Anastasia (Anatole Litvak, 1956).
François Truffaut saved his most pointed barb for last. Ending a short review in 1957 with a kiss-off, the notoriously venomous critic urges: “Anatole Litvak despises you; despise him back.”1 He was writing about Anastasia (1956), “a most mediocre film which has for its theme a historical enigma, one of the stupidest and emptiest subjects in a category that never fails to fill the theaters.” Anastasia certainly filled the Jolly Cinema in Bologna this June, the opening night film in Il Cinema Ritrovato’s centerpiece retrospective on the Ukrainian filmmaker, himself something of a historical enigma.
The selection made for a curious introduction to the first major showcase for a director billed in the festival’s program preview as “an unjustly overlooked master…[who] made some of the most riveting and innovative films in the history of cinema.” It’s on such approbative epistles that flights are hastily booked, festival passes acquired, and last-minute accommodation secured. So much for Truffaut’s characterization of Litvak as a “docile slave” who “directed Anastasia with laziness, lack of imagination, and bad taste that even his advanced age cannot excuse.”
Litvak was only 54 when he directed the film—hardly in his dotage—but the lolloping Anastasia does invite excuses. Il Cinema Ritrovato’s program notes describe it as “one of the quintessential films of the 1950s,” the decade which gave rise to the youth movie and the Method, the antihero and the psychological western, atomic anxiety and rock ’n’ roll. If the 2022 Sight and Sound decennial poll is anything to go by—in which Anastasia failed to secure a single vote—it’s not even considered quintessential among the historical melodramas of 1956.
These days, the film is probably best-remembered for Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar win, an anointment which marked a poignant moment of reputational rehabilitation. The Swedish superstar had been ostracized by both industry and the public following her affair and extramarital pregnancy with Roberto Rossellini. Her last American production had been Under Capricorn (1949) for Alfred Hitchcock, seven years prior. In all its gestural thrashing and declamatory emoting, her performance as Anna—a former psychiatric patient in 1920s Paris who may or may not be the missing heir to the Romanov fortune—is a far cry from the tortile intensity she brought to Rossellini’s psychodramas during her European exile. For Truffaut, she was “badly photographed and awkwardly costumed” in “the worst role she’s ever had.” Repeated references to a head injury in Arthur Laurents’s prosaic dialogue can only explain so much.
City for Conquest (Anatole Litvak, 1956).
Litvak was never much of an actor’s director. He had “an abrupt way of giving orders,” writes Elia Kazan—who starred in two of his pictures—and “was always dominating and impatient with objection and error.” “‘More, Getch, more!’ [Litvak] would say, mispronouncing my nickname,” recalled Kazan. “I finally got up the nerve to ask him, ‘More what?’ He had nothing to say to that, answering only with vigorous movements with his arms and body.”2
Anastasia signaled the start of Bergman’s spiral into turgidity—it would be another 22 years before Ingmar Bergman would take her talents to the whetstone with Autumn Sonata (1978)—but Litvak was already well into his. The run of women’s pictures he directed at the tail end of his career are mostly bereft of the qualities that characterize his best work. Gone are the descriptive tracking shots of City for Conquest (1940) that antagonized James Cagney, who resented the mark-hitting requirements of Litvak’s extensive camera rehearsals. Gone is the inventive use of sound, which brought so much to the pungent atmospherics of his earliest films. By the mid-1950s, with Litvak working at 20th Century Fox, the innovations weren’t his, but were foisted upon him. CinemaScope, in particular—an anamorphic format put to such remarkable use by his contemporary, Richard Fleischer—seemed to paralyze Litvak, and mostly served to emphasize the stage origins of The Deep Blue Sea (1955) and the staid Anastasia. For newcomers to his work, Litvak’s late period doesn’t make for the most sympathetic point of entry to a fascinatingly haphazard career.
Tovarich (Anatole Litvak, 1937).
Tovarich (1937), the first in Litvak’s nine-film run for Warner Bros., is much more representative. In its examinations of identity and dislocation, it’s something of a companion piece to Anastasia, albeit a circus compared to the later film’s mausoleum. Also based on a stage play, Tovarich features Charles Boyer—a newly minted star thanks to Litvak’s Mayerling (1936), a surprise omission from the Bologna program—and Claudette Colbert as a pair of Russian royals displaced in Paris following an unspecified revolution. Penniless, they’re forced to take jobs as a butler and maid in the home of a wealthy French banker.
It’s a film touched by madness, careening between laggardly screwball hijinks and realpolitik drama. Litvak would forge strong working relationships with left-wing writers over the years, notably John Wexley (Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, both 1939), who would be deposed as a communist sympathizer to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s. Tovarich was written, less controversially, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), but the film’s politics are all over the place: at once sympathetic to the socialist cause of the revolution and nostalgic for the accouterments of Russia’s Tsarist glory days.
Litvak alienated his leading lady, along with most of his crew. Biographer Michelangelo Capua notes that Litvak would insist on using three cameras for even the most trivial of scenes, an extravagance unobservable on screen. With his fixation on the mechanics of a given shot, the actors were left to flounder, as seen in the dissonant registers of a central section that leans heavily into farce—a comic style that demands a fleetness of foot and a lightness of touch.
Litvak’s pal Billy Wilder famously had a sign on his desk that read, “What would Lubitsch do?” It’s a question pertinent to Tovarich, a film that wants for the sophistication of the so-called “Lubitsch Touch”—those magical gestural flourishes and directorial sleights of hand—as it navigates the vertices of class and power. In its cocktail of comedy, sentiment, and cynicism, Tovarich should be prime Lubitschean material—but Trouble in Paradise (1932) it ain’t.
The Deep Blue Sea (Anatole Litvak, 1955).
Litvak often suffers by comparison. His take on Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea can’t touch the emotional force of the Terence Davies, and his misguided remake of Le jour se lève (1939), The Long Night (1947), is no match for Marcel Carné’s poetic nihilism. Cagney wanted Raoul Walsh for City for Conquest, a film that shrinks under the white-hot glare of The Roaring Twenties (1939), while Truffaut went after Litvak again in 1961, unfavorably comparing his Françoise Sagan adaptation, Goodbye Again (1961), with Otto Preminger’s, Bonjour Tristesse (1958). Reviewing Litvak’s final feature—the pulpily titled The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970)—for Time magazine, Jay Cocks describes Litvak as “a kind of Preminger without pizzazz.”
Litvak may not have made a film that can stand alongside Preminger’s best, but he was similarly promiscuous with his genre preferences. Unlike Preminger, Litvak’s sensibilities were hardly modernist, but the two shared an eccentric approach to character and the conventions of storytelling. And like Preminger, Litvak wasn’t averse to making a “social issue” picture.
Nominated for six Oscars, The Snake Pit (1948) remains Litvak’s best-known film. One of the first pictures to be set in a psychiatric hospital, it was more than a decade ahead of Georges Franju’s The Keepers (1959) and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) in its harrowing depiction of institutional care. A film about mental illness with a split-personality disorder of its own, The Snake Pit divides its time between the present-tense treatment of Virginia (Olivia de Havilland), a state-hospital inmate, and the psychological mystery—told in flashback—of her nervous breakdown.
The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948).
Informed by the five months Litvak spent conducting research at Brooklyn State Hospital, the film’s asylum sequences carry a disturbing intensity. In the UK, an introductory title card was added to assure viewers that British psychiatric hospitals were nothing like the American ones depicted, and twelve minutes were shorn from the film “to avoid causing apprehension and distress,” including a stark scene of electric-shock therapy. As edited by Dorothy Spencer, who had cut My Darling Clementine (1946) for John Ford and Foreign Correspondent (1940) for Hitchcock, the bravura set piece draws on some of the most powerful images Litvak ever produced. The film was a passion project that appears to have energized the director, whose pursuant camera and oppressive shadow play conjure an airless sense of entrapment and cognitive disintegration.
During the war years, Litvak was one of the key architects—alongside Frank Capra—of the Why We Fight propaganda films, helming one of the strongest in the series with The Battle of Russia (1943). He had also made a number of Signal Corps shorts about soldiers undergoing treatment for PTSD, and much of The Snake Pit attests to this background in documentary. Not that Litvak was averse to an expressionist flourish. In the film’s most famous process shot, Litvak surveys the notorious Ward One from overhead. As Virginia describes the secure unit as a serpent’s den, Litvak illustrates her words literally, pulling up and up until the writhing figures in the center of the frame resemble those in Botticelli’s paintings for The Divine Comedy.
But the vivid immediacy of the hospital sequences is undercut in a parallel narrative straitjacketed by melodrama; with every flashback, the film grinds to a halt. Freud had been in fashion at least since Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), and the Oedipal roots of the protagonist’s breakdown are simplistic at best. The women in Litvak’s cinema are invariably on—or over—the edge of one breakdown or another, but few are invested with the kind of complexity de Havilland brings to Virginia, whose sure and lucid expression can drop a veil of confusion and fragility in the space of a skittish breath.
Lilac (Anatole Litvak, 1932).
Much like his characters, Litvak’s films often appear to be suffering from crises of identity, in which multiple narrative or genre elements are fighting for supremacy. Introducing Litvak’s Lilac (1932) at the 2019 edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bertrand Tavernier described the filmmaker’s storytelling as “very, very free.” He admitted to taking a long time to come around to Litvak—“in [the 1960s] Anatole Litvak was despised by the French critics”—but his comment on the director’s approach to storytelling is useful, particularly when looking at the two films Litvak made with Kazan. A muddle to one pair of eyes can be freedom to another.
City for Conquest finds Litvak seven pictures into his studio contract, making a film that purports to tick every box on the Warner Bros. bingo card. Not wanting for ambition, it’s at once a gangster movie, a sentimental up-by-the-bootstraps melodrama, a sports picture with musical numbers, and a quasi–city symphony, dazzled by the promise of the Big Apple. With studio legends James Wong Howe and Sol Polito behind the camera, a baseline of craftsmanship can be taken for granted. And with James Cagney in the lead, so can an irrepressible spark of live-wire vitality. But it takes a surer hand than Litvak’s to pull such disparate elements into a satisfying whole. In its approximation of the Warner house style, City for Conquest attests to Litvak’s journeyman credentials. Here, artistry is a slave to proficiency.
The previous year, Cagney and director Raoul Walsh had written the elegy for 1930s urban mythmaking with The Roaring Twenties, a film that pulverized the postwar promise of the American dream. City for Conquest has all the qualities of a reheated dinner, hedging its bets of self-actualization in a tale of two brothers: one a composer who makes the big time (Arthur Kennedy); the other a truck-driving boxer (Cagney) who first loses his sweetheart (Ann Sheridan) to Anthony Quinn’s smooth operator, then his eyesight to the ring. “Who else could give Cagney the scene at the end when, in his blurred vision, the image of Ann Sheridan comes into full focus?” asks the program notes of a sequence that shoots for Chaplin but barely grazes Capra.
Kazan has a small but memorable role as the brothers’ neighborhood pal, a wannabe gangster with a great name, Googi Zucco—soon eating pavement when he tries to muscle those responsible for blinding Cagney. Kazan only gave two substantial performances on film, both of them for Litvak. City for Conquest makes a studied bid for sentimental approval, but Blues in the Night (1941) is the more satisfying article when it comes to the loose-limbed benefits of the narrative freedom cited by Tavernier.
Blues in the Night (Anatole Litvak, 1941).
Executing a series of handbrake turns between jazz musical and noir, Litvak’s final film for Warner Bros. might not be any more generically cohesive than City for Conquest, but there’s less grandstanding in its aspirations and more moxie in its execution. Better not to dwell on questions of cultural appropriation in its telling of a band of down-and-out musicians determined to play “the real blues,” who get caught up with a gangster and his moll in a dive joint on the wrong side of the Hudson River.
Litvak seems to be in his element here, crafting elegant tracking shots that seamlessly connect interior and exterior spaces, and congenial group compositions that assert the camaraderie found in playing music together. And yet the picture’s most innovative sequences belong to another filmmaker altogether. Don Siegel was a montage creator on the studio payroll at Warner, where he would famously cut the invasion of France sequence for Casablanca (1942). On Blues in the Night, Siegel was responsible for a number of transition montages as the band ride the railroads from joint to joint, and for two extraordinary dream sequences in which the film briefly soars. In one, Betty Field’s femme fatale sees herself falling through the keys of the piano as her singing voice meets its limits. In the other—a virtuosic kaleidoscope of nightmarish imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Elm Street sequel—Richard Whorf’s tortured pianist finds his hands stuck in a morass of molten keys as leering faces redouble his humiliation.
Siegel wasn’t a fan of the film, and, according to his autobiography, told Litvak as much. Kazan was similarly unimpressed: “‘Acting,’ an old critic said, ‘is a lamp placed in the soul of man so we can see who we are,’” he writes. “Not that summer, not on the Litvak set. When Blues in the Night comes on the late-late show, I advise you to skip it.” It was Kazan’s last acting job for the screen. It seems that after two pictures, Litvak had put him off for good. “I sure as hell can direct better than Anatole Litvak,” he adds, for good measure.
No More Love! (Anatole Litvak, 1931).
Litvak had a habit of rubbing people the wrong way, but it’s difficult to get a sense of the man from his films. It doesn’t help that he gave few interviews, and those he did give were squarely focused on promotion. Apparently he was something of a Don Juan—another factor that irked Cagney—but you wouldn’t know it from his invariably sexless pictures. “He’d recently become notorious for crawling under a grand piano with a prominent actress of the day at one of ‘those Hollywood parties,’” writes Kazan, “there to enjoy a variety of lovemaking not seen in films.”
Perhaps the unsettled nature of so many of his pictures can be traced to his own itinerant youth. Born in Kyiv in 1902 to Russian Jewish parents, “Tola”—as he was known to industry colleagues—attended the State School of Theatre having already earned a doctorate in philosophy. Inspired by the emergent Soviet avant-garde, he switched allegiance from stage to screen, directing his first short in 1924. By the end of the same year, he was in Germany, working as an assistant editor for G. W. Pabst on Joyless Street (1925).
A sojourn in Paris saw Litvak further his apprenticeship under Abel Gance, for whom he served various roles, including as one of the many assistant directors on Napoleon (1927). His feature debut, the lost film Dolly Gets Ahead (1930), was made for UFA in Berlin, and over the following six years, Litvak would divide his time between France, England, and Germany, directing feature films in each.
Litvak’s earliest extant film was screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato: a UFA production called No More Love! (1931), which was shot simultaneously in German and French (the latter version titled Calais-Douvres). A high-concept comedy set aboard a ship filled with men who have sworn off romance, the film is notable for the presence of the great Max Ophüls as assistant director. A Bologna crowd primed for discovery—and for lighthearted comic froth—makes for a sympathetic suitor, but the ungainly No More Love! was dead on arrival. Those who skipped its single screening wouldn’t have missed any sleep, much like those in attendance.
Lilac (Anatole Litvak, 1932).
But what a difference a year makes. Lilac opens with movement. A sinuous tracking shot follows soldiers on parade, up and over a bridge before panning right to capture a group of children marching in imitation. “No more war!” one of them cries, as they disband into a frantic game of cops and robbers, interrupted by the discovery of a dead body. A blind accordionist plays, a passing train whistles, and police cars race to the scene in a cacophonous flurry of sound and action. The community gathers around the corpse, speculating on the cause of death, as Litvak’s camera takes in their faces. A place, its people, and an inciting incident—all established in an opening five minutes that look like nothing else in Litvak’s filmography.
With a series of newspaper headlines, the plot—such as it is—is set in motion: the glove of a prostitute named Lilac is found near the body. She has an alibi, and a factory worker is arrested on suspicion of murder. A brief interlude sets up the police investigation, before we move to the local neighborhood—“a nest of whores and gutter rats”—via a series of magnificent sequence shots. Max Ophüls didn’t work on Lilac, but it’s easy to imagine that he had this film by his former boss in mind when planning the crane shot that scales the walls of the Normandy brothel in Le Plaisir (1952). Litvak begins at street level, on the shutters of a café, before prowling past the line of sex workers and ascending to the windows above. A washerwoman sings inside as the camera moves back out to the street, settling on a hotel sign that establishes the locus of act two. It’s a purely cinematic description of a social environment in a film that eschews genre congruity for textural detail. Tavernier, in his 2019 introduction, compared it to the first talking films by Jean Renoir and the love stories of Frank Borzage. This might be overstating the case for Lilac, but there’s little doubt that the director’s four-year French period finds him at a creative peak.
Top: The Crew (Anatole, Litvak, 1935). Bottom: The Woman Between (Anatole Litvak, 1937).
Litvak liked The Crew (1935), another of his French productions, so much that he remade it, to diminishing returns, as The Woman Between (1937) for his first stateside production. A kind of proto–Only Angels Have Wings (1939) in its examination of loyalty and courage among a platoon of daredevil World War I pilots, the original film’s opening stretch does a great job of establishing group behavior, and—à la Hawks—the newcomer’s entry into a hermetic world marked by gestural shorthand and easy fellowship in the face of professional danger. Litvak finds romance in the fog, and makes great gains in his location photography, as planes take off in treacherous conditions while a melancholy tune is knocked out on a piano that soulfully marks time until the pilots’ safe—or otherwise—return. As in Hawks, music serves as a focal point for fomenting forget-about-the-day-job intimacy.
But atmosphere can only get you so far, and unlike Hawks, Litvak shows little interest in the pleasures of adventure. After half an hour in this wholly masculine space, Litvak signs off act one with a literal summation of the preceding set-up: “Up in the sky,” some sudden onscreen text reads, “they weren’t two men sharing danger, they were one cell, two hearts beating to the same rhythm. They went beyond friendship, they completed each other… And they understood what it is to be a CREW.”
Here, The Crew’s plot kicks into gear, as the woman we briefly met at the start is revealed to be married to one pilot and conducting an affair with another, his comrade-in-arms, an intrigue unbeknownst to either man. Where Hawks welcomes women into his group ecologies, eking out dramatic tension from the subsequent reorganization of the group dynamics, Litvak holds the mononymous Annabella’s Hélène/Denise (as she is variously known to the two men) on the outside, establishing a more traditionally melodramatic test of faith between brotherhood and love.
It’s a fine picture, beautifully restored in 2018 by Pathé, and like Lilac, one of Litvak’s best. But as with so many of the works selected for Il Cinema Ritrovato’s retrospective, it’s a film that struggles to bear the weight of the festival’s hyperbolic presentation. Has Litvak been “unjustly overlooked,” per the festival’s program preview, or has he simply been filed among the swathes of studio journeymen with a few memorable pictures under their belt? If he’s a “master” filmmaker, as Il Cinema Ritrovato would have it, he’s a master without a masterpiece to his name.
Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948).
Such elevation, whatever the benefit to ticket sales, does neither Litvak, nor the festival, nor its audiences any favors. Litvak had an intriguing career, but it’s one whose fascination lies in the tension between artistic aspirations and the inherent limitations of the studio system. It’s interesting to think how Ophüls, witness to Litvak’s early ambitions with the camera, would run with those nascent ideas, expanding on the potential of the sequence shot to ever more elaborate ends. Litvak, meanwhile, would increasingly temper his vision as his creative impulses butted against the mandates of studio filmmaking.
When a festival of rediscoveries runs out of masters to champion, does it need to create new ones? Or is there a different kind of value worth espousing in the middle ground, in those studio filmmakers less readily identifiable as auteurs, who in their variety and complexity are all the more interesting for the lack of coherence and cohesion across their filmographies?
There’s certainly value to be found in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a ripe thriller built on solid genre foundations. Adapted by Lucille Fletcher from her own hit radio play, and starring Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most famous roles, it’s a film that plays to Litvak’s strengths with the camera while bypassing his tendencies toward narrative disorder with a tightly wound screenplay that sticks to the established parameters of its premise.
In what critic David Thomson describes as a “classic sheet-chewer,”3 Stanwyck stars as the heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, a bedridden invalid who lives her life on the telephone. Trying to reach her husband at the office, she overhears a murder plot over a crossed wire, eventually coming to realize that she is the intended victim. With Stanwyck largely confined to her room in the film’s present tense, its mysteries play out over the telephone through a series of increasingly frantic calls. Litvak makes wonderful use of the close quarters, his camera prowling the boundaries of the space like a caged animal, always sticking to the advice he gave to Don Siegel: “You must always have a reason to move your camera, be it a dolly or a pan.”
With so much of the film’s action tethered to one end of a telephone receiver or another, Litvak is forced to create visual interest through dynamic blocking, as characters deliver reams of exposition. Unlike most of his work, Sorry, Wrong Number is all plot, and Litvak rises to the challenge of a very specific set of problems with great ingenuity, crafting elaborate master shots of which Spielberg would be proud.
It’s a shame that Litvak didn’t turn his hand more frequently to straightforward genre projects, the kind of structurally sound sandboxes that would become Siegel’s métier. One gets the sense that Litvak’s visual acuity, too, would have thrived in this arena.
Back in 1939, before Raoul Walsh took over, Litvak worked for a very brief period on The Roaring Twenties, quitting the project when studio boss Jack Warner fired his preferred screenwriters. It’s a footnote to a career that was contemporaneously celebrated with nineteen Oscar nominations across various films, including two for Best Director. Here was a filmmaker who, according to Kazan, was a man “of considerable culture and reputation.” But it was a reputation that didn’t last. Hollywood was kind to Litvak, but until this year’s bid by Il Cinema Ritrovato for canonical consideration, history had largely shrugged. Perhaps a riff on Gladys George’s immortal final words in Walsh’s masterpiece can serve as a career eulogy: This is Anatole Litvak. He used to be a big shot.