Some Came Running

"Cinema Speculation," by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino is above all else an entertainer, so one expects his “first work of non-fiction,” per the jacket copy, to be entertaining. And so it is. Brash and uninhibitedly opinionated, written in a conversational style that’s hard to pull off successfully (and indeed he often doesn’t do that, but he does do it often enough that you stay with him through the awkwardness), Cinema Speculation, which mostly focuses on Hollywood pictures (and picture-makers) Tarantino discovered in his unusual youth, serves up vivid reading for hours on end.

Tarantino is also, like many of us, subject to market forces. And while I’d never argue that Cinema Speculation isn’t exactly the book he wanted to write (for better or worse), this reader was mildly let down at how frequently he was told something he already knew, at least in terms of subject and theme. The Tarantino I have gotten the biggest kick out of reading — and the one I’ve learned the most from, because frankly, the guy has seen and absorbed a good deal more cinema than I have — is the one who would speak at length to Tim Lucas about his “50 Best Sequels,” which he did in issue 172 (Jan.-Feb. 2013) of Video Watchdog. You know that bit in “Who Put The Bomp?” when Barry Mann sings “who was that man? / I’d like to shake his hand?” I feel that way about Tarantino just for introducing me to the spectacularly perverse Amityville II: The Possession. Tarantino’s appreciation for the minutiae of underappreciated cinema is frequently (not always) matched by remarkable insight into the material — and he can also make convincing arguments as to why it’s good. As to whether the chauvinism that often accompanies his stated allegiances is justified, or ought to be tolerated (what are you gonna do if you don’t wanna tolerate it?), I don’t much care. I’m just always grateful to have new places to go digging.

But this book wasn’t written by that Tarantino. (It contains maybe one reference to William Witney?) I think that may be because, like so many of us, Tarantino is obliged to cooperate with the market, and I suspect that his editors at Harper (which is part of the company where my own publisher, Hanover Square Press, also resides), felt that a book which interwove memoir with considerations of pictures starring the likes of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and directed by the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader might have more commercial potential. And that’s what we have here.

The book is a lot of fun for several reasons. First, for better or worse, Tarantino seems to have almost effortless access to his six-year-old self, stretching all the way to his sixteen-or-so-year-old self. His recollections of the movies he saw, where he saw them, his own often uncomprehending reactions to them, and the audience’s reactions to them, are not often exactly charming, but they are compelling and credible. And his raw impressions form childhood meld almost seamlessly into his, let’s call it adult analysis of the pictures. For as much as he is eager to project an image of cool (look at him glowering in his author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket!) Tarantino’s personality has an awkward side — it’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s an insecurity and vulnerability that’s pretty common among (for lack of a better term) “film nerds,” particularly in their adolescence. It’s a social liability that also renders them unusually sensitive. Tarantino, here and elsewhere, hides this with his bluster (in this book, a lot of things he doesn’t like really “suck,” and so on) but he’s also remarkably up front about what moves him.

Which is not to say that I recommend this book because it’ll provide a skeleton key to Tarantino’s personality. As if anyone really needs one. No, it’s because when he combines the film nerd with the wannabe critic and blends in the working director he still is today, he comes up with some really valuable insight. And the insider stuff he gets from the likes of Niele McQueen, Walter Hill, John Flynn and other film folk is fantastic, always, cutting through the mythology so many of us critics can’t help but try to construct about how Hollywood films get (got?) made and why.

When he argues that Taxi Driver would not have gone into production had not Death Wish made a fortune, he’s applying good critical observation combined with his own experience as a professional filmmaker whose fate often rests in the hands of those marketers I mentioned earlier. They’re everywhere.

He’s also exceptionally good about conveying Ye Olde Direct Experience of Moviemaking. In his chapter on Taxi Driver, he recalls himself, age 15, viewing the film for the first time in 1977, on a double bill with a far less distinguished “Revengeamatic” called The Farmer, with an almost all-Black audience in Scottsdale:

For the film’s first half — to us, the audience in the Carson Twin Cinema — it was a comedy about a stupid idiot who’s turning into more and more of a nutter as the story goes on.

I doubt during its Grand Palais screening at the Cannes Film Festival Taxi Driver induced as many laughs as it did that Saturday afternoon. But in a way, the black audience laughing at Travis Bickle’s antics in Taxi Driver wasn’t that different from that hip Sunset Strip (mostly) white audience at the Tiffany laughing at Peter Boyle’s Joe.

Then the moment happened that made the whole theater burst into hysterics. That one guy walking down the street, ranting and raving that he’s going to kill his woman (“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill that bitch!”). We laughed so hard at that guy, we were a little disconnected from the movie for the next twenty minutes. Because we kept cracking each other up about it. That guy was so funny, we had to make ourselves stop laughing.

What was it about the I’ll kill that bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everybody in the theater had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

Reading that passage I rather wish that Tarantino had worked with a stronger editor; the writing’s a little lumpy. But what he gets to here is really important, and really not talked about enough in film writing: how audiences respond and why. Who knows. Maybe they just don’t anymore. When we mourn the potential passing of the theatrical experience, we should also be thinking about the decline of the neighborhood theater, and the weird ways that movies could move us in specific environments. Tarantino doesn’t play his experiences with Black audiences for exotic appeal as, say, Harlan Ellison might have (and I probably have). He considers the responses for what they were: honest. This becomes particularly clear in the book’s final chapter, a homage to a nomadic adult Black friend, Floyd, that details the guy’s aesthetic with sober, admiring clarity.

I found myself agreeing with him a lot — about John Flynn’s The Outfit, which he’s completely right about (“except for the freeze-frame at the end,” I thought to myself, and then I watched the ending again and thought, “Nah, he’s right about that too”), about Dirty Harry, you know, that sorta thing. He’s really weird about Boorman’s Point Blank, and I don’t think he makes his case against it, as I don’t think he makes his case for Deliverance going “slack.” But I decline to speculate about just why he feels like dumping on Boorman so much. I mentioned his bluster before — I was startled at times about how blunt and brash he can be. He’s not at all afraid of potentially ticking off filmmakers one infers that he’s been friendly with in the past. “De Palma would fall on his face and never really get back up again after fucking up Tom Wolfe” is a weird thing to say, given De Palma then went on to make Raising Cain, Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale (maybe the ultimate De Palma film in my opinion) and Mission Impossible.

By the same token, he’s not always as perversely contrarian as you might expect him to be — he actually calls Clint Eastwood’s chimp movie Every Which Way But Loose “abysmal.” Eyebrows will raise at his generous praise of Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley, not by me, though, because I haven’t seen it. Although now I intend to. Partially because he ties its inspiration to the East Side Kids movies. Partially because he ties its setting to that of a Raoul Walsh ‘50s picture, Glory Alley, that I also haven’t seen.  Also because Tarantino’s writing on Stallone strongly suggests that the thing he values most as a filmgoer and a filmmaker is surprise: “Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise. The unknown guy in the lead, how emotional the film ended up being, that incredibly stirring score by Bill Conti, and one of the most dynamic climaxes most of us had ever experienced in a cinema.” Arguably he’s a little overheated when he writes “dare I say Stallone is the best director Stallone has ever worked with.” A very cursory look at Stallone’s filmography might make you tilt your head a bit — Luis Llosa and Bruce Malmuth are not terribly distinguished names — but as you dig deeper you think, wait, what about…Ted Kotcheff? John Landis? And then you’re like, OKAY, what about John Huston? Woody Allen? PAUL BARTEL? The formulation might work if he means Stallone is the best director for Stallone. But even so. The idea is finally just kind of funny. And it's in keeping with the fact that his internal logic relative to the cinema he grew up with is packed with contradictions that will never, and probably ought never, be resolved.

The book can frustrate in different ways. In a chapter about Schrader’s Hardcore, looking at its opening scenes, he writes, “When we first meet sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Kristen at a Grand Rapids Christmas church party, she looks like a runaway even in her own home.” That’s great. He continues: “One look at her and you can tell she’s either going to be a junkie, a child prostitute, or a suicide victim.” Okay, show your work. A little later, he almost does, revealing that Schrader recruited the sallow-looking actress who plays Kristen, Ilah Davis, from the world of porn. And the volume has its share of redundancies and typos, which, given my own experience, I’m not inclined to get all that huffy about. (Although mixing up “imply” and “infer,” as he does in the chapter about The Getaway, is kind of shocking given how much us pedants go on about it all the time.) (And since I first posted, a correspondent has pointed out a genuinely mortifying Richard/Robert Mulligan mix-up that I didn't catch.)

Two more things: the “no-white-pimps” bit introduced in the Taxi Driver chapter has a fantastic punchline in the Hardcore chapter. And I kind of agree with him about Willy Best in The Ghost Breakers — the character he plays in the film, because he’s going up against Bob Hope at his most craven, functions as a sort of existential coeval, and their work together becomes a not-quite neutral but definitely not-as-unpalatable-as-it-might-have-been dance of comedic stylings.

Buñuel's least favorite Buñuel: "La fievre monte a El Pao"

Gérard Philipe and  Maria Félix in Fievre.

Myself and others have not infrequently had the occasion to quote Luis Buñuel’s reflection on his career as a filmmaker, to the effect that, while he’d often been obliged to work with scanty budgets and subjects that he didn’t find aesthetically congenial, he’d never put on film something that contradicted his morality. For instance, in my New York Times’ review of Ingmar Bergman’s rarely seen This Can’t Happen Here — a 1950 anti-Communist propaganda narrative that Bergman very soon came to see as a bad move — I kicked off with what I thought was the Buñuel quote: “I never made a single scene that contradicted my convictions or my morality.”

Trying to track down the quote recently, what I found was a slightly different pronouncement. Which is from a 1964 interview with Wilfried Berghahn, for the German film magazine Filmkritik, and it goes like this: “It is quite true that in the beginning, caught up by necessity, I was forced to make cheap films. But I never made a film which went against my conscience or convictions.” In the excerpt from the quote as cited on the site cranes are flying, Buñuel continues: “I have never made a superficial, uninteresting film.”

But in his conversations with the Mexican film critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in 1974 through 1975, collected in the invaluable book Objects of Desire: Conversations With Luis Buñuel, he reveals some considerable misgivings about 1959’s La fievre monte a El Pao. Turrent says, “It doesn’t seem like you have very good memories of La fievre monte a El Pao.” Buñuel responds: “No, and neither did Gérard Philipe. It’s the last film he acted in. One day during filming we dropped our masks. ‘Why did you agree to make this film?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And you?’ ‘I don’t know either,’ I told him.”

I’m not familiar with the situation in today’s France, but here in the States, French film star Gerard Philipe is barely remembered, in part because his career did not even span two decades. He died in 1960, at age 37, not too long after completing Fievre. But prior to that the delicately handsome actor was something of a matinee idol in his country.  His greatest cinephile hits include Ophuls’ 1950 La Ronde and Vadim’s 1959 Les Liaisons Dangereuses; he also made pictures with Allegret, Becker, Clair, Guitry, and Autant-Lara, the latter if I recall correctly something of a bete noir for the anti-Cinema du Papa agitators of Cahiers du Cinema. (Godard called Autant-Lara’s 1947 Devil in the Flesh, starring Philipe, “miserable,” so there’s that.)

Buñuel explains why he agreed to make the film with customary bluntness: “My agent proposed it from Paris. A certain producer wanted to make a film with me and came to see me in Mexico. The truth is that it didn’t interest me much, and I accepted it only because at the time I took everything offered to me, as long as it wasn’t humiliating, because I didn’t have any money and lived day to day. I think my lack of interest is apparent. It turned out to be a very routine film, made to get out of my financial predicament.”

While one can’t quite call Fievre a buried Buñuel, it’s not one that’s frequently revived, so I never saw it until this month, courtesy of a solid all-region French Blu-ray (with English subtitles yet) from Pathé, complete with a “restored by” box on the front cover. You may recall Pathé was widely criticized for its digital scrubbing of Carné’s Les enfants du paradis back in 2012, and it may have learned something from that episode. I didn’t consider the image here bothersome in the slightest but some might still find its rendering of Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography a little more Mr. Clean that it ought to be. I’m thinking of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s remarks about contemporary video transfers in my friend Farran Smith Nehme’s interview with the idiosyncratic duo in the September 2022 issue of Sight and Sound, with Tarantino rhapsodizing over the days when  “Ninety-nine per cent of every video transfer was done from a direct print of a movie. They had a 35mm or a 16mm, usually a 35. They had the best print they could get, but it was a print,” and Avary chiming in that sometimes an original negative scan is “sometimes worse” than one from an interpositive. Such sources, Tarantino points out, “Never saw a lab…never played in a theatre, never entertained and audience…that print has no life.”

Does it seem like I’m waltzing around articulating my direct experience of the movie? Well I probably am, in part because Buñuel’s own implicit assessment of the work is so spot on. “Despite everything, I tried to make a professional, well-made film, and even to put in interesting details.” And guess what? He did. The movie is set on a fictional Caribbean island where its tyrant Vargas is assassinated. The aftermath relates a triangle of intrigue between Vazquez, the martinet’s mild-mannered and idealistic secretary (Philipe), Gual, the underhanded and corrupt military leader making an out-and-out power grab (Jean Servais, best-known for his portrayal of a hangdog heist man in Rififi), and Inés (Maria Félix), Vargas’ widow, who had been conducting an affair with an officer before her husband was killed and who now flits between the sincere attentions of Vazquez and the perverse desires of Gual.

Overt politics never interested Buñuel, but sexual politics certainly did, and it’s interesting that he didn’t opt to emphasize them more in this scenario. Certainly, once he got the assignment, he took it seriously; in a December 1958 letter to his Paris-based agent, Paulette Dorise (reproduced in the volume Luis Buñuel: A Life In Letters), he wrote of his work on the screenplay, which was based on a novel by Henri Castillou: “Luckily filming is still three and a half months away, which will give me time to introduce new improvements, as well as the changes that are likely to emerge from your notes. I am happy with the work in general. Despite what you may think, the adaptation was very, very difficult.” For all its difficulty, Buñuel must have felt obliged to stick closely with the overtly political aspects of the story. Because watching the movie, it’s entirely self-evident that Vazquez is a much less compelling character than Gual. It’s not that Buñuel couldn’t make idealistic characters interesting; I mean, look at Nazarin. The problem here is that Vazquez’s idealism doesn’t propel him into the absurd that way that Nazarin’s does. And there’s also Philipe’s delicacy. Some observers of the movie have said he looks physically ill here; he doesn’t, really; he was never an intimidating presence (his portrayal of the ultimately hapless and feeble Count in Ophuls’ La Ronde almost a decade earlier uses his corporeal wispiness to great effect), and again, Buñuel is right on when recalling this movie 15 years after its making: “The role didn’t go very well for Gérard; he wasn’t the man for that character, that was obvious even in the way he wore his pistol hanging loosely on his belt.”

On the other hand, Servais’ Gual is really something, particularly as he toys sexually with Maria Felix’s uninhibited Inés, giving her precise instructions on how to undress for him and then dismissing her with an abruptness that suggests self-disgust but could be something rather more peculiar. Servais’ hooded eyes and dispirited jowls put across a paranoid mood that’s practically Nixonian.

The scenes between Servais and Felix, one of which Buñuel claimed to have adapted from Tosca, are the liveliest in the movie. Another sequence, in which two former henchmen divide the worldly goods of a master who’s just been put to death, has a droll Buñuelian mordancy. So too, does Vazquez’s declaration of love for Inés, which he makes from a subservient position, while cleaning up broken glass in what was once Vargas’ office. But there’s no surrealism, either lower-case “s” or upper. And there’s not much fever, and there’s practically no mounting. So while it’s a Buñuel picture as per the credits, one is left with the conviction that it’s something less than un vrai Buñuel picture.

In a February 1960 letter to Buñuel, his friend the film critic Georges Sadoul wrote from Paris:

“Anne Philipe” — Gerard’s widow — “came to dinner last week, the first time we’d seen her since the death of poor Gérard, we had so much to talk about we didn’t have a chance to ask her about you, we were also afraid of stirring up sad, recent memories. We were genuinely relieved to discover that Gérard’s death was not related to any kind of amoebic infection. The doctors were mistake, thinking there was an amoebic connection, when it was in fact cancer; so, no one can now claim he died prematurely because he went to make a film in Mexico, where he was supposed to have contracted a terrible illness.”

Tavernier and the fraught story of "In The Electric Mist"

John Goodman and Tommy Lee Jones, In The Electric Mist, Tavernier, 2009.

Bertrand Tavernier, who died today at age 79 ("So young," gasped this 61-year-old) had a long, distinguished, and honorable career, one difficult to sum up quickly, in no small part because a good deal of his substantial filmography is unjustly obscure in the States. I met and interviewed him in 2011, when he was in New York promoting his exceptional, vivid historical film The Princess of Montpensier. By now you've probably read this before, but he was a great interview, warm, erudite, good-humored, always eager to talk cinema. 

Aside from Montpensier, we discussed his prior picture, one of his infrequent English-language pictures, In the Electric Mist. When word got out in 2007 or so that Tavernier was making it, cinephiles and fans of hard-boiled literature were pretty excited, as I mention below. The U.S. release of the movie befuddled more than a few viewers. So, for feature package the interview yielded — this was for a e-magazine startup named Nomad (you remember startups) for which I was the editor of the movie organ, called "Wide Screen," I wrote a piece comparing the U.S. cut with Tavernier's own version of the movie, which he put together in France surreptitiously, and which was put out on French DVD.

In Bertrand's memory, I reproduce the piece below. And after that, as he is no longer with us and no longer bound by whatever egregious contractual enjoinment prevented him from talking about the film on the record, I include a section of the transcript of our conversation, lightly edited. 

When it was announced a few years back that the French director Bertrand Tavernier would be returning to English-language filmmaking with an adaptation of James Lee Burke’s crime novel In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead, several different breeds of enthusiasts started drooling. Fans of the crime writer Burke had to be stoked that one of his works was about to be tackled by Tavernier had to have been excited that their man was getting a film treatment from a director who clearly appreciated genre material—Tavernier’s terrific Coup de Torchon was an excellent transposition of a novel by Jim Thompson, one of Burke’s acknowledged antecedents. Fans of Tavernier were tickled by the notion of the director working in the U.S. for the first time since his very well regarded Round Midnight. Fans of actor Tommy Lee Jones were excited that the actor was going to be embodying Burke’s recovering-alcoholic-lawman Dave Robicheaux. (The character was last portrayed on film by Alec Baldwin, in the not-entirely successful Burke adaptation Heaven’s Prisoners, directed by Phil Joanou.) Especially coming after Jones’ superb portrayal of Texas lawman Ed Tom Bell in the Coen brothers’ 2007 No Country For Old Men. In the Electric Mist, as the title was shortened to, looked like it had a shot at being a very worthy quasi-successor to that excellent film.

But the picture didn’t even wind up having a theatrical release in the United States, coming out straight to DVD in spring of 2009. Hardly an event picture, as it happens. What happened? As Chris Mosey explains in an interview with Tavernier that was a web exclusive for Cineaste magazine in the 2010,  “Tavernier and both his American producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and editor, Roberto Silvi [had a conflict] concerning the cutting of the movie. When their disagreements proved impossible to resolve, the only solution was to release two versions of the same film, one for either side of the Atlantic. Fitzgerald, head of Ithaca Pictures, supervised Silvi on the cutting of the shorter, faster-paced film for the U.S. market. Tavernier, with the help of editor Thierry Derocles, completed his own cut." If you are lucky enough to own a multi-region DVD player (foreign-manufactured DVDs are often embedded with a “region code” that makes them impossible to play on domestic machines), it’s possible to make a comparison between the two versions.

The initial difference is pretty stark and immediately discernible just by looking at the information on the respective box covers. My Image Entertainment domestic DVD lists a running time of 102 minutes; the French-issued TFI  Video Blu-ray disc shows “1h57,” or 117 minutes. So we’re talking about an American issue that is a full fifteen minutes shorter than the American one.

The differences start at the very beginning. In Tavernier’s version, there are atmospheric slow-lateral-dollying shots of the titular mist sitting in a gray swamp. Tommy Lee Jones’ unmistakable voice comes on the soundtrack: “In the ancient world, people placed heavy stones on the graves of their dead, so their souls would not wander…” The American opening is a little more “on the nose,” as it were: a shot of Jones sitting at a bar, a bartender pouring him a shot of whiskey, and Jones getting up and walking away without taking the shot. The voiceover here: “My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m an alcoholic. Sometimes I’m tempted to have a drink. But I never do.”

This kind of encapsulates the essential difference between the two versions: the American cut is rather more direct and literal minded, while Tavernier’s cut has more emphasis on atmosphere, mood, and so on. It might therefore follow that the American version is brisker, more story-driven, more conventionally entertaining. It actually isn’t. It’s just more literal-minded, is all. As it happens, Tavernier’s version, after its atmospheric beginning, kicks off with Robicheaux’s investigation of the grisly murder of a part-time prostitute, the uneasiness of the shady characters he’s interrogating creating an absorbing tension that seeps into the film as a whole. The restructuring imposed by Fitzgerald and American editor Silvi introduces the movie-actor characters played by Peter Sarsgaard and Kelly MacDonald earlier on, for no real reason except to maybe bring more recognizable faces into the picture sooner than later. One excised scene, of Robicheaux attending an AA meeting, doesn’t advance the story all that much, but does do a better and subtler job of enhancing the characterization of Robicheaux than the above-cited opening shots and narration achieve. Another excised scene showing the malevolent local big-shot played by John Goodman deliberately beaning Robicheaux with a baseball represents an even dumber cut, as it’s a great showcase for both Goodman and Jones and it gives Goodman’s character more of the sinister “he’s-not-bluffing” sense that makes the viewer eventually feel more empathy for the fix Robicheaux finds himself in at the film’s climax.

Some of the footage from that excised scene does find its way into the ending of the American version, in a way the most egregious of the many egregious changes. A shot of Goodman swatting a baseball is included in a “where are they now” montage, narrated by Jones, detailing the fates of all the characters in the scenario. Needless to say Tavernier’s ending is both far more evocative and emotionally/narratively satisfying, I won’t give it away here. But I will say that while Tavernier’s cut of the film DOES represent a worthy quasi-successor to No Country For Old Men, the American cut plays like a better-than-average thing you might have caught in the wee hours on Court TV back in the day. A no doubt very frustrating state of affairs, not just for Tavernier (who I believe is contractually enjoined from discussing the matter in any detail), but for American film lovers as well.

 

And here's a portion of that interview. 

 

WIDE SCREEN:  I want to talk a little bit about In the Electric Mist.

TAVERNIER:  Yeah.

WIDE SCREEN:  Because of working in America after you worked intermittently throughout your career with American actors and American themes, American writers.  And I wasn't able to read the journal you kept of the film, but there was an interesting thing in an article about it about working with an editor who always wanted to do transitions through close-ups.  And it seems interesting when you're looking at your written work and looking at the films that inspired you and getting to the point where American or Hollywood film grammar has gotten to the point where it's almost split off into something different than what inspired you.

TAVERNIER:  And from the grammar in Hollywood and some of the directors I admire.

WIDE SCREEN:  Yeah.

TAVERNIER:  I mean because when I was told that I was doing too-long takes and not enough coverage I was thinking of Otto Preminger and many, many brilliant directors.  On the whole I find the contribution of Tommy Lee Jones invaluable.  I found him brilliant, very, very respectful of the other actors.  Very.  I've never seen an actor so polite, so respectful of his colleagues.  I mean he could be...he could come on the set and not say good morning to anybody.  And some people on the crew hated him.  But I mean with Levon Helm or with Ned Beatty, with John Goodman, or with Mary Steenburgen, everybody, he was always trying to help.  With Kelly Macdonald he was--he says, Kelly, I want to help you so we can see you better.  We'll turn you there.  So I've never seen somebody so refined, so attentive, so full of admiration for the others.  I never see.  And for me the real Tommy Lee Jones is there, is not the guy who can be a bit rocky and sometimes a bit difficult, is somebody  who  — a person who contributed in the writing, to some of the best lines of the movie.  And the best scene, the fishing scene, is a scene which he himself wrote during the shooting.  I thought I was missing a scene between him and Bootsie [Steenburgen], and he said to me, 'Bertrand, what the scene should be about?'  And I said, 'About understanding.'  And two days after, he came with that scene.  On the salamander, does she know she's a salamander.  And does she understand--I mean beautiful scene.  Lovely scene. 

But the problem I had, I lost...I had a total moment of despair and I could not — I was not getting along with the editor, to a point that I didn't want to provide any ideas.  I was dry.  I became dead.  I just wanted to leave the editing room to see my friends.  There was no pleasure.  That was the first time that happened in my whole life.  And then when I went to Paris and I could have an agreement with the producer, Michael Fitzgerald, and I could start the editing of the version that is called the French version, then suddenly in four weeks — I mean it took very little time — and suddenly I found enthusiasm.  I was working with a crew which was enthusiastic, who loved what they saw.  And all the ideas which I kept every time I was trying a few of them in New Orleans and I was facing a crisis and I was...I decided to fight.  I recorded all the voiceover I'd been writing. I was listening on the phone to Tommy Lee recording it.  And Tommy Lee was like that first stage.  I've never seen somebody so good with voiceover.  The control he has of his voice, of the music of his voice.  And that was so important, the voice, because Burke's book are told in the first person and they have a rhythmic melody. 

What I found difficult in America, I found the crew are very big, I found some of the rules are so strange that it's becoming embarrassing.  I found that you have a hierarchy where people do not talk to each other, so sometimes you have a conflict because two different or two different kind of people are working on the same thing and they are not communicating.

But speaking of talent, I had some of the best people I've ever worked with. I had the best person on sound, Paul Ledford, who is a genius of sound, has been working with Stephen Soderbergh on many films. Paul is a genius.  And a lovely man. When they learned I was editing the film in Paris they sent me hours of wild sounds for me, to help me.  And when I wanted to pay them, they said 'No, Bertrand, because we had so much love working with you, so much fun, we are giving it to you' so I had wonderful people.  Wonderful.  And I gave Paul a credit, a main credit, as sound mixer. and that's a typical kind of thing when suddenly becomes something with the union. 

I mean for instance I wanted to to start my version with the credit 'This film is dedicated to Philip Noiret who loved so much the novels of James Lee Burke.'  So the WGA calls me and says, 'Bertrand, we cannot put that there; you named somebody from the WGA before your own credit.'  And all those calls, I was in Paris, were taking place between 2 and 4 in the morning.  And after 15 days I said, let's forget about that.  And that's what I found rigid.  That system, very rigid.  

Hollywood To Tehran To Tokyo: The Journey Of "Like Someone In Love"

Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanishi (in mirror), Like Someone In Love, 2014, directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Songs are a form of storytelling, so it stands to reason that most great or even good songs have at-least-good stories attached to them. One of the most popular songs by composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Johnny Burke, was, for instance, inspired by an argument that the songwriting team overheard their friend and collaborator Bing Crosby having with his first son Gary.

According to Van Heusen biographer Christopher Coppula, Burke and Van Heusen were dining at Crosby’s home; Gary, who was about ten at the time, was expressing dissatisfaction with having to go to school. The elder Crosby upbraided him, saying, “So you want to be a mule, be a mule.” Burke was thunderstruck. He and Van Heusen had been stuck for quite a while on their latest assignment, writing songs for an upcoming Crosby picture, Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey. McCarey had instructed the duo to concoct a pop song version of the Ten Commandments, wisdom that Crosby’s priest character could infectiously impart to his young charges at the church’s school. “So you want to be a mule, be a mule” was not exactly “thou shalt not,” but it flipped a switch for Burke, and “Swinging On A Star” was born.

There’s no such lore surrounding “Like Someone In Love,” the beautiful ballad by Van Heusen and Burke that debuted in 1944, the same year as “Swinging On A Star.” In the midst of one of their busiest years, the team composed it, and a couple of other songs, for an RKO period comedy called Belle of the Yukon. An amiable trifle directed by veteran William Seiler, Belle stars Randolph Scott and Gypsy Rose Lee as a couple of quasi-grifters in the late-19^th-century Great White North. The juvenile romantic leads are William Marshall as Steve, a new-in-town piano player, and radio discovery Dinah Shore as Lettie, daughter of a saloon owner. About 22 minutes into the picture, Steve is tinkering with a tune at the piano and Lettie comes down the stairs; Steve says he’s been working on a song, and he plays the head of “Like Someone In Love.” Lettie says “It’s lovely,” and Steve says “Why don’t you try it?” She picks up the sheet music and starts singing. Two verses and two refrains later, you have a new addition to The Great American Songbook.

A confection in appealing Technicolor, Belle is one of those movies whose narrative evanesces even as you’re watching it; it must have been something of a tonic to U.S. audiences in the waning but still uncertain days of late World War II. It says nothing dishonorable about the great Randolph Scott to note that he more or less sleepwalks through his role; the part of “Honest John Calhoun” demands nothing more. If you’ve ever wondered why burlesque great Gypsy Rose Lee never had the film career of her sister June Havoc, Belle will answer all your questions in that department. Shore is the most engaging presence in the film. Her features are not those of what was considered a classic beauty at the time, but she’s terrifically attractive and projects a personality both earnest and sly. And she sings like a bird; as the performer who gave birth to “Like Someone In Love,” she delivers something absolutely beautiful. Oddly enough, though, the Van Heusen/Burke song from Belle that made a bigger splash, initially, was the now largely forgotten (but still delightful) “Sleigh Ride In July,” which earned the duo an Oscar nomination for 1945. (Belle was released on December 27, 1944, which apparently pushed it ahead for Academy consideration at the time.) “Like Someone In Love” became a hit in spring of 1945 via its recording by Bing Crosby.

Burke and Van Heusen were among Crosby’s favorite songwriters; they of course wrote the tunes for Crosby and Bob Hope’s Road pictures. In the final Road picture, The Road To Hong Kong, made in 1962, after the Burke/Van Heusen team dissolved, Hope’s character was named Chester Babcock—which had been Van Heusen’s birth name. (The one-time bordello piano player was known for, among many other things, making elaborately hilarious ribald sport of that birth name.) For his stage name, the composer “chose Van Heusen, the name of a famous line of men's shirts, because he felt it was a name associated with old money, elegance and class,” David Lehman notes in his book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. “What he didn't realize was that the Van Heusen line was the creation of a German-Jewish peddler named Israel Phillips."

Crosby’s rendition relocated the song at the crossroads of pop and jazz, as the crooner’s singing tended to do. About a dozen years later—on August 16, 1957, to be exact—the young tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, with bassist Earl May and drummer Art Taylor, recorded a version of the tune at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. There’s a peculiar notion among some younger folks about jazz musicians like Coltrane and Miles Davis—that they made their recordings of pop and musical theater songs out of some mission to apply a veneer of “hipness” to white bread or just plain white music. At its most extreme, this presumption posits that Coltrane cut his revolutionary version of “My Favorite Things” mainly to troll Sound of Music fans. This is mistaken thinking. What attracted Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus (his playful retitling of “All the Things You Are” notwithstanding) and so many other great musicians to these songs was a musical deftness that intertwined beguiling melody with a harmonic complexity that opened up all manner of improvisational doors. Van Heusen biographer Coppula writes of “Like Someone In Love:” “This tune, like ‘Darn That Dream,’ has enjoyed broad pop/jazz crossover popularity, with recording by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Stan Kenton, Coleman Hawkins, and Stan Getz (among many others). The appeal to jazz artists is explained in part by the linear structure of Van Heusen’s melody, permitting the artist to utilize all variety of harmonies in a chromatic bass line. It offers a suitable vehicle for the artist to express his creativity in fashioning harmonies while providing an interesting enough melody in its own right.” Indeed, Coltrane’s rendition of the song begins with the saxophonist playing alone, as if in mid-solo, extrapolating on a phrase from the verse in a near-keening cry, and fluttering in that register for a couple of bars before the bass and drums come in and Coltrane states the theme itself.

Ella Fitzgerald recorded her version two months later, October 15, 1957, in Los Angeles. She and/or producer Norman Granz also titled the attendant album Like Someone In Love. The LP was made after one of her grandest masterpieces, the still-amazing four-LP Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook. This album is less thematically ambitions, but Fitzgerald’s singing is no less exacting or elegant than it ever was in this period. Burke and Van Heusen appear throughout, albeit in differing permutations; “I Thought About You,” by Van Heusen with lyrics by Johnny Mercer is here, as is “What’s New,” lyrics by Burke, music by Bob Haggart. “Like Someone In Love” is the sole Burke/Van Heusen tune. The orchestral arrangement by Frank De Vol is more Hollywood sound stage than Cotton Club or any other swinging locale; the impeccably tasteful De Vol never had the swinging brashness of a Nelson Riddle or the Debussy leanings of early Gordon Jenkins but he gets the song…as Ella, of course, also does. She begins the song with a bit of a fake-out after the string intro, singing the opening word “Lately” as if to explicitly rhyme it with “stately.” But the very slight hiccup she makes at “myself” lets her completely melt into “out gazing at stars” and from that point on the whole thing’s like a beautiful dream. Her version is still, arguably, the definitive vocalization.

“Nowadays we don’t like watching an old man, especially an old man in love,” the Iranian film director Abba Kiarostami says in a making-of documentary included on the Criterion Collection edition of his 2012 feature Like Someone In Love, the picture that would be his last. It was the second that he shot outside of his native country, a French/Japanese co-production. It tells a necessarily incomplete story of an elderly academic, a young prostitute he awkwardly procures for an evening, and the disturbed, possessive boyfriend of the prostitute, who the professor meets even more awkwardly on the day following the night of his assignation. Kiarostami, as seen in photographs, exuded the kind of cool one associates with certain cinematic masters, aided in no small part by his ever-present sunglasses. But in interviews, it’s clear that the character with whom he most identified in this film is the decidedly not-chill Takeshi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno, playing his first lead in his early eighties after, according to Kiarostami, a career of bit roles and extra work), the widowed professor who is, among many other things, hugely clueless about sex workers, even a sex worker as ingenuous as Rin Takanashi’s Akiko. “When I started searching for music for the moment the girl enters the old man’s apartment,” Kiarostami told Dennis Lim in an interview for the New York Times in 2012, “it came naturally that as someone from my generation, he would listen to jazz. The first album I took off my shelf was Ella Fitzgerald and I just bumped into this song, ‘Like Someone in Love,’” In pre-revolutionary Iran, Western music was widely known, and the artistic cognoscenti of Tehran was well-versed in jazz, as was the case in other cosmopolitan centers throughout the world. Kiarostami scored his first short film, 1970’s Bread and Alley, with a Paul Desmond version of the Beatles tune “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.”

Kiarostami (who presumably held on to his jazz record collection after the revolution, whose regime’s animus to all things Western very definitely extended to music) went on to explain to Lim that he also thought that song title would be a better title for the film itself; in script form the movie was called The End. “The phrase itself sounds good to me too,” the director continued in his conversation with Lim. “There is nothing determined and definitive about love. It’s better to say that we are like someone in love rather than asserting that we are in love. Death or birth are definitive; love is nothing but an illusion. We have in this film four people who are like some people in love.”

Akiko arrives at Takeshi’s apartment in a confused rush, and doesn’t even take off her coat after he invites her to have a seat in the living room of his cozy, book-lined apartment. After Takeshi tries to make small talk with Akiko—their conversation, while amiable, is also nearly mortifyingly awkward—she hops into his bedroom. A Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra rendition of “Solitude” plays softly on Takeshi’s stereo. Takeshi follows Akiko into the bedroom, seats himself on a chair facing the bed, and we see a soft-focus reflection of Akiko in the dresser mirror next to the chair. Takeshi tries to lure her out of bed…with the promise of a soup he’s cooked, a specialty of her region (he knows where she’s from because her pimp, a former student of his, told him). While we can’t see Akiko’s face, we can practically see her wrinkling her nose as she tells him, “I’ll hate that. My Gran made it all the time when we were little.”

He’s a little crestfallen; he gets up and goes back into his study/dining room. He’s been getting vexing business-related phone calls all evening, so he unplugs his desk phone. He looks out his front window. Some interesting stuff happens with the sound mixing; the noise form the street outside, including a honking horn, is foregrounded, and the strains of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Like Someone In Love” almost seep in to the audio track, very nearly inaudible at first. As Takeshi putters around, the song gets louder, and more distinct, but it never reaches what one might call an aggressive or even definite volume. Nevertheless, Takeshi turns down the volume on his amplifier. And the phone rings again—the landline in the bedroom is still plugged in. Takeshi, concerned with letting Akiko sleep, goes into the bedroom and disables the phone. A clock on a shelf above the bed indicates that it’s 11:30 at night. Who’s calling at this hour?

Takeshi leaves the room after tucking Akiko in, so we can assume they did not sleep together, but he still looks pretty pleased with himself as he drives her around the next morning (taking her to her college, where she has an exam), smiling as he watches her put her grey leggings on. Soon enough Akiko’s sweaty, strung-out looking boyfriend Noriaki (Ryô Kase) enters the picture, and everybody acts with spectacularly bad judgment. “When you know you may be lied to, it’s best not to ask questions,” Takeshi says to Noriaki even as he sort-of masquerades as Akiko’s grandfather. The flimsy webs of deceit escalate a situation that ought never have come into being in the first place, and when Akiko expresses worry, Takeshi sings “Que Sera Sera” to her, in Japanese translation, and elicits one of her final (slight, tentative, and, hell yes, awkward) smiles in the movie.

The movie ends in Takeshi’s apartment, with a wounded, traumatized Akiko sitting in his living room and Takeshi scrambling around, with Noriaki raging outside, letting them know that he knows that they are (still) lying: “Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.” Things are going from bad to worse both on screen and on the soundtrack. As Noriaki yells, the microwave in which Takeshi was warming milk for Akiko beeps to signal the end of its heating cycle, and then continues its periodic reminder beep. A rock comes through the front window, and the shattering of glass is terribly disturbing, as is Takeshi’s disappearance from the frame. And at this time the Fitzgerald recording of “Like Someone In Love” comes on again, louder than it was the first time it was heard. “Lately I find myself,” Fitzgerald sings, as all three characters in the scene seem as lost as they’ve ever been. Is the music diegetic or extra-diegetic? While it’s not likely that the stereo has somehow turned itself back on, there’s so much madness going on that this is not entirely outside the realm of narrative probability. The credits begin to go up, and the screen goes black, and soon Fitzgerald sings “sometimes the things I do astound me.”

Kiarostami told Dennis Lim, “I’ve said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end. I would say that this film doesn’t have an adequate opening and it doesn’t have a real ending either, but it also proves my idea that all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.” The filmmaker presses this point more insistently in Like Someone In Love than in any other film, including his previous feature, the spectacularly knotty and moving Certified Copy.

“Like Someone In Love” was conceived and written in Los Angeles, recorded there years later by Ella Fitzgerald, and then many years later than that, Abbas Kiarostami pulled that Ella Fitzgerald album off of his shelf at home in Tehran. And subsequently played its title song on the stereo of an imaginary elderly man in the vicinity of Tokyo/Yokohama, where American jazz is well-loved by substantial (albeit possibly quickly disappearing, these days) pockets of its population.

It is an incidental irony that the song’s composer Jimmy Van Heusen, an aviation enthusiast from the thirties on (despite the fact that he did quite well both professionally and personally in Hollywood, he never much liked the place, and would fly himself back to New York between movie assignments), safety-tested American fighter planes for Lockheed prior to and in the early days of World War II.

Thanks to James Kaplan (whose excellent Vanity Fair profile of Jimmy Van Heusen you might want to read next) and to Brook Babcock, keeper of the flame.

In memoriam Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016.

"Madame:" An Evening With Catherine Robbe-Grillet

Left, Beverly Charpentier; with pen, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Wednesday, October 7; photograph by Michael George.

By the way, when we visited Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had dressed herself a la gamine in my honor, pretending to be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when we met again at a publisher’s luncheon in a restaurant. After pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked, “Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle?” It was very funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in photographs, roared with laughter.

—Vladimir Nabokov; in an interview with Alfred Appel, Jr., conducted August 1970, collected in Strong Opinions, 1973, McGraw-Hill

Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov places this meeting in 1959. By this time, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, née Rastakian, has already published her first novel, The Image, published by Editions du Minuet under the pen name Jean De Berg in 1956, when she is 26. She married Robbe-Grillet in 1957. The Image is a detailed account of a sado-masochistic relationship; it was made into a film, shot on location in Paris, by Radley Metzger in 1975. Robbe-Grillet appeared in two of her husband’s films, both among his best, 1963’s L’Immortelle and 1966’s Trans-Europe Express. In the years since her husband’s death (he passed away in 2008) she has gained a second reputation; for a very rare speaking appearance in New York, held by the  French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) on Tuesday evening, she was referred to more than once as “France’s most famous dominatrix.” The evening, which was prefaced by an edited version of La ceremonie, Lina Mannheimer’s documentary about Madame Robbe-Grillet, which also features extensive interviews with Robbe-Grillet’s companion and, …well,… it’s hard to put a name to it, and “slave” will not do…in any event, a good deal of the post-film discussion focused on how Beverly Charpentier, who spoke quite a bit herself while serving as Madame’s translator, could, as an extremely accomplished heterosexual woman with two grown children, have given her whole life over to the care and obedience of Catherine.

The panel was moderated by Toni Bentley, the one-time ballet dancer whose writings have come to chronicle her own explorations of sado-masochism. Wearing a near-crimson dress, Bentley, who authored the recent Vanity Fair article which introduced Madame Robbe-Grillet and her life work/style to an American audience, asked a series of questions, told the audience that she expected their own questions to be “bold,” and related a tale of her own participation in a bondage ritual with Robbe-Grillet and Charpentier.

So, you know, it was not an entirely literary evening. (It’s part of the French Alliance’s “Art of Sex And Seduction” series.) I myself am not terribly interested in S&M as a practice (despite my having penned, pseudonymously, an account of an evening at The Vault for a Guccione publication back in the ‘80s; like they say, once a philosopher, twice a…never mind…), but like all closed or semi-closed social systems, it is certainly interesting, and Madame Robbe-Grillet, a woman of fierce and formidable intelligence, brings her perceptual acuity to bear on the phenomenon in a dispassionate way when necessary. Looking very proper in her black dress suit and white headband, Madame, now 85 years of age, reflected on the fact that, from what statistics she could glean, 90 percent of all the individuals with an interest in sadomasochism are males, and that the disproportion creates, among other things, a certain kind of complicity among women who participate in the lifestyle. Also discussed were the differences between professional dominatrices and those who practice discipline as a lifestyle; Madame Robbe-Grillet, who does the latter, does not disdain sex workers—indeed, she has heartfelt praise for them—but does not take money herself; it redefines the nature of the whole exchange, she says, and of course she is correct. As for Charpentier, answering why a woman as accomplished as herself should be in the position she’s chosen, wondered aloud why it would be considered so unusual, and cited the motto of the American college fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, “joy in service.” A not dissimilar concept animates some practices within twelve step programs, but I wasn’t gonna bring that up necessarily.

There was much laughter in the talk. “Obviously, if you’ve read or seen 50 Shades of Gray, you know that a predilection for sadomasochism is the result of something terrible that happened to you as a child,” Madame Robbe-Grillet said, luxuriating in mild, rancor-free irony. “It’s reassuring for people to tie it in to some childhood trauma, but I can’t say that there’s any that I myself remember.” She went on to say that sexuality was still a place of mystery, and while “çe me derange pas” that psychoanalysts, both amateur and professional, have tried to figure out “why” she spent decades as a submissive before turning dominant, or any of the other features of her erotic life, she herself had/has “no need to find out where my desires come from.” I was delighted when, at the question of how long she intended to keep up her practice of rituals now that she’s in her ninth decade of life, Madame cited the example of Portuguese filmmaker Manoel De Oliviera, who continued making films even past the age of 100.

It is a tricky business, sado-masochism, and particularly in these times. At one point, Madame made mention of the fact that a genuine sadist derives no pleasure from inflicting pain on a person who enjoys receiving pain, as that goes against the whole ethos of sadism; the implications of this statement were left to hang as Madame continued by speaking of ideas of consent. Consent, I infer, is one of the rationales that inform the ritualistic practices in Robbe-Grillet’s mode of living. But these practices are not all she lives for. Again without irritation, she noted, “I know I’m billed as France’s most famous dominatrix, and I am, but I’m also a nice little old lady who’s interested in the theatre, music, and literature, and who makes jam!”

There was not much time for audience questions. The house, Florence Gould Hall, was packed, and the male-to-female ratio was something like 60:40, and of course I thought more than once of old Woody Allen jokes about the personal ads in the New York Review Of Books. The questions were not terribly “bold,” and I didn’t get to ask either of mine, the first of which was to solicit her own recollection of the meeting with Nabokov so very long ago (in the year of my own birth, as it happens), the second would have been about the extent to which she’d been involved in the making of the film version of The Image, and her impression of the picture. There was a book-signing afterwards, though, and I got to be third on line.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s final published fiction, A Sentimental Novel, is so replete with elaborate erotic fantasies of such atrocities as child murder and such that it’s easy to ignore its ingenious structure, a variant of that of Raymond Roussel’s long poem “La Vue”—a structure that in some way inoculates the work from genuine moral condemnation, or should, or, oh, I don’t know. Although Robbe-Grillet doesn’t get into it in his wonderful memoir, published in English translation in 1988 as Ghosts In The Mirror, his marriage to Catherine was, among other things, a long-held S&M relationship. (His depiction of the marriage in the book is in fact, especially for this author, downright romantic. The book contains an account of how the couple survived the first crash of an Air France Boeing 707 in 1961, and how his main regret from that event was that in his incinerated luggage was a bracelet he had brought for Catherine in commemoration of their meeting exactly ten years before, while he was stuck on his novel Les Gommes and took a trip to Istanbul on impulse—the couple met on the Orient Express!) The cover of the paperback edition of Madame’s memoir of her husband, Alain, is a picture of the two locked in an impossibly tender embrace that has an emotional echo of Annie Leibovitz’s famed 1980 Lennon/Ono shot. The book is a series of alphabetically arranged vignettes/observations, some several pages, others only a paragraph or two. I certainly hope an English translation is in the offing; here is my own probably very not-good and certainly completely unauthorized translation of the entry called “Fax.”

FAX

My man has a happy relationship with tools, but with technology…?

Apart from the fax, he never puts aside his obstinate refusal of technical innovations (digital photo, computer, mobile phone). Only the fax finds grace with Alain; he has it in constant use after I buy him a simple model. He will not even hear of a credit card, even after being tricked up in a Canadian hotel, or it becomes a requirement for accessing an international phone line. He will never change; he’d rather suffer than bend.

Fortunately, without being infatuated with them, I have no issue with electronics, domestic or otherwise, and everything works out.

Tools, that’s him; electronics, me.

 It was Alain that I chose for Madame to sign. Charpentier was by her side to translate, and I mentioned right off that I was an admirer of hers and a longtime admirer of her husband’s. Madame said something to Charpentier, and Charpentier said to me “You are a good person;” by way of amplifying this, Madame—who despite her tiny frame gives the impression of being a formidably strong person, and is unfailingly alert, with vivacious eyes—continued, “Tous les amateurs de Robbe-Grillet sont bonnes.”

Fritz Lang and Pierre Menard

Debra Paget in The Tiger of Eschnapur, part one of Fritz Lang's Indian Tomb epic, 1959

Perhaps, or perhaps not, you have heard of Blue, a 2014 album by the virtuosic jazz combo Mostly Other People Do The Killing. It is a note-for-note re-creation, or "cover version" of Miles Davis' seminal 1959 LP Kind of Blue. MOPDTK is known for, among other things, an antic sense of humor that manifests itself in cheeky album cover artwork, as in the piss-take of Keith Jarrett's seminal The Koln Concert on its own 2011 disc The Caimbra Concert. That record also featured this provocative liner note: “In fact, every note and sound on this recording is a reference to some other recording or performance, real or imaginary. Enjoy!”

Blue is a record that raises all sorts of questions beyond the initial "Why?" It is useful to remember that, its one-time reputation as an ultra-suave makeout disc notwithstanding, the recording by the Davis quintet was a significant building block for free jazz: in putting into action some particular ideas provoked in him by the work of George Russell, and hooking improvisation to modes rather than chord changes, Davis was taking down a particular net, and one of the things Blue is asking is for the listener to experience the music of Kind of Blue in the explicit context of fifty years of the net being down. So it is apt that, for the liner notes to Blue, that disc's booklet reproduces in full the translated text of Jorge Luis Borges' droll and dizzying short story Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote.

Trying to do in music what Borges' Menard—a fictional character, we have to keep reminding ourselves—accomplished in writing is, practically speaking, a whole different enterprise. Here are three key paragraphs from Borges' story that illustrate pertinent problems (the translation, here as in the Blue liner notes, is Andrew Hurley's): 

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one have to say that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

Initially, Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to CatholIcism, fight against the Moor of Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too east. Too impossible,!, rather, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminuation. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. 

The members of Mostly Other People Do The Killing, augmented by a pianist, obviously came to Kind of Blue via their own experiences as human beings, white men, musicians, jazz musicians, readers of music, readers of music theory and criticism, and so on. But unlike Menard they were practically obliged to come to their Quixote, Kind of Blue, via all manner of mediating technology, beginning with their musical instruments. 

As with music, so, even more so perhaps, with film. I thought of Borges' story, and of Blue, while watching again, for the first time in some time, and with a concentration suggested by my thoughts about Borges and Menard and Blue, Fritz Lang's two 1959 films The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, a two-feature quasi-serial. (I viewed them via the excellent UK import set from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, a Region B issue, alas.) The movie is a remake of a 1921 picture that, I must admit, I have not seen: Das indische Grabmal erster Teil, another two-parter, silent, directed by Joe May, then a cinematic colleague and rival of Lang's. The scenario of the film was a creation of Thea von Harbou and, as it happens, Lang. If I read David Kalat's account (in his invaluable 2001 book The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse) correctly, the scenario was the first collaboration between what was to become the husband-and-wife team, an adaptation of von Harbou's own novel. Said novel, like the popular "Westerns" of Karl May, trucked in German pop culture's fascination with "the exotic." (It is crucial, of course, that we continually locate this fascination in the first three decades of the 20th Century.) German film industry machinations led to May, and not Lang, handling the direction of the film, which starred Conrad Veidt.

At the end of the 1950s Lang's Hollywood career was winding down as his eyesight degenerated. His final American-produced film was the severely pessimistic 1957 Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, its death-penalty centered plot making it, among other things, a mordant answer-film/companion piece to Lang's U.S. debut, the galvanic Fury, an anti-lynch mob parable. Both Doubt and Lang's prior While The City Sleeps took film noir fatalism into the realm of the police procedural and depicted modes of modern life corrupted in ways that Lang's romantic Metropolis had never foreseen. According to Kalat, when German producer Artur Brauner offered Lang a deal to remake the May film, he had no idea that Lang had been so intimately involved in the original: “Ironically, Brauner did not recognize what it meant to Lang: Brauner was unaware that Lang had been involved with the original and was ignorant of the entire story of Lang’s history with Joe May. As far as Brauner was concerned, he was simply pairing a remake of a golden oldie with one of the leading lights of the old school.” To Peter Bogdanovich, discussing the remake in 1965, Lang said simply "You should make a picture you started." He elaborated, reflecting that doing this at the end of his career was "like a circle that was beginning to close—a kind of fate." 

I don't know that Lang read Borges, or even that he saw Performance for that matter; I cannot extrapolate from Lang's admiration of certain Jess Franco films the extent to which Lang had any kind of great enthusiasms for meta-narratives. What is certain is that the tropes which support the entire scenario of what I'll now refer to as a whole as The Indian Tomb had undergone a cataclysmic contextual shift between 1921 and 1959, and Lang's choice to ignore that shift in a sense represents a sort of triumph of Menardian thinking. Remember the way, in his story, Borges marvels at the two different representations of the notion of history being the mother of truth. In Cervantes, writes Borges, the phrase is "mere rhetorical praise of history." In Menard, "the idea is staggering." So in Tomb, observations concerning "Western" ideas, and dialogue like "I'm a European; we count in hours" carries a charge that simply could not have been present in the original version. 

Written on water: Paget and Paul Hubschmid. 

The casting of the Oklahoma-born Debra Paget as Seetha alone has implications that could fill a doctoral dissertation. Reputed love object of both Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes, not infrequent player of "Indian" girls in Hollywood Westerns, her skills as a seductively undulating dancer were first (as far as I know) and most convincingly displayed in believe it or not, the 1952 John Philip Sousa biopic Stars And Stripes Forever. In Tomb she is also a dancer, Seetha, and her moves, witnessed surreptitiously by German architect Harold Berger, bring about a change in the sculpted goddess to whom she dedicates her dance. Soon the couple are on the run pursued by a vengeful maharaja. Paget, as it happens, is the only truly vivid performer in the whole movie; the rest of the cast, and Hubschmid in particular, emit a generic anonymity that's actually rather in keeping with their functions in what is on a surface level an anachronistic exercise. 

Lepers.

But as Tom Gunning points out in his invaluable study, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity,  the German critics who savaged this work on those grounds on its initial release could not have been more wrong: "Lang's control of colour photography [...] represents a truly modern aspect of film-making. The non-realistic, semi-abstract plot and characters would inspire the most advanced filmmakers of the 60s, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Marie Straub." (As we all know, Godard would also hire Lang to act, as himself, in Le Mepris, and offer therein an implicit explanation as to why he shot Tomb in color but not in widescreen.) Reflecting on the enterprise as a whole, Gunning writes that Lang's “return to Germany from exile […] yields a profound sense of the untimeliness of history, the knowledge that nothing can ever truly be repeated, and that in repetition lies not so much the promise of rebirth as the harbinger of death. Repetition involves a profound mourning for the passage of time.” Seeing the lepers of Tomb and recalling the underground dwellers of Metropolis certainly supports this idea. But the exercise was not without its drollery. Paget's dance, while in the context of the plot is meant to be part of a sacred rite, cannot help but recall the dance with which the Robot Maria seduces the scions of the ruling class in Metropolis, and it's kind of funny that Paget's moves in the film wound up running afoul of Hollywood prudery: they were cut from an American release of the film. Lang is not a director one customarily thinks of as playful, but we can see his pleasure principle at work in this, and in several other sequences of the film. In spite of the constraints of the source material, or maybe because of them, this movie feels like another example of Rossellini's "film of a free man." 

Kittie!

Menard’s Quixote, which, I will once again point out, never really existed, was conceived and only partially executed in the circumscribed sphere of Borges’ story, in order to answer certain questions—some of which had not been in evidence at all until the "second" Quixote was manifested. MOPDTK’s Blue was conceived and executed with a large number of questions already in mind; and the work is an explicit posing of those questions. Just having them out there in that form fulfills the purpose of the enterprise. Lang’s work, I think, falls somewhere in between those of Borges/Menard and the jazz group. In a sense, this least sentimental of filmmakers was going on a kind of sentimental journey, sure. But there is also at work in every frame of Tomb a conscious and diligent  testing of the elasticity of form. In returning to the narrative mode that helped make him one of the primary architects of dramatic cinema as we still  know it today, Lang conducts an inquiry as to both its durability and whether its innocence can be recaptured. Except the second is a trick question; the movie lays bare the naivete of the scenario von Harbou and Lang and Joe May concocted in the first place, and reveals that what so many viewers process as innocence was in fact a contrivance. It’s for that reason that Lang's next and final film, The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse, so seemingly inapposite a followup to this ostensibly romantic saga, is really its inevitable next move. Its anti-televisual paranoia and vision of a surveillance state further pulls the rug out from under Tomb's attempted romance.  And to explicitly locate Tomb between the brackets of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and Thousand Eyes evokes a frisson that's both undeniable and undeniably unpleasant. But very Lang.  

Ken Russell's "Lisztomania" (White Elephant Blogathon)

What follows is my contribution to the Blogathon hosted by Philip Tatler IV at his apparently ever-name-changing film site. 

My God, what have I done: Roger Daltrey and Nell Campbell (yes, THE Nell Campbell). 

I had rather high hopes for the almost universally reviled 1975 gonzo biopic of composer pianist Franz Liszt as I prepared to view it in full for the first time. Celebrity culture is, we perceive, even more over-the-top today than it was in the 1970s or the 1840s, so I thought it entirely possible that the film, directed by Ken Russell very shortly after his wrapping what would be his pretty-commercially-successful film of The Who's "rock opera" Tommy, might demonstrate a certain prescience viewed in 2015.

But no, actually. Lisztomania remains fixed in its time a two-pronged demonstration of both amusingly wretched excess and what a resourceful and fortunate mad artiste could get away with as a studio-sponsored filmmaker during one decade in the last quarter  of the 20th century. 

Ken Russell was a longtime music maven, one of exceptional taste and, yes, in some cases, prescience: he made a documentary short featuring Davy Graham all the way back in 1959. He gave John Corigliano his first film-scoring gig, for Altered States, in 1980. And so on. Even prior to his feature film examination of Tchaikovsky, 1970's The Music Lovers, Russell had an exceptional and idiosyncratic track record with respect to films on music and musicians, both documentary and fictionalized, largely produced by the BBC. (He cited one of these films, 1968's Delius: Song of Summer, as a personal favorite.) The film follows from the not inaccurate but facile observation that Franz Liszt was something like a 19th century rock star. (As it happens, the coinage "Lisztomania" was a contemporary one, invented by the poet Heinrich Heine.) Hence, one casts a real rock star, The Who's Roger Daltrey, to play super showman Franz. And, because he's Roger Daltrey, you have him flounce about with his shirt off quite a bit. You make an array of Romantic composers look like the after-party of an arena show, with plenty of vulgar and possibly anachronistic dialogue: “Liszt, my dear fellow—" “Oh piss off Brahms." Then you...

Then you what? Russell seems to have not put a lot of really coherent thought into his screenplay, and the film plays out like a series of Russell-lized sketches from Liszt's life, with half-hearted but ticcy pastiche largely ruling the day, as in a depiction of Liszt's child-producing years that see Daltrey donning a Little Tramp uniform, complete with Chaplin mustache. While his sense of story construction, such as it is, abandons him, Russell's musicological chops stay somewhat keen albeit increasingly deranged. Russell really, really, really doesn't like Wagner. The fellow first turns up in a sailor's cap with Nietzsche's name circling its brim, arrogant but nevertheless flattered by Liszt's attention and compliments. But he walks out of a Liszt recital after seeing Franz scatter some Wagner themes into his musical extrapolations only to constantly fall back on the teeny-bopper-fan-pleasing "Chopsticks," Liszt's big hit single. Wagner: The First Rockist, apparently.

Interestingly, it's Wagner, played with stalwart conviction if no particular insight by Paul Nicholas (again, I must insist that what he's given to work with would have flummoxed Daniel Day-Lewis), who gets the most personality here, hopping from petulant student to Dr. Frankenstein to Dracula to Hitler in less than an hour and fifty, while Daltrey's Liszt is a strutting mooncalf with a May Pole-sized dick. (That's not meant metaphorically. There really is a scene in which he grows a giant phallus, and his female coterie do a May dance, or something, around it.) 

One of said coterie is played by Nell Campbell, and she is in several scenes dressed pretty much identically to the way she is in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. See her in this chorus line, third from left.

The movie actually has a great number of what I'll kindly call affinities with the London stage version of Rocky Horror and its subsequent film. Campbell was in both, and her uninhibited work as the "groupie" Columbia won her a small cult that grew sufficiently to propel her to Texas-Guinan-style heights in '80s New York night life. Rocky Horror Picture Show was shot, very nicely, by Peter Suschitzky, who I dare say must have felt a more than slight case of deja vu while working on Lisztomania, to which he contributes many beautiful vistas  Not just due to Campbell's presence but the lifting of the Frankenstein's monster conceit. In Rocky Horror Dr. Frank N. Furter uses Universal monster movie methods to create his ultimate dumb hunk, Rocky. In Lisztomania Wagner does the same thing, albeit with a higher budget and more elaborate production design, to create his Siegfried, the hero of the Ring cycle and Germany's redeemer. The punchline of Russell's joke is that he cast Rick Wakeman, the prog-rock keyboard hero who oversaw the movie's soundtrack, as Siegfried, and dressed him in a Thor Halloween costume or something (I think it's too late to sue, Marvel Studios). Wakeman's kind of lanky and soft, nobody's idea of an ubermensch, and the first thing he does on stepping off the lab's slab (in platform boots, no less) is quaff a stein of pilsener and belch. Is this some kind of clever anti-nationalist joke, or just a bunch of drunkards taking the incoherent piss?

For better or worse, it's most probably the latter, and the joke truly curdles after Wagner rises from the grave brandishing an electric-guitar-machine-gun and shooting down cartoonish skullcapped Jews in a backlot ghetto. 

The pop-art trappings of this period of Russell film are sometimes deemed psychedelic but their garishness and incoherence are more truly representative of the alcoholic bender. Lisztomania is certainly a curious film, and very watchable in its curiousness, but it's ultimately a hectoring film. It's like you met a guy at a bar and he was telling you some interesting stuff—"That's pretty fascinating, that you should find a similarity between Cosima Wagner and Kundry in Parsifal!"— but then there's that one-too-many point that you now can't put your finger on, and suddenly you're stuck under the table with the guy and he's telling you his tab has run out and you've got to spot him something. 

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 3

  "As if she could smell him..." M. Paradine (Alida Valli) senses the presence of Latour (Louis Jourdan)

Dear Farran,

Well thank you for sending me a nice slow Vertigo pitch across the plate. Your point is interesting and, I think, valid. But, given the structure of the extant film—it rather is a shame we’ll never be able to see the longer cuts—one has to look at Paradine sideways to get to that conclusion. But I like, anyway. It’s interesting too, that, during this particular period, the mid-to-late 40s (and for me, Hitchcock at the ABSOLUTE “height of his powers” is the stretch starting with ‘43’s Shadow of a Doubt and ending with ‘60’s Psycho), we find Hitchcock’s viewer-identification/sympathy strategies tilted to the female characters, e.g. Ingrid Bergman in both Notorious and Under Capricorn, Ann Todd to a somewhat lesser extent (strictly in terms of screen time, at least) here.

While it’s absolutely a stretch to call Hitchcock a feminist filmmaker, I think there’s still a lot of room to do some critical digging on his depictions of women. (Robin Wood’s chapter on Hitchcock and Bergman in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is a good start.)  Someone, it occurs to me, could get a nice paper out of the way Hitchcock used his own daughter, Patricia, in his films. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, in The Paradine Case, the not-well-known-enough Joan Tetzel plays a sarcastic young woman affecting to be jaded beyond her years, an anticipation of Patricia’s snarky senator’s-younger-daughter in 1951’s Strangers on a Train. 

In any event, your alternative reading of the movie underscores an almost entirely irrefutable truth about what makes Hitchcock a great filmmaker. He conceived Paradine Case as a way to tell a story that related to his own fears/neuroses: that is, the tale of a good man’s sexual humiliation at the hands of a (Hitchcock’s words) “nymphomaniac” and a “clod.” He did not get that, largely due to Selznick’s hand. But, as you demonstrate, he didn’t get nothing, either. Even when Hitchcock’s explicit plans fail, his instinct does not, nor does his artistry.

One thing I’m increasingly fascinated by is what I hesitate to call the movie’s Pirandellian dimension. Hitchcock famously insisted that the production design recreated the actual interior of the Old Bailey to a very precise degree. This is very much the theatre in which a “real” drama is played. The main actors, or course, are in costume, as they are during a formal dinner party at the movie’s beginning. It’s at this latter scene that Hitchcock meant to establish a particular character dynamic. At this affair, the sight of Ann Todd’s bare shoulder electrifies Charles Laughton’s Judge Horfield. Hitchcock establishes this in a bravura feat of both shooting and editing. He begins with a medium close-up of Laughton entering the party, and then speedily dollies in on the actor/character as something catches his attention. He then cuts on motion to a medium shot of Todd, and this shot itself is already dollying in fast (this was all done before the zoom lens as we know it was developed) to Todd’s shoulder, and once the camera rests on a close-up of the shoulder, the scene cuts back to Laughton’s reaction. We get the picture as surely as getting hit by a lightning bolt. Then Laughton makes his intentions known and brazenly comes on to Todd’s Mrs. Keane. Her refusal to play along is ostensibly what leads to Horfield’s dismissive, contemptuous treatment of Gregory Peck’s Keane in court, but this isn’t followed through with the strength of this initial impetus. I suspect this theme was diluted in the film’s trimming.

 

Something not like the Kuleshov Effect: Charles Laughton fixates on Ann Todd. 

In any event, my point is that all of the main characters of the movie, save Laughton’s, are severely circumscribed by the formalities of their environment. Formalities that are so exacting that one can mistake this movie for a period piece. But it is not: its London features electricity and double-decker buses, and an establishing shot of the Old Bailey exterior shows it undergoing post-Blitz reconstruction. In any event, the only reason Laughton’s character is not similarly circumscribed is because of his power. He literally IS the law here. Everyone else is toiling under what the kids nowadays call “the dominant ideology,” and playing their roles within its hierarchy. There’s a definite sadness about this state of affairs expressed in the film. It’s not as if Hitchcock is going full Ford Madox Ford in bemoaning sexual repression (“Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?”, as we remember from The Good Soldier), but there’s more than an implication of a similar sentiment. It comes across most definitely in the exchanges between Joan Tetzel’s Judy and Charles Coburn’s Simon, father-and-daughter sideline observers of the whole sorry business.

The ornate settings in which Laughton/Horfield plays with unabashed free range (it must be said though that Hitchcock gets a far more controlled performance out of Laughton here than he did in Jamaica Inn, in which Laughton’s super-glazed hamming is delightful nonetheless) are a stark contrast to the dingy confines of the prison where Valli’s Maddalena Paradine dwells through most of the film. If you’ll forgive me, in more sweeping philosophical terms, the difference is to me reminiscent of the red pill/blue pill worlds of The Matrix. No, really. Hitchcock’s intention was different, but not, ultimately, in political terms, THAT different: “What interested me in this picture was to take a person like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her submit to all their formalities, and to say to her maid, as she was leaving her home between the two inspectors, ‘I don’t think I shall be back for dinner.’ And then to show her spending the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will never emerge. […]It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated […]”

As Leff relates, this mode of contrast did not please the movie’s producer: “At least three scenes between Valli and Peck occurred in a spare five by six conference room at Halloway Prison. […] Hitchcock often put his actors in confined places to make them (and the audience) sweat. The stark scenes in this virtually unfurnished room—the antithesis of the mahogany-and-marble home of Maddalena Paradine—adumbrate the documentary style of The Wrong Man. Valli and Peck worked on the set for nine days, producing footage remarkable for its severity. Selznick meanwhile badgered Hitchcock to leave the gangster-in-a-cell style to other, lesser studios […]” As astute as Selznick could be, he did not have much of an appreciation for mise-en-scène at times.

I feel bad for self-proclaimed Hitchcock nuts who pooh-pooh this picture, or any other non-thriller Hitchcock. (It’s true that I lean more to Robin Wood’s side than Rohmer and Chabrol’s on Mr. and Mrs. Smith; while Rohmer and Chabrol are correct in identifying that film’s most Hitchcockian scene, said scene is also borderline grotesque, and Wood is right in nailing down the film’s defining weakness, which is that Norman Krasna’s script is a borderline crass rehash of The Awful Truth.) Because no matter what the material, Hitchcock’s always inventing, stretching, testing, film language itself, which is never not interesting. As Rohmer and Chabrol state at the conclusion of their book, “In Hitchcock’s work form does not embellish content, it creates it.” And it’s almost always a kick to watch that miracle take place before one’s eyes. Don't you think?

GK

This is the third of a four-part series. See part one below; part two here; and I'll update when part four appears at the Siren's blog tomorrow, and maybe I'll put up a kind of post-game show when we're done...

UPDATE: The Siren's thrilling (it really is!) conclusion to this exchange is now posted, here. 

The "Paradine" Letters: An exchange with The Self Styled Siren, Part One

This is the first of a four-part dialogue. The next installment will appear at Self Styled Siren on Friday, May 1. 

Alida Valli in The Paradine Case, Alfred Hitchcock, 1947.

Dear Farran,

I'm taking you seriously as to the idea we discussed the other morning, at a delightful-as-usual breakfast at Court Street Grocers. The idea being to rejuvenate our respective blogs with an epistolary exchange about Alfred Hitchcock's 1947 picture The Paradine Case.  

(By the way, you see what I did there, with the totes adorbes allusion to our social relationship and our exemplary taste in local food emporiums? I was going for a Korean-tacos-while-watching-Schindler's List effect, which seems to be the thing in arts writing these days. OK, I'll stop now.)

As I mentioned, to you and in a blog post elsewhere, since my mom died I've gone on an enormous Hitchcock jag, for sentimental reasons and maybe other reasons as well. The supplement on the Criterion Collection disc of Truffaut's Le peau douce, a video essay by our friend Kent Jones on the book Hitchcock/Truffaut and its effect on Hitchcock's reputation, a preface of sorts I believe to Kent's feature-length documentary on the subject, certainly stirred up something in my critical consciousness prior to the personal catastrophe that set me on a cinematic sentimental journey of sorts. In any event, my companion in this latest round of Hitchcock studies was a used paperback of a translation of Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's 1957 book Hitchcock, subtitled The First Forty-Four Films.

The book has a lot to recommend it, not just because Rohmer and Chabrol were astute critics. It’s really fascinating to read a Hitchcock study that ends with The Wrong Man: that is, before at least three Really Significant Canonical works (Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho) and two Significant Pieces of Expressive Esoterica (The Birds and Marnie) (and these are my own categories of course). So the argument that Rohmer and Chabrol make to establish Hitchcock as a major film artist seems peculiarly circumscribed to readers who have the entirety of Hitch’s career to take into account. There’s also the matter of the Catholic conservative perspective of the writers, which leads to them privileging I Confess and The Wrong Man in ways a lot of contemporary critics won’t or wouldn’t.

In terms of formal analysis, they treat The Paradine Case, Rope, and Under Capricorn as pretty much a trilogy, and not just because they’re, you know, subsequent films. Each of the pictures represent a variation on a singular formal perspective, that is, each of the films is a sort of long-take laboratory. The first one, the one we’re most occupied with, The Paradine Case, ran into some trouble in this respect because its producer, David O. Selznick, who also adapted the film’s scenario, was not very big on the long take at all. Here’s Leonard Leff in his book Hitchcock & Selznick, about a day on The Paradine Case shoot: “One day, looking ahead to the fluidity of his Transatlantic pictures, Hitchcock prepared an elaborate tracking shot of [Gregory] Peck and [Ann] Todd. While grips frantically pulled away furniture to make a path, the probing camera followed the actors through a long and arduous take. Todd called the shot ‘frightening,’ but Selznick had the last word: ‘Theatrical.’ Appearing on the set, he ordered the sequence filmed conventionally. Hitchcock unwillingly obliged.” 

And so it went, apparently. Still, Hitchcock was able to pull off at least two memorable shots in this vein: the final God’s-eye view of the courtroom, with Gregory Peck’s shattered character, the barrister Keane, nearly staggering out, which shot inspired rapturous praise from Rohmer and Chabrol; and the famous-but-not-famous-enough shot of murder defendant Madame Paradine (Alida Valli) sitting in her courtroom box as witness and lover Latour (Louis Jourdan) enters the courtroom, and the camera tracks his long walk behind and then in front of her. “We had to do that in two takes. The camera is on Alida Valli’s face, and in the background you see Louis Jourdan coming down to the witness box,” Hitchcock recalled to François Truffaut. “First, I photographed the scene without her; the camera panned him all around, at a two-hundred degree turn, from the door to the witness box. Then, I photographed her in the foreground; we sat her in front of the screen, on a twisting stool, so that we might have the revolving effect, and when the camera went off her to go back to Louis Jourdan, she was pulled off the screen. It was quite complicated, but it was very interesting to work that out.”

The shot is magnificent both from a technical point of view—I wonder it you’d actually need to do it as a composite now, given certain advances in technology that we can maybe talk about later—and a pictorial design point of view, and, most important, it registers emotionally. As Hitchcock noted, “We wanted to give the impression that she senses his presence […] that she can actually feel him behind her, as if she could smell him.” Yes, we do get that. The Paradine Case gets pooh-poohed by a lot of self-proclaimed Hitchcock fans because, the murder element aside, it’s more of a melodrama than a thriller. Ostensibly what they used to call “a woman’s picture.” Boiled down, it’s the story of a good man (Peck’s Keane) who falls in love with his client (Valli), which wreaks havoc on his marriage to a good woman (Todd). Complicating factors include Charles Laughton’s judge, who has a weird sick thing for Keane’s wife, and of course Jourdan as Madame Paradine’s paramour.  But hell—I think it’s pretty top-flight melodrama, in the Hitchcock mode (which is quite different but equally as cinematically and emotionally astute as the Sirk mode): swift, sharply written, involving, emotionally potent. I think another reason the movie gets short shrift is that there’s a tendency to take Hitchcock himself too much at his word. Rohmer and Chabrol note that Selznick chose the film’s actors (and indeed he did!) and “insisted on Louis Jourdan for the groom, whereas the director would have preferred a ‘clod’.” Sounds as if the fellas agree. Hitchcock amplified this to Truffaut, after grousing that Peck couldn’t “properly represent an English lawyer.” Hitchcock calls the casting of Jourdan the film’s worst flaw. “After all,” he says, “the story of The Paradine Case is about the degradation of a gentleman who becomes enamored of his client, a woman who is not only a murderess, but also a nymphomaniac. And that degradation reaches its climactic point when he’s forced to confront the heroine with one of her lovers, who is a groom. But the groom should have been a manure-smelling stable hand, a man who really reeked of manure.” 

Whoa! There’s a lot to unpack there. It’s like he wanted to make the long-form version of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Hitchcock’s own sexual idiosyncrasies/insecurities as expressed/implied here aren’t HUGELY unusual, particularly when you take into account the nearly inherent sexism of men of his generation and nationality. But for a director who did so many amazing things with his actresses and his female characters, he definitely had, in this case, a huge blind spot. I think Jourdan is fine here and I know you do too; I think Hitchcock, in his desire to indulge his own paranoia about pretty women walking around with gorillas on his street, underestimates the erotic appeal of the smooth, which Jourdan most definitely represents. Maybe this is where I should get off and let you do some talking…

GK

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Self Styled Siren reply. Stay tuned for Part Three, at this site, on the morning of Monday, May 4. Thanks, as ever, for reading. 

"Splendor In The Grass"

 

 

 

 

1961. Directed by Elia Kazan. Director of Photography, Boris Kaufman. Actors, in order of appearance:  Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Zohra Lampert.