When The Shooting Stops Read online

  The editing finished, Balaban and I went out to Los Angeles, where the score was recorded. This was my first trip to the West Coast and a major professional event. Despite my cynical attitude toward Hollywood, it was still the Mecca of the movie world. But the trip left me a little deflated about the success I had just achieved.

  There are certain things that unsettle nearly every Easterner his first time in Los Angeles, almost as a preparation for any deeper bringdowns the town may have in store for him. In my case the discomfort began with the array of foreign-car dealerships that gilded the roadway in from the airport—an intimidating line-up of Maser-atis, Alfa Romeos, Jaguars, Mercedes, Rolls-Royces—that seemed determined to remind me of exactly where I stood in the social order. This was accompanied by an incident that reinforced all the preconceptions that New Yorkers have about Los Angeles. Toward the end of the ride, I spotted a most stunning piece of architecture, a white-domed building that rose up beyond the palms like a Greek temple. “What is that?” I asked the cab driver. “Oh, that?” he said. “That’s a funeral parlor.”

  My feelings of estrangement were further inflamed the next morning. Balaban and I had an eight-thirty appointment with some studio executives, and I got up early and took a stroll down Rodeo Drive. Cars were on the street, people in them going to work, but no one else was out walking at that hour. I later discovered that walking is not a highly rated activity in Beverly Hills. Anyway, as I strolled along, looking at the fabulous window displays in the fancy shops, I noticed a police car inching behind me, stopping when I stopped, moving when I moved. After a couple of blocks, it pulled up next to me, a window came down on the passenger side, and a cop motioned to me. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Window shopping,” I said, “I’m from out of town.” He looked at me quizzically, but finally said, “All right,” and moved on.

  A few hours later I got my tour of the Fox cutting rooms, and the premonitions I’d felt since my arrival in Los Angeles finally developed into full-blown despair. In contrast to the opulent front offices, the cutting rooms were located at the far end of the property in a low, factorylike building. The barren corridors were lined with twenty or thirty cubicles, small windowless rooms, almost like cell blocks. Inside, the furniture and equipment were old and shabby. And in the eyes and smiles of the cutters, the men who had made it to the top of my profession, I saw fear and servility.

  It was now fourteen years since I’d left the OWI, and I had spent most of those years hungering to become a feature-film editor. I had no greater ambition. Cutting Murder Incorporated had been the biggest event of my life. And now, in a way I only partially understood, everything seemed sullied.

  When I got back to New York, the first thing I did was order a carpet for my cutting room.

  Sidney Lumet (hat) working with Boris Kaufman (camera).

  (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  10 ■ The Pawnbroker

  Part I: The Re-creation of the Flashback

  In 1961 Ely Landau, an independent New York producer, hired Sidney Lumet to direct Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which was to star Montgomery Clift. Lumet had just completed a dazzling film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Landau’s first production, and the galvanized producer was preparing for even bigger things from McCullers’ highly acclaimed novel. Meanwhile, running tandem to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was another Landau production, The Pawnbroker. Under the direction of Arthur Hiller (who nine years later scored an enormous hit with Love Story) and starring Rod Steiger (chosen from a list of actors that included Burl Ives, Kirk Douglas, and Sir Laurence Olivier), The Pawnbroker was a saga of pain, despair, and hopelessness. It was a less prestigious property, an act of homage to the concentration-camp victims and survivors whose lives it portrayed, and Landau accorded it less expectation for success.

  As the directors wended their way through the usual preproduction throes of casting and script revision, Landau worked out the final business arrangements, including the acquisition of insurance policies for the two films, insurance being an absolute necessity given the financial disaster that would arise from the death or incapacity of the director or one of the stars. But by early 1962, with a bare three weeks left before shooting was scheduled to begin, an unusual, even incredible, circumstance developed: Landau had yet to find a company willing to insure the erratic Montgomery Clift. With preproduction time on the point of evaporating, Landau made the only decision he could and jettisoned The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; but he held onto his first-choice director by dropping Hiller and moving Lumet over to The Pawnbroker.

  It thus happened that with his head full of the details and deliberations of another film, Lumet was confronted with a picture that had already been cast and worried over by its intended director, a film that turned out to be one of the grimmest, most challenging, and most memorable of his career.

  I first met Sidney Lumet in 1959. I was just back from my disheartening trip to Hollywood when I heard that he was about to film Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey, a play that I had worshiped since my early twenties. With three gangster pictures to my credit (Mad Dog Coll, a disaster, was my third) and the threat of becoming a gangster editor hanging over me, I decided it was time to promote myself. I went to see Sidney with a reel from a low-budget feature I was cutting, screened it for him, and then pitched for myself in so blatant a way I still get gooseflesh recalling it, not to mention a swoon of wonderment over his decision to hire me. The film turned out to have few editorial challenges, mainly because it had long scenes adapted faithfully from the play (as provided for in an agreement with O’Neill’s widow). It was shot in six weeks and cut in eight. Although my contribution was routine, my name was now linked with an acclaimed film, and thenceforth I was perceived as a serious feature editor.

  The Pawnbroker was our second film together. Based on a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, it is the story of Sol Nazerman, a concentration-camp survivor who lost his wife and two children. He now lives in a New York suburb with his sister-in-law’s family, works in Harlem as a pawnbroker, and spends time in a city apartment with his girl friend and her dying father, also survivors of the Holocaust. He’s a man with a trudging walk and a dour expression, a man who seems to care about nothing, a “hard man,” as his customers call him, or “the walking dead,” as his girl friend’s father insists. The events of the film all take place within a few days of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his wife’s death, during which time he finds himself harassed by horrible memories that he thought no longer had the power to intrude on him.

  The success of the film depended on its ability to make the audience identify with Nazerman, one of the most unsympathetic heroes in film history. The memory flashbacks to the Nazi era were clearly the key—if viewers could see what Nazerman had been through, they could understand his crusted condition and maybe even acknowledge that “there but for fortune go I.” But by 1962 people had put World War II and its atrocities behind them, and it was questionable whether audiences would be willing to reopen themselves to the stupendous evil that had squeezed the life out of its victims. What tricks of emotional penetration could Lumet perform that went beyond the well-known newsreel images of liberation bulldozers pushing piles of emaciated dead into mass graves? Surely if viewers had hardened themselves to that, they could harden themselves to anything. So another family is ripped out of its daily existence, packed into a crowded freight car, and after losing one or two members along the way is interred in a camp and suffers unspeakable agonies. The information is either too brutal to portray or else simply incapable of reaching us any more. The scriptwriters, Morton Fine and David Friedkin, must have known what they were up against, for in an unusual note to the director they asked that some more graphic way be found of representing memory. They feared the traditional flashback would not have the needed impact.

  The time was right for an overhaul of the flashback. In the thirties and forties flashbacks had been very popular and always
happened in the same way. A sequence quieted down, Joan Crawford or Bette Davis said, “I remember . . .”or began reminiscing in a dreamy way about her first marriage, the camera moved in on her entranced face, an eerie “time” music saturated the sound track, a shimmering optical effect crept over the screen as if oil were dripping across it, and everyone in the audience knew, “Uh-oh, we’re going into memory.” And sure enough, during a long, slow “ripple” dissolve, the star’s face gradually disappeared, to be replaced by a scene from the past or perhaps the same face looking twenty years younger. Some films started at the end and the rest of the story was told in retrospect. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was told entirely through flashbacks, as a reporter tried to uncover the truth about the dead newspaper magnate by interviewing the men who worked for him. Over the years certain aspects of the flashback technique had been shortened or done away with, but the basic formula prevailed.

  Then in 1959, an editor-turned-director named Alain Resnais, after several years as a documentary filmmaker, made his first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Hiroshima was so innovative that it was inaccessible to most viewers; they found it confusing and disorienting. But it turned out to be an important work in motion-picture history (as well as a direct influence on The Pawnbroker) in part because Resnais broke with the established pattern of showing flashbacks.

  In the film, a French movie actress, on location in Hiroshima, has an affair with a Japanese man. As they make love, as they talk, elements of the past—her love for a soldier of the occupying German army; the soldier’s death; her humiliation after the war when partisans grabbed her along with other women who consorted with the enemy, marched her through town, and publicly shaved her head; the incineration of Hiroshima by the atomic attack; the aftereffects of the bombing—intermingle without warning with the present action. Sometimes we don’t even know for sure whether we are in the past or the present, and unlike any previous flashback movie, the pieces of past action—memories that are triggered by certain words, questions, or emotions—erupt on the screen out of chronological order, so that we cannot grasp the story—we’re never quite sure that it all holds together-—until the end. Here and there Resnais throws in a flash four-frame cut—a mere sixth of a second, too fast for the viewer to pick up the information—to suggest the continual dominance of the remembered events. When I saw the film, I knew it would have a liberating impact on filmmaking. Resnais was extreme, he was ahead of his time in technique, but he was a trailblazer and others would now be free to follow.

  In 1960 another French director shook up filmmaking even more. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the leaders of the “New Wave” of French moviemakers. His first film, Breathless, had all the elements that characterized the New Wave films—location shooting, hand-held cameras for getting into otherwise inaccessible spots, a bouncy image, a low budget, and a lot of action. Although the film has something of gangster flavor, with Jean-Paul Belmondo playing the hood and Jean Seberg his pretty American girl friend, the greatest and most significant action was in Godard’s cuts—he jumped characters from location to location without the slightest concern for the time-honored geography of cutting. In the indirect way that a pioneer work influences everything that comes after it, the jump cuts initiated in Breathless allowed Lumet and me additional avenues of freedom in trying to solve the special problems with which The Pawnbroker script presented us.

  This is not to say that jump cutting was entirely new to film. A jump typically occurred from one scene, say a coffee shop where a group of bandits are plotting a bank robbery, to another, say a bank where the busy tellers are innocently awaiting their fate. A jump also occurred when a scene was clearly ended (the robbers getting shot to ribbons by the police as the getaway car gets away with the bare remnants of the gang) and a new scene, sometime in the future, is beginning (the same characters reunited in the interrogation tank at the police station). In early pictures these transitions were covered with an imaginative array of fades, dissolves, wipes, and irises, but gradually the flat cut became standard.

  But unless a scene had come to an end, or a cut was made to simultaneous action elsewhere, or the focus jumped from one character to another within a single scene, editorial geography was carefully followed. This meant that when an actor moved from one location to another, the camera went with him. We saw Bogart’s car pull up in front of a building and we saw Bogart glance up at a high window and grimace. We saw him get out, walk up to the entrance, open the door, and pass through. Then we switched perspective to the inside of the building. We saw Bogart enter the lobby and walk toward us, coming to a stop in front of the elevator. We saw him poke the button, wait, mash out his cigarette, grind his teeth. We saw him get inside the elevator, and we saw the doors close around him. Then we switched to the interior of the elevator, a close shot of his tense face as he watched the elevator indicator; then the indicator itself slowly sweeping across the floor numbers and coming to a stop on “17.” We cut back to his face as he lowered his vision to watch the door open; cut to a view of the opening elevator from the hallway, Bogart exiting and approaching the camera. We then followed him down the hallway to his destination, saw him knock, put his hands in his pockets, and wait—until Lauren Bacall cracked the door, put her face in the opening, and said, “Yeah, whatta you want?” A predictable series of cuts then led us inside her apartment, where the action resumed.

  For all of editing’s advances, this was the standard procedure for thirty years. To build suspense, the process was lengthened and seemed like an eternity; to evoke an atmosphere of crackling speed, it was abbreviated, with certain elements omitted entirely. When taken to its literal extreme in early television, we saw side views of actors moving from room to room in a way that revealed the absence of a fourth wall and seemed to scream out, “This is only a set!” Stultifying adherence to geographical logic was another example of filmmaking’s vestigial dependency on its theatrical heritage.

  Like a modern Alexander, Godard undid this awkward connection by recklessly slashing film loose from decades of convention. When he wanted to move Belmondo from his bedroom to the street across town where Jean Seberg is peddling the Herald Tribune, he simply cut from the bedroom to the street. He didn’t bother to show Belmondo leaving the room; he didn’t bother to include an establishing shot of Belmondo’s arrival. One moment Belmondo is staring at his pistol in his bed, dreaming of American gangsters, the next moment he is talking to his girl friend about pulling a heist. The film’s title is not supposed to mean “thrilling” or “thrilled” (as in “Smirnoff leaves you breathless”), but “out of breath”—and out of breath is how many viewers felt as they clambered along after Godard’s cuts, their mental computations working overtime to fill in the geographical gaps the jumps created.

  Godard and his editor, Cécile Decugis, were so impatient with film’s theatrical heritage that they couldn’t even bear to follow a character across the room. If what Belmondo said on the left side of the room was important, and the next useful thing was said on the right side, they just jumped him from one position to the next. Today this technique has become convention, and no one loses any breath following it. On television every evening you can see a cop, awakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call, put down the phone, and—zip!—he’s gettting out of his car on the other side of town. Through a painless spin along a well-established mental circuitry you quickly grasp what would have been confusing twenty years ago—that it’s only a half hour later and the cop is responding to the tip he got on the phone. You forget that this has followed thirty years of kissing his wife, getting out of bed, pulling on his clothes, walking to the door, and all the other little steps of traditional editorial geography.

  In terms of film technique, The Pawnbroker is not as radical as either Hiroshima or Breathless. Adding some important innovations of his own, Lumet successfully assimilated the advances of these two pioneer films and put them to work in a way that was close enough to traditional movie methods t
o keep the picture within the grasp of the average viewer.

  He made his first innovation in the film’s opening sequence, which was a setup for the flashbacks that were to follow. Before we see the titles or have any idea what the movie is about, we see two children running happily through a field of high grasses, stirring up butterflies as they go. The writers had asked that this scene be filmed with a heavy grain to give the effect of pointillism, the Postimpressionistic painting style, most often associated with Seurat and his parasol-bearing ladies, in which the picture is created entirely by visible dabs of paint. Instead, Sidney chose to represent the action in silent slow motion, a shrewd decision because it gave the entire scene a cherishing, timeless quality. The characters open their mouths and call to each other, but we cannot hear the words. They are a memory.

  We are witnessing a family picnic in another time. We see the mother fetching water from a stream, an elderly couple on a blanket under a tree—the man, an Orthodox Jew with a hat and side curls, occupying himself with a chessboard. Now we see Rod Steiger, a big open-faced man, aglow with the pleasure of the day, waiting as his butterfly-chasing children run to him. In slow motion, he drops his wine bottle and kneels to grasp the boy and the girl as they leap into his arms. With a child’s head over each shoulder, he turns and turns and turns, whirling them through the air. The camera moves in on the boy’s face as his smile turns to fright. Quickly we glimpse each of the characters as they look up and see something that drains the spirit from their faces. Finally we see Steiger, the slow motion freezing, as, terror-stricken, he lets the children slide slowly down his sides.