Saying a last goodbye to a friend is tough. Attending a funeral or memorial service, we acutely feel the pain of loss; its shock blurs the complicated glory and compromise of a life just ended.
Saying goodbye to people in arts and entertainment is easier. They touched us, but with a general radiance that rarely triggers feelings of ownership, and whose ending focuses out attention on what they meant than how they went. We knew them at their best: swankly coiffed, speaking or singing lines they had memorized, presenting the words or images they got right on the fifth or 50th try. And we have all the evidence of their achievement, all the films, CDs, books they left us, from which we can create a monument in our memory.
Last month TIME and other organs of journalism paid tribute to those notables who died in 2003. Late as ever, I offer my valediction to people who, though most of them didn’t know me, had a lot to do with stocking my fondest memories. Some of these names may be unfamiliar to you, and I’ll explain why they deserve inclusion. A few celebrated ones have received enough coverage to make my comments unnecessary. Besides, I wrote at length in TIME on Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn just after they died, and for TIME.com on Bob Hope just before. Some of the other brief Obits I wrote for various editions of TIME. And one death last year — that of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson — will require comment this year, for she was the victim in the Phil Spector murder case, due to begin later this month.
In the spirit of informed and passionate year-end roll calls by Rex Reed (in the New York Observer), Michael J. Weldon (Psychotronic Video) and Ed Grant (the invaluable Manhattan cable-access show Media Funhouse), I offer this very personal list. I hope it will remind readers of the breadth of popular culture, and its enrichment, by people on three continents. It saddens and warms me to think of them.
FILM
At first, Wendy Hiller didn’t know she was special. “I thought Shaw asked all young actresses to do those parts,” she said after George Bernard Shaw chose her, at 23, to play the lead roles in new productions of “Saint Joan” and “Pygmalion.” Then the films of “Pygmalion” and “Major Barbara.” She imbued these roles with a bonnie Brit common sense that was at once earthy and buoyant. Four decades later she was playing princesses (“Murder on the Orient Express”) and suspicious mother superiors (“The Elephant Man”), but Hiller rarely suppressed that twinkle. Like any Shaw heroine she knew that even the strongest political argument needs charm to put it over. She kept me charmed for all that time. But I was not her longest admirer. That was writer Ronald Gow, her husband for 56 years, until his death in 1993. Ten years later, she joined him.
Three Hollywood leading ladies from an age when the leads were ladies: Ellen Drew, who charmed Dick Powell into spending money he only thought he had, in “Christmas in July …. raven-haired Jeanne Crain, who at 19 mimed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might as Well Be Spring” in “State Fair” (Louanne Hogan did the singing), then played Joe Mankiewicz’s most sensible heroine in “A Letter to Three Wives” and impersonated a light-skinned African-American in “Pinky” … and lovely Hope Lange, Oscar-nominated as the raped daughter in “Peyton Place,” then a gracious ornament of TV and film, including her one walk on the weird side in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”
I’ll miss wall-eyed Jack Elam, who brought great menace to his early coot-varmint roles and charm to his later geezer parts; in between was the fabulous cameo in “Once Upon a Time in the West.” … Lyle Bettger was the blondest, most menacing villain in his film debut, “No Man of Her Own.” … All of Donald O’Connor‘s vaudevillian snazz and snap is compressed into the two minutes of his “Make Em Laugh” routine in “Singin’ in the Rain”: he made mock love to a cloth dummy, did backflips off a wall and then hurtled through it — still smilin’ — in the greatest comic dance solo in film history. … Les Tremayne‘s dulcet voice wallpapered the 50s, as the befuddled auctioneer in “North by Northwest” and as narrator for hundreds of films and trailers.
That grimacing movie stalwart Robert Stack died last year. Over a 60-year career, the L.A. native is best remembered as Eliot Ness in TV’s “The Untouchables.” But he was equally impressive in 1950s epics by Budd Boetticher (“The Bullfighter and the Lady”), Samuel Fuller (“House of Bamboo”) and William Wellman (“The High and the Mighty”). Beneath his rugged looks and rough voice, Stack often suggested a psychic danger, an imminent imploding that got him an Oscar nomination for “Written on the Wind” and gave his Ness the undertone of obsessiveness: a G-man Javert. As host of “Unsolved Mysteries,” Stack lent this same Old Testament God authority to tales of missing persons and unquiet ghosts. And he was married to the same woman for 46 years. All in all, a life that might make even Robert Stack smile.
Hume Cronyn‘s snappy intelligence lent the weight of insolence to his bantam frame in “Shadow of a Doubt,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “The Parallax View” and many fine two-handers with his wife Jessica Tandy. In 1994, I received a tender note from Cronyn about my Obit. He said it was “so eloquent and rewarding that I only wish I could have shared it with Jessie. In those last few weeks, when she wanted so desperately to die (never with tears, never with self-pity, but just because of exhaustion), I kept trying to remind her what an extraordinary success she had had as a wife, a mother and an actress. I hope that it registered and that in her darkest moments she may have remembered and even believed it.”
An exaltation of crafts: cinematographer Conrad Hall, master of telephoto angst. Through his eye, realism never looked better: “Cool Hand Luke,” “In Cold Blood,” “Electra Glide in Blue,” “Day of the Locust,” “American Beauty.” He shot his last film, “Road to Perdition,” at 75. … Norman Panama, with his partner Melvin Frank, wrote the craziest Hope-Crosby picture (“Road to Utopia”) and the best Danny Kaye (“The Court Jester,” with the immortal line, “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true”). … Way down the budget (and quality) ladder, Jack Pollexfen wrote and produced two of Edgar G. Ulmer’s grade-Z fantasies, “The Man from Planet X” and “Daughter of Dr. Jekyll.” … John Jympson edited “A Hard Day’s Night.” His filmography doesn’t have much more in the way of rule-smashing inventiveness, but, really, does it need to?
In the French style: producer Serge Silberman goaded some notoriously difficult men — Luis Bu&ñtilde;uel, Jean-Pierre Melville, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Jacques Beineix — to create some of their best films. … Daniel Toscan de Plantier, producer (“Cousin Cousine”) and head of the French promotion guild Unifrance, died at the Berlin Film Festival in February. He made good films and, through his passionate crusade fro French cinema, made films better. … Max Pécas directed some of the glammiest of French soft-core in the 60s, then went hard in the 70s. The French magazine Trash Times called him “le fleuron du navet gaulois paillard” (I double-dare anyone to translate that so it makes sense), and Tim Burton said, “Max Pécas is to comic movies what Ed Wood is to science fiction movies.” That’s not fair; he was much better. His luscious compositions and languid pace created a seductive frame for beautiful actresses to do naughty things. … Marie Trintignant was born to French movie royalty — supersuave actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and director Nadine Marquand Trintignant — and proved a lovely ornament to French films. She died August 1 from head injuries, reportedly after a fight with her boyfriend, rock star Bertrand Cantat. Two months later Nadine published a book addressed to her dead child, “My Daughter Marie.”
Cheerie-bye to that learned dilettante George Plimpton, the Paris Review editor and Manhattan brahmin who guest-starred in a half-dozen other careers, including movie actor. … And a ghostly wave across the Croisette to author and critic Alexander Walker. He was the Evening Standard’s movie reviewer for 43 years and a Cannes Festival celebrant for at least 50. Silver-plumed Alex was a dashing presence in London and Cannes, and an excellent film historian. None of which impressed Ken Russell when, after Alex had panned Russell’s “The Devils,” confronted him on a TV show by (as Walker relates the incident in his book “Hollywood, England”) swatting him with a copy of his newspaper: “‘Then go’ —WHACK! — ‘to America and write’ —WHACK! — ‘for the fucking Americans’ —WHACK!”
Occasionally, in combing the IMDb list of the year’s deaths, I got a little shock of sadness. I had seen Ying Ruocheng in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and in “Little Buddha,” as the chief monk in charge of finding the next avatar. Now, on the first day of my first visit to Beijing in 1995, I was sitting in his modest home. Ying had translated “The Death of a Salesman” into Chinese and played Willy Loman across that vast country. In the mid-80s he was Vice-Minister of Culture. But when I visited him with his son Ying Da (a successful sitcom producer) and TIME Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime Flor-Cruz, the old mandarin was out of favor. But not out of stories or opinions. I recall that evening as a magical introduction to Chinese culture, and I am bereft at the news of his death on December 27.
POP MUSIC
Voices of the 50s: Hank Ballard‘s first hit, the raunchy “Work With Me, Annie,” was before my rhythm-and-blues listening time. But his late-50s party-song trilogy — “Finger Poppin’ Time,” “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go” and “The Twist” — had me singing and dancing along. Still does. Altogether now: “There’s a thrill / Up on the hill / Let’s go, let’s go let’s go.” … Felice Bryant, with her husband Boudleaux, wrote the Everly Brothers’ hits “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up, Little Suzie” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Their “Rocky Top” was made the official state song of Tennessee. … Mickey Most‘s was a name I saw on many of the early British Invasion 45s. He produced The Animals, Donovan, Lulu and, later, Suzy Quatro and Kim Wilde. … Bobby Hatfield, the top half of the Righteous Brothers, shrieks soulfully in my memorial juke box, where “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” can never be played too often.
In the 50s, Sam Phillips‘ Sun Records in Memphis was the home of raw genius. Black singers like Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King, and whites like Carl Perkins, John R. Cash (Phillips changed his name to Johnny), Roy Orbison and that holy hellion of rockabilly, Jerry Lee Lewis. One day an 18-year-old Elvis Presley went to Sun’s studio to record two songs for his mother and was soon vamping on the Arthur Crudup tune “That’s All Right.” Phillips legendarily remarked, “That’s a pop song, just ’bout.” Pop as in a pop-music explosion. Phillips didn’t sing or play an instrument, he didn’t always produce the music that came out of his studio, and in 1955 he shortsightedly sold Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000. But his ear was a genius. He had the aural version of precognition. As it happened, he retired a rich man — not because of Sun but because he was an early shareholder in another midcentury Memphis business, Holiday Inn.
Two grand chanteuses: Elizabeth Welch, who died in July at 99, was a star in the 1923 “Blackbirds” revue, where she introduced the Charleston. Her parentage was African, aboriginal American, Scots and Irish; she called herself “a one-woman United Nations.” But before the U.N. came to New York, she had to leave the U.S. to find steady, undemeaning employment. Emigrating to Europe, she co-starred with Paul Robeson in two Brit films of the 30s and enlivened other Brit films for the next four decades. I saw her in a Jerome Kern revue in 1985, where the infirm octogenarian brought down the house while sitting in a chair. … My brother Paul first saw Nina Simone in an Atlantic City bar in 1956. The next year Simone, who had studied piano at Juilliard, lent her alto-clarinet voice to the Gershwins’ “I Loves Ya, Porgy.” For a while she had minor singles hits (I know; I’ve still got them) with “Children Go Where I Send You” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” In the 60s she composed and sang some stinging racial satires (“Mississippi Goddam,” “Backlash Blues”) that became anthems. Her voice and subtle keyboard stylings made a home for any genre: blues, show tunes, a little Bach and, as I remember from a 1968 Carnegie Hall concert, the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” She could do it all, powerfully, beautifully.
TELEVISION
A last gust of gratitude to two newscasters: David Brinkley, whose nicely surly delivery goaded a functionary in (I think) the Johnson Administration to accuse him of “editorializing with an eyebrow” … and Roy Neal, the first newsman I remember, on Philadelphia’s WPTZ in the early 50s; then NBC’s space correspondent in the 60s. … Earl Bellamy directed about half of the 10 seasons of “Father Knows Best,” which to the naive me of the 50s was a documentary of small-town domesticity, and which still has a charm, reticence and authority you can’t find nowadays, except on “FKB” reruns.
Art Carney‘s stint with Jackie Gleason was only a speck in a 50-year career that began in radio (a specialty was imitating F.D.R.), flourished on Broadway (where he was the original Felix Unger in “The Odd Couple”) and earned distinction in Hollywood (an Oscar for 1974’s “Harry and Tonto”). But as Ed Norton, the “underground sanitation expert” and upstairs neighbor of Gleason’s Ralph Kramden in the primal sitcom “The Honeymooners,” Carney proved that a second banana could be the top. His booming voice was complemented by a genius for body English. Carney’s every move was an eccentric dance. He walked in a springy slouch, his thin frame forming a question mark, his gut preceding his chest by a beat or two. His hands were ever aflutter, shaking off invisible water (or sewage), conducting an imaginary silly symphony. While Ralph was the choleric loser, Ed was the lucky buffoon. Like the Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew (another bon vivant blithely ignorant of the way the world saw and smelled him), Norton exuded a sweet assurance that life would treat him as he treated life: with an easy shrug and an eager guffaw. That’s how an acute farceur humanized a sewer rat for audiences of the 50s and every TV generation since.
PAIRS
It is a lovely and melancholy fact that people who have shared a love for decades occasionally die within a few months of each other — by natural causes, because fate unplugged their lifeline, or by their own hand. One thinks of Charles Boyer, who committed suicide two days after his wife of 44 years died of cancer; or of Jean Cocteau, who, on hearing of his friend Edith Piaf’s death, supposedly said there was nothing left to live for and, with his usual taste for Surrealist melodrama, died the same day.
Last May 15, when June Carter Cash died, Johnny Cash, her husband of 35 years was devastated. His minister said, “Her passing took his last spark, the last bit of his heart.” At his first public appearance after her death, Cash was nearly mute with remorse: “The pain is so severe,” he told the crowd at the Carter Family Fold country music festival in Hiltons, Va., “there is no way of describing it.” The King of Country Music followed his queen to the grave within four months.
Cash had always seemed to be auditioning for that final stage. He dressed like a hip coroner and sang like a gunman turned Pentecostal preacher. His haunting songs perfectly matched his haunted voice. Rarely before Cash had a singer taken vocal pain — not the adolescent shriek of most rock singers but the abiding ache of a veteran victim — and made it so audible and immediate, so dark, so deep. Rarely, before or since, has a voice also shown the grit to express, endure and outlive that misery. His songs played like confessions on a deathbed or death row, but he delivered them with the plangent stoicism of a world-class poker player dealt a bum hand.
Tex McCrary and his wife Jinx Falkenburg (a top model and the first Miss Rheingold) had pioneered chat radio — as well as boy-and-girl TV news anchors — with their “Tex and Jinx Show” in the 40s and 50s. He died last July, at 92; she, four weeks later, at 84. They had been married for 58 years.
You may not know Tom Glazer and Sidney Glazier, but you should remember their work. Glazer, one of the popularizers of folk music in the tradition of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, was the master of the “found” song. He put a tune to Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to the Senate and had a hit with “Old Soldiers Never Die (They Just Fade Away).” He Americanized the African chant “Skokiaan”; put words to a 1903 Hans Engelmann tune and stormed the charts with “Melody of Love”; twisted “On Top of Old Smokey” into the kid’s giggle-anthem “On Top of Spaghetti”; provided the Kingston Trio with “A Worried Man.” His brother Sidney produced the first solo films by Mel Brooks (“The Producers”) and Woody Allen (“Take the Money and Run”). Tom died in February, Sidney in December. And never mind that their surnames were different. As the “Mystery Science Theater” wags said of director Sam Newfield and his brother, producer Sigmund Neufeld, “They got in different lines at Ellis Island.”
Other performers, not related by blood or marriage, had symbiotic or coincidental careers that linked them in the audience’s mind. Leslie Cheung, the Hong Kong movie heartthrob who killed himself last April Fool’s Day, had been a dominant pop star for 20 years. His female counterpart was Anita Mui, “the Hong Kong Madonna,” with whom he had memorably co-starred in the 1988 award-winner “Rouge.” Mui succumbed to cervical cancer December 30. It was among my saddest honors of 2003 to write their Obits.
Italy has produced many superb clowns. Two of my favorites passed last year. In nearly 150 films over 60 years, Alberto Sordi achieved celebrity of such magnitude that s Roman street was named for him; his cherubic face and expansive gestures summarized a nation’s innocent bombast. He received magnificent support in a dozen films from Leopoldo Trieste, who typically played the sweet-souled loser — what’s Italian for nebbish? Trieste played the honeymooner whose bride falls for the comic-book hero Sordi in Fellini’s “The White Sheik,” the would-be playwright to Sordi’s mama’s-boy in “I Vitelloni.” Even when he played priests and property owners in later films, this delicate farceur had the odor of weakness and decay about him. He was the pathetic count whom Stefania Sandrelli is forced to marry in Pietro Germi’s ferocious Sicilian satire “Seduced and Abandoned”, and the landlord who first insults, then kowtows to Robert DeNiro’s Vito Corleone in “The Godfather, Part II.” That was Trieste’s subtle comic gift: to preen while cringing.
We bid farewell to a pair of Bollywood legends. In the great Indian films of the 50s and 60s, nearly every stalwart hero had a grinning, comic-relief friend in Johnny Walker (often spelled Johny Walker), whose unrivaled status as India’s top slapstick sidekick was echoed in the stage names of those who followed, such as Tony Brandy and Johnny Whiskey. But the emotional constant of Indian film is maternal love — the hearth that warms the hero — and the Mother of all Mothers was Leela Chitnis. Chitnis had the art of suffering radiantly: under arched eyebrows, her large, luminous eyes could hold glistening tears seemingly for hours on end, to cascade down her face with joy or agony in the final reel. In Raj Kapoor’s “Awaara,” she was required to age 24 years in the role of a loving wife who is unjustly accused of infidelity. After that, she played mum to the top male stars of Bombay’s Golden Age: Dilip Kumar in “Ganga Jumna,” Dev Anand in “Guide,” Dharmendra in “Aap Ki Parchhaiyan.” Women on pedestals are expected to behave like statuary: the heavenward glance, the beseeching gesture, a grandeur silent and stoic. Not Chitnis. Hers was a robust femininity; it humanized the saints she played. She retired in the 80s and — denied the child love she so often got in movies — died alone, at 91, in a Danbury, Conn., nursing home.
Charles Bronson was the Lithuanian-American coal miner, Sunday painter and finally — at 47, with “Once Upon a Time in the West” — movie star. In his bloom of Euro-American eminence (his American superstardom wouldn’t come until “Death Wish” in 1974, when he was 53), Bronson starred in “Adieu l’Ami” and “Rider in the Rain,” two films written by Sébastien Japrisot. Japrisot, whose pen name was an anagram of his real name, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, also adapted Pauline Réage’s steamy “Histoire d’O.” The novels of this “French Graham Greene” were filmed as “The Sleeping Car Murders” by Costa-Gavras and “One Deadly Summer” by Jean Becker. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of “Amélie” fame, is filming Japrisot’s most famous novel, “A Very Long Engagement,” to star Audrey Tautou.
In 1977, at the Museum of Modern Art, I gave an eight-evening lecture series on the Hollywood Screenwriter, with each session highlighting a distinguished writer or writing team. One of my guests was George Axelrod, who had helped set the tone for pop culture’s postwar flirtation with infidelity and angst in his Broadway farce “The Seven Year Itch.” For the movies, he wrote the scripts for “Bus Stop,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and that classic spiked cocktail of melodrama, satire and treason, “The Manchurian Candidate,” as well as directing the cult comedy “Lord Love a Duck.” Another evening was illuminated by David Newman and Robert Benton. They had been a kind of writer-director team since their Esquire days, when David (the word man) and Bob (the art director) created the Dubious Achievement Awards. These foreign-film lovers originally offered their “Bonnie and Clyde” script to Jean-Luc Godard, then François Truffaut. Somehow Warren Beatty convinced them it should be an American film. After Benton and Newman broke up, David and his wife Leslie worked on the “Superman” films and hosted some of the Upper West Side’s coolest parties, including one in the 70s when they showed “Glen or Glenda” (long before Ed Wood’s canonization as a trash auteur) and Tex Avery’s immortal “Rock-a-bye Bear.” Axelrod and David died within a week of each other last June.
Another two screenwriters, more tenuously linked. When I was a kid, It seemed that maybe a third of all Hollywood movies had Philip Yordan‘s name on as screenwriter. No one could be that prolific, and no one was. Yordan, who on his own did write some good movies (“Dillinger,” “The Man from Laramie,” “The Big Combo”), also acted as a front for many blacklisted scripters. Thus the Yordan name appeared on “Johnny Guitar,” “Men in War, “El Cid” and dozens more for which Yordan was, essentially, the broker for outlaw writers. In contrast, Oscar-, Tony- and Emmy-winning scribe Peter Stone wrote at least one film, Stanley Donen’s sprightly “Arabesque,” under the pseudonym Pierre Marton — who knows why? That film was a sequel of sorts to the Stone-Donen “Charade,” still one of the blithest thrillers in movie history. I first knew Stone as a librettist for Broadway musicals; his first work, “Kean,” was a vigorous sketch of 19th century theater life. Later he wrote the books for “My One and Only” and “The Will Rogers Follies.” He also wrote, as president of the Writers Guild, a threatening letter to TIME after I’d parodied a Kander-and-Ebb song in a theater review. My brush with greatness. Yordan and Stone died 33 days apart last spring.
Cinema isn’t just Hollywood movies; at least, it didn’t used to be. It encompassed artistic documentaries of the sort Francis Thompson made famous in screening rooms (the 1957 “New York, New York”) and trade pavilions (the 1964 New York World’s Fair highlight “To Be Alive,” which inspired dozens of Disney-park attractions). And, children, there was once a flourishing sidestream called experimental cinema, whose guru was Stan Brakhage. Saint Stan was the soul of abstract film (“Anticipation of the Night, “Cat’s Cradle,” “Window Water Baby Moving,” Mothlight,” “Dog Star Man,” “The Art of Vision”) in the 50s and early 60s, when it seemed that the avant-garde could mount a serious challenge to narrative films. Today, there’s not much avant-garde; there’s hardly even a garde. But Brakhage kept painting on film, scratching it, shooting births and funerals and the lovemaking in between. His work is a testament to the artist’s need to clarify and baffle — and a reproach to the present, when “independent” now means a stodgily narrative film with a slot at Sundance and a chance to get it released (and re-cut) by Miramax.
I promise not to torture this “pairs” trope too much longer. (Should I note that Maurice Pialat, the iconoclastic French director, and Maurice Gibb, the Zeppo of the Bee Gees, died on consecutive days? Probably not.) But let me acknowledge two comic masters of pen and ink: Al Hirschfeld, the Broadway immortalizer, and immortal, who died just five months short of his 100th birthday (and whom I laureled in a That Old Feeling column); and William Steig, whose capering drunks and satyrs formed the most beguiling Steig party, and who ingratiated himself with a different generation by writing children’s books (“Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” “The Amazing Bone, “Shrek!”), though he was no expert on the genre. “To tell the truth, I don’t read children’s books,” he once said. “I’m an adult. I just write them.”
A tip of the TIME tam to two artists who brought dance to a larger audience. Gregory Hines was an updater and emancipator of the ancient art of tap dancing. On film, he swapped moves with Mikhail Baryshnikov (in “White Nights”) and cracked wise with Billy Crystal (in “Running Scared”). His greatest gift, however, was in his feet, which hit the amplified floor like Chinese firecrackers, broke from standard 4/4 time into daring sprung rhythms and inspired Savion Glover and the new breed of hip-hop tappers. Vera Zorina, who was Norwegian but changed her name when she joined the Ballet Russe, came to America with George Balanchine, her husband, and starred in “On Your Toes,” his collaboration with Rogers and Hart. Zorina was no ethereal waif; she gave sturdy, supple body to the classical dance. In the wartime morale-booster “Star Spangled Rhythm,” a GI dreams of Vera, and she prances sexily through the snow to “That Old Black Magic.” The number curled toes and warmed groins across the globe. If this was ballet, the GIs thought, put me in tights.
Here’s an actor-auteur tandem. An Oscar-winning British director with an acidulous touch, John Schlesinger helped define swinging London in all its flash and falseness in “Darling,” which made Julie Christie a star. His U.S. directing debut, the 1969 “Midnight Cowboy,” was the only X-rated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar and the first of the gay director’s several films dealing with homosexuality. His visual style often strained unduly to make editorial points — no need to rub our noses in the squalor, John, we can smell it from here — but he knew the fears that eat at smart people. This made him the right man to direct William Goldman’s angst-ridden thriller “Marathon Man” and Alan Bennett’s “An Englishman Abroad.” This was the finest portrait in Schlesinger’s gallery of men clever enough to know they have made a mess of their lives.
The main character there was the Anglo-Soviet spy Guy Burgess, and the star of that tiny, shiny gem was Alan Bates, who got his first star role in Schlesinger’s 1962 “A Kind of Loving.” A modest giant who bestrode nearly a half-century of excellence, Bates had co-starred in the original London stage production of “Look Back in Anger.” But the Angry Young Man tag never quite fit his protean gifts. Whether wrestling nude in “Women in Love” or incarnating a Jewish prisoner in “The Fixer,” Bates brought strength, delicacy, wit and humanity to each role. I well remember seeing “Nothing But the Best,” with Bates as a charming schemer on the rise who will stop at nothing, including murder, to get the job and the girl; the movie convinced me that only a big city like New York could hold my (more plebeian) ambitions. In films he often squired showier stars — Anthony Quinn in “Zorba the Greek,” Lynn Redgrave in “Georgy Girl,” Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman,” Bette Midler in “The Rose” — to Oscar nominations; he was the solid ground they danced on. The stage allowed him to dominate. He radiated silky malevolence in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” a tonic cynicism in “Butley” and several other Simon Gray comedies, a charming naivete in Turgenev’s “Fortune’s Fool.” Bates’ brilliance was too often taken for granted. His absence leaves a profound hole, an ache, in our theater and film life.
One final pair: filmmakers whose magnificent work was smirched by controversy. Leni Riefenstahl might be remembered as cinema’s greatest woman director or as its most gifted documentary filmmaker, whose two-part Olympia, a record of the 1936 Summer Games, pioneered techniques and attitudes copied in virtually all TV sports coverage. Instead, she is vilified as the venal genius who glamorized the Hitler myth in 1935’s Triumph of the Will. This record of a Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg still sickens with its close-up view of the spellbinding Fuhrer — this was the original “Springtime for Hitler” — and still enthralls with the artful precision of its editing craft. (I wrote two Riefenstahl columns to mark her 100th birthday.) A wily 101 at her death, she outlived most of her critics but not her reputation; for 60 years, she was blackballed from the medium she helped define. In 2002 she completed a new movie, “Underwater Impressions.” It has yet to be shown at any major film festival.
