Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart knew how to wear a hat, ridiculous as it was. All four made their film debuts in the 1930s and worked with one of Hollywood's pioneers, Cecil B. DeMille; in Grant's case, on the radio. In addition, they were very tall, a substantial physical peculiarity to understand their "oblique" ways, always inclined slightly to the right, before the camera.
Politics of the actors, an
essay by the critic and filmmaker of the
nouvelle vague
Luc Moullet, collected the concept of the "politics of the authors" coined in the fifties by
Cahiers du Cinéma
and, three decades later, turn it around and show some of its insurmountable contradictions. Edited in 1993 by the own
Cahiers
, the text is translated into Spanish for the first time in a co-edition between Athenaica and Serie Gong, thus settling an outstanding debt with the bibliography on cinema in Spanish.
These four totems allow Moullet to open a pending debate: are certain actors as authors as the filmmakers who directed them?
Did the industry stigmatize its stars by treating them as mere commercial claims?
In an unfortunate attack, Hitchcock called them mere cattle and, in a cunning way, the system agreed with him.
Why does much of the critical tradition delight in formal analysis but seldom delve into acting?
The debate lasts for a long time, but, as Moullet recalls, the directors won the game and
La fiera de mi hija
(1938) did not end up being a work by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, but by Howard Hawks. In his humorous analysis, the Frenchman explains why he opts for these four names over other no less classical and no less authors, such as Henry Fonda or Humphrey Bogart. Brilliant in his investigation of these movie icons, Moullet rarely quotes actresses, and if he does, like Marilyn Monroe, it is for the wrong reasons. He distils an arbitrary tyranny against the method and against any hint of psychology or theatrical grounds in the acting work, something that makes him sidestep not only acting revolutionaries like Marlon Brando and his elongated shadow, but also true technical giants, of any technique, like Jack Lemmon and Spencer Tracy.
Walter Brennan and Gary Cooper in 'Sergeant York', 1941. Photograph: CAHIERS DU CINÉMACAHIERS DU CINÉMA
Lover of laconism, discretion and
underplay
from a Gary Cooper ("a sort of Stradivarius" who passes from one aesthetic to another, from one filmmaker to another, "with the infinite possibilities of impassivity"), Moullet opts for "perfection without great effort" compared to that "they lose 20 kilos to play a role in which they work for a year to ultimately deliver only mediocre hysteria and soporific bloating." In a formidable chapter, the critic portrays Wayne as the actor of decrepitude, the false achiever, the man who best knew how to embody, even when he was young, decadence and old age. "You could say that he was not young, or that he consumed it in that bulimia of [first] inconsequential performances, inconsequential performances, or even that he hated his image as a mediocre young cowboy."Under his imposing physical qualities lurked "contradictory and unusual elements", that "cowboy with lumbago" that nurtured the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks.
Wayne was employed in stubborn characters that life ended up teaching a lesson (
Desert Centaurs, Red River
). For Moullet, Wayne is the group leader and Cooper is the lonely man: "Cooper is heroic, Wayne is everyday." “This man who never did theater, the hateful reactionary”, he says about the second, “turns out to be at the same time the first of the avant-garde in terms of acting. Well, considering the best films of today, by Hal Hartley or Abbas Kiarostami, Kira Muratova or Robert Bresson, Krzysztof Kieslowski or Éric Rohmer, Juzo Itami or Ousmane Sembène, Oliveira or Jean-Marie Straub, it would not be Cooper, much less Grant or Stewart whom we could cite as precursors, but Wayne and his discreet presence, the silhouette perfectly integrated into the film's tapestry ”.
In the book only the private life of one of them, Cary Grant, who, unlike Rock Hudson, did play on screen with the double meanings of his homosexuality. Grant separated from his first wife after seven months of marriage, a personal instability that he knew how to transfer to countless characters who were either separated or suffered marital conflicts. Grant is the most complete of his magnificent four, capable of a unique speed of gesture, with slanted movements that characterize both his facet as a heartthrob and his irresistible gift as a comedian. James Stewart ("a monster of intelligence" within the shot, an inventor of gestures) was played the role of the indolent dreamer. Like the previous three, it has that heeled quality of a tall and upright man.One of his great secrets was how he used his hands and his ability to act without moving (
The rear window
), but his other great contribution was the use of bad diction, hesitant speech, “chewing gum 15 years before the Actor's Studio”.
Stewart's charisma, Moullet points out, enables him to "reconcile and reconcile" deep America with the "
intelligentsia
."
It is difficult to calculate the emotional power that a simple movement gives off from any of these four film myths.
But the enormous value of Moullet's text is that, in addition to lucidly and passionately deciphering the work of these giants and, incidentally, questioning from their guts the famous "authors' policy", it brings the true author of the cinema back to the fore: the collective art.
Stakeholder policy
Luc Moullet.
Translation by Juan José Vidal.
Athenaica / Gong Series, 2021. 224 pages.
20 euros.
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