'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Flags of Our Fathers, it seems to me, is an intelligent and pained study of the stupid deceits in “victory”—a film well worth making. Whereas Letters from Iwo Jima is an academic exercise from a guy who has always done shoot-outs pretty well. On the other hand, Fires on the Plain is about the end of humanism, and Clint Eastwood is still too content with himself to notice that post has been passed. This film comes from a novel by Shohei Ooka, with a script by Natto Wada. The black-and-white photography is by Setsuo Kobayashi.

  The Firm (1988)

  No, this is not your 1993 Firm with Tom Cruise; this is the 1988 Firm with Gary Oldman, the one that Alan Clarke made. For the most part, Clarke made his films for British television, taking social situations that interested him and just boring in with a mixture of documentary authenticity (so the acting was like fresh blood) and a camera technique that was in love with Steadicam and this idea that a camera could walk in anywhere and see something special. It was a method that included being friends with writers and actors, and knowing them so well that he could lean on them to do more or do better. So the whole film became a test of daring, just as it was for the BBC or ITV later (would they dare to show it?).

  The Firm grew out of what was happening in British soccer—in particular, the violence at games or around the grounds on game-days, and the special reputation for “bother” that British fans were getting in Europe. Mrs. Thatcher said it was all unemployed kids fighting; keep them out of the grounds and everything would be all right. But The Firm is based on a darker knowledge: that the trouble is coming from gangs of older men, people with jobs and families, who just love the aggravation they associate with soccer and who have a general contempt for their society that is neither unfounded nor inexplicable. In part, it’s because the society has never been able to reach them.

  The script was by Al Hunter. David Thompson produced for the BBC. But “Clarky” was very much in charge out on the streets, filming adventures and accidents, encouraging his actors to improvise and to be dangerous. Bex Bissell (Oldman) has a wife (Lesley Manville) and a couple of kids, as well as a decent job in real estate. But Bex’s life—his soul—is entirely caught up in the mounting rivalry between two gangs of football thugs. It ends, as it should, with a killing—not so much as a demonstration of a sick society but as a warning as to what heedless energy will do.

  Oldman has never given a better performance than he does in this 70-minute film, and you should remember in the quarrel scenes he has with his wife that Oldman and Manville were married at the time. The rest of the cast includes Phil Davis (a mainstay of modern British film), Andrew Wilde, Charles Lawson, William Vanderpuye, Jay Simpson, and Nick Dunning.

  Clarke (1935–90) died far too young, and it’s very hard to say that BBC drama is as tough or threatening without him. There are several other Clarke films I thought of as well as The Firm—like Elephant, The Road, and Scum—but in the end I went for this one because it’s grit in your face after the talcum powder of the Tom Cruise Firm. If you want to see Clarke’s influence, you can find it in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth or in Tim Roth’s The War Zone.

  Fists in the Pocket (1965)

  Born and raised in Piacenza, in a strict Catholic, bourgeois home, Marco Bellocchio went to art school in London and came back a scourge to his own class in Italy, a man infected by Buñuel and Dostoyevsky in equal measure. His debut film, Fists in the Pocket, was one of the great crossover films in Italian history, abandoning the conventional bourgeois ethics and stability for something (or anything) new and dangerous. It’s one of the sharpest films of the decade in its attack on the family.

  Four adult children live with their blind mother. Augusto (Marino Masé), the older brother, is in charge, but he’s indolent, cynical, and greedy. He has two younger brothers, Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), who is sweet but retarded, and Alessandro (Lou Castel), epileptic, brilliant, dangerous, and a giddy maker of mischief. Then there is their sister, Giulia (Paola Pitagora), who is unstable. As the story develops, Alessandro comes to believe that only one thing can save their ignominious status: a kind of collective suicide—and he can handle it.

  Bellocchio establishes this dysfunctional group at the dining table. There is no central experience or direction. People read books. They sink into their own dismay. The cat prowls the table stealing food. People conspire behind each other’s backs. There are sudden outbursts of temper and violence. It is like mealtime in a prison or an institution, and while the audience can guess that Alessandro is ill, we are still drawn to his insulting, aggressive, yet wildly funny mockery of the others. He has the last energy in the family, no matter how destructive he may be. The older brother, by contrast, is like a bored guard over the disarray.

  And Lou Castel was a sight to behold as Alessandro. With a lot of James Dean’s brusqueness, he was a Swede who had to be dubbed into Italian for this film. He never enjoyed a settled career, but everyone who loves Fists in the Pocket gives him credit for his wayward instincts.

  Bellocchio wrote and directed, Alberto Marrama did the photography, Gisella Longo was in charge of art direction, and Ennio Morricone wrote the music. The style is rough and jagged, with a lot of long lenses used on intimate scenes so that focus is shallow and ordinary household objects jut into the frame with menace. The emphasis is very emotional or psychic, and a reminder that in years to come Bellocchio would work closely with his own analysts.

  In the mid-1960s, this was as striking a debut as Bertolucci’s, and it was reckoned that Bellocchio was a great director in the making. That promise has not quite been fulfilled, but nothing takes away from the stormy mood of Fists in the Pocket and its helpless scrutiny of a family living like isolated animals. There was a sequel of a kind, The Eyes, the Mouth (1982), with Castel again, Angela Molina, and Emmanuelle Riva. For anyone struck by the first film, pursuit of the second is to be encouraged.

  Five Easy Pieces (1970)

  Not many films before Five Easy Pieces had made such a bold assertion as saying, Look, that American down there—Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), apparently an oil-rigger in California—is a self-imposed exile from an intense, tender, and musical family in the Pacific Northwest, or somewhere that looks like it. It’s not just that he could have been a contender; he might have played piano recitals in hushed halls for the quiet reverence of just a few. But something in Bobby couldn’t take the claustrophobia or the intensity, and so he hit the road to be the very opposite of what he had been raised to be. It is the same dynamic as figures in James Toback’s Fingers, but that came seven years later. Still, it’s a reflection, I think, of Nicholson, a quiet man who loves to be extroverted, and of director Bob Rafelson, studious, Jewish, Ivy League, very bright, who likes to be called Curly, roam the world, and behave like an adventurer.

  Of course, Bobby isn’t really happy or right anywhere he goes. He had Karen Black as a girlfriend at first, and her every word grates on the fine soul he hoped to lose. In the Northwest he sure would like to have his brother’s consort, Susan Anspach, but she sees the horror of his self-betrayal and gives him back all his old guilt as if she were a member of the family. At the end of this film, Bobby is on the road again, ready to abandon every tie. It seems to me an open question whether he is going to become a vagrant or an outlaw. Maybe he settles the dilemma by being an actor.

  Rafelson was working from a terrific script by Carole Eastman—terrific not just in its construction but in so many scenes of astonishing dialogue, like the chicken-sandwich set piece in the diner, Bobby’s long speech to his silent father, and the lacerating way Anspach dismisses him. Rafelson has no more reason to trust an artist than an oil-rigger, and it is part of his great appetite that the film also has several other fascinating but mysterious female presences: Lois Smith as the sister, Sally Struthers as the sensational motel fuck, and Helena Kallianiotes as the witch picked up on the road.

  The picture was made for BBS (Rafelson’s company with Steve Blauner and Bert Schneider), and it was so cheap it turne
d out to be a significant hit—and an example of the new kind of movie. The rest of the cast includes Ralph Waite, Billy Green Bush, and Fannie Flagg, all excellent. And there are absolutely piercing incidents, like Bobby climbing onto a freight truck, starting to play the piano it contains, and being carried away as if forever. Deep down in this film there’s an ear for the nagging call of getaway and escape, of not doing the obvious or the sensible thing, of being American and unknown; and it may be that just as it let Nicholson flower as an actor, so it is a prediction about what would happen to Rafelson. For here in the early seventies, with this and The King of Marvin Gardens, he makes his mark and then drifts away.

  Flesh and the Devil (1926)

  By the end of 1926, the case for Greta Garbo was not quite settled. The publicity was working, and Torrent, her first M-G-M film, had done well enough. But on the second, The Temptress, Mauritz Stiller was fired and the picture lost money. Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer decided on Flesh and the Devil as her third—and now they would do the obvious thing: cast her opposite John Gilbert. Neither star was happy with the setup. Yet again, Garbo was asked to play a married woman, Felicitas, who has an affair, who ignores her husband and wins the love of two friends, Leo (Gilbert) and Ulrich (Lars Hanson).

  The story came from the novel The Undying Past, by Hermann Sudermann (the novelist also behind Murnau’s Sunrise), with a screenplay by Benjamin Glazer. Clarence Brown would direct, with William Daniels in charge of the photography—clearly this was a venture to which Thalberg was paying the closest attention. Garbo resisted for two days, and then she turned up for work. Once she and Gilbert were photographed together, the future was clear.

  Of course, people had been kissing on the screen for what seemed like a thousand years, and some did it better than others. But the screen kiss was a formal gesture; it was a narrative device—these two people in the story are in love. The audience appreciated that but felt a deep, unsatisfied yearning. They knew in their shy hearts that the kiss meant something else: that these two people were going to make love. And I think it is very important, all over the world, that the movies had a destiny to meet in which they pleased the millions who had an idea of what being in love was but who were inflamed by the idea of sex. Just look at the title Metro gave the film, and at least understand the instantaneous recoil, the horror, in so many churches and churchy people. One thing over the edge was in prospect—abandonment. Could the public handle it? Could order survive with such intense private pleasure?

  Not without go-betweens, and that is how we need to think of Garbo and Gilbert. This is how you need to see Flesh and the Devil and the way, within moments of their meeting, Felicitas takes charge of Leo and starts to kiss him as if his very head was a vessel full of life. The kisses are openmouthed. The lovers become horizontal. But she is the dynamic force in the transaction. Their first scene was more shocking and expansive than the first meeting in Last Tango in Paris.

  And here is the key: When Brown had enough, he said himself, he simply made a gesture to tell his camera crew to stop and move away, to leave the stars still kissing—the fire was theirs to put out. They were in love; they were lovers. Shortly thereafter, Garbo moved into Gilbert’s house on Tower Grove Drive. The picture opened early in 1927 and was the first sensation of the year. It cost $373,000 and earned $1.25 million all over the world. Do not underestimate the surge of energy in all directions: that kiss, that sucking, that moisture, had to be heard. The rest of the film hardly mattered.

  Floating Clouds (1955)

  Mikio Naruse made Floating Clouds in the year that produced Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing—from Twentieth Century Fox, with Jennifer Jones as the Eurasian doctor and with that thunderous theme song by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. It’s a chance collision, perhaps, and in all likelihood Naruse knew as little about Henry King’s picture as King cared about Naruse’s. Yet the films are not dissimilar: Both are love stories in which the central relationship is fated not to be. You can blame it on the prior arrangement of the world and its lives, or you can put it all down to the bad luck of people.

  Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is not in this book, yet it seems to have been what America wanted in 1955. Although it indulges its interracial love affair temporarily, it does not want to go so far as to license it. And in casting Jones opposite William Holden, it allows the racially inclined fantasist to take the story whichever way he likes. And while love can be so many things, by night and day, the thought that it really is this many-splendored thing is more than a little unsettling. The bombast of the song leaves an unfortunate feeling that love is a kind of American or fascist or consumerist duty, when in truth a lot of people seem to get through life without being ambushed by it.

  Yet here’s the other thing that is very important to this book: Naruse’s Floating Clouds was apparently a big success in Japan at just the time (the mid-1950s) when Japanese films by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi were making their way to the West, yet it took fifty years before the efforts of James Quandt of the Cinémathèque Ontario and the Japan Foundation managed to bring Floating Clouds to the West. For myself, I only caught up with it during the writing of this book, and I have to say that I find it heartbreaking, beautiful, and deserving of a place. But what of other Naruse films I haven’t seen yet or other directors who are not set up on tracks that bring their films to the West? There has not been a moment since the 1960s when foreign-language films have faced such difficulty in finding an American audience.

  Floating Clouds—which you will have a tough time finding—is based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi (who worked a lot with Naruse in his last years), with outstanding photography (black and white) by Masao Tamai. It is the failed love story of a couple who meet during the Japanese occupation of Indochina in 1943: Tomioka (Masayuki Mori), an engineer with a wife at home, and Yukiko (Hideko Takamine), a secretarial worker. They fall in love. They return to a ruined Japan. Their feelings remain, but they are not strong enough to overcome the hard life. The greatest irony of all in the comparison with Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is our difficulty in resisting the idea that this defeated fascist state—the country that produced Floating Clouds—may be the more modern and mature of the two.

  Floating Weeds (1959)

  It is not often the case in the work of Ozu that the occupation of characters matters too much. He seems to have felt—as many people do in real life—that job decision, or fate, was out of the hands of the individual. So people find their identity in his films in family status more than career position. Which makes it intriguing that Ozu was drawn to the subject of Floating Weeds twice in his career. Of course, it is not so surprising that a man who had worked with actors all his life should find acting interesting, or vulnerable. But such is the case. And what is most remarkable of all is that Ozu goes beyond Western artists in his calm reflection on whether the emotional decisions of actors can be trusted or are helplessly affected by the actor’s readiness to be someone else.

  Floating Weeds is the story of a group of traveling players—in Japanese, “floating weeds” is what they’re actually called. Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura) is the leader of the troupe. The company is not good. They play the provinces in poor locations. They just about manage. Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), the leading actress, is his mistress. Their status together is like that of the company as a whole: a kind of suppressed sadness holding a system together. They have come to a town where Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura) lives. Long ago, she and Komajuro had a love affair. There was a child, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), and the father is known as the young man’s “uncle.” But the mistress learns the secret and is so angered that she sets up an actress (Ayako Wakao) to seduce the young man. The father hates to see his son with an actress. He doesn’t trust “players.” But then he sees that the young couple are really in love. He wonders whether he once was in love with the mother.

  It is fascinating to see how the company does its work and prepares, and it is as always a matter of deep satisfaction to se
e how Ozu identifies human connection or proximity. He does not glamorize togetherness. He likes separate shots of people, still, without camera movement. His imagery is full of depth and crowded compositions; we have to study the story in terms of spatial bonds and juxtapositions. Yet talk isolates people, and Ozu prefers to view them from a distance, objectively, without a need for sympathy or approval. He is saying, You must look very carefully if you want to distinguish between what an actor does and what his character is. In other words, in all of Ozu’s films, he is gently posing the question: Can you trust an actor, or can you only be moved by him? And then he is asking us whether our dilemma in real life is any different. What follows is a situation of utter simplicity that becomes incalculably complex. And it is in the face of the complexity that most Ozu characters accept their lot rather than try to intervene in life. This attitude is significantly shifted away from the Western code of being held responsible for what we do—and of making our own lives. Ozu suggests instead, Be responsible for what you see—be affected yet silent. And that condition takes us very quickly to helplessness, or the feeling of being powerless with fate. How do we think we know other people—is it just from watching actors?

  Foolish Wives (1922)

  Just think of the situation first—it might be something for Melville or Preminger. Three people live in Monte Carlo, allegedly an exiled count and his two female cousins. They are imposters, gamblers, and tricksters, with their own incestuous possibilities. They live as if wealthy and carefree, but they are on the edge and desperate. They are living by their wits, trying to take advantage of the decadent bourgeoisie who are addicted to Monte. It will all end badly. But will they destroy themselves or others?