Some Came Running

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.”

On doing investigative journalism at Premiere

The July 1998 Premiere article "Flirting With Disaster," which was referenced the other day in an incredibly brave and true piece for Indiewire by Liz Manne, can be found here. Thank you to Stephen Saito for saving me the trouble of abusing my own scanner. Below is a small account of how that piece, and another, came to be. 

I guess it was some time in the summer of 1997 when Jim Meigs, the then-editor-in-chief of Premiere, told me there was an investigative journalist with whom he wanted me to work. John Connolly had once been a detective with the NYPD, and during the heyday of Spy magazine had done a lot of the digging for inside-Hollywood columns penned by the of course fictitious “Celia Brady.” The piece Jim handed me was something John had done about Michael Viner, a producer and publisher and, from the sound of it, a fairly shady guy. I was a little wary of the piece for two reasons. One, I did not think that Premiere’s readership would give a rat’s ass about Viner, and two, there seemed to have been some personal animus between author and subject. Connolly’s piece was upfront about it, but I still didn’t like it. I felt a little burned after having taken over a piece about a heroin-addicted actor and learned months after publication that its author had been some combination of personal assistant and NA sponsor to the guy.

One day John came up to the office. If we were gonna be a team, we made a very odd couple. John like myself is a broad-shouldered Irish guy (well, half-Irish in my case) but he was a quintessential old-school man of a certain world. Florid of complexion, always crisply dressed in a blazer over a cashmere turtleneck or some such thing, well-groomed, ever carrying a discreet hint of aftershave. Whereas I was a slouchy cigarette-dangling-from-the-lip quasi-dirtbag who thought that having edited the National Magazine Award-nominated “David Lynch Keeps His Head” by David Foster Wallace entitled me to come to work in my Tex Avery t-shirt two or three days out of the week. (Daniel Filipacchi—the chairman of Premiere’s owner Hachette-Filipacchi and the man who introduced Chantal Goya to Jean-Luc Godard—did eye that t-shirt with amused admiration in the elevator one day, I think. Tex Avery was big in France.)

When John pitched New Line, he opened with a story in which, on a “trust-building” cattle-drive exercise during a corporate retreat, one executive (he’s named in the article) decided to ditch the activity and go back to the resort with a bunch of colleagues and trip out on mushrooms. And I told John, “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but if I had been one of the people on that cattle drive, I would have been right behind him on the way to the van. You’re going to have to come up with something better.”

And so he did. Quite a bit. All this happened, as we bragged in our display copy, over the course of eight months. Eight months that were sometimes exhilarating, sometimes dispiriting. Personally, they were mostly miserable. I remember saying to Jim very early in the process, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.” And he said, “This is journalism. Do you want to do it?” Leaving aside a detailed examination of “want,” I assented.

I can’t actually go into much detail on the process, even to this day. All through it, though, we had amazing support from two women at the top of Hachette’s legal team. This was kind of surprising. Hachette’s CEO at the time was still David Pecker. At the time Pecker was not highly invested in investigative journalism, to say the least. The Editorial Director was the late Jean-Louis Ginibre, who I wouldn’t call discouraging, but who also often gave the impression that he’d rather be in Philadelphia, where he housed his 30,000-LP jazz record collection. And who could blame him. And I think at the time Hachette’s deductible in a libel or defamation lawsuit was something like $500,000, an amount the company was not eager to spend on such an endeavor. And yet. The company’s General Counsel, Catherine Flickinger, and her second in command, Kathy Daniels, were incredibly helpful in mapping out what we needed to do to protect ourselves and most importantly our sources, most of who ended up being anonymous.

Eventually we started having these very heated meeting with publicists and lawyers from New Line, objecting to many things, including what they termed Connolly’s “when did you stop beating your wife” line of questioning. There I sat with my dangling cigarette and Tex Avery t-shirt staring down these guys in very expensive suits with a “you fucking die!” glare. What a schmuck. One of the publicists, after one such meeting, told me that I was personally going to hear from a lawyer, a particular one, but that I shouldn’t worry, because this lawyer was “the nicest guy you’d ever meet.” Somehow this did not sound very reassuring. Later I found out that this lawyer, now invariably referred to by me as “the nicest lawyer I’m ever going to meet,” was the husband of a cousin of the woman I was dating at the time. This turned out to be a genuine coincidence, but still. In any event, I never met the guy. I often wonder just how nice he was.

We made a rather bad strategic error at the end of the process. There was one anecdote that we had definitively nailed in terms of sourcing even though the subjects of the story were not its sources. It was about a New Line executive laying a hand on a well-known actor, female, who was developing a project to produce and star in at the studio. We thought, why not ask the actor to comment on the story. After all, this figure was well known as someone doing good work in making the industry more female-forward, etc. Surely she will want to get on board with this. So we faxed the paragraph with the anecdote to her, care of her manager. Within ten minutes there were three phone calls, one from manager, one from agent, one from lawyer, all saying that if we printed the story we’d be sued seven ways from Sunday or whatever the phrase is. So, the anecdote went. Which was a pain in the ass because we were already in galleys and had to change the layout. That wasn’t the only reason. For a really long time I was really irritated at the actor, and it’s only been in recent years that I accepted that in extending the opportunity to comment, we were also extending the opportunity to shut it down, and she had very legitimate reasons to do so.

As Liz Manne’s excellent piece on her own experience of sexual harassment at New Line points out, when the piece was published, Premiere was subjected to a lot of tsk-tsking from industry “insiders” such as Peter Bart and David Poland, quibbling with the sourcing of the story, bemoaning the fact that we were going after “mavericks,” and a lot of other bullshit. Poland, to his credit, has expressed his regret over certain of his comments; I don’t expect to hear anything from Bart, who the record shows was also invested in protecting that other maverick, Harvey Weinstein. I never liked that guy. Bart, I mean. I never liked Harvey either, and was delighted that he stopped knowing who I was after I wrote that, with The Cider House Rules, he was creating a new “cinema du Papa.”

At the time of the New Line piece, though, Harvey was very happy. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Harvey had a byline on a piece in the same issue in which the New Line story appeared—one in which he bemoaned the use of anonymous sources in film journalism, for Christ's sake. I honestly have no idea how this scheduling glitch came to be. I believe, though, that  it was the last time Harvey’s byline appeared in Premiere. In any event, rumor had it that he had photocopies of both his own piece and the New Line story on his desk as the magazine hit newsstands, and he gleefully passed out both to visitors to his office. I thought that was gross.

Because the piece did not result in a lawsuit—on account of, you know, every goddamn thing in it being absolutely true—John was feeling feisty and suggested he and I team up on a Miramax piece next. I don’t think I was particularly eager to put myself through what would have been an even more painful process, but I knew it was a salutary idea anyway. John spent a large amount of his own money hiring a private detective to track a potential source, a sexual assault victim, halfway around the world. When John finally contacted her, she insisted her encounter with Harvey had been entirely consensual.

In the meantime something else had happened. New Line did not sue us, but they blackballed us. The company had always made the kind of movies that appealed to our core readership, the entirety of which would soon become contributors to Ain't It Cool News (not really, sorry), and now New Line was going to deny us, with extreme prejudice, access to those movies. The studio would soon go into production on the Lord of the Rings movies, to give you some idea of our problem.

Now obviously the individual talents working on these movies would want out coverage, and would afford us forms of direct access, but the whole process was made much more difficult when you had the studio against you. We had to ask ourselves whether we could live up to the other aspects of the magazine’s mandate if both New Line AND Miramax were refusing to play ball with us. It wasn’t a matter of advertising—we were not very proactive with respect to advertising from studios at that time. But as we were making our morality-versus-business calculations, John’s trail went cold.           

Jim Meigs was let go as EOC in late 2000, and his successor, Michael Solomon, was eager to make a big splash with his debut issue, so he brought John C. back, and put us to work on a piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had about four weeks to do what we took eight months to do with the New Line story, but we created a solid, unpleasant portrait of a philanderer and ass-grabber (and worse) that again was not challenged in a court of law. (We were inadvertently helped out a great deal by Mr. Schwarzenegger’s legal representation, which early on in the process faxed us a cease and desist letter that laid out in great detail all the things they would hold us liable for if we printed them. So we didn’t print them. Genius.) The reaction to that story only bolstered the cynicism I felt after the New Line story not only did not end sexual harassment in Hollywood, but was spun to make Premiere look like the bad guys for printing it. A bevy of Schwarzenegger’s cronies and colleagues, including Linda Hamilton, Rita Wilson, and James Cameron, wrote in with testimonials about what a great guy the future Governor of California was. The multivalent fallout from Schwarzenegger’s divorce from Maria Shriver all but verified everything in the story (we had inklings about the illegitimate child story, but no solid trail)—and not many people cared anymore, at that.

The thing was this: people did not only think highly of Schwarzenegger, they had an investment IN thinking highly of him. Michael Solomon did not know it at the time, but rather than making a big splash, he had laid out the first nail of his coffin. The boys upstairs, to a one, were very “Why are we going after Ah-nuld?” It just didn’t sit right with them. Michael did not last a year at the magazine, and after he left, the word was handed down that John Connolly (whom Michael and I were cultivating for non-scandalous work, too; he did a rather lovely piece on the last days of Mae West for us, and a funny Robert Evans profile too) was no longer going hang a shingle at Premiere.

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.  

I apologize, sir, for not telling you sooner that you're a DEGENERATE!

Just wanted to get that out there.

For those of you following from home, the news is that the manufacturer of my on-the-fritz-since-July plasma display has managed, according to them, to have successfully rebuilt the defective part that caused all the trouble, and depending on when the part reaches my TV repair facility, I could have my set fixed some time this week. What on earth shall I revel in first? The Criterion Blu-ray of Paths of Glory—the above screen cap is from the standard def edition of a new master/transfer—is only one of many exciting potential choices. I'll keep you posted. A new Blu-ray Consumer Guide should follow the blessed event in short order, if said event comes off. 

Ford/Lincoln

Three views:

Lincoln the Visionary—signing into law that act that will build a trans-continental raildroad, despite the protests of those arguing that such a further expense cannot by borne in a time of war. Played by Charles Edward Bull, The Iron Horse, 1924; directed by John Ford. 

Lincoln the Martyr—felled by assassin John Wilkes Booth. Played by Frank McGlynn Sr., The Prisoner of Shark Island, 1936; directed by John Ford.

Young Mr. Lincoln. Henry Fonda, 1939. Directed by John Ford.