In a long and exhausting story conference at the dawn of my screenwriting career, as Brian De Palma and I wrestled with the Byzantine plot of Body Double (1984) I asked Brian what on earth was the motivation for our main character’s line of action.
“There are only two valid dramatic motivations for anything,” said Brian with a chuckle, “sex or money, and they usually go together.”
Of course, in Brian’s movies, this dramatic reductivism is usually at work.
Over the years, I’ve refined Brian’s cinematic philosophy to an even simpler and more stark formulation: Every great movie is, at the core, a love story.
The challenges to my reductivism come fast and furious.
Said one film lover: “What about a film like Zulu (1964) one of your favorites. There’s not a love story in sight.”
But Zulu is a love story; it’s about soldiers fighting a desperate last stand. These British soldiers are not fighting for any higher principal or even for some valuable piece of ground. Like all soldiers from time immemorial they are fighting for the guy who stands next to them.
I do have one friend, a screenwriter who scorns my formulation, considers it nonsense. But this friend is unmarried, has indulged in nothing but destructive relationships with women, and is not a particularly successful screenwriter.
The other day, I screened the powerful and haunting High Sierra, 1941. Based on a terrific book by the prolific novelist and screenwriter W.R. Burnett, this is typically labeled a gangster movie. But a closer reading of the film reveals that several poignant love stories drive the action of the central plot.
Mad Dog Roy Earle, Humphrey Bogart, loves Velma, the 15 year-old Joan Leslie, and pays for an operation to repair her clubfoot. But Velma jilts Earle. Earle turns for comfort to a dance hall girl (code for prostitute) Marie, Ida Lupino who sorrowfully loves Roy in spite of the fact that he still loves the lovely and chaste Velma.
As fate closes in on the doomed couple, Bogart and Lupino cling to each other, hoping somehow to escape to freedom. Director Raoul Walsh delivers the aching vulnerability that is at the heart of this relationship.
In 1974, Raoul Walsh published Each Man in His Time, a memoir whose relationship to the truth is, at best, tenuous. So fanciful is this book that Walsh deleted any mention of his first wife, actress Miriam Cooper. She was with him at the beginning of his career and starred in many of his early films.
Walsh’s memoir is a maddening read. The lies and obfuscations come fast and furious. But, thankfully, a new biography, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director, by Marilyn Ann Moss, has just been published. Moss captures Walsh’s swashbuckling personality. She correctly points out that Walsh’s chronic money troubles were not, as he claimed, solely due to Miriam Cooper’s alimony demands, but because of massive losses at the race track. It’s a fine book that does not shrink from Walsh’s obvious failings. He was an indifferent husband and an absent father. Walsh could also be an inert Hollywood hack, churning out bad movies for a desperately needed paycheck.
Something of a schnorrer, Walsh penned notes, sprinkled with bad Yiddish, to studio chief Jack Warner, begging for loans in order to pay off his crushing gambling debts.
“They’re after my tuchus [butt] again, Jack,” he wrote, referring to Miriam Cooper’s attorneys when they came after him—just as she had been doing since the early 1930’s. “I have a chance to pick up a M’tseha [a great discovery] on a piece of property,” he wrote in 1947, asking for a loan. “I will either make a fortune out of this or go machoula [meshuga, crazy] again,” he wrote a few days later. “Dear Colonel,” he wrote in August 1945, “The Irish and the Jews are always in trouble—that is what makes the world go round.”
But back to love as the focus of all great movies. Moss eloquently summarizes Walsh’s narrative paradigm:
But he also puts Earle and Marie at the center of the most crucial Walshian narrative: the love between a man and a woman. This was, he insisted again and again, the fundamental motivation for his pictures, the hope that a man and a woman would come together—or at least die trying.
Today is Asarah B’Tevet. Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a meaningful fast.
“There are only two valid dramatic motivations for anything,” said Brian with a chuckle, “sex or money, and they usually go together.”
What about CARRIE? The dramatic motivation in that picture is adolescent sadism.
Regarding French New Wave Films: BREATHLESS, JULES AND JIM and THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISE all bored me to tears.
Miranda:
You are confusing plot with sub-text. Of course Carrie is dominated by the revenge motive—probably the most frequently used of the 36 plots that exist—but her love for the handsome Tommy Ross, played by William Katt is at the core of Carrie’s story. One more note: the revenge that motivates Carrie is driven by sexual pathology which is a variation on the love theme.
How about “Speed?” t’s not a classic, but it’ss a well-made film, absorbing and exciting. But it’s not a love story. Sure, there’s some attraction between the cop and the girl, but it’s not really developed.
Kishke:
Try and imagine Speed without the love story. The film would fall flat, the emotional stakes through which the audience mediates its feelings, would not resonate. The love stories in thrillers do not develop along the lines of a straight love story, but they are central to this kind of narrative. In fact, for the screenwriter, director and actors,it takes a great deal more talent and craft to make a love story work in this genre.
I see your point.
Interesting piece Robert.
“But he also puts Earle and Marie at the center of the most crucial Walshian narrative: the love between a man and a woman. This was, he insisted again and again, the fundamental motivation for his pictures, the hope that a man and a woman would come together—or at least die trying.”
In reading this I was thinking that in a good movie doesn’t the audience always want the man and woman to “live happily ever after?” When the screenwriter creates these expectations and there is no |happy ending” the movie bombs.
Perhaps it is a resolution they want – if they don’t stay together a sorrowful and painful reason why they don’t?
Of course add extra marital affairs to the mix and the audience’s desires become a bit more complicated – depending, I guess, on the state of the aggrieved spouse.
On director’s books – my father gave me this old book (yet to read – on the “pile to read” Fun In A Chinese Laundry by Josef Von Sternberg.
It’s an old book (list price – hardback – was $6.95).
Ever hear of this one?
Bill:
Quite smart of you to bring up happy endings. Audiences like happy endings—when they are organic to the story and earned. A false happy ending can leave an audience feeling as if they have been tricked.
Raoul Walsh favored happy endings. With High Sierra he lobbied to have Bogart and Lupino escape to safety. But the Breen office demanded that criminals pay for their sins, thus Bogart’s death was an iron clad requirement.
You have a copy of Fun in the Chinese Laundry!
I (stupidly) lent my copy to a colleague who never returned it. Claims it got lost. Sigh. Love that crazy book. Von Sternberg was a great, if limited, director and his book is an ode to his own genius.
A pretty good bio by John Baxter of Von S was published last year. I’ll write about it and Von S in the near future. His relationship with Dietrich was really twisted.
Bill:
Two of the most important classic films, Gone With The Wind and Casablanca, have satisfactory resolutions, but certainly not happy endings–in the sense that the protagonists end in each others arms. Both however offer hope, the Bogart picture a little more so. In GWTW you wonder what took Rhett so long.
Robert:
What I meant to say, and did not, was that revered French filmmakers and critics, seem to celebrate the most ordinary level of American product and at least somewhat ignore the best of American art and craftsmanship. I don’t mean to snobbishly ignore the oddly creative stuff that was turned out by Monogram, but to celebrate the justifiably obscure in place of Clarence Brown, Jack Conway (not at the same level, but capable) is something I find disturbing. I like Frankie Darro, but he isn’t a visitor from Charleston. And I don’t like the Frenchies either.
Barry:
Godard dedicated Breathless to Monogram pictures. Which makes no sense at all because Breathless is the polar opposite of the B movie studio. I think the French Cahier crowd were a bunch of self-absorbed brats. The American movies they claimed to adore were not subtitled and not one of these jokers spoke a word of English. So they really had no idea of the wretched writing in the pictures they championed or the lame plots. Basically, the French New Wave were a intellectual frauds. Only Truffaut went to the trouble to learn enough English so he could study Hitchcock’s films and his interview with Hitch is important, though Hitch played Francois like a harp.
To Clarence Brown and Jack Conway I would add Mitchell Leisen and Edmund Goulding, excellent and inspired craftsmen.
I have to admit that when Frankie Darro shows up on screen, I check out.
Robert:
I would like to shake your hand. Great writing, thinking and brevity.
Barry:
Thanks so much. The feeling is mutual.
With the obvious caveat that I’m not a successful screenwriter either, I’m going to have to disagree with you here, Robert. All the best stories are about redemption. Love by itself isn’t enough: we’re not interested in watching two people fall in love and get together without facing any difficulties. There have to be obstacles, and they have to be overcome, and the process of overcoming them, in the best stories, involves at least one of the characters having to improve themselves. Redemption.
Squander Two:
Thanks so much for the articulate dissenting opinion. It is true that the hero must overcome obstacles during his journey. That is the machinery of plot, the gears that you see turning. But the subtext,in great films, revolves around the search for true love. And love always equals redemption. I should have made that clear in my formulation.
I’m not sure whether maybe there’s a difference here between fiction in general and screenplays in particular. Certainly I can think of plenty of great novels where the story revolves around redemption and there’s either no love story in sight or just a peripheral one that could easily be removed, but it’s not so easy with films. How about <i>Constantine</i>? No idea what you thought of that. I think it’s superb.
Just watched <i>Bandits</i>, which very much makes your point.
I should add that Bandits also has the huge advantage for any film of containing Cate Blanchett, so it’s actually driven by three love stories: the love between her and Bruce Willis, the love between her and Billy Bob Thornton, and of course the love between her and me, which she still won’t publicly admit to.
Squander Two:
There is a huge difference between novels and movies. Movies are surface and action whereas many novels are interior thought. I have not made a study of novels but the novels I enjoy most, say Jane Austen, are all love-centered.
I have not seen Constantine. Is it a great film?
Last time I saw Cate she did mention you, so don’t despair:-)
I would highly recommend Constantine, yes. It’s probably the most intelligent of all the comic-book adaptations, in that it doesn’t culminate with two men in costumes punching each other. It’s about good, evil, Heaven, Hell, corruption, and redemption. And it features some great performances. People say Keanu Reeves acn’t act, but I think his performances vary wildly and he can act perfectly well with the right director. Constantine is one of his good ones.
Literature is apparently supposed to be about conflict. Austen wrote about love, yes, but love from the female point of view at a time when women could not pursue love without coming into conflict with society. One of the single most popular and influential stories in English is A Christmas Carol, and it’s redemption through and through.
Glad to hear Cate hasn’t forgotten about me. Despite never having met me. That’s real love, that is.
Thanks for the heads-up on the book, Robert. I’m normally not a fan of directors’ biographies (with the exception of von Stroheim), but I’ve always been interested in Walsh, placing him in the sort of “man’s man” category of directors as Wyler, Ford and Huston. I’ll have to have my wife download a tease on her kindle.
In his early days, Walsh directed Theda Bara in Carmen; he bet William Fox that if he used some standing sets on the Fox lot, he could beat DeMille’s Carmen (with Geraldine Farrar) to market. And he did, despite Miriam Cooper being on set and absolutely hating Bara, thinking she was having an affair with Walsh!
Christopher:
I agree with you about bios of directors. Most just feed into the auteur obsession. But I was always curious about Walsh, especially after reading his faux memoir and also reading Miriam Cooper’s autobiography “Dark Lady of the Silents” which is a better book, but is still an exercise in obfuscation. Walsh is interesting because though talented, he shot his films at lightning speed, according to Jimmy Cagney, so he could get to the race track.
Yes, Miriam really hated Theda Bara. Walsh was definitely stepping out on Miriam, but there’s no evidence that he and Bara were an item. Maybe you should put Walsh and Miriam in your next Theda Bara mystery. That would be a real kick.
Robert:
Agreed, but what do you make of Film Socialisme, and/or anything else out of the French New Wave…? Are these things similar to your thinking, but with the thinking and presentation obscured, or is the love between the French and Hollywood primitivism, let’s say at the Ford Beebe level. Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending presented something addressing this, but not enough.
Barry:
I don’t like the French New Wave. At all. Truffaut was the best of the bunch but I still find his movies tedious, overly academic and, well, French. So I don’t even think about applying my theory to their movies.
Anyway, Marxism animates French movies more than anything else.