Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Cinema / July–August 1965

  MASQUERADE

  Make no mistake, this is a praise review. But if you detect a piercing note of bewilderment, a sense of the reviewer spinning about gyroscopically demanding to know which way they went, it all lies in the nature and thrust of a delightful, current trend in adventure films.

  That Man from Rio and the Ian Fleming—James Bond operas typify the movement, with Topkapi and Charade as minor entries in the sweep-stakes. Lineally descended from Huston's Beat the Devil and several of the Hitchcockian posturings (notably The 39 Steps and North by Northwest), the keynote is handsomely-mounted spy or suspense thrillers, with just a touch of Professor Dodgson's Alice and the sort of flair style the French call panache.

  You start with an intricate "threat" (no mere Maltese Falcon will suffice in these times of seeded bubonic plague and Doomsday Machines that will turn us all into a smelly specie of cosmic pizza) and you select the right sort of secret agent to thwart it. Be he suave and cool à la James Bond or rugged and realistic like Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm (as he is in the novels, not—I'm sure—as Dean Martin will portray him in the upcoming series from Columbia), he has to be ready to go anywhere, perform any task, and lay his life on the line from Beirut to Baton Rouge. He also has to be a little out of his gourd to sign up for cockamamie work like that.

  The villain has to be larger than life, snarl a whole lot (if possible, in one of the lesser dialects of Bantu) and have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of super-weapons and super-schemes. He has to, the poor debbil, he's gonna lose in the last three minutes, anyhow.

  It is a phylum of cinema nonsense we heartily endorse. After years of Odetsstyle social outrage, more years of Hollywood twin-bed unreality, and most recently a miasma of depravity films that set the adenoids to jangling and the teeth to scrape, a wave of movie madness is most welcome.

  Add to the huzzahs an item called Masquerade, with Cliff Robertson as the world's biggest patsy, standing around with a Mickey Mouse expression on his matinee idol's face, as a conglomerate circus of super-and-lesser spies uses him for everything but the village basketball.

  Is there a plot? Who the hell knows! Very possible, but don't expect any certainties. There's a kidnapped thirteen-year-old who will shortly become the ruling rajah of a mythical Oil Monarchy, a wily Grand Vizier, some foofaraw about leased oil rights, a retired but hardly recalcitrant English Colonel (brilliantly pavane'd by Jack Hawkins, who only improves with each year and wrinkle), a group of smugglers who aren't smugglers, a beautiful girl who keeps sucking on a bottle of Coke as though she were determined to stay out of The Pepsi Generation . . . a midget, a knife-thrower, a private detective, a ramrodstiff British major-domo, and a cast of lesser estimables who pop in and out like the figurines on a cuckoo clock. The similarity does not end there.

  Robertson is a delight, Hawkins runs close to amuck, the photography ranges from sharp and perceptive to pedestrian and drab, the script bears the unmistakable stamp of William (The Temple of Gold) Goldman's special demented Muse, and director Basil Dearden should be awarded the W. C. Fields Annual Juggling Award for keeping all those cigar boxes and top hats and brass balls skimming through the air. If we detect the crash of an implement or two in the b.g., there really isn't time to worry about it because Robertson still has to get that bamboo pole away from the white-crested vulture, so he can escape from the animal cage with that guy's wife, whom he has been balling throughout the picture, and catch up with the guy who records the Flamenco singers for BBC before he tries to steal the kid back from the double-crossing Home Office official with the donkey, attempting to cross that uncompleted dam in Spain . . . uh . . . try it: painless.

  It might help if Cinema had a type font called Shrill Gothic.

  Cinema / July–August 1965

  MICKEY ONE

  It takes a peculiarly slantwise mind to understand Kafka the first time out. It will take a similarly oriented mind to understand Mickey One the first time it is seen. For the similarities between Kafka's writing and Arthur Penn's personal vision of what film should be, and do, are greater than the dichotomies between the two forms.

  It is this reviewer's contention that Mickey One is the finest American film of the year, and possibly of many years. Despite the impending tragedy.

  For the very obtuseness and existential disorientation of Penn's approach, the very qualities that hoist this film onto a plateau of brilliance and directorial bravura, are the qualities that will most alienate unqualified audiences, and condemn Mickey One to box-office shakiness. Already the tragedy is taking form: the night I saw it, in preview, at the Writers Guild screening, ninety percent of the audience—men intimately knowledgeable with the film form, allegedly—wandered out of the theater as if they had been stunned by the hammer. When they could not fathom what was going on, they turned to ridicule. In New York, the film has already opened, and as a telephone conversation with a friend in Manhattan informs me, "The reviews are bombing it." The name of the game is tragedy.

  The same specie of tragedy that bombed Kubrick's Paths of Glory when it first was released; and again, the similarities are greater than the divergent themes of the two films might lead one to suspect. Only now are we coming to realize what a small masterpiece Paths of Glory has become; and I contend that while Mickey One will die an inglorious box-office death, years hence it will serve as a way-marker for avant-garde filmmakers, and be looked at with ever-growing respect.

  (Which brings up the subject of the unworthiness of most American film audiences, a topic that desperately needs to be talked about. For without a concerted effort toward education of "the great unwashed," we will continue ad infinitum to be deluged with bad, sordid and inept films directed toward the slob mind; and experimental, daring films of this nature will continue to go unmade, because the economic loss will be built in. But that is a topic for another time.)

  The story of Mickey One is a simple, contemporary entertainment, on its primary level. Mickey, a stand-up comic, has gotten into the Mob for a substantial amount of money, through gambling. To work off the debt, they buy up his contract and he is forced to work in Mob-owned clubs. But the constant fear, the constant surveillance, finally weigh on him to a crushing point where he flees, knowing if they catch him, they will kill him for welshing.

  He runs interminably, becomes paranoid in the process, for everywhere he turns the invisible eyes of the Mob seek him out. He can trust no one. He becomes an alley man, a derelict. Then he meets a girl, and for the first time in too long, he is able to relate to someone. He gets himself a booking in a small club, and inevitably, through the innocent machinations of his agent, he gets a crack at a posh room. But he is terrified. If he gets seen, they will find him. He tries to turn the job down, but the manager of the club recognizes him and lets the Mob know who he is, that he has found the comic they have been looking for. The booker of the club—initially—is only interested in furthering the career of this "talented youngster," and so becomes a dupe of the manager and the Mob to put Mickey before the spotlight, where they can get at him. Mickey panics, manages to escape again and is on the verge of resuming his blind flight, when he develops backbone, stands, and finds—in that Kafkaesque logic of human unpredictability—that they are done with him, he is off the hook, free.

  That is the story; on the face of it, not particularly deep or meaningful in terms of psychology or social influences, but then Moby-Dick is only the story of a vengeful man after a big fish, if you want to make it a reductio ad absurdum.

  It is the telling of the story that lends the colors and intricacies, the purport (as if pure entertainment were not sufficient). Penn uses symbolism in a manner that most brings to mind Kafka—hence the comparison. The Mob becomes the fear and death symbol. Mickey becomes the pawn symbol, the man manipulated by his Times and the pressures of a System he cannot even comprehend, much less fit into. (The parallel to K., the hapless protagonist of The Trial, is inescapable.) The girl becomes the sy
mbol of rationality. The club manager, Fryer (played with some confusion in a shrieking key by the usually memorable Jeff Corey), becomes the element of consciencelessness in modern man, the attitude that it is not the individual's responsibility what horrors are perpetrated on his fellow man.

  But even here, in the area of symbolism, an area usually so mystic and clouded by variant definitions, Penn supersedes the trite, and parallels the Kafka implementation of double-level representation. For instance:

  At oddly disjointed and seemingly irrelevant junctures of the fast-moving plot, a tiny Japanese junk-artist appears, motioning to Mickey One. The comic sees him everywhere: in an alley, beckoning with terrifying immediacy; riding on a junk wagon pulled by a blind white horse (the classic death symbol as typified in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds); on a lakefront staging-area in front of Chicago's Marina Towers, displaying a whirling madcap construction of spare junk parts and fireworks; and finally, when Mickey is contemplating suicide, in an automobile destruction yard where cars are squashed into cubes à la Goldfinger.

  Every time Mickey sees the little Oriental, he flees in panic, and throughout the picture we come to believe the Japanese is Penn's handy pocket symbol of death and pursuing evil. Yet the construction is called YES! and in the end it is the little Japanese man, beckoning to Mickey, standing on the edge of that car-cubing destroyer, who saves Mickey from suicide. And in the final moments of the film we come to the realization that Penn has had us, that we have smoothly swallowed his red herring, that the Japanese artist is literally the manifestation of Yes! Yes to life, yes to courage, yes to continuing the fight, yes to fighting conformity and the System, all Systems that threaten to deaden and punch-file the individual in an era where the individual is subjected to the rigors of keeping the machinery functioning smoothly.

  An example of consummate directorial artistry.

  Further indicated in the use of camera and editing. Penn has employed many of the Richard Lester/Sidney Furie/John Schlesinger techniques, but has studiously—and laudably—avoided their excess, their silliness or their bizarre aspects. There are no shots through keyholes, no slantwise camera postures that force one to tilt in the theater seat, no camera obtrusiveness for the sheer sake of brio. In point of fact, the dissolve (a sadly-neglected technique) has been utilized much more than the smash-cut or the upside-down camerawork.

  (In one shot, Mickey, large in the foreground, stares into a destruction tunnel at the car-squash yard, where a vehicle suddenly erupts in a bouquet of flame. As this shot fades, and the car, tunnel and flames vanish, leaving only Mickey corporeal in the foreground, the incoming shot superimposes, and we see Mickey in the background, walking toward himself, up a dark alley. It is a very poignant and subtle way of showing a man literally looking at himself, studying his past, contemplating his future.)

  Kafka's habit of sketching-out the denouement of a story, resolving the problems through the use of absence of resolution, is employed here by Penn, and inherent in this tactic is the seed of the tragedy mentioned above, for it will only serve to confuse the filmgoer who expects everything spelled out for him like a Giant Golden Book. Mickey is on the verge of being murdered by the Mob, and then, suddenly, without warning, he is free, and we see him playing the piano on Chicago's lakefront, the world stretching out all around him, open and free.

  But for those who wish to seek beneath the surface, the point is fulsomely made: a man may win his freedom, even through endless flight, if he never turns his back on living, if he insists on saying Yes!

  The players are all uniformly well-cast, with Warren Beatty's Mickey possibly the best work he has done to date. Even the labored pseudo-Method shticks do not rankle, this time. There is a pathetic quality, a feisty helplessness that Beatty brings to the role that fits glovelike.

  Hurd Hatfield plays the club booker with a dash that forces us to wonder why we have seen so little of this brilliant performer. There is just the right nuance of homosexual attraction for Mickey on the part of Hatfield's Castle.

  Franchot Tone is wasted, both in appearance and in this role, yet his professionalism and dignity manage to illuminate the few minutes onscreen in which his Ruby Lapp mysteriously assumes the mien of a Delphic Oracle.

  If there are carps with the film, they are two, and minor. The sound recording is less than good, and with Beatty mumbling and murmuring, many of his pertinent lines (and even the comedic throwaway lines) are lost on the wind. The ending: while I cannot dispute Penn's option to go for artistic integrity, he might have saved this film for the slob mind, had he made Mickey's ultimate release more largely-written, more easily palatable. But this is a strictly commercial objection, product of this reviewer's having worked in the arena and having come to accept much of the totem and taboo as realistic thinking about what an audience will swallow. It has nothing whatever to do with the heart, soul or intent of the creator, and as such, here in these pages, is suspect and invalid.

  There is an infinitude of other things to say about Mickey One . . . that it is a peculiarly American film, that it could not have been done in any other country with this sort of fidelity and verve, impact and message. That Penn has incredibly become something of an American Fellini, dealing with purely subjective subject matter in a totally objective posture. That the screenwriting is consistently impressive, sometimes almost blindingly so. That the word "pretentious" will be predictably used by every reviewer who cannot summon up enough freedom of horizon to plunge full up to the cerebrum in what the film tries to do. That . . .

  Suffice it to say that Mickey One is more than an entertainment, more than a happening. It is a very personal experience, created out of honesty and a sense of purpose. Even were Arthur Penn to proclaim publicly that he hadn't the faintest idea what he was doing, that the entire company merely winged it, the film would still stand unscathed, for I suspect this picture came as much from the dark and mysterious terra incognita of the subconscious as from a Hollywood soundstage.

  Cinema / December 1965

  THE WAR LORD

  When I was twelve years old, I walked out on a movie. It was Wuthering Heights, in its second reissue, at the Park Theater in Painesville, Ohio. I didn't understand it. I am considerably older now, and last night I walked out on my second motion picture. It was Franklin Schaffner's The War Lord. I understood it too well.

  There are films that enlighten, that point a moral, that enrich and beguile. There are films that make one think, that tell one something new about the world, that explore a viewpoint fresh and different. There are films that merely entertain. Nothing more is expected of them. But when a film bores, that is the cardinal sin. The War Lord, categorically, is the single most boring film I have ever almost seen.

  Almost. This review is being written on half a film. I could not endure sitting through any more of it. As it will be my intention here to convince any reader to avoid this abomination, I will not go into great length, save to explain that the plot concerns an 11th century feudal baron (Charlton Heston) who is awarded a dank and ugly little duchy of swamps and fens on the Normandy coast. He spends half his time fending off the barbarian raiders from across the sea, and the other half trying to roll a local pig-girl in the hay.

  It is the most obstinately endless film ever made. It has all the appeal of attendance at a snails' convention. Heston looks ten thousand years old in the roast-beef-red color Universal has filmed him. (One gets the distinct impression Heston makes a film a week; last week I saw him in The Agony and the Ecstasy and he was brilliant.) Here, he is carved from granite, and about as expressive. Circling Heston's Mt. Everest of impassive taciturnity is a sun about to go nova called Richard Boone. The ex-Paladin stalks about muttering tomfoolery in a very Robert Ruark hairy-chested tone of voice, and never cracks a smile. He is so loud and unappealing, in a role of no merit whatsoever, that one wonders why he took the part. The pig-girl is played in truly underwhelming fashion by Miss Rosemary Forsyth, a creature of pale blue eyes and very littl
e visible talent. Even when she is naked.

  Maurice Evans is a shock, Guy Stockwell barely manages to survive, the plot is guaranteed to induce tunnelvision and highway fatigue, the camerawork is uninspired, the sets (built on the back lot at Universal for a staggering sum) are ludicrous, and in all it is a classic example of bringing Universal's TV techniques to the big screen. (How long has it been since you saw that faint flickering purple line around an actor, when he stands in front of a process screen?) They attempt to give the impression of a big budget film, with nine horsemen, seven peasants and a horde of pigs. By moving them around and spacing them out, they have cleverly managed to give the impression of a struck set just before the stragglers sign their chits and go home for the day.