FEDORA 1978 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2018/07/fedora-1978.html
Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay and not a review, plot points are referenced for the purpose of analysis. "Have They forgotten what a star looks like?" - Norma Desmond Sunset Boulevard (1950) Such a thought occurred to me while watching Billy Wilder’s penultimate film Fedora, a they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to, post-Golden Age eulogy for the Hollywood of old. Set in such glamorous locales as France, Greece, and Los Angeles, Fedora nevertheless has the nondescript, pared-down, underpopulated look of a TV-movie when what it cries out for the lacquered sheen of the days of the studio system. Why? Because it's a heartfelt, elegiac rumination on the immortality of silver screen legends and the myth-making magic of the Hollywood star system. One that's undermined at every turn by its obvious budget limitations and the conspicuously low-wattage luminance of its own “This will have to make do” compromise of a cast.
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William Holden as Barry "Dutch" Detweiler
Marthe Keller as Fedora
Hildegard Knef as Countess Sobryanski
Jose Ferrer as Dr. Emmanuel Vando
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Frances Sternhagen as Miss Balfour
In 1976, actor-turned-author Thomas Tryon (he wrote the bestseller The Other and was the wooden, lantern-jawed presence in the films The Cardinal and I Married a Monster from Outer Space) published Crowned Heads, a collection of four loosely-connected roman à clef novellas set in Hollywood. The screen rights were swiftly snapped up, early reports suggesting Tryon’s gossipy interlinked tales of Tinseltown (the novel’s four stories share common characters) were to be made into a TV miniseries. Sometime later, trade papers announced that the most popular of the short stories, Fedora, about a Garbo-esque movie queen whose ageless beauty is the source of a bizarre mystery, was to be made into a feature film by multi-Academy Award-winning director/writer Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend). Tryon’s mystery-shrouded Hollywood Gothic offered Wilder (whose most recent spate of films had all been comedies) an opportunity for a return to melodramatic form: à la Sunset Boulevard (1950) Fedora’s industry-insider angle appeared to be an ideal match for the director’s distinct brand of perceptive cynicism and dark wit. When it was further disclosed that Wilder was to reunite with longtime script collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) and Sunset Boulevard star William Holden (in what would be their fourth picture together), the potential of the proposed film adaptation sounded even more promising.
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Making a cameo appearance to deliver a special Oscar to Fedora, Henry Fonda plays himself but is billed simply as President of the Academy, a position he never held in real life. Gregory Peck was originally intended for the role. Fonda's bit part plays better today, far removed from '70s associations with him as the guy from The Swarm, Rollercoaster, and all those GAF Viewmaster commercials.
But Hollywood, as we all know (ironically, via Wilder’s own Sunset Boulevard) has a short memory. When it came to finding a studio willing to produce Fedora, the distinguished career and track record of the 70-something director mattered considerably less to industry higher-ups than the fact that Wilder’s last three releases (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes -1970, Avanti!-1972, and The Front Page-1974) had all tanked miserably at the box office. Wilder and Diamond reworked Tryon’s novella in ways that intentionally evoked and referenced Sunset Boulevard, so securing the services of William Holden as narrator and leading man was a major coup. But progress on the project was hampered considerably when Wilder hit a major snag in the casting of the all-important roles lead of the elusive, eternally youthful Fedora, and her companion, the mysterious Countess Sobryanski. Wilder’s initial casting choices of Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich, later Vanessa Redgrave and real-life mother, actress Rachel Kempson, all turned the film down due to concerns with the screenplay. These delays forced Fedora into development hell—the property being handed from one studio to the next, rewrite to rewrite—before all the major studios eventually bailed. This led Wilder to make his film overseas with French-German tax shelter money, casting Fedora with actors who, happily, didn't strain the film’s budget, but neither did they generate much in the way of pre-release marquee 4/15
enthusiasm.
In yet another second-choice slot, longtime TV game show panelist Arlene Francis stepped into the intended for Barbara Walters
Fedora, a film told in flashback spanning thirty years, and set in exotic locales and meant to depict the opulent lifestyle of individuals whose money affords the luxury of running away from time; was originally budgeted at $4 million but shot to over $6 million due to production problems. Even with this spike in finances, Wilder knew, given the scope of the story, that his film had the budget of a B-picture. For a sense of 1977-1978 scale: an intimate movie like Annie Hall, shot on location with no (then) big names in the cast, cost $4 million. The average cost of major studio releases like The Boys From Brazil was $12 million, the relatively small Heaven Can Wait came in at $15 Million. Hindsight suggests that Wilder, unable to make Fedora the way it should have been made, would have been wise to let the project go. As it was, faced with compromise at every turn, Fedora proved to be an ill-fated production plagued with delays and setbacks from the start. Fear of going over budget prohibited Wilder from having rehearsals (worse, it shows); he rather ungallantly referred to his leading lady as “Not much of an actress,” and bemoaned Keller’s inability to play the dual roles of Fedora and the Countess (ostensibly due to the oldage makeup proving too painful for the actress, insiders saying she wasn’t up to the challenge) occasioning the casting of Hildegard Knef. The original editor was fired after two months of shooting, the cast didn’t get along, and the unintelligibly thick accents of both Keller and Knef necessitated the postproduction looping of both voices. I’m not sure whom we're actually listening to on the current Blu-ray release, but the hollow disembodied voices– especially the terrible one used for Fedora’s little girl–wreak havoc with the film’s two pivotal performances.
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Marthe Keller certainly has the beauty and regal cheekbones of a classic Hollywood star, she simply lacked the effortless hauteur
When completed, Fedora started out well, what with a huge Cannes premiere and considerable press fanfare focusing on Billy Wilder's "comeback." Advance buzz fizzled out rather swiftly, the film besieged by such poor preview response and bad word-of-mouth that it sat on the shelf for a year while its producers searched for a distributor. Trying too hard to please too many potential buyers, Fedora was tinkered and fiddled with to the tune of losing some 12-minutes of its original footage and sizable chunks of its lush Miklos Rozsa score (Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Madame Bovary). With a high degree of anticipation (I loved the Thomas Tryon novel, was infatuated with Marthe Keller, and a big fan of Billy Wilder) I finally saw Fedora when, after what felt like years of bad advance publicity, it briefly played in Westwood in the Spring of 1979‌before disappearing without a trace.
Cast as himself, the beauteous Michael York exudes so much macho mojo he literally drives Fedora to madness for want of him. It may seem like a stretch to accept that an actress who'd worked with the greats would be taken with so mild-mannered a leading man, but I recall in the '70s Bette Davis citing the transcendently bland Robert Wagner as one of her favorites.
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THE STUFF OF DREAMS The story: Desperate over being put out to pasture by New Hollywood’s breed of bearded young upstarts, 59-year-old producer Barry Detweiler (William Holden) hopes to resuscitate his flagging career by coaxing reclusive screen goddess Fedora (just one name, like Cher or Charo, played by Marthe Keller) out of retirement to star in The Snows of Yesteryear, a film that would mark the 4 th American adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“This time we can do it right!”). Tracking her down to her island compound off the shore of Corfu, Detweiler finds the aged star just as beautiful as when they last worked together thirty years earlier (and shared a seaside tryst), but grows concerned when the eccentrically vainglorious actress (forever in gloves, enormous shades, and wide-brimmed hat) appears to be both emotionally unstable and peculiarly cowed by her motley retinue: the autocratic, wheelchair-bound Polish Countess Sobryanski; starchy personal secretary Miss Balfour; and dipsomaniacal age-retardation gerontologist Dr. Vando. Detweiler’s fears are confirmed when Fedora confides to him that she is being held against her will, but his efforts to aid in her escape precipitate a series of cataclysmic events leading to tragedy and the unearthing of a dark, fiercelyguarded secret.
The Countess surrounded by her ever-present heaters
I won’t lie and say I wasn’t disappointed when Fedora's end credits rolled (with its misspelling of Michael York's name). I enjoyed it, for the film’s central mystery is compellingly weird enough to sustain interest (although given the extreme lengths the bizarre characters go to protect their secret, the ultimate reveal can’t help but have an air of “Is that all there is?” to it), plus it was nice to see William Holden reprising his Joe Gillis bit again. But as movies go, Fedora struck me as a bit of a puzzler. I left the theater that day with the impression that Fedora was an admirably ambitious effort on Billy Wilder’s part that somehow got away from him. 7/15
Sunset Boulevard embraced its themes and delivered an outlandish tale shrouded in a baroque style that recalled the melodramatic excesses of the silent era. Fedora, a melancholy a paean to the Hollywood of yesteryear and the days of the studio system, is strangely lacking in atmosphere for so macabre a story. The flat, characterless cinematography is very often visually at odds with the film's nostalgia-laced themes.
Oscar Winners Jose Ferrer for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950 William Holden (under Billy Wilder's direction) for Stalag 17 (1954)
Most damning of all is how disconcerting it is to watch an entire film devoted to heralding the magisterial splendor of the immortal goddesses of the silver screen, yet fails to generate much heat with its leading lady. Fedora cries out for a dynamic, larger-than-life screen presence...someone along the lines of Faye Dunaway (I can't think of another contemporary actress who better radiates classic movie star style). The conspicuous lack of any genuine star quality at the center of the film torpedoes the credibility of a preposterous story that needs all the verisimilitude it can get. Wilder perhaps recognized this himself, given that he ends the film with this exchange: “This would have made a much better picture than the script I brought you” “Yes, but who would you get to play it?”
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Fedora shoots a scene recalling Hedy Lamarr's scandalous nude swim in Ecstasy (1933) WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Much in the way Alfred Hitchcock’s lesser works have come to be reevaluated after his death, Fedora's longstanding unavailability combined with renewed cinephile appreciation for Billy Wilder has produced a sort of revivalist interest in the film. Fedora's old-fashioned charms play a bit better in the age of greenscreen, CGI, and comic book franchises than it did in 1978. I wouldn't call Fedora an underappreciated masterpiece, but I do think it’s Billy Wilder’s best film since 1966’s The Fortune Cookie, and superior to some of his more unwatchable fare like One, Two, Three (1961) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). Because I hadn’t remembered the film so fondly, revisiting Fedora via the pristine, restored Blu-ray, I’m able to enjoy it as a kind of extended The Twilight Zone episode. (In fact, it recalls a similar-themed 1964 Twilight Zone episode titled “Queen of the Nile” in which Ann Blyth starred as an ageless movie queen with a secret.) I confess to not being able to take the film as seriously as some, finding Fedora’s flaws too substantial and numerous to engage me emotionally. But the film is made with a sincere (if bitter) conviction, some style, and a great deal of wit (“Not there! That’s the cat’s chair!”). Which, when combined with the abundant unintentional humor, gives Fedora its own a loopy, absurdist grace.
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Mommie Dearest Little Antonia (Christine Mueller) learns it's no picnic being the daughter of a movie star
One of my favorite things about Fedora (which couldn’t have been intentional and will sound like faint praise) is how its execution and construction seems designed to draw attention to the more far-fetched aspects of the plot rather than conceal them. Fedora begins on a note of implausibility and just keeps stacking the crazy from there. The first leap of faith we’re asked to accept is that during the waning days of the ‘70s nostalgia craze, when real-life screen legends Mae West and Audrey Hepburn were appearing in embarrassments like Sextette (1978) and Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (1978); when Golden Age stars gained visibility by subjecting themselves to being trotted out like waxworks displays on the TV shows Fantasy Island and The Love Boat; and when movie theaters were overflowing with youth-oriented fare like Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978), or gritty dramas like Saturday Night Fever (1977) and The Deer Hunter (1978)—that anyone in their right mind would think there was an audience clamoring for a remake of Anna Karenina starring a 67-yearold Anna.
Sunset Boulevard -1950
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Fedora - 1978
There’s fun to be had in catching all the Sunset Boulevard references, the mystery elements that don't quite make sense (Fedora goes around in gloves and dark glasses even when no one but her handlers are around), but it gets a little wearying hearing Wilder vent his spleen about Hollywood through Holden’s character. Holden’s last film appearance would be in Blake Edward’s S.O.B. (1980) another movie by a battle-scarred director with a Hollywood ax to grind.
Throughout Fedora, I kept wondering why no one commented on the fact that her servant Miss Balfour (a bit like The Omen's Mrs. Baylock crossed with Mommie Dearest's Carol Ann) never ages. That's certainly true in real-life for character actress Frances Sternhagen who looks pretty much the same today as she always has.
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PERFORMANCES Looking (refreshingly) every day of his 59 years, William Holden’s un niptucked appearance fits perfectly in with the film’s “youth at all costs” theme; the actor's solid likability grounding Fedora in a reality little else in the film is tethered to. And while scenes of his running or kicking down doors had me more preoccupied with his health than the plot, and I could have gone to my grave without the sight of Holden’s granddad bod in saggy jockey shorts; he is nevertheless a major plus to the film and it's great seeing him.
In the nearly empty theater where I saw Fedora, this big dramatic scene revealing Fedora's hidden shrine to Michael York was greeted by giggles, not gasps
Fedora came at the tail end of America’s brief but high-profile love affair with Swiss/German actress Marthe Keller. After catching the attention of the studios with her performance in Claude Le Louche’s And Now My Love (1974), America beckoned and cast her in a series of showy roles that only made clear they hadn’t a clue as to how to use her. Her thick accent branding her as an “other” or “exotic,” she was cast as a femme fatale in the films Marathon Man and Black Sunday, and the manic pixie dream girl to Al Pacino’s morose race car driver in Bobby Deerfield. I think Keller's beautiful, but largely at sea when it comes to conveying oldHollywood star quality, and that dubbing thing just does no one any favors. But that being said, I still think she's very good here. Willful yet fragile, she's the warm heart at the center of a cold Hollywood nightmare.
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Of the cast members appearing to have the most fun in their serio-camp roles are Hildegard Knef and Jose Ferrer, which seems rather apt, as they play caricatures more than characters. Fedora, long unavailable and rarely-seen, is definitely worth a look. As I've said, it plays much better now than in 1978. You won't find the same level of perceptive cynicism Billy Wilder brought to his far superior Sunset Boulevard, but there's still much to enjoy amongst the film's unrealized ideas. And if you're of a certain age, plenty of nostalgia.
Thomas Tryon is said to have based the character of Fedora on a number of Hollywood legends, but the one most often cited is the largely forgotten Corinne Griffith. At age 72, Griffith claimed not to be the real Corinne Griffith, but rather, the actress' 52-year-old sister. Her assertion being that following the death of the original Corinne many years before, she assumed the identity of her older sister and carried on with both her life and career.
BONUS MATERIAL
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Faye Dunaway was always the Fedora Billy Wilder needed. And by the looks of her at age 77 in this 2018 Gucci commercial (which captures more real movie star magic in 90-seconds than the entirety of Wilder's film), I'd say she IS Fedora.
Swan Song: The Story of Billy Wilder's Fedora The European Blu-Ray release of Fedora contains many enviable extras not available here in the States. Among them, a documentary featuring deleted scenes and commentary by Marthe Keller, Michael York, and others involved in the making of the film. Watch the trailer HERE
For more on Fedora, check out the blog Angelman's Place 14/15
Old-Fashioned, but not Old Hat
Copyright © Ken Anderson
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