Mr. Klein by Joseph Losey Review By: Royal S
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Review Reviewed Work(s): Mr. Klein by Joseph Losey Review by: Royal S. Brown Source: Cinéaste, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1998), pp. 82-83 Published by: Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41689119 Accessed: 15-04-2020 08:48 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cineaste Publishers, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinéaste This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:48:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Girls a more revealing documentary. Just as York Times writer Howell Raines, author time, he made some of his best films, the "Bull" Connors of the South couldn't Taylor Branch, journalist Walter Cronkite) including The Criminal (1960), The Servant have existed without the George Wallaces, are depicted as fair-minded intellectuals (1963), Accident (1966), and The Go- so Dynamite Bob couldn't have functioned capable of accurately assessing American Between (1972), the last three featuring without support from significant portions race of relations. Lee and Pollard also captured screenplays by British playwright Harold the white community. Many Americans some incredibly ironic moments and images Pinter, with whom Losey tried for years to played a role as passive instrumentalists, on film. In one of the final interviews, Chris make a film based on Marcel Proust's A la persons who never spoke out against white McNair shows his favorite photo of Denise recherche du temps perdu. Shot in 1976, Mr. supremacy or the violence of the Klan. Some to the director. A bright-eyed, young black Klein is the first of three French-language viewers might expect a Spike Lee film girl, to posing proudly with her blonde-haired, films made by Losey in his final decade (he implicate the larger white community in theblue-eyed doll, looks straight into her died in 1984). climate of racial hostility. Lee's focus infather's 4 - and by extension Lee's - camera. Mr. Klein stars Alain Delon, who also Little Girls on institutional versus individual This photo's messages are many. The image coproduced and who played the assassin in racism, is a departure from earlier films of Denise McNair clutching her white doll Losey's 1972 The Assassination of Trotsky, as (School Dazey Do The Right Thing, Jungle symbolizes black America's unrequited rela- a wealthy, French Catholic art dealer named Fever , Malcolm X) which placed greater tionship to mainstream society. It signifies Robert Klein living in Paris during the emphasis on individual conduct rather than the efforts of black Americans, who, despite Second World War. At the beginning of the institutional responsibility. With this, his their cultural assimilation (and acceptance film, he discovers that he has been mistaken first documentary, Lee adopts a diplomatic of mainstream norms), have faced a variety for - and/or has been set up by - a second tone, handling the material with less parti- of rebuffs - segregation, racial violence, and "Mr. Klein" who in all probability is Jewish san fervor and fewer authorial flourishes. institutional racism. and who in fact may be a part of the To its credit, 4 Little Girls emphasizes the The American Dream was ironically one Resistance. Klein immediately takes the truism that America's racial turf war is at the that cost many African Americans their matter to the police, only to find that, rather intersection of race and class tensions. One lives. If America is the land of freedom and than isolating himself from the Jews, he is of Spike Lee's subjects provides a salient opportunity, the journey to freedom from increasingly suspected of being Jewish. example: "When blacks created a new, afflu- slavery, the acquisition of civil rights and the Unable to produce an important family ent neighborhood in the Fifties on the site of quest for socioeconomic inclusion in Ameri- document, and unable to track down the a former Birmingham garbage dump, the ca has, for black Americans, proven a haz- "other" Mr. Klein, who throughout the neighborhood soon became known as ardous road. - Mia L. Mask entire film remains an unseen, Kafkaesque "Dynamite Hill" due to frequent bombings enigma, Robert Klein first loses all of his by jealous whites." In this respect, 4 Little rights as a businessman and then, ulti- Girls recalls themes raised by John Single- mately, in spite of the efforts of his solidly ton's Rosewood (1997), a drama based on aMr. Klein bourgeois, solidly French Catholic lawyer true story about the Klan's 1923 destruction Directed by Joseph Losey; starring Alain (Michel Lonsdale) to get him out of the of a black middle-class enclave in Florida. Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Juliet Berto, Michel country under an assumed name, is shipped With 4 Little Girls, the director again Lonsdale and Suzanne Flon; VHS, color, 124 off to a concentration camp in a boxcar. evinces market savvy for timeliness. Lee has mins. Distributed by First Run Features, 153 Interestingly, Mr. Klein brings together repeatedly culled characters and scenarios Waverly Place, NYC 10014 in a single film the two most important from daily headlines (e.g., Do the Right facets of the Losey vision that manifests Thing , Get on the Bus). 4 Little Girls emerges It is interesting that several people, all of itself in his best films. On the one hand, at the end of the antifeminist, antigay, anti- them knowledgeable in film, to whom there I is the political activist who visited the Affirmative Action Nineties - aka the back- mentioned that I was reviewing a film byU.S.S.R. in the mid-Thirties, worked with lash era. Bombings and civil-rights injustices Joseph Losey, all thought that Losey was Bertolt Brecht, helped create The Living are again making news headlines. Fire British. One friend was totally stunned Newspaperto (sponsored by the WPA), ran a bombings of predominantly black churches learn that the director was born in Wiscon- political cabaret, and launched his film have risen in rural areas and legal wars are sin (in 1909). But, of course, Losey was one career in 1948 with The Boy With Green still being waged over small-town espionage. of the more notable victims of the House Hair y a pacifist allegory with a strong Recently, for example, the Mississippi Sov- Un-American Activities Committee. Black- antixenophobic message reflecting the ereignty Commission - created in 1956, listed by Hollywood in 1952 for failing toAmerican witch hunts that were already defunct since 1977 - which employed agents appear before the committee (the director underway. Losey and Pinter's offbeat and informants to unearth gossip about was in Italy shooting a film and unable todepiction of class struggle in The Servant civil-rights activists and state voter registra- make it back in time), Losey sought exile inremains one of the most savage on film. On tion drives, was finally exposed in 1996 after England, where, after a certain period ofthe other hand, there is the Joseph Losey a twenty-one-year campaign to suppress the who found himself totally at ease with the organization's files was derailed by the linguistic and narrative enigmas of Harold ACLU. In March 1998, one month after 4 Pinter, and who in 1968 made The Cere- Little Girls premiered on cable TV, the Sov- mony , a film so embedded in unexplained ereignty Commission's records were made ritual and in ambiguities, both psychological public at the Archives & History Depart- and narrative, that it borders on the ment. This past July, three white men were experimental, even while starring Elizabeth charged with murder for dragging a black Taylor and Mia Farrow. man to his death on a Jasper, Texas road. In Mr. Klein , Losey, just for starters, And, in August 1998, the murder of Vernon keeps the other Mr. Klein so hidden that the Dahmer - a black merchant killed in 1966 audience can never be sure that this when the Klan firebombed his home in Hat- mysterious figure - or his girlfriend, who tiesburg - made headlines when district parallels Robert Klein's live-in mistress (the attorneys reopened his widow's case. late Juliet Berto) - even exists. In Mr. Kleins 4 Little Girls is a tightly constructed, well- Kafkaesque labyrinth, every hoped-for exit balanced documentary. Several sympathetic opens onto an even gloomier new entrance. white liberals (e.g., attorney Bill Baxley, New Alain Delon stars in Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein. Nor do Losey or screenwriter Franco Solinas 82 CINEASTE This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:48:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ever clarify just what it is that drives Robert created out of bloodlines and nasolabial rationales and interpretations are, however, Klein to obsessively, à la Dostoevsky, pursue spaces. First Run Features offers a reas- it must be said that for the most part the a disastrous route when it is clear that, by onably clean print of the film, marred hereromanticization of the past and the unre- such acts as visiting the other Klein's and there by some swishing noises on strainedthe silliness and low humor on display rundown apartment, he is digging himself soundtrack and some slightly out-of-sync in Amarcord - both undeniably appealing - into a bottomless pit.