Some Came Running

Text and subtext in Eastwood's "Invictus"

So. Variety's Todd McCarthy and Newsweek's David Ansen have gone ahead and ignored a studio-imposed embargo and reviewed Clint Eastwood's Invictus, which opens in less than two weeks. This breach of etiquette—perpetrated by old-media types, who were supposed to be good for such courtesies, yet!—of course has much of the film blogosphere in a huff, and Jeffrey Wells has gone and posted something like four different sort-of considerations of Invictus in the wake of said breach. 

One of which is called "Leadership" and quotes the musings of some schmuck on The Huffington Post who has also said "feh" to the embargo and who "points out," as they say, some correspondences between the Nelson Mandela administration ins South Africa and that of...wait for it...Barack Obama in the United States. I will not linger long on this schmuck's magnificent two-handed grasp of both the spurious and the obvious. I only point this out to note that these musings move Wells to reproduce two bits of the Invictus script, by Anthony Peckham. One has a Mandela aide chiding him for "risking political capital," on account of rugby, yet. Mandela replies: "The day I am afraid to do that is the day I am no longer fit to lead." Another script swatch has Mandela declaring, "[I]n this instance the people are wrong. And it is my job as their elected reader to make them see that."

These little bites inspire a Wells commenter who dubs himself "Arturobandini2" to sputter: "Jesus, is that dialogue actually in the movie? That's a much worse indicator of quality than any review that's slipped out. Screenwriting 101 teaches you that subtext is NEVER EVER spelled out in the dialogue." 

Well, first, as it happens, yes, that dialogue is actually in the movie, and it plays fine, thank you. Just one more reason why you should never review a picture according to its script. Second, fuck "Screenwriting 101." It's one reason why so very many movies are so very bad. Thirdly, it ain't subtext. It's text. One of the reasons I admire Invictus so much is that it's really not a "sports movie." Indeed, up until the very final match, the rugby stuff here is treated largely as an afterthought; there's no will-they-make-it? fakery or pumping up of suspense. Invictus is a movie about political leadership, about the semiotics of sport and its relation to patriotism/national identity, and about the very canny benign manipulations of several men who understand how one step to some kind of real national unity can be achieved via a sports spectacle. It is absolutely correct for the character of Mandela to be an almost meticulously self-conscious leader, given his unprecedentedness as the head of South Africa's government, and the fact that he had grown into a figure of near-mythical stature well before he took that position. So the considerations that Peckham has his Mandela character overtly articulating are entirely apt. We understand what Mandela has in mind, and part of the joy of the film is watching it come together. The subtext, which is not explicitly spelled out deals with exactly why Mandela chooses to embrace this rugby team that dresses itself in the colors of the apartheid flag. And that's dealt with quite beautifully and movingly by Eastwood and lead actors Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, both of whom are outstanding. 

Okay, back to honoring that embargo. Although, as with last year's Gran Torino, part of me wants to save my further thoughts on this picture for after the opening, the better to hash it all out with you. 

"The heavenly electricity:" Douglas Sirk's "Summer Storm" (1944)

This, recently released on DVD, really is a must-see, a terrific piece of cinematic storytelling and a key early Hollywood work from the great Sirk. Dave Kehr gave it a nice write-up in the Times last Sunday, but I was so thoroughly impressed when I sat down to watch it that I began thinking that Dave's praise was curiously faint. I don't think it actually was, mind you, merely describing my own strong response to the movie. As Dave says on his website, the DVD transfer, from VCI, is merely passable—the screen caps here show its softness—but passable is good enough for the film to put itself over, and what the picture has to put over is very special.

One of those things is, I think, what could be George Sanders' very best performance, as Petroff, a respected judge in pre-revolutionary Russia who falls very hard—and he's hardly the only one—for grasping peasant beauty Olga. He's at once the embodiment of civilized ideals and a kind of species of rot—exactly the sort of contradictory character that Anton Chekhov excelled at creating. Of course, Chekhov's The Shooting Party, on which this picture was based, was written and set further back in Russia's history than when this film is set; the adaptation, by Rowland Leigh, is a smart one and the time shift is hardly inapt. In any event, Sanders' Petroff is pitched at perfect levels of both self-regard and self-loathing, but never approaches the arch; it's a thoroughly considered piece of work. As is that of Edward Everett Horton, playing a rather buffoonish Count Volsky, aka "Piggy" (see Gentleman Prefer Blondes, almost ten years later), and reaching emotional depths that his bountiful comic performances never even glanced at. (According to the book Sirk on Sirk, Horton proclaimed the part as the best he ever had, and Sirk the best director he ever worked with.)

The whole cast is so superb that after a few minutes or so no one cares that everybody in the picture, down to Sig Ruman and Hugo Haas, is speaking in a different accent; Sirk locks down the tone so deftly that Hollywood convention becomes its own law here and you just go with it. It seems particularly right that Linda Darnell plays Olga pretty much as a vulgar young American would-be starlet, pouting and saying things like "Huh?" and such. But make no mistake, the film does not disdain her; it rather sees her as a kid who's just trying to get somewhere, and using what she's got to make it happen. She's rather moving in several scenes, especially one when she talks about her fear of lightning and her belief that everyone who dies as a result of "the heavenly electricity" is automatically sent to paradise. I should not forget Anna Lee, as a spurned fianceé, who is nicely understated in her decency and sports a distinct resemblance to Diane Keaton in her final scenes in the film.

Dave Kehr rightly notes that the film, a relatively low-budget production for the time, "does not display the baroque stylistics of the Technicolor melodramas Sirk later made for Universal," and that's true. What it does display is Sirk's storytelling economy and his highly developed sense of emotional nuance. This is not a picture with a lot of camera movements, but as Spencer Tracy said in Pat and Mike, what's there is "cherce." Particularly in the scene of the wedding banquet, after Olga willfully marries the overseer of Volsky's estate, in which a couple of deft sweeps over and around the table limn the very pronounced class distinctions of the various guests.

Oh, and did I mention Linda Darnell is in it? I did? Okay. Still. 

 

As they say...what the fuck is up?

Also, the film's punchline is absolutely devastating and quite elegantly phrased. Do not miss this. 

"The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans"

Don't let the juxtaposition of Nicolas Cage and the Virgin Mary seen above fool you: this loose remake of Abel Ferrara's raw 1992 masterpiece doesn't have anything like the spiritual dimension of the first film. If anything, The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans is an almost-perfect representation of the old Marx gloss on Hegel, the one where history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce. For all of its strengths and weaknesses, Werner Herzog's movie, from a script by William M. Finkelstein, is best appreciated as a comedy.

As befits Herzog, it's a behavioral comedy, one that comes up with a novel answer in just about every scene to the question, "Well, how bad is he?" After injuring his back in an accident of compassion, Cage's once-good cop Terence McDonagh winds up addicted to pretty much every narcotics substance on the planet. As he snorts and pops his way through the investigation of a particularly grisly drug-related mass murder, the film plays a game of "Can You Top This?" as its actual plot line coalesces in a desultory fashion. (Despite his penchant for "adventure" movies, Herzog has always been more about creating galvanic effects/atmospheres than in orchestrating breathtaking narrative momentum.) Is McDonagh really going to threaten to shoot that drugstore security guard? Rip off coke from his call-girl girlfriend's client in the middle of a date? Shake down that fearsome drug kingpin he once had a hard-on to see behind bars? Use the word "nigga" in the presence of said drug kingpin and his intimidating cohort, African-Americans all? Yes, yes, yes, and aw-no-you-dint-hells-yeah, as they say.

The reports are quite accurate as to Cage's "going there" for all this, but this performance is a piece of virtuosic slapstick rather than the exhibition (exhibitionism?) of raw-nerve emotional torment that Harvey Keitel essayed in Ferrara's film. If you're not in on the joke by the time Cage's character gets the run of the property room from whence he filches a lot of his dope, whereupon his eyes go wider than Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu did at the sight of Jonathan Harker's blood, then you'll never get it.  The original Bad Lieutenant is a genuinely agonized religious parable about the nature of forgiveness and redemption. This is a far more cynical exercise that practically trips over itself laughing at the deliberately cheap ironies it proffers in its final 20 minutes. If I was Abel Ferrara, I'd be pissed off too.

But as I'm not Abel, I can recommend this as a divertingly crazed romp that will resonate particularly well with fans of Cage the eccentric performer rather than Cage the action blockbuster cardboard cutout, or Cage the money manager for that matter.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #5: "The Prowler," directed by Joseph Losey

Last week's installment, including links to previous weeks, here.

Farber: "A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, out of Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands."

This too-little-seen picture still packs something like a scorpion's sting—for all the sensationalism of its content, it's too nuanced overall to wallop the viewer. The setting is not just "suburbia;" it's Los Angeles' suburbia, which is one reason the picture struck such a resonant chord with crime novelist James Ellroy, who calls this "a masterpiece of sexual creepiness, institutional corruption and suffocating, ugly passion." Indeed. What weird power the film retains; that creepiness seems to practically ooze out of the cuts, leaving a weirdly metallic psychic residue, and some might note that it is remarkable that Losey achieved such mastery of this unique tone with just his third feature. 

Farber's typically idiosyncratic listing of its highlights is also typically on the money. "Athletic nostalgia?" Well, yes, it's reflected in the creepy narcissism of Heflin's character, a one-time football hero who's now a cop and who spends his off-hours in a shabby single room with his firing-range souvenir and a bunch of muscle magazines. 

And there he shaves himself in grim, weird satisfaction, waiting from the call he just knows is gonna come from Keyes' aforementioned dumb, hot, average American babe. For the film's first half, their assignations are at the big hacienda-style house her husband bought for the couple—the house she stays cooped up in every night, listening to said husband's radio show, while Heflin's cop moves in more and more bluntly. When he really clinches the deal, Losey's camera pans to this image of Heflin's police hat sitting atop the radio and the Hi-Fi housing briefcase on which Hubby listens to acetates of his own show—a pithy and distasteful visual metaphor of the sort that Losey would continue to hone throughout his career.

Late in the film, the couple are forced to live as outcasts from civilization, and their dancing takes on a more surreal tinge. It's bizarre, for sure, but nothing in The Prowler ever feels forced; the script, partially by an uncredited Dalton Trumbo, sneaks in a convincing rationale for their ghost-town exile early on. It's a marvelous construction all around. Farber mentions "the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well," and Losey, in Tom Milne's book-length interview, mentions that he and production designer John Hubley "spent a good deal of time trying to find the right sort of horror for the Spanish house...[and] reducing and particularizing the horror." 

 

The director credits the producer Sam Spiegel—here credited under his frequent pseudonym "S.P. Eagle"—with giving him both the means and latitude to take the proper pains with the picture. "[He] was a marvelous producer. His attitude was, 'You're right for this, but you're not very experienced. I'll give you the best cameraman in Hollywood, the best technicians, the best first assistant. I don't care what I pay, and you do it any way you want to.' This was extraordinary." The proof is in the credits: the DP was Arthur Miller (How Green Was My Valley), the production designer Boris Leven, the assistant director Robert Aldrich. According to biographer David Caute, this was the Hollywood film of which Losey was most proud. 

It is also the first film in which the theme that would help establish his auteur status resonates so cleanly. "The feminine role in Losey's world is strictly subordinate because of the histrionic hysteria of his actors," Andrew Sarris notes in his entry on Losey in The American Cinema. "Men simply cannot cope with their lives and social institutions, and they crack up with very lyrical results."  Yes. In several respects Heflin's Webb Garwood, who seems to have been cracking up before he has even been introduced to the viewer, is a direct antecedent to Stanley Baker's ruinous Tyvian Jones in Losey's 1962's Eve. To name just one other fragile/brittle male Losey creation.

This is a remarkably rich film on so many levels; hence, it pains me to report it's not yet available on commercial DVD. I owe my latest viewing of it to the kindness of a collector. Varied rumors abound on the interet about the wherefores of its status, but nothing to indicate an imminent release. One hopes this situation changes soon. 

"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

One of the consolations of art is that it can be used to remake the world, up to a point. And this consolation applies as much to the artist doing the remaking as it might to the consumer of the resultant art product. "Wes Anderson fans will note that Mr. Fox's wardrobe bears an uncanny resemblance to the suits the director wore during his clipped haircut/pre contact-lens phase," my friend Kent Jones says in his terrific Film Comment cover essay on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson's new film, a stop-motion animated adaptation of a Roald Dahl wryly-funny-animal tale. I imagine it must have been fun for Anderson to reinvent a former self of his as a snappy, clever, fun-loving semi-rogue who's also an idiosyncratic, self-appointed savior to his community. Just as I imagine it had to have been at least a bit sadly self-knowing of him to give the obsessive, self-deluding, heartbroken, and finally suicidal Richie Tenenbaum that camel-hair jacket. 

Both God and the devil are in the details, and art can grow more consoling and transporting the more richly detailed it is. I spoke with Kent about the film a little after he first saw it, which was a few weeks before I did; he said, "It's completely a Wes Anderson movie," and thinking about the source material and the medium I wondered how it could be, but of course it absolutely is, for how could it not be. And part of what makes in completely an Anderson movie is its attention to detail. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Fox's hands in the shot above, the little claws. The terribly, terribly odd painting on the wall. The acorns on the wallpaper. Yes, I know, every production designer worth his or her salt is going to be this invested in detail, but it's the character of the detail I'm talking about. The way the lampshade is askew. The intimation of terror in the painting. 

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #4: 'The Thing From Another World," directed (it is said) by Christian Nyby

Previous installments here, here, and here.

Farber: "Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie directed by Christian Nyby; fast, crisp and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine, unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks' Scarface, about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves."

Those plants are still pretty unsettling.

I presume that this film needs no introduction. And I'm hardly the first person to note what an exhilaration it is to go through Farber on Film and read his smart, plain, piety-free analyses of future classics—stuff that became the building blocks not just of auteurism but of film studies in general. And stuff that's still crisp and enjoyable. The Thing From Another World remains one of the most engaging and watchable pictures of its kind. A lot of it has to do with the atmosphere. While Hawks is credited only as producer here, and never attempted to wrest any credit from director Nyby in interviews, that atmosphere has Hawks' stamp all over it. There are stretches here that make this, like the previously discussed His Kind of Woman, something of a great "hangout picture." The weather outside may be frightful at the Arctic outpost where most of the picture takes place, but inside there's cards and booze and banter (the sharp jabbering Farber evokes) and a very warm stove. The group dynamic remains pretty cozy even as the tension generated by the film's murderous alien visitor ratchets up. (It's interesting to that when Hawks idolizer John Carpenter essayed his own version of this story, that warmth was pretty much sucked out of the scenario straight away.)

One might expect that the one-girl-for-every-ten-or-so-boys ratio at the camp might generate some discontent, but no. The primary male-female relationship in the picture is between Tobey's Captain Hendry (as superb as Farber says) and Margaret Sheridan's Nikki, secretary to science crew chief Dr. Carrington. Their flirtation leads to the above bit, really a legendary episode in the Hawksian saga of the battle of the sexes, in which Nikki tries to elude Hendry's wandering hands by tying them behind his back before making cocktails for two. The open secret that is this relationship does little more than elicit some good-natured ribbing of Hendry from his men. 

 

What splits the group up is...ideoogy. "The central conflict in The Thing is not between humanity and a destructive invader, but between two opposed concepts of value embodied in the two opposed groups whose clash the Thing precipitates." But by the picture's end it's Hendry's tough-minded pragmatism that wins the day and reunites the group, with only head scientist Carrington still insisting that there's too much to learn from the Thing to allow its destruction. His final pleading with the brutish being really makes him look like one of the cinema's Great Simps, but the film sorta/kinda forgives him—key line: "Good for you, Scotty."

 

This is all quite fascinating, and kudos to Charles Lederer's tight, unobtrusively smart script for evoking pretty complex philosophical/existential dilemmas so deftly. The sensationalism of the "frying" of the Thing at the end tends to make one forget about all the intellectual stuff (the special effects are simplicity itself, and yet it's still a striking, one-of-a-kind sequence). But don't forget that the film ends not on a note of triumphalism but with an admonition: "Keep watching the skies!" No, not exactly "progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness." (Jeez, can you imagine what a Mark Steyn could come up with if somebody reminded him of this film's existence?)

 

In the "You Know You're Old When..." department, you know you're old when you watch this film and you look at the guy above left and the phrase "Say the secret word" pops into your head. DIscuss in comments. The guy above right, by the way, is Paul Frees—second week in a row he's turned up in this Farber series!

The picture's available, for a ridiculously low price, in a good-looking but extras-free DVD from Warner. 

Images of the day, 11/4/09

From the furious climax of Don Siegel's spectacular 1958 The Lineup, one of the crown jewels of Sony's new and very welcome Film Noir Classics I set. The getaway car taking an exit ramp to nowhere and narrowly missing a fatal drop is classic Siegel: a fantastic thrill generator first and foremost, and also a fantastic visual metaphor that the director knows just how far to push.

The Lineup, written by Sterling Silliphant, is an odd, tetchy, tingly little beast without a single ingratiating character within miles. The first section sees a couple of San Francisco cops dourly investigating the death of one of their own. These two characters, played by the sleekly officious Warner Anderson and a lumbering, oafish Emile Meyer, are clearly not officers you want to get on the wrong side of, even a little bit. About a half-hour through the picture shifts focus to a couple of hired criminals out to retrieve a shipment of drugs that was stashed in items held by various tourists on a trans-Pacific cruise. The tricky part is that the tourists are unknowing mules. 

These two guys, the loose-cannon psycho Julian Dancer (an electric Eli Wallach) and his dourly avuncular keeper Julian (a pathetically poignant Robert Keith) are among the most memorable hoods in movie history, and SIegel's camera just eats up their every interaction and individual tic. The picture's boiling point happens when Dancer feels compelled to abduct a single mom and her little girl. 

Anyway, if you haven't seen it, it's an absolute must, a cinematic daredevil act leaping from one giddily charged moment to another. Amidst all the thrills, there's a  distinctly intellectual vibe that creeps into the movie, particularly when Wallach's Dancer negotiates with a wheelchair-bound fellow known as "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor, Janet Leigh's fussbudget boss in Psycho, here cast brilliantly against type as something like a human icepick).

 

There's an almost, dare I say it, Sartre-esque feel to the way fate is doled out in this scene. Spooky, and practically edifying!

The presentation also features a commentary in which the sober film noir expert Eddie Mueller attempts to rein in crime novelist James Ellroy, who sounds as if a) he's hopped up on what they used to call goofballs, and b) would like to come off like one of the more offensively non-PC characters who populate his novels. When Mueller can sit on Ellroy a little bit, they both strut their erudition most impressively, but it's when Ellroy can't be contained that this feature is most entertaining. Although you're likely to be grateful that the guy's only talking to you from your home theater and not actually in the same room with you. I just started on Ellroy's American Tabloid trilogy, and I must say, when he's cooking the writer pretty much defines the term "compulsively readable."

I want to delve in to the Sony set a little more soon, but right now I'm obliged to contrast the coming-to-American-screens soon one-part version of John Woo's Red Cliff with the sprawling Chinese two-parter. Which I may talk about at The Auteurs' next week. 

The Mabuse hour...

Over at The Auteurs', some reflections on one of the biggest DVD events of the year: Eureka!/Masters of Cinema's epic boxset of all of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. A spectacular achievement, just a top-notch presentation of timeless, ever-galvanic cinema. The ornate clock above is from the first film of the series, the nearly-five-hour Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, as mind-blowing an epic at the 1920s ever produced. More images, and more of my jabbering, in today's Foreign Region DVD Report. 

UPDATE: My friend Ed Hulse asks in comments whether the Eureka!/MOC disc of Spieler represents an improvement over the 2006 domestic Kino release. I say yes, and provide competing screen caps below the fold.

Bearded in his own den

Here's Dominique Thomas and Ella Creton in Catherine Breillat's imaginative, provocative, shocking, and hilarious adaptation of Perrault's fairy tale, Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard). I caught it at the New York Film Festival and think it a stone masterpiece, a film Breillat was absolutely born to make. (I remember the producer Jeremy Thomas once asking me, "Don't you want to see David Cronenberg make a film of Ballard's Crash?" and replying, "Oh yes, please;" I can imagine giving a similar response had someone asked me about wanting to see a Breillat Bluebeard. Sometimes dreams DO come true!) The picture's being released in the U.S. by Strand some time next year, the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. I spoke with Breillat, always one of my favorite interview subjects, about the film when she was in New York earlier this month, and she was fascinating and fierce as always. Here is the interview, courtesy of The Auteurs'.

Image of the day, 10/29/09 (Special "Well, THAT isn't very nice" Edition)

A ballsy Georges Marchal gives his greetings to the local authorities in Death in the Garden, a 1956 Luis Buñuel oddity from right before his second great period. Why oddity? It's a French-Mexican coproduction shot in Mexico, from a French-language script in part by the great Raymond Queneau. Not a great favorite of the maestro's: "The production was torture," he tells De La Colina and Turrent in the indispensible interview book Objects of Desire, and then he elaborates. I haven't been able to watch this in its entirety yet, and I'll have more to say about it when I do; in the meantime, I sure do get a kick out of this shot.