Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead by Richard Combs

‘Last acts’ in the cinema can be a precarious business. Not just because film‐makers approaching the end of their careers may be beset by problems of failing health, failing inspiration or failing insurance, but because all the pitfalls of the movie business can make last acts as fragile an undertaking as first acts. Are we justified, then, in thinking that the last film a director makes – or a near‐to‐last film – will necessarily constitute a final statement, a summing up, a gathering together of the artistic experience of a lifetime in one culminating vision?

In many cases, obviously not – last films can be as ad hoc, compromised, and a fortuitous grasping of commercial opportunity as a film made at any other stage of a career. But we persist in hoping that the culminating vision comes through. It’s the superstitious feeling that might gather round what anyone (even a film critic) suspects could be their final act, or a getting‐close‐to‐the‐end act: the hope that it will contain something special and retroactively confer significance and coherence on a lifetime of similar but helplessly scattered acts.

First, an accounting of this terminal accounting. Only nine of the 19 films in our season were actually the last films made by their directors. The other 10 were followed by one, two, or – in the case of D.W. Griffith – something like a dozen films before their makers were done with the movies, or – again in Griffith’s case – the movies were done with them. So in those 10 cases, we’ve made our own selection of what might be culminating works, films in which the thematic and stylistic concerns of a lifetime are carried off with a fullness that (in retrospect) we can see as triumphant. In fact, it might be easier to construct a “culminating vision” case for these films than for the ones that really were their directors’ last works, and which can display a disconcerting interest in striking off in new directions.

1 Among the nine which really are last works, only one seems self‐consciously to present itself as such: Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). This was the third and final instalment of Cocteau’s Orphic Cycle, which had begun with his first film, Le Sang d’un poète (which we are showing on a double bill with the Testament), and which continued with probably his most famous film, Orphée. And the Testament really is a circling back through the maker’s artistic life, revisiting its phantoms and the poetic symbols he had used to explain it, and including both the actors who had embodied them (Jean Marais, Maria Casares) and other fellow spirits, or just friends (Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner).

The satisfying finality of the Testament has led some to suppose that Cocteau was dying when he made it. But he died three years later – reputedly of a heart attack brought on by the news of the death of another friend, Edith Piaf, the same day (a synchronicity which belongs in this film). Did Robert Altman know he was dying when he made A Prairie Home Companion (2006)? Perhaps: he had been very ill, and this film has a lightness and yet an emotional depth which is both death‐defying and accepting, invoking and toying with death throughout. An angel of death in a white trenchcoat wanders among the denizens of the eponymous radio show during its final broadcast, and Altman, like Cocteau, revels in his own poetry. Sisters (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) embody his favourite figure for the mirage of doubleness, and – uncannily – the film is set in the “twin city” of St. Paul/Minneapolis, recalling doubled Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri) where Altman was born.

Of course, death has made a finality of some careers which might have had other places to go. Stanley Kubrick died while completing Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which led to much speculation about whether he even got to the final cut (or sound edit), and what else he might have done (if not A.I., the science‐fiction project he had spent years developing but then wanted Steven Spielberg to direct). In the event, Eyes Wide Shut has overtaken 2001: A Space Odyssey – Kubrick’s riddle machine – to become his inscrutable monument. Modern Manhattan becomes as mysterious and haunted a place as The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, because it is haunted not by ghosts but by the serial selves of desire, looking for a place to feel at home

2 Alfred Hitchcock definitely had another film planned after Family Plot (1976): a thriller based on the escape of the spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs prison. But when health and mortality determined that Family Plot would be his last film, it was an entirely appropriate result. This comedy thriller is a delightful send‐off, featuring two amateur con artists (Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris) crossing paths with two lethally efficient professionals (William Devane, Karen Black). Not least of the film’s pleasures – murder and mayhem combined with a tongue‐ in‐cheek tone – is that it reveals the artificiality of the distinction between British and American Hitchcock still peddled by many commentators.

Of the films that aren’t strictly ‘last’ works, there’s an interesting group that might still be called testament films: these were longstanding or cherished projects, which their makers finally delivered with heroic effort (and usually at great expense), and followed them with only more minor final work. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) was one of a brace (with Kagemusha) of visually spectacular samurai films; Jacques Tati bankrupted himself to put up his own functioning city, a ghostly reflection of Paris, for his hall of mirrors comedy Playtime (1967). We have the restored 162‐minute cut of Samuel Fuller’s loosely episodic but intensely surrealistic war film, The Big Red One (1980), and Billy Wilder’s loving recreation‐cum‐parody, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970; see accompanying essay), sadly not yet restored to include such deleted episodes as “The Curious Case of the Upside‐Down Room”.

And then there is a group of actually final films which go beyond culmination to reveal their makers moving off, startlingly, in new directions. John Ford’s 7 Women (1966) abandons the American West for a 30s‐style melodrama, with rampaging Mongolian bandits and a nearly all‐female cast of threatened missionaries (so new it often takes us back to Ford’s 30s expressionism). Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) is a singularly interior picture of madness – lyrical, melancholic and mysterious (see accompanying essay) – from the director of boxing (Body and Soul) and pool‐hall (The Hustler) classics. And Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) tears up the rule book (and Lumet’s own history in family drama) for the exploits of a modern family unit – a “mom and pop” business and two out‐of‐control brothers – that could only be called dysfunctional if we understand that word in gut‐tearing Jacobean terms.