LOVE IN THE CITY: ATTEMPTED SUICIDE (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

In 1953 Cesare Zavattini produced L’amore in città, which comprises six short films, each by a different filmmaker, in one instance, two filmmakers, one of them Zavattini, who also contributed to the scripts of all but one of the films. The “city” is contemporary Rome.
     Michelangelo Antonioni wrings from the omnibus film’s overarching theme of love the tormented love that “Tentato suicidio” pseudo-documents, that is to say, portrays. Nonprofessionally cast, the film purports to have gathered young women who have attempted suicide; with a sumptuous expanse of blank space overhead, they are lit so that they appear as shades or shadows: psychologically, death’s lasting imprint. Indeed, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (by Gianni Di Venanzo, no less) yields throughout deep shadows gripping the forms of human figures.
     Three women are individually interviewed. The first, whose fiancé didn’t want her to work at a job or to read books, appears alternately in two positions: sitting on a public bench—an indication of the recent past; standing up for the interview. Sitting down implies relaxation, but ironical Antonioni uses these images to convey the defeatism and exhaustion that preceded Rosanna Carta’s suicide attempt (as a pedestrian in traffic) and to suggest relapses following her survival. The second interviewee—an 18-year-old girl—attempted suicide twice, once by drowning outdoors and the second time, indoors, by cutting her wrist. When we watch her begin to do this, we momentarily presume we are glimpsing a past suicide attempt; but her remark, “There was blood everywhere,” corrects our error. This is typical of Antonioni’s creation of confused time elements as a means of conveying the interviewee’s high level of past and recurrent anxiety.
     “Don’t you think life has its good moments?” the offscreen interviewer asks.
     Overwhelmingly bad ones, too.

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WHERE LOVE HAS GONE (Edward Dmytryk, 1964)

In the late fifties, Hollywood glamourpuss Lana Turner, once the “sweater girl” and “the girl next door,” became embroiled in a scandal involving the stabbing death of boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, an enforcer for gangster Mickey Cohen, presumably by Turner’s 15-year-old daughter. An inquest determined the motive as self-defense, but rumors arose that the girl, who was protected by juvenile delinquency laws, may have taken the fall for her mother, whose career was at stake. Novelist Harold Robbins may have been exploiting these rumors in his 1962 potboiler Where Love Has Gone (beautiful title, incidentally), which many at the time saw as a fictionalization of the Turner-daughter-Stompanato event. Two years later, the film version changed the names of major characters (Luke Carey became Luke Miller; Nora Hayden, Valerie Hayden)—I presume, as a sly tease regarding the origins of the plot. (There is a vague suggestion that the 1945 film of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce also influenced the plot.) As in the book, Nora/Valerie is no longer a movie star but a society “sculptress.” The weapon is a sculpting chisel.
     Edward Dmytryk, the “Hollywood Ten” member who recanted his courage, tiresomely directed—there isn’t a single shot of any interest—from a lame script by John Michael Hayes. (Hayes’s script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 1954, was his best.) Susan Hayward and, as Valerie’s imperious mother, Bette Davis both act superficially—in my minority opinion, Hayward a lot more convincingly and compellingly. Joey Heatherton comes off best, perhaps, as daughter and granddaughter Dani (Danielle). What fascinates me most, though, is the scandal-dipped nature of this cast. Not long before Turner’s ordeal, Hayward had an ordeal of her own: with its sensational disclosures, her widely publicized divorce from actor Jess Barker, which, among other things, cost her an Oscar (as Lillian Roth, in I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Daniel Mann, 1955). In the 1940s, rumors started that Warner Bros. covered up studio superstar Davis’s killing of an abusive spouse. Lastly, when she was fifteen, Heatherton married Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lance Rentzel, who broke their marriage by exposing himself to a 10-year-old girl. Indeed, Rentzel had been caught flashing earlier—B.J.: Before Joey.