36 Hours

Hi Aki,

We watched 36 Hours tonight, made in 1965. WW2 drama starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Taylor. Black and White, Panavision.

It’s May 31 1944. Garner knows the secret plans for the allied invasion. The Germans seem to believe the landing will be in Calais, but in reality it’s Normandy. But maybe the Germans are only pretending to believe it’s Calais. Garner has a contact in Lisbon who might give them a clue whether the Germans believe in Calais or are only fooling.

Garner goes to Lisbon but he is drugged, put on a truck, a plane, flown to Germany. There near the Swiss border the Germans have constructed an exact copy of a US military hospital. This is their plan, to convince Garner that it’s now 1950, the war is long over, he has had amnesia. In this way they hope to fool him into revealing the actual details of the invasion. It is a plan the Germans have used before, 18 times, without fail, but those men were simple soldiers. Garner is a top intelligence man. The SS doesn’t trust Dr Gerber (Rod Taylor) to succeed here. They give Gerber 36 hours to find out; then the torturers will go to work.

Gerber has Garner’s hair dyed to look older, puts drops in his eyes to make him need glasses. Garner wakes up and is disoriented, and at first the plan is working out well. Gerber is helped by nurse Anna (Eva Marie Saint) who pretends to be Garner’s nurse as well as wife.

Garner is totally fooled. He gives away the plans in great detail. Then…

…Then he finds he has a paper cut on his finger. He got that paper cut the night before he left for Lisbon. Desperately he tries to unravel the mystery. In a couple easy ways he gets it. He threatens Anna and she tells him the truth. She was in a concentration camp, she agreed to anything to get out, she was a nurse, she spoke English, so she was brought into this plot.

Garner gets Anna to help him. She tells Gerber and the SS man that Garner has escaped, that he knows the truth, has seen through them from the start.

Garner is captured and brought to the SS. But first Gerber talks to him. Gerber (in an unbelievable scene they try to sell as well as they can) reveals he created this amnesia gag at first to help German soldiers shell-shocked coming back from the Russian front. And over the months, studying Garner’s file, he has come to know and like him. And he’s not only sorry for what Garner will now face, but Gerber is still unconvinced that Garner was lying when he told them the invasion would be Normandy.

Shock, the SS man, has no such thoughts. He believes the invasion is most likely to come at Calais because that is where the high command thinks it will come.

For a couple days, Garner (and Anna, because Shock finds out that Anna betrayed them) are tortured. The torture is this: they are put in comfortable chairs for a few hours. Yes, the comfy chair!!!

Meanwhile the Allied Command knows Garner has been taken, and they don’t know if he can stand being tortured. They know he will try to sell the Germans on the idea it will be Calais. So they arrange for German spies in England to be fed clues that it will be Calais on June 7 though in fact it is set for Normandy June 5.

When this fake intelligence makes it down the German command, and Shock tells Garner, ‘We know it’s Calais,’ then Garner seems to give up. They release him and put him and Anna in a suite of rooms in a castle on very comfy beds. Yes, the comfy beds!!!

When Garner wakes up, he sees the clock-calendar. It’s early hours of June 5 so he relaxes and tells Anna that it’s too late for the Germans, he and she have made it. The invasion is already beginning.

In walks Gerber who has had the room bugged. ‘Oh, this clock is set ahead, by the way. It’s only 11.42 – June 4. And you were telling the truth about Normandy, eh? Glad to hear it.’

Gerber sends the information by courier to the top general in the area to be delivered personally, but the courier instead gives it to Shock.

But meanwhile the dawn of June 5 comes … and no invasion. (This is a clever use of history; the invasion was set for the fifth, but bad weather made them put it off. Everybody knew it was going to be 5 or 6 or 7 because that was the dark of the moon and the tide was right.)

So Gerber is now totally discredited, even though to be a traitor. Gerber knows he has nothing to lose, so he helps Garner and Anna escape. He stays behind and is arrested. He injects himself with poison to cheat the SS guys even being able to torture him or shoot him.

Garner and Anna go cross country to the Minister in the nearby town. This man has helped American flyers get across the border, but he’s out of town. Still his housekeeper helps them. She puts them in contact with a fat, old, very comical and cynical Home Guard border patrol man (Sig Ruman, later to be famous as ‘Sergeant Schultz’ on TV). For some money he will help them.

But Garner has mentioned this minister in the talks with Gerber and the SS man before Garner realized that they were Germans. The SS man goes to the minister’s house, gets the plan out of the housekeeper, and arrests Garner and Anna just this side of the border. He intends not to take them back but to shoot them. But he gets shot himself, by the Home Guard comedian, who helps Garner and Anna get away, and drapes Shock’s body over the fence as though he had been shot trying to escape.

In Switzerland Anna and Garner say farewell. He is bound back to London, she for an internment camp for refugees. She finally manages to cry with relief, for the first time since her brutal treatment in the concentration camp took away her last tears. The two cars drive away, parting at a fork in the road, and the credits roll.

The movie is based on a Roald Dahl story. But here’s the interesting thing, in the credits in big letters it says, Based on ‘Beware the Dog’ by Roald Dahl then in small letters it says, Also on a story by X and Y (I can’t remember those names).

So here is my guess: the basic premise, of the fake amnesia, the ‘doctor’ trying to get him to ‘remember’ 6 years that haven’t actually happened yet, etc. – this is in Roald Dahl’s story. It’s very clever, and the story probably starts with our hero waking up. Confused. How did I get here? Kind of stuff. Then ‘Why do I look older? Why do I need glasses now? what’s this date on the paper – 1950?!?’

The doctors come in, and try to help him.

He gives away the place and troop disposition of the invasion.

Then he figures it out, by a clever means (probably the paper cut gag, though that seems to rely a bit too much on accident to me). And now he must fool the ‘doctor’ into believing that he was onto them from the beginning.

It’s all a game of psychology, faking, convincing, lying.

There is the hero, the doctor, maybe a torturer too. But probably just hero and doctor (maybe another doctor).

There are no girls and no romance and no thrilling escape.

This would have been a good:

• play
• live TV drama
• intense movie (the kind that we were taught makes a good debut feature: ‘2 guys in a room talking’ kind of feature)

It does not make a good wide-screen big-name movie from MGM using all the props they have on hand from the other WW2 movies they were making at the time.

So, in adapting, I imagine that the producers said something like, ‘We need a GIRL! We need ROMANCE! We need ACTION! We need the guy not just to fool the Nazis and get killed, or go into prison camp like in the Dahl story, we need him to ESCAPE!’

And they pulled in this cheap pulp story of a guy hooking up with a woman who was being used by the Nazis after getting out of concentration camp, and the cynical border guard, all that stuff. Everything cheap and bad about the movie, in other words, comes from:

• this second pulp story
• introductory material setting up the problem (the part about sending Garner to Lisbon, and the scenes in Lisbon)
• and whatever else the producers thought would make for better box-office

But of course the only scenes that work in the movie are those that come from the Dahl story. And it starts to go wrong as soon as we have to build up the girl and she says she is married to Garner. This is preposterous of course. And as soon as he figures it out, he starts acting in pulp action-hero manner, threatening the girl, running, fighting – crap.

Where does the sympathetic portrayal of Dr Gerber come in I wonder? This part almost seems as though it doesn’t come from either story, but is instead a condition of getting a big name star to play the part. ‘Rod Taylor doesn’t want to play a Nazi, man! He wants to be a good guy! All the potential stars for this part don’t want it! We gotta sweeten the deal but we can’t PAY more; anyway money isn’t the problem. Hey how about we make him a GOOD Nazi, not a bad one? He can even have good motives for his work, and he can help Garner escape! Oh, he’ll do it now? Great, baby, great!’

The biggest problem lies in how the introductory big-budget stuff and the later crappy escape stuff crowd in on the core of the movie, the scenes of convincing, being fooled, catching on, trying to trick back, trying to convince them. This is the only part that is suspenseful or interesting. As soon as Garner says ‘Normandy’ and goes on to give all the code-names for the beaches, and tell what troops will be landing on what beaches, it really got me going. ‘How is he going to take this back? He can’t kill them, it wouldn’t do any good, they have passed on the words already. He’s going to have to fool them back, and how on earth is he going to do THAT?’ – That’s what went through my mind, I was all excited to see how they were going to handle.

You can’t imagine my disappointment as we move into the laughable ‘Torture in the comfy chairs!’ part, and the crappy, too-easy, escape.

(5 May 2009)

The Three Bandits of The Hidden Fortress

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.

You know the movie very well, of course. I’ve only seen it three or four times. Every time I remember that the beginning is slow and there’s a lot of the two Fools who are the heroes, before the real story gets going. And every time when I watch, the beginning with the two Fools before the real story gets going seems to take longer.

I guess you have to find the Fools’ antics funny to enjoy them. The odd thing is that I do find them funny, once they are contrasted with the heroic General and brave, fiery Princess. But on their own, the Fools don’t amuse me at all. Could it be I’m missing a lot by not knowing Japanese? Maybe their accents, the words they use, are funnier than the bare-bones subtitles.

Anyway, it’s 45 minutes before we meet the Princess for real. And it’s an hour before the General, Princess, and Fools set out on their mission. I count that as the end of Act I. A whole hour for Act I! Too long for me!

The story: War has broken out between the Akizuki and Yamana clans. The Hayakawa clan stays out of the war but has agreed to shelter the survivors of the losing Akizukis – if they can cross the border.

But we really begin with the two Fools. They are peasants who sold all their goods to buy a couple weapons and join the war, in the hope of gaining riches. Didn’t work out that way: arriving late to battle, they were pressed into service stripping corpses. Now in rags, they are trudging back to Hayakawa where they’re from, and quarreling every step of the way, blaming each other for the mess they’re in.

They find the Yamana-Hayakawa border closed and patrolled by Yamana soldiers watching lest any last Akizukis escape. Then the Fools get picked up by Yamana troops and are thrown in with other captives digging out the foundations of Akizuki castle, searching for the rumored 200 gold pieces that formed the basis of Akizuki wealth.

The fools manage to get away in the confusion following a slave revolt, and wander the wild hinterlands, hungry, stealing what they can, at the end of their rope. Then they find some sticks with gold pieces hidden in them.

Searching for more, the Fools run into a fierce bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who says he knows where the rest of the gold is. And he has a wild spitfire of a girl wandering around too, in the Hidden Fortress abandoned by the Akizukis, which was used at one time as a spy post on Yamana lands.

But in fact the bandit is the Akizuki general Rokurota, and the girl is the Akizuki Princess Yuki, with a high price on her head. They are holed up here unsure what to do. And the General would have killed the Fools, only when he asks them their plans, they babble out some nonsense about the only way to get to Hayakawa is by going into Yamana first. This appeals to the General, and so he spares them and even adopts their plan.

So (at last, after a whole hour!) they set forth: the General, the Princess, two Fools and three horses weighted down with billets of wood concealing the Akizuki gold. They enter Yamana territory, but news of their movements are always just behind them. Along the way they sell the horses, buy a enslaved Akizuki captive and a cart, do battle with Yamana generals, burn all the wood in a fire festival, dig up the gold from the ashes come dawn, and flee for their lives over wild mountains on the Hayakawa marches. But it’s all in vain. The two Fools make up their minds to betray the Princess, but they fail even in this – Princess and General are already captured. Totally defeated but still with their lives, the Fools trudge on into Hayakawa to make their way home.

Behind them the general Rokurota defeated in a duel comes to identify the General and the Princess. But he has been beaten savagely and scarred for having lost the duel, and his old honorable friendship with Rokurota has soured in the rival general’s heart. Rokurota apologizes to the Princess, but Yuki thanks the General for the best time of her life, and sings the song from the Fire Festival on rising above attachment to life.

Come the morning, they set out from the frontier for Yamana castle. But at the last moment the Yamana general, remembering the song, battles his own men, sets the General and Princess free, and sends them into Hayakawa, with the horses laden with gold ahead of them. Then he leaps on a horse and follows.

Far ahead, the two Fools trudge along. Once again they are swearing friendship – until the horses with the gold come along. Then they start bickering over who gets what, until some Hayakawa troops ride up an arrest them.

In the final scenes, the Fools meet again their traveling companions, now transformed in courtly dress and battle armor. General Rokurota offers the Fools two gold pieces in thanks for their services, and the Fools leave Hayakawa castle, finally (it would seem) having learned their lesson, and no longer squabbling over gold.

This was a hard project to make work. It seems as though Kurosawa is really telling the Fools’ story, but the heroic General and brave Princess are too interesting, and as soon as they appear, the story shifts to them. I could say Kurosawa was making more of a kids’ story, and the Fools give the kids somebody to look down on and laugh at. But it goes deeper.

The opening scenes tell us what war is like for most of the people who fight it. Dirty, destructive, and inglorious. When the General and Princess hijack the story, we get glimpses into what war is like for the elite: glorious, adventurous, honorable. The point then is clear: the samurai elite can wage glorious war, on an individual basis, but as soon as it gets into clans and states, then inevitably the peasants are drawn in, and war is no longer so nice. The idea that a peasant can gain from war is the ultimate folly.

The opening reminds me a little of Yoshikawa’s Musashi which also opens with the hero, a peasant gone off to fight in war, waking up in the piles of dead, learning that his side has lost the war. He also went to war with a buddy from his home village, and the two end up following very different paths from the corpse-field. There is also Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari about two peasants who go to war for gain, which came out five years before The Hidden Fortress.

Does anyone remember the folly of war at movie’s end after seeing the General strike down his foes, and the heroic escape at the end? Or do we instead see the dirt and ugliness of the beginning as the Fools’ own fault, and nothing inherent in war at all? Intellectually I can say that war is wrong here, but I can’t help but get excited when I see the horses galloping and hear the grandiose martial music that is General Rokurota’s theme.

(10 April 2009)

Lacombe Lucien

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. This was I think his most acclaimed film, though he had many such – heck, he was hired the day he graduated from film school to direct the film of a Jacques Cousteau expedition, and he and Cousteau won an Oscar for it!

So the story: it’s 1944 and we are in the southwest corner of France, in the countryside near the spanish border. Young Lucien is a janitor at a hospice. He doesn’t talk much. And he has a sort of callousness about him, established by his gratuitous slingshot killing of a small bird singing on a branch outside the hospice ward window.

He goes home to the family farm when he has a few days off, only to find a bunch of strangers staying there. His mother is sleeping with a guy while his father is off fighting with degaulle or in jail, I didn’t catch which. Lucien is only happy when he’s out in the fields shooting rabbits.

He goes to his old schoolteacher to join the resistance. But the schoolteacher tells him he’s too young, and they have too many young kids like him. Lucien says he doesn’t want to go back to cleaning bedpans, but it’s no good.

He bicycles back to town to the hospice, but gets a flat on the way. This brings him into town after curfew, and he’s dragged into the local hotel where the collaborators, the French ‘German police’ are headquartered. But they take a liking to him, get him drunk, get him talking, and he tells them all about his schoolteacher.

Next thing he knows the schoolteacher is brought in to be tortured, and Lucien is a member of the German police.

They lead a fine life. Lucien is just a punk really, a young thug with not much conscience, no principles, not a thought in his head.

One thing the film does very well is play off silences, pauses when people don’t say anything, and we have to fill in what’s going on in their heads ourselves.

Lucien along the way meets a jewish tailor in hiding in town, and his lovely daughter. Lucien wants this girl bad, but she’s cultured and refined from Paris, and he’s a country bumpkin and a punk. Nevertheless they become lovers, and she begs him to help her father get across the border to spain.

Finally the father, outraged at this punk fucking his daughter, acts foolishly and gets arrested. The daughter blames Lucien. The way Lucien understands it, it was the father’s own fault – but Lucien really doesn’t understand anything. This is a constant source of irritation in watching the movie, that we are so much smarter than Lucien, and wonder what the hell he is thinking, can he really be so dumb?

Later on the Germans come to arrest the daughter and her grandmother, and Lucien goes along to show the Germans where to find them. Lucien takes back a gold watch he had given the father, but the German soldier takes it from him. Lucien then shoots the German soldier and flees with his girl and her granny. And we can’t be sure if in the end he shot the German soldier to help his girl, or just to get the watch – which is the first thing he does after he shoots the soldier.

They drive into the mountains toward the border, but the car overheats. They they must go on foot, but granny is not going to be able to climb the mountains.

Finding an abandoned farmhouse along the way, they move in. Lucien is back in his true element. He catches birds and rabbits. Granny plays solitaire like always. The girl plays with Lucien, sleeps with him, thinks about killing him in his sleep. (She’s another one with long silences during which we wonder exactly what is going on in her mind).

The peaceful idyll ends abruptly – not with German soldiers like we all expect, but with the credits. As Lucien lies in the cool grass, dozing, and his girl watches him from the pool where she’s been bathing, titles appear on the screen telling us he was arrested on October 12 1944, sentenced to death, and executed.

We aren’t told anything about the girl or granny.

The end.

The story is told with fragments, scenes, gradually filling in the portrait of the young punk. Once he hooks up with the girl, most of the scenes are concerned with his relations to that family, his awkward wooing, alternating with threats against the father and attempts to make nice. These scenes have a ghastly hilarity – they might give rise to nervous laughter, and I think some are intended to be funny; my dad and I didn’t laugh, though I chuckled once.

The actor who plays the tailor father gives the best performance. it’s quite good. Lucien is played by a young actor who looks right, and almost looks young enough; but he’s not a subtle actor, so Malle can only have him look rather blankly on. I wonder if whether this actor had been more accomplished, we would not have had to be guessing so much at what’s on his mind. On the other hand Malle might have been frustrated himself with this character, and this type of character. Maybe in the end he doesn’t know why such a character joins the German police other than the obvious reasons.

The German police are typified as semi-losers, quite banal, ordinary. They act more like gangsters low-caliber gangsters, than representatives of any government. It’s an interesting glimpse into what society is like when it breaks down like that.

Did I like it? Parts of it. In the end I feel frustrated, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants a memoir of the second world war.

Julien is about 13. His mom and dad are wealthy. He goes to private catholic school. It is January 1944.

A new kid enters his class. The kids are rough to him, all the kids are little bastards. Julien is also rough on him but in time the two kids are together here and there and strike up a friendship. Julien snoops through the kid’s stuff and learns he’s really a jew the priest is hiding.

The shared secret brings the boys closer together. But then the Germans come. They get three boys, all the jews, and the priest, and arrest them. Julien waves goodbye to his friend. Later he will hear that his friend and the other two kids both died in Auschwitz; the priest died in another prison. ‘Though 40 years have passed I will never forget that day.’

Nothing remarkable about the filmmaking. The script strings together a series of scenes without too much structure. The main thing is the way the two boys are antagonists rivals and then friends. There are a couple of subplots. A portrait of France in that time.

Very good view of the school kids. No sentimentality. Solid filmmaking with nothing flashy. Decent soundwork for the scenes where the entire track is made up of foley and loops and ambience. One very expressive scene shows the kids playing war games in the woods; Julien and his friend get lost, but find the treasure. But dark comes down and there might be wolves. And the woods are quiet… that’s the scene where all the sound is done in foley and it’s very good, a bit heavy on the foley and looping, but nobody but a filmmaker would notice it.

A very human film. Even the guy who denounces them is quite well drawn and we understand very well why he betrayed them. We even sympathize with him. Like renoir said, ‘everybody has his reasons.’

(written around 28 February 2009)

PS — to read Aki’s translation of this post in Japanese, click here.