Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  What I'm plodding toward, of course, is the strange and frightening tendency adrift in the land, lo these last eighteen years, for nature to imitate art. Life ran the phony beatnik photo, and within months, everyone of Kerouac's proselytizers—people who had not lived that way prior to the publication of the photograph though they might have subscribed to the "beat philosophy"—were existing in squalor that could have been a Doppelganger for the Life environment. (And though the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin had never been any farther South than Ohio, Americans everywhere accepted her view of conditions and acted upon it, thereby precipitating, in part, the Civil War.)

  Nature imitating art, rather than the reverse. An artificial reality accepted as an existing condition, rather than truth based upon observation. Nature imitating art, a flagrant warping of a natural state traditional since man first observed the wild dog and scratched its likeness on a limestone wall. (And spare me analogies of primitive man exercising his imagination on those same walls. He may have envisioned a seven-headed Cerberus, but that didn't poof! call one into existence.)

  Now we subsist in a world molded by show biz; predicated on the huckster's image of us; preshrunk and plastic packaged. Everything that does not conform to this insanity seems bogus to us. It seems sometimes that believability is inversely proportional to the amount of bullshit suffusing it. The boundaries of shadow and reality have blurred, thereby causing us to wander terrified through a truly schizoid culture. Shadow, reality, they are now one and the same.

  So who is to say: is the reality Up the Down Staircase or is it The Blackboard Jungle?

  Who are the real kids in the schools? Bel Kaufman's tragic and somehow strangely winsome Alice Blake, her feral Joe Ferone, her demeaned yet noble Jose Rodriguez? Or Evan Hunter's stereotyped Negro, Greg Miller, his clichéd psychopath, Artie West (who could have been written for the young Vic Morrow, so pat was the image of a teenaged giggling killer; a post-puberty Johnny Udo as seen by Widmark)? Which image is more relevant of teachers today? Richard Brooks and Glenn Ford's Mr. Dadier, or Robert Mulligan and Sandy Dennis's Miss Barrett?

  In the answer to these questions—and they're all the same question, obviously—we strike to the heart of the nature of responsibility of our cinematic creators. In the answer we can judge whether our universal prurience is being jellied or our spirits uplifted. The answer tells us whether we have become a filmgoing nation addicted to the cheap, the sensational, the fraudulent . . . or if we are capable of recognizing truth when it is presented to us.

  It also indicates a safe path down which we can pass to discover which films are "good" and which are "bad."

  That Evan Hunter's novel, on which Blackboard Jungle was based, was entirely a product of the author's imagination (as was his North Trades Manual High School, a creation that resembles not at all the New York technical high where Hunter put in a scant few weeks as a summer replacement) is not terribly relevant. The authors of the film could have opted for realism, rather than accepting the whole cloth presented to them. There was an option at the time. Now there is none. So the relevancy of the basic source's verisimilitude is academic, even as the authenticity of Staircase's Calvin Coolidge High School is irrelevant. Pakula and Mulligan chose to go where it was happening. They employed authoress Bel Kaufman—seventeen years in metropolitan school systems as opposed to Hunter's brief and unhappy stint—as technical advisor. They did not cast Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier and a host of overage Hollywood character types in T-shirts and jeans more suitable to lounging around Schwab's than slouching schoolroom desks. They interviewed school kids in New York, and hired them. They did not shoot on soundstages outside which the California popcornland lay drowsing dreamily; they did not shatter their illusion when lunch break was called and the finger-poppers dashed to phone their agents. They shot among the scrawled walls and rotting stairways of New York schools.

  Some things are relevant. Others are not.

  The inevitable product, of course, is what must finally furnish the answer we desperately need. By now, with late late movies doing the saturation for us, we have all seen The Blackboard Jungle. We remember the shapely teacher straightening the seam of her nylon beside the staircase, and then the attempted rape. We remember Glenn Ford's fight with Vic Morrow at knifepoint in the classroom. And we remember a somehow incongruously overage Sidney Poitier doing the best he could to look heroic and noble with Ford as sort of a Black Man's Burden. We remember violence, a touch of sex, some phony pittypat dialogue, a school filled with psychos, junkies, prostitutes, Machiavellian teenaged blackmailers, vandals, imbeciles and assorted rejects.

  What story does Up the Down Staircase tell, by comparison? There is blessed little violence. Nothing a healthy peruser of Playboy could call sex. The talk is everyday, even as you or I, so that don't get it. And the kids who pass through this story seem like individuals, not archetypes. So what is there to remember about this film? And in the memory, do we find our answer?

  The most repetitious memory, the one to which the mind turns without volition, is the feeling of helplessness for the children. They are boxed in. They attend school but learn only by chance, almost—it seems—despite the System. They come to the world wide open, and find it closed to them. The teachers they encounter range from inept and outright criminally untalented to devoted, dedicated and brilliant. But the film denies us the flight of fancy offered by most artless creations in this genre: there can never truly be a happy ending. If they learn by wild chance, by happenstance encounter, then the conclusion is inevitable: most of them will never learn. They will come away from the school encounter perhaps even less equipped than when they began.

  This is something concrete the film tells us. That our educational system is unconscionably inadequate and outdated and gross. The Blackboard Jungle never had that to say. The most important statement of all, and it chose to tell, rather, of gangbangs in the wood shop.

  Following closely on the initial memory is the recollection of the kids themselves, who they are, their inability to communicate, their hostility, their suspicion. Another strong statement that strikes directly to the heart of the problem of silence between the generations. Buried within the attitudes manifested by the kids in Staircase are the seeds of the hippie movement, the concepts of flower power and the love generation. All the lies and obfuscations the kids are forced to submit to, in the name of "getting an education," have poisoned them; the withdrawal symptoms are called hippies, protests, credulity gaps, getting high, dropping out. By studying the characters portrayed in Staircase, any forward-looking educator (and every square momma and daddy who just doesn't understand what all this long hair and hippie nonsense is all about) can make the linkages with the realities through which they move daily. One can get none of this from Blackboard Jungle.

  Then there is the acting. Oddly, one tends to remember the amateurs in Staircase, rather than the professionals. Eileen Heckart, Sandy Dennis, Sorrell Booke, all do fine jobs (though I wish to God someone would tell Sandy Dennis that a persistent stammer, a waving of arms and invariably moist eyes does not necessarily connote deep intense feelings, but merely a studied inarticulateness that wearies as time passes). But it is the helpless character played by Ellen O'Mara that thrusts up from all the wonders of Staircase with a fragile strength that will remain with the viewer long after the subtleties of plot have faded.

  Miss O'Mara's background and biography were sadly neglected in the Warner Bros. handouts on the film, so I have no idea if she is a student actress, a novice hired out of a Manhattan schoolroom, or possibly Dame Edith Evans in disguise. All I can say is that for me, her portrayal of the lovesick high school girl, doomed to a life trapped in a body shaped like a pound of mud, hopelessly infatuated with an English teacher who is a coward and in many ways a rotter, was the high point of the film. It captured for all time the plight of an unlovely child in a world that is geared for the Pretty Plastic People. Her performance is worthy of much more than merely a nomination for th
e debased Oscar, but as that is the only yardstick we have at present, certainly that, at least, is due her.

  The other younger actors—Jeff Howard, Jose Rodriguez, John Fantauzzi—and the ones who played Harry A. Kagan, Rusty, Lou Martin, Linda Rosen—all sparkle and glimmer as they perform the most difficult task an actor can undertake: to instill individual character into the personality of an unformed entity. Children have no real style, no real pattern. They cannot be tagged on sight the way adults can. They have no real touches with the master world. To indicate this, and yet separate each one as a human being with a face and a name and a way to go, is an enormously difficult chore. It has been done not once or twice in Staircase, but almost a dozen times. What do we remember of Blackboard Jungle? Poitier? Morrow? Rafael Compos? Certainly not Ford.

  Which brings us full circle to nature imitating art. After Blackboard Jungle, all depictions of schools where the underprivileged were concerned modeled themselves after the inaccurate Richard Brooks high school. And soon, the reality came into being. The kids acted that way, the teachers accepted it as truth, the parents shuddered at all the knifeplay in the halls of academe, and it became a fait accompli. Staircase mirrors reality. It shows us what our schools have become. It does not belabor us with plot, therefore I have not bothered explicating the minimal twists and turns of same, but forces us by holding us roughly by the neck, to watch the kind of nightmare world in which the kids of today must function for eight hours, five days a week.

  I submit Up the Down Staircase is a film that approaches perfection. It entertains, certainly, but it fulfills even more of the criteria for perfection: it stimulates, it touches, it understands, it deals with truth on several levels. It is my understanding that Staircase has not done smash b.o. business. It has done reasonably well in its first runs, but it is by no means one of the big smasheroo hit successes of the year. It does not approach Blackboard Jungle for public acclaim.

  And therein lies the answer to the questions posed earlier anent the debasement of taste of the American filmgoing public.

  Cinema / Winter 1967

  ROSEMARY'S BABY

  As a writer of fantasy, I cannot conceive of any way in which Rosemary's Baby could be improved. It is, for this reviewer, one of the very finest fantasy films ever made. The promise of Roman Polanski remains undimmed. The talent he displayed with Repulsion is more controlled, more adroit, certainly more impressive here. The acting is beyond reproach: not only Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, who are so right they ring like finest crystal, but a cast of the most exemplary character actors working at the top of their form; to be treated to the likes of Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer (oh, that glorious professional!), Ralph Bellamy, Maurice Evans, Patsy Kelly and (unparalleled joy!) Elisha Cook, all in one film, all working, is to know up front that the vehicle rolls on the safest treads.

  I will not deal with the plot. For those who read Ira Levin's masterful novel (the best contemporary fantasy since Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife), be apprised it is followed faithfully. Polanski, who both scripted and directed, is a friend to the often-ignored novelist whose work is sold to films and then masticated so thoroughly that even Shakespeare had "additional dialogue." For this alone Polanski deserves hosannahs.

  For those who have not read the book, and have not had the film's puzzle explained to them by blathering reviewers who should know better (lop off their hands!), best you go to it fresh and unsullied. For those who have heard descriptions of what it's all about, merely this: the film is about a girl named Rosemary who gives birth to a child, and is not happy about it, for reasons no one could consider anything less than horrendous.

  It is difficult for me not to rush into the streets to sing the praises of this remarkable and compelling film, a darkling vision of unforgettable tension. It is the sort of film Hitchcock would be making today, had he not grown old along about The Man Who Knew Too Much. Polanski has not taken on the Old Master's mantle, he has created his own, with the warp and woof of black magic, danger, the essence of fear and a sinister simplicity that is like all great Art—so deceptively simple-looking, until one tries to take it apart and find out why it functions as well as it does, without any moving parts.

  It would have been incredibly easy for a director as brash as Polanski—who would have had to be infinitely less talented—to muck this film up. All the elements for cheap sensationalism are there. But with the lean, hard scripting (idiomatically so American one wonders how Polanski managed such a flawless translation . . . until one considers Nabokov) and the fiercely underplayed acting, Polanski has spun out his tale dualistically—both as story of growing suspense and as study of young girl going psychopathically paranoid. It can be enjoyed thoroughly from the first moment, with none of the fantasy elements yet making their appearance, simply as an interesting mainstream story of a young married couple; evocative testament to the excellence of Miss Farrow's and Mr. Cassavetes's sturdy, craftsmanlike, entirely engrossing performances. A word more about Miss Farrow later.

  Polanski. Jesus, the man is good! Let me tell you a thing: in all the canon of fantasy writing, the very hardest job of all is the creation of a contemporary fantasy, using the elements of ancient myth or folklore—gnomes, witches, demonology, dragons, dryads, mermaids—in such a way that the old horrors have relevance for our times. The new demons are with us, yet they are merely manifestations of the old deities. Today we tremble before the wrath of the gods of Neon, Smog, Freeway, Street Violence; the God of Machines and the Paingod, the God in the slot machine and that most jealous of Gods who needs to be worshipped daily, The All-Seeing Eye of the Teevee. These gods and demons can frighten us out of our minds where vampires and werewolves cannot. Polanski knows this. He has been constructing with his last three films a modern grimoire utilizing these ancient, dust-and-hoar-covered legends in their modern settings. And he has become a master at it. This is a task of great rigor, but Polanski has somewhichway tapped into the bubbling lava of fear down in the gut of all of us.

  Additionally, the film is filled with a thousand goodies: the dichotomous artificiality of the apartment settings in which Miss Farrow and Mr. Cassavetes play out their nightmare. The rooms seem to be setups for House Beautiful; nothing could be more apple pie American in this day and age of materialism. Decorator furniture, mentions of Vidal Sassoon, Lipton Tea, the Reader's Digest: against which a crawling horror takes hideous shape. Even the usually detrimental use of a publicized pretty (in this case the 1967 Playboy Playmate of the Year, the staggeringly attractive Angela Dorian) works to full advantage. Miss Dorian underplays and acts, seeming at once winsome and touching. Her exit from the film has genuine impact, extraordinary for the brief space of time she is actually onscreen.

  But it is Mia Farrow who carries the production. No mean feat working chockablock with such inveterate and splendidly adept scene-stealers as Ruth Gordon, Blackmer and Bellamy. She is the exhibitor of a kind of tensile strength that I have seldom seen in recent years. Her characterization is fleshed-out completely. There will be no man in the audience who could doubt her selection by the father of the baby as his mate. What she never seemed to possess on television, even at her best, presence, she exhibits here with controlled passion. There can be no doubt after this film: Mia Farrow is an actress.

  For those who need specific statements, who have not yet been able to grasp that this reviewer was knocked out by Rosemary's Baby, let me conclude by saying quite boldly: this film will be looked back upon with growing recognition as the years pass. It is in every way and by every standard of critical judgment, a classic of that most intriguing of genres, the film of fear.

  Cinema/Fall 1968

  LES CARABINIERS

  Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film is an exercise in audacity. It is also, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an exercise in directorial self-indulgence. It is, in many ways, an exercise in idiocy.

  Life is too short. To be bored for even seventy-nine minutes is too long. I await the thunk of poison-tipped
arrows. The critics have acclaimed Les Carabiniers a small masterpiece; friends whose cinematic opinions I respect, have labeled me a lout; followers of my reviews have accused me of carrying a grudge against Godard since I proclaimed I'd felt shucked at Breathless. I stand naked before mine enemies. Perhaps the nictating membranes that slip down over my eyes when I am being stoned into sleepiness by an "art film" have obscured my appreciation of a stunning experience. Perhaps. I suggest those who find this deprecating review of M. Godard's pud-pulling unacceptable, cross check with less-Philistinic reviewers and then go or not go accordingly. I can only report what I can report: and what I report is that this is an elaborate fraud, the practice of which by an American filmmaker would bring forth howls of outrage by the selfsame dilettantes who foam and fawn over Godard's silliness, merely because it is in French.

  Disjointed, spastic, directorially on a level with the famous Candy Barr epic, Smart Aleck, self-consciously acted, it makes a point that was dulled along about the time William March wrote "Company K"; the point being that war is absurd. Oh, really! Don't tell that to Aristophanes, M. Godard, he thought he pointed that out with skill in "Lysistrata." War is absurd? Never been said before so powerfully (according to the critics)? What about Dr. Strangelove? What about Paths of Glory? What about King and Country, How I Won the War, The Brave Italian People? No, I'm afraid not. Which is not to say that Godard, or anyone else, shouldn't try. Saying what has been said already is an accepted attack; only the final product need be judged. By that standard, Godard fails dismally.