If you need it, here is the reminder: The Allies went to war in Europe to save Poland from Nazi takeover. Yet here we are in May 1945, the last day of the war, and Poland has not been rescued. It is a matter of judgment or taste whether it has survived. But Maciek and his colleague are in a small town in Poland, under orders from the Polish émigré government in London, to assassinate the local official who is ready to make peace with the Russians. The Nazis are gone from Poland, along with the Jews, but Poland is in the Soviet sphere of influence. Another tyranny is coming into place. And Maciek—so young, so vivid he is nearly girlish—is the last assassin, well aware that his task is futile, but acting out the part like someone in Dostoyevsky and ready to convert himself into one more glass of vodka. There is a spectacular scene where he lines up those glasses—the lost heroes of the resistance—and sets light to them one by one. And in his attitude, he is tragic but ironic. He has to die, for he is nearly mad.
The film covers twelve hours or so in the small town, much of it in the ramshackle hotel where the target of the assassination lives. Maciek meets a girl there, a barmaid (Ewa Krzyzewska), and they become lovers of a doomed sort. But the photography is tender and lustrous, and you can see how far Wajda has come in his trilogy, even if the characters in Ashes and Diamonds are the most gripped by doubt and anxiety. The action has set pieces—Maciek dying among sheets hanging on a line and then on a trash heap—and there are glaring symbols from time to time (an upside-down crucifixion, the white horse of Poland). But the trilogy is a powerful work, and Ashes and Diamonds is the romantic treatment of Poland’s final failure.
The film owes a lot to its Maciek, Zbigniew Cybulski, an actor who could hardly deny the impact of James Dean and Marlon Brando on him. Alas, Cybulski was killed in 1967, in a rail accident. He was only forty, and he had been born in the Ukraine. But he resolves that this film will be existentialist, ironic, and rueful, and he survives his own mannerisms as easily as Dean ever did.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
In the late 1940s, there were several American neo-realist crime pictures, shot on the city streets and determined to reveal the tough, unglamorous life of a cop—The Naked City was one of the best known. The Asphalt Jungle sounds like the same kind of thing, a lament for used-up shoe leather and lost illusions. But it’s John Huston, and it’s a bit different. The W. R. Burnett novel (1949) that he sold to M-G-M was a conventional piece, narrated by a police officer, very much along the lines that a postwar city was a jungle for hoodlum apes.
Huston wasn’t the only director who might have turned the emphasis around, but he sees the criminals as colorful monkeys, full of character and charm, trying to make their own sort of living in difficult times. Indeed, Huston—who kept company with diverse and fascinating circles—opined once that crime was just “a left-handed kind of activity,” nothing you could really condemn, but a vagary in human nature and understandable if you realize what a raw deal the would-be criminals have had.
It was shot beautifully in Los Angeles by Harold Rosson, with a harsh-looking image (you feel the asphalt from the first sequence, where boorish cops are trying to hustle enigmatic criminals). There’s no doubt where the sympathy lies as the film assembles its gang for “the job.” There’s Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), a “hooligan” but not bright, a guy who longs to live among horses. There’s Gus (James Whitmore), the laconic barman, who can be expected to stash guns and drive the car. Throw in an expert safecracker, Calveri (Anthony Caruso), and Alonzo “Lon” Emmerich (Louis Calhern), the crooked lawyer who has a sick wife and “some sweet kid,” Angela (Marilyn Monroe), on the side. There’s Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a pro and a turncoat. And there’s the Dutchman, Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), a brilliant manager of jobs who can’t keep his imagination off girls.
And, more or less, we like them. Dix is the hero, with a girl named Doll (Jean Hagen). Lon is made very sympathetic by Calhern, and his scenes with Marilyn are lovely, wistful and horny. But Doc is the gem, the little artist, doctor of something or other but expert in perverse human nature; it’s his luck that, when his escape is nearly made, he will be picked up because he lingered just a few seconds too long to watch a pretty girl (Helene Stanley) dancing to a jukebox.
The film was scripted by Huston and Ben Maddow, and everything ends up all right. The cops “win.” A suicide kills himself offscreen in just the poetic touch that would have appealed to the character. Dix gets his by a horse meadow. And Huston’s self-mocking toughness has carried off the switch to perfection. By the way, he got this job only after he managed to beg off doing the monstrous Quo Vadis. Working on a sweet picture or one that stank could be just luck. And that’s how Huston sees the jungle operating. John McIntire is the police commissioner with a routine sermon on the wicked enemy, but he knows those are the guys Huston prefers.
L’Atalante (1934)
I have to gulp at the thought of just five hundred words for L’Atalante, instead of a book. This is not so much a masterpiece as a definition of cinema—and thus a film that stands resolutely apart from the great body of films, even most of those in this book. L’Atalante is the end of director Jean Vigo’s life, yet it is the dawn of so many possibilities in cinema and a manifesto for a kind of personal cinema that may destroy the filmmaker in the process while leaving his name like a memorial. It is the French New Wave, yet it is l’amour fou as well, surrealism and magic all done in a camera style that hauntingly evokes and then surpasses a thing called gray reality.
That may be the best place to start in a short tribute, for the camera was in the hands (chiefly) of Boris Kaufman, a man whose career reached from The Man with a Movie Camera (made in 1927 by Boris’s brother, Denis, known as Dziga Vertov) to 12 Angry Men and other pieces of New York naturalism. Now, how could anyone see or feel ghosts or spirits in Sidney Lumet’s jury room, yet how, as this old barge passes slowly by, do we not see all the spirit forms of romance in L’Atalante?
Is the difference just France in the 1930s and America in the 1950s? I think not. Vigo is a poet, and it would not have been possible for anyone on his film to miss the way in which every image was both a sufficiency and a metaphor. In America, it has always felt natural and comfortable to assume that if you photograph something, then you come away with the exact appearance of that thing; all the more credit, then, to everyone from Diane Arbus to Samuel Fuller, who guessed that the truth was more open. But in France, the inwardness of the image is not questioned, and that is the fundamental thing that makes it easy (or necessary) to treat French film as an attempt upon art, as opposed to entertainment.
The story is as simple as it can be. Two men work a barge, Jean (Jean Daste) and le père Jules (Michel Simon). They are like Ishmael and Queequeg, except that Jules has something of Ahab, Long John Silver, and Jonah’s whale in him. Jean finds a woman to marry (Dita Parlo), and after a brief, stark ceremony, the wedding procession walks back to the boat and the barge moves on again, plus one. The love falters. The woman goes away. The man searches for her. And all the while Père Jules is a monster of eternity, bestiality, and death, all those things the lovers fear and ignore.
Desire makes the story work, and the film is waterlogged with longing, from the couple’s need for “happiness” to Jules’s urge for outrage. This kind of rural life seems unshakeable, yet the film is filled with vulnerability and the immanence of loss as it shifts our gaze from Miranda to Caliban and sees that they may be siblings or in allegiance. The essential music is by Maurice Jaubert.
Atlantic City (1980)
Sally (Susan Sarandon) works at one of the casinos in Atlantic City. She is a waitress at the shellfish counter, but a part of her day is devoted to lessons on how to speak French and how to be a deft croupier. Her teacher is Joseph (Michel Piccoli), a worldly Frenchman. He promises her a future in Monte Carlo. But at the end of the day, Sally smells of fish, so she comes home and washes her arms, her neck, and her breasts in lemon juice. In the dark, across the way, Lou (Burt Lanca
ster) watches this show. He is handsome but elderly, a minor player in the numbers racket who tries to dress like an old-fashioned gangster. Then Sally’s sister, Chrissie (Hollis McLaren), arrives in town, very pregnant, with her husband, Dave (Robert Joy), and a load of stolen cocaine. Soon enough the real gangsters will come looking for their stuff. Lou nurses Grace (Kate Reid), his lover from way back, who came to town, took third place in a Betty Grable look-alike contest, and stayed around.
The dreams are fanciful, the past is another country, and it’s winter in Atlantic City, which hasn’t quite made it yet as a major American resort. But these lives get tangled, and for a very short season Lou is able to behave as a gangster might have done once before, and Sally becomes his doll. It’s a light, whimsical film, fond of its dreamers, and just a touch generous to them all. It’s an interesting question as to whether director Louis Malle would have been quite as forgiving if he had had French characters. Does he see America as morally looser, or more adventurous? At any event, the characters we’d happily see gone are disposed of, and those who have earned a night or two of wayward bliss are given it.
In truth, it’s a French-Canadian film, despite the setting. Denis Héroux produced it out of Montreal, with Malle’s brother, Vincent, from Paris. The special flavor comes from John Guare’s screenplay, full of ingenuity without ever abandoning realism. It was shot by Richard Ciupka, with clever design work by Anne Pritchard and costumes—Lou’s tendency to white and gray is splendid—by François Barbeau. Michel Legrand was in charge of the music, though there are extracts from Bellini and Paul Anka.
It would make a fine double bill with The King of Marvin Gardens, and Bob Rafelson would have every right to claim an extra toughness. Yet Atlantic City got five big Oscar nominations: Best Picture and Best Screenplay, as well as nods for Malle, Lancaster, and Sarandon.
The supporting cast includes Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, and Wallace Shawn. It’s a sweet picture, and not a bad example of the calculator in Louis Malle. He was a bit like Lou, acting tough and experienced but prepared to settle for a lucky bonus here and there. This is five nominations better, and several degrees more facile, than The King of Marvin Gardens.
Attack! (1956)
In the mid-1950s, Robert Aldrich made a run of films that easily explains why so many smart French filmgoers thought he was the crack shot among younger American directors. I’m thinking basically of Apache, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife, and Attack! In subject matter, they cover the waterfront, though thematically one can see emerging a kind of demented heroism, a warping ordeal in which the braver or more forthright the hero becomes, the more doomed he is. That said, it’s possible to see Attack!—the least known of the four now—as the most characteristic.
It comes from a play, Fragile Fox, by Norman Brooks, and despite the opening-up in some harsh combat scenes, no one could miss the staginess of the format. During the Battle of the Bulge, a few American soldiers huddle in shelled buildings or dugouts in a mountingly hysterical analysis of courage. Aldrich once said, “Basically it’s an antiwar film. You start from the cliché ‘War is hell’ and you try and refine that into a personal statement of the unnecessary heroics that induce people to get into a war-psychology. And reverse the war-psychology into saying that it’s a pretty ugly business. The Defense Department refused cooperation and it looked for a while as though it wasn’t going to be made. But we devised methods to make it look reasonably acceptable and realistic and went ahead.”
You can see the Defense Department’s point of view; for as scripted by James Poe, this is a film about the fear of fear, and the way command power can manipulate military operations to benefit public relations. Thus, though Eddie Albert plays a devious and cowardly officer (and does so superbly), the real villain of the piece is Lee Marvin’s cocksure colonel, one of his very best bastards, and the kind of self-promoting officer we have become more familiar with in military operations since Attack! In passing, I should note the obvious influence of this colonel and the film’s overall mood on Stanley Kubrick and Paths of Glory.
But Attack! truly is a Jack Palance film, and one of his best. His character dies some ten minutes or so before the end of the picture, but there are several glimpses of his face thereafter, caught in the horrific moment of death, deepened by rigor mortis and by Palance’s none-too-subtle Christ-like stance. These shots make it clear that he was an actor with a death mask rather than a face. That is not a flippant comment. Attack! sends his character to the cross, and Aldrich trusts the actor to deliver the inner dread and exultation in the crisis.
It’s an Associates and Aldrich film, which means Joseph Biroc did the photography and Frank de Vol the music. Together, they made something claustrophobic and special, a true portrait of the madness in war. The supporting cast includes Robert Strauss, Richard Jaeckel, Buddy Ebsen, Strother Martin, Steven Geray, and Peter van Eyck. In hindsight, it’s stunning that Attack!, Men in War, and Paths of Glory were overlooked while The Bridge on the River Kwai was hailed as an important statement on war.
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Over the credits, a Schubert piano sonata pauses for the braying call of an unseen donkey—had Robert Bresson turned to comedy at last? Or to what a donkey helplessly stands for? After all, Bresson can cast his pictures and carry out their direction by being abstemious over personal expressions and those habitual yieldings toward sentimentality that others are prone to (call them smiles or frowns). But a donkey! Can anyone film a donkey without summoning up that unquenchable (if absurd) affection for any placid animal beset by man, kind or unkind? When the horrid teenage boy in the leather jacket ties newspaper to Balthazar’s untidy tail and sets fire to it, how are we to prevent or restrain our hatred of him, let alone our moral disapproval?
Somewhere in the French countryside, a donkey is born. It is not clear at first whether he is central to the film or a mirror to all the human characters he meets. But I think he is intended as a saintly example, ignored by some and likely to vex and anger others. He grows up, cared for by a young girl (Anne Wiazemsky, frozen-faced but still closer to an actress than Bresson had been before). He works for the baker, carrying panniers of loaves around the area—that is the time of the tail-burning. He is beaten by cruel people. He does tricks in the circus. He falls sick and is nearly “put down.” He attracts a strange, Christ-like vagrant. But, like any animal, he is at the mercy of fate or providence. And as we watch him more closely, so he becomes like a pilgrim, making his way toward death, on a hillside surrounded by sheep.
No, Disney did not seek the remake rights, though that idea is probably less absurd than Cary Grant’s redoing Bicycle Thieves. The ending of Au Hasard Balthazar is, I find, moving in ways that exceed Bresson, just because this saint is a donkey. We do not know how to look at such creatures without abandoning scrutiny or objectivity. It’s not that Bresson’s austere style—with quick dissolves here, going from one time to another without connecting the two—ever comes close to a kind of Black Beauty for donkeys. But one look at those large, sad eyes—why do I call them sad?—and we are suckers. Donkeys may be as withdrawn as Bartleby, but they can’t help their affinity with get-well cards.
The photography is by Ghislain Cloquet; it was his first Bresson film, though he would do Mouchette and (I have to admit it) Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin. The music is by Jean Wiener, when it is not Schubert. And the supporting cast includes Walter Green, Jean-Claude Guilbert, and François Lafarge. The film is also notable for the attention Bresson pays to teenagers. He was to become increasingly drawn to and troubled by the anger or confused feelings of young people, no matter that his purity of style still manages to suggest a cinema made in the eighteenth century.
Autumn Sonata (1978)
At the time, much was made of the meeting—at last—of Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman. But Ingrid might have anticipated a chilly atmosphere. She was ill already. This would prove her penultimate film—she died in 1982—and it is a very
testing challenge on some aspects of being Ingrid Bergman that had slipped by in all the celebration and scandal. So Ingrid might have guessed what Ingmar would have waiting—and no one was more preoccupied with issues of parental responsibility than Ingmar.
So Ingrid plays Charlotte, a world-famous concert pianist. Her longtime lover and musical associate, Leonardo, has just died. One day, she gets a letter from her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann), who lives in the Norwegian countryside with her husband, Viktor (Halvar Björk), and her spastic sister, Helena (Lena Nyman). So Charlotte comes on a visit and is startled to find Helena, for, as the mother, she had years ago put Helena in an institution. Eva has quietly elected to look after her.
That is the beginning of Charlotte’s stay, a time in which the mother listens to the daughter play Chopin and feels bound to correct her playing; and in which, in a long middle-of-the-night encounter, all the old unresolved issues are made clear. What it all comes down to is that Charlotte has put her career and her art above her own children, and that Eva, at least, has suffered in resentment and loss because of it. In all his talk, it is quite clear that the film—if obliquely—is relying on our knowledge of Ingrid’s life. The Leonardo figure (though he appears in flashback, played by an actor) is plainly an allusion to Roberto Rossellini.
It is a film of faces and interiors, done in color and shot beautifully by Sven Nykvist, and as such it is a model for the very late period of Bergman’s ventures, like Faithless and Saraband. It is very powerful because of that deep concentration on words from the heart and because of its lack of interest in any other diversionary subject. Still, it is not as good as the later films, in part because it does seem set up and reliant on Ingrid’s willingness to go through this ordeal. She is wonderful in the film, and one cannot doubt that after all the adventures of her career she remained a great Swedish actress, utterly at home with Ingmar’s grilling. But it says something else about Ingrid’s masochistic narcissism that she will sit still for this. In a way, the film needs the voice of Leonardo—or some figure more lively and generous than Liv Ullmann’s Eva.
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