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Charles Bronson was the Lithuanian-American coal miner, Sunday painter and finally — at 47, with "Once Upon a Time in the West" — movie star. In his bloom of Euro-American eminence (his American superstardom wouldn't come until "Death Wish" in 1974, when he was 53), Bronson starred in "Adieu l'Ami" and "Rider in the Rain," two films written by Sbastien Japrisot. Japrisot, whose pen name was an anagram of his real name, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, also adapted Pauline Rage's steamy "Histoire d'O." The novels of this "French Graham Greene" were filmed as "The Sleeping Car Murders" by Costa-Gavras and "One Deadly Summer" by Jean Becker. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of "Amlie" fame, is filming Japrisot's most famous novel, "A Very Long Engagement," to star Audrey Tautou.
In 1977, at the Museum of Modern Art, I gave an eight-evening lecture series on the Hollywood Screenwriter, with each session highlighting a distinguished writer or writing team. One of my guests was George Axelrod, who had helped set the tone for pop culture's postwar flirtation with infidelity and angst in his Broadway farce "The Seven Year Itch." For the movies, he wrote the scripts for "Bus Stop," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and that classic spiked cocktail of melodrama, satire and treason, "The Manchurian Candidate," as well as directing the cult comedy "Lord Love a Duck." Another evening was illuminated by David Newman and Robert Benton. They had been a kind of writer-director team since their Esquire days, when David (the word man) and Bob (the art director) created the Dubious Achievement Awards. These foreign-film lovers originally offered their "Bonnie and Clyde" script to Jean-Luc Godard, then Franois Truffaut. Somehow Warren Beatty convinced them it should be an American film. After Benton and Newman broke up, David and his wife Leslie worked on the "Superman" films and hosted some of the Upper West Side's coolest parties, including one in the 70s when they showed "Glen or Glenda" (long before Ed Wood's canonization as a trash auteur) and Tex Avery's immortal "Rock-a-bye Bear." Axelrod and David died within a week of each other last June.
Another two screenwriters, more tenuously linked. When I was a kid, It seemed that maybe a third of all Hollywood movies had Philip Yordan's name on as screenwriter. No one could be that prolific, and no one was. Yordan, who on his own did write some good movies ("Dillinger," "The Man from Laramie," "The Big Combo"), also acted as a front for many blacklisted scripters. Thus the Yordan name appeared on "Johnny Guitar," "Men in War, "El Cid" and dozens more for which Yordan was, essentially, the broker for outlaw writers. In contrast, Oscar-, Tony- and Emmy-winning scribe Peter Stone wrote at least one film, Stanley Donen's sprightly "Arabesque," under the pseudonym Pierre Marton — who knows why? That film was a sequel of sorts to the Stone-Donen "Charade," still one of the blithest thrillers in movie history. I first knew Stone as a librettist for Broadway musicals; his first work, "Kean," was a vigorous sketch of 19th century theater life. Later he wrote the books for "My One and Only" and "The Will Rogers Follies." He also wrote, as president of the Writers Guild, a threatening letter to TIME after I'd parodied a Kander-and-Ebb song in a theater review. My brush with greatness. Yordan and Stone died 33 days apart last spring.
Cinema isn't just Hollywood movies; at least, it didn't used to be. It encompassed artistic documentaries of the sort Francis Thompson made famous in screening rooms (the 1957 "New York, New York") and trade pavilions (the 1964 New York World's Fair highlight "To Be Alive," which inspired dozens of Disney-park attractions). And, children, there was once a flourishing sidestream called experimental cinema, whose guru was Stan Brakhage. Saint Stan was the soul of abstract film ("Anticipation of the Night, "Cat's Cradle," "Window Water Baby Moving," Mothlight," "Dog Star Man," "The Art of Vision") in the 50s and early 60s, when it seemed that the avant-garde could mount a serious challenge to narrative films. Today, there's not much avant-garde; there's hardly even a garde. But Brakhage kept painting on film, scratching it, shooting births and funerals and the lovemaking in between. His work is a testament to the artist's need to clarify and baffle — and a reproach to the present, when "independent" now means a stodgily narrative film with a slot at Sundance and a chance to get it released (and re-cut) by Miramax.
I promise not to torture this "pairs" trope too much longer. (Should I note that Maurice Pialat, the iconoclastic French director, and Maurice Gibb, the Zeppo of the Bee Gees, died on consecutive days? Probably not.) But let me acknowledge two comic masters of pen and ink: Al Hirschfeld, the Broadway immortalizer, and immortal, who died just five months short of his 100th birthday (and whom I laureled in a That Old Feeling column); and William Steig, whose capering drunks and satyrs formed the most beguiling Steig party, and who ingratiated himself with a different generation by writing children's books ("Sylvester and the Magic Pebble," "The Amazing Bone, "Shrek!"), though he was no expert on the genre. "To tell the truth, I don't read children's books," he once said. "I'm an adult. I just write them."
A tip of the TIME tam to two artists who brought dance to a larger audience. Gregory Hines was an updater and emancipator of the ancient art of tap dancing. On film, he swapped moves with Mikhail Baryshnikov (in "White Nights") and cracked wise with Billy Crystal (in "Running Scared"). His greatest gift, however, was in his feet, which hit the amplified floor like Chinese firecrackers, broke from standard 4/4 time into daring sprung rhythms and inspired Savion Glover and the new breed of hip-hop tappers. Vera Zorina, who was Norwegian but changed her name when she joined the Ballet Russe, came to America with George Balanchine, her husband, and starred in "On Your Toes," his collaboration with Rogers and Hart. Zorina was no ethereal waif; she gave sturdy, supple body to the classical dance. In the wartime morale-booster "Star Spangled Rhythm," a GI dreams of Vera, and she prances sexily through the snow to "That Old Black Magic." The number curled toes and warmed groins across the globe. If this was ballet, the GIs thought, put me in tights.
Here's an actor-auteur tandem. An Oscar-winning British director with an acidulous touch, John Schlesinger helped define swinging London in all its flash and falseness in "Darling," which made Julie Christie a star. His U.S. directing debut, the 1969 "Midnight Cowboy," was the only X-rated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar and the first of the gay director's several films dealing with homosexuality. His visual style often strained unduly to make editorial points — no need to rub our noses in the squalor, John, we can smell it from here — but he knew the fears that eat at smart people. This made him the right man to direct William Goldman's angst-ridden thriller "Marathon Man" and Alan Bennett's "An Englishman Abroad." This was the finest portrait in Schlesinger's gallery of men clever enough to know they have made a mess of their lives.
The main character there was the Anglo-Soviet spy Guy Burgess, and the star of that tiny, shiny gem was Alan Bates, who got his first star role in Schlesinger's 1962 "A Kind of Loving." A modest giant who bestrode nearly a half-century of excellence, Bates had co-starred in the original London stage production of "Look Back in Anger." But the Angry Young Man tag never quite fit his protean gifts. Whether wrestling nude in "Women in Love" or incarnating a Jewish prisoner in "The Fixer," Bates brought strength, delicacy, wit and humanity to each role. I well remember seeing "Nothing But the Best," with Bates as a charming schemer on the rise who will stop at nothing, including murder, to get the job and the girl; the movie convinced me that only a big city like New York could hold my (more plebeian) ambitions. In films he often squired showier stars — Anthony Quinn in "Zorba the Greek," Lynn Redgrave in "Georgy Girl," Jill Clayburgh in "An Unmarried Woman," Bette Midler in "The Rose" — to Oscar nominations; he was the solid ground they danced on. The stage allowed him to dominate. He radiated silky malevolence in Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker," a tonic cynicism in "Butley" and several other Simon Gray comedies, a charming naivete in Turgenev's "Fortune's Fool." Bates' brilliance was too often taken for granted. His absence leaves a profound hole, an ache, in our theater and film life.
One final pair: filmmakers whose magnificent work was smirched by controversy. Leni Riefenstahl might be remembered as cinema's greatest woman director or as its most gifted documentary filmmaker, whose two-part Olympia, a record of the 1936 Summer Games, pioneered techniques and attitudes copied in virtually all TV sports coverage. Instead, she is vilified as the venal genius who glamorized the Hitler myth in 1935's Triumph of the Will. This record of a Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg still sickens with its close-up view of the spellbinding Fuhrer — this was the original "Springtime for Hitler" — and still enthralls with the artful precision of its editing craft. (I wrote two Riefenstahl columns to mark her 100th birthday.) A wily 101 at her death, she outlived most of her critics but not her reputation; for 60 years, she was blackballed from the medium she helped define. In 2002 she completed a new movie, "Underwater Impressions." It has yet to be shown at any major film festival.