'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Perhaps The Informer needs to be opera, with someone like Verdi writing for a great tenor whose flights of liberty are always restrained and brought crashing down by the form of the music. In song, it might be possible to miss the crushed sob, the slobbering whimper, the self-satisfied snort of McLaglen. When I say I do not like him, I mean I hate having to watch him. That may be in part distaste for the treachery of Gypo Nolan. I don’t think so. Treachery is surely intriguing. Rather, it is the righteous self-pity I find so offensive, and the failure of the man to notice himself quietly in a mirror when he has a stage at his disposal.

  The Informer is truly a silent film, one of those universal statements much loved in Germany and Russia and supposedly the begging opportunity for grand acting. But when the lack of restraint in playing is so flagrant, then I think the undisciplined nature of the character is nauseating and overwhelming. Ford became a decent director of underacting—Harry Carey, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, and so on. He is bearable and even interesting when his characters stay masked. But when he decides to show us everything, I have had enough after a couple of minutes.

  The Innocents (1961)

  Henry James’s novella (it is a hundred pages) The Turn of the Screw appeared in 1898. He called it “a very mechanical matter… an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject & rather a shameless potboiler.” It’s good of him, so soon after the appearance of movies, to drop that hint about the pictorial being a touch vulgar or second-rate, and it can be taken as his adroit way of suggesting that the kind of hysterical people who “see” things may come into their own as and when a medium gets under way that literalizes the seeing.

  Alas, it’s too late now to think of taking Henry James to the movies, though it is fascinating to think of James as a film critic. Imagine him on the “physicality” of Malkovich and Kidman in The Portrait of a Lady. Life will probably be too short—and a good thing, too, I hear you saying. Nevertheless…

  … as you find yourself in the dark, with just the lovely but alarmed face of Deborah Kerr to light up the dark places in Bly House, don’t say I didn’t make the suggestion. We hardly know if Henry James went to the movies (there is no truth in the suggestion that he died during a screening of Intolerance), let alone what he might have thought about it all. But The Turn of the Screw (which has tempted dramatists in so many forms) does have a Grand Guignol frisson to it that cries out for movie. That’s what Truman Capote thought when he was approached to do the screenplay. He loved the novella and enjoyed the work, though the powers that be found it necessary to hire William Archibald and then John Mortimer to do a little polishing.

  The film is faithful, in a fashion. Miss Giddens is the governess coming to Bly House—though in the novella she is not named, and stays as just “I,” like another newcomer at a moody house. Their uncle has hired her to look after two young children, Miles and Flora. Miss Giddens has the help of a friendly housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins), but she begins to realize that the children have been affected—and maybe more than that—by the evil of a former employee, Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde), and his lover, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), the previous governess.

  The film was directed by Jack Clayton and photographed by Freddie Francis in black-and-white CinemaScope with reverence and with a clear interpretation: that Miss Giddens is sexually repressed and that the horror she finds (with its allure of sexual possession) is something she needs to find. It’s a reasonable modern interpretation: these days we reckon that governesses are more deadly than evil itself. As James might have observed, the problem with a thing being pictorial is that it becomes fixed—it is one thing and not all the others it might be. Whereas the blessing of reading is the possibility that lingers, the way in which we are encouraged all the time to see things in so many different ways. So The Innocents is not very frightening, or not as perilous as the novella. But chances are that any day now someone else will try it again.

  In the Heat of the Night (1967)

  One night in a small Southern town, a man is killed. A lone black man is picked up at the railroad depot and arrested. He’s brought before Sheriff Gillespie and it turns out that the black is from Philadelphia. “What do they call you up there?” asks Gillespie, and the black replies, “They call me Mr. Tibbs.” Yes, it’s a fetching hook, but don’t lose sight that—seven years later—this is The Defiant Ones again, a plot device that chains a black and a white together until they make friends.

  It came from a routine thriller novel by John Ball, and the appointed screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, saw it far more as an opportunity for creative narrative than a sermon from the mount. It’s a clever trick that leads to a fundamental antagonism between two guys who have to solve a crime together. And with Sidney Poitier still playing the black man, and with Rod Steiger as Gillespie, there was no trouble with the audience getting the message. As Silliphant has made clear, you don’t really get points for messages so trite and obvious.

  Quincy Jones delivered a good, jazzy score. Silliphant wrote the scenes as tight as he could. And Norman Jewison did an expert job at keeping it running predictably. In turn, it was well edited by Hal Ashby. The supporting cast included Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Scott Wilson, Larry Gates, Quentin Dean, James Patterson, Anthony James, and William Schallert.

  There’s no reason for a professional job like this not to work. But then you have to reckon with the terrible way in which the film was overpraised for its hollow political correctness. It won Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger (Poitier was not nominated), and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ashby also won for the editing. The travesty in those results is that Bonnie and Clyde lost out: Warren Beatty as Best Actor, Benton and Newman for their original screenplay—and Dede Allen was not even nominated for editing. You can say that Bonnie and Clyde was too daring, that it pushed too many uncomfortable buttons. But not to notice the depressing, safe rectitude of In the Heat of the Night leaves the Academy looking foolish and helpless. There was also the consideration that Bonnie and Clyde did more than twice as well at the box office.

  Meanwhile, the movie of In the Heat of the Night simply spread a false but comforting view of the South, one in which deft storytelling could heal all wounds. There was even a TV series in the 1980s, with Carroll O’Connor as Gillespie and Howard Rollins as Tibbs, in which those good old boys just worked together and Americans were supposed to believe they had imagined racial problems. Whereas Bonnie and Clyde was a film that opened up new social and political realities and opportunities. In a country as diverse and seething as America, there is no good way for movies to be as comforting and reassuring as the Academy would like them to be.

  In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

  It seems so unlikely—Ozu meets Norman Mailer—and it was a film for which its maker, Nagisa Oshima, had to work in France to challenge Japanese censorship. At home, he could not have made the shots of exposed, erect penises and open vaginas let alone the obsessive sexual coupling that is the film. So he shot in France (aided by the French producer Anatole Dauman), and then found that the infamous film had trouble getting a proper release in many parts of the world. Yet to this day (and even with Michael Winterbottom’s admirable Nine Songs greedy to be seen), In the Realm of the Senses deserves to be judged as a lucid, tender yet completely arousing film about the sex urge.

  There is an important prologue, too often omitted from accounts of the film: Sada (Eiko Matsuda) is a beautiful young woman come to work at the inn of Kichi-zo (Tatsya Fuji). Before she has met the boss, an old tramp claims to have known her once. She is touched. She offers him some sexual consolation—thus his is the first penis in the picture and it is as young, vigorous, and handsome—or not—as that of Kichi-zo. The universality of the sexual act and its indifference to appearance are established already—and their meanings are a little at odds with the ravishing beauty of Oshima’s lovers.

  Sada and Kichi-zo become sexually insatiable for each other. The Ozu-ish camera has to get quite low and angle itsel
f a little more accurately than is usual to observe all the penetrations. The pleasure is acted? Who knows? Certainly the question arises, for there seems to be a complete sexual immersion on the part of the two people. And that leads directly to the question of whether sexual pleasure relies on acting or has deeper roots. This is underlined by the many situations in which the couple are so overwhelmed as to allow others to watch them—like us?

  We believe in their love: the playing achieves an astonishing tenderness that makes all the nakedness that much more shocking. But they are on a futile quest. Sex exhausts them. She becomes radiant, he grows tired. Habit does intrude on the explosive freshness. And so the lovers gravitate toward their own finale: death as the game they want—with the penis that she has cut off as the memento mori.

  Thirty years after it was made In the Realm of the Senses still has an erotic charge that leaves most rival films seeming feeble. Oshima was as interested in the politics of sex as in the heartfelt coupling, and he is—like all of us—in love with a process that may be as disillusioning and as separating as it is orgasmic. In contrast, Last Tango in Paris seems a very contrived, sheltered film, just as those American sex films—even the pornography from the new age lack Oshima’s critical intelligence. This is a landmark picture because it begins to suggest that the cinema has finally lost its great obsessive quest. “Are they really doing it?” drifts into the larger question, “Is anyone convinced?”

  In the White City (1983)

  In the 1970s and ’80s, a genre came into being that one might call a “film festival movie.” As a rule, it was a European coproduction; it was artistic or adventurous, and it was not likely to sustain a high audience in any one country. But it was the sort of film that easily filled out the program at the growing pack of film festivals. Some were better than others; many were much worse. It’s just that without the circuit of film festivals I’m not sure they would have been made. And some of them were almost poetically about people out of their element, in strange cities, muddling along with the language, beginning to wonder if their identity was slipping.

  One of the very best of these films is Alain Tanner’s In the White City. It was a Swiss-Portuguese coproduction, though there was some English money in it, too. It was in at least four languages—Portuguese, French, German, and English.

  Bruno Ganz is a seaman on a tanker ship that comes into Lisbon. He gets off the ship to go exploring. He never says to himself or the film, “Ah, Lisbon, what a beautiful city,” yet this picture (photographed by Acácio de Almeida) does bring out all the intricacy of the old city, with winding streets and alleys on several hillsides overlooking the Tagus. He stays in the city. He finds a small hotel and rents a room. He even starts an affair with the maid there (Teresa Madruga). He has a wife or another woman back in Germany, and we see her—disconsolate and bitter—receiving his letters. He is robbed. He is even stabbed a little later as he goes after one of the robbers. Time collapses on him. Sometimes he barely survives, but he pawns a Swiss watch for 5,000 escudos, and some whiskey.

  Much of the film is silent, except for the natural sounds of the streets and the saxophone music of Jean-Luc Barbier. The man has a small movie camera: He films himself and the things he sees. But the drifting life in the white city is taking its toll. He becomes utterly rootless, free but lost, and you could argue deep into the night what the film is suggesting about internationalism and the breakdown of personality. It is very beautiful, and Ganz is the ideal actor for this kind of thing—stalwart, inward, yet full of tiny nuances and signals, a man to be watched, and a man content to have very little action. He is sympathetic, and yet we would not be astonished to discover something awful about the man. We are getting down toward a human zero where anything is possible.

  And quite clearly, it’s something that only film could have done. To see him strolling away his life in Lisbon is lovely, calming, yet disconcerting. You feel the charm and the stealthy terror in letting yourself get lost. Plainly, not too many people were ever expected to see the film. And no one was too disturbed about that limited plan. So, let’s do it, they said. And watching the film is very close to the weightlessness that can hardly remember which festival you’re at today.

  Intolerance (1916)

  What happened in the mind of D. W. Griffith? He had labored so hard to make Birth of a Nation—it had seemed that he would never raise the money or persuade an audience to pay attention. The film had stirred up controversy with its support of the old South and a new Klan. It had indicated the viability of something to be called the film business. As a work of art, it had several passages of beauty and a new, narrative intelligence mixed in with strident, alienated detachment from the mood of 1915. And so the next year Griffith tried to make a film that made it clear he understood everything. He would call it Intolerance, and the title was meant to sum up man’s inhumanity to man as well as some people’s misunderstanding of Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation, for good and ill, had been an authentic epic. Intolerance just asked for admiration.

  As if the effort of organizing one story had been too much for him, Griffith made Intolerance an episode film. This was the more crushing a disaster in that one of his four episodes could be cut clear of the wreckage to make a remarkable picture. I mean the “Modern Story,” which had been planned as a separate film and which is still very exciting in terms of its cross-cutting in the attempt to save the boy from the gallows. This episode is what Griffith did best: brilliant, modern suspense, geared up to rapidity—whenever Griffith let himself slow down he was yielding to bathos.

  But then there are three other episodes: the “Judean Story,” leading up to the Crucifixion; the “French Story,” which is the massacre of the Huguenots in 1572; and the “Babylonian Story,” set in 539 B.C., with the Persian siege of the city.

  The Babylonian episode includes the fabulous sets built in Los Angeles—and yes, there is that crane shot where the camera even moves a little over the set. It is stupendous, yet it goes nowhere—and that is such a model of the film’s self-destructive frenzy. The crosscutting, self-interrupting format is wearisome (the film originally was three and a half hours). The sheer pretension is a roadblock, and one longs for the “Modern Story” to hold the screen.

  Virtually everyone in Hollywood worked on Intolerance. There were assistant directors like Stroheim, Tod Browning, and Woody Van Dyke. Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown photographed it. There was a painful linking device, Lillian Gish sweetly rocking the cradle of history. And there are many worthy performances: In the “Modern Story,” Mae Marsh as the heroine, Robert Harron as the wronged boy, and Miriam Cooper (the best thing in the picture) as “the Friendless One.” In the “Judean Story,” Howard Gaye as the Nazarene, Bessie Love as the Bride of Cana, and Stroheim as a Pharisee. In the “French Story,” Eugene Pallette as Prosper Latour, Josephine Crowell as Catherine de Medici, Constance Talmadge as Marguerite de Valois, and Joseph Henabery as Coligny. In the “Babylonian Story,” Constance Talmadge is very vivid as the Mountain Girl de Alfred Paget is Belshazzar, and George Seigmann is Cyrus.

  Anyone concerned with film history has to see Intolerance, and pass on. The film cost a little under $400,000, and it did badly. One guesses that Griffith was as surprised by failure here as he had been by triumph on Birth of a Nation.

  Into the Woods (1991)

  I have done this for my children and just as often for myself: I load the videotape of the New York production of Into the Woods and sit back. You could say that I am watching the live recording of several performances in the New York run of that show. But, these days, I watch many movies in exactly the same way—though seldom with the same mix of emotions or an equally inspiring belief that moving imagery, drama, narrative, and music can still work wonders. In other words, the fierce “purist” separation of film and television seems increasingly wasteful and misleading. It is often true that television seems unable to become a resplendent visual medium. Things are rarely beautiful on television. But only a
fool can say that television doesn’t these days beat big brother at narrative ingenuity, dialogue, and daring content.

  The real point is to address oneself to how the genius of Stephen Sondheim is conveyed. But just as there are a few outstanding figures in the arts in the age of cinema who have managed not to be deeply involved in film—Balanchine, Ellington, Nabokov, Sondheim—so it is fatuous and self-abusive for the serious hedonist to deny himself Into the Woods because it is a mongrel. My biggest dilemma was whether to opt for Into the Woods or Sweeney Todd, a “play” with music that has already enjoyed several different versions. (I took both.)

  Not that I mean to make unusual claims for the “film” of Into the Woods. What exists on tape is the American Playhouse version of the original 1987 Broadway production, “directed by James Lapine,” who had also written the book. Lapine himself may wince at a few awkward moments when “coverage” was fudged—in the same way the sports crews that film great games admit that they “miss” certain moments. And one could easily enough imagine a movie movie of Into the Woods—by Baz Luhrmann, say, or even Mr. Sondheim—that starts afresh, employs far more elaborate sets, and is like a fairy story as rendered by Cocteau rather than a fairy story tenderly dissected on the stage.

  In the end, the paucity of Sondheim movie movies has to indicate his love and preference for the stage as a grid—and this tape can only approximate the live delight of seeing actors and actresses “play with” the anthology of fairy stories that makes the show and makes its very special acid wit. Rather than do Moby Dick, Welles went to an amateur attempt at it—because he saw more meaning there. And that is the way to read Sondheim’s shows, I think, as the bits and pieces of movie with the suspended disbelief like a ball that is being kicked around.