The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Invasion of the Body Snatchers a Walter Wanger/Allied Artists sci-fi thriller directed by Don Siegel.

The story has a doctor being called in to the hospital to interview a strange mental case: a respected man from the nearby town of Santa Mira, CA, a doctor himself, who is raving paranoically about ‘them’ and how his whole town was taken over. As the man (Kevin McCarthy) settles down and tells his story, the screen goes blurry and the flashback begins.

It started ‘last Thursday’ when the Dr was called back early from a medical conference he’d been at for a couple of weeks. People were frantically trying to get appointments and would only see him. But when he gets into his office, none of the appointments show up. And there’s the little kid who runs screaming into the road ahead of the Dr’s car, claiming his mother isn’t really his mother. And there’s the middle aged woman who claims her father isn’t her father, even though he looks just like him, sounds just like him, and remembers everything her father knew. She can’t even explain what it is, there’s just ‘something missing.’

The Dr meets another person come back to the town, his old flame Becky (Dana Wynter). She’s just off being divorces, and he’s also divorced, so they feel the old magic and go on a date. But the restaurant is empty. Nobody comes there anymore, the owner tells them.

The Dr gets another frantic call, from a friend and writer. He goes to the writer’s house and finds on the man’s pool table a dead man – what seems to be a dead man. But the face is oddly indistinct, and the hands have no fingerprints. The dead man does, however, happen to exactly match the general physical shape of the writer. And later that night, the dead man begins to wake up – and now he has a cut on his hand just where the writer cut his hand an hour ago.

Soon the cause of all this becomes clear, when the Dr finds in his greenhouse four large seed pods, that burst open, and out of them emerge the slimy, rapidly changing, forms … forms that match with increasing exactitude the Dr, his girlfriend, and the writer and his wife.

It happens when you sleep. When the pod-thing reaches maturity, which it can do inside a day, it can read all your memories while you sleep. When ‘you’ wake up, you are a pod-person too.

The discovery of the threat takes up the first half of the picture. The second half details the frantic efforts of Dr and girlfriend to get out of town to warn the other communities. But the pod people are growing thousands of the pods in greenhouses (it’s a central California farming town) and trucking them out to those other communities.

In a confrontation with some of the pod people, the Dr gets a chance to learn just how it was it happened. The seeds came first from space, and landed in the fields. The pods can take on the exact semblance of whatever life form they choose. They are just like humans, except they have no emotions, no fear, no love, no greed, no ambition, no faith. They all think just alike.

The Dr and Becky manage to run into the hills, chased by the pod people, and they find temporary shelter in an abandoned mine. But Becky sleeps, and when the Dr kisses her, he rises off her body in horror – she’s one of them now. He runs out, chased again, and ends up in the middle of the freeway, desperately trying to get someone to pick him up, to believe him, to take the threat seriously…

Back in the present, he fails to persuade the examining physician, until a report comes in of an accident where giant, weird seed pods fell off a truck. At this the alarmed physician calls the FBI to send out the alert and seal off all roads to Santa Mira.

The film is one of several of the ‘Who Goes There? or, My Neighbors are Aliens!’ films that came out in the 1950s, and is one of the best of them. Supposedly the creators were aiming at the rise of suburbia and the lifelessness of it, or the general rise of more plastic people following the tumultuous years of Depression and war. It also plays into the general fears of Communists and Communist sympathizers that plagued the popular imagination, fanned by zealots of the far Right.

Siegel kept the pace moving along smartly. This is vital for a story which is, at base, preposterous. We have to keep getting new scenes to be distracted from thinking about what we’re watching. The pods themselves are a bit ridiculous, except for the genuinely (to this day) creepy shots of the pods bursting and the bubbling, oozing proto-human shapes sliding wetly out.

The script and first cut of the picture had no frame story, and ended with the shots of Kevin McCarthy as the Dr in close-up looking straight into the camera shouting, ‘You’re next!’ – but when Wanger and the other brass at Allied Artists saw this, they thought it was too bleak and frightening, so they gave Siegel money to shoot the frame, which ends on a more hopeful note. (I wonder if there is any DVD version that gives us that version – it would be a pretty simple matter of skipping the bookend scenes and suppressing the voiceover narration.)

One thing the flashback structure does give us though is a sense of fear and foreboding from the opening. There is a necessary Act 1 of exposition in which everything seems normal on the surface, before the Dr begins to suspect that something is really wrong (with the examination of the unfinished corpse on the writer’s pool table). Without the flashback structure, these scenes would play very tame, even boring; but with the prologue that sense of fear hangs over all this, and we have been assured that something is really wrong; this lets us interpret everything even slightly odd in ways the Dr doesn’t as yet; it also makes us suspect everybody around him, and lets us develop our paranoia over a longer portion of the picture’s running time.

Of course, the closing scene shows us the Dr now relieved, feeling he’s no longer alone. But there is no certainty that the pods can be defeated. There are only the grounds for hope, and no real hope at all.

(Two interesting side notes: Sam Peckinpah was Siegel’s assistant for a few pictures, including this one. Sam claimed to have done a complete rewrite of the script himself, a claim which is widely disputed. In the 1980s Phil Kaufman remade the picture as a comment on the Reagan years and what looked like a return to 1950s life.)

One problem: there really isn’t any difference between the pod people and the regular people. In the 1980s remake (with better actors and more time shooting) Kaufman tried to bring out in performances the lack of emotions when people ‘went pod’ but Siegel really doesn’t get that, and the script doesn’t highlight the difference. Instead, and this is interesting, the difference shows up in the reactions of those not yet converted. They know, and we get the idea just because THEY react that way. In the same vein, what’s so bad about being a pod? The movie doesn’t give a good intellectual answer, but it gives us a good movie answer – because our heroes react in horror to the conversion of those they know, and because the conversion is forced – nobody has a choice.

In this light, it would be an idea to make a My Name is Legion adaptation (the Richard Mathieson novel adapted 3 times as Last Man on Earth and Omega Man in which all the world is vampires, except one man) along the pod people idea: show the doctor faking that he’s a pod person, and so far as he knows everybody else has changed over – but he doesn’t know for sure, so he has to hide himself, who he really is, and yet he’s always tempted – is this woman ‘real’ or that man, that kid?

Here the metaphor would cover things like being gay and trying to pretend you’re straight in a homophobic society, or being an immigrant in a different culture, or being ‘different’ in any way and trying to fit in.

Since this question of ‘fitting in’ is so strong among adolescents, it could be done in a teen-high school setting. The teachers are the main proponents of the pods, they grow them and convert kids; the hero is the last one, so far as he knows, who’s still a ‘real’ kid.

In a weird way, this is the same issue as Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

(27 April 2009)

Changeling

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Changeling the Clint Eastwood movie.

The story is ‘a true story’ based on a famous case in Los Angeles from the 1920s. In 1928 single mom Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), having promised her son they would go to the movies, instead has to work. When she gets home that night, her son is gone. She looks everywhere but he’s gone. The police try to find him, no good. But Collins is persistent, and her case attracts the attention of Reverend Gebleit (I probably spelled that wrong – John Malkovitch plays him) who is a crusader against the violent, corrupt LAPD. And he uses the case to ridicule the LAPD for incompetence along with violence and corruption.

Five months after she loses her son, Collins is told by the police that her boy Walter has been found in Iowa. They will meet him at the train station. There the Police Captain Jones and a gaggle of reporters are on hand to make the most of the publicity – the LAPD reuniting mother and missing child. But when she sees the kid, Collins says it’s not her son. The Captain, faced with the reporters, talks her into taking the kid home on a ‘trial basis’ for a couple weeks; the ordeal has changed him, he looks different, and if she doesn’t take care of him nobody will. Reluctantly Collins agrees, and the reporters all swarm around to take pictures of the happy family.

Collins grows more and more sure that this is not her son. She tries to tell this to Captain Jones, bringing evidence – the new kid is shorter, he is circumcised and her son wasn’t, the teacher knows he’s not the same, the dentist confirms it too. But the cops won’t listen, and even threaten her. At this point Collins lets the Reverend talk her into going to the press, but Captain Jones has her picked up and commits her in secret to a mental hospital.

There Collins is a prisoner, drugged, abused, and threatened. The doctor in charge is no more helpful or sympathetic than the cops, and uses double-talk to make her seem paranoid and unbalanced.

Meanwhile though, a detective finds up in a farm town outside LA (now called Mira Loma) evidence of a serial killer. Northcott, a Canadian, has forced his nephew to help him drive into LA, pick up boys, and bring them back to the farm, where Northcott cages them in the chicken coop before he chops them up with axes. Northcott has fled to Vancouver, but the nephew identifies Collins’s son Walter as one of the children he and Northcott abducted.

Collins is freed, and sues the city. Northcott is caught and brought back to trial. The two trials are held at the same time. As a result of the civil suit, Captain Jones is dismissed, the Chief made to resign, and the Mayor doesn’t run for re-election.

Two years later, just before he is hanged, Northcott telegrams Collins to tell her the truth about her son and how he killed him. Collins has refused to give up trying to find him, because maybe the nephew didn’t remember Walter right, and maybe Walter was one of the two or three kids who escaped. So she goes up to San Quentin penitentiary to meet Northcott. But he refuses to talk, and goes to the grave telling nothing.

Five years later (now it’s 1935) one of the missing boys turns up. He tells of the night he escaped. Two boys broke out, and he tried to follow, but got hung up on the chicken coop wire; one of the boys came back to help him – it was Walter Collins. The boy was separated from the other two, Walter and the other, as Northcott chased them. Since then the boy has been in hiding, afraid he might be accused of complicity.

Collins gains new hope from this news, and continues trying to find her son. She will spend the rest of her life in doing so, without success.

That’s the end of the movie. It’s a good period reconstruction, and Jolie is pretty good, taking at last a more mainstream, non-genre role. The guy playing Captain Jones, and the hospital doctor, are both great: Eastwood wants us to hate them and I sure did. The serial killer aspect of the story is downplayed, and emphasis centers on Christine Collins.

Here’s something interesting: this was a hot script that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard optioned for their Imagine company. Howard was supposed to direct, but he had two other pictures he wanted to do first, and so Grazer brought in Eastwood to do this; Eastwood says he likes to shoot pictures set in the Depression when he grew up. And his libertarian streak would lend himself to liking this story of how bad the cops and authorities can be. But Grazer and Howard had the screenwriter to a couple more drafts of the script, and Eastwood when he came on board went back to the first draft! He thought it had more heart and directness.

The problem I had with the script is – it covers too much ground. J. Michael Stracynzki (I probably spelled that wrong too – he’s most famous as the creator/producer of the TV show Babylon 5) just found too much in the real life stories that he liked, and was unable to let any of it go. In fact he did claim to let some of it go (for one thing, Northcott was aided in his crimes by his mother, but the mother is dropped) but once we leave Collins in the mental hospital and follow the investigation into the murders, the movie seems to be telling a different story. And then we have the two trials. And then we have the scenes of the hanging in San Quentin. And then we have the scenes from 5 years later. At some point it starts to feel as though this movie intends to tell the story of Los Angeles County for the next 80 years. It just doesn’t know when to stop.

Eastwood’s pace as usual is on the slow side. Well, old men make old men’s movies of course. But I wish they had concentrated just on the abuse of Collins and left it at that. Sam Fuller would have maybe left Collins in the psycho ward with the cops triumphant, and left it at that.

(22 April 2009)

(Adapting) The Osterman Weekend

Hi Aki,

This weekend we watched The Osterman Weekend a 1984 adaptation of the thriller by Robert Ludlum, directed by Sam Peckinpah in what turned out to be the last picture he made.

The story is preposterous so I’ll just give it brief: CIA agent Fassett (John Hurt) finds his wife murdered. She was killed by the KGB but what Fassett doesn’t know is that CIA head Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) greenlit the killing in a swap with the KGB, and Danforth’s men even videotaped the woman’s murder along with the lovemaking session between her and her husband moments before she was killed.

Now Fassett has come to Danforth with a proposal: he claims that in the course of tracking his wife’s killers he has uncovered ‘The Omega Organization’ a secret KGB cell of prominent wealthy Americans, all linked by their friendship from college. Every year these three men meet with a fourth, the crusading, ultra-patriotic TV interviewer, John Tanner (Rutger Hauer). Tanner has been attacking Danforth for some time, but Danforth thinks that if Fassett can use Tanner to uncover Omega it will further Danforth’s political ambitions.

Tanner is shocked at the idea his old friends might be traitors but goes along with it and Fassett fills his house (which is set in the wild hills of Oxnard far from anyone else) with cameras and microphones so Fassett and Tanner himself can spy on the three friends during their weekend visit. Fassett plays tapes designed to make the three nervous; they don’t know anything about Fassett, and think Tanner is the one behind it.

Tensions mount and the four are soon at one another’s throats. But when two of them try to escape Fassett has them murdered. This leaves Tanner with Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson) as the only two left, at which point Fassett lets Tanner know it was all a setup – the three men were only involved with a tax dodge, not the Soviets.

Fassett orders his men to attack Tanner and Osterman, but between Tanner and his wife the spies are overcome. But Fassett kidnaps Mrs Tanner and the Tanner boy. He uses this to force Tanner to expose the truth about Danforth on his TV show – because Fassett has unearthed the tape the CIA made of his wife’s murder, and he knows that Danforth had agreed to it. Fassett’s whole plan has been to maneuver Danforth and Tanner to this point, so he can show the world what Danforth really is and be avenged for his wife’s murder.

Tanner seems to go along, but with Osterman’s help he records his part of the show in advance; Danforth and Fassett are both live, but Tanner is involved with somebody (who is never made clear) to track the video feed from Fassett’s secret location so he can confront Fassett. Fassett, his revenge complete, aims his pistol at Tanner, forcing Tanner to shoot and kill him. Tanner finds his wife, son, and dog bound and helpless but unharmed. Meanwhile the final summing-up Tanner pre-recorded plays on: a statement to the television audience that they are really to blame for all this, that television has made the country passive and unconnected with the realities of life, and challenging them to turn their televisions off – expecting that we won’t be able to do so.

That’s the end of the story. I don’t know what the plot of Ludlum’s novel was, but it has been apparently much changed here. One of the Peckinpah experts on the commentary track in fact suggested the possibility that this tale might have been a more mainstream story of the weekend gone wrong, which after achieving fame Ludlum retrieved from his trunk and overlaid with the frame of the espionage thriller in order to make a quick sale. In turn the producers were eager to get the Ludlum brand name on a production, so they got the rights to this one without having the slightest respect for the material.

So what I want to look at is how do you adapt a novel you don’t like?

In this case, your strongest asset is the Ludlum brand: political espionage thrillers in which nothing is as it seems, and the American government is no different from the Soviets. And so in order to maximize box-office, the producers give us that.

But the meat of the story, and the most interesting scenes, are set in the Tanner house during the weekend, as the old friends find old antagonisms resurfacing, lose trust in one another, and finally confront one another as enemies. So this is what you’d like to see made into the entire Act 2 if you can.

The solution arrived at (this movie) was one we can lay 90% at the doorstep of the producers screenwriters and studio. Ten percent or less would then go to Peckinpah who had not made a film in a number of years, had not had a hit in much longer, had made many enemies in Hollywood and was suffering from ill health. Peckinpah is said to have regarded Osterman not as a major work but only as a move back into the business. He wanted to prove he could shoot this in budget, on schedule, deliver solid entertainment even though the story was crap and preposterous – and then work this into his next deal, which might be closer to a picture he really wanted to make. For their part, the producers got a chance to get a ‘name’ director with a flair for action and cutting at a bargain price, a chastened wild man they hoped they might control. So Peckinpah mainly shot the script, he stayed in budget, didn’t get all the coverage he otherwise would have liked, and worked with the actors to get good performances all around. And then he managed to slip in a bit of his own views and style along the way, as much as he thought he could get away with.

So our first problem is the whole setup. The plot, as ridiculous as it is, bears also the sin of complexity. This is a major flaw since it means half an hour or 40 minutes are wasted just in talky scenes trying to sell us on a situation that is patently ludicrous: that an investment banker, a plastic surgeon, and a TV writer/producer, all successful, all rich, agree to work for the KGB to overthrow the government of the United States (in some way that is never specified). Then a successful network TV newsman who knows just how to manipulate video footage to make it say anything that you want, believes in some footage that he himself calls the ‘easiest sort of thing to fake’ and believes it so much that he now throws away 20 years of friendship and agrees to hand his friends over to the authorities.

Well, you aren’t going to convince anybody of any of this. So either come up with another solution, or cut this to the bone so you win some more time to examine the process of the friends’ falling-out.

What other solution could there be? Here we find a fatal flaw: what Tanner is told is a lie. Therefore we can’t offer him any true evidence. But maybe we could say that the four friends were involved with espionage in college. For that matter, why do they have to be friends from college? They could have been in the army together, or working abroad for some mutual company. This company might have been involved with what the friends thought was industrial espionage, only it turns out (or so Fassett can claim) to have been in truth political Cold War espionage.

This kind of solution is somewhat less preposterous. It lays the foundation for an honest suspicion on Tanner’s part as well as allowing any sort of secrets buried in the friends’ past operations they might not want to see brought to light. Giving the friends a past with some sort of violence in it would also make more believable whatever violence the men resort to when they fall out on the fatal weekend.

Now let’s talk about who’s to blame. The evil is the deception and crimes the government feels compelled to engage in during the Cold War. Danforth believes so easily in the fictitious Omega conspiracy simply because he sees Reds under every bed, he want to distrust everybody he can’t directly control, and he wants to launch some sort of criminal expose to advance his political career to the next step, presumably the White House. (Peckinpah was quoted as saying he modeled Danforth on Alexander Haig ‘as exactly as I though I could get away with.’)

The evil isn’t television per se, which is only a tool or technology the spies use in their work. This makes the final lines, spoken by a man whose career has been based in TV, and who has just used the medium to expose a dangerous man and now tries to blame television for all the evil in the world, seem not only laughable but not supported by anything else in the picture. It may be true, it may be laudable, but it is tacked-on to this picture, and it’s out of place in a suspense thriller. Peckinpah is not Pakula and this movie is not The Parallax View.

The movie makes a game effort to detail and sell the conspiracy, but I think it’d be better to go the exact opposite way: since you’re never going to get us to buy this whole thing, don’t give us any exposition of it. Leave it surreal, abstract. Suggest without saying. Indulge in the sin of obscurity whenever clarity leads to preposterousness.

So here’s my suggestion: open with the death of Fassett’s wife. But show us Fassett screening it over and over in some dark room. Then the titles over the Tanners on a hunting trip (they are good bow-hunters, which figures in the resolution of the siege of the house later on). The Tanners come home to find their house taken over by Fassett and his men. He has already installed all his surveillance gear and gives a bare-bones explanation of this Omega business, then introduces Danforth via video. Danforth agrees to be on Tanner’s show providing Tanner goes along with Fassett this weekend. Tanner is still making up his mind when his friends drive up.

One of the principles in getting us in the audience past what can’t be explained, or what we’ll never believe, is to move quickly through the scenes, while distracting us with eye-candy: violence or sex or gags or stars. In the end maybe we’ll walk out of the theater shaking our heads in disbelief, but we won’t mind so long as we feel we’ve had enough enjoyable sights and stunts along the way.

Maybe the biggest sin of this movie is that with the great cast it had (Chris Sarandon and Dennis Hopper round out the four friends; their wives include Meg Foster, Cassie Yates, and Helen Shaver) it doesn’t make the most of them. The growing suspicions, doubts, distrust among the friends could have played out (in another world) like The Big Chill meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rather than short-change the exposition, the movie instead short-changes the dramatic rupturing of the friendships. And this was done in the name of making sense out of the nonsense of the setup which turns out to be not only nonsense, but false.

(20 April 2009)

The Barefoot Contessa

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Barefoot Contessa a 1954 movie written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. It stars Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart.

The story opens on a small cemetery in Rome where a funeral has just taken place. In the rain Harry Dawes (Bogart) the veteran American movie director and writer, is among those mourning the passing of the Contessa, whose marble statue surmounts her tomb. The movie unfolds in flashbacks. In the first, Harry remembers meeting the Contessa, aka Maria Damata, aka Maria Vargas, for the first time.

It was in Spain. Ultra-rich Texan Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) has decided to finance some movies; he has hired a press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and Dawes, who at this point is a washed-up drunkard and has-been who might still have another picture in him based on his latest script. They have come in search of a ‘new face’ and hope to launch a new star to grace the picture. In Rome they heard of Maria Vargas who dances in a small club in Spain; they flew here to meet her and arrange a screen test.

Maria (Ava Gardner) doesn’t know if she wants to go into pictures. She does know she despises Oscar and finds the Texan repulsive. He doesn’t drink, or smoke, and holds himself in total, hypocritical self-control which Maria senses comes out of an innate sickness. But she likes Harry and loves his old movies, and if he can help her become a good actress, she’s willing to go through with it.

In a long scene, Harry tracks her down at her home, a small dirty apartment in a poor part of town where her family lives. There Harry and Maria swap stories and confess who they really are. And Maria tells how when she was a little girl in the Civil War, she dug in the dirt with bare feet and felt safe. To this day she doesn’t like to wear shoes, she likes to feel the dirt on her feet.

Harry does convince her, and the screen test is a great one. Now Harry’s flashback ends, we go back to the funeral, and Oscar takes up the tale.

Everyone agrees Maria has all the makings of a star, and the first picture is a smash hit. But with all the rumors and gossip, nobody ever catches Maria dating her producer, her costars. She doesn’t go to the usual nightclubs or schmooze the business. She shows up at the premiere of her debut picture without any date, accompanied only by her director Harry Dawes and his wife.

The picture is a smash in America, but just as it’s about to be released internationally, Maria’s father is arrested for the murder of her mother.

Back to the funeral, and Harry starts a new flashback. Maria hated her mother. She does everything she can to defend her father. She breaks every rule in Hollywood. And she gets her father acquitted, and emerges a bigger star than ever. Maria goes on to make two more pictures which the Texan produces and Harry writes and directs.

But then she has a falling-out with the producer and goes away with an Argentine playboy to sail with him on his yacht on the Mediterranean Sea.

Harry’s second flashback ends and Oscar starts his second. The Argentine also hired him, and Oscar went on the cruise as well. But even as Maria never would fuck the Texan, so she won’t fuck the Argentine; Oscar doesn’t know it, but Maria only sleeps with common men, men who arouse her and don’t buy her, men who are in the dirt. (This is shown in the earlier Harry flashbacks. Harry understands Maria, so in his flashbacks we see an understanding of her. But Oscar doesn’t ever understand her, and all we see in his flashbacks reveals his befuddlement and what he himself knows and understands.)

On the French Riviera, in gambling casinos, Maria is bored by the ‘International Set’ while the Argentine gambles. Sometimes he wins big. But one day he loses big, and he blames Maria. He’s not getting any sex from her anyway, and he erupts and curses her in front of the socialites in their parties. Another man appears (Rossano Brazzi) and slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria away. And that’s the last time Oscar sees her.

Now we return to the funeral and find the Count who married her (Brazzi) and he gives us his flashback of her. He remembers when, driven out of his mind by sleeplessness and despair, he drove out of Italy into France. His car overheats along the road, and he goes to a gypsy camp for water. There in the gypsy camp he is enchanted to see a woman dancing with one of the gypsies. She is beautiful and no gypsy – she is in fact Maria; this is the Count’s first sight of her. For a couple of seconds they look at each other; then the Count gets a pail of water and returns to his car. He drives away, confident he will see this woman again.

And so he does, at the casino. He sees her collect some of the Argentine’s winnings, cash the chips, and toss the bundle of money out the window to the gypsy she danced with. Then he sees her confrontation with the Argentine, who blames her taking the chips on the change of his luck. The Count slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria out to his car. And so they go to his ancestral home.

To Maria the Count is a perfect gentleman, the Prince Charming of her Cinderella dreams (the fairy tale is mentioned in several conversations between Harry and Maria in earlier and later flashbacks). He never tries to fuck her, he only kisses her hand and gazes at her with love. And she loves him back. But there are warnings we get in a conversation between the Count and his sister. They talk about the end of their family; she is barren, and he – ever since October 25, 1942– The sister tells him she sees that Maria is completely in love with him, and it would be cruel of him to marry her. Just to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Countess of their house. But the Count will not be talked out of it.

Harry gives us his final flashback. He was in Italy scouting locations for a new picture. Maria of course has written to him many letters of her newfound love. Now she comes to him and takes him to meet the Count. Harry gives her away in the marriage ceremony. But Harry has a foreboding. Something is wrong about the whole setup, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Harry doesn’t see Maria for some time after that. Thirteen weeks later, she comes to him in the middle of the night. He’s hard at work rewriting the scene he’s going to shoot tomorrow. She confesses the dreadful secret to him, the thing that made him uneasy. Her husband never did anything more than kiss her hand. In a flashback-inside-a-flashback, Maria tells Harry about her wedding night, when the Count came to see her, handed her a military medical form, and explained how in the war he almost died in an explosion, and the doctors saved his life but not his manhood.

And ever since then, Maria confesses, she’s been sleeping with one of the lusty earthy men she can’t help fucking – one of the servants. But she’s going to break it off now, because the affair did what she wanted: she is pregnant and she will give her husband a child and heir.

But when Harry watches her car drive away, he sees another car drive after her. Worried, Harry gets in his car and follows … to the Count’s palazzo … where he sees her statue, finished at last … and hears two shots fired.

The count comes out of the gardener’s cottage carrying his dead Countess. He has shot both of them. Maria never got to tell him she was pregnant. And Harry doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

Back at the funeral, the rain has stopped. The sun has come out to shine on the statue of the barefoot contessa. The mourners break up. The Count is led away in handcuffs. Harry bids her a final farewell and walks away.

The picture was shot in Italy in Technicolor but I always remember it in black and white. It would have been better in black and white; Gardner’s coloring and cheekbones and chin dimple come out great in black and white with kickers and rear cross key and obi lights. The color in the print was a little washed out, uneven. Jack Cardiff was the DP, he’s famous for his nature photography, but this is mostly on sets. But the production ownership might be mostly responsible for the unevenness of the print; it wasn’t made and owned by a major studio that could safeguard the elements.

What is most curious about the film to me is the attitude toward sex, and lust. Maria is a woman of great physical beauty and desires; there are many men in her life; not one of them fucks her. Much is made in the script about the difference between how stories turn out in real life and how they turn out in scripts. So maybe Mankiewicz is deliberately going against type here. Of course the ad campaigns all stressed Maria’s many men and hinted at wild sex orgies. And of course the film would have sold a lot more tickets with even one hot love scene. Did Maria even get to kiss a man? I mean a passionate kiss? I don’t recall one. I only remember kisses to the cheek and hugs.

Beyond this, the men seem to fall into two categories, or three: the least important are the nameless ‘cousins’ that Maria beds down along the way, unable, she says, to help herself (although today we would probably call these the most healthy and ‘normal’ expressions of love/sex in the story, oddly enough). None of these guys gets a name or a single line of dialogue, they don’t really count, which is why they don’t really deserve to get a category of their own.

The other two categories are the big shots, the money men, who try to buy Maria’s favors, and the men who are gentlemen and understand her, but for all intents and purposes might as well be gay. The failure of the money men is foreshadowed in the first scene in the Madrid nightclub: Maria Vargas has a rule, never to come out to sit with the customers. She ends up working for the Texan, and ‘sitting with’ the Argentine, but won’t sleep with either.

As for the gentlemen, Dawes is the father figure, too old to fuck her, too tired. He is saved from being the ‘gay friend’ (only just saved, mind you) by having an attractive young wife (his third or fourth according to the script) and being played by Bogart. But this character might as well be George Cukor for all that, and I wonder if Mankiewicz really intended to code Harry Dawes as the gay friend. As for the Count, he too seems gay – my old dad thought that would be the Count’s secret, although the mention of a specific date that begins his misery told me it couldn’t be that – but impotent is just as good, and if he were gay, then there couldn’t be the fullness of irony that he loves her with all his heart, but hasn’t the body to follow through on it.

Ava isn’t given really enough to do here. The role seems written around her limitations as an actress; as a sex star, she could have given a lot more with the right cameraman and if only Mankiewicz had stooped to giving us fans a little more of the salaciousness we crave, and that the ads promised. But Ava had a reputation of looking good but not remembering lines so good. We should be glad she manages to suggest a Spanish accent – really not an accent so much as a foreigner’s way with English.

The movie also is one of a long line of ‘inside Hollywood’ pictures that they seem to relish so much. As though the plumber really is that interesting when he goes on at length, down at the bar, about how he fixed the leaky faucets…

(17 April 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)

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry the 1976 documentary by Donald Brittain that I saw so many years ago, that first introduced me to Lowry and his book Under the Volcano – a book I never read.

The doc is in many ways superior to the John Huston adaptation of Volcano in capturing the book, the mood of the book, the flavor of the book. The problem in making a movie out of that book is that there is a story, but the story is secondary to the manner in which it is told. And the primary impulse in adapting it to film must be to tell the story. For a Hollywood movie, the story is the main and primary thing.

Huston at this point in his life was in failing health. He knew just what he wanted to do, but he was not in total command of his set. More: the movie was shot on location, and the budget was such that Huston and his crew could not remake Mexico. And yet for all that, I thought that the shots of the volcanoes in particular were much better in the documentary than in the film, even though Gabriel Figueroa was a great cinematographer.

The doc quotes extensively from the novel. And it has the great good fortune of Richard Burton’s voice to read all passages quoting Lowry. There is no better voice for the job; it makes me wish for an audiobook edition of Volcano done by Burton. Not only did Burton have a great voice, and a wonderful mastery over his voice, not only was he a great actor, but he knew a thing or two about drinking and alcoholism himself.

But watching it tonight, I was struck by something else. I caught myself wondering how Albert Finney (who starred in Huston’s movie as the semi-autobiographical character of the author) would have read those passages. It seemed to me that Finney would have brought a bit more humor to them – a lot more humor. Even whimsey. This is in keeping with how Finney played the Consul, of course, and it’s quite possible he would have read the book with a heavier take on the thing; but the subject of the tale, of a drunk man’s dying day, is so heavy in and of itself, that the lightness, almost jollity, Finney brings to the part, would have helped a lot with reading the novel.

Burton now began to strike me as overly dramatic, too heavy, too gloomy, almost demonic, almost hateful. Surely there must have been self-loathing in the Consul’s soul, but self-loathing can also be expressed with playful irony. And in one passage Burton read, the Consul is trying to express how it’s important to see the fun of it all, or else we will never understand the appeal of the liquor.

There are many other pieces to the documentary, of course – biographical bits covering Lowry’s family, his school years, his years after Mexico (I was shocked, actually, to learn that Lowry spent only 20 months in Mexico that first sojourn, when he conceived of the story and wrote most of the first draft – it seems as though the Consul must have been there for decades, and that Lowry too must have steeped himself in Mexico for years and years) and the triumph of final acceptance and publication, followed by years of bitter humiliation and defeat, unable to write anything else that was decent, that was even publishable.

I should give you some idea of the shape of the doc also, because shape is everything to a doc; the doc is really written in the editing room as you know. So they begin with Lowry’s death, and they leave it open, unanswered, just how he died. Was it heart failure, was it choking, was it suicide, was it accident? Had he swallowed sleeping pills and overdosed, had it just been an accident that he took them, had he not taken them at all? Had he drowned in his own vomit? Nobody, it seems, knew; the court inquiry came down with a verdict that it was an accident, ‘death by misadventure’ in the legal term.

The doc then takes us to Lowry’s birth family and upbringing, and goes forward, in linear fashion, to his end. Along the way there are many horrors, and Brittain’s crew films the important places Lowry visited in his life – the public school, Oxford, New York, Mexico, Vancouver, and finally back in England. But rather than use archival footage, Brittain does something bold and quite evocative: he films those places as they are today. So the students at Leeds public school have long hair as they did in the 1970s; but they are shown doing all those things that they did in the 1920s (or 1850s for that matter). In New York we see the homeless drunks and the seedy bars Lowry would have known; they are the drunks and bars of 1975 and yet we get much of the flavor of what Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have felt about it.

Bellevue, the notorious mental hospital where Lowry was committed, is only shot from the street; I guess they didn’t give permission to shoot inside; but Brittain shows us a strange man walking down the sidewalk in front of Bellevue carrying a sign, I KNOW and shouting to the world, ‘Do you know your name? Do you know what to sign? When you go to work? I know!’ It’s chilling.

From New York the doc follows Lowry’s trail to Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, finally back to England for the final years of his miserable life. There at last the doc resumes the question of his death, offering us more details (though Lowry had cut way back on drinking, on the night of his death he drank half a bottle of gin, got in a great ripping row with his wife, she smashed the gin bottle, he attacked her with a chair, she spent the night in the landlady’s place, and Lowry swallowed two entire bottles of sleeping pills) and determining, to the satisfaction of Brittain at least, that it was most definitely a suicide. (Oddly enough, though he interviews Mrs Lowry on camera, he shows us nothing of her comments on Lowry’s end; did she refuse to talk of it? Or did she not give the answers Brittain wanted to hear?)

So we have a circular or ‘ring structure’ in which the movie comes returns at its end to the starting-point. This I find is often used in biopics, especially when the end of the subject’s life is seen as meaningless or unchosen (see Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi for other examples of this).

The title An Inquiry Into the Death, etc. supports the notion that the movie is aimed at settling this question. But really – who cares about that matter, whether Lowry jumped or stumbled on that last night? He’d been ‘dead’ literarily speaking for a decade; indeed he was only ‘alive’ to the world of letters for the two brief periods when he put forth his first novel, Ultramarine to ridicule and swift oblivion, and then ten years later or so, the eight years of working up Volcano.

Other choices for structure might have been to begin and end with Volcano itself: great literary éclat – what about this book, now? Who wrote it, under what circumstances, why? Then trace Lowry in Mexico, intercutting bits of backstory – the whirlwind courtship in Paris to the wife who soon fled back to New York, years in New York then down to Mexico, and so forth. From here we can then look forward to his failure to follow on, and then into the rising scholarly interest in the novel.

Maybe the autobiographical bits in Volcano and its intense quasi-self-portrait, interested Brittain more in Lowry than in literary matters. Beginning with the inquest is something of a hook for our interests, and the mystery structure holds up some glimmer of suspense to keep us watching to the end? I felt no suspense, however; I didn’t care whether Lowry suicided or had a heart attack; it was the evocative portrait of a squalid, wasted life filled with wretchedness fog and confusion, and illuminated by this one great flash of light, that appealed to me.

Here’s an interesting bit: I’d remembered the whole movie in black and white. Did I watch it on a black and white television? I don’t believe so. But in particular the Mexican footage I remember in grainy black and white, though it’s in Ektachrome gaudy color. Weird. But that maybe just me. Maybe my mind considers Lowry’s life in the light of The Lost Weekend and that time as only properly seen in black and white photography.

I still don’t want to read the book. Only, if the Burton audiobook edition exists, I would listen to that.

(11 April 2009)

The Young One

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Young One another Buñuel movie. It was shot in Mexico with mostly American actors, and supposed to be set of the coast of North or South Carolina.

Story is from writer/producer Hugo Butler, based on a Peter Mathiesson short story. Butler was a leftist who got kicked out of Hollywood in the blacklist purges of the early 1950s, so he went to Mexico, and made a couple of movies with Buñuel – Robinson Crusoe and this one. According to the commentary on the disk, Butler had wanted to make a movie about black-white racial tensions for awhile, and this was it.

Bernie Hamilton plays ‘Traver’ a black jazz musician touring with his band. We see him first as he comes onto the island shore in a small dinghy; in flashbacks we find out why: accused of, maybe guilty of, rape, he had to flee the cops, stole the dinghy, and ended up here.

‘Here’ is a private island serving as a game reserve for a local hunting club. The only people who live on it are Miller (played by Zachary Scott, who had starred in the Butler-scripted, Jean Renoir film from 1945, The Southerner – Scott was a relatively minor star, and there he got to star in movies for two of the greatest directors of all time!) and the grand-daughter of Miller’s just-dead handyman, a sort of girl-woman who doesn’t know how old she is, and has grown up here half wild.

We see Miller at first pretty angry with the girl, and no reason why, and he makes her drop eggs on the floor, and he shouts at her, and orders her to clean herself up and comb her hair. But when she comes back and serves him his supper, she has undergone the usual movie transition into beauty, and Miller feels it. From then on he is lusting after her, and seems unable to control himself. He rapes her on two nights in the course of the movie.

But Traver and the girl develop an easier relationship. He too feels her appeal, but he can control himself; and she treats him as just another person, unlike the others in the story, who are all bigoted to different degrees. At first Miller, when he hears about the black man who’s left money for gasoline and tools to patch the damaged dinghy, he gets his gun and tries to shoot him. But he misses, and that night Traver busts into the cabin and gets the drop on Miller. Eventually a sort of uneasy truce develops between the two, although neither much likes the other, and Miller feels an angry jealousy whenever the girl hangs out with Traver and listens to him play his clarinet or ‘licorice stick’ (!!!)

When a preacher comes with Jackson, another employee of the hunting club, to say the rites over the girl’s grandfather’s grave, all hell breaks loose. First Jackson tells Miller that Traver is wanted for rape; then over night Miller crawls over Jackson’s body to rape the girl again, and Jackson finds out what’s been going on between them; then Miller and Jackson head out and catch Traver and tie him to the cabin porch; then the preacher also figures out that Traver has been ‘abusing the innocence of that child’ and Traver admits it and asks, ‘What if I marry her?’

(Oh, by the way, the girl’s name is Eve or Evie, short for Evelyn, and when she first feeds Miller and he notices how pretty she is, she hands him an apple for dessert.)

The preacher becomes convinced that Traver is innocent of the rape charges. The preacher tries to be open and liberal, but not even he can quite stand the notion of sleeping on a bed that a black man has slept on for one night. Jackson is an out and out racist, and in a speech to Traver tells him ‘I don’t even think you’re human, I think you people got something missing, you don’t have souls.’ So at the end of the movie, Miller, considering what he did to the girl, is willing to help Traver leave, but Jackson attacks Traver with a knife. Traver succeeds in defending himself, and escapes the island in the repaired dinghy with Miller’s help.

The black and white photography is excellent. Acting is so-so, but I think Zachary Scott does a better job here than in The Southerner because this role covers more range. Buñuel moves his camera in almost every shot he can, and gives the film a lot of energy and life.

What’s most interesting here is how Buñuel manages to satisfy his producer/co-writer’s intentions of delivering a ‘message’ film about racism, something that we can accept as a straightforward realistic story, and yet also fill it with his own flourishes and little touches of psychoanalytic bits, bits from legend and fairy-tale, surrealism, and subversion.

Also I liked how the movie refused to obey the tracks that it seemed to lay down ahead of itself. There were several points in the story when I thought I knew just how the story was going to develop, based on what the typical Hollywood film would do – every time the movie zigzagged off to one side and surprised me. For example, it looked like it was going to be a Most Dangerous Game for awhile, with the two men hunting each other through the thick island forests and swamps. Later it looked like Miller would rape the girl, then kill Traver and when the girl complained, blame the rape on the dead black man.

Finally, speaking outside the movie, what surprised me was that everybody in the story was more civilized, more decent, and less ruthlessly savage, than I expected. It seems a black mark against us today, that a movie made on this subject would now have much more violence, less trust, less understanding. Tim calls this attitude ‘badass’ and blames Quentin Tarantino for being the primary exponent of it – a sort of wallowing in, a thorough relishing of violence and treachery that knows no civilizing moderation, and even boasts of it.

(4 April 2009)

Follow Me Quietly

Hi Aki,

Last night I watched Follow Me Quietly a 40s crime picture. It’s a B picture, runs about 65 minutes, and was directed by Richard Fleischer at RKO studios.

Story involves the police investigation to apprehend ‘the Judge’ a serial killer who strangles his victims and leaves notes calling the victims ‘sinners’ whom he has ‘judged.’ He always strangles them, from behind, always at night, always in the rain. A young gal-reporter working from the 4 Star Crime lurid magazine wants a scoop, and she dogs Lt Grant, who’s obsessed with the Judge. Only the Lt despises that magazine and won’t give the girl a break. They talk in one scene about the relative responsibilities and importance of the public’s right to know and the policeman’s desire for a secret, effective investigation. But in the end he warms to her because, well, if he didn’t there’d be no romance, and back then every movie had to have at least a little love in it.

The Lt is so obsessed by the case that instead of a description, he has special effects make him a dummy that looks exactly like the Judge based on all their evidence – it looks so eerily like him (except for the face, that is blank) that some witnesses are struck by the resemblance, and the cops go around LA rounding up every tall middle-aged man!

The Lt even stages a show and interview with the dummy for the rest of the department – and the Lt supplies the voice and answers for the Judge. He even takes to putting the dummy in his office and talking to it. ‘It’s a rainy night, Judge … I know you feel restless tonight … you’re going to kill again tonight, aren’t you?’

In the movie’s only genuinely creepy moment, the Lt then leaves to drive around town in the rain at night. His sergeant partner is left alone in the room with the dummy, but it’s too creepy for him, and he leaves. Then we see the dummy all by itself, sitting and looking out on the rainy cityscape … then the dummy stirs, looks round, stands up! It takes out the real dummy from a closet, and walks out… (This scene, quite effective, is never explained. Who was the guy, was it the Judge himself, and if so, how did he walk into police HQ and into the Lt’s office? Why was he there?)

Eventually they track the Judge down, and find his apartment, where they wait for him to come home. In another effective scene, a man the manager says is his tenant ‘Charles Roy’ – alias the Judge, walks up the street toward the apartment building. It’s broad daylight. We only see the suit, the hat – he looks like the dummy, all right – and he pauses on the stoop. Looks up and down the street. It’s empty, nobody is there. He looks up – and we see his face for the first time!!! Somehow he guesses the cops are there and he bolts. The chase is on.

They chase him to a nearby waterworks for the climax, well shot (too bad it’s not at night; there are many other such chases in crime thrillers of the period, shot at real locations; the best of them shoot at night so the machines and pipes of the plant cut bars of black and white across the scene like a cage). The Lt chases the Judge up to the top, flight after flight. He shoots, but the Judge grabs the gun and fires back. Out of bullets, the Judge reaches the top, and the Lt climbs relentlessly up to get him. At this point there’s no telling Judge from Lt and indeed, a few characters have remarked how much the Lt is like the Judge.

The two battle it out, and the Lt wins. He handcuffs the Judge and leads him down. But some stray bullets have punctured holes in a water pipe, and the way down leads through a shower of water, that falls on the metal floor like the rain … the rain … the Judge can’t take it, he finds new strength and overcomes the Lt, dragging him back up the catwalk steps to the top pipes. The Lt falls under the rail and is dangling, several stories up, suspended only by the handcuffs. He fights back, but the Judge kicks him, forces him down, writhes like a madman – the handcuffs pull loose – the Judge pitches backward over the opposite railing and falls to his death. The Lt manages to hold on, and even hooks up with his gal reporter at the bar where they met. Ah, true love!

The title seems to come out of nowhere. The film is well shot for a cheapie, although the darkness you usually think of in a noir is lacking. I didn’t catch who shot it. One structural flaw has a montage of searching, then one scene, then another search montage. The opening is strong, but oddly wrong: we open on the rain splashing on a sidewalk, and a woman’s shapely legs in black high heels pacing back and forth. (Turns out this is the reporter outside the bar, she then goes in to try to find the Lt for an interview.)

The most interesting credit turns out to be who shared credit for original story: Anthony Mann! Indeed, the story has the Mann double hero, the hero who is just one reflection different from the villain he’s tracking, the hero obsessed, almost psychotically so. Alas, Fleischer and star William Lundigan don’t manage to portray this creepiness – either they didn’t get it, or they didn’t want to go that far. Anthony Mann, if he had directed, would have pushed his star to go there, though whether Lundigan could have managed what Jimmy Stewart did later in Winchester ‘73 and his other Mann westerns.

(23 March 2009)

Escape From Alcatraz

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Escape from Alcatraz. I liked it.

I must see it.  Those “old filmmakers” had different mentality and I kind of like it too.  He’s a master, but the “masters” who are dominating Hollywood at this moment lack some quality that those old masters had.  Maybe not only Hollywood people, but we got fat mentally.

Melville is a very different mentality. He directed Delon in Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge. This film, Army of Shadows was made in 1969 but never released in America till 3 years ago. Melville usually made gangster films. His gangster films were informed by his experience in the resistance…his resistance films were informed by his gangster films. The resistance fighters are like gangster, the gangsters are like resistance fighters.

Escape From Alcatraz is much the same. Tough guys against an oppressive authority. They win - maybe - but there is no rejoicing in victory. In both films the ending is truncated, incomplete. In Alcatraz for example, we see the three men swimming out into the water. Then day, discovery of escape, search…the men are never found. A mystery. Did they drown or reach land? The movie is based on a book, a fictionalized, I think, account of the only ‘successful’ escape from that prison. But the real case the book is based on is only a ‘successful’ escape because the bodies were not found. Nothing was heard of the men. To this day we don’t know what happened.

And the movie respects that. We get a clue that they reached another island in San Francisco Bay. Nothing else.

What is important in both films is a test of integrity, spirit, manhood. What counts is not to give in, not to give up, go on fighting. Doesn’t matter if you make it or not. Doesn’t matter if you defeat the Germans or not. Only that you try, and go on trying.

Both are existentialist works in this regard.

(21 January 2009)

Bachanales Sexuelles

Bachanales Sexuelles

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Bachanales Sexuelles, an early 1970s movie from Jean Rollin. He directed this one under his ‘Michel Gentil’ pseudonym that he used for a lot of his porn films.

And this is a soft-core porno. Story involves a secret sex-cult ruled over by the tyrannical Malvine in an 18th-century chateau. Somebody from the cult has stolen pictures from Malvine and is publishing stories revealing the cult’s activities, and Malvine is determined to uncover the traitor and punish him. All she can glean from his publisher, however, is his address.

What Malvine doesn’t know yet is that the apartment in question is now inhabited by the nameless man’s niece Valerie. She got a message from her uncle saying he’d gone to New York for 6 months and asking her to apartment sit for him. But in the huge apartment, adorned with posters for Rollin’s famous vampire movies (maybe it was shot in Rollin’s own apartment?) Valerie feels nervous, so she invites her best pal Sophie to come share the bed with her. Of course a sex scene ensues.

Later that night two women in ninja outfits (one blue, one white) break into the apartment and abduct Sophie. Valerie is so drunk she sleeps through it, but Sophie manages to call her friend Frederic before she is taken. So here comes Fred, who suspects Sophie was playing a trick on him, so he gets in bed with her – only to find out that ‘Sophie’ is actually Valerie. (Of course, a sex scene follows.)

Meanwhile Sophie is dragged before Malvine in the chateau. She tries to tell them she’s not Valerie, but no good; Malvine orders her tortured. Of course the torments get a couple of the cult members excited, so they have to have sex.

Since Sophie won’t talk, Malvine sends Jenny to the apartment disguised as a maid to search out the photos that the mysterious traitor has stolen. Jenny runs into the real Valerie and Fred – of course a sex scene follows. Then the uncle’s real maid appears, and a French maid catfight ensues! At least they get the truth out of Jenny, that she is there for the photos, and the truth is that these photos are blackmail pix that Malvine uses to enforce her wicked will over her acolytes. Fred, who has by accident found the stash where the photo negatives are hidden, lets Jenny burn her incriminating pictures, and in turn Jenny gives them the address of the chateau.

Fred and Valerie go to the chateau. Meanwhile in the picture’s one true Rollin-scene, Malvine is out on the grounds shooting a pistol at some mannequins dressed as women and men, and finally addresses one female mannequin dressed as a man, calling it traitor, telling it she will unmask it at tonight’s ceremony, then fuck him before she murders him. She proceeds to kiss the dummy on the lips and shoot it in the crotch. Truly a demented, surreal scene that lacks only some weird colored lighting to rank in the Rollin hall of fame.

Some more shenanigans follow, and at last at the big orgy-ceremony, Valerie recognizes her uncle, Fred burns all the negatives, and the cultists all flee like vampires at daybreak, leaving only the uncle, a couple of sadist acolytes the uncle guns down, Fred, the twin ninjas, and Valerie and Sophie along with the newest adept. These last three run for their lives and sanity; Fred hangs around to make out with the twins (who also appeared in one of Rollin’s vampire movies he shot under his own name) and the uncle proceeds to do Malvine before, presumably, killing her.

Rollin at his best shows a poetical, surreal appreciation of setting and landscapes. He can make a Paris street look like a rundown street in a forsaken city on an alien planet, without any sort of budget. He loves colored light, and weirdness. He is famous for his vampire films, but how he came to make them is significant: he wanted to make surreal poetry films, but nobody would give him money for them. He did happen to know a couple of theater-chain owners who showed sex films at their theaters, so they said, ‘Put in some naked girls so we can show them at our theaters, and we’ll give you money for production.’ So was born La Vampire Nue his first feature, which he calls ‘the first French lesbian vampire movie,’ even though Roger Vadim had made Blood and Roses some years before. So he went on to do a series of vampire and horror movies with generous nudity, and got a famous French comic strip artist (Drouillet, I think) to draw posters, and those posters are glorious – they’re the reason I first became interested in Rollin’s movies.

Rollin had a gift for the striking image, the disturbing scene. His best films are like fairy tales from Jung. He likes things like circuses and the monsters of his infancy – the ghouls, werewolves, vampires, and so forth. His weakest point is always pace, which is always slow as grass growing. But part of the effect his films have lies in this slow, slow pace – it drives the audience to think deeply on what they see, and start creating scenarios on their own. You always see more in a Rollin film than he puts on the screen, in part because, bored to death, you are mentally trying to make a better story out of what he gives you. How can a man waste such great images on non-stories and nothing?

When Rollin lingers on an image, it does something to me. I find I have to ‘make sense’ of it somehow; I have to conjure up a reason why the image is onscreen so long. In part this comes from an assumption that the filmmaker is rational and does nothing without a valid artistic reason (as opposed to a practical or commercial reason – for example, a low-budget filmmaker might need to stretch every scene so as to meet acceptable feature length).

But it also comes from a phenomenon like the one we experience when we speak a word over and over again. The word loses its meaning and becomes a sound; the sound begins to strike us as strange, weird; eventually the sound itself suggests some other meaning.

Say a movie has a quick shot of a clock on the wall. Then it cuts back to the main action. OK, the cutaway tells us what time it is, and that’s the ‘reason why’ they put in the shot of the clock. But what if the shot of the clock stays onscreen for a long time? Well, it can’t be just to tell us what time it is, we figured that out already. So we start to look at the clock, what make it is, its details. We start to hear the ticking, if the clock ticks. We start to wonder about time itself. We watch the pendulum swing, or the second hand turn around.

Rollin didn’t just give us shots of clocks, he charged his images with religious and other iconography. There seems to be intrinsic meaning in those shots.

Here’s another reason why Rollin gave us so many lingering shots of things, and shots of landscapes. Rollin was dealing with taboo subject matter in most of his movies, and he had to be careful of the censors. If he couldn’t show directly what he wanted, he could show other parts of a scene (like the clock on the wall, an example I’m just making up here) while the soundtrack carries on. And if he gives us enough time on these innocuous, censor-save shots, he encourages us to imagine what is happening. So whether it’s sex, or sadism, or some violent act of a ghoul werewolf or vampire, the setting as mute witness to it all inspires us to create what could not be directly filmed. (This approach is doubly valuable in an age when different countries have different levels of tolerance and artistic liberty; it allows the local versions to be more or less coherent and of feature length.)

And yet one more reason Rollin would have liked these shots. Generally Rollin cast his female leads strictly by their looks. Did their look arouse, interest, intrigue Rollin? As a result, he hired a lot of women who couldn’t act; Rollin wasn’t much of an actors’ director in any event, and the low budget shooting he was condemned to obey meant quick setups and very few takes – if a shot was technically OK (and sometimes even if it wasn’t) then no retake was called for.

This means that the performances in Rollin’s movies were pretty much all dreadful. The best he could get out of his performers was a certain look, and to dress them in a certain way, and more or less ask them to move in a certain way. So in a Rollin movie, you don’t get a good conventional, classical drama ‘scene’ with lines of dialogue, speeches, and emotions. When he tries for such things, Rollin finds his cast just isn’t up to it, and there isn’t time to coach them and do retakes and full coverage.

Later on he drifted into softcore, then hardcore sex films, which are maybe a bit more honest, but in Bachanales Sexuelles at least, the lighting is not up to his usual standard. On the other hand the pace is somewhat better, as the sex scene gives him something to cover and cut, and us something to watch, and it’s a lot more detailed than he gets with his vampires.

It’s interesting to compare this sex film to his vampire films in other ways. The sex cult could easily be a vampire clutch, and Malvine rather than it’s ‘high priestess,’ might as well be the Vampire Queen of La Vampire Nue or his other vampire films. Fucking, or drinking blood, what’s the difference here?

One difference involves tension. In the vampire film, while the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the vampires to drink their blood … we can feel tension. Nothing is happening, but we know what’s going to happen, and we know the girls won’t like it. In the sex film the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the next sex scene with the next person to enter the apartment. But here we know the girls will like it, and so there is not a story-based tension. Instead the tension is more based in the audience, as we fret and wish for the film to get on with it and show us some goodies.

I’ve never seen any of Rollin’s hardcore that he did later in the 70s and into the 80s. I wonder if they are any better.

(21 March 2009)

The Diary of a Chambermaid

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Hi Aki,

We watched The Diary of a Chambermaid tonight. Another Buñuel, from early in his second French period.

Story has Celestine, a Paris chambermaid, accept employment in a house in the country. There’s nothing to do there, everyone is provincial, the servants are nincompoops or brutes, the old master is a dotty shoe fetishist, the mistress, his daughter, is a stickler, uptight, who can’t stomach sex with her husband, her husband as a result is condemned to long walks in the woods hunting, or trying to seduce the chambermaid as he has every chambermaid before her. Celestine, however, will have nothing to do with him. Though the mistress at first doesn’t like Celestine at all (possibly because Celestine is pretty, and the mistress fears her husband will take up with Celestine) later on she warms to her (maybe because Celestine doesn’t sleep with husband). Celestine manages to get pretty much what she wants from all of them.

The first half plays out as a sly satire on the upper class, though the servants are no saints. The second half turns into a bit of a murder mystery or suspense film: A young girl whom Celestine was especially fond of, is found raped and butcherd in the woods, on the very night the old gentleman is found dead with Celestine’s boot in his mouth! Celestine is sure that Joseph, another servant, is responsible, because he is a sadist and a brute and a fascist as well. We are sure it’s Joseph as well, since we see him meet the girl in the woods, then run after her, and then a shot of the girl’s legs emerging bare from behind a bush, with two great snails crawling on them (probably the most unforgettable image of the film – in fact this whole sequence is strong, playing like something out of a folktale, Little Red Riding Hood gone dark).

Celestine proceeds to snoop on the man, goes into his rooms, even pretends to love him and sleeps with him, all the while trying to get him to confess to the murder. At last she frames him, and this has him arrested and charged. But since the only bit of evidence is the toe of one of his shoes that Celestine has put at the scene of the murder, the charges are dropped.

Celestine goes on to marry the retired army captain next door, and rescues the girl who’s bound to be the next victim of her former master. And Joseph goes on to have his café in Cherbourg, cheering the fascists as they march through the city.

There’s something that struck me as odd about the structure of the household, and looking up the plot of the 1891 novel from which it’s adapted, I see that there Celestine first had the old shoe fetishist as master, then when he died she moved on to serve the couple. The novel is a non-linear, more episolary novel, presented as though it is the actual diary of the girl Celestine R., filled with condemnations of French society in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, dirty with money, the rich the worst, the poor helplessly in the thrall of the rich, and yet little better morally. Octave Mirbeau, the author, seems to have been fulminating, but Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean Carrière were lighter in tone, perhaps, more amused and bemused by the ridiculous spectacle we all make of ourselves. The feud between the household’s master and the neighboring army captain is pretty funny.

The film is shot in black and white, and well lighted; a handsome production in all, with an excellent cast, lots of period 1920s costumes, carts and horses and antique cars, and so on. One annoying thing is it is shot in widescreen anamorphic ‘Franscope’ and the lenses are not well shaped; figures at the edges of the screen are stretched quite thin, and wide angle lenses distort the middle of the shot during pans; a closeup on a snail in the little girl’s hand is quite disturbing – I’m not sure just what happened in the shot, as the camera booms back and the frame widens out, something happens – is it a quick change of lenses in the middle of the shot, or a change in lighting, or the breathing of the lens as a slight zoom is snuck in?

Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, and she’s quite good. It’s interesting this came to us on the same day as Susana, which also deals with a young pretty servant girl entering the household, immediately desired by all the men. Susana encourages and enflames this lust, Celestine seems not particularly to want it, and easily fends off the attractions she doesn’t desire, deftly handling everybody. This was part of the novel, it seems, as well: How the lower class can if they are intelligent and skillful, maneuver their ‘masters’ into doing what the servants want. One servant in the movie who isn’t so intelligent is Celestine’s successor as chambermaid: We see the master try all his old lines on her, and she just doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to say no, and yet she can’t imagine leaving and losing the employment. She is on the verge of tears, and a few minutes later she is ordered into the barn where she will be raped by the master.

There’s little surrealism here, and apart from the old man’s shoe fetishism (which is also in the novel, but apparently Buñuel also liked women’s feet more than usual) and the army captain throwing garbage over the hedge into the master’s yard, everything proceeds quite realistically.

There is no music in the movie. Susana on the other hand was pumping with melodramatic music like a Warners 1940 melodrama, practically wall to wall. Buñuel didn’t have much control over Susana, which was a for-hire job; Chambermaid is much more under his control, and yet is quite restrained and ‘French’ if you will, and if I saw it without the credits I doubt if Buñuel would occur to me as the likely director.

(19 March 2009)

Late Summer

Hi Aki,

Tonight: Late Summer, Ozu’s next-to-last movie. Man the colors were bright! They had a pristine print. All the compositions were good, almost all of them were good enough to be paintings.

Again Chishu Ryu was in small part. In fact it was only a cameo, although he delivers a philosophical tagline that sums up what could be the message of the film.

The photography really struck me. I don’t recall so many deep shots in other Ozu films. Lots of halls like tunnels, lots of vanishing lines. Did I just miss this in his other films? Is this a new DP? Hmm.

The last images of the film are striking. Chishu Ryu could have played the lead – the father of the family who was always playing around, and goes off to see his mistress and dies at her house - I wonder if Ozu didn’t want to ‘spoil’ Ryu’s persona having him play the part, or if he just thought he was wrong for it, or if he was interested in mixing up his usual cast. Setsuko Hara is in it, playing the sister of the lovely young actress who played her daughter in Late Autumn, or the last Ozu I saw; these titles drive me nuts.

Anyway, after the funeral of the father, a couple of bystanders, fishing in a nearby stream (a woman and Ryu) comment on life and the dead: ‘If he was old, then it was time, but it would be tragedy if a young person died,’ says the woman. Then Ryu gives the sermon, and they go back to fishing. Then we see three shots of headstones, with big black crows on them, pecking at the stones. Disturbing, not Ozu-like at all.

I wonder if he was feeling like he was going to die soon. Maybe he had been sick. Don’t know.

It’s amazing how he juggled these family dramas, always the same story, with little wrinkles.

One sequence that struck me as really good writing and direction: the youngest sister works at a place, and one of the co-workers is being sent to Sapporo (from Osaka where the movie takes place). So they have a farewell get-together, and finally she and the young man are the last ones to leave, sitting at the train station. Well, the two scenes before this, the office setting up the party, the girl gives a look – you suspect her feelings for whoever is going are rather deep. Then at the party, everybody has a line – except her. And when they are singing, to end the scene, she stumbles over the line, and starts again.

I thought it was interesting as a way to treat the major actor in the scene, to give her no lines of dialogue. Usually actors want the lines, and the writer tries to come up with something clever, some way for her to say goodbye to the guy while revealing other things. Instead it’s done opposite.

But then Ozu does give us the station scene, where the guy just keeps saying, ‘What a great party! I’m going to miss you guys!’

At the movie’s end, the girl decides not to accept the proposal by the guy her family has set her up with. Instead she is going to go to Sapporo. And I don’t know if she means to be the guy’s mistress, or if she plans to marry him. But big sis Setsuko Hara says that’s the right decision, so that must mean marriage, right? Or will she just take a transfer and work in the same office, and maybe never marry?

(23 january 2009)

Viridiana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana.

It’s really 2 stories, or felt like it. The first story has young novice Viridiana, a few days from her final vows, being required to go visit her uncle, a rich landowner who has paid for her education. She hardly knows him, though, and doesn’t really want to go.

But the uncle is struck by V’s resemblance to his dead wife. It turns out she died on their wedding night, in her bridal gown, and it deeply affected the uncle. Now he becomes obsessed by V, and wants her to marry him. He does get her to agree to wear her aunt’s bridal gown.

V is deeply religious and innocent. She is shocked by her uncle’s proposal, repulsed, disgusted, and the old man only gets her to calm down by giving her drugged coffee. He then takes her to his bedroom, locks the door, and begins to undress her...

Next morning he begs her to stay. He tells her that he raped her while she was drugged, and so there’s no point in her going back to the convent now…

This only makes V more upset, which disturbs her uncle so that he begs the housemaid to talk to V. Tell her the truth, he asks, tell her that I meant to rape her, but I didn’t go through with it … she’s still pure. But the housekeeper is reluctant, so the Uncle talks again to V. V doesn’t know whether to believe him or not – I don’t know which of his stories to believe – and leaves for town still totally upset. When she is ready to board the bus back to the convent, she is halted by the police: her Uncle has hanged himself with the housekeeper’s daughter’s jump rope.

This ends the first story, which is much like the gothic melodramas Bunuel was doing in Mexico during the 50s. But then in this – his first film back in his native Spain – he goes on to spin a second story, one that looks forward to the social satires he would do in Paris during the 60s.

Viridiana goes back to the estate. When her Mother Superior visits her, V tells her she can’t go back to the convent now … she has changed too much. Instead she plans on pursuing private charity work.

To this end, V gathers a dozen or so cripples and beggars from the town, and gives them a home in the outbuildings of the estate. She gives them new clothes and work to keep them exercised and active. The beggars take this charity, but they are neither entirely evil, nor do their hearts shine with gold, they are crude and cynical, and you can see where it will end, because V is too naive and innocent to deal with the likes of them.

Meanwhile, a new character enters the tale: Jorge, the Uncle’s bastard son shows up with his girlfriend. The uncle left at least part of the estate to Jorge, and he is set to modernize it, tear the weeds from the fields and sow new crops, prune the orchards, bring electricity to the mansion. He’s a tough, aggressive, macho man, and he is rather interested in the beautiful blonde Viridiana – more than she would like.

Soon enough Jorge’s girlfriend, bored and jealous, leaves, and Jorge is fucking the housekeeper (we are left wondering whether the housekeeper performed similar services for the Uncle, and whether her little girl might be another of the Uncle’s bastards). He’s still after V though.

Everything comes to a climax one day when Jorge, V, and the housekeeper and her daughter go into town for a couple of days. The housekeeper’s daughter has a toothache and must see a dentist; Jorge and V have an appointment with the lawyer, probably to see to the closing of the Uncle’s will.

The beggars see their chance. They break into the big house and stage a riotous, drunken party. They smash furniture, plates, glasses. They spill wine over the expensive table linens. They fuck on the floor and pose in a blasphemous tableau mocking the Last Supper.

Jorge and V come home that night and surprise them. The beggars for the most part leave quietly, but two of them attack Jorge and tie him up, then proceed to rape Viridiana. Jorge manages to bribe one into murdering the other, then he frees himself and chases the last one off.

In the final scenes, a day or so later, V contemplates cutting off her beautiful blonde hair in grief and penitence, but decides not to. Instead she goes to her cousin. He sits her down with the housekeeper, and proceeds to teach them how to play cards. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘all cats are gray in the dark.’

The end.

The movie was banned in Spain, which might have contributed to sending Bunuel to France for the rest of his career. Certainly the church would have objected to the Last Supper scene, and the general sarcastic view of the young convent trained girl’s innocence. But a bigger factor might have been Franco.

The movie could be taken as an allegory of Spain’s history. The Church is seduced and almost won over by the landed aristocracy from whom she has sprung; then the Communists briefly take over, and turn everything upside-down; then the dictator comes in and incites murder between comrades (civil war) then proceeds to screw over both the working class and the church.

Bunuel’s time in Mexico showed how he could deliver popular entertainment that still served his purposes. The gothic melodrama and family soap opera only needs to be exaggerated a little to approach absurdity, and its strong reliance on symbols helps the dreamlike, surrealist images. Bunuel here uses some striking images to suggest this: the uncle fishes a bee out of a water cask, Viridiana sleepwalks and dumps ashes on her uncle’s bed; the uncle fetishistically wears articles of his dead bride’s gown; the crown of thorns in Viridiana’s possessions is tossed by the housekeeper’s daughter into a fire, then hooked out and dropped on the earth where it burns on; the jump rope the Uncle gives the little girl he uses to hang himself, then is taken as a belt by the beggar who rapes V. Little touches like this prove unforgettable, adding dimensions to the movie.

(Sunday 15 March 2009)

Equinox Flower

Hi, Aki,

Tonight we watched autumn equinox by Ozu. The funny thing about this movie is that I’m still not sure whether he meant it as a comedy, social commentary, or drama. Unfortunately, I had a terrible headache when I watched it – this might explain some of my confusion.

The story involves the usual terrain that Ozu moved through in his later movies: conflict between generations, and arranging for a daughter’s marriage and departure. The beginning sets up Papa as a man who understands the drawbacks of arranged marriages as well as the yearning of young love. Unhappily, Papa seems to forget all his well-meaning understanding when it comes to his own daughter and her fate. He is seeking suitable candidates for her hand without consulting her, as was the traditional approach his parents used when he got married. Meanwhile – though he doesn’t know it yet – his daughter has her heart set on a young man, and yet she refuses to be drawn out by Papa when he asks her if she is interested in any young man.

The two butt heads after the girl’s boyfriend shows up unexpectedly in Papa’s office and without warning or the use of the customary intermediary asks for her hand. Papa is nonplussed and says he’ll have to think about it. Once he gets home he angrily confronts his daughter who, instead of sweet talking him, simply declares that she intends to marry the young man whether her father and mother like it or not. This backs Papa into a corner, and he tells the girl she’s not allowed to leave the house and that he definitely opposes the marriage.

Two subplots bring Papa into considering his own situation through other people’s stories. One of his old middle school friends has lost his own daughter in exactly the same way – the girl has defied him, he has forbidden her marriage, and she has abandoned him to take up with her boyfriend (although it’s not clear whether the girl is married or not). There is also the rather silly proprietress of a country Inn whose daughter is determined to select her own husband, and appeals to family friend Papa for support against her mother’s choice of marriage candidates. Of course, in both these situations, Papa is most reasonable and flexible and ends up giving advice that contradicts his behavior in his own family situation.

In the end however Papa is maneuvered and manipulated into not only allowing the marriage of his daughter to go forward, but also attending the ceremony and finally going to visit his daughter and her new husband in Osaka to reassure them that he wishes them only the best.

What struck me in considering this movie was how rich a study Ozu is for all prospective screen writers and filmmakers. For production students, his absolute clarity and attention to composition is amazing. For screenwriters, his approach is to build up by accretion the general understanding and emotional position of his audience. In Hollywood movies, character is announced their plans and proceed to try to implement them. In this movie, the first third or half of the film unspools before we learn about the daughter’s boyfriend. It feels a bit random and meandering compared to Hollywood movies, and the audience has to be more tuned in to nuance and subtlety and remember everyone and everything that is going on in order to fully enjoy and comprehend the story. Each scene is a small fragment which makes us understand something and feel something, and the total effect of all these fragments allows us to feel only one way about the situation by the time the movie ends.

An Ozu movie is like a jigsaw puzzle. In a Hollywood movie, each scene arises from the previous scene and leads into the subsequent film (or it should). Ozu's scenes connect to three or four other scenes, and the mosaic thus built up is only appreciated when you can hold all the scenes in your head – or rather in your heart.

Ozu and his screenwriter would come up with a long list of scenes and fragments of scenes having to do with the basic situation – in this case, they would be three lists – one for each of the two subplots and the main story line. The fragments would be arranged and rearranged into the order that made emotional sense, by which I mean an order that would position us viewers into feeling the way Ozu intends us to feel. This would then involve the calculus of interpolating the three storylines – so that each fragment from the subplot would also affect us in the way we think about and feel about the main story line.

That makes me believe that it would be good practice to reverse the method by which Ozu and his screenwriter constructed the screenplay. List all of the scenes of an Ozu movie and put them on index cards and then tried to re-order them in a way that gives a better effect – or a different effect than the one in the movie.

(15 March 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)