Fred Zinnemann Week was never planned as a chronological rundown, but it’s rather oddly turning out that way. It also feels like it could overspill its banks into next week, when Shadowplay will be coming live from Hollywood but I’ll be too busy to write about my experiences until I get back…
This week’s The Forgotten, over at the Daily Notebook, deals with TERESA, one of several Zinnemann films to deal with post-war malaise. ACT OF VIOLENCE frames the issue in exciting, feverish noir terms, while THE SEARCH, THE MEN and TERESA form an informal trilogy of realism emotional dramas using unfamiliar actors and non-professionals on location to create a pseudo-documentary feeling. Despite my love of the fantastic and exaggerated, I find these films powerful and highly filmic.
Here’s a moment from THE SEARCH, which deals with displaced children, and in particular one, Ivan Jandl.
Rivers (and fishing) are important in Zinnemann (so are mountains), and here the moving water, earlier associated with death, comes to feel like a representation of the continuity of human life. I’m touched by Clift’s quiet, sensitive performance, but also by what he actually says, and normally attempts to comfort in the face of death fall flat for me. Truffaut’s character has that line to the priest in THE GREEN ROOM, that if he can’t provide immediate resurrection of the departed one, he’s no use whatsoever. It’s kind of true. And with religious stuff, I always just think, “Nope. That can’t be right.” What Clift says here does offer some limited comfort — because it’s clearly TRUE, and it also acknowledges the bleakness of irreparable loss.
Zinnemann’s choice to shoot from the back makes the river a character and also saves him having to ask a small child to act something few adults could pull off. As Joseph H Lewis said of a comparable moment in SO LONG THE NIGHT, “How the hell do you film that?” The best choice is to withdraw and let the audience imagine it.
THE SEARCH led indirectly to THE MEN, F.Z.’s first collaboration with producer Stanley Kramer. It’s also Brando’s first film — his persona must have been a shock to audiences at the time, he’s aggressively proletarian and sullen. What stops this one being as good as THE SEARCH is, to a small degree, Teresa Wright, whose acting style is somewhat too sugary to pair with Brando’s, and to a much greater extent, Dimitri Tiomkin’s score. Zinnemann was shooting TERESA in Italy when the film was post-produced, and by the time he heard the hectoring, banal, shouty music it was too late to change anything. Tiomkin’s decision to score the death of a Latino soldier with Spanish guitar seems particularly offensive.
On the plus side, Everett Sloane gives a restrained perf — he manages to stop his eyebrows squirming all over his head for the most part, and his natural gifts for acerbic wit and uningratiating bluntness shine. Of all the actors, Jack Webb does the best job of blending in with the real disabled veterans who populate the smaller roles — Webb’s version of not-acting comes closer to actual not acting than Brando’s by a country mile.
And so to TERESA, which Zinnemann felt had some structural defects and some issues with the balance of the performances — these problems, if they even are problems, seem to add to the film’s convincing evocation of real-life emotional mess.
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