James Harvey opens his latest book with a quote from another great essayist, James Baldwin, on the essence of movie stars. “One does not go to see them act,” Baldwin wrote. “One goes to watch them be.” It was an astute observation 40 years ago, and is the organizing principle of Harvey’s Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar (published by Faber and Faber).
Harvey has watched all the stars long and closely, analyzing their appearance and their manner, and fathoming what was essential. He begins with the era when stars were expected to be larger than reality, Platonic ideals rather than actors compromised with ordinary life. Great acting is beside the point for Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne. They may or may not have had enormous thespian resources to draw from but were fascinating personae whose faces and body language were nations unto themselves, representing the aspirations of millions.
With Ingrid Bergman, expectations began to change. As Harvey writes, Hollywood mogul David O. Selznik intuited that the public was ready to move beyond the standards of glamor represented by Garbo and Dietrich: “She was natural and blooming and unaffected, guileless and seemingly transparent.” Harvey carefully delineates cinema’s passage from romanticism to realism. On screen, Garbo never entirely inhabited real life, and even Marlon Brando in the gritty On the Waterfront was “as improbable as a Jersey longshoreman as Garbo’s Grusinskaya is a Russian ballerina.” Yet, both are “deeply believable.” Harvey choses another apt quote to describe an earlier era in Hollywood. According to Jean Renoir, “There is not realism in American films but something much better—great truth.”
But Brando and the Method acolytes were the bridge to actors such as Robert De Niro, “committed to the ‘real’ as a way to truth.” De Niro was characteristic of the desire not simply to represent a character but to transform oneself into that character. For Raging Bull, De Niro gained 70 pounds, setting the precedent for the beefing up of Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey, and the idea that a screen actor should disappear inside his roles. Not all actors of recent generations have followed De Niro’s path, as George Clooney and Tom Cruise bare witness.
On the evidence of the insightful, erudite and fun to read Watching Them Be, Harvey may well be considered one of the finest film critics writing today.
