Ferdy on Films, etc.

2007-02-23T12:17:00.000-06:00

I Want Action!*

About this time last year, I was just moving about my daily life--going to work, having a home life, and writing this blog. I keep up with some of the Chicago-centric blogs to see what's new in town, and I saw an item in one of them about something called The Beachwood Reporter. Clicking through, I discovered a site of great relevance and irreverence about the big politics and big business of my home town. Specifically, editor Steve Rhodes took to task the fat cats of the Daley Machine who have run this city since the first Mayor Daley took office about the year I was born. But Steve didn't stop there. He tore into the two major dailies, The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times, for their fatuous, timid, and lazy journalism, particularly with regard to our local pols. I'd found a kindred spirit in blogland.

I immediately contacted Steve and told him I wanted to do something, anything for The Beachwood, and gave him my blog URL as reference. He told me he liked what I did and would be happy to have me aboard. So, I started writing the odd article for him. We entered negotiations to have Ferdy on Films relocated to the Beachwood site. That discussion and process have taken almost a year, but it is finally about to happen.

Ferdy on Films will have a new home at ferdyonfilms.com. I have to learn a whole new publishing system, so you might see a few glitches here and there until I learn the ropes. However, I guarantee that Ferdy on Films won't change what we do here. Reviews of offroad movies have been and always will be our stock and trade. Rod and I will be joined by a couple of new writers, and we'll add a few new items of interest in the months to come.

We're currently doing a special section on the Oscars at The Beachwood, with a brilliant column by Rod anchoring the proceedings. Check it out and check out Ferdy at the Beachwood's coverage of the European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center beginning March 2.

I've had a ball here at Blogger and hope you'll join me at my new home. And now to quote Peggy Cummins, the star of the first film I reviewed on this site and the face that has been my stand-in on this site all along:

"Come on, Bart, let's finish it the way we started it: on the level."* l

*Annie Laurie Starr (Gun Crazy)

2007-02-12T16:02:00.000-06:00

Viridiana (1961)
Director: Luis Buñuel

In his excellent autobiography, My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel said, "When I was younger, my so-called conscience forbade me to entertain certain images--like fratricide, for instance, or incest. I'd tell myself these were hideous ideas and push them out of my mind. But when I reached the age of 60, I finally understood the perfect innocence of the imagination. It took that long for me to admit that whatever entered my head was my business and mine alone."

Luis Buñuel was 61 when Viridiana premiered, and his tale of sexual perversion and the deflowering of a would-be nun bore out his philosophy to a tee. Generalissimo Francisco Franco, as you might imagine, was not as amused by the imaginative freedom of the over-60 director. Despite Viridiana's selection as Spain's official entry into the Cannes Film Festival, Buñuel was forced to flee to Mexico to escape reprisals by Franco's fascist regime. He remained there the rest of his life, eventually becoming a Mexican citizen. (Ironically, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who must have been inspired by Buñuel, took up the cause of examining Franco's Spain in both The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.)

Many of Buñuel's films rail against the hypocrisy and uselessness of the bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, and the State. While these themes remain fairly constant throughout his genuine oeuvre (as opposed to the dozens of films he made for a buck in Mexico as a journeyman director), some of his films are informed primarily by his surrealist philosophy, and reflect his lifelong fascination with dreams. Viridiana is just such a film.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is a novice in a cloistered convent. Shortly before she is to take final vows and be locked away from society forever, the Mother Superior suggests that she pay one last visit to her uncle Jaime (Fernando Rey), who paid for her schooling. Viridiana strenuously resists this suggestion, but says that if ordered, she will go. This scene is the first to suggest the dreamlike structure of the film, with a resistant consciousness obeying an order to plunge into the irrational.

The scene shifts to an estate, where we see the fancy footwork of a young girl jumping rope under a tree. She is Rita (Teresa Rabal), the sassy daughter of Don Jaime's maid Ramona (Margarita Lozano). When the camera pulls back, we see Don Jaime watching her in delight. He even surprises her with a new jump rope that has real wooden handles. He seems to revel in her innocence and liveliness. His own life has been a lonely one since the death of his wife.

Viridiana arrives into this sweet scene, but Don Jaime's warm greeting to her is met with a distinct chill. Viridiana doesn't really remember him and still considers him something of a disgrace for fathering a child out of wedlock and abandoning the mother and child, though Don Jaime claims that was the way the woman wanted things. He assures her that his son will be provided for after he has died. He also comments on how much like her late aunt Viridiana is, right down to her walk.

Viridiana goes to her room to change and rest. The camera moves into Don Jaime's bedroom, where he has a white, high-heeled shoe slipped over the top half of his foot and a veil draped over a dressing screen. He picks up a corset and starts to model it in front of his mirror, quickly tucking it out of sight when the loyal Ramona comes in. He tries to persuade Ramona to speak to Viridiana on his behalf, to ask her to stay on at the house indefinitely. Ramona demurs, suggesting Don Jaime speak to her himself. He moves to her room, but hides out of sight when he sees Viridiana disrobing. In one of Buñuel's patented leg shots, she removes her thick, dark stockings to reveal a very shapely leg.

With Ramona's assistance, he eventually persuades Viridiana to do him one last favor--don his dead wife's wedding gown. Apparently, Viridiana was moved by the story of his wife's death in his arms on their wedding night. However, she is repulsed when he proposes marriage to her. This refusal is Ramona's cue to drug Viridiana's tea. Don Jaime lays her out on a bed, intending to rape her. He unbuttons her top and kisses her passionately, but shies from the deed itself. When she comes to in the morning, however, he lies to her and tells her he has ruined her so that she can never return to the convent. Her disgusted rejection of him pushes him to suicide. In a scene of obscene hilarity, Rita is shown playing with the same jump rope Don Jaime used to hang himself.

Overcome with guilt, Viridiana determines that she cannot return to the convent after all. To carry out her pious mission in the world, she invites local beggars to live in Don Jaime's mansion. She hopes that with religious instruction and useful tasks to perform, they will be uplifted and their souls will be saved. Most submit themselves to her requirements, but as with many religiously based missions, the unfortunates endure the sermons primarily for the food and shelter. In a move that Princess Diana would mirror several decades later, Viridiana touches a "leper" (actually, a syphilis victim) whom the other beggars shun. They agree to suffer his presence, but only if he sleeps in the shed and ties a can to himself so they will know when he is around. When one of the beggars applies himself to painting a religious picture, he asks the lovely Viridiana to pose for him as the Blessed Virgin. When she does so, her vanity becomes all too apparent.

To pick away at this chink in the saintly armor enters Viridiana's bastard cousin Jorge (Francisco Rabal). He unashamedly brings his mistress with him and sets about turning the neglected estate to useful growing and industry. His mistress notices his undue interest in the indifferent Viridiana, and leaves him. He then takes up with Ramona.

One night, the owners of the estate must leave for town. The beggars become curious about the main house and sneak in. They kill a couple of goats and have a feast, soiling the expensive lace tablecloth, breaking the crystal and china, and making love behind the furniture. In a grotesque parody of Don Jaime's earlier scene, the syphilitic beggar dons the dead wife's corset and her veil and dances an obscene jig. One of the women urges them to assemble for a photograph. The tableau they create is one of the greatest visual gags in cinematic history. When the masters of the house return, the beggars vanish from the house or remove themselves to other rooms. Two of the beggars overpower Jorge and rape Viridiana. With her ideals in tatters and her sexual nature awakened in an archetypal way, Viridiana is both freed and imprisoned by her new, worldly impulses.

This film dwells in the unconscious as easily as an ant dwells in its underground tunnels. The death of Don Jaime's wife on their wedding night is a shadow cast over the rest of the film. Could the rich man have murdered her so as not to have to consummate the marriage? He certainly has done nothing to find another mate or sexual partner. Perhaps she, too, was drugged, but with an accidental lethal dose. Clearly, Don Jaime's sexual perversion sets the stage for the beggars' orgy and Viridiana's fall and rebirth as a sexual creature with warped tastes. The way the story unfolds reminds me of the progress of a dream. Viridiana's close resemblance to her aunt sounds like the "you were there, but you weren't you" episodes that friends often hear from dreamers. Viridiana's dress-up date with her uncle reveals incestuous impulses in her as well, to come to full flower by the end of the dream.

Luis Buñuel's darkly humorous films stand up extremely well for new audiences because they tap archetypes and primal impulses we all have and find the need to suppress at different times for different reasons. His discovery that "whatever entered my head was my business and mine alone" was a terrific benefit to younger moviegoers looking for that same release. l

2007-02-02T10:20:00.000-06:00

1900 (Novecento, 1976)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

By Roderick Heath

In the mid 1970s, Bernardo Bertolucci was a figure with the financial clout and artistic eminence to produce a hugely ambitious flop. But that flop, 1900, is such a totemic work that it is impossible to dismiss, as it attempts to revive the mammoth dimensions of presound epic cinema, like Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, and invest it with a kind of socialist epic mythology. It also illustrates the schism between the standout features of Bertolucci as a director—a great portrayer of sensuality and psychology, and a committed political artist who can never quite reconcile the two perspectives.

The film begins a huge ellipse as the Allies are winning the war and partisans are mopping up the remnants of Italian fascism. Field-labouring women scooping hay in shots framed like classical landscape artists spy the escaping Atila (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Regina (Laura Betti), and chase after them with pitchforks. The sight of this middle-aged pair crying for each other, farm implements jutting from their bodies, is horrific and demands sympathy. One of the peasant boys decides to march into the house of the local padrone (landlord), Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and take him prisoner. Alfredo, caught at breakfast, pleasantly agrees, “Long live Stalin!”

1900 contrasts Alfredo with Olmo Dalco (Gerard Depardieu). Both men were born on the night Giuseppi Verdi died (January 27, 1901), and are tied together by life on the Berlinghieri estate. Each grows up in the care of their grandfathers—Alfredo, with the grand old padrone (Burt Lancaster), and for Olmo, Leo (Sterling Hayden), patriarch of the peasants who are nightly locked in their barn. The two old bulls have a prickly friendship, united by their earthy sense of nature, sex, and socializing even as they are separated by class and resentment. Olmo never discovers who his father is. Alfredo knows his all too well—the cold, callow, money-grubbing younger son of the padrone, Giovanni (Romolo Valli). Elder son Ottavio (Werner Bruhns) has fled the estate to lead a bohemian, cosmopolitan life.

Casting Lancaster as the padrone ties this film thematically and chronologically to Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, as that film’s aspiring liberal Italy is dying. The padrone gives Alfredo a buffer from his crass parents, but hangs himself when he can’t achieve an erection in the hand of a girl. Mechanization destroys the bonds of the landlord-peasant relationship; Giovanni’s entitled greed doesn’t help. The native wisdom of Leo—he won’t let any Dalco become a priest, the ultimate freeloader—agrees with the socialist ideals that excite the labourers to strikes and revolts. He lectures Olmo in his creed as the boy marches down the long dining table, stepping over the eating families’ plates of food, a vision of the gritty vitality of communal life. Olmo and Alfredo (played as youths by Roberto Maccanti and Paolo Pavesi, respectively) taunt and entertain each other with the dirty panoply of boyish obsessions and character tests. Olmo’s great feat of bravery is to lay between railroad tracks as a train (a recurring symbol of tidal history) rushes over him, which Alfredo cannot at first manage, and no one sees it when he does.

World War I precipitates the great rupture in Italian society that has been building. Olmo fights and Alfredo is commissioned, but kept home by his father’s influence. Olmo returns to find the number of workers reduced, machines encroaching, and the estate now run by foreman Atila, who poses as a simpatico fellow veteran. With the prodding of his personal Lady Macbeth, Regina, Atila soon becomes a fascist bigwig. Giovanni and other landowners form a fascist chapter in response to their inability to evict peasantry, who successfully resist the cavalry with nonviolent tactics.

Olmo and Alfredo resume their edgy friendship, Alfredo regarding them both as free spirits, though he is torn between temptations of power and the intentions of his liberality. Bertolucci tries to demonstrate how Alfredo is a decent man imprisoned by position, his ability to force his wishes on other people incidentally malevolent. Alfredo and Olmo go into the city to visit Ottavio, and get sidetracked with a prostitute, Neve (Stefania Casini). When the three of them are in bed together (as usual, Bertolucci suggests homoeroticism, but never gets around to portraying it), Alfredo forces Neve to drink, which sets her off in a violent epileptic fit between the two men whose penises she’s grasping.

Olmo has a crush on Anita (Anna Henkel), an educated girl who has come to work on the estate and act as the peasant’s schoolteacher. They marry and have children, and Anna starts a community school through the developing socialist infrastructure. Alfredo meets Ada Paulhan (Dominique Sanda, tres bon), a half-French orphan (her parents perished guiding rich tourists on a mountaineering expedition; “They died as they lived—beyond their means.”) who lives with Ottavio and whom he assumes is his mistress, not yet knowing his uncle is homosexual. Ada’s a loopy, capricious poseur and muse who occasionally fakes blindness and writes awful poetry. Alfredo finds her wonderful.

Alfredo, Ada, and Ottavio live out a bohemian fantasy, snorting cocaine and gaily dancing. Ada and Alfredo and Olmo and Anita drink together in bar set up in a barn, Afredo begging that the four of them will always remain the same. Two deflowerings are instantly precipitated. Ada and Alfredo screw amidst the hay bales, Alfredo stunned that Ada is a virgin. The innocent solidarity of the socialists is killed when Atila and the fascists burn the school, killing three old peasant men Anita had been teaching to read. As the communists rally, Atila, being fitted for a black uniform, demonstrates to his awed fellows the attitude required of a fascist; he straps a cat to the wall and crushes it with a running head-butt.

Atila and Regina are the film’s nexus of evil (Sutherland managed to freak himself out viewing his acutely perverse performance). Giovanni dies and Alfredo inherits the estate. Despite Olmo’s earnest, faintly menacing warning, Alfredo cannot rid himself of Atila, a deep-rooted cancer. Regina’s crush on Alfredo (they were briefly lovers; in one scene, Alfredo tries to orgasm Regina with the butt of his rifle, a moment as ribald as it is symbolic) makes her loathe Ada. Atila and Laura’s machinations extend to murdering a woman for her house, and, at Alfredo and Ada’s wedding, drunkenly raping and beating to death a young boy. When the body is found by searching wedding guests, Olmo is close by. Spurred by Atila, they mercilessly beat him, and Alfredo won’t stop it. Is he afraid of Atila? Or glad to see his judgmental pal receive a hiding? Either way, Olmo’s life is only saved when another peasant confesses. Anita dies, leaving Olmo to care for several small children. (Even at 300 minutes, 1900 is missing pieces. We see neither Anita and Olmo’s wedding nor her death, and supporting characters in the film often disappear.)

Ada is distanced from Alfredo—Ottavio has vowed never to return at all—because of his poor response to fascist courtship. Ada relies on Olmo for emotional support even as he resents her trying to tutor his kids. Perhaps the film’s best scene comes when Alfredo and Ada row fiercely in a skid row tavern, Alfredo accusing Ada of having an affair with Olmo, then infuriated by her calling him a fascist. Alfredo recognizes Neve when she enters the tavern; her laughing acceptance of life’s caprices briefly reunites the troubled couple.

As Italy enters World War II, Alfredo’s attempts to fire Atila prove impotent. Atila massacres “partisans” in a miniature concentration camp set up in the centre of the villa. Olmo goes into hiding, and does not reappear until war’s end. Atila and Regina, after the pitchforking, are both duly shot by a kangaroo court, with Alfredo to be next for his collaboration. Bertolucci tries to celebrate the victory for the Italian workers in scenes staged to resemble a ’60s happening or Stalinist rally, with narrative becomes imagistic parade. Eventually, with Solomonian wisdom, Olmo talks the partisans out of executing Alfredo because all they have to do is declare that the padrone is dead—not the inhabitant of the role, but the role, the title, the idea. Alfredo, up till now accepting and life-weary, manages a stiff-necked response to Olmo’s rescue. Just as when they were kids, they begin wrestling in enraged love.

1900 is a structural chimera, trying to fuse Shakespearean drama, Brechtian epic theater, socialist realism, and propagandist melodrama. Bertolucci tips his hat to Visconti not only via The Leopard, but also by borrowing thematic value from Visconti’s own rise-of-fascism parable, The Damned, following its lead in quoting the plots of MacBeth and King Lear, and also its portrayal of fascism as indivisible from a psychologically rooted adoration of raw force, sexual degeneracy, and gross greed. This also echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975). As in Pasolini’s oeuvre, 1900 contrasts free sexuality in his bohemians (Ottavio cavorting with his male models) and workers (Olmo gives Anita earth-shaking head) with the savagery of fascist sexuality, in Atila’s child rape and Regina’s voracity that conceals an incapacity for orgasm. Alfredo’s occasional displays of cruelty in bed reflect his temptation to the extreme ego-fulfillment of fascism.

1900 is at its best when not concentrating on politics. The complexities that compile in Ada and Alfredo’s marriage, which breaks up because of her fear she will be held guilty with Alfredo at the war’s end, but already long poisoned by the spectacle of his weakness, successfully dovetails the themes. The multinational cast demanded by complex funding arrangements, but allowing a capricious pick-and-choose of international talent, meant that the soundtrack is never entirely comfortable. In the English dub ( most of the smaller parts are Italian), things often go spaghetti western, yet watching the Italian version loses the original interpretations by De Niro, Lancaster, Hayden, et al. De Niro, in his career’s golden era, is at his youthful, supple best. He ages far more convincingly in the film than he has in real life. The film has slow stretches, but always seems to have some virtuoso set-piece in store, from the sweeping early sequences that show off Bertolucci’s gift for camera movement (aided by the Velazquez-toned photography of Vittorio Storaro), to give a sensation of drifting through countryside and time, to that vivid final scene, both distressing and weirdly comic, a glimpse of a future where Alfredo and Olmo are old men, still fighting and sticking by each other. Olmo escorts Alfredo to his last act on earth, lying across the railroad, head about to be flattened by a train. Like his grandfather, Alfredo suicides—a tired, sympathetic remnant of a superfluous class clucked over with indulgent dismissal by Olmo. l

2007-01-29T20:57:00.000-06:00

Angel Heart (1987)
Director: Alan Parker

When the hubbie suggested to me that we watch Angel Heart, I had trouble placing the name. Something about it sounded familiar, but the title isn't exactly distinctive. Slowly, the clouds cleared, and I remembered that this movie marked Lisa Bonet's screen debut and got her kicked off "The Cosby Show." As a matter of curiosity and because Bonet always impressed me as the most interesting of Bill Cosby's television family, I readily agreed to watch the film. That was a very good decision. Angel Heart is a very good movie.

Heading a powerhouse cast that includes Robert De Niro and Charlotte Rampling is Mickey Rourke, an actor with an intensity and vulnerability that invite comparison with Sean Penn. The time is the mid 1950s, and the place is New York City. Rourke plays Harry Angel, a private eye who gets most of his clients from the phone book because he’s one of the first names listed. Harry gets a phone call from an attorney named Herman Winesap (Dann Florek) who wishes to engage his services on behalf of a client, Louis Cyphre (De Niro). Winesap asks Harry to meet them at an address in Harlem, a black church at which a rousing service is taking place. Harry climbs the stairs to the second story and passes an open door. A woman is on her hands and knees scrubbing a large splash of blood off a wall. Winesap moves to greet Harry and motions him toward another room, casually tossing off an explanation for the blood: “A parishioner shot himself.”

Inside the room, Harry is introduced to Cyphre, who is sitting on an ornate chair on what appears to be an altar. Cyphre is rather fussily dressed, sports slicked-back hair, and twists a gold-knobbed cane between his pointy fingernails. He tells Harry that he is looking for a singer named Johnny Favorite, nee Liebling, who has skipped out on a debt and has been out of sight for 12 years. Cyphre goes on to say that he happened to catch Liebling's trail at a hospital for brain-injured patients, but that Liebling disappeared from the hospital suddenly one night. With these few clues and a generous retainer in hand, Harry goes about tracking down Johnny Favorite.

Harry visits the hospital, where he flashes a fake National Institute of Health ID and charms a nurse into showing him Liebling's medical record. Liebling apparently received his injury during WWII. He was checked out during the night by an elegant woman and a man driving a large car. Harry decides to visit Liebling's now semi-retired doctor of record, Albert Fowler (Michael Higgins), to see what he knows. Harry "lets" himself into Fowler's home, which looks like a pigsty. He goes through the place, and finds an unloaded gun in the bedroom dresser. He finds the good doctor's stash of morphine in the fridge. Sitting in the dark, Harry waits for Fowler to return home. When Fowler refuses to provide any useful information, Harry locks him in his bedroom and tells him that he'll get his fix when he decides to talk. With that, Harry repairs to a diner while Fowler stews at home. When Harry returns and turns the skeleton key in the bedroom door, he's in for a shock. Fowler is dead, a bullet through the eye, and beside him the gun from his dresser, a photo of his wife, and a bible Harry gave an idle tap to when he saw it in the drawer. The bible was hollow, a repository for bullets.

Harry must now work the musicians that played with Johnny. He learns that Johnny was involved with a high-class society dame from New Orleans named Margaret Krusemark (Rampling), and that she was into some mighty strange things. Johnny's bandleader Spider Simpson (Charles Gordone) remembers she visited an voodoo herbalist named Carter. He also says Johnny had a colored lover named Evangeline Proudfoot, also from New Orleans. Harry surmises that Margaret was the one who sprung Johnny from the hospital. He heads down to New Orleans to follow the scent.

The shift of scene to New Orleans cranks the tension up several notes. The hints at voodoo and primitivism captured in passing in the Harlem church--particularly a figure hidden in deep black veils who will not speak to Harry--come bursting into the hot, sweaty Louisiana sun. Harry visits several of Johnny's former companions, beginning with Margaret, who is a palmist. He gives Margaret his birth date to help her reading. She comments that it is the same as someone she knew. When she realizes Harry is after Johnny, she has him escorted out.

Harry spies an herbalist store with the same name as the New York shop--Carter. He meets Mammy Carter (Peggy Severe) and inquires about a woman named Evangeline. "Just about everyone around here is named Evangeline," is the quick answer. When he mentions her last name, he learns that she's dead. He heads to the poor side of town to visit her grave. There, he spies a pretty young woman (Bonet) with a child on her hip coming to place flowers on the grave. He learns she is Evangeline's daughter Epiphany, and he is quite attracted to her.

Harry goes off to find another musician Johnny played with named Toots Sweet (jazz/blues great Brownie McGhee). Toots is reluctant to talk about Johnny, but he seems to be hiding something. After the club where Toots is playing closes down, Harry follows him to a clearing in the woods. A hoodoo ceremony is taking place, and Epiphany, the high priestess, is dancing and chanting. She slits the throat of a chicken, smears its blood on her, and writhes and beats her hands on the ground in ecstatic abandon. When Harry sees her the next day, he scold her for the previous night's display. She answers back that it's a free country (though in 1950s Louisiana, it was barely that for blacks) and that they don't kill people. An accusation to Harry?

Perhaps prophetic. Toots is found the next day, choked when his own severed genitals were stuffed down his throat. Harry seems to be implicated. Soon, Margaret turns up dead as well, her heart cut out. Harry is convinced that Johnny is trying to cover his tracks and is framing Harry for the murders. He contacts Cyphre for help, but Cyphre is the last person on earth Harry should be turning to. Cyphre is, in fact, the Devil (Louis Cyphre = Lucifer), not something this movie tries very hard to hide. Clearly, Johnny Favorite owes him a soul, and Lucifer never indulges a welcher.

Harry's involvement in this dark contract is an intricate one, and the sense of foreboding he feels as he sinks deeper and deeper into its depths is painful and nerve-wracking to watch. Rourke plays Harry as a regular guy who is way in over his head. His dreams and hallucinations reflect his terror and the secrets in his own soul that are starting to be scratched raw. Harry is a noir antihero, not wholly good, but so seeming a victim of circumstances. Rourke works very effectively to draw the viewer into the story to try to figure out the leads along with him, to make sense of a bewildering and terrifying set of events. Harry's fortunes seem very much in doubt, as a recurring image of a slowly spinning fan suggests the wheel of fortune. Where will Harry be when the wheel stops?

De Niro is a very good Devil, when he is actually called upon to drop the fey facade. In one scene, he and Harry sit in a diner talking. Cyphre peels and holds a boiled egg in front of him. "Some people say that the soul is like an egg." He proceeds to chew the egg up and swallow it, a humorless, malevolent expression etched on his face. He keeps watch on Harry's progress, and is the unseen hand behind each horrific act Harry witnesses.

Lisa Bonet seems, at first, to overdo her character's sexual nature. However, when we learn that she has been an integral part of the small circle of the blackest magic that surrounded Johnny Favorite, it seems only natural for sex to be part of her devotion. Bonet is absolutely stunning to look at, creating a magnetic field around herself in every scene in which she appears. For her part, the magnificent Charlotte Rampling takes a small role and deftly suggests an obsessed nature inside a gentile shell.

Alan Parker has a checkered record of films he has chosen to make. Mississippi Burning, for example, was lambasted for its flagrant liberties with the facts. His visual flare and ability to pile up suspense, however, can never be questioned, particularly as regards Angel Heart. Assisted by his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Michael Seresin, Parker creates a visually stunning, evocative hothouse where hoodoo and voodoo fit naturally and the ordinary world isn't good enough to rate a cameo. The plot is mazelike, but Parker handles it with a sure hand and perfect pacing. I've seen this film twice and had the same level of suspense each time, so well does Parker suck us in. Angel Heart is pure heaven. l

2007-01-21T08:42:00.000-06:00

Alice's Restaurant (1969)
Director: Arthur Penn

I harbor a somewhat jaundiced view of the 1960s. From my point of view, the legacy of that era is decidedly mixed, and I am truly offended whenever someone of a certain age speaks to me with condescension that they "were there" and I wasn't. Of course, that's not exactly true; I was there--just not old enough to participate in the earth-shaking events that shaped the next few decades. Be that as it may, Alice's Restaurant is a window on the 1960s unlike any other film I have ever seen. It's the only film I know of that actually makes me feel sorry that I was too young to be a hippie.

The film is based on Arlo Guthrie's long, narrative song "Alice's Restaurant." The song ranges over the famous garbage incident that landed him and a buddy in a local Massachusetts jail, as well as Arlo's experiences in a military induction center in New York City. The movie recreates the events in the song faithfully, but tacks on other story elements, presumably events related to the script writer and director by Arlo, who stars as himself in the film. (In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you that I had a huge crush on Arlo Guthrie, still find him adorable, and that my feelings may color this review a bit.)

The film opens with the bad news that Arlo must report to sign up for the draft that is supplying troops to fight the war in Vietnam. Arlo does what many young men did at that time--he finds a college to enroll in to qualify for a draft deferment. He travels all the way from New York to Montana to find a college, thumbing his way across country as his famous father, populist musician Woody Guthrie, used to do. The long-haired, festively clad Arlo is an uneasy fit in conservative Montana, and he is regularly subjected to taunts by the locals who feel threatened by his appearance. One day, his friend Roger (Geoff Outlaw) comes to visit. Two hippies in town are way too much for the locals. Roger is run off, and Arlo takes a beating at a local diner. He staggers into the street and collapses from the concussion he likely suffered. This is no fist fight from the Old West. One young man is outnumbered, shown no mercy, and felled in a very realistic way. He is immediately thrown out of school.

Arlo decides to visit his friends Ray (James Broderick) and Alice Brock (Pat Quinn) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The 40ish couple have just purchased a church and set up a commune for their friends and anyone else who decides to drop in. In a rather amusing scene, the priests hold a last service for a handful of congregants, reminding them that God is not attached to any one building, but can be found everywhere. They desanctify the church and file out. Ray and Alice watch expectantly, take the keys from one of the priests, and run through the church like a couple of ecstatics.

When Arlo shows up shortly thereafter, Alice embraces him in a mighty friendly hug. Alice is an extremely affectionate earth mother to all her charges, many of whom are young, lost teens. Arlo heads down to New York City to play some folk gigs. He is propositioned by a 14-year-old girl, who takes him to a crash pad so that she can notch up another musician. Arlo declines very politely, saying he'd rather not catch her cold. The authenticity of this scene again provides a fuller picture of how these lost youth who became flower children lived and survived.

One young man named Shelly (Michael McClanathan) is being released from Bellevue, where he has been kicking a heroin habit. Ray goes to New York to fetch him. Shelly, a creator of mobiles, wants his art back. Ruth (Eulalie Noble), one of Woody's crowd and now the middle-aged owner of the club where Arlo is playing, offers the money needed to pay Shelly's back rent and give him access to his apartment. Ruth tries to seduce Arlo, who is much less gallant in rejecting her. The casual sex casually sought is a fixture throughout the film.

When Shelly arrives at the church, Alice shows an affection toward him that is uncomfortable for Ray. Jealous, he teases Shelly and pursues sex with Alice more regularly, ringing the church bell, as is the prerogative of the lord and lady of the manor, after each tryst. Shelly's fragile grip on sobriety is tested, particularly after he and Alice have sex, and he gets to feeling jealous himself.

Alice opens her famous restaurant with the construction help of the entire tribe. She's a fabulous cook and manages to attract the locals, who seem to be pretty tolerant of the commune, perhaps because they are good, independent New Englanders. Officer William "Obie" Obanhein (playing himself) is fairly passive and accepting of the tribe; Alice has a way of working her charms. His patience is tested, however, the day after Alice and Ray's Thanksgiving feast. Arlo and Roger decide to fill Arlo's VW van--a fixture in the 60s--with the garbage this large celebration generated and take it to the town dump. Unfortunately, the dump is closed. The pair start driving and, spying some debris down an embankment on the side of the road, choose that spot to deposit their load. They are seen in action by an older couple and turned into the police.

After a comically exhaustive investigation of the crime scene, Obie does his duty; he arrests the pair and throws them in jail, asking them to remove their belts to prevent suicide and removing their toilet seat to see that they don't bang their heads on it and drown. Arlo and Roger come to trial, plead guilty, and agree to pay a $50 fine and clean up the garbage. This conviction will stand Arlo in good stead when he receives his induction notice and must show that he is physically and morally fit to serve in the military. When he is found to have been convicted of a crime, he is asked by a sergeant if he has rehabilitated himself. A quote from the song comes in on voiceover: "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." Arlo is released to the loving arms of his girl, Mari-chan (Tina Chen), whom he met at the Thanksgiving feast only a few days before.

What makes this film so unique is its unflinching, but essentially positive view of the story, participants, and era. We see the tragedy of the times--the runaways, drug addicts, painful infidelities, prejudice, and violence. But we also see the love the tribe has for each other and the joy of living an improvisational life. Arlo Guthrie isn't a very good actor, but he is a very good hippie. His fresh, smiling face says so much about why society's misfits were able to come together and create a world of their own that aspired to celebrate the best of what it means to be alive--love, sex, family, caring, a live-and-let-live ethos that abhorred cruelty. A scene during which Joni Mitchell's haunting "Songs to Aging Children," is sung, pays a beautiful and sad tribute to this sweet and doomed community.

James Broderick embodies a man who was born just a little too soon. Ray--not the real Ray, but the movie Ray--seems to me to be a man who was burdened with responsibilities, perhaps as a soldier in the Korean War and a husband in the conformist 50s. His mid-life crisis came at a perfect time, but his emotional and experiential baggage prevented him from truly understanding his newly embraced life. The movie Alice was born to be a hippie. Her backstory could not have been as fraught as Ray's, and her frequent disappointment and uncomprehension of him create a sadness at the core of the joyful family.

Although Woody's legacy is written all over this film, scenes between a mute and dying Woody (Joseph Boley) and Arlo seem awkward and unhelpful in understanding that legacy. Filming a duet between Arlo and influential folkie Pete Seeger does nothing to correct this weakness. The viewer simply must know that Woody's solidarity and rapport with the Dust Bowl refugees like himself who inhabited the shanty towns of California in the 1930s has its direct mirror in Arlo's life. The respectable Hal Ashby film, Bound for Glory, is recommended viewing to help get a bit of perspective on the life and early times of Woody Guthrie.

Alice's Restaurant paints an authentic and hopeful picture of a time most have heard about, but few, even those old enough to have been hippies, ever really saw or understood. What the film may lack in structure and style, it more than makes up for in sincerity and understanding. Among Arthur Penn's many examinations of society through individual experience, Alice's Restaurant stands as a unique, near-documentary, achievement. l

2007-01-12T19:01:00.000-06:00

Footlight Parade (1933)
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Dance Director: Busby Berkeley

In 1933, Warner Bros. Pictures provided audiences with three classic movie musicals with almost identical creative teams. The first was 42nd Street, the second was Gold Diggers of 1933, and the third was Footlight Parade. All three films featured Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, the reigning ingenue couple of the 30s; all had dance numbers by Busby Berkeley; and all included memorable music by Harry Warren. But Footlight Parade is by far my favorite, and the most accomplished of the three films. Here's why.

Although Warner Bros. was the leader in talking pictures and had the first music synched with the images on screen (1927’s sensation The Jazz Singer), MGM was the gold standard in movie musicals. MGM, specifically producer Arthur Freed, understood the importance of weaving music and dancing into a story, a technique epitomized by such MGM gems of the 1930s as The Merry Widow, Monte Carlo, The Great Ziegfeld, and culminating in the timeless The Wizard of Oz.

Many 1930s Warner Bros. musicals tended to have an odd structure—frontloading the film with a big production number, filling a lengthy middle with a conventional feature film, and ending with a couple more show-stopping production numbers. 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade all fit this format. Part of the reason for this structure had to do with the fact that Busby Berkeley was the director of the musical portions, and there is simply no way a Berkeley production number can have any bearing with reality. They are short films in themselves, and excellent ones at that, particularly in each of these films.

So what’s so different about Footlight Parade? Ruby Keeler’s acting and dancing skills improved measurably from her debut in 42nd Street to her featured, but secondary role in Footlight Parade. Her break-the-floor slapping and tapping took on a little more lightness and precision, and she danced better in combination with other dancers.

While each film has a showbiz theme, Footlight Parade has one that sheds a lot of light on the history of films, and particularly on the adaptation of stage performers to the silver screen. In 42nd Street, we have a standard story about putting on a show in distressed circumstances. Gold Diggers gives us a good idea of the high unemployment during the Depression, particularly among show people, but spends the majority of its time focusing on a flip story of how three showgirls land wealthy husbands. Footlight Parade gives us a context for the production numbers that actually helps make sense of how lavish (though certainly unrealistically so) they are.

The most important difference between the three films, however, is that Footlight Parade stars James Cagney and Joan Blondell. These two wonderful actors--Cagney, a bonafide star, and Blondell, an underrated actress of enormous warmth and appeal--had a history together, beginning on Broadway in the hit play Penny Arcade and continuing to Hollywood, where they reprised their parts in this play in its film version, Sinner’s Holiday (1930). Their chemistry and timing help define and flesh out their characters' relationship in Footlight Parade of career-driven boss Chester Kent and Nan Prescott, dedicated secretary in love with Kent. Their line readings are never clichéd or throwaway. For example, in this exchange:

Chester Kent: Sometimes I get the feeling you don't like anybody.

Nan Prescott: If you only knew.

We catch Nan’s longing look, which Kent misses, and it’s a real heart-tugger.

The film tells the story of a writer of stage musicals (Kent) who can’t get them produced anymore because audiences have been abandoning the legitimate theatre for the movie theatre. Two producers, Al Frazer (Arthur Hohl) and Silas Gould (Guy Kibbee), take Kent to a nearby movie house and show him that live dance productions called prologues, which show between screenings of the film, satisfy an audience’s craving for live theatre. The prologues, however, are costly to produce. Kent gets an inspiration to create a factory-like setting (inspired, no doubt, by the type of movie factory in which Footlight Parade was made) for the production of prologues. Stock routines could be taught to a unit of dancers and singers and then sent on the road. With numerous units able to fill the demand, success should be assured.

Keeler plays super-efficient production assistant Bea Thorn, dressed as all super-efficient women should be in round, horn-rimmed glasses, matronly clothing, and sensible shoes. Dick Powell is Scott Blair, a new protégé of Si Gould’s wife Harriet (Ruth Donnelly) whom Kent is forced to take on. Fortunately, Scotty can sing. He also inspires Bea to stop being sensible, fall in love, and return to her roots as a hoofer. There are several intrigues, including a romance Kent starts with Vivian (Claire Dodd), a down-and-out gold digger who is staying with Nan; a mole in Kent’s organization who is feeding his ideas to a competitor; and Kent’s mercenary ex-wife (Renee Whitney) returned to claim her share of his good fortune—which he doesn’t have because his partners have been cheating him. The story is told briskly, with sparkling dialogue and equally sparkling stars to speak it. Cagney is having a ball doing what he always loved best—singing and dancing.

And speaking of singing and dancing, feast your eyes on the production numbers. “Honeymoon Hotel” has Keeler and Powell getting married and spending their first night together in a hotel filled with honeymooners. In true precode fashion, the sex is more than alluded to, the women are scantily clad, and Billy Barty, the most successful midget in movies, plays a not-so-innocent child who follows the chorus girls around the corridors. “On a Waterfall” has to be seen to be believed. From a simple stage duet by Keeler and Powell, an entire soundstage full of water slides and an enormous pool emerge. Berkeley’s famous overhead camera shots show the mermaids move into the kaleidoscopic formations for which he was known. The cameras take us underwater, too, for some sexy shots. Clearly, these prologues cannot be justified by the story. Only the magic of movies can present these types of images to a large audience at one time. They simply are their own source of wonder. The final production number, “Shanghai Lil” features my favorite dance by Keeler. Her eccentric tapping style perfectly fits Cagney’s, and they carry this number off beautifully. You can see it here.

Footlight Parade combines screwball comedy's wisecracking, scattershot dialogue with the psychedelic fever dreams of Busby Berkeley and some of the best actors of the 1930s to produce a film of enduring appeal and subtle social commentary. This film is essential viewing for every film enthusiast. l

2007-01-05T13:15:00.000-06:00

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno, 2006)
Director: Guillermo del Toro

The cineaste world has gone wild over Pan’s Labyrinth. The film has earned a phenomenal 99% positive rating from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s hard to know what more there is to say about it—but I’ll try. While Pan’s Labyrinth is a must-see among cineastes and has strong support from the fanboy demographic, who flocked to see two of Guillermo del Toro’s previous films, Blade 2 and Hellboy, the moviegoing populace at large is going to ignore it in droves because it’s in Spanish and too violent for family viewing. That’s a shame, because this is as fine a bit of storytelling as the best Steven Spielberg narratives. Despite its realistic, graphic violence and buckets of blood, the movie rides a wave of enchantment by weaving its overt fairytale storyline subtly, but powerfully, into its real-world storyline to create a sublime sort of hybrid.

As a sort of follow-up to del Toro’s 2001 feature The Devil’s Backbone, a bleak and chilling ghost story set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is set in a rural area of Spain shortly after Franco’s fascist regime has taken power. Rebels still hope to unseat Franco, so military outposts continue their gruesome job of exterminating the opposition. To one such outpost travel 10-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who has married the outpost’s leader, Captain Vidal (Sergi López).

As del Toro sets the scene at the beginning of the film, a voiceover narration tells of the princess of the underworld who, out of curiosity and boredom, went up to the physical world and lost all memory of her identity in the rays of the sun. Her father searched for her, and never gave up hope that she would return to his kingdom one day and reclaim her identity and place. Already, del Toro has very simply put us into “tell me a story” mode, piquing our interest and riveting our attention to the tale he intends to unfold. Further, he concentrates our attention on Ofelia, who is shown in close-up reading this fairytale in a book as she rides in the car with her mother. Carmen becomes nauseated, and her driver must stop the car for her. This is an arduous trip, and Carmen is having a difficult pregnancy. She is, however, obeying her new husband, who believes a baby boy should be born near his father. In the captain’s mind, there is no chance the baby will be a girl.

Their late arrival to the outpost annoys the Captain. His greeting to his wife is perfunctory and includes an order for her to sit in a wheelchair for transportation to her new quarters. Ofelia does not like him, but she is far beneath his notice. Looking after her will be Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), the chief housekeeper. It is Mercedes who goes to retrieve Ofelia after she wanders off to explore the grounds and finds an ancient stone maze in the rundown garden.

Carmen meets Dr. Ferreiro (Álex Angulo), who will be attending her during her pregnancy. He seems kind and concerned; Ofelia learns that he is providing medical supplies to the resistance through Mercedes, whose brother is one of its leaders. Mercedes sees Ofelia watch her take the supplies from the doctor and worries about the security of her secret. Ofelia reassures her; her hatred for the Captain guarantees Mercedes’ and Dr. Ferreiro’s safety. We come to hate the Captain, too, when we watch him commit a heinous act of brutality just to teach one of his officers a lesson.

Ofelia looks for an escape from her unhappy world. She finds it when a praying mantis that has followed her car transforms into a fairy and leads her out of the house to the maze. She comes to a circle with a staircase leading deep below ground. When she reaches the bottom, she meets a half-human, half-ram faun (Doug Jones)—perhaps it is Pan himself. He instantly recognizes her as the long-lost princess and convinces her that she must complete three tasks to prove that her essence is still pure and take her rightful place in the underworld kingdom. He hands her a book and tells her to read it and complete the tasks before the next full moon, which is fast approaching.

Ofelia examines the book in private. Its pages are empty, but when the light hits it, words and drawings magically appear. Her first task is to go to the base of a very old tree that is being strangled by a giant toad. There she is to place three rubies in the toad’s mouth, which will kill it and free the tree. She runs out in a beautiful party dress her mother has gotten her to wear to a special dinner party the Captain is having that night to introduce Carmen to his friends. She carefully removes the dress, although she has muddied her party shoes, and crawls inside the tree to confront the toad and complete the task. Enormous beetles writhe all around her, and she is slimed by the toad before conceiving a clever way to complete her task. When she emerges from the tree with a magic key the toad coughed up, her party dress has blown into the mud. Her mother, who has already been shown a cold shoulder by her husband at the dinner party, expresses her disappointment that Ofelia has missed the dinner and ruined her dress.

Soon thereafter, Carmen’s pregnancy takes a bad turn. When Ofelia looks in her magic book for her next task, the pages reveal only a red and spreading stain. She runs to her mother and finds her hemorrhaging badly, in a scene of graphic horror. The Captain tells Dr. Ferreiro that if a choice must be made, to save his son over his wife. Ofelia overhears this conversation. She knows, too, that if her mother dies, she will be utterly expendable.

Ofelia is given her second task. She must use the key to open a safe in a banquet hall and retrieve its contents. The faun admonishes her not to eat from the banquet table under any circumstances and to return to her home before an hourglass he gives her runs out of sand. He gives her a piece of chalk to draw a door to the banquet hall, which is the only way to reach it from her room, and three of his fairies to help her. A creature called Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones) slumbers at the table. She goes past him and retrieves the contents of the safe easily. But she pauses to eat two grapes, rousing Pale Man and sending him in pursuit of her. He eats two of the fairies, but Ofelia manages to escape. She hands the faun the item she retrieved, an ancient dagger, but hands him back only one of the fairies in the box her gave her. The faun is furious that she did not listen to him and ends the trial.

Back in the real world, the hunt for the resistance fighters is on. The Captain has decided to starve them out of hiding and confiscates all of the food in the area and locks it away, taking the only key to the storeroom from Mercedes. The insurgents blow up two trains to create a diversion. When the troops return from investigating the explosion, the storeroom has been unlocked, and all of the food is missing. The Captain follows his hunches to uncover the conspirators in his household. A new doctor is put in charge of Carmen, and she dies in childbirth. In the meantime, Ofelia has been forgiven and allowed one more chance to complete her trial. She is instructed to bring her newborn brother to the faun. Unfortunately, the Captain sees her, and follows her into the maze where the film climaxes.

Pan’s Labyrinth spends as much time in the real world as in its fantasy world. Del Toro toggles between the stories expertly, relieving some of our tension at the horrible acts of cruelty perpetrated by the Captain by letting us escape with Ofelia. But he never allows the suspense to dissipate completely; this is no Disney fairytale. The trials are frightening, and Ofelia is put on her guard when Mercedes tells her that fauns cannot be trusted. Del Toro has shown his complete ease with make-believe in other films; therefore, he finds it unnecessary to decide whether Ofelia’s fantasy world is real or not. This decision frees the audience from worrying about this detail and allows it to surrender completely to his story. All directors could learn a lesson or two from del Toro's less-is-more approach to CGI. The effects, CGI and otherwise, in this movie are sophisticated, subtle, and appropriate. They don't seek to reinvent the wheel with regard to a fairytale look, yet still manage to be original and surprising, particularly the Pale Man creature.

There are a few over-the-top moments that knock this film off its masterpiece pedestal, but nonetheless, add to the audience’s enjoyment. The Captain’s villainy is poured on with a bit too much relish. One wince-inducing scene (the man in the seat next to me was doubled up and moaning in agony watching it) demonstrates that the Captain, far from being completely cold, relishes pain. It reminded me of a scene from Urban Cowboy (1980) in which the no-good Wes (Scott Glenn) is shown full-face, playing with the worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle he just emptied, twisting it between his teeth in a leer of pure evil. In another scene, Mercedes’ desperate run from the outpost ends in a far-too-pat moment designed strictly to provide a payoff to the audience.

Ultimately, we are left with a nagging question that melds the two stories together. Was the final test in the trial completed the way we are led to believe it was? I think that to win a kingdom, enormous sacrifices must be made. The resistance fighters understood this and were willing to lay down their lives to be free. In the end, Ofelia’s essential purity may have been what the faun was always after. l

2006-12-29T12:37:00.000-06:00

A New Leaf (1971)
Director: Elaine May

As a Chicago native, I feel a particular kinship with Elaine May. As the female of half of the comedy team Nichols & May, she helped forge a peculiarly Chicago style of humor based on improvisation that has been exported around the world by alumni of the comedy group, the Compass Players, and its offshoot, Second City. Both Nichols and May went on to careers as film directors in Hollywood, but only Mike Nichols has been able to sustain that career. Elaine May's fourth film, Ishtar (1987), laid such an egg that she never got to sit in the director's chair again. Luckily, we have her debut film, A New Leaf, one of the funniest films I have ever seen.

A New Leaf opens by introducing us to Henry Graham (Walter Matthau), a fussy, middle-aged bachelor who has been living off a trust fund as a brahmin in elite New York society. He rides, he drives a Ferrari, he goes to his club, and he employs a manservant named Harold (George Rose), embracing "a tradition that was dead long before you were born." He's snobbish, foppish, and very nearly broke.

Henry does not realize he's about run out of money until a bounced check is returned to him. He confronts Beckett, his banker (Mike Nichols lookalike William Redfield), about this embarrassment and outrage. In classic Nichols & May style, Beckett tries to explain to Henry that his trust fund could have afforded him a living of $70,000 a year, but that he chose to spend $200,000 a year. As a consequence, Henry has blown through his trust fund. He no longer has any money. Henry sits looking at Beckett in a defiant, but quizzical way. He responds, pointing to the piece of paper in contention, "What about this check?" Beckett explains that he just explained that Henry hasn't any money. "But no check has ever bounced before," Henry offers, apparent proof that he is not without money. Beckett says that Henry has indeed bounced checks before. "I have covered them, $545 of my own money, just so that I might never have to meet with you." Beckett considers it a bargain, too. When the news finally seems to reach Henry's vacuous brain, he pulls together as much dignity as possible and offers Beckett his gold cigarette case, dumping its contents onto Beckett's desk. "This should cover the $545 I owe you. Smoke them in good health."

In despair, Henry seeks Harold's consolation. He asks Harold what he would do if Henry couldn't pay him anymore. "I should leave immediately - after giving proper notice, of course." So much for consolation. He tries for counsel. Harold suggests asking Henry's rich uncle for a loan. Uncle Harry (James Coco) did, after all, raise the orphaned Henry. This, of course, was a laughable suggestion when Henry first made it to Beckett. Uncle Harry hates Henry's guts. Henry is coming to the conclusion that the only thing left is suicide, that is, until Harold suggests that he marry money. Henry grasps at this hopeful straw while, at the same time, finding repugnant the idea that someone would come in and touch his things. Henry, it appears, is completely asexual and perhaps afflicted with a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. How will he pull it off? He decides he can manage it only if he does away with his bride soon after appropriating her fortune.

Henry practices humbling himself to his uncle to obtain a $50,000 loan to keep up appearances while he woos and wins an appropriate female. He goes to his even more fey and disagreeable uncle, who laughs at his suggestion. Henry offers him an interest rate and 6-week term that would have made Shylock blush. Uncle Harry considers and then makes a counter offer. He will accept Henry's terms, but if Henry does not repay the debt with interest on time, Uncle Harry will be entitled to 10 times the initial loan - all that Henry has left. Henry is so desperate to remain idly rich that he agrees. He immediately sets about his task.

He attends a garden party, where a rich woman named Sally Hart (Renée Taylor) is pointed out to him. He takes her aside, and they sit under tree as Henry swats mosquitoes on his neck and face and Sally writhes seductively in his direction. As she appears ready to remove her top, the camera closes in on her cleavage. We hear Henry's anguished cry of "Don't let them out!" Strike one.

Henry's further attempts are fruitless. With only a little over a week to go, he goes to his tailor to bid him adieu. He enters Lutece to see its elegant dining room once more. In a never-say-die moment, he attends a luncheon where a likely prospect finally pops up. She is a wallflower named Henrietta Lowell (Elaine May), a botanist and university professor who is heir to a fortune. "Who was her father?" Henry asks his friend Bo (Graham Jarvis). "He was an industrialist or a composer. Something like that." Henry approaches her. She spills tea all over the oriental rug. The maid starts to blot the rug. She spills another cup of tea. Her hostess accuses Henrietta of maliciousness. Henry expresses outrage on Henrietta's behalf - and the courtship is on.

He instructs himself on the finer points of botany like a man possessed. Henrietta asks him if he is a botanist, too. Oh no, he assures her, "Every science has its fans." He seeks to get to know her better:

"Tell me about yourself, Miss Lowell - your work, your hopes, your dreams."

"Well, I work as a teacher, and I also do field work and write monographs. My hope is to discover a new variety of fern that has never been described or classified. I don't know what my dream is. Do you think it could be the same as my hope? Well, at any rate, that is my work and my hope except for my dream, which I'm not sure of."

He takes her to dine and expounds on the relative merits of a '55 wine over a '56 vintage. Henrietta interjects that she never liked alcohol until one of her students introduced her to a drink on one of their field trips. "Have you ever tasted Mogen David extra-heavy malaga wine with soda water and lime juice?" No, but he will. He'll do anything to marry this woman in time.

Henry proposes three days after their meeting, and she accepts. Her lawyer Andy (Jack Weston) is beside himself. He has been controlling her money for decades - and thieving from her along with the rest of her large household staff - and doesn't want anyone else milking his cash cow. He tells her about Henry's $50,000 debt as proof of his fortune hunting. Henry confesses that he was suicidal about his financial condition - until he met her. Henrietta decides to settle Henry's debt and give him full access to her fortune to prove he is not after her money. OK, yeah, did you follow that? Me neither.

While they are on their honeymoon, Henrietta leans dangerously over a cliff to collect a fern she doesn't recall having encountered before. They return to her palatial estate, and Henry plots her demise, seeking out household gardening products to use in a lethal brew. Unfortunately, Henrietta believes in organic gardening. Rats! He must devise some other means, but in the meantime, he throws himself into running her house and taking care that she is not an embarrassment to him:

"Oh, no. I forgot to check her before she went to school this morning. She'll be walking around all day with price tags dangling from her sleeves."

"I took the liberty, sir."

"Thank you, Harold. Was she free of crumbs?"

"Only a slight sprinkling, sir."

Harold is becoming rather fond of the pathetically endearing Henrietta and tries to dissuade Henry from what he fears he will do to her. But Henrietta herself may inspire Henry to a change of heart when she joyfully announces that she has discovered a new fern and has named it after him in gratitude for the confidence he instilled in her to pursue her hope (or dream?). He seems genuinely touched that she would give up her place in history to him. But then they go on a botanical expedition alone, and his scheme has its best chance to succeed.

A New Leaf is graced with a raft of comedy's finest practitioners bringing to life one of its finest scripts. I'm reasonably sure that many parts of this movie came about through improvisation of an order that comedians working today can only envy. In addition, the physical humor, particularly as provided by Elaine May, has me rolling on the floor just thinking about it.

I have wanted to see this comedy again for years, but it is surprisingly hard to find. If the hubbie had not been so persistent on eBay to secure us an old VHS recording, I wouldn't have spent my holiday laughing my ass off. This, like The Conformist, is another superb, sophisticated movie that Paramount, in its infinite wisdom, has taken its sweet time releasing on DVD. I'll be writing to them to see if I can help pry it loose. I hope you will, too. l

Write to Paramount Home Video, 5555 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, CA 90038, U.S. Start by thanking them for releasing The Conformist. A little appreciation goes a long way.

2006-12-24T13:29:00.000-06:00

The Conformist (Il Conformista, 1970)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

The Conformist is a film that has attained legendary status. A beautiful and surprisingly assured work by preeminent director Bernardo Bertolucci and equally respected cinematographer Vittorio Storaro when they were just in their 20s, The Conformist dropped quickly from sight after its rave reception at several film festivals. It only got a very, very limited run in the United States after the likes of Francis Ford Coppola urged Paramount to release it. The film also was scarce in its native country because of its depiction of the popularity of fascism in 1930s Italy.

At long last, Paramount has released a DVD of The Conformist, including a three-part special on the making of the film that includes interviews with Bertolucci and Storaro. This DVD, the most anticipated foreign-film release of the year, does justice to the film (which I saw on the big screen early in 2006) and sheds light on its sometimes frustratingly oblique approach.

The title character is Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant). We first meet him in a hotel room fitted out with ornate, antique furniture, surrounding his nervous movements and '30s private-eye appearance with traditional elegance. Already there seems to be some sort of disconnect between Marcello and his surroundings. Marcello soon is shown riding in a car with Manganiello (Gastone Moschin), an affably viperish operative for the Italian fascists. From here on, most of the film is shown in flashback as we watch Marcello move from privileged childhood to fledgling spy for the Italian government.

Marcello is friends with a blind fascist named Italo (José Quaglio). This not-very-subtle symbol for Italy under Mussolini broadcasts fascist propaganda on the radio and introduces an eager Marcello to the Colonel (Fosco Giachetti), who can help Marcello realize his ambitions. Marcello enters a monumental building, his tiny figure like an ant moving across a vast marble expanse. He enters the wrong room for a brief moment and catches a glimpse of a ranking fascist seducing a woman in mourning attire who is laying across his desk. Marcello's and the woman's eyes meet for an instant. Excusing himself quietly, Marcello goes on to the Colonel's office.

Marcello offers to try to infiltrate the antifascist movement through his former philosophy professor, a middle-aged man named Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) who is a self-exile in Paris. The Colonel knows Marcello is not a true believer, nor is he being bribed to work for the fascists. The Colonel cannot guess Marcello's motive for signing on to the cause, but he willingly accepts. When the Colonel learns Marcello is soon to be married, he considers a honeymoon in Paris as the ideal cover.

A happy Marcello goes to dine with his fiancee Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) and her mother (Yvonne Sanson). Giulia is a simple-minded bourgeois whom Marcello chose because of her sheer ordinariness, her good looks, and her sexually eager nature. He teases her about their honeymoon destination, and she teases him with an invitation to love right on the carpet of the sitting room. (This invitation must have been the inspiration for a similar offer from Angelica Huston to Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor.) Giulia's black-and-white striped dress and the shadows created by the light coming through the blinds suggest a noirish atmosphere, but moreso a rigid geometry surrounding Marcello. His desire, like all fascists, is for strict order.

The Clericis' train makes a stop before they proceed to Paris. Marcello moves quickly along a dock, moving behind a painting at an outdoor market of a boat on a dockside, and emerging from behind the painting into the exact scene it depicted. Marcello meets Manganiello in a boathouse where the older fascist is being entertained by a red-haired whore. Manganiello sends her over to greet his friend. He takes one look at her and hugs her close. Marcello is given a handgun, and in a move that frightens Manganiello, points it straight at the him. Marcello then assumes a couple more attitudes with the gun, practicing not only how to hold and aim it, but also to look like a man who holds, aims, and fires guns. Instead of infiltrating the Quadri antifascist cell, he is ordered to kill the man.

Once the newlyweds are ensconced in their hotel room (the room we saw in the opening scene), Marcello phones Quadri to suggest a meeting for old times' sake. Quadri invites the Clericis over for tea. They are greeted at the door by a large dog and Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda). Marcello seems thunderstruck by her, and we get the distinct impression that they know each other. In fact, Sanda played the woman in black and the whore. She is clearly the woman of Marcello's dreams, and he spends the rest of his trip to Paris pursuing her.

For her part, Anna distrusts Marcello and has her eye on Giulia. The two women go out shopping for gowns they can wear dancing, and while they prepare for the evening out, Anna has sexual contact with an initially angry and then willing Giulia. Immediately after this encounter, Anna goes to Marcello and falls into his arms. Her interest in Marcello, however, is to plead with him to spare her life and that of her husband.

Manganiello has tried to contact Marcello, but having lost his taste for his task because it puts Anna in danger, Marcello dodges him. Finally, there can be no more delay. We return to the present, as the two men follow the Quadris up a snow-covered mountain road as they make their way to their vacation home outside of Paris. The Quadris' way is blocked by a car that has skidded in front of them, the driver apparently stricken. Manganiello blocks their way from behind. Against Anna's cautions, her husband leaves the car to check on the other driver. At that moment, a number of trench-coated fascists - Marcello's and Manganiello's coconspirators - emerge from the surrounding woods and set upon Quadri with knifes in a scene reminiscent of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Anna flees her car and spies Marcello in the backseat of the rear car. She bangs on his window, wailing like an animal for his help. He might have helped her or mercifully shot her to end her misery, but he sits by and does nothing. She runs off and is stalked and shot dead in a scene of utter brutality.

The film fast-forwards to the end of the war. Marcello plays with his young daughter as the household listens to the radio in their house in Rome as news of Mussolini's arrest and demonstrations throughout the city rings out. Giulia reminisces regretfully about the Quadris, but forgives Marcello for his fascist loyalty. "It was good for your career," she says in unreflexive, bourgeois justification. Italo calls Marcello for help, and Marcello grabs his coat, though it is dangerous for known fascists to be in the streets. Giulia tries to stop him, but he says he must go, that he wants to see what it looks like when a dictatorship falls. On the street, he has an encounter that upsets everything he ever believed about himself and turns him into a raging lunatic. His fascist control is gone from inside him as well as from the city that swallows him up in the night.

So what is it that drives Marcello? What is it that he believes about himself that leads him to pursue social conformity in spite of the irrational urges that spill forth when he is confronted with Anna and her lookalikes? We are led to believe that a homosexual encounter Marcello had when he was 14 that resulted in him shooting his seducer has made him feel different. Bertolucci and Storaro state in the DVD interviews that it is the shooting that set him apart as a killer in his own mind, but I think there is much more going on than that. The man who seduced him was his chauffeur, and this man rescued the young Marcello from the tauntings of his schoolmates, who had attempted to remove his pants. So, we see right away that he doesn't fit in, perhaps because of his family's wealth, perhaps because he has betrayed some hint of homosexual longing.

Before Marcello marries Giulia, he goes with his morphine-addicted mother (Milly) to see his father (Giuseppe Addobbati), who has been institutionalized in an insane asylum (in fact, a massive building constructed at Mussolini's orders). It would certainly not surprise me if Marcello was a little touched himself, or at the very least, fearful of being overtaken by the madness that felled his father and drove his mother's addiction. Those who seek to fence out the irrational will naturally gravitate to the safe, narrow tracks of society's rules, and certainly to fascism. (It's easy to see how the neoconservatism of modern times that bears a strong resemblance to fascism might have arisen from the sexually and politically open 1960s and '70s.)

Marcello's attitude toward women is at least as repressed as his other urges. When the Quadris and Clericis go out for Chinese food and dancing, Anna asks Giulia to dance. The two do a seductive tango that disturbs the conventional couples on the dance floor and scandalizes Marcello. Quadri is content with their behavior: "They both look so pretty." He has accepted the bisexual Anna as she is, whereas Marcello holds his wife in contempt and thinks nothing of abandoning her on their honeymoon for Anna. While he may feel an irresistible regard for Anna, it is, perhaps, more threatening to think that his conventional wife is more sexually liberated that he could have imagined. As the ultimate irrational in a man's psyche, women must be as predictable as possible for the man Marcello desperately wants to become.

The central metaphor of this film is Plato's cave. When Marcello and his old professor meet, Marcello reminds Quadri of the lesson about the prisoners chained to face the back of a cave, seeing only the shadows of the objects moving behind them. As in Plato's cave, Marcello himself seems to be a shadow. This is emphasized when Marcello's shadow on the wall of Quadri's study vanishes when the professor opens the window blinds.

Like all of Bertolucci's films, The Conformist is deeply sensual. Storaro provides sumptuous visual effects that make the film appear to be a dream inside a dream. Bertolucci says in the DVD interview that he always thought it was a shame that films had to be edited from the daily rushes. For him, the rushes represent the unfiltered creativity of the entire enterprise. Nonetheless, Storaro and film editor Franco Arcalli manage to keep an impressionistic, almost surrealist feel even as they create a mood and narrative drive that build from illusion to horror. Lead actor Jean-Louis Trintignant is just a little too cryptic for my tastes. He doesn't suggest depths under still waters, and I think that would have helped this film in its first half. Marcello is a part made for Matt Damon. As heretical is this may seem, Alberto Moravia's novel on which this film is based may be due for a reinterpretation. Of course, no one should, or will, ever remake The Conformist. l

2006-12-19T12:30:00.000-06:00

Last House on the Left (1972)
Director: Wes Craven

By Roderick Heath

From among the other talented filmmakers of the early ’70s who began in or gravitated to horror, Wes Craven is one of the few who has managed the impressive feat of surviving (seen John Carpenter lately?). Red Eye was one of the best-made, least pretentious, most pleasurable films of 2005, whilst Cursed was one of the worst, which sums up Craven’s uneven career in a nutshell. Best known for the well-conceived, badly executed A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the Scream franchise, Craven’s films often balance a deft realism with a heightened, often high-camp wit, built of cleanly constructed shots, well-filmed action, sleek framing (great in widescreen), and an assured ability to slowly crank up narratives to a frenzied pitch.

Craven, like Hitchcock, deals with the violence and chaos lying just below the surface of normal life. Even more than Hitchcock, he details the capacity of average people not to survive, but to respond to evil with equal violence. The worms turn and prove often to be alligators themselves in ferociously Darwinian narratives that often pointedly satirize their eras. Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes take on the outsider terror of the ’70s-era bourgeoisie. A Nightmare on Elm Street saw the pitch-black side of repression and past evil swallowing up Reagan-era children; The People Under The Stairs portrayed Bush One-era urban life as a prison run by fascist capitalists named Ron and Nancy. Scream exactly described the emotional paranoia and media-obsessing self-distancing of Generation X.

Last House on the Left, Craven’s second film (after a porn film, Together, in 1970) in collaboration with producer Sean S. Cunningham, is one of those fascinating experiences of watching a director learn how to make a film as the work is progressing. In its first half-hour, LHotL is, frankly, shit, and no amount of auteurist squinting can make out talent. The plot is acknowledged by all as a modern-day spin on the Swedish myth Ingmar Bergman filmed as The Virgin Spring (1961). Dr. John Collingwood (Gaylord St. James), an affable, greying academic, his wife Estelle (Cynthia Carr), and teenage daughter Mari (Sandra Cassell), live in leafy upstate New York. The Collingwoods are neither insufferably square nor certifiably hip, and are mildly uncomfortable with their daughter’s bursting sexuality, pithy teenaged attitude, and choice of friend in Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), a slightly older girl with a penchant for pot and wayside excitement. Estelle gives her daughter a present - a peace-symbol necklace.

To a soundtrack of awful faux folk/rock (by costar David Hess, a Tin Pan Alley escapee), Mari and Phyllis drive into Manhattan for a concert whilst listening to a radio news report about the recent jail break of sex offenders and low-rent criminal masterminds Krug Stillo (Hess) and Weasel Padowski (Fred J. Lincoln), with the aid of their bisexual moll Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Krug’s drug-addled, browbeaten son Junior (Marc Sheffer). Wouldn’t you know it that waht Mari and Phyllis try to score some weed, they approach Junior, who takes them to the apartment where the gang are holed up. Swiftly, Krug, Weasel, and Sadie rape Cynthia, whilst Mari watches in frozen terror (the intended impact of this moment is blunted by its home movie staging).

Hoping to escape to Canada, Krug and his cohort stuff their two prisoners in the boot of their car and drive out of the city; being idiots, and more impressed by TV than real life, they ponder if their actions will make the great list of “sex crimes of the century.” The Collingwoods, worrying about their daughter’s overlong absence, call the police. Just a few hundred meters away, Krug and company have pulled over into the woods, where they force the two girls to have sex with each other after various acts of torture. It’s here that Craven gains tense control over his grisly material. Aiming for a detached, unremitting approach, the unblinking camera and stark staging makes the scene intensely convincing (even the actors, especially Cassell, were freaking out). Craven stated his desire was to approach violence in a confrontational, entirely unromanticised way, and in this he certainly succeeds.

Craven’s background - a would-be hipster philosophy professor who had gotten bored with academia and moved to Greenwich Village - is evident, at first clumsily, but with increasing precision. The film is culturally engaged to an extent the film’s standard reading - as the ultimate parental cautionary tale - hardly encompasses; amidst the many issues tossed at the screen include such hot-button issues as Vietnam, the generation gap, feminism, and the peculiar violence fascination of the hippie era that made hits out films like Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and this one. The narrative is driven by a series of essential conflicts: rich/poor, suburban/urban, mainstream/outsider, sex/violence, unmotivated violence/revenge, “good” family vs. “bad” family.

Mari tries to convince Junior, who likes the girl but is too psychologically defeated, to help her escape. The spunkier Phyllis makes a run through the woods, but - in a merciless fright moment - is caught, stabbed, and gutted in a series of flash cuts that make the violence thankfully incoherent but even more sensually violent. Krug rapes Mari after carving his name on her chest. Mari stumbles in a daze down to wash in a pond as Krug and gang stand, uncomfortable, even ashamed, in temporary awareness of their loathsome acts. Krug dutifully shoots Mari in the pond, and she sinks into the slimy water.

This intense drama is cross-cut with very bad comic relief by the sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove, later of Karate Kid villain fame), while responding to the Collingwoods’ plea for them to find Mari, find themselves desperately trying to get a life after their car breaks down. Krug, Weasel, Junior, and Sadie clean up and head for the nearest house, where they pose as travelers needing a place to stay for the night. Yup, it’s the Collingwood place. The Collingwoods treat their guests to a blackly comic, hospitable dinner as their guests struggle to be convincingly square salespeople. Junior is afflicted with nightmares that Estelle tries to soothe, but then she recognises Mari’s peace necklace around his neck. Estelle wakes John, and they search the woods. They find Mari’s body and howl in agony over it. Rather than calling the police, John and Estelle now plot their own intimate vengeance.

Craven pulls off a thunderous finale, and lays down a blueprint for many of his later films, not just in having his heroes turn tables on their savage nemeses, but also in their method. John, like later Craven heroes, proves that humans became the dominant species on the planet not just by being violent, but by being intelligently so. Estelle lures Weasel outside, pretending to respond to his self-promotion as a super-stud. She convinces him to tie himself up to prove his prowess as Estelle performs fellatio on him, and then she bites off his penis and spits it in the pond. John wakes Krug and tries to shoot him, but Krug, quick and tough, beats John in a straight fistfight. Junior tries to help John, but at goading from his father, the emotionally broken youth shoots himself. Krug’s escape is halted when he grabs an electrified door knob, one of John’s traps. Whilst he struggles to stand, John descends to his basement and returns with his chainsaw, and relentlessly presses toward Krug until he corners him. Sadie flees, but is caught and disemboweled by Estelle. The sheriff and deputy arrive just in time to see John cut Krug in half. The final image is of the distraught John and Estelle clutching each other in the charnel house that was their home.

As this synopsis indicates, Last House on the Left isn’t a cute horror movie, but nor is it the macho endurance test too many contemporary horror films have become. It is rigorously low-tech and oddly honourable in its purpose. Craven is never tempted to indulge, and he knows when enough is enough. The Collingwoods’ revenge is both atrocious and entirely sympathetic, and Krug and his band, though vicious and crazed, are not blank-faced ciphers of evil. They’re weedy, underclass offspring who rudely destroy the shallow rebellion fantasies of Mari’s generation (she has a Mick Jagger picture on her bedroom wall under which Krug and Sadie later sleep) and the tranquility of bourgeois life. Along with Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, LHotL was one of a batch of hugely controversial studies in violence released in the 1971-72 season. Unlike Kubrick and Peckinpah, Craven does not blur the morality of the sexual violence with matters of sexual desire, dominance, and aggressor-identification. In Phyllis’ case, there’s a brief, promising flash of modern heroine spunk when she escapes that Craven’s later heroines, like Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Scream, display. Krug, well embodied by Hess, commands none of the sly heroism of Alex as a sleazy thug, pathetic in his hollow-souled, deadbeat monstrousness.

Last House on the Left proved enormously profitable as well as controversial. Five years passed before Craven followed it up with The Hills Have Eyes, which, in many ways, is a remake with a more fantastic set-up. Producer Sean S. Cunnigham would, for his own shot at the big time, concoct a Halloween rip-off entitled Friday the 13th that would invert everything that was worthy about LHotL as the ultimate body-count porn. The best of the Friday the 13th series, Part II, was directed by Steve Miner, a student of Craven’s who was employed as an assistant director and editor on this film. LHotL’s influence was strong on other low-budget beasts like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), knock-offs like Lipstick (1976) and I Spit On Your Grave (1979), through to art films of the ilk of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl. The Hills Have Eyes was remade by a French director, suggesting Craven has become canonical there.

This is the last in my series on horror films. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it, and I hope it’s been a stimulating and amusing read for all of you. l

2006-12-13T12:02:00.000-06:00

Detour (1945)
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Detour, a $30,000 quickie produced in 6 days by a no-name film company and a B movie director, is considered a classic film noir - perhaps the earliest pure example of the form - that is essential viewing for any film buff. To see this film for the first time is to fight competing impulses: laughter at its many technical "mistakes" and uneasiness over the snowballing "bad luck" of the protagonist, Al (Tom Neal). Neither impulse is wrong, but both are more complicated than they seem. Detour is the perfect name for a film that takes its audience far from its usual expectations to realize, only slowly, that they are riding along with a psychopath.

Al narrates the film from beginning to end. When we first meet him, he’s playing piano with a small combo in a low-rent nightclub in New York City. His girl, a pretty blonde named Sue (Claudia Drake), is the combo’s singer, and she has a great voice. One evening, he is playing solo on stage, embellishing on classical themes in a truly masterful way. The manager comes up to him and hands him a $10 tip from a patron. He’s scornful of this tip: "When this drunk gave me a ten spot, I couldn't get very excited. What was it? A piece of paper crawling with germs." Al thinks he should be in the big time, playing Carnegie Hall. When he shares his bitterness with Sue, she is sympathetic but is worried about her own dreams of success. She has decided to go to Los Angeles and try her luck out there. We watch them walk down a foggy street to her apartment; in one of the many technically clumsy moments, the street is so fogged up by an overzealous technician that we can’t see them at all for part of the walk. She tells him they can still get married as they planned, but just not for a while.

Al is torn up by Sue’s departure. One night, he phones her from a pay phone. We only get his side of the conversation and a 2-second cut-in of Sue to prove, I guess, that he really is talking to her. This was done, no doubt, to save money on film. He’s coming out to be with her if he has to hitch the whole way—and he very nearly does. We are shown one of those cheesy maps that marks his progress across country and watch him thumbing along the highway. Someone had the bizarre idea to show Al traveling from right to left across the movie screen to simulate a westward journey. To achieve this unnecessary effect, the film was flopped, so it appears that all the cars Al gets into have their steering wheels on the right side of the car. When he finally gets into a car in Arizona that has the steering wheel where American cars ought to have them, the noir part of the story really takes root.

In Arizona, Al is picked up by a man named Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund MacDonald), a professional gambler on his way to L.A. from Florida. Haskell’s got a fancy convertible car, a roll of cash, a generous disposition, and, apparently, a heart condition; he asks Al to give him a box of pills from the glove compartment from time to time that must contain nitroglycerine. Al notices a nasty gash on Haskell’s hand that looks like he was mauled by a wildcat. Haskell says it was a wildcat but not an animal. It was a dame with a 100 percent mean streak running through her.

The two men take turns driving. One night while Al is driving, it starts to rain. Al stops the car to put up the top. He asks Haskell to move aside as he reaches for the top on the passenger side, but Haskell doesn’t respond. Al opens the door, and Haskell spills out onto the ground, apparently dead of a heart attack. Al panics. He fears the cops won’t believe a penniless hitchhiker like him that Haskell died of natural causes. He ditches Haskell’s body in some bushes, takes his clothes to look more respectable, and takes his wallet and identity.

The next day, Al pulls up at a filling station. He notices a young woman hitching near the station and offers her a ride. He seems to find her an odd sort of attractive. She says her name is Vera (Ann Savage), but doesn’t offer up much more information. He says his name is Haskell. They ride for a while, and finally, she turns toward him with a ferocious look on her face. She says, “You’re not Haskell!” She was the woman who scratched Haskell, and she assumes Al has probably killed him. From that moment on, Al is her prisoner, forced to take care of her so she won’t turn him into the police. They move into an apartment in L.A. Al intends to sell the car he took off Haskell and give Vera the money to pay her off.

Unfortunately, she sees an item in the paper that says that authorities are looking for the long-lost heir to the fortune of Charles Haskell, Sr. Vera insists Al try to impersonate Haskell and collect on the fortune. Al protests he'll never pull it off - he couldn't even tell the manager at the car dealership what kind of insurance he carried on the car when he tried to sell it. A very drunk Vera makes good on her threat to phone the police. She dials, but the call is never completed. Al accidentally kills her in a rather ingenious scene. When we next see Al, he's sitting in a diner on his way back East, dreaming of Sue and pleading with the audience to believe that things just don't work out for him: "Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all."

There are a number of elements that make this film work. First, Ann Savage lives up to her name. She plays Vera as a spiteful survivor, quick to make threats and even quicker to carry them out. She’s utterly mesmerizing to watch as the first real noir femme fatale who uses her wits to manipulate a seemingly weak man. The script is beautifully written by Martin Goldsmith based on his own novel. It's hardboiled without being one long cliche, colorful without drawing too much attention to itself. These characters could have said these things, which is not something you could ever say of another supplier of noir material - Mickey Spillane.

What really makes this film fascinating is Al's first-person narrative. This is the film that taught me an unforgettable lesson about the unreliable narrator. If we hadn't had the voiceover from Al's point of view, we would be inclined to think he was a true innocent caught in a spiral of bad luck and fear. Instead, we are forced to examine every element of the film to see if it seems plausible, to see if maybe it didn't happen another way. Was Al's musicianship as great as we heard, or was it what he imagined? If he really was the next Paderewski, as his boss snidely suggests, would he really be playing in a dump?

Let's look at Sue's departure. He says they were to be married. To me it looks like a classic brush-off. You don't move across country to keep a relationship going. Perhaps the cut-in of Sue wasn't just a cheap effect. Maybe his entire conversation was a fantasy. Every aspect of this film has to be questioned from an objective standpoint, and that's what makes it such an object lesson in audience manipulation. Even the cheap look contrasts the tawdriness of Al with his vision of himself. That most likely was unintentional, but it happens nonetheless.

I love Detour. It's the model for Memento, Secret Window, and every other film that tries to make a viewer believe it's something it's not, and may even succeed whether we ought to or not. l

2006-12-04T12:18:00.000-06:00

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2005)
Director: Andrew Douglas

Since the discovery of the New World, Europeans have been fascinated by American rustics. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin practically made a career in France out of being an "authentic" American. So it seemed natural for English director Andrew Douglas to want to go out and make a film about the American hillbillies and rednecks he envisioned after he encountered Jim White's debut album "Wrong-Eyed Jesus (Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted)." BBC Arena was more than willing to put up the funds to produce Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Fascination with the bloodlines and musical heritage that run between the old families of the Old South and the even older families of Merrie Olde England make such a film an audience pleaser on the right side of the Atlantic. Throw in some decent country music, and you may have a film that people around the world will respond to.

Douglas uses White as the guide through the heart of the trailer-trash, Pentacostal, backwoods, musical South. To equip them properly for their journey, White secures a rusted boat of a car circa 1970 and buys a statue of Jesus to put in its trunk. As White drives Douglas and camera crew through lands that time forgot, he talks of his own spiritual feelings and desire to belong to the South, where he grew up but not where he was born or where he spends most of his time. He's fond of metaphors, and, for this writer, uses them to distraction.

They pass trailers by the dozens, towns that begin and end in the span of a five-minute drive, and some homes on stilts in the middle of swampland. The camera travels across water (shades of Jesus!) and lands in front of a house in the middle of a lake, its porch skimming the waters. On it stands the Handsome Family, who perform a song. This is the first of many musical interludes that seem to want to make a connection between the land and the music, but usually come off as too precious by half. Another clear miss is a haunting rendition of "Amazing Grace" played on a saw by Melissa Swingle as she sits on a blanket in the trunk of a car parked in the middle of a wood. Following this song, Douglas films her sitting in the back seat of the car telling a fairly pointless story about two of her relatives laughing at their grandmother's funeral.

Not all of the musical moments misstep, however. A Kentucky coal miner and banjo picker provides some touches of authenticity with his round, weathered face and old timey rendition of "Rye Whiskey." A finely crafted duet of "First There Was" by Johnny Dowd and Maggie Brown moves quietly between Dowd sitting in a barber shop and Brown curling a woman's hair in the adjacent beauty salon. Indeed, the male and female worlds seem to separate into two experiences as filmed by Douglas - heartache for women and hard work and violence for men. Only in church and in juke joints do the two worlds come together in a variation of the same kind of ecstatic, emotional release these hard-against-it people need to keep head and heart together.

Perhaps the best parts of this film for me are the musing of Georgia-born writer Harry Crews. He provides one of the best descriptions of the heart of the South I've heard simply by explaining what the people in his town did when the Sears Roebuck catalog arrived in the mail. First, he points out that all of the people in the catalog were perfect, "with all the fingers they were entitled to," and all the people in his town were maimed and marked from physical labor, brawling, and disease. Nonetheless, the townspeople gave the Sears people "lives" like their own - pairing a female model on page 33 with a male model on another page and imagining an affair between them that the female's daddy on page 107 was going to end using a rifle. The South is about family, and at least among the people Douglas meets, about troubled family life. It's easy to see why the sacrificed Son of God would seem a familiar and living being to these people.

And it's easy to see that Jim White's real quest is not to be Southern in his blood, as he claims, but to have family ties that bind. This fact, I think, is what saves this film from its considerable shortcomings - its unmotivated artiness (including its last, utterly false shot), Diane Arbus-like portraits of its subjects, and the complete absence of African Americans and a mention of the obvious link between Pentacostal worship and African-inspired rituals of the Southern Baptist church. White really loves these people. So while Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus tells us nothing new about the South and revels in its cliche, gothic images, thanks to Jim White, its heart is strong. l

For an excellent contemporary film about the South that gets at the ides of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus without jumping through all the fancy hoops, I highly recommend Junebug. Tellingly, perhaps, the outsider in that film is English.

2006-11-30T16:44:00.000-06:00

Wolfen (1981)
Director: Michael Wadleigh

By Roderick Heath

1980-81 saw a revival of the werewolf flick, thanks largely to the explosion of special-effects technique, that Janus-faced friend of the horror film. Joe Dante and John Sayles’ The Howling and John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London sported set-piece transformation scenes achieved with prosthetics and gas bladders that were, at the time, startling and now just seem to bring those films’ narratives to a screaming halt. Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen, not exactly a werewolf film, eschewed make-up or mechanical monstrosities for its villainy, and this is a problem. The real wolves used in Wolfen, pristinely furred and rather cute, are less threatening and unusual than the film’s admirably long build-up demands.

Wolfen was nonetheless hardly shy of utilizing then cutting-edge technology in constructing a genuinely modern horror film. Wadleigh used the newly invented Steadicam (also used in another great 1981 horror film, The Shining) and infrared cameras for POV shots (later stolen for 1986’s Predator), helicopter shots, and multilayered sound recording to create a vision of modern New York that is, in its way, as sophisticated and all-embracing as Dreyer’s style for Vampyr, but in an altogether different fashion. Wadleigh’s camera makes New York over as a kind of primal landscape, alien in its familiarity, sometimes surreally modern, and at other times a near-spectral space.

Where The Howling and An American Werewolf In London, sharp-witted films balanced by strong doses of fashionable gore, tapped into the self-satirizing, self-referential mood of their era and scored with audiences, the more ambitious and original Wolfen belly-flopped big time at the box office. As you’d expect from the director of Woodstock, Wolfen is a radical-spirited horror film (as opposed to films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the counterculture are the victims, or The Last House On The Left, where they themselves are the horror). Based on a throwaway novel by new-age crank named Whitley Streiber, Wadleigh, displaying the same sweeping command of camera and editing as he did in his great concert film, creates a witty, if occasionally hectoring, thriller. Considering the allusions to Patty Hearst, the Weathermen, and Watergate, Wolfen must have seemed out of its time, and certainly against the grain of the oncoming Reaganite mood. With its insidious vision of omnipresent surveillance, environmentalist bent, and evisceration of corporate culture, Wolfen feels more contemporary now than it did at the time of its release. Wolfen’s use of modern forensic investigation also anticipates the fetishist ghoulishness of the CSI dynasty.

The film opens with two Native American men standing atop a Brooklyn Bridge arch, performing a rite. That night, one of the men, Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), throws a bottle at the passing limousine. In the limousine is Christopher Van der Veer (Max M. Brown) and his cocaine-sniffing wife (Anne Marie Pohtano). Later, this pair and their ex-Haitian secret police bodyguard/chauffeur are savagely killed by unseen beasts whilst visiting Van der Veer’s personal shrine, a windmill set up in Battery Park in honor of his ancestor, who founded the city. The police, and the omniscient security company that was watching over the Van der Veers, are mystified. Police Chief Warren (Dick O’Neill) calls in his ablest and most troubled detective, Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), who has been suspended due to alcoholic binges after an unspecified personal trauma.

Dewey is a mordant man with a shabby look and shabbier manner. He tramps through the investigation spurning bureaucracy (“The only thing separating you from a guard dog is a brain,” he tells a door-guarding officer, something I often quote to doormen looking for ID), keeps a sign on his office wall that reads “God, guns, and guts made America great; let’s keep all three,” and has a compulsion to make friends with all manner of oddballs and social rejects. Most prominent among them is his forensic expert pal Whittington (Gregory Hines, an obvious star in the making), and zoological expert and all-out geek Ferguson (Tom Noonan). These three, to the disdain and dismissal of the super-efficient security officials, happily drill away on their odd hunches involving wolf hair found on the Van der Veers and on scores of unidentified body parts found scattered all over Brooklyn. The security company investigates radical organizations they feel may have bumped Van der Veer off for his various acts of corporate monstrosity, including one to which Van der Veer’s niece belongs (“Revolutionary my ass!” a technician mutters, “Until her goddamn trust fund runs out.”).

Dewey is handed a partner by the company, Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora - why the hell isn’t that smart, sexy lady used more by filmmakers?), a psychologist with a particular interest into the mindset of revolutionary and antiestablishment movements. Neff (as Dewey insists on calling her) is a wry, skeptical match for Dewey. Dewey soon realizes how his forensic discoveries and the political angle may dovetail. He tracks down Eddie Holt, an old acquaintance. Eddie, in his youth a hot-headed NAM member, assassinated an “apple,” a nonradical Indian leader. Eddie hints about shape-shifting, invoking the full revue of “Indian jive,” but ultimately reveals this as a humorous put-on that nonetheless hints at an unexplained meaning.

Dewey and friends have latched onto the trail of the Wolfen – a super-intelligent species of wolf closely linked to the native humans, who have, like Eddie’s tribe, survived not by running from civilization but by burrowing within its bowels. Now that their hunting and breeding grounds in the slums of New York are threatened, they’ve retaliated directly by killing the mastermind. Eddie and his fellow Indians know of the Wolfen and mock Dewey as an inadequate representative of white America. Dewey and the Wolfen begin their mutual stalking. The Wolfen kills the animal-loving Ferguson when he misunderstands their appearance, and refrain from attacking Dewey and Neff in bed for the sublimely animal reason that killing a breeding pair seems, for them, to be verboten. Dewey and Whittington patrol the Wolfen’s apparent nest – a gorgeously spooky, shattered church – with high-powered rifles, but find themselves outmatched. After a conflict that costs the lives of Whittington and Warren, including a battle that pointedly takes place on Wall St. and ends in flame and bloodshed, Dewey, finally deducing the Wolfen’s motives, signals to them his understanding by smashing Van der Veer’s model of the ultramodern buildings to be erected on their home turf.

Despite being the biggest-budgeted film I’ve reviewed in my horror series – or because of it – Wolfen is the least forgivably uneven. But Wadleigh’s approach is so vigorous and original that you want to forgive his lapses into trite sermonizing and Green-leftie imagery about as deep as the weeping Indian ad, especially in the faltering coda that also hints at an already dismissed supernatural side to the Wolfen. With clever, consistent visual layering, Wadleigh evokes an eerie, alternate universe, showing how the Wolfen’s awesome senses work. The surveillance and lie detector gear the security firm spend a fortune on and the arduous forensic work that Whittington performs, do jobs the Wolfen perform naturally. In the film’s bravura sequence, accompanied by James Horner’s unnerving, exciting score (back when he still did exciting scores), a Wolfen tracks Dewey and Neff from Brooklyn to Manhattan, deducing barely visible tire tracks and intangible scents, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, casually killing a hardhat, and crossing the span – guy wires glowing in hallucinogenic beauty to the Wolfen’s eye. As evidenced by this sequence the cinematography, by Gerry Fisher, Fredric Abeles, and Steadicam inventor and operator Garrett Brown, is often astonishing.

Wadleigh called the film “the thinking man’s horror film,” which is a bit arrogant and easy to ridicule. But the film’s linkages of image and idea are deliberate and rich. Much of the drama revolves around the Brooklyn Bridge, that neo-Gothic link between history and the future, architecture and art. Van der Veer, scion and descendent of a founding family with a shrine of humble beginnings at Battery Park, is a “real friend of the Third World” in Dewey’s sarcastic appraisal, funding government overthrows and the like; he is the oldest, purest incarnation of the invading European exploitation of North America, whilst, as Ferguson describes it, the Indians and the wolves went on the “genocide express,” yet they survive through cleverness. The Wolfen scavenge on the people society allows to be thrown away – the sick, the homeless, the junkies. The movie’s suggestion that urban renewal, supposedly a way of improving the living standards of poor, inner city populations, but actually a device to force them out and usher in gentrification and the destruction of authentic identities, has been proven dead right. Ultimately, Wadleigh, with a certain upbeat charm, suggests the wild, the natural, and the oddball will always beat out the technological, the repressive, and the corrupt.

The messages of Wolfen ultimately hardly matter more than the conservative Catholicism of The Exorcist; they’re both just well-staged yarns. Wolfen delivers through the byplay between Finney, Hines, and Venora, which is humorous and intriguing, and tramples the cliché aspects of Dewey’s outsider cop, Neff’s spunky gal pal, and Whittington’s streetwise black dude headed for a sticky end. Most of the film is a model of careful build-up, sustained mood, and judicious violence. It’s a true pity Wadleigh has not made another film, but he did forge a style that would be exploited by future blockbuster directors.

But I still want to give the Wolfen a scratch behind the ear. l

2006-11-27T14:44:00.000-06:00

The Two of Us (Le Vieil Homme et L'enfant, 1967)
Director: Claude Berri

"I was 8 years old and already a Jew."

This statement seems an odd way for a narrator to introduce us to his reminiscences of youth - odd, that is, for people who had little more to do as children than to be themselves. But, Claude Berri did not grow up during ordinary times. He turned 8 in 1944 Paris, and being a Jew was the fact that governed his every move. How he came to love a Vichyist anti-Semite during the last year of World War II is recounted in the joyful and touching The Two of Us.

The film begins with young Claude Langmann (Alain Cohen) casing a toy store with a friend. His friend causes a distraction, and Claude stuffs one metal truck, then another, under his coat and attempts to leave. A large hand moves into the frame and lands on Claude's shoulder, and the chase is on. That evening, Claude's father (Charles Denner) performs a similar chase around the family furniture to administer a spanking to the mischievous Claude. Mr. Langmann doesn't have the usual worries of a father with a sticky-fingered son. The family's life is extremely precarious, and Mr. Langmann worries that the attention his son is attracting will lead authorities to discover their secret and mean their doom. He laments that Claude doesn't seem to understand the gravity of the situation and will not listen to him. Of course he doesn't. He's 8 and doesn't really understand what it means to other people that he is Jewish.

In the next couple of scenes, it is apparent that the Langmanns have moved house twice. Another prank - this time, smoking in the landlady's outhouse - is the final straw. Claude must be sent where he can do less harm. A woman who has taken the Langmanns in arranges for Claude to stay with her parents in the countryside, near Grenoble. She warns Claude's parents that although her father is a good man, he is a vocal anti-Semite and that Claude must be careful not to reveal his faith. Claude learns that his new name will be Longuet, that he must always bathe alone to conceal his circumcized penis, and that he must say the "Our Father" prayer at night before he goes to sleep. Mr. Langmann drills Claude on the prayer even as his train begins to carry him away. It is hard not to view the moving train and think where else trains took Jews in 1944.

When Claude and his patroness arrive, the old man (Michel Simon) welcomes the boy to climb in his lap and call him "Grandpa." He introduces Claude to his beloved dog Kinou, a sickly and ancient mongrel that seems to sense bombings and that the old man spoonfeeds at the dinner table. We are then treated to Sunday dinner, accompanied by Vichy propaganda on the radio and Grandpa's denunciation of meat eaters ("cannibals"), the English, Jews, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks. The old man's daughter quiets him with a sly reply, "You'd think you had a Jew living here." He replies, "That's all I need!" This sounds like a rocky start for the young Jewish boy.

But The Two of Us takes a different tack. Claude's life in his adopted home isn't at all disagreeable. In fact, it's practically paradise. He is enrolled at school, gets happily into the lice-check circle, and laughs when one infested boy faces the teacher's hair clipper. He is teased, too, as a "Paris brat, smells like a rat," a taunt just a little too close to Jew-baiting for the audience, but a perfectly normal occurrence among children. The teasing turns into a fistfight that leaves Claude with a cut on his head. Grandpa bursts with pride at the young boy's courage. "Grandma" (Luce Fabiole) predictably tells the old man not to encourage him.

Grandpa talks to Claude about his pride in the great Marshall Petain and about his own service in the first World War. He shows Claude a scar, a bayonet wound, he says. Claude says, "It's on your back. Were you running away?" A flustered Grandpa then displays another wound in his gut. Claude says, "That's your appendicitis. My dad has a scar there." It's a funny scene, and Grandpa never gets mad. He loves Claude almost as much as he loves his dog - maybe more. His wife, he says to Claude when the boy remarks on a naked woman tattooed to his arm, is another story. "The first years are great, then..." In this house, Grandma is the boss.

One order Grandma gives Claude is not obeyed. She pours him a bath and briefly leaves the room. Claude undresses quickly and begins to wash. Grandma returns and tells him to stand in the tub so she can wash him. They are already late for church. Remembering what his mother said, Claude refuses. "Don't you want me to see your birdie?" she asks. "I've seen them before." Claude is adamant, and Grandpa backs him up. "That's right," he says. "Don't let her fool around with it."

Claude asks Grandpa a lot of questions about Jews. "How can you tell a Jew?" "They smell." "Even if they wash?" "It's like a goat. You can wash it for 3 hours, and 15 minutes later, it stinks again." Jews have hooked noses to smell out money. On the Sabbath, Jews use no electricity and eat by candlelight. Jews wear their hats indoors while they eat. They have curly hair and big ears. Later, Claude decides to play a joke on the old folks. He knocks at their bedroom door and announces ominously that he's become one of them. "Who?" asks Grandpa. "A Jew." Grandma scolds Grandpa for telling him stories about Jews and giving him nightmares. Grandpa assures him that he has a fine straight nose and couldn't possibly be a Jew. Inviting Claude to sleep with him, Grandpa says, "Now, would I let a Jew sleep in my bed?" That Claude can play this joke with such good humor shows a love and compassion for a man who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. Later, when the electricity goes out during dinner, they must eat by candlelight. "We are eating like Jews," says Claude. For once, Grandpa accepts this without comment. Love for the boy and the joy of being a grandfather seem to be lightening his reflexive bigotry.

But Claude never reveals his faith. Grandpa finds Kinou agitated one morning, and then goes to the calendar to pull off the slip of paper from the previous day. The new date, June 5, 1944, is D-Day and, according to Grandpa, the invasion kills the prescient Kinou. Liberation celebrants fill the streets of the small town. Grandpa and Grandma sadly remove Petain's picture from their wall and put it away. They know that Claude, too, will be leaving soon. When Claude's parents drive off with him on a bus, Claude smiles and waves out the back window to the sad couple who looked after him so well, loved him, and let him be a child for a few short months. Giving a little Jewish boy a childhood in the shadow of unspeakable death was a great gift indeed. It is no wonder that Berri paid them back with such a beautiful, funny, heartfelt film that doesn't forget the seriousness of the times but never collapses into them. l

2006-11-20T12:15:00.000-06:00

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Director: Peter Weir

As the world has gotten smaller and easier to negotiate through electronic means and jet-fueled transport, would-be adventurers have had to venture further and further out of reach. Many victims of modern ennui have turned upward, crawling up Everest like a foolish band of ants to a flame; inward, looking for an inner space of boundless creativity; or outward to the stars, intrigued by the weird and wondrous forms from the postcards sent by unmanned explorers named Hubble and Voyager. Filmmakers have reflected these new frontiers, abandoning the thrilling quests of old in the Wild West, in darkest Africa, and on the high seas for the quaint relics they are.

Thus, Master and Commander: The Far Side of World was a risky venture for Twentieth Century Fox and its production partners to launch. Although Patrick O’Brian’s maritime book series upon which the film was based is very popular, its fan base doesn’t exactly approach the size and fanaticism of, say, Harry Potter loyalists. If the movie were to do well, it would have to appeal to more than the history buffs and be more than a modernized swashbuckler. It would have to create wonder.

I don’t think Master and Commander created as much wonder in as many people as it should have, but I, for one, was completely captivated, convinced, transported, and thrilled by this elegant recreation of a time and place where wonders never ceased for those who lived in it. The time was the early 1800s. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), captain of the H.M.S. Surprise is patrolling in the waters near South America for ships in Napoleon’s fleet. A blow against a French ship will be a blow for England and for the crew’s wallets when they claim the prize of the captured ship and its cargo. Sailing with Aubrey as the Surprise’s surgeon is his friend Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), doctor, amateur naturalist, and civilian. The two men play classical music together and act as each other’s confidante and adviser.

Along on this voyage is midshipman Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis), an aristocrat of about 14 years of age. Aubrey takes Blakeney and his young friend, midshipman Peter Calamy (Max Benitz), under his wing in training them to be officers. Among the other assorted officers are first lieutenant Tom Pullings (James D’Arcy), veteran seaman Master Allen (Robert Pugh), and midshipman Hollom (Lee Ingleby), who lacks the confidence and leadership for his own command.

One foggy evening, Hollom thinks he spies a ship on the horizon. Aubrey and Pullings seek the ship, but see nothing. Hollom hesitates about what he saw, and the crew stands down. Only moments later, the Surprise is fired upon and sustains casualties and damage. The chase is on after the “ghost ship” that hides in the fog, a French ship called the Acheron.

Young Blakeney took wood shrapnel in his arm during the attack and develops life-threatening gangrene that requires that he have his arm amputated. Aubrey visits him in his bunk and makes him a gift of a personally inscribed book about the exploits of Lord Nelson, the one-armed idol of every man on board and once Aubrey’s commander. Aubrey is a leader of men who also can pay individual attention to each man.

The Acheron proves a fast ship and a worthy adversary. It gets the jump on the Surprise by hiding in coves along the shore. Unable to outrun the Acheron, Aubrey creates a decoy. His crew builds a buoy with a light to mimic the stern of the Surprise. “Mr. Calamy,” he says, “You have your first command,” as he sends the midshipman out to float the buoy away from the Surprise. The Surprise then tacks away from the buoy, and all on board listen triumphantly as they hear the Acheron fire on the decoy.

The trick buys Aubrey time to make repairs at the nearby Galapagos Islands. Maturin is in hog heaven, hearing as he has of the strange life forms the Galapagos are said to contain. Blakeney mentions that he sees a lizard swimming in the water. Maturin says lizards don’t swim. Blakeney replies, “This one does.” Maturin is stunned by the discovery of a swimming iguana. He combs the island collecting specimens, one more fascinating than the next, with Blakeney and an ordinary seaman at his side. When they reach the other side of the island, Blakeney spies the Acheron hiding in a harbor. The naturalist and his charges drop their treasures and race back to Aubrey, who immediately prepares to set sail. Maturin protests that he wishes to remain on the island, particularly since Aubrey is exceeding the mandate of his orders in following after the Acheron. Aubrey rebuffs him harshly, putting his mission ahead of Maturin’s "silly" hobby. Later, he will redeem himself after Maturin is shot in a freak accident by returning the ship to the Galapagos so that the bullet can be removed safely on solid land.

Aubrey pursues the French vessel around the treacherous Cape Horn. As the icy waters and high seas batter the ship’s sails, popular Able Seaman Joe Plaice (George Innes) is sent up the mast to tie them down. When he gets into trouble, Mr. Hollom is sent up to rescue him. Hollom freezes in fear, however, and the mast breaks off with Joe clinging to it and must be cut free to prevent the ship from sinking. The crewmen hold Hollom personally responsible for Joe’s death, and their disrespect for him causes Aubrey to order the flogging of one of the men. Soon thereafter, the ship hits the doldrums, and the superstitious crew blames Hollom as bad luck personified. His loneliness and feelings of being out of place are wrenching and tragic.

Eventually, Aubrey catches the Acheron’s scent again when they come upon some merchant seamen adrift after their ship was attacked. Aubrey devises another trick that will help the Surprise move next to their quarry and pummel them with cannon fire, thus piercing the Acheron's state-of-the-art double-hull design with close-range fire and allowing them to board the ship and take control.

Master and Commander is a film that goes from strength to strength. Following the blueprint of authenticity that made the O’Brian books so popular, this film is a time machine. The crew is covered with the scars of battles past, including star Russell Crowe, whose mangled ear presents prominently and unvaingloriously in several scenes. The customs of the British Navy at this time are well observed, from the manner of salutes given to the officers, to the details of a flogging, to the medical practices of the time, and the fine craftsmanship of the carpenters who were always aboard to build spare parts, make repairs, and fashion objects in their idle time that collectors can’t get enough of these days. It’s odd to see such young men in such responsible positions, but to quote from another period drama, Interview with the Vampire, “Times were different them. I was a man and master of an estate.” The cast is strong, right down to the smallest of speaking roles, and make their somewhat idealized relish of service and adventure real and breathing.

Crowe is a perfect balance of humanizing camaraderie, self-assurance, and leadership. He’s a muscular actor who is at his best in muscular roles, such as Aubrey or Bud White in L. A. Confidential. Paul Bettany is an actor’s actor who disappears into every role. In this one, Maturin’s intelligence and civilian railing at military protocol seem to ooze out of every pore.

Weir creates a world both exciting and tedious, horrifying to a modern audience in its crudeness (Maturin must remove the bullet from his own shoulder in a wince-inducing scene), but modern to its inhabitants, as Aubrey admires the inventive construction of the Acheron through a model built from memory by two able seamen who saw it being constructed in an American port. Most of all, Weir brilliantly stages battles at sea. Listen carefully to Aubrey’s plan to defeat the Acheron, then watch as every detail of his plan is put into action in the ensuing engagement. It’s a brilliant bit of filmmaking that pays tribute to the art of battle strategizing and execution. I’m going to quote Aubrey’s plan here. Print it off and then read it after you see the film. See if Weir doesn’t manage the whole scene exactly as planned:

Right lads, now, I know there's not a faint heart among you, and I know you're as anxious as I am to get into close action. But we must bring them right up beside us before we spring this trap. That will test our nerve, and discipline will count just as much as courage. The Acheron is a tough nut to crack... more than twice our guns, more than twice our numbers, and they will sell their lives dearly. Topmen, your handling of the sheets to be lubberly and un-navy like. Until the signal calls, you're to spill the wind from our sails, this will bring us almost to a complete stop. Gun crews, you must run out and tie down in double quick time. With the rear wheels removed, you've gained elevation, and without recoil, there'll be no chance for reload, so gun captains, that gives you one shot from the lardboard battery... one shot only. You'll fire for her mainmast. Much will depend on your accuracy... however... even crippled, she will still be dangerous, like a wounded beast. Captain Howard and the marines will sweep their weather deck with swivel gun and musket fire from the tops. They'll try and even the odds for us before we board. They mean to take us as a prize.

It isn’t easy these days to shoot a film that can make the breath quicken in excitement and a whole world of adventure come alive. Big-screen interpretations of comic book heroes and scifi aliens have, paradoxically, cramped our imaginations. I never expect to be as dazzled and delighted by a tricked-up action movie as I am by Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. This film is the greatest swashbuckler of all time. l

2006-11-15T13:45:00.000-06:00

Vampyr: Der Traum des Allan Grey (1931)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

By Roderick Heath

1931 was a watershed year for horror cinema. With Tod Browning’s crepuscular, but patchy Dracula, James Whale’s Gothic fairy tale Frankenstein, Rouben Mamoulian’s vivid Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Michael Curtiz’s flashy, absurd Doctor X, the genre found its feet in the Hollywood of sound, and made a big impact at the box office. At the time, they set the pace, created stars, and codified the film concept of Mary Shelley’s homunculus, Bram Stoker’s vampire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s doppelganger (Doctor X purloined the mad scientist imagery of pulp magazine covers for the cinema). Yet despite their iconic status, the Universal-brand horror films have little relevance to the modern genre. Many of today’s films, however, owe something to another 1931 film.

Vampyr, supposedly inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” and other stories in Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly collection (in truth it owes little but mood to Le Fanu), was at the time completely overshadowed. It was directed and written by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the Danish director who had begun with the hit Master of the House (1924). But as Dreyer became more formally rigorous and experimental, exemplified by his now-famous La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927), he lost audiences. German and Scandinavian directors had a field day with macabre subjects, for visual rhapsodies and post-WWI expressions of mental anguish and collapse. These included Victor Sjöstrom (The Phantom Carriage, 1920), Benjamin Christensen (Häxan, 1921), F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu, of course, 1921), Abel Gance (Au Secours!, 1923), Paul Leni (Waxworks, 1924), and Fritz Lang (coauthor of Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari, 1919, and director of Der Meude Tod,1921).

Dreyer’s efforts with Vampyr were not about telling a story through the symbolic prisms of Expressionism, but pursuing the tantalizing challenge of Surrealism, to capture the essence of a dream as itself; to replicate the sensations, the elided realities and meanings, the disjunctive perspectives. The film’s dialogue is in English, German, and French, with an eye to making export easier, but also contributing to its “nowhere” mood.

Vampyr was produced privately by the film’s star, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg (acting under the name Julian West). The sallow-faced Gunzburg plays wandering geek and professional busybody Allan Grey, loosely based on one of Le Fanu’s recurring heroes, (he’s called David Gray in the English version) who tramps about the countryside in tweed suit, jaunty hat, with a net on his shoulder. He suggests a holidaying entomologist with a morphine habit and an uncoventional sex life. He arrives in Courtempierre, an isolated Franco-German village, passing, at the ferry bell, a black figure carrying a scythe, a sight that would make most men turn and head in another direction. The opening scrawl tells us that Allan has had many strange encounters; he’s a kind of proto-Fox Mulder. He settles into a small hotel room, the walls of which are covered in macabre, medieval decorations. He hears someone muttering outside, and catches a brief glimpse of a gnarled-faced man haunting the upstairs. He is awoken at midnight by a visitor; not, as he may have been hoping, the innkeeper’s daughter, but aged local chatelaine (Maurice Schutz) who makes wordless entreaty to him, as an outsider and therefore apparently trustworthy, to care for a package, marked “Not To Be Opened Until My Death.”

Allan, knowing such packages never bode well, tries to follow the old man. He wanders the day-for-midnight wonderland of the village, where shadows without forms move by themselves and dogs and children moan constantly. Allan explores a ruined chateau, which, with its cavernous rooms and labyrinthine halls, exactly conjures those shifting space-time traps of dreams. It is vaguely inhabited by a soldier and a one-legged man, both of whom, when they sleep, have their shadows walk off and perform nefarious deeds at someone else’s bidding. There’s also an ancient crone (Henriette Gérard) wearing Flemish dress of the 1600s and a bespectacled, meek-looking but creepy doctor (Jan Hieronimko - what a name!). In the film’s most bizarre and wondrous moment, the camera explores a vast attic where a populace of shadows are dancing to snatches of Gypsy fiddle, until the crone, on a lower floor, framed by dangling, rotating cartwheels, angrily lifts her cane for silence, which she gains instantaneously. She hands the doctor a vial of poison. Clearly, they’re in league for some awful purpose.

Allan escapes the ruin and reaches the chatelaine’s house just in time to see the shadows of the soldier and one-legged man shoot the chatelaine. His assassination seems almost expected by the household, for he’s been fighting this oppressive, intangible evil. Allan is invited to stay and protect them, Gisele (Rena Mandel, an ex-nude model), the chatelaine’s daughter, Her sister Leone (Sybille Schmitz, the film’s only professional actor) is continually lured into the garden and drained of blood by the crone. In one of the most needle-sharp erotic-horror moments in cinema, Leone awakens from a delirium and latches eyes on her sister, her happy smile broadening into a grin of perverse lust, scaring Gisele away. A servant is sent by carriage to fetch the police; when it comes rolling back, the driver is bloody and lifeless. Allan, exhausted, falls asleep. He dreams Gisele has been kidnapped and tied up in the ruin, and then finds his own body in a coffin; in a bravura long POV shot, we are Allan as the lid of his coffin is nailed on and he is carried by the gloating faces of the doctor and the crone.

Allan awakens with a jolt as panic erupts in the house. The doctor, having called to check on Leone, has poisoned her. Allan and the chatelaine’s loyal servant (Albert Bras) open the package entrusted to Allan by the chatelaine. It’s a book on vampires from the 1770s, based on papers found in Faust’s collection. Despite this lip-smacking suggestion of forbidden lore, it only relates basic stake-in-the-heart stuff, and gives a clue to the vampire’s identity by detailing how, in the 1750s, an outbreak of vampire attacks in Courtempierre were blamed on a dead woman named Marguerite Chopin. Allan and the servant search the graveyard for Chopin’s grave and find it contains the crone. The servant stakes the vampire as Allan searches for Gisele in the ruin. He unties her, scares off the doctor, and gets her out of the haunted village by boat. The servant gets final revenge when he finds the doctor has cornered himself in a flour mill; he sets the machinery rolling and the perfidious medico slowly drowns in tons of white flour, shouting “I don’t want to die!” Might have thought of that before you started poisoning girls and mistreating dogs!

In developing this cryptic, often blackly comic film, Dreyer and cinematographer Rudolph Mate were inspired a flour mill wreathed in dusty clouds they passed while on a train, a sight that inspired the finale and the hazy, washed-out visuals produced by false light shone on the lens. Contributing was Nosferatu’s designer Hermann Warm, and like that film, Vampyr shares an appealing rejection of studio-created atmosphere for careful manipulation of real settings. Vampyr is technically primitive, with poor sound from an experimental system. Dreyer used this flaw to good effect, muting the dialogue and reduces the soundtrack to menacing rumbles and barely heard sonorous music, adding to the ruined look. Dreyer seems to have been the first director to seek an illusion of the uncanny by devolving the techniques of film, something now every film student tries at least once. Yet Dreyer’s camera is sublimely mobile, roaming halls and rooms with restless, hungry fascination.

Vampyr pilots the next few generations’ worth of experimental film in its attempts to capture the uncanny. In The Ring, when one character judges the mysterious videotape as good in a student film fashion, he’s absolutely right, but that tradition of experimental short, and, more recently, death metal music videos trying to recreate the ugly dissociations of nightmares, have some roots in Dreyer’s style. It’s hard to imagine David Lynch’s films, especially Eraserhead, without Dreyer. Much of what Lynch accomplished - weird soundtrack, disorientating editing, sickly half-seen visions - is present here. But Vampyr is gossamer in its invocation of the morbid, more in the key of Mahler than evanescence.

Vampyr is modernist, in its war with perspective, reality, and the limitations of the senses, and feels particularly reminiscent of Kafka - especially in its dark humor, the way Allan keeps walking into the weirdest circumstances without blanching and falls in love with Gisele at the drop of a hat. It’s also a pure invocation of the spirit of the Gothic genre, that European sense of being enveloped and suffocated by history, something that ultimately was lost on Hollywood. Vampyr envisions a world haunted by loss and a past only visible in shreds, entrapped by identity but adrift between realities. Although Allan and Gisele escape from the fog-shrouded bank, they arrive on the side that our scythe-wielding friend crossed to earlier; it’s hard to tell if the waking world will be better. That waking world was about to collapse in on itself. Under the Nazis, German horror cinema would be extinguished, thanks to their detestation of the psychological and the genre’s too-pointed realisation of what forces were stirring under the surface - Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari envisioned the country as a giant insane asylum waiting for an authoritative administrator.

Vampyr was ignored on release. Dreyer did not make another film for 13 years, until with Day of Wrath (1943) he returned to studying the legacies of historical evil and psychological oppression. Sybille Schmitz later starred in Frank Wisbar’s version of the death-and-the-maiden theme, Faehrmann Maria (1936), which Wisbar remade when he decamped stateside as PRC’s Strangler in the Swamp (1946). Nicholas de Gunzburg became an investment banker in New York, a notable sight for many years walking the streets displaying the same haunted, soulful expression he sports in Vampyr. l

You can now read Rod Heath's poetry and other writing on Rod Writes, http://rodwrites.blogspot.com.

2006-11-06T19:56:00.000-06:00

49 Up (2005)
Director: Michael Apted

“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”

In 1963, the British TV series “World in Action” aired “Seven Up,” a program that brought together a group of 7 year olds from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and interviewed them about how they saw their future careers and family lives. The idea was to give viewers a glimpse of what the population of England in the year 2000 might look like while giving an airing to the controversy surrounding the lack of mobility in England’s rigid class structure. What followed this somewhat inconsidered idea of dubious value has become a landmark in film documentary – a series of seven films so far that has followed the lives of most of these children at regular seven-year intervals.

I’ve followed the Up series, which has played on the arthouse circuit for years, since I became aware of it; 28 Up was the first one I saw. If you never saw any of the previous films, however, you’d still be pretty well caught up on the interview subjects. Michael Apted, who directed every episode but the first, uses clips from the previous films and provides voiceover summaries to bring viewers up to speed. My husband, who never saw a single Up film until yesterday, was fully acquainted with the project by the end of 49 Up, the newest in the series.

Fourteen subjects have participated in the series at one time or another. Charles and Peter dropped out fairly early, and John went on a hiatus for 42 Up, but is back for the new film. Participating in all seven are Bruce, Jackie, Symon, Andrew, Sue, Nick, Neil, Lynn, Paul, Suzy, and Tony. Apted doesn’t use their last names, and with divorces and remarriages overtaking a number of the subjects, it seems like a good way to go for this review, too.

Our upper-class kids – John and Andrew – went to the prestigious prep schools and universities they said they would when they were seven, and then became successful lawyers with proper wives and families and all the trappings of success. Andrew would have liked to have spent more time with his kids instead of at the office, natch. John married an ambassador’s daughter and does charitable work connected with his aristocratic family’s roots in Bulgaria.

Tony – from working-class East London – wanted to be a jockey at age seven. He did become a jockey but wasn’t good enough to keep at it. He became a cab driver, married in his twenties, had a family, had affairs that nearly broke up his marriage, got through it, and is now living in what amounts to a English colony in Spain for the solidly middle class. The East London girls – Jackie, Lynn, and Sue – all said they had a million options when they were 21, admitted that they had few options when they were 28, and have either stayed married or divorced and remarried once or twice. All have kids. Symon, the only black in the sample, got married, had five kids, divorced, got happily remarried, had another kid, works at a warehouse, and takes in foster kids.

The most compelling member of the sample, Neil, started displaying evidence of mental illness at 21 and was homeless by 28. He eventually ended up in the remote Shetland Islands of Scotland. He pulled himself together, though, and got into politics at the city council level in London. Now, still single and still battling problems being around people, he moved back to Scotland, is running for office again as a liberal in a conservative rural district, and is active in the Anglican church. I can tell you that I and other Up followers were relieved to find out in 42 Up that he was still alive, and I’m delighted that he’s still hanging in there.

To be honest, after seven years, I needed a refresher on who these people were, and even after seeing the film, I couldn’t remember most of the names or associate them with their stories. And that, I think, is the problem I’m finally starting to acknowledge with the Up series. While it has been universally hailed, with Roger Ebert naming it one of the 10 best films (taken together) of all time, there just isn’t anything deeply memorable about it. Almost all of the participants claim that the cyclic intrusion into their lives is painful, an invasion of privacy that forces them to relive old hurts. Suzy, a girl from wealth who went from a cynical chain smoker at 21 to a happily married woman, says she imagines people are interested in her and the others for a few minutes and then they’re on to other things. Even the rather amazing odyssey of idealist Bruce, who taught math in Bangladesh and inner-city London, has resolved in a boringly happy marriage and teaching position at the posh St. Albans school. He plays cricket, is an older parent to two young children, and gets ribbed for going “yuppie.”

Andrew and John have wondered whether this chronicle will prove anything at various times during the series. I have to ask the same thing. As a contemporary of the Up participants, I've seen myself and my friends go through much the same changes. What makes these lives uniquely interesting enough to intrude upon every seven years? Does this utterly unscientific, statistically insignificant sample tell us anything about class, age, divorce, or any other subject dealt with in the films? Does their chronicle amount to one of the ten best films of all time? I say, no way.

Apted hasn’t proven anything about the human condition other than sometimes we make plans and they happen, and sometimes they don’t. Wealth is an advantage for obtaining a similarly wealthy life as an adult, but most people can find a way to live comfortably, even happily. Apted seems a poor anthropologist to me, neither probing nor objective. He's a bit of a snob, asking prying questions of people further down the food chain (Nick’s marital problems, Neil’s enforced celibacy, Jackie’s happiness or disappointment about her daughter being like her) and skimming the surface with the bluebloods. It seems he can’t forget the class question that got him started on this project. Too bad. If he'd dug a little deeper, he might have had something really different. Despite the inherent fascination of eavesdropping on real people’s lives – hence the explosion of “reality” TV – and perhaps the relatively good news for younger viewers that by 50, people seem to finally "get" their lives (balanced by the equally depressing news that they will probably double in size), the Up experience is pretty much like Bruce's description of his relationship with Neil, who roomed with him for two years in London. They keep in touch by letter once in a while, and Bruce wonders what he's up to and hopes he's doing ok. Me, too, guys. See you in another seven years, I guess. l

2006-11-02T20:02:00.000-06:00

Ride the High Country (1962)
Director: Sam Peckinpah

Over the last couple of months, I have been drawn to Westerns. Living and working in a densely populated metropolis has started to give me that hemmed-in feeling, and if there’s one thing you can count on in Westerns, it’s at least a few shots of wide-open vistas. That’s the mythic place the West holds in our imaginations—almost limitless space waiting for the solitary seeker to enter and make things up as he or she goes along.

Ride the High Country was one of Sam Peckinpah’s early films, done before he developed his reputation for extreme violence. It evokes a humorous and mainly sweet nostalgia for the mythic West in part by starring two elder statesmen of Western dramas: Joel McCrea, in his second-to-last film, and Randolph Scott, in his last film. Unlike the vigorous Western icons they played in countless films, McCrea and Scott wind up their careers playing two gunslingers who are coming to the end of the trail.

There are few genres that can so quickly and iconically set a mood as a Western, and Peckinpah takes no liberties with the convention: We get our long shot of open country to start the film. Soon we are drawn into human commerce. Steve Judd (McCrea), who once had a name to be reckoned with, comes to town to take a job with a bank hauling $250,000 worth of gold from miners in the high country who wish to make deposits. Several couriers have already been killed by bandits, and the father and son bankers Abner and Luther Sampson approached Judd because of his reputation with a gun and as a lawman.

The scene during which the deal is struck is a comic gem. First, the milquetoast actors Bryon Foulger and Percy Helton, who play the Sampsons, were actually the same age. Watching them playing father and son in the same nervous, mousy way, looking very much alike, is a sly commentary on the essence of the bean counter. When Judd learns that the actual amount he'll be protecting is about $20,000, the Sampsons say, "Well, it's still a respectable sum." We have to wonder if it is worth the risk of another life, but that's not the Sampsons' concern. Judd, on the other hand, is quite a bit older than they expected, and their rueful glances tell us everything about what it's like to be an older worker - an especially difficult transition to uselessness for a Western hero. Judd says he'd like to look over the contract alone, and he is shown to the toilet. He pulls out his glasses, examines the document, folds his glasses away, and then for no apparent reason, flushes the toilet. He asks for $40 a day, $20 for him and $10 each for the two men he intends to hire.

Before going to the bank, and after dodging a horseless buggy, Judd runs into his old partner Gil Westrum (Scott), who is running a crooked carny act. He tells Westrum about his job and asks him and Westrum's young assistant Heck (Ron Starr) if they'd like to ride with him. After he leaves to meet the Sampsons, Westrum confides to Heck that they'll ride with Judd to steal the gold. "What if he doesn't go along," asks Heck. Westrum says they'll get the gold with or without Judd's cooperation.

Halfway up the mountain, the three men stop at a farm to see if they can spend the night. The pious farmer Joshua Knudsen (R. G. Armstrong) agrees to let them sleep in the barn. Just then, a figure we saw scurry into the house on seeing the men's approach and throw off some scruffy farm clothes emerges from the house. It is Knudsen's daughter Elsa (Mariette Hartley), and she has on a lovely and revealing dress. We learn what a stern father Joshua is when he angrily scolds her and tells her to put on proper clothes. She's dying to get out from under his thumb and away from the isolated farm. Heck is smitten with her and encourages the older men to take her with them. They refuse, but Elsa follows them anyway and says she is going to the mining camp to marry Billy Hammond (James Drury). She becomes drawn to Heck as the trip progresses, but his advances are too aggressive, and she bolts for Billy as soon as they reach camp.

The marriage is a disaster from the moment it is official. The drunken revelries end in the near rape of Elsa by Billy's four brothers. Just as she runs screaming from the bridal bed in the camp saloon/hotel, Judd shows up, decks Billy, and says Elsa is coming back with them. The Hammonds call a camp court - the only justice available in this isolated place - but Westrum forces the justice of the peace (Edgar Buchanan) to say that he wasn't licensed to marry anyone. The court must find in Judd's favor. Off camera, the Hammonds beat up the alcoholic preacher and then set out to reclaim Elsa. The film ends in a final showdown at the Knudsen farm between the aged gunslingers and the Hammond brothers.

Although this is not a flat-out, mature Peckinpah film, there are more than glimpses of his savage, macabre style. The wedding scene is filled with grotesques - whores dressed in their gaudiest finery to act as bridesmaids, their obese madam decked out in a green, satin gown with a cone-bustier top that puts Madonna's cone bra to shame, the preacher drunk and drooling. The virgin Elsa, with her short Joan of Arc hair (in fact, Hartley had just finished playing the Maid of Orleans on stage), looks like the perfect sacrifice. The entire scene resembles Bunuel's famous beggars orgy in Viridiana, but in vivid color and tinged with wild West abandon to rev up the Western conventions. We get another comic grotesque scene before the final shootout. Peckinpah photographs a gaggle of chickens and lingers on them for quite some time. It is only after we have dismissed this interlude as a throwaway shot that Peckinpah pans up to the wide-eyed and bloody face of Knudsen, dead and draped across a rail near the chicken coop.

This film has been called an elegy to the West, but I see it as very much a traditional Western. The important relationships in it are between men, setting up father-son and brother-brother associations that, at first, look unique, but actually are very traditional. The caricature father-son and brother-brother relationships are the Sampsons and the Hammonds. The heart of the film is the brotherlike relationship between Westrum and Judd, which becomes severely strained when Judd discovers Westrum plans to betray him. Judd embodies the noble sheriff type who plays clean and stands up for what is right. He came to this position through hard knocks and a lifetime of playing both sides of the fence. He represents the wisdom of age and self-knowledge. Westrum, a weaker and more worldly character of less renown than Judd ever had - he lies about his accomplishments on his carny marquee - is clearly the junior member of the team and was, perhaps, in the son position in years gone by. It is Heck who finally shows the choice that must be made between good father and bad father. When he adopts Judd's ethics, he shows that there is a future for the West after all. In the end, Peckinpah reveals his belief in the salutary myths of the Old West. Imagine that. l

2006-10-13T16:30:00.000-05:00

The Birds (1963)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

By Roderick Heath

“Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.”

The Birds introduces us to Melanie Daniels, a socialite in the fullest sense of the word. A creature of her big-city environment, comfortable with her social and sexual status, adroit, adept at getting what she wants. Intelligent, wily, occupied, but powerfully bored, indulging her not-very-serious whims until they have serious results. We find all these things out about her in the first scene of The Birds - in the still-got-it smile she gives at getting a wolf-whistle on the street; in how she pretends to be a shopgirl for the benefit of Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor); in how she’s irritated by Mitch having taken her in rather than vice versa, and then chiding her because of one of her stunts that he felt should have gotten her jailed; in how swiftly she tracks down the identity of this handsome, authoritative pest, so at odds with Melanie’s flittering interests. When Mitch ends the joke with the above-quoted line, he identifies Melanie as a prisoner, a practical joker for whom the joke is on herself, in her dissociation from responsibility. The line is, of course, a double pun. In The Birds, humans are living in a gilded cage, fluttering behind bars, delivered from the dangerous freedom of true flight, living in what Norman Bates called “private traps.” Soon the humans will be literally encaged by the birds.

Like so many Hitchcock heroes, Melanie leaves the social womb of a city – here, San Francisco, capital of American gothic – for Mitch’s home town of Bodega Bay, at the end of a drive up the radiant Pacific coast. Hitchcock indulges in the hushed, rugged prettiness of Melanie’s drive, preparing the film’s dialectic of beauty and violence and humorously shows two lovebirds rocking to the car’s movements in their cage in the cage like people. Melanie has the best revenge for Mitch’s judgmental swagger, combining this, one of her patented practical jokes with an altruistic gift. The lovebirds, however, are a very unfunny portent of things to come.

In teasing out information about Mitch and his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) and adolescent sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), Melanie talks to local schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), a transplanted bohemian with a husky-voiced air of bruised, serene discontent. She recognizes the hidden meanings in Melanie’s journey, of which Melanie is herself hardly aware. Annie made the same journey once, failed, and washed up. Melanie successfully plays her prank, leaving the lovebirds in the Brenner’s white waterside house, making a getaway via runabout, only to have a seagull to strike her head and draw a spark of blood that stains Melanie’s gloves, the first note of a gore symphony.

Melanie is one of Hitchchock’s most interesting heroes (despite casting Tippi Hedren, a barely competent actress). She’s a Hitchcock blonde, but is linked less to Grace Kelly’s liquid nitrogen burn or Ingrid Bergman’s intricately suffering damsels than to Roger O. Thornhill in North By Northwest as a representative of a useless class, gossip-column twin to his playboy ad man. Melanie is caught up in charades, games, and jokes enacted with mirthless passive-aggressive precision. Mitch tends to Melanie’s wound with care but interviews her with lawyerly skill, entrapping Melanie in her lies until she’s left with no choice but to come to dinner with his family. The first half of The Birds is a neurotic screwball comedy, without that genre’s “oh, isn’t this hilarious?” nudges, populated by aching characters.

Melanie finds Lydia intimidating, just as Annie did. Annie has spent four years puzzling out the riddle of that sphinx for the next brave soul, and found Lydia’s iciness is not that of a domineering matron but rather of an emotionally weak woman. One of Hitchcock’s most powerful ever shots shows Melanie chatting on the phone to Mitch whilst Annie reclines, apparently disinterested, but tense through to her bones.

As the shot indicates, Hitchcock could have been a Renoir or Bertolucci if he’d wanted to, so acute was he at communicating the psychic workings of his characters. Hitchcock had learnt his craft during a vital two-year stint in Munich in the fulcrum years of the early ’20s. He was most inspired to direct by Fritz Lang’s Der Muede Tod (1921), which, with its expressionist style and death-and-the-maiden eroticism, casts a long shadow to this film (another future great converted by that work was Luis Bunuel). Hitchcock’s penchant for minimalist frames and charged visual metaphors, influenced by silent era expressionism, here has been razored down to resemble Japanese artistry, especially in the way Hitchcock places figures in relation to landscapes. Robert Burks’ superb cinematography is crucial; Burks, Hitchcock’s long-time collaborator, only made Marnie after this with him, and then died in a house fire. The sparseness of the drama makes The Birds the first haiku monster movie.

Hitchcock came from the lively tradition of Cockney black humor, with its obsession for interweaving sex, crime, comedy, and death that turns savage serial killings into the subjects of children’s nursery rhymes. From Lang and other German masters, Hitchcock’s native bent happily met the Germanic tradition of taking the psychological content in gothic and crime stories seriously. Perhaps aware that his standing as an artist and a commercial force was at its pinnacle, Hitchcock took risks with The Birds. Dispensing with music, traditional narrative, and star names, Hitchcock was selling The Birds on the back of his cinematic skill, using mere sound and the lack of it for generating suspense.

Most intriguing is the cue he takes from the Italian films of alienation. The Birds' lack of explanation for its horrors and question-mark finale dovetails the arbitrary cruelties of the macabre tradition with modernist narrative deconstruction, loudly introduced to cinema audiences by Antonioni with L’Avventura. The Birds makes a most pointed reference to La Dolce Vita. Melanie, talking with Mitch at Cathy’s birthday party, demystifies one of her most infamous stunts, cavorting nude in a fountain in Rome and states her recent stabs at altruism resulted from her Roman experiences: “It was very easy to get lost there.” She also reveals the true gap between her and Mitch, which has nothing to do with money or place of birth but with emotional bedrock. Whereas Mitch has a family who loves him almost to the point of suffocation, Melanie is consumed with loathing for her mother who “ran off with some hotel man in the east” when she was a child. Annie, supervising the party, watches them connecting with mournful expression.

The film also plays with the apocalyptic hint of La Dolce Vita’s finale – that the rotting, hedonistic world will keep fiddling as beasts lurch from the sea. To catch Melanie’s La Dolce Vita reference is to think of that film’s characters, the threat she felt of being “lost” amongst them, and the urgency of destruction around them. The Birds seems a near-sequel, distilling its ’60s paranoia of nuclear holocaust and social-moral collapse, transmuted by Hitchcock’s Anglo-Catholic censoriousness into a parable of decay and struggle. Explanations for the birds’ behavior are posited – that they are affected by an illness; that they are a fulfillment of biblical prophecy; and, according to an hysterical diner patron, that Melanie is a kind of Typhoid Mary bringing bird attacks in her evil wake. Each of these explanations is mocked. But Melanie, whom the birds have targeted, does seem to be an avatar of everything wrong in the human world. The first three incidents - the gull that clips Melanie’s head, the bird that slams into Annie’s door, the attack on the children’s birthday party – come as the humans are playing some sort of emotionally fraught game, and the birds provide savage metaphysical comment.

Still, Hitchcock, though a moralist, was never a hanging judge. He held the rich and the sexy, the happy and the hollow, the common man and the uncommon woman, in a dialectic of delight and disgust. He put his heroes through character tests of medieval rigor. The ironies of The Birds’ story develop logically even as worldly logic evaporates, and the characters each fall under the microscope that determines their fates. Mitch, one of Hitchcock’s familiar momma’s boys, is actually one of his most straightforwardly macho heroes. His rescues of Melanie are only metaphors for his rescue job of her psyche. Lydia, apparently loathing potential rivals for her son’s affection, is, in fact, projecting her own fear of rejection and desire for maternal intimacy onto them. Annie’s long-ago failure to fight through is mirrored in her tragically brutal end.

Melanie’s passage through the fire is central. She has not one, but two “shower scenes.” The shots of her driving through the vast, beautiful landscape find their ultimate reversal when Melanie is trapped in the cage of a phone booth, watching unimaginable carnage, her world gone from ennui-producing plenty to terror-provoking entrapment. Later, the inhabitants of the Brenner house pass through several circles of hell - a not-at-all-coincidental, infernal red glow from their fire is the only light as demons peck, shred, and smash their shell. Melanie is caught alone in an upstairs room by birds that have penetrated the ceiling, and she’s being torn to shreds as she shouts first for Mitch, and then, barely audible, cries for him to get Cathy and Lydia out of the house. It is only at this point that all the Brenners arrive to save her. Melanie, in that final renunciation of self-interest and offering her last breath for others’ salvation, gains her the right to existence and have a family. The last image of her is of a near-catatonic, blood-spattered woman folding gratefully into the arms of mother Lydia. Hitchcock’s films are filled with heroes who finally gain their salvation by taking great physical chances, bordering on masochism, for their lovers.

The Birds is Hitchcock’s last great film. Marnie and Frenzy have elements of greatness, but are uneven. Marnie especially attempted to cross into new territory of a dramatically sustained, stylized psychodrama, but was too late and unfashionable an effort. The Birds has its ropy moments, like the campy “wooo, spooky!” bits when Melanie and Annie notice birds doing funny things, and the halfhearted make-up of mangled Melanie after her attack. Despite Hedren and Taylor’s anemic performances, Pleshette and Tandy are brilliant, and there are great cameos by Ethel Griffies as one of Hitchcock’s pet kooks, a know-it-all ornithologist, and the ever-sturdy Charles MacGraw as a gruff fishing boat captain. Hitchcock had one of his best writing collaborators in the great, recently late Evan Hunter, who provides a superbly suggestive script. Such was his seismic force and artistic vitality, that Hitchcock, despite only making two real horror films, The Birds and Psycho, created with each a brand-new genre strand. As Psycho pointed forward to the slasher film, so The Birds promises such varying works as Night of the Living Dead (which borrows the house-siege situation), Jaws (1975), (1977), The Hills Have Eyes, Aliens (1986), and even John Sayles’ Limbo (1999) with its theme of family found through trial. l

2006-10-08T12:44:00.000-05:00

Chicago International Film Festival

I'm at the CIFF for the next two weeks, so Ferdy on Films won't see too much activity until after the show is over. If you want to catch my reviews of the films I will be seeing there, go to The Beachwood Reporter and look under the People, Places, and Things section. I've already seen a couple of outstanding films and am looking forward to the variety of documentaries and feature films I have lined up, as well as one silent film, Chicago (1927). l

2006-10-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

"Our Backstreets" #12
Why I Blog

Yesterday, I got the surprising request from an on-line publication called Reconstruction to write a piece and post it here on why I blog. Why surprising? I’m always surprised when someone finds me here among the billions of words on the internet and talks to me—that is, now I am.

At first, I thought my blog would be a steady stream of content from me and commentary from my readers. In fact, I get very, very few comments. I think that may be a function of writing about obscure films. How can you comment if you haven’t seen the films. “Gee, I like your writing?” “I’ll put that in my Netflix queue?” I have taken it on faith and am content that people will find me, read me, and some of them will come back again to see what’s new on my site.

Why do I blog? I am a professional writer and editor who makes a living covering subjects about which I have an interest, but no fervency. It never seemed worth the time and effort to write pieces about my personal interests and submit them to publications that might not have the desire or space to publish them, and so I didn’t. I’m not the type to write only for myself; I’m not a diarist, which I suppose sets me apart from a lot of bloggers.

Of course, like many people, I instantly recognized the potential of the internet to help me reach beyond my immediate surroundings to people and places I would never meet in a lifetime of searching. When I went from film fan to serious film buff, I became intensively involved on a film discussion board with approximately 40 regulars. At this omnivorous stage of my film education, I was hungry for information and views that could expand my horizons, as well as to express my own views to a knowledgeable “sounding board.” I also liked meeting new personalities from all over the world and making “friends.” I felt part of a community that seemed like a foreign country to people who were staunchly offline.

After several years, however, the limits of discussion boards became all too apparent. It was hard to attract and engage new people into the established group, which had a virulent hostility to newbies (my own acceptance into the group was a very long and agonizing process). As such, the opinions and behaviors of posters about film became predictable and of decreasing value. Personality clashes and a chat room atmosphere began to take the place of information exchange and the camaraderie of mutal interest, making the board very disagreeable to me. Additionally, I found out that, for me, friends are made on the ground, not in cyberspace.

I had begun to write reviews of films for this discussion board, but was painfully aware that they were virtually ignored. At the same time, my film knowledge and growing acuity as a film critic were becoming apparent to me, to the few people who did read my reviews on the board, and to members of the film community in my hometown I met in classes and at screenings.

When I made the decision to leave the film discussion board, it was with the intention of starting a publication-quality blog where I could indulge my love of writing and film at the same time, with total content, illustration, and layout control. I hoped to provide unique content by following my offroad approach to film viewing and analysis and thereby fill a need. I focus on every type of film, from every era and country, with a strong complement of reviews of silent films and documentaries, and a handful of overlooked current releases. I also review some television miniseries of particular worth, and provide commentary on issues about which I feel strongly, though the latter concern is a relatively minor part of my blog. I have a contributor who also left the film discussion board for much the same reasons as I did. His writing and knowledge of film are first-rate, and he adds immeasurably to the quality of my blog.

I have decided to align my blog with a website that complements my personality and whose work I admire. I have mixed emotions about this. I won’t be as obscure, which may, happily, stimulate more discussion. But I rather enjoy being somewhat unknown, like the films I review, to allow for more freedom of movement without pain. I’m also worried about losing creative control. If that happens, I’ll go back to being an independent blogger. My blog is a labor of love, and while it is not confessional in any major sense, you can probably learn a lot about me from the way I write and what I have to say about these flickering images of the human condition. l

2006-10-04T10:04:00.000-05:00

"Our Backstreets" #11
Had Enough?

Another school shooting. This time it was among peace-loving people who are so basic in their living that they didn't even have a telephone in school to call for help when the mad man struck and killed their little girls. Two other communities in the last week and a half also suffered the agony of a school shooting. There have been many school shootings. The most famous of them all, Columbine, riveted the world in 1999. Yet, no federal legislation targeting gun manufacturers and dealers came out of it. Instead, incredibly, a commission was formed to take aim at the entertainment industry for allegedly putting violent ideas into children's heads, not at the people who put guns in their hands. A pretty good summary of where we stood on gun control in 2004 can be found here. I haven't found anything more recent so far, but I'm pretty sure not much has changed. Nobody seems to want it to, and the pro-gun lobby wraps itself in the Constitution whenever there's a challenge.

What I know is that the Second Amendment of the Constitution has never been used to form a standing militia to fight an unjust government, which is why it was written in the first place. The Confederate states didn't use it. They just left the Union. The only people who cling to the Second Amendment are people who like to shoot things--targets, animals, people. Republicans who say they are strict constitutionalists ought to look at gun control laws and pass them right through. They are not unconstitutional because they do not speak to the right to form a militia to fight an unjust government.

But, frankly, I think gun control isn't going far enough. Guns need to be outlawed. Period. We can't go around trying to find every nut who wants to shoot up a school or kill his brother-in-law over a card game. Better we should remove the instrument of destruction completely. What do gun manufacturers add to the world? Guns. Killers. Grieving families and friends. We should work as hard to stamp out guns as we did to stamp out polio. Guns are a killer disease.

I wrote a letter to my senators and congresswoman. I'm posting it below for you to use to write your own letters. Send an e-mail to your representatives. Here's where you can find their e-mail addresses and links to their snail mail addresses. Here's what you send them (or put it in your own words):

DATE

The Honorable NAME and ADDRESS

Dear NAME,

The shooting of innocent children in their schools has shocked the nation yet again. Thoughts are focused on what we can do to prevent this from ever happening again. The entire community must help stem the causes of violence. But as my representative, I ask you to play a big part in helping.

The kneejerk reaction is to do more to deter the crime by making the penalties stiffer. This will not work. The only way we can avoid another sickening display of violence against schoolchildren is to take the guns out of the hands of the people who would use them.

I know gun control is a hot issue. People claim they have a right to bear arms as guaranteed by the Constitution. I say that the right of teachers and children to be safe in schools and for parents to expect to see their children every day, safe and sound, after school trumps the NRA and those who support its position.

I am heartsick to think that I might have to wake up one morning and see another headline about children lying dead in their classrooms. It’s time to get the manufacturers and dealers of guns off the streets. Then we won’t have to worry about looking for the needle-in-a-haystack lunatic who will kill our children with a commercial product we don’t really need.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME

Do it. Do it today. I've had enough. Haven't you? l

2006-09-28T15:22:00.000-05:00

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
Director: Terence Fisher

By Roderick Heath

This is the best film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book. In fact, it’s better than the book. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels hardly stack up against his short-story gems. The novel of Hound shoots itself in the foot by blowing the cover on its villain halfway through, then stumbling through an anti-climactic last act. It also avoids examining undercurrents the story presents, even copping out of the science/superstition clash that drives the narrative, only flirting with the ideas comically when Bishop Frankland threatens to sue amateur anthropologist Dr. Mortimer for body-snatching in his digs at Neolithic sites. But Doyle fails to bring anything to a point. He even writes Holmes out of half of the novel.

Armed with a tight screenplay by John Bryant, Fisher’s film charges with force into the story’s potential. Opening with a typically thunderous James Bernard score timed with lightning bursts, the camera closes in slowly on the matte-painted Baskerville Hall. The velvet-threat tones of Francis de Wolff, playing Mortimer, intones the legend of the hound. In the 17th century, a tenant farmer is tortured in the Hall by aristocratic cads because he stood between his daughter—imprisoned upstairs—and Sir Hugo Baskerville (played with perfect sleazy elegance by David Oxley). Baskerville, for a coup de grace, roasts the man in the fireplace.

Sir Hugo has to pay up on a wager to his fellow noble scoundrels on how long the man would last, and being the gentleman he is, he proposes paying with the girl. Proceeding upstairs, he finds the girl has absconded out the window via the ivy-covered walls. Hugo orders his hunting hounds released to chase her down, and sets out on horseback, crying “May the hounds of hell take me if I can’t hunt her down!” He catches her in the fog among wreathed ruins of an abbey and stabs her death with relish. He is then confronted by a growling, unseen monster that devours him greedily amid the creep’s blood-curdling screams.

Having gotten our attention, Fisher dissolves to Holmes’ study as Mortimer concludes his reading. Unlike the novel’s agreeable geek, this Mortimer is a fat, faintly shifty self-publicist who responds huffily to Holmes’ less-than-enthralled air. Peter Cushing’s Holmes is introduced, his pencil-thin form leisurely lifting his hand with a gasp of vision not at Mortimer’s words but to play a chess move that’s occurred to him. Watson is played by Andre Morell, who had portrayed Nigel Kneale’s scientific titan Quatermass on television, making it clear he’s not a Nigel Bruce buffoon but a quick-witted, if slightly old-boyish, colleague.

Dr. Mortimer engages Holmes to solve the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville with a litany of relishable clues, such as the footprints of a gigantic hound and the fact that Sir Charles tiptoed (“But he wasn’t tiptoeing,” Cushing intones, “He was running, Watson, running for his life until he burst his heart!”). Holmes is also to protect Sir Charles’ heir, Sir Henry (Christopher Lee), who, it soon turns out, needs protection badly. There’s a stowaway tarantula in his boot, that crawls onto his shoulder (suggesting, in one shot, a large lump of lint), and is disposed of by Holmes who hits it like he’s killing an anaconda. Though hardly dangerous to anyone else, the spider could have been fatal to Sir Henry, with hiss inherited heart condition. Holmes announces he must stay in town, so he has Watson accompany Mortimer and Sir Henry to Baskerville Hall.

First seen in delicately menacing sunlight with Bernard’s eerie oboe scoring, Dartmoor soon becomes a nightmare-drenched wonderland. There’s the convicted killer of prostitutes Selden (David Birks) loose from Dartmoor Prison, for piquance. There’s dingbat local minister and entomologist Bishop Frankland (Miles Malleson), for comic relief. Or is he? Did the tarantula come from his collection? Why does Mrs. Barrymore (Helen Goss), wife of the trusty housekeeper (John LeMesurier), weep at night? Why is Selden signaling to the hall? What are saturnine farmer Stapleton (Ewen Solon) and his enfant sauvage daughter Cecile (Marla Landi) up to?

Despite the noisy music and equally loud color, Fisher’s films are marked by a cool mixture of poetic realism and tightly built sequences, and, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a riot of florid atmosphere--rotting leaves, jagged stone, dawn-lit moors, rustling silk, blood-red coats, Marla Landi’s earthy skin, dripping mines, lanterns, and black bogs. Fisher’s Hammer films revitalised British cinema and rode point for a revolution of Horror popularity that only ran out of steam some 25 years later. Fisher began his directorial career in stultifying quota quickies. His one early work of note was So Long At The Fair (1951), featuring Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons, a fascinating mystery based on a great urban myth. The film sits heavily under the starchy influence of the standard period film, and would have benefited from Fisher’s later, rowdier touch.

Indeed, before the Fisher-Hammer explosion, British genre cinema, though rich and fascinating, lacked the damn-the-torpedoes drive of their American brethren. Suddenly, that WWII-era, stiff-upper-lip veneer cracked, and out came a bloody-gorged beauty, luxuriating in sex, violence, pounding melodrama, black humor, and with a coherent thematic agenda. Like the “Angry Young Man” tales that were emerging at the same time, Fisher’s early Hammer films jumped with the eagerness of a terrier on rats onto the skeletons in the English cupboard--particularly sex, class, and religion. Hollywood and European Horror of the ’20s and ’30s, only took cues from Freud and surrealism. This hitherto unexplored element in the Gothic genre became, in the hands of ’60s Horror practitioners, at its best a potent vessel for revisionist views of history, power relations, and morality shifts.

Dracula, for instance, the invading foreign seducer preying on the flower of English femininity, was refashioned by Fisher and Lee as a suave precursor of James Bond, a vampire Heathcliff, a variant on the handsome ruffians Stewart Granger played years before. Amidst the generic explosion the success of the early Hammer productions generated, Fisher’s films laid down the blueprint for a movement away from purely metaphoric horror into more socially and psychologically aware works. Whilst too many horror stories are reflexively conservative creations, serving up doses of misogyny, fear of sexual deviancy, and needful conformity, Fisher began a trend that would be expanded on by later directors such as Peter Sasdy, Michael Reeves, Gordon Hessler, Hans Geissendoerfer (in his vampirism-is-Hitlerism parable Jonathan [1968]), Roman Polanski, and George Romero. Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, written by Anthony Shaffer and starring Lee, created as a parody/tribute, inverted Fisher’s style by replacing Gothic chic with deceptive folkish whimsy, but reverently employed his intellectual approach. Much later, Fisher would be paid homage by Neil Jordan with his remarkably bizarre fantasy The Company of Wolves (1984) and Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Fisher’s films show a consistent fascination with the relationship of Manichaeistic forces: good and evil and their fraught relationship. As axiomatic as this fascination sounds in the genre context, it is, in fact, hardly so. Some directors, Jean Rollin for instance, regarded traditional “good” as an idiotic blind alley. Others, from Murnau through to Polanski and Romero, regard it as fragile and ineffective. Still others, the true exploitation directors, conform to standard moralist structures even as they rejoice and celebrate what they purport to condemn. In Fisher’s films, good and evil stand entwined, evil usually rather more attractive than good, and fatally so.

Fisher’s moral eye was unpredictable, original, and inescapable. He turned tragic titan Victor Frankenstein into a ruthless, destructive sociopath, a meddler so driven to discover that everything, even human life, becomes incidental. He is light years from Colin Clive’s preening motherly male, instead a manifestation of the alienation found in Edward Teller’s disinterested statement about the detonation of the atomic bomb he helped create: “Who wants to see that? It’s just a big bang.” Fisher then became the only director to do anything interesting with Dracula’s nemesis, Van Helsing, turning him from aged savant into dashing man of iron, comforting in his fearless resolve and paternal, caring strength, but frightening in his puritanical brutality and willingness to crush the leech-like sensuality of vampires (usually women). As well as the first servings of truly in-your-face gore in his stakings, Fisher also offered a clear statement of the painful relation between “good” and “repression,” an indictment of for-your-own-good regimes.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes stands in the same position as Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein as an arbiter of rationalism in an ignorant, intellectually sluggish world; he is Frankenstein with a moral compass. He clears away the shadows and reveals the greasepaint and old rope used by Stapleton to make Sir Henry think the past is quite literally haunting him. Holmes is (here at least) a less interesting figure than Cushing’s Frankenstein and Van Helsing, except in his haughty, egotistical streak, a strong trait in the stories, more emphasized here than any other film.

The film is most crucially interesting in remoulding the relationship of Sir Henry and Stapleton’s daughter (in the novel, his actual wife, forced to pose as his offspring to make his potential future claims easier). Casting Lee as the descendent of the depraved Sir Hugo marks him as a powerful, imperious, sexually magnetic presence. As such, far more meaningful than the novel’s pallid baronet, Sir Henry is attracted to the gleaming-eyed, sullen-mouthed, Spanish-born Cecile Stapleton (Marla Landi), who provokes and yet runs from his stirred lust. Sir Henry is cursed with the same rapacious instincts as his ancestor, but so is Cecile--her fire is the Baskerville genes sharpened by deprivation and centuries of rage held by the peasantry towards their aristocratic exploiters, to their deadliest, most sexually sadistic point. A femme fatale to the max, Cecile is Sir Hugo returned in his victim’s body.

Likewise, Stapleton (Ewen Solon)--in the novel an insidious, devious naturalist, a false-benign opposite of Holmes--here plays the gentleman farmer but crippled (by an inherited trait of Sir Hugo’s, a plot point) and down-at-heel, generating his evil plot with native cunning rather than intellectual prowess. The Stapletons’ revenge enacts the classic “return of the repressed.” In the film’s breathlessly well-staged finale (apart from a less-than-terrifying mutt), Cecile, having lured Sir Henry to the Abbey, the ruins of which are, throughout the film, a bullring-like battleground of good and evil, and turns their passionate tryst to a mocking tirade in preparation to serve Sir Henry up for dinner. Doyle had a singular running theme of abused women in his stories--in one, a maltreated wife fills her villainous husband with the entire magazine of a revolver, to Holmes’ and Watson’s unblinking approval--and characterized Miss Stapleton as a terrified dove trapped by her husband. Fittingly, where in the book it is Stapleton who is sucked into Grimpen Mire, here Cecile is last seen sliding into the muck. The evil of the Baskervilles, their greedy sexuality, dies with her.

Fisher, though not as decoratively sophisticated as Bava, was great at pace and action--two elements that directors with infinitely larger budgets and resources can never get in proper balance. None of his films slow for a second, whilst remaining as coherent as filmmaking can get. His trademark touches include vigorous close-ups and deep-focus dioramic shots that bind together elements and crystallise the action. Fisher expanded his intensely rhythmic approach to editing (his first job in pictures), and The Hound of the Baskervilles stomps on its tackier production elements to create a film of racing verve.

Hound was a comparative box office failure, because the audience resented a lack of monsters, so a planned series of Holmes films did not join the painfully distended Frankenstein and Dracula cycles. Fisher continued provided visitations on traditional themes, though his romantic variation on The Phantom of the Opera (1962) proved a big flop and stalled his career. Generally out of place as Hammer films became sillier, sexier, and more violent, Fisher served up one more bona fide classic and the last word on his Manichaeistic themes, The Devil Rides Out (1967), from a Dennis Wheatley novel. He turned in a couple of more half-hearted Frankenstein flicks and the limp The Lost Continent (1968) before retiring and dying in 1980. l

A small note of trivia: Michael Hawkins, who plays the most prominent of Sir Hugo’s cronies, is the father of Christian Slater.

2006-09-23T15:52:00.000-05:00

Excellent Cadavers (2005)
Director: Marco Turco

In 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two magistrates who had been working for more than a decade to break the back of the Sicilian Mafia, were murdered in spectacular bombings that outraged the people of Sicily and the rest of Italy. The saga of how they got to their fateful deaths, what they accomplished, how they were betrayed, and what has happened in the subsequent decade comprise the documentary Excellent Cadavers.

Excellent Cadavers is a 1995 book by American journalist Alexander Stille, and it formed the basis for a 1999 film of the same name. This Italian documentary uses Stille as narrator who is shown retracing the steps he took to write his book, with incidents he recounted told in "flashback" through archival film footage and interviews with individuals who knew the players and witnessed the various events of this dramatic period in Italian history. A brief history of the modern Mafia emerges as well.

Before World War II, the Mafia (referred to often in the film as Cosa Nostra) operated mainly in the countryside of Sicily. The Allied governments--as usual, incredibly shortsighted and naive--used the local Mafia leaders to keep order right after the war, and the organization got a taste of the money that could be made by expanding into the cities. During the 1970s, mafiosi from the rural region of Corleone began a bloody extermination campaign to rid themselves of rivals for the lucrative heroin trade to the United States. At this time, Giovanni Falcone a magistrate from Palermo who was working in Sicily began a painstaking investigation into Mafia crimes and their connections with the Palermo business community. The murders of mafiosi, policemen, and magistrates continued.

Eventually, a group called the Anti-Mafia Pool, whose most prominent members were Falcone, Borsellino, and magistrate Antonino Caponnetto, amassed enough evidence to hand down indictments--thousands of pages of them put together while they were holed up for their own protection in a prison on the island of Sardinia. They were aided by the detailed information provided by a Mafia family head, Tommaso Bruscetta, who had been captured in 1982 in Brazil where he had fled after escaping from prison during a day release. Bruscetta had suffered the loss of many family members during the reign of terror of the Corleonesi, and informing was his form of revenge.

What became known as the maxi trial began in 1986 in a football-field-sized bunker built to withstand a missle attack. Again, Falcone and Borsellino were virtual prisoners along with the 474 indicted mafiosi who watched the proceedings from cells that lined the entire rear of the courtroom. At its end two years later, the trial resulted in 360 convictions. Only a handful withstood the appeals process, and only after the Mafia-corrupted magistrate Corrado Carnevale, the "Sentence Killer," was forced to resign from the appellate court upon revelations of serious ethics violations. In 1992, the Mafia got their revenge. They killed Salvo Lima, the mayor of Palermo, for failing to halt the maxi trial, and finally got to Falcone and Borsellino. Upon the death of the latter, an extremely emotional Caponnetto was quoted on camera as saying, "It's all over."

Although the public rage was intense and a witness protection program that Falcone and Borsellino had urged for years was instituted in response to their murders, the decade that followed, which included the indictment of seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti for Mafia activities, saw the work of the Anti-Mafia Pool all but dismantled by corrupt politicians. Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister in the mid 1990 and from 2001-2006, clearly sided with the Mafia.

Turco's documentary goes into great detail about how Falcone basically put together a database of Mafia transactions by hand. As a Sicilian, Falcone understood the horrible toll Mafia activity took on the local economy and well-being of average Sicilians. The horrifying bloodbaths that periodically erupted--a murder occurred in Palermo every three days during 1982--are brought vividly to the screen for the outrages they are. One nauseating photo taken by Letizia Battaglia, a photojournalist who Stille speaks with intensively during the film, shows the severed head of a man sitting on the front seat of a car. After looking at such photos and viewing the arrogant, self-pitying mafiosi whining inside their courtroom cages, Falcone's ultimately fatal crusade against the Mafia doesn't seem the act of a madman or a careerist, as Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, the coiner of the phrase "excellent cadavers," seemed to imply in one comment about the maxi trial. Falcone, Borsellino, and the rest of the Anti-Mafia Pool were courageous fighters against a persistent cancer that the majority of Italians would like to see eradicated.

I felt that I got to know Falcone and Borsellino and understand the rhythms of their lives at this time through their own words and those of their intimates. I had seen the outside of the courtroom bunker and knew about the maxi trial, but to actually see inside, to listen to Bruscetta from inside his bulletproof booth denounce one of the defendants who ordered his brother's death, was a powerful experience. I had known in my gut and from reading Sciascia's novels about the Mafia (most notably The Day of the Owl) that the Mafia is not "cool" or honorable. I never watched The Sopranos precisely because of my disdain for these thugs. How they work--and that was laid bare by Bruscetta--is of interest, if only to find effective ways to cut them apart. In Italy, the people had the will, but not the power. Unfortunately, politicians find these criminals useful, and it was politicians whose visible rejection of Falcone for promotion within the criminal justice system made him vulnerable. The results are heartbreaking not only for him, but also for the Sicilian and Italian people.

Although the use of Stille doesn't work very well, this film is still quite effective. It covers a lot of territory in a judiciously edited manner. We get enough information to make sense of the complex relationships and proceedings, but not so much that it becomes confusing. People who are very familiar with the maxi trials may not hear anything new, but the power of the images Turco put together and the pain of the people who knew Falcone and Borsellino should help them get beyond their knowledge to the emotional core of this story. The most heart-wrenching scene in the film is the public funeral of the police killed along with Falcone. The widow of one of the fallen men tries so hard to speak of love, peace, and forgiveness, but is compelled again and again to acknowledge that the Mafia has no love. "There is no love here," she chokes through her tears to her adversaries hidden in the crowd.

As a citizen of Chicago, one name kept running through my head as I watched this fine film--Mayor Richard M. Daley. His absolute power in the city and his administration's corruption (from which the Mafia likely benefits) share a lot in common with the Italian cancer. But it doesn't seem to bother a lot of people who are getting theirs in "the city that works." Public outcry, which seems highly unlikely, may be the only thing to make justice more than a motto cut into a frieze. l

2006-09-21T17:25:00.000-05:00

Winchester '73 (1950)
Director: Anthony Mann

High-Spade Frankie Wilson: Did you ever wonder what he'd think about you hunting down Dutch Henry?

Lin McAdam: He'd understand. He taught me to hunt.

Wilson: Not men. Hunting for food, that's alright. Hunting a man to kill him? You're beginning to like it.

McAdam: That's where you're wrong. I don't like it. Some things a man has to do, so he does 'em.

This pointed exchange between James Stewart as rancher-turned-avenger Lin McAdam and Millard Mitchell as his best friend outlines the contradictions that animate Winchester '73 and make it a forerunner to the complex Westerns that were to follow, most notably the acclaimed John Ford film The Searchers (1956).

Anthony Mann is probably best known to film buffs as a noir director. The year he made Winchester '73, his first Western, was also the year he directed one of the best noirs ever made--Side Street. His transition from a genre that owes so much to the German Expressionism that Mann, as a German, was so adept at gives a perverse twist to the most American of genres. Although the title card for Winchester '73 shows a wide-open West with two tiny figures riding along the top of a ridge, this film is shot in the classic claustrophobic fashion of noir, with noirish betrayal at every turn the fuel that stokes its story.

The film begins in Dodge City, now lawful and gunless thanks to the ministrations of Sheriff Wyatt Earp, whose aged, genial portrayal by Will Geer is a strange one to eyes accustomed to young and vigorous impersonations by the likes of Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. A large number of gun slingers have gathered in town (and been requested to check their firearms at the door) to enter a sharpshooting contest for which the prize is a Winchester repeater rifle, called "One in a Thousand" due to its astonishing perfection. Lin McAdam is one of the contestants, as is a man who calls himself Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally). Lin and Dutch Henry come face to face in the saloon where registration for the event is going on, and the tension between them, shown in extreme close-ups of both men, registers immediately and erupts into a fight. Earp breaks the men up, and tells them they can take up where they left off after the contest. He takes Lin's name down, and Lin makes a point to say that it's his real name, unlike others who feel they need to take another one. This is the first signal of a betrayal, and it most certainly was aimed at Dutch Henry.

During the shooting contest, Lin and Dutch Henry fire bull's eyes in identical patterns with their rifles, and end up as the finalists vying for the prize. Moving the targets further away does nothing to affect their accuracy, so they take to firing at coins tossed in the air. Eventually, Lin says if he can't hit a postage stamp stuck to a coin he has already shot through, he'll cede the contest to Dutch Henry. Lin succeeds and is declared the winner. His feeling of victory is short-lived, however. Dutch Henry breaks into Lin's room and wrestles the gun away from him, nearly choking Lin in the process. He and his men ride out of town quickly without picking up their guns from Earp's office. Thus, by necessity, their next stop is a gun dealer. Lin and High-Spade ride in relentless pursuit. It's not the Winchester Lin wants so much--it's Dutch Henry's head on a platter. It's what he "has to do," the manly code of Western justice that, in Mann's hands, plays like the inescapable fate of a noir antihero.

Dutch Henry is suckered at the gun dealer's by a card hustler and gun runner who wins all his money at poker and the Winchester, too. As he rides off, Dutch Henry follows in murderous pursuit. He's too late, however, to get either his gold or the Winchester. When he catches up with the gun runner, the man is dead, robbed and scalped by Indians unhappy with the quality of the guns he has brought to them for sale. It is their intention to massacre the government soldiers on their land using repeating rifles, just as the Sioux did only weeks before to General Custer and his men.

Lola (Shelley Winters), a young woman Lin met in Dodge City as she was run out of town by Earp for prostitution, is riding with her fiance Steve (Charles Drake) to a ranch he wants to buy for them. They are ambushed by the Indians who killed the gun runner, and Steve abandons Lola in sheer terror--yet another betrayal. Fortunately for them both, he sees some U.S. cavalry men in a nearby valley. He returns for Lola, who is whipping her team for all they're worth, and they ride to what they think is the safety of the encampment. Unfortunately, the Indians have had the soldiers pinned down all day getting ready to attack. Into this trap ride Lin and High-Spade, who clue the soldiers--replacements for the current troops at the fort--into Indian fighting and likely methods of attack. The commanding officer Sgt. Wilkes (Jay C. Flippen) says he could have used men like them at Bull Run. Lin said they were there, all right, but fighting on the other side, a reminder of the betrayal of Americans against their own kind. The Indians are routed and the chief killed. Lola, attracted to Lin, asks him for a bullet before he leaves. This phallic symbol signals Lola's in-kind abandonment of Steve. The Winchester the chief had been using is recovered by Sgt. Wilkes, but Lin misses his chance to reclaim it. Steve accepts it instead.

We leave Lin's quest behind to follow Lola and Steve to the ranch house he wants to buy. The sound of gunfire and horse's hooves interrupt their tortured conversation about Steve's abandonment of Lola to the Indians. An outlaw gang breaks into the house and holds them and the wife and child of the house's owner hostage against a posse of lawmen who have chased them there. Waco Johnnie Dean (Dan Duryea) takes a fancy to Lola, humiliates Steve by forcing him to do woman's work, and eventually kills him. In a strangely hilarious scene, the posse sends a burning wagon into the side of the house to flush Dean and his gang out. The macho code of Westerns by which the gun reigns supreme stands in ridiculous contrast to a family's home being destroyed. There is an unintentional reminder for modern viewers in Dean's nickname, Waco, of a "successful" assault on "outlaws" by the feds at Waco, Texas, that ended in mass destruction. Where's the law in that?

Eventually, we catch up with Dutch Henry when Waco, with Lola in tow, meets up with him for a bank robbery. Waco has taken the Winchester from Steve, and Dutch Henry demands it back. To pull the robbery, the gang rides into town where Lin and High-Spade also have gone believing Dutch Henry might be headed there. Lola insults Waco, Lin gets to defend her, and Waco and several of his men end up dead. Dutch Henry, however, escapes, with Lin in hot pursuit. A final shoot-out in the hills, with Dutch Henry--actually Lin's brother Matthew--firing on Lin with his own Winchester, and Lin trying to outmaneuver Dutch Henry in among the crags of the narrow cliffs is a symphony of claustrophobia.

In Anthony Mann's West, there is no love. Brotherly love has been twisted into hate and vengeance. Lola's devotion to Steve was questionable even before he skunked out on her, and she seems to accept her abduction by Waco with the almost casual equanimity of a woman who's never been too choosy about the company she keeps. Her attaction to Lin is animalistic, like a good femme fatale who doesn't really get to do her thing in this genre, as is his to her. The actors have a wonderful chemistry that somewhat defies Stewart's screen image. Winters was gorgeous, and she always had a strong sensuality, but under Mann's direction, cinematographer William Daniels photographs Stewart to look sexier than I've ever seen him.

Mann turns the Western on its head in the subversive way German directors always tackled American myths. Long before it became fashionable, the senseless violence of the Old West is made to look childish and a sheer waste. I love that Wyatt Earp resembles everybody's kindly grandfather, as though Mann is showing what the West without its myths would look like. Frankly, it looks awfully boring, and gives us another clue about our love affair with the gun and a macho code of conduct.

High-Spade's conversation with Lin, quoted up top, really shows up the code. Lin is avenging his father, but High-Spade questions whether that's what his father would have wanted. That doesn't matter. You have to do what you think is expected of you by your society, no matter that it means a betrayal of biblical proportions. Lin doesn't have a plan for his future after he guns down Dutch Henry; that's not part of the myth. Don't fighting men just keep fighting? I do believe Lin when he says he doesn't enjoy it; nobody likes to be pushed around by a life script. We may infer a happy ending, but in true noir tradition, there is no real sense of happiness or future as the screen goes to black--only emptiness and a perfect gun without a purpose. l

2006-09-14T11:37:00.000-05:00

The Public Defender (1931)
Director: J. Walter Ruben

A paradox exists in the world of the film buff. Buffs consider cinema an art form that transcends mere entertainment or box office value. Yet, buffs are constantly looking for corners of film making that few people would give a second look--and those corners often contain the throwaway entertainments of yesteryear. To the average filmgoer, a bad film is just a bad film. To a film buff, a bad film might have other rewards in what it reveals about tastes, technological capabilities, social norms, and fashions and decor of a particular period. A bad film might also give a collector of a particular star's filmography a missing link or insight into their favorite performer. It is with these thoughts in mind that I review a bad film that I'm very happy I saw--The Public Defender.

The Public Defender--not really bad, but rather mediocre--is a fascinating film to me for several reasons. The year it was made was interesting for the film industry, in general, and for its star Richard Dix, in particular. In 1931, Dix not only made this low-budget quickie, but also starred in the acclaimed Western, Cimarron. He received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, and Cimarron won a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, and stamped cinema history with one of its most famous scenes--the thrilling stampede of would-be landowners during the Oklahoma land rush of 1889. The film also is an early talkie, and witnessing the challenges of this new technology has merit. In addition, the story of The Public Defender could have been ripped off for a hero who has been fodder for many an entertainment up to the current day--Batman. Finally, Richard Dix is an actor who has been a compelling presence to me ever since I saw him in a superb silent film about the plight of Native American veterans of World War I, The Vanishing American (1925).

The Public Defender begins in the board room of a bank, where board member Eugene Gerry (Emmett King) is being arrested for misappropriation of funds. Gerry swears his innocence, but his colleagues turn a deaf ear to his pleas. In fact, they are the real thieves and are using him as the fall guy. A short time later, one of the conspirators is robbed of some business papers. The only clue to his assailant is a card left at the scene that says "The Reckoner."

The other conspirators are at a country club, talking in private, when rich playboy Pike Winslow (Dix) enters the club following a couple of months of traveling after quitting his job to live off his large inheritance. He is there to dine with Barbara Gerry (Shirley Grey) and her disapproving Aunt Matilda (Nella Walker). Gerry laments that their home and its contents will be sold to pay restitution to the bank. Winslow offers the use of an apartment of a friend who will be going abroad and is looking for a suitable tenant to sublet it; of course, the apartment actual is his. Winslow also attends the estate auction and secretly buys some of the Gerry treasures to return to the family. He is sure Eugene Gerry is innocent and has been about trying to prove it--as The Reckoner. His date with Ms. Gerry is a cover to allow him to snoop around the bank partners.

The parallel with Bruce Wayne/Batman (which did not appear until 1939) is unmistakable. Winslow even has an Alfred-like "Professor" played by Boris Karloff and a strong-arm "Doc" (Paul Hurst) who forms a rough parallel to Robin. Winslow constantly pesters the police inspector 'Mal' O'Neil (Alan Roscoe) for a deputy's badge, suggesting the alliance Batman would form with Commissioner Gordon. He also never steals anything of monetary value; he is only after evidence of the crime and frame-up.

Within its low budget, The Public Defender manages a few scenes to suggest the opulent surroundings of its main characters, particularly the auction inside the Gerry home. Most of the sets, however, are very plain, and the costumes might have come from the actors' own closets. When characters walk on wooden floors, every footfall is loud and clear. Improvements in microphone equipment and placing were works in progress. Characters appear and disappear with a single line of explanation, and many actions happen only to set up a climactic scene. Even disapproving Aunt Matilda has a change of heart toward Winslow that just happens. The acting is barely workmanlike from most of the cast.

Even Dix seems a bit wooden. His is a body and face made more for the silent screen. His voice has a strange, muffled quality to it I first noted from my viewing of him in the RKO/Val Lewton production The Ghost Ship (1943). Yet he went on to a long career at RKO and beyond, winning a new and loyal audience as the star of seven movies based on the mystery radio series "The Whistler." Indeed, The Public Defender has a serial feel, and serials were an important staple in the Hollywood line-up that persists today on television shows such as 24 and in movie series like Star Wars. While I can't call it a good movie, The Public Defender moves briskly and entertains, a tribute to what the movie factory could produce within its small budgets and tight shooting schedules. Yeoman directors like J. Walter Ruben aren't auteurs, but they are professionals who could teach modern film makers a trick or two.

In reviewing this film, I'm violating a rule I set for Ferdy on Films not to write about films that are not available in home viewing formats. It is only because Turner Classic Movies had a Richard Dix film festival that I got a chance to see it. Still, I think that a discussion of The Public Defender is instructive to provide a way to "read" films for more than their mere entertainment value. Keep your eye on TCM listings for future showings and try it yourself. You might just like it. l

2006-09-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

Hamsun (1996)
Director: Jan Troell

This morning, as I got online to check my e-mail, my ISP's infotainment service, Comcast News, flashed a headline that caught my attention: "Chicken Dies, Wife Shoots Husband." Clicking through, I was greeting with the following opening paragraph:

"Chesire, Ore. - A woman shot her husband in the back after he killed her pet chicken, the Lane County sheriff's deputies said. Deputies said they were sure that Mary Gray, 58, intended to shoot her husband, Stephen Gray, 43. They weren't certain if the husband meant to fire at the chicken."

I immediately thought of Hamsun.

Like the opening of that "news" story, Hamsun begins with an old man sitting at a desk and becoming increasingly annoyed with the cluckings of a chicken in the yard outside his window. He spritely races after the beast and beats it to death with the handle of his cane. His wife runs out to examine the remains of her pet and cries bitterly that everything, even her chicken, has to be sacrificed to his genius. The old man turns and walks unrepentantly back to his room, packs his bags, and moves to a hotel for some peace and quiet to work on his new novel.

The man is Knut Hamsun (Max von Sydow), chronicler of the soul of Norway and the country's pride and joy as the winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature. The woman is Marie (Ghita Nørby), 22 years his junior, a former actress who constantly complains about giving up her promising career to marry Hamsun. She is a lonely woman who finds herself married more to an icon than a man and green with envy over his fame. The time is the late 1930s, and the specter of war in Europe has Norwegians worried about maintaining their neutrality and guarding their own safety.

Into this climate comes a man whose name is now synonymous with "traitor," Vidkun Quisling (Sverre Anker Ousdal). He is in the rural village near the Hamsuns' farm to speak about the principles of national socialism. The turnout for his talk is quite small, but one important person is in the audience--Marie. She is quite taken with the Nazi emphasis on the importance of women in nation building; she doesn't seem to take in that this role is primarily to maintain the purity of the national bloodline. Quisling actively courts Marie as a way to get to the great man himself and attempt to secure his endorsement. When Hamsun learns that Germany is against England, a country he hates for causing starvation in Norway during World War I, he signs on to the Nazi cause as well. Marie, who is fluent in German, takes frequent trips to Germany to hobnob with the Nazi elite. She thoroughly enjoys shining under her own spotlight.

The Nazi takeover of Norway is complete by mid 1940, with Quisling at the helm and Hamsun a visible supporter in the flesh and in his editorials and letters to the editor of the nation's most prominent newspapers. It is not long, of course, until the Nazis start their systematic oppression of the Norwegians. The outcry of a sell-out among the Norwegians puts Hamsun on the defensive. He is hounded by the press, his books are thrown into the streets by his neighbors, and worst of all, his own concerns about Hitler's broken promises for Norwegian sovereignty alongside Germany worry him greatly.

He decides to visit the Fuhrer and meets the infamous leader in his mountain retreat, Berghof, where he is kept waiting by a scornful Hitler (Ernst Jacobi) and his minions. Hitler attempts to flatter and admire Hamsun into making the visit little more than a courtesy call, but Hamsun presses his cause for Norwegian sovereignty, reminding Hitler of his promises to Norway in exchange for its support. Hitler bristles and abruptly ends the visit, nearly throwing Hamsun out on his ear. Hamsun, thoroughly disillusioned, returns to Norway, Marie, and their troubled marriage.

From this brief description, it would be easy to think that Hamsun is more a political history than anything else. In fact, however, the film is chiefly occupied with the dysfunctional marriage between Knut and Marie and the dysfunctional family it spawned. It is easy to imagine that Hamsun was attracted to Marie's vivacity as a contrast to his own reclusiveness, as well as her purported physical attractiveness, handsomely realized even in middle age by Ghita Nørby. But the marriage is a classic oil-and-water affair. A writer's life is often a solitary and selfish one into which a live wire like Marie rarely can fit. In the case of a symbol like Hamsun, the private persona can be all but obliterated. When the Hamsun children show up to try to patch their parents' marriage back together, childhood resentments against the father who was always absent, even when he was in the room, bubble up and over. Anette Hoff, as Knut's favorite child Ellinor, gives a sympathetic reading on the old man in contrast to her siblings' bitterness, but nothing seems to resolve. Eventually, Knut and Marie reunite to continue their inevitable dance until death.

Swedish director Jan Troell is best known, if he is known at all in places outside of Scandinavia, for his 1971 television miniseries The Emigrants. He has a real feel for Scandinavian history and manages to work an alchemy on his cast that is truly surprising, considering his two leads, von Sydow and Nørby, spoke their native Swedish and Danish, respectively, throughout filming. Jacobi as Hitler is one of the most effective screen Fuhrers I've seen, bringing his malevolence and egomania to life quickly and ferociously. Hamsun's reputation was nearly ruined in Norway because of his wartime alliance, and the film suggests that it was his naivete, ultranationalism, and insularity that may have been to blame for his choice. Nonetheless, though Hamsun seems thoroughly reviled throughout much of this picture, von Sydow takes pains to show the vulnerable and often bewildered old man beneath the prim, three-piece suit. I found Hamsun to be a singular and convincing portrait of an artist who paved his own road to hell. This husband definitely meant to kill the chicken. l

2006-09-07T16:30:00.000-05:00

Lèvres de Sang (Lips of Blood, 1975)
Director: Jean Rollin

By Roderick Heath

Jean Rollin, now 69, is a whole grain cinema anarchist and one of the few fine French horror directors. He began with homemade shorts and rose all the way to directing homemade features. His films skirt soft-core pornography and, when circumstances require, plunge right in. But he’s also one of the most authentic poets every to take up the art form. Rollin debut feature, Le Viol du Vampire (1967) arose from several shorts he was asked to make for a French distributor who needed to fill out a bill sporting a short American vampire film. Rollin The resulting film was a predictably uneven, but attention-winning mish-mash of surrealism, Grand Guignol, and black humor.

Rollin became one of the few true heirs to arise from a long tradition of Parisian underground cinema whose forebears include Feuillade and Bunuel, as well as French Gothic literature (Leroux was his favorite author), and the vast, semivisible world of European S&M comics (one of the major artists of which, Druillet, designed Rollins’ posters and appeared in Le Viol). Visually, Rollin’s films, with their semiclothed females arranged in geometric forms and intensely fetishist poses, recreate that style vividly. As in Feuillade and the early Dali-Bunuel collaborations, he utilised Paris, that marvellous free set, and set up against it the most bizarre and impossible images he could concoct.

His masterpiece is Lèvres de Sang. When I say masterpiece I maintain proportions. It’s not a film as free from defects and soaring in its ambitions as Les Enfants du Paradis or The Seven Samurai. In the murky realm of '70s Euro-cinema, experimental, genre, and off-beat directors maintained their careers by spicing their films with nudity to satisfy fleapit theatre crowds and the distributors who serviced them. For Rollin, this was hardly a problem; he was dedicated eroticist, and his films enact the sexual aspects most horror films depict only metaphorically. They’re adult fairy tales, dressed in gothic-erotic clothing. To see how good Rollin was at this, it’s an easy task to compare the unembarrassed sexuality of Lèvres de Sang with any late-period Hammer film, say, Twins Of Evil (1972), or, to aim higher, see how he outclasses the efforts of Ken Russell. This is not to say Rollins’ films are free of gratuity. On the contrary, there’s so much gratuity you stop noticing.

In Lèvres de Sang, Rollin presents an uncompromisingly direct study of the incestuous that underlies many vampire mythology which has corrupt ancestors heave off the lids of their tombs and spread disease and death among their descendants. Simultaneously, Lèvres de Sang succeeds in capturing a note of wistful longing for the scenes, hints, landscapes, people that remain on the very horizon of childhood memory, which can, thanks to some small evocation--the right tint of light, a smell, a familiar face--lance right through your adult perceptions and memories to present unfulfilled chances and unanswered questions, even mysteries.

The film begins in a dank crypt where a middle-aged woman with a girlish face, wearing a veil and furs, is supervising men who are placing in the crypt several coffins. Cut to an exterior shot of a ruined chateau--a pull-back reveals it’s just a photo on the wall of a Parisian apartment, where a Bunuel-boring society party is occurring. A man in his thirties, tall, blonde-haired Frédéric (Jean-Lou Philippe, who also cowrote the screenplay with Rollin), is stricken in fascination by the image to the point of ignoring his girlfriend. He shakes himself from his reverie and finds her lounging on a divan with a black-haired woman, who, in reply to Frédéric’s compliment of her perfume, suggests a pretty smell is like a memory or a beautiful woman, the most precious and transitory of thrills.

Frédéric drops into a memory. As a boy, lost at night, he entered the ruin. Dwelling within it was a teenaged girl (Anne Briand) with short brown hair, a pale face, red lips, and draped in white clothes, who greeted him with delicate affection and settled him down to sleep for the night. In the morning, before dawn, she woke him up to send him on his way home. As he rushed from the ruin, he shut the gate, locking her in, but he called back that he loved her and would return to free her.

Frédéric’s girlfriend finds his preoccupation sufficient to walk off in a huff. Frédéric asks guests about the picture, but no one knows the place it depicts. Frédéric appeals to his mother, who we recognise is the woman from the opening, and tries to explain the striking memory the photo evokes. The girl haunts him and, as he says, “I love her the way you love at twelve.” There are yawning holes in Frédéric’s childhood recollections, apparently caused by the traumatising death of his father. His mother impatiently, and a touch desperately, denies the event occurred. Frédéric is unconvinced, and gets a lead from another guest about a photographer who took the shot. This is the black-haired lady, who, when he visits her salon, is busy taking nude photos of a model (a quick-forward remote is advisable here, unless of course you dig it). The photographer tells Frédéric she was paid to keep the location of the ruin secret, but finds him sufficiently attractive (the advantages of coauthoring the script) that she promises to look up the location and meet him later, when she’ll be on a midnight photo shoot at the Paris Aquarium.

To waste time until the rendezvous, Frédéric goes to a movie theatre (showing what looks awfully like one of Rollin’s earlier films) and spies a familiar figure standing in the rear exit. Borrowing an usher’s flashlight, he sees it’s the girl of his memory before she disappears. He pursues her outside and sees her by the gates of Montmartre Cemetery. Bewildered but determined, Frédéric climbs the gate and follows her intermittent appearances until they lead him into the familiar crypt. Frédéric breaks open the coffins, and finds bats grotesquely entangled in shrouds. Frédéric runs off, and the bats turn into young vampire women--draped in see-through shrouds, natch--who look like bloodsucking, heroin-chic fashion models. Most striking are a pair of twins (Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel), who begin stalking the rain-gleaming Parisian streets. Frédéric, unaware of this, encounters a tragic-looking woman wearing too much make-up,who claims to be the girl from the castle. But she’s only a paid decoy who lures him into a room and locks him up. He is freed by the twins, who have torn the woman’s throat out.

Frédéric arrives at the Aquarium, where he passes a suspicious man (who resembles a homicidal Ron Burgundy) and finds the photographer, murdered, in one of the displays. Frédéric pursues the assassin onto a metro train, where his quarry pulls a gun on him. Frédéric escapes from the train, jumps off an overpass, and is pursued. He is saved again by the vampires, who turn on a fountain, obscuring Frédéric from the assassin’s aim. Frédéric, distraught, goes to his mother for help, but she has him hauled away by the men in white coats. Frédéric is brought straitjacketed before a psychiatrist, who cheerfully proposes using shock treatment on him, but finds--in the film’s funniest pay-off--his two nurses are actually the vampire twins, and they kill the good doctor. Frédéric is free, but without hope of solving the mystery until the girl appears beside a blind postcard seller, pointing to one of the cards; it shows the chateau and its location.

Frédéric reaches the chateau, to find the vampire girls have congregated there. He penetrates the ruin and finds the belongings of the teenaged girl, and a sealed coffin, inside of which she lies with a pin in her heart. His mother appears and explains that the girl is his older sister, Jennifer. Made a vampire at the age of 16, she killed Frédéric’s father and created the other vampires, who terrorized the countryside. The mother staked Jennifer, but could not bring herself to behead her or the other girls, so they were all imprisoned. Her tolerance is at an end. Outside, her paid killers hunt down and stake the vampire girls, and she requests that Frédéric perform the coup-de-grace of beheading his sister to end the evil. As the bodies of the vampires are incinerated in a pit, Frédéric appears with a severed head--but it is actually from one of the girl’s dolls--that he throws in the fire. When his mother and the men have left, Frédéric removes the pin from Jennifer’s heart. She awakens and the pair celebrate their joyful reunion. She explains that though she was paralysed, she had learned to project her thoughts, which is how she could appear to him. After having sex on the beach, she turns him into a vampire, and they seal themselves in a coffin to drift on the sea to an island where they will live off shipwrecked sailors.

It’s a splendidly antisocial twist on the traditional imperative of the vampire story, particularly of stories like Le Fanu’s Carmilla, where the lesbian title character must be destroyed so the patriarchy remains unthreatened (and yet, Rollin comes closer than anyone else to capturing the nocturne tone of Le Fanu’s writing). In a less imaginative film, the image of threatening female sexuality would be obliterated, and the man’s need to transgress, to break beyond the boundaries of society and memory dully punished or be retracted. Or worse yet, in the modern mould, the triumph of evil would be a facile punchline. Instead it’s an oddly idealistic finale, reminiscent of Pasolini’s principles. Frédéric blindly believes, from the beginning, that Jennifer’s lost, wounded, caring beauty is worth defying death, madness, and all social values, and remains true to this instinct to the end.

Even as Jennifer’s vampire acolytes are murderous, the mother’s methods of keeping the secret safe, the disease trapped, are just as bad. The brutality of the standard vampire-killing--phallic penetration by staking--is highlighted by the forlorn sight of the twins, a stake having gone right through one into the other, sinking to death clutching each other like children. The news that Jennifer killed his father only seems to confirm that her chief crime was not vampirism, but up-ending the bourgeois family structure. The patriarchy was destroyed early, and their mother’s compensatory, viciously repressive matriarchy is finally outwitted. There is a sorrow to the finale as well as a liberation. Though Frédéric and Jennifer have found each other, death is death, no matter how animated.

Thematically interesting as Lèvres de Sang is, it exists entirely to justify Rollin’s creation of gorgeously weird images, and evocation of a rare, haunted mood. Few other films in the genre that approach its sonorus, alien poetry, oddities like Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931) and John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971); only Fellini’s 8½ (1963) equals it for evoking how childhood recollections bleed into the present. Dotted through the film are memorable touches, essayed in what is, considering the film’s miniscule budget, obscenely pretty, silk-textured cinematography by Jean-François Robin:

At the party, where a bunch of teenagers, flagrantly dressed down, dart between the evening-dressed guests and pinch food from the buffet. The tableaux vivant shots of the vampire girls around the chateau, semiclothed by wind-wafting silks. The hilarious-horrible flashback out of a BDSM comic where the vampire girls drag a nude, chained victim to their lair. The starkly nasty sight of the dead photographer, lying upside-down, bare-breasted and bloodless on water-washed rocks. The scenes where Frédéric pursues and is pursued by the assassin, which evoke Hitchcock, Lang, and Feuillade. Frédéric kissing the dollhead’s lips in the deathly chill of dawn, and his mother’s veiled face stony in triumph. And the finale, a symphony of images (Jennifer invokes an orchestra in the sounds of nature, “conducted by a madman!”), with Frédéric and Jennifer’s entwined, naked forms; Jennifer standing like the human equivalent of the Wicker Man, arms raised in a rite of primal nature worship; the chilling hint as Frédéric lowers himself into the coffin and stops momentarily to study her fine but deathly still face. Their coffin, buffeted by the waves, brushing against the black ribs of a groin, finally floating out into the ship-ridden sea.

Lèvres de Sang was a flop, satisfying neither horror buffs out for blood nor porn patrons, and it’s easy to see why. It’s actually an assertion of primal innocence and places both gore and sex at the disposal of its playful narrative. Rollin survived--just--and limped along under various pseudonyms before nearly recapturing some of his old intensity with Fascination (1979) and La Nuit des Traqueés (1980), both featuring Brigitte Lahaie who, later, added memorable erotic shape to Henry & June (1990). l

2006-09-05T16:23:00.000-05:00

Divorce, Italian Style (Divorzio all'italiana, 1961)
Director: Pietro Germi

In the 1960s, the flower of Italian cinema finally came into full bloom on the international scene. Of course, Italian movie makers had been producing stellar work since at least the 1940s. But it was in 1960 that Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita created a worldwide sensation. Suddenly, Italian cinema was all the rage, with Fellini leading the charge and Marcello Mastrioanni, the star of La Dolce Vita, the very symbol of disaffection that would come to characterize that tumultuous decade.

There were fainter lights in the Italian sky whose work also received recognition at the time but who have faded with the years. One of them was Pietro Germi. A skilled screenwriter and veteran director, Germi originally conceived of Divorce, Italian Style as a tragedy, but the story's possibilities pushed him and screenwriter Ennio De Concini to the extreme edges of comedy. So admired was the screenplay when it made the rounds that Mastrioanni, then a big star, agreed to do a screen test to win the part of murder-minded Baron Ferdinando "Fefe" Cefalú from Germi's original choice, Anthony Quinn. The film that resulted is one of the funniest and biting I have ever seen, with a visual humor Billy Wilder would have envied.

Agrigento, Sicily is the setting for this burlesque--an important point because divorce was illegal there at this time. Fefe has been married for more than a decade to Rosalia (Daniela Rocco), a foolish middlebrow who has gotten on his very last nerve. Fefe and Rosalia live with Fefe's parents in a wing of the Cefalú manor house--all that is left of the noble family's fortune. In the opposite wing lives Fefe's uncle, whose lovely 16-year-old daughter Angela (Stefania Sandrelli) has captured Fefe's heart.

At first, it's hard to see what Fefe dislikes so much about Rosalia. She's affectionate, often wants to make love, and seems to have a bit of an intellect, though more of the pop-psych variety. Yet, once we see her anger at Fefe, it all becomes clear. A shrieking goes off in Fefe's head, and we are treated to his fantasies of murder. These visual flights of fancy go beyond anything that could be described, so closely woven are they with the comic rhythm of the film. But each is perfectly timed, short and sweet, and accompanied by sublime looks on Mastrioanni's face as he imagines the deed.

One day, Fefe approaches Angela in a moonlit garden, and she admits she has nursed a passion for him, too. (No matter that they are first cousins; this is the nobility!) From that moment on, he is determined to kill his wife. But he must find a way to do it that will ensure he won't spend the rest of his life in prison. Recently, a woman received 7 years for murdering her husband, whom she had caught in the arms of another woman. Fefe reasons that if he can maneuver his wife into having an affair and degrade his honor sufficiently to require an honor killing to restore the family name, he could get a light sentence.

Fefe's search for a suitable paramour for his wife is hilarious. He buys Rosalia a new dress and parades her through town during the customary evening strolls once popular in Italy. He hopes the usual tableau of searching male eyes will find her irresistible, as he did when he was young and foolish. While many admire her form, this is not a very efficient way to find her a lover. He thinks an artist would entice her, and singles out a singer in the church choir. During church, he remarks helpfully to Rosalia that the man has quite a lovely voice. She agrees with a giggle and then says, "Poor man." She whispers into his ear, and the camera pans up to the man singing in the choir box. After church, a voiceover by Fefe confirms that this man was obviously not a suitable choice. This is the deadpan way we learn of the man's "infirmity" as a castrato.

One day, a painter comes to town to do some work in the church. It turns out that he and Rosalia were lovers before the war. Fefe instantly commissions him to restore some frescoes in the Cefalú home, monitoring the two former lovers with a tape recorder to see how their renewed romance may be progressing. Eventually, Rosalia does run off with her lover, and the town watches as Fefe becomes more and more degraded. When he takes his evening stroll now, he is subjected to catcalls and urgings to avenge his honor and that of his family. His sister's long-time fiance, who, in a running joke, Fefe constantly catches in compromising situations with his sister, breaks the engagement because of Fefe's humiliation. Finally, mafia Don Calogero (Ugo Torrente) agrees to help find out where Rosalia is hiding so that Fefe can do the "right" thing--just what Fefe had been waiting for.

This film is a visual feast in which the actors inhabit their caricatures with relish. For example, Sandrelli knows exactly the type of vixen called for, and she puts on the best madonna/whore I've seen in quite a while. When Fefe's lust is still in its undeclared state, he peers through a high window in the bathroom to watch Angela lounge on her bed across the courtyard, shutters thrown open and cover off in all her calculated innocence.

Rocco has the wide face and too wide smile of the stereotypical shallow wife. Everything about her is both fetching and grating. She plays Rosalia as a woman who is unaware of anything but her own narrow concerns. When she runs off with her lover, she doesn't even have the sense to worry about their safety. She is the perfect buffoon.

Of course, the ultimate buffoon is Fefe himself. Mastrioanni plays him as a degenerated aristocrat, with shellacked hair, a foppish cigarette holder, and a peculiar mouth tic that eventually becomes very grating. He's certainly ingenious about how to get what he wants, but he is as unreflexive and doltish as any of the other characters. The rules of Sicilian life are very rigid, leaving little space for individuality. Germi capitalized on this rigidity to lampoon both the code of honor and the roles into which bourgeois Italians eagerly throw themselves.

Germi references Mastrioanni's triumph in La Dolce Vita by showing the fictional opening of the Fellini film in Agrigento. With its expert direction, dead-on casting, and inventive cinematography Divorce, Italian Style stands alongside this Fellini milestone as one of the gems of Italian cinema. l

2006-08-29T15:21:00.000-05:00

Audrey Rose (1977)
Director: Robert Wise

When Robert Wise was given the assignment late in his career to direct this film of an apparent reincarnation "gone wrong," he was well prepared for the task. During his long career, Wise directed many tales of the eerie, such as the brilliant The Body Snatcher (1945) and The Haunting (1963). He also directed some of the finest women's films around, including I Want to Live! (1958) and So Big (1953). He also created two classic science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). His respect for the subject matter of each of these disparate genres, his knowing direction of the women in his films, and the skill he brought to bear to create the appropriate mood for any story come together in Audrey Rose, a disturbing film that stands with the best of his work.

From the very beginning, Audrey Rose juxtaposes a happy, privileged family in New York City with a stranger in their midst. At first, that stranger can only be noticed by the observant viewer who doesn't glaze over during the first few minutes of a movie. As Janice Templeton (Marsha Mason), her husband Bill (John Beck), and their 11-year-old daughter Ivy (Susan Swift) walk and play in Central Park, a figure in a trench coat makes passing appearances--standing beside a tree, sitting among the empty seats of the park's bandshell. Later, this figure, a man with an enormous beard, stands outside Ivy's school. Janice notices him and becomes spooked, sure that he is after Ivy. She reports the encounter to Bill, whose entreaties to the police to protect their daughter cannot be acted upon; the stranger has done nothing but appear in public places, and there's no law against that.

As concerned as Janice is about the stranger, she is even more concerned about Ivy. Her daughter has been having nightmares and screaming fits, which occur around her birthday. These fits seem to have intensified over the years, and neither Janice nor Bill have made headway against them.

One day, Janice is late meeting Ivy after school. She searches the school, then sees Ivy run down an alley. She calls out, but Ivy doesn't answer. She chases Ivy into a dead end, but Ivy has vanished. When she turns around, she sees the stranger. He approaches her and says he is sorry for all the subterfuge and the disguise, but he had to be sure before they met.

The Templetons receive a Who's Who clipping in the mail that identifies the stranger as respected scientist Elliott Hoover (Anthony Hopkins), an apparent attempt to show he is not a crackpot. Eventually, the Templetons consent to meet him at a restaurant. There he tells them a tragic story of a car accident 11 years before that claimed the lives of his beloved wife and 5-year-old daughter Audrey Rose. Wise showed us this horrific accident in the opening sequence of the film. The car plunged down a ravine, rolled, and burst into flames. Hoover tells of his long period of mourning, broken when two spiritualists said that his wife's spirit was at peace but that Audrey Rose was alive. He recounts his odyssey in India where he studied Hinduism and came to believe in reincarnation. Then Hoover drops the bomb. He believes that Ivy Templeton is the reincarnation of his daughter, a "wrong" reincarnation that happened before her soul was able to come to terms with her short life and violent death. Bill and Janice's sympathy turns to anger, and they storm out of the restaurant and warn him to stay away from them and Ivy.

Of course, Hoover does no such thing. He comes to their home and talks his way in. The home is exactly as the spiritualists had described it. He is more sure than ever that Audrey Rose's spirit is alive in Ivy. He tells Janice that medical examiners determined that Audrey Rose lived a full five minutes after the car stopped rolling, was burned, and died of smoke inhalation. He gives his daughter's time of death. Janice reveals that Ivy was born a mere two minutes later. While he is there, Ivy has another screaming fit. Hoover calls to Audrey Rose as Ivy screams for "Daddy," and is able to soothe her. Janice is starting to doubt her own beliefs. Bill warns her not to be taken in and to keep Hoover well away from their home.

Hoover attempts to come by again. Janice tells the doorman to refuse his entry. But then Ivy has another fit. She starts banging on the windows of her bedroom. The palms of her hands are burned, though a cold autumn rain is pelting the windows. Frantic, Janice tells the doorman to let Hoover in. He is able, once again, to calm her. Janice is starting to believe his story, but Bill is furious, feeling usurped as the father of Ivy and head of the household. He insists that Ivy needs psychiatric help, nothing more.

Ivy has another uncontrollable fit. Hoover appears again, but this time he removes her from the apartment. The doorman confirms that Hoover has sublet an apartment in the building. When Bill brings the police to Hoover's door, Hoover is arrested on a kidnapping charge. The rest of the film revolves around his highly publicized trial, which ends in a dramatic attempt by the prosecution to debunk Hoover's reincarnation defense--a past-life regression under hypnosis.

Reincarnation, Indian mysticism, and past-life regression were the vogue at the time this film was made, giving Audrey Rose a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Never during the film are the acts of the apparently reincarnated Audrey Rose surrounded by excessive "spookiness" or violence, which keeps the story from devolving into the horror film it somewhat resembles in storyline and set-up--The Exorcist. Anthony Hopkins seems a bit too twitchy for my tastes, a bit too effete and intense. He was not yet completely in control of his technique, but nevertheless, we get the sense of a man shattered by grief and galvanized by a belief that events seem to justify.

John Beck, who has the thankless task of being the blustering heavy, actually comes across as a loving family man fighting for custody of his child against a man who has a claim that his wife comes to believe is legitimate. He is frustrated that Ivy runs to Hoover instead of him in her time of need, though when she is fully Ivy, she considers Bill to be her father. Indeed, she never really knows that Hoover thinks she is his daughter, because she only comes to him as Audrey Rose in her death throes. Susan Swift performs this emotional trauma over and over with utter conviction and fearlessness.

Marsha Mason is the real revelation in this film. I'm used to seeing her in lighter fare from Neil Simon, but I always recognized that she has a prodigious acting talent. Wise gets it all out of her and then some. She moves through a wide range of emotions believably and seamlessly, and comes to her belief in Audrey Rose honestly and with an enormous amount of love for her daughter. Wise's respect for the feminine point of view, developed on the women's films he directed, prevents Janice from being a mere foil for the men in the film or a flaky dupe.

This film comes down squarely on the side of reincarnation and the danger of meddling in matters of the spirit. As such, the ending is a bit too pat and optimistic, the only betrayal of the truth the film creates within its unique point of view. I was thrilled to be reminded what a wonderful director Robert Wise was. Audrey Rose is a lesser-known but no lesser effort from the master. l

2006-08-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

Island of Lost Souls (1933)
Director: Erle C. Kenton

The novels of H. G. Wells have proven irresistible to film makers with a taste for the fantastical. The Island of Dr. Moreau has been filmed three times, but the 1933 version was the first and, in my opinion, the best. It's amazing how much suspense can be achieved with so little pyrotechnics. Stripped to its bare essentials and focusing on human cruelty, this masterful horror film shares much in common with the fine films of the eerie produced by Val Lewton. Island of Lost Souls sent a shiver down my spine more than once.

The story is laid out simply and economically. Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) is sailing from Africa to Samoa aboard a freighter laden with cages of wild animals to meet his fiancee Ruth (Leila Hyams). He befriends the wireless operator, who warns him to stay clear of the frequently drunk and disorderly Captain Davies (Stanley Fields). Nonetheless, Parker sees Davies mistreat M'ling (Tetsu Komai), the odd-looking servant of Dr. Montgomery (Arthur Hohl), and punches Davies' lights out. Parker has wired Ruth when he will be arriving, but before the ship makes port, it stops to drop its animal cargo, Dr. Montgomery, and M'ling at a small island inhabited by Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton). Davies, still smarting from Parker's attack, informs Parker that he will be disembarking there, too. When Parker resists, Davies punches him and throws him overboard onto the deck of Moreau's ship. Moreau protests, but to no avail. He is forced to bring Parker to the island, about which macabre rumors have been floated all across the South Seas.

Moreau threads the small party through a wooded area using a whip to scare off strange creatures who look human. Once they reach the big house on the hill where Moreau lives, we finally get a good look at him. Laughton's round face and obsequious smile are framed by a pencil-stubble moustache and pencil goatee--a most ridiculous face! He cautions Parker to stay in the house.

A young woman with a decidedly feline look is called by Moreau. He has decided to see if she is a real woman, with real human attractions and instincts. This is the first explicit indication that something very fishy is going on, and Moreau is responsible for it. The woman, Lota (Kathleen Burke), is brought to Parker, and he tries to make small talk with her. She can speak, but is awkward around him. Moreau retires from the room and watches them from a distance. It appears that Lota is indeed drawn to Parker, and Moreau feels triumphant.

He turns his attention to a compound a short distance from the house where several grass huts stand and a fire burns. He, along with one of the inhabitants of the compound known as the Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi), leads the odd-looking men below him in a recitation of the Law, punctuating each law (no walking on four limbs, no tasting of flesh, no taking of life) with the admonishment, "Are we not men?" Following a satisfactory "prayer" session, Moreau enters the House of Pain to work with Montgomery on his research--specifically, on a hairy man strapped to a gurney who starts to scream as soon as the two men approach. It is now sickeningly obvious to us that Moreau has been turning beasts into humans.

When Parker discovers Moreau's secret, the film takes a much more sinister turn. Laughton, like the vast majority of British actors, knows exactly how to appear utterly civilized and yet ruthless. Moreau is not inclined to kill Parker--his experiments are about creating human life, not destroying it. Yet, he will not let his godlike ambitions be thwarted. When Ruth appears, along with the skipper of the ship that has taken her to Parker's last known position, Moreau sets one of his creations, Ouran (Hans Steinke), after the captain to ensure that no one leaves the island. This act proves his undoing.

In the hands of director Kenton, Moreau's creations balance their animal origins with their humanlike forms and indoctrination. It would be easy to dismiss their revolt against Moreau as just another horror film convention, but there is really something righteous and pitiable about their actions. While we know they must be destroyed as aberrations of nature, there is sadness in watching it happen. They provide a persuasive case against the meddling of humanity in the natural order of things.

Other aspects of the film are authentically felt and add to the accumulation of horror. From Davies' utter callousness and imperiousness about his ship--a parallel with Moreau's--to Montgomery, a disgraced former medical student who has made his bargain with the devil to save his own skin, we are faced with the depravity of humanity. This depravity contrasts sharply with the poor animals that are stripped of their essence and made to conform to a mad scientist's conception of perfection. The lost souls referred to in the title of this film, changed as it is from H. G. Wells' title, could very well refer to Dr. Moreau and Montgomery. If we suppose that it refers to the animals, the break with scripture that states that only humans have souls is an ironic one indeed.

Laughton is an extremely effective villian in this film. Lugosi, with a smaller part and hampered by a hairy visage, still uses his voice to command moral authority over Laughton. He is an effective leader of his kind, and Laughton's Moreau maintains his hubristic position against them even as they move to destroy him. The other actors are B-movie material, with the exception of Kathleen Burke. Her Lota is a superb prototype for other catwomen to come, from Simone Simon in the 1942 Cat People to Nastassja Kinski in the 1982 remake of that film, and even to Jennifer Blaire in the horror satire The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001).

Island of Lost Souls is both a genuinely scary horror movie and a morality tale. In an age in which cosmetic surgery and genetic engineering are well-accepted practices, it would behoove us to consider the message H. G. Wells had for humanity. Island of Lost Souls is an eerie and sensitive messenger. l

2006-08-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

Operazione Paura (alternate titles: Operation Fear; Kill, Baby, Kill; Curse of the Living Dead; Don’t Walk In The Park, 1966)
Director: Mario Bava

By Roderick Heath

Let us now praise infamous men. The men who had no notion of Cannes or Oscar in their hearts, with no audience other than the drooling perverts hanging around outside fleapit theatres of Paris, Rome, London, and New York. Who bravely made money so that bourgeois poseurs could have art cinema. Who battled pirate producers, the perversity of distributors, and the sheer bloody ignorance of mainstream critics. Who brought intelligence, poetry, and artistry to the most despised of genres—horror.

Mario Bava was an experienced cinematographer who worked with the likes of De Sica and Raoul Walsh before becoming a features director around the same time as Sergio Leone. Bava’s background is obvious in his films, with their creative camerawork and orchestrated lighting. Bava is still far less famous than Leone, partly because of the genre he worked in, partly because of the vagaries of distribution that made his films hard to see, and because he rarely worked with the same level of acting collaborators (one notable exception being Telly Savalas in Lisa e il Diavolo, [1972]). So the realms of artistry found in Mario Bava’s work still rank as hidden treasure to most filmgoers.

Not that he was without duds. Even Elke Sommer’s miniskirt couldn’t save Baron Blood (Gli Orrori del Castello di Norimberga, 1972). Scripts usually stank, but in the hands of stylists of the calibre of Bava, this became a plus because they could cut back on dialogue and required acting and concentrate on flights of cinema. Bava contributed to the first film of the ‘50s Horror renaissance, I Vampiri (1956), predating Terence Fisher’s Curse of Frankenstein by a year, when director Riccardo Freda walked off the production because of the absurdly tight budget, leaving Bava to get the film finished in four days.

Freda was a great stylist in his own right. Splendidly morbid images dot his L’Orribile Segreto del Dr Hitchcock (1962) -- the ghostly brilliance of a funeral procession in a sun shower; the black lace curtains around the bier-like bed that the title character (Robert Flemyng) sweeps aside; Flemyng’s desperate attempts to gain access to a corpse in a clean, white, hospital morgue to satiate his necrophiliac desires; the distant patch of light that steadily grows as the heroine nears the end of the tunnel not knowing what awaits her; the jagged flash edits that reveal a mysterious shroud-wrapped figure playing a harpsichord in a lighting-lit house; and most iconic, gothic muse Barbara Steele’s face screaming in silent anguish through the glass face-plate of a sealed coffin. These survive long after the dumb dialogue and stick-figure dramatics are forgotten.

Yet Freda never conquered those limitations as effectively as Bava. Bava made the last few great Gothic horror films, including La Maschera del Demonio (1960) and Operazione Paura, and helped invent the stalk-and-slash film with Sei Donne Per L’Assassino (1964) and Ecologio del Delitto (1971), cited by John Carpenter and Sean Cunningham as the source for the stylistics of Halloween (1978), and Friday the 13th (1980), making Bava a shibboleth for horror directors at that time.

Operazione Paura, probably Bava's best film, benefits from a tight screenplay (penned by Bava with Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale). In 1900, investigator Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) arrives in the small Mittel Europa village of Kermigen, a very un-Germanic Italian hamlet, with that look of such towns of being both partly organic and partly hewn over centuries out of solid rock. Eswai has been called to this hillbilly realm to perform an autopsy on Irena Hollander, whom we’ve seen in the pre-title scene run screaming across a field, climb some stairs, and throw herself onto a spiked iron fence. Eswai is there at the behest of Inspector Kruger (Piero Lulli), who had received a letter from Irena raving about danger and evil in the town. Kruger’s having trouble getting anyone to talk. Even the town’s Burgomaster, the bald, nervously sweaty, but seemingly sane Karl (Max Lawrence, real name Luciano Catennachi) can’t explain the situation, only give warnings about the grim nearby mansion, the Villa Graps, the name of which elicits a camp gasp of fear from everyone. Whilst Kruger goes to investigate the villa -- he’ll be right back -- Eswai gets an assistant in the comely form of Monica Shuftan (Erica Blanc), a medical student who has briefly returned to her home town to visit the graves of her parents, and the pair perform the autopsy on Irena. They discover a silver coin buried in the body’s heart. Monica, familiar with local folklore, knows it is a charm designed to save the soul of the deceased from evil spirits.

Eswai is soon attacked by villagers, who insist he die for performing the autopsy, but he is saved by the commanding appearance of a black-clad witch named Ruth (Fabienne Dali). She disappears before Eswai can thank her. Later, Eswai spies on her performing a ritual on Nadienne (Micaela Esdra), daughter of the owners of the inn he’s staying at; Nadine has seen the spectral face a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl peering through the window at her, a sure omen of death. Ruth, despite her cruel exorcism practices (whipping the girl’s back with a branch and forcing her to wear a girdle of thorns) and somber demeanour, comes across as the most pleasant person in town, with her throaty, sorrowful voice and calm, protective attitude. It’s no wonder she’s getting it on with Burgomaster Karl, who ruins the mood of their tete-a-tete by delivering the body of Kruger for Ruth to perform her solemn duty for the town’s dead -- putting that coin in the heart.

Eswai, still looking for the Inspector, ventures into the Villa Graps,and find a lone occupant, the crazed-looking old Baroness Graps (Gianna Vivaldi), who, when alone, sweats and suffers as swelling voices suggest tormenting ghostly presences, tying her to the sleeping Monica’s nightmare involving freaky dolls (one of the many horror visual clichés that Bava invented) and dark tombs. Eswai encounters the blonde girl in the halls of Villa. She says her name is Melissa, and behind Eswai on the wall, unnoticed, is her portrait, which sports the dates of her birth and death.

Yep, Melissa’s a ghost, raining sorrow and bloodshed on the village, forcing people to commit suicide by sheer will. Why? Years before, during a feast, someone knocked her down with a horse, and the villagers, who loathed the Graps family, ignored her as she bled to death. Since then, the embittered Baroness, gifted with mediumistic powers, has been the conduit by which Melissa maintains her vengeful presence. Monica is revealed to be Melissa’s sister; the Shuftans, the Graps’ former servants, had rescued her as a baby from the villa. Karl gives his life to reveal this secret, prompting Ruth to finally defy the prophecy that she will die in the villa and confront the Baroness. Ruth strangles the Baroness, though the old bat has lanced Ruth through the chest with a poker, and the two women fall dead.

Operazione Paura stumbles in points, especially in Paul’s throwaway rescue of Monica from a cardboard balcony. The film also suffers at the hands of its lead, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, whose emoting consists of narrowing his eyes and bending his limbs at angles resembling a Ken doll. Bava was at his best in keeping a stately tempo of mystery and atmosphere. Action is virtually perfunctory in his work (as are traditional heroics). In Operazione Paura his slow-build mastery is in full evidence.

The film takes across the course of one night. Eswai arrives at dusk, the sun still giving a watery glow across the flat, bare plains around the town, which is anxiously closing up for the night. The dead woman’s coffin is being hurried through the narrow, crumbling streets. Once darkness has fallen, Melissa is introduced in a POV shot; the camera, accompanied by rusty, yawing sounds, is swinging back and forth looking out upon a cemetery. Then the camera ceases swinging and drops down, and a child’s stockinged legs and trailing dress sweep into view from their place on the swing, and the amused giggle of Melissa’s that punctuates appearances and murders is heard. Melissa stalks the Kermigen night, the shadows of her hands reaching up to windows, then her gliding form forming in view (ironically, Melissa is played by a boy in a wig!). That Melissa’s appearances are clearly announced opens the way for the film’s best shock, when Karl ascends to his attic to fetch a letter for Monica; opening a locked cupboard, he screams as Melissa is revealed hiding inside, clutching the letter and smiling with sublime menace.

Probably my favorite scene involves nothing; when Eswai and Monica are locked outside by the innkeeper for causing Nadienne’s death, they are left despairingly tolling a bell for non-xistent help. Bava cuts through the deserted town, which quivers with shadow and unnameable menace, as composer Carlo Rusticheri’s eerie music composed of unusual, sonorous instrumentation tickles the backbone. Equally memorable for sheer style is Monica’s prophetic nightmare--Monica pleads and moans as the menacing doll advances on her from behind, a shot that perfectly evokes the aware-but-helpless sensations of a bad dream.

Bava’s sense of symmetry is crucial, and it drives the whole narrative of many of his films, which usually end by closing a circle. His characters often find themselves trapped in cycles of behaviour and fate (incest is the grim heart of many of his films). “The circle of death is finally broken,” Ruth gasps in her last breath. In Operazione Paura, this circularity is even visualised when, after Monica has vanished with a scream, Eswai chases a mysterious intruder through the Villa Graps, through identical rooms, catching up gradually until he grips the figure’s shoulder and spins it around to find he has been chasing himself.

Bava’s women are often avatars for condensed pathologies in the Western psyche over female sexuality. Bava invented the stalk-and-slash horror film that became epidemic in the '80s with Sei Donne Per L’Assassino (Seven Women for the Killer, 1964), a title that says it all. This film that lays down a familiar blueprint; Cameron Mitchell’s momma’s boy psycho killer struggles vainly to exterminate female sexuality, a viewpoint usually radically missed by the sadistic spectacles of its legion of imitators. Bava’s women usually inhabit multiple, contradictory roles, toying with familiar Western/Christian stereotypes; Asa/Katia in La Maschera del Demonio, who threatens to become both sexual predator and victim; Daliah Lavi’s Nevenka In La Frusta e il Corpo (1963), both submissive and murderer; Daria Nicolodi’s Dora in Shock (1977), who is both mother and lover of her possessed son; Lisa (Elke Sommer) in Lisa e il Diavolo, who finds herself bound eternally to the identity of a dead woman. Operazione Paura is cited as slightly weaker than La Maschera because it splits its pathological women into multiple parts, yet with characteristic awareness, Bava inverts the usual imagery by making the image of evil the blonde little girl and the force of good the black-haired witch. Although the structure puts Eswai front and centre, he is actually a useless representative of male arrogance; his “sensible” intervention with Nadienne, stripping her of Ruth’s barbed protection, results in Nadienne’s terrible death. When he catches himself trying to rescue the girl, it’s the logical end for Eswai, confronted by his own egotism.

In Kermigen, the patriarchy of the village has been punished by the matriarchal rage of the Baroness, which has become so crazed it blights everything in reach, even the Baroness’s remaining daughter. The only person free to do anything, though she knows it will spell her end, is Ruth, who inhabits the guise of the most threatening form of female sexuality, the "dark" woman, familiar literary twin of the pristine "fair" woman (here, Monica)--single, mysterious, engaging in S&M-like “exorcism” practises on young women. Usually she’d be burnt at the stake, but now she’s the saviour. The film’s finale, dark woman and warped mother die in each other’s arms, one choked and the other fatally penetrated, in a potent image loaded with erotic and symbolic import, leaving virginal beauty Monica safe and sound.

Despite his status as an Italian horror maestro, Bava never indulged in gore, though his early films are violent in a way that would not be permissible in British and American horror for some time. The opening of his first full feature, La Maschera del Demonio, is one of the most brutal in all of cinema, and the end of his last film, Shock, has one of the most wince-worthy, yet oddly pretty throat slashings ever filmed. His jolts of violence are always pungent, effective moments, with a certain horrible beauty.

The quagmire of financing in the '70s killed the European genre cinema traditions and institutions within whichBava worked. The technical and artistic fluency he strived for was degraded by a forced reliance on time-and-money saving devices, such as zoom lens shots. Signing on with Spanish filibuster Alfred Leone didn’t help; Lisa e il Diavolo, a dark, suffocating dream of a film, was butchered, and 20-odd minutes of unrelated footage featuring Robert Alda as a priest was inserted. The film was released as Beyond the Door II (the original film, long a virtual myth known only to Spanish critics, is, thankfully, available today on DVD and video).

Bava’s influence has been undeniable, even if his best characteristics--his intelligence, his sense of cinema as a plastic medium, and his richly artful eye--hardly remain with us, today they’re becoming better and better appreciated in themselves. Bava’s son Lamberto, an assistant director on Operazione Paura, became a successful horror director in the '80s. l

2006-08-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

The Singing Detective (TV, 1986)
Writer: Dennis Potter
Director: Jon Amiel

"There are songs to sing, there are feelings to feel, there are thoughts to think. That makes three things, and you can't do three things at the same time. The singing is easy, syrup in my mouth, and the thinking comes with the tune, so that leaves only the feelings. Am I right, or am I right? I can sing the singing. I can think the thinking. But you're not going to catch me feeling the feeling. No, sir."

--Detective Philip Marlow, The Singing Detective

In 1986, the 6-part miniseries The Singing Detective exploded onto British TV screens like a bomb during the Blitz--a bold, inventive exploration into the heart of darkness and the rise to redemption of one man, Philip E. Marlow, a writer of detective novels who suffers from a horrifying case of psoriatic arthropathy. Reactions were equally strong, and mixed. Some viewers decried the play (as writer Dennis Potter and his colleagues always called them) as obscene and an unpleasant way to relax at home. Others were moved by the raw emotional journey of a deeply troubled man. When the series came to U.S. television the following year, the raves were unanimous. Dennis Potter had conquered America.

Dennis Potter was the son of a miner who grew up in the Forest of Dean, on the English side of the border with Wales in Glochestershire. A rural, isolated place with a unique, archaic dialect, the Forest was Potter's refuge and creative source after he had left it for an education at Oxford and a successful career as a writer of television plays during the golden age of television drama at the BBC. While all of Potter's plays deal with his obsessions, particularly sex, The Singing Detective is his most autobiographical work.

Potter suffered from chronic psoriatic arthropathy, a disfiguring illness characterized by inflamed, flaking skin and pain and stiffness in the joints. Potter had to wear pajamas under his clothes with their pantlegs tucked into his socks to prevent a trail of dead skin from following him wherever he went. He spent considerable time in hospital, and that is where his stand-in, Marlow (Michael Gambon), spends the duration of this series, lost in a sea of memories, fever-induced delirium, and battles with patients, doctors, nurses, and his wife Nicola (Janet Suzman).

When we first encounter Marlow, it is on his admittance to the mockingly named Sherpa Tensay ward of a London hospital inhabited primarily by cardiac patients. Most have been confined to their beds there for a long time, and their peculiarities are on full display. Mr. Hall (David Ryall) is a fussy, lonely complainer who is irritated routinely with Reginald (Gerard Horan), whose bed is next to Hall's but who constantly has his nose in a detective novel. (Later, Reggie and Hall will be surprised that the author of the book Reggie is reading, The Singing Detective, has been sharing their ward with them.) We get an immediate sense of the boredom and rhythms of the ward as Hall squabbles to a half-listening Reggie and mumbles across the room at the loathsome Nurse White (Imelda Staunton), who has yet again started the beverage trolley rounds on the other side of the room.

Marlow arrives bellowing in pain and yelling at the orderly to draw the curtains around his bed as he changes into his pajama top. When we see the horrible flaking on his back, we understand the humiliation Marlow must be feeling. It is compounded when the pretty Nurse Mills (Joanne Whalley) rubs grease on his thighs, causing him to have an erection and climax on her. He tries to explain, but only succeeds in embarrassing her and himself more. Marlow is emotionally and sexually repressed, and it is tempting to consider his outward appearance a reflection of an inner filth.

Soon thereafter, a team of doctors comes to visit him. The senior physician asks questions of Marlow, only to be answered by the attending doctors who flank him. In a fit of pique, Marlow interjects, "Why is it when you lose your health the entire medical profession takes it as axiomatic you've also lost your mind?" and then begins a tearful, impassioned plea for understanding. The doctors, bone dry of the milk of human kindness, immediately discuss a mental health consult and start naming medications to improve his attitude. At this point, Marlow hallucinates an incredible production number to the song "Dry Bones" and featuring lip-synching and dancing doctors, nurses in white showgirl costumes, and gaudy lighting.

The musical numbers are a large part of this work, all songs from the 30s, and all lip-synched as Marlow's father used to do at a local Forest pub. Potter was a man who believed in the ideals expressed in these songs, that life really was full of love and purest longing. The contrasting of such tunes as "After You've Gone," "The Teddy Bear Picnic," and "We'll Meet Again," with the harsh realities of the ward, Marlow's condition, and the crucible traumas Marlow suffered as a boy both reflect and deflect real events.

Marlow also writes a new Singing Detective novel in his head to pass the time, a tale of espionage that involves a client named Mark Binney (Patrick Malahide) who comes to the character of Detective Marlow after a Russian whore he met the night before in the Skinskapes nighclub and slept with ends up dead in the Thames. The imaginative scenes use the language of a Raymond Chandler novel, not the sort of thing Marlow had set out to write. When asked by Dr. Gibbon (Bill Paterson), the psychotherapist he finally agrees to see, what sort of writer he really would have wanted to be, Marlow gives the somewhat surprising answer that he would have wanted to write praises to a loving and merciful god. Yet he heaps contempt upon some evangelical Christians led by one of the doctors who invade the ward for a revival meeting. When the doctor loses his temper and says, "those who are not with us are against us," we realize that Marlow may not be as jaded as he seems and can smell a phony a mile away.

Or can he? He is also filled with paranoia, particularly toward his wife, whom he believes is trying to steal a screenplay from him for her lover, Finney (Malahide), to pass off as his own to a Hollywood producer. This paranoid fantasy intercuts with memories Dr. Gibbon stirs of his childhood in the Forest, his parents' unhappy marriage, and an injustice he committed against a schoolmate that has haunted him all his life. The series intercuts each thread--the present, the hallucinations, the past, and the novel--as a kind of detective story of its own. We try to piece together the "truth" along with Marlow, and are fed clues--fragments of scenes that grow longer and more revealing as the series moves along and we watch Marlow progress physically and emotionally. It boggles the mind how Potter sustained and expanded upon all these threads over the course of nearly seven hours. The writing is literate and absolutely brilliant, and the cinematography and direction give us parallel movements (a raised hand reminds Marlow of his father [Jim Carter] waving good-bye at a train station) and line readings that can be interpreted in more than one way. He even leaves us with one "truth" about Philip's mother of which we may never be sure.

The cast is first-rate. I found Lyndon Davies, the young actor who plays Philip at age 10, particularly spellbinding. His earnest, open feelings and sad face while he prays to God from the top of a tree give the poignancy needed to feel sympathy for the adult Marlow at his most venomous. Michael Gambon's tour de force performance ranks among the finest you will ever see on stage, screen, or television.

A work of this magnitude has many, many surprises and rewards I will leave for the viewer to discover, not the least of which is the exquisite evocation of the Forest of Dean and its people. What is most important about The Singing Detective is the profoundly unsparing humanity it offers its audience. No, this is not a show of escapism. This is meat and sinew, bone and blood. This is nourishment for the mind and the soul, both of which were deeply precious to Potter. Thank goodness there was a time when television writers talked up, not down, to their audience. Let's hope such a time comes again. l

Dennis Potter contributed the screenplay for the 2003 film The Singing Detective, starring Robert Downey, Jr. This is a highly truncated, but still interesting work that I enjoyed. DVD recordings of The Singing Detective miniseries are available. The BBC Video version has a nice extras disc with reactions to the show from the time, an interview with Potter, and a short documentary about Potter, among other features. Finally, a viewing of Dennis Potter: The Last Interview is a must. A dig Potter gives Rupert Murdoch in The Singing Detective reaches its full flourish as he tells interviewer Melvyn Bragg that he has named his fatal cancer "Rupert."

2006-08-08T17:32:00.000-05:00

Billy Elliott (2000)
Director: Stephen Daldry

Children have been important to adult films since their earliest days. Slapstick silent comedies often had some destructive brat in a bonnet driving some overwhelmed adult around the bend. In other films, such as Chaplin's The Kid, the child (Jackie Coogan) was on equal footing and an integral part of a sentimental story of familial love. Even in these films, however, the child was a bit idealized, a condition that would persist through the syrupy Shirley Temple movies that sold innocence to a jaded world and the safe S-E-X Andy Hardy films that would make Mickey Rooney seem eternally adolescent for the rest of his career.

It would take post-WWII social breakdown to gradually make children in adult movies into the too-clever-by-half youngsters, snarky teens, and violent thugs we fear and loathe today. To find anything approaching an "average" child, you have to see films whose primary target audience is children/teens or the increasingly rare family film. Billy Elliott has the most appealing, real kids I have seen on the screen in a very long time, which I suspect accounts for the legions of adults who have been completely charmed by it. Jamie Bell, who plays the title role, is absolutely extraordinary, the kind of kid any parent would like to claim as his or her own. Yet, this really isn't a stellar family film in the strictest sense because the adults in it are one-dimensional and motivated by plot rather than character. This film speaks best to kids.

Billy is the 11-year-old son of a widowed coal miner (Gary Lewis) in Northern England. He shares a room with his older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) and tends to his somewhat feeble-minded, live-in grandmother (Jean Heywood) whose mantra is that she could have been a professional dancer. Perhaps it's her influence that causes Billy to join the ballet class taught by Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters) he has been eyeing from across the gymnasium where he is supposed to be learning to box. The teacher sees something in Billy and singles him out for special attention. Slowly, Billy gets the hang of it, feeling triumphant when he finally manages to nail a pirouette.

Billy has been lying to his father about what he has been doing when he's supposed to be boxing. His father hits the roof, but not because dancing is for "poofs." He's angry that Billy has been wasting money, for the miners are on strike and every penny counts. He forces Billy to give up the class, but Mrs. Wilkinson agrees to continue his training for free and prepares him for a regional audition for the Royal Ballet School.

The day of the audition, Tony is arrested for taking part in a violent demonstration against the mining company and scabs who have been crossing the picket line. Billy must miss the audition to go with his father to bail Tony out of jail. That is when Billy's teacher and father go head-to-head over the boy's future.

A major turning point occurs when Billy and his best friend Michael, who Billy has caught cross-dressing, go into the gymnasium so that Billy can show Michael what dancing is about. Because he knows Michael likes dresses, he fetches one of the girls' tutus and then puts Michael through some barre positions. Naturally, Billy's father walks in on them. Defiantly, Billy does the dance he had prepared for the audition, ending with him staring down his father. Mr. Elliott storms out of the gym but heads straight for Mrs. Wilkinson's house and finds out how he can help Billy get into the Royal Ballet School. We know then that we are headed for a happy ending, though the film manages to make the journey from the coal pit to the orchestra pit an interesting one.

The interactions between Billy and Michael are first-rate. Billy slowly comes to realize that Michael is a "poof" who fancies him, but he isn't bothered by it once the surprise fades. Both boys are frank in their affection for each other, however different in character, and convey a naturalness in everything, from Michael putting lipstick on Billy to Billy giving Michael a kiss on the cheek as he sets off for London. Debbie (Nicola Blackwell), Mrs. Wilkinson's daughter, fancies Billy and urges him into the class in an offhand manner that, nonetheless, shows a shrewdness about how to get him to drop his inhibitions. She is effectively seductive when she and Billy have a pillow fight in her room, tempting Billy to kiss her even though he doesn't fancy her. It's a terrific scene of budding sexuality that is played absolutely right. Another scene in which Billy imagines his dead mother is still alive is deeply moving.

The adults fare much less well. Mrs. Wilkinson doesn't even get a first name, and she's saddled with the cliched life of a frustrated housewife pouring her emotion into Billy's dancing. Mr. Elliott's support for Billy's dancing ambitions, while possibly true for his character, came out of left field because his part was so underwritten. When he runs through the hilly, cobblestoned streets to the union hall to shout that Billy has been accepted to the school, it just looks like an obligatory scene rather than a real moment. However, the film succeeds in contrasting the bleak future Billy would have in the mines with the promise of a fulfilling life in the arts and the big city. I thought it was a nice touch that when Billy asks his father what London is like as they ride the train to the audition, Mr. Elliott declares that he's never been there, or anywhere else.

Stephen Daldry's capital in Hollywood rose in a backhanded way when he was credited with directing Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose to an Oscar in The Hours. A closer look at that flawed film would show that he brought the best out in all the members of that stellar cast, and he does the same with Billy Elliott. I lay the blame for this not-quite-right film at the feet of its writer, Lee Hall, who appears to have done mainly children's films before this one. This would explain his affinity for his young characters and clumsiness with his adults. I wonder if he also was responsible for Billy becoming a righteous tap dancer when he was, after all, learning ballet, but perhaps that was the producer playing to Jamie Bell's strength. As a former dancer, I was bothered by this inconsistency, but as a viewer, I loved every step in Mr. Bell's gifted feet. He is the heart of the movie and gives it everything he's got. You might just fall in love with him--and with Billy Elliott. l

2006-07-30T16:53:00.000-05:00

Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt (2004)
Director: Margaret Brown

Music documentary is a specialized and difficult film genre in which to dabble. In most cases, the music is the most interesting aspect of the musician or group being profiled. The music documentarian, therefore, essentially has two choices—make a concert film that puts the music and the musician’s magnetic persona center stage or choose a subject with such an interesting life or at such an interesting juncture in history that the visual experience will at least equal the experience of simply listening to a CD.

Among the successes of the genre are Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), which records the last live concert of The Band; the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (1970), about the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont, California; Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970); and Sam Jones’ I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002), about the recording of Wilco’s fourth album. Each of these documentaries covered a live experience, which gave the directors the advantage of being able to react to events as they unfolded.

Even when a director must rely primarily on archival footage, the results can be inspired. Bob Smeaton’s Festival Express (2003), about the rock festival train that brought Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and other top performers to cities across Canada in 1970, benefited from great candid films of the time and a sense of fun about the experience Smeaton was able to capture. Smeaton certainly got lucky by having an abundance of source material from which to choose. Margaret Brown, on the other hand, set herself the challenge of documenting the life of a musician who had cult status even in his own lifetime and is almost unknown today. The pickings must have been a lot slimmer for her.

Brown took filmed concert footage, archival photos and home movies, and live interviews with Van Zandt’s contemporaries and loved ones, and presented them in a sometimes interesting, sometimes tricked-up visual display. Brown explains her finished product in this way in her director’s note:

“Guy (Clark, a close friend of Van Zandt’s) told me that Townes’ songs work because of negative space. It’s the holes you leave, he said. I wanted Be Here to Love Me to work in the same way—not by spelling out every detail of his life, but by presenting details that are often more telling than dates or facts. By juxtaposing voiceover with performance, traveling in time to present effect before cause, and letting the audience make up their own mind about whether Townes’ decision to drop his family and most trappings of normal life to ‘get a guitar and go’ was worth it, I felt that this would create a more emotionally true film.”

The fact that this statement of purpose is so pretentious and presumptuous regarding the value of dates, facts, and the audience's right to decide whether Van Zandt’s choices were worth it (To whom? Townes? His wives and children? Music?) shows that even Brown recognizes that her film doesn’t really work. It is unnecessarily vague when a few title cards or voiceovers with basic information would have been enlightening without ruining the creative flow. Worst of all, by failing to get closer to the heart of Van Zandt, Be Here to Love Me ends up sullying his legacy with tragic artist clichés that never abate.

Who was Townes Van Zandt? I’d never heard of him. The official website of Be There to Love Me quotes Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth about Townes: “He’s not really a country singer, you wouldn’t call him a blues artist, he’s not quite a folk singer, he doesn’t exactly write pop songs, so what is he? He does not fit neatly into a category, and to me, that is what sets him apart as a great artist.” I found that the concise description from my sweetie, a 54-year-old ex-hippie, said it all: “He was the Woody Guthrie of my generation.” Indeed, Van Zandt's life and work bear a strong likeness to Guthrie's.

Van Zandt was a troubled alcoholic and polydrug abuser (glue was his first high) from a well-to-do Forth Worth, Texas, family who had the gifts of poetry and music. He was influenced by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bob Dylan and combined a folk-bluesy style with serious lyrics to create songs and performances that touched listeners deeply. Perhaps his best-known song is “Pancho & Lefty,” recorded by Emmylou Harris and made into a music video and top single by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Van Zandt died in 1997 at the age of 52, leaving behind three children, three wives, and a lot of great songs that are seldom played today.

The film concentrates on the more grisly aspects of his life. He dropped off the porch of a four-story building supposedly to experience the sensation of falling. His parents, worried about his suicidal inclinations, allowed doctors to apply insulin shock treatments to him for three months that wiped out his childhood memories. He married a traditional girl who was shocked when the first song he wrote after they were married was “Waiting to Die.” “Here I was, a 20-year-old newlywed thinking he’d come out with a love song for me,” Jeanene said. Brown did not think it was important to mention how long they were married, when they divorced and why, and how many of Townes' children were hers. We are just left with the information that he was gone on the road a lot, and that was probably the reason she got fed up. I learned from other sources that it took her 16 years to call it quits.

We get the idea that Van Zandt wasn’t much fun to be around from his son J.T. and his second wife Cindy. A six-year-old J.T. apparently begged to return to Jeanene from a two-week trip to see Townes he had been looking forward to tremendously. Cindy, when asked in archival footage what it was like to live with Townes, got a grim look on her face and said that it sucked. She laughed immediately and changed her tune, but the truth was already out.

His best friend Guy Clark said Townes was always hitting on his wife Susanna. Clark, still a hard-living musician almost certainly drunk during the film's interviews, was probably a major contributor to Van Zandt’s sobriety problems through mere association. Other enablers were Kevin and Harold Eggers, record producers who didn’t do much to advance Van Zandt’s career and seem as messed up as he was. Renowned music producer John Lomax III was ready to take on Van Zandt, but Townes messed that up.

So what are we left with? Some nice footage of Townes singing some great songs. Some stars, like Emmylou and Willie, paying tribute to Van Zandt’s music while not really seeming to know anything about him. Some intimates whose affection for Townes doesn’t really connect with us.

The only people in the film who really moved me were Van Zandt’s children. J.T., the oldest, seems to have come to terms with his father, though he doesn’t buy the idea that artists need to give up everyone for their art. Teenaged Will seems eternally sad and haunted. Young Katie Belle sings to her father’s records as her only living legacy of him.

I’m glad I saw this movie because it gave me a taste of a musician whose work has the touch of genius. I could have been spared the troubled artist line this film bangs home like a two-year hangover; it does not make the life of Townes Van Zandt interesting, but rather just another train wreck from the world of music. l

2006-07-23T09:47:00.000-05:00

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
Director: Harry Edwards

In the pantheon of silent film clowns led by the Big Three--Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd--Harry Langdon is barely remembered. Yet in his time, his popularity was equal to the Big Three, and he made some timeless classics. He was the first silent clown to whom I was drawn when I first started watching shorts from this bygone era on a PBS series called "The Toy that Grew Up." I was instantly captivated by his babyfaced sweetness as he negotiated peril after peril to reach his happy ending.

Langdon, a major vaudeville star, first made an impact on the silver screen in Mack Sennett shorts as the innocent man-child character created for him by Frank Capra, then a writer. This character went straight to the hearts of moviegoing audiences and propelled Langdon to stardom. He formed his own production company and inked a six-picture deal with First National. The three features he created with Capra under this deal, including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, rival the best of the films of the Big Three.

In Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Langdon plays Harry Logan, the son of a broken-down cobbler named Amos Logan (Alec B. Francis) who is on the verge of eviction from his shop. He can't compete with Burton Shoes, a corporation whose nationwide billboard campaign is driving independent shoemakers out of business. Even as Amos finagles an extra three months' occupancy out of his landlord and sends Harry off to raise the rent money, John Burton (Edwards Davis) is unveiling a new publicity stunt to cement his stranglehold on the American market. He has invited champion race walkers from all over the world to compete for a $25,000 prize by walking across the United States wearing Burton Shoes.

As the contestants assemble at Burton's East Coast factory, Harry unwittingly is drawn into the race by the imperious world champion Nick Kargas (Tom Murray), who commandeers Harry to carry his luggage. Burton's daughter Betty (Joan Crawford), whose image on the popular billboard has won Harry's heart, sees Kargas heap abuse on Harry. She brings Harry the shoes and jersey he needs to enter the race and urges him to compete, promising him a date in California at the end of the walk. A thoroughly smitten Harry signs on.

Among the wonderful bits in this energetically paced film is the double-take Harry does when he turns away from the image of Betty he has been mooning over only to see the real Betty, dressed exactly as she is on the billboard, trying to catch his attention. He becomes incredibly shy, running away from her, then coming close again, then running away. He acts like a 3-year-old boy. We should be annoyed with him, but we aren't. Langdon is so sincerely bashful that he charms us as well as Betty. And anyone who has the heavy-browed, Mommie Dearest picture of Joan Crawford in their head will find her unrecognizable as the beautiful, sympathetic ingenue who falls for Harry in this picture.

Another charming comic scene has a farmer complain to two police officers that someone is stealing his fruit. Of course, it is Harry, who has fruit stains all over his face and a bag of fruit bulging under his oversized jersey. As he tries to evade exposure as the thief, he moves the fruit behind him. This allows the head of a chicken he also has filched to poke through a hole in the jersey. I was helpless with laughter as Harry tries to hide the curious chicken. When next we see Harry, he is working on a chain gang. Don't ask about the illogic of this turn of events within the context of the race--the gags in this sequence are just too good.

One gag that equals Harold Lloyd's seemingly death-defying stunts occurs when Harry tries to outrun some policemen who are trying to return him to the chain gang from which he has escaped. He runs through a flock of sheep and scales a fence that is built right at the edge of a cliff. As he lowers himself over the fence, his jersey gets caught on a nail. He frees the material, only to find his belt hooked as well. As he starts to unbuckle the belt, he chances to look behind him at the sheer drop below. He gingerly rebuckles his belt, pulls a hammer from his voluminous pants, pulls nails out the fence, and nails his sweater to the wood. Of course, as he pulls nails out, he is disassembling the fence, and ends up tobaggoning down the side of the cliff to safety. The scene is hilarious and thrilling in the same way as Lloyd's high-wire stunts.

Naturally, Harry wins the race and Betty. The final sequence of the film is the capper to Harry's man-child persona. The now married and prosperous Harry and Betty look in on their baby. Of course, it is Langdon dressed in a bonnet and playing in a cradle. His impersonation is perfect, from the quick tears to the awkward playing with his own hands. This scene shows the true power of the character Harry Langdon perfected. Although his career went into decline through some bad choices, causing him to fade from view in the decades that followed, Langdon was a noble clown who deserves to be discovered by a whole new audience. l

2006-07-17T15:21:00.000-05:00

The War Tapes (2006)
Director: Deborah Scranton

Are you old enough to remember when the humble home movie was something middle-class families carted out to get unwanted guests out of their homes for the evening? All one had to do was pull out that 8mm or 16mm reel-to-reel and thread up the trip to Tampa and wait for those lingering dinner guests to scan the room for their belongings and fake a yawn. Times have changed.

Today, digital imaging using small, affordable equipment has put movie making in the hands of people from all walks of life who never would have thought to point and shoot before. It has also brought a new level of intimacy, revelation, and creativity to film that is well worth paying to see. In the case of The War Tapes, the digital video images captured by three National Guardsmen from New Hampshire during their one-year tour of duty in Iraq give a you-are-there experience of real war unlike other accounts we've seen. We aren’t just getting the action footage that most of us think of as war. We’re also watching our soldiers risk their lives guarding trucks filled with sewage from private construction sites, and traffic accidents, and racial slurs. These previously unseen sights of war are perhaps the most jarring part of this remarkable documentary.

Mike Moriarity, Zack Bazzi, and Steve Pink are the principal subjects/cinematographers of The War Tapes. Moriarity is a 34-year-old family man who is deeply patriotic and was profoundly affected by the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Towers, which he visited and filmed. He expressed his willingness to be put on active duty only if the Guard would send him to Iraq. Bazzi is in his mid 20s, born in Lebanon and brought to the United States at the age of 8 as a war refugee. He was regular Army for four years before joining the Guard after discharge. Although he is from the Middle East and speaks fluent Arabic, he seems rueful of and a bit detached from the politics on either side. He considers himself a professional soldier and likes being a leader and doing his job well. Pink is in his mid 20s. He signed up for the Guard impulsively and isn’t happy about going to Iraq. We experience him as much through a diary he keeps and letters he writes as we do through the lens of his camera.

We learn that the Guards get two days of training a month and watch them go about their maneuvers in a forest clearing in a somewhat amateurish manner. Even if you didn’t know about the controversy over calling the Guard up to active duty overseas (they are intended as a domestic force), you’d have to wonder if this type and amount of training is enough.

We meet Moriarity’s wife and two small children, Bazzi’s mother, and Pink’s girlfriend and learn a bit about each of the men’s lives and backgrounds. We watch them board the plane for Iraq, land, and get oriented to their new home. Camp Anaconda is a tent community for new arrivals that is constantly shelled by the Iraqi insurgency. None of the men spends much time filming it. They prefer to show us the roads they travel day in and day out guarding convoys of trucks belonging to KBR/Halliburton and the blood of their fallen comrades. We get an account of the alphabet-soup dangers the men face, including IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, a.k.a., car bombs). The Guards speed past motorists, donkey carts, and Iraqis on foot, yelling for them to get out of the way. It looks dangerous for everyone, and eventually, an Iraqi girl is struck and cut in half by a humvee in the dark as she runs into the road. This incident haunts Pink, in particular.

We hear a lot of explosions and return gunfire from the humvees. Burning cars and spidered glass in the humvees are common sights. Moriarity takes us to a military vehicle graveyard, poignantly paying tribute to the men and women who died in them. “That was someone’s father or mother, husband or wife.” He’s a gentle soul at heart who seems more and more saddened by what he sees and the lies he hears coming from the news media and politicians. When President Bush declares an end to major fighting, he wonders what part of the war Bush is looking at.

Bazzi lays bare the prejudice of the American troops. He says they call Iraqis “Hadjis.” The term is respectful among Muslims, denoting a man who has made his pilgrimage to Mecca. “I don’t think they (the Americans) mean it as a term of respect, though,” Bazzi rather pointlessly says.

The most intense sequence in the film is an assault on Fallujah, with house-to-house searches for insurgents that leave the unit’s CO shot. After the battle, Pink returns to film some of the enemy dead and tells a story of a dog that was eating a body. One of the unit commanders ordered the men to get the dog away from the body or to shoot it. “I wasn’t briefed on how to shoot a dog,” says Pink. “Good for him. I hope he filled his belly.”

In the sequence shot by director Scranton after the men return from their tour, Bazzi says, “Everyone makes money off war. I got paid to fight. I made money. KBR made money. The guys who make the yellow ribbons all over the place made money.” He also says he loves being a soldier and has reenlisted in the Guard. Pink, the most emotionally stoic of the men, looks physically deranged and is refusing any treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Instead, he cynically takes out his rage and anxiety on KBR/Halliburton. Moriarity has PTSD and carpal tunnel syndrome from his tour, and is receiving treatment at the VA. He still feels that the mission to bring democracy to the Iraqis is a noble one, but one that is not actually being executed. The bottom line for these men is that the war is being fought for money, particulary KBR and Vice President Cheney.

The people who know and love these men say they were changed by their time in Iraq. I would not have known that just from watching the film. Aside from appearing traumatized or shut down to varying degrees, each of the men seems to have a fairly consistent relationship to the world—the adventure-seeking soldier, the troubled guy who can’t get his act together, the family man who will do his best every day. How much their war experiences end up interfering with their life's trajectory is anyone’s guess. Pink could very well end up a suicide, and Moriarity could wind up on disability—neither appealing outcomes. Bazzi, pursuing a bachelor's degree, is the only one who seems to be doing what he intended to do.

What this important document does is give us the war on the ground as it was lived by three men, their families at home, and the people in Iraq who surrounded them. Their film choices are unique and personal, not mitigated by the imperatives of telling a particular story in a particular way or being able to bring the film to market. Of course, Scranton shaped these choices, but with Kartemquin’s Steve James (Hoop Dreams) behind her as producer and editor, I feel confident of the fidelity of the film to the men who shot it. I will think about this one for a long, long time. l

2006-07-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Director: Ang Lee

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Director: Tommy Lee Jones

By Roderick Heath

The Modern Western has racked up enough films to be considered a defined and important genre. There have always been Westerns set in contemporary times, such as George Stevens’ Giant (1956), but this genre truly arrived—with its themes of man against society, of nature and humanity intermingling or failing to, of deromanticising a mythic scene—in the early ‘60s, with a small cannonade of pictures. These films included John Huston and Arthur Miller’s The Misfits, David Miller and Dalton Trumbo’s Lonely Are The Brave, and Martin Ritt’s Hud, based not too coincidentally on Brokeback Mountain scriptwriter Larry McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By. The Modern Western is a dusty, disillusioned genre about men and, occasionally, women, who survive on the myths of the past and who often would make excellent heroes for those tales, but find themselves eternally alienated and often destroyed by the tawdriness of modern life. There is no longer the sheer nobility and almost religious awe that attended the commencement of the cattle drive in Red River in the lives of men like Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. Today they’re spotty, hopeless young men stuck with the stink of sheep-shit and toxoplasmosis, hardly able to scrape together a living unless they get lucky enough to marry the boss’ daughter. In truth, of course, that was what life was like for the pioneer cowboys, too, but that’s neither here nor there, when John Wayne is more potent a force than any real westerner.

Brokeback Mountain and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada are the two latest examples of the form, the appeal of which includes the inordinate amount of grit allowed in paying attention to the lives of working-class people while giving passing nods to the gods of cinema legend. Both films are driven by an intense male bond—in one case, a bond that has bloomed into a proper love affair—and observe the moral and emotional consequences of that bond. Another theme of the Modern Western, inevitably, is culture shift. In Modern Westerns, the heroes are tugged at and tempted by the pull of changing cultural winds even whilst they try their best to preserve themselves in an old cultural skin. Both films essentially exist within the same environment, where nature is predominant rather than repressed, where civilization has petered out in shabbily built buildings through which the wind whistles, and society is almost sparse enough for people to get away with living by their own rules. Almost.

As in another recent Modern Western, Billy Bob Thornton’s underrated All The Pretty Horses, Three Burials is about the divide between the United States and Mexico, of the temptation of outsider gringos to find their identities in the romantic poverty of Mexico. Tommy Lee Jones’ aging cowboy Pete Perkins takes it upon himself, like a true western hero, to fulfill an unanswered plea for justice. The method he uses is not a varmint shooting, but a primal process of penitence inflicted on the callow, foolish, violent border guard Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), who has killed accidentally Pete’s amigo, the illegal immigrant baquero Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cadillo).

These characters inhabit a sterile, impermanent Texas town where Mike and his wife Lou Ann (January Jones) have moved from Cleveland and where they were a popular, pretty couple. In the film’s first half, the various characters are explored in layered, time-hopping style. Without the distracting buzz of suburban life, Mike’s emotional vacuity and gross sexuality are thrown into high contrast. Mike takes out his frustration on the illegals he captures. Lou Ann, increasingly alienated and excruciatingly bored, is pulled into friendship with waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo), who lives a cheerfully your-cheatin’-heart lifestyle, having affairs with Pete and local sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) under the nose of her diner-owner husband. Lou Ann ends up spending mot of her time with Melquiades, and it is a pure coincidence that Pete guns down Melquiades whilst on patrol.

The first “burial”’ is the shallow grave Pete gives Melquiades on a mountain. The second is the one the authorities give him when his body is disinterred by coyotes. With only rumours as to what happened spread by the border guards, and Belmont’s insistence that Melquiades was “only a wetback,” Pete abandons his reticence in favour of kidnapping Mike, forcing him to dig up Melquiades’ corpse, and then proceeding, with the border guards in hot pursuit (and Belmont’s comic disinterest), to cross the border to give Melquiades—and maybe Mike—a proper burial.

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is as classic a westerner as Pete Perkins. Tall, rangy, stiff-mouthed, painfully reserved, the redeeming aspects of his life are his one true love, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall), and, much later, his daughter Alma Jr. (Kate Mara). In between are an eternity of pain caused by confused and gut-wrenching relationships with the one man and several women in his life. Ennis, orphaned in his adolescence, finds his identity crystallised during the months he and fellow teenaged ranch-hand Jack tended sheep on the eponymous slab of wind-washed granite. When both are prematurely exiled from the existence that seems redolent of a Greek mythic idyll, they accept their surface identities within the strict machismo order of modern Midwest America.

Jack tries to live up to the macho reputation of his bullrider father, then marries dashing horse girl Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway) and does his best to wriggle his way up the social pole. Ennis marries Alma de Beers (Michelle Williams) and has kids by her, but can never give up either his desire for the simple freedom of range work or for the adolescent warmth of his love for Jack. Their snatched interludes together on fishing trips, tolerated to a certain extent by their wives, offer fleeting and ultimately dissatisfying tranquility. Both men are transfigured by their sexuality, but where for Ennis it is a vital emotion he seeks, for Jack it’s both more complex and also more typical; carefully compartmentalising, he sleeps with Mexican male hookers and keeps on the lookout for another partner who will adapt to his part-time vision of love. Ennis lives in justified fear of frontier morality, which eventually claims Jack.

Both films are remarkably rich tapestries that extend well beyond the specifics of their plot to take in an almost epic, yet expressively minimalist vision of whole cultures in a state of flux, and the people within them in a state of crisis. Although Pete and Melquiades are not homosexual—though it’s easy to imagine Pete as Ennis, 20 years after the end of Brokeback—their bond, as well as Jack and Ennis’, demand almost mystical commitment to notions beyond the visible, or even factual. For Ennis, it is to accept permanent emotional exile: our last vision of him, a reverse of the end of The Searchers, is gazing out on an eternal plain whilst living with dreams and memories in his shabby trailer. For Pete, it is to reject his country, his livelihood, even his sanity, to give Melquiades a true resting place, and extract from a man with no terms of reference beyond bad daytime soaps and suburban plasticity a true contrition.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that Brokeback Mountain, concentrating as it does on a gay romance, offers its most biting and memorable moments in observing the men’s heterosexual lives—the kitchen confrontation where Alma, having left Ennis, lets slip her simmering loathing of him and Jack sets Ennis off like Krakatoa, is one of the most convincing moments of marital spite ever filmed. Similarly, when Ennis spurns vibrant barmaid Cassie (Linda Cardellini) and apologises, “Sorry, I can’t have been too much fun,” she responds in anguish, “Dammit, Ennis, girls don’t fall in love with fun,” I suspect a lot more men than the bisexual cowboys of this world might recognise themselves. The film follows Annie Proulx’s majestic novella very closely, ironically weakening when it adds some potentially nifty ideas of its own, especially Lureen. Lureen’s status as a gender-crosser in her own right, a champion rodeo rider who boldly seduces and screws Jack, demanded more depth and time and strikes sparks off the film’s later portrait of her as an icy homestead princess. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a messier, less compressed tale, and overdoes its early portrayal of Mike Norton’s baseness, but then Three Burials has an edge of wryly surreal comedy and deliberate morality tale at its heart, not the lightly poetic realism and heart-dulling tragedy of Brokeback Mountain.

Ang Lee is a great filmmaker, but has yet to make a genuinely great film. His work on Brokeback is as meticulous and measured as always, almost too much so. It is often so over-posed in its desolate beauty as to look like the world’s first animated Andrew Wyeth painting, and his feeling for the West is never quite convincingly raw. Since the warm inclusiveness of his early films, a frost has gilded Lee’s heart, and he finally seems to mistake emotional stinginess for detachment. This attitude accounts for my lingering dissatisfaction with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ride With The Devil, The Ice Storm, and his work on Brokeback Mountain, which is finally a triumph more for the actors and screenwriters (McMurtry and Diana Ossana), than of Lee’s Oscar-winning turn.

In comparison, Tommy Lee Jones’ work on Three Burials is much less refined and skilled, particularly some clumsy scene interchanges where music starts blaring without reason and static camera set-ups. Yet Jones knows his subject more truly, and at his best, he captures with almost surreal intensity his locale and characters, particularly when he gets to the Mexican side of the border, and Pete lounges drunkenly in a cantina that’s ancient but with modern appliances. Guillermo Arriaga’s screenplay is as humane and fine-threaded as his work for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and retains two of his singular qualities: his love of moral fable and his tendency to go on too long.

A part of me wanted to see—unlikely as it was—Sam Peckinpah make Brokeback Mountain, and Three Burials gives hints of what that might have looked like. For Peckinpah, that blood and dust and hot leather would have reeked with urgency, whilst Brokeback smells only of far-off snow. Brokeback Mountain is still a remarkably haunting and intense experience. Three Burials is a less fine but more pleasurable experience, its moments of urgent humanity and its jolts of wry humour sit happily in the memory. Both films are spotted with great performances up front and in the background from Pepper, Leo, and Levon Helm in Three Burials, and from Ledger, down to Williams, Hathaway, Cardellini, even a small shot of cheer from scene-stealer Anna Faris (whose dingbat starlet was one of Lost In Translation’s memorable elements), in Brokeback. Beyond this, Three Burials confirms the beauty of human beings, where Brokeback, for all the pseudo-political arguments the mass-media and commentators tried to extrapolate from its tale, actually states a thesis that living is agony, no matter your caste and character. l

2006-07-06T17:05:00.000-05:00

Don Juan (1926)
Director: Alan Crosland

This year will see several champagne corks fly to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the introduction of Vitaphone to the American moviegoing public. On July 26, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) plans to present the Vitaphone Corporation’s complete sound-on-disk program at the Linwood Dunn Theatre in Hollywood just as it occurred in 1926 at the Warner Theater in New York City.

Warner Brothers' premiere of the Vitaphone process, for which Don Juan was the centerpiece, made a small noise compared with the thunderous response when it released The Jazz Singer (also directed by Crosland) in 1927, allowing millions to hear vaudeville's megastar Al Jolson sing out from the flat screen. Nonetheless, the use of a record synchronized to actions on the movie screen got a very respectable launch with the John Barrymore vehicle Don Juan and several short subjects. Subscribers to Turner Classic Movies got a sneak preview this weekend when TCM presented the first program AMPAS will offer later this month.

This tale of the legendary ladies' man begins in his childhood. A five-year-old Don Juan plays happily with his father Don Jose (John Barrymore) and mother Donna Isobel (Jane Winton) in their castle in Seville, Spain, before Don Jose must leave on a trip. After he rides away, Donna Isobel waves her lover in from the garden. Unfortunately, the trip was a ruse designed to capture Donna Isobel in flagrante. The lover hides in an opening in the thick castle walls, and Donna Isobel plays dumb as her husband calls some men in to finish repairing the wall. Donna Isobel's anxiety grows until the last stone is replaced, sealing her lover alive in the wall. She flings herself at the wall and pleads with Don Jose to spare him. Instead, in a heartbroken rage, he sends her away as little Don Juan cries out for her.

Don Jose goes on to live a life of debauchery, never keeping company with a woman for more than a couple of months. He is teaching his growing boy (a radiant Freddie Bartholomew look-alike named Philippe de Lacy) never to give his heart to any woman. During a banquet, Don Jose spurns the attentions of his current paramour Donna Elvira (Helena D'Algy) for a new love. In a jealous rage, she stabs him through the heart. In his dying breath, he muses to Don Juan that the circle of woman is finally complete, "birth, disillusionment, death."

The movie fast-forwards to Rome, where the grown Don Juan (Barrymore) has taken up residence and built a reputation as a womanizer. He attracts the attention of the reigning Borgia family, particularly Lucrezia (Estelle Taylor), who believes her enormous political power and, of course, irresistible looks and grace, will see her triumph over the Don where all other women have failed. She invites him to a soiree to which the rival Orsini family members Duke Della Varnese (Josef Swickard) and his daughter Adriana (Mary Astor) have been invited on behalf of a smitten friend of the Borgias, Count Giano Donati (Montagu Love). Don Juan, like Donati, is drawn to Adriana's virtue, and he makes an enemy of the Borgias by rejecting Lucrezia to pursue Adriana. Love has its trials, of course, including a massive sword fight and imprisonment for the Don and torture for Adriana. But Hollywood being what it is, true love triumphs over power and a bad upbringing.

Aside from an overwrought third act and Hollywood ending, this film has a great deal to recommend it. Alan Crosland directs his cast with a deft hand, muting even the most florid scenes by keeping their emotions real and their gesticulations to a minimum. Barrymore is especially good as Don Jose--his fury at his betrayal terrifying to watch even through the distance of time and celluloid. I've seen a number of films in which people are buried alive, but this film's is the most horrifying in my experience, with effective crosscutting between the terrified Donna Isobel, murderous Don Jose, smirking manservant Leandro (John Roche), and efficient servants doing their deadly work.

The Roman home of Don Juan is a setting for a great short comedy within the film. Pedrillo (Willard Louis) is a jovial co-conspirator in Don Juan's amorous shenanigans. He keeps two ladies waiting for the tardy Don by telling each exactly and identically what they want to hear, "You are his only love." A camera lingers on a closed door, the stand-in for the man behind it as he makes love to a third woman. The timing of the actors and editing is perfect so that despite the predictability of the scene, we can't help but be charmed.

Barrymore, at age 44 and the worse for wear from his acute alcoholism, does not cut a particularly alluring figure. He looks haggard, particularly in profile, making him somewhat unconvincing as the supreme lover of women. Yet he attacks his action sequences with relish and energy and projects the superior air of a man who would defy Lucrezia Borgia, known today mainly for her penchant for poisoning her foes. Small delights for the classic movie fan include appearances by the future Charlie Chan, Warner Oland, as Lucrezia's brother Caesar and Myrna Loy as her maidservant Mai.

Despite being a Vitaphone film, Don Juan does not use the process to produce dialogue. Instead, Vitaphone was used to sync a film score perfomed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. It is one of the finest scores I've ever heard for a silent movie and well deserving of recognition.

I watched two of the shorts that accompanied the first Vitaphone presentation, one of the New York Philharmonic playing and the other a hilarious "commercial" for the new sound process by none other than an ill-at-ease Will Hays, the author of the infamous Production Code that brought censorship to the movies. These novelties were mere icing on the cake for a terrific debut sound film. Seek them and the other shorts out if you can, but definitely try to get your hands around a copy of Don Juan. This piece of film history is a cracking good film to the core. l

2006-07-04T13:35:00.000-05:00

Silver City (2004)
Director: John Sayles

Today, on the 230th birthday of the great experiment in democracy known as the United States of America, I thought John Sayles’ state of the union address, Silver City, would be an appropriate film to review. I’m not a big fan of Sayles, whose films often seem like well-intentioned misfires. With this political satire, however, he shows that he can be an inspired cinematic force given the right motivation.

Silver City is a real place, but in this film it is a dream—a development for the well-heeled built on the slag heap of a silver mine closed down by federal regulators for safety and pollution violations. The developer is Senator Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy), a man with a well-known record of failed enterprises, including his son Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), who is running to be the governor of Colorado. It is during the filming of a campaign commercial designed to show Dickie to be environmentally friendly that the movie begins.

Dickie’s campaign manager Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) is rehearsing Dickie on one phrase he keeps getting wrong. Dickie is not the brightest bulb in the marquee. In fact, he bears a rather strong resemblance to someone currently taking up space in the Oval Office. When Dickie finally gets the line right, the commercial moves forward. On cue, Dickie casts a fishing line into a lake. When Raven yells cut, Dickie tries to retrieve the line, but he has landed something. As he reels the line in, a human hand breaks the surface of the water. Raven instantly closes down the set and moves the shoot to an alternate location. He suspects a conspiracy to label Dickie as the candidate “who landed a stiff” in the lake to reduce him to an also-ran novelty.

Raven engages a detective agency run by Senator Pilager’s wife Grace Seymour (Mary Kay Place) to intimidate three suspects in the supposed conspiracy. Grace reluctantly assigns the job to Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston), a former newspaper reporter who went to work for her after he was set up to make a false accusation in a story and dismissed from his paper. Danny is a natural investigator, but he’s still a dreamer. Grace fears he will not be up to the goon work this important client wants done.

And so he is not. When he approaches the first suspected saboteur Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer), a right-wing talk radio host, Danny’s “you’re being watched” sounds more like “nice shirt” than a threat. Castleton spits his venom, challenging Raven and Pilager to come and get him. Sayles reveals this Rush Limbaugh knock-off to be an angry bully more than spoiling for a fight. Anyone will do.

Dickie’s sister Maddy is another suspect. She is a dope-smoking Olympic hopeful in archery with a mixed-race son whose conception when Maddy was a teenager upset her father’s political ambitions. When Danny approaches her, she shoots an arrow alongside his head and otherwise acts like the hostile loose cannon she is—or pretends to be. She seduces Danny and then kicks him out. Later we will see her aiming at a target that has her brother’s picture on it.

It is when Danny approaches his last suspect, Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite), that he finds out what really happened to the corpse on the end of Dickie’s fishing line. Lyle, a former federal regulator who went up against ruthless business mogul Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson) over the Silver City site, tells a tale of buried toxins invading the watershed. Danny attempts to get the truth out through another former reporter, Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), who runs a website dedicated to exposing conservative corruption.

Sayles has fun playing with his stereotypes. Sheriff Joe Skaggs (Joe Gammon), who is investigating the death of the floating Mexican, is all gruff frontier lawman who shows his scorn for the sissified slickers around him at every opportunity, beginning by insulting the hook on Dickie Pilager’s line. He says the hook couldn’t catch anything (although clearly it has), but as a prop, it wasn’t meant to.

Benteen rides with Dickie through open land (“We’ll make a cowboy out of you yet!”), patting himself vigorously on the back for being a man of vision. He sees money on that land but is blind to the priceless natural vista that he could never create on his own. A view won’t make Benteen rich, and he sneers at the tree huggers. Skaggs and Benteen—indeed, most of the characters in this film—are misguided in their superior attitudes that actually reflect total self-absorption. His arrow aims true at these deserving targets.

He is way off the mark, however, in setting up the central romance between Danny and Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), a reporter who disloyally did not quit the paper after Danny was dismissed. Nora ended their very serious affair and is now involved with a professional middleman (Billy Zane) whom she intends to marry. This mismatch makes no sense except as a desperate run to the opposite side of the room, away from anyone like Danny. She paints Danny as the Antichrist, but she also declares that he was the love of her life. Sayles perhaps was aiming for something like the Julie Christie/Warren Beatty romance in Shampoo, but Huston and Bello have no chemistry at all, and the dialogue he saddled Bello with is weak and unmotivated.

Sayles is such a humanist that he finds a heart in all but the most ridiculous of his characters. This is both a strength and a weakness in this film and in his film-making in general. It’s hard to pull off the biting satire Silver City aspires to be, as well as the serious social commentary of such films as Casa de los babys, with vaguely focused characters about whom Sayles wants us to care. His murder mystery is so convoluted that it got tedious to follow. He includes one kind-of action scene that ends up being a fizzle—action just isn’t his strong suit. His characters’ names are a bit too obvious. Nonetheless, Silver City succeeds as few films have in presenting the essence of our national scene today and in suggesting how poisonous that scene has become. You owe it to your country to see this film! l

2006-06-30T16:57:00.000-05:00

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

It is my considered opinion that the collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was the greatest of its kind in the history of entertainment. How many directors could claim such genuine masterpieces as I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and of course, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—Pressburger’s favorite film—and serve as writers and producers for many of their films? I could have chosen any of these films, which I view regularly, to write about, but Colonel Blimp is so decidedly British that I think of it as an ideal introduction to this decidedly British team. (Never mind that Pressburger was Hungarian. He was a fervent Anglophile most of his life.)

Colonel Blimp is an early entry in the Powell/Pressburger canon, but it already has a consistent point of view that would be a hallmark of the team. It also includes a number of their informal stock company—Roger Livesey, previously seen in I Know Where I’m Going!; Anton Walbrook, cast later in The Red Shoes; Deborah Kerr, later the star of Black Narcissus; John Laurie, also from I Know Where I’m Going!; and second-unit cameraman Jack Cardiff, whose distinguished career as a cinematographer would include several Powell/Pressburger films, most notably Black Narcissus.

A Powell/Pressburger film always seems wistful, watching its characters balance between tradition, honor, and simplicity and a magnetic modern world. Interestingly, Powell/Pressburger women generally are very strong-minded and ambitious, a focal point for the tension between modernity and tradition in most of the team's films. Colonel Blimp, therefore, is a bit of an anomaly by placing General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) at the center of the vortex, a career soldier whose fair-fight ethos slams up against the ruthlessness of 20th century warfare. Nonetheless, the three women in Wynne-Candy's life during the 40-year span of the film—all played by Deborah Kerr—become the embodiment for him of the ideal, the never-changing aspects of his world view.

The film begins in the present, with a messenger speeding on a motorbike to deliver a message to a young British officer awaiting orders about a military exercise, the very picture of the revved-up modern world. "War starts at midnight. Make it real," the message says. The officer decides to make it very real by launching a sneak attack before midnight. He surprises Wynne-Candy, the head of the Home Guard, in his club's Turkish bath and declares him and every other sweating body in view prisoners of war. Wynne-Candy protests that the war doesn't start until midnight, to which the brash officer replies that by launching a surprise attack, he was making it "real." He adds insult to injury by declaring that he will never become as complacent as the fat, moustachioed Wynne-Candy. This remark enrages the general, and he dunks the officer in the bath while upbraiding him that he has no idea how Wynne-Candy came to have his belly and his moustache. Since we in the audience don't know either, Powell and Pressburger oblige us with the rest of the movie, a flashback begining in the Turkish bath wherein lingers a young Clive Candy just back from the Boer War, humming an opera tune, "Je suis Titania," from Ambroise Thomas' Mignon that will create an incident later in the film.

Candy has written about his experiences in South Africa for a London newspaper, and a letter from an English tutor in Germany, Edith Hunter (Kerr), finds its way to him. The letter urges him to come to Berlin and stop horrible rumors of torture and other atrocities being spread about the British forces in South Africa. Against his CO's directive, Candy travels to Berlin, where he meets Miss Hunter. She takes him to a cafe frequented by the rumor monger Kaunitz (David Ward) where Candy can confront him. Kaunitz's crowd and Candy alternately bribe the cafe band to play their respective songs ("Je suis Titania" in Candy's case), and Kaunitz at last becomes enraged by Candy's interference. The two men trade insults until Kaunitz spits in Candy's face, and Candy punches him. The incident results in a formal challenge to a duel.

The rituals attendant to the duel are laid out very carefully and in great detail. The courtesies observed for this barbaric feud-settler give the viewer a very clear idea of how seriously the phrase "officer and gentleman" was taken when Candy cut his teeth. Because Candy's insult was to the entire German army, any of its officers can duel with him. The task falls to a reluctant Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), whom Candy has never met.

The audience is treated to only the opening parries of the duel as the camera dollies up and out a high window of the gymnasium where it is taking place. The directors let a nurse relate the results. Candy has nearly had his upper lip cut off. This injury is the reason behind Candy's moustache. Edith attends him and Theo, who is recuperating from a slashed forehead at the same nursing home. Candy and Theo become fast friends who share the same sense of duty while recognizing that they never had a real quarrel. When at last Candy and Edith are able to return to England, Theo sheepishly confesses that he and Edith have fallen in love. Candy enthusiastically congratulates Theo, but when Edith gives him a kiss good-bye, Candy realizes that he has fallen in love with her.

The second act takes us to World War I, and Candy is on the move in France. Unable to reach his destination, he finds food and shelter at a French convent, where he spies a nurse, Barbara Wynne (Kerr), who bears a striking resemblance to Edith. He ascertains some particulars about her which he will use to track her down at home. Soon, he receives the news that the Armistice has been negotiated, and Candy is delighted that victory was won without resort to dirty pool.

His sportsmanlike regard for the Germans seems naive and even moreso when he meets up with Theo in a POW camp some months later, after he has wooed and won Barbara. Theo snubs him, but later phones before he is shipped back to Germany to apologize. Wynne-Candy invites him over to dine with some distinguished gentlemen. All express supreme confidence that England will bail Germany out of its difficulties. Theo sneers at this assembly when he is with his fellow officers on the train, calling them children. Theo recognizes that the rules of the game are changed, and were changing as early as Theo and Clive's first meeting when vicious slurs were being used in Germany to discredit the English.

Act III is, of course, set during World War II. The home Clive and Barbara inherited from Clive's beloved Aunt Margaret (Muriel Aked) is bombed. No longer able to fight in combat, Wynne-Candy becomes head of the Home Guards. He encounters Theo yet again as he is trying to enter England as a refugee. Edith has died and their two sons have become Nazis. He says he grew "homesick" for England, pure and simple, the home of his beloved wife. Clive pulls some strings to see that he is granted asylum but fails to grasp the evil and lawlessness of Nazism that Theo begs him to see. Clive still believes that a war fought fairly is a winning strategy and the only honorable conduct for military men. When their evening together has passed, Wynne-Candy asks his driver Angela "Johnny" Cannon (Kerr) to take Theo to his hotel. Theo is struck by Johnny's resemblance to Edith and realizes that what Clive told him is true—Clive never got over his love for Edith. The closing scene has Clive standing near the site of his bombed house, which is now a water reservoir. He is reminded of a promise he made Barbara on the steps of that house, and announces his compliance: "I still haven't changed."

I realize I may have tried your patience with this lengthy synopsis, but I didn't convey even the half of it. This is a rich and intricate look at 40 years in the life of a career soldier from England's upper class, but curiously titled. During the period in which Clive Wynne-Candy lived, a cartoon character named Colonel Blimp was created by David Low. Blimp was a snobbish, reactionary buffoon whose preposterous statements were barbs aimed directly at the anti-democratic policies of the British government. It's hard to reconcile the cartoon Colonel Blimp with the honorable and lovable Wynne-Candy. They live as one in one respect—a blindness to change and a stubborn belief in the rightness of their own convictions. I surmise, therefore, that the title refers to the life and death of an ideal as the ritualistic honor of the career soldier gave way to a people's army and the brutality of modern warfare. In this respect, Colonel Blimp is a much more realistic and unblinking look at the passing of a modern age of chivalry than the similarly themed Grand Illusion.

The performances are uniformly outstanding. Indeed, Kerr was never better, creating three distinct women that Clive never really sees for what they are. The look of this film is lush on the homefront and gritty on the field of battle. A fine example of the film's exquisite economy of storytelling is the sequence in which we see Aunt Margaret's blank study walls fill up, scattershot, with the heads of wild animals Candy bagged during peacetime to keep himself occupied. This sequence, shot by Jack Cardiff, sealed his fate alongside Powell and Pressburger making several movie masterpieces. An extra on the DVD of the film mentions that Winston Churchill tried to suppress the movie for its sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of a German and because Churchill wanted to dispel the notion that Colonel Blimps still had a place in the modern British army. Actor/director Stephen Fry, who was filmed for this extra, mused that, in fact, Churchill himself was Blimp. Whatever you may think of that assessment, there can be no doubt that the "Blimp" of this extraordinary film is anything but a blustering windbag. He does the British Army and his creators, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, proud. l

2006-06-25T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
Director: Jamie Uys

There’s not much I find funnier than a well-timed pratfall. It’s embarrassing how much I roar when I see a comedian bump into something and fall down. To me, the pratfall is the most sublime of the class of physical humor we call slapstick. As a silent film fan, I’ve seen some of the best slapstick artists who ever lived—Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Colleen Moore, Fatty Arbuckle—all of whom bounced and banged their way into the hearts of audiences the world over. Modern practitioners of the art of slapstick, such as Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, and Mel Brooks, owe a great deal to these early masters.

The medium of film itself lent something unique to slapstick in the early days—the techniques of varying the speed of and reversing the film. This new type of physical gag gave a wacky edge to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, for example, and has somewhat unfairly branded silent films as herky-jerky, fast-motion affairs, which very few of them were. Nonetheless, the Keystone form endured, particularly in British humor, as seen in such television programs as “The Benny Hill Show” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” It is quite conceivable that Jamie Uys, an Afrikaner in South Africa, watched these and similar shows and movies and thought it would be a pip to make movies like this himself. In 1980, he made a very physical comedy called The Gods Must Be Crazy that became a worldwide sensation, proving yet again the enduring appeal of slapstick.

The film is told in a fable-like way, with a narrator (Paddy O’Byrne) beginning with a geography/ethnography lesson about sub-Saharan Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Its harsh conditions are highlighted to emphasize that nobody, not even the animals, hangs around after the rainy season is over—that is, of course, with the exception of the San (known in the movie as Bushmen). We are told that the Bushmen are supreme survivalists who don’t know they have nothing. Indeed, the narrator, sounding like a used car salesman, makes their society seem utopian as they live in perfect peace and harmony with each other and all the good things in the environment.

One day, a bush pilot flies near a Bushman family compound and throws an empty Coke bottle out of his window. A Bushman hunter sees it fall, and picks it up. It is the hardest object he has ever seen, and assumes it was sent by the gods. At first, the family benefits from the many uses they extract from the bottle—musical instrument, skin stretcher, root pounder. But the Bushmen learn covetousness as well, and fight to use the bottle. When one member of the family hits another on the head with the bottle, there is nothing else to be done but to throw the “evil thing” off the edge of the earth. Xixo (N!xau) sets off on his long march to the end of the earth.

The character of Xixo is the core around which several stories revolve. In one, an incompetent band of rebels who have assassinated several members of their country’s government are on the run. We watch as their hideout is discovered, and two of their number try to shoot down a helicopter with a rocket thrower, only to be thwarted because the missile keeps falling out the back of the weapon. Another two are shown in a card game that stops for nothing, including a march across the desert.

Another story involves the encounters of Kate Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo) a refugee from urban living who falls into misadventures with girl-shy field researcher Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers) when she moves to the bush to be a teacher. Steyn goes to pick her up from a distant bus depot in a battered jeep his assistant Mpudi (Michael Thys) calls the Anti-Christ. The jeep is the devil to start and will not restart if shut down. It also has no hand break. It's the height of slapstick when Steyn must open and close cattle gates in the road without losing his jeep down a hill. When he finally does reach Kate, he becomes a stammering fool as he lifts the hingeless passenger door off the car so she can get in. When they stop for gas, Kate gets a face full of window cleaner when a helpful gas station attendant tries to clean a windshield that doesn’t exist.

Xixo moves into Steyn's, Kate's, and Mpudi's world when he is arrested and put in jail for poaching a goat, not understanding the concept of ownership and never having seen a goat or a shepherd before. Mpudi, who speaks the San click language, convinces Steyn to get the "little bugger" out of jail before he dies, unaccustomed as he is to being unfree. A climactic sequence occurs when the rebels come to Kate's village and force her and her class to march with them as human shields as they attempt to reach the border and escape their pursuers. They are rescued by Xixo, who infiltrates the hostage camp and shoots the rebels with a tiny bow and arrow dipped in a liquid tranquilizer.

The film is filled with sight gags, including a rhinocerous stamping out fires (“the firefighters of the bush”), a tree that grabs Kate while she is in her underwear and ensnares her and her rescuer, Steyn, in a ribald dance of disentanglement, and Mpudi swearing at the Anti-Christ in several languages as he throws parts out from underneath the jeep. A clever script, fast-motion action, and ridiculous caricatures all make for a potpourri of riotousness, that, nonetheless, has an acidic quality.

The film plays to our desire to believe that the San are the sane ones and that the “gods” (civilization) are indeed crazy. The warmth and sense of security with which N!xau imbues Xixo's persona (no doubt he was largely playing himself) helps lull us into this wistful trap. It's pretty clear, however, that Uys is sending up the romantic notions that surround Africa.

The idea that a Coke bottle is the first hard object the San have ever seen is ludicrous on its face, and we should be on our guard from that moment on that this is a fractured fairytale. While that fact makes the comedy all the more edgy and funny, some of the sad realities of African life can be glimpsed throughout this film if we care to look. Rebel factions have destroyed the stability of many African nations, and tribal conflicts have cost millions of lives. Driving through a river full of hippos, as Steyn does, is suicide. And the San lead very harsh lives indeed.

A documentary extra on the DVD shows us N!xau 10 years after the filming of The Gods Must Be Crazy. He was living in a border camp in Namibia where people were dying of starvation. A tee shirt he probably got in Paris when he was touring the world to promote the film was in tatters. He has since died of tuberculosis. It makes me sad to think that this natural clown is no longer with us. We are fortunate, nonetheless, to have available this very funny tribute to slapstick and to the bemused spirit of N!xau. l