50 ans de cinéma américain: Henry King (1896-1982)

The following is a translation of the entry on Henry King in Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s 50 ans de cinéma américain (1991).

 

KING Henry

1896-1982 

This was the revelation of the Zanuck retrospective at the Cinémathèque in the mid-1960s. Taken by French criticism to be an anonymous technician on the basis of his last films, often mediocre, although The Bravados [1958] and even Tender Is the Night [1962] weren’t negligible, King should in fact take his place among the greats. From 1919 (23 1/2 Hours’ Leave, produced by Thomas Ince) until O. Henry’s Full House (the episode The Gift of the Magi, the best of the lot) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro [both 1952], he directed a large number of films, always decent, sometimes inspired. Academic on his bad days, classical on his good ones, he perfectly represents a generation of American artists, now extremely rare, more interested in exaltation than critique, in the noble emotions than in human wickedness, more attracted by romantic stories than by action.

The modern genres don’t interest him and, faced with Hemingway or Fitzgerald, he privileges the sentimental aspect and clouds the meaning of their works. He’s more comfortable with less decadent chronicles, rooted more in History or the American spirit—that of the founders, not the skeptics. Not that he refuses to evolve, as evidenced by The Gunfighter [1950], several years ahead of High Noon [1952]; but he won’t sacrifice to fashion, which could be his negative: inversion of myths, degradation of genres. Moreover he has always preferred evocation to violence, melodrama to drama. In his filmography we find very few westerns, no crime movies and, even in a pirate film like the delightful Black Swan [1942], sadism disappears behind good humor.

Under contract for many years at Fox where he was the model director, King mainly sang of the events and gestures of exceptional characters: leaders, inventors, proud souls, from Fulton to Berandette Soubirous by way of Wilson and Stanley, without counting fictional characters like Johnny Ringo. This passion for special individuals who, at the same time as their own destiny, forge that of the community that surrounds them and makes it progress, is married marvelously with a lyrical generosity, while not excluding lucidity. King doesn’t hide from us Stanley’s wrongs, or the cruelty of the orders given by Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High [1949], who sends dozens of pilots to their deaths and knows it.

King overwhelms us with a sentimental biopic (Wilson [1944] remains the beautiful archetype in astonishing color) as with a melodrama (the first two-thirds of Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie [1952]), with the troubles of Fulton (Little Old New York [1940], very much forgotten by histories of cinema) as with the life of Irving Berlin (Alexander’s Ragtime Band [1938], of which at least two sequences are sublime). In 1950 he directed his two best films, The Gunfighter, a very moving chronicle of the last hours of a gunman whose presence provokes wherever he goes, and Twelve O’Clock High, which contains one of the most beautiful flashbacks in the history of cinema.

This panoramic which, starting from Dean Jagger, depicts a field, the grass of which is gradually flattened by the wind originating in the land of the super-fortresses, thus takes us into the past. An admirable shot, prelude to scenes of very strong tension, with few cuts, where it never manipulates our emotions. Gregory Peck is exceptional in it, as often with King (the other actors also, Millard Mitchell and Hugh Marlowe) who rewrote the script, achieving a scenario that Zanuck considered the best he had read. A simple nuance: we would now hesitate to affirm that these are “his two best films,” other titles that come to mind, from State Fair [1933] to Margie [1946] by way of Stanley and Livingstone [1939] and Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie which, reseen, is truly splendid. But this hierarchical classification is a matter of personal taste and therefore not important. What matters is that the oeuvre of King is beginning to be estimated at its true value. Long gone are the days when all of the editors of a magazine quitted the Nickelodeon hall, in the ‘60s, rather than see The Black Swan. The qualities, the originality that we used to boast about (along with Jacques Lourcelles in Préscence) impose themselves more and more each year. They situate themselves at the antipodes of frivolity, of the stirrings of socialites and snobs, and testify to a profound attachment to beliefs, to a morality inherited from Griffith who, moreover, went crazy over Tol’able David [1921]. Virginian filmmaker par excellence, King defended values, a culture, typical of Southern civilization, at the same time rooted in tradition and open to the world. Director of a rural America (the shots of little cities, of prairies, abound in his work) attentive to the passage of time, to the rhythm of the seasons, to the importance of a journey or a discovery (cf. the number of scenes of separations and reunions), he places his camera at the height of feeling—like Hawks, at the “height of man.”

Gregory Peck, in a very interesting prologue to the monograph by Walter Coppedge, reveals to us that two of the primordial twists of The Bravados were put in and written by King, which made the men that Peck revenged innocent of the rape of his wife and added the final confession. Profoundly religious, King refuses to champion the notion of revenge, even justified. One of these ideas is brilliant, the other more debatable: both testify to a vision, to a culture. This culture, openly sentimental (his Griffith remake is moreover a lot less bad than has been claimed), often draws inspiration from a literature which one easily suspects the limits and conventions of. Thus, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain [1951], a very personal project, adapts a novel that Walter Coppedge classes among the soap operas of the Saturday Evening Post. Nevertheless, despite the lackluster performance of William Lundigan, the film transcends its point of departure, so great is its force of conviction, so passionate the attachment the director bears for his characters. With King, to cite James Q. Wilson, “the habits of the heart are never subverted by the ambitions of the spirit.” It’s interesting to compare this work with Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown [1950] which remains more external, more detached relative to certain feelings, certain values: the best shots of Tourneur are engraved, the best moments the instances of weariness. In King, everything that exalts the notion of sacrifice is carried by the mise-en-scene. He magnificently renders the attachment to the soil, to the home, notions which may seem simplistic or antiquated, in this close to Ford, a Ford who privileged rootedness relative to rootlessness. One finds all these themes again in his biopics, typical of Fox and often remarkable given the conventions of the genre: Wilson, Stanley and Livingstone, and in the historical films which are similar, one of the best of which remains Lloyd’s of London [1936] where he imposed Tyrone Power and George Sanders. The sensibility of King, his attention to detail, a genuine sense for historical atmosphere—provided that the period coincides with his culture—often enables him to move beyond reconstruction towards recreation, especially in his American works where the peaceful rhythm of the mise-en-scene seems to be born from the feelings of the characters.

Like all successful historical films, they also speak to us of the era in which they were made: thus, I’d Climb reflects as much on the 1950s as on the beginning of the century, Wilson revolves more around World War II. Nellie is the only work where King deals with in the present, implicitly, the change of mentality which upsets America. He tried to impose Marilyn Monroe in the title role, which would have reinforced the timeliness of the theme, but the studio refused. This in no way restricts the originality of a work devoted to a male character who constantly makes mistakes and causes misfortune for his loved ones, a rarely addressed subject which anticipates The Bravados. Margie is one of those little miracles which seems to have everything to make it sink into mawkishness and yet barely brushes up against it. King directs—superbly—a bland debutante, Jeanne Crain, remarkable in this role of the schoolgirl “awakening to love” in a little town during the 1920s. The relations, very well treated, between the mother and the daughter, make this “little slice of Americana” one of King’s best films.

He's less at ease when he treats foreign stories. His style becomes more stiff, more conventional (Captain From Castile [1947]). Even a historical fantasy like Prince of Foxes [1949] doesn’t escape from stasis despite some excellent action scenes: a battle in the forest, the assault of a city, the final duel. Formally, the film is spectacular, King finding in Leon Shamroy the ideal cinematographer, passing with mastery from real exteriors (of which he made himself the ardent advocate of in 1922) to studio décor, brilliantly utilizing depth of field and short focal lengths. Orson Welles, for once, doesn’t look like he’s simply chasing after any paying work. It’s him and Everett Sloane who actually dominate the film, which is paralyzed by the presence of Wanda Hendrix and a predictable scenario. On several occasions, a bad choice of actresses (where the studio must have played a large role) will freeze the historical works of King: Susan Hayward in David and Bathsheba [1951], a very literary but somewhat inert scenario by Philip Dunne, Simone Simon (Seventh Heaven [1937]), Terry Moore (King of the Khyber Rifles [1953], otherwise totally bleak and out of fashion). It’s a defect absent from his melodramas and pastoral chronicles, but which suffers from a more neorealist story like A Bell for Adano [1945] where it’s difficult to accept Gene Tierney as a blond Italian. This stasis disappears as soon as he can root the story in a context he knows or in feelings which are close to him, everything that touches or tears apart the family unit. Thus, in Adano the return of the prisoners constitutes an anthologizable sequence.

Even a western like Jesse James [1939] turns into a family chronicle, into an elegiac poem. King films the back of reality, interested only in the myth he is filming, with the help of a clever scenario by Nunnally Johnson close to a Griffithian romance. Jesse James is closer to Tol’able David than the westerns of Ford or Walsh. It’s the apology and defense of the values attached to rural America as against the capitalists of the East, the corruption that the city brings. Jesse James isn’t so far from Ford’s young Lincoln. The moral of the film, as noted by Walter Coppedge, also concerns the America of the post-depression era, which this apology for heroic and provincial individualism could only resonate with. His late period is less catastrophic than that of Negulesco, although the CinemaScope succeeds rather poorly and he signs a good number of formidable “turkeys,” as the Americans say: Carousel [1956], Beloved Infidel [1959] and especially the dismal This Earth Is Mine [1959], a sad foreshadowing of television soap opera. However, we would love to see two works that Coppedge considers misunderstood masterpieces: Over the Hill [1931] and Remember the Day [1941], which seem very personal, akin to State Fair, Stella Dallas [1925] or The Song of Bernadette [1943].