Criterion Reflections

Blast of Silence (1961) - #428

2012-01-20T22:20:00.000-05:00

They all hate the gun they hire. When people look at you, baby boy Frankie Bono, they see death. Death across the counter. Remembering...

Remembering... Though Blast of Silence begins with birth imagery (impermeable darkness save for a single pinprick of light that eventually expands to become the open mouth of a subway tunnel,) the film plays out like a mournful final reminiscence, that trembling awful moment of helpless remorse experienced by sad lost souls as they realize their appointment with death is upon them and all that comes to mind is a flood of regrets they are now powerless to address. A short, sordid peep over the shoulder of Frankie Bono, a hate-filled hit-man, sent on a job to kill a man he's never met but soon deeply despises based on nothing more than offense at his appearance, Blast of Silence has a lot going for it for film noir aficionados - vintage New York street-level cinematography, an acute visual sensibility deriving from its director/writer/star's background in comic book illustration, as existentially bleak and dour an outlook as one could ever ask from the genre, an evocative and varied musical soundtrack capturing cool jazz, rolling marimbas and conga beats of the era. The atmosphere is dank and the characters are, without exception, rough hewn, taking us on a harsh plunge into some down and dirty business that delivers many gratifying moments when you're in one of those moods to wallow in alienation and self-serving rejection of all things warm, fuzzy and sentimental. But what lingers longest in my imagination, a couple days after watching it through for the second time, is the palpably ashen aftertaste of a life wasted and acutely aware of its own predestined failure from the moment of first encounter with the cold hostile world it dropped into.

The most unique characteristic of the film, both then and now, is the use of an unattributed second-person narrator (as demonstrated in the lead quote above.) The speaker is never revealed, and his perspective remains mysterious as it speaks in mocking tones to Frankie, tossing off incisively withering taunts with just a tinge of sarcasm and irony. Is it a "Voice of God," rendering a Judgement Day closing argument as if to prove Frankie deserved the damnation that collapsed upon him after he flawlessly - except for one slight wobble and an unplanned execution - carried out his murderous commission? Is the Voice that of Frankie himself, an outgrowth of his inner conflicts that divides him against himself? Either could be the case, since the Voice knows things about Frankie that no other human ever would - painful memories, trivial bits of information that would lie dormant in the subconscious until triggered into awareness by odd inexplicable associations with seemingly insignificant events.

The corrosive litany of contempt, projected toward his connections, his past and future victims, the crowds of nameless strangers he weaves through... the mantric repetition of words like "hate" and "remembering"... the circuitous pacing, clandestine driving, and aimless time-consuming wander down cold, windswept streets ... the ritualistic invocation of "Baby Boy Frankie Bono" even though by now he's a grown man, now dreadfully nearer the end of his days than he quite imagines (though inwardly welcomes and is ready for, so he thinks)... the derisive congratulatory salutation, "that's just how you like it"... smug, malicious jabs about roads in life not taken, delusional notions of careers as an architect, an engineer... all delivered with a sneering wise-guy lilt by the Voice. These characteristics all point to a fractured, self-absorbed infantilism that gnawed at the core of Frankie's being. Unmet needs that go way back in his life, a back story only hinted at as the anti-hero recalls his youth spent in an orphanage much like the one he spies from his perch atop the building where he waits to fulfill his contract. Blast of Silence, an deceptively quiet little film that was quickly lost in the endless shuffle of popular entertainments, full of iconic urban wasteland imagery, calmly plucks its deep psychological notes like the bass player fingering his strings in the Village Gate nightclub, proving to be more dangerous and devastating to the fraudulent attainments of middle class prosperity than one might imagine at first glance. Frankie Bono is out there, watching and waiting for that moment when your guard is dropped, your protection is parked out on the street, when you're more vulnerable than you'll ever realize... until it's too late.

Next: Yojimbo

The Human Condition Part 3 (1961) - #480

2012-01-12T22:38:00.001-05:00

The country you were taught to know will be dead... and that's how it should be.

After filming the first two parts of The Human Condition (No Greater Love and The Road to Eternity) in close succession, Masaki Kobayashi and his crew took a well-deserved and presumably much needed respite from their labors before undertaking the task of shooting the excruciating finale, A Soldier's Prayer. Given Kobayashi's faithful adaptation of the popular novel on which the films were based, everyone involved - cast, crew and audience - knew they were in for a gut-wrenching ordeal when the time came to put the remainder of poor Private Kaji's sad story on screen for the ages. A substantial break, not to mention a lot of planning and technical coordination, was needed to bring this magnificent (though draining) epic to its devastating conclusion. After taking viewers on a journey through forced labor camps, military exercises and front-line battles in the first seven hours of the trilogy, A Soldier's Prayer thrusts us into the brutal aftermath of the Pacific War, as Kaji and various companions scratch their way through tangled forests, barren deserts, refugee hideouts and a Soviet P.O.W. camp, persistently struggling to stay one step ahead of death's shadow for the simple sake of witnessing another day.

Murder, starvation, imprisonment, suicide, depression, abandonment, isolation and betrayal. Debasing shame and humiliation, loss of hope, groveling in filth, fire and freezing snow... deprivations of every sort imaginable - even inconsolable screaming babies in the middle of the night! - all this and more press down relentlessly upon our protagonist and his unfortunate fellow survivors of Japan's disastrous defeat after its occupation of Manchuria. The spectacle is riveting, the cinematography luminous in its horrific splendor, and every performance impeccably captures the unique angles on misery experienced by soldiers, peasants, old men, young women, confused and innocent children as they scramble over the war-swept plains in their visceral fight for life.

I don't know if the casting for A Soldier's Prayer had already taken place prior to the release of the earlier sections, but the appearance in this last part of a pair of familiar actors, Chishu Ryu and Hideko Takamine, whom I highly respect from their work with Ozu and Naruse, seems to indicate that the success and massive sweep of the trilogy made it an attractive project for high-profile performers, the kind they like to have on their resume, even if it's just a bit part. Certainly, the list of acting credits included in this handsome box set is among the longest one will find among any Criterion films, and I imagine that others more familiar with Japanese cinema of the late 1950s find it a fascinating "who's who" of actors from that period.

In the meantime, The Human Condition's first two installments went on to become box office sensations in Japan, establishing Tatsuya Nakadai as a major star for years to come. The process that led to him landing the role of Kaji, and his later-in-life musings on the impact that role had on his career and personal development, are given good long looks on the supplemental features disc included with this package. It was a coveted role with many aspiring actors in pursuit, but Kobayashi saw something special in Nakadai, who hadn't done all that much to distinguish himself from the pack up to that point and seemed mystified by his selection both before and after the production wrapped up. The story goes that in his screen test, Nakadai made a certain facial expression, one capturing the crazed delirium that overtook Kaji at the conclusion of The Human Condition, that sealed the decision.

There's no doubt that Kobayashi got it right. Nakadai absolutely emptied himself in order to take on Kaji's metamorphosis from a stubborn, intellectualized and ultimately self-serving idealist to the haunted, shell-shocked and war ravaged soul who knew no rest in his pursuit of a reunion with his wife Michiko. The physical ordeals he underwent as an actor included weeks of boot-camp intensity military training, as well as taking real beatings from his fellow actors in various fight scenes and coming close to clinical hypothermia as he laid motionless on the ground in an actual snowstorm in the film's conclusion.

No less demanding than the hardships he experienced in the varied geographic settings of The Human Condition was the intense psychic and emotional topography he had to navigate as we see Kaji gradually but inexorably reduced by circumstances and grief to a staggering husk of a man. In that process, he's still called upon to be a leader and a protector of those who look up to him, and to most observers there's no obvious fault to be found in how he discharges his duties, guiding his various companions through hostile forests, dangerous homesteads inhabited by vengeful Chinese peasants, barren deserts and innumerable other dangers. And yet Kaji finds himself repeatedly facing situations in which his noble convictions and simple reverence for life are forcibly compromised or sometimes simply overwhelmed by the furious emotions stirred up by an overload of stress and futility.

Part 3 opens with him carrying out a premeditated act of murder in order to help his companions avoid detection by an enemy patrol. Near the end, Kaji kills again in raw vengeance, falling far short of his lofty principled pacifism of just a few years earlier. Conscious of his failures throughout, Kaji's quest is to achieve some sort of redemption, some way of atoning for the disappointments and squandered opportunities that he knows are attributable only to him. As admirably heroic as Kaji may be when comparing his deeds to the conduct of others around him, he's much more complex and intricately rendered than your standard war-movie protagonist. That's partly due to the fact that we spend so much time seeing the war through Kaji's eyes - this is a nearly 10 hour movie in which the main character dominates almost every scene, after all. But Kobayashi's deep grasp of Kaji's motivations, and his courageous exposition of the man's irreconcilable interior conflicts, makes Kaji a truly transcendent figure who convincingly embodies some of the most troubling yet invigorating characteristics of human nature.

As I've said in my reviews of the first two parts, there's more breadth and levity to our common "human condition" than this monumental work chooses to portray, but in giving a profound articulation of the power that love and a quest for moral purity can exert in resistance to extreme hardship, after the idols of nationalism and political ideology have been stripped of their delusional powers, A Soldier's Prayer is practically without peer. The high artistry and depth of detail that went into its production adds to the sobering inspiration that this masterpiece delivers.

Next: Blast of Silence

Pigs and Battleships (1961) - #472

2012-01-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

Japan is a beautiful country with a unique culture, able to incorporate the finer practices and customs of other countries.

Judging from just about every review I've read, including the Criterion Collection's booklet essay included in the DVD, it seems almost obligatory, when writing about Shohei Imamura's breakthrough film Pigs and Battleships, to present him in stark contrast to the venerable Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. That's largely owing to his experience working with Ozu upon first entering Japan's film industry, assisting him on a trio of important films of the early 1950s, including Early Summer and Tokyo Story. Despite their working relationship in that formative stage of Imamura's career, or more likely, in reaction to what that work produced and how it was received, Imamura went on to make films that mark a severe departure from the refined and elegant traditional Japanese style that Ozu epitomized. Imamura was far from alone in making provocative, iconoclastic Japanese films at this time - Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, Koreyoshi Kurahara and others were quite busy pushing the limits of cinematic boundaries as well - but his influence and reputation continued to grow as the decade went on. Pigs and Battleships wasn't his first directorial effort, but it's the one that set his work apart from the pack, landing him in a bit of trouble with his employers at Nikkatsu Studio but confirming his determination to forge a path of presenting his vision of "cultural anthropology" on film.

So though I run the risk of sounding like an imitator, in my case, comparisons between Imamura and Ozu can hardly be avoided, since I first watched Pigs and Battleships a little over a week ago, hard on the heels of viewing Ozu's 1960 film Late Autumn. The two films sit in close succession on the time line of Criterion films I'm working through, and as deeply impressed as I was to see Ozu's mature artistry on display so near to the end of his career, I think watching such a disparate work from the same nation, released just a couple months later, benefited my viewing of each, helping me to better appreciate them both, but for drastically different reasons. Imamura certainly had a legitimate point in wanting to demonstrate that Japanese life in 1961 consisted of so much more than the quiet, deeply internalized and genteel relational dilemmas that preoccupied Ozu (and continue to make his films so interesting and accessible to many people who live outside of his time and social context.) While Ozu's work between the late 40s and early 60s does provide evidence of the growing affluence and increased stability of postwar Japan, there were huge issues that his aesthetic approach led him to avoid or at most to address with indirect glances. And one of them was the ongoing American military presence in some parts of Japan, such as the United States Fleet Activities base in Yokosuka, located just south of Tokyo. The site was first occupied by American forces in August 1945, just after Japan's surrender, and soon became a major naval outpost that remains under US control to this day. While the presence of foreign sailors and the impact they exert on the local community there provides the backdrop for Pigs and Battleships, Japanese citizens are Imamura's primary focus, and it turns out to be a raw, wildly funny but also unsettling and disturbing portrait of that society - despite the opening disclaimer that This Story is Entirely Fictional.

After a few establishing shots of the base accompanied by jarringly familiar "patriotic" sounding American music, we're plunged immediately into the sleazy little neighborhoods surrounding the outpost, where sailors take their shore leave maneuvering past the prying eyes of military police patrols and two-bit hustlers looking to get them drunk, hook them up with good-time girls and loosen up their wallets. Though Imamura wasn't intending to market his films outside his natural audience, seeing our men in uniform as viewed through Japanese eyes was pretty novel and illuminating for me, even if they were never really developed as full-fledged characters in the script. I couldn't help thinking about my dad, who was stationed in Japan as a young Marine corporal right around this time, just a few months before I was born, and probably witnessed (or participated!) in some of the shenanigans that went on around the base. To the Yokosuka locals, the American presence is just a source of fresh and readily available cash, an exploitable resource sitting there for the taking. And it's in this seedy milieu that we first meet Kinta, an aspiring hoodlum who's pledged himself to a local gang involved in supplying pork to the Americans, as well as other, more overtly corrupt shakedowns and petty turf wars. He's a cocky brat, running around town bare-chested with a silk jacket embroidered with "Japan" in English lettering on the back, dark aviator sunglasses and brandishing a sideways baseball cap. Too willing to ingratiate his way up the criminal ranks, he's the perfect patsy - young, dumb and impulsive enough to take on whatever crap assignment nobody else in the gang wants to handle themselves.

Kinta's got a girlfriend, Haruko, who works for her family's restaurant but dreams of something more stable and and honest, though not necessarily as lucrative. Her aspirations are for marriage and family, sustained by a solid factory job. They're both naive, just emerging from late adolescence, right on the cusp of making those young adult decisions that will steer their destinies almost irrevocably from that point forward, yet typically oblivious to the big picture and utterly at the mercy of their emotions and impulses of the moment. For Kinta, his desire to score points with the gangsters overrides Haruko's numerous appeals to straighten up his act and not become a stooge - but he sure has the hots for his gal, and amidst all the jostling, strutting and conflicts that unfold so rapidly throughout Pigs and Battleships, Imamura throws in enough scenes of tender, innocent infatuation to remind us just how deeply over their heads these two unfortunate young lovers really are.

The plot machinations of Pigs and Battleships are too intricate, or just plain confusing, to bother summarizing here, and the substance of the film doesn't require a viewer to closely follow each lurid transaction or dirty double-cross that propels the characters from one crisis to the next in order to assimilate Imamura's message. The impact comes from watching how Kinta and Haruko in particular respond to the hard blows of circumstance that hit them from all angles. They're both powerless peons at the bottom of Yokosuka's exploitative hierarchy. Kinta's asked to take the fall for his gang boss if a murder rap comes down after a rival is knocked off, and he overcomes his goggle-eyed revulsion at having to help dispose of the body with nervous pulls from the whiskey flask tossed his way. Strung along by his fellow gangsters as much for their amusement as for actually advancing their criminal enterprise, Kinta throws himself ever more recklessly into his outlaw persona with thuggish joviality, bashing merchandise, blustering threats to shop owners and tossing around money that's not his as he lives out his notion of what it means to be a big shot. But the reckless swagger he musters is belied by his kindhearted concern for neighbors less fortunate than him. What he surmises to be the harmless theft of a few young piglets gets him in trouble with one of his bosses, until that boss learns that the kid isn't so much a scammer out to rip off the gang as he's really just a kid with enough shreds of conscience intact that he's sincerely willing to help people he cares about for altruistic motives.

Haruko, for her part, loves her man more than she loves the promises of easy money and material luxury he likes to promise her. But she's not immune to the fascinations that emanate from Yokosuka's illicit pastimes, ultimately trying her hand at prostitution as an act of defiance against her disappointing boyfriend, her money-grubbing family and the stultifying conditions she's subjected to. Simultaneously scorning and emulating the example of her sister, the proverbial gold digger who's hooked up with a Japanese-American and contemplates moving with him to the USA, Haruko briefly sets aside her scruples and lets herself go wild, giving herself over for a night of "fun" with three drunk and horny Americans. In capturing the scene, Imamura's swirling overhead camera simulates the inescapable and nauseating vortex of confusion and dread that overtakes Haruko as she finds herself trapped in a situation way beyond her control. But there's no time for her to wallow in victimhood. The room stops spinning, she seizes a brash opportunity to get a small slice of revenge, which quickly blows up on her, leading to pursuit by raging sailors in underwear, a harsh smackdown and her arrest, ultimately snapping Haruko back to her senses as she realizes the futility of traveling further down that path of abandonment.

Beyond Imamura's frantic forays through a modern rendition of The Lower Depths, we're drawn into some ruminations on Japan's strained relationships with some of its Asian neighbors, as represented by Chinese and Korean racketeers all working their own angles in the pork game. The tensions probably have more resonance with viewers closer to that context than I am, but these scenes cast a dark ironic light on the quote that leads off this essay, read from a school textbook by Haruko's little brother in the aftermath of an ugly catfight between his older sisters. As his voice-over continues extolling Japan's cultural virtues, we see pigs in a crate being towed through the squalid streets of Yokosuka, contradicting all standing notions we may have about tranquil zen gardens, elegant calligraphy, cherry blossoms and meditative tea ceremonies as emblems of that great civilization. And if that gritty come-down isn't enough, there's this, the most memorable and defining sequence of Pigs and Battleships that works pretty well on its own simply for its outrageous visuals, even for those who don't really have any clue as to why the young man is brandishing a machine gun, shooting out the neon and ultimately turning his porcine cargo loose into Yokosuka's red light district:

But after that blazing climactic scene, in which Kinta's fate is tragically sealed, we still have to see how things wind up with Haruko, and her exit is indisputably the most noble and admirable gesture of the entire film, though it consists of nothing more than striding upstream against the current of a flock of addle-brained Japanese women streaming toward the docks waiting to greet a new arrival of American seamen. Haruko, recognizing that everything taking place within the confines of Yokosuka is saturated with the slime of raw exploitation, has nothing better to offer as her alternative than hopping the next train out of town. Rather than endure one more ripoff or pin her hopes to some foolish man waiting to either fall victim to a scam or be the victimizer himself, she takes a chance on self-determination. We don't know where that train will take her, or if the scene she lands in will be all that much different than what she left behind, qualitatively speaking. Unlike the pigs peddled by the gangs and eaten by the Yanks, Haruko recognizes what awaits her if she just sits still and lets herself be passively consumed. Her only alternative is to adopt the hardened exterior and the merciless determination so characteristic of the steel-clad battleships always looming in the background as they float unchallenged upon the waters of Tokyo Bay.

Next: The Human Condition Part 3

Year's End Reflections #3

2011-12-31T18:59:00.002-05:00

Another year, another 100 movie reviews posted by me, either here or over on CriterionCast.com. That's my short take on what my third year of dedicated work in studying the films of the Criterion Collection (and their spin-off lines) has produced, though it would be a mistake to just boil the experience down to numbers. I've learned a lot, interacted with quite a few people who share my interests in these great cinematic achievements and carved out a little niche for myself in what turned out to be a much bigger and more complex world of movie-blogging than I ever suspected. Writing for this blog has taken me through a short but pivotal stretch in film history, 1958-1960. TV came of age in that era, pushing studios to challenge old taboos and censorship practices in order to give paying customers something they couldn't see in their living rooms. With The 400 Blows and Breathless, the Nouvelle Vague began to break open new territory for not only what cinema could address but also how stories were told. The increasing use of widescreen compositions in films like Spartacus, The Hidden Fortress and L'avventura broadened perspectives, literally and perceptively. At the same time, B-movies like The Blob, Fiend Without a Face and First Man into Space brought garish thrills and campy humor, as well as a love of the craft expressed through shoestring budgets, into the conversation. Ingmar Bergman parted ways with Gunnar Fischer and began his celebrated partnership with Sven Nykvist, neither perhaps suspecting the fruits that working collaboration would bear over the next two decades.

As for myself, reading over my thoughts from a year ago, at the end of 2010, much of what I expressed there carries over without any needed alterations. I'm still working regularly for Criterion Cast, cranking out my weekly Journey Through the Eclipse Series, though not quite as punctually over the past few months as that Monday afternoon deadline I tried to maintain ate into my weekend time, producing tensions that are best avoided when one has the option. As things stand, I count around 43 Eclipse films (including the upcoming Jean-Pierre Gorin set) that I have yet to review, which, combined with some new releases, should give me at least one more full year of weekly Eclipse columns to publish there. After that, I imagine I'll stay connected with the site in some way; we'll see what happens a year from now!

Ryan Gallagher, editor of CriterionCast.com, has been very accommodating and I really appreciate his work there, along with the invitation to become a regular contributor to both the site and, less frequently, their fantastic podcast where I've enjoyed a few guest appearances, discussing films like Paths of Glory, The Burmese Harp and in a trio of year-ending episodes, quite a few other titles as we listed our favorite Criterion releases of 2011, a summary of this year's Eclipse Series offerings, and our wish lists for blu-ray upgrades for existing titles in the year ahead. I figure on spending a few more Friday evenings skyping with the guys as the program continues following various arcs, themed months that link otherwise disparate films into a thought-provoking conversational context. Let me also mention another online program, The AuteurCast, hosted by Rudie Obias and West Anthony. They requested my input to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinders The Marriage of Maria Braun, and I had a great time conversing with them. Here's hoping we can do it again in 2012!

As I peek at what's ahead for me here, I'm excited to keep moving forward into the amazing decade's worth of films from the Sixties. 1961 beckons, the year I was born, as it turns out, so now I'm finally getting into films that were released within my lifetime. Yojimbo/Sanjuro, Last Year at Marienbad, Viridiana are right around the corner. I'll soon be wrapping up The Human Condition trilogy and, sadly, only two more Ozu films remain for me to review. After that, lots of Godard, further New Wave explorations from France, Japan, eastern Europe, Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy, and so many more classics I'm eager to revisit or discover. In this timeline, cinema is just on the verge of leaping into ever more radical and innovative forms of expression! And of course, Stan Brakhage will be there quietly doing his silent, visual thing to wrap it up as I reach the conclusion of each calendar year.

Just yesterday I finished up the films of 1960, including Brakhage's The Dead, plus a few titles that I normally wouldn't have covered here from the Essential Art House and Hulu Plus subsidiaries that Criterion utilizes in different ways. Going forward, I intend to make the Criterion films on their Hulu Plus channel part of my viewing discipline, though I'm not going to promise a review of each film here. I just don't see myself having enough time to dedicate to all those installments of the Zatoichi series as they come up in my timeline!

Speaking of my timeline, I'm willing to share it as a Google Doc (read only) if anyone is interested in checking out the spreadsheet I've made to keep track of all the Criterion-related films. Come on, share my obsession, I know you're curious. Just get a message to me if you want to take me up on the offer.

Finally, let me wrap up with a simple word of thanks to those who've interacted with me here via comments, over on Facebook, Twitter, GetGlue, MUBI or (most recently) Letterboxd, through the CriterionCast.com website or private email messages. Your opinions, observations and recommendations mean a lot to me, as does just knowing that we share this connection of appreciating some of the greatest works of art created over the past hundred years or so. Even when I'm just sitting here in my basement watching a DVD or blu-ray by myself, through the online cinephile community we're all a part of, I know I'm not truly alone!

The Dead (1960) - #517

2011-12-30T12:21:00.002-05:00

The Dead became my first work in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making The Dead kept me alive. - Stan Brakhage

The first recognizable object one sees when watching The Dead, Stan Brakhage's only film produced in 1960, is the marble foot of a statue, that as the camera pans up the figure turns out to belong to a brooding, shrouded sentry, perhaps an angel, a monk, or the Grim Reaper himself, standing atop a grave, seemingly taunting us by presenting a handful of coins that, despite the apparent generosity, we could not remove from his grip without destroying them. The tomb is one of many located in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, the most famous and densely occupied graveyard in Paris. Some individuals buried there with Criterion connections include Max Ophuls, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand and Pierre Brasseur. The remains of Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, among many others (more than a million actually) are interred there as well. That's interesting background trivia, but none of it mattered at all to Stan Brakhage, of course, he was just there for the visuals (and perhaps some other more personal, spiritual or artistic reasons that I can't begin to speculate on, though his quote above offers a glimmer of insight.)

Commentators more deeply immersed in Brakhage's work and world than I offer some helpful insight, so I'm including a few links about The Dead that readers can follow if they want to learn more. My impressions can be read after the clip, which runs a bit under 11 minutes if you want to watch The Dead yourself.

Immediately after cutting away from the stern, cross-armed statue, we see the face of a living man (maybe Brakhage himself? it wouldn't surprise me) in that characteristic averted glance head tilt reminiscent of the pose of sculpted angels that populate the cemetery and reappear so frequently in The Dead. The juxtaposition of figures, cold dead stone and warm living flesh, sets the film in motion as we careen through the heavily wooded, densely packed graveyard, eerily rendered in negative exposures, superimposed overlays and skewed fragments that undercut the somber serenity such environments generally try to convey. Further disorientation occurs as we're suddenly and inexplicably transported down the course of a river, staring at the pedestrians and bystanders gathered on its banks. The restless camera never stops or gets close enough to any of the objects it captures to provide much in the way of detail, and the people who cross the visual path of its lens are mere ephemeral blurs, not individuals in any meaningful sense. Most of them are just sitting there, passing through time, not doing anything all that remarkable, interesting or worthy of further reflection. One gets the sense that they're just biding their time here on earth, before they too take their place among The Dead.

But while I have your attention, and as my thoughts (and presumably yours) are at least for a moment inclined to ponder our destined mortality, let me offer brief capsule reviews of a few other 1960 films I watched recently as I wrap up that year's Criterion-related output here on my blog. Though all were created quite independently of each other, they have in common a theme of survival in the face of extremely hostile conditions.

Kapo, part of the bare-bones Essential Art House series of DVDs, is one of five films that Criterion released exclusively in this format before the line went dormant a couple years ago. The others are Mayerling, Le jour se leve, Gervaise and Last Holiday. All except Kapo are now out of print, though they don't seem too difficult to find, nor are they very expensive, at least the last time I checked. Kapo's most noteworthy attribute is that it was one of the first films that sought to explore life inside a Nazi concentration camp. Though Resnais' Night and Fog predates Kapo by a good five years, that film was a documentary that used archival footage and new material shot at Auschwitz. Kapo gives us a fictional story that begins with a Jewish teenager's removal from her presumably safe home in Paris, after the city had been occupied by the Germans. Her transformation from a culturally refined and innocent schoolgirl who inadvertently escapes her appointment with the gas chamber, only to become a cold and manipulative enforcer within the evil hierarchy of the death camp, is both brave and chilling. Susan Strasberg gives a very compelling performance as she endures depression and the loss of all hope, before capitalizing on the advantages that her youthful beauty and compartmentalized morality can provide in her determination to stay alive at all costs. As stark and surprising as the premise is, especially for such a pioneering work in the "fictionalized Holocaust" sub-genre, Kapo turns back to conventionality for the sake of a more palatable ending, as she becomes the noble martyr figure that we've come to expect from Holocaust and similar war crimes horrors movies. Still, for a film of its era to go as far as it does in portraying the nasty venality that undoubtedly took place within the camps, I have to give my respects to Gillo Pontecorvo, who built on his journalistic experience to make this film, and went on to direct The Battle of Algiers, an even more courageous and innovative work than what he accomplished in Kapo.

Letter Never Sent is currently available on Criterion's Hulu Plus channel, or you can follow this link to see the whole thing, without subtitles, on YouTube. But it was announced as a March release earlier this month, so I look forward to revisiting this visually enthralling film in blu-ray hi-definition next spring. I first discovered it back in August while browsing around on Hulu, happy to see another Soviet film from the "thaw" period following the death of Stalin, when Kruschev decided for whatever reason to lighten up on the censorship and allow filmmakers a little more leeway in their storytelling. I'd seen The Cranes are Flying earlier in the year and was intrigued to see what Mikhail Kalatozov did as a follow-up to that impressive film. Letter Never Sent simply astonished me as it took the modest premise of a geology expedition to Siberia in directions I would have never anticipated. A dramatic opening shot of the exploration party being left behind in the trackless wilderness is just a foretaste of visual splendors to come, but they're mostly of a horrifying nature, at least for those of us who dread the idea of being caught in the midst of a raging forest fire with no easy means of escape. When that conflagration breaks out, the story lines based on budding romance and small rivalries within the group are mostly subsumed as they find their common purpose in banding together and getting through the ordeal intact. An ideological strain of strength-through-collectivism pervades Letter Never Sent (this is, after all, a Mosfilm production,) providing a fascinating contrast to the rank individualism that motivated Edith/Nichole in Kapo. Different adversaries call for different measures, I suppose. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what others have to say about this impressive piece of work when it comes out on disc in a few months. Hopefully I will have a chance to give it a more extensive review on CriterionCast.com, should I be fortunate enough to have an advance copy sent my way.

Finally, another Hulu Plus exclusive (for now, though I really really hope that Criterion finds a way to release it on blu-ray or DVD), Kaneto Shindo's The Naked Island. Though not nearly as kinetically stimulating as Letter Never Sent, it's every bit as visually wondrous as it chronicles the rigorous life of a modern-day peasant family eking out their subsistence on a parched little outcropping in the middle of Japan's Inland Sea. The parents and their two sons have hours of toil to get through each day, as they have to row their boat ashore multiple times a day just to get a few buckets full of water for their crops. Each trip between their island and the harbor shore is punctuated by other tasks: tending to the crops, preparation of meals, bathing, fishing, feeding the goat, laboriously clearing the roots of trees to create a new little patch of arable soil.

The film takes us through the course of seasons, gorgeously capturing the accompanying rituals and duties as they shift over the course of a year. There's no dialog, just music and naturalistic sound effects, the voices of children singing and and adults chanting. You'll either find it unbearably tedious or magnificently enthralling, and your response will largely be predicated on your ability to simply slow yourself down long enough to adjust to The Naked Island's languid rhythms. Though I'm casually lumping it in with Kapo and Letter Never Sent, there's obviously a huge chasm of existential threat between the situations presented in those two films and Shindo's portrayal of a simple rustic existence that is based on his own experience as a child. After all, the family could have relocated and taken on a more ordinary, less arduous type of labor to make ends meet. But it hardly requires narrative explication to make clear to the viewer that these people were born to this way life. Despite the inherent frustrations, the inevitable daydreams of greater comforts and the completely forgivable breakdown that one of the parents succumbs to (briefly) toward the end of the film, The Naked Island is a testimony of honor and an inspiring challenge to all of us to summon up our own courage, look within and fully inhabit the life that we're each called to live in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It's a perfectly fitting film to wrap up my third full year of blogging through the Criterion Collection (both past and perhaps future entries.)

Next: Pigs and Battleships

Zazie dans le Metro (1960) - #570

2011-12-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

What's all this mess?

Zazie dans le Metro is a film I wish I'd seen thirty years ago, or maybe even further back, when I was still a teenager. Its wild blend of candy-colored surrealism, cartoon zaniness, playful linguistic twists and rampant unpredictability might have changed my life back then, or at least opened up some lines of inquiry that for various reasons never presented themselves to me in my earlier-in-life experiences. As it was, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, playing punk rock and wrestling with the anarchist impulses that time and experience gradually sublimated into more socially constructive outlets, a film like Zazie might have galvanized my creative focus in a whole new direction, away from music and literature, and more toward cinema in its more experimental and provocative manifestations.

Back then I had become aware of Bunuel's early surrealist films, and I dabbled in the overwrought wordplay of writers like James Joyce and Jack Kerouac in his more manic, unhinged moments. I'd begun to see deeper levels of subversive wit and existential commentary in the brash antics I enjoyed in Looney Tunes and Three Stooges shorts. I'd watched my share of head-trip stoner movies with their pseudo-philosophical banter and self-consciously dream-like sequences, and seen even more films in a stoned condition myself, which may have had more of an adverse effect on my appreciation of cinema than I ever suspected at the time. Zazie dans le Metro takes the best aspects from these occasionally incompatible cultural streams and whips them into a frenzied concoction with a distinctly French flavor to it, creating a film quite singular in my experience, an explosive, joy-inducing romp that I'll just have to watch with some frequency to make up for all that lost time.

When I learned earlier this year that Criterion was going to release Zazie in tandem with another, much later film from Louis Malle (1975's Black Moon,) I didn't look too deeply into the matter. Black Moon intrigued me when I learned of it's quasi-sci-fi attributes and the fact that Malle filmed it on his private estate. A spectacle of vintage mid-70s self-indulgence began to take root in my imagination, and I made a priority of watching Black Moon fairly soon after I brought it home. Knowing that Zazie was coming up soon in my timeline for this blog, I reserved it for watching within its chronological context, so this past week was my first viewing of a film that I vaguely expected would be something akin to Albert Lamorrisse's The Red Balloon, only with more amped-up silliness, owing to hints of its reputation and the undeniably goofy but charming cover illustration by Yann Legendre. You know, a playful tour of Paris from a delightful child's-eye point of view: wistful, innocent, charming, slightly nostalgic, that kind of thing.

But my presumptuous expectations were favorably challenged and raised a couple weeks ago when my colleague Travis George at CriterionCast.com listed Zazie dans le Metro as his second-favorite Criterion release of 2011. (Check out the podcast or visit the website to see all of our picks.) His comments informed me that I was in for something quite a bit more raucous and invigorating than the sweet, slightly cock-eyed kids film that I thought Louis Malle had crafted.

To call Zazie dans le Metro a kids film is neither inaccurate nor misleading, but in order for that to be so, we have to clear our minds of the normal assumptions that accompany that label. Based on a popular, linguistically innovative novel that tweaks the French language in a way that reminds me a bit of Anthony Burgess' neologisms in A Clockwork Orange (just based on what I've read about Raymond Queneu's original text,) Zazie presents us with a foul-mouthed, sarcastic, rambunctious girl around ten years old, who's left in the care of her Uncle Gilbert for a couple of days so that her mother can go have a fling with some loverboy she's meeting in Paris. The uncle has free time during the day to show Zazie around the city because he works as a dancing female impersonator at a Parisian drag club. Zazie is immediately disappointed upon her arrival because, as a girl from the country, her dreams of the big city center around riding on the Metro subway line, which happens to be closed due to a worker's strike. Gilbert's attempt to substitute aimless taxi rides around the city quickly prove to be only annoying futilities to Zazie. Her boredom with adult manners and hypocrisies is easily provoked, even though Uncle Gilbert and Aunt Albertine are hardly the old fuddie-duddies that often push kids in that direction. Still, Zazie becomes restless, runs away from her distracted guardians, and we're swiftly embarked on a crazy excursion through some of the most-filmed sites of Paris and a few of its back alleys too. The pace is one of continual acceleration that doesn't stop until lecherous pedophilic pursuits are thwarted, old Tom & Jerry chase scenes get re-enacted complete with exploding props and blackface collateral damage, characters dangle from the steel girders of the Eiffel Tower spouting pseudo-profundities that still carry meaning despite their airy silliness:

...and a culminating food fight in a restaurant overleaps the usual messy slapstick hijinx of such scenes, devolving into a set-shredding chaos that predates The Who, Jimi Hendrix or any other rock god guitar smashers you'd care to name by a good five or six years at least.

And that's just a surface summary of what goes on in Zazie dans le Metro. Poke a little further into it, as I've only begun to myself, and there's no shortage of disturbing, unsettling matters to consider. Zazie's the product of a broken home, one that was fractured by her father's death at the hands of the mother, for misdeeds that are left unspecified but imply some nasty repulsive drunken conduct on his part, probably involving his daughter. The relationships between adults, be they lovers, friends, adversaries or random strangers on the street, are all tainted by various shades of venality, repression and deceit, to the point that Zazie's willful non-conforming brattiness seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the sordid environment her caretakers have led her into. And through it all, besides her ripping vocal commentary, Zazie's trademark gap-toothed grin beams at us from the screen, taking unmasked and undiluted delight in giving these insane grown-ups the dismissive brush-off and childish taunts they deserve. Even though there's not a single moment in Zazie dans le Metro when the titular protagonist closes her eyes and sticks out her tongue, Legendre's cover art perfectly captures her essence and attitude all the same, in a way that Zazie's middle finger or any other gesture might be too easily misconstrued.

Next: Brakhage '60

Shoot the Piano Player (1960) - #315

2011-12-11T15:52:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it helps to spill your guts to a stranger.

For early viewers of The 400 Blows who were eager to take in Francois Truffaut's follow-up to his impressive and epoch-marking debut, Shoot the Piano Player proved to be just a bit too bleak, puzzling and creatively adventurous for them to conveniently figure out and get on board with. That's what I'm surmising anyway, as I learn of the film's failure to capture the affections of its audience back in 1960 when it opened to muted shades of indifference - quite a contrast to the warm enthusiasm generated by the first installment of what came to be known as The Adventures of Antoine Doinel. Shoot the Piano Player's critical and box office struggles turned out to be quite an unfortunate outcome, since they seem to have exercised an inhibiting effect on Truffaut for the remainder of his career. After scripting the first draft of Breathless and then taking on this film, sourced from an American crime novel, Truffaut basically swore off doing any more pictures featuring gangsters or the criminal underworld. I have a lot to learn about Truffaut's subsequent body of work, so I'll suspend judgement until I'm much better informed, but by my reckoning, he had sufficient grasp of his material, injecting enough humor and unpredictability to keep the genre conventions fresh. But perhaps cranking out this kind of world-weary, verging on the nihilistic product was just a tightrope act that he knew he'd be unable to sustain over the long run.

Shoot the Piano Player tells a story about Charlie Koller, a tentative, inhibited musician doing what he can to put the tragic failure of his former life behind him. Back when he was famed concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, his incessant need for emotional reassurance and excessive absorption in his career drove his charming but fragile wife Theresa over the edge (literally) - especially as she unsuccessfully wrestled with the guilt incurred by her own contributions to his professional advancement. The clip below, about a third of the way into the film, provides some of this back story. Starting around the 4:30 mark, it features one of Truffaut's and cinematographer Raoul Cotard's characteristically eye-catching and memorable sequences: Edouard's hesitant approach to the studio of his prospective employers, with five different frames angling in to catch his moment of dread as he contemplates whether or not to push the doorbell, followed by the wistful retreating tracking shot of the beautiful anonymous violinist whose audition preceded his own.

The collapse of Edouard's world following the end of his marriage magnified his tendencies toward over-analyzing his emotional impulses to the point of paralysis, and it's that all too human characteristic, as much as it is his musical talent, that connects the lives of the classical artist he was and the barroom dance floor tinkler known as Charlie Koller that he's become. Charlie doesn't have a whole lot going for him - no commitments, just enough money to scratch by and no more expectations resting upon him than to show up at the local cafe the next evening and lively up the place with his boogie woogie piano stylings. Though he's underachieving badly, as we first get to know him while the story opens, that seems to be just the way he likes it.

But his momentary tranquility is just a mirage, unable to hold its illusory power as circumstances change around him. Chico, his long estranged brother who's caught up in petty crime, barges in on Charlie, blowing his cover and complicating matters as he evades the pursuit of two thugs he gypped out of their share of loot from a robbery. His no-strings liaisons with the pretty hooker Clarisse, who works the cafe crowd every bit as expertly as her musician friends at their respective professions, are disrupted when Charlie develops sincere feelings for Lena, a virginal, earnest waitress who knows his history and reconnects him to the still tender, barely suppressed wounds of his past. It's an emotionally risky and rigorous process for him to go through as he reverses all the efforts he's taken to construct a new identity, a less vulnerable concept of himself. But when Lena's honor is offended and her life threatened, the meek pianist springs into action, at least temporarily, before his double-mindedness reasserts itself and leads to a nearly fatal moment of hesitation. And when his little brother Fido gets ensnared in a hostage scheme cooked up by Chico's gangster adversaries, Charlie finally realizes that he can no longer retreat into the passive detachment that's been his primary coping mechanism to deal with an unbearable load of pain and regrets.

From that point, the action transfers out of Paris to a pleasantly surprising snowy rural locale as Charlie/Edouard reunites with his brothers, ostensibly to let the heat die down as he's now a wanted man, but also to unconsciously await the beautifully tragic denouement of his interlude with Lena. Truffaut wraps up the story, and Charlie's futile effort to reconstruct his life, with bittersweet resignation instead of the open-ended menu of possibilities that present themselves in Antoine Doinel's piercing gaze at the end of The 400 Blows, where viewers could (for awhile anyway) script their own sequel, as optimistic or pessimistic as they'd like. The moments of Shoot the Piano Player that stick with me most though are Charlie's numerous voice-over monologues, taking me into the consciousness of a man I can relate to myself as a guy who's prone at times to over-thinking a situation until the moment of spontaneous ignition has passed and all that's left is a sad impotent fizzle. Charlie's dilemmas run the range from comic to catastrophic, with far higher (though fictional) stakes in the long term than anything I've had to deal with in real life for quite a few years. Still, he's a convincingly rendered, ultimately sympathetic character despite his frequent failures to launch. And as a man prone to withdraw into the anonymity and social indifference that an exploitable talent like his musical ability makes possible, he sounds a note of caution to creative-obsessive types to stay accessible and attuned to the important people in our lives.

Truffaut himself saw this film as verging on parody, going by comments he made in a pair of interviews featured on the Disc 2 supplements. However he might want to categorize it, Shoot the Piano Player abounds in cinematic adventurousness and humor as Truffaut reaches into his bag of tricks at random moments, as much to the delight of modern viewers as it was to the consternation of those who may have preferred a softer, more predictable palette back in 1960. As it turned out, his inherent sincerity and an unresolved disdain for criminality in general apparently created too much internal discomfort for him to continue venturing down the path of glamorizing that way of life over the course of his artistic career, despite the deep admiration and inspiration that crime-based noir films generated in Truffaut and his Nouvelle Vague peers. Perhaps because it stands as such a distinctive entry in his filmography, Shoot the Piano Player has a contingent that considers it their favorite among his works. I have way too much to discover to draw that conclusion, but there's plenty to enjoy here on its own terms, whatever reservations Truffaut himself may have had looking back.

Next: Zazie dans le Metro

Spartacus (1960) - #105

2011-11-22T23:07:00.001-05:00

When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That's why he's not afraid of it. That's why we'll win.

As ambitious in scale, investment of talent and commercial aspirations as any film in the Criterion Collection, and significantly more so than most, Spartacus may seem at first glance to be something of a misfit when placed alongside the foreign, art house and more independent/auteurist films that Criterion is known for. As part of the ancient classical epic genre, ranked alongside major studio productions like Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, The Robe and, most significantly Ben-Hur that preceded it over the course of the 1950s, Spartacus looks and feels like your standard colossal Hollywood blockbuster of that era, featuring massive sets, abundant pomp and pageantry, portentous dialogue and the proverbial "cast of thousands." But despite these similarities, Spartacus stands quite apart from them in its underlying tone of subversion and challenge to popular mores and conventional power structures.

Telling the historically-based tale of a slave revolt that posed a serious challenge to the authority of the Roman Empire in pre-Christian times, the idea for this film was sparked by Kirk Douglas after his bid to be cast as the lead in Ben-Hur was rejected in Charlton Heston's favor. Though I can understand Douglas' disappointment, I think it turned out for the better. I'm not a big fan of Heston's wooden, grimacing over-acting style, but he makes a better Ben-Hur than his rambunctious dimple-chinned rival would have, given the pious direction that William Wyler and MGM took with that movie. And Kirk Douglas as the executive producer of Spartacus turns in an arguably better performance than Kirk Douglas the star performer. In assembling an impressive international cast, giving Stanley Kubrick an important opportunity to solidify his reputation as a director, and breaching the barriers to intellectual honesty posed by the McCarthy-era blacklisting of identified communist sympathizers by naming screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in the credits, Spartacus proved to be as radical and world-changing in its lasting impact on cinema as was the ancient uprising it chronicled on the politics and militarism of its time.

Watching Spartacus among the other Criterion films of 1960 doesn't really help much in assessing its place its achievements in that era, so for comparison's sake, I watched Ben-Hur via a streaming rental on YouTube to put the two epics side by side. The last quote in the trailer above, saying that Spartacus surpassed Ben-Hur "in wit, characterization and romance," was easily borne out in my opinion, even though Ben-Hur obviously earned much greater recognition in terms of awards and box office receipts. I think that's largely attributable to the conflicting goals of the two films. Whereas Ben-Hur aimed to provide a message that closely adhered to and reinforced the expectations of its mainstream audience, through its embellishments on the biblical accounts of Jesus Christ and its embrace of the triumphant individualism of its titular hero, Spartacus is at its heart a story of class struggle and collective solidarity. Both films concern a man who rises up from slavery to boldly challenge corrupt imperial forces, but it's significant to note that Judah Ben-Hur was heir to wealth and privilege, fell into slavery due to injustice and envy, and accomplished his victory through a form of acquiescence to the future power of a Christian church destined to merge with the Roman Empire. In contrast, Spartacus was born into slavery, never received any kind of formal education, and inspired a revolt based not on an appeal to ancient religious traditions but only to the inherent striving for freedom and self-determination common to oppressed peoples whose consciences have been awakened. Ben-Hur is, in short, a film much more compatible and even subservient to cultural authoritarianism than Spartacus could ever be construed or accused of.

Perhaps it's this inherent threat to the status quo, more than the appearance of a particular man's name for a few seconds on the opening credits, that led John Wayne and the American Legion to vociferously oppose Spartacus and call for the film's boycott when it was first released - a sad indication of just how repressive and unreasonable our nation's popular culture was at the time. One of the most vital supplements featured on Criterion's two-disc DVD set (and an expensive one, at that!) offers fascinating background to the controversy surrounding Spartacus, and the significant part it played in destroying not only the blacklist but also the Hayes Code. A letter from the MPAA outlines in disturbing but humorous detail the specific offenses that Trumbo's script committed (of course, the text was turned into them before the decision to credit Trumbo directly rather than the "Sam Jackson" alias he'd been forced to use in his work on other films.) Some of the mandated cuts were implemented in the first theatrical release; others appear to have been ignored altogether. Thankfully, we have the complete film as Trumbo, Kirk Douglas and replacement director Stanley Kubrick intended, thanks to a comprehensive restoration from 1991 that not only reinstated the deleted scenes, but gave us a visually magnificent document of the kind of films they just don't make any more.

Another point establishing the superiority of Spartacus over Ben-Hur is found in the supporting cast, and the overall quality of acting in general. One can debate the merits of Kirk Douglas vs. Charlton Heston as a matter of personal preference (which of the two is the snail, which is the oyster?) but no equivalent to the cumulative talents of Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov and Tony Curtis is anywhere to be found among the cast of Ben-Hur. I have to applaud the courage of Kirk Douglas in putting this troupe together, knowing full well that he'd likely be overshadowed by the complexity and intrigue they each brought to their respective roles. Whereas Douglas as Spartacus is a straightforward action man, possessed of all the requisite taciturn virtues befitting his role (though he allows himself a few choice moments to seethe as only Kirk Douglas can), the best lines and most provocative performances are pushed further down the bill. Olivier as the sexually-ambiguous, vaingloriously insecure tyrant in the making, Jean Simmons as a slave woman conscious of her status as chattel but maintaining her integrity as best she can, the shrewd exchanges of Ustinov's slave trader and Laughton's cynical populist politician - the four of them are each masterful, commanding their scenes with poise and elegance. And their British roots contributed to the "hell with it" attitude that pushed Douglas to make the fateful decision to defy the blacklist, as their careers faced less risk than would have been the case if he'd recruited a more conventional Hollywood-based supporting cast.

Setting aside then all the background information that makes the production of Spartacus a significant story in its own right, we are left with a film that captures and expresses a sense of mounting fury and outrage in response to the unchecked abuses and contempt of untrammeled might and authority. As such, it's a film that speaks to us today, in an age where wealth, privilege and access to power are increasingly concentrated into the hands of a few, to the detriment of the many. The old-fashionedness of epic-scaled costume dramas like Spartacus, with its requisite concessions to still prevailing taboos, may present some obstacles to connecting with a younger audience more accustomed to across-the-board extremity and explicitness. More recent retellings of the Spartacus myth, like the motion comic or the episodic series produced by Starz, have expanded liberties in which to tell their story, and though I haven't taken the time to do more than sample viewings, it seems clear enough that they wouldn't enjoy these opportunities to continue the Spartacus legacy if it hadn't been for the brave efforts of Kirk Douglas, who risked a hard-fought reputation as a Hollywood leading man in order to bring his vision of an ancient rabble-rouser and true freedom fighter on to the big screen for all the world to gaze upon in awe and admiration.

Next: Shoot the Piano Player

Tunes of Glory (1960) - #225

2011-11-09T00:23:00.001-05:00

And when you and I are long forgot, they'll say, "You should have heard them playing. You should have seen them marching then."

Though the idea is hardly anything new, a recent cycle of "manliness" has been making the rounds in American advertising and the popular culture it informs. It's mostly a farcical campaign, urging guys to "man up!" and poking fun at wimpy behaviors that deserve the pejorative "unmanly." While the trend has provoked a slight backlash from feminists who openly wonder about the motives behind "men's-only" soft drinks and a return to the juvenile mockery of calling a group of sluggish men "ladies," the misogynous bluster behind these gags is pretty easily neutered on close examination. What passes as manly in these ads is a thin appeal to the underlying neuroses and gender-role confusion that most 21st century men in this society have yet to adequately resolve, though many of us have settled into some kind of arrangement that works for ourselves and those with whom we spend our time. Re-watching Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory this past week got me thinking that the film is as good a place as any to start engaging with the topic of what it means to be a man, especially a man moving through middle age, and better than most. (The upcoming Criterion release of 12 Angry Men will make for a good follow-up.)

Set in the magnificent barracks of a Scottish military regiment, Tunes of Glory is a relic of an unadulterated man's world the likes of which I suspect scarcely exists in Western society anymore. Though the irony of labeling this film as hyper-masculine is obvious enough, as I recall the many scenes of frolicsome dancing involving men wearing kilts and tassled stockings, that tag sticks firmly and seems all the more fitting the deeper one digs into the conflicts, rivalries, camaraderie and competitive jostling for position among the men centrally involved in its plot. The high testosterone content doesn't manifest itself in adrenaline-pumping action scenes, brutal violence, sexual exploits or self-sacrificing bravery either - all of which are characteristics commonly associated with male-oriented entertainment. Rather, the essential reason I see Tunes of Glory as so emblematic of the problems and impulses that motivate men to behave as we do is based on its sociological observations. It's a profound meditation on the peculiar but unmistakable rites of endurance that men set up for each other, and the damnable difficulties we have in negotiating those hazards gracefully as we deal with life's inevitable changes.

The story involves two men who find themselves vying to be the alpha male in a highly formalized, even fetishistic environment - a military battalion in the Scottish Highlands, in the winter following the end of World War II, where the danger of actually going into combat has now diminished, with the survivors' jobs now consisting of endless parade drills and the maintenance of strict discipline as numerous rituals are acted out on schedule for the benefit of the soldiers and local townspeople alike. With the martial chain of command established and the pressures of keeping the unit cohesive constantly pressing in, human nature demands some kind of release, and the men, as Tunes of Glory begins, find their natural outlet in Major Jock Sinclair, a garrulous hard drinking man who's risen from the common ranks of piper to command his regiment. He's secured their loyalty to work diligently under his authority during the day by allowing them to cut loose in late nights of drinking and carousing, and his feisty manners encourage the more boisterous among them to reinforce that tone within their peer group.

But Jock's rowdy steerage of the outpost is coming to an end as we learn early on that he's to be succeeded in command by Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow, a straight-laced, by-the-books type who appears to be something of an aristocrat appointed by headquarters to move in and whip the rambunctious outpost into shape. That's clearly Sinclair's take on the situation, and even as he goes about following orders, he refuses to passively submit to the new commander, especially as the colonel's firm insistence on detail and protocol calls Jock's free-wheeling approach to leadership into question. As it turns out, Barrow has a history of involvement with this regiment and has not enjoyed nearly the degree of comfort and privilege in his background that his fastidious habits seem to suggest. Indeed, he goes on to reveal (inadvertently, not as an excuse for any of the difficulties that subsequently ensued), that he'd been water-boarded while incarcerated as a prisoner of war. This untreated trauma and its psychological effects wind up having a tragic, dramatic effect in several ways, as Barrow struggles to cope with his own failure to impose the high standards of order and conformity he considers to be his duty. His lack of familiarity with just about all of the men he's assigned to lead creates intractable tensions, as well as opportunities for mischief and manipulation by the enigmatic Major Scott, a key figure who never aligns himself with either Sinclair or Barrow, but instead seems intent on maintaining adequate distance from and impartiality toward everyone around him in order to pursue his vaguely malevolent but undeclared agenda. There always seems to be a trouble maker like him around in just about any situation where competitions for power and control develop, throwing little twists of chaos so subtly into the mix.

The clash between the hot-tempered Jock (played with startling fluency and power by Alec Guinness) and Col. Barrow (in a more constrained but equally intense performance from John Mills) fuels Tunes of Glory through its central development, but the plot is loaded with numerous sidebars depicting memorable secondary characters interacting with the two protagonists and each other, each casting their own light on the disruptions that the main conflict triggers. Besides Maj. Scott mentioned above, we have examples of determined fidelity (Eric, Dusty and Hugo, younger men that stand with Jock through his ups and downs, whom he affectionately called "my babies"), his pretty teenage daughter Moirag (Susannah York, in her film debut) and her piper boyfriend Corporal Fraser (suspected and forbidden by the over-protective father, who knows exactly what kind of a rascal he was when he was a piper of the same age.) Rounding out the company, we get acquainted with a crew of delightfully wise and authentic Scotsmen, impressing us as convincingly realized characters who also manage to capture specific archetypal traits of how men boxed in by customs and regulations ingeniously and instinctively calculate their response to the demands of conflicting authorities above them.

The clip below provides a vivid example of how these manly men had to adapt to new orders that contradicted not only the rules established by Barrow's predecessors but also the practices they'd been comfortable and familiar with all throughout their lives. Though Tunes of Glory isn't commonly regarded as a "dance film," dance certainly plays an important part in it, particularly this scene. Barrow has instructed the men that their steps and movements need to take on a more genteel quality, and in order to assure that the necessary changes will be made, he's instituted compulsory practice sessions beginning early each morning. The fruits of their labor are to be revealed at a social gala thrown by the regiment to which the local citizens are invited. But largely due to Jock's insubordinate influence, the men's conduct falls short of Barrow's ideals. The colonel's response to that disappointment is one of several emotionally shattering scenes in this film - it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it.

Barrow's meltdown at the casual mutiny of the men who disregard his orders and allow themselves too much fun signals the first of several tipping points that both he and Sinclair have to endure, and from which neither will fully recover. Sinclair's first crisis is a blow-up triggered by his possessive rage when he discovers his daughter chatting discreetly at a local bar with her boyfriend, well after the hour she should have been nestled at home. Jock barges in, begins reading his daughter the riot act, and when Corp. Fraser tries to intervene in defense of his sweetheart, he takes an elbow to the jaw from the enraged father in response. Problem is, Fraser is a uniformed soldier, and Jock's violation of protocol gets him in serious trouble. He knows that this is the kind of thing that could ruin his career, and he has no solid defense to excuse himself. All that he can do is turn for a bit of solace to Mary (always charming Kay Walsh), a stage actress capable of holding her own in a battle of will and wits with Jock. But she's in the midst of entertaining another guest, his erstwhile friend, now rival, Major Scott - and so Jock finds himself truly alone, loveless and on the verge of becoming useless in this world. It's a crappy place for a middle aged guy to find himself, and yet so often so many of us do!

Jock's last resort is to rely on the unpredictable and altogether undeserved mercy of Barrow, whose discretion can determine exactly how the case against Major Sinclair is resolved, either by dropping the charge and dealing with it "in house" or reporting the violation to upper command and sealing his ruin. Barrow has a lot riding on the decision himself, as the ripple effects of whatever he chooses to do will have incalculable ramifications on the men who will be prone to seeing him as either too lenient and indulgent, or ruthlessly harsh, in dealing with a misbehaving, high-ranking officer.

The subtle but incisive verbal jousting that establishes this predicament creates an intricate series of maneuvers that unfold from scene to scene making Barrow's final decision, and its immediate aftermath, quite a marvel to behold. It's a vexing dilemma, the outlines of which will be quickly familiar to anyone who's ever had to make painful decisions balancing risks to both one's personal reputation and people you deeply care about.

And without spelling out the end altogether, I'll just let it be said that both Barrow and Sinclair wind up snapping badly under the pressure. Each of them had, for their own respective reasons, staked themselves to one of the classic manly attitudes and approaches to life. For Basil Barrow, it was the authoritative, no-nonsense, stickler for the rules demand for complete control, and a willingness to impose severe penalties upon those who challenged his standards - ultimately condemning himself when he fell short of his own mark. For Jock Sinclair, he took the path of the hell-raiser, the gregarious good-time chappie who openly mocked the weak and effeminate (the "unmanly," as today's adverts would put it), burned callously through his relationships with women and suppressed his emotional maturity through a steady flow of whisky in and brash exuberance out without ever getting a steady grip on the inner demons that propelled him so recklessly through life. I asked my wife if the lesson from Tunes of Glory is that men are inevitably destined to go insane at the end of it all. She replied that it's just evidence that having too many men cooped up in one place without enough sensible women around to keep them grounded is bound to wind up badly. Whatever effect my passivity has on my manliness rankings, I can't really argue with that!

Next: Spartacus

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - #319

2011-11-07T22:17:00.002-05:00

It wasn't easy, leaping into a snake pit like this.

My concurrent exploration of both the Criterion Collection and its subsidiary spin-offs, the Eclipse Series and more recently the catalog of films they've released exclusively on their Hulu Plus channel, has recently drawn me into the tumultuous choppy waters of the Japanese New Wave. In particular, I've been watching early films of Nagisa Oshima (Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial) and Koreyoshi Kurahara (Intimidation, The Warped Ones), along with Nabuo Nakagawa's Jigoku, my most recent entry here on this blog. With an unprecedented explicitness and lack of restraint, whether in terms of graphic images, raw emotions or bitterly cynical assessments of Japan's moral and social fiber, these new voices were giving expression to a generation of young people who'd grown up with the Pacific War and its aftermath more as a dim childhood memory than the defining historic circumstances of their lives. It's a fascinating era to study, and the satisfaction of making acquaintance with these emerging auteurs is only enhanced by measuring them up against the work of a more mature and seasoned directorial hand.

Akira Kurosawa, who'd done so much to put Japanese film in front of a truly global audience, successfully met the challenge of his upstart competition, not by beating them at their own game but by raising his own to new levels of artistic ambition and penetrating insight into the weaknesses and ethical compromises of the society around him. The Bad Sleep Well, his sprawling 1960 modern-day epic of corruption and vengeance in the realm of business and politics, stands as a stately magnum opus that confidently absorbs the shrieks and howls of Oshima and Kurahara at their most nihilistic while reminding his audience, young and old alike, that the moral vacuum they abhor was not generated by the aimless street thugs or impoverished riff-raff of the Japanese underclass. Instead, the rot started at the top, and it's on them, the privileged and respected authorities who set up and enforce the rules of the game, that the heavier share of responsibility ultimately falls.

Combining narrative and film elements ranging from Shakespearean tragedy, film noir, the social problem (shakai-mono) sub-genre and even elements of ghost stories and psychological thrillers, Kurosawa proves himself once again, as if there were any room for doubt, to be a true master of cinema, completely in control of how to tell his story, staging its many moods and scenes with as deft and nimble a touch as he's rightly celebrated for in his massively popular and famous historical period epics. Though it's difficult for a film set in a contemporary environment of urban affluence and corporate office space to compete on purely visual terms with the pageantry of samurai sword battles, mounted cavalry raids or magnificent medieval castles, The Bad Sleep Well offers a rich visual feast nevertheless - at least for those who appreciate finely detailed, immaculate deep-focused black & white cinematography. By 1960, even a filmmaker as averse to change as Yasujiro Ozu had begun filming in color, but Kurosawa wouldn't make the switch for another decade yet. No matter, that. His command of the wide screen and the stark contrasts of light and shadow give The Bad Sleep Well just the right atmospheric touches as we're drawn into this voracious whirlpool of patronized corruption, culturally-enforced suicide, kidnapping, madness and the futile pursuit of unrequited revenge.

For those seeking a plot summary, The Bad Sleep Well is indeed a vengeance tale, chronicling the prolonged scheme of Nishi, bastard offspring of a failed businessman who had taken his life some years ago at the behest of the corporate overlords whom his son now plots to destroy. With single-minded determination, he cultivates a false identity, wins the confidence of the executive he secretly loathes, becomes his trusted personal secretary and connives to marry his beautiful but disabled daughter. The film opens with a tightly-paced wedding scene in which a savvy throng of reporters, sensing the eruption of a business scandal, sarcastically deliver the opening exposition that fills us in on the back story while emulating the "play within a play" scene from Hamlet, in which a staged re-enactment of a past crime is used to gauge the guilt-stricken reaction of key suspects. It's an ingenious method for grabbing an audience's attention while efficiently spelling out details in a much less cumbersome manner than would normally be taken to convey so much information.

The Hamlet parallels, frequently cited when The Bad Sleep Well is placed alongside Kurosawa's other Shakespearean adaptations (Throne of Blood, Ran), continue primarily through:

Nishi's conflicted wavering away from his homicidal, judgement inflicting purpose when he comes up to the moment of fully carrying out his revenge

the Laertes/Ophelia echoes found in the relationship between Nishi's wife and her rash, over-protective brother who, in delivering a wedding toast to his new brother-in-law, impulsively vows to kill Nishi if he ever causes his sister any unhappiness (and comes very close to keeping that promise later on the film); and...

in a clever device that injects ghost sightings into the storyline in such a way as to loosen the grip on sanity that some of the more psychologically fragile characters struggle to maintain - most vividly among them, the droopy-eyed Akira Nishimura (as Shirai, expendable flunky extraordinaire), who uses his sad-sack facial features to great effect here, just as he did in Kurahara's Intimidation released just a few months earlier and serving as a fitting companion piece to The Bad Sleep Well of directors old and young in looking at the venality and corruption running rampant within the Japanese business world at the time.

As ingeniously creative and technically impressive as Kurosawa proves himself to be on the craftsmanship side of this project, perhaps the most memorable and surprising aspects of The Bad Sleep Well are to be found in the disciplined, subtle performance of Toshiro Mifune, who steps away from his usual wild-man persona to portray a hardened protagonist frustrated to find himself troubled by an inextinguishable spark of compassion that only serves to complicate his plans, and the unflinching gaze into the void that we're subjected to by the film's darkly pessimistic ending. After working through the unexpected maelstrom of emotions stirred up by the realization of his scheme, Nishi reasserts his grim determination, putting all the pieces in place to bring his father's killers to justice - even though he has to go to extreme lengths, imprisoning a key witness in the wreckage of an underground vault left abandoned after one of the war's devastating firebombings. His captive, an aging Takashi Shimura, is pushed to the brink of madness himself due to the deprivations of food and solitary confinement - quite an amazing reversal from the two great actors' roles in Seven Samurai from just six years earlier.

But circumstances unfold in a way that once again prove correct the old Robert Burns line about the "best laid schemes of mice and men" often going askew (to use the English translation) and ultimately coming to naught. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I won't reveal the ending in detail, but if you haven't seen The Bad Sleep Well yet (and you really should, if you consider yourself any kind of Kurosawa aficionado,) don't get your hopes up for a feel-good, redemptive, Hollywood ending. The message implicit in the title, that the predatory powers who exploit the weak and dependent are maddeningly ensconced in comforts and remain untouchable to those who cry out and demand justice in this world, continues to ring true in our own day. Nishi's desperate ploys to try to work around this conundrum, and the toll that his evil deeds take upon him and the few for whom he dares to indulge his affection, prevent him from being a role model worthy of emulation. However noble their intention, motives that drive us to adopt the tools of injustice we strive against must find some other, better outlet.

Next: Tunes of Glory

Jigoku (1960) - #352

2011-10-22T12:09:00.001-04:00

Hear me! You who in life piled up sin upon sin will be trapped in Hell forever. Suffer! Suffer! This vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity.

When I was 14 years old, a high school classmate whom I had recently befriended invited me to a night of free roller skating at a local rink. I had nothing else to do and was glad to be asked, so I took up his offer and went into it expecting a fun time. And it was, for about the half-hour or so that I and the other boys (no girls) were allowed to wheel around on the floor.

Well before I was needing or expecting to take a break from the activity, a signal was given to remove our skates. Chairs were brought out, placed in rows and we were told to sit down to listen to a message that one of the adults had for us. Within a few minutes of his speech, what had been a pleasant night out with a bunch of guys turned into a brutal psychological encounter with the threat of everlasting, unrelenting, intensely painful physical punishment at the hands of an angry God, if I failed to make the right decision, right then, there and now, to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. I'd been baited and lured by my friend into attending a fierce fundamentalist hellfire sermon, delivered for ostensibly "evangelistic" purposes intended to save my soul from eternal damnation.

Chances are pretty good that just about anyone reading this article has had a similar experience, and even this event was not my first exposure to dire warnings about going to Hell. What made this particular incident stand out so clearly in my memory, some 35 years later, was the speaker's unfettered intensity and sadistic relish with which he described the particular torments we'd be subject to if we didn't yield to his persuasion. He advised to go home that evening, turn on our kitchen stove and just for a few seconds, press our hand on the burner, after it had fully heated up. Then imagine that searing pain coursing through every nerve in our body forever and ever and ever! Lock ourselves in a small closet and scream in agony as loud as we can, then imagine the horrific sound of such pitiful, eardrum-shattering wailing and gnashing of teeth, amplified by the hundreds of millions of souls who will be similarly screaming their guts out without ceasing. Recall the foulest smelling stench that you've ever encountered - a dead animal carcass, nose-blistering ammonia, whatever detestable filth might come to mind - and imagine the terror of being trapped in such a disgusting, vomit-inducing circumstance without any hope of relief or cleanliness. Think of times when you were parched with thirst or famished with hunger, weak and exhausted, and ponder the anguish of never having so much as one drop of cool water or one morsel of nourishing food to alleviate your cravings. And so on, delivered with steely-eyed seriousness and the utmost confidence that everything he was saying, this crew-cut, disciplined, uncompromising molder of young minds, was absolutely, undoubtedly true. Not manipulative, not an exaggeration, not a mind game - but just the pure gospel truth that every person has to be confronted with so that they can be fully held accountable on that great and terrible Day of Judgment that awaits us all.

Well, I was one of the relatively few who did not come forward from my metal folding chair to repeat the Sinner's Prayer that evening. (I did eventually, several years later, but that's another story...) My friend did though, and afterward I asked him about it since I already knew that he went to church and said he was a Christian. I wondered why he had to go up and pray since he'd probably already done that before. His answer was something along the lines of "that's just what we do, I've probably said that prayer a hundred times already." I could sort of understand his reasoning, since we'd also spent time doing things like smoking pot, drinking beer and listening to Led Zeppelin and Kiss records that I knew his church (and Jesus) didn't approve of. But I was still puzzled by his wavering back and forth between "walking the straight and narrow" and "rock'n'rolling all night and partying every day." He told me that he was just "backslid" for now, and that he'd fully repent once and for all someday, once he was an adult.

That's a long diversion away from the film I'm here to write about, but the anecdote certainly came to my mind more than a few times as I watched Jigoku, an influential Japanese horror film and, in its final act, a wildly visual cinematic imagining of Hell, though from a Buddhist, not a Christian perspective. That last half-hour is the part that secured Jigoku's reputation as an early classic of bizarre, extreme, explicit blood and guts on film, so graphic that it was hard to track down for many years afterward, and still quite capable of astonishing viewers today despite the erosion of many taboos about what could be shown on the screen since it debuted in 1960. Dismemberment, beheading, impaling, peeled away skin revealing still pulsating internal organs... it's all here, and more, impressively conceived and executed in an era where there wasn't anything close to the kind of special effects industry that produces such convincingly gruesome illusions of the worst atrocities imaginable.

Along with the gore, director Nobuo Nakagawa conjured up elaborately choreographed scenarios of bodies and limbs in various configurations, writhing heaps of humanity helplessly groping, grasping, clawing, crawling and staggering in vain, looking for escape, lamenting the wicked choices they made that led them to their fate of present and unending misery. Though the film was produced too early to give any significant credit to the psychedelic upheavals soon to come in popular culture, the forty-minute tour of Hell that Jigoku takes us on is remarkably prescient in its trippiness.

A bad trip, that is...

As stunning and dynamic as those scenes are, what makes Jigoku work for me is the hour that Nakagawa spends building us up to that revelatory vision of the afterlife. There is a story, after all, and that story tells us the reasons that these characters wound up in, and ultimately deserved, such dire afflictions. Shiro, the main character around which all the activity revolves, is a young man just entering into adulthood - engaged to his lovely girlfriend Yukiko and wrestling with questions of purpose and ethics that people at that stage of life ought to be thinking through as they establish themselves in this world. We first meet him in a lecture hall, where a professor is expounding on "Concepts of Hell," helpfully pointing out that the doctrine of punishment after death for the wicked is not unique to Buddhism, but is also taught in the world's other great religions. (Hmm, my 14-year old self thought that Christians were the ones who came up with all that stuff!) His friend Tamura, who has an uncanny knack for showing up out of nowhere, tends to put a benign twist on various forms of temptation that he and Shiro face, and it leads to them covering up a fatal car accident where they run down a drunken pedestrian who happens to be the leader of a minor yakuza gang. His crime committed, Shiro is now fearful of getting caught, and that leads inevitably to other moral indiscretions, each one cascading into the next until our bewildered protagonist finds himself ensnared in a web of deadly sins: lust, greed, drunkenness, deception, hypocrisy, murder...

Along the way, he crosses paths with a number of others whose carnal abandon also put them on a path to the netherworld: a doctor who callously exploits his patients; a prostitute and her mother who use sexual favors to lure their victim into lethal traps; adulterous lovers who cavort shamelessly in the presence of an ailing spouse and other family members, and wind up cheating on each other. Crimes of the past, like the snatching of a canteen that denied a dying soldier his last request for water, continue to haunt the conscience, pouring fuel onto the flames of perdition that await. Drunken orgies, shameless vulgarity, coldly calculated revenge and the wanton defilement of all that is noble and pure - it's a vile catalog of sins that Jigoku compiles over its first sixty minutes, though the misdeeds are not necessarily waved in our face or made glaringly obvious. Despite a weird camera angle or two (actually, quite a few more than that!) a lot of what we see happening in Shiro's world doesn't come across as so bad. The actions of him and those around him have the look of everyday life about them, and just like my young friend from years ago, the characters all operate on the assumption that whatever they may have done wrong, there's a long future ahead when they can make up for it. But alas, that's not what's in store, as events lead up to a massive die-off at a crowded nursing home that shuttles the poor souls gathered there across the River Sanzu to reckon with Enma, the King of Hell.

The darkness that surrounds Enma, and dominates most of the scenes in Jigoku, even those set amongst the living, gives the film a strong and strange dream-like quality. The surrealistic vibe is further enhanced by eerie, sinister music and vocalizations, unpredictable narrative transitions that may take a couple viewings to fully fathom what just happened, and an ending that is as ambiguous and inconclusive as a film that depicts eternity really ought to be. I know next to nothing about Nakagawa's intentions in making this film, even after viewing the supplement on his career and its interviews with a few people associated with Jigoku's creation. A mature director well into his career at the time, on a peer level with Kurosawa and Ozu, he was coming off the financial success of Ghost Story of Yotsuya (available on Criterion's Hulu Plus channel) and had creative license to make just about any movie he wanted. He chose this direction, inspired as much by the legend of Faust as he was traditional Buddhist teachings. It's hard to know if he was sincerely trying to warn his audience about the judgments he depicts on screen or if he simply saw the opportunity to create vivid tableaux that triggered the imaginations of people regardless of where they fall across the spectrum of cultures or religious beliefs. While the garish imagery and profuse screaming of Jigoku's suffering victims puts the film at risk of being seen as an insane black comedy, as my hellfire anecdote above and the real-life experiences of billions of others remind us, its themes of malicious human sin and relentless divine punishment continue to resonate with and provoke primal anxieties deep within human nature that the passage of time and ever-increasing scientific knowledge has not thoroughly extinguished.

Next: The Bad Sleep Well

L'avventura (1960) - #98

2011-10-13T23:42:00.000-04:00

And still... she acted as though our love, yours, her father's, mine, in a manner of speaking, was nothing to her, meant nothing to her.

Whether you consider its title intelligently subtle or simply misleading, L'avventura (The Adventure, with a slangy innuendo equivalent to what we'd call a sexual fling) both challenged and expanded the expectations of audiences who looked to the cinema as a mirror of what goes on in ordinary human relationships. Awarded a special jury prize at Cannes for it's "remarkable contribution to the search for a new cinematic language," L'avventura clearly stood out from the pack in an era when other ambitious and talented directors were creating films destined to make a lasting impression on future generations of film lovers. Think of The 400 Blows, Breathless, and Shadows as impressive breakthrough debuts, or Peeping Tom, Pickpocket, Eyes Without a Face or Le Trou as definitive works from more experienced directors that went on to establish new ground rules across a range of genres. Psycho and La Dolce Vita, two non-Criterion films released contemporaneously, also stand out as landmarks worth including in this list of perennial benchmarks. While it may be harder to fully appreciate L'avventura's revolutionary innovations without some intentional effort to compare it to these and other films of that era, the visual and narrative spell it casts continues to exert a hold on those patient and perceptive enough for Michelangelo Antonioni's long takes and meticulous compositions sink in and alter their cinematic conscience.

As one of the most written-about and minutely analyzed films of its time, maybe even of all time, there's probably not much that I have to say that hasn't been hashed out by learned scribes more deeply versed in Antonioniana than I ever figure to be. I've been watching it over the past two weeks now, my usual blogging routine of one review per week slowing to a crawl due to the distractions of postseason baseball (I'm a big fan of the Detroit Tigers) and the usual sense of responsibility I feel whenever my work on this timeline of Criterion classics confronts me with a venerable art house milestone. I'd seen L'avventura a couple times before in years past, considered it sufficiently interesting and impressive to warrant its reputation, but it wasn't until this more recent, much closer go-round of viewing the film multiple times, with commentary and in a nice big widescreen presentation, that its majesty fully registered. My first impressions in years past focused mainly on the famous switcheroo, as the mystery of Anna's disappearance from the rocky Aeolian island disturbingly fades to irrelevance while Sandro and Claudia pursue their shallow, vain and ill-fated relationship. As sidebars to all that, we have scattered examples of the dismal pettiness of the idly self-indulgent Italian upper class, magnificent shots of timeless landscapes and impressively meaningful architecture (both classical and modern) and, of course, the lovely visage and exquisitely tousled, wind-blown blondeness of Monica Vitti. That, and the textbook course in atmospherically cool aesthetics, is the conventional surface reading of the film, and even at that level, L'avventura provides ample rewards.

Where one goes with this film from that point probably depends a lot on just how one sees its content relating to personal daily life. My reading of various reviews shows a lot of analysis that meanders into cliches about "ennui" and "alienation," as if invoking those terms provides a sufficient summary of what L'avventura is about or what Antonioni is trying to say. Perhaps there was once some merit to be found in debating those topics and how they reflect on the decline of Western social values or our ability to sincerely invest in romantic/erotic relationships. But let's face it, we've been living in a post-L'avventura world for over 50 years now, and what I find most interesting about Sandro and Claudia isn't how shallow or empty they are as negative role models but simply how emblematic they became as prototypes for future male-female relationships and the sexual currency deployed over the course of subsequent decades.

Physically, they are a gorgeous couple, impeccably dressed, irresistibly drawn to each other after the briefest period of awkward resistance on Claudia's part, in response to the abrupt disappearance of her friend and the initial shock of Sandro's unyielding advance. Undoubtedly, raw erotic attraction plays a part in their coupling, though the emphasis falls more on the male's restless eye for conquerable women - Claudia being just the latest, until the very end, though a more appropriate "steady" due to her compatible class affiliation and cleaner reputation than the attention-grabbing slut he's caught hooking up with in an empty hotel lobby. Claudia is a vivacious young woman with drives and desires of her own, some sexual, others emotional, and Sandro, as it turns out, seems to possess the qualities she's looking for, at least during the brief span of time in which we view their relationship. My pet notion about the arc that Sandro and Claudia's emotional bond will travel past the end of the film is that its ascension into a quasi-committed relationship is roughly similar to the trajectory experienced by Sandro and Anna - we just see them at the very tail end of the inevitable descent.

Does that imply then that I believe Claudia herself will eventually find herself as petulantly resentful toward Sandro, the man who "vilifies everything," as Anna came to regard him? Will she wind up pulling her own disappearing act one of these days? No, not likely. Claudia and Anna are two different women, after all, and their response to the disillusionment that a man like Sandro is bound to put them through will not be identical. Some women see the warning signs and dump the creep as quickly as they can manage, while others sense a need for them to hang in there with the weak and vulnerable man who, despite his manipulations and treachery, still requires and in some way deserves their on-going love and support.

However one might categorize the various reactions of different "types" of women to such disappointments and unavoidable wounds arising from their entanglement with such men, their mutual experience gives them a common bond. The controversies and questions touched on in L'avventura about the foundations and uncertain durability of committed male-female relationships are approached from a perspective sympathetic to then-emerging strands of feminist thought. Sandro's worm-like, childish sobbing, after he's caught in flagrante delicto on the sofa with Gloria Perkins, is such a remarkably poignant demonstration of a man's confused blend of sincere remorse and blatantly manipulative self-pity that it ought to be studied by just about any culturally literate couple that finds itself in counseling due to a crisis of infidelity by the dominant partner. Here's the clip, unfortunately in lower resolution than it deserves - get the DVD, and let's hope for a Blu-ray of this exquisitely shot film soon! - but still quite resonant as long as your fairly in touch with the two hours of "adventure" that preceded it.

Companion Review: La Dolce Vita

Next: Jigoku

The Fugitive Kind (1960) - #515

2011-10-01T18:00:00.000-04:00

He's a peculiar talker. And that is the reason I got to let him go...

For all the different types of great classic movies I watch for this blog, it's pretty remarkable how long it's been since I've reviewed a genuine Hollywood product here. Scanning through my list of reviews, I'd say Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, which I wrote up last December, was the last one, and that's owing more to the star power of Kirk Douglas than anything else about the film. So that probably explains just how different it felt for me to watch and blog here about The Fugitive Kind, replete with its glossy sheen, its tastefully calculated touches of scandal and adult subject matter and the world class talents of Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani on the screen, Sidney Lumet as director and Tennessee Williams in charge of the screenplay. Throw in some strong supporting performances from Joanne Woodward and others, and you have something that stands out a little uniquely within the Criterion Collection - one of a very small number of titles they've released over the years that actually have actor credits on the cover, above the name of the film itself. Not a big deal in the marketing scheme of your average DVD release, but a shrewd adjustment from the norm as far as Criterion is concerned.

With that illustrious lineup, and given my practically inexcusable lack of familiarity with the work of Tennessee Williams in comparison to his reputation, influence and on-going relevance in American theatrical arts, I had fairly high expectations going in, and for the most part, I was not at all disappointed as to the quality of craftsmanship or intelligence I encountered. But I was indeed reminded as to why I had never felt compelled to delve much deeper than the standard high school English class compulsory exposure to Williams that most students in this country have received over the past few decades. Simply put, I just don't really enjoy my visits to the milieu he found so fascinating - that sweaty, nasty, grubby Southern cesspool of overwrought emotions and twangy drawling lyricism that made him such a popular marvel and sensation back in the prime of his career and continues to draw new admirers and enthusiasts to this day. Same reason that I never got into William Faulkner. I know it's my bias and not a very justifiable one at that, but really I would have no problem with a scenario involving a cavalry charge of runaway bulldozers just plowing through the sleazy little hamlet that Williams constructed here and shoving all these characters off into oblivion... in fact, I'd probably find just a bit more satisfaction from watching that than I was able to glean from viewing this admittedly well-executed but occasionally overblown bit of stagecraft on film.

The Fugitive Kind's story involves a man, Valentine Xavier, who lives up to his clumsily/cleverly conceived name by become a romantic savior of sorts to two hot-blooded but badly misunderstood and henceforth love-starved women. He rolls into town on his 30th birthday, turning his back on fifteen years of raucous living as a traveling guitar player working the Mississippi and Louisiana juke joint circuit, after running afoul of the law and having an epiphany on the futility of his ways in close proximity to his testimony before a judge. Doing what he can to pick up honest work, but unable to fully smother the raw animal magnetism that served him well on and off the stage, he takes a job as a clerk in a small-town mercantile shop run by an Italian woman named Lady Torrance, who married Jabe, the store's owner, an older man who's now bedridden and dying of cancer. He's a vile, cruel and suspicious old bastard who seems to have no pleasures left in life beyond inflicting misery on those nearest to him, particularly his wife Lady whom he knows from his own experience is prone to promiscuity, especially with him laid up and out of her sight for hours at a time.

Jabe quickly catches on to the obvious dangers that a good looking young drifter with a guitar poses to his possessive claim on Lady (not for the sake of love or affection, mind you, just ownership, since they both gave up on each other as partners and lovers quite a long time ago.) Jabe's role is to throw malignant obstacles in the way that impede anyone's progress toward freedom, happiness, fulfillment or just about any other contentment a person might experience in life. And though Lady and Val put up an honorable enough resistance to keep their relationship within its proper and respectable limits, it's pretty obvious that they're going to get together for at least one night of illicit ecstasy before the drama reaches its inevitably tragic, calamitous conclusion. Especially when one remembers that this is just a Southern Gothic retelling of the Orpheus myth.

The other woman caught up in this passionate thicket is Carol Cutrere, a full-blown floozy who was born to one of the leading families in town but has been busy heaping shame upon their good name ever since she came of age. Her first offense seems to have been an inordinate degree of concern (given her social status and the prevailing racism of the community) with the lack of justice experienced by most of the black folks in the region. She'd gotten caught up in marching for civil rights, but was quickly railroaded and made an object of scorn, at least in part due to her rebellion against the efforts to shame her into silence. Now her objective was to live down to the low, trampy expectations that the authorities, including her own brother, had set for her. She knows some of the lowdown dirt on Val that could get him in trouble with the local sheriff, Jabe Torrance or anyone else looking askance at the good looking stranger in town, but she's too busy scheming how to get him alone and all to herself to risk saying anything that might get him locked up or banished from the county.

So with those three roles occupied by the steamy brooding hunk Marlon Brando, the hot-blooded, aging but still voluptuous Anna Magnani and the curvaceous bleach blond wild woman-child Joanne Woodward, The Fugitive Kind packed the promise of sufficient sex appeal, it would seem, to hold the attention of anyone whose taste or vocabulary failed to fully engage with the rather unrealistic, rhapsodic dialogues and monologues that were voiced by the assembled actors. But despite those advantages, this film didn't really do very well upon its initial release. For one, it's really not all that sexy after all - the three actors are charismatic enough in their own way, but the chemistry between them never really ignites as brightly as it ought and they each carry such an excessive load of emotional baggage that just giving themselves over to simple love, or even lust, seems too big a stretch for most viewers to sufficiently believe and empathize with. The dark tones and harsh social critique of small-minded corruption and prejudice might have been too undiluted to catch on with the general public at that time as well; there's a lot of mean-spiritedness to overcome, and much of it feels just a bit too cleverly contrived to fit the demands of the script than reflective of typical human behavior. Throw in some middlebrow symbolic gestures and more than a few examples of excessively chewed up scenery and we're left with a film that is certainly admirable and interesting, both then and now, but not one that seems likely to generate much positive "you gotta see this!" word of mouth.

So after watching The Fugitive Kind a couple times through over this past week, and learning more about him through the helpful supplements on this 2-disc set released last year, just before Criterion started releasing everything new in Blu-ray format, I'm left with an opinion of moderate respect for Tennessee Williams. That assessment, I'm certain, sells him considerably short of the credit he's due for his distinguished career achievements and enduring popularity, but from what I've seen, he's a bit too soapy and grandiose in his characterizations to persuade me to spend more time in his world. If anyone thinks I'm missing the boat here, that I owe it to myself to dig deeper into his works, I could be pretty easy to convince in that regard. It wouldn't be the first time that I've reversed an initial mediocre/"not for me" impression.

I don't have a strong enough passion for Tennessee Williams either way for me to consider myself a fan or a hater, and I understand that The Fugitive Kind was based on an early play of his that he reworked over the course of more than a decade before it reached its final form. So I can indulge some of the blatant theatricality and artifice, the far from realistic dialog and the transparent constructions that Williams used to put his characters in dramatic tension with each other, not only in this film but also from the very early trio of one-act plays included on Disc 2 that, in their own way, provide even more abundant entertainment value than the main feature. Coming from the same era that produced The Golden Age of Television, Criterion's amazing box set of early live-on-TV teleplays, I definitely came to appreciate Williams' talent as a wordsmith and his capacity for conjuring up hot bubbling cauldrons of rampant emotionalism for popular consumption - he clearly sought to stir things up within his audience and I tip my hat to him for taking a big swing at the repressive forces that weighed so heavily down on creative talents in the 1950s. I've linked to a very helpful review about the Three Plays by Tennessee Williams that I'm happy to recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the background to that program.

Despite my lukewarm, mixed reaction to the film, I'm still glad to have The Fugitive Kind on my shelf and easily see why it deserves its spot in the collection. For starters, it's yet another variation on the Orphic legend, such a source of inspiration for other great Criterion films! Then there's Brando (giving the world's first million-dollar-per-film acting performance)... Magnani... Lumet... and an overlooked prime piece of work from a pivotal playwright and screenwriter of his era - they're all Hall of Famers and there's enough packed in this set to reward further examination and reflection later on. Here's a short clip featuring Brando and Magnani, with one of the most impressive word-pictures to be found in the film as Val uses verbal flourishes, some mannered head nods and eye rolls, and is assisted by mood lighting of a rare caliber and unflinching nerve, to speak of himself and others like him as a bird who sleeps on the wind...

Next: L'avventura

Peeping Tom (1960) - #58

2011-09-24T21:42:00.002-04:00

You're so at home with that camera, you make me feel at home too. You have it in you, boy.

It's been a long time since I reviewed a Michael Powell film for this blog - twenty months, to be more specific. The Tales of Hoffmann, produced, written and directed in 1951 by Powell in collaboration with fellow "Archer" Emeric Pressburger, was the most recent entry here, from December 2009, the year I started this series and a year that included a lot of amazing Powell & Pressburger movies, starting with 49th Parallel from 1941, along with classics like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale and several others, all of which I enjoyed when their turn arrived in the early days of this project. So when Peeping Tom came up in my queue, I was quite happy to reconnect with this master filmmaker, even though I had a vague understanding that the poor reception it initially received by British film critics, and subsequently the broader public, signaled a sharp downward spiral in Powell's career that he never quite recovered from. Powell, who had broken off his partnership with Pressburger just a few years prior to this film, collaborated instead with screenwriter Leo Marks, who supplied the story that Powell helped to visualize in his unique style. Though I won't take the time to say much about him here, Marks is a very interesting fellow whose remarkable life experiences are highlighted in the documentary supplement on the now out-of-print Criterion DVD (part of last year's Studio Canal purge that eventually did lead to Peeping Tom's 2010 release as a Region 2-locked Blu-ray.)

Given my own eagerness to see more of Powell's wonderful visual ingenuity and unconventional approach to story-telling, from nearly a decade later than the most recent film of his I'd seen, I couldn't help but wonder just what it was about Peeping Tom that compelled the harsh reactions of its detractors. The negative reviews are famously derisive, with one memorable line stating that "the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." This article from the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television offers more zinger quotes and fascinating background on the controversy surrounding Peeping Tom upon initial release. Over the years since, it's been rediscovered and championed to the point that it's now a widely admired and highly influential classic in the psychological thriller genre, maybe even the first "slasher flick," for what that claim is worth...

Now I know that times and tastes change (oh, if that reviewer could only have imagined where cinema has taken us over these past 50 years!), and clearly from what I knew going in and eventually saw for myself, Peeping Tom is not a film destined for universal enjoyment and admiration. It's a disturbing tale of a twisted serial killer, one intended to unsettle its viewers. But the skill and intelligence behind the film surely merit more consideration and engaged discernment than such a blunt summary dismissal, don't they? And doesn't Powell's indisputable track record entitle him to some degree of deference from the critical establishment? Clearly it seemed to me that something beyond the usual aggravation that leads critics to pan films they dislike was at work here, and that's what interested me, beyond the simple intrigue of seeing Powell's craftsmanship and the wry, much-discussed insights that Peeping Tom makes about the art of film making and its appeal to the voyeuristic tendencies of cinema's most ardent fans.

So I spent time over this past week watching - just... patiently... watching - and comparing Peeping Tom with two of its closest companion pieces, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, released just a few months later in 1960, and Fritz Lang's M, the German masterpiece that really laid the groundwork for presenting sympathetic sickos on the silver screen. While both of these films had their share of detractors (such lurid preoccupation with murderous subject matter is bound to offend some, in any time and culture), neither had anywhere near the devastating impact on their creators' careers that Peeping Tom had on Powell's. What was it about Powell's presentation of Mark Lewis that rankled so much more deeply than Lang's treatment of Hans Beckert or Hitchcock's portrayal of Norman Bates?

We can quickly dismiss any notion that Mark's predatory behavior toward slutty blonde look-alikes of his step-mother is somehow more outrageous than Hans hunting down and killing vulnerable little girls or Bates' psychotic collapse into his "mother" persona that results in slasher outbursts at the Bates Motel. All the victims are undeserving of their fate, regardless of the tarnished innocence of some. I suppose a case could be made that Peeping Tom shows more relish regarding the use of its knife; even though the deadly blade makes appearances in all three films, the camera lingers more deliberately over the stiletto concealed in his tripod, poised directly at the throats of Moira Shearer and Anna Massey, than it does on Beckert's switchblade, handed back to him by his naive would-be victim, or the brutal butcher's knife that slashes so artfully in its brief appearances in Psycho. Yes, there is a degree of sadism to be found in Peeping Tom that the other two films can't quite rival. But I think the critics' disquiet went deeper than that.

Whereas M used the device of a serial killer on the loose among many other elements (e.g. police procedural, socio-political commentary on class tensions between professionals in the legal system and the criminal underworld, the divisive effect his crimes have on the local community, etc.) and Psycho is celebrated for its unprecedented plot twists, diversions and visual tricks, Peeping Tom is, much more than either film, spent almost entirely within the psychological realm of the obsessive oddball at its center. Though Mark Lewis has all the hallmarks of a classic villain - clearly sinister and thoroughly inappropriate urges that he acts on, seemingly untroubled by any pangs of conscience - he doesn't really fit that culprit role nearly as much as Beckert or Bates do, even with the respective "excuses" that each screenplay provides to explain their homicidal behavior.

Lewis is given a more charitable rationale than either of the other killers, as we see in grotesque detail the filmed abuse inflicted upon him as a boy in the guise of "psychological experiments" by his renowned father. As he explains to his friend over the course of two pivotal scenes, the cumulative effect of this deliberately provoked state of fear that he was repeatedly subjected to has warped his ability to feel emotions like most people do, and created in him an appetite, an erotic craving in fact, that can only be satisfied in a pursuit that inevitably leads to new heights of terror and depravity before it finally overwhelms and devours him in its culmination. Even more upsetting, especially in the context of a "respectable popular entertainment": the notion that murder and eventual suicide are crucial components of an artist's magnum opus. A bizarre and hideous thought, once one snaps back to reality after getting lost in Peeping Tom's seductive and often charming allures - the saturated EastmanColor tones, Powell's trademark control over the framing and composition of so many great shots, Archers stalwart Esmond Knight's turn as director of the film-within-the-film, Shearer's jazzy little dance number and the recollection it stirs of her role in The Red Shoes, even British pin-up legend Pamela Green in her eye-catching moments.

I suppose that all this talent, in the service of a story so forthrightly depraved, was just a bit too much for the British cultural watchdogs to stomach at the time, and who knows what kind of petty resentments they may have had toward Powell on a personal level for stepping so far and freely out of the bounds they expected him to observe?

But I think the final straw for them back then, and perversely what makes Peeping Tom of such enduring interesting to so many cinephiles since, is just how central a role the actual medium of film plays in the formation of this fiend. Even though the movie is vulnerable to criticism that its scenario is excessively theatrical and not all that convincing as a prototype for "real world crime," I think one has to keep in mind that most of Powell's films have that fantastic, slightly gothic element to them. His characters inhabit an enhanced reality, acting out their driving forces theatrically, and that's clearly a make-or-break point for some viewers who will find fault for the artificiality of the premise. Through Powell and his own lifelong dedication to the movies, Mark Lewis' diabolically cruel and pathetically impotent utilization of the cinematic arts adds a documentary twist that makes the killing of his victims that much more... well, this poster kind of sums it up!

Exploitative and tacky as it may be, the poster claims are persuasive if you let the implications of Lewis's mania sink in, even as Peeping Tom now seems relatively tame and even somewhat shackled down by its lack of explicitness due to the prevailing limitations of its time. I think the absence of blood and gore works to its advantage as a film but makes its more provocative points a bit easier to miss without the reinforcement of overt violence. Even though I don't think anyone would disagree with my assessment that there are plenty of movies, older and newer than Peeping Tom, that outdo it in the scariness factor, this is a film that made a much bigger cultural impact than would have ever seemed likely after its early descent into obscurity. It's a shame that Powell never again benefited from the kind of support and artistic freedom that his creative gifts deserved.

Next: The Fugitive Kind

Classe Tous Risques (1960) - #434

2011-09-16T17:29:00.002-04:00

You can hide a kid... and a machine gun.

By the time a man reaches his late 30s or early 40s, it's safe to assume, regardless of whatever kind of ethical standards he ascribes to, that he has made a sufficient number of compromises and moral transgressions in his life to fully crash the reputational house of cards he's constructed to win the approval and admiration of everyone who expected better things of him. I don't think I'm guilty of projection here, nor am I harboring any particularly explosive secrets about my past. I just know how guys operate in responding to the gamut of temptations we face. Even the bad boys among us, those who flaunt their aggression, their promiscuity, their self-styled outlaw attitudes and behaviors, have chapters they'd rather not talk about and want to keep under wraps as much as possible. Merely for the sake of convenience, we'd like to pull a cloak of forgetfulness over past events and interactions now rendered nearly irrelevant due to the passage of time and the transience of relationships. The weight of our conscience and the potential loss of control over our life circumstances, should we be called to account for our trespasses, tends to pin us down as we seek out trustworthy defenses and foolproof alibis, should they ever become necessary.

I think that sense of cumulative midlife guilt is what draws mild-mannered, relatively safe and stable citizens like myself to appreciate a film like Classe tous risques, a 1960 French gangster film that, in its dramatization of that universal conflict between the compromises of our past and the resulting limitations they impose upon our future, marked a new step forward in the genre. It builds on that sense of world-weariness that was first established in the venerable "old gangster" trio of Rififi, Touchez pas au grisbi and Bob le flambeur, moving the action out of the Pigalle district of Paris (to start with, anyway, though the action winds up pretty close to that neighborhood) and giving us a younger, more physically imposing focal point in ex-wrestler Lino Ventura. In its reminder that hardened crooks also have family lives and mundane head-of-household concerns like many of the rest of us, Classe tous risques also serves as a bridge to more contemporary humanized renditions of career criminals such as we see in The Sopranos.

Ventura, who made his film acting debut via a bit part in Touchez pas au grisbi, had by this point emerged as a compelling leading man. His brawny physique, chiseled facial features and commanding presence on screen served him well here, and over the course of a lengthy career. And by some combination of fortuitous luck and knowing instinct, he was paired up with a young Jean-Paul Belmondo, before Breathless had been released and vaulted him to an even greater level of international stardom. Like Breathless, Classe tous risque was also a debut film, in this instance for Claude Sautet, who doesn't have any other Criterion titles in his filmography beyond serving as a writer for Eyes Without A Face. And speaking of writers, this film shares a common denominator with Le Trou, my previous entry in this series, in that both were based on novels written by real-life ex-con Jose Giovanni, who contributes some valuable insights in the supplements on this DVD. Released very close together in 1960, they both flopped at first, before eventually reaching their wider audience and establishing themselves as classics. I think the Belmondo factor was instrumental in getting Class tous risques a well-deserved second look. In fact, the American trailer, clumsily billed here as The Big Risk, included on the DVD, gives the impression that this is primarily Belmondo's film, even though he plays a secondary supporting role, not even a co-star quite yet. A more accurate preview can be found here, in the French trailer:

And that late entry and "just enough" inclusion of Belmondo is a good thing, as too much focus on his Eric Stark character would have been an easy trap to fall into (or for studio bosses to impose on a young director) if his celebrity status had already been established. Jean-Paul does a fine job injecting his youthful charisma into the scenes allotted to him, but the spotlight clearly demands and deserves to rest on Ventura's performance as Aldo Davos, a renowned criminal tough guy and gang boss whose exploits had put not only him but also his wife and two young sons on the run for the past ten years. As Class tous risques opens in Milan's central train station, a voice-over informs us that the family is en route back home to France, a dicey gamble made necessary by the unmistakable sense that the Italian police force is this close to swooping in on the wanted fugitive. To get out of town undetected and slip through the dragnet of immigration checkpoints likely to trip up their journey, Abel and his friend Raymond resort to a daring and desperate heist on the street, leading to a riveting opening sequence of hot pursuit and narrow escapes.

Punctuating the action are several scenes showing Abel's more sensitive side, as a father and husband who recognizes just how far out on the limb he's carried his family in pursuit of ill-gotten gain, yet without any safe way of backing up or lowering them to a more secure footing. These parts of the film showcase Ventura's indisputable acting skill and insight into the character of Davos, as he struggles to maintain the balance between manly strength and resilience expected of him while suppressing the growing sense of frustration and futility as he resorts to ever more desperate measures to meet his family's needs. The only direction open to him is forward into the path of risk and danger, even as he understands the constantly increasing difficulties he and, through no fault of their own, his loved ones are likely to face.

Just when it appears that Abel and his clandestine crew have made a safe transfer out of town (though not without a few victims along the way) and avoided capture, disaster strikes as they're intercepted by patrolling customs agents. A gunfight breaks out, killing two of his fellow travelers and leaving him with the burden of caring for his sons while also trying to evade the law. From this point forward, the net begins to tighten around Abel, though he is not without resources. He makes phone contact with some of his old shady pals in Paris, calling in past favors and expecting them to adhere to the underworld code of honor that compels them to come to the aid of one of their own in times of trouble.

But the times have changed, and so have the gangster ethos by which these hoods operate. They've all grown up somewhat, and there's too much for them to lose to dare take that chance to go across the border to fetch a wanted man who's already been sentenced to Death Row and has nothing left to lose. So they opt instead to recruit a fresh face, someone unknown to both Abel and the police and thereby less likely to draw notice at the border crossings and other roadblocks set up along the way. That's where Belmondo comes in, as the young but wily courier whose quick thinking and reckless nerve helps Abel and his sons get back to their native soil.

But despite the success of their plan, Abel still sees the failure of his friends to personally come to his aid as a betrayal. Of course he's right in that they weren't willing to take the chance themselves, and exposed him to an obvious double-cross if the driver they'd sent had turned out to be a fink or simply incapable of pulling off the job. Still, their decision is plausible, defensible, practical - in short, it's perfectly in keeping with the legitimacy and hypocrisy so characteristic of what passes for "adulthood" in the civilized world. From this point, where Abel confronts his supposed allies and partners in crime, the rest of Classe tous risques is a heart-rending process of seeing Abel stripped of all that matters to him the most - his sons, his freedom, his self-respect, until, in his own words, "there's nothing left." The film's conclusion, so abrupt, unsentimental and direct as to have a more life-like feel to it than usual for these kinds of stories, leaves us hanging in that we don't know exactly how Abel got that last stage of his journey. Nevertheless it tells us everything we need to know about the man and the hazards of the path he traveled on.

Eclipse Review: The League of Gentlemen

Next: Peeping Tom

Le Trou (1960) - #129

2011-09-14T23:44:00.001-04:00

Poor Gaspard.

As the nouvelle vague was breaking out in cinematheques around the world, one of its precursors and patron saints, French director Jacques Becker, was unknowingly wrapping up his career with what turned out to be his final film. Though not necessarily the kind of self-consciously elegiac monument to himself that Jean Cocteau assembled in Testament of Orpheus, Le Trou (literally, The Hole) seems to be a fitting send-off for Becker, though he was still young, not yet 54, and no one would have faulted him for presuming he had a few more films to go before his work was done.

Never one of France's higher profile directors in his lifetime, Becker nevertheless had the distinction of being admired as a powerful film maker by those whose taste and scrutiny looked beyond the conventions of respectability and catering to popular tastes. I only know him through his earlier Criterion films, Casque d'or and Touchez pas au grisbi, as well as his brief cameo in the early Jean Renoir satire Boudu Saved From Drowning, which he also worked on as a crew member. This DVD was the first Criterion release of a Becker film, a relic from the days when bare-bones releases were a lot more the norm than they are today, so don't come to this (now out-of-print) disc expecting anything extra by way of supplements. In a way, this lean presentation is also quite suitable to the film itself. In its stripped down, plain spoken but intensely penetrative portrayal of male solidarity and determination in the face of the law's indifference to their dismal fate, Le Trou confronts its audience with the truth of their complicity in a system that compels admittedly flawed men to use their noblest impulses in ways that virtually assure the destruction of themselves and those who refuse to play by its corrupted rules.

The basic premise of Le Trou is that imprisoned men, facing a long and hopeless stretch of confinement, will continually seek opportunities for escape, and occasionally act boldly and strategically to make it happen. The challenge of discovering and exploiting that escape route, while avoiding detection by the guards and the prison authorities above them, drives the suspense practically without hesitation over the course of two solid hours. Given what we know about prisons, the durability of their structure, the security measures taken to thwart jailbreaks (whether conspired or impulsive) and the dreadful ramifications of being caught in the act, the artist's challenge in such stories is to first lead us to invest in the characters themselves, and second, present a plan to get out that is both plausible and fascinating to observe. In both respects, Becker succeeds to such a degree that he effectively set the template for future variations on this theme.

What gets the film off to such a powerful start, happily sustained by both its cinematic methods and the natural demeanor of the nonprofessional actors at its center, is that we're immediately informed that this story is based on true events. "Non-actor" Jean Keraudy looks up from the car engine he's working on and turns to the camera, directly informing us that his film is his story of events that took place 13 years earlier. From there, we see a view of Paris and pan down into the imposing fortress of a large urban prison, where we're soon introduced to a group of men, including Keraudy among them, who set out on a risky quest for freedom from their cramped quarters. After we've watched it all unfold, and come to learn that an unusual degree of fidelity to that history was exercised in its making, we're even more impressed. The Santé prison in Paris, where the original escape took place, was the actual set for many of the scenes, and those that were shot in the studio were done on a soundstage that serves as a faithful replica of the prison cell and corridor where most of the action takes place.

But the verisimilitude goes well beyond the look and feel of Le Trou's atmospherics. What makes this film admirable and especially refreshing by the standards of most popular films today is just how low-tech and visceral an approach is taken to the material. Much of what makes Le Trou such a compelling watch is established through long wordless takes of muscles and crude implements crashing through thick barriers of concrete and stone, or bare fingers working a raw hacksaw blade through iron bars and steel locks. There are enough close calls and tense moments to satisfy just about anyone's appetite for "how will they get out of this?" nail-biters, but it's the gritty persistence, and the meticulous sound design of clanging metal and bouncing gravel in real time that stands out most strongly in retrospect. Becker's patience to capture this hard labor in all its nerve-wracking tedium, and his confidence in knowing that this idiosyncratic reduction of the usual cinematic "action" would still fixate our attention, is masterful.

Rather than win our affections with an array of character archetypes calculated to give most in the audience "someone to relate to," the men of Le Trou are, with one exception, not invested with any kind of a backstory to explain their imprisonment or what they hope to accomplish if their escape plans succeed. They're representatives of working class men who stoically play the hand that life's dealt them, hewing to a code of honor more instinctively felt than clearly articulated among their peers, despite whatever criminality got them into their current predicament. Each have their own personalities and role within the scheme, but the four thoroughly bonded inmates - Geo, Roland, Manu and Monseigneur - are first and foremost distinguished by their toughness, their resiliency and their unspoken commitment of solidarity with one another... even if they each plan to go their separate ways the moment they step unfettered into the open air.

That fifth inmate, Gaspard, is the peculiar wrinkle in Le Trou's plot, the guy who doesn't quite belong but gets pulled in anyway. He's obviously set apart from the rest both by his looks and his demeanor toward his fellow captives and their captors alike. We first see him after he's been busted for possession of a contraband lighter, which he tries to excuse by saying he'd forgotten it was in his pocket, it had no fuel, he kept it for sentimental reasons, and so on. It's a line of pleading and currying of favor that his eventual cellmates would never think of using if faced with a similar interrogation. Even though his banter manages to get Gaspard off the hook with the warden, it sets him up as "sympathetique" - a nice guy - a trait that will lead to future exploitation. Lacking the tough, grizzled defenses that build up over the course of a life filled with hard knocks, Gaspard is a man both privileged and to be pitied. The film's conclusion, about which I won't say much in detail, simply left me wondering if the hole referred to in the title wasn't so much the one they carved out of the floor in their jail cell as it is the emptiness that lurks behind Gaspard's need to be liked and the ease with which he allows himself to be emptied out and filled by others, without knowing himself what he really wants or needs.

Next: Classe Tous Risques

Breathless (1960) - #408

2011-09-03T21:33:00.003-04:00

Grief is a compromise. I want all or nothing.

As a child of the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s, the first I ever heard of anything referred to as "the New Wave" had everything to do with music and nothing to do with the movies. After getting turned on to the seductions of arena rock bands in 1975, when Kiss Alive! became the first record album I ever bought with my own money, within a couple years I became aware of an angrier, more forceful musical style that appealed to my surly mindset at the time - punk rock, just emerging over in England through bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned. The USA had its own emerging punk scene, and I recall quite vividly, after already having purchased my first two Ramones albums (their self-titled debut and Leave Home), the day that Sire Records simultaneously issued four LPs, Talking Heads '77, Richard Hell and the VoidOids' Blank Generation, The Saints' (I'm) Stranded and the Dead Boys' Young Loud and Snotty. Of the four albums, all of which are pretty fondly remembered or even revered in select circles nowadays, I liked the latter two a lot more than the former. The Saints and especially the Dead Boys held nothing back with their snarling vocals, jagged buzzsaw guitars and relentless faster-than-your-average-band tempos. As far as I was concerned, they were genuine punk rock. The Talking Heads and Richard Hell, by my late-teenage standard of measure, were OK, but kind of soft and whiny. They were a notch below; they were new wave.

That marketing campaign, and subsequent efforts to sell New Wave acts like Television, Patti Smith, the Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, Blondie and many others, was probably more of a favor to A&R men looking to wean their clients off of disco and what's now labeled "classic rock" than a sincere tribute to the original New Wave/Nouvelle Vague that preceded their efforts two decades earlier. And it turned out to be a lot more successful in the long term than would be judged in more immediate returns on that investment. By the time some of the late 70s New Wave bands hit their commercial stride in the early 80s, the label had already been dropped or misapplied to the point it became meaningless, maybe even pejorative. The net result, for me anyway, was that for a long time, New Wave served as a synonym for watered down, less daring, commercially compromised versions of "the real thing."

In due time, I grew up and came to realize that the original New Wave in cinema, though not without its own commercial aspirations, was indeed a significant movement fully deserving my respect and attention. (I also came to realize that some of that softer, whiny New Wave music had a lot more punch and bite to it than the poseurs who hid behind loud amplification could muster, but that story belongs in a different context, not here...) And with the arrival of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in my queue for this blog, I think I have a better understanding of why those early music marketers saw a resemblance between what was happening in the emergence of punk and what had happened when Godard and his peers stood up and loudly refuted the presumptions and mannerisms of the cinematic mainstream in an earlier era. Breathless is, in my view, a rough equivalent to Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols: Brash, anarchic, subversively funny, aware of its provocations and happy to offend, yet still conscious of the need to provide something genuinely catchy, entertaining and sincere, though only to a point.

I'm not going to go too much further in defending that thesis; disagree, push back all you want, I'll issue a reply but I'm not out to change your mind on the topic - I can "take it or leave it each time" (to quote Richard Hell.) But as I've been watching Breathless and the associated supplements on the Criterion blu-ray over the course of the past week, the similarities in their cocky tone and how they relish the opportunity to deconstruct and reconstruct elements derived from earlier expressions of rebellion grow ever harder to avoid. Though neither the Pistols' LP nor Godard's feature debut were "the first" in their respective Waves, they both stand apart as singular shots across the bow, arguably surpassed in artistic merits by others in those same movements but still undeniable reference points for anyone revisiting their histories. And for anyone who wants to say that either Bollocks or Breathless are the purest statements of each scene's revolutionary ideals, the arguments are relatively direct, uncomplicated and persuasive.

Of course, the differences between the Sex Pistols and Jean-Luc Godard as artists are just as numerous and substantial, as a comparison of the subsequent length of their careers makes obvious. Breathless is, for starters, immeasurably sexier than anything associated with Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and company. Building on the raw magnetism of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg's enigmatic take on the "good girl gone bad" theme, Godard clearly understood the enhanced impact that an appealing and fresh-faced young couple can have on drawing in and holding his audience's attention. Of course the pair needs to be utilized properly, and in Breathless they are, either in spite of or because of the highly spontaneous, intuitive approach Godard used in constructing his film - writing dialog day by day, keeping Belmondo, Seberg and nearly everyone else in the dark about where the story was heading, masterfully constructing dozens of small moments in which his actors would do very little besides walk down the street, or gaze either at or away from each other, looking fabulously cool each step and stage of the way.

Beyond the appealing lead actor casting, Breathless is gifted with a suave free-flowing jazz accompaniment, picking up where Miles Davis left off in his memorably evocative score for Louis Malles' Elevator to the Gallows. Raoul Coutard's low-light hand-held camera seems to always have found itself in the exactly right place to catch the little nuances of facial expressions and nice angles that give us that sense of being mute observers of intensely fascinating real life exchanges in a timelessly contemporary setting. With all these volatile, potentially explosive elements gathered together, as is always the case, the success of the venture came down to the editing. How the pieces were put together, sequenced, soundtracked, framed and presented to viewers, in such stark contrast to the typical movies of its time, had an immeasurable impact on how Breathless was originally received and how it continues to amaze us today.

Boiling the story of Breathless down to its essence then: Michel Poiccard, a two-bit hoodlum, steals a car, gets pulled over after a quick outburst of mindless impulsivity on the road, and shoots a cop in an equally reflexive bout of panic. He makes his way back to the city (crucially, right in the heart of downtown Paris) to meet up with a girl he's taken a liking to and wants to get with again. He knows he's on the lam, the law could swarm down on him at any minute, and he really doesn't have any plan on how to extricate himself from this jam. But his routine is to not worry too much about that stuff. He's an in-the-moment kind of guy, so far out on his limb of risk and misadventure that reeling it in and playing it cautious simply doesn't make any sense at this point.

Patricia Franchini is an American who, without much explanation, wound up at 20 years of age hawking copies of the New York Herald-Tribune on the Champs-Elysee, making a go of it as an ex-pat in Paris when so many other options might have seemed more practical. She had a brief fling with Michel, didn't really expect to see him again, but here he is, accosting her abruptly as she walks her route, obviously intent on pursuing her in earnest seduction. She's willing to play along with his game, but she has other tasks to attend to, so he'll have to wait his turn. She aspires to be a writer, following in the legendary footsteps of other American free spirits who've established their literary reputations in decades past by tramping for a time in the City of Lights. Some free wheeling romance with a ruggedly virile, yet shady character from the back alleys of Paris is just grist for her mill, a story in the making, let's see where this goes.

Step by step, Michel and Patricia draw their partner into each other's worlds, though Michel, on account of the cataclysmic life or death stakes that surround him, winds up exerting the greater influence. The centerpiece of the film, and their relationship, is the long drawn-out hotel scene, a cramped 25-minute 1:1 that the rest of the world is privileged to peep in on. In a film crammed full of iconic moments, the segment that kicks off with Michel, having shamelessly helped himself into Patricia's bed, stripped down to his boxers and a few flecks of jewelry while she was at work, playfully batting down her defenses until she contentedly succumbs to his wiles, is one that rewards multiple views. It's a brilliantly mundane battle of amorous wits, simultaneously as shallow and profound, deep and ephemeral as only a conversation of twenty-somethings in various degrees of infatuation can be. Seberg cuddling her teddy bear and grimacing in the mirror, beguiling us with her flawlessly striking yet casual style, Belmondo idly flipping through the pages of a nudie magazine, effortlessly blowing magnificently florid plumes of smoke and dropping ashes in the sheets... each manage to capture a snapshot of youthful femininity and masculinity as it stood in 1959 and still finds a way to epitomize over 50 years later. A moment of calm before the storm that Michel knows is close to breaking out, and that Patricia will soon find engulfing her, though she suspects little more than the fact that a pushy but attractive young man has pressed himself unavoidably into a moment of decision that she has to now deal with.

Does Breathless have a lasting message to be reckoned with here? I'm not sure that it does, though there's no shortage whatsoever of things worth praising about this film. As much an homage to the films that Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema conspirators loved and drew inspiration from as it is a testimony to the compelling power of youthful attraction and reckless daring that cinema captures more effervescently than any other medium, Breathless is the kind of film that rightfully deserves as much scrutiny, praise and prolonged reflection as it's generated over the past five decades. The impulse that drives Breathless to its fatalistic, exhilarating conclusion, one of the most memorable and iconic death scenes of all time, is one more demanding to be experienced than merely analyzed. It's the kind of film I'm ultimately more eager to talk about than write about... or maybe I can continue on a bit further in the Comments section if anyone wants to join me in dissecting any of the innumerable delights to be found in this film.

Criterion's blu-ray and DVD package offers plenty in the way of background information for anyone wanting to dig deeper into the origins of Breathless or learn more about the personalities that burned themselves into our memory. Particularly moving is a video essay recapping the career and sad demise of Jean Seberg, who got caught up in bad marriages, radical political activism and subsequent persecution from the FBI, before ultimately succumbing twenty years later to ever-mounting suicidal urges. Claude Ventura's pilgrimage/documentary, Chambre 12, Hotel de Suede, tracking down as many of the key players who made Breathless (including a brusquely dismissive Godard himself, over the phone), serves as proof of the obsessively transforming effect that a preoccupation with the film can have on a person who tries to determine with some degree of certainty just where Breathless derives its magic. It's an enjoyable quest, but ultimately futile. Breathless is simply a sterling example of cinematic alchemy, a project that just as easily could have been a forgettable flop, as Belmondo and others intimately involved with the project originally thought it would be. That it turned out to be such a world changer, against all odds, is attributable to the same mysterious forces that, from time to time, help uniquely iconic visions that are, to some extent, arrogant towards the mass of humanity find a more receptive audience than their creators and those who facilitated or opposed their creation ever expected.

Next: Le Trou

Testament of Orpheus (1960) - #69

2011-08-24T12:54:00.000-04:00

Poets know many awesome things.

The pending re-release (next Tuesday, as of this writing) of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus in upgraded DVD and Blu-ray editions makes this as good a time as I could hope for to review Testament of Orpheus, the last film he ever made, a sequel to his work of ten years earlier. Criterion lost the rights to both Testament and the first installment of his long-in-the-making Orphic Trilogy, The Blood of a Poet, in early 2010, making the original box set containing those three films something of a collector's item. However, they retained the rights to Orpheus, easily the most marketable and relatively conventional film of that trio, and are now on the brink of issuing what looks to be like a very nice upgrade of their initial offering. So having already reviewed the previous installments on this blog, I will do my part to draw a bit of attention to what is in a very real sense Cocteau's concluding statement regarding his artistic life and legacy.

Though it never makes any sense to watch the last part of a trilogy without first viewing the others, that rule applies even more heavily to Testament of Orpheus than usual. It opens with a scene from Orpheus' conclusion, one presumably intended as return the viewer to the mindset generated by the earlier film. While Orpheus clearly can function as a stand-alone film (The Blood of a Poet being so singular and discontinuous with the other two), Testament of Orpheus not only requires some familiarity with its immediate predecessor, it's also best consumed by those who have come to appreciate the artistry and career that it celebrates, namely that of Jean Cocteau himself. For this is, even in the most charitable interpretation of the term, a massively self-indulging cinematic exercise. Cocteau plays a version, or better yet, several versions of himself, speaking directly to the camera in the first person and through voice-overs, a practice that links all the Orphic Trilogy but is taken to new heights here. He conducts himself with an air of reflexive importance that, if taken too seriously, makes him insufferable to novices and contemptible to those who've decided they don't like his routine. There are numerous reviews of Testament of Orpheus one can easily find that fall into this category, and I'm far from making a broad recommendation or defense of this film to those who find it difficult to accompany Cocteau on the journey he invites us to take.

However, if one sees his apparent grandiosity and willingness to toss out epigrammatic platitudes as evidence of a playful and creative spirit, as I do, then I think Testament of Orpheus holds immense value as both entertainment and food for thought. Cocteau himself, through the voice of a young child in the film, admits to "playing the buffoon," a clear enough indication for my taste that he doesn't intend for his film to be regarded as a profound dissertation on the significance and value of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, except wherever one may happen to find those qualities amidst the scattered mix of gems and rubble he presents in his Testament. As he puts it in a written preface, included with the DVD, "The Testament of Orpheus is simply a machine for creating meanings. The film offers the viewer hieroglyphics that he can interpret as he pleases so as to quench his inquisitive thirst for Cartesianism."

Or, as he elaborates at the beginning of this film:

It is the unique power of cinema to allow a great many people to dream the same dream together and to present illusion to us as if it were strict reality. It is, in short, an admirable vehicle for poetry. My film is nothing other than a striptease act, gradually peeling away my body to reveal my naked soul. For there is a considerable audience eager for this truth beyond truth which will one day become the sign of our times. This is the legacy of a poet to the youth in which he has always found support.

I suppose those statements themselves can serve as a valid litmus test to determine whether or not Cocteau's personal brand of aesthetic whimsy works for you or not.

As with his more universally hailed masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast, Cocteau shows an indisputable talent for conjuring up mythic images and archetypes, transferring his well-practiced skills in the realm of painting and illustration to the cinematic format through a full panoply of set designs, costumes, choreographed movements, contemporary celebrities (some of whom are still recognizable today, others who wind up as irretrievably dated inside jokes) and, most strikingly, camera tricks. There are more slow-motion sequences, appearing/disappearing acts and film loops run backwards than I could begin to count, again to the point where they may become annoying to some while endearing to others. Ashes rise from the flames to become whole objects, bodies pop up from the floor or out of the water, torn and mangled flowers appear to be mended through the careful caress of deft fingers.

At one point, a character even has his spoken words played in reverse. On top of all that, we have an absurd injection of pseudo-science fiction as Cocteau opens the film with a half-baked time travel scheme that requires either close attention or multiple viewings to make much sense of. Along the way he meets centaurs, the goddess Athena and the tragic figure of Oedipus Rex, endures a fairly lengthy interrogation and trial by the characters he inadvertently prosecuted himself (as director) in Orpheus, and even stages his own death (by a hurled javelin) and resurrection before setting out for one last walk through the rugged and myth-infused Mediterranean coastline that he called home for most of his adult life. Fending off portents of doom, accompanied by his guardian Cegeste (played by real-life adopted son and protege Edouard Dermithe,) Cocteau/Orpheus winds up facing what he thinks is his final judgment when he's accosted on a winding road by jackbooted motorcycle cops - but they turn out to merely be local police working their mundane beat, and they allow him the chance to disappear into invisible immortality while they go chasing after more important and relevant quarry, like a speeding convertible filled with teenagers listening to rock'n'roll - Cocteau's not-too-subtle acknowledgement that his time has passed and it's the turn of a new generation to carry the torch of artistic emancipation. (And it's fair to conclude that the always forward thinking Cocteau sensed the impending revolution of the Nouvelle Vague about to splash down hard with the next film I'll review here, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.)

Is there an obvious reason for all this visual goofing around? Sometimes it's just to revel in the unusual sights, to convey a sense of child-like astonishment, but for the most part, I think Cocteau simply wanted to capture for perpetuity a vivid image that impressed itself on his imagination, without thinking all that much or deeply about how it would fit like clockwork into an ingeniously constructed narrative. This is the essence of surrealism, as pompous and pretentious as can be if wielded as some kind of higher authority or secret wisdom, but also capable of wreaking subversive havoc on the strongholds of those who both assume and act as if they have a commanding part to play in the story of the universe, or human society, whichever domain you choose to take more seriously.

As essential as it may be to first watch Orpheus before venturing into Testament of Orpheus, even more important to appreciating the final film, in my opinion, is a short home movie that Cocteau made in 1952 titled Villa Santo Sospir. Shot on 16mm Kodachrome, it brings us even more clearly into the presence of Cocteau the man and artist, as he lived in the day-to-day, apart from the inevitable conceits of his Testament. In addition to seeing Cocteau's beautiful paintings and interior designs in color (slightly faded though it may be), the footage provides ample evidence that he was quite successful in creating a most amazing life for himself, in a most gorgeous landscape and geographic setting on top of it all. It's a real gem of a supplement for anyone who wants to know more about Cocteau and the interior vision that came to fruition not only in these films, but also in a rich repository of written and visual works that he left behind. I've embedded the middle section of Villa Santo Sospir just to focus on the art itself, though you can find the whole film in three sections on YouTube:

Just as The Blood of the Poet is situated between the visual bookends of an imploding industrial chimney stack falling to the ground (implying that all the action in that film took place in an instant of time), so Testament of Orpheus is framed by first, smoke coalescing to form a bubble at the tip of a dagger, and finally by that dagger intersecting with the bubble and re-releasing all the smoke it originally captured. Though Cocteau's name continues to appear in writing credits on films even as recently as 2010, for him, this film really is a supremely fitting...

Jean Cocteau, je vous salue.

Eclipse Review: Intimidation

Next: Breathless

The Virgin Spring (1960) - #321

2011-08-21T13:40:00.001-04:00

A day can start out beautifully and end in misery.

Over the past 10 days or so since I watched The Virgin Spring again in preparation for this review, my normal routines have been disrupted by the simultaneous preparation for my son's wedding, which took place this past Friday. Thus, as I've been pondering what I would have to say about this important transitional film from Ingmar Bergman, my thoughts have revolved more around the family dynamics at play. I found myself empathizing quite a bit with the grieving parents whose hopes and aspirations for their daughter were so brutally dashed by a chance encounter in a forest glen that led to immense grief and loss. I know that in some respect, "parenting issues" are just one of numerous subtopics of The Virgin Spring, which offers several broader and arguably more profound questions about morality, religion, revenge and culture to mull over. But that was my point of entry into this great movie, and mentioning the wedding and its surrounding activities also serves as a quick explanation as to why it took me so long to write up my thoughts on this relatively brief and uncomplicated film.

Inspired by from a medieval Scandinavian folk ballad, The Virgin Spring bears numerous similarities to Bergman's international breakthrough sensation The Seventh Seal, and it seems like a safe assumption that the project was put together at least in part to build upon the popularity of that film, shot just three years earlier but still going strong as it made its way around the world, impressing audiences with its deft combination of impressively crisp black & white cinematography and a bold willingness to go deep in the philosophical weight of its subject matter. By placing their stories in far distant time periods, the high-minded dialog and overtly archetypal characters feel more plausible to modern audiences and better facilitate exchanges that might feel ponderous or unwieldy if voiced by actors in more modern dress and circumstances. At least, that was the conventional wisdom at the time, most likely. But even though The Virgin Spring won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and Japan's Kinema Jumpo honors as "best foreign film," Bergman abandoned this kind of distant historical setting for the remainder of his career. It's possible that he didn't want to get pigeon-holed as a kind of formulaic director, but it's just as likely that he was put on alert by the disdain that the critical intelligentsia, particularly in Europe, felt for his film when it was first released. As the Nouvelle Vague was just on the brink of exploding into the contemporary film scene, with a decidedly cool attitude and a lack of interest in rehashing what seemed at the time like tired, worn out platitudes of religious debate, Bergman's archaic depiction of a man's crisis of conscience and vexation over the inscrutable will of God felt passe, indulgent and worst of all, irrelevant. Admiration for his technical skills and the visual beauty of the work was practically universal, but I was fascinated to see just how poorly The Virgin Spring fared among the Cahiers du Cinema crowd and others who saw this film as evidence of "Bergman in decline!" But back then, I guess they were looking for something a little more hip, cool and jazzy than the introspective Swede could muster. I'll be interested in learning more about how that school of critics responded to his "Faith Trilogy" as I move further into the 1960s on this blog.

But so much for the debates that followed The Virgin Spring's original release. Of course now it's regarded as a pivotal masterpiece, even an "early work" of sorts, since he went on to make so many amazing films over the course of the next few decades. And the intervening decades have gone on to demonstrate that questions about God and ethics are still very much with us in popular discourse, not to mention a lingering intrigue with the medieval era, when the conditions of life were crude but so much simpler and motives of lust and vengeance were apparently easier to act upon than in the litigious, security-minded and constantly monitored society that's developed in recent decades.

For anyone who hasn't seen The Virgin Spring, or needs a refresher, the plot is pretty straightforward. A teenage girl named Karin, only child of Tore and Mareta, prosperous and upstanding Christian farmers, is sent one morning to deliver candles to the church some miles away from their isolated, fortress-like estate. The girl is pretty, conceited and naive, the result of a privileged and pampered background. She's accompanied for part of the journey by Ingeri, her dark-haired, unkempt and scandalously pregnant foster sister, but the two split up along the way after a brief spat and Ingeri's fears that something bad is about to happen (something she actually prayed to her pagan god Odin to make happen.) Karin, now riding alone, is met by a trio of brothers, two men and a boy, who herd goats in the wilderness. They charm her with flattering words and she agrees to spend a moment sharing her lunch with them. But they soon surround her, then savagely rape and kill her. Stripping her dead body of the fine garments that she'd worn to carry out her sacred delivery, the brothers arrive late that evening at Tore's farmstead. Keeping in custom with his status as a benevolent landowner, he agrees to give them lodging on a cold, frost-bitten night. In the course of their stay, Tore and Mareta discover evidence that proves the men killed their missing daughter. This revelation pushes Tore into a ritual of vengeance that runs contrary to his professed Christian faith. After he has completed his brutal acts of retribution, he leads his household on a trek through the forest to find Karin's corpse. Upon seeing her lying in her unnatural repose, Tore in anguish prays aloud to God, confessing his own sin in killing the men who abused his daughter and wondering why the Almighty allowed all this to happen. As the grieving parents lift Karin's head to begin the burial preparations, a stream of water miraculously begins to flow out from the spot on which she laid - the "virgin spring" for which the film was named.

That's the basic outline, but of course, there's so much more to be savored and contemplated. One of the most obvious and routinely noted tensions is the conflict between the old Nordic paganism and the emergence of Christianity that was in the process of becoming the established conquering religion as Europe's new order spread into the northernmost regions of the continent. Odin-worship is introduced immediately through Ingeri, in both her three-breath incantation-like lighting of the morning fire and her overt prayers to Odin as The Virgin Spring opens. She seeks his furious reprisals through invective curses she calls down on those who consider themselves her benefactors, and her superiors, though she regards them as inflicting torment on her lonely, forsaken existence. In sharp contrast to her guttural petitions, we cut straight to Tore and Mareta saying their own morning prayers, in front of a large wood-carved crucifix. In this scene, we begin to see more than the simple dualism of pagan vs. Christian that most commentators dwell on, for Tore and Mareta each show subtle distinctions in how religion fits into their lives. Mareta is earnestly sincere to the point of inflicting severe penance on herself for what she regards as insufficient piety, while Tore gives hints of being a more formal, and less emotionally invested, participant in Christian rituals, stifling a yawn in his prayers and seldom going beyond the minimal requirements of his (presumably) recently acquired faith.

Likewise in Ingeri and an unnamed pagan bridge keeper, we see different shades of the old heathen-style practice. For Ingeri, it appears that her embrace of Odin is as much an act of rebellion and rejection of the moralistic, shaming Christianity that has caused her to feel like such an outcast. I see it as not too different than the teenage heavy-metal "satanists" and goth kids who ascribe on a juvenile level to beliefs and customs aimed more at causing outrage from their parents than from a serious deliberation over the competing truth-claims made by various religious traditions. Ingeri is acting out her resentment and frustration in calling upon Odin and the dark spirits who accompany him, while the bridge keeper seems more like an adherent to the old ways, gathering his relics and reveling in the chance to show them off to a lusty young woman who obviously seems familiar and receptive to the now-forbidden fruit he seeks to offer.

And in Karin, we see another kind of spirituality of sorts, a self-satisfied, smug and presumptuous faith that has been largely untested by real trials in life - drawing from that lack of stress a sense of entitlement, privilege and divine protection that proves to be tragically ill-founded. She's aware of the growing power that her beauty can achieve, moaning pitiably or turning on the charm with a smile, a hug and a twinkle in her eyes, whatever is best suited to deliver the comfort she seeks. The contrasts between her, knowingly pampered by her parents and flattered by the gentlemen whose attention she effortlessly draws, and the reprobate Ingeri, are easily cataloged: light/darkness, indulgence/discipline, smugness/self-loathing, innocent/cynical, chaste/lascivious, water/fire... and so on.

The Virgin Spring divides fairly neatly into three distinct parts, each initiated by an elaborate set of preparations, though each are directed toward very different purposes. The first preparation ritual involves Mareta and Karin as the mother dresses her daughter in the most elegant finery they can assemble for her to take her doomed pilgrimage into the countryside. After more or less faking an illness as a pretext for sleeping in, Karin fairly bounds out of bed when her mother produces the sumptuous garments in which she'll be clothed. Tenderly brushing Karin's lovely blonde hair, Mareta unknowingly provides her daughter's last rites, as does Tore a few minutes later when he shares one last embrace and fond words of admonition with her before she sets out on her way.

A second preparation takes place after the three goatherds hear the whinny of Karin's steed and catch a glimpse of her, sunning herself in a mild ecstasy out in an open clearing of the forest. Instantly seized with lust for this unimaginably vulnerable maiden, the two older brothers pursue her like wild game, using their knowledge of hidden paths and shortcuts to promptly appear in her path. Quickly sizing up her enjoyment of flattery and the exploitable kindness of a young girl's heart, they easily persuade her to pause a moment to keep them company, and she does, hardly suspecting the terrors that await. Some of the comments I've read would lump the goatherds in with the pagan Ingeri and that bridge keeper here, as far as their spiritual frame of reference is concerned, but I disagree with any such conclusion. They are not acting out of any particular form of belief or moral code, but simply an unchecked impulse of raw lust and greedy opportunity. Despite her unreflective assumption of God's protection, given the holy errand she's been assigned to perform, she quickly finds herself surrounded and helpless to resist the diabolical whims that the two older men, and even the younger, astonished brother, give into as they pursue, restrain, ravish and murder her in the span a few horrific minutes. Even in today's relentlessly explicit popular culture, this scene retains its power to disturb all but the most calloused viewers. Despite Karin's obvious "spoilage" due to her parental doting, she retains a sweetness that is utterly sad to see cut down so heinously, so meaninglessly.

The third preparation sequence occurs in the middle of the night, after Mareta, internally wrought with dreadful anxiety over her missing daughter, is presented with the garments that she instantly recognizes and from which she draws the appallingly correct conclusions. The goat keeper seeks to make an exchange of the fine silken shift for some badly needed money. Exhibiting immensely calm and constrained self-control by not reacting to what she's just learned, Mareta responds simply to her guest that she needs to consult with her husband to determine the exact price that such a precious package demands. With great composure, she delivers the evidence to her husband, who instantly springs into action, knowing now what fate has befallen his dear Karin and understanding the task it requires of him.

That raven-haired woman who assists Tore in his ritual is Ingeri, and the words he utters to her at the end of that clip are a command from the Christian father to his pagan servant to bring him the butcher's knife, an implement both lethal in its intended purpose and dedicated (as evidenced by the idol carved into its handle) to deities whose familiarity long preceded the merciful and long-suffering Christ his household now officially serves.

His self-flagellation and ablutions now completed, Tore goes about his business with cold-blooded zeal, and its one of the most chilling demonstrations of visceral revenge that the cinema had ever seen to that point. Stabbing one of Karin's assailants in the throat, strangling another and pushing his body into a fire pit, and finally capping it off with the nauseating spectacle of a young boy's body hurled viciously into a wall, it's far from the kind of feel-good score-settling that we've come to take for granted in the "rape revenge" genre that arguably grew directly out of The Virgin Spring. In particular, the boy's killing is a step too far that parallels Karin's senseless slaughter and ought to remove, or at least tarnish, the sense of sympathy that we have for Tore as he unleashes his inner fury. Along with the rough, unblinking rape scene, which was still censored in the USA and elsewhere, it helped to establish Bergman's strong reputation as a ground-breaker when it came to candor and realism regarding the visual depiction of life's most excruciating moments. Naturally, some of this was billed and advertised in exploitative fashion, but Bergman had an important role to play in the 1960s cultural revolutions, and it only helped that he was able to make these innovations in vehicles that could tangibly demonstrate artistic depth and credibility.

The final scene, involving the retrieval of Karin's body after a procession through the forest that briefly conjures a woodsy comparison to The Seventh Seal's "Dance of Death," leads to the wondrous sign of flowing water that follows Tore's anguished confession to God. It keeps faith with the enigmatic ballad, Tores dotter i Vange, reprinted in The Virgin Spring's liner notes, though it makes a significant dramatic improvement in postponing the bubbling forth of that fountain until the girl's body has been discovered by her parents, rather than immediately upon her death as implied by the original text. His vow to build a church on that now-holy site, and the apparent vindication of an overtly Christian interpretation to the myth may also account for some of the higher-critical drubbing that The Virgin Spring received in some circles, as well as its more popular embrace by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and others who probably appreciated Bergman's apparent endorsement of religious faith. However one personally applies the spiritual implications of this film, there's no disputing the fact that from this point forward, Bergman's wrestling with Christianity, and the shadows of his own personal past and present, would grow ever more complicated... and fascinating.

Next: Testament of Orpheus

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) - #377

2011-08-09T23:33:00.002-04:00

I hated climbing those stairs more than anything. But once I was up, I would take each day as it came.

I know there are serious cinephiles more experienced and resourceful than me who have had opportunities over the years to discover and appreciate the films of Mikio Naruse on the big screen, projected in a proper theatrical setting, the way they were meant to be seen and enjoyed. But to those of us left (for better or worse) at the mercy of the whims of commercial DVD distributers to see most of the great works of 20th century cinema in the comfort of our homes, Naruse is one of those names that, once we've made acquaintance with Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi and a host of more current Japanese filmmakers, has hovered tantalizingly in that limbo-land of "reputedly great but scarcely available, and only at forbidding expense and/or in low-quality."

Just as Criterion finally accomplished their long-awaited breakthrough last month by finally adding a film by Satyajit Ray (The Music Room) into their library, a few years ago they achieved a similar coup by securing the rights to issue their first, and so far only, Naruse film into the Collection proper, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. I recall some of the grateful hubbub surrounding that release, though it took me until just recently to finally get around to watching it. Assuming for fairly obvious reasons that the 2007 edition of this DVD was many viewers' first exposure to Naruse, I decided that I'd take a slightly different approach than what seemed like the conventional route. Given the reputation of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs as Naruse's artistic pinnacle, I wanted to build up to seeing him at his best by watching all of the older stuff I could get my hands on. It's a plan that I couldn't have easily followed even last year, but one made conveniently possible in the past several weeks after Criterion dramatically expanded Naruse's reach into the American market through the inclusion on their Hulu Plus channel of several middle-period features he shot in the 1950s. That's in addition to this past spring's release, through their Eclipse subsidiary line, of Silent Naruse, a set of his five oldest films, the only works extant from seventeen he made in the early 1930s before entering the sound era. (I've reviewed a few of them over the past few months at CriterionCast.com.)

What I learned about Naruse over this past ten days or so of semi-immersion into his filmography (he still made many dozens of films which may never see the light of day in this country, what a shame) basically confirms the reports that preceded my actual viewing of his movies: he succeeded in creating an internally consistent and coherent cinematic universe, realistically based in his contemporary Japanese setting, portraying exquisitely vexing dilemmas that offer no easy or clean escape to the hard-pressed individuals, almost invariably women, at the center of these dramas. Treading similar terrain as his peer Kenji Mizoguchi (also under-represented in the Criterion Collection, with only two of his films Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff skewing novice's impressions to see him as primarily a creator of excellent historical costume dramas,) Naruse anchored himself firmly in the lower working class milieu of women whose options typically pivot between working as barkeeps or in geisha houses or giving themselves over to unhappy marriages to unworthy men; the basic choice consisting of which form of exploitation they find the least odious to endure.

As the ragged and brash Expressionist- and Eisenstein-inspired experimentation of his silent films receded into a more refined and polished sensibility in his mature works, Naruse developed his talent for conveying strong dramatic movements through rather subtle and sophisticated gestures: facial expressions, slight nods, averted glances and small bodily movements that said a lot without the need for overwrought music or emotional histrionics executed so routinely in the more conventional weepy melodramas that reached primarily female audiences in the days before TV soap operas captured that crowd. As I learned in the special features included with When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, he was notoriously reticent to let others in on his creative vision during the making of his films, amazingly economical in setting up his shots and knowing exactly how they would look and fit together when it came time to edit them into the finished work, and unswervingly determined to depict life's endless ability to disappoint those who dare to hope for the best, despite the depressing situation immediately confronting them.

Which isn't to say that watching a Naruse film is a dismal, joyless affair. Quite the contrary - I found these films quite absorbing and fully worth all the attention I could give them, even though in a compressed time frame of watching them all once through in close proximity, they tend to spill over into each other in memory. That's especially the case, more than most directors, because his films feature fairly minimalist plot lines, more intent on creating atmosphere and intrigue with the characters themselves than in stirring up an emblematic crisis and reeling us in through its resolution, whether happy or sad, according to the standard maneuvers of most popular movies. Naruse's world, if it turns out to be a place one basically enjoys and is curious to learn more about, is an easy place to meander around and get lost. Even after we've spent an hour or two going through life's changes with his characters, we're left with all sorts of nagging doubts as to how things will ultimately wind up with them. This open-ended quality will undoubtedly prove unsatisfying or frustrating to some, but it gives his work a remarkable verisimilitude, and on a purely aesthetic level, Naruse is as impeccable and masterly an auteur as one could ever desire, though flash and sensation are not really part of his repertoire at all.

So with all that long preamble, let me offer a few thoughts on When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. I can easily see why Criterion chose to release this one over Ginza Cosmetics, Mother, Wife or Flowing, the four 1950s films currently available on Hulu Plus that each preceded this film over the course of that decade. Working in widescreen Tohoscope, with a swanky space-age cocktail bar soundtrack and the brilliantly charismatic Hideko Takamine at the center of the story, I doubt that Naruse made any films more instantly appealing to a Western audience. Rather than unfolding in the mysterious and increasingly archaic setting of a geisha house in decline, as in Flowing, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is set in the upscale surface glamor of Tokyo's Ginza district, where rich businessmen gathered in bars after hours to make deals, flirt with and be flattered by pretty young women and find temporary solace from the pressures of life through free-flowing servings of alcohol. It's an attractive set-up, both exotic and accessible without much need for explanation or acclimation to understand what's going on.

The story, such as it is, concerns Keiko, referred to as Mama with affection and admiration by the customers and employees of Bar Carton, where she works as the lead hostess. She's a widow who lost her husband years ago when he was hit by a truck (a favorite Naruse device, so I've learned) and now is trapped by circumstances in a role she hates but cannot escape. Her particular dilemma is that she's on the verge of turning 30, almost to the point of being too old for marriage to anyone respectable and stable, and also getting a bit over-aged to simply be an employee rather than the owner of a bar. Furthermore, both options entail a loss of independence and self-sufficiency that offer her the primary satisfaction she finds in her lot. She doesn't want to resign into a mundane wifely routine, especially given the compromised choice of men she has to choose from (too old, too chubby, too domineering or simply too contentedly married and settled to break up a happy home to be with her.) Nor does she want to concede her principles to become a kept woman, the mistress of some lecherous old tycoon who would gladly put up the cash she needs to underwrite her own business in exchange for free access to her personal intimacies. Keiko has maintained a degree of purity that, along with her charming manners and beauty, help her to stand out distinctly in her boozy and crass environs.

Besides Naruse's technical prowess, much of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs' pleasures derive from watching Mama navigate her way with crisp precision and intelligent skill through the numerous financial, amorous and psychological hazards surrounding her, from rivals, friends and would-be lovers alike, though the strains clearly take their toll on her over the course of the film. Rounding it all out is a wonderful ensemble cast, including then-rising star Tatsuya Nakadai, stepping away briefly from his massive performance in the first two installments of The Human Condition (part three would arrive in 1961, and he'd go on to greater heights in Harakiri the following year.) He plays the bar manager with a barely-contained yearning for Keiko that builds to a satisfying outburst for them both at the end. And a crew of eye-pleasing barmaids give evidence of the growing Westernization of Japan, as we see, in contrast to Keiko's stubborn yet elegant traditionalism, fashionably modern young women sporting hairstyles and wardrobe choices of a decidedly Sixties-ish cut, even if we're just into the earliest weeks of that decade when this film was released.

Like just about every other Naruse film I've watched over the past week, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs concludes with our protagonist not all that far removed from where she began the film, with little more than a bittersweet burden of dashed hopes and discouragement to process through before regrouping to face whatever her next bout with adversity turns out to be. Thus I can't really find the right words to wrap up this review; there's no pithy moral to the story, no patented wisdom or life lessons to be gleaned from this film, at least none that would fail to strike me as facile platitudes, given the nuance and delicacy with which Naruse and his talented cast paint their portraits. Just a challenge to persevere in standing up to our own troubles, since we're undoubtedly surrounded by people going through even tougher situations. Consider this review an invitation to take a similar journey as I did and just plunge into a steady stream of Naruse's films. Maybe if enough of us clog up the Hulu Plus bandwidth, we'll get another Eclipse set of his to explore, or better yet some well-deserved releases of films I've read about like Late Chrysanthemums or any of his "meteorological" films: Summer Clouds, Floating Clouds, Scattered Clouds, Sudden Rain, Lightning... Hmmm, it seems that, as Ozu was to the seasons of the year, Naruse was to the weather of a temperamental day.

Eclipse Review: Take Aim at the Police Van

Next: The Virgin Spring

Eyes Without a Face (1960) - #260

2011-07-30T11:00:00.003-04:00

The future, madame, is something we should have started on long ago.

That phrase, uttered by the fiendishly cold and imperious Dr. Genessier at an important moment for establishing his character in Eyes Without a Face, also serves a purpose for me here as my blogging project now moves into the Criterion Collection's most popular decade: the 1960s.

Whatever one may rationalize about the arbitrariness or inevitability of these date changes, there's still a discernible effect on the popular consciousness when the calendar flips over like that. Personally, I always get a sense of living a little bit more "in the future" when a new decade begins, and even though I wasn't quite alive yet in 1960, I can easily understand the sense of excitement and anticipation that must have been felt by many at that time. The era of space exploration was just underway, European colonialism was on its last legs, a world of new possibilities and scientific advancements seemed to be breaking over the horizon. Well, the Sixties did turn out to be a tumultuous era, and the cultural upheavals that occurred in that span of time inspired bold new visions and a radical expansion of cinematic boundaries from veterans like Fellini, Kurosawa and Bergman who've already been abundantly represented and reviewed here, along with newcomers like Godard, Suzuki, Antonioni and others whose contributions to the Criterion Collection will prove to be just as numerous and memorable.

But our exploration of the decade begins with a curious hybrid of French cerebral "cinema of quality" and pioneering advancements in the sub-genre of "surgically-induced body horror." Eyes Without a Face is rightfully established as a horror classic, incorporating elements of poetic, dream-like style into its unblinking examination of the lengths to which a misanthropic control freak would go to recapture the sense of order and privilege to which he feels entitled.

Dr. Genessier, descendant of a prominent and wealthy French family, has used his station in life to become a renowned surgeon, expert in the techniques of skin grafting. As such, he's capable of restoring hope and inspiring confidence among those who see value in the restoration of lost beauty, whether through accidental damage or the ravages of time. The quote I used at the beginning of this essay reveals him to be something of a real-world futurist, convinced of the potential that science and technology have to overcome the errors and mistakes brought about by human ignorance and the raw power of untamed elemental forces. Even moreso, Genessier is convinced that his superior intellect and highly disciplined surgical skills are sufficient to overcome, even temporarily, the wear and tear imposed upon us by life on this mortal coil.

Genessier's hubris is put to the test as we learn, through expertly choreographed reveals, just why a woman is driving alone at night with a corpse in her back seat which she proceeds to wordlessly dump in the river; why he keeps his daughter Christiane locked up in a third story bedroom in his elegant villa; why she's required to wear a mask that makes her look like a porcelain doll; why he keeps a dozen or more large and potentially vicious dogs locked in cages in his cellar; and why Louise, his female assistant, a woman of remarkable poise and beauty, would consent to assist the doctor in conducting the hideous experiments and crimes necessary for him to restore Christiane's Eyes Without a Face to their original condition

What makes the film work so effectively is the air of clinical restraint and objectivity that hangs over the whole proceedings. Lots of "approaching" occurs from one scene to another, and within the scenes themselves. Characters step carefully toward their destinations, and watch tentatively through windows, behind curtains, cautiously observing, peering around corners or staring intently at the object before them. After a room is emptied of characters, the camera lingers to see if perhaps something else remains behind. This trailer even gives some hints of that, as compressed as these short samples of films generally tend to be:

Director Georges Franju shows profound discipline himself in allowing events to unfold at a deliberate, tension-inducing pace - one of my favorite scenes in the film is a four minute sequence of the doctor pulling a sports car into his driveway, parking it in the garage, walking into his house, through several doors and up the stairs into Christiane's room (where we see her for the first time.) It's a slow, elegant processional that ramps up the intrigue, to be sure, but isn't merely a cheap stunt to set us up for the jump scene. In fact, the payoff is pretty mild compared to what we might expect from your standard horror movie. When the shocks and gasps are induced (and trust me, they are still capable of making you squirm even more than fifty years after they were first conceived), they land with all the more impact because the methodical pacing exposes the calculated, rationalized depravity that steers Genessier's actions. He's far from a mad scientist, even though he's often described as such in reviews - rather, he operates from an aristocratic frame of reference, using the education and deference made possible through familial heritage to act out his sense of superiority to the rest of the human race, harvesting lone female stragglers of common stock to get the spare parts he needs. His is an operational motive not all that different than the oligarchical authoritarianism that governed European civilization for centuries and still exerts a strong residual influence in Western societies today.

Just as effective as the austere narrative structure, Maurice Jarre's demented carnival soundtrack music and the luminous cinematography are the performances of the lead trio. Dr. Genessier is played with impressive stoicism by Pierre Brasseur, who had significant parts in Children of Paradise, Port of Shadows and Le Plaisir. His dead-eye stares into the camera and portentous somnambulent gait lend weight to his portrayal of a man for whom life has lost its allure except as a means of propping up his grandiose sense of brilliant ingenuity, the man in perpetual command. Alida Valli (female lead in Senso and The Third Man) fluctuates between a suggestive hint of sadism in rounding up recruits for the doctor's laboratory to cringing in horrified shame every so often as the depths of her complicity in Genessier's outrageous scheme breaks through the web of denial she's woven in her own self-defense. And Edith Scob, whose actual face is only seen for a few minutes of screen time, is disarmingly waif-like and wispy in her white robe and mask, gliding down the corridors of her prison/mansion on an ethereal cloud reminiscent of Belle in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. The supporting cast of two young pretty French models serve their purpose quite effectively as well, lovely faces reacting in screams and expressions of sheer terror that still prove to be so compelling even after we've seen such things hundreds of times before.

The supplements on Criterion's DVD shed helpful light on Franju's aesthetic approach to filmmaking and the source material behind Eyes Without a Face, with an amusing interview of the two man writing team Boileau-Narcejac who supplied not only this story but also texts that were adapted to become Hitchcock's Vertigo and Clouzot's Diabolique. Most informative of all though is a short documentary film Franju shot a decade earlier, The Blood of Beasts, in which we see horses and cattle slaughtered, sliced up and processed in reality, in a way that Franju could only scarcely begin to imitate through artifice in Eyes Without a Face. The dispassionate manner in which workmen moved living animals through their stations to become, in mere seconds, dismembered commodities, is in fact more chilling and disturbing than the boundary-pushing instances of on-screen gore that caused early viewers to faint in the theater. And I have to admit, seeing a woman's face peeled off on a large screen, back in an era where one just did not expect to see something that grotesque actually shown in a respectable cinematheque, must have been pretty intense. The film was subsequently censored, its more explicit scenes suppressed for decades until a restored print was distributed in the early 2000s, eventually leading to the Criterion release. Incredulously, for its US release, Eyes Without a Face was renamed The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus (!) and packaged as part of a twin-bill with a cheap special effects schlockfest called The Manster (a precursor of sorts to How To Get Ahead In Advertising.) Though it would be fun to see the differences between the original and the censored American print (we do get a look at the trailer), it's kind of a pity that a credible work of art like Eyes Without A Face got mangled in its trip across the Atlantic. But then again, given the film's subject matter concerning deliberate mutilation of innocent victims, one could conclude that it's an apt stroke of poetic justice. Thankfully, the damage has been repaired and in this case, the scars are all but invisible.

Next: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Brakhage '59 - #184

2011-07-23T09:07:00.002-04:00

For my last entry here covering Criterion Collection films of the 1950s, I'm doing something that cuts a little bit against the format I've used (one film per post) since starting this series of chronological reviews in January 2009. I'm summarizing the three available-on-DVD works of Stan Brakhage from 1959, and that's the approach that I plan to take from this point forward in covering the films packaged in By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes 1 and 2, one of the most unique and polarizing sets to be found among the nearly (and soon to be over) 600 spine numbers that Criterion offers.

If you don't know the name, you can learn a lot about Brakhage here. I won't recap his story too much, since I'd basically just be parroting what I've read from others who know much more about him than I do. By way of quick summary though, Brakhage introduced a lot of abstract expressionist elements into his filmmaking and established a reputation as one of the most prolific and relentless explorers of the interplay between light, lens, film and the human eye. He also radically expanded the limits of how film could be edited and what it could show, and what makes him even more remarkable, at this point in my study of his work, is just how far ahead of their time his fast cuts, scrambled sequencing and non-linear mash-ups appear when watched alongside other filmmakers, even the greatest of innovators, from that era. That doesn't mean his films are necessarily enjoyable or entertaining; I appreciate the boldness of his vision but generally only watch these discs in limited doses or put his later, more purely colorful stuff on in the background as video wallpaper. Some of his works are harrowing, densely impenetrable or induce feelings of discomfort. Sitting down to view Brakhage for an extended period requires me to be in a certain mood, one of disciplined intentionality and even determination to avoid letting my attention wander. To be honest, sometimes I even have to repress the nagging, irritating query-to-self, "what the hell am I watching this for anyway?" But I find once I wrestle through that, my dedication finds its reward.

Brakhage is easy to mock, not at all difficult to dismiss if one feels so inclined - and I'll also add that much of the writing about his films that I've read over the past couple years is the kind of stuff that tarnishes the reputation of "serious" film writers as overblown, verbose, self-aggrandizing wordspinners who can trot out a robust vocabulary but not really communicate all that much that sticks with the reader. My intention is to just watch each film a few times, enough to let the images sink in, become comfortably familiar and generate something to say. The last thing I want to do is try to convince you that Brakhage is more brilliant, important or relevant than your own unmediated assessment of his work would lead you to believe.

Given my penchant for watching these Criterion titles in the order they were made, thereby tracking the career developments of various artists behind or in front of the camera as well as the introduction of new styles and technologies into cinematic art, this plan of attack makes the most sense to me as a way of grappling with the enigmatic flow of visual stimuli that Brakhage produced over the course of several decades toiling on the front lines of the avant-garde. How else am I to make adequately digest and hopefully make some kind of sense of this tip of the celluloid iceberg that Brakhage left behind after he parted ways with this world - a corpus of some 400 films ranging in length from nine seconds to over four hours? I suppose I could just pick a point in my timeline and say "OK, time to check By Brakhage off my list, here's my summary of three Blu-ray discs worth of massively imaginative, occasionally pretentious but often beguiling experimentalism." But that wouldn't quite do. So here I am, planning to wrap up my blogging for each year up through 2003 with a recap of whatever works of Stan Brakhage happened to produce during that particular anno Dei. And, where possible/practical, I'll include representative clips from YouTube to show you what my feeble words are trying to grapple with.

Cat's Cradle

Years before either Kurt Vonnegut or Harry Chapin appropriated the phrase for their own famous works (a novel and a song, respectively), Stan Brakhage wove his own Cat's Cradle. The short film makes for a fine introduction to Brakhage's work. It's autobiographical in that he and his wife Jane appear in it, along with a pair of friends, another couple of creative bohemian types that Stan and Jane hung out with in those days. It also has an early morning feel to it, with everyone appearing kind of groggy, disheveled and in the process of getting their day underway. Dark silhouettes of what appear to be gesticulating fingers, or maybe just hands rubbing together, open the film with an incantatory flourish. The brooding Stan is having a smoke, Jane and her female friend, adorned in an odd little white apron over her slacks, are washing dishes, maybe preparing some food or pouring drinks and the other guy, the one with the little beatnik goatee, seems to be shaking off the cobwebs from the night before. A black cat meanders around, looking as felines do like they know a lot more than they can or would even bother to say, if they could. Streaky white light streams in from low angles, especially in the opening shots of this six-minute film, washing across the red-saturated hues of bed sheets, bare feet, floral print wall paper and some vaguely sinister looking illustration of a spider.

The excitement and creativity comes not so much from the scene captured on screen, but the editing, a rapid whirlwind of slices and splices that certainly don't pack the kind of novelty now that they once did, but still put the viewer on edge, throwing up flashes of white that provide contrast from the otherwise murky red-black hues. The fourth minute is my favorite part of the film, if you're interested. Whoop! what's that? Clothes are slipping off, in soft focus, body parts and hair not on heads flash past in soft focus. This erotically suggestive reveal happens very quickly early, barely registering, especially on first view, before returning a bit more extensively and clearly at the end, with the barest hint of some sort of caressing movement registering as the last flickering embers of illumination disappear into blackness and the hand-scratched credits slither across the screen.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse

Building on the hints of sexuality filtered in through subtle imagery in Cat's Cradle, Brakhage now drops any pretense of restraint with Wedlock House: An Intercourse. The first images we see are of a naked woman laying on a bed, being mounted by a man (again, it's Stan and Jane), with the only concession to late-50s notions of propriety consisting of printing the film in negative, somehow rendering the nudity less "pornographic" perhaps? Filmed in the early months of their marriage, I can understand the impulse a young artist might have to capture such sweet intimate moments, though this is far from being a straight-up homemade sex-movie. (I have no doubt that somewhere in Brakhage's personal archives such footage exists, probably in abundance...) This scene serves as a framework and punctuation for the interior portion of the film, an experiment in light and shadow that casts a ghostly pall over the filmed encounter of a now-clothed young husband and wife. They sip their coffee, draw on their cigarettes, stare languidly just out of line with the camera lens, as if they see something lurking over our shoulder. Kind of a spooky effect, especially the way the candle light (and some other incandescent form of illumination) swings and swerves, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in counterpoint to the similarly undulating camera. Is there a message here? Perhaps it's the idea that even in the middle of mundane conversation and shared silence with each other, as the young couple grapples with the reality of a shared life commitment they entered into voluntarily but failed to fully comprehend, the sexual undercurrent, that yearning for return and release, is a reliable constant.

Window Water Baby Moving

(Fair warning: before you click on this video, just be sure you're in a place where people around you won't freak out over the sight of a naked woman giving birth to a child.)

With all the sex going on in these movies, especially in that 1950s pre-Pill era, it's practically inevitable that a baby's going to come along sooner rather than later, and that's exactly where Stan and Jane wound up. Of course, the young man with a camera had big ideas about capturing the awe-inducing experience of child-birth on film, and of course he went about it in his characteristically innovative way, capturing the splendors, shapes and textures of his wife's pregnant body in the days leading up to the delivery (at home, not in the hospital, due to objections from the medical staff of having a husband equipped with movie camera on the scene as they went about their business.) Window Water Baby Moving is one of Brakhage's most widely viewed and justly famous works, simply on account of his willingness to show things that most people at the time strongly believed should not be shown on film. The fact that this reel existed made it an obvious choice in the decade or two that followed for natural childbirth advocates, Lamaze coaches and others to show prospective parents just what to expect when it came time for baby to be born. This was especially valuable for men planning to be present at the birth, as the stereotype of the husband pacing nervously in the waiting room puffing on cigarettes while the wife was in the Maternity Ward being attended to by the professionals became less the norm and more of an archaic cliché.

For all its practical value as a teaching tool (obscured only slightly by Brakhage's artistic quirks, which even to a non-cinephile makes the film more effective and evocative than if he'd taken a straight documentary approach), Window Water Baby Moving remains a very intense movie-watching experience. And that's despite the fact that there's no sound (though your mind's ear fills it in quite effectively when you see Jane gnashing her teeth in pain and Stan gasping in wide-eyed astonishment at the spectacle he just witnessed), images of childbirth are presumably familiar to all of us and we're not nearly as sheltered from the kind of explicit display that shocked the film's original audience, almost leading to the destruction of the footage when it was seized by Kodak's film lab upon exposure. Brakhage had to provide a note from his wife's doctor to prove to the authorities that he wasn't a pornographer; otherwise, Window Water Baby Moving would have been aborted before delivery, never seeing the light of day.

Next: Eyes Without a Face

Pickpocket (1959) - #314

2011-07-14T20:15:00.002-04:00

I'd become incredibly audacious. I got on well with my two accomplices. It couldn't last.

Robert Bresson as a director, and Pickpocket as a film, are indisputably held in higher esteem for people who have fallen thoroughly under the spell that fine art house cinema is capable of casting than the average movie watchers who might, for whatever reason, find themselves facing this oddly fascinating little masterpiece from late in 1959. Despite starting off with a bang, a successful if enigmatic demonstration of the art for which the film is titled, Pickpocket quickly abandons any pretense of being a crowd-pleaser as it leaps forward in its narrative unfolding, oblivious or perhaps even contemptuous in its lack of interest in delivering the explanations or other background elements that allow a more accessible frame of reference for understanding Michel's self-annihilating urge to commit acts of petty theft so brazen and foolhardy as to guarantee his eventual detection and capture.

Clearly Bresson is one of those directors more intent on pursuing his own personal ambitions and fulfillment, supremely confident, to the point of what some would consider arrogance, that even if only a select few are willing to follow him toward his destination, it's easily a price worth paying to avoid the moribund constraints of commercial considerations that would have made Pickpocket a more conventionally satisfying foray into the noir-ish criminal underworld explored so successfully by great French crime films like Rififi, Touchez pas au grisbi and Bob le flambeur in the years preceding its release. One big difference, of course, is the age of the protagonist - those three films all have in common aging crooks well past their prime, reminiscing in various ways about youth's faded glory. Pickpocket features a man still emerging into adulthood, a reflection perhaps of the Nouvelle Vague that was erupting into French cinema even as Bresson, one of the old guard whose innovations helped pave the way for that uprising, was still at the top of his game.

Whether or not the following quote applies to Bresson's personal philosophy of life, it seems at least worthy of conjecture that when his anti-hero Michel voiced the following sentiments, he may have been speaking about the director's attitudes toward run-of-the-mill filmmaking aimed at generating big box office, and the role that contrarian talents like himself played in the contemporary cinematic scene:

Can we not admit that certain skilled men, gifted with intelligence, talent or even genius, and thus indispensable to society, rather than stagnate, should be free to disobey laws in certain cases?

This Nietzschean outlook is bound to offend some, appeal to others, and leave most just kind of scratching their head and shrugging, "what the huh?" before moving on to some more easily digestible distraction. Such is Pickpocket's fate, destined as it is to be an object of fascination to a select few, and a readily acknowledgeable landmark to others who may recognize Bresson's superior craftsmanship, his innovative vision for the future of cinema and the skillful application of a rigorous discipline, even as they fall short of fully embracing the film as a satisfying experience, due to its brevity, its severity or its lack of the kind of user-friendly payoff that we've come to expect from movies we hold especially near and dear to our hearts.

As a story, Pickpocket is even slimmer than the peculiar 75 minute runtime would suggest. That clipped, abbreviated duration suggests something along the lines of a prime-time TV drama, plus a little extra, not the deeper exploration of human interiority that comes as part of the package with a standard two-hour feature film these days. And yet, there are a series of small but influential gestures that demonstrate Bresson's willingness to pack more in, and create more rewatchability for his selected clique of aficionados, than ever occurs to the average network TV director, whose mission is primarily to advance concise, tidy narratives and lead the viewer to a hook that draws them into the next episode. Pickpocket's story arc, such as it is, tracks the slide onto the edges of oblivion that Michel finds so necessary to fulfill his own sense of self, but offers precious little in the way of any context that would help us, the outsiders sitting in the dark, staring at this spectacle, to understand "why?"

It occurs to me as I write this that I'm spending more time talking about Bresson and his method than about the actual content of the film itself. Such are the hazards of directing as he does, hewing so faithfully to the path he's chosen to travel. Perhaps I'm falling into the trap of regarding his work as a triumph of style over substance; if so, I won't take on the fault as my own. Pickpocket is an impressive piece of work, presenting us with a leading-man cipher, an idler akin to any number of aimless, perturbed young men found in the short stories of Kafka or Melville's (the author, not the director) Bartleby the Scrivener, only to offer the slightest hint of redemption and harmony at the very end of the film, after he's convinced us that he lacks conscience or any motivation to change. Bresson himself pushes us to that edge, stifling as he does both the merits and the restrictions of standardized melodrama, thriller or suspense films, even while exploiting select elements of all three genres.

So allow me to discuss then, the characteristics of Michel, his accomplices Jacques and two others who remain unnamed, mere functionaries for all their stylized execution of the fine art of picking pockets, and Jeanne, the teenage redemptress cast more for her ability to cast piercing soulful stares than for anything resembling acting. Bresson famously referred to his cast as "models" and the way they're used here offers ample demonstration of what distinguishes them from "actors." Their expectations were to deliver their lines in flat, emotionless monotones, looking up, looking down, turning away from the camera elliptically so as to parallel Bresson's forward leaps in time, skipping over the scenes many other directors would consider essential in order to render a sensible arc of character development or the necessary exposition to keep us tracking as a group.

Michel is the prototype of the young man just coming to adult awareness of his own potentials without the guidance of any kind of moral framework that will put his gifts in focus. Alienated from his peers, reluctant to lower his guard enough to accept Jeanne's sincere affection (a credible substitute for love, all things considered), Michel instead follows his own juvenile impulses to take that which does not belong to him yet which he feels entitled to nevertheless. Finding like-minded companions who can help him advance his criminal skills, he soon backs himself into a corner, drawing the attention of the police and making himself a marked man. The only escape, after his mother has passed away and he finds himself truly without mooring, is to leave town by train, Paris to Milan to Rome to London, a passage that compresses two years of life experience into a few narrated seconds of screen time before we see him disembark from a train in the same suit, tie and haircut he left with. It's scarcely a believable advancement, especially when Jeanne enters the room looking practically identical to the pretty teenager we last saw her as. What is the point of this transition, except to demonstrate Michel's seemingly hardened resignation to his pickpocket ways? It also serves to ennoble Jeanne's patient, saintly willingness to await Michel's not-so-inevitable moment of realization that life may have more to offer than the displaced eroticism of brushing up against strangers and extracting random treasures from concealed compartments of their personal attire.

As astonishing as anything we see in Pickpocket is the discovery that awaits in a delightful and revelatory documentary, The Models of Pickpocket, a 2003 documentary included on Criterion's DVD, originally released a couple years later. In it, filmmaker Babette Mangolte manages to track down the three principle characters from the film, Michel (Martin LaSalle), Jeanne (Martika Green) and Jacques (Pierre Lemarie) to their respective homes in Mexico, Austria and France. Beyond just hearing their intriguing anecdotes from the production of this movie, I was even more impressed by seeing what formidable people each of them had become over the decades following their brief forays into the acting side of show business. This hour-long documentary, along with a generous smattering of other shorts and supplements, definitely compensates for what is otherwise a rather short main feature. Pickpocket remains one of the archetypal portrayals of a psychologically ambiguous and largely unexplained loner whose actions provoke many more questions than supply the kind of comforting answers and platitudes we often seek from movies, merely for the sake of confirming that which we already believe.

Next: Brakhage '59

Ballad of a Soldier (1959) - #148

2011-07-06T23:54:00.002-04:00

He could have become a remarkable man.

Ballad of a Soldier is a pleasantly accessible and emotionally powerful meditation on the effects of war on a society's common folk that probably earns its status as an "important classic and contemporary film" (i.e. part of the Criterion Collection) as much for the circumstances of its original release and historic significance as for it's cinematic achievements. It's a handsome production, skillfully rendered and performed with impeccable sincerity by a very photogenic cast - even the rough-hewn peasants, tragic victims and a small number of unsympathetic characters, presented to us as examples of weakness and faltering integrity, have a noble glow to them. A few scenes show technical prowess, most memorably an early overhead shot of tanks pursuing a running soldier that flips upside down as the action passes directly underneath the camera, and a dreamy montage reverie later in the film in which two would-be lovers, now parted by circumstance and ever-increasing miles, speak tenderly to each other in their own thoughts words of affection that they never dared speak to each other. But these effects, as moving and genteel as they unquestionably are, might not in themselves have won the enduring respect and admiration that they have if the film itself hadn't emerged at a particularly critical time - the late 1950s "thaw" in Soviet media censorship and US-USSR relations that took place after the passing of Stalin but before the Cold War ramped up again in the early 1960s with the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the entry of the USA into the Vietnamese conflict.

Ballad of a Soldier offered convincing evidence that the Russians were not the cold cruel barbarians or amoral atheists proclaimed by the hysterical anti-Communist propaganda of that time. Its message, that war not only disrupts and scars the civilians living far behind the battle lines, but also deprives the future of men possessed of courage, compassion and dedication to their homeland, resonates memorably with anyone capable of recognizing such a simple but profound truth. Though we do witness a few scenes of battle, it's a sanitized view of combat - even the civilian casualties of a bombed passenger train that catches on fire show scarcely a trace of injury, with one woman's corpse fairly described as "radiant" beneath the gaze of her mourning fellow-travelers. What's more important to director Grigori Chukrai isn't a graphic depiction of the horrors of war, but rather the bravery and common bonds that represent the best in people during a time of great duress.

In this sense, Chukrai could be charged by cynics and/or realists of presenting an overly idealized portrayal of how people respond, and that point isn't too hard to argue. The protagonist, a 19-year old infantryman named Alyosha, is in many ways a relentless paragon of virtue, though he goes about his heroism with a natural, soft-spoken humility that wins him favor from the people he meets in the film and from all but the most jaded members of the audience. A few lucky shots reeled off in panic while he runs for his life allow him to disable two German tanks, and this unlikely display of heroism earns him a six-day leave of absence from the grateful and impressed field general, who's moved by Alyosha's earnest desire to return to his village in order to fix the leaky roof of his mother's farm home. From there, the story consists entirely of Alyosha's encounters along the way home with characters who could be regarded as wartime archetypes: the wounded soldier avoiding a reunion with his wife, dreading her rejection when she sees how he's been disfigured; the petty corruption of a sentry who talks tough but slyly indicates his willingness to take a bribe in order to facilitate Alyosha's return home; a faithless wife who's taken up with another man while her husband serves valiantly on the front lines, convinced of her steadfast fidelity.

Most poignant of these encounters are Alyosha's unexpected infatuation with Shura, a lovely young stowaway who he meets in a straw-laden box car and takes on as a traveling companion for the central portion of the film, and the long-delayed return to his home village that, for all of its inevitability still remains one of the most genuinely emotive mother-child reunions that I've ever seen on film. Her loping athletic strides as she runs in from the vast wheat fields to embrace her son, her wailing cries of "Alyosha!" and the raw clinging hugs that the two of them lavish upon each other convey such a strength of love and amazed relief, a satisfying crescendo of pathos after all the diversions the young man has had to endure... but only after one has seen the trek that Alyosha had to complete to arrive at his destination.

The role of these two women in Alyosha's life is really the key to what makes Ballad of a Soldier more than a simple morality tale or a merely sentimental evocation of the sadness and loss of war. The mother strikes a statuesque pose at the beginning of the film which she reprises at the end, gazing down the road that she last saw her son drive away on, so solemn and martyr-like that I was briefly led to assume that I was in for a shorter Russian version of the somber heavy slog that is The Human Condition, a Japanese look back at the war that also came out in 1959 (or at least, six hours of the nearly ten-hour epic that would conclude its release in 1961.) Thankfully, Ballad of a Soldier has a lot more charm and humor over the course of its swiftly moving 90 minutes than you'll find in Kobayashi's magnum opus, and we're also left feeling quite a bit more optimistic about humanity's ability to rebound from the travesties of war than the bitter taste left by Fires on the Plain, another grim reminiscence that same year from Japan.

A big reason for that optimism, despite the tragic (though again, sanitized) conclusion of Ballad of a Soldier, is the sweet blossoming of chaste romance that occurs between Alyosha and Shura - they make a winsome couple, all the more appealing because of the innocence of their unfulfilled, belatedly realized yearnings for each other. This touch of sensuality was indeed a big breakthrough for Soviet cinema, breathing fresh life into the domestic Russian movie scene and demonstrating to sympathetic Westerners that a romantic heartbeat could still be detected beneath the cautious repressive glare of Communist doctrinaire censorship.

This compilation of a few scenes (not really a trailer) is the only sample I could find from Ballad of a Soldier. It's a fine representation of what awaits your discovery.

I recommend it as a good film to show friends who might be a little leery or ambivalent about watching an old black and white Russian film, because I think it's a movie that most general audiences could relate to and appreciate, so direct and universally applicable is its message. I'll even go so far as to say it's an inspirational film - not necessarily realistic, but an appealingly idealized representation of how we'd all like to think we'd behave if the rigors and deprivations of war would ever fall directly upon us. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but we all need to cultivate our nobler aspirations for ourselves. Sentimental perhaps, too good to be true, probably, Ballad of a Soldier sincerely seeks to uplift the human spirit and I sure can't fault a work of art for pursuing such ambitions.

Next: Pickpocket

The Atomic Submarine (1959) - #366

2011-06-30T13:59:00.002-04:00

Point of view is everything. To us, your form of life is ugly, as we appear to you.

Fond recollections from childhood viewings and admiration for the moxie that went into making movies like The Atomic Submarine are probably enough justification for the inclusion of a few prime examples of that genre in the Criterion Collection. But once you get past the wooden acting, creaky scripts, stilted narration, corny humor, low-budget props and sheer implausibility of The Atomic Submarine's story line, you'll find themes and ideas worth pondering a bit longer than it takes to laugh away at the non-stop unraveling of sci-fi B-movie conventions. The plot synopsis is uncomplicated: a state-of-the-art nuclear sub, christened the Tiger Shark, is sent on a mission to discover and eliminate a strange underwater menace that's destroyed several other vessels trying to work their way across the Arctic Circle. Upon arrival, with the requisite senior scientific advisers and expendable, doomed crewmen along for the ride, they encounter a repulsive monster with sinister intentions to take over the world and must resort to desperate improvisations to defeat the enemy and keep humanity free to mess up the planet on our own terms.

But as for those extra nuances of enjoyment I alluded to:

There's a headier-than-expected socio-political debate between a young principled pacifist and the career military man and WWII veteran sub captain over the merits of war and peace;
A ludicrous and awkward cheesecake seduction scene featuring Joi Lansing, Frank Sinatra's platinum-blonde girlfriend at the time, and de facto leading man Arthur Franz, the epitome of "middle-aged-schlub in denial" who still thinks he's hot enough stuff to pull in young tarts like Ms. Lansing (and who's sold to the audience as such, generating bigger chuckles now for the absurdity of it than were intended at the time;
an irreplicable pop-culture snapshot of the American public's first encounter with the technology of nuclear powered warships and the eerie fascination of floating across the top of the globe (complete with maps!) under iceberg-infested waters that harbor other unknown perils;
interpolated vintage documentary footage of real submarines and ship explosions, the purchase of which actually functioned as a catalyst for making not only The Atomic Submarine but also a few other underwater-themed films, using some of the same clips;
a weird futuristic "Electro-Sonic" musical score by Alexander Laszlo worth focusing on and listening to on its own merits;
an archetypal tentacled cyclopic submersible slime-beast that either directly or subconsciously inspired the Simpsons' variation on that theme

and most significantly, a primal example of the basic technological science fiction thriller standards that eventually went on to establish the template for so many later big budget blockbusters that have fueled the summer movie industry for the last three decades or so:

A group of (actual or quasi)military men, beset by temperamental or ideological tensions, sent on an all-but-impossible quest to thwart a dreadful but mysterious non-human adversary, using the latest and most extreme technological assets at their disposal which in themselves are no match for the alien invasion, but when combined with crafty human ingenuity, make all the difference in averting our total destruction and perhaps opening us up to the possibility of a happier future for our species... if we will only learn...

Movies like Independence Day, Armageddon, or most notably, The Abyss, which seems to draw directly from The Atomic Submarine's plot, readily come to mind, but there are many more that could be named. In essence, the main difference between crude antecedents like The Atomic Submarine and its much better funded progeny is in the level of prioritization such escapist techno-fantasies received from studio chiefs over the decades. In the late 1950s, such a film was a tolerable little diversion, a tidy money maker if cranked out quickly and cheaply enough. On the commentary track, we learn that this productions was only allotted eights days of shooting time and a miniscule budget, resulting in bathtub-toy quality replicas for the underwater effects and the usual hodgepodge of buttons, levers, switches and dials piled up on a generic soundstage that could have functioned just as effectively as parts of a mock-up space ship. Originally destined for little more than opening a twin-bill that catered to the kiddies on a Saturday morning matinee, and after that, syndication for late night TV, little did anyone ever suspect that such a humble little scrapheap of a movie would ever stand proudly alongside such distinguished company as other "important classic and contemporary films" released that same year: The 400 Blows, Hiroshima mon amour, Black Orpheus, The Human Condition... the list could go on.

Producer Alex Gordon is the special guest interviewed on that commentary and the common thread that links together The Atomic Submarine and the other films (Corridors of Blood, The Haunted Strangler, First Man Into Space) found in this Monsters and Madmen box set. He, along with other similarly scrappy cinematic entrepreneurs like him, took the leftovers that the studio heads offered and did the best they could under the circumstances. Little did they or anyone else at the time ever fathom that some day, such incredulous but eyeball grabbing world-shaking scenarios, if fueled with the kind of lavish budgets, extended production schedules and top-shelf creative talent that became the standard after the financial and cultural breakthrough of Star Wars, would become the bread-and-butter blockbuster product that helped keep the entire Hollywood movie industry afloat.

Next: Ballad Of A Soldier