Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
There is a fascinating diary on the making of this film, composed by François Truffaut under increasing stress and published in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma in English. The melancholy of the journal comes from the mounting alienation between Truffaut and his star, Oskar Werner, the man whose career had been so boosted by Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) and who was now looking for a route to stardom. But as the filming goes on, Truffaut is increasingly dismayed at the vanity of his old friend and more and more intrigued by the beguiling actor Cyril Cusack, playing the fire captain. Unfortunately, Cusack’s character is the film’s villain, and so the ironic humanity of the captain is an asset Truffaut can never turn in at the bank.
You can see the appeal of Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future world that hunts down books as the germ of subversion. And Truffaut does a lovely job, in snow-touched woods, with his resistance community of freedom fighters who are memorizing the text of books so that they can pass them on to the future. The film does look good, and cameraman Nicolas Roeg does very well by the primary colors of this tyrannous state, especially the fire-engine red. The music is by Bernard Herrmann, and if it is not quite as good as he managed on The Bride Wore Black, still, it helps the picture.
The obstinate problem is with the leads. Werner looks lost far more than self-aggrandizing. It’s as if he didn’t understand the dynamic of a suspense film and how far that demands a kind of coded response in his face. Truffaut said he was far happier with Julie Christie—but really, it doesn’t show. She has a rich opportunity in two roles: the automaton wife and the resistance fighter. It hardly seems possible to fail, but Christie—never an especially intelligent actress—seems to be working without direction.
This suggests another problem: Truffaut never learned to speak decent English. In his own language, especially in these early years, he had a terrific rapport with his players, a kind of intimacy that shows in every small movement of a face. But is it possible that he simply couldn’t get through to actors who had no French? In turn, this reminds one of the considerable trouble French-speaking directors have usually had with English-speaking casts. Jean Renoir’s American films are more worthwhile than Fahrenheit 451, but is it possible that his actors were striving to hear his nuances? A concomitant of this problem is this question: How many of the French critics who adored American cinema always grasped the exact intonations and idioms of American dialogue? Fahrenheit 451 is an interesting curiosity, but it helps show the gulf between the two cultures.
Or was it that Truffaut had such a deep-seated prejudice against what he called “Anglo-Saxon cinema” that he inevitably began to manufacture problems for himself? It’s strange and comic, for here is the man who—apparently—heard every bit of innuendo and superciliousness in the talk in Hitchcock films. Or was it that the pictures in those films told him how to hear the words?
Fallen Angels (1995)
I was in a video store, Le Video in San Francisco, renting Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels. There were two guys behind the counter, very young, and as they noticed Fallen Angels passing through their system, one said to the other, “That’s my favorite Wong Kar-Wai.” The other guy was eager. “Does it have two stories?” he asked. “I don’t know,” said the first guy, “I’ve never seen it all.”
Fallen Angels indeed, and somehow this seemed to me not just classic Wong but a scene from his work in an age when even Nicole Kidman will tell you he is one of the most important and innovative directors around and that she longs to work with him.
I include Fallen Angels because I like it very much and believe you should see it. However, I am bound to point out that the finale of the writing of this book happened to coincide with the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni reported on successive days. I welcome Wong Kar-Wai (who will be fifty in 2008) to this community, but I am not prepared to be jostled out of the hot-shittedness of his work to the point of disloyalty to Bergman and Antonioni. Wong Kar-Wai is innovative, brilliant, and beautiful in ways that had made Jean-Luc Godard lose patience with himself by the age of forty. Even then, Godard had possessed an instant sense of gravity only assisted by his poker-faced wit. There is the smeared color of Wong’s handheld, wide-angled shots that makes kids squirm like eels in the water of Hong Kong. It is a riveting, elastic vision. He knows that it’s possible to watch his images in a trance of delight—with or without drug assistance. But to be so prepared for such limited pleasure is a warning sign of boredom that should not be ignored.
You will say that this is not exactly welcoming or enthusiastic. But again I insist: Look at Fallen Angels, look at the balletic flex of the mass killings and the stone-faced diligence of the girl who cleans up for the killer afterward. And ask what has happened to ballet or diligence. The rhythms, the sour color clashes, the overwhelming carnality of it all, are akin to the feeling of looking into a wok as noodles, sprouts, and human worms change color in the cooking. This is a very talented director who gives every sign of being ready to dump talent in our laps—and no more.
There is a second story in Fallen Angels—so often Wong slams ingredients together to make a menu and a sweet-sour explosion. The second story is of a son and a father, and in ways that are hard to itemize but inescapable as you see it, the father becomes a figure of pathos and tragic reach. The film does not build from that. The two stories do not interact (as events in Magnolia do); they are simply a gesture toward the world being an impossible crowd of situations.
Alas, I think that fame has bred self-regard in Wong Kar-Wai. I do not see him getting better, but I want you to see Fallen Angels as expressive of a moment when he was on the point of becoming an artist and not just a hot-shit cook.
The Fallen Idol (1948)
One day in 1947, producer Alexander Korda and director Carol Reed were together, wondering what Reed might do next. Korda had a bad cold. Before going off to bed, he gave his friend an old Graham Greene story, “The Basement Room,” to read. Reed liked it and went to Korda’s bedroom to tell him so. Straightaway, Korda got Greene on the phone and fixed a lunch for the following day. Greene arrived at the restaurant and asked Reed, “Well, how do you see it?”
The story was about a little boy living in a large house—an embassy perhaps. His parents are always away, so the boy grows close to the butler. But the butler is part of an unhappy love triangle, and there’s a murder. It turns out that the boy, the man’s great admirer, is the one who gives him away. Greene and Reed agreed that that ending was too bleak. But suppose the boy just feels the butler is a murderer and tries to save him but nearly ruins him because of his lies?
The two men felt they’d reached a workable compromise—but I’m not so sure. And it makes an intriguing point about endings. Greene’s ending in the story was very pessimistic, but the salvation in the movie feels contrived and fake. For me it has always spoiled the film. A year or two later in The Third Man, Reed, Greene, and Korda, still together, delivered that great ending where Alida Valli never wavers or pauses but just keeps walking past Joseph Cotten in the cemetery because he’s dead for her. And it was Greene who, in later publishing the novella of The Third Man, had the two characters reconciling and walking away hand in hand.
So The Fallen Idol has a large problem. Never mind; it’s three-quarters of a wonderful film. For the embassy they found an empty house in London’s Belgravia, and then set designer Vincent Korda and cameraman Georges Périnal brought it to life as the place where the boy, Phillipe, plays. And the film, for the most part, is seen through the boy’s eyes.
The grown-up story is the butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), his odious wife (Sonia Dresdel), and the foreign girl Baines loves (Michèle Morgan). And Reed is very good at letting us feel both the boy’s vision of it and a darker adult perspective. Indeed, the boy, Bobby Henrey, is the switch that turns the film on. Reed found the kid and grew very close to him, and it’s a new kind of child acting—full of plausible appeal, but showing how a child can g
et everything wrong, too.
I suspect the audience could have taken the tough ending. A good enough film raises our expectations, and it should be wary of cheating itself. Richardson is sublime, Dresdel is vicious, Morgan is saintly, and there’s a range of good character work from Denis O’Dea, Jack Hawkins, Dora Bryan, Walter Fitzgerald, Bernard Lee, Karel Stepanek, Joan Young, and Geoffrey Keen. But Henrey is the secret heart of the picture.
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
As broadcast on Swedish television, this is a 300-minute work. The theatrical release outside Sweden was 189 minutes, and the DVD release we have is close to 200 minutes. So Ingmar Bergman, the master of the 90-minute film, has relaxed with the onset of memory and a splendid veteran status that began saying with this film that this might be his last full-length work. I do not begrudge the length when Bergman’s appetite for detail and people remains so sharp, but there is a great contrast evident between the detached style of Fanny and Alexander—inward pauses, long shots, slowly unwinding action—and the dramatic severity of the earlier work.
Fanny and Alexander is, if not directly autobiographical, then the work of a man opening himself up to the notion of the adult being fed by the child. But in Wild Strawberries, Bergman took on a structure that had the same interest in the past. What is most striking here is the greater warmth with which that past works on the present. That owes something to the confident use of color and to a mounting interest in décor, but also to the older man’s realization that despite every hazard, so many people come through more or less intact. Especially in Bergman’s early work, there was a feeling of damage set up by early life. But here we feel strengths in the family, in tradition, and even in life itself that can restore balance and hope.
One other point: With Fanny and Alexander, it becomes impossible to overlook the influence of Dickens on Bergman. I am not just talking about the focus on children and their surviving hardship and threat. Nor even the Vergerus episode here, whose tone so resembles that of David Copperfield with the Murdstones. Instead, I am thinking of the abiding example of the theater (the grandmother of Fanny and Alexander is an actress, and at the end she is thinking of a comeback in Strindberg’s Dream Play). The theater is seen as a model of life and a means of entertainment for all, in which the individual may lose his or her own neurosis. Surely this is Bergman’s great lesson from life: that work in performance can turn real pain into a manageable process.
The pacing of Fanny and Alexander is magisterial, yet the experience of these children sustains the grandeur. The importance of place and routine is plain. And—this is no surprise—the acting is both collegial and idiosyncratic: Erland Josephson as the Jewish uncle is a Micawberish creation; Jan Malmsjö makes Bishop Vergerus hateful; Ewa Fröling is one more Swedish beauty as the mother, Emilie; Gunn Wållgren is the grandmother; and, among so many other good performances, I would pick out Harriet Andersson, scarcely recognizable but wicked as Vergerus’s maid.
It’s fair to say that the ease of working here has gone a touch too far. Just as Bergman’s earlier pessimism could seem forced, so here the benevolence is a degree too much, too cozy. It’s a small cavil. Bergman proves himself a visionary of old age, the saint of lives that may think they are settled.
Fantasia (1940)
If you had to compile a book about the decline of the American empire, there’s a long list of things that many Americans hailed as triumphs but that turned out to be unmistakable proof of disaster. Take Fantasia. In the late 1930s, Walt Disney had the thought for a new “Silly Symphony” in which he would supply an animated story to go with Paul Dukas’s symphonic poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The idea was nifty and not a bad match for the music. It was Mickey Mouse as the mischievous apprentice who is finally packed off by the sorcerer’s magic and a pack of swatting brooms. (You may still judge that this is the best thing in Fantasia, one section that gets the tone right.) Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra were doing the music, which meant that the piece was costing $125,000, a lot more than was ever devoted to a Mickey short.
Roy Disney pointed this out, and Walt’s grandiose response was, Let’s do a whole movie like this. Stokowski (who evidently foresaw a lot of publicity for himself and his orchestra) said, Why not? Well, Fantasia ended up at 116 minutes at a cost of $2.28 million. The final selection was the Dukas, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (done to abstract animation), Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain”—and why not Schubert’s “Ave Maria” as a finale?
The whole thing was introduced and narrated by musicologist Deems Taylor. If only it had had the calm common sense of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. What happened—and I think it was predictable—was that the better the music, the more trashy, second-rate, and absurd the pictures seemed. I’m not sure if the history of Hollywood has so naked an example of the unbridgeable gulf between high art and low art. Moreover, the vulgarity of Fantasia has to be set beside the degree to which Disney’s suffocating example has worked to deny alternative approaches to animation in America. There is a kind of animation as well drawn as painting, as adult as real drama, and as capable of dealing with experience as, say, Svankmaier and the Quay Brothers.
Nor is there really any reason to think that a child might be drawn toward “classical” music by the film. Disney had no respect for, and very little understanding of, how music worked. He wanted it to be accessible, malleable, and ready for translation. So when he gets to Stravinsky and Beethoven, the onscreen result is hideous and distracting. Nor did the American public respond to the picture—it was a flop and showed Disney’s lamentable failure to grasp his own achievement. That the picture was a monument of animation hardly matters—the drawing was often brilliant, but always “house style” and impersonal. The Academy nevertheless awarded certificates of praise to Disney and his top people and to Leopold Stokowski.
Fantômas (1913)
Louis Feuillade, born in 1873, was the son of a wine dealer. He did military service in the cavalry, and he worked variously as a writer, an actor, and a bullfight critic—remember the matador with his cloaks and capes. In 1906 he started writing stories for the infant movie industry in France, and by 1910 he was the director-creator of immense, energetic serials, the standard short-form suspense material offered to a returning audience. What we know about him depends to a great extent on what has survived (thanks to the Cinémathèque Française). It is simply not possible to take an overview of his career, or even to be sure that Feuillade was ahead of his time and his peers. There may have been others. But in our present state of film history, Feuillade is rated as a pioneer, and even a genius. Whatever decision the viewer comes to, he is the first true director, chronologically, to appear in this book.
We do know that Fantômas was a sensation in Paris. It was a serial of just three episodes, made by Gaumont, taken from the novels of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, in which Fantômas was a masked figure, the Master of Crime, who teases and torments a policeman named Inspector Juve. The criminal organization led by Fantômas is infinite, and although the characters are wildly farfetched, they are grounded by being filmed in and against the actual streets of Paris in 1913 (before the war began and regulations against filming were imposed).
Several things emerge from this setup and are notably distinct from similar serial adventures of the day in the United States: The serial in America is always in defense of law and order (before the onset of any censorship), yet in France the films are allowed to glamorize and eroticize the criminals and take pleasure in the way their infinite, and even magical, resources help them avoid capture. The criminal urge is recognized as something the public nurses. The mystical power of Dr. Mabuse in the German films just a few years away is certainly borrowed from the Feuillade pictures. Second, the view of Paris in the background is not just a
n invaluable physical record but a haunting mixture of real and surreal. And the photographic quality helps underline the deliberate siting of fantasy actions in real places. What’s more, as time went by and Feuillade felt emboldened—even in war, as security was a blanket that could be used to smother his cloaked characters—he hired increasingly daring players and designers. Just as Paris was drawn into his work, so it partook of ideas and people from the avant-garde.
The Feuillade serials that followed—The Vampires (1915), Judex (1916), Tih Minh—(1918) are exhilarating, playful, profuse, and ingenious in their plot invention, and sinister in their notion of the disease of crime invading the stable structures of society. America caught the virus in the gangster films of early sound—the idea that we could have fun saying hallo to some hoodlum’s little friend—but in the silent era Feuillade was without rival or peer at letting the black cloak confound morale. For the first time, it was hard to tell entertainment from subversiveness.
Fargo (1996)
At last, the proof that in the well-known phrase “Prairie Home Companion,” the word to mistrust was “Companion.” Yes, Fargo’s cold enough to prompt a good deal of cuddling for comfort—and Marge Gunderson is pregnant—but the idea of trusting anyone ever again is so much less pressing than that lonesome cold. After all, what is Jerry Lundegaard doing but getting his own wife put up for ransom to get himself out of some tricky fiscal difficulties?
Fargo is just 97 minutes long, compact and efficient (cost $7 million; earnings $24.5 million), a sort of “the gang’s all here” of American independent film, and a quiet knockout. When the snow is that thick, you won’t hear a body or a Douglas fir fall, just the hush being underlined. But the tonal range of the film is what is leaving puffs of breath in the air. From one moment to the next this film is gruesome, bloody, and “Oh, no!” as well as so funny you wish those starchy voices would stop talking for a second.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 46