Editor's Notebook

Home , Karel Reisz

:1 VOL.XVII, No. 4 - SUMMER 1964 Editor's Notebook THE COVER: The Poor in Spirit Ingmar Bergman's The Silence In its April 3 issue, Time put on a ludicrous ARTICLES: display of pique at the recent Ford Foundation The Word, the Image, and The Silence awards to twelve independent film-makers. CAROL BRIGHTMAN 3 Ranging from tired Philistinism ("No one much about HIud, Deep in the Heart of [speak for yourself] has heard Divided Hollywood PAULINE KAEL 15 movies like Breath-Death, Cosmic Ray, and Stone Sonata") to irrelevant exaggeration of this INTERVIEW ("tuns gold"), ugly hatchet-job appears, on internal evidence of ignorance, to be 12 Lindsay Anderson PETER COWIE the work of someone besides Time's regular anonymous reviewer, Brad Darrach, who is a SPECIAL FEATURE ON CINEMA-VERITE: knowledgeable critic beset by a split-level edit- THREE VIEWS ing system. The piece misunderstands the pur- Cinema of Common Sense COLIN YOUNG 26 poses of the grants, calling them "prizes" for Cindma-V&ritd in France PETER GRAHAhM 30 previous films rather than the funds for new On the Search for the Real Nitty-Gritty works which they almost all are. It assumes the HENRY BREITROSE 36 variety of films made earlier by the recipients Photo-Feature: The Technology 24 is some kind of menace, instead of a sign of vitality. It grotesquely lacks any sense of hu- FILM REVIEWS mor: Time trying to make fun of funsters like The Easy Life JOHN SEELYE 41 Stan Vanderbeek or Bruce Conner is like a II Posto ERNEST CALLENBACH 44 mechanic troubleshooting Tinguely's self-de- This Sporting Life ERNEST CALLENBACH 45 stroying machine. In the French Style SYDNEY FIELD 48 The article is a hodgepodge of disconnected Lady with the Dog ALEX SZOGYI 51 reactions. It includes a precis of Kent Mac- Sansho Dayu EILEEN BOWSER 53 kenzie's Exiles which is unutterably and in- Tide STEVEN P. HILL 54 Night sufferably fact, America ERNEST CALLENBACH 55 condescending-precisely, in America, Mackenzie took such to Point of Order ERNEST CALLENBACH 56 everything pains avoid. But it gives good marks to Carmen D'Avino, perhaps because his color "resurrec- ENTERTAINMENTS R. M. HODGENS 58 tion" of a slum apartment offers excuse for a little of Time's religious theme-mongering. SCHOLARSHIP ADDENDUM 60 Both reactions are irrelevant to the substantial virtues of the two film-makers.Or the dismissal BOOKS 61 of a mystical artist like Jordan Belson because

FILM QUARTERLY is published by the University of California Press, Berkeley 4, California. $1.00 per copy, $4.00 per year (higher rates abroad-see your subscription agent). Editor: ERNEST CALLENBACH.Assistant to the Editor: CHRISTINE LEEFELDT. Los Angeles Editor: COLIN YOUNG. New York Editor: ROBERT HUGHES. Rome Editor: LETIZIA CIOTTI MILLER. Paris Editor: GINETTE BILLARD. Chicago Editor: CAROL BRIGHTMAN. Advisory Editorial Board: ANDRIEs DEINUM, AUGUST FRUGE', HUGH GRAY, ALBERT JOHNSON, PAUL JORGENSEN, NEAL OXENHANDLER.Copyright 1964 by the Regents o' the University of California. Views expressed in signed articles are those of the authors. Indexed in International Index to Periodicals and Art Index. Published quarterly. Second-class postage paid at Berkeley, California, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. 2 ?EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK his talk about art as a crucible sounds odd- New Periodicals Or that kind of mystic lacks the proper stamp. Moviegoer (Box 128, New York 9, N.Y.-$1.00 per the coy omission of film-makers whose work copy, $3.25 per year) is the best of the new crop of does in fact approximate the writer's ideas U.S. film journals. Editor James Stoller has adopted about "professional" cinema-Dan Drasin, Ed the sound policy of gathering good writers and giving Emschwiller, Helen Levitt. their highly personal reactions full scope. The first What is sad about this, and worth more than issue contains a variety of articles and reviews, re- of some of a sneer from those who care for the prints Pauline Kael's fine blurbs for the passing Cinema a curious note Paul is that the are in Berkeley Guild, by art, foundations theory sup- Goodman explaining why he and his friends don't posed to provide the intellectual risk capital take films very seriously, and comments on the Great for a society whose formal power centers have Auteur Debate. little concern for art or ideas; this is, in principle, why their funds are not taxed away into the government's coffers. In practice, even the giants are timorous and conventional beasties in almost all their grants. Time's sour reaction to Ford's surprisingly adventurous set of grants hence does our national cultural scene no service. But we may expect with some confidence that among the lucky film-makers at least several will produce films of top quality which are genuinely novel. This will be good return for money: the total budget for grants ["tuns of gold"] was below that for a low-budget Holly- wood film or a modest TV spectacular. The Ford Foundation, in short, deserves a modest pat on the back, and not this elbow in the kidney. Contributors EILEEN BOWSER is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modem Art Film Library. HENRY BREITROSE is in charge of film teaching and production in the Broad- casting and Film Division, Stanford University. CAROL BRIGHTMAN has been working on several film projects in Chicago. PETER COWIE is editor of The International Film Guide [see Books section] and writes for British film magazines. SYD FIELD works for the Wolper Company, TV film-makers, in Los Angeles. PETER GRAHAM lives in Paris and writes for Films & Filming and other journals. PAULINE KAEL'S book of film criticism, I Lost It at the Movies, will be published by Atlantic Monthly Press in January. JOHN SEELYE teaches English at the Univer- sity of California, Berkeley. ALEX SZOGYIis a student of Chekov whose translation of The Cherry Orchard was a recent New York stage success; he is finishing a Chekov book for Macmillan. :3 CAROLBRIGHTMAN The Word, The Image, And The Silence In contemporary criticism, particularly when it used as sticks to beat or tame the very animals "pans," it becomes increasingly obvious that from which they are wrenched. Whenever the words of seeming description just don't meaning is attributed to man or deed within stick-at least not to what happens on the these films, it characteristically presents itself screen. Instead, it is the paper wars which are as simply a further phenomenological routine: supported, the sectarian skirmishes of critics we take it or leave it depending on whether or whose periodic schedules encourage newsy jur- not it is displaced by another, or left hanging. isdiction at the price of understanding. Film But first we note its presence on its own criticism has, in effect, largely become an awk- peculiar terms. Recognition without judgment, ward series of maneuvers between camps, by unfortunately, has always been rare in the which critics can distinguish themselves not West; only in our time we have forgotten that according to their singular perceptions, but it is the essential distinction which would simply from each other. That they fail even in make the critic's imperative a worthwhile one. that is obvious from the surprising coincidnce "Ingmar Bergman's The Silence," John of fault-finding phrases which, in the hands of Simon submits, "is, I am sorry to say, a many serious critics, only exceeds Crowther's disappointing film" (New Leader, Feb. 17). I anxious preoccupation with "negativism" by a maintain it is not, but my first concern here is degree of literacy, or by a matter of taste. It to question the technique of Simon's judgment. would appear, from a cursory reading of such I choose his review because it so effectively regular critics as Kauffman, Simon, and then spans the gap between the news hacks, bedev- Sarris, that they are often intent upon resisting iled with messages of promise, and those critics those cinematic impressions which cannot be who know better than to freight movies with subsumed beneath a single word or phrase an irrelevant duty to console-but who never- which judges, while it presumes to describe. theless have not eluded that vocabulary which Yet it is just these impressions of which the scales their plus and minus value according to best of modern cinema is made. vague normative assumptions of what "says" Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and Bergmal something, and what does not. Essentially in The Silence may be analyzed according there is no difference between the affirmative to a literary principle of dislocation, for ex- mania, bored in the face of gratuitous inven- ample; but to superimpose on that a suspicion tion, and the splenetic disaffection of critics of formlessness which slips easily into charges such as Simon who can't put up with [God- of deliberate obscurantism, or irreverence for ard's] "attitudinizing and maundering about the "fullness of life" (a novelistic ideal we've the human crisis" (NL, Sept. 30, 1963) at the clung to long after the fragmentations of mod- expense-of what? Of succinct statement pre- ern life have undermined it), is a tricky pas- sumably, direct narration, content unencumb- time of critics who have inherited movies large- ered by stylistic options. It is hard to guess the ly by default, in place of the new novels which alternative because it forces us to stop talking have abandoned them. Like much of recent about modern films and begin talking about European literature these films defeat the drama perhaps, or nineteenth-century novels- pundit; their meanings (or apparent lack some art where, alas, the blind of the camera is thereof) cannot be paraphrased, much less absent. 4 THESILENCE

We do know, however, what happens to the objects (including the human) into which he critic when a modern film is found "maunder- is thrown. The emotional content of his existing"; so will his attention. "Emptiness, bore- ence arises from a crisis without solution. But dom and lack of transcendental values" will, our critic won't have one without the other; by virtue of a peculiarly anxious empathizing, hence he is doubly confused. He wants an out, guarantee the emptiness, boredom, and lack of an alternative to the apparent submission, a a transcendental response from the spectator. proper measure of experience which might As if these emotions projected in the film are attribute motive to that existence, giving it the merely projections of living tensions, the spec- causal necessity he likes to find in life. tator suffers accordingly, mistaking art for life. "Like Antonioni, Bergman chose to make a He is accustomed to the abreactions of their trilogy about the emptiness, boredom and lack more positive or tragic counterparts. These of transcendental values in life; like Anton- latter emotions, he finds, do not tend to drag, ioni's, Bergman's third installment stringently without happy end or any end at all; conven- divests itself of narrative content and shifts the tionally, they respond to objective stimuli as burden of communication from incident to im- well as ultimately transformthe given world in plication, from statement to symbol." The their own images. The emotions born of frus- comparison with Antonioni is apt, but the tration, on the other hand, endure for the very analysis is wrong. reason that the given environment cannot be Let me first suggest that if Simon insists assimilated or overwhelmed; it remains in the upon bracketing this formidable assembly be- rough: the fractious residue of a world cut off neath such worn and depreciable labels, better from human use which survives to remind its he simply say these "trilogies" (if the term inhabitants of their uselessness. A character in itself is anything more than a critical expedi- this case doesn't interact; he does not develop ency) are about lives which happen to be in time-but in space. His being expands, empty, bored, and bereft of transcendental gesture by gesture, until by the end he has values. There is a difference, and not a negli- revealed himself within the configuration of gible one for a face-to-face encounter with

Jai The basic constellation in THE SILENCE

gv'ON F-f M H.-'iia.i. 1K. .!7 THESILENCE S these films. What preserves them all from be- sense not according to what happens, but to ing thematic tracts in the first place (with the how it happens. The plot synopsis is irrelevant partial exception of Through a Glass Darkly) because the film is not "about" a plot, but is the fact that character is applied to idea, not about certain emotions, about character. idea to character. (When the latter occurs, Events serve to provoke characters to certain Simon may be right: "Bergman, whatever his quintessential routines through which we see greatness, does not have enough 'ideas' for a their existences circumscribed. film of ideas." NL, May 27, 1963-on Winter Light. ) Film like any art has a number of parts, Simon seriously errs when he automatically none of which are expendable but any of introduces an evalutative discrimination be- which can be exploited to serve varying pur- tween the effectiveness of "communication" poses. It is unfortunate, and not entirely coin- shifted from "incident" to "implication," from cidental, in a time when the director's function "statement"to "symbol."He assumes a gradual as technician is frequently exploited far more weakening-or dissolution-of expression in than his (or his screenwriter's) function as its passage from statement to symbol ("sym- storyteller, that critics should tax that part of bol" in a sense the Symbolists would have stylistic invention with the losses accrued by abjured). Just so, does Kauffman find The the part of direct narration. Hence Kauffman: Silence "patently a symbolic work about "Bergman so easily creates such an atmosphere alienation ... its symbolism is its defect; it of import that, in fact, its excellence only breaks down into a series of discernable meta- emphasizes the vacuousness of the piece." The phors" which he scrupulously itemizes; he then resulting exegeses are not only misleading but concludes imperturbably, "it almost seems to useless to a true reception of the film. have been contrived as an exercise for that Consider Simon: "Like Eclipse, The Silence school that looks on criticism as cryptography" deals with non-communication." (Non-com- (New Republic, Feb. 22, 1964. Italics mine: munication, like in vacuousness.) But what curious that Kauffmannfaults the critic not the are the silences, punctured by natural sounds film, which would seal his case.) The well is and only abortively by vague, erratic mono- poisoned, no wonder it yields an unsavory syllables in both films, if they are not forms draught. of communication? Because these characters Such semantic malpractice cannot be cured do not speak in paragraphs, are they not com- by a dictionary or thesaurus. Only a new look municating? (This, I fear, is the plaint of the at the films themselves will suffice. Kauff- literary man.) A muttered "No-no," a blank or mann's charming synopsis demonstrates how searching stare, is as much an act of communi- irrelevant the old, letter-bent eye can be to cation in film as a mouthful of whys and where- these films. "Two sisters are traveling through fores. Bergman's "implication" may be as Europe. . . . Ester is unmarried, Anna is declarative as Wayne's whip, it only says married and is accompanied by her eleven- something else. A mum female is not a trussed year-old son. Ester suffers a violent attack symbol of man's inability to communicate, but of an unnamed but obviously grave illness. a mum female. It's the least we owe her, with- They must stay overnight in the capital of out holding her or her director to promises a fictitious country . . . in a luxe hotel . they never made. We might listen to our It all happens, but something's wrong (and it's Vittis, Moreaus, and Thulins for what they not the fact that this would seem to make even do say, not for what they fail to say. Eclipse, duller watching than it does reading). The finally, isn't "about non-communication,"but a missing factor upon which the whole power of certain kind of communication; the same holds the film depends is that The Silence makes for The Silence. If what is communicated is THESILENCE

confusion over the purpose of a film-a confusion which is more than semantic. There is no reason why film or any art should be freighted with a "burden of communication." People may frequently address each other for that purpose, but artists are rarely so singlemind- edly inclined. In art such communication is a contingency of the essential production. A film is composed of parts of which "communication" is one, but one inextricably bound to the visual structure of the whole; and in the modern film one which is often inci- Anna and the waiter. moreover, dental, as spectacle to a tragedy. It is the propagandist, however enlightened or enlight- so be but let us boredom, emptiness, etc., it, ening, who will use his characters, incidents, not fall into a and about Panglossian trap prate and symbols primarily to communicate certain an to the "inability communicate": happier messages, rather than to them. Ima- emotions a objectify just aren't there; meanwhile, great gine for a moment some natural mystery (a some acute con- deal, including intelligence man's fate, driven to term an the nature of in their perhaps, by cerning women, happens accident): suppose we were asked to choose absence. between belief and In his review of Feb. comprehension; compar- Eclipse (NL, 4, ably, we can art from Simon called it a a distinguish propaganda. 1963), "luminous failure," In neither case are we fooled, but in the latter which better describe his own phrase might the sense is merely conveyed rather than critical response to the film. After.a brilliantly created. of as a "meta- perceptive description Eclipse For critics suffering from an undue preoccu- made of smaller he phor up many metaphors," pation with film as communication, style, or nevertheless asks-and we must demand the formal coherence, will frequently go unnoticed of same him-"Why should so many superb or misconstrued. "Like Eclipse, The Silence details add up to an unsatisfactory film?""Be- will have no truck with a middle. And there cause," he replies, "we cannot care for people is no end either . ." Unless one walks in who will not even put up a fight against after the beginning, such an observation is boredom, because we are not allowed to go irresponsible. Again Simon barks up other inside characters, because no possible alterna- trees. Very possibly for any film whatsoever, tive to defeat is offered." But why can't we no matter how conventionally narrated, the care? Won't our amour propre allow it? Or is it beginning, end and middle must be first a commitment to that "fulness of life" properly considered as just those points before which delineated in novels? Are we free to care only nothing happens, after which nothing hap- when these characters become somehow hope- pens, and then, everywhere in between. ful? Is their acquiesence too strong a tonic for Even with a causal propulsion from one event us, a sense of loss which poisons our attentive- to another, the movement of "plot" in cinema ness? It is our loss, of course, if that is the case. is uniquely a succession of images-not inci- But despite Simon's oddly arbitraryconclusion, dents; and the expressive content of an image it would appear he cared very much, at least or sequence, contributive to the total plot, is enough to notice a great deal more in the film not necessarily proportionate to its apparent than most. activity or relevance to the solution of plot. It It may well be that an obdurate impatience is indeed extremely difficult when speaking of with such hopelessness begins with a critical film to dissociate the function of incident itself THESILENCE : 7 from the function of its component images unity which seals the three lives in an inescap- (angle, lighting, sound properties, etc., which able vise at each end: from their emergence determine their net effect). Simon manages so out of a mutally debilitating past into a for- easily because he is simply looking for-and eign city, to the return of the two back to the so, naturally misses-action, the action which same past, without future, by the same route, leads the spectator from one time and place while the third surrenders to an actual death, and statement, to another. locked in the middling labyrinth of the strange hotel. Importantly, we would lose Bergman's First in the consequent "threefold inade- favored myth of the journey which, although it quacy" Simon finds in The Silence, is "not proves elliptical in The Silence, in many of his enough forward thrust, not enough momentum earlier films serves to draw character along an to unite the specific points, the complementary arduous path of discovery and development, but discrete images." Presumably he will take for better or worse. his if are ornamental to images only they Simon submits as the second of the action which moves neatly if thrustingly for- aspect "threefold "There is not ward. It is undoubtedly a problem of the inadequacy": enough films of risk another expedi- human content; there are hints of the past ... imagist today (to not have in ent that we must to but the characters do enough space label) respond specifically what the cinematic environment: that our attention whch to develop, precisely because space to the must be tuned to the tensions in there is must remain empty convey delicately We are reminded of his visual as well as sound montage, and finally message." impatience with for not us "to inside that the beginnings and ends of these contra- Eclipse allowing go be observed in the characters." Just why he should demand puntal sequences initially indeed as well as in mise en scene, rather further entrance (if any "inside"exists) montage that Simon is than in the and solution of narrative is unclear, but it's clear enough origin dissatisfied with action. Such attention is and we not alone among critics ap- nothing new, motivation. know too well how it can be pearances unbuttressed by explicit blindly pressed and is that into the service of the most The point of The Silence Eclipse egregious examples with of New American Cinema. But The Silence is the emptiness, the preoccupation objects, is the "human content" of each film. When the no such film: Like an imagist film it is many take over a static in that there is no develop- objects (in Eclipse) they displace significant of human not "human con- ment of Action is synchronous; the dra- quality content, plot.* tent" itself. Man must remain even matic whole in the overall pattern of responsible, emerges for his it is the least we juxtaposition. Should the film begin anywhere displacement. Again, else but in the heat of the train owe him. clammy if critics ceased at mes- where again it ends, the whole Perhaps snapping compartment, does this well-bred, would collapse. We would lose the thematic sages ("Why intelligent boy pee in the corridor of this posh hotel? *Godard is the exception here, since images in his Obviously, that means something."-Kauff- hands are themselves set in motion. Through jump- mann), this deductive trap could be avoided.* used cuts, swift panning, and the "snapshot" cutting Simon has considered only that space where he in Le Petit Soldat, action is not accreted through successive visual impressions, but is propelled on a *"The dwarfs are just symbols. . . . The tank in the linear plane, frame by frame; like the full life of the street is a sumbol. . . . The few words in the foreign Absurd which it reflects, it affords no regret, no language are a symbol. Even the wild sex is a sym- flashback nostalgia for the consequences of actions bol." (Sarris, Village Voice, Feb 20, 1964). So goes already spent in a present severed from successive the ridiculous extreme of this kind of criticism-a moments of consciousness; its happening is all, and is kind of madness, assuredly, where either everything's complete. a symbol, or nothing is. 8 " : THESILENCE finds his "message," and obviously, finding Ester would say that on her deathbed. Unlike it less than earthshaking he wants more, the tag line, "God is love, love in all its forms," more filler material. The ladies are too dis- in Through a Glass Darkly, Ester's recognition turbed, the boy a sphinx without a riddle; provides us with only a skeleton key to her there must be some explanation! Clearly The schizophrenia, a schizophrenia which is, fund- Silence does not offer us full-blown case stud- amentally, as ordinary as it is alarming. Her ies, or even spare ones. We are confronted monologue (for the sympathetic old waiter with the effects of disturbance, of the supine can't understand a word) is simply a tentative obeisance of the boy, not the causes; the symp- summation, which happens to be final, under toms, not the disease. But why demand more? which her previous misadventures might be reckoned. As apologia it is equally vulnerable like all last- We might introduce a very respectable arg- to reason and passing sensation, find ument here for the timely realism of Bergman's ditch acts of personal vengeance. We ourselves still her assemblage, but this isn't the point. Simon observing phenomenological- ressembles the art critic who looks at a Gris ly, with no real explanation of the origin of her no real of a and complains there is no substance there, breakdown, expectation solution, nevertheless for the act of only surfaces. By now we should know that but waiting recog- the "insides" of things, as well as minds, can nition which will seal her fate. That is the is unrelieved in a only be viably described from the outsides. tension which ultimately There are many ways to accomplish this. A dramatic sense; it is merely superceded when to psychoanalytic inter-penetration of behavioral our attention is shifted the boy troubling symbols is only a more frantic manipulation over the foreign words she has passed on to of surfaces, and in film particularly this pre- him. occupation tends to be least interesting (e.g., As it happens Ester knows perhaps a little David and Lisa, along with the plurality of more about herself than we can, but not Hollywood's psychodynamic whodunits). Berg- enough to convert herself conveniently to sym- man in fact deserves credit here for controlling bol. From the intellectual pride (a pride, as his impulse to explain, an impulse which has well, in the appurtenances of intellect) which burdened many of his films with themes they we observe manifested so coolly before the strain overmuch to deliver. No doubt it is typewriter, we can deduce a long history of this very reserve which led Truffaut to allude such "attitudes" desperately assumed-but to The Silence as his best film - a reserve none the less authentic for that-to withstand which in effect leads Bergman to engage in the invasion of irrational forces which will the same dislocation of action from its cus- fracture not only the attitudes but the human tomary emotional, judicative responses which will-to-assume itself. The "forces"-the incest- Truffaut himself used so effectively in Shoot uous attraction for father, then sister, finally the Piano Player. for self-achieve their proper magnitude as the Only when Ester's breakdown seems immin- shriek of flesh, once repressed, or exiled by the ent and we are shocked by our incomprehen- disjunctive demands of intellect, becomes in- sion of her disease ("symbol" says lung can- tolerably mean and animalistic. The forces of cer) does she exclaim: "We try out many the body, finally, its "secretions and excre- attitudes; but the forces are too strong, the tions," prove too strong for the assumptions of dark forces." And these lines do provide a clue, the will. in depth, of the existential imperatives Ester Could this be the Message? And is the leap has wagered without profit. They underline the to faith to follow? Perhaps the words which psychical evidence of her torment without dim- Johan doggedly pursues on the retreating train inishing it by abstraction. She exclaims, she do forge a link between Ester's last will and does not explain, and it comes as revelation: testament to the powers of comprehension and THESILENCE :9 the ongoing, pre-reflective life of the boy. to wonder why Bergman has to make films "Spirit," he reads (in the dubbed version, when his messages are carried so economically although we are denied this last-minute tip in in a few lines, in a few static sets. But it the subtitles). Simon concludes that this final doesn't satisfy. For one reason, as Colin Young act of communication suggests "Art is univer- observes in his review of The Fiancis, because sal, and so, potentially, is language." Such a "Ester and Anna must finally say to each other leap does befit the customary reduction of what their conduct has said already to us. This Bergman's plots to Intellect v. Art, Reason v. is not dramatic redundancy-exposition in the Faith, etc. Even better, we could snare a eighth reel-unless you look at these films as happy synthesis here, since it is the intellec- being conventionally about action which grows tual's submission to faith in the endurance of continually in a straight line instead of pro- language as source of communion among men ceeding in circles which never really close." which carries the day. (The fact that, as Words speak while images only appear, and Simon observes, language shared by the sisters words are our business (don't we all share is used solely to poison each other further them?) while images are thrust upon us in the against themselves, and can only fall com- pure state, from a source compounded of arti- fortably upon the uncomprehending ears of the fice and raw being, leagued in the elusive old waiter, could merely add a note of heroic interests of the director's imagination. So we desperation to Ester's testament.) find ourselves surrendering to the faintest ap- If Ester's sudden volubility is also Berg- peal of language which explains, at the ex- man's, the screenwriter finally possessing the pense of a visual language which simply pre- screen, then perhaps the mesmeric oscillations sents. We find it hard to see the sudden burst between Ester's unsure intellectualism and of speech as just another phenomenalist event. Anna's unsure voluptuosity (linked by Johan's Even Anna explains (earlier): "You hate me dutiful passage from one to the other) have because you hate yourself-and all I have!" merely been enforced to set up reverberations Her revelation probes the surface of their en- in our mind ("implications"), which Bergman mity like a periscope. But nothing follows: can manipulate, even fulfill, in the single ver- Ester dismisses her with a tricky condescension bal dialogue between the "attitudes" and the still left to her. Nevertheless the words may "darkforces.'" linger. Our first clue-first among the many with Not bad. Silence could make sense after which we would later challenge Bergman's all: it's been communicated. The polar per- cinematic integrity, concluding perhaps, with sonae of the two women, locked in a baleful Kauffmann, that the fact "the film is a rebus, embrace, cancel each other out dramatically. with clues to be hunted in it, indicates its The dilemma can only be resolved in the limitations" (not our own, of course). But timely confession of the more articulate, rising Anna's words do echo throughout the succeed- from her heated couch to speak for a director ing silence. Ultimately, the two women do who simply hung around with a camera until mirror each other; the dichotomy can be re- this moment, when he would finally say what solved only if they fuse, intellect with animal- just can't be said any other way. ity. Until then (until another film) Anna will So runs the risk of reading a movie. If this find Ester's eye in the mirrorwatching her feed should satisfy we should not be surprised to on her reflection, and Ester will find Anna's sex catch ourselves a moment later echoing Sarris, eating at her own body in despair of ever for one, whose critical job is relieved by the claiming that sex; and each will hate what she "evidence of an irreversible decline" he finds so lacks, and love, needing the loss to heal the generously supported in the symbolic obvious- open wound. There can be no fusion, just as ness of The Silence. Or like Kauffmann and there is no explanation in The Silence but Simon (on Winter Light), how easy it will be merely image straining to achieve a coherence 10= THESILENCE through the dwindling resources of meaning sensual. Anna moving through the streets, the which words provide. Anna catches a further bathroom, or just moving, is far more so. It is symptom, not a solution. The silence in the not the degree of exertion which animates film, as much as the grate of natural and these latter scenes; it is their resonance, their unnatural sounds, perpetually threatens to suggestiveness, cinematically enforced in close- swallow the human voice. Not unreasonably do ups which amplify the minutest gestures into these characters often halt mid-sentence, over- actions of resounding signficance. Walking whelmed by their vulnerability. back and forth in the room becomes the pacing of a trapped animal. Lighting a cigarette, It is hardly suprising that Simon should find getting a fix. Ester's grimace, a spellbound his third inadequacy in the physicality of the shriek without issue. Anna putting on a dress, film (although it should be noted that this an act of self-immolation. The old man eating physicality, which Sarris believes pitches The a frank to lure the boy, nothing less, or less Silence into the nudie circuit, is as searing a ludicrous, than castration. Johan being frocked display of wounded intellect-not sex-ima- by the dwarfs, a defloration. True passion ginable). "For a film which proceeds by meta- resides in the charged gesture, not the overt phors and implications," says Simon, "certain act. sensual details are too strong." The question Not the least curious aspect of these close- arises, Even if we could support this distinc- ups is the fact that instead of creating a sense tion between implication and incident, meta- of intimacy with the characters, they effectual- phor and statement, why single out "certain ly alienate them from us. We are continually sensual details" as somehow "stronger" than rearing back from the massive circumstances of what seems to be the nonsensual details of the their narrow lives. Faces, fingers, hair, appear rest of the film? This is a confession of taste, or too close-they get in the way. Ester's naked of a proclivity to register the more obvious face imprisons her, but it is all there is. The functions of sex on a higher frequency than only difference between these three faces other demonstrations of instinct, thought, or filling the screen and the painted masks of emotion. What really unsettles Simon is likely earlier films whereby Bergman obscures the to be that Bergman has isolated sensual details human countenance from' simple view, is that from their customary contexts. Even when these faces mask themselves, without artifice. Anna takes the cafe waiter, sex is still some- Sven Nyvkist's camera imprisons them by how onanistic; more important, these details liberating them from any background. Just are reported naturalistically without any inter- so, the spare details of environment themselves est in causes or effect.* encroach. Rather than provide the objects by But the real issue here is that Johan's adven- which a man passes out of himself into a tures in the hotel corridor, or Ester's assault concrete world, these corridors, damask cur- upon cigarette, bottle, and later, upon her tains, featherbeds appear as obstacles, like the translations (safe cinematic proof of the Fe- glass windows through which an infrequent male Intellectual), are no more nor less "impli- view of the world outside is gained-sealing cation" or "metaphor" than Ester or Anna the inhabitants away from any real encounter indulging themselves (much to their dissatis- with that world. Like the earliest of Bergman's faction). To me, these indulgences are less films, The Silence is an huis clos but not on because if one looks so *Kauffman is led by the details to quibble, "Foe of principle, simply censorship as I presume to be, I have not yet seen close, it appears that way. Stripped to its explicit sexual details in any film that were necessary inessentials, the human condition itself is to it. Whatever was cut out of The Silence has not claustrophopic. hurt it" (an interesting admission coming from one Every visual incident amplifies the frustra- of our more venerated weekly reviewers). tion of instinct caught at cross-purposes with 11

are entering is sealed off from the rest of the world - and from its own fredom - by military rule). The sun which Johan watches rising over the mountains, a white heat re- sembling Antonioni's ultramodern "eclipse," is unnatural. All of the pastimes open to Johan are unnatural; only his curiosity is not. When he looks out at us, it is as if he sees as far as the flat screen which delimits him, no Anna-from Ester's viewpoint. further. His eyes never really focus. He has the terrifying innocence which comes once in a reality, until by the end, instinct appears lifetime from knowing the worst without resoundingly solipsistic. Reality remains a understanding either the worst or the best life may offer. Should tank, lumbering prehistoric monster, phallus he never mature to understand, erect but extinct like the spine of a dead he might be one of the bemused Ex- terminators horseshoe crab. Escape appears for the boy of the coming generation. Like the as an interminable chase through the laby- depthless Anna who stares at mirrors, Johan rinthine corridors: for his mother, it is the stares and finds things staring back at him, all bought relief of the cafe' and theater, reached equally detached from any knowledge he might have through a street pinched by men and ma- of their use. All three are hemmed a chines. For Ester everything she finds herself in by web of anxiety spun from the uncon- doing is a futile escape. scious recesses of their frustration, which for- bids Johan is the sphinx; his blank face compels natural engagement. but it interpretation, repels every attempt to Bergman has transformed his three favorite read. When the old waiter attempts to "talk"to themes into a new film, quite superior to the of his his Johan (after misfire sudden, frightful others. Notably, the Big Questions do not he fumbles for a worn func- embrace) photo of tion in The Silence as excuses for taken at the same the big himself age standing behind answers. There is indeed no exit the coffin of his in life's gamc, open father. The boy responds but hell is hardly rendered more bearable with with less in interest; interest he later slips it togetherness. Women do scrape the bottom beneath the unseen. Brief of carpet, displays of human experience, but for that very affection are native to his reason youth; an over-all theirs is the more pitiful lot. (Unlike impression of cool reticence is more the native to women in Brink of Life, Ester and Anna are his character. is involved in a Johan crisis not awaiting men. In fact, the absence of without he be the solution; may product of it, men-except for the dumb and solely but he no in func- promises salvation; effect he is tionary waiters-in The Silence is a curious unformed to be enough the product of other thing; Ester tries hard to assume the worlds the sisters have masculine forgotten or never principle, but cracks embarrassingly.) known. His remains the one Lastly, existence which mans' quest for knowledge is, in truth, a the shrill of The bitter bridges edge Silence with the one, so much so that the twin horns of reason world of but he possibility beyond, has not yet and impulse which he is condemned to ride do stepped beyond. So far, he too only perceives eventually impale the world him. Life itself is a dying-in; through glass. And when he does any other form of protest his attention is would bore these swiftly as by the three travelers who at least trainload of tanks .marshalled, know how to make which jerk his round eyes more out of their "lack of transcendental back and val- forth, uncomprehendingly (while uies" in less time and space than a host us that of telling clearly enough the town we busier charactersmarked for deliverance. 12 PETERCOWIE An Interview with Lindsay Anderson

Lindsay Anderson, whose first feature, THIS SPORTING LIFE, appeared last year, has been noted for his work in various fields, including film criticism and documentary. He was one of the founder-editors of SEQUENCE in 1947, and began writing and directing industrial films in 1948. Among his best known short films are WAKEFIELD EXPRESS, THURSDAY'S CHILDREN, 0 DREAMLAND and EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS. He has also worked in the theater, where his productions have included THE LONG AND THE SHORT AND THE TALL, SERGEANT MUSGRAVE'S DANCE, BILLY LIAR, THE FIRE RAISERS, and THE DIARY OF A MADMAN. Most recently he has directed the London production of Max Frisch's ANDORRA at the National Theatre.

Is there any connection between the theatrical revival Reisz with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This that started in British theater with Look Back in last film, which owed its existence again to Tony Anger in 1956, and the resurgence of the British Richardson and John Osborne, who imposed both cinema a year or two later? Karel Reisz and Albert Finney on a reluctant indus- Of course there is. Most immediately because both try, really and finally dispelled the prejudice against "revivals" were signalled by the same work-Tony new talent in British films. Richardson's production of John Osborne's play at How did you manage to set up This Sporting the Royal Court in 1956, and his direction of the Life? film version a year later. Probably the development I didn't. The production of this film was really a was inevitable anyway, since the time was historical- miracle. Although I had suggested it originally as a ly ripe for a break-through of both creative and subject to Tony Richardson, who wanted me to direct social activity in the flabby, exhausted atmosphere of a film for Woodfall, it was eventually bought by the postwar Britain. It happened first in the theater, Rank Organization to be made by Julian Wintle's probably because it is easier to experiment with a Independent Artists. I think their idea was that the play than with a film. The finance involved is not so novel could make another Saturday Night and Sun- vast, and new talent is more readily acceptable. In day Morning; and this is why it was offered to Karel fact, there was strong pressure against the employ- Reisz. But Karel did not want to make another ment of Tony Richardson to direct Look Back ini Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and he was Anger, and Associated British were only forced to anxious to get experience on the production side. So accept him by the intransigence of John Osborne. he offered to produce the film if I were given it to (Similarly they had refused to consider the idea of direct. Much to my surprise Julian Wintle agreed, my directing the film version of The Long and the and so we made the picture under extremely good Short and the Tall, as they had refused to accept the conditions, and without having to go through the idea of Peter O'Toole playing the leading role which tortuous ordeal of setting it up. he had brilliantly created on the stage.) A further fillip was given to the movement by the success of Why is it that scarcely any British directors write Jack Clayton's first full-length film, Room at the Top, their own scripts, in the way that many French direc- and by the even greater success in Britain of Karel tors are able to? ANDERSON

Lindsay Anderson directing Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts

In the first place it is something of a myth that the New Waves of France and Italy. England-or directors on the Continent always write their own rather intellectual England-has not changed so very scripts. Truffaut, for instance, works with writers and much, and there is still the prejudice against direct his last two films have been adapted from novels. and large-scale emotional statement that crippled and Resnais is also extremely literary in his approach to exiled a writer like D. H. Lawrence. But, taking a film-making-and even Antonioni works with writers, larger view, I found the response to the film extreme- though certainly from his own ideas. I think the ly gratifying, particularly when one bears in mind its dependence of the British directors on novels or plays harshness and its uncompromising emotional de- arises partly from the much greater difficulty in this mands. Ten years ago it is impossible to imagine country of setting up pictures, and the fact that such a film achieving a full circuit release in Britain. producers and distributors are more likely to accept Do you feel that the present system of distribution subjects that have already proved themselves in and exhibition in Britain needs overhauling? another medium. This certainly inhibits one from set- Most emphatically. From a purely economic point ting out to write an original script. Whether there is of view, the domination of exhibition by the two also a more basic "literary attitude" on the part of powerful combines of Rank and A.B.C. is certainly British artists is a question I should like to see critics most pernicious-and I wish that the critics of artis- discuss with discernment. tically pretentious reviews like Sight and Sound Did you find the reception of This Sporting Life could bring themselves to admit the relationship be- encouraging? tween these intractable economic realities, and the Yes and no. In general the critical response was creative daydreams in which they so naively in- extremely good; though I was interested, if not terri- dulge. bly surprised, to find that "highbrows" tended to be And apart from the economics of the case, this noticeably less enthusiastic than ordinary, sensitive petrifaction of the system of exhibition means that people. Our bad reviews came from snob papers like the whole business of showing films remains obsti- The Times, The Manchester Guardian, The New nately and disastrously out of date. It is the distribu- Statesman and The Spectator-precisely, in fact, tors and the exhibitors who are behind the times, not from those critics who are always moaning that the the film-makers. Films continue to be handled and British cinema cannot achieve the same "artistry" as publicized and shown almost exactly as they were 14: ANDERSON thirty years ago. If anything rather worse, since the Hope, or On the Waterfront? All of which were cinemas are older and the people who run them are equally "obsessed with the lower classes"... more defeatist. There is certainly a new public for Do you like to work with actors, or would you good films, and one which could be made to yield prefer to use amateurs, like a number of Continental profitable business. Unfortunately distributors and ex- directors? hibitors are so lacking in vitality that they can think I have no resentment of actors, if that's what you only in terms of immense and unshakeable profits mean, in the manner of Bresson, Antonioni, etc. Act- from spectacular blockbusters. In this respect the ing at its best is a creative, fully expressive art; and British cinema is lagging far behind the Americans- I think that the tendency today to regard actors as there is absolutely no equivalent here to the art unfortunately necessary pieces of furniture, to be theater chain in the US, which has developed so manipulated and pushed around by the director, is marvellously in the last few years. very mistaken. When I read in a notice of This How do you explain what some critics have called Sporting Life a phrase like "Anderson has 'managed "The obsession with the lower classes and the North to extract' powerful performances from Richard of England" in so many recent British films? Harris and Rachel Roberts," I can only smile. This is I regard such phrases as journalistic jargon, impos- an extraordinarily false idea of how such collabora- sible to discuss very seriously. Britain remains so tions work. In fact the Frank Machin of the film is obstinately and unprofitably class-conscious that it is Richard Harris' creation-and a vital contribution to still impossible to make a film without the social the whole personality of the picture. To work with level of its characters being the first consideration. Of artists of this caliber is enormously stimulating-- course this is ridiculous. much more so, to me, than trying to restrict them to But you won't deny that there has at least been a the limits of one's own imagination. shift in subject matter and social approach in the Is there any director who has had a particular best of recent British films? influence on you? As regards technique I should have Undoubtedly-and largely for social-historical reasons thought Resnais ... -the most vital writings of the past several years in I admire Resnais. I don't like his pictures very Britain has come from writers of working-class origin, much, at least not so far, but that is a matter of and astonishingly many of these have come from the taste. Certainly I think his daring and his rigor have industrial midlands and the North. David Storey, helped many other directors (including myself) to Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, John Arden, Stan break down the old shibboleths of "technique"-I Barstow, John Braine, Willis Hall and Keith Water- mean the kind of faceless Hollywood narrative style house . . .. The same, incidentally, is true of our that still represents to many technicians the only young actors: Albert Finney from Lancashire, Tom permissible way of telling a story on film. But the Courtenay and Peter O'Toole from Yorkshire, Tom construction of This Sporting Life was not inspired Bell from Liverpool. Naturally this has resulted in a by Resnais: it came more or less directly from the shift from the almost exclusively middle-class, subur- book. And much of the cutting style and the use of ban concern of the pre-1956 British cinema. But only sound develops the style I used in documentaries a small number of these books or films have been years back, like Wakefield Express and Every Day primarily "social" in their approach. Unfortunately Except Christmas-which no doubt showed the in- most of the cirtics and the journalists who write fluence of Humphrey Jennings. And I think there's a about them remain bourgeois either by origin or by sort of (unfashionable) directness and absoluteness in ambition; and undoubtedly they see this new tradi- the way the characters are regarded that might recall tion as something of a threat. Defensively they falsify John Ford . . . . But this game of "influences" is a what they see, and hasten to create by the use of tricky one, and perhaps better played by critics than quite inaccurate labels ("kitchen-sink," "working- by artists. I can tell you one thing: the spider didn't class realism," etc.) a phoney image which they can come from Bergman, but from the novel. And any- easily destroy. The persistent falsification and deni- way I have never seen Through a Glass Darkly. gration of these works by some critics is purely a Have you any plans for further work in the cine- domestic facet of the class-war. Do you remember ma? any of them (or their like-minded predecessors) ap- I am hoping to direct a new and more authentic plying the same dismissive sneers to films like La version of Wuthering Heights. David Storey is doing Bete lHumaine, Le Jour se Leve, Two Pennyworth of the script, and Richard Harris will play Heathcliff. :15 PAULINEKAEL Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those Those who live by making movies showing a who attack American "materialism" was first luxurious way of life worry over the American aroused by the refugees from Hitler who so "image" abroad. But, the economics of movie- often contrasted their "culture" with our "vul- making being what they are, usually all the gar materialism" when I discovered that their producers do about it is worry-which is prob- "culture" consisted of their having had serv- ably just as well because films made out of ants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance social conscience have generally given an even with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan more distorted view of America than those Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of made out of business sense, and are much less Mahler and Bruckner. And as the cultural amusing. treasures they brought over with them were The most conspicuous recent exception is likely to be Meissen porcelain, Biedermeier Hud-one of the few entertaining American furniture, oriental carpets, wax fruit, and movies released in 1963 and just possibly the bookcases with glass doors, it wasn't too diffi- most completely schizoid movie produced any- cult to reconstruct their "culture"and discover where anytime. Hud is a commercial Holly- that it was a stuffier, more middle-class ma- wood movie that is ostensibly an indictment of terialism and sentimentality than they could materialism, and it has been accepted as that afford in the new world. by most of the critics. But those who made it These suspicions were intensified by later protected their material interest in the film so experience: the most grasping Europeans well that they turned it into the opposite: a were, almost inevitably, the ones who levelled celebration and glorification of materialism- the charge of American materialism. Just re- of the man who looks out for himself-which cently, at a film festival, a behind-the-iron- probably appeals to movie audiences just be- curtain movie director, who interrupted my cause it confirms their own feelings. This re- interview with him to fawn over every Holly- sponse to Hud may be the only time the wood dignitary (or supposed dignitary) who general audience has understood film-makers came in sight, concluded the interview with, better than they understood themselves. Audi- "You Americans won't understand this, but I ences ignored the cant of the makers' liberal, don't make movies just for money." serious intentions, and enjoyed the film for its Americans are so vulnerable, so confused vital element: the nihilistic "heel" who wants and defensive about prosperity-and nowhere the good things of life and doesn't give a damn more so than in Hollywood, where they seem for the general welfare. The writers' and direc- to feel they can cleanse it, justify their right to tor's "anti-materialism"turns out to be a lot it, by gilding it with "culture,"as if to say, see, like the refugees' anti-materialism: they had we're not materialistic, we appreciate the finer their Stefan Zweig side-young, tender Lon things. ("The hunting scene on the wall of the (Brandon de Wilde) and Melvyn Douglas' cabana isn't wallpaper: it's handpainted.") Homer, a representative of the "good" as HUD

involvement are: your arguments are weak and trite; the arguments you set up to knock down are strong. Hud's shouted last remark,his poor credo, "The world's so full of crap a man's going to get into it sooner or later, whether he's careful or not," has, at least, the ring of his truth. The generalized pious principles of the good old codger belong to no body. The day Hud opened in San Francisco the theater was packed with an audience that laughed and reacted with pleasure to the verve and speed and economy, and (although I can't be sure of this) enjoyed the surprise of the slightly perverse ending as much as I did. It was like the split movies of the war years- with those cynical heel-heroes whom we liked because they expressed contempt for the sanctimonious goody guys and overstuffed family values, and whom we still liked (because they From HUD. were played by actors who seemed contemptu- ous) even when they reformed. prating and tedious as Polonius; and they had It's not likely that those earlier commercial their protection, their solid saleable property of writers and directors were self-deceived about Meissen and Biedermeier, in Paul Newman. what they were doing: they were trying to put Somehow it all reminds one of the old, something over, and knew they could only go apochryphal story conference-"It's a modern so far. They made the character a heel so that western, see, with this hell-raising, pleasure- we would identify with his rejection of official loving man who doesn't respect any of the values, and then slyly squared everything by virtues, and, at the end, we'll fool them, he having him turn hero. And it seems to me that doesn't get the girl and he doesn't change!" we (my college friends) and perhaps the audi- "But who'll want to see that?" ence at large didn't take all this very seriously, "Oh, that's all fixed-we've got Paul New- that we enjoyed it for its obvious hokum and man for the part." glamor and excitement and romance, and for They could cast him as a mean man and the wisecracking American idiom, and the know that the audience would never believe in tempo and rhythm of slick style. We enjoyed his meanness. For there are certain actors who the pretense that the world was like this-fast have such extraordinaryaudience rapport that and funny; this pretence which was necessary the audience does not believe in their villainy for its enjoyment separated the good American except to relish it, as with Brando; and there commercial movie-the good "hack" job like are others, like Newman, who in addition to Casablanca or To Have and Have Not-from this rapport, project such a traditional heroic film art and other art. This was the best kind frankness and sweetness that the audience of Hollywood product: the result of the team- dotes on them, seeks to protect them from work of talented, highly paid professional harm or pain. Casting Newman as a mean hacks who were making a living; and we materialist is like writing a manifesto against enjoyed it as a product, and assumed that the banking system while juggling your invest- those involved in it enjoyed the money they ments so you can break the bank. And even made. the manifesto betrays where your feelings and What gave the Hollywood movie its vitality HUD: 17 and its distinctive flavor was that despite the of Vivien Leigh's performance, that I could melodramatic situations, the absurd triumphs reflect that Stanley was clinging to his brute's of virtue and the inordinate punishments for bit of truth, his sense that her gentility and trivial vice-perhaps even because of the stale coquetry were intolerably fake. And it seemed conventions and the necessity to infuse some to me that this was one of the reasons why life that would make the picture seem new Streetcar was a great play-that Blanche and within them-the "feel" of the time and place Stanley upset us, and complicated our re- (Hollywood, whatever the locale of the story) sponses. This was no Lillian Hellman melo- came through, and often the attitudes, the drama with good and evil clay pigeons. The problems, the tensions. Sometimes more of conflict was genuine and dramatic. But Hud American life came through in routine thrillers didn't have a dramatic adversary; his adver- and prison-break films and even in the yacht- saries were out of Lillian Hellmanland. ing-set comedies than in important, "serious" The setting, however, wasn't melodramatic, films like The Best Years of Our Lives or A it was comic-not the legendary west of myth- Place in the Sun, paralyzed, self-conscious imi- making movies like the sluggish Shane but the tations of European art, or films like Gentle- modern west I grew up in, the ludicrous real man's Agreement, with the indigenous paraly- west. The comedy was in the realism: the sis of the Hollywood "problem"picture, which incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets is morally solved in advance. And when the and transistor radios, juke boxes, Dr. Pepper commercial film-makershad some freedom and signs, paper-back books-all emphasizing the leeway, as well as talent, an extraordinary standardization of culture in the loneliness of amount came through-the rhythm of Ameri- vast spaces. My west wasn't Texas; it was can life that gives films like She Done Him northern California, but our Sonoma County Wrong, I'm No Angel, the Rogers-Astaire ranch was very much like this one-with the musicals, Easy Living, Bringing Up Baby, The frame house, and "the couple's" cabin like the Thin Man, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, housekeeper's cabin, and the hired hands' Strangers On A Train, Pat and Mike, The bunkhouse, and my father and older brothers Crimson Pirate, Singin' in the Rain, The Big charging over dirt roads, not in Cadillacs but Sleep, or the more recent The Manchurian in Studebakers, and the Saturday nights in the Candidate and Charade a freshness and spirit dead little town with its movie house and ice- that makes them unlike the films of any other cream parlor. This was the small-town west I country. Our movies are the best proof that and so many of my friends came out of-escap- Americans are liveliest and freest when we ing from the swaggering small-town hot-shots don't take ourselves too seriously. like Hud. But I didn't remember any boys like Taking Hud as a commercial movie, I was Brandon de Wilde's Lon: he wasn't born in the interested to see that the audience reacted to west or in anybody's imagination; that 17-year- Hud as a Stanley Kowalski on the range, old blank sheet of paper has been handed laughing with his coarseness and sexual as- down from generations of lazy hack writers. sertiveness, and sharing his contempt for social His only "reality" is from de Wilde's having values. Years before, when I saw the movie played the part before: from Shane to Hud, he version of A Streetcar Named Desire, I was has been our observer, our boy in the west. shocked and outraged at those in the audience testing heroes. But in Hud, he can't fill even who expressed their delight when Brando as this cardboard role of representing the spec- Stanley jeered at Blanche. At the time, I didn't tator because Newman's Hud has himself come understand it when they laughed their agree- to represent the audience. And I didn't re- ment as Stanley exploded in rage and smashed member any clean old man like Melvyn Doug- things. It was only later, away from the spell las' Homer: his principles and rectitude 18: HUD weren't created either, they were handed down It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture from the authors' mouthpieces of the socially that nurtures indulgence and greed. Here is conscious plays and movies of the 'thirties and the essence of this picture. While it looks like a 'forties. Occupied towns in the war movies modern Western, and is an outdoor drama, frequently spawned these righteous, prophetic indeed, Hud is as wide and profound a con- elder citizens. templation of the human condition as one of Somewhere in the back of my mind, Hud the New England plays of Eugene O'Neill ... began to stand for the people who would vote The striking, important thing about it is the for Goldwater, while Homer was clearly an clarity with which it unreels. The sureness and upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather integrity of it are as crystal-clear as the plot is typical of the weakness of the whole message spare ... the great key scene of the film, a picture idea that the good liberals who made scene in which [the] entire herd of cattle is the film made their own spokesman a fuddy- deliberately and dutifully destroyed, that helps duddy, worse, made him inhuman-except for fill the screen with an emotion that I've seldom the brief sequence when he isn't a spokesman felt from any film. It brings the theme of for anything, when he follows the bouncing infection and destruction into focus with daz- ball and sings "Clementine" at the movies. zling clarity." Hud, the "villain" of the piece, is less phony As usual, with that reverse acumen that than Homer. makes him invaluable, Crowther has put his finger on a sore spot. The director carefully In the next few days I recommended Hud to builds up the emotion that Crowther and prob- friends (and now "friends" no longer means ably audiences in general feel when the cattle, college students but academic and professional confused and trying to escape, are forced into people) and was bewildered when they came the mass grave that has been dug by a bull- back indignant that I'd wasted their time. I dozer, and are there systematically shot down, was even more bewildered when the reviews covered with lime, and buried. This is the started coming out; what were the critics talk- movie's big scene, and it can be no accident ing about? Unlike the laughing audience, they that the scene derives some of its emotional were taking Hud at serious message value as a power from the Nazis' final solution of the work of integrity, and, even in some cases, as a Jewish problem; it's inconceivable that these tragedy. In The New York Herald Tribune, overtones would not have occurred to the Judith Crist found that "Both the portraits and group-predominantly Jewish-who made the the people are completely without compromise film. Within the terms of the story, this emo- -and therein is not only the foundation but tion that is worked up is wrong, because it is also the rare achievement of this film." In The not Hud the bad man who wants to destroy Saturday Review, Arthur Knight said that "it is the herd; it is Homer the good man who the kind of creative collaboration too long accedes to what is necessary to stop the spread absent from our screen ... by the end of the of infection. And is all this emotion appropri- film, there can be no two thoughts about Hud: ate to the slaughter of animals who were, after he's purely and simply a bastard. And by the all, raised to be slaughtered and would, in the end of the film, for all his charm, he has normal course of events, be even more brutally succeeded in alienating everyone, including the slaughtered in a few weeks? What's involved is audience." According to Bosley Crowther in simply the difference in money between what The New York Times, "Hud is a rancher who the government pays for the killing of the is fully and foully diseased with all the germs animals and their market value. It would not of materialism that are infecting and sickening have been difficult for the writers and director modern man ... And the place where he lives to arrange the action so that the audience is not just Texas. It is the whole country today. would feel quick relief at the destruction of HUD: :19 the herd. But I would guess that they couldn't have only to toss in a few bitter asides about resist the opportunity for a big emotional our expense-account civilization and strew a scene, a scene with impact, even though the few platitudes like, "Little by little the country emotions don't support the meaning of the changes because of the men people admire" story. They got their big scene: it didn't matter and the movie becomes "a drama of moral what it meant. corruption," etc. The English critics got even So it's pretty hard to figure out the critical more out of it: Derek Prouse experienced a congratulations for clarity and integrity, or "catharsis"in The Sunday Times, as did Peter such statements as Penelope Gilliatt's in The John Dyer in Sight and Sound. Dyer seems to Observer, "Hud is the most sober and powerful react to cues from his experience at other film from America for a long time. The line of movies; his review, suggesting as it does a it is very skilfully controlled: the scene when super-fan's identification with the film-makers' Melvyn Douglas's diseased cattle have to be fondest dreams, is worth a little examination. shot arrives like the descent of a Greek plague." "From the ominous discovery of the first dead Whose error are the gods punishing? Was heifer, to the massacre of the diseased herd, to Homer, in buying Mexican cattle, merely Homer's own end and Hud's empty inheritance taking a risk, or committing hubris? One of the of a land he passively stood by and watched things you learn on a ranch, or any other place, die, the story methodically unwinds like a is that nobody is responsible for natural ca- python lying sated in the sun." People will be tastrophes; one of the things you learn in going to Hud, as Charles Addams was report- movies and other dramatic forms is the sym- ed to have gone to Cleopatra, "to see the bolic use of catastrophe. The locusts descend- snake." Dyer squeezes out more meaning and ed on Paul Muni in The Good Earth because lots more symbolism than the film-makers he had gotten rich and bad: a farmer in the could squeeze in. (A) Homer just suddenly up movies who neglects his humble wife and goes and died, of a broken heart, one supposes. It in for high living is sure to lose his crops. Hud wasn't prepared for, it was merely convenient. plays it both ways: the texture of the film is (B) Hud's inheritance isn't empty: he has a wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful large ranch, and the land has oil. Dyer projects sequence is needed to jack up the action the notion of Hud's emptiness as a human values, a disaster is used for all the symbolic being onto his inheritance. (C) Hud didn't overtones that can be hit-and without any passively stand by and watch the land die. significant story meaning. I don't think the line The land hasn't changed. Nor was Hud pass- of Htud is so much "controlled" as adjusted, ive: he worked the ranch, and he certainly set by conflicting aims at seriousness and suc- couldn't be held responsible for the cattle be- cess. coming infected-unless Dyer wants to go so It hardly seems possible but perhaps Crow- far as to view that infection as a symbol of or a ther thought the cattle were symbolically "fully punishment for Hud's sickness. Even Homer, and foully diseased with all the germs of who blamed Hud for just about everything materialism that are infecting and sickening else, didn't accuse him of infecting the cattle. modern man." Those sick cattle must have Dyer would perhaps go that far, because something to do with the language he uses in somehow "the aridity of the cattle-less land- describing the film. "It is a drama of moral scape mirrors his own barren future." Why corruption-of the debilitating disease of ava- couldn't it equally mirror Homer's barren past? ricious self-seeking-that is creeping across the In this scheme of symbolic interpreta- land and infecting the minds of young people tion, if there was a dog on the ranch, and it in this complex, materialistic age. It is forged had worms, Hud the worm would be the in the smoldering confrontation of an aging reason. Writing of the "terse and elemental cattleman and his corrupted son." Scriptwriters polarity of the film," Dyer says, "The earth is 20 : : HUD livelihood, freedom and death to Homer; an men get tir6d of playing cards. They either implacably hostile prison to Hud"-though it think about sex or try do do something about would be just as easy, and perhaps more true it. There isn't much else to do-the life doesn't to the audience's experience of the film, to exactly stimulate the imagination, though it interpret Hud's opportunism as love of life and does stimulate the senses. Dyer takes as proof Homer's righteousness as rigid and life-destroy- of Hud's bad character that "his appetites are ing-and unfair. The scriptwriters give Homer reserved for married women." What alterna- principles (which are hardly likely to move the tives are there for a young man in a small audience); but they're careful to show that town? Would it be proof of a good character to Hud is misunderstood and rejected when he seduce young girls and wreck their reputa- makes affectionate overtures to his father. tions? There are always a few widows, of a Dyer loads meaning onto Hud's actions and course, and, sometimes, divorcee like Alma, behavior: for example, "Instead of bronco- the housekeeper (given substance by Patricia busting he goes in for a (doubtless) meta- Neal), but they can hardly supply the demand from phorical bout of pig-wrestling." Why "instead the married men, who are in a better of"-as if there were bronco-busting to do position to give them favors, jobs, presents, and even and he dodged it-when there is nothing of houses, farms. I remember my father the kind in the film? And what would the pig- taking me along when he visited our local wrestling be a metaphor for? Does Dyer take widow: I played in the new barn which was pigs to represent women, or does he mean that being constructed by workmen who seemed to the pig-wrestling shows Hud's swinishness? take their orders from my father. At six or Having watched my older brothers trying to seven, I was very proud of my father for being catch greased pigs in this traditional western the protector of widows. small-town sport, I took the sequence as an I assumed the audience enjoyed and re- indication of how boring and empty small- sponded to Hud's chasing women because this town life is, and how coarse the games in represented a break with western movie con- which the boys work off a little steam. I had ventions and myths, and as the film was flout- seen the same boys who wrestled greased pigs ing these conventions and teasing the audience and who had fairly crude ideas of sex and to enjoy the change, it didn't occur to me that sport enter a blazing building to save the lives in this movie his activity would be construed of panic-stricken horses, and emerge charred as "bad." But Crowther finds that the way but at peace with the world and themselves. Hud "indulges himself with his neighbor'swife" is "one of the sure, unmistakable tokens of a Are the reviewers trying to justify having dangerous social predator." Is this knowledge enjoyed the movie, or just looking for an angle, derived from the film (where I didn't discover when they interpret the illustrative details it) or from Crowther'sknowledge of life? If the morally? Any number of them got their tip on latter, I can only supply evidence against him Hud's character by his taking advantage of a from my own life. My father who was adulter- husband's absence to go to bed with the wife. ous, and a Republican who, like Hud, was But he couldn't very well make love to her opposed to any government interference, was when her husband was home-although that in no sense and in no one's eyes a social would be par for the course of "art" movies predator. He was generous and kind, and these days. The summer nights are very long democratic in the western way that Easterners on a Western ranch. As a child, I could stretch still don't understand: it was not out of guilty out on a hammock on the porch and read an condescension that mealtimes were communal Oz book from cover to cover while my grand- affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranch- parents and uncles and aunts and parents hands joining the family, it was the way West- didn't stir from their card game. The young erners lived. HUD 21

If Homer, like my father, had frequented brating ritual rapes annually on their anniver- married women or widows, would Dyer inter- saries. pret that as a symbol of Homer's evil? Or, as Rape is a strong word when a man knows Homer voiced sentiments dear to the script- that a woman wants him but won't accept him writers and critics, would his "transgressions" unless he commits himself emotionally. Alma's be interpreted as a touching indication of mixture of provocative camaraderie plus reser- human frailty? What Dyer and others took for vations invites "rape." (Just as, in a different symbols were the cliches of melodrama- way, Blanche DuBois did-though Williams where character traits are sorted out and erred in having her go mad: it was enough, it separated, one set of attitudes and behavior for was really more, that she was broken, finished.) the good characters, another for the bad char- The scriptwriters for Hud, who, I daresay, are acters. In melodrama, human desires and as familiar as critics with theories of melo- drives make a person weak or corrupt: the drama, know that heroes and villains both heroic must be the unblemished good like want the same things and that it is their way Homer, whose goodness is not tainted with of trying to get them that separates one from understanding. Reading the cues this way, the other. They impart this knowledge to these critics missed what audiences were react- Alma, who tells Hud that she wanted him and ing to, just as Richard Whitehall in Films and he could have had her if he'd gone about it Filming describes Newman's Hud as "the-hair- differently. But this kind of knowingness, em- on-the-chest-male"-although the monstexposed ployed to make the script more clever, more movie chest since Valentino's is just as hairless. frank, more modern, puts a strain on the credi- I suppose we're all supposed to react on cue bility of the melodramatic actions it explicates to movie rape (or as is usually the case, at- -and embellishes. Similarly the writers invite tempted rape); rape, like a cattle massacre, is a laugh by having Alma, seeing the nudes Lon a box-office value. No doubt in Htud we're has on his wall, say "I'm a girl, they don't do a really supposed to believe that Alma is, as thing for me." Before the Kinsey report on Stanley Kauffmann says, "driven off by his women, a woman might say, "They don't do a [Hud's] vicious physical assault." But in terms thing for me" but she wouldn't have prefaced of the modernity of the settings and the char- it with "I'm a girl" because she wouldn't have acters, as well as the age of the protagonists known that erotic reactions to pictures are (they're at least in their middle thirties), it not characteristic of women. was more probable that Alma left the ranch The Ravetches have been highly praised for because a frustrated rape is just too sordid and the screenplay: Penelope Gilliatt considers it embarrassing for all concerned-for the drunk- "Americanwriting at its abrasive best"; Brend- en Hud who forced himself upon her, for her an Gill says it is "honestly written"; Time calls for defending herself so titanically, for young it "a no-compromise script." Dyer expresses a Lon the innocent who "saved" her. Alma ob- fairly general view when he says it's "on a viously wants to go to bed with Hud, but she level of sophistication totally unexpected from has been rejecting his propositions because she their scripts for two of Ritt's least successful, doesn't want to be just another casual dame to Faulkner-inspired films." This has some special him; she wants to be treated differently from irony because not only is their technique in the others. If Lon hadn't rushed to protect his Hud a continuation of the episodic method idealized view of her, chances are that the next they used in combining disparate Faulkner morning Hud would have felt guilty and re- stories into The Long Hot Summer, but the pentant, and Alma would have been grateful dialogue quoted most appreciatively by the to him for having used the violence necessary reviewers to illustrate their new skill (Alma's to break down her resistance, thus proving that rebuff of Hud, "No thanks, I've had one cold- she was different. They might have been cele- hearted bastard in my life, I don't want an- 22: :HUD other") is lifted almost verbatim from that making message picture. And that's what earlier script (when it was Joanne Woodward Crowther means when he says, "Hud is a film telling off Paul Newman). They didn't get that does its makers, the medium and Holly- acclaim for their integrity and honesty that wood proud." He means something similar time because, although the movie was enter- when he calls his own praise of the film a taining and a box-office hit, the material was "daring endorsement"-as if it placed him in resolved as a jolly comedy, the actors and some kind of jeopardy to be so forthright. actresses were paired off, and Newman as Ben Quick the barn burner turned out not really to If most of the critics who acclaimed the film be a barn burner after all. They hadn't yet appeared as innocent as Lon and as moralistic found the "courage" that keeps Hud what as Homer, Dwight Macdonald, who perceived Time called him, "an unregenerate heel" and that "it is poor Hud who is forced by the script "a cad to the end." It may have taken them to openly practice the actual as against the several years to learn that with enough close- mythical American Way of Life" regarded this ups of his blue, blue eyes and his hurt, sensi- perception as proof of the stupidity of the film. tive mouth, Newman's Ben Quick could have But the movie wouldn't necessarily be a burned barns all right, and audiences would good movie if its moral message was dramatic- have loved him more for it. ally sustained in the story and action, and In neither film do the episodes and char- perhaps it isn't necessarily a bad movie if its acters hold together, but Ritt, in the interim moral message is not sustained in the story and having made Hemingway's Adventures of a action. By all formal theories, a work that is Young Man and failed to find a style appropri- split cannot be a work of art, but leaving the ate to it, has now, with the aid of James Wong validity of these principles aside, do they hold Howe's black and white cinematography, found for lesser works-not works of art but works of something like a reasonably clean visual equiv- commerce and craftsmanship, sometimes fused alent for Hemingway's prose. Visually Hud by artistry? Is a commercial piece of entertain- is so apparently simple and precise and un- ment (which may or may not aspire to be, or adorned, so skeletonic, that we may admire the pretend to be, a work of art) necessarily a poor bones without being quite sure of the name of one if its material is confused or duplicit, or the beast. This Westerner is part gangster, part reveals elements at variance with its stated Champion, part rebel-without-a-cause, part the theme, or shows the divided intentions of the traditional cynic-hero who pretends not to care craftsmen who made it? My answer is no, that because he cares so much. in some films the more ambivalence that comes When Time says Hud is "the most brazenly through, the more the film may mean to us or honest picture to be made in the U.S. this the more fun it may be. The process by which season" the key word is brazenly. The film an idea for a movie is turned into the product brazens it out. In The New Yorker Brendan that reaches us is so involved, and so many Gill writes, "It's an attractive irony of the compromises, cuts, and changes may have situation that, despite the integrity of its taken place, so much hope and disgust and makers, Hud is bound to prove a box-office spoilage and waste may be embodied in it or smash. I find this coincidence gratifying. Vir- mummified in it, that the tension in the prod- tue is said to be its own reward, but money is uct, or some sense of urgency still left in it, nice, too, and I'm always pleased to see it may be our only contact with the life in which flowing toward people who have had other the product was processed. Commercial prod- things on their minds." Believing in this coinci- ducts in which we do not sense or experience dence is like believing in Santa Claus. Gill's divided hopes and aims and ideas may be the last sentence lacks another final "too." In Hol- dullest-ones in which everything alive was lywood, a "picture with integrity" is a money- processed out, or perhaps ones that were never HUD: :23 alive even at the beginning. Hud is so astutely audience somewhat bewildered. Many may made and yet such a mess that it tells us much leave the theatre with little more than a bitter more than its message. It is redeemed by its aftertaste at apparently having spent almost fundamental dishonesty. It is perhaps an two hours in the company of an unpleasant archetypal Hollywood movie: split in so pivotal figure, instead of with the fresh philo- many revealing ways that, like On the Water- sophical slant on the changing patterns and front or From Here to Eternity, it is the movie values of the contemporary American West of its year (even though it's shallow and not that lurks just beneath the surface and is the nearly so good a film as either of them). elusive prize that only the more analytical My friends were angry that I'd sent them customer will take away as a reward. Stripped to Hud because, like Macdonald, they "saw of this bonus of insight and perception, the through it," they saw that Hud was not the picture loses its taste, flavor and significance villain, and they knew that though he ex- and rests on the naked values of its plot, and pressed vulgar notions that offended them, that, alas, is liable to be the superficial way it these notions might not be unpopular. The film is received by too many people." And in a itself flirts with this realization: when Homer triumphant gesture of naivete, Variety's man is berating Hud, Lon asks, "Why pick on Hud, suggests a solution: "A clever ad image that Grandpa? Nearly everybody around town is hints of intended artistic stature rather than like him." mere racy melodrama could boost its fortuneg My friends, more or less socialist, detest a somewhat by encouraging the audience-to-be crude Hud who doesn't believe in government to be prepared to probe a little, not just come interference because they believe in more, and for pure escape and sensual stimulus." more drastic, government action to integrate But the advertising men, more shrewd about the schools and end discrimination in housing the film than the reviewer, and not a bit naive, and employment. However, they are so anti- had already written full-page ads: "HUD has CIA that at Thanksgiving dinner a respected got guts. He uses them to take what he wants, professor could drunkenly insist that he had and damn anybody who gets in his way. HUD positive proof that the CIA had engineered the has charm. He uses it to possess any woman he murder of Kennedy with no voice but mine wants, and hang anybody who gets in his way. raised in doubt. They want centralized power HUD is all man, but a man with a barbed wire when it works for their civil-libertarian aims, soul. Somewhere in your life you've met a but they dread and fear its international poli- HUD, fascinating as a cobra, mean as hell, not cies. They hate cops but call them at the first so much above the law as outside it. He's a hint of a prowler: they are split, and it shows charmer. He has an enormous craving for pos- in a million ways. I imagine they're very like sessions, for people, for women. To him they're the people who made Hud, and like them all things to be owned, to be used, to be they do rather well for themselves. They're so manipulated. That's HUD, without the sugar careful to play the game at their jobs that if coating ... You'll think, 'This is how it really they hadn't told you that they're really screw- is.' Hud shows you a segment of life as it really ing the system, you'd never guess it. is. Hud is a beautiful, honest motion picture." The plaintive reviewer for Variety, obviously No, but it's a good movie. Lon disguised as "Tube," can't believe what he sees and searches for what the film is really The saying: "Where Hud misfires and falls short of News, a monthly bulletin designed to circulate information about the mark is in its failure to filter its independent film production and meaning exhibition, is now being published by Canyon Cinema and theme lucidly through its characters and at a new address: 2201 Ward This lack of and Street, Berkeley, Cali- story. clarity dramatic neat- fornia. Subscriptions are $2.00 a year and sample ness is likely to leave the bulk of the filmgoing copies are usually available. 24 : THE TECHNOLOGY Film is an art peculiarly at the mercy of its technology. This is obvious in what relates to quality of image and sound. Less apparent, yet of immense significance, are the effects of technological factors associated with crew requirements,supervisory relationships, operating schedules, and so on. Space prohibited the inclu- sion in our last issue of the following photographs, which strikingly illustrate some of the extremes which can be found within current film-making practice.

4 The standard Hollywood full- crew method. As many as 50 technicians work on the normal Holly- wood set. This allows great technical resourcefulness which can produce fine technical results; but it also constipates the creative process and can restrict the director's au- thority to the point where he can realistically be described as "the foreman on the set."

The cindma-v6rit6 approach. I The blimpless, battery-driven Auri- con camera and Nagra tape-recorder (often with a directional microphone) minimize size, weight, and intrusiveness. They are oper- ated by a two-man crew. Normally the brothers David and Albert Maysles, shown here, use only natural, existing lighting. Such equipment comes close to the hypothetical "camera-pen" envisioned by French film-maker and critic Alex- andre Astruc, with which one could "write" films as directly as one writes on paper. qW 25

=AIM -4 The Oxberry animation stand shown here is the key component in the standard full-cell animation process upon which the traditional Disney . Much bigger versions W&A style depended. also exist, but this one is capable of ...... 4 ...... extremely complex and delicate com- IN "U.- binations of movements. However, its use an elaborate division of

...... requires ,+"7e ...... AL t labor previous to the photography ...... stage: outlining, inking, and coloring of the moving figures; the painting of backgrounds; charts of movements,exactly timed. Operation of the machine W is in itself a specialized job. Cost of the installation is reported to be around $40,000.

John Korty'shome-made animation stand N in Stinson Beach, California. Korty'srig uses a 16mm Bolex camera with zoom lens. The table supplies only 140 watts of flourescent light from below: Korty's images are made with translucent papers, knotty yarns, and Mid. other items. It can move from side to side and rotate. Total cost is around $1700. This the creative and system keeps process simple ...... direct, as Kortymanipulates his materials on the light table as he shoots. The result (see below) is a sprightly, Klee-like style which has earned Korty a reputation as one of the chief Al~i-iiiii~;iiii~~i~ n e w talents in -7-;;' U. S. animation. He's now working with HenryJacobs (whose record The Interview was the basis of the Pin- toff film) on what promises to be a horrifyinglyfunny film on smoking. 26: THREEVOWDSW ON OiNAA=VERUfTE COLINYOUNG Cinema of Common Sense

The term cindma-verit6 has been used, loosely, traditional forms this has led the director on to by critics to label documentary films which the sound stage where by set design, costum- employ the technical advantages of the new ing, lighting, and casting he can place in front light cameras and sound recorders, and which of his cameras the precise image he seeks to usually do not begin with a script but with an represent, and for the editing he supplies him- actual on-going event which they try to record, self with those shots which he can then re- or a situation which they attempt to describe, direct into the controlled interpretation of the always, allegedly at least, with the minimum of image which will be shown to an audience. interpretation. In attempting to get at the Generally speaking, most such controls are truth of a situation, the preconceived script is abandoned by the c-v director; and he tries, disallowed, the film-maker does not direct (in during editing, to be dictated to by his subject, the sense of controlling what is in front 6f the rather than conversely. camera), and the editing process is faithful to This seems familiar-it fits with one possible the actual event-its continuity, its relation- interpretation of what Robert Flaherty was ships, its entire character. No one, I maintain, about (what Frances Flaherty calls nonpre- really expects to find such a thing as the "ob- conception). It is also very unfamiliar because jective statement," although some of the new it has resulted in some rather startling films- documentary film-makers sometimes permit films which do not seem to follow at all the themselves to talk as if that's what their films traditional lines of the story film. were concerned with. In less polemic moments In this space I had meant to write a full- they will admit to the "subjectivity" of their scale polemic on behalf of cinema-virit6, but cameras and their editing, but will insist that circumstances prevented me from undertaking they are trying, to the limit of their own dis- it now. The polemic is needed, it seems to me, cretion, to represent the events or situations as because the new styles in documentary are they found them-not as they expected to find either being attacked (at least in part through them, not as they wish you to believe they misunderstanding) or ignored (by timorous found them, but as they saw them through exhibitors and television bookers). Henry the camera. Breitrose asks what is meant by calling a This, then, could more accurately be called "Living Camera"film interesting (Leacock and the cinema of common sense, the naturalist the others at Drew Associates used to say they cinema-Louis Marcorelles prefers "direct cin- were merely trying to get on to subjects which ema," Drew Associates have dubbed their pro- were "interesting" and present them as faith- gram "The Living Camera." It can readily be fully as possible to an audience). He says that distinguished from the conventional cinema the films are usually as good as their subjects which deals, and revels, in contrivance-the are interesting, but that the most successful immaculate control which a film-maker can ones work because their subjects have a struc- exercise on his material so as to present to an ture which permits the "story" to unfold audience his very personal vision of it. In its "naturally." He concludes that whenever the CINEMA-VERITE 27 meaning of the event is externally evident, and ly by the track, with the race still in progress, a when the event's structure is sufficiently similar race no longer his. He becomes aware of the to the traditional structure of dramatic conflict, camera, tries to pretend he has not seen it, but there is a good chance of the films'sworking. we become aware of his bluff-we see him This seems to me to beg the question-just putting on an act, we see him gradually be- as Peter Graham does when he implies that all coming resentful of the camera he had earlier cinema must be judged by the same set of accepted and welcomed; and because of this standards-Potemkin and Le Chemin de la we see more clearly below the surface of a man Mauvaise Route equally, even although these who lived to win and who lost-precisely standards were arrived at and set down before because, when Sachs was no longer lost in his Herman made a film, before Rouch or Leacock own task, the camera became an intrusive or the Maysles ever held a camera. There was element. the day when a documentary film-maker ar- It was perhaps remembering this that led gued, at the first Flaherty Seminar in 1954, Leacock and Gregory Shuker to make a fatal that a documentary film-maker, if he could not mistake in Nehru.* At the outset they had have a set script in his hand, should at least undertaken not to interfere or intrude in any have a strong outline in mind and should see way-except by being there. In return for to it that all material shot would relate to that permission to follow Nehru, they promised to outline and would contribute to the argument ask no questions and make no demands of any of the film. Who said that? Leacock. Seven kind. But in editing the film, Leacock has said, years later he was saying something else. The they found themselves without any dramatic cinema had moved forward. The critics want material, without the usual elements of narra- to hold it back. tive conflict. They had just faithfully followed Nevertheless, Breitrose is justified in keeping and recorded the work of an extraordinaryman some kind of score. Among the Drew Associ- over a short period. But in looking for some ates films some are vastly more successful than threat to tie together the various parts they others. On the Pole (the story of Eddie Sachs' concluded that the key was in the promise 1962 race at Indianapolis) is a fascinating they had made to Nehru-a promise they had, document of a man chasing a lunatic ambition. in the end, broken. Thus, in the film (broad- Undoubtedly, this is the most articulate film cast May 31 on KHJ-TV, Los Angeles, and like made by the group. They chose Sachs, firstly the other "Living Camera" films available for because he had the favored position (earned other TV bookings) they keep pointing to this by the driver with the fastest qualifying heat), sequence, building it up, and then finishing and secondly because he was a talkative, out- the film with it. Unfortunately it is a complete going man. But the film succeeds because of fizzle. Shuker asks Nehru a question or two, the film-makers'skill in putting the audience in Nehru answers them, in a perfectly straight a position to judge what is being said. Know- conversational tone. Nothing much is said-we ing that they could not predict the outcome, learn little new. It is as bad a gimmick as in they took us inside Sachs' ambition to win and Gitlin's The Comedian in which a perfectly then stayed with him when he lost, forced out straightforward account of Shelley Berman of the race by car trouble. It is here, in this opening a show in Florida is tricked up by early example of "Living Camera," that one promises of fireworks in the last act-when myth is quickly destroyed-namely that the Berman's act is "ruined" by an off-stage tele- presence of the camera interferes with the audience's chances of seeing a person behave *As we go to press, Sachs has just been killed in the naturally. We see Sachs standing disconsolate- 1964 race, and headlines announce Nehru's death. 28: CINEMA-VERITE

phone ringing. What, left to itself, could have more traditional sort-juxtaposition to force a been a savage little moment, is dressed up as certain interpretation-but it was arrived at by melodrama and then flops. the simple device of extending the reportage These errors of judgment are a hold-over situation from one location to two. from the conservative classical drama. They After On the Pole, I find Football and Petey ought to be totally unnecessary. It ought to be and Johnny the most interesting of the Drew enough to spend fifteen days with Nehru (or, Associates' films. (I belong to the minority not more questionably, three of four with Ber- liking The Chair). Football exploits a situation man), so long as the film-maker is telling us of straightforward conflict. Given extroverts in something we did not know before, and prob- front of the camera a skilled crew cannot miss. ably could not know very readily by any other But Petey and Johnny is a failure-defeated means. Thus both Primary (1960) and Crisis by the dilemma which all cindma-ve'ritdmust (1963) by the "Living Camera" teams did face up to in the end: how to be faithful to a show us a part of politics that went beyond subject which does not fit neatly into the simple screen journalism. In Primary we are structural patterns of conventional drama, following the Humphrey-Kennedy battle in without betraying the audience. Drew chose Wisconsin. In Crisis the subject is the Kennedy- what he considered the best of two betrayals. Governor Wallace battle over the token inte- He slicked up the situation, concentrated on a gration of higher education in Alabama. The gang member's marriage to provide a focus New York Times editorialized against the lat- point, wrote narration for the social worker ter film on the grounds of improper interfer- (the film was shot in Harlem), and threw ence with the due processes of government. away hours of taped conversation recorded Crucial to their argument was the contention wild on the streets. that Leacock et al. could not witness the The French, and French-Canadians, have President, the Attorney-General and others different problems. Michel Brault (and Pierre without materially affecting their work and Perrault) walked into a small Quebec fishing decisions. Again, on the screen, we can tell village and documented the villagers' decision when Robert Kennedy is putting on an act. It is to take up again the hunt for the white whale hard to believe that the act substantially alters that had formerly provided them with their what he would have done in the same situation principal source of income. It so happened if the cameras had been absent. The great they caught a whale, and that these men, and service of the film is that it successfully cap- their families, had a natural grace and wit tures a few moments in the problems of gov- which Brault and his recordist Carrii'e could ernment. By having one crew with the Attor- catch. But there is also a strong "traditional" ney-General in Washington and another in element to Pour la Suite du Monde-the Alabama the film-makers were able to cover scenes, though not directed, are set and the the conflict with a thoroughness which was not camera always tries to place the people in their matched at the time really by any of the landscape. The film ends up by being as close We see participants. Kennedy hesitating over a to Zavattini as to Flaherty and, with a mini- decision, needing information from Alabama mum of narration, is a victory for the naturalist which the cameras have the edited already (in cinema. The Brault-Jutra-Carriere film La shown to us in the audience. The result is film) Lutte (on professional wrestling in Montreal) to dramatize the of complexity the situation, and Wolf Koenig's Lonely Boy manage at the and to clarify the nature of the crisis and the same time to be accurate documents of their in difficulty arriving at a correct and tactically subjects and (without narration) scathing com- appropriate decision. This was editing of a mentaries on the society which nurtures them. CINEMA-VERITE :29

By comparison, the Ballentine-Shepherd pro- (interview) then another (reportage, witness) duction The Most is contrived and rigged, al- we get a picture of the life the inmates of the though also enjoyable. It is only if you insist, hospital lead. The experience for an audience with Graham, that all films must meet the is emotional rather than intellectual, but it is same standards that we have to choose be- certainly not totally vague and indeterminate. tween The Most and Lonely Boy. To say you In Les Inconnus de la Terre (a better film), like both is not to admit to a collapse of criti- Ruspoli talks with farmers who don't want to cal judgment, but to suggest that critical ideas move off the land and go into the city-and may need broadening. from time to time moves his camera far enough Rouch began as an ethnographer and fell away so that we see the recordist sitting with into the cinema. He has always had to contend his gear across from the men in the fields. with the effect that his shooting is having on There is no reason for this, except to remind us - his subjects in Moi, Un Noir "Edward G. that we are, in part, watching a record-that Robinson" went into prison, in Chronique d'un Ruspoli's film, interpretative in part, is also Ete the Renault worker does lose his job. But if rooted in the fact of these peoples' lives. this is irresponsibility, as Graham suggests, it is But where Graham is totally unsympathetic irresponsibility of a very special kind. Rouch is to a new mood in the cinema is with Jean not a callous observer. He is no more indiffer- Herman's brilliant Chemin de la Mauvaise ent than he is detached. It is possibly his lack Route (formerly called Bon Pour La Vie Civ- of detachment that flaws his films, but it also ile. Here the film-makeris found guilty of mix- gives them much of their excitement. I think ing his styles-of recording lengthy interviews Graham completely misreads his intentions in and then presenting them out of continuity, of Chronique and is deaf to Rouch's own protes- interpreting his interviews with iconographic tations of failure. All cinema-ve'ritdworth the material and reportage; he also stages some name reveals its conventions to its audience. scenes with his two principals and re-enacts Thus it is in character for Leacock and Shuker others. This might be called "using the re- to introduce Nehru with explanation of sources of the cinema"-it is also very easy to their methods-what they shouldn'tahi do is re- follow (apart from the alarming rapidity of print shots (Nehru climbing on to a platform; some of the cutting) because it declares itself Paul Crump's warden walking down the prison as it goes along-nothing is hidden, or faked. corridor to test the electrocution equipment- In the end, I suppose, we must count heads- although this last was Drew's doing). Rouch Graham's sympathy is smothered, mine is not. may not be making a "film"in Chronique, but What I see as a series of devices to render definitions never stopped something as dy- coherent something which came out in a namic as the cinema from moving on. Rouch garbled, inarticulate way, Graham sees as makes his methods elaborately clear, and puts marionetting. For in fact the more the young us in a perfect position to judge. So also, I gypsy and his mistress appear like the figures would have thought, does Ruspoli in Regards they emulate the more I sympathize with them sur la Folie. Graham suggested in correspon- -because Herman has also taken the precau- dence that I must have had definite views tion to make us like them, not in the first place, about madness before seeing Ruspoli's film and but gradually as the film progresses. It is so that this is why I find the film richly informa- obviously a document about these two people tive and suggestive. I do not think the weeks that this fact holds together the other threads spent as a nurse in a Glasgow asylum told me Herman develops. Marker does it brilliantly in very much but in any case Ruspoli does not Le Joli AMaitoo, but Herman's film stands as a leave us totally at sea. First with one style [continued on page 40] 40: CINEMA-VERITE tions, is not practicable in cinma-v&rite',as long as one is to be true to cinema-ve'rite"'sbasic assumptions of what is truth. FILM CLASSICS What seems to have happened is that important technological advances in film-making . . . for film societies . . for have become, for some, a magic key to the entertainment truth of the world. All of the nonsense about the armed with camera and film-maker, re- ANATOMYOF A MURDER-USA,Otto Prem- corder, being able to exercise a passive "Christ- inger's study of justice and personality; James like vision" and find the real nature of the world Stewart, Lee Remick,Ben Gazzara. to appears be a suitably elaborate rationale for MYSTERIOUSISLAND (color)-Jules Verne's the fact that some of the films made in this celebrated novel. style cannot do justice to their subjects. Ob- in remains as a MEXICANBUS RIDE-Luis Bufiuel's sexy com- jectivity, film, big myth as edy of country matters. it ever was. An enormously promising way of treating certain kinds of subjects, i.e., BROTHERSKARAMAZOV - Germany; Anna those with strong internal structure, in which Sten, Fritz Rasp. optimal spontaneity can reveal meaning hither- SYMPHONIEPASTORALE--France; Jean Delan to inaccessible, is well on its way to becoming noy's touching film of the Andre Gide novel. a mystique of technological existentialism, with Write for appropriate overtones of Zen nonpreconception. complete catalog But we cannot assume as c-v seems to, that TRANS-WORLDFILMS, Dept. FQ there a is universal or absolute truth about 332 S. MichiganAve., Chicago4, III. objects and events-in short, that there is a real nitty-gritty-and thus we must face up the fact that, to paraphrase Euclid on mathematics, there is no royal road to the real nitty-gritty. over than after ten minutes-that it stays on the surface. The same would be said of The YOUNGON CINIMA-VIRITI (CONT'D) Beatles. The Maysles think that they should not fascinating prototype"for a possible series of interfere in shooting, that they should never set films which an American film-maker might do things up-the sequence in Showman with well to consider, if, and this is an important Susskind arguing at Levine in a Boston radio reservation, he can ever hope to get the confi- station just happened-for to do so would dence of his subjects as Herman clearly did break the deal with their subject and, equally here. important, upset their own equilibrium as ob- The Maysles brothers, Albert and David, are servers. a special case. They consider themselves the None of the film-makers discussed above purists of the movement-in Showman (about would agree that he has been making super- distributor-producer Joe Levine) and The ficial films. I am not even convinced this is the Beatles they attempt to present their subjects crucial point. An American philosopher called completely without bias. As for the first, I have Mrs. Ladd Franklin once said she was sur- been told (in Hollywood) that the film is too prised she rarely met another solipsist. The critical of the "industry" and of Levine, and idealist critics should not run away when they (in New York) that the film is a whitewash of meet an empirical film-maker. He is neither the industry and Levine. I suppose, then, that obscene nor dangerous. He is merely exploring the Maysles suceeded. Those who don't like a part of the cinema-the part Kracauer Showman say they learn no more when it is claimed (falsely) is the whole. 30: PETERGRAHAM Cinema-VWrit6in France

Three years ago, few people had heard of the They do have one quality in common: they term cindma-veritd, and only those familiar all use reality as a means to their various ends. with Dziga-Vertov's 1924 communist mani- That is to say, they are anti-fictional, they festo on the cinema knew what it meant. Since dispense with a scenario, actors, and studio, then, cindma-viritd has become such a house- and use film of real people, actual events. hold word that its adherents have already been Although all such directors aim at the truth, satirized (albeit rather insipidly) in Jacques this of course does not mean that the end is Baratier's Dragdes au Poivre, a film intended automatically any truer than a film using fic- not for a select audience of initiates but for .the tional or artificial means. It is, I think, far more general public. Cinema-ve'ritdhas been hailed difficult to avoid deliberate or accidental dis- by some as a great new art form, branded by tortion when one is using nonfictional material. others as "still-borne" or "a lie." Few contro- The persuasive power of the cinema is such versies have produced such violent verbal that any tendency, conscious or otherwise, to clashes. One of the reasons for this, of course, distort or deceive can easily pass unnoticed. It is that no one ever took the trouble to define is in their attitude to their material that such what was meant by the term, which was thus film-makersstand or fall. taken to cover many divergent methods and Take Jean Rouch and Mario Ruspoli, the ideologies. two directors most commonly associated with As so often, the film critics are guilty of cindma-veritd in France. Rouch made several much of this confusion. Three years ago, the excellent films in Africa as an ethnographer. shrewd producer of Jean Rouch's Chronique He became increasingly interested in the cin- d'un Etd dug out Vertov's term and gave it a ema as a medium, and subsequently, using his new lease on life in his skillfully launched light and efficient equipment as an ornitholo- publicity for the film. The journalists, avid for gist uses binoculars, he focused in Chronique new catch-phrases, began to extend its mean- d'un Etd on the typical Parisian. "What is ing to include film-makers as different from happiness?" he and his collaborator Edgar Rouch as Drew and Leacock, Reichenbach, Morin asked, hoping that the bluntness of the Marker, and even Flaherty-who was claimed question would provoke their subjects to reveal at the 1962 Tours short-film festival as the their inner preoccupations, their anxieties and father of the movement. The designation their passions in the twitch of an eyelid, the spread like wildfire: home movies, Italian ne- fidgeting of a hand. Rouch at first wanted to orealism, direct TV reportage and (in the efface his role as a director and allow the opinion of Jean Douchet) even Advise and ineluctable power of the camera to do its work. Consent were all cindma-ve'ritd.Tot homines, Objectivity was his sole aim. But this resulted tot sententiae. Everyone felt comfortable in in a tentative approach and a hesitant film. their judgments of the movement, for everyone Worshipping the objectivity of the camera as had a different conception of it. And the film- recording instrument in his interviews, he for- makers themselves, as was the case with the feits the chance and the responsibility to im- Angry Young Men and the Nouvelle Vague, pose on the material a view of life which is his had much less sense of brotherhood than out- own. Thus none of Rouch's films reaches a siders liked to suppose. higher level than that of interesting experimen- CINEMA-VERITE: tation, as does Chris Markerin Le Joli Mai, for instance, which combines interview and personal evocation in a novel way. Ruspoli too, in his film about a lunatic asylum, Regards sur la Folie, was trying to be objective. He wanted to confront the spectator, in the starkest manner possible, with madness. In his interviews with the inmates he allowed nothing to taint the purity of the question- answer procedure. He refused to distort the purely visual presence of a madman with a commentary which would necessarily have given it a particularslant. How is it, then, that neither Rouch nor Marker's LE JOLI MAI. Ruspoli succeeds in being "objective"? Evi- dently because they have failed to understand texts, leading viewers to attribute three differ- either the purpose or the innate qualities of the ent expressions to it. But it applies minutely cinema. If film is an art, its purpose is not and subtly to every film. In Regards sur la merely to record, but to select, organize, and Folie, Ruspoli leaves us deliberately at sea. alchemize what is recorded.* Watching the The viewer's reactions to insanity vary accord- material that Rouch and Ruspoli collected, in ing to his prejudices or his indifference, for no spite of its undeniable interest, is like being context is provided. The psychiatrist who revo- allowed to see only the palette of a painter lutionized the methods of the hospital where who is producing a masterpiece; it has all the the film was shot felt that the document would elements that could go to make a work of art, be a true picture of life in a mental institution but is never more than a tantalizing suggestion only if projected to psychiatrists, who could fill of what one might have seen. in the gaps and draw their own expert conclu- But Regards sur la Folie and Chroniquc sions. This is a damning judgment on a film d'un Ete are more than harmless might-have- aimed at a larger audience. In fact, through his beens. For in their quest for objectivity, Rouch deliberate detachment and refusal to com- and Ruspoli overlooked one of the paradoxes of municate with his subjects, Ruspoli has (unin- the cinema, which applies as much to fictional tentionally I am sure) shorn the film of sympa- as to documentary films. Although the camera thy and warmth, generating in the mind of the can be absolutely true to an event in its ex- lay spectator a reactionary attitude to mental ternal manifestation (actions, words, gestures) illness. it can never, alone, be true to the meaning of Ruspoli's film does not fail because he did that event, which is always dependent upon not organize or select; the fact that he picked the selection and arrangement of the context. certain camera set-ups, certain rhythms in the This was crudely proved by Kuleshov's now editing, means that he must have made a rather tiresomely renowned experiment with choice. It fails because he attempted to make the same actor's face in three different con- no choice, which is attempting the impossible.

*Jean-Luc Godard argues in his sharp and (I think) largely incorrect attack on Leacock in the Cahiers "Ameri- can Cinema" number (150-151): "Leacock and his team do not take account (and the cinema is nothing but the taking of account) that their eye in the act of looking through the viewer is at once more and less than the apparatus which serves the eye . . Deprived of consciousness, thus, Leacock's camera, despite registering . its honesty, loses the two fundamental qualities of a camera: intelligence and sensibility. . . . His lack of subjectivity, in the last analysis, leads Leacock to lack objectivity." 32: : CINEMA-VERITE

The same is true of Chronique d'un Etad. psychologically interesting. Rouch tells us that When one realizes that the total material shot the man in the film with a shaven head was amounted to 25 hours before cutting and 1) extremely nervous in front of the camera. Curi- hours after cutting, one sees the enormous ously enough, he is the only individual who process of selection involved. Thus Rouch must imposes himself as a presence, instead of being admit that the presentation of the characters in a half-baked character. This unpredictable the film must have been conditioned by his transition from life to film makes a mockery of own view of them. He retained what he Rouch's intentions. though was interesting or revealing, but still There has been much discussion about the seeks to pass it off as a somehow totally objec- camera's relationship with its subjects in tive portrayal. Chronique. Rouch showed the filmed material Indeed, behind Rouch's scientific facade to the subjects months later, and filmed them there lurks the frustrated dramaturge. In the again as they discussed their reactions to see- scene in Chronique where Marceline and Jean- ing themselves. Sometimes their behavior be- Pierre talk together on the jetty at St. Tropez, fore the camera changed. Marilou wept, not in Rouch actually had them prepare what they a normal healthy way, but self-indulgently, as were going to say and rehearse it before he set a means of exhibitionistic catharsis. Sometimes the camera going. And in his latest film, Lib- the course of their lives was changed. Angelo ertd, he gave some friends of his (non-actors) had difficult problems, both personal and con- one or two themes on which to meditate (lib- nected with his job (he was fired). This partici- erty, love, etc.), and then filmed them in the pation of the cinema in life has had great claims throes-the word is chosen on purpose-of made for it. But this type of procedure creates improvising dialogue. In his own words, he exceptional circumstances; it is not every day was aiming at a kind of cinematographic com- that one has the opportunity of coming so na- media dell'arte. What he achieved was an kedly face to face with oneself. I feel that the uneasy hybrid. The characteristics of the live experience is not universal enough to be of real documentary or television report (wobbly interest to anyone but a trained psychologist. camera, bad sound, hesitancy) rub shoulders And in the case of Angelo, where the camera with the accoutrements of the traditional fic-' changed the course of his life, questions of tional film (J. C. Bach and quotations from moral responsibility must be raised; Big Broth- Sade on the soundtrack). The most interesting er is not so far away. aspect of the film lies on a multiconscious Responsibility, moral or otherwise, is what level. One is aware from time to time that the Rouch and Ruspoli shirk by their approach. "actors'" inspiration is drying up. Their em- They have not the courage of their convictions. barrassmentbreaks the tenor of the film, but is They cannot accept the inevitable: that the film-maker cannot be objective and must mould reality according to his personal beliefs. Two other French directors, Franqois Reichen- bach and Jean Herman, whose latest films are sometimes dubbed cinema-veritd, are not afraid to impose their own views. Both have the right approach. But unfortunately their films, though full of interest, are marred by what one might call a lack of honesty or respect toward their subjects. In Un Coeur Gros Comme Ca, Reichenbach gives a picture of a young Negro, Abdoulaye

Rouch's CHRONIQUE D'UN RTE. CINEMA-VERITE 33

Faye, who comes to Paris to study and to box. seriousness, her swearing pass in such rapid We see his encounter with Parisian life, his succession that she jerks like a marionette on disappointment in the ring; we hear his letters strings. back home. Much of the time, Faye did not The question of the film-maker's respect realize or particularly care that the camera was for his material arises very in the cr,,cially filming him, and hence a large part of the film, case of compilation films. By these I mean thanks to Reichenbach's perceptive eye, cap- (in Marcel Martin's definition) films "resulting tures Faye's innocence and charm. Unfortu- from a combination of documents which had a nately Reichenbach oversteps the mark. In one separate existence beforehand and were not sequence he yields to the temptation of giving filmed with this use in view." In other words, one of Faye's favorite songs about Paris a films like Mein Kampf and The Life of Adolf poetical visual setting. This evocation of Paris, Hitler. Owing to the immense shortage of however, has nothing to do with Faye; it is an material, historical events are difficult to recon- insertion of Reichenbach's own imagination. struct satisfactorily. The temptation is always, On its own terms it would be perfectly valid, in the case of a famous battle for instance, to but it only irritates here. use any striking pieces of newsreel which are In Le Chemin de la Mauvaise Route, Jean not inconsistent with shots of the battle in Herman focuses on two juvenile delinquents, question. And if fact, even the best compila- Jean-Claude and Colette. He questions them tion films, such as Aurel's 14-18 and the on prison, love, death, happiness, etc. He ob- Thorndykes' The German Story, occasionally tains a great frankness, and the interviews not have to resort to this. If this kind of film were only record the callous cynicism of their atti- kept strictly within the limits of its definition, tudes but also suggest, very strongly, their it would be silent; for the sound nearly always vulnerability. Herman wanted also to show the has to be added afterwards from other sources. kind of world in which they live, so he inter- When we are fortunate enough to fall upon a polated shots of pop singers, leatherjackets, document as self-sufficient as the film taken by motorcyclists, and the like. It is a pity that the Nazis of the Warsaw Ghetto, silence tells. Herman has a cinematic tic; his whirlwind This extraordinarily pathetic record, shot on editing rarely allows a shot to last more than a 16mm, was due to be edited into a propaganda second or two, and the long-term effect leaves film to extol the efficiency of the Germans' one breathless. With this comes the awareness solution of the "Jewish problem." The images that, like Reichenbach, Herman imposes his brought back by the cameramen were so un- own vision too harshly and indiscriminate- flattering that the Germans abandoned the ly-whole sequences of Le Chemin are virtual- idea. When the spectator is aware of the film's ly indistinguishable from his earlier frenetic history, the searing silence generates its own shorts, Actua-Tilt and Twist Parade. And by the end of the film any sympathy for the young people is, for me, effectively smothered, for Herman makes them as puppet-like as the pop singers they adulate. In one long sequence at the end, Colette opens her heart; her lacquer- hard surface dissolves, and she is revealed as an ordinary, rather sentimental girl. She even weeps. But Herman chops up this confession and reshuffles the pieces; in a glut of jump- cuts, he shows her one moment with tears in her eyes, the next without; her laughter, her

Reichenbach's UN COEUIlGios COMME CA. 34: CINEMA-VERITE

terrible irony. Similar at first sight in its pathos into an artistic unity. This results not simply in is a shot in Rossif's account of the Spanish a destructive attack on Levine (though he is Civil War, Mourir d Madrid, of a small, shiver- open enough to criticism) but in true satire. As ing child perched on a heap of rubble. What a in Juvenal or Nathaniel West, its savagery does quirk of fortune, one thinks, that a cameraman not induce one to recoil in disgust; it asks one happened to catch so poignant an image. But to understand. One of the reasons for this lies, then comes the realization that the shot is too I think, in yet another curious paradox. The consciously well composed, that the grain of camera, by focussing on a particular rectangle the film is too fine to have been taken before of reality, heightens it-thus producing a kind the war by a newsreel cameraman. In fact this of distancing effect between the image and the shot, like many others in the film, was taken by spectator. This is why ordinary people seem Rossif himself. No doubt the child is Spanish, more ridiculous on the screen than they would and perhaps Franco is the cause of its shiver- in real life. For instance, in John Schlesinger's ing; but such a tacit insertion of specially film Terminus there is a sequence where peo- filmed material into a context of newsreel shots ple apply to a lost-luggage office. The reaction is dishonest. Dishonest because it deceives, of an audience to their timid inquiries is help- whereas Resnais, in his masterly juxtaposition less laughter. No doubt the scene, witnessed of past and present in Night and Fog, threw his by someone on the spot, would have been own work into relief by shooting it in color. droll, but it would hardly have seemed hilar- The two essential qualities of the good cin- ious as it did on the screen. ema-verite or compilation film, artistic honesty In Showman there is a scene where Levine and the courage of one's convictions, are to be reminisces about his childhood. He uses senti- found in the work of two American teams, mental language and becomes emotionally Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, and the quite carried away. In a fictional film, such a brothers David and Albert Maysles, and a scene would be intolerably maudlin. But be- Frenchman, Chris Marker. cause it is real, it takes on a secondary mean- The Americans have made considerable ing. It shows Levine to be an average, rather technical advances: handy silent cameras; sentimental, and not particularly intelligent quick, precise exposure settings; fast film; man: the ruthless film mogul is reduced to portable recorders synchronized electronically human proportions. Even in the most satirical with the camera. With this equipment they sequences (when he is giving orders over the can approximate quite closely the flexibility of telephone, or talking to Sophia Loren, who the human senses. This opens up whole new dwarfs him) he never becomes merely an im- fields of experience; they can follow their sub- age of capitalism. He is at once a symbol and a jects almost anywhere, and because of their man. unobtrusiveness (they need no artificial light- Drew and Leacock, in their less successful ing) people soon forget the presence of the films, do not show as much restraint and sensi- camera and attain surprising naturalness. bility. There is an almost Rouchian overtone of In Showman, the Maysles investigate that the romanesque in Susan Starr and Jane. The phenomenon Joe Levine, the American film former is an account of a concert pianist's producer. They show his life from day to day: ordeal at an international competition. She his work at his his office, reunion with old fails to win the prize, and in an attempt to give friends, his public and private life. Like Lea- the film a happy ending, the film-makers over- the aim cock, Maysles say they at objectivity. emphasize her friendship (is it really love?) And in the sense that they did not tamper with with another pianist. In Jane, we see Jane events be called they might loosely objective. Fonda's first appearance in a Broadway play: But through their selection of incident and the rehearsals, the tension, her emotional diffi- their transformed their editing they material culties, and cruelly, the complete flop of the CINEMA-VERITE: S35 play. Throughout, one has the impression that Drew is basically a journalist. His aim is to Jane is acting rather than being. And, as in lay bare the facts and make a rational indict- Susan Starr, emotional attachments seem cur- ment. This is also the aim of the anonymously iously forced. But there is one moment in the made Octobre at Paris, an account of the film when the mask falls and we see the true, bloody clashes between Algerians and the vulnerable, young actress-when the camera Paris police in October, 1961. Although I have fixes relentlessly on her face as she reads out read the script, I have not yet been able to see the notices which damn both the play and her the film (it is seized by the police whenever performance. they get wind of a clandestine showing), but The Drew-Leacock approach is better suited by all accounts it is a courageous document. to events over which they have little con- Chris Marker's more personal approach is trol-as in Primary (electioneering), Football, different from that of Drew-Leacock or the or The Chair. Here, especially in the first two, Maysles. In films such as Cuba Si! and Le Joli the film-makers limit their role to presenting Mai, he examines his own conscience in a facts as they see them. But they never allow poetical rather than analytical way. This kind themselves to become mere neutral recording of method is full of hazards, as the films of agents who press buttons. Drew has said that Herman and Reichenbach show by their faults. he may not know for sure what will happen, But Marker's sensibility and control are such but he will have a pretty good idea of what he that he never once puts a foot wrong. In Le is after. Thus, in Football for instance, by ]oli Mai (1962), he treats the same subject lightning zooms into a contorted face, or hands (Parisians) and uses the same technique (flex- clasped in prayer, the film-makerspinpoint the ible equipment, interviews, etc.) as Rouch in particular aspect of the subject they wish to Chronique. But here the result is a work of art. emphasize. Straight conversations with all kinds of Par- The French critic Andre Bazin once wrote isians (shopgirls, an Algerian, an OAS sym- that he found the few, undramatic images of pathizer, a worker priest, engineers and so on) the early stages of Scott's antarctic expedition, are combined with more lyrical linking pas- actually shot by one of the expedition mem- sages where Marker evokes his own vision of bers, more compelling than all the suspense the city. For him, the expressive resources of and excitement of the feature Scott of the the cinema are not anathema. Shots and se- Antarctic. They provided, he said, a more quences are not strung sloppily one after an- direct link with the experience itself. The same other in misguided imitation of reality, but is true of The Chair when compared with I form part of an organic whole: each section Want to Live. We are brought as close as we contains groups of interviews which are rele- can ever come to the hideous apparatus of vant to each other, and the first part shows us capital punishment. The long tracking shot the romantic visionary aspect of aspiring Pari- down labyrinthine corridors to the death sians, the second goes on to more political chamber, where the electric chair waits like questions. The music also plays an important some shiny black insect, has few parallels in and subtle part. For example, Marker discreet- the history of the cinema.* Nearly the whole ly adds some faintly nostalgic music to part of film was shot before Crump was pardoned, at a an interview (with a soldier and his fiancee) time when no one knew whether he would be and this combination of the actual scene and allowed to live or not. We see the drawn face the musical comment produces, through the of the prison warden, Crump's friend but po- depth of the associations it evokes, a true tential executioner-it was he who would have poetic image. Whereas with Rouch the com- to pull the switch. We relive an experience. mentary is virtually abjured, with Marker it The moral impact is enormous. constitutes the binding element; subdued but 36: CINEMA-VERITE full of sinew, it guides the spectator persua- and Leacock justify themselves by what they sively through the film and up to its moving are. They have no need of a catchy label to conclusion. Like his earlier film on Castro's bolster up their intentions. These film-makers Cuba, Le Joli Mai is the lucid yet passionate present not the truth, but their truth. The term essay of a man who believes in and cares about cindma-verite, by postulating some absolute his fellow men. truth, is only a monumental red herring. The The films of Marker, the Maysles, and Drew sooner it is buried and forgotten, the better.

HENRYBREITROSE On the Search for the Real Nitty-Gritty: Problems & Possibilities in Cinmma-V ritu

Ask a nonacademic about the allgemeine iqueness is, somehow, bound to be revealed. Wahrheit or the Ding an sich and he will And sometimes it is. probably look at you as if you are quite out of Iris Barry's statement that "film is a way of your head. Ask about the "real nitty-gritty" seeing more than meets the eye" has been and he'll dig. He may not answer, but dig he preached to an infinite number of film stu- must. He'll know that what you are asking is dents, and bromidic as it may be at this time, what is really going on, what is the basis, what it still suggests in a precise way that film- is the truth, what is the essence of things. In making is more than bearing witness. Through the nitty-gritty world, truth and meaning turn the manipulation of images something trans- up, more often than not, without benefit of an cending witnessing may come about. One may ideological matrix. The questions "what, why, argue that with editing the "truth"is distorted and how" are admissable, but the answers are by the selective processes involved. The fallacy to be found only in the object or event itself. that the camera "never lies" comes easiest to The trick is to be able to see them. those who know least about camera work. Any Cinema-veritd, in its various manifestations, tyro cameraman knows which lenses to use to seems to be an attempt to get at the nitty- get the right "effect," to adjust the visible age gritty of the world by observing people in the of an actress, to pick a man out of the crowd, process of some crucial interactions with each to get a favorable portrait. Camera angle and other. The truth about them, the answer to placement also select, emphasize, modify and "what is life really like?" is thought to be distort, as do any number of other tricks of the there, somewhere, and the way to tease it out camera profession. To argue that editing dis- is through the use of battery-powered sync torts the "truth" any more than camera work camera linked to a portable sync recorder. One does would seem to be a silly argument. The looks at the world through an Eclair Coutant reasons why Operation Abolition was untruth- or a modified Auricon, and listens to it through ful about an event have much more to do with a Nagra or Perfectone recorder-and its un- the intent of its producers than with the fact CINEMA-VERITE: :37 that it was "edited." Conversely, without in- er be noticed? Will Leacock and Shuker in- voking intent one is hard put to find the v&rite trude? The answer is, of course, yes. The in cine"ma-viritd, or, for that matter, the resolution is that Nehru really doesn't mind. "Pravda"in Kino Pravda, its slavic god parent. We find out quite a bit about the "Living Camera"technique, but little about Nehru. At its best, cinedma-ve'ritdcan get close to an The differentiation between revelation and object or event. It can give more than witnes- observation is really the difference between sing or even vicarious participation. When conceiving of the camera and recorder as ex- skillfully done, an audience member can, more tensions of creative personality and perceptual than with any other style of production, get to apparatus of the film makers and thinking know the subject in a way approaching, in about them in terms of some magical mechan- intensity and distortion, the literary metaphor ical toy. Jargon like neo-pilotton, Wildum's of knowing as carnal knowledge. In the best plastic blimp, resolver, sound spot, accutron work the camera can penetrate the world of sync, and allusions to Kudelski's long-awaited the participants, can interact with them, and something-or-other, and Arriflex's forthcoming can serve the functions of illuminating and model S are current and choice in c-v shop revealing their world. In much cinedma-v&rite talk. One often wonders whether films are work, however, there is the feeling of the made by men using machines because there is outsider unable to gain entry into the group, no other way to state or explore that which who stands at the edge, disassociated, alien, they feel to be salient and significant or by but not yet alienated. He looks, he forms machines alone. Does deus ever arrive ex compositions in his mind's eye, he postulates machina? comments on what is going on, but being Traditionally, if one can talk about tradition outside he can't really see what is going on. in this field, documentary has been concerned Being alien, he could not understand even if with revealing man and his enviornment, as he could see and hear and understand. opposed to merely recording events on film. In Drew the Associate "Living Camera" film Although the social conditions and technologi- Nehru, the latter situation applies. We are told cal means of documentary have changed enor- that together with Ricky Leacock and Gregory mously in the relatively recent past films are Shuker, camera and recorder team, we will still made by men, and often are about other intimately witness the world of Nehru. The men. is that problem nothing happens, or at least The "Living Camera" film Eddie (original nothing that is understandable to the "Living title: On the Pole) manages to tell us more Camera" team. There is no conflict, no crisis, about the racing car driver Eddie Sachs, his save for the fear that Nehru will be mobbed by goals, ambitions, and style of life than he the throngs of Indians who turn out to hear probably can verbalize; not that he doesn't him talk. Nehru doesn't get mobbed. Shuker talk, but rather that his actions are more elo- almost does: the crucial event turns out to be quent than his verbal statements. In his rela- not about Nehru at all, but rather about the tionship with his wife, with his driver col- film-maker. Ultimately, the relatively calm and leagues, with his automobile, his pit crew, and rather dull this off to (write the "alien" ex- the Indianapolis 500-mile race, Eddie emerges planation) witnessing of Nehru takes on a new as a complex and often contradictory structure. The person- interaction between the camera- ality. The crucial action in the film is, of recorder team and Nehru emerges as the focus course, the race. Until the race, Eddie is sure of the film. The stress, crisis, conflict and that this will be his last. He will win and resolution on depend whether the noninterfer- retire. He has come close to winning before ence between Nehru pact and Leacock-Shuker and this time he has the coveted pole position. will be Will abrogated. the camera and record- Tension and expectation are built up. The race 38 CINEMA-VERITE

begins, concludes, and Eddie loses. After the noes and a yes. David does indeed stay, after race, his thoughts of retiring are gone. He will, reaching some sort of understanding with his of course, try again. Why does he race? He wife. Jimmy and Marguerita leave. Visually, never tells us, but we.know, in an intimate and the most moving portions of the film are Da- complex way that defies verbalization. We vid's two good-byes to his wife: one after her know because we have been close to Eddie first visit in the film is close to the point of inti- Sachs during a crisis in his life. macy, and lengthy far past audience embarrass- Taken as a group, the "Living Camera"films ment. It makes the point, in a subtle and com- share one curious and all-pervasive trait. In a plex way, that David's relationship with his way reminiscent of traditional well-made dra- wife is a strong and dependent one, and ration- ma, they dote on conflict and resolution. Inter- alizes the statement by one of the other resi- estingly, whereas traditionally photographed dents in a group therapy-cum-discussionsession feature-film production has come to the point called a "synanon," that David is an infantile of eschewing fundamentally 19th-century dra- person who has difficulty interacting with other matic narrative style, the technically radical persons on an adult level, and whose drug prob- "Living Camera" films make it a stock in trade lem is intimately tied up with his problems of for documentary. Antonioni, Godard, and even dependence. Perhaps the weakest point of the Fellini break loose from the well-made play film, and the most obvious one, is the sequence concept, but Drew, Leacock and their collab- of Marguerita "kicking cold turkey" in the orators use the same traditional dramatic and living room. The narrator assures the audience narrative structuring device. that she is in need of "all of the sympathy she The struggle for human souls seems to be a can get" and the camera shows us David and structuring device for at least three "Living another resident accompanying her discomfort Camera" films. In David, the struggle takes with a slow blues-y kind of song. It is as if the place at Synanon House in Santa Monica, style screams to the audience "Isn't this poetic California. David is a junkie trying to stay and moving!" It very well may have been, but clean. Synanon is a narcotics treatment center, the qualities of poesy and emotion are de- run by former addicts without benefit of offi- stroyed by its obviousness. A close second in cial medical sanction or police approval. David's disappointment is what is advertised by the special problem is that his wife and child are, narrator as a "violent and often explosive syn- in the eyes of the people in charge of Synanon, anon." We are told that it works and that interfering with his withdrawal from drugs. professionals in the field are stumped as to His responsibilities toward them are used as a why; but what we see is an almost convention- rationale for possible leaving. The detrimental al discussion, reminiscent of a rather tame effects of leaving are indicated by examination group therapy session. In the few instances in of pictures of people who were made to leave which reaction shots are cut in the sequence by unsympathetic authorities and are now picks up in intensity, but generally one is either imprisoned or dead. Soon, the struggle is stumped, not as to why the session works, but for three souls. A man who left before his time rather as to why the narrator advertises some- returns, and we are told that he is "almost thing that the film does not deliver. The "Liv- dead from massive injections of hereoin." A ing Camera" does not preclude intrusive, om- neophyte girl arrives to kick the habit, pub- niscient narration. licly, in the living room, as is the custom. In Petey and Johnny, the struggle is by a Instantly one crisis becomes three. Will David youth worker for a teen-age kid, certifiable as a leave? Will Synanon be able to hold on to juvenile delinquent by those so inclined. The Jimmy, the returned prodigal? Will Marguer- relationship of the worker with the kid, of the ita kick "cold turkey" and stay in Synanon for kid with other kids, and of the youth worker complete rehabilitation? The results are two with the other kids in the area, are shown with CINEMA-VERITE: :39 considerable warmth, and the wonder of this time. The problem with the film is that the film is that the film makers could gain this kind parallelism doesn't really work. Close-up shots of entr6 into the street world of slum teen- of the facial tic of one of the coaches are agers. In The Chair, the struggle is for the life referred to again and again in order to build of Paul Crump, whose reformation while in tension as the game nears its close. The prob- prison was unrecognized by some, held irrele- lem is that this is the coach of the winning vant by others, and championed by the few team, which by the time the tic is cut in is so who thought of prison as a means for rehabili- far ahead that victory is all but guaranteed. tation, rather than as an instrument of social The most telling and horrifying shots in the vengeance. The Chair is probably the most film are in the dressing room of the winning publicized of the "Living Camera" films and team, before the game and during half time. possibly the best. In any event, it deserves The coach, in his pep talk to the boys, picks somewhat longer treatment than is possible in up a piece of wood and with it demonstrates this article. how to deal with the opposition by beating it The "Living Camera" technique becomes savagely on a bench, while shouting to his doubly complex, doubly promising, and doubly team. After the game, in the winning team's disappointing in Mooney vs. Fowle (original dressing room, one of the boys on the team title: A Tale of Two Coaches). The film con- recapitulates these instructions with a soft cerns itself with an annual football game, drink carton as he beats it ecstatically on the played before thousands of spectators at night concrete floor. in the Orange Bowl. The competing teams are Ultimately, critical judgement about the from two local high schools, and the spec- "Living Camera" films becomes trapped into tators, players, students, and coaches take their dependence on the nature of the subject. The football seriously indeed. The film attempts to films, generally, are as good as their subjects set up a parallelism between the two schools, are interesting. But "interesting"implies only a both in themselves and in the personalities of kind of pragmatic tautology. Subjects "work" the two coaches. A kind of grimness and in "Living Camera" if they have within them humorless determination permeates the rela- enough structure so that the film itself takes on tionships among the players and between a natural rather than an enforced continuity, coach and team. In a large measure, the foot- such as that of traditional dramatic conflict. ball game becomes a microcosm of the world The problem is really whether the subject fits in which the players will' soon have to partici- the form, which is the reverse of looking at the pate. The object is not to play the game, but form-content relationship from the more tradi- rather to win, and both coaches hammer this tional and perhaps more sensible point of view home to their charges in a manner calculated of fitting the treatment to the subject. The to make Marine basic training look like a "truth"of an event, then, can be seen using the Summerhill school. The film indulges in the cindma-veritetechnique only when the event is pre-game pep rallies and in the half-time such that its meaning is externally evident and marching and drum-majorette-ing with appro- self-structured. The juxtaposition of sequences priate attention to immediately postpubescent to generate new levels of meaning, whether as sexuality. I believe it was Marshall McLuhan practiced by Eisenstein or Basil Wright or who described the drum majorette as the Humphrey Jennings or George Stoney, isn't apotheosis of contemporary fetishism, combin- part of the rhetoric of cinima-verite. People in ing organization, militarism, youth, and sex. c-v are contrasted in real time and real space, Close-ups of behinds cut into the sequence and and only if they are normally there to begin distorted shots using an extreme wide-angle with. Relating them in filmic time and space, lens let the spectator know where the living albeit interesting and practical in terms of films camera's mind happens to be wandering at the whose form is dictated by content considera- 40: CINEMA-VERITE tions, is not practicable in cinma-v&rite',as long as one is to be true to cinema-ve'rite"'sbasic assumptions of what is truth. FILM CLASSICS What seems to have happened is that important technological advances in film-making . . . for film societies . . for have become, for some, a magic key to the entertainment truth of the world. All of the nonsense about the armed with camera and film-maker, re- ANATOMYOF A MURDER-USA,Otto Prem- corder, being able to exercise a passive "Christ- inger's study of justice and personality; James like vision" and find the real nature of the world Stewart, Lee Remick,Ben Gazzara. to appears be a suitably elaborate rationale for MYSTERIOUSISLAND (color)-Jules Verne's the fact that some of the films made in this celebrated novel. style cannot do justice to their subjects. Ob- in remains as a MEXICANBUS RIDE-Luis Bufiuel's sexy com- jectivity, film, big myth as edy of country matters. it ever was. An enormously promising way of treating certain kinds of subjects, i.e., BROTHERSKARAMAZOV - Germany; Anna those with strong internal structure, in which Sten, Fritz Rasp. optimal spontaneity can reveal meaning hither- SYMPHONIEPASTORALE--France; Jean Delan to inaccessible, is well on its way to becoming noy's touching film of the Andre Gide novel. a mystique of technological existentialism, with Write for appropriate overtones of Zen nonpreconception. complete catalog But we cannot assume as c-v seems to, that TRANS-WORLDFILMS, Dept. FQ there a is universal or absolute truth about 332 S. MichiganAve., Chicago4, III. objects and events-in short, that there is a real nitty-gritty-and thus we must face up the fact that, to paraphrase Euclid on mathematics, there is no royal road to the real nitty-gritty. over than after ten minutes-that it stays on the surface. The same would be said of The YOUNGON CINIMA-VIRITI (CONT'D) Beatles. The Maysles think that they should not fascinating prototype"for a possible series of interfere in shooting, that they should never set films which an American film-maker might do things up-the sequence in Showman with well to consider, if, and this is an important Susskind arguing at Levine in a Boston radio reservation, he can ever hope to get the confi- station just happened-for to do so would dence of his subjects as Herman clearly did break the deal with their subject and, equally here. important, upset their own equilibrium as ob- The Maysles brothers, Albert and David, are servers. a special case. They consider themselves the None of the film-makers discussed above purists of the movement-in Showman (about would agree that he has been making super- distributor-producer Joe Levine) and The ficial films. I am not even convinced this is the Beatles they attempt to present their subjects crucial point. An American philosopher called completely without bias. As for the first, I have Mrs. Ladd Franklin once said she was sur- been told (in Hollywood) that the film is too prised she rarely met another solipsist. The critical of the "industry" and of Levine, and idealist critics should not run away when they (in New York) that the film is a whitewash of meet an empirical film-maker. He is neither the industry and Levine. I suppose, then, that obscene nor dangerous. He is merely exploring the Maysles suceeded. Those who don't like a part of the cinema-the part Kracauer Showman say they learn no more when it is claimed (falsely) is the whole. 4'4 I - -, . A' -; Ii: 0

4*4 40K ?J*

Above: AMERICA, AMERICA [see page 55]. Film Reviews THEEASY LIFE

(Original title: II Sorpasso-The Overtaking ["Passing"]) Director: Dino Risi. Script: Ettore Scola and Ruggero Mac- cari. Camera: Alfio Contini. Music: Riz Ortolani. With Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Commencing with The Bicycle Thief, postwar Italian films have tended towards the picaresque, using the wanderer motif as the basis for a search into existence. This has been true even of films like La Dolce Vita, L'Avventura, La Notte, and 8%, where the characters move (or are moved) from one static episode to another, a plot pattern that might well be 42: SFILMREVIEWS

called "arrested picaresque": time, as in a The main action starts when Bruno stops. In Faulkner novel, is tacked upon a dissection the quiet suburbs, he gets out of his car to board. drink at a faucet. Spying a young man looking The slow-motion picaro in many cases has The picture opens with Bruno (Gassman) been Marcello Mastroianni, whose expression driving his Aurelia sportscar madly about the of stunned wonder is suited to this particular Roman outskirts, searching for a telephone so genre. In him, the existentialist directors have that he can call a girl who has (we later learn) found their absurd hero, the cinema's counter- been waiting over an hour for him to show up. part to Meursault, or the wandering narratorof Because it is a holiday, all the shops are closed. Nausea: an Italian J. Alfred Prufrock. He tries, at one point, to squeeze his arm A more traditional picaro can be found in through a grating and put a coin into a wall recent films starring Vittorio Gassman. In La phone, but he cannot quite reach the slot. Grande Guerra he was a chronic Army goof- These images, of a frantic, unsuccessful search off, in Big Deal on Madonna Street he darted through an empty town, and of a vain attempt through a slapstick gauntlet of criminal misad- to put through a call-to reach somebody-are ventures, and in Love and Larceny he played a symbolic prelude to the subsequent action: a con-man running through life at a 40-degree the theme music, suitable but nonetheless a angle, changing costumes as he went. At this clich6, is fast-tempo jazz. frantic pace, Gassman somewhat resembles the at him from a window, he asks him to call the "other" Charlie Chaplin, the villain-clown we girl, but ends up in the young man's apart- tend to forget in favor of the charming tramp. inent, calling her himself. By this time she has In The Easy Life Gassman plays a similar role, left, and Bruno-apparently at a loss as to how but one with more sinister implications. to kill the rest of the day-takes it upon Unlike the baffled-looking, intellectual Mas- himself to strike up a conversation with the troianni, Gassman is an archetypal picaro, with young man, a law student named Roberto a narrow, hungry face and satanic good-looks. (played by Jean Louis Trintignant). These His eyes are small and without much expres- first few minutes of their encounter, in which sion, hiding all thought, but his face betrays Bruno's pushy self-assertiveness is played off his rapaciousness, his appetite for experience- against Roberto's timidity and indecisiveness, the picaro's main diet. In The Easy Life, establishes the pattern for the rest of the pic- Cassman is a trickster, but something more as ture. Against his will, Roberto is invited out of well. Perhaps The Trickster. his apartment for a "drink" (he neither smokes nor drinks), which turns into a "meal" (which he tries to decline), which turns into a two-day Bruno charms the family at the farm. excursion. At length, Roberto begins to relax somewhat. Resigned to being taken for a ride (his wallet, as well as he, is in Bruno's hands), he cannot but admire the sureness and verve of .53 his strange companion. Soon he enters into the spirit of things, and attempts to emulate Bruno's carefree attitude. He no longer cringes as the little sportcar hurtles past slower vehicles, its horn tooting like the pipes of a Pan gone mad. I I. the action -hill _1111?!?. Apparently random, picaresque d carries the two through episodes of high and lit fid. Y FILMREVIEWS :43 low life, silly and tragic events. Bruno attempts and that his teenage daughter is about to find to make a quick dollar from merchandise the security he never gave her by marrying spilled in a fatal highway crash. He and "Bibi," a businessman old enough, as Bruno Roberto follow two German girls into a ceme- puts it, "to have a daughter I could take out." tery, but are put off by the environment. They He no longer seems so sure of himself, so much stop at a roadside restaurant, and Roberto is in control of life. During the next day, at the accidentally locked in the men's room as Bruno seashore, he waterskis, swims, hops about, tries to make time with the cashier. Finally laughs, jokes, tries to put the touch on Bibi for they eat, in a seaside inn, and Roberto almost 50,000 lire-but all of it is strained, desperate, escapes while Bruno is attempting to get the competitive: a gloss on his earlier gaiety. Like waitress into bed upstairs. But Bruno overtakes Roberto at the farm, he is given an opportunity him, and they go on to the farm of Roberto's to discover the truth about his past, but he childhood. As Roberto wanders through the laughs and dances on. Like Willy Loman, the house, Bruno charms the family with his tragic salesman, "comical" Bruno refuses to enthusiasm and energy, usurping Roberto's abandon his dream. His journey, we begin to place as the center of attention. Through perceive, is a flight from truth. When he beats asides, he reveals that the beloved old family Bibi at pingpong, winning his daughter's ad- retainer is a homosexual, that the "handsome" miration (and 50,000 lire), it is a sad victory. uncle is ugly and a cuckold, and that Roberto's He pays back Roberto's loans, but he is still in "cousin" (a stolid, Fascistic lawyer) is really debt to himself. the bastard son of the tenant farmer; finally, Roberto, meanwhile, has been wandering one presumes, he seduces Roberto's maiden about the beach. He phones the girl Valeria, aunt, a handsome woman whom Roberto has but she is out. He talks with Bruno's daughter, idolized into a madonna. In less than an hour, and it is clear that she is attracted to him. The Bruno has ripped up Roberto's nostalgic dream Italian title of the film, which has until now like an old photograph, and they roar on down apparently referred to Bruno's reckless driving, the highway, passing everyone. now seems applicable to Roberto's transforma- Still, Roberto is not unwilling that this tion. When the two finally head toward Rome, should happen. Confronted with the insuffer- it is Roberto who is hilarious, declaring that able cousin-who wants him to "settle down, these have been the happiest days of his life. like me"-he prefers his new friend. He be- At his urging, Bruno drives faster, racing with gins, shyly, to welcome the adventures that a stubborn car side by side until, at the crest of follow. In a fancy club, Bruno makes up to the a hill, they meet a truck coming head on. buxom blonde wife of a business acquaintance Swerving with a cry (the camera never leaves as Roberto makes embarrassed eyes at a bored Bruno from this moment), Bruno slides the girl nearby. Two men that Bruno has crowded Aurelia broadside into the truck, and is hurled off the road with his Aurelia show up, and a out of the car onto the shoulder. Roberto, fight follows in which Roberto joins. Much caught in the car, is killed when it plunges shoving and screaming ensues, and the two over a cliff. The picture ends with Bruno, face comrades celebrate the outcome by getting drained of hunger, looking down at the wreck- drunk, and in this condition arrive at the home age. At this moment all the earlier tokens-the of Bruno'sestranged wife. near-misses, the near-connections, the unsuc- At this point, with Roberto sodden and silly, cessful phone calls, the road-side wreck, the the story begins to concentrate on Bruno's graveyard, the futile quest, Roberto's laughter history. The pace remains brisk, maintained by -telescope into his drawn, empty face. Death, a series of vignettes which begin in mid-action, too, is hungry, and Bruno, the agent of but our idea of Bruno undergoes a radical Roberto's transcendence, has been Death's change. We learn that his wife despises him agent. It is he who cannot change, who is left 44 FILMREVIEWS to go on passing others without surpassing bawdiness, but this is mere decoration, not himself. intrinsic to the action. It is like the porno- Unlike the Mastroianni films, The Easy Life graphic covers on cheap paperbacks: irrelevant is empty of reflective dialogue. It is the action, to the text, they are there to sell the books. symbolically conceived, which speaks: the This film may be no Gil Blas, but it does not editing of the film and the camera work are need such "selling." -JOHN SEELYE aimed at an almost unceasing rush of event. Only in an occasional rare moment does the camera "think," as in a lovely interlude when Roberto walks to the phone to call Valeria, passing slowly through the self-absorbed, ILPOSTO beautiful faces of girls doing the Twist. Be- cause the camera is on Roberto's head, it (The Job. Released in U. S. as The Sound of Trumpets.) excises the debased movements of the Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. Photography: ugly, Lamberto Caimi. dance (which are accentuated in other episodes): all we see are faces, weaving rhythm- II Posto was Olmi's second feature; like I ically, with an almost beatific concentration of Fidanzati, it shows strongly the imprint of his each dancer in her dance. Like flowery crystals documentary training. (He made something under a lens, they pass in and out of focus, an like 30 short sponsored films before his first intense matrix of beauty from which Roberto, feature, II Tiempo sie fermato-Time Stood like a butterfly, is emerging. Still.) In this evolution Olmi may be interest- But these moments are few. Most of the ingly compared with, say, John Schlesinger- time the camera is used objectively, to record Schlesinger's documentaries, such as Terminus, events. The editing, with its abrupt and yet also earned him a try at features; but in the harmonious transitions, does the talking, to- British situation he has been forced into far gether with the faces of the actors. Roberto's more "theatrical"forms than has Olmi. youthful, blond, but somewhat weak good Olmi's minute observation of ordinary life is, looks (he is called "Hamlet" by Bruno's daugh- of course, poetically selected and arranged, or ter), relaxes from suspicion into a shy eager- nobody would sit through it. It is no doubt ness to awaken. Bruno's hard, almost wolfish easy to overrate his factuality and conse- jollity tightens into something like fear. quently, in a way, underrate him as an artist. Roberto, rising, passes Bruno descending, but II Posto is, on the surface, a careful and the implication is purely dramatic: the passing, sometimes droll record of how an Italian boy like Roberto's moment of truth, is silent. hunts for a job in a large, secure corporation, A final objection. Director Risi felt it neces- which he expects to take care of him for life. sary to parade a series of hip-wobbling chip- He meets a girl also applying for a job, and pies through various scenes. This is distasteful, gets very interested in her. They are tested, and detracts (in any way you like) from the interviewed, and finally assigned to posts. picture. This voyeurist display of thrusting Shyly, he has never really made a play for her, backsides cheapens the tone of the film, and and he loses track of her, then sees her going calls the viewer's unwilling attention to the off to lunch with a man from her office. world of demiwhores that attaches itself to any Finally, because of a death, he gets the clerk's movie colbny, rather than to the characters and job he was after, and settles down at his desk the story. Only at the beach, where wiggling as a man might lie down in his coffin. flesh is standard equipment, along with boats Oddly enough, the tone of II Posto is remi- and balls, do these bit players settle into niscent of those films by young Americans who place-and even there with some resistance. A hope to hold the cinematic mirror up to the traditional element of the picaresque is its seaminess of urban American life, but have not 44 FILMREVIEWS to go on passing others without surpassing bawdiness, but this is mere decoration, not himself. intrinsic to the action. It is like the porno- Unlike the Mastroianni films, The Easy Life graphic covers on cheap paperbacks: irrelevant is empty of reflective dialogue. It is the action, to the text, they are there to sell the books. symbolically conceived, which speaks: the This film may be no Gil Blas, but it does not editing of the film and the camera work are need such "selling." -JOHN SEELYE aimed at an almost unceasing rush of event. Only in an occasional rare moment does the camera "think," as in a lovely interlude when Roberto walks to the phone to call Valeria, passing slowly through the self-absorbed, ILPOSTO beautiful faces of girls doing the Twist. Be- cause the camera is on Roberto's head, it (The Job. Released in U. S. as The Sound of Trumpets.) excises the debased movements of the Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. Photography: ugly, Lamberto Caimi. dance (which are accentuated in other episodes): all we see are faces, weaving rhythm- II Posto was Olmi's second feature; like I ically, with an almost beatific concentration of Fidanzati, it shows strongly the imprint of his each dancer in her dance. Like flowery crystals documentary training. (He made something under a lens, they pass in and out of focus, an like 30 short sponsored films before his first intense matrix of beauty from which Roberto, feature, II Tiempo sie fermato-Time Stood like a butterfly, is emerging. Still.) In this evolution Olmi may be interest- But these moments are few. Most of the ingly compared with, say, John Schlesinger- time the camera is used objectively, to record Schlesinger's documentaries, such as Terminus, events. The editing, with its abrupt and yet also earned him a try at features; but in the harmonious transitions, does the talking, to- British situation he has been forced into far gether with the faces of the actors. Roberto's more "theatrical"forms than has Olmi. youthful, blond, but somewhat weak good Olmi's minute observation of ordinary life is, looks (he is called "Hamlet" by Bruno's daugh- of course, poetically selected and arranged, or ter), relaxes from suspicion into a shy eager- nobody would sit through it. It is no doubt ness to awaken. Bruno's hard, almost wolfish easy to overrate his factuality and conse- jollity tightens into something like fear. quently, in a way, underrate him as an artist. Roberto, rising, passes Bruno descending, but II Posto is, on the surface, a careful and the implication is purely dramatic: the passing, sometimes droll record of how an Italian boy like Roberto's moment of truth, is silent. hunts for a job in a large, secure corporation, A final objection. Director Risi felt it neces- which he expects to take care of him for life. sary to parade a series of hip-wobbling chip- He meets a girl also applying for a job, and pies through various scenes. This is distasteful, gets very interested in her. They are tested, and detracts (in any way you like) from the interviewed, and finally assigned to posts. picture. This voyeurist display of thrusting Shyly, he has never really made a play for her, backsides cheapens the tone of the film, and and he loses track of her, then sees her going calls the viewer's unwilling attention to the off to lunch with a man from her office. world of demiwhores that attaches itself to any Finally, because of a death, he gets the clerk's movie colbny, rather than to the characters and job he was after, and settles down at his desk the story. Only at the beach, where wiggling as a man might lie down in his coffin. flesh is standard equipment, along with boats Oddly enough, the tone of II Posto is remi- and balls, do these bit players settle into niscent of those films by young Americans who place-and even there with some resistance. A hope to hold the cinematic mirror up to the traditional element of the picaresque is its seaminess of urban American life, but have not FILMREVIEWS :45 yet learned the techniques of "making things usiially have, and helps us to feel for Domen- interesting." Like the young Americans, Olmi ico. knows that this chilly, massive, frightening One curious aspect of the film is its sound scene is not interesting (that is the whole point track, which is very subdued-with long peri- about it-that it is an inhuman way of life); ods of hush. I am sure that, even in the but unlike them, he has something else on industrial north of Italy, this agonizing quiet- which to structure his films-a close and sym- ness is far from "documentary."Sometimes the pathetic observation of character, and in parti- sense of silence is oppressive because it is a cular of suffering. Domenico in II Posto is kind of homage to the corporation the young being impinged upon by the world: this is the people are applying to; in the anterooms of the "drama" which holds our attention. If every gods one grows silent. But Olmi has general- film has some underlying question as its impell- ized this throughout the film. Eyes speak, ing thread, which the viewer wants to see especially Domenico's; but the voices say little, unravelled, in II Posto it is something like and then guardedly.... "Will he be able to stand it?" Domenico is Actually, however, this is another aspect of extremely touching in his shyness, his softness, the spare stylistic tone of the film as a wvhole. what the girl calls his oldfashioned air, his "This is all there is," is Olmi's basic position: plaintive hopes for a quiet doomed existence these young people searching for jobs they will (or for love). soon despise, wandering amid impersonal sky- II Posto rests, then, squarely upon the scrapers, stores jammed with expensive goods, shoulders of the boy. In this stripped-down, inscrutable bureaucratic tyrannies. The only meticulous. style, this Chayevskyism deroman- thing worth any serious attention is the occa- ticized, if we do not like him and sympathize sional solitary person. It is because his stylistic with him the film will be merely an ordeal, tone matches so well his concern for lonely rather than the ordeal artistically ordered people-isolated, blocked from gratifying ac- which Olmi intended. Olmi has been lucky in tion of any kind-that Olmi is a first-class film- his protagonist, for Sandro Panzieri plays maker. Like Antonioni, he is an artist of the Domenico faultlessly in a somber minor key. last-ditch stand being waged, in all the indus- He is helped, however, by the general style of trialized cities of the world, against the civili- the film, which is such as to reawaken a level zation we have created.-ERNESTCALLENBACH of curiosity not usually touched by ordinary films. Olmi includes a lot of documentary material: long-lens street footage, a careful record of the job physical exam, cafeteria eating scenes in which food is a revolting animal THISSPORTING LIFE necessity. There are also the strange passages showing the awful cramped lives of the other Director: Lindsay Anderson. Producer: Karel Reisz. Screen- clerks, which Olmi inserts in the film play by David Storey, based on his novel. Photography: midway Denys Coop. Music: Roberto Gerhard. Continental. to make perfectly clear what it is that Domen- ico is really headed for. (These are followed by American and European critics have become an excruciating pan shot going entirely around used to the pleasures of looking down their the room where the clerks sit all day.) Though noses at the British cinema: poor Tony Rich- Olmi is a poet, he is not a romantic; hence he ardson trying to be cinematic (when he is only is able to integrate his "found" material per- a consummate director of actors), or poor fectly with his story (such as it is) without the David Lean (enshrining Lawrence in a cellu- discomfiting slight shifts in tone that character- loid pyramid), or poor Carol Reed ("where is ized Cleo front 5 to 7. This gives us a kind of Carol Reed?"). Anderson openly challenged confidence in the reality of the film we do not this national fall from grace in an attempt to FILMREVIEWS :45 yet learned the techniques of "making things usiially have, and helps us to feel for Domen- interesting." Like the young Americans, Olmi ico. knows that this chilly, massive, frightening One curious aspect of the film is its sound scene is not interesting (that is the whole point track, which is very subdued-with long peri- about it-that it is an inhuman way of life); ods of hush. I am sure that, even in the but unlike them, he has something else on industrial north of Italy, this agonizing quiet- which to structure his films-a close and sym- ness is far from "documentary."Sometimes the pathetic observation of character, and in parti- sense of silence is oppressive because it is a cular of suffering. Domenico in II Posto is kind of homage to the corporation the young being impinged upon by the world: this is the people are applying to; in the anterooms of the "drama" which holds our attention. If every gods one grows silent. But Olmi has general- film has some underlying question as its impell- ized this throughout the film. Eyes speak, ing thread, which the viewer wants to see especially Domenico's; but the voices say little, unravelled, in II Posto it is something like and then guardedly.... "Will he be able to stand it?" Domenico is Actually, however, this is another aspect of extremely touching in his shyness, his softness, the spare stylistic tone of the film as a wvhole. what the girl calls his oldfashioned air, his "This is all there is," is Olmi's basic position: plaintive hopes for a quiet doomed existence these young people searching for jobs they will (or for love). soon despise, wandering amid impersonal sky- II Posto rests, then, squarely upon the scrapers, stores jammed with expensive goods, shoulders of the boy. In this stripped-down, inscrutable bureaucratic tyrannies. The only meticulous. style, this Chayevskyism deroman- thing worth any serious attention is the occa- ticized, if we do not like him and sympathize sional solitary person. It is because his stylistic with him the film will be merely an ordeal, tone matches so well his concern for lonely rather than the ordeal artistically ordered people-isolated, blocked from gratifying ac- which Olmi intended. Olmi has been lucky in tion of any kind-that Olmi is a first-class film- his protagonist, for Sandro Panzieri plays maker. Like Antonioni, he is an artist of the Domenico faultlessly in a somber minor key. last-ditch stand being waged, in all the indus- He is helped, however, by the general style of trialized cities of the world, against the civili- the film, which is such as to reawaken a level zation we have created.-ERNESTCALLENBACH of curiosity not usually touched by ordinary films. Olmi includes a lot of documentary material: long-lens street footage, a careful record of the job physical exam, cafeteria eating scenes in which food is a revolting animal THISSPORTING LIFE necessity. There are also the strange passages showing the awful cramped lives of the other Director: Lindsay Anderson. Producer: Karel Reisz. Screen- clerks, which Olmi inserts in the film play by David Storey, based on his novel. Photography: midway Denys Coop. Music: Roberto Gerhard. Continental. to make perfectly clear what it is that Domen- ico is really headed for. (These are followed by American and European critics have become an excruciating pan shot going entirely around used to the pleasures of looking down their the room where the clerks sit all day.) Though noses at the British cinema: poor Tony Rich- Olmi is a poet, he is not a romantic; hence he ardson trying to be cinematic (when he is only is able to integrate his "found" material per- a consummate director of actors), or poor fectly with his story (such as it is) without the David Lean (enshrining Lawrence in a cellu- discomfiting slight shifts in tone that character- loid pyramid), or poor Carol Reed ("where is ized Cleo front 5 to 7. This gives us a kind of Carol Reed?"). Anderson openly challenged confidence in the reality of the film we do not this national fall from grace in an attempt to 46 = : FILMREVIEWS make a film that was as lively and innovative excursions to a dance, a pub, a tony restaurant, as the New Wave. So he was practically bound a mansion, a stadium, etc.-hardly the stuff of to be knocked by all those committed against which a Saturday Night and Sunday Morning "commitment," and convinced that no British is made. Machin has a brief dream flash of his director, and especially no leftwing British work as a miner; on the reality levels occupied director, could possibly know anything about by most of the film, his only "work"is playing art. rugby. Our efforts to secure a definitive early As a corollary to this, it is not a portrait of review of this film were unsuccessful. Much has The Worker as Epic Hero. Inevitably, a certain by now been written about it, and a regular amount of British comment dealt with this review hardly seems necessary. But some of class problem: whether Machin was "inflated" the circumstances of its reception and what I to epic proportions, whether this was a Bad take to be misunderstandings of it still deserve Thing, etc., etc. Now Machin in the film is a comment. Partisan reactions to Sporting Life man whose distinction from other men, in his were of course predictable, because of Ander- objective life, arises only from his physical skill son's role in the Sequence generation, the com- and lack of scruples on the playing field. From mitment debate, and the program of "Free a working-class perspective this makes him a Cinema." The release of the film caused a "sport" in the scientific sense: and it is this certain amount of consternation, however, be- feeling which makes him wary of the abandon- cause it was far from the social moralizing ment of his former job. More conclusively, the most people expected of Anderson. Relieved, dialogue passages in which the players are Peter Baker of Films & Filming roundly de- likened to great apes, or proxy "heroes,"makes clared that if it was not successful "there is no serious argument on this point ludicrous; the hope for British cinema." Movie came out film's perspective is far more complex than the "AGAINST Sporting Life," interpreting it as terms in which it has been discussed. an aborted tragedy in which Frank Machin is Nor is Sporting Life a tract against the supposed to be "noble" or "heroic" and worry- corrupt upper classes. In this as in much else, ing because he isn't. And even in quarters the film simply takes Machin's viewpoint: the sympathetic or neutral to Anderson there has Weavers and their associates are brute facts of been a curious inability to take the film simply life, inscrutable in their business dealings as what it is. (Machin does not really know if he has much To briefly clear away some misconceptions is chance of getting his thousand pounds), baff- thus the first order of business; knowing what ling in their switching of roles (he is taken the film is not, we may then perhaps see what aback by Mrs. Weaver's advances, and sur- it is. prised to discover the reversal in the club ownership feuds). The attitude of the film It is not hard to follow, for one thing. Its toward the Weavers is that which Machin flashback structure is strongly introduced might express if you asked him what he through the anesthesia scene, and though it thought of them. thereafter becomes more briskly fluid, it never Nor is the film a private entertainment for departs from a perspicuous associative line, homosexuals. It is hardly news that there are and indeed for the most part the fundamental homosexual components in the horseplay of line of the film is chronological. athletes, or in the relations between elderly It is not a study of North England working- men and young men they are in positions to class life. Machin rants about the life on Mrs. promote. Anderson has not shirked these as- Hammond's street once, but we actually see pects of his subject; neither has he, as has been almost nothing of it. What we do see is the hinted in some quarters, drooled over them. closed world of the Hammond household, with What does this leave us with, then? FILMREVIEWS " 47

I maintain that This Sporting Life is a verbal struggles have the dismal and frustrated portrait of a miserable neurotic impasse, from tone of the neurotic relationship-and so well approximately (though not rigorously) Machin's have Anderson, Richard Harris, and Rachel point of view. More precisely, it might be Roberts caught this that the film will probably subtitled what the National Film Board called someday be used in psychology classes. one of its shorts: The Feeling of Rejection. I find it curious that the feelings of a man I do not mean that it has no social implications whose demands upon a woman are refused, at all; the most trivial film has some; but in and whose life is thereby destroyed, also the manner of the contemporary cinema, what formed the central concern of II Grido. In one may conclude about the society surround- Antonioni's film the rejection arises, inscruta- ing the central figures is incidental to the bly, just from the changing of sentiments with main concerns of the film. What Anderson time; in Anderson's we surmise it is from some spends his time on is a minute delineation of fairly complex psychopathology, but we cannot Machin's state of mind. be sure. After all, perhaps Mr. Hammond died He does this, however, using a visible a purely accidental death, and Weaver's hint surface tone which, within the flashback was subtly malicious; perhaps it is simply the framework, is almost entirely flat realism, with ferocity of Machin's lunges toward her which no other distancing devices such as the narra- casue her recoil. In this, as in much else, tor in Jules and Jim or the part-titles in Vivre Anderson has left the film richly ambiguous. Sa Vie. Moreover, he leads the viewer astray We do not really know, for instance, whether by lax construction in occasionally deviating the turnabout among the owners is because from what Machin sees, knows, or feels; and Weaver has found out about Frank's session some people have clearly seen the film as an with Mrs. Weaver-or, if it is, whether it is omniscient third-person narration, despite the because he believes she succeeded or because flashback structure with its abrupt switches, he knows she failed. (His role in the club may and despite other obvious difficulties. have been partly the procuring of players for For instance, if the film were an omniscient her purposes as well as his own.) Nor do we narration of the usual sort, it would include know precisely how peculiar is the relation many more facts than we get. Mrs. Ham- between Frank and the old man. Probably mond's curious history would be explained in Mrs. Hammond's outburst against the latter is plain terms, and the reasons for the demands some kind of tic; on the other hand, why did Frank makes on her would be spelled out. Frank go to the old man's rooming house when (This would, of course, make it an entirely he left the Hammond house? different sort of film, with a different emotional focus and different kinds of "action.") In fact, Taking some such approach, the stylistic we see Mrs. Hammond almost exclusively questions raised by Movie can be seen in a through Machin's eyes. Within this limitation sensible light. Anderson keeps us close-up to we see her clear, but we do not see her whole. Machin, "forces Machin upon us" in Movie's This is most obvious, perhaps, in the handling terms; we have no apparently objective, spa- of the children. The film shows Frank playing cious world in which to take his measure, as with them in a sibling way or bringing them we would seem to in a film using a third- gifts in an avuncular way; it never shows us person structure; Sporting Life is not ironic, as Mrs. Hammond dealing with them in a moth- such a film would have to be. The estimate of erly way-evidently because this is not some- Machin which Anderson permits us is "merely" thing Frank really perceives. Frank, indeed, like the estimates we form of ourselves in seeks mothering himself: he tries endlessly to difficult emotional situations: tentative, with persuade her that he needs her. Since this is awful gaps, capable of sudden reverses or precisely what frightens her the most, their surprises. This is a different emotional end- 48 FILMREVIEWS

point than is sought by films of the kind Movie ished and distracted. Mrs. Hammond is evi- writers chiefly like; and in this case Ian dently dying, and Machin is in anguish: how Cameron felt, wrongly, that he was being the hell did that spider get in there? Machin's asked to "admire" Machin since the film led crushing of it is as risible as the wildly unmed- him to unwillingly "identify" with him. But a ical spurt of blood from Mrs. Hammond's film is not better or worse for having such an mouth. Anderson does recover himself immedi- objective rather than another. ately afterward; and the last scene, when The flaws in the work arise when Anderson Machin hangs-like the ape she has called departs, in either of two directions, from his him-from the doorway, and then falls to the central strategy. In the restaurant scene, which floor and curls up like a baby, would have has been widely and rightly criticized, he carried the ending with far more power sans makes Machin unbearably boorish. The result spider. The error here was to enter too far is that the film is in effect asking us to excuse "into" Machin-expecting to invest the spider on him, some hypothetical shared distaste for with a certain subjective horror. This may middleclass stuffiness. This scene, in other work for a few viewers; but for most it remains flows words, too far into the objective world of just a nasty-looking spider and a silly digres- public behavior, manners, politics, etc. (The sion. By contrast, be it noted, the use made of dance scene has similar tendencies, though not Machin's teeth being smashed is discreet and pushed so far.) On the other hand is the kind powerful; teeth are, in the dream-interpreta- of mistake involved with the spider of the tion game, one of the few invariant genital ending. Though this may not be derivative of symbols. Bergman (the spider is a well-established mul- This Sporting Life is not the best of the ticultural death symbol, after all) its appear- recent British films. Its moments of uncer- ance is so startlingly off-key that we are aston- tainty, which might almost be called melodramatic, rank it below both the imposing Room Mrs. Hammond and Frank: the neurotic impasse. at the Top and the solid Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, though of course the latter were less ambitious stylistically and hence less likely to entail serious lapses. But This Sport- ing Life will in due time be seen, I believe, as the first British breakthrough into the subjective cinema, the cinema which escapes the usual narrative conventions, since Humphrey Jennings. -ERNEST CALLENBACH

IN THEFRENCH STYLE

Director: Robert Parrish. Producer and scriptwriter: Irwin Show. (Based on his stories "In the French Style" and "A Year to Learn the Language.") Photography: Michel Kelber. Music: Joseph Kosma. Columbia. Dawn. At the Paris airport two lonely figures stand in bold silhouette against the intrusion of a new day. In the distance, the whine of jet 48 FILMREVIEWS

IN THEFRENCH STYLE

planes preparing for departure. In the fore- sentient beings they remain unfulfilled; Shaw's ground, a protruding stairway bisects the oth- hand always hovers in the background careful- erwise empty frame, creating an atmosphere ly manipulating his players in controlled and of desolation and solitude. The camera begins contrived environments. For "Book-of-the a slow crane upwards, ending in a high, ob- Month Club" readers, however, his especial lique angle. An extreme close-up follows of appeal lies in his ability to embellish his crea- journalist Walter Beddoes (Stanley Baker), tions with slickness and sentimentality, blithe- who is speaking to Christina James (Jean ly presented as social awareness and human Seberg). "I've gone every place I was sent, understanding. without hesitation, without regret," he tells It is not surprising then, to find In the Christina. "I've never let anything stand in my French Style adhering to the precepts of way. Not fear, or weariness, or possessions. Or Shaw's thematic canon, which thus illuminates love. It's my life, my value. It's what I live its basic weakness: his characters, with the by." His words reflect the internal struggle exception of Walter Beddoes, are two-dimen- confronting Christina James: the absence of sional; they lack motivation and awareness. any moral values, an absence which catalyzes Incidents seem contrived, episodic, and artifi- her everpresent feelings of emptiness and alie- cial. Within the broad spectrum of cinematic nation. The scene is also crucial in that it plasticity, Shaw's little excursion is anemic, a begins a crisis in Christina's way of life. For tale told a thousand different times in a thou- when Beddoes leaves on his assignment to Al- sand different ways, possessing neither sound geria, she will enter an intense period of self- nor fury. Robert Parrish's direction is bland critical evaluation, emerging only when she and pedestrian, a sanctimonious display of realizes that for four years she has been living pap and fodder. It is incongruous, then, to say in Paris without direction or meaning, living that In the French Style is solid and vital like an emotional transient. Her newly ac- testimony about contemporary society. Yet this quired awareness gives her the strength to is what Irwin Shaw has achieved in spite of leave Paris, her lover, and return to America his intention. to engaged a mild-mannered, colloquial doc- Christina James, a young, romantic exile determined to tor, live a sedate life in San and would-be painter, spends four years in Francisco. The scene is short, yet it sets the Paris bent on self-expression, independence, tone: Shaw is out to depict an American re- and love. She is a girl who, she says, suffers to the sponse moral ambiguity of our times. the pangs of "being more in love with people than they are with me. .. ." Aptly described In the French Style is Irwin Shaw's first in the short story from which the film derives film as writer-producer, and marks the first its title, she is breathtakingly but a time beautiful, (he gleefully admits) that he has been "girl of whom your grandmother was not like- able to exercise complete control over what he Iv to approve, but she was ... an ornament to has written. He has been an articulate voice the wandering and troubled years of the sec- on the scene contemporary for more than ond half of the twentieth century." The film twenty years. He is a prolific writer, not a emerges through the personality of Christina, great one; he endures because he is a kind of Parrish insisting the camera assiduously follow sociological touchstone, mirroring particular every move, adoring every action, needs and emotions reaction, of the times. His charac- and eventually, her isolation. Her first bitter- ters are a pithy, selfish, disenchanted group of sweet experience in love with men and Guy (Philippe women incapacitated in life because Forquet) is abruptly punctured when she they lack any set of values. stringent But as finds him to be three years younger than she; = FILMREVIEWS

enough perspective and strength to flee from what she now knows to be a destructive pattern. It is by her decision to leave, however, that Shaw is able to complete his little literary for- mula. Christina has taken the first step toward salvation; it does not matter that she will marry a man she does not love, whom she has known only six weeks. For Shaw her commitment to change her way of life suffices to re- solve the problem: she will leave Paris, she will marry Haislip, she will learn to love him, Jean Seberg and Stanley Baker. and thus find the love she has sought so desperately. he has tried to woo her only to impress his Shaw indicates her character change by friends. Her faith shaken, she attempts to having Christina alter her habits and physical avoid emotional involvements by donning the appearance: instead of ordering scotch, hot mask of indifference, and, in the French style tea; her style of dress is subdued, her hair (so she thinks), cynically comes to consider color has returned to its natural shade. love an illusion. Yet she never relinquishes her Throughout the film he has carefully tried to need to love, and actually revels in her de- accentuate the fact that Christina has been pendent independency. Bill (Jack Hedley) the one who has loved, who has given herself dallies with her, then throws her over for "his in relationships which fail only because her Greek girl." And Beddoes, her last and most feelings are not reciprocated. Yet despite intense "amour," finds that he is forced to Shaw's efforts, the d6nouement somehow choose between love or denigrating his moral seems blurred, like a photograph slightly out standards, and idealistically remains true to of focus. We suddenly realize that this his own ethic. effect-which is the key to the film as a When Beddoes returns from Algeria he whole-is generated by the fact that what finds that Christina has decided to marry Doc- Christina James says she will do is exactly the tor Haislip (James Leo Herlihy-author of All opposite of what Jean Seberg projects Chris- Fall Down, who should stick to writing and tina James will do. not indulge in acting) because, as she says: Shaw's intent in this film hinges on Chris- "I'm tired of airports and I'm tired of seeing tina being able to love; but Seberg nullifies people off. I'm tired of not being allowed to the script point by her acting. She neither cry until the plane leaves the ground. I'm communicates love, nor embodies it. As an ac- tired of being handed around the group. I'm tress she does not have the conviction or tired of being more in love with people than depth which imbues a characterization with they are with me. .. ." Despite her decision, urgency, meaning, sincerity. Her marvellously she is still torn between her attachment to contemporary vacancy is anchored in not be- Beddoes and her desire to end a way of life. ing able to respond to situation or character; "Would you leave him now and run away she neither listens to dialogue nor does she with me?" Beddoes asks her. "Yes," she re- react to it. It is not that she does not commu- plies, "but I can't. I want to be loved for nicate with the audience-she can, and magni- once, and he loves me." And so, after many ficently (if perhaps unintentionally) as empty affairs, she has been able to glean Breathless proves; but what she communicates FILMREVIEWS : :51 is that she has nothing to say, or nothing to embodiment of what Lionel Trilling appropri- give. And this seeming paradox is her particu- ately terms "the morality of inertia." The in- lar attraction, beginning with her performance eluctable evidence of the film--leads to one as Patricia in Breathless. conclusion: her life will remain empty, unful- It might well be argued that Christina de- filled, without direction or meaning, no matter rives from Patricia. Patricia, like Christina, what resolutions she may make. Her character comes to Paris ostensibly to get an education in San Francisco will remain her character. in Living, perhaps become a reporter, and lose The final irony is rich: "I became a produ- her ingrained midwestern scruples about mak- cer," says Shaw, "to protect what I had writing love. And, like Christina, her moral con- ten."-SYDNEY FIELD sciousness is neither strong enough, nor sufficiently defined to sustain her; she remains emotionally complacent and immobile, forti- fied only by her myopic ego. Both characters LADYWITH THE DOG imply that life is nothing more than conven- a sandwich in Director: Josef Heifetz. Photography: A. Moskvin and D. ience, wrapped cellophane lay- Meishlev. Score: N. Simonyan. With lya Savvina and Alexei ers of experience. When Patricia is faced with Batalov. Artkino. a crucial moral decision, whether or not to A film uses its medium when its form turn Michel over to the police, she proves fully what another medium can never unable to cope with herself and her predica- accomplishes achieve. with the is such a a ment. After she betrays him, she cannot com- Lady Dog film, rare work of art which makes a prehend his bitter and just pronouncement haunting study of nostalgia. Although the film was made in upon her as a human being: "Tu es degueu- in 1959, it recreates faithfully the late-nineteenth- lasse," he cries outrage. In Five Day Lover milieu Chekhov carries this same when she century originally envisaged. Seberg banner; Nostalgia is a feeling-state redolent rushes into her lover's arms it never occurs to peculiarly of the nineteenth century-a form of Sehn- her that she should her behavior. question sucht, a yearning to recapture something Whether these roles reflect Jean Seberg as a which has somehow irrevocably been lost. or person, simply reflect her professional style Chekhov is the master of nostalgia; he con- is an intriguing but irrelevant question. But juries it up in his plays and short stories with a one wonders what might have happened if turn of a phrase, the slightest allusion; he Patricia had returned to America as Christina evokes it instinctively in his distracted, melan- does: is In the French Style an attempted choly people. "answer"to Breathless? Lady with the Dog (DAMA C COBACHKOI), Jean Seberg has inadvertently invested Chris- written in 1899,0 is a tale told with classic tina James with an abysmal emptiness com- simplicity. It is an unfulfilled love story of a parable to that of Valentina in Antonioni's La man and woman (already married) who meet Notte. Both are victims of a time where com- by chance, fall in love, and cannot liberate munication, on all levels, has broken down; themselves to make a life together. They steal both experience the anguish and frustration time to meet furtively and struggle against the born of need to touch, to feel, to love. Valen- inevitable futility of their relationship. It is a tina is aware of her isolation, but is powerless story of three cities: they meet at Yalta, a to take any meaningful action to overcome it. Crimean resort town; Dimitri Dimitrich Gom- Christina will always remain outside the spin- ov sees a lady with a little dog pass by. They ning wheel of human contact, condemned by *It is hard to locate in Chekhov collections, but the her own lack of perception. Christina is the Everyman Plays and Stories of Anton Tchekov has it. FILMREVIEWS : :51 is that she has nothing to say, or nothing to embodiment of what Lionel Trilling appropri- give. And this seeming paradox is her particu- ately terms "the morality of inertia." The in- lar attraction, beginning with her performance eluctable evidence of the film--leads to one as Patricia in Breathless. conclusion: her life will remain empty, unful- It might well be argued that Christina de- filled, without direction or meaning, no matter rives from Patricia. Patricia, like Christina, what resolutions she may make. Her character comes to Paris ostensibly to get an education in San Francisco will remain her character. in Living, perhaps become a reporter, and lose The final irony is rich: "I became a produ- her ingrained midwestern scruples about mak- cer," says Shaw, "to protect what I had writing love. And, like Christina, her moral con- ten."-SYDNEY FIELD sciousness is neither strong enough, nor sufficiently defined to sustain her; she remains emotionally complacent and immobile, forti- fied only by her myopic ego. Both characters LADYWITH THE DOG imply that life is nothing more than conven- a sandwich in Director: Josef Heifetz. Photography: A. Moskvin and D. ience, wrapped cellophane lay- Meishlev. Score: N. Simonyan. With lya Savvina and Alexei ers of experience. When Patricia is faced with Batalov. Artkino. a crucial moral decision, whether or not to A film uses its medium when its form turn Michel over to the police, she proves fully what another medium can never unable to cope with herself and her predica- accomplishes achieve. with the is such a a ment. After she betrays him, she cannot com- Lady Dog film, rare work of art which makes a prehend his bitter and just pronouncement haunting study of nostalgia. Although the film was made in upon her as a human being: "Tu es degueu- in 1959, it recreates faithfully the late-nineteenth- lasse," he cries outrage. In Five Day Lover milieu Chekhov carries this same when she century originally envisaged. Seberg banner; Nostalgia is a feeling-state redolent rushes into her lover's arms it never occurs to peculiarly of the nineteenth century-a form of Sehn- her that she should her behavior. question sucht, a yearning to recapture something Whether these roles reflect Jean Seberg as a which has somehow irrevocably been lost. or person, simply reflect her professional style Chekhov is the master of nostalgia; he con- is an intriguing but irrelevant question. But juries it up in his plays and short stories with a one wonders what might have happened if turn of a phrase, the slightest allusion; he Patricia had returned to America as Christina evokes it instinctively in his distracted, melan- does: is In the French Style an attempted choly people. "answer"to Breathless? Lady with the Dog (DAMA C COBACHKOI), Jean Seberg has inadvertently invested Chris- written in 1899,0 is a tale told with classic tina James with an abysmal emptiness com- simplicity. It is an unfulfilled love story of a parable to that of Valentina in Antonioni's La man and woman (already married) who meet Notte. Both are victims of a time where com- by chance, fall in love, and cannot liberate munication, on all levels, has broken down; themselves to make a life together. They steal both experience the anguish and frustration time to meet furtively and struggle against the born of need to touch, to feel, to love. Valen- inevitable futility of their relationship. It is a tina is aware of her isolation, but is powerless story of three cities: they meet at Yalta, a to take any meaningful action to overcome it. Crimean resort town; Dimitri Dimitrich Gom- Christina will always remain outside the spin- ov sees a lady with a little dog pass by. They ning wheel of human contact, condemned by *It is hard to locate in Chekhov collections, but the her own lack of perception. Christina is the Everyman Plays and Stories of Anton Tchekov has it. FILMREVIEWS

The film encompasses the story in two hours without adding any events and keeping the dialogue down to a bare minimum. The camera accomplishes the subtle progressions in the story and the development is mirroredespecial- ly in the close-ups of the characters as they react to each other; the camera lingers patient- ly on all the faces, taking the time to register their varying and vacillating emotions. A lush nineteenth-century rhapsodic musical background helps to create the mood and nourish the slowly building nostalgic tension. is so slow that it Ya Savina and Alexei Batalov. The pace of the film succeeds in creating that same timelessness in the films of Kurosawa returns to which is to be found have an affair. Anna Sergueyevna not that Dimitri Di- and Ingmar Bergman. (It is surprising her husband in the provinces; one of the films of all children in Bergman called it great mitrich goes back to his wife and take on this is a woman with intellectual time.) The simplest moments Moscow. His wife as the camera pauses to cap- a comic Her haunting quality and musical pretensions, portrait. ture an essence. Dimitri walks in the cold an obsequious husband is a municipal servant, winter snow with his daughter and tries to portrait. Dimitri gentleman, an equally comic his as she chatters gaily but her to her forget preoccupations tries to forget Anna pursues on. Dimitri sits in his club and tries to interest when he cannot forget her. He native village in his friends' card games and in- her and her husband to the himself dares to follow cessant meaningless conversation. His wife theater and speaks to her during the intermis- at a goes into ecstasies over his piano playing sion. She is frightend but he soon convinces meet musical soiree; he can only think of his beloved her to continue the relationship. They while he Dimitri and Anna sit time. The He Anna plays. furtively from time to years pass. a sunset and wonder about their of his They are overwhelmed watching is conscious age. lives. At last they alternately sit and stand the of their love with futility ... uncomfortably in the hotel room they share have together whenever they meet and have the "Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You cried to we can't find conversation quoted above in which they try enough ... Now let us talk and see if dilemma. We do not out." Then they talked it all over, and reach an answer to their some way look in at them tried to discover some means of avoiding the neces- hear this conversation. We torment above sity for concealment and deception, and the through the window of their room, high each as of living in different towns, and of not seeing the street. We watch their anguished faces other for a long time. How could they shake off these one or the other stares out. Then Dimitri leaves intolerable fetters? "How? How?" he asked, holding and walks down into the street. He pauses for his head in his hands. "How?" And it seemed that in to look at her hotel window, there a moment high up a little while the solution would be found and music and he walks off into the and to both of them the soars, would begin a lovely new life; She stands there, her face at the win- the end was still very far off, and night. it was clear that Their nostalgia an impossible that their hardest and most difficult period was only dow, in pain. for underscored by the almost too strident just beginning." love is violins. The film ends as the story does, at a the resolution. We, the This tenuous and tale is recount- crisis point, before passionate in our hearts what the ending ed with Chekhov's characteristic brevity. It spectators, know be. takes barely more than fifteen pages. must eventually FILMREVIEWS = =53

That such a film could have come from the which was so greatly praised when it was seen Soviet Union in 1959 is a singular mystery. here in 1954. Yet Mizoguchi had a long film Josef Heifetz, the director, has until now not career, from about 1922 until his death in been known for any major cinematic efforts. 1956, making some eighty-odd films, and There is not a trace of socialist realism in the those who know his work place him with film. It is pure late-nineteenth-century roman- Kurosawa at the very height of the Japanese ticism, finely tempered by the ironic subtlety of cinema. On the basis of Ugetsu and now San- Chekhov. The film was received with apathy sho Dayu, I think we will come to agree with in then won a Cannes festival Russia, prize. this estimate. There surely are other Because of the lavished it Mizo- praise upon abroad, guchi films well worth discovery by distribu- its director was evidently almost disgraced: he tors here. Sansho Dayu has been obtained by had produced an unacceptable a anomaly, a distibutor and is to appear in theaters this nonpolitical masterwork. Chekhov's magic year. It is also available to film societies in simplicity had somehow been distilled into this areas where theatrical are quiet film. Alexei Batalov, a dignified actor showings unlikely. Sansho is a set in with great sensitivity and humor, was made up Dayu Japanese legend the to look like Chekhov himself. This added to Heian period, 11th century, constructed by the feeling that the story was probably highly Mizoguchi into a visible poem of timeless autobiographical. beauty and interpreted with the humanism for which The strength of the film is in its lingering he was noted. Mizoguchi discards the romanticism camera work, the deliberate intensity with and heroics which are usually as- which it focuses on the feeling states of Dimitri sociated with the period film. There is no and Anna. We are reminded of Gloria Swan- grandiose sword-play. A brother and sister of son's statement in Sunset Boulevard about the noble blood are sold into slavery under the superiority of the silent films over talkies: "In tyrant Sansho. The horrors of this life tend to those days we had faces!" Josef Heifetz has brutalize the young man. In keeping with trained his camera on the faces of the actors Mizoguchi's favorite theme of woman as spir- and shown us all the unspoken nuances of itual guide, the sister recalls the brother to the their feelings. By the end of the film, the teachings of their father, exiled for his acts of nostalgia is almost unbearable. Heifetz has kindness which are in opposition to the feudal definitively recreated the story and shown us society. The sister sacrifices herself to help her what a story can only barely suggest: the heart- brother escape from bondage, and he is en- breaking image of those who lived it. abled to live to pass on the spark of human -ALEX SZOGYI mercy in a heartless world. Misoguchi's haunting images create an at- in which the film comes SANSHODAYU mosphere perhaps as close as it can come to the pity and terror of the classic Screenplay by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda, based on Greek tragedy. The Japanese cine- the novel by Ogai Mori. Photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa. ma in general emphasizes landscape and phe- Music by Fumio Hayasaka. Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki nomena of nature, found indeed in western Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo, Ichiro Sugai. Brandon Films. cinema, but used by the Japanese as easily understood symbols which are common to the Sansho Dayu, the film which opened the Mu- whole culture. Mizoguchi goes even further seum of Modern Art's section of the recent and uses the enviornment as the chief actor in New York Film Festival, was the revelation of his film. Mizoguchi's extraordinary eye, the Festival. Kenji Mizoguchi is known to trained in youth in an art school, finds just most of us in this country only by his Ugetsu, that setting which will give meaning to the 54: = FILMREVIEWS dramatic scene to be enacted there. He uses a continuing to dread the ancient legend that small number of set-ups, each carefully com- she is descended from an evil race of half- posed and held for a long period of time. He animal creatures, and how their love is trag- is sparing of his close-ups, which helps the ically destroyed by this superstitution and by a spectator to accept the reality of an earlier suave but sinister Englishman who tries to force his unwanted affection the age. The abduction of the children, torn from upon girl. their mother, takes place on the shores of a Val Lewton's production of The Cat People misty body of water, in a beautiful and terrify- proved to be one of the big sleepers, artis- and of the decade. It ing scene. The boat drifting from shore and tically financially, also out of is shown in the made a big impression on a teen-age film sight long shot, holding enthusiast viewer's emotions to the last frame. named Curtis Harrington, who a The scenes unfold one from another like decade later was to write perhaps the first serious of the horror scroll These scenes analysis genre (Holly- paintings. highly charged wood Quarterly, Winter, 1952), in which he are a far cry from the films of our own direc- stressed Lewton's contribution to the which are too psycho- tors of the pictorial style, often logical fantasy-thriller. And now the wheel or merely decorative pretentious. Japan's own comes full circle, as Harrington has strikingly Gate of Hell, with its beautiful color photog- recapitulated the above history with his intri- raphy, has not the power and the richness of guing little feature, Night Tide, in which he Sansho Dayu, photographed in black and succeeds admirably in his stated aim "to do a white by Kazuo Miyagawa, who was respon- film in the Val Lewton tradition." in Rashomon. sible for the camerawork Sansho Not that Night Tide will set the world on of art with Dayu is an oriental work qualities fire (Cat People had its weaknesses and dull of that make it a universality deeply moving spots too, as I discovered on seeing it this year for a western audience. It is re- experience shortly after Night Tide), but Harrington, and it moved from current film-making trends, thanks to imaginative direction, has created even in an older but I represents Japan school, several exciting scenes and moments of there will continue to be a still for superb hope place cinema, and in addition has nice kind of perform- this controlled and precise film-mak- ances, especially from Dennis BOWSER Hopper-whose ing.-EILEEN appealing directness and mannerisms are reminiscent of Montgomery Clift when he was breaking in. Considering that Night Tide was made from the studios and their NIGHTTIDE away control, for "less than $100,000," one expects that future Direction and screenplay: Curtis Harrington. Production: Harrington's pictures will bear as much Aram Kantarian. Distrubution: American-International.Music: watching and study as Lewton's splendid David Raksin. Photography: Vilis Lapenieks. Editing: Jodie thrillers. Copelan. Design: Paul Mathison. It is fascinating to compare the two films In 1942 the literary advisor and assistant of a and note their many similarities-some of famous producer set out on his own to pro- which, I hear from Harrington, were not con- duce a low-budget horror film of a new, artis- sciously intended, but which probably reveal tic type, based on the power of suggestion the depth of Lewton's influence on his early and emphasizing atmosphere and psychology cinematic outlook. The story line (transposed instead of made-up monsters. His film told of from a Serbian cat-legend to a Greek mermaid- a clean-cut young American who falls in love myth) and the stylistic approach (a quiet, with a strange, beautiful brunette from the leisurely pace, concentrating on the characters Balkans, now living in a modern U.S. city but in interesting but realistic surroundings, crea- 54: = FILMREVIEWS dramatic scene to be enacted there. He uses a continuing to dread the ancient legend that small number of set-ups, each carefully com- she is descended from an evil race of half- posed and held for a long period of time. He animal creatures, and how their love is trag- is sparing of his close-ups, which helps the ically destroyed by this superstitution and by a spectator to accept the reality of an earlier suave but sinister Englishman who tries to force his unwanted affection the age. The abduction of the children, torn from upon girl. their mother, takes place on the shores of a Val Lewton's production of The Cat People misty body of water, in a beautiful and terrify- proved to be one of the big sleepers, artis- and of the decade. It ing scene. The boat drifting from shore and tically financially, also out of is shown in the made a big impression on a teen-age film sight long shot, holding enthusiast viewer's emotions to the last frame. named Curtis Harrington, who a The scenes unfold one from another like decade later was to write perhaps the first serious of the horror scroll These scenes analysis genre (Holly- paintings. highly charged wood Quarterly, Winter, 1952), in which he are a far cry from the films of our own direc- stressed Lewton's contribution to the which are too psycho- tors of the pictorial style, often logical fantasy-thriller. And now the wheel or merely decorative pretentious. Japan's own comes full circle, as Harrington has strikingly Gate of Hell, with its beautiful color photog- recapitulated the above history with his intri- raphy, has not the power and the richness of guing little feature, Night Tide, in which he Sansho Dayu, photographed in black and succeeds admirably in his stated aim "to do a white by Kazuo Miyagawa, who was respon- film in the Val Lewton tradition." in Rashomon. sible for the camerawork Sansho Not that Night Tide will set the world on of art with Dayu is an oriental work qualities fire (Cat People had its weaknesses and dull of that make it a universality deeply moving spots too, as I discovered on seeing it this year for a western audience. It is re- experience shortly after Night Tide), but Harrington, and it moved from current film-making trends, thanks to imaginative direction, has created even in an older but I represents Japan school, several exciting scenes and moments of there will continue to be a still for superb hope place cinema, and in addition has nice kind of perform- this controlled and precise film-mak- ances, especially from Dennis BOWSER Hopper-whose ing.-EILEEN appealing directness and mannerisms are reminiscent of Montgomery Clift when he was breaking in. Considering that Night Tide was made from the studios and their NIGHTTIDE away control, for "less than $100,000," one expects that future Direction and screenplay: Curtis Harrington. Production: Harrington's pictures will bear as much Aram Kantarian. Distrubution: American-International.Music: watching and study as Lewton's splendid David Raksin. Photography: Vilis Lapenieks. Editing: Jodie thrillers. Copelan. Design: Paul Mathison. It is fascinating to compare the two films In 1942 the literary advisor and assistant of a and note their many similarities-some of famous producer set out on his own to pro- which, I hear from Harrington, were not con- duce a low-budget horror film of a new, artis- sciously intended, but which probably reveal tic type, based on the power of suggestion the depth of Lewton's influence on his early and emphasizing atmosphere and psychology cinematic outlook. The story line (transposed instead of made-up monsters. His film told of from a Serbian cat-legend to a Greek mermaid- a clean-cut young American who falls in love myth) and the stylistic approach (a quiet, with a strange, beautiful brunette from the leisurely pace, concentrating on the characters Balkans, now living in a modern U.S. city but in interesting but realistic surroundings, crea- FILMREVIEWS : :55

tion of scare effects not on the screen but in contention (in his 1952 article) that "the ter- the viewers' imagination through cinematic ror of waiting for the final revelation, not the techniques such as shock cuts, camera zooms, seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic bits of spooky music, and hints dropped in stimulus toward tension and fright." dialogue) are of course pure Lewton, as are Thus in some respects Harrington improves the central characters. In both pictures we on what he inherits from Lewton, while in find the cursed exotic, girl (the Simone Simon others-the shock cut to the whirling, scream- somewhat role, woodenly played by newcomer ing people on an amusement ride, or the char- Linda Lawson as her sincere Mora), but acter of the charming old fortune teller unimaginative boy-friend (Hopper's "Method" or David Rak- of the sailor the (played by Marjorie Eaton), conception young gives part sin's spooky musical themes ("Tell-Tale real immediacy), the older man who wants to Harp," etc.), the writer-director owes have Mora for himself (Gavin Muir in a role nothing to Lewton, and demonstrates that distantly related to Tom in Cat plenty of Conway's filmic went People), a sympathetic girl-next-door who is independent ingenuity into the of Tide, which has its around to console the hero (a very winning making Night interest performance by Luana Anders), and last but apart from all the connections with its illustri- not least, a strange, eery foreign woman who ous predecessor, and despite structural and appears in a cafe and says something frighten- technical flaws, such as can only be expected ing to the heroine in her native language in any first feature. -STEVENP. HILL (enacted by the lady painter Cameron). Among the many other Cat People touches reflected in Tide are Lewton's beloved Night AMERICA literary quotations (Harrington borrows the AMERICA, last four lines of Poe's "Annabelle Lee" for his Written, produced, and directed by Elia Kazan. Photog- end-title), a dream sequence (Harrington has raphy: Haskell Wexler. Music: Manos Hadjidakis. Warners. two), a phone ringing and then no one at the Like Tony Richardson, Kazan is a director who gets other end of the line, a clever silent opening which leads to powerful performances from his actors, and in the first meeting of the two Brando and James Dean he has worked with two of principals (Night Tide's opening, however, is the most striking postwar talents. Where he has had much richer in atmosphere, having been shot strong scripts also, as in Streetcar Named Desire, the -like much of the film-on location at an under-rated East of Eden, or On the Waterfront, his amusement pier, as compared with Lewton's particular kind of talent has come through extraord- studio zoo). Lewton's famous "bus" effect inarily well; these are films which will last, though (where the audience is given a shock by a none of them is a really great work. Even Kazan's loud noise accompanying the sudden appear- worst films are by no means the filmed plays turned ance of some object) is also utilized on occa- out by lesser men coming from television or the sion by Harrington, as in the scene under the stage; in fact, in avoiding that danger, Kazan tends to fall into a decoratively "cinematic" style in which pier when the heroine's scream suddenly effects are a little too worked attracts our attention to her strong obviously for, just as she is rather than allowed to rise out of the material, out of being swamped by a crashing wave. This the structure of the work itself. In a nutshell, Kazan whole episode incidentally, builds up real ten- is a "pushy" director; his best films have been those sion for several minutes before we know what in which he had a good story and good actors to is happening, with tracks down the hall, shad- push against. ows, echoes, etc., and reveals (as in several In America, America he had total free rein; it is a personal film in sense of the word. And other sequences) more directorial ingenuity every hence I am forced to the unwilling conclusion that Kazan is than its analogue, the swimming pool scene of not a director who gains by producing, writing, and Cat People. It also substantiates Harrington's directing, at least not on material so close to him. FILMREVIEWS : :55

Like Mankiewicz in Barefoot Contessa, or Foreman cence. But why, then, the persistence in a heroic in The Victors, or Kramer in practically anything, tone? Kazan here seems to have needed the harsh disci- With such uncertainties of conception at its heart, pline of the check-and-balance system of filming. This it is no wonder that the film wanders unsurely and method does not allow idiosyncratic masterpieces, lacks balance. Individual episodes are impressive, but and on this count the Hollywood producer certainly have a way of countering each other. The initial deserves the villainous character he has acquired; but sequences of Turkish oppression and Greek family at least it prevents excesses. And most of the troubles life, for instance, constitute an effective opening, with with America, America are excesses. a solidly documentary feel in Haskell Wexler's pho- In a work which swings erratically from epic tography. This generates a certain (perhaps cliche) drama to psychological analysis, Kazan asks an exces- sympathy for Stavros and his mission. The second sive sympathy for his young hero with the "Anatolian episode, that with the con-man, in which he is smile"-Stavros is a stupid, gullible, vacantly ambi- gulled, tricked, robbed, and driven to murder because tious, incompetently cynical youth, whose irrepressi- he can think of no other way to get rid of the guy, ble smile turns out to be a mask rather than a veers off toward inadvertent comedy, and leaves us redeeming naive virtue. (Good luck ultimately saves viewing Stavros as a hopeless incompetent. The Con- Stavros, but his own incorrigible schmuckery causes stantinople episodes similarly add confusion: the almost all his troubles.) Kazan asks us to follow dockside experiences convince us that Stavros is a Stavros' adventures for an excessive three hours: he dolt, the revolutionist episode is so scantily presented sees his father cringe to the Turks, and sees in the that we can make nothing of it, except that it was Armenian massacres the likely fate of the Greeks in another of Stavros' mistakes; and the courtship epi- Turkey; sent off on his redemptive mission to Amer- sode shows that he is a cad without either the cour- ica with all the family wealth, he is robbed succes- age of his ambitions or the unprincipled intelligence sively by one raftsman, one itinerant con-man, one to recognize a good thing when he sees it-in the prostitute; he is shot and left for dead during a form of the girl (who is, as usual in such situations, police attack on a revolutionist meeting; he courts a not bad-looking after all) or of the life of ease, plain wealthy girl to use the dowry for passage mon- money, and security she offers. ey, but can't stick it; finally he gets on shipboard as The playing further accentuates the unevenness. the paid lover of a woman married to a rich Ameri- Stavros speaks in a slight and not unpleasant Greek can; and even then he almost gets sent back to Go, accent. The others speak purest American, and the being saved only by the benevolent suicide of a effect is like that of a badly dubbed foreign film; one tubercular fellow-seeker. keeps wishing there were subtitles instead. Thus We are asked to take an excessive interest in this Kazan's documentary good intentions turn against hardly epic tale, and with progressively less reason. him. Nor is this merely a linguistic problem. Since The grail Stavros seeks perhaps qualifies as epical, the other actors are Americans, they mostly move like being suitably vague and ambiguous: America is at Americans; and this is surely one of the unconscious first a haven from oppression, but Stavros soon thinks factors which lead one to feel, throughout America, of it chiefly as a place where he will be cleansed of America, that one is in the presence of a worthy but all the sins he has committed in order to get there. lamentably irritating enterprise. His ill-starred jousts and reluctant wooing of maidens -ERNEST CALLENBACH might have made a comic epic. But Kazan is being serious: he has drawn us Stavros the idiot hero, apt for all manner of lunacy, while thinking he was making a sentimental gesture toward his ancestors. POINTOF ORDER Director: Indeed, one comes uncomfortably close to feeling Emile de Antonio. Producers: Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot. Editorial consultants: David Bazelon that the film's latent is the real, subject precisely and Richard Rovere. Editor: Robert Duncan. 97 minutes. failures and humiliations which Stavros so largely brings upon himself. Kazan gives these episodes full Writing about a film on a congressional investigating dramatic play, with his accustomed energy. It is, of committee from the San Francisco Bay Area is writ- course, not unknown for minority group members to ing from sanctuary. Here HUAC, on its last incursion have a kind of fixation on traits that cause them outside Washington, met a solid wall of public re- grief; and one may grant Kazan many mixed feelings sentment-which culminated in the City Hall "riot," about his real-life uncle Stavros and his lost inno- provided the material for a notorious film called Op- 4'4 I - -, . A' -; Ii: 0

4*4 40K ?J*

Above: AMERICA, AMERICA [see page 55]. Film Reviews THEEASY LIFE

eration Abolition, gave J. Edgar Hoover occasion to ed in the end to a trial of personalities through say several things that were false, led to a court television. (The nature of this basic contest was di- proceeding which invalidated police reports, and vined most effectively by Welch, who shamelessly generally sowed consternation. The conservative ma- played to the real jury, the TV audience, and won.) yor was reported to have remarked that next time the No political issue was ever illuminated by the hearings, Committee would have to provide its own army; and and there is of course no political significance in the the Committee has not returned. film, which will seem mostly a ludicrous display of However, the investigating committee remains a highly charged personal quibbling to anyone who did fundamental feature of American political life, and not live through those times. McClellan at one this is the importance of Point of Order, which is a point attempted to bring some focus to a major documentary in a sense which has become rare late- political question, the conflict between the Eisen- ly: it is a record, heavily condensed but still a re- hower order and congressional powers; Welch and cord, of a great national disgrace: the so-called Mc- Symington tried to put McCarthy on the spot about Carthy-Army hearings. The film, which is composed his personal privileges of secrecy. (It is perhaps of eight major episodes, has been edited as smoothly needless to add that no unknown subversion was as allowed by the television kinescopes which were revealed.) The real political lesson of the hearings its raw material. That the result is nonetheless a kind was never spoken of. of dramatic form arises from the fact that the hear- Point of Order may seem tame to young people ings were themselves a drama-though a sordid and who have just seen The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. dismaying one. Strangelove, or Seven Days in May. But it is, after It is a drama with no heroes. Even in this brief all, a kind of re-run; and the climate in which the record, and in its own nonpolitical terms, everyone in recent films have been made is to a goodly extent the it has something important to be ashamed of. There aftermath of the hearings. Point of Order, like the is McCarthy himself, with his switchblade smile, the new films, portrays a world in which only a thin note of hysteria in his voice, his arrogance and his veneer of order remains over the cauldron of plots, determination to remain outside the usual political counterplots, corruption, deception, and public hyster- rules; there is McClellan with his asides to his old ia; in which the faceless electorate judges on appar- Senate buddy "Joe"; there is the cunning Boston ent personality rather than ideas or performance, and lawyer, Joseph Welch, bringing out a battery of is shamelessly manipulated by all hands; in which courtroom tricks and at one point contributing a soap- the national life is controlled by irresponsible and opera speech that rivals another dramatic, high-point emotionally unstable men-in short, a political life of of that era, Nixon's tearful cloth-coat speech. There is a deplorably Roman type. The success of these mov- Secretary of the Army Stevens, who may have been a ies testifies that this is hardly an unheard-of view of good golf companion but lacked any other qualifica- things. tion for high office; there is Eisenhower whose late As Point of Order is edited, it is Welch's "Have letter attempted unsuccessfully to protect executive you no sense of decency?" which sets up the coup de personnel from the Committee; there is Roy Cohn, grace administered by Symington. At the end Mc- McCarthy's assistant, a surly intelligence; and, Carthy is heard raving on, as the hearing adjourns though never seen in person, there is David Shine, confusedly around him. Perhaps, by that time, the the fairhaired boy whose Army privileges were, with TV audience too had become bored, and were ready characteristic irrelevance, the immediate issue upon to switch to another channel. (That at least, in these which the hearings turned.-Altogether, a cast which procedureless hearings, is one procedure we need not makes Fidel Castro look like a dignified television cringe to approve.) statesman. It remains to be said that the film bends over In these hearings the political life of a great na- backwards in being fair to McCarthy (his stubbly tion was revealed as a morass of personal vendettas, jowl has been supressed throughout, and little of his hidden influence, irresponsible accusations, and an sinister hysteria appears) and that the technical qual- incredible lack of regular procedure and intellectual ity of the material is astonishingly good considering relevance. (Point of Order is a chillingly ironic the number of electronic and photographic genera- title.) The hearings were, though we only dimly tions behind the 35mm prints. However depressing perceived it as they came over the TV sets, an epic this instance of the TV-record method may be, it is farce melodrama. In the best American tradition of one which clearly will bear much further fruit. government by men, not ideas, the hearings amount- -ERNEST CALLENBACH 58= Entertainments R. M. HODGENS*

All the Way Home is based on a play which was konspiratsia to kill James Bond and his reputation based on James Agee's Death in the Family; but its does not do as well as SPECTRE's plot to steal a remote ancestry barely shows in Alex Segal's film, Lektor and avenge Dr. No. This alteration-brought which looks merely like an ordinary, competent about by Lotte Lenya's defection from SMERSH to adaptation from the stage. The boy is played with SPECTRE-gives the film version an actual and hardly a lapse by Michael Kearny, and occasionally potential continuity which already seems tedious, an (notably in a scene where he is introduced to his ironic complication, more neutral political implica- senile great-grandmother) some of Agee's peculiar tion, and the fantastic air of Dr. No. In short, it is combination of nostalgia and insight comes through. pointless. But the chief defects of the film seem to be For the rest, it is pretty Jean Simmons and handsome the result of its makers' contempt for their material Robert Preston going through tired old play routines: and their audience; thus things keep happening for finding it hard to tell the boy of the mother's preg- "Cstrong sensation" alone and poor Bond (Sean Con- nancy, hearing the news of father's accident on the nery again, of course) keeps mouthing stupidities telephone, learning to live with grief, etc.-E.C. that assert their superiority to the tastes they hope to gratify. Fortunately, the production is slicker this Becket; or, unrequited love. To playwright Jean time, and Terence Young's more careful direction Anouilh and adapter Peter Anhalt, the trouble be- keeps it moving at a pace that overcomes asinine tween Archbishop Becket (Richard Burton) and action and unpleasant tone, creating considerable King Henry (Peter O'Toole) is much less a con- dramatic excitement, and the strong sensations are flict of secular church and diffident state over the editorial, if not musical. Some of the violence, it law than it is a personal misunderstanding. This turns out, is called for, and not much of it displays Becket is a collaborator with the Existential problem excessive ferocity in the manner of recent work by who falls in love with "the honor of God," while Ford, Frankenheimer, and Hitchcock. Henry is a hysterical clown in love with the Arch- bishop. This is Absurd, of course, but even if it were Man's Favorite Sport? is two hours of relaxed (or true it would remain uninteresting. It is unfair be- dull), semi-improvisational (or dull) romantic come- sides, and especially disappointing from a playwright dy from producer-director Howard Hawks. The plot- who had the tact to refrain from claiming that Joan involving fishing expert Rock Hudson, who cannot of Arc was really a boy. Director Peter Glenville's fish, caught up in a tournament-promises some be described style might as repressive; the result is amusement but delivers little, becomes tediously that one can appreciate the ritual, and Burton in the repetitious and for climax turns to irritation-as he role of a man playing a role, but there's little relief wins but disqualifies himself to make up for his from the anachronistic witticism and romance. phoniness, and the snivelling heroine (Paula Pren- tiss) flees to her double sleeping-bag, and what looks Cry of Battle. A callow youth (James MacArthur), like a bright final moment is finally The stranded in the Philippines when the Japanese in- merely silly. acting is also curiously dull; Miss Prentiss vade, becomes a dull "animal's" (Van Heflin's) overplays anxiously, but nobody else does much playing at all. proteg6. Before the inevitable estrangement, they go an awful lot to through illustrate their essential Night Must Fall. The Sagan-Chabrol Landru, fol- differences in love (mostly with Rita Moreno) and lowing brashly in the giant footsteps of Chaplin's Mon- war (as the youth learns to be a soldier, and the sieur Verdoux, at least tried to offer a criminal for man proves to be a bandit). The cast is good, and our time: the murderer as petty businessman. Director Irving Lerner's direction is at least efficient. Karel Reisz and star Albert Finney, reworking a 1937 film based on Emlyn Williams' 1935 play, here From Russia, with Love. The vulgarization of an Ian give us merely an actor's exercise. Rather than elab- Fleming novel can't be easy work, but they've done orating the whispered class theme of original, it again. What made reasonable sense as SMERSH's the they focus on the clinical detail: murder rituals, manipulation of the women, onanistic actions. This gives items *All are by Mr. Hodgens unless followed by a Finney a role full of pyrotechnical demands: twitch- special signature. ings, growlings, orgasms, vomitings. Yet the film ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and ENTERTAINMENTS: :59 founders on the artificiality of the performance-im- attended. Stuart Whitman feigns insanity in order to pressive in its control of explosions, it yet fails to discover where a mad killer (Roddy McDowall) has convince. The film opens with a promise never ful- hidden a load of money. Commitment proves easy filled: Olivia, light as air, wanders the grounds; a and he is soon among rather pleasant company which quick cut discloses Danny in violent action in the includes Prince Mike Romanoff who pops in as guest woods. But the suggested dangerous contest between patient. Whitman's success is threatened by Dr. Ed- them never materializes-the film simply unwinds wina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) who desperately Danny's compulsions. Olivia becomes beside the needs the money because neither the government nor point as interest shifts principally to Danny's erotic the foundations will support her research. She diverts games with Mrs. Bramson (Mona Washbourne). The him by slamming 100 volts through his brain and last portion of the film succeeds only in the well- then injecting her experimental drug to induce cata- managed seduction of the maid in Olivia's room, tonia. All seems lost but soon enough her success through which Danny mocks both women. Finney turns to ashes and Whitman wanders off with the Reisz this But and pace sequence admirably. such lovely young patient (Carol Lynley) whose only intermittent successes film so cannot carry a severely problem was a phobia about being touched. All this undermined by the tone of the central performance should indicate that Shock Treatment could have been and the SMITH script's deficiencies.-JEssE a romp. Unfortunately Sanders has only managed a sporadically amusing, but frequently limp and sag- Paris When it Sizzles. "Unfortunately, Miss Simpson, ging, film. -JESSE SMITH we are not writing a musical," says the desperate screen writer to his (William Holden) admiring To Bed or Not to Bed is Gian Luigi Polidoro's at- He typist (Audrey Hepburn). might have something tempt at a cross-cultural sexual comedy: a bold there. They're writing a desperately trite burlesque of enterprise but far from successful, for the film never a melodrama. The hero comes to our share opinion of comes through to a clear attitude either on the his own what screenwriter Axelrod script; George Italian hero's hellfire-motivated morality or the chilly thinks of his is unclear. Miss Hepburn's mugging can freedom of the Swedish girls he drools over. The film be and so can the undue with pleasant, care which manages a few terse moments where it becomes clear director Richard has handled much of his co- Quine that the universes do not meet: the girls are puzzled producer's script. under his shyly prurient questioning and he is paralyzed by the of female sexual Sunday in New York is a surprisingly pleasant thought independence. It also has a few moments of silli- romantic comedy, relatively speaking, and the mis- charming such as those in the sauna But Polidoro taken identity is actually funny. Director Peter ness, episode. relies too much on a Italian Tewksbury keeps Norman Krasna's neat adaptation of purely travelogue-like so his lacks coherence and it his own play moving fairly well, though Jane Fonda is perspective, film bite; be a titillation to Latins with a bit tense and Rod Taylor a bit phlegmatic. may an open-or-shut view of female virtue, but for anyone to whom Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis' satirical farce about women are not an oppressed class the film never an integrationist preacher of that name (Ossie even begins to explore any interesting questions. In- Davis), is interesting as propaganda and confusion, deed its tone verges on voyeuristic bad taste, like an but rather slight as theater and nothing at all as film. American film about the "South Seas." (It bears an- Davis' preaching (as actor, in the big set-speech he other resemblance in that, despite its constant harp- wrote for himself) is still something to hear. Nicholas ing on sex, neither the hero nor anybody else actual- Webster produced and directed. ly gets laid.) The fact seems to be that every culture has its vision of some other culture with a sexually Shock Treatment. Denis Sanders and Sydney Boehm liberated life, from which untrammeled have pieced a of the joys-and together pastiche Psychiatric unmentionable Film with bones from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor diseases-are thought to snring; but this is an anthropological moral which Polidoro and flesh grafted from anything at hand. The cliches only glimpses fitfully, and his film hence remains a victim and obligatory sequences of this genre wink by: the of the envies of which a better film would take a murder with garden shears, the absurd psychiatric thoroughly sardonic view. -E.C. testimony in court, the hospital dance, the patient in treatment, the sexual assault on the sane by the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sophia Loren insane, the snap-in-the-head turning attendant into comes across in this one as the hybrid matriarch and 60 : FILMSCOLARSHIP sex monster who haunts the dreams of little Italian father to the detached and defeated Milanese of the boys and old writers and directors, in this case De second episode. Then in the last and most farcical of Sica, Zavattini, and Moravia. Eduardo de Fillippo the three he becomes a provincial travelling sales- wrote the first and best episode, a mere anecdote in man, florid, gesticulating, swept along by an erotic which Sophia Loren stays pregnant and blooming to energy that is exactly comic. As for Sophia Loren's evade arrest for selling black-market cigarettes, while body, clothes are draped on it to suggest that she is Marcello Mastroianni, her husband, sags into im- a centaur or a statue or perhaps a beautiful horse, potency, a condition that apparently seems funny to making her always the slightly perverse creation of some people. Mastroianni comes across at last as the male fantasy. All three of the episodes are based on magnificent comic actor we began to see in Divorce the failure to achieve coition, and I suggest that a Italian Style. He is able to handle Neapolitan and better title than the present one, which I don't Bolognese dialogue with perfect ease, modulating understand, would be Coitus Interruptus. from the gentle and somewhat bewildered Neapolitan -NEAL OXENHANDLER

Addendum: Canada developments in the Canadian field. These analytical Scholarship entries for periodicals are amalgamated with the Book and Periodical Card Index to assist in In our issue for Winter, 1962, our survey of Amer- preparing ican resources for film scholarship did not take comprehensive bibliographies on any given aspect. of north of the border. Since In recent months the Information Service at the account developments on Canadian and American film people have much to Canadian Film Institute has provided information a current 8mm gain from closer contact, and not only with respect foreign film festivals, censorship case, to the remarkable work of the Canadian National sound and its prospects, history of cinema in many Film we include below a supplementary countries, and details of film schools throughout the Board, world. It has also been a constant source of informa- report. tion for film societies and their program directors. While no Canadian film archive has been estab- CANADIANFILM INSTITUTE lished certain positive steps have been taken. The 1762 Carling Avenue, Ottawa 3, Canada CFI Archives Committee, a voluntary body, is a pro- visional member of Federation Internationale des In 1958 a grant from the Canada Council enabled Archives du Film. It has preserved some 400,000 the Canadian Film Institute to develop its Library feet of early Canadian film, although lack of finances and Information Service. The reference library now has prevented adequate documentation of this ma- consists of 1,000 books on the film, 400 film periodi- terial. Other valuable historical works of film art are cals, of which 183 are current, and files housing available for study purposes through the Canadian approximately 15,000 pamphlets, catalogues of maior Film Institute and the Canadian Federation of Film film distributors in Canada, USA, and Europe, and a Societies. Among CFI's collection of over 7,000 films large collection of classified material on every aspect is a large number of documentaries of historical of film. The documentation work carried out by the importance. The CFFS circulating library includes Library staff involves the compilation of the Film- a number of early silent short and feature films which Title-Index, the Location Index, and the Biographical are available for study by film groups. Index, the cataloguing of books and pamphlets on The most encouraging recent development in the the film and the continuous scanning and indexing of field of archives is "Connaissance du Cinema," a periodicals, and the maintenance of vertical files com- group centered in Montreal, which is planning to posed largely of newspaper clippings, program notes, present a number of film classics gathered from the and reviews. The Film-Title-Index provides detailed world's film archives. It is hoped that "Connaissance information on 30,000 titles (e.g., gives year of produ Cin6ma" will be an additional stimulant to the duction, producer, running time, versions, synopsis, formation of the Canadian Film Archive by 1967, reviews in current literature, awards, etc.). The Canada's Centennial year. Location Index provides a source of prints in both Apart from the Canadian Film Institute, a number 16mm and 35mm in major film libraries in Canada. of other centers in Canada offer resources for film The Biogranhical Index is a detailed record of direc- scholarship. Among these are the libraries at Office tors and film personalities, their films listed with Catholique National des Techniques de Diffusion in dates of production, reviews of their work in the, film Montreal which has a large collection of information literature and supplemented with further references about film, and the College des J6suites in Quebec to vertical file material. The cataloguing and classifi- which incorporates its film collection in the main cation of the books and pamphlets in the Library college library. L'Office Catholique National des parallels the master Film-Title-Index so that scripts, Techniques de Diffusion has a wide range of publi- story source, and biographical works may all be used cations including fiches filmographiques and certain for further reference. Twenty-five periodicals are select bibliographies. indexed currently for film reviews, articles on the Although the National Library of Canada has not film, and biographical reviews. Indexing covers the developed its film information section to any extent whole motion picture industry with special attention to it has a collection of 250,000 stills which was de- 60 : FILMSCOLARSHIP sex monster who haunts the dreams of little Italian father to the detached and defeated Milanese of the boys and old writers and directors, in this case De second episode. Then in the last and most farcical of Sica, Zavattini, and Moravia. Eduardo de Fillippo the three he becomes a provincial travelling sales- wrote the first and best episode, a mere anecdote in man, florid, gesticulating, swept along by an erotic which Sophia Loren stays pregnant and blooming to energy that is exactly comic. As for Sophia Loren's evade arrest for selling black-market cigarettes, while body, clothes are draped on it to suggest that she is Marcello Mastroianni, her husband, sags into im- a centaur or a statue or perhaps a beautiful horse, potency, a condition that apparently seems funny to making her always the slightly perverse creation of some people. Mastroianni comes across at last as the male fantasy. All three of the episodes are based on magnificent comic actor we began to see in Divorce the failure to achieve coition, and I suggest that a Italian Style. He is able to handle Neapolitan and better title than the present one, which I don't Bolognese dialogue with perfect ease, modulating understand, would be Coitus Interruptus. from the gentle and somewhat bewildered Neapolitan -NEAL OXENHANDLER

posited by the Canadian Federation of Film Societies. continuing course in film production. L'Universit6 However, most of these stills have yet to be cata- de Montrbal will offer a course in film history to logued. In addition to these organized information coincide with the "Connaissance du Cinema" screen- centers there are a number of private collections ings over the next year. across Canada whose resources could be made avail- Possibly because few feature films have been pro- able. duced in Canada, and because of the ready avail- Film education in Canada is still in a gestative ability of United States resources, Canadian resources stage. No Canadian university offers credit courses for film scholarship have developed only slowly. How- in film, although a number of university extension ever, the significant contribution of our volunteer departments have offered courses in film history and cineastes and the encouraging development of the appreciation, and in film production. The University organizations described above are evidence of Cana- of British Columbia Extension Department has pre- da's ability to make its own contribution to North sented courses in film history, and, over the last two American resources for film scholarship. - PETER years, courses in film appreciation. It also has a MORRIS AND SHIRLEY WEBB

producer once sent me his Ali Baba and the Books Forty Thieves for possible distribution in the U.S. About seven minutes had been unreeled INDIANFILM when Ali Baba went into a song and dance with a girl friend who had been introduced By Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy. (New York: Columbia into the story. Songs recurred University Press, 1963. $7.50) throughout the film. But even modern stories, of a serious This is not the first book which has attempted sort, routinely contain songs and dances; in to survey the Indian cinema, but it is the first fact, it was not until 1954-23 years after the which might be called post-Ray in its perspec- introduction of sound film in India-that a tive.* Indian Film covers the history of film motion picture in Hindi was produced without production in India from its beginnings, 50 them. (This was Munna, written and pro- years ago, )under British rule. Its portrait of duced by K. A. Abbas; though critically ac- the forces that have molded the Indian film, claimed it was not a box-officesuccess.) and especially of particular difficulties such as Stars have the industry more at their mercy language barriers, a virulent star system, a even than their U.S. counterparts: many stars fragmented and undercapitalized entrepreneu- get half the production budget, and as it is rial class, and an extremely strict censorship, the custom to work on as many as seven films is clear and dismal. The authors have done a at once, they may give a week or two to a film thorough job of research, analysis, and com- and then not be able to resume work on it for ment. To the reader of their book it will now six months. There are instances where a film be plain why one of the world's largest film- has taken three years to produce. producer nations was able to produce only a Americans may not think of India as a par- tiny handful of quality films until recently. ticularly puritanical country, but Indian cen- There are anomalies of surprising strength sorship is among the most stringent in the behind the sorry record of the Indian film. world. The recent head of the Ministry of In- The song-and-dance tradition, which still formation and Broadcasting justified virtually holds directors by the throat, is not just some weird temporary aberration; it back *See, for example, The Indian Film, by Panna Shah goes (Bombay: I. K. Menon for the 2,000 years through the association of Motion Picture Socie- long ty of and The Indian drama with and dance. One can India, 1950) Economic Aspects of the song Film Industry in India, by Rikhab Dass Jain (Delhi: understand this with some films. An Indian Atma Ram & Sons, 1960). BOOKS: :61

unrestricted censorship by arguing that "The man canon, by a fellow Swede who has re- intellectual or educated audience can forgive cently made his first feature film. Its tone is or even appreciate unconventional themes or far from the adulatory one customary in such ideas put on a screen. The same cannot be books; in fact some readers may conclude that said of the bulk of the people. .. ." Small Donner doesn't much like Bergman's films. wonder, then, that most producers stick to Donner is harsh on the bravura aspects of conventional entertainment vehicles that make Bergman's work, and wishes that Bergman money and cause no trouble. was a more directly "social" director. He also Barnouw and Krishnaswamy observe that under-rates the comic side of Bergman's gen- one man, Satyajit Ray, has made the world ius, and hence gives a curiously flat estimate conscious of India's movie industry. They de- of a film like Smiles of a Summer Night. Still, vote a long and appreciative chapter to a bio- in attempting a strictly dispassionate analysis graphical account of Ray and the problems he (he refers to the director throughout simply as had to surmount. Practically everything about "B" and confines all biographical materials to Ray's work was revolutionary for Indian films: an appendix) Donner manages to present a his family's cultural background, his careful reasonably coherent picture of Bergman's de- and conscious self-education in the film cul- velopment from the possessive yet often ture of the world (he helped organize the piqued perspective Swedes have on him. Don- Calcutta Film Society), his reliance on per- ner's elaboration of the Christian and post- sonal finance to begin shooting Pather Pan- Christian questions which have obsessed chali, his success with nonprofessionals in Bergman is thorough, and his stylistic analysis both cast and crew (now developed into one is usually lucid, though brisk. He deals fully of the world's best "stock companies"), his in- and matter-of-factly with influences upon finite pains with every detail, and his steadfast Bergman. There is a large bibliography. De- dedication to art rather than profitability. The spite its chilly tone, this is a useful survey of international success of his films has now giv- Bergman's work to date, and it comes at an en a chance to a number of talented young appropriate time: when he has finished his men in West Bengal to make films that other- trilogy (with The Silence) and will doubtless wise would have found no backers. Ray's suc- embark on new things.-E.C. cess also awakened the interest of commercial producers, in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, in the export market-particularly the United States. Many of these latter imagine that all they have to do is eliminate the songs from THEORIEDER MASSENMEDIEN their pictures in order to score great American coups. But at least Ray has blazed the way, (Theory of the Mass Media) by Erich Feldmann. (Munich and Basle: Reinhardt, 1962. 210 pages. DM and others will learn to follow. And this book, 13.) which might not have been written at this This ambitious book undertakes to define the time but for Ray, will probably hasten the scope and purpose of an autonomous "science" trend.-EDwARDHARRISON (Wissenschaft) of the mass media, especially of film and television; it emphasizes the need THEPERSONAL VISION for a special academic discipline devoted to OFINGMAR BERGMAN the study of the principles and practices of the mass communication media as a branch of By Jorn Donner. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1964. $5.95) "Kulturwissenschaft";it proposes an epistemo- logical and phenomenological examination of This is a comprehensive appraisal of the Berg- the motion picture (and television) as a branch BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. BOOKS: 63 of philosophy. Its author, professor of philos- diverge slightly (not always through omis- ophy and pedagogy at the University of Bonn, sions), still conjure up the originals, and will is a man of vast erudition and ample qualifica- be especially valuable in the case of the little- tions, making it is the more regrettable that the shown II Grido. No camera indications are merit of his book hardly justifies its ambitions given, which is like omitting all punctuation and pretensions. While, by and large, his points or adverbs from a novel; but the only way to are well taken, his arguments sound, his prin- produce visual scripts would be to reconstruct ciples consistent, he does not add anything them from the screen, since Antonioni (like new in either insight or substance. Moreover, most European directors today) does not work the task of penetrating the formidable stylistic from a detailed shot-by-shot script. Full credits obstructions and intellectual conceits requires are given. Well designed and printed by rea- Ltpatience and persistence which are not fully sonably good offset-numerous and apt illus- regarded. For all its laudable intentions, the trations.-E. C. book is more likely to discourage the reader than to enlighten him. To use communications INTERNATIONALFILM GUIDE terminology: there is far too much noise inter- Edited by Peter Cowie. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., fering with the intelligibility of the message. 1964. $1.75. London: Tantivy Press.) notes reveal a marked ab- The bibliographical Though its critical coverage, in an to outside Ger- attempt sence of authoritative writing summarize a whole year's work, is sometimes of and Italian many, especially English, French, so abbreviated as to be hardly worth the film It is hard to account for these theory. trouble, this yearbook contains a large amount omissions in an otherwise carefully documented of information unobtainable elsewhere: sum- AMBERG study.-GEORGE maries of the festivals, an index to magazines, information on new cameras, a directory THECONTEMPORARY CINEMA of European film schools, and a guide to By Penelope Houston. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. bookstores specializing in film books, art thea- $1.25) ters in London, Paris, Germany, and Switzer- An elementary survey which will replace land, and notes on various film studios and other Manvell as a good basic introduction to the enterprises. -E.C. rather it none- film world. Necessarily sketchy, AMERICANCINEMATOGRAPHER MANUAL theless touches most of the important bases; one would now like to see Miss Houston take Compiled and edited by Joseph V. Mascelli. (Published by the American Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North on the task of a higher-level book. This one is Orange Drive, Hollywood 28, Calif.) intelligent, sensible, well organized, and writ- A handily organized and useful ten in that passionless style which takes over enormously guide to cameras, film when an expert tries to write a popular stock, cranes, dollies, and vir- book-leaving out personal prejudices, experi- lights, filters, lenses, sound-recorders, other technical of ences, and softening the vital tually every aspect film- peculiarities, notes on differences of opinion which animate an art making, including high-speed, in- and the criticism thereof.-E.C. frared, underwater, and process photography. PROFESSIONALCINEMATOGRAPHY SCREENPLAYSOF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI By Charles G. Clarke, A.S.C. (Published by the American (II Grido, L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse) With an intro- Society of Cinematographers, 1782 North Orange Drive, duction by Antonioni. (New York: Orion Press, $7.95) Hollywood 28, Calif.) Like all his statements, the introduction by The skill necessary to avoid studio lighting Antonioni is wry, serious, and very personal. techniques successfully involves the same de- The scripts, though the prints we have seen tailed technical knowledge as using them. 64: BOOKS

This vastly informative survey of studio-style Listings will hence be to photography suggestive any We have reluctantly decided to curtail our cameraman or whatever his views on director, book-review coverage to allow more space for lighting style, and can help the beginner save film reviews. Some of the volumes which will his and Includes some time, money, energy. be given brief annotations in the listings be- material on special effects, especially a trans- low are valuable works which could be dis- the parency technique developed by author, cussed at length if space allowed. who now teaches at UCLA. Michelangelo Antonioni. THEART OF THE FILM By Pierre Leprohon. (New York: Simon & By Ernest Lindgren. (New York: Macmillan, 1963. Revised Schuster, 1963. $4.50 cloth, $1.95 paper) and enlarged edition. $7.50) Translation from the "Cinema d'aujourd'hui" Reissue of a methodically reasoned statement series. Leprohon is a terrible sentimentalist, of the aesthetics of film, as practiced roughly and hence far from a good critic of Antonioni, from Griffith to the advent of the widescreen especially on II Grido; he correctly says that style. An added section on film criticism inter- this film is underestimated, but gives it an estingly applies Collingwood's distinctions be- obstinately far-fetched interpretation that flies tween amusement art, art as magic, and art in the face of Antonioni's own statements, as proper to the "commitment" debate. Often well as the evidence of the film. He is not ponderous, and certainly not a brilliant book, very good on L'Avventura or La Notte either, this is nonetheless the best single work for and Ian Cameron's monograph remains a bet- people just getting seriously interested in how ter survey of Antonioni's work. However, the films work. brief quotations from Antonioni and the other materials are informative. A MILLIONAND ONE NIGHTS appended A Historyof the MotionPicture Through 1925 The Story Of "The Misfits." By Terry Ramsaye. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. By James Goode. (New York: Bobbs Merrill, $10.00 cloth, $3.95 paperback) 1963. $5.00) A naive and often embarrassing Ramsaye's genial account of the invention of "popular" account; nonetheless, an interesting the motion picture machinery-which accept- portrayal of the manufacture of a curious moved Edison's own version of events--has been ie. Badly printed, including the Magnum pic- disproved in essential respects by Gordon tures. Hendricks, in The Edison Motion Picture The Technique Of Documentary Film Pro- Myth (University of California Press, 1961- duction. Other well exist in $4.00). shortcomings may W. York: the but in a field where of By Hugh Baddely. (New Hastings work, study origin- House-Focal Press, 1963. In certain al sources is vol- $10.00) scandalously rare, Ramsaye's respects this volume is more than ume remains a and will continue to up-to-date landmark, Spottiswoode's Film and Its no- set the for other and more Techniques: stage painstaking tably in its of sound. The researchers. The edition has been out coverage magnetic original British terminology is a definite drawback, of print for a long time and in recent years however. has brought high prices. This reprint, which reproduces the original (including the pic- Agee On Film: Volume I, Reviews and Com- tures) in a slightly smaller format and in one ments. thick volume, is extremely valuable, making By James Agee. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. this fundamental document in film history Paperback, $2.45) It is excellent to have this once more available to all.-E.C. volume, which contains the largest body of BOOKS= 65 first-rate film reviews ever written in the Unit- Antonioni. ed States-and possibly anywhere else-in an Par Roger Tailleur et P. L. Thirard. (Paris: inexpensive edition. Editions Universitaires, 1963) Agee On Film: Volume II, Five Film Scripts. Le Droit de Regard. By James Agee. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Par Jean Cayrol at Claude Durand. (Paris: Paperback, $2.75) Contents: Foreword by Editions du Seuil, 1963) Philosophical essays John Huston; Noa Noa; The African Queen; exploring various aesthetic issues raised by The Night of the Hunter; The Bride Comes to films, especially shorts. Includes several Yellow Sky; The Blue Hotel. scripts; illustrated. Censorship: Government And Obscenity. Esthdtique et Psychologie du Cindma. Vol. I: By Terrence J. Murphy. (Baltimore: Helicon, Les Structures. 1963. $5.50) This volume, though it bears a Par Jean Mitry. (Paris: Editions Universitaires, Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, and quotes J. 1963) An ambitious attempt to develop a Edgar Hoover with a straight face, does noth- philosophically sophisticated aesthetics. To be ing to elevate the arguments about obscenity reviewed (Vol. II due shortly). laws from the ludicrous level on generally Internationale Film-Bibliographie, 1952-1962. which they are phrased and, with in- though Edited by H. P. Manz. (Zurich: Verlag Hans creasing difficulty and enforced. rarity, Rohr, 1962. No price given) A 260-page bibli- Contemporary Polish Cinematography. ography that will fill about half the gap since (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1962. The Film as Art. Lists books in Western lan- No price given.) A survey by a team of writ- guages, and periodicals; some entries have ers of the history and current situation of the very brief annotations, most have none. Com- Polish film. pletely indexed. The Films Of Greta Garbo. Theatre Books in Print. By A. E. Santaniello. York: Drama Compiled by Michael Conway, Dion McGreg- (New Book or, and Mark Ricci. Introduction Parker Shop, 150 West 52nd Street, 1963) Annotated by of books now Tyler. (New York: Citadel 1963. survey available, including a Press, section Gives and on film books. Useful for libraries, $5.95) credits, synopsis, excerpts drama from critical reactions to each Garbo film. departments, teachers. Las Doce Sillas. By Thomas Gutierrez Alea and Olive. Ugo Classifieds (Habana: I.C.A.I.C., 1963). Since we cannot see Cuban films in this country, a printed Rate: 10c per word, in advance. such as this carries script more than ordinary NEW 1964 CATALOG NOW AVAILABLE. interest. World's largest collection of books and related materials on Luis Bunuel. motion pictures. Send $1.00 to: Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 6658 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood 28, By Ado Kyrou. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Calif. 1963. $4.50 cloth, $1.95 paper). Translation THE FILMS OF BERKELEY. from the "Cinema d'oujourd'hui"series. Kyrou's BUSBY 30-page monograph includes rare interview and historical data on fabu- essay is sometimes woolly, but the script ex- tracts, critical lous Warner Brothers musicals of the 30's together notes, letters, and interviews with index of Berkeley films. Send $2.00 to David also included in the volume are a valuable Martin, 2642,2 McAllister Street, San Francisco compact source of information. 94118