36 Hours

Hi Aki,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doctors come in, and try to help him.

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

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

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

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

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

This would have been a good:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(5 May 2009)

Executive Suite

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Executive Suite a 1954 movie. Directed by Robert Wise with all-star cast.

The story centers on the Treadwell furniture company. The legendary president Avery Bullard drops dead without a successor. The 5 top men of the company are all on the company board; there is also a Wall Street investor and a woman with an emotional breakdown in her past; she is Julia Treadwell (Barbara Stanwyck), the daughter of the company’s founder, and the ex-mistress of the dead president.

So it’s all about: who gets to be president next? The financial guy, the bean-counter Shaw (Fredric March), wants it bad, and he is maneuvering like mad to get it. The others, including perennial #2 man Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), head of Sales Dudley (Paul Douglas), head of Manufacturing Grimm (Dean Jagger), and Don, the young hotshot designer (William Holden), are horrified. Nobody wants the bean-counter, but they can’t agree on who should get it. The only hope is the young furniture designer, but he’s too young, he’s unknown to the bankers, he is more concerned with making furniture.

It all comes down to the meeting of the board (the entire action of the story covers about 29 hours, from Friday afternoon until Saturday 7 p.m., and the clock is a major player – it even announces the cast in a really awkward bit: as the stars’ names appear on screen, they zoom up bigger, and stop at full-size just as the clock of the tower BONGGGGS to count the hours!). Shaw, the bean-counter, seems to have everything locked up when he bribes one man and blackmails another into voting for him, and has Julia’s proxy, moments before Don gets into a vicious fight with Julia, sinking any chance he ever had. Julia in despair walks out the president’s office to jump off the Tower, even as her father had years before – but the great Clock BONGGGS to announce 6 o’clock – the time of the fateful board meeting. This must be the second curtain.

But, the bean-counter doesn’t win on the first vote. I suppose this is the ‘twist’ that takes us into the second half of Act 3. It does bring us 2 scenes that break up the long boardroom scene: out in the anteroom, Don is called by his wife (June Alyson), who confesses that Alderson had called her to tell Don to delay the meeting until Alderson arrives (presumably, and in the event, with Grimm in tow) – but she confesses that she didn’t call, didn’t try to pass on the message, because she doesn’t want Don to be President, fearing that it would take him away from their home too much. The other break in the boardroom scene takes us into the executive washroom where Caswell (Louis Calhern) the Wall Street gambler that Bullard had brought grudgingly onto the board to satisfy the Wall Street crowd, tells Shaw that he is the one who voted ‘Abstain’ in order to pressure Shaw a little more. (When Caswell saw ahead of the news that Bullard was dead, he sold Treadwell stock short in hope that he would make a killing when the stock dropped like a stone come Monday morning; but Shaw released the quarterly earnings Friday night, which were good, and should guarantee that the stock price won’t fall; panicking because he lacks the cash to cover his bet, Caswell wants Shaw to sell him stock to cover his short sale.)

That brings us back into the boardroom. Now all the stars are present, and Shaw is all set to go; only Don begins a speech as a delaying tactic until Alderson and Grimm arrive, but it ends as the chief message of the picture, as the philosophies of Don and Shaw are revealed. Shaw thinks the purpose of the company is to increase the dividend payout to shareholders; his means are first to cut expenses, and second to finagle preferential tax treatment. But Don thinks the purpose of the company is to make furniture! Don goes on to deliver an impassioned speech that reveals his goals, his dreams, his vibrant passion for making good furniture, better, not cheaper and worse, than the company has made before. His speech carries the day, winning over Dudley and Grimm and Don ends up elected unanimously. ‘Together, we can do it,’ was one of his themes, and as soon as the vote is recorded, he goes to shake Shaw’s hand. Shaw offers his congratulations, and Don says ‘thanks’ and calls Shaw by his first name for the first time.

A brief scene out in the anteroom concludes: Julia warns Don’s wife that she will lead a lonely life from now on, but to forgive her husband for loving the company more than his family; and Don and his wife leave.

The good guys have won, but what makes Executive Suite not dated, and especially poignant, is that this is the battle America has been fighting for 60 years – and losing. In real life, the Shaw bean-counters did eventually prevail; American manufacturing, riding high in the 1950s with the delusion that we were ‘best’ (and not taking into account that the industrial base of all our competitors had been destroyed in the War), coasted for 20 years, and then, well, beginning in the 1980s the bean-counters dominated, and have captured the American economy in the years since, producing cheap goods made in factories in third-world countries where governments would look the other way over worker conditions that border on slavery, and pollution that poisons their populace. Here, in this picture, we can see the beginning of the debate, and a clear focus on the path that the country should have taken, but didn’t.

Ernest Lehman adapted the best-selling novel (it was Lehman’s first job, according to commentary by Oliver Stone) and MGM provided props and production design that was, as usual back then, top-notch. The design of the executive suite is according to Stone, typical of the boardrooms and top offices of the time, but it reminded me of a medieval church or monastery. The rich woodwork, low doors, stained-glass windows, with Gothic arches.

The story is amazingly complex. The running time is only 104 minutes, but there are half-a-dozen major characters, each with his own story, and a very complicated backstory that even Stone couldn’t quite grasp. I suspect that only those who’ve read the novel really know all that has been going on. But I won’t bore you with the full rundown.

Wise (and John Houseman, who produced) give us no score music at all. There is only a little source music in the Stork Club as Caswell sits with his expensive mistress and worries that he might be sunk if Bullard turns out not to be dead after all. And then there is the tolling of the bell, that sounds like some Call for the Last Judgment by God Almighty, bringing Bullard to his death, and forbidding Julia from jumping off the balcony even as her father had done in the Depression when the factory closed and the whole town faced dire straits. Most of the principal characters have wives or mistresses, everybody is drawn very well, though quickly and efficiently.

The final boardroom scene is a tour de force. What makes it so amazing is how nobody who isn’t a director will think it’s special in any way. You know how Bob Miller taught us that one of the toughest scenes to direct is the dinner scene where a few people are sitting around a table – how hard it is not to cross the line, to match all the eyelines, not to confuse the audience as to who is talking to whom – well this scene, in its first part, has 6 people sitting around a table; in its second part the stakes go up, and there are 8 people to keep track of. And it goes on for about 20 minutes! Wise worked out the blocking, the shots, everything – he had begun as an editor, after all – and made it work. There’s only one cut that bothers me: when Grimm comes in, he sits opposite Don. Grimm at this point has been wooed by Alderson to support Don’s candidacy, but Grimm, who is Don’s direct boss and jealous of this young hot-shot being hired to teach Grimm his business, is against him, and Alderson has failed to convince him. Grimm sits down, and looks straight at Don, a look that says, ‘No way buster!’ Grimm here looks almost into the camera, just a few degrees off it. In the next shot, a cut to Don looking back at Grimm, taking in this message, Don is decidedly off angle – it’s a bit off being a side profile. The shots don’t cut together at all. Why did Wise do it this way? Was it a mistake? All I can think to justify the shot is that he’s suggesting that Don isn’t so aggressively opposed to Grimm as Grimm is to Don; Don at this point has already learned Grimm ‘can’t be budged’ to support him, and Don probably has only the slightest hope that he might stop Shaw. So his angle tells us that Don is reading Grimm’s message and accepting it without confronting Grimm or asking Grimm to reconsider, or positioning himself as an enemy. (Don, we have to conclude from earlier scenes, will leave the company if Shaw is President, because Shaw will certainly kill Don’s R+D budget to find new means and methods of molding the furniture.)

The nicest part of this double-scene is the place of the dead Bullard. There is one throne-like chair at the head of the boardroom table. Executive Secretary Erica Martin (Nina Foch – did you ever take her class at USC? I didn’t, one of my regrets) in setting up the meeting, by habit puts a pad at Bullard’s place. She has loved this man in a chaste way (well, we have to wonder what the novel might say about the relationship, but in the movie Martin is more like the High Priestess in the Cult of Avery Bullard, and not his mistress – though I believe that had Bullard wanted her in his bed, Erica would have jumped at the chance) and now she moves his chair away from the table. Later when Shaw comes in, he walks right to the head of the table, intending to sit in the throne, and is discomfited to see the place empty, the chair against the window. So he pulls up a chair at the opposite end, the ‘foot’ rather than the ‘head’ of the table.

Throughout the boardroom scene(s) that place is empty, and when Grimm and Alderson arrive, all the places are filled except for that spot. Don in his big passionate speech walks around half the room. He ends up standing in the space where Bullard would have sat, framed against the stained glass windows. That shot (there are actually a couple of them, broken by an insert showing Don walking to the side of the room to pick up a crappy table the company makes, his example of everything the company is doing wrong) tells us that Don is indeed the new Bullard. It’s a great example of how to make a powerful scene:

1. Start with the writing to get it right.
2. Carry on with the performances and casting.
3. Finally in production, the direction just enhances and supports what the writing and performance deliver.

Another very interesting choice was how the opening sequence was presented. How are they going to cast Avery Bullard, an old man, a man of immense charisma and intelligence and drive? Remember they have put the top stars they could get in these subordinate positions. So they need a star who is going to outclass them by that magnitude, and who’s out there? What’s worse is that in Don’s climactic speech he admits that Bullard was slipping in his final years. So not only do we want a star to out-star all the other stars, but we have to ask him to portray a character who is over the hill.

Who’s out there? Well, Clark Gable would be my first choice. We could totally believe him as the driving genius who rescued the company, seduced Barbara Stanwyck, dropped her when he got what he needed, and inspired the worship of Nina Foch, Walter Pidgeon, Bill Holden, and the others. But at this point in his career Gable is still playing leading man opposite Doris Day and other young cuties; he probably wouldn’t do it. There’s also the Psycho problem. Psycho was infamous for killing the biggest name in the cast half way through the picture. How would audiences react to seeing Clark Gable, ‘the King,’ drop dead in the gutter 4 minutes into the picture?

So instead of all this, the opening sequence, in which Bullard says good-bye to the Wall Street broker with whom he’s had lunch, goes down the elevator, into a telegraph office, dashes off a telegram to Erica Martin commanding a special meeting of the Executive Committee that evening, walks out to hail a taxi – and drops dead – is shot all POV, subjective camera. We hear Bullard’s voice and see his hand – that’s all. It makes for a great hook. We want to know who this guy is, what did he look like? Right away the Wall Street guy and Caswell have a talk about Bullard, the way he runs his company. And when the telegram comes into the Tower and Miss Martin informs people of the meeting it sets off more speculation and questions, What’s on the old man’s mind? What is the meeting for?

Over the course of the first half of the picture everybody weighs in on Avery Bullard, pro and con. He achieves his shadowy, almost legendary status by virtue of these talks, as well as from the fact that we have not seen his face, we have only these abstract conversations from which to judge him.

(4 May 2009)

Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

Mysteries

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Mysteries a 1978 Dutch film adapting Knut Hamsun’s novel. It stars Rutger Hauer, Sylvia Kristel, Rita Tushingham and David Rappaport. It was shot by the great Robbie Müller but unhappily the DVD is based on a poor quality print, the colors of which are all wrong, and is cropped. I also suspect it was heavily cut down since there are several very awkward edits. (On the other hand imdb.com lists the longest cut at 97 minutes, and the US cut at 93, which is roughly what I saw; I didn’t miss much.)

The story is set in the 1890s on a small coastal village (shot on the Isle of Man, but probably the novel is set in Norway). One day a young man commits suicide in the fields. The very next day a stranger, also a young man, comes to visit. He stays in the hotel for an indeterminate period and claims he is an agronomist and that his name is Johann Friedrich Nagel (Rutger Hauer).

There is a dwarf (David Rappaport) and all the town picks on him, and one of Nagel’s first kindnesses is to the midget, whose name is Grogard. Grogard in fact is the picture’s narrator, and his voiceover is used to help make sense of everything and carry us through the tale economically. You know these 19th century novels are long and dense. Hamsun also specialized in the psychological realism that was held to be the novel’s chief purpose in those times.

Nagel falls in love with two women. First there is the ‘frivolous’ Dany Kielland (Sylvia Kristel) who is engaged to a lieutenant serving elsewhere. She seems alternately drawn to and repulsed by Nagel, and Nagel falls helplessly under her spell. Then there is the poor woman with a past, Martha Gude (Rita Tushingham) whose hair has turned all white because of a grief in her past which the midget tells us, ‘It’s not for me to tell.’ So, we never find out.

Once in his sojourn Nagel is visited by a woman the midget tells us was Nagel’s former love. She calls him Simonsen and takes money from him and goes.

Nagel’s behavior grows ever more erratic as Dany scorns his offers of love. He stalks her and hangs around her house and poisons her dog. He turns to Martha and she accepts his marriage proposal, but on the next day rejects him and disappears. Nagel is sure that Dany has filled Martha’s mind with lies about him. So he takes 90% prussic acid, which he carries always in a vial in his pocket. But the midget has replaced the poison with water. Nagel stays in his hotel room, driving himself into nightmares, torturing himself, harming himself. At last he runs down the pier and dives into the water and drowns.

The midget feels he has to do something in memory of his friend, so he throws acid on the lovely face of Dany, scarring her. He is sent to prison for 3 years, but feels ‘not one moment of remorse.’ And the two women, Martha and Dany, are thereafter often seen about the town walking arm in arm, speaking of their memories of the enigmatic man.

Hamsun is said to be famous for his lyrical descriptions of nature, and the Isle of Man is so undeveloped it offers Müller a great place to shoot gorgeous landscapes as Nagel and company take long walks. But the print is so bad I can’t tell how nice these might have been, and the effect of those shots is therefore lost. At the same time the version I saw has been dubbed into English; not a great problem when it concerns Tushingham and Rappaport, who are English speakers, nor such a problem with Kristel, who was never a great actress. But Hauer’s performance is hard to tell, since we see him and hear another man’s voice. All I can say is that Hauer looks very much of the period. Clothes and styles are nicely done.

There is an odd power of the picture that does grow. Some traces of the psychological portrait glimmer through. And I do like these glimpses back into the peak of European civilization; it fills me with sadness to contemplate how far we have fallen in 120 years.

(25 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 Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 April 2009)

Under the Volcano

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Under the Volcano an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s literary masterpiece, directed by John Huston in 1984.

The story centers on an alcoholic ex-British Consul (Albert Finney) in Cuernavaca Mexico on the Day of the Dead in 1938. He drinks constantly in amazing, staggering amounts. His wife (ex-wife, actually) Yvonne (Jacqueline Bissett) comes back to him, trying to make another go of their marriage, but the Consul can’t forget or forgive her for having slept with his half-brother (Anthony Andrews). And so his life ends, under the volcanoes that loom above the countryside as a malevolent symbol.

Long ago, I believe before this movie was made, I watched a documentary on Lowry and his life and the creation of this book, liberally interspersed with passages read from the book and images of Mexico. This absolutely staggered me and I always wanted to read the book and yet never did … the prospect of hundreds of pages of drunken misery seemed too depressing to me. When the movie came out, I knew it could never match the documentary, so I never watched it, though I was curious about it. Finally, at last, I have.

Here’s an odd coincidence: the DP was Gabriel Figueroa, who may be the same guy (same name, anyway) as the DP on The Young One which was made 25 years earlier! I thought the colors were perhaps too bright, not stylized enough. (Another minor quibble: Finney and Andrews and most of the men in the cast sported hair lengths more suited for the 80s than the 30s.)

It seems at first to be minor Huston in the beginning, but the climax, in which some fascists pick on the Consul for no particular reason, and then shoot him like a dog in the mud in the rain outside the lowest, filthiest cantina and whorehouse in the district, is chilling and very powerful.

Finney gives a fine performance, but Bissett was a revelation to me – never have I seen her give so rich and emotionally deep a performance as this one. I remember her debut in Hollywood in the late 1960s, in Bullitt and some Frank Sinatra private eye film, and a surfer movie, when she was just a model, really. Here some 20 years later she has the chops and world experience to really bring it.

I suspect that Huston and the screenwriters only loosely based this on the book, for there is a strong theme of the approaching war, that I don’t remember from the documentary. For example, in an early scene, the Consul makes quite a scene at a formal event for the Red Cross by insulting the German ambassador, then ranting and raving about the Mexican custom of requiring the dead to be transported by express train only, accompanied by a relative with a first-class ticket; the Consul works this up into trains stuffed and packed with the dead, packed upright, or chopped up and stuffed into bags to make room for them all. Of course there would come death trains that went to the concentration camps in a few years in Eastern Europe.

Huston lived in Mexico in the 1930s, he lived there on and off for other periods of his life, and shot many movies there. Some of this movie might come as much from his memories of the place as the book. It might even be true that Huston met Lowry at the time, I don’t know.

I wish I could see the documentary again. This movie was good, very good … the documentary still overpowers it in my memory.

(6 April 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)

The Watchmaker

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Watchmaker (L’Horloger de Lyons) a Bertrand Tavernier movie adapted from a Georges Simenon novel.

In this one simenon, instead of following the detective, focused on the father of the accused. Michel is just an ordinary watch repair sales guy with his own shop. One day the cops come tell him his car’s been found abandoned. Turns out his son took it, and with a girl murdered a man. The couple is now on the run.

The movie shows how the innocent father is caught up, manipulated by cops, journalists; how friends of the murdered man smash his shop, and friends of the girl come to give support; people whisper about him behind his back. And he doesn’t have any idea why his son did it. The defense attorney wants to build up a fake case, and the cops also want the other worker girls to testify.

The father gets increasingly annoyed by the circus, and though at first he finds he didn’t understand his son at all, by the end he comes to feel a closer bond to him than ever. His only testimony at the trial is that he stands by his son, in all solidarity.

The second to last scene shows the father visiting his son in prison. Son has been sentenced to 20 years, so he’ll be almost 40 when he gets out. The father and son have a nice talk. The father shares a story of when he was a young man, beginning of WW2, how he hit a general in defiance. He says he will take care of the girl and his son’s child, which will be his grandchild.

The film is shot very messy, hand held, natural light, ugly looking. Very low key performances, which accords well with the usual simenon approach to life and stories. Tavernier shot it all in lyons and at times he chooses locations and shots to kind of say, ‘Hey! We’re in lyons!’ – not really in a pushy way the James Bond way, but it gets borderline; this is the only real flaw I find in his approach. Phillippe Noiret is very good as the father. Noiret and Tavernier worked together a lot; this movie I think is their beginning together, and they were in Revenge of the Musketeers which I saw last night, which was 30 years after Watchmaker, which was 1974.

There is a sort of feeling of hope and happiness at the end, oddly enough. The irony of this was intentional. In one sense, at this point the circus has moved on to new scandals and cases, so the man and his son can go back to private lives.

At the same time, Simenon was interested in sociology more than psychology, and there are references here to the political scene in France that I don’t understand. No doubt if I knew better, I would appreciate more of what Tavernier was doing.

At first the movie seemed ugly and badly made. But seeing the Simenon source and how it played out, it was right, I thought.

Phillippe Sarde did the music. He did music for Revenge of the Musketeers too, and both film scores did little but annoy me. He was bad in 1974 and still bad in 2004.

Watchmaker is a movie that really calls for no score. It’s low key, and just wants to look at these characters almost in a documentary way. Music wants to tell us how to feel, and build our feelings. It just works wrong here. As for Musketeers, in the very first scene, he’s using a sort of music and instrumentation that seems avant-garde, modern – totally out of place for the 17th century.

(29 January 2009)

The Mask of Dimitrios

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched The Mask of Dimitrios a 1944 Warners pic directed by Jean Negulesco. Negulesco was one of the house directors at Warners in the 40s, I don’t know anything more about him than that.

Story, adapted from the Eric Ambler novel, takes place in several countries in Europe in 1938 (i.e., prewar period) with flashbacks from as early as 1918.

In Istanbul, some young people playing along the beach discover a corpse washed ashore. In the lining of the suit is the man’s name: Dimitrios Makropoulis. In the official session of the Military Police, Colonel Haki announces that the case of Dimitrios Makropoulis is officially closed. Reporters want to ask questions, but the colonel dismisses them all. That night the colonel goes to a party given by a society dame. A Dutch writer (played by Peter Lorre) is vacationing in Istanbul when he meets the colonel, who turns out to be a fan of Lorre’s detective novels. He takes him out on the veranda to escape the nonsense of the women, and begins to tell him about Dimitrios – smuggler, spy, assassin, thief. He tells him the first and only case he was personally involved in, and a flashback shows us 1918 when Dimitrios, a young poor fig-packer, is desperate to leave Turkey, but needs money. He persuades his partner to go steal money from a local fence. Dimitrios murders the fence and finds the hidden cash-box. The partner is shocked at the killing, but he takes his share and proceeds to live it up. This sudden wealth arouses the suspicions of the police, who take him in and get him to confess to robbing the fence. ‘But I didn’t kill him, that was all Dimitrios!’ ‘Dimitrios? Where is this Dimitrios?’ But Dimitrios has left the country, and the partner is just as guilty of the killing as if he had done it himself.

Lorre talks the colonel into letting him see the body – ‘I have never seen a dead man before, and this Dimitrios fascinates me’ – and so they go to the morgue and Lorre gets to see the body (of course we don’t see the face).

Meanwhile a fat man is checking into a hotel in Istanbul, and wonders whether a certain ‘Constantine Gollis’ has checked in. No, and there is no record he ever stayed there. The fat man (played by Sydney Greenstreet) proceeds to the morgue himself, and tries to see the body, but he is too late – it has been ‘disposed of’ already.

In Colonel Haki’s office, Lorre learns more about the notorious career of Dimitrios, the countries he was in, the crimes he committed. There is not one photograph of the man on file, nobody knows what he looked like before they found his corpse. Lorre, yielding to his obsession with the diabolically clever man, determines to follow his trail and learn more about him.

First stop is Athens, where Dimitrios operated under the name of Talat. In the hall of records Lorre reads the file – it has few details other than birth date and ‘fig-packer’ as profession, enough to identify ‘Talat’ definitely as Dimitrios – but we see Greenstreet in the background – also there, we presume, to learn about Dimitrios. But Greenstreet leaves before Lorre meets him.

Lorre travels by train to Sofia, next stop in Colonel Haki’s summary. Greenstreet shares his sleeper, but doesn’t let Lorre know he too is interested in Dimitrios. In Sofia, Lorre interviews a local shady lady who runs a low-class bar and brothel. She tells how in 1921 she met a ragged, poor Dimitrios, and his dirty dealings: he gets money by blackmailing a rich man who is her lover; he becomes her lover himself, though he also frightens her with his cold-bloodedness, and he goes on to take a job to assassinate the country’s premier. He then takes money from her to make his getaway, and forces her to provide him with an alibi to the police.

When Lorre returns to his hotel room he finds it has been searched and there is Greenstreet holding a gun on him! After a talk, Greenstreet announces that he knows some things, and Lorre knows ‘one fact’ and if the bits are put together, they will mean a million french francs for them to split.

Greenstreet sends Lorre on to Geneva where, with an intro by Greenstreet, Lorre learns from a man named Groder about the espionage, gambling, blackmail and double-cross Dimitrios pulled in Belgrade in the late 20s.

Lorre goes on to Paris to meet Greenstreet as they arranged. Now Greenstreet hands Lorre a photograph and Lorre says it’s Dimitrios. But the photograph is of Constantine Gollis, not Dimitrios. Greenstreet, Gollis, and others were part of a French smuggling ring Dimitrios organized, and then betrayed – so he could take all their loot for himself. When they got out of prison, Gollis swore to kill Dimitrios and tracked him to Istanbul – but Dimitrios got to him first.

Now Greenstreet has his blackmail operation all planned: he will blackmail Dimitrios for a million francs, and he and Lorre will split it. Lorre is needed, because he has seen the dead man in Istanbul, and can swear to it that the corpse was really Gollis and not Dimitrios. Lorre wants to meet Dimitrios at last, but he wants nothing to do with blackmail or the money. Greenstreet is delighted with this arrangement, it means he gets all the money.

They work the blackmail on Dimitrios, now running the Asian Credit Trust bank, and a very wealthy man. Though Dimitrios tries to put killers onto them, Greenstreet outsmarts them. They get the money and go to Greenstreet’s place, where Greenstreet revels in the 1,000-sheet pile of mille-franc notes. But they notice an elegant hat on a chair…

Dimitrios is there with a gun. He had double, double-crossed them, and now he shoots Greenstreet. Lorre, driven to unusual fury at this, attacks Dimitrios, and the gun falls to the floor. The two men struggle, and Greenstreet, only wounded, manages to get hold of the gun. He holds Dimitrios at bay and tells Lorre to get out. Lorre goes out the apartment and half down the stairs. He hears three shots – but who shot whom? He goes back to see, and meets Greenstreet. Dimitrios at last is really dead. The police arrive, and Greenstreet happily goes to prison, after achieving his revenge. He tells Lorre to write a book about Dimitrios and send him a copy. ‘Where I’m going, I’ll have plenty of time for reading,’ he says.

The end.

The print was muddy, and not restored. It is hard then to say whether the lighting is all that good. The shadows are deep and rich but I suspect there are black areas that would in the original release have shown up as visible penetrable grays.

The chief appeal to the production is the re-teaming of Lorre and Greenstreet, who were first together in The Maltese Falcon and had been teamed in some other films at Warners where they were under contract. They make a good pair, the nervous little Lorre and the big, florid Greenstreet. In this case, two near-stars make for one full star, I suppose – it is a lot of fun to watch the two of them together.

The production has to recreate lots of European cities. It isn’t entirely convincing, what we get is sort of Hollywood-generic Europe rather than anything specific to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, France. But the writers and Negulesco make every witness different, a character in his own right, along the way. They use a lot of map animations to convince us that the places are changing, and to help us understand where we are.

Maps are not used today; instead there is only a title superimposed on an image, say, ‘Belgrade.’ But the maps, with the animations of moving from Sofia to Geneva, really let us orient ourselves in space, and are a much more forceful and comprehensible way of indicating a big change in locale. Especially when the production doesn’t ever leave the Warners back lot or European street exteriors in Burbank.

Unfortunately for the production, Lorre is not empathetic enough, or Negulesco doesn’t treat him in a sufficiently empathetic manner. When all is said and done, we get an interesting tale that is put together like a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks. Zachary Scott plays Dimitrios, and he is only fair – he lacks the grand flair of a true movie villain, and doesn’t exactly inspire us with awe for his brilliance or dread of his knavery.

(written around 12 March 2009)

Elmer Gantry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Richard Brooks’s only great film, Elmer Gantry. Wow it was good though I do have some quibbles – at times the production can’t quite give the sense of scale necessary, and the back-lot, stage-bound large sets were a bit of a problem. John Alton, one of the greatest black and white DPs, shot, and color wasn’t his big thing, alas.

Story is from Sinclair Lewis’s novel about revivalism and touring preachers in the early nineteen-twenties. Elmer Gantry, a traveling salesman, falls in love from afar with Sister Sharon Falconer, a headlining preacher, and finagles and cons his way into the organization. With Elmer’s help, Sister Sharon really hits the big time.

There are complications along the way, and much is given over to questions of faith, and tent revivalism, a form of show business, as opposed to real churches. The movie has a lot to say about today’s evangelical movement which has its roots in these revivals, and about today’s megachurches, which are the heirs of Sister Sharon and her kind. I believe that Lewis based his sister Sharon character on Aimee Semple Mcpherson, a famous preacher in California who disappeared under strange circumstances – I don’t know the details.

The movie, made in 1960, was nominated for many Oscars. Burt Lancaster stars as Gantry, Jean Simmons as Sister Sharon, Arthur Kennedy as the cynical newspaperman, and in supporting role and best actress winner, Shirley Jones – gosh she was cute and sexy in this picture.

Richard Brooks was a screenwriter who went on to be writer/director, but his movies are usually a bit preachy, and as a director he rarely did more than shoot his scripts. This was about the best he did, though some might prefer The Professionals, a western he made about 7 years later.

Generally I find his movies bad and self-important, preachy, and not well done. This one though really does get me. The performances are really good, and I guess the novel had some great lines and scenes, because they show up here much better than Brooks usually can manage.

(written around 8 March 2009)