Conversations with Scorsese Read Online Free Page A

the years. I liked
Judgment at Nuremberg
a lot. And I’m talking about Kramer’s productions, too, like
The Men,
Fred Zinnemann’s picture, and
Home of the Brave
and
High Noon,
to a certain extent. I prefer the Ford and Hawkswesterns. But still, there’s something aboutGary Cooper and that music and the editing that’s just remarkable. There’s so much tension in the way the film is developed. [It is about a sheriff forced to capture an outlaw gang alone, when no one in town will aid him.]
    RS: But Cooper was in and of himself a remarkable figure, don’t you think? I mean, he was such a great minimalist movie actor.
    MS: Oh, you’re absolutely right. In the forties he went into a dark period, likeJames Stewart had with Hitchcock and withAnthony Mann—I think of films like
The Fountainhead.
But primarily there’s a film, a very lurid melodrama called
Bright Leaf.
Do you know it?
    RS: I ran it just recently.
    MS: I saw it at the age of about ten. I have been affected by that picture.
    RS: How so?
    MS: The hysteria of it, and his destructive character. And the sensuality betweenPatricia Neal and him andLauren Bacall. And the whole way it develops, with him killing his father-in-law,Donald Crisp. And, of course, the whole film ends in a conflagration.
    RS: Yeah, and what’s interesting about it is that it takes you about half the movie to realize he’s nuts.
    MS: The fact that the film was glorifying the making of cigarettes has nothing to do with it. Right? It has nothing to do with it.
    RS: Right [
chuckles
].
    MS: There’s something about this crazy character that was terrifying, and very interesting.
    RS: Because, after all, this is nice, heroic Gary Cooper.
    MS: You know: Come on, what’s happening here? It was shocking. It’s not a great film. But it was a very surprising one.
    RS: He was an amazing actor. I mean, I don’t think he ever consciously acted a second in his life. But there was something in him that could bring you close to tears sometimes.
    MS: I’ll never forget him writing his last will and testament in
High Noon.
And the last shot, I went back home and I drew a scene from the film. You know what I drew?
    RS: No.
    MS: I drew his boot and the star next to the boot, his sheriff’s badge when he threw it on the ground. Just that. That represented the film to me. Because that boom out [a huge camera pullback, isolating Cooper from the rest of the community] made me understand a little about effective imagery on the screen. Why was that so effective when he was so small in the frame? I went back and studied that one.
    RS: That boom locks him out of the town that has betrayed him.
    MS: And the betrayal idea for me was very powerful. I mean, it always has been, and I still explore it in the pictures I make. So that’s why that image of the star in the dust by his boot was so strong for me.
    RS: It’s funny, it’s a movie that in my head I don’t like, but when I see it, it takes me up in some way. Finally, I think it’s awestern for people who don’t really like westerns—I mean westerns that take up more conventionalized stories. This one offers an unmistakable McCarthy-era metaphor for them to chew on.
    MS: And then you had
Baby Doll
[a comicSouthern Gothic film about a virgin bride, her dimwitted husband, and a sexually avaricious neighbor], theElia Kazan movie that was condemned by the church from the pulpit, which I never got to see then because I always used to check the condemned list—I was a good kid trying to behave. The C list [it stood for “condemned” by theCatholic Legion of Decency] was always filled with titles like
Le Plaisir
[Max Ophüls’s three-part film examining three aspects of pleasure—in youth, in the pursuit of purity, in the waning years of life], and
Letters from My Windmill
[directed byMarcel Pagnol,it is also ananthology film—warm, gently sacrilegious, featuring tipsy and devil-tempted priests], and anyIngmar Bergman film.
    There was this contrast