Actors, Models, and Directors

Actors, Models, and Directors

There are 32 posts filed in Actors, Models, and Directors (this is page 3 of 4).

Philippine Cinema: A Childhood in Black and White

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My love of old movies started in the Philippines. When I was in elementary school in the 1970s, I’d be home in time to watch “Piling Piling Pelikula” (“Movie Picks”). The program followed a noontime variety show called “Student Canteen.” A composite of “The Gong Show” and “Donny and Marie,” “Student Canteen” featured an IQ contest and a singing competition, dances, and guest appearances by the stars of the day. The atmosphere of frolicsome high school and college kids filling the rafters that preceded two hours of Filipino black and white films from the 1930s to the 1960s was smart network programming. I was riveted. Although “Piling Piling Pelikula” was a voyage to the past, something about those films was of my present. None of them had a sad ending. Every feature finished with lovers reconciled, a lost child finding a home, or the transformation of a villain into a kind soul.

I am thinking at this moment of “Aklat ng Buhay” (“Book of Life”)(1952). Actress Rosa Rosal is as odious as a Disney stepmother in her pathological urge to reduce a six-year-old boy to tears with bouts of voice-raising and denunciations of worthlessness. In the end, she is repentant. I cannot for the life of me recall the plot, but I surmise that it would not be far from that of “Cinderella” (1950). What causes Rosal’s character to change is insignificant. The point is she does, and she is a happy woman as a result. She hugs the boy and then taunts him by reverting to her awful old self, after which she laughs and says how difficult it is for her to even simulate meanness. That was reality for me before puberty – rainbow and sugar. In tandem with each other, “Student Canteen” and “Piling Piling Pelikula” mirrored the insouciance of my childhood.

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My viewing mate was our housekeeper, Maring. She had started out with the family as my nanny, or as we say in Tagalog, my yaya. On the occasions that my mother was out, Maring would sit with me in the family room, even though she was supposed to be dusting tabletops, a rag in hand in the event the car honk should announce my mother’s return. Whether it was beef steak Tagalog marinating in soy sauce or fried chicken that was served me for lunch, old Filipino movies made for the perfect dessert. The names of actors back then evoked sweetness: Mario Montenegro, Carmen Rosales, Rogelio de la Rosa, Gloria Romero… the alliteration and the rolling of the R’s caressed the tongue like candy. They were all lookers, too, fashioned after a Hollywood counterpart. Amalia Fuentes was the Elizabeth Taylor of the Philippines; Lou Salvador, Jr. was our James Dean; and Barbara Perez was Audrey Hepburn. Rosa Rosal was herself a stunner. Part French, svelte with hair the black of black crystal against fair skin, she was as alluring as a white tiger. Joan Crawford might have inspired her image. I have a vision of Rosal in a scene to another film where she drowns herself by walking into the ocean as Crawford does in “Humoresque” (1946).

It might have been Maring who tuned me into “Piling Piling Pelikula.” Her favorite star was Nora Aunor, the Barbra Streisand of the Philippines and the personification of the rags to riches fairy tale. Petite with skin brown as toast, she was the antithesis of the Western mestiza held as the ideal beauty. Aunor had gotten her break in the entertainment industry when first place in a national singing competition catapulted her from water vendor at train depots to superstar. A snapshot of Aunor on a parade float, standing beside her romantic partner both onscreen and off, Tirso Cruz III, was among Maring’s souvenirs. Maring kept it in a Samsonite valise along with a jade bracelet wrapped in tissue and a wallet made of rice paper, both of which were gifts my mother had bought during trips to Hong Kong and Japan. Maring also had a photograph of a young Caucasian couple. “My amo and ama before,” she said. Prior to working for my family, she had taken care of their boy. I see a red shirt on the man, hair trimmed like Larry Hagman’s in “I Love Jeannie,” and a smile Sesame Street friendly. But I remember neither the mother nor if the boy was in the picture. Either her former employers had moved back to the States or the boy had grown up so that Maring was no longer of use. Whatever her reason for leaving, I felt a tinge of sadness as I gazed at these strangers. One moment Maring was indispensable, relied upon to bathe the boy and put on his socks. Then one day, just like that, she wasn’t.

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Now here she was as my yaya and our housekeeper. The things in life that would upset me was when my mother prohibited me to swim in our pool because I had the sniffles and being called to dinner before the conclusion to an episode of “The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mystery Series.” Otherwise, I spent my days in the maids’ quarters, listening to Maring’s music and radio dramas. Because of her, Nora Aunor had been my favorite singer, as well, Aunor’s rendition of the “The Lord’s Prayer” being my song of choice, only at the period when Maring and I were both hooked on “Piling Piling Pelikula,” I no longer needed a step stool to reach the sink, and I certainly no longer needed her to assist in washing my face. Still, it was too soon for Maring to go. I was learning things from her. She was nuts over pop culture. “I said so,” she beamed with a clap of the hands when Miss Baguio won the Miss Philippines title. She herself hailed from the mountain city. With her thick legs and rotund features, Maring was the embodiment of the Igorot, the native of the region, and of this she was very proud, although the newly crowned beauty queen looked more Chinese than indigenous. When Elvis died, Maring might as well had worn black instead of her white maid’s uniform. That was how much in mourning she was. Her face was a mask of gloom as she dispiritedly maneuvered the rag in her hand over tabletops as if it were a tear-soaked hanky. Rogue that I was, I said that Miss Baguio shouldn’t have won and that Elvis was old anyway.

However, I never teased Maring when it came to bygone black and white Filipino movies. The two primary film production companies in the days of yore were Sampaguita Pictures, which was named after the national flower, and LVN Pictures, famous as the MGM Studios of the Philippines. That we Filipinos could build our own version of Hollywood that celebrated our culture of provincial family values and moonlight serenades was a feast for the eyes. For the decade of the ‘70s, every one of us glued to the TV to watch “Piling Piling Pelikula” was merry and carefree, as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn and as handsome as James Dean. That Nora Aunor could glitter among the most glamorous of the mestizas made us believe that no dream was impossible.

Upon the dawning of the 1980s, those days were over. I grew up.

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“The Salt of the Earth”: Through the Lens of Love

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Photographer Sebastião Salgado has said that he is not an artist; an artist makes an object. He calls himself a storyteller. With the camera as his medium of narration, he has occupied news pages with images of global issues ranging from the famine in Ethiopia to the slave labor of Brazilian mine workers, from oil drills in Kuwait to the Yugoslavian Siege of Bihac. True to the creed of storytelling, Salgado focuses on people. We humans have created the world as it is today. Although we credit ourselves for the breakthroughs of space travel and the internet, the destruction that has been heaped upon earth is largely of our doing, as well. On this, Salgado sheds a light. His pictures aren’t pretty, and rarely is a person smiling. And yet, they are beautiful in their portrayal of will and dignity. Even when prostrate, his human subjects rise like pillars amid a map of rubble. No famous faces here, neither leaders of state nor Nobel laureates for peace. Salgado focuses his lens on the likes of you and me, law-abiding citizens who at any moment can become pawns in a political feud. The photographer may not be making an object, but he is making us feel by relaying to us his vision of the downtrodden, and therefore, changing the way we look at the world. That he doesn’t regard himself as an artist might be modesty. I say he is. One of the best.

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Some things Salgado has seen: corpses along dirt paths like fallen trees in the aftermath of a hurricane; children grimy as sewer rats; and millions of displaced in an exodus towards a promised land that doesn’t exist. We, too, have seen these, in textbooks and journals and in documentaries such as this, “The Salt of the Earth” (2014), and all as scenes from somebody else’s nightmare. Salgado’s, no doubt. The irony in Salgado is that he discovered his vocation of photographic storyteller by chance. He never took classes on the craft nor had he been greatly interested in the scourges afflicting nations across the Mediterranean. He was an economist in Paris in the 1970s when his wife, Lélia, gave him a camera. His first picture was of her, languid on a windowsill against a backdrop of the city line, and out of this tender portrait was born a hunger to record the many faces of love in all the cultures of the world. Love shines strongest when we have lost everything and have only each other. Thus, began a journey that would last to this day to lands where civilizations have collapsed.

Lélia has been partner to Salgado’s passion from the get-go. She quit her job as an architect. He quit his job as an economist. They started a photo studio and worked together in order for him to be the best in the field that he could be. There’s a love story right there, the proverbial “behind every great man is a great woman.” I am a firm believer in the silent influence one has in the success of another, whether the former is a spouse, a friend, or a relation. We have words for this individual such as “muse” and “inspiration.” While for some it can be solitary being at the top, nobody gets there alone. What would Chinese director Zhang Yimou be without actress Gong Li? (http://www.rafsy.com/actors-models-directors/gong-li-the-garbo-of-the-far-east/) Gertrude Stein without Alice B. Toklas? Hubert de Givenchy without Audrey Hepburn? Of his mother, George Washington has said, “I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/24983-my-mother-was-the-most-beautiful-woman-i-ever-saw) Spiritualist Deepak Chopra acknowledges several people: “If you want to do really important things in life and big things in life, you can’t do anything by yourself. And your best teams are your friends and your siblings.”(https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/deepak_chopra_599972)

Parents1I see this in my parents. My mother has a scrapbook of magazine articles written on her when she was single. Since she was a lovely girl – petite with the Spanish traits of high cheekbones and an aquiline nose – Philippine media relished in using her image to fill empty columns. One magazine features a cover story of her engagement to my father. He was a clerk at the Bank of America, while she was a secretary at Caltex. She would not be working much longer because, as my father is quoted, he would be the protector and sole provider of the family. We today would consider this an old-fashioned view of marriage. Father and mother were wed in 1958. The accompanying photograph of them attests to the respect for tradition prevalent in that era. They are standing underneath a tree – she in a flouncy skirt and do styled after Jean Simmons’s crop; he in white pants and black hair glistening with pomade. My father is at an angle with his back to the camera; only part of his smile is visible. The smile that dominates the shot is that of my mother. As my father holds her hand, her smile is all giving, even worshipful. This isn’t a common photograph of a 22-year-old girl in love. This is a quiet moment in which the bride is entrusting the groom with her future. From that moment on, she would be the guardian of his dreams and ambitions. Old-fashioned marriage aside, it worked.

Even though my father was frequently on business trips during my childhood, he was an ever present figure. He was home on weekends, tanning in the garden or, for the year we lived in Walnut Creek, picking weeds and mowing the lawn. During the week, he always occupied his seat at the head of the dinner table so that we could have the last meal of the day as a family. If he had to work late, he would call my mother, who would tell us kids to eat ahead while she waited up for him so that she and he could dine together. Then we would watch TV. Our favorite shows: “Hawaii Five-O” and “Laugh-In” in the 1960s; “The Love Boat,” “Charlie’s Angels,” and “Fantasy Island” in the 1970s; followed by “Three’s Company” and “Dynasty” in the 1980s.

For her part, my mother was the classic homemaker. She never missed any school production I appeared in. In the fifth grade, I was cast as an evil stepbrother in “Cinderfellow,” the male version of “Cinderella.” I had my star moment with a monologue delivered amid excessive arm raises. I must have grown between the casting period and opening night because my trousers were so short that the hem was above my ankles. After I took my bow at the end of the play to the applause of the audience, my mother rushed to me, aghast. “Your socks don’t match,” she said. “One is blue and the other is black.” But she was smiling and so was I. It was her responsibility to notice those things.

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I always thought my father confided to my mother everything that went on at the office. Only a couple of years ago did my mother say this wasn’t so. For my mother to build the home as a safe haven for her husband and children, they agreed that it was mandatory worries pertaining to the bank stay locked in its vaults. That was the only way my father could stay true to the oath he had made that day under the tree. As a result, we’ve survived everything from kidnap threats to a bank run, and in the 57 years that my parents have been married, my father moved up from clerk to founder of his own bank. The business trips that took him away from us had been difficult for my mother, but she understood the necessity of them; they were part of the dream she had married into.

Sebastião Salgado in “The Salt of the Earth” expresses the downside of success on his own family. While growing up, son Juliano hardly ever saw dad. Nevertheless, this did not diminish the boy’s pride in his father. That Salgado ventured to lands and was privy to experiences people only read about made him a superhero in Juliano’s eyes. Today, Juliano has followed in Salgado’s profession and works as his father’s assistant. Lélia remains by Salgado’s side as editor to his books.

One doesn’t need to make an object to be an artist. Art can be something intangible that is beautiful on account of its power to move us, discernible to our hearts rather than to our eyes. How we love so that our dreams can flourish is itself a vision to behold.

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“Sunset Boulevard”: The Edge of Madness

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Among my stack of books is one entitled “Leading Ladies: The 50 Most Unforgettable Actresses of the Studio Era.” It is also a tribute to 50 of the most beautiful women of the 20th century. Glamour shots paired with a listing of must-see films and tid-bits of trivia enliven the pages. Titles are at our disposal on DVD so that we could see for ourselves why these actresses are memorable. Each has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

All this aside, one flabbergasting fact stands out that unifies them as members of an exclusive sorority. Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Lena Horne, Myrna Loy, Marilyn Monroe… these screen goddesses were married an average of three times. From the end of the last marriage (usually through divorce) up to the time of their deaths, which could have been anywhere between two years and 30 years, they lived without a spouse. As Rita Hayworth once said, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda… and woke up with me.” She was alluding to her role in the 1946 movie named after her character, one that cemented her persona as the “love goddess” of war-era America.

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Hayworth’s quote could serve as the life story of all gorgeous creatures. Their images so bewitch us that we forget they are just that – images, manufactured avatars of touch-ups and airbrushing packaged to feed our dreams. No model or actress has ever lived up to her two-dimensional alter ego. 1950s supermodel, Dovima, herself deplored, “I began to have the idea that I was a photograph…a plastic image. I could only be myself behind the camera.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovima) Thus, with Hayworth and company, men married them for their projection of an ideal, and when the human in them surfaced, their husbands bolted. For one’s reality to consist of such betrayal is enough to drive any woman to the edge of madness. If you want to have a distinct picture just how cuckoo, watch “Sunset Boulevard” (1950).

The story of Norman Desmond (Gloria Swanson) has spawned a Broadway musical and spoofs on the “The Carol Burnett Show”: aging silent screen superstar-turned-recluse plans a comeback, employs the professional assistance and personal companionship of a handsome screenwriter (William Holden), and becomes a murderess on the night he walks out on her. Swanson’s performance is over the top, aptly so because that was how moving picture actors performed before sound destroyed their lives, all this widening of the eyes and gesticulations of an orchestra conductor.

The staginess is fitting for the character of Norman Desmond. The has-been is unable to distinguish fact from fiction. For 20 years, she has been holed up in a crumbling mansion, in the company of a manservant, Max (Erich Von Stroheim), who makes it his life’s duty to pen bogus fan letters in order to satiate her delusions of grandeur. The guy isn’t all with it himself. Her fantasy world keeps him breathing, for he, too, was great once… or could have been. Max was a promising director when he had discovered Desmond and had molded her into a star. He is also her husband. Talk about not only a reversal of fortune, but also a reversal of roles. (I believe the word for a man in this position is uxorious.) What a spider’s web screenwriter, Joe Gillis, gets entangled in on the afternoon he swerves his car onto a driveway in an effort to circumvent cops who are after him for a parking ticket. If he had just paid the paltry fine, he would have had a long life. But then we wouldn’t have a movie. If it’s any consolation, the reward of a dramatic story can justify a bad decision.

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For Swanson, playing the role that Mae West and silent greats, Pola Negri and Mary Pickford, had turned down proved to be a good decision. In addition to receiving an Oscar nomination, Swanson is most remembered for the role of Desmond. Any discussion of her earlier films serves as a precursor to “Sunset Boulevard.” Not that the film is autobiographical. Far from it. Through the 1950s and beyond, Swanson flourished as hostess to her own TV show, fashion designer, and fitness guru. Other film offers came, which she rejected because they were variations of the Billy Wilder classic, and crazed old movie star was not the character she wanted to be pigeonholed as.

In her seventies, Swanson did make a star appearance in “Airport 1975” (1974). The disaster flick called for something simple, for the actress to play herself – Gloria Swanson, dressed in fur and black head cloak, narrating to a reporter the story of her life as the queen of a bygone Hollywood, complete with references to Cecile B. DeMille and Carole Lombard. Though somewhat of a parody, we can see in her eyes glee for the chance to tell the world in another blockbuster movie just what it is to be La Swanson. The woman lived a life of excess that included marriage to European (albeit penniless) nobility, the title of marquise, and a weekly salary of $20,000 (a quarter of a million dollars in 2015 currency rate). The lesson: extravagance is permissible so long as one remains level headed.

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Unfortunately, Swanson’s contemporaries did not fare as well as she. One, in particular, had a hard fall, and it is said that she served as the prototype for Norma Desmond – Mae Murray. Known as “the girl with the bee-stung lips,” Murray fabricated everything about her life, going so far as to change her birth year from 1885 to 1898 so that when she did “The Merry Widow” in 1925, her most famous motion picture directed by none other than Erich Von Stroheim and that called for a 20-something actress, she was 40. Like Swanson, she was one of the biggest paid stars with the trappings of a palatial home and a penniless, titled European husband to prove it. Unlike Swanson, she had a mind for neither business nor the hard facts of life: “I am not a realist by nature, and for me to try and become one would only make me acutely unhappy. . .  I have lived as much as possible in a world of fancy.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mae-murray-the-girl-with-the-bee-stung-lips-by-michael-g-ankerich/2013/01/25/c3f4b7e4-326c-11e2-bb9b-288a310849ee_story.html?utm_term=.81f97e0b8433)

Murray was imperious on set. Disagreeable behavior coupled with a sham of a royal husband who siphoned her fortune left her unemployed, indigent, and insane. In her seventies, she was found disoriented on the streets of St. Louis, believing she had completed a bus trip to New York. “Step aside, peasants,” Murray would tell those around her. “Princess Mdvani is passing through.” It mattered not that homes were now Central Park benches and a Salvation Army shelter and that her daily attire were rags held up by clothes pins.

At least, Desmond retains her wealth and finds a spark of hope in that lonely existence of hers where the sun set long ago. Gillis could walk out on her any moment, but he never does. The truth is the guy cares for her. They are two drifters joined in a macabre partnership of glories past and a future built on dreams. He sees in her the wreckage of fame, the effects of an aftershock when the world turns its back on those who have worked so darn hard to be adored by all. She sees in him happiness.

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Rita Hayworth’s epitaph could well be that of Norma Desmond: “All I wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know, to be loved.” (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rita_hayworth_127213)

Brooke Shields: The Prettiest Baby of All

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Brooke Shields is of my generation. As the most famous teen of the 1980s, she was many a boy’s crush. Although “Pretty Baby” (1978) never screened in the Philippines, the premise of a 12-year-old girl’s virginity sold by auction taboo to our Catholic conservatism, we did get “The Blue Lagoon” (1980). Male actors may have predominantly fueled my fantasies, but it wasn’t Christopher Atkins that riveted me. It was she. The publicity blitz focused on the 5’10”, 15-year-old, woman-child who, consciously or not, enthralled the world with her polarizing aura of virginity and sexuality. Philippine magazines ran articles reporting that a body double had been used for the nude scenes and that a ditch had been constructed for Shields to walk in when filming occurred with her co-star because she was taller than he. All this coincided with my growing fascination for fashion models, those static and silent images of female perfection. Had I been a girl, I might have both resented Shields and been threatened by the media’s idealization of women. They embody an impossible standard of beauty. But being a boy, I never saw them as role models, and since my sexual predilection leaned towards the same sex, neither did I lust over them. They captivated me on an aesthetic level the way a Klimt portrait does. And with Shields, that she was close to my age filled me with wonderment at the rank of celebrity she was able to reach simply for being a stunner. They say that looks aren’t everything. Bull shit. So beautiful was Shields that she gained the favor of Imelda Marcos. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-2000s-present/imelda-our-guilty-pleasure/)

In 1983, the second Manila International Film Festival was held. Then First Lady Imelda Marcos had commissioned the project a year prior in her ambition to make the city a film capital on the par of Cannes. Jeremy Irons, Sir Richard Attenborough, and Peter O’Toole were among the luminaries invited. From four continents, countries that included Japan, Australia, the United States, and Italy competed, submitting for consideration of the top prize films now considered classics such as “Frances” (1982) and “La Traviata” (1983). Of all the attendees who could boast a cachet that consisted of knighthoods and France’s Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Shields was the showstopper. Not so strange in a country obsessed with beauty and beauty contests. A local couturier rushed to present her with a terno – our national costume of cinched waist and sleeves cut in the form of a cathedral dome – and reporters queried her mother for an opinion on young Brooke appearing in bold (our word for sexy) movies. Reporters especially thought it cute that Shields, with all her prominence in the echelon of glamour and high fashion, was in disbelief that the diamonds sewn into Mrs. Marcos’s black gown were real. 25 years later, Shields would have fond reminiscences of that event, telling a reporter to the American edition of a Filipino newspaper, The Inquirer, on an interview to promote “Lipstick Jungle,” a TV sit-com in which she was the main star: “I’ve had as much fun cutting the ribbon at that festival as I was excited to come here today to celebrate a new chapter in my life.”

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Those were heady times, to be sure, not only for Brooke Shields, but also for us Filipinos. Although nobody could have known it then, the second Manila International Film Festival would be Imelda Marcos’s last hurrah. Since its inception, the festival had already been shrouded in a cloak of controversy. The Manila Film Center, which resembles ancient Egypt’s Temple of Derr, cost $25 million ($60 million in 2015 currency rate) to erect, a fortune in a country where floods rise waist-high during monsoon season due to poor infrastructure. The lobby was built in 72 hours – a job which would normally have taken six weeks of toil – and in the rush for completion, a scaffold collapsed, sending 169 laborers to the construction pit. Rumors buzzed that the first lady ordered cement poured on the trapped men, whether dead or alive. On opening night, attendees reported incidences of haunting – voices in empty spaces; furniture moving on their own; a projection screen buckling. Little would Shields realize a year later that she could have been treading a mass grave. Entering glass portals with Mrs. Marcos by her side, green eyes dreamy amid a combustion of camera flashes, she was the vision of a fairy tale princess in a waltz with darkness – Sleeping Beauty under Maleficent’s spell.

Eight months later – on August 21, 1983 – the opposition leader to the Marcos administration, Benigno Aquino, Jr., was assassinated, triggering a revolt against the government that would culminate in the first family’s exile to Hawaii. There would never be another Manila International Film Festival, and the center would be left abandoned until the second millennium, a decaying monument to the sins of grandiosity.

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As for Brooke Shields, she never set foot in the Philippines again. She would move past adolescence, get a degree from Princeton University, marry twice, and start a family. She would break ties with her mother on account of the latter’s problems with alcohol, and she would have a public row with Tom Cruise (http://www.rafsy.com/actors-models-directors/tom-cruise-the-art-of-survival/) over treatment for postpartum depression. Like any other human, she has experienced life’s highs and lows. Shields is soon to turn 50. Of her crow’s feet, she says, “I’ve earned these.”

However, no matter how greatly Brooke Shields has matured, I still see in her the nubile nymph whose beauty so mesmerized the Filipinos during a volatile episode in Philippine history that she has become ingrained in our collective memory. And every time I hear Lionel Richie and Diana Ross croon the title song to another famous Shields coming-of-age romance, “Endless Love” (1981), I am that 14-year-old boy once more, calling the neighborhood betamax store to deliver the latest starring my favorite supermodel.

Rudolph Valentino: Fire of the Silver Screen

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In 2004, the annual Silent Film Festival in San Francisco screened “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1921) at the Castro Theater. Since I expected a small audience (a silent film, really?), I arrived ten minutes before show time. Big mistake. Imagine the cash registers at Costco on 4th of July. That’s how many people were waiting with ticket in hand. A line extended from the marquee down a quarter of the block to 17th Street, around the corner and up a full block to Noe Street, then around Noe. People weren’t gathered on the pavement for the feature either. It could have been anything so long as it starred the man who was seducing a crowd to spend a sunny afternoon in the darkness of an antiquated movie palace – Rudolph Valentino. I will dispel any notion you might have of everybody present as an old timer. I stress that I… then in my thirties… was there, and I bear witness to the phenomenon that a chunk of the viewers were youths who fit the Haight-Ashbury template of frayed jeans and scraggly hair. Nearly 80 years after his death, Valentino remained a big draw. As I overheard a woman say while gazing at the actor’s name on the marquee, “I guess that’s how it is when you’ve gained immortality in films.”

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How did Valentino manage such a feat? For starters, he was f_ing hot by any standard, be it 1920s or 2000s. I have an indelible image in my head of footage I once saw on TV that featured a pair of flappers strapped to arm cords designed to measure the increase of heart rate upon viewing a Valentino movie. The needle to the flatline screen went berserk. So did the two women. Their eyes popped out as though their fingers had been plugged into a socket. Electricity current (or maybe it was hair peroxide) kindled their wavy flapper bob. Delirious to the point of fainting, they appeared in the throes of an orgasm. The Valentino I saw on screen at the Castro Theater justified the histrionics. There is a reason the tango scene made him famous. In a poncho and a leer underneath a sombrero, he intrudes on a couple heating up a tavern dance floor. Since the señorita’s partner refuses to budge, our star in character as Julio Desnoyers whips out a sword and stabs the poor hombre. He then grabs the lady, lunges, dips, and glides, his body pressed against hers with enough strength for an appendage to poke a hole through his gaucho pants. The persona of the Latin lover was born. Contrary to popular perception, the male archetype started with Rudolph Valentino, not with Zorro.

Valentino was the first with regards to another pop cultural phenomenon that would include James Dean, River Phoenix, and Heath Ledger – the mythologizing of a Hollywood star in the aftermath of an untimely death. Young, beautiful, and at the pinnacle of his stardom, Valentino was 31 when he died of a perforated ulcer in 1926. 50,000 mourners attended his wake in New York city. Those who couldn’t get in, smashed windows, and still others – a handful of maniacal fans – killed themselves. The next time America would witness this form of crazed adulation was some 40 years later, when Marilyn Monroe’s death spiked up the suicide rate by 12% in one week. Film historians never refer to a Valentino film as a touchstone in either artistry or technicality. Neither is Valentino remembered as a great actor. We wonder if he would be the legend he has become had he lived to old age. He could have flourished in talkies as Greta Garbo did (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/flesh-and-the-devil-the-sound-of-an-original/), disappeared only to make a big bang of a comeback two and a half decades later à la Gloria Swanson (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/sunset-boulevard-the-edge-of-madness/), or joined his silent contemporaries on the plummet to oblivion. At the same time, wondering of what might have been is futile. No amount of speculation can amend that the man’s passing under tragic circumstances gave him posthumous fame.

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I am as susceptible to the marketing of celebrity misfortunes as any member of the star-gazing public. Young death is a large reason for my romanticizing Valentino. That Valentino had a risqué personal life renders him all the more alluring. Before he was a star, he was a gigolo and a petty thief. His first wife was a lesbian. The public jeered him as a “pink powder puff” upon the release of “Monsieur Beaucaire” (1924) due to his heavy make-up, beauty mole, and flamboyant costumes. He was rumored to have given actor Ramon Novarro an art deco dildo as well as to have had homosexual liaisons all over Hollywood. The guy was literally a walking piece of sex. Plus, he could have been a friend of Dorothy. And then he was gone. No images will ever exist of Valentino’s transmogrifying into a slovenly old man with a pachyderm belly as they do for cinema’s all-time hunk, Marlon Brando. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/a-streetcar-named-desire-forever-young/)

As an artist and a gay man endowed with a highly visual sensibility, I wonder about my own legacy. I am at the age I am meant to be, at the peak of my physical power. 48 is old enough to express wisdom and young enough for future possibilities. I lift weights, have grown comfortable in my own skin, and project through my writings a voice that is distinctly my own. In my daydreams, my novels would exhibit the literary virtuoso of William Styron, packaged with an author pic that stuns with the good looks of Rudolph Valentino. However, even though people assume me to be ten years younger, the Dorian Gray effect can only last so long. Should the reveries persist past my middle years, then I’d be Norma Desmond demented. Alas, although I can always believe within reason in applause for my creative output, the face the public would associate with it could be that of a man who buys movie tickets at the price for a senior citizen. That’s okay so long as I am not prone to whatever it is John Travolta has done to make his face plasticized. The day will come when I must say without contention, “I am old.”

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Immortality and eternal physical beauty are attained only in young death. That is why we are hooked on Valentino and the celebrities after him who have met his fate. We project onto them a desire that we pay plastic surgeons a fortune to fulfill. The irony is that Rudolph Valentino was not on a death wish. On the contrary, he spent his last moments speaking of the future. Yet there we have it: a sex symbol for the ages who will forever be ageless.

 

 

Twiggy: The Flowering of a Waif

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Isabella Rossellini has said that true beauty is when you see a woman as beautiful rather than as once having been beautiful. That’s a tough state to achieve. Many a celebrated beauty spends her early blush of womanhood in front of the camera for the world to behold as a vision of spring loveliness. The permanence of film creates an illusion of agelessness, and that illusion becomes her identity. We wax poetic over our infatuation with these women and the nubility they exude. Of Greta Garbo, a film critic gushed, “Her luscious lips and volcanic, slumberous eyes enfire men to such passion that friendships collapse.”(http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/flesh-and-the-devil-the-sound-of-an-original/) In some form or other, the same has been said of Eve, Helen of Troy, and Nefertiti. Like the illusion itself, the praise is ephemeral. The world turns unkind to the appearance of a wrinkle and an increase in girth. The inevitability of age results in a dearth of film offers and photo shoots. Garbo became a recluse. Marilyn Monroe died.(http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/bus-stop-stardom-in-the-hollywood-night/) They were both just 36. As a septuagenarian, when gawkers would hound her for a glimpse of her celluloid past, Garbo scoffed, “I look like the Madwoman of Chaillot, hair hanging.” (https://people.com/archive/cover-story-the-great-garbo-vol-33-no-17/)

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For a moment, Twiggy had a place in the gallery of bygone beauties. She was a relic when I was coming of age, and she wasn’t even old, a mere 20-something. Throughout the 1970s, she made a career for herself on screen (both big and small), stage, and in song, earning a pair of Golden Globe awards for Best Actress and New Star of the Year as well as a spot on the British pop charts. That she evolved past modeling, however, was nothing I was aware of. I neither heard her recordings nor saw her movies. That continues to hold true today. For all the Western shows and commercials featured on Philippine TV, many such as “The Brady Bunch” and “Gilligan’s Island” never reached the shores of my homeland. My cognizance of American pop culture didn’t happen until the late ‘70s with “Charlie’s Angels.” Yet I must have encountered Twiggy’s image somewhere…. perhaps in Hong Kong or Japan, where I had spent my toddler years and where Twiggy had been a hit… because that face and that name seem to have been with me all my life.

The first memory of Twiggy I do have dates to the early 1980s. I used to watch an afternoon TV show that would bring the viewers on a voyage through a time capsule to events and inventions of the past. In black and white footage, a girl with linguine limbs, butterfly wing lashes, and the most supercilious of facial expressions since Garbo strutted off the catwalk and into my consciousness. What invention is that? I marveled. Reporters and photographers swarmed around her as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea. It was Twiggy on her arrival in New York in the year I was born. At 18, she had such command of her audience and such awareness of her power to bring the public to its knees with a sashay and a bat of the lashes that I was instantly mired in a feeling of both envy and awe. Whatever it is we call the It factor, she had. I wanted that for myself. Disregard that Twiggy is female. Star quality, charisma, sex appeal… whatever other sobriquets It is known by… is a virtue on anybody of either gender.

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Yes, I include sex appeal because the Twiggy on TV at that moment, in all her cropped hair and flat-chested boyishness, was sexy. The way she moved, her sureness of steps and high head, and her oblivion to the camera flashes and buzzing bee interrogations put her on a pedestal. There’s something alluring about someone you want but can’t have. I encounter that on a daily basis at the gym. It’s called desire. And it’s damn frustrating. Frustration was evident on the face of every member of the press in Twiggy’s presence – the ogling, the swooning, the defeat. You don’t forget that when you’re a kid filled with imaginings of the type of grown-up you want to be.

The clip lasted for no more than ten minutes. Like a genie in a bottle, Twiggy disappeared. I wouldn’t hear of or see her again until 30 years later, with her as a judge on “America’s Next Top Model.” Amid the back stabbing whininess of under-educated girls and Tyra Bank’s atrocious get-ups, Twiggy stands out as a class act. Free of vamping and excessive botox, she is a sedate figure in bangs and tailored suits. Plus, she smiles. In her modeling pictures from the 1960s, she is often somber, as if a show of teeth would have detracted from the wattage of those marble ball eyes. Who knows? Maybe Twiggy wasn’t all that happy back then. To be thrust into the limelight at 16 is a daunting experience, after all, especially when you had not planned on it. Those of us who do not have fame romanticize the attention. We overlook the pressure of expectation and the sacrifices made. Woody Allen, for one, made fun of Twiggy. During that seminal landing in New York, the comedian asked her on a filmed interview who her favorite philosopher was. Since she had been expecting inane questions about her impressions of America, she could not answer, at which Allen looked over his shoulder at the camera with an expression of disdain.

You can almost sense Twiggy on “America’s Next Top Model,” wise with a well-deserved longevity, surreptitiously rolling her eyes across her forehead in questioning the intelligence of those girls the way Allen once questioned hers. She may have stopped schooling to become a world-famous model, but at least she had read Dickens. And she can talk. Eloquently. When Twiggy looks back on her heyday, she does so with detachment and amusement. It’s almost as if she were speaking about somebody else: “I always describe her, ‘60s Twiggy, as my little friend who sits on my shoulder.” (http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/lifestyle/gh-women-celebrity-interviews/best-twiggy-quotes-to-live-by-sixties-fashion-icon)

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In the second decade of the second millennium, Twiggy starred in an ad campaign for Marks and Spencer in which she dons dresses with the panache of the sexagenarian that she is. That she is not the gangly teen she was 50 years ago does not bother her an inkling. In her own words, “I don’t understand people getting depressed about getting older. There is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well embrace it.” (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/twiggy_612673) Embrace her age, Twiggy has. She laughs. She cavorts. She’s having the time of her life.

“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”: Innocence Immortalized in Rainbow Colors

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Had Matisse been God, he would have created the world of Cherbourg. Rainbow colors burnish the screen with the dewy freshness of paint on a palette. Snow flakes flurry to the ground like raining chips of porcelain china. Buildings possess the geometric precision of cut-out figures in a pop-up book. Add to the mix the music of Michel Legrand and a 20-year-old actress by the name of Catherine Deneuve in her first starring role, and what you have in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964) is a piece of French cinema destined to be a winner at the Cannes Film Festival.

Deneuve is Genevieve, a provincial girl in the throes of first love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a mechanic whose ambition is to own a gas station. They stroll on the streets of Cherbourg, sharing thoughts of getting married and having a child, which they will name Francois should it be a boy or Francoise should it be a girl. So sure are they of the future their devotion promises that everything in their midst, be it a house door or Genevieve’s dress, is as delectable as icing on a wedding cake. Conflicts arise, as they always do for young lovers. Genevieve’s mother (Anne Vernon) does not approve of Guy, and Guy receives a draft notice. It is the era of the Algiers War. This proves to be the perfect reason to implement a dramatic device indispensable to some of cinema’s most epic romances, starting with every film adaptation of “Anna Karenina” to “Sunflower” (1970) to “Before Sunrise” (1995) – a train station farewell.

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Not a single misstep happens in this scene. On the contrary, it is prolonged to maximum effect. Genevieve and Guy sing their duet amid hugs and tears and kisses in the station café. The duet is so sensitively rendered (by voiceovers) that it is remembered to this day as one of Legrand’s best:

If it takes forever, I will wait for you. For a thousand summers, I will wait for you. Till you’re back beside me, till I’m holding you, till I hear you sigh here in my arms.

As Genevieve waves adieu to Guy’s departing train, it is raining. She grows ever so small in the distance until exhaust fumes envelop her in a fog.

Cherbourg has lost its sheen.

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Genevieve is left not only crestfallen, but also pregnant. She tells her mother that she will kill herself, which generates a balk and the line that a love suicide only happens in the movies. So Genevieve goes on to marry, not Guy but a traveling jeweler by the name of Roland (Marc Michel), who assures her comfort in Paris and a father to her child. Upstanding character that he is, Roland does not rescind on his word. Guy returns, and though he goes through a period of dejection over the loss of Genevieve, he finds another woman to love in the form of Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the caregiver to his ailing aunt (Mireille Perrey). This is not entirely a surprise. From the start, we sense that Madeleine will play a crucial role in our hero’s life or else she would not have been so pretty.

Every man is handsome. Every woman is beautiful. Neither villain nor villainess exists. Everybody ends up happy. Cherbourg regains its sheen. Yet “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” is a tragedy all the same because the undying love between Genevieve and Guy on which the film stands fails to be an enduring foundation after all. Despite the oath of till death do us part, the begging to stay, and the declaration of life as worthless without each other, Genevieve and Guy are able to put their love to rest.

From a practical perspective, this is a healthy depiction of first love. No Romeo and Juliet are Guy and Genevieve nor, hopefully, are all young lovers in real life. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/romeo-and-juliet-till-death-and-beyond/) Nonetheless, we cannot deny its sadness.

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For me, however, this was the beginning of my love affair with Catherine Deneuve. I am not alone here. Such is the world’s shared fascination with her that in the five decades since the premier of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” her oeuvre has made for popular screenings in art theaters. On top of that, her current works merit an American release. Even in black and white, Deneuve glows. Case in point is her second film, “Repulsion” (1965), which reveals a drastic departure from the role of a pristine young woman. It is also as dark as a film could be, both visually and content-wise. Deneuve plays a schizophrenic whose hallucinations of sexual abuse lead her to murder. As erotically charged as “Repulsion” is, Deneuve does something that is a testament to her early flourishing as a great actress; she escapes being tawdry on account of her ability to imbue her character with psychological and emotional depth.

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Directors from Luis Bunuel to Francois Truffaut would seize upon this talent for the first half of Deneuve’s career, establishing her persona as a snow capped volcano. No other blonde beauty in the world could have conveyed both aloofness and debasement as the bored wife of a Ken doll in “Belle de Jour” (1967), one who gets her kicks by moonlighting as a whore to thugs marred with the hideous looks of a James Bond villain. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/on-her-majestys-secret-service-redemption-in-time/) In “The Last Metro” (1981), Deneuve is a fusion of regality and sexuality as the inaccessible wife of a Jewish theater owner during Nazi occupied Paris whose passion flares when she succumbs to her attraction to an actor.

Deneuve is now in her seventies. Her star is far from faded. She remains not only a fine actress, but also a beautiful woman. The secret to her longevity is not complex; she accepts her age. In one of her latest films, “On My Way” (2013), she plays Bettie, a former beauty queen on a road trip with her grandson that leads to an older person’s revelations of regrets and a desire to make amends. During one night of drinking, a young man picks her up. The next day, as sunlight bursts through the window and reveals how a woman of a certain age can look the morning after, the man says, “Wow. You must have been really beautiful when you were young. A real stunner.” For an actress to embody the role of a head turner whose looks have waned takes guts. Name any actress of Deneuve’s generation – Jane Fonda, Sophia Loren, Ann-Margret – and it is unlikely you would ever see them in a vulnerable confrontation with reality filmed for posterity.

Someday, Catherine Deneuve will no longer be. Such is the passing of the seasons, the way of life. Not to despair. We are all aware of this; hence, our duty to create art. Granted the immortality of Deneuve’s films, tomorrow’s viewers can regale in her first foray onto the world stage: in a small town called Cherbourg, as a lass named Genevieve in love with a bumpkin named Guy, joined hand in hand in lighting the universe with the incandescence of youth.

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Woody Allen: The Unlikely Romantic

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Mrs. Roney was my journalism teacher at the International School Manila. Blonde and big-boned, she was always in a dress (I remember her wardrobe exclusively as blue), and at times she wore her hair in pigtails so that she resembled a 30-something Nelly Olson. In addition to edifying us that the first paragraph of a news article must contain the five W’s and single H (who, what, when, where, why, and how), Mrs. Roney regaled the class on intrigues within the high courts of the international media. One day she held up an issue of Newsweek that featured a cover image of a soldier in the Lebanon War cradling a gun, an image, she claimed, that her photographer friend had taken but that was credited to somebody else. Another day, she stopped in the middle of a lecture on the Columbia Broadcasting System and asked me to repeat everything she had just said since I was engaged in a one-sided conversation with the person seated in front of me rather than focused on her. I said whatever it is I said, at which she responded, “Well, Rafaelito, I wish I had your talent of talking to one person and listening to another at the same time.” Mrs. Roney was absorbing with a touch of austerity as well as a fair listener, just as a teacher should be. The one time the woman in her surfaced was when she declared to the class, all aswoon with eyes bright, “Woody Allen is the sexiest man alive.”

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I don’t know why that comment, but there it was. My reaction was exactly as yours: huh? Woody Allen is funny, I’ll give him that. He assures us with bawdiness in “Bananas” (1971) that sucking out the poison from a snake bite may be more pleasurable than clinical, depending on who is bitten and in what part of the anatomy. He makes hooking up at an art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam” (1972) a comedic moment. In “Annie Hall” (1977), he generates laughter when his thoughts for Annie at their first meeting are not in sync with his words. But Allen as sexy? Rob Lowe, maybe. Val Kilmer, yes. Richard Gere, definitely. (http://www.rafsy.com/actors-models-directors/richard-gere-love-is-love-is-love/) If the word sexy in association with Allen was something I was meant to grow into, the stage bypassed me in light of the biggest Hollywood scandal that would usher in the next decade – the auteur’s affair with girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter.

It is alarming to what degree one action which unites the world in reprobation can denigrate an individual. Never mind the Best Film and Best Director Oscars for “Annie Hall” or the accolades of genius. My opinion of Allen went from funny to disturbing. Revelations of Soon-Yi Previn, 35 years his junior, in nudie photos for his pleasure screamed creep, and tabloid shots of a bespectacled hunched man with receding hair and the nose of a proboscis monkey as romantic squire to an Asian girl barely out of her teens could have been lifted from an FBI file on sexual predators in the Far East. People were not just making fun of the way Allen looked, but also for his being a pervert. I would have expected a televised defense from Allen, such as what Princess Diana did in justifying her divorce. No. He was silent throughout. His retaliation tactic instead was films, films, and more films – “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993), “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995) – and more Oscar recognition. No matter what my opinion of him as a person, I couldn’t resist. I no longer rented his films. I went to the theater to see every one of them. Scandal of scandals: I will never find Woody Allen sexy, but I discovered that I am one big fan.

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My fandom for Allen is more than about laughter. It is about the theme that remains constant in his dearest outputs through the changing political climate, from “Manhattan” (1979) to “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) to “Midnight in Paris” (2011) – the burgeoning of love with the most unlikely of persons, whether that person is a precocious high schooler, a coke sniveling date from hell, or the sales attendant to an antique store along the Seine. Even when the hero or heroine ends up alone, a glimmer of hope still shines. Nothing ever fades in a Woody Allen romance.

Take the Allen film that most resonates with me, “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985). Mia Farrow is Cecilia, a Depression Era wife whose sole escape from her dismal life as a diner waitress married to an oaf of a drinker is the theater. Night after night, she sees the same film until something only possible in movies occurs; the hero she is enamored with (Jeff Daniels) jumps out of the screen and into her life. They dance. He professes his love. Her husband (Danny Aiello) fights him. Being a figure from a movie, he moves with suave and he survives a punch with hair in place and suit unruffled. Word gets to Hollywood about this two-dimensional entity that has come to life and is running amuck with a waitress. The actor who portrays him is ordered to coerce his character back to the silver screen.

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We all want a happy ending. For Cecilia, she is promised this every night at the neighborhood theater, a place as forlorn as a brick jailhouse, there where dreams are meant to be contained. (Such was a woman’s plight in the 1930s.) At her most heart broken, Cecilia spends what little money she has left on the latest feature. The theater is practically empty. It always is. This is her home. Just when she is about to cry, the screen lights her face and her despair disappears. Fred and Ginger are towering 15 feet in front of her – he in tuxedo, she in shimmering gown of feathered fringes – cheek to cheek and both twirling on their feet as if on a cloud. Never mind that in truth they are in a sound stage with plywood partitions and lights hanging from a rafter beam. So silver is their sheen that they might as well be dancing in the evening glow.

Therein lies the message of a Woody Allen film: as the world around us falls asunder, we can rely on one thing to keep us afloat. Behold the magic of moonlight, music, and movies.

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“Casablanca”: From Mess to Masterpiece

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“Casablanca” (1942) is a movie that during its production was saddled with a recipe for disaster. Two different versions of the ending were shot because nobody had a clue where the story was going. The script changed on a daily basis, rendering useless hours of memorizing lines and internalizing characters, each of whose essence was altered upon the omission of one scene and the inclusion of another. More vexing was that the onscreen chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was non-existent once the camera stopped rolling. As Bergman’s eldest daughter, Pia Lindstrom, put it, “I don’t think they were particularly simpatico.” (https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/No-moonlight-or-love-songs-on-the-Casablanca-set-2596909.php) All this is no news. The mess that was “Casablanca” in the making is ingrained in Hollywood folklore, and the masterpiece that emerged from this mess has cast a spell so far reaching that through the decades “Casablanca” has become as integral to our collective psyche as the Rock of Gibraltar is to the earth. It is unlikely the spell will ever break as time goes by.

This raises a conundrum: how then is a classic created? As evidenced by “Casablanca,” one would be hard pressed to say that passion and love for a project lead to something wonderful. Neither Warner Brothers nor anybody else involved with “Casablanca” from the writers to the director had expectations of the film. It was considered another commonplace piece of entertainment Hollywood churned out yearly on an industry line basis, packaged for mass consumption and then meant to be disposed of and forgotten. During breaks, Bergman would retreat to her quarter in anticipation of a call informing her that she got the lead to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943). That was where the glory for her was at, and certainly the rest of the crew was yearning for this fiasco to be done with so that everyone could move on to the real deal. Yet day after day, the writers wrote away, the actors adapted to on-the-minute changes, and director Michael Curtiz remained focused on a vision. Confusion and frustrations notwithstanding, no accounts of Bogart and Bergman exist of either one as having been a slacker. Everybody was there to do a job and do it everybody did, to the end.

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And that, perhaps, is a how a classic is created; people do their best under the circumstance and excel as a result. It’s like a love affair, really. When passion hits a roadblock, you stay committed. You learn to see your partner as a person, not as a projection of your lofty ideal, and together you work towards a life with a house free of plumbing issues, turkey on Thanksgiving, and vacations to faraway lands for a spicy dab of adventure. You do not expect perfection. You expect instead occasional disagreements and temper outbursts. You expect flight cancellations, defective orders from amazon, and spoiled sushi. You expect reality. If the affair ends, then it ends with memories of both of you as having once made something beautiful, discordances included.

Consider other creations hailed as great or a classic or a masterpiece or whatever other superlatives critics and historians bestow upon such creations indicative of seemingly superhuman talent. Margaret Mitchell confided to friends that she would be happy if “Gone with the Wind” sold a hundred copies. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/gone-with-the-wind-another-day-another-chance/)  Leonard Bernstein took a gamble with “West Side Story,” a musical so raw in its depiction of such social issues as gang rivalry and juvenile delinquency that it was feared too downbeat for Broadway. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/west-side-story-devotion-in-death/) Alfred Hitchcock’s “Pyscho” (1960) is a product of relentless editing. Of course, these examples differ from “Casablanca” in that their creators started out loving what they were doing. But you see what I’m getting at. Love wasn’t enough. For that love to be visible to the world, it took work, work, and more work, work absent of delusions of grandeur, work steeped in the hard facts of diligence, trial and error, disappointment, and perseverance. In the case of “Casablanca,” the work behind it produced a movie the American Film Institute ranked at the end of the century as third on a list of 100 of the greatest films of all time made in English. (“Citizen Kane” (1941) ranks number one and “The Godfather” (1972) takes second place.)

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“Casablanca” tells the story of a love triangle that unfolds in the midst of World War II. That is all. Scarcely a sub-plot exists or even psychological complexity. It’s a safe film for marketing purposes since a romance in a time of strife offers plenty of conflict and excitement. However, it is the message that this particular romance imparts that has elevated “Casablanca” from light entertainment to a drama of deep philosophizing. I can think of no other scene in any film that conveys such life changing thoughts with total ease than in Rick’s final goodbye to Ilsa before she boards the plane to be with the husband (Paul Henreid) she planned on abandoning. Rick holds her on the chin, raises her face to his, and gazing for the last time into those eyes that glisten with tears and star light, he says one of the most famous lines of the 20th century: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Rick is right. Jews are being incinerated in crematoriums. The Japanese Imperial Army has mobilized Filipino and American prisoners of war for a death march across the Philippine island of Bataan. Bombs are decimating cities in half the globe. Who cares about the misery of two men in love with the same woman?

Who cares about this blog? About my high aspirations of literary recognition? About my thoughts and feelings? Maybe nobody. Still, we all have our lives to live on this one planet that bears the fruit of human existence, and we need films like “Casablanca” because they remind us that in this crazy world, love is the noblest cause worth fighting for. I could disappear into a crowd of seven billion people, doing whatever it is everybody else does and probably be good at it and even content, or – like Bogart and Bergman and Curtiz, like Mitchell and Bernstein and Hitchcock – I could keep pounding away on what I love and am gifted at for a brush with greatness.

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Nastassja Kinski: The Eternal Tess

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In 1981, I hardly went to the cinema. Betamax was the rage in the Philippines. Every neighborhood had a betamax store that delivered film cassettes at your doorstep within thirty minutes of phoning for a title. Since most of the foreign films were not yet released or not released at all, the cassettes were pirated; some were filmed by a video recorder snuck into a theater. You can imagine the quality – static lines across the screen, muffled audio, widescreen shots that resulted in characters omitted from view as dialogue was spoken. So you might assume that my sitting through “Tess” (1979) was a drudgery. It was. I spent half the time rewinding a scene to catch the dialogue and adjusting knobs for a widescreen shot to be condensed, often to no avail. Nevertheless, I had been compelled to watch the film due to a single image that had seduced me when shown at a televised airing of the Academy Awards ceremony weeks earlier: Angel Clare (Peter Firth) gazing with ardor into the eyes of Tess D’Urbervbille (Nastassja Kinski) as he carries her over a puddle, the world surrounding them an explosion of sunlight and vernation and violins and bass.

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I was 14 years old. The TV was in my parents’ room, and so both my father and mother happened to be watching “Tess” with me. My mother was especially upset that I would rent an R-rated film. “Why do you like films like that?” she asked. She must have been expecting something akin to “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1981), which features softcore starlet Sylvia Crystal in many scenes of erotic arousal and which I would later rent. My response: “It’s a good film. It was nominated for an Oscar. What do you expect me to watch? Disney cartoons?” I made no mention of the actress. I neither knew her name nor did I remember her face from the clip presented at the Academy Awards. All I remembered up to that point was the spring backdrop, the longing in the eyes of the lover for the beloved, and the theme song as dramatic as the rumbling of the earth.

My mother’s disapproval of the film and my unfamiliarity with the actress would change within minutes. When Nastassja Kinski occupied the screen, whether in close-up or in distant shot, she dominated it. How to describe her visual impact? My father said it best: “She looks like Ingrid Bergman.”

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My father was not alone in his comparison of Kinski to Bergman. The New York Times film critic, Pauline Kael, herself bestowed that compliment onto the actress. Director Roman Polanski no doubt must have seen the resemblance, too – the sensuous pout and noble nose, the dignified carriage and eyes that oscillate between pride and vulnerability. For all the tragedy that permeates “Tess,” Polanski manages to create a work of tenderness and subtlety. In every frame you get the impression that he is making love not only to the story’s heroine, but also to the actress who is personifying her. He is paying tribute to a beauty so startling that Kinski drew comparison to yet another actress of inimitable stature: Greta Garbo.

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Before you conclude that Kinski was nothing more than a pretty figure, bear in mind that she was 18 when she filmed “Tess.” For an 18-year-old to play a woman who is impoverished, raped, impregnated, loved, rejected, scorned, kept, entrapped, and sentenced to death at the gallows for murder takes more than a visage of photogenic perfection. “Tess” is one helluva heavy drama, yet with what grace Kinski carries the burden of such woes. There are tears, but no histrionics. There is emotion, but no sentimentality. The most climactic moment is the quietest. Tess – dressed in a gown the red of fury, blood, and passion – rises from a slumber on a Stonehenge altar, a sacrificial lamb resigned to her fate. The sun lights the sky. The gendarmes close in on her. Angel Clare, hair as curled and golden as that of a cherub, begs the gendarmes to allow Tess peace. But Tess is already at peace. “I am ready,” she says, her voice lilting with the softness of a morning drizzle.

Tess D’Urberville is free at last from the curse of beauty.

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Nastassja Kinski starred in other films of note – “Cat People” (1982), “Unfaithfully Yours” (1984), “Paris, Texas” (1984) – but with the exception of the last of the aforementioned, none did her justice. Too exotic, too European, and too anachronistic, she was best in the period piece that made her a star. She wanted to play Evelyn Nesbit. The project never materialized, which is a tragedy in itself. She would have been magnificent as the turn-of-the-century femme fatale who drives a man to insanity and then murder. For the rest of Kinski’s career, roles in which she would have been perfect constantly eluded her. The actress deserved more than that, she who possessed a loveliness that inspires art and an emotionality that weakens hearts.

Where Hollywood fell short, fashion magazines compensated for; Kinski was a photographer’s muse. She made a big splash in a Richard Avedon photograph that featured her as Eve surrendering to the serpent’s kiss. That image hung as a poster on my dorm wall during my freshman year at Tufts University. I spent a total of $75 on the poster and the framing – an extravagance well worth it. I lived on the ground level, and the poster hung at an angle from the window so that it was visible from across the lawn. In the evening, I would direct my table lamp at the image so that it shone like a jewel-encrusted mosaic. Through 30 years of traveling, I have lost “Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent.” I recently searched for a replacement on the internet and found one, but it is beyond my budget.

Selling price: $700

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