An Incomplete Education
Page 18
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Unlike Chien, which seems a little on the adolescent, look-Ma-no-hands side, L’Age comes across as fresh, stringent, biting, if anything enhanced by all that’s gone on between then and now. It’s your single best introduction to (1) avant-garde cinema (marked by its fondness for abstraction, its eschewal of narrative, and its overall flakiness), (2) surrealism (with all its jarring, illogical literalness, plus more Freudian bric-a-brac than you can shake a phallus at), and (3) Buñuel himself (whose later themes, targets, and preoccupations it sets in motion). The other avant-garde—and quasi-surrealist—film of the period: Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (also 1930, also financed by the Vicomte de Noailles), a “poem on celluloid,” according to Cocteau, featuring a mouth in a drawing that comes alive, a hermaphrodite with a Danger de Mort sign in its crotch, and a fatal snowball fight. After its rhapsodizing and self-congratulation, you’ll appreciate Buñuel’s outrage all the more. STAGECOACH (American, 1939)
Director
John Ford. The grand old man of American movies. Gruff, big-hearted, meditative Irishman with a taste for folklore and nostalgia. In many ways a throwback to Griffith (sentimental, moralistic, committed to the probing of character and motive), Ford remained, through the Forties and Fifties, the single most important director whom Hollywood didn’t totally undo. Instead it gave him four Oscars (for The Informer, 1935; The Grapes of Wrath, 1940; How Green Was My Valley, 1941; and The Quiet Man, 1952), plus a couple more for his wartime documentaries. He also received, in 1973, the first of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Awards, a fitting tribute to a man who, over the course of fifty years, made some 130 movies (including silents), the majority of which dealt with the American experience—the history, the dream, the legend—in one form or another, most notably the western. You can complain that Ford’s maudlin and simplistic; you can regret that he ever took on such highfalutin, arty projects as Informer and Grapes; and you can explain how, unlike his confrère Howard Hawks (more on him in a minute), he needed a strong screenwriter at his side, but you can’t not stand up when he enters the room.
Story
Grand Hotel with, sagebrush and on wheels. Stagecoach in question is bound for Cheyenne; on board are a former Confederate officer turned cardsharp (John Carradine), an alcoholic doctor (Thomas Mitchell, who’d played Scarlet O’Hara’s father that same year), a prostitute (Claire Trevor) who’s just been run out of town, a timid whiskey salesman, an escaped convict, a bank embezzler, and, of course, the pregnant wife of a cavalry lieutenant, who refuses to speak to the prostitute. Andy “Jingles” Devine is the driver. Along the way they’re joined by the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who’s lost his horse; both the prostitute and the doctor undergo radical transformations (he becomes Marcus Welby); the army wife gives birth; the Apaches attack; the cavalry comes to the rescue; and, finally, in Cheyenne, the Ringo Kid settles an old score with the Plummer boys, then rides off with the prostitute to start a new life.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
The western, already an established Hollywood genre, gained new respectability. It also gained a form, a flexibility, and an overall relevance: Now “prestige” directors could make westerns without being accused of slumming. John Wayne, previously no great shakes, became a star—as did Monument Valley, the tract on the Utah-Arizona border with all those buttes, mesas, and sandstone spires; both would figure in many John Ford westerns to come, notably the so called cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande). Literary types got to note the resemblance to Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boule de Suif,” about a prostitute traveling in a carriage with a bunch of bourgeois during the Franco-Prussian War, while everybody else in the theater watched for the Indians to mass on the horizon.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
To be honest, there isn’t much. Stagecoach was remade in the Sixties, with Ann-Margret in the Claire Trevor role, but the fact that we’re even telling you that shows you how little news there is here. However, Stagecoach is still the best choice for those who want in on the Ford mystique, an important first stop on anybody’s road toward the bitter, dark (and cultish) The Searchers. Do be careful with the important Ford/Hawks polarity. Born in 1895 and 1896, respectively, they both made westerns (Hawks was even smart enough to hire Ford’s boy, John Wayne) and they both hung around forever, with Peter Bogdanovich hounding them for interviews and dinner invitations every step of the way. But Hawks was never the Establishment favorite Ford was (no Academy Awards, for instance, unless you want to count a “special” one), perhaps because he eschewed art for action, sentimentality for cynicism, the safe idea of woman as Maureen O’Hara for the sexy idea of woman as Lauren Bacall. With no folklore and great humor (Ford had none), Hawks made at least one film in every important genre: the gangster picture (Scarface), the screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby), the film noir (The Big Sleep), the musical (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and yes, the western (Rio Bravo). He wasn’t an innovator, as Ford could be when he chose, but he was the most artless of the great Hollywood directors—so craftsmanlike, so in control as to be “invisible.” And it was Hawks, not Ford, who stopped those Cahiers du Cinéma French boys cold when they first discovered Hollywood. LA RÈGLE DU JEU (French, 1939;
English title, THE RULES OF THE GAME)
Director
Jean Renoir. The grand old man of world cinema, impossible to dislike and even harder to disparage. Had his ups (sunny, unfettered childhood overseen by his father, Pierre Auguste, the Impressionist painter; unbroken lifetime string of supportive women and creative collaborators, what he called his équipe; at least one film that was both a popular and critical smash, namely the 1937 La Grande Illusion, about national loyalties and class affinities in a World War I German prisoner-of-war camp). And his downs (majority of his films misunderstood and cold-shouldered at the time they were released; Règle, his masterpiece, first butchered, then withdrawn, finally bombed to smithereens; personal inability to cope with Hollywood during his exile there in the Forties). Words to brace yourself for in any discussion of Renoir: humanism, realism (and/or naturalism), lyricism; luminosity, spontaneity, generosity; nature, artifice, civilization. What they’re really trying to say: that Renoir’s heart was in the right place, that he took the long view, that he cared about people (especially his actors, for the sake of whom he was willing to sacrifice plot, dialogue, or technique), that he had an artist’s soul as well as eye and winked at his audience with both, that he understood how—as one of the characters in Règle puts it—“The terrible thing is that everyone has his own reasons.” Basic Renoir, in addition to Règle and Illusion, the two big guns: Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932; the inspiration for Down and Out in Beverly Hills), A Day in the Country (1936), The Southerner (1945; about a family of sharecroppers, the best from his Hollywood period), The River (1951; shot in India), The Golden Coach (1952; in which Anna Magnani plays an actress on tour in eighteenth-century Peru).
Story
Rich marquis throws elaborate country house party for high-toned (if, entre nous, somewhat vulgar) friends; sex, games, and the chase on everybody’s mind, notably those of marquis, marquis’ wife, her aviator lover, marquis’ mistress, estate gamekeeper, his wife the lady’s maid, and poacher new to the neighborhood. (Also at the party: Octave, the friend of the family, played by Renoir himself.) In the course of the week or two that everyone’s together, there’s a hunt (watch for the beaters flushing the rabbits and pheasants), elaborate theatrics and a fancy-dress ball, the shooting of the aviator by the gamekeeper, and a tour of the marquis’ collection of wind-up toys.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
To begin with, that Renoir had gotten carried away. Because of bad weather and casting problems, Règle wound up costing twice what it was supposed to; plus it ran 113 minutes and the front office insisted it be shaved down. Also, what with Europe in a tizzy and war about to break out, a lot of pe
ople weren’t much in the mood for what Renoir called “an exact depiction of the bourgeois of our time”; for the ultranationalists and anti-Semites among them, the presence in the cast of a Jew (the marquis) and an Austrian (the marquis’ wife) was the last straw. Then there were those who merely found the movie immoral, decadent, or incomprehensible. More footage was cut. Even so, Règle was banned as demoralizing; when the Nazis arrived on the scene, it was banned all over again. To add insult to injury, in 1942 the Allies inadvertently destroyed the film’s original negative. (English-speaking audiences wouldn’t get to see the complete, painstakingly reconstructed version until the late 1950s.) In the meantime Renoir had fled to America; by the time he returned to France in the early 1950s his spirit was broken.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Half the crowd raves about how dazzling, complex, brilliantly structured and ironic it is; the other half about its richness, sensuality, egalitarianism, and drollness. Then they get down to specifics: the multiple viewpoint, how Règle doesn’t root for one side or the other in the class war, how it was the first psychologically sophisticated film in which the notion of “good” people and “bad” people was completely eliminated. Alternatively, Renoir’s use of the deep focus, in which the camera pulls back to show us a landscape as clear and sharp as characters busily ensnaring each other in the foreground—a perfect way to probe human relationships, establish man’s interaction with the world, and engage the viewer by bringing him into the field of action. Or maybe you prefer to think of Renoir as the spiritual leader of the French cinema, whose artistry and humanity served, in the Thirties, as the only alternative to Hollywood brashness and glamour. If you aren’t swept away by any of the above, at least be mindful of Renoir’s enormous influence on the next generation of filmmakers, from Truffaut and the New Wave in France, to the neo-realists (De Sica, Rossellini, et al.) in Italy, to Satyajit Ray, who never stopped talking about how he met Renoir when the latter was filming The River on the banks of the Ganges. Finally, there’s critic Pauline Kael, who pointed out how Règle foreshadows all those jaundiced house-party movies of the 1960s—L’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, Last Year at Marienbad—in which the big house symbolizes the remains of European civilization. CITIZEN KANE (American, 1940)
Director
Orson Welles. The wunderkind: Kane, which he produced, directed, wrote (sort of), and starred in, all at the age of twenty-five, remains the most impressive directorial—and entrepreneurial—debut in movie history. Keep in mind that Welles already had an out-sized reputation when he got to Hollywood, as an actor and director for the stage (he had founded the Mercury Theater in 1937) and radio (he was the force behind the weekly Mercury Theater of the Air); it was this reputation that accounted for the degree of artistic and financial control he was given on Kane, and the degree of suspicion and dislike Hollywood instinctively felt for him. After Kane, which turned out to be a commercial failure and a public-relations fiasco, it was all dowhill. His next (and next best) film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), was reedited in his absence, and everything from then on suffered from either funding or quality-control problems. Still, nobody’s had more influence on young filmmakers over the last fifty years. Many of them see Welles as a titan, committed to art and personal vision, eager to experiment with storytelling and cinematography, a man brought down by nothing less than hubris. Others see him as a big chubby boy given to overstatement, unnecessary camera movement, and half-baked profundity, a man done in by simple egomania. Our favorite summation of Welles: that of Herman J. Mankiewicz, coauthor of the Kane screenplay, who, observing the big man on the set one day, was heard to mutter, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Other Welles you might consider turning out for: The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Macbeth (1948), Touch of Evil (1958), Mr. Arkadin (1962), The Trial (1963), Chimes at Midnight (1966, with Welles as Falstaff).
Story
Never a dull moment. Media baron and thwarted politician Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles and based largely on William Randolph Hearst) dies, in bedroom of fabulous castle home, Xanadu (cf San Simeon), with “Rosebud” his last spoken word. Cut to March of Time–style newsreel acquainting us with the outline of his overscale, somewhat unsavory, and absolutely enigmatic life. Cut to newspaper office, whence young reporter is dispatched to discover essence of same, especially as it might be summed up by word “Rosebud.” He visits library established by Thatcher, Kane’s childhood guardian (George Couloris), where he reads of Kane’s youth and, of course, this being the twentieth century, of Kane’s mother (Agnes Moorehead); then interviews, in succession, Kane’s business manager (Everett Sloane), Kane’s best friend (Joseph Cotten), Kane’s mistress (Dorothy Comingore), and Kane’s majordomo at Xanadu. Loads of flashbacks, in which we observe Kane run newspaper, stir up war with Cuba, marry niece of president (Ruth Warrick), meet toothachy mistress and attempt to turn her into diva, run for office. But reporter never finds out what “Rosebud” means. We do, though: After everybody’s gone home, camera registers it as name of sled, now being consigned by workmen to Xanadu’s furnace, that Kane hit Thatcher in stomach with when, so many years ago, latter tried to separate him from mother.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Prime example of a film undone by advance publicity, most notably attempts by Hearst to suppress, buy up, calumniate, etc., Kane. He succeeded in making distribution a nightmare for parent studio RKO and in infuriating, boring, and perplexing enough people so that, when the film finally came out, it died on the vine. (Hollywood, ever vulnerable in the manners-and-morals department, and fearing another Fatty Arbuckle–type scandal, got so roiled it booed Kane at the Academy Awards every time one of its nine nominations came up; that year John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley was the big winner.) Then there was Welles the man, the sacred monster, the virtuoso, who in Kane did with the moving picture almost everything that could be done with it, yanking his audiences forward and backward in time, montaging sound as well as image, plunging his camera through, say, the skylight of a New Jersey cabaret rather than using the front door—and then, on top of the pyrotechnics, starred in the thing himself. Scandal and bravura—but Kane remained out of circulation from its initial release till its late-1950s art-house revival.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Welles and Kane zoom to very top of 1972 Sight & Sound international critics poll! The most written about, most controversial movie ever! America on map as producer of sound films to rival Europe’s! The one American talking picture that “seems as fresh today as the day it opened”! (That last is Pauline Kael, whose The Citizen Kane Book is required reading for zealots.) On the other hand, you can, as far as fashioning a personal reaction to Kane, do better. Revel in the film’s unabashed theatricality, its sleight of hand, its highly visible “in-sides.” Note the polished camera work of Gregg Toland, the Bernard Herrmann score. Suggest that Kane hints at the insanity implicit in American pop culture—and American life—as broadly as a Busby Berkeley musical number. (Or Jeffrey Dahmer.) Get behind Kael’s assertion that screenwriter Mankiewicz is the real genius behind Kane; then cite Peter Bogdanovich’s refutation of same. And rather than alluding to Rosebud (a gimmick in the film, a cliché in film talk), take as your favorite scene the one in which old Bernstein, Kane’s business manager, reminisces about seeing the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: “She didn’t see me at all,” he says, “but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
For Extra Credit
The General (Buster Keaton, 1926). Now widely held to be the best of all Twenties comedies, bar none. (In case you hadn’t noticed, Keaton’s no longer playing Garth to Chaplin’s Wayne.) The reasons: action that’s all of a piece, rather than episodic and “taped together” (Southern engineer gets back the supply train Yankee soldiers have hijacked, as well as his girlfriend, who was accidentally aboard), plus technique that integrates character and environment, incident and
existence, instead of just capturing a few brilliant pantomimes on celluloid. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton doesn’t mime, emote, or ingratiate—he merely stares, a man up against a whole army (not just the town bully), with a face as quintessentially American as Abe Lincoln’s (cf. Chaplin’s Old World one) and a girl who’s more pain in the ass than Holy Grail.
Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926). Soviet movies aren’t just Eisenstein. In fact at the time, many critics preferred the work of his contemporary Pudovkin, who was lyric and emotional where Eisenstein was epic and intellectual, and who, as Dwight Macdonald remarked, used his shots as a novelist uses words rather than, à la Eisenstein, as a musician uses notes. Case in point: Mother, Pudovkin’s masterpiece, the tale of a woman who, tricked by the police into betraying her own son (who’s in league with a bunch of striking workers), learns that radicalism is the only way to fly; it’s all from a Maxim Gorky story you may know in its subsequent Mother Courage incarnation. To be noted: The professional actors (cf. Eisenstein’s insistence upon using nonprofessionals); the fact that the movie’s hero while symbolic, is nevertheless an individual (cf. Eisenstein’s masses); the way in which montage here is a function of “linkage,” of shots being used like so many building blocks (as opposed to Eisenstein’s dialectical “collision” of images).