Planes, Trains, and Cinema

The day that trains ceased to be the most popular form of transportation was a sad day for cinema. For decades they had been the stars of countless thrillers and screwball comedies, exploited for their twisting narrow claustrophobia, the privacy of their first-class berths, and the serendipity of public dining cars where you could be seated at a table with anyone (or someone very specific if you bribed the steward). Trains allowed for a cross-section of the population to be in close proximity for a short while and then go their separate ways. Tennis stars and oedipally stunted dandies, men on the run and cool worldly blondes, heiresses and impoverished musicians, notorious vamps and missionary priests, cross-dressing fugitives and sex-kittenish ukulele-players, shy wallflowers and impecunious charmers, millionaires and entire “Ale and Quail” clubs--fate brings all these together for a time to forward the plots of their various cinematic journeys. In fact there seems to be no other form of transportation more suited to film. Cars provide room for only a few passengers and buses are at once too communal and too confined to offer the same variety of plots that a train can. Which isn’t to say that buses and cars don’t have their place in movies (the road movie is a whole genre in itself), but simply that they don’t touch on the breadth of possibilities that trains offered in their hey-day.

Trains have played a vital role in film history from its very start. Arguably the first horror film and the first western featured trains. The “horror” film is a little actuality by the Lumière brothers in 1895 of a train arriving head on into a station, which according to the advertising sent the audience fleeing for the exits in fear for their lives. The western is The Great Train Robbery from 1903, one of the most effective early film narratives. The comedic value of locomotion, however, was most thoroughly explored for the first time in the 1920s by Buster Keaton. He gave us two of the most delightful train journeys in silent film history, Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927). Both films are comedies of Southern manners, and Our Hospitality begins the long and very fruitful tradition of a fateful romantic entanglement beginning in a shared train compartment. This would continue in screwball comedies and thrillers throughout ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. By the ‘60s most trains came equipped with a mysteriously obliging blonde who would unquestioningly aid our desperate heroes in their hour of need.

The great writer/director of the early 1940s, Preston Sturges, understood well the comedic value of the atmosphere of those close quarters, from the awkward athletics involved in jumping on and off the freight cars of Sullivan’s Travels, to the awkward athletics (and sensuous possibilities) of a stranger climbing in and out of an upper berth in Palm Beach Story, to even more awkward revelations which can occur in the privacy first class sleeping compartment of a honeymooning couple in The Lady Eve. Still the unimpeachable master of both locomotive comedy and suspense is Alfred Hitchcock, and The Lady Vanishes from 1938 is the quintessential train movie, encapsulating all the romantic, comedic, and thrilling possibilities which train travel lends itself to. Iris Henderson is a young English woman traveling in a central European alpine nation as the world teeters on the brink of war, more importantly she teeters on the brink of marriage to a “blue-blooded cheque-chaser,” and a teetering flowerpot meant for rather whimsical old governess thrusts her into the midst of an international situation. Stuck on a train with a slight concussion Iris is forced to rely on her fellow passengers, the majority of whom wish to convince her that she is hallucinating. It is Hitchcock at his most sparkling, and its locomotive setting shows the director in his element. He was fascinated by the way people were thrown together through train travel. The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Suspicion all deal with the romantic possibilities in meeting strangers on trains. Strangers on a Train though, plays with the opposite possibility--sharing a train compartment with a psychopath.

Today most people travel by airplane rather than trains, and though they are used for pretty much the same purpose, an airplane is far more limiting cinematically than a train. Their cabins are too big for privacy, and the various nooks and crannies are too small to provide good cover. There is no place to hide on a normal airplane, so directors often create huge multi-layer luxury-liners of jets, which so little resemble the planes that us plebs fly on that it is hard for audiences to connect them with their own experiences. The Jodie Foster film Flightplan exemplifies this problem. The pitch might intrigue--“The Lady Vanishes, but on a plane”--but in order to allow a vanishing to occur the director destroys any claustrophobia that might be invoked by making the plane itself is so huge that it seems like a flying office building. The familiarity that the movie tries to breed by being set in a space that the majority of its audience have been at one time or another is negated as Jodie Foster’s character descends into the bowels of this beast whose vastness is belied by the confines of its fuselage.

None of this is to say that it isn’t possible to make a good movie set on an airplane. Only a month before the release of Flightplan Wes Craven’s admirably tense airline thriller Red Eye came out. This film exploited rather than fought the fact that there is no place to hide on a plane, and used to great effect the terror familiar to every traveler of having a seatmate from hell. An absolutely top-notch B movie (complete with a ludicrous final act) it doesn’t try to take the elements of a train thriller and simply set them on a plane, but finds a way to work with its environment rather than struggle against it. Hitchcock would have been proud.

In The Eye of the Beholder

What makes greatness in acting? There are any number of lists out there, some fan-made, some critical, some created by 'legitimate' organizations like AFI or BFI, listing the '100 Greatest Actors of All-Time'.  A number often top the list: Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and, more recently, Johnny Depp.  There seems to be little disagreement that those actors are indeed great, though their order of greatness is, like any other 'Top' list, open for debate.  And what about the ones put down lower on that same list, or the ones not there at all? Is Peter O'Toole, for instance, really a greater actor than Humphrey Bogart? Is Cary Grant a lesser performer than Gregory Peck?

We tend to think of the 'Method Men' of the 1950s onwards as being somehow greater than the actors of the classical Hollywood era, or their classical counterparts of the stage.  Marlon Brando is 'authentic' in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' in a way that Humphrey Bogart simply is not.  But, consider how authentic 'Streetcar' really is.  It is, after all, a Tennessee Williams play.  Brando's performance is wrenching and raw, but I defy you to name one person of your acquaintance who remotely resembles Stanley Kowalski (and if you can, you might want to run as far away as possible).  Brando is not being realistic, he's being hyper-realistic, externalizing raw emotion and power.  But his performance is as inauthentic as you can get outside of a sociopath.

So authenticity is a bit of dubious category to discuss great acting.  So what is? Here follows my personal criteria, open for debate as always, but it at least gets at some definition of what it takes to be labelled 'great'.

Naturally, I have my own preferences and my own attitudes.  Certain actors who are labelled 'great' leave me scratching my head, or walking out of the theatre.  I am consistently underwhelmed by performers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Jude Law, and Russell Crowe, all of whom have been severally called the 'greatest actors of their generation'.  Heath Ledger seems to me to be one of those actors who might have been, but will never be.  Nannina, I know, reacts badly to Jack Nicholson, whom I consider to be in the realm of the greats.  Personal preference shall probably always play a role when we try to agree what actors are great, good, mediocre and poor.  But I think we can be brought to agree on at least a few things.  

Disclaimer: obviously, I'm talking about all male actors here.  Female actors deserve their own article and I don't have the energy to combine the two. 

   1.  Charisma

Probably the most important factor.  A great actor is one who demands audience attention.  If he is on screen, the audience's eyes must be drawn to him.  Most remarkable is when two charismatic actors share the screen--see Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine duke it out for two hours in 'Sleuth'.  A great actor can also point up the lesser qualities of his co-stars, as his charisma dwarfs otherwise good actors.  A charismatic actor can make a bad guy charming and attractive (Alan Rickman in 'Die Hard'), so much so that we all feel some little sadness at his final, inevitable death.  Charisma is probably undefinable, often subjective, but seems a necessary factor and does not merely relate to physical attractiveness.  You can find an actor charismatic without ever finding him attractive, and it is his charisma (not his abs) that draws you, and the camera, to him.  

2.  Breadth of Character

The ability to portray diverse, contradictory characters seems a necessity for an actor to be truly considered great.  This does not mean that the actor's persona must, therefore, vanish beneath a veneer of characterization.  Most great actors become known for being themselves.  I do not think it goes against an actor to bring his star persona to the screen.  Cary Grant was always Cary Grant, to be sure, but he was also a comedian, a lover, even (nearly) a villain.  The star persona can sometimes be a millstone and prevent the actor from appearing as a true other, a character outside himself.  But his ability to play that persona, and to counteract it, as Henry Fonda did in 'Once Upon a Time in the West' or Grant attempted to do in 'Suspicion', can in itself be called greatness.  Too often we dismiss actors for playing themselves.  What they are really playing is a star persona, a larger-than-life figure of the imagination.  That takes ability.  It can also lead to greatness.     

3. Vocalization

Forgive me for this, but it is my strong belief that a great actor must have a great voice.  Whether the refined, classically trained intonations of a Gielgud, or the nasal, everyman-ness of a Brando or Nicholson, much of the strength of an actor lies in his ability to articulate his lines.  Some actors, like Brando or Dean, founded their acting style in not being understood, making mumbling an act of art.  This style of performance, founded in the Method, works perfectly for certain roles: it would never do for The Wild One to speak Shakespeare.  But it can also limit an actor.  To continue to use Brando as an example, his performance as Marc Antony in 'Julius Caesar' has been derided (rightly, I think) as a case of two acting styles meeting and failing to mesh.  Stanley Kowalski does not belong in ancient Rome and Shakespeare's language does not sit easily on Brando's tongue.  You can't mumble out 'Friends, Romans' and create the desired effect.  His voice feels wildly out of place, particularly surrounded by actors like James Mason and John Gielgud, whose refined voices and classical backgrounds slip perfectly into place in a Shakespeare drama.    

4. Ability

This is what it all comes down to.  A great actor, simply put, can really act.  He can make you feel his character's desperation, humanity; he can find beauty in the ugliest of characters, nuance in the most perfect.  And this does not merely go for drama.  Comedians are consistently undervalued in the list of great actors, but every actor has admitted that tragedy is much easier than comedy.  Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd: all deserve their places in the pantheon.  We tend to award dramatic performances, but how difficult was it for Chaplin to make us laugh at a man eating his shoe? Or for Keaton to find physical humor in a house falling down? Some of Cary Grant's best performances are so good because they do not dwell on the dark side, but give us the joy of seeing a handsome man making a fool of himself, of him making us laugh.  So ability does not merely fall into the realm of tortured characters self-destructing, but also in joyful characters managing against all odds to turn their pathos to humor.  

So here I have shown my colours.  I could give you my personal list of great actors, but in truth they are too numerous and, I feel, impossible to rank.  I cannot in good conscience put Brando or Dean at the top of a list that must include Olivier and Redgrave, and how can one compare? At the very least I can say that, while we must always disagree about this or that performer, we can emphatically agree that there are the great ones out there, who consistently give us moments and movies to argue about, analyze, and enjoy.  Perhaps ultimately greatness is in the eye of the beholder.       

Sink or Swim

I possess a rather unfashionable opinion. An opinion which eleven years ago was once so widely held for a few months that everyone in the interest of not following the crowd unanimously decreed that hence forth (effective around February 18th, 1998) it would be utterly and unforgivably démodé. The opinion is this: “Titanic” is a great film, and I don’t mean this statement to be tempered with any face saving “fors”, “in so far ases”, or “ifs”. “Titanic” certainly has its flaws, and if one element had been out of place it would not be great, as the evidence of the deleted scenes show us (for those who don’t possess the 3 disc ultimate edition the deleted scenes are almost uniformly terrible, and the alternate ending is one of the worst that I have ever seen), but beneath that is a movie that against almost insurmountable odds succeeds.

First of all full disclosure: I saw Titanic in theatres when I was twelve at least five times that I can count, though I’m probably forgetting a sixth, which was pretty much par for the course for a twelve year old girl back in 1997. And I scoured the internet for every picture from the film I could find to create a scrapbook version of the movie in chronological order, complete with quotes (it really is a little like watching the film, but takes less time), which was perhaps a bit obsessive even for a twelve year old girl in 1997. Now that I have guaranteed that none of my friends will ever talk to me again I shall endeavor to claw my way back into your good graces by explaining why.

Well first and foremost I will give you one reason that did not enter into the equation back when I was twelve, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nothing annoyed me more back then than when some condescending fifty-something leaned over and with a wink said “I know why you like Titanic.” Was it so unbelievable to them that I could come to a decision not based on effervescent intoxication of preteen hormones? I actually had to argue my case so frequently that a positive dislike of Leonardo DiCaprio formed that wasn’t dispelled until 2003 and “Catch Me if You Can”. It was the world the movie immersed me in that I loved. The history fascinated me; a PBS documentary on the Titanic that came out in ’95 moved me to tears. The Gilded Age fascinated me. The costumes fascinated me. Sure, I enjoyed the story of Jack and Rose, but it never made me cry, what made me cry were the incidental details on the periphery. The true stories that Jack and Rose ran through in their roller coaster ride for survival – Ida and Isidor Straus lying side by side in their first class berth as water floods beneath them, the middle class father bidding farewell to his wife and two daughters (one of whom is an avatar for real life survivor Eva Hart who recalled her father’s last words to her as “Hold mummy’s hand and be a good little girl”), Captain Smith’s empty-eyed return to the wheel house when he realizes that there was nothing more he could do, Victor Garber’s gentle pathos as the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews. It is the band’s final dirge for the sinking boat, so wonderfully mournful, that strikes the exact right note. Far more moving to me than Rose’s tearful promise to Jack is Father Byles’ recitation of Revelations 21 at the stern of the ship while performing his last mass. These are all real events and real people. That James Cameron was able to include these stories without exploitation or disrespect is the film’s greatest accomplishment. It heightens our understanding of the real tragedy while also deepening our emotions for the fictitious one. It is this combination of reality and fantasy that the genre of the historical epic is based on, and it fails nine times out of ten. Back in 1997 it seemed inevitable that "Titanic" would fail.

In the years after its release on December 19th 1997 “Titanic” has become known for its incredible success, becoming the box office record holder (though it must be said that it would fall from its lofty position if inflation were taken into account) and winning eleven academy awards, tied for first with “Ben-Hur”, and “The Return of the King”. What is forgotten is the fact that “Titanic” was supposed to be “Waterworld” in terms of failure. It was predicted to be mentioned in the same breath as “Heaven’s Gate” and “Cutthroat Island”. It’s budget ballooned from $110 million to $200 million, then the most expensive movie ever made (again not counting inflation), its release date was notoriously shoved back from July 4th weekend to December, never a good sign for a film, and it was over three hours long limiting the number of times that each movie theatre could show it, plus it had no big stars to bring people in. Bill Mechanic, the chairman of Fox which along with Paramount financed the move, when asked by the New York Times about what he had learned from the experience of making “Titanic” replied, “It's a growth experience. Hopefully you won't make the same mistakes again” (NYT Dec 22, 1997). “Titanic” a mistake? It seems unthinkable now, but back in 1997 no one thought that it would make a profit. It was supposed to sink like its subject and namesake. It was a cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris and excess. It was supposed to bring Fox and Paramount down with it, and even after it had been in the number one box office position for three weeks in a row Larry Gerbrandt, a top media research consultant described “Titanic” as being “symptomatic of a fundamental problem in Hollywood. This is the fact that there's an important difference between not losing money and getting a decent return on your investment. The idea is to make a lot of money. When all you do is break even on your biggest film, you do nothing for your bottom line” (NYT Jan 5, 1998). With our hindsight it seems impossible to link “Titanic” with noble failure.

Perhaps it was too popular. Perhaps it won too many awards, but you cannot deny that it deserved the technical Oscars it received. It has the best production values I have ever seen on screen, and possibly the most effective and judicious use of special effects in the past two decades. If you can tell me which scenes were real, which scenes were done with miniatures and green screens, and which were entirely digital I’ll give you a lollipop. But the reason that it is a great movie goes beyond sets and special effects, costumes and cinematography. I am very skeptical about films that are over two hours long (if it is a romantic comedy then ninety minutes is my limit). A film has to earn its running time, and in the countless times I’ve seen it “Titanic” has never bored me. At three and a quarter hours it doesn’t flag. Sure my aunt fell asleep while watching it, and I am willing to accept that there are people out there who never liked it, but whether you like it or not people will still be watching “Titanic” fifty years from now, and any film that is able to connect with that many people over such a long period of time deserves to be given the title great.