Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

24 September 2025

Read instead…in print #38: Conversations at the AFI with the Great Moviemakers

Reading the series of talks compiled in Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers, with directors, writers, actors, cameramen, composers, editors, feels like attending the seminars yourself. More than that, these conversations, preserved and presented here by George Stevens Jr, and revolving around how movies are made, are very visual, they take you to the very core of a scene, of a location, of a performance, of a character. They are felt, just as a film is not just watched, but felt and lived. “The next generation” in the subtitle refers to the time period beginning with the 1950s, when the studio system was collapsing and people could no longer depend on, or were bound by, the structure of studio life to make movies. Sydney Pollack talks about why he generally worked with Robert Redford much more directly than he did with other actors, and why directing is sometimes about not directing, Alan J. Pakula talks about why he aimed for and how they attained the claustrophobic world, that feeling of being trapped in space, of being caught, in Klute, Nora Ephron talks about how Sven Nykvist, “the world’s greatest cinematographer”, doesn’t care about putting a star actor in the dark, editor Anne Coates talks about the details in Lawrence of Arabia that you only see if you watch the film on the big screen (you can’t see them on a little screen). The magic of cinema is on the big screen. The magic of cinema is that it talks to you, and sings to you, and tells you a story visually.

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers is a fascinating revelation of the art of making pictures.

”One of the questions I’ve always asked myself
when reading a script or working with ideas for a film is,
why is this a movie? […]
The thing should not work for blind people.
Essentially it’s a false medium if it’s a medium that
works just fine when you’re not paying attention
with your eyes.
What really interests me is something that could only be
a film. This idea couldn’t be turned into a play or novel or
anything else. You want to concentrate on creating something
that is uniquely cinematic.”

James Mangold

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

MORE STORIES

Read instead…in print #37: Isabelle Huppert by Carole Ballaïche

Robert Redford had the confidence to trust the audience and just be

“I like to think with pencil in hand”:
In conversation with graphic designer F Ron Miller

Posted by classiq in Books, Film, Read instead...in print | | Comments Off

17 September 2025

Robert Redford had the confidence to trust the audience and just be

Photo: Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men”, 1976. Wildwood Enterprises

Robert Redford was promoting his politically-charged film The Candidate in 1972 when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two investigative reporters from The Washington Post, broke out the Watergate story, followed by president Nixon’s downfall. But Redford didn’t want All the President’s Men, to be about Watergate or Nixon. “I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?” This is one of the best political thrillers ever made, especially that we know the outcome in advance. And that is because what is indeed fascinating about the story is the journalistic part. “We took all the elements of their work — the typewriters, telephones, pens on paper, and kicked up the sound on all of them. Every scene where the typewriter is used, the noise is kicked into high gear so there’s a real bang. What does it sound like? It sounds like weapon.” This is a film that continues to fascinate, after repetitive views. It’s the perfect film. It is also, I might add, essential viewing today. What is a newspaper, what is the press? The mission is to get the story – but to get it right.

Robert Redford made it clear from the very beginning that he came into films because of the craft of acting, and then, by founding the Sundance Film Festival, that he stuck in the business because of the films themselves, which is why he wanted to open the path for independent film makers. “There was nothing at the end of the rainbow for me here. Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood — I was born next door.” He inspired change in the American cinema, and made it happen. His cultural legacy is priceless.

Sydney Pollack, his frequent collaborator (they made 7 films together, including This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, Out of Africa, Three Days of the Condor), said in an interview at The American Film Institute (published in the book The Great Movie Filmmakers: The Next Generation, from the 1950s to Hollywood today), in 1983, that “there is something very American about him. He has a much darker inside than what one sees on the outside. He’s prototypically American in that sense. America has this glamorous exterior and a rather troubled, dark interior. Redford has that.” And here I like to make a parallel with Redford’s role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Unlike the reckless and daredevil Butch, the leader of the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, an enthusiastic bank robber with a vision, Sundance is the golden boy with darkness within, quiet, ironic and cool, and the voice of reason. With the arrival of the 1960s and of films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American cinema left behind the sharp morality of Old Hollywood films, and especially classic Westerns, and dared to deal with people as individuals and their rebellion against society, and against the norm, and introduced more ambiguous characters and the outlaws as antiheroes: Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford’s Sundance the Kid robbed banks for fun and they won the audiences over with their charisma. The teaming of Paul Newman and Robert Redford was so magical that this kind of buddy chemistry has been attempted to replicate in vain ever since (the most recent pairing, that of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, came closer than anything before).

Photo: Robert Redford and Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and Sundance the Kid”, 1976.
Campanile Productions, George Roy Hill-Paul Monash Production, Newman-Foreman Company, Twentieth Century Fox

Bathed in cinematographer Conrad Hall’s sepia hues, George Roy Hill’s comically elegiac western offers more visual interest than the two handsome, well-defined, contrasting characters, and more narrative substance than the good humoured situations and damned-fool heroics of its characters. It has to do with the depiction of real bonding and real friendship. Because despite common belief, that doesn’t come off that easily on screen, or in real life. It also has to do, as Paul Newman was saying in a 1994 commentary on the film, with the way he and Redford gave each other space on screen, the way they gave each other the stage in turn. Paul Newman was the one who wanted Redford as his co-star (and George Roy Hill fought for him with the producers) and screenwriter William Goldman was recalling in an interview how everyone who hadn’t wanted Redford in the picture in the first place told Newman not to allow Redford to have so many close-ups. But Newman had no problem with that, because he always wanted to play opposite good actors, because only that way he could better himself. They both let each other have their moments, and that’s true friendship, and that’s chemistry, and that showed in the film. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, from 2013, Redford was telling her how he never forgot that it was thanks to Newman that he got the part and that they became great friends during filming, a friendship that carried on throughout their lives. Their adventure in the film does not end well, but it is an ending that carries their memory into romantic legend.

“He’s the kind of actor I like in the sense that he’s mysterious,” Sydney Pollack remarked in the same interview. “Actors often feel they have to do a little acting here and there. The fact is there are very few of them who have the confidence to trust the audience and just be. One of the things that’s most impressive in film acting is someone with enough confidence to do nothing, someone who as a human being is sufficiently interesting so that he’s behaving truthfully within a role, the audience will be satisfied and watch him. Redford has that quality. He creates a lot of interest by what he doesn’t do, by the way he withholds things. He creates a need on the part of the audience to move toward him to find out more. […] To my mind Redford is best in roles where the character is somewhat introverted, though still capable of a lot.” Everything with Redford came from instinct and the reality of doing. Redford, in turn, confessed that Sydney Pollack was “the one director that seems to read me best”. Their work together was intuitive.

Photo: Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”, 1975. Wildwood Enterprises, Dinonde Laurentiis Company

Dave Grusin’s musical score in Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor wouldn’t even have made sense in a dreamy snowy landscape, or cityscape for that matter. “He did an extraordinary score to that picture, kind of a jazz thriller score with a very bluesy love theme done on a saxophone, as I remember. He always got great players. That score was unique,” Sydney Pollack said about his frequent soundtrack collaborator. But it is the subtle bursts of holiday music that have this heightened effect of taunting Robert Redford’s character and throwing him deeper in this state of alienation and desolation when he finds himself not trusting anyone after his co-workers are shot and he is forced to take a hostage while constantly looking over his shoulder in order to stay alive. And look over his shoulder he does, from the start to the open-to-interpretation ending – is he, is each one of us, just an individual, just another face in the crowd? He certainly draws us, the audience, in, moving toward him to find out more.

Robert Redford plays CIA analyst on the run Joseph Turner in one of Sydney Pollack’s best political thrillers, set in 1974 New York. More than its star power, the film is a great thriller, which is what the director intended. The film has been, from the beginning, considered by critics to tap into the political sensibilities of the times and of a nation faltering from the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War and Watergate. And it did, but without knowing it.

“I think that the critics are falling into all kinds of traps with this movie,” Sydney Pollack commented in an interview with Patrick McGilligan in 1976, reproduced in the booklet issued by the Masters of Cinema along with the blu-Ray edition of the film. “Absolutely falling all over themselves. Half the critics are looking at it as a serious political piece of propaganda and criticising it on that level which, God knows, wasn’t intended, the film was three-quarters finished before any of these CIA revelations began to happen. We were doing a straight thriller. That’s what we wanted to do. And we were shocked that as much of what we imagined, if you will, was coming to pass. We were absolutely dumbfounded. The attempt was, first of all, to make it faithful to the genre of a thriller. And within that, to explore certain ideas of suspicion, trust, morality, if you will; but it was not intended in any way as a documentary, I suppose, but as a warning – using the CIA almost as a metaphor, and drawing certain conclusions from post-Watergate America.”

Robert Redford would go on and star in All the President’s Men the following year, but in Three Days of the Condor his Joe Turner reads books all day and introduces codes and plots into a computer. “I’m not a field agent, I just read books!” His preppy clothes are exactly what the character and his bookish job ask for, and his timeless American sensibility easily comes through, as Sydney Pollack pointed out, but it’s his ability to evade the perils he comes across and his subtle divulgence of his desolate state of mind as he is first to realise Faye Dunaway’s photographer character may have more in common with his alienation and desolation than she would care to admit or even realise, that decidedly makes his character plausible and drives us to look closer. “It’s winter,” it’s her simple answer to his precise questions about her images. But he knows better. And so do we, because Robert Redford has the confidence to trust the audience and just be.

MORE STORIES

Bob Willoughby, the photographer that was as great as the stars he shot:
In conversation with Christopher Willoughby

“Compositions and camera movement had to have a conceptual reason”:
In conversation with cinematographer Adrian Teijido

“I’m still learning, which keeps it fresh”:
In conversation with film still photographer JoJo Whilden

Posted by classiq in Film | | Comments Off

11 September 2025

September Newsletter: Made in Milan, A Hell of a Good Life, and Outlaw Blues

Photos: Classiq Journal

”I think of myself as someone who is a beginner,
not as someone who has already said a lot.”

Giorgio Armani, Made in Milan

Viewing

Fatto a Milano (Made in Milan), 1990
Martin Scorsese

In 1990, Martin Scorsese made a short documentary about Giorgio Armani, titled Fatto a Milano (Made in Milan), a beautiful piece of work, that not only predated the landscape of fashion films, but also Armani’s own book (I wrote about it here), released in 2015, 25 years after the film. I wrote about the documentary quite a few years back and now, in celebrating the legacy that Giorgio Armani left to the world, I am republishing it in a revised form.

Giorgio Armani and Martin Scorsese’s partnership was deep and lasting, just as the influence of films in the designer’s work. The two first worked together on some Armani commercials and the short documentary, then on Goodfellas (1990) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Armani actively supported and funded Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, focused on preserving and restoring neglected film gems. They also collaborated on Scorsese’s 2001 documentary on Italian cinema. In 2015, Armani even teamed up with La Cinémathèque Française in Paris to support an exhibition dedicated to Martin Scorsese. The designer’s passion for cinema is well known, as he named it his first great love.

Scorsese, in return, expressed his admiration and respect for the Italian designer in his letter to his long-time friend, appeared in Vanity Fair , in August 2015, preceding the 40th anniversary of the Italian fashion house: “I look at Giorgio’s clothes, at his sense of balance and proportion, line and shape, color and texture, and I’m always astonished all over again. It doesn’t matter who’s wearing them – he makes us all look good. Part of it is because we feel good wearing his clothes.”

I believe Armani has been chosen so often to contribute to the costume department not because he was Armani – his success as a fashion designer only skyrocketed after the film American Gigolo – but because he could make his clothes work for a character, because he could adapt to the needs of the film, because he is, first and foremost, a craftsman who draws his designs by hand, and because he is a stylist, too, who knows “absolutely everything there is to know – where to put the pins, how to place the jackets in the best possible position, how to shape the waistline,” as photographer Aldo Fallai remarked. Ultimately, it’s the costume designer who decides that his work will fit with what they want to achieve.

The designer’s contribution to films such as The Untouchables, Voyager, The Comfort of Strangers is very well known, but there is one other film that I find equally, if not even more so, remarkable in the way that Armani married the spirit and narrative power of the film costumes with his brand’s strong aesthetic identity. The costumes for Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire were a collaboration between costume designer Marilyn Vance and Giorgio Armani – approximately 200 costumes were sewn in duplicates and triplicates in Armani’s factory in Milan and the fashion designer also contributed pieces to dress the extras. “I have contributed to movies of all kinds,” said Giorgio Armani in his eponymous book. […] When a filmmaker calls me, I always evaluate the project carefully.” In Streets of Fire, Armani’s costume appropriation once again works beautifully. The costumes are memorable not because they stand out, not because they are the mirror of a specific time or period, but precisely because they are not of a particular time and period. They feel timeless and timely at the same time. They depict characters that only exist in that world, a neon-soaked “Rock & Roll fable”, from another time, another place, each character a walking story unto themselves. In Streets of Fire, the costumes create the world. And it’s Amy Madigan’s ‘80s Hawksian heroine look that will forever feed my imagination. Her McCoy is the most vibrant and original character. Under her uniform of confrontation, run-down leather baseball cap, grey bomber jacket and oversized boyfriend jeans, she is much more than a banal tomboy. It suggests a new attitude, being faithful to herself and nobody else, so her clothes become something aspirational. Although I haven’t found any source to indicate that Amy clothes’ were completely provided by Armani, her look undeniably bears the signature of Armani. And what could have been a more perfect match for a female character that was originally created for a man than the designer who has always championed the down-to-earth essence of a subtle elegance and who freed men and women from rigidity, suggesting new attitudes? She is protesting the status quo, seeking change in a certain sartorial androgyny, and she couldn’t do it better than dressed the way she is.

Returning to Scorsese’s documentary, you can definitely notice Scorsese’s classic cinematic style come through in this Armani film portrait, as the director likes to call it, which was written by a long-time collaborator of Scorsese’s, Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York, Mean Streets) and edited by another valued and long-term collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker. The film, voiced entirely by Armani, follows the designer through Milan, the city that breathes life into his collections, his “chosen city”, where he lives and works, through his studio and onto the runway. Milan is a city that respects you and lets you express yourself, he says, “if you have something to say”, he adds. Armani is subtle, just like his clothes. He is a perfectionist, too. “I think of myself as someone who is a beginner, not as someone who has already said a lot”.

Armani talks about his personal style, about his dressing uniform, about the colour blue. “Why blue? Because I think blue looks good on me.” He talks about his work, about the jacket, where it all started. “I have always insisted upon rigorous simplicity. I can’t stand exhibitionism. It’s all a process… searching for elegance… knowing where to look… then finding it… hidden away.” He is shown before one of his shows, preparing the models, supervising every single detail, directing them before sending them on the catwalk. He talks about his past, while still remaining reserved. He has always been influenced by his own past and his family’s, and by the past of the cinema, but has tried not to be trapped by it. The cinema, which, more than his own fashion collections, can reward him in the most satisfying of ways: eternity. “Society changes, and my clothes change with it. But I try to filter my own ideas through a daily reality. It’s as if I were on a movie set. Life is the movie and my clothes are the costumes.” We will always have the movies.

Farewell, Mr. Armani!

Image to the left: Michael Paré and Amy Madigan in Streets of Fire, 1984, directed by Walter Hill.
Costumes by Marilyn Vance and Giorgio Armani.

Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, 1978
Hans-Christoph Blumenberg

Ein verdammt gutes Lieben is a little under-the-radar documentary made in German about Howard Hawks. Five days with Howard Hawks at and around his home in Palm Springs, California. In his own words, Hawks takes us throughout his life (the simple life, his love of the outdoors, flying and cars), and career, and those distinctive cinematic phases we often encounter in his movies, from his style of filming, the outright dialogue comedies, and Cary Grant, to his female characters and the landscapes. “I’m a storyteller, I’m not an artist.” So here we are welcome to 19 chapters from the memories of a storyteller.

Twentieth Century, 1934
Howard Hawks

The film where we are treated for the first time to the full array of Carole Lombard’s manic qualities and the film that introduced a new genre, the screwball comedy. Before this, Hawks explained, “they didn’t have leading men and leading women make damn fools of themselves like they did in that picture”. Cinema was still being invented and Howard Hawks was one of those at the forefront of it, with his freewheeling approach and overlapping dialogue.

On a side note, two films coming out Venice that have caught my attention are Duse, directed by Pietro Marcello, and Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which also won the Golden Lion for best film. I am looking forward to watching them in cinemas.

Reading

The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson

Gabba Gabba Hey: A Conversation with The Ramones is, quite simply put, essential rock ‘n’ roll reading and a beautiful journalistic piece in its own right. I am glad it’s the book I chose to learn more about the band that the author, Carl Cafarelli, calls “The American Beatles”. As Jeff Tamarkin writes, “all of the joy, and bedlam, and fire, and dedication that fueled the Ramones can be found in these pages”. And I do want to bring up the cover of the book – design by Joy Wasserman into discussion (Did the cover matter when I spotted the book in the bookshop? Yes, yes, it did!) – because it’s so perfectly in tune (no pun intended) with The Ramones look: leather jacket, jeans and Converse trainers, a look that is no less part of their legacy and far-reaching influence than the breakneck speed of their short songs.

Listening

The soundtrack: Streets of Fire, 1984

The podcast: Great Lives

The concert: The films in concert at The Royal Albert Hall. There is a great line-up for the following months, and the best part is that you can turn it into a wonderful experience you can enjoy with your entire family: from Back To the Future and How to Train Your Dragon, to Home Alone and The Lord of the Rings.

The album: Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan

Making

It started with travel and adventure. It inspires grace and elegance. It embraces the simple joys. It celebrates nature, naturalness and the every day. Sauths is a linen clothing brand, therefore a hymn to an eternal summer, wherever in the world you may find yourself. “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exploring

Head for the Hills: Katy Griffith’s life long affair with Romania, as seen in the latest issue of Selvedge Magazine, titled Deco. Be transported on a journey through rural Romania, and find inspiration in an accompanying travel guide, full of museum and market tips to inspire an adventure within the region. You are also welcome to read the interview I did with the founder of Selvedge Magazine, Polly Leonard, who has a visionary mind and an eye, skill and respect for craft and for the beautifully made: Threaded Stories: A Talk with Polly Leonard.

As a personal note, head for Apuseni Mountains, too, and the hiking trails.

On an end note

When it comes to books, I look for inspiration everywhere (except the algorithms of the big online retailers). The Wainwright Prizes champion stories that connect people and planet and celebrate nature writing and conservation storytelling, and they have just announced their 2025 winners.

“The strongest growth often begins out of sight. Trees send roots deep before they stretch towards the sky. Depth takes patience, and growth that lasts doesn’t always happen fast, in life, as in nature.” Here are four more powerful ways the natural world shows us that patience, care, and steady progress are essential lessons that can guide both our personal lives and how we care for the planet.

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

”Like most writers, I’m always eager to write
without actually getting paid for it.”

Carl Cafarelli, Gabba Gabba Hey! A conversation with The Ramones

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | | Comments Off

4 September 2025

Read instead…in print #37: Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche

It was 1993 when photographer Carole Bellaïche met Isabelle Huppert for the first time. She was on a Cahiers du Cinéma assignment and she travelled to Lausanne, where Huppert was rehearsing for the play Orlando, directed by Bob Wilson. “The very first photo I took of Isabelle Huppert, actress, was the on-stage photo of a very handsome man, in Bob Wilson’s geometric light of absolute precision – she was Orlando. A man at first who magically becomes a woman, a disturbing character who straddles reality and time. Like her, in a way.”

It was the following year that Carole Bellaïche and Isabelle Huppert came to know each other. Isabelle asked Carole to photograph her as Marlène Dietrich, because Louis Malle wanted to make a film about the Hollywood star. “The project was ultimately abandoned, but we had our photos. That’s when our long romance began.”

The photographer found in Isabelle “the ideal model: complicit, playful and extremely present. A great actress, of a rare singularity, who never tires of these moments of shooting, with whom everything is possible, and who by a strange faculty changes without really changing. Her face, which is so familiar to me now, always surprises me, seduces me, fulfills me in this permanent and obsessive search for the ideal, and for beauty.” With each moment and each photo, we see her in perpetual transformation and yet wonderfully familiar. A complete actor. A fearless talent. Always reinventing herself. You can feel her arresting presence in a photograph just as if you were watching her on screen. You can not escape her intensity, be that her edgy grace, her sharp glare or her moral complexity. The more you watch her, the more of an enigma she becomes. You can not look away.

The book Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche follows Isabelle to Brazil, Cambodia, China, Cannes, accompanies her in so many experiences and special moments, and ultimately tells the story of the photographer-model relationship, but also of the rise of a star. And of a complicity in creating stories. Because each photo is a story in itself; they tell us so much, and yet they leave so much unsaid, to be discovered, to wonder about, to be fascinated by. The story of “a myth, a model woman, a muse for many, and a heroine of our times.”

”She knows, I think, that she holds some kind of truth.”

Read instead…in print #36: North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much

“Art will set you free”: In conversation with photographer Bill Phelps

Posted by classiq in Film, Photography, Read instead...in print | | Comments Off

31 August 2025

Carole Lombard’s spectacular repartee in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

Carole Lombard had tomboyish qualities, flair for comedy and could hold up her glamour all at the same time like no other actress.

As a twelve-year-old, she appeared in her first film, A Perfect Crime, in 1921, where she played a tomboy who could swing a baseball bat. But it was Howard Hawks who used her effectively for the first time on screen in Twentieth Century, 1934, alongside John Barrymore. Hawks saw her “at a party with a couple of drinks in her and she was hilarious and uninhibited and just what the part needed.” Orson Welles himself recounted in his book-length interviews with Peter Bogdanovic, This Is Orson Welles, that he and Lombard performed many practical jokes. They were pals and tremendous friends.

It is with Lombard, Todd McCarthy writes in the book Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, that Hawks truly began discovering young actresses, shaping their screen personalities and fashioning what became known as “the Hawksian woman”, an independent type with a mind of her own who would stand up to men. He saw something in Lombard (“She was a complete extrovert,” Hawks would recall, “she didn’t say or do anything she didn’t feel she wanted to do, and she was so beautiful and so well dressed that she’d get by with it.”) and trusted to pair her with a well accomplished actor, thus giving her room to free her personality on screen. Just as he would do with other actresses, more notably Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby”, he instinctively knew how to help Lombard be her natural self on screen after a rocky start of the shooting: “Now we’re going back in and make the scene and you kick, and you do any damn thing that comes into your mind that’s natural, and quit acting. If you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you this afternoon.” It worked and “Lombard’s natural spirited quality came through unchecked in her performance”. She is both appealing and self-sufficient, forthright and holding her own with poise and humour in a mad, mad comedy.

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

Hawks preferred comedies to dramas, but he didn’t make comedies just for the sake of being funny (on a side note, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be has often been considered his funniest film because it is his most serious). He pushed comedy forward, and his characters too, he makes his men sometimes heroes and sometimes he demoralizes them, and his women he usually places far superior to men, his stories never driven by commercialism and sentimentality but by a genuine sense of storytelling. He was a storyteller. His worlds, whether in comedies, adventure or noir films, were the creation of a unique artistic vision, a fascinating combination of fantasy and reality, of stylistic intuition and human emotion that can easily fit into our own imagination. There is something about watching a Howard Hawks film that makes me feel good about myself and dream a little.

Carole Lombard went on to team up with William Powell causing a sparkling riot in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, the definitive screwball comedy, and she brought all her ingeniosity and exuberance to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

In 1941, Alfred Hitchcock made Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a picture done almost only “as a friendly gesture to Carole Lombard”, he confessed in his interviews with François Truffaut. “She asked whether I’d do a picture with her.” And he did. Although he admitted he really didn’t understand the type of people portrayed in the film, he knew how to emphasize humour, and, luckily for him, he had Lombard’s wonderful comedic timing and “spectacular repartee” to his aid. She could do the most bold, outrageous thing and still not lose the audience. And Hitchcock always had his audience in his mind. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is Hitchcock’s only pure comedy in Hollywood and a pretty good one on its own, a humorous vehicle in which Carole Lombard excelled.

It is a classic story about a married couple who find out after three years together that they aren’t in fact legally married at all. A wild and funny string of events follows, but it is Lombard’s magnetism that wins your full attention whenever she’s on screen. She is a cinematic wonder. She is glamorous and very self-aware, elevated and grounded at the same time, and at the top of her role in a very natural way. She expertly shaves Robert Montgomery and she does it dressed in a pristine pair of satin pajamas. She has the ability to express her feelings just with her face when she and her husband are trying to have dinner at the rundown restaurant from the time when they started dating. She is the personification of innocence when she just nods in agreement when her husband repeatedly asks her if she’s not crossed with him anymore after a bedroom quarrel that has lasted three days. She is all class and grace when she gets soaked wet in a torrential rain in her beautiful black Irene coat. And she is ready to spark when the fuse is lit in the mountain ski lodge where she is delightfully confused about whether to leave or stay. She could do wisecracking, expansive acting and nuanced humour. Even when swathed in silver lamé.

Photo: Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

MORE STORIES

Very, very natural and herself: Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby”

Interview with photographer Laura Wilson

Bonnie Lee and the leather jacket flying men in “Only Angels Have Wings”

Posted by classiq in Film | | Comments Off