The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (11 page)

Pier Angeli
(Anna Maria Pierangeli) (1932–71), b. Cagliari, Sardinia
Pier Angeli was one of the great beauties of the early fifties, but there was a tragic potential in her melancholy gaze. She was the (or a) beloved of James Dean, but her family disapproved of him. So she married the singer Vic Damone in 1954, but that only lasted a few years. She returned to Europe in the 1960s and was declared a suicide when she was not yet forty, the victim of a drug overdose. She was a great deal more demure and accepting than, say, Jean Seberg, but it’s a wonder that her small story hasn’t yet been turned into a movie.

The twin sister of Marisa Pavan, she was discovered as a teenager by Léonide Moguy and starred in
Domani È Troppo Tardi
(49, Moguy) and
Domani È un Altro Giorno
(50, Moguy). “Utterly charming and fragile,” she was hired by Fred Zinnemann for
Teresa
(50), and that led to an MGM contract. In America, she also made
The Light Touch
(51, Richard Brooks);
The Devil Makes Three
(52, Andrew Marton);
The Story of Three Loves
(53, Gottfried Reinhardt), in which she is a suicidal girl rescued by Kirk Douglas;
Sombrero
(53, Norman Foster);
The Flame and the Flesh
(54, Brooks);
The Silver Chalice
(54, Victor Saville); pretty good as the wife to Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(56, Robert Wise);
Port Afrique
(56, Rudolph Maté); to France for
The Vintage
(57, Jeffrey Hayden); with Danny Kaye in
Merry Andrew
(58, Michael Kidd).

That’s when she went back to Europe, and to more halting work:
S.O.S. Pacific
(60, Guy Green); the unlikely wife in
The Angry Silence
(60, Green);
Sodom and Gomorrah
(61, Robert Aldrich);
White Slave Ship
(62, Silvio Amadio), with Edmund Purdom;
Shadow of Evil
(64, André Hunebelle);
Spy in Your Eye
(65, Vittorio Sala);
Battle of the Bulge
(65, Ken Annakin);
One Step to Hell
(68, Sandy Howard);
Every Bastard a King
(70, Uri Zohar), made in Israel;
Octaman
(71, Harry Essex).

Theo Angelopoulos
, b. Athens, Greece, 1936
1968:
I Ekpombi/The Broadcast
(s). 1970:
Anaparastasis/Reconstruction
. 1972:
I Meres tou 36/Days of 36
. 1975:
O Thiassos/The Travelling Players
. 1977:
I Kinighi/The Hunters
. 1980:
O Megalexandros/Alexander the Great
. 1984:
Taxidi stin Kythera/Voyage to Cythera
. 1986:
O Melissokomos/The Beekeeper
. 1989:
Topio stin Omichli/Landscape in the Mist
. 1991:
To Meteoro Vina tou Pelargou/The Suspended Step of the Stork
. 1995:
To Vlemma ton Odyssea/Ulysses’ Gaze;
an episode of
Lumière et Compagnie
. 1998:
Mai Aiwniothta kai mia Mere/Eternity and a Day
. 2004:
Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
. 2008:
Trilogy: The Dust of Time
.

The movies, or cinema, are nearly one hundred years old. How many of the medium’s greatest practitioners are alive and/or still functioning? Bresson, Kurosawa, Antonioni, and Wilder are all gone. Rivette and Godard are working. There are a few others, a little younger, who might claim a place in the pantheon—Bertolucci, Scorsese, Chris Marker, Zhang Yimou, Marcel Ophuls even …? But already, I think, this list has reached below the very top rank. It may be more helpful to be
more
stringent in making the list, in which case let it hold at Antonioni, Rivette … and Theo Angelopoulos, who is sixty-eight and at work.

Angelopoulos studied law at the University of Athens, and then film at I.D.H.E.C. in Paris. He was film critic for the Athens paper
Allagi
in the mid-sixties, when he worked on an unfinished feature project known as
Formix Story
.

In the seventies, he made three movies—all lengthy and not slow so much as preoccupied with duration—that addressed the history of modern Greece.
Days of 36
concerns a prisoner who makes a hostage out of a politician who visits his jail.
The Travelling Players
uses a band of actors to uncover Greek history in the years 1936 to 1952. In
The Hunter
, the years from 1949 to 1976 are dealt with through the fablelike incident of a hunting party that discovers a young man’s body frozen in the snow.

Preeminently, those films showed the elaboration of one of the cinema’s most sophisticated and beautiful “sequence shot” styles, with moving camera. In other words, Angelopoulos’s camera tracks almost as constantly and naturally as photography employs light. Early critics said he was like Jancso, but Angelopoulos himself declared that Murnau, Mizoguchi, and Welles were stronger influences. By now, it has become clear that his style is deeply personal and poetic—and, of course, it has to be experienced, for the work is not just plastic but temporal. When Angelopoulos
moves
, he is sailing in time as well as space, and the shifts, the progress, the traveling make a metaphor for history and understanding. (The
Travelling Players
has just eighty shots in four hours.) This is engrossing cinema, not fast or fluent, yet compelling once its rhythm has been yielded to. Not that Angelopoulos is determined on naturalism. His movies are theatrical, and nearly Brechtian: they are lessons in which “real life” is imposed upon by schema, clearly labeled points of view, and the nearly abstract emphasis on wintry space, desolation, and time spent waiting.

The Travelling Players
is a masterpiece that owed a good deal to the political repressiveness of Greece in much of the director’s lifetime. As the country has been liberated, so Angelopoulos has moved on to loftier, and more general, themes—to a kind of contemporary mythology.

Voyage to Cythera
concerns a filmmaker who wants to make a movie about an elderly political refugee. And so he begins to watch him, and follow him, until the old man’s life takes on the elements of story. The beauty of the film has seldom been equaled, and the balance of liquid movement and rocklike human interpretation is both tragic and exhilarating.

In
Landscape in the Mist
—the only one of these films to have had any commercial release in the United States—two children travel to a legendary “Germany” searching for their father. This is a story of mythic needs transcending borders, and it may prove an uncanny intuition about the real political/geographical future of Europe. Indeed, there are hints of recent Balkan chaos in
The Suspended Step of the Stork
that make the film more intriguing as time passes. This is a story of a journalist who believes he has discovered a former leading politician who is now living as a humble refugee.

It is hard for anyone to study Angelopoulos properly. The films deserve large screens—but one would settle for wretched video versions. Film culture has come a long way since the days when it was impossible to see “old” films in any form. Nevertheless, it is the case that many people who take the medium seriously have scarcely heard of, let alone encountered, the work of a master. And there are so few masters left now.

Jennifer Aniston
, b. Sherman Oaks, California, 1969
According to the official data, between 1994 and 2004, Jennifer Aniston was Rachel Green in 238 episodes of
Friends
. It might take a book to explain why she was the central figure in that deeply entertaining show—and it wouldn’t be worth a book. But of the three women the show followed, Rachel was plainly the most average or accessible in her feelings and behavior: she was cute, she was pert, she was sexy and just a little flaky, yet she was decent, all-American, and the kind of girl the girl-next-door would hope to live next door to. She was funny, and a very expert player and—more or less—her romantic destiny was the hinge of the show.

And somehow, the charm didn’t stop with
Friends
. More than anyone else in the cast, Aniston has kept her hold on public attention. It’s not just that her private life, the possibility of illicit topless pictures, and the triangle of the gods (Brad-Jen-Angie) still endures, like thunder off the Keys. It is that Aniston has not only kept her career going (at the level of about $7 million a movie—modest next to her
Friends
booty), but that she has made some watchable pictures. She is in her forties now and it cannot go on much longer, but for fifteen years Aniston has made America care over where the heart and soul (and the taut bod) of Jen or Rache are resting (or working). And rather in the manner of Doris Day once upon a time, while one can make gentle fun of Jennifer Aniston, it’s hard to dislike her.

Of Greek descent, and the daughter of an actor, Aniston seemed always like TV material: she had parts in such series as
Molloy, Ferris Bueller
(as the sister), and
Muddling Through
before
Friends
came along.

But there were a few movies:
Leprechaun
(93, Mark Jones);
Dream for an Insomniac
(96, Tiffanie DeBartolo); and
She’s the One
(96, Edward Burns)—which capitalized on
Friends
. Her movie career bloomed with
Picture Perfect
(97, Glenn Gordon Caron), which has a 1930s feeling and a dash of Jean Arthur;
’Til There Was You
(97, Scott Winant);
The Object of My Affection
(98, Nicholas Hytner), written by Wendy Wasserstein, and very touching;
Office Space
(99, Mike Judge).

It was in 2000 that she married Brad Pitt and she began to be one of the most famous and imitated women in America:
Rock Star
(01, Stephen Herek), with Mark Wahlberg;
The Good Girl
(02, Miguel Arteta), with Jake Gyllenhaal, and a good film; with Jim Carrey in
Bruce Almighty
(03, Tom Shadyac);
Along Came Polly
(04, John Hamburg), with Ben Stiller.

The show ended (though there is not a minute when
Friends
is not playing somewhere still). The marriage was over. But
Derailed
(05, Mikael Håfstrom), was an interesting departure with Jen as a nasty piece of work. As the mistress of her own career, she still finds worthwhile ventures:
Rumor Has It
(05, Rob Reiner);
Friends with Money
(06, Nicole Holofcener), another excellent picture. But
The BreakUp
(06, Peyton Reed), with Vince Vaughn felt like a rip-off from life.
Marley & Me
(08, David Frankel) was a dog picture.
He’s Just Not That Into You
(09, Ken Kwapis) did well and
Love Happens
(09, Brandon Camp) showed no falloff.

I have the hunch still that with a great script and in the right hands Jennifer Aniston could make a romantic comedy to live with the best.

Ann-Margret
(Ann-Margaret Olsson), b. Valsjöbyn, Sweden, 1941
People everywhere are fondly inclined to Ann-Margret. There does not seem to be an excess of personality in the sixty-year-old. But they remember the very exciting dancer, with such avid eyes, and they rejoice in her survival. Having come to America as a child, she attended Northwestern University and was working in nightclubs as a singer-dancer when George Burns discovered her. (Did this add thirty years to his life?) Most of her early films were wretched, but she was one of the best and most provocative partners Elvis ever had, and she surprised most people with her vulnerability as a sexpot yearning for domesticity in
Carnal Knowledge
(71, Mike Nichols).

Her movies were
Pocketful of Miracles
(61, Frank Capra);
State Fair
(62, José Ferrer);
Bye Bye Birdie
(63, George Sidney); very exciting and commanding in
Viva Las Vegas
(64, Sidney)—she was the best movie partner Elvis ever had;
Kitten With a Whip
(64, Douglas Heyes);
The Pleasure Seekers
(65, Jean Negulesco);
Bus Riley’s Back in Town
(65, Harvey Hart);
Once a Thief
(65, Ralph Nelson);
The Cincinnati Kid
(65, Norman Jewison);
Made in Paris
(66, Boris Sagal);
Stagecoach
(66, Gordon Douglas);
The Swinger
(66, Sidney);
Il Tigre
(67, Dino Risi);
Il Profeta
(68, Risi);
Sette Uomini e un Cervello
(70, Edward Ross);
C.C. and Company
(70, Seymour Robbie);
R.P.M
. (70, Stanley Kramer);
The Train Robbers
(73, Burt Kennedy);
Tommy
(75, Ken Russell); as Lady Booby in
Joseph Andrews
(76, Tony Richardson);
The Last Remake of Beau Geste
(77, Marty Feldman);
Magic
(78, Richard Attenborough).

She had a famous fall from a Las Vegas stage, and came back. She looked after her manager and husband, Roger Smith, when he was ill. And as she approached the age of forty, she was an increasingly impressive beauty. In movies, she might seldom be much more than decoration:
The Cheap Detective
(78, Robert Moore);
The Villain
(79, Hal Needham);
Middle Age Crazy
(80, John Trent);
The Return of the Soldier
(81, Alan Bridges);
I Ought to Be in Pictures
(82, Herbert Ross);
Lookin’ to Get Out
(82, Hal Ashby);
Twice in a Lifetime
(85, Bud Yorkin);
52 Pick-Up
(86, John Frankenheimer);
A Tiger’s Tale
(87, Peter Douglas); and
A New Life
(88, Alan Alda).

But she has been more eminent on TV, where her castled beauty and the intriguingly shy details of her acting were well suited to the medium, even if she hardly altered from soap opera to Tennessee Williams—she massages disparate scripts into the medium of one magnificently sated look. She has done some big TV productions, all with John Erman as director: as the dying mother in
Who Will Love My Children?
(83); as a soft-focus Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(84);
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles
(87); and
Our Sons
(91). She was the sweet filling in the sandwich of
Grumpy Old Men
(93, Donald Petrie) and
Grumpier Old Men
(95, Howard Deutsch) and a lush in
Any Given Sunday
(99, Oliver Stone). She also played a woman looking to adopt a Romanian child in
Nobody’s Children
(94, David Wheatley).