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VOL. XXIII, No. 1 Fall 1969 Editor's Notebook

ARTICLES AFI GUIDE TO COLLEGEFILM COURSES This booklet initiates an annual Peckinpah's Return STEPHENFARBER 2 survey series, listing institutionswhich offer degrees and also Welles's Chimes at Midnight noting courses given at other institutions,usu- MCBRIDE11 JOSEPH ally in such departmentsas speech, drama,jour- nalism, communications,and occasionally art. REVIEWS The booklet documents the impressive expan- sion in courses (and total of students) over the Midnight Cowboy DAVIDDENBY 20 past several years, and is a convenient source Easy Rider HARRIETR. POLT 22 of basic informationfor prospective students; $1.00 from AFI, 1815 H Street NW, Washing- Teorema ROBERTCHAPPETTA 24 ton 20006. Only film courses visibly named as Le Socrate GEORGELELLIS 29 such are included; rumors indicate that many courses with film are also Shame ERNEST CALLENBACH 32 actually dealing pro- liferating in history, sociology, psychology, de- Goodbye, Columbus STEPHENFARBER 34 sign, English, law, foreign language, linguistics, Belle de Jour MARGOTS. KERNAN 38 and other departments.This developmentis not only a tactical one to get around college com- Viva and Louis DAvID DENBY 41 mittee barricades;it also serves to decreasefilm The Immortal Story WILLIAM JOHNSON44 people's naturaland regrettabletendency to intellectual When film is dealt The Thief of Paris TONYREIF 47 parochialism. with as a naturalresource and subject-matterin most nonscientificdepartments, we will know that it SHORT NOTICES 48 is being taken seriouslyby the intellectualcom- munity, in the same manner as print. Mean- while, we should encourage the percolation of BOOKS film courses everywhere, wherever and whenever possible, under whatever course-labelsare necessary. The students get the word quickly enough, and turn up in droves. CONTRIBUTORS DAN BATESis an editorial assistant on Castle of Frankenstein. LEOBRAUDY teaches literature at Columbia. ROBERTCHAPPETTA COVER: lives in New York. R. C. DALEteaches at the University of Washing- Jason Robards and Stella Stevens in Sam ton and is now in Paris working on a study of Peckinpah's Ballad of Cable Hogue. (continued on page 58)

VOL. XXIII, No. 1 Fall 1969 Editor's Notebook

FILM is QUARTERLY published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, California 94720. $1.25 per copy, $5.00 in the and Pan-America. per year U.S., Canada, Special two-year subscription rate: $8.00. Elsewhere: $2.50 per copy, $9.00 per year. Editor: ERNEST CALLENBACH. Assistant to the Editor: MARIGAYGRANA. New York Editors: ROBERTHUGHES and SHATNOFF. Editor: STEPHENFARBER. JUDITH Los Angeles Paris Editor: GINETTEBILLARD. Rome Editor: GIDEONBACHMANN. London Editor: PETER Edi- torial Board: ANDRIES CowIE. Advisory DEINUM, AUGUST FRUGE, GRAY,ALBERT JOHNSON, NEAL COLIN YOUNG. of the HUGH OXENHANDLER, Copyright 1969 by The Regents University of California. Views expressed in signed articles are those of the authors. Indexed in Reader's Guide to Peri. odical Literature, Art Index and Social Sciences and Humanities Index. Published quarterly. Second-class at California. Printed in U.S.A. postage paid Berkeley, 58 BOOKS to have emerged from television in years. Nothing CONTRIBUTORS(cont'd.) he does could be called brilliant or innovative, but Rene Clair. MICHAELDEMPSEY has studied film at most everything is enhanced by grace, style, mod- UCLA. DAVID DENBY is a graduate student at est but thoughtful imagination. This is a Universal Stanford, working in film aesthetics and history, and shot has a unnatural picture, every slightly and US social history. FOSTERHIRSCH has worked pallor that is the studio's hallmark, so Goldstone's in the New York story of Paramount to us interested in at his departments ability keep looking movie and Fox. DENNIS HUNT is a graduate student at is all the more He has an intuitive impressive. feel- Berkeley. RICHARD T. JAMESON runs an art theater for the of film-whether he wants to ing language in Seattle. WILLIAM JOHNSON, whose article on the Americana of the convey tawdry Indianapolis film music appeared in the Summer 1969 FQ, 500, the violence of the race itself, the loneliness lives in New York. MARGOTS. KERNANhas been of the hero at a celebration-that makes victory his active in film showing in Washington, D.C. next movie worth forward to. looking GEORGE LELLIS lives in New York. JOSEPH Number directed Tom One, listlessly by Gries, MCBRIDE is editor of the Wisconsin Film needs some of the same an Society flair; awkward, old- volume Persistence Vision, and is on a flashback dissolve is of working fashioned technique enough book about Welles. HARRIETR. POLT teaches at to make head for the exit. But anyone looking be- Merritt Oakland. TONY REIF is neath the one can admire the skeleton College, from surface, of Vancouver and studies film at UCLA. WILLIAM a serious and film. potentially important Winning ROUTT is in the Committee on Social at is constructed around the race itself- Thought Indianapolis the University of Chicago. a sequence that lasts almost thirty minutes-but Number One, about an aging football player's last NEW PERIODICAL little of the action that the season, provides sports Screen is the enthusiast wants to see. This is an austere, even successor to Screen Education, and is available free to somber film, and I can't think of another film that members of the Society for Educa- deals in this with the crisis in a tion in Film and Television, 81 Dean Street, London quite way profes- WIV sional athlete's life when he begins to lose com- 6AA, England (membership fee 30s.). The first issue features mand of his body. Sports movies used to ignore informative,nonpolemical articles this crisis and confine their canvasses to rousing and reviews, most of them interesting to a wide moments of glory, while in recent years the movie audience but some especially aimed at teachers. athlete has become simply a caricatured symbol of the Establishment (see The Graduate or Goodbye, Columbus). So this bleak but sympathetic portrait is doubly unfashionable; it won't please the beer- Books bellied sports fans or the hip college students. The film's writing usually seems honest, as far as it goes-whether examining the callousness of the team manager, the anemic jobs that the hero has GROVE PRESSSCRIPT BOOKS to look forward to on the black retirement, young General Editor: Robert Hughes. (New York: Grove Press, 1969. quarterback who is all too eager to push him out, $1.95 per volume) or his uneasy relationship with his wife, whose own career has been blooming while his has been The four books listed below are the best recre- waning. But nothing is taken quite far enough. ations of films yet to be achieved in book form. Most of the scenes are a little too clearly labelled, They will probably be surpassed only when and then cut off. Charlton Heston's performance 8mm or EVR copies of films are available for is genuine, though; he seems the right age, and he home use and Each volume a looks and study. presents slightly exhausted humiliated too-a script based on the film itself ratherthan drawn sensitive portrait of a man losing hold of the only skill that once his life with We from the working papers of the film-makers,as supplied passion. is with know that some retiring football players have more customary script books. The advantage glamorous options, but the great majority are still of this system, obviously, is that it provides an probably in the position of this character. Heston accurate record of what is really in the films- and the film as a whole give him surprising dignity. an aim often only fitfully accomplished other- -STEPHEN FARBER wise. (Moreover,in the case of Masculin Fem- 2 STEPHEN FARBER

Peckinpah's Return

I hate that word "comeback."It's a return. obsession with violence is more degenerate than -Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD other film-makers'obsessions with religion or sex or decor. The Wild Bunch is first film Sam Peckinpah's I do object to some of the film's equivocations, after more than four years of forced inactivity, and its tendency to sacrifice characterization to and it is gratifying, in a way, that the most reaction and spectacle. The individual characters cent outcast from Hollywood has directed, for are just distinct enough to be believable, but his "comeback," not just a good movie but a none of them are really very interesting. The commercially successful one too. Nothing makes only way to accept the characters at all is to see the industry forget its grudges quicker than the them as one conglomeratecharacter, the Wild sound of money. The critics have responded as Bunch. Peckinpahis interestedin these men as Peckinpah hoped they would, with either ecsta- a group, and he uses them to epitomize a major tic raves or angry denunciations; almost no one generic character,the Outlaw. But even grant- is neutral on this film. Ride the High Country ing this, the film, particularlyon a second view- was a sensitive, modest film, but Peckinpah has ing, seems flat and underwritten. aimed much higher this time. The Wild Bunch The charactersin The Wild Bunch are not is not a minor film; it's a sprawling, spectacular, complex, though the film's attitudes toward ambitious, wilfully controversial picture, an what they represent, toward violence, and to- assault on a audience's senses and emotions, an ward the Western myth in general, are very aggressive bid for the spotlight. Fortunately, the complex; but complexity is very close to con- film deserves the spotlight. Its first impression fusion, and the film often seems out of control is literally overpowering; The Wild Bunch is (which is a corollary of its high emotional much more dazzling than Ride the High Coun- charge). But I respecteven the film'sconfusions, try, but it loses some of the reflective qualities for they always seem to grow out of Peckinpah's that made Peckinpah's early film so quietly most profound doubts and uncertainties, a very memorable.There were starkimages of violence rich, intense self-questioning; they never seem in Ride the High Country too, but violence is concessions to the audience. the subject and the controllingpassion of The One first notices these confusions in the visual Wild Bunch. Let me say right away that the style of the film. The materialis straightforward violence does not offend me, even though this and conventionalin many ways, and there are is the goriest film I have ever seen. But the gore several elegant panoramicshots that are a staple is not gratuitous;the film is intelligent about the of Westerns; but there are also some very con- significanceof violence in America,and in addi- temporarytricks of film-making-slow motion, tion, the images of violence are quite simply subliminal cutting-that testify to Peckinpah's beautiful. I don't believe that the violence in dissatisfactionwith the Westernform, his desire this movie (or in any other movie) will send to break it open and reconceive it. The sophisti- children out on the streets to murder, nor do I cation of his technique does not always match feel that Peckinpah'sobvious fascination, even the simplicity of the plotting and characteriza- PECKINPAH 3 tions, and audiences encouragedby Peckinpah's the same sadism in Bonnie and Clyde that looks mastery of the medium to expect a more subtle so appalling in the police. Bonnie and Clyde film are probably bewildered by the crude hu- kill only in self-defense, and the camera almost mor and old-fashioned melodrama of many never puts us into the position of their victims; scenes. The middle sections particularly lack we always identify with them, suffer with the dimension-effectively photographed but pro- violence inflicted on them but never with the tracted, essentially hollow action scenes. And violence that they inflict. Even in the scene in even the technique can turn surprisinglyold- which the Texas Ranger spits in Bonnie'sface, fashioned, as in some turgid flashbackdissolves Clyde's reaction is surprisinglymild and gentle (just recently cut out of the film) or the senti- -he gets angry and throws the man into the mental superimpositionof the laughing faces of water, but he doesn't really hurt him. The Wild the Bunch over the final scene. At these mo- Bunch is more hardheaded because it admits ments the film recalls vintage John Ford, while the heroes' attractionto violence. We can't de- in the editing of the gun battles Peckinpah lude ourselves that the Bunch are innocent; shows that he is a contemporaryof Kurosawa, they're clearly depraved and vicious-savages Truffaut,Arthur Penn. who love the thrill of slaughter. The Wild Bunch, like the traditionalWestern, And yet they do retain our sympathy. Per- is concernedwith honor among men. There are haps one reason is that in a world where the exuberant scenes of masculine camaraderieon "respectable" people seem equally sadistic, the order of Ford or Hawks-the Bunch laugh- where indeed violence seems the primaryfact of ing over the abortive results of a robbery at- human nature (as Peckinpahemphasizes by his tempt, drinking and whoring and taking baths repeated shots of children responding enthusi- together, nostalgically reminiscing about old astically to torture), the qualities of candor and times over the campfire. The grittiness and ri- resiliencethat distinguishthe Bunch seem espe- bald humor of these scenes should not blind us cially precious. They are at a disadvantage in to their familiarity and robust sentimentality. comparison with the respectable people, not The film sometimes bathes the Wild Bunch in just because they are outlaws, but because they a soft golden haze, particularlyduring the lyri- are old men trying to find their way in a land cal scene of their exit from the Mexican village that is beginning to change beyond recognition. where Angel (Jamie Sanchez) lives, serenaded There is one striking shot of the Bunch leader, by the peasants, handed roses by the women. Pike (William Holden), stumbling to get onto But at other moments the film sees them with a his horse and then riding off, weary, beaten, harshnessthat is unconventionaland bracing-- hunched over, and still unafraid, that crystal- as limited, slow-witted, mercenaryopportunists lizes the film'sadmiration of these men for their ruled by an unnatural blood lust. The Wild refusal to submit to time and inevitable decay. Bunch has been comparedto Bonnie and Clyde They are outsiders, failures, with nowhere to because of its sympathy for the outlaw and its turn and no place to go, but they have not been mockery of all forms of "law and order"- defeated. They have the strength to endure. whether the temperanceunion and railroadmen To give a better idea of the richness of the in South Texas, Pershing's incompetent army film's attitude toward the Bunch, I'd like to along the border, or the coldblooded federales consider the conclusionof the film in some de- Villa's fighting revolutionariesin Mexico. But tail-a series of sequences with a quite remark- in one respect the film is sharperand more hon- able gradationof moods. has been taken est Angel than Bonnie and Clyde-it does not flinch prisoner by Mapache's federales for a from giving showing the brutality of its heroes. One carton of stolen guns to the revolutionaries,and that has thing always botheredme about Penn's the Bunch, though regretful, casually decide to film is its uneasy unwillingnessto acknowledge leave him to his death-the first twist on the PECKINPAH

As the Bunch begin their walk into town, Peckinpahchanges mood, swells the music, and films the march with the classical rhythm and dramatic flair of all archetypalWestern show- downs. The Bunch look imposing and heroic, but this vision is shaded by irony if we remember to place it against the uncomfortablepre- ceding scene and the horrifyingone that is to follow. Mapache cuts Angel's throat before their eyes, and they respondwith rage, turning their guns against him and the rest of the village, massacring the Mexicans who are too drunk to make much of a stand against them. Eventuallythey get hold of a machine gun that is mounted in the center of town, and with that they are able to take a toll of hundredsof lives. Peckinpahfilms this battle with great urgency and passion, drawing it out with almost hallu- cinatory,surreal relentlessness, yet punctuating it with jagged, electric shock cutting. (Lou Lombardo'sediting is the finest editing of an American film since Bonnie and Clyde.) When Warren Oates takes hold of the machine gun and shrieks like a maniac as he fires in a fit of orgasmicrelease, it is one of the most appalling THE WILD BUNCH: The final massacre. images of human bestiality ever filmed-an echo of a primevalwar cry. The Bunch may go Western myth of loyalty. But they return to into the slaughterin search of honor and retri- Mapache's village to take refuge from the bution, but the blood quicklywashes away their bounty hunters who are pursuingthem. When noble sentiments.There is a fine moment when they see Angel being dragged along the ground Pike, shot in the back by a woman, turns and by the German general'sautomobile, they are without flinching fires directly at her breast, disgusted, but not disgusted enough to try to that economically conveys the Bunch's mind- save him, and they accept Mapache's offer of less, automaticinstinct for brutality--an instinct that overwhelmstheir moral When whores for the evening. But the next morning-- aspirations. in an unusually sensitive and understated se- the massacre is over, and the town is littered quence-Pike is haunted by feelings of remorse with bodies, includingthose of the Bunch, Deke Thornton and embarrassmentthat he cannot quite inter- (Robert Ryan), their former partner pret. As he watches his woman wash her body, and tireless pursuer, rides in, and the bounty the delicacy of her movements as well as her huntersunder his command,a vile pack of gut- humiliationwhen he offers her money make it ter scavengerswho make the Wild Bunch look clear that she is not really a whore, and he is saintly, begin stripping the bodies of boots, troubled because of his insensitivityto her and watches, gold fillings. Peckinpah has daringly his obliviousnessto the tortureof his friend. So shifted mood again, from a shatteringvision of when he calls the others to help him retrieve apocalyptichorror to the grotesque black com- Angel, the decision grows convincinglyout of edy that has always been one of his specialties a sense of guilt and self-revulsion. as a director;the comedyseems an effectiveway PECKINPAH 5 of underscoringthe senselessnessand absurdity the Westerner or about the violence of the out- of the massacre--a bitter, nihilistic laugh at the law, and The Wild Bunchreflects his confusions. Bunch'spretensions of virtue. We rightly demand more clarity from an artist, But the film does not end quite there. There but at the same time, the genuinely agonized are some sere, mournfulimages of peasant wo- temper of The Wild Bunch makes it a search- men in black moving among the bodies, then ing, unsettling film. their and gathering belongings leaving the vil- The film opens on a group of children in silent exile. Thornton "play- lage desolate, sits at the ing" by placing a couple of scorpionsin a con- to the revolted what he has gates town, by seen, tainer filled with red ants, then setting fire to exhausted the effort of life itself. But when by both, and at the very end it is a child who mur- the old man who is the last survivorof the Wild ders Pike; the film'svision of childrenis perhaps Bunch rides in and asks Thornton to him join most revealing of its ambivalence. After the Thornton comes to life and the two of again, massacrein the Texas town near the beginning, them as ride off in search laugh together they a group of children run among the corpses of adventures. "It won't be like the old in times," the street firing make-believe pistols and imi- the old man tells "but it's him, something."And tating the gunfighters with admiration and it is over this affirmativeconclusion that the delight; later, even more devastatingly,as Angel faces of the dead laughing members of the is dragged around Mapache'svillage, children Bunch are The final superimposed. image is a chase after him laughing and With of shouting. reprise the Bunch's resounding farewell to these images Peckinpah means to their one moment of clearly say Angel's village, grace and that violence is an inherent part of human na- glory. ture, but it is interesting that the faces of the During these last twenty minutes of his film children almost always contain expressions of Peckinpahso disturbsour emotions that we are innocence and wonder that are not quite ac- literally drained by the conclusion. Just as we counted for by the philosophical statement are convinced of the meaninglessness of the about their intuitive cruelty. When the children Bunch's life and death, Peckinpah once again in Angel's village look at the Wild Bunch, with twists our response and forces us to pay a final shy curiosity and admiration,we cannot help tribute to their irreverenceand their resilience. but be touched by their responsivenessto these It may be because of the tremendouscomplex- lost men. One of the Mexicans says to Pike ity of the film's evaluation of the Bunch that shortly afterwards,as they observe the playful- many critics have been so outraged. What is ness of the Gorch brothers, "We all dream of Peckinpahtrying to say? If he means to repel us being a child again. Even the worst of us." For by the life of violence, why that strangelysenti- the faces of the children are still unformed, mental finale? And if he means the film as a open to possibilites, and it is that sense of celebration of the outlaw, why must he so im- possibility that makes us dream. Children may merse us in the outlaw's brutality?There are no be instinctively violent, but the freshness of easy interpretationsof The Wild Bunch. Peck- their faces teases us to believe that they are inpah is feeling out his own responses to his capable of something more than violence. It is characters'way of life, and he is asking us to this something more that Peckinpah searches struggle with him to make sense of the experi- for in the Wild Bunch too-call it an inchoate ences on the screen. For all of its technical sense of honor or loyalty or commitment-and assurance,this is an unfinished,open-ended film, just as often as he is wryly skeptical about the a tentative explorationof a peculiar, vanishing Bunch, he asks us to believe that they are re- of way life, rather than a clearly formulated deemable. The children in the film embody thesis film. Peckinpahhas not resolved his own innocence and evil, beauty and corruption,gen- feelings about the masculine code of honor of tleness and brutality, and the film as a whole 6 PECKINPAH wavers between a harsh, very contemporary It's well known that you had a lot of trouble cynicism and an older, mellower belief in grand before you started working here at Warners, human possibilities that has always been the and I wanted to ask about your working rela- most sentimental affirmation of the Western. tionships here. Apparentlythey're very satisfy- Traditional Westerns wallowed in this senti- ing. mentality and became rosy parables of virtue Very satisfying. Delightful. I work very close- triumphant, while some very recent Westerns ly with my executive producer, Philip Feldman, have gone to the other extreme and opted for and very closely with Ken Hyman, who is the a cynical stance that is often just as hysterical president of Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. I find and glib. It is Peckinpah's effort to play these them to be very creative, tough, stimulating, and two attitudes against each other that makes his damn fine people to work with. Westerns seem so rich; his mixture of realism And you find that and you have all the freedom romanticism (a mixture that was already that you want? recognizable, on a much smaller scale, in Ride I think Ken Hyman described it as limited the High Country), even if not yet ration- quite total carte blanche. And I find I work ally illuminates the Western very well proportioned, under these circumstances. I wouldn't want to myths so that they seem relevant, not remote. change a damn thing. I like it. I spoke with Peckinpah about The Wild How did you get involved with them? Bunch and about his career generally several Both Ken Hyman and Phil Feldman had seen months ago, while he was still completing the Ride the High Countryand MajorDundee and editing of the film and simultaneously making knew the circumstances behind the mutilation preparations for the shooting of his next film, of Dundee, and they knew some of my television The Ballad of Cable Hogue. During the after- work also, and both wanted me to make pictures noon that I spent with him, he was running for them and with them. I was delighted in their down to the editing room, testing girls for a trust and their encouragement, because I liter- secondary role in Cable Hogue, looking at the ally hadn't worked for four years because of art director's the fiasco with Bressler on Dundee drawings, making arrangements' Jerry and for rehearsals, ordering horses. His ability to Martin Ransohoff on The Cincinnati Kid. To keep in command of everything was impressive, some degree I have to take the blame, because I was an ability that shows through the following con- an idiot to start to make a picture with versation. But what is most interesting about those two people in the first place; their ap- this interview is that it reveals many of the proach to films was so completely different from same uncertainties that can be "read" in more mine. disguised form in the film itself. Peckinpah is During the interim you did some television? an instinctive director, not an intellectual one, Some television and a screenplay or two, and and his instinct for cinema is unquestionably wrote and directed Noon Wine for Stage 67, masterful. But I would say that if he is to con- which was a joy to do. That was with Jason to tinue grow as an artist, he needs to strive for Robards, Per Oscarsson, Olivia de Havilland. more intellectual clarity; he needs to order and Dan Melnick of Talent Associates produced it. his hidden question assumptions even more I worked very well with Dan. We were all very ruthlessly, so that he can go on testing himself pleased with the way the show turned out. I instead of simply repeating and reworking the received two nominations on it actually, one themes of The Wild Bunch. I hope that his next from the Writers Guild, one from the Screen film is not a Western. Directors Guild. But you didn't have any opportunityto work on filmsduring that period? PECKINPAH 7

No. I was known as a troublemaker-I think was it mostlyin the cutting? for all the wrong reasons actually. When you A great deal of trouble all the way through. set out to make a certain type of picture, it's Unbelievablesituation. very difficultto change in the middle, particu- Was that also a case of starting out to do larly if you don't respect the people who are one kind of film and then being pressuredto do suggesting the changes, and if the changes are something else? bloody fucking awful. Ransohoff talked one Absolutely. It was a very tight script, intri- kind of picture on The CincinnatiKid to me, cately intertwined; you know, if you removed but he didn't really want the kind of picture a part of it, somethingelse would fall out fifteen that I wanted to make; he wanted the kind of pages later. Bressler wanted to cut after we picture he got, which I thought was very very started shooting, and we tried, but it didn't dull. work. Yes, I did too. What was the originalinten- And it was this bad reputationthat kept you tion? from working? The intentionwas to give a fairly honest look Yes. I know several people who wanted me at life in the thirties, in a Depression area, and for pictures, and the studios wouldn'ttouch me what happens to a man who plays stud for a in any way, shape, or form. I couldn'teven get living, how it affects his life and those around on the lot at Columbia. him. I thought the picture came out just like a That's one of the frightening things about story in an old Cosmopolitanor something, al- the whole industry. though I enjoyed the color. But I was dead set I think it's changing. I hope it is. against casting Ann-Margretin that picture. I Do you think you'd have less trouble now? had a feeling I would never do the picture, but Well, I am less trouble now, let's put it that I didn't really expect to be fired after I got way. Maybe I've learned a lot. I will not start started. But that was just Marty'sway. I found a picture until we know the ground rules, how out later that no matter what I'd shot-and I we're going to work. And thank God I don't thought it was some astonishinglygood footage have to. I can more or less pick and choose the -I was going to be fired, or shall we say sand- propertiesI want to do, and who I'm going to bagged. But he has his way of making films, do them with. It's a very good feeling. and I have mine. With Mr. Feldman and Mr. Hyman, is it that What about MajorDundee? Did you have a they don't interfere as much, or is it that you lot of trouble while you were making that, or feel that their attitudes are very close to yours?

THE WILD BUNCH: Traditional marchto the showdown. 8 PECKINPAH

They're enormously creative people, and I So I was curiouswhether the epic scope of Wild feel we work together very well. I respect them, Bunch gets in the way of that concern with and they respect me. They let me do my thing, character. so to speak, and whenever they can, they high- Well, I wasn't trying to make an epic, I was light it, and give me all the help that I could trying to tell a simple story about bad men in possibly need. They're damn good, they're changing times. I was trying to make a few tough, they've got good ideas. And I either have comments on violence and the people who live to a better get one, or I use theirs. You don't by violence. It's not a means to something, vio- mind with like it's working people that, a de- lence is an end in itself to these people. I enjoyed light. making it. We all worked very hard. I was talk- I was listening to what you said earlierabout ing to Bill Holden and Ernest Borgnine and the unions and guilds. Do you have trouble some other members of the cast, and they all with them? want to do another one. I guess we all knew we You always have problems with them. They were making a serious picture when we were make it very very hard to make a picture, par- down there; there's a certain delight in that. ticularly the kind we're doing now on Cable Everybody is so concerned right now about Hogue, which is a low-budget picture. We are violence in films. What was your attitude about right on the line of not being able to make it. the violence? But it doesn't make any difference to the unions Actually it's an anti-violence film because I whether you only have a limited budget, or use violence as it is. It's ugly, brutalizing, and whether you're making a multimillion dollar bloody fucking awful. It's not fun and games picture; the same rules go into effect. And I and cowboys and Indians, it's a terrible, ugly think that's detrimental to the industry. I think thing. And yet there's a certain response that they should encourage low-budget pictures, and you get from it, an excitement, because we're a lot more pictures would be made. I think they all violent people, we have violence within us. ought to have two rates. I believe in the unions, I don't know if you can legislate against it. It's but I think they're hurting themselves and in children, as I bring out in the film. I don't they're hurting a lot of us who want to make know about violence on television. I object to particular stories that we have to do out of it because I think it's usually so goddamned price. We should be encouraged by the unions dull. They just have a lot of violence for its own to do these stories rather than being penalized-- sake, it's not motivated. Violence is a part of perhaps something like deferred payment if the life, and I don't think we can bury our heads in picture makes money. the sand and ignore it. It's important to under- Was The Wild Bunch an expensive film? stand it and the reason people seem to need That was a $4 million picture. But if we'd violence vicariously. We had five million years, tried to do it here, it would have been impossible you know, of surviving, and I don't see how to bring it in for 6 or 7 million, because of the the species is going to survive without violence. extra problem and the sets, which are all Mexi- You say that the film is really anti-violence can. It was a difficult picture because of its size. because it shows how ugly violence is. But as We had a large cast and an enormous amount you also say, of obviouslya lot of people who watch action. it won't respondto it in that Are more way. you comfortable working on a I think they will, because there's of smaller, more intimate enough it. film? You don't think some people will just get a No, the amount of concentration is about the kick out of it? same. Both are challenging. I don't think so. I think will I ask because everybody be a I've noticed that in your films little sickened by it, at least I or a the charactersis hope so, little interplayof something you are dismayed, at least dismayed-which is the effect always very interested and handle in, very well. that I'm trying for. On Dundee they cut 80%of PECKINPAH 9 the violence out and made it very attractive and was trying to make, that power corrupts just as exciting; but the really bloody, awful things that much as lawlessness. happen to men in war were cut out of the pic- Is Cable Hogue a contemporary film? ture, which I thought was unforgivable-along No, 1908, 1909-about people in the West, with most of the story and all the character but it's not a Western. interplay and the rest of it. That general period seems to be one that Did you face any sort of pressures to tone you're interested in. down the violence in this film because of all No, I'm just trying to get out of the 1870 the uproarabout it last summer? period. Right now I'm up to 1913, 1914. The No. We discussed it, but we had a particular next one is going to be even later. story to make, and we thought that we had a In Wild Bunch, why did you want to do a point to make about violence, that it's awful, film about a group of criminals? this kind of violence. Other kinds of violence The outlaws of the West have always fasci- may be very necessary; the violence in a pro nated me. They had a certain notoriety, they football game is certainly fascinating to millions, were supposed to have a Robin Hood quality and I thoroughly enjoy it. But I don't think we about them, which was not really the truth, but should say it doesn't exist and we should destroy they were strong individuals; in a land for all violence-by what means? You can't legislate intents and purposes without law, they made against it. On the one hand, you have the violent their own. I suppose I'm something of an out- protests of these kids today, which I believe in. law myself. I identify with them. But our Some of the racial problems have only been characters in The Wild Bunch are limited and brought to the public attention through vio- adolescent, they're not too bright. They're fas- lence. Then you can deal with the horror of cinating characters. I've always wondered what President Kennedy's assassination and his broth- happened to the outlaw leaders of the Old West death. But a er's political assassination has very when it changed. It's been a fascinating subject little to do with film violence. I don't think to me, and I thought this story by Walon Green television had too much to do with training dramatized it, set it up well. So I wrote the either Oswald or Sirhan. screenplay with him and made the picture. It's Yes, I agree that people are really much too a very uncompromising film-the language, the willing to jump to the conclusion that just be- action, the details, the lives of these people are cause there have been violent acts, television as I imagine they were. We tried to recreate an and films must be the cause. environment, an era, and I think we were rea- You know, that's bullshit, that's absolute sonably successful with it. It's a disturbing film, bullshit. people who've seen it call it a shattering film. Well, that's why I wondered whether you The strange thing is that you feel a great sense had been affected in any way by this talk. of loss when these killers reach the end of the No way whatsoever. I think war is a hideous line. and we thing, show a small part of a war; we Did you write Cable Hogue too? show what kind of people get into the situation, No, Warren Oates gave me a script that he'd and how end. We they try to make them human read and liked, and I liked it enough to buy it. and not all beings, black, but there's certainly Gordon Dawson did the rewrite on it. John little white in them. very Crawford and Edmond Penney did the script, One thing I felt in the early parts of the film and I think it's a I'm was that the lovely script, very happy "good guys,"the people on the side to be doing it. It's got a lot of warmth, it's a love of the are more law, really ruthless and more story really, but again it deals with some degree brutal, even, than the criminals. of morality. This was shot before the Chicago incidents, Going back to what said earlier about but you I think they more or less prove the point I having a reputationas a troublemaker-I know 10 PECKINPAH this is an industrywhere people get labelled very find a producerwhom they can work with con- easily. Does that reputation still affect you in genially. any way? You have to be very careful with Phil, be- I make trouble with shoddy workmanship, cause if I would casually say, I would like to and with shoddy, shabby people, people who shoot past the top of a mountain, that night he don't do their job, and the whiners, and com- would have the top of the mountain gone. He's plainers, and the bitchers, and the sore-asses beautiful. And he will do it at a cost that is who talk a good piece of work and never pro- hardly anything. He's a miracle man. He's in- duce. I don't know why the hell they went into terested in making good pictures. motion pictures in the first place. It's certainly And you feel that you and he have the same not to make pictures, it's just a sort of masturba- interests? tion or something, and I don't like to be around Absolutely. Absolutely. We have enormous them. I was very lucky. I started in television differences sometimes, thank God. It keeps me with Dick Powell-an extraordinary man, who stimulated. And sometimes he's very right in- always encouraged you to do your best, and deed. Phil is executive producer on Cable was creative and had good ideas, and with him Hogue. We're forming, I think, a fine staff here, I was able to do The Westerner, which turned and we have some great plans. out to be quite an extraordinary little series. So Was The Wild Bunch almost all shot on loca- he spoiled me, you might say-that dedication tion? and enthusiasm and talent that he brought to Every bit of it. the organization where I more or less grew up; And how about this new film? and I was appalled to find out that there were Every bit of it is on location. And then I think so many self-centered idiots floating around who I will take a couple of months off. By June it'll have other interests than making a good film. be two years I've been working on Wild Bunch. Again, it's my fault that I didn't understand I will have completed two pictures in two this. I understand it better now. years, which is a lot of work when you're involv- Have you found a lot of sloppy work among ed in writing and directing and producing. But studio people and technicians? I don't like to work any other way. Well, I've found enough of it. I think Mr. Did you have difficulty working in Mexico? Feldman and I fired 22 people off The Wild Not really. The staff of the Syndicato is diffi- Bunch. That's not all studio people of course. cult to work with. The workers, the crews, the Some of them were independent, some of them technicians are marvelous, they're as good as were from the Mexico City Syndicato. But we they are here, very enthusiastic. But their unions work very hard. The days are certainly not 8- present problems as unions do here. But I like hour days for all the people concerned. There's Mexico very much. I have an ex-wife there, actually a very fine staff here at Warner Broth- many good friends. ers. Did you do a lot of reconstructionwork, or Do you plan to go on working with Phil did you find that you could use the locationsas Feldman? they existed? We've got two other projects that we're pre- No, we did some reconstruction work in the paring. And I'm up for two other pictures off the town of Paras. It's an old town, built in the lot, and it depends on which one is going to be 1600's, so we reconstructed some of the build- put together first. As I said, I like working with ings to give it a little more of an Anglo look, like Phil very much. I expect to be working with him a Texas border town, and it came out very well. in the future. The film looks exactly like the newsreels of It's interesting to know what kind of rela- 1916, of the Revolution. I got a lot of old news- tionship between a director and a producer reels from the Mexican government. And actu- works best. Very few film-makersare able to ally I wanted to make the picture in black and WELLES 11 white. We have no choice. I think black and Saw Red Desert the other night. Jesus, it's a white evokes a different kind of feeling. We have beautiful film, extraordinary, I loved it. A little scratched prints in negative of some of the film, self-indulgent here and there. That thin line of but I'm using it, I'm scratching other prints to doing something right and then getting carried give it a newsreel quality. I think it'll play. away. I've only seen two Antonioni films, that How much actual visual planning do you do? and Blow-Up. I thought Blow-Up was flawless. Do you try to conceive all of the shots very And I think that's the only film outside of carefully before you get to the set? Bonnie and Clyde that I've seen in the last two Every one. I'm up at 4:00 in the morning, years. I ran Bonnie and Clyde when I got back looking at my day's work, which I've already from The Wild Bunch. sketched in before, and I go over it again and What did you think of it? again. Light changes, action, something may Loved it, loved it, they did all my shtick. I come up, so I try to know every single possible thought everything about it was great. Although approach, and then I pick the one I want. I our picture is completely different in many always prepare. That's why I lose 15 to 20 ways, there are strange similarities. I don't know pounds on every picture, it's like an endurance how they are similar, except they both deal race or something. No, I don't like to go on the with violence and the people involved in vio- set and start "creating." We do that before in lence. Our people are not as attractive as rehearsal. But we know our work so well that if Faye and Warren, but yet they are attractive. some new idea does come up, we've gone it's that the outlaw. through everything else, and we know exactly Again, sympathy for where to go. For example, the exit from the I just tried to make them honest. Yet they village in Wild Bunch was not in the script. I come off as human beings, which possibly is a shot that in less than a day, and it's one of the frightening thing. high points in the picture. All of a sudden we They're going to really get disturbed about knew the picture needed it. But that couldn't this, I'll tell you. I'm exhausted when I see it, have happened unless we'd been so well- I'm literally exhausted for hours, and all it is prepared . . . really is a simple adventure story. .

JOSEPH McBRIDE

Welles's Chimes at Midnight

Back in the days of the Mercury Theater, John This assumption arises in part from the boister- Houseman was asked when Orson Welles's pro- ous, uneven quality of some of Welles's adapta- duction of Caesar Julius would open. "When tions and from the bravura aspects of his style, Welles finishes writing it," he replied. The feel- but it fails to take into account the common that Welles hurls ing himself against Shake- source of both the imperfections and the to speare merely gratify himself with the sound achievements. Shakespeare was Welles's first of the collision is as common as it is misleading. dramatic love, and whenever he has wanted to WELLES 11 white. We have no choice. I think black and Saw Red Desert the other night. Jesus, it's a white evokes a different kind of feeling. We have beautiful film, extraordinary, I loved it. A little scratched prints in negative of some of the film, self-indulgent here and there. That thin line of but I'm using it, I'm scratching other prints to doing something right and then getting carried give it a newsreel quality. I think it'll play. away. I've only seen two Antonioni films, that How much actual visual planning do you do? and Blow-Up. I thought Blow-Up was flawless. Do you try to conceive all of the shots very And I think that's the only film outside of carefully before you get to the set? Bonnie and Clyde that I've seen in the last two Every one. I'm up at 4:00 in the morning, years. I ran Bonnie and Clyde when I got back looking at my day's work, which I've already from The Wild Bunch. sketched in before, and I go over it again and What did you think of it? again. Light changes, action, something may Loved it, loved it, they did all my shtick. I come up, so I try to know every single possible thought everything about it was great. Although approach, and then I pick the one I want. I our picture is completely different in many always prepare. That's why I lose 15 to 20 ways, there are strange similarities. I don't know pounds on every picture, it's like an endurance how they are similar, except they both deal race or something. No, I don't like to go on the with violence and the people involved in vio- set and start "creating." We do that before in lence. Our people are not as attractive as rehearsal. But we know our work so well that if Faye and Warren, but yet they are attractive. some new idea does come up, we've gone it's that the outlaw. through everything else, and we know exactly Again, sympathy for where to go. For example, the exit from the I just tried to make them honest. Yet they village in Wild Bunch was not in the script. I come off as human beings, which possibly is a shot that in less than a day, and it's one of the frightening thing. high points in the picture. All of a sudden we They're going to really get disturbed about knew the picture needed it. But that couldn't this, I'll tell you. I'm exhausted when I see it, have happened unless we'd been so well- I'm literally exhausted for hours, and all it is prepared . . . really is a simple adventure story. .

JOSEPH McBRIDE

Welles's Chimes at Midnight

find himself artistically he has returned to witches into voodoo doctors and changing the Shakespeare's plays. In them he finds not only locale to Haiti; he played Caesar in modern themes compatible with his own and characters dress as an allegory of fascism; and, most spec- large enough to justify his most grandiose con- tacularly, he combined eight of Shakespeare's ceptions, but also a standard against which he history plays into a monstrous spectacle called can measure his own egotism, a theatrical ideal Five Kings, which sealed the doom of the Mer- which challenges him to reconcile his subjec- cury Theater. His three Shakespearean films- tive obsessions with the demands of universality. Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes Welles has refused to dramatize Crime and at Midnight (1966)-have been more and Punishment, explaining that he finds himself in more faithful to the letter of Shakespeare but, complete agreement with Dostoevsky and would paradoxically, less and less faithful to the spirit not be content just to illustrate the book. In as he acquires more grace and confidence in Shakespeare, however, he finds a superior power uniting his own vision to Shakespeare's. If whose dramas are capable of broadening, not Welles no longer pulls a stunt like the voodoo merely confirming, his own ideas. When he Macbeth, he takes a larger, subtler liberty in adapts Shakespeare he is able to enlarge his changing the emphasis of the Falstaff-Hal plays conception of the hero without, as in Mr. from the moral awakening of the ideal king to Arkadin, limiting his social perspective in the the willful destruction of innocence by a young process. "Shakespeare is the staff of life," he has man newly conscious of power. declared, and it is clear that Welles sees Shake- Welles's theme was there all the time, of speare as his artistic conscience, the consummate course, and the kingship theme is as subsidiary example of the fusion of a personal vision with to Welles as it is paramount to Shakespeare, but the full ironic complexity of human nature. If, the point is that Welles's vision has finally ma- like Shakespeare, he refuses to judge his char- tured, so that we no longer feel the damaging acters and never violates his conception of char- pull between one moral system and another, as acter to make an ideological point, he also, like we do, for example, in his Othello, in which both Shakespeare, at every point makes clear the the text and Welles's acting resist his inchoate precise moral structure under which his char- attempt to make lago the hero. What Welles acters live. In Shakespeare also he is able to find has conquered is the diffusion of emphasis and an appropriate setting for his kingly characters statement, so that he no longer tries to tell the to inhabit. Just as John Ford leaves the unheroic whole history of England from 1377 to 1485, present for the American frontier, Welles finds but concentrates instead on the moral drama in medieval castles and battlefields a setting behind the story of a single king. The audience congenial to true grandeur of spirit. In Touch of Chimes at Midnight is scarcely aware of the of Evil and Citizen Kane, he is able to create extensive textual revision and rearranging that fittingly heroic universes for his heroes to rule, Welles has unobtrustively performed on the but in Mr. Arkadin and The Trial the moral plays; for Five Kings that was one of the cen- smallness of the heroes collides with Welles's tral fascinations. attempts to conjure up an egocentric universe. A Welles adaptation of Shakespeare is not an The Shakespearean form, however, minimizes ad hoc project but the result of a lifetime of such dangers by allowing Welles to freely allo- scholarship and creative experiment. The gene- cate social power to Macbeth and an Othello sis of Chimes at Midnight, for example, extends and a Falstaff which would be difficult to justify even beyond Five Kings. Welles had written a in a less feudal world. first adaptation of the chronicles when he was As a young man Welles approached his mas- twelve years old and a student at the Todd ter with boundless ego. He staged an all-black School in Woodstock, Illinois-where he was of production Macbeth in Harlem, turning the director of a student company that performed WELLES 13 not only Shakespeare but also more obscure not Othello the play. It certainly could not have Elizabethan playwrights such as Jonson, Mar- been written without Shakespeare, but it is first lowe, Dekker, and Ford. The project incubated and foremost an opera. Othello the movie, I until Welles staged Chimes at Midnight in Bel- hope, is first and foremost a motion picture." fast in 1960; he was finally able to raise money If Welles changes Shakespeare's emphasis to for the film in 1964, and completed it in 1966 ally it more closely to his own, his intention is after almost forty years of contemplation and not to distort, attack or ignore the text. The experimentation. Shakespeare has been his problem he explores in Macbeth and Othello touchstone for nearly his entire life. As he tells and brings to fruition in Chimes at Midnight is it, his mother had read him Lamb's Tales from primarily one of integration and stylization. The Shakespeare when he was two, and when he two early films are seriously handicapped, Mac- discovered that they were not the real thing beth by extreme budgetary restrictions and a but had been watered down for children, he resulting crudeness of tone (which in some demanded that she read him the plays them- ways, however, helps to create the necessary selves. She gave him his first book, A Midsum- atmosphere of monolithic superstition, though it mer Night's Dream, for his third birthday, and hinders Welles in smoothly integrating his con- he quickly began to assemble the complete cept of Macbeth's character with Shake- works of Shakespeare in his library. He attended speare's), and Othello by inadequate sound productions of the plays from an early age, and synchronization (which necessitates some eva- directed his own adaptations of Shakespeare sive camerawork and blurs the impact of much well as his (as own plays) in his puppet theater of the dialogue), and by the problem of recon- for his family, supplying all the voices himself. ciling lago to the text. the By time he was seven he could recite any But most vital to Welles's concerns, and re- from speech King Lear, and by the time he was solved partially in Othello, is the question of he ten, claims, he had learned all the tragic striking a stylistic balance between poetry and parts. At the age of nine he had played Lear in setting. Macbeth is performed in a condensed version papier-mach6 in his back yard. He de- sets, and only in the foggy exteriors do we find in the lighted playing great monsters-Richard the necessary naturalistic counterpoint. For III, Brutus (and Cassius in the same produc- Othello, Welles was able to shoot his exteriors tion), Scrooge, Judas. He proved his versatility in Italy, Morocco and on the island of Torcello, the by playing Blessed Virgin in one play, Christ and the resulting freedom in selection of set- in another. When he was a teen-ager he declared tings adds immensely to the mood. The scene that The Duchess of Malfi was his favorite play, of Duncan's arrival at court in Macbeth, for as he has older though grown he has proved example, cannot, for all its details of pagan more to partial Lear, which he still hopes to drummers and horrific costumes, avoid the dis- film. tracting appearance of a sound with Leni stage Riefenstahl has made an interesting painted backdrop for sky, constructed comment on rocks, Welles's Shakespearean films: and so forth. We are thrown back on our sense Welles "Orson draws marvellous pictures in the of the play as a theatrical and Welles's of spectacle, margin Shakespeare, but his films are like style is too expressionistic to accommodate such operas or ballets suggested by Shakespeare, not totally unreal surroundings without disturbing himself." Welles's Shakespeare position is simi- the ironic tension he requires between the lar: "I use Shakespeare's words and characters hero's overweening ego and the strictures of to make motion are pictures. They variations on social responsibility. The miniature long-shots his themes. . . Without presuming to com- of the castle in Citizen Kane work well because pare to I think myself Verdi, he gives me my Welles juxtaposes them in the newsreel with best justification. The Otello is opera certainly documentary shots of the actual Hearst castle; 14 WELLES

since we have already seen aerial views of the has been solved in Westerns and in Japanese castle in the daylight, we can then easily accept period pictures, Welles explains, because of the the stylization of the darkened castle seen long evolution of a tradition. With Shakespeare, through hazy trees with tiny lights flickering as he puts it, "These are people who have more here and there in the gloom. The tension of life in them than any human being ever had. setting is perfectly allied with that of character: But you can't simply dress up and be them, you as Kane retreats farther and farther into a self- have to make a world for them. .... In Henry enclosed fantasy world, we no longer see the V, for example, you see the people riding out castle as a real object but as a projection of his of the castle, and suddenly they are on a golf imagination. Similarly, Welles takes great pains course somewhere charging each other. You in the early parts of The Magnificent Ambersons can't escape it, they have entered another to establish the documentary verity of the man- world. . . . What I am trying to do is to see sion and the town surrounding it; as the mood the outside, real world through the same eyes becomes more claustrophobic, we see less of as the inside, fabricated one. To create a kind the total view and more of the expressionisti- of unity." Welles is raising here the problem cally shadowed and distorted interiors. of mise-en-scene, of the integration of character We can conclude that the more stylized the and poetry with visual rhythm, which is our Wellesian character, the more carefully con- particular concern in discussing Welles's Shake- sidered must be the deployment of landscape. spearean films. If the of Macbeth settings make such considera- Chimes at Midnight is Welles's masterpiece, tions and impossible, drive the work into pure the fullest expression of everything he had with its expressionism attendant virtues and been working toward since Citizen Kane, which the limitations, settings of Chimes at Midnight itself was more an end than a beginning. The solve the problem brilliantly. First of all, Welles younger Welles was obsessed with the problem filmed in Spain-not merely because Spanish of construction, and solved it perfectly with a was behind the money production, but because geometric style which locked the apparently in Moorish castles, towns, and faces he could powerful hero into an ironic vise of which he find a world which, like the hellish border set- was almost totally unaware. We could not be of Touch ting of Evil, is not slavishly literal and farther from the characters, and perhaps this historical but permits any latitude of shading distancing, however suited to the telling of a from the naturalistic to the grotesque. We see story of futile omnipotence, was an acknowl- this too in Othello, perhaps most clearly in the edgment of artistic immaturity on Welles's part: scene on the parapet in which lago goads faced with the problem of defining himself, he Othello's jealousy. The photography is that of contrived a style to prove that definition is an eerie, slightly unreal twilight. Othello wears illusory. In Chimes at Midnight, Welles has a massive white robe, light from the left casting merged his own viewpoint and that of his hero a hazy aura on his profile; he strides back and into a direct communication of emotion. His forth, driving lago closer and closer to the edge style, though it is every bit as deliberate and of the precipice below which, from a dizzying controlled as in Kane, no longer demands our we see height, the waves smashing. Kurosawa attention for itself. There is nothing here to achieved a similar stylization in the forest scenes correspond with the trickery in Kane; there is of Throne his of Blood, version of Macbeth, in a battle sequence which is one of the greatest which the two men on horses wheel around achievements in action direction in the history of violently in the throes of a wild thunderstorm, the cinema, and which moreover is constructed their movements foreshortened and made more in a highly rhetorical pattern, almost as tightly spasmodic by the compressed perspective of a as a fugue, but it presents itself to the audience long-focus lens. The problem of a world-style not as an artistic demonstration but as an over- WELLES

Orson Welles, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

whelming physical experience. himself behind the camera in The Ambersons, I think that here Welles finds himself where revealing himself through his attitude toward Beethoven found himself when he replaced other people, and here he looms before us buoy- musical instruments with voices in the Ninth antly fat, literally and figuratively much more Symphony: he has broken the bounds of his himself than he has ever been before. tools (the camera and the cutting bench) and And, appropriately, the story he is telling is has given everything over to human instruments the story of a man who is completely candid, a (his actors). When told that no one could pos- liar who expects no one to believe his lies and sibly sing some of the notes he had written, so exaggerates them to the point of absurdity, Beethoven replied that it was no concern of his. a man whose complete lack of pretense, when Welles is more pragmatic-since he himself confronted with the world's demands of respon- must make the actors correspond to his purposes sibility and self-denial, becames the very cause -but there is the same rhapsodic exhilaration of his destruction. During production, Welles in his submersion into faces and voices. As explained his intentions: "Chimes should be Pierre Buboeuf puts it, "He broods with a dis- very plain on the visual level because above all quiet like Rembrandt's over his own face, and it is a very real human story. . . . Everything it is not inconsequential that he finds there other of importance in the film should be found on the attunements, accents less brilliant but more faces; on these faces that whole universe I was human, which he substitutes for the dazzling speaking of should be found. I imagine that it flashes of the past." We feel, as we do in The will be 'the' film of my life in terms of close-ups. Magnificent Ambersons, that Welles is rejecting . . A story like Chimes demands them, be- the mask of self-conscious stylization in order cause the moment we step back and separate to find himself in a relaxed, sensual spontaneity. ourselves from the faces, we see the people in A crucial difference, however, is that Welles hid period costumes and many actors in the fore- WELLES

to widen the gulf between Kane's emotions and our comprehension of them. If Citizen Kane has a flaw, it is in its relative dispassion-a scheme in which we are so far removed from the hero that we may easily watch his struggle with mere fascination; Kane is perhaps too mathe- matical in conception. The true hero, it is not unfitting to say, is not Kane but Welles himself. But in Chimes there is finally no distance between Welles and Falstaff; a simple exchange of close-ups between Hal and Falstaff conveys emotions infinitely deeper than does Kane's ex- CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT: KeithBaxter and Welles. plosive action. It is the difference between the expression of an emotion and the sharing of an ground. The closer we are to the faces, the more emotion. universal it becomes. Chimes is a somber com- Welles's liberties with the text generally es- edy, the story of the betrayal of friendship." cape our notice, extreme as they are, not only And after the film was completed, he observed, because he has so smoothly transformed Shake- "The Ambersons and Chimes at Midnight repre- speare's concerns into his own but because his sent more than anything else what I would like concentration on Falstaff enables him to achieve to do in films . . . what I am trying to discover a dramatic focus which Shakespeare's historical now in films is not technical surprises or shocks, concerns tend at times to dilute. The story is but a more complete unity of forms, of shapes. taken from 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, with That's what I'm reaching for, what I hope is bits from Henry V, The Merry Wives of Wind- true. If it is, then I'm reaching maturity as an sor and Richard II, and a narration from Holins- artist. If it isn't true, then I'm in decadence, hed's Chronicles. Shakespeare seems to have you know?" intended Falstaff as a relatively simple comic The reader of these descriptions should not counterpoint to the King-Prince-Hotspur story suppose that Chimes is as fluid and deceptively in the first part of Henry IV (as the rather awk- nonchalant as a Renoir film; far from it. When ward alternation of historical and comic scenes I talk about a "plain" style, I mean that the would suggest) and only gradually discovered camera is at the service of the actors, and not that Falstaff was so profound a character that vice versa (as in The Trial, for instance). When he all but overshadowed the drama of kingship. a director matures, his work becomes more Not only the greater length given to Falstaff's lucid, more direct, allowing room for deeper scenes, but the immeasurably more fluid struc- audience response; as Truffaut has put it, what ture of the second part-in which the imbalance is in front of the camera becomes more impor- threatened by Falstaff's pre-eminence becomes tant. And "direct," in the complex rhetorical qualified by the crisis in his relationship with world of Welles's films, means not that the issues the Prince-attest to Shakespeare's fully ripened are simplified, but that their presentation is-- understanding of Falstaff's meaning. We of we feel them with more intensity and passion. course have been prepared for the rejection of Compare the climax of Kane, in which Kane Falstaff by the great tavern scene in the first slaps Susan, to the muted climax of Chimes at part, but in the second, not only in Hal's eyes Midnight, in which Hal banishes Falstaff and as a threat to his princely dignity but in his the old man murmurs, "Master Shallow, I owe own as well, Falstaff takes on a graver aspect. you a thousand pound." The scene in Kane is Images of age, disease and death suddenly pro- exciting and moving, but its theatricality tends liferate, and the gay denunciations of honor give WELLES 17 way in the second part to sober, more closely rightfully able to purpose the building of an reasoned (and more witty) inward reflection. empire. But for Welles (for Shakespeare too, Shakespeare also creates four new companions but to a lesser degree of emphasis) Hal has lost for Falstaff-Pistol, Doll Tearsheet, Shallow, the better part of himself in his rejection of and Silence-as if to compensate for Hal's grow- Falstaff and all he stands for. The banishment is ing absorption into himself. "In the first part of inevitable if he is to acquiesce to his position of the play," Welles comments, "the Hotspur sub- power, but the price of the world dominion he plot keeps the business of the triangle between will thus achieve is the subjection of his own the King, his son and Falstaff (who is a sort of moral nature, as Welles makes clear in the arbi- foster father) from dominating. But in my film, trariness of his first action after the banishment. which is made to tell, essentially, the story of Hal's final words to Falstaff have a meaning that triangle, there are bound to be values which entirely opposite to their meaning in the play: can't exist as it is played in the original. It's "Being awaked, I do despise my dream . really quite a different drama." Presume not that I am the thing I was . . . I We can see in Welles's decision to make Hal have turned away my former self." And his last a subordinate figure to Falstaff not only an ex- words in the film show how much he has de- tremely ironic attitude toward the idea of the luded himself: "We consider it was excess of "Christian king" (a concept as alien to Welles wine that set him on." Welles holds on the new as it is central to Shakespeare and, in a modem king's pose of bemused reflection for several guise, to John Ford, from whom Welles borrows long seconds, and in the next shot shows us greatly in this film), but also a more definite Falstaff's coffin. emphasis on the essential goodness of Falstaff's For Shakespeare, Falstaff is essentially a character, the tragic nobility of even those at- comic figure because, while completely innocent, tributes-his disregard of health and social dis- he is destructive of kingly power, and must be cretion-which will inevitably destroy him. The sacrificed without question to the demands of a act of banishment by Shakespeare's Hal is not greater order. For Welles, the greater order is a tragic decision; it is the seal of moral maturity, Falstaff, and Hal sacrifices both Falstaff and the "noble change" he proclaims to the "incred- himself in the submission to his own will. Hal is ulous world." The war he will wage on France as destructive of innocence as Falstaff is of king- as Henry V, which Shakespeare is at pains to ship. And Welles gives us a strong sense of a present in that play as the God-given and ances- curious moral trait of Falstaff's which several trally determined right of empire, becomes in Shakespearean commentators have pointed out: Chimes at Midnight a totally unmotivated, mad- though innocent, he seeks out the very force willful ly action. On our first sight of Hal after which will destroy him. In this we can see a the of ceremony coronation, he proclaims the quality in Falstaff which precludes calling him war with no reason given but for a sentry's cry a merely comic figure. If we can call Chimes at of "No of king England, if not king of France!" Midnight the tragedy of Falstaff (and we can, In other words, Hal, on accepting responsibility, even though he makes moral decisions only by immediately puts it to blindly destructive ends. instinct), it is tragedy perhaps more in the Welles does not invoke, as Shakespeare does, a Aristotelian than in the Shakespearean sense of for higher imperative Hal's action, presenting the term. Welles's description of Falstaff is pro- it as a solely function of his will. Welles's Hal found: "What is difficult about Falstaff, I be- is as a truly tragic figure as is his father, who lieve, is that he is the greatest conception of a had wrested his kingdom illegitimately from good man, the most completely good man, in all Richard and was then doomed to face unceasing drama. His faults are so small and he makes rebellion. tremendous jokes out of little faults. But his Hal comes into his crown legitimately, by goodness is like bread, like wine . . . And that of and in right birth, Shakespeare's terms is thus was why I lost the comedy. The more I played 18 WELLES

it, the more I felt that I was playing Shake- of youth an accusation not only of Hal's un- speare's good, pure man." natural suppression of youth but of death itself. We do not see in Falstaff an essentially noble Much more than in Shakespeare, the spectacle man of extraordinary gifts who destroys himself of an old man shepherding the revels of a through a grave flaw in his nature which is also saturnine young man strikes us as a bitter defi- the source of his nobility; we see in him some- ance of age and the logic of destiny. Falstaff thing rather more subtle and less absolute-a seeks out Hal because Hal is the least capable, man of extraordinary gifts which destroy him due to his princehood, of casting off responsibili- because he fails to acknowledge their irrecon- ties and the promise of power, and when this cilable conflict with the nature of the world. His ultimate test of his goodness fails, Falstaff fails moral blindness (which is to say his childlike with it. The heroism lies in the disparity between an attribute candor, he is sometimes apt to use the greatness of the purpose and the inadequacy as a ploy) is his only flaw. Much as Othello was of the means. blind to the existence of the kind of power lago When a tragic hero is destroyed, Bradley re- Falstaff is possessed, blind to the possibility that marks, the primary impression is of waste. Hal could his of absolute reject gift love. A. C. Waste is our feeling when Welles, at the end, remarks of Othello that Bradley we share his shows Falstaff's huge coffin being wheeled slow- scorn for the "triumphant fetters of the flesh ly across a barren landscape with only a quies- and the littleness of all the lives that must sur- cent castle breaking the line of the horizon, the vive him." Falstaff we can has a say triumphant narrator telling us of Hal, "a majesty was he of the absoluteness of acceptance the flesh and that both lived and died a pattern in prince- a for spontaneous respect all the lives around hood, a lodestar in honor, and famous to the him. world alway." We know that what the narrator The mention of Iago is more than casual. is saying is literally true (it was written of the as his father has been Just careful to cover the historical Henry V, who had Sir John Oldcastle, of his illegitimacy kingship with actions which Falstaff's prototype, executed for treason), but assert his legitimacy-the vanquishing of inter- we cannot help to sense the tragic irony as we nal rebellion-Hal schools himself in hypocrisy. see the remnants of Hal's humanity being carted From the Welles makes first, clear that Hal's away. His expressions and carriage during the merry-making with Falstaff is fraudulent, both banishment speech convey that mingled a gran- distraction from his impending moral crisis deur and grief-stricken horror that came so and a testing of his ability to withstand the naturally to his father after a lifetime of schem- of temptations instinct. Iago's "I am not what ing, and when he turns away from Falstaff into I am" finds many echoes in Hal, from his first a tableau of banners and shields, he becomes a . . herein will soliloquy (" I imitate the sun, smaller and smaller figure vanishing into the /Who doth the permit base contagious clouds/ endlessly repetitive corridors of history. If we To smother his up beauty from the world"), never sympathize fully with Hal, if we feel, as delivered with Falstaff musing vaguely in the Welles does, that there is something "beady- to background, his final "Presume not that I am eyed and self-regarding" about him even after the I which leaves thing was," Falstaff destitute he becomes king, we never cease to admire him, and uncomprehending. A great deal of the film's even in his tragic folly. pathos and comes from the reversal irony of old Thanks to Keith Baxter's marvellous per- and men's roles. Falstaff's young innocence is a formance-next to John Gielgud's incomparable on Welles's sublimely defiant gesture part. As a Henry IV the finest in a near-perfect cast-Hal man he both Falstaff young played and Richard is dignified and comprehensible even at his III in Five as if to Kings, impart a Jekyll-and- cruellest and most vain. Welles's instincts are Hyde to the character. as an old duplicity Now, acute here, for the unpleasantness of Joseph man, he makes Falstaff's constant protestations K is almost fatal to The Trial, and Hal, who WELLES 19 quite resembles K in his self-righteousness, weary," and Falstaff murmuring, "S'blood, I'm needs a sense of human dignity and compassion as melancholy as a gibbed cat or a lugged bear." to make him a suitable subject of Falstaff's Bells ringing in the distance give funereal attention and to make him fully aware of what punctuation to the very first scenes in the film, he is rejecting when he banishes Falstaff. Hal and motifs of rejection and farewell are domi- fills us with awe in that chilling moment when nant throughout. The battle scene, the cata- he turns from Falstaff and whispers to himself, clysm of destruction at the center of the film, "At the end, try the man," as if reciting a prayer; begins in splendid romantic exuberance and in his sudden childlike humility when his father ends with agonizingly slow, ponderous clouts appears, wraith-like, and demands his crown; from soldiers writhing dully in the mud. Welles and most of all in his powerful, serene silence edits the battle on the principle of "a blow after the battle, when he drops his pot of ale given, a blow received," and the predominant and walks mutely off to follow his destiny. feeling is of a monumental impasse, of incred- Welles creates a mythic finality about Hal when, ible exertion without effect. Falstaff's flesh cutting away from Hotspur resolving to duel finally gets the better of him, and he lies help- him to the death, he shows us a cloud of dust, lessly sprawled in bed as Hal and Poins taunt which rises to reveal Hal standing helmet and him before Doll Tearsheet, his wit his only shield in hand on the battlefield (a copy of reprieve. The king seems chilled and mummified Ford's introduction of John Wayne in Stage- in his huge tomb-like castle. Hal and Hotspur coach, dust rising to show him with rifle in one seem almost inert when they duel in their armor arm and saddle in the other). shells. But Falstaff! Falstaff runs with a breath- Death hangs over the entire film, and the takingly funny agility through the charging gaiety seems desperate. Both Hal's foster father troops (a stroke of genius), and weaves his way and his real father are dying, and he is too through an unheeding, mindless tavern full of preoccupied with his own legendary future to dancers. But he does not disappear into the be of solace to either. His fun takes odd and aimless masses; he seems doomed to stand out vicious forms, as if he were reproaching both awkwardly from the landscape, like a castle. himself, for wasting time, and the butts of his Everything in the film is on the verge of slowing humor, for encouraging him. He wants to see to a standstill. Falstaff "sweat to death" running from the Chimes at Midnight has none of the violent Gad's Hill robbery, wants to expose him as a movements from exhilaration to dejection of monstrous liar, wants to "beat him before his Welles's earlier films; its equipoise reflects an whore." One critic has suggested that in the achieved serenity. Throughout the film, most first of part Henry IV, Hal is killing his patri- bitterly in the strained play-acting between Hal cidal tendencies (by killing Hotspur, his father's and Falstaff in the tavern scene which fore- rival), and in the second part is killing his libi- shadows the climax, the awareness of destruc- his narcissistic do, self-adoration (Falstaff, of tion is present even in moments of "respite." in course), order to prepare himself for the Falstaff battles this awareness throughout; his of assumption kingship. Welles replaces this attempts to ignore it provide the comedy. He sense of "penance" with a sense of vertiginous has none of Kane's guile and worldly ability, self-destruction. Like his father, like Hotspur, and his greatness presents itself as a monstrous like, indeed, Falstaff, Hal has sought precisely jest impossible to ignore but easy to dismiss. the course which will destroy him. Hal is fright- He demands nothing but attention, and offers because is ening he so young and yet seems so all of himself in return. His egocentricity, like old. Welles draws a striking parallel in the feel- his body, is carried past the ridiculous into the of ings Hal and both his "fathers" when he sublime, to the point of melancholia. He fears follows the king's speech on sleep with Hal nothing but death, and reproaches Doll Tear- telling Poins, "Before God, I am exceeding sheet with, "Thou'It forget me when I am 20 REVIEWS gone." It is unlikely that Welles as director or are never superior to Falstaff. He is naked be- actor will achieve again so moving a scene as fore us. Chimes at Midnight is Welles's testa- that of Falstaff's expulsion. With the author's ment. consent we may feel superior to Kane, but we

Reviews

MIDNIGHTCOWBOY in the vilest of circumstances and through the Director: John Schlesinger. Producer: Jerome Hellman. Script vilest of acts. The beautiful and dumb Joe by Waldo Salt from the novel by James Leo Herlihy. Photog- Buck leaves Houston to make his fortune in raphy: Adam Holender. Music: John and Nilsson. Berry UA. New York, where, he believes, hordes of wealthy women have been sexually stranded by the Darling, an earlier movie directed by John town's population of "tootie-fruities" and will Schlesinger, was almost ruined by a profusion gratefully empty their pocketbooks for his serv- of satirical "points" and cheap ironic contrasts ices. His analysis of the situation may not that never added up to a coherent view of the be entirely wrong, but Joe doesn't make it, he's bitchy darling of the title or the society she was not ruthless enough for success: he suffers from climbing through. The film produced the de- being used, as a prostitute is used, for a variety pressing effect that comes from listening to of unusual purposes, his clients are far more some terribly sophisticated person, witty and corrupt than he, and the city grinds him knowing, who can't concentrate his mind on a down. Because he's always been neglected and single line of analysis or attack and settles for taken advantage of, Joe is rather afraid of people; he an easy show of superiority over any material wants companionship but can't get it, and brought to his attention. In Midnight Cowboy offers his body because it's the only way to the central material-derived directly from make contact with anyone-these aspects of James Leo Herlihy's novel-is stronger, simpler, Joe's character are blurred and mostly free of opportunities for moral one- by Schlesinger, despite a mess of flashbacks that are upmanship on the part of film-makers and supposed to bring them out. audience. When Schlesinger relies on his great This buckskinned skill with actors and lets this material play, as ingenue stumbles around he does in the scenes with Dustin Hoffman and in the city of night, completely lost, until he finds a friend and in Ratso Jon Voight alone together, the film is very mov- guide Rizzo, ump- teenth child of an Italian ing, even great. But he doesn't appear to recog- immigrant family from the Bronx and the nize his best moments, since he is always under- complete expression of the cutting them, and this time he has a new New York ethos. In New York a man is no- trouble: as well as the weakness for ironic where if he doesn't have something going for decoration, Schlesinger's style has taken on that him, some interior knowledge of the city's mys- chic brutality, made popular by Lester and tery, a way of surviving its aggression; and which others, is now considered essential in Ratso is all know-how, inside dope, and queer and important English American movies. dishonest skills. But this time skill isn't enough. is a Herlihy's story paradox of innocence-- Like the brilliant decaying city, Ratso is incur- of innocence and health surviving flourishing ably falling apart. As the winter draws on, the REVIEWS two friends decide to go to Florida, which Ratso imagines as a paradise of sunshine and cocoa- nuts, the two fundamentals necessary to sustain life. With his mind now concentrated on raising enough money to get to Florida and save Ratso's health, Joe allows himself to be picked up by an elderly faggot, whom he beats, robs, and nearly kills-at the poor man's invitation. The two get on the bus, chucking New York and their old clothes; but just as they draw into sight of Miami, Ratso dies. In a peculiar way, Joe is the latest version of the prostitute with the heart of gold; he always does what the customer asks. But any MIDNIGHT COWBOY possibility of clich6 is averted by the unusual combination of qualities that Herlihy gives him. He is both sensitive and dumb, vulnerable and directed, and edited. I only wish Schlesinger violent, willing to take advantage and strangely would take his stylistic cues from certain mod- possessed with an earnest desire to make con- ern writers like Hemingway and Babel and tact and give pleasure. One can say of Jon directors like Bufiuel and Jancso, all of whom Voight that he holds all these paradoxes in have worked extensively with brutal or sordid place. He takes this character, so self-absorbed subjects. The narrative styles of these masters, he can think only when looking in the mirror, though various, are precise, restrained, fastid- and registers his increasing pleasure in learning ious. The calm in the style, in relation to the to care for someone else. At no point does he violence of what's going on, sets up an ironic betray the presence of a clever man only appear- situation: these may be disastrous events in the ing to be stupid, as some actors will do un- lives of the characters, but, the manner of tell- consciously, letting us know they feel superior ing implies, they are routine events in the world to the character they are playing; it's one of we inhabit. Although Herlihy's style has no the most cleanly and beautifully possessed roles particular distinction, it belongs roughly in this in recent movies. tradition, and his manner implies that Ratso Waldo Salt's adaptation fills out Ratso, but and Joe are part of a great moral and social dis- not enough. Still, at its best the character has location. a Dickensian richness of gesture and manner, Schlesinger gives us this dislocation, but it's and the familiar pathos of an alert mind miser- all violent, frenzied, unprecedented. Visually, ably trapped in a vile body. Dustin Hoffman the film relies on shock effects piled one on top looks really awful. His right foot is deformed, of another. Flashbacks come crashing in on the his teeth are mouldy and cigaret-stained, and action with rapid cutting, distorted wide-angle when he laughs you don't hear anything. Man- shots, and clangorous sound-and if you haven't nerism and heavy make-up are a great tempta- read Herlihy, you may have no idea what's tion for an actor; if he gives way to them com- going on in them, despite all their portentous pletely, he will settle for best-supporting-actor "expressiveness." Every time the script calls "effectiveness." But Hoffman doesn't settle, he for Joe to have sex with someone, Schlesinger makes it a major role by showing us that Ratso goes berserk. The first encounter, with an aging feels everything that happens to him. blonde, is played for comic grotesqueness. As That as far as I want to go in praising Mid- the couple work out in bed, they fall on and off night Cowboy. Much of it is crudely shot, a remote television control, and commercials, 22 REVIEWS

movies, and a sermon flash on the TV screen-- her nose. If you experienced this cut as I did- but what's the point? It's one of those ideas that not only as a failure of taste and art but as a are supposed to be dazzling even if they don't betrayal-then you may also be wondering if mean anything. Later, when Joe allows a young a sensibility so obsessively eager to demonstrate man to perform fellatio on him in a movie the world's indecency isn't half in love with theater, we see the science fiction movie they what it holds up for our disgust. are watching, and at the appropriate moment -DAVID DENBY a spaceship takes off. Terrible. I don't see how Schlesinger can afford to light all these Roman candles; they almost blind us to his crucial point, which is Joe's feelings during these two exper- iences. When a film-maker wants to shock an audience out of its complacency, he often loses all taste. With the highest motives, he brutalizes EASY us. In case there is an idiot somewhere (where?) RIDER who hasn't understood that New York is sordid, Directed by Dennis Hopper. Produced by Peter Fonda. Script by there are scenes of Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern. Photography: Laszlo Kovacs. meaningless obscenity to Columbia. punish his stupidity: a man lying unattended on the pavement in front of Tiffany's; people Easy Rider is a motorcycle film and also a kind doing nasty to a on a things dog television; of latter-day Western. What makes it remark- woman in a cafeteria herself run- exciting by able, aside from the fact that it contains none ning a rubber mouse over her arms and face of the idiocies of the former genre and few of and then over a little It's true can boy. you those of the latter, is that it is perhaps the see all these in New but when a first things York, feature film to capture successfully the director uses them to fill out the corners of his conflict between the new hippy, "tribal," drug-oriented set and provide atmosphere, he both demon- generation and their opposite numbers in the strates his incapacity to his materials arrange straight world. It is honest, almost always into art and puts the audience in the same con- posi- vincing, beautiful, and engrossing. tion, against its will, as the people who idly The film opens with Wyatt (Peter Fonda, watch a man dying in the street or the enjoy who also produced) and Billy (Dennis Hopper, spectacle of a poodle trussed in a G-string. It's who directed) in Mexico making a purchase amazing how who knew of moviegoers precisely cocaine. In the next scene they are what to think of a film like Mondo Cane selling it to a well-heeled pusher with whom they ren- haven't objected in this case to being treated dezvous under the landing approach at the like a reader of the National Enquirer. Los Angeles airport. The morality of this oper- In the last scene, Joe Buck takes his dead ation is not commented upon, though the back- friend into his arms as the bus into pulls Miami. ground rock band at this point sings "God It's a fine we're moved Damn moment; by the desola- the Pusher." Their new wealth the tion of his his gives two losing only friend, particularly as young men freedom, and we his even a friend and immediately see having caring for someone them riding off on their else has been so It's spectacularly shiny difficult. one of the few motorcycles, Wyatt's embellished with moments of unabashed an emotion in recent films American flag (he calls himself that's "Captain Amer- completely earned-and then Schlesinger, ica" throughout the film). or maybe his editor Hugh Robertson, rather Significantly, the titles appear at this point, than allow this achievement to hold the screen as the two men begin their journey through a until the movie's end, cuts to people gawking landscape familiar to us from many Westerns. at the dead man and to a woman powdering Now the film takes on an epic and episodic REVIEWS 23 quality, the grandeur of the landscape and the but American audiences know where they are freedom of the ride enhanced by Laszlo Kovacs's with an amiable drunk. poetic photography. They stop for an al fresco The atmosphere grows increasingly hostile, lunch with a farmer and his large family, then and in a cafe somewhere in the south, while pick up a hippy hitch-hiker and accompany the teen-age girls giggle and flirt, the local him to his commune. Always the tension is pres- sheriff and his cohorts make loud remarks about ent: motel owners won't rent rooms to them, long hair and fairies. Wyatt, Billy, and George farmers regard them with reserve, Billy is ner- leave without being served. That night, in a vous that the hitch-hiker will find the money brutal but economical scene, the locals come hidden in a piece of plastic tubing in Wyatt's out and beat up the men in their sleeping-bags, gas tank. Casting himself as the suspicious, killing George. paranoid, unkind Billy enables Hopper not only Wyatt and Billy finally reach New Orleans, to escape the holy-hippy syndrome but to get and, clean shaven for the first time, visit the some interesting contrasts of manner and feel- brothel that George had told them of, because ing between the two men. Wyatt is truly cool, "he would have wanted us to." The omens of but Billy has a lot to learn, and in the end his disaster become more intense. The brothel is truculence leads them to disaster. Some farmers reminiscent of a decaying baroque church, and and people along the roadside accept them, in an episode filmed in grainy 16mm, the two the commune-dwellers--at least the girls-- men and their whores have an eeriely bad LSD want them to stay; but Wyatt, clearly the lead- trip in a cemetery. It is a grim yet fitting climax. er, has to push on. It is part of the legendary The ending is bloody, equally grim and fit- American quality of the film that they have to ting. Billy gives the finger to two hicks who are keep moving, heading vaguely for New Orleans trying to scare him with a gun, and they let and the Mardi Gras. him have it. Then, for good measure, or to make As they get closer to their goal, the natives sure that Wyatt doesn't report them, they finish become more and more unfriendly. In a little him off also. As his gaudy bike leaps high into town they spontaneously join the tag-end of a the air, the film is over. parade and are arrested for "parading without In a way, freedom is what Easy Rider is a permit." Their cell-mate George, a drunken about-the craving for freedom and the in- young local aristocrat, turns out surprisingly to ability to use it once it's been attained. The be on their side ("Ah'm a law'r-done a lot of small-towners who hound and imprison Billy work for ACLU"), and in the morning when and Wyatt are, as George says, afraid of the they are all released, they quite easily convince freedom they represent. "Don't ever tell any- him that he, too, wants to go to New Orleans. body they ain't free, 'cause they're gonna get Superbly played by Jack Nicholson, George real busy killin' and maimin' to prove they're rides in his white suit and football helmet be- free," he adds. The Southwestern farmer, who hind Wyatt, swigs from his whiskey bottle, and has a horde of children because his wife is after some protest joins the other two in their Catholic, had aimed for California when he was nightly marijuana-smoking. George is both a young, he says, but "you know how it is. .... type ("What's that? Marijuana? Oh, ah couldn't To Billy and Wyatt, the money stashed in the do that!") and yet a truly original character, gas tank represents freedom. Yet when they and during his brief time on the screen he be- get to the commune, where they could perhaps comes the most lovable of the three, combining live as freely as anywhere, Wyatt feels that he the familiar vices and charms of the old with a has to leave. Later, by the campfire, he says gleeful inclination to try the untried. His role, enigmatically, "We blew it." Whether "it" refers moreover, offers the non-hip viewer someone to a chance for happiness in the commune, or to identify with in the film: Fonda may be slight- something else, isn't quite clear; we are left to ly sinister, and Hopper slightly nasty or uptight, speculate for ourselves whether Hopper intends REVIEWS

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in EASY RIDER

some criticism of the individualist ethic the Easy Rider is a film which will probably be cyclists have lived and will die by. appreciated by many people for the wrong rea- The film's one weakness is the mystical tone sons. The squares will come for the sensational- that overlies some parts of it (was the country ism of pot-smoking and naked hippies; the hip- ever the tolerant place the script imagines?) pies will come to see their stereotypes about and the romantic gloss given to a couple of the cops and southerners reinforced; and everybody episodes, notably the farm lunch and commune who loved A Man and a Woman will come for episodes. The commune-dwellers are too uni- the lapses into facile loveliness of open roads formly clean, friendly, well-housed, and pious in the photography. Nonetheless, Easy Rider is to be true; and the mime troupe which suddenly an important film for our time, one of the few appears is not only implausible but also faintly that shows America as it is today. embarrassing: a bit of Los Angeles "culture" -HARRIET R. POLT worked up for the commune sequence, which seems to have been shot somewhere in the LA hills. Wyatt himself radiates this romantic aura, but Peter Fonda brings the part off so that the TEOREMA character is appealing rather than offensive. kind and to Script and direction: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photography: Giuseppe Lonely, driven, yet generous strang- Russolini. Music: Ennio Morricone. Produced by Franco Rosselli ers, he is a modern variation of the classical and Monolo Bolognini. frontier hero and not so very far from characters Henry Fonda used to play. If instead of a white "The lost are like this, and their scourge to be Stetson he wears a red-white-and-blue crash hel- As I am mine, theirsweating selves; but worse." met, this chiefly indicates a change in forms of -Gerard Manley Hopkins locomotion. More significant of changing times is the fact that his quest leads him to the east Teorema is one of those peculiar, bad, yet instead of to the west, and that violence and original movies which intrigue movie buffs by death come from the longer-established settlers their very impurity. Pasolini's metaphoric images rather than from the Indians, Mexicans, or are often static and uncinematically developed, nouveaux-tribesmen of the commune. but they have a content more memorable than REVIEWS 25 those of more cinematic films like Point Blank, What is not neorealist in Teorema is Paso- in which the abstractly sensuous use of the me- lini's use of the classic past. Seeing the movie is dium is often dazzling but finally empty. Paso- meant to be a religious experience as it was for lini's title, Teorema, underlines his didactic in- the Greeks watching tragedy: the catharsis-or, tentions: to demonstrate poetically the spiritual in Teorema, the purgative sense of alienation- squalor of the bourgeoisie; and, like Peter is to come through one household or family. As Weiss's Marat/Sade, to provoke the audience we experience the anxiety and disorder of the to commitment by showing it alienation. In its bourgeois family, in some of its guises-art, sex, bourgeois family, Teorema has four de Sades and madness-and at the end, in the void of for its images of alienation, and in the family the volcanic desert itself, we are meant to be maid, one saint as its Marat sacred figure. But moved, to feel their anguish, and be purged. Pasolini's sense of commitment is not so simple In so far as Pasolini draws upon the classic past, as Weiss's, and Pasolini's use of Artaud's ideas the sense of tragedy largely does not work. Can makes Teorema a richer kind of failure than a bourgeois family merely by being representa- Marat/Sade. Although Teorema fails, part of it tive have the stature of the House of Atreus? fails strikingly: toward poetry not of words but The fall from bourgeois contentment more images, and a tragedy not of characters but readily evokes laughter than pity or terror, as presences-who, though real and immediate, evidenced by Bellocchio's satire, China Is Near. shake us with their strangeness, and who act (Bellocchio's first film, Fist in the Pocket, out, beyond well-plotted narrative, frightening though more like Teorema in its gothic frenzy, but beautiful dreams. also has humorous overtones, black and Bufiuel- Pasolini's film poetry comes out of neorealism. like.) At the beginning of the film, Pasolini Teorema is shot in a direct, unadorned style, tries to give us a sense of the family's status, if and like past neorealist films, it deals with con- not their stature: we see the children going to temporary reality from a left-wing political van- the best schools, and jerkily edited shots of the tage. No longer, however, is the focus of ad- source of the family wealth, the family factory. vanced Italian film-makers on the working class But to show the family as representatively or the poor, the sympathetic victims of Zavat- affluent is to make them blank and lacking in tini's scripts, but the class from which the direc- mythic resonance. More effective is the neo- tors come, the bourgeoisie, which they may realist device of a media newsman seeking the depict with either an acid detachment, as in workers' reactions to the gift of the family fac- Bellocchio's China Is Near, or a lyric irony, as tory. This interview, which sets the main action in Bertolucci's Before the Revolution. Pasolini of the film back in time, gives us a sense that has tried in part to use his own homosexual the destiny of the bourgeois family is already neurosis as a metaphor for the anomie of the fated: once the visiting god had come, its tragic bourgeoisie: in Teorema, the bourgeois family suffering was ineluctable. Yet whatever force is not a family, but a collection of atoms, each their suffering has for us is Artaud-like, more going on its own anguished path alone and like litany than classic tragedy: Can a bourgeois apart from the others. And the film itself- . . . (father, son, mother, daughter) cope with though it was mainly shot out of doors, naturally, the power of the divine? With the power of the in both sunlight and overcast sky-has, with its divine, a bourgeois . . . (father, son, mother, spareness of dialogue, and slowness of action, a daughter) can not cope. dream-like aura. And in its metaphysical an- The visiting god of Teorema is a cunning its sense guish, of blocked vistas, its mixture of reversal of the traditional Christ-figure return- modern and classical allusions, it recalls de ing to earth: it is the bourgeois family, not Chirico's paintings-with their mannequin fig- "Christ," who this time is "crucified" or alien- ures driven a by rage of restlessness from their ated. Like the God of the Old Testament, at stillness. least as Pasolini has conceived him, the visitor 26 REVIEWS has come, not merely to comfort his chosen wittily brings color back into the film, as if he people, but to shake them up, radically-with were indeed some kind of god. On the other a carnal knowledge of the divine. Aside from hand, the dialogue that greets his presence the maid, the carnal knowledge is as traumatic points to his human shape: in the only bit of for the bourgeois household as it was for Oedi- English in the film, an allusion perhaps to pus to lie with his mother. The trauma does, Stamp's nationality, a guest asks, "Who is that however, arouse the family members from the boy?". The daughter shrugs and answers equiv- false tranquillity of their everyday lives, and ocally, "A boy . . . " Although Stamp is too brings them an increase of consciousness. "Sex" old for the part, he is, I think, meant to suggest is here being used as a metaphor for a concrete, "a boy" or young man as in the archaic Greek transcendental mode of knowing, as "knowing" statues. Further, Pasolini's repeated crotch has traditionally been used as a metaphor for shots of Stamp, if limp and desexualized as the sex. Since the holy is ineffable, it must be con- god's sexual encounters, suggest a homoerotic veyed, as Pasolini has said, beyond language, idealization of the male figure. The son anguish- signs and symbols, concretely, as in sexual ex- edly compares his undeveloped body with perience. The actual handling of the sexual Stamp's and his sense of inadequacy drives him encounters, however, is ritualized and robbed to self-loathing queerness. The god's reading to of sensuousness. For example: while the servant the father from Rimbaud recalls the homoerotic lies on the bed, only half-revived from her sui- relationship of Verlaine and Rimbaud, the fool- cide attempt and looking like Mantegna's Dead ish virgin and the infernal bridegroom. Even Christ, the god lies limply on top of her fully the nymphomania of the wife, played by Silvana clothed, to "resurrect" her, in what seems more Mangano-now stylishly slim, no longer the an extreme case of Caritas or Christian charity voluptuous figure of Bitter Rice-is on the than the physical act of love. The "sex" should homoerotic model of a furtive and restless have had the sensuousness, say of Titian, if not search. Each member of the bourgeois family the sexual ecstasy of Bernini's statues, like The exemplifies Plato's myth of recollection: the Vision of St. Theresa. Or, at the very least, the ideal once having been experienced, each is earthiness of the fat whore, Wanda, in Nights driven to search for what each had concretely if of Cabiria-for though Pasolini uses sex as a too briefly known. As Santayana has said: to metaphor for the holy, sex in itself does not love things as they are is to make a mockery of seem holy to Pasolini. If the bourgeois wife is them. at fault for reducing love to sexuality, Pasolini Although some of Pasolini's images are strik- seemes to me to be at fault in excluding real ing, his clumsy handling of the medium weakens from love. Pasolini sexuality spiritual is more their effectiveness. Even a non-auteur director, effective in conjuring up, Artaud-like, disturbing say W. S. Van Dyke, who shot such films as of and images nymphomania homosexuality, in- San Francisco with peremptory speed, had a tended to shake the up bourgeois audience as sure and graceful flow of images lacking in the visiting god shakes up the bourgeois family. Teorema. This unsureness in the use of the In outward appearance, the visiting god, medium, coupled with an anxiety about com- played by Terence Stamp, has the peculiar municating his points, leads to one of Pasolini's smile, calmness, and lean muscularity of archaic worst faults: an overseriousness of tone. To Greek statues. His sparring with the father, and underline the theme of death-in-life, Pasolini his racing of the family dog also suggest a repeatedly uses excerpts from Mozart's Requiem youthful springiness. With his entrance scene, as heavyhandedly as Hollywood mood music. Pasolini makes two contrasting little jokes. Near To show that they are suffering terribly, Paso- the beginning, for a short stretch the film is in lini has his actors emit absurd little cries of black and white, and Stamp's entrance scene anguish. And to make clear that bourgeois life REVIEWS 27 is a wasteland, Pasolini mechanically inserts The women in the film hide behind some sort repeated shots of the volcanic desert, with Bib- of mask: the daughter, played by Anne Wia- lical quotations as graffiti of doom. The cries of zemski, wears a blank, plain look; the maid, anguish and the shots of the desert are largely Laura Betti, a marvelously impassive face; and unnecessary as preparation for the final images, the wife, Silvana Mangano, her usual movie star nor do they work in themselves as poetic effects. make-up (which Mangano satirizes in Visconti's Whether intentionally or not, simple, mechan- episode, The Witch Burned Alive, in the an- ical repetition in movies is likely to have a comic thology film, The Witches). Whatever identity effect. Repetition of motif is better done musi- a woman may have is hidden, and some may cally, as variations on a theme, as in Antonioni's have no identity at all; which is, I think, ex- Blow Up, a playful and intricate symphony of pressed in the extreme metaphor of the daugh- useless, mock and uncompleted actions: the ter's catatonic state. What Pasolini shows as hero fights for the broken guitar, orders a meal alternatives for women is narrow even for Italian he doesn't stay for, asks a girl to call him back society: withdrawal, promiscuity, or sainthood. and then has nothing to say. Unlike Antonioni, After the visiting god departs, the fates of Pasolini has failed to work out some of his sub- the four members of the bourgeois family are themes and especially the details of the action intercut and counterpointed with that of the with the same sense of musical variation. Even servant who becomes a saint. The blank, white without a more varied use of motifs, Pasolini's walls of the daughter's room where she lies in effects could have been considerably toned a catatonic state contrast sharply with the rich down and better orchestrated. and irregular forms of the village to which the The device of the visiting god enables Paso- servant returns. One can almost touch the un- lini to give a loose structure to the film without even, slanting roofs and the worn walls, with having a detailed narrative, and to emphasize their patches of brick showing through. While the images rather than the story. Directly, the the daughter's scenes are necessarily indoors, god brings to consciousness what is buried in- the maid's are attractively shot outside where, side the characters, fantasy material that would in addition, crowds can form to give us a sense not otherwise be acted out. Other Italian direc- of community. Although the maid, like the tors have used parallel devices: Bertolucci, the daughter, seems at first to be in a comatose "double" in Partner; and Bellocchio, metaphoric state, within her there is not a blankness but epilepsy in Fist in the Pocket. In Teorema, the the old peasant myths that allow her to tran- fantasy material seems less personal in that it is scend herself as an individual. Admittedly, more conventionalized and clearly metaphoric. Pasolini does have a real feeling for landscape A partial exception is the wife's pickup se- and the picturesqueness of rural poverty, but quences, in which Pasolini displays a homo- his sense of the miraculous, and of the power erotic lyrical feeling, as in the shots of a nude of peasant myths, is as over-conventionalized male sleeping, his hands over his genitals like and lifeless as the works of art in most American a Venus of Modesty. It would be wrong to say, Catholic churches (whose taste reflects that of however, that the wife's pickup scenes are the European peasantry who came here, rather merely a masquerade for homosexual encoun- than that of the ruling classes who stayed be- ters. Such reductionism doesn't respect the very hind). What Pasolini is saying may be true- real sensual reality of surfaces, for it it were a my grandmother, of Southern Italian peasant man rather than a woman picking up the young stock, was sustained to a very ripe age by the we men, would not experience the episode in old myths--but, in Teorema, the old myths no the same way. To that extent, then, even these longer have the power of art. pickup scenes are conventionalized. In any case, The maid's last sequence is a foil for the the theme of masquerade is integral to the film. father's, the final images of the film. After hav- 28 : REVIEWS ing risen over the roofs of the village, the used image, and the only one that, in terror if servant-saint, with an unwitting sense of Marx- not in pity, recalls the classic sense of tragedy. ist dialectic, asks to be buried in earth, with her On the whole, however, Pasolini's natural eyes uncovered, near a new housing site. Al- gift may be less for tragedy than for humor. In though the sense of the sacred may be buried Teorema, the most likable sequence is that of within us all, the maid's burial more specifically the struggle of the bourgeois son to be an represents the sense of the sacred buried within artist; and in the otherwise poor anthology film, the working class and peasantry: through the The Witches, only Pasolini's episode, The Earth earth, the eyes look out and tears renew the As Seen from the Moon, with Toto, in the style ground. By contrast, the father wanders in a of silent film comedy, is any good. Pasolini's desert, where no buildings are, dry as volcanic sense of humor seems more complex and gen- ash. The maid is in purgatory; the father, in hell. erous than his sense of tragedy, which is often The final images of the film-the father wan- too mechanical, lacking the manic sense of dis- dering, hairy and naked, alone in a shadow- covery of Bertolucci's Partner. What is good swept desert, screaming-though distinctively about the son's sequence is that even in his an- Pasolini's in style, have their source in both guish, there is something sympathetically spon- Tolstoi and Francis Bacon. In Tolstoi's The taneous and playful-as in that natural act and Death of Ivan Ilych, though Ivan Ilych screams logical extension of abstract expressionist body in agony the last three days of his life, he had gestures in paint. Pasolini, to be sure, disap- achieved an inner peace. Unlike Ivan Ilych, the proves of his lack of seriousness, as reflected in father does not achieve any peace; yet, as evi- the last shot of the sequence in which the boy denced by the gift of the factory to the workers, turns glumly away from a failed drip painting in his dissolution he does attain some sort of on the wall. Still, as the short, skinny, freckled humanity. What we do not get, however, is the son, played by Jose Cruz Soublette, mocks him- feeling of compassion and renewal Tolstoi gives self, there is in his voice real feeling and reson- us; whatever sense of renewal there is in the ance. If, in his lack of the sense of the sacred, maid's sequence does not carry over to this the son can only profane, his profanity is richer one. The force of Pasolini's images is more like in feeling than the anguish of the other bour- that of Bacon's paintings, which Pasolini uses, geois family members. not for though compositional or formal effects Teorema's real importance is as part of a is not a (he painterly film-maker), but for their resurgence of Italian films, marked by this castration-obsessed content. The symbol of cas- tendency to extreme or odd metaphor-Belloc- tration or crucifixion occurs in several of Paso- chio's Fist in the Pocket, Bertolucci's Partner, lini's films: in The Gospel According to St. and Antonioni's Blow-Up. (The rather odd dis- the Matthew, Christ is so prissy and arrogant appearing corpse in Blow-Up, I take to be a he seems to be to asking be crucified; and in memento mori, intended to shake up the plea- the death Accatone, or "crucifixion" of the hero sure-seeking, restless hero, and to give him, as seems merely contrived. In Teorema, the cas- in the final distancing shot, pause). These works tration is image given to us more directly and recall surrealism without actually being surreal- powerfully. As in Bacon's Pope paintings, and ist, for though they have moved a considerable Death Ivan Tolstoi's of Ilych, Pasolini has given way from neorealism, their metaphoric wild- us as Victim not one of Zavattini's poor, but ness is contained within a loose but natural a figure from the exploiting class. Pasolini's frame. Perhaps "neosurrealist" would be a bet- screaming factory-owner father has less to do ter word. However flawed, Teorema suggests with Marx than Freud: the castration of an strongly the possibilities of such a neosurrealist authority figure is more terrifying than one of cinema. And in the best neosurrealist work so the exploited. It is Pasolini's most effectively far, Bertolucci's Partner, which has not been REVIEWS 29

released in the United States at the time of this The story is, however, surprisingly sufficient writing, there is a shadowy lyricism, a poetry to carry the movie. Le Socrate (played by a of both the fantastic and the natural, that is hard, square-faced, gray-haired Pierre Luzan) both uniquely Italian and uniquely cinematic. and Lemay, the mustachioed police inspector -ROBERT CHAPPETTA (R. J. Chauffard) develop not only thematically but comically. Whether indulging in projected nuclear war, rearranging the geology of the earth, pantomiming an existence as circus ani- LE SOCRATE mals, or just lying in the sun, their little char- ades are but also wise and Written and directed by Robert Lapoujade. Photography: Jean- funny, winking, like Jacques Renon. Music: Bernard Palmegiani. New Yorker Films. an existential Laurel and Hardy. In contrast, the picture's love interest is brooding and neu- What is pleasing about Le Socrate is that it rotic. Lemay's daughter Sylvie (Martine Bro- arises not so much out of other films, but, like chard), a pretty but unremarkable girl, has Cocteau's work, out of broader movements of broken up with Adam (Jean-Pierre Sentirer), art in general. As such, Lapoujade is as subver- presumably a stage director, in favor of an sive in form as he is in his of the con- rejection equally unremarkable Pierre (Stephane Fay). ventional screen image, eschewing both conven- Adam is a dark-haired, sunken-eyed, black- tional storytelling and the New Wave habit of turtleneck type who demands his love directly dressing an avant-garde narrative in some more and rudely. Strangely enough we side with him traditional garb (e.g., Band of Outsiders as a rather than Pierre, for the two lovers' self- gangster picture, The Bride Wore Black as sus- absorption seems callous and isolated; they do pense drama, or the Czech Firemen's Ball as a lot of walking in the woods but their attrac- neorealist comedy.) Indeed, construction-wise, tion seems banal; we sense that somehow their Lapoujade film is perhaps closest to pre-Petulia love has left them short-sighted and less self- Lester, being, to stretch an analogy, a ninety- aware, that it is merely a product of the medi- minute, semi-abstract, partially animated exper- ocre world around them. Perhaps it is because imental short, to Lester's ninety-minute TV they are lovers with so little personality beyond commercials. their love; they are, in themselves, boring to out- What there is of story is hardly remarkable, siders. It is logical, then, that Sylvie's lover is a sort of chichi, typically French parable on Le Socrate's downfall. Worried about her father, individuality and philosophy, the police men- she tells him about the pair's seemingly inex- tality, role-playing, and most of the accompany- plicable doings, and it is he who tips the press ing fashionable themes which, perhaps not off to the philosopher, knowing that his ideas without justification, comprise today's intellec- will be destroyed through the exploitation of tual's reservoir of profundity. In outline and on publicity. the surface it like goes something this, calling Sylvie and Pierre do, however, offer Lapou- to mind the pseudo-poetic plotting used in jade an opportunity to carry off one of the more works like or Vertigo Sundays and Cybele: original erotic scenes in recent memory. Instead Policeman tails mysterious person, an unortho- of tumbling nude around a bed for the dox ump- but precious relationship develops between teenth time, our lovers are seen seated at the the outsiders do not two, understand and de- breakfast table, in bathrobes. They rise, em- the Yet the stroy relationship. person tailed here brace, he exposes her breasts and proceeds to is a rather philosopher than a standard pretty bite them. The camera pulls back and he is the girl, relationship is intellectual rather than slipping her panties from under her robe. and our emotional, sorrow is not for stifled love Laughable? Perhaps, but there hasn't been a but for stifled ideas. scene like that since Un Chien Andalou. REVIEWS 29

The relationship with Adam is almost more Small, too, is the kind of fairy-tale quality it tantalizing. Apart from some brief scenes pre- achieves, not only in its story (at times a sort senting their break-up, all we know of them of egg-head Curse of the Cat People), but also comes from some quick flashbacks which are in physical appearance. Buildings look like repeated periodically throughout the picture: doll houses, and even much of the countryside the girl, lying on a stage in a chartreuse leotard has an odd two-dimensional appearance. Apart and tights, performing some strange movements from some footage of police brutality during to Adam's directions; a dog, tied to a pole, demonstrations, little visual reference is made barking and running; the fall of an ocean break- to the outside world; it is a rotogravure, story- er followed by some flying birds. Indeed, long book environment, a landscape filled with na- before the whole is put into a context, the con- ture and comfortable middle-class living, dis- flict between opposing forces of freedom and rupted only by a few misfits, with little else. slavery is evoked, if not exactly stated. Toward One beautiful scene, a variation on Weekend's the end of the film we see the entire rehearsal, rotating barnyard, sums up the lives of this intercut with what is presumably an actual per- mini-world's small inhabitants. The camera formance. The sick-minded Adam is directing begins a continuous pan about the house of the Living Theater in a strange sado-masochistic the police inspector. As it moves, we see, in dance, which men and women in turn ex- through a kind of jump-cut semi-animation, the roles in change portrayals of dominant-submis- figures of the characters as they dress, undress, sive relationships. Clearly, Lapoujade seems to go to bed, get up, eat, shave, read, make love: be a saying, perverse society produces perverse the assortment of diurnal actions that make up and he artists, offers our heroine a choice be- their everyday lives. The fragments of film are tween two equally questionable lovers. The arranged so that the circular movement of the scene is however. more, Its juxtaposition of both camera is carried through, so the continuity of rehearsal and performance is not only kineti- life is suggested, even when fragmented into cally exciting, but gives some feel of the theat- its constituent parts. rical act of creation, Le momen- making Socrate, Such choppy editing abounds in the film, tarily, a kind of musical of the backstage Living and reminds us of Lapoujade's background as Theater, into a few minutes the merging single an animator. When used in this work it is not intertwined thrills of and realiza- experiment so much a separate stylistic device as it is tion. a logical extension of the jump-cut, used for Le Socrate takes in Weekend place country, punctuation rather than attenuation. Continuity that France where the provincial bourgeoisie is aborted, actions are cut into, space is frag- where evil is all that is reigns, contrary to the mented. People pop in for a few frames, then and in given order, where, desperation, people reappear elsewhere dressed differently. Rocks seek freedom by anarchic perversion of estab- move about, sky is pieced together as a series lishment standards. Yet there is nothing in Le of short, jumping camera pans, and as the Socrate to the exotic beauties of comparable milieu changes without a word, time and space Weekend. at Lapoujade's images seem, times, become all the more irrelevant to the people almost the coun- intentionally mundane, seeing in it. The materials of the film are arranged not tryside on its own microcosmic terms, small, so much horizontally, as it were, but vertically, rather than scenic; actions are as of presented not so much according to literary sequence, rather than as questionable significance epic; but in a kind of subliminal relationship to each words are functional rather than Le elegant. other, a mosaic rather than a linear approach Socrate is a small movie-small both as its to film-making. This is not just mere trickery, limited world is small also in its small, simul- for as we become more and more spatially and taneous and out confronting acting the pro- chronologically disoriented, the story becomes fundities of life in terms of tiny games. more and more universal. Just as the landscape REVIEWSC is unreal, so too Lapoujade bends and twists the actions in it to his own fancy. By the end of the film, its characters cannot possibly be confused with anyone recognizable; their identities are too inseparable from their environment. Neither real nor imagined, they are closer to pieces in a Richter-like chess game or figures in a Paul Delvaux landscape than representa- tions of humanity. Indeed, Le Socrate is far more out of Dada and surrealism than it is out of the New Wave, for the impression it leaves is that of a kind of clarity-confusion, of exacting images serving incongrous subject matter, of anarchic freedom LE SOCRATE,by Lapoujade in ignoring the boundaries between the relevant and the arbitrary, the precise and the play- throughout the picture to turn ordinary images ful. in is Surely image it more Magritte than into pleasant surprises. While they evoke no and in tone The Bride Monet, more Stripped belly laughs, it is remarkable how efficiently Bare Her Even than Guernica. by Bachelors, Lapoujade keeps them coming. In one, the cop And while Jean-Jacques Renon has photo- is tailing the philosopher as the latter walks graphed it in the logical, clean-edge Coutard awkwardly down the street, bouncing, one foot manner, the movie is composed with a kind of in the gutter, the other in the sidewalk. The Dada anti-aestheticism. The at first. images jar policeman takes up this odd manner of walking Colors and objects don't balance, but cancel in order to coordinate their footsteps. At one each other out, like dresses on a rack or ads point the film stops, reverses a few frames, runs in a magazine. Like Antonioni, Lapoujade again to the same point only to reverse several paints his landscape, but the result is neither times over in the same manner, as though drib- nor poetic, satisfying, nor reasonable, but dis- bling the figure between two invisible walls. tracting-not in a negative sense, but in the The humor is purely visual, quirky in the best sense that things distract our eyes in real life. manner of the cinematic non-sequitur. Later It is as if the director, in realizing the neat the two are lying in the grass. The camera pans containment the screen achieves, has sought to down Le Socrate, whose feet touch Lemay's open it up by putting back the world's incon- head, then, all in one stroke, pans down Lemay, gruous elements. Paint is smudged around, in whose feet touch Le Socrate's head, and so on. seemingly random colors, pretty, but hardly The normal continuum of space and time is thematically meaningful. Lapoujade gives his suddenly extended. The point is not that they actors strangely made-up faces, American are stretching out in the sun at a particular Indian-like at times, with lines and figures time in a particular place, but the experience drawn in child-like pastels. (Perhaps he intend- itself. ed some reference here to the painting of Greek Even the framing of the individual shots, too statues; it hardly matters, for the effect, unrea- direct to be attractive and too ambiguous to soned as it may seem, is pleasantly defiant of be functional in the traditional manner, works conventional logic.) People are clothed like in an unexpected way. One of the best exam- mannequins in refrigerator ads, too well dressed ples of this occurs in a scene where Sylvie to be quite human, too calculatedly average to rejects Adam. She is sitting outdoors (on the be chic. Almost everything on screen is familiar, left side of the screen) slicing carrots for dinner, but it disturbs, because it is all left askew. as he approaches her (from the right). The Le Socrate is filled with sight gags, employed camera is a questionably characterless mid- 32 REVIEWS

length away from them, and there is some paint nature of visual and mental processes them- pointlessly daubed around the trees behind. selves, avoiding the tendency which threatens The shot works in a way that close-ups of faces to turn film-making into a kind of visual song- or symbolic (maybe) carrots, scenic indulgence writing, an art which, for all its ability to move or nervous cutting could not have. Since at this and be beautiful, becomes dependent on its point in the film we are almost totally unac- conventions in order to define itself. quainted with the two of them, we identify, -GEORGE LELLIS not with the personal tension, but with the uneasiness of the situation as a whole, as evidenced only by the way they look and what they're saying. To focus the situation or even SHAME to give it too much visual significance would (Skammen) Director: Ingmar Bergman. Script: Bergman. Photog- have been self-defeating, for our attention and raphy: Sven Nykvist. United Artists. consciousness would then be drawn to the With Shame returns to the couple themselves, rather than to their place in Bergman territory the work as a whole. It is cinematic indirection of The Seventh Seal, his first international tri- in the cinema: a world of the highest order. umph swept by chronic senseless wars, in which sensitive men are bat- This, first Lapoujade's feature, represents tered and even men cannot both a nice extension of and reaction to where cynical thrive. Von Sydow and movies, particularly the French cinema, have Bj6rnstrand reappear--older now, tireder, still more lost. The of been In a it is the first figure faith in going lately. way post- Seventh the radiant Bibi has Godardian French film to use such Seal, Andersson, techniques vanished; in her place is the earthier Liv Ull- and content for ends quite distinct from the mann, playing a musician who reveals a peas- master's. In its deliberately artificial, dry, her- ant endurance, but whose grace has been de- metic, sometimes even cute it becomes an look, stroyed by the end of the film. alternative to the sombre Utrillo appealing In a way Shame is a Persona cool Matisse and disapointment. cityscapes, interiors, pretty was a subtle work that seemed to Renoir which dazzlingly countrysides provide backdrops open up new, avenues for those bunches of disquieting, intriguing grubby, semi-intellectual, for Bergman, the harsh observational semi-Bohemian characters refining who wander around austerities of The Silence and the other "cham- so much of the French-influenced cinema to- ber films" with a contemporary, self-conscious Even the music is a from day. refreshing change ambiguity of point-of-view, the Delerue and yet incorporating plunk-plunk Legrand scores Bergman's usual richness of nu- which make me want to ears psychological stop up my every ance. Hour of the Wolf, it seems to me, was an time start because they tinkling away-not over-reaching from Persona, a stylistic exten- weren't a from the ex- they refreshing change sion which did not work. The earlier film, cesses of Max Steiner or Maurice at the Jarre whether you interpret it largely "objectively," but because their has time, simplicity lapsed or as a drama entirely within one psyche, or as into affectation. Bernard simple Palmegiani's a projection from Alma's perspective or Elisa- music for Le Socrate in seems this context a bet's, is at any rate a film that can be felt and model of from invention, slipping gracefully considered as a coherent work, and abstract electronic visually sounds to recognizable in- psychologically. (I'm inclined to think it's strumental pop-tunish figures. Alma's film.) But Hour of the Wolf cannot be What is more, however, Le Socrate is a contained within any one coherent point-of- movie that seeks out its own form, a movie view; its structural problem is insoluble. Each which doesn't look for solutions to cinematic character evidently perceives the fantasies of in problems other films, but goes back to the the other, and the camera for its part sees the REVIEWS characters within their fantasies as well as at other times; but the film never lets on how we are seeing all these things. (The device of the diary would only work in a novel). And I find it impossible to argue, like one imperturbable friend, that there's nothing wrong with a film just because it's insane. I think that, in the dis- balances of Hour of the Wolf, Bergmann was paying some of the immense psychological price that must be exacted for working so near the line between sanity and madness; of all directors, he is the most personally brave in the sense of being willing to work with dangerous psychic material-to dredge, as he himself SHAME once said, down into the primitive levels of infancy where we are all frighteningly psy- ment recaptures the territory, executes some chotic. collaborators, and in a terrifying but not blood- Shame returns aearer the surface again; it is thirsty way re-establishes itself, perhaps not for safer, less daring. The photography is almost long. The war has evidently been going on for documentary, with a grey neutral light even in years, and the central characters, both former interiors; none of the strangeness of Persona, or musicians, have retreated to an island for safe- the expressionism of Hour of the Wolf. There ty.) But the idea that the world is hell is hardly are many long takes, and some of them were new for Bergman. Shame chiefly adds military evidently unscripted although carefully plan- and political aspects to the emotional, theologi- ned-a very startling development for Berg- cal, social, and sexual hells of his earlier films. man. In the years since Seventh Seal, a great I have never personally been caught up in deal of excess stylistic baggage has been aban- war or paramilitary actions (except as Berkeley doned. There are no "ideas" in Shame. Except citizens have observed the latter recently) but perhaps for the last shot, the film would make Shame seems bloodcurdlingly effective on this sense without its sound track. Indeed, much of level, and in a way more humanly affecting than what the characters say does not really make the super-terror of The War Game. The swoop- much sense anyway. Bergman has long aban- ing planes, sudden haphazard destruction, and doned the role of the Great Dubber, who used above all the sense of being unable to tell what to put into his characters' mouths important is happening beyond one's immediate sight thoughts about God, life, and the loneliness of range, seem to me a convincing portrait of what man in an inscrutable universe. His characters "small wars" are like for civilians. Only the now nag fiercely at each other; the mild, wishy- drive among the flames has any feel of con- washy husband proves capable of bestial physi- trived "special effects." cal cruelty quite outside the psychological rep- Shame is in fact quite remarkable among war ertoire of The Seventh Seal, where evil was a films, and takes its place among a tiny honor- metaphysical abstraction and Death a symbolic able handful that may be considered genuinely figure in a theatrical black cloak. antiwar. The usual "antiwar" film gains its This is not only a political development. The laurels by including a certain amount of ob- film does take place during a war which is viously senseless gore and destruction. It may vaguely like Vietnam but in a fairly precise even allege conscious or unconscious villainy on Swedish context. (There are invaders with the part of war-makers, like Kubrick's Paths of frightening technology, and guerrillas in the Glory. But the battle scenes prove to have a woods sympathetic to them; the old govern- purposeful choreographic grace and power 34 SREVIEWS lacking in the rest of the movie (or indeed in Thus the power the ending should have had most movies). War may be hell, but it sure is somehow diffused. The boat is adrift, its does give the camera something to photograph! people apparently doomed to starvation. When More subtly, war films almost universally pro- all possibilities of action in the outside world vide an artificial and reassuring orientation to have been blocked or made senseless, human what is happening, both through dramatic de- beings turn inward; they curl and die. The wife vices and dialogue and through the elementary can only recount her dreams. This reaction of tactics of coherent screen movement (especial- humanity to the utterly monstrous, the unbear- ly having one army move to the right and the able, is perhaps what Kurtz in Heart of Dark- other to the left). Whatever the script may say, ness calls "the horror." To Bergman it is the battles on film thus are given visual sense. But shame of modem man. -ERNEST CALLENBACH Shame's war scenes, like the documentary Vietnam footage in The Anderson Platoon, but closer up, never make visual sense. If we found ourselves magically transported, like Keaton's little projectionist, suddenly catapulted into GOODBYE, COLUMBUS Shame, we wouldn't have the faintest idea what Director: Larry Peerce. Producer: Stanley Jaffe. Script: Arnold to do: which way to run, where to hide. We Schulman, based on the novella by Philip Roth. Photography: would be, in other words, in exactly the posi- Gerald Hirschfield. Music: The Association. Paramount. tion of a Vietnamese peasant upon whose vil- You don't have to be to lage the B-52s, too high for the eye to see, Jewish enjoy Goodbye, Columbus it but do have are raining bombs in a carefully computerized (though helps), you to be old to have memories of random pattern. enough strong what it felt like to live the swollen Naturally enough, this aspect of the film is through as a enormously depressing, and doubtless it largely Fabulous Fifties. For it is very specific accounts for the film not proving popular- social document that the film first impresses one-the of a from the though it is also true that it lacks jazzed-up sex story poor Jewish boy scenes. In the long run, it will probably seem Bronx, a forerunner of today's dropouts, who the film's greatest achievement. For there are has a summer romance with an upper-middle- defects in the characterization and plot struc- class girl from Westchester. The differences in ture. The initial relationship between the rather their background turn them on to each other- childish husband and the wholesome wife is Neil is attracted to Brenda largely because of convincing, as is her seduction, in its dolorous the exotic glitter of her nouveau riche world, way; and we may accept the immediate mur- while she is attracted to him because he is derous aftermath as a particularly violent Nor- outside that world and therefore can be used dic crime passionel. (It is a little reminiscent of to bait her snobbish parents. And it is this Virgin Spring.) But thereafter Von Sydow same class difference that ultimately separates seems to have gone berserk, utterly and totally. them-the romance ends when Neil realizes This might have been made emotionally cred- that he can never belong to Brenda's world ible in a film with another tone; but the whole and that she can never escape it. Philip Roth's last part of the film leaves us asking awkward novella has even been read as a fifties-style literal questions that should not have been al- satiric analogue to An American Tragedy or lowed to arise: Why do they decide to return The Great Gatsby. The ethnic humor is really to the presumably even more hazardous main- only incidental; the novella's main achievement land? Why, in the final scene when they drift is its brilliant, exact dissection of affluent Eisen- at sea among the corpses, do all the bodies float hower America. so magically together? And why do the people But Roth published his satire ten years ago; in the boat not rig a sail? what relevance can the film-a fairly faithful 34 SREVIEWS lacking in the rest of the movie (or indeed in Thus the power the ending should have had most movies). War may be hell, but it sure is somehow diffused. The boat is adrift, its does give the camera something to photograph! people apparently doomed to starvation. When More subtly, war films almost universally pro- all possibilities of action in the outside world vide an artificial and reassuring orientation to have been blocked or made senseless, human what is happening, both through dramatic de- beings turn inward; they curl and die. The wife vices and dialogue and through the elementary can only recount her dreams. This reaction of tactics of coherent screen movement (especial- humanity to the utterly monstrous, the unbear- ly having one army move to the right and the able, is perhaps what Kurtz in Heart of Dark- other to the left). Whatever the script may say, ness calls "the horror." To Bergman it is the battles on film thus are given visual sense. But shame of modem man. -ERNEST CALLENBACH Shame's war scenes, like the documentary Vietnam footage in The Anderson Platoon, but closer up, never make visual sense. If we found ourselves magically transported, like Keaton's little projectionist, suddenly catapulted into GOODBYE, COLUMBUS Shame, we wouldn't have the faintest idea what Director: Larry Peerce. Producer: Stanley Jaffe. Script: Arnold to do: which way to run, where to hide. We Schulman, based on the novella by Philip Roth. Photography: would be, in other words, in exactly the posi- Gerald Hirschfield. Music: The Association. Paramount. tion of a Vietnamese peasant upon whose vil- You don't have to be to lage the B-52s, too high for the eye to see, Jewish enjoy Goodbye, Columbus it but do have are raining bombs in a carefully computerized (though helps), you to be old to have memories of random pattern. enough strong what it felt like to live the swollen Naturally enough, this aspect of the film is through as a enormously depressing, and doubtless it largely Fabulous Fifties. For it is very specific accounts for the film not proving popular- social document that the film first impresses one-the of a from the though it is also true that it lacks jazzed-up sex story poor Jewish boy scenes. In the long run, it will probably seem Bronx, a forerunner of today's dropouts, who the film's greatest achievement. For there are has a summer romance with an upper-middle- defects in the characterization and plot struc- class girl from Westchester. The differences in ture. The initial relationship between the rather their background turn them on to each other- childish husband and the wholesome wife is Neil is attracted to Brenda largely because of convincing, as is her seduction, in its dolorous the exotic glitter of her nouveau riche world, way; and we may accept the immediate mur- while she is attracted to him because he is derous aftermath as a particularly violent Nor- outside that world and therefore can be used dic crime passionel. (It is a little reminiscent of to bait her snobbish parents. And it is this Virgin Spring.) But thereafter Von Sydow same class difference that ultimately separates seems to have gone berserk, utterly and totally. them-the romance ends when Neil realizes This might have been made emotionally cred- that he can never belong to Brenda's world ible in a film with another tone; but the whole and that she can never escape it. Philip Roth's last part of the film leaves us asking awkward novella has even been read as a fifties-style literal questions that should not have been al- satiric analogue to An American Tragedy or lowed to arise: Why do they decide to return The Great Gatsby. The ethnic humor is really to the presumably even more hazardous main- only incidental; the novella's main achievement land? Why, in the final scene when they drift is its brilliant, exact dissection of affluent Eisen- at sea among the corpses, do all the bodies float hower America. so magically together? And why do the people But Roth published his satire ten years ago; in the boat not rig a sail? what relevance can the film-a fairly faithful REVIEWS 35

and literal transcription (especially of Roth's is probably somewhat less insular than in the marvelous dialogue)-have today? Eisenhower time of the Patimkins.) To say that the film is is dead. Mantovani and the country-club dance irrelevant because it does not have the look no longer seem to be representative Americana. and sound of "today" is to have a curiously Period is the film's biggest problem, and the narrow attitude toward art. Surely one purpose major stumbling-block to its appreciation. All of art, rarely attempted, is to make us consider of the people who last year hailed The Grad- the influences on our lives, the boundaries of uate for being so "contemporary" are not about a world that once shaped our values and expec- to make the same mistake again. They have tations. Goodbye, Columbus illuminates a seg- read the sociological analyses of The Graduate ment of our common past, ties not quite broken, by E. Z. Friedenberg and Jacob Brackman, scars not quite healed. and they know that Benjamin should have The second recurring criticism of the film talked about the draft and Vietnam and com- also relates to its social satire. Again the same munal sex and LSD; so now they are making people who loved the two-dimensional support- the same demands of Neil and Brenda. I agree ing characters in The Graduate have attacked that it's discouraging that no American film this film for caricaturing the nouveau riche. has yet dealt honestly with the tone and atti- There is some caricaturing in Goodbye, Colum- tudes of contemporary youth, but it seems un- bus, particularly in Michael Meyers's portrait fair that Goodbye, Columbus is getting the of dense, all-American brother Ron, who wash- criticisms that should have been levelled at es out his jockstrap every night, collects Manto- You'reA Big Boy Now and The Graduateand vani and Kostelanetz, and goes into a trance Three in the Attic, for at least this film does not whenever he listens to recorded excerpts of belabor the obvious; all of the "youth" movies his last college basketball game; but Meyers is are but dated, Goodbye, Columbus is the first simply too funny to complain about. (Peerce to examine late-fifties suburban excess with in- reportedly discovered him at a wedding while and sight compassion. The film's only mistake researching the film.) Other heavy touches are is in Roth's updating story; ideally it should less excusable-too much sagging flesh in the have been a period piece, set, like the novella, country club scenes, too many close-ups of food in 1956. But without making apologies for during the Patimkin dinner scenes, too many writer Arnold Schulman and director Larry cute Yiddish inflections from Neil's Bronx aunt it is to Peerce, easy see why they decided and uncle. But for the most part, the film is too against the extraordinarily difficult-and prob- harsh to be called caricature. I think the reason of ably expensive-effort reconstructing the that nobody minded the lampooning in The recent past. They were intelligent enough to Graduate was that it was so good-natured; no the references to keep 1969 to a minimum. In one watching the film could possibly feel that fact, except for some gratuitous "psychedelic" he had anything in common with those comical and one editing confusing discussion of The suburban harpies. Even the straightest, fattest the film Pill, deliberately avoids details that middle-class audiences could laugh would comfortably specify its period. And this was wise. at Benjamin's parents and their friends. But The film would have been much worse if Peerce it's not so easy to chuckle over Mrs. Patimkin and Schulman had tried to insert some refer- in Goodbye, Columbus (except for an occasion- ences to drugs and Vietnam, because then the al cheap moment, like the scene in which she entire would have story collapsed; it would puts on rubber gloves before retiring); she's make no sense at all in a world of SDS and too ugly and recognizable a figure to be con- McLuhan. The only sensible way to "read" descended to. The supercilious rich bitch- Goodbye, Columbus is as an of interpretation mother, brittle, waxy, bleached, jealous of her the fifties zeitgeist. is not to (This suggest, of husband's affection for her daughter, coldly course, that suburbia has but it disappeared, protective of her family's "standing," always on 36 REVIEWS

the verge of hysteria but controlling it-this scene, Neil visits him at his store, and Patimkin is an angry and compelling characterization, presents a side of the Generation Gap not perhaps slightly stylized, but unnerving too. usually acknowledged: "You kids look at us as Simply the disparaging tone she uses to call if we were a bunch of freaks and you were her Negro maid to the dinner table is chilling. something special. You know something? At We almost laugh when her voice changes from your age I felt exactly the same way. Surprise its silky hostess whisper to shriek "Carlotta!" you?" And because Neil responds to this out- but the shriek is such a startling accusation of burst with surprise, and respect too, he seems the contempt with which an assimilated minor- appealingly unfashionable, a giant step ahead ity group treats a still-unassimilated one that of the swinging sixties youth who refuse to be the laughter sticks in our throats. shaken out of their stereotypes of the older Similarly, the long wedding scene has been generation. attacked as gross and vulgar and viciously But it is in the characterization of Brenda exaggerated, which probably means that it that the film gets most profoundly inside its strikes too close to home. On the other hand, satirizable milieu to present a complex, search- maybe this scene does look exaggerated to ing portrait of the victim of affluence. Our first someone who has never attended a Jewish impression is that Brenda has an irreverence wedding. I found the details witty and observ- to match Neil's; she can see the absurdity of ant-the compulsive guzzling of food, fat her parents' conspicuous consumption, and women and little girls waltzing together, the she brazenly flaunts her own sexual liberation bridegroom dancing amiably with his maid, in defiance of her family's puritan smugness. the two uncles from the carpet business mea- What she loves in Neil is his skepticism of her suring the length of the dance floor, women parents' values. Intuitively she identifies him waddling off with centerpieces at the end of with her idealized memories of her own past. the evening. The scene is twisted slightly so For after a nasty and frustrating fight with her that it looks larger-than-life and more appall- mother, she rushes up to their attic, where the ing, but in essence it is truthful. And when Neil furniture they brought with them from the recoils from this ghastly spectacle, we know Bronx-"when we were poor"-is now stored, that he knows, finally, who he is. I suspect that and she demands that Neil make love to her what really bothers people about the film is that there, among the dusty chairs and lamps. She it is completely honest about the fact that this feels she will be refreshed if she can get in is a Jewish milieu; to non-Jews the harshness touch with her roots, and Neil represents a link probably seems like anti-Semitism (even though with the past-he has the honesty and integrity the film was made by Jews). But this honesty, that she associates with poverty, with alien- this willingness to offend is refreshing-again ation. She is using him to try to discover and in comparison to The Graduate, where the mix- test a comparable strength in herself. ture of WASP and vaguely Jewish (though But the attempt is doomed because Brenda never as faces and specified such) mannerisms is too dependent on the values of her family. was unpleasantly evasive. She makes fun of her father and her For that in brother, matter, spite of all its cruelty, but it is clear that she essentially loves them Goodbye, Columbus can be much more com- both for their crudeness. At her brother's wed- than The Graduate passionate too. Mr. Patim- ding she dances with joyful abandon before kin, excellently played by Jack Klugman, is a the guests, and cries guiltily when her father boorish the film bourgeois predator, yet allows takes her aside to congratulate her on her high him a measure of even humanity, more than morals. And when she and Neil sleep together Roth did. His affection for his children is gen- night after night right in her parents' uine, even he can house, though express it only by down the hall from their own bedroom, it is an or offering money clothes. And in one moving interestingly ambiguous gesture-she is shame- REVIEWS 37

lessly attacking their prudishness, but at the Brenda more simply wrong. The film com- same time, like a spoiled child, making sure that plicates both characters. when she violates bourgeois decency, she does At first Ali MacGraw seems almost too in- it from safe inside the family home. It may also telligent and too charming for Brenda, but be that she secretly wants to be caught and gradually we begin to appreciate how those punished. For when she meets Neil outside the qualities strain against the limits of the part home, in a shabby hotel room in Boston, she and enrich it. Her Brenda is witty, alert, pene- is suddenly more frightened and uncomfortable. trating, yet almost simultaneously petty and His poverty and alienation had a certain for- shallow; we see a tentative, unexplored capa- bidden thrill in juxtaposition to her parents' city for feeling and perception smothered by world, but when she must confront them on abundance. She was a somewhat smaller char- their own, she backs off. Once her parents have acter in Roth, less adventurous, more easily discovered the diaphragm that she "acciden- overwhelmed by her wealth. And Neil was less tally" left behind in her drawer, she feels vulnerable and fallible, too close to Roth's own ashamed to bring Neil home again. She cannot spokesman. Richard Benjamin is an enormously free herself of the guilt that traps her in her intelligent actor, and he has a reflective quality parents' comfortable world. that is a rare pleasure to see in an American For her rebellion against the family is really film; we feel he has the brains to understand oedipal rebellion, not an articulate moral re- exactly what is so monstrous about suburban bellion; it is expressed almost wholly in sexual America. But he scoffs at the bourgeois world defiance-a direct enough strike against her with a little too much complacency of his own. mother. But although Brenda's disdain for the He wears a constant wry, superior smile as a materialistic way of life is confused with in- defense against feeling and commitment-and cestuous longings and hostilities, it still con- perhaps to conceal his envy of the Patimkins' tains an inchoate fury. Like so many middle- affluence. Neil is at least sensitive enough to class girls, her only outlet for all of the hostility recognize that he has a problem. In an interest- -personal, sexual, social, moral-that she feels ing scene that was not in the novella, Brenda toward her family but barely understands is an angrily objects to his jokes about her country incongruously fierce competitiveness with her club friends: "You turn down your nose at mother; the oedipal rivalry must bear all of her everything." Neil acknowledges the criticism, muddled resentment against suburbia too, and admitting that he can't locate himself anywhere so it surfaces in inappropriate flashes of venom in his world, neither inside the affluent society and rage. nor in radical opposition to it: "Everything But we care about Brenda just because she looks ridiculous to me." One reason that he is confused, struggling to break free of her needs Brenda is that she finally gives him environment with all the wrong gestures of something to connect with; her directness of protest, but still protesting in the only way feeling seems a meaningful alternative to his that she can. And what makes the film even own aloofness. In some ways Brenda is bolder more disturbing is that Neil is unable and un- than Neil: it is she who goes swimming nude to willing help her. He takes a little too much a few hundred feet from where the country delight in mocking her, her parents and her club dance is going on; Neil would be terrified friends, delivering stern, godlike judgments on of taking that kind of chance. And although their moral failures. There is something un- Roth meant to suggest that this kind of daring pleasantly fastidious and self-righteous about was essentially superficial and hollow, Ali Neil. This limitation was occasionally implied MacGraw's freshness and passion suggest some- between the lines of Roth's novella, but the thing more complicated-in Brenda's sexual film-makers have explored it much more fully. brazenness there is an appetite for life that In the story Neil was more simply right, Neil shies away from. Neil is not adventurous 38 REVIEWS

enough to help her explore her instinctive re- Neil's only natural reflex. It is clear to us- belliousness so that it grows into genuine self- but not to Neil-that Brenda needs help; if knowledge and integrity. He could help her she left the diaphragm deliberately, it was not shake off her parents' values, and at the same out of bitchy connivance but out of fear and time, if he would let her, she could help him desperate confusion. But he is unwilling to overcome his defensiveness and his intellectual acknowledge the confusion of her feelings; he detachment from life. wants an easy explanation and a quick resolu- This intuitive understanding of what they tion. Whether they would ever be able to work can offer to each other gives their scenes to- out the overwhelming problems between them gether great vitality-at least the scenes with is uncertain, but what is most interesting is dialogue. Unfortunately, when he wants to how reluctant Neil is even to try. His lack of create a "visual" romantic scene, Larry Peerce generosity to Brenda is depressing. The film's returns to Marlboro country-slow-motion first impression may be its fifties-style social swimming scenes, soft-focus shots of the lovers satire, but its strongest impression is its pained, riding bicycles through the woods. Peerce has bitter vision of young love-love too weak to not the slightest feeling for cinematic move- compete with Brenda's social conditioning and ment or imagery; the photography and cutting Neil's self-satisfied morality. Peerce is techni- in this film are pretty consistently poor. But cally clumsy, his mise en scene is dated, but to say that Peerce is a poor director is only half Goodbye, Columbus lives because it pricks of the truth; he is a poor director of the re- romantic movie fantasies with an unsparing sources of film, but he is a very fine director of skepticism that is not just timely, but timeless actors (a gift that was intermittently apparent too. -STEPHEN FARBER even in his two forgettable preceding films, One Potato Two Potato and The Incident). Peerce's sensitivity to people pays off in the astonishing rapport that Richard Benjamin and BELLEDE JOUR Ali MacGraw show when they are playing to- Director: Luis Bunuel. Script: Bunuel and Jean-Claude Car- gether. Their love scenes are frank, tender, riere, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel. Photography: witty, passionate, exhilarating. Sacha Vierny. Because the love scenes are so charming, In Belle De Bufiuel again subverts the ultimate failure of their love is all the more reality by creatingJotur, a character whose emotional affecting. The dialogue in the bleak parting isolation makes "everyday life" as remote and scene is Roth's, but the direction and playing fantastic as a dream. One way Bufiuel achieves of the scene once again complicate Roth, and this validation of fantasy is by his choice of an make it difficult to side with Neil against elegant, "traditional," visual style, a neutral Brenda. He is almost certainly right that she camera position, and simple, straightforward must have deliberately-though unconsciously editing. -left the diaphragm at home so that her moth- Bufiuel cuts back and forth between fantasy, er would find it and thus give her an excuse dream, and reality very economically and with- to end the relationship. And yet Neil is quite out self-conscious structural emphasis.* There harsh in this scene, almost relieved to find *Allied Brenda guilty. As he accuses her of betraying Artists, the American distributor, has seen their love, he never once looks at her; he stares fit to equip the print distributed here with italic subtitles for the and dream straight ahead, implacably passing sentence on fantasy sequences. her, and then almost Though Bufiuel does use bells and other sound compulsively picks up her cues to introduce these father's letter to mock it: sequences, italicized sub- "Why does your titles interject an anti-surreal formalism that father all im- capitalize these letters?" Scorn is pedes the free flow of association. REVIEWS are no shock cuts or wildly differing shot lengths. He only uses one dissolve, near the end of the film: a double image of autumn trees moving against the apartment building where S6v6rine and Pierre live. The way the shot is composed it could actually be a straight shot, but it works like a dissolve because it suggests a compound linkage between the autumn woods of Sev6rine's fantasies and the prison flat she seeks to escape. Sacha Vierny's camera establishes a cool middle distance and rarely deviates from it. An occasional long shot is introduced to great effect, such as the carriage shots in the beginning and end, but rarely does the camera come any closer to the actors than a head and shoulders close-up. Even hands and feet are established in a as when we see S6v6rine's hands setting, BELLE DE JOUR nervously stroking a marble table top, or her feet walking up the tacky art-nouveau staircase to Mme. Anais' maison de rendez-vous. This middle-distance camera establishes a cool ob- in S6v6rine's eyes and her guilt feelings drive jectivity which enables Bufiuel to show us erotic her back to masochism. In her final fantasy, dualism without tipping the scales for or against the carriage returns empty and we hear the fantasy or "real life." meowing of cats mingled with the sound of Sound patterns are as revealing as images in bells. Two imagined sounds have merged, and this film. Raymond Durgnat has sugested that we are left with the assumption that Severine of Belle de Jour can be seen as S6v6rine's attempt has moved completely into the world fantasy. to create her own movie. Sounds serve as clues The punning references to cats that recur to S6v6rine's relative states of mind, and by throughout the movie are one way that Bufiuel In her summoning up varying combinations, S6v6rine hints at Severine's sexual fears. fantasies, modulates and varies her own score. cats are whips or fetishes. In the opening scene For instance, in the opening scene where she with the coachman, Severine asks the one with imagines herself and Pierre riding through the a whip not to let the cats loose. In the dream woods in a landau, we hear carriage bells inter- which ends when Pierre and Husson pelt her mixed with the melancholy of a train whistle. with mud she asks if bulls have names like cats This combination of sounds establishes two ("expiation and remorse"). In her fantasy cats are modes of perception: S6v6rine is creating a about the necrophiliac duke, actually synthesis between the (presumed) imagined present, but their role remains veiled. carriage bells and the (presumed) real train Following this line a bit further, Severine's whistle. fantasy about the necrophiliac duke can be The carriage sounds change in the final seen as her attempt to reinstate herself in her scene. When Husson tells Pierre about her life own self-esteem after she had failed at playing Anais' masochistic as a prostitute, Sev6rine retreats to fantasy an aggressive role with Mme. again. With this knowledge Pierre has regained client. This scene is one of the funniest and his moral superiority and with it, the power of saddest that Bufiuel has ever done-full of mar- the doctor's isolating S6v6rine. Thus he becomes "revived" velous touches like happy anticipa- 40 REVIEWS

tory expression as he opens his suitcase full of disaster in the newspaper establishes a link to gadgets, and his impatient "Not yet!" when another childhood fear-that of being buried Charlotte begins to hurry through her accus- alive. To Bufiuel, childhood is a monstrous trap tomed role. and there is nothing romantic to him about When Severine watches Charlotte whip the innocence. doctor she is seeing one of her own masochistic Bufiuel's trapped victims often find that they fantasies being acted out, and the sight repels must fall back upon atavism to become free: her. To compensate, she invents an entirely the sacrifice of the child in Diary of a Cham- passive part for herself in the next fantasy: that bermaid, the repetition ritual at the end of The of a dead child who is nonetheless sexually Exterminating Angel. Sev rine seeks total free- attractive. Her choice of this particular role dom, but to achieve this she invents elaborate combines her needs for erotic role-playing, ex- rituals of humiliation and servitude. piation (the duke invites her to take part in a Bufiuel establishes the relationships inside "religious ceremony"), and punishment (she is the house of Mme. Anais with great care. Mme. thrown out of the chateau when the ceremony Anais, whose cashmere sweaters and comme il is over). faut manners barely conceal a monstrous feral Other punning images exist in temporal suc- possessiveness, commands a nursery-schoolgirl cession and establish narrative connections. The world of treats and punishents. Each customer fire in which Severine burns her panties after brings a special climate of feeling with him, and her first day with Mme. Anais becomes the so the women wait with happy anticipation, dream campfire which cannot warm the soup boredom, or nervous apprehension. Husson Pierre and Husson are cooking, and later had called them "enslaved women," but Ma- crackles in the salon of the necrophiliac duke. thilde and Charlotte are actually commonsense Bufiuel uses literal reality-things photo- working girls who depend on what the day graphed as we know them to exist in three- brings for gratification and reward. They ad- dimensional space rather than juxtaposed into mire Severine's St. Laurent wardrobe, but go atypical relationships-to give an implicit au- about their jobs with no apparent need for her thority to Severine's fantasies. To paraphrase shuttle routes between conscious and uncon- Bazin, the camera creates factual hallucinations. scious experience. Severine places her fantasies in an elaborate Severine is also playing a game with herself romantic world of candlelit chateaux, coaches all through the film, assembling a private col- and footmen, and black-clad figures duelling at lection of image-feeling clusters which make dawn. A fairy-tale world such as this is a fa- more sense to her, logically and erotically, than miliar setting for frightening childhood fanta- her life as the wife of a rich bourgeois doctor in sies, and Bufiuel has long been observing the Gaullist France. The film eventually becomes dark side of childhood. In his movies, as in the SBverine's own surrealist creation, like the unbowdlerized fairy tales of Grimm and Per- game called "le cadavre exquis" which was in- rault, children are often the innocent victims of vented by Breton and his friends in Paris during a particularly nasty fate. Two flashbacks to the twenties. In this game, drawings or poems Severine's own childhood indicate the patterns were created by each participant adding a line of fixation and guilt that she seeks to escape: without seeing what had gone before. The fact in one she is furtively caressed by a heavy- that Severine herself plays the role of an exquis- handed workman, and in the other she turns ite corpse in one of her fantasies is perhaps co- away from a priest offering the communion incidental, but nonetheless interesting. Host. In the bordello, the maid's small daugh- Bufiuel's connection with the early surrealist ter is shown as a potential victim of Mme. movement in Paris is well-known. To the sur- Anais, and Charlotte's reference to the Aberfan realist philosophers, dreams, fantasies, and even REVIEWS 41

madness were considered legitimate escape VIVA AND LOUIS routes from the snares of reality. Automatic A film by Andy Warhol (also known as "Blue Movie" and writing, "exquisite corpse" drawings, frottage, "Fuck"). and even hysterical states were utilized as avenues to the psychic automatism which ex- "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, pressed the unconscious. The first Surrealist just look at the surface: of my paintings and Manifesto hailed Freud for "recovering the films and me, and there I am. There's nothing rights of the imagination". And later on Breton behind it."-From an interview with Gretchen and Aragon were to enthusiastically state that Berg, Cahiers du Cindma in English, May, "hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and 1967. can be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression."* I see no reason not to take Warhol at his word. Severine's is a narrative based on the story His marvelously banal interviews prove the of the and as Belle de logic unconscious, such, point, and when reading them one is struck Jour becomes an surreal work. "We essentially with a certain integrity, a sense that the dif- are all at the of the dream," wrote the mercy ferent parts of him fit perfectly together. To editors of La Revolution Surrealiste, "and we be sure, there's nothing "behind" his emptiness, owe it to ourselves to submit to its in the power the celebrated nullity of works and personality; waking state."t Since Bufiuel made two impor- and with that lucidity that forms his one ad- tant early surrealist films, Le Chien Andalou mirable characteristic, and that appears to and L'Age d'Or, it is that his be hardly surprising denied to many of his Warhol later work should also reveal affinities with enemies, knows surrealism. exactly where to place himself-"I could be forgotten tomorrow." Much of the reaction to However, since the early films, im- Bufiuel's Warhol has been muddled, personal, and agery has become less emblematic and beside poly- the point. People with defensive morphos, and less concerned with conventional respond annoy- ance and or, much worse, surrealist iconography. In Belle de Jour it is indignation desper- the fact that the narrative structure alternates ate attempts to get with it and find something complex and revelatory. My favorite in between fantasy and reality without establish- this genre is the of Battcock ing priorities between them which writing Gregory in provides Film Culture the film's surreal frame of reference. The dead and his anthology, The New American Cinema, his donkeys and truncated hands typical of early particularly ineffable "interpretation" of the emblematic surrealist imagery have been dis- Empire, eight-hour carded in favor of a cinematic narrative which moving-still picture of the Empire State Build- ing "Sound is with expresses surrealism's original iconoclastic spirit. (e.g., dispensed also, and absence -MARGOT S. KERNAN its is consistent with the object photographed, since the Empire State Building does not, qua building, make noise"). No matter how one writes about Warhol, he gets the last laugh. With his recent activities, he has managed to extend the matter *Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, "The Quin- subject quagenary of Hysteria," from La Revolution Sur- of movies beyond permissiveness into the range realiste, No. 11, March 1928. Quoted in Patrick of profitable scandal, make some money, find Waldberg, Surrealism(New York: McGraw-Hill),, employment for his friends, and-what is least 62. p. important to him-gain acceptance in certain tJ. A. Boifford, P. Eluard, R. Vitrac, La Revolution quarters as a leader of the New York avant- No. Surrealiste, 1, December 1924. Quoted in garde. All this has been accomplished without Waldberg, 47. p. producing anything of more than marginal REVIEWS 41

value (although it is work of great interest, a -would be echoed by the widespread mood, curious paradox I'll try to explain), all achieved the national disgust; when there would be an without any more effort than is required by- audience, too careless for art but too sophisti- as he puts it--"staying off the streets and keep- cated for conventional material, that would ing busy." But once you get too excited about accept him cheerfully as their own. any of this and break into print to complain Warhol's works are virtually defined by their about it, Warhol has made a fool of you. That severe withdrawal of effort and conscientious- is why the smartest among those who loathe ness. It's silly to give something that is half him say nothing. put-on the fullness of response implied by the If the New York avant-garde is falling apart, usual essay form; something less formal is in as some have claimed, then its degeneration order, so I offer the following descriptive notes really isn't Warhol's fault. Warhol created the on Viva and Louis: Brillo Box sculpture, but not the sensibility CINEMATIC INNOVATION: Viva and Louis is that made its triumph possible. What he did 130 minutes of film about two of Warhol's was to the final extension on the perform great people who are spending a day together in a modern doctrine that any subject-human or West Side apartment to make a movie-the material-can be aestheticized by an act of one eventually called Viva and Louis. The will. Only in his case the extension amounted dramatic action of the film consists of the two to a nihilist both of the mockery, grand doctrine characters struggling to find enough to say and and of all those insecure about already what do to fill up the time it takes for the film to pass was art and what wasn't. In a similar manner, through the camera. They lie about, make love, he takes the that is inherent in all voyeurism eat, and shower. At one point, they plaintively movies and it as the sole adopts principle of ask if "it's still running," but no one is there his with work, showing you literally everything, to answer, and they are left alone and rather the result that who anyone actually sits through frightened, huddling naked in a bathtub, while his winds in a miserable pictures up position the camera grinds on. Mercifully, Louis farts, to raise to in them. objections anything Perhaps which gives Viva something to react to; soon the one behind thing Warhol's facade is a sly after, the film runs out and the movie ends. It an to the audience malice, impulse punish for could have been an hour shorter or twenty its tolerance or curiosity. hours longer. Even his enemies him credit for com- give Nothing has been cut out of the original mercial shrewdness to (while hastening point footage, as is Warhol's usual practice. Most of out that in all other he is ways appallingly, the action takes place on a large double bed, one Not might say vindictively, stupid). only placed in front of a window facing out to the has he out how to one and figured stay a half Hudson River and the setting sun. Several ahead of art and movie steps fashions, but he shots have been lyrically in silhou- the "composed" judged correctly historical moment when ette, and something a his natural approaching rhythm, or sensibility-that weird mixture of at least a punctuation, has been established bohemia and by sub-lumpen Madison Avenue* alternating long static takes in the classic manner and machine-gun clusters of frames. As usual Warhol does a certain amount *Warhol started as a commercial fashion artist of random of and has recently begun making television commer- spotting elbows, backs, organs, etc., but for the most the characters are cials for Schrafft'sRestaurants-which is a perverse part kept reasonably touch, since those bland eating houses are the in frame. While everyone else making movies is epitome of bourgeois gentility. But then advertising playing with zooms and change-focus shots, has always been the one art in which decadence Warhol diddles with the lens and so and aperture, gentility coexist peacefully. we have several quick rushes from dark to REVIEWS 43

light and then back again, usually in mid-shot. up and there is some horsing around in the In one scene, however, there is a relation of shower that generates far greater warmth than techniques to content that is less arbitrary than the act itself. usual, and what results is a peculiar mixture of Is it pornographic, then? Yes, by most legal the obscene and the sentimental. The scene in definitions. But subjectively, it's not porno- which Viva and Louis screw (from start to graphic. It's lewd, and rather cold, and quite finish) has been deliberately overexposed, and dull, but it has nothing of the solemn, impact- the unfiltered daylight floods in on the sheets, ed, fantasy quality of movie pornography. the air, and the interlocked bodies, changing There's a steady flow of chatter throughout the them all into a heavenly pale blue-copulating film that breaks up any possibility of fantasy. cherubs, lit by Hallmark cards. Louis and Viva are always removing themselves SEX: There was a funny cartoon in The from what they are doing and letting us know Realist a few years ago: a policeman is peering all about their state of mind, so that we never with a flashlight into a parked car; a couple forget that what we are seeing isn't sex, but blinks out at him; the policeman says, "Making "sex," isn't fucking, but "fucking." love? I saw what you were doing, you were SUPERSTARS: Because they concentrate so fucking." Warhol has produced a scene of sex- heavily on physical appearance and modes of ual intercourse that is so cold that the police personal expression, the movies allow us to will have even less doubts than usual about indulge our love of gossip, our endless apprecia- what is going on. Of course love or feeling of tion of "personality"-it's often said that movies any kind is Warhol's greatest enemy, and by give rise to a mystique of personality. We may no stretch of anyone's imagination could Louis live our lives in constant reference to movie and Viva's making it together be called the stars and talk about them in the most familiar result of passion. (How could Warhol's people terms. But as long as they are actors, as long experience "passion"? They do maintain a cer- as they are playing roles and trying to create tain disinterested tenderness for each other, illusions of some sort, there is a measure of though.) It's plain old screwing, and a pretty respect, of reserve, and distance in our relations low-key performance all around. Norman with them. In Warhol's documentaries, how- Mailer has expressed his uneasiness about ac- ever, the people are always playing themselves, tors on on the actually fornicating camera, and because of this and what they do (taking that such grounds deep personal engagement, off all their clothes), the saving distance is dedicated to would creating art, tend to debase annihilated, we are brought disastrously close, and the sexual itself. personal engagement act and we can only respond with the full cruelty I think I understand what he but the means, of personal evaluation. We judge their intelli- doesn't arise The problem just here. act is gence, their imagination, their sexuality, their but not much technically complete, happens; nakedness, and so on. Thus, Playboy magazine, there's no intimacy, no lust, no climax, and no which has been struggling to assimilate Warhol satisfaction. The act hasn't been debased be- somehow or other, has complained several cause it hasn't been fully represented; and it times about Viva's breasts. probably can't be fully represented, thank Responding in the same manner (there's no heaven, because the presence of the camera other way), I can quickly dismiss Louis as not destroys nearly everything that makes sex a terribly bright or interesting. But Viva's anoth- different than or a experience eating taking er story. Ah, Viva . . . With her hair pulled bath. Mailer wanted to protect the sexual act, back she looks like a puzzled ostrich. And the but sex is safe from our in- probably grossest voice! Its normal tone is a majestic low whine, trusions. When the shutter is switched on, we but under provocation it suddenly and rather turn off. Afterwards, Viva and Louis loosen alarmingly modulates up, getting shriller and 44 REVIEWS shriller, until it finally levels off at a plate- ed away. Under his cheerful tutelage, the noth- rattling screech. The whole ensemble is very ingness that has so attracted and appalled the funny, especially when put to use in some great modern artists emerges with a ghastly shaggy dog story about a man in a bar or an innocent smile into the world of the mass media encounter with the Long Island police or the as a positive value. time she called the White House to "complain" "I like being a vacuum; it leaves me alone about something or other. Almost all the inter- to work." -DAVID DENBY est and fun in the movie comes from these stories and from both Viva and Louis talking with hopeless banality about some "public issue" like politics, police, or atomic weapons THE IMMORTALSTORY (Viva: "Didn't I talk about this in another Script and direction: Orson Welles. Photography: Willy Kurant. movie"?), talk which is made more comical in Altura Films. the context of their lounging bare-assed before the camera. If this film were signed by an unknown name like Orson Baddeleys instead of Orson Welles, Viva: You really know a lot of facts. Where I might I I credit its do you know them from? (though hope wouldn't) faults to the director and its virtues to chance Louis: Television. and Isak Dinesen. The on which it's from Anec- "When I read I look at story based, magazines just the dotes is Dinesen: cool and and the I don't read of Destiny, typical pictures words, usually it. artificial, with a continual of There's no to the I suggestion sym- meaning words. just feel bolic that are hard to into focus. the with and look at depths bring shapes my eye, if you The setting is China. Mr. I've the nineteenth-century something long enough, discovered, Clay, an English merchant of immense wealth, Warhol's Cahiers meaning goes away."-From has spent his life surrounded by dry facts. One interview. day he encounters fiction in the shape of a nautical yarn about a sailor who's offered five I said earlier that Warhol's is of no output guineas to impregnate the young and beautiful but interest. This value, great paradox might wife of a wealthy old man. Disturbed by the be resolved the reader of War- by reminding idea of a story with no counterpart in reality, hol's dubious relation to an important aspect Clay determines to make it come true, so that of modern culture. An earlier of generation one sailor at least will tell the story as fact dadaist creators announced its blasphemies instead of fiction. Virginie, the daughter of a and in a series negations of furious manifestos. merchant he ruined and drove to suicide, is Warhol publishes no manifestos. In fact, he hired at a substantial fee to play the wife, and doesn't think of his output as a negation at all: a sailor is picked up at the docks. To them, he's just doing what he knows best and what however, the night turns out to be not at all comes easiest. He's not reacting against any- like a drama directed by Clay but an unfor- thing. Warhol comes after the great expression gettable time of love. Clay dies, and the sailor of negative energy that informs so much of swears that he will never tell anyone the story modern art; he's a barnacle clinging to post- of what happened that night. modern taste. Warhol's career has been made Welles's adaptation is in places oddly care- possible by this immense effort of modern art less. In Dinesen's story, Clay's first encounter and the great clearing away of emotion and with fiction, before the nautical yarn, is a pas- value that resulted from it, but he's mostly un- sage from Isaiah. On the printed page, one is conscious of the pain that accompanied the prepared to gloss over the unlikelihood of Clay's effort and the significance of what's been clear- never having read the Bible. On the screen, 44 REVIEWS shriller, until it finally levels off at a plate- ed away. Under his cheerful tutelage, the noth- rattling screech. The whole ensemble is very ingness that has so attracted and appalled the funny, especially when put to use in some great modern artists emerges with a ghastly shaggy dog story about a man in a bar or an innocent smile into the world of the mass media encounter with the Long Island police or the as a positive value. time she called the White House to "complain" "I like being a vacuum; it leaves me alone about something or other. Almost all the inter- to work." -DAVID DENBY est and fun in the movie comes from these stories and from both Viva and Louis talking with hopeless banality about some "public issue" like politics, police, or atomic weapons THE IMMORTALSTORY (Viva: "Didn't I talk about this in another Script and direction: Orson Welles. Photography: Willy Kurant. movie"?), talk which is made more comical in Altura Films. the context of their lounging bare-assed before the camera. If this film were signed by an unknown name like Orson Baddeleys instead of Orson Welles, Viva: You really know a lot of facts. Where I might I I credit its do you know them from? (though hope wouldn't) faults to the director and its virtues to chance Louis: Television. and Isak Dinesen. The on which it's from Anec- "When I read I look at story based, magazines just the dotes is Dinesen: cool and and the I don't read of Destiny, typical pictures words, usually it. artificial, with a continual of There's no to the I suggestion sym- meaning words. just feel bolic that are hard to into focus. the with and look at depths bring shapes my eye, if you The setting is China. Mr. I've the nineteenth-century something long enough, discovered, Clay, an English merchant of immense wealth, Warhol's Cahiers meaning goes away."-From has spent his life surrounded by dry facts. One interview. day he encounters fiction in the shape of a nautical yarn about a sailor who's offered five I said earlier that Warhol's is of no output guineas to impregnate the young and beautiful but interest. This value, great paradox might wife of a wealthy old man. Disturbed by the be resolved the reader of War- by reminding idea of a story with no counterpart in reality, hol's dubious relation to an important aspect Clay determines to make it come true, so that of modern culture. An earlier of generation one sailor at least will tell the story as fact dadaist creators announced its blasphemies instead of fiction. Virginie, the daughter of a and in a series negations of furious manifestos. merchant he ruined and drove to suicide, is Warhol publishes no manifestos. In fact, he hired at a substantial fee to play the wife, and doesn't think of his output as a negation at all: a sailor is picked up at the docks. To them, he's just doing what he knows best and what however, the night turns out to be not at all comes easiest. He's not reacting against any- like a drama directed by Clay but an unfor- thing. Warhol comes after the great expression gettable time of love. Clay dies, and the sailor of negative energy that informs so much of swears that he will never tell anyone the story modern art; he's a barnacle clinging to post- of what happened that night. modern taste. Warhol's career has been made Welles's adaptation is in places oddly care- possible by this immense effort of modern art less. In Dinesen's story, Clay's first encounter and the great clearing away of emotion and with fiction, before the nautical yarn, is a pas- value that resulted from it, but he's mostly un- sage from Isaiah. On the printed page, one is conscious of the pain that accompanied the prepared to gloss over the unlikelihood of Clay's effort and the significance of what's been clear- never having read the Bible. On the screen, REVIEWS however, where Welles himself makes Clay the incarnation of Victorian-Protestant self-help, the implausibility stares one in the face. When the sailor starts making love to Vir- ginie, she cries out that there's an earthquake. In the story it's explained that an earthquake had taken place when she lost her virginity, years before, so the reader can understand that she is now experiencing an equivalent emotional awakening. But the film omits this explanation, and the spectator can only find Virginie's cry grotesque. Even the technical aspects of the film show signs of carelessness. Roughnesses in the dub- bing and cutting may be due to budgetary and logistical difficulties, but these cannot excuse the over-lighting of the bedroom sequence. When the sailor comes to Virginie he asks her, "Are you seventeen?"-that being his age. She answers "Yes," trusting to the darkness to hide the fact that she is ten years older; and it is because she fears his discovering the truth that she urges him to leave before day-break. In the film, however, the bed is bathed in a white light strong enough to let the sailor read a THE IMMORTAL STORY newspaper's want ads, let alone the maturity of Virginie's face. his chair, speaking slowly and without a spark All these discrepancies blur the impact of of humor. The one exception occurs just after the story as Dinesen wrote it, and if Welles's the sailor has joined Virginie in bed: Clay bursts intention was simply to translate the story into in at the door and excitedly declares, "When cinematic terms he did not achieve a brilliant you two are left to yourselves, and believe that success. But was that his intention? Shakespeare you are following the command of your young had a different purpose from Holinshed; Picas- blood only, you will still be doing nothing, so's portraits cannot be judged by their photo- nothing at all, but what I have willed you to graphic likeness; Brahms's Variations on a do . . . This room, this bed, you yourselves Theme of Haydn rightly sound less like Haydn with this same young hot blood in you-it is than Brahms. all nothing but a story turned, at my word, Of course, these examples can be cited to into reality." (I quote from the story; in justify any adaptation which departs from its Welles's screenplay the phrasing is less liter- original, whether for good or ill. But right from ary.) Then Clay goes back to his chair and the beginning of The Immortal Story I found remains there until he dies. it casting a spell which its weaknesses failed It's dangerously easy to read nonexistent to break. symbolism into films, but I think it's reasonable The clue to the nature of this spell is in the to see Clay, the would-be shaper of reality, as screen figure of Clay. This is not one of the a reflection of Welles the film-maker. Reality restless, ironic monsters of past Welles films-- asserts itself more strongly in films than in any a Kane, Arkadin, or Quinlan. In every scene other artistic medium, and it can frustrate even except one Clay remains immobile, rooted in the most skilled of directors who struggle to 46 I REVIEWS shape it to their vision-just as the sailor, while it. In transferring Dinesen's four main charac- following Clay's script to the letter, frustrates ters to the screen, Welles focuses sharply on his desire to have the nautical yarn told as a the different ways they respond to the imper- true experience. In fact, reality asserts itself so manence of life. The sailor is young, tall, vigor- strongly in films that audiences customarily ous; having to part from Virginie immediately identify actors with the characters they play. after falling in love with her is the first big Even people who think carefully about films blow that life's impermanence has dealt him, often refer to the actor instead of the character, and although he reacts with passion he is not if only because the actor's screen presence is so yet scarred; when last seen in the film, he is much more memorable than the character's striding away as vigorous and confident as name. Thus to most viewers, with or without ever. Virginie accepts the impermanence of life, symbolism, Welles is Clay. being prepared to enjoy whatever comes along There is nothing in the film to show that and pay any necessary price in suffering after- Welles is conscious of this equivalence: he does ward; and Welles conveys this with some extra- not openly dramatize the film-maker's predica- ordinary close-ups of her eyes as she watches ment as Bergman does, say, in The Magician. the sailor undressing: the eyes themselves, calm But the fact that Clay suggests this predica- and unblinking, suggest that she is experienced ment no doubt attracted Welles to Dinesen's in love affairs and their aftermath, while the story in the first place, and it certainly accounts spatial disorientation of the close-ups, each shot for the film's curious fascination. from a different angle, suggests her willingness Seen in this light, the film is no longer a to be moved and excited. Clay's clerk, a Jew somewhat clumsily faithful version of the origi- who has escaped from continual persecution nal story. It is telling a subtly different story and peregrination in Europe, has purged him- of its own. In transforming Dinesen's prose into self of any desire or regret that would expose images and sounds, Welles gives resonance to him to the pain of life's impermanence; his one everything that hints at the impermanence of ambition is to shut himself up in the security of life. his room; and by showing the room from out- Dinesen begins her story with a series of side the window, with yellow lamplight warm- expository paragraphs; Welles draws on these ing the bare white walls for a few moments for his narration but at the same time presents before the clerk lowers the blinds, Welles gives quick-cut scenes of Clay riding through the the audience a physical insight into the clerk's seaport in his carriage and of other merchants withdrawal from life. commenting on him as he passes. The port Clay, of course, is the one character who setting itself, which remains a purely formal tries to battle with the impermanence of life. symbol of impermanence in the story, comes He does have this in common with other to life on the screen with Chinese hurrying to Welles monster-heroes. Unlike them, however, and fro in the background. Dinesen devotes Clay appears to have had no personal experi- two pages to describing Virginie's reactions ence of loss; neither the story nor the film when she enters Clay's house, which had been implies that as a youth he was much different her father's before Clay drove him to ruin, but from the man he grew into, one who recognizes Welles is content with one vivid scene: Vir- nothing but hard facts and cold figures. Only ginie looking at herself in the mirror and whis- in his second childhood does he become aware pering, "The last time I looked in this I was a of life outside his experience; and although he little girl." Welles's choice of incidental music wants to reduce that life to his own limited -gentle, melancholy pieces by Erik Satie- also amplifies the film's sense of time passing. This is a theme in Welles's recurring films,* *See my "Orson Welles: Of Time and Loss," FQ, but once again he creates new variations on Fall 1967. REVIEWS 47 terms, the quixotic force of his obsession lends ment has eluded them just as completely as it grandeur to his undertaking. Perhaps anyone eludes the more conventional people, grubbing who attempts to grasp the impermanence of for money and status as "respectable" members life, whether in art or in life itself, must have of society. The calling has failed them--or per- not only strength and determination but a frame haps they have failed the calling, by never of mind that will seem not quite sane to other taking it seriously enough. Only the escaped people. Welles the actor conveys this simply convict, Cannonier, with his messianic vision of and brilliantly: while his speech and manner society brought to its knees through a concerted are those of a tough, authoritarian old man, program of criminal anarchy, has the strength his face wears a slightly bewildered expression, of purpose the calling demands. The others, for as if Clay is himself astonished at what he is all their ingenuity and daring, remain dilet- doing. And in the scene where Clay appears tantes of crime, motivated by the "secret pleas- at the bedroom door, Welles gives his character ure of the heart" but lacking a purpose beyond a sudden charge of physical and verbal energy, the self to sustain them. as if Clay's bewilderment, now that his plan For them robbery is an anti-social act all right, seems to be nearing fruition, has been swept but one they are driven to for personal reasons away in a burst of creative fury. (Belmondo cheated out of his inheritance, i.e., It is the real-life counterpart of this creative out of his rightful place in society) and out of fury in Welles himself that makes the film so a great need to establish some kind of identity arresting. In The Immortal Story Welles does for themselves. Belmondo speaks of a house as what he wants to do and what he knows how a "thing waiting to be gutted." The sexual over- to do-light up a new facet of the theme of tones are explicit-robbery as a kind of inverse life's impermanence and man's struggle against rape, in which the power of society is forcibly it. The film is neither a flawless gem nor a withdrawn and appropriated to oneself. And, to flawed masterpiece, but it is memorable and go back to the religious analogy for a moment, alive. -WILLIAM JOHNSON it is also a kind of communion, a ritual celebration of a religion of danger, skill and destruction -a communion in which the thief asserts and makes contact with his own aliveness by staking THE THIEFOF PARIS his life on his wits and capabilities and pit- them and the inert material Produced and directed Louis and ting against society by Malle. Script: Malle Jean it so to. What as the Claude Carriere, based on a novel by Georges Darien. Dialogue vainly clings they lack, Daniel Boulanger. Photography: Henri Decae. priest points out, is "self-assurance," the self- sufficiency that would raise their activities from Louis Malle's comedy-drama about the adven- the level of personal vendetta and rebellious tures of a gentleman-thief in turn-of-the-century ego-assertion to that of revolution. Certainly Europe confronts us with a vision of crime as a few movie societies have ever seemed riper for near-religious vocation. Towards the end of the destruction than this one, with its reactionary film, the priest-right after a particularly bril- misers and power-hungry demagogues, its dis- liant performance in which he elegantly hoists torted values, its aimlessness, its lack of human- the mistress of Belmondo's uncle on her own ity and feelings. But how is the thief to effect vengeful petard-turns to Belmondo and re- a cure when he is the one who is suffering most marks (I'm paraphrasing): "All these people acutely these very ailments, when his behavior chasing around after they don't know what-- is a much more desperate but equally self- they're crazy. And I am too. How to cure the regarding attempt to find an individual solution sickness of the heart . . . " And with this he to the same old problems? announces, as it were, the loss of faith, the real- The particular charm of Malle's film is the ef- ization that, after all, redemption and fulfill- ortless way these serious considerations emerge REVIEWS 47 terms, the quixotic force of his obsession lends ment has eluded them just as completely as it grandeur to his undertaking. Perhaps anyone eludes the more conventional people, grubbing who attempts to grasp the impermanence of for money and status as "respectable" members life, whether in art or in life itself, must have of society. The calling has failed them--or per- not only strength and determination but a frame haps they have failed the calling, by never of mind that will seem not quite sane to other taking it seriously enough. Only the escaped people. Welles the actor conveys this simply convict, Cannonier, with his messianic vision of and brilliantly: while his speech and manner society brought to its knees through a concerted are those of a tough, authoritarian old man, program of criminal anarchy, has the strength his face wears a slightly bewildered expression, of purpose the calling demands. The others, for as if Clay is himself astonished at what he is all their ingenuity and daring, remain dilet- doing. And in the scene where Clay appears tantes of crime, motivated by the "secret pleas- at the bedroom door, Welles gives his character ure of the heart" but lacking a purpose beyond a sudden charge of physical and verbal energy, the self to sustain them. as if Clay's bewilderment, now that his plan For them robbery is an anti-social act all right, seems to be nearing fruition, has been swept but one they are driven to for personal reasons away in a burst of creative fury. (Belmondo cheated out of his inheritance, i.e., It is the real-life counterpart of this creative out of his rightful place in society) and out of fury in Welles himself that makes the film so a great need to establish some kind of identity arresting. In The Immortal Story Welles does for themselves. Belmondo speaks of a house as what he wants to do and what he knows how a "thing waiting to be gutted." The sexual over- to do-light up a new facet of the theme of tones are explicit-robbery as a kind of inverse life's impermanence and man's struggle against rape, in which the power of society is forcibly it. The film is neither a flawless gem nor a withdrawn and appropriated to oneself. And, to flawed masterpiece, but it is memorable and go back to the religious analogy for a moment, alive. -WILLIAM JOHNSON it is also a kind of communion, a ritual celebration of a religion of danger, skill and destruction -a communion in which the thief asserts and makes contact with his own aliveness by staking THE THIEFOF PARIS his life on his wits and capabilities and pit- them and the inert material Produced and directed Louis and ting against society by Malle. Script: Malle Jean it so to. What as the Claude Carriere, based on a novel by Georges Darien. Dialogue vainly clings they lack, Daniel Boulanger. Photography: Henri Decae. priest points out, is "self-assurance," the self- sufficiency that would raise their activities from Louis Malle's comedy-drama about the adven- the level of personal vendetta and rebellious tures of a gentleman-thief in turn-of-the-century ego-assertion to that of revolution. Certainly Europe confronts us with a vision of crime as a few movie societies have ever seemed riper for near-religious vocation. Towards the end of the destruction than this one, with its reactionary film, the priest-right after a particularly bril- misers and power-hungry demagogues, its dis- liant performance in which he elegantly hoists torted values, its aimlessness, its lack of human- the mistress of Belmondo's uncle on her own ity and feelings. But how is the thief to effect vengeful petard-turns to Belmondo and re- a cure when he is the one who is suffering most marks (I'm paraphrasing): "All these people acutely these very ailments, when his behavior chasing around after they don't know what-- is a much more desperate but equally self- they're crazy. And I am too. How to cure the regarding attempt to find an individual solution sickness of the heart . . . " And with this he to the same old problems? announces, as it were, the loss of faith, the real- The particular charm of Malle's film is the ef- ization that, after all, redemption and fulfill- ortless way these serious considerations emerge 48 SHORT NOTICES bit by bit from the surface texture of cheerful tifully cool irony at the film's end. Playfully amorality, as the characters stop for a minute manipulating the genre's conventions and audi- to ponder their lack of direction before plung- ence expectations, Malle has his anti-hero get ing back into the preoccupied life of the profes- away with the heist we've been watching him at sional criminal. For the most part the film is throughout the film. Over the garden wall and quite engagingly genial and lighthearted, the down the empty street in the grey autumn thieves going about their business of depriv- morning, his two leather bags bulging with loot; ing the obviously unworthy with great aplomb then the wait at the suburban station for the thanks to a witty, cheeky and inventive script commuter train-no hitches. As he starts to get (Carriere is Etaix's collaborator, Boulanger on the train an obliging porter insists on helping wrote de Broca's successes). Adding consider- him with his bags-aha, now it comes! But it ably to the festive air is one of the most gracious doesn't. The curtain gently closes over a long- evocations of a period that I've seen. Yet Malle held shot of Belmondo sitting at the train win- seldom lets these ample opportunities for pure dow as if in reverie, the brightening countryside entertainment take over the film for long-as he streaming by in a blur. His face is blank with did for example in Viva Maria, to my mind a the blankness of vague disappointment and dis- much more frivolous and also less entertaining satisfaction, the prospect of a psychic let-down film about ostensibly more serious revolution- stretching indefinitely into the future. Some- aries. how, we may guess, the secret happiness, the For one thing, Belmondo's relationships have sense of life lived at the extreme, has gone out a casual, uncommitted edge to them that contin- of his act of communion. And with the exhilara- ually points back to the opportunist amorality tion of the acte gratuit gradually replaced by lying just beneath the surface of his character, the tedium of a predictable routine from which and on to the gaping alienation at its center. He even random danger seems largely absent, he is truly a man alone, searching within himself comes more than ever to resemble the bourgeois and through his more and more compulsively he so despises. Portrait of a man on the verge asserted role as social outcast and antagonist of early middle age, imperceptibly succumbing for a sense of identity he will never find. The to a sickness unto death.-TONY REIF pathos of his situation is suggested with beau-

Short Notices

In Coogan's Bluff Don Siegel completes the diptych big town. The first scenes set the primitivistpremise. of the urban world he began in Madigan. Its New In the desert an Indian wearing only a loincloth York street scenes are located a few blocks away waits with a rifle. Coogan (Eastwood) stalks from the scene of Madigan's beginning in Spanish him. In the background blares music reminicent Harlem. For studio scenes it uses the same street set; of the bravura accompaniment to Sergio Leone's it takes place in the same New York precinct with Italian westerns. Siegel is having fun with the the same precinct house; and it uses many of the conventions of Eastwood's role as the anti-hero of same actors. But where Madigan was basically Leone westerns. Tough, taciturn, and direct, he realistic, took pains to complicate moral issues, and takes "every lousy one-man job that comes along" imitated in its inconclusive ending the slice of life in a world marked with naturalness, easy sensual- bleeding on both sides, Coogan's Bluff is an en- ity, and simple duties-political, social, and sexual. closed fantasy about the purer world that exists Then, for obscure reasons, he is sent to New York outside the city and about the conflicts that result to extradite a prisoner. In New York Coogan is when Clint Eastwood meets the corruptionsof the faced by the urban world in all its bureaucracy, 48 SHORT NOTICES bit by bit from the surface texture of cheerful tifully cool irony at the film's end. Playfully amorality, as the characters stop for a minute manipulating the genre's conventions and audi- to ponder their lack of direction before plung- ence expectations, Malle has his anti-hero get ing back into the preoccupied life of the profes- away with the heist we've been watching him at sional criminal. For the most part the film is throughout the film. Over the garden wall and quite engagingly genial and lighthearted, the down the empty street in the grey autumn thieves going about their business of depriv- morning, his two leather bags bulging with loot; ing the obviously unworthy with great aplomb then the wait at the suburban station for the thanks to a witty, cheeky and inventive script commuter train-no hitches. As he starts to get (Carriere is Etaix's collaborator, Boulanger on the train an obliging porter insists on helping wrote de Broca's successes). Adding consider- him with his bags-aha, now it comes! But it ably to the festive air is one of the most gracious doesn't. The curtain gently closes over a long- evocations of a period that I've seen. Yet Malle held shot of Belmondo sitting at the train win- seldom lets these ample opportunities for pure dow as if in reverie, the brightening countryside entertainment take over the film for long-as he streaming by in a blur. His face is blank with did for example in Viva Maria, to my mind a the blankness of vague disappointment and dis- much more frivolous and also less entertaining satisfaction, the prospect of a psychic let-down film about ostensibly more serious revolution- stretching indefinitely into the future. Some- aries. how, we may guess, the secret happiness, the For one thing, Belmondo's relationships have sense of life lived at the extreme, has gone out a casual, uncommitted edge to them that contin- of his act of communion. And with the exhilara- ually points back to the opportunist amorality tion of the acte gratuit gradually replaced by lying just beneath the surface of his character, the tedium of a predictable routine from which and on to the gaping alienation at its center. He even random danger seems largely absent, he is truly a man alone, searching within himself comes more than ever to resemble the bourgeois and through his more and more compulsively he so despises. Portrait of a man on the verge asserted role as social outcast and antagonist of early middle age, imperceptibly succumbing for a sense of identity he will never find. The to a sickness unto death.-TONY REIF pathos of his situation is suggested with beau-

Short Notices

jargon and confusion. The blunt natural man from How to Make It bears amazing similarities to John the West blunders full tilt into the elaborate city Huston's 1941 masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon. systems of police stake-outs, perverse sex, psycho- Roger Corman'scast of odd, fascinating characters logical explanation, and dirty hotels. Leaving be- spends practically the whole picture in pursuit of hind the good-hearted sexuality of the western an elusive, inestimably valuable treasure: a set of girl he finds instead the social worker who lives five-pound-note plates swiped from the British amid filing cabinets and mishmash Freudianisms. mint. There's a delightful Sydney Greenstreet sur- In place of the crusty old Western sheriff he finds rogate in Victor Buono's fat Turk, a nice bit of the New York detective lieutenant (Lee J. Cobb) casting since Buono is reported to be a fan of Green- who continually makes fun of Coogan's individ- street; almost accordingly, Cormansucceeds in get- ualism. All is distorted by the prism of Coogan's ting a subtler, better disciplined performance from pastoral innocence. The hippy scenes are gleefully Buono than has any previous director, including depraved. And Coogan's frontier Americanisms Robert Aldrich who discovered him. Whereas the continually collide with outraged Negroes, sinister director's late father had a stunning guest star and ap- Jews, ironic Irishmen. Coogan has to bluff pearance in Falcon, Corman himself for because crops up the city isn't a place for directness. He one wordless scene here. The hero, Vic Morrow, finally gets his prisoner through a pseudo horse is an A pupil of the Bogart school, and his dia- chase in the more (with motorcycles) comfortable logue (by Bob Barash) is fittingly tough and sharp, medieval greenness of the Cloisters, where the as is that of all the characters. And, when in and the grass the river and the trees enable him to end the beautiful heroine (Mary Astor there, function the again. Just before he takes off with the continually underrated Suzanne Pleshette here) from the Pan Am prisoner heliport the social worker turns out to be the film's arch villain and murderess, girlfriend, dressed in an orange-red coordinated the hero, though he maintains a certain indistinct wardrobe with to boots up her navel, runs up to yen for her, unhesitatingly turns her over to the kiss him goodbye. Then the camera goes up with local constabulary (in this Cesar the case, Romero). helicopter until she becomes an orange-red bug But you don't recognize the film as a rehash of -another of the spot artificiality amid the greater un- Huston-Hammett original until much later, after naturalnessof the But it's a city. mistake to think you've had time to mull it over. While you're ac- this is New York. It's New York really as Coogan tually watching it, you're constantly engrossed by sees it, a caricature of urban with a twisted life, Corman's dashing visual style and steady pacing (for the that re- geography example, title) wryly of narrative events. Indeed, this film, apparently flects the authenticity of And it Madigan. finally an independent effort of Corman's own company is not even Coogan's New York, but the New York shot on location in Monaco and that the man Turkey, constitutes city imagines is seen by the unspoiled a return to the clean, hard, economical of child from the West. style his Siegel's acute sense of genre earliest American International efforts, about the shows that the anti-hero, for all his cynicism, rep- best of which was Machine Gun Kelly. There's a resents an and the ideal, world of bandits, cut- remnant of the more baroque Vincent Price period throats, and rustlers is yet a purer world than the in a scene of Miss Pleshette's massive Turkishwres- jungle cities. But his insight is complex enough to tler hireling Milton Reid (of Hammer horrorfilms) poke fun at the impulse behind the ideal even literally crushing the head of the plate thief's while it exploresits nature. The great directorsplay daughter (Charlotte Rampling) between his hands. with their audiences, alternately exploiting and ex- We see the blood streaming down between her posing the generic assumptionsthe audience brings bared breasts. This garishly perverse scene is so to the movie experience. Unlike Robert Aldrich in out of continuity with the rest of the film that it Lylah Clare, Siegel never descends into the seems to have been stuck in at the last moment; empty why should so unarguable a as Corman and reflexive invocation of the act of making a stylist in- clude such a scene? thinking about it gives me movie. Coogan's Bluff is a wise man's game, with Just a headache. This scene aside, the film is of good, a controlled caricature,irresponsible wit, and sense of that a hearty B-picture stock, hardly anything you'd play only practiced and intelligent direc- nominate as a work of but a above- tor can art, consistently bring off.-LEo BRAUDY average programmer.-DAN BATES sometimes I "Che, just don't understand you." The Inquiring Nuns. Whether you like this film is de- -JACK PALANCE (as Fidel) pendent upon how interested you are in people. SHORT NOTICES 49

The Inquiring Nuns (Intermedia Foundation, Chi- pains to make clear that what we see is the public cago) is simply a feature-length series of filmed image of each of the people encountered. Two interviews: two nuns go about asking people nuns do the interviewing-formal figures that to whether they are happy. Film-makers Gerry Te- most of us are symbols rather than human beings. maner and Gordon Quinn have turned in a fine The interviews take place in public areas (on a technical job and have had remarkable luck with downtown street, in front of a church on Sunday, both questioners and questionees. So completely in front of a supermarket,in an art gallery). The have they achieved their aim of totally objective middle class (white, but in one painful sequence film-making that one's responses to the film are black) provides the subjects for the interviews. really responses to the people interviewed, and The intrusionof directorand microphoneare visible one's evaluation of it gets all mixed up with whether more than once, reminding the audience of the one liked or didn't like this or that person. For some artificial situation in which these subjects find the film may be too long, but that will be because themselves. No documentary of which I am aware they are not held as I was by the image of human has been made with a greater consciousnessof the beings with their public faces on. Others are sus- presence of the camera, and in none has this pres- picious of the criteria used in selection and editing ence been used so perfectly for what it is: a thing (most of those interviewed said that they were that makes people act as they would wish others happy, which seemed strange to the college audi- to see them, and not a mechanism with which to ence with whom I saw it). Temaner and Quinn say reveal its subjects' secret souls. This then, is docu- that their only standards were those of time and mentary without the lies of fiction. A film that does repetition and that they have done no violence, no more than it can do. It is quiet, simple, artless. even in montage, to what their subjects did or said. It does not crash down on the viewer like a bolt The simplicity and directness of the film add sub- from the blue. In fact, I should suppose that many stance to this claim. Throughout, the camera is people will be bored to death by it. Many people focused on the inquirers and those they accost. are bored by reality-and many more than that are One cannot detect even the shadow of an "edi- bored by other human beings. The Inquiring Nuns torial" comment. The film abounds in small mo- is all about other human beings and about nothing ments of humor or revelation-but these are all else. -WILLIAMf ROUTT supplied by the characters themselves. They are real moments: not fictionalizedor stage-managedin LastSummer is Frank Perry's best film by far, a re- the cutting room. A vast beast of a man turns out freshingly unconventional and alert dissection of to be a soft-spoken and cultured mathematician, an appealing quartet of young people drawn to- a professor lectures on the sociology of happiness, gether for the summer on Fire Island. For about a man confesses his love with great consciousness the first hour the conversations are exceptionally of the irrevocability of that confession now that it well-written (by Eleanor Perry) and performed; has been filmed, and one nice woman thanks the in the best sense, they seem overheard, not com- nuns for asking her whether she was happy. No posed. The three beautiful teenagers, Sandy, Peter, encounter lacks its interest. But because the beau- and Dan, are carefully distinguished without sacri- ties and the agonies of this film are those of real ficing a persuasive sense of the very special social people one hesitates to put one's own-possibly milieu-affluent, enervated broken homes-that links libelous-interpretation on their actions. Each view- them. When a homely, more serious girl named er must himself decide who is comic and who Rhoda tries to join the group, the film grows more tragic, who has won and who has been defeated. poignant. Rhoda is a sharply observed character- The Inquiring Nuns is the closest thing to a "pure" a sensitive, lonely girl who wants desperately to documentary-that is, to a truly nonfictionalized belong but cannot refrain from asking questions film-that I have ever seen. To reach this most that are too disturbing for the others to tolerate. illusive of all cinematic goals, Temaner and Quinn She is irresistibly touching, but I especially like started off with Jean Rouch's question. But, unlike the unsentimentalityof the characterization.Much Rouch, they never let the interaction of questioner of the time she speaks with a moralistic, even prig- and questioned go beyond the public realm and into gish solemnity that is ludicrous but believable; the the private. Chroniqued'un Etd seemed to be saying dialogue shows a shrewd understanding of the that people will reveal their private selves to the awkwardness of the adolescent intellectual. What camera. Temaner and Quinn attempt nothing of is most gratifying about Last Summer is that its such doubtful validity. Instead they are at great portrait of adolescence has universality as well as SHORT NOTICES topicality; it is one of the few youth films that tries to encompass more than contemporaryfads, cap- turing the exuberance, the clannishness, the innocent lustfulness, the nastiness of teenagers with rare sympathy and economy. But the film lurches out of Perry's control-not because it is rambling and episodic, but because Perry feels nervous about that haphazardness and tries to build to a more dramatic resolution. Some sensational plot twists are contrived-the quartet abandoning a Puerto Rican computer date to a group of toughs (this ruins an otherwise accurately painful sequence of the teenagers playing mercilesslywith a man whom set before him. But now that blacks are more ag- they can see only as a sterotype), then Dan's brutal gressive and noisily proud of their blackness, they rape of Rhoda while Peter and Sandy hold her expect their screen heroes to follow suit. The Lost down-that give an unpleasantly schematic quality Man, in which Poitier is a hip-talking militant in to the film's conclusion. I am predisposed in favor a Philadelphia ghetto, is his answer to the critics of any movie today that says something against who have been complaining that he can't play any- young people, but this lurid finale says it with a thing but upstanding, turn-the-other-cheekblacks. shrillness that is simply false to the characteriza- The critics were right, because he is a bust as a tions established earlier. The small cruelties that shady black. In a sequence apparently designed young people can perform so casually and unthink- to shut up his critics, he strolls down a filthy street, ingly are very skillfully and convincingly delineated sidestepping garbage and smiling at the ragged in the first half of the film, but to make us accept black children. Poitier, however, is too aristocratic so grotesque and deliberate a cruelty as the rape to be at home in a grimy ghetto. Hip talk, which is of Rhoda, the whole film would have had to be ill-suited to the non-hip, does not become him. As much less naturalistic, much more bizarre. Until a leader in a mysterious militant organization, he the script betrays them, the performancesby Bar- mastermindsa big holdup, which backfires,forcing bara Hershey, Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison, him to kill a man before he can escape. Though and especially Cathy Burns (as Rhoda) are superb. he is an outlaw, he is more saintly than cold- Perry deserves credit for these performances, and blooded. One cannot think too harshly of a man also for a more restrained, less pretentious visual who steals from the Establishment to feed and style than he usually provides. He is still a basically clothe destitute black families. Thus the film never clumsy and obvious film-maker, but the dialogue takes its political side seriously; it remains only a and performancesmore than compensate this time; thriller, with writer-directorRobert Alan Aurthur in addition, Gerald Hirschfield'sphotography is so creating some tense moments during the cops' beautiful-and for a change, pertinently beautiful hectic hunt for the fleeing bandit. One of the many (many scenes are bathed in a dazzling, slightly un- times that he stoops to schmaltz and sensationalism natural white light that effectively implies the in- is in the sketchily developed romance between sularity of the lives of these golden children)- Poitier and the daughter (Joanna Shimkus) of a that it hides a multitude of Perry's sins. white liberal lawyer. If Poitier is supposedly such -STEPHEN FARBER a staunch militant, why is he paired with a white TheLost Man. Sidney Poitier films are subtle sermons girl? Early in the film there is a hint of an affair to blacks on how to make it in a white world-be between them, but it comes as a surprise when flawless and have the white attitude, and survival she abandons her rich father to hit the trail with is a cinch. Until last year's mostly black and mostly a black fugitive whom she doesn't seem to know corny For The Love Of Ivy, he was always the very well. Her role is skimpy, implausible, and un- black in a field of whites. In recent years, he has convincingly acted. They end up like Bonnie and been a pal to needy nuns, wooed a wealthy white Clyde, and Aurthur does all that he can to get us coed away from her parents, made angels out of to symphasize with the dead lovers-like having a classroom of English hooligans, and made asses the camera slowly pan over their bloody, dramati- out of Mississippi bigots. Heavily armed with vir- cally intertwined bodies. All that is missing is a tues and unburdened by faults, he slithers un- soundtrack voice fervently crooning, "There's a scathed through any obstacles that screenwriters place for us . . ."-DENNISHUNT SHORT NOTICES topicality; it is one of the few youth films that tries to encompass more than contemporaryfads, cap- turing the exuberance, the clannishness, the innocent lustfulness, the nastiness of teenagers with rare sympathy and economy. But the film lurches out of Perry's control-not because it is rambling and episodic, but because Perry feels nervous about that haphazardness and tries to build to a more dramatic resolution. Some sensational plot twists are contrived-the quartet abandoning a Puerto Rican computer date to a group of toughs (this ruins an otherwise accurately painful sequence of the teenagers playing mercilesslywith a man whom set before him. But now that blacks are more ag- they can see only as a sterotype), then Dan's brutal gressive and noisily proud of their blackness, they rape of Rhoda while Peter and Sandy hold her expect their screen heroes to follow suit. The Lost down-that give an unpleasantly schematic quality Man, in which Poitier is a hip-talking militant in to the film's conclusion. I am predisposed in favor a Philadelphia ghetto, is his answer to the critics of any movie today that says something against who have been complaining that he can't play any- young people, but this lurid finale says it with a thing but upstanding, turn-the-other-cheekblacks. shrillness that is simply false to the characteriza- The critics were right, because he is a bust as a tions established earlier. The small cruelties that shady black. In a sequence apparently designed young people can perform so casually and unthink- to shut up his critics, he strolls down a filthy street, ingly are very skillfully and convincingly delineated sidestepping garbage and smiling at the ragged in the first half of the film, but to make us accept black children. Poitier, however, is too aristocratic so grotesque and deliberate a cruelty as the rape to be at home in a grimy ghetto. Hip talk, which is of Rhoda, the whole film would have had to be ill-suited to the non-hip, does not become him. As much less naturalistic, much more bizarre. Until a leader in a mysterious militant organization, he the script betrays them, the performancesby Bar- mastermindsa big holdup, which backfires,forcing bara Hershey, Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison, him to kill a man before he can escape. Though and especially Cathy Burns (as Rhoda) are superb. he is an outlaw, he is more saintly than cold- Perry deserves credit for these performances, and blooded. One cannot think too harshly of a man also for a more restrained, less pretentious visual who steals from the Establishment to feed and style than he usually provides. He is still a basically clothe destitute black families. Thus the film never clumsy and obvious film-maker, but the dialogue takes its political side seriously; it remains only a and performancesmore than compensate this time; thriller, with writer-directorRobert Alan Aurthur in addition, Gerald Hirschfield'sphotography is so creating some tense moments during the cops' beautiful-and for a change, pertinently beautiful hectic hunt for the fleeing bandit. One of the many (many scenes are bathed in a dazzling, slightly un- times that he stoops to schmaltz and sensationalism natural white light that effectively implies the in- is in the sketchily developed romance between sularity of the lives of these golden children)- Poitier and the daughter (Joanna Shimkus) of a that it hides a multitude of Perry's sins. white liberal lawyer. If Poitier is supposedly such -STEPHEN FARBER a staunch militant, why is he paired with a white TheLost Man. Sidney Poitier films are subtle sermons girl? Early in the film there is a hint of an affair to blacks on how to make it in a white world-be between them, but it comes as a surprise when flawless and have the white attitude, and survival she abandons her rich father to hit the trail with is a cinch. Until last year's mostly black and mostly a black fugitive whom she doesn't seem to know corny For The Love Of Ivy, he was always the very well. Her role is skimpy, implausible, and un- black in a field of whites. In recent years, he has convincingly acted. They end up like Bonnie and been a pal to needy nuns, wooed a wealthy white Clyde, and Aurthur does all that he can to get us coed away from her parents, made angels out of to symphasize with the dead lovers-like having a classroom of English hooligans, and made asses the camera slowly pan over their bloody, dramati- out of Mississippi bigots. Heavily armed with vir- cally intertwined bodies. All that is missing is a tues and unburdened by faults, he slithers un- soundtrack voice fervently crooning, "There's a scathed through any obstacles that screenwriters place for us . . ."-DENNISHUNT 52 : SHORT NOTICES

Monterey Pop is basically a simple divertissement: the subsequent death of its director, Sparr, 57, a film substitute for attending a big music festival after a plane crash while scouting locations for his -glimpses of the major performers (climaxed with next Schenck production. From Variety one learns a driving and very well photographed and edited that Sparr had made "scores of telepix," including Ravi Shankar piece) and the picturesque people two 1957 and 1958 "Maverick"episodes for which who grace such affairs. But the major significance he received Emmy nominations. The snuffing out of the film lies in proving once again that a film of a career that can justly be tagged no more-but shot in 16mm and then blown up for 35mm distribu- no less-than "promising"carries with it a peculiar tion has no problems in playing theater circuits. frustrationin the face of the increasing Hollywood Both definition and color rendition in Monterey proliferation of hacks.-DAN BATES Pop are perfectly satisfactory to its intended audience (pretty much anyone under 30-which also The Night of the Following Day, a genuinely peculiar happens to be the majoraudience for all films these and original film by Hubert Cornfield,sneaked into days). Indeed probably the only audience which New York a few months ago with all the welcome might find fault with it would be union camera- of a snake at a garden party. Not even the presence men. The lesson of this film, as of Cassavetes's in it of Marlon Brando merited attention. The re- immensely successful Faces and the Maysles broth- viewers dismissed it as a sadistic, ineptly plotted ers' Salesman, is that 16mm is here to stay as a kidnap film. It is nothing of the sort. It is a dream method of making feature films.-E. C. film, in particularthe dream of a sexy, mini-skirted, not very bright young lady of about twenty; her More Dead Than Alive. One hardly expects attempted dream is a kidnap fantasy, conceived while she is profundity from a Clint Walker Western produced on a plane flying to Paris. We do not learn until by Aubrey Schenck, but that's what you get here. the end that what we have been watching is a Indeed, pretensions aside, this is one of the best dream, but this is not a gimmick ending, or a last- B-Westerns since Budd Boetticher quit directing minute excuse, but rather the key to the film's Randolph Scott. For character development and entire conception. In the girl's erotic fantasy she is intricacy of narrative construction, it renders note- kidnapped by Brando who, in a blond wig, looks worthy the heretofore unheard names of Robert like the Brandoin The Young Lions and sounds like Sparr (director) and George Schenck (scenarist). the Brando of The Wild One and On the Water- Sparr gets from Vincent Price his most rounded front. The element of self-parody allows Brando to characterization since Sam Fuller's old Baron of give a broad, vivid performance. The girl also in- Arizona. Price is a two-bit Wild West Show boss cludes in her dream a seamy character played by who gives Walker, a convicted killer out on parole, Richard Boone-a sex maniac who rapes the dream- his one steady job. The direction isn't flawless: er, Boone also works with an element of self- Price's eventual death at the hands of a young parody in character and performance; he comes trick artist (Paul Hampton) who is both Walker's off as an aging, sinister, comic-grotesque Paladin. rival and fan is done slow motion a*la Penn and The exchanges between Brando and Boone are Peckinpah, needless gimmickry since violence and first-rateexamples of macabre humor. A stewardess its effects do not seem to be this otherwise aston- (Rita Moreno) is transformed into Brando's girl- ishingly erudite little Western's central point. That, friend who gets jealous because she thinks Brando rather, is perhaps the inability to ever atone really is fooling around with the girl. The kidnappers, for past sins: the hand carrying the gun that will then, fulfill and flatter the dreamer's subliminal ultimately do in Walker to our shock for one of desires and vanities. That this is a dream explains those sins (one of the murders for which Walker the use of kidnapping film cliches: the familiar was originally sent to prison was of the father of motivations of the kidnappers, their inevitable his ultimate killer) is as inevitably forward-press- falling out, the complicated machinations for ex- ing as that truckload of toilets in Lonely Are the tortion of the ransom, the last-minute panic. As Brave. Of course, the film is a sleeper and is likely director, Cornfield has not used the dream frame- to remain so: while large in relative scope, it is work as an easy opportunity for flashy cinematic small in advertising and distribution. Excepting hijinks: no psychedelic or pop-art colors and fancy Andrew Sarris, I know of no "big" reviewer who editing. Instead, the details are close to the surface has acknowledged it. While nothing great, it is texture of reality, with a few things just a shade sufficiently accomplished to warrant recognition. off: Rita Moreno sniffs drugs through a dollar bill, Sadly, any notice paid it must take into account a policeman maddeningly and improbably keeps SHORT NOTICES 53 reappearing as if the dreamer can't get rid of him, more than a single assured opinion about any social the sense of time and place is not always continu- fact that falls within its purview. Cheers to Tina ous. Especially subtle is the dreamer's progressive and Lester Pine, who wrote the screenplay. Alan loss of control. There is an increasing sense of Arkin is also quite good, but I feel badly about his chaos, of everything going haywire, and the stan- being in the film at all. He's the only one who dard expectations of the genre are upset: the girl's could do such an impersonation,and with his mar- father is killed (which shouldn't happen), the velous energy and sense of detail he's the next best policeman is killed. At the end, everyone is dead thing to a real Puerto Rican actor-which was except Brando and the dreamer. Cornfield con- exactly what was needed. With a Puerto Rican actor tinues here the interest in dreams which he ex- in the part, Rodriguez'sscheme to pass off his sons pressed in Pressure Point, another vastly under- as Cuban refugees would probably have been rated film. Hopefully, he will be given further played straight for its desperation and craziness; opportunities to use film as a medium for the ex- with Arkin there, one has the feeling that everyone ploration of the geography of the dream world. could relax and take the project less seriously, and And hopefully, his film will untimately receive the Rodriguez's attempted hoax-played for laughs, attention it deserves.-FOSTERHIRSCH most of them feeble-comes out Wacky and Lov- able, something out of I Love Lucy or Gilligan's Popi is a comedy that gets something of the life of Island.-DAVID DENBY Puerto Rican Harlem onto the screen, and does it without the protective falsification of previous La Prisonniere. While researching La Prisonniere, liberal movies about poor families. Alan Arkin, as Henri-Georges Clouzot discovered that in Paris Avram Rodriguez (more on that later), hits his kids alone there were several thousand men who (like when angry, makes love with his girl friend while Stan, one of the movie's protagonists) satisfy their the kids wait outside, tricks the welfare depart- perverse sexual needs by photographing nubile ment, and schemes to give his kids away-which is young women in submissive poses. He takes things fairly commonplace among Puerto Rican families a step further by making Stan (Laurent Terzieff) and isn't regarded as anything like the moral dis- a hip art dealer anxious to establish an "art super- aster that most of the audience is likely to consider market" whose assembly lines will dispense shim- it. ArthurHiller's direction of the street scenes pro- mering metal constructs,kinetic sculptures, colored duces the suggestion that for two young boys the blocks, and scintillating trompe-l'oeil designs-chic, ghetto is a dangerous but rather good place to perishable objects for the masses. As he sees it, in grow up: the clutter of discarded furniture on the a world whose artworks are no different from its sidewalks, which to us looks like garbage and which clothes, decors, cars, or windowshades, why haggle has middle-class audiences clucking and sighing, over the concept of "meaning" or expect any? appears to the boys as an entertaining series of Clouzot's peering camera, besides turning these obstacles and variations on the terrain; the mass artifacts into hard, glittering movie images, subtly of people-overcrowding to us-opens up the pos- uses extreme close-ups and fast cutting to translate sibilities of encounter and exchange; and the vio- trees, traffic,scenery, people into semi-op montages lence, something terrifying and unprecedented if that visually state the salient qualities of his char- ever we experience it, is accepted as an ultimate acters' lives. Stan lures his existence into" twilight but hardly arbitraryexpression of personality,some- a pretty, plumpish film editor called Josee (Eliza- thing you take and give back. Of course the movie beth Wiener), the mistress of one of his customers. adopts the point of view of "us," all the while it Jos6e seems the very model of liberated woman, is expressing these things. As us, as an American, but Stan obliges her to face her capacity and eager- Rodriguez exercises his right to live for and through ness for perversion. Soon she participates in his his sons, which means getting them out of the photographic sessions. In the movie's best scene, ghetto somehow. East Harlem is the negation of Stan's camera pores over a sweating, wriggling being an American precisely because it closes off hired girl while the aroused Josee watches until, the future of his children. When his scheme fails, mortified by her pleasure, she flees. She is "la and all three return home at the end of the movie, prisonniere" of the bourgeois mentality, which to his defeat is experienced by his sons as a victory; Stan and doubtless to Clouzot as well means a they want to live there. This kind of thing may pathological obsession with cleanliness born of a seem very elementary, but you don't often see an refusal to acknowledge the impulses of the flesh. American movie that allows the audience to hold However, the director fails to link art (or pseudo- SHORT NOTICES 53 reappearing as if the dreamer can't get rid of him, more than a single assured opinion about any social the sense of time and place is not always continu- fact that falls within its purview. Cheers to Tina ous. Especially subtle is the dreamer's progressive and Lester Pine, who wrote the screenplay. Alan loss of control. There is an increasing sense of Arkin is also quite good, but I feel badly about his chaos, of everything going haywire, and the stan- being in the film at all. He's the only one who dard expectations of the genre are upset: the girl's could do such an impersonation,and with his mar- father is killed (which shouldn't happen), the velous energy and sense of detail he's the next best policeman is killed. At the end, everyone is dead thing to a real Puerto Rican actor-which was except Brando and the dreamer. Cornfield con- exactly what was needed. With a Puerto Rican actor tinues here the interest in dreams which he ex- in the part, Rodriguez'sscheme to pass off his sons pressed in Pressure Point, another vastly under- as Cuban refugees would probably have been rated film. Hopefully, he will be given further played straight for its desperation and craziness; opportunities to use film as a medium for the ex- with Arkin there, one has the feeling that everyone ploration of the geography of the dream world. could relax and take the project less seriously, and And hopefully, his film will untimately receive the Rodriguez's attempted hoax-played for laughs, attention it deserves.-FOSTERHIRSCH most of them feeble-comes out Wacky and Lov- able, something out of I Love Lucy or Gilligan's Popi is a comedy that gets something of the life of Island.-DAVID DENBY Puerto Rican Harlem onto the screen, and does it without the protective falsification of previous La Prisonniere. While researching La Prisonniere, liberal movies about poor families. Alan Arkin, as Henri-Georges Clouzot discovered that in Paris Avram Rodriguez (more on that later), hits his kids alone there were several thousand men who (like when angry, makes love with his girl friend while Stan, one of the movie's protagonists) satisfy their the kids wait outside, tricks the welfare depart- perverse sexual needs by photographing nubile ment, and schemes to give his kids away-which is young women in submissive poses. He takes things fairly commonplace among Puerto Rican families a step further by making Stan (Laurent Terzieff) and isn't regarded as anything like the moral dis- a hip art dealer anxious to establish an "art super- aster that most of the audience is likely to consider market" whose assembly lines will dispense shim- it. ArthurHiller's direction of the street scenes pro- mering metal constructs,kinetic sculptures, colored duces the suggestion that for two young boys the blocks, and scintillating trompe-l'oeil designs-chic, ghetto is a dangerous but rather good place to perishable objects for the masses. As he sees it, in grow up: the clutter of discarded furniture on the a world whose artworks are no different from its sidewalks, which to us looks like garbage and which clothes, decors, cars, or windowshades, why haggle has middle-class audiences clucking and sighing, over the concept of "meaning" or expect any? appears to the boys as an entertaining series of Clouzot's peering camera, besides turning these obstacles and variations on the terrain; the mass artifacts into hard, glittering movie images, subtly of people-overcrowding to us-opens up the pos- uses extreme close-ups and fast cutting to translate sibilities of encounter and exchange; and the vio- trees, traffic,scenery, people into semi-op montages lence, something terrifying and unprecedented if that visually state the salient qualities of his char- ever we experience it, is accepted as an ultimate acters' lives. Stan lures his existence into" twilight but hardly arbitraryexpression of personality,some- a pretty, plumpish film editor called Josee (Eliza- thing you take and give back. Of course the movie beth Wiener), the mistress of one of his customers. adopts the point of view of "us," all the while it Jos6e seems the very model of liberated woman, is expressing these things. As us, as an American, but Stan obliges her to face her capacity and eager- Rodriguez exercises his right to live for and through ness for perversion. Soon she participates in his his sons, which means getting them out of the photographic sessions. In the movie's best scene, ghetto somehow. East Harlem is the negation of Stan's camera pores over a sweating, wriggling being an American precisely because it closes off hired girl while the aroused Josee watches until, the future of his children. When his scheme fails, mortified by her pleasure, she flees. She is "la and all three return home at the end of the movie, prisonniere" of the bourgeois mentality, which to his defeat is experienced by his sons as a victory; Stan and doubtless to Clouzot as well means a they want to live there. This kind of thing may pathological obsession with cleanliness born of a seem very elementary, but you don't often see an refusal to acknowledge the impulses of the flesh. American movie that allows the audience to hold However, the director fails to link art (or pseudo- SHORT NOTICES 53 reappearing as if the dreamer can't get rid of him, more than a single assured opinion about any social the sense of time and place is not always continu- fact that falls within its purview. Cheers to Tina ous. Especially subtle is the dreamer's progressive and Lester Pine, who wrote the screenplay. Alan loss of control. There is an increasing sense of Arkin is also quite good, but I feel badly about his chaos, of everything going haywire, and the stan- being in the film at all. He's the only one who dard expectations of the genre are upset: the girl's could do such an impersonation,and with his mar- father is killed (which shouldn't happen), the velous energy and sense of detail he's the next best policeman is killed. At the end, everyone is dead thing to a real Puerto Rican actor-which was except Brando and the dreamer. Cornfield con- exactly what was needed. With a Puerto Rican actor tinues here the interest in dreams which he ex- in the part, Rodriguez'sscheme to pass off his sons pressed in Pressure Point, another vastly under- as Cuban refugees would probably have been rated film. Hopefully, he will be given further played straight for its desperation and craziness; opportunities to use film as a medium for the ex- with Arkin there, one has the feeling that everyone ploration of the geography of the dream world. could relax and take the project less seriously, and And hopefully, his film will untimately receive the Rodriguez's attempted hoax-played for laughs, attention it deserves.-FOSTERHIRSCH most of them feeble-comes out Wacky and Lov- able, something out of I Love Lucy or Gilligan's Popi is a comedy that gets something of the life of Island.-DAVID DENBY Puerto Rican Harlem onto the screen, and does it without the protective falsification of previous La Prisonniere. While researching La Prisonniere, liberal movies about poor families. Alan Arkin, as Henri-Georges Clouzot discovered that in Paris Avram Rodriguez (more on that later), hits his kids alone there were several thousand men who (like when angry, makes love with his girl friend while Stan, one of the movie's protagonists) satisfy their the kids wait outside, tricks the welfare depart- perverse sexual needs by photographing nubile ment, and schemes to give his kids away-which is young women in submissive poses. He takes things fairly commonplace among Puerto Rican families a step further by making Stan (Laurent Terzieff) and isn't regarded as anything like the moral dis- a hip art dealer anxious to establish an "art super- aster that most of the audience is likely to consider market" whose assembly lines will dispense shim- it. ArthurHiller's direction of the street scenes pro- mering metal constructs,kinetic sculptures, colored duces the suggestion that for two young boys the blocks, and scintillating trompe-l'oeil designs-chic, ghetto is a dangerous but rather good place to perishable objects for the masses. As he sees it, in grow up: the clutter of discarded furniture on the a world whose artworks are no different from its sidewalks, which to us looks like garbage and which clothes, decors, cars, or windowshades, why haggle has middle-class audiences clucking and sighing, over the concept of "meaning" or expect any? appears to the boys as an entertaining series of Clouzot's peering camera, besides turning these obstacles and variations on the terrain; the mass artifacts into hard, glittering movie images, subtly of people-overcrowding to us-opens up the pos- uses extreme close-ups and fast cutting to translate sibilities of encounter and exchange; and the vio- trees, traffic,scenery, people into semi-op montages lence, something terrifying and unprecedented if that visually state the salient qualities of his char- ever we experience it, is accepted as an ultimate acters' lives. Stan lures his existence into" twilight but hardly arbitraryexpression of personality,some- a pretty, plumpish film editor called Josee (Eliza- thing you take and give back. Of course the movie beth Wiener), the mistress of one of his customers. adopts the point of view of "us," all the while it Jos6e seems the very model of liberated woman, is expressing these things. As us, as an American, but Stan obliges her to face her capacity and eager- Rodriguez exercises his right to live for and through ness for perversion. Soon she participates in his his sons, which means getting them out of the photographic sessions. In the movie's best scene, ghetto somehow. East Harlem is the negation of Stan's camera pores over a sweating, wriggling being an American precisely because it closes off hired girl while the aroused Josee watches until, the future of his children. When his scheme fails, mortified by her pleasure, she flees. She is "la and all three return home at the end of the movie, prisonniere" of the bourgeois mentality, which to his defeat is experienced by his sons as a victory; Stan and doubtless to Clouzot as well means a they want to live there. This kind of thing may pathological obsession with cleanliness born of a seem very elementary, but you don't often see an refusal to acknowledge the impulses of the flesh. American movie that allows the audience to hold However, the director fails to link art (or pseudo- 54 SHORT NOTICES

art) to perversion; Stan might just as well be a bittered marriage (which flash in a la The Pawn- truck driver and Josee a fishwife. His dialogue is broker), and intense emotional demands. The re- often trite; Stan's constant statements about "en- sulting tensions come to a riskily dramatic birth- joying shame" are less than startling insights, and and-death climax, salvaged by an astringentending. his speech about accepting his own evil gives off Korty's latest film is again gorgeously photo- a whiff of diluted Genet. Then, after revealing graphed, and its portrait of the couple's world is Stan's impotence and Jos&e'shopes of curing it a gentle, personal one, far from the over-wrought during their subsequent love idyll, he falls back fictions of Hollywood's youth scramble.-E. C. on oysters and surf, as well as one of those sex scenes featuring indistinguishable bits of undulat- Salesman, a direct-cinema film about a group of ing skin. With an irony all the more deadly for Bible salesmen and their small-town, lower-middle- being unintentional, Clouzot, after having charged class Catholic customers, poses anew the basic photographic copulation with eroticism, makes the problem of cindma-viritd and similar nonfiction real thing feeble indeed. Finally, Josee drives her films: what is the "organizing principle"? Every car in front of a train and ends up in the hospital. film, dramatic or documentary, has some dialectic In a climactic sequence that supposedly captures which governs implicitly why things happen or are her comatose thoughts, a blizzard of colors, shapes, shown in the manner and order we see them. Even fractured flashbacks, and fantasies hits us. This mundane documentaries, if they are any good, scattershot ending confirms Clouzot's seduction by prove to have some subterraneanlogic of this sort, the tinsel that he is ostensibly analyzing. Despite and so do poetic non-narrativefilms. Direct cinema, his compassion and style, he does not really know with its reluctance to meddle with its subjects any what he is doing, or how to do it (two ways of more than is absolutely necessary to get them to saying the same thing).--MICHAEL DEMPSEY let you film them, is at the mercy of the subjects to provide a logic for the picture. Thus, for instance, Ring of Bright Water. As you may know, it's about a a film about a draft-eligible youth would have an London clerk who throws over his job, moves to inherent logic. Either he will escape to Canada, or the coast of Scotland, and devotes his life to raising go to jail, or go into the army, or perhaps get re- otters. It's a strange sort of idyll, one made possible jected. A film following his activities, even appar- by the hero's being played out at the age of forty; ently trivial ones, would thus have a distinct shape absolutely nothing is made of the fact that both and tension; above all, it would have an ending. hero and heroine respond rather more generously But the Maysles in their choices of subject have to their pets than to each other. I guess it's for consistently dared to go against this principle: in children, or at least for those who won't be im- Salesman, as in their portraits of Nehru and Joe patient with its remarkablelaziness and irresolution. Levine, they have chosen to deal with people who Such movies don't come along every day, and this are simply going on from day to day. The Bible one is decent and quiet and damned pretty; not salesmen are wearing their lives away on the tread- much happens, but Wolfgang Suchnitsky'scamera mill, as they have done for years and will go on takes in a fine lot of Hebrides air, sea, rock, and doing. After 15 minutes of Salesman, thus, we are heather.-DAVIDDENBY well aware of the basic lines of force in their lives; and because of the lack of tension inherent in the Riverrunis John Korty's contemporaryvariation on material, we settle down to assimilate the film as one of the oldest of triangles-but one little dealt information rather than drama-we take it as an with in film or fiction (perhaps because of its touch- educational experience. And the film is informative, iness): the rivalry of father and lover for a beau- if you have never watched salesmen operate, never tiful girl. The girl is pregnant, and the young attended sales meetings, etc. This means that the couple have left the turmoil of Berkeley for the only organizing principle operative is curiosity. But misty green countryside north of San Francisco- an intellectual concern like curiosity is not a very living on a coastal sheep ranch and trying to get strong one when confronted with a 90-minute film; back to fundamental realities. Their style is the we're not that curious about salesmen, even if we quiet, serious, honest style of most middleclass take them to be typical of the American condition, youth trying to cope with a corrupt world. Into fellow-sufferers in the wasteland, or whatnot. No their delicately balanced life intrudes the girl's doubt sensing this, the Maysles and editor Charlotte merchant-seaman father, bringing with him out- Zwerin have attempted to provide some dramatic of-date ideas and prejudices, memories of an em- line by centering on Paul, the most cynical of the SHORT NOTICES 55 group, who is supposed at the end of the film to prisoners where they expect to find an even dozen. drop out of the game. But this is largely artifac- Is the odd man, Piccoli, the apolitical innocent he tual within Salesman itself-even if Paul did, as claims to be, or a planted agent? While the com- reported, drop Bibles and go into roofing-and-siding pany makes its lightning strikes and hairbreadth after the film was shot. (Roofing-and-siding, by the escapes down country lanes, the thirteenth man way, hardly constitutes a noble advance for him: is carried along. The problem of what to do with it's an even worse racket than Bibles.) Although him becomes the means of exposing a whole politi- the ending is appalling enough, with Paul's Irish cal spectrum: Brialy, a rabid Marxist, wants to imitation dying on his lips, its preparation is on kill him outright to protect the cause; Blain dis- the one hand somewhat contrived-his buddy count- agrees, certain of nothing except that he cannot ing sales slips on the motel bed with lines that sound kill a man who may be innocent; Cremer, the dubbed in his mouth - and on the other hand leader, finds it disconcertingly hard to make any psychologically insufficient: if Paul really is going decision in the matter. Throughout all, Piccoli pre- through some major change in his life, we would serves an increasingly desperate calm, threatened like to see much more of it than is given us on the by Germans and partisans both. An ambiguous last screen, and we have a natural suspicion that it has shot suggests that, although he has got free, in something important to do with the shooting of time of war there can be no political man. Costa- the film. (Only Jean Rouch, it seems to me, has Gavras's characterizations are entirely devoid of been willing to admit in his films that the shooting the fussiness sometimes found in his earlier film of the film itself is a major event in the subjects' (Montand's games with a menthol inhaler, for lives, and that this importance is a legitimate- example). And when, from an aerial vantage, we indeed perhaps obligatory- part of the film.) De- watch a truckful of guerrillas wind down a moun- spite its structural limitations, however, Salesman tain road, while a German convoy approaches on remains that honorable contribution to film, an a lower level, the camera plane turns with the honest document; it is part of that great effort truck into a handy cul-de-sac a split second before now going forward among film-makers the world the convoy rounds the last bend. Few are the over to capture the human condition so that we viewers who do not hold their breath during the may know who and where we are.-E. C. long, lovely, intricate shot that makes us all in- It is a movie of Shock Several voluntary partisans. virtually Troop. years ago a young Greek named involvement. Its warfare is workmanlike Costa-Gavrasmade his first a French physical film, mystery -a sense reinforced by that undeviating forward called The Sleeping Car Murder. Filming his own motion. Its of war as a are fero- the director achieved a balance in images dirty game script, unique cious without being gory. While the camera looks his handling of well-known movie people. He did down on a a moves not were neither did misty valley, trapped guerrilla coyly pretend they nobodies, toward the enemy to surrender, suddenly he grotesque maquillage or gratuitoustrade- leaping permit on one of his captors and destroying both of them mark bits; rather, their entrances and exits were a the act as witnessed a tele- struck like character in a wvith grenade; through keynotes most complex lens is beautiful. works action score. Such combined force and scopic oddly Although he efficiency in familiar B-film Costa Gavras is deriva- would not have been without their territory, possible slightly tive of nobody. All the sadder, then, that his films giddy identifiability, and in turn made possible the will be seen few of the who re- and wealth of nuance that was by people might speed, density, member them. United Artists is circulating only achieved in the film. Now Costa-Gavras is back dubbed of Shock with some of the same atrociously prints Troop, treating players-Michel Piccoli, it strictly as second-feature, grind-house stuff. But Jacques Perrin-and a countryside more: Jean- Claude Gerard Bruno Charles even if subtitled copies were available, few art Brialy, Blain, Cremer, houses would to them. Vanel, Claude Pierre Albert be discerning enough play Brasseur, Clementi, What will Remy-too many even to make the credit titles of happen to Costa-Gavras' new film, Z, Shock Shock at a dead run remains to be seen. His Cannes award should pro- Troop. Troop begins it and hardly ever lets down. At a glance it seems a tect from mishandling.Probably the best hope for his films is minor film-as Sleeping Car Murder also seemed, earlier that this fine, unique director will at a glance. A band of resistance fighters play hell not be overlooked by film-society and 16mm pro- with the Nazis in a heavily occupied sector of post- grammers, who should go out of their way to de- card villages and pastoral landscapes. During a sign a schedule with a place for Costa-Gavras's raid on a German stronghold they liberate thirteen damn good cinema.-RIcHARDT. JAMESON SHORT NOTICES 55 group, who is supposed at the end of the film to prisoners where they expect to find an even dozen. drop out of the game. But this is largely artifac- Is the odd man, Piccoli, the apolitical innocent he tual within Salesman itself-even if Paul did, as claims to be, or a planted agent? While the com- reported, drop Bibles and go into roofing-and-siding pany makes its lightning strikes and hairbreadth after the film was shot. (Roofing-and-siding, by the escapes down country lanes, the thirteenth man way, hardly constitutes a noble advance for him: is carried along. The problem of what to do with it's an even worse racket than Bibles.) Although him becomes the means of exposing a whole politi- the ending is appalling enough, with Paul's Irish cal spectrum: Brialy, a rabid Marxist, wants to imitation dying on his lips, its preparation is on kill him outright to protect the cause; Blain dis- the one hand somewhat contrived-his buddy count- agrees, certain of nothing except that he cannot ing sales slips on the motel bed with lines that sound kill a man who may be innocent; Cremer, the dubbed in his mouth - and on the other hand leader, finds it disconcertingly hard to make any psychologically insufficient: if Paul really is going decision in the matter. Throughout all, Piccoli pre- through some major change in his life, we would serves an increasingly desperate calm, threatened like to see much more of it than is given us on the by Germans and partisans both. An ambiguous last screen, and we have a natural suspicion that it has shot suggests that, although he has got free, in something important to do with the shooting of time of war there can be no political man. Costa- the film. (Only Jean Rouch, it seems to me, has Gavras's characterizations are entirely devoid of been willing to admit in his films that the shooting the fussiness sometimes found in his earlier film of the film itself is a major event in the subjects' (Montand's games with a menthol inhaler, for lives, and that this importance is a legitimate- example). And when, from an aerial vantage, we indeed perhaps obligatory- part of the film.) De- watch a truckful of guerrillas wind down a moun- spite its structural limitations, however, Salesman tain road, while a German convoy approaches on remains that honorable contribution to film, an a lower level, the camera plane turns with the honest document; it is part of that great effort truck into a handy cul-de-sac a split second before now going forward among film-makers the world the convoy rounds the last bend. Few are the over to capture the human condition so that we viewers who do not hold their breath during the may know who and where we are.-E. C. long, lovely, intricate shot that makes us all in- It is a movie of Shock Several voluntary partisans. virtually Troop. years ago a young Greek named involvement. Its warfare is workmanlike Costa-Gavrasmade his first a French physical film, mystery -a sense reinforced by that undeviating forward called The Sleeping Car Murder. Filming his own motion. Its of war as a are fero- the director achieved a balance in images dirty game script, unique cious without being gory. While the camera looks his handling of well-known movie people. He did down on a a moves not were neither did misty valley, trapped guerrilla coyly pretend they nobodies, toward the enemy to surrender, suddenly he grotesque maquillage or gratuitoustrade- leaping permit on one of his captors and destroying both of them mark bits; rather, their entrances and exits were a the act as witnessed a tele- struck like character in a wvith grenade; through keynotes most complex lens is beautiful. works action score. Such combined force and scopic oddly Although he efficiency in familiar B-film Costa Gavras is deriva- would not have been without their territory, possible slightly tive of nobody. All the sadder, then, that his films giddy identifiability, and in turn made possible the will be seen few of the who re- and wealth of nuance that was by people might speed, density, member them. United Artists is circulating only achieved in the film. Now Costa-Gavras is back dubbed of Shock with some of the same atrociously prints Troop, treating players-Michel Piccoli, it strictly as second-feature, grind-house stuff. But Jacques Perrin-and a countryside more: Jean- Claude Gerard Bruno Charles even if subtitled copies were available, few art Brialy, Blain, Cremer, houses would to them. Vanel, Claude Pierre Albert be discerning enough play Brasseur, Clementi, What will Remy-too many even to make the credit titles of happen to Costa-Gavras' new film, Z, Shock Shock at a dead run remains to be seen. His Cannes award should pro- Troop. Troop begins it and hardly ever lets down. At a glance it seems a tect from mishandling.Probably the best hope for his films is minor film-as Sleeping Car Murder also seemed, earlier that this fine, unique director will at a glance. A band of resistance fighters play hell not be overlooked by film-society and 16mm pro- with the Nazis in a heavily occupied sector of post- grammers, who should go out of their way to de- card villages and pastoral landscapes. During a sign a schedule with a place for Costa-Gavras's raid on a German stronghold they liberate thirteen damn good cinema.-RIcHARDT. JAMESON 56 SHORT NOTICES

That Cold Day in the Park.Obscure dramas, laden quite another to make freaks of your characters, with opaque relationships,carefully developed (yet as through loneliness were an exotic disease. still incomprehensible) motifs, latent themes, and -MICHAEL DEMPSEY inexplicable deeds, seem to be the newest cinematic fad, as the recent films of Losey, Clouzot, The Touchables and Three in the Attic. The modishness and Chabrol could indicate. The latest and by far of popular cinema is best illustrated by the influ- the worst specimen is That Cold Day in the Park, ence of outrageous sartorial fantasies on just about directed Robert Altman from by Gillian Freeman's every age-group seen on film (Carnaby Street is script out of a novel. The movie shows a lonely, universal now), and the insinuating merging of thirtyish virgin (Sandy Dennis) setting up a sullen, Lelouchian film style and elements found in The rain-drenched youth (Michael Burns) in her lux- Graduate, with pop-rock vocalizing behind every urious so that he can and warm apartment dry seductive image. One should be prepared for the himself. Since he says not a word to her, she takes emergence of new cinema myths, but the simul- him for a him and mute, gives presents lodging, taneous appearance of the British comedy, The and hopes, Collector-like, that he will love and Touchables (directed by Robert Freeman) and make love to her. But, when she goes out-to shop, our own Three In The Attic (directed by Richard bowl, or be fitted with a diaphragm,he skips down Wilson) leads to the conclusion regarding the con- to a houseboat to watch his sleek sister's lover temporary battle of the sexes that the swinging bounce her in their bed. Then the trio eat cookies world of London is not too far from the lush fan- Sister later comes at (or something). calling tasies of Beverly Hills' "beautiful people." Both brother's new home and insists on taking a bath films dramatize a discotheque-dreamof sexual before his rape right eyes. So he joins her amid the and feminine indomitability; the handsome young bubbles. When our learns of her spinster guest's heroes in each film are kidnapped, held love- daytime escapades, she boards up his window and and "forced" to submit to the vengeful locks him in. Then prisoner, she picks up a whore for him of several beautiful girls. If memory and then . The movie physicalities .. is a stupefying clutter of serves, it seems that the French already had a go irrelevancies. We a lot of get hard-breathinghints at this sort of escapade back in 1958, when Alain about the siblings-their link to her lover, their Delon was sexually ambushed by three heroines strange home life, their incestuous dalliances. All in Michel Boisrond's film, Faibles Femmes. If, in this is kinkily amusing for a while, until we realize the future, we ever wonder what bizarre reveries that none of it will be either probed or related to have been touched off by Playboy, then these two the rest of the Altman's direction runs to story. films must be cited. Surprisingly,the films are quite fancy reflection shots, blurry transitions, and pon- entertaining and harmless, with The Touchables derous camera movement. He strains to be ornate gaining a slight edge over its Americancounterpart, but cannot relate his devices to his heroine's sub- and this is chiefly due to Alan Pudney's superb jectivity. Whereas Losey gave us uneasy comedy, photography and the director'sunswerving success Clouzot compassionate dissection, and Chabrol in making the entire thing a mocking comedy with cool elegance, Altman supplies logy murkraking. satirical undertones. Freeman is a refugee from The sole provocative scene contains the repressed television commercials, and he is aware of the im- woman's description of her elderly suitor; she finds pact of carefully wrought tableaux, those which his isolation and suffering repulsive and ugly, even best illustrate the wish-fulfillmentsof middle-class though her problems are exactly the same. Addi- fantasies. His four heroines representdifferent types tional virtues are the interior lighting of Lazlo of London "birds,"and their personalitiesare vivid to from Kovacs and some of the acting. Surprisingly,Sandy enough keep any spectator being bored. Dennis largely abandons her tremulous tics and Besides, they live in a giant bubble-dome in the gives a for which country, a place where a life of fairytale languor firm, disciplined performance, and sensual Susanne Benton's lush sexiness and look pleasure centers around a large carou- knowing where abducted provide the perfect contrast. No doubt Altman de- sel-bed the pop-singer, Christian serves some credit for but to become a (David Anthony) is kept prisoner. The film is this, good amusingly satirical in the first (a in director he must half-baked man- part party stop mistaking Tussaud's, with wax figures of Michael Caine, Ken- nerisms for It psychological profundity. is one thing edy, Queen Victoria and DeGaulle staring round to stylize emotions or to seek metaphors,outlandish at the swingers; a society wrestling match, with or otherwise, for their terrifying extremities; it is one of the fighters in red ballet shoes, etc.), and SHORT NOTICES 57 decidedly lyrical in the second half with its slow- TrueGrit, directed by Henry Hathaway and pro- motion gambols among piles of pink and gold duced by Hal Wallis, is the best forties picture of pillows, and pastoral or psychedelic effects used 1969, and perhaps an indication that there is still quite startingly and colorfully. The last part of the a certain life left in the old Hollywood corpse. It's film is unduly violent-but it is most compelling a performance- and dialogue-centered picture, during a chase sequence, when the girls pursue utterly without redeeming cinematic importance, Christian on horseback through overgrown marsh but somehow its artistic shiftlessness is almost en- country. There is some odd business about a kinky dearing, despite the agonizing slow pace of the underworld mob, led by a "gay" Negro wrestler, shooting and editing. Like John Wayne, as a tough, who also wants Christian.The Touchables is among one-eyed old marshal who falls off his horse and the most successful of the recent light comedies catches the truculent murderer (Jeff Corey) more from Britain, not at all pretentious, and very re- through luck than true grit, the picture has a kind vealing about the many-sidedness of life among of besotted satisfaction about it. Besides, the sup- the Mods. posedly 14-year-old heroine delivers her campy As for Three In The Attic, its intentions are archaic lines with all the aplomb of an elephant slightly more prurient. It is an ode to the physical playing hopscotch. It may be clean, but it's the and histrionic attributes of actor ChristopherJones. best fun around.-E. C. Jones portrays a collegian named Paxton Quigley, a notoriously successful seducer of nubile coeds and possessor of some measure of intellectual guile. Winning and Number One are two attempts to When three of his conquests discover his sexual humanize the sports movie, customarily one of the chicanery, they lock him in a sorority house attic most mindless and debased of Hollywood genres. and systematically begin to screw him to death. Winning, an auto-racing movie, is more commer- Let it be said at this point that they almost suc- cial, and it is easy enough to mock for its plot ceed, but a wise house-mother and the triumph of cliches and corny lines of dialogue, but it is just true love prevent such a satisfactory denouement. as easy to like. The charactersare not terribly com- Out of this balderdash emerges a good bad film plicated, but at least we believe in them and even which is of some sociological importance. It is an care about them-largely because of the perform- excellent example of Hollywood's continued efforts ances of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and to create another James Dean, and, if Christopher Richard Thomas, who plays Miss Woodward's Jones is given a proper script, he is definitely it. teenage son. In many ways the Newmans are not The resemblances in face and voice are often un- a very likely screen couple; we never quite under- canny, and the subtle use of camera and dialogue, stand why he is attracted to her. Woodward's in his case, have given him the appurtenances of image is usually a variation on the ordinary,small- a male sex symbol that Dean never possessed until town American woman-in this film an Avis girl his cult made him a posthumous deity. The per- and Indy driver's wife; but Newman can never formance of Judy Pace, an attractive Negro actress, help seeming extraordinary, a sensitive outsider. is a staggering example of the way in which black He doesn't fit easily into this rather simple role, artists can betray themselves into being sterotypes or to put it another way, his face always hints of or vulgarizations of human behavior. The Negro more interesting perceptions in the character than woman as sex symbol is a boring clich6 by now, the writing is able to explore. Still, given the prob- and when someone dares to adopt a honeychile lems of the casting, both stars bring so much care accent when enticing a white man-only to speak and inventiveness to their performances-in roles normally when among blacks-then one might as that could easily have been walked through-that well revive the lost artistryof Nina Mae McKinney they always hold our interest. A couple of scenes in Hallelujah or Pinky as exemplars of cinematic in which young Thomas tries to understand the progress. The march toward total nudity moves breakup of his mother'ssecond marriageare, thanks further in this film: not only are the three young to the three actors, more delicate, observant, and ladies given ample perusal, but Jones's naked pos- touching than we have any right to expect from terior is revealed as a matter of course, so that those this kind of movie. The rest is thin-a quick court- volumes by Lo Duca on eroticism in the cinema ship across the country, adultery and reconcilia- will soon have a new edition on the male. Or will tion, rivalry on the track-but filmed with great spectators become inured to seeing the varied flair by a young TV-trained director, James Gold- anatomies of ecstasy "in toto"?-ALBERT JOHNSON stone, who seems to me the only promising director SHORT NOTICES 57 decidedly lyrical in the second half with its slow- TrueGrit, directed by Henry Hathaway and pro- motion gambols among piles of pink and gold duced by Hal Wallis, is the best forties picture of pillows, and pastoral or psychedelic effects used 1969, and perhaps an indication that there is still quite startingly and colorfully. The last part of the a certain life left in the old Hollywood corpse. It's film is unduly violent-but it is most compelling a performance- and dialogue-centered picture, during a chase sequence, when the girls pursue utterly without redeeming cinematic importance, Christian on horseback through overgrown marsh but somehow its artistic shiftlessness is almost en- country. There is some odd business about a kinky dearing, despite the agonizing slow pace of the underworld mob, led by a "gay" Negro wrestler, shooting and editing. Like John Wayne, as a tough, who also wants Christian.The Touchables is among one-eyed old marshal who falls off his horse and the most successful of the recent light comedies catches the truculent murderer (Jeff Corey) more from Britain, not at all pretentious, and very re- through luck than true grit, the picture has a kind vealing about the many-sidedness of life among of besotted satisfaction about it. Besides, the sup- the Mods. posedly 14-year-old heroine delivers her campy As for Three In The Attic, its intentions are archaic lines with all the aplomb of an elephant slightly more prurient. It is an ode to the physical playing hopscotch. It may be clean, but it's the and histrionic attributes of actor ChristopherJones. best fun around.-E. C. Jones portrays a collegian named Paxton Quigley, a notoriously successful seducer of nubile coeds and possessor of some measure of intellectual guile. Winning and Number One are two attempts to When three of his conquests discover his sexual humanize the sports movie, customarily one of the chicanery, they lock him in a sorority house attic most mindless and debased of Hollywood genres. and systematically begin to screw him to death. Winning, an auto-racing movie, is more commer- Let it be said at this point that they almost suc- cial, and it is easy enough to mock for its plot ceed, but a wise house-mother and the triumph of cliches and corny lines of dialogue, but it is just true love prevent such a satisfactory denouement. as easy to like. The charactersare not terribly com- Out of this balderdash emerges a good bad film plicated, but at least we believe in them and even which is of some sociological importance. It is an care about them-largely because of the perform- excellent example of Hollywood's continued efforts ances of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and to create another James Dean, and, if Christopher Richard Thomas, who plays Miss Woodward's Jones is given a proper script, he is definitely it. teenage son. In many ways the Newmans are not The resemblances in face and voice are often un- a very likely screen couple; we never quite under- canny, and the subtle use of camera and dialogue, stand why he is attracted to her. Woodward's in his case, have given him the appurtenances of image is usually a variation on the ordinary,small- a male sex symbol that Dean never possessed until town American woman-in this film an Avis girl his cult made him a posthumous deity. The per- and Indy driver's wife; but Newman can never formance of Judy Pace, an attractive Negro actress, help seeming extraordinary, a sensitive outsider. is a staggering example of the way in which black He doesn't fit easily into this rather simple role, artists can betray themselves into being sterotypes or to put it another way, his face always hints of or vulgarizations of human behavior. The Negro more interesting perceptions in the character than woman as sex symbol is a boring clich6 by now, the writing is able to explore. Still, given the prob- and when someone dares to adopt a honeychile lems of the casting, both stars bring so much care accent when enticing a white man-only to speak and inventiveness to their performances-in roles normally when among blacks-then one might as that could easily have been walked through-that well revive the lost artistryof Nina Mae McKinney they always hold our interest. A couple of scenes in Hallelujah or Pinky as exemplars of cinematic in which young Thomas tries to understand the progress. The march toward total nudity moves breakup of his mother'ssecond marriageare, thanks further in this film: not only are the three young to the three actors, more delicate, observant, and ladies given ample perusal, but Jones's naked pos- touching than we have any right to expect from terior is revealed as a matter of course, so that those this kind of movie. The rest is thin-a quick court- volumes by Lo Duca on eroticism in the cinema ship across the country, adultery and reconcilia- will soon have a new edition on the male. Or will tion, rivalry on the track-but filmed with great spectators become inured to seeing the varied flair by a young TV-trained director, James Gold- anatomies of ecstasy "in toto"?-ALBERT JOHNSON stone, who seems to me the only promising director SHORT NOTICES 57 decidedly lyrical in the second half with its slow- TrueGrit, directed by Henry Hathaway and pro- motion gambols among piles of pink and gold duced by Hal Wallis, is the best forties picture of pillows, and pastoral or psychedelic effects used 1969, and perhaps an indication that there is still quite startingly and colorfully. The last part of the a certain life left in the old Hollywood corpse. It's film is unduly violent-but it is most compelling a performance- and dialogue-centered picture, during a chase sequence, when the girls pursue utterly without redeeming cinematic importance, Christian on horseback through overgrown marsh but somehow its artistic shiftlessness is almost en- country. There is some odd business about a kinky dearing, despite the agonizing slow pace of the underworld mob, led by a "gay" Negro wrestler, shooting and editing. Like John Wayne, as a tough, who also wants Christian.The Touchables is among one-eyed old marshal who falls off his horse and the most successful of the recent light comedies catches the truculent murderer (Jeff Corey) more from Britain, not at all pretentious, and very re- through luck than true grit, the picture has a kind vealing about the many-sidedness of life among of besotted satisfaction about it. Besides, the sup- the Mods. posedly 14-year-old heroine delivers her campy As for Three In The Attic, its intentions are archaic lines with all the aplomb of an elephant slightly more prurient. It is an ode to the physical playing hopscotch. It may be clean, but it's the and histrionic attributes of actor ChristopherJones. best fun around.-E. C. Jones portrays a collegian named Paxton Quigley, a notoriously successful seducer of nubile coeds and possessor of some measure of intellectual guile. Winning and Number One are two attempts to When three of his conquests discover his sexual humanize the sports movie, customarily one of the chicanery, they lock him in a sorority house attic most mindless and debased of Hollywood genres. and systematically begin to screw him to death. Winning, an auto-racing movie, is more commer- Let it be said at this point that they almost suc- cial, and it is easy enough to mock for its plot ceed, but a wise house-mother and the triumph of cliches and corny lines of dialogue, but it is just true love prevent such a satisfactory denouement. as easy to like. The charactersare not terribly com- Out of this balderdash emerges a good bad film plicated, but at least we believe in them and even which is of some sociological importance. It is an care about them-largely because of the perform- excellent example of Hollywood's continued efforts ances of Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and to create another James Dean, and, if Christopher Richard Thomas, who plays Miss Woodward's Jones is given a proper script, he is definitely it. teenage son. In many ways the Newmans are not The resemblances in face and voice are often un- a very likely screen couple; we never quite under- canny, and the subtle use of camera and dialogue, stand why he is attracted to her. Woodward's in his case, have given him the appurtenances of image is usually a variation on the ordinary,small- a male sex symbol that Dean never possessed until town American woman-in this film an Avis girl his cult made him a posthumous deity. The per- and Indy driver's wife; but Newman can never formance of Judy Pace, an attractive Negro actress, help seeming extraordinary, a sensitive outsider. is a staggering example of the way in which black He doesn't fit easily into this rather simple role, artists can betray themselves into being sterotypes or to put it another way, his face always hints of or vulgarizations of human behavior. The Negro more interesting perceptions in the character than woman as sex symbol is a boring clich6 by now, the writing is able to explore. Still, given the prob- and when someone dares to adopt a honeychile lems of the casting, both stars bring so much care accent when enticing a white man-only to speak and inventiveness to their performances-in roles normally when among blacks-then one might as that could easily have been walked through-that well revive the lost artistryof Nina Mae McKinney they always hold our interest. A couple of scenes in Hallelujah or Pinky as exemplars of cinematic in which young Thomas tries to understand the progress. The march toward total nudity moves breakup of his mother'ssecond marriageare, thanks further in this film: not only are the three young to the three actors, more delicate, observant, and ladies given ample perusal, but Jones's naked pos- touching than we have any right to expect from terior is revealed as a matter of course, so that those this kind of movie. The rest is thin-a quick court- volumes by Lo Duca on eroticism in the cinema ship across the country, adultery and reconcilia- will soon have a new edition on the male. Or will tion, rivalry on the track-but filmed with great spectators become inured to seeing the varied flair by a young TV-trained director, James Gold- anatomies of ecstasy "in toto"?-ALBERT JOHNSON stone, who seems to me the only promising director 58 BOOKS to have emerged from television in years. Nothing CONTRIBUTORS(cont'd.) he does could be called brilliant or innovative, but Rene Clair. MICHAELDEMPSEY has studied film at most everything is enhanced by grace, style, mod- UCLA. DAVID DENBY is a graduate student at est but thoughtful imagination. This is a Universal Stanford, working in film aesthetics and history, and shot has a unnatural picture, every slightly and US social history. FOSTERHIRSCH has worked pallor that is the studio's hallmark, so Goldstone's in the New York story of Paramount to us interested in at his departments ability keep looking movie and Fox. DENNIS HUNT is a graduate student at is all the more He has an intuitive impressive. feel- Berkeley. RICHARD T. JAMESON runs an art theater for the of film-whether he wants to ing language in Seattle. WILLIAM JOHNSON, whose article on the Americana of the convey tawdry Indianapolis film music appeared in the Summer 1969 FQ, 500, the violence of the race itself, the loneliness lives in New York. MARGOTS. KERNANhas been of the hero at a celebration-that makes victory his active in film showing in Washington, D.C. next movie worth forward to. looking GEORGE LELLIS lives in New York. JOSEPH Number directed Tom One, listlessly by Gries, MCBRIDE is editor of the Wisconsin Film needs some of the same an Society flair; awkward, old- volume Persistence Vision, and is on a flashback dissolve is of working fashioned technique enough book about Welles. HARRIETR. POLT teaches at to make head for the exit. But anyone looking be- Merritt Oakland. TONY REIF is neath the one can admire the skeleton College, from surface, of Vancouver and studies film at UCLA. WILLIAM a serious and film. potentially important Winning ROUTT is in the Committee on Social at is constructed around the race itself- Thought Indianapolis the University of Chicago. a sequence that lasts almost thirty minutes-but Number One, about an aging football player's last NEW PERIODICAL little of the action that the season, provides sports Screen is the enthusiast wants to see. This is an austere, even successor to Screen Education, and is available free to somber film, and I can't think of another film that members of the Society for Educa- deals in this with the crisis in a tion in Film and Television, 81 Dean Street, London quite way profes- WIV sional athlete's life when he begins to lose com- 6AA, England (membership fee 30s.). The first issue features mand of his body. Sports movies used to ignore informative,nonpolemical articles this crisis and confine their canvasses to rousing and reviews, most of them interesting to a wide moments of glory, while in recent years the movie audience but some especially aimed at teachers. athlete has become simply a caricatured symbol of the Establishment (see The Graduate or Goodbye, Columbus). So this bleak but sympathetic portrait is doubly unfashionable; it won't please the beer- Books bellied sports fans or the hip college students. The film's writing usually seems honest, as far as it goes-whether examining the callousness of the team manager, the anemic jobs that the hero has GROVE PRESSSCRIPT BOOKS to look forward to on the black retirement, young General Editor: Robert Hughes. (New York: Grove Press, 1969. quarterback who is all too eager to push him out, $1.95 per volume) or his uneasy relationship with his wife, whose own career has been blooming while his has been The four books listed below are the best recre- waning. But nothing is taken quite far enough. ations of films yet to be achieved in book form. Most of the scenes are a little too clearly labelled, They will probably be surpassed only when and then cut off. Charlton Heston's performance 8mm or EVR copies of films are available for is genuine, though; he seems the right age, and he home use and Each volume a looks and study. presents slightly exhausted humiliated too-a script based on the film itself ratherthan drawn sensitive portrait of a man losing hold of the only skill that once his life with We from the working papers of the film-makers,as supplied passion. is with know that some retiring football players have more customary script books. The advantage glamorous options, but the great majority are still of this system, obviously, is that it provides an probably in the position of this character. Heston accurate record of what is really in the films- and the film as a whole give him surprising dignity. an aim often only fitfully accomplished other- -STEPHEN FARBER wise. (Moreover,in the case of Masculin Fem- 58 BOOKS to have emerged from television in years. Nothing CONTRIBUTORS(cont'd.) he does could be called brilliant or innovative, but Rene Clair. MICHAELDEMPSEY has studied film at most everything is enhanced by grace, style, mod- UCLA. DAVID DENBY is a graduate student at est but thoughtful imagination. This is a Universal Stanford, working in film aesthetics and history, and shot has a unnatural picture, every slightly and US social history. FOSTERHIRSCH has worked pallor that is the studio's hallmark, so Goldstone's in the New York story of Paramount to us interested in at his departments ability keep looking movie and Fox. DENNIS HUNT is a graduate student at is all the more He has an intuitive impressive. feel- Berkeley. RICHARD T. JAMESON runs an art theater for the of film-whether he wants to ing language in Seattle. WILLIAM JOHNSON, whose article on the Americana of the convey tawdry Indianapolis film music appeared in the Summer 1969 FQ, 500, the violence of the race itself, the loneliness lives in New York. MARGOTS. KERNANhas been of the hero at a celebration-that makes victory his active in film showing in Washington, D.C. next movie worth forward to. looking GEORGE LELLIS lives in New York. JOSEPH Number directed Tom One, listlessly by Gries, MCBRIDE is editor of the Wisconsin Film needs some of the same an Society flair; awkward, old- volume Persistence Vision, and is on a flashback dissolve is of working fashioned technique enough book about Welles. HARRIETR. POLT teaches at to make head for the exit. But anyone looking be- Merritt Oakland. TONY REIF is neath the one can admire the skeleton College, from surface, of Vancouver and studies film at UCLA. WILLIAM a serious and film. potentially important Winning ROUTT is in the Committee on Social at is constructed around the race itself- Thought Indianapolis the University of Chicago. a sequence that lasts almost thirty minutes-but Number One, about an aging football player's last NEW PERIODICAL little of the action that the season, provides sports Screen is the enthusiast wants to see. This is an austere, even successor to Screen Education, and is available free to somber film, and I can't think of another film that members of the Society for Educa- deals in this with the crisis in a tion in Film and Television, 81 Dean Street, London quite way profes- WIV sional athlete's life when he begins to lose com- 6AA, England (membership fee 30s.). The first issue features mand of his body. Sports movies used to ignore informative,nonpolemical articles this crisis and confine their canvasses to rousing and reviews, most of them interesting to a wide moments of glory, while in recent years the movie audience but some especially aimed at teachers. athlete has become simply a caricatured symbol of the Establishment (see The Graduate or Goodbye, Columbus). So this bleak but sympathetic portrait is doubly unfashionable; it won't please the beer- Books bellied sports fans or the hip college students. The film's writing usually seems honest, as far as it goes-whether examining the callousness of the team manager, the anemic jobs that the hero has GROVE PRESSSCRIPT BOOKS to look forward to on the black retirement, young General Editor: Robert Hughes. (New York: Grove Press, 1969. quarterback who is all too eager to push him out, $1.95 per volume) or his uneasy relationship with his wife, whose own career has been blooming while his has been The four books listed below are the best recre- waning. But nothing is taken quite far enough. ations of films yet to be achieved in book form. Most of the scenes are a little too clearly labelled, They will probably be surpassed only when and then cut off. Charlton Heston's performance 8mm or EVR copies of films are available for is genuine, though; he seems the right age, and he home use and Each volume a looks and study. presents slightly exhausted humiliated too-a script based on the film itself ratherthan drawn sensitive portrait of a man losing hold of the only skill that once his life with We from the working papers of the film-makers,as supplied passion. is with know that some retiring football players have more customary script books. The advantage glamorous options, but the great majority are still of this system, obviously, is that it provides an probably in the position of this character. Heston accurate record of what is really in the films- and the film as a whole give him surprising dignity. an aim often only fitfully accomplished other- -STEPHEN FARBER wise. (Moreover,in the case of Masculin Fem- BOOKS 59 inin-and this is true of many Godard films-- films today is to see the age's own image of itself, the original"script" materials are sparse.) Such to see how the films dramatised and fostered the scriptsmay be less interestingto the philological aspirations of the business age. mind for between intent For some odd reason, all three of these books searching divergences share what I am to call Robinson'scritical and result;but for such readersa special section tempted All three are essentially aimless, wander- in the L'Avventuravolume gives omitted and perversity. variant and dering lists of actors, directors, cameramen, art di- scenes, also the originallyconceived rectors, studio bosses, and what have you. form the are Keeping of ending. The books very copi- to the twenties book as an example, we notice that ously illustrated,with stills drawn mostly from once Robinson abandons his sociocultural-etc. ap- frame enlargementsinstead of posed publicity proach, all semblance of critical order goes out of stills-an expensive but highly desirable proc- it; it immediately loses its life's blood and gives way ess. The resulting volumes should prove ex- to a jumble of names and titles put together with- tremely useful in film classes and for scholars out much consideration or justification. Most of it working on close studies of film style. amounts to tired old gossip and gleanings from contemporary trade journals, enlivened here and there L'Avventura: A Film by MichelangeloAnton- by snatches of conversations or interviews or auto- ioni. Over 80 illustrations.Includes reportage biography, for which the reader is terribly grateful. on the making of the film, two interviews with Throughout the three books, the monotony created the director, and a group of critical reviews. by title after title followed by one or two sentences' worth of or value Rashomon: A Film by Akira Kurosawa.Over summary judgments eventually throws the reader into a state bordering on des- 200 illustrations. Includes the original stories from which the film was several critical peration. For an example from Robinson's book, drawn, take the entire entry on Chaplin's The Kid: "An articles, and the first sequence from the Holly- odd mixture of rich comedy and victorian pathos wood remake, The Outrage. (the unmarried mother is introduced with the title "Her it The 400 Blows: A Film by Francois Truf- only sin-motherhood"), aroused tre- faut. Over 100 illustrations. Includes scenes mendous enthusiasmin audiences all over the world, and over two and a half million dollars for from the original scenario omitted from film, a grossed of Cahiers two interviews with First National. Jackie Coogan became one of the collage articles, most characteristicidols of the twenties." the and four criticalreviews. director, That entry comes in the middle of an "extended" Masculin Feminin: A Film by Jean-Luc Go- consideration of Chaplin, but it is virtually indis- dard. Over 100 illustrations. tinguishable from every other item in the book. Stan Grove Press has also issued, in a differ- Laurel, in cinematic terms the greatest and most in- slightly novative director and editor of silent is ent format, I Am Curious (Yellow), with 250 comedy, treated this way (again a complete entry): "An- illustrations--$1.75. other important director of comedy who made his debut about this time, though his real importance HOLLYWOOD IN THE ... only becomes clear with advent of talkies, was Stan (London: A. Zwemmer and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968, Inter- Laurel, a veteran of the Fred Karno variety com- national Film Guide Series. $1.45 per volume, paper) pany and of the Roach comedies before he acciden- tally teamed up with Oliver Hardy in 1927." The first of this three-volume group of books, David Robinson'stask was obviously complicated by his Robinson'sHollywood in the Twenties, sets off with inability to see many of the films he purports to an attempt to place the production of its decade in discuss, but that problem doesn't form the real core a number of historical contexts: political, economic, of his trouble, which comes from his lack of a solid cultural, moral, communications,theatrical, and fi- critical approach.That lack is shared to some extent nally, industrial. After thirty pages (of a 170-page by John Baxter, who wrote the second book in the book) one begins to wonder why the author spends series, Hollywood in the Thirties. On the positive so much time dwelling on ancillary considerations, side, both can serve the novice as a sort of Bae- when suddenly it becomes clear: to Robinson,these decker to who was where doing what during the aren't ancillary considerationsat all-this is the way thirties, and provide him with a neat pronounce- he looks at old movies: "The fascination of these ment or two on just about everybody in and around BOOKS 59 inin-and this is true of many Godard films-- films today is to see the age's own image of itself, the original"script" materials are sparse.) Such to see how the films dramatised and fostered the scriptsmay be less interestingto the philological aspirations of the business age. mind for between intent For some odd reason, all three of these books searching divergences share what I am to call Robinson'scritical and result;but for such readersa special section tempted All three are essentially aimless, wander- in the L'Avventuravolume gives omitted and perversity. variant and dering lists of actors, directors, cameramen, art di- scenes, also the originallyconceived rectors, studio bosses, and what have you. form the are Keeping of ending. The books very copi- to the twenties book as an example, we notice that ously illustrated,with stills drawn mostly from once Robinson abandons his sociocultural-etc. ap- frame enlargementsinstead of posed publicity proach, all semblance of critical order goes out of stills-an expensive but highly desirable proc- it; it immediately loses its life's blood and gives way ess. The resulting volumes should prove ex- to a jumble of names and titles put together with- tremely useful in film classes and for scholars out much consideration or justification. Most of it working on close studies of film style. amounts to tired old gossip and gleanings from contemporary trade journals, enlivened here and there L'Avventura: A Film by MichelangeloAnton- by snatches of conversations or interviews or auto- ioni. Over 80 illustrations.Includes reportage biography, for which the reader is terribly grateful. on the making of the film, two interviews with Throughout the three books, the monotony created the director, and a group of critical reviews. by title after title followed by one or two sentences' worth of or value Rashomon: A Film by Akira Kurosawa.Over summary judgments eventually throws the reader into a state bordering on des- 200 illustrations. Includes the original stories from which the film was several critical peration. For an example from Robinson's book, drawn, take the entire entry on Chaplin's The Kid: "An articles, and the first sequence from the Holly- odd mixture of rich comedy and victorian pathos wood remake, The Outrage. (the unmarried mother is introduced with the title "Her it The 400 Blows: A Film by Francois Truf- only sin-motherhood"), aroused tre- faut. Over 100 illustrations. Includes scenes mendous enthusiasmin audiences all over the world, and over two and a half million dollars for from the original scenario omitted from film, a grossed of Cahiers two interviews with First National. Jackie Coogan became one of the collage articles, most characteristicidols of the twenties." the and four criticalreviews. director, That entry comes in the middle of an "extended" Masculin Feminin: A Film by Jean-Luc Go- consideration of Chaplin, but it is virtually indis- dard. Over 100 illustrations. tinguishable from every other item in the book. Stan Grove Press has also issued, in a differ- Laurel, in cinematic terms the greatest and most in- slightly novative director and editor of silent is ent format, I Am Curious (Yellow), with 250 comedy, treated this way (again a complete entry): "An- illustrations--$1.75. other important director of comedy who made his debut about this time, though his real importance HOLLYWOOD IN THE ... only becomes clear with advent of talkies, was Stan (London: A. Zwemmer and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968, Inter- Laurel, a veteran of the Fred Karno variety com- national Film Guide Series. $1.45 per volume, paper) pany and of the Roach comedies before he acciden- tally teamed up with Oliver Hardy in 1927." The first of this three-volume group of books, David Robinson'stask was obviously complicated by his Robinson'sHollywood in the Twenties, sets off with inability to see many of the films he purports to an attempt to place the production of its decade in discuss, but that problem doesn't form the real core a number of historical contexts: political, economic, of his trouble, which comes from his lack of a solid cultural, moral, communications,theatrical, and fi- critical approach.That lack is shared to some extent nally, industrial. After thirty pages (of a 170-page by John Baxter, who wrote the second book in the book) one begins to wonder why the author spends series, Hollywood in the Thirties. On the positive so much time dwelling on ancillary considerations, side, both can serve the novice as a sort of Bae- when suddenly it becomes clear: to Robinson,these decker to who was where doing what during the aren't ancillary considerationsat all-this is the way thirties, and provide him with a neat pronounce- he looks at old movies: "The fascination of these ment or two on just about everybody in and around 60 BOOKS

Hollywood for that crucial moment at the cocktail edition of the Almanac lists Curtiz among the party. Fortunately for the person who wants to go "champion of champion" directors from 1936, the a little farther than that, Baxter'sbook proves to be time of the list's inception, to 1961, the year before somewhat more enlightening than Robinson's. In his death, with only three years in which he didn't his introduction, Baxter announces one major work- place, and with the astoundingrecord of being num- ing principle: he will devote lots of space to ques- ber one from 1942 to 1959 without a single lapse! tions of technique in his study. Unfortunately, he If box-office success is the sole gauge of movie- abandoned that resolution almost as quickly as he making, then we would all have to agree with Bax- set it down on paper. The book consists almost en- ter. But since that happily isn't the case we can tirely of highly generalized descriptionsand sketchy instead judge Curtiz on the merits of his films as plot summaries.If one were to remove all the gen- they meet the test of time, and I somehow doubt uine technical discussion from it, the book wouldn't that a serious film study group in the United States be lighter by more than a couple of pages. will soon put on a retrospectiveprogram of Curtiz. Baxter's principal theses are (1) that the studio As Andrew Sarris so succinctly put it, "If many of system, like any factory system, produced work that the early Curtiz films are hardly worth remember- was more typical of the factory than of any indi- ing, none of the later ones are even worth seeing." vidual craftsman in its employ, which (2) "argues The third book in the series, Hollywood in the against the applicability of the auteur theory or any Forties, shares the problems of the earlier books, variation of it." In order to demonstrate his points, even to the irony of using a production still from he sets off on a rapid tour through the Metro, Para- Casablanca, Curtiz's one flukey masterpiece, on its mount, and Warner lots, characterizingthe typical cover. AuthorsCharles Higham and Joel Greenberg product of each and commenting on how it got to reassert that Curtiz is "greatest of all," leaving vir- be that way. Many readers will be tempted to do tually in the lurch such "minor"directors as Hitch- violence to the book while they're making their way cock, Welles, Hawks, Ford, and Huston (Walter through the first couple of chapters, which are ex- Huston gets mentioned more than his son in this tremely exasperatingin their foreign-press-corpssu- study). But instead of indulging in the pot-pourri perficiality. But the persevering reader will find to approach of the first two volumes, here the writers his relief that the author picks up steam, enthu- have adopted a consistent critical approach at least siasm, and knowledge when he hits the Warner lot, in outline: organizationby genre. Unfortunatelyfor and pretty much maintains a reasonable level of both the book and the entirely valid notion of genre information from there on through his examination studies, the writers fail to provide strong generic of various individuals and genres important in the analyses of the works, which still end up treated decade. in a few sentences that concentrate almost exclu- Despite his studio tours and generalizations,Bax- sively on plot or meaningless generalization. Here's ter doesn't really have his heart in his rejection of a typical example of that sort of pointless adjective- auteurisme, since he constantly uses such terms as mongering: "This was magnificent,passionate, full- "characteristic"and "typical" to describe the work throated film-making, aided immeasurably by the of the directors he considers throughout the book. contributions of photographersJoseph Walker and Furthermore,he is decidedly at his most thoughtful Joseph Biroc, and by the editing of William Horn- when dealing straightforwardlywith directors as beck." If you can learn anything from that sort of auteurs, although even there the severe space limi- writing, don't bother to read the rest of this review. tations he observes make for unreasonableconden- Get the books instead. sation and oversimplification,such as this chilling All in all, the forties book produces a set of kiss-off of Ford: 'Too he John often, sacrifices a extremely weird values. One page after putting film with one hand and saves it with the other. It down Citizen Kane for everything but Welles's act- is only his skill as a technician and director of male ing ("Welles was not yet the technical of a actors equal that sustains his tangled career." Capra or Curtiz"), we learn that Irving There's lots to about in such Rapper's argue evaluations, Adventures of Mark Twain is "perhaps the most especially when you get to pronouncements like impressive of all Forties large-scale this: biopics " "Inescapablyone of the best directors ever to John Huston, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in the Michael emerge cinema, Curtiz lays a sub- "had really little to say and was not especially in- stantial claim to the being greatest director of the volved with his characters or their predicaments." thirties."Now some people would doubtlessly agree The second part of that could lead with pronouncement this coronation-as a matter of fact, my 1967 to volumes of comment on its trivial view of art, BOOKS 61 and the first part is easily refuted by anyone who film organizationsand services all over the world. has paid the slightest attention to the thematic in- Especially good coverage of European art houses tegrity of Huston's oeuvre from his first screenplay and bookstores. on. George Marshall'sMurder, He Says receives the same amount of as Jean Cocteau. By Rene Gilson. (New York: Crown, space Kane, but a great deal 1969. $2.95) more enthusiasm, and Mitchell Leisen's Since You Translated from the Cinema d'Au- Went Away gets elevated to the rank of "one of the jourd'huiseries (rather raggedly), this study should Forties' The section of the renew attention to a now unfortunately neglected masterpieces." longest director. Cocteau was the sort of film-maker book centered on a single deals with who person produ- could never exist in the commercial American cer Val Lewton. Although it figures among the best cinema, a living link between commentariesI've seen on Lewton's work, it's very movies and poetry, odd indeed that Lewton should receive this sus- drama, and belles lettres-but he remains a constant and intriguing tained attention when it is withheld from so many inspiration for underground film- directors of obviously greater makers. Gilson's commentaryis a bit rhapsodic but importance. informative tc Indeed, probably the most intriguing thing about enough be tolerable; the appended quotes from Cocteau himself are these books has to do with their value systems. I brisk, charming, must confess that I am still somewhat in the dark astonishing, painful. over their concepts of film aesthetics. I know what Seventy Years of Cinema.By Peter Cowie. (New they think is good and bad, but I really don't know York: Barnes, 1969. $15.00 A coffee-table book, why they think that. Surely anybody who takes film reasonably well printed. Includes a synopsis and and criticism seriously must agree that a critic's critical thumbnail sketch of the several most im- values are more important and more enlightening portant features of the year, plus listings of shorts to the reader than his value judgmentson individual and documentaries.As is probably inevitable in any films. The values revealed in these books seem book attempting to cover so much ground, the haphazardly and capriciously applied-Welles con- weakest link is the rather hasty interpretive mate- demned because some of his process shots appear rial; nonetheless, the volume is a painless way to to be shaky after you've looked at the film long begin learning some film history. enough, Flynn praised because he "wore period The Picture Palace. By Dennis (New York: clothes Sharp. well, turnedin some very acceptable swords- Praeger, 1969. $12.50) Emphasizes British theaters. manship, and exuded an air of devil-may-care joie Good illustrations, but four abominably off-color de vivre." What does it all add up to? Some impres- plates. sions, some lots of partial plot summaries, adjectives, The Emergence of Film Art. Edited by Lewis and of value judgments. You can learn a lit- Jacobs. piles (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1969. tle bit about individual films, a little more about Paper, $3.95) A historically oriented anthology, including studio traditions,practically nothing about directors or their creative pieces by contemporarywriters for the most part, trends, and absolutely nothing but with a few older articles. about film aesthetics. There's scarcely a provocative The Studio. Dunne. thought (as opposed to outrageous statements) in By John Gregory (New York: Farrar, and 1969. the whole works, and I have a strong feeling that Straus, Giroux, $5.95) Record the lack is due to the writers' to come of a year spent watching Fox executives and pro- inability up ducers in action. with a viable approach to the problem of dealing with films in terms of decades rather than as the Filmed Books and Plays. By A. G. S. Easer. (New artistic production of their creators. But, then, one York: British Book Center, 1969. $11.50) An un- wonders why did they even try?-R. C. DALE annotated list of books and plays from which films have been made, 1928-1967. LISTINGS Exploring the Film. By William Kuhns and Robert Stanley. (Dayton, Ohio: 1968. No The First Colour Motion Pictures. By D. B. Thomas. Pflaum, price given) A textbook aimed at the high-school film (New York: B. I. S., 845 3rd Ave., New York courses that are steadily spreading across the coun- 10022. $1.20) A 44-page illustrated pamphlet on Kinemacolour. try, this is a largely concrete and down-to-earth treatment, avoiding the and codification International Film rigidity Guide 1969. Edited by Peter that are the curse of so many texts; it will not Cowie. York: stop (New Barnes, 1969. $2.95) The sixth students from liking movies. A teacher's booklet is issue of this excellent guide to recent films and to also available. BOOKS 61 and the first part is easily refuted by anyone who film organizationsand services all over the world. has paid the slightest attention to the thematic in- Especially good coverage of European art houses tegrity of Huston's oeuvre from his first screenplay and bookstores. on. George Marshall'sMurder, He Says receives the same amount of as Jean Cocteau. By Rene Gilson. (New York: Crown, space Kane, but a great deal 1969. $2.95) more enthusiasm, and Mitchell Leisen's Since You Translated from the Cinema d'Au- Went Away gets elevated to the rank of "one of the jourd'huiseries (rather raggedly), this study should Forties' The section of the renew attention to a now unfortunately neglected masterpieces." longest director. Cocteau was the sort of film-maker book centered on a single deals with who person produ- could never exist in the commercial American cer Val Lewton. Although it figures among the best cinema, a living link between commentariesI've seen on Lewton's work, it's very movies and poetry, odd indeed that Lewton should receive this sus- drama, and belles lettres-but he remains a constant and intriguing tained attention when it is withheld from so many inspiration for underground film- directors of obviously greater makers. Gilson's commentaryis a bit rhapsodic but importance. informative tc Indeed, probably the most intriguing thing about enough be tolerable; the appended quotes from Cocteau himself are these books has to do with their value systems. I brisk, charming, must confess that I am still somewhat in the dark astonishing, painful. over their concepts of film aesthetics. I know what Seventy Years of Cinema.By Peter Cowie. (New they think is good and bad, but I really don't know York: Barnes, 1969. $15.00 A coffee-table book, why they think that. Surely anybody who takes film reasonably well printed. Includes a synopsis and and criticism seriously must agree that a critic's critical thumbnail sketch of the several most im- values are more important and more enlightening portant features of the year, plus listings of shorts to the reader than his value judgmentson individual and documentaries.As is probably inevitable in any films. The values revealed in these books seem book attempting to cover so much ground, the haphazardly and capriciously applied-Welles con- weakest link is the rather hasty interpretive mate- demned because some of his process shots appear rial; nonetheless, the volume is a painless way to to be shaky after you've looked at the film long begin learning some film history. enough, Flynn praised because he "wore period The Picture Palace. By Dennis (New York: clothes Sharp. well, turnedin some very acceptable swords- Praeger, 1969. $12.50) Emphasizes British theaters. manship, and exuded an air of devil-may-care joie Good illustrations, but four abominably off-color de vivre." What does it all add up to? Some impres- plates. sions, some lots of partial plot summaries, adjectives, The Emergence of Film Art. Edited by Lewis and of value judgments. You can learn a lit- Jacobs. piles (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1969. tle bit about individual films, a little more about Paper, $3.95) A historically oriented anthology, including studio traditions,practically nothing about directors or their creative pieces by contemporarywriters for the most part, trends, and absolutely nothing but with a few older articles. about film aesthetics. There's scarcely a provocative The Studio. Dunne. thought (as opposed to outrageous statements) in By John Gregory (New York: Farrar, and 1969. the whole works, and I have a strong feeling that Straus, Giroux, $5.95) Record the lack is due to the writers' to come of a year spent watching Fox executives and pro- inability up ducers in action. with a viable approach to the problem of dealing with films in terms of decades rather than as the Filmed Books and Plays. By A. G. S. Easer. (New artistic production of their creators. But, then, one York: British Book Center, 1969. $11.50) An un- wonders why did they even try?-R. C. DALE annotated list of books and plays from which films have been made, 1928-1967. LISTINGS Exploring the Film. By William Kuhns and Robert Stanley. (Dayton, Ohio: 1968. No The First Colour Motion Pictures. By D. B. Thomas. Pflaum, price given) A textbook aimed at the high-school film (New York: B. I. S., 845 3rd Ave., New York courses that are steadily spreading across the coun- 10022. $1.20) A 44-page illustrated pamphlet on Kinemacolour. try, this is a largely concrete and down-to-earth treatment, avoiding the and codification International Film rigidity Guide 1969. Edited by Peter that are the curse of so many texts; it will not Cowie. York: stop (New Barnes, 1969. $2.95) The sixth students from liking movies. A teacher's booklet is issue of this excellent guide to recent films and to also available. 62 BOOKS

Thalberg: Life and Legend. By Bob Thomas. (New social one-upmanship without effort; surprisingly York: Doubleday, 1969, $7.95) A blowsily anec- informed, often funny, and chastening. dotal book: its first chapter begins, "Why should New Cinema in Britain. By Roger Manvell. (New he have become the architect of the American York: Dutton, 1969. $1.95) Superquicksurvey with film?" but if you think there should be no way to lots of pictures. Even go after that but up, you're wrong. the The Great Funnies:A Historyof Film Comedy. By David irrelevant details have a way of seeming dubious. Robinson. (New York: Dutton, 1969. $1.95) Like (Is that photo of the genius's birthplace really the the above, essentially a very heavily illustrated "brownstone" the text calls it? Hasn't Thomas article, inflated to book format, and inevitably heard about Stroheim's "military career" being very cursory. After a few of Thomas's phoney?) pages twaddle, Feature Films on 8mm and and the reader ceases to wonder whether Thalberg 16mm. Compiled edited by James L. Limbacher. (New York:Educa- could really have been interesting-even if, as seems tional Film Library Assn., 250 W. 57th St., NY likely, his eminence was simply due to his being a cool business head in an indus- 10019. $7.50) Second edition of an essential title sensible, intelligent, index. try largely populated by erratic monomaniacs. What remains from Thalberg today, aside from the BillyWilder. By Axel Madsen. (Bloomington: Indi- ana 1969. A legend of MGM profitability in his day, is slight: University Press, Paper, $1.95) rather of a director whose stock is lower he produced Vidor's Big Parade and Hallelujah, quirkish study Clarence Brown's Anna Christie with Garbo; he let than it ought to be; Madsen underates the powerful Ace in the Hole and his estimate of recent Wilder the Marx Brothers make A Night at the Opera; he flubbed the chance to do anything with Keaton, he follows the French line in which The Apartmentis probably hurt Stroheim'sFoolish Wives, and when seen as better than Some Like It Hot. confronted with the decision on what to do about a Censorship of the Movies. By Richard S. Randall. really outstanding film, Stroheim'sGreed, he capit- (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. ulated to Mayer and set a studio cutter hacking $7.95) Traces the history, organization,and opera- away at it. But he built MGM into the biggest tion of state and local censorship, and discusses film factory ever: a process of some historical im- religious pressure-groupsand the industry's Code. portance, upon which this thoroughly trivial book Despite the legal advances documented, the study offers no perspective whatever.-E.C. may be a little sanguine. Jean-LucGodard. Edited by Toby Mussman. (New The Western: An Illustrated Guide. By Allen Eyles. York: Dutton, 1968. $2.45) A collection of articles (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968. $2.95) and interviews; Godard's own talk and writing is Federico Fellini. By Gilbert Salachas. (New York: amply represented, and especially intriguing. Crown, 1969. $2.95) Contains some amusing anec- dotal but the lead about The Movies, Mr. and Me. Lillian material, essay making up Griffith, By Gish, a of the book is to with Ann Pinchot. (New York: 1969. quarter rhapsodic and, speak Prentice-Hall, idiotic: must or Fellin- $7.95) A charming and accurate frankly, "One accept reject apparently quite ism and all its works . . . The esthetic of the cin- autobiography of one of Griffith's leading ladies; east bursts us, and leaves us good at conveying the atmosphere of early movie upon conflagration production. stupefied." The rest of the book, collected reviews and remarks of Fellini himself, is readable but hard- With Eisenstein in Hollywood. By Ivor Montagu. (New ly essential. York: International 1969. Publishers, Paper, $1.95) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Peter Wollen. A chatty account of a in By disheartening episode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. which, nonetheless, a deal of fun was had good by $1.95) A sometimes suggestive but still very sketchy all. About half the book is the scripts of Sutter's to Gold attempt apply structural analysis and semiology and An American Tragedy, Eisenstein's un- to films. produced Hollywood projects. Keaton.By David Robinson. (Bloomington: Indiana The Cinema of Fritz Lang. By Paul M. Jensen. (New University Press, 1969. $1.95) A detailed analysis, York: A. S. Barnes, A non-idola- 1969.) thorough, tracing Keaton's astonishing virtuosity of technique trous, largely thematic study. and construction through many of his best films, and Bluff Your Way in the Cinema. By Ken Wlaschin. stressing the sophistication and rigor of the film- (London: Wolfe, 1969. 5s.) A "bluffer'sguide" to style side of his work. PARADIGM FILM

EDDIE-New York Festival '69 NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED ME NIGGER-Mannheim, New York, San Francisco, Chicago Festivals '68; Melbourne & Sydney Festivals '69. A Paradigm Production MEAN TO ME-New York Festival '69 MY GIRL FRIEND'S WEDDING-New York Festival '69; Cannes '69. A Paradigm Production HOW DO YOU SEDUCE A MAN-New York Festival '69 ONCE UPON A LINE-Chicago & 3rd International Festivals, '68 ?-. SECRET CINEMA-London Festival '66; New York Festival '67 THE AROUSING-British Board of Film Censors Reject

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