Film Chronicle
2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2016.0077
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoFilm Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) How to Steal a Million, directed by William Wyler (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2004); Moulin Rouge, directed by John Huston (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2008); Woman in Gold, directed by Simon Curtis (Anchor Bay, 2015); Rembrandt, directed by Alexander Korda (MGM, 2001); Mr. Turner, directed by Mike Leigh (Sony Pictures, 2015); Vincent: the Life & Death of Vincent van Gogh, directed by Paul Cox (Docurama, 2005); Pollock, directed by Ed Harris (Sony Pictures, 2001); The Mystery of Picasso, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, including Guernica, directed by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens (Team Marketing, 2011) How to Steal a Million, directed by William Wyler toward the end of his illustrious career, is an entertaining bit of fluff. It sticks closely to the 1960s formula for sophisticated romantic comedy: have two bankable stars (here, Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole) banter facetiously away while climbing in and out of sports cars in a European setting (Paris), add a few foreign character actors for laughs and a museum heist for a soupçon of lighthearted suspense (a child’s boomerang figures in the caper), and there is your film. Hepburn plays the daughter of a master forger of artwork, O’Toole a mystery man who seems to know a lot about burglary. She wears Givenchy and Cartier; he orders Dom Perignon; they plot together with aplomb and then, when forced to hide in a tiny museum closet, fall into each other’s arms. I like the smiling affectionate look Hepburn gives that closet as she exits it, and even more the costume she’s wearing at that moment: Audrey Hepburn disguised as a Parisian cleaning woman, expert eye make-up in place, scrub-brush and bucket in her shapely hand. Moreover, it is a pleasure to see How to Steal a Million employing three old pros in the supporting cast, the magnificent Welsh scenery-chewer Hugh Griffith as the art-forger dad; Marcel Dalio, once Jean Renoir’s great star (in The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion) as a moustachioed connoisseur; and Charles Boyer in a tiny role as O’Toole’s advisor, but still lending his suave French baritone to proceedings. The cleverest thing in the film is its title sequence. Inside an elaborately carved gilt picture frame, the credits are superimposed on changing canvases, Post-Impressionist, Cubist, and Abstract. (The last canvas is a red-toned Gauguin, shown just before going under the hammer in a Paris auction house.) The gilt frame fits the film’s wide Panavision format perfectly, hinting that there is, that there must be, a formal congruity between painting and filming. What is each of these arts, if not a capturing of imagined [End Page 433] reality within a rectilinear space, a composed and (usually) colored perspective on the world? The framed Gauguin on the wall of a gallery corresponds precisely to the framed Wyler on the screen of a movie house. An earlier film which confirms—which revels in—this correspondence between painting and the cinema is Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s 1952 biopic about Toulouse-Lautrec. Here the plot is interrupted twice by rapid montages of Lautrec paintings, posters, and designs. They fill the screen with color, but not more color than belongs to the rest of the film. Huston and his British cameraman Oswald Morris took special pains to render their scenes of Bohemian Paris in a three-strip Technicolor adjusted to match the tones of Lautrec’s palette. There could scarcely be a more thoroughly contrived imitation of painting on film. Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times suggested as much: “a bounty of gorgeous color pictures of the Parisian café world at the century’s turn and of beautifully patterned compositions conveying sentiments, moods and atmosphere.” José Ferrer’s performance as the crippled, dwarfish, psychologically damaged painter is a remarkable feat of physical acting, but the supporting roles are less impressively taken (the Hammer horror star Christopher Lee appears with total unconvincingness as Georges Seurat), and the script is only so-so. It is the visuals of the film which truly astound, from early sequences in the Moulin Rouge, with can-can dancers whooping and...
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