Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
When "Darling" became a hit, both in the U.K. and stateside, Christie, even more so than most movie stars, began to represent more than just the parts she chose and the way she played them. She represented the spirit and style of her era, but not in a way that was forgotten in a month or two. Even today, Christie still stands as the actress of the '60s, the way Clara Bow was the "It" girl of the '20s. It had not only to do with her talent, nor even with the fact that she was English. (To be English in the '60s was coolness itself.) She seemed to speak a language of her own, a language her contemporaries instantly understood, in the way she carried herself and the way she dressed. "What Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the ten Best-Dressed women combined," Time magazine decreed in 1967, and for once, Time was right. Captured in fashion photos from the era, Christie paints even the most ridiculous clothes with dignity. In pictures from the late '60s, she's the model of droopy elegance in haute-hippie garb. Just a few years earlier, in a mid-'60s fashion shot by David Bailey, we'd seen her looking serious and gorgeous in a dress of shimmery paillettes, their silliness offsetting her sun-kissed gravity.
From the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, Christie was a major presence in popular movies. In 1967 she played that Hardy heroine for real in Schlesinger's "Far From the Madding Crowd," a picture that captured the bleak beauty of Hardy perfectly. As Bathsheba Everdene, a plucky, self-sufficient landowner who becomes enmeshed in the love of three different men, Christie again balances that graciously composed façade with an innocence that's buried deep; she shows a kind of cautious openness to the world around her. What makes her Bathsheba so moving is that no matter how many trials she faces, she never seems to be on the verge of cracking. Instead, she lets you see, with little more than the flicker of an eyelid or a reserved smile, how painful it is to persevere, and to bend. An extraordinary cast joined Christie, including Terence Stamp and Alan Bates, but the movie was rejected by the same audiences that loved the supposedly with-it quality of "Darling." "Far From the Madding Crowd" is a picture that has never quite received its due; it ranks among Schlesinger's best work, as well as Christie's.
Christie racked up an astonishing number of movie credits through the late '70s, among them François Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451" (1966), Richard Lester's "Petulia" (1968), Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" (1973) and Warren Beatty and Buck Henry's "Heaven Can Wait" (1978). She has worked fairly steadily since then, although she hasn't always been in the spotlight. Notoriously guarded about her private life, she's the kind of actress who resurfaces now and then in a terrific performance, and you ask yourself where on earth she's been. In 1997 she appeared opposite Nick Nolte in Alan Rudolph's "Afterglow," for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. In 1996, she played an aging but still incontrovertibly sensual Gertrude in Branagh's "Hamlet"; it was one of the most remarkable performances of her career.
But my two favorite Christie performances, four years apart, seem like spiritual counterparts to each other. They also, as it happens, feature the same costar, Warren Beatty, with whom Christie was romantically involved in the early '70s.
It seemed that once Beatty and Christie -- who reteamed for a third time in 1978's "Heaven Can Wait" -- locked in to each other's natural rhythms, as lovers do, there was no turning back. They're one of the most natural, effortless movie pairings ever. In both Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and Hal Ashby's 1975 "Shampoo," Christie is the tougher one, the woman who faces up to everything that her male partner just can't. In "McCabe," she's Constance Miller, a brothel madam who sweeps into Presbyterian Church, the frontier town run by John McCabe (Beatty), ready to get down to business. There's something lustful, but not sensual, about the way she sits down at the town cafe and orders up "four eggs fried, stew and strong tea." It's the equivalent of a Wild West power lunch. She eats it like a man or, more specifically, like a convict, shoveling the chow into her gob with one hand as she hunches protectively over the plate. McCabe watches, enchanted and a little abashed. He has fallen in love.
On the other hand, the only time Mrs. Miller succumbs to sensuality is when she sets herself adrift on opium: Her eyes soften, and their gaze reaches out as if to embrace an imaginary lover. She's much less yielding with the shambling, stuttering, heartbreakingly decent McCabe, who becomes her lover. He pays for the privilege, of course. She wouldn't have it any other way.
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