Slow news week in film culture®. A middling second-string critic parted ways in a snit with The Village Voice, which really hasn’t been readable since Mailer left, prompting a languorous yawn of indifference. And of course this Sunday is, in a mystifying turn of phrase, “Oscar’s biggest night!” I discussed this atrocity exhibition in a column exactly one year ago, and my feelings on the subject have not altered a jot or a tittle since. Oh, and probably the most significant piece of journalism of our time appeared in New York Magazine, where someone called Katie Van Syckle wrote of her doomed love affair with Beasts of the Southern Wild producer Dan Janvey, a work full of Poignant Writing like, “And suddenly, the gaping hole in the drywall felt like a long time ago,” which begs to be read aloud with friends in sighing, wistful tones, interrupted by periodic fits of gasping hysteria.
As I mentioned last week, this Saturday is occasion for one of my critically-acclaimed, sparsely-attended ventures into programming with still-official film critic Nic Rapold. The place is 92YTribeca, near the gaping maw of the Holland Tunnel, possibly the least-alluring piece of turf in Manhattan. (Even that strip of Broadway above Madison Square Park is breaking out with boutique hotels.) The film is The Night of the Following Day; the director, continuing the funny-names theme (“Allan Dwan”) of last week, is Hubert Cornfield.
“Who is Hubert Cornfield?” asked an article in the November, 1960 issue of Positif, credited to P-L Thirard and none other than Bertrand Tavernier. This marked Cornfield as a dark horse coming on strong—in the 1962 Pantheon of Movie magazine he was filed under “Competent or Ambitious.” Today, however, probably less people can answer the question “Who is Hubert Cornfield?” than could then.
Where to begin? Leon Cornfeld, Hubert’s grandfather, was a Romanian-born actor, film producer, and impresario, who kept offices in Vienna and Istanbul—which is where Hubert was born in 1929, to Leon’s son, Albert. I can’t say when the Cornfelds became Cornfields, but it’s known that Albert moved the family between the US and France, where he eventually served as vice-president of 20th Century Fox in Europe. Albert Cornfield can be found in the Deseret News of December 30, 1955 “angrily [denying] French accusations that his firm was involved in a propaganda plot to blacken France’s name in North Africa by ‘staging’ the shooting of an Algerian rebel” for Fox-MovieTone news.
Most of the biographical information on Hubert Cornfield that follows comes from his own testimony in the Spring 1962 Film Quarterly, its “Special Issue on Hollywood.” Cornfield came to New York after spending much of his boyhood in France, and he attended the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia School of Art. A stint in the art department of the European offices of Fox followed, where the poster for All About Eve was among his credits. “I guess in technique, I followed Paul Rand, Saul Bass,” he said of this period, “and in the Paris office I knew Chabrol and Godard.”
Cornfield returned to New York, where he shot a (presumably abstract) “film on the color ‘red’” around Greenwich Village with a secondhand Bell & Howell and hung around the Actor’s Studio as a “director-observer,” before heading west to work as a reader for Allied Artists. In 1955, at age twenty-six, just missing the mark established by his wunderkind idol Orson Welles, Hubert had finished his directorial debut, Sudden Danger, first in a four-film series for Allied starring former cowboy star “Wild” Bill Elliott as Lt. Andy Doyle. In terms of historical interest, this falls somewhat short of the debut that Cornfield had apparently been planning for himself: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. (Salinger’s polite-but-firm note refusing sale of the book to Cornfield was auctioned by University Archives in 2010 for $22,500.)
From here, Cornfield’s filmmaking career begins in earnest. 1957’s Lure of the Swamp has allured a few cinephiles, but the earliest of Cornfield’s films that I have seen is Plunder Road, from the same year and also for Regal Films. It’s a pip of a “B” which begins with a quintet of criminals (including Gene Raymond, Elisha Cook, Jr., Raymond Morris, and Steven Ritch, who co-wrote the screenplay) pulling off an insanely baroque robbery of a diesel train, a caper which involves a cherry picker, stunt jumping, nitro glycerin, and knockout gas—all in driving rain no less. (Cornfield called Jean-Pierre Melville a friend, and it’s hard to believe Melville didn’t think of this sequence when planning 1972’s Un flic.) This was followed by The 3rd Voice, a 1960 CinemaScope production with Laraine Day masterminding a murder plot where cohort Edmund O’Brien learns to mimic and replace the husband who jilted her, and 1962’s Pressure Point, which has an unusually wry and subtle Sidney Poitier as a prison psychiatrist assigned to a seditious homegrown fascist, a German-American Bund member circa 1942, superbly played by Bobby Darin. A Stanley Kramer production, Pressure Point’s reputation has probably suffered from the diminishing of Kramer’s stock, but there is nothing facile in its depiction of the pathology of hate and, dramatizing the case history of Darin’s character, Cornfield devises a number of ingenious effects which overlap past and present, the psychiatrist’s office with the scenes of trauma, aided by cinematographer Ernest Haller, also Cornfield’s DP on Plunder Road and The 3rd Voice.
Together Cornfield and Haller give these films’ black-and-white photography a bold, chalkboard feeling. The director’s background as a graphic artist is evident in his dynamic and impactful visual sense, established in invariably striking title sequences which show the admitted influence of Bass. Cornfield also evinces a keen interest in tricksy psychological thrillers after the model of Welles, and both of these signature elements are at work in his next film, The Night of the Following Day.
After building some career momentum, Cornfield didn’t work in the six years after Pressure Point—in The American Cinema, which skeptically relegates the director to Miscellany, Andrew Sarris suggests that Cornfield’s “career seems to have been blighted after a disagreement with producer Stanley Kramer over Pressure Point.” (Much the same happened to John Cassavetes after Too Late Blues; apparently the liberal lion of Hollywood operated the blacklist of the Kennedy era.) That makes The Night of the Following Day Cornfield’s ’68 Comeback Special, succinctly described in an Amazon.com Editor’s Review as “A vile tale of a young girl’s kidnapping by a brutal gang of ruthless opportunists, whose bickering and betrayal threaten everyone’s lives before the heist is even over.”
Like James B. Harris’ 1987 Cop, which we screened at 92Y a couple of months ago and which I wrote about here, Night is a movie that’s slightly unstuck from time. Both Harris and Cornfield’s sensibilities were formed during the Indian Summer of noir, in which both men were active—Cornfield as a director, Harris as Stanley Kubrick’s producer on 1956’s The Killing. As Joe Dante alludes to in the video above, before settling on Lionel White’s Clean Break, which was the basis of The Killing, Kubrick and Harris had first been interested in an unpublished 1955 novel by White called The Snatchers, rejected by the Production Code Administration under their “kidnapping clause,” only to be snatched up by Cornfield, still looking for his first picture after being rejected by Salinger.
The Snatchers was finally adapted as The Night of the Following Day, a film which, like Plunder Road—or, for that matter, The Killing—is about a minutely-planned heist ultimately undone by human negligence, weakness, and error. Pamela Franklin stars as the girl in Night, a heiress picked up by a phony chauffeur from Orly Airport, then held for ransom in a cold, sparsely-furnished seaside house. Her kidnappers are Richard Boone, Jess Hahn, Rita Moreno and, in the lead, Moreno’s former lover, Marlon Brando, who wears the chauffeur’s uniform and bottle-blonde coiffure. Another parallel between Harris-Kubrick and Cornfield arises here, for both clashed mightily with Brando. Kubrick was weeks from shooting a Paramount Western for the star, which had in one of its many permutations been called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones , when he was disinvited from the production in November, 1958. The film was finally released in 1961, with an immensely ballooned budget, as One Eyed Jacks, Brando’s sole directorial credit.
Despite Brando’s best efforts, The Night of the Following Day is a Hubert Cornfield film. Cornfield died in 2006 shortly after having suffered a diabetic seizure, and was in obvious ill-health as he recorded the gurgling, sporadic commentary track for the 2004 Universal DVD release of Night (this lovely L.A. Weekly obituary by F.X. Feeney notes that Cornfield had lost his voice box to cancer in the ‘70s), which is largely given over to his recounting Brando’s on-set insubordination, attempts to “embarrass” and “belittle” him as director. “He tried to seduce my wife,” Cornfield says, “and the next day he came and told me that he tried to seduce my wife, but he didn’t succeed. So I told him, ‘Well, Marlon, I’m so flattered, I will never forget that honor.’ Anyway, later in the film, I started getting a little fed up.” Cornfield also recounts Brando’s insistence on having Richard Boone direct a key scene—Brando and Jess Hahn’s kitchen confrontation, the tone of which is notably disjointed from the rest of the picture—and Brando’s performing dead drunk in a scene where he walks in on Moreno’s nodding junkie sleeping in the tub. (Cornfield has nothing but praise for the work of the West Side Story actress, who “could cry on a dime”—and who, incidentally, will have a memoir out in two weeks.)
This may all be taken with a grain of salt. Feeney makes a note of Cornfield’s own quarrelsome personality, as well as his “Casanova recklessness when it came to sleeping with the wives and mistresses of backers and allies.” (In fact, anyone who knew Cornfield personally seems to feel obliged to mention his satyr-like horniness.) In his 2008 Brando biography Somebody, Stefan Kanfer discursively states that Night was made only so Brando could “discharge his final obligation to Universal” and that, according to the star, Cornfield’s dream logic-driven script made “as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit.” Kanfer’s effort to cast Brando’s on-set behavior in the best possible light becomes rather suspect, however, when he states that Cornfield was “too inexperienced to assert any meaningful authority” on-set, a description which hardly corresponds to the personality which emerges in the Film Quarterly profile. In that same profile, however, Cornfield discusses being dismissed while on-location in Florida after six days of shooting 1961’s Angel Baby, to be replaced by Paul Wendkos. In fact, Cornfield scarcely ever seems to have completed a film without interference: Pressure Point’s wretched bookending scenes with Peter Falk were added by Kramer after Cornfield’s departure, with Darin’s connivance. A great admirer of Welles, Cornfield seems to have cultivated some of his idol’s combative, maverick demeanor, bringing to mind something Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said: “I would suffer like Van Gogh, to paint like Van Gogh. I would not suffer like Van Gogh however, to paint like Gaugin.”
Returning to The Night of the Following Day, there is more than a little irony in the relationship between what happened on location with and what happens in the movie. The caper film, concerned as it is with group psychology, high-pressure problem-solving, and rallying for one big production number, is a close relation of the “Let’s put on a show” backstage drama, and so a ready metaphor for the filmmaking process. In Night, Brando—whose character bears his childhood nickname “Bud”—is in effect playing the exasperated impresario or director of a kidnapping “production” who is beset on all sides by his collaborators’ incompetence, personality dysfunctions, and general lack of focus on the job at hand.
Another irony: Folly though it may be, One Eyed Jacks is a pretty extraordinary movie, as is The Night of the Following Day. Is this despite or because of Brando’s interference? Did Brando know what he was doing, acting as a destabilizing force on the set? Was he like Mark E. Smith playing prankster bandleader, wandering on the stage, maliciously monkeying with his disposable bandmates’ equipment, so to create a sharpening tension? Was there method (or Method) to this madness?
I am inclined to think not. In his commentary, Cornfield reports that Brando refused to play a love scene with Franklin, which would’ve morally compromised Bud along with the rest of the crew; instead, per Cornfield, “He becomes the knight in shining armor, destroying the whole point of the picture.” This matches up quite well with the testimony of Sam Peckinpah, who’d written one of the many drafts of One Eyed Jacks: “Marlon screwed it up. He’s a hell of an actor, but in those days he had to end up as a hero, and that’s not the point of the story.” An indolent, disobedient genius, Brando had the luxury of being able to make things impossible and, with the right collaborators, still get away with it. (I thought of Brando immediately when Richard Brody posted a statement from Gerard Depardieu’s daughter, from an article in Le Monde, on Twitter: “Basically, he’s disappointed in today’s world and is trying to make it amusing.”)
Brando has the right collaborators in Night. As the untrustworthy sadist who comes on with a calm, persuasive pitch, Moore makes a great heavy, towering over Franklin, while boasting a complexion like the surface of a hostile, barren planetoid. Cornfield and DP Willi Kurant sustain the film’s sodden, inclement atmosphere, all wet sand and lowering skies over an off-season seaside town, while the shots taken on the rain-slick French highway, after Brando has absconded with Franklin, might be out of Duras’ Le camion.
Cornfield suggests still another point of reference, appropriate to the film’s soft-edged air of unreality, which is justified by a twist ending cribbed from Dead of Night. “This picture is really a homage to the painter Magritte who came from that region on the channel in Belgium,” Cornfield says on the DVD commentary over the final shot, “The umbrella, the bowler hat, right out of a Magritte painting.”
It is worth noting that at the same time that Hubert was cinematographically invoking Magritte in the north of France, his uncle, Bernard, was in the midst of becoming “the most talked about financier in Europe since the Great Depression,” owning “more chateaux, town houses, villas, and apartments in the world’s capitals than any Rothschild or Esterhazy in their high times.” This is according to Do You Sincerely Want to Be Rich?: The Full Story of Bernard Cornfeld and IOS by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, and Godfrey Iodgson, which recounts how Bernard pulled off one of the greatest confidence scams of all time. A child of Leon Cornfeld’s second marriage, and actually two years his nephew’s junior, Bernard, prophet of “people’s capitalism,” created and managed the gargantuan Inverstors Overseas Services mutual fund, which employed an army of salesmen to go door-to-door encouraging middle-class families to invest in offshore funds, funds which then acted as a personal piggy bank for Bernard and the IOS bigs.
This would normally be a good spot to draw a facile syllogism between the criminal behavior being depicted by the nephew and that being performed by the uncle. Fortunately I have just been reading the excellent new book Abraham Polonsky: Interviews, part of University Press of Mississippi’s ongoing Conversations with Filmmakers series, in which the blacklist survivor comments on adapting Ira Wolfert’s novel Tucker’s People into the singular noir Force of Evil:
“The book had a clear parallel to Fascism. I mean, that’s an ordinary metaphor you find in all economic writing and in poetry of left-wing journalism: gangsterism is like capitalism, or the other way round. I don’t know if that’s true, but anyhow it’s a metaphor when you’re desperate.”
It will have to remain a mystery how Polonsky, who died in 1999, was able to see an advanced screening of 2012’s Killing Them Softly.*
Well, I’ve got to get back to my day job. Until next week, I can be found standing on Cooper Square with a boom box over my head, bumping this… (“Rejection is one thing, but rejection from a fool is cruel…”)
*Force of Evil has much more in common with another George V. Higgins adaptation, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which, along with Phil Karlson’s The Brothers Rico, forms a holy trinity of talking-for-your-life noirs.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.