MANUSCRIPT Outtakes Kauffmann Film Collection Cardullo

Outtakes: Collected Film Essays
and Reviews from Six Decades
By Stanley Kauffmann
Edited by R. J. Cardullo
2
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Biography
Introduction
FILM REVIEWS (at the time of the films’ initial U.S. release)
Directors on Display (25 directors)
Strawberry and Chocolate, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1993

Guantanamera, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1995
Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen, 1969

Radio Days, Woody Allen, 1987
Another Woman, Woody Allen, 1988
Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody Allen, 1993
Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen, 1997
Dark Habits, Pedro Almodóvar, 1983

What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Pedro Almodóvar, 1984
Matador, Pedro Almodóvar, 1986
Kika, Pedro Almodóvar, 1993
One Wild Moment, Claude Berri, 1977

Tchao Pantin, Claude Berri, 1983
Uranus, Claude Berri, 1990
Luna, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979

The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987
Stealing Beauty, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996
Sweetie, Jane Campion, 1989

An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion, 1990
Portrait of a Lady, Jane Campion, 1996
Shadows, John Cassavetes, 1959

Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1977
Gardens of Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, 1987

New York Stories, Francis Ford Coppola & others, 1989
The Godfather III, Francis Ford Coppola, 1990
Hi, Mom!, Brian De Palma, 1970

Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma, 1980
Scarface, Brian De Palma, 1983
The Untouchables, Brian De Palma, 1987
Casualties of War, Brian De Palma, 1989
3
The Seven Deadly Sins, Jean-Luc Godard & others, 1962

Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
Vladimir and Rosa, Jean-Luc Godard, 1971
Numéro deux, Jean-Luc Godard, 1975
Stroszek, Werner Herzog, 1977

Where the Green Ants Dream, Werner Herzog, 1984
Wise Blood, John Huston, 1979

Prizzi’s Honor, John Huston, 1985
The Match Factory Girl, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989

Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989
I Hired a Contract Killer, Aki Kaurismäki, 1990
Naked, Mike Leigh, 1993

Career Girls, Mike Leigh, 1997
Poor Cow, Ken Loach, 1967

Raining Stones, Ken Loach, 1993
Ladybird, Ladybird, Ken Loach, 1994
Land and Freedom, Ken Loach, 1995
Zazie (in the Metro), Louis Malle, 1960

Murmur of the Heart, Louis Malle, 1971
Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle, 1987
Oblomov, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1979

Dark Eyes, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1987
Ecce Bombo, Nanni Moretti, 1978

Golden Dreams, Nanni Moretti, 1981
Palombella Rossa, Nanni Moretti, 1989
Dear Diary, Nanni Moretti, 1993
Tilaï, Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990

Samba Traoré, Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1992
Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970

The Chess Players, Satyajit Ray, 1977
The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray, 1984
Branches of the Tree, Satyajit Ray, 1990
The Broken Journey, Satyajit Ray, 1994
Mon Oncle d’Amérique, Alain Resnais, 1980

Mélo, Alain Resnais, 1986
The Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer, 1981

Le Beau Mariage, Éric Rohmer, 1982
4
Summer (Le Rayon vert), Éric Rohmer, 1986

Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Éric Rohmer, 1987
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, Éric Rohmer, 1987
A Tale of Springtime, Éric Rohmer, 1990
A Tale of Winter, Éric Rohmer, 1992
The Mattei Affair, Francesco Rosi, 1972

Christ Stopped at Eboli, Francesco Rosi, 1979
The Truce, Francesco Rosi, 1997
Summer Skin, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1961

Hand in the Trap, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1961
Love at Twenty, François Truffaut & others, 1962

The Green Room, François Truffaut, 1978
Confidentially Yours, François Truffaut, 1983
Films in Focus (35 entries)
Mr. Arkadin, Orson Welles, 1955

Gervaise, René Clément, 1956
The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Brooks, 1958
Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus, 1959
The L-Shaped Room, Bryan Forbes, 1962
Lilith, Robert Rossen, 1964
Lord Jim, Richard Brooks, 1965
Justine, George Cukor, 1969
Ludwig, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1972
We All Loved Each Other So Much, Ettore Scola, 1974
Max Havelaar, Fons Rademakers, 1976
Le Crabe tambour, Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1977
In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978
Theme, Gleb Panfilov, 1979
Messidor, Alain Tanner, 1979
City of Women, Federico Fellini, 1980
The Makioka Sisters, Kon Ichikawa, 1983
The Shooting Party, Alan Bridges, 1985
Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino, 1985
Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987
The Cry of the Owl, Claude Chabrol, 1987
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Philip Kaufman, 1988
36 Fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988
Hanussen, István Szabó, 1988
Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir, 1989
Martha and I, Jiří Weiss, 1990
Korczak, Andrzej Wajda, 1990
Jungle Fever, Spike Lee, 1991
Orlando, Sally Potter, 1992
The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese, 1993
5
The Remains of the Day, James Ivory, 1993

The Natural, Barry Levinson, 1994
Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997
Mrs. Dalloway, Marleen Gorris, 1997
Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997
Theater into Cinema (20 entries)
The Balcony, Joseph Strick, 1963

The Sea Gull, Sidney Lumet, 1968
A Doll’s House, Patrick Garland, 1973
Equus, Sidney Lumet, 1977
The Elephant Man, David Lynch, 1980
The Dresser, Peter Yates, 1983
Henry IV, Marco Bellocchio, 1984
Plenty, Fred Schepisi, 1985
Die Nacht (The Night), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1985
’night, Mother, Tom Moore, 1986
Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme, 1987
Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Beresford, 1989
The Madness of King George, Nicholas Hytner, 1994
Richard III, Richard Loncraine, 1995
Othello, Oliver Parker, 1995
American Buffalo, Michael Corrente, 1996
Twelfth Night, Trevor Nunn, 1996
Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann, 1996
The Crucible, Nicholas Hytner, 1996
Dancing at Lugnasa, Pat O’Connor, 1998
First Fictions (15 entries)
Charlie Bubbles, Albert Finney, 1967

Coming Apart, Milton Moses Ginsburg, 1969
Summer Paradise, Gunnel Lindblom, 1977
Gal Young ’Un, Victor Nuñez, 1979
Smithereens, Susan Seidelman, 1982
Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson, 1987
Wish You Were Here, David Leland, 1987
Lonely Woman Seeks Life Companion, Viacheslav Krishtofovich, 1987
A World Apart, Chris Menges, 1988
The Music of Chance, Philip Haas, 1993
Mina Tannenbaum, Martine Dugowson, 1994
Maborosi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1995
Manny & Lo, Lisa Krueger, 1996
Walking and Talking, Nicole Holofcener, 1996
The Daytrippers, Greg Mottola, 1996
INTERLUDE
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“Film Diary, 1961-1963”
BOOK REVIEWS (5 entries)
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, by Thomas
Schatz, 1988
Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era, by Kevin
Brownlow, 1990
In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, Walter Murch, 1995
Fritz Lang, by Patrick McGilligan, 1997
Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, by Gavin Lambert, 2000
RE-VIEWINGS & REMEMBRANCES (15 entries)
Gone With the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939

Late Autumn, Yasujiro Ozu, 1960
“On Film Acting”
The Lost One (Der Verlorene), Peter Lorre, 1951
A Passage to India, David Lean, 1984
“Japanese Film”
Elena and Her Men, Jean Renoir, 1956
Sunnyside, Charles Chaplin, 1919
Love, Károly Makk, 1971
Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick, 1960
Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis, 1950
“Stan Laurel, 1890-1965”
“The Lumière Brothers: Louis, 1864-1948; and Auguste, 1862-1954”
“Charles Denner, 1926-1995”
Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
7
Acknowledgements
All of the material in Outtakes: Collected Film Essays and Reviews from Six
Decades, by Stanley Kauffmann, originally appeared in The New Republic, except
where noted. My thanks to the editors of this publication for their cooperation in
this project; permission to reprint came from Stanley Kauffmann himself, who
during his long career always copyrighted his articles, reviews, and essays in his
own name rather than the name of the publication in which they first appeared.
My deep gratitude goes out to the late Mr. Kauffmann and his wife, Laura,
for their valuable support of and assistance on this project during the final years
of their lives.
8
Biography
Stanley Jules Kauffmann was born in New York City on April 24, 1916, and
was graduated from the College of Fine Arts of New York University in 1935. He
spent ten years, from 1931 to 1941, as an actor and stage manager with the
Washington Square Players and published a large number of short as well as long
plays. He was also the author of nine novels, published in the United States and
abroad, and two collections of memoirs; for Bantam, Ballantine, and Knopf, he
worked as a book publisher’s editor from 1949 to 1960. From 1967 to 1986,
Kauffmann taught drama and film at Yale University; between the years 1973 and
2006, he also taught at the City University of New York, Hunter College, and
Adelphi University.
Starting in 1958, Kauffmann became active in criticism. At that time he was
appointed the film critic of The New Republic, with which magazine he was
associated ever since, except for an eight-month period in 1966 when he was
exclusively the theater critic of The New York Times. In addition to his film reviews,
he wrote a large number of book reviews for The New Republic; from 1969 to 1979
he served as both film and theater critic for this magazine; and earlier, from 1963
to 1965, Kauffmann also served as the drama critic for the Public Broadcasting
television station in New York, WNET. He continued as film critic for The New
Republic but wrote theater criticism for the Saturday Review for five years, from
1979 to 1985. He contributed reviews and articles to many other journals, as
well—among them Horizon, Commentary, Salmagundi, Yale Review, Kenyon
Review, Theater, and The American Scholar.
Kauffmann published eight collections of film criticism in his lifetime: A
World on Film (1966), Figures of Light (1971), Living Images (1975), Before My
Eyes (1980), Field of View (1986), Distinguishing Features (1994), Regarding Film
(2001), and Ten Great Films (2012). He was the editor of the anthology American
Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane” (1972). He also published
three collections of theater criticism, Persons of the Drama (1976), Theater
Criticisms (1983), and About the Theater (2010), together with two collections of
interviews: Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann (2003) and Film Critic Talks:
Interviews with Stanley Kauffmann, 1972-2012 (2013).
In 1974 Kauffmann was given the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic
Criticism; from 1972 to 1976 he was a member of the Theater-and-Film Advisory
Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts; in 1969 and 1975 he was a juror
for the National Book Awards; and in 1982 he received the George Polk Award for
Film Criticism as well as the Edwin Booth Award in 1986, in addition to the 1986
Birmingham Film Festival Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the 1999 Telluride
Film Festival Award for Criticism. A former Ford Foundation (1964, 1971),
Rockefeller (1978), Guggenheim (1979-80), Japan Foundation (1986), and New
York Institute for the Humanities (1995) fellow, Kauffmann received an Emmy
Award for the first-ever television series about film, which he conducted for five
years in the 1960s on WNET-TV, the New York PBS station. He also received, in
1995, the Outstanding Teacher Award from the Association for Theater in Higher
Education.
Pre-deceased in 2012 by his wife since 1943, Laura Cohen Kauffmann,
Stanley Kauffmann died in New York City on October 9, 2013, at the age of ninety-
seven.
9
Introduction: “Man of the Movies: The Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann”
Wolcott Gibbs, late of The New Yorker, once wrote the following of his
experience as a film critic: “It is my indignant opinion that ninety percent of the
moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless, and dull that it is
preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while
chewing gum.”1 Gibbs vowed that he would never review another movie, and he
kept his promise.
As it happens, he quit movie reviewing just before the discovery that there
was a market for European films in the United States. It was the 1946 box-office
triumph in New York of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City that opened the way for many
low-budget Italian and French pictures. Even better ones began coming to
America, from Asia as well as Europe, after the 1950 success of Kurosawa’s
Rashomon. These foreign films increasingly exposed the tinsel and cardboard of
the indigenous product, but—more to the present point—they made the
reviewing of movies a rewarding activity.
Stanley Kauffmann’s career as a film critic for The New Republic began not
long afterward, in February of 1958—decades before the advent of simplified
thumbs-up, thumbs-down reviewing popularized by television commentators like
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Significantly, this was also the year in which Agee on
Film was published, and thus a year that marks the beginning of a change in
general attitudes toward serious film criticism in the United States. Indeed, the
1960s and early 1970s were heady times for such criticism. Films, then, were
being talked about in terms of art, and the central document of the time describing
the general conversation was written in 1966 by Stanley Kauffmann and
published in his very first collection of film criticism, A World on Film (also from
1966): it was titled “The Film Generation.” “There exists a Film Generation,”
Kauffmann opined, “the first generation that has matured in a culture in which the
film has been of accepted serious relevance, however that seriousness is defined.”2
Kauffmann’s directly stated and cleanly structured essay was written in his
characteristically precise, quietly professional style. Looking optimistically
toward the future, “The Film Generation” supplied historical context and
reasonable definition for the burgeoning American film culture.
In colleges and universities, in cafés, bars, theater lobbies, and their
surrounding sidewalks, movies were then becoming the subject of heated debates.
Neither moviegoing nor movie reviewing was new, as Kauffmann’s own American
Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane” (1972) proved. But youthful
hordes, uncomfortable with literature and not yet enslaved by television, now
found something to get excited about in the cinema. More than ever before and
perhaps ever since, they looked to critics to stimulate, shape, or confirm their
opinions, and they gravitated toward the critics who best satisfied their individual
bents.
The word “critics” refers to journalistic ones (as opposed to newspaper
reviewers), not academics or scholars. It was the former group that led the fight
to give film stature as art, and by the first few years of the 1970s this battle had
been won. Virtually every college and university in America by then was offering
film courses, and many had degree programs or were in the process of developing
them. Yet with every new course, program, and treatise, ironically, the less
relevant the writing of the pioneering journalistic critics became to the professors.
10
Was this a case of film education outdistancing the journalists, whose

establishment had advanced middle age or beyond, and who had therefore ceased
to grow intellectually? Or had the demand to achieve academic respectability
killed off the love of movies in those film scholars, who, once drawn to motion
pictures out of passion, were now burying them in mounds of hopelessly
“scientific,” theoretical verbiage?
The split between the academics or scholars and the journalistic critics can
best be understood in terms of classical and romantic temperaments: one
deductive, starting with general principles and moving to specific examples, the
other inductive, relying on each “text” to stimulate insights appropriate to it. And
because of the strong French influence on academic thinking about film, it was
unlikely then, in the mid-1970s, just as it is now, that American journalistic critics
would adopt any of the academy’s viewpoints. For those viewpoints go against a
longstanding American tradition. Leslie Fiedler put this issue best when he said
something to the effect that no matter what they try to do, the French keep
reinventing neoclassicism while the Americans keep reinventing romanticism.
Stanley Kauffmann himself once said something similar in a 1992 interview
in South Atlantic Quarterly: “The academic critics think of me as an impressionist,
because I . . . deal experientially with film, deal with it analytically in terms of a
highly personal set of ineffable standards. That is, I could not possibly codify for
you what my beliefs are about film; it’s a matter of instances rather than
precepts.”3 For Kauffmann, the most fundamental quality of film criticism was not
the code or theory behind it, but its moral rigor—its commitment to the art of film,
passion to see it improve and be taken as seriously as any fine art, and disregard
for any kind of popularity. It seems, then, that for the foreseeable future (and that
future may be brief given the surfeit of Internet “chat” about the cinema)
journalistic criticism of this kind will be at odds with academic film study. But the
journalists still need to be read, especially in universities, if only to keep alive the
romantic enthusiasm that brought professors to the cinema in the first place.
Where does Stanley Kauffmann stand among the journalistic critics?
Though precise terminology is elusive, there were, at the time he became
prominent, two kinds of critics: the “eggheads,” who preferred what were loosely
called art films, and the populists, who “grooved” on Hollywood movies and their
foreign counterparts where they could find them. The eggheads were Stanley
Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, Vernon Young, and John Simon, with relatively
few adherents. The populists were Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Manny
Farber, with their legions of followers. In between, and antecedent to both groups,
were good souls like James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Otis Ferguson (all three of
whom died prematurely, perhaps to the enhancement of their already deserved
reputations).
Of the egghead critics, Kauffmann was the least dogmatic and the least
elitist, though he was accused by his detractors of being too “distant,”
“professorial,” or “dispassionate”—too impersonal in his reviews, according to the
crusading Kael, to make others want to see the movies he liked. (Would an
“impersonal” critic have forgiven many sins in otherwise negligible films, as
Kauffmann often did, as long as they had a progressive social message?)
Nonetheless, for over fifty years, Stanley Kauffmann wrote about film in The New
Republic and elsewhere. And since 1967, he had also been teaching film as well as
theater and critical writing at the Yale School of Drama, Hunter College, the City
11
University of New York Graduate Center, and beyond. Kauffmann’s own critical
style is civilized and easygoing, not chattily egocentric like Kael’s, coltishly soul-
baring like Sarris’s, or Olympianly ironic like Macdonald’s. He was a man at home
in film history, conversant with culture and the arts generally, informative without
being preachy, using his writing to think about his subject and pleased to take us
into his confidence.
The internal consistency of Kauffmann’s evaluations makes clear that he
says what he thinks, though his insights are neither gratuitously shocking nor
necessarily innovative, and he does not make a show of himself or battle
insistently on behalf of his own reputation. Here, then, was a critic who took films
more seriously than he took himself. His stance was anything but a commonplace
one among his fellow critics. Indeed, much film criticism still seems to be written
by persons who love nothing more than their own persona, or know no other art
form. As Kauffmann himself put the matter in a 1965 essay on Pauline Kael in
Harper’s Magazine, he pledged allegiance to “a view of the film as a descendant of
the theater and literature, certainly sui generis but not without ancestors or
cousins, to be judged by its own unique standards which are yet analogous to
those of other arts: a view that is pluralistic, aesthetic but not anti-science,
contemporary but not unhistorical, and humanistic. 4 Stanley Kauffmann, then,
was a man of large interests, great knowledge, and supreme responsibility.
A particular value of his work was his willingness to go against critical
consensus. Kauffmann was never intimidated, for example, by precious, arty
analyses and endorsements of films that included the French cachet (from Cahiers
du cinéma) among their number. Nor was he ever overawed by films that won
their fame because of their “difficulty,” or because they claimed to be “advanced.”
Just because a film was labeled nouvelle vague, or New Wave, and was made by
Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Philippe de Broca, Agnès Varda, even Jean
Cocteau or Robert Bresson, Kauffmann did not cast aside his obligations as a critic
to take on the mantle of a cineaste. No matter how big or idolized the director,
Kauffmann always strove to separate brouhaha from artistry.
Witness his disliking of The Serpent’s Egg (1978) despite the fact that he
was an Ingmar Bergman fan; his not hesitating to explain why Perceval (1978) fails
even though he was otherwise an admirer of Éric Rohmer; or, in a Salmagundi
interview from 1991 (included in Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann), his
extended critique of the urbane realism of an otherwise overrated Woody Allen.
Witness also the following comeuppances Kauffmann delivered to Luis Buñuel in
A World on Film in a review of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955):
“He is a master technician with the outlook of a collegiate idealist who has just
discovered venality and lust.” . . . “Buñuel, the swami of sadism, has now reached
the point of self-parody.” . . . “Buñuel remains, for me, a highly resourceful
technician and a highly neurotic adolescent.”5 Buñuel may have been too old and
too far-gone for change by this time (1966), but these harsh words surely gave
some “Buñuel-can-do-no-wrong” devotees a prod toward reevaluating their
master.
All the pieces on Buñuel in A World on Film are grouped together, which is
not as trivial an editorial choice as it may sound. Rather, it is symptomatic of
Kauffmann’s longtime concern with continuity—one that continued up to his last
book, Ten Great Films (2012). When, in Before My Eyes (1980), you read his review
of Family Plot (1976), you also register the important point that, for all the
12
encomia about Alfred Hitchcock’s style, a Hitchcock film has always stood or
stumbled by virtue of its script. An extended essay in the same volume on 8½
(1963) discusses not just that film but also its relation to Federico Fellini’s life and
its place in the cinematic pantheon as well as the artistic pantheon generally.
Writing on the much-awarded Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), Kauffmann once
again swims against the critical tide by asserting that it is far from top-drawer
Ermanno Olmi, and proceeds to explain why by citing much earlier, better films by
this director like Il Posto (1961) and The Fiancés (1963).
No qualifications of such value judgments on Stanley Kauffmann’s part are
necessary because, in unabashedly, rigorously, thoughtfully, and humanely
deploying those principles of value and judgment, he always reached conclusions
that were conditional. Responding, for instance, to Susan Sontag’s contention, in
her famous essay on Godard (from the 1969 book Styles of Radical Will), that “just
as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the
composition, duration, and placement of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason
for excluding anything from a film,”6 Kauffmann wrote the following in Figures of
Light (1971):
This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a

thesis that any enlightened person would support: there are no absolutes
in art. The Godardians take this to mean (like Ivan Karamazov) that
therefore everything is permissible. Others of us take it to mean that
therefore standards have to be empirically searched out and continually
readjusted, to distinguish art from autism; that, just as responsive morals
have to be found without a divine authority if humanity is to survive, so
responsive aesthetics have to be found without canonical standards if art
is to survive.7
Some, in reading Kauffmann’s conflation of aesthetic and moral standards above,

may choose to see the finger-wagging or millennial doomsaying of a self-
appointed cultural gatekeeper. Yet such a conflation is not just an essential tenet
for anyone engaged in criticism: it is in addition a sign of the genuine ardor, and
the true seriousness (shorn of any sweater-vest insinuations), that Stanley
Kauffmann brought to bear in his own writing.
As should anyone who is deeply serious about art, Kauffmann took failings
in it as they should be taken: that is, personally. “Fine artists make us feel
proprietary about them,” he wrote in Before My Eyes, apropos of Antonioni’s 1975
film The Passenger: “They invade us so strongly, become so much a part of the way
we look outward and inward, that we can’t approach new works of theirs without
a sense that we are intimately involved.”8 Kauffmann’s aesthetic high-mindedness
was of the healthiest variety imaginable, born neither of easy cynicism nor of
unthinking adherence to traditional (i.e., fabricated) canonical standards—whose
existence, in any salutarily tangible sense, he dismissed as casually as the
Almighty’s. Such high-minded thinking was premised on a profound disdain of
glibness, of posturing, of pretense and laziness and arbitrariness, qualities that are
disagreeable enough in other spheres of existence but positively despicable in
(what should be) the heightened and heightening realm of art. (The divination of
artistic purpose, purpose both worthy and realized, was another of Kauffmann’s
perennially unfashionable dedications.)
13
Already during his first full decade as a film critic, Kauffmann had become
one of the profession’s most admired writers for the directness of his spare prose.
He wasted little time in getting to the point. For this reason, A World on Film
remains one of the best of collections of his movie reviews, even if it was the first.
Writing about an Irvin Kershner picture, for example, Kauffmann opened with the
following sentence: “The Luck of Ginger Coffey [1964] . . . is the sort of work that is
vastly overpraised simply because it is not phony.” 9 The first sentence of
Kauffmann’s review of L’Avventura (1960) is itself short, simple, and resoundingly
dramatic: “At last.”10 Furthermore, compare the heart- and loin-throbbing double-
entendre titles of Pauline Kael’s collections of film criticism (I Lost It at the Movies,
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper into Movies, When the Lights Go Down,
Taking It All In) with the sober, scrutinizing, ocular-based metaphors of
Kauffmann’s: Figures of Light, Living Images, Before My Eyes, Field of View,
Distinguishing Features, and finally, simply, Regarding Film.)
Apart from the economy of his writing style, breadth of range is another
Kauffmann virtue, abundantly on display in Before My Eyes. What other critic
would begin a review of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978), as Kauffmann does in
this book, by relating the film to latter-day European naturalism; in another piece,
compare Bergman to Eugene O’Neill; or, in another review, detail the ways in
which young German filmmakers of the 1970s utilized American popular culture?
Who other than Kauffmann would lay out Lina Wertmüller’s options for
portraying the Holocaust in Seven Beauties (1976) . . . and then explain why she
decided on comedy; or indicate his perceptiveness of the pleasures, and occasional
profundities, of pop by calling Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) not simply
the best science-fiction movie ever made but “an event in the history of faith”11?
Who else among the critics would notice—as Kauffmann does in Regarding Film—
in Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) an unacknowledged debt not only to Frank
Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) but also to a Finnish film and a Ukrainian one; reveal
his astute appreciation of the old Hollywood masters by arguing that to place John
Ford “among the great directors of the world, as we must, is to see that the ‘pure
force of genius’ is relatively stronger in Ford than in Dickens because Ford had
much less freedom of choice and much less control over the finished form of his
work” 12 ; or discuss, during a single conversation (with Studs Terkel in 1985,
included in Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann) about the theater, the subjects
of Harold Pinter and acting, Samuel Beckett and Bert Lahr, and Bertolt Brecht and
Berlin?
From the perspective of his more than five decades as a critic, nearly four
decades as a teacher, and a number of years in-between as an editor, playwright,
and novelist, Stanley Kauffmann clearly continued to see films in a broad cultural
and historical context that eludes the tunnel-vision reviewers whose only
reference points are Hollywood, old movies, and the box office. He was
particularly sensitive to the parasitic relationship that middlebrow movies too
often have with genuine art. “He’s the film equivalent of the advertising-agency art
director who haunts the galleries to keep his eye fresh,” Kauffmann wrote of
Robert Altman in Before My Eyes. “The future may judge our age culturally by its
high estimate of Altman. Indeed, the nonsense about him is already coming
undone.”13
Reviewing Kauffmann’s Living Images (1975) a number of years ago, one
reviewer suggested that his most salient quality as a critic was that of “raffish
14
dignity.” 14 His raffishness was more wry than pronounced, however, as in the
following humorous comment about George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told
(1965), from A World on Film: “Sometimes I am more relieved than at other times
that I am not a Christian; these occasions include the experience of most films
about Jesus.” 15 Kauffmann’s raffishness remained as lively as ever, as in the
following understatedly but effectively witty comment about Fargo (1996), from
Regarding Film (2001): “The hot news about Joel and Ethan Coen is that they have
made a tolerable film.”16 Or, from the same collection, these slicing words about
Touch of Evil: “[Charlton] Heston’s attempts to be a dashing young man were
painful even when he was young. 17 Often Kauffmann’s opening lines are as
amusingly provocative as Pauline Kael’s. Witness the following three from Before
My Eyes: “When François Truffaut has an idea, he makes a film. And sometimes
when he doesn’t have an idea, he makes a film anyway.”18 . . . “Paddy Chayefsky is
the kind of writer who is not an obvious escape-monger or fabricator but a
venturer who takes his audience on an interesting tour of anguish and then
delivers everyone safely right back to his front door.”19 . . . “One way to pass the
time while watching a turkey with big people in it is to wonder why they agreed
to do it.”20
Sometimes, however, Kauffmann’s amusing provocativeness or dignified
raffishness turns to harsh dismissal. This may be the result of an impatience with
stars or directors who keep flourishing despite his low opinion of them, but, from
the mid-1970s on, Kauffmann seemed less willing to be gentlemanly. Thus, in
Before My Eyes, he saw his bugbear Robert Altman as “a walking death sentence
on the prospects of American film” and a “public embarrassment,” the director’s
Quintet (1979) “paralyzingly stupid.”21 Shampoo (1975) struck Kauffmann in the
same volume as “disgusting,”22 while Liza Minnelli in New York, New York (1977)
resembled a “giant rodent en route to a costume ball.” 23 Perhaps for a critic so
concerned with film’s relationship to larger culture, the many opportunities lost,
bungled, or cheapened had come to seem unbearable after years of reviewing.
Even so, as early as 1959, Kauffmann was able to toss off this line in
dismissal of Gregory Peck: “He embodies Gordon Craig’s ideal of an actor: an
Übermarionette, wooden to the core.” 24 Only two years later—in the same
collection of criticism—he had this to say about the performance of Jackie Gleason
in The Hustler: “It is the best use of a manikin by a director since Elia Kazan
photographed Burl Ives as Big Daddy”25 in 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And, in
1963, in an interview published by the magazine Seventh Art, Kauffmann
dismissed la politique des auteurs, or the auteur theory of film (which holds that
the director is the primary “author” of any motion picture), with the following
words: “I think it is utterly boring . . . it’s for irresponsible children. It bores me
even to say as much as I’ve said.”26
Whether harsh or generous, Stanley Kauffmann was most certainly a
master of the felicitous phrase and memorable characterization. So, in Regarding
Film, he describes Emma Thompson as the “first film actress since Katharine
Hepburn to make intelligence sexy” 27 ; he finds in Amistad (1997) a sense of
“presence in the past” 28 he has not experienced since Bergman’s Virgin Spring
(1960); and he notes that Oliver Stone “in appalling measure” 29 succeeds in
Natural Born Killers (1994). Kauffmann is acute about a lesser but related film,
Pulp Fiction (1994), which “nourishes, abets, cultural slumming [with] calculated
grunginess.” 30 And, ever sensitive to cinematography, he writes of Stalingrad
15
(1993) that “the colors don’t glamorize, they confirm,”31 while in the camerawork
of Sister, My Sister (1994) he finds “the everyday put before us as evidence of
strangeness.”32 In Carrington (1995), for its part, “appurtenances of class and of
conscious bohemianism are integral to the characters themselves, not imposed as
décor. Settings and story are unified.”33
As they were not, for instance, in Barry Lyndon (1975). At a time—the last
quarter of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first—when gorgeous
cinematography had all but overwhelmed intelligent screenwriting, Kauffmann’s
senses never overpowered his sensibility. Of Barry Lyndon, whose visual splendor
blinded many critics to its intellectual emptiness, he wrote in Before My Eyes:
“Stanley Kubrick began professional life as a photographer and has lately been
reverting to his first career. His new film very nearly accommodates Zeno’s
paradox of motion: it seems to remain in one place while actually it is moving
ahead. Kubrick has produced three hours and four minutes of pictures.”34 Unlike
auteurists and other aesthetes, then, Kauffmann understood that films begin
where most reviews don’t: the screenplay. And he reiterated his belief when he
wrote the following in praise of Charley Varrick (1973) in Living Images: “It was
directed by Don Siegel, a great favorite of the auteur critics, and it proves yet again
that there’s nothing wrong with an auteur director that a good script [by Howard
Rodman and Dean Riesner, as adapted from John Reese’s novel The Looters] can’t
cure.”35
None of the above is to say that Stanley Kauffmann was the kind of film
critic who could easily be dismissed as “literary.” For example, Kauffmann’s ability
to engage with non-narrative work that, in his eyes, thoroughly justifies its
breaking of conventional cinematic modes through the validity of its artistic
purpose, as well as the breadth of its intellectual and technical resources, is
evidenced by his piece on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler (1977), included in
Field of View (1986). Moreover, Kauffmann reserves his greatest scorn for
conventional screenwriters whose own prose never equals their literary
aspirations, deftly puncturing the pretensions of, among others, James Toback
(The Gambler, 1974) and Thomas McGuane (The Missouri Breaks, 1976).
Kauffmann is also mercilessly attentive to the sort of detail that is usually
overlooked in hyperbolic reviews. Reviewing The Godfather: Part II in 1975, for
example, he patiently noted four gigantic plot holes before adding casually, “And,
by the way, the ship on which young Vito is said to be arriving in New York from
Sicily is actually leaving New York, sailing south past the Statue of Liberty.”36
One of the subconscious advantages of being a critic on a “little” magazine
like The New Republic may be that one feels sufficiently free to tout small films, or
neglected art, in addition to covering major releases like the first part of The
Godfather (1972). Kauffmann always showed this predilection for unheralded
work, perhaps never more strongly than in Before My Eyes. There Elaine May’s
barely acknowledged Mikey and Nicky (1976) is praised as “an implicitly large
film” and “an odd, biting, grinning, sideways-scuttling rodent of a picture”37 that is
the best film by an American woman to date. Go Tell the Spartans (1978), to
Kauffmann’s eyes, is the finest film about Vietnam, far above Coming Home
(released in the same year)—a point that he expands upon during his 1992
interview in South Atlantic Quarterly38 with reference to Platoon (1986) and Full
Metal Jacket (1987). The flaws in Go Tell the Spartans are pointed out, to be sure,
but so are the wider accomplishments. And so is the acting.
16
Among Kauffmann’s major distinctions from other film critics was a pre-
occupation with actors. Having been a stage actor himself, he was sensitive to
performers while other film critics treated them tangentially, if at all—even if they
were icons on the order of Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe, who had the screen
power to shape the force and nature of their films. Kauffmann was the antithesis
of those critics who believed that “serious” film criticism had everything to do with
theory, genre, politics, auteurism, or other theme-couching considerations, and
very little to do with the acting leads whom they parenthetically deigned to cite.
To word-shoveling spiritual rhapsodists like Pauline Kael and Parker Tyler, then,
Burt Lancaster up there on the screen might as well have been Arnold Stang. Even
someone normally as judicious as Vernon Young could mindlessly argue that “film
criticism can usually afford to disregard actors in a film’s total effect, unless they
are grossly bad or overwhelmingly good.”39
As evidence of Stanley Kauffmann’s keen interest in screen acting, let’s
have a look at this critic on the acting of Jane Fonda—someone whose career he
had watched from the beginning. He keenly locates the mediocrity of Coming
Home as the source of Fonda’s “crimped” performance: “Her performance seems
crimped by the role’s careful sterilization. There’s nothing much more than Jane
Wyman pertness at the start, to which is later added some Elissa Landi soul. I
choose ’30s references because, under the ’68 trappings, a perennial movie-movie
is what Coming Home is.”40 Such a comment is typical of Kauffmann’s criticism and
serves as evidence, together with the following nuggets, that he was the only
American film critic who had a thorough, incisive appreciation of the performance
side of cinema.
From A World on Film, sample these remarks comparing Frank Sinatra with
Marlon Brando: “The emotion displayed by Sinatra, one feels, is always Sinatra’s
emotion, not the character’s. . . . If it were possible to see Sinatra in Brando’s role
in On the Waterfront [1954], that would clarify the difference between mere
simulation and creative acting.”41 In praise of Brenda de Banzie’s performance in
The Entertainer (1960), Kauffmann acerbically wrote, in the same volume, “Her
drunk scene is one to which all Studio actors should be taken and held fast by the
nape the neck until they have seen it a dozen times.” 42 And about Ralph
Richardson’s performance as the faded matinee idol James Tyrone in Sidney
Lumet’s film of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), Kauffmann
was not afraid to be stingy, even to a time-honored great, when he wrote in A
World on Film that the actor “provides a sound performance, instead of the
affected distortion that he often palms off as originality. One cannot quite believe
that his face ever set feminine hearts aflutter or that he is more than occasionally
Irish (when he remembers the brogue); but he drives hard and honestly for the
center of this warped, grandiloquent man.”43
Nor was Kauffmann afraid to praise a performance that other reviewers
had damned. In his critique of John Frankenheimer’s film version of O’Neill’s The
Iceman Cometh (1973), from Living Images, he lauded the acting of Lee Marvin,
whose portrayal of Hickey, many other critics felt, had let the production down—
especially in comparison to Jason Robards’ legendary stage rendition of this major
character. “And to crown the work there is Lee Marvin, as Hickey, the salesman-
apostle,” Kauffmann wrote:
17
To put it simply: Marvin was born to play Hickey. He has the perfect
understanding of the man and perfect equipment to deal with it. . . . Marvin
understands the bumps and sags, and he lifts it all adroitly with gesture,
with vaudevillian’s esprit, to present both the man who was and who is.
Then comes the payoff, the great last act. Marvin is wonderful. I have seen
James Barton, the first Hickey, and Jason Robards (along with others), and
though they were both unforgettably good, Marvin goes past them—so
powerfully that he makes the crux of the play clearer than I have ever found
it before, on stage or page.44
Let us now consider Stanley Kauffmann on the creative acting of Paul

Newman—a performer who appeared alongside Lee Marvin in Pocket Money
(1972), and whose work Kauffmann had early celebrated, in A World on Film, in a
dual review of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) and Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues
(1961). The following passage comes from an interview with Kauffmann that
appeared in Film Heritage in the fall of 1972:
Paul Newman is much more subtle than he’s given credit for being. . . . If I
could take clips from Sometimes a Great Notion [1971] and Pocket Money
and show them to you side by side, figuratively, I think I could demonstrate
what I mean about subtlety of imagination working its way out through
vocal inflection, physical attitudes, personality aura, and all the other
factors that go towards subtle delineation. Newman . . . thinks differently in
his pictures. It’s not a question of a stock company actor putting on hook
nose and beard and becoming “somebody else,” a man of a thousand faces
or anything like that—that’s easy. Newman works from a core outward,
differently. And you would find, I believe, that his whole system of timing
was different in Pocket Money from what it was in the logging picture,
Sometimes a Great Notion.45
Lastly in the acting department, consider this analysis, from Regarding

Film, of the two stars who have played Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962, 1997):
“James Mason is the ideal Humbert. He gives us a doomed man, conscious of it,
accepting it. . . . [Jeremy] Irons in the role [gives] it his customary vestments of
intelligence and sensitive reticence, but at his deepest he is no more than
melancholy. Mason suggested a tragic fall.”46 As for the difference between a comic
performer and a comic actor, Kauffmann replies in A World on Film: “A performer
is a person who does things to make you laugh; an actor creates a character at
whose actions and utterances you laugh.” 47 To Kauffmann, Peter Ustinov and
Peter Sellers were comic performers; Alec Guinness and Jack Lemmon were comic
actors. Of the “comic” Lemmon, Kauffmann went on presciently to say the
following—also from A World on Film—about his performance in Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment (1960): “Jack Lemmon is the kind of problem American films need.
He is a vigorous, highly talented, and technically equipped actor with a wide
emotional range. Can Hollywood supply him with material that is good enough for
him?”48
Probably most important in any consideration of Stanley Kauffmann’s
critical virtues is that, while many of his fellow reviewers were carried away on
their own waves of rhetorical bluster, or blurby hyperbole, during the last few
18
decades of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first—particularly in

their undiscriminating remarks about film acting—he did not forget the real duty
or responsibility of a critic. Which is to exercise his judgment in the service of art,
not to try desperately to substitute rhetorical fireworks for the experience of art,
or to attempt to create masterpieces by fiat rather than discover them by careful
observation. To be sure, Kauffmann was not afraid to generalize from his detailed
observations, though he was always careful to avoid the thesis-mongering that too
often passes these days for cultural criticism.
For his part, he avoided such axe-grinding. Letting his aesthetics flow into
his morality, without dichotomy, Kauffmann thus explored movies in order to
search out the universality of their subject matter, the artistry of their technique,
and the ethical force that makes some art objects greater than others. He
wonderfully does all three in a review of that difficult yet impressive film Last Year
at Marienbad (1961), where, neither blinded by its technique nor alienated by its
innovation, he could lucidly and sympathetically locate its artistic impulse at the
same time as he had to conclude, “After Marienbad, I knew more about Alain
Resnais and Resnais’s search for reality; but after La Notte [1961] and L’Avventura
I knew more about myself.”49
Kauffmann’s description of Harry Alan Potamkin, in a thoughtful
appreciation of the late Marxist critic, could equally apply to himself: “He judged
film by its own criteria, certainly . . . but criteria no more lax or unbuttoned than
those that any good critic would apply to any other art.” Unfortunately, as
Kauffmann noted in this piece from Before My Eyes, “The assumption, then and
now, is that such an approach precludes appreciation of good popular film. Or that
such an approach marks the ‘literary’ film critic.”50 Perhaps this was too sour a
view of the cinematic landscape in the late 1970s. But it is none too sour a view
from the vantage point of 2016. If anyone is beleaguered these days, it is critics
with taste and intelligence—like the late Stanley Kauffmann—who bring to their
work a littérateur’s perspective on narrative structure and character
development, who use their cultural appetite to make thematic connections
between movies (the most populist art form) and literature, and who,
pedagogically speaking, focus less on the sociological or political implications of a
film than on the quality of its artistic expression.
Still, Kauffmann felt considerably less beleaguered than most of his fellow
film critics; and, as he pointed out in his interview in South Atlantic Quarterly, “The
serious critic . . . who can’t enjoy what to him is an entertainment film, is lacking
in full capacity for enjoying the best film, I think.”51 As Kauffmann himself would
have agreed, the fact that a Japanese film by Yasujiro Ozu does not run very long
in America’s biggest city doesn’t prove any more about the status of the art and its
audience than the fact that Athol Fugard’s drama Boesman and Lena (1969) didn’t
break the attendance record set by Hello, Dolly! (1964), or that John Berryman’s
Dream Songs (1964) did not outsell the pop poetry of Rod McKuen. It is not so
much that Kauffmann was sanguine about the state of the cinema at any particular
time; rather, he knew that masterpieces in any form in any age are few and far
between, and that a responsible critic must exercise the same judgment in the
valleys as on the peaks. In the meantime, he was hardly waiting around for the
next great work of art to appear, or for an old master miraculously to regain his
powers.
19
Indeed, Kauffmann’s powers of discernment are perhaps most evident in

his writing about films that were far from being total successes; he is capable of
simultaneously appreciating their virtues (often limited) and deploring their
shortcomings (often considerable). “Julia is irresistible,” he confessed in 1977.
“Tears must flow. Mine certainly did. But this is not to say that it’s really good. In
fact, if it were really good, tears might flow less, perhaps not at all. Julia is first-
class middlebrow beautified filmmaking.”52 Or consider, from 1978, this vintage-
Kauffmann criticism of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven:
He brought over Nestor Almendros for this film and has proved, by doing
this, the last thing he wanted to prove: there is no such thing as an artist-
cinematographer; there are only good cinematographers who sometimes
work for artists. And when the director is weak, as Malick is here, he tends
to lean more and more on the good cinematographer’s ability, and so
swamps the film in pretty pictures.53
In the end, Stanley Kauffmann’s film writing creates the kind of evocative
and sensitive critical world that recharges a work of art while searching out and
probing its parts. He does not merely mediate between his readers and the
artwork; he allows the play of his intelligence to respond to the force of that work,
using language to capture the thrust of a film and test it against its own
possibilities. At his best, Kauffmann responds to the cinema, in Henry James’s
phrase, with “perception at the pitch of passion.”54 Agreement with him matters
less than recognition of his ability to summon up the memory of films enjoyed; to
evoke the pleasure of, and build up appetite for, films unseen; and, on privileged
occasions, to change our long-held but nonetheless obsolete critical estimates, or
to make us reflect for the first time on the magic of being born at a time when the
arrival of film could transform one’s life. Without the movies, writes Kauffmann in
Regarding Film, “Josef von Sternberg might have spent his life in the lace business;
Howard Hawks might have remained an engineer . . . [David] Lean might have
browned out his life as a London accountant.” 55 So too did Stanley Kauffmann
discover film criticism, and apply himself to it, at precisely the right time.
The right time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, was also when Kauffmann
became one of the first film critics to use television as a means of consistently
investigating film culture, as he brought an erudite brand of criticism to the public
airwaves. Stanley Kauffmann was the host of “The Art of Film” on the old WNDT-
TV, based in Newark, New Jersey, from 1963 to 1967. (WNDT merged with the
National Educational Television [NET] in 1970, when the Public Broadcasting
Service was formed, and became PBS’s New York affiliate, WNET-TV, Channel 13.)
On this program—which in 1964 won a local New York-area Emmy Award for
general excellence—he conducted serious discussions regarding the techniques
and artistry of filmmaking with guests who included directors and screenwriters
like Michelangelo Antonioni and Harold Pinter, as well as producers and actors.
Film clips were interspersed to illustrate points in a documentary-like manner,
rather than being used as they mostly were in later years: as free advertising by
studios trying to plug their newest releases. As much as his reviews in The New
Republic and the books that anthologized them, “The Art of Film” thus helped to
establish Kauffmann’s reputation as a critic of perception and power.
20
As if his television commentary and print reviewing of film were not

enough, Stanley Kauffmann was even a frontline drama critic for a time, starting
in the 1960s, for The New York Times and Saturday Review among other
publications. (Indeed, from 1963 to 1965, he served as both the drama and film
critic for the public television station in Newark, WNDT.) Kauffmann stopped
writing regular theater criticism in 1985 but continued to write film criticism until
his death in 2013. And the present volume, Outtakes: Collected Film Essays and
Reviews from Six Decades, contains a selection of that film criticism—arranged
chronologically, by section, from the earliest piece to the latest. These previously
uncollected pieces from the 1950s to the 2000s were selected on the basis of their
international as well as national (American) representativeness, and with the idea
in mind of creating a balance between prominent film directors and those less
prominent or relatively early in their careers.
Included in Outtakes, then, are reviews of such new and notable fiction
features (at the time of their initial American release) as Woody Allen’s Take the
Money and Run, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus,
Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, Federico Fellini’s City of Women, Wim Wenders’ Wings
of Desire, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the
Forest, and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table; reviews of first films by artists
like Albert Finney and Philip Haas; books about the movie directors Fritz Lang and
Lindsay Anderson; several reconsiderations of classic films such as Victor
Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and David Lean’s A
Passage to India; remembrances of late, distinguished film actors such as Stan
Laurel and Charles Denner; and ruminations on such important subjects as film
acting and the relationship between theater and film.
In Outtakes, as in his previous collections, Kauffmann regularly comments
on the nature, as well as what can be called (with the advent of the Internet) the
crisis, of film criticism, as he does on such subjects as the function of criticism, the
qualifications of a critic, the influence or power of critics, newspaper reviewing
versus magazine criticism versus academic scholarship, and critical theory as
opposed to critical practice. Other topics routinely touched on in Kauffmann’s
work include the relationship between theater and film, particularly the difference
between stage and screen acting; children and the cinema and the phenomenon of
child actors; the relationship between novels and the movies made from them;
Shakespeare and the cinema; sex and sexuality as well as realism, taste, and
violence in film; the pleasures, and treasures, of documentary film; various
national cinemas (among them those of Brazil, Cuba, and the Netherlands); the
extent to which cinema seems embedded in French culture more than in any
other; the phenomenon of film festivals; the persistence of American independent
filmmakers in the face of the commercial behemoth of Hollywood; the ostensible
“death of film” in the age of digital cinema; and the issue of government subsidy
for the cinema in particular and for the arts in general.
Let me conclude by mentioning a long, lovely piece that Stanley Kauffmann
wrote in tribute to (the still-living) John Gielgud in 1977 (and included in Before
My Eyes), in which he took issue with Brecht’s admonition in his play Life of Galileo
(1938-47) that “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”56 “Unknown is the land
that needs no hero. Unknown is the interior land that needs no hero,” Kauffmann
retorts:
21
Brecht’s line becomes even more doubtful when we see that what we have
chiefly left to cheer us, in the whirl and disorder of our days, are some
heroes, heroines: not mouthers of ideals but practitioners of excellence,
men and women who have made personal worlds in which the centers
hold. They help us. And excellence that gives us a model, however distantly
analogous to our lives, is a testament of possibility. Art is still one locus of
such excellence, whichever art it is that speaks to you most directly.57
Beyond the exquisite, carefully chosen phrasing whose ease belies its
exceedingly precise construction, beyond the unerring sense of rhythm and
cadence that punctuates a luxuriously unspooling flow of words, concepts, and
imagery with short, sharp, functional little phrases (“They help us”), there is also
in the above passage something fundamental to Kauffmann’s writing as a whole—
and something that went largely unremarked upon in the many respectful tributes
to the longtime New Republic critic upon his death in October 2013 at the age of
ninety-seven. That something, simply put, is drama: in the sweeping sense of scale
that cannot be concealed behind the cool judiciousness of the prose, and in the
utterly serious conviction that art, in its many and variegated forms, is playing for
the highest stakes imaginable. Hence Kauffmann’s critical writing is not only
evaluation (though it is that, incisively), not only enthusiasm (though it is that,
fervently); it is engagement, of a rare (not rarefied) variety: of a writer who has
refined his craft, sharpened his perceptions, and through them broadened his
range of response and feeling in celebrating an artist, Gielgud, whose work
validates what he knows the medium to be capable of but so seldom achieves.
“Thus my account of debt, or a sketch of it,” Kauffmann ends his encomium
to John Gielgud. “There a vision of a theater, of a film, better than has been
available to him most of his career, thus a vision of is rigor in his life (says his
acting), there is—consciously or not—the world better than the one he lives in.
And thus, implicitly, he performs the fundamental function of art: to criticize
life.” 58 If the role of art is to criticize life, then Stanley Kauffmann ceaselessly
demonstrated that criticism can be a way, for those to whom it speaks most
directly, to live a life in art.
Notes
1Wolcott Gibbs, More in Sorrow (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 268.
2Stanley Kauffmann, A World on Film: Film Criticism and Comment (New York:
Harper & Row, 1966), 415.
3 Bert Cardullo, ed., Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann (Jackson: University
Press
of Mississippi, 2003), 168.
4Stanley Kauffmann, “Focus on Film Criticism: I Lost It at the Movies, by Pauline
Kael, “ Harper’s Magazine 230 (June 1965): 114.

5Kauffmann, A World on Film, 352.
6Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Dell, 1969), 176.
7Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 110-111.

8Stanley Kauffmann, Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and Comment (New York:
22
Harper & Row, 1980), 121.

11Kauffmann, Before My Eyes, 155.
12Stanley Kauffmann, Distinguishing Features: Film Criticism and Comment
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 224.

14Stephen R. Lawson, “Book Review of Living Images,” Theater 6.3 (Spring 1975):
73.
16Stanley Kauffmann, Regarding Film: Film Criticism and Comment (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 83.

17Kauffmann, Regarding Film, 172.
26Cardullo, Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann, 3.
35Stanley Kauffmann, Living Images: Film Criticism and Comment (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), 241.

38Cardullo, Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann, 182-183.
39Edward Murray, Nine American Film Critics (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975),
199.
43 Kauffmann, A World on Film, 75-76.
44Kauffmann, Living Images, 240.
45Cardullo, Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann, 42-43.
50Kauffmann, Before My Eyes, 376-377.
51Cardullo, Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann, 163.
23

54Henry James, “Criticism,” in his Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1893), 264.

56Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, trans. Charles Laughton (New York: Grove Press,
1966), 115.
Bibliography
Brecht, Bertolt. Life of Galileo. Trans. Charles Laughton. Ed. Eric Bentley. New
York: Grove Press, 1966. 43-129.
Cardullo, Bert, ed. Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann. Jackson: University
Press
of Mississippi, 2003.
Gibbs, Wolcott. More in Sorrow. New York: Henry Holt, 1958.
James, Henry. “Criticism.” In Essays in London and Elsewhere. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1893. 259-266.
Kauffmann, Stanley. “Focus on Film Criticism: I Lost It at the Movies, by Pauline
Kael.” Harper’s Magazine, 230.1381 (June 1965): 113-116.
----------. A World on Film: Film Criticism and Comment. New York: Harper & Row,
1966.
----------. Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment. New York: Harper & Row,
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----------, ed. American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane”. New
York: Liveright, 1972.
----------. Living Images: Film Criticism and Comment. New York: Harper & Row,
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----------. Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and Comment. New York: Harper & Row,
1980.
----------. Field of View: Film Criticism and Comment. New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1986.
----------. Distinguishing Features: Film Criticism and Comment. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994.
----------. Regarding Film: Film Criticism and Comment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001.
Lawson, Stephen R. Book Review of Living Images, by Stanley Kauffmann. Theater,
6.3 (Spring 1975): 70-75.
Murray, Edward. Nine American Film Critics. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975.
Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Dell, 1969.
24
FILM REVIEWS
Directors on Display
Strawberry and Chocolate, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1993 (The New Republic, 6
February 1995)
In 1983 a documentary called Improper Conduct, co-directed by the late

Nestor Almendros, exposed the harassment of gays in Castro’s Cuba. A new film,
Strawberry and Chocolate, is a fictional work about gay life in Cuba that deals with
less patent forms of harassment. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who co-directed it with
Juan Carlos Tabío, is safely ensconced in cinema history with Memories of
Underdevelopment. In that 1968 film Alea explored spiritual malaise in the midst
of revolutionary fervor with extraordinary candor and artistry. He has been active
in the intervening years, but it’s his latest film, Strawberry and Chocolate, that
quite understandably has drawn most attention.
25
The screenplay is by Senel Paz, adapted from one of his own stories, and,
with the prerogatives of art, it treats its theme with subtleties that were not
available to Almendros in a documentary. Almendros was protesting injustice.
Paz, like many people who live under oppressive governments, gay or otherwise,
is interested in how people breathe, grow, protect themselves in such a world.
The story opens with a young man and woman, in Havana, going to a hotel
to make love. This sequence leads to another with a sardonic twist that a wit like
Molnár would have enjoyed. Let’s just say that love is not made. The young man,
called David, alone and disconsolate, has an ice cream in a café—chocolate.
Another young man, called Diego, who more or less flaunts his gayness, sits down
at the same table with a strawberry ice cream. Diego makes conversation. David
resists entanglement; but Diego is clever, and eventually David is inveigled into
going to Diego’s apartment with him.
We, wised up as we are by filmgoing, are sure that David, disappointed in
women, will succumb to Diego’s advances. Not so. Instead, beginning that day and
continuing thereafter, we get what David, a fervent Marxist, would call a dialectical
relationship between himself and Diego, an apolitical aesthete. David is a
university student, socially committed; Diego is a photographer who wants only
to live an artistically and emotionally fulfilling life. The continuing tension that
arises out of their sexual difference only heightens the dialectics.
Other people are involved, chiefly a Castro helot who is David’s friend and
neighbor. Police agents and spies do not appear, yet we get a clear sense
throughout of privacies being played out in an intensely politicized community.
The directors have comprehended the qualities in Paz’s script, which they
helped to prepare, and have drawn them out delicately—no heavy underlining.
Just when we may be feeling that we are traveling down the well-worn road of the
homosexual who aims at the unacknowledged latency in a straight, some jolt of
character or thought or atmosphere reminds us that this story is not just a re-
upholstered cliché.
The two principal roles have been extremely well cast. Vladimir Cruz, as
David, is straightforward with an acute combination of seriousness and naïveté.
But the part calls for several kinds of honesty, which Cruz provides. The complex
acting comes from Jorge Perrugoría as Diego. An exceptionally handsome man and
gifted actor, Perrugoría plays Diego as a man who will not conceal his gayness
(neither does a friend of his); he loves its style, and that style is his form of courage.
We all have read about homosexual men in wartime who were especially
courageous because they wanted to show that gays are not ipso facto weak and
cowardly. They were at least as admirable as any straight military hero. Diego’s
courage is more social. His swish—or whatever the word is in Spanish—is to him
what the white plume is to Cyrano.
Guantanamera, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1995 (The New Republic, 28 July

1997)
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who died last year, was and is the best-known Cuban
filmmaker, before or since Castro. Among Alea’s films that were shown in the
United States, two were especially impressive: Strawberry and Chocolate (1993),
a gentle, empathic treatment of homosexuality, and Memories of
Underdevelopment (1968), about a bourgeois sybarite encountering the new Cuba.
26
Both pictures were to some degree surprising, in view of their provenance.

A friendly account of a gay man was unexpected under Cuban rule; only a few
years earlier Nestor Almendros had made a documentary indicting Cuba’s
persecution of homosexuals. And Memories of Underdevelopment, which I saw
again recently—it’s the film that won Alea an international reputation—clearly
reveals Antonioni’s influence in tempo and introspection; and Antonioni is not
exactly an exemplar of Marxist vigor. Adding to the surprise of these films is the
fact that Alea was no political dissident; he was an early and devoted supporter of
Castro.
Continuing the paradox, here is Alea’s latest and last film, which chuckles
at the revolutionary state—something like the Ilf-Petrov Twelve Chairs, a 1928
Soviet novel that Alea transposed to Cuba and filmed early in his career (1962).
Guantanamera means “The Woman of Guantanamo,” but it refers to the city, not
the U.S. naval base. It was written by Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, with Eliseo
Alberto Diego; Alea and Tabío, who had collaborated previously, directed. Here
we have an amiable comedy-romance that centers on a corpse—the troubles in
transporting a coffin across Cuba to the right cemetery. (And here, too, there’s an
Alea precedent, a satirical comedy called Death of a Bureaucrat 1966—about
burial errors.)
Adolfo (played by Carlo Cruz) is a fortyish pompous bureaucrat in
Guantanamo. He is married to a retired professor of economics, Georgina (played
by Mirtha Ibarra, Alea’s wife). Georgina’s elderly aunt, a famous singer known as
Guantanamera, comes home to visit and dies in the embrace of her childhood
sweetheart, Candido (played by Raúl Eguren). The aunt’s coffin must cross Cuba
to her cemetery of choice, and the puffy Adolfo is in charge of the meager two-car
cortege. Of course mishaps occur, most of them through the tangles of Communist
bureaucracy.
One non-political tangle is Georgina’s accidental meeting with a former
student of hers, Mariano (Jorge Perrugoría, familiar from Strawberry and
Chocolate). Mariano, now a truck driver, had something more than a crush on his
teacher, and she has treasured a note he wrote her when he left school. Mariano
knows plenty of attractive women along his trucking route—apparently he moves
from bed to bed as he delivers the goods—but the fresh sight of Georgina makes
him look at love and life differently.
All through the cortege’s trip, officialdom hinders progress. But
counterpointed with these troubles are the colors of Cuban personality—from
silliness to triumphant warmth—colors that, Alea seems to say, persist in Cuba
under any regime. The finish of the film is guessable, but by then the people and
the plots have become so comfy that we want the added comfort of a predictable
ending.
Ibarra is an actress of resource, charm, and mature sex appeal. Perrugoría
is so attractive that we don’t bother to wonder about the future of this young man
and this markedly older woman. And there’s a modestly wise performance by
Eguren as the dead woman’s sweetheart who waited all his life for her to come
back, only to have her die in his arms, and who now accompanies her coffin
because, as he figures it, fidelity is fidelity.
What keeps Guantanamera entertaining, what makes it more than a series
of gags, good or otherwise, is the Alea-Tabío feeling for the people. In the manner
of some French comedies of the 1930s, this film finds an engaging way of bragging
27
about its country, warts and all.
Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen, 1969 (The New Republic, 13
September 1969)
Several reviews of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run have said that
it’s funny for an hour or so, then runs down. I disagree. It simply runs on. If you
came in during the picture and saw the second half first, it would be just as funny
as the first half is for those who see it from the beginning. Allen, who is the co-
author, director, and star, is a witty man, but he is a stand-up comedian, a
performer whose basic method is that of the fisherman: he comes out and casts
his lines a number of times, trying to catch as many laughs as possible. After a
while, he quits, hoping that his average has been high.
Allen’s longer efforts are just larger numbers of tries. This is painfully clear
in his current Broadway comedy, Play It Again, Sam, which is a revue sketch
cancerously overgrown. His film is much better because Allen has clever schemes
about the medium itself, where he has none at all about the theater. In fact, if the
picture were to be saddled with a theme, it would be the penetration by media-
forms into our fantasies: film hits, TV interviews, TV quiz games, TV commercials.
Once again he is the bespectacled shnook, this time the shnook as criminal.
We never believe for a moment that Allen is a criminal—as we can believe, at least
partially, that Keaton is a Confederate railroad engineer in The General (1926)—
so the fun is all conscious comment. This means that the comment has to keep
coming; there is little chance for dramatic understructure in the comedy. And this,
plus the fact that Allen doesn’t even seem to sense the need for cumulation and
growth, makes the picture a series of items, good or less good. But a lot of them
are funny.
Janet Margolin is appealing as the doe-eyed Bonnie to this clumsy Clyde.
Allen’s direction is competent enough; at least the camera always looks where it
ought to look in order to get the laugh. My guess is that he owes considerable to
Ralph Rosenblum, the film editor, who was “editorial consultant.” I think I even
saw Rosenblum make a brief appearance, rising through the sidewalk in a freight
elevator.
Radio Days, Woody Allen, 1987 (The New Republic, 9 March 1987)
An uncle of mine was the first one in our family to buy a radio, in the mid-
1920s, and once a week all the rest of us trooped up to the Bronx to listen to it. I
was eight or nine, and though I cant remember the programs, I remember the
miracle—also the smell of the set when it heated up. Within a few months our
household had its own set, and I felt that we had become members of a public
secret society. We were privy now to messages floating invisibly all around us, that
were in the very air we breathed.
Woody Allen’s Radio Days begins about fourteen years later, when radio
was still king. As usual in an Allen period piece, the atmospherics are first class.
The clothes and rooms and cars are easy enough to get; but Allen recaptures the
way people lived by the radio, as a skin diver lives by his snorkel. (Television
expanded this feeling, of course, but it lacked a basic novelty: society—people’s
28
homes—had already been electronically linked.) The cinematographer, Carlo Di

Palma, re-creates precisely the lighting of broadcasting studios, a light that both
embalmed and enhanced. In the mid-1940s I wrote and directed a network radio
show, and I can vouch for Di Palma’s uncanny authenticity. That light, unlike TV
studio lighting, was just part of the workplace, or, if there was a studio audience,
part of the hype. Santo Loquasto, the designer, gets fun out of the fact that, when
there was an audience, the actors often worked against a background display that
pushed the sponsor’s product.
Another asset of the film is that Allen isn’t in it. He narrates; and though
names have been changed, we are meant to assume, from the first-person
narration, that the Jewish family we see in their Rockaway Beach home represents
Allen’s family. (Please consider that the obligatory comparison with Neil Simon’s
Brighton Beach Memoirs film, 1986—same period, same social group—has been
made, and we’ll move on.) The core of the film is the effect that certain radio shows
had on various members of the family and their friends. The script is made up of a
series of (mostly) self-contained episodes, with little continuity, and Allen gets
much out of what was being imagined as against what the actors really looked like.
This latter element leads to a structural defect. Allen doesn’t stick to the
listeners’ end of things; he takes us into the lives of some of the radio performers.
Thus Radio Days splits right down the middle, between social history and show-
biz anecdotes. If Allen had stayed with the former and explored it further, the film
might have been stronger; most of the latter are familiar or strained. Even some
of the Rockaway episodes have nothing to do with radio, such as one in which a
young woman discovers that her date is homosexual and one in which a member
of the family goes next door to rebuke some Communist neighbors and comes back
two hours later a slogan-slinging Red. But Allen makes good Rockaway use of quiz
shows. There are also Westerns, the Orson Welles Martian broadcast, and more.
Mia Farrow, who did a sharp Mafia tootsie in Broadway Danny Rose (1984),
settles here for a trite caricature here as a nightclub cigarette girl. Tony Roberts,
the son of a well-known announcer of the period, seems utterly at ease as an
announcer. David Warrilow, one of Samuel Beckett’s favorite actors, is miscast as
a breakfast-show host: no such host ever sounded British or even upper-class
American. Allen’s self-hate leaks out yet again in the casting of “his” family. All of
them are strikingly plain, except one spinster aunt, nicely played by Dianne Wiest;
and that aunt is made both nearsighted and unlucky in love.
Radio Days joins Zelig (1983), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), and
Stardust Memories (1980), to name only a few, as another Allen film that starts
well and thins out because the scriptwriter depended too much on the director.
Allen, the director, has become competent; Allen, the writer, still doesn’t ask the
screenplay enough tough questions before the shooting begins.
Another Woman, Woody Allen, 1988 (The New Republic, 21 November 1988)
What Woody Allen is injuring these days is our regard for his intelligence.
All his previous films except Interiors (1978) have obviously had a bright man
behind them, no matter what the success of the individual film. Always the
undeluded Allen had shrewd perceptions about his society and had attempted,
well or less well, to embody them in film. But with September (1987) and now with
Another Woman, he has stopped looking at his world. He now looks at films, mostly
29
by Ingmar Bergman.
Many a good artist has modeled himself on a previous artist. To speak only
  of film history, consider Truffaut and Renoir, Peckinpah and Ford, Bergman
himself and Sjöström. But in each of these cases, the younger artist used his model
as a means to explore his own experience, not to imitate the other’s experience. I
know a woman who was in a famous ballet teacher’s class in the year when The
Red Shoes (1948) was first seen. One day, this woman told me, a newcomer arrived
in the studio and persuaded the teacher to let her join the class. The newcomer
then put on a pair of red ballet slippers. These were her only asset. She had seen
the film, and she thought that, if she just put on a pair of red shoes in a ballet class,
she would dance like Moira Shearer. That woman was an inexperienced nut case:
Allen is neither. Still he has taken his red shoes from Bergman films and thinks
that merely by putting on the accoutrements he will be a similar artist.
It is not intelligent: to think that, merely by repeatedly mentioning some of
the dilemmas of existence, one has confronted them as Bergman does; that the
choice of such subjects means that one can disregard organic structure and
cumulative drama (which Bergman never disregards); or to think that serious
intent demands pompous diction. (“You’re capable of such a lack of feeling,” a man
says to his lover in the middle of a quarrel.) It’s not even intelligent to engage
Bergman’s cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, magical though he is: it seems a
pathetic, desperately imitative move.
Above all, it is not intelligent to think, as Allen apparently does, that comedy
is categorically a lower form than drama or tragedy and that a serious filmmaker
must strive upward to the higher forms. Allen seems to have made his last two
films, as he made Interiors, because he thought that wit would not fulfill the
seriousness in him. This, if true, is a grave misreading of himself and of the
dominant national tenor of our time. The most significant American playwrights
and screenwriters these days, Shepard and Mamet among them, are incisive,
satiric rather than unrelievedly somber. One reason for the international success
of Allen’s comedies, I believe, is that they are part of that national tenor, authentic
to us and fascinating to others.
But Another Woman, quite aside from its flaws of structure and diction,
strives uncomfortably to be dark, “European,” rather than indigenous. (A classy
musical décor of Satie, Weill, and Mahler—rather than the Gershwin in Allen’s
past—confirms this urge.) All the items above reflect fundamentally on Allen’s
intelligence. The title is meant to be a double entendre. Gena Rowlands plays a
woman turning fifty who finds that her new husband is involved with another
woman just at the time when, because of her birthday, she feels herself becoming
another woman. Of this reasonably interesting proposition Allen makes nothing
at all. Portentous devices, like psychoanalytic sessions next door overheard in
Rowlands’ workroom, flashbacks to various periods in her life, are all just
apparatus (mostly Bergman-derived), polished up and used to no affective end.
We are meant to be impressed merely by the profundity in Allen’s choice of
apparatus. Rowlands’ inner crisis ends suddenly, she is “at peace,” when she reads
a new novel in which she is a character. Even this possible theme—a person who
feels her life somewhat justified by its realization in an artwork—is snapped off
quickly with a supposed resonance that is merely a hollow click.
Rowlands’ career is a series of earnest efforts, never really successful be-
cause she is more earnest than talented. She delivers emotional and reflective
30
statements, with fairly appropriate vocal colors and facial expressions, but the all-
important transformative element is quite lacking. Here she is further
handicapped because she plays a professor of philosophy, and her commonplace,
slurred speech fights the image. No, I don’t think that all philosophy teachers are
eloquent; but if we’re told that a woman is a distinguished philosopher and if she
speaks as Rowlands does, some explanation is needed.
Allen has once again studded his cast with famous people, not all of them
actors. Among the professionals, that excellent actor Ian Holm, the husband,
suffers most; he seems puzzled as to why he is present or what he’s supposed to
provide. The actor who does best is Gene Hackman as a friend who wants
Rowlands to marry him instead of Holm. In a few scenes Hackman creates a man
hopelessly in love.
Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody Allen, 1993 (The New Republic, 4 October
1993)
Woody Allen makes two kinds of films: those completely of his own
devising (Annie Hall 1977, Manhattan 1979) and those patently modeled on
predecessors (Stardust Memories 1980, Interiors 1978, homages to Fellini and
Bergman respectively). His new one, Manhattan Murder Mystery, is in the latter
group: it’s based on The Movies. It’s the sort of comedy-mystery that we associate
with Bob Hope (The Cat and the Canary 1939, etc.) but that in fact antedated
Hope by decades. And Allen ends his story in a movie theater, behind a screen on
which The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is showing. Allen’s finish is braided with the
famous house-of-mirrors finish in the Welles film. There’s even an echo of Everett
Sloane’s canes in The Lady, with a cane used by a woman in Allen’s film.
The tone and milieu are still Allen—Manhattan Jewish with lots of Allen’s
Manhattan Jewish humor—but to a greater degree than usual with him, the
picture is plotty. The screenplay by Allen and Marshall Brickman is, like most
screenplays in this genre, an arrangement. A lot of unexpected things have to
happen in the course of such a picture, arranged so that they can all be explained
at the end. This kind of romp-mystery doesn’t exist to be satisfactorily solved but
to provide laughs and shocks throughout, which this one does. In fact, we don’t
even really care much about the solution, as long as the explanation is gotten
through fairly quickly. Anjelica Huston handles it here, briskly.
Diane Keaton, after a sixteen-year absence from the Allen fold, rejoins him,
playing his wife. He is an editor at HarperCollins. They have a college-age son and
have neighbors in their apartment house who are seemingly nice. (Seemingly.
Oho!) He and she are floating along in middle age. Keaton, to busy herself, is
thinking of opening a restaurant, possibly with Alan Alda, a newly single friend.
Instead she opens a murder case, with the help of Alda.
The trouble begins with the sudden death by coronary of a woman who
lived down the hall with her husband of twenty-eight years. Suspicion grows in
Keaton’s mind, despite Allen’s dismissals, that foul play was involved. He keeps
trying to calm her down with lots of Allen gags, like suggesting that she save a little
craziness for menopause. But she persists, is proved right in her suspicions, and
then Allen, too, gets entangled in the case.
It all moves quickly and, within the limits of comedy-mystery reason,
logically. The laugh lines are frequent. (Keaton drags Allen to a performance of The
31
Flying Dutchman, and he insists on leaving, saying that after he listens to Wagner
for a while, he feels like invading Poland.) Allen’s directing skills are as good as
they have latterly become, except for some vestiges of the hand-held camera
flummery that so addled Husbands and Wives (1992). He contrives to include, too,
some of his continuing adoration of Manhattan; for instance, under the credits he
uses a Cole Porter ode to New York sung by our Bard Laureate, Bobby Short.
To a surprising degree, Keaton manages to belie her age, or aging, by
holding to her familiar flaky style, riffing on every line with interjections and
repetitions, almost persuading us that she is the same old (young) Keaton. Will she
some day play grandmothers who riff? Alda is amiable as the friend who almost
becomes a corner in a triangle. Huston has a small part as an author of Allen’s and
convinces us utterly that she is a woman of experience and resource. Also, she is
strikingly dressed.
The picture’s one big drawback, which keeps it from being completely
amusing, is Allen’s performance. He cannot act. He never could act. There’s no sign,
at this late date, that he ever will be able to act. He is a desperate, frantic amateur.
He proved this, if it needed proving, when he played in someone else’s script in
Scenes from a Mall (1991). His amateurishness is slightly mitigated in his own
films because we’re aware that he is the author of the funny lines he’s speaking.
But the contrast between the professional writer and the amateur actor is off-
putting.
His part here, through most of the picture, consists of “Yes, but” acting.
Character A (Keaton in this case) embarks on a certain course and Character B
(Allen) tries to dissuade. His dialogue consists of a lot of lines like “Yes, but how
do you know? How can you possibly—” as Keaton overrides him. “Yes, but” acting
needs a clear follow-through in the mind of a performer, some idea of the person
who exists while the other character is speaking. Allen just interrupts on cue,
gesticulates and flubbers until Keaton drives on, and then semaphores painfully
banal signs of impatience until his next cue comes. There’s no one home there. It’s
Amateur Night. What the part needed was Dustin Hoffman or Richard Dreyfuss.
They are actors, not writers who think they know their material so well that of
course they can perform it.
Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen, 1997 (The New Republic, 19 January

1998)
At last Woody Allen’s appearance in a leading role serves a purpose.

Unintended, perhaps, but effective. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen’s latest, his
acting is, as always, coarse and repetitive, accompanied constantly by so much
hand-wagging that he seems the victim of St. Vitus. But Harry, the Jewish New York
novelist whom he plays, is such a despicable, exploitative, deceptive egotist that
an authentic performance of the role—say, by Dustin Hoffman—would have made
him unbearable. As we watch Allen we know that the part is not intended to be
credible, like the other roles in the film: it’s just an occasion for Allen’s shtick.
Harry is a convenience to make the film possible, as is the fact that so many women
have been mad about him. Even the hooker we see is sympathetic to him.
Still, Allen’s cartoon acting is all the more noticeable because he is
surrounded by so many good actors. Or maybe, because Harry is so dreadful,
Allen’s cartoon acting now seems more egregious in these surroundings. Judy
32
Davis has the opening scene with him, an ex-girlfriend who is murderously angry
because Harry has utilized their relationship in his new novel; and Davis is
excellent. Demi Moore, as a former wife who became devoutly Jewish, to Harry’s
discomfort, is funny. Kirstie Alley, as another former wife, very hostile, steams
through her scenes. Other pleasing performances come from Caroline Aaron, Billy
Crystal, and Elisabeth Shue. Richard Benjamin is at ease as one of Harry’s
autobiographical characters in a novel. Robin Williams amuses as a character in
one of Harry’s short stories that might have come from Ben Hecht.
These last two characters appear in some of the several episodes that are
reenactments of Harry’s fiction. Late in the film Harry confronts several of his
characters in the, shall we say, flesh, but this is not a Pirandellian venture. It occurs
simply because Allen needs more material to keep his film going.
All that really happens in the film’s present tense is that Harry goes upstate
to his university to be honored. He kidnaps his small son, who lives with the
divorced mother, to accompany him on this trip. His affection for his son is Harry’s
one positive quality; yet he also pays a hooker in hot pants $500 to go along with
them. (A great pal for his son, yes?) The university ceremony is stymied for various
reasons, but Allen, perhaps touching his Fellini file, has it happen anyway in a
dream sequence; the ceremony is held and all the people in his life, including his
fictional characters, attend.
Deconstructing Harry is really just a series of sketches, but many of them
are amusing because this Manhattan Punchinello works with competent actors
and because his dialogue is lithe and sometimes quotable. (“Tradition is the
illusion of permanence.”) The film shows yet again that Allen knows how to flatter
his audience: Harry is a sexually busy, glib atheist, exploitative of women, whose
continual patronage of hookers is clearly his ideal in man-woman relationships,
which is why his marriages failed. Apparently audiences, American and otherwise,
male and female, either identify with this character or are amused by his witty
cynicism in a medium not especially noted for either quality.
Cinematic note: Allen and his editor, Susan E. Morse, use small jump cuts
all through this picture, but they can’t be called Godardian. They don’t mirror any
serious moral anarchism in the film itself. They’re just décor.
Dark Habits, Pedro Almodóvar, 1983 (The New Republic, 6 June 1988)
Pedro Almodóvar both writes and directs his films, and if his writing ever
catches up with his directing, he’ll be a filmmaker of some significance. He has the
awe-cum-hatred of religion, the bitter comedy of a man horrified by society, the
sadistic sensuality that marked Buñuel—and other Spaniards. In any one scene
Almodóvar deploys those qualities incisively as a director. But the blueprint of the
entire structure is blurry.
One reason for hope is that his fourth film, What Have I Done to Deserve
This? (1984), which was his first to be shown in the United States (in 1985), raked
a Madrid housewife over the coals of urban life with a fairly firm satirical grip. But
now another of his films has been released here, and it plops into that sad, damp
bag: it Shows Talent.
Dark Habits, his third film, was made too soon after Almodóvar got the idea,
without enough self-questioning. A nightclub chanteuse is visited in her seedy
33
dressing room by some nuns who want her autograph. Soon after, when her
boyfriend dies of an overdose, the frightened singer flees for refuge to the convent
of those nuns and finds some surprises.
Wholly devout, these nuns express their devotion through truly dark
habits. One of them writes soft-porn novels under a pen name; several of them do
drugs; all of them have strange religious names. Sister Manure, Sister Snake, Sister
Sin, and so on. Possibly they behave in this manner in order to bring themselves
closer to their favorite guests, women in sleazy sorts of trouble. So the singer is
quite welcome in this convent where the Madonna is dressed in chic robes
according to the season of the year, and where the convent’s priest smokes during
mass.
As items in a comic dialogue, all these matters are well drawn. But in terms
of forward motion, the script has troubles. First, it’s a one-joke affair. Once the idea
of reversals in the convent is established, we get only more and more of the same
joke. Even less helpfully, the film starts as the story of the singer, then focuses on
the sisters, then stays with them as, eventually, the singer returns to the world. It’s
as if the scenery took over from the protagonist.
What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Pedro Almodóvar, 1984 (The New
Republic, 20 May 1985)
What Have I Done to Deserve This?, a Spanish film, is like a skillful team of
comic acrobats, tumbling away furiously, defying laws of gravity—both kinds. Yet,
for all its skill, I didn’t laugh once; and gradually, through the film, I found out why.
Pedro Almodóvar, who wrote and directed, is wickedly inventive, morally
anarchic, but not quite enough. Centrally and finally, he falters.
The picture begins with shots of kendo combat, in full Japanese rig,
interrupted by the credits in cartoon lettering. The kendo academy is in Madrid.
Soon we see one of the kendo combatants, now naked, step into the shower. A
cleaning woman, in her thirties, watches. He beckons her into the shower, and she
joins him for passionate (though quite visibly impossible) sex. It’s this woman,
played by Carmen Maura, who is the center of the film. We go home with her, meet
her family, neighbors, and, subsequently, other employers. (Household chores
included, she puts in an eighteen-hour day.)
Her family includes: a vain taxi-driver husband who bosses her mercilessly
while he reminisces about an affair he once had in Germany with a woman for
whom he forged some Hitler letters; Maura’s mother-in-law, who locks up her
bottles of mineral water and sells them to the rest of the family; Maura’s teenaged
son who pushes dope, and her younger teenaged son, who (she knows) is available
to older men. Her neighbors include a congenial prostitute whom we first see
when she comes in to borrow a whip, and an abrasive woman who hates her
angelic-looking daughter of ten or so—a child who avenges herself with secret
telekinetic powers. Maura’s other employers include a kleptomaniac woman who
steals her watch when she takes it off to work.
As is proper in farce, especially improper farce, each of the characters
pursues his or her ego trail with fierce concentration on personal goals. The trails
slide through and around one another with the surprise that comes from
consistency, the consistency of blinkered vision. Almodóvar’s actors, with one
important exception, are perfectly cast—from Maura’s mother-in-law, whose eyes
34
never actually can be seen behind her gleaming specs, to the angelic little girl who
can peel off wallpaper by willing it. Almodóvar has been making films for ten
years, has done a number of wild shorts and three wild previous features, and now
can work with frightening accuracy, like a chef in a Japanese steak house slicing
beef and vegetables so swiftly that you expect to see his fingers on the grill. So
much that Almodóvar does is so dexterously naughty that I kept asking myself:
Why don’t I laugh?
The last sequence clarified the answer. In the course of the film we have
seen Maura volunteer as a voyeuse when her whore friend needs a spectator to
please an exhibitionist client; have seen her give her younger son for “adoption”
to a flagrantly homosexual dentist so that she won’t have to support the boy; have
seen her murder her husband and get away with it because it looks like an
accident. But we have also seen Maura (who has a marked resemblance to Irene
Papas) as a loving mother and daughter-in-law and an understandably responsive
woman. All the other characters are kept strictly within their eccentric solipsisms;
she is an earth mother, the support of her family and world, and these qualities
just don’t fit with her amoral actions, which she seems almost to borrow from the
others around her. Moreover, the actress herself, at least as she is directed here, is
so womanly and warm that she seems a different breed of being from the others.
Consciously or not, we keep asking what she’s doing in this film.
This contrast is rammed home at the end when, her mother-in-law and
older son having gone back to Ma’s native village, Maura is left alone in the tiny
family flat. She has a scene of quiet desolation, a suggestion of suicidal intent, until
her younger son returns from his dentist-protector. Mother and boy embrace
tearfully. The whole sequence jars, by Almodóvar’s own criteria, and
retrospectively it explains why the entire film, for all its black sparkle, isn’t funny.
Let me explain by analogy.
The dramatist Joe Orton doesn’t have a heart. Almodóvar, whose film has a
tone very much like Orton’s plays, lacks the Englishman’s full measure of
amorality. Almodóvar plunges into moral anarchy with a lifeline of “heart” around
his waist. And he worsens matters by his final shots, immense checkerboard
façades of the apartment house in which Maura lives and of similar characterless
beehives. It’s more moral apologia that fails At the last, after sharp-toothed
disregard for convention, Almodóvar tries to explain his characters’ amorality
with a few dabs of glib urban sociology: they are the way they are because of
faceless modern life. Nonsense, both as sociology and as art. If Almodóvar wants
to take on the risks of an Orton—whose work he knows, I’d guess—he needs to
take on all the risks, without mealymouthed apologies.
Matador, Pedro Almodóvar, 1986 (The New Republic, 6 June 1988)
Matador, Almodóvar’s fifth feature, is even more disorderly than, say, Dark
Habits (1983). It’s a tale of love, sex, and death, which centers—when it finally
does center—on the last coupling of a hypersensual murderess and a former
matador. During this coupling, which they both know will be their last, she kills
him and then herself. The themes leading up to that climax, treated fiercely, might
have made a good film. The linkage of sex and death is familiar in both psychology
and art, but it takes some concentration to make it emblematic rather than
psychotic.
35
Almodóvar’s screenplay is schizoid. Captured by this gruesome subject, he

still can’t suppress his instinct for sharp comedy based on reversals. For instance,
at the dinner table in a luxurious home, grace is said by the mother of the house,
who offers thanks, not for daily bread but for chicken soup, sole meunière, and
(after prompting by the maid) flan.
Again, it’s all well done. Again, any one sequence, seen in isolation, would
show the hand of a filmmaker with control and personality. But, assembled,
Matador is a series of tugs and counter-tugs that leaves us muddled and remote.
Kika, Pedro Almodóvar, 1993 (The New Republic, 6 June 1994)
The history of the twentieth-century assault on Good Taste will surely be

written one day, and surely Pedro Almodóvar will figure in it. That history will be
analogous to another cultural campaign, the move to blur distinctions between
high art and popular art. (Terms that the blurrers use.) Almodóvar, sizzlingly
talented, makes films that are polished and gleaming but are, basically, something
like soft-core porno comic strips. His chief motive is his belief that Mrs. Grundy is
a hypocritical dolt and deserves to have her skirts blown up around her head. His
films mock smug conventions, and they do it with sophisticated razzberries.
Often in his still-brief career he has been like a marauding shark, ripping
social order and making us smile while he does it. Now he marauds further and
wants us to keep smiling. In Kika, which is set in Madrid, a leading character is a
handsome satyriast who is below mental par. His sister, a housemaid, tells us that,
to keep him from violating the whole neighborhood, she occasionally gives him
sex to cool him down. This brother, hiding in the apartment where she works
because the police are after him, finds the mistress of the house asleep in her slip,
inserts orange sections in her vagina, then sniffs and eats them; then, armed, he
rapes her. This wakes her—and she objects, though not in terror. While the rape
is going on—and on (he is indefatigable)—his sister and others come into the
bedroom and ask him to desist, but he continues, while the victim protests and the
sister pleads. At last he withdraws, goes out onto the terrace, and masturbates. A
woman in the street below looks up and gets a drop of semen on her cheek.
I don’t think I distort by isolating these matters, as long as I emphasize that
a spirit of burlesque pervades the film. (Burlesque rape? Yes, says Almodóvar.)
The gaudy décor and the revue-sketch acting support this mood. But Kika on the
whole shows a weakness in Almodóvar. Often he is irreverent about stupidities in
society, but sometimes he is merely irreverent. It’s as though he means us to say,
“If we want his brilliant excesses, we just have to accept his worrisome ones.”
Kika, the lady of the house, played with tired drive by Veronica Forque, is
hardly a prude; she lives with a lingerie photographer and occasionally beds her
lover’s stepfather, who lives upstairs. That stepfather is played by Peter Coyote,
who studded his way through Outrageous Fortune (1987) with Bette Midler and
talked dirty all through Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992). Here he continues on his
glandular way, dubbed (I suppose) in Spanish. The housemaid is an Almodóvar
familiar, the woman who looks like a Picasso model, Rossy de Palma. Her
phallocrat brother is Santiago Lajusticia. Victoria Abril, another Almodóvar pet,
plays the host of a TV program called “Today’s Worst,” which features daily
disasters. She wears a spaceship costume, bust-enhancing, with a camcorder on
top of her helmet. It’s a better role than her American début in Jimmy Hollywood
36
(1994), but it doesn’t make the most of this spirited comedienne.

I haven’t attempted to sketch much of the story. Let’s just say that it glides
along from blast to attempted blast and that sometimes it strains. I hope this strain
doesn’t mean that Almodóvar is running dry, that he doesn’t still have a lot of first-
class stingers to jab us with.
One Wild Moment, Claude Berri, 1977 (The New Republic, 14 March 1981)
Walter Huston once did a play about it (Apple of His Eye, 1946) and sang
about it (“September Song” in Knickerbocker Holiday, 1938). Edward G. Robinson
also did a play about it (Middle of the Night, 1956) and Fredric March later filmed
it. What is “it”? Love between a middle-aged man and a girl. Here it is again, treated
 with sympathy and candor, in a French film called One Wild Moment. The source
is unlikely: Claude Berri, who wrote and directed it, previously committed such
minor crimes as The Two of Us (1967) and The Sex Shop (1972), treacle and
suburban tease respectively. Now, for whatever mysterious reason, Berri is at
least temporarily more interested in truth than commercial consequences and,
helped by a good cast, has made a good small film. Small, as a plastic bomb may be
small.
Berri has complicated the basic situation by making the girl, who is not
quite eighteen, the daughter of the forty-four-year-old man’s best friend. This not
only gives the pain an extra twist, it opens up more of the subterranean tremors.
The two men have gone off for a seaside holiday in a rented villa with their two
daughters, who are of an age and close friends. One man is Victor Lanoux, of
Cousin, Cousine (1975), who has quarreled with his wife: she has gone to Morocco
and may join them later. The other man is Jean-Pierre Marielle, the ultra-proud
aristocrat of Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975), who is divorced. Marielle’s daughter,
Christine Dejoux, gives him trouble because she insists on living as she pleases;
any requests from him, like getting home at a reasonable hour of the night, have
the predictable effect. The angry case that Dejoux makes for being let alone may
be neither logical nor mature, but it strikes familiar anguishes. Marielle’s troubles
with Lanoux’s daughter, Agnès Soral, are especially poignant because they are
reflections of his concerns about his own daughter.
The holiday begins usually enough. Too usually, in fact: the litany of radio
commercials in the car as the four drive southward toward the sea made me think
that Berri’s persistent sea is platitude. But even before the knots of complication,
the film becomes watchable because the four are amusingly realistic and well
acted. In simplest terms, they are recognizable fellow creatures. (Recognizable
even though topless bathing of daughters with fathers and others is not exactly
Jones Beach.) Then one night Marielle drifts into a wedding on the beach of two of
Soral’s friends. A good time is being had by all, and soon by Marielle. Then there’s
some moonlight bathing, with the girls naked, the men in their briefs (the last
prudishness is male nudity). And we sense what’s going to happen. When Marielle
and Soral come out on an isolated part of the beach, dripping wet and breathing
hard and feeling good, and look at each other, it happens. (One nasty practical
note: wet bodies on the sand with no blanket? Er . . . really???)
It would have been bad enough if it were just what the title says, one wild
moment. But Marielle has really started things: the girl tells him that she adores
37
him, has adored him for years. They meet again, and—what’s both horrible and
reassuring—his own daughter tells him that she knows and understands. (Though
it further weakens his hold on her, of course.) What’s worse, Soral tells her father,
Lanoux, that she has made love for the first time: she had always promised to tell
him, though she had said it would be beforehand. (She won’t identify the man.)
Lanoux takes this difference as cause for anger—he clearly wants such a cause in
order to discard his lofty modern permissiveness—and rampages around the
resort town suspecting men, at last assaulting one man. Marielle witnesses some
of this and confesses. Lanoux is stunned. In a way Marielle is the more shaken: by
the fact that it is his friend’s daughter of his own daughter’s age; by the fact that
she loves him so warmly, so truthfully; by the fact that he is responding with much
more than the wild-moment feeling. The picture ends—a cliché to match the
opener—with a freeze-frame of Marielle and Soral. They are apparently going to
have a try at being serious about their feelings for each other. Perhaps even
marriage.
A lot of live nerves are naturally and disturbingly entangled here, most of
them bound to the complications of father-daughter relationships. Lanoux’s rage
when he learns that his daughter is now a non-virgin has the usual (unspoken)
source: if society forbids me to be my daughter’s lover, how dare anyone else be?
And of course Marielle, by loving Soral, is vicariously sleeping with his own
daughter. All this is true without being in the least sordid, any more than the fact
that many men marry women who, consciously or not, remind them of their
mothers. And Dejoux’s acceptance of her father’s affair with her friend is,
irritatingly to him, her tacit knowledge that her friend is a kind of proxy for herself.
But that’s not all: the feeling between Marielle and Soral is in itself affecting,
Freudian linkages or not. And that feeling has built into it the time-pathos of all
age-distanced relationships: because we aren’t the same age, we can’t possibly
have our whole lives together, but if we were the same age, we might not feel the
way we do, might not even have been attracted to each other.
Very little of this is said, a great deal of it is touchingly implicit. Lanoux
presumably will recover—somewhat, anyway—if Marielle marries his daughter
because then at least he can’t feel that his friend trifled with his daughter. Marielle
will take a hazing from some parts of society, but, if the marriage works—for a
time, anyway—that will pass, and he’ll probably gain more respect, even
authority, with his own daughter. The marriage might well last a good long time: I
foresee children. Within the framework of the film, however, the real “winners”
are the two daughters. They have exposed the flimsiness of some conventions, to
their fathers’ embarrassment; one of them is wedded to a vicarious father and the
other one knows it. It might all work out quite well.
If the film leads to fantasies about what might happen after the final freeze,
that is another way of proving that Berri tapped something deep. I’d want to wait
a bit before believing that Berri has come into any kind of enlarged artistic stature:
lots of minor people in every art make occasional good works. But that’s no reason
to undervalue the good work he has done. A modest film with large and lasting
echoes.
Tchao Pantin, Claude Berri, 1983 (The New Republic, 11 March 1985)
38
Lambert, a pudgy, middle-aged quasi-alcoholic, works the night shift at a

filling station in a shabby district of Paris. He is taciturn, impassive. Bensoussan, a
young half-Arab/half-Jew, around twenty, stops in one night for a moped spark
plug (really to duck the police, who are rolling by in a patrol car). Nothing much
happens between Lambert and Bensoussan. But the visits recur because, we feel,
both are secretly lonely.
In the early part of the story we spend more time with the youth than with
the older man, and we soon learn that Bensoussan, who has said he is a bartender,
is really a drug pusher for an Arab café owner. He confesses this to Lambert one
night as they sit together in the filling station. Lambert merely shrugs and says the
youth will be dead soon. By this time, however, we know that the two men are
grudgingly fond of each other. When Lambert is too soused to pump gas,
Bensoussan helps out. When the youth gets beaten up by some other dealers,
Lambert finds his rat-hole room and cleans him up.
It’s from a novel called Tchao Pantin and keeps the title, which translates
roughly as So Long, Stooge. The novel is by Alain Page, but it sounds like Simenon.
When the youth has a three-hour affair with a punk girl, and later describes it to
Lambert, the Simenon quality increases; it increases further when the girl, who
has entered the story obliquely, becomes involved with Lambert after Bensoussan
is killed. (No surprise. It was bound to come, as Lambert predicted.) And the focus
of the narrative is pure Simenon, the intense inquiry into grubby lives being lived
in cramped attitudes, an inquiry that discloses pathos, drama, even magnitude.
The director, Claude Berri, who wrote the screenplay with Page,
understands all this. But the difference from Simenon, which makes this good film
somewhat lesser than it might have been, is that Berri-Page explain too much. We
know almost from the start what the youth’s life is, that Lambert lives alone. We
know by Lambert’s very ignoring of Bensoussan’s questions that he once had a
wife and family. For the Simenon effect, that’s all we need to know. But the script
works out parallels between Lambert’s past and the present that neaten up the
film too much, that make its mysteries into coincidences and transform a slicing
into life (rather than a slice of life) into a tidily balanced story. The relationship
between the street boy and the sodden night-shift man, their wretched grasp for
“family” in the small, lighted station amid gas pumps and dark buildings, was
foundation enough. The action that follows the boy’s death would therefore have
been more moving if it had been less precisely justified.
Whether the balancing is in the novel I don’t know. Berri’s work has
antecedents for bother the strengths and timidities of this film. He has been
directing for twenty years and has made soppy pictures (The Two of Us, 1967) and
at least one that was truthfully disturbing (One Wild Moment, 1977). The best of
Tchao Pantin, most of it, is Berri’s best; the weak bits rank with his weakest.
Indeed, I could hardly believe my eyes when, just before the end, a black cat
crossed Lambert’s path.
But Tchao Pantin sneaks up on you. It promises little at the start, and, in a
curious way, that small promise is inviting. No gripping situation is set up. All that
happens is that two completely credible human beings move into view—and into
view of each other. Because of the director’s cool, ungrubby hand at the beginning,
the film wins our confidence. This confidence is never quite betrayed: the essence
of those two people remains, and the girl’s is added. The picture thus never goes
flat: it just becomes too much of a movie.
39
Most of the good quality comes from Berri’s actors. Lambert is played by a
man called simply Coluche (Michel Gérard Joseph Colucci), who has a reputation
in France as a comedian. He is temperamentally a cross between Jack Warden and
Walter Matthau, though he doesn’t look like either. I had seen Coluche only once
before, dismal in a dismal comedy called My Best Friend’s Girl (1983). But Tchao
Pantin has nothing to do with comedy: Coluche goes to the core of a dour man,
convincing us of the man’s tacit reasons for dourness. Lambert is a silent, dark
pool on one side of the rushing city currents.
Richard Anconina, scrawny and beak-nosed, creates a Bensoussan
completely concentrated on the small objectives and defiances of his life, yet
vulnerable to generosity. Anconina doesn’t trade on recognizable street
mannerisms; his Bensoussan is an individual who lives in the street world. And
Lola, the punk girl played by Agnès Soral, progresses touchingly from a role that
she had adopted to the Lola who had adopted the role.
The cinematography is by Bruno Nuytten, who worked in the United States
once. (He did Brubaker 1980 with Robert Redford.) At first, despite the virtuosity
of the opening rain sequence, I thought the film looked a bit viscous; but as it went
along, the rather thick colors emphasized the neon-soaked feeling of these night
lives. The art director is Alexandre Trauner, born in 1906, who has been working
in film since 1932—to name just one of his many achievements, Children of
Paradise (1945)—and is an acknowledged master in his field. I don’t contend that
the settings here are immediately recognizable as a master’s work, but they
certainly are vivid.
Uranus, Claude Berri, 1990 (The New Republic, 9 September 1991)
The French director Claude Berri has had a peculiar career. What’s peculiar
is that there are some genuinely good items in it. The man who began with such
treacle as Le Poulet (The Chicken, 1962) and The Two of Us (1967) and The Sex
Shop (1972) seemed destined for a successful confectionery life. But Tchao Pantin
(1983) wasn’t bad, and the duo of Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon of the Spring
(1986) was solid—full-blooded, old-fashioned films that might easily have slipped
into the Berri molasses barrel but which were kept firm.
However, as Heraclitus said, character is fate. With Uranus Berri had the
chance to make the film of his life; instead, lapsing into earlier extravagance, he
hasn’t done much more than show us what the film might have been. The subject
is postwar France, the place a bombed-out town in the spring of 1945. The
screenplay was adapted by Berri and his sister, Arlette Langmann, from a 1948
novel by Marcel Aymé (unread by me), a man whose own behavior under the
Occupation was not above suspicion and who here treats that very theme:
behavior under the Occupation and its after-effects. Needless to say, it’s a complex
topic. What it certainly doesn’t need is “dramatizing” in the most facile sense. From
what I know of Aymé’s work, I doubt that it’s so treated by him in his novel. The
heaviness here shows the vulgar Berri touch of old.
Contrasting kinds of behavior collide in the film: those who resisted the
Germans (mostly Communists); those who collaborated out of genuine conviction
that fascism was France’s salvation; those who collaborated because they didn’t
care much one way or another and wanted to keep out of trouble. One grim fact
the film faces is that, now that the Germans are gone and the French fascists
40
overthrown, the triumphant Communists are behaving much like fascists—

controlling jobs, plotting, indicting out of vindictiveness rather than proof. This
grimness is underscored by the one fugitive in the film, certain to be shot if found,
a still-convinced French fascist. The film’s best element is that Berri sees the irony
in this reversal of the wartime situation when anti-fascists were in hiding; and he
adds to the irony by using an actor, Gérard Desarthe, who gives the role dignity,
conviction, quiet fatalism. (It seems pertinent to note that Berri is Jewish.)
One of the now powerful Communists, played by Michel Blanc, is something
of a counterpart, quiet and honest. One of the apoliticals, Jean-Pierre Marielle, is
bland and shrugging; another, Philippe Noiret, is ruefully philosophical, enjoying
the spectacle of life as it plays out around him. (This is said to have been Aymé’s
view.) No woman in the film—there are several prominent ones—is given political
color of any kind.
The film goes chiefly awry in the way Berri writes the neighborhood café
owner and the way he is acted by the prodigiously gifted Gérard Depardieu. The
patron is shown as a sensual brute who loves poetry and tries to improvise it and
as the enemy of one particular Communist fink whom he persecutes throughout
the story. (The patron wears a faint Hitler mustache.) Depardieu spends about
three-quarters of his screen time bullying his enemy or roaring with élan vital. He
has mountainous presence, but Berri exploits it so shamelessly that he tears the
film apart. And there’s a protracted death scene for Depardieu that reminded me
of Nick Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But Berri also encourages or allows three older actors to overstep:
Marielle, Noiret, and Michel Galabru, who was wondrous as the madman in The
Judge and the Assassin (1976) and is here a wartime profiteer. Each of these men
has at least one long speech in which he explains himself to his own satisfaction.
Marielle is a shrewd opportunist who talks cynically: money is the only real value,
he says. (Yet he behaves humanely: he shelters the fugitive fascist at some
personal risk.) Galabru exemplifies je m’en foutisme. He tells his son, in their comfy
home, that one of the reasons he did what he did during the war was his self-
disgust at bringing into the world a son so much like himself.
Noiret, a schoolteacher who boards in Marielle’s apartment, wends his way
from soup in his room to the corner of Depardieu’s café, which is his temporary
schoolroom until the school is rebuilt. His house was bombed during the war, just
as he was reading about Uranus in an astronomy series: hence the title’s
implication that the town, through that bombing, became another planet. (His wife
was killed that night because she was with her lover, whose house was flattened.)
Now, almost resignedly, he gets pleasure out of the sights and sounds of the day.
Under Berri’s weak hand, each of these fine artists goes a bit overboard.
For a while, we can tell ourselves that these actors, with their excellent voices and
love of their language, are taking realism into hyperrealism by concentrating on
their own art, making the film an occasion for truth in performance rather than
truth in text. But soon it’s clear that this is the wrong vehicle for such aesthetic
adventure. Their performances simply are a bit fruity. Add Depardieu’s rolling
around in self-display, and Uranus becomes a serious picture, about the mobility
of morality, seriously botched.
Luna, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979 (The New Republic, 20 October 1979)

41
The line of Bernardo Bertolucci’s career is beginning to look as wretched

as Robert Altman’s. Bertolucci, too, began with something more than promise 
(Before the Revolution in 1964, even Partner four years later in 1968). Very soon
he began to swamp that promise with self-intoxicating dexterity and egocentric
artiness, which is the only kind of artiness actually (The Spider’s Stratagem and
The Conformist, both from 1970). Then, like Altman, he peaked with a film that was
more bulk than weight. (Last Tango in Paris 1972 can now be seen as Bertolucci’s
Nashville 1975.) Not surprisingly, the same critical pumping stations that later
inflated Altman also blew Bertolucci. Then, inevitably, came the shrinking into
mannerism and derivation (1900, from 1976), while the laurelers were left
holding their oversized laurels. Now comes Luna, a picture so ludicrously bad that
one is almost tempted to pity Bertolucci. But no, he is a monstrous and disgusting
artist, not a failed authentic one, and for the sake of the authentic ones, successful
or failed, Bertolucci has to be seen as what he is: a clever, cheap exploiter of
everything that comes to his hand, including the talent he began with (like
Altman).
I can’t even grant that he started Luna with a serious idea, even with a
serious ambition toward moods and textures for which he had to find an idea.
From its first moment, Luna feels like self-indulgence, lazy preening while lying on
the audience’s lap. The very first shots, intense close-ups of a curly-headed infant
dropping honey that his mother puts on her finger for him to lick, seem
exhibitionistic rather than direct. (And, oh, is this ever a weightily symbolic scene,
with the child tagging along a thread of yarn as he toddles—umbilical cord,
perhaps?—and is there ever a reprise near the end.) The full moon appears in this
first sequence (the title is Italian for moon), rather hurriedly jammed in after a
long daylight scene; more shots of the moon are jammed in later as symbols of
femininity and flow. When the film isn’t being portentously symbolic, it’s being
empty—one or the other. The emptiness of the way many beautiful locations are
used soon becomes exploitation.
Vittorio Storaro, whose lush  cinematography was so ironically apt in  
Apocalypse Now (1979), is once again—with Bertolucci—merely fulsome. And
with the movement of the camera, too, Bertolucci turns emptiness into offense.
The camera rarely stops moving—pans and zooms and withdrawals—but these
movements are so devoid of dramatic or even sheerly kinetic force that they
become cartoons of the whole aesthetics of camera movement. One exploitation
of place that I found especially galling—I admit this is personal—is a scene at the
front gate of Verdi’s villa at Sant’ Agata (which Bertolucci treats as if it were a
suburb of Rome instead of being far up past Parma). The scene there between Jill
Clayburgh and her son affected me the way a Busby Berkeley number at Lourdes
might affect a Catholic.
What does this big iridescent tumor of a film pretend to be? Underneath
the two hours of pomposity is a story that, essentially, is quite old-fashioned, for
all its blatantly daring detail. An American opera singer has a fifteen-year-old son
whom she loves but neglects because of her career. His putative father dies. She
takes the boy to Rome, where she is singing and where she learns that he is on
dope. After the story goes through a lot of stuff—just stuff—the boy learns that
the recently deceased father was not his real father: the latter is an Italian still
42
living nearby and teaching small children. (Bertolucci leans on sentimental

attribution—teacher equals simple goodness—as cornily as D. W. Griffith.)
Apparently the boy’s disturbance has come from some vague intimation that he
has never known his real father (pure Victorian mysticism). He seeks out Dad and
reunites him with Mom (more Victoriana) at an outdoor opera rehearsal.
The theme apparently—not so apparently, in fact—is that the boy has to
be surrogate for his father until his father appears, surrogate in both his own life
and his mother’s. He and Mom are very close. At one point she masturbates him in
his moment of need (a mother’s work is never done); at another, they come very
close to incest, a scene that ends with his head resting on the crotch of her panties.
The publicity tells us that originally Bertolucci wanted mother and son to Do It but
decided that it would end the picture right there, nothing could follow it. Wrong.
He could have finished with a trio, non-operatic: mother, son, and long-lost father.
Well, maybe next time. And maybe next time, some glimmer of conviction, of
internal imperative for the goings-on. I don’t care much for Louis Malle’s film
about incest, Murmur of the Heart (1971), but at least it had an inner rationale.
It’s remotely conceivable that a really rich performance of the opera singer
and a movingly anguished performance of the son might have given some texture
to this nauseating fraud. But Clayburgh, who sometimes looks like a beagle, is
skimpy as the singer. Many opera singers sound vernacular and tinny when they
speak, as she does, but on the stage they don’t “act” vernacular and tinny as she
does, and they usually have some on-stage manner off-stage. The role desperately
needed more than the one-and-a-half or two dimensions that Clayburgh can give
it. As the son, Matthew Barry is not a discovery.
The screenplay, rendered into English by George Malko, was written by
Bertolucci, his brother Giuseppe, and Clare Peploe. She is a young Englishwoman
whose conjunction with Michelangelo Antonioni’s life marks its artistic downturn.
His career, even in its decline, has no resemblance to Bertolucci’s. Still, Peploe
appears in Antonioni’s work as assistant on Zabriskie Point (1970); her brother,
Mark, was the original author of The Passenger (1975) and presumably she wasn’t
far away. She joined Bertolucci on 1900, and here she is again. In the old days,
lepers had to wear bells. Nowadays artistic lepers get job after job.
The soundtrack of Luna is egregiously bad, full of those long dead silences
that are interludes, not of quiet in a room, but of dead non-sound in a recording
studio while everyone is waiting for the next cue. And a further desecration is the
way that Bertolucci has used fragments of Verdi in the film. Obviously influenced
by Visconti’s integration of opera into film, Bertolucci has been mimicking it since
Before the Revolution. There it was not mere pillage to support a weak structure.
Here it is worse than plunder of Verdi—it is also mockery of Visconti. In the
wonderful opening of Senso (1954),Visconti uses a scene in Il Trovatore along with
a sense of the backstage atmosphere of the opera house as the generative
metaphor of his film. Bertolucci also uses a scene from Il Trovatore, also takes us
backstage, but it is all sheer aural and visual décor, to no point in the picture.
The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987 (The New Republic, 14

December 1987)
Marx and Freud have dominated Bernardo Bertolucci’s career, for better
and worse. Better: Before the Revolution (1964) and Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man
43
(1981). Worse: 1900 (1976) and Luna (1979). The twin deities apparently
persuaded Bertolucci to choose his latest subject. The story of the Chinese
emperor Pu Yi could hardly have swept Bertolucci off his feet as a drama. It’s not
a drama at all—Pu Yi was a victim, nothing more. But presumably the director saw
a Freudian catalyst in the beginning of The Last Emperor and saw one face of
Marxism in its conclusion, and these may have fixed him on the subject.
If the term “pathetic” can be applied to any emperor in world history, Pu Yi
is the man. In 1908, at the age of three, he was taken from his high-born mother
(who later killed herself) by his grandmother, the Dowager Empress, and brought
to live in the Forbidden City, the huge imperial residence in Peking (as it then was).
Within a few days the males between him and the throne died, and the child was
named emperor. In 1912 a republic was declared, and the seven-year-old emperor
abdicated. The child, now even more of a nominal ruler, wandered like a prisoner
at large within the Forbidden City.
Marriage and concubines came along in time, as did expulsion from the
palace and eventual residence in Manchuria, Pu Yi’s place of origin. In 1931 the
Japanese invaded Manchuria and established the empire of Manchukuo with Pu Yi
as their puppet emperor—a front through whom they could rule. Pu Yi tried to
establish parity with the Japanese and got into trouble. After the Second World
War, he and his wife wanted to flee to Japan but were intercepted by Soviet
paratroopers and were turned over to the Chinese revolutionaries. Pu Yi then
served ten years in a Chinese political prison at hard labor. When he was released,
he worked as a gardener until his death in 1967.
The Freudian touches are of course the insecurities brought about by
separation from his mother and by his loneliness as a child. We are even treated
to some glimpses of his toilet training. His imprisonment at the end, during which
he was not physically ill-treated, was seen by his Communist jailers as re-
education so that, in time, he could take a useful place in society.
The sole personally initiated action in this long chronicle is his puny,
quickly squelched rebellion against the Japanese. Everything else is reaction. Pu
Yi’s story isn’t even poignant. Who can be moved by his story, who can think it
sad? Edmond Rostand found some smidgen of poignancy in L’Aiglon, the story of
Napoleon’s son, who spent his short life trying to regain his father’s throne, but
even that story is now of diminished interest. Pu Yi is simply an eccentricity of
history, worth a paragraph in Reader’s Digest, not a nearly three-hour film.
Apparently Bertolucci made it chiefly because he was empowered to make
it. We’re told that he approached the Chinese government with two projects to be
done in China, Malraux’s Man’s Fate (once planned by Fred Zinnemann) and this
story. The Chinese would not sanction the Malraux, so Bertolucci went ahead with
this film rather than waste the chance to shoot in China. The questionable motive
led to questionable filmmaking. The Last Emperor is slightly sophisticated DeMille,
laden with sumptuous costumes and tours of the Forbidden City and mobs of
people. Bertolucci had the use of extras on a scale far beyond the budget limits of
Western filmmaking; it’s a long time since I’ve seen such crowds on the screen, so
many long lines of uniformed guards standing at attention. The Forbidden City is
a prime travelogue subject, but neither the panoramas nor the choreographed
crowds constitute a film.
The screenplay by the director and Mark Peploe tries to liven things up by
cutting back and forth in time. The film begins in the Red Chinese prison, then goes
44
to the three-year-old child and to other time planes, returning to the prison after
flashbacks until it reaches “the present” and moves forward from the prison to the
finish. This flitting doesn’t help. When the puppet emperor’s tennis game is
interrupted by armed guards, there’s no terror; when, in a dinner jacket, he sings
“Am I Blue?” at a lavish party, there’s no humor; when, at the last, the bent old
gardener buys a tourist’s ticket of admission to his former palace, there’s no pang.
Even the very last bit, a guide taking American tourists through the throne room,
is muffed, a toothless bite.
John Lone, the Chinese-American actor who was strange and forceful in
Schepisi’s Iceman (1984), behaves credibly as (the adult) Pu Yi but has little
chance to do anything other than behave credibly. Most of the roles are played by
English-speaking Chinese actors, some of whom are effective. The only
recognizable actor is Peter O’Toole as the emperor’s British tutor. O’Toole, looking
much more than twenty years older than he looked in 1967, tries to give the role
flavor by over-articulating—enouncing “Scotland” as “Scot-land,” for instance.
Bertolucci, hot or cold, extravagant or focused, was always visible in his films. Here
he is invisible, swamped by pedestrian procedure. A controversial director has
reached bottom—he has made a consistently boring film.
Stealing Beauty, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996 (The New Republic, 24 June

1996)
Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film is a record of infatuations. Stealing

Beauty—a meaningless title—tells us first of all that the middle-aged Bertolucci is
infatuated with Liv Tyler, a young American actress. (I’m speaking only of what’s
visible on screen.) Such infatuation is hardly new, and sometimes it has produced
exceptional work. But sometimes it’s embarrassing, as it is here. Tyler has a good
face for film, and Bertolucci muses on it at length: the eyes, cheeks, and mouth that
are fine in themselves and together compose loveliness. Otherwise, Tyler is dull: a
droning voice, commonplace talent, no electricity. Yet Bertolucci treats her as if
she were, say, a new Audrey Hepburn and thus only makes her slightness slighter
and his enslavement more patent.
Another infatuation, more understandable: Bertolucci loves Tuscany,
where the film is set. He wants to use it, not only as background but as an aesthetic
embrace of his characters. Tuscany is paradise, as someone says in the picture, but
Bertolucci and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, are so besotted with it that
they have mostly rendered it in heavy postcard colors.
Still another infatuation: Bertolucci, after all these years, is still
wonderstruck with decadence. “Decadent! How I love that early Victorian word!”
says a character in Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play. Well, Bertolucci is less early Victorian
than late neorealistic, as he reruns the symptoms of rotted European morality that
oozed across the screen in the ’60s and ’70s. When Tyler goes to a large party in a
large villa, we expect that, after enough wine and enough pot, we’ll see the Ugly
Facts about these seemingly beautiful people. And, unfortunately, Bertolucci does
not disappoint.
Bertolucci’s original story—a generous adjective—was made into a
screenplay by the American novelist Susan Minot, who has an unwavering eye for
the predictable and an ear for the tired phrase. (One lover to another: “I like it
when you’re mad.”) The basic idea is that Tyler, now nineteen, has come to a
45
hilltop villa to have her portrait done by an Irish artist who lives there with his
wife and a garland of guests. Tyler is also returning to this place because here she
had her first kiss (not from the artist) and may now have her first sex. She will also
try to discover the lover of her now-deceased mother who might have begotten
her at this very villa.
Not unusable themes, but Bertolucci is so avid for “touches” that the story
gets smothered with atmospheric baggage. One of the guests (Jeremy Irons) is
terminally ill and is near the end; his function, on his way out, is to urge Tyler to
live—by which he means to copulate. Also on the premises is a “legendary art
dealer” (Jean Marais, Cocteau’s erstwhile ideal now in his eighties) intended, I
suppose, to give perspective to the century. He is mere ambulatory décor, as is a
journalist who writes advice to the lovelorn (Stefania Sandrelli, once one of the
stunners in Bertolucci’s The Conformist 1970). And there’s an American lawyer
and his English girlfriend, who provide samples of sexual intercourse when the
director wants to dab it in. Various high-testosterone English and Italian young
men are woven through for differing reasons, and there’s an overnight visit by an
Italian army lieutenant for no reason whatsoever.
Naturally there are big dinner tables in the kitchen and big luncheon tables
under the Tuscan skies, and naturally what looks initially like a group of
attractively tinted souls turns out to have different colors. The general
atmosphere is supposed to be sexual, through which Tyler is moving toward
defloration. Twice she accidentally witnesses couples grappling. Her near-
seduction is accompanied by hootchy-kootchy “Oriental” music (and there’s no
reason to think that Bertolucci was being funny; he has no humor).
But long before the promised end, we sense that, interested though he may
have been in Tyler’s story, Bertolucci was chiefly concerned to employ his
infatuations in what he thought would be a Chekhovian mode. Assemble a group
of different people in a country house, each with a strand of history and a purpose,
and the result is Chekhov, right? This was the delusion that hobbled the recent
Russian film Burnt by the Sun (1994), and it does the same to Stealing Beauty.
Something else becomes clear about Bertolucci. When a career is so heavily
laden with vacuous artiness, so full of inadequately examined choices, so emptily
assumptive of superiority, a hard fact looms. Fundamentally, under the chi-chi,
Bertolucci is stupid.
Sweetie, Jane Campion, 1989 (The New Republic, 26 February 1990)
Jane Campion is a newcomer, a New Zealander who works in Australia and

is now loudly hailed in America. Sweetie is her first feature. She wrote it with
Gerard Lee; but after the first five or six minutes, it’s clear that her heart is not in
the screenplay—it’s in the pictures that she makes with her cinematographer,
Sally Bongers.
Still, there is a screenplay—about a young Australian factory worker
named Kay, who believes in omens and hauntings. Tea leaves, for instance. A
medium tells her that a question mark will figure in her life. She then meets Lou, a
young man whose hair curls in a question mark on his forehead. Immediately she
seduces him away from his fiancée. Then Sweetie arrives at the house that Kay
shares with Lou. Sweetie is Kay’s adipose, highly disturbed sister who thinks she’s
46
a pop singer and who brings along her drugged-out “producer.” Sweetie
immediately slovens up the house, in her neurotic way, and the parents can’t help,
because back in their house, Mom has just left Dad and has gone out west to
become a cook on a ranch (as we’d call it).
A few questions. What did Lou’s fiancée say or do to Kay after the latter
stole her boyfriend? Why did Kay and Lou make love in an oil puddle on a garage
floor? Why did Mom leave Dad? Why do Mom and Dad become reconciled? What
do Kay and Lou and Dad think will happen, other than disaster, when they leave
Sweetie alone in Kay’s house and drive out west to see Mom?
Answers are not expected. The questions themselves are the answer—the
fact that they, and others, exist. They only underscore that Campion is more keen
about photo opportunities than about dramatic or narrative cogency. Her
screenplay is to her what a libretto was to a lesser nineteenth-century opera
composer: a series of pegs for visual arias.
Corners of rooms, low angles, high angles, shots past large objects in the
foreground, heightened light or lowered light—all these get a good workout.
When we go to a cemetery, the first shot is of a row of cypress trees, through which
we manage to glimpse one grave. This shot, like so many others, is not meant to
epitomize the moment but to draw our attention to Campion. And Bongers.
Campion has been compared to Jim Jarmusch. This seems absurd.
Jarmusch’s spare screenplays are carefully measured to the necessary minimum,
like good minimal design of every kind. His camera operates in the same precise,
equivalently minimal way. Campion wants to deal much more conventionally with
her characters, with more psychological probing and emotional interaction than
Jarmusch cares about. At the same time she wants to indulge her painterly eye.
The result is a deadlock between these two elements, dramatic and pictorial.
If Campion can accept that we now know about her eye and can
concentrate on an integrated story, she might make a good traditional filmmaker.
If that road doesn’t interest her, she could diminish the emotional turbulence in
her scripts so that it doesn’t clamor for attention, and become something like a
(minor) cinematic Robert Wilson. But whatever she does later, Sweetie is only a
workshop along the way.
An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion, 1990 (The New Republic, 3 June 1991)
Last year, reviewing Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), I said, “If Campion can
accept that we now know about her [pictorial] eye and can concentrate on an
integrated story, she might make a good traditional filmmaker.” She hadn’t waited
for my advice: she was already almost finished with An Angel at My Table, which
is traditional in approach, which employs her eye to present a narrative, and
which is good.
An Angel at My Table is a two-and-a-half-hour distillation, by the
screenwriter Laura Jones, of Janet Frame’s three volumes of autobiography. (The
books, published from 1982 to 1984, are now available in one paperbound volume
from George Braziller.) The film calls itself a trilogy, with one section devoted to
each volume. For those who haven’t read the books, the story may be surprising.
We know that Frame is an eminent writer, and we know that she will move from
ordinary beginnings to recognition and success. But we are not prepared for much
of the dark texture that intervenes or for the odd, almost cheery tone in which
47
even the worst moments are couched.

Frame (b. 1924) is one of the five children of a New Zealand railway worker
and his hearty wife. Her childhood included the usual momentous initiations into
the world but also into a world beyond the visible and tangible, disclosed to her
by imagination. Early on, she discovered that she liked to write and that she was
shy. This shyness apparently had something to do with the fact that she was
chunkily built, had a large mop of frizzy red hair, and had curious teeth.
When she was quite young, a sister drowned. (Ten years later, another
sister drowned.) As a young teacher, she became stressed and depressed and
made a feeble (aspirin) attempt at suicide. She was taken to a mental hospital,
falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was given electric shock therapy. In and
out of hospitals, she was given 200 shock treatments in the next eight years—
during which she also published a book of stories and won a prize.
With a travel grant, she went to London. She soon fell into a consciously
arty set, who were somewhat nettled to find that this provincial had already
published a book and had another forthcoming. She then went to Ibiza (along the
way, her teeth were fixed), continued to write fiction and poetry, had her first
sexual experience, returned to London—where the diagnosis of schizophrenia
was ruled false—then went home to New Zealand, where she lives and writes. (To
date, eleven novels, four story collections, a volume of poetry, and a children’s
book.)
The first part of the film is the fullest because childhood, though hardly
simple, is simpler than what comes after. In the second and third parts, even those
who don’t know the books may sense synoptic touches. But Jones’s screenplay, as
treated by Campion, does the essential: it captures the straightforward, fresh tone.
For Frame’s autobiography is suffused with appetite, with openness, even when
she is beset by peculiar people, peculiar diagnoses, peculiar emotions. She is like
an especially patient Candide, forging ahead with mixed purpose and acceptance,
with ego (who could be a writer without ego?) but with wonder. The film
understands all this.
Campion’s prime and perfect move was in the casting of the three Janets:
the child, Alexia Keogh, the adolescent, Karen Fergusson, and the young woman,
Kerry Fox. Each of them has a third of the picture. That Campion was able to find
three people with physical resemblances to one another and to Frame was
possibly only good luck, though makeup and costuming doubtless helped. But,
more important, what Campion achieved with her three Janets was a continuity of
presence and person, of temperament: a manner of walking, of posture, of gesture,
and, fundamentally, a continuity of inner self. The woman who has her first sexual
experience in Ibiza is related to the child who, at the family dinner table,
innocently uses a naughty word that a school chum taught her.
Everyone else in the cast helps substantially. The casting and behavior of
the child’s schoolteachers evoke time and place. K. J. Wilson is her sturdy father;
Iris Churn is an Erda-like mother. David Letch dabs in a vivid sketch of Janet’s Irish
landlord in London, who is smitten with her. William Brandt is amusingly serious
as her American lover in Ibiza. The score by Don McGlashan has a nice folk feeling,
varied with a few uses of Schubert’s “An die Musik,” which enraptured Janet at
first hearing.
Campion’s previous film was burdened with precious camera work—high
angles, low angles, weird vantage points. Not one bit of that is evident here. She
48
was so concerned with her subject that she forgot about self-display and put her
(considerable) pictorial skill at the service of Janet Frame. Oh, there are a couple
of shots of a distant train chugging along past a sunset, but those are negligible if
only because they are commonplace. Campion is so responsive to the currents of
humanity in this story that she has found the exactly right general locus for her
camera—close without close-ups. The camera is attentive, not intrusive.
The cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh adds something else, particularly
in the first section—a homely grubbiness. At first it seems like inadequate color, a
bit runny, or like slightly undefined focus; but soon it’s apparent that Campion and
Dryburgh want to suggest a social milieu, crowded, congenial, warmly though
somewhat shabbily dressed. From the photography alone, we get some sense of
what life is like for this segment of New Zealand society, getting the best out of
what they had, in their pullovers and plain dresses, at close quarters.
An Angel at My Table (it’s the title of the second of Frame’s three volumes)
is not often exciting or deeply moving. It’s simply interesting. Two qualities
distinguish it. First, one female artist of a particular culture wanted to present the
life of another female artist of that culture. I don’t think it’s wisdom after the event
to say that certain bonds of sisterly sympathy are manifest throughout, certain
avenues of understanding. (There’s a cousinly relationship with My Brilliant
Career 1979, an Australian woman’s film from an autobiographical novel by an
Australian woman.) Second, the purpose here is to recount a life, rather than to
create a drama. This was probably not a fresh film idea when Mark Donskoi made
his Gorky trilogy (1938-40). Still, there is something full-souled about the venture,
something respectful of the human enterprise as a whole and of art as its adjunct.
In any case, Campion has moved forward healthily. More, please.
Portrait of a Lady, Jane Campion, 1996 (The New Republic, 23 December

1996)
Once more unto the breach, dear friends—the breach between a

distinguished piece of fiction and a film made from it. This time it is Henry James’s
1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. Jane Campion’s film summons, once more, a
wild fancy: this would be an even better picture than we can think it if the novel
didn’t exist.
Concede at once that condensation—of James’s fifty-five chapters, of his
deep explorations of character—was inevitable if we were going to survive the
film, which runs 144 minutes as it is. Viewing, contrary to popular assumption, is
harder than reading: we have all read for more than 144 minutes many times, but
film is more draining per second than reading, more unrelenting in its command
of our collaboration. Besides, there is the subconscious imperative of theatrical
shape that nags at the back of our brains while viewing, which doesn’t occur while
reading. Whether the actors are live or photographed, an acted story has temporal
obligations.
The screenplay by Laura Jones, who has written for and with Campion in
the past, nonetheless tries to frame the events—more important, the moral
adventure—in some kind of Jamesian proportion. In 1872, Isabel Archer, a young
American woman, is in England at the estate of relatives when she gets a marriage
proposal from the highly eligible Lord Warburton. She declines: certainly because
she doesn’t love him, but certainly, too, because she is hungry for experience, of a
49
kind she can’t specify. Another man proposes, too, while—so to speak—she is
observed by her cousin, Ralph Touchett, a gentle soul ill with consumption. After
she declines the second man, Ralph persuades his rich, dying father to leave Isabel
a large legacy to empower her quest for who knows what. “The conception of a
certain young woman affronting her destiny” was how James conceived the novel;
and Isabel heads for the continent to do her affronting.
In Florence, she meets a fortyish American who lives there, Gilbert
Osmond, an aesthete with “an odd mixture of the detached and the involved.” He,
too, proposes. Isabel takes three years to make up her mind, traveling the while;
then, following her destiny, she marries Osmond. Her destiny darkens. The couple
has a baby that dies, and they develop an enmity that lives. Previous suitors
reappear. For these and other reasons, Osmond becomes even angrier at Isabel.
She, for her part, learns disturbing facts about Osmond’s past. When Ralph
Touchett, back in England, begins to die, Osmond forbids Isabel to go to him. She
disobeys. With her lovingly at his side, Ralph dies. The novel ends with her return
to Italy, though not necessarily to her marriage. The film leaves us wondering
whether she will indeed return to Italy. In either case, there is more destiny to
affront.
It is a critical commonplace that Isabel in some ways resembles James
himself. She comes from Albany, New York, where James spent some of his
childhood. Like James, she is of an era in which the gaining of experience for young
Americans of her class meant going to Europe, being seasoned there. Whether or
not James would have adapted, to himself and Isabel, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,
c’est moi,” Campion has colored her film as if he had that empathy. To her, James
was not only concerned with “a certain young woman,” he was a pioneer in
feminist issues as such.
Some of Campion’s embroidery is strange, some heavy. The sequence
before and under the credits shows us contemporary young women of different
races, all in airy gowns in a woodland glade, all circling and beseeching the camera.
Perhaps this is to suggest that, even today, the persistent image of young women
is that of available nymphs. Interludes in the film take James’s implication into the
explicit. We see Isabel’s frustrated sexual hunger in a dream scene in which she
rolls on a bed with her suitors. Her travels in Mediterranean countries are
synopsized in a heated fantasy that presents her naked. (Did James ever see a
naked woman?)
These additions, and others, seem more than an attempt to assure us that
James is up to date: they also seem an attack on Jane Austen’s acceptances. Recent
Austen films have italicized that her young women have no options in life but to
hunt for rich husbands. Isabel is aware of other options (her friend Henrietta
Stackpole is a journalist), but, even within the marriage game, she has more
nuance, more suggestion of secret shadow; she chafes more at social boundaries.
Campion apparently wanted to dramatize this difference from the Austen pattern.
Cinematically, too, Campion is sometimes intrusive. A number of sequences
begin with a tilted establishing shot, for no reason except that she wants to remind
us that she’s at the helm. The cuts between scenes, intended to be elliptical, are
sometimes merely jerky. And she leans a lot on great close-ups, which get a bit
repetitious even when she keeps the heads off-center.
But, with the exquisite camera work of Stuart Dryburgh, Campion gives us
an inviting view of every scene, sometimes a touch tricky (past statuary),
50
sometimes a touch too picturesque (with huge trees), but on the whole with an
eye that searches and perceives. And crowning her work are her accomplishments
with her cast—except Shelley Winters as Mrs. Touchett and Shelley Duvall as
Countess Gemini. The two Shelleys could have been left wherever they were.
Nicole Kidman, for her part, may not be the Isabel Archer of our imagination, but
neither is she the Nicole Kidman of our past acquaintance. In the recent, bizarre
To Die For (1995), she was surprisingly colorful, and here Campion has induced
her to mine herself further. Kidman comes up with tones of hurt and resolve and
poise and warmth that she has never shown before.
John Malkovich, not always easy to admire, is perfectly cast here, which is
itself a rarity. His moodiness and almost disinterested viciousness fit Gilbert
Osmond. He gives a performance that, without grotesquerie, makes us scent from
the start that there is unpleasantly more to him than Isabel suspects. The most
adroit casting is of Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle. Hershey is light-years away
from her beginnings in film as a Barbie doll with a voice. Through her three film
decades, she has grown and grown, with insufficient praise for her continuing
development. Playing the mature American-born woman who has long lived in
Europe and has learned from it, Hershey immediately and perfectly suggests
complexity.
Martin Donovan, known for his quite different work with Hal Hartley, is
touching yet manly as the afflicted Ralph. John Gielgud is his father, a small part
but, naturally, unforgettable. (Odd thought: How does a ninety-two-year-old actor
feel about playing a deathbed scene?)
And a note of gratitude to the film’s Polish composer, Wojciech Kilar. Kilar’s
music, relying on meditative strings, helps to carry the film along. Campion’s
choice of Kilar is one more sign that the woman who made An Angel at My Table
has emerged from the preciousness of The Piano (1993) to resume an interesting
career.
Shadows, John Cassavetes, 1959 (The New Republic, 6 March 1961)
Shadows, an American film directed by John Cassavetes, has a relation to

the work of the British Free Cinema, a documentary movement. This film was, as
it were, shot free-hand—some of it out of focus and with levels of sound-recording
that are often bizarre. All the settings are real New York streets, bars, apartments.
As much as anything else, it attempts to bring its environment back alive. Thus it
is an exercise in what Siegfried Kracauer calls “the redemption of physical reality.”
The theory is generally well demonstrated here: the world fixed on film with time
figuratively stopped (which is the basic fascination of all photography), and truth
as the sum of literal facts.
The story is about two black brothers and their sister: the brothers, who
are musicians, are dark brown and light tan, respectively; the pretty sister is light-
skinned enough to “pass” for white. Their professional and personal frustrations,
bitterness, and resolution are explored with varying effectiveness. Here again the
main interest is in method. All the dialogue was improvised by the actors while
the camera was in motion; only the story outline was pre-arranged.
Improvisation is becoming one of the more abused facets of acting theory,
particularly by those who forget that Stanislavsky intended it only as an exercise
51
in the preparation of roles. We are told that some of the excellent French film
Breathless (1960) was improvised, but it was done under a much firmer scenario
than Shadows and the dialogue was tested before filming. Also, improvisation
intended for an audience calls for more than acting ability, and the actors
appearing in Breathless are keener than those we see in Shadows. 
Yet much of the American film has a free, jazzy, immediate feeling, a sense
of eavesdropping that is provocative. Part of its appeal lies in feeding our
subconscious revulsion with the artificial prettiness of most film “pictures”
(although there are some seemingly inserted close-ups even here). Most of it is in
the adventure of a new dimension possible only to the film.
The dimension is limited, however. Experiment is very welcome in an art
so young and already so commerce-ridden. Anyone who cares about films will be
glad that Shadows was made and will hope that it stimulates other filmmakers. But
the logical end of cinematic “reality” is to poke a camera out the window and let it
run for two hours; and the end of improvisation is conversation, not drama.
Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1977 (The New Republic, 10 June 1991)
The late John Cassavetes—writer, director, actor—is a problem in

American film history. As an actor, in his own pictures and in others, he has unique
fire. His portrayal of a desperate, feverishly charming paranoiac in Elaine May’s
Mikey and Nicky (1976) gives life to the crinkled tenets of Method acting. But
Cassavetes’ own films are troubling.
Clearly they are attempts to cut new roads, heterodox and free, using the
“noodling” of hyper-realistic detail to open large territories of dread and pain. But
they never quite realize their aim. A valiant attempt has just been made in New
York to fix Cassavetes’ place in the film firmament, a retrospective of his work,
featuring a film that had never had a theatrical release. But Opening Night (1977)
leaves the subject of Cassavetes as muddy as before.
Opening Night deals with the production of a play that is trying out in New
Haven, then heading for Broadway. Most of the film takes place in New Haven.
(Nothing looks like anything I ever saw in that city—no small matter in a picture
whose unseen motto is “Nitty Gritty.”) The story centers on the star of the show,
played by Gena Rowlands. She is a drinker, and her tippling is heightened by the
death of a fan, a young woman who is killed by another car when she scrambles
after Rowlands’ limo outside the stage door. The accident becomes a metaphor for
the star: to this middle-aging woman, it’s as if her last grip on youth had slipped.
She is haunted, in fantasy, by reappearances of the young woman. The role that
the star is performing in the play-within-the-film is also a middle-aging woman,
torn between her ex-husband and a lover. The screenplay is structured, somewhat
too neatly, around mirror images throughout, and Cassavetes underlines this
pattern by the frequent use of mirrors in his shooting.
But the picture wobbles—for two principal reasons. First, not for the only
time in this director’s work, Rowlands. She was Cassavetes’ wife, and he was
devoted to her as an actress, but her acting simply doesn’t repay his devotion. It’s
difficult enough to believe in Rowlands as that actress offstage, but when she is
onstage—in rehearsal or performance—the idea that she is a commanding star is
quite beyond belief. She has no depth, no resonance, no flourish of technique, no
(the inevitable word) personality. Her features are milky and bland, and for some
52
reason, her eyebrows here are made to curve upward at the inner ends, lending a
pitiful touch. The only reason that she is the star of this film, and the play within
it, is that she has the most lines and the camera is on her more than on others.
Ironically, Rowlands’ defects are italicized by Cassavetes himself. He plays
an actor who is the lover in the play and who offstage has been the star’s lover. He
refers to himself bitterly as a subsidiary actor in the show. But when they are
onstage together, Cassavetes blows Rowlands away. She is just a woman with
some lines of dialogue, who makes faces consonant with them. He is a power.
Then there’s the credibility of the theatrical milieu. Almost everything
about the play’s production is either cliché or fakery. These aspects combine in the
last section, the Broadway opening. Because of her inner turmoil about aging and
love, Rowlands turns up at the theater on opening night very late and very drunk.
(It’s not clear why the packed house has waited for her or why the producer takes
so long to speak to the audience.) Rowlands is so soused that she can’t walk. The
play’s director makes her crawl to her dressing room. Then coffee is administered,
and we know she will come ’round, will perform, and will get an ovation at the
finish. This, from a filmmaker rebelliously interested in truth, is shocking. It’s the
merest 1930s Hollywood show-biz claptrap.
Still, there is some slash-and-acid in the film, some subtle byplay,
particularly from Cassavetes and from Ben Gazzara, who is the show’s director.
Enough so that Cassavetes remains a problem.
Gardens of Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, 1987 (The New Republic, 25 May
1987)
Francis Ford Coppola continues his sad way. His talent doesn’t diminish
(although it doesn’t grow): he just keeps grasping desperately for chances to use
it in an increasingly tough film world. He bounces from subject to subject,
discernibly searching not for variety but for success.
A Hollywood story editor I know went recently to see another director who
started big around the same time as Coppola did, then hit a slide. Arrived at the
director’s estate, my friend found a Mexican gardener in front and asked him
where Mr. So-and-so was. “Out in the back,” said the gardener. As my friend
started toward the back, the gardener called after him, “He needs a hit.” Coppola’s
previous picture, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), may have been a success—I don’t
know—but it and his latest are the work  of a man who also needs hits, not of a
man doing what he really wants to do. There’s no need to indict Coppola for the
current conditions of American filmmaking; neither is there any reason to see
Gardens of Stone as anything other than what it is.
It’s a genre picture, one more in a line of U.S. armed forces movies, dressed
up with a new setting and a décor of discussion. The picture begins in 1968 at Fort
Myer, Virginia; the focus is the training and duty of the Old Guard that
accompanies military funerals at Arlington Cemetery. (Hence the title.) The script
by Ronald Bass, adapted from a novel by Nicholas Proffitt, is a collection of
platitudes: centrally, the young soldier who comes under the command of a
sergeant who was his father’s Army buddy. The young man is in love with a
53
colonel’s daughter. Also, there’s a hulking sergeant-major who is tough on his men
but really loves them. Also, the sergeant is divorced and lonely. Talk about
Vietnam provides the contemporary glitzing-up of all these stock elements. The
sergeant has doubts about the war (“Nothing to win. And no way to win it”) yet
insists on duty. He cozies up with a Washington Post woman reporter who is
against the war. (Try to believe that match from either side.) The worst scene in
the picture is a trumped-up quarrel at a party between a peacenik lawyer and the
sergeant, in which the latter breaks the former’s jaw—and is forgiven!
The sergeant is played by James Caan, who was at his best in The Godfather
(1972) for Coppola and, absent for a few years, now looks much older, full of jaw-
clenchings and tears-blinked-back moments. The sergeant-major is James Earl
Jones, monstrously fat but weighty in other ways, too. Anjelica Huston, appealingly
odd, is the Post reporter. The young soldier and his sweetheart are played by two
nonentities named D. B. Sweeney and Mary Stuart Masterson.
Through all this farrago of stuff retrieved from Wallace Beery and Victor
McLaglen, here seasoned with mod spices, Coppola moves with more than
fluency—with an eye refreshingly acute from first shot to last. It’s hard to see that
he has developed a style, or even styles: he hops from style to style as he finds
scripts for which he can get financing. But certainly he is deft. What we’re left with,
after the deftness, is a clanking army-life flick updated with Vietnam talk, made
just eight years after Coppola made the hyperbolic but seriously intended
Apocalypse Now (1979).
New York Stories, Francis Ford Coppola & others, 1989 (The New Republic, 27
March 1989)
Anthology films—the screen equivalent of a bill of one-act plays—were

fairly common in the 1950s and 1960s but have almost disappeared. I’ve missed
them, and I was glad to see one coming along. I’m still glad, though it turns out to
be a mixed bag: mixed bags are the risk and reward of the form. When a feature
film begins poorly, hope for the next hour and a half of your life seems to swirl up
out of your body like a visible wraith. But when an anthology film begins poorly,
hope, for the other segments, remains.
However, New York Stories, a three-parter, begins well. The first segment
is the best; then comes a sagging second part, during which hope  is a thing with
fluttering feathers; then hope is rewarded—the third part picks  up smartly, if not
to the level of the first. That opener was written by Richard Price, the novelist
(Bloodbrothers) and screenwriter, and was directed by Martin Scorsese, who after
his recent biblical excursion (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988) is now back in
SoHo, where most of After Hours (1985) took place.
Price’s screenplay is set—nay, embedded—in the downtown art world. A
fortyish painter, Nick Nolte, is celebrated and successful. He is mad about a young
painter, Rosanna Arquette, who lived in a cubicle in his huge loft, ran off for a while
with another man, and now consents to return, after Nolte pleads, on condition
that she doesn’t have to sleep with him. He is still mad for her, and she plays his
desire the way Itzhak Perlman plays the fiddle. The romance not-quite-réchauffé
cannot last and doesn’t. There are brawls, private and public. (At one point he
bellows, as proof of his knowingness, that he had four marriages before she was
born.) The real fracture comes not from brawling but because she insists that he
54
tell her whether or not her painting is good. He knows that a negative answer, or
no answer, will finish matters between them. He can’t give her the answer she
wants. His refusal to lie about art validates him and the story.
Nestor Almendros, the cinematographer of this first part, makes the most
of the gobs of paint that this abstract artist wallops and sweeps and smooths onto
his huge canvas. Thelma Schoonmaker’s sharp editing reflects those spurts and
sweeps. Scorsese, a director whose norm of emotional heat is always several
notches above average, pitches the episode perfectly for its intensity and for the
comedy in the moment and the overview.
Scorsese’s choicest work is with his actors. Nolte is not famous for
flexibility and depth, but here, bearded and bespectacled, he gives shade and
variety to his performance. Arquette, whose prom-queen conceit usually
intervenes between us and her sexiness, concentrates so truly on her
dissatisfactions that it’s easy to understand why Nolte is enslaved. Her caprice,
based on discontent with herself, her flashes of near-compassion for Nolte along
with her hate for his doglike devotion, are subtleties that presumably Scorsese
found in her.
The title of this episode, “Life Lessons,” is a small sour joke. The lessons
aren’t learned.
The third episode, “Oedipus Wrecks,” is better than its title. Written and
directed by Woody Allen, with himself in the leading role, it’s an extended Jewish-
mother joke, but it’s a pretty good one. There’s a twist that I can’t disclose except
to say that, like his play The Floating Light Bulb, it reflects his interest in stage
magic.
Allen plays a successful Manhattan lawyer named Sheldon Mills, né
Milstein, whose mother still lives in the neighborhood and the mode that he
escaped. Allen has a new lover, Mia Farrow, a divorcée with three children, whom
he takes home to meet his mother. Mom, Mae Questel, is cordial enough, shows
Farrow the baby pictures and so on, but privately she asks her son what he’s doing
with a blonde with three children. Mom ultimately makes her displeasure
overarchingly clear. This results in a change of heart on Farrow’s part and an
eventual amorous realignment for Allen that pleases Mom.
The theme music of this Allen episode is “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl
That Married Dear Old Dad.” (Take that, Sophocles.) But my favorite moment, a
romantic reverie, involves another song. Allen has had dinner at the home of his
second lady friend, who wrapped some pieces of boiled chicken for him to take
back home with him. Standing pensively by his apartment window, he pulls a
chicken leg from the package and gazes at it as once a swain might have gazed at
a locket, while the soundtrack music swells in “All the Things You Are.”
Farrow is pleasant. Questel is vivid without any Anne Bancroft or Sylvia
Miles clowning. Allen shows yet again that he is a personality, not an actor; seams
keep gaping in his performance. But since he knows how to write for himself, he
can get away with it.
The middle episode is “Life with Zoe,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola,
written by him and his daughter, Sofia Coppola. A wealthy twelve-year-old girl
lives in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Her mother, a famous photographer, globe-
trots continually; her father, an even more famous flutist, globe-trots, too.
(Incidental note: Coppola’s father is a flutist.) Zoe is attended by a butler and
spends most of her time with equally wealthy school friends. An even wealthier
55
boy comes along. The plot then involves a huge diamond, clumsily introduced into
the story, that links her father with the beautiful aunt of the rich boy.
It’s all meant to have a tart, vaguely Maupassant flavor, but it begins dull
and never generates interest. Most of this is due to Coppola as director rather than
as author. He cast the principal role poorly: the child is unappealing and dim.
Giancarlo Giannini, as the father, is wasted; with Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister) as
the mother, there is little to waste. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography itself is
inaptly gauzy. And Coppola seems always to be scrambling for the right vantage
points, like a paparazzo frantic to grab pictures of a celebrity. He even tilts the
camera pointlessly during a robbery sequence. The whole segment, which
includes a bad gag about a homeless man patronized by the rich child, struggles
along without rhythm, charm, or point.
Coppola leaves us where this episode found us: bemused by what seems to
be his predicament. Through Apocalypse Now (1979), his films, whether successful
or not, showed a director with an edge, an ambition, a large-scale identity in
formation. Since then, he has not only not developed, he has lost identity. It’s as if
the strain of Apocalypse Now left him stranded, grasping but not reaching.
Coppola is now fifty. Those who admired his earlier work and those who at
least recognized the director’s character will hope that some sort of self-
reclamation is in order. He said once that being a director is “like running in front
of a locomotive. If you stop, if you trip, if you make a mistake, you get killed.” That’s
what seems to have been on his mind lately. Maybe he should just get off the tracks
for a while and catch his breath.
The Godfather III, Francis Ford Coppola, 1990 (The New Republic, 21 January
1991)
Lately I saw tapes of the first two Godfather films (1972, 1974) to refresh
myself before seeing The Godfather: Part III. The faults are still worrisome. The
editing leaves fissures. The screenplays don’t always make sense. Why do so many
loud-mouthed antagonists defy the family without learning from previous
examples? Why don’t they know they’re going to be killed? How could the mass
murders at the end of Part I settle anything? How could they be anything but a
declaration of war? Al Pacino is still hard to credit as Brando’s heir; he looks as if
Brando could have him for breakfast. Brando’s performance itself is still
questionable; among other things, his accent keeps slipping. (He did much better
in The Freshman 1990, playing off his previous performance.) And we can only
be grateful that Diane Keaton is not on screen any more than she is.
Yet the films have qualities that distinguish them from most Mafia films
before and since. First is their size. The director and co-writer, Francis Ford
Coppola, knew that sheer dimension would give the films a greater gravity than
any one or two story strands could produce. Then there’s the historical
perspective, the sense that we are seeing the continuum of Sicilian life in another
setting. This historicity—created by more than Michael’s visit to Sicily in Part I—
provides a rationale that few other Mafia films convey.
Possibly most important is Gordon Willis’s cinematography. Imagine any
one scene of those films—same script, same actors—in cruder light with less
evocative shadowings, and the whole enterprise is nakedly disclosed as just a
gangster picture, only longer. Willis’s gold and his different shades of black make
56
it all look serious. Part III, equally long, is equally uplifted by Willis’s camera. It’s
as if the Corleone family had engaged a master painter to do portraits of these
racketeers, drug peddlers, and murderers, and by his art had aggrandized these
people of the moral gutter.
Once again the screenplay is by Coppola and Mario Puzo. Once again the
structure suggests an opera libretto, with big set pieces—arias, duets, trios, etc.—
connected by lesser narrative. Appropriately, then, the last sequence takes place
in an opera house—in Palermo, where Michael’s son is making his début in
Cavalleria Rusticana (which itself is set in Sicily). There’s no need to detail all that
leads up to this finale. I’ll just note that the film begins in 1979, when Michael is in
his sixties and is being invested with a papal order in New York. At the celebration
that follows (reminiscent of the wedding party at the start of Part I), Michael
presents a $500 million check for aid to Sicily. This is the sort of touch that gives
The Godfather mythic power with critics. What critic would be impressed with
$500 thousand?
Again, some points in the screenplay are puzzling. In Part I Franco Citti was
a Sicilian bodyguard whom we last saw fleeing from the booby-trapped car that
killed Michael’s bride. Obviously Citti was in on the plot. How come he is now a
trusted aide? Further: Is history being revised here? The plot involves a Vatican
bank and the murder of Pope John Paul. What do Coppola and Puzo know that we
don’t know? (And what greater eminence in the world—or out of it—will they find
to murder in Part IV?) A skilled Sicilian killer is hired for a big hit in the last
sequence, a man famed for his subtlety of assassination. His plan for the hit seems
shabby; and when it fails, his desperate substitute is downright stupid. How could
he possibly have escaped?
Coppola has also made a major mistake in casting. (Outside of Diane
Keaton, who was, I suppose, a given.) He has put his daughter, Sofia, in the role of
Michael’s daughter. She is not an actress of professional caliber, and she shows
little hint of becoming one. In her key moment in the last sequence, at the
screening I attended, she got the wrong reaction from the audience.
Al Pacino, of course, plays Michael and plays him somewhat overly stoop-
shouldered and antique for a man in his early sixties. This approach doesn’t lend
much authority to a performance that was never authoritative enough. To beef up
his part, the authors give him a few touches of diabetic shock, as a kind of actor’s
cadenza.
Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, is again Michael’s sister. Shire has matured in
the years since Part II, which helps. Eli Wallach putters around as a deceptively
decrepit capo. Joe Mantegna is good enough as an obstreperous rival of the
Corleone clan, though—once again—how does he expect to survive? Donal
Donnelly is mouselike as a scheming archbishop. Raf Vallone (a pleasure to see
him again) gives plentiful solidity to the cardinal who becomes pope. The chief
supporting player, who is really more than that, is Andy Garcia as Michael’s
nephew. Clearly this young man is going to be Michael’s successor. Garcia, who
first became noticeable in The Untouchables (1987), has seductive strength,
homicidal cool. One reason to look forward to Part IV is that he’ll fill the center
better than Pacino does.
Coppola directs with vigor, skill, and, I’d say, relief. After the troubles he
has had since Part II, with unworthy screenplays that wasted his talent, he seems
to slip back into another Godfather film with a happy sigh. He’s like an actor
57
resuming a role in a previous success after some misadventures. Coppola’s relish

is manifest. But sometimes his touch is heavy. For instance, a mob hit is planned
in a chapel with a huge crucified Christ in the background. On the other hand, one
of the hit plannings (there are many) is especially clever: in a kitchen with a TV
newscaster talking about the reason for the hit while a thunderstorm roars
outside. (Was Coppola remembering the kitchen-and-thunder scene in The
Magnificent Ambersons 1942?)
Part of the success of the first two Godfather films was presumably due to
the usual vicarious thrill of GoodFellas (1990) and other Mafia pictures: we move
into a criminal society and live by its brutal, greedy standards for a couple of
hours. Part III supplies the same thrill, plus the unique quality of this series: we
join a family so rich that they have acquired the dignity that riches bring in our
world, whatever their source. Ultimately, however, the Godfather success may rest
on the fact that, structurally, these films are old-fashioned. The nineteenth-
century opera libretto, as noted, is a possible paradigm. Martin Scorsese wanted
GoodFellas to hurtle along, with present-day pace and pulse. Coppola wants to
enjoy his story more, without slack but without hurry. This paradoxical
combination, of venerable method and contemporary material, may be the base of
the Godfather appeal.
Hi, Mom!, Brian De Palma, 1970 (The New Republic, 16 May 1970)
Brian De Palma, who made Greetings (1968), is a twentieth-century version

of what the last century called a Bad Boy: a mischievous, likeable scamp. While I
watched his latest film, Hi, Mom!, I felt like his uncle, shaking my head and
chuckling, “Young devil.” Imagine—pranks with condoms! (Well, high time. The
German writer Grabbe did it in a play in 1822.) Greetings had its funny moments
and Hi, Mom! has even more, but both these clever, generally sharp films, would
have, been impossible to anyone but a Bad Boy.
Greetings was about three young New Yorkers and how two of them tried
to  avoid the draft. Hi, Mom! Concentrates  on one of the three, Robert De Niro,
who was the “peep art” specialist in the earlier picture and was last seen being
interviewed in Vietnam. Now he is back, tries to pursue his peeping career with a
new kind of porno film, unachieves, gets an acting job in a “total theater”
production about blacks, gets trapped into marriage, and gets drastically
untrapped.
The screenplay is credited to De Palma, but I assume that the same method
was followed as in Greetings. There (De Palma said) situations were given to the
actors, lines were improvised while a tape recorder rolled, the result was refined,
and then it was shot. The plus side of the method (which isn’t new) is that you get
a nice figurative sense of the people who are making the film bursting into the film
with high spirits. The negative side is some meandering and some moments that
seem funnier to them than to us.
Another trouble is that the subjects aren’t, alas, as fruitful for satire as
Vietnam. Also there is an apartment house bombing at the end, which, in the light
of recent events, left me without an overview to laugh from. There is some
confused shooting and editing in the black-theater episode (presented as part of a
TV show called N.I.T.—National Intellectual Television—Journal). But the weakest
58
element is that the weight of the picture rests on De Niro, who was very good as
part of a troika in the first picture but lacks the range and appeal to sustain a film
more or less by himself. The most professional appearance is by the very funny
Allen Garfield, who was the porno salesman in Greetings and here is a porno film
producer with quality standards.
Sags and all, Hi, Mom! is infectious with intelligent and perceptive high
spirits. (I won’t explain the title; the picture does that.) And there are moments of
fine filming, like the opening shot. We see the doorway of an East Side tenement
and, at the end of the dark hall, the backyard. The camera moves down the hall
into the rubbishy yard and surprises the surly janitor at work there, who
thereupon scolds the camera for sneaking up on him.
Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma, 1980 (The New Republic, 23 August 1980)
Like nature, film criticism abhors a vacuum. What’s wanted at all times is a
stylist to sing about—more than one, if possible. The style itself doesn’t matter—
Max Ophüls or Samuel Fuller—so long as the writer can a) concentrate on it juicily;
b) discount content; c) discount those who consider content. The whole project
becomes a means of sorting out those who can really “see” films from those who
can’t, those who “love movies” from those who, like myself, would be embarrassed
to be under that soppy rubric. I’m always a bit relieved when I fail the test (though
I don’t always).
I’ve failed again. The latest stylistic laureate, who has been getting nearer
and nearer to it through recent years, is the still-young American director Brian
De Palma. His latest film, Dressed to Kill, seems to be a box-office hit and a critical
one. De Palma specializes in scare and murder: Sisters (I walked out of that 1973
picture), Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), although his first released pictures were
comic hijinks, Hi, Mom! (1970) and Greetings (1968). Nowadays the comparison
most often slapped on him is Hitchcock, and in a few respects, the comparison is
deserved.
For instance, Dressed to Kill is constructed to provide occasions for
cinematic “arias,” like those in Hitchcock. De Palma wrote his script around three
such main sequences: a cat-and-cat game in the Metropolitan Museum between a
man and a woman; a scene between a hooker and a New York psychiatrist in his
office during a thunderstorm at night (neither of them comments on it though I’ve
never seen such a huge storm in this city); and a scare sequence at the end that
has a basic resemblance to the last sequence in Carrie. In these three sections—
and elsewhere—De Palma certainly weaves extraordinary silk-and-polyester
texture. His camera glides (much more insinuatingly than Kubrick’s in The Shining
1980), the editing is acute, the compositions are generally economical and
strong. True, he overuses big close-ups right from the beginning, and he stoops to
one of the dreariest clichés—a shot with a telephone large in the foreground so
that you know the character in the background is coming to pick up the phone. But
it’s pretty hard to fault his skills.
Next question: Is that enough? And next question: Does skill—the proper
word for De Palma, I think, not style—justify everything? Excuse all faults?
Compensate for all vacancies? Before anyone mentions the name Flaubert, I’ll
quote the much-quoted passage myself: “In literature there are no such things as
beautiful subjects. . . . One can write about any one thing equally well as about any
59
other.” But Flaubert did not say there is no such thing as a subject; and he went on
immediately to say: “The artist must raise everything to a higher level.”
And what is the subject of Dressed to Kill? The agonies of a homicidal
transvestite. (I’m not tipping the plot—not very much. Any seasoned viewer will
guess the key gimmick long before it’s revealed, and it’s revealed long before the
end.) It would be ludicrous to suggest that this subject is “raised” in Flaubert’s
sense—it’s merely exploited for sex and violence, the sex seamy and the violence
unwatchable. (Razors.) If you’ve been waiting for a work to reveal the connections
between sex and violence—which means if you’re under the age of, say, nine—
Dressed to Kill will enlighten you. Otherwise it may seem, as it did to me, high-gloss
exploitation.
The apostles already contend that the center of the film is the very fact that
it has no plot or moral center. It begins with a well-to-do woman, maritally
unsatisfied, who cruises New York to (the phrase used) get laid. Later the focus
shifts to her bright teenaged son, about whom she has made a laboriously
contrived sexual joke, and a hooker. The boy is monastically pure, but the hooker
is stock-market mad. The detective on the case is a vulgarian. If things aren’t
grubby enough by then, you get a gang of black youths chasing the (blonde) hooker
through the subway to rape her. And the film ends with the pure boy comforting
the frightened hooker in his mom’s bed, so—who knows?—he may be about to
become a citizen of De Palma’s centerless world, just as we fade out. But is De
Palma a new Céline, a new Georges Bataille? I get no such anti-conviction  
conviction from the film. I get only that because virtually all taboos are now 
taboo, pictures like Dressed to Kill can be made.
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) has been invoked a lot in discussing this film,
because of the transvestite and because there are two, count ’em, two shower
scenes with naked women, start and finish. (Modesty note: In the first one Angie
Dickinson caresses her body, as she watches her husband shave with a
premonitory open razor, and the camera snaps from face to breast and pubis.
Interviews assert that only the face is Dickinson’s. A nice touch. She doesn’t mind
our thinking that we’re seeing her body as long as it’s someone else’s.) I’m no
Psycho addict, but the comparison seems glib. The script of Psycho, by Joseph
Stefano from a Robert Bloch novel, has a narrative and “viewpoint” center, and no
plot holes. In De Palma’s film, how did the murderer know that the victim would
forget a ring and come back upstairs? And Hitchcock doesn’t use a dream for an
extra dollop of thrills. And Hitchcock suggests, with dramatic music; De Palma
shows, with oily music. In the famous Psycho shower scene, says James Naremore,
“Out of more than fifty separate shots, only one shows a knife entering a body . . .
a tiny puncture. Even in this explicit shot, there is no blood.” De Palma details the
razoring. (Not to me. I had to look away).
The most important similarity of Dressed to Kill to Psycho I haven’t seen
mentioned. One of Hitchcock’s biggest shocks is “outside” the film, a violation of
audience confidence. When we see a star in a film, see her early, we expect her to
go substantially through the picture. One of the strongest jolts in Psycho is that
Janet Leigh gets murdered so soon. De Palma apes this device; he relies on us,
watching the film, to supply a violable orthodoxy.
The performances don’t need comment.
I haven’t been so depressed by a skillfully made film since the post-
Nashville Altman crop in the mid-’70s. What ability De Palma has. What emptiness.
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What glorying in that emptiness as proof that he’s a true auteur. Well, at least the
filmniks are happy once more: they have a new “stylist.”
Scarface, Brian De Palma, 1983 (The New Republic, 9 & 16 January 1983)
Another remake. The new Scarface is a panderers’ picture. The original,

directed by Howard Hawks and released in 1932, has been as overrated as are
most good American films by rhapsodists eager to create pantheons, but, despite
Paul Muni’s overacting in the title role, it was directed with cinematic imagination;
and it was written in Ben Hecht’s high style—facile, flashy cynicism. The Hawks
film is a relatively serious attempt by the best show biz of the time to examine the
criminal world of the time for its greed and blood lust, also as a pressure cooker
for sexual aberrance. Tony Camonte, based on Al Capone, burns with animal greed
and brutality, and at least part of his fire is sublimated desire for his sister. The
last sequence, in which she joins him in the shootout against the police even
though he has just murdered her newlywed husband, is true Hawks-Hecht, a quick
skim of profundities made impressive by professional skills.
No one could maintain that the 1932 Scarface was done without hope of
profit (the co-producer was Howard Hughes); still, its various clevernesses
provide the kind of pleasure that even the president of the A.S.P.C.A. might get at
a bullfight by a leading matador. This new Scarface is as if that same president
were at an Elizabethan bearbaiting.
The new Scarface seems to take its tone, stylistically and otherwise, from
the mansion in which its protagonist ends up. This time called Tony Montana, he
is a Cuban sent to Florida in the Castro shipments of 1980. He rises from Miami
dishwasher to the top of the drug trade in less than three years and lives in an
immense house furnished like the lounges of 1920s movie palaces. That seems
appropriate enough for this Tony (although there’s a wee question about how he
got so much money so quickly), but, more sickeningly, that décor seems the
crystallization of the sort of filmmaking employed by the director throughout.
Brian De Palma’s vision of Montana’s dream fits perfectly with De Palma’s own
view of filmmaking. All of this film, even its most squalid settings, as well as its
characterizations and narrative, is as overblown and banal and vulgar as that
ultimate villa.
Poor old Tony Camonte never had it so good so fast. Of course the money
in the drug trade today would have been far beyond Camonte’s nakedest dream of
avarice. Near the end, though relatively soon after his rise to power, Tony Montana
is supposed to be clearing ten to twelve million a month. He dies after some
hoglike snuffling of a mound of cocaine on his desk that is worth more money than
Camonte (Capone) probably ever saw. Everything is inflated, including the size of
international criminal operations and of ill-gotten gains. The film audience’s
threshold of excitement has also risen. Violence gets more violent, gaudiness gets
more gaudy, characters get more streamlined, cinematic style gets less subtle. De
Palma and pals are out to pander to new gluttonies, and they have picked the right
material, both as excuse and as medium. Hawks’s Scarface treated a subject; De
Palma’s Scarface hitches a ride on its subject. Characters in the Hawks film are
written and acted with some obligation to shatter stereotypes of crime films; with
De Palma, characters are stuffed back into their stock shells. For example, the girl
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whom De Palma’s Tony wins from his boss is played by a Barbie doll; for Hawks,
she was a good actress with a real face, Karen Morley.
Block by block, De Palma has built his career largely on imitation, usually
of Hitchcock, from his very first film. Murder à la Mod (1968), through Dressed to
Kill (1980) and Blow Out. (1981). When Scarface was announced, I expected a
Hawks imitation: the only surprise is that it’s something of a Coppola imitation,
reaching for the sudden eruption of blood into phony luxe that marked The
Godfather (1972). But De Palma doesn’t have the talent that Coppola (once)
showed. Not one of the sequences or compositions in this Scarface, from a murder
in a Cuban refugee camp, to nightclub shootouts, to luxe circular bathtubs, does
anything but remind us—frequently of films we wish we hadn’t seen in the first
place—and thereby reminds us of De Palma’s bankruptcy. His idea of a “touch” is
to have the camera come close to Tony’s eyes, accompanied by ominous music,
whenever he looks at his sister with as-yet unacknowledged incestuous lust.
The violence in this new Scarface was much publicized in advance through
its difficulty in getting an R-rating, and if I didn’t believe that the ratings examiners
are honest, I’d suspect that De Palma’s distributors paid for the advance fuss. The
violence is not discernibly more bloody or frequent than in a picture I saw just the
night before called Uncommon Valor (1983), which got its R without publicity. De
Palma’s one notable contribution was possibly inspired by The Texas Chain-Saw
Massacre (1974): while Tony is forced to watch, a drug dealer torments him by
(off-screen) amputating the arm and leg of a pal with a chain saw.
The story, written by Oliver Stone, is the very boring and predictable arc of
a criminal’s rise and fall, not new with the first Scarface or with Little Caesar
(1931) or The Public Enemy (1931). Whether or not you know Hawks’s film, you
know, after the first ten minutes of this Scarface, what the outline is of the next
160 minutes. The general shape is still the Hecht shape, and a few of the details of
the original are retained, like the electric sign reading “The World Is Yours,” which,
seen early, is seen again at the bloody end (and which I have always thought the
nadir of Hecht’s Broadway cynicism). Inevitably we get a few sops to “right
thinking,” passed off as deepenings of character. This new Tony hates
communists; won’t murder a man by blowing up his car because the man’s wife
and kids are with him (though Tony blows out the brains of the man sitting next
to him to prevent the “bad” murder); spouts a fake Hamlet speech about the
meaning of life. “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but
to sleep and feed?” gets translated into the vulgate for a drunken speech by the
rich Tony in a nightclub. He walks out telling the gaping patrons that they need
him because he’s the bad guy who makes them feel good. With this profundity—
that we all rest easier because there are murderers with wealth and power—the
picture leaves us to reel.
The script does make one moralistic change from Hecht, perhaps because,
contradictorily, it affords a chance for sexual explicitness. In Hawks’s film, after
Tony guns down his best friend because he thinks the friend is shacking up with
his sister, he finds out that his sister and the friend had just been married;
nevertheless, during the final shootout, the frenzied sister, responding to instincts
deeper than grief, helps Tony load his guns. With De Palma the same mistaken
murder occurs, but Tony’s sister does not forgive him or help him. Instead, when
trouble arrives, she comes into his study, virtually undressed, demented, and
taunts him about what he has really wanted all along before she starts shooting at
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him herself. This change plays both sides of a twisty street: it keeps the sister from
forgetting her murdered husband, and it also provides a little extra sexual tease.
Note another change. In Hawks the last shootout is against the police. In De
Palma that shootout is against a small army of thugs loosed on Tony by a Bolivian
drug mogul whom he has betrayed. The size of that thug army, the speed with
which it is summoned, the implications of international reach, the immense
arsenal of huge weapons—these are all part of the tonal design that runs
throughout this film and ends at Tony’s Napoleonic desk. Nothing exceeds like
excess.
The last disgust is for Al Pacino, who plays Tony. His chief power as an actor
is in violence or the threat of it. When he gets a part that can use that power in a
work of some substance, like David Mamet’s play American Buffalo or Sidney
Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), his talent gives it life and resonances. But
unlike other actors of murderous roles such as James Cagney and Edward G.
Robinson, he has no range; he just sells violence wherever anyone will hire him to
do it, like a mercenary soldier who doesn’t care whom he shoots so long as he’s
paid. It’s disgusting to see Pacino pouring the gifts he has used well elsewhere into
this sewer. (He does assume a good Cuban accent.)
This film is dedicated to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht. I haven’t seen a
more hopeless attempt at aggrandizement-through-dedication since William
Friedkin adapted his sorry Sorcerer (1977) from The Wages of Fear (1953) and
dedicated his distortion to Henri-Georges Clouzot, who made the original.
The Untouchables, Brian De Palma, 1987 (The New Republic, 2 June 1987)
Brian De Palma likes old movies and has spent much of his career trying to
make them. At last he has made a good one. The Untouchables, derived from the
TV series and some books about it, raises De Palma to the height of his movie-buff
devotion, to the point where he behaves like an old-time Hollywood director
reincarnated. His new film resembles an early 1930s automobile restyled by a
1980s designer, with the old car quite discernible and the modernization quite
snappy.
The Untouchables reached theater screens once before as The Scarface Mob
(1958), which was a pilot film for the TV series that was also released theatrically.
I missed it. (De Palma’s own deplorable Scarface four years ago, in 1983, had
nothing to do with Capone.) For his new film, De Palma asked the theater poet of
Chicago, David Mamet, to do the screenplay. This was the first piece of acute
casting. It’s impossible to say how much of the handling of scenes is Mamet’s work,
but surely the structure owes much to him, and of course the dialogue is his.
Mamet, in a way, anticipated De Palma’s direction. The rule seems to have been:
“Don’t change the old reliable Gangster Picture: just do it better.” Mamet plunged
into the middle of the mainstream and succeeded. The old-timers had more
freedom than Mamet. Ben Hecht’s script for the 1932 Scarface used incest to sizzle
it along. The Thew-Glasmon-Bright script for The Public Enemy (1931)—still my
favorite gangster picture—was composed of a series of plaque-like scenes almost
like a medieval mystery play. Mamet, revisiting the past, could not alter it. He
sought no “angle”: he took the Capone-Ness story as a great chance to revel in the
most conventional aspects of a genre.
Still, there are perceptible Mamet touches. Some examples: the language of
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a seasoned old cop, Jim Malone, who joins Ness’s small anti-Capone force (with
Mamet’s ear, it can hardly be an accident that Malone rhymes with Capone); the
language of Scarface Al himself, which dumps on us like a truckload of rocks; a
fierce hand-to-hand fight between two gray-haired men, Malone and a police
captain; Ness’s wry last line—the last line of the picture after the smoke has
cleared from these Prohibition battles. A reporter asks him what he’ll do if
Prohibition is repealed, and he says, “I think I’ll take a drink.”
The story is simple enough, plentiful enough. In 1930 Eliot Ness, a Treasury
agent, arrives in Chicago with wife and child and sets out, against odds and apathy,
to nail Capone. He recruits three loyal aides, one of them Italian to show us that
not all Italians are gangsters. (Racial epithets are, quite accurately for the time,
part of the invective throughout.) Ness meets setbacks in tactics and in law;
eventually, with the help of the Treasury accountant who is one of his team, he
proceeds with the tax-evasion approach that finally puts Capone in prison. Many
gunfights; many raids; many confrontations. There’s even a “Western” episode on
the Canadian border—with a troop of Mounties on the skyline à la John Ford—as
Ness and friends ride to seize a truck convoy of whiskey. (No explanation of how
these city types learned to ride.) The ending is foretold not only by history but by
the movies; what matters is how we get there.
This De Palma knew and relished. Many of his visual fandangos in the past,
like the museum sequence in Dressed to Kill (1980), were film-school smart-
aleckings. They’re not entirely gone from The Untouchables: a heavy reference to
the Potemkin (1925) baby carriage in a railroad station shoot-out; a pullback from
a shot of two men talking behind a window to reveal that they are in a plane. But
most of the time, this time, the subject has carried De Palma from mere showing
off to some virtuosity—in other words, the showing off is done so well that it helps.
He uses Panavision and justifies it in the very first shot. The wide screen is filled
with an overhead view of a barber shop, looking straight down on a barber chair,
its occupant’s face swathed in a towel, the chair surrounded by henchmen and
reporters. It is brilliantly lighted (by Stephen H. Burum), immensely detailed,
loaded with promise. The split-second effect is of full-color magic archaeology: the
mound of intervening years has been swept away and we are looking into the 1930
life of Chicago, the fief of Al Capone—who is the man in the chair.
Shot after shot, cut after cut, De Palma rarely falters. A bundle of
newspapers plunks onto a red carpet outside a hotel, and a bellboy bustles out to
get them; Ness and Malone converse in a church, and the camera looks up past
them at the gorgeous ceiling; the camera tracks along the outside of a ground-floor
apartment as a hit man watches his victim through the windows. And after a
machine gun starts spitting, there’s a shock cut to a close profile of an opera tenor
in clown costume singing “Vesti la giubba” (“On with the motley”), from Pagliacci.
Hitchcock and Hawks are still very much at De Palma’s back, but they might have
approved compositions like the one in which Ness alone confronts Capone and his
bodyguards on a grand hotel staircase and the action seems to pour forward onto
Ness. In further deference to the past, De Palma even uses a device I haven’t seen
in years. When a person falls through the air these days, we see only the start and
the finish. But when one of these gangsters is shoved off a roof, we get a close-up
matte shot of the falling man while the building races away behind him,
Kevin Costner, who is Ness, doesn’t come on like a ball of fire, but his
strength and humor keep growing. Sean Connery plays the aging Malone as if he
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had done James Bond and all the other roles just to season himself for this one, to
make the old cop both true and retrospective. Charles Martin Smith is right as the
wistful, heroic accountant. Andy Garcia is snakelike as the fourth member of the
Ness quartet. Robert De Niro, whose first film appearance was in De Palma’s
Greetings (1968), gives Capone the clumsy theatricality of a barbarian who wants
to be a ham, and also gives him the insane fury that we remember from Scorsese’s
Mean Streets (1973), still frightening.
It used to be a critical commonplace to   compare gangster films to
Westerns. The  comparison is now historical because  Westerns have faded so
badly. (Two   possible explanations for that fade: space   flicks now supply a
setting for black- and-white morality and broad action; at titudes toward Indians
have changed.)  But the gangster, whatever his new  name or game, is not only
still present in   our society, his presence is swollen—so   much that the
underworld sometimes  seems to be the real world while the rest  of us dawdle
in the deer park of criminal  kings.
Forty years ago Robert Warshow  wrote: “Most Americans have never
seen  a gangster. What matters is that the  gangster as an experience of art is
universal to Americans.” The facts of our life and art experience, fueled
additionally now by television, make The Untouchables simultaneously relevant
yet quaint. With its battles over mere booze, with Capone’s brazen antics, De
Palma’s film seems in a ghastly way almost innocent. By now the slouching beast
has made it to Bethlehem.
Casualties of War, Brian De Palma, 1989 (The New Republic, 2 October 1989)
Through most of his career Brian De Palma has been too clever for his own
good. Once, with The Untouchables (1987), he was clever enough. Now that he has
chosen the largest subject of his life, he isn’t clever at all. Few would have expected
that, when he tackled the Vietnam War, he would address it with commensurate
depth, but at least there was a chance that he might show some ingenuity.
Casualties of War turns out, however, to be clumsy and banal. It’s as if De Palma
had become embarrassed about his usual slickness, in relation to this material, but
then had nothing to put in its place. 
Still, he has profited in a way by his choice of subject. Some of the press
have apparently taken his very choice of serious material as proof in itself that he
has dealt with it seriously. He hasn’t. He gives us a chance to look once more at a
perennial and terrible subject—what happens to the humanity of relatively decent
men when they are plunged into war—but he fumbles his treatment of it.
The central act of the film is the kidnapping of a Vietnamese girl by U.S.
soldiers, her rape, and her murder. The night before they go out on patrol, a squad
of five men wants to go to a village near their base to visit a brothel. But passes are
canceled because the Viet Cong is in the village, presumably using the brothel.
Vindictively, when the squad is out the next day, the sergeant orders them to grab
a girl from a village and bring her along. In time four of the five soldiers rape her.
The exception is Eriksson, the newcomer in the squad, who tries to protect and
free the girl, and fails. Later she is murdered, for the squad’s convenience. 
We then move to Part Two—Eriksson’s struggle at the base camp to bring
the four other members of the squad to justice. He has to fight the army’s
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protectiveness of its own, its unwillingness to make waves, its prejudice against
villagers on the suspicion that many of them are Cong supporters. But Eriksson
persists, and eventually the judicial wheels roll. 
All this is framed by a postwar encounter in a suburban train back home
when Eriksson glimpses a young Asian woman who reminds him of the
Vietnamese girl. (Eriksson must have a busy time flashing back if he sinks so
completely into memory every time he glimpses a young Asian woman in
America.) At the end we return to the train. The young woman understands
somehow that he has been going through a mnemonic torment and assures him—
either out of some Delphic power in herself or on order from the film’s
producers—that the bad dream is over now, all will be well.
We never learn what this means. (Will he forget about the Vietnamese girl?
Will he accept what happened to her as just one of those things? What in the world
does the ending mean?) But this closing assurance is given to Eriksson over a
swelling chorus of angelic voices that is only the last offense in one of the most
ludicrous scores ever plopped onto a purportedly serious picture. It was
composed by Ennio Morricone, who has drooled musically over more than 175
pictures—to judge by the ones I’ve seen, anyway—and here contributes this film’s
outstanding blotch. The score under the suspense sequences sounds like the organ
stuff that used to accompany suspense in silent pictures; Eriksson’s
pronouncements about morality and justice are heard over horn chords; and
those heavenly, redemptive voices at the end are the crowning marshmallow.
Whatever the film’s claims to gravity, Morricone’s music helps to dim them. But
then the director who made this hollow picture is the man who commissioned the
score. 
He is also the director who commissioned David Rabe to write the
screenplay from a book by Daniel Lang. Rabe is one of the most overrated
American playwrights, probably the one most likely to lapse into undergraduate
irony and sermonizing on the subject of war. In his screenplay all the characters
seem familiar, not from life but from previous films or plays or novels; all of them
are pushed around like charade figures to symbolize Quality A in conflict with
Quality B. Following the story is thus less like watching a drama unfold than like
watching a recipe being filled: a cup of bitterness, a spoonful of lust, a dash of
remorse, etc. Except for the suffering of the girl—very easy to convey—the story
is detached and unaffecting, though guns are going off and people are being killed
throughout.
Whenever we might possibly begin to be involved, the dialogue bars us.
Admittedly, this is partly because the actors are incomprehensible about 30% of
the time. Mostly it’s because Rabe ranges from the war-movie cliché to the stagy
to the incredibly fancy. I thought I heard one tough grunt refer to Winnie the Pooh;
I know I heard the bestial sergeant make a wordplay on a line from Psalms: “Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
This film was supposed to be a drama of cause and effect, the crime against
the girl as catalyst for Eriksson’s struggle with the military. But the first part is so
synthetic that Part Two seems a protracted, puny epilogue instead of a courageous
resolution. (And would the girl’s body still be lying where it fell—in the same
condition—by the time the Army got around to investigating the case?)
Rabe has dissociated himself from the finished film, and has done even that
in a woolly, ambiguous manner. I hope that his displeasure with the picture begins
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with his own contribution. Unless De Palma tampered with every line, Rabe can’t
get off the hook so airily.
Stephen H. Burum was the cinematographer of The Untouchables and did a
good job of making history look both present and historical in that film. Here,
however, he shows a strange talent for transforming real locations into phony
back-lot settings. In fact De Palma made the outdoor sequences in Thailand, but
the squad’s first night patrol is lighted in a way that makes every tree seem
spurious. This peculiarity recurs.
The casting and the acting are mostly deplorable. Thuy Thu Le is
moderately affecting as the victimized girl, but any Asian actress, speaking a
strange language, bound and ravaged by brutes, would have to be inordinately dull
not to be affecting. Several members of the squad demonstrate casting at the stock
level. Sean Penn, for one—as the sergeant of the squad and the instigator of the
abduction—is rankly dreadful. He does an imitation of Robert De Niro that
deteriorates into parody, seemingly encouraged by De Palma, with overdone
pauses between lines and actorish gestures between phrases.
As Eriksson, Michael J. Fox does his best, but it’s a lightweight best. Besides,
he suffers from De Palma’s nineteenth-century-melodrama casting: if you want to
show that one member of a group is morally superior to the others, put a clean-
cut fellow in the good-guy role and put tough mugs in the others. The film might
have been marginally more interesting if Penn, tightly directed, had played
Eriksson and someone credible as a rugged vet (like Tom Berenger in Platoon
1986) had done the sergeant.
De Palma, ultimately responsible for all the above, is immediately
responsible for the banalities of composition and motion—the slow, sentimental
dissolves (in a supposedly hard-nosed picture), the silhouette shots of soldiers
crossing ridges against the sunrise (militarily stupid and cinematically hoary).
Some of the suspense intercutting—as when Fox is trapped, his legs having gone
through the top of a Cong tunnel, while a Vietnamese crawls through the tunnel
toward the dangling legs with a knife in his mouth—would have embarrassed
Edwin S. Porter, director of The Great Train Robbery (1903). Not one moment in
the whole film shows an original or even keenly imaginative eye. At best the
direction is commonplace, at worst pretty dumb (a latrine sequence, for instance).
It seems a rule when writing about Vietnam films to place a new one in
relation to others. Obediently, I note that two are still outstanding: Hamburger Hill
(1987), for its re-creation of combat hell, and Platoon, which transcends its
schema to achieve what De Palma bungles—the moral transformation of men in
war. De Palma is just a derivative Hollywoodnik who, in this case, hasn’t even been
able to bite off more than he can chew.
The Seven Deadly Sins, Jean-Luc Godard & others, 1962 (The New Republic,
22 December 1962)
One puzzle is the “anthology” film—the picture made up of separate short

episodes on related themes. Why make such a film without a set of sharp
scriptlets—funny or biting or moving but all with point? A recent wave of them
has revealed no such basis. Now comes The Seven Deadly Sins (directors: Philippe
de Broca, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Sylvain Dhomme, Jean-Luc Godard,
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Édouard Molinaro, Roger Vadim), a French film whose seven episodes explore the
sins of the catechism. It is so freighted with directorial, writing, and acting talent
that the flatness of the result is upsetting.
How could Godard have thought there was anything in, and have
contributed so little to, the feeble risqué joke in “Laziness”? How could de Broca
have so thoroughly excluded his comic gifts from “Gluttony”? Where did Félicien
Marceau and Chabrol get the nerve to write and direct “Greed”? Can they really
not know that the story of the posh prostitute who refunds the price of the cadet’s
lottery ticket is—if I may be forgiven—hoary? (It was one of Alexander Woollcott’s
favorites.)
“Pride,” by Vadim, is at least a neatly machined French-type skit about an
errant wife’s piquant reason for reform. But the only episode really worthy of its
sin is “Anger,” written by Eugène Ionesco (his first screenplay) and directed by
Dhomme. Satan is strolling about in bored human form on a bonny bourgeois
Sunday and decides to stir things up. By putting a fly in every husband’s Sunday
soup, he ignites a fuse that leads from family quarrels to world cataclysm. Its wit
and imagination indicate that Ionesco has a pretty sense of how to play with film
possibilities to some purpose. An anthology film entirely by Ionesco (who has
always been at his best in short bursts)—now there is an idea.
Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (The New Republic, 20 November 1965)
Central to Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film Alphaville, which is a purportedly

serious science-fiction thriller, is its choice of leading actor. Eddie Constantine is a
waffle-faced, iron-jawed, American-born hoofer who went to France fifteen years
ago and there made a huge success in fifty pictures about an FBI agent named
Lemmy Caution—pictures that are no more likely to be shown in the United States
than Italian Westerns. Godard took this now-famous character and its actor as the
protagonist of his film, subtitled Tarzan vs. IBM, which is as if an English director
who wanted to make a serious comment in thriller form used, as protagonist,
James Bond played by Sean Connery. Thus from the start, from before the start, the
French audience shared a small conspiracy of parody and point with Godard that
is his private joke when the picture goes abroad.
Alphaville itself is a city somewhere in the future. Lemmy Caution arrives
there from earth on a private-eye mission, gets involved with a girl (tuberous Anna
Karina), chases a mysterious scientist-dictator through public buildings and
streets and laboratories, and finally takes the girl back with him to earth.
Throughout, he is teaching her the meaning of individuality and love in this
mechanized city. Her last words, as she rides away with him, are her first utterance
of “Je . . . vous . . . aime.”
The visual fillip of the film is that Godard shot all the scenes of this future
city in the Paris of today: the neon boulevards, the modern lobbies, the antiseptic
corridors. That is the most effective device in a picture that leaps, goat-like, from
one device to the next. (In conversation Godard has said: “People say it’s about a
man of today in the world of tomorrow. But it is really about a man of yesterday
in the world of today.”) There is a scene in which men are executed for having
shown emotion, machine-gunned on a diving board over a pool and then finished
off by bathing beauties armed with knives; there are Wellesian shots of Akim
Tamiroff, whose living apparently depends on not shaving too often; there is
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literary name-dropping on the soundtrack; but these all contribute less than the
fact that Monsieur Godard could shoot this picture in his own Paris.
It starts as a lively burlesque of tough private-eye nonsense, all slinky sex
and casual slaughter. It quickly degenerates into a banal thesis film: the need to
preserve the soul in a soulless landscape. What is dependably wearisome about
Godard is that, though he is of the film filmic, Nouvelle Vague and Cahiers du cinéma
to his back teeth, every one of his pictures sooner or later bogs down in extended
portentous talk that is only accompanied by pictures, like a lecture with slides.
That unhappy inevitability is worsened here because the mysterious scientist,
unseen, is equipped with an electric voice-box like those given to people whose
larynxes have been surgically removed.
As with much of all modern art, Godard is critically prized even when he is
despised because he provides opportunities for verbiage. Film critics (and what
man who has ever written a review of any kind does not also consider himself a
film critic?) expatiate on Godard particularly because his films are often apropos
of such vogue subjects as popular culture and its latest stunted offspring, pop art.
Many of these critics  seem agonized because they like fine art  and also like
popular art. This has been   true of a good many cultivated people  through
history, but because they were  usually less aesthetically and intellectually self-
conscious, they did not feel   puritanically compelled to justify the   same
sensibility’s enjoyment of both  Flaubert and Fleming, Éluard and Ellington. Now
the ceremony of innocence is drowned indeed—in floods of dubious exegesis; and
as long as Godard can provide these seemingly catholic but essentially guilt-ridden
intellectuals with materials for discourse, he is sure of attention.
The difficulty, for one viewer at least, is that most of his films are, for the
most part, no more interesting than the articles about them. At best they are
usually a cinematic person’s acts of daring—to be uncinematic and to be
deliberately corny. (Here the use of Caution-Constantine, the sci-fi atmosphere,
the banal theme.) But it is premature parody. As Mary McCarthy in The Group tried
to disguise her inadequate grip of her material by pretending that she was
satirizing it, so Godard pretends to be doing a double- or triple-take on trite
material. Generally it is icing without the cake.
Vladimir and Rosa, Jean-Luc Godard, 1971 (The New Republic, 1 May 1971)
A new film from Jean-Luc Godard these days is like a message from exile.
He is over there, with the rest of the self-exiled, in the Siberia that is physically
interwoven with our society yet far remote, waiting for the explosion that he
counts on as final justification. Each new film is like a breath on a fuse he believes
to be smoldering. He’s trying to free himself of art, of even revolt against art, yet
each film betrays at least some traces of—horrid individualist word—talent. Each
film shows the longing of an artist for conclusion, a particular weakness of artists
in political works. In Le Gai savoir (Joy of Learning, 1968), through his two
principal actors, he apologizes at the end for what he has been forced to leave out
and says that Straub in Germany and Bertolucci in Italy will make the real films for
the masses. Two of the most hyper-aesthetic filmmakers alive! Yet a final torch
had to be uplifted. Near the end of this latest film, an actor calls on workers and
students and farmers to unite—to begin uniting at once. Why not call on them to
become six feet tall and immortal at once?
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Yet this new film, Vladimir and Rosa, is the most effective agitprop of his
post-“bourgeois” films that I’ve seen. (There are several others, including one
about Italy and one about Palestine guerrillas, not yet shown in the United States.
He says that Vladimir and Rosa is to help pay for the Palestine film.) Godard has
forsaken the method of See You at Mao (1970) and Sympathy for the Devil (1968),
and Pravda (1969), which depended in large part on the contrasts of surrealist
collage, and is using here what can be called Street Theater with interludes.
The main story is a fantasy-burlesque of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. I
can’t explain the title: I can only supply a few facts. Vladimir was Lenin’s first
name, and there seems to be a voice on the soundtrack of someone called Vladimir.
There is also a person (not a character, really) called Karl Rosa, who gets his name,
I assume, from Liebknecht and Luxemburg. (All three historical personages
figured in Pravda.) Theory-and-practice is supposed to be the theme of this new
film, though this is not demonstrated. There are caricatures in it based on Bobby
Seale and Judge Hoffman and William Kunstler—called John here, and criticized
as a knowing ham. Anne Wiazemsky is also one of the symbolic defendants.
Interludes include a wild TV press conference run by Kunstler; an allegory
about Women’s Liberation, in which a girl stands behind a man and reads a
feminist manifesto while he mouths the words, to prove that the gender of the
voice alters the meaning of sexual statements; a sequence in which Godard
himself, with a sound engineer, strolls back and forth along a tennis net discussing
politics while tennis is being played; a scene in which a man mentions the United
States, the USSR, and Israel, after each of which Godard, in cop’s uniform, gives a
Nazi salute and says “Sieg heil!” then opens his fly and pulls out a night-stick.
That’s funny, because it’s more than a joke. Some elements of the trial are
 also funny: like some of the caricature of Judge Hoffman and the jury—only 
six—who stand throughout and who are about as impassive as judges at a dog
show. There is even some humor in the unconcealed cheapness with which the
picture is made: most of the  trial is shot in close-ups against a piece of cloth
tacked on a wall, like television drama in 1950. The disregard for facsimile is part
of the joke.
There is plenty of cinematic hijinks: the images of two fists, with letters on
the back of each, coming together to spell a word as they break a ruler on which a
message is written; flashes of the Marx Brothers and Brecht; passages of black
screen while voices explain the blackness. Yet despite the filmic display, the effect
is of Street Theater, explication by acting, by living posters, propagandizing by
inviting the audience to laugh at cruelty and dishonesty. Many sections reminded
me of films I’ve seen of plays being performed in North Vietnam villages for the
rather lighthearted encouragement of the audience. But one difference here is the
absence of communal reliance: in the North Vietnamese plays, the actors are part
of the audience and are easy. Here the actors have the frivolity of frenzy.
And the frivolity is inconsistent. Some of the film is undergraduate jape.
The criticism of imperialism, both American and Soviet, has all the usual triteness
and rhetoric, all the usual sanctification of Mao that depends on our not knowing
as much about China as we do about the USSR. The values swing blithely from
humane to anti-humane as glibly as ever: a plea for women’s rights as human
beings is followed by the jocular announcement of the bombing of an El Al plane.
In the spirit of collectivism, the picture has no credits. Yet, paradoxically,
it’s the Godard film in which he himself appears most often. So much for the anti-
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cult of personality. On the whole, though, this is the best recent Godard film I’ve
seen, on the simple negative ground that it’s least boring. Again there is the sense
that these post-Weekend (1967) methods are well suited to his temperament and
that cartooning is best suited of all.
Why the feeling, then, that he’s in exile? Certainly not because all his social
criticisms are false. Godard would probably call my feeling (that he is exiled) the
nostalgia in people like me for the traditions of bourgeois culture. True. But there
is something more: there is regret. Regret that he has forsaken ambiguity for
certainty. From the exile of that certainty, he sends us this latest defiant message.
Numéro deux, Jean-Luc Godard, 1975 (The New Republic, 1 & 8 August 1981)
And now for a different filmic view of commitment, love, sex, and
contemporary pressures—naturally—from Jean-Luc Godard, along with a
different way of presenting it. His latest American release was made before the
Godard film last released here, Every Man for Himself (1980). The earlier one is
called Numéro deux (Number Two): it was originally called Numéro 2 (À bout de
souffle). The connection with the original À bout de souffle—Breathless (1960)—is
tenuous. Then why Numéro deux? Lots of guesses have been guessed, from the
position of women in social hierarchy to the nursery bathroom term as an epithet
for the world. The guess that makes most sense is that Godard felt he was starting
a new career, but then why not Numéro trois? His second period, the Dziga Vertov
Group, began in 1968. He moved to Grenoble in 1975, which is where and when
he made this film; and it’s not directly connected with the previous phase as far as
I can see.
Whatever the title, this picture continues my latter-day experience with
Godard. These days I get different rewards and tediums from his work, for at least
two reasons: first, in the twenty years since my first Godard film, I’ve changed (I
hope); second, the film world has certainly changed—has become significantly
straitened, particularly in the last few years. Godard has become more valuable,
even in the ways that he can get tiresome.
Much of Numéro deux was made on videotape. (Does this explain the title—
 a second technology?) In the opening shot Godard is standing next to a video
machine, speaking to us, and at the same time we see his smaller image on the
video screen, facing us. This goes on for a couple of minutes. I can’t remember a
great deal of what he said, but I remember the interesting double image. (Numéro
deux?) Very often through the film, we see two images simultaneously, sometimes
three. This isn’t done with conventional split-screen. Godard uses, inset in the
large black theater screen like photographs inset in a black mat, two or three
television screens. Sometimes the concurrent images comment on each other,
sometimes not; sometimes one or the other interior screen is blank or filled with
TV “snow.” One ineluctable point Godard is making is about the force-feeding of
the electronic media—including what’s being forced on you here.
From this non-sequential, formally varied film, a theme emerges. A young
working-class couple, presumably in Grenoble, have two children; one set of
grandparents also lives with them. (Grandpa is a former union official, a
Communist.) The general intent is to show how political and economic conditions
affect private life: to show that shutting the front door or, more particularly, the
bedroom door doesn’t shut out the world. Many of the images are sexually explicit
71
ones of the couple, and there are also clips from a porno film: all these are treated
in ways that refrigerate them. Which is part of Godard’s point.
The theme of prostitution has long been dominant in his work, with
prostitution signifying everything from selling sexual access to one’s body to
selling one’s time (therefore life) in an office job that one doesn’t respect. Lately
Godard’s use of sex in sexual prostitution has become much more candid. His
picture of housewives’ afternoon whoring, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(1967), was a Sunday school feature compared with Numéro deux. The increased
candor may mean more anger and more desperation in that anger.
For me, the changes in my view of Godard, pro and con, are made clearer
by this film. I care less and less about what he says. The theme of the picture, the
effect of public life on private life, is hardly new; and his portentous obiter dicta,
on the soundtrack or printed on the screen, sound more and more like café
wisdom. But his vision is not only not repetitive, not only not trite: it keeps
ranging, testing, flying. I care very little for what Godard has said in his last two
films—I don’t think I could quote one complete line—but I care a good deal about
what he has seen. In these days of billion-dollar special effects glitz, Godard is
showing that the exploration of the two-dimensional black screen by
imagination—not by billions—is still excitingly open.
Stroszek, Werner Herzog, 1977 (The New Republic, 20 & 27 August 1977)
The latest film by the gifted Werner Herzog, Stroszek, continues one of  his
favorite themes: craziness in and of  our world. His second feature, Even Dwarfs
Started Small (1970), was about a  revolt by dwarfs in an institution  against the
tyrannical director of the  place, also a dwarf. The film was  something like Vigo’s
Zéro de conduite (1933) as remade by Buñuel on a particularly manic day. Aguirre,
the Wrath of God (1972) was about political madness in the Spanish
conquistadores. The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1974) was about a nineteenth-
century youth malformed from birth by the power drives of others and finally
murdered by them. Stroszek is a young man, not quite competent mentally, who
is battered by today’s Germany and who immigrates to  the United States with
two other battered people— a young whore and a very old man—looking for
refuge with the old man’s American nephew in Wisconsin.
The picture splits in more than setting. The German half is a broodingly
taut, if somewhat trite account of the bullying of the helpless Stroszek by two burly
pimps because he has befriended their abused whore. Herzog handles this section
easily, taciturnly. But strain runs through the American section. The ease is gone,
and what we get is a collection of grotesque souvenirs. As with Wim Wenders’
Alice in the Cities (1974), the tourist’s notebook is figuratively out, for crudeness
and rudeness. It’s the Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970) fallacy all over again.  
Also, in the American section Herzog relies a lot on improvisation and “stolen”
footage, and much of it is clumsy. Worst, he manufactures the debacle at the end.
Everything seems to be going O.K. in Wisconsin, then suddenly—just because
Herzog needs it—everything goes wrong. He ends with very heavy symbolism:
Stroszek circling aimlessly on a cable car while some conditioned chickens in an
amusement arcade react repeatedly to repeated stimuli. This corn is far beneath
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the best of Herzog.

Stroszek has touches of that best. For instance, Stroszek, in middle distance,
his back to us, watches his American trailer-home being hauled away in the
background because payments are overdue. He is stationary: the house he has
been living in simply slides laterally out of the frame. It’s a Keaton touch. And the
cinematography by Herzog’s usual teammate Thomas Mauch is exceptional.
(Mauch also did the Alexander Kluge film Strongman Ferdinand 1976.)
As for the performances, I think that Bruno S., the real-life ex-derelict who
was Kaspar Hauser, has reached the end of his film usefulness; but Eva Mattes,
who plays the whore, ranges past what she showed as the homicidal fourteen-
year-old in Fassbinder’s Jail Bait (1973). This role doesn’t have the emotional
peaks of the Fassbinder film, but it calls for different colors, which Mattes supplies
confidently.
So, less well in this instance, Herzog remains an artist working in Germany.
In that maddening country—with some people trying to glorify the unspeakable
past, some trying to refashion it, some trying to make the future different, some
trying to make the future like the past—artists continue as an agonized voice:
German, hating Germany because they are German and want to change the
residence of their being and their love. For the time being, prominent among these
artists are the filmmakers—like Werner Herzog and other members of the New
German Cinema.
Where the Green Ants Dream, Werner Herzog, 1984 (The New Republic, 11
February 1985)
When a strong director makes a wretched picture, I wish it could just

disappear. Werner Herzog is such a director, Where the Green Ants Dream such a
picture. While I was watching it, I wished that the projector were like a tape
recorder with the erase button pushed. If that sounds proprietary, it’s Herzog who
is to blame: he made me—and many thousands—partner in his projects, through
such films as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Nosferatu (1979) and
Fitzcarraldo (1982). None of these films is even nearly flawless; all of them are
wonderfully reckless adventures. They make me feel that I’ve traveled into several
kinds of danger with an aesthetic explorer. The new one made me feel that I had
been to a safe little do-gooder film directed by a man who had stolen Herzog’s
name.
The basic idea is echt Herzog: a conflict between intrusive civilization and
Natural Man in a remote corner of the world. This time Herzog has journeyed to
the interior of Australia, where a mining company is encroaching on the sacred
lands of the aborigines, doing so with legal rights given them by a government of
their fellows. The aborigines tacitly and stubbornly resist, even to the point of
sitting in front of bulldozers with stoic disregard of danger. The mining company
presses its legal case; the natives lose, of course. This land “where the green ants
dream”—ants that, in the aboriginal belief, originate and continue life through
their dreaming—is to be dug up. The ants are to be dislodged, their dreaming
disrupted. We do not yet know the aftermath.
But the oppositions are too pat, and the very instance of confrontation is
overly familiar. Excepting some of the aborigines, mysterious simply in their
simple dignity, every aspect of the film is weak. Herzog’s earlier films, erratic or
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not, struck into several kinds of new territory. Here he seems not to know how
often this Australian-whites-vs.-Australian-aborigines conflict has been used
before, as social drama and as emblem. Nicolas Roeg, Peter Weir, and Fred
Schepisi are only some of the directors who have made films on this theme. Worse,
Where the Green Ants Dream gives not one image to compare with the visual
marvels that Herzog has lavished on even his poorest previous work. It’s as if he
had left his visual acuity at home, even though he uses his customary
cinematographer, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein.
Worst, Herzog’s script misses no chance for character cliché: an earnest,
gangly young scientist who works for the company but whose heart is with the
natives; a rough construction boss who wants to run right over the blacks; a
company executive so blatantly wily that it’s hard to believe he ever got to be an
executive. Herzog has even rummaged in some old coffer of cinema picturesques
and pulled out a little old lady who has lost her dog in the vast desert and is waiting
for him under a parasol. Perhaps part of the script trouble comes from the fact
that, apparently, Herzog wrote it in English. He speaks English fairly fluently; I’ve
heard him at press conferences. People who speak a foreign language sometimes
delude themselves into thinking they can write creatively in that language, then
fall into snares that they would avoid on truly familiar ground.
The closest that the film comes to a real Herzog touch is with a two-
motored plane, green because it’s ex-military, which the aborigines request and
which is given them as a grand sop. They don’t want it for flying but as a totem of
the green ants. Its fate is the closest to a valid symbol in the film.
Werner Herzog’s new picture leaves me impatient for his next.
Wise Blood, John Huston, 1979 (The New Republic, 15 March 1980)
John Huston’s career has been eclectically ambitious, in an idle way. He has
 taken on a number of good books, of widely different varieties, and has wrestled
some of them on to the screen successfully: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The  
African Queen (1951), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and (a short story)
The Man Who Would Be King (1975). On the other hand, he had no hesitation in
tackling such numbers as The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Moby Dick (1956),
and, if you please, The Bible (1966), all of which failed. One of the better things to
be said about him is that he has failed equally badly with dreck: The Roots of
Heaven (1958), The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), The Unforgiven (1960), The
List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Fat City (1972). A middleweight, it would seem.
Except that he has also had his failures in the middle ranges as well. Two
of them were Southern Grotesque in provenance if not in setting: Williams’s The
Night of the Iguana (1964) and McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). (But
note that, in the last, Brando gave one of his best and least appreciated
performances.) Now it’s Southern Grotesque time, and again Huston has fumbled.
Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood is middling O’Connor, I think,
far from the finest work by that often wonderful writer, but it’s kept on a course
of gravity, of taut contrast with a rational world and a healthy Christianity, by
O’Connor’s presence through her prose. The book is populated with distorted
humans in baroque landscapes, but O’Connor’s art manages, not easily, to keep it
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an agon instead of a freak show.

Huston was apparently unaware of this. Likewise his screenwriter,
Benedict Fitzgerald. When Éric Rohmer made The Marquise of O . . . (1976) he
evidently knew that he had to situate his film in a technique of composition which
would reproduce in pure cinema the medium of Kleist’s prose. But no such need
ever crossed the Huston-Fitzgerald minds. They thought that (near) fidelity to the
story and the dialogue would in itself re-create the book.
It doesn’t, of course. What we get are the data of the book: a chamber of
horrors and a mass of unexplained behavior. A few flashbacks, with some glimpses
of Huston himself as the preaching grandfather, do not explain Hazel Motes’s anti-
clerical religiosity. (And Brad Dourif in the role doesn’t explain Hazel’s power over
women.) Instead of a mad Protestant Stephen Dedalus with the cursed Jesuit
strain injected backward, this Hazel is only a horny and homicidal psychopath.
O’Connor, in a note written ten years after the book was first published, called
Hazel “a Christian malgré lui” and said the book was “a comic novel.” Neither point
is made here.
Huston’s direction shows no special fluency or ease. Gerry Fisher’s
cinematography—the pallidness deliberate, I suppose—makes the factitiousness
more so. O’Connor wanted to show us one lode of the resident evangelical strain
in American history. But Huston’s film shows us only a South of nutty religious con
men and their gulls.
Prizzi’s Honor, John Huston, 1985 (The New Republic, 8 July 1985)
John Huston, now seventy-nine, is not noted for profound authenticity; but
he never neglects the idea of suspense. He has tackled films derived from plenty
of serious sources—Melville, McCullers, Williams, the Bible (!)—but his best ones
have usually been the ones where he has had fun, has had the most success in
having various kinds of fun: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Across the Pacific (1942),
The Man Who Would Be King (1975), for examples.
So it was good news that he had moved from Lowry’s Under the Volcano
(which Huston filmed in 1984) to a gangster novel by Richard Condon.
(Screenplay by Condon and Janet Roach.) Still, though it turns out to be a murder
comedy with laughs that make you simultaneously shake your head, Prizzi’s Honor
is not top Huston fun.
Oh, he is still a very clever man. Who would have thought it possible to find
a new angle at which to shoot furious sexual intercourse? Or to find a new way to
show us a man getting a bullet in the head? Or to get laughs simply from insert
shots of a transcontinental airplane flying either west or east? And he is fiendishly
skillful in his use of his daughter, Anjelica, who looks like the finest bred mare in
history, for satire and sex.
But Prizzi’s Honor fumbles a bit before it sets its tone, and it is suffused with
Mafia clichés. The aging don, head of the Brooklyn “family”—played by William
Hickey, who wisely steers wide of anything like Brando—is now more a personage
of ritual than of drama, exercising cruelty through the language of paternal care.
The gang wars are old stuff and are not helped by the unlikely performances of
John Randolph and Lee Richardson as the markedly un-Italian sons of the monkey-
like old man.
To make matters worse, Jack Nicholson, as Randolph’s son and a Mafia
75
soldier, gives such a designedly stupid  performance that he’s incredible as a 

crown prince, and he wallows so utterly  in Brooklynese—with a paralyzed up- 
per lip—that he sounds less acclimated  to America than his father. And Kathleen
Turner, supposedly Polish-American, as an independent contractor (of killings,
naturally) is so flashily blond in conspicuous clothes that she would be identifiable
around a corner in a heavy fog. Her profession as a “hitter” seems unlikely. The
romance between her and Nicholson, which is emotionally hot at the same time
that the plot makes them enemies, is reminiscent of the Sam Spade-Brigid
O’Shaughessy tensions in The Maltese Falcon, here carried to glandular extremes.
If more questions had been asked of this script, and had been answered, it
might have made a pretty good sexual comedy in a general moral sewer, a kind of
laugh-and-lust counterpart of Mikey and Nicky (1976). As is, it coasts along pretty
much on Huston’s self-confidence and the fun he got out of making it.
Unfortunately, this is more than we get out of watching it.
The Match Factory Girl, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989; Leningrad Cowboys Go

America, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989; and I Hired a Contract Killer, Aki Kaurismäki,
1990 (The New Republic, 12 November 1990)
Reviewing Aki Kaurismäki’s Ariel (1988) last August, a film that suddenly
put Finland on the contemporary cinema map, I asked two questions. Do all Finns
understand English? (We saw a Bogart clip being shown on Finnish TV without
subtitles.) Do all Finns smoke a lot? (Cigarettes fumed furiously throughout.)
Matti Forss of Espoo, Finland, has kindly written to answer my questions.
Most Finns, he says, do not understand English well enough to understand Bogart
pictures; all films have Finnish and Swedish subtitles. (It’s a bilingual country.) So
this Bogart clip, we can assume, was just one more disregard of fact in a realistic
fairy tale. As for the other query, Forss says every Finn does not smoke like the
hero of Ariel. In fact, cigarette advertising is forbidden in Finland. Yet people do
smoke—women more than men, youngsters more than grown-ups. Says Forss,
“You explain that!”
I can’t, but perhaps Kaurismäki can. Two of his subsequent films were
shown at the recent New York Film Festival, and he appeared after the press
screening to answer questions. Most of them were at the usual abysmal level.
Kaurismäki, bottle of beer in hand, self-deprecatingly confident, handled them all
quite well, often wittily, in adequate English. Someone asked why, in his films,
ashes on cigarettes were allowed to get so long. He replied that in Finland people
are so happy that they forget to watch their cigarettes and flick the ashes. A perfect
press conference answer, I thought. I wish I had known then about Forss’s
quandary; I’d like to have heard Kaurismäki answer.
The two films shown at the festival, neither of which is yet announced for
release in the United States, were The Match Factory Girl and I Hired a Contract
Killer. The first, set in Helsinki, is about a teenaged girl who lives with her uncaring
family, a slave of theirs and of the industrial system—she is on the soul-deadening
assembly line of a match factory. One evening she meets a well-to-do young man
in a bar and goes off with him. When she tries to see him again, he shunts her away.
When she writes him that she is pregnant, he sends her a check for an abortion.
She then buys rat poison, possibly thinking of suicide, but she decides to use it on
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rats. Only those who are responsive to Kaurismäki’s astringent style—a style that
clings to naturalistic detail as it contradictorily spins fairy tales—will believe that
this is a comedy. (The title itself echoes a previous fairy tale—Hans Christian
Andersen’s The Little Match Girl.)
The other film is set in London and is spoken entirely in English, even by
the leading man, Jean-Pierre Léaud, familiar from many Truffaut and Godard films.
(Kaurismäki has said somewhere that he once played a small film part and
imitated Léaud; his directorial debt to Godard—in nonchalance even more than in
style—is patent.) Léaud is a clerk in the London Waterworks who is dismissed
after fifteen years’ service and despondently tries suicide. (Again!—again in a
comedy.) He fails, then hires a contract killer to knock him off, falls in love, and
tries to cancel the contract. This film, too, is done in a style that deals wittily—and,
in plot terms, arbitrarily—with sordidness, a style that David Lynch has attempted
less successfully.
In that press conference Kaurismäki, serious for a moment, said that a chief
influence on him was Robert Bresson. Without overreading, this influence can be
sensed in these two films—an untidy secular Mouchette (1967), a somewhat more
untidy Pickpocket (1959). But the Bresson touch is much less apparent in
Leningrad Cowboys Go America—made in 1989 like The Match Factory Girl—
which is being shown here. (This is Kaurismäki’s ninth feature in ten years. It’s
obviously impossible for him—at least at his present age—to do anything but buzz
along breezily.)
Here the obvious household god is Jim Jarmusch, and lest there be any
doubt, Jarmusch himself plays the small part of a secondhand car dealer.
Everything about this picture is wildly, sometimes amusingly, unbelievable. A
band of musicians, called the Leningrad Cowboys, all wear suits and ties and white
shirts and wigs (supposed to be their own hair) of one huge lock combed forward
like a unicorn’s prong. They play an audition for a possible agent in a hut far above
the Arctic Circle. The agent rejects them but gives them the address of another
agent in New York.
They arrive in Manhattan, bringing their guitar player who was frozen stiff
and is in a wooden box with his guitar sticking out through a hole. This agent gives
them an address in Mexico where they can play a wedding. They buy a jalopy from
Jarmusch, start south, have adventures—some of them on Jarmusch turf
(Memphis)—play the Mexican date, and make a hit that leads to a future. It helps
that, en route, the band has switched from corn to rock and the guitar player has
thawed.
This is the first Kaurismäki film I’ve seen that tries overtly to be funny; in
the others, the humor seeps through the seriousness. Leningrad Cowboys Go
America isn’t funny enough, though. Often, the joke stops somewhere up there on
the screen and doesn’t quite reach us. On the evidence so far, Kaurismäki has to
be telling a somber tale wickedly, has in some degree to be mocking the very fact
that he is telling a dark story, in order to amuse. But of prodigal, high-handed
talent he has no lack. (And he has a filmmaking brother, Mika, whose work hasn’t
yet been shown in the U.S.)
Naked, Mike Leigh, 1993 (The New Republic, 3 January 1994)

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Godard’s Breathless (1960) begins with car theft and murder; and in the
last sequence the protagonist runs down the middle of a street. Mike Leigh’s Naked
begins with rape—or at least sex turned very nasty—and a car theft; and it ends
with the protagonist limping down the middle of a street. What happens in
between is Leigh’s own, but if Godard were Leigh’s age and British, he might well
have made this picture. The insouciance toward plot, the chance encounters along
the way that are explored in great detail and then sharply dropped—these, too,
are reminders of Godard.
The first Leigh film I saw was High Hopes (1988), also quasi-Godardian,
which dealt with proud casualness among anti-Thatcher dropouts in London.
Then came Life Is Sweet (1990), revolving around a restaurant, which was a
disappointment, confected. He’s back in casual stride again with Naked as he tells
the non-tale of Johnny, a bright and dedicatedly grungy young man who steals a
car in Manchester, drives to London, looks up Louise, a friend from Manchester,
sleeps with her roommate because Louise isn’t there at the moment, and moves in
for a while.
He floats around London for one night, meeting a young Scottish couple
whose Glasgow speech we can’t understand, a philosophic night watchman, an
older woman whose offer of sex he declines because she resembles his mother, a
waitress who invites him home and then declines him. Something of a
counterpoint to Johnny’s narrative is that of Sebastian, a rich young sadist who
owns the house that Louise is subletting and who shows up to collect sexually. The
fact that sleek Sebastian is not much more sadistic than anomic Johnny suggests
that the ruling genius here isn’t Émile Durkheim but Andrea Dworkin.
The film leans heavily in favor of dropping out, which gives it a slightly
sentimental, dated feeling. We’re asked to share the ’60s view that those who do
nothing are of greater purity than those who may be trying to do something useful.
Johnny is an inquirer who lives on the hope that he won’t find answers, scrounging
along in several ways, shrugging himself free of emotion and commitment. Which
attitude, at this late date, is supposed to make him especially interesting.
David Thewlis’s performance helps, however. Lesley Sharp, as the girl from
Manchester, and Katrin Cartlidge, as her housemate, are taking. One of Leigh’s
anti-conventions is to use women who are not pretty. This ploy succeeds in a wry
way: the more we know these women, the prettier they become.
Leigh works with his actors for months before shooting, asking them to
improvise on scenes he has planned. Then the improvised dialogue is written
down, organized, polished. It’s a method that was used by Joseph Chaikin’s Open
Theater and other groups. In Leigh’s film it leads to a certain springiness in the
talk.
Career Girls, Mike Leigh, 1997 (The New Republic, 25 August 1997)
For the English writer-director Mike Leigh, realism has a special meaning
and a special danger. Leigh is notable as a director who works intensely with his
actors, sometimes for months before shooting, to fuse actor and role and
encourage improvisation. His whole drive is to do everything with more
untrammeled verity than is common in films. This approach can result in such
exceptional films as High Hopes (1988) and Secrets and Lies (1996). It can also
result in such films as Naked (1993) and his latest, Career Girls, in which the ultra-
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realism is used for not much more purpose than to be ultra-realistic.

Career Girls braids two timelines. It begins with Annie, in her mid-twenties,
on a train to London where she meets Hannah, about her own age. In the other
line we meet Annie and Hannah when they were late teenagers living together,
with another girl, in London. The re-meeting of the two, for the first time in six
years, plays against what they were like when they first knew each other.
The texture of each strand seems, as far as a male American can judge,
exact. Earlier, Hannah was cocky and snappy, aggressive because she was just a
bit frightened. The provincial Annie, just arrived—with a bad case of dermatitis—
is numbed a bit with excitement and timidity. Nowadays the older Hannah has
transmuted her hip-hop aggression into a fair simulacrum of urban sophistication.
Annie, clear-skinned and controlled, brings to the reunion a touch more sentiment
than it deserves. Leigh attempts to “serious” things up in a manner he has used
before—with a mentally impaired character. A young abnormal man, who is in
both time strands, seems to be present merely as a reproof to the two girls/women
for not having more empathy, for being so self-centered. The presence of this man
seems more facile, on Leigh’s part, than seriously disturbing.
Before very long, and while admiring the unvarnished texture of the film,
we begin to wonder why we are looking at and listening to this material.
Essentially it’s the stuff of many American films and some TV shows—cinéma
vérité that goes nowhere except to contemplate its own unadorned navel. Neither
of the time strands is in itself particularly interesting, and the juxtaposition of both
strands reveals very little that couldn’t have been predicted.
The one sparkling asset of the film is Katrin Cartlidge, as Hannah. Cartlidge
was in Naked and did well; she did even better as Emily Watson’s patient, mature
sister-in-law in Breaking the Waves (1996). Here, as the younger Hannah, she
performs a performing character: the syncopated, superficially knowledgeable,
tinselly teenager whose protection against the impinging world is to be a stand-
up comic sans microphone. In the older Hannah we see that act transmuted into
sheen. The older Hannah’s self, not her body, seems clothed in Spandex. Lynda
Steadman, as the two Annies, has less showy parts but makes them discreetly
sweet.
Like many another genuine innovator, Leigh can get so immersed in the
making of a film that he takes its creation as its reason for being. But we aren’t
present at the creation, fascinating as it may have been. We have only the result,
which this time is not enough.
Poor Cow, Ken Loach, 1967 (The New Republic, 10 February 1968)
The second shot in Poor Cow is of the heroine’s vagina—at least it is

supposed to be hers. The first shot is of her face on the hospital delivery table as
she takes a whiff of gas; the second is of the birth itself. Thus, in key with the title,
her bovinity is immediately established. She is a creature destined to service males
and bear offspring.
This birth shot is by no means a “first” in films. (One predecessor: Jean
Gabin’s natural-childbirth picture, The Case of Dr. Laurent, from 1957.) Both this
lack of novelty and this desire to shock with Truth typify the whole film. In one
way Poor Cow resembles Marco Bellocchio’s recent China Is Near (1967): new
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techniques have been applied to traditional material. But Bellocchio’s material

triumphs over his method. Here the material is finally unrewarding, and we end
up just watching the new techniques go somersaulting by.
That material is our old friend, the naturalistic scrutiny of the life of the
poor, as developed in continental literature during the nineteenth century and
imported into England around 1900 by such writers as Somerset Maugham (Liza
of Lambeth) and Arthur Morrison (A Child of the Jago). Joy is a working-class girl
in postwar London who gets pregnant at eighteen and is married to the child’s
father, a young thief. She treats his job simply as a job. When he is caught and
jailed, she falls in love with another thief, Dave, who too is eventually caught and
sentenced to twelve years. Lonely and bored with her pub job, Joy sleeps with
various men. Her husband, whom she is  divorcing, is released from prison and  
gets her to come back to him. She is  unhappy with him. She really loves Dave,
who has many years to serve. The film ends with Joy still fairly confident about
her future, trying to get clear of her husband, hoping some day to be happy with
Dave and in the interim to avoid prostitution.
The screenplay was written by Nell Dunn, who wrote the recently
published novel on which it is based, and by Ken Loach, who directed the film.
Loach is a young Englishman, fresh out of television and also, I guess, fresh out of
every art-movie house in London. His style, applied to this old-fashioned material,
is straight imitation Godard. Godard’s influence seems to be the starting point for
many young directors around the world—in Italy, Bellocchio; in Poland, Jerzy
Skolimowski (Le départ The Departure, 1967 and Barrier 1966); in Germany,
Alexander Kluge (Yesterday Girl 1966)—but most of these directors manage to
give the influence a touch of themselves. Loach apes: the ferociously elliptical
cutting, the handheld camera, the “chapter” titles (originally out of Brecht), the
shots “stolen” in the streets. The film even closes with a Godardian interview as
Joy answers an unseen questioner. The last shot is that new cliché, already ancient,
the freeze frame. 
We are told these days—and only in the world of film criticism would it be
considered news—that the era of the plot is over, that dramatic narrative is giving
way to “essay” or exploration. Poor Cow is of mixed breed: it makes some moves
toward story in the early part, but the later part settles down   mostly into
exploration—of milieu and character—and that later part has considerable
dullness in it because what it explores is generally trite. The milieu is by now very
familiar, and there is little about this girl herself that isn’t apparent quite early,
when “story” is still in progress. When the story fades, so does interest. There are
some good sequences, like the one in which Joy and another girl do some quasi-
nude modeling for a lecherous camera club, and her love for her baby son runs
through the dawdling film like a clear persistent stream. But in herself Joy is not
rich enough—in range or depth—to sustain a film that depends on her richness,
rather than on events.
At the base, then, of all the film’s superficial modern vitality, is dull-
wittedness: about the material and the method. The writers have not given us any
new illumination of the forces that made Joy a cow, or even a new emotional use
of familiar materials; and the director’s style is so slavish that we can almost feel
Loach perspiring in fear that he has left out one Godardian device. For Joy a new
actress named Carol White has been found, presumably as competition for Julie
Christie, which she is not, either in looks or personality. The only attractive
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performance is by Terence Stamp as Dave—gentle, affectionate, resigned. There

is Technicolor. There are some songs by Donovan, and there are some old-
fashioned songs. The former are supposed to be deft comment, because they are
mod; the latter are supposed to comment satirically because they are corny. But
both uses—by now—seem corny.
Raining Stones, Ken Loach, 1993 (The New Republic, 28 March 1994)
Ken Loach, the celebrant of the English working class, used subtitles in his
last film, Riff-Raff (1991), to help us with the arcane speech of the people in the
story. Why didn’t Loach retain that simple, useful device for his latest? Raining
Stones, set in northern England, is incomprehensible half the time. And yet . . .
The shape of the story is so lucid that watching the film is, much of the time,
like watching an opera performance in a foreign language: if we’ve read a synopsis,
we’re all right. With Loach, we don’t need a synopsis because we can understand
half and fill in the rest. Obviously, as subtitled operas on television prove, it’s
immeasurably better to know the smallest details; and obviously (I hope) I’m not
arguing for semi-incomprehensibility. Still, Raining Stones is a teaser. I can’t even
explain the title: someone says something about “raining stones seven days a
week,” and I couldn’t get the rest of the remark. Yet the selves and the quandaries
of the principal people are so vivid that the picture holds.
Bob, a workingman with wife and child, is unemployed. He and his friend
Tommy are city folk, but we first see them out on the moors stealing a sheep, which
they then sell to a butcher in town for disappointing money. While Bob is trying to
peddle some of the mutton, his van is stolen. He must have a van to get about and
find work, so he borrows money from loan sharks to buy another. He doesn’t find
work and can’t keep up the loan payments. The sharks are criminals; they move in
on Bob, heavily.
What keeps us watching this unsurprising story are the characters and the
texture of their lives—in their homes, their pubs, their (Catholic) church. Loach is
clearly more interested in people than in stories: he just wants enough story, as
supplied by Jim Allen’s screenplay, to keep his characters in motion. Conditions,
circumstances, the possibilities of reasonable hope—for people with limited
access to hope—these are Loach’s prime concerns.
And they would be enough, in hands like his, but Loach insures our interest
with humor. Tommy, Bob’s friend, played with helplessness and ingenuity by
Ricky Tomlinson (who was in Riff-Raff), accompanies him pretty much
throughout, chubby, ebullient, in the same sea of troubles as Bob but using jokes
as water wings. Presumably Loach put a lot of local people in small roles. Even his
leading actors, though good, are not really professionals: they’ve done some acting
here and there. He seems to take his approach from the Italian neorealists of the
postwar years, and it’s crystallized by the confidence he obviously inspires in his
people and the unobtrusive deftness with which he films them.
It’s odd to be recommending a picture that can’t be entirely understood,
but Bob and friends are so engaging that we soon begin to feel it’s our fault for not
understanding them. (Still, I hope that someone subtitles this film some day.)
Ladybird, Ladybird, Ken Loach, 1994 (The New Republic, 12 December 1994)
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The short and simple annals of the poor, in Ken Loach’s hands, become full-
bodied and complex. His latest film, Ladybird, Ladybird, is in the line of such Loach
works as Raining Stones (1993) and Riff-Raff (1991), a closer look at the lives and
incidents in those newspaper pages that we turn as we get to what really interests
us. By now we are all—in Britain and America—comfily satisfied with the
difference between the conditions of poor people a hundred years ago and today;
it takes a jolt to remind us that indoor plumbing doesn’t eradicate all economic
problems and personal anguish.
Loach jolts. But a key tone of his films, which makes them more affecting,
is that he doesn’t deal in pity: he deals in lives. The people in the past two films
and this one simply handle what they have to handle, as best as they can. They do
not see themselves as an underclass: it’s we who, if we will, supply that context.
They are too busy getting on with it.
Ladybird, Ladybird is set in East London and is (yet again) based on a true
story, which is verified by the closing titles. Maggie is a pub singer, in her thirties,
who has had four children by four different men. All four children have been taken
away from her by social services, which is an agony to her—she adores them. We
get some of her past life, including her own horrid, sexually abused childhood,
when she meets Jorge, a Paraguayan political exile, responds to his gentleness, and
confides in him about her four children. He in turn responds to her deep feeling,
her travails, and, to be sure, her sexuality. Maggie and Jorge begin to live together.
He supports them with a restaurant job for which he is underpaid because he
overstays his visit and becomes “illegal.”
In time they have a daughter, and we see firsthand that Maggie is a doting,
warm mother. We know, too, from those flashbacks and from new experiences
with social services people, that she is scarily short-fused, explosive. When any
difficulties arise, either with social officers or anyone else, she goes wild. This
instability, plus her financial state and the fact that she isn’t married, causes the
government to take her daughter away. Maggie’s subsequent stormy behavior at
the court hearing only confirms the government action. And this happens again
when she has another daughter with Jorge.
He, loyal, patient, perceptive, stays with her—not without some troubled
moments, but steadfast. And a closing title tells us that the real Maggie and Jorge
have had three more children, whom they have been allowed to keep. But that
closing title only increases an uncertainty about the film. As it progresses, we are
less and less sure of Loach’s focus. Certainly his central character Maggie has all
his sympathy, but she also has all his truth. And she is shown to be such a volatile,
quickly violent person that it’s difficult to argue with the social-service decisions.
Those services are shown to be imperfect; Maggie is shown to be devotedly
maternal. But who among us can think it ruthless of social welfare to worry about
children in the care of this neurotic woman? The fact that her neurosis is
explicable doesn’t help.
Then there are the three post-film children. What happened to Maggie and
her circumstances with Jorge to change the government’s view of her fitness?
Loach saith not. If we are meant to take Maggie’s side throughout, Loach has made
this difficult with his very honesty. He may have started out to make a film about
the cold cruelty of child welfare, but then, by refusing to load the dice, he created
not an argument but a dilemma.
In any case his treatment of the material is in his best style—a combination
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of documentary candor, technical deftness, and sympathetic directing of actors. As

Jorge, a Chilean musician named Vladimir Vega soon triumphs over his lack of
physical appeal with his tenderness of spirit. (This is echt Loach: to take a
seemingly unattractive person and let him win us with his being. Thus implicitly
Loach criticizes the priorities of most film casting.) Maggie is played by Crissy
Rock, who is a stand-up comic in her native Liverpool. Loach led her into
territories of pathos and rage that, quite possibly, she didn’t know she owned.
Land and Freedom, Ken Loach, 1995 (The New Republic, 1 April 1996)
Ken Loach, that invaluable Englishman who made Riff-Raff (1991), Raining
Stones (1993), and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), has perfected a style that might be
called neorealism updated. Loach is as concerned with the harshness of social
reality and the tenderness under it as ever Rossellini and De Sica were, but he
leavens the mix with more professional actors than the pure neorealists used in
their work. They wanted film to find the truth in “mere” people: Loach thinks that
the right actors need not interfere with the search for truth—they can in fact
illuminate it. He isn’t therefore superior to his predecessors, but he certainly
proves his right to his views.
His views make his latest film, Land and Freedom, just as finely fashioned
as the ones cited above. In texture and urgency it never wavers. But it does leave
us wondering about its being as a whole. Land and Freedom is about the Spanish
Civil War as seen by Dave Hart, an English working man and a communist, who
volunteers to fight in Spain in 1936; but the picture begins with his death in
Liverpool today.
In Jim Allen’s screenplay, Dave’s granddaughter goes through his letters
and clippings and photos, and the film flashes back to his experiences in Spain: his
combat life, his encounters with the communist factionalism that accompanies the
fight against fascism, his involvement in the ponderous discussion groups, his love
affair with a young woman in the ranks alongside him, and the dreadful inevitable
results of the war—inevitable not only because Italy and Germany were
supporting Franco, not only because the democracies were reluctant to support
communists, but because of the strife among anti-Franco forces and the
subversions of Stalin.
For those of us who lived through those days, Loach re-creates engulfingly
the atmosphere in which we lived and feared. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in
1935 had been naked brutality. Still, it seemed somewhat distant. Franco’s
rebellion in Spain seemed to presage the tidal roll of fascism toward us. Loach
made me remember nightmares (and my two heroic days when I got an
application form for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and studied it, then never
filled it out).
World War II and subsequent events erased the simplistic dualism of
fascism vs. communism—but apparently not for Loach. As Dave Hart’s body is
lowered into his Liverpool grave, his relatives and friends, young and old, raise
their fists in the communist salute. It’s not knee-jerk anti-communism, I think, to
wonder—after that salute—about the purpose of the film. Is Loach sympathizing
or satirizing? Is he telling us that Dave—and perhaps he himself—learned nothing
from the slitherings of communist policy in the Spanish Civil War, let alone the
cascade of subsequent history? In recent years, even deeply held radical beliefs
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have come in for darker tempering; we get no sense of that from Loach’s
excellently made but ideationally puzzling film.
Zazie (in the Metro), Louis Malle, 1960 (The New Republic, 18 December
1961)
A new French movie, Zazie (in the Metro), attempts to reproduce a novel.
Raymond Queneau’s recent book is a piece of sometimes funny bizarrerie about
an uninhibited eleven-year-old girl brought to Paris for a weekend by her mother,
who is then busy with a lover and leaves the child with an uncle—a nightclub
female impersonator. The child proceeds to raise hell among a group of people
who are far from staid citizens.
The film was directed by Louis Malle, who made The Lovers (1958), which,
though foolish, showed flair; and Frantic (a.k.a. Elevator to the Gallows, 1957), a
commonplace thriller. In Zazie Malle has not tried to duplicate Queneau’s barmy
style; he has tried to find its cinematic equivalent. What he has chosen is silent-
film comedy, so we get an anthology of gags from Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon,
Harold Lloyd, et al. Example: A chases B; they run behind a billboard; when they
emerge, B is chasing A. But in the old comedies all the foofaraw was to some plot
purpose, however thin; here there is none, just a long collection of gags that,
because they exist in a vacuum, soon become tiresome. Worse, a feeling of coterie
preciousness envelops the film. One can almost hear the voices of Malle’s friends
cooing on the soundtrack: “Oh, Louis, how delicious!”
Murmur of the Heart, Louis Malle, 1971 (The New Republic, 13 November
1971)
Louis Malle, one of the first of the French New Wave, is a gifted fumbler. He
moves in interesting directions but always mucks up. In Zazie (1960) he fiddled
with surrealist jump-cutting and fumbled. In The Fire Within (1963) he aspired à
la Camus and fumbled. In Viva Maria! (1965) he tried a picaresque sexy romance,
fumbled again, and we won’t even talk about his Poe episode in the anthology film
Spirits of the Dead (1968). Now comes Murmur of the Heart. He directed it well,
but the script, which he wrote, is the epitome of a mediocre writer’s idea of
sensitivity and daring. So . . . another fumble.
It’s the story of how a boy, not quite fifteen, gets to make love with his
mother. From the very beginning, signals are flashed—blindingly. Mama, who is
lovely and relatively young, runs around in her slip before him and his older
teenaged brothers. More, she is foreign—an Italian in a French family—thus the
“different” person needed for a “different” action. More, the boy is highly
intelligent, so he is “different,” too. More, they are well-to-do, so they live in an
atmosphere of culture and off-hand taste and easy tristesse. What hack writer, up
from some scriptwriting cellar, would not have made a beeline for all these
elements if asked for a script in which incest could be made acceptable? (Ask a
social worker about the kind of home in which incest is most likely to occur.)
Malle doesn’t leave the triteness there. When the boy mentions
masturbation in confession, the priest—as if on cue from three centuries of anti-
clerical literature—reaches forward and feels him up. When the boy goes to bed
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with his first whore and tries to kiss her, she tells him—guess!—that she doesn’t
kiss her customers; she saves that for her fiancé. Even the final “snapper”
sequence, after the sex with his ma, is debased Colette. Malle, to put it kindly, is
malleable.
Benoît Ferreux is attractive as the boy in an angular, broody, witty way. The
best pleasure in the picture is Lea Massari as the mother. She was the girl who
disappeared early in L’Avventura (1960) and has virtually disappeared from all
films since then—on American screens, at least. She’s warm, credibly free-spirited,
wonderfully funny-looking, and wonderfully sexy. Now that she’s back from that
island, I hope she’ll stick around. The real argument against this film is not its
corny sensitivities but its purposelessness. The good works about incest, of
various kinds, have used the subject significantly. But the whole point of this
picture is simply to go on long enough and tremulously enough so that the incest
scene is “tasteful” when it arrives. Suppose it is. Why bother?
Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle, 1987 (The New Republic, 22 February
1988)
Louis Malle keeps trying to set up shop as a front-rank director. If he

doesn’t make it in one neighborhood, he hangs out his shingle in another. Some of
his neighborhoods have been: the New Wave (The Lovers, 1958); documentary
(Phantom India, a.k.a. Calcutta, 1969); nostalgic Americana (Atlantic City, 1981);
“meaningful” erotica (Murmur of the Heart, 1971; Pretty Baby, 1978); and German-
occupied France (Lacombe, Lucien, 1974). Other directors have wandered around
in subject and place, conveying a sense of curiosity and growth (Ford, Huston,
Welles); with Malle, the feeling is less adventure than adventurism, a need to move
on because he can’t really dig in.
Now, after My Dinner with André (1981), a modest artistic success because
Malle directed modestly, after Crackers (1984), a disastrous American comedy,
Malle returns to a milieu he hasn’t visited since 1974 with Lacombe, Lucien—
occupied France; and he makes a better film than he did the last time he was in
this territory. Au Revoir les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), as he tells us in a brief,
spoken epilogue, is autobiographical, an experience that has been pressing on his
mind since he was a schoolboy in 1943-44.
Malle (he gives himself another name in the film) was eleven, at a Catholic
boarding school near Fontainebleau. One day a new boy, called Bonnet, is brought
in by the priest who heads the school. The new boy undergoes the usual hazings
and cruelties through which children vent their resentment of their elders on
peers. It’s soon clear that Bonnet is temperamentally withdrawn, somewhat
brighter than the others, and close-mouthed about his family background. We
sense the truth about him fairly quickly, because of the period and the occasional
appearances of German troops and French-Nazi militia; but it’s quite right that we
should sense it before Bonnet’s companions, first, because they are children and
second, because they are engulfed in the circumstance and we are observing it.
At last, acting on a tip from a kitchen employee, a Gestapo agent appears,
hunting out the Jewish boys hidden in the school. In Malle’s class occurs the event
that, understandably, he has never been able to forget. The agent asks the Jewish
boy to reveal himself. Malle, who has some time before learned Bonnet’s real name
(Kippelstein), inadvertently glances at the Jewish boy. The Gestapo man pounces
85
on Bonnet. Then he finds two other Jewish boys elsewhere in the school and takes
them off along with the priest-principal. Before he leaves, Bonnet forgives Malle,
saying that he would have been discovered anyway. But Malle hasn’t forgiven
himself. He tells us that the destination of the arrested boys was Auschwitz.
Unlike Lacombe, Lucien, the new film has no heavy touches to enlist our
sympathies. (It has one resemblance to the earlier film: the Gestapo’s informant is
a loutish youth, a kitchen helper who is discharged and gets his revenge by
informing the Germans. Also, some shots are reminiscent of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de
conduite 1933; but how could they be avoided in a film set in a French boarding
school?) Still, with no sins of commission, Au Revoir les Enfants falters on the side
of omission. It never evokes much more than what can be called the inherent
emotion of its subject. No film about people under the Nazis, let alone children, let
alone Jewish children, can be devoid of tensions. But Malle doesn’t go much
beyond or beneath the given tensions: on the contrary, he seems to rely on them
to establish and maintain his film.
What was so deeply scored in his memory would, he apparently believed,
carry its own weight. This resulted in a restraint on Malle’s part that is unusual
and welcome, but it also resulted in—harsh word though it is—superficiality. The
roles of “Malle” and Bonnet are not well or deeply developed. Besides, the two
young actors are neither talented nor appealing, and Malle shows no special gifts
in handling children. The boys are never false, but they never become more than
stock figures: the safe boy who doesn’t mean to betray, the Jewish boy who is
slowly but surely doomed.
The boarding-school setting forces an unfair comparison. If the life span of
Vigo had been different and he had been through the experience of the young
Malle, the result would likely have been a film that went beyond a lucid chronicle
of the facts, ghastly as they were, to a bitter poem of ingrained cruelty.
Oblomov, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1979 (The New Republic, 21 March 1981)
One surprise about Oblomov is that, as far as I can tell, it has never been
filmed before. The name of the protagonist, as well as the generic “Oblomovism,”
has passed into several languages, yet this new Soviet picture is the first based
on the book. A second surprise is that it’s a good film: surprising chiefly because
 the previous work I’ve seen by Nikita Mikhalkov, the director—A Slave of Love 
(1976)—was blatantly prettified. Oblomov isn’t free of director’s intrusions, but
on the whole it’s a moving, atmospherically authentic distillation of a great, highly
significant novel. One byproduct of the picture’s arrival may be to turn people to
Goncharov’s book; everyone knows his and its name, but many have it on their
Must Read Some Time list.
Our hero—a ridiculous use of the term if ever there was one—is in his early
thirties and lives in St. Petersburg in the 1850s on the income of a badly run estate,
which he rarely visits. What Oblomov does mostly is sleep. Or at least lie down. In
his large, dowdy apartment, attended by a manservant, he reclines in his bed or
on his sofa, calls for what he wants, grumbles when he gets it, overeats, and resists
the efforts of friends to activate him.
But if that were all, Oblomov (accent his name on the second syllable)
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would be only a Gogol cartoon out of The Inspector General. What makes the novel
as important as it is good is that it’s one of the early appearances in European
literature of the dramatic power of disaffection. It had been preceded by Musset’s
Fantasio and Büchner’s Leonce and Lena. Russian critics have pointed out the
connection with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and the hero of Lermontov’s Hero of Our
Time. What about Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man? What about—
ineluctably—Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?
Why then did the USSR decide to make a film on this theme—from a novel
supremely embodying this theme? The answer may lie in the attitude that Soviet
theaters often take toward Chekhov: that the plays describe a past lassitude and
are therefore cautionary tales. This misguided belief about Chekhov and the Soviet
present may be the ill wind that has blown to this film’s good. Besides, the
screenplay by Mikhalkov and Aleksander Adabashyan rearranges the material
somewhat: the script begins with Oblomov as a small boy, cosseted by mommy on
the country estate, and there are flashbacks throughout to this pampered
boyhood. Possibly we are to infer that he was the spoiled scion of wealthy
bourgeoisie; and that the encouragement of idleness leads, inevitably, to the sofa,
literally or figuratively. Outside the Soviet paradigm, however, Oblomov poses less
soluble questions.
As in the novel, the film is not simply about a man who won’t get up and
busy himself: it’s about why he won’t. He is convinced that any activity by him, any
existence by him, doesn’t much matter in the cosmic scheme—in fact, that there
isn’t much of a cosmic scheme. His life is futile and therefore may as well be
unobtrusive to others and pleasant to himself. The one possibility for his life to be
altered galvanically is his love for the young and beautiful Olga. It looks as if that
love may be fulfilled: but the complications of self-doubt cede her to Oblomov’s
close friend, Stolz. (Another of those partly German Russians of the nineteenth
century, like Tusenbach in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.) Oblomov sinks back into
lethargy, eventually marries his housekeeper, has a son, and dies—rather,
disappears completely. With an echo of the opening, the film ends with his little
son running across fields to greet his mother. (Oddly, the child seems to run well
over a mile—just to sustain the final image.) The inescapable implication is that
Oblomov fils is headed eventually for the Oblomov sofa.
This isn’t the emphasis of the book, though its sources are in Goncharov;
still the film has lovely flavor and nicely muted poignancy. When Mikhalkov
relaxes, when he isn’t fretting to be visually inventive by moving the camera in or
out without necessity, when he isn’t searching for an odd angle—in short, when
he relies on his actors and his story—the picture holds well. Occasionally he can
put invention really at the service of the story. Near the end, in the Stolz home,
there’s a shot with Stolz at his desk in another room, left background; his wife,
Olga, sewing in a close room, foreground; and an old friend in the room with her,
right background. The triangle, involving two rooms, fixes an old relationship by
means of the arrangement of space.
As in all Soviet films, the color ranges from the dull to the insufficiently
clarified to the gorgeous. The music is good; early on, Olga, an amateur singer, does
Norma’s “Casta diva” after dinner, and it finds its way onto the soundtrack as a
binding theme.
Elena Solovei, who was the heroine of A Slave of Love, is Olga, winning and
puzzled and vulnerable—much more appealing than she was in the earlier film.
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Yuri Bogatyryev is staunch and generous as Stolz, a friend in the full nineteenth-
century sense. Inevitably the picture depends on Oblomov, and Oleg Tabakov is
excellent. He gets the prosaic but real yearning, the insufficient confidence without
silliness, the pudgy but delicate dignity that make him withdraw from what Robert
Penn Warren calls the “slur of the world’s weather.” Oblomov had to wait
surprisingly long for filming: now that the film is here, it will remain.
Dark Eyes, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1987 (The New Republic, 12 October 1987)
Dark Eyes opens daringly. We are in the empty dining room of a luxe Italian
ship, around 1915. In comes a thirsty man who is told that he is early: they aren’t
serving yet. Another man, writing at a table, invites the newcomer to join him and
share his pitcher of wine. The newcomer, played by Vsevolod Larionov, and the
man with the wine, Marcello Mastroianni, converse in Italian. Mastroianni
recognizes the first man’s Russian accent, and this opens the floodgates of memory
in his own mind. Mastroianni begins to tell a story. This story is the film, and the
film itself frequently reverts to its telling at this table.
The daring in that first six or seven minutes is that nothing happens except
the conversation of the two men. The director, Nikita Mikhalkov, does what
Ingmar Bergman occasionally did—he throws the burden of his opening on his
actors. Mikhalkov emphasizes this by using close-ups throughout the scene.
“These are two interesting characters,” he seems to say. “More, they are played by
two actors in themselves interesting. I bet on them.” He wins. Mastroianni and
Larionov capture us with their savory interplay.
But that is the best scene in the film, the one most sensitively and
economically realized. Much in the rest of the film is gorgeous, but a good deal of
it is too gorgeous. Some of the performances are cleanly drawn, some are hammy.
Mastroianni himself gets thinner and thinner as the film progresses. The
screenplay begins with a nugget of promise, then wastes that promise as it goes.
Dark Eyes is an Italian-Soviet co-production and was shot in both countries.
Mastroianni, we’re told, was enchanted by such Mikhalkov films as A Slave of Love
(1976) and Oblomov (1979). He pressed his producer, Silvia D’Amico Bendico, to
approach Mikhalkov, and after much conferring, this film was arranged and made.
The screenplay was written by Mikhalkov with a Russian collaborator, Alexander
Adabashyan, and an Italian, Suso Cecchi D’Amico. (D’Amico, who has worked on
many of the best Italian films of the last forty years, is the mother of the producer.)
It was based on some Chekhov stories, principally “The Lady with the Dog,” and
there begins the trouble.
Those who know the story, or the lovely Soviet film of it by Josef Heifetz
(1959), will wonder why it was substantively altered. Those who don’t know the
story won’t be aware of what they are missing or why. In the original, a Muscovite,
married to a wealthy woman, vacations in Yalta and has a brief affair—he thinks—
with the vacationing wife of a provincial official. They part. The man, back in
Moscow, belatedly realizes that he has fallen in love, travels to the woman's
provincial home, and finds that the same is true of her. Their tragedy, of thwarted
love, begins. (The English literary critic John Bayley, with pardonable excess,
recently called it the greatest short story ever written.)
The screenplay naturally makes the man an Italian. He is bored with his
rich wife, is unfaithful, and goes to the spa of Montecatini, where he meets a young
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Russian married woman. They have an affair. Subsequently he pursues her to

Russia and finds that she is as much in love as he. He leaves, saying that he will
free himself and return, but he doesn’t. Some of the alterations don’t much hurt
the Chekhov story, but the ending reduces tragedy to pathos—or would do so if it
succeeded. The film’s last moments consist of two twists that I mustn’t reveal; the
mere fact that there are twists is proof of debasement. The fundamental damage
is to the man’s character. He is made a lecherous buffoon, a stupid idler, incapable
of the change of feeling we are told he undergoes.
The screenplay (which includes nods to Cicero and Tolstoy) further bogs
down with changes of tone, particularly some fake Gogol scenes with Russian
officials, quite divorced from the realistic level of most of the film. And in the
provincial Russian town a sequence is inserted with a local vet who wants to save
forests, for no other reason apparently than to remind us of Dr. Astrov in
Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
The inadequate writing of the leading role is italicized by Mastroianni’s
performance. In a way he has himself become the character he plays here—a rich
idler, supported by a wealthy wife (the film industry), who doesn’t really work at
acting anymore: he just dallies with what comes along. If he had played the
character to the hilt, he might have vitalized even this misconceived role and thus
bound the film together. But in virtually the whole picture he moves and listens
and responds as if he had been wakened out of the star’s easy chair to do a scene.
The marvelous actor of The Organizer (1963) and La Notte (1961) and 8½ (1963),
even of   the recent Brazilian Gabriela (1983), is here encased in protective
superficialities, facile signals of emotion and concern remembered from past
performances.
The mention of 8½ is additionally bitter because some of the sequences at
the spa mimic Fellini’s parodic touches at his spa. Anyone who makes a film at an
elegant spa runs the risk of comparison with Fellini; certainly aware of this,
Mikhalkov takes that risk and falters. He is neither inventive nor serious enough
to do successful satire. Throughout the picture he merely hungers for artistic
effect.
The camerawork by Franco di Giacomo is sometimes oddly muted— the
sky is often gray on sunny days, the trees and grass almost brown, though
Mikhalkov wants lushness. He can use camera motion well, following persistently;
he can “dress” a scene well with an incidental passerby. But he zooms in and out
excessively, and he wallows in capital-B Beauty—vistas of wind-swept Russian
streets, long shots of a wagon rolling across a vast Russian meadow. Mikhalkov
also lays on acting-class trickery. When the lovers meet again in Russia, Mikhalkov
has Mastroianni pursue the frightened woman while she carries a tray with
rattling glasses; then the man takes the tray and the glasses rattle some more.
When he corners her in a barn, they kiss as chicken feathers descend around them.
This cheapness is further cheapened by Francis Lai’s score.
The Russian wife is played wistfully, therefore rightly, by Elena Safonova,
who has something of the effect of the cognate actress in the Heifetz film: at first
she seems a ninny, but she becomes a ninny with a sorrow. Safonova changes
much more affectingly than Mastroianni. The long-absent Silvana Mangano is
sympathetic as the rich Italian wife. The underrated Marthe Keller is perfect as
Mastroianni’s ex-mistress and friend, with just the right blend of affection for him
and amusement at her affection.
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Various Russian actors, including the renowned Innokenti Smoktunovski,

overact. The Italian actors are generally more restrained than the Russian ones,
just as Mikhalkov’s Italian sequences are less cinematically inflated than his
Russian ones.
Ecce Bombo, Nanni Moretti, 1978; and Golden Dreams, Nanni Moretti, 1981
(The New Republic, 1 October 1990)
Two early films by Nanni Moretti—also an actor-writer-director—were

shown briefly in New York in late summer. In August the Film Society of Lincoln
Center presented a sixteen-day series, with at least two films a day, of some of the
best Italian work since World War II. Included were Ecce Bombo, Moretti’s début
in 1978, and Golden Dreams, winner of the 1981 Venice prize.
Under the credits of the first, we hear a man’s hoarse voice calling the
words “Ecce Bombo,” roughly “Here comes Bombo,” and only well along in the
picture do we learn that this is the cry of a street vendor as he peddles his cart
along. The connection of this image with the rest of the film is slim but wiry. The
story is mostly concerned with a young Roman student named Michele, played by
Moretti, and four male friends—and some girlfriends—who are shopping and
selling: shopping for ways to live or selling views that they hold. From start to
finish Ecce Bombo is the work of an iconoclastic temperament, witty, rude,
eruptive, compassionate—something like a young Godard who has seen the films
of the first young Godard.
The picture is immersed in film reference. It begins on a film set. On
Michele’s bedroom wall is a huge photo of Buster Keaton. When Michele quarrels
with a middle-class boor, his crowning insult is “You deserve Alberto Sordi”—
Sordi being the adored comic film embodiment of middle-class troubles.
Ecce Bombo is a latter-day urban version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, which dealt
with small-town youthful discontent in 1953. Golden Dreams is a contemporary
treatment of some of the themes of Fellini’s 8½, which dealt with the creative
difficulties of a film director in 1963. Moretti again plays a Michele (not exactly the
same one—the family backgrounds are different) who has made a first film
something like Ecce Bombo and who is now trying to organize his second film
while running the gauntlet of public appearances and debates about his first. He
even engages in a TV confrontation with another young director that ends in a
boxing match.
All this is dryly funny; what are hilarious are the scenes from a film he is
writing about Freud, his daughter, and his mother. Michele sits down to write their
scenes. We then watch the scenes and watch Freud and his family falter as we cut
to Michele’s pen faltering. Moretti also plays another young man in Golden Dreams,
a bearded professor in love with one of his students, about whom he fantasizes.
This strand of fantasy ends with a horror-movie joke. And we see a sequence from
a different young director’s film, a spry musical about Vietnam protests in 1968,
clearly meant to show us how emptily theatrical those protests seem to Michele’s
generation.
Both of these Moretti films are overlong, seemingly crammed with
everything that was on his mind; yet both of them reveal a bursting, angry,
exultant spirit, an individual inscribing his generation’s particularities on the
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screen with talent and imagination. His best qualities surged forward to complete
realization in his 1985 film The Mass Is Ended, in which Moretti was a young priest
trying to deal with the problems of his former university companions in Rome.
That beautiful work is Moretti’s summa so far.
In any case, despite any reservations, Italy is lucky to have such an artist at
work as Moretti, tragi-comedian of the visible and invisible life around him.
Palombella Rossa, Nanni Moretti, 1989 (The New Republic, 23 April 1990)
Two years ago, Nanni Moretti’s The Mass Is Ended (1985) was seen in the
United States briefly. It was Moretti’s fourth feature but his first to be released in
this country, and it explained his high reputation in Europe as writer, director, and
actor. (He plays his own leading roles.) The film dealt with the difficulties facing
an earnest young priest in Italy today, and an Italian friend of mine called it the
best treatment of post-1968 Italy that he had seen. A hostile New York press cut
short the film’s run.
Recently, in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by the Film
Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, there was a chance to
see Moretti’s latest. Palombella Rossa. Literally this title means red wood-pigeon,
and I don’t understand its application. The film is about a water-polo match (a
sport that Moretti used to play professionally), treated as a metaphor of crisis for
the Moretti character—a Communist in intellectual difficulties today.
Moretti, who is now thirty-seven, uses the metaphor gracefully, wittily, in
a style that owes something to Fellini but has its own touching gravity. This is not
as wholly satisfying a film as The Mass Is Ended, but it proves again that Moretti is
a refined, perceptive, endearing artist. And the two showings of Palombella Rossa
in that recent series apparently constitute its entire American career.
In Peter Bondanella’s valuable Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the
Present (1990), he writes of the 1980s:
Only two figures, Nanni Moretti and Pupi Avati—both undeservedly little
known outside of Italy—may be said to have earned the right to be
considered as first-rank directors with a body of work that stands in
comparison to that of their older and better-established colleagues.
I’ve never had a chance to see anything of Avati’s. Of Moretti I’ve seen just enough
to know what American filmgoers are missing.
Dear Diary, Nanni Moretti, 1993 (The New Republic, 17 October 1994)
In 1988 Nanni Moretti’s masterpiece The Mass Is Ended (1985) was shown
in New York and was obtusely treated by the press. A bit of Moretti’s earlier and
later work was seen subsequently in New York in special showings, but nothing
happened to make up for that mistreatment, to establish Moretti in this country
with anything like his European reputation. There, a celebrated artist who writes,
directs, and stars in ultra-serious, frenetic comedies about his life and times, he is
celebrated. Here in the United States, zippo.
Two recent announcements cheered me up. The film branch of the Joseph
Papp Public Theater announced a retrospective of Moretti’s seven films, and the
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New York Film Festival announced the premiere of his eighth film, to be released
shortly afterward.
At the Public I saw a Moretti new to me and saw again two that I knew. The
first was Bianca (1984), in which he plays an oddball mathematics teacher at an
oddball high school—named for Marilyn Monroe—where he has a passion for a
student. I previously had seen, and enjoyed again, Golden Dreams, made in 1981,
in which Moretti is more or less himself, a film director heckled by coevals for
waxing slothful. The climax is a television debate between him and a “rival”
director, each supported by his fans, which includes a boxing match between the
pair.
And I saw for the third time The Mass Is Ended. Moretti plays a young priest
who, after a time in a rural church, is assigned to his native Rome, where he
frequently sees his family and his old university friends. He is utterly devoted to
his parochial work, and he tries to help his friends with their various problems,
his sister and his parents with theirs. He fails completely: religion, in his person
anyway, batters fruitlessly at modern complexities. An exception is an older friend
who, after some foolish intoxication with the idea of becoming a priest, marries—
is married by Moretti. The priest himself is soon to leave Rome for a wind-lashed
church in Tierra del Fuego, where he will be needed. His character, he thinks, will
be more suited to that place.
That basic character is more or less the same in all of the three films and in
(as I remember) two others that I have seen: a questing, perturbed, whimsical
young man, as dissatisfied with himself as he is with the world. Political tremors
vibrate around him. (Moretti has made a documentary that I have not seen of the
latter-day fate of the Italian Communist Party.) He gets into troubles by following
impulses. He asks sharp questions of complete strangers; he converses intimately
with people he doesn’t know; sometimes when frustrated he even throws himself
on the ground in tantrums. In short, he behaves like a highly intelligent, witty child
in an adult’s body.
Moretti sometimes has been called the Italian Woody Allen. Not really so.
Quite apart from the relative quality of their writing-directing-acting gifts, their
personae are markedly different. Allen is an often funny, worried, whining stand-
up comic, exiled from nightclubs, who wants us to know he has read some books.
Moretti behaves as if he had been present at the Creation, is awed by this privilege,
and is furious at everyone who can’t see the miracle—including himself when he
wavers.
Two other characteristics run through his films, related to the child-man.
He always gets to play at least a little football (soccer). He always gets to eat some
sweets, usually pastries. (And keeps thin.) His production company is called
Sacher Films, after Sacher-torte, the Viennese killer chocolate cake.
All of the above are in his latest, Dear Diary. In a way it’s his most daring
film so far because it’s about so little. Yet it succeeds, through his easy charm, his
outbursts that are moving or amusing, the neat planning of the “freehand”
moments. The Moretti character this time is Moretti, presumably telling us truths
about himself as we follow him through three “chapters” of his diary.
The first, “On My Vespa,” opens with the camera trailing Moretti as he rides
through lovely Roman streets on a summer day while we hear his thoughts. He
visits different residential districts and comments tellingly on them, but this is
secondary: he’s really using Rome itself, its winding streets and foliage, to hold us.
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The streets are almost empty. When he meets people, all of them strangers, he
speaks to them as if they had been in the middle of a conversation.
The chapter ends with a trip to the dreary spot where Pasolini was
murdered in 1975, a place to which Moretti had not been before and that he
seemingly felt he owed a visit. All the high points of this chapter are connected
with film. As he rides, he thinks of the spate of despairing Italian films in which
youngish characters moan about their decay, and we see a sharp spoof of a scene
from such a film. Moretti, reveling in his sunny city, shouts at these characters to
dissociate himself from them. Then there’s a good gag connected with the
American picture Flashdance (1983). And, after telling us that in summer the only
films being shown are horror and porn, Moretti quotes from a high-flown
intellectual rave about horror films. In a fantasy scene he sits beside the bed of the
critic who wrote this lofty nonsense and reads it to him insistently while the critic
weeps and begs for mercy and tries to cover his ears with his pillow.
In Chapter Two, “Islands,” Moretti goes to Lipari, an island off Sicily, to
work on a film script. He stays with an eremitic philosopher friend, Gerardo, who
never watches television. For various reasons the two men visit other islands, and,
through Moretti, Gerardo is introduced to TV. He is infected. On Stromboli he
shouts down the slopes of the volcano to Moretti, asking him to relay questions to
some American tourists about the fate of certain characters in soap operas.
Chapter Three, “Doctors,” tells of a year that Moretti spent in going to
various Roman dermatologists to rid himself of an itch that was driving him mad.
One specialist after another prescribes a long list of drugs, each list different. He
even tries acupuncture with two grave Chinese doctors. None of any of the
prescriptions and treatments is of any use. By treating it all straight-faced, by
never losing his temper with the doctors, Moretti manages to make the long
medical pilgrimage funny. Finally, at a doctor-friend’s suggestion, he has a CAT
scan, and a growth is discovered on one of his lungs. The radiologist says it is
inoperable; the doctor-friend disagrees. The growth is removed, the itch
disappears, and Moretti is spared to us.
He is in his early forties. As long as he is alive (may it be long), he will be
encountering life, its irritations—which infuriate him—and its joys—which in a
way infuriate him even more because they are insufficiently appreciated.
Presumably he will be sending back film reports to us on these encounters. Lucky
us.
Tilaï, Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990 (The New Republic, 17 December 1990)
Space is one of the key terms in film discussion, and, like every critical term,
it has various applications. Renoir’s planes of movement within a room are one
kind of spatial discrimination. Antonioni’s linkage of people to urban vistas is a
way of using space as twentieth-century fate. John Ford’s view of space dramatizes
Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the frontier principle in American life.
The use of space in Idrissa Ouédraogo’s films might at first seem connected
with Ford’s idea—drama about people-shaped dots in the middle of immensity.
Both in Yaaba (1989), seen last year, and now in Tilaï, everything happens on a
huge platter of earth under a huge inverted bowl of sky. Between them, a tiny
village. This might suggest Ford. But there is a great difference. Ford’s films, which
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center on white people though they contain Indians, are not called Westerns for
nothing: they are about Westerners entering a new domain, different from that of
their forebears. Ouédraogo’s films, set in his native Burkina Faso, are about people
whose forebears never lived anywhere else.
The oddity, to an American viewer, is that these Africans do not seem
aware of space. Ford’s people—to some extent this includes his Indians—are
conscious of the vastness around them and have developed self-sufficiencies to
deal with solitude. The Burkina Faso people seem not to know that anyone else
lives differently and have no comparisons to make.
Yet there is a relation between their way of life and their awesome
environment. The manner in which these villagers speak, beginning every
utterance with the name of the person addressed, gives their talk a certain size
whether the actual subject is large or trifling. The laws that govern them, laws of
marriage and fidelity and the capital punishment for breaching them, seem carved
in invisible gigantic rock. The details of their daily lives, those flimsy huts, that
frugal food, are small-scale; their inner lives, conceived in obligation, are large and
rugged.
“Tilaï” means The Law. The story is built on an opening fact so simple yet
foreboding that it seems like a pronouncement by the chorus at the start of a
classic tragedy. A young man returns to his village after an absence of some time
to find that his intended bride has been taken and married by his father. Once we
know that, we know that blood will be spilled. The Italians say, “Mort’ di fratello,
mort’ di coltello” (death of a brother, death by the knife); or, when close relatives
quarrel, somebody dies. So it proves.
As in Yaaba, Ouédraogo makes the difficulties of his work seem
nonexistent. We are never conscious that the people we see are not professional
actors. With his knowledge of their lives, with his affinity for truth, Ouédraogo
wipes away self-consciousness. Ina Cissé and Rasmané Ouédraogo—presumably
he’s related to the director—are especially affecting as the filched bride and the
frustrated lover. With the cinematography of Jean Monsigny and Pierre-Laurent
Chénieux, the director brings even the heat of the place to his film—without strain.
Every shot in the picture is framed by a sophisticated eye, but we feel the effect of
the shot much more than we think about the director’s eye.
Tilaï, even at its peak moments, is not greatly moving. Even the deaths seem
ritualistic, rather than personal. But this may be an aspect of the culture. Perhaps
the intent is less to wring our withers than to trace, slowly and gracefully, the idea
of inevitability. In any case, with his two films seen in the United States, Ouédraogo
has already made a unique contribution to world cinema—and has aroused
expectation.
Samba Traoré, Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1992 (The New Republic, 4 October 1993)
Some of the actors in Samba Traoré are acknowledged amateurs, natives of

Burkina Faso, where the film is set, but the roles they play are apparently so much
in the fabric of their usual lives that there are no seams. They are helped, too, the
director tells us, by the fact that he tailored scenes to fit them. They are also helped
by the fact that none of them (I assume) has any professional ambition, so there’s
no self-consciousness, no attempt to “do” what they are doing.
Some of the actors, however, are professional and have had training.
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Bakary Sangaré, who has the title role, has even worked with Peter Brook in Paris.
The paradoxical triumph of the professionals here is that they are
indistinguishable from the amateurs.
Idrissa Ouédraogo is the author-director, the man who did Yaaba (1989)
and Tilaï (1990) and who again shows such confident skill that his purity of intent
comes through unimpeded. The new film, though it’s set among the same sorts of
people, is basically different from the earlier ones. Yaaba and Tilaï took their
entire beings, their incidents and arch, from the dailiness of village life. Samba
Traoré has more of a constructed story.
The film, spoken in Mòoré, or Mossi—one of the country’s many dialects—
opens with Samba committing a robbery in the city. He flees to his native village
with the loot, and we see how both village honesty and the police ultimately bring
his misdeed into the open. The story doesn’t open the sense of immensity that Tilaï
had; still, because of Ouédraogo’s knowledge and love of the people, it has
immediacy and warmth, it stirs concern.
Two points. First, I wasn’t clear about the source, in this tiny remote village,
of items that suddenly appear, like new beds, a new bicycle, a saddled horse.
Second, Mariam Kaba, who plays Samba’s eventual bride, is one of the most
beautiful human beings I have seen in years.
Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970 (The New Republic, 21 April
1973)
Neglect is benign for some artists. An American novelist named William

March was thought by some to be a neglected fine writer until a large anthology
of his work was published; that finished March. The Indian director, Satyajit Ray,
is a first-class artist—until you see his films. As long as he isn’t imported, one can
talk about injustice and neglect. But then along comes a Ray film, and, allowing for
such exceptions as Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and Charulata (The Lonely
Wife, 1964), it is usually a mild and fairly dull item.
Days and Nights in the Forest, a newly released Ray film, is milder and dull,
wretchedly photographed, archaically edited, sentimental, and superficial in style
and theme. Four young middle-class men from Calcutta drive far out into the
country for a holiday. The quartet could hardly be more tritely composed: a
dreamer, a buffoon, an athlete, a fusspot. They take over a government forest-
bungalow by bribing the caretaker, who is poor and has a sick wife. (Social point
here.) One of the four has an affair with a local “bad” girl. (Culture contrast here.)
Two Calcutta girls are holidaying nearby and become friendly with two others of
the men. (Reverse cultural comment here.)
The banality is relieved only by the charm of a girl named Sharmila Tagore
and the near-subtlety of a word game played by the men and the two Calcutta girls.
Otherwise it’s the sort of film one sees at foreign countries’ cultural centers in the
United States, where the “travelogue” content makes ninnies overlook the various
crudities and sets them wondering why we can’t make American-culture films like
that. These are usually the people who ignore or dismiss films like Wanda (1970)
and Payday (1973).
The Chess Players, Satyajit Ray, 1977 (The New Republic, 3 June 1978)
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Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players is set in 1830 in Lucknow, the Moslem
center of the subcontinent. (This is Ray’s first picture in Hindi instead of his native
Bengali.) The British, through their army and the East India Company, have been
permitting the Moslem kings to rule in the Moslem state of which Lucknow is
capital. The present king is a composer, a devotee of dance and song, a connoisseur
of the arts, and a very bad ruler. The two title characters are his subjects, wealthy
Moslems who spend their days playing chess while the wife of one pines for her
husband and the wife of the other does not—she has a lover. The local British
commander, because of the bad government and the discontent of the people,
moves to take power, by force of arms if necessary, to insure the security of the
kingdom for British interests.
These are quasi-Chekhovian  materials, obviously. This particular  Cherry
Orchard is being taken over, not  by a nouveau riche in mixed awe and vengeance,
but by a cold force: still there is the same contrast between an elegant order and a
graceless, efficient, but ultimately more humane new order. Once again the East
has bowed to the West, the Greeks to the Romans.
But Ray’s screenplay does little more than set all this out in the first twenty
minutes or so, then go round and round the elements again and again for another
two hours—from British commander’s office to king’s palace to chess game—with
no deepening of the characters, about whom there is nothing more to be known
after those first twenty minutes, and with only the slow inevitability of the
changeover oozing along outside the film’s triangular shape. The commander
(unattractively right), the king (pleasantly wrong), the two players (pathetic
symbols of amiable lethargy), over and over. The one small dramatization of the
matter occurs when the two players, to escape army service should the king decide
to defend his crown (which he doesn’t), move their chess game to a deserted
village across the river.
The details of Ray’s filmmaking only add to the tedium. About the Hindi
dialogue I say nothing, since my Hindi is rusty. But the English dialogue, in the
commander’s scenes, is stale stuff and is delivered by Richard Attenborough—in
Scottish accent—with his voice trapped inside a three-note range and his manner
fitted to the first talkie ever made.
The most shocking aspect of the film is that such an experienced director
as Ray should be so technically maladroit. In many scenes the camera zooms in for
an immense close-up of the speaker for no other reason than that the scene is
ending. In one scene with Attenborough, the camera follows him at waist level as
he crosses the room so that, when he sits, his head will come into frame—a
clumsiness that no good film school would allow in a first-year student. When the
two nobles are playing in the deserted village near the end, they spy a boy some
distance off whom they call to serve them. We see the boy from their viewpoint,
then in a long shot, then we look from behind him to the two men, then we follow
the boy in a traveling shot as he walks toward them—all this fuss about a tiny
detail in the story and all of it revealing the still-recurrent insecurity in Ray’s
technique. For the viewer who knows or cares little about such matters, the effect
is unconsciously distracting, unclean.
Satyajit Ray’s control thus continues to fluctuate, his style refuses to
resolve. If he makes Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and Charulata (The
Lonely Wife, 1964), he also makes Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) and The
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Chess Players. Next move . . .
The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray, 1984 (The New Republic, 8 July 1985)
All his life the Bengali director Satyajit Ray has been associated with
Rabindranath Tagore. The poet-novelist was a friend of Ray’s family, and Ray went
to an art school founded by Tagore. In 1961 Ray made a film about Tagore, but
eighteen years earlier, before the director’s career had actually started, his first
screenplay was an adaptation of Tagore’s novel The Home and the World, for which
he even scouted locations. This production did not materialize; twenty-four other
films then intervened. Now at last comes Ray’s film of The Home and the World. My
next sentence is not the one I’d like to write: it ought to contain the word
“masterpiece,” but it can’t. The Home and the World is a delicate work, made by a
director who has learned much, discarded much, and grown; but it amounts to a
thoroughly understood set of interweaving patterns rather than an overwhelming
film.
As per the title, the patterns are personal and political. The time is around
1907, the place is East Bengal (now Bangladesh). Lord Curzon, the British viceroy,
has split Bengal into two administrative units, separating Hindu from Moslem, in
the belief that “divide and rule” will strengthen the imperial grip. We see
something of Moslem protest, but we concentrate on Hindus. Some Hindus are
activist, even terrorist, in anti-British feeling; some Hindus, equally opposed to the
British, are afraid that a boycott will hurt the poor, who depend on cheap British
goods, and will also inflame trouble with the Moslems.
One in the first group of Hindus is Sandip, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, a
veteran of twelve Ray films. One in the latter is Nikhil, played by Victor Banerjee,
lately seen as Dr. Aziz in David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984). The differences
between these two friends—Sandip, the leader of the activists, and Nikhil, the
wealthy merchant with true humanitarian concerns—dramatize the changes in
the world. The changes in the home come from those same humane, enlightening
motives in Nikhil, who insists that his wife Bimala (Swatilekha Chatterjee) learn
to speak English as he does and that she come out of purdah (the practice of
screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain), that
she meet his friends. From the alterations in home life comes an affair, brief but
passionate, between Bimala and Sandip; from the turmoil in the world comes
Nikhil’s death.
One characteristic of Ray’s films, not constant but recurrent, has been the
microcosm, the small system that implicates great forces. Charulata (The Lonely
Wife, 1964, and also taken from Tagore) and The Chess Players (1977) are two such
works; The Home and the World is another. Most of the action takes place in a few
rooms in the large home of the married couple, with the world swirling around it
and finally obtruding. Much of the screen time is occupied by two characters
only—some pairing of the three principals. The chamber play effect is heightened
by Ray’s use of the camera. He keeps close to his players most of the time, not
literally in close-up but to convey the idea that they are conscious of their
closeness to each other, that confinement of various sorts is on their minds. (Ray
uses mirrors once in a while as if to suggest potential enlargement of the confines.)
In one particularly subtle scene, the one in which Bimala first really becomes
aware of Sandip’s attractiveness, he is seated on the arm of a sofa in the middle of
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a large room and, as they talk, she moves from point to point in a wide circle
around him, thus making him the new center of her life.
The film runs 130 minutes, and its length only underscores an early
awareness in us. The director’s love for his characters, the commitment of the
actors to their work, the richness of physical detail don’t compensate for the fact
that we quite soon know what will happen. It isn’t plot novelty or character
idiosyncrasy that is missing, it is deepening. What we get, essentially, is a long
statement of genuineness at more or less the same level. Time, sheer duration,
inevitably either strengthens or weakens a film. Duration doesn’t help The Home
and the World.
Branches of the Tree, Satyajit Ray, 1990 (The New Republic, 11 May 1992)
Satyajit Ray makes an assumption about his viewers. He assumes that they
can be interested in a film that simply dwells with its characters, rather than one
that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives. Part of his assumption rests on a
common culture with his immediate public. (“All my films are made with my own
Bengali audience in view,” he has said.) But by now, after nearly forty years of
filmmaking and more than thirty films, he knows that his work touches other
viewers as well, that, by being faithfully Bengali, he can also reach other sorts of
people. His films are one more example of the truism that the road to universality
starts in a particularized place.
This is a far cry from saying that Ray’s films are international smasheroos.
(They aren’t even national smasheroos: only fifty-five million of India’s 840
million speak Bengali.) At home, in West Bengal, the films cut across several social
strata; abroad they are epicurean. The critic Rustom Bharucha, himself Calcuttan
but writing in America, said, “If one had to select an essentially cinematic quality
that epitomizes Ray’s films, it would be his acute awareness of the minuscule,”
which limits their occidental appeal.
Sometimes Ray can carry this minuscular quality so far that his films
become not daintily precious but almost busily bland, as if the camera had been
stuck through a window somewhat in Andy Warhol fashion to record
undifferentiated dailiness. But at his best, as in the Apu trilogy (1955-59) and
Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Ray creates a tension between our general
expectations of film and his refusal to fulfill those expectations, thus showing—
proving—that film can be and do more.
One of his latest films to reach us, Branches of the Tree, restates that quiet
proposition quietly. (The film had its New York premiere at the Walter Reade
Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center, hoping for further release.) The new film is
above the middle level of Ray’s work, not in the class of the titles above but a
gratifying experience for Blakean world-in-a-grain-of-sand people. A much-
respected Bengali man, prosperous and public-minded, is given a celebration for
his seventieth birthday at which he has a heart attack. One of his sons, whose mind
was unsettled in an auto accident, lives with the father but is unable to
comprehend what has happened. The man’s three other sons hurry from their
fairly distant homes, with their families, to be near him. In the week of his
recuperation, we grow to know these sons and perceive the moral spectrum that
they and their wives encompass. That is all.
The father has always said there is white money and black money; we find
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out which of the sons has opted for which. The presence in the house of the father’s
father, aged ninety-three, and of a child helps to give us a sense of the line in which
these ethical questions are set, and the mentally incompetent son supplies a kind
of null amorality. (One of the sons has been so revolted by the peculations of his
employer that he has quit his job to enter a purer world, the theater. Evidently
purity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.)
Almost all of the film takes place indoors, in the ill man’s house. The camera
opens on a huge flower arrangement in the middle of a drawing-room table, then
concentrates on the paterfamilias and his afflicted son. A servant comes in to clear
things and leaves, walking past the camera with seeming disregard of his place in
focus. When Ray is operating at his most astute, as he is here, he is trying to
controvert the Heisenberg principle: these people are observed without
disturbing the order of their lives. This pleasant artifice of non-artifice continues
throughout.
Ray, who writes his own screenplays though often from other material, is
sometimes called Chekhovian. This seems to me superficial. Chekhov,
incomparably subtle and implicative though he was, used those qualities to
dramatize lives. Ray’s intent is more like Yasujiro Ozu’s. (In fact, Branches of the
Tree has some resemblance to the last section of Tokyo Story 1953.) The artist’s
vocation, according to this intent, is to find revealing currents of life, to respect
them and let them flow. Ray lacks Ozu’s complete technical mastery; there is some
bumpy editing. And the performances sometimes stray into theatricality. But his
ambition is the same as Ozu’s.
Those who saw the last Oscar telecast saw Ray accepting a special award
in his hospital bed in Calcutta. He has been gravely ill for some time. But there is
at least one more completed film, The Stranger (1991), coming to the Walter
Reade and, I hope, to other places.
The Broken Journey, Satyajit Ray, 1994 (The New Republic, 19 June 1995)
The Broken Journey was written by Satyajit Ray toward the end of his life
when he was ailing and was directed by his son Sandip. Ray père had long been
hospitalized, with plenty of time to consider the medical profession in India, its
concerns and priorities. His story, like several he wrote in later years, focuses on
a member of the upper classes, in this case a successful physician in Calcutta, and
the person’s sequestering within his social stratum. Because of a flat tire on a
motor trip—the doctor is on his way to address a Rotarian meeting—he gets
involved in the medical crisis of an impoverished villager, and the doctor’s social
views are broadened.
This is by far the simplest Ray screenplay I know, an explicit morality
drama. Its strength grows from the non-homiletic intent of the author, his genuine
concern for the classes buried under social stigma. But no one will place this film
among Ray’s major works. Sandip Ray, who began directing in 1980 and who had
directed several of his father’s TV scripts, clearly has tried to follow his father’s
style. (In an interview with Andrew Robinson in 1989, when Sandip was assisting
his father on a film, Ray senior said, “He knows exactly what I want.”) Sandip uses
panning shots of a kind I don’t remember in his father’s films—opening on an
object, then moving to a person—but generally the purpose of the directing is as
Satyajit would have wanted: to induce us to really look at people, to value them
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adequately.
Soumitra Chatterjee, in his fifteenth Ray role, is thoroughly convincing as
the doctor, and Subhalakshmi Munshi is lovely as the sick villager’s daughter who
now, with the doctor’s help, may become a nurse.
Mon Oncle d’Amérique, Alain Resnais, 1980 (The New Republic, 17 January
1981)
A friend of mine, French-born and versed in French culture, says that the
French cultural weakness is shallow profundity. In film, the strongest support for
this criticism comes from Alain Resnais. Increasingly through the years, his films
have become like the legend of that wonderful French actor with the wonderful
voice, sounding wonderful as he reads the telephone book.
Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), seen
again, are better off not seen again. The more recent ones, culminating in the
velour-brained Providence (1977), have been less impressive even on first
viewing. Now comes Mon Oncle d’Amérque, the most trivial of the lot and the most
apparently so because it is shorn of the former Resnais luxe and depends on
sprightliness. Without his previous cinematic upholstery, Resnais is more nakedly
banal. 
He has been much impressed with the work of a French behavioral
scientist named Henri Laborit, and he has woven the picture around shots of 
Laborit himself, discoursing to us at his desk. (The script is by the veteran Jean 
Gruault, but presumably the impulse   for the film, as usual, was Resnais’s.)  
Laborit may, for all I know, be a scientist of merit, but his remarks in this film are
sub-Reader’s Digest; and Resnais’s dramatization of Laborit’s theories is so trite,
so unexpanding of either our scientific knowledge or our human experience, that
the effect is like that of those TV commercials where a wife helps her sneezing
husband with some medicine, then a man in a white coat says, “Yes! Laboratory
tests prove . . . Gloppo brings instant relief faster.”
Once, to my knowledge, this interweaving of a scientist’s discourse with an
apposite story was well done—in Dušan Makavejev’s ironic-tragic Love Affair, or
the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967). I’d bet that Resnais knows
Makavejev’s immensely superior film, but it hasn’t helped him. The French script
braids the stories of three people who are at first unacquainted: a textile executive,
hardworking but dull, Gérard Depardieu; a public functionary, Roger Pierre; and
an actress of sorts, Nicole Garcia. (The title refers to a mythical relative on whom
responsibilities and prospects are laden.) These three and others go through
strophes of ambition, desire, competition, success, and failure, about none of
which there is the slightest obscurity but all of which the doctor is lugged in to
explain. If that’s not enough, after we see white rats experimented with in his lab,
some scenes between the characters are re-played with the actors wearing rat
masks. And if that’s not enough, shots of French film stars—Danielle Darrieux, Jean
Marais, Jean Gabin—are spliced in to explain the characters’ role models.
Absolutely nothing about human behavior is opened up by this film,
although its portentous apparatus is a booby-trap that has already trapped some
boobies. What’s more to the point, as a comedy that is commented on as it goes,
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it’s badly failed Sacha Guitry. Resnais is one of the papier-mâché monuments of
cinema.
Mélo, Alain Resnais, 1986 (The New Republic, 7 March 1988)
Henri Bernstein (1876-1953) was a very popular Parisian boulevard

playwright, a craftsman of light plays on weighty subjects. Many of his plays were
made into films. Mélo (1929) was filmed five times, two of those versions in
German—with Elisabeth Bergner in 1932 and with Maria Schell in 1952.
Now Alain Resnais has filmed it again with himself as star, so to speak, and
with apparently very little screen adaptation. The reasons for Resnais’s choice lie
elsewhere than in the quality of this conventional, skillfully machined piece. One
guess: he had worked with his four principal actors twice before and found a script
that would accommodate them again. Another guess: filming it more or less as it
is in the original would challenge his ingenuity.
Essentially it’s a triangle comedy-drama with one appended character.
André Dussollier plays a successful violinist who visits a conservatory classmate,
Pierre Arditi, now much less successful, and meets Arditi’s wife, Sabine Azema.
(The wife’s role was obviously built up in the German versions.) Her cousin, Fanny
Ardant, is briefly introduced. Azema then contrives a visit to Dussollier’s
apartment, and they become lovers.
The play deepens, relatively speaking, as the wife develops torments of
conscience and kills herself. The big scene is between the two men in the third act.
(I use the word “act” because Resnais keeps reminding us of theater provenance:
a curtain at the beginning, twice during the film, and again at the end.) It’s three
years later. Arditi, now married to Ardant, is about to leave Paris forever; he visits
Dussollier and beseeches him to confess that he was Azema’s lover. Just to have it
settled in his mind. Dussollier lies with complete conviction—to reassure Pierre,
to keep relationships as they are, and probably also to assure himself that he can
lie, that he can play a role as well as he plays the violin.
The play/film is Dussollier’s to make, and he succeeds. He lies with such
heartfelt sincerity that he achieves the small frisson that Bernstein was after: How
can we ever know when someone is speaking the truth? Azema (who was the
artist’s capricious daughter in Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country 1984) has
dazzle and shade. Arditi has exactly the right tone, a self-knowledge of mediocrity
without self-pity. Ardant is adequate in her small role.
Resnais has solved all the problems involved. The film takes place mainly
in three settings, and most of the time he keeps it from feeling confined—no small
achievement in a piece that runs almost two hours. The question remains: Why
did he want to solve these particular problems? Can he really believe that there
are profundities in the play, or did he just want to work again with these four
actors? Or did he want to show that he could deal with a lightweight boulevard
play as well as his heavier materials in the past? In fact I enjoyed Mélo much more
than the last Resnais I saw, Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980), but it’s still like an
encore piece, after a serious recital—an encore, again, that runs almost two hours.
The Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer, 1981 (The New Republic, 14 October 1981)
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When an artist has been as fine as Éric Rohmer, particularly in an art as

unstable and treacherous as film, there’s a temptation to take his career as
symptomatic of that art’s possibilities. “If this is what happens to him,” we infer,
“then this must be the best that his art can permit. His work is delineating the
limits of possibility.”
Obviously that paragraph wouldn’t have been written if Rohmer’s new film
were good. The troubles implicit here are not the usual directors’ woes: money or
casting or extrinsic hassles. Maybe there were such difficulties for Rohmer, but
they’re not apparent, not even important. The problems here are intrinsic,
fundamental: they would pertain if filmmaking were no more expensive or
technologically complex than composing a poem.
Rohmer began as a writer. He wrote fiction before film criticism, before he
started his own magazine in Paris, La Gazette du cinéma, in 1950. His Six Moral
Tales (1963-72), most of them now well known as films, were written as stories,
said Rohmer, before he knew he was going to be a filmmaker. They were
translated and published last year (by Viking), and they are self-sufficient, good
fiction. Rohmer’s subsequent films of them are, like Malraux’s and Handke’s films,
realizations in another art of material already realized as writing by the same man.
So the films of his Six Moral Tales, including those exquisite pictures Claire’s
Knee (1970), My Night at Maud’s (1969), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), have
a kind of umbilical link with literature. Rohmer found ways to transmute literature
into film: that process has been the center of his style. He has not been a stodgy,
“literary” director: he has been a unique and daring film artist, a synesthetic
alchemist. Apparently he needed this connection with literature in order to film
at all because, when he had finished with his own six good stories, he moved on
to adapt two   world masterpieces, Kleist’s The Marquise of O. . . in 1976 and
Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval in 1978. The former film is now widely recognized
as a treasure in our heritage of great cinema. The latter shows Rohmer bravely
urging the film form to an  aesthetic accommodation that is beyond  it. If the
phrase “noble failure” can ever be used unpatronizingly, Perceval is the instance.
After a three-year absence, during which he staged a Kleist play in Paris,
Rohmer has launched a new series of films that he calls Comedies and Proverbs.
The opening film is now shown in the U.S., The Aviator’s Wife, and my first question
is whether he has cut the ties to literature-as-base that had previously sustained
him. Did he write this story first as a story? I must doubt it: because this new film
is not only the thinnest Rohmer that I know, its method is a reversion to the anti-
writer style of the earliest French New Wave.
The Aviator’s Wife centers on François, a Paris student and part-time postal
worker, in love with Anne, an office worker, who is tiring of him. Christian, an
aviator, who too has had an affair with Anne, tells her that their relation   is
finished. François sees Christian leaving Anne’s apartment, spots him at a café
later, and spends the day following Christian and a blonde woman who joins him.
François assumes that the blonde is Christian’s wife, whose move to Paris is his
reason for leaving Anne. During this surveillance François picks up a fifteen-year-
old student, Lucie, who amuses herself by spending the afternoon with François
watching the other pair. When Lucie has to leave, she gives François her address.
It turns out that the blonde is Christian’s sister, not his wife (for all that this
matters). In the end, after a long to-and-fro scene in Anne’s bedroom highly
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reminiscent of the long bedroom scene in Godard’s Breathless (1960), François

and Anne are possibly reconciled. She nevertheless tells him to write Lucie, whom
he has mentioned. That night, when he arrives at Lucie’s apartment house to leave
a note, he sees her kissing a young man good-bye. Presumably François is now
going to follow that young man as he did Christian, and the picture ends with a
sentimental ballad about Paris on the soundtrack.
The story—deliberately, I assume—has no narrative richness: it’s meant to
simulate the dailiness of the lives involved. The camera follows François and the
others the way François follows Christian, wherever the meandering may lead,
encouraging moodiness, pointless chatter, and tiny conversational games. It’s
much like what Godard and Varda and others were doing so many years ago,
glorying in the power of film to renounce traditional drama: film’s power, merely
by presence and penetration, to be with people and let their beings be the film.
(Coincidentally, perhaps, Philippe Marlaud, who plays François, and Anne-Laure
Meury, the Lucie, suggest Michel Debord and Catherine-Isabelle Duport of
Godard’s Masculine/Feminine 1966.) But, besides the fact that Rohmer’s use of
the method now seems imitative, the Godard of those days was using the method
as one of a series of attacks on “classic” cinema, and Rohmer is not. At one point
Rohmer irises out and in again to denote a time lapse—a device that’s
embarrassingly out of texture, a failed jeu, as if a middle-aged man were doing a
few rock steps.
What Rohmer intended to be simple is vapid. What he intended to be
eddying and insightful is garrulous. And the people whom he chose to “fill” the
screen—especially the rather whiny and unappealing Marie Rivière, who plays
Anne—don’t. I kept remembering Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore
(1973), where the three people on whom he concentrated became the theater of
the film. Most certainly not so here.
I’m not positive that Rohmer wrote this screenplay directly for the screen
instead of finishing it first as prose narrative, but it certainly lacks the assurance
of his earlier work. Some of the dialogue may even have been improvised, again à
la early New Wave. Possibly because he no longer had the literary support that he
always had before, he has fallen back on French cinematic platitudes. He has
written an explanation of what the new Comedies and Proverbs series will be
about, telling us that they will be theater-oriented—which is not perceptible in
The Aviator’s Wife—and that the series will not be limited to six. The motto of this
film is “One can’t think of nothing,” which is neither comic nor proverbial. But I
won’t quote further from his statement about the series because it too strongly
underscores the film’s faults: Gallic cinematic bloat at its most tedious.
To be saying these things about Rohmer! Possibly—and this was the
opening worry of my review—what’s happening to him is a film fate. His literary-
cinema linkage was his form of film creation, and perhaps he has abandoned it, not
because he couldn’t find another literary work he wanted to adapt, but because
the process of creation that such adaptation meant to him has weakened. This new
non-adaptation, the unworthiest Rohmer film that I know, makes me wonder
whether this new move, far from being liberation or innovation, may be a sign of
exhaustion.
Perhaps it’s no longer possible to have a lifelong career as a fertile film
artist. The circumstances, not merely financial, that supported an Ozu or
Mizoguchi or Ford or Renoir no longer pertain. Recently Bergman has announced
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that he will make only two more films, though he is now only sixty-three. The
varyingly interesting men who began work after 1950—Fellini, Antonioni, Olmi,
Jancsó, Kubrick, Peckinpah, and Teshigahara, among others—seem to fall away
sooner or later into desperation or silence or rhetoric. Occasionally they flicker up
again, like Fellini, but they don’t have “reliable” careers. The younger generation
is even more quickly disappointing. The French director Bertrand Blier made his
American début with the harsh, valuably disturbing Going Places (1974), then lost
his teeth through chewing on sugar until he hit sweet success with Get Out Your
Handkerchiefs (1978); and lately he has come up with Beau-père (Stepfather,
1981): a sentimental concoction about a young man living with a woman who has
a fourteen-year-old daughter and who, after the woman is killed, has an affair with
the demanding girl though he is, in a sense, her stepfather. It couldn’t be more
soggily daring. So, within seven years, Blier has gone into the French candy
business.
Money is not the central issue (for once!). A continually fruitful creative life
is harder in any art than it used to be, and perhaps the film world is more vampiric
than other arts, perhaps it drains and demands more. A theater lighting designer
I know says that every talented theater director has twelve good productions in
him. I don’t take that as gospel, but if it is even faintly suggestive in regard to
theater troubles, it gets frighteningly magnified when we think about film. If Éric
Rohmer, wonderful artist that he has been, not only can make a film like this but
can also surround it with fanfares of assertion and ambition, I’m tempted to think
that somewhere in himself he feels fear, emptiness, and is reacting with more
bravado than art.
I’d like little better than to apologize for this review in a year or two.
Le Beau Mariage, Éric Rohmer, 1982 (The New Republic, 4 October 1982)
An American director, now retired,  used to gibe at unfriendly critics by  

saying that, if his films were made in French, those critics would approve  them.
During Le Beau Mariage (A Good Marriage), I couldn’t help thinking exactly the
reverse: if this film had been made in English, in America, possibly some of the
critics who have praised it might have seen its banality. That’s an especially harsh
term to use because the writer-director was Éric Rohmer. His last film was The
Aviator’s Wife (1981), about which I wrote adversely. I speculated about the
emptiness I thought it revealed, and ended by hoping I could apologize for the
review in the future. Not yet.
Rohmer is sure of a high place in film history. Between 1963 and 1972 he
made his Six Moral Tales, four of which were full-length and were released in the
United States to the increasing delight of some of us. Then in 1976 he made, from
the Kleist novella, The Marquise of O. . ., which is arguably the best film made
anywhere in the 1970s. But two years later he produced Perceval (1978), out of
Chrétien de Troyes, which was aesthetically ambitious but cinematically null.
Then after a three-year absence, during which he directed a Kleist play in Paris, he
launched a new series, called Comedies and Proverbs, of which The Aviator’s Wife
was the disappointing first.
Rohmer’s filmmaking, as I’ve previously noted, has strong links to
literature: his Six Moral Tales were written as short stories, have been published,
and are well worth reading. Then came his films from a great novella and a great
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medieval poem. His new series seems to lack the writing that gave him cinematic
assurance and success (usually). The Aviator’s Wife was a feeble relapse into New
Wave filmic solipsism. Le Beau Mariage is at least a return to the true Rohmer style
of the Six Moral Tales, but the script on which that style is used has little effect or—
however you choose to define the term—meaning.
Béatrice Romand, who played Claire’s younger sister in Claire’s Knee
(1970) twelve years ago, is here an art history student in Paris who works part-
time in an antique shop outside Paris. Romand is having an affair with a married
painter in Paris but is turned off by the complications in his life. She decides
arbitrarily to marry, though she has no man in mind. A woman friend in the other
town, Arielle Dombasle, introduces Romand to her cousin, a single and successful
Parisian lawyer. There’s a  great deal of train travel between the  town and Paris.
The lawyer, played by André Dussollier, who was so good as  Gawain in Perceval
(and is currently in Pinter’s Betrayal on the Paris stage), is enforcedly friendly,
not very interested, but Romand pursues him, counseled by Dombasle, whose
advice turns out to be not only wrong but stupid. Dussollier tries to shunt Romand
off without offense, but since she persists, she is inevitably offended and “gives
him up.” In the last scene she is on that train again, sitting opposite a young man
whom we glimpsed briefly at the very beginning. This time a smile develops
between them; and we get the not very profound point that Mr. Right has been
figuratively under her nose the whole time, figuratively waiting for her.
Rohmer apparently wanted us to go through various strophes of ego
exploration, sexual torque, maneuvers, and embarrassments, as a distillation of
one available crisis in contemporary society. To this end, he has used the visual
mastery of the Six Moral Tales: the same personal rhythms, shots held as long or
as little as he chooses, rather than as convention dictates; the same simple but
unique points of view. The camera team of Bernard Lutic, Romain Winding, and
Nicolas Brunet have given him the texture that Nestor Almendros provided in
earlier Rohmer films—the feeling that a mosaic of colors and patterns has been
assembled, then lacquered with realism.
But all this mastery is applied to an unresponsive script. The lovely
execution doesn’t deepen the material; it’s perceptible apart from the material
and only emphasizes the slightness and triteness. This is an hour-and-a-half TV
script about a girl’s failed schemes to get an older man, only it happens to have
been made by a fine artist. There’s even the scene in which the frustrated girl
throws herself face down on her bed in her lonely little room, as if her name were
Debbie and there were college pennants on the wall.
Compare Le Beau Mariage with Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon (1972).
There are two substantive differences. The protagonist here is a woman (for the
first time in Rohmer’s career) and the man is married, but the basic situation is
the same: a not particularly attractive young woman pursues a man and fails to
get him. In Chloe we see the young woman grow through need, become larger
through her very openness of supplication; we see the man begin to respond
almost as much out of compassion as desire, then disengage because of faith
committed elsewhere. Essentially, cruel though the conclusion is to Chloe, it is a
spiritual drama. The new film is about a calculating nuisance. Calculating
nuisances, male or female, can suffer just as much as anyone else, but in this case—
partly because of Romand’s unaffecting performance—we get no chance to
empathize. All our available sympathy, not much anyway, goes to the pursued
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person, in this case the man. Rohmer’s script and Romand’s character never plumb
deeper than the conventional marriage game; they aren’t deepened just because
it’s in French and in France.
The painful question with Rohmer is one of tense. Was he an artist? Or is
he an artist? At best the question is not yet answered.
Summer (Le Rayon vert), Éric Rohmer, 1986 (The New Republic, 1 September
1986)
Éric Rohmer’s new film is a kind of puzzle. Summer (Le Rayon vert), the
latest in his new series called Comedies and Proverbs (begun in 1981), was
presumably intended to have some spiritual resonance. This intention is true of
all his films, and some of them accomplish it well. Not here.
Nonetheless, Summer is the work of a distinctive and admirable stylist. (Its
only visual fault is the graininess of some shots— it was made in 16mm, then
blown up.) Rohmer has a unique sense of composition, always implicative, and a
way of gently pressing on a scene until he gets what he wants from it. For instance,
at the start, two young women are chatting at an office desk when the telephone
rings. One of them answers and calls a third young woman, Marie Rivière, to the
phone. The two other women (of no importance to the story, as we learn) remain
in the shot, conversing, while Rivière hears a friend tell her that vacation plans
have changed. She is ditched. Her boyfriend has also ditched her. She then walks
off-screen. By holding it all in one shot, without any cuts, Rohmer gives us the
feeling that a segment of life has been generated and that one of the elements in
that segment, Rivière, has been selected for our attention because her
peregrinations will reward.
But they don’t . The film is laden with portentous trappings. Each sequence
is dated—Monday July 2nd, Tuesday July 3rd, and so on—to little point. Many of the
scenes—Rivière seated with some friends at a picnic table, Rivière visiting a
friend’s family in Cherbourg—seem to be done with improvised dialogue and are
in themselves interesting, but again to little point. The story is inane. Rivière is left
without vacation plans. She tries one place, then another, goes to the Alps and,
without even unpacking, returns at once. She cries when alone, sometimes when
not alone. Friends try to arrange dates with other men to replace the lost
boyfriend. She can’t respond; she even runs away. At last, in Biarritz, she meets
Mr. Right. Together they go to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and there they witness the green
ray—the rare sunset phenomenon that Jules Verne describes in a novel and that
is the film’s symbol—and they know they were made for each other.
Rivière plays it neurotically well, a wounded woman, fractured in
confidence. But underneath the good acting and the good direction is dime-store-
romance travail, concluded with an arbitrary happy ending. A jilted woman
flounders around all summer until, a figurative split-second before her vacation is
over, she meets someone she likes. Rohmer handles this piffle as if he were doing
another My Night at Maud’s (1969) or Claire’s Knee (1970). A final puzzle: How
could he have been so misled?
Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Éric Rohmer, 1987 (The New Republic, 1 August
1988)
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Every country seems to be interested in love, but the French like to

converse about it more than most. When a French writer runs out of subject
matter, or even if he doesn’t, toujours l’amour. Sometimes other things happen in
such a work, but they tend to be background or justification for the love dialogue.
In film the prime exemplar of this French propensity is Éric Rohmer.
Between 1963 and 1972 he wrote and directed a series called, as a group, Six
Moral Tales, all hinging on discussions of love. (He also published the fiction from
which he derived the films, and very good stories they are.) The best-known of the
six, My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon
(1972), contain very little action in the usual sense but a good deal of fascinating
conversation on their common subject. And each of them dramatizes its moral: an
aspect of the risk or mystery that can accompany love.
Then, after two films drawn from other authors, The Marquise of O . . .
(1976) and Perceval (1978), Rohmer launched a new series in 1981 called
Comedies and Proverbs. So far, this series has been much inferior to the first. All of
the later ones are made with his finesse—he’s the Cellini of film intimacy—but
most of the screenplays are attenuated. The proverbs themselves are not fertile,
and the discourse about love, sensitive and witty for a while, palls—because it
lacks the spiritual underpinning that the very Catholic Rohmer gave his early
sextet. The best of the new is Pauline at the Beach (1983), which at least had some
Marivaux moves and countermoves to provide comedy. But most of the five are
lapidary lapses. So is the sixth and latest, Boyfriends and Girlfriends.
The proverb on which this film rests is “The friends of my friends are my
friends.” (The French title translates as My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.) The setting is
Cergy-Pontoise, a “new town” just outside Paris. Blanche, an employee of the
town’s bureau of cultural affairs, strikes up an acquaintance with Léa, who is at
computer school. In time Blanche, who is unattached, meets Léa’s boyfriend,
Fabien, and also meets Alexandre, just a friend of Léa’s. Blanche likes Fabien well
enough but is smitten by Alexandre, so much so that she becomes tongue-tied in
his presence and is miserable later. Matters sort themselves out eventually, in
Rohmer’s anti-Chekhovian mode. (Chekhov keeps telling us that Cupid really is
blind, that lives are often made wretched by unrequited love. Rohmer advises his
characters to be patient: things will work out.)
The dialogue (through subtitles) is so sharp and frank that we expect
substance. It doesn’t arrive. Rohmer’s directorial skill never wavers, which only
adds to the ultimate disappointment. The man who made Six Moral Tales, who
here chose these quietly interesting actors, who frames each shot subtly, who uses
the “new town” (as his admired Antonioni might have done) to adumbrate the
desperately chic lives within it—that man, we think, must be designing this film
toward some substantive end, as he did in the past. But no: this time, exceptional
as Rohmer the director is, Rohmer the writer has been seduced by the hum of his
fine-tuned dialogue into thinking that the hum itself is significant.
Emmanuelle Chaulet (Blanche) and Sophie Renoir (Léa) counterpoint each
other in much more than the blonde-brunette mode: their voices and
personalities, their ways of moving, both blend and contrast. (As do the quite
ordinary clothes that Rohmer characters wear, selected for understated contrast
and harmony.) The two men, Éric Viellard (Fabien) and François-Éric Gendron
(Alexandre), are equally well paired, though they have somewhat less chance for
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impact on us. All four, under Rohmer’s hand, play like a good string quartet, but
the score isn’t worthy of them or their leader.
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, Éric Rohmer, 1987 (The New
Republic, 28 August 1989)
Éric Rohmer says he made most of his new film—not his newest, actually,
but the latest to be released in the U.S.—while waiting around to get the shots of
the “green ray” for Summer (1986). The new arrival, called Four Adventures of
Reinette and Mirabelle, has connections with Summer. It uses the same
cinematographer, the same editor, and two of the same actors. Also, one of the
adventures depends on a particular time of day, in this case the “blue hour” right
before dawn, just as Summer depended on the “green ray” right before sunset.
Unlike Summer, however, this new film, says Rohmer, is not part of his
current series, Comedies and Proverbs. It’s hard to see why not: the tone is similar,
and a Rohmerian proverb could easily be adduced as rubric. The dialogue also
seems much like that of past Rohmer, to judge by subtitles, though he says it was
improvised by the cast (and then takes writing credit anyway).
Reinette and Mirabelle consists of four adventures about two young
women. The episodic form suits Rohmer well—revealingly well; its rightness
points up why most of his other films in this decade, the ’80s, seemed distended.
Rohmer’s dynamics tend to be vertical: he likes to delve into a territory that is
pretty quickly marked out, rather than to press constantly forward horizontally in
conventional narrative. Lately his choices of territory have not always been worth
the amount of delving he gave them. But here, with four episodes that average
twenty-five minutes each, the method and the material fit each other nicely. The
delicacy of what he is after in each case is not hurt through stretching.
Reinette is a country shopkeeper’s daughter, living off by herself in an
abandoned farmhouse while she paints. (The paintings were done by Joëlle
Miquel, who plays the part.) She is full of vitality; she savors every incident and
experience of the day. Mirabelle, a prematurely world-weary Parisian student, is
spending the summer with her parents at their country house. One day—we are
now in the first episode, “The Blue Hour”—Mirabelle is bicycling up a remote road
when she gets a flat. This is just opposite Reinette’s place. Reinette helps her, gives
her a meal, tells her about the “blue hour,” then invites her to stay overnight to see
it the next morning.
The pre-dawn moment—the “hour” is really only the moment between the
time when the night birds grown quiet and the day birds begin—is spoiled by a
tractor, so Mirabelle agrees to stay still another night. During the day the two of
them visit neighboring farmers, obviously real farmers, in a flavorful scene
reminiscent of Rouquier’s farm film Farrebique (1946). When Reinette says that
next year she wants to go to art school in Paris, Mirabelle invites her to share her
apartment, since her present roommate is leaving. The matter is not immediately
settled, because the two, the city sophisticate and the country enthusiast, are not
completely affined. But the following morning, they experience the “blue hour”
together, and the moment is so lovely that it unites them.
In the next episode, “The Waiter,” they are living together in Paris. One
morning they agree to meet at noon in a Montparnasse café. Reinette, still a
stranger in Paris, has some amusing (and recognizable) experiences trying to find
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the place, then has a funny scene with a waiter because he won’t break a large bill
with which she wants to pay for a coffee. The trouble is worked out with the polish
of a smart cabaret sketch.
“The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac, and the Hustler” begins with Mirabelle as
she helps, or means to help, a woman who is stealing things from a supermarket.
Reinette is horrified when she learns of Mirabelle’s attitude toward this theft, then
has some odd encounters of her own in a railway station with a panhandler and a
con woman (not really a hustler in our sense). Again, a surprise finish.
“Selling the Picture” starts with the sophisticated Mirabelle as she teases
the voluble Reinette for talking too much. Reinette bets that she can keep from
speaking for a whole day. As it turns out, this is the day she must show a picture
of hers to an art dealer. Still again, the episode has the lineaments of a refined skit.
In each of these episodes Rohmer takes time to enjoy the nuances of the
moment, the small contradictions and surprises of dailiness. He never gives us the
feeling of feverishly building to a payoff, of chucking as he puts the pieces in place
for the finish; thus the finish seems part of the body of the piece, not a mere tag.
All of the episodes, like all of Rohmer’s films, are built on faith—a faith that
may have its origins in the divine but is so concentrated on the worldly that it
seems sheer optimism. All is eventually for the best in Rohmer’s world. Rebuff,
travail, disappointment are all recompensed fully. But the recompense is so firmly
entwined in Rohmer’s credo that it is inevitable for him, the fulfillment of his
character, and nearly as wry as it is happy: so it’s never syrupy.
The two young women, Miquel and Jessica Forde, are true instances of
Rohmer casting. When we first see them, we can hardly believe that they are going
to play principal roles, less because they are not conventionally attractive than
because they both seem on their way somewhere else, pausing only to be in this
picture because the camera is there. But Rohmer finds ways to stimulate them
while keeping them at their non-professional ease—a considerable feat—and
finds attractions in them that we had not foreseen. They can hardly be called first-
class actors, but (especially if the claim about improvisation is true) they have
imagination and aplomb.
A Tale of Springtime, Éric Rohmer, 1990 (The New Republic, 31 August 1992)
Éric Rohmer is a minimalist but of a peculiar kind. Minimalism, let’s say, is

a method of understatement, of implication in extremis, opposed to explication in
any sense. Rohmer’s cinematic methods—his framing, his editing within a scene,
his ellipses between scenes—are all brilliantly minimalist; but the décor of any
one shot is intensely detailed, and the dialogue of his screenplays is disquisitional.
Two people who have recently met can talk for three or four minutes about their
feelings for each other, as they do in his latest film, then kiss, then talk for another
three or four minutes about that one kiss. The action is spare; the texture of the
discourse around it is neo-Cartesian. It’s enjoyable.
A Tale of Springtime, Rohmer’s latest, is the first of a new series. The first
and best series was Six Moral Tales: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Claire’s Knee
(1970) are among these films made from 1963 to 1972. Then came the six films of
the Comedies and Proverbs series, from 1981 to 1987. (Between those two series
came the masterly The Marquise of O . . . 1976.) His new film launches a new
series: Tales of the Four Seasons. It’s hard to see how some of these films couldn’t
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have been in the other series, but if this taxonomy is useful to Rohmer, that’s
enough.
Paris again. And again Rohmer enjoys the way that commonplace events
can lead to odd situations. A philosophy teacher in her late twenties, played by
Anne Teyssèdre, goes to a party and there meets a music student some ten years
younger, Florence Darel. The two converse because they are both bored at the
party. Darel invites Teyssèdre back to the flat she shares with her father, who is
rarely there, and the two women, though of differing maturity, become friendly
and frank with each other.
The story then takes them to Darel’s country place and to an encounter
with her father, Hugues Quester, and his lover, Eloise Bennett. Darel hates Bennett,
and she arranges matters, when the chance arises, so that Teyssèdre and her
father are left alone together, hoping that her new friend may replace Bennett.
Also involved in the story are four other people, only one of whom is seen: Darel’s
(divorced) mother, Teyssèdre’s lover, Darel’s lover, and Bennett’s other lover. A
missing necklace is also involved as another counter in a game of suspicion and
accident, of sexual and temperamental interplay, of the limitations of candor.
It would be straining to try to infer a realized theme from this film—or, for
that matter, from its title. Its rewards are in the grave simplicity with which
Rohmer has directed it and in the quality of the conversation. (A slight touch of
bravura here. Teyssèdre drops a reference to Gyges’s ring, from Book Two of
Plato’s Republic, and this is certainly the only screenplay in world film history to
use the word “maieutic.”)
Rohmer’s cast is acutely selected. Partly because they are unfamiliar—true
of most people in his latter-day films—they seem to be non-actors who have been
chosen for personal aptness rather than for acting talent. They are not maladroit
and may, for all I know, be celebrated in France; but they give this film a suggestion
of disclosed privacy rather than of created art. This, added to Rohmer’s cinematic
asceticism, has a wry result: even when his films aren’t overwhelmingly
interesting, they have some interest.
A Tale of Winter, Éric Rohmer, 1992 (The New Republic, 9 May 1994)
We’re lucky that Éric Rohmer is French. His cultural lineage—Marivaux,

Laclos, and Musset are some of his ancestors—enables him to anatomize the
fluctuations of love with the gravity of a physicist splitting molecules. Rohmer has
made one emotionally large-scale film, The Marquise of O . . . (1976), but in the
usual Rohmer scale, a touch of a girl’s knee (Claire’s Knee, 1970) or a long man-
woman philosophical discussion (My Night at Maud’s, 1969) is climactic. No
filmmaker is easier to satirize, but none so easily survives satire: for, besides his
sheer cinematic wizardry, his insistence on magnifying fibrillations persuades us
that the motto is right—God is in the details. Rohmer’s films (almost) always hold
us in themselves, but even if interest in the dialogue flags slightly, his fierce
sincerity cows us.
His latest, A Tale of Winter, is the second in a new series called Tales of the
Four Seasons. (He likes to present his films in series, though the linkage is not
always clear.) To sketch the story is to show yet again that Rohmer is more
concerned with emotional analysis than emotional storm. Félicie and Charles have
a passionate affair at a beach one summer. They part, intending to re-meet, but
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she accidentally gives him the wrong address. Five years later, in Paris, she has a
small daughter, fruit of the affair, lives with a librarian named Loïc, works in a
beauty salon, moves to Nevers with her boss, Maxence, when he opens a salon
there, stays only a short time, and returns to Paris where Loïc wants her again. She
can’t decide: the memory of Charles, the one man she loved completely, still haunts
all her amorous decisions.
At this point we are torn. Like normal human beings, we want her to find
Charles and be happy; but like seasoned filmgoers, we are wary of a contrived
happy ending. Rohmer, with typical courage, comforts our schism—both parts.
Most of the film takes place between Christmas and New Year’s and
focuses, with traditional Gallic calibration, on Félicie’s dilemmas of choice—
Maxence or Loïc or no one, all under the specter of Charles. Rohmer makes us care
because he makes us see that life doesn’t consist of dramatic peaks but of dramatic
continuum, day by day, almost hour by hour. To him, everyone’s life is a pilgrim’s
progress, and all that is needed to make it interesting is perception.
Religion flutters along the edge of Félicie’s problems: she gets some sort of
clarification when she takes her daughter to see a Christmas crèche in a cathedral
(and Loïc doesn’t miss the chance to restate an old Rohmer theme, Pascal’s wager).
However, the resolution is not divine but Shakespearian. Toward the end Loïc
takes Félicie to see a performance of The Winter’s Tale, and the “miracle” in the
close of that play prefigures the “miracle” in Félicie’s life. (Rohmer says that a
chance viewing of the play on TV started his thinking about this film.)
Rohmer has learned a lot from his cinematic forebear, Robert Bresson—in
no way more than in his dealings with actors. As did Bresson, he spends much time
with his principal people before he begins work, in order to learn about them (he
rarely uses the same actors twice), and he encourages both their suggestions and
improvisations. This approach—“anti-theater,” let’s call it—has limitations, and
he knows it. In The Marquise of O . . . , he used first-rank theater actors and let them
rip. But here, especially with the Shakespeare scene as contrast, he makes the
conversational charismatic. He creates a tacitly persistent reality that makes us
feel as if we could walk around behind the actors and never get “backstage.”
Charlotte Véry (Félicie), Frédéric Van Den Driessche (Charles), Hervé Furic (Loïc),
and Michel Voletti (Maxence) are all paradoxical. We don’t know beforehand what
we expect of them: we find out, as they supply it.
A visual note. Almost all of Rohmer’s films have been pictorially intricate.
The very textiles on furniture have been part of the scheme. Here Rohmer has paid
less attention than usual to light and texture. Nothing is crude; nothing is visually
remarkable. The cinematographer, Luc Pagès, presumably did what the director
asked of him. Apparently, this time Rohmer wanted his film to look as daringly
“daily” as his subject.
The Mattei Affair, Francesco Rosi, 1972 (The New Republic, 2 June 1973)
Francesco Rosi’s new film, The Mattei Affair, isn’t going to turn the trick for
him in the United States. Rosi is a director of stunning ability and genuine
seriousness, with strong (though not unique) interests: he explores actual events,
through fictional re-creation, as social phenomena (like Costa-Gavras and others).
His first film seen here was Salvatore Giuliano (1962), about the Sicilian bandit: a
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flawed picture but with a rough, catching fabric, with a purposive feel and a fine
graphic sense. Of his later films, not all shown in the U.S., the only one I have seen
until now is The Moment of Truth (1965), made in Spain, a cruel-compassionate
study of what bullfighting means as escape-hatch for poor boys. At present he is
making a film about Lucky Luciano, and in New York lately, where he came to
shoot some scenes for it, he said with a laugh, “Unfortunately not a real gangster
picture.”
The Mattei Affair is concerned with the forces under events: this time the
story of Enrico Mattei, the Italian oil executive who died in a plane crash—
probably murdered—in1962. Mattei had prescience about what it’s now modish
to call the energy crisis, had a clear vision of the importance of oil in politics; and
his activities in Italy and abroad ran counter to those of the big oil companies of
the world. He was a rationalist, a nationalist, and an internationalist, unconcerned
with exploitation. His death was a convenience for the exploiters.
It was a natural theme for Rosi and, sheerly in filmmaking terms, he
handles it comfortably. But skillfully though it is composed and edited,
intelligently though it proceeds, its affective power is weak. We see what Mattei is
about, we understand his aims, we recognize his enemies; but the heat of his
struggle never touches us. The film is deft (but mere) exposition of a problem.
Costa-Gavras, who is comparable, takes a much more externalized subject
in State of Siege (1972) and keeps us gripped with guns and kidnapping; this is a
crime story and, not to derogate Costa-Gavras for his choice of subject, he has
easier materials to work with than Rosi had. I wish Rosi had succeeded with his
subtler sociopolitical drama. I’m afraid he hasn’t. But he whets my appetite for the
Luciano film.
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Francesco Rosi, 1979 (The New Republic, 19 April
1980)
It’s getting a bit late to worry about Francesco Rosi. He’s been directing
since 1958, and the balance in him of virtues and faults, too equal to keep him from
first-class work, hasn’t yet tipped favorably. If anything, the reverse.
Rosi is Neapolitan, “political,” and  marks his films with a humane, cursive
  gravity. He’s concerned with the well- being of his countrymen, with the plots 
and complots that oppress them; his  camera moves to disclose and unravel  the
conspiracies against justice, glides  succinctly and discreetly, in such films as  The
Mattei Affair (about oil), from 1972, and Lucky  Luciano (about the Mafia), from
1974. His early and, I think, best film, Salvatore Giuliano (1962), was a “ballad”
about the Sicilian bandit as an emblem of protest, and many of its images are
incised in memory—the massacre at the communist rally, the naked corpse of
Giuliano packed in ice against the Sicilian summer. (And let’s not forget that the
cinematographer who perfected those images was the late Gianni Di Venanzo, who
died in 1966 at the age of forty-six: an inadequately recognized force in the
postwar Italian film rebirth.) But in that work and later ones, Rosi’s structure has
been weak, his drama flabby. He relies on texture to do almost everything for him,
and it doesn’t. (It’s odd, this failing, because he began as assistant to Luchino
Visconti, whose dramatic sense leaned the other way, to the florid. Has Rosi been
overreacting to Visconti all through his own career?)
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Now Rosi has filmed a subject that, I’d  guess, he has had in mind for a long
time,  but he hasn’t re-examined it in the light  of lapsed time, with enough rigor.
One  of the most famous of postwar Italian  books was Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped
at Eboli. Levi was a physician and painter,  an anti-Fascist who in the 1930s had 
been exiled from Rome to Lucania in  southern Italy along with other “politicals,”
and who wrote about the experience ten years later. The story is not of Levi’s
sufferings, for in any real sense he didn’t suffer. When we think of political
dissidents under Hitler and Stalin in those years, Levi and his fellow anti-Fascists
seem just to be on faintly spartan holidays in an exquisite countryside.
However, not much claim is made about his suffering. Levi’s real subject is
the Lucanian peasantry, his countrymen whose lives were straitened in every
regard. But they and their villages strike us differently today. When Gian Maria
Volonté, as Levi, speaks on the soundtrack about the desolation, the misery, the
abandonment of these people. I thought that he ought to be glad he never saw the
South Bronx or many parts of Harlem. More: I saw Christ Stopped at Eboli just after
a documentary on ABC-TV about Cambodia today.
Not that misery must be the most miserable in our experience in order to 
be moving. The life of a Lucanian peasant even now, I’m sure, is harder than most
of us will ever know (although the worst we actually see here are some
superstitions about illness). Compare Eboli only with Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs
(1978). Rosi’s film is the notebook of a tourist, compassionate but safe. Olmi’s film
fell sadly short of success, but we lived with the peasants, were surrounded by the
hardness of their lives. Levi was a visitor, judging by the difference between
Lucanian life and that in Rome. Olmi never patronized his people; Levi, as drawn
by Rosi, can’t quite escape the scent of tourism.
And the tour plods, episode after episode, an invertebrate travelogue. Rosi
attempts to give it a semi-spine with a (non-sexual) relationship between Levi and
his housekeeper. Irene Papas fills the part with her dark juices, but she simply
appears for a while, then disappears. The episode is one more brick not cemented
into place. Volonté, saturnine and strong, does what he can as Levi, but there’s not
enough for him to do.
Always Rosi wants to cut against conventional filmmaking, which is
admirable, but all that he replaces conventional structure with is flaccidness.
That’s often been true of him, and here it’s worse because he hasn’t seen what his
material looks like today. Levi’s book is generally credited with being in the van of
postwar Italian social realism. That—in the days when Liberation still hung in the
air, the days when presumably Rosi first read and loved the book—was a while
ago.
The Truce, Francesco Rosi, 1997 (The New Republic, 11 May 1998)
For Primo Levi, the peace after World War II was only an armistice—before
the next war began. His memoir that described his postwar homeward journey
from Auschwitz to Turin was called The Truce (1974). In 1981, thirty-six years
after the war’s end, this former partisan wrote a poem called “Partisan.” The first
line: “Where are you now, partisans of all the valleys?” The poem goes on to say
that they must be on guard against the enemy:
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What enemy? Every man is the enemy

of every other,
With everyone split by an inner border,
The right hand enemy of the left.
On your feet, old men,
enemies of yourselves:
Our war is never over.
Clearly Levi had come to believe that the rooted threat against peace was the inner
state of man, that thus peace would always be a mere truce. Presumably this belief
became too much for him to bear. For this reason among possible others,
presumably, he took his life in 1987.
It’s a serious challenge to make a film about Levi, and Francesco Rosi,
always serious, always wresting large subjects, was seemingly as fit a choice for
the task as any director could be. Salvatore Giuliano (1962), The Moment of Truth
(1965), Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)—not to mention Carmen (1984)—were not
flawless, but had concepts of large scope and were grave in their tactics.
The Truce was made from an adaptation by Rosi and Tonino Guerra,
Antonioni’s longtime collaborator. (The version being shown in the U.S. is in
English.) It opens with chilling verity, promising to be worthy of its subject; but
little by little the film becomes only one more account of the horrors of the war
and of the postwar period. The adventures are terrible and ironic, as Levi and
some other Italian prisoners make their enforced meandering way from Poland
through much of central Europe before they reach home. But the center of Levi’s
book is missing, the uniqueness—Levi himself.
Physically he is there, almost all the time. John Turturro plays Levi and is
always sober and respectful of the man, decent and responsive as the moment
demands. But, as given, this character could have been any one of other
comparable men. The Levi who wrote the book—other books and poetry—about
his life, about being trapped inside that life, about being as humane as possible
within that entrapment, is not there. Probably he could not be.
Turturro is given some voice-over lines from Levi. (When the Auschwitz
prisoners are freed: “We felt unfit for our newfound liberty.”) Yet these don’t
compensate for the absence of the whole man through whom all the events of the
book are experienced. I’ve lost my copy of The Truce (which is now available under
another title, The Reawakening), but I’ve been looking again at The Periodic Table
and am refreshed in Levi’s being. To show him, as a film must do, to show his
actions instead of inhabiting him, as a book allows, is to reduce him. Scores and
scores of autobiographies have been filmed, but the greater the degree of
interiority in the original, the thinner the film is likely to be. Here, despite all that
Rosi and Turturro can do, the Levi we look at and listen to is not near the Levi we
know.
Without Levi, the film is only a series of episodes that, in essence, are much
like those in some past films. The Truce is delicately shot and edited and has some
graphic minor performances, but it is inevitably disappointing.
Summer Skin, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1961 (The New Republic, 18 June
1962)
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Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but, in art, it is the flattest
form of sincerity. An important original note is bound to echo in other artists, but
mere imitation is rarely rewarding because it begins on the surface and paws
inward, a reverse process. Now come the imitations of Antonioni. Italians have
already begun (e.g., Zurlini’s Girl with a Suitcase, 1961); an Argentinian, Leopoldo
Torre Nilsson, continues, with Summer Skin. He thinks that if one anatomizes
trifles, if one simply allows large faces to be “present” on the screen, one has
achieved the Antonioni style. What he lacks are: a meaningful story devoid of stale
devices and fake irony; a sense of rhythm and of tension that lets him know when
a “held” shot is becoming more boring or more beautiful; a philosophical ground
from which all else flowers, not superficial pastiche profundity; an encompassing
aesthetic that translates his life-view into affecting art.
Of this, in Torre Nilsson, nothing. He has a moderately keen eye for
composition and for the arresting; he has an ambition to be a serious director. Not
much more.
His sententiousness begins with his belief that this script—by his wife,
Beatriz Guido—is serious. Essentially it is comic. Marcela is the granddaughter of
a successful courtesan, still practicing. Grandma’s current lover has a sick son who
has a year to live. The father will give Marcela, post mortem, a year in Paris and a
Dior wardrobe if she will comfort the young man’s last months. She accepts. He
falls in love with her; she responds. At the last the young man is miraculously
cured, which surprises no one except the people in the picture. (Up to this point,
as Colette would have seen, it is a comedy.) When the boy informs Marcela of his
cure, however, she tells him she hates him, that all she wants now is the promised
price. He shoots himself. 
The dénouement is a dogged insistence on bitterness; it does not grow out
of the story. Marcela’s summer skin (we should say “tan”) is figuratively her
response to the boy’s summertime ardor, which, she thinks, will fade in the
autumn when he dies. But we experienced filmgoers know that she will be
genuinely drawn to him. After he leaves, presumably forever, she sits lonely on the
beach for days and starts up hopefully at every passing car. Then why does she
burst into loathing when he reappears and tells her the good news?
Films like this—all mannerism without style, ambition without means—
come often from countries where artists are without nourishing traditions and
where audiences tend to overpraise the local product to prove that they are
culturally equal with any other country. This is not to say that some nations are
Calvinistically elect in culture and the rest are out of grace forever, but good art in
any form usually comes from a country that has been working in that form for
some time. The South American films we have so far seen here substantiate this
view. But a Brazilian film (Anselmo Duarte’s The Payer of Promises 1962) has
won this year’s Cannes prize and may prove a harbinger of less imitative and
hollow filmmaking.
Torre Nilsson wrote recently: “I feel an enormous modesty at every
showing of Summer Skin.” This seems an appropriate response.
Hand in the Trap, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1961 (The New Republic, 29 June
1963)
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The work of the Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is sometimes

quite attractive but is sooner or later disappointing. Of the five films that I have
seen previously, the best was The Fall (1959), which touches the Henry James-
William Golding-Richard Hughes theme of wickedness in children. The children
were handled excellently and the film was technically impressive, but the result
was thematically and dramatically vacuous. Summer Skin (1961) had some skill
and mood, but its resolution was unconvincing. Two of the films, The Female:
Seventy Times Seven (1962) and The Kidnapper (1958), become bankrupt earlier.
The former is a grim triangle in near-primitive Patagonia about two rough men
and an attractive young woman who, in this rugged, windy country, wears a very
low-cut dress and unfailing eye makeup. In the latter film, one of the many, many
dramatic highlights is a scene in which a pig eats a baby.
Now comes Hand in the Trap, which won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes in
1961. Like Torre Nilsson’s earlier End of Innocence (a.k.a. The House of the Angel,
1957), it is a story of a woman traumatized by amorous experience. A girl spends
a summer with two aunts in their large house in a small town. In the attic is
supposed to be a deformed, illegitimate half-brother of hers whom she has never
seen. She discovers that it is really another aunt, generally believed to be in the
United States, who took to the attic and living death after being jilted by a local
buck who had seduced her. This buck, still quite passable, subsequently seduces
the niece and establishes her in an apartment in Buenos Aires.
The Brontean overtones are no more than that. Torre Nilsson films have a
certain sheen that derives from their reflections of their artistic sources, but they
never have intact lives or even sense of their own. This film is filled with silly
romanticizing instead of the melancholy romanticism at which it aims. Torre
Nilsson has some technical talents, but he lacks the artistic intelligence to guide
them. He remains a director who needs a director. 
Love at Twenty, François Truffaut & others, 1962 (The New Republic, 9 March
1963)
Love at Twenty is yet another anthology film—five episodes dealing with

its subject in five countries. The best is the first: an anecdote about a Parisian boy’s
unrequited first love that at least leads to friendship with the girl’s parents.
François Truffaut elevates the material with his seemingly unfailing poetic
pyrotechnics. Renzo Rossellini’s Roman episode, by contrast, is astoundingly trite
and tritely handled. As for the Japanese episode, by Shintaro Ishihara, it is a boring
bit of psychosis.
The Polish episode, by Andrzej Wajda, deals—as is usual in Wajda’s films—
with an interesting idea. (A thirtyish hero of the Resistance, still heroic, is
momentarily attractive to a teenaged girl but soon becomes tiresome to her and
her young friends.) As is also usual with Wajda, he handles it with leaden mittens.
The German episode, deftly directed by Max Ophüls, is a cute boy-girl romance,
perfectly conventional except that in this case they have the baby before they fall
in love and get married.
The Green Room, François Truffaut, 1978 (The New Republic, 6 October
1979)
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Some footage of World War I battles, tinted blue. François Truffaut’s face,
bewhiskered under a poilu helmet, weary, coming closer through the battles. The
film credits, superimposed on these shots. Then a title tells us that the story we’re
going to see takes place in a French town about ten years after the war in which
millions were killed. Then a close shot of old-fashioned lace curtains (clean, white,
quiet, after the foregoing). An elderly maid crosses from left to right, quite close.
Voices. She returns from right to left, leading in Truffaut in civilian clothes.
What simplicity. What control. This opening is typical of the way that 
Truffaut has made all of The Green  Room, and it confirms—reconfirms, as the
airlines say—that there is no more fluent filmmaker working today. By now he
has such ease and confidence that he seems almost a little ashamed of talent, as
if the display of talent were a distraction—and this in spite of the fact that he
himself is on the screen nearly the whole time in the leading role. The making of
this picture is so reticently accomplished (there’s one irrelevant iris shot as a
Truffaut trademark), the recurrent lateral movements so gently encourage the
flow and engagement, the angles and discoveries are so discreet, the performances
are so keyed to dignified intimacy—and Nestor Almendros’s cinematography is so
well up to his usual excellence—that for the first hour or so, all is pleasure. That’s
about when unease begins to wear through.
The trouble with The Green Room is not like that in Fassbinder’s Marriage
of Maria Braun (1979). With Fassbinder, some good acting and directing were
expended on a finally incomprehensible script. Truffaut’s script, written with his
old collaborator Jean Gruault, is perfectly comprehensible—but it’s unrewarding.
In fact, though it’s intended to be poetically mystic, it becomes faintly repellent.
The screenplay is “based on themes from Henry James,” principally from “The
Altar of the Dead,” with some chordal support from “The Beast in the Jungle.” (I’d
have preferred the emphasis the other way ’round.) The theme, here enacted by a
shaken ex-soldier, is of a life spent in love of the dead, in trying to live with the
dead; and it degenerates from the spiritual into the obsessive, neurotic, sickly. The
real destiny, the emotionally logical destiny, for this James-Truffaut hero is not
faced: it’s the one that Faulkner gives to his protagonist in the best treatment of
this macabre subject, “A Rose for Emily”—literally to sleep with the skeleton of
the dead beloved.
The film wants to move toward an exaltation of purity, of fidelity beyond
the flesh, in which the hero is eventually joined by a young woman (Nathalie Baye)
who at first resists his ideas. But it’s more like a disease that he finally gives her.
Everything that color and editing and music can do to help the idea as poem and
anguish is done; but it comes out necrophilia. (Truffaut’s one deviation from
seriousness is in the pictures on the walls of the chapel that his hero builds for his
dead. If these are all friends whose deaths “live” with him, then why pictures of
James himself, Proust, Wilde, Oskar Werner in his Jules and Jim 1962 uniform?
Why Cocteau, who was still very much alive at the time of the story? It’s all out of
kilter, a touch of Truffaut’s 1950s high jinks.)
It was a mistake, I think, for Truffaut to play the hero. (Whom he makes a
journalist. As he showed in the Antoine Doinel films, Truffaut likes to fantasize
about working in a newspaper/magazine office.) He’s credible enough in what he
says and does, though his face is not aging attractively, but he cannot supply the
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unspoken that the role should have. Charles Denner in the part, or Jean-Claude
Brialy or Maurice Ronet, would not have made the film a success but would at least
have taken it below the phenomenal to the implicit.
Still it’s interesting that Truffaut chose this subject: paradoxically, it shows
both his range and his circumscription. It’s a new subject, yet in a way it’s more
about the same dark strands that have persisted in his only partially lyrical work.
In many of his films, death and aberration are just below the surface of the charm.
Here they are not buried at all; they are the focus. The hero, smitten by the war he
survived, by the guilt he feels in his survival, can think of little other than death,
particularly of his dead wife. It’s Truffaut’s frankest address so far to the shadows
that haunt his work, but, despite its quietly superb execution, it comes out dank.
Confidentially Yours, François Truffaut, 1983 (The New Republic, 20

February 1984)
A prolific and highly personal director has also made a black-and-white

film that is, in good part, a tribute to a director and a school he worships.
Confidentially Yours, François Truffaut’s latest, is based on an American thriller, as
were four of his previous films; and once again Truffaut is paying idiosyncratic
homage to Hitchcock and to American film noir. (Hence the black and white,
comfortably handled by Nestor Almendros.)
Set in a city near Nice, it’s one more story of an unjustly accused man trying
to prove his innocence of murder, a task complicated by more murders. His one
aide is an attractive secretary whom he fired just before the storm broke. The plot
is complete with diligent cops, cagey private eyes, sleazy nightclubs, and a panel
that reveals a hidden room. The prime requirement here, obviously, is not
credibility but entertainment. The only question is: Does the time past
unnoticeably?
No. The story is insufficiently clever, the people are insufficiently engaging.
As the accused, Jean-Louis Trintignant is weak in comedy, which this bloody plot
requires. As the loyal secretary, Fanny Ardant, first seen in and as The Woman Next
Door (1981), is less fascinating to at least some others than she patently is to
Truffaut. She is a passable actress but not the overwhelming sex symbol that the
director apparently thinks her. She has such a firm-jawed face that, at certain
angles, she looks like a transvestite.
This is one of those discomforting films where we feel the director getting
more pleasure than ourselves. Truffaut says, in the publicity, that he was
“seduced” by Ardant’s looks. Truffaut, believe it or not, is now fifty-two.
Confidentially Yours is not much more than an invitation to watch a middle-aged
man showing off for and with his new crush.
Films in Focus
Mr. Arkadin, Orson Welles, 1955 (The New Republic, 8 October 1962)
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Orson Welles made  Mr. Arkadin abroad in 1955; it was shown there as
Confidential Report, but it has not had theatrical distribution in the United States
until now. It does little to resolve the contradictions of his career.
The script—by Welles—is Eric Ambler parody, unintentional. One of those
mystery millionaires of Europe is amnesiac about the first twenty years of his life,
and he hires an American roustabout, who is wooing his daughter, to search out
his beginnings. Suspense stories of this kind are supposed to travel on rails of
cynical worldliness, impelled by murder, with waystops of bizarre character. But
Welles’s dialogue   is so ludicrously gnomic, the motivations so abrupt, the
atmosphere so   vacuously portentous, that the film is never either scary or
moving. It was photographed all over Europe with the avidity for color of the
American expatriate who wants to show the stay-at-homes how acclimated he is
to Old World byways and blasé wickedness.
The post-recorded soundtrack, partially dubbed by some who are not in
the cast, is execrable. Playing Arkadin, Welles figuratively smells of greasepaint
and spirit gum as his wig line, beard line, and putty nose shriek for attention.
Robert Arden, the American, is the most dubious of Welles’s several dubious
discoveries. Michael Redgrave plays an eccentric Polish pawnbroker with heavy
stress on all three components. Having said that, I note that  Katina Paxinou gives
her usual good performance and Akim Tamiroff his unusually good one.
More importantly, every foot of the film was shot with a dramatic vigor and
the whole work composed with visual ingenuity. Welles has a gigantic gift for
telling stories excitingly with the camera; but here, as on other occasions, he
wastes it on inferior stuff. (On two other occasions he distorted Macbeth 1948
and Othello 1952.) Mr. Arkadin thus proves yet again that the creative and the
editorial gift are not always present simultaneously.
Gervaise, René Clément, 1956 (The Reporter, 23 January 1958)
The compliment one can pay the new French film Gervaise is to say that it
represents faithfully the novel on which it is based. The usual movie made from a
novel, like the recent film of Nana (Christian-Jaque, 1955), is generally a grab bag;
the producer takes from the book what he thinks will fit his stars or his conception
of assured popularity. This isn’t true of the producer (Annie Dorfmann), the
director (René Clément), and the screenwriters (Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost)
of Gervaise. Their purpose has been simply to render a novel as film. Limited only
by the inflexible differences between the two media, they have succeeded.
L’Assommoir, it will be remembered, is a cornerstone in Zola’s immense
Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels. It was one of the first Zola novels—it
was published in 1877—to achieve wide popularity. An American translation
(under the title Gervaise, incidentally) appeared only two years later and was
made from the sixtieth French edition. The book tells the story of Gervaise
Macquart, a cripple from the south of France who comes to Paris with her lover
and their two sons, works hard to support them all, is deserted by the lover,
marries a roof mender by whom she has a daughter (Nana), and then has to
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support him, too, after he is injured in a fall. She opens a laundry shop, but her
husband’s drinking—encouraged by her lover, who returns and is welcomed into
the house by the husband—brings about their eventual ruin. In the end the
husband dies raving in a madhouse, the sons are scattered, Nana is gaily embarked
on her own story, and Gervaise, her hope crushed, dies drunk and alone. Though
it sounds austere, Angus Wilson has called this Zola’s most compassionate work.
The book is in the film. The last quarter of the novel is drastically
condensed but the spirit of it is not violated; instead of protracting the husband’s
delirious disintegration, Gervaise’s decline, and the start of Nana’s fancy career,
the adapters let the first occur in the shop and clearly foreshadow the latter two.
It is enough; two hours of any movie, even a refreshingly grim one, are enough. To
reread the novel is to be struck by the fidelity of the film. The first view of the
cheap hotel balcony, the steamy fight in the public laundry, the wedding party in
the Louvre, the fall from the roof, the feast on Gervaise’s saint’s day—all these are
in the film.
“I must show all the world trying to bring about her ruin, consciously or
unconsciously,” Zola wrote about his heroine in a note to the novel. As Gervaise,
Maria Schell embodies the giving soul looking for a worthy receiving soul who is
heartlessly used, in the short or long run, by men whose egos are unable to
withstand her generosity. There is in Schell’s performance perhaps an ounce too
much winsomeness, but she moves us with her straightforward simple affection.
(Both her performance and the film won awards at the Venice Film Festival.) The
rest of the cast, notably Suzy Delair as Virginie, is always satisfactory. But the most
notable triumphs of the film are those of the adapters and the director.
How to Make a World
How do the Europeans, especially the French, evoke the past so

convincingly in their films? The answer cannot be simply that their sets are ready-
made. Old Paris streets are available to American filmmakers as well. Part of the
answer is in the actors, whose training and whose imaginations—cultivated by
that training—enable them to breathe and bend in costume. Yet a larger part of
the answer must lie with the directors, in this case René Clément. He has made his
world. What happens to his principals in a tavern or a market place or a music hall
seems only a portion of what is happening there; certain characters are in the
foreground only because it is their story that has been chosen to be told. Any of
the people moving around them are equally real, equally interesting, just as busily
engaged in following the unraveling threads of their own lives. There are no dress
extras in this picture.
Clément also has a gift for unfolding a large scene from a small beginning.
The scene that ends with the husband’s wild, obscene smashing of the laundry
begins with a close-up of little Nana looking through a glass that is about to be
heated and affixed to her ailing father’s back. The effect is one of slipping through
a quiet keyhole into a gradually revealed house full of hell.
The squeamish may at first object to the blatancy of the husband’s bloodied
back (when his delirium topples him against the wall with cupping glasses on
him), of a vomit-spattered bed, of nose-picking. But that objection will not hold
against the director; these things are true to the spirit of the book. For at almost
every point the film is strapped to the book; you cannot tug at the former without
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the latter.
Here the reward of virtue is that the film’s faults are Zola’s faults. For all its
excellences of acting, editing, photography, and direction, the picture leaves us
with a feeling of pointlessness. We have watched a simple, hard-working woman
beaten down by a clever, opportunistic lover whom she cannot resist, by a weak
husband who turns to drink, by ceaseless toil, and by whimsical fate. It is not
tragic; it is simply grinding. We are neither enlightened sociologically nor
harrowed by her experience. As to the former, Zola’s theories are cold, his
revelations stale. His theory of scientific determinism may have been a valuable
ingredient in the intellectual ferment of the Third Republic, but we now know
enough about slums and poverty to understand that we must fight ceaselessly to
eliminate them, and must not expect human character to be notably improved
thereby.
We are not moved tragically by the heroine’s fall because we are too
conscious that she is a clinical example. “It is surely a lesson in morality,” wrote
Zola in his preface to the novel. Indeed, in the scene of the soiled bed he writes:
“And this was the outcome of Drink, this was an example of the results of the
passion for strong liquor; Man degraded to bestiality.” In the film as in the book,
the author, standing at the side with blackboard pointer, vitiates his own work as
art. It is a slice of life, and we feel that the knife might have gone into any one of a
million specimens.
If all this is true, why isn’t Zola’s film (for such it is) at the level of a franker
soap opera of the nineteenth century? For the hallmark of soap opera is continual
woe heaped on the unremittingly virtuous. What prevents Gervaise from being
merely Nana’s Mama, or Too Poor to Be Sober? There are, I think, two factors that
keep us from being bored or from sniggering. The first is the titanic intensity of
the mind that assembled these materials and is pointing this moral. His purpose
may be didactic, but his perceptions, his sympathies, his energies, his instinct for
architecture are enormous. His theories seem foolish, but Zola makes himself felt
despite them. The second factor is the result of the first: we find ourselves touched
by a work written in anger at the obstacles men put in the road of their own
perfectibility. In our world of more moderate expectations, we are moved,
nostalgically, by the fire of a man to whom the farthest horizon was at once
limitless and attainable.
The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Brooks, 1958 (The Reporter, 3 April 1958)
The only sensible way to approach a film made from a gigantic work like
The Brothers Karamazov is with good wishes and moderate hopes. Obviously, the
matter of length alone prevents a film from encompassing this novel with anything
like completeness. The tests one may reasonably expect such a picture to meet
are: does it present an acceptable microcosm of Dostoevsky’s universe, and is the
presentation itself satisfactory?
On both scores the new MGM   color production, directed by Richard
Brooks and produced by Pandro   S. Berman, deserves considerable   praise.
Brooks, who published several novels before devoting himself  to film work, has
written his own  screenplay from an adaptation by the  well-known playwrights
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Julius J. and  Philip G. Epstein. As might be foreseen, the script is principally

devoted to the more easily externalized encounters and conflicts in the novel:
Dmitri’s love relationships, his father’s debauchery, the murder, and the trial.
Much of Dostoevsky’s dialogue (in Constance Garnett’s translation) has been
retained, and within the scope of these episodes an honest and intelligent effort
has been made to develop the characters in depth.
In the matter of presentation, the picture has been handsomely mounted
and beautifully costumed. The interiors, particularly that of the Karamazov house,
give exactly the right atmosphere of cultural frontiersmen, of a people rich in
talents, avid for experience, belatedly joining the course of Western culture. There
is a fairly close parallel (as Edmund Wilson, among others,  has pointed out)
between nineteenth-century Russia and nineteenth-century America vis-à-vis
western Europe. In the picture the streets of Ryevsk rightly remind us of a raw
Kansas town; the cloying luxury of the Karamazov home might, in essence, be that
of any Midwestern robber baron’s mansion.
Beyond this, and much more important, several of the performances are
fine. As the elder Karamazov, Lee J. Cobb triumphs. In recent film and television
performances, Cobb has seemed to trade heavily on a kind of ostentatious honesty,
a conscious air of abandonment of trickery, which in itself is an affectation. In
Karamazov, Cobb has discarded a theory about acting in order to act. He has used
empathy and imagination, and the result is a valid, valuable artistic creation.
It is true, of course, that he has the best “part” in the book. Audiences
always respond to an intelligent scoundrel. But it is easy for a  performance of
Karamazov to dissolve in a welter of bombast. Cobb gives us this gross character
with subtlety: the feral cunning, the sudden fears, the surprising perceptions. It is
a graphic portrait of a huge glutton, greedy for self-gratification and power and
equally greedy for respect and love and salvation.
Yul Brynner, whose background includes considerable training in the
French theater, shows the benefits of that training in a well-sustained and
sensitive performance as the eldest son, Dmitri. One quickly forgives him his silly
baldpate trademark as he shows us the schizoid torment of this man torn between
his heredity and his vision, who can find a measure of peace only by accepting
moral responsibility for a crime he did not commit. Brynner’s face does as much
to create the right ambience for the picture as any other factor; his repose and
silences tell as much as his outbursts.
Claire Bloom, as Katya, delineates crisply an upper-class girl whose
conventionality is not only her code but her burden and her weapon. (It is true
that she offers herself to Dmitri in return for a crucial loan to her father; but she
falls in love with him because he does “the decent thing.”) We feel her straining at
the bonds of her upbringing to reach Dmitri, and we understand the outrage of her
little soul when her seeming generosity toward Grushenka is spurned.
But in spite of all the virtues cited above, one leaves the film with a sense
of disappointment. Part of this is due to the shortcomings of the script. One is
prepared for some tailoring of the ending, for, in plot though not in theme, the
novel is notoriously indeterminate. But Brooks has felt it necessary to show Dmitri
escaping with Grushenka and even interrupting his flight to visit the bedside of
the dying boy Ilyusha, to have Ivan discover God on the witness stand and to have
him snub Katya at the close. (Presumably MGM is punishing her for having helped
to convict Dmitri.) These seem excessive concessions to popular sentimentality
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and theatrical neatness. Beyond this, although it is remarkable to hear any serious
mention in a Hollywood film of such matters as the nature of sin, the effect of
religious belief on ethics, and the shape of a national soul, these themes are treated
with the breathless haste of a television adaptation. To take the love and murder
elements so far out of their social and religious context is to synopsize, not to
condense. One does not expect to find the whole “Russian Monk” section in the
film or to hear Ivan tell the story of the Grand Inquisitor, but—to cite three
examples—the skimpiness of the Father Zossima and Snegiryov episodes and the
reductio ad absurdum of Ivan’s philosophy make us conscious of surgery, not
Dostoevsky.
Apart from various defects in the script, the production makes use of
blatantly symbolic lighting. Characters step out of amber into green at patly
appropriate moments; beds are bathed in purple. In fact (as in the recent A
Farewell to Arms 1957), stagy lighting effects sometimes interfere with scenes
that might otherwise be credible. One more point about the direction: there are a
number of wild parties in the picture, tiresome because the handling of them is
predictable. Although these scenes may be accurate enough, they remain clichés.
Yet even with the same script, the same lighting and editing, this film
could have been much more successful if four of the leading roles had been well
played. Maria Schell, in my view, is rapidly becoming the most overrated actress
of our time. As Grushenka, she grins or she does not grin; there isn’t a great deal
more to her performance. Here, in this Slavic Carmen, the author has given us a
marvelous portrait of a woman whose being is in her passions, who will live for
them only, without pity for herself or anyone else: shrewd, defiant, fatalistic. Schell
has the color and fire of an Alpine milkmaid. Her Grushenka simply does not flame;
and without an enthralling Grushenka the plot lacks a fulcrum.
Richard Basehart paws ineffectually at the exterior of Ivan, the articulate
atheist; the net effect is simply of a pleasant young man pinching his eyebrows
together to indicate deep thought and inner turmoil. As Alyosha, the young
embodiment of Russian mystic fervor, William Shatner is a nullity; his bland face
and voice contradict everything he says and does. As Smerdyakov, the Caliban in
the house, Albert Salmi concentrates so thoroughly on superficial melodramatics
that he evokes little true horror. With competent performances in these three
parts, in addition to Schell’s, we would not only be more moved, we would—in
spite of the truncations—understand more of the author’s underlying meanings.
After Dostoevsky’s death, Tolstoy wrote: “I never saw this man and never
had any direct relations with him, and suddenly, when he died, I understood that
he was the closest,  dearest, and most necessary man to me.” It is what one feels
after reading this monumental book—that the author was a redeemer in art who
 was born and suffered that men might be, at least to the limits of his experience,
further exalted. Buried somewhere among the good and bad things in this film is
a vague, fumbling hint that this might be true. But the inadequacies block the
channel, and what is “most necessary” never quite reaches and rewards us.
Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus, 1959 (The New Republic, 4 January 1960)
It is obvious—once you see it done—that dance is a felicitous method for

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film storytelling. A form that is motion belongs in motion pictures. This was clear
to Marcel Camus, one of the New Wave of French directors, who, at age forty-
seven, is the Ancient of that group. His Black Orpheus, winner of the Cannes Golden
Palm, although it is ostensibly acted in a conventional way, is in essence a danced
film. Those who saw this in Modern Times (1936)—in which every movement,
every gesture was molded rhythmically by Chaplin, who always dances, and by
Paulette Goddard, who seemed never to touch her heels to the ground—will
recognize it here. The basic concept of Camus’s film is the idea (in the Platonic
sense) of movement.
Because the picture’s background is the annual carnival in Rio de Janeiro
and because the story deals with the blacks of that city, to whom dance is as
natural as song-speech is to orthodox Jews, there is also a great deal of formal
dancing of many kinds: cha-cha or samba or improvisation. But this only sets the
outward seal on a film that, when it is dealing with the daily life, with the flirtations
and fears of its characters, couches them in super-natural, musically attuned
motion.
The use of the Rio carnival as a setting is excellent, though not completely
original. (If memory serves, Orson Welles was making a carnival film there about
fifteen years ago when he was discharged by the new management at RKO and the
film was shelved.) An entire city in rhapsody is a provocative environment for a
picture; in it Camus has placed a modern version of an old legend. The two leading
characters are named, with disarming straightforwardness, Orpheus and
Eurydice. The legend is distorted: the bulk of the picture deals with their courtship
and love and only in the vaguest way touches on the most important part of the
legend—the chance to restore the dead girl. In straining for the atmosphere of
myth, the script scants motivation (why is the character in the Death costume
pursuing Eurydice?) and forces in a pat way the death of the hero.
But, despite this strain, despite adduced poetical touches, the film is often
beautiful, a swirl of color and music and movement almost from first to last. The
story is simply an excuse for the presentation of the milieu. The cast is all-black,
most of them Brazilian non-professionals; Orpheus is a local football player. The
only foreigner is the Eurydice, Marpessa Dawn, a beautiful American dancer.
None of the acting, finally, is worth discussion and the Eastmancolor is, as
usual, somewhat below Technicolor quality; but the picture is worth seeing. The
effect is of visual music.
The L-Shaped Room, Bryan Forbes, 1962 (The New Republic, 8 June 1963)
Bryan Forbes seems unable to make up his mind. This gifted Englishman,
an actor turned screenwriter, producer, and director, is interested in serious
materials or at least in the idea of doing serious work (by “serious” I obviously
don’t mean “non-comic”), but he seems to have a shopgirl streak in his soul. There
is always an element of merchandise in his films. The Angry Silence (1960), which
he wrote and co-produced, had a timely subject: a working man questioning the
conformities of unionism; but it was vitiated by some silly melodramatics. He
adapted Only Two Can Play (1962) from a Kingsley Amis novel; but he blotched its
good character-comedy with some mechanical Bob Hope gags.
Now he presents his second directorial job, The L-Shaped Room, with his
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own screenplay, adapted from a novel by Lynne Reid Banks, and again much that
is truthful in it is derogated by splashes of spurious showmanship. A French girl
in London takes a top-floor room in a cheap lodging house, where she waits out
her pregnancy to have an illegitimate child. In the plyboard elbow of her room is
another room occupied by a West Indian black; on the floor below lives a
struggling young writer; on the ground floor is a retired music-hall actress; in the
basement are a couple of tarts. She becomes fast friends with them all and falls in
love with the writer. They have an affair that splits when he learns that she was
pregnant when they met; he is reconciled temporarily but, at the last, cannot
accept another man’s child. She goes back to France with her baby.
There are many attractive elements in the film, highest among which is
Leslie Caron’s touching and sometimes fierce performance as the girl. Yet,
paradoxically, her presence in the film is its first weakness. The novel was about
an English girl, but, quite apart from comparison with the original, the character
of this French girl simply is not credible. It is a wry joke in England that French
girls come over to have their babies for free on the National Health Service, but
here is an enchanting French girl who, we are told, comes over to England to have
her first lover! At the age of twenty-seven! The reasons she adduces—parental
primness and so on—ring quite false (which is not to say there are no prim French
parents). Credibility has been strained to accommodate Caron and to provide the
film with a star.
All through the script there is ambivalence. The dialogue swings between
liberally profane zest and soppiness, like the whore’s story of the Yank soldier who
started her off or the old actress’s theatrical-reminiscence corn. The plot swings
between hard straightforwardness and expediency. The black is obviously meant
to have fallen in love with the girl, but this is transmuted to moral disapproval of
her affair; and, toward the end, this important character is allowed to disappear,
to avoid resolving his story. In terms of inner dynamics, the film really finishes
when the girl escapes a miscarriage and the writer, remorseful, is reconciled to
her pregnancy. But a happy ending and moral approbation are not wanted, so the
plot is padded to give the hero time enough to change his mind again.
Forbes’s direction, too, is markedly insecure. Passionate and humorous
passages alternate with stale or stilted effects: the repeated device of having the
girl run happily toward the camera only to be disappointed by something so that
her face falls; silly byplay with a tin of Colman’s Mustard (the writer’s name is
Colman); a trite Christmas celebration out of The Entertainer (film, 1960) and a
dozen other stuffy-parlor parties; a beatnik nightclub sequence so dismally
unoriginal that it even ends with a close-up of a trumpet bell to black out the scene.
For his score, Forbes has used an arrangement of the first Brahms piano concerto,
which is some tons too heavy for the material and comes avalanching in whenever
love or loneliness is mentioned. (Except when a chorus trills “Silent Night” at the
hospital.)
The bad moments in this film are in almost schizoid contrast with the good
scenes, like many of the episodes between the lovers or the meeting of the girl and
her ex-lover. And the chic veneer of sexual frankness does not cover up the cracks.
This oscillation between the true and the trumpery leaves the picture without
point. It starts as the story of a girl determined to have her child, not in expiation
but to fulfill her experience and herself; it ends with her becoming a punching bag
for the hero’s emotional gymnastics and a raisonneuse for the other characters’
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confessions.
As the writer, Tom Bell has incisiveness, humor, and hook-nosed, lean good
looks. He joins Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Alan Bates in the group of
forceful young actors unearthed by the decade’s upheaval in British films. Brock
Peters must be weary of comparison with Sidney Poitier, but he has much of the
latter’s power, although he does not yet have his subtlety. Cicely Courtneidge, the
old musical star, is in unsurprising command of the old musical performer role,
and Emlyn Williams makes a brief, nicely repulsive appearance as a slimy doctor.
Lilith, Robert Rossen, 1964 (The New Republic, 22 August 1964)
After a thirty-year career as screenwriter and director, much of which

showed ambition and some of which showed achievement, Robert Rossen
directed The Hustler (1961), an extraordinarily well-made film. Its faults were
those of the script’s Hemingwayesque imitations—trying to make the pool table a
substitute for the bull or prize ring as a moral arena; but , besides the sheerly
cinematic excellences he gave the picture, Rossen led Paul Newman to one of his
best portrayals, gave George C. Scott his first leg up the ladder from ranting to
controlled, powerful acting, and did such sleight-of-hand with Jackie Gleason that
many people were convinced he had given a performance. Now Rossen has left the
grimy and vernacular where he has spent so much of his career and has,
surprisingly, turned to the poetically suggestive, the delicate and shadowy.
Lilith is an attempt to plunge into a half-world—the floating, distorted
world of the mentally unbalanced—not for the sake of Snake Pit (1948) horrors
but to explore meanings of reality, possibilities of compassion, emotional
vulnerabilities that persist, however the context alters around them. It must be
said at the outset that the film is faulty; but it is much more than head-patting to
commend Rossen for (a) changing his field so completely (quite uncommon
among well-known directors); (b) choosing a field so difficult and interesting; (c)
achieving some success.
With Eugen Schüfftan’s superb soft photography (another instance of
range— Schüfftan did The Hustler in naturalistic tonalities) and with evocative
music by Kenyon Hopkins, the film begins arrestingly, with indications, rather
than the presence, of its eponymous heroine. Vincent, a young war veteran, is
restless and discontent, and thinks he may find satisfaction working in the (rather
elegant) mental santarium near the Maryland town in which he lives. He is taken
on as an attendant and soon meets Lilith, a patient who has made a little universe
of her own music, painting, secrets. The mystery and the risky fascination of the
girl are quickly persuasive. Vincent falls in love with her and—against all rules and
even against specific warning—has an affair with her. He discovers eventually that
she is also having a lesbian affair with another inmate, that she is quite blithe
about sexual conventions, general moralities, other persons—that she is an
emotional glutton, egocentric, and essentially destructive.
Another young inmate, male, is also enamored of Lilith, is hopeful, is at last
spurned, and commits suicide. This act shocks Lilith out of her seeming normality
and reduces her to the wretched state in which we last see her, sitting on the floor,
isolated in her mind, far past Ophelia. The experience has wrecked Vincent, too.
He is about to wander off when he turns suddenly to the doctor and
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superintendent and says, “Help me.” The film freezes (a bow to Truffaut) and ends.
Rossen’s script, which he derived from J. R. Salamanca’s novel, thus has
fascinating materials. Its small echo of Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 gives it roots, rather
than a derivative quality. But despite the film’s excellent texture throughout
dissatisfactions mount on two scores: individual incidents and organic strength.
Examples of the former: Why is there not stricter supervision of Vincent after the
chief doctor suspects his infatuation? Where do the lovers’ meetings take place? If
in the hospital, how are they unobserved? There are arrant movie touches:
Vincent’s scene with the husband of an old girlfriend is trite and would add little
if it weren’t. A scene in which the superintendent looks for him and finds him,
disconsolate, in a bar is as old a touch as the opening shot of that scene, a blonde
at the bar.
In the larger view, events and motives do not flow together cumulatively,
to produce cataclysm. The significance of the lesbian theme is not well developed.
Lilith’s shattering effect on Vincent does not grow, spear by spear. The other man
is not convincingly driven over the edge; and why does his suicide wreck the
arrogant Lilith? The net feeling of the film—which I do not state as fact—is as if it
had come to the editing stage with certain key connective scenes un-shot and with
no chance of shooting them, as if the film were assembled as well as possible out
of the best materials available.
Some of this lack of cumulation is due to Warren Beatty’s performance as
Vincent. It was a good idea to cast the part against type, not with a sensitive plant
like Anthony Perkins. But Beatty has only two facets to his acting technique:
absolute concentration and understatement to the point of omission. Gabin,
Belmondo, and Brando also use these methods and frequently seem to speak
volumes with them. Partly this is because they have stronger personalities than
Beatty, partly it is because this is not all they can do: they have their moments of
fire and outburst that these prevalent quiet moments seem to be containing. Not
Beatty, who is all small-scale intensity in an insufficient voice; so we are never
convinced of the transition in him, that Lilith has roweled his soul inside out.
On the other hand, Jean Seberg, who is also cast against type as Lilith, is
much more successful. The obvious casting would have been, say, Audrey
Hepburn. Seberg’s simple beauty and Midwestern accent give an almost sisterly
cover under which her conscious and unconscious malevolence can work; her
qualities make the mystery all the more mysterious. This is not to imply that she
succeeds only by default. Seberg continues to improve as a film actress and makes
some of her strokes with intelligence and feeling. But the facts of her person are a
contrapuntal advantage to belief in the character.
Special mention must be made of the way Rossen and Schüfftan have
treated Seberg’s remarkably photogenic face. There is one scene in which she
gathers her skirt above her knees, wades into a still lake, and kisses her own
image, which—simply as photography—is as lovely as anything one has a right to
expect in films. For her part, Anne Meacham—the “other” woman—is an actress
in love with her own quivering soul. As the lover, Peter Fonda is, as usual,
unimpressive. Kim Hunter is pleasant as the superintendent.
One may guess that, in Rossen’s venture into a quite new sphere for him,
he became less sure of his dramatic bearings or—which is another way of putting
the same thing—was seduced into thinking that the poetic quality would
compensate for the lack of dramatic cohesion and constant growth. Thus, for all
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the film’s considerable merits, it disappoints.
Lord Jim, Richard Brooks, 1965 (The New Republic, 13 March 1965)
Richard Brooks’s version of Lord Jim raises the question of whether one
likes films, in addition to whether one likes Conrad. Much of the picture is
extraordinarily well made and Peter O’Toole’s performance in the title role is
touched with the poetic; but the revisions, deletions, and additions to the original
have the effect of changing the subject under discussion. I am thinking only of
those who know the book when I say that they may find this film enjoyable as such.
Is the phrase “as such” tenable? The point seems worth exploring when a novel is
an accepted classic and the film that has been derived from it has certain virtues
of its own.
It seems to me hypocritically naïve to go to a film version of such a book
expecting or hoping that no changes at all have been made and being shocked at
discovering otherwise. All of us know that the times when the novel has not been
altered or wrenched out of shape are rare. (David Copperfield? Great Expectations?
Wuthering Heights? It would require a fresh look to make sure.) But beyond sad
experience, there is the fundamental fact that, even in understanding hands,
adaptation cannot mean mere reproduction. To belabor the obvious, there is the
sheer matter of time: a film that included all the dialogue in an average novel
would run perhaps twenty or twenty-five hours. But there is the even more
fundamental fact that a novel exists in its prose; to put it into pictures—to
substitute actual places and persons for places and persons that are meant to be
suggested inside one’s head by Conrad’s words—is to put Conrad largely out of
the question and to make demands on another aesthetic. Even to take the
synopsized plot—intact, without rearrangement—is not really to be faithful: it is
merely to extract a skeleton, which turns to rubber when it is extracted and which
can be hardened into bone again only if the new, cinematic flesh that is put on it is
molded by that new aesthetic.
It is purely academic to argue from the above that adaptation ought not to
be attempted. The history of film is the history of adaptation, usually from novels.
It is true that the best films—with rare exceptions like Pudovkin’s 1926 version of
Gorky’s Mother—are original works or are liberal adaptations from inferior fiction
that could only be improved by adaptation. But the amount of useful original
material written for the screen has never been enough to fill it, and the attraction
of certain novels has been understandably strong. As in this case. (I wonder only
why Lord Jim has been relatively neglected; the one previous version I know of
was made by Victor Fleming in 1925, in the silent days.) Besides, there is the added
value of a famous title. So it is mock heroics to play Canute to the sea of
adaptations.
Still, the paradox remains: one enjoys much in this film at the same time
that one is disconcerted by the changes. But if it is fruitless to complain of changes
as such or of the very practice of adaptation, how can the dissatisfaction be
resolved? (Not merely by staying away if, like me, you often get various kinds of
pleasure along with the dissatisfaction.) One helpful method, when a good or great
book is involved, might be the recognition of a Third Force: neither the original
novel nor an original film. In music there is an ancient tradition of variations on
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other composers’ themes, and no one complains because Brahms and

Rachmaninoff have, each in his own way, been “unfaithful” to Paganini. Robert
Lowell showed in Imitations that a related process is possible in poetry. Not to
equate Brooks with these gentlemen, perhaps the same attitude could apply to this
kind of film. In the most rigorously artistic view, the film has demands to be filled
in faithfulness to itself; it needs to be as self-centered as any other art. Anything
else leads to adaptations petrified with reverence (the 1960 film of Sons and
Lovers, for example). There seems to me a place for “variation” films: to be judged
by standards analogous to variations in music and poetry. Has the adapter
exploited the original material satisfactorily? Does he justify his alterations?
One obvious objection to this approach is that Brahms’s variations are in
the same medium and are not intended to produce the same effect as the original
work; Brooks’s variations, in a different medium, are so intended. But unless we
are going to dismiss automatically as rape every film of every worthy novel, then
we need some way of appreciating them as what they are: since they cannot, in the
nature of the case, be the novels themselves. The work of the adapter, judged as
possible contribution rather than being arbitrarily dismissed as vandalism, seems
one viable approach. Let us shelve the literary purist view that the film’s success
must be judged by degree of fidelity, and instead judge whether the changes help
the film, as film, to arrive at the same general effect; further, whether the changes
show virtuosity in the new medium and thus actually add artistic values that were
not possible in the first medium. (This, of course, in addition to those original
elements that are retained and simply translated.)
By these standards, then, some of the changes in the script of Lord Jim are
understandable: the untangling of the time-skein, for instance. But many are
incomprehensible. Why, for instance, is the ship Patna in the midst of a storm
when she strikes the obstacle? Surely it is less pictorially trite and dramatically
much more conducive to Jim’s later shame if, as in Conrad, the officers panic before
the squall breaks. A large addition in the script is more understandable but less
excusable: a character called The General has been invented, a dictator who
tyrannizes the fictional country of Patusan and against whom Jim leads a
revolution. I would guess that this whole episode is the producers’ back-
formation. They realized that the film would have to be shot partially on some
Oriental location (Cambodia, as it turned out) as well as in studios; that to follow
the synopsized Conrad story, as is, would give them a film of perhaps 100 or 110
minutes; that they needed a longer picture to justify the high prices they would
have to charge even if it were shorter. Therefore they had to put in more story;
and Brooks has supplied an extensive action-packed episode, with heavy
implications about the People and Freedom. The General himself is one more try
at the new-style philosophizing torturer, two of whose better incarnations are in
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Bridget Boland’s The Prisoner. Eli Wallach
plays him equally derivatively, with no suggestion of the necessary force.
Other changes—regrettable even by “variation” standards—are too many
to detail, but two must be noted. By building the General (out of the character of
Sherif Ali from Lawrence of Arabia 1962?), Brooks has diminished Doramin, thus
making Jim’s last action less inevitable. Second, the pervasive tone of the script
misses the important Conradian irony. It is all written as straight tragedy of
honor—neo-Elizabethan style—without the ambience of the modern view that
Conrad uses to keep his fiction from being stiffly absolutist. As a “variation” film,
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then, Lord Jim shows expansion without inner justification; change of key to its
detriment; italicizing of theme to disproportion. What John Osborne’s script for
Tom Jones (1963) is supposed by some (not by me) to have accomplished, will
hardly be claimed for Brooks’s script here. It is different but not equal.
But Brooks also directed, much more successfully than he adapted; and it
is in this area that the cinematic values, as such, begin to appear. The montage
section of Jim’s marine training is swiftly and engagingly done, and the battles are
clear, spacious, convincing. Some scenes that depart from Conrad—like Jim’s last
moments—are in themselves good film episodes. Of course Brooks had the help
of one of the best film editors, Alan Osbiston. Otto Preminger wrote recently that
critics overestimate the editor’s contribution. Perhaps so. I note, however, that
this is by far the best direction that Brooks has done and that J. Lee Thompson—
whose taut Guns of Navarone (1961) was made with Osbiston’s help—has not
made a bearable film since he changed editors. As for cinematography, Brooks had
the asset of Freddie Young, the superb cinematographer of David Lean’s Lawrence
of Arabia.
In the large cast Paul Lukas, as Stein, is outstanding. He has lost none of his
magic power to move us. Daliah Lavi, as Jewel, is also outstanding because she is
so bad. She is duskily lovely, but when she opens her mouth, she becomes a lump.
And there is O’Toole as Jim. His work is the premier example in this picture of the
benefits that a “variation” film can add. Obviously, the character is, as written here,
a simplified version, without much of the original’s humor or conscious self-
dramatization. But the Conradian quintessence is there, a man torn in an agony
that would not bother all men, although many might wish that they were capable
of it. Peter O’Toole’s person, voice, and performance heighten this romantic truth,
making a somewhat different character from the original, but a fascinating and
affecting one.
There are certainly resemblances between O’Toole’s Jim and his T. E.
Lawrence; but besides the fact that his King in Becket (1964) showed that he is not
limited to this kind of part, there are subtle and lovely differences in Jim: the sheer
sunny happiness of the early scenes, the hushed shock at discovering what he is
capable of doing. (Much of the later portion is played in daring gradations of
piano.) His last glance at the sky before he dies is that of the man who “goes away
from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of
conduct.” All in all, this variation on the character of Conrad’s Jim—simplified by
Brooks but enriched by O’Toole—is as good a justification as this whole matter of
adaptation is likely to get.
Justine, George Cukor, 1969 (The New Republic, 30 August 1969)
Justine is a Pandro S. Berman production in Panavision, color, and trouble.

Berman, who has been producing for over thirty years, has turned out several
good entertainments, like some Astaire musicals; but he is subject to attacks of
“quality” ambition, like (if they may be joined) The Brothers Karamazov (1958)
and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). Others were involved first; still, he was probably
predestined to try to make a film of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
Berman’s first choice for director was Joseph Strick, possibly because Strick had
just “licked” (in 1967) another long novel, Ulysses. But Strick-licking turned out to
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be unsatisfactory and he was replaced by George Cukor. The Durrell work is much
involved with femininity, explicit and atmospheric; Cukor, rightly or superficially,
has the name of being a “woman’s director.” Together Berman and Cukor, with the
scriptwriting of Lawrence B. Marcus, have licked Durrell, to a frazzle.
It couldn’t have been otherwise. Durrell’s tetralogy is, for me, a first-class
second-class work of literature, gorgeous, witty, and flattering: it takes us into a
universe of exoticism and sexual acceptances and ambiguities in a way that
amuses us and moves us without really enlarging us, and it makes us feel terribly
worldly just for having made the literary trip. Alone, those factors would have
been assets for filming, but what makes the film transposition impossible is
Durrell’s chief defect. The longer the quartet goes on, the clearer it becomes, and
the less interesting. What has been presented as character contradiction and
exploration becomes just the deviousness of a well-fleshed spy story. Marcel
Proust (so to speak) becomes Eric Ambler. Plus a big disadvantage for movies:
Ambler can be filmed because from Word One he exists as Ambler, but to condense
Durrell’s four novels reduces them even from their own reductive process. They
become,   in film-script form, one long series of   explanations. (With frantic
attempts to touch as many bases as possible; there is even a fast reference to
Cavafy, the poet of Alexandria who is so important to Durrell.)
Leon Shamroy, the cinematographer, began in films with Robert Flaherty
and is a man of greater resource than he is usually allowed to show. The best
elements in this film are visual: the exteriors (shot in Tunis) and some of the 
thick-draperied interiors, which made me feel as if my mouth were full of Turkish
coffee. But even visually there are defects. Look at the scene in which Darley
accompanies Justine to the beach and she frolics in the waves; then note, when we
move to a close-up of them lying on the sand, how the light changes in the studio
insert.
Anouk Aimée is Justine, which seems ideal casting. It would be if she had a
part to play, but her role is a series of tenuously connected fragments. All she is
able to do is to merchandise Aimée beauty and sexiness and sophisticated
tenderness. She is not an actress of great depth or range, but she is certainly more
than a personality. (Remember her portrayal of the wife in 8½ 1963.) Without
the compass points of a character, an actress can only paddle around in the circle
of herself, as producers and directors trade on what she has established in fuller
roles in the past. This is what has already happened to Jeanne Moreau, whose
appearances have become a kind of medley of “And then I played. . . .” I hope it will
not happen to Aimée.
In that recurrent character of the young British schoolmaster in a strange
environment, Michael York is merely British. Dirk Bogarde has an easy time of it
with a dilution of the caustic Pursewarden. Anna Karina, the Melissa, does not gain
in subtlety or credibility or physical appeal. Severn Dearden manages to get a little
flavor into the capsule version of Balthasar. The rest are bland or worse.
This is Cukor’s first film since he trudged through My Fair Lady (1964), and,
at its best, it is competent. If Cukor had remained in the theater, where he started,
he would presumably by now be considered a veteran competent director of
“heart” comedies and lightweight dramas, capable of staging adequate
productions of plays like The Philadelphia Story (of which he made the 1940
movie). Instead he went into films, where the equivalent quality of work has made
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him, for some, a minor idol. Films are permanent, can be pored over, subjected to
the aggrandizements of sentimental familiarity, and can be made to satisfy the
hungers of those who feel an imperative to find serious merit in entertainment
pictures.
Not all entertainment pictures, of course; that would spoil their constructs
of discrimination. But in the Higher Philistinism, which, complexly articulated, is
one aspect of the auteur theory in films, Cukor is hailed as having displayed superb
style in his long string of fabricated commercial entertainments. One auteur critic
has called Cukor a “genuine artist.” I wonder, for instance, about both Cukor’s
genuineness and artistry in the sequence from Justine where Bogarde walks away
from us past a huge bush in a garden. The incident is selected and photographed
so that, with the memory of five thousand similar stereotyped moments behind
us, we know he is going to be surprised by someone on the other side of the bush.
Or the scene in which York climbs the dome of his schoolbuilding, an incident
patently contrived so that he will surely be discovered up there by someone who
is going to enter soon. The list could easily be lengthened, and does not persuade
me about Cukor’s “genuine artistry.”
Ludwig, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1972 (The New Republic, 23 August 1980)
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler (1977), though seven hours long, is

only the third part of what Syberberg considers a trilogy. The first part is Ludwig,
subtitled Requiem for a Virgin King, made in 1972 at a mere two hours and twenty
minutes. Ludwig is now released in this country by the same firm that distributes
the other film, American Zoetrope, and has had its American premiere in the film
series at the Public Theater in New York.
Those who saw, or only read about, the Hitler film have some idea of the
method in Ludwig. Seen second, it appears not so much a first part as a rough draft:
in method and, to some degree, in handling of the themes. Ludwig II of Bavaria
(1846-86), theatrically mad and madly theatrical though he was, doesn’t remotely
match Adolf in interest. His grandeurs and miseries, his loves and lonelinesses and
lunacies, strike Syberberg—and some others—as signifiers of the “German soul,”
even as predictions of Nazism. Luchino Visconti had some such idea in his film
Ludwig (1972), a relatively traditional narrative, gorgeous but garbled. In both
versions, the historical resonance is muted for non-Germans, though, of the two,
Syberberg treats it more openly.
His Ludwig is drenched with Wagner. The opening scene is a parody of the
opening of Das Rheingold, with a child Ludwig as Alberich. Later there’s a scene in
which Ludwig—played by Harry Baer, who did much sitting at desks in Our
Hitler—sits at a desk while we hear the entire “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde.
There are also huge chunks of Die Götterdämmerung, Lohengrin, and more. In Our
  Hitler the proliferation of Wagner was   complementary, but here Syberberg
seems to be leaning on Wagner, asking the music to do much of his work for him.
A director of his gifts couldn’t make a film without some excellent images.
My favorite is a shot of Ludwig sitting in his palace, nude women on either side of
him holding torches, snow falling in front of him; behind him is a rear-projection
film of modern tourists being shown through that palace. Anachronisms are
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frequent: further instances are soundtrack snippets of American radio shows—

“Superman” and “The Shadow” and “The Lone Ranger.” The only point I can see in
them is facile: contrast between past luxe and mass-cult today. Or possibly,
because these programs were presumably available on Armed Forces Radio in
Germany, those snippets are reminders of the war and the defeat that Hitler (for
Syberberg, a scion of Ludwig) brought on Germany.
One recurrent stylistic convention that differs from Our Hitler is the use of
the patent sound-stages in the other film. Well, in Our Hitler Adolf is called the
greatest filmmaker in the world, so the sound-stage device applies. In Ludwig the
theater scenery crystallizes the theatricality of Ludwig’s life and the
“performance” of his life, his passion for the theater, his devotion to Wagner.
Through the rhapsody of free-form scenes—involving Bismarck, Wagner,
Lola Montès, and many more—two themes pervade. First, the German self-image
as romantic poisoning, which means poisoning both of and by romanticism.
Second, Syberberg’s torment at the fate of being German, of sharing that
inheritance, along with his tormented pride at sharing it. But these themes are
much more fulfilled in the later, longer film.
A final puzzler. The closing title is Requiescat in Pace. Why? I suppose we
all wish a peaceful rest to most people, but after what has been shown here about
antecedent curse, why a closing note of compassion?
The intervening film, No. 2 in the trilogy, is Karl May (1974), about the
German writer of Western novels who is still very popular in the German-speaking
world and was loved by Hitler. Despite reservations about the above, I hope No. 2
gets released in the U.S. At whatever level, Syberberg is too good to go unseen.
We All Loved Each Other So Much, Ettore Scola, 1974 (The New Republic, 18
June 1977)
The worship of lost innocence is not an American monopoly. The Italian

male loves to weep about his past purity, too, but in this case, at least, he’s more
entertaining about it. Ettore Scola, a director and screenwriter whose work has
been coming to the U.S. sporadically for the last dozen or so years (as screenwriter,
High Infidelity 1964 and Il Sorpasso The Easy Life, 1962), is the co-author and
director of We All Loved Each Other So Much. It has some resemblance to last year’s
French film Vincent, François, Paul, and the Others (1974), so apparently male
teariness about lost male innocence is international.
But there’s some fun in it here. Three Italians were partisans together in
the Second World War. The story virtually begins there, in black and white, after
a brief present-tense introduction in color. The three go their ways, re-meeting
from time to time by accident, the film of their lives progressing into color as it
gets closer to the present. Nino Manfredi becomes a hospital orderly and remains
one. Vittorio Gassman becomes a lawyer and marries the daughter of a rich
building contractor. Stefano Satta Flores becomes a professor but is so inebriated
with love for film that he gets into a fight, loses his job, has to leave his wife and
child in the north, has to go to Rome and become a film critic. (Eheu “Oh dear”,
as older Romans used to say.) The three men are linked by their common past, of
course, the high days when they were at their noblest, but they are also linked by
a beautiful girl/woman, Stefania Sandrelli, whom Manfredi meets first, who gets
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involved with the other two in time, but who ends up with Manfredi.
The point that is blazoned at the end— this postwar generation was a
failure— is not remotely made in the film. This generation is no worse, no more or
less responsible, than any other; the sighing moral is tacked on finally to give
retroactive weight to a picture that is only a series of comic and sentimental
episodes, some better than others. Scola uses clever devices. Early in the story
Sandrelli, a would-be actress, takes Manfredi to a performance of O’Neill’s Strange
Interlude, and the production’s gimmick for internal revelation—a spotlight on the
character who thinks aloud while the others “freeze” in the dark—is used
frequently in the film thereafter for fair comic effect. Satta Flores’ passion for films
allows Scola to interweave a strand of contemporary Italian cinema history. De
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) figures in the professor’s own fate, and Scola goes on
from this to use the shooting of the Fontana di Trevi scene in La Dolce Vita (1960)
as a means of reuniting Manfredi and Sandrelli, who is an extra. (Fellini and
Mastroianni appear briefly, revisiting their own pasts.) Antonioni’s L’Eclisse
(Eclipse, 1962) touches the life of Gassman’s rich wife.
It’s a ragbag picture, thriving or not as it goes along by the appeal of each
episode, and many of them are appealing. All the performances are good enough,
though Manfredi will always be for me the actor they use when they can’t get Ugo
Tognazzi or Alberto Sordi; and though Aldo Fabrizi, the rich contractor, has
become a bloated-toad grotesque of the man who played the priest in Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City (1945). The picture is out to sell some stock-in-trade Italian
charm and the facile rue of life seen against the glow of lost purity. It does.
Max Havelaar, Fons Rademakers, 1976 (The New Republic, 3 February 1979)
Question: What nineteenth-century Dutch novel was published in the

United States in 1927 with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence? And also,
reportedly, was described by Freud as one of the ten most outstanding works of
world literature? Answer: I didn’t know, either, until a film of the novel came along
from Holland. Max Havelaar, published in Amsterdam in 1860, was written by
Eduard Douwes Dekker under the pen name Multatuli, which, says Lawrence, is
Latin for “suffered much.” The book deals with Dutch rule in Indonesia and cruelty
to Indonesians. It caused a furor and led, says Lawrence, to some betterment of
conditions. But he emphasizes that the oppression was in fact carried out by native
princes and existed long before the Dutch arrived to profit by it. That is one
difference in the book from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with which it has be compared.
For decades Max Havelaar was the only Dutch novel of any world
reputation, and in recent decades it lost even that distinction. In 1976 it was filmed
by Fons Rademakers, who is himself, in a way, like the novel: he’s the only Dutch
filmmaker with any world reputation. (In fiction films. In documentaries there are
Bert Haanstra and Joris Ivens.) Nonetheless, his work has hardly been seen in the
U.S. He was born in 1920, studied acting at home and in Paris, still acts
occasionally, but went into directing and was an assistant to Renoir, Fellini, De
Sica, David Lean, and Jacques Becker. In Holland he made seven features before
Max Havelaar, one of which (The Village on the River) was nominated for an Oscar
in 1958 as Best Foreign Film.
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Thus Rademakers is a mature director of long experience. You would know

this, anyway, from the first few minutes of Max Havelaar. You would know that
you are in the hands of an unostentatiously competent, impassioned director: a
man who knows what he is doing and does it reticently, yet with an enthusiasm
that keeps what you see very much more than merely well-turned. As with Renoir,
his intimate moments are composed to make the most of them humanely, not
prettily; as with Lean, his large-scale action has dash but also intelligence.
The film’s prime achievement is that it runs two hours and forty-five
minutes and is never boring. That negative compliment is, of course, made up of
positives. The cinematography by Jan de Bont is exquisite: the colors show
Indonesia as seductive as we want it to be without mushiness. The editing by Peter
Bergema is alert (except for some shots that linger a moment after the action is
finished—only a few frames make a difference). The film has dissatisfactions, but
none of them has to do with the filming.
The story begins in Amsterdam in the 1850s, with Havelaar, impoverished,
trying to interest a rich merchant in subsidizing publication of the manuscripts of
his adventures. The merchant begins to read, and we flash back. Havelaar is a
minor government official on Celebes who, after some success there, is assigned
an assistant residency in a remote outpost on Java. He sails with his wife and small
son. We have already seen that his predecessor on Java was poisoned by the native
Regent for interference and that the murder was covered up with a false medical
report; so we know what Havelaar is getting into. He gets into it. He tries to change
the crooked system, not with blind heroics but with some understanding of
custom. Still he fails; is assigned to a lesser post; resigns. Interwoven with this is
the story of two very young Javanese lovers—played by two beautiful young
people—whose lives end tragically in a rebellion.
Lawrence says that Dekker’s novel is a satire. Not much satire in the film,
except for the rather emphatic last sequence in which the camera pans slowly over
Amsterdam burghers in church, singing a hymn of Christian love after we have just
seen what their prosperity is built on. Other than that, the film is straightforward
epic narrative. In fact, that’s the film’s chief drawback: its linear quality. Since I
haven’t read the book, I can’t say whether Gerard Soeteman’s screenplay is
reductive, but the characters are painted a primary color at the beginning, and
they never vary or deepen. Havelaar is high-minded and high-spirited: he dives
into the shark-infested sea to save his boy’s dog; he fights a duel to protect a native
woman, then embraces the man whom he has wounded; he wins the hearts of all
who are winnable; he never makes an error in judgment, only in expediency. His
wife is unfailingly loyal. The young lovers are unfailingly idyllic. From the aspect
of further dimensions in character or in any of the complex themes involved, the
film does nothing. It moves through strophes that are made familiar very early.
But—not a negligible but—it moves through them very well. Rademakers
directs with such vigor, such clarity, such compassion that, even though we soon
realize more or less what we are going to see, we want to see it. Part of the appeal
is sheer travelogue, but Rademakers integrates the exquisite Javanese
landscapes—to show us why Havelaar loves this country and these people, why
its ambiguities are going to defeat him. Rademakers’ eye for motion is precise and
comprehending, whether it’s a carriage struggling along a dirt track with its escort
or Havelaar embracing his wife. When the young lovers are pursued by killers
through a  forest, it’s a real chase (a reminder of Kurosawa), not some trite footage
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to be endured until that portion of the plot is fulfilled. Gentle details are handled
gently: a boy with a flute; a tea party. If this film doesn’t confirm Rademakers as a
unique stylist, it gives us exceptionally enjoyable craft. (And a little late in
Rademakers’ day, too.)
A large part of his craft is his ability to cast and direct actors. His main
choice brings us another belated discovery, Peter Faber, who plays Max. Faber 
fills—I mean fills—the role. He swings into it as surely as he does, often, onto
horses. He looks a bit like Max von Sydow, and, though the character doesn’t give
him the chance for the depths that von Sydow has shown, Faber has presence and
power, the ease and sense of address that come from experience. Whatever
Rademakers’ abilities, the picture would sag without Faber.
Are the Javanese players professionals? There’s a Malaysian film industry,
and I’ve read of filming in Indonesia as well. Professional or not, every one of them
is good, adroitly responsive to Rademakers—particularly Minih bin Misan as the
father of the boy.
Mention of von Sydow reminds me of Jan Troell’s The Emigrants (1971)
and The New Land (1972), based on novels by Vilhelm Moberg. Max Havelaar is
the best (roughly)   comparable film I’ve seen since: a film   novel, with equal
emphasis on both words. Troell’s films are better, with more complex characters,
a greater sense of growth, greater directorial sophistication. But, like them, Max
 Havelaar too makes a world and encloses us in it, making us feel released into
new space at the same time that we are being enclosed. Anyway, if it did nothing
more than, belatedly, introduce Rademakers and Faber, it would be very welcome.
Le Crabe tambour, Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1977 (The New Republic, 12 March

1984)
The title, Le Crabe tambour, is wretched even after it’s explained. The
protagonist’s father called his children little crabs, and this son he called the
drummer crab because the boy used to beat his chest at table when he was hungry.
This is completely irrelevant to the film. It’s not even misleading: it doesn’t lead
anywhere.
A pity because the film is generally strong and insistent, is always visually
superb, and is ethically stubborn. The subject is military honor, the codes that men
have evolved through history in war and in the sustenance of martial behavior. In
the long view, we can see that these codes have about as much philosophic weight
as epaulettes and medals; in shorter view, taking the world as it is, we can see that
military codes do for some what organized religions do for many: they provide
believers with a means of conducting their lives and deaths.
Le Crabe tambour was written by the French filmmaker Pierre
Schoendoerffer from his novel of that name, which (we’re told) was based on the
life of a man who is still living. Schoendoerffer had long firsthand experience of
the French war in Vietnam during the early 1950s and returned in 1967 to make
a documentary called The Anderson Platoon, about the U.S. war there. Much of his
new film takes place during that earlier, French war; parts of it go to Algeria and
other places involving French arms and naval vessels.
The “present” of the film is aboard a destroyer heading west across the
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Atlantic to tend some French trawlers off Newfoundland. A story about a man
nicknamed the Drummer Crab is recounted idly on the bridge, and this starts a
story about the same man that involves the destroyer’s captain. The film keeps
returning to this ship and a “present” narrative, but that narrative is filled out by
a series of substantial flashbacks centering on the Drummer Crab, whose name
was Willsdorff. He was a French naval officer (Alsatian evidently) whom we first
see patrolling the Mekong River on a gunboat, easy, amused, gallant, a sort of
reticent latter-day D’Artagnan figuratively conducting his own war in Vietnam;
and he continued in Algeria, where he fought on behalf of the French colonials and
opposed de Gaulle’s settlement. He is shown to be the stuff of legends.
Willsdorff served a five-year prison term for his Algerian activities, after
which—something like T. E. Lawrence in this regard—he opted for obscurity and
is now captain of one of those trawlers off Canada. The destroyer’s captain had
once promised Willsdorff to resign his commission along with the other man in
certain circumstances. The captain reneged and is making this voyage as a
penance.
With its weavings through different planes of the past, the film provides a
view of colonial disintegration through the eyes of men who had been trained to
defend the empire and who had committed themselves. This is not today a widely
popular belief; nonetheless these men felt betrayed by their country’s government
after putting their lives on the line, and keeping them there, to protect that
country’s interests. (I thought of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, an alpine comparison
yet relevant because its protagonist holds views that don’t elicit much sympathy
from contemporary audiences.)
Le Crabe tambour has the force of understandable, if unshared, pride, and
its impact would be even stronger if the two principal roles were more aptly cast.
Jacques Perrin is merely credible as Willsdorff; he has no overtones, no conviction
of belonging to a secret society of aristocrats, like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of
Arabia (1962). Jean Rochefort, usually an excellent actor, is miscast as the
destroyer captain; it’s an outline of a performance waiting for the appropriate
colors. But the film never sags or wavers, and its harmonics of violent action and
inner quandaries merit the term used in the publicity: Conradian.
Schoendoerffer has a keen sense of texture and pace, and he is also keen
enough to make the most of Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer. Coutard has
been busy since 1959, when he began his long association with Godard and
Truffaut, among others. (I recently saw again Godard’s A Married Woman, from
1964, which owes as much to Coutard as does this film.) In 1970 he made a
documentary of his own about Vietnam, Hoa-Binh. His work in Le Crabe tambour
confirms his place in the company of such men as Kazuo Miyagawa, Sven Nykvist,
and Nestor Almendros. Coutard’s Mekong River and African desert and Breton
churchyards are breathtaking, but it is with the Atlantic itself that he triumphs. He
makes the sea a monster, snarling and clawing at the destroyer or enticing it with
deceptive steely calm. He transmutes the bow of the destroyer into the protagonist
of an epic, slashing through waves higher than the ship, slicing ice floes into
disappearing sculptures. He makes us remember how ships figure in the epics of
the ancients. Yet the film never slacks into a gallery of pictures: always the angle
and the light and the movement aid the moment. One shot in particular I expect
not to forget—a daytime scene of thick fog, through which the destroyer
materializes, its lights burning.
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Le Crabe tambour was made in 1977 and, at this writing, is scheduled for
only a one-week showing at the Public Theater in New York. This is ridiculous. All
those who can respond to this film will, I trust, get the chance to see it.
The very limited engagement (at present) of Le Crabe tambour raises again
a recurring question: Why review films that may not get widespread theatrical
distribution? Some answers.
First, those who are specifically interested in films are interested in
evaluations of what is happening in the art. This interest is not in direct ratio to
availability—which is also true of course with other arts. Every national journal
that reviews theater or musical performance knows that no more than a tiny
percentage of its readers will see or hear the work discussed. Those journals
assume an interest wider than the possibilities of attendance.
Second, with film, availability can be changed. Certain local theaters may
be persuaded to book a film; and many films not widely distributed otherwise are
eventually available for rental in 16mm. A sizable number of films are thus
available that were never shown theatrically. (Not many foreign films make it as
yet to cassettes.) Individuals, teachers and students, private and public film
societies want to know about new films.
Third, and possibly most important, a point that has nothing to do with
specific interest in the field: film is a subject. Apparently, people who like to read
like to read about film. None of us is able to attend a tenth of all the concerts and
exhibits and dance events that we read about; still we benefit from much of what
we read about them. Those who do the writing rely on a hope that I reciprocally
share.
In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978 (The New

Republic, 5 & 12 July 1980)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder cascades on. He made his first feature film in
1965, and I’ve seen fourteen pictures that he’s made since then, which means that
I’ve missed twenty-one. By far the best of the fourteen were Jail Bait (1973) and
Effi Briest (1974), both of which were adaptations—the first from a play by the
contemporary Franz Xaver Kroetz, the second from Fontane’s famous nineteenth-
century novel. But no Law of Fassbinder can be inferred from this. A Fassbinder
adaptation can be tedious (Despair, in 1978, from Nabokov); an original script of
his can be engrossing (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, from 1974); he can direct beautifully
a script by others that chews less than it bites off (The Marriage of Maria Braun,
from 1979). A new Fassbinder film is, or can be, a new combination of experiences.
The only films he makes that are nearly predictable in quality are those on
homosexuality. Fassbinder himself is openly homosexual and thus has more than
a caseworker’s interest in the subject, but the results so far have been weak:
vapidly sentimental (Fox and His Friends, in 1975, with Fassbinder as a
homosexual youth misused by rich men) or vacuously pretentious (The Bitter
Tears of Petra von Kant, from 1972, in which a trite lesbian drama was suffocated
in aesthetic velour).
His latest film to be released in the United States (not his most recent)
keeps the weakness going. In a Year of Thirteen Moons is about a male homosexual
after a transsexual operation who now lives as a woman: Erwin, who has an ex-
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wife and a daughter, has become Elvira and lives with a man. The title refers to the
fact that every seven years there’s a year with thirteen moons, and we’re told that
such a year is dangerous for people primarily influenced by their emotions. But
how many people aren’t? Besides, there’s no reason to think that Elvira was more
stable in other years.
Maybe, after all, there is a Law of   Fassbinder: when he treats
homosexuality, his closeness to the subject damages him, instead of giving him 
special power. And this apparently   applies also to transsexuality, which is  
surgical confirmation of an attraction to what was originally one’s own sex. Once
 again, in Thirteen Moons, Fassbinder loses his humor, his slash against the explicit
and drippy (how astringent The Marriage of Maria Braun was in this regard), his
ability to carry his subject past data into metaphor.
Elvira’s sufferings, in Frankfurt today, are burdened with both excess and 
insufficiency. First, as in the worst Tennessee Williams, what is called anguish of
the soul is really just frustrated orgasm-hunting. I’m not knocking orgasms: quite
the opposite. I’m deploring the residual puritanism that insists on poeticizing
horniness. An orgasm is not much of a cure for true loneliness; both sex and the
soul are debased by this Williams-Fassbinder lexicon. If there were even some hint
that Fassbinder was consciously dealing with people who must aggrandize their
needs with rhetoric, the film would be better. But there’s no sense of this:
Fassbinder’s view seems to be Elvira’s. A dingy sensual life is asked to serve as a
moral arena—and fails.
In his weakened condition—weak in his discriminations—Fassbinder
lowers his guard against the clichéd and the ridiculous. Is there a more facile film
cliché than a sequence in a slaughterhouse to epitomize the disregarded horrors
of everyday life? As for the ridiculous: a female prostitute friend, Zora, takes Elvira
to a spiritual counselor; and there in a small room,  while his boyfriend does
muscle-building exercises, the counselor prattles loonily to Elvira, who is weeping
copiously, as Zora examines her breasts in a mirror. (A cozy domestic interior that
S. J. Perelman might have loved.) Or: Elvira, spending the night on the floor of a
luxe office, listens and watches sympathetically as a black man comes in,
discourses a while, then hangs himself. Or: Elvira herself commits suicide on a bed
next to which Zora and a man are sprawled on the floor.
The intent of the story, which I won’t synopsize, is presumably to extend
and deepen our communions, but in spite of Volker Spengler’s good performance
as Elvira, it doesn’t happen. Just the reverse: the underlying fault of Thirteen Moons
is its narrowness, its parochialism. The Marriage of Maria Braun, for all its
postmodernist high-handedness, moved to make its protagonist’s life a symbol of
West Germany. In a Year of Thirteen Moons stays where it starts, a gallery of
eccentrics whose talk and behavior are narcissistic, deluded, essentially petty.
Compare this film and Fassbinder’s other homosexual films with the great
postwar works of art on homosexuality, Genet’s novels. Of The Thief’s Journal, one
of those novels, Sartre wrote:
. . . behind the first-degree myths . . . we discover the reflective myths. . . . If

you are able to see at the seam the thin line separating the enveloping myth
from the enveloped myth, you will discover the truth, which is terrifying.
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In Thirteen Moons nothing remotely like that happens. It never rises far above the
lachrymose and faintly ridiculous; and it’s very long.
But there’s one important point to note. Fassbinder not only directed,
which of course he always does; not only wrote the script, which he often does;
not only did the art direction, which he sometimes does; he also did the
cinematography, which to my knowledge he’s never done before. It’s fine. He’s
prodigious, all right. We won’t have to wait long for further proof of it.
Theme, Gleb Panfilov, 1979 (The New Republic, 26 October 1987)
Glasnost touches the film world with the arrival of Theme, a Soviet film
made in 1979 and shown in the USSR only in 1986. Now that we can see it here in
the U.S., the immediate question is not why it was suppressed under the old Soviet
dispensation but how it ever got made. The protagonist is a playwright, fifty-four
years old, greatly successful in his younger years, idolized by many, especially the
young, who is now in that time of middle middle-age when he feels sterile and
ashamed. His past seems footling, his future empty. This of course is not a new
subject, whether the protagonist is an artist, as in Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960),
or a man (or men) of business, as in numerous Italian and French films—Scola’s
We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974), for instance. But Theme puts the subject
in an extraordinary context. This Soviet playwright has begun to think bitterly of
his former subservience to state approval; and he comes into contact obliquely
with a young writer, presumably Jewish, who means to emigrate for freedom of
expression.
Near incredibly, this film was permitted to be made. After six years’
hibernation, it was liberated, has arrived, is welcome. The screenplay, a
collaboration between the director, Gleb Panfilov, and Alexander Chernivsky, tells
of a visit to a small provincial town by the playwright, Kim Yesenin, with his friend
and former war comrade, a novelist named Igor, and Kim’s blond companion,
Svetlana. (She very soon returns to Moscow, where they all live, when
developments show her that she is in the way.)
They are to stay with an elderly woman friend of Igor’s, but when they
arrive at the house, Kim lets the others out and, restless, goes for a drive. He
stumbles on a small museum that has an exhibit about a local poet. Inside he sees
a lovely woman in her thirties guiding a group of French tourists. Kim, typically of
the menopausal male, is sexually avid, especially because his name apparently has
an aphrodisiac effect on women, and is interested.
He makes no move, but that night, the woman, Sasha, appears at their
hostess’s home for dinner. In the course of the evening, she delivers, with
gentleness, some home truths to Kim about himself. He says he is glad to hear the
truth, but we know the temper of that gladness. Next day, after a note from Sasha,
he meets her in a graveyard, expecting that this is the prelude to an affair. It is not:
she only wanted to show him the grave of the local poet and some epitaphs he had
written. She leaves him suddenly. He learns her address, goes to her apartment,
finds the door open, and is snooping around when she returns with a man. Those
two halt in the doorway, while Kim skulks behind the refrigerator in the kitchen.
A long, hot, love-hate scene follows between the pair in the doorway,
during which Kim is filled with curiosity and the fear of discovery. The man is
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leaving the country—apparently for Israel—and implores Sasha to leave with him.
She refuses; he tears himself away; she faints. Kim comes out of the kitchen, steps
over her—a sourly funny moment—and escapes unseen. He gets into his car,
intending to drive straight back to Moscow. He changes his mind; and a few other
events conclude the film.
I’ve detailed the story because there’s so little to it. But the simple structure
is thoroughly enriched with character portrayal, with reflection. Throughout,
we’re given a double awareness: we see and hear what everyone in the scene sees
and hears, and we also hear Kim’s thoughts, on the soundtrack. Thus, while flattery
and non-flattery are winged at him, we hear him in his invisible tower
commenting on his isolation and wry despair. The six or seven major scenes are
handled in theater-film style. That is, although Panfilov uses varied angles and
reverse shots at different distances, the cinematics are minimal: the scenes are
conceived like scenes in a play, meant to develop the drama by what is said.
Because of the material, the actors, and Panfilov’s delicacy, the film is never static.
It grips.
Delicacy is not common in modern Soviet directing, but from the first
sequence Panfilov shows it. His style is light but firm, refreshing in its spareness.
In that sequence a car is traveling along a lonely road through a flat, snowy
landscape. Inside are Kim and Igor and Svetlana. The two men squabble about the
music on the radio. In a very long shot, we see the car stop; one man gets out and
starts to walk away, the other man follows and persuades him to return to the car.
All the while we hear their voices up close. The contrast between the immensity
of the beautiful, stark landscape and the tiny, bickering figures is comic; but the
shot also comments on the hugeness of Mother Russia, about which they have
been talking in the car, and her almost cruel patience with her children,
Panfilov’s chief stylistic predilections are long shots of that kind and scenes
set in enclosed spaces, viewed through archways and doorways. The passionate
love scene and quarrel between Sasha and her lover is seen for the most part as
Kim would have seen it, spying from the kitchen—a narrow corridor of light in the
dark apartment at the end of which two people are locked in one of the most
important encounters of their lives. The composition seems to exert pressure on
what is happening within it. And in the exterior shots, with Leonid Kalashnikov’s
camera, Panfilov conveys what is both awesome and lovely about the Russian
winter.
The two leading actors are excellent. Sasha is played by Inna Churikova,
who is Panfilov’s wife and has made six films with him. She suggests a tulip—a
long neck with a round head. Her face, not conventionally pretty, is open yet
dignified. We’re told that she is a big Soviet star, which is easy to believe. We’re
told the same about Mikhail Ulyanov, the Kim, and it’s equally easy to believe. He
looks like a craggier Richard Burton, and he has Burton’s ability to speak with
silence and with his voice—his voice itself, as distinct from the words he is
uttering. A young traffic policeman, who is used politely as a comic foil, is well
done by Sergei Nikonenko. Stanislav Lyubshin gives fire and pain to the emigré
lover.
The ending of the film is a mirror of the protagonist’s dilemma. It is the
ending that Kim might have written for one of his plays, trying to tie up neatly the
complications of some lives. Panfilov doesn’t retract the playwright’s discontents,
but there is a small hint that light may be flickering at the end of the tunnel—a
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theme that may salvage Kim’s writing and his state of mind. But the very neatness
of the ending implies an irony, and, in view of that irony, we may doubt that the
light will flourish.
Still, Theme is an exceptional film, subtle and resonant. This is, I think,
Panfilov’s first film to be shown in the United States. Born in 1934, he was first
trained as a chemical engineer, then went to the Moscow Film School. He has been
making feature films since 1968—a total of seven, including three since Theme.
More Panfilov, please.
Messidor, Alain Tanner, 1979 (The New Republic, 20 June 1981)
I hope that the following statement proves to be false. The career of Alain
Tanner, the French-Swiss filmmaker, is following a familiar pattern: early
promise, early achievement, then increasingly repetitive, assumptive, and self-
indulgent work as it becomes increasingly clear that the director has said what he
had to say and is not growing. This statement, which I would love to have the
pleasure of retracting, is strengthened by Tanner’s new film Messidor.
His first feature, Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), made when he was forty,
was a version (conscious or not) of Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse: a successful
middle-aged businessman tries to reclaim his life by going to live among young
dropouts and rebels. It was the work of a born filmmaker, but it was damp around
the edges with sentimental leftism. His next, La Salamandre (1971), is one of the
important films of the postwar era, I think. Two writers, of different intellectual
tempers, try to do a television script about a working-class girl who committed a
crime a year before. Emphases shift through the inquiry and, in a sense, she beats
them, is too strong for them, emerging at the end free and angry and happy. It’s
one of the best films I know about changing consciousness in women and about
bourgeois-liberal holidays in radicalism.
Tanner had a co-author on the script of La Salamandre, the English Marxist
art critic and novelist John Berger, and I assumed that Berger’s help explained the
toughening of sinew and the stripping away of flab. This inference was heightened
by Tanner’s next—Return from Africa (1972)—which he did without Berger and
which was just a protracted anecdote of bourgeois embarrassment about failure
to break out of conventional patterns. But Berger returned for The Middle of the
World (1974), which was stronger than Return from Africa yet much weaker than
La Salamandre, a picture of promise that ended awash in big, unearned radical
pronouncements. And Berger also worked with Tanner on the next, Jonah Who
Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), which was drenched unbearably in the leftist
sentimentality that had dampened the first and third pictures. Jonah was full of
good-hearted radicals whose good-heartedness and radicalism were made to
seem interchangeable and inseparable. A supermarket checkout girl was fired for
thievery, a bad history teacher was fired because he was a bad teacher, etc., but
our sympathies were supposed to be with them because they were contra society.
The romance of radicalism had never been more glib, even in Godard.
Now Tanner has made another film without Berger, has said in fact that he
made it without a formal script (if you choose to take interviews as gospel), that
many scenes were improvised on a scenario. Improvised or not, this time he
repeats himself in visual and structural formulations that exceed the idea of
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personal style and merely reveal destitution (like Fellini in City of Women 1980).
Connected with that, worse than that, the film is nothing but sophomoric, radical,
and philosophic assumptions.
Messidor takes its name from one of the summer months in the calendar of
the French Revolution: it’s also the name that the two girls in the film assume.
Jeanne, nineteen years old, is a history student in Geneva, browned-off by studying
for exams, who leaves her boyfriend to go hitchhiking in the country for a few days.
Marie, eighteen, is a shopgirl who has been visiting her father in Geneva and is
now returning to the town where she lives. The two girls meet when the same car
gives them a lift. They like each other, each being an untypical experience for the
other.
They push on together, hitchhiking and hiking past Marie’s town, past the
limits of the money they have, which means more or less what Jeanne has. They
decide to play a kind of game with time and chance and motion, just to see how
long they can go on. In the course of their adventures, they—brace yourself—meet
many kinds of people! They meet generous ones and crabbed ones and lecherous
ones, dismissive ones, complaining ones, uninterested and compassionate ones.
Although they are already eighteen and nineteen, it’s only now they discover that
there are many sorts of people in the world.
They nearly get raped, though it’s not quite clear why they couldn’t have
jumped out of the car when the two men turned up a dirt road. In order to get
away, Marie has to bop one of the men with a rock. Why didn’t the men expect
attack? Why didn’t each man grab one girl instead of both men grabbing Jeanne
and leaving Marie free? Answer: because then the girls would not have been
plunged into a legal-moral mess.
They are subsequently given food and shelter, by people who are therefore
good; refused help, by people who are therefore bad. They steal a loaded pistol
from an army officer who gives them a lift; hold up a grocer at gunpoint; are
described on TV as armed fugitives; and, before their arrest, kill a man who, they
think (incorrectly), informed on them.
During all of this we are expected to sympathize, if not approve—to
understand that this heartless and materialist world of theirs and ours has
numbed them into anomie and aimlessness, has driven them into exile and
anarchy within their own country. All I could see was an exhibition of angst and
alienation of the most facile, college-dorm sort. (I’d like to have heard the police
chief explaining to the murdered man’s widow: “You’ll understand, ma’am. The
girls were in an existential crisis.”) Perfectly matched with the ideational
banalities in the picture are the arty platitudes: sequences in which the two girls
simply loaf and absolutely nothing happens; sequences in which we see only
stretches of exquisite Swiss landscape—exquisitely photographed by Renato
Berta, Tanner’s customary cinematographer—ostensibly intended as ironic
contrast between nature and man; a sequence in which the two girls squat and
relieve themselves side by side; a sequence in which they play Russian roulette
with the pistol. And the philosophic apex of it all? They come to realize that
everyone passing in the street has goals and interests of his own.
The yoking of worker and intellectual, the use of withdrawal as statement,
the categorization of all people as nice or not nice, these are Tanner elements that
Tanner has by now reduced to cliché. But the very idea of the picture is by now a
cliché: the picture that details the exile of a person within his own society, going
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on a pilgrimage without a goal. It’s a postwar crop, the best of which, Blier’s Going
Places (1974) was about two young men. (Can Tanner not know the Blier film?)
Blier’s men were sharply characterized: they were post-1968 nihilists whose
lives mocked the very piety-mocking radicalism of 1968, just as Blier’s direction
mocked Godard’s 1960s   cinematic radicalism. Wenders’ Kings of   the Road
(1976), and even the recent Le Voyage en douce (1980) and Cocktail Molotov
(1980), fit more or less in this genre—call it the generation-gap, moral-political
picaresque. But a special hazard of any picaresque is the string-of-beads structure;
more than most forms, the picaresque has to justify its going on. Messidor could
have been a half hour shorter and omitted nothing of consequence, could have
been a half hour longer—perhaps would have been if the budget had permitted.
Another defect, particularly grievous in a meandering film, is the casting of
the two girls. In Going Places, the two young men themselves, Gérard Depardieu
and Patrick Dewaere, conveyed buried bitterness and rue, menace, sexual aura.
Tanner’s two young women, Clémentine Amouroux (Jeanne) and Catherine
Rétoré (Marie), are as close to negligible as any two people can be who are
followed by a camera for two hours. (No one whom a camera scrutinizes for two
hours can be utterly uninteresting all the time, but that says more about
photography than it necessarily says about the subject.)
Tanner—knowingly?—includes another connection to Going Places. When
men are not available and blood is warm, Jeanne suggests a homosexual act to
Marie, just as Depardieu does analogously to Dewaere in Going Places. Blier’s men
do it, Tanner’s women do not—Marie, the working-class girl, is horrified. Blier’s
men were of more or less the same intellectual class. Maybe Tanner is implying
something about working-class puritanism.
But then everything is straining to imply something in Messidor. Like many
a serious but desperate director, Tanner seems to insist that every detail in his
film is heavy with meaning. I began to feel that Tanner intended highway markers
and food brands and types of cars to be “saying” things, like those ballets in which
toys and furniture come to life at night. When news of the girls is broadcast on TV,
it’s supposed to show us how nasty the capitalist media are, I think. (As if any
country wouldn’t broadcast alarms about fugitives.) When the girls move into
German-speaking Switzerland, I suppose it is to italicize their exile in their own
country, and since Jeanne is the only one of the pair with a little German, I suppose
it shows something about impediments to working-class education.
But no. These are all only sterile, thin strategies laid over a hollow idea.
Shorn of pretense, Messidor is about two discontented girls who let their general
unfocused unhappiness inflate its own importance and license their slide into
crime. As a picture about the pitfalls of fake profundities, it might have been a
black comedy, but it’s certainly meant otherwise. Angst and anomie and the
struggle to retain reason are much too grave questions in our time for this sort of
smug, pass-the-wine-jug sighing.
Many a good artist has had, essentially, only one thing to say, but the living
of his life has taught him differing ways to say it. Tanner has had only one thing to
say so far but is in effect repeating the way he says it. His art is dying of starvation,
and like many of the starving, it’s getting bloated as it dies.
City of Women, Federico Fellini, 1980 (The New Republic, 4 April 1981)
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All through City of Women I kept wondering what had been going through
Federico Fellini’s mind while he was making it. That’s an unorthodox way to view
a film—Intentional Fallacy is only one of the canonical errors—but a few directors
are so close to me that I feel personally involved in their new films. Some of their
past works are so tightly knitted into my experience and fantasy that I can’t escape
a proprietary, even nervous feeling when a new film by one of them comes along.
Bergman and Antonioni and Kurosawa are three such: Fellini, too, though his
record is much less consistently high than the others. Still, the man who made I
Vitelloni (1953), “The Temptations of Dr. Antonio” (in 1962, from the anthology
film Boccaccio ’70), 8½ (1963), and Amarcord (1974) belongs to me, and I can’t
help worrying about him, in intrusive, non-critical ways.
So with this latest film I couldn’t help puzzling how he had made choices
from day to day, hour to hour. City of Women is quite poor—at least as poor as
Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) and without even the tiny asset of the last film’s
symbolism—an attempt at the harmony of music that ended in chaos. But it’s not
the inferiority of City of Women that distressed me most: what good artist has
always worked well? (Look at later Picasso.) Besides, quality is not always best
judged by the maker; many an artist has preferred works of his that the world
ranks otherwise. No, what baffled me was, not why Fellini didn’t see that the film
wasn’t very good but that he didn’t recognize its familiarity, didn’t know how
much he was repeating himself.
Before some details on that point, a word on the structure. City of Women
is schizoid. Part One is set in a huge luxe country hotel full of women—feminists,
mostly young, variously caricatured—into which the tail-chasing Marcello
Mastroianni stumbles. Well, not exactly stumbles: he gets off a train at Fregene
(where Fellini has a house, by the way) to follow a Junoesque woman into the
woods, and she leads him to the hotel. After a lot of humiliating tricks played by
the women on the middle-aged, ludicrously lecherous Mastroianni, the film shifts
gears. He wanders into the fantastically palatial home-and-harem of a middle-
aged stud called, in the subtitles. Dr. Züberkock. (His name in Italian is Cazzone,
which translates, without equivocation, as supercock.) After some more
adventures in that house, whose atmosphere is the reverse of the hotel,
Mastroianni moves into a mélange of personal memories.
The film ends where it began, in Mastroianni’s railway compartment. The
whole picture has been—I can hardly bear to write this—a dream. And Fellini tries
for a last quasi-metaphysical twist by having three women of the dream come into
the compartment after Mastroianni wakes.
The first part, the luxe hive full of nothing but queen bees, has an odd 
reverse-flow stylistic effect. It kept reminding me of Lina Wertmüller (also the
stud’s palace), and Wertmüller began her career as assistant to Fellini. More: the
brutal, aggressive, castration-implying behavior of some of the   women has
suggestions of Bertrand   Blier’s Femmes Fatales (1976). Through these early
sections could Fellini not have known all this? Could he have been unaware of
echoes re-echoed?
Concede that possibility, and the last long section is still a very different
matter. It’s less a stroll down Mastroianni’s Memory Lane, as presented, than
down Fellini’s. Some items: a beach, with a view of the sea; on the beach, some
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boys peeping at the body of a woman; Mastroianni’s use of expletives from comic-
strip balloons; a sexual advance by a homely woman who exposes her gargantuan
bosom at him; his cool wife visiting him in the midst of madness; fragments of
vaudeville; a mass of people out of Mastroianni’s past coming down a flight of
steps at him; a shot looking directly down on him, floating high in the air; escape
from women by ascent into the sky. You could list those items on an exam in
Fellini, and ask the student to match them up with 8½, Juliet of the Spirits (1965),
or Amarcord. How, I kept wondering, could Fellini not know he was duplicating
and that, by duplicating, he was diminishing?
There’s an additional burr. Analysis of Fellini films in Jungian or Freudian
terms is plentiful, and a bit of it has even been helpful. Fellini seems to have read
some of it and has taken it on himself to put in Jungian/Freudian clues instead of
concentrating on the work and leaving the inferences to others. He uses a lot of
long dark corridors with light at the end; he repeats often the device of
Mastroianni on a winding children’s playground slide; he opens and closes the film
with his camera on the front of a locomotive heading for a tunnel. (Hitchcockians
will spy a reference here.)
In some of Fellini’s post-Dolce Vita fumbles, he has at least partially
compensated with unique visual invention and spectacle, with staggering/witty
costume and design and composition and color. Very little of that in City of Women.
Dante Ferretti, the designer, is not as striking as Danilo Donati, who was not in the
same class as the late great Piero Gherardi. And the music by Luis Bacalov is
stratospheres below what the late Nino Rota used to supply for Fellini. I’ll
remember only a few bits from this film: the photograph gallery of women in
Züberkock’s home, with a switch under each picture that turns on the voice of the
woman in sexual moments; or the pitch-black screen out of which the lights of a
huge amusement park suddenly snap. Slim pickings for a 138-minute film.
I thought I had a rule of thumb about  Fellini: that, after La Dolce Vita
(1960), the good films were those about memory—8½, Amarcord, much of The
Clowns (1970); but that thumb is now fractured along with its rule. City of Women
is filled with reworkings and leftovers of memory, in a context of self-mockery that
is itself histrionic and insincere, nothing like Guido’s in 8½. Is it really possible
that, in all the months of preparation of this film, Fellini could not have known that
he was rehashing?
The Makioka Sisters, Kon Ichikawa, 1983 (The New Republic, 4 March 1985)
Kon Ichikawa is one of the lustrous names in Japanese cinema. Luster, in

American context, means that a small fraction of a director’s output has been seen
in the U.S. and has been praised. For Ichikawa, that fraction—of a career that
began in 1946 and numbers more than sixty films—includes The Burmese Harp
(1956), Fires on the Plain (1959), Odd Obsession (1959), and Tokyo Olympiad
(1965). The first two were powerful antiwar pictures, the third was about an aging
husband’s anguish over diminishing sexual power, the last was a documentary.
These four films are not typical of Ichikawa’s work, but then only his whole career
could represent him typically. He is quoted as saying, “I don’t have a unifying
theme—I just make any picture I like or any that the company tells me to do.” The
remark may sound indifferent, but it’s the indifference of a director whose
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aesthetic consciousness, as Audie Bock writes in Japanese Film Directors, is

assured “a permanent rank in contemporary film history.”
Odd Obsession was made in 1958 from The Key, by Junichiro Tanizaki,
considered one of Japan’s premier twentieth-century novelists. In 1983 Ichikawa
 filmed The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki, written before The Key and regarded 
even more highly. Tanizaki worked on it for a number of years during the 1940s,
 composing it as an elegy to a passing society; and the prospect of an Ichikawa
film of the book was promising. The film now arrives, and disappoints.
Mine is not the disappointment of someone who knows the novel: I’ve read
only an excerpt in a Donald Keene anthology. But from that excerpt, from Keene’s
comments, and from the screenplay by Ichikawa and Shinya Hidaka, it’s not hard
to infer the structure and tone of the whole, long work. The film begins in 1938 in
Osaka; there reside four daughters of a deceased wealthy merchant. The four
daughters range in age from about twenty to forty years old, and the older two are
married. Through the ties of the four women, their conflicts and differences, their
differing views of their place and their future as women, we get insights into a
segment—apparently a large segment—of middle-class Japanese life.
The pattern is familiar. The execution is all. The work’s value depends on
the degree to which the familiar is made to reveal depths that surprise, illuminate,
frighten. It seems safe to assume that, in the novel, Tanizaki did what Yasujiro Ozu
did in several of his films: the diurnal became a crystal of the infinite. But in
Ichikawa’s film, the dailiness is all. Paths are faithfully traced, episodes are
condensed to screen form and time, readers of the novel presumably are given
sufficient recognition points so that they won’t feel cheated.
Ichikawa has been called in Japan an “illustrator.” Well, he wasn’t merely
an illustrator when he made Fires on the Plain from Shohei Ooka’s novel or a mere
reporter when he made Tokyo Olympiad; but for the most part, illustration and
social reporting are what we get in The Makioka Sisters.
The actual making of the film, moment by moment, is predictably
exceptional. The compositions, the editing, the rhythms are all done with surety
and taste. The color, by a longtime collaborator, Kiyoshi Hasegawa, has a gentle
unsubtlety, as if to suggest early color movies. One oddity, recurrent in Japanese
film, is the use of Western music. I couldn’t connect Handel’s “Largo” with any of
the several scenes it underscores.
The Shooting Party, Alan Bridges, 1985 (The New Republic, 17 June 1985)
Once again the screen converts an actor’s face into a calendar of our lives,
and once again this perception is intensified by seeing his latest film only after his
death. In 1958, to cite a past instance, it was Robert Donat, in The Inn of Sixth
Happiness, the ivory version of our younger idol. Donat had died before the picture
was released, and his last words on the screen were “We shall not meet again, I
think. Farewell.” Now   it’s James Mason who appears posthumously, as the
wealthy titled Englishman of 1913 who is the host of The Shooting Party. His last
words in the film don’t have the same sad aptness as Donat’s, but since the film is
itself an elegy, Mason’s whole performance has a silver melancholy. I saw him first
in I Met a Murderer (1939), saturnine and gripping, and, along with the rest of the
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world, I’ve watched him go through many films and many years. Among artists
there is an increment unique to actors, especially film actors: Mason’s gently
rueful old knight is deepened by our knowledge that it is old Mason.
Around him is a fitting company. Dorothy Tutin, a British theater treasure,
plays his wife, lady of a vast manor. Edward Fox, the human knife blade, plays the
most troublesome of the guests in their house, a nearly pathological lord. Cheryl
Campbell, who was evangelism personified in Chariots of Fire (1981), here is Fox’s
hedonistic wife. The consciously fine young lovers (she’s married, he isn’t) are
nicely turned by Judi Bowker and Rupert Frazer. An impressive man named
Aharon Impale, new to me though a mature actor, plays the Jewish millionaire who
is the uneasily welcomed member of the party. Gordon Jackson, best-known in the
U.S. as the butler in the “Upstairs, Downstairs” television series (1971-75), is a
wonderfully gnarled poacher who is pressed into service as a beater for the
gentry’s hunt; John Gielgud is passionately nutty as the crusader for animal rights
who tries to stop the party’s shooting of birds. (The confrontation between
Gielgud and Mason, excellently written and played, is the first scene between
them, I believe, since they were Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1953.)
Mason’s other guests, including a snooty young Hungarian count, are also
perfectly cast, as are two servant lovers who echo the above-stairs amours. Put
such a group of actors in Tom Rand’s Edwardian clothes (specially woven fabrics?)
and the result is sumptuous nostalgia.
The pleasures go on. The music by John Scott is always helpful. Fred
Tammes, the cinematographer, gives us earth and autumn outdoors without facile
sepia; indoors he gives us period lighting without undue brilliance or shadow. The
editor, Peter Davies, keeps the motion supple without distracting us. However, the
editing probably owes a good deal—in general form—to Julian Bond’s screenplay.
I haven’t read the Isabel Colegate novel on which it’s based so I can’t say how much
of the dialogue is Bond’s, but surely he’s responsible for the structure, which deals
handily with the group-protagonist problem. Bond keeps the numerous plot
strands independent as they interweave.
Over all these elements presides the talent of the director, Alan Bridges.
Clearly he is drawn to the earlier England of this century and to the interplay of
classes. The Hireling (1973) was a small, true tragedy of class division. The Return
of the Soldier (1982) dealt with cognate material. Here again Bridges is trying to
understand the too easily understood, the tensions of class—between classes and
within a class because class exists. His handling of place and protocol is fluent.
Bridges shows again that he inspires confidence in his actors. He evokes
the quirkiest and the deepest that each can give his or her character. He uses his
camera imaginatively for the small touch and the large. When Gielgud and Jackson
meet, the poacher is in a field near us, just having killed a rabbit. The crusader, in
a lane beyond and a little below him, doesn’t see the killing. The poacher with his
rabbit and the crusader with his pamphlets then move along companionably on
different levels, the camera traveling with them, toward an inn. In larger scale
Bridges ends the film with a near-repeat of his opening shot. At the start we see
the hunting party in middle distance, moving slowly across a field from lower left
toward upper right. One figure lingers behind, and we assume that it’s Mason
because we hear him commenting on the soundtrack. At the finish the party moves
again in the same direction, this time bearing a litter with the body of a beater who
has been accidentally killed. Again a figure lingers behind, and we assume it’s
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Frazer because his comments close the film.

But The Shooting Party has a major trouble. The title itself warns us of it,
and the picture confirms it. The idea of a shooting party as symbol is so familiar
that, far from stimulating, it puts us on guard. The prime film example, of course,
is the hunt in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939); Saura’s The Hunt (1966) and
the two films of Chekhov’s novel The Shooting Party (1944, 1978) are further
examples. The idea of a group of people put in a context of violence-as-pleasure in
order to expose secrets in them, to epitomize differences in class, to foreshadow
greater violence, is by now tired.
The Bridges-Bond film makes matters worse through emphasis. All aspects
of the symbol are virtually labeled. In Mason’s opening narration, he speaks of his
country’s worrisome condition, and he hazards that a possible war with Germany
may ennoble it. At the dinner table Frazer speaks of the end of an era, of a
civilization. Social change is ticked off with the presence of a Jew in these august
Anglican precincts. (A reminder of Galsworthy’s play Loyalties.) One of the beaters
is accidentally shot—by Fox, crazily eager to improve his hunt score—and the
dying man is cradled by Mason. Through the film, this man has talked bitterly of
the upper classes, yet his last words, in an aristocrat’s arms, are “God save the
British empire,” as if death were giving him a prevision of Sarajevo.
Even more emphasis comes from the Hungarian count, who is much more
haughty than the titled English. He and Mason’s granddaughter, previously
attracted to each other, are speaking after the death. “After all,” says the count, “he
was only a peasant.” She replies, “The thing is, you see, that we all knew him.” All
bets are then off between this pair. The exchange is patently meant to suggest the
immutable cruelty of the continent as against the basic decency of Britain, thus in
an oblique way to predict the First World War. (To me, the Hungarian’s remark
was less patronizing than her sentimentality.)
After the film itself, we see “facts” about the future deaths in battle of
several of these fictional characters. Epilogues of this kind are now too
commonplace to help, especially when they try for last quick stabs of poignancy,
and especially when they state the obvious. Who would not assume that some of
the men we have seen, regardless of class or country, would be killed in the war?
That’s the difficulty with The Shooting Party—its overriding fear that it is
not making its points. A large amount of talent in all the arts and crafts of film have
been invested here, and in themselves they provide much pleasure. But it’s as if
two different minds were struggling with each other. The mind that dealt with the
actual making of the film is subtle; the mind that dealt with the thematic material
is frightened and heavy. The symbol of the shooting party—in 1913!—could not
really be made fresh. But if the film had been content to imply, without
blackboard-pointer comments, it might have been much more affecting.
Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino, 1985 (The New Republic, 16 September
1985)
Who will write the book about Year of the Dragon? Michael Cimino’s
previous film, Heaven’s Gate (1980), is the subject of Final Cut, a recent book by
Steven Bach, former production chief of United Artists, the company that was sunk
by the immense flop of that film. Year of the Dragon, expensive though it surely
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must have been, may not ruin its distributors, the company that bought United
Artists; may not ruin its producer, Dino de Laurentiis; but it’s such a sleazy story,
with such ridiculous/offensive dialogue, with such a fusillade of febrile climaxes,
that its career may prompt a literary sequel.
Much of Final Cut seemed to me déjà vu: I felt that, with other names and
sums, I had read material like this many times before. One aspect was unique.
Trouble was evident very early, and nothing was done about it. Says Bach:
In the first six days of shooting on Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino had fallen
five days behind. He had shot almost 60,000 feet of film and had
approximately a minute and a half of usable material, which had cost
roughly $900,000 to expose. . . . No one as yet could estimate how much
beyond [the budget of] $15 million the picture would go at the present rate.
Yet they kept going! The passage made me think of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s
generally thought that the tower was built, then it leaned. But at least some people
believe that it began to lean shortly after construction started and that the builders
continued.
I don’t know what the expense sheets looked like after six days’ shooting
on Year of the Dragon or how they compared with original budget estimates; but,
even before that, hadn’t anyone read the script? De Laurentiis and the executive
producer, Fred Caruso, whatever their own powers, must at least have a friend or
two who can read. That script, adapted by Cimino and Oliver Stone from a novel
by Robert Daley, is like a two-hour special of “Miami Vice” or “Hill Street Blues,”
or any of that family, transferred to New York’s Chinatown and environs, and
padded to run another fifteen or twenty minutes. It’s upholstered with some
foreign travel, with some nudity and sex and a lot of rough language, but it’s
basically an ultrafamiliar television police yarn that was not fresh when television
was invented. The bet, I assume, was that pubic hair and raunchy talk would take
it out of the TV stratum into high cinema orbit; but they only emphasize the overall
strain to make it seem more profound than TV.
A new captain is assigned to the Chinatown police precinct, and he says he’s
going to clean up the crime—drugs and drug murders, extortions, briberies, and
slave labor—that infests the area. He goes up against the Chinese mafia (the clans
are called triads), police department politics, and various other obstacles with all
the assurance of a newcomer to police fiction, let alone police reality. Yet he has
been a cop for fifteen years and is the most decorated man on the force.
His name is Stanley White. (A technical police consultant on the film is also
named Stanley White. No claim is made that the film is biographical.) White’s
name is shortened from a Polish name, he says, so this apparently licenses him to
call himself a Polack; and because he has a Chinese-American lover—a woman
television newscaster—he can say Chink. (Cracks at Italians are licensed by the
names of the director and producers.) Besides the racial slurring, which is relished
as a screen liberation, there is an incessant barrage of obscenity. Nowadays it’s
supposedly retrograde to object to that language. Well, I object to it. Verisimilitude
is not the question. (The other day I had lunch at a cafeteria table next to two
policemen, and the talk was as blue as the tunics.) But the drenching of film
dialogue with obscenity has become a nearly sure sign of desperation: the thinner
the script, the more sulfurous the talk. And are there really many well-bred young
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women who, in a lovers’ quarrel, completely disregard being called a “cunt”?

On one hand, the film is crammed with cliché. On the other, it’s crammed
with incredible novelty. Cliché: the picture starts with a Chinese New Year’s Day
celebration, putting such emphasis on the firecrackers that we know the parade is
going to be used as cover for a killing. White has marital troubles—he neglects his
wife for his job—of so cinematically stale a kind that we wonder how the actors
can find the steam to speak the lines. Analogously stale are the quarrels in the
police commissioner’s office. Sometimes the very words themselves are so trite
that we almost gasp. During a lovers’ quarrel: “Give you an inch and you take a
mile.”
Incredible novelty: The suave young boss of the Chinatown mafia makes a
trip to Thailand and presents the chief of the heroin source with the head of a
mafia rival. (I mean, Sam Peckinpah fans, the head.) A Chinese gun moll, fleeing the
cops, runs into the middle of the street and is buffeted on one side, then the other,
by passing cabs. Forget the fact that no street in Chinatown has two-way traffic:
Wouldn’t at least one of the drivers have stopped? The woman newscaster is angry
at White when he comes to the studio; she doesn’t want to speak to him. Why is
she angry? Because she is involved with him, three Chinese men broke into her
apartment the day before and raped her. Well, say, that would make any woman
angry. The final shoot-out between White and the mafia boss—just a ton or two
too heavily an update of a Western finish—ends with White’s victory, after which
he hands his gun to the supine boss, risking his own life, so that the Chinese can
commit suicide. (A suggestion here of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo 1961 gallantry. Can
White have seen that film?)
Loose ends dangle in both plot and theme. Plot: an elderly Chinese forces
his way into a Polish funeral, kneels at the coffin, and crosses himself. Who was
he? A white man suddenly appears in the mafia boss’s retinue to warn him that his
office is bugged. Who was that white man? Theme: White blasts loudly at U.S.
corruption by television; the subject is then dropped. Vietnam bitterness—
whether pro- or anti- Rambo (1982) is not quite clear—is randomly raised and
also dropped. (White is a Vietnam veteran.) The need to understand Chinese
cultural complexities—White has an armful of books at the start—is raised, too,
and dropped for the usual fists-and-firearms formula.
In short, which is the wrong term for a picture that runs over two hours,
Year of the Dragon is a mess. The few fibers that hold it together are provided by
some of the cast. Mickey Rourke plays White, and though he is not the new James
Cagney that apparently some think him, he has splashes of street sex appeal and
guts. Caroline Kava, familiar in the theater, gives a finely tuned performance in the
trite role of his neglected wife. Another theater figure, gifted as actor and director,
is the Chinese-American John Lone, coolly graceful as the mafia (triad) boss. Victor
Wong, who has worked with Lone Off-Broadway (and who was the lovable saloon
owner in Dim Sum 1985), is effectively present as a member of the crime council.
On the other hand, Ariane Koizumi, a slender young Chinese-American woman
who plays the TV newscaster, is a slender young Chinese-American woman.
Cimino has a vivid sense of swirl and motion: he knows how to move a
camera, and he knows how to move actors within the frame. He also has quite
evident ability to win the confidence of actors, to open them up. He is so good at
these matters that his besetting flaw comes as a continual shock: he has no sense
of proportion. He doesn’t know when dialogue gets ludicrous. (A rookie Chinese-
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American cop interrupts objections to an assignment with a long, canned history

of his people.) He doesn’t know when logic is breached. (The hip TV newscaster
sees a villainously smiling Chinese in her lobby, yet she goes straight on up to her
apartment.) He doesn’t know when quarrels, fights, or films themselves go on
much too long. Year of the Dragon is flabby and invertebrate.
So was Heaven’s Gate; and so, two years before it, was The Deer Hunter
(1978). Risking the “I told you so” tag, I point out that Cimino’s faults have been
patent for some time; I wrote of The Deer Hunter at the time of its release: “So
many of the elements are so good that it all adds up to a pity. Someone, or more
than one—writer or producers or director or editor or all—fogged up about why
this picture was being made and whether it was on the rails.” The most interesting
element in Cimino, more interesting than his gifts, is the mystery of how he
mesmerizes people into financing his defects. Final Cut explored this mystery but
didn’t solve it. Maybe the next book will.
Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987 (The New Republic, 23 May 1988)
Those who admire Peter Handke’s writing, as I do, will know that one of its
prime components is the exaltation of minutiae. The protagonist (all of Handke’s
fiction is told from one point of view) will be walking along and will observe
ordinary things; and by the very act of isolating commonplace details and linking
them, Handke persuades us that the diurnal is mysterious, that to look closely at
commonplace matters and to juxtapose them makes them even more mysterious.
Here’s an example from his latest novel, Across, which is set in a suburb of
Salzburg:
On the darkening street of the Colony, a young girl in baggy blue trousers
was walking straight into the last yellow glow in the sky. An older woman
on a bicycle turned in from a side street, holding a full milk can in one hand.
. . . An old man was walking from his house to his garden gate and back,
changing his glasses on the way out and feeling his pulse on the way back.
As usual, the wind was from the west.
Against this tessellated detail, made ominous simply by quiet scrutiny, an agon
eventually grows that threatens to shake the cosmos in which girls walk and
women bicycle and old men change their glasses. This is all the more true because
that cosmos is lateral: the heavens above it are empty.
Handke alters this last point drastically in his new screenplay. (The stupid
English title is Wings of Desire. The German title translates as Heaven over Berlin
or possibly The Sky over Berlin.) Once again the fabric of the piece is made up of
mundane details spliced together, but this time they are mostly the private
thoughts of numberless individuals, not their visible actions or audible utterances,
and those thoughts are heard by two angels who descend from a heaven that is
obviously not empty.
Damiel, the chief of the two angels, is played by Bruno Ganz, perhaps best
known as the Russian count in Rohmer’s Marquise of O . . . (1976). His companion,
Cassiel, is played by Otto Sander, who was the marquise’s brother in that earlier
film. Both angels wear ordinary clothes, undistinguished overcoats. Damiel’s
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wings are shown only occasionally—for instance, at the beginning when he stands
atop the Gedächtniskirche looking down on Berlin. We never see him or Cassiel
fly: they appear in one place or another and, occasionally, fade from the picture.
They both move among people on the streets, in the Underground, in a library,
listening to what is in the mind of one silent person after another. The angels
cannot significantly help anyone, though their presence is sometimes sensed.
One other difference from previous Handke works is strong. Handke’s
characters generally move through their lives uncomplainingly and with
considerable curiosity but not often with joy in the fact of existence. Damiel wants
to exist—as a human. He is greatly moved by what he sees and hears, is
particularly moved by children, and is jealous of mortal life. He wants to slough
his angelic being and become someone within time, not outside it, someone
content with the adventure of each mortal day. He says to Cassiel: “I want to enter
history if only to hold an apple in my hand.”
All this is seen against a backdrop of Berlin today at its ugliest, with some
flashbacks of wartime newsreels. Three mortals stand out in Damiel’s wanderings.
There’s an old storyteller fearful that his tales—and therefore the past—will be
lost, played by the ancient Curt Bois, who was one of Brecht’s favorite actors. Peter
Falk appears as his rough-diamond self—an American actor named Peter Falk
who is making a film about wartime Berlin, complete with swastika’d soldiers and
yellow-badged Jews. Solveig Dommartin, a bit wan, is a trapeze performer with a
small, failing circus, who is left alone, like Chaplin at the end of The Circus (1928),
when her troupe moves on. Damiel falls in love with her, and that love galvanizes
his change to mortal status.
The screenplay is too long. Handke’s books and plays are all on the short
side because he acutely measures stress on his peculiar structures and does not
overload. Not so here. Twenty minutes cut out of the 130 would greatly improve
the piece. The idea of angels moving among mortals never quite shakes a hint of
sugariness, no matter how pungent the writing. Falk turns out to have been an
angel himself who changed jobs thirty years before (to become a film actor!); he
says, “There are a lot of us around,” which is another touch of sweetening. But this
new Handke, penetrating a world of secrets instead of observing surfaces that
connote secrets, is making a wry comment on his former approach, heightened by
his usual poetic insight. He is much helped by Ganz. No face ever looked less
conventionally angelic yet more reticently compassionate.
The trouble with this screenplay—and obviously the worst thing to be said
about it—is that it was filmed. It ought only to have been published. I would love
to read it translated in full, not compressed into (quite good) subtitles. I would
love to read it undistracted by Wim Wenders’ filming. Wenders and Handke, old
friends, have collaborated before. Wenders directed The Goalie’s Anxiety at the
Penalty Kick (1972), the fine film that Handke adapted from his novel; and
Wenders produced the film that Handke himself directed of his screenplay The
Left-Handed Woman (1978), a gem. The best aspect of Wenders’ work here is that
it was done in Germany; he has returned home after his ungainly forays abroad
and doesn’t have to keep proving that he knows the terrain.
The next best aspect is the camerawork of the venerable Henri Alekan. (The
circus in the film is named for him.) Most of the film is shot not in black and white,
but in a sort of dark green and light gray, which strikes the right ambiguous note
between realism and the unreal. But color sequences are arbitrarily inserted from
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time to time by Wenders, with no apparent design. The color is merely a

distraction. Worse is the distention of almost every sequence with repetitive shots
and shots held too long. Equally bad is the film’s lack of grace and rhythm. The
result is that Wenders has done little more than underscore the weaknesses of
Handke’s screenplay—its risk of the saccharine and its undue length.
Its very existence as a film sets up expectations that wouldn’t exist within
a book—another reason I’d bet that there would be more pleasure in reading the
screenplay. I can’t remember ever thinking that previously about a film. In a way
it’s a comment on Handke’s persistence as a daring artist, not always successful,
and on Wenders’ diminution as an artist, not often successful.
The Cry of the Owl, Claude Chabrol, 1987 (The New Republic, 11 November
1991)
Very often an opening shot tells us a lot about a director. The first thing we
see in The Cry of the Owl is a darkened room. Then a young woman switches on
the lights. That’s all; yet by its crisp simplicity, we know that the director wanted
to avoid a clichéd opening or a pretentious one. He wanted to use the ordinary in
a way that evoked both our interest and our confidence in him.
That director was Claude Chabrol, who knows everything there is to know
about filmmaking. He has made more than forty films since 1957, when in a sense
he spawned the French New Wave. I haven’t seen them all—not all have been
released in the United States—but among the ones I know are such gems as
Landru (1963) and This Man Must Die (1969). The Cry of the Owl was made in 1987
(he has made four films since then), was released spottily in the U.S., and is now
launched again by the Film Forum in New York. A good thing, too.
The screenplay, adapted by Chabrol and Odile Barski from a Patricia
Highsmith novel, tells the story of an unlucky man. Robert is a draftsman whose
hobby is drawing predatory birds. (Among them is an owl.) A Parisian, he has
moved to Vichy while getting a divorce and is trying to put himself in order. He is
subject to depressions, but he has humor and warmth. He is haunted by the feeling
that death accompanies him without touching him; and he has some reason to
think so.
Gently, unmalevolently, he likes to spy through the windows of the house
of Juliette, the woman we saw in the first shot. He doesn’t know her and means no
ill: he simply enjoys vicariously, from behind the trees, the life she lives with her
boyfriend. She senses that someone is watching, and after some days, one
afternoon when she is burning trash in the garden, Robert appears and explains
himself.
Out of this odd encounter eventually come several murders and a suicide.
Robert is completely innocent yet is more and more entangled. At the last, when
still another killing occurs of which he is innocent, he reaches to involve himself.
There’s a final freeze frame (as we hear the owl’s cry). Possibly he is about to put
his fingerprints where they will incriminate him; this would keep him from
causing more deaths, however innocently.
What is most intriguing about the story is that it seems not to have been
plotted: we don’t hear scriptwriters hammering and sawing. Certain characters
are assembled, and from an initial premise, they simply follow their natures. Thus
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the story unwinds its skeins and knits various fates.

Critics often compare Chabrol to Hitchcock (about whom he co-wrote a
book with Éric Rohmer). At his best Chabrol seems to me to function as well as
Hitchcock and with less hand-rubbing self-display. Except for an occasional
Hitchcockian touch in The Cry of the Owl, like the trash fire leaping between Robert
and Juliette when they first meet, Chabrol’s directing mirrors the script’s style:
neat, shrewdly selective, limpid rather than patently scintillating. And yet before
long we see that, tacitly, it does scintillate.
As Robert, Christophe Malavoy is completely engaging. His reserve, his
empathy make his increasing entanglements much more moving than the
conventional “wrong man” theme of Hitchcock because the story is less plotty,
more humane. The woman who plays Juliette, Mathilda May, is one of the latest
sensations of French films. This is easy to understand. She is quite competent and
is strikingly attractive. The cinematographer—I could almost say “as usual”
because he has done so many Chabrol films—was Jean Rabier. Excellent, as usual.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Philip Kaufman, 1988 (The New Republic,
29 February 1988)
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, according to some, is a

great novel. Maybe. Of greatness, tomorrow’s critics are better judges than today’s.
But one point is sure: Kundera is the greatest café companion imaginable. To be
seated across a small table from him with drinks or coffee cups between us, which
is where his books seem to put me, certifies the sometimes dubious existence of
civilization, even though his discourse wryly turns civilization over to show its
underside.
What wit, what tacit grief, what quiet terror, what fresh insight into
received ideas, what poignant interplay between eroticism and the political
climate in which various lovers go to bed. And what nonchalance about traditional
novelistic structure—a blitheness tolerable only in a writer with diamond-cutter’s
control. Reviewing an earlier Kundera novel, Robert M. Adams wrote:
A constant interweaving of fantasy and realism, surreal metaphor and

prosaic literalness, is characteristic of Kundera’s technique. He intervenes
frequently to address his readers directly, question his characters, recite
his own experiences, or account for his authorial proceedings. He is
particularly careful to leave undefined the relations between episodes of
his novel; it is the reader’s business to make of these relations what he can.
Again and again in this artfully artless book an act or gesture turns
imperceptibly into its exact opposite. . . . These subtle transformations and
unemphasized points of correspondence are the special privileges of a
meticulously crafted fiction.
Word for word these comments apply also to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I
would add only, in small dissent, that Kundera’s intent to charm, and the knowing
pathos of that charm because it comes from an exile writing about a country in
bondage, is ultimately a bit theatrical.
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Still, I’ve quoted Adams at length because he cites the important aspects of
Kundera’s work, and it is precisely those aspects that are missing from the new
film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Only a director with gifts analogous to
Kundera’s might have approximated the book’s “artfully artless” qualities—say, a
Godard or Makavejev at his best. Otherwise we were bound to get more or less
what we got: plot elements extracted, connected, expanded, contracted. The depth
and sparkle and shadow of Kundera’s novel depend on the different glimpses of
his story he gives us as he talks all around it. Without that context, the story itself
is rather banal, disjointed, arbitrarily maneuvered; and without that context, the
film has only a tenuous relation to the book.
Does knowledge of the book prejudice a prospective viewer of the film?
Well, it made this prospective viewer hopeful. I hoped that Philip Kaufman, the
director and co-author of the screenplay, would expand the capabilities he
suggested in the past. (The Right Stuff, from 1983, and a remake of Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, from 1978, are his two best previous films, both of them
competently done.) I hoped that Jean-Claude Carrière, the co-author, who often
worked with Buñuel, among others, would help to liberate the screenplay from
convention. But the collaborators chose to make a film of a book that Kundera
expressly did not write, a traditional, continuous, mostly present-tense novel.
Not only are the characters shorn of the Kundera context, they are shorn of
characteristics so that they can slip more neatly into regular film slots. Of course
the book had to be compressed—the picture runs almost three hours anyway—
but Kaufman and Carrière have done their compressing less with an eye to
condensing the original than to transforming it into a well-behaved film with good
conventional narrative manners. Tomas, the central figure, is shorn of a previous
marriage and of the son who grows to manhood and a life contrapuntal to his
father’s. The three other chief characters—Tereza, Tomas’s wife; Sabina, his most
recurrent mistress; and Franz, Sabina’s principal other lover—are also shorn.
Sabina comes off best for a negative reason: there’s less of her background in the
book to shear away.
Virtually none of the themes that Kundera weaves through his novel, that
give the novel its character, is broached: compassion, cyclical repetition,
Beethoven, the theological implications of shit—others, many others. As for the
theme in the title, it’s mentioned once. (I don’t know what the title can mean to
those who haven’t read the book.) So is kitsch, which is one of Kundera’s major
motifs. The Oedipus theme is mentioned only to be mangled.
What we are left with is just a story, not particularly enthralling in itself. In
the Prague of 1968 lives and works an attractive, philandering young brain
surgeon named Tomas. The film opens in a hospital, where a nurse strips for him
behind clouded glass while other doctors watch; even their patient sits up to look.
This beginning made me expectant. Had they made the book into a comedy? This
would emphasize only one of its tones; still, it might make a lively picture. Soon,
however, the pace slowed to a plod, relieved—frequently—by passionate
couplings.
Tomas’s meeting with Tereza, his falling in love, their marriage, their flight
to Geneva after the Soviet invasion, their return, the results of Tomas’s one overt
political action, the Sabina episodes with and without Tomas—all these are
stitched into sequence, but the more we see, the thinner the film becomes. Even
(or especially) when incidents are expanded from the novel, they are thinned. The
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marriage, which is one sentence in the book, is spun out into a heavily comic “big”
scene. The nude photographing of Sabina by Tereza and vice versa is much
expanded and is given a homoerotic suggestion. (The book treats the scene as a
teasing frolic between two members of Tomas’s harem.) These scenes are typical
of Kaufman and Carrière’s predictable choices, which eat up screen time that
might have been used to Kundera’s advantage.
There are good touches. Early in the film Tomas goes to a hospital in a spa
to perform brain surgery. Outside, a band is playing a waltz; Tomas hums along as
he saws his patient’s skull. The Soviet invasion of Prague is excellently done—Sven
Nykvist is the cinematographer—blending newsreels with shots that include
Tomas and Tereza. (Still, riots may not be so difficult: the best part of Spielberg’s
attenuated Empire of the Sun 1983 is the rioting in Shanghai.) And the screenplay
honors one point in the book: Kundera’s insistence that we know in advance about
the fate of Tomas and Tereza. The film, like the book, ends with ironic happiness—
their finish just ahead of them.
The film’s best investment is in the cast, and Kaufman’s best achievement
is what he does with his actors. Juliette Binoche, the French actress who was in
Rouge Baiser (Red Kiss, 1985), gives Tereza the right vulnerability and sweetness
and desperate strength. The Sabina is Lena Olin, the Swedish actress who was the
young woman in Bergman’s After the Rehearsal (1984). How Olin has grown in
spirit, guile, variety. She creates—to use an old-fashioned noun—a true bohemian.
The Dutch actor Derek de Lint is appealing in what is left of Franz’s character.
(Because of the international cast, I’d better note that the film is in English.)
Daniel Day-Lewis, who was the cockney gay in My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985) and the Edwardian prig in A Room With a View (1985), comes on like a
house afire as Tomas. (His hair darkened, he looks like a more supple Maximilian
Schell.) But Day-Lewis’s role is so sparely written, its dialogue so bald and trite,
that the director seems to have relied on him to fill it out with acting. Day-Lewis
tries his best. For instance, every time someone opens a door and finds him on the
threshold, he goes through a little facial ballet to suggest complexities around the
skimpy lines he is given to speak. It’s clear that if the part had really been written,
instead of being sketched at length, Day-Lewis could have carried it.
36 Fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988 (The New Republic, 6 February 1989)
Catherine Breillat, the Frenchwoman who adapted 36 Fillette from a novel

of her own and directed the film, says that it’s based on something that once
happened to her. Since this is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl’s sexual
initiation, Breillat’s comment titillates; but more important, it adds to the film’s
scariness.
The title is a French dress size, which must be ample because this fourteen-
year-old, played by Delphine Zentout, is voluptuous. She and her older brother and
her parents, a working-class family, are vacationing in a tent pitched near a
crowded beach. The troubles en famille are standard adolescent vs. parents fare.
One evening Zentout and her brother, breaking loose from home, are picked up by
some people in a car. The driver is a man in his late thirties, Étienne Chicot. Zentout
is attracted to him, frightened, sullenly aggressive; Chicot, a skilled womanizer, is
only moderately interested. So it is not quite the Lolita syndrome. The man is not
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particularly a pedophile; the nymphet is hotly curious, provocative, and, very

privately, afraid.
In the course of the next few days, despite hassles with parents, Zentout
pursues Chicot and becomes sexually intimate with him though she’s not actually
deflowered. The episode ends grubbily, unsatisfyingly. She looks up a teenaged
boy whom she doesn’t much like and maneuvers him into initiating her fully. Then
she derides him and leaves. In the last shot, outside, she faces the camera and
smiles, sunnily. That smile could mean a number of things. To me, it meant that
she is now ready to fend for herself sexually and is now ready for vengeance.
36 Fillette is distinct from other films of recent years about teenaged girls
and older men—Beau-père (Stepfather, 1981), Peppermint Soda (1977), Smooth
Talk (1985)—for two reasons. The first is stylistic. Breillat—and this is rare
nowadays—is a disciple of Godard. She shows this most clearly not with jump-
cuts or by fracturing the boundaries of the frame, but through a Godardian
naturalism that burrows beyond reproduction of life to distillation, the way an
enlarged photograph of a commonplace object renders it into something else. For
instance, there’s a long scene in Chicot’s hotel suite where screen time almost
duplicates real time. Zentout asks for a drink, and Chicot goes into the next room
to mix it. The camera remains with her as she waits, sitting, fidgeting, looking
about, picking up something, putting it down, etc. The elapsed minute or so not
only brings us closer to Zentout with a kind of engaging candor; the breach of
cinematic convention is mimetic of the breach of social convention that Zentout is
committing by being in this room.
To underscore the Godard connection, Breillat uses Jean-Pierre Léaud for
a long conversation with Zentout early on—inserted, irrelevant to the action,
merely an inquiry into character, such as Léaud did for Godard in
Masculine/Feminine (1966).
The second distinction of 36 Fillette is its frankness, which is treated quite
casually, as if Zentout’s actions were much more usual than society likes to hear
about. On the one hand are the pretty patterns of behavior that older people
impose on what they choose to forget of their own adolescence; on the other hand
are the facts of sexual secrets, real or fantasized, that keep gnawing at the
adolescent. (In Shepard’s Far North 1988 a rabbity fifteen-year-old girl tells her
aunt that she wishes she were dead, and the aunt says, “You’ll only feel that way
for another year, sweetheart.”) All fourteen-year-old girls don’t behave like
Zentout, but not all parents want to know how many girls think about behaving
that way. 36 Fillette is discomfiting because it puts Zentout before us with
nonchalant authenticity.
Is the older man reprehensible? Unreservedly, yes. But Zentout’s actions
make his response understandable. Breillat says that her early title for her novel
and film was Beware Wolves, or How Young Girls Ask for Their Own Murder.
Hanussen, István Szabó, 1988 (The New Republic, 10 April 1989)
Thomas Mann’s story “Mario and the Magician” (1929), about the tragic
result of a clairvoyant’s performance in an Italian seaside resort, is sometimes
read as an allegory of Italy under fascism. István Szabó’s new film, Hanussen, is
about an Austrian clairvoyant whose performances in Central Europe and in
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Berlin coincide with the rise of Nazism and lead to a tragic end. The screenplay by
Szabó and Peter Dobai is derived from facts about an actual Hanussen, and I don’t
know that either of these authors ever read the Mann story. If they haven’t, the
reminders of Mann in the film are all the more provocative, since on their own the
filmmakers saw a connection between a thaumaturge and a quasi-sacral politics.
Szabó considers Hanussen, which is the protagonist’s name, the last part of
a trilogy. Film trilogies are often ex-post-facto affairs—the director decides later
that that’s what he was making—but certainly the first two films are also steeped
in twentieth-century politics and war. Mephisto (again based on fact), from 1981,
dealt with a German actor who was co-opted by the Nazis; Colonel Redl (again
based on fact), from 1985, dealt with the treachery and homosexuality of an
Austrian officer in the 1914 era. Hanussen has negative and positive resemblances
to the previous two. Like them, it’s more portentous than resolved. But like them,
it’s rich in detail and atmospherics that are more rewarding than its story.
Further links: Hanussen has the same cinematographer as the other two,
Lajos Koltai, and the same leading actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer. Koltai’s work is
almost an analogue of the whole film, more lush than clarifying. Brandauer,
however, gives his best performance in the “trilogy,” more acutely inflected, more
reticently strong, less frantic for effects. By the film’s end he has drawn a man
cunning yet unsure, vain of his occult power yet somewhat frightened, struggling
yet resigned to his fate.
That resignation connects to Szabó’s strength. Hanussen seems almost to
accept his fate because he is a Central European, as if the people of his country,
Austria, and of Mitteleuropa generally, are the pawns of harsh political powers.
(Two of the lesser power figures in the film are based on historical personages:
the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and Walter Rathenau, the German minister of
foreign affairs who was murdered by anti-Semite nationalists in 1922.) Szabó
understands these Central Europeans and creates their world vividly: hotel
lobbies, restaurants, cafés, Biedermeier apartments, clothes, of course—and faces.
What a gallery of faces. Most of them are Hungarian actors—Erland Josephson,
Swedish, is an exception—and all of them are presumably dubbed in the German
on the soundtrack. Those faces are the film’s real locus.
Hanussen begins with a battle during World War I, as some Austrian troops
murmur the Lord’s Prayer just before an attack. (The film’s low point comes soon
after: a banal shot of a crucified Jesus in a church amid the carnage.) A traumatized
soldier named Schneider (Brandauer) comes under the care of a Jewish
psychiatrist (Josephson); discovers his visionary powers; becomes, after the war,
a professional with the name Hanussen; and tours. As the 1930s begin, he finds
himself in the uncomfortable position of predicting Hitler’s success, which leads
to discomforts and dangers.
Hanussen has no specific plot parallels with Mann’s great story; the relation
is thematic—the linkage of performance to power and the operation of hypnosis
in the political sphere. Though those themes are not completely realized, they
resonate.
Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir, 1989 (The New Republic, 26 June 1989)
The title Dead Poets Society comes from the name of a group of boarding-
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school boys who meet secretly at night in a cave and read aloud from great writers.
They have taken this idea from their English teacher, who was in such a group
when he was a student at the school. (A salute to the filmmakers for using this
eccentric, attractive title.)
The time is 1959. This explains, or justifies, the fact that there is neither a
non-white face nor a non-Anglo-Saxon name in the film. This school is in Vermont.
(The film was actually shot in Delaware—the first feature to be shot in Delaware,
if that’s of interest even in Delaware.) The school, which aches to be English, is 100
years old and prides itself, of course, on its antique traditions. A new teacher
challenges some of those traditions, especially those of hidebound teaching,
because of passion for his subject and concern for his students. He knows
especially well what he is daring: he is an alumnus.
This teacher is witty, humane, unconventional. He irritates the rest of the
faculty, but he sets out to win and stimulate the boys and does both. Those who
know Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) will recognize the configuration. If Vigo
had wanted to beef up his film from its forty-four minutes into a feature, he might
have used some of the plot strands in Dead Poets Society. One of the boys applies
character lessons learned from his teacher in pursuit of a seemingly hopeless love.
Another boy risks head-on conflict with his stern father about a choice of career.
The teacher has opened an ambition in the boy, which the father means to block.
Nothing about this film sounds, as described, novel. Yet it grips, because it
has been made with plentiful feeling, vigor, belief. Tom Schulman wrote the
screenplay apparently out of a sense of indebtedness to a teacher of his own. We
have all had at least one teacher like him—someone who fractures the die-cast
role of teacher and seems a person with a life outside the classroom, who teaches
as much out of that life as out of texts. The ending of the film, though a touch
contrived, contrasts the two types of teacher, with victory going where we expect
it to go.
Peter Weir, the Australian who made Gallipoli (1981), The Last Wave
(1977), and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), among others, directed with a keen
eye. Weir can be sententious, as in the films above, but American settings bring
out the best in him. His most moving previous film was Witness (1985), set in the
Amish country of Pennsylvania; now in Vermont (all right, Delaware) he again
works in close, with heat and tenderness and no pomp. He’s somewhat overfond
of symbols—flocks of starlings or wild ducks, the members of the Society slowly
disappearing in a mist—but he makes us as eager to see what will happen next as
he seemingly is.
Weir is helped immensely by John Seale, the cinematographer who did
Witness and, lately, Rain Man (1988). Seale shoots the seasons of the year like
archetypal statements, and he gets the most out of corridors and cloisters in this
neo-Gothic school.
But the film depends on the teacher, and Robin Williams plays him almost
to the hilt. Williams has had trouble with straight roles (e.g., The World According
to Garp 1982) because he is much more a performer than an actor, specializing
in stream of consciousness on fast-forward. There is no place for that specialty
here. Still, the teacher he plays is a conscious performer, and Williams very nearly
makes us forget that he is one, too. With his tight bright face like an expensive
piece of polished leather goods, he bustles into every moment with appetite. (One
negative aid: he has no love scenes to play in this film.)
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Kurtwood Smith, whom I first became aware of as the DA in True Believer

(1989), does the stern father with chilling force and surgical technique. Where has
Smith been all these years? Norman Lloyd plays the crusty old head of the school
with all the John Houseman authority he can muster. It’s a difficult role because
it’s full of unavoidably predictable responses; Lloyd does his best to register a
whole man. The boys, in their middle teens, are all adequate and are all
empathetically handled by Weir.
Dead Poets Society, affecting though it is, benefits from context. American
films of the past few months have been so dreary that a good new American film
seems a special blessing. When the preview finished, many in the large audience
applauded. I felt that, among other things, they were offering thanks for being
spared this year another Pink Cadillac or Criminal Law or Cold Feet or Vampire’s
Kiss.
Martha and I, Jiří Weiss, 1990 (The New Republic, 13 March 1995)
The Czech director Jiří Weiss was born in 1913 and won his first film prize,
for a documentary, in 1934. Rapidly he became an outstanding figure in the pre-
war Czech cinema. As Hitler loomed, Weiss, a Jew, moved to Britain where, for
government units, he made his first fiction films. Then he joined the U.S. Signal
Corps, and after the war he returned home. Again he became outstanding; yet
again, this time because of growing Soviet pressures, he went into exile. He
worked and taught in the United States. When the atmosphere changed, he
returned to his own country, where once more he became a film stalwart.
In 1989, aged seventy-six, Weiss wrote Martha and I, derived from youthful
memories, and in 1990 he directed it. Now, in 1995, after it has won prizes for
Weiss and for his leading actors at several festivals, it is released in the United
States (by Cinema Four). With this film, Weiss enters the circle of marathon
winners, along with Buñuel, Lean, Huston, and others—directors who did notable
work in their seventies. Martha and I is lovely. Sad but lovely.
The story deals with three people, which makes the title slightly
ambiguous. The “I” is presumably Emil, the Czech boy whom we see growing up
and whose voice, as a man, occasionally reminisces on the soundtrack. But Emil is
absent for a stretch toward the end, and in any case the center consists of the
relationships between Martha and both Emil and his uncle. So the “I” does double
duty.
In 1935 Emil is in his early teens, the son of a well-to-do Jewish woman in
Prague. One day she discovers him discovering amour with the maid, and she
packs the boy off to her brother in the town of Brux. Uncle Ernst is a gynecologist,
a free-thinking man who encourages Emil to read Boccaccio. When Ernst’s much
younger Hungarian wife is unfaithful to him, he divorces her, less in anger than in
acceptance of the inevitable. Much more faithful to him is his cook and maid,
Martha, a quiet, solid German woman, loving and gentle, who becomes maternally
fond of Emil. It seems sensibly inevitable that Ernst marry Martha, which surprises
neighbors but pleases Emil.
The warm, crinkly chronicle of life in the doctor’s home, with friends and
music and medical practice, gets its first crude jog when Martha’s brother, echt
deutsch, is invited to dinner and bursts out against one of the other guests, a Jew.
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The brother has become a fervent Nazi—as did many in Czechoslovakia during the
1930s—and this allows us to prevision the rest of the film. Chillingly.
Eventually Ernst is forced to leave Brux. He moves to Prague with Martha
and Emil. Eventually, too, Martha is abducted by her brothers—she has two—and
is willy-nilly divorced from her Jewish husband. Emil, prompted by his uncle, flees
the country. He isn’t seen again until he returns after the war, in British uniform,
to learn what happened to his family, including Martha.
Weiss, concerned with this humane exception of a Nazi’s sister devoted to
her Jewish husband, directs with comprehending reticence. He knows so much
about his material that he is careful to say only what is necessary. Everything we
see—a town street, a kitchen table—speaks of the place it is in and the long years
behind it. Weiss made his film in locations where, he knows, matters much like his
story actually occurred. An artist’s biography is of course irrelevant to judgment
of his work, but it’s sometimes hard to forget. Why forget it in this case?
Quickly I add that, by any standards, Weiss’s direction is fluent:
dramatically sure, visually acute without artiness. He has cast his film perfectly
and has drawn from his actors exactly the performances we want even though we
didn’t know it in advance. This is all the more remarkable because in most cases
he had to do double casting, presences and voices. The dialogue is in German, as it
needed to be for those people at that time, but most of the cast had to be dubbed.
(Not something I generally applaud, but here it was apparently necessary. Most of
the available actors speak Czech or Slovak.)
The one native German is Marianne Sägebrecht, who is Martha.
Saegebrecht is the obese woman who was used, chiefly by Percy Adlon, in films
that strove so feverishly for cult status that I could hardly wait for them to fall into
cult hands. Here Weiss has treated Sägebrecht as an actress, and she has
responded with sincerity, even finesse. It’s easy to understand why, despite
Martha’s servile background and her size, the middle-aging doctor wanted to
marry her.
He is played by Michel Piccoli. No, that is not a misprint: apparently some
French financing depended on the use of Piccoli. All for the good. This silken
diabolist turns to face us straight on, so to speak, and gives us a colorful, wise,
engaging character. Václav Chalupa and Ondřej Vetchý, as the earlier and later
Emil, fulfill their parts in the pattern.
More Weiss, please. Let’s look forward to the next.
Korczak, Andrzej Wajda, 1990 (The New Republic, 8 April 1991)
Out of the Warsaw ghetto—I don’t need to specify the years—have come
stories of courage, devotion, bruised yet persistent pride that make the rest of us
feel like pygmies. None of these stories is more humbling yet exalting than that of
Janusz Korczak and his 200 children. Betty Jean Lifton gave the whole account of
Korczak’s life in The King of Children (1988). Now, from Poland—a country that
manages to keep some embers of anti-Semitism glowing though it has only a few
thousand Jews left out of the more than three million who were there before
Hitler—comes a film that concentrates on Korczak’s last three years. It was
directed by the celebrated Andrzej Wajda and is called simply Korczak.
Korczak, born Henryk Goldszmit, was a Jewish physician, educated in
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Poland and abroad, who specialized in children, and in more than the clinical
sense. He was concerned as much with their social treatment as with their medical
care. He formulated a so-called Magna Carta of children’s rights, still so pertinent
that, in his honor, UNESCO scheduled its Year of the Child, 1978-79, to coincide
with the centennial anniversary of his birth.
He wrote novels for children (his pen name became his name for general
use) and did popular radio programs in Warsaw that often dealt with children’s
issues. When the Germans came, he was the director of an orphanage for Jewish
children. Through difficulties that don’t need retelling here, Korczak and a few
colleagues tried to take care of the children. Eventually the Germans took care of
them. At Treblinka, amid the thousands of other rock monuments, stands one
inscribed: “Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit) and the Children.”
How I wish that Wajda’s film were better. When I heard that it was
forthcoming, my instinctive resistance to fiction about the Holocaust was stayed
by the thought that Wajda, at his best, might treat the material in a way that
justified its re-creation, with a view through art that enhanced the story instead of
merely utilizing it. But Korczak is, at most, inoffensive.
The trouble begins with the screenplay by an old Wajda hand, Agnieska
Holland. She had no perspective on the material, either in insight or in mode of
telling. Her only object was to cram in as much incident and reference as possible
in a hurried synoptic manner, not free of coincidences. So we move from an early
pre-ghetto reference to Palestine as the land where Jews were free through a
ghetto encounter with a German army doctor who just happens to have heard
Korczak lecture in Berlin ten years earlier (these are only two of the ticked-off
points) to a last sequence that is sheer cotton candy. The freight car in which
Korczak and his children are being taken to Treblinka magically detaches itself
from the rest of the train. In slow motion the doctor and the children descend from
the car and, banner waving, march joyfully across a great field. This pneumatic
uplift betrays even the mere literalness of the film.
Wajda has directed with no more imagination and style than if he were
making a TV Movie of the Week on this Sunday’s interesting topic. Except that he
had the sense to use black and white and except for his choice of leading actor,
Wajda doesn’t even demonstrate the benefits of experience. Every scene is
commonplace in treatment; and he has done some editing, especially with
explanatory reaction shots, that is dismally heavy-handed. Nothing in the
screenplay or directing raises this film, as film, above the banal.
The only vital element is the performance of Korczak. Wojciech Pszoniak,
an important actor in the Polish theater, is probably best known in the U.S. for his
Robespierre in one of Wajda’s best films, Danton (1983). Here he plays Korczak
with the fire of a man fueled by love and by impatience that the world can’t act on
what he takes to be patent truths. There’s a manic quality in Korczak that is
perhaps one aspect of heroism, an inability to deal with alternatives to whole-
souled commitment. Pszoniak captures that quality so thoroughly that his acting
almost seems to be struggling against the film in which it is caught.
Wajda was recently elected a senator in Poland and has said that this will
be his last film. I hope not. I’ve never been a Wajda zealot, but I hope he can finish
his film career with something more than good intentions.
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Jungle Fever, Spike Lee, 1991 (The New Republic, 29 July 1991)
Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) was not the first
American play about interracial love; the line goes back at least to Dion
Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859). Since O’Neill, there have of course been more
plays on the subject, and naturally some films. It’s hardly surprising that the theme
recurs in a country whose racial problems began early and remain severe. When
at last a black filmmaker turns to the subject—the first one to do so, as far as I
know—his choice seems historically inevitable, right, promising. More: Spike
Lee’s talent is by now a kind of cultural fact. But his Jungle Fever disappoints.
The central story concerns a black man and a white woman. A successful,
married architect, played by Wesley Snipes, lives on Striver’s Row in Harlem. A
young Italian-American woman, Annabella Sciorra, who lives in the Bensonhurst
district of Brooklyn, becomes his secretary. They work together late, into the night,
and things happen—in the office, at first. Word of their affair reaches Snipes’s wife
and Sciorra’s father. Tempests follow, evictions from their respective homes. The
two lovers then try to live with each other; but their feelings falter and they soon
separate, presumably to return in time to their previous lives.
This is the picture’s prime letdown—not that the lovers part, but that the
experience, for all the family storms it causes, seems adventitious, thematically
thin. All we get from it is that she wanted the experience of loving a black man, and
he, never before maritally unfaithful, couldn’t resist a white woman. Here, after
some centuries, a black artist—a black filmmaker—has a chance to explore this
deep-running subject in our society, and he doesn’t add any more to it than what
anyone might have guessed, in fact not a great deal more than the arc of many
extramarital affairs.
Worse, this love affair is used principally as an armature for other stories,
some of which—as Lee treats them—are more interesting: Snipes’s troubles with
his crackhead older brother and with his parents; Sciorra’s ructions with her
father and brothers; her pursuit by a shy Bensonhurst swain, John Turturro, and
his eventual shift of affection to a young black woman who comes into his candy
store every morning for her newspaper. (She wants the Times. Throughout, The
New York Times is used as a mark of black upward mobility.) These stories and
others absorb us more than the central love affair.
Lee’s screenplay has two other striking flaws. First, he doesn’t deal
comfortably with the middle-class elements. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., says that in the
late ’60s and ’70s “many blacks became defensive about a middle-class past or
future. . . . To be black and middle-class was to betray, somehow, one’s black
heritage.” This may be the case, but it hardly licenses Lee to handle the details of
the middle-class world so loosely. In Snipes’s architectural firm, would the two
(white) owner-partners argue loudly with him about business matters, in front of
others, as they follow him down a corridor to his office? Would Snipes’s wife,
Lonette McKee, throw him out of the house the way she does? She is drawn as an
ultra-chic woman, a buyer at Bloomingdale’s, but she throws his clothes out their
first-floor window and yells at him through that window like a fishwife, in front of
the neighbors. Lee’s own background is said to be middle class. But his writing
seems more authentic when he goes further down the line.
Second, mechanical plotting. Snipes confides about his white lover to a
black friend. Why? Sciorra confides about her black lover to white friends. Why?
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In both cases, only because the author needs to have the beans spilled. Snipes’s
preacher-father and his mother invite him and Sciorra to dinner, and the father
then excoriates Sciorra viciously. If we can foresee that this will happen, why not
Snipes? When his druggy brother steals their father’s television set, Snipes trails
him to a crack den to get it back only to find that it has been sold for drugs, which
any ten-year-old could have predicted. At the very end Snipes is accosted by a
drug-crazed black hooker. In a spasm of compassion, he embraces her and lets out
a cry of anguish. This is a glib, last-minute grab at profundity that doesn’t grow out
of what has happened before, as flashily clever as the hero’s embrace of the
starveling child at the end of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of
Nicholas Nickleby. (Did Lee see that show?)
But turn from Writer Lee to Director Lee, and we’re in different country.
Yes, he uses an irrelevant iris-out, and he uses again the sterile device of having
people ride (inexplicably) past a background when they are supposed to be
walking. But by and large Lee directs forcefully, keenly, with the assurance of
someone born to do this work. The scenes in Turturro’s candy store, when
Sciorra’s brothers and friends tease him and fight with him, seem played to street-
corner percussion. The scenes with the druggy brother, Samuel L. Jackson, are
pungently sad. (While he begs for money from his family, he performs the dance
steps he used to do, as appeals to past family fun.)
And a new extraordinary quality appears in Lee’s directing—gentleness.
The Snipes-Sciorra affair, as it begins and grows, is given a tenderness hitherto
unseen in Lee’s work. (Except for the quite brief glimpse of Danny Aiello’s feelings
for Lee’s sister in Do the Right Thing 1989.) Lee’s treatment of Turturro is tender,
too, and gives Turturro himself a break in his long line of snivelling sociopaths. In
fact, Turturro’s response to his black woman customer, of which we see only the
start, hints at a more rewarding relationship than the scanted Snipes-Sciorra fling.
Snipes’s acting has been highly praised; to me, he is moderately competent.
Sciorra has had some stage experience, but her acting seems bred of films, small
gestures, inflections, hesitations, impulses—a subtle oscillograph of buried
feelings. Jackson, as the desperate brother, gives the film’s strongest performance.
When he enters, he commands, with innate power and with character conviction.
Lee himself, as Snipes’s blabbermouth friend, gives more or less the performance
he has given several times before in his films, but with less asked of him, so he’s
more acceptable.
Ossie Davis is saddled with the preacher-father role. He’s an imposing
actor, but the role is tedious and is further burdened with a long monologue about
sexual tensions between blacks and whites in the South that he came from,
material that wasn’t entirely new when Lillian Smith used it in Strange Fruit
(1944). We learn a great deal more about current attitudes toward sex, black-
white and black-black, from a seemingly improvised scene between McKee and
some of her black girlfriends—a scene that, by indirection, underscores how Lee
has deprived the Snipes-Sciorra affair of insights.
A last note, about the music. Lee uses three Sinatra recordings, old
favorites, that soar under quarrels in the candy store and elsewhere. A wryly
effective way for Lee to further his fixation with Italian-black relations. And a sort
of proof that he is still more at ease, more subtle, in his old, by-now familiar
territories than in this new one of middle-class interracial love. As a director, he
grows, he excites. As a screenwriter, he still has more ambition than grasp.
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Orlando, Sally Potter, 1992 (The New Republic, 28 June 1993)
Some projects in art are doomed from the start. For instance, the ballet of
Hamlet that I once saw. It wasn’t done by Balanchine for Baryshnikov, but even if
those men had been involved, though it would have been blessedly improved, it
still would have been doomed.
Sally Potter, a young Englishwoman of evident brains and talent, has
written and directed a film of Orlando. The film itself makes clear that she
understood most of the difficulties involved in adapting Virginia Woolf’s book. But
the film also makes clear that she didn’t quite grasp the inevitable. Woolf’s work
is in the form that it’s in because that’s what it is.
One basic problem, as Potter did see, is not so much with the story—which
presents problems enough—but with the prose: how to transmute it into film. For
instance, after Orlando calls aloud her lover’s name: “The beautiful, glittering
name fell out of the sky like a steel blue feather.” “Film that, Potter,” she
doubtlessly said to herself about that and about a hundred other instances in the
book. She took steps. She engaged Alexei Rodionov, the very best of the Russian
cinematographers whose work I’ve seen, and with him she contrived sequences
that in themselves are gorgeous, evocative, austere, lush. Halations often crown
scenes like aureoles.
The trouble is that all these sequences don’t meld into the Woolf tissue, and
without that tissue the book is only a fantastic tale. We can imagine that after
Potter showed one or another sequence to people—possibly to backers—they
said, “That’s it. You’ve got it. Now for the whole thing.” But the whole thing is
precisely what isn’t here. Probably couldn’t be. Twenty-five years ago Mary Ellen
Bute made a film modestly called Passages (1966) from James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake, and, within scale, she succeeded better in her venture than Potter does here.
I don’t mean to rank Woolf with Joyce. For this reader, Orlando is a lesser
work than some claim. In the course of the book the disparaging poet Nicholas
Greene says of Sir Thomas Browne that “he was for writing poetry in prose and
people soon got tired of such conceits as that.” It was brave of Woolf to include
that line because it states her own book’s risk-taking—the reader’s feeling after a
while that a slog through a barnyard might be a welcome respite from the
empyrean. Still, there is the empyrean in the book, and we’re constantly aware of
Potter’s gifted but unavailing attempts to reach it.
There’s another trouble, too, inherent in the move to film. Woolf’s fantasy
follows her protagonist from the Elizabethan age to the present (which here is
sensibly moved to our present from Woolf’s 1928), with era stops along the way
and with a gender change from male to female. For all these delicate
impossibilities, Woolf enlists our collaboration simply by assuming that readers,
taken by the manner of the telling, will work the necessary magic themselves. It’s
a cunning call to partnership with her, which flatters us and succeeds.
But film doesn’t need that collaboration. Film is the very home of
ascendancy over the literal, the earthbound. Changes of place and century and sex,
in an instant, offer no problem whatsoever and need no kind of collaboration from
the audience. Many decades of filmic miracles have left us, in a sense,
imaginatively slothful because we needn’t lift a figurative finger. Fantasy on film
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demands less. It’s “normal.” On the screen, therefore, Orlando almost gets jostled
into the Time Bandits (1981) genre.
Some lesser quibbles. Why is Othello misquoted? Why is Orlando’s eventual
son changed to a daughter? This upsets the gender cycle that Woolf presumably
had in mind. Why insert such banal locutions as “Goodbye. Good luck”?
On the other hand, some of Potter’s touches are fine. Queen Elizabeth’s
arrival at Orlando’s stately home is a really royal progress. A tea party that the
eighteenth-century Orlando attends, with Swift and Addison and Pope, is good
pastiche fun. The gauzy-mysterious palace of a Middle Eastern potentate has
pleasant Arabian Nights languor.
Some of the performances are striking. Quentin Crisp, in a nod to the story’s
androgyny, plays Elizabeth and is grandly sour as the old queen. It’s she who bids
Orlando, her young favorite, never to age. (However, she certainly doesn’t bid him
to become female. That comes later.) Heathcote Williams, himself a notable
playwright, overenunciates amusingly as Greene, the Elizabethan literary
malcontent, and in a witty casting maneuver, Greene also appears later as a
modern money-minded publisher. John Wood, exquisite actor, is the Archduke
Harry, looking like a Rowlandson cartoon. Charlotte Valandrey, as Sasha,
Orlando’s Russian light o’ love, is enchanting. Billy Zane, as the female Orlando’s
nineteenth-century lover, here made an American, is a true romantic presence.
Tilda Swinton as Orlando is insufficient. She—here s/he might be
permitted—fills the first need: she resembles Vita Sackville-West. Literary
history’s most open secret is that Orlando was an elegant love letter to Woolf’s
lesbian inamorata. (Three of the photographs in the book, supposedly of Orlando,
are in fact of Sackville-West.) Swinton has subtlety—her line readings are
sometimes almost chordal, freighted with more than one meaning. But she has no
whiff of fire. This is a drastic loss in a character who, as male or female, goes
lovemaking through the ages. Swinton’s declarations of passion—for people, for
poetry, for life—come right from the refrigerator.
Potter’s directing often has freshness. At the very start she gives us a hint
of it. The Elizabethan Orlando is striding back and forth under a great tree (the
same tree under which the film ends), and Potter’s camera, at a fair distance,
moves counter to Orlando’s striding, gliding left when he goes right and vice versa.
She keeps him centered on the screen, but she avoids tracking him tritely. Potter’s
decision to have Orlando occasionally play to the camera is in fact the closest that
the film comes to the invitations of the book. Moreover, the way that Potter takes
Orlando through an immense maze in a formal garden, to emerge radically
changed, has humor and verve.
But for all of this, for all the splendid costumes and the magnificence of such
sequences as the festival on the frozen Thames, the film just keeps reaching and
hoping.
The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese, 1993 (The New Republic, 18 October
1993)
The basic trouble with Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence is Edith
Wharton’s novel. Looking back fifty years in 1920, Wharton conceived a tale of
love versus honor set in New York high society of that past era, and she embodied
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it in a full-dress novel. But her material would have served only as a short story,
at most a novella, for Tolstoy or Chekhov. What helps to sustain Wharton’s more
extended treatment is the attractive prose in which she wraps her narrative. Her
writing has so much wit and perception, such a taking blend of satire-cum-
nostalgia, that the book holds us though the story is slender. (I still feel the ending
shortchanges us. I want to know what Ellen Olenska said to Newland Archer’s son
in her Paris apartment, what the youth thought when she ordered the shutters
closed against his father, how he later reported the meeting to his father.) In the
film, without its garment of text, the denuded story is thin.
It’s worse than that—because the film tries to be the novel. Attempting to
reproduce the text’s quality, very nearly page for page, Scorsese even uses
considerable prose excerpts on the soundtrack (read flatly by Joanne Woodward).
He and his co-adapter, Jay Cocks, have been zealously faithful to the original, but,
ironically, all that this fidelity does is make the picture seem slow. Film can’t cloak,
can’t justify, as Wharton’s prose does, the linearity of the story.
It’s even worse—because (to close the novel’s trap) Scorsese and Cocks
had no choice: the picture has to run as long as it does. The adapters understood
that there was absolutely no point in the enterprise if the decorum of drawing
room and dining room, the rustle of silk and the spruceness of boutonnières, were
slighted. Etiquette, at its most stately, is the theater of this drama. Among some
critics, there was advance worry about this; could Scorsese, the director from
Little Italy, cope with the Four Hundred? That worry always seemed unnecessary
to me. A director of his gifts, flanked with brigades of various period experts, aided
mightily by the camera of Michael Ballhaus, would delight in the nooks and
crannies of the period—and he does. But it’s a bitter triumph. He had to include
all the glitter and elegance; yet it doesn’t sustain the story as Wharton’s writing
does.
Not for lack of cinematic imagination. Scorsese is one of the two or three
best American directors now at work, and his talent is quickly evident in the way
the camera searches out every wisp of possible action in a scene, the way that
characters move up to and past the camera to suggest that the theater in which we
are sitting is part of the room on screen, the way the camera often nestles in to
people as if to hear secrets. In a moment that might have been static for another
director, when Newland Archer gets an important telegram from his fiancée, May
Welland, Scorsese has May speak it in front of an immense bank of flowers as the
camera comes close, charging the moment with perfume and intimacy.
When twenty-six years elapse, after Ellen takes herself out of Newland
Archer’s life and returns to Europe, a time-lapse that Wharton can handle with a
simple chapter break, Scorsese shuns the banality of fade-out on the young Archer
and fade-in on the middle-aged man. He concentrates on Archer’s library, “in
which most of the real things of his life had happened.” He circles the room slowly,
showing us moments in the Archer family chronicle during those years.
And music! The most Scorsesean touch in Wharton’s book is that it begins
at the opera. (Remember Mascagni under the opening of Raging Bull 1980.) Red
meat to Scorsese, as it was to Visconti in Senso (1954). Onward from this opening,
Scorsese uses lively music to spank sequences into life—often, at balls and parties,
with music that comes from within the scene or else with Elmer Bernstein’s
felicitous score.
But—a heavy but—Scorsese has made serious mistakes with his principal
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actors. The biggest disappointment is in the crucial part, Daniel Day-Lewis as

Newland Archer. Archer is the protagonist, happily affianced to May Welland, who
then falls in love with the newly arrived Ellen Olenska. The central drama is his.
(Ellen’s agon is no less, but she isn’t placed at the center.) On the basis of Day-
Lewis’s past work, forceful and graphic in A Room With a View (1985), My Beautiful
Laundrette (1985), and My Left Foot (1989), he seemed very likely to inhabit the
role, to vitalize it. He doesn’t. He merely moves through it. There’s never a spark
to sting us: he leaves us cold, observant. Perhaps Scorsese was counting on his
personality to grip us, a resident power such as Fredric March or James Mason
had. Day-Lewis doesn’t have it. He needed to act (which Mason or March would
have done, too!), but he doesn’t. He skates through. It’s surprising that Scorsese
didn’t remedy this.
Michelle Pfeiffer is a somewhat more complicated case. As Ellen Olenska,
the American who returns to New York after a broken European marriage, Pfeiffer
tries hard but fails. It’s sad. She is living as intelligent a life as is possible for an
American film star these days: seeking variety, taking chances, addressing every
role with all the resources she can command. She just doesn’t command enough—
in fire or depth or resonance. The result in film after film is a somewhat washed-
out version of the woman she is playing, like a painting that has faded. Her Ellen
is perceptible but pallid. What helps Pfeiffer most is the fact that though she is
exceptionally pretty, she patently doesn’t rely on her prettiness: she wants to act.
But, with her Ellen, though we know what she means from moment to moment,
we simply don’t feel it.
Winona Ryder is disastrously miscast as May Welland, Archer’s utterly
conventional fiancée and eventual wife, who turns out to have been more
perceptive than her husband knew. Ryder is wrong, first, physically. Wharton
describes May as being “tall, round-bosomed, and willowy” with a “goddesslike-
build,” and comments frequently on her features. Clearly Wharton means May’s
physical being to help explain why Archer wanted her. Here Archer has chosen a
moderately pleasant, quite unremarkable girl. As for Ryder’s acting, the one smile
for me in this film—which is and must be socially hyperconscious—occurred
when Ryder remarks to Archer that a man she has just met seems common. To put
it gently, her social superiority is unconvincing.
Robert Sean Leonard, who trivialized Claudio in the recent Much Ado About
Nothing (1993), has less chance here to do damage in the small role of Archer’s
son. But most of the supporting actors in the lustrous New York social parade are
neatly cast, and two of them do the best acting in the film. Alec McCowen, as
Sillerton Jackson, the aging socialite, has the gravity of a man to whom protocol is
his reason for being. Miriam Margolyes, as the obese and ultra-rich Mrs. Mingott,
curls the surrounding air with dry disdain and hierarchical rigor.
The Age of Innocence was dramatized on Broadway in 1928 and was filmed
in Hollywood in 1924 and 1934. I don’t know any of those versions, and I wonder
how (which means I doubt that) they avoided the snare that Wharton unwittingly
set for her adapters, the snare that, for all his gifts, caught Scorsese.
The Remains of the Day, James Ivory, 1993 (The New Republic, 6 December
1993)
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Anthony Hopkins is the center of The Remains of the Day—more

specifically, Hopkins’ body. After an introductory sequence that takes us up a
driveway to palatial Darlington Hall in Oxfordshire, where an auction is being
conducted in a tent on the lawn, the picture proper begins with Hopkins, as
Stevens the butler, opening some shutters. His tempo of movement, the pitch of
his body, the set of his head, the fact that—apparently just by thinking it—he has
enlarged his jaw to suggest a touch of the bulldog, these things announce that a
character has been created and that we are in for exceptional acting.
Nowadays we hear a good deal about body language, particularly in
connection with so-called performance artists. Good for them. But, for actors, body
language has been around for a while: Jack Nicholson in Hoffa (1992) and Vanessa
Redgrave in Howards End (1992) are only two recent examples. Quite clearly,
Hopkins decided that the man who led Stevens’ life would manifest it physically,
kinetically. He bears himself like the legatee of a line of butlers with the charge of
passing on the legacy.
From this conception, the rest follows inevitably, if you’re Hopkins. The
precision of his speech conveys that he is a man who has learned to speak well
without any substantial education behind him. (His father, whom we meet in the
course of things, has a working-class accent.) The time is 1958, the “present” of
the film; and Hopkins gives us a man who has aged somewhat but is still perfectly
competent, grown from the Stevens before World War II, whom we soon see. We
quickly feel that the Hall would seem empty without him. In short, Hopkins is the
film. Excellent though it is in many ways, it would come to little without his
performance.
The screenplay readjusts some of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, not to its
advantage. As is widely known, a screenplay by Harold Pinter was discarded in
favor of one by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the usual writer of this director, James Ivory,
and his producer, Ismail Merchant. It’s conceivable that Pinter wanted to stick
closer to the book; his previous adaptations suggest this. Jhabvala is certainly no
crude hack, but she has underscored some matters and has altered the tone of the
original.
The story interweaves the “present” with doings in Darlington Hall in the
1930s. From Stevens, moving through both time planes, we get a personification
of Britain slipping fatefully into World War II and struggling for balance thereafter.
Stevens is devoted to his master, Lord Darlington, a well-meaning but fuzzy-
minded aristo who, in the 1930s, thinks he is working to avoid war and who invites
high figures in various governments to convene in his house. (The suggestions of
the notorious Cliveden Set are clear.) Stevens feels honored to be serving a man
who is involved in great events and who intends well for his country. Stevens’
blind trust is meant as nationally symbolic.
Also running through the pre-war and postwar years are his relations with
the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, whom we first see in her early thirties. They have
occasional disagreements, yet he respects her professionalism. On his part, it’s no
more than that. He never acknowledges that her response may be otherwise.
Both the political element and the personal element are subtly drawn in
the book, but Jhabvala italicizes much of the subtlety. On the political side there is
an encounter with a doctor in the postwar years that pounds a point to pieces.
Stevens has taken a holiday, as urged by his new American employer (Darlington
has died), and has borrowed a car. He goes to visit Miss Kenton, long departed
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from the Hall, who now lives in the West Country. En route he meets a doctor
who—in the film, not the book—harries Stevens about his tacit collaboration in
the allegedly treacherous activities at Darlington Hall before the war until Stevens
evades and lies a bit. This changes Stevens front a man armored in loyalty to a
shifty time-server, and it’s done just to make sure the audience understands that
the film’s political heart is in the right place.
Stevens’ relationship with Miss Kenton is as it was in the book, but the
film’s treatment of it is more sentimental. When they are in service together, she
has a rather reticent crush on him, but the film underscores it. In the “present,” as
he drives to meet her in his employer’s car (a Daimler, not the novel’s Ford), as we
learn that she has been married, has a daughter, and is now separated from her
husband, we suspect that at romance may be belatedly fulfilled. No such thing
happens. When he and Miss Kenton part after a mild afternoon together, he puts
her on a bus, then notices that she is crying. That’s all—in the novel. The film holds
on her face as she rides away in tears, her last chance with him fading away.
This shot ruptures the first-person perspective of Stevens (not for the first
time, either) that is essential to the work. That perspective is not merely a literary
device that could be discarded in the film. Ishiguro’s aim was to show a man so
encapsulated in protocols that all the major events of his life, political and
emotional, happen on the periphery of that life. We see, through his eyes, more
clearly than he does what is happening around him. Ishiguro means this, I believe,
as a comment on England. The film fractures his intent. The argument presumably
is that the fracturing needed to be done in order to make the novel into a film. This
argument can be doubted; in any case, what is not arguable is that, to Ishiguro’s
exquisitely poised work, Jhabvala has painted on colors of “Upstairs, Downstairs”
(1971-75).
Let’s add very quickly that, whatever the screenplay’s flaws, it is filmed
superbly. James Ivory showed in Howards End that he is no longer (the British jibe)
a Laura Ashley director, chiefly interested in décor. Ivory does equally well in The
Remains of the Day. Darlington Hail—actually several stately homes were used—
is treated as Stevens might have treated it: majestic, venerable, but the place
where he works.
Emma Thompson, on whom be peace, is Miss Kenton, gently exact in her
blend of professional pride and personal desperation. She is lesser in the story
than Hopkins, but she certainly helps to keep the fabric whole. Her best scene is
one in a pub with the man she determines to marry. But I must note that this scene,
too, is an insertion in the original, as are others of her scenes. Again the argument,
I suppose, is for heightened dramatization; again, it is done at the expense of the
poignantly enclosed feeling of the novel.
James Fox plays Darlington with the right tweedy ease, warm but dim.
Christopher Reeves plays a “collapsed” part; the American congressman who
attends a Darlington Hall conference before the war is here combined with the
postwar American who buys the Hall. Poor Reeves. He’s so big and so
conventionally handsome that, though he is serious, it’s hard to take him seriously.
Elegy is the key term for this work, from the title onward. In the film
version, the explicit touches don’t help; but because of Ivory and Hopkins and their
colleagues, much of it has melancholy beauty.
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The Natural, Barry Levinson, 1994 (The New Republic, 11 June 1984)
In The Natural, Robert Redford is first seen as a Midwest farm youth in the
late 1920s who goes to Chicago for a pitching tryout with the Cubs and seems
bound to make good. A woman whom he met on the train invites him to her hotel
room; she, demented, shoots him in the stomach, then commits suicide. After
fifteen obscure years, most of them spent out of baseball, Redford is scouted by
the New York Knights in a semi-pro game, comes to New York, and in time
succeeds as a slugging outfielder. Again a beautiful woman threatens him with
destruction—of a different sort. The sudden reappearance of a sweetheart from
his farm-country past, accompanied by the adolescent son that Redford didn’t
know he had, bolsters him, brings him through to victory and to the retirement
that his health demands. He returns to the farmland of his boyhood; the last
sequence is a replay of the opening sequence in a wheat field, except that he is
throwing fly balls as his father once did and his son is catching them instead of
himself.
As screen stories go, it’s pretty good: with its Hemingway use of
contemporary sport as the locus of contemporary epic, with agreeable
symmetries, and with a symbolic overlay of temptations and redemption. As
screen adaptations go, it really goes—far from the Bernard Malamud novel that is
its source. Robert Towne and Phil Dusenberry, the screenwriters, have reworked
much of the material of the novel, some of it quite unconventional, into a script
that tries to retain the unconventional atmosphere while forging conventional
form. To Malamud’s symmetries they have added some of their own (the use of
lightning, for instance); they have converted Malamud’s malevolent forces into
patent villains; and they have transformed his novel of haunting fate into a
mystical story with a happy ending. The Natural was Malamud’s first novel (and
has no Jews in it), but it contains several themes that run through his later books
(all of which have Jews in them): actions have consequences; some mistakes are
irreparable; happiness exists as a criterion, not as an achievable state; life, seen
with ideal objectivity, is a complex joke but still a joke, even though, like the hero
of The Natural, you weep “many bitter tears” at the end of your story. The
screenwriters have kept only hints of these themes.
I’m not raising here the antique complaint of the distortion of a novel (or
play) by film, although there’s no question that Malamud’s novel has been
distorted. Even if one places this book among its author’s lesser works—my own
opinion—one can’t be blind either to the screen changes or the reasons for them.
If The Natural is sacrosanct to you, stay away from the film and reread the book.
On the other hand, if you want to see how some competent craftsmen winnowed
some cinematic elements out of the book and transmuted them to their own ends,
the film has its rewards.
The first problem that the filmmakers faced, and dealt with adequately,
was tone: how to balance and combine the hard, clear-cut talk and action of
baseball with the numinous elements that overhang the story. (Curious, how
baseball induces authors to use it as a locus for the fantastic. Some post-Malamud
examples: Douglas Wallop’s novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which
became the musical and film musical Damn Yankees 1958; Robert Coover’s novel
The Universal Baseball Association, Henry Waugh, Prop.; John Ford Noonan’s play
The Year Boston Won the Pennant.) The director, Barry Levinson, whose first film
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was Diner (1982), understood from the start that this matter of tone was primary;
he and his cinematographer, the talented Caleb Deschanel, have tried to move and
light the film so as to suggest that the bright world of the diamond is surrounded
by mysterious forces. We have all seen the blimp shots, now TV commonplaces, of
a brilliantly lighted playing field surrounded by oceanic darkness. That may have
been a guiding metaphor for the film; and, except that Levinson uses slow motion
too predictably for emphases of both fact and fantasy, he fulfills it much of the
time.
Second, the filmmakers have frankly faced commercial considerations and,
to their purposes, have made those considerations serve them. Having altered and
condensed and rearranged the materials as they did all along the line, they had no
alternative but to give the film a happy ending; so they gave it one that, in pop
terms, is good glow-making. Once this film story is launched as it is, it takes on its
own artistic responsibilities; any unhappy ending would have been jarring, even
more arbitrary than what we see. Kenneth Burke’s famous dictum tells us that
form is the arousal and satisfaction of expectation. George M. Cohan’s earthy
equivalent was that the audience writes the last act. Malamud purists will shriek
at the ending, but they will have been shrieking long before that. Those who can
accept the idea that this is not the novel, in order to see what pleasures they may
get from the transformation, will get those pleasures.
Oddly, the pleasure that comes first to mind is a scene of two men shaving.
Just before the game that will decide the pennant race, the Knights manager and
his bench coach are shaving side by side in a locker-room mirror. The manager is
Wilford Brimley, familiar now from Tender Mercies (1983) and The Stone Boy
(1984). The coach is Richard Farnsworth, already beloved (I hope) because of
Comes a Horseman (1978) and The Grey Fox (1982). Those two laconic codgers
scraping away, saying things I can’t even remember, exemplify the fact that the
right people doing even commonplace things at the right time can make the screen
interesting.
Or there’s the scene in which Redford re-meets his boyhood sweetheart.
He slips into a soda-fountain booth opposite her, and the first thing he says, after
fifteen years, is, “Are you married?” (Malamud’s line, transposed.) Redford’s look
at her implies the quick rush through his mind of everything that had been
between them and that he is still able to hope; and leads him directly to the
question he wants to ask even more than he wants to say hello. It’s a subtle, lovely
moment.
Or there’s the recurring presence of Robert Duvall as an almost literally
diabolical sportswriter, insisting that the past continues, that the wolves of mortal
malice are always at the door.
Redford, making his first screen appearance in four years (too long!),
reminds those who need reminding that he is one of the perfect male film stars.
Like only a few other men—Paul Newman and Marcello Mastroianni—he is
extraordinarily handsome, effortlessly fascinating, and enormously talented. His
role here is not the most demanding of his career, not on the level of The Candidate
and Jeremiah Johnson (both from 1972), but it gives us ample chance to see
another kind of natural in his element.
Glenn Close is the boyhood sweetheart, and, once again, she works honestly
and unappealingly. The costumes and settings tell us graphically that we are in the
1930s, but we would know it anyway: there’s not a black man on any of the ball
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teams. I didn’t even see a black person in any of the ballpark crowds. (Was this
why, at one of the ball club parties, they sing “Darktown Strutters’ Ball”? Are we
being told something about pre-Jackie-Robinson prejudice?)
Possibly I ought to feel guilty about not being more protective (as I often
have been) of a novel by a good writer, but with all its alterations, the film an sich
gave me some fun. Which underscores my chief critical dictum: criticism is less a
matter of dicta than of instances.
Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997 (The New Republic, 10

November 1997)
The year is 1977 when Boogie Nights begins. Eddie Adams is a seventeen-
year-old busboy in a San Fernando Valley nightclub when he is spotted by Jack
Horner, a director of porno films. Horner, with the intuition that made him
wealthy, senses potency and potential in Eddie. He quickly learns that Eddie has
already earned some money sexually, so little persuasion is needed. Horner soon
makes Eddie into a big porno star, under the name Dirk Diggler.
For us, however, he remains, most of the time, Eddie, a basically sweet naïf,
doing what is asked of him sexually like an obliging peasant youth in Sade, except
that he becomes mildly famous and well-off. His new life brings along many new
people. First, there is Horner’s girlfriend, a porno star called Amber Waves—in
fact, she is Eddie’s first on-camera lay. Then there is Rollergirl, a porno playmate
who doesn’t take off her roller skates for sex. And there is a large miscellany of
others in and around the business, almost all of them druggies.
Some of the group’s stories are tracked through the screenplay, with or
without Eddie’s involvement, much as was done in Nashville (1975) or Pulp Fiction
(1994). This braiding device entails a bit of padding; still, as the film blasts along
from 1977 to 1983, it cracks open its world. The finish fits out most of the strands
with relatively pleasant conclusions. Only the ending of Eddie’s story is a touch too
neat. (And, too, there are a couple of murders along the way that the picture simply
shrugs off.)
Boogie Nights was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. This is
remarkable. Anderson’s only previous film, Hard Eight (1996), was one of those
strained independent films whose threadbare central idea wears out very soon.
With Boogie Nights Anderson may have had help from the people who are always
around an expensive production, but it has the temper of one person’s ingenuity
and energy. It’s an extraordinary step forward from his first picture—a 152-
minute film with almost no sags.
All this in spite of the fact that Anderson never quite achieves his
presumable chief aim. This picture moves us into a terrain where the moral scale
is unabashedly different from the rest of the world’s, even the part that patronizes
porn, and it asks us to accept that scale: its ambitions, judgments, loyalties, even
its annual “Oscars.” This acceptance never quite happens for us. When a porno
production man finally kills his wife, who has frequently coupled with other men
in public, and then kills himself, it’s hard to feel the pathos that’s intended. Why
didn’t he shoot her before? Or why did he bother now? When Amber, a divorcee,
goes to law for visitation rights with her son and loses, her heartache doesn’t quite
reach us. Who would want a child to spend much time in her environment?
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Yet, despite the film’s distance from us, we are held. In part, of course,
there’s the sexual titillation: whether or not we’re sated with porn, the way that
those films are made still catches us. Mostly, however, our interest seems to
connect with a shift in standards. Moral criteria have been replaced by stylistic
ones. To put it another way, if Boogie Nights were poorly made and acted, its
materials would make it intolerably tawdry. But it’s so well done that we keep
watching.
Film historians may already be at their computers, tapping away at this
transition from the sin-suffer-repent of the past to the contemporary acceptance
of almost anything if it’s sufficiently well made. Of course there have been
precedents in other arts for centuries. (Why is Courbet’s The Origin of the World,
a depersonalized close-up of female genitalia, hung in a museum instead of being
copied and sold with Hustler? Because it’s beautifully painted.) Now this license
through quality reaches the most widely seen art on earth. What does this
transition imply or—dread word—forebode? Tune in next century.
As is, Boogie Nights dazzles along. Two scenes stand out memorably. After
Amber loses her plea for her son, she is in her lush bedroom talking with Rollergirl,
who has problems of her own. The younger one, in tears, says she needs a mom,
and the older one (not that old) hugs her as they cry and nestle together. The
suggestions in this well-written scene are subtle and evocative. And there’s a long
scene toward the end where Eddie, temporarily in money trouble, takes part in a
drug delivery and robbery. The place is the home of the rich Rahad Jackson, who
is on a giggling high throughout, in his briefs and open robe. The scene is
punctuated by the firecrackers that his Chinese companion keeps setting off; and
the inevitably bloody outcome hovers invisibly in the air waiting to materialize.
The whole scene plays like an insane ballet.
Anderson directs throughout with verve and fluency. His very enthusiasm
spurs his talent to carry him over dangers. For instance, the several wild parties.
Little is deader on screen than most wild parties, but Anderson makes them
smooth, hip bacchanals, with variegated people winding through on their
hedonistic way.
His ability, always clear, is at its clearest in his casting and directing of
actors. Mark Wahlberg gives Eddie the precise note of unvicious amorality. (At the
end we glimpse the reason for Eddie’s success—his prodigious organ. At least we
are to believe it’s his.) Burt Reynolds seems to have invested his whole career in
preparation for Jack Horner. Ease used as ethic, a seriousness that is meant to be
transparent: these and all the other qualities that marked his unctuously
inveigling performances lead directly to Jack, a man of a dependability that is
limited only by self-interest, with an embrace that is part smother.
Julianne Moore, already distinguished not only by her gifts but by her
daring choice of roles, is rightly regal as Amber. She is the queen of herself, moving
through her life with the assurance of hermetically sealed values. Heather Graham,
the Rollergirl, is pleasant as a human Barbie doll. Every other part, large or lesser,
is cast precisely and taken to its utmost. A particular salute to the English actor,
Alfred Molina, as Rahad, a carefully designed frenetic performance.
Three more salutes. Robert Elswit gets right to the texture of scene after
scene, and thus gives the film itself a seductive luridness. Dylan Tichenor, the
editor, knows exactly what we want to be looking at, a moment before we know it
ourselves. And the music, old and new, tended by Michael Penn, is a jet propulsion
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under it all.
Mrs. Dalloway, Marleen Gorris, 1997 (The New Republic, 9 March 1998)
Last week a film that was a free adaptation of a famous novel, Alfonso
Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998); this week a film that clings close to a famous
novel, Mrs. Dalloway.
That intelligent and inquiring English actress, Eileen Atkins, has been
working on Virginia Woolf projects for almost ten years. First, Atkins did a one-
woman adaptation of A Room of One’s Own, which she played in London and New
York and on tour, an inviting and lucid performance. Then Atkins made a theater
piece, not exactly a play, out of the correspondence of Woolf and her lover, Vita
Sackville-West. In New York, Atkins played Virginia and Vanessa Redgrave played
Vita; and though the piece showed its lack of dramatic core, the skill and charm of
the two performers made it a treat.
Atkins persists. Now she has made a screenplay of Mrs. Dalloway for
Redgrave. Clearly Atkins recognized the problems in adapting this shimmery
novel, but, alas, recognizing them is not enough. Those problems still obtrude.
Woolf’s novel might be seen as a (much smaller) parallel to Joyce’s Ulysses.
By closely following one day in the life of one quite ordinary woman, the book
includes a social tapestry, a political index, a theological position, and something
of the history that had produced all these elements. Woolf knew Joyce’s work
(about which she had decidedly mixed feelings, especially because of Joyce’s
candor); but “stream of consciousness” technique was in the air at the time, and
she might well have done what she did if Joyce had never existed.
That technique works wonderfully well in the novel; but it is not a
comfortable film mode. The story deals with one June day in the London of 1923,
from morning to the evening when Clarissa Dalloway gives a party in her house.
She is wealthy and reticently elegant, the middle-aged wife of an M.P., a woman
whose life is plainly pleasant and vacuous. Through her day of party preparations,
several other stories wind. A former suitor of hers, Peter Walsh, returns after a
long stay in India. He visits Clarissa, is still in some way affected by her, yet tells
her of a current amorous involvement. And there is the story of a young man, a
severely shell-shocked veteran of the Great War (as it was prematurely called),
who has a devoted Italian wife. His story connects with Mrs. Dalloway because the
physician who so signally fails to help him is a guest at her party that evening.
To accommodate the background of these and other encounters, Atkins has
devised some flashback scenes, derived from Woolf. Also, those scenes serve the
usual purpose of the past juxtaposed with the present, a pathos so inevitable that
it hardly needs to be mentioned. When we see the young Peter asking the young
Clarissa to marry him and thus break out of her cosseted life, when we see her opt
instead for the quite conventional young Richard Dalloway, we understand how
Clarissa’s upbringing has crimped the possibilities for her life. She was reared to
be a quite conventional lady, and that is what she has become.
This flashing-back is pretty to look at, and it flexes the narrative, but it
works against the unification of the piece; and unification of the whole was
patently what Woolf was after. Her prose makes the novel a holistic work even
when the narrative shifts from one strand to another. This is impossible in the film,
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where the shifts are exactly that, breaks from the centrality of Mrs. Dalloway’s day.
There’s a further disjuncture. Woolf’s prose transmutes ordinary
experience. One instance: when Big Ben strikes, she writes: “The leaden circles
dissolved in the air.” In the film we simply hear the bells. In a sense Woolf might
just as well not have written as she did. Any of us can hear bells; only Woolf could
have thus transfigured the sound, and the film cheats us of her.
This is not remotely to argue a fixed superiority of literature over film, but
it is to suggest that some novels resist adaptation to the core of their beings.
Further, it suggests that an actress-writer can fall so much in love with a fine novel
that she overlooks her own experience and knowledge. (For a quite contrary
example, see Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility 1995.)
And, unfortunately, that is not all. Most of Mrs. Dalloway’s activity during
that June day is inner—things that she thinks and feels. Atkins knew this, of course,
and tried to enrich the outer, visible woman with some voice-over quotations from
her thoughts. But those few quotations never have, could not have, the wholeness
of the contrapuntal feeling in the book, the sense that the woman whom the world
sees has a more interesting, invisible self constantly attending her. And since Mrs.
Dalloway is largely banal in her utterances, her dialogue is mostly tedious slivers
of politesse: “Delighted that you could come,” “How lovely to see you,” and so on.
This condition puts a dreadful burden on Vanessa Redgrave. She has rarely
had a role that demanded less of (let us please use the term) her genius. She moves
through Mrs. Dalloway’s house and the London streets like a great, beautiful ship
sailing on urban seas, and when she speaks, she makes as much as she decently
can of her clumps of standard chatter. If the role weren’t in the hands of an actress
who is being underused, it would be intolerable. But even Redgrave can’t make
Mrs. Dalloway, in this form, a fascinating woman.
Her clothes, designed by Judy Pepperdine, are unostentatiously lovely,
especially the hats. In the pre-war flashback scenes, the clothes bespeak their
period cleverly. And in those clothes, the performances of the young Clarissa and
Peter and Richard are vividly . . . young. As the older Peter, Michael Kitchen carries
nicely an air of regret plus hope.
But the most demanding performance, a demand well met, is by Rupert
Graves as the unbalanced war veteran. This man’s presence in both novel and film
is obviously meant to give us a glimpse of the horror in the world through which
Mrs. Dalloway has floated. Graves has to deal with abrupt swirls of mood and
reality, and he does it movingly.
The director was Marleen Gorris, the Dutch woman whose last film of the
five she has made, Antonia’s Line (1995), was smoothly fulfilled. (Incidentally,
Gorris did an M.A. at an English university, and she has some feeling for the
country.) In her hands we can be sure that the feminist aspects of Woolf’s work
will not be slighted. More, Gorris understands the story, as, in the truest sense, a
woman’s work. The handicaps that she could not overcome are the implacable
ones of the screenplay.
Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997 (The New Republic, 23 November

1998)
Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote, directed, and stars in Life Is Beautiful, is

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one of Italy’s most popular comedians. Americans have had the chance to see him
in Fellini’s last film, Voices of the Moon (1990), and in two of Jim Jarmusch’s films,
Down by Law (1986) and Night on Earth (1991), in all of which he showed himself
to be a skilled clown in the circus tradition—what can be called silhouette comedy,
as against the combination of silhouette and interiority that marks Chaplin or
Keaton.
Benigni’s new film leaves the province in which we have seen him and
moves into the Chaplin-Keaton area. He has made a comedy about a Nazi
concentration camp. Actually, he has made half a film on that subject. Apparently
he couldn’t devise enough material to set the whole film in the camp, so he fills the
first half of the picture with his slapstick (silhouette) adventures on the way to
marriage and the begetting of the son who is the focus of the second half. And that
second half requires acting—genuine acting—at which Benigni is not quite adept.
Benigni plays Guido, a Jewish waiter who, after marriage, opens a
bookshop. He and his wife (Nicoletta Braschi) adore their small boy (Giorgio
Cantarini). When all three are ultimately taken to the concentration camp, Guido
gets the idea to pretend that the whole horror is a game—to soothe and to protect
the boy. For instance, in the camp Guido persuades the boy that the heavy labor
that is forced on the inmates is a contest in which all are trying to win points
toward a prize.
If this idea grates somewhat in synopsis—and there are numerous others
like it—it grates only a little less in the film itself, mitigated skimpily by Benigni’s
clowning, not by his acting. In the press notes he cites, as one of his inspirations
for the film, a line from Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. During his imprisonment Levi
thinks: “What if all this were nothing but a joke? This cannot be true. . . .” But the
cosmic reverberations of Levi’s comment are reduced to the incredible and the
distasteful in Benigni’s mundane circus antics. Any repugnance we might feel is
supposed to be swept away by the wash of paternal love, Guido’s intent to protect
his son from the facts. This protection is so blatantly impossible that the paternal
love begins to seem theatrically phony. Even a small child (if he had been able to
survive with his father) would have seen fairly soon that the object of the camp
was not to have fun, a fact that renders Benigni’s idea much less a moving instance
of love than an actor’s shallow conceit. Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties (1975) wrung
some grim comedy out of a concentration camp—without whimsy. Benigni
certainly knew the risk he was taking with his idea, but the circumstances
overwhelm him.
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Theater into Cinema
The Balcony, Joseph Strick, 1963 (The New Republic, 23 March 1963)
Jean Genet’s play The Balcony has a considerable history of adaptation in

its short life. It was first published in 1956 in fifteen scenes; it was subsequently
published in 1960 in nine scenes. (This is the version available in the U.S. in
translation.) Its first production was in English—London, 1957—over the
author’s violent protests about the way it was produced. It was first presented in
New York, Off-Broadway, in March 1960 and was condensed before the opening;
it was presented in France the following May and was again condensed after the
opening. It has now been radically adapted for the screen and has been filmed Off-
Hollywood.
The Balcony is the name of a brothel in an unidentified country that is torn
by revolt. This brothel, an imaginatively equipped palace of illusion, is an
observation post from which the bloodshed and struggle can be watched; and the
fantasies that the clients act out with the girls are caricatures of the world outside.
Three regular customers have always enacted a bishop, a judge, a general, and in
a moment of crisis they have to masquerade as such in the real world. The chief of
police, busy suppressing the rebels, takes time to visit the madam, who is his
mistress. One of his frustrations is that no client has yet wanted to impersonate
him. The rebel leader appears toward the end and asks to impersonate the chief.
At the conclusion of his scene with a girl, the leader castrates himself. The
characters disperse. The revolt is either a success or a failure; it is not clear. The
madam addresses the audience: “You must now go home, where everything—you
can be quite sure—will be even falser than here.”
Even this stripped summary discloses that the play is a fantasy on themes
of power and of relative values, as mirrored in extreme rituals of sex. Genet’s plays
have been shoved into the hastily convoked Theater of the Absurd, but they do not
belong there. Both before and after The Balcony, he has shown himself a poetic
dramatist of social protest. The modes of meaninglessness—of Beckett, Ionesco,
Pinter, Adamov—are remote from this man, whose life and work have been acts
of assault, hatred of degraded ideals. There is cruelty in the Absurdists, but there
is little hate. Hate is impossible without ideals, and ideals are impossible in the
theater’s current reductio ad Absurdum.
The screenplay of The Balcony, by Ben Maddow, tries to slice down to the
themes of the original, articulating them somewhat differently. In a narrow sense
the script is an improvement. Genet poses vivid situations, then does not develop
them dramatically. For example, each of the clients’ scenes begins startlingly, but
after one has perceived both the fetish and its symbolism, which takes about a
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minute, nothing further comes of the scene but verbal embroidery on the initial
situation. On a larger scale the play could be summed up the same way: it is a
basically startling and promising image that is not successfully developed. One
does not ask for copybook maxims from a poetic drama, but on Genet’s own terms,
the metaphors do not generate sufficient tension, do not grow and burst, as the act
of drama should. The best effects are those of lyric poetry, which has only to
establish striking figures in apposition and need not do much more with them.
Maddow, sensing this, has tried to impose stricter form and direction on
the material, has shortened and simplified. Thus some of the theatrical tedium has
been excised, but, inevitably, so has much of the imagery and idea. If Genet had
shaped the work better, it would be a better play; Maddow’s shaping only makes
it more streamlined. And, while altering, Maddow has added mere gags (the
general settles his bill with a credit card); and he has disrupted the tone of the
work by fluctuating between bitter fantasy and broad satire. The police chief
makes a jabberwocky radio address; the three fake officials make a farcical
triumphant tour by car and pay a meaningless visit to the morgue; the castration
is omitted, and the chief and the rebel fight—stopped only by the whores’
stripping them naked at the madam’s orders.
Yet this same script might have become a more satisfying film in the hands
of a more gifted director. Joseph Strick, who previously made the sophomoric
Savage Eye (1960), has little knowledge of acting, a trite pictorial eye, and less
sense of tone than his scriptwriter. Under the titles we see a montage of newsreel
shots: street riots, raging mobs. From this scary reality we switch to the brothel,
which does not seem to be related even in fantasy to this grainy newsreel world.
(When the three fakers later ride through the streets, the newsreel shots, which
had previously been used with the grimmest reality, are now used for
Chaplinesque effects.) Within the chimerical brothel itself, the film is handled
without evocative poetic effect. The camera is factual; it needed the touch of a
Cocteau.
Strick cannot help insecure actresses like Joyce Jameson and Arnette Jens,
and he has miscast Ruby Dee. Peter Falk, an actor of guttural capabilities, is never
allowed to make the police chief either a power symbol with comic facets or a Marx
Brothers butt. Shelley Winters, the madam, is much too earthbound to be an Earth
Mother. We could believe her as a madam in Toledo or Tulsa, not as the archetypal
madam of Nowhere and Everywhere. However, the film does give substantial
opportunity to that shamefully neglected actress, Lee Grant, who plays the
madam’s lesbian friend. How prodigally wasteful our theater and films are, not to
offer fuller scope to this fine actress.
The merits of the picture, which exist, must not be scanted. It is worth
applauding the elementary fact that it was made, that something was done—even
if it was adapting a French play—to keep American films at least vaguely in touch
with what is happening in the rest of the world. More positively, after all the faults
have been noted, the picture contains a residuum of the suggestive ambiguities of
Genet’s play. And it conveys some sense of sex as ambience, sex not merely as the
pleasures of the bed but as a pervasive force, a medium for mysteries, revelations,
fulfillments.
The Sea Gull, Sidney Lumet, 1968 (The New Republic, 11 January 1969)
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From the very first moment of The Sea Gull, it’s clear that Sidney Lumet
doesn’t know what to do and so is going to do lots and lots of things. Long shots of
scenery, a girl—presumably Nina—galloping a horse on the other side of the lake.
Insecure, irrelevant, just pretty. Then, in utter distortion of the play, we see Masha
and Medvedenko in a little sexual tussle in the grass. Somehow they manage to
slide from this tussle into the somber opening lines, and we are off. Far off. Lumet
apparently wanted to make his outdoor scenes Beautiful. (This time he’s imitating
Elvira Madigan 1967.) Mostly he makes them look like indoor sets. And the post-
recording of the outdoor scenes has a dead studio sound.
Lumet’s furiously energetic, tin cleverness would be partially redressed if
the performances were good. They are not. As Madame Arkadina, Simone Signoret
(peace to the ashes of her earlier self) is ludicrous, a plump lady who cannot speak
English and who, in close-up, looks like a badly painted clown. James Mason, at his
most profound, makes Trigorin sound merely peevish. Harry Andrews, as Sorin,
barks as if he were still at the Battle of Balaclava in The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1968). David Warner, the Treplev, continues to mistake biliousness for
sensitivity. Denholm Elliott is unfocused as Dorn (and is atrociously wigged).
Kathleen Widdoes and Alfred Lynch, as Masha and Medvedenko, are acceptable.
Ronald Radd, as her father, is not.
The major disappointment is Vanessa Redgrave’s Nina. I had read of her in
the part on the London stage in the early 1960s and looked forward to her in this
picture. Now she is too old to play Nina—on film, at any rate. Redgrave has the
technique and range to cope with what few modern actresses could manage: the
high-flying play-within-a-play. And her confession to Treplev of her love for
Trigorin, after what the latter has done to her, is moving. But most of the time I
felt that she was trying for the girlishness, the newness, of Nina, and the strain
seemed to unsettle her.
The poor performances, combined  with Lumet’s defective rhythmic sense
and camerawork, make the film tedious. This isn’t hard with Chekhov, who is far
from actor-proof even on  the stage—where he belongs; but it  makes this film
dislocation all the  more gratuitous. For a last treat Lumet  distorts the ending.
Dorn discovers Treplev’s body outside, then he returns to the group sitting about
the table. The camera moves slowly from face to face as everyone’s unspoken
knowledge of the tragedy is implied. Chekhov wanted only a moment of
apprehension as Dorn goes out to investigate the noise; when he returns and lies
about the cause, the triviality of the lotto game is to continue, while Dorn takes
Trigorin aside and tells him quietly what has happened. Lumet gives us a general
Great Realization. Chekhov wanted life resumed with the fact of death slipped in
on the periphery. But since Lumet began with a distortion, why shouldn’t he end
with one?
A Doll’s House, Patrick Garland, 1973 (The New Republic, 2 June 1973)
With A Doll’s House we are back with questions raised, hardly for the first
time, by the recent Soviet film of Uncle Vanya (1971). Is there such a thing as a
good film of a major play? Allowing for arguable exceptions like the films of Henry
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V (1944) and Pygmalion (1938), I think the answer is still no. The better the play,
the less alterable the form. What we get here are some swatches of Ibsen, scissored
apart, with some gussets of transition and transposition inserted, and the whole
renovation stitched together again. And, as is the way with film adaptations,
although stuff is inserted, the whole altered thing is smaller than the original. This
film runs about ninety minutes.
It was made for two reasons: first, the topicality of the theme; second, the
success that Claire Bloom, the star, has had as Nora in New York and then London.
(Another film is coming with Jane Fonda as Nora.)  As to the first reason, it’s
dubious. I think the play is as much a struggle against nineteenth-century
dramaturgy as against nineteenth-century marriage, but it does have some size;
and that size is reduced by harping on topicality.
Others have pointed out, rightly, that A Doll’s House could have been about
either Nora or Torvald; it is really about marriage, not the oppression of women.
Indeed, five years after the play was written, the first great writer to discuss it,
August Strindberg, argued vigorously that Ibsen had proved the direct opposite of
what he intended to prove. (See the preface to Strindberg’s collection of stories
titled Getting Married, newly translated by Mary Sandbach and recently published
by Viking.) Even granting Strindberg’s biases, his argument delivers a jolt. In any
event the play still creaks and cranks along, driven through its mechanics only by
the great mind that knew all along how it would end.
Claire Bloom proves again that she is a much better actress on screen than
on stage: to put it properly, she is good on film and weak on stage. I’ve seen her in
this and several other plays, I’ve even gone to a solo poetry recital of hers, and
never has she had a trace of command, let alone of conviction. Her voice and
person simply are not able to cope with space. On film, with a compressed
environment, with an opportunity to work almost completely for “interiorness,”
she is truthful and at ease. On film she looks a bit old for Nora, which she didn’t on
stage; but here, insofar as the shredded script permits, she can more clearly paint
in the character’s substructure: her concept of Nora as consciously playing her
little squirrel tricks, debasing herself deliberately to play the little wifey-pifey for
Torvald, so that when she changes, we can see her throw off a role rather than
suddenly alter character.
Anthony Hopkins bulges forcefully as Torvald and cracks credibly.
Denholm Elliott, who was a fine Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler at the Royal Court
last summer, is an equally fine Krogstad here. Anna Massey is a reedily affecting
Mrs. Linde, and Ralph Richardson delights as Dr. Rank.
Christopher Hampton made the screenplay from his own reasonably
limber stage version. Patrick Garland, like Bloom, gains from the move to film. His
direction on stage was like Schubert operetta réchauffé. He is much better off with
less space to live in, moment by moment, and with enforced control of the
audience’s eyes.
Equus, Sidney Lumet, 1977 (The New Republic, 5 November 1977)
Lionel Trilling, if I may drop a name, came to dinner a few years ago, shortly
after he had seen the Broadway production of Equus. “Have you written about it?”
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he asked. Yes, I said. “Pro or con?” he asked anxiously. Con. Ease suffused his
beautiful face, and dinner proceeded happily.
Trilling and I—forgive the conjunction—were in the minority. The play had
been a tremendous success in London at the National, had been hailed in New York
before it came here by touring New York critics avid for middle-seriousness, and
had then opened in the City to praise and profits. It’s probably still playing
somewhere in the United States. What bothered Trilling was not the play’s
success—success or failure was not his professional interest—but its ecstatic
critical reception. Like all good critics he remained naïve in one way at least: he
never could reconcile himself to the fact that inferior work often gets high praise.
(I’ve never known a good critic who was really cynical. The good ones are
outraged by bad criticism the thousandth time as much as the first time.)
Now comes the film of Equus. Now among the manifold reasons why I wish
Trilling were still alive is a trifling one—I could tell him that the film exposes the
play. I have no  clue as to whether the film will be a success, but I risk one
prediction: the   film will impose less than the play. The   acting, even Sidney
Lumet’s direction, may be praised, but the dubiousness of the material will be
more apparent. And this drew me to think of past occasions when transposition
to film has been like an acid bath revealing the lead in allegedly golden plays—
Miller’s Death of a   Salesman and Kopit’s Indians are only two examples—and
then to explore why this   happens. I don’t mean plays that make   bad films
because they’re badly filmed: Terence McNally’s The Ritz is a better-than-average
farce, but its better-than-average film director, Richard Lester, doesn’t know how
to handle stage material. I mean precisely the way that the film form searches out
flabbiness and thinness in material that, in the theater, has been thought
substantial.
Often this is because techniques that seemed impressive in the theater are
stripped away or reduced to commonplaces by the very form of film. The time-
interweavings in Salesman, the heavy-breathing sleight of hand in Indians—these
are such commonplaces of film discourse that they couldn’t possibly aggrandize
the material on screen. So the film medium revealed that the material under the
wrappings was: (a) separable from the wrappings, which in good art would not be
the case; (b) less than it had seemed when wrapped.
In Equus on the stage, the central metaphor was a boxing ring, into which
the actors for each scene stepped from the sidelines. The encounters between the
psychiatrist and the boy who had blinded six horses were seen as bouts,
probably—since the recurrent motif in the doctor’s mind is ancient Greece—
intended to have some of the flavor of classic pugilism. The horses were
represented by six young men in skin-tight costumes with wire-frame horse heads
and cothurni. All this symbolic accoutrement was necessity changed into device.
The boxing ring was a way of theatrical containment and of abstraction. And, since
six real horses were somewhat out of the question, the men-as-horses suggested
both the sleek physicality of the beasts and the underlay of unacknowledged
homosexuality that pervaded the boy’s problem.
These devices gave the play, for many, an air of the poetically profound; but
these devices were ruled out by the transposition to film. Symbolism has often
been used in films and sometimes by masters—Cocteau and Bergman, for
examples—but usually it has been symbolism conceived in cinematic modes, and
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it has very rarely been used in expensive pictures aimed at the massiest mass
market. The mass theater audience is not only much smaller numerically than the
mass film audience, it begins at a somewhat higher stratum of intellectual-artistic
sophistication. (As I’ve noted before, there is no longer a truly popular theater
audience corresponding in kind to the immense broad base of the film audience.)
The Broadway audience and its counterparts elsewhere rather enjoy, from time
to time, a bit of comfy derrière-garde experimentation and non-realism—Michael
Cristofer’s The Shadow Box is a current instance. One of the reasons for the success
of Equus, I’m convinced, was its assurance to theater audiences that they had been
tested imaginatively—and had passed!
There’s none of this in the film version. Not only because the biggest part
of the audience would be discomfited by it but because the film medium itself
would be discomfited by it. Nothing is easier to the film than to include many
places, so the boxing-ring idea would seem artificial. Real horses, easy to manage
with cutting and re-takes, push the idea of symbolic horses into the trashcan. Even
the most subtle viewer would find these symbols hard to credit in a film.
So the film is stripped of its theater paraphernalia. And the script must
therefore rearrange the time planes. For the most part we don’t get the past as, for
the most part, we got it in the play: through the boy’s remembering “now” of what
happened “then.” The film goes to the past in conventional flashback, converting
the past into another “now.” This makes patent nonsense of what was dreamily
disguised nonsense in the play. We see the boy—again, as in the play, well acted
by Peter Firth—behaving moonily and loonily with real horses before he commits
the atrocities, instead of remembering his past behavior moonily and loonily after
he commits them. This is to make the boy a very visible clinical case right from his
first appearance. He is so immediately weird that his parents seem dense not to
notice it, and the girl’s sexual interest in him becomes highly bizarre. The film
changes the play’s intended mystery about the boy’s explosion into a flat
inevitability, highly predictable by everyone around.
The film does even worse, in a different way, for the psychiatrist. (Played
by Richard Burton with more to work on than in The Exorcist II 1977 but with
about equal professional sincerity.) The play’s various devices tried to give the
doctor at least a base for his own agony—his envy of the boy’s passion. In the film
the present-tense re-creation of the past makes the doctor’s envy, which was
clearly silly to some of us in the theater, now glaringly clear. Here is a doctor a
great deal sicker than his patient—not deprived of passion but sick. Because what
the doctor is envying here is, obviously, not passion but psychosis.
And the loading of the dice by the author, Peter Shaffer, is much more
conspicuous here. The boy has been assigned to a doctor who is having a frigid
marital life. In the play it was plain enough that if the doctor were happily married,
the whole thesis would crumble. In the film, the contrivance of choosing just this
one doctor seems much clumsier, and the whole jerry-built pseudo-Laurentian
comment on the lack of ecstasy in modern life utterly collapses.
But the film medium reveals the spuriousness in spurious plays by more
than the stripping away of theatrical devices. Sometimes a poor play has no such
devices: it tries to make its way by conviction of realism. Then we get such films
as The Subject Was Roses (1968) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-
Moon Marigolds (1972)—both made from Pulitzer Prize plays—where what
seemed like verisimilitude in the theater shows up as artifice, or mere banality.
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The film medium begins realer than the theater: it eats such plays for breakfast
before it gets down to the day’s realistic work. It’s like putting a ten-power
photograph under a 1,000-power viewer and discovering that the photo is
insufficiently microscopic or touched up. With Equus it wasn’t a case of beginning
with gritty realism. The necessities of film “reduced” the play to realism, and that
second-stage realism simply doesn’t stand up under the camera. Put it another
way: if there had never been a play called Equus, the film still wouldn’t ring true.
What does this mean about the relative truth and value of the two arts as
such? Absolutely nothing. Some good plays become good films (The Homecoming,
1973), some good plays become bad films (Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1962),
some bad plays become good films (Way Down East, 1920). About the reverse
flow—from film to stage—there’s much less to say for the obvious reason that, in
historical sequence, the theater has been much more of a source for films than vice
versa. The few instances I know of the reverse flow have been deplorable: Sweet
Charity, Sugar, Rashomon, A Little Night Music. (The last is soon to return as a film!)
They showed, not surprisingly, that the film has its own untranslatable systems of
felicities and disguises, that the theater’s peculiar strengths can sometimes cripple
even a healthy film script. But a trash-detection factor in the theater, analogous
with what I’ve been discussing above, doesn’t really apply because I can’t think of
an original screenplay as poor as the Equus film adaptation that has been
reworked for the stage.
As the century moves on, a fascinating subject opens up more and more:
the aesthetic relations/differences between theater and film. Last spring I looked
into the subject with a group of CUNY graduate students. The first thing we learned
is that the literature is skimpy. André Bazin’s two-part essay “Theater and
Cinema” is a locus for stimulating argument, not for veneration. James Hurt’s
anthology Focus on Film and Theater is very valuable but necessarily limited. Just
about the last thing we learned is that, increasingly, a true basic duality has been
growing in creative people. Talents coming to maturity these days do not often
think of themselves arbitrarily as either playwrights or screenwriters: both arts
seem linked, interactive, wonderfully identical, wonderfully different. Even if a
writer does choose one or the other, the basic linkage must remain, in the last
quarter of this century. No matter how much a playwright may loathe film, he
cannot write for the theater today without awareness of the film’s effect on vision,
rhythm, and realism. No matter how much a screenwriter may disregard the
theater, he cannot (if he’s serious) disregard what the best modern dramatists
have wrought—in strophes of dialogue, surgeries of character, spectrums of
imagination. I can’t imagine that Terrence Malick’s script for Badlands (1973) or
Éric Rohmer’s scripts for several of his Moral Tales (1963-72) would be as they
are if Beckett and the so-called Theater of the Absurd hadn’t existed.
The subject is rosy. And has really only begun to be cultivated. I describe
it here to prevent any misconception about the intent of this piece. I’m not 
remotely interested in ranking the two arts. I am interested, and Equus brings it 
up again, in this X-ray detector action of the film form on some overrated plays: 
in showing up the outlines of papier-mâché arty décor, in penetrating the surface
of superficial realism. Whatever  the success of this picture, at least the  film
version of Equus must show a larger number of people that there is less in the 
work than met the theater audience’s eye.
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The Elephant Man, David Lynch, 1980 (The New Republic, 18 October 1980)
The first minute of The Elephant Man is awful. So it’s a surprise that the
next half hour or so is pretty good. But the rest of it is almost as bad as the opening.
That first minute shows us, mistily, John Merrick’s mother being frightened
by an elephant when she was pregnant. As an explanation of his disfigurement—
which he believes—it’s scientifically loony, and as film, it’s ludicrous. Then, for a
while, the camera of Freddie Francis, guided by the director David Lynch, gives us
the dank brick of Victorian London so graphically that we feel rubbed against it.
(Properly, the whole film is in black and white. Francis and Lynch clearly studied
Victorian photographs carefully.) Through this section the screenplay by
Christopher DeVore, Eric Bergren, and Lynch is laying out its ground vividly
enough; but when it wants to swing into action, it doesn’t. It repeats and drags,
seems only tenuously impelled by an idea, is written in flabby language.
The script is not based on Bernard Pomerance’s now well-known play;
both are derived from the same factual sources. Pomerance’s play, I continue to
think, has merit. There’s some sogginess in the dialogue, some patness in
arrangement, some imbalance in structure. (The real drama is in Treves, the
doctor, not in Merrick, who is only a victim without possibilities; but Merrick is so
much more eye-catching that Treves fades.) Still Pomerance uses some deft
ellipses, some nice irony—in, for instance, Merrick’s building of a model of the
church across the way; and much of the writing is astringent, tart, suggestive.
The screenplay’s dialogue has, comparatively, no flavor at all: it’s merely
loose talk. (And “contact” is used as a verb in 1884. There’s a reference to “The
London Times”—in London.) The church model becomes just a hobby. The visits
of the star actress, Mrs. Kendal, which in the play were at least theatrically
effective, are stupid. (And Mrs. Kendal is played by Anne Bancroft, right off the
Bronx subway. Her husband, Mel Brooks, was one of the backers.)
The play, well or less well, grapples with an immense theme: the
arbitrariness of life, its lack of design or reason, posed against what we are capable
of expecting. “Man’s great blessing/curse, the gift of logic,” (to quote myself),
“keeps ramming into the illogic of existence.” The film, nebulously, barely visibly,
is about a lesser but good idea: man’s fear of that arbitrariness, a fear that takes
derisive or “scientific” or sanctimonious form. The night porter at Merrick’s
hospital sells places to pub pals to peer at the Elephant Man. (Dreadfully heavy-
handed direction in those scenes.) Treves gets professional status by discovering
and exhibiting Merrick, and Treves’s hospital gets renown by sheltering him.
Society, even royalty, brings gifts and feels noble about it. All these are ways of
gaping in fear at a gap in the design of existence. But this theme is not cultivated
and harvested. After it’s set, it’s just reiterated over and over until the fact of
iteration obscures it. (And what was the significance of all that smoke issuing from
factories and trains and steamers? Is any visual theme a valid theme?)
John Hurt, behind a swollen helmet of makeup, does as well as possible in
the title role, though his inflections are a bit subtle for a man who has spoken so
little. The play deals better with both face and voice. The stage Merrick wears no
makeup at all: he contorts his body to suggest disfigurement. Thus we avoid
getting used to the horror, and thus symbolically we can accept Merrick’s supple
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discourse out of symbolic grotesqueness. In the film he could not be barefaced: the
camera leaves no room for that kind of imagining; yet the lumpy twisted head soon
becomes just one more horror-flick getup, and the drawing-room dialogue issuing
from it is faintly comic.
What the film of The Elephant Man proves, I think, is that this idea really
belongs in the theater.
The Dresser, Peter Yates, 1983 (The New Republic, 12 December 1983)
Surprise. I saw Ronald Harwood’s play The Dresser in London in 1980 and
wasn’t greatly taken by it. I saw it again on Broadway a year later, hoping that a
major cast change would help. It did, but not enough. I went to the film more in
duty than hope and was nicely surprised. The script is essentially what it was, a
theatrical tour de force about the theater with more tour than force, but now
there’s Albert Finney. His performance not only enriches the role he has taken
over, it improves the balance of the piece. Finney can’t rid the work of its
fundamental vanity, but he certainly gives it more life along the way, and he does
it in a style with a particular reward for anyone interested in acting.
During the 1950s Harwood spent seven years in the theatrical company of
Donald Wolfit, as actor but part of the  time as Wolfit’s dresser, and out of that
experience Harwood has written both a   biography of Wolfit and this play.
Americans know Wolfit chiefly through   his substantial supporting roles in  
films—such as the girl’s tycoon father  in Room at the Top (1959)—but in the
British  theater he was a star who headed his  own touring company, specializing
in  Shakespeare.
In The Dresser Harwood  drew on his Wolfit experience for character and
atmosphere only; it’s not strictly factual. For instance, the play/film takes place in
wartime Britain, January 1942, in a small town, before, during, and after a
performance of King Lear by the knighted star, on what turns out to be the last day
of his life. He is supposed to have played Lear hundreds of times before. But Wolfit
didn’t play his first Lear until six months after the date of the play, wasn’t knighted
until 1957, and died (in a hospital) in 1968. These differences deliberately keep
the script from being taken too biographically, but nothing can—or is meant to—
keep it from conveying the flavor of the man and his theater.
The basic structural twist is familiar: a shift of the spotlight from the
expected protagonist to a peripheral figure. Some previous examples: Napoleon’s
Barber (filmed by John Ford in 1928) and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead. Harwood has taken the hero-valet combination and, if he doesn’t
concentrate exclusively on the valet, at least he shows how important the latter is
to the hero. Harwood draws both these characters with intimacy and skill, and he
sketches in the others adroitly—the star’s wife, the quietly adoring spinster stage
manager, the differently pathetic members of the company. The dialogue is neatly
turned. The trouble is that, despite the script’s various virtues, it comes at last to
only one more agon about the Agony of It All—the strain of being a star performer
on whom the vampiric public feeds. I know of few subjects more tedious.
The protagonist in past films on this theme has moved from actor (A Star
Is Born, 1937, 1954, 1976) to rock singer (The Rose, 1979). Those films are always
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telling us how the public uses up the star cruelly, but whatever the specific subject,
the idea is vain. It may be true, even for the best artists, but it’s no more true than
for many doctors or teachers or social workers or any professionals on whom
many others depend greedily, even selfishly. These other professions don’t in
themselves provide media for self-glorification, as the performer’s profession
does. To me, the strain is part of the game. A star’s sufferings move me just about
as much as a President’s complaint about overwork after years of campaigning to
get the job.
Harwood has had an instinct about the defect in the theme and has tried to
buffer it by setting the play in wartime. The star thus can wave the banner of duty:
he is fighting the barbarians with his own means, by taking Shakespeare to every
corner of the embattled island; and his effort to pull his racked self together and
perform can thus be seen—through his own eyes anyway—as something more
than “the show must go on.” But it’s just wartime camouflage for perennial
histrionism. The last day of an actor who summons himself to give what may have
been his best performance before dying in his dressing room is, at the end, nothing
more than that. It has no reach or resonance. It’s just an exercise in self-pity before
a backstage mirror
Finney, however, embellishes the texture. In London the star was played
by Freddie Jones, who supplied little more than the plummy quality. In New York
a much better actor, Paul Rogers, gave the part greater range but, within the
structure, he couldn’t enlarge the play sufficiently In the screen adaptation
Harwood has given the star more “space,” and Finney fills it. Filling it, he alters the
balance to the film’s benefit.
Besides, Finney does something that neither Jones nor Rogers did: he
models his performance of the star on Wolfit himself. As it happens, I saw Wolfit’s
Lear (New York, 1947), but I don’t think experience of Wolfit is a prerequisite to
appreciating what Finney does. It’s clear that he’s not giving us Finney, as he has
done engagingly in many films and as he did less engagingly in Hamlet on the
London stage: he is creating, with himself, someone distinct from himself. Wolfit
subscribed wholesouledly to what he called the “unfashionable theater,” with a
large-scale style that is too often glibly confused with hamminess. If Finney has a
fault in this film, it’s that confusion: the segments of his Lear that we see are
somewhat broadened. But as the actor himself, the offstage man who goes onstage
to speak those lines, Finney does a work of imaginative transformation, with the
perception that an actor who spends his time in great roles, often regal ones,
sometimes loses sight of where the stage ends and the so-called real world begins.
Tom Courtenay plays Norman, the dresser, as he did in London and New
York, and it’s a flawlessly turned performance. But that’s what it was at the start.
Courtenay is as rhythmically tidy, touchingly effeminate, understandably
vindictive, and fiercely loyal as he was three years ago. In the film, because of the
extension of the “Wolfit” role and Finney’s power in it, Courtenay has to bear less
of the weight, which helps. This is no reflection on Courtenay. If the soul’s turmoil
of an actor pulling himself together for a performance is less generally fascinating
than theater people think, the travails of his dresser in maneuvering him are even
less so. Courtenay is better off here for sharing the burden.
Another pleasant surprise is the direction of Peter Yates. Most of what I’ve
seen of his, from Bullitt (1968) to Eyewitness (1981), has been consecrated to the
ideal of flash, of dazzle. Here he simply places his film, which is about acting, at the
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service of his actors. There’s no trickery, no egotistical director’s attention-

grabbing. He puts his camera at every moment where it will be of most use to the
moment and to us. He keeps it close much of the time, not for immense close-ups
but because the faces are what the film is about. If a director hasn’t developed a
style through which a film can move to its truth, and Yates hasn’t, his best course
is to be invisible, which is what Yates does effectively here.
Henry IV, Marco Bellocchio, 1984 (The New Republic, 24 June 1985)
Pirandello’s importance seems to me of an intellectual and moral nature,

i.e., a cultural rather than an artistic one: he sought to introduce into
popular culture the “dialectic” of modern philosophy, in contrast to the
Aristotelian-Catholic mode of conceiving “the objectivity of reality.”
Thus Antonio Gramsci, who was a theater critic for four years in his late twenties.
(Later, in his Letters from Prison, he said that he had written enough about
Pirandello in those years to make a book.) I venture to agree with Gramsci on the
locus of Pirandello’s importance, most clearly in Henry IV. Many commentators
compare that play with Hamlet, a comparison that, for me, only underscores
Gramsci’s view. The lasting worth of Henry IV is not in its intrinsic artistic vitality
but in its exploration of reality. No such choice is possible with Hamlet.
An Italian film of Henry IV brings the subject up. It stars Marcello
Mastroianni and was directed by Marco Bellocchio, who made the adaptation with
Tonino Guerra, celebrated for his work with Antonioni. The names bristle with
promise, but it is not kept. And after all the film’s faults are noted, the central
broken promise is Pirandello’s.
To remind you: the time is today, in a castle. Twenty years earlier, a wealthy
man (never named) was dressed for a carnival as Henry IV, the Holy Roman
Emperor, when he fell from his horse and hit his head. Apparently this man then
became deluded that he was Henry IV and, with the support of his family, has been
living in eleventh-century dress, attended by appropriately dressed servants. The
present action of the play includes the woman he once loved in vain; her nineteen-
year-old daughter, who is her youthful image; the woman’s lover, who may have
pricked Henry’s horse on that fateful day; and a psychiatrist who visits Henry
with them. The doctor’s intent is to stage a shock that may bring Henry to his
senses, but the result is that Henry—who has not always been as deluded as he
seemed and who has partly taken refuge in his “affliction”—stabs the lover in a
frenzy, and is now sealed into his delusion.
The oddity of the film is that it does something of what I think the play
needs, and still it doesn’t succeed. In my minority view, the last act of the play is
the only material of genuine interest. A two-minute choric prologue could easily
replace the previous two acts of tortuous exposition and padding. The screenplay,
made for Italian television, though it doesn’t follow this prescription, greatly
condenses the acts leading to the climax; yet the work isn’t saved. It remains a
demonstration of views of reality, not a gripping drama.
Mastroianni struggles with the role of Henry—rather, he keeps struggling
to struggle. Throughout the film he seems to be reaching for substance to engage
him and test him, substance that he can probe and crack open. All he seems able
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to find is a series of attitudes, admittedly somewhat more interesting than in

several lesser films of his where he has been tempted to loaf. He isn’t loafing here,
but neither does his performance create the ark of mysteries that he and
Pirandello wanted.
Bellocchio began his career smashingly with such strong films as Fists in
the Pocket (1965), China Is Near (1967), and In the Name of the Father (1972).
Lately he has lapsed into ambiguous vacuities like Leap into the Void (1980) and
The Eyes, the Mouth (1982). Pirandello hasn’t helped him. The film adaptation puts
in a couple of subtle touches to help the play-acting theme: when Henry falls from
his horse (in flashback), he doesn’t really strike his head hard; after he stabs his
old rival and the wounded man is taken out, we see that Henry has used a trick,
collapsible sword. But Bellocchio doesn’t significantly use this “performance”: his
direction fragments into unwieldy bits. Any overview he may have of the work is
never realized.
More Pirandello may be coming our way. While I was in Cortona last
August, a company was in the vicinity shooting a film based on his novel The Late
Mattia Pascal, starring Mastroianni. Despite the disappointment above, I hope the
new one arrives.
Plenty, Fred Schepisi, 1985 (The New Republic, 30 September 1985)
The exceptionally gifted David Hare has made a screen adaptation of his
play Plenty, and quite evidently began with decisions about form. To understand
those decisions, a glance first at the play. It deals with an Englishwoman named
Susan Traherne: her exaltation during her underground war service as a late
teenager in France, 1943-44; her anticipation of splendid change in the postwar
world; her growing disappointments; her various jobs; her various grabs at
personal fulfillment, including a rocky marriage; her decline into mental shakiness
and a threat of utter dissolution. It ends with a retrospective glimpse of her in
France, August 1944, exultant at victory.
The play’s power (despite some faults discussed later) lay not only in its
concise dialogue and sharp characterizations but in its very shape. In a postscript
to the published play Hare wrote: “I planned a play in twelve scenes, in which
there would be twelve dramatic actions.” Part of his plan was to breach
chronological order at the start. The play begins in 1962, then goes back to 1943
so that we see the young committed Susan only after we have had a hint of her
postwar fate. Another effect of Hare’s plan is that the very shapes of the twelve
scenes are mimetic of the dialogue, tense and astringent. The play is, so to speak,
shaped the way it sounds.
I see no intrinsic reason why the play could not have been filmed pretty
much in that form or cluster of forms, allowing for some cinematic easements at
the joins. This was done well (to choose two examples) with Pinter’s The Caretaker
(film, 1963) and The Homecoming (film, 1973). I can easily see the commercial
reasons for converting the play into a more “producible” item. I don’t mean explicit
betrayal of ideas: I’m speaking only of form, though of course form is aesthetically
connected with those ideas. The story is now lined up in strict chronology, except
for the closing flashback; this takes care of any worries about confusing a film
audience, but it seriously diminishes that first wartime scene.
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Almost everything implicit in the play is now spelled out in the film. When
Susan gets her first postwar job, utterly prosaic, we see the dingy office. When
she’s working in advertising and quits in the middle of a dog-food commercial, we
are given the inanities in detail as if we needed proof that Susan is superior to
them. When her husband, a foreign-service officer, is posted to the Middle East,
we go there. (Said to be Jordan but shot in Tunisia. The producers weren’t going
to miss that visual chance, irrelevant though it is.) The argument for such
adaptation of a play—not arbitrarily true—is that to confine the action to a few
rooms, more or less, is uncinematic. Another argument, incontrovertibly true, is
that one can’t get many production values out of a film confined to a few rooms.
And everyone concerned with Plenty wanted to transform it into a big picture for
a big star.
The basic problems of Hare’s extraordinary play persist, even grow, in the
film. It’s hard to believe that a person of Susan’s mind could have been so deluded
by the excitements of war as to forget history: to forget that no war has ever been
followed by the complete realization of the aims for which it was fought, or
nominally fought. We know that war experience often proves to be the high point
of many people’s lives, but that’s quite a different matter. Further, Plenty strikes
me as a political work with the political credo omitted. Hare, alone or in
collaboration, has written plays with radical political views. Here he criticizes
strongly a self-gratifying society and a stodgy government but does so almost
peripherally. And now, the revised, bloated structure of the film only emphasizes
the play’s flaws. Susan seems even more ethically and intellectually slothful, a
woman waiting for the good not to happen so that she can take refuge first in
bitterness, then in recurrent “mental” episodes. She looks down disdainfully from
unearned elevation. (Her war experiences were brave but scarcely unique.)
This makes the film sentimental, where the play, though flawed, was not.
Hare underscores that sentimentality in two ways particularly. In the first
wartime scene Susan meets a British agent who tells her that his chief gave him a
pair of cuff links for good luck. This is in the play. In the film we go back with them
to her room in the French village, where the pair sleep together. When he has to
rush off suddenly on a mission, he leaves the cuff links as a memento. From then
on, she keeps the cuff links in her pocketbook, and they become a visual leitmotiv
as she recurrently looks at them through the years. In the penultimate scene in
1962, she and that agent are reunited in a shabby room in an English seaside hotel.
When she zonks out on marijuana, he goes, but not before he sees the cuff links in
her open bag. (All that’s missing is a “links” theme in the score.)
And there’s a small but significant change in the final scene, the flashback
to the end of the war that is in both play and film. In the film it’s on a lovely French
hillside overlooking a village where victory is about to be celebrated—Susan and
a lovable old French farmer and his lovable old horse. There’s some wistful
conversation, then he invites her home to have some soup with his wife and
himself. In the play, before that invitation, the farmer says he’s not going down to
join the celebration. “Myself, I work. A farmer. Like any other day. The Frenchman
works or starves. He is the piss. The shit. The lowest of the low.” Susan completely
disregards him and ends with her joyous last line, “There will be days and days
and days like this.” The film, too, ends with that line, but the softening of the
farmer's dialogue eliminates the play’s clear signal at the (chronological) start of
her story that the war has made little change in many people’s lives and that she
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is incapable of seeing it. The cuff links and the sweetened farmer are among the
alterations that slacken tensions around and within Susan.
The Susan is Meryl Streep. I’ve been fervent about her since her drama
school days, but I think her performance here—excepting Still of the Night (1982),
which was just a blip on the screen for all concerned—is her least successful film
work to date. This is a relative statement, relative to Streep’s gifts, which easily
embrace the emotional range of this role. But her voice sounds limited,
uninflected, insufficiently interesting. Vocal richness has long been a problem for
her, I think; and here she is surrounded by English actors brought up in a tradition
where the voice is not just a means of making words audible but is the instrument
with which acting begins. That tradition is not one of hammy scooping and gliding
but of belief in the magic of the word itself and of the finest shades of inflection.
Streep has several big scenes to play with John Gielgud, the emperor of this
tradition; one long scene with Ian McKellen, who is very adept in it; and a great
deal to play with Charles Dance, who is decently competent in it. All of them,
merely by using their techniques truthfully, make Streep sound vocally lackluster.
Even Tracey Ullman, a young woman of limited experience, has, simply by virtue
of an ear conditioned to England’s English, more color than Streep. Unlike Streep’s
work with accents in Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Silkwood (1983) and The
Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), her work here makes her seem so concerned about
merely sounding English that it absorbs much of her imaginative energy. (Her
English role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1981 was in a quite different
vein—lush romance.)
Gielgud, as an arrogant but honorable ambassador, is a high-comedy
delight. McKellen, in his one long scene as a lofty foreign-service official, embodies
the dictum he pronounces: “Behavior is all.” Dance, in the largest male role, is
perfectly cast: he is winning enough to persuade us that Susan could feel fondly
for him yet mild enough to let us understand that she might tire. As a cockney
whom Susan selects to father a child in one of her attempts to replenish her life—
an attempt that doesn’t click biologically—Sting (Gordon Matthew Sumner) has
aggressive sensitivity. Ullman, button-eyed and pert, is lively as Susan’s chum, but
her part is condensed to mute its counterpoint. In the original, this scattery young
woman blunders her way up from bohemianism to give her life some purpose.
This aspect of the play is present but dimmed in the film. Sam Neill, first widely
visible in the Australian My Brilliant Career (1979), is adequately taciturn as the
secret-agent lover.
Fred Schepisi, also Australian, who directed the haunting The Chant of
Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), has a touch of David Lean: he suggests intimacy in the
large scenes and sizable power in the intimate ones. Richard MacDonald’s sets are
first-class. He uses fireplaces as totems of change in Susan’s life. In her first
postwar flat, there’s a small gas heater; in a later home, there’s a mod fireplace set
above floor level in a plaster wall; later, in her married home, there’s a huge ornate
hearth and mantel. Ian Baker, Schepisi’s constant colleague, is one of three or four
Australian cinematographers who have lately established themselves as peers of
the best. Every moment of Plenty looks lovely without being beautiful.
In that postscript to Plenty, Hare said: “It’s a common criticism of my work
  that I write about women whom I find   admirable, but whom the audience
dislikes,” and he explains that what he’s aiming at is ambiguity. He wants the 
audience to make the decision. My   complaint about Wetherby (1985), the
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fascinating film he wrote and directed, was that I couldn’t determine that he found
his heroine admirable or anything else and that I didn’t like or dislike her. What I
felt was incompletion, not ambiguity. As for Plenty, in the original play there was
never any doubt about liking Susan, by Hare or us, but the ambiguities of theme
seemed to be more in Hare than in the work. The film discloses fewer ambiguities
in him, more (questionable) clarity of purpose. Without actually traducing his
ideas, he has somewhat smoothed out his fractious play for a star, according to the
film world’s needs.
Die Nacht (The Night), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1985 (The New Republic, 2
December 1985)
A true adventurer in film, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg presses on. After Our

Hitler (1977) and Parsifal (1982), which teemed with images and characters and
devices and fantasies, he now presents Die Nacht, which is mostly set in one place
and, through all of its six hours, has only one performer. Yet this film is not a whit
less adventurous than the earlier ones and, through different modes and stimuli,
teems just as plentifully.
Die Nacht consists of a prologue and two sections, with an intermission
after Part I. After the prologue, of a half hour or so, the credits appear, a number
of authors are listed, some album pages turn, and then we move to Part I and the
only setting used thereafter. Part II begins with a similar listing of authors, some
album pages, and a return to that same setting. (The prologue is in pale colors, as
shot by Xaver Schwarzenberger; the rest is in black and white.) From the authors
whom he names, Syberberg has culled, touched up, and interwoven—with some
autobiographical material—a skein of language intended to circumscribe the
night of his title: the long night of Western culture.
That he includes more than Europe in this night is patent from the start.
The prologue, spoken in a large, rubble-strewn room in a battered Berlin building,
is the speech of the American Indian chief Seattle when he signed a peace treaty
with Washington, D.C., in 1855. His words envision the end of his people and their
ways, but Seattle warns the white man that, though the Indians may disappear
from view, their spirits will continue to inhabit the land. Syberberg dabs this
speech with present-day references that ensure topicality and ensure also that the
words apply to Europe as well as the United States. The speaker is the great
German actress Edith Clever, clad in a simple dress and holding a dark, rough cloth
about herself. Only then do the credits come—after Clever finishes speaking.
We now move to a placeless place: a floor of gleaming black gravel, a white
circle of light at its center and a small white cloth in the light, with a cloak of
darkness surrounding everything. In the light, acutely varied by the
cinematographer Schwarzenberger, Clever spends the next five-and-a-half
hours—close to us or with the camera at differing distances and angles, her body
statuesque or sinuous depending on the angle and the light, her torso curved away
from the camera-eye into architectural form, her body self-caressed in
recollections of Eros, her presence immediate, her presence godlike, as she speaks,
intones, sings, mourns, and eulogizes through the medium of the text that
Syberberg has prepared. As far as the film reveals, Clever, or Clever’s character, is
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the sole survivor of a long, glorious, and atrocious history, and before she too
disappears into the black all around her, she offers a threnody.
The text, often accompanied by sections of Bach’s Das wohltemperierte
Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier) in Sviatoslav Richter’s hands, moves through
literature that is mostly German—Hölderlin, Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche, as well
as Schiller, Kleist, Novalis, and Heidegger—but with minglings of other cultures
translated into German. (Prospero’s farewell to his art, from The Tempest but in
German, is transfixing.) The tone ranges from Wagner’s crawling pleas for help
from his patron Giacomo Meyerbeer, to his slimy spewings to King Ludwig II about
“Jewry in Music”; from the sight of a child’s toy in Clever’s hand to her sublime
reciting of a poem (by Novalis?) in which humankind asks Jesus if his father is still
alive, to which the son of God, his eyes streaming with tears, replies that we are all
orphans now.
Courage is one hallmark of Syberberg’s film work, and that hallmark is
visible in Die Nacht. He wants to burst through order and plunge into the
unknown, the possibly chaotic, there to forge a new aesthetic order. Since he did
this differently in his previous two films—Our Hitler and Parsifal—no fixed
criteria will help the spectator to navigate Syberberg’s artistic ventures.
Sometimes, I must admit, Die Nacht escaped my powers of attention during my
sole viewing of it. For the film doesn’t aim at a relentless, concentrated march
toward spiritual nakedness and existential nullity like Acropolis, the titanic theater
production by Jerzy Grotowski from the mid-1960s, which conducted its own
requiem. (Acropolis took the concentration camp at Auschwitz for its setting, and,
for its “plot,” the building by the prisoners there of the gas chamber in which they
will be consumed.) Die Nacht, six times as long, does not march and only fitfully
exalts.
Principally, the film remembers, but its memories wander in addition to
both fondling the past and grieving over it. Certainly it has passages that repeat
notes already heard. Certainly, too, it vibrates more fully for someone familiar
with German literature in German. But even such a person would not find every
moment in Die Nacht tense and fraught with meaning: I, for one, did not. Yet it is a
facet of Syberberg’s experimental daring—not an excuse for avant-garde idling—
that, instead of shaping a drama, he has in effect enclosed a preserve or park, of
time, in which to linger and remember and even nod in the last remaining light.
One factor in this film, however, did sustain me through its length, and it was
surely a part of Syberberg’s design from the beginning. Die Nacht must have been
conceived, that is, with the prospective collaboration of Edith Clever in the
principal—and, it’s worth repeating, the lone—role.
Clever is known in the United States chiefly through the films Die
linkshändige Frau (The Left-Handed Woman, 1978; written and directed by Peter
Handke) and The Marquise of O. (Éric Rohmer’s version, 1976), and through
Syberberg’s Parsifal, where she mimed Kundry so intensely that, although it was
not her singing voice we heard, it seemed to be. What is not known in North
America is her theater career, mostly with the Schaubühne in the former West
Berlin. I have never seen Clever on stage, but I know that she has played leading
roles in works by Schiller (Kabale und Liebe [Love and Intrigue]), Goethe (Torquato
Tasso), Middleton and Rowley (The Changeling), Ibsen (Peer Gynt), and Aeschylus
(The Oresteia), as well as in plays by Gorky, Brecht, and Botho Strauss. In 1983 she
played Gertrude in Hamlet.
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I cite all of these instances prior to Clever’s work in Die Nacht because they
are quite clearly the sources of her spiritual or imaginative endowment (not to
speak of her physical resources), of the simple majesty with which she makes her
very first movement, utters her very first word in this, Syberberg’s eighth film. I
know of no better actress or actor in the world than Edith Clever, and few are her
peers; but Die Nacht is not a display vehicle, a “one-woman show” where the
woman herself, or generic “woman,” is the focus. Clever is completely and
wondrously in union with what is happening in the film. So much so that her art
in itself is as much a manifestation of the culture that Die Nacht embraces and
indicts, as much both an exhilarating triumph and a profound grief, as any of the
words in the text.
Clever performed Die Nacht a few times in a small Paris theater in 1984,
and, in conversation with Syberberg and Clever a few days after I saw the film, I
asked if it had been planned as a theater piece, then filmed. No, Syberberg
responded, Die Nacht had been planned as a film, but when this Paris theater
offered to produce it (after its initial production some years before at the
Schaubühne in Berlin), he accepted. The stage setting was much like that of the
film, and French subtitles were projected high above, on the dark wall behind
Clever. The production was done in two evenings—three-and-a-half hours, then
two-and-a-half hours—each evening without intermission. “And,” said Syberberg
proudly, “although there was a prompter there, Edith never needed him, she never
faltered.” I replied that I supposed the stage darkened from time to time—if only
to give Clever a momentary breather—in the way that the film goes to black and
then resumes at a different angle or distance. “No,” said Syberberg, “the pauses in
the film of Die Nacht are there only because the film runs out in the camera-
magazine.”
That Paris engagement was Syberberg’s first theater work, and it
underscored that, volitionally or not, he was further exploring—on screen as on
stage—what I once called, in reference to Parsifal, the “theater of film.” Two
passages in the film of Die Nacht especially mark this exploration: two Wagnerian
excerpts, one from Isolde’s “Liebestod,” the other from Brünnhilde’s “Immolation
Scene” in Götterdämmerung. In both instances, we hear a full orchestra playing as
Clever sings. She has nothing like an operatic voice; she merely sings pleasantly.
(Syberberg did tell me, however, that a Wagnerian conductor he knew was struck
by the accuracy of her entrances and tempi and phrasing.) The point is that, with
her modest singing voice, Clever acts those excerpts in a manner that illuminates
them as never before.
Wagner himself asked the impossible: wonderful singing and wonderful
acting. A major Wagnerian production gives you the first, plus passable acting.
Clever, who could not possibly do the first, supplies what is always missing from
the second. As I watched her perform in the film of Die Nacht, I suddenly wanted
to see a Wagnerian “theater of film” in which Clever would give us, in this manner,
the missing dramatic element to add to our memory of musically great Isoldes, to
name just one heroine—which is not the same (if you think about it) as her miming
a character, however convincingly in the case of Parsifal’s Kundry, to the
accompaniment of another woman’s operatic voice.
All of the above is to emphasize that Syberberg is seeking new
empowerment for the arts he inherited in the arts he practices: theater and film,
or film and theater. What persists after the long filmic threnody of Die Nacht, as
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after the enduring theatrical conceptualization of Parsifal, is that Syberberg’s

search, in tandem with Clever, is the expression of an austere hope (but
nonetheless a valid one) not only for the rebirth of the culture he is mourning, but
also for the consecration of a theater of film.
Why a theater of film? Because the filmmaker Syberberg paradoxically
believes, as he said to me, that film represents “the birth of dead light and dead
images, the birth of a plastic art on film that split the nucleus of the world into a
series of views and angles, much as scientists split the atom, and thus disturbed
the world in ways we all know.” Only the human spirit can cohere in the face of
such a disturbed world, ever veering toward environmental destruction and
nuclear holocaust. And that spirit, that “grace of pure life,” as Syberberg put it, can
still be found—whole, shining, and undisturbed—in the living theater.
’night, Mother, Tom Moore, 1986 (The New Republic, 13 October 1986)
Marsha Norman has adapted her play ’night, Mother for the screen and has
helped it slightly in a negative way, by a small omission. But it remains an
artificiality, a stunt, which (like Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly) is so proud of its
clever shape that in the end pallid cleverness is all it has to offer.
Jessie Cates, in her late thirties, lives with her widowed mother, Thelma, in
a cutesy house somewhere in a rural but not backwoods region. At the beginning,
Jessie tells Thelma that she is going to kill herself. Thelma tries to dissuade her.
After an hour and a half of talk, Jessie runs into her bedroom, locks the door, and
shoots herself. During that hour and a half, we learn that Jessie is divorced, has a
teenaged drug-addict son, and is epileptic, though she has had no attacks for a
year. The remission is, I assume, to assure us that Jessie is committing suicide for
reasons other than physical ones; the illness itself is meant to link her with her
father, who also was epileptic. Jessie is going to kill herself because “‘I’ never got
here.” She feels that if she lived another fifty years, she would be in the same empty
condition. The author makes some attempt to bond Jessie and her dead father
against her petulant old ninny of a mother, who never loved her husband. But
since the author never shows that this alliance has anything to do with Jessie’s
decision, all the exploration and reminiscence degenerate into palaver to fill out
the time frame.
Jessie is not neurotic, not desperate. She is much more organized and self-
possessed than her mother. Her decision to kill herself is supposed to come from
a dispassionate, philosophical view. Why does she announce the decision to her
mother? She says she wants to spare Thelma the pain of discovery, but in effect
she gives Thelma ninety extra minutes of pain. Why doesn’t the silly, childish
Thelma become hysterical instead of trying to be persuasive and appealing?
Because that would spoil the author’s design.
I quote from my review of the play:
If the play were true—to Norman’s characters as she wants us to think of

them—it wouldn’t exist. Either Jessie would shoot herself before it begins
or as soon as she discloses her plans, Thelma would collapse. . . . Thelma’s
one impeccable line comes right after the shot. Against the locked bedroom
door she sobs: “Forgive me. I thought you were mine.” The drama that
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really leads to that line—of a clawing Electra complex, of the mother’s

mirror-image hatreds, and of pity overarching both—has not been written.
Norman has omitted that last line from the screenplay. Thus at least she avoids
suggesting the play/film that this might have been.
The screenplay “opens up” the play conventionally: we see rooms other
than the play’s one room, we see other members of the family outside. Still it
remains a two-character piece. Such a piece needs two virtuosos, and this film 
doesn’t have them. Anne Bancroft, the Thelma, is a vulgar actress. Almost every 
choice she makes, from her first mugging outside the window, seems to have been
  decided before a mirror by a woman of   defective taste. Her defects are
underscored here because she apparently has  no picture of the woman as a
whole: she merely moves from point to point, maneuvering to score with each
one. Sissy Spacek, the Jessie, is much better. To the best of her ability, she tries to
realize a character out of the adduced characteristics that Norman provides. But
Spacek   doesn’t have enough ability. She does nothing false; she is just
insufficiently interesting.
Tom Moore, director of the first theater production, also directed the film.
He overdoes reaction shots: too often he insists on showing us the listener’s face,
while the other one is talking, although we know very well what the reaction is.
Moore also seems to be walking a tightrope: if he shoots one scene over Bancroft’s
shoulder, focusing on Spacek for a time, he very soon does the reverse. As for his
work with the two women, I’d assume that it was difficult to help Bancroft but that
Spacek responded.
Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme, 1987 (The New Republic, 23

March 1987)
It’s always gratifying to see someone accomplish the impossible. Everyone

knows that a good film cannot be made of a one-performer theater piece—
everyone, that is, who hasn’t seen Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s masterly six-hour
work Die Nacht (The Night, 1985), with Edith Clever. Now here is another one-
performer filmed theater piece, not comparable to Die Nacht in length or any other
way except that it, too, accomplished the impossible. Swimming to Cambodia is
funny, pungent, obliquely grave, and its interest never flags.
The author-performer is Spalding Gray, who has been active for twenty
years in the Off-Off Broadway theater. He was one of the founders of the Wooster
Group, which did a number of his pieces at the Performing Garage, the place where
he first did Swimming to Cambodia and where the film was made. (I saw the piece
last year when it moved up to Lincoln Center.) It could hardly be simpler. Gray, a
pleasant-looking man in his early forties, comes out onto a relatively bare stage,
furnished only with a table and chair, a glass of water, and two stands from which
he later pulls down maps. For the film, a blue-sky-and-clouds backdrop has been
added. Gray wears an open sport short and chinos, and he carries a notebook, to
which he occasionally refers or pretends to refer. Seated at the table, he tells us an
autobiographical story. In the theater there was an intermission, and the whole
ran just under two hours. For the film it has been condensed to eighty-seven
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minutes with, of course, no intermission.

Jonathan Demme, who has been laureled by some for Something Wild
(1986) and other films, directed. For me, this is his best work, reticent yet sage.
Demme hasn’t tried to compensate drastically for the “handicap” of a one-man
show: he seems to relish the cinematic difficulty and just lets us enjoy the fact that,
in the main, Gray’s writing and performance are making this film. Demme moves
in and out and often changes angles; he alters the lighting to underscore
transitions: but none of this, except for one sudden close-up near the end,
distracts. He has done only enough to make sure that our traditional filmic
conditioning doesn’t interfere with our enjoyment of Gray.
In 1983, Gray tells us, he was engaged for a small part in The Killing Fields
(1984), Roland Joffé’s film about Sydney Schanberg’s life during the end of the
Vietnam War and after. Gray played a miniscule role as an aide to the American
ambassador in Saigon. (A few clips are inserted.) Gray recounts his experiences
during the filming, which was done in Thailand: the lush movie-company living,
the general extravagance. He says that one small bit of his had to be shot sixty-six
times, then had to be dubbed later in New York because of cricket noises on the
soundtrack. But this account, amusing as it is, is only the main stem of the piece.
Out of its branches grows much else: about his life in New York, his companions
in the film company, his reaction to the beauty of Southeast Asia, especially the
beaches. Yet, in his dry, maturely wide-eyed way, Gray also tells us tangentially
how his involvement in this film made the starkness of the Vietnam War,
especially the secret bombing of Cambodia, indelibly real to him. He comes on as
an informal, somewhat garrulous and taking SoHo character who got involved in
the making of a major picture; but behind that involvement, his adventures with
his friends, his samplings of Thai pot, and his enjoyment of a free ride, shadows
lurk.
I can’t quite say that Gray’s monologue did more to re-create the
ghastliness of those last Saigon days than did The Killing Fields. But I wasn’t a great
admirer of Joffé’s film, and I was more ironically moved by what seeps through
this account from a man who lucked into a luxurious stay in a horribly haunted
part of the world.
Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Beresford, 1989 (The New Republic, 22 January
1990)
Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman are first-rate in Driving Miss Daisy. It
would be surprising if they weren’t. Two such exceptional actors could not miss
the opportunities in Alfred Uhry’s screenplay, which, like his play on which it’s
based, was constructed as a sure thing. This is not to say that any other two actors
would have been as good as Tandy and Freeman, only that any two good actors
could climb aboard this tidy little vehicle and ride off to huzzahs and talk of
Academy Awards. That’s what Uhry’s piece exists for.
Tandy plays an aging, well-to-do Atlanta widow, Jewish, who is getting too
old to drive. Freeman is the somewhat younger—though not young—black man
engaged by Tandy’s married son, Dan Aykroyd, to be his mother’s chauffeur.
Tandy, proud and independent, resents the arrival of Freeman, patient and wise,
who understands both her resentment and her need of his help. The whole film
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then lies plain before us. Her resentment is going to fade, and through the years
they are going to become friends.
I’ve read somewhere that Uhry drew his play from his family’s history, so I
don’t suppose that he set out consciously to provide another item in the genre that
includes the musical comedy The Zulu and the Zayda and the film A Majority of One
(1961)—a genre in which a Jewish person and a very different kind of person,
initially distant, grow close and prove that all the peoples of the world could get
on together if only we’d get in there and try. But Driving Miss Daisy ends up just
one more of that soppy breed.
As in any pop genre when well executed, Daisy has its melty moments.
(“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” says the heroine of Coward’s Private
Lives.) But the whole piece exists to stroke the audience reassuringly. The old
woman asserts often that she has no prejudice, though she has no black friends.
Freeman’s granddaughter, at the end of the years traveled through, is a high school
biology teacher, though Aykroyd is insufficiently concerned even to know of this.
Driving Miss Daisy tells us that if we just keep on as we’re going, allowing carefully
stratified friendships to blossom here and there, everything is going to be O.K. If
Stanley Kramer were still active in film production, he would have rushed to buy
the screen rights of Uhry’s play.
In the theater the piece had only three characters: all the others were
suggested. Suggested, too, were the settings and the successive cars that Miss
Daisy acquires through the years and that her chauffeur drives. This Thornton
Wilder approach lent the play a veneer of imagination. The screenplay is of course
“opened up,” with the other characters present, with the places and the cars real.
Thus the veneer is stripped away, and the piece is all the more clearly revealed as
a cozy tearjerker. This is emphasized by Peter James’s cinematography, which lays
on a golden haze that might give Hallmark itself some pause.
But Tandy and Freeman are fine. Primarily they are tasteful. They
understood what plums they had been handed, and instead of cutting loose, they
worked with truth and care. Freeman gives an extended, but not inflated, version
of his theater performance in this role, with all the dignity allowed a man in his
circumscribed position, with humor and sagacity, and with as valid a depiction of
advancing age, free of actor’s hokum, as I can remember. To see this film right after
seeing Freeman’s ex-slave Union soldier in Glory (1989) is to be reassured about
the survival of imaginative acting in our beleaguered film and theater worlds.
Tandy has a sense of proportion. All of Miss Daisy’s attributes—defensive
pride, restrained gratitude, tempered dislike of her daughter-in-law, loyalty to her
standards—are made part of a woman, not facets of a virtuoso performance.
Toward the end Miss Daisy has an attack of senile dementia that is especially
moving because Tandy has given us such a lustrous portrait of the disciplined
woman who is now wandering. This scene, like all of what she does here, reminds
us that we are enjoying the fruit of a long, lovely career. (Tandy was Cordelia to
John Gielgud’s Lear in the 1940 theater production directed by Harley Granville-
Barker. This, by the way, was thirteen years after her début!)
Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman thus do what prime actors have very
often done: they make the piece they are in seem better than it is.
The Madness of King George, Nicholas Hytner, 1994 (The New Republic, 30
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January 1995)
Scarlet begins it. British officers swirl into an ante-chamber of Windsor in

1788, their scarlet uniforms declarative of pomp and glory, the dresses of the
ladies around them glittering in complement. Thus Nicholas Hytner opens The
Madness of King George, establishing the visual drama of court life as an element,
not mere background, in the political and personal conflicts shortly to follow.
The film is adapted by Alan Bennett from his play The Madness of George
III. (The title was altered slightly so that we movie mutts won’t think this is the
second sequel to a first film about George.) Hytner directed the play’s premiere
for the (London) National Theatre, and this production was brought to New York.
For those who, like myself, were disappointed in the play, the film contains
pleasant surprises, all of them resulting from differences between the two arts.
The story starts just before the onset of King George’s first bout of madness,
then follows his treatment by several physicians, his recovery, and his resumption
of power. Wound into this account, itself harrowing and pathetic by turns, are all
the strands dependent on the king’s condition. Political balance varies from day to
day according to the color of the royal urine, which is supposedly an index to his
recovery. The opposing leaders in the House of Commons, William Pitt the
Younger and Charles James Fox, jockey to keep or get control, and they vie to
maneuver the Prince of Wales, whose hopes rise and fall as his father’s health falls
and rises. (Some digs about royal-family behavior have present-day sting.)
All of the above, as material for drama, may sound remote and moldy to
modern viewers. Shakespeare can grip us with stories of English kings, but even
he had occasional troubles. (Take another look at King John.) Lesser dramatists,
which all other dramatists are, have crammed theaters and libraries with plays
about royal hugger-mugger that are torpid. There are usually two troubles with
them. Only a really vitalizing art can make us empathize today with royal lives;
and history isn’t artistic—it insists on longueurs, and it doesn’t always provide
climaxes.
On the first score, Bennett’s play does better than most. The fear and
fascination of madness link kings and commoners. And Bennett’s dialogue can
glisten. He writes in chewy morsels that render period speech with a modern edge.
Says the Prince of Wales: “To be heir to the throne is not a position; it is a
predicament.” Or the king to a doctor who had previously been a clergyman:
KING: You have quitted a profession I have always loved, and embraced
one I heartily detest.
WILLIS: Our Saviour went about healing the sick.
KING: Yes, but he had not 700 pounds a year for it.
Bennett can also be nicely wry. In one episode Dr. Francis Willis orders the king to
read aloud, as therapy presumably, a scene from Shakespeare, and they light on
the recognition scene from King Lear, in which the mad Lear recovers. (Bennett
would have gotten more from this episode if he had told us that this was possibly
the last time these words were spoken in George’s lifetime. When his madness
subsequently returned, Shakespeare’s text was banned from the stage; only a
prettified version was performed until George’s death in 1820.)
But on the second score, even Bennett’s clever style on stage didn’t triumph
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over an integral burden of fact. Madness was not a play but a chronicle. There was
no climax. Some things happened; then they stopped happening. Bennett tried to
compensate by inserting, just before the finish, a flash-forward, which told us that
the madness was going to recur and that our century would discover that the
trouble was physiological, not psychological. But the flash-forward didn’t make us
forget that we had spent a long evening only to return to the situation where it all
started.
Thus the play. Bennett’s film adaptation omits the last-minute warning of
more trouble ahead—along with other trimming—yet it’s much stronger than the
play. True, the film audience will now believe at the end that the king was
permanently cured; so, in script terms, the film is even more of a chronicle than
the play. Yet, paradoxically, it is more gripping than the play. The simple
explanation: it is a film.
As film, The Madness of King George is strong proof that the immediacy of
the human countenance, the almost palpable verities of costume and place, the
ranges of vista, the enforcements of rhythm—all of them film prerogatives—can
fuse and create genuine dramatic sustenance. It happened, for example, in
Rossellini’s The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966), and it happens again here.
I suggest no superiority of film art over theater art: I’m describing a
difference. (To note one contrary instance of the theater’s power: no film, however
great, has done for me precisely what Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides did.) A
central beauty of the theater is that it can suggest physicalities, though it often
fulfills them; a central beauty of film is that it can fulfill physicalities, though it
often suggests them. In the case of The Madness of King George, helped
marvelously by the deployment of Handel on the soundtrack, film fulfills.
Nigel Hawthorne, who was George in the National Theatre production,
plays him again here. He was scintillating on stage, and he’s even better here—
because it’s film. Skilled and vivid though his theater performance was, it
impressed most in its marathon effect: Hawthorne did the whole long demanding
role right there before us in one evening. On film, obviously, that effect disappears,
and his acting supervenes. Here it scintillates even more brightly: shrewd, vain,
pathetic, regal. And film brings us a Hawthorne quality that escaped me in the
theater: his resemblance, in face and voice and speech and flavor, to Ralph
Richardson. Wonderful. Film can certainly use such an actor. Is it too late for
Hawthorne to have Richardson’s latter-day career?
Most helpful among the others are Julian Wadham as Pitt, Jim Carter as Fox,
Rupert Everett as the Prince (though he’s not as fat as his father keeps
complaining), and John Wood as the cobra Edward Thurlow. Ian Holm is not his
most incisive self as Dr. Willis. Helen Mirren, who plays Queen Charlotte, doesn’t
convince as the mother of fifteen children, nor does she consistently sound
German, which Charlotte was. The costume designer, Mark Thompson, has seen
the entire company ingeniously, as figures out of Johan Zoffany and Thomas
Rowlandson and (no ancestor, alas) Angelica Kauffmann. Andrew Dunn, the
impressive cinematographer, serves both the director and the designer with
perceptible relish.
A comparative study, international, immense, could be done of directors
who have worked in both theater and film. Some broad categories are apparent.
First, directors whose style is essentially unchanged in both arts—Elia Kazan and
Mike Nichols, for instance. Second, those whose theater and film works are
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markedly different. A towering instance is Ingmar Bergman: to judge by the three

theater pieces of his that I’ve seen, his films allow him to shed gimmicks and
concentrate on intensity. Hytner, much lower in the scale, is also in this second
group, a director whose film work is distinct from his theater approach.
I’ve seen two of Hytner’s theater productions, The Madness of George III and
Carousel, and thought that, contradictorily, Carousel had less musical-comedy
fluency than Madness. But the film of Madness displays new resources in Hytner—
freedoms offered and exploited, motion understood as something other than
action and speed, a comprehension of texture itself as a form of dynamics. In
Hamlet Claudius says, “Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.” Hytner,
Bennett, Hawthorne, and their colleagues ensure that George will be watched.
Richard III, Richard Loncraine, 1995 (The New Republic, 12 February 1996)
Some works in the performing arts are interesting only if done by virtuoso
performers. I wouldn’t want to hear the Sibelius violin concerto again except with
an absolutely dazzling soloist. The film of Richard III reminds us that this play is in
the same dubious state. If we penetrate the incense that surrounds the very name
of the author, the play stands revealed as one of his least rewarding: in character
development, moral profundity, and quality of verse. (“I had an Edward, till a
Richard kill’d him; / I had a husband, till a Richard kill’d him.” Etc., etc.) Only a lot
of dazzle in the leading role can sustain our attention to the incessant murders and
the litanies about them.
Ian McKellen is not the man for the job. Yes, he has long experience in
Shakespeare. Yes, this film derives from a theater production that was successful
in London and New York. Yes, McKellen is intelligent, skilled, and muscularly
forceful. What he doesn’t have is brilliance; and without that, both the title
character and the drama sink into Victor Hugo.
Cutting the play severely, as this screen adaptation does, doesn’t reduce the
burden. It only makes the play less tolerable because there is less breathing space
between the killings, less regard for motive and reaction. Transposing the play to
the twentieth century—in this case the 1930s—only raises the question: Why?
When Orson Welles did Julius Caesar à la Mussolini in 1937, an argument for
topicality was advanced (not without strain even then). But Richard III in the
1930s? Now? Are we to believe that this power-greedy homicidal malcontent was
a fascist? Nonsense. He had nothing in his head except schemes for personal
advancement. The apposition is facile—and reductive of the dangers of fascism.
Richard Loncraine, the director, and his colleagues have labored to make
the film fast and electric; but they, like McKellen with his cigarettes and pop
records, only seem to be sweating with worry. “Shakespeare isn’t old-fashioned
and boring!” they insist and insist, thus getting in the way of whatever impact this
sanguinary parade might possibly have.
Only one scene in the play has a kernel of intrinsic interest for me, the
wooing of Lady Anne, in which Richard interrupts the funeral procession of her
father-in-law—whom he killed after he killed her husband—to court Anne and
propose marriage. In the film the scene is played in a morgue, over the corpse (a
very different theatrical matter from a coffin), and the text is more severely sliced
than the corpse.
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Lady Anne is Kristin Scott Thomas, sufficiently la-de-dah. Some others do

well enough with the scraps of their parts that remain: Annette Bening as Queen
Elizabeth, Nigel Hawthorne as Clarence, Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York.
There’s a special poignancy in the case of John Wood as King Edward. He’s too old
for it now, but what I’ve seen of Wood on stage in Molière and Stoppard and
Schnitzler persuades me that he must have been a scintillating Richard III when
he played it in London some years back.
The most famous line in the play, certainly, comes in the battle of Bosworth
Field: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” How does this motorized film
deal with it? By putting Richard in an army vehicle that gets stuck at a crucial
moment.
Othello, Oliver Parker, 1995 (The New Republic, 12 February 1996)
I know of no drama in the whole history of the art, including the Greeks,
that surpasses Othello in the sense of a force launched at the start that drives
unremittingly to the end, gathering speed and power as it goes.
The basic trouble with the film of Othello is that, for what it takes to be
cinematic reasons, it breaks up this direct course into fragments. Further, the
adaptation by Oliver Parker, who also directed, shuns complete scenes, complete
at least in shape even if condensed. So what we get is an assemblage, a mosaic,
instead of unbroken onrush.
Throughout, Parker scrabbles for “cinematizing” as constantly as Orson
Welles did in his Othello film (1952), though not as effectively. (Welles had lately
seen Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part I, 1944 and patently used it as a filmic
model.) This leads to oddities. For instance, the scene in which Iago swears to help
Othello in his quest for revenge is put by Parker in the water—on the beach at the
ocean’s edge. Yet when he gets the chance really to utilize film’s power—to cut
away, for instance—he muffs it. The last scene of the play is a directorial headache
in the theater. What to do with Othello while he waits for Desdemona to pray?
What to do with Emilia’s body after she insists on lying down to die next to her
dead mistress? How to get Emilia out of the way so that, after Othello stabs himself,
he can kiss his wife goodbye without a third person on hand? Parker uses none of
the devices of editing to help him with these matters.
Besides the rearrangements of the text, a great deal is cut. To what is left of
his role, Laurence Fishburne gives a committed try. He does well enough in dignity
and manly love until the speech that ends “Othello’s occupation’s gone!”, which
lacks size. His performance never regains sufficient stature. Whether or not the
picture was shot in sequence, it’s easy to mark this as the place where Fishburne
begins to dwindle. (I must note, too, that he is not helped much by his costumes.
When he arrives at Cyprus, he seems to be wearing what look like leathern
Bermuda shorts.)
What was the casting principle of this film—in terms of accents? Fishburne
speaks good American English. Gabriele Ferzetti (of L’Avventura, long ago in 1960)
wrestles with English as the Duke. As for Desdemona, even if we concede that
Irène Jacob is much too old for the role and concede, too, that she is insufficiently
winning, why a markedly French woman?
Kenneth Branagh’s speech doesn’t quite fit with the others, but he makes it
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seem their hard luck. Branagh’s Iago isn’t near Christopher Plummer’s
magnificent performance on the stage in 1982; still, he savors neatly what text and
space are granted him. The “put money in thy purse” speech to Roderigo is a gem,
delicately modeled without actorish maneuvering.
The composer, Charles Mole, had the horrible task of writing a score that,
for many of us, would compete with Verdi. Mole comes off honorably, with music
of lyric gravity.
Classics Ahead! A recent issue of Variety lists twenty-four British films in
production. A full third of them are adaptations of famous works—two from
Shakespeare, two from Hardy, one from James, one from Austen, one from Conrad
and one from Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows). All aboard for
Parnassus . . . let’s hope.
American Buffalo, Michael Corrente, 1996 (The New Republic, 16-23

September 1996)
Obviously the one-set play with very few characters is not suitable for
filming—except that, like so many obvious wisdoms, it’s untrue. Precepts bend to
talent. Stevie (1978) and The Caretaker (1963) and My Dinner with André (1981),
all made from small-scale theater works, are valuable films. American Buffalo is
another.
David Mamet made the screen adaptation of his play and has done only a
little physical “opening up”: most of the film takes place where the play does, in
Don’s Resale Shop, a junk shop crammed with all kinds of odds and ends. One of
the play’s fascinations is that it seems to put that shop under a microscope. A
minuscule speck of the world is hugely enlarged, like the eye of a fly in magnifying
photography; so, paradoxically, the shop becomes massive in veristic detail at the
same time that it becomes an abstraction. In the film the paradox is heightened
with a simple device. The streets outside are always empty, whether we glimpse
them through the windows or occasionally go out there. Once in a long while, a car
drives by. Not one other person is seen, other than a few partially glimpsed faces
in a poker game right at the start. Thus this intensely realistic shop is
simultaneously anywhere and nowhere.
It’s in a dingy part of whatever city it is. Opposite Don’s is a vacant movie
theater, for rent. Diagonally across the way is the coffee shop that figures in the
dialogue, but the doorway is not exactly busy. Sometimes it rains, heavily, and, as
heavy rain will do, this increases the sense of enclosure.
Mamet’s language in itself underscores the paradox of verism-cum-
abstraction. The general texture is naturalistic, nearly stenographic—the broken
sentences, the repetitions, the litanies of everyday; then, suddenly, with a word or
a phrase, the vernacular lifts into an arch. “This is admirable.” “You know, this is
real classical money we’re talking about.” “The shot is yours, no one’s disputing
that.” “The path of some crazed lunatic sees you as an invasion of his personal
domain.” With a lesser writer, such lines might seem fissures in verism; but Mamet
so thoroughly certifies the accuracy of his ear that we feel we are flying past the
character’s actual powers of expression into the thoughts in him that he isn’t
always able to express. Like the physical context, the real is lifted into the abstract.
Two men are the center of the piece: Don, who owns the shop, and Teach,
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of no known occupation except burglaries now and then. They gab and fret and
discuss and pass the time until, almost obliquely, a plan for a burglary is broached
by Don. There’s a third character, a young gofer called Bob, a sort of apprentice to
Don, who is also involved in the burglary plan. The title refers to an American
buffalo nickel that a customer bought in Don’s shop a week or so earlier.
Don suspects, though he’s not sure, that the coin is worth more than he got
for it and that the customer has other rarities. Don decides to rob the customer’s
house, and it’s around this scheme that the play simmers and boils. The scheme is
inchoate—very loose indeed if these are experienced burglars—but the play’s
emphasis is not on the burglary itself, it’s on the dialogue around it, the verbal
volleyball that the two principals keep playing. In Beckett’s Endgame, Clov asks,
“What is there to keep me here?” Hamm replies, “The dialogue.” Beckett’s pair are
inside an empty sphere scraping its top; Mamet’s pair are also inside, scraping the
bottom. Both pairs live and breathe through interchange.
American Buffalo is full of opportunities for the eager symbolic interpreter.
The junk shop as the detritus of an errant, wasteful society; Teach (which is only
his nickname) as an instructor who can’t instruct; and (bingo!) the quest for the
coin whose true value isn’t known, plus the fumbling of that quest—all this is
fodder for symbolists. For me, however, the play is a species of incantation,
profane and desperate, by vacuous men trying to create through their “dialogue”
some sense of being, some environment for that being.
The producer of this film was Gregory Mosher, long experienced in the
theater, who directed the world premiere of American Buffalo in Chicago in 1975.
The director was Michael Corrente, who has written and directed one previous
film, Federal Hill (1994), unseen by me. Corrente was trained for the theater and
has worked there, including a production of American Buffalo. Presumably aided
by Mosher and certainly aided by the editor, Kate Sanford, he keeps the film
moving without jostling it. Corrente never seems worried about the one-room
venue, and his freedom is even clearer in those few scenes where we go outside—
they never seem frantic attempts to escape four walls. The film just takes place,
naturally and energetically, where it takes place.
About the performances themselves, some question. Dustin Hoffman is
Teach, long-haired and scruffy, loping around like a man who has nowhere to go
and is, from moment to moment, inventing a dynamic for his life. Hoffman was
implicitly up against tough competition in this part. Some of us have seen Robert
Duvall and Al Pacino as Teach, and each was, in his own temper, superb. Hoffman,
ultimately, is not. He has all the technique, the vigor of address, the experienced
actor’s ravening of actor’s chances, but sometimes these attributes become
apparent. A gesture is too clearly enjoyed, an intonation slips upward from this
mucky world; and we become aware of Hoffman, the star, slumming.
Remembering his Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (1969) twenty-seven years ago,
in some measure an antecedent of Teach, I hoped to see Ratso much more full and
complex. But in those twenty-seven years Hoffman has become so stellar that he
can’t keep every wisp of his success out of this performance.
Don is played by Dennis Franz, known for his running role on television in
“NYPD Blue.” Here his performance exemplifies the freeze that TV acting can
inflict. I’ve seen that show a few times and have seen how Franz presents his bulky
presence, his taciturnity, his knowingness week after week in episodes that are in
part tailored to keep him turning out the Franz product. He keeps doing it here.
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Franz certainly has some substance but only to the degree that his predetermined
persona allows. He renders the same brusque authority, and, as on TV, his
expression scarcely alters throughout the picture. “This is what you bought,” he
seems to say, “and this is what you’ll get.”
Bob is done by a teenaged black actor, Sean Nelson. He is completely
competent, but Nelson adds another element to the mix. Bob has usually been
played by someone in his early twenties. The use of Nelson in the part puts Don
and Teach in the position of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Two further notes. When, toward the end, Teach trashes the shop, it’s done
much more violently than I’ve ever seen. This takes Don’s passivity past the
credible. And Thomas Newman’s music is incomprehensibly harsh at the start and
finish.
At any rate, American Buffalo is now available on film, in a lucid version.
Whatever that version’s flaws, Mamet’s incantation works again.
Twelfth Night, Trevor Nunn, 1996 (The New Republic, 2 December 1996)
Twelfth Night was directed by Trevor Nunn, an experienced theater hand,

and is, in a way, a fair sample of this century’s theater productions of Shakespeare.
The guiding principle here is: transpose the play, in time or place or both, to a time
or place about which it was not written. The original purpose was to heighten the
play’s topicality or to refresh the audience’s experience of the play, but in recent
decades this motive has been somewhat smothered by another. The director
doesn’t want to seem hidebound by tradition, so he has to do something to the
play. Nunn’s Twelfth Night is still set in Illyria, the mythical country of the original,
but the time is moved ahead to the mid-nineteenth century. (When Sebastian
arrives in this strange country and goes to see the sights, he carries a copy of
Baedeker’s Illyria.)
This alteration by Nunn might be called minimal. Other directors have done
much more to Twelfth Night, particularly in the sexual vein, because Viola spends
most of her time in male dress and calls herself Cesario. A woman (Olivia) is
smitten with her, and a man (Orsino) is strongly attracted to Cesario though the
latter is “male.” Add the fact that in Shakespeare’s time all women’s roles were
played by boys, and the sexual stew really simmers. Nunn hints only slightly at this
theme and restricts himself to the temporal move. But why the mid-nineteenth
century? Why not the mid-eighteenth? Or mid-twenty-first?
However, having settled for minimal change, Nunn then proceeds to muck
up his production. The cutting and the rearrangements of the text are not much
more severe than one is braced for, but he misconstrues the play’s temper
jarringly. Visually the film is seen mostly in a dreary gray climate—this play that
seems entirely scented with flowers. Nunn cast Sir Toby Belch with a grossly
unfunny actor, Mel Smith, who suggests nothing of the minor Falstaff in his part.
That otherwise excellent actor Richard E. Grant plays Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who
is to Toby as Roderigo is to Iago, as if Sir Andrew were on his way to becoming
Hamlet. Maria, the maid who is a sort of cousin of Doll Tearsheet, is done by Imelda
Staunton without an iota of merriment.
Imogen Stubbs, as Viola, one of the most romantic roles ever written, has
all the warmth and color of a Popsicle. Orsino, the count whom she/he serves, is
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played in a muffled manner by Toby Stephens, with no poetic line. A few people in
the cast suggest what they might have done with their roles in a full-bodied
production. Helena Bonham Carter, as the Countess Olivia, who falls in love with
the disguised Viola, moves feelingly from mourning for her dead brother to
longing for the youth. Nigel Hawthorne is a perfect Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, or
would be if he had not been urged by Nunn to distend his pomposities. And Ben
Kingsley makes Olivia’s jester, Feste, a shrewd philosopher with dignity under the
motley.
A shipwreck, twins mistaken for each other, a woman posing as a man, a
wise fool—all elements that Shakespeare used elsewhere—were woven by him
into a lyric entity with language that is almost beyond belief. But Nunn, though
modest in his alterations, has bungled the gist of the enterprise.
Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann, 1996 (The New Republic, 2 December 1996)
The Australian director Baz Luhrmann takes the following view of

Shakespeare: he regards the mere transposition of a play in time or place as nice-
nellie daring. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, he explodes the play itself; and his
explosion begins with his title. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is both a joke
and a manifesto that are clear a few seconds after the film begins. The first thing
we see is a TV set. A newscaster speaks the opening chorus. Then the screen
erupts.
The term “music video” covers it. One visual cascade after another, one
sound blast—mostly of rock—after another. The setting is South Florida, Verona
Beach, the time today. Possibly tomorrow. The Montagues and Capulets, except
for the parents, are cool cats. A racially mixed lot, they drive large convertibles and
carry large pistols. (A slight disjuncture here when they talk of swords and wave
pistols; but by that time, who cares?) There’s a very heavy load of Catholicism: the
Madonna, the crucifix, church interiors with rows and rows of candles. The
Catholicism is not used in contrast with the lust and killing but as part of the
texture: the lovers-haters-killers are Catholics, that’s all. Of course the church is in
Shakespeare, too, but the play takes place in an entirely Catholic world. Here
Luhrmann has made a choice of emphasis.
His first film was the garish Strictly Ballroom (1992), and of course he has
directed music videos, too. His designer, Catherine Martin, who has worked with
him before, here gives him bloated settings—ugly ones and overly pretty ones—
by the basketful. The film devours them ravenously, burps noisily, and whirls
along pyrotechnically.
Amid all this splattering a few fragments of the original text remain,
addressed in 1990s-style. A few members of the cast—Pete Postlethwaite as Friar
Laurence, Miriam Margolyes as Juliet’s nurse, John Leguizamo as Tybalt—remind
us of what their roles really are. Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet (Claire
Danes) ought not to be better than they are or they would seem out of place. (Much
of the balcony scene takes place in a swimming pool in the Capulets’ garden.)
Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night, made in the same year, seems to say
of Luhrmann’s that it is excessive, that one can modernize Shakespeare with
restraint. Luhrmann seems to be making a rude noise in response, implying that
Nunn wants to swim with one foot on shore. For myself, I’ve never seen the need
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to modernize plays that don’t seem out of date; but of the two approaches in these
films I confess I prefer Luhrmann’s. Nunn’s fiddling seems mere temporal décor.
Luhrmann is in effect doing a translation, almost as if he had rendered the text into
Finnish or Bulgarian, with a few English wisps remaining as souvenirs of the
origin.
Why did Luhrmann have to fiddle with the greatest young-love story in the
language? Presumably he would reply that there was no point in fiddling with
anything smaller. If you want pristine Romeo and Juliet, he says, it’s still there, it
will always be there. If you want to see and hear this play soaked in a 1990s
sensibility, here’s the film. The result is horrifying, but it’s also unsettling in its
ruthlessness.
Oddly, both Nunn’s Twelfth Night and Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet do
something I’ve often noted about the screen versions of other, much lesser plays.
The film medium is like an X-ray that enlarges flaws in plays. In Twelfth Night the
end of the Malvolio story is always troublesome. The arrogant steward is tricked
into making a fool of himself, but the result of the trickery is nasty. His story has
to be finished, and Shakespeare has to interrupt the happy ending to finish it. This
rift in the concluding pleasantness is even more rude on film.
In Romeo and Juliet the flaw in the tragic structure is the gimmick of the
poison. Friar Laurence gives Juliet a drug that will make her seem dead and keep
her that way until Romeo arrives in the tomb. Romeo arrives a bit too soon, thinks
she is really dead, and takes poison. She awakes to find him dead. This accident,
with tragedy hanging on a few minutes one way or another, is a long way from the
tragic wholeness of, say, Macbeth or King Lear—a governing wholeness, despite
their plot devices. Luhrmann, very cleverly, capitalizes on the gimmickry of the
gimmick. Romeo thinks Juliet is dead and drinks the poison, but before he actually
dies, she awakes and sees him dying. And he sees that she’s alive. (After he expires,
she finishes herself with his pistol.) This added twist underscores the patness of
the original.
The Crucible, Nicholas Hytner, 1996 (The New Republic, 16 December 1996)
“At a moment when we are all being ‘investigated,’ or imagining that we

shall be, it is vastly disturbing to see indignant images of investigation on the other
side of the footlights.” So wrote Eric Bentley in 1953, reviewing Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible in The New Republic. Bentley’s widely discussed review then commented
on the play’s implied parallel between the communist witch-hunt in the early
1950s and the witch-hunt in Salem in 1692:
[The parallel] is true in that people today are being persecuted on quite
chimerical grounds. It is untrue in that communism is not, to put it mildly,
merely a chimera.
This criticism is still haunting Miller. In a recent New Yorker article about the
writing of The Crucible, a moving article generally, he refers to this point (without
mentioning Bentley) and replies that the existence of witches, in the seventeenth
century, “was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America.” But
this is no reply: neither Bentley nor anyone else had questioned that witchcraft
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was taken seriously in 1692. The real objection was that McCarthyism, as Miller
certifies in his article, was what spurred him to write his play and that the analogy
with the Salem witch-hunt was specious.
Paradoxically, this forty-year-old argument is all the more interesting
today because, at this moment, it is irrelevant. Presented now as a film, The
Crucible is actually helped by the fact that no topical analogy applies. (Diabolist
circles today don’t signify politically.) With no need to weather the political-
analogy test, freed too of the gratitude of an audience hungry for anti-
McCarthyism, the play stands on its own and is better for it.
John Proctor is a farmer in the Massachusetts colony; he and his wife,
Elizabeth, have two sons. (Reduced, for some reason, from the three sons in the
play.) Some months before the start, Elizabeth had discharged their maid, Abigail
Williams, because she thought—justly—that something sexual was brewing
between her husband and the maid. Now Abigail, living with her clergyman uncle,
dances at night in the woods with other girls her age, eighteen or so, more to vent
sexual steam than anything else. They are discovered by her uncle, who is enraged.
This turmoil leads to brief hysterical paralysis in two of the girls, and this
in turn leads to charges that they have been bewitched. Accusations of witchcraft
increase. After a chain of connections, Abigail sees a way, through more
accusations of witchcraft, to get rid of Elizabeth so that she can have John. She
doesn’t see that John, too, will be involved.
A cloudburst of panic breaks over the village. (Abigail’s uncle presses
witchcraft charges against some men because he wants to acquire their land.) A
prominent judge is brought in, and trials are held, all of them recorded. Eventually
nineteen people are hanged as witches, including Proctor. He is given a chance to
clear himself by signing a confession—to acts he did not commit. He signs; then,
like Joan of Arc, he tears up his confession and chooses death. (Abigail had
arranged for him to escape with her; he refused, and she fled alone.)
Miller says that he saw his way into the historical material, as a playwright,
when he read in the record about a gesture of Abigail’s toward John, a gesture
revealing tenderness. Thus the play became possible for him when he saw sex as
a motivation for Abigail’s charges, to which he added land-greediness in others.
(When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the first screenplay of The Crucible in 1957, called
The Witches of Salem, he saw the drama baldly as class war.) No one can quarrel
with the possible truth of Miller’s interpretation, but it’s noteworthy that he
couldn’t envision his play until he saw it in sexual and material terms, which were
not at all the supernatural terms in which the colonists and those “loftiest minds”
saw it.
Besides these mundane reductions of motive, there are other points to
consider. Once the characters are arranged in relation to one another, we simply
watch the play unfold predictably. Of course this is also true of great tragedy, but
The Crucible, as it moves along, seems more the fulfillment of an author’s pattern
than the grinding of an inexorable fate. And in that pattern there is a gap. Abigail,
the Iago of the piece, runs away. Miller merely drops her when he has no further
need of her. Not a Shakespearean tactic.
Yet this is the best Miller work that I know. (I haven’t seen or read two
recent plays.) First, the dialogue. In his modern plays, the dialogue sometimes
sounds like squeaky shoes, stiff, uncomfortable. His writing seems much more at
ease, more easily figurative and less dragooned into poetry, in the formalities of
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the seventeenth century. (Miller acknowledges the help of a poet friend with the
dialogue.) As for the wholeness of the work, there’s no point in comparing it with
such moribundities as After the Fall or Incident at Vichy or The Price or Broken
Glass. The two comparable works are A View from the Bridge and Death of a
Salesman. But the former is ultimately a bit of police news decked out with tragic
garlands; and the latter does not, as it claims, dramatize the fall of a man, under
worldly pressures, into self-delusion. Willy Loman is deluded from the beginning.
The Crucible has sinew. Despite Miller’s compression of the metaphysical
theme into sweaty contrivings, this is the play of his that comes closest to naked,
ancient drama. Forty years after it was written, shorn of contemporary “utility,”
the play stands a bit taller, especially toward the end (Act IV of the original), where
Proctor must make his gaunt choice. (When he rips up his false and cowardly
confession, thus choosing the gallows, his wife, weeping, throws herself on him.
He looks at the judges and says: “Give them no tear. Show honor now, show a stony
heart and sink them with it.”)
Miller made his own screen adaptation and, considerably experienced in
this work, did it deftly. He has pruned his play for the sake of cinematic movement
and expanded it for the same reason. (For instance, to let us see the girls dancing
in the woods.) I don’t understand why John and Elizabeth have their last private
conversation on a beach, with the jailers a hundred yards away, when all they had
wanted was to be alone; and I much prefer the way the play ends, with Elizabeth’s
closing lines after John leaves (“He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it
from him”), to the film’s finish on the gallows. But Miller has clearly had a fresh
look at his work and has restructured it as if he had conceived it for the screen; he
hasn’t been content to saw up his play and re-tack it together.
Nicholas Hytner, the director, is less limber here than he was with The
Madness of King George (1994). Once in a while he indulges in stage “pictures”
rather than film flow; and once in a while he misses the center of the action. Early
on, when one of the pseudo-paralyzed girls sits up, she is just discernible at the
bottom left corner of the screen.
But, miraculously, Hytner has evoked something like a performance from
Winona Ryder as Abigail. She doesn’t reveal a burning talent, but at least she is
here not the star of a college show. Daniel Day-Lewis, as Proctor, gets better the
less he has to be a believable farmer and the more he becomes the protagonist of
a moral drama. Joan Allen, who was Mrs. Nixon in Nixon (1995), has always been
a rather cool actress, so the part of Elizabeth Proctor fits her. Paul Scofield is the
senior judge and speaks his lines adequately. Scofield is of course a highly
accomplished actor, but in some roles he does little more than burnish his lines
carefully and serve them up on the silver salver of his experience. No bother about
creating a man behind the lines. That’s what he did as the King of France in
Branagh’s Henry V (1989), and that’s what he does here.
Regrets about George Fenton’s score. It sounds as if he had been listening
to Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954). Much heaviness, much
tympani.
Dancing at Lugnasa, Pat O’Connor, 1998 (The New Republic, 30 November

1998)
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Here is Meryl Streep again. (And, I hope, again and again.) Only a few weeks
ago One True Thing (1998) presented her as an American housewife, with Streep
struggling bravely to pry her role free of a cereal ad in a women’s magazine. She
had more success than the banal role deserved. Now she takes on a much more
taxing challenge. She joins a cast of foreign actors and performs as one of the
foreign group. In Dancing at Lughnasa she is one of five Irish sisters. The other
four are played by native Irish actresses, and Streep—a New Jersey lass—comes
off as truly Donegal as the rest of them.
Of course, accents have always been relished as chances for virtuosity in
the Streep career—Polish in Sophie’s Choice (1982), Dixie in Silkwood (1983), high
British in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)—but in few of the past films was
she closely surrounded by a cluster of native speakers. Two of the prominent men
in the Lughnasa cast are also non-Irish—Michael Gambon, playing the priest who
is the sisters’ brother, is English, and Rhys Ifans, the lover of one of the sisters, is
Welsh—and they do well, but they do not need to belong to a tight nuclear group
as Streep must and as she flawlessly succeeds in doing. I couldn’t help wondering
what the Irish women in the cast thought of their American sibling. It’s easy to
imagine an initial resentment as, for commercial reasons, a Yank film star took the
dominant woman’s role from an Irish actress; still, it’s even easier to imagine how
Streep’s authenticity won them over. Anyway, imaginings aside, the result is
marvelously homogeneous. For the ninety-four minutes of this film, Streep was
born in Ballybeg in Donegal just as surely as her sisters were. Once more in a
Streep transmutation, accent is almost the least of it, just one aspect of a created
character in every shade of mind and soul.
Pat O’Connor, who directed Circle of Friends (1995) with warmth and
flavor, treats Dancing at Lughnasa almost as the product of the Donegal
countryside. For O’Connor, the rigor of the story, its rootedness and its attempts
to break loose, seem the harvest of the landscape where it happens. (The year is
1936.) Frank McGuinness made the screenplay from Brian Friel’s play—the same
McGuinness who did the version of A Doll’s House that was on Broadway a few
seasons back—and has eased it into its new form with no more “opening up” than
is helpful.
Which brings us to Friel’s play itself. First, the title. Lugh, pronounced
“Loo,” was the Celtic god of the harvest. Lá Lughnasa, pronounced “Loonasa,” was
the god’s feast day and, sixty years ago anyway—which may be one reason why
the piece is set back in 1936—was still celebrated in some parts of rural Ireland
with bonfires and dancing. Friel’s play is not about the survival of paganism,
however—not in any deistic sense. It deals with the suppression of earthy
instincts and their inevitable explosion, and those instincts are here linked with
primitivism. To be natural, the play implies, is to burrow beneath the strictures of
our civilization. This theme is signaled at the very start: around the opening
credits of this picture about Donegal folk we see African masks and sculptures.
The film’s license for the African objects comes from Jack, the brother of the five
Mundy sisters, a priest who has spent many years in Uganda and, returned to this
Donegal cottage somewhat muzzy in his mind, often adverts to his experience of
Ugandan rituals.
The Mundy sisters range in age from the twenties well up into the forties,
or beyond. Four of them are, presumably, virgins; one of them has a “love child,” a
boy, but no lover. In fact, during the play the boy’s father comes to tell the boy’s
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mother that he’s off to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The youngest
sister, who is simple-minded, has a married man tagging after her to console him
for his departed wife; she is willing, but her sisters interfere for her own good.
Into this small house of large congested feelings comes the family’s first
radio. It breaks down, and its repair coincides with a crisis in both the finances of
the Mundys and the writhings of buried sexual feelings—along with, in Friel’s
somewhat patent design, the arrival of Lughnasa. As the radio feeds music into the
cottage, one by one the sisters begin to dance, and the climax of the film is this
uncharacteristic outburst of near-wild physicality—their own private Lughnasa.
The film is able, aptly, to take that dancing outdoors so that they dance on the earth
itself. What happens afterward is merely the subsiding of this brief ecstasy: the
five sisters settle into lives that differ—but only in kinds of drabness—from their
previous lives, as described for us by a voice-over.
This material could have made a solid one-act play, like Synge’s Riders to
the Sea or Frank O’Connor’s In the Train, but Friel has drawn it out into a full-
length work that, for all the crinkle and lilt in some of the dialogue, sags in the
middle. Once we know the tension, the unsatisfied hungers among the sisters, we
sit around waiting for the explosion. Very little integrated, organic drama grows
between the exposition and the explosion. Friel fills in the interim with
exploration of characters who are not, as he draws them, deeply explorable. (For
instance, he plunks in several minutes with the sisters grouped around a table
leafing through an old photo album, just to add body to the piece.) Then, after the
outburst of dancing, the film is tied off hastily with that most glib of devices, the
voice-over.
And that voice-over itself is strange. It is spoken by a man who was the boy
of the story, looking back years later on this summer of 1936. A curious retrospect.
We have seen a drama of bitterness, frustration, disintegration; but his memory of
that summer, he says, “owes nothing to fact.” He remembers it as a time when
everyone was “floating on sweet sounds.” Either Friel is trying to paint a golden
glow on his dark story as it fades away or else he is trying to show us how memory,
especially that of childhood, can shape the past the way we wish it had been. But
if this latter is really what Friel intended, it makes the body of the play seem all the
more attenuated—the lengthy posing of some grimness just so that a man, who
was a boy then, can remember it otherwise.
But, Friel apart, the making of the film is impressive. In addition to Streep,
her sisters are as vital as the script allows—even a bit more so: Catherine
McCormack, Kathy Burke, Sophie Thompson, and (from the play’s original cast)
Brid Brennan. Gambon, by now a welcome figure, generates a kind of awesome
pathos as the priest-brother who comes home dazed by Africa.
First Fictions
Charlie Bubbles, Albert Finney, 1967 (The New Republic, 9 March 1968)
Albert Finney has directed his first picture, and he also stars in it. Both the
hero and the film are called Charlie Bubbles, but Charlie doesn’t—which is the
point of the story. In a different sense, this is also its downfall.
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The script is by Shelagh Delaney, who wrote A Taste of Honey (film, 1961),
and it tells of a few days in the life of a rich young English writer, originally from
the Midlands, now living in London. He has found that success is hollow, folks. The
film simply exposes, rather than dramatizes, some somnolent episodes in his
life—like barely animated tableaux from a stale modern morality play—that show
how Charlie’s big London house and Rolls and fame do not compensate for the
atrophy that has set in, that has already divorced him from both wife and child.
Not only does the picture fumble in its reach for revelation, it begins and
ends with two completely phony “movie” scenes. In the first, Charlie and another
Midlands writer slosh each other with food and sauces in a posh London
restaurant. It is all done calmly with the men taking turns, and I daresay is meant
to show their contempt for their new luxe life, but it is just bad Laurel and Hardy.
At the very end Charlie goes off into the sky in the basket of a balloon that has
suddenly appeared outside his house. In between the opening and closing, as
Charlie drives up to the Midlands to visit his small son and ex-wife, we are treated
to a series of scenes that are written like freshman imitations of Pinter. Finney’s
direction is imitation Antonioni. Here is still another director who thinks that, by
putting in pauses and taking out climaxes, you make an Antonioni film.
There is certainly a story to be told about the hero of Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning (1960) after, figuratively, he gets educated a bit, shows some
talent, and makes a smash. Moreover, Charlie’s own case has been duplicated, in
several fields, many times in Britain’s last decade. But we get here only a hint of
the fundamental paradox: the Charlies have been struggling for centuries to get
out of their class bondage and, once sprung, find that their class has nourished
them, that they are starving without it. This is not to argue for a return; it is simply
to prepare for some uncomfortable transition. If Charlie’s little son grows up to be
a success, he will probably be able to enjoy its hollowness.
I was glad to see Finney in the Broadway production of Joe Egg because it
removed my fear, based on this film, that he was suffering from ambulatory
catatonia. Like Director Finney, Actor Finney thinks that doing nothing is the way
to represent spiritual void. Some of the others have an edge to them, like an ex-
mistress, well and briefly played by Yootha Joyce. Billie Whitelaw, too long absent
from the screen, gives a neat, embittered performance as the ex-wife. But Charlie’s
American secretary-assistant is played by Liza Minnelli. There is nothing to say
about Minnelli, except that she is Judy Garland’s daughter.
Progress report: This is the Year of Fellation in films. It was suggested in Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), and it is accomplished here—just off-camera.
Coming Apart, Milton Moses Ginsburg, 1969 (The New Republic, 15

November 1969)
Coming Apart is awful, but it has some points of generic interest. First, it is
part of the price we have to pay for some new freedoms in film. I don’t mean that
it is obvious pornography, squeezing in through a door opened by artists. It is
something worse: fake seriousness, with the high-toned, college-trained, heavy
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breathing of the New Superficial, the self-indulgence that quotes Pascal and
writhes in angst but is not much more than exploitation with existential plumage.
Of that school (which has its counterpart in fiction) Coming Apart is a ripe and
repellent example.
Second, there is some small technical interest. The film is supposed to have
been made by its protagonist, who has concealed a camera in his living room.
There are not much more than three camera set-ups in the whole thing, mostly
focused on a big sofa with a large wall-mirror behind it. We see people on the sofa
and we also see them when they leave it. The idea of a camera hidden by the
protagonist has been used to much better purpose in a film made a couple of years
ago, as yet unreleased, David Holzman’s Diary (1967), by Jim McBride. But its use
in Coming Apart, fixed and facing that mirror, does create a sense of space-in-
confinement.
The hero is a psychoanalyst, married. This room is neither his home nor his
office but a pad to which he brings girls. (His wife also appears.) We are supposed
to believe that it is the place where he disintegrates psychically, although this is a
highly arbitrary development, intended to give depth to what is a series of
sketches about making out with variously kooky girls. The psychic penetration
and the spiritual agony are at about the level of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966)—
skin-deep. There is one fairly funny sequence with a masochistic girl whose
eagerness to be burned with cigarettes only embarrasses the hero. He is played by
Rip Torn, who is gentle and likable throughout. The film was written and directed
by Milton Moses Ginsberg, who has just sufficient cleverness, in several serious
ways, to have a successful future ahead of him.
Summer Paradise, Gunnel Lindblom, 1977 (The New Republic, 25 March

1978)
Summer Paradise is a family film in two senses. First, the film itself.
It begins with a woman in her sixties opening her apartment door but
keeping the chain on. Outside is a woman of her own age whom she recognizes
and admits. The first woman turns out to be a doctor, the second a social worker;
they are old friends who frequently quarrel but who remain friends because their
friendship is so old that, if for no other reason, it must be respected for its age. The
doctor is closing her office, about to leave for the summer home where her family
gathers every year. The social worker is off to a couple of conferences but will later
join the doctor’s family at the summer place.
From the fissure of the open/chained door, this Swedish film moves into a
tale of openings-up that still keep on their guard chains. The shape of the story is
familiar, but it’s always an interesting device when used with insight: a social form
is probed to show that it contains much that contradicts the sentiment of the form.
In this case the family’s annual reunion at the summer house, with some friends
present, is and is not the pleasant occasion that the initial moments promise. If it
were only what it seems to be at the start, the film would be soppy; if it were only
the exact opposite, it would have the peculiar untruth of mere cynicism trying to
“expose” human feeling.
The doctor, Birgitta Valberg, picks up her little granddaughter at the home
of her older daughter, the stunning Agneta Ekmanner, who is in bed with a new
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boyfriend when Valberg arrives. The doctor and the child go on ahead to be
followed by the others. Up at the (lovely) country home, Valberg meets her
parents. This focus on an old person that suddenly shifts to the old person’s
parents reminds one of the sudden lengthening of perspective in Ingmar
Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) when Victor Sjöström, the old protagonist,
suddenly goes to visit his mother. And this reminder of Bergman is not only in
order, it brings up the second sense in which this is a family picture.
Summer Paradise was directed—her début—by Gunnel Lindblom, familiar
as a Bergman actress (the randy sister in The Silence 1963, for instance).
Lindblom has assisted Bergman on several of his theater productions and has
herself directed in the theater. This first film of hers, made in 1977, was produced
by Bergman.
The script was adapted from a novel by Ulla Isaksson by Isaksson and
Lindblom. (The former wrote, among other scripts, The Virgin Spring 1960.) The
“family” feeling of the film’s making is pervasive and somehow cozy, like
recognizing facial features in nephews and nieces. The summer reunion recalls the
flashbacks in Wild Strawberries, the pivotal use of Midsummer Eve recalls Smiles
of a Summer Night (1955), the TV Flash of horror news from Lebanon recalls the
Vietnam news on television in Persona (1966). These and other resemblances
could hardly have occurred unwittingly: clearly, in form and subject and cinematic
style, Lindblom is declaring herself a disciple of Bergman’s. As such, she gets high
marks. Summer Paradise is something like an early Bergman film made by a later
Bergman. This material wouldn’t interest him today as much as it once did, but it
shows controls and balances that he didn’t always have in his earlier days. So if
Summer Paradise is not innovative or expanding in any way, it has a lot of
pleasures in its making and in its humane concerns.
About fifteen characters are involved in the story, each of whom has some
sort of drama or development. Synopsis would be pointless and unwieldy. The
skill in the script and the direction is best shown by the fact that we never get the
feeling of having to wait until each character gets a turn, as in a long vaudeville
bill. All seems to go forward more or less simultaneously and interrelatedly, as the
summer house gets filled up with loves and troubles and disappointments and
reconciliations and the inevitable strand of tragedy. Characters are drawn with an
eye to contradictions. Valberg herself, for instance, is not just lovable old Grandma
Doctor, though she is that, too: she is a woman who didn’t know how to live with
a man and has passed the defect on in some degree to both her daughters, the
older of whom seems, besides her harvesting of males, to have some interest in
lesbianism. Valberg’s father is a doting old patriarch but is also an egocentric king
for whom respect comes both naturally and hard. The social worker, when she
gets there, is happy to be with these people in this place, but she is driven almost
to madness by their complete disregard of the ills and stupidities in the world that
are, she believes, pushing mankind toward doom. All this is interwoven with the
dailiness of each day—with the food for instance. Molnár says, truly, in The Play’s
the Thing: “Audiences always like to see actors eating.” The great platters and
bowls of beautiful food passed around the outdoor luncheon table do a great deal
to certify the plus side of the family’s ledger and to provide the atmosphere against
which poignancy is created.
Why is it all not soap opera? Mod soap opera, of course, in which problems
militate. Well, I’m not absolutely sure that it’s not soap opera—that is, a braid of 
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small-scale domestic dramas presented   more for the exercise of familiar

responses than for any real extension of experience. (Quite unlike Bergman’s
Scenes from a Marriage 1973, for instance, which cuts clean away from any such
suspicion.) But, first of all, good soap opera is in one way like good anything:
namely, good. Second, the intensity with which the materials of the various
dramas are connected with matters larger than themselves gives them, if not
depth, at least some status. Third, unlike Paul Mazursky’s recent An Unmarried
Woman (1978), there is no feeling of a checklist of hot topics being ticked off: the
troubles and trials seem generated and spontaneous. Thus the script doesn’t live
beyond its means. And last—again unlike Mazursky’s film—it’s all well done.
Lindblom has modeled her directing on her master’s. The camera
movement and the editing follow the impulse of the scene. Such dogmas as
reaction shots or “don’t cut between lines” mean nothing to her. The filming seems
to fit each sequence like a well-tailored garment: no wrinkles, no droops, no
shortages. The only moment that bothered me was the very last when the camera
closed up on the freeze-frame shot of an autistic boy. (He’s the son of Ekmanner’s
woman friend.) I wasn’t disturbed so much because of the resemblance to the last
moment of The Four Hundred Blows (1959) but because I didn’t know why we
were ending with him, of all characters. Why not the old doctor with whom we
began?
Tony Forsberg’s color photography is in the discreet Gunnar Fischer-Sven
Nykvist line, though not quite up to it. Alan Blair’s subtitles are succinct. The actors
are exactly what we want: we feel they’ve always been there, have never done
anything but live these lives.
Only a few of them are familiar. Valberg played Max von Sydow’s wife in
The Virgin Spring. Sif Ruud, the social worker, has been in various Bergman films.
Ekmanner was in Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals (1969). The patriarch is Holger
Löwenadler, who was the girl’s father in Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974). And lest
Lindblom seem guilty (some guilt!) of using a lot of fine actors who do all the acting
work for her, so to speak, I note the mordant performance of the autistic boy by
Toni Magnusson, in which the director must surely have figured.
But the fact that only a few of the faces were familiar, and none of them was
very familiar, made me wonder about the different effect that this film must have
had in Sweden. Not because of the language: my question could apply to a British
film or if I understood Swedish. All of these actors, most of them relatively new to
me, are well-known to Swedish audiences, some of them through decades in
various Swedish theaters, all of them through films we have not seen or through
TV. I saw people, then actors. A Swedish audience would see actors, then people.
There are advantages both ways, if the work is good, but it made me realize again
that any picture shipped out of its country of origin becomes to some degree a
different film. (I once saw M*A*S*H 1970 with Icelandic subtitles in Reykjavik,
and I’d give a great deal to know what the absolutely silent audience thought they
were seeing.) For me, meeting many of these actors for the first time in Summer
Paradise gave the picture a dimension of verismo; but seeing them again, as I hope
I shall do in other pictures, will give me a somewhat different pleasure:
affirmations of shared experience.
Gal Young ’Un, Victor Nuñez, 1979 (The New Republic, 9 May 1981)
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A group called First Run Features has assembled seventeen independent

American films and is showing them in a three-month program at the Art Theater
in New York. Some of them have been seen previously; many of them are now, or
are soon going to be, in several other cities. Occasionally, the bill as such will be
presented in other cities. “Independent” means, almost always, low budget; what
it certainly means, if a film reaches the screen still identified as “independent,” is
that none of the big distributors has picked it up, that it is having to make its way
screen by screen. So far I’ve seen only one of the seventeen being handled by FRF,
but, so far, cheers!
Gal Young ’Un is fiction, made from a story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
probably best remembered as the author of The Yearling, which was filmed in
1946. Like a lot of Rawlings’ stories, Gal Young ’Un is about poor Florida whites in
the 1920s. All the work on the film except the acting was done by Victor Nuñez—
the adaptation, the directing, the photography, and the editing.
Nuñez’s single best achievement is his casting and his direction of his cast.
If he had been given a $10 million budget, he could have had better-known people
but not necessarily better ones. It’s easy to imagine certain familiar actors in the
principal roles, but what’s astonishing about this cast is that you don’t want to.
When you remember this picture and think of those characters, you can’t think of
them otherwise than as embodied by those actors, even when you fantasize about
their lives before or after or laterally out of the story. This is an acid test.
It’s Prohibition time, there’s moonshining and bootlegging. A good-looking
young scoundrel, David Peck, marries a lonely widow, Dana Preu, just because she
has a house out in the country, some cash, and a good location for a still. She learns
his reasons after the marriage; accepts her fate; accepts—as fitting her wifely lot—
her work in the running of the still, although nothing like that has ever been part
of her life. Peck soon buys a flashy car and goes off on selling trips of at least a
week. She accepts this, too, stoically, even affectionately. Then, on one return, he
brings home a girl whom he installs in an upstairs bedroom. Which he sometimes
visits. The girl is played by J. Smith, who, if she keeps on acting, won’t change her
name, I hope.
The wife turns. Up to now she has accepted everything, whether she liked
it or not, as part of her wifely portion. The girl’s intrusion changes everything
because it changes the marriage. The end, even the twist after the end, can be
foreseen, but this doesn’t hurt. It would matter in most films that masquerade as
realism but are just malarkey: Gal Young ’Un is very far from masquerade, so its
realism holds us even when we know how it’s unfolding.
Peck is a credible self-justifying country skunk, with enough sex and con to
get away with selfishness most of the time, and with the old device of falling back
on tribal feeling, “belonging” in these parts, knowing these folks, as part of his
license and excuse. J. Smith catches perfectly the non-vicious amorality of a
homeless kid who does more or less what men tell her to do and sleeps where
she’s told because she has neither choice nor standards, but who is in fact a good-
hearted innocent, whose residual innocence finally saves her.
The kingpin—queenpin—is Preu, however, as the loyal, terse, dignified
widow. I’ve read that Preu is by profession an English teacher. She is also a natural
film actor—at least with Nuñez’s help. She is able to concentrate her imagination
and body on a state of being/feeling with no worry about external revelation of
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that state, with the ability to let the “visibility” of that state come through, the
ability (as they say) to let the camera find it. This is a talent and is not open to
anyone simply by not “acting.” It is the gift of unspoken film expressiveness, and
Preu has it. When the camera holds on her, she holds us. What helps to certify this
talent is Preu’s validity on either side of taciturnity, when she has to express
emotion, which she always does authentically. But it is with her power of
implication that she pulls the film into small strong shape.
If Nuñez were as confident in other departments as he is with his actors,
the film would be even stronger. It’s flawed by just what he doesn’t do with his
actors—over-directing. The camera tracks superfluously; there are uncalled-for
close-ups and handheld sequences, reverse shots or additional shots of a scene for
no apparent reason. The framing shows occasional touches of the arty. His sense
of timing occasionally lapses: when he cuts from a face with a question to another
face with an answer, he sometimes misses half a beat, like a cue picked up too
slowly on stage.
I emphasize that these are flaws in a good film that could have been better.
Nuñez is now thirty-five and is working. He gives us real reasons to hope.
Smithereens, Susan Seidelman, 1982 (The New Republic, 6 December 1982)
One of my favorite critical anecdotes: A Paris literary critic, ca. 1900, wrote
a long essay proving that naturalism was dead. Another critic, away from Paris at
the time, heard about the essay just as it was going to press and immediately
telegraphed the first man: “Naturalism not dead. Letter follows.”
Letters have been following for some time now, and they have generally
been right. Naturalism did not die: it persisted pluralistically, as it had been and
also in mutation. The first wave of naturalistic art, the Goncourt-Zola wave, was
meant to shake the paunchy bourgeoisie with seamy facts that they were eager to
ignore. That sort of naturalism held center stage for only a few decades, until
symbolism and other successors took the spotlight, but even in its pristine form,
naturalism never disappeared. And in recent decades, it has taken on a new being.
The morphology is the same, the intent different. Naturalism is no longer used as
a fact-bearer but as a truth-teller; it no longer brings us information about our
society, which we can now get from multiple other sources: it has become a style,
one of the stylistic options available to the artistic imagination. This is especially
clear in the theater with the plays of, for instance, David Storey (England), Franz
Xaver Kroetz (Germany), and Wolfgang Bauer (Austria).
In film, surprisingly, naturalism has had a somewhat different history—
surprisingly because film might seem to be the perfect and permanent medium for
“classical” naturalism. And from earliest days—von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) is not
the first example—“classical” naturalism has had a place in film. But, in part
because naturalism is so easy for film, it has moved to deeper dimensions, greater
complexities.
Yvette Biró treats the matter, along with other important issues, in her 
thoughtful new book, Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema (Indiana
University Press). Says Biró:
The usual methods of recording reality had been transformed into the
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reality of recording. . . . In what lies film’s originality . . .? First of all, in the

prosaic nature of its symbolization, in the profane concreteness of
abstraction. . . . Natural existence is realized in direct physical movements
and reactions. . . . The film lifts memorable elements out of their usual
surroundings, cleanses them, pares them down, and then holds them close
to us. Thus we see a hitherto hidden but very expressive face.
This power lies to any filmmaker’s hand as the power of an automobile lies to the
hand of any fool who can turn an ignition key. Many of the dullest and/or
exploitative cinematic minds have been quick to exploit that cinematic power.
“Memorable moments” have not been their concern: all they have focused on is
the facile use of this power. Think of Warhol and, especially, his epigones.
But a new American film, superficially akin to the Warhol school, moves
into some of the domain that Biró describes; it understands the principle of
concreteness as abstraction. For the first few minutes Smithereens seems like one
more post-film-school student film, dealing in somewhat jagged terms with
materials closest to the director’s experience and purse, justifying itself by the
mere fact of being a film. But this director, Susan Seidelman, explores the gritty
lives of young people in SoHo with vision and idea, and the result is a work of odd,
pertinent, artistic substance.
This is Seidelman’s first feature: she has made three previous shorter films.
With Ron Nyswaner, she devised this story, then Nyswaner and Peter Askin wrote
the screenplay. Those facts are relevant in a peculiarly partial way; it’s quickly
apparent that the events of the story are trite, and it’s quickly apparent that this is
unimportant. I soon began to think (certainly not because of the subject) of Scott
Fitzgerald’s stories about a Hollywood agent named Pat Hobby. The stories as
such are mostly poor, some of them are dreadful; but read as a whole, the Pat
Hobby stories take on depth because the narratives become the background: Pat’s
character and the Hollywood milieu are what matter.
With Smithereens Seidelman seems to have decided that she needed some
sort of action, some arrangement of encounters and rebuffs and problems for her
heroine, simply to keep the young woman in motion: but the story would simply
be a means of enabling us to spend some time with the heroine, to see her world
with her in it. The events serve as kinetic filler, while we watch and listen and
perceive. What the film is really about is not what happens but the heroine’s
condition: her hassled, befuddled response to contemporary American hype, her
ambition to float in a sea of trashy chic.
The woman is played by Susan Berman, who is quite right for the part in
temperament and in looks—blithely gaunt. We first see her in the subway, pasting
up Xerox copies of a photograph or handing them to people. These are photos of
herself, and the only words on them are “Who Is This?” Our first apprehensive
reaction is that this is going to be a film about a search for identity: but it’s nothing
so conventional, so formulaic. Her handouts are a search for publicity—publicity
to no definable end, just publicity. Berman has come to New York to be part of The
Scene, to differentiate herself from her married and baby-bearing sister, somehow
to be borne aloft, somehow to be part of the swing and the dazzle.
She works in a Xerox copy center, yet is locked out of her room for
nonpayment of rent. She flops where and with whom she can. Two men figure.
One is a sweet youth from Montana, played reticently by Brad Rinn, who lives in a
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van parked in a vacant lot on the lower West Side. (His quiet, vulnerable devotion
is the one “fictional” touch in the picture. Montana=Sweetness. Why does someone
from the Wide Open Spaces have to be like Gary Cooper? Why not like Gary
Gilmore?) And there is a rock musician, coolly played by Richard Hell, who
tolerates her from time to time and finally dumps her. By then she has lost
Montana Slim, whose patience has frazzled. At the end she is walking along the
streets, carrying her bags, bound nowhere; is buzzed by a man in a car; ignores
him, is pursued by him. He asks whether she has any other place to go. She halts
and turns to him in a (regrettable) freeze frame.
The moral tone of this film is unearned despair; that, I emphasize, is its
chosen tone, not my criticism. In a recent Italian film called The Meadow (1979),
when young people sat around and wallowed in hopelessness, they were irritating
because they were supposed to be intellectuals, superior beings who had looked
into the empty hand of a nonexistent God but who affected the viewer only as
egocentric louts, wasting good lives that were available to them. Not Berman or
her friends. They haven’t peered into anything; all they have are poses—with
cigarettes. When Berman is abandoned by the rock musician at the end, she says
to another girl, whom he has also abandoned, that she has been, figuratively,
fucked. The other girl says bitterly, “Life is fucked.” The line is a pitifully juvenile
profundity and, for that reason, exactly right. Berman and peers are not the victims
of existential despair or anomie or any collapse that requires a height from which
to fall. She and her peers are more or less where they have always been, the
walking wounded of bombardment by hype—by disc-jockey, discotheque,
National Enquirer, TV-commercial, carbonic-gas-injected hype. And all she has is
a hunger to be the subject of that hype—maybe by some sort of connection with a
rock group—instead of its victim.
Two elements in this film are especially strong. First is the verity of the girl.
She is stupid, deceitful, desperate, like some sort of crawly insect that attaches
itself to any available surface, especially a glitzy one. The unswerving disregard
for audience sympathy with which she is written and directed and played
commands respect and attention.
The other element is Seidelman’s filmmaking skill. Smithereens shows
fluency, a good eye, control. First films often look skimpy, as if just enough footage
had been shot to splice together a cogent narrative. Smithereens feels easy,
selective; in fact, Seidelman had so much to choose from in some sequences that
she overedits a bit, works in too many reverse angles, too many tracking shots.
Some economy, particularly toward the end, would have helped.
Her film made me think of Wanda (1970), which was written and directed
by the late Barbara Loden, with Loden in the leading role. Wanda, which I think is
an ignored small gem, is far superior to Smithereens, but it too deals with a young
woman subjected to emotional battering. In Loden’s film, the assault is by male
selfishness; in Seidelman’s it’s by incessant glitz. Both films, as it happens, end
with a freeze frame, as the protagonist is apparently entering on a life of whoring,
the one security that’s left.
Wanda is a fine work of “classical” naturalism. Smithereens is less deft and,
essentially, less traditional: it moves past “the recording of reality” to “the reality
of recording.” In Biró’s term, it is an abstraction made concrete. It doesn’t want to
wring our withers with a new kind of tragic fall, a dumb-prole protagonist instead
of a queen. It uses sur-naturalism to abstract concretely the being of this self-
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centered girl who has no certifiable self. It shows us that the camera can find and
dramatize the center of such a being unaided by two thousand years of
conditioning by tragedy. No one can be deeply moved by the fate of this girl. That
is precisely what this film is deliberately and movingly about.
Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson, 1987 (The New Republic, 13 & 20 July 1987)
If you remember Truffaut’s Story of Adèle H. (1975), you will remember

Bruce Robinson, whether or not you know his name: he played the English
lieutenant pursued by Adèle. Years later, wearing another hat, he wrote the
screenplay of The Killing Fields (1984). Now, adding still another hat, he has
written and directed Withnail and I. It’s a small, delightfully neat picture in a
valuable tradition: film  as memoir. Examples are plentiful; Truffaut himself with
The Four Hundred Blows (1959) is only one such. Robinson uses the form to make
history of a rite of his own passage.
He is the “I,” of course, and Withnail is a coeval young actor in the London
of 1969. Both are unemployed much of the time, living in a dirty, overstuffed cheap
flat on unemployment checks, drinking a great deal, smoking as much pot as they
can get, quite consciously being end-of-the-’60s characters. Withnail is the general
of this two-man army, but it’s the “I” who decides that they need a break from
London seediness. Withnail has a wealthy fat pouf of an uncle who lends them his
cottage in the country. Uncle Monty, however, doesn’t add that he plans to visit
them because he has a lech for the “I.” Before, during, and after the country stay,
comedy keeps flavoring the scrapes, with the added spice of commotion
recollected in tranquility. The memoir ends, as does the decade, with the narrator
getting a decent acting job and leaving Withnail, who, in the last shot, quotes
Hamlet to console and justify himself.
With an access of hindsight, we perceive that the narrator is really the
stronger of the pair though he generally sees himself dominated. But Robinson
evidently remembers this year in his life as his Withnail period, and, wittily and
sharply, he shows us why it mattered. Self-dramatization was a keynote of the
time, a mode of which Withnail was a master; and he mastered his friend. Part of
their drama was the belief that they lived in a decade as in a place, so that, when
the decade ended, they had to move as from a place.
Robinson’s writing is carefully brisk (although, as in many British films,
some of the throwaway lines are lost to American ears). His directing is good: he
knows where to look and for how long. Paul McGann is thoughtfully taking as the
narrator. But three elements guarantee the film’s quality. Peter Hannan’s camera
makes the London squalor almost Dickensian and makes the green of the English
countryside rightly unreal as a background for this ultra-urban pair. Richard
Griffiths as the epicurean-lecherous uncle delightfully overarticulates speech and
movement. And Richard E. Grant is dark and dashing as Withnail, a sensitive soul
doomed to an insufficiently appreciative, insufficiently alcoholic world.
Quibble if you like that Robinson frequently wanders from the narrator’s
view by showing us scenes in which “I” isn’t present. (That last shot, for instance.)
The real test of formal violations is: Are we glad they happened? Here we certainly
are. At the end the very violations help to give the film its neatness: its encasement
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of the time in one man’s life when it was possible to be irresponsible.
Wish You Were Here, David Leland, 1987 (The New Republic, 3 August 1987)
Wish You Were Here is a fairly bright English comedy-drama written by

David Leland, co-author of the strained script of Mona Lisa (1986), sole writer of
the not quite bearable Personal Services (1987). His latest is very much better,
possibly because he directed it himself—his first such job. The script’s basic idea
is familiar and the ending is mechanically happy, but there’s considerable honesty
in the film, along with some humorously rough situations and some brisk dialogue.
A willful, wild adolescent girl is growing up in an English seaside town. The
time is 1951, and her wartime childhood is implicated in our very first glimpse of
her—in a gas mask. Her wildness makes trouble for her hairdresser father but is
exploited by a young swain and by a man of her father’s age. Very quickly we are
put in the necessary perspective: we see the maddening effect she has on other
people, and we see those people as maddening from her point of view. Binding the
two views together is the girl’s aloof amusement at both.
Leland uses more flashbacks than are necessary, and he leans on lower-
middle-class English tackiness in a rerun of the John Osborne-Tony Richardson
exaggerations in The Entertainer (film, 1960). But he has a keen eye, warm
sympathies, and some subtleties in cinematic treatment. All through this film
about an adolescent’s travail runs a frieze of ancient people: after she bicycles
down the boardwalk, an antique man is pushed past in a wheelchair; in the
tearoom where she is a waitress, the lady pianist is an elderly peony; under the
hood of a stalled motor car, an aged owner works to get it going.
Tom Bell as the girl’s dominator then suppliant is grimly, metallically sexy.
Heathcote Williams (a playwright too little known) is snappily comic in his one
scene as a psychiatrist. The girl herself, Emily Lloyd—sixteen when the film was
made—is perfect: so perceptive, so shaded, so moving, so irresistibly funny she
makes us think that she’s performing well within her limits, that she can do much
more. I hope she does.
Lonely Woman Seeks Life Companion, Viacheslav Krishtofovich, 1987 (The

New Republic, 19 March 1990)
Lonely Woman Seeks Life Companion is an unusual Soviet film, though that
adjective may soon become inappropriate. What was once thought of as the usual
Soviet film may fade away. This well-turned screenplay by Viktor Merezhko is
close, intimate, finely calibrated. Essentially it’s a two-character picture, though
other people function in the story.
Klavdia, a forty-two-year-old seamstress in Kiev, puts up notices on five
telephone poles inviting the attention of single men. The first man who rings the
doorbell of her small apartment is a pleasant drunk, Valentin. (She never meets
another candidate.) Reluctantly she allows him to come in, though she is
unattracted. He turns out to be not only clever but intelligent and perceptive, and
although things start rather roughly—in their first meeting he tries to rob her, and
she crowns him with an ironing board—a relationship of tacit feelings, needs,
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recognitions develops. At the finish the future is left somewhat open-ended and
nebulous for Klavdia, yet a clearer finish, happy or not, might have seemed too
neat.
Viacheslav Krishtofovich, the director, has worked a good deal in television.
That may have been the perfect preparation for this first feature. Most of it is
between two people, mostly the camera is in close, and Krishtofovich deals with
these facts as opportunity, not constriction. Directing as if it were a chamber work,
more reliant on nuance than on large climax, he brings off the film very well.
Alexander Zbruyev, as Valentin, gives a performance like a self-peeling
onion, except that at the center there is a complex man. Irina Kupchenko, as
Klavdia, is an actress of dignity, humor, and despair, with the ability to fill silences
with self. The four main artists—writer, director, and two principal actors—make
this film a small, savory treat.
A World Apart, Chris Menges, 1988 (The New Republic, 18 & 25 July 1988)
A World Apart, set in South Africa in 1963 and centered on the struggle
against apartheid, is an autobiographical film. Largely. Shawn Slovo, who wrote
the screenplay, has changed names of characters, but in a postscript she identifies
the woman called Diana Roth as her mother, Ruth First. The daughter, called Molly
instead of Shawn, is only one of two central characters. The story is thus not told
entirely from Shawn/Molly’s point of view: a great deal of the film concerns
Diana’s actions when away from her daughter. Slovo must have reconstructed
those episodes from what her mother either told her or wrote in her book One
Hundred and Seventeen Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation (1965).
The father, Gus Roth—to stick to film names—exits the film right at the
start, leaving South Africa on mysterious business. (The actual man, Joe Slovo, is
now in Zambia, the only white member of the executive committee of the African
National Congress.) The action of the film is double: the struggle of Diana in
support of black freedom, which is made even more difficult by a new law that
allows the government to detain anyone for ninety days without inquiry; the
struggle of the thirteen-year-old Molly to maintain normal relations with her
school chums and with her mother, made more difficult by the latter’s
imprisonment. Diana’s travail is terrible, but in a sense it is simpler than her
daughter’s. Diana knows who she is and why she is suffering, including her
worries about her children. (There are three others, younger than Molly.) Molly
doesn’t yet know quite who she is or what is happening: the facts are clear to her
but not much of their resonance. The basic movement in the story is Molly’s
growth to some true awareness.
There’s nothing really new in this film, but material doesn’t have to be new
to be moving. The familiar South African battle lines—what else can they be
called?—are drawn again. Some attempt is made to deal fairly with the ruling
whites: a teacher in Molly’s school explains that what we Americans call the Boer
War was their war for independence, like the American one; police officials are
proud that they are less brutal with a white woman than with other detainees. But
the rooted, tragic war grinds on.
Slovo’s screenplay has its blemishes. Bits seem left over or left out: coming
downstairs from her office with Molly near the start, Diana suddenly says she has
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forgotten something and goes back up to get it. The return is made to seem
important, but that’s the end of the sequence. When a pleasant occasion happens,
like a black and white celebration or a birthday party for the six-year-old Roth, we
know it will be interrupted unpleasantly. Near the end Diana is under strict house
arrest, constantly watched, yet she manages to attend a black man’s funeral. How?
The Roths live in a lovely large house with several servants, yet no mention is
made of the source of their money. Diana’s job couldn’t supply it.
The most disturbing element in the script is its treatment of communism.
Several times in the picture, people call the Roths Communists. No reply is ever
made, and not one word on the subject is uttered in the privacy of the Roth home.
The implication—for American viewers, anyway—is that those name-callers are
facile Red-baiters, the sort that every American liberal is only too familiar with,
and that the accusation is false. As Slovo handles it, the ignoring of the charge
promotes this assumption. But the Roths were Communists, and Slovo diminishes
their honesty by not having them or their friends say so. From her parents’ point
of view, it would not be a confession but a full statement of their political selves.
Obviously, for commercial reasons, it’s better to fudge the matter, but fudging is a
sorry business in a film about political agony and martyrdom. (Diana—Ruth First,
that is—was killed some years later by a parcel bomb.)
Almost everything in the making of the film is extraordinarily good.
(Exception: the music by Hans Zimmer portentously telegraphs drama to come.)
A World Apart is the first fiction feature directed by Chris Menges, the excellent
cinematographer of The Mission (1986). Under his hand, Peter Biziou provides
perfectly competent camera work, but the welcome surprise is that Menges has
concentrated on the acting—with fine results. It’s all solid, confident, strong.
David Suchet, as Diana’s chief interrogator in prison, conveys, in the course
of his stern questionings, that he is falling a little in love with her. Diana’s mother
is forcefully played by Yvonne Bryceland, a long-time associate of Athol Fugard
and a leading South African actress. Linda Mvusi, the Roths’ maid and Molly’s
darling, is a simple, compassionate black goddess.
Barbara Hershey plays Diana and is phenomenal. The phenomenon has
been growing for some time. Her first screen appearances in 1968 were appealing,
and in recent years—Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Hoosiers (1986), Tin Men
(1987)—she has grown as an actress. Reportedly, her most complex role was in
Konchalovsky’s Shy People (1987), which has not yet been shown in the United
States. It was this performance that led to Diana: Menges was the cinematographer
of Shy People and wanted no other woman than Hershey for this role.
She has done what is widely held to be impossible for a film actor,
untrained in any formal way and confined to what’s available in most film and TV
scripts: she has become technically adept and, more astonishing, she has greatly
deepened. Hershey began in the gelatin-mold Movieland way, picked up by an
agent out of a high school production in Hollywood. What ought to have lain ahead
of her other than a rerun of the Lana Turner career? But her performance of Diana,
especially in the prison sequences, comes from warm understanding and the
vigorous, direct means to express it. There’s never a false move or sound, never a
sense of “big scenes.” In the late sequences she is afflicted with crude makeup to
show her prison sufferings (how could Menges’s eye have accepted it?), and she
even triumphs over that. Her accent is more British than corkscrew South African,
but at least she never loses it.
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Jodhi May, the English girl who plays Molly, is irresistible, almost precisely
because she seems so resistible at first. Not only is she not particularly pretty, her
features lack distinction; she is slightly round-shouldered, and she is given a real
mixing-bowl haircut. These very matters become endearing before long, become
essential to the Molly that she believes in and creates. The adolescent still has
some of the overt dependencies of a child (soon to become covert), and she has
enough intelligence to know that her demands are childish even though she can’t
help making them. As Diana’s political convictions lead to separation from her
family, Molly begins to resent her mother’s choices; to the daughter, those choices
imply more concern with activism than with family, a willingness to be separated
from them. May gives these angers full body and, with Menges’s help, also gives us
the blossoming adult beneath them who understands her mother’s courage.
The fate of gifted adolescent actors is even more unpredictable than that of
gifted adults. Whatever became, for instance, of the marvelous Patricia Gozzi, who
in the early sixties was in Sundays and Cybele (1962) and Rapture (1965)? I hope
that, twenty years from now, the same question won’t be asked about Jodhi May.
The Music of Chance, Philip Haas, 1993 (The New Republic, 21 June 1993)
Paul Auster is a lucky man. The first film version of one of his novels does
it justice. Justice may be an odd word to use in connection with an Auster novel;
so is luck. Nonetheless, the terms seem to apply, because the film is first class.
Talent applies, too, of course. The Music of Chance was adapted for the
screen by Philip Haas and his wife, Belinda Haas. He then directed, she edited;
together they have made a picture that is serenely eccentric, perfectly modeled,
exquisitely seen. Like Auster’s work, it is (choose one) dreamily
realistic/realistically dreamlike.
Philip Haas, though American, began professional life in the London theater
as an assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He moved into film
and made a number of documentaries about contemporary artists and about
purely ethnic artists, such as Australian aborigines. Belinda Haas, born in Belfast,
came to the United States to study journalism, became a TV producer, then in 1988
joined with Philip as writer and editor. Auster’s novel is their feature film début.
It’s the richest American début, in both accomplishment and promise, since Hal
Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, and Jim Jarmusch—with all of whom they share an
interest in evocative understatement.
About the producers of this picture I’ll say only that backers of this
enterprise needed courage and devilry. The cinematographer was the Frenchman
Bernard Zitzermann, the magician who put Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière (1978)
on film and who has worked with Haas on a documentary. The casting and the look
of the production are in such accord that it’s almost as if the actors were created
by the production designer, Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski.
Auster’s novel begins with a rootless man, James Nashe, a former Boston
fireman, who, after inheriting some money, buys a good car and, with no particular
plan in mind, simply drives around the United States. (Why, by the way, did the
film change his Saab to a BMW?) One day Nashe is en route to New York when he
picks up a beaten and bloody young man, Jack Pozzi, who turns out to be a
professional card player.
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Nashe has about $10,000 left of his inheritance, and with it, he backs Pozzi
in a poker game with two rich recluses in a New Jersey mansion. Pozzi and Nashe
lose, and are stripped of everything; they agree to work off their debts. The rich
men have imported stones from the walls of an Irish castle. The two losers agree
to build a wall with those stones in a meadow below the mansion—at a daily rate
that will liquidate the debt in three months. During the work, there are
extraordinary developments.
If this story sounds mad, then I’ve outlined it well. The film’s triumph—
Auster’s, to begin with—is to make one step follow another logically, though in
conspectus it all seems weirdly askew. The frame-by-frame credence rests with
the actors, who never falter. They are led by Mandy Patinkin, impressive as Nashe.
From the first glimpse, Patinkin suggests a man with depths to be mined, depths
that he himself may not have mined.
Another first glimpse, of James Spader as Pozzi, is a bit unsettling. With his
black-dyed hair, his distorted speech, his whining, Spader’s first impression is of
mere acting. But gradually a man slips in, to make the performance a portrait of
that man. Charles Durning, actually working for a change instead of coasting on
his corpulence, gives one of the recluses an amusing, stern solidity. His partner is
the wispy Joel Grey. (The Laurel-and-Hardy resemblance is noted in the film.)
Grey’s presence is really all that is needed, and he supplies it reticently. M. Emmet
Walsh, as the recluses’ caretaker, has just the right servile nastiness (the “It’s-not-
my-fault-I’m-just-doing-my-job” syndrome). For someone like me, who has just
been through the Holocaust Museum, Walsh’s performance has a reminiscent ring
of camp guards. It’s not impossible that this was in Auster’s mind.
Auster’s mind—there’s a subject. He is a coolly subversive writer in a
delicate and insidious way. Not for Auster any apparent anarchy of form or style:
he composes smoothly, the tone is placid. But out of the ordinary texture, strange
patterns and forces emerge, as if lovely green trees along the way suddenly reach
out to strangle us.
The deceptive word in the title here is “chance”: nothing happens in an
Auster novel by chance. A man (in an earlier novel) goes for walks along certain
Manhattan streets without forethought, and his walks begin to describe certain
patterns. In The Music of Chance Nashe, nearing the end of his freedom to wander,
gives a lift to a man who seems to offer a way to extend that freedom. (Two minor
points. Nashe spent seven years in the Boston fire department; the recluses made
their money seven years ago. Nashe has $10,000 left; there are 10,000 stones in
the meadow for the wall. In an Auster novel, these are not accidents.) The
encounter has drastic results. The film softens those results, but not without
Auster’s approval—he himself plays a bit part in the new ending.
What is the source of design in Auster? Smirking gods? I think not. There is
no hint in what I’ve read of his work of the Thornton Wilder syndrome. (Some
people are killed, seemingly senselessly, when the bridge of San Luis Rey
collapses. We learn subsequently why heaven thought it was time for them to go.)
Auster insists that design is a drug. He doesn’t say that, whatever our beliefs, fate
operates. He says that, whatever our beliefs, his novels exist to supply a fate for
the fate-hungry, to demonstrate that, fundamentally, fate and design are desperate
human inventions.
In The Music of Chance the Joel Grey recluse has constructed a City of the
World—something like an architect’s model, with figures two inches high, in
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which everything important in his life is happening simultaneously. While Nashe

and Pozzi labor on their wall, the wall is replicated in the model. I think the City of
the World is a paradigm of how fascinating yet nonbinding the idea of fate is for
Auster. Nashe steals figures of the recluses from the model and subsequently
burns them. Result? Nothing that would not otherwise have happened. The model
is actually a mockery of design.
All this matches Auster’s idea of character. He seems to respect but
ultimately to disregard centuries-old procedures of characterization. He begins
conventionally enough, then he simply has people behave as he needs them to
behave. His gravity of tone lends believability to his overall patterns; that same
gravity makes us accept his people as players in his game.
And that gravity of tone informs, synesthetically, Philip Haas’s direction,
which catches the Austerian wryly grave tone and which is supported by Belinda
Haas’s astringent editing. Thus they fulfill both the design and the skepticism
about design in this fascinating, intelligent, deceptively lucid film.
Mina Tannenbaum, Martine Dugowson, 1994 (The New Republic, 6 March

1995)
O François Truffaut, thou art mighty yet! Here is a new French film in
which: the nurses in a maternity ward waltz dreamily in the hospital corridor with
infants in their arms; scenes are replayed in a way that a participant would have
preferred; a young woman’s first sight of a handsome young man is shown in slow
motion; private thoughts on the soundtrack counterpoint conversations; a choric
character occasionally addresses the camera; a spotlight irises out on a character.
And there’s more—all reminders of the late 1950s when Truffaut and colleagues
burst upon us in the New Wave.
Let’s be glad of the reminders, say I. Mina Tannenbaum is the feature début
of a gifted writer-director, Martine Dugowson, who treats these New Wavelets
with such delight and surge that she seems an inheritor, not an imitator. Her own
delicacy, her wit and insight are so clear that she seems exactly the right artist to
advance the sector of film possibility first opened by Truffaut & Co.
Dugowson’s film could have been called Mina and Ethel. Mina Tannenbaum
is born on the same day as Ethel Bénégui in 1958 in a Paris hospital. These two
Jewish girls meet in a ballet class when they are children and, through childhood
escapades and quarrels, incisively yet lightly handled, they become fast friends.
Their friendship is the gist of what we see, as they move through the years into
their thirties. Boys occur, then men. Professions arrive—painting for Mina,
journalism for Ethel. Their friendship serves as a bond and sometimes a barrier
between them, but it cuts much deeper than they or we have realized. The ending
of the story is as shocking and almost as retrospectively deepening, as the ending
of Jules and Jim (1962).
The mutations of affectation and irritation between them are set in a
context of Parisian Jewish life in the postwar years. Mina’s mother, a camp
survivor, won’t allow her daughter’s young German acquaintances into their home
in the 1970s. Ethel’s mother, on her deathbed, plagues her daughter yet again
about getting a Jewish husband. If Dugowson doesn’t explore the milieu the way
that Claude Berri and Diane Kurys have done, her family touches are warm with
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authenticity.
Neither high drama nor intimate comedy is the point of Mina Tannenbaum,
though it has some of the former and much of the latter. Like a lot of good fiction
and some good films, its purpose is texture, not plot. Dugowson has such
understanding of her people, such faith in them, that she makes us feel lucky to
accompany these two young women through the years. There are two moments I
could have done without, however: fantasies with clips of Rita Hayworth and Bette
Davis. These jokes seem too facile for Dugowson’s subtle touch. Otherwise she
says much with little—as, for instance, the last glimpse of Mina in fetal position.
Dugowson is excellently helped by the six players of her two leading roles.
The four children who play the girls, first at age five and then at ten, have charm,
especially the bespectacled Mina, who suggests a J. D. Salinger child. But the real
weight, of course, falls to the adults. Romane Bohringer, who had the title role in
The Accompanist in 1992, is Mina, and she proves again that she is one kind of
invaluable film player: she convinces us of emotional storms and peaks more with
inner truth than outer sign (the kind of actress that Isabelle Huppert would like to
be). Elsa Zylberstein, the Ethel, is more traditional, and finely so: she expresses
more than she conceals, but always with color and truth. Bohringer’s and
Zylberstein’s approaches to acting fit the two women they are playing, so
Dugowson has cast her film well.
Maborosi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1995 (The New Republic, 7 October 1996)
The art of film is not advanced by arty films. A Japanese film called Maborosi
runs the risk of artiness with its very opening shots; but it never slips over the
edge. One factor that safeguards it from preciousness, that keeps it a work of art,
is that the director, Hirokazu Kore-eda, knows exactly the danger he is in and why
he is facing it.
Kore-eda, now thirty-three, has made several documentaries, but this is his
first feature. Yoshihisa Ogita adapted the screenplay from a novel by the well-
known Teru Miyamoto. A young wife lives with her husband and infant son in a
small apartment in Osaka. Happily, she thinks. One day her husband commits
suicide. She doesn’t understand why. The mystery haunts her. In the course of
time she marries again, a man who lives in a fishing village. Her life seems to have
resettled until she goes back to Osaka for a visit, and the mystery of her first
husband’s death envelops her again, even after she returns to her new home. She
is now almost immobilized with incomprehension. Her present husband tells her
that his fisherman father once spoke of the existence of a “maborosi,” an ignis
fatuus that could lead men to destruction. This really explains nothing; still, the
impossibility of explaining everything in life is apparently the film’s theme.
The story is slender, but Kore-eda uses it merely as an armature for mood
pieces, much as nineteenth-century composers used libretti as occasions for arias
and duets and choruses and so on. In Maborosi the “arias” are visual—
collaborations between the director and his wonderful cinematographer Masao
Nakabori. I haven’t seen such exquisite work in a Japanese film since the heyday
of the great Kazuo Miyagawa, the cinematographer of Rashomon (1950) and
Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and The Ballad of Orin (1977).
Nakabori has no interest in the gorgeous. He concentrates on the
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articulation of place through light, often set in horizontal planes, making the frame
seem very delicately striated. Always the color scheme is gentle. And always, as
Kore-eda clearly desires, the elements in any shot are minimal. Nakabori
underscores a contrast that others have used: the difference between the patent
geometry of Japanese interiors—the explicit rectangles of windows and bare
walls—and the curve and flow of human bodies. But there is no moment in
Maborosi when we are not rewarded simply by looking.
Toward the end the young woman is sitting in a small doorless shack, a bus
stop on a country road. It’s a medium long shot. The interior of the shack is dark,
and it takes a moment before we see her within. The composition—the small
shack, the large vistas behind it, the patch of darkness in the doorway that
gradually reveals the woman—is exquisite.
Kore-eda works mostly in long shots, sometimes quite long. He rarely
moves the camera. With Nakabori, he presents a gallery of visual meditations on
the situations in which the young woman finds herself. His compositions neither
illustrate nor dramatize: they transmute.
In any traditional view, there is no acting in the film. Most of the time the
actors are used almost as balletic figures, slow-moving, in a terrain that itself
seems concerned with their concerns. In a sense Kore-eda is a revolutionary
director, not with blare and pyrotechnics but with the revision of our expectations.
He asks us to look for rewards quite different from those of most other films, even
very fine ones. And, quietly, he gratifies.
Manny & Lo, Lisa Krueger, 1996 (The New Republic, 12 August 1996)
In this swollen summer season, when Independence Day (1996) has sucked
in another million dollars since you began reading this article, it’s pleasant to come
across an engaging small-scale film. Manny & Lo is a low-budget first feature by a
woman about women; and it shows talent.
The first zing of interest in Manny & Lo came from something that doesn’t
often register, the names of the producers. Dean Silvers and Marlen Hecht were
involved in the production of David O. Russell’s two films, Spanking the Monkey
(1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996), so clearly they have an eye for new talent.
That eye has worked again. This new writer-director, Lisa Krueger, took on a
delicate, therefore difficult job, but it’s the kind of project that would occur only to
someone with a good chance of accomplishing it, which she has done.
Manny and Lo are sisters, eleven and sixteen. Both of them have fled from
(different) foster homes in order to be together and to be free. They have stolen a
car, which Lo drives. They live on the road, stealing food and gas. Manny is quiet,
perceptive, shrewd, yet without that precocious knowingness about sex that is so
often dumped on film children these days. Lo is bossy, profane, insecure, and
pregnant.
After they have followed their vagabond lives for a while, breaking into
empty houses for shelter and lifting food from supermarkets, plus a bit of sex for
Lo, Manny insists that they must face a fact they’ve been avoiding: Lo’s
approaching baby. They break into the well-furnished country home of some city
type and camp there. They then kidnap Elaine, a woman in her forties who works
in a maternity shop in a nearby town. Elaine has indeed been a nurse. The sisters
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shackle her ankles so that she can’t run away, and they depend on her for advice.
Elaine is a steep contrast to the girls. Her kidnapping will be noticed, she
says proudly, because she is the coffee chairman of her church group; and her code
of behavior does right by coffee chairmen everywhere—punctilious, ethically
aphoristic, unafraid. Her propriety as she hobbles around the house in her
shackles is exemplary, funny, and, of course, symbolic.
Developments, as they tend to do, develop further. After some to-ing and
fro-ing, including their flight from the house because the owner has discovered
them, Lo finally has her baby by the side of a stream, with Elaine assisting. (The
tidily achieved birth is the script’s one suppositious touch.)
The film opens and closes with shots of a stream running simple and free.
That’s how the sisters would like to live. Those who remember the lovely 1987
film made from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping will recall that it ends
with two young sisters hitting the road with their aunt. In an abstract sense, Manny
& Lo is the sequel. Freedom, in our world, is not free: it must be bought with
considerable danger and, quite possibly, a bit of crime. Manny & Lo, for all its
verism, is a romance that quietly acknowledges the impossibilities of romance.
John Lurie’s jazz score helps—spiky, prodding. As Elaine, Mary Kay Place,
veteran of The Big Chill (1983) and many other films and TV shows, has a witty
power of concentration on the disproportionate, staunchly defending petty-
bourgeois etiquette in the midst of chaos. Aleksa Palladino gives Lo a bravado to
which she clings like a scared swimmer to a log. But the key performance comes
from Manny—Scarlett Johansson, who has been acting since the age of eight Off-
Broadway and in television and films. She has a lovely core of serenity and
concern. It’s easy to teach bright children to mimic, but Krueger has evoked a
faculty of truth in Johansson. I hope we’ll see more of her translucent face.
Krueger herself has had film education in California and France, has
worked with European directors, and has been a fellow at Sundance, where she
had advice on the making of this film from several professionals. Her advisers have
wisely not interfered with the reticent daring of Manny & Lo, its seeming
casualness and spontaneity. The film itself is to the film world what the two sisters
are to society.
Walking and Talking, Nicole Holofcener, 1996 (The New Republic, 12 August
1996)
Walking and Talking, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, is, yes,
another Generation X film, but it’s at least partially redeemed by the hyper-
realistic acting of the two leading women. (It also has a helpful small resemblance,
in tone and humor, to the English film Antonia and Jane 1991.) Like the recent
Manny & Lo, Walking and Talking is a low-budget first feature by a woman about
women; and it also shows talent.
We glimpse Laura and Amelia first as early teenaged friends, commenting
on the grossness of the pictures in a sex manual. Then, when they’re around thirty
in New York, we see them contending with the grossness and non-grossness of sex
itself. They are still extremely close. Laura is a therapist about to marry. Amelia is
in an office job, is seeing a therapist, and is not about to marry.
Most of the film is concerned with the sexual adventures and
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misadventures of the pair, even the betrothed one. Amelia gets tangled briefly
with a video-store clerk, who is really a writer. (“Really” something else is typical:
Laura meets a waiter who is really an actor.) The clerk episode explodes because
of an answering machine bungle by Laura. Laura’s engagement hits a rock because
of a mole on her fiancé’s chest. (I won’t explain.) The overall atmosphere of the
picture is that of waiting—waiting, not searching—for some point and purpose in
life, even for the marrying couple.
Holofcener, who studied film at Columbia and has directed shorts, gets
some sprightliness into her writing but not much difference in characterization
between the two women. Seemingly, either woman could step into the other’s life
without much trouble, and this aspect is not sufficiently dramatized to make it the
point of the film. Yet the opening and close of the picture underscore that,
whatever else may happen with them, their sisterly love, their near-symbiosis, is
their refuge.
Some of the dialogue seems improvised; still, what makes even the most
banal lines shine a bit is the acting of the two women, Anne Heche (Laura) and
Catherine Keener (Amelia). Every utterance, every response, gets a décor of facial
play—lightning-swift flickers of repressed statements, half-thoughts, regrets,
secrets. Their faces become the screens of mental X-ray machines. It’s an almost
microscopic style of acting that was developed in TV, probably because the writing
there is usually so bad that the actors or directors brought forth this style to give
the dialogue some non-verbal texture. It’s as if the actor were trying to express
facially the stage directions that precede or follow the line in order to enrich it.
This fine-spun style could easily become mere mugging and even if not,
could become a bit wearing. But Holofcener and Heche and Keener have used it
amusingly here, sometimes even touchingly. It’s the chief interest in the film.
The Daytrippers, Greg Mottola, 1996 (The New Republic, 10 March 1997)
A man named Oliver Edwards appears a couple of times in Boswell’s Life of

Samuel Johnson. At one point Edwards says he knows that Johnson is a philosopher
and adds: “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how,
cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Taking Edwards’ terms as given, I, too, try
to be a philosopher about current American film; but for me, too, cheerfulness
keeps breaking in.
Just look at these films by new American directors in the last year (1996):
Flirting with Disaster, Manny & Lo, Walking and Talking, Sling Blade. Some real
cheer there. And now there’s still another ray of light, The Daytrippers. Greg
Mottola, who wrote and directed, is bright, funny, seemingly casual. His first film
has some of the larky yet perceptive quality of the French New Wave.
His subject is familiar, as is the device by which it’s introduced, yet their
very familiarity gives Mottola the chance to flirt and dance with them. A young
suburban wife has a husband who works in a Manhattan publishing house. One
day she discovers accidentally a passionate note from a lover, apparently to her
husband. (“Oh Lord,” we think. “Again?”) She does something unpredictable.
Instead of carrying on one way or another, she takes the note to her parents, who
live nearby with her unmarried younger sister. Sister’s boyfriend is also present.
All four try to reassure her: the note is misleading, it’s someone else’s note, etc.
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But all five of them pile into the parents’ clunky car and drive into Manhattan to
see the husband and sort the matter out. The familial expedition is a novelty in this
situation—and promises amusement.
Of course it strains belief a bit, but that’s one of Mottola’s chief modes. He
gets fun out of unlikely actions plunked into the middle of veristic procedure. He
keeps up that contrast between realism and caprice all during the film: a slightly
bizarre call at the publishing office where they learn that the husband is out;
Mom’s fainting spell in the street that leads to lunch in a stranger’s apartment; the
young wife’s offer of help to a woman loading her car that leads somewhere else;
and so on. The family’s daylong search for the facts behind the note leads to a
discovery that will no longer be a shock to us but nonetheless shocks them. And at
the end Mottola again upsets neatness by leaving matters unsettled, like an
unresolved open chord.
After the freehand esprit, character is Mottola’s main concern. The only two
people who don’t deepen in the course of the day are Ma and Pa—stock lower-
middle-class types who are played quite conventionally by Anne Meara and Pat
McNamara. The young wife, who sees further into her marriage and herself, is
done pleasantly by Hope Davis. Stanley Tucci, as her husband, is smooth but
explodes when explosion is needed. Parker Posey is very credibly quirky as
Davis’s sister, and Liev Schreiber strikes all the right witty-sad notes as her
boyfriend. Campbell Scott is more interesting than usual as a novelist on the loose,
and Marcia Gay Harden slashes in a mod cartoon as a lovelorn woman at a party.
Mottola’s dialogue proves—right from the start as Tucci and Davis drive
home after dinner at her parents’ house—that he has a fresh view of the diurnal,
which means that he takes his diction from life, not from previous scripts. His
directing, if not extraordinary, is straightforward, clean. The general tone of the
picture, in the shapes of scenes as well as their contents, might be called “Seinfeld”-
cool. All the younger characters—the characters, not the people who play them—
have roles in today’s urban society and are obsessed with a fear of letting their
roles drag, of becoming square. The only times they abandon their roles are when
something drastic cracks them open. Mottola doesn’t merely surf along on these
attitudes; he empathizes and comments.
Anyway, cheerfulness breaks in—for a while, at least.
INTERLUDE
“Film Diary, 1961” (Film Quarterly, Winter 1961-62)

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The best picture I have seen so far this year (as of October 15, 1961) is
L’Avventura (1960), in which Michelangelo Antonioni moves toward a kind of
drama possible only in film: poetic immersion in character instead of conflict of
character. Almost as if to rebut it, Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960) flowers
out of the orthodox theatrical: an inconclusive but rich, flavorful film with an
appropriately Mediterranean performance by the long-underrated Sophia Loren.
La Dolce Vita (1960) demonstrated two things: (1) Federico Fellini’s stunning
virtuosity; (2) I Vitelloni (1953) is still the one Fellini film that is not in some way
distorted to display that virtuosity. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) may be a
happy accident, but it certainly is happy—if that is the right word for a film that
so perfectly matches method with a theme of dispassionate immorality. More
Godard must be seen before one can be quite sure about him. But one can be sure
about Philippe de Broca’s talent. The Love Game (1960) and The Joker (1960)
prove that he has inherited a good deal of René Clair’s ability to look at stern
realities with an unflinching comic eye.
Just when many of us thought that we had had enough of Britain’s belated
social realism, along came Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960); and now we have had enough, unless further examples are as beautifully
made as this film. Guy Green’s The Mark (1961) and Ralph Thomas’s No Love for
Johnnie (1961) dealt interestingly with psycho-sexual and politico-sexual subjects,
and The Bridge (1959) revealed Bernhard Wicki’s clean storytelling skill.
A Cold Wind in August (1961) was surprisingly genuine, thanks to
Alexander Singer’s direction and Lola Albright’s performance. The Hustler (1961),
a somewhat vacuous script, was forcefully played by Paul Newman and incisively
directed by Robert Rossen. West Side Story (1961), despite its lame last third, was
my favorite American film of the year and the best film musical I can remember.
Not to discount Robert Wise—viva Jerome Robbins! I hope I may be spared one
more line to help deflate, if possible, Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers
(1960), a film remarkable in that it manages to be simultaneously gaseous and
ponderous.
“Film Diary, 1961-62” (Film Quarterly, Spring 1962)
The best film I saw in the last quarter (October 15, 1961-January 31, 1962)
is one of the best films I have ever seen—Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Night
(1961). Several viewings make me think that the mid-twentieth century anarchy
of art, accelerated by the world’s transition from history to question-mark, may
be resolved to some degree by this artist; that in the as-yet infantile art of the film
he may be finding avenues not possible in ancient arts; that the texture of a good
man’s despair may in itself be a source of hope. Additionally, I admire this film’s
gently ruthless truth about the relations of men and women.
Celebrated directors stud the quarter. Akira Kurosawa had three belated
American premieres, all partially disappointing: Throne of Blood (after Macbeth,
1957), stunningly done but emotionally remote; The Hidden Fortress (condensed,
1958), superb filmmaking without much content; The Lower Depths (1957),
excellently acted but immobile and tedious. Luis Buñuel, a director whom I would
like to be able to dismiss but certainly cannot, produced Viridiana (1961), another
of his exercises in cruelty and moral revolt, always watchable but freighted with
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sophomoric symbolism. (The difference between Buñuel and Antonioni is the

difference between exhibitionistic perversity profound pessimism.) The
Argentinian Leopoldo Torre Nilsson was represented in New York privately
(Cinema 16) by The Fall (1959), a moderately interesting exploration of children’s
amorality, and publicly by Summer Skin (1961), a minor ripple from the New
Wave. To me, he is a talented director from whom little can be expected.
André Cayatte, a fine filmmaker as such, showed in Tomorrow Is My Turn
(1960) that he needs guidance with his scripts to keep them focused and
integrated. Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) contained the same
mixture we have seen before in the work of this artist—two parts pose to one part
poetry. Philippe de Broca’s Five-Day Lover (1961), although too conventionally
“French” in theme and conclusion, was delightfully directed and played.
Among American films, which included Stanley Kramer’s superficial
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), the Lumet-lamed View from the Bridge (1962),
and the ridiculous Too Late Blues (1961) from John Cassavetes, only Billy Wilder’s
One, Two, Three (1961)—despite its occasional straining for laughs—was the
work of a capable man making the film of which he is capable.
“Film Diary, 1962” (Film Quarterly, Summer 1962)
The three outstanding films of the quarter ending April 30, 1962, were all
of extraordinary quality, all finally unsatisfactory. Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
contained, as usual, many brilliant Bergman promises, fewer fulfillments. At the
start of a film by Ingmar Bergman, I always feel I am on the edge of a large
experience; at the end I sit telling the rosary of its virtues, trying to understand its
shortcomings. Here the excellent “chamber” playing of Gunnar Björnstrand, Max
von Sydow, and Harriet Andersson; the exquisite and exquisitely apt
cinematography; the delicately rigorous editing—all seemed worthier of a more
cogent script. From Bergman screenplays I sometimes get the “New Yorker short
story” feeling: namely, “only you lesser clods would ask that this be organically
and thematically clear.”
François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) is the work of a man with
imagination, spirit, and (as yet) no style, bursting at us with everything he knows,
still unused to the fact that he is a director, has talent, and can just calm down now
and make films. The pre-war selection has Colette-like charm, the second part
twists off into a neurotic Strindbergian conclusion, neither convincingly prepared
nor convincingly abrupt and unprepared—simply disconnected. About Alain
Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) too much has already been written; I note
here only that it is a generally amusing artistic game.
A Taste of Honey (1961) was insecurely directed by Tony Richardson but
contained more of merit than one expects from him; at least he evoked a moving
performance from an Albert Finney-type female named Rita Tushingham. Satyajit
Ray’s Devi (The Goddess, 1960) would be moderately interesting if condensed by
a third; the rub between old and new India has been better dramatized by him
before and doubtless will be again. Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels
(1961) also needed someone less in love with each shot to edit it, but this medieval
tale contains some beautiful balletic shots of a group of possessed nuns.
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Among American films, the fresh family scenes of John Frankenheimer’s All
Fall Down (1962) almost compensated for the trite unsexiness of the sex episodes.
Roger Corman’s The Intruder (1962) was a contrived and essentially inutile film
about Southern racism but had some good filmmaking in it and some chilling
location shots.
As for Jean Dasque’s delightful twelve-minute Play Ball (1960), I’m glad
that limited space keeps me from succumbing to clichés about French comic
invention and pastry-puff dexterity.
“Film Diary, 1962” (Film Quarterly, Autumn 1962)
The three months ending July 31, 1962, produced some American films of
interest. Chief among these was Lolita (1962), whose screenplay Vladimir
Nabokov seduced out of his own novel. The savage satire, the poetic horror, the
lyric sexuality were all diminished in the name of practicality. What was left—a
rather sodden study of a sad middle-aged fumbler—was well performed by James
Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, and Sue Lyon, a postgraduate nymphet.
Stanley Kubrick’s direction had flashes of fire and hate but not enough—not nearly
the imagination and wit that (for examples) de Broca or Godard or Truffaut might
have brought to it. From beginning to end this film was boxed for delivery to the
Production Code seal office and the Legion of Decency. Those who think that the
film should not be judged against the novel cannot argue away the fact that the
producers are relying heavily on the novel’s reputation to attract audiences. If so,
why is comparison not appropriate? And must we always concede that to judge a
novelized film on its own merits means to assume that films are a lesser, more
restricted form than novels?
Ernest Hemingway’s quintessence consisted of writing realistically about
romantic people and situations. Martin Ritt’s Hemingway’s Adventures as a Young
Man (1962), from A. E. Hotchner’s screenplay, captured some of the sense of
encounter between a young man and a world of “unforgettable characters.” The
film suffered from softness of will and from Susan Strasberg; and Richard Beymer,
as the hero, proved that an odyssey does not require an absolutely convincing
Odysseus if the people he meets are convincing.
Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Kirk Douglas’s tolerable modern Western, also
suffered from lack of resolution and anxiety to please; but it contained some
mordant moments.
A Kind of Loving (1962), with which John Schlesinger makes a welcome
feature début, is one more of the English “social realies.” Its trite story is wedded
to a setting that is essentially irrelevant, but Alan Bates’s performance as the hero,
built on pungent dialogue by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse, is touching.
The best is saved for last. The Island (a.k.a. The Naked Island, 1960), written
and directed by Kaneto Shindo, is a film without dialogue about a farmer, his wife,
and two small sons who scratch out their living on a tiny island on Japan’s Inland
Sea. The veracity of every moment in the film, as performed by accomplished
actors, is a much-needed rebuke to the sophistries of neorealism. More
importantly, the film is a pure statement of love, of a cosmos realized and
sustained by interdependence, of a happiness too simple for most of us to aspire
towards.
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The quarter ending October 31, 1962, brought a new Antonioni film, than
which a quarter can do no more. Eclipse (1962) completes the trilogy begun by
L’Avventura (1960) and The Night (1961), and this world ends neither with a bang
nor a whimper but in poignantly suspended animation. Michelangelo Antonioni’s
story is of a Roman girl ending one love and beginning another, which too she
knows will end; it progresses with that ambience of stillness—like watching one’s
self from within one’s own mind—that is this artist’s particular and haunting note.
Because the girl is less individualized than his earlier protagonists, is more of a
personified contemporary symbol, the film is less moving than the first two; but
Antonioni’s splaying open of an environment and his frenzied ballet of the Roman
stock exchange are matters possible only to a master.
Among American films, The Connection (1961), now licensed for New York
exhibition, is likely to become the Dred Scott of the cinema, more famous as a case
than for itself. The sophomoric naturalism of the script, the air of import (though
the cupboard is bare) are aggravated by Jack Gelber’s nagging attempts to take us
past artistic reality to “real” reality. Shirley Clarke is one of the younger Americans
trying to rehabilitate our film world, but her direction here, despite some telling
touches, tends to be as emptily portentous as the script.
Billy Budd (1962) seems ideal material for a film if two problems can be
solved: the casting of Billy so that he is too good and yet true; Terence Stamp does
not quite succeed in the former role, and Peter Ustinov is grotesquely inadequate
in the latter. Ustinov’s direction, clumsy enough in a trifle like his own Romanoff
and Juliet (1961), would be fatal here if there were much life to start with.
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) would have been better as an long-
playing phonograph record than the LP film that it is. Now we have to watch the
non-moving pictures while we listen, and none of Sidney Lumet’s limited but
insistent wiles can make them live on the screen. However, Jason Robards is fine
as the son and Ralph Richardson sustains the father; but the gifted Katharine
Hepburn is miscast as the mother and Dean Stockwell is miscast vocationally.
To conclude, another master’s work: Yojimbo (1961). This seems as if Akira
Kurosawa had decided to take the “lone-gun” Western and not only transpose it
to nineteenth-century Japan but amplify the melodrama into drama, the Good Guy
into a hero. With a weathered-oak-and-lightning performance by Toshiro Mifune
that further displays his credible virtuosity, the result evokes the balcony thrills
of childhood together with a high degree of aesthetic satisfaction.
“Film Diary, 1963” (Film Quarterly, Spring 1963)
The quarter ending January 31, 1963 brought an embarrassment of richly

discussable films. David and Lisa (1962) is the best American low-budget
production I can remember and a good picture it its own right. It is somewhat
constricted and occasionally clumsy, and its ending is mechanical; but, in general,
Frank Perry’s direction and Eleanor Perry’s script generate compassion and
concern. Keir Dullea gives a flaring performance as a compulsive neurotic.
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The two most important films of the quarter are its biggest
disappointments—and for related reasons. Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962)
contains scenes as coruscatingly brilliant as any he has ever done; but, wounded
by Anthony Perkins’ performance as K., the film is killed by its desertion of Kafka’s
theme. In The Elusive Corporal (1962) Jean Renoir deals again with French
prisoners in Germany—this time in a later war. Jean-Pierre Cassel invests the
leading role with lightness, tenderness, and poetry of motion, and many of the
scenes are marvelously made, but this film, too, lacks thematic consequence. It is
finally unsatisfying, a series of varyingly successful skits and sketches.
Two more “big” films. In To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Robert Mulligan’s
direction (particularly of the children) triumphs gently over Gregory Peck’s
performance and, almost, over the sentimentalities of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is the most powerfully photographed color film I
know—photography that is not merely decoration but whose beauty is integral to
the film. David Lean is, for the most part, in superb command of both the vast
action shots and the subjective scenes. Peter O’Toole makes Lawrence a
fascinating man, and all the cast, except José Ferrer, are excellent. Robert Bolt’s
script is too long for what it treats (Lawrence’s Arabian career) and does not treat
enough (his post-Arabian career); yet much of the dialogue is so good as to give
pleasure in itself besides advancing character and story.
Some failures. Akira Kurosawa’s contemporary The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
is disappointingly heavy and vacuous, interesting only in further displaying the
range of the magnificent Toshiro Mifune. Michael Cacoyannis’s Electra (1962),
despite some intelligence, some pretty pictures, and Irene Papas’s gifted
performance, is essentially misconceived. The classic Greek theater does not
function in the film form. Serge Bourgignon’s first film Sundays and Cybele (1962)
is the most overpraised picture in years. A lot of elements—plainly marked
“Poetic”—have been selected and lined up but have not been fused or vitalized.
We know what we are supposed to feel but, except for some moments in young
Patricia Gozzi’s extraordinary performance, we don’t feel it.
Some successes. Two unpretentious, solid Italian films: Luigi Comencini’s
Everybody Go Home! (1960), a tart and candid examination of Italian attitudes in
1943 after the Badoglio surrender, with Alberto Sordi superb as a pragmatic
lieutenant; and Dino Risi’s Love and Larceny (1960), with Vittorio Gassman as a
chameleon con man, a comedy funnier, though less ambitious, than Pietro Germi’s
Divorce Italian Style (1961). Finally, the best postwar Russian film I have seen:
Josef Heifetz’s Lady with the Dog (1959)—Chekhov completely comprehended
and affectingly rendered.
“Film Diary, 1963” (Film Quarterly, Summer 1963)
The quarter ending April 30, 1963, brought a new Bergman, an old
Antonioni, a new and old Kurosawa. Winter Light (1963), a further inquiry by
Ingmar Bergman into the present-day viability of religion, depicts the dilemma of
a spiritually bankrupt clergyman. The tone is set by the title: thin sun, brightness
without heat. The film is made with a marvelous economy and a sureness that are
in themselves more affecting than the central thesis, which is stated, not fully
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dramatized. The residual effect is literary, an idea worked out on paper, and then
filmed, rather than a fulfillment in film.
Dan Talbot continues his laudable work in importing neglected films for his
New Yorker Theater. He must be thanked for the chance to see Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Le Amiche (1955), which preceded the trilogy and is much more than
a rough draft for it. In its seriousness and dexterity, the film would be a peak for
many a director; in sheer beauty and individualized style, however, it is not
Antonioni’s full flowering.
Talbot also brought us Akira Kurosawa’s uncut, two-and-three-quarter-
hour modern version of The Idiot (1951). Equal thanks but not equal praise. It is
hard to believe that this mere series of illustrated scenes from a novel was made
after Rashomon (1950). Kurosawa’s recent Sanjuro (1962), a sequel to Yojimbo
(1961), is rich in skill, poor in content: an action picture with even less texture
than the first chapter of the itinerant samurai’s adventures. Not a frame of film in
it can be faulted, not a gesture of Toshiro Mifune’s that is ineffective, but I hope
that soon this director and star will again bite off at least as much as they can chew.
Other foreign films: Lindsay Anderson’s first feature, This Sporting Life
(1963), has sequences of fierce character collision like cars smashing headlong,
with fine performances by Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts; but the script is
unsteady, and Anderson’s control ranges from the confident to the somewhat
confused. Parts are so good that they make the weaker sections seem worse. Joan
Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) is a chipper cockney folk-comedy, whose
vital material is somewhat debilitated by the chromium-plated “musical” feel of
the film. Satyajit Ray’s Two Daughters (1961), based on two Rabindranath Tagore
stories, is delicate, indigenous, finally tedious; honesty and (to us) novel settings
cannot entirely redeem predictable material.
American films: Hud (1963), about contemporary Texas ranch life, is easily
the best of the quarter. Paul Newman’s and Patricia Neal’s performances, Martin
Ritt’s lithe, evocative direction are of high quality; the dialogue by Irving Ravetch
and Harriet Frank, Jr., is quick and salty. But the roots of the Hud character’s
solipsism are not convincingly drawn. The result is a well-made structure on a
flimsy foundation; fundamentally, the picture seems pointless. Joseph Strick’s The
Balcony (1963), from Genet’s play, is like a neat cardboard cut-out imposed on a
large, less tidy canvas, but it has some graphic images and Lee Grant’s subtle
performance. Minimally, one can be glad that it was made—and in this country.
Which is more than can be said of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
“Film Diary, 1963” (Film Quarterly, Autumn 1963)
Outstanding in the quarter ending July 31, 1963, were two contrasting
Italian films. Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) is an example of art so excellently made
that it not only seems better than it is, in a sense it is better than it seems. One is
continually delighted by its cinematic bravura; moved, reproved, and tickled by
nuance and insight; constantly aware that the entertainment is being provided by
sensibility and fabulous talent. Later, one sees that its content, its point, is slight;
then, still later, one sees that the execution was so miraculous that the thematic
shortcoming looms small. Ermanno Olmi’s The Sound of Trumpets (a fairly free
translation of Il Posto 1961) is a simple sad poem about flickering humanism in
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a poured-concrete world—all the sadder for being the director’s protest and not
the characters’. 8½ is a coruscatingly orchestrated piece, with everything from
fiddles to glockenspiel and theremin. Olmi’s film is a small chamber work,
woodwinds and strings, some pertinent variations on a familiar theme.
William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is an apt subject for a film
and may some day be made into a good one. Peter Brook’s 1963 attempt fails
because of the obtrusion of theory—a vaguely neorealistic, “non-acted”
approach—which makes the film sag in the internals of its scenes like an amateur
play and which vitiates the terror. It seems to have been edited like mad in an
effort to make up for the fact that what happens between one cut and another is
generally limp. The studio sound fights the location photography, and Raymond
Leppard’s music wants to tug heartstrings but cannot even grasp them.
After one notes the obvious influences on Roman Polanski’s Knife in the
Water (1962), it remains a considerable achievement, overlong but perceptive
and subtle and technically adroit. It has only the three characters of its triangle,
but it is principally the husband’s drama and treats him with unsparing
understanding.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) was an extraordinary film that, as
happens from time to time, might have been better than its direction. This
suspicion is partly confirmed by My Life to Live (1962), a lengthy collection of arty
attitudinizings insisting on their importance, with the insistent note getting
shriller as the film becomes more vacuous.
Some American films. The Condemned of Altona (1962): Jean-Paul Sartre,
the man-sized dramatist, shrunk to the scale of scriptwriter Abby Mann, an
artistic, intellectual, and moral Lilliputian. All the Way Home (1963): an irresistible
child (Michael Kearney), a good actress giving a fair performance (Jean Simmons),
Robert Preston doing the Music Man without music; the warm sentimental effects
lost because of the sentimentality with which the differences between the married
pair have been excised. Cleopatra (1963): Rex Harrison’s consummate skill,
Richard Burton’s sporadically effective melancholia, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
rhinestone dialogue. Like Elizabeth Taylor, the film is occasionally impressive
spectacle, but it is really two stories and, like Miss Taylor, overexposes its
cleavage.
New York’s first Film Festival at Lincoln Center was highly interesting
because of the audience, and because of three features and the chance to see a
display of international shorts. The audience, if we discount the fringe that would
flock to soup-can sculpture if they thought it would demonstrate special
sensitivities, showed an enthusiasm (both pro and con) that proved again the
unique importance of the cinema today. The three outstanding features were
Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962), Ermanno Olmi’s The Fiancés (1963),
and Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963). Outstanding shorts were those by the
Czechs Václav Bedřich (Chlapíci 1963) and Jiří Brdečka (The Frozen Logger
1963), the Italian Bruno Bozzetto (Mr. Rossi Goes Skiing 1963), the Englishman
George Dunning (The Apple 1963), and the American Stan Vanderbeek
(Breathdeath 1963).
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Some adverse comments. First, it was senseless for the Museum of Modern
Art to run a concurrent series; both programs simply could not be encompassed.
Second, the cinéma-vérité documentary by Richard Leacock and Robert Drew
(Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment 1963) seemed to me corruptive in its
assumptions that these matters of presidential and legal activity were public
property. Of course the individuals concerned had assented. Of course the film 
was not boring. It would not be boring if a camera were secreted in the president’s
bedroom, but it would not be much more intrusive, either. (The fake democratic-
public interest argument could run: “The White House belongs to the country and
the people have a right to know what happens in it.”)
As for specific pictures at the New York Film Festival, I will note only that
the status of cinéma vérité was not enhanced by a French feature (The Trial of Joan
of Arc 1962, by Robert Bresson); that an imitation of Antonioni (The Sea 1962,
by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi) proves that the adolescent mind thinks that the way to
respond to commercialism is to wallow in artiness; that all the films (excepting
Olmi’s) were too long. Richard Roud’s selection of features was extremely
questionable. One realizes that his choice was limited; presumably he could not
have every film he would have liked. But this does not excuse (to particularize just
once) the ludicrous Jean-Pierre Melville trash (Magnet of Doom 1963) and
several others. Moreover, Roud’s program notes, soggy with the worst film-
journal jargon, lavished such indiscriminate praise on all the films that the
program became the cinéaste equivalent of the Madison Avenue hard sell.
Brief notes on three recent pictures. Tom Jones (1963), easily the film most
overrated by New York reviewers in my lifetime, is a sporadically amusing,
generally well-acted, superbly photographed jumble. Tony Richardson, a director
without a style, grabs at everything from Turpin to Truffaut, seemingly in fear of
boring his audience with an eighteenth-century story. Billy Liar (1963), scripted
by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from the former’s 1959 novel, is bitterly
funny for the most part, and shows increased self-confidence on the part of the
gifted John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay, imaginatively supple enough, lacks the
sex and bottled-up steam that Albert Finney must have brought to the 1960 stage
production. Also, the role of the “free” girl is cloudy, and in it Julie Christie gets an
almost MGM star build-up of smiley close-ups. It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(1963), a film no less inflated than its title, shows what a man (Stanley Kramer)
who doesn’t understand seriousness can do when he turns to lightness. Dozens of
comedians, three hours and forty minutes of Cinerama slapstick, and nothing like
equivalent laughs. I’ll remember only thirty or forty seconds of Buster Keaton.
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BOOK REVIEWS
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, by Thomas
Schatz (The New Republic, 27 February 1989)
The Hollywood studio system, which began around 1920 and flourished
from around 1930 through the 1950s, is unique in Western culture. It has
descendants of a sort but no proximate forebears. Basically the studio system can
be seen as an exponent of the familiar Marx-Engels dictum on the relation of a
society’s art to its modes of production:
Raphael as much as any artist was determined by . . . the organization of

society and division of labor in his locality, and, finally, by the division of
labor in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse. . . . In Paris,
the great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the
organization of work for their production. (The German Ideology, 1846)
But neither sixteenth-century Rome nor nineteenth-century Paris had burst with
a demand for their arts equivalent to America’s demand for films—followed by
the world’s demand for American films—in the first half of the twentieth century.
The difference in degree ordained an absolute difference in kind. No cultural
phenomenon on record ranks in size and effect with Hollywood.
Much has been made of the truth that, in an era of accelerating technology,
film was the first art—and is still the best art—to employ technology for
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humanistic ends. What is equally true is that the technology that made the art
possible also made it globally available. Thus the very nature of the art itself
produced the means to satisfy the global appetite for it.
Naturally Hollywood has been a mother lode for historians and
biographers. Studies of individuals, of individual studios, cluster on the shelves.
There are even studies of studio founders as a group: The Moguls, by Norman
Zierold (1969), and The Movie Moguls, by Philip French (1969), both of which deal
with the fact that most of the moguls were Jewish immigrants, and the latest and
fullest in this subgenre. An Empire of Their Own, by Neal Gabler (1988), which
concentrates on that fact. Lately, overviews of the whole thirty-year explosion
have increased. The two best up to now were The Hollywood Studio System, by
Douglas Gomery (1986), which focuses on the financial histories of the studios,
and a collection of essays by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson
called The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), a huge, thoughtful examination of
the film styles and modes of production brought about by studio conditions. (One
of the guidelines of this invaluable work is the Marx-Engels quotation cited above.)
Now, as if to complete  a triad, comes Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System.
Schatz, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, chronicles the
founding, growth, maintenance, and decline of four of the studios—and views the
whole history as an adventure. Drawing largely on primary sources and using
photographs liberally, he includes a good deal about financial records (à la
Gomery) and a good deal about modes of production (à la Bordwell-Staiger-
Thompson), but his emphasis is on the personal drama of the men involved—their
vision, drive, capacity for work, greed, loyalties and betrayals, perception,
blindness, and zest. Zest, as a factor of ambition, of fascination with the medium,
is the dominant element in this long book.
The Genius of the System takes its title from a 1957 essay by André Bazin in
which he bade the French auteurist critics infatuated with American cinema to
“admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that
filmmaker but the genius of the system.” (Schatz is so taken with this quotation
that he featured it in his earlier, 1981 book, Hollywood Genres.) That system
consisted of eight major studios, two of which were only “major minors”—
Universal and Columbia—because they owned no theaters back in the days before
anti-trust rulings outlawed that “integration” between production and exhibition.
Schatz deals with two of the “major majors,” MGM and Warner Brothers, one of
the lesser group, Universal, and the most prominent of the independent
producers, David O. Selznick. Schatz limited his book to those four companies
because “looking at all of them in a single volume would be impossible” in detail
and because eight such full histories could not be braided into “a unified
narrative.” In his bibliographical note he adds what may be a key factor: he chose
his four companies because of the availability of primary research sources,
“corporate records in archives around the country.”
Schatz justifies this choice-by-research-possibilities. With each studio he
gives us the view from the inside, derived from company records, ledgers, memos,
letters, telegrams, personal memoirs, minutes of conferences. (And, as
acknowledged, he also uses published material.) He interweaves the four
accounts, trying to keep them abreast chronologically. Occasionally the four
stories overlap: e.g., Irving Thalberg began at Universal, then moved to MGM;
Selznick was a force at MGM before he founded his own company. Each of the
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majors produced one film a week in its heyday, and the impressionistic overview
of the period is of an eight-part giant well pumping away steadily for decades to
slake a worldwide thirst.
Some of the earliest American film directors, Maurice Tourneur and Erich
von Stroheim, for instance, began as individualists who controlled everything
about their films; but as the studios waxed in process and strength, the
individualists either had to conform or be smashed. Nowadays, it seems the only
possibility, but it must have seemed daring then to put the manufacture of film on
the same assembly-line basis that was developing in so many other fields. (Could
the rise of Henry Ford have been far from pioneer Hollywood minds?) The studios
firmly called film “product,” and they organized departments to supply all
components: writing, scene and costume design and construction, photography,
casting, filmmaking itself, editing, marketing, and more. The superreality and the
anti-reality—everything but reality—that were fed through film into the wide
world’s fantasies were as carefully engineered as the new automobiles that were
altering physical lives.
Obviously more than business skill was involved. Talent was needed, even
if it was only a talent for hiring talent. In some instances—Thalberg is always and
rightly named as the chief example—an executive had extraordinary gifts for
divining what the public wanted and for fashioning it out of inchoate material.
That is the recurrent argument of Schatz’s book: initially and finally, a film was
made by the men in charge of the picture and of the studio. (Schatz notes only one
important woman on the production side—Kay Brown, Selznick’s canny story
editor.)
This producer-power is a point often ignored. The producers in their
serried ranks—from the Jack L. Warners at the very top down through the unit
producers and executive producers or whatever their banana-republic titles were
and all the way up again—were the real determiners of a film’s existence. The
directors did what they could, and some of them distinguished themselves; but
almost none of them had the authority to start or finish a film. (Schatz tells us how
such eminences as Huston and Hitchcock walked away from pictures after
shooting them and left the editing in executives’ hands.) Writers worked in squads
that were dispatched to a film script at various stages of production the way a
military commander sends squads until he captures a position. (Former
journalists, says Schatz, were of more use to the studio than novelists and
playwrights because journalists were more utilitarian, more willing to treat the
business as a business.) No matter what the visible talents, everything that was on
the screen was there, just the way it was there, because of men who were not on
the screen.
Yet the studios developed “personal” characteristics because the chiefs saw
the strengths and weaknesses in their own parishes. For a while, MGM specialized
in lush “women’s” pictures, Warner in nitty-gritty street films, Selznick in
adaptations of famous novels; Universal became a not-so-little shop of horrors.
These emphases were never exclusive within a studio nor were they permanent.
(When the horror box office faded, Universal was revived by Deanna Durbin.) But
studios thrived on knowing their markets and on having the right people on the
payroll to satisfy them. Long-term contracts made the studio system possible,
made genre specialization logical and easier. The non-genre picture, of which
there were many, was more troublesome.
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Schatz is especially vivid in his ac-counts of the making of some well- 

known films—Grand Hotel (1932), Frankenstein (1931), Jezebel (1938), and
Notorious (1946) are only a few of them. Mining the daily records, Schatz shows
us experienced yet harried men as they experimented with one approach and
another, altered, expanded, discarded, argued, revised up to and after the
previews. We see stupidities, vulgarities, silliness, but more often than not—or the
studios would have foundered long before they did—we see keen industrial skill
at work, sometimes a touch more than that. We can understand from these notes,
to put the matter at its earthiest, why Thalberg rose from an annual salary of
$1,250 at Universal in 1918 to $400,000 at MGM in 1926.
We get glimpses of projects that were sweated over, sometimes for years,
then dropped. We see familiar pictures go through metamorphoses from the
unfamiliar to the shapes we know. We read of castings that never came off: Buster
Keaton as the ailing, downtrodden Kringelein in Grand Hotel (L. B. Mayer vetoed
Keaton because of his drinking), Ronald Reagan as Rick in 1942’s Casablanca (as
soon as Hal Wallis became the picture’s producer, he changed the casting).
Perhaps, somewhere in the Borges land of unwritten books, those unmade films
exist and are now playing.
What happened to those great humming machines of film manufacture?
Why did they slow down and crumble? The first, obvious cause was the rise of
television, which lavished entertainment on the public at home and charged no
price except the rupture—with commercials—of the viewer’s sense of pictorial
continuity. Another reason, as Schatz makes clear, was the ultimate success of the
federal anti-trust actions against the studios, which began in 1938 and climaxed
in 1948. These judgments forced the separation of ownership of studios and
theaters. That joint ownership had been manifestly unfair to independent theater
owners, who got second choice of the studio offerings, often under oppressive
terms; but the separation deprived the studios of the circulation of their blood, an
assured flow from the heart to the extremities. Without that assured circulation,
the studios suffered sluggishness and attrition—just as television arrived! Some
studios still nominally exist, but mostly they are only financiers and distributors,
loci for other people’s films, which compete for exhibition instead of proceeding
to it confidently as the last step in a great chain of being.
Schatz tells his interwoven stories in serviceable prose, though he
sometimes feels compelled to be chummily casual.  (“A go project”; Englishmen
are Brits;  Cagney’s first name is always Jimmy.) He commits some egregious
slights and errors. He calls auteurism “adolescent  romanticism,” which seems
harsh even   to an anti-auteurist like me. He describes Mae   West as a
“vaudevillian” before she  came to pictures, which is inadequate. He places the
Capitol Theater in New  York on Times Square, which is six  blocks off. And
horrendously, he describes Thomas Eakins, whose work was  a source of visual
ideas for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), as “a popular magazine illustrator at the turn
of the century, something of  a predecessor to Norman Rockwell.” But  Schatz
keeps the energy level of the  book high, a prime requisite for his complex story.
Shall we mourn the passing of the studios? It would be no more sensible
than to mourn the invention of television. The real question that pursues   the
reader of Schatz’s book and of The  Classical Hollywood Cinema is: Why ought we
to care one way or the other? Aside from sociological interest and the excitement
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of a gigantic enterprise, why ought those who love film be concerned about the
styles and fates of factories whose methods almost completely contradict the
methods by which most of the world’s great films have been made?
The answer, for me, is Libeled Lady (1936). One answer, anyway. Of the 500
or so films a year from all Hollywood sources during that Golden Age—and I saw
many of them when they were released, some of them much more recently—I
estimate that about two percent are worth the time of a cultivated viewer today.
My example of that one-in-fifty is not a musical with Astaire’s heartstopping
genius, not Citizen Kane (1941), not one of John Ford’s best, but a 1936 MGM
programmer, a farce-comedy with a routine producer, Lawrence Weingarten, and
a routine director. Jack Conway. (Schatz mentions the film, but it’s not in his
skimpy index.) Three writers are credited, Maurine Watkins, Howard Emmett
Rogers, and George Oppenheimer, but doubtless others were involved.
Presumably Libeled Lady was concocted as a means to employ four of the studio’s
stars, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and William Powell. Presumably the
picture was planned and worked on, right from start to end of the assembly line,
as a device to help pay the studio overhead. Yet the result, right off that assembly
line, is a light-fingered, clever delight.
My argument is a good deal more than the one about a million monkeys
eventually typing out Hamlet. Libeled Lady is what Bazin’s “genius of the system”
means to me, not the recherché aesthetic values in run-of-the-mill pop culture but
the fact that the mere assemblage of a lot of talents and a lot of ambitions is bound
to produce something truly good occasionally. Besides, there is a proportional
argument to be made for the studios. I know of no study that compares
Hollywood’s activities during the studio years with the activities of Broadway or
the publication of novels during those years. Such a study would be subjective, not
statistical. Still, except for a very few peaks in drama and fiction, how could any
respectable study show the proportion of lastingly good plays or novels to be
much higher than that of lastingly good films?
Money was always the goal in Hollywood, certainly, but something more
than money-hunger flared in the first decades of American film. I once spent a few
days turning the yellowed pages of the earliest film trade journals, around 1908,
and although almost everything was business news—who had made what, who
had bought what—heat seemed to burn up from those crumbling pages, passion
about something new and momentous, bigger (as those people sensed) than any
of them could foresee. That fire wasn’t entirely lost in the industrialization during
the next forty years. It wasn’t only the cash that obsessed the Movieland mind;
money can be made in other ways. Film itself absorbed most of them, day and
night—the thrill of filmmaking. That’s why there is something touching in Schatz’s
history of an industry.
Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era, by
Kevin Brownlow, 1990 (The New Republic, 31 December 1990)
History keeps changing. New research, new perceptions keep the past from
being mummified, make it almost as responsive to experience as the present. This
is something of a paradox in most histories, but in the history of film it’s an
astonishment. The remotest past of film (film itself, not the prehistory) is less than
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100 years behind us, yet that past is already so obscured that new knowledge
keeps altering it.
Kevin Brownlow, the English film historian, has devoted the last twenty
years to brushing away some rapidly accumulated cobwebs. His latest book,
Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (Alfred A.
Knopf, with 250 photographs), revises some widely held views of American silent
films, along with views of the America that made those films. Political and cultural
historians have nourished the idea of an American innocence that persisted until
World War I and beyond. This idea was reflected in Edward Wagenknecht’s
history of silent film, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (1962), and it is this basic
view that Brownlow now skewers. Other film historians, Lewis Jacobs, for
instance, have touched on some of the matters that Brownlow raises, but he
unifies the argument.
He has proceeded simply by examining available records and seeing
available films, some of them thought to be unavailable. This is not a record of
secret or smuggled pictures—fraternity house porn, etc. Brownlow chronicles
silent pictures that were, for the most part, made by known producers for general
release. The fact that these pictures have often been scanted in histories of
American film possibly reveals an America not so much innocent as eager to think
itself so: the Barefoot Boy Syndrome.
Brownlow’s first chapter is about censorship, and he has good satirical fun
with it just by collecting data. The urge to censor was bound to emerge quickly in
an “innocent” country’s encounter with film, especially since, by 1910, twenty-six
million Americans were going to nickelodeons every week. In 1908 Mayor George
B. McClellan of New York was so disturbed by the threat of the nickelodeons to
morality that he closed them all down on the ground of public safety. It took four
court orders to reopen them. Even so, children under sixteen had to be
accompanied by an adult. Were the films smutty? Then, as now, it all depended on
who was doing the defining. States set up censorship boards, and in Pennsylvania
a mother could not be shown making clothes for an unborn child because “the
movies are patronized by thousands of children who believe that babies are
brought by the stork, and it would be criminal to undeceive them.”
Brownlow then devotes ten chapters to the main themes he finds in
American silent film. The first of these, of course, is sex. After dismissing “cooch
reels,” which were sold privately, he turns to the public pictures, notes the lurid
titles that were often used on relatively staid pictures, then examines a surprising
number of films that dealt with, for the day, surprisingly daring topics.
In 1916 Lillian Gish, the platonic idea of purity, made The Children Pay, in
which she was a daughter whose life was besmirched by her parents’ divorce. The
subject was so hot that later the divorce was cut, and Gish was shown to be
suffering because she was an orphan. In 1915 Richard Bennett (who late in life
played Major Amberson in the 1942 Orson Welles film) made a picture based on
Eugène Brieux’s play Damaged Goods, which is about syphilis. That same year D.
W. Griffith’s company produced a version of Ghosts, the Ibsen play in which
syphilis figures. I once saw this film; it’s a long way from Ibsen, but it’s grim
enough. In 1917 Margaret Sanger, brave pioneer of birth control, made a
documentary film called Birth Control and acted in it.
“White slave” films flourished in those days, the most
celebrated/excoriated one being Traffic in Souls (1913). It was apparently a
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seriously intended picture and was, says Brownlow, “the first film not taken from
a novel or a play to receive a Broadway opening.” This instance and the ones above
are only a meager handful of the unexpected items in the sex chapter. The other
chapters—on drugs, prohibition, crime, political corruption, women’s suffrage,
prisons, poverty, immigrants, industry—are at least equally crammed with jolts to
our notions of early-film blandness. What follows are a few examples.
It’s generally known that Wallace Reid, an immensely popular star, died in
1923 of drugs. It’s less widely known that his widow then collaborated with the
celebrated Thomas H. Ince on a picture called Human Wreckage, about drug
addiction, and acted in it.
Poverty and the troubles thereof were a locus for a great many films of the
era. “The early filmmakers, many of whom came from precisely this background
[big-city poverty], believed they wielded a powerful influence for change.” But
some of the more striking films in this area came from a man of quite different
background. In 1915 Cecil B. DeMille, who ended up as an arch-conservative, made
a picture called Kindling—about what slums do to children—which Brownlow
calls “a socialist tract.” In 1926 DeMille made The Volga Boatmen, which Brownlow
calls the one picture of the day that portrayed the Russian Revolution in a
favorable light.
These concerns led inevitably to the subject of labor problems. As early as
1908 came a film called The Molly Maguires (though it was very differently
oriented from the Martin Ritt-Walter Bernstein film of the same name in 1970).
The horrifying Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in New York, was the
impetus for three films: The Crime of Carelessness (1912), The Locked Door (1915),
and The Children of Eve (1914). The year 1926 saw The Passaic Textile Strike,
which combined fiction, newsreel shots of the strike, and reconstruction of events
(a practice with a previous history). Brownlow says, “I put off writing this book
until I saw that film,” and he suggests that some of the shots anticipate Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin, which, though made in 1925, had not yet been shown in the
United States. The director of The Passaic Textile Strike was long unknown but has
since been revealed to be one Samuel Russak.
The making of this American film raises the matter of verism. Brownlow
jogs the assumption that the use of actual locales became widespread only after
World War II. Here are a very few of the many actual places used as silent film
settings: Ellis Island (not always the warmly welcoming place it is now accounted),
Sing Sing, a cotton mill, and a meat-packing plant—for a 1914 film of Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Verism extended to the use of famous or infamous persons to portray
themselves. Outstanding among these was Iliodor (Sergei Michailovich Trufanov),
the Russian priest who had been a friend of Rasputin—then an enemy—and who
had fled for his life. Iliodor played himself in The Fall of the Romanoffs (1917),
which was co-produced by Lewis J. Selznick, father of David O.
Brownlow sometimes details plots at too great length. Sometimes personal
stories, better suited to the endnotes, intrude on the historical narrative.
Occasionally his language slips: a term like “instant classic” ought to be beneath
him. But his book is wonderfully valuable. It enlightens; it shakes preconceptions;
it adds fascinating colors to a fabric assumed to be more or less monochrome. In
American Silent Film (1978), William K. Everson spoke of “a growing suspicion
that 1913-14 may be one of the great lost frontiers of film scholarship, likely to
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reveal more examples of modernity and sophistication in filmmaking than

historians have ever suspected.” Brownlow suspected. For those years, and for
many before and after, he has opened the lost frontiers.
In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, Walter Murch, 1995 (The
New Republic, 15-22 July 1996)
“The foundation of film art is editing.” That’s the first line of Vsevolod
Pudovkin’s introduction to his Film Technique (1949). But he wasn’t thinking of
editing as it’s generally practiced today: to him editing was an inseparable part of
the director’s function. He said further: “The material of the film director consists
not of real processes happening in real space and real time, but of those pieces of
celluloid on which these processes have been recorded.” The key word is
“director”; editing was seen as, not merely his prerogative, but his very reason for
being. Today editing is the director’s possible privilege: to have “final cut,” or any
cut at all. To Pudovkin and his contemporaries, the question did not exist.
When did the completely separate profession of film editing emerge, as
distinct from editing assistant to a director? I can’t find any clear historical account
of it. (Doctoral students of film! A gap to be filled?) But take, as an instance, the
filmography of D. W. Griffith. The first time a film editor is credited is on his last
picture, The Struggle (1931); we can assume that previously Griffith had done all
the editing himself.
It’s easy to infer that, as production was stepped up in every filmmaking
country, as more and more directors had to be employed who wanted to be, or
who were allowed to be, only craftsmen on assembly lines, those assembly lines
had also to include editors. At some point in the history of the Broadway musical,
there was a cognate development. The composer stopped being a composer and
became a tune writer; someone else, called the orchestrator, came in to finish the
job, to convert the tunes into the music that was played in the theater. That two-
man composing-team idea would have been inconceivable to a well-trained
musician like (to leave Olympians out of it) Victor Herbert. The two-man directing-
editing team would have been inconceivable to early filmmakers. Perhaps a
cultural-historical relation exists between the rise of the professional film editor
and the professional orchestrator.
None of this is to argue against the importance of the film editor. Quite the
contrary. As the director became more constricted or less competent or even less
interested, the editor’s importance grew.
All of the above is by way of introduction to the subject of Walter Murch,
film editor. Murch is hardly known outside the film world, but to many filmmakers
he is a greatly respected figure—to some, a bit of a guru. His standing is built on,
and rises beyond, his work as a film editor and a sound editor. Among the films for
which he edited the soundtracks are The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now
(1979); and there’s a fascinating interview with him in Vincent LoBrutto’s 1994
book Sound-on-Film. (LoBrutto says that Murch’s work “led to the beginning of a
new era in film sound.”) But it’s as a film editor that I’ve been chiefly aware of
Murch and have heard most about him—editing on such films as Julia (1977), The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and The Godfather III (1990). So when I saw
his name on the cover of the latest issue of Brick, the Canadian literary journal, I
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turned to his article at once.

“Blink!,” as the article is called, is about film editing, and after I had raced
through it, I saw the note that it had been excerpted from Murch’s recent book, In
the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. I hadn’t heard of it; I got a copy
quickly (Silman-James Press). It consists of the revised transcript of a long lecture
that Murch gave in Australia in 1988. He has added an afterword on the
advantages and risks of digital editing, but the prime of the book is the distillation
of Murch’s experience and insight.
The nuggets are numerous. Here he is on the subject of public previews,
which he thinks are “tricky.” He is “extremely suspicious” of those cards that
audience members fill out as they leave:
The most helpful thing of all is simply learning how you feel when the film
is being shown to 600 people who have never seen it before. Emotionally
it seems like some big hand has come and grabbed you by the hair, picked
you up, and put you down 90 degrees to one side. . . . It’s as if up to this
moment you have been constructing a building but always standing in front
of it to evaluate it. Now all of a sudden you are looking at the side of a
building and seeing things you seem to have never seen before.
The central sections deal with his approaches to the cutting and splicing of
film. The first approach is psychological:
We [the audience] accept the cut because it resembles the way images are
juxtaposed in our dreams. In fact, the abruptness of the cut may be one of
the key determinants in actually producing the similarity between films
and dreams. In the darkness of the theater, we say to ourselves, in effect,
“This looks like reality, but it cannot be reality because it is so visually
continuous, therefore it must be a dream.”
The second approach merges the psychological with the physiological—

the phenomenon of blinking:
People will sometimes keep their eyes open for minutes at a time—at other
times they will blink repeatedly—with many variations in between. The
question then is, “What is causing them to blink?” . . . The blink is either
something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it
is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking
place anyway . . . And that blink will occur where a cut could have
happened, had the conversation been filmed. Not a frame earlier or later.
[Italics in the original.]
I felt like one of the people who had watched Columbus stand the egg on end. Of
course I knew that, now that I’ve learned it.
Fritz Lang, by Patrick McGilligan, 1997 (The New York Times, 20 July 1997)
“My private life has nothing to do with my films,” Fritz Lang said.
Apparently Patrick McGilligan chose that line as the epigraph for his biography,
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Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (St. Martin’s Press), precisely because he meant
to disprove it. This he does, with numerous correlatives between Lang’s life and
work, but these are only part of a larger accomplishment. McGilligan justifies his
subtitle by disclosing the nature of the beast.
A beast Lang certainly was, in the mythological sense, like a griffin, a
creature comprising elements even more sharply contrasting than those in most
of us mortals. McGilligan, with ferocious research and a touch of wonder—
throughout, he seems to be shaking his head in fascination—spreads those
elements before us: the quasi-diabolist artist, the sadistic perfectionist with his
actors, the fervent devotee of truth, the twister of facts, the elegant immoralist, the
indefatigable amorist, the disturbing seer into the giant maladies of his epoch.
If one had the gall to select a film director whose temper and style best
represent this century, it could well be Lang. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas
Pynchon’s profound phantasmagoria of our turbulences, some trenchant specters
from Lang’s films streak across the novel’s lowering sky. How fitting they seem—
instances of the way that the claw of this particular beast has scored this age. In
fact, with the possible exception of Hitchcock, no director other than Fritz Lang
can be said to have put such vivid images of politics-cum-terror into the
unconscious of today’s Western world. Lang’s imagination had plenty of other
reaches, but, as with Roman Polanksi, there seemed to be some sort of ghastly
affinity between his life—including his personal life—and violence.
Lang was born in Vienna in 1890, had some schooling, savored a bit of café
conviviality, then left for a few Wanderjahre as a painter of sorts. In 1914, when
World War I broke out, he returned home, enlisted the next year in the Austrian
Army, became an officer, was twice wounded and decorated. While on leave in
Vienna he was unexpectedly asked to be in a play; his acceptance led, through
further happenstance, to the writing of screenplays. When the war ended, he
moved to Berlin as a screenwriter. In 1919 he began to direct his screenplays. In
1920 he met Thea von Harbou, a writer who became his screenplay collaborator,
his mistress, and eventually his second wife. In 1921, with Destiny, he was
established as a director of importance.
Destiny, a symbolic work about death (its German title, Der müde Tod,
translates as “Weary Death”), must have had a special poignancy for a nation that
lately endured four years of horrendous war, and it is still haunting. Two Lang
films about an arch-criminal named Dr. Mabuse dramatized, in expressionist
mode, the devil theory of history. The Nibelungs (1924), based on the medieval
saga, was designed to bolster German morale; today it bolsters us esthetically,
with its sculptural strengths. Metropolis (1927), about a city of the future and its
mechanized slaves, remains timely. (Berliners may have seen it as an example of
Max Reinhardt’s influence on film. Lang’s choreographed masses could have been
suggested by the choreographed crowds in Reinhardt’s theater productions.)
Woman in the Moon (1929) is credited with some prophecies about space travel.
Lang’s own favorite among his films, then and thereafter, was M (1931).
“He had fastened on the idea,” McGilligan writes about Lang in later life, “that M
was his only masterpiece.” In any case, it is an unshakable one—a psychotic
murderer viewed as a poison in society that is purged not by police and
government but by criminals and beggars. Indeed, as William Troy wrote, “The
modern psychopath . . . attains to the dignity of the tragic hero” in M. The film has
suggestions of another talent that was flowering at the time, Bertolt Brecht. It was
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through Brecht’s theater work that Peter Lorre, who played the child murderer,
had risen to view. The clan of beggars in the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera three
years earlier could not have been completely unrelated to the clan of beggars in
M. This connection with the current theater, this furthering of contemporary
imaginings, seemed only to certify Lang’s place as avatar of an age. For after M,
McGilligan writes, Lang was “one of the most critically acclaimed directors of
Germany’s film world.”
In 1933 Hitler ascended, and Lang left for France. (Thea von Harbou chose
to remain in Germany.) In France he filmed Molnár’s Liliom (1934) with Charles
Boyer, then went to Hollywood, where he spent virtually the rest of his life. His
first American film was Fury (1936), about a lynch mob. His twenty-second
Hollywood film was Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), another look at the justice
system. In between, he treated a wide range of subjects. He made an anti-Nazi film,
Hangmen Also Die (1943), based on a story by himself and Brecht, also a
Hollywood exile, and he made three westerns.
Lang’s last three films were a two-part adventure story shot partly in India
in 1959 and, in Germany the next year, a return to the archcriminal, Dr. Mabuse.
In 1963 he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, after which he
returned to California. Death found him in 1976, at the age of eighty-five, in
Beverly Hills, still guzzling martinis and employing call girls.
About many of the “facts” of Lang’s life that he himself provided,
McGilligan’s research hangs questions. Did Lang ever really have a first wife? If so,
was he really implicated in her death by shooting after she discovered him with
von Harbou in flagrante? Or did Lang’s wife simply commit suicide? Did he leave
Germany in a hurry in 1933 when Goebbels, acting for Hitler, asked him to head
Nazi films? Or did he dally for months, making up his mind? Did Lang ever really
marry Lily Latte, the woman who was with him for many years, through all his sex
shenanigans, until the end? (Their relationship was, let’s say, odd. He allowed her
to have a live-in lover for a while. At other times he encouraged friends to sleep
with her.)
Lang enjoyed obfuscation and contradiction. His war wounds affected his
sight in some unexplained way, but, as the photographs in this bountifully
illustrated book show, he wore a monocle in his left eye when he was young and,
later on, a patch on his right eye. Toward his last decade he became nearly blind,
yet—the crowning contradiction—he served as president of the jury at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1964. He could hardly see the screen. A friend sitting next to him
whispered what was happening.
Whatever he distorted or obscured about himself—for instance, when
convenient, the fact that his mother was born Jewish—whatever his brutality with
actors, whatever the recurrences of egomania and guile, Lang is safe behind a
bulwark: the quality of his best films. Latter-day critical opinion holds that his
American films are at the level of his earlier work. Certainly there are elements in
the later work clearly derived from the earlier—for one instance, the shop window
as emblem in M returns in Fury and in Scarlet Street (1945). In Hollywood, his
cinematic ingenuity still prospered, still influenced others: in You Only Live Once
(1937), a newspaper prepares three front pages to cover three possible outcomes
of an event, a device apparently not lost on Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941).
But in at least one regard Lang’s earlier career is incomparably superior. In
Germany he was an eminence in the country’s cultural life; there was no such place
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to be filled in Hollywood by anyone. In the later years, McGilligan writes: “When

people asked him . . . if he pined for Germany, Lang’s reply was simple. ‘I miss
walking down the street and being called Meister.’” This is more than vanity: it is
an implication of the place of film in the two cultures.
Patrick McGilligan must be one of the busiest writers about film in the
United States. Since 1975 he has published four other biographies of film figures
and three volumes of interviews with screenwriters and has annotated three
volumes of screenplays. His passion and thoroughness make his Lang biography a
permanent resource. (Lang kept voluminous journals, which were lost or
destroyed. Otherwise this book would doubtless have been longer.)
McGilligan’s prose is ambitious but sometimes strained. A girl has
“drooping lids and soulful orbs.” Words are misused: a revolver is “strewn” next
to a bathtub. There is a touch of biographer’s clairvoyance: “As Fritz Lang lay
dying, no doubt he thought of the character Liliom.” And the last page is simply
unworthy of the book. Mr. McGilligan speculates about Lang’s opinion of this
biography as he reads it up in heaven. This coda sounds like a riff that the author
thought he had earned by his devotion to duty in the preceding pages.
But those preceding pages do their job. Fritz Lang is set before us, with
bestial nature and fulminant genius, his life lapped in the cultural and political
history that made him what he was and that he, in turn, helped to epitomize.
Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, by Gavin Lambert, 2000 (The New York
Times, 12 November 2000)
Lindsay Anderson, though dead, is still a troubling man. He made only six
feature films in his life, which ended in 1994 when he was seventy-one. True, he
spent much of his time directing in the theater, but film was his first love, and, for
most of us, it’s through films that we can remember him. There’s the rub. This
Sporting Life (1963), If . . . (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and a few others stick in
the memory, but in a peculiar way: they show us the greatness that he never quite
achieved.
Egotism, distempered into sheer arrogance, nagged all of his film career.
Besides the above, there was the high-handed mixing of color with black-and-
white in If . . . without any valid explanation, the high-handed borrowings in
Britannia Hospital (1982) with the air that they became original just because he
borrowed them. Reviewing If . . . in 1969, I said: “If there were a way to rate talent
in the abstract, Anderson would rank high among the world’s directors.” But from
first to last, his films were marred by flaws that almost carried subtitles: “If I do it,
it’s all right.”
It’s possible that his film career had a special function for him in relation to
his theater career. Anderson was a co-founder of the English Stage Company and
for a time was a member of the troika that ran the company’s home, the Royal
Court. There, and elsewhere, his theater work won high praise. I saw only one of
his theater pieces, when it came to New York, David Storey’s Home with John
Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. I suppose that, indirectly, I saw another—the film
version of Storey’s In Celebration (1974), which Anderson made after he had
directed the play for the stage. Both of these pieces were excellently done and
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showed a director serving an author with talent, with exceptional yet unobtrusive
skill, and without intrusive ego.
In the theater, it’s worth noting, no matter how a director “conceptualizes,”
he is the interpreter—not the author—of a given text. In the theater, relieved of
the need or chance to contribute greatly to the text, the director can concentrate
on directing. Thus in the theater Anderson was more constrained to focus on his
true gifts, was less able to maneuver the text with personal angst. It seems likely,
then, from the examples of Home and In Celebration and from what has been
reported about other productions, that Lindsay Anderson was at his best in the
theater. But in film the director most often is, or wants to be, or often must be, a
co-author, expressly or indirectly, credited or not. In film the director supersedes
the author, and in film Anderson seemed to be working off the strictures that the
theater imposed on his ego.
The obvious precedent is Ingmar Bergman. Numerous directors have
worked in both theater and film, but Bergman is the prime reference. Certainly his
filmmaking, done mostly in summers when theaters were closed, was the venue
where he could be his own author, freed from obligations to someone else’s text.
But, at his best, Bergman used film to explore themes in ways that cinema alone
could afford, not as revenge on theater’s conditions. Which last is what Lindsay
Anderson seemed to do. Still, this doesn’t totally explain why Anderson, who could
have been the best film director that Britain ever produced, has left us only
imperfect works, which increased in imperfection as he went along. Indeed,
sheerly in terms of talent, he belongs among the pre-eminent film directors of the
world in the last century. But this is true only if talent is separated from
accomplishment, a schism that Anderson presses on us. Otherwise, the view must
be different: his career is marked by distinguished yet unfulfilled work.
I have written different versions of the above paragraphs ever since
Anderson’s first feature, This Sporting Life, right through to the documentary he
made about himself, Is That All There Is? (1995). Inferences about his problems
could be drawn from his films, and those inferences can now be deepened with
the publication of Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (Alfred A. Knopf). The author is
Gavin Lambert, who was a schoolmate of Anderson’s, was at Oxford with him, and
remained a friend until Anderson’s death.
Lambert himself has been a film magazine editor, screenwriter, novelist of
Hollywood life, biographer of Hollywood figures, even a sometime director, and
writes a fluent, wry, purring prose. His book, steeped in old acquaintance, is
something of an oddity: a biography shaped as an autobiography in which the
author plays a smaller role than another man. Lambert’s life is the base from which
we view Anderson, though at times Lambert is so taken with his own narrative
that we can almost hear him reminding himself of his title. But from his long
friendship and from Anderson’s extensive diaries, Lambert is able to paint a full
portrait of his friend, even though he spent his own life out of England—mostly in
Hollywood.
Anderson was co-founder of a film journal, Sequence, at Oxford in 1947.
Sequence was moved to London, and Lambert came aboard. It continued four
times a year for three years, after which Lambert became editor of Sight and
Sound, the British Film Institute magazine. In 1956 he immigrated to Hollywood
at the invitation of the director Nicholas Ray to work as a dialogue director and
screenwriter. Anderson stayed in England, though he disliked its snug suet-
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pudding coziness, and aligned himself with leftist politics. (Later he said, “I’ve
never been an extreme left-winger, but I think that in the 1950s and ’60s there
was reason to hope there might be a social democratic solution.”) Yet when an
industrial company asked him to make shorts, he accepted and prospered at it.
This led to further film work and to membership in an anti-traditional,
documentary movement called Free Cinema.
In 1957 Tony Richardson, who was also in the Free Cinema, invited him to
direct for the newly organized English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater.
The fact that, as Anderson’s life then worked out, he did more directing in the
theater than in film—this fact is obscure in the United States because only two of
his actual theater productions were shown here: the aforementioned Home, in
1970, and William Douglas-Home’s The Kingfisher, with Rex Harrison and
Claudette Colbert, in 1978.
Lambert, of course, saw little of his friend’s theater work because he was
far distant, but he knows the Anderson films well—too well, perhaps; we do not
need quite so many plot details, though he often comments on them acutely. The
films did not progress in a steady flow: after This Sporting Life came only five more
features: If . . ., O Lucky Man!, In Celebration, Britannia Hospital, and The Whales of
August (1987). (Anderson also appeared, as a film director, in O Lucky Man! and,
much more effectively, as a Cambridge dignitary in Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire
1981.)
All his films, except The Whales of August, which was a terminal disaster,
fascinate and infuriate because they could have been better. Incisive and exciting
as they frequently are, scathing indictments of stupidity and greed and dishonor,
they are nonetheless the work of an artist handicapped by his own passion.
Anderson wanted to use his talent to proclaim the faults in the world, to sing the
human and humane, but his impatience both with society and with the obstacles
to his talent led him, as I suggested earlier, to a sort of uncontrolled vengeance on
film art itself, a destructive imperiousness. Just one instance: when colleagues on
If . . . asked him to explain why the picture was in color with sections in black and
white, Anderson, presumably intoxicated with one of his rare grants of power,
replied that he did not have to explain—he just shot some scenes in black and
white “when I felt like it.” So now If
. . . is forever a furiously satirical-poetic attack on English public-school inanities
that is pointlessly mixed in texture.
His personal behavior, too, as Lambert copiously shows, was volatile, to
phrase it gently. I had one small experience of his temperament. In April 1963, I
interviewed Lindsay Anderson on television, in admiration of his work with the
Free Cinema movement (and I showed his 1953 documentary short O Dreamland,
the first Anderson picture to be available in the U.S.). In July of that year I saw and
reviewed This Sporting Life and, along with considerable praise, noted some
reservations. When I ran into him a few weeks later, he behaved as if that TV
conversation had been a lifetime guarantee of unqualified support on which I had
ratted in my review.
Part of Anderson’s angst had a connection, apparently, with his
homosexuality. Lambert, who is also homosexual, distinguishes between himself
and Anderson in this matter. When Lambert was a schoolboy of eleven, a teacher
initiated him, and he “felt no shame or fear, only gratitude.” (Lambert evaded
service in World War II by appearing at the draft board with his eyelids painted
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gold.) He recounts many of his affairs happily. On the other hand, Anderson (who
served in the British Army) said in his college diaries: “It seems then that I am
homosexual. Oh God. It really is rather awful and I suppose I shall never get rid of
it.” Some of Anderson’s affairs are mentioned, along with some unrequited crushes
that made him miserable (including an adoration of John Ford, of all people, about
whose films he wrote a valuable book in 1981, About John Ford). It is hard to think
that this persistent private turmoil had no effect on his public behavior, social and
professional.
The differences between him and Lambert seem curiously programmatic.
Lambert rejoiced in being gay, spent most of his life out of England in an
environment that he enjoyed, and generally liked the mainstream film world.
Anderson was uncomfortable with his sexuality, spent his life in a country he
disliked, and fought the mainstream film world. The contrasts between the two
men almost create a counterpoint.
Toward the end of this candid yet affectionate book, his biographer says of
Anderson, “He was an idealist, and idealists seldom die happy.” Gavin Lambert, by
his own account, will probably die happier. But he knows very well that happiness
was not the prime goal of his gifted, seething, unconsummated friend.
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RE-VIEWINGS & REMEMBRANCES
Gone With the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939 (The Atlantic Monthly, March
1973)
I can’t remember why I saw Gone With the Wind a second time, in 1960. The
first time was the year it came out, 1939. I hope never to see it again: twice is twice
as much as any lifetime needs. But it’s remarkable that after spending almost eight
hours of my existence in front of this film, I can remember only two points vividly.
I can kid myself that I remember much discussed moments—the crane shot of the
wounded at Atlanta, Hattie McDaniel talking herself down the long stairway, and
so on. But what really sticks in my mind is, first, the title itself, floating in with the
wind from right to left, one giant billowy letter at a time; and, second, a scene
among Southern gentlemen near the beginning, before the outbreak of war. Rhett
Butler makes a truthful remark about the South’s poor chances, and a young
hotblood challenges him to a duel. Rhett takes the youth’s impetuosity calmly and
turns away. Another man tells the gloating youth that his life has just been spared,
for Butler is the best pistol shot in the South.
I suppose this means that the film is most significant to me as a “property”
and that only one of its cavalier flourishes struck a deep response in my own
system of fantasies.
The most interesting way to consider Gone With the Wind today is in
comparison with the film that may eventually surpass it in profits, The Godfather
(1972). Look at the similarities. Both originated in best-selling American novels.
Both are very long. Both are about predators. Both are ultra-American yet are very
closely allied to Europe (Walter Scott and Sicily). And, most important, both live
within codes of honor, and both codes are romances. William R. Taylor has shown,
in Cavalier and Yankee (1961), that the “Walter Scott” antebellum South was
largely a literary fabrication, concocted at the time, not retrospectively; as for The
Godfather, our newspapers show us daily that “They Only Kill Each Other” is just
another escape hatch to allow us to blink facts. “Us,” by the way, means the world,
not just the United States, since the whole world flocks to both films.
And that’s interesting, too, because it leads to a difference, not a likeness.
In a new age, when the “realistic” Godfather is packing them in, the romantic Gone
With the Wind is still popular. There’s a crumb of comfort in that: at least culture
is still more pluralist than some of our propagandists would have us believe.
Late Autumn, Yasujiro Ozu, 1960 (The New Republic, 3 November 1973)
Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63) was a master. Late Autumn, a late film of his, is
exquisite and not to be missed. It reworks so closely some themes Ozu treated
earlier in his career that detailed criticism would largely be repetitive.
Made in color in 1960, Late Autumn is now being released in the United
States as part of New Yorker Films’ continuing effort to do some justice to Ozu in
America. The setting is Tokyo once again, and the materials once again are
generational conflict and matchmaking, subjects that Ozu liked because they
contained just enough tension for the dramas he wanted to make out of everyday
life. Late Autumn follows the attempts of three older men to help the widow of a
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late friend to marry off her daughter. The daughter is less than happy at the
proposals, mainly because of her reluctance to leave her mother alone;
nonetheless, with her mother’s assurance, the daughter marries the pre-arranged
suitor, leaving the older woman to live alone.
As Paul Schrader says in Transcendental Style in Film (published in 1972 by
the University of California Press): “Ozu’s later cycle of family-office films (thirteen
films from 1949 to 1962) features the estrangement of parents and children . . .
the father-daughter conflict of Late Spring 1949 became the mother-daughter
conflict of Late Autumn and reverted to a father-daughter conflict in An Autumn
Afternoon 1962.” Since they are all performed by a relatively stable “company”
of actors and are all directed in Ozu’s beautifully idiosyncratic, gently controlled
style, these films tend to interfuse in memory. But each work is like a psalm in a
book of psalms to sad, lovable, sacred life. The key work of those shown here so
far is still Tokyo Story (1953), but Late Autumn is by the same very fine artist. It
supports Schrader’s observation: “In every Ozu film, the whole world exists in one
family. The ends of the earth are no more distant than outside the house.”
“On Film Acting” (The New Republic, 30 December 1982)
Looking back at 1982, I’m struck by the number of times that the acting in
an American film was good, or better, even when the script was poor, or worse.
This is not a new phenomenon, but it stands out sharply in a one-year retrospect.
Some widely varied examples: Peter O’Toole in My Favorite Year, Jack Nicholson
in The Border, Amy Madigan in Love Child, Michael Keaton in Night Shift, Rachel
Ward in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Gary Busey in Barbarosa. The presumable
reason for the disparity is that it’s relatively easier to interpret than to create from
scratch. This is not to say, dear actor friends, that acting is easy, that it is not an art
difficult to master and capable of exquisite achievement. (One of my points here is
to assail lazy assumptions about acting.) But apparently it’s harder to originate a
“plan” for a work than to fulfill it.
The Western world has been used to this disparity for centuries in the
theater. From the Renaissance until 1890 or so, the life of the theater has
depended much less on good new plays than on good acting. Theaters ran for
seasons without a new play, at any rate without a successful one; audiences went
to see acting, to see actors in known plays—just as audiences go today to hear
singers in known operas. It was only toward the beginning of our century that
“new production” came to be virtually synonymous with “new play” and that
theaters were founded specifically to produce new plays, with the acting
sometimes done by amateurs. And only since this time has going to the theater
usually involved at least as much expectation about the play as about the acting.
At any rate we’re now well accustomed to the fact that, when we go to a
new play, which is what most of our theatergoing consists of, we’ll probably
experience better acting than writing. But what’s somewhat astonishing is that
this expectation, consciously or not, has become equally true in films. The much
younger film medium, not yet ninety years old, has no antecedents comparable to
the theater’s, antecedents of centuries in which acting was prized above writing.
What’s more, the conditions of filmmaking—if we use theater conditions as
referents—make good acting seemingly impossible. Sequences are shot out of
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chronological order; individual scenes are often broken up into several days’
shooting, sometimes longer; the cumulation and momentum that are integral to
theater performance are unavailable in film work. (Peter O’Toole, whose
performance as T. E. Lawrence still flames in memory, once told me that when he
watched a certain sequence from that film for the first time, he gasped aloud as he
realized that, between a long shot of him and the immediately following close-up,
a year and a half had elapsed. But the performance flowed.)
Rehearsal of actors, also integral to the theater, is almost a luxury in films.
Occasionally I read of a director who gets his principal actors together for as much
as, say, three weeks before shooting begins. From this grandeur, rehearsals scale
all the way down to the vanishing point. Actors have told me that, in films made
for TV, some directors get irritated when any rehearsal at all is asked for; budgeted
time has already been consumed with the camera set-up. The actor is supposed to
know his job.
Even when there is some rehearsal time, even when the director is
intelligent and gifted, he isn’t invariably able to help his actors to any considerable
degree. Many film directors feel that their basic and paramount work with actors
is in casting, in finding the right person for the right role; after that, it’s more or
less up to the actor to deliver. You don’t have to believe Hitchcock’s much-quoted
line—“Actors are cattle”—to infer that careful work with actors is not always
among a director’s strengths. One of the most cinematically fluent American
directors, Howard Hawks, admitted his limitations. He said that, when he was
shooting Monkey Business (1952), he couldn’t make clear to Katharine Hepburn
what he wanted her to do in certain comic scenes, and he referred her to another
member of the cast, an experienced stage actor named Walter Catlett, for help.
Which Catlett gave her. Hawks then wrote in more scenes for Catlett to keep the
man around the set.
Logically, then, good acting ought to be very rare, but we see it again and
again, even in poor scripts. If we widen the focus to include good, or good enough,
scripts, we can add to this year’s list such performances as Paul Newman’s in The
Verdict and Richard Pryor’s in Some Kind of Hero. If we widen further to include
foreign films, the list must include, among others, Denholm Elliott in Brimstone
and Treacle, Jutta Lampe and Gudrun Gabriel in Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness
(1979), Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa in Marianne and Juliane (1981), Eva
Mattes and Jürgen Arndt in Celeste, Jean Rochefort in Birgit Haas Must Be Killed
(1981). This year brought confirmation that Klaus Kinski is an artist, not just a
fascinating eccentric: to such past work as Woyzeck (1979) and Nosferatu (1979),
he added his performances in La Femme enfant (1980) and Fitzcarraldo. And the
year’s list includes a performance that I rank among the best that I know: Michel
Galabru as the homicidal religious-sexual psychotic in The Judge and the Assassin
(1976).
No, there should not be any or much good acting in films, yet there it is, as
this past year confirms again strongly. One possible explanation for its existence
may lie in a psychological-aesthetic conditioning that has taken place in the acting
profession in this century and that has nothing to do with the theater. Listen to the
earliest recordings of singers, and you can hear that they didn’t really know how
to perform for recording. They were used to the opera house; the existence of
recording had not been part of their cultural environment from birth. Today any
mediocre tenor knows more about recording than Francesco Tamagno knew. It’s
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conceivable that, in the tribe of actors, a comparable conditioning has taken place
in relation to camera and microphone and, most important, in relation to
filmmaking conditions. I’ve watched fine actors on the set—Fredric March and Rex
Harrison, for just two instances—and have seen how they can summon up the
requisite pitch and intensity for a retake or an insert or a scene that leads into a
scene that was done the day before. This more immediate access to imaginative
truth seems to have been bred in good actors in this century in defense against
and in utilization of the circumstances of filming.
Prospects.
Acting that has not yet been shown, most of which has not yet even been
done—such acting matters here, too, as we’ll see.
First, a general worry. People keep asking what hope there can be for depth
 or sophistication or subtlety in U.S. films, now that the average cost is $10 million
and a bargain-basement film costs $3 million. (Obviously I’m talking only of fiction
features for theaters.) The answer, I think, is that there isn’t much reliable hope
of that kind: what we can hope for is good entertainment, like E.T., Victor/Victoria,
Tex, and The Verdict. But an American film of some adventurousness still manages
occasionally to appear. Diner was, for a relatively big-budget picture, relatively
unorthodox in structure and method. My Dinner with André (1981), which cost
more than might have been supposed though it was not in the big-bucks league,
got made and released and found an audience. Smithereens is, in budget and
technique ($80,000; 16mm film blown up to 35mm), the expected independent
film; what’s unexpected is its unique vision.
But these are exceptions. Especially in these days of darkening economic
skies, it’s hard to hope for further exceptions in the rest of the 1980s; it’s harder
still to hope for the relatively numerous exceptions that we had in the 1970s, such
as The Hired Hand (1971), The Conversation (1974), Payday (1973), Desperate
Characters (1971), Mikey and Nicky (1976), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Go Tell
the Spartans (1978). (Woody Allen, whatever one thinks of him, is an exception:
apparently he has a free hand.)
Other countries are complaining about economic conditions, are doubtless
more straitened than they were, and will worsen in the expected slump; but they
are still able to make films for much less than the U.S. figures—and they still get
one type or another of government subsidy. These economic facts, combined with
cultural differences that I’ve explored more than once, mean that Americans who
want something in addition to—not instead of—entertainment will probably have
to depend increasingly on the best of foreign films. This is not a credo of inverse
parochialism: it is experience applied to expectation.
But confining ourselves to American prospects, we can still find some
bright sides to look on. It’s hard to believe that at least a few U.S. films will not be
exceptions to probabilities and prophecies. It’s easy to believe that many U.S. films
will be good entertainment and that they will be cinematically excellent. American
photography, design, editing, and recording are unsurpassed in the world.
And, in continuing paradox—miracle, if you like—the acting in U.S. films
will often be good, occasionally better than that. This may be the brightest possible
side to look on in the American film future. Strictures on subject and method will
make good acting stand out more clearly as it transcends conventional scripts.
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This may lead us to be more aware of acting as an art with its own aesthetics and
standards; in the mind of the audience, acting may return to the high place it held
a century ago. Taste in acting has long been declining, even among those with
finely developed taste in other arts. Necessity may turn out to be the mother of
attention.
The Lost One (Der Verlorene), Peter Lorre, 1951 (The New Republic, 13 & 20
August 1984)
Listen, we are calling you back. Driven

out
You must now return. The country
  Out of which you were driven flowed
once 
With milk and honey. You are being
called back 
To a country that has been destroyed. And we have nothing more 
To offer you than the fact that you are
needed. 
Thus, in 1950, Bertolt Brecht, back in Berlin, in his poem “To the Actor P. L.
in Exile.” But, like much in Brecht’s life, the poem is paradoxical. Though Peter
Lorre had not returned to the German stage, he was no longer in exile: he was at
the moment living in Bavaria; and he had already returned to (West) Germany to
make a film that was released the following year. That film, The Lost One (1951),
has lived up to its name: it had its first American showing at Filmex in Los Angeles
last year and has just had its U.S. theatrical premiere at the Film Forum in New
York.
It’s a disappointment, not nearly worth Lotte Eisner’s praise in her 1952
book The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema, but it’s a poignant
occasion in a poignant life. Lorre, as is unknown to the world that thought him a
Hollywood freak, was a serious and experienced theater actor before he went into
films. Born in Hungary (as László Loewenstein), trained in Vienna, he made his
Berlin début in 1929, aged twenty-five. Brecht had a hand in that début and soon
used Lorre in his own plays. Lang saw the début and ticketed Lorre for M in 1931.
(I’ve always thought that Brecht was an unseen presence in M, both in stimulation
of the script and in the directing of Lorre’s performance.)
After a few more German films, Lorre immigrated to England in 1933 and
was soon launched on his “monster” career in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1934). He went to Hollywood and quickly succeeded in a line of bizarre
roles. By the time the refugee Brecht arrived in 1941, Lorre was rich and very
helpful. But self-disgust (apparently) had made him a morphine addict; this and
other factors severely affected his film success. He had to take other steps to keep
working. Out of need but also because, it seems clear, he wanted to do some
anointing of a troubled conscience, he returned to Germany, found likely film
material and a producer, collaborated on a script, directed, and played the leading
role.
The Lost One is based on the true story of a certain Dr. Rothe, a German
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immunologist who had murdered his fiancée in 1943 on suspicion that she was
conveying his experiments to the British. He formed a habit of murdering women.
Most of the film takes place after the war (with many flashbacks) in a refugee camp
near Hamburg, where the doctor is now working with an assistant—the former
Gestapo official who covered up the doctor’s first murder. The past haunts the
doctor, and after considerable torment he finds his way out through several
deaths, including his own.
What a pleasure it would be to help celebrate the discovery of a lost gem,
to help certify posthumously the act of personal reclamation that Lorre intended.
But the film is heavy, slow, cinematically trite. The reminders of M are frequent
and funereal. Lorre’s direction is clumsily imitative of early Fritz Lang. Worst of
all, the psychological and moral dramas in the story are never clarified and
fulfilled. The tone is assumptive, as if the film were saying, “You know the sort of
anguish we mean.” Too much of what we see comes down to Lorre, as the doctor,
smoking cigarettes and pacing silently amidst the shadows.
Still, it’s Lorre himself who is the one interesting feature. Here is a man who
had spent many years playing supporting roles coming again to the center. The
frustration of the film is that he gives a screen-filling performance, even with
touches of the sadly romantic. But he needed a better director and a better script—
Lorre himself was in fact something of a writer. (He is rumored to have
collaborated with Brecht on some lost poems. Brecht thought he was the best
reader of German poetry in the world.) But this script is a misfire.
Lorre didn’t accept the invitation in Brecht’s poem. His Hollywood career
picked up again, possibly as a result of his work in The Lost One, which otherwise
had no success. He made eighteen more American films, one of which, John
Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953), was worth his talent. He died in March 1964 of a
heart seizure, three months short of his sixtieth birthday.
A Passage to India, David Lean, 1984 (The New Republic, 10 June 1985)
I’ve been collecting reviews of A Passage to India (1984) by people who

don’t usually review films, and a curious lot these exhibits are. Noel Annan (The
New York Review of Books, January 17th) describes the meeting between David
Lean, eventually the screenwriter-editor-director of the film, and the dons of
King’s College, Cambridge, which is E. M. Forster’s executor. Annan says the dons
had read a screenplay of the novel by Santha Rama Rau that reassured them
enough about the eventual quality of the film such that they were willing to meet
with Lean. But “as it turned out”—an odd phrase because the dons’ reassurance
had come from Rau’s script—David Lean wrote his own screenplay. Says Annan,
“It was not difficult to predict the result.” Indeed it wasn’t: Lean’s film is for Annan
 a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lean made the film as it is, says Annan, because he has
“little respect for [his audience.”
But what about Annan’s respect for his readers? He makes two glaring and
important misstatements of fact. He says that the film “begins with the arrival of
the P & O liner that brings not only Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested to Bombay, but
the Viceroy as well”; and that the film “ends in Srinagar with magnificent shots of
the Himalayas.” Neither of these statements is true. The film begins and ends in
rainy London. This is something more than a detail: the start and finish are Lean’s
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attempt to round off the themes, to transmute into cinematic form some of the
ideas-—especially at the end of the book—that he felt would not work on screen
in Forster’s form. With that frame of start and finish, Lean is trying to imply
Britain’s failures in India and India’s inevitable triumphs. Annan doesn’t deal with
these attempts by Lean: he simply rules that they don’t exist.
In the February 14th issue of The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode
writes that, as he recalls, Annan wasn’t present at that Cambridge meeting
(although the impression in Annan’s article is otherwise) and that his report
wasn’t entirely accurate. Santha Rama Rau’s screenplay could not have figured in
the matter, says Kermode, because Lean had sent copies of his own screenplay to
Cambridge in advance of the meeting. Again, where is Annan’s respect for his
readers? (Kermode feels he must note that he tested Lean’s vaunted knowledge of
the novel by asking him the name of Ronnie Heaslop’s Hindu servant. On this
weighty question, Lean flunked. So much for upstart film rabble.)
Now Christopher Hitchens weighs in with a three-page scathing review of
the film in the journal Grand Street (Spring 1985). An aggregate of about one page
is devoted to quotations from Forster’s letters and from Lean’s indefensibly
grandiose comments in interviews. This décor is insufficient for Hitchens, as he
ends with rumor: “Rumors filtering from the set suggest that we were narrowly
spared even worse—we hear of Alec Guinness walking off one scene, of Peggy
Ashcroft being invited to play the rendezvous in the mosque with more love
interest.” (Bother the fact that it’s not a rendezvous, in novel or film; it’s an
accidental meeting.) Hitchens insists that even what we don’t see proves that the
film is bad.
He complains that Lean “manages to be unfair to everybody. The British
are portrayed in stock terms, as brutes, duffers, or eccentrics, and the Indians as
chattering babus, servile and cunning by turns.” Tapan Raychaudhuri, who teaches
Asian history at Oxford, disagrees about the source of the “stock terms” and Lean’s
use of them (The London Times Literary Supplement, April 5th). In his review
Raychaudhuri writes:
The Indian characters in Forster’s novel are not entirely convincing and are
somewhat stereotyped, as are his British bureaucrats. . . . Lean’s Anglo-
Indians . . . appear more real in the novel, as much the creatures of historical
circumstance as are the hapless lot they rule over.
Though Raychaudhuri spots some startling gaffes in the film, he calls it “pure
enchantment; a splendid film.” Yet he, too, says: “A forced happy ending is the
logical climax of Lean’s] vision of India.” One might dispute this view of the
concluding scenes in India, but—again—they are not the end of the film. It ends,
not amidst snowy peaks but in Adela Quested’s rain-curtained living room.
I’m hardly arguing that one must like the film. Some of my best friends
don’t. The point is that, in these articles, those who dwell in strata high above the
film world have deigned to descend to find support for their prejudices. Annan
says: “Every great novel loses when dramatized because it conveys meaning that
cannot be seen on the screen.” In an isolated state, this platitude is inarguable, but
all it does experientially is to prepare Annan and like thinkers to discount any film
made from a great novel. Obviously no great novel needs to be filmed, but in the
right hands—as experience proves soundly—a great novel can be filmed in a way
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that puts another art truly at its service, a way that conveys meanings visible on
the screen. Examples: Robert Bresson’s 1951 film of Bernanos’s Diary of a Country
Priest, Éric Rohmer’s film of Kleist’s The Marquise of O . . . in 1976.
I don’t contend that Lean’s film is in their class; but I saw it again recently,
and apart from the atrocious score (which won an Oscar!), I think even more
firmly that the art in its making transmutes major elements of the novel into
cinematic form, suggests other resonances, and honors Forster. With his view of
film, he might not have acknowledged the honor; nonetheless I think it was paid
to him.
“Japanese Film” (The New Republic, 3 February 1986)
Invited by the Japan Foundation, I’ve just spent two weeks in Tokyo and
Kyoto. Among the many interesting people I met were some film figures.
Mitsuo Yanagimachi chose to meet in   a Tokyo coffee shop. (All
conversations  were through able interpreters, assigned by the foundation.) The
coffee  shop has a back room that one enters  over stepping-stones across a small
 pool; and that back room, full of people  talking much and eating little, was 
where we sat. Yanagimachi, now in his  early forties, directed Himatsuri (Fire
Festival, 1985), which was shown at the last New York Film Festival, then bad a
run at the Bleecker Street Cinema. In the currently dim Japanese film scene, he is
one of the lights, and by now he is used to being trotted out to meet visitors—not
bored, just ready, experienced. Somewhat plump, casually dressed, he responded
to questions thoughtfully and skillfully.
He has been making films for about twelve years; Himatsuri was his fourth
feature. (It was backed in part by Seibu, a department store. Apparently big
department stores have a Medicean function in Japan: I saw a dance program in a
small theater next to an art gallery on the top floor of Seibu.) I had been more
struck by the subject of Himatsuri than by the film as a whole. A lumberman who
lives in a fishing village with his wife and children resists the encroachments of
industrialization; one day he goes to the forest and embraces the trees as if in
farewell; then he goes home and kills his family and himself. My concern had been
that, to a Japanese audience apparently, the lives of the man’s family as well as his
own were at his disposal, as part of his protest against pollution.
Yanagimachi understood my concern but was not disturbed by it. He
stressed the difference in view between East and West on the subject of
individualism; in the East, he said, individualism is often best realized through, or
is lesser than, communion with great forces. He stressed the pantheist nature of
Shintoism. He stressed that the murders and the suicide were meant
metaphorically (although suggested by an actual case). He felt that some action
had to be taken against Western influence, even when that influence was spread
by the Japanese themselves. He said that too many people, like his parents, were
resigned, felt helpless about the destruction of old values. (His actual phrase was
“Go fight City Hall.”) Himatsuri had been at least one small counterblow that might
encourage further resistance.
I was more interested in listening to him than in arguing with him. Anyone
who has read anything about Japan knows that the basic struggle there,
ideological-spiritual-cultural, is between old and new. What a visitor might have
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expected was that the old values would be defended by old fogies or by young
adulators of old fogies. But here was someone who was dressed and looked like a
man in a Soho café where he might have been expounding on self-gratification in
one lexicon or another; and instead this man was talking about the importance of
tradition and devotional standards. This hip-looking man ended by saying that, in
certain circumstances, suicide is not the abnegation of life but its culmination, its
fulfillment.
Woman in the Dunes (1964) is one of my favorite Japanese films. I was eager
to talk with the director, Hiroshi Teshigahara, especially since he has made only a
few films since then, not much seen or discussed. We met in an astonishing place:
a beautifully decorated conference room on the top (eleventh) floor of an exquisite
modern Tokyo building that is entirely a school of flower arrangement.
Teshigahara is a gray-haired, elegant man, large for a Japanese, and was
dressed in chic, Italian-style sports clothes. He was gracious but without effusion.
He is the head of this school, which is highly regarded and quite successful, and
has been running it since 1980. He is also a ceramist and has had numerous
exhibits of his work. He inscribed for me a copy of the catalog of his Paris
exhibition in 1981.
I said that this building (designed by Kenzo Tange), the school, the ceramics
explained why he had made relatively few films in the past years. But I told him
how much Woman in the Dunes has meant to me—even more so during my few
days in Tokyo. The film underscores the idea that space does not equal freedom,
that the world can be crystallized wherever you are. I had to hope that he was
going to continue making films. He replied that be had a project in mind, historical.
Then he explained, without being asked, what has kept him from spending more
time on films. His father had founded this school; when his father died, his sister
took it over. Then, within a year, she died. Teshigahara could not abandon the
school, out of obligation to the teachers and the students but principally out of
obligation to his father. He himself had not been very good at flower arrangement
when he started, he said, but he has come to love it: sculpture with the ephemeral.
I looked at this elegant man sitting in this lovely room, with the gardens of the
Imperial Palace visible behind and below: a gifted film artist who had skimped on
that aspect of his work out of regard for family obligations, obligations to an art
that recognized its own mortality. I said that, meager though my qualifications for
judgment were, I couldn’t imagine anything more Japanese.
When my remark was translated, he smiled and nodded once, sharply.
In Kyoto I had a reunion with the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.
(A few of the films in his long career: with Yasujiro Ozu, Floating Weeds 1959;
with Kon Ichikawa, Enjo 1958 and Tokyo Olympiad 1965; with Kenji Mizoguchi,
Ugetsu 1953 and Sansho the Bailiff 1954; with Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon
1950 and Yojimbo 1961.) I had met him in New York when I introduced him at
the start of a Miyagawa retrospective at the Japan Society and had lunched with
him the day after. I had felt immediately drawn to this tiny, white-haired, warm
man who had come from so far in so many senses and yet felt so close. Now
seventy-seven and spry, he hurried across the Kyoto hotel lobby to hug me. Very
un-Japanese.
Miyagawa had begun work on Kagemusha with Kurosawa in 1980, had
done a few sequences, but had developed  eye trouble and was told by doctors
that   he was going blind. In fact, he has just   finished another picture with
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Masahiro Shinoda, for whom he did the exquisite color photography of The Ballad
of Orin in 1977.
As we drank tea, I asked him how he had got into films. He had begun his
career by doing ink drawings, he said, then still photography. In those days before
the Second World War, Kyoto had been a filmmaking center, and his sister had a
girlfriend who got him a job in a studio film lab, doing developing. He is vehement
about the importance to his subsequent career of his experience in the
development lab. That work, plus his ability as a second baseman on the studio
ball team, got him a chance as a camera assistant.
The next day we passed a Buddhist temple with a front wall made of huge
stones. Miyagawa said that he had made the first shot of his first film in front of
that wall, in 1935. He then led us through the very long, very narrow open-air food
market of the town, jammed with people doing their shopping for New Year’s Eve
dinner (this was December 31st), a big event in Japan. He darted ahead through
the swarm and came back with a present, a thick rice cake topped with a tangerine,
a typical New Year’s decoration. He showed us a small Shinto shrine, hidden just
off this thronged street. He and the young interpreter quickly bowed their beads
over palm-pressed hands. Then he took us to lunch at a restaurant that specialized
in Kyoto cooking. When we came out, he gestured toward a glitzy modern shop
across the street. It was the site of his birthplace. Then he gestured the other way
toward a low stucco building: his grammar school.
Miyagawa has worked all over Japan, of course, but a good deal of the time
be has worked in Kyoto, which he hates to leave. Many Western artists of various
kinds have been rooted in their native regions, but cinematographers? Miyagawa
works in, sometimes leaves, but always returns to Kyoto, his home and his
replenishment.
All the Japanese films I have seen are, visually, almost unsurpassed and
only rarely equaled. Even when they are boring as dramas, as was Teinosuke
Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1953), they are ravishing to the eye; that film contained
as beautiful color pictures as I can remember on the screen. When the drama
matches the visual quality, the result is a stunner like Kurosawa’s Rashomon.
Shiro Toyoda’s The Mistress (1953), while not in the same class as
Rashomon, was quite enjoyable when I first saw it in 1959, and, after seeing it
again recently, I’d like to discuss it a bit, along with one other Japanese film. The
Mistress’s story, which is its weakness, takes place in 1900 and tells of a poor girl
who becomes a rich merchant’s mistress in order to provide for her ailing father,
whom she cannot otherwise adequately support. The merchant sets her up in her
own house—and also gets a house for the father. She is ashamed of her position,
more so when she discovers that her benefactor is married and that he is a
moneylender, not a merchant. (Why these are added indignities one does not
learn.) A handsome young medical student passes her door daily on the way to
school. She falls in love with him and he is attracted to her, but he holds back
because he has an appointment to leave Japan as apprentice to a German doctor.
Still, the inspiration of her brief, unfulfilled love for him gives her the courage to
break out of her gilded cage and be free. (Her father, for whom she first accepted
concubinage, presumably is now free, too: to starve.)
This heart-throb drama would have been rejected indignantly thirty-five
years ago by Norma Talmadge and Richard Barthelmess as old-hat. But it is
tolerable here because it is well acted by a popular star, in the title role—not only
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touchingly acted but acted in a style that has an exotic interest of its own. There is
no Kabuki formalism about it or quaint, gift-shop Oriental flavor; it is a style rooted
in the human springs of another culture and is affecting.
Then, too, as in many foreign pictures, there are fascinating glimpses of
foreign mores. I had thought that, unlike some closer to home, the Japanese
husband was an unquestioned king, but the moneylender’s righteously harrying
wife might just have loosened her corsets in Levittown. The position of mistress
in the community, the slavish devotion of her infatuated patron, the odd ways that
people did or didn’t make a living, the way children played and students
celebrated—all these and more are incidental and valuable bonuses.
But the chief richness of the film is in its filming. The director, Toyoda, and
his cinematographer, Mitsuo Miura, make us feel again that there is a special magic
built into Japanese movie cameras. This black-and-white film is photographed in
a succession of subtle lights and exquisite compositions that achieve a double
effect: they tinge the players and the backgrounds with poetry and at the same
time make them more immediate and real. That statement is tautological, of
course, but let us remember that many Occidental moviemakers tirelessly equate
immediacy with bleak naturalism.
It appears that Kihachi Okamoto was also a director much under the
generally benevolent influence of Kurosawa, to judge from Okamoto’s film
Samurai Assassin, which I saw for the first time in 1965, the year of its release.
Samurai Assassin, like some of Kurosawa’s pictures, is a bloody melodrama
phrased in pictorial compositions so exquisite that they make it a kind of
visualized ballad; is edited, for the most part, as if electric sparks connect
sequences, yet with an almost reflective languor in the middle of some scenes;
employs the pan shot frequently to keep a scene flowing from one actor to another
to another. (We are told by some film aestheticians that the pan shot is a mistaken
concept because it controverts the natural use of the eye: we don’t “pan” in life, we
blink and shift our gaze. But strict correspondence to life seems a limiting
aesthetic canon. One reason that the pan or traveling or trucking shot, discreetly
used, seems valuable to me is precisely that it provides a kind of vision—a
continuum of excitement and growth—not possible in life: experience converted
into a smoothly unrolling ribbon.)
Okamoto’s picture is not as good as Kurosawa’s similar films because the
beginning is too slow and complicated; the characters are less sharply
individualized; there is too much serious reliance on the lurid story, not enough
directorial comment and viewpoint. The film builds to one long fight: an attack on
a lord by a group of rebels who have to battle his bodyguards; and Okamoto is
determined that we shall have plenty of what we have waited for. There is much
hacking and piercing and gouging, all in a series of brief shocks that are well
choreographed and assembled. But so much gore tempts us to giggle.
Like many samurai films, this one deals with the period in the mid-
nineteenth century when the feudal system was dissolving. The hero, a samurai
without a lord, cannot get a post because his father is unknown to him. He
becomes a hired bravo for a political band who are out to murder a despot, and,
after the long battle described above, he decapitates the despot and bears the head
off on a pike. He does not know, as anyone familiar with Verdi’s Il Trovatore could
have told him, that the man he killed was his close kin.
Toshiro Mifune plays the samurai as excellently (and this is the trouble) as
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he has played him several times before: a roistering, brave, rude, excellent
swordsman. The actor of such varied roles as the thief in The Lower Depths (1957),
the proud general in The Hidden Fortress (1958), the old businessman in  I Live in
Fear (1955), the younger businessman in High and Low (1963)—all films by
Kurosawa—is harping too much on one string, even if it is a good and profitable
one. But the picture is worth seeing. For one thing, no one seems able to handle
snow in films as well as the Japanese. The last fight is a frantic white ballet.
Japanese films, alas, still seem to arrive from another planet, and many
Japanese pictures probably could not succeed in the United States because they
would have little meaning for Americans. But it is hard to believe that there would
not be appreciative and sufficiently large audiences for more Japanese films than
are now shown.
Elena and Her Men, Jean Renoir, 1956 (The New Republic, 30 June 1986)
Jean Renoir’s Elena and Her Men, made in 1956, has not been shown
theatrically in the United States since 1957, when it was released here, dubbed
into English, under the title Paris Does Strange Things. Now the Film Program at
the Public Theater in New York brings us the original version, subtitled. I assume
there is also some dubbing in this French version because the leading man is the
American Mel Ferrer. Ingrid Bergman, the leading woman, plays a princess who
was made Polish, I assume, to explain her accent in French. (She too may have
been dubbed. At any rate, Renoir is said to have thought her French “scarcely
adequate,” especially since she went home every evening and spoke Italian with
her then-husband, Roberto Rossellini.)
I had never seen the film in any version and hurried to what I expected to
be a disappointment: which it proved to be. This flip remark—about a man who 
made masterpieces and had immense influence on other directors—is justified as
 much by the writings about the film as by the film itself. Renoir calls Elena and
Her Men a “musical fantasy” and treats it as a divertissement with some knives
hidden among the flowers. I don’t think the knives are very sharp or the flowers
very   beguiling, but nowhere does he imply   the aspirations that have been
attributed to Elena by others. Jean-Luc Godard: “‘The’ French film par excellence
. . . because it is the most intelligent of films. Art and theory of art, at one and the
same time; beauty and the secret of beauty.” François Truffaut: “Renoir in his
greatest period.” Concede that these two young Cahiers du cinéma critics were
then promoting the “personal” approach to filmmaking that Renoir certainly
embodied. Still, those comments were part of an impassioned rhetoric that
became exemplary for critical mimics at home and abroad and that helped to
establish the auteur view of (among others) Renoir. This view takes the director’s
style as the career’s principal achievement. It tends to blur distinctions among
individual works, or even more idiosyncratically, it exalts dubious works in the
career as if to controvert non-auteur critics who prefer the Renoir films in which
his style is employed to more fulfilling purpose. So Elena, as I feared, did not live
up to its advance billing.
It is set in Paris at the turn of the century, but it centers on a woman’s
intrigues to promote a military dictator clearly based on General Georges
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Boulanger (1837-91), whose rightist plottings had collapsed over a decade earlier.
Now to make a flirtatious musical comedy on that subject at any time would have
risked trivialization of grave matters. (Boulanger committed suicide.) To make
such a musical only eleven years after the end of World War II verges on the
callously recuperative. “History in . . . Elena and Her Men . . . becomes subordinated
to the demands of art,” wrote Leo Braudy. The same might be said about the
musical show Springtime for Hitler contained within Mel Brooks’s The Producers
(1967).
Bergman, a widow, agrees to marry an elderly rich businessman because
she needs money. In a crowd honoring a popular general on July 14 th (Bastille
Day), she meets a wealthy young idler, Ferrer. He introduces her to his friend the
general, Jean Marais, who is smitten with Bergman at first sight even though he
has a devoted mistress. Then the general’s advisers ask Bergman to use her wiles
on him, to persuade him to seize power—especially since a war threat with
Germany has flared over an accident with an observer balloon. (This, from the
maker of La Grande illusion 1937, could be tolerable only if it were funny.)
Bergman’s rich fiancé agrees to the scheme out of patriotism. The final sorting-out
takes place in a small-town brothel, which is used, not like the brothel in Genet’s
The Balcony—a symbolic place where prostitution and power intermingle—but
for conventional male fantasy, a haven where all the girls are gorgeous and
everyone is jolly. The last offense is to show us that French men and women,
including the crowd surrounding the brothel, are more interested in lovemaking
than in politics. Bergman ends up with Ferrer, the general goes off with his
mistress, and France is saved from dictatorship by l’amour.
Elena and Her Men needn’t have been “the most intelligent of films.” It could
indeed have had exactly the same risky script if it had been in the hands of a René
Clair or Ernst Lubitsch. But Renoir plods. Apparently, in order to have a light
touch, he needed a serious subject, as in that great film The Rules of the Game
(1939). He deliberately reminds us here of that pre-war film: part of Elena is set
in a chateau, has love chases with servants, and even a fat female guest. The
reminder was a further mistake.
No director of Renoir’s talents could make a film without showing them.
His style is visible in Elena and Her Men and mostly consists, as usual, of attempts
to meld theater and film. In the first scene, for instance, he “deepens” the screen
by pivoting from a two-shot of Bergman and a friend at a piano, seemingly alone,
to show us two people playing cards beyond them in an alcove—the way a theater
director might suddenly turn on the lights upstage. When Bergman’s carriage is
trapped in the July 14th crowd, we first get the size of the crowd only by the people
visible through the window—another theater effect. But every sequence that is
supposed to be feathery and tickling—like the later misplacing of a child in that
crowd scene—sorely lacks the touch that Clair could have given it.
Even if it were better than it is, Elena and Her Men would still sag because
of it two leading actors. Renoir made the film, he said, because of Ingrid Bergman:
“I wanted to see her laugh and smile on the screen.” She looks beautiful, and she
does laugh and smile a lot, but none of this makes her a competent comedienne.
(It’s a Danielle Darrieux role.) As for Mel Ferrer, the idea of associating charm and
elegance with him gave me the only laugh in his performance. (It was a part for
Gérard Philipe.) Renoir’s casting of Bergman and Ferrer—presumably with at
least one eye on the international box office—sank the ship before it was launched.
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Sunnyside, Charles Chaplin, 1919 (The New Republic, 22 May 1989)
To celebrate the centennial of Charlie Chaplin’s birth, I saw a Chaplin film I

had never seen. Sunnyside, one of the longest pictures of his first screen decade—
twenty-nine minutes—by one mischance or another had eluded me through the
years. In April the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a two-week
“Centennial Celebration” of Charlie’s pictures and showed Sunnyside on the first
day. I was there.
Sunnyside, to put it grudgingly, doesn’t disappoint if one is prepared for an
imperfect work. Those who have written about it, in 1919 and more recently,
warned of its imperfections. Chaplin himself said that making it “had been like
pulling teeth.” (His turbulent private life was distracting him at the time.) I can’t
disagree with the adverse comment; still, I’m grateful to have filled the gap in my
Chaplin experience, for the pleasures that are in the film, and for the chance to see
its connections with his subsequent career.
He is a farmhand here, in a village called Sunnyside, with a harsh boss who
rouses him at 4 a.m., reads the Bible a lot, and kicks Charlie’s seat a lot. Charlie is
enamored of a village lass played by Edna Purviance, and after various adventures,
many of which involve a city slicker who makes him jealous, Charlie gets the girl.
Some of the materials foreshadow later use. Virtue is ignored before it is
rewarded—a recurrent Chaplin theme. The burly farmer and the slim hired man
sitting at a bare wooden table in a bare room immediately suggest the cabin scene
in The Gold Rush (1925). Later, when Charlie is driving some cows along a road
with a stick while he reads a book, the cows wander off unnoticed by the absorbed
Charlie. A broad-bottomed woman is bent over in the road before him as he comes
along, and he absently taps her with the stick. This may be the seed of the moment
in Modern Times (1936) when the assembly-line worker, crazed by twisting two
nuts with two wrenches hour after hour, wanders into the street with his hands
still twisting and meets a buxom woman with two large buttons on her bodice.
Again Chaplin shows a familiar odd mixture in his work. The village street
could be anywhere in Europe, but all the people are Yankee. So are the targets of
his comic jabs. The opening iris shot of a church steeple, the title itself, and the
religiosity of the tyrannical old farmer are double-edged comments: on the
sanctimonious harshness of country life and on the then-prevailing American
theater and film claptrap about that life.
The story strains and bumps along, but this look at the underside of rural
romance is sharp. And, however arbitrarily, Chaplin gives himself the chance for
one of his best dance sequences. A runaway cow knocks him unconscious, and in
the dream that follows, four garlanded, lightly clad nymphs summon him to a
woodland frolic. With two tufts of his hair lifted to look like Pan’s horns, he
gambols with them—beautifully. Nor does he forget the Chaplin wry touch: in the
middle of his dream, he lands on a cactus.
Love, Károly Makk, 1971 (The New Republic, 11 March 1991)
When Károly Makk’s Love was released in the United States in 1973, I was
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one of those who called it a treasure. I had a proprietary interest in this Hungarian
film because Lili Darvas, the actress who played the key role of a bedridden old
woman, was a beloved friend. (She lived in New York but had returned to
Budapest, her native city, for this picture.) I felt that Love, in addition to its intrinsic
beauties, justified the very existence of cinema. Every good film is such a
justification, of course, but this one was especially precious to me because it
preserved an example of Lili Darvas’s art.
Love wasn’t much of a success. Darvas and Mari Törőcsik, who plays her
daughter-in-law, had won prizes at the Cannes Festival of 1971, and there were
other awards; still, Love didn’t come to the U.S. immediately. When it arrived, it
was generally well reviewed, yet soon disappeared. A few years ago Joseph Papp’s
film theater at the Public ran a Makk retrospective that included a splendid, fresh
print of Love. Otherwise it has appeared only infrequently in revival houses. A
16mm print was rentable if you happened to know the people who owned it—for
some reason, it had vanished from the catalogues—and I showed it often in film
courses. Always and unfailingly there was the same result: those who were seeing
it for the first time were overwhelmed and were also outraged that such a
wonderful work had been kept from them, sealed in a cold vault by commerce.
Now, to my surprise and joy, Love is on videotape, made from an excellent
print and subtitled clearly. Now it is freed from that vault, and any of us can have
it when we like. That this is a commonplace paradox by now—hundreds of fine
films that did little at the box office are now on tape—doesn’t in the slightest
diminish my happiness in this case. The appearance of Love on tape is, for me, a
justification of the existence of the VCR, just as the original justified cinema itself.
The usual complaints about tapes don’t figure here: the reduced image is
excellently graded in its black-and-white range, and the frame is unaltered.
Without qualification, this tape is a blessing. It’s available from the Connoisseur
Video Collection in Los Angeles at $59.95 plus shipping. That seems little enough
for a masterpiece.
I reviewed the film at length in The New Republic in 1973, and will note
here only an aspect that is underscored every time I see it. Love is a perfect
example of political art. (Equal emphasis on both words.) Tibor Déry’s screenplay,
derived from two of his stories, is about a dying old woman, who still has about
her an air of Franz Joseph elegance; her daughter-in-law, who visits her daily and
supplies her with fake letters from her son in America; and the son, who is in fact
a political prisoner in Budapest. (The time is presumably the late 1950s.) Makk,
his cinematographer, János Tóth, his composer, András Milhály, his editor, György
Sivó—all of them superb—have concentrated intensely on the kinds of love that
exist among these three people and how love is affected by the climate in which
one dares to have hopes about it. The film is a cry against tyranny from innermost
privacies. By concentrating on three people and their feelings, it presents a world
and its history.
A little more than a year after Love was released in America, Lili Darvas
died. Still, after viewing this tape, that statement seems somehow incorrect.
Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick, 1960 (The New Republic, 27 May 1991)
Those who missed it or weren’t around when it was first released in 1960
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now have a chance to see Spartacus—all three-and-a-half hours of it. Apparently

inspired by the success of the Lawrence of Arabia (1962) re-release in 1988,
Universal engaged Robert A. Harris, who was in charge of the reconstruction of
Lawrence, to do the same for this picture. About the restoration of previously
omitted material, I can’t comment after the lapse of thirty-one years, but the
restored scene about which there has been most publicity—a veiled reference by
a Roman patrician to his sexual tastes—must have been in the 1960 version that I
saw because I referred to it in my original review.
The screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo from a Howard Fast novel, two
names that had been shadowed in the HUAC (House Un-American Activities
Committee) days. Since Universal implicitly asks for comparison with Lawrence of
Arabia, it seems fair to say that the Spartacus script is not in the same universe as
Robert Bolt’s for the other film. Still, its romance, between the slave-gladiator
Spartacus and the slave girl who becomes his wife, is more amusing than
ridiculous, just an obeisance to a genre convention. As for the grandiose
libertarian sentiments that Spartacus utters, Trumbo and Fast, whether they knew
it or not, were merely following a tradition.
The revolt of the slave-gladiators led by Spartacus in 72 B.C. was the subject
of a blank-verse play, The Gladiator, by Robert Montgomery Bird, presented in
1831 by Edwin Forrest, the first native-born American star, who played the title
role. It was a success and remained in his repertoire for years. Democratic
affirmations were part of Forrest’s stock-in-trade in the new republic, and nothing
in the current screenplay is more orotund and anachronistic than
Man is heaven’s work, and beggars’ brats may ’herit

A soul to mount them up the steeps of fortune,
With regal necks to be their stepping blocks.—
This makes the Trumbo-Fast diction sound conservative.

In 1960 I thought more highly of Stanley Kubrick’s directing and Russell
Metty’s color cinematography than I do now, but partly that is due to Kubrick’s
own subsequent accomplishments in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and (cinematically
anyway) in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), partly to Lawrence of Arabia itself—
David Lean’s directing and Freddie Young’s camera. Alex North’s music for
Spartacus—raucous Hollywood self-parody—is very much worse than Maurice
Jarre’s for Lean. In only one respect is Spartacus remotely comparable to
Lawrence: some of Kubrick’s actors are as good as all of Lean’s.
Peter Ustinov, as a slave dealer, is still masterfully comic in his slyly frank
greed and cowardice. Charles Laughton, as a democratic womanizing senator, is
at his cunning best. I never really believe a word that Laughton says, but I’m
always mesmerized by his thaumaturgic power with words. And Laurence Olivier.
To see him again as an arrogant patrician senator is to regret again—even more—
that I never saw his Coriolanus, which he had done in two English productions
before Spartacus was made and which was reputedly one of his best roles. Clearly
he drew strands from his Coriolanus experience for the fabric of his performance
here; to judge by photos, his makeup is the same. He is superb. (In one brief
relooped sequence, his lines are dubbed by Anthony Hopkins, unobtrusively.)
Jean Simmons is no less charming than ever in the impossible role of the
slave girl. Tony Curtis is still “a singger of songgs.” Kirk Douglas, jaw muscles and
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all, still strives to energize the title role—to show, in a part written like a recipe,
humor, tenderness, resolve, and nobility.
But Spartacus is a product, not a production, a spectacular product with
thousands of extras in some of its battle scenes but never more than a contraption.
The Hollywood vaults are full of such historical artifacts. Are they all going to be
restored and re-released? I hope not. We couldn’t expect all, or any, of them to be
up to the standard of Lawrence of Arabia, so, ladies and gentlemen of the West
Coast, some moderation, please.
Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis, 1950 (The New Republic, 24 June 1991)
It’s like old times. The auteur theory has surfaced again. This is the critical
approach, French in origin (cela va sans dire) and prominent in the two decades
after World War II, which proposed that the director is the true author of a film,
that his style determines its quality, that such elements as acting, dialogue, and
thematic gravity are at most secondary. For the past twenty years or so, that
critical view has been buried in a subsequent avalanche of quite different theories,
again mostly French in origin—structuralism, semiology, deconstruction,
feminism, and others. But a recent film program at the Public Theater in New York
took us back to auteurisme.
The occasion was a bill devoted to one of that school’s favorite directors,
Joseph H. Lewis, and to its favorite Lewis work, Gun Crazy. It was made in 1949
and, ever since, has been stoutly promoted by some as an ignored masterpiece. Its
reappearance has brought forth considerable comment, including a paean by Jay
Cocks and Martin Scorsese. This revival, which will probably cause ripples
elsewhere, makes the auteur view visible again.
I’m glad of it. It reminds us all, including non-auteurists like myself, that
there are such things in a critic as a passion for films, a belief in their pleasure and
their artistic importance. Foolish as auteurists’ claims could be, nothing ever
motivated them except that passion. With the latter-day theoretical critics,
passion is apparently inappropriate. We usually feel that they write because
Professor A wants his dean to think him up to date or because Professors B and C
are contesting for the title of the American Christian Metz or because Professors
D to K want to redress history’s injustices to women, blacks, Asians, homosexuals,
and others by exposing the prejudice and the white male heterosexual viewpoint
in past and current films. Sometimes these critiques are, under one sun or another,
admirable, but they don’t have much to do directly with film passion and pleasure.
Well, what is this film Gun Crazy that all our auteurist swains commend it?
A perfect example for them, that’s what. Its interest is all in its cinematics—its
direction, editing, and cinematography. The story is a down-and-dirty film noir
saga based on a Saturday Evening Post story by MacKinlay Kantor, once a best-
selling novelist, who co-wrote the screenplay with Millard Kaufman. According to
several sources, Kaufman was a front for Dalton Trumbo, then under a HUAC
blight. This last is a surprise because Trumbo was a good screenwriter, and the
very worst element in this film is its wooden dialogue.
The story is patently derived from the actual Bonnie and Clyde chronicle.
And after Bonnie and Clyde appeared in 1967, it became auteur-chic to say that
Lewis’s overlooked version was better than Arthur Penn’s big hit. This, in the view
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of one who didn’t care much for Bonnie and Clyde, is mere cognoscenti snobbism.
Still, Gun Crazy has its strengths.
Not in the acting. John Dall and Peggy Cummins are at best passable and
are often foolishly strained. Within the restrictions of the period, the screenplay
tries to imply strong sexual themes: the pistol as phallus, Cummins as sexually
aroused by robbing and killing, Dall a skilled sharpshooter who is seduced into
using his talent in crime (a woman teaches him the complete use of his phallus),
etc. She has been doing trick shooting in a carnival; he has been doing very little.
They hook up and run off together. (One touch that seems quaint today: they stop
at a Justice of the Peace en route.) They begin their crime career moderately and
get worse as they go. All of this should seem like heat rising, steam filtering
through the cracks. Dall and Cummins are simply not up to it.
It’s Lewis’s picture. Born in 1910, he entered films at the age of seventeen,
was an editor, a designer of main titles (the first credits we see), a second-unit
director, and at last the director of a string of pop pictures—Westerns, horror,
crime, costume. By 1949 he was well flexed, and with Russell Harlan’s black-and-
white camera, he rose to his opportunity.
Concede that he uses a device now wearily dated, the montage transition—
one stickup dissolving into another, one police broadcast into another, newspaper
headlines swooping into view. Concede too the obvious bows to budget
restraints—the couple’s visit to a city depicted by reflected traffic in a shop
window, a posse at the end that consists of two men and an off-screen voice.
Otherwise, it’s virtuoso direction all the way.
The most celebrated sequence is the bank robbery. The camera is in the
back seat of the couple’s car, and it stays there as Dall goes into the bank to do the
job, as Cummins gets out of the car to flirt with a cop and then to coldcock him
with a pistol when Dall comes running out with the loot. (Godard, author of a
comparable sequence in Breathless 1960, surely knew Gun Crazy.) But there’s
much besides.
Three examples. The opening shot, under the main titles, is from the inside
of a gunshop window looking out into rain-pelted dingy streets at night while a
neon hotel sign blinks on and off. Presto, we are in film noir country. Later, in a
diner, where the penniless couple have gone for hamburgers—without onions,
which would have cost a nickel more—the first shot, past the griddle, down the
length of the counter to Dall and Cummins at the end, is like Edward Hopper
distilled. At the beginning of the last sequence, in a misty swamp at night, the
camera moves through the reeds to pick up the ghostly faces of the fugitive pair as
they lie together, as they know and we know that the end is near. Kurosawa
wouldn’t have been ashamed of that shot.
The texture of the film is self-contradictory. The general intent is ruthless
realism, but very little that happens is, in realistic terms, credible. How could this
(not very bright) pair possibly have escaped capture as long as they did? How did
she and he get the jobs in the meat-packing plant in order to pull off a big job?
Especially after their pictures had been in the papers. Etc. But Lewis apparently
needed—wanted—a screenplay just sufficiently cogent to let him take off from it.
This view of a script as merely an adequate armature for a director had its
origin in the theater. Ever since the Restoration, actor-managers had treated
plays—sometimes the classics—merely as opportunities for them to strut their
stuff. When the director entered the theater in the late nineteenth century, this
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alchemy of dross into gold was even more emphasized. David Belasco produced
dozens of plays in a long career, but with the exception of The Merchant of Venice
(and, to stretch a point, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West), none
of them is remotely interesting today. Yet the best critics of the day understood
that his authors’ scripts were only the medium for Belasco’s own art, that he
rejected the best new plays of his time (by Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov)
because he didn’t want to be under obligations to good material.
And when an art came along in which the director is inescapably the prime
figure, no matter how important his colleagues, this practice flourished even more
completely. It’s flatly impossible to take Gun Crazy seriously as a whole, but it’s not
as a whole that it should be seen. Those who saw Belasco’s 1912 production of The
Governor’s Lady marveled, not at the play but at what Belasco did with it—the
restaurant scene in particular. Whether or not he knew it, Joseph H. Lewis was
carrying on the Belasco tradition in a different venue.
“Stan Laurel, 1890-1965” (The New Republic, 5 August 1991)
Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later known as Stan Laurel, was born in Ulverston,
England, on June 16, 1890. One hundred and one years and one day later, I arrived
in Ulverston to visit the Laurel and Hardy Museum, the only one in the world. The
museum consists of two medium-sized rooms off an alley up a side street. One
room is decorated with photographs and mementos, and offers videotapes and
books and Laurel-and-Hardy dolls for sale. The other is a theater with perhaps
twenty seats. Clips from videotapes of Laurel and Hardy play constantly,
interrupted only by comments from Bill Cubin, the portly and amiable ex-mayor
of Ulverston who founded the museum. Cubin also introduces some home movies
that the two comics made in Hollywood, both when they were at their height and
in later years when illness forced their retirement. And there is a Dutch TV
documentary about the museum, with English commentary, which includes a bit
with Cubin.
Any question about how a famous clown came out of this small northern
town is answered by the fact that he didn’t really come from here, in a sense: his
parents were busy theater folk who were just roosting in Ulverston for a while
with family. Stan left Ulverston when he was a boy. But the town has made what it
could out of his sojourn: there’s a plaque on his birthplace, and nearby is a pub
called The Stan Laurel, with his endearingly foolish face on the pub sign.
Some friends and I stopped for cream teas in a small tearoom just across a
narrow street from a grocery shop called J. J. Gillam & Son. One of the friends,
English, said that the shop and its windows looked exactly as she remembered
such shops from her childhood. I glanced through a book I had bought at the
museum about Stan’s early days, and there was a photo of Gillam’s looking exactly
the same, where he had bought toffee when he was a boy.
I’ve always been a limited Laurel-and-Hardy enthusiast, the limitation
being not their talent but their choices of material. (Toward the end, Laurel said,
“We should have stayed in the short-film category. There’s just so much we can do
along a certain line and then it gets to be unfunny.”) But as we strolled through
Ulverston afterward, I couldn’t help thinking (odd though this connection seems
just now) of Zagreb.
274
In Zagreb I once saw a Laurel-and-Hardy feature, Fra Diavolo (1933), in

English with Croatian subtitles. I liked it; but the audience was absolutely
screaming with joy. Young and old were bouncing up and down in their seats,
applauding as they nearly choked with laughter. I was much more moved by them
than by the film. What they were loving, or half of it anyway, had originated in
these twisty streets of gray stucco houses. Film has made some powers global and,
granting the stay of film-stock corruption, immortal.
“The Lumière Brothers: Louis, 1864-1948; and Auguste, 1862-1954” (The

New Republic, 2 March 1992)
I was in Lyon recently to see Ariane Mnouchkine’s company, which is away

from its Paris home at the moment, touring France. The Mnouchkine
productions—three Greek plays—were wonderful enough, but there were
bonuses. First, Lyon itself, a gem. Second, the food, unbelievable. Third, the Institut
Lumière. The Lumière brothers, Louis (1864-1948) and Auguste (1862-1954),
weren’t born in Lyon, but they did their film pioneering there in the house that
was built by their father, a successful portrait photographer.
I liked the Institute before I saw it: Lyon predisposes you, especially
through its obvious interest in film and theater. The Institute is located on the Rue
du Premier-Film, and there is also an Avenue Frères Lumière, an Avenue Roberto
Rossellini, a Rue Louis Jouvet, and a Rue Charles Dullin. (I don’t even count such
commonplaces as a Rue Pierre Corneille and a Quai Romain Rolland.)
Another name that shone before I got there was that of the Institute’s
president, Bertrand Tavernier, a devout Lyonnais who reveled in his city in The
Clockmaker (1974) and A Week’s Vacation (1980). I knew that his title is honorary;
still, I hoped he might be there. He wasn’t: the director of the Institute, Bernard
Chardère, was there, the man who founded the well-known film magazine Positif
and who has been running this institute since its inception in 1982. He welcomed
me.
I’ve seen other museums that are in the homes of the people they honor—
Toulouse-Lautrec’s in Albi, Pirandello’s in Agrigento, Goethe’s in Frankfurt, Shaw’s
in Ayot St. Lawrence—but, possibly excepting Toulouse’s, none was a museum
piece in itself. This Belle Époque villa is big, bosomy, elegant, with high mansard
roofs, stonework chimneys, carved stone under the eaves, and a large glass-
enclosed solarium. The reception hall, high-ceilinged and wide, is bordered by a
sweeping stairway. The ground floor has several lofty chambers with parquet
flooring, ornate mantels wrapping big fireplaces, high mirrors topped by marble
heads, inlaid woodwork in the walls, and fancy pargetting in the ceilings. The
offices and the library are on the floor above, and I assume (I didn’t see them) that
they look more contemporary. Downstairs the clothes that I and others were
wearing seemed inadequate.
Chardère, who looks a little like the late Henri Langlois, the founder of the
Cinémathèque Française, calmly disregarded my ignorance of French and his of
English and took me on a guided tour. Because we had some common knowledge
of the subject and could each get an occasional phrase in the other language, I had
a good time. (I can’t speak for him.) The centerpiece of the museum is, naturally,
its permanent exhibit on the development of the idea of photography, the need for
275
it, and the evolution of the moving-picture camera and projector in the hands of
the Lumières.
The father, Antoine, was, in addition to his photographic work, a
manufacturer of photographic equipment. Louis followed him and Auguste soon
joined Louis, and the brothers organized a small factory near the villa for
manufacturing photo materials. Then, after he retired, Antoine saw a
demonstration in Paris in the early 1890s of the Edison Kinetoscope, a sort of peep
show, and he advised his sons to get busy. Others were busy, too, in several
countries; the competition was keen. Max Skladanowsky of Berlin actually gave
the first public exhibition of film several weeks before the Lumières, but the
brothers had already been showing film privately to invited guests. They went
public in Paris on December 28, 1895.
It was this début that ignited the global blaze, and the kingpin of the
Institute’s historical exhibit is the actual projector that was used. Standing now in
its place of honor, it looks gawkily innocent. “It’s not my fault,” it seems to say in
its rude mechanical simplicity. “How did I know what would happen?”
The villa and the grounds themselves play a part in the chronicle of early
film. The earliest Lumière motion picture, which runs about fifty seconds, is
Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), the Lumière factory. Chardère indicated
where it had stood, about eighty yards away. Feeding Baby (1895), in which
Auguste and his wife tend their infant son, was shot just outside the house on the
other side. (Family note: the two brothers married two sisters, daughters of a Lyon
brewer. The two families shared the villa.) Both of these items were on that first
Paris bill, along with eight other items, most of them shot in Lyon. And all this was
done within the lifetimes of some still surviving people.
Chardère explained that various special exhibits run continually—I saw a
good one of still photography by someone new—and that there are always film
series in progress. The current series is on the subject of actors: the poster
features Brando and Garbo. He showed me the very inviting small screening room
downstairs, with comfortable scarlet-upholstered seats that, he says, are filled
almost every day for the film programs.
Then Chardère loaded me with posters and postcards, pamphlets and
brochures, and put me in the car that he had summoned to take me back to my
hotel—a good distance because the Institute is in an outlying district. (Called
Monplaisir. Ah, those Lyonnaises.) This is my note of thanks.
Since then, I’ve been thinking of that day less as a trip to a museum than as
a visit to some people whom I was too late to catch. The richness and generosity
of the villa itself seem to reflect the warmth of the people who lived there. What
excitement those rooms must have known in those days when a new age was in
birth. I felt that I had sensed it during my visit. Fanciful, of course, but that’s what
fancy is for.
“Charles Denner, 1926-1995” (The New Republic, 16 October 1995)
In Paris, in July of 1971, I went to visit Charles Denner, the sterling French
actor who died a few weeks ago. I had been overwhelmed by his very different but
equally beautiful performances in two unjustly neglected films of the ’60s, Claude
Chabrol’s Landru (1963) and Alain Jessua’s Life Upside Down (1964), and was
276
much more keen to talk to him than to the glitzier people offered by UniFrance,
the government’s film agency. I did see some of the others later, but for me Denner
came first, in this quick trip to meet some French artists whose work had appealed
to me. What he did and gave on the screen had to have come from somewhere, and
I’d long been interested in learning more about him.
The UniFrance translator who took me to Denner’s apartment in the Rue
Carnot—and a modest building it was—had made a mistake. We rang Denner’s
doorbell at the appointed time: a dog barked inside. Then my UniFrance friend
remembered that she had set the meeting for my hotel. She called the hotel and
was told that Denner was there, waiting.
When we arrived, he was sitting quietly in a corner of the hotel’s small
garden, hatless, wearing a windbreaker, smoking a cigarette. After my apology,
which he shrugged off, I told him that in a way I had met his dog before him. He
smiled and said something to the effect that maybe he ought to quit while he was
ahead.
Some film actors seem larger or smaller than their screen selves when you
meet them. Denner was exactly the same size: short, solid, composed but agile. His
cheekbones seemed, as on film, to suggest gaunt resolution. His nose was strong,
declarative. His voice, as I already knew, was vibrant, with a touch of roughness
under the music. He was cordial in a quite formal way, but he seemed pleased that
a foreigner had sought him out.
I told him why: because of his work in several films, including, from 1968,
Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (where he played the artist) and, from 1969,
Costa-Gavras’s Z (as the friend of Yves Montand whom the opposition tries to run
down with an automobile) but especially for those two major roles. (It’s a disgrace
to have to identify in this way—as I guess I must—an actor of Denner’s quality.)
He glowed a bit. I told him I wanted to know more about the man who had done
those performances. Would he tell me about himself?
He nodded and lit another cigarette. He had been born in 1926 to a Polish
Jewish family who lived near Krakow and had been brought to France when he
was 4. His earliest ambition was to be a cantor in a synagogue. He was in his early
teens when the war came. He had joined the Resistance and had met an older man
in his unit who became his intellectual mentor. They read Racine and Molière
together (Denner even memorized the latter’s Misanthrope) in their hideouts.
After the war, though he had never seen a play or a film, he decided to be an actor.
He went to study with the renowned Charles Dullin, largely because he knew Jean-
Louis Barrault had studied with Dullin, and Denner venerated Barrault’s
performance in Children of Paradise (1945).
He first worked in political theater with a group of French-Jewish actors
called the Companions of the Ark. In 1949 he was engaged by Jean Vilar, the
founder of the Théâtre National Populaire, for Vilar’s annual festival at Avignon,
and he was with Vilar until 1953. By the time of our meeting he had appeared in
130 plays (and had also made numerous television appearances). When he spoke
about acting to me, the term he used over and over is “composition,” in both the
musical and painterly senses. And how did film acting differ from theater acting
for him? “In the theater I am naked. In films I am naked in a closed room.”
Denner’s first film was a small part in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows
(1957), one of the earliest works of the French New Wave. Chabrol saw him in a
celebrated Vilar production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which he
277
had played the Hermann Goering character with a red wig and lots of padding, and
chose him in 1962 for the character of Landru, slim with a shaved head and a
bushy black beard. Two years later, he played the lead in Jessua’s Life Upside Down,
a man whom we see slide slowly, dreamily, happily into immobilizing mental
illness.
I told him I thought that Landru, a serious version of the Bluebeard story,
ought to be played on double bills with Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
Denner took that as a considerable compliment and said that he himself had dared
to hope this might happen sometime. (It never did, to my knowledge.) I told him
that I would show Landru every year in a film course of mine if an undubbed
16mm print were available. (It never has been.) But I often showed Life Upside
Down, I told him. “Je suis très content,” he said, and looked it.
In later years, among many other roles, he played the lead in Truffaut’s The
Man Who Loved Women (1983). But before that film was made, he did Claude
Lelouch’s And Now My Love (1974). When Truffaut was in America in 1976 he
wrote to a friend that Denner was “quite known and liked here” because of the
Lelouch picture.
Denner hasn’t been visible since 1986: he spent his last decade fighting
cancer. His death, at the age of sixty-nine, is a sharp reminder that his best work
belongs in the gallery of the best acting in film history and ought to have the same
(somewhat slim) chance of being remembered as the rest of that gallery. In any
case, goodbye to him and thanks.
Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967 (The New Republic, 17 March 1997)
The French star Alain Delon is now retired, but a 1967 film of his has just
been released in the United States in its original version. Le Samouraï was directed
by Jean-Pierre Melville, a hero of the French New Wave, who wrote the taut
screenplay from a Joan McLeod novel. The picture, which is about a Parisian
contract killer, was released in America in a doctored version in the early 1970s
under the title The Godson—apropos of you know what. Now, restored, it is given
its real American premiere at the Film Forum in New York.
The original title is wrong, too. A samurai did not accept commissions to
kill merely for money: honor and ethics were involved. But Delon’s character is
simply a technician with no criterion except efficiency and no purpose except cash.
He is alone. He has a girlfriend who adores him, but he accepts her adoration
rather stonily. He lives within himself. Melville gives him no antecedents or
explanations, few feelings, and very little dialogue. A schemer, this man’s drama is
in the rupture of his schemes.
Melville’s establishing shot at the start establishes more than place. We see
a shadowy, mean room, two windows at the back pasted with gray light. It’s like a
stage set in black and white. Then we see that there’s a man present, an inhabitant
of this dark, lying on the bed, smoking. It’s only after Delon leaves this room that
some color—not much—enters the film. The silent stalker slips out of his lair into
the world, kills, withdraws.
What Melville quite rightly counted on to bolster his film, to answer
questions and also to suggest new ones, was Delon’s face. Gray-eyed, delicate,
almost angelic, Delon’s face is so unconnected with his profession that we are
278
strangely awed. Antonioni used this contradiction differently in Eclipse (1962) by

making Delon a busy stockbroker. Melville uses that face to effect a reversal of
convention.
Here is an icy killer, with no overt claims to our sympathy. Yet, through
Melville’s intense emphasis on his face, we are held. The action is lean and shivery,
but it’s the face that holds us. We want to know more about this man though we
doubt that we will. Thus the film medium exercises a peculiar strength: it
transforms an actor’s face, in itself, into a protagonist.
279
Chronology: Stanley Jules Kauffmann
Born: 24 April 1916 in New York City, the son of Joseph H. Kauffmann, a
dentist, and Jeanette (Steiner) Kauffmann; one sibling, a sister, who pre-
deceased him.
Died: 9 October 2013 in New York City.
Educated: in the public schools of New York City (including DeWitt Clinton
High School in the Bronx) and at New York University (B.F.A., 1935).
Married: 5 February 1943, to Laura (Cohen) Kauffmann (died in 2012); no

children.
Positions
Actor-Stage Manager, Washington Square Players, New York, 1931-1941

Associate Editor, Bantam Books, 1949-1952
Editor-in-Chief, Ballantine Books, 1952-1956
Editor, Alfred A. Knopf, 1959-1960
Film Critic, The New Republic, 1958-1965, 1967-2013
Drama Critic, WNET-TV, New York, 1963-1965
Host, “The Art of Film,” WNET-TV, New York, 1963-1967
Drama Critic, The New York Times, 1966
Associate Literary Editor, The New Republic, 1966-1967
Theater Critic, The New Republic, 1969-1979
Professor of Drama, Yale University, 1967-1973, 1977-1986
Distinguished Professor of English, York College, City University of New York,
1973-1976
Visiting Professor of Drama, City University of New York Graduate Center,
1976-1992
Theater Critic, Saturday Review, 1979-1985
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theater and Film, Adelphi University,
1992-1996
Visiting Professor of Drama, Hunter College, City University of New York,
1993-2006
Awards and Distinctions
Emmy for “The Art of Film,” WNET-TV, New York, 1963-1964

Honorary Fellow, Morse College, Yale University, 1964-2013
Ford Foundation Fellow for Study Abroad, 1964 and 1971
Juror, National Book Awards, 1969, 1975
George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 1972-1973
280
Member, Theater Advisory Panel, National Endowment for the Arts, 1972-
1976
Rockefeller Fellow, 1978
Guggenheim Fellow, 1979-1980
George Polk Award for Film Criticism, 1982
Edwin Booth Award for Significant Impact on Theater and Performance in New
York, 1986
Travel Grant from the Japan Foundation for Interest in and of Support of
Japanese Films, 1986
Birmingham Film Festival Prize for Lifetime Achievement, 1986
Fellow, New York Institute for the Humanities, 1995
Outstanding Teacher Award, Association for Theater in Higher Education,
1995
Telluride Film Festival Award for Criticism, 1999
“Film Culture: Past and Present,” Symposium in Honor of Stanley Kauffmann,
sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New
York Graduate Center, 2002
Featured in the documentary film For the Love of Movies: The Story of American
Film Criticism, 2009
281
Bibliography: Stanley Kauffmann
Non-Fiction
A World on Film: Film Criticism and Comment (1966)

Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment (1971)
American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane (1972)
Living Images: Film Criticism and Comment (1975)
Persons of the Drama: Theater Criticism and Comment (1976)
Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and Comment (1980)
Albums of Early Life (memoirs, 1980)
Theater Criticisms (1983)
Field of View: Film Criticism and Comment (1986)
Distinguishing Features: Film Criticism and Comment (1994)
Regarding Film: Film Criticism and Comment (2001)
Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann (2003)
Albums of a Life (memoirs, 2007)
About the Theater (2010)
Ten Great Films (2012)
Film Critic Talks: Interviews with Stanley Kauffmann, 1972-2012 (2013)
Fiction
The King of Proxy Street (1941)

The Bad Samaritan (1943)
This Time Forever (1945)
The Hidden Hero (1949)
The Tightrope (1952; The Philanderer, U.K.)
A Change of Climate (1954; a.k.a. A New Desire)
Showdown Creek (1955, under the pseudonym Lucas Todd; filmed in 1957 as Fury
at
Showdown, starring John Derek)
Man of the World (1956; The Very Man, U.K.)
If It Be Love (1960)
Drama
The Red-Handkerchief Man (three acts, 1933)

The Mayor’s Hose (one-act, 1934)
How She Managed Her Marriage (one-act, 1935); The Singer in Search of a Key
(one-act, 1935); The True Adventure (three acts, 1935)
Altogether Reformed (three acts, 1936); Father Spills the Beans (three acts, 1936)
A Million Stars (one-act, 1937); Cyrano of the Long Nose (one-act, 1937); The
Marooning of Marilla (one-act, 1937); A Word from the Wise, for Three
Women (1937); Come Again: A South Seas Vignette (one-act, 1937); Coming
of Age (one-act, 1937); Eleanor on the Hill: A Fantasia (one-act, 1937); His
First Wife (one-act, 1937)
The Cow Was in the Parlor (one-act, 1938); Mr. Flemington Sits Down (one-act,
282
1938); Right under Her Nose (one-act, 1938)

The More the Merrier (one-act, 1939)
Overhead (one-act, 1940); Play Ball! (1940); Close Courting (one-act, 1940); The
Prince Who Shouldn’t Have Shaved: A Frolic (one-act, 1940); The Salvation
of Mr. Song (one-act, 1940)
Bobino, His Adventures (two-act children’s play, 1941)
The Bayfield Picture (one-act, 1942); Pig of My Dreams (one-act, 1942)
Cupid’s Bow (one-act, 1943)
Food for Freedom (one-act children’s play, 1944)

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Outtakes: Collected Film Essays

and Reviews from Six Decades

Directors on Display (25 directors)

Strawberry and Chocolate, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1993

Take the Money and Run, Woody Allen, 1969

Dark Habits, Pedro Almodóvar, 1983

One Wild Moment, Claude Berri, 1977

Luna, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979

Sweetie, Jane Campion, 1989

Shadows, John Cassavetes, 1959

Gardens of Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, 1987

Hi, Mom!, Brian De Palma, 1970

The Seven Deadly Sins, Jean-Luc Godard & others, 1962

Stroszek, Werner Herzog, 1977

Wise Blood, John Huston, 1979

The Match Factory Girl, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989

Naked, Mike Leigh, 1993

Poor Cow, Ken Loach, 1967

Zazie (in the Metro), Louis Malle, 1960

Oblomov, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1979

Ecce Bombo, Nanni Moretti, 1978

Tilaï, Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990

Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970

Mon Oncle d’Amérique, Alain Resnais, 1980

The Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer, 1981

Summer (Le Rayon vert), Éric Rohmer, 1986

The Mattei Affair, Francesco Rosi, 1972

Summer Skin, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1961

Love at Twenty, François Truffaut & others, 1962

Films in Focus (35 entries)

Mr. Arkadin, Orson Welles, 1955

The Remains of the Day, James Ivory, 1993

Theater into Cinema (20 entries)

The Balcony, Joseph Strick, 1963

First Fictions (15 entries)

Charlie Bubbles, Albert Finney, 1967

“Film Diary, 1961-1963”

BOOK REVIEWS (5 entries)

RE-VIEWINGS & REMEMBRANCES (15 entries)

Gone With the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939

Introduction: “Man of the Movies: The Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann”

Was this a case of film education outdistancing the journalists, whose

This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a

Some, in reading Kauffmann’s conflation of aesthetic and moral standards above,

Let us now consider Stanley Kauffmann on the creative acting of Paul

Lastly in the acting department, consider this analysis, from Regarding

decades of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first—particularly in

Indeed, Kauffmann’s powers of discernment are perhaps most evident in

As if his television commentary and print reviewing of film were not

Kael, “ Harper’s Magazine 230 (June 1965): 114.

Harper & Row, 1971), 110-111.

Harper & Row, 1980), 121.

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 224.

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 83.

Harper & Row, 1975), 241.

52Kauffmann, Before My Eyes, 294.

Harper & Brothers, 1893), 264.

In 1983 a documentary called Improper Conduct, co-directed by the late

Guantanamera, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1995 (The New Republic, 28 July

Both pictures were to some degree surprising, in view of their provenance.

The line of Bernardo Bertolucci’s career is beginning to look as wretched

soldier, gives such a designedly stupid  performance that he’s incredible as a 

An American director, now retired,  used to gibe at unfriendly critics by  

Julius J. and  Philip G. Epstein. As might be foreseen, the script is principally