The film was conveniently open to all interpretations. You could say it was a satire on the failure of any moral objections to grip the slippery sheen of self-indulgence. You could even say that it was a placid Catholic contemplation of the vague need for forgiveness. But in the end, no answer seems forceful enough to carry through the sheer monotony. When orgies are dull and obscure, as they are here, it means that a kind of laziness, moral as much as physical, has taken over. Yet, as it happened, La Dolce Vita coincided with the decline of censorship and thus gave serious weight to the thought that we would soon be seeing shocking things such as we had never dreamed of before.
Not yet.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Horror, it seems to me, is a painful and erroneous genre if one enters the dark tunnel chanting that label and expecting to be frightened. Almost inevitably that experience ends in disappointment and the historical evidence that no genre dates quicker than horror. But suppose wise heads ignore the label. Suppose they whisper to you, Well, here’s a nice little story in which coincidence seems to get out of hand. Suppose it’s a mixture of a love story and a mystery; suppose it’s just one of those quiet surmisings about the habit in life for supernatural echoes to begin to shiver the surface of the water.
Don’t Look Now is exactly what cool intelligence can do with horror, so long as it fights shy of using that word. Tell yourself that it’s a family story. John and Laura are very happily married—there’s never a hint here of that kind of glib sermonizing that says all their troubles come from marital unease. On the contrary, slap bang in the middle of the film, in one of those luxe but pressingly tight hotel rooms you find in Venice, they enjoy what may be the best married sex scene in the history of the movies. If you believe in that sort of magic, surely they have conceived in that silent frenzy, so stringently cut against shots of them dressing, or reassembling, afterward.
But perhaps you believe in other kinds of magic? A daughter has drowned in the pond in their English garden. They go to Venice in part to recover, and also because John is helping to restore a church there. They meet two English sisters, one of them blind, and it is the blind one who tells Laura that she has seen the dead daughter—not to worry, she’s happy. If only the couple could take that advice. But, in grief still, and in Venice in winter, they succumb to fiction and to wondering. John sees a strange, childlike figure in red in the maze of side streets. He thinks it could be his daughter.
From a story by Daphne Du Maurier and a script by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, this is a film that does not give up its cold grip. Yes, you can write it off, finally, as occult nonsense—except that nothing occult has happened, just the weakness of sensible people for believing in such things. Don’t Look Now deserves a place in any survey of films impressed by the cinema’s irrational force. But it works as a story of rotten luck hitting undeserving people. And I think in the end what it comes close to meaning is the lure of the death wish that calls itself luck.
This is Nicolas Roeg’s best film by far, beautiful, grave, and forbidding. In so many ways it takes its atmospheric suggestions from Venice itself. Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania are perfect as the sisters, but the film belongs to the wounded good nature in Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, just as it clings to our inability to stop believing.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
When I think of Do the Right Thing, the first thought I get is just the look of Bed-Stuy on the hottest day of the year in Ernest R. Dickerson’s gorgeous, overheated color photography. You think you’re in another country, the way Jonathan Demme can hit you for a moment. And there’s a terrific, rowdy feeling in the film for Brooklyn as a black city, down next to New Orleans, except that the people are so much faster with their mouths and ready for the big switch to be hit. I don’t know still exactly what Spike Lee meant—and he is the kind of guy who can look at you with droopy eyes, listen to what you got, and tell you that’s exactly what he meant. But if you look at the movies Oscar-nominated as Best Picture in 1990—Driving Miss Daisy, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams, My Left Foot—there isn’t one of them I’d rather see than Do the Right Thing.
Yes, that’s right, it didn’t get nominated. Spike did get a nod for the script, yet I’d have to say that the script is, in this case, the most archaic thing in the film, and the sure sign of some desperate need to tie it all together at the end. What is special about Do the Right Thing is the life, the look, and the movieness of it all. But what can you say when a lace doily of a movie wins Best Picture and Do the Right Thing doesn’t get nominated, except that the Academy is a club where people can get very sentimental over how good they are to their chauffeurs.
Do the Right Thing is Street Scene with soul food. And it’s not just that you feel you are there. On the contrary, Bed-Stuy never looked like this—but this is a designed, photographed place as fresh as Jacques Demy’s Cherbourg. And Lee, who, in my opinion, is not the greatest shot maker in the world as a rule, has got a deep perspective eye excited by the look. The screen is teeming with action and relationship, even though it’s a very theatrical place where three old cats sit out in a Carib sun gossiping about it all.
It’s the drama that is problematic, the fixing of everything on Sal’s pizza place (Lee had wanted Robert De Niro for Sal at first rather than Danny Aiello—that could have made the trigger tighter still). The opportunity for direct talks on race and everything is too blatant, too easy, and too loaded. I wish the film had moved away from that direction and toward a loose, dancing form where the characters went into song. The daily life and the small incidents were more eloquent than the set-piece melodrama.
Never mind; this is an exhilarating movie, full of pleasure and surprises. The rich cast includes Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Richard Edson, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez, and John Savage. Not least: on a budget of $6.5 million, it had a U.S. gross of $27.5 million.
Double Indemnity (1944)
James M. Cain (who knew a good deal about movies) once said of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, “It’s the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of.” He picked out the ending and the framing device of the movie—the way Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is telling the story on the office dictaphone for his boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). But he might have added that sensational early scene where Walter calls at the Dietrichson house and there’s Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck), upstairs, in a towel and a sweaty shine from sunbathing. When she comes downstairs she is dressed, and she wears that anklet that catches Walter’s eye the way a hook gets a fish. Very soon they’re into that counterpunching flirtation that isn’t in the novel and that you could easily attribute to Wilder’s cowriter, Raymond Chandler. But everything listed here is part of Wilder’s grinning fascination with nasty, sexy people and his huge respect for Cain’s basic story. Because what you get in Double Indemnity is two scorpions, fucking and biting at each other. And you can do that in 1944—a big year for morale—because you’ve got Barton Keyes, the man for whom insurance is a church.
Wilder said it was producer Joseph Sistrom who sold him on Double Indemnity, which was published in 1943. For years, Cain’s earlier book, The Postman Always Rings Twice, had been deemed unfilmable, but Sistrom thought they could get away with Double Indemnity. And Wilder sat down with Chandler to do the script, because Wilder, it was thought, had no experience of the American hard-boiled school. Then it turned out that Chandler knew nothing about movies. So the two classics knocked against each other badly, yet a smooth script emerged.
And Wilder was off. He had John Seitz as his cameraman, and he told him to show the dust hanging in the sunlight as well as the night as real night. The sets, by Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira, are quite beautiful, and the insurance office has a formal power not to be missed. When Walter is dying and Keyes tells him he won’t make it to the elevator, it means something.
The casting is of a k
ind that changed Hollywood. Stanwyck was a little reluctant to be so nasty, but then she saw that it made her. Fred MacMurray simply looks a better and better actor as the years pass, and there are volumes to be said about a man who hates himself even while he’s trying to look so good. But still, it’s Keyes who holds the film in place, and Edward G. Robinson is a fussy little treat, nagging away at detail and looking for his matches. When he says, “Closer than that, Walter,” at the end, you can see that his heart is broken, because he put his trust in Walter and now he has lost faith in himself. Like many things in Wilder over the years, there’s just enough of a hint of something between the two guys that you notice it. It’s like Stanwyck’s anklet, or the angora sweater she wears. There are no holes in the sweater or the film, but you can see through them both. At the time, it didn’t do too well: five big Oscar nominations but not a prize.
The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
Tony Soprano comes into a diner in suburban New Jersey and sees himself already sitting at a table alone, waiting. It’s hardly a surprise. It’s a place he frequents, and so he might easily be there already. In The Passenger, Jack Nicholson slips out of his own life and picks up that of a man who has died in the next room in a north African hotel; no one seems to notice the difference. We are all of us double lives in the age of film and photograph, likely to be held up to judgment against a still picture we don’t recall being taken. The Jekyll and Hyde game is so enchanting now that we have pretty well given up on the old moral scheme, that Jekyll was a humanitarian and Hyde a beast. Once Hyde comes out into the open, you see he’s so like Jekyll it’s amusing.
And so Véronique, a beautiful, dark-haired French girl, goes to Crakow on some kind of trip. There is a demonstration in the city square, so the people in her tour bus have to be rounded up quickly to be driven to… safety, is it? Is that the place? As Véronique takes still pictures as the bus wheels and turns, she does not notice—photography can be a way of not seeing—that the beautiful, dark-haired girl in the square watching the bus resembles her. And she does not know that the girl’s name is Veronika.
That’s the setup for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, in which the Polish woman—possessed of an eerie, extraordinary singing voice—dies as she sings in Poland, and Véronique, trying to find her way through life in Paris, feels the shadow trip her. Of course, this is a film of our era. It identifies the theme or the cutting strategy of so many films, from Short Cuts to Magnolia that lives apart are lives together now. It is that old Poe-faced Borgesian notion of the double at work, but it is the infinite hope—the last desperate gamble?—that all our lives are linked, so there is no such thing as a stranger.
This is Kieslowski’s best film, even if not entirely free from his awkward mixture of moral tales and the look of Vogue magazine. We can never forget the beauty of Irène Jacob in the two roles here or the sepia-enriched color photography (by Slawomir Idziak). The movie looks and feels sexy and modish in ways that actually curtail its huge thematic interest. Still, there are passages of authentic rapture and mystery, and I am grateful for the innocence of Jacob when the knowingness of Juliette Binoche might have dominated, embalming the chanciness of it all.
As it is, Kieslowski’s aim seems to be to free Véronique for her own life, to have her happy. And, of course, if the scheme is valid, then it opens us all up to more complex and more interesting things—not least, whether resemblance is a key or the infinity beyond the locked door. The film is greatly aided by the music of Zbigniew Preisner, and it suggests that we are not far from a moment when composers might start to make films.
Le Doulos (1963)
The other day I saw Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd (2006), which I believe is based on the career of James Angleton, a man sometimes described as a master spy and subsequently revealed as a chronic mess. For about the first thirty or forty minutes of the film, I found it impossible to follow, or discern. Then, gradually, it became clearer and less intriguing. What I am getting at here is something that is vital to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos, a classic of its kind, but a film that can break down philosophers with the simple request “Tell me the story.”
Le Doulos comes from a novel by Pierre Lesou, published in 1957. All I am going to attempt to say is that it is about two underworld figures: Faugel (Serge Reggiani), a thief and a convict; and Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a thief and an informer. Melville wrote the script himself and sometimes claimed that every item of the story did actually fit together and in place. There is a book on Melville by Ginette Vincendeau that breaks the plot down over several pages and then assumes that it has explained it all.
But explanations are so tedious. We learned that lesson—didn’t we?—on The Big Sleep. In the course of the making of that film, several of the participants admitted that they didn’t quite grasp the story. The worry worked its way back as far as Raymond Chandler (the writer of the book), and he agreed that it didn’t fit. Then, late in the day, sensing a deeper anxiety, Warner Brothers added a long explanation sequence to the film. I’m still not sure that that dreary passage works. Who can tell, when it swiftly relinquishes the attention that the film had commanded until that point?
Le Doulos is brilliant and commanding. And I daresay that if anyone ever cracked its story and could reassemble it in the dark, then people would stop seeing the picture. How general a principle lives within this theory? I can think of plenty of instances where confusion over the story prompts viewers to dissatisfaction with a film, or even to walk out on it. So the lesson is not just “Be unclear and they will be hooked.”
Still, there are stories that are more in the telling than the analysis. In the same way, there are situations in life, like the relationship between one’s parents, that enthrall us forever, or until some kind of misery or terminus intrudes. We know the facts of those stories, but the why remains inscrutable. Yet because it is our story, we cannot lose the habit of wanting it told. I suppose we want the story to go on forever—we want our parents to live forever, no matter that it may have been a hard time.
Le Doulos led Melville into an obsession with obscure stories, and I’m not sure it was always good for him. It’s there in The Army of Shadows, where the chaos is held off because we know (or hope) that some of these people were honorable. In the crime setting, no such hopes survive. And when people lie all the time, they become like counters in a game. Whereas the game is always better with people—and people sometimes tell the truth. They cannot lose the habit.
Dracula (1931)
There had been horror before Dracula in American film—after all, one of the great stars of the silent era is Lon Chaney, whose conviction—allied to his imaginative appetite for his own warping, crippling, and deforming—leaves him frightening still in many films. Moreover, we should remember that Chaney died in 1930. But for that, he was the obvious candidate for the two films that introduced the sound horror picture from Universal: Dracula and Frankenstein.
There had been a stage play of the Bram Stoker novel with Hamilton Deane in the title role. It was an immense success, and when it came over to Broadway in 1927 it acquired a strange Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, who had done supporting parts onstage and in the movies. He was three years in the play eventually, taking it on tour, and sufficiently unstable to have reached the conclusion that he really was Dracula.
In 1931, Universal decided to film it. (There were reservations about the story, apparently. Carl Laemmle, Sr., had the feeling that people didn’t want to be frightened and upset. It was his son who stuck out for tightening the screws.) Tod Browning was the director, and he had a script by Garrett Fort that was based on the play (by Deane and John L. Balderston) far more than on the novel. Dudley Murphy did some additional dialogue. Perhaps the key assignment was that of the photography—to Karl Freund, who had recently arrived from Germany, where he had done Murnau’s The Last Laugh and some of Lang’s Metropolis. Freund would become a great Hollywood cameraman—Camille,
Key Largo—before ending up as an authoritarian master at Desilu.
All seemed set, and the movie was a tremendous success, opening on St. Valentine’s Day and being advertised as “The Strangest Love Story of All.” It’s too late to complain. Lugosi’s harsh Hungarian voice announced, “I—am Dra-cu-la,” and the myth was afoot. No matter that it’s Browning and Freund (which ought to be magic); the film is really rather stodgy. The cast includes Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye (very spooky as Renfield), Edward Van Sloan, and Frances Dade. Seen today, I fear that Lugosi is just a preparation for Martin Landau in Ed Wood. In other words, the hint of camp is in there at the outset—not just in Lugosi’s “I drink—wine.” We never feel that anyone making the film had seen Nosferatu. And I’m not sure that Browning was ever convinced by the subject—as he clearly was by Freaks and many of the Chaney pictures.
Never mind those reservations. The film had a million in rentals, and it set Universal on a firm course. Dracula and his relatives keep crawling out of their coffins. The trend is clear. Over the years, as if to satisfy the female instinct about Stoker’s point, the count has become more handsome, more irresistible. A key step in that development was Christopher Lee in the Hammer film Dracula (1958). But Frank Langella’s 1979 version—though pioneered onstage—still left question marks.
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
Peter Greenaway had been known before this film (and since) as a determined member of the avant-garde, experimental, formalist, and intensely intellectual. But The Draughtsman’s Contract caused a stir in that, while retaining some of those austere traits, it also stepped over the line into a kind of British mainstream: It was a country-house mystery, it exploited dandified seventeenth-century elegance, it had a good deal of sex, and any tasteful home would have been happy to have it on its walls. In addition, it was jointly funded by Channel 4 and the British Film Institute for about £300,000. As it happened, The Draughtsman’s Contract was a hit in many countries. Moreover, Greenaway elected to shorten his first four-hour cut to 108 minutes, which seemed to take advantage of provocative material.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 39