Yet it’s not really a story so much as a game, a kind of backgammon played on a long voyage, where if you play enough times you may get the thing to come out sweetly and rewardingly. There is a payoff (not disclosed here) and a happy sense of discovery, closely followed by a feeling of emptiness. For nothing really emerges in the finale except for the need to play the game again.
The script, by Christopher McQuarrie, won an Oscar, and it’s very long on skill. But it doesn’t really have the stamina or the vision to summon up much meaning. So Bryan Singer can only direct it for the sake of skill and intrigue—and in the end our concentration deserves more. So I think there’s too much anticlimax for anyone’s good—and the highly original method has not really gone much farther, though a crack here can become a hole elsewhere in Being John Malkovich.
Vampyr (1932)
So, how did Carl Dreyer move from The Passion of Joan of Arc to Vampyr? Prints of Vampyr have muttered German dialogue, a few faraway sound effects, and lengthy English subtitles in Gothic type. None of which really helps this novella-like tone-poem of a film. Further, coming in 1932, it has to be a film on which the participants had seen Murnau’s Nosferatu and Lugosi’s Dracula. In which case, it seems strange that Dreyer—a very sophisticated man—should want to believe so completely in the hokey business of vampires. Doesn’t he see the inadvertent ways in which his film has drifted toward camp or even comic territory? Are we really expected to feel a spiritual equivalence between this and The Passion of Joan of Arc? In which case, I fear, Vampyr suffers a good deal. Any young audience seeing it today is likely to find it foolish and, worse than that, humorless.
All we know is that Dreyer got funding for this film from Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, who also plays the lead, Allan Grey, under the name of Julian West. He looks a little like a lugubrious George Gershwin or one of those handsome young men in Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. He comes to a village in France that is afflicted by vampires. And thus, in just over 70 minutes, Dreyer spells out the details of the vampire technique and shows Grey’s struggle to survive two sisters, and even to save one of them from the devilish bloodlust—the titles talk about the Devil a good deal.
Dreyer used as his basis Camilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, but there is not really anything like narrative flow. Nor is the film frightening, until that passage where Grey is put in a coffin with a window in it. Instead, we find ourselves admiring a somewhat esoteric essay on vampiric urges. The history tells us that Rudolph Maté’s camera equipment was faulty so that the film turned out fogged on some early scenes. Dreyer liked this effect and asked Maté to imitate it deliberately. This isn’t the way to win a photographer’s heart—but it accounts for the rare, misty gray look to the film.
There is some very striking imagery—a ferryman with a great scythe; a hand creeping up a banister; and even, occasionally, the faces of characters struck by horror. But there isn’t suspense, or dread, or flow—and time and again we are left asking ourselves how far Dreyer really believed this stuff. Whereas, of course, the matter of belief is the rock on which Joan of Arc is made, and the substance that leaves one hardly noticing the silence of the film.
The screenplay is by Dreyer and Christen Jul and the art direction is by Herman Warm. The books say that it is a deeply atmospheric film. But I suspect that Dreyer needed to abandon all the obvious vampire apparatus to get at that. It’s a picture that might have worked better if the word vampyr had never been used and if we had been left to deduce its presence from a disconcerting love story.
Vera Drake (2004)
How many Mike Leigh films can this book hold? He is a great figure, not just in the achievement, but in the seriousness of his approach. Leigh likes to gather actors in something like six months of rehearsal. They have outline characters, and they then build a life for their role in rehearsal. Through many improvisations, a tight written script is arrived at. Different methods work on different subjects and for different people. But I think Leigh’s contribution to a theory of preparation is immense, and a most valuable link to theater.
But which Leigh films? I love several of the earlier pictures. Everyone admired Secrets and Lies. But in the end I must have Vera Drake, because it is so moving, so perfect a portrait of England in the 1950s, and so surprising in one aspect. Vera is a cleaning lady with a steady sideline: She helps girls who have got into trouble. She does this not as a feminist or a libertarian. She does it to be helpful. She doesn’t even get paid. And—here is the surprise—in her tight-knit working-class family, she keeps it a secret from the others. I know, at first, that seems implausible, but I think it is part of the film’s bleak truth to realize that in Britain then things were compartmentalized. Perhaps they still are.
Leigh was sixty when he made Vera Drake, and an established international figure, yet he had the greatest difficulty in funding a very low-budget film. This is worth stressing in that Leigh’s commitment needs to be understood in a framework of very modest financial return. So Vera Drake had some British money, but some French money, too. And it found the money hard to get because even people who knew Leigh said, “The story of an uneducated back-street abortionist? It hardly sounds like a movie.” When are such people trusted?
Now, of course, you know the film. You recall the respect and the prizes it won and you realize it did quite well. But I’m not sure if Leigh will ever be accepted, or able to relax. The film was shot in Super 16, by Dick Pope, in a most somber range of colors. It was shot, by Leigh, with a camera style that becomes more Ozu-like—and for the best reasons, because Ozu and Leigh are alike in locating a kind of unsentimental family focus in plain interiors, a place where family feeling exists—so long as you don’t regard it as that American confection that obscures all other realities.
So the film is a grim lesson in the social services in the 1950s and on the nature of family life. There’s so much small talk, and so little that is really said. This is a film in which Leigh gets the conspiracy of English lower-class life—to ignore every “it” they can think of—without condescension or cutesiness.
Imelda Staunton gives not a hint of performance as Vera, she simply is the benighted woman. And the film has a mass of fine supporting work from Phil Davis, Peter Wight (as the policeman), Alex Kelly, Daniel Mays, Adrian Scarborough, Heather Craney, Eddie Marsan, Ruth Sheen, Sally Hawkins, Lesley Manville, and Jim Broadbent (as the judge)
The Verdict (1982)
The Verdict is too simpleminded or self-righteous to be deeply interesting, no matter that it’s very well made. After all, the Archdiocese of Boston (in the person of Edward Binns) behaves very badly and is ready to rely on a total cynicism in the judge (Milo O’Shea going too far, I think) and its saturnine legal mastermind (James Mason, exactly right—but who is surprised by that?).Wesley Addy’s pinched, hangdog face was born to play the venal, lying doctor and Lindsay Crouse is heaven-sent as the honest admitting nurse who will come clean in the end. Of course, the awful judge excludes her testimony, but no jury is going to forget what they heard. And thus in the end, the jury, Ms. Crouse, and the legal team headed by the very shaky Paul Newman is 110 percent on the side of right.
I don’t know the novel (by Barry Reed), so I can’t judge whether the original has been smoothed out a little. But I’d trust David Mamet to deliver a rather bullying screenplay—heavy-handed, but monotonously righteous. Whereas what The Verdict really cries out for is a touch or two of Otto Preminger’s skepticism about American legal process. In other words, we know Paul Newman has the case (if he can stay sober long enough to bring it home). We ache for the good guy he longs to be, and we are furious at the potential injustice of the wicked Church and its sanctimonious legal tools screwing this poor family out of any damages. When the jury comes in and asks if they can award over the limit, Jack Warden’s gaze up to heaven is ours too—it’s all too good to be true, and complacency actually takes away all the wan, wintry sensibility that there is in Andrzej Bartkowiak’s superb lighting (the light for a graver
film).
It has to be said that Sidney Lumet the craftsman can pay too much attention to crossing the ts and dotting the is of a neat script and not enough to searching for something like doubt. And if you want to call a film The Verdict, don’t you need more doubt or a less loaded case? But Lumet has always had a weakness for piling on.
Not that Paul Newman is less than magnificent—it was a travesty that he won his Oscar not for this but for The Color of Money. Still, the fascination in the film, I think, is there to behold, and see neglected—it’s the Charlotte Rampling character, the betrayer, the one mess in the film. If only we knew more about her. If only we could see more of her ambiguity in the other characters. If only we were allowed a role as intelligent observers that meant we could not make up our minds as easily or tidily. As it is, you don’t really see what—beyond sheer contrivance—has brought Newman’s lawyer so low that he is the burnt-out case at the beginning. Justice needs a greater sense of doubt and frailty, and fewer people so automatically fit to be hissed or cheered.
Der Verlorene (1951)
In 1950, Peter Lorre was forty-six. Hungarian and Jewish (he was born Lászlo Loewenstein), he had been a well-known figure in German theater, though hard to cast. As such, he had been the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, a picture that made him and imprisoned him. He was forever afterward a killer or a monster, though one glimpse of his bulging eyes suggested a rare, if not warped, sensitivity. He was a “success” in Hollywood. He worked all the time—as villain, threat, coward—and he played the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in several films. He was world-famous, yet he was a wreck, a drug addict, a smiling refugee from his own legend. It was at that point that he returned to Germany—not to play Hamlet for the Berliner Ensemble (that was Brecht’s offer), but to direct and star in Der Verlorene (The Lost One).
It would be a strange poetic justice if the adventure had turned out well, if Lorre had redeemed his haphazard career with a masterpiece and a success. In fact, Der Verlorene was a commercial mess, and it is not a great film. But it shows the large imagination of the man, as well as his desperate yearning. It is a remarkable, haunting picture, and one that deserves to be much better known.
It is the story of Dr. Karl Rothe, a man who worked in the Nazi camps but was appalled by the experiments there, and who in the years after the war becomes a homicidal maniac. There is some evidence to suggest that the story was based on a real figure, and Lorre sought out the novelist Benno Vigny in the attempt to make a script. Lorre wrote himself, but the thing never came clear. He drew in other writing associates: the director Helmut Käutner and Axel Eggebrecht. He got an old friend, Arnold Pressburger, to set the film up as a producer. He had every intention of doing it as a film noir—after all, Lorre had worked on several in America—and he engaged Václav Vích as director of photography. He cast the film with the utmost care. And it seems that there were moments when he believed it could all be a success. Who knows? Lorre was not well. He found postwar Germany depressing and uncongenial. And I think when there were script problems. he hoped “atmosphere” would bridge the gap. If only he had had Lang again to steady the ship.
But the attempt and its pathos are clear. The film is visceral and moody, and Lorre prowls through it like a ghost, looking older than he was, looking like death. The idea of murder as cruelty and vengeance is evident (really, it was a Lang film without the controlling geometry), and Rothe is the man in M in reverse, if you like: a humane victim driven to murder out of a feeling of retribution. Germany did not appreciate the film, and it got very little release anywhere else. But it remains a direct imprint of a very troubled soul. With Karl John, Helmuth Rudolph, Johanna Hofer, Renate Mannhardt, Eva-Ingeborg Scholz, Lotte Rausch, Gisela Trowe, Hansi Wendler, Kurt Meister, and Alexander Hunzinger.
Vertigo (1958)
A San Francisco cop, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), discovers his vertigo in a rooftop chase when another policeman dies trying to save him. He works at recovery, with his girlfriend, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), though she is painfully aware of his moderate feelings for her. Then an old school friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), calls him in. Can Scottie take a job? To follow Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who seems obsessed with an ancestor, Carlotta Valdes, who killed herself a hundred years earlier. Scottie follows Madeleine’s strange day in the city, and she seems like a sleepwalker, a ghost or an actress playing a part.
But people watching actresses may fall in love with them. And when Madeleine jumps into the water at Fort Point, Scottie is compelled to save her. At last, they talk. They fall in love. He tries to rescue her from the curse of Carlotta. But at a nearby mission, she escapes him, climbs a tower as he suffers from vertigo, and hurls herself to her death. Scottie has a breakdown. And then one day as he tries to recover, he sees a woman on the streets of San Francisco—a redhead named Judy—who resembles Madeleine. He wonders if he can make her more like Madeleine.
In great mystery films, attempts to tell the story usually make mistakes. That has happened here. But I will go no further with this narrative in case there are readers who have not seen the film yet. For this is a film about watching, about making a film, and about directing an actress. It is also about being raised to a great height of suspense and risking a fall. For Hitchcock, therefore, it was very personal, and for us it raises questions about voyeurism and performance that may threaten our feeling for cinema as a whole.
It is also a film about extraordinary cruelty, for as the plot becomes clear—and several viewings are necessary for that—we appreciate Gavin’s diabolical intrigue. (Whether Hitch grasped that is not so clear.) The darkness is buried in the glorious views of San Francisco, even more beautiful in 1957 than it may be now. And this is a film about desire and the black hole that can bury it—about light and dark, the ingredients of cinema.
So it is a masterpiece and an endless mystery—a love story, yet a hate story, too; an enchantment, yet an analysis of how stupid belief is. It failed when it came out. Perhaps it was too challenging. But we have learned how to watch it, and we have discovered the mortified figure Hitchcock often masked with his comedian persona. The performances are extraordinary. Stewart is truly frightening in that we face the limits in an otherwise reassuring presence. Kim Novak’s attempt at her two roles is a touching achievement. But don’t forget Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, or Henry Jones. Bernard Herrmann’s score is so extreme it is played in concert halls. Robert Burks shot the film, Hal Pereira and Henry Bumstead designed it. Edith Head did the clothes. It’s a test case: If you are moved by this film, you are a creature of cinema. But if you are alarmed by its implausibility, its hysteria, its cruelty—well, there are novels. Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor wrote the script from D’Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Une Vie (1958)
Just before the coming of the New Wave, Alexandre Astruc, the sometime novelist, critic, and essayist on film forms, made this beautiful, heartfelt adaptation of Une Vie that rapidly became lost in the new orthodoxy that nothing worthwhile was made as we waited for the wave on the shore. It was taken from the novel by Guy de Maupassant, published in 1883, and it would clearly be designed as tribute to the style of Une Partie de Campagne, even if Claude Renoir (the great director’s nephew) had not been director of photography.
Astruc was the author of several key articles in the development of French film theory, including “La camera-stylo,” written in 1948:
… the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theater, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of ca
mera-stylo (the camera as pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.
I wonder whether Astruc would now see the new dawn of 1948 as a happy moment—one with Welles, Mizoguchi, Ophüls, all at work, not to mention the coming of Antonioni, Nicholas Ray, and Alain Resnais, figures whose work must have delighted him. But today isn’t it possible that the “camera-digitale” has been a horrible replacement for the pen and the camera, a machine that writes out reality as quick as a wipe, and just as synthetic? Moreover, it might be argued that the “tyranny” of the visual in filmmaking has set in with a vengeance.
So I would not be surprised if Une Vie continued to look like a very modern film, despite its nineteenth-century setting in rural Normandy. Jeanne Dandieu (Maria Schell) is of marriageable age. She meets and falls for the dark, rather sullen Julien de Lamare (Christian Marquand). He takes her without noticing her great romantic needs—she is an Emma Bovary in the passive voice. So in time Julien seduces her servant girl, Rosalia (Pascale Petit), and gets her pregnant. The child comes and Jeanne makes it her own. But the self-destructive Julien (there is a shot of him shaving that says how close he is to sardonic suicide) finds another lover, Gilberte (Antonella Lualdi). They are in a love-nest caravan together when an enraged husband (Ivan Desny) sends it over a cliff. Une Vie continues.
The rural colors, the camera movements, the subdued playing, the invariable sense of passionate detail and a set of great performances make it a classic—yet hardly seen or known today.
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