By Roderick Heath

Among those in the wave of new German cinema to emerge from the mid-1960s and into the ’70s, the most restless, protean, and tragic figure was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder’s relentless pace of work between 1970 and his death in 1982 would have been admired by old studio pros, whilst maintaining the strictest standards of artistic experimentation and expressive engagement. Fassbinder’s importance as a film artist manifested on several levels: in his rummaging through cultural detritus and worship of Douglas Sirk, he was a pop ironist, but also a fearless innovator and a key inventor of queer cinema. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, an adaptation of his own play, is considered one of the pivotal works in his career in that he gained complete control over various themes and stylistic impulses here, ironically by zeroing in on the most limited drama imaginable: the film never leaves the ground floor of the title character’s house, and barely even moves from her bedroom space. As has proven true for many of the best directors, the challenge of such a limited, theatrical setting stimulated the most refined cinematic reflexes in Fassbinder: the visual style of Bitter Tears is subtly epic and consistently, arrestingly beautiful.

Petra (Margit Carstensen), our antiheroine whose capacious bed is the centrepiece of the film’s geography, story, and the fraught emotional and sexual warfare about to take place, is awakened by her servant Marlene (Irm Hermann), who draws up the blinds, abruptly showering Petra with sunlight. Petra’s at a crossroads in her life: a former model and jet-setting wife now gaining fame as a designer, she relishes requests for work from fashion houses that had turned her down not long ago. Petra’s marriage ended within the past couple of years, and she has a teenage daughter, Gabriele (Eva Mattes), who is a milk-fed calf of the most innocent and irritating sort.

Petra is visited at the outset by her sister, Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), who’s lodged comfortably in a standard relationship with her husband, a baron, and she attempts to understand Petra’s lengthy, abstract explanation of why her union with her once slavishly adored husband Lester failed. Sidonie trumpets her own success in achieving a familiar balance in her own union—she lets her husband maintain an illusion of authority, but gets her own way in the end. This is precisely the kind of dishonesty Petra dislikes, for the refusal to sink into such hypocrisies defined her marriage, which actually disintegrated when she began to outearn her husband. Accompanying Sidonie is a young friend of hers, Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla), who instantly fixates Petra. When Petra invites Karin to come back later, she does, dressed, like Petra, in the most ornate and displaying clothes imaginable. After a delicate process of teasing out Karin’s troubled past, including the fact she’s recently abandoned her Australian husband, Petra declares her love for the girl.

What follows is the definition of a chamber piece, but Fassbinder renders his limited setting almost impossibly lush by several tricks of décor, including, most obviously, a wall covered with a detail from Nicolas Poussin’s “Midas and Bacchus,” with a nymph’s feminine form prominently sprawled. Mannequins and busts to support Petra’s array of wigs lend a kind of immobile chorus to the proceedings, and later, to mock her own situation, Petra arranges those mannequins in sexual positions. Fassbinder uses the layout of the apartment for the most cunning effects of mise-en-scène, like having Marlene watch Sidonie and Petra from a another room via two windows and fingering the glass with hopeless, alienated angst, or, later, using a bench top to divide the frame in such a way as to perfectly realise the sudden schism between lovers. He even plays games with the amount of available space in the apartment: in early scenes, Petra’s bed dominates the set, but later it’s pushed away so that Petra’s bedroom is a great wilderness of white shag carpet in which she flounders in an alcohol-pickled rage. The almost maddening closeness of the space is pushed even further in the scene of Petra’s seduction of Karin, as Marlene, present as always yet rendered a nonperson by Petra’s regime, bangs away relentlessly on a typewriter, her noise almost omnipresent and yet unprocessed. Pointedly, Marlene only stops typing, as she had earlier stopped working, when Petra begins to speak of her own failed amours. Marlene’s desire for knowledge of Petra’s mental landscape is matched only by Petra’s complete uninterest in the mental landscape of others.

That’s not to say that Petra is intended as a villain, but she is a thoroughly flawed human whose prejudices, blind spots, and self-delusion are gnawed to the bone as if by a school of piranha. Fassbinder’s drama carefully warps perspective and emotional response with such skill that it’s possible to hate and empathise with every character. Petra is able to write herself into the role of the distraught Pygmalion spiralling in despair of the amoral, ice-cold work of art she’s given birth to and been betrayed in the lowest way when Karin abruptly abandons her to return to her husband, now armed with the contacts and experience she’s gained as a model. But Karin, even in her stony, apparently contemptuous kiss-off, insists she loved Petra in her own way—that of a blithe young swinger whose willingness to take advantage of situations she stumbles into shouldn’t be confused with Petra’s own still instinctively materialist concept of love: having spurned her husband for trying to assert economic control over her, Petra has simply repeated the process.

As a fashion designer, Petra is an artist after a fashion, but a lazy one—she has Marlene do the colouring in her sketches—and her art form is always implicitly one of altering surfaces as though those acts could reconstruct the interior. Thus, putting on make-up and dressing are elaborate and overt acts throughout: Petra, after her rude awakening by Marlene, goes through the paces of adorning herself until she’s the image of what she wants to be: an empress, in command of the erotic, the fiscal, the emotional, and the social. Later, when she meets Karin, they have both dressed up in a fashion that’s both flesh-revealing and ornate: they’re like super-stylised fantasies of ’30s high fashion, pagan priestesses forming a new cult of love and ditzy narcissists all at once. It’s camp, of course, but subtler and less overtly amusing than that form is usually seen to be: Fassbinder’s love of femme glamour and formalist aesthetics is tempered by a coolly unsentimental, relentless study of games, pretences, cruelties, and vulnerabilities.

Rhetorically, Fassbinder achieves a number of entwined, but distinct ends. Overt gay themes were still relatively fresh to the screen in 1972, and Fassbinder’s disquiet about exploring his own homosexuality is partly distilled through the use of lesbians (he’d get around to looking at gay men with 1974’s Fox and His Friends). But that is not to mistake the film for naïve or shy in any fashion, and it’s a choice he makes the most of, considering he could also encompass questions of women’s lib and social restructuring through his protagonists here in a uniquely holistic tale. Fassbinder manages to tease the strands apart with surprising care at the end, chiefly through the late entrant to the tale, Petra’s mother Valerie (Gisela Fackeldey), who separates her surprise and emotional uncertainty over her daughter’s homosexuality (“My daughter loves a girl…how peculiar!”) and her solicitous rebukes over Petra’s willingness to hurt others to make herself feel better. Thus, Petra’s sexuality and her personality are carefully distinguished. Petra’s in rebellion against familiar patriarchal structures and convenient fictions, but also utterly in thrall to them and, though she doesn’t perceive it, she’s actually an enforcer of a system of power. She emphasises the freedom that she and Lester sought in their marriage, which finally curdled when financial freedom was in her grasp (“That way, oppression lies, that’s obvious. It’s like this, ‘I hear what you’re saying, and, of course, I understand, but who brings home the bacon?’”), at which point she developed a loathing for what she describes as the “stink of men.” And yet, the tendency to turn a lover into a possession to be bought, however subtly and in whatever good faith, is one that Petra reproduces in her relationship with Karin.

In the third act, months after Petra and Karin’s relationship began, Petra needles a calmly indolent and purposefully resistant Karin about who she was with when she went out dancing the previous night until she delivers what is, tellingly, both the film’s funniest and most merciless line: she was with “a big black man with a big black dick.” It’s a memorable crux not only for the way the revelation acts like a bucket of cold water on their relationship, but also for the instantly codified racial and sexual anxieties with which Karin skewers Petra. The title’s specificity is worth noting: Petra von Kant weeps a lot of bitter tears indeed, but only for Petra von Kant. Even her name has meaning as one that marks her as a member of the German aristocracy (she herself notes with humoured weariness, “Nothing ever changes in Germany.”), and her rhetoric about freedom is entirely hypocritical: “It’s a waste of time being nice to servants,” she says with contempt for the slavishly devoted Marlene. Fassbinder here manages the genuinely sophisticated job of pointing out that liberation in one segment of a society quite often comes at the cost to someone else, and he refuses to let Petra off the hook for her sense of entitlement and personal arrogance.

If Petra is still doggedly interesting and compelling in spite of all her appalling behaviour, it’s because she’s absolutely fearless in confronting her shifting sexuality and is at least searching for a genuine alternative. The film’s course has an almost Buddhist logic to it, as it essentially strips her of everything she possesses at the start, until she’s left alone, dishevelled, and humiliated, but finally, fundamentally aware enough to smile as she watches Marlene pack her things and walk out on her. She even finally comes to doubt she loved Karin, but rather that she made her a doll to act out a psychodrama (Sidonie sparks Petra’s vicious final tirades with the gift of a blonde doll that resembles Karin), but the evidence that Petra’s emotional reflexes, intensity of feeling, and commitment to an ideal make everyone around her look puny is hard to ignore. Bitter Tears has a lot of similarities to the first mainstream, lesbian-themed film, The Killing of Sister George (1968), but unlike in Robert Aldrich’s film, where Beryl Reid’s George is left alone and devastated by her unremitting nonconformity, Petra’s journey to a similar end entails more contradictions and even a degree of desired necessity. Petra needs her betrayal to take the liberty to firebomb every smarmy platitude and straw-dummy social role around her, and the sequence in which she tries to terrorise and emotionally flay her mother, sister, and daughter with truly loathsome force,sees her spurning not just them, but also what they represent—the nagging, settled aspects of femininity and the inevitable of past and future.

Bitter Tears is a bitterly funny film in spite of, and partly in service to, its intensity of feeling, as in the spectacle Petra makes of herself and her insults to her family, at once mortifying and giddily hilarious as Petra is unspeakably honest in calling her daughter a nasty little monster and accusing her mother of having been a passive whore with a fancy title who never did a day’s work in her life. Although there’s nothing to entertain anyone searching for vicarious soft-core thrills detachable from context—Petra and Karin only even kiss once—it’s also a lividly erotic film. That’s because of the way everything on screen is charged with beauty through the terrific, crisp cinematography of Michael Ballhaus. The carefully coordinated colours in the set design and costuming start to resemble art nouveau in their careful clash of tones, and those great nude figures on the wall in turns mirror, mock, and contrast the characters in front of them. The film builds to a conclusion that seems initially funny and facile but is actually curiously cryptic: Marlene’s final walkout, packing away belongings including a revolver, in her declaration of independence, comes not from some final straw of humiliation, but because Petra, having attempted to free her, takes away even the dignity of Marlene’s masochism, a dignity Petra herself has indulged to the limit. l

By Roderick Heath

A few days ago, my blog partner Marilyn posted a link on Facebook to a piece by sportswriter Jason Whitlock discussing the Tiger Woods/Elin Nordegren break-up, speaking with a certain philosophical shame over the way such serious things tend to be trivialised in our age, saturated with reportage and yet often devoid of honest emotional context. The point and subject of the article kept coming back to me like a nagging cough whilst watching John Schlesinger’s Darling, a vintage film that purposefully uses the nominal structure of a tabloid article to try to say something real about the kind of person almost nobody takes seriously.

The lousy last couple of films that capped off John Schlesinger’s career were a sorry comedown for one of the brightest talents to emerge from the British Free Cinema movement of the early 1960s. But apart from a couple of misjudged works, Schlesinger’s career run from his debut, 1962’s A Kind of Loving through to 1985’s The Falcon and the Snowman is evergreen in quality and fierce in creative compulsion. Something that’s quite distinctive about his best films, even his adaptations of heavyweight literary classics like Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Day of the Locust (1975), is the energy they give off, which feels as if they’re being lived from moment to moment rather than carefully crafted, which they surely are. Darling, a quintessential slice of Swinging ’60s flash and cynicism, won Julie Christie an Oscar for Best Actress.

Schlesinger had set Christie on the path to stardom with her small role in his second film, Billy Liar (1963), and Darling capped off a near-meteoric rise in the same year as her enormous hit Doctor Zhivago, a hell of a one-two punch by any standards. Christie herself preferred her measured, subtle performance in Zhivago, but it’s easily discernible why she won for the more modest film, where she’s front and centre throughout. Darling’s protagonist, Diana Scott, is supposedly narrating her life story for Ideal Woman magazine, for which ads are plastered over other posters trying to raise awareness of third-world poverty. Her life proves to be one of those dizzying arcs that reflects the switchback ride of Swinging London at the time, full of starlets who shot to fame and then descended to a variety of fates. As a young, married woman with pretences to being hip and hoping to have success as a model, she was picked off the street to be interviewed as an example of modern youth by slightly world-weary TV producer and host Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). A dissatisfied intellectual who responded to Diana’s overboiling vivacity with his own, suppressed, playful energy, they soon became lovers. Diana left her young husband, and Robert his wife and children, to shack up in an initially happy no-strings-attached cohabitation; Robert was open to letting Diana pursue whatever extracurricular fancies she had as long as they weren’t anything serious.

Diana’s decision to abort Robert’s child sent her into a momentary emotional spiral, but she returned to him. When she began deceiving him over her trysts with coldly charming plutocrat playboy Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), however, a furious Robert walked out on her. She took comfort in a close friendship with a gay photographer, Mal (Roland Curram), who, along with Miles, helped her gain a break as the face of an ad campaign for chocolate, and they travelled through Europe together. Diana received a marriage proposal from Prince Cesare della Romita (José Luis de Villalonga), a middle-aged Italian royal with a castle full of kids whose eye and mind she caught when she came to his estate to shoot a commercial. Upon realising her relationship with Miles will never develop beyond hedonistic indulgence, and despairing of ever patching things up with Robert, she finally marries Cesare, but finds herself even more thoroughly trapped by the ornate sterility of the prince’s home and his mostly absentee status.

Darling plays in some ways as a feminine companion piece to the following year’s Alfie and other Free Cinema works of the period like This Sporting Life (1963). Whilst reflecting on contemporary problems, their narratives evoke the structures of Regency-era English novels (small wonder Schlesinger’s New Wave teammate Tony Richardson adapted Tom Jones), by following a hero in his or her wayward efforts to construct a truly self-actualised life, but passing a point where an irretrievable mistake has been made. Like Alfie, under the modish chic, it carries a whiff of reactionary distaste for the new, but it’s truly about the crisis of not being able to live within a traditional mode of life without being able to find anything satisfying to take its place. Darling is particularly noteworthy in offering a female avatar for this recurring drama, one who seems to have it all: young, beautiful, and willful enough to get what she wants, but unsure how to keep it, Diana takes advantage of the changes in the world that can allow a provincial petite bourgeoise like her to become an “It” girl, and yet the machinations that promote her, rather than representing an age of emancipation, reflect a deeply meretricious world. “I’m very handy on a telephone, too,’ Miles warns her after she boots him out of her apartment with an insult, reminding her that his kingcraft that helped her get ahead can bury her, too.

But Diana is uncertain just exactly what she wants. Fascinated and turned on by Robert’s intelligence and worldliness, she gravitates toward the scale of money and power that Miles can wield, and the once seemingly forbidden things he can show her, from the sexy allure of ultramodern corporate boardrooms to the incestuous world of the British upper class and the seamy ebullience of Parisian bohemia. The temptation to give one’s self over to being entertained, and thus owned, is one Diana gives into when she sneaks out of an audition to spend the day with Miles. This theme echoes on a larger level in which Schlesinger and screenwriter Frederic Raphael (whose later screenplays for films like Two for the Road, 1967, and Eyes Wide Shut, 1999, often returned to the theme of people in love who hurt each other in variegated ways, often with a panoramic, satiric quality) posit the degree to which the shock of the new and the age of liberation is actually a shallow marketing invention, one for which Diana is an ennobled consumer. Her own most genuine act of rebellion is to shoplift from a supermarket with Mal as her gleeful helpmate. Her and Mal’s relationship, which takes up a chunk of the film’s middle third, is defined by its thankful lack of sex and ease of companionship for Diana after the emotional bruises of her time with Robert and the greasy chill of her erotic fascination with Miles. But even this alliance runs into a roadblock when Mal sneaks away for a sexual escapade with a handsome waiter, and she’s both teed off and interested enough to be the next one in the waiter’s bed.

Schlesinger was really pushing the boundaries of what mainstream cinema could handle at the time, and undoubtedly his own homosexuality drove him to portray Mal in the warmest and most easygoing of fashions. Otherwise, his eye is an unforgiving one: a painstaking portraitist with his main characters, Schlesinger renders the background as a Hogarthian sprawl of acid-dripping mockery and caricatures. Robert introduces Diana to a respected old author whom he presents as the moral centre of the film—Matthew Southgate (Hugo Dyson), who became world-famous in spite of entirely shunning the limelight: he explicitly contrasts the rest of venal pack. Schlesinger offers splendid satiric vignettes, from a glimpse of the tacky B-movie “Jacqueline” in which Diana plays the title character, murdered in the first scene, cueing a spot-on send-up of the Hammer type of psycho-thriller, to the travails of making TV ads. And there’s the society gathering Miles takes Diana to that is full of British magnates and politicians, resplendent in their racism, patronisation, and on-the-quiet libidinous indulgence, and the grossly try-hard hipster party he takes her to in Paris, replete with sex acts as entertainment and nasty games where participants are called upon to artfully insult other guests—a challenge Diana rises to with bravura in taking down Miles a peg or two. Thanks to her looks, Diana can gain access to the great world, but her actual part in it is passive: she is a commodity, and Cesare buys her, in essence, with his good manners.

The arc of Schlesinger’s career had moved from the kitchen sink Midlands drama of A Kind of Loving to the fantasist drawn to and shrinking from the bright lights of London in Billy Liar, to this portrait of a girl shocked and delighted by the world at large. Indeed, Darling is as an artwork a little like Diana herself: beautiful, open, playful, gobsmacked by perversity in a faintly provincial fashion, and finally, a little frustrating. Darling and Schlesinger’s subsequent Midnight Cowboy (1969) were easily embraced by the mainstream and showered with Oscars in spite of their provocative subject matter and stylistic vigour because they are, at least in one manner of speaking, quite conservative: they make merciless fun of the arty counterculture and depict protagonists finally skewered by their efforts to find a way out of traditional roles. But that summary is a little reductive: Schlesinger’s efforts to be unstintingly honest were often brutal, but necessarily so, if they were to be honest. Like Thomas Hardy, whose Far From the Madding Crowd was to be, almost inevitably, Schlesinger’s next, and probably greatest, film, he looked at the lives of his characters as inseparable from social context and personal character fibre, in spite of all impulses to rebel and transgress; this is distinct from traditional morality plays, although there’s an aspect of those at work here. Schlesinger perceives a world full of people who, when it gets right down to it, use each other without compunction, and true affection is a brittle thing that can be as potentially torturous as any hate.

Scenes in which Diana takes refuge for a short time with her conventional sister and her husband, and contends with awkward set-up dinner dates with their idea of good potential mates, makes immediately apparent why Diana’s willing to risk it all for something out of the ordinary. She marches through an unadventurous landscape with teasing shows of wit and self-possession, keeping pace with Robert’s syllogistic blarney, and, after proposing to Miles how interesting it would be if it took three sexes to have a child (“Don’t you think we have enough trouble with two?” he ripostes), and explores many different types of sexual pairing, short of lesbianism—and even there she has a close graze with an interested sculptress (Annette Carell) in Paris. Yet she inflicts punishment on herself for committing acts for the sake of her worldly dissatisfaction, like her abortion and her falling out with Tony. She finally seeks a retreat into borrowed tropes of a supposedly settled and ordered culture, including returning to her Catholic faith and in marrying the prince, but this, too, turns out to be fancy wrapping on a convenient sham. That she finally ends up pining for the intimate joys of her relationship with Robert, whose relative lack of money and flash initially disappointed her, is a sentimental reflex on her part that he won’t indulge. This builds to a desolate conclusion in which, after a night together in reunion, he ignores her pleas that she wants to come back to him and makes her return to the prince. For all both of their pained longing for each other, Robert’s insistence on honesty, which demands they both have to start their lives again from scratch if they’re to have any real lives at all, is sour but honourable.

The way Schlesinger keeps his landscape vibrating refuses moral lessons that are too easy, thankfully, and aspects of his subsequent, best films are anticipated throughout. Bogarde and Harvey were cast in roles that deliberately played on their reputations already well-established in films before this, and both are customarily excellent: Bogarde’s skill as an actor is still relatively underrecognised. But it’s Christie who dominates with her supple and alert acting throughout, capturing Diana’s multifaceted liveliness and humour, her smarts and wiles, and also her slippery, elusive quality that signals a lack of a true inner compass, neither amoral nor truly self-aware. I particularly loved Diana’s explosion in a tube station when, after Robert calls her a whore, she begins ranting with a My Fair Lady Cockney accent and complaining he hasn’t paid her enough. The film’s dramatic highpoint isn’t her final bust-up with Robert, but a scene that evokes Kane’s devastation of Susan’s room in Citizen Kane (1941): consumed by anxiety and despair, Diana stalks through the prince’s ornate house, strips off her clothes, and assaults not the suffocating finery, but the Christmas cards over the fireplace—paltry signifiers of emotional ties. Even if Darling does show its age in some respects, the cast’s perfection is eternal, and the filmmaking is still giddily entertaining. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

One of the great mysteries of life is the act of creation. Many people consider the creation of life a miracle, and teasing out the artistic muses is a delicate and clandestine act of faith. The muse Terpsichore has gotten a lot of attention lately, with the TV series So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars runaway hits, and La Danse (2010), about the Ballet de l’Opera de Paris by renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman, the latest in a steady line of nonfiction films focusing on dance. When a revival of the landmark musical A Chorus Line was announced in 2005, directors Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern seized the chance to discover what strange brew must be mixed to recreate the 1975 “singular sensation.”

A Chorus Line was a truly special musical. The first major production to be developed over months using a workshop format, it told the real backstage story of chorines and chorus boys—not overnight fame when called upon to replace an injured star, but rather constant rejection for everything from their actual talent to their physical attributes, career-threatening injuries, and always an overwhelming love of dancing that kept them in the game when prudence would dictate a change in direction. This approach made the smile and frown of the comedy/tragedy masks real, and audiences responded to the human drama in a way perhaps no one but the man who conceived the idea—dancer/choreographer Michael Bennett—expected.

The film begins with a shot of a reel-to-reel tape recorder and the recording of the conversation that took place between Bennett and a group of Broadway show dancers that formed the basis of the show. Various talking heads, mainly Bennett’s longtime friend and collaborator Bob Avian, explained the process. Bennett encouraged the dancers to open up about their lives and their art by sharing his own story. One Asian dancer (Baayork Lee, who became “Connie” in the musical and was part of the production team of the revival) was hampered by her short stature, while another dancer (“Val”) couldn’t get work until she had her breasts enlarged. One young man (“Paul”) faced the shock of coming out as a homosexual to his parents when they unexpectedly attended his performance at a drag club and saw him dressed as a woman. From these and other stories, James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante fashioned a book for the show, and Oscar-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban were engaged to write the music and lyrics. Bennett provided the choreography; the part of Cassie, a featured dancer in a career drought, was written especially for Bennett’s longtime muse Donna McKechnie.

The eight-month-long audition process begins with an open call that attracts 3,000 hopefuls. Del Deo and Stern telescope this beginning process by showing whole groups of dancers being dismissed after a brief show of their technique. They also focus on one unknown from New Jersey named Jessica Lee Goldyn who says she doesn’t have a fallback plan if dancing doesn’t work out because “if you do, you’ll fall back.” That determination—and rigorous training and preparation—will get her all the way to the finals.

Del Deo and Stern narrow their focus to only about half a dozen of the characters being cast and those in the running to play them. Auditions for Val, the dancer who got breast augmentation, take up an inordinate amount of screen time, perhaps for not-so-noble reasons. We see one dancer after another shaking and squeezing her ta-tas at the panel, and it does get rather grating. For other characters, the directors seem content with producing short vignettes, most amusingly, the casting of Maggie, the character who must reach a crescendo in the song “At the Ballet” that is beyond the reach of most of the hopefuls. Quick cuts through the missed, shouted, and croaked vocalizing, matched with the winces of the casting panel, add humor to a rather humorless process, and we are left with a final shot of a young woman who hits the high note just right. At the end of the film, we see that our assumption that she got the part is correct, but until then, she vanishes from the screen.

After Cassie, the role of Paul is the most important, with Paul’s monologue about growing up gay an emotional centerpiece. The casting panel flips through cards, rejecting numerous candidates for the role until Jason Tan steps in. The panel is reduced to tears by his rendition of the monologue, and after they compose themselves, Avian simply says “Sign him up.”

Of course, not all the tryouts are with unknowns. Phone calls are made to successful Equity members, like Alisan Porter, auditioning for the part her mother played in the first national touring company of A Chorus Line, and Charlotte d’Amboise, daughter of famed dancer Jacques d’Amboise. Lacking any context from the documentarians and based on how many of them greet each other with hugs and kisses, it appears that these A-list dancers comprise the largest share of those in the finals. I’d really like to believe Charlotte d’Amboise when she says she has suffered the kinds of knocks that qualify her to understand the role of Cassie, but when someone’s very talented AND born into the showbiz elite, it’s hard to believe no one would hire her.

And this is the biggest flaw in Every Little Step—Del Deo and Stern barely scratch the surface of the dancers they showcase. When d’Amboise says she has suffered setbacks, the next questions should be “when?” and “what kinds of setbacks?”. Instead, the statement is left to stand alone, and the directors fill the screen with an interview with her father. Now, I’m as big an admirer of Jacques d’Amboise as the next dance fan, but what does he have to do with A Chorus Line? He’s not auditioning for the show or choreographing it. He’s not one of the original dancers on whom the story is based. He was, in fact, a very successful ballet and featured show dancer, not a chorus boy. I have to assume that Del Deo and Stern simply think he’s interesting and able to add some star quality to this tale of a musical about nonstars—a sad betrayal of the aims of the show and its creators.

The musical numbers in A Chorus Line are marvelous, but aside from archival footage of McKechnie dancing part of her solo “The Music and the Mirror,” we barely get to see them. The other strength of the musical is its personal stories, but we learn next to nothing about those auditioning or those who finally get hired. Deidra Goodwin, who wins the part of Sheila, says she almost gave up but learned from a psychic that she was meant to keep entertaining people—and that’s all she wrote about Deidra. Her rival for the part, Rachelle Rak, gets comparative mountains of screen time, but it is only through offhand comments she makes that we learn that she was in Fosse for more than two years and that she broke up with her boyfriend during the first round of auditions. How was Jason Tan able to move the casting team so much? We get absolutely nothing about him.

Nonetheless, Every Little Step does have some value. The production history as told by those who made it is very interesting. Hamlisch talks about how he had just won two Oscars and how he had to break the news to his agent that he was turning down the lucrative offers in Hollywood to return to New York for a job paying $100 a week. McKechnie and Avian talk a great deal about Bennett’s background, career, and ambitions. The rigors of casting a show are seen in meticulous detail, though the proliferation of talent competitions on television has removed the novelty of this inside look at the judging process. And if you’re a theatre fan or a lover of Hollywood’s backstage musicals, the documentary has its own inherent appeal.

Ultimately, though, I wonder how much any person can get out of a film about the creative process. There have been many, many films that show individuals in the act of creation, but none of them are really able to articulate the process in any satisfactory way. The discussions the casting team have in this film about what they are looking for or what is needed for a particular role sound clichéd or imprecise. What does it mean to be an organic dancer? What exactly is a tough sweetheart supposed to project? How do they know when they’ve got “it”? We can see the result, but the mystery of creation is something no documentary will ever be able to capture. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Barbara Kopple has done it again. The preeminent documentarian of the American experience and Cecilia Peck, her codirector (and daughter of Gregory Peck), have turned their compassionate beam on the three gifted and courageous women whose idea of being patriotic created the greatest crisis of their professional lives. Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing takes us along with this phenomenally successful band from the night in 2003 lead singer Natalie Maines told a British audience that the Chicks were ashamed that the President of the United States was from Texas to the recording of their album, Taking the Long Way, an angry and emotional chronicle of their experiences.

Before 2003, country music fans made the Dallas-based Dixie Chicks the top-selling female group in history. Natalie Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison were selling out stadiums and living the life of millionaire recording artists and peformers, though they were not yet on the radar screen of most Americans. The film opens with the band getting ready for their concert in Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in London to open their Top of the World Tour. A television playing in the background shows then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s WMD dog-and-pony show at the United Nations, and President Bush’s warning to Saddam Hussein to disarm within 48 hours or accept the consequences. Soon thereafter, the Chicks take to the London stage and Maines utters her famous statement to thunderous applause: “We don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Within hours, the comment has made news in the States. Disappointed fans don’t understand how Maines could be so disrespectful and unpatriotic. Country music stations stop playing the Dixie Chicks on the air. A couple of right-wing organizations organize CD destruction events, and an apology by Maines gets no traction. The mainstream media sit up and take notice. Eventually the Chicks are interviewed by television journalist Diane Sawyer and make the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

The film captures the intense debates between the Chicks and their stalwart manager Simon Renshaw about how to respond to the controversy. Maines, the most vocal of the band members, is adamant about sticking it to country radio, offended that they refuse to play the group’s music—not even their runaway-hit single. The backlash intensifies as country singer Toby Keith exploits their problems by writing a song criticizing them and whipping up his audiences to oppose them. We are in on the Chicks’s bull-session about how to respond. Maines famously hits the stage wearing a T-shirt that has the initials FUTK on the front. Anti-Chicks forces respond with an FUDC T-shirt. We hear Martie quip, “What have they got against Dick Cheney?” Eventually, we share the tension when the Chicks bring their Top of the World tour to Dallas. They have received a death threat, and their fear is palpable. Although Maines tries to lighten the mood with a joke to the camera crew before going onstage (“I’ll see you in four hours, if I’m not shot.”), her black humor conveys just how horrifying the lives of these American successes have become.

All of the film footage up to 2005 was shot by a variety of people. Kopple and Peck meticulously assembled it and added to it with video footage of their own in a film that looks visually coherent and surprisingly crisp. Their own footage concentrates on the private lives of the Chicks and their recording session. We meet Natalie’s father and learn how a tape he made of her for her application to the Berklee College of Music in Boston eventually ended up with Maguire and Robison and landed her the gig with the Chicks. They chronicle Martie’s pregnancy and delivery of twins, and listen as she and Emily talk about their struggles to become pregnant. This struggle will become the song “So Hard.” We watch as the band decamps to Los Angeles to write and record Taking the Long Way with famed producer Rick Rubin. Natalie’s rendition of “Not Ready to Make Nice” shows that the war against the hate of the fans who rejected the Chicks and the government that ignores the wishes of a wide swath of the American electorate rages on:

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and I don’t have time to go ’round and ’round and ’round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better
Shut up and sing or my life will be over.

It is fascinating to see how these women create their lives, make their music, rejoice in their triumphs, and seem to be made stronger in the crucible of public controversy. They are loving parents and spouses, shrewd businesswomen, incredibly funny and warm, and principled in a way that few entertainers with so much to lose could be. And they do take a real hit. Although their CDs continue to break sales records, their concert sales are sluggish, and schedule changes must be made.

While I’m sure Cecelia Peck contributed a lot to this film (she and Kopple previously collaborated on A Conversation with Gregory Peck, with Peck producing and Kopple directing), it is veteran director Barbara Kopple who must have led the way. The film has the kind of intimacy she is always able to achieve, and the perfect pacing and judicious editing of hundreds of hours of footage to find exactly the right images and tone to tell the story.

While Kopple’s subject matter usually has a liberal bent, if you did not know her body of work, you would not be sure of her politics. Her genius is in letting her subjects tell their own story. Even the actions of the “villains” are simply presented. A consultant from the Lipton Tea Company, which sponsored the Top of the World Tour, is shown frankly explaining the company’s discomfort with their political stand. Maines tries to explain that it was just a comment in the heat of the moment designed to rouse the crowd, but over time, her own simple faux pas seems to radicalize her.

Maines, with the support of her bandmates, let out the dirty little secret that some all-American girls from the South are liberal and can distrust and dislike a right-wing government. This revelation is educational for both the super-patriots from country music’s stronghold states and liberals in other parts of the country who look at the South as a land of rednecks. Let’s not forget that the original American protest singer, Woody Guthrie, was from Oklahoma; it appears that the Chicks from neighboring Texas, who are still stumping for basic human rights as they continue to make music, are following in a tradition much older than the radical right claims to represent. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The other afternoon, the hubby and I lunched at The Foundation, a vegetarian restaurant near Vancouver’s Antique Row. In addition to serving up great fare, the proprietors of the restaurant also offer inspiration. Looking like fortunes pulled from giant fortune cookies, quotes decorate the restaurant’s walls, including one from the great Illinois statesman, Adlai Stevenson II, that stared me in the face throughout my meal:

I consider a free society to be a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Stevenson, of course, was rather unpopular with American voters of the 1950s, who thought his intellectual gifts, liberal ideals, and religious vagueness were suspicious and more than a little effete—twice they chose retired General Dwight D. Eisenhower as their president over Stevenson. I sometimes wonder how the course of history might have been changed had Stevenson outranked Joseph McCarthy and others of his ilk with more than a little sympathy for fascism.

The powerful anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm was a rare show of strength from the Hollywood that later would be brought to its knees by McCarthy. At a time when the major studios were avoiding the subject, MGM took a stand. Hitler was peculiarly adept at understanding the power of seditious art; much to his annoyance, his “show trial” of “degenerate art” touring Germany was wildly popular. Not one to make that same mistake twice, after viewing The Mortal Storm, he banned all MGM films from screening in Germany.

It’s not hard to see why this film would have incensed him or any other good Nazi. While it exposed audiences to the truth of Nazi Germany in hopes of arousing them to action, modern audiences can only look at the film with a sense of foreboding as the happy and honorable Roth family is corralled and then strangled by the forces of madness.

Viktor Roth (Frank Morgan) awakens on his 60th birthday to the felicitations of his wife Amelie (Irene Roth), daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan), young son Rudi (Gene Reynolds), and grown stepsons Erich and Otto von Rohn (William T. Orr and Robert Stack). Viktor, a professor of biology, heads off to work and drops several hints about his special day, only to be ignored by his colleagues. Crestfallen, he walks into his lecture hall to the resounding applause and stamping of feet of his students, his family, and his colleagues. Student Fritz Marberg (Robert Young) and long-time family friend Martin Breitner (James Stewart) present him with an engraved trophy of the torchbearer. Initially annoyed at believing his birthday to have been forgotten, Viktor melts into gratitude and gives a heartfelt speech of admiration for his students and colleagues.

The family holds a celebratory dinner that night and Fritz brashly announces that he and Freya are engaged, though Freya has not yet consented. Just then, the Roth’s maid Marta (Esther Dale) comes in with word that Hitler has been made Germany’s chancellor. Fritz, Erich, and Otto run to the next room to listen to the news on the radio; they are ecstatic. Amelie is worried because Viktor is a Jew, but Viktor simply prays that Hitler will govern Germany with wisdom. Martin’s mood, initially darkened by Freya’s engagement, grows positively black with the news of Hitler’s ascendancy. The fissures we see in this family scene grow over the course of the film, as Fritz, Erich, and Otto join the Nazi Party, Martin helps a Jewish schoolteacher escape to Austria and becomes a fugitive himself, Viktor is arrested and killed for being a Jew and teaching facts that contradict Hitler’s notions of a master race of Aryans, and Freya is detained for trying to take Viktor’s last manuscript out of the country.

Frank Borzage was the logical—and only—choice to direct this film. He had made two previous films on the rise of the Nazis, Little Man, What Now? (1933) and Three Comrades (1938), while no other director came near the topic. But aside from his familiarity with the subject matter, Borzage—a director with a “touch” as personal and romantic as Ernst Lubitsch’s, but with deeper undertones—makes the downfall of this family a personal tragedy that has universal meaning. The fracture between the Roths and the von Rohns and Fritz isn’t as clean as is often found in other such films. Fritz really loves Freya and is torn first by his ideals and then, when those are betrayed, by his sense of duty; when Freya breaks with him, his pain and longing at seeing her underscore every scene. Erich and Otto feel genuine love for Viktor, who has been a real father to them, but get ground up in the Nazi machine so that their individuality is nearly lost; only Otto, the younger of the two, sees the folly that has been set in motion. Dale is perfect as the maid who turns on the Roths without much reluctance—as a member of the serving class, one certainly resentful of a perceived Jewish wealth and power, her happiness at the rise of Hitler and the emotionless way she leaves her job of 10 years rings tragically true.

The complex of emotions the great Margaret Sullavan brought to her craft are on full display here. Her embarrassment at Fritz’s announcement of their engagement is tinged with anger, her attempt at clinging to her affection for him an inward struggle, her dawning realization of the depth of her love for family friend Martin as gradual as it would be in real life. Stewart isn’t given much room to do more than a short version of his aw-shucks good-guy routine, but my interest in his performance was deepened by the knowledge that he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1940 and finally met the physical requirements in 1941. He really meant what he said in this film and put his life on the line to help people like the one he played here.

For me, Frank Morgan’s performance is the most heartbreaking. Although he was well-versed at playing kindly, sentimental roles, Viktor has an edge that, say, his Wizard of Oz never would have. There is nothing accidental about Viktor’s courageous actions. He refuses to teach anything other than what science has discovered, and shows up the caretaker at his university, whose limp “Heil Hitler” to a colleague is self-reproach enough. He says, “I’ve never prized safety, Erich, either for myself or my children. I prized courage.”

Borzage also could film action. As they attempt to ski to freedom in Austria, Freya and Martin are chased down a mountainside by a Nazi platoon led by Fritz. Recalling a more carefree ski they had early in the film, the irony and desperation of this scene keep one breathless with fear. The simple crumpling of one body far in the distance (which one is it?) after the platoon takes aim and fires is nauseatingly real.

The Mortal Storm is an exceedingly difficult film to watch. The attention to detail, the true performances, the inexorable rhythms of tragedy create an urgency that certainly must have been the aim of Borzage and his cast and crew. An important film in many ways in the careers of all those involved, it is the rare film that sends a message with a delicacy and artistry that any film enthusiast can appreciate. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

An event that only a lucky few in a handful of cities gets to enjoy is Noir City. Held by the Film Noir Foundation—and a major source of funds for the work they do to restore noir films and make them available in 35mm format—Noir City began life eight years ago in San Francisco, the home of the FNF. Last year, FNF President Eddie Muller and noir film scholar Foster Hirsch brought Noir City to Chicago for the first time. It was a huge thrill to listen to them, especially Foster Hirsch, whose book Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen holds a proud place in my home library, as they introduced the only film I was able to see last year, the superlative The Prowler. Noir City returned to Chicago this past weekend, and I had the great pleasure to listen to FNF cofounder Alan Rode introduce the double bill of Cry Danger and City that Never Sleeps.

Eddie Muller wrote about the rescue of Cry Danger for the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon that I cohosted with Farran Nehme, The Self-Styled Siren. So, it was a particular thrill to see that fantastic noir and to have the chance to announce to the audience that not only are we holding another fundraising blogathon next February, but that the proceeds will benefit the FNF. I’m happy to say that the announcement garnered resounding applause from the noir enthusiasts who filled the historic Music Box Theatre, their appreciation stoked by having just watched City that Never Sleeps. Viewing this rare noir filmed on location in Chicago and at Republic Pictures’ studios was even more special because we saw the only known 35mm print of the film, lent to Noir City by Martin Scorsese from his personal collection. The Chicago audience got a chance to see our city as it was in 1953 and hear a well-rendered script whose authentic recreation of the mental and physical geography of Chicago was itself a rarity to us.

City that Never Sleeps is an unusual picture. Chronicling one night on the mean streets of Chicago, it combines noir with a police procedural like The Naked City, with a voiceover introduction very similiar to the one used in that film. The big difference, however, is that the voice purports to be the Voice of Chicago, and it is played by Chill Wills, an actor better known for playing hicks (was that an intentional jab at our Midwest metropolis?). After introducing us to the streets of Chicago and the main players in our story, Wills shows up as a Clarence-like guardian angel named Joe who rides as the temporary partner of our main character, John Kelly, Jr. (Gig Young). Kelly is a burned-out, married cop who wants to run away to California with Sally, a beautiful burlesque dancer (Mala Powers) he had been carrying on with, and find a better-paying line of work that will get him as far from the seedy side of life as possible.

Sally, an innocent who came to the city to be a ballerina, also wants to wash away the grime of her reduced circumstances, but shows Johnny the door when he makes yet another excuse to avoid leaving his wife. Johnny, feeling trapped and desperate to win Sally back, rings Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold), to say he has reconsidered Biddel’s offer. Biddel, a powerful attorney who has coopted both the high and low elements of society, has offered Johnny $5,000 to take care of a little problem he has—Biddel’s protégé Hayes Stewart (William Talman) has grown too big for his britches and needs to cool his heels in jail for a year or two to think about it. Johnny is to pick up Stewart at Biddel’s office, where Biddel has planted bait that the light-fingered Stewart won’t be able to resists, and drive him to Indiana, where he is wanted on an outstanding warrant.

City that Never Sleeps gives us a lot of action in the long night of Johnny’s soul. The cast of characters that complicate the plot includes Johnny’s cop father, John “Pops” Kelly, Sr. (the engaging Otto Hulett), who pushed Johnny to become a cop; Johnny’s kid brother Stubby (Ron Hagerthy), who idolizes Stewart; Lydia Biddel (the magnificent Marie Windsor), the resentful former hash slinger Penrod married and turned into a society lady; and Greg Warren (Wally Cassell), an actor with a crush on Sally who has been reduced to pretending to be a mechanical man in the display window outside of the nightclub where Sally works. Each of these characters is put in danger by Stewart as he tries to evade capture.

Windsor and Talman are mesmerizing as lovers and coconspirators against the smug molder of souls, Edward Arnold. The confrontation scene between the three of them positively crackles, with Windsor getting the best line after Arnold says he met her when he had an hour to kill at her diner: “Yes, and you used it to murder years of my life!”

Gig Young does bitter quite well, but it is hard to identify with his character; since Johnny is supposed to be more moved by others than self-motivated, he makes a rather pallid hero. Even his determination to sell out to Penrod is pushed by Sally, who threatens to run off with the sweet, dreamy Greg if Johnny doesn’t grow a pair. Nonetheless, the film builds to a thrilling climax that sees Johnny chase Stewart down the middle of the El tracks, with the electrified third rail rather melodramatically inserted before fearful reaction shots by Stewart to emphasize the danger. Despite this exciting chase and the ensuing fist fight—Talman and Young look exhausted and they really were suffering from the location shooting on the tracks in the middle of winter—the cheap looping of the same footage of police cars racing out from lower Wacker Drive to the scene of the fight almost ruins it.

Other continuity mistakes, such as when Pops is supposed to be going to the Continental Hotel and the building clearly says The Angeles above the doorway, reflect the low budget and made me admire even more how much director Auer and the crack cast were able to make this convoluted and gimmicky script—albeit with some great lines—come to life. For example, Johnny answers a call about a pregnant woman about to give birth in a taxi. He leads her carefully behind a wall as a group of passers-by stand near the cab in stony silence. When the baby’s cries are heard, all their faces soften, showing that the hardened city we’ve been watching through most of the picture actually has a heart. Auer’s camera angles in the scene between Stewart, Lydia, and Penrod telegraph the triangle—Lydia is seen in a mirror as Penrod enters the room, and their images switch places as the scene progresses.

One image that my blog partner Rod remembers—and it is indeed memorable—is when Greg sheds a tear as Sally tries to talk him out of the window, where he is a sitting duck for Stewart. As the tears roll down his silver cheeks, his humanity is revealed to the drunken couple who are leering at him from the street. Again, although its beating is weak, the heart of Chicago is glimpsed subtly in this tale of murder and corruption. Perhaps screenwriter Steve Fisher had these words from Nelson Algren’s epic poem Chicago: City on the Make in mind when he wrote this literate script:

Yet on nights when, under all the arc-lamps, the little men of the rain come running, you’ll know at last that, long long ago, something went wrong between St. Columbanus and North Troy Street. And Chicago divided your heart.

Leaving you loving the joint for keeps.

Yet knowing it never can love you. l

By Roderick Heath

For comics and satirists these days, an understanding of the 1980s action movie is as reliable a source of easy gags as the lexicon of Westerns and Tarzan movies were for Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and their generation. The send-ups of ritualised narratives, posturing, and pomposity get laughs because of the painfully personal dating of what once looked so cool and because so many of us watched those movies and can’t quite work out how life never worked out so freaking awesome. One irony is that a lot of ’80s action films were, at least tacitly, already comedies, made with tongues planted deep in cheeks and full of self-aware touches. The meta joke of Die Hard’s villain Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) mocking hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) as another American brat addicted to fantasies of John Wayne and Rambo echoes on and on in popular culture.

John McTiernan’s 1988 action-adventure classic was an adaptation of Roderick Thorpe’s pulp thriller Nothing Lasts Forever, from which the script was drawn with a degree of fidelity by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza. They substituted McClane for Thorpe’s recurring hero Joe Leland, who had been played by Frank Sinatra in the 1968 film The Detective. McClane, introduced lugging around a stuffed bear upon arrival in Los Angeles and trying to roll with the tiny, proliferating perversities of the West Coast, is the archetypal blue collar guy who’s worked himself up to a post that would have once have garnered him great respect. But L.A. and the Nakatomi Plaza, where his estranged wife Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia) works, is one gigantic proof of his irrelevance. From being picked up in a limousine casually whistled up by the company as a friendly gesture but one that feels like the worst form of patronisation imaginable, to the office with unctuous coke fiends like Ellis (Hart Bochner), a Nakatomi exec who’s the model slick-talking yuppie wanker, trying to make Holly, and discovering his wife’s readoption of her maiden name to assert her independence, Die Hard essentially lays out a long series of little ego deaths for John. He contends with them sporting a wry, cagey smile, but even the efforts of the sartorial CEO Takagi (James Shigeta) to put him at ease with offhand jokes about Pearl Harbour and too many reminders of his wife’s quality don’t work.

Then, like the most ironically grotesque of godsends, a team of heat-packing terrorists arrive, and, of course, John gets the chance to do what he’s capable at: the kicking of much ass. Up against a motley collective of international thugs led by Gruber, John turns the tactics of the terrorists back on them, using speed, agility, creative use of terrain, improvised weapons, and even psychological warfare to rumble his opponents. He’s sustained only by the support of L.A. police sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the first local cop to arrive on the scene after John’s signals for aid are all but ignored by officious locals. Powell talks John through crises by CB radio as the rest of the LAPD rolls up ready to charge in like the Rough Riders, playing right into Gruber’s Machiavellian strategy. Whilst Gruber waits for the inevitable moment when the FBI will cut the power to the building, giving him access to a super-secure vault, McClane’s efforts reduce the team of thugs one by one, inspiring the particular wrath of Gruber’s chief henchman, Karl (Alexander Gudonov), after John kills his younger brother, another of the crew.

I hadn’t seen Die Hard in quite a long time, and revisiting it now was all the more interesting for the passage of time. Although elements have certainly dated, it’s perhaps clearer now just how good a film it is. It has a theoretical similarity to many an old noir movie like The Desperate Hours (1955) or Split Second (1953), in which an assailed hero squares off against a kidnapping villain. But Die Hard also has big, gnarly explosions, superlatively filmed and edited action scenes, and a truly epic sweep. Certainly essayed in the broadest and most caricatured of terms, its rollicking, unceasing narrative flow nonetheless casts a lithe, coherent eye on so much of late ’80s culture. The golden years of Japanese business imperialism, yuppie excess, macho overcompensation, media saturation, the state of modern marriage and manhood, and the problems of the traditional family dealing with the effects of second-wave feminism, the alchemy of former radicals into enthusiastic capitalists, and even the alienation of technology, all come in for a volley in the course of the film. It’s also bracing to recall such a mixture of fantastically distorted reality and enthusiastically, viciously tactile violence.

It’s this intricate, reflexive sensibility that helps make Die Hard surprising, whilst it still manages to keep its focus squarely on the most important elements: McClane’s interactions with helpmate Al and nemesis Gruber over the radio and his despairing desire to get back to Holly and finish the conversation he was fouling up earlier. His war with Gruber’s team is the best way he can express his devotion whilst freeing himself from the humiliation of his wife’s business success. McClane’s a strong, focused, morally and emotionally simple man whose refusal to concede to forces greater than himself has made him the odd man out in a careerist, often willfully ignorant world. Such were fairly common character traits in ’80s genre flicks, and in his blue-collar resentment, unswerving moral core, and sense of waning masculine clout, he’s essentially a toned-down version of Mickey Rourke’s character in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon (1984). John’s only easy amicability is with commonsense, African-American characters Al and his chauffeur Argyle (De’voreaux White) who are still engaged in the aspirational struggle that is John’s defining background creed—one that had been blithely ignored by corporate triumphalism.

But the thing that was different about McClane as an action hero was that once he got started, he set about his business with a relish that unsettled his opponents. Taunting them with harsh humour, knowing only the roughhouse pith of Irish street-fighting, he has no time for playing the gentleman, and he turns his own lack of polish here into a fundamental asset. John, whilst being astounded by his own gall and ability to survive and think on his feet, carrying on his sarcastic, self-reprobating monologues all the while, nonetheless proves cocky, even ruthless, and innately equipped for such barnstorming heroics. “Only John can drive somebody that crazy!” Holly perceives in watching Karl smash things in frustration, understanding that not only is John still alive in the building, but that he’s finally found his metier. John’s defiant preference for the most ludicrous Western hero of all, Roy Rogers, inspires his profane kiss-off “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,” angrily rejects cultural conservatism in favour of a rudely evolving sense of American iconography.

Time and time again, the characters around John are defined by blissful ignorance or arrogant stupidity. The paranoia of ’70s films involving politics and violence has given way to a general impression that most of the modern world is defined not by power and conspiracy, but by idiocy, marketing, and corruption. Bochner’s hilarious performance as Ellis contrasts John in his belief that words and style, as opposed to dedication and substance, can solve everything; he tries to make a deal with “Hans, bubby!” only to get shot in the face for his pains. Moronic pretty boys rule the media: the vignette of anchor Harvey Johnson (David Ursin) being corrected after stating that Helsinki is in Sweden, is as devastating as anything in Broadcast News and takes 1/500th as long to make its point than that smug film. And, of course, rapacious hack Richard Thornburg (William Atherton, at the height of his career phase of playing hissworthy assholes) finishes up endangering the whole McClane family by stooping to the lowest, most thoughtless kind of gutter journalism. People in authority and trusted positions repeatedly use their power to humiliate and threaten ordinary workers—it’s no wonder they’re all Johnsons.

The LAPD becomes hopelessly dedicated to simultaneously showing off and covering its own ass. John’s initial attempts to call in the cavalry can’t overcome officious call centre operatives, the Deputy Police Chief Robinson (Paul Gleason) puts down all of his efforts because they’re not under control, SWAT officers charge in to traps they’ve been warned about, and the blowhard FBI pairing Agent Johnson (Grand L. Bush) and Special Agent Johnson (Robert Davi) strut in, oozing machismo and authority, to do exactly what Hans wants them to do in following their standard procedure whilst thinking they’re in absolute control. It’s easy to read Die Hard as reactionary fantasy—all-American tough guy takes out the Eurotrash and reestablishes the nuclear family; traumatised Al regains his gun-toting mojo right at the end when he kills a surprisingly undead Karl—but its instinctual resonances spread in many directions.

Special Agent Johnson’s whoop of glee when he and his partner ride Chinooks through the streets of L.A., hollering “Just like fuckin’ Saigon,” sets up a purposeful contrast: the arrogant, trigger-happy desire to avenge the failures of Vietnam amongst Reaganite officials is personified in contrast to John’s apparently messy, but actually highly focused efforts to deal with the problem. The tactics the police utilise reproduce Vietnam’s heresies, hurling obvious, militaristic tactics and hardware at a situation that instead demands brains and pinpoint force. John has a specifically personal, defensive, as opposed to unilaterally aggressive, motive at heart, and he’s characterised not as an inheritor of the Vietnam legacy but of the WWII GI spirit, as his discomfort at the spectacle of Japanese-American fusion is swiftly channelled to good use when the terrorists, belonging in nationality to another Axis enemy, stage their own Pearl Harbour sneak attack (the sequel, 1990’s darker Die Hard 2, explicitly characterised John’s adventures now as “Just like Iwo Jima!”).

Meanwhile Hans and crew, whilst defined as former German radicals (a theme so touchy that in Germany they were recharacterised as Irish), have actually dedicated themselves to Mammon, their true purpose to rob a fortune in bearer bonds, and then cynically dynamite all the hostages to fool the authorities. This depoliticised touch was reputedly an element McTiernan insisted on, and it was a smart one, for it not only provides humour—Hans’s phony list of political prisoners to be released, picked willy-nilly from magazines, is very funny—but also extended John’s conflict with business and bureaucracy. Hans and team have merely taken business warfare and thoughtless consumption to a limit in deciding to play that game. Holly’s anxiety about showing weakness in her place of business has demanded she assume the persona of dissociated toughness, and Hans’s discovery of her true identity is the most painfully extreme version of her anxiety. John’s final battle with Hans demands the Rolex watch the company gave to Holly, a symbolic wedding ring to the new age of rootless money-worship, and to be unclipped and discarded, causing Hans to fall to his death.

Although Die Hard, like many of its breed, is deliberately funny, what was clearly proven by Len Wiseman’s sanitised, plasticised Live Free or Die Hard in 2007, in which McClane couldn’t even get the whole of his signature catchphrase out lest it get the film a prohibitive censor rating, was that the Hollywood action film has lost its balls. In Die Hard, great gobs of blood spurt out of bodies when they’re shot, huge explosions rip apart bastions of capitalism, salty language drops from many a mouth, and even the most ludicrous action scenes still look and feel somehow, vaguely real. McClane took the exasperated, but brutality-absorbing normality of Indiana Jones and placed it in a squarely contemporary context. The final images of McClane reveal a man caked in blood and sweat, barely able to stand because of the gashes, gouges, and scorch marks all over his body. His suffering to a degree of physical punishment that had rarely been received by a screen hero before, evokes an almost martyrlike cleansing as the necessary catalyst for John’s return to home and hearth.

Die Hard is not a flawless film. McTiernan’s desire to take the edge off the violence with humor provides a bit too much comic relief, and there are at least four or five characters too many vying for attention. But as both entry and exemplar in the action movie stakes, it stands effortlessly tall, and always in that hyper-efficient, unself-conscious tradition in Hollywood filmmaking that has a recognisable link to the work of Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks. McTiernan, who had only two feature films to his credit before this (1986’s moody, bizarre Nomads, and 1987′s standard-setting Predator), provides direction so sleek that you almost don’t notice it; it takes a real effort to sit back and watch how he builds shots and scenes, like one marvellous tracking shot on the roof that swings from one group of terrorists flushing John to Karl, who treads forth carefully like a true predator (Godunov’s physicality exhibits his background as a dancer, and he died tragically young), with the nocturnal cityscape behind it all—context as well as excitement beautifully delivered. McTiernan’s later bad habit of blocking his action too tightly is rarely in evidence. The look of the film, courtesy of Jan de Bont (who went on to direct Speed [1994]), with its glittering surfaces and carefully diffused shades of silvery blue blotched here and there by the flashing police lights, flames, and floods of blood, is ’80s cinematography at its definitive. Kudos, too, to Michael Kamen’s thrilling score.

Rickman, strutting through the film like a leopard in a suit, is more charismatic in his villainy— still often voted some of the best of all time—than the heroics of most leading men. It’s almost impossible to believe that Rickman, then 42, was making his feature film debut. The contrast between his silken threat and John’s blunt, blustery persona is one of the most indelible contrasts in the history of genre filmmaking. Willis has grown a lot as an actor since his breakthrough here, but it’s so easy to perceive why this remains his most associated role. His terse, faintly exasperated tension in the early scenes is redolent of withheld emotion and compact force turned inward at the outset, and builds to the moment when he cuts his latent savagery loose on Karl with rampant, animalistic fury. Bedelia, whilst cast in a passive role, nonetheless delivers a terrific performance as she contends with Hans. “Frankly, I don’t enjoy being this close to you,” she articulates with exact, fearless acidity, making it clear why she’s the kind of woman John would brave all the terrors of the world to get back.

Yippee-ki-yay, folks. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Recently, on the occasion of Peter O’Toole’s birthday, my blog partner Rod announced on Facebook that O’Toole is his favorite living actor. One certainly doesn’t argue with favorites, as they are personal choices, but I think anyone would be hard put to disagree with his choice in any case. Anyone, male or female, who didn’t fall in love with Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia must have been very jaded indeed. His portrayal of the rather naive and vulnerable adventurer made almost mad by his experiences in North Africa is a performance for the ages. Since Lawrence, the prolific O’Toole has built up an eclectic body of work on film, in television, and as a voice actor for animated films that shows his range; his creative energy, still undimming at the age of 78 (he’s filming two movies this year and is in preproduction on a third); and his continued popularity with both those who make movies and those who watch them.

In 2006, O’Toole tackled a character very close to himself—an elderly actor of renown—who takes one more shot at love with a barely legal girl. While the stretch of his skills is not so great, the fearlessness needed to expose what certainly must be real parts of himself as an elderly man was just as great an achievement as in Lawrence. He is no longer naive, but he is just as vulnerable and at least as seductive.

Maurice (O’Toole) accompanies his actor friend Ian (Leslie Phillips) from the hospital where he has just been discharged to Ian’s flat. They shop to restock Ian’s home with food and essentials. When they reach Ian’s spotless and beautifully appointed apartment, Ian informs Maurice that his great-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) will be coming to look after him. “I bought a bell to keep by my bedside,” Ian cheerfully informs Maurice, and gives the obnoxious object a tinkle.

The day of Jessie’s arrival, Ian runs to the diner where Maurice and another friend (Richard Griffiths) are having tea and says the girl is a complete nightmare. “I bought a nice piece of halibut, and she didn’t know how to cook it!” Ian despairs. Maurice decides to accompany Ian home and meet the she-devil herself. Maurice gets Ian settled and offers to make him a cup of tea. He moves through the familiar flat where he has been a visitor for decades and slowly passes an open doorway. Sitting in it like a scruffy black cat is Jessie. Her eyes are thick with liner, her clothes are barely there, and she wears the insolent scowl of most people her age. Maurice is intrigued.

He stops by the apartment again, and this time asks Jessie a little about herself. She wants to be a model. She’s not model attractive, so Maurice asks if she has a fallback plan. “Don’t you think I can be a model?” she spits at him. He backpedals. He has learned in his long life how to smooth over his thoughtless insults—he has, no doubt, made many. He says he can probably help her because he knows a lot of people. “You famous or something?” Jessie asks. “A bit,” Maurice demurs. He says his full name. She doesn’t recognize it.

True to his word, Maurice gets her a modeling job. She will be posing nude for his art class. Well, we saw this seduction coming, and now Jessie’s in on it, too. She agrees, but only if Maurice leaves the class. He tries to position himself at the transom of a door to spy on her, but ends up falling through and knocking over several easels. The comic timing of the scene, and Maurice’s guilty-but-innocent response are priceless, and shows O’Toole’s comedic chops very well. After class, Maurice takes Jessie to the National Gallery, where they study Velasquez’s Venus at her Mirror (The Rokeby Venus). He tells her that Venus was a goddess who inspired people to love. He said that a real model posed for the goddess, just like she is donig. From that moment on, he calls her “Venus” and is, too, inspired to love.

The delicacy of this drama could have been spoiled at any moment. We’re looking at what most of us would call a dirty old man. But O’Toole shows us that the old have a lot to offer in the way of love and the experience to know how to offer it. Yes, Maurice was a ladies’ man, and we see his routine. He plies Jessie with gifts and impresses her with a limousine ride and the chance to be on a movie set as he plays a bit part in a costume drama. But he really does care. He becomes faint on the set, but one look at her concerned face lifts him up, and he carries on as a man renewed.

For her part, Whittaker plays Jessie as a young girl who can’t exactly explain why she’s so turned on by this relic. She gives him small sexual favors—three kisses on her shoulder, permission to smell her neck—and becomes very cross if he tries for more. But his kindness to her, particularly when she shares the secret of a first love and a forced abortion, wins her heart as well.

The supporting cast of elderly actors, including Vanessa Redgrave as Maurice’s wife, bring the world of the aged to life in a plausible way. The concern with obituaries and raising all-too-frequent toasts to the newly dead, the long-standing relationships that are as much a part of life as breathing itself, the infirmities, hospitals, healthcare workers—this is what we all face should we reach our golden years. These images are not often seen on the screen, and very few directors take up this subject with any regularity. The master of the silver-haired screen is Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox, whose A Woman’s Tale is the pinnacle of the genre.

For his part, director Roger Michell keeps the film in perfect balance. His touch for romance has been well developed on such films as Persuasion (1995) and Notting Hill (1999). But it is to honored screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (his novel Intimacy was given a first-rate adaptation by director Patrice Chéreau) I tip my hat. This is a beautifully written screenplay, both witty and wise, that deserved to be honored with the talents of O’Toole, Redgrave, and the rest of the uniformly fine cast. Make time to see it. l

By Roderick Heath

This is an entry in The John Huston Blogathon hosted by Adam Zanzie of Icebox Movies.

Whenever the subject of profoundly underrated movies comes up, John Huston’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s legendary novel is one I think of immediately. Melville’s colossal work, with its multifaceted symbols and thickets of Victorian prose, is impossible to condense entirely as a film, and yet Huston managed the ungodly job of reducing that tome to two vigorous, fascinating, simultaneously sensual, and incantatory hours of cinema. If lead actor Gregory Peck’s performance as Captain Ahab was a bit less studied, I’d put it ahead of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as my personal choice for Huston’s masterpiece. Stylistically, it explored new territory in attempting to fuse the traditional effects of classic Hollywood filmmaking with a fresh hue of realism and metaphysical grandeur. Huston sat himself at the crossroads between cinema and literature, and in his greatest works, negotiated a rare alchemy. His simultaneous respect for the source text and the expressiveness of his camera are in fine balance throughout most of Moby Dick, and it’s a film that seems both authentically historical and ahead of its time.

Huston wrote the script with Ray Bradbury—now there’s an unexpected partnership for you—and maintained his practise of sticking as close to the letter of a text as possible, which, in the case of Melville’s work, demands adjustment to the sonorous musicality and archaism of the dialogue. It is, of course, adaptation, and yet Huston’s fascination for characters whose private madness manifests as obsessive, self-destructive, but officially aspirational quest, the most consistent of his themes in the first part of his long and ragged career, is immediately personal. He had travelled from the modest symbol of the Maltese Falcon through to the gold dust of the Sierra Madre, the revolution of We Were Strangers (1949), the heist of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the art of Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge (1952), and later, the psychoanalysis of Freud (1962) and the preaching of Wise Blood (1979). The object of this quest evolved from mere corrosive greed to something deeper, an unquenchable need to control the world through some lens, in his protagonists. Like Lautrec and Treasure’s Fred C. Dobbs, Captain Ahab’s a man degraded in worldly condition who nonetheless tries to prove himself equal to gods in his own way.

Moby Dick came at a fraught time for Huston, who was entering the middle and still rather underregarded phase of his directing career, which extended more or less to 1972’s Fat City. Huston’s epochal run of collaborations with Humphrey Bogart had recently ended with the square flop of his leisurely, self-satirising comedy-thriller Beat the Devil (1954), which lost Bogart a lot of money. If the years to come saw Huston’s oeuvre lose the shape associated with many great directors, his efforts to expand the lexicon of mainstream cinema’s expressive techniques whilst maintaining reverence for good writing didn’t go anywhere.

When Ishmael (Richard Basehart) issues his famous introduction, Huston kicks off a subtly rapturous piece of filmmaking that accompanies his meditations on the mystic gravity of water: Ishmael appears in the frame silhouetted against the sky, and then proceeds downhill, following the paths of cataracts and streams until they lead him to the sea and New Bedford itself. When he arrives there, the patrons of the Spouter Inn, including genial innkeeper Peter Coffin (Joseph Tomelty) and fiercely friendly sailor Stubbs (Harry Andrews), induct Ishmael into the peculiar fellowship of whalers, and then glimpse the ivory-legged Ahab in a flash of lightning, limping by the inn. Huston builds up the presence of Ahab as a being of fear and force with tremendous skill, even though he doesn’t make a proper appearance until more than a half-hour into the film, through the relentless drum of his false leg on the deck of the Pequod and the reactions of other men to his twisted, foreboding form: “His looks tell more than any church sermon about the mortality of man,” Quaker agent Peleg (Mervyn Johns) advises Ishmael. When he finally does appear, he’s a gross fusion of the natural and unnatural, stalwart Yankee and shaman, fused with the bone of the whales he decimates and idolises in the most perverse of fashions.

Whilst remaining keenly faithful to the book Huston stages Moby Dick as a succession of lengthy and intricate sequences, so that structurally his film is less novelistic than symphonic (the importance of Philip Sainton’s flavourful, frenzied score, amazingly enough his only work for the movies, is inestimable). After Ishmael’s arrival, he attends the sermon of Father Mapple (Orson Welles, in a splendidly judged piece of arch character acting), where Huston’s camera drifts up the centre aisle, passing by the singing congregants engaged in social ritual and religious contract, whilst the wall, sporting the memorial markers for the dozens of men lost at sea engaged in New Bedford’s business, tells its own version of the story of whaling. It’s a shot that welds the communal and the private, the historic, the physical and metaphysical, the emotional and the ironic all together. Mapple himself, preaching his ferocious version of the tale of Jonah and the whale (what sermon does he give every other week?), presents the first visual and thematic correlation between mystic and master, in climbing onto his pulpit fashioned like a ship’s prow. In much the same way, and with an equally fervent but more equivocal, bizarre fashion, Ahab preaches the sermon of the white whale and the necessity of destroying it to his bewitched crew, to annihilate “what mauls and mutilates our race.” Whilst Queequeg (Friedrich Ledebur) is defined as a heathen—in response to the pointed questions of Peleg’s fellow Quaker Bildad (Philip Stainton), he replies by hurling his harpoon with such deadly accuracy all objections are ceased—he and the other non-Caucasian men who form the ship’s trinity of harpooners are the first to recognise Ahab’s cabalistic god.

The first great sequence is the Pequod’s sailing day, a thrumming piece of cinema with precisely outlaid vignettes, from a congregant (Iris Tree) handing out bibles to the crewmen being ignored decisively by Queequeg; the silent chorus of widows and wives watching their menfolk prepare to disappear for three years; first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn) waving farewell to his wife (Joan Plowright) and children who keep a more distant vigil; Ishmael and Queequeg’s encounter with the ranting seer Elijah (Royal Dano); cabinboy Pip (Tamba Allenby) dancing and beating his tambourine under a flowing Stars and Stripes; the crew raising sails and leaving port whilst singing authentic shanties (taught to the cast by A. L. Bert Lloyd, who leads them on screen); and the final shout of “Around the world!” by the helmsman that echoes about the bay as the ship sails out of the harbour. This is one of the great scenes in cinema, in how it not only offers up precise, heartfelt, rousing detail, but also describes an entire organic world with such depth that it seems torn out of racial memor; the helmsman’s cry resounds with such a sense of space and solitude that the awe of communing with the ocean that the men are embarking upon is in itself a spiritual challenge. This also reveals what Huston had learnt from Don Siegel, who had cut together an embryonic version of the scene for Huston’s 1942 programmer Across the Pacific.

“Captains can’t break the law!” shouts Flask (Seamus Kelly), the Pequod’s hot-headed third mate in riposte to Starbuck’s suggestion that they can topple Ahab from his post: “They is the law, as far as I’m concerned!” But Starbuck, whose “courage was one of the great staples of the ship…there when required, and not to be foolishly wasted,” objects to Ahab’s deification and his quarrel in turn with the “thing behind the mask” that animates the forces of the world and Moby Dick in particular. He suspects Ahab means to tear down god in killing Moby Dick and determines to stop him, and yet Starbuck’s own objectifying Protestantism is blind to the force of nature itself: “Moby Dick’s no monster, he’s a whale! We don’t run from whales, we kill ‘em!” he barks at the Pequod’s crew, thus committing them to the same suicidal mission for which Ahab has already perished. Genn’s terrific performance is worth noting for the way he balances calm with a curious, deeper ardour, particularly in the scene where his nerve fails him and he can’t shoot a suddenly reflective Ahab. Huston’s most cunningly added flourish is to situate Ahab’s anticipated meeting with Moby Dick, plotted from a chart he’s compiled that allows him to follow the movements of whales, at Bikini Atoll, then infamous for being the location of American H-bomb tests: Ahab’s date with the white whale is humankind’s date with annihilation.

Huston’s efforts to infuse the industrialised cinema that had given him his break with a deeper, more fluent realism of look and feel had led him to shoot deep in Mexico and Africa, and for Moby Dick, it led him back to Ireland, where he would live off and on for the rest of his life. To stand in for the old Yankee whaling town of New Bedford, he utilised the historic town of Youghal, and he worked with his director of photography, Oswald Morris, to find a way of diffusing the hitherto overbright and cheery Technicolor so that the film would take on the a more incisive, subtle palette. Huston had already experimented with colour effects in Moulin Rouge, and whatever the dramatic weaknesses of that film, it was a successful experiment in mise-en-scène. The look of Moby Dick, with its detailed, yet muted colour, possesses a quality that looks more modern than many ’50s films and yet also captures the look of period daguerreotypes and lithographs. The model work in the whaling scenes is inevitably dated, and Huston edited those scenes furiously to maintain the impression of terrific physicality and interspersed real footage of traditional whaling in the Azores.

One great pleasure of the film is the remarkable depth of actors who dot the landscape, sometimes in the smallest of roles, like Bernard Miles as a Manxman crewman, and Francis de Wolff as the captain of fellow whaling ship the Rachel, glimpsed only in distant long shots and yet still affecting in pleading with Ahab to aid him in searching for his missing son. Basehart was a bit too ripe to be playing Ishmael—at 40, he was two years older than Peck—but it’s certain Huston cast him for his open, yet weathered looks and rich baritone, which makes for a stirring voiceover. The whole cast, even German actor Ledebur as Queequeg, seem chosen with such care they almost seem born for their roles.

It’s an irony then that the most commonly cited weakness of the film is Peck’s performance, which, though by no means bad, is not quite right either. Peck was and is associated with onscreen humanity and decency, and lacks the innate sense of wildness and unswerving authority necessary for Ahab. Peck is more acutely stylised in his performance, straining his mid-century naturalism to approximate the outlandish “supreme lord and dictator.” Huston had originally wanted his own father Walter to play the part when he first came up with the project, and Welles had wanted to make a version himself; both Welles and John Huston himself, as Peck later said, would have made more ideal Ahabs. Nonetheless, Peck, with his lanky uprightness and air of physical force struggling to accustom itself to the weight of his false leg and the scar that has cleft his face, embodies Ahab as the Yankee golden boy regressed into primitivist spell-casting. His eyes flash in threat and ardour as he explains his motives, his voice swings from low menace to bellowing fury, whipping his men into bloodlust. He eyes Ishmael with strange intent when pronouncing “body” in addressing Ishmael (to Ishmael’s quivering fixation), as if detecting the strange charge between him and “same body” friend Queequeg and appealing to flesh and soul in turning his crew into a cult to hunt down the whale.

In the second extraordinary sequence, the Pequod, stuck becalmed at Bikini, becomes the scene of devolution, as Queequeg, convinced by his soothsaying bones that he’s going to die, sits immobile after paying the carpenter to build him a coffin, and the crew, sweltering in a tropical evening, the moon as hot as a sun, begins to fray. The chipping of the carpenter’s labours and Pip commencing an eerie song and dance provide a strange rhythmic music for the action as Ishmael appeals to his friend to come around, and a bored crew member, testing Queequeg’s resolve, slices long bloody lines in his chest. Huston’s editing here, and the use of sound, is brilliant in creating a stygian mood, and builds to a remarkable, silent tussle as Ishmael tries to save his friend from mutilation, only to be set upon and threatened with murder himself before Queequeg comes around to save him, and the cry of “Thar she blows!” finally breaks the spell. Moby Dick appears like “a great white god,” as Pip describes him, jumping clean over the longboats hunting him, and the Pequod gives chase, ploughing through a storm at Ahab’s behest—he even threatens Starbuck with a lance when he tries to cut rigging. Ahab play-acts a masterstroke of theatre when St. Elmo’s Fire illuminates the ship, taking the last step towards shamanism in snatching fire from the sky and “put(ting) out the last fear.”

All that’s left is for the final, consuming battle with Moby Dick, in which Ahab finishes up straddling his nemesis’s back and stabbing him with fury whilst screaming his curses, before drowning and beckoning in death to his crew. The whale furiously bashes the hull of the Pequod in and crushes the puny humans who taunt him with animalistic rage before succumbing to Ahab’s harpoon wounds. It’s the most ambitious scene of action Huston ever attempted, and it’s brilliantly staged, even if the special effects now look ropy. In compensation, Huston’s cutting manages to be both coherent and yet full of sound and fury, signifying quite a lot indeed, as the great whale’s teeth rake the waters and his tail smashes down on the helpless men, leaving Ishmael to drift clinging to Queequeg’s coffin until rescue by the Rachel, the sole escapee from this annihilating hour. It’s a deeply affecting end to a film ripe for reevaluation, and Huston himself, a man who constantly tried and often failed to keep one foot in a world of macho excess and another in artistic sensitivity, pushed both impulses to a limit in Moby Dick. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The big movie of the 2010 summer season, by amount of attention paid, seems to be Inception. This latest outing by the man who set the cinematic world on fire with his mind-bending mystery Memento (2000) and left fanboys panting with devotion in 2008 with The Dark Knight, his version of the Batman myth, has critics and the general public admiring it as the blockbuster with a brain. Isn’t it nice, they say, to actually walk out of an action film with something to think about?

I must say that I’m a bit dumbfounded by this reaction. “What could they be thinking about?” I ask myself. It’s possible, I suppose, that some of the archetypal images Nolan used in the film, for example, the malevolent anima represented by Cobb’s “wife” Mal (French for “bad”) or the fortress that represents the Self of Cobb’s supposed target Robert Fischer, could have reacted with unconscious material in the male audience’s mind. As a woman, I wouldn’t react to an anima image, so I readily admit to a built-in block toward a kind of thinking this film could generate.

And is it inherently more intriguing to think that you can, as Roger Ebert put it, think your way into a dream than, say, being plugged into the hive mind of the Borg in Star-Trek or fight the soma-like virtual reality created by the machines in The Matrix? Say, aren’t those Matrix agents kind of just like the “projections” that attack Cobb and his team in Inception? Well, that’s another argument for another day.

Personally, I don’t think people are using their post-movie think time to consider the possibilities of the unconscious, the richness of dream material in understanding ourselves and our world, or any other larger implications that could arise from such a film. Sadly, Nolan has contented himself to enter the realm of the psyche as though it were merely a soundstage to film yet another loud, crashing movie. So I think the only thing Inception accomplishes in the way of thought is encouraging audiences to figure out what really happened. Did Cobb and his team succeed in their mission to plant an idea in Fischer’s psyche, or did the entire movie happen in Cobb’s head? Most people concede that Nolan’s dreamscape doesn’t resemble real dreaming, and assumptions the film makes, for instance, that lucid dreaming actually exists, are open to debate. (Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz contends that dreamers believe they are consciously controlling something the psyche was doing on its own anyway.) Nonetheless, a movie can make its own rules as long as they don’t have too many internal inconsistencies and don’t stretch the suspension of disbelief too far. That the ambiguous ending of Inception is neither disturbing to consider, nor particularly memorable, speaks to just how modest the film’s ambitions are—and how overblown its reception has been.

A film that debuted the same year as Memento—and that was as mysterious and involved in the inner workings of the mind as that movie—was American Psycho. Based on the 1991 notoriously violent book of the same name by flavor du jour writer of the East Coast literati, Bret Easton Ellis, the film was a disappointment at the box office—perhaps backlash to the perceived misogyny of the book—and faded from view. Yet, the genuinely disturbing implications of that blackly comic film have a heft and longevity that the humorlessly drab imaginings of the mind of Nolan will never approach.

The confusion American Psycho plants is much more subtle and, therefore, more powerful. Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic 27-year-old graduate of Harvard and its business school, works on Wall Street, dates graduates from the Seven Sisters colleges who couldn’t figure their way out of a paper bag, and competes with his peers over everything from the look of their business cards to the size and location of their apartments. Driven crazy by the supposed perfection of the business card of colleague Paul Allen, Bateman gets him drunk, takes him home with him, puts on a CD of Huey Lewis and the News, and hacks him to pieces with an axe. When several of his colleagues catch him stuffing the body, now encased in a two-suiter, into his car, one of them asks Bateman where he got the luggage. “Jean-Paul Gauthier,” says Bateman, relieved that they hadn’t questioned him about what was inside it.

Indeed, what’s inside doesn’t count for anything to the characters in this movie, forming the flipside to the philosophy of Inception that ideas can only take hold if the person believes they have come from within. However, American Psycho takes its cynicism about the manipulation of identity seriously, whereas Inception, whether or not you believe Cobb’s mission was real, suggests that brainwashing in service of a noble cause—in this case, breaking up a monopoly that could concentrate control of virtually all the natural resources of the world in a single man’s hands—is the right thing to do. Much of the thrilling suspense Inception offers comes from our fear that our heroes will be “killed” in the dream and stuck like Sleeping Beauty in something called limbo forever.

In American Psycho, barely perceptible differences in various black-type, whitish-paper business cards form a literal case of life and death. The derisive laughter of a woman at Bateman’s impassioned treatise on the depth of Whitney Houston’s music dooms her as well. Bateman represents a type for whom marketing has become gospel to such an extent that he convinces himself of the profundity of the superficial. He complains, for example, that a hooker he has picked up for an evening threesome is not drinking his very fine chardonnay without even realizing that labeling a wine by the grape used to make it is a generics marketing strategy of recent vintage that disassociates the product from the producer.

In both Inception and American Psycho, the central character starts to lose control of himself. Cobb can’t keep thoughts of Mal out of the engineered dreams of his team, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the imaginary people Fischer deploys like white corpuscles to rid his mind of their foreign presence; Bateman can’t control his irritation with people and finds himself in the throes of an uncontrollable bloodlust that will see him shoot, chainsaw, eat, blow up, and dismember, by his own count, 20 or more people. Yet, it is the original murder of Allen that has him the most worried about getting away with his crimes, as a police detective has been snooping into that one. We can see a rough correspondence between Bateman’s guilt over Allen and Cobb’s guilt over causing the death of his wife.

Yet, Mary Harron implicates the audience in Bateman’s nightmare by allowing us many moments of black humor to distance us from his sickening deeds. Bateman’s dissertation-like dissection of the lyrics of a lot of catchy, meaningless tunes (“Take the lyrics to ‘Land of Confusion.’ In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority.”) while giving orders to two prostitutes is one of several comic vignettes bordering on genius, recreating the bread and circuses of the 1980s that distracted citizens (“don’t worry, be happy”) and allowed radical conservatives to begin their assault on America’s political, financial, and social landscape. She reinforces the madness of that assault and the delusions that clouded our judgment by presenting a final nighttime action sequence, complete with exploding cars and shattering plate-glass windows, and then making us wonder if Bateman hasn’t been imagining everything we’ve just seen. His nearly incomprehensible conversation with a man he made a rambling confession to over the phone may be entirely in his head, or his very identity and life as Bateman may be fictitious.

The final lines of the film coming to us from the go-go 80s are portentous of where we are today: “My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.” Thanks to the deft handling of this despicable story by Mary Harron, the confession is hardly meaningless. Bateman’s desperate grasping at externals has driven him to a psychotic break, one, she seems to suggest, we may all be headed toward if we don’t find ourselves in time.

Inception’s final moments are simply a plot twist that may involve a person to whom we have never been properly introduced who has, perhaps, solved a personal problem we can’t trust is even real. And/or he perhaps really has saved the world from a dangerous corporate monopoly through some kind of scifi magic no one can take seriously. This is not progress of thought or introspection. As we shoot impotently into the giant maw of international corporate rule, it looks like the Batemans have won. l

By Roderick Heath

In the early 1960s, the Hollywood Western genre was beginning its long decline. The genre’s most iconic stars, like John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, aged, the directors who had fostered in its greatest years were themselves fading, the “adult” westerns of the ’50s had begun an antimythic trend that corroded the traditional mores of the horse opera, and television, with dozens of Western-themed shows on the schedule, was sapping the remnant vitality of the form. And yet, Westerns were still hugely popular worldwide, including in Europe, where, with the decline in American-produced fare, some producers wanted to get some of that sweet legal tender that oatsers could still generate. The first to try making a Western outside of the traditional American milieu was Hammer Studio’s ex-chieftain Michael Carreras, who had the bright idea of shooting the 1961 Anglo-Spanish coproduction Terrain Brutal (Savage Guns) in Almeria, Spain. After a couple more multinational follow-ups, the first Italian-produced Western, Duello nel Texas, debuted; the historical musclemen sagas that formed much of Italy’s genre cinema was running out of steam, and something else had to fill the void of violent trash.

This experiment in international genre resuscitation might have finished up as an ignominious pop-kitsch footnote if not for one Sergio Leone, an experienced screenwriter and assistant director who had recently graduated to official directing credits with the 1961 peplum pic The Colossus of Rhodes and wanted to tackle the genre. Leone, the son of early film director Roberto Roberti (birth name Vincenzo Leone) and actress Edvige Valcarenghi, claimed great affinity with the West as a subject of private enthusiasm, and disliked the more moralistic variety of Western that had arisen in the late ’50s, of which the likes of The Fastest Gun in the West (1956) or The Hanging Tree (1959) might serve as good examples. Leone resolved to toss out the psychological and metaphoric weight and get down and dirty. He began looking for a star, first trying Henry Fonda and then others, like Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and even Duello nel Texas’ star Richard Harrison. He finally found a taker in Clint Eastwood, the slender, stone-faced young actor known for the TV series Rawhide, and soon produced a huge hit that defined the Spaghetti Western in the short term and had no small impact on cinema in general.

Leone battered together a script with the help of Víctor Andrés Catena and Jaime Comas Gil, and had English dialogue written by Mark Lowell, but the film was structured to lessen the reliance on dialogue, with actors in smaller roles mostly dubbed. Leone’s ideal of the Western translated into an Italian visual style became the priority, offering up ebullient widescreen compositions that reproduce lighting and colour effects and arrangement of elements that call to mind the finest effects of Renaissance painting. The difficulty in taking A Fistful of Dollars seriously in and of itself is the immediately obvious fact that Leone and his collaborators egregiously ripped off Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), taking a cue from the successful Western adaptation of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954)— The Magnificent Seven (1960). Leone later tried to defend himself by claiming he’d taken as much inspiration from the classic Italian play Servant of Two Masters, something which film writer Christopher Frayling emphasises. But this seems like blather, considering A Fistful of Dollars follows Yojimbo practically scene for scene: the same subplots, characters, narrative gimmicks, and even similar shots. Kurosawa successfully sued for a share of the profits, but it’s arguably only fair that he was hoist by his own petard, considering the debt his film owed Dashiell Hammett and the fact that it was a tribute to the Western traditions of John Ford.

In many ways, however, the closeness of the template and its unofficial, on-the-sly status, makes for a revelatory creation. The contrast of Kurosawa’s vision and Leone’s, differing takes by two cinematic titans on a simple and wittily brutal genre tale, is one of the few opportunities the cinema has ever offered for such clear comparison of disparate creative impulses. Kurosawa’s film is cool, crisply etched, his camera usually standing far back, the framing as sharp and refined as the edge of Toshiro Mifune’s katana blade; Leone’s frames jostle with detail, colossal close-ups, and multi-hued lighting that work in a symphonic fashion. Another difference is temperamental. Kurosawa doesn’t introduce the subplot of a woman who’s been forced to become a concubine by evil men, separating her from her husband and son, until halfway through Yojimbo. Leone makes one of the first images of his more operatic film that of the enslaved woman’s son trying to sneak into the house where she’s kept, from which he’s chased by sleazy thugs, who then beat up his father when he tries to protect the lad. This occurs in the casually observant eyeline of Joe (Eastwood), the wandering, poncho-clad mercenary who arrives in the tiny Mexican town of San Miguel, and right from that moment, it’s certain he knows not to give a damn about what chaos he starts.

Two clans are competing for the lucrative border-smuggling trade in weapons and liquor for which San Miguel an ideal locale. The Baxter cadres, led by the nominal sheriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy), face off against the three Rojos brothers—Ramón (Gian Maria Volonté), Esteban (Sieghardt Rupp), and Don Miguel (Antonio Prieto)—and their hired guns. Joe is harassed by the Baxters’ heavies and advised by tavern owner Silvanito (José Calvo) to hurry away after explaining the calamity that’s engulfed the town. Joe, however, seems to see opportunity—exterminating four of the Baxters’ gunmen with his own phenomenally fast draw—and tries to sell his services, in turn, to both the Baxters and the Rojos. But neither are exactly comfortable outfits to work for: Baxter’s Lady Macbeth of a wife, Consuelo (Margarita Lozano), wants to have him killed off quickly, and the Rojos are driven along by Machiavellian bastard Ramón, who contrives a successful ambush of a federale unit to rob them of the gold they’re transporting. So Joe sets up a battle between the two sides by arranging two of the dead soldiers’ bodies in a graveyard and sells information to each band, making the Rojos think the corpses are still-living survivors of the massacre they’ll have to finish off, and then tipping the Baxters to the advantage they might have in capturing the soldiers alive.

This last flourish, the impudence toward propriety and a purely makeshift sense of existence where even the dead are props to be used in the mean business of staying alive, is pure, original Leone, one of the touches that helped define his style. Leone was making films about the Wild West, but his thinking always seemed even more ancient. At the very least, he tapped into something mostly latent in the genre that had always been tidied over by American Western filmmakers seeking a veneer of relevance to contemporary society. Leone saw that it was precisely the wildness, the often barely discernible patina of civilisation reduced and reveling in animalistic behaviours that was the greater part of the genre’s pleasure. Men are hairy, sweaty, dirty, horny, greedy, and often ruthless in his movies. Basic opposites are always functioning in Leone’s films, in spite of the refinement of the style: life, death, earth, sky, rich, poor, man, woman. Personalities are present, ethics hazily visible, certain codes certainly dominant, but defined only by direct and basic force. The reduction is signaled by the animated cut-outs that form the credit sequence, and this also introduces the new note of pop-art to the proceedings.

The simultaneously deepening tactile and moral realism in Leone’s films and the unrealism, the borderline-mythic touches and the distancing from historical context, is one of the great contradictions in cinema. Emblems are important. The Baxter house, a roughly carpentered, but still recognisable approximation of a classic Yankee manor, and the Rojos house, with its lustrous Spanish white and columns, present not merely the abodes of warring gangs, but also warring civilisations and the contrast of Old World elegance versus American solidity. Joe himself, with his regulation cowboy gear and swathing poncho, blends cultural tropes in a suggestive fashion. In between the buildings, the no-man’s-land of San Miguel’s main street, is the first of Leone’s bullrings for warrior confrontation, which Leone’s widescreen lens describes in patient intimacy, often using the terraces of the Rojo house to further force the lens of perspective. Joe finds helpmates in grouchy, but fascinated Silvanito and the local coffin maker, and his only true nemesis is soon identified in Ramón, the man who gleefully machine-gunned the federales, the only one canny and brutal enough to present a real challenge. Facades are important in Leone’s films (just look at how often the image of a man hidden behind a screen spying or aiming a gun at someone appears in his films), and so is the alternation of identities; Ramón kills the federales wearing U.S. uniforms. However, no one’s better at muddying the waters than Joe. In the absence of real things to stir up trouble about, Joe provides illusions, like those two dead Mexicans, to leaven his divide-and-exploit strategy. There’s always some bullshit, Leone constantly suggests, hiding a real motive.

This stage-managed graveyard battle gives Joe the chance to search for the stolen gold, but he ends up taking an accidental hostage, Marisol (Marianne Koch), mother of the boy, now Ramón’s squaw, whom the Baxters eagerly use as a trading piece to get back their own useless son Antonio (Bruno Carotenuto). The discovery of Marisol’s history motivates Joe to win her freedom even though he’ll endanger his own life, because he “knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help,” as he tells her and her family before driving them away. Finally, real feeling has intervened in proceedings as a true motive, but it’s almost fatal for Joe, who’s captured and relentlessly beaten by the Rojos and their thugs. He turns the tables by crushing two of his torturers by rolling a gigantic barrel of gunpowder down on them—a gleefully nasty comeuppance—and then covers his escape by setting that powder alight. He literally and figuratively kindles an eruption, because the outraged Rojos assault the Baxters’ house and massacre all the inhabitants.

Kurosawa treated the story as both amusingly and harshly Darwinian, one of a wolf contending mostly with insects that cannibalise each other in thrilling but essentially pathetic ways. Leone wrings a different, more imperative flavour out of the action, and though still humorous, his possesses a darker lustre. Consuela Baxter’s death—the black-clad matriarch shouting defiance and a primal curse at the Rojos before being shot down in a wreath of smoke bellowing from her house—is exultant in its grotesquery and melodramatic scale; indeed, the whole sequence sports a remarkably, infernal vividness. So, too, is the little opera of gestures and glances on display when Marisol is briefly reunited with her family in the street during the prisoner swap. Leone, in spite of the great ease with which people die and the contempt with which they’re often treated in his work, always makes something almost transcendent out of the moments before dying.

Joe, the first incarnation of the character dubbed “The Man with No Name” (that was essentially a United Artists marketing gimmick), is only guided by a moral compass based in personal empathy, and there’s not much of that. We don’t hold it against him he uses people he loathes to make some money: most of us do that. That he proves to be a proper good guy isn’t in question, but he is definitely one of those Leone protagonists who has “something to do with death”, who, even if they don’t realise it, in essence, bring apocalypse wherever they tread. Joe even poses as a knight-errant or a risen, vengeful angel. Still playing games of truth and illusion, letting off explosives so that he steps out of the smoke like a spook after, having survived torture and eluded the hunting Rojos, he recuperates and returns strapping wearing body armour culled from the iron of a boiler to fend off the rifle blasts he knows Ramón will loose at him. Joe finally confronts the Rojos when they turn their vicious attentions to Silvanito, and doesn’t leave the town until all his foes are decimated. The irony here is that Joe mythologises himself to scare his enemies into irrational decisions, just as Leone mythologises the proceedings with a self-conscious smoke-and-mirrors style.

A Fistful of Dollars is usually described as a warm-up for the grander calisthenics of Leone’s career, but in viewing it after a very long interlude, and for all Leone’s debts and still-developing talents, I recognized it as great filmmaking indeed. Perhaps its very lack of pretension makes it a better, tauter film than the awkward intermediary sequel For A Few Dollars More (1966). It’s a wonder that with all the production problems of working with actors and technicians from four countries, Leone still managed to craft such a strong drama; this is the film that proved Leone was born to be directing motion pictures.

Eastwood’s properly terse performance, of course, made him the international film star he still is, and much of his appeal as presented here is as much about the quiet, sly good-humour he lets through Joe’s otherwise taciturn and unremitting exterior. He looks on the world much like a science experiment he’s running, sometimes a bit wryly disconcerted at how the experiment is proceeding, at least until it turns real, and then…you better run, boy. A Fistful of Dollars also sports the first of Leone’s immortally styled gun duels, defined by the rapid, rhythmic cutting between expectant faces, humour, and macho swagger slowly fading at the realisation that someone’s about to die, and then the concussive simplicity of the moment when the gunfire actually comes, with four or five men at a time dropping dead on the spot in a single, encompassing shot. Life is never more amazingly intense for Leone as in the few moments before it ends. l

By Roderick Heath

Ben-Hur is still by far the most dramatically nuanced, intricately constructed, and sheerly entertaining of the old-school blockbuster epics. The film’s reputation for at-all-costs size and bludgeoning bluster has always somewhat obscured what a damn well-put-together piece of moviemaking it is. It was a career highlight for William Wyler, who, after decades of refining his cinematic technique, applied his integrity and care in drawing out realism in his acting and approach to mise-en-scène to the most unlikely genre and came up trumps. The pressure was on Wyler, as MGM spared no expense on the risky production to save itself from bankruptcy; he likened the experience to working as one of the film’s galley slaves. Nonetheless, with its great cost and even greater profit, Ben-Hur represented the high-water mark of Hollywood’s efforts to combat the encroachment of television, both in terms of popular appeal, production craft, and confidence in the act of total cinematic creation. Within a decade, filmmaking looked and sounded completely different.

Ben-Hur was chosen as a project by MGM executives and brought to fruition by producer Sam Zimbalist, who died during filming, because of the great success they’d had more than 30 years before with Fred Niblo’s entertaining, if comparatively cartoonish silent version, a production that had been hellishly protracted and fatal for several crew members. Wyler’s film is often considered together with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) for obvious reasons: both are religious-themed sagas, both star Charlton Heston, and both feature Martha Scott as his on-screen mother. Actually, the films are quite different. DeMille’s film is spectacle in the purest sense, achieved in his cheerfully two-dimensional, almost ritualised style; Ben-Hur attempts to be intimate and artful in balancing out the grander elements, and employs naïf touches more carefully throughout. DeMille based his visual style on academic historical painters like Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whilst Ben-Hur’s production designers and cinematographer Robert L. Surtees obviously went to school on Renaissance Italian painters like Caravaggio and Michelangelo, whose Sistine Chapel panel “The Creation of Adam” provides the iconic backdrop for the credits.

Ben-Hur was, of course, based on the novel by Lew Wallace, subtitled A Tale of the Christ, and the narrative sustains a counterpoint of the life of Jesus and its hero, a fictional Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Heston), commencing and finishing explicitly with Gospel scenes. But at the heart of Ben-Hur is a Dumas-esque tale of betrayal and revenge. The pretitle sequence, a visually striking Nativity scene, hits exactly the right momentous note, with the standard picture-book images of the Magi gathering along with sundry locals to look upon the holy family. A shepherd blows his horn to announce something incredulously wonderful in the most nondescript of forms, ringing out with curious eeriness as the Star of Bethlehem fades, leaving us momentarily with the remote, rugged landscape of ancient Judea before Miklos Rosza’s grandiose horns blare out a thrilling fanfare. And yet a stand-out quality of the film is that the first hour is chiefly a series of carefully wrought, complex, interpersonal scenes that build the drama in a mosaic of phrases and gestures.

Messala (Boyd), appointed as military governor of Judea where his father had once served, returns to the land where he grew up, full of swaggering pride in gaining his appointment and overjoyed to see his youthful chum Judah again. “Close in every way!” Judah states happily when the two men bond over a little javelin target practice. But the differences enforced by time, nationality, and personal philosophy keep revealing themselves, in their first meeting and again when Messala visits Judah’s home, greeted like family by Judah’s mother Miriam (Scott) and especially his besotted sister Tirzah (Cathy O’Donnell, Wyler’s sister-in-law). For example, Messala realises he’s committed a faux pas in recounting tales of glorious Roman slaughters to Judah’s family—domestic citizens of a conquered nation.

But the break doesn’t fully manifest until Messala presses Judah to give him the names of Judean patriots who dislike Roman hegemony; their rift suddenly defines itself in religious, personal, cultural, and political terms. When Tirzah accidentally knocks a tile from the roof of their house, causing the new governor to be injured, Messala grasps the opportunity to further his career and punish his former friend by having Judah, Miriam, Tirzah, and Judah’s slave accountant Simonides (Sam Jaffe) imprisoned. Judah spends the next four years chained to the oar of a Roman war galley.

One of the assistant directors on this film was 30-year-old Sergio Leone. I’ve always suspected the influence of Wyler’s technique on his—that way both men had of constructing quiet, slow-burn sequences full of small, but revelatory detail. It’s particularly evident in a scene like the one on which the ship Judah is serving is taken over by the new admiral, Quintus Arias (Jack Hawkins), who, fascinated by Judah’s still-fiery hate and determination, tests him and all the other slaves by making them row at increasingly high speeds, trying to shake the impenetrably hard stare Judah keeps fixed on him. It’s a galvanising scene that possesses undercurrents of emotional, physical, and sexual power. Judah is subsequently herded up to Arias’ cabin and offered a chance to become a gladiator, his near-nakedness and the disparity of power between the two men full of potent homoerotic overtone. Although rebuffed, Arias is still intrigued enough to make sure Judah is left unchained during the subsequent, thunderous battle with Macedonian pirates.

Another strong aspect of Ben-Hur is the level of physical grit and gore it allows to seep into the usually cardboard epic genre, and the sea battle offers great examples—a man so desperate to get a chain off his ankle he rubs the flesh off his leg, another man with a severed arm sporting a stump of bone, and half-a-dozen rowers crushed by the great ram of an enemy ship puncturing the hull. Whilst the model work of the ships shows its age, the editing and staging of the whole sequence is impeccable cinema.

Judah, having saved Quintus from the ship and stopped him from committing suicide when he thinks the battle lost, gains his freedom thanks to the amusingly dotty-seeming Tiberias (George Relph), and becomes Arias’ adopted son and a champion chariot driver. He finally returns to Judea to meet in swift succession one of the Magi, Balthazar (Finlay Currie, of course), who’s searching for the holy child he saw born, and his host, Sheik Ilderim (Hugh Griffith). Before you can say “dramatic device,” the Sheikh offers Judah the chance to race his four white Arabian steeds against Messala’s champion blacks at the great circus in Jerusalem, an offer Judah initially turns down. When he finally gets home, he finds his house being cared for by Simonides’ daughter Esther (Haya Harareet), who was supposed to have been married, but instead has settled for caring for her father, who emerged crippled from the prison where Miriam and Tirzah remain. Judah confronts Messala and demands he get them out, but when they are extracted from the black hole they’ve been kept in for five years, they’re found to have contracted leprosy. Returning to the house of Hur at night, they beg Esther to keep their illness secret, so she tells Judah they died in jail, prompting him to finally seek out revenge on Messala on the circus track.

Ben-Hur is melodrama, no question, but the film aims unabashedly to transcend into myth, a form always distinguished by a simultaneous cosmic and microcosmic sweep. Wyler pays close attention to totems and symbols with important emblems recurring throughout. Horses, from the pale horse Judah offers Messala at the start to the Manichaeistic duel of their white and black steeds in the chariot race, are emblems of good and evil. Water—the water that Jesus gives to Judah at the moment of crisis, and that Judah tries to give back at the end, the cleansing rain that falls at the end—is the sustenance of faith. Rings—the ring of slavery Judah removes from Esther at the outset to keep as an emblem of chastity, and the ring of Arias—are the bonds of family and loyalty. The crossbeams at which Judah and Messala aim their javelins clearly anticipate the crucifix, and the spear they both throw in friendship Judah soon enough takes up and aims at his betraying friend. The structure of the drama sustains the weight of the metaphysical mythology, particularly in building first to the good-versus-evil climax of the chariot race and then the more subtle miracle that erases suffering.

A majority of the screenplay was famously rewritten by Gore Vidal, but credited only to initial author Karl Tunberg, and Vidal’s contributions are usually only mentioned in terms of his playful gay subtext. But Vidal’s fingerprints are all over other aspects of the script, particularly in the portrayal of militaristic imperialism, which reflects a lot of Vidal’s meditations on the patrician America with which he was familiar, and the pointed portrayal of Judah’s refusal to name names to Messala: Judah is destroyed by blacklisting. “Patriots?” Messala repeatedly sneers when refusing to countenance the idea Judah offers that men who dislike the system aren’t necessarily dangerous or wrong. It’s also hard to miss the political wish-fulfillment of Jewish Judah and Arab Ilderim joining forces to combat a common enemy. Ilderim even pins a Star of David to Judah’s cloak to “shine out for your people and mine” before the race, and the conclusion is altered from the book (where Judah became a Roman aiding the Christians in getting a foothold there) for a true homecoming. Whilst the story is officially New Testament, the plot is closer to Job, and the characterisations of Judah and Messala stand in effectively for a battle of creeds as well as more personal motives; Judah eventually channels his hate for Messala into a general disdain for Rome, which he feels twisted his friend up with evil values.

Wyler’s deep-focus, widescreen compositions, always a hallmark of his style, are used throughout for grand dramatic purposes, as when Judah hides behind a stone whilst Esther gives food to Miriam and Tirzah—the landscape and composition of the shot communicating the jagged pain he’s in. The moment when Judah and his family retreat under a hail of stones by people hysterical at the proximity of lepers, whilst the blind man to whom they just gave a coin sadly drops that sullied money onto the ground, offers wild disparities of provoked emotion encompassed within the same shot. I love the gothic vibe that infuses the film at several junctures, particularly the creepy scene when Miriam and Tirzah encounter Esther in the courtyard of the house of Hur, swathed in concealing robes like living ghosts with Hammer horror leaves swirling desolately in the winds; Judah later describes their state as like “living in a grave!” The conclusion is similarly lushly stylised, as Wyler cleverly has the miracle of their healing revealed in strobing flashes of lightning, the Hurs contorting in pain and the world consumed by momentary furious darkness, as a flailing storm plunges and washes Jesus’ spilt blood down to mingle with the earth. This works better than the Sunday school visions of Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount and the passion play affectations of his end, but the overt contrast between the patient, tactile realism of the rest of the film and the mystic visions of Jesus does place the juxtaposition of the sacred, profane, and merely earthly with fervent effect.

Of course, the chariot race is the film’s great set piece, and that sequence, directed from start to finish by Andrew Marton and realised thanks to the skills of Yakima Canutt and his team of stunt artists, is still an effortless contender for the greatest action sequence in cinema history. That’s largely because it’s a carefully composed movie in and of itself, with fluent logic of detail, from the wicked spikes that jut from Messala’s chariot and Judah removing his helmet to make sure his enemy can see his face, to the climax of the race when Messala gives into his most debased impulses and makes the mistake of trying to beat Judah—he starts whipping him—rather than his chariot. The widescreen compositions are particularly great in absorbing the landscape of wildly working horses and wheels, the hysterical tumble of events as chariots crash, men are killed, and Judah himself is nearly vaulted head over heels when his vehicle has to jump a crashed opponent’s. The decision to leave music out of the scene is particularly admirable, opting for the urgent thrum of hooves and the roars of the crowd, building to the inevitable comeuppance of Messala, stamped into a bloody mess and lolling broken in the sand, sudden shame and regret stamped on Judah’s face.

The old line “should’ve ended at the chariot race” has never really rung true for me, though, because Ben-Hur still manages to go to an interesting place after this; the simple effect of the race’s concussive, satisfying violence gives way to a portrayal of the inability of such vengeance to heal hurt. Messala’s so desperate to keep hurting Judah even after death that he delivers an evil piece of news rather than let surgeons try to save his life, and his malignancy, as Esther somewhat too pointedly states, seems to take Judah over. Judah rejects Pontius Pilate’s (Frank Thring Jr.) offer of protection as a gnawing, increasingly inhuman passion for violent cleansing consumes him. As the religious vignettes move in, meaningful lines like “In his pain, this look of peace!” get a bit much, but it’s still notable to me how carefully Wyler builds the rhythm of the film toward the final miracle. He also manages, unlike so many screen depictions of the Crucifixion, to communicate a proper metaphoric sense of what the event signifies by concentrating not merely on horror, but also on consequence; the healing of Miriam and Tirzah is in itself symbolic of moral and emotional renewal. Wyler, who was Jewish, wanted to make a film that appealed to all faiths in portraying faith itself as an ennobling ideal rather than a mere sectarian triumph. Even a godless heathen like me likes the point.

Ben-Hur cleaned up at the 1959 Oscars, taking home 11 statuettes, including one for Heston. It’s not Heston’s best performance—he’s demonstrably better, for instance, in El Cid—as he tends to hit some of his dramatic moments too hard, too early, but it’s still admirable how he prevents the mass of the production from crushing him. He acts like a man with a weight on his shoulders, his great bearish frame buckling under the impact of suffering, constantly wishing to bring his innate physical and psychological strength to bear, but hampered by his own better sense and will. Boyd, on the other hand, is beautifully, perversely malicious as Messala: I especially love the mordant precision with which he pronounces the lone word “Return?” in mocking Judah’s promise of revenge. Neither man was a subtle actor, but the job of keeping their bristling bombast in balanced counterpoint is nicely fulfilled by Harareet, the only actual Palestinian in the film. The more I watch the film, the more I admire her performance in a problematic role. Griffith, as Ilderim, gives the kind of hammy, scene-stealing performance that’s easy to love, and Hawkins is as fine as he ever was. No, Ben-Hur’s not perfect—I’d really like to know who does Jesus’ hair—but frankly, I really don’t give a damn. l

Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur will be shown with organ accompaniment on July 30, 8 p.m., at Chicago’s Portage Theatre, 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave., as part of the Silent Film Society of Chicago’s Silent Summer Film Festival.

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Oh to be in Oleanna,
That’s where I’d like to be
Than to be in Norway
And bear the chains of slavery.

Little roasted piggies
Rush around the city streets
Inquiring so politely
If a slice of ham you’d like to eat.

Beer as sweet as Muncheners
Springs from the ground and flows away
The cows all like to milk themselves
And the hens lay eggs ten times a day.

This satirical folk song about the failed utopia Norwegian violin virtuoso Ole Bull tried to set up in 19th century Pennsylvania is the obscure and pretentious origin of the name of David Mamet’s play Oleanna—and perhaps that pretension was part of Mamet’s game plan. The idea of Oleanna certainly makes sense to the aspirations of the play’s two characters—a smug professor about to grasp the gold ring of guaranteed employment and freedom of thought that is tenure and a working-class, somewhat dull female student of his who has sacrificed to realize her supposed promise at the expensive, exclusive university at which the play is set. The tragedy of their Oleanna is that neither are true believers in the power of education; instead, their cynical pretensions barely conceal that they have each put their faith in power and hierarchy to get ahead.

Tellingly, the play premiered in 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just a stoning’s throw from Harvard, and not so far from Worcester, Mass., the home of College of the Holy Cross, where the then-newly minted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas matriculated in English literature 20 years earlier. Thomas almost certainly inspired this examination of sexual politics, as the term “sexual harassment” (ha-RASS-ment or HAR-ass-ment was the pronunciation dilemma of 1991) was ubiquitous following testimony at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing by Anita Hill. Hill, Thomas’special assistant when they both worked at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said he had spoken in a sexually inappropriate manner to her on several occasions. Testimony by Angela Wright, another Thomas aide, that “she had not considered the behavior to be sexual harassment, but that others might” seems to have informed Mamet’s construction of the play. Mamet’s obsession with language and meaning gets a workout in this play, as interpretation of the text/subtext of the first act leads to a radical and ruinous shift in power in the second.

The play was moved to the screen with little consideration for cinematic possibilities by the man who created it in the first place. That is not pleasing for the more cinematically inclined members of the audience, but the virtue of this approach is that we are really forced to consider the movie’s text—how language can be flattened of nuance by committing it to paper (presaging the rampaging misunderstandings that take place every day in online communications), how interruptions in conversation can destroy understanding, and how social position (teacher/student, male/female) can create a very different experience for the participants in a conversation.

During the first half, John (William H. Macy) is meeting in his office with Carol (Debra Eisenstadt), a student of his who is doing poorly. Repeatedly, Carol says she doesn’t understand a word he is saying, that she can’t follow the discussions, and that she has tried and failed to understand his point of view in the book he has written and is using as a classroom text. John takes the blame for her lack of understanding, and offers to have intensive one-on-one sessions with her to help her succeed. He offers a reassuring arm around the shoulder, and reveals a bit of his personal life, perhaps as a way to build rapport or perhaps simply because he is constantly interrupting their conversation to take phone calls from his wife and real estate agent. John explains that he is awaiting an announcement that he has made tenure and is buying a house to go along with his new job security and salary increase. As befits their respective positions and prospects—imminent success and looming failure—John is magnanimous, a rush of erudite words and concepts, and only slightly regretful that he has to take call after call during their meeting; Carol is sheepish, desperate, bewildered, and frankly kind of annoying in her repeated, emphatic “I don’t understand” and commands that John explain his $10 words in plain English.

During the second half, the tables are turned—John is the sheepish and desperate one. Carol has filed a complaint against him for sexual harassment and racism (using the term “the white man’s burden”) and submitted a report to the tenure committee detailing his abuses. What? This is as unexpected for audiences as it is for John, but Carol has written everything down from their meeting. When read out loud, it sounds like what she accuses him of:

He said he liked me, that he liked being with me. He’d let me write my examination paper over if I could come back oftener to see him in his office. He told me he had problems with his wife and that he wanted to take off the artificial stricture of teacher and student. He put his arms around…

Carol has fallen in with a “group,” which given the elite university setting suggests women modeled on Mary McCarthy’s characters in The Group (at least, that was a fun and useful way for me to imagine how Mamet might have conceptualized them while writing the script). Her group has apparently instructed her in the error of John’s ways and helped her draft a list of demands that could possibly save John his job, if not guarantee his tenure; one of the demands includes the banning of several books from the curriculum, including his. His indignation at this affront pushes him from cajoling to defiant. The last straw, however, is when John learns from his wife that Carol has charged him with attempted rape; witnesses heard her yell for him to let go of her and saw her run frantically from his office at the end of the first half. “You think that you can destroy my life after how I’ve treated you,” he yells and begins slapping and hitting her, stopping just short of pummeling her with a heavy chair. The final words, as he recoils from himself in horror, are “Oh my god.” “Yes, that’s right,” says Carol. The ambiguity of that final sentence is interesting to ponder—has John finally had his consciousness raised about his own monstrous prerogatives, or has Carol become the new god in his universe(ity).

Sorry for all the wordplay, but Mamet’s language is always very carefully chosen for its depth of meanings. Of course, he takes kind of cockeyed aim at the political correctness that was spreading through campuses at the time; John is skewered for the historical and relatively innocuous phrase “white man’s burden.” Perhaps, tellingly, the example of another professor in Philip Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain being dismissed for using the word “niggardly” in class points to the larger problem of the decay of vocabulary in American society.

But vocabulary is the least of it. Although Carol doesn’t understand a few words John uses, such as “paradigm” and “predilection,” she is not inarticulate, and she clearly understands that John is a hypocrite. Her protests that she doesn’t understand refer to how it is possible for John to bite the hand that feeds him, criticizing in his book and in his lectures the assumption that higher education is necessary. John and Carol are moving at opposite purposes toward social mobility—John is already at the top and so declares that one doesn’t have to go to college to achieve, whereas the still-striving Carol sees he wouldn’t be saying such things if he hadn’t already succeeded and resents his condescension. He pretends to question social constructs like higher education, and yet when faced with a construct he is not consciously aware of—his male prerogatives—he is relatively defenseless and reduced to animal aggression to defend himself.

What I find most interesting about Oleanna is that it seems to be an exercise in Mamet trying to figure out women. He has, in my opinion, never written a wholly successful woman character; in fact, some of them have failed miserably. His early, most successful plays revolved around the rituals and relationships of men. His abstract expressionist verbiage isn’t very user-friendly for actors or audiences and requires a strong grasp on the feelings and motivations that underlie it in order for a character to truly emerge as a person. William H. Macy, a cofounder with Mamet of Chicago’s now-defunct St. Nicholas Theatre, originated several of the playwright’s roles and has learned to climb into this difficult skin. He knows how to punch Mamet’s words like a pointillist painter to create the image. He also can let us know a dozen thoughts with a look. For example, when Carol is about to reveal a part of herself she has “never told anyone,” the phone rings; he knows he should let it ring, but he really doesn’t want to become her confidant and cares more about his pending home purchase anyway. The guilty/apologetic/offhand look Macy assumes is exactly right and forms a crucial link in the vehemence of Carol’s attack on him in the second half.

Eisenstadt fares less well. Not only can’t Mamet write women, he can’t really direct them. He has her use props to signal her mental state, putting on her glasses and pulling her hair back when she becomes defensive and rejects mercy for John. He has her sounding as stupid as she thinks she is in the first half with inappropriately punched repetitions of “I don’t understand.” The flatness in her voice, certainly as directed by Mamet, robs her of her intelligence and nuance and does not adequately convey her fear of failing John’s class and intimidation about her privileged surroundings. He forces her to find her identity in her group, as though she had no mind of her own, and seems to turn her into a Cultural Revolutionary with the anti-educational act of proposing a ban on certain books. Eisenstadt strives to individualize Carol, but she can’t overcome the deficits Mamet has hung on her.

So, in the end, Oleanna is something like a Socratic dialog, where we get to judge the “he said, she said” evidence and render a verdict. Mamet stacks the deck against Carol, and it’s hard not to think she completely overreacted and is actually a virulent danger. Turning John into an abuser at the end is the only way Mamet knows to balance the scale, but there’s an ever-so-slight hint of “she deserves it.” The film is a stilted, stagebound misfire, but it’s still fascinating, thought-provoking, and a snapshot of America’s recent culture war at one of its most intense moments. l

By Roderick Heath

Shock Corridor was one of the last of the run of aggressively hyped-up, yet genuinely canny flicks that formed Sam Fuller’s gloriously overheated oeuvre at its height, made when he was trying to sustain himself on poverty row budgets as an independent filmmaker. Shock Corridor is supposedly a murder mystery set in a hospital for mentally disturbed patients, but really has virtually nothing to do with then-contemporary psychiatry and everything to do with Fuller’s analysis of a social landscape that seems to have struck him as 95 percent crazy. Johnny Barrett’s (Peter Breck) self-appointed mission to win a Pulitzer Prize by finding the killer of a man named Sloan hidden amongst the hospital residents is the starting point for a long journey through the twists of the American moral and sexual psyche circa 1963 that is, on occasions, one of the best metaphors for a social project since Melville sent his mariners after the white whale. Some directors lose their will and wit in low-budget genre work, but Fuller seemed to revel in it: he could make raw melodrama, sexploitation, seamy production, and unfiltered sensationalism work for him.

Johnny, at the outset, has gained the approval of his editor, “Swanee” Swanson (Bill Zuckert), to pursue the story, and Swanee has pressed his psychiatrist friend Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) to tutor Johnny on how to fool doctors, police, and hospital staff to get himself placed in the hospital. His girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) is integral to the plan: she has to pose as his sister, to whom he’s supposed to be incestuously attracted, as the first manifestation of a dangerous instability that will require incarceration. But Cathy, an scholarly woman who’s probably smarter than Johnny but who works as a stripper to makes ends meet, is vehemently afraid of the plan, sensing something strange and masochistic in Johnny’s pursuit. Cathy and Johnny’s verbal combat over the advisability of the plan instantly ignites the powder keg Fuller has amassed, Cathy swiping a cigarette out of Johnny’s hand in rage and then pleading with him to reconsider; their dialogue explicitly evokes Hamlet and Greek tragedy as leitmotif (pretending to be mad, illusory identity, secret incest) and mission statement. The film has already quoted Euripides at the outset: “Those whom God wishes to destroy they first make mad.” But whom does God wish to destroy?

Johnny’s subsequent emotional coercion of Cathy finally forces her to present the false story to the police, and Johnny assaults the psychiatrist who interviews him, landing him squarely where he wants to be. In the hospital, he encounters a panoply of bizarre patients, like rotund opera freak Pagliacci (Larry Tucker), and some equally disturbing staff. He works his way into the lives of the three men who witnessed the murder. Stuart (James Best) is a hick who believes he’s Confederate Cavalry General Jeb Stuart; Trent (Hari Rhodes), an African-American student who went crazy after being used as an integration guinea pig; and Boden (Gene Evans), a former nuclear scientist who’s reverted to a childish state. Just how tenuous Johnny’s hold on to sanity himself is soon evident—when he’s been sedated and locked up even before hospitalization, he hallucinates Cathy in her performing persona, making taunting come-ons and resting on his shoulder like a psychosexual Jiminy Cricket.

Each of his quarries in the hospital is enacting a trauma that is linked to the others. Stuart’s mind snapped after he returned from Korea, where he’d deserted and adopted Communism, the first time in his life he’d felt any pride in himself after being raised by racist redneck parents. The example of an heroic, genuinely patriotic POW finally brought him back to the fold, but he was still ostracised on return and took refuge in the fantasy of being a Southern military hero, one who leaps to his feet in joyful salute when Johnny poses as Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stuart’s commander and also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. That works as well, if differently, with Trent, for he, in his psychosis, spouts white supremacist rhetoric and claims himself to have founded the Klan. Boden’s mind was broken by his part in inventing the atomic bomb. Between the three of them, they suggest the whole state of postwar America has been defined by deranged, fractious responses to the Age of Anxiety, with roots going back to the Civil War and beyond and resolving logically in the mass paranoia of the Cold War, racial strife, and the nuclear era. Suddenly it starts to look a whole lot like Fuller had his entire country in mind when quoting Euripides. “The last egghead I had in here was Ben Franklin!” snaps an aggressive orderly about another patient as Johnny enters, and one doubts the reference to the brainiest of the Founding Fathers is accidental.

Fuller’s metaphors are suspect, but he tackles them with such electric intensity and personally felt passion that he converts his hoary raw material into an orchestral psychodrama. Fuller repeatedly references his own life and career(s) as well as invoking a sociohistorical survey—the film is punctuated by colour documentary footage that Fuller shot himself whilst on location for various film projects. From the very first scene, the faintly nails-on-a-chalkboard emotional intensity is sustained, and the relationship of Johnny and Cathy sets the urgent tone of the proceedings. Johnny strikes up an uneasy friendship with Pagliacci, who awakens him one night bellowing Verdi in his ear and then playacts murder on him, a blackly funny and peculiar mix of feigned violence and tender, possibly homoerotic intimacy; Dr. Cristo (John Matthews), the hospital’s medical chief, assures Johnny the Pagliacci is actually harmless. Later, Johnny pretends to embark on a paddle-steamer ride with Trent. Meanwhile Cathy’s gnawing anxiety manifests in one priceless little moment when, in speaking with Cristo, she rattles her fingernails repeatedly on a desktop, tipping him off to something peculiar in her psyche, too. Not knowing the truth he begins to assume that the fictional incest wasn’t entirely one-sided.

The notion of a man acting crazy so well that he becomes crazy is hoary, but more dynamic is the idea of a man being drawn to an institution to fulfill a need within himself that beckons with greatness, but proves to be madness, oddly anticipates Kubrick’s The Shining. Breck’s performance is modulated in a similar way to Jack Nicholson’s in Kubrick’s film, already acting ever so vaguely dissociative and regressive under the guise of cocksure determination as Cathy tries to make herself heard. The innermost enigma of Johnny’s search for the murderer proves to have been motivated not by hate or irrationality, but by sex—the murderer, the seemingly friendly orderly Wilkes (Chuck Roberson), was molesting catatonic female patients, and Sloan was murdered for knowing this. Equal and opposite gender savagery is manifest when Johnny finds himself unexpectedly in a ward for nymphomaniacs; rather than a paradise of pleasure, the women lurk like waiting birds of prey, one of them singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” as a mocking chant, menace thick in the air. Fuller stages the scene like a set piece from Psycho as Johnny can’t open the door behind him and tries to leave quietly, only for the women to assault him in carnivorous passion like the Bacchantes falling on Orpheus in a devouring love-rage. Their unhinged sexuality contrasts Cathy’s efforts to play the falsified love-object whilst simultaneously asserting her wisdom.

Fuller cumulatively suggests through Johnny’s search that the great American need to penetrate and triumph is part of its problem. Simultaneously, the spectacle of individuals acting the opposite of what they are to save them from reality is the repeated motif. Unlike a lot of pleading-spouse duets, Johnny and Cathy’s relationship is vital to this story, in part because both are subsuming themselves—Cathy less happily—in roles to get ahead. Her burlesque act gives Fuller ample opportunity to lift the eye candy quotient in the movie, but he also hits a note of uniquely odd romanticism as Cathy sings her song for the patrons, heavily made-up face floating in a feather boa as she steadily disrobes before a tacky backdrop festooned with tinsel hearts. Towers is gorgeous and the song lustrous, yet there’s something sublimely forlorn about the whole sequence that lays down the emotional groundwork for what follows. Later, when she pleads with Swanee to make him aware of Johnny’s mental state, Fuller stacks the deck tellingly by having him patronise her whilst she’s dressed in skintight leotards.

Cathy is defined, sequentially, as an intellectual, a stripper, and a tragic lover, and Fuller photographs her as lonely, distinct from her milieu, standing out all the more individually the more Johnny sinks into his, often presenting an overt contrast between her fraying emotions and her ludicrous dress, whilst patronised all the while about her concerns about Johnny. Johnny puts his body on the line in an even more profound way than she does, partly, it’s hinted, out of frustration. Cathy’s stage act is comparatively tame, whilst one of the more dim-witted women she works with remarks that the only act that would be worth anything is one that goes all the way, which is precisely the enterprise Johnny’s engaged in. Johnny’s fantasy of Cathy has nothing to do with the real woman, but the one who embodies the wispy erotic-emotional fantasy on stage. Later, he entirely reconstructs her into an untouchable icon of desire by identifying her with the fake sister she’s embodying, unable to reconcile the disparate versions of womanhood Cathy inhabits that he can’t cope with.

As equally trenchant, and more easily discernable, as Cathy’s mask is the self-made Klan hood that Trent dons to rant racist rhetoric and chase down one of his fellow black patients, presenting the feverishly sick spectacle of the frightened older man being pursued by the whipped-up loonies led by another black man wearing the ghoulish camouflage of race-hate (“Let’s get him before he marries my daughter!” he shouts). Johnny’s choice to identify himself as Forrest is canny not merely in how it taps into both Stuart’s and Trent’s delusions, but also in explicating how conjoined the neuroses of war, caste, and colour are in American society. The ritual form of Johnny’s encounters with his three quarries is to satiate their fantasies, allowing them to have moments of lucidity presaged by dreams that evoke their buried traumas tangentially. Fuller introduces a self-reflexive note by having the dreamers remark that they have their dreams “in colour,” thus acknowledging that their world is an inauthentic, black-and-white one. Trent’s dream of tribal rituals with masked dancers is accompanied by his voiceover disquisitions on the dates of the crucial Supreme Court desegregation decisions—associating legal rulings with tribal lore: the political is primal—and memories of vicious assaults by clansmen. When the madmen have moments of clarity, Johnny’s pursuit of his truth comes constantly at the cost of his inability to hear their crucial stories; his specific objective is finally distinct from broader truths he’s not interested in discerning.

Fuller makes a meal out of his own former profession’s capacity to pursue the sensational and ignore the contextual. His punishment for Johnny is the most lethally amusing one that can be imposed on a media creature: he is stricken by a recurring inability to speak. When he does finally extract the identity of the killer, Johnny’s own collapsing psyche, pushed along by submission to electroshock therapy, prevents him from offering it up, and then he forgets it; only his own colour dream and psychotic fantasy of being trapped in an indoor rainstorm hands him the metaphoric key, the memory that Wilkes, the murderer, supervises the hydrotherapy cures. Whilst Johnny does manage the conventionally heroic act of uncovering the killer and defeating him in a furious physical showdown, it’s at the cost of his sanity—he descends into a catatonic state after he’s written his prize-winning story. Fuller’s breathless histrionics, as evinced in the rainstorm scene, with Breck contorting and screaming, tend to be so heightened in concept that they cease being naïve and becomes hallucinatory.

In spite of the low budget, Shock Corridor is technically superior, with former Orson Welles collaborator Stanley Cortez providing no-nonsense cinematography and Jerome Thoms’ compulsive, occasionally disjunctive editing. The acting, particularly by Towers and Rhodes, is remarkably good in the context. One of Fuller’s subtler technical coups comes in a dinner sequence when Johnny sits between Pagliacci and another patient, the uneasy silence punctuated only by the amplified sounds of food being chewed, inevitably resolving in a violent eruption. The very finish, with Cathy desperately trying to mould Johnny’s arms so that he’ll embrace her, is a logical terminus indeed; he’s now the perfect, immobile love object, completely calcified and mindless, and Cathy’s devoted sanity seems as crazy as he is. It’s a gruesomely affecting end to a perversely brilliant film. l

By Roderick Heath

Johnny To has emerged in the past few years as a master of Hong Kong genre cinema, filling the void left by the departure and disgrace of John Woo and other industry notables in Hollywood adventures. To and Woo share characteristics, both concentrating on bristling macho dramatics, each analysing fundamental social, business, and personal bonds through the charged metaphors of the gangster film, and both channelling the influence of foreign masters like Ford, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Leone into their localised aesthetic. They’re very different in other respects, however: where Woo is usually an operatic executor of movies that are fundamentally about movies, reverent of the given structures and precepts of the genre film, To is much more of an ironist, willing to play games with his audience’s expectations in laying out standard elements and then executing simple, but brilliantly effective twists. To’s as strong a stylist as any in modern cinema, but a purposeful, efficient one, saving pyrotechnics for the moment of maximum impact, and with his dancing camerawork, lightning editing, and keen mise-en-scène, he barely wastes a frame. Election proved something of a breakthrough for him in terms of overseas attention, and it’s not hard to see why.

The story is fairly simple, but To keeps his pieces moving on the board so fast it’s a challenge to stay focused. The Wo Sing triad, one of the most notable—but far from only—illegal organisations in Hong Kong is having an election for its chairman, who serves for two-year spells. The tradition of the election is over a hundred years old, and the codes that bind the triad members together go back even further, to the days of resistance against the Manchus and the rebellions of the Shaolin monks. The two candidates to replace outgoing boss Whistle (Chung Wang) are Lam Lok (Simon Yam) and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai), two temperamentally disparate kingpins. Lok is calm, disdainful of showy expressions of power, the kind of guy who walks around his neighbourhood and converses with shopkeepers without a weapon or bodyguards, a detail which speaks of his certainty of power. He keeps a fine apartment with his son Denny (Jonathan Lee). Big D is far less restrained: married to a potent kingmaker wife (Maggie Shiu), he’s a man who smiles and cajoles with excessive pleasantness and explodes in childish tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants. And he doesn’t, when, in spite of his carefully administered bribes to some of the “uncles” who form the decisive circle of triad chiefs, Lok wins the election as the most honourable and respectable of the choices.

Big D decides to dispute the election, and kidnaps two of the uncles he blames for his loss, cranky old Long Gun (Yuen-Yin Yu) and dissolute Sam (Robert Hung), whom he’d bribed but who failed to vote for him because there wasn’t enough money to go around. He nails them inside wooden crates, and rolls them repeatedly down a mountainside until they’re bloodied, dazed messes. Calling up Whistle, he threatens their lives unless Whistle helps him in challenging the triad’s guardian of tradition, Teng Wai (Wong Tin Lam); Whistle responds by having a subordinate hide the carved dragon-motif baton that is the symbol of authority in the Wo Sing in mainland China. Big D senses he might still stake a claim to the governorship if he can get hold of the baton by proving that he has the muscle and guts to snatch the baton to those who would still deny his authority.

Getting wind of an impending clash between the quickly polarising sides, the police, commanded by stoic Chief Superintendent Hui (David Chiang), drag in all the uncles, including Lok and Big D, who, still raging at his fellow uncles who he thinks betrayed him, begins kicking Whistle in front of reporters whilst waiting to be taken into the police station. Whistle flees the violence, but is run over by a car and critically injured. The cops, desperate not to see a gang war start, only want to force the uncles to find a way to sort out their problems. But events threaten to spiral out of everyone’s control as rival bands of men loyal to Big D and the other uncles try to fetch the baton from its hiding place in Guangzhou, and an embittered Whistle tries to blab from his hospital bed.

To’s quick eye takes in a raft of small details that fill out the universe of the triad bosses with alternatively disarming and dismaying effect. Most of these gangsters aren’t actually very tough or especially good at their jobs—they’re mostly middle-age men whose days of roughneck street warfare and standover work are behind them. Amongst the younger ones, who include young punks with something to prove, and genuinely fierce warriors in need of a watchful eye, the slickest is the preternaturally cool Jimmy Lee (Louis Koo), who distributes bribes and collects debts whilst also attending seminars in finance. Small and large rituals—Teng Wai making tea for the uncles to seal their election decision; a later, full-on, religious-flavoured, blood-brother ceremony—define and seal their society. The power of ritual and tradition is simultaneously endangered, illusory, and still binding in subtle and supple ways. The governorship of the triad is established by totems and oaths, and but these are only emblems of real things, and the competition to command the emblems will finally express the reality of those symbols. As the film plays out, the meanings of those symbols become thoroughly apparent.

Election also hints at broader meanings through its title: the election, the illusion of democracy, is a sanctified ritual in the triad. But it’s only possible because of the mutual consent of powerful men, and To encompasses the history of Hong Kong and the relationship of Chinese society to centuries of hegemonic rulers both foreign and domestic. Simultaneously, what adherence to a creed means is taken seriously all the way through, even though the drama is driven by upstart Big D’s refusal to accept the rules, a breach of the creed. He threatens that if he doesn’t get his way, he will break away and form his own triad, a potent threat indeed as no one wants a war. The police know they can’t stamp out the triads, and are happy to act as something like referees in this game to reduce collateral damage; their attempts to corral the uncles before the situation combusts prove partly successful. In a moment that’s both ribald and telling, Long Gun, whilst berating Sam and Big D for failing to give a big enough bribe, orders a nubile young prostitute to jump up and down for him: those old farts are happy as long as their pockets are stuffed, their dicks are wet, and the world’s jumping to their regulated beat.

In the film’s sustained, exhilarating central movement, the battling factions and the police try to beat each other in ferrying the baton out of China, leading to the teeth-gnashing moment between two intermediate members. Kun (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), functionary for a boss who’s signed on with Big D because he’ll sell their drugs at a higher rate, beats Lok loyalist Big Head (Suet Lam) with a log to get him to give up the baton, whilst Big Head recites the words of their triad oath, explicating the bizarre bond of corporeal grit and spiritual adherence that keeps the Triad bound together. But then Kun gets a call from his boss, telling him the plan’s changed: he’s now to make sure that the baton comes home to Lok, and he has to apologise to the bloodied, battered Big Head before immediately leaving with the baton, knocking over a policeman in his relentless drive back to Hong Kong. He then passes the baton on to motorcycle-riding, hard-as-nails kung-fu warrior Jet (Nick Cheung), who was first glimpsed in the film taking offence to Big D’s patronising jokes, which caused him to crush up and eat a ceramic spoon as a fuck-you to the wannabe overlord; we know then he’d rather die than let Big D get the baton. With Jimmy Lee, who manages to intercept him, they beat off a mob of his men, Jimmy stuffing one heavy into a barrel and stomping on the lid until he’s trapped like a Looney Tunes character and Jet finishing up with a machete jutting from his shoulder. But the pair’s grit sees them victorious and Lok gains the baton. It’s the most generically satisfying part of the film as a blindingly executed piece of action.

Terrific little details flitter by at high speed, like the “you’re full of shit!” look Jimmy wears in listening to Uncle Sam’s swearing he’s not going to gamble any more, or Teng recalling how the baton once had to be sprayed down with insecticide after the last election because the former holder was such a slob. There are points in Election where even fierce attention won’t really reward a first-time viewer. Many of the bosses and their henchmen are swiftly introduced and barely distinguishable, though that’s probably intentional. Lok’s supine calm and Big D’s hot-headed smarm are, on the other hand, very carefully contrasted to carefully manipulate initial impressions. Lok, with his calm demeanour and general reputation for honour and chivalry within the triad, seems by far the better man, yet one senses that Lok’s security in his sense of power gives him a great capacity for ruthlessness. This is proven when, to make sure Whistle doesn’t blab to the cops, he has Whistle’s son run down by a truck and threatens that his daughter will be next, causing Whistle to commit suicide by pulling out his own life support. Once the baton’s in Lok’s hands, he reaches out to Big D, bringing him into his plan to expand the Wo Sing’s turf by taking over another triad’s territory: Big D pretends then to make an alliance with that triad’s boss, Brother Dinosaur (Bo Yuen), only to team with Lok to kill him, Big D relishing stabbing and kicking the dying man. All suddenly seems right in the Wo Sing world again.

But To saves his most brutal and amazing flourish for the very end: when Lok, Denny, and Mr. and Mrs. Big D share a bucolic afternoon fishing, Big D, pleased by how things are going, suggests that he and Lok share the Wo Sing governorship as some other triad bosses have done. Lok says they’ll have to talk it over with the fellow bosses, and then, when Denny and Mrs. D are momentarily absent, he picks up a huge rock and bashes Big D’s head in with it. Mrs. D sees him and tries to run away, but Lok catches her, throttles her, and buries her with her husband in an unmarked grave, before calmly driving home with his son, who witnessed his violence, in glazed, silent trauma, into a blood-red sunset.

The ending is both a ruthlessly concise trash job on the veneer of gangland civility that brings to mind the climax of Scorsese’s Casino (1995)—indeed, the thought of Scorsese having remade this film rather than the far less inspired Infernal Affairs is a tantalising one—with its galvanising, surprisingly prolonged, and truthful violence, but it’s also a coldly logical culmination of all that has proceeded. Lok’s unremitting execution of his rival and his problematic wife is both power politics defined, and obedience to the creed of the triad. Big D has violated the society’s laws and defied the judgement of the uncles, and he pays the price for that violation in the same way that Big Head defended the laws: at the cost of having his body pummelled, but this time unto death. This hardly leavens the final disturbing vision of Lam Lok as a brutal psychopath, his son’s haunted look saying all that’s necessary about life in this world even as they slip back into their social roles. The savage excellence of this coda elevates Election far above the pack. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

For decades, song and dance were well-respected staples in Hollywood films, making legends of Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, and many, many other talented performers. As the supply of seasoned musical talent dried up with the extinction of vaudeville and hard times fell on both Hollywood and a nation rapidly losing its innocence to televised war and assassination, the movie musical all but disappeared.

While white America was busy debriding and closing its wounds, other American subcultures continued to crave music and dance on screen. Perhaps it was MTV’s music videos, which debuted in the 1980s, that caught the attention of some Hollywood producers, but dance-filled films aimed primarily at the youth market slowly started trickling out of the dream factory again. White faces could still be found in films like Footloose and Dirty Dancing, but the breakout hit and trendsetter of the decade, Flashdance, starred Jennifer Beals, a mixed-race actress. From then on, dance films remained largely an entertainment of minority audiences.

In 1998, the perhaps inevitable pairing of a pop singer with an actress/dancer, providing a blend that film producers could understand and bank on, took place. Puerto Rican singing idol Chayanne was teamed with Vanessa Williams, a beauty queen who was proving to be an effective screen presence, for Dance with Me, an entry in the growing ballroom dance subgenre. The film effectively mixes family drama and love story with street dancing and formal dancing—a combination that made Flashdance such a potent force for audiences. Yet, it slyly lampoons the Reader’s Digest approach to dance (“8 to 80, anyone can do it, makes you feel good”) by drawing a porous, but definite line between amateur and professional dancers that proves to be a credit to both.

The film opens onto the lively streets of Santiago de Cuba, where the sway of music and dance seems to fill even the most mundane of chores. We follow Rafael Infante (Chayanne) to a cemetery, where he lays flowers on the grave of his mother. At home, he regards a letter addressed to a John Burnett (Kris Kristofferson) in Houston, Texas. Soon, he receives an answer to his letter telling him there is a job for him—a favor to Rafael’s mother, with whom Burnett had an affair on a cruise ship. Rafael has not yet told Burnett that he is the father Rafael never knew.

At the Houston airport, he is met by Ruby (Williams), who takes him to the dance studio Burnett runs. Ruby dashes off to teach a class, and Rafael is left to regard the students and employees of the lived-in studio. Burnett arrives, orients him quickly to his duties as the studio handyman and takes him to his home; Rafael will live in a walk-up apartment adjacent to the main house. Burnett declines Rafael’s request to go out for drinks, as he dashes back to the studio. Thus abandoned with his dashed hopes that he and his father would find immediate rapport, we experience along with Rafael the uncertainty of a new immigrant.

There’s no question that there will be a serious romance between the alliteratively named Ruby and Rafael—they simply look too good together—but there is Ruby’s defensiveness after a disastrous relationship with her former dance partner (professional Latin-division dancer Rick Valenzuela) and Rafael’s offensive clumsiness to contend with first. When Rafael watches Ruby and her new partner Michael (Harry Groener—who knew The Mayor from TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer could dance so well?!) practicing, he wonders how they can dance without music. Ruby, practicing her footwork dancing around a pillar while Michael takes a break, says, “It’s choreography.” He presses his point that it should be the music that tells a dancer what to do, insulting Ruby’s professionalism. She returns the insult when she accedes to Rafael’s request that she teach him how to dance at a local salsa club, and she catches him dancing quite well with another woman while she was in the restroom. “Why didn’t you tell me you could dance?” she asks him accusingly. “I’m Cuban. Of course I can dance,” he replies, as though she has rocks in her head, “just not the way you do.”

Haines offers these exchanges to set up themes about the dance world that complement the story and make the connection between a love of dance and a love of life. In the amateur world, the joy of the music and communality, such as when Ruby and Rafael slow dance at an engagement party they happen into and a second, more successful attempt at clubbing, help Ruby put her life into perspective. At the same time, the pro-am competition for which studio regular Patricia (Jane Krakowski) is preparing with John as her partner shows that even an amateur can aspire to be the best she can be as an expression of the love she feels for dance. John, who has grown tired and lost his passion for dance, also has a solitary personal life. It is only when he realizes belatedly what he might be missing after an angry confrontation with Rafael in which his secret is revealed that his interest in dance renews.

Randa Haines, director of the highly honored drama Children of a Lesser God, might have been expected to emphasize the film’s dramatic story. But she shows her versatility and intelligence by using the clichés in which the script trafficks as punctuation for the dance sequences, where the emotional lives of characters play out with much more nuance and effect. The stunning artistry of Krakowski took me by surprise. Obviously a trained dancer, she creates a passionate pas de deux with Rafael at the championship that subtly tells half the story of the Rafael/Ruby romance.

When Ruby dances with her former partner in the other half of the story, she spots Rafael in the audience; overjoyed that she hasn’t lost him after all, she responds to the movements he makes in the crowd and imagines that she is in his arms instead. The unlocking of her passion proves to be the key to winning the championship and, of course, a happy, harmonious life with him working for a revitalized Burnett at his dance studio.

Haines’ camerawork is superlative in the dance sequences, which form the majority of the film. She choreographs her shots precisely at the salsa club, seemingly as abandoned as the dancers, yet ending up exactly where she needs to be when Ruby and Rafael, who have been changing partners throughout the sequence, end up in each other’s arms. She does not adhere to the full-body shooting favored by dancers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but there were few times when I felt cheated, so deftly does she move between the story on the dancers’ faces and the movements of their bodies. I would have liked to have seen a little more of Joan Plowright’s dancing in the senior division competition—as studio regular Bea Johnson, she more than showed her chops during her dance lessons—but it was gratifying to see her in the spotlight anyway in an endearing duet with Chayanne. It was also gratifying to see Haines pay tribute to Gene Kelly’s classic “Singing in the Rain” dance when Rafael, caught in a field of lawn sprinklers, cavorts and splashes his feet in a puddle. The closing credits are a short story in themselves, using this normally useless time to show the richness of Ruby’s, Rafael’s, and John’s lives following their final reconciliation at the competition. The film’s editors Lisa Fruchtman and William S. Scharf deserve maximum kudos for their efforts.

Since Dance with Me came out, one film tried to fuse the white and minority audiences—Save the Last Dance (2001). An excellent film that transports a white ballet dancer into the black South Side of Chicago, where she learns to meld tradition with new styles, this could have paved a new road for dance/music films. Sadly, it was not to be. Dance with Me is a wonderful film, but it remains in the dance film ghetto, and its director and performers far from creating this kind of magic again. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

When is a fear irrational? Is there something wrong with the irrational? Two interests collided recently when I saw Akira Kurosawa’s snapshot of Japan in the atomic age, I Live in Fear, and started reading Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In both works, the irrational, or unconscious, are given legitimacy in the face of an overwhelming reality that ignites a fear that cannot be rationalized away.

The film opens in a dental office, where Dr. Harada (Takashi Shimura) complains about how busy he is with work and with his duties as a court mediator. Just then, he receives a call asking him to report to the court in the afternoon. The case he will help mediate is of a family trying to have their patriarch, Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune), declared incompetent. When he arrives at the courthouse, the large family is jostling in and out of a small courtroom, and they initially push him out of the way. When they learn who he is, much bowing and many apologies come his way.

The case, reluctantly brought by Nakajima’s wife Sue (Kyoko Aoyama) at the urging of her children, concerns her husband’s plan to sell his factory and home and move the entire family—including the son of a dead mistress and a second mistress, their grown daughter, and her son—to Brazil. None of them want to leave their homes and lives in Japan, nor do they wish to lose their inheritance, which Nakajima is going through rapidly to realize his plan. A declaration of incompetence is their only option.

When Harada and his legal colleagues hear evidence from Nakajima, it’s hard to consider him incompetent. He has found a longtime Japanese émigré (Eijiro Tono) in Brazil who wishes to return to Japan, shown a film of the farm he will exchange for the factory to his family, and given a reason for his urgency that is hard for anyone to dispute at a basic level—aboveground testing of the hydrogen bomb is to commence at Bikini Atoll. Nakajima asks the court and his family whether they are afraid of the bomb. No one can deny that they are, but not enough to run for their lives. Besides, says Nakajima’s son Jiro (Mironu Kiaki), there is really no place to hide from the bomb since fallout is carried around the world on the wind. But when the elderly émigré farmer tells Nakajima he’d rather have a large parcel of land facing Mt. Fuji than a factory, Nakajima tries to gather money quickly anywhere he can to buy the land, forcing the court to declare him incompetent, an action that haunts Harada. Catastrophe is just around the corner for Mr. Nakajima and his well-meaning family.

Jung has several things to say about the obsessive condition Nakajima found himself in and the results of that obsession:

I recall a professor of philosophy who once consulted me about his cancer phobia. He suffered from a compulsive conviction that he had a malignant tumor, although nothing of the kind was ever found in dozens of X-ray pictures. ‘Oh, I know there is nothing,’ he would say, ‘but there might be something.’ What was it that produced this idea? It obviously came from a fear that was not instilled by conscious deliberation. The morbid thought suddenly overcame him, and it had a power of its own that he could not control.

Nakajima’s fear, though based upon a real, imminent event, intensified because of posttraumatic stress brought on by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. In a very affecting scene, Nakajima is visiting his mistress and infant grandson. Lightning from a storm sends bright flashes through the house. Nakajima, disoriented and acutely anxious, runs to the child and covers him with his body. The uncomfortable reactions of his family to his panic only add to his torment. Says Jung of his cancer-obsessed patient,

It was far more difficult for this educated man to make an admission of this kind than it would have been for a primitive to say that he was plagued by a ghost. The malign influence of evil spirits is at least an admissible hypothesis in a primitive culture, but it is a shattering experience for a civilized person to admit that his troubles are nothing more than a foolish prank of the imagination. The primitive phenomenon of obsession has not vanished; it is the same as ever. It is only interpreted in a different and more obnoxious way.

Indeed, the people in Nakajima’s life live in a kind of mass denial. Coming from an island nation with a growing population, the Japanese’s well-known xenophobia makes them resist accepting immigrants and fear aggressors who could cut off the means of their existence. This particular point is brought home subtly when the Nakajimas view the film from Brazil, seeing a parched land populated by blacks—a graphic depiction of Jung’s often-feared and misunderstood shadow.

The Japanese also live on volcanic islands subject to eruptions and earthquakes. Again, the shrewd scene of Nakajima and the elderly émigré standing on verdant land, with a beautiful view of Mt. Fuji in the background, offers the double-edged sword of denial—a denial, for example, anyone who lives on the fire-prone, mudslide-ridden, earthquake-threatened California coast can understand. Such denial is crazy-making for Nakajima, who knows his fear is not irrational. Jung cautions, “If the warnings of the dream are disregarded, real accidents may take their place.” Indeed, Kurosawa could be said to have issued a warning to the people of the earth through his cinematic dream.

Says Jung:

In our conscious life, we are exposed to all kinds of influences. Other people stimulate or depress us, events at the office or in our social life distract us. Such things seduce us into following ways that are unsuitable to our individuality. Whether or not we are aware of the effect they have on our consciousness, it is disturbed by and exposed to them almost without defense.

Alas, Nakajima’s inability to reconcile his fear with a rational calculation of the risks of remaining in Japan, or to convince his loved ones to share his fear, lead to a psychotic break. Desperation causes him to burn down his factory, hoping that if his family has no means of support, they will be forced to leave with him. In the end, he destroys himself, retreating into the delusion that he has been safely transported off the earth when he witnesses a rising sun from his cell in a mental hospital.

It is not possible to praise Mifune highly enough for the performance he gives. At first, he imbues Nakajima with the strong will and certainty of a traditional Asian patriarch, fanning himself obsessively in the heat of the courthouse, increasing the beats of his fan at a furious pace when his family challenges his decisions. His arguments in favor of his position are sound and his actions logically considered for the desired outcome. Yet, we are in the same difficult position the judges are—is it really likely that his family faces annihilation from the H-bomb testing and should he be allowed to uproot them and compromise their legacy and ability to earn a living based on fear of a remote outcome?

Nonetheless, our logic is forced to the back as Mifune pleads with the great love he bears his family to let him save them, to spare “that innocent life,” as he points to his infant grandson. His conviction is heart-rending, as is his genuine sorrow at the plight of his factory workers—when they ask him what will become of them now that the factory has been destroyed, he despairs only that he hadn’t planned a way to take them all to Brazil.

The great Takashi Shimura serves as the Doubting Thomas to our rational outlook. He digs below the surface into the irrational and wonders who is more sane—Nakajima or the rest of the world. The mushroom cloud, the newest symbol to enter our unconscious, exerts a potent force on him, as he finds he cannot dismiss Nakajima from his mind. In this sense, he, too, enters into this obsession sent from the irrational.

The film seems as though it should end when Harada and Nakajima view the rising sun, but it doesn’t. Kurosawa brings us back into the real world to consider the problem he has presented to us. As Harada slowly descends the stairs of the mental hospital after his visit, Nakajima’s illegitimate daughter, bearing her little boy, climbs up. They pass each other without recognition, as the implicit question about the future is left hanging in the stairway between sanity and madness. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

As some of you know, I decided to celebrate my 55th birthday by throwing a party at which I would show a film from the year of my birth—1955. My friends Mike Phillips and Julian Antos at the Bank of America Cinema opened the theatre to me and offered their projection services, and Julian and I went to work to secure The Ladykillers, an absolutely perfect comedy to give to my friends. After six months of searching, we could not lay hands on a print of the film. With only two weeks until the party, I approached the Chicago Film Archives and chose from their collection a film from 1950 that at least shared a star with The Ladykillers—Alec Guinness. I had already purchased the 1955 Daffy Duck cartoon Stork Naked, with an appropriate birth-related theme, to start the show, so I felt comfortable going a little outside the parameters I’d set for myself. While expecting more comedy than I got, I found in this underappreciated little gem a good lesson for living that accorded quite well with my time of life, a somewhat somber reminder to live each day as though it were your last.

The film opens in a clinic, with one Dr. Pevensey (Ronald Simpson) examining X-rays. George Bird’s (Guinness) brings a sad furrow to the doctor’s brow, and he calls George in from the crowded waiting room to tell him he has Lampington’s disease and that his life can be measured in mere weeks. George, deeply depressed by this diagnosis and made aware by the doctor’s questions about family that he’s quite alone in the world, leaves the clinic in a daze. He quits his job as a farm machinery salesman, even after his boss offers higher and higher wage increases to keep him—another reminder of how he’s been cheated not just of a long life, but in the life he’s been leading.

Not knowing what else to do with himself, George cashes in everything of value and empties his savings account, intending to take a suite at the best hotel in a posh English resort town and live the high life at the last. Before he leaves, he is waylaid by the owner of a second-hand store who has just acquired a load of Saville Row suits from an estate sale that he divines are a perfect fit for George. Thus outfitted like a swell, George is able to check into the Regal looking the part of a man of substance, even if he prefers drinking beer to wine or brandy.

From this point on, Last Holiday proceeds like a largely stagebound play that combines aspects of screenwriter J. B. Priestley’s own accusatory play of eerie “coincidences,” An Inspector Calls, and Grand Hotel (1932), based on a play by William A. Drake. Like Grand Hotel, Priestley populates his hotel with contrasting types—a crass, shady businessman and his wife with the “common” names of Joe and Daisy Clarence (Sid James and Jean Colin); an attractive, well-bred couple living beyond their means, Sheila and Derek Rockingham (Beatrice Campbell and Brian Worth); an elderly aristocrat, Lady Oswington (Muriel George), and her paid companion Miss Fox (Esma Cannon); a cabinet minister (Campbell Cotts) and his aide (Brian Colton); and Chalfont (Wilfrid Hyde-White), the inventor of one of the machines George has been selling. The Greek chorus of the play is Mrs. Poole (Kay Walsh), the head housekeeper who is a shrewd judge of character, correctly assessing George as a common man who is having a blowout—perhaps an inheritance from a rich aunt. She keeps him apprised of hotel intrigues and develops a motherly sort of crush on him.

As can only happen in a play, and especially one written by Priestley, George turns out to have the answers to the problems of most of the guests with whom he interacts. He is able to tell Chalfont about a design flaw in the plow he sells that the inventor can then work on resolving, thereby renewing his interest in his work. His ideas about boosting England’s agricultural industry lead to an offer of a government post from the cabinet minister. He gives the Rockinghams money to settle their debts and get back on their feet—money he won by being extraordinarily lucky in a poker game organized by Joe Clarence, a card sharp himself. George even has a fairly chaste flirtation with Sheila Rockingham, one she instigated to wheedle money out of him but that turns into genuine affection that gives the bachelor a taste of romance before the end.

The deus ex machina of the film is the arrival of Sir Trevor Lampington (Ernest Thesiger), who declares from one look at George that he does not have the disease Lampington discovered. From this point on, the film moves with a zeal that is positively bracing after the funereal tone and foreshadowings of death, such as the appearance of a hearse, that preceded it. Rather than only the “fiddler on the roof” lament of a street violinist (David McCallum) scoring the film, joyful orchestral flourishes accompany a rejuvenated George, who sees that the opportunities he has been turning down throughout the film are now there for the taking.

But Priestley sees the world rigged against the common man who doesn’t cheat like the Clarences to get above their station. Even given the chance to break free from Lady Oswington when George offers her money to start her own shop, Miss Fox turns back to her mistress. A strike by all the hotel workers gives the elite guests a chance to wait on themselves and make their own meals, which raises their spirits in being able to band together. Priestley may have wanted us to think they had a chance to learn empathy with the lower classes in this way, but I rather think they simply confirmed their own superiority—a suspicion made more real for me when they all turn on George at the end, snuggling back into their belief in the ascendancy of bloodlines and power.

And, yes, George is the ultimate casualty in the class war. He becomes something of a Christ figure by dying anyway. Strangely, I didn’t find the ebullient mood created in the final act of the film diminished by his death, so well does Guinness deliver a man who has made peace with himself and his lot. Indeed, Guinness upends the heavy-handed political agenda of Priestley by creating an indelibly real person in this, his first starring role. His George never really, truly becomes comfortable in his pose. When he first tries on the expensive suits, he looks at himself in the mirror in small disbelief at how well the suits fit. When he enters the hotel lobby, he looks awkward and perhaps only dimly aware that all eyes are on him, wondering who this mystery man can be. After all, there’s no somebody these somebodies don’t know.

Nonetheless, a dying man attains a certain freedom to speak his mind. When a friend of Chalfont’s, Sir Robert Kyle (Moultrie Kelsall), moves into the suite next to George’s and complains about the shoddiness of the alterations he ordered, George confronts him about the noise and berates him for blaming the workers who are doing their best with the inferior materials they’ve been given to work with. George tells Sheila to get away from Derek, whom he sizes up as a waste of space, something he certainly would have been too shy to do before. Given the chance to speak truth to power, he does, in a plain-spoken manner that loses its defensiveness as the film progresses.

Director Cass sets up some interesting shots, particularly one of the hotel guests turning on George when he fails to show up for the dinner they have cooked in his honor. Shooting through a glass door pane, their forms are separated from the viewer, smaller, and slightly distorted, a much more subtle commentary on their humanity than Priestley’s words achieve. And though the film is quite set-bound, aside from some walks in the garden, the film doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as it could have. Indeed, Guinness literally breathes fresh air into a stale, Victorian environment. A fine supporting cast, particularly Walsh and Helen Cherry, who plays the discreet and bemused front-desk clerk, flesh out this film and help make it a moving and enjoyable experience. l

By Roderick Heath

The Prisoner, an epochal surrealist-satiric thriller series, feels as much a commentary on the television show itself as it is on politics or society: the construction of a bogus living space that’s constantly filmed; the random-seeming changes of cast; the ongoing, enclosed situation that may have no discernable outcome; the unvarying efforts to create and force story and character arcs and spark behaviours with predetermined ends whilst mimicking the happenstance flow of life. Quite apart from the anticipation of the inane horrors of reality television, even the episodes that bend the boundaries of genre, transposing the essential plot into Western and comic book settings, reveals the often interchangeable elements of sausage-factory entertainment. Star and co-mastermind Patrick McGoohan was partly inspired by his own exhausting workload on his hit show Danger Man. He and key collaborators George Markstein and David Tomblin presented a perfect metaphor for the way television, cranked out day and night, with shows that either run impossibly long or get cancelled before they can logically and succinctly end, becomes a kind of ongoing existential nightmare.

The Prisoner wasn’t one of those shows of the kind I’ve mentioned above; at just 17 episodes, it describes a fascinating and relatively contiguous narrative back when that was still a rare idea. McGoohan sold the concept of The Prisoner to ITV boss Lew Grade after considerable wrangling over how long the series would be, and the final episode count sports some obvious filler episodes towards the end (not to say they aren’t entertaining anyway). Although it’s not a uniformly executed unit, the core concept, and the way the major elements are introduced and illustrated, possess energy unique and obvious more than 40 years later. I’ll try not to bore you with comments on how the show anticipated more recent creations like Lost, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Dennis Potter’s works and myriad other permutations throughout popular culture (though I think I just did); the list of influences could go on and on, especially on scifi movies since the early 1970s. And that’s not to mention a pitch-perfect episode of The Simpsons in 2000, when about 80% of the audience would have had no idea what all those gags about Number Six were referring to.

It’s taken me a long time to catch up with the series, and the experience was certainly tinged bittersweet in finally watching it over a year after McGoohan’s death. McGoohan had a terrific, compact force as a screen actor, and even as late as Braveheart (1995), it was delightful to watch him galvanise overblown claptrap into something like delicious melodrama. The Prisoner’s later episodes were affected by McGoohan’s work on the film Ice Station Zebra (1968), which is chiefly worth watching today for the spectacle of McGoohan giving Rock Hudson an acting lesson. Considering the deep involvement he had in The Prisoner, it is, in its way, testimony to a talent that never was quite fulfilled—but then again the compressed brilliance of the series with its unmistakeable tropes and intricately orchestrated ideas was a hard act to repeat. The atmosphere of The Village, a fake community with its false front of jollity, jaunty uniforms, omnipresent sloganeering and surveillance, and the roaming, shapeless, unnerving “Rover” security guards, is minutely conceived and indelibly portrayed.

The Prisoner accounts the experience of its unnamed protagonist when, having abruptly quit his post with a British government intelligence service, he’s gassed and awakens some time later in a room that looks like his own home, but proves to be a replica. He’s now in The Village, a locality that soon proves to be both a jail and a home for “people who know too much or too little,” where prisoners and Guardians are indistinguishable except for certain elite members, and everyone has a number, not a name. Coded as Number Six, the hero contends with a power system that is arranged to flatten all resistance, and quickly distinguishes the few genuine rebels from natural conformists. Although he, because of his nominal importance, is spared most of the worst methods on hand, Number Six is still subjected to a merciless and gruelling procession of manipulations, plots, and scientific procedures to crush his spirit and extract his reasons for resigning. The Village is located on a remote island, and escape is virtually impossible thanks to the Rovers, giant plastic balls that swallow up escapees. In each episode, Number Six faces off against Number Two, the supposedly elected administrator of the island, but the person in the post in constantly changing and answers to a mysterious Number One and the rest of their organisation.

The first episode, ‘Arrival,’ establishes most of the essentials with clarity and a surprisingly cinematic style, with the rapid, choppy editing and forceful, almost abstracting camerawork offering an expressive intensity TV still doesn’t offer much. The debut was put together by Don Chaffey, who had directed Jason and the Argonauts (1963) for Ray Harryhausen and worked on several Hammer films. The filmic, pop-art-infused look and structure of the series is just one of its stand-out qualities, and though some episodes dip close to the look and plotting of more average action series like The Saint, The Avengers, and Danger Man itself, that’s more the exception than the rule. The bewildering clash of textures that is The Village—the faux-Italianate architecture of the town centre, the seaside pleasantness of the neighbouring port with its mocking fake boat, and ultra-futuristic hidden abodes of the Guardians—establishes the matryoshka-like multiplicity of hidden truths. A serious question for Number Six is whose “side” runs The Village. Although clearly still conceived in the schismatic structures of the Cold War, the “sides” are kept purposefully vague, and soon enough, the notion that there are or soon will be no sides, that The Village is the future world in miniature, is introduced with relish by one of the Number Twos. A distinct pleasure of the show, over and above its Byzantine complications, is the impressive array of then-contemporary British acting talent, with the likes of Eric Portman, Leo McKern, Derren Nesbitt, George Baker, Guy Doleman, and Mary Morris popping up throughout, particularly in the Number Two spot.

It’s bordering on the obvious to say that although aspects of The Prisoner are certainly late-’60s modish, it looks even more relevant today than when it was made, now that Britain’s been turned into a giant CCTV playground, the spectacles of Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror’s renditions, and an increasingly high level of distracting gibberish infuses contemporary media and political sources. The dark heart of The Village’s purpose is glimpsed in brief, but telling vignettes when Number Six visits the hospital and sees people being subjected to therapies to make them compliant members of the society—methods that both take aim at quack psychiatric practises of the era, such as the aversion therapies being inflicted on homosexual people, and also anticipating today’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The image of the prisoners caught by a Rover, their faces distorted in terrified masks while being smothered by plastic, is a grotesque one. The show’s opening credits are ritualised in depicting Number Six’s kidnapping, turning his plight into an Oroborus-like experience of constantly awakening in the strange locale, his shout of “I am not a number, I am a free man!” met with the hilarity of whoever’s Number Two that week.

Whilst Number Six is supposedly being saved from the worst punishments of the operation, the cruelty that is part and parcel of The Village (underneath the smiling threat of the Number Twos and the stern, hysterical outrage of the citizens’ committees, and inherent in the various manipulations enforced on Number Six) is mind-boggling—at one point, in ‘Many Happy Returns,’ he’s allowed to escape the island temporarily as a mocking birthday present. And yet the series suggests many people put up with such sadisms every day and call it being a member of society. Not all the anticipations are negative: it’s hard to believe that modern internet-fuelled alternative culture wasn’t anticipated and indeed partly based on Number Six’s methods, and also those of his fellow prisoners. In ‘It’s Your Funeral,’ the villagers who are still resisting indulge in a game they call “jamming” (hence the ’90s fad for anarchic “culture jamming”?), feeding the authorities disinformation: “It’s one of the most important ways of fighting back!” declares one participant (Annette Andre). But their need to muddy the waters is then used by their enemies for their own ends.

Whilst Number Six is an empathetic hero, the notion that he’s not all the much different to his oppressors is repeatedly mooted. Thanks to McGoohan’s superlative, sustained performance, he’s cool, relentless, and aggressive, self-satisfied in his public schoolboy ideal of rugged individuality, seemingly as asocial outside The Village as in it. His private war with the world is only literalised when he’s put there, a notion that echoes when he finally escapes the island in the last episode, but with the world now taking on aspects of The Village. McGoohan’s extremely Catholic dislike of playing love scenes means the only time Number Six kisses a woman is when his mind’s been transferred into another body (that of Nigel Stock) and then it’s a fiancée (Zena Walker), daughter of his boss, who hadn’t been mentioned before; that aspect only reinforces the miasma of alienation that surrounds Number Six. In ‘Checkmate,’ Number Six puts together a cabal of resistors after developing a method to discern prisoners from jailers though their behaviour, only to have his escape plot foiled when his people turn on him because he acts more like a Guardian. In ‘Hammer Into Anvil,’ Number Six is at both his most righteous and most vicious: he uses the atmosphere of paranoia, distrust, and elusive truth for his own ends, when he sets out to destroy the current Number Two (Patrick Cargill) after he causes the suicide of a woman he’s interrogating, by faking evidence that suggests Number Two is being plotted against by his own side, reducing his quarry to a quivering, hysterical mental wreck.

There’s a tone of satire of macho values and more specifically the action-man ethos of a lot of ’60s pop culture (McGoohan and Markstein disagreed for years afterwards as to whether Number Six was Danger Man’s protagonist John Drake), with the fact that Number Six is physically indomitable—a champion boxer and fencer, he never loses a fight where he isn’t outnumbered five to one—and yet this usually does him no good at all. In ‘A Change of Mind,’ he’s relentlessly hounded precisely because he resists a couple of bullies, a touch that might remind a few of us of high school. Number Six’s great mental fitness usually serves him better in resisting all the attempts to subsume his personality and distort his sense of reality, whether they involve fooling him into thinking he’s an impostor created by the Guardians to take on the “real” Number Six, in ‘The Schizoid Man’; making him think he’s undergone a behaviour-controlling lobotomy, in ‘A Change of Mind’; or, most bizarrely, feeding him full of psychedelic drugs and making him play out a western scenario, in ‘Living in Harmony.’ The latter episode introduces a particularly good performance from Alexis Kanner as The Kid, a young subordinate of Number Two posing as a hotshot gunslinger, who’s driven mad by that pose and kills a woman and then himself—only to be resurrected later as the spirit of youthful, countercultural rebellion.

Some of the show’s metaphors were corny back then—the characters being likened to chess pawns in ‘Checkmate,’ Number Six sabotaging The Village’s controlling supercomputer project by asking it the illogical question, “Why?”—but many others are still potent. In the pungently funny satire ‘Free For All’ (an episode McGoohan wrote and directed), Number Six is encouraged by the current Number Two (Eric Portman) to run for his job in the annual elections because his reputation as an aggressive resister lends the vote an veneer of authenticity. What follows analyses the processing of authentic statesmen into regulation politicians, as The Village journalist replaces his initial lack of comment into standard political cliché before he’s then drugged and brainwashed into speaking mindless rhetoric to wildly enthusiastic crowds. He wins the election, but then the woman (Rachel Herbert) who’s been his assigned driver throughout the campaign and has spoken only in foreign gibberish and acted childishly slaps him silly and imperiously takes Number Two’s chair. In ‘The Chimes of Big Ben,’ Number Six enters an art contest where all the other artists, having succumbed to the cult of star-fucking, have all produced works that idolise the only celebrity about—Number Two.

McKern was the obvious choice to bring back for the final two episodes, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and ‘Fall Out,’ where the series takes a wild swing towards allegorical surrealism and doesn’t come back: ‘Fall Out’ was nominated for a Hugo Award, losing out to 2001: A Space Odyssey of all things. McKern’s Number Two is brought back to break Number Six at all costs, with the death of one of them certain. Number Two tries to deconstruct Number Six by devolving his mind back to childhood and leading him through his experiences, only to find that Number Six’s presumed asocialness is actually derived from his social values, and his individualism finally triumphs. But Number Two is revived, along with The Kid, as examples of failed rebellion to contrast Number Six, who’s presented to a bizarre cabal of masked people, each representing some segment of society, ready to accept him as ruler. But when he is ushered in to meet Number One, the head honcho proves to be a lunatic wearing a monkey mask, and the whole enterprise is a self-perpetuating delusion. The series resolves in a kind of hallucinatory anarchy close to that same year’s If…., as Number Six, Number Two, and The Kid machine-gun their captors to the strains of “All You Need is Love” and flee by a mysterious underground route directly into London. The technocratic world of the Guardians coalesces into a final vision of a madman blasting off into outer space, whilst the three rebels ride along the highway in a cage, dancing to “Dem Dry Bones.” It’s a finish that manages to be threatening and elating all at once, as close to genius as anything I’ve ever seen in television. l

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If ever a great director ended their career on a high, prototypical note, it was Luis Buñuel. I’ve always said that everything Buñuel was about as a filmmaker is in his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire. Among his many dreamscapes—from his early, surrealistic L’Âge d’Or to his mysterious, blasphemous Viridiana and kinky sex farce Belle de Jour—That Obscure Object of Desire must be seen as Buñuel’s ultimate dream, the final, clear telling of the story of his inner life. It recycles his trademark obsessions almost as jokes on himself and his fans and foretells that this will be the last time he and his anima will spar on camera.

We are barely into the film before Buñuel dispenses a couple of his trademark flourishes. Opening shots of Seville segue to a large home as its master, Mateo Fabert (Fernando Rey, Buñuel’s marvelously pompous alter ego in a number of films), walks through a red, upholstered door into an ornate bedroom and instructs his valet (Andre Weber) to burn a blood-stained pillow he is picking off the floor. “Burn it all!” he says in disgust, as the valet picks up and shows Buñuel’s favorite fetish objects—a pair of high-heeled shoes and a pair of lace panties.

Mateo has decided to leave for Paris, and climbs in his large American car to be driven to the train station. We see another man get into a chauffeur-driven car and a close-up of the car ignition. With one turn of the key, the car explodes in a ball of fire. “They’re even here,” Mateo says, in a “there goes the neighborhood” manner, of the terrorists who will plague the film. As he boards the first-class train carriage, it fills with people he knows—a neighbor (Milena Vukotic) traveling with her young daughter and a judge (Julien Bertheau) who is a friend of his cousin’s. Last into his car is a dwarf—a psychologist whom the judge knows from the courthouse, where he gives expert testimony. As Mateo looks out the window, he sees a woman (Carole Bouquet), black-eyed and forehead bandaged, striding along the platform looking into each carriage. We see him hand some money to a reluctant train porter, who goes into the toilet and emerges with a bucket. When the woman reaches Mateo, the object of her search, he dumps the full bucket of water on her head. She brushes at the water with disgust, throws her suitcase to the ground, and boards the nearest carriage. This act provokes the curiosity of Mateo’s carriagemates, and they listen with relish as he relates the story of “the worst woman on the earth.”

Mateo met Conchita when she was engaged to serve as his maid. She knew nothing about being a maid and had hands too delicate to have done serious housework. Smitten, Mateo made plans to seduce her that very night, but was politely rebuffed by Conchita (now played by Angela Molina). Upon arising the next day, he learns that the object of his desire has quit and left for parts unknown. He loses her and runs into her by chance a couple of times, first in a nightclub, where she is working as a coat checker, and later, in Lausanne, when he is robbed of exactly 800 francs by a couple of young men, and finds out Conchita was behind the robbery to get them only what they needed to buy train tickets back to Paris. He tells her to keep the money she tries to return and extracts her address in Paris, a humble flat on an ancient block of buildings that she shares with her religious, widowed mother, Encarnación (Maria Asquerino) who is too bourgeois and useless to work.

Mateo becomes their benefactor, and eventually the coy Conchita agrees to be his mistress in his rarely used home on the outskirts of Paris. Their encounter at his estate is a teasing comedy in which Conchita is disturbed by the photo of Mateo’s late wife in the bedroom they are to occupy and insists on another room. Once there, Conchita tantalizes Mateo by exposing her breasts, only to reveal that she is wearing a garment that amounts to a chastity belt. They take up residence in the villa, but Mateo catches her sneaking one of the young men with whom she was traveling into her bedroom. For the rest of the movie, Conchita will toy with Mateo, dancing naked for some tourists in a cabaret where she is employed, and wheedling the deed to a lavish home in Seville, only to lock him out, curse his very existence, and make love to a young man in the courtyard while Mateo watches briefly in fascinated horror.

And perhaps predictably, even after relating the entire story to his captive audience, he and Conchita disembark the train and go off together on a shopping spree. After viewing yet another Buñuel trademark, a seamstress sewing a rent in a lace garment Conchita has left with her (reminiscent of Arturo de Córdova’s character’s plan to sew his wife’s vagina closed to prevent her from straying in El), the pair walks off, only to be obscured by the smoke and debris of the explosion that ends the movie.

In his wonderful autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel writes at length about his lifelong fascination with dreams and imagination. That Obscure Object of Desire is, I believe, his most completely realized dream. Despite the resemblance to reality that is Mateo’s train journey, Buñuel has populated it with the ultimate dream cliché—a dwarf, who, humorously, is a psychiatrist trying to analyze Mateo’s experiences with Conchita—as well as people he knows in some way, as we all do in our dreams.

Buñuel, born in Spain, adopted France as his home and returned to work there in his last years after many years in Mexico, during which he became a Mexican citizen. The director actually has two mistresses—France and Spain—to which he feels affinity, if not fidelity, creating an unstable situation. But it seems to me that what he is really trying to do is to join harmoniously his male aspect and his female anima; this explains why he can’t just break with Conchita with resolute finality, for which of us can truly escape ourselves.

He doesn’t understand his female aspect. She is constantly changing, signified not only by the two actresses who share one role, but also by their different levels of refinement. Carole Bouquet, the face of the most chic couture house in the world, Chanel, is effortlessly beautiful, sophisticated, and importantly, French. Angela Molina is earthy, more brazenly sensual, and Spanish. The language Buñuel chooses for the film is French, but he dubs both actresses with a third one, confusing the issue even further. Buñuel dubs Rey with Michel Piccoli to bring perfection to Mateo, who is called Mathieu in many reviews and subtitling, though we can clearly hear Conchita call him Mateo. The duality of Buñuel’s expatriate status, therefore, also is acknowledged.

For once, Buñuel gives his antipathy toward the Catholic Church a bit of a rest, even though he ascribes most of the terrorist attacks to the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Again, this seems like an in-joke, a way to get one of his trademark themes out of the way so he can focus his attention on his main project of reconciling the duality in himself.

His anima entices him with words of love, pursues him when he rejects her, deceives and berates him, and tells him she doesn’t need his money and can’t be bought. When he calls her the worst woman on the earth, he is actually chiding himself, seeing the native intelligence, integrity, and mischief in himself in terms of his feminine aspect. Does he want to dominate her? Would he if she yielded to him? That, Buñuel seems to suggest, could never happen. The final scene—the closing of the symbolic vagina—leads to an explosion we can assume causes Conchita’s and Mateo’s annihilation. Perhaps this is Buñuel closing the book on his career and life, feeling that a final reconciliation of the anima and animus can come only in death—or at least, he won’t be making any more movies trying to work on the problem.

Otto Rank is one of the many psychologists whose theories come up frequently when looking at Buñuel (much to the director’s amusement, claiming his imagination was not a subject for psychoanalytic study). In looking at this Wikipedia passage about Rank, however, you don’t have to be Fellini, so to speak, to figure out Buñuel:

On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two “poles of fear” can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one’s uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires “seeking at once isolation and union” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, “originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life” (1932/1989, p. xxii).

That Obscure Object of Desire moves in a dreamlike way, its flashback structure encouraging the mixture of reality and imagination (as Buñuel said “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories”) that becomes a dream truth. The switching between Molina and Bouquet is confusing, disorienting, further plunging the viewer into the undersea world of the unconscious. That’s when the great director is most effective in weaving his magic, a truthful untruth we are seduced into following to its illogically logical conclusion. l