Cinema: Picture Man’s Picture

The Letter (Warner) is almost actionless. It opens with a murder, somewhat later shows a creepy sequence among hidden hallways in the Chinese quarter of Singapore. Otherwise the plot is unwound with conversation rather than movement — usually fatal for cinema. Furthermore, it is a rather conventional mystery story, the tale of a sly and devious wife (Bette Davis) of a British rubber planter (Herbert Marshall) who murders her lover when he appears to be losing interest. There is a trial, an acquittal, a day of reckoning. Moving, as it does, at a laggardly pace, it should, according to all the rules of movies, be just another dreary episode in the cinema’s crime cycle. But it isn’t.

Meticulous little Director William Wyler has packed his picture with atmosphere, an elusive quality for movies. He keeps his audience strained with a most effective dramatic time bomb — the constant feeling that something very bad is about to occur. Bette Davis helps with a display of psychopathic evil as repulsive as her Mildred in that other Somerset Maugham cinema success, Of Human Bondage. Herbert Marshall, more limber than usual, behaves appropriately for a true-blue British colonial. James Stephenson, hitherto confined to furnishing British background, gives the part of the lawyer a distinguished, neatly devised piece of acting.

But they might all have gone down in a sea of verbiage without the mood of pursuing doom running from scene to scene. For this, the bows may well go to Cameraman Tony Gaudio, whose slanting shadows and subdued photography make the tropic atmosphere more ominous than the leer of any villain.

The tone is there from the start when Gaudio’s camera looks on the lifeless landscape of the rubber plantation. Moving slowly, it picks up the dripping of tapped rubber trees, a thatched hut filled with sleeping natives, another hut hung with drying rubber strips, glides beside a fence to where a pigeon is drowsing. The silence is heavy with long, sharp shadows. Suddenly a shot splits the still air, the pigeon flaps off, a figure staggers onto the porch of a house in the background.

Gaudio’s fine photography represents the kind of perfection that is automatically expected from the skilled, unpublicized, tight little fraternity which grinds Hollywood’s cameras. Directors, actors, writers, producers are expected to falter and blunder now & then. But the cameraman’s record must be faultless; he must go quietly about his business, supervising the lighting, arranging camera angles, advising the director on effective touches. He must operate his 425-lb. contraption of multi-lensed, cog-wheeled intricacies with as much dexterity as if it were a Leica. With shooting time costing $20 a minute and with no chance to see the results until the following day, he cannot afford errors.

Used to their comparative anonymity, cameramen lead the most normal lives of Hollywood’s high-salaried citizens, rarely appear in the gossip columns or at Goldwyn, Mayer or Zanuck parties. They own houses, raise families. Professionally, they are tied in a union as exclusive as a London club, the American Society of Cinematographers, which, until its recent application for an A. F. of L. charter, had no truck with national affiliations. It costs $100 to join, holds a closed-shop contract with all major studios.

Professional Hollywood tips its hat to a dozen top cameramen. There is lean, youthful Gregg Toland, who grabbed last year’s Oscar with his eerie effects in Wuthering Heights, has this year supplied two more candidates with The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home. Toland’s daring, imaginative style has earned him a reputation as the Artist of the cameramen, even though he is somewhat shorter on technical skill than his top-notch competitors. After 20 years at the job, Toland, now 36, earns $62,000 a year from his contract with Samuel Goldwyn, lives a quiet, unsocial Hollywood life in spite of his upper-bracket salary.

The millions of cinemaddicts who “ohed” and “ahed” over the brilliant colors in Gone With the Wind were admiring the first Technicolor job by the perfectionist of the cinematographers, tall, blond, rosy-cheeked Ernest Haller. At 44, Ernie Haller has 17 years’ experience and 80 pictures behind him but still frets and fumes over details with a wad of gum in his mouth, always complains about his results. Now earning $800 a week at Warner Brothers, Haller’s single Technicolor experience with G. W. T. W. has won him recognition as the dean of the field. Like most photographers, Haller’s hobby is photography, and he is now building a swimming pool near his San Fernando Valley home with a peek hole in one side for experiments in marine photography.

Joseph Valentine (Guiseppe Valentino), who calls himself a “dago wop,” has followed Deanna Durbin’s cinema growth from a pup. Most great reputations in the business are built on subdued arty effects —the specialties of Toland, Gaudio and chunky Chinese James Wong Howe—but Valentine has won his colors with gaiety. The lilt he catches in the gait of Deanna Durbin swinging along, singing a song, is the difference between making a musical bright and fluffy or allowing it to settle like cold soufflé. Dark, athletic, with a Cupid’s-bow mustache, Valentine is a leader in cameramen’s politics, earns $700 weekly on his Universal contract.

How much fervent fans owe to these and other experts of the lens is Holly wood’s well-guarded secret. But many an idol stays at the top of the heap because of their magic. They know they must avoid oblique angle close-ups of Clark Gable so that his sugar-bowl ears won’t predominate. They quickly learn that a new comer like Ingrid Bergman must be shot from the left as her face is expressionless from the other side. They are careful with close-ups of older beauties like Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich, keeping them motionless to conceal the wrinkles that make-up and careful lighting won’t hide. Photographing rubber chins and putty noses on a bias to avoid detection is a matter of course.

They must also have eyes and memories more sensitive than a geologist’s seismograph. The exigencies of movie production often require that successive scenes in the same room be shot weeks apart. The most accurate instruments used to record the intensity of light have a wide margin of error; so at least 25% of the factors involved in reconstructing a similar setting depend on the sensitivity of the cameraman. The experts say you have to “feel” it.

Late in 1931, Tony Gaudio had a spat with Director Lewis Milestone during the filming of The Front Page, walked off the set in a huff. For a year he couldn’t get a job or even an interview despite his standing as one of the top cameramen in town. When Brother Jack Warner, whom he calls “Mr. Warner Brothers,” finally hired him to shoot screen tests, Tony discovered the cold shoulder came from a whispering campaign that his eyesight was failing—the kiss of death for any cameraman. The rumor finally dispelled, Tony is now well back in the swim, crucifying the King’s English, doing his important share of the business of getting America’s Best Entertainment into the cans. The Letter was No. 1,012 (including shorts) for him.