Bogart and Bacall had it, Newman and Redford had it, the cast of The Godfather had it. But Kidman and Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut and Taylor and Burton in Cleopatra seemed to be having a bad time. Is on-screen chemistry for real or are performers just putting on an act within an act, asks David Thomson
Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh didn't get on during the filming of Gone with the Wind, and it didn't matter. They convinced the huge first audience, and then the crowds of more than 60 years, that they were crazy about each other. Gable reckoned the first director, George Cukor, was lavishing attention on the English novice. Cukor felt that Gable was acting surly and difficult by arriving late, without rehearsal, and refusing to attempt a southern accent. What does it matter, the actor argued, if the only south in this Scarlett is South Kensington?
There were other issues: Gable had been assigned to the picture like a stud bull being loaned to a neighbour, whereas Leigh was given the chance of a lifetime, having read the book in London and believing she was destined to be Scarlett, and then getting the role after a fantastic international search had found no one.
Making the picture in California, they sweated together under the lights. But they shared little else. Leigh was infatuated with Laurence Olivier, and Gable was about to marry Carole Lombard. It was on the screen that something happened: Gable looked at Leigh, he twitched his moustache and it was like a thistle inserted in some tender place on her body. She was agitated. He grinned. We call this kind of thing chemistry when it shows in the way movie stars look at each other, and give every intimation of wanting to have sex the moment someone says "Cut!" But maybe the thing happening is going on inside our heads more than theirs.
Sometimes, however, the dream of chemical combination turns into giddy passion. When he came to film To Have and Have Not (1944), director Howard Hawks had every intention of making Betty Perske his mistress. He had discovered her (with the help of a long-suffering wife); he had helped find "Lauren Bacall" as a name; he had schooled her to speak low; and he had dressed her in clothes like those worn by his wife. You'll be playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, he told her.
Not that he saw Bogart as any serious impediment. Bogart was old enough to be Bacall's father (Hawks was older still). He was having awful trouble with his third wife, Mayo Methot; they were drinking too much and fighting; he was very self-conscious about his toupee; he was, as all observed, a wreck. He was crying all over the place. And then Hawks told him that in his plan this new girl was going to be even more insolent on screen than Bogart liked to be. "That'll be something," mused Bogart, and so it was. With just a little insolent banter to go on - about how to whistle - the actors fell in love. Hawks was left with mixed feelings. He knew he had on his hands chemistry of a rare kind. He guessed the movie was going to be a knockout. But he'd lost his beautiful dame.
SO ARE WE safe in saying that Bogart and Bacall had chemistry? In their first two films together - To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep - there's no question. They define chemistry, and The Big Sleep is not simply a mystery story or a film noir so much as a rare kind of sexual comedy designed to showcase the two stars and their simmering heat. Of course, it's Hawks again, and an extension of that kind of teasing insolence he had in mind when making the original casting.
In private, Bogart and Bacall didn't have Hawks or his screenwriters (one of whom was William Faulkner), and the hard facts suggest that they grew a little bored with each other. There were other films - Dark Passage and Key Largo - where the chemistry has turned sedate, something has cooled off. Bogart got chemical again, with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, but Bacall never recovered that first thrill.
The lesson is that chemistry - maybe the better word is casting - is a good deal more than a couple of faces seeming to fit like adjoining pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
Even in an age of far greater sexual liberation than was felt in the 1930s or 1940s, we often go to the movies to bring aid or sustenance to our own relationships. So we warm to Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney for a moment in Out Of Sight (it didn't last, on screen or off); we treasure the uninhibited sexual scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (probably unfilmable without their willing support); and we feel some profound disconnect between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. There was a film about sex that was a severe turn-off.
Compare that with Mike Nichols's recent Closer - not the most cheerful study of sex and romance ever made, but a film and a central quartet so lovely and horny that every possible chemical reaction seems possible. Natalie Portman and Clive Owen may have been the chief beneficiaries of that in career terms, but Julia Roberts has seldom acted better.
We are more open about chemistry now: Newman and Redford had it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, and there's an attempt at a mutual admiration society among the guys in the Ocean's Eleven films. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis had it in Thelma & Louise. But then, dismally, Kidman and Sean Penn didn't in The Interpreter. We knew the film was going to say they had it, but one look at their depressed faces gave the game away. On the other hand, years earlier in Three Days Of The Condor (same director, Sydney Pollack), although Redford was compelled to keep Faye Dunaway as a captive, you could see the flame growing in their eyes. We knew it before their characters did.
Equally, there is a crucial difference between the real thing and acting cute. Some people think of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally as chemistry. Yet it seems to me that that is a picture about narcissists using the other person as a mirror for themselves. Come forward a few years and Ryan (with Mark Ruffalo) in In The Cut was untidily naked and raw with desire. That film didn't get noticed, because the sex was too direct and visceral. Sometimes - as in Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs - the coupling is more engineering than chemistry.
Many young stars are more comfortable holding the screen on their own than really engaging with other people - I'd put Matt Damon, Jude Law and Tom Cruise in that category, and in part it's because they've never had the training in playing extensive, witty dialogue scenes - few people write those scenes any more. Yet history suggests that they are vital to chemistry. In their two great films, the one thing Bogart and Bacall were allowed by censorship was to talk together in a vaguely dirty way.
SUCH PAIRINGS WERE part of the studio system, and they made production easier, just as no one ever thought to put Stan Laurel with anyone but Oliver Hardy. Similarly, the Marx Brothers were a commercial unit, even if in truth they seemed less fraternal than creatures from alien races, imprisoned together by delirious misunderstanding.
Still, this is to treat movies as simply the pairing of two agents. Casting covers so much more. Indeed, casting extends to every part in a picture - the locations, the overall look of the thing, the dialogue and the music. In short, casting is another way of describing all you elect to put in a picture.
Take Chinatown. It was always meant for Jack Nicholson. Writer Robert Towne wrote with Jack's voice in mind - that's largely why the lines sound so personal. Then Faye Dunaway was added to the mix and director Roman Polanski determined to make Dunaway feel uneasy, an outcast on the very male set. She became a little more paranoid or difficult - all of which helped the chemistry she had with Jack. In the first half of the film she treats him like dirt; in the second she can't get enough of him. Now we're cooking. Then add John Huston andgive him the line - to Jack - "Are you sleeping with my daughter, Mr Gittes?", when Jack and Huston know that Jack is sleeping with Huston's actual daughter, Anjelica. Then find the right clothes and the right settings for Chinatown. Then be bold enough at the last moment to dump one score (because it's wrong) and get Jerry Goldsmith to do a fresh score so right that it enhances every emotion, every trace of sour nostalgia and says this is a tragedy, not just a film noir.
This is another way of stressing how collaborative every film needs to be, or how far someone - often the director, but not always - needs to share his vision with so many other willing assistants. Consider The Godfather. Why is it so good? Yes, it's a compelling story well told, the structure of the film and the dialogue are beautiful, the photography by Gordon Willis, the design by Dean Tavoularis and the music by Nino Rota are perfect. Plus, Brando simply is Vito Corleone. Agreed, but largely because he is that character in the film as we have it, shutting out all other possibilities. Remember that Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum and many others wanted that part.
Then look at the next level of characters: don't James Caan, John Cazale, Al Pacino and Talia Shire feel like brothers and sisters? Aren't they, along with Robert Duvall, a group of people who regarded Brando as their father figure as an actor - not just their dad at the Corleone dinner table? Then, wider still, look at all the small parts in The Godfather. It is not just that they are well cast; it is that they seem to inhabit one world. You should give credit to Francis Ford Coppola, to the script, to Mario Puzo - and to Fred Roos, one of Hollywood's great casting directors. No part feels small. And yet before Pacino clinched Michael, it could have been Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman.
If you doubt the role of luck, just remember Apocalypse Now, where Harvey Keitel was first cast as Captain Willard. They shot a couple of weeks, and then Roos and Coppola put their heads together and agreed that Keitel - a terrific actor - was chemically wrong. Something in his manner or being was too fixed, too fierce, and they wanted Willard to be numb, open, vacant. So Keitel was released and Martin Sheen was hired. The time available for making that kind of correction is short. Go two weeks too far and you end up with a movie ruined or led astray by a casting decision.
Just as Brando had been ideal in The Godfather, one can argue that he was a dead end in Apocalypse Now - too gross, too much of a black hole, too unwilling to play it Coppola's way. Suppose Colonel Kurtz had been Robert Duvall as he appears earlier in the film - insanely militaristic. A force that requires a massive, dramatic struggle, instead of the gloomy philosophising with which the picture ends. Duvall (a Coppola favourite) would have fallen on that role like a tiger with raw meat.
The alleged chemistry of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor betrayed as many films as it helped. Cleopatra, The Sandpiper and Boom were duds, but unexpectedly in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? the teaming sprang to life, perhaps because it traded on the quarrelling that was so much a part of their real relationship.
Some actors excel in certain scenes or situations, and freeze up in others. Robert De Niro may have been one of our greatest screen actors, but how many love scenes with him can you remember, let alone treasure? (Okay, with Cathy Moriarty briefly in Raging Bull - but the real chemistry there is between De Niro and Joe Pesci.) Judy Garland was an uneasy actress in dramatic scenes, unless she had to look after someone more vulnerable. No one ever found her over-solicitous in life, but in Meet Me in St Louis (with young sister Margaret O'Brien) and in A Star is Born (with collapsing husband James Mason) her warmth has not died yet. For a decade Bogart was a screen villain, passable yet not at ease and less than a star. Then someone shifted his casting chemistry slightly - he became a tough, stoic loner, and he was a lock for the rest of his career. He had found what he was meant to do.
AND THERE WE come to the most mysterious and potent chemistry of all, the one that may exist between a performer and the camera. To praise the mystique itself, film people have always claimed that the camera loves some people and not others. Ostensibly, that seems like nonsense. Faces are alike; the light is uniform; a smile is just a smile - isn't it?
Many of us are wary of being photographed. We tense up. We hold ourselves against the scrutiny or the invasion. We become grim or shrill in our look. We give nothing away. And, in life, we are probably more trained in concealing our feelings than in revealing them.
But there is a type of person, not necessarily an actor, who enjoys being photographed, because he or she reckons that revelation is their strength. They regard the camera as a friend, or a lover even. Nicole Kidman takes a positive pleasure - something not far from a passion - in being photographed. Marilyn Monroe had a similar rapport with the still camera. She was not always as happy with movie cameras, but the ethos of the still seemed to move her; it was her hope to be a radiant self for just a split second.
Far-fetched? Try photographing different people and soon enough you will notice this difference. With luck, you will find someone whose whole being starts to expand when a camera is studying them. As Josef von Sternberg told Marlene Dietrich - one of those icon faces - just look at the light and think of nothing. The result was seven films - from The Blue Angel to The Devil is a Woman - that live in film history. The process was some kind of chemistry, but it was a model for another radiance and reaction - our faces, lit up by the screen, changed by it.
