I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  [1961]

  La Grande Illusion

  (1937)

  In form, La Grande Illusion is an escape story; yet who would think of it this way? It’s like saying that Oedipus Rex is a detective story. The great work transcends the usual categories. La Grande Illusion is a perceptive study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during World War I. The two aristocrats, the German prison commander von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) and the captured French officer de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), share a common world of memories and sentiments. Though their class is doomed by the changes which have produced the war, they must act out the rituals of noblesse oblige and serve a nationalism they do not believe in. The Frenchman sacrifices his life for men he does not really approve of — the plebian Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). These ironies and ambiguities give genuine depth to the theme — fraternization, and the illusions of nationality.

  La Grande Illusion had an immediate, idealistic aim. Hitler was about to move into Austria and Czechoslovakia: another war was imminent. Renoir hoped to reawaken in the German people the spirit of comradeship that had developed toward the end of World War I, when he had been in a prison camp. “I made La Grande Illusion because I am a pacifist,” Renoir said in 1938, but already his hopes for the film had been destroyed. The new Nazi nationalism was more frenzied and irrational than the nationalism he had argued against. Goebbels had already banned the movie in Germany; by the summer of 1940, the Nazis were in Paris, and the prints were confiscated.

  By then Renoir had fled France, and he thought that La Grande Illusion, having failed in its purpose — to guide men toward a common understanding, having failed even to reach the men he was addressing — would be as ephemeral as so many other films. But La Grande Illusion is poetry: it is not limited to a specific era or a specific problem; its larger subject is the nature of man, and the years have not diminished its greatness.

  Although the message of La Grande Illusion is in its hope for international brotherhood, compassion, and peace, it is also an elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy. It’s rare for a man who aligns himself with the rising working classes to perceive the beauty and elegance of the decaying elite and the way of life that is finished no matter which countries win the war. Compare Renoir’s treatment of the career officers with, say, Eisenstein’s in Potemkin, and you have the measure of Renoir’s humanity. Eisenstein idealizes the proletariat, and cruelly caricatures the military; Renoir isn’t a sociologist or a historian who might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups — he simply isn’t concerned with swine. His officers — von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu — were at home in the international sportsmanship of the prewar world, but the skills, maneuvers, courage and honor that made military combat a high form of sportsmanship are a lost art, a fool’s game, in this mass war. The war, ironically, has outmoded the military. These officers are commanding men who, in their terms, are not even soldiers; the fighting itself has become a series of base humiliations. They have lost sympathy with the world; they have lost even their self-respect. All they have left is their sense of the rules of the fool’s game — and they play by them. Von Rauffenstein’s grief at his slaughter of de Boeldieu is so moving and painful because von Rauffenstein knows the stupidity and waste of it. When he cuts the sprig of geranium, the only flower in the fortress, it is for the death of nobility — and his own manhood. (Von Stroheim had used the geranium in the fortress scene of Queen Kelly — but the flower wasn’t cut off, the whole picture was.) Von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu are in a great romantic tradition: Cyrano had his plume, they draw on their white gloves, perhaps the district officer in Kenya dressed for dinner even when his only guests might be Mau-Mau. They go in style.

  Marechal, the mechanic who has become an officer, has no sense of style — he is uneasy in the presence of urbanity and polish; but he is the common man raised to his finest qualities: he has natural gallantry. Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that Renoir is a bit like Marechal, with his joy in life, his survival power. Renoir gives more of himself than an aristocrat would think proper. He has none of that aristocratic reserve, the attitude that what you don’t express is more important than what you express. But, unlike Marechal, Renoir is an artist: he celebrates the life that Marechal lives.

  To a generation unfamiliar with the young Gabin and the young Fresnay, a generation that thinks of von Stroheim in terms of his legendary, ruined masterpieces, the performances of these three actors are fresh and exciting — three different styles of acting that illuminate each other. The miracle of Gabin’s performance in this type of good, simple-hero role is that you’re not aware of any performance. With Fresnay and von Stroheim, you are, and you should be; they represent a way of life that is dedicated to superbly controlled outer appearances. Try to imagine an exchange of roles between, say, Gabin and Fresnay, and you see how “right” the casting and acting are. This is true, also, for the lesser roles: a few words and we know the worlds of these characters, who speak in their own tongues — French, German, or English, and who embody their backgrounds, classes, and attitudes.

  In cinema there is the artistry that brings the medium alive with self-conscious excitement (Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane) and there is the artistry that makes the medium disappear (La Grande Illusion, De Sica’s Shoeshine). La Grande Illusion is a triumph of clarity and lucidity; every detail fits simply, easily, and intelligibly. There is no unnecessary camera virtuosity: the compositions seem to emerge from the material. It’s as if beauty just happens (is it necessary to state that this unobtrusive artistry is perhaps the most difficult to achieve?). The characters, the dialogue, the fortress, the farm, the landscape, all fuse into the story and the theme. The result is the greatest achievement in narrative film. It’s a little embarrassing to state this so baldly, but La Grande Illusion, like Renoir’s earlier, but very different, Partie de Campagne, is just about a perfect work (in fact, I can’t find a flaw in it). There was no reason for Renoir to tap this vein again. His next great work was the tragi-comic carnal chase, La Règle du Jeu, which accelerates in intensity until it becomes a macabre fantasy.

  It is not difficult to assess Jean Renoir’s position as a film director: he is the master of the French school of naturalistic cinema. Even the best works of Feyder, Carné, Duvivier, Pagnol, don’t have the luminosity of the great Renoir films. (It is one of those ludicrous paradoxes of fame that, even in film reviews, Renoir is commonly identified as the son of the great Impressionist, as if his own light, which has filled the screen for almost four decades, were not strong enough to prevent confusion.) How can his special radiance be explained? Perhaps it’s because Renoir is thoroughly involved in his films; he reaches out toward us, he gives everything he has. And this generosity is so extraordinary that perhaps we can give it another name: passion.

  [1961]

  Forbidden Games

  (1952)

  This is perhaps the greatest war film since La Grande Illusion — neither, it should be noted, deals with actual warfare. The director, René Clément, is well known for such films as Battle of the Rails, Les Maudits, M. Ripois, Gervaise, but none of these approaches the stature of Forbidden Games. Nor do his other films approach Forbidden Games in mood or style; the cold irony which is one of his strongest characteristics is here transformed by love and tenderness — it becomes lacerating. Forbidden Games is so fully felt that Clément’s method of presentation — a series of harsh contrasts between the intuitive, almost lyric understanding of the two children and the ludicrous, bestial human comedy of the adults — is an act of kindness to the audience: without the contrasts we would dissolve in tears of pity for us all.

  If you are one of those Americans who think that American taste is not up to European taste, may we point out that in Paris itself, this film was a commercial disaster until it was awarded the Grand Prix at Venice. Whatever your judgmen
t of the work as film art (though a masterwork, it has many imperfections), Forbidden Games is one of that small body of film experiences that does not leave you quite the same. (If you “think you may have seen it, but aren’t sure” — you haven’t seen it.)

  Forbidden Games begins in 1940 on a crowded highway outside Paris; suddenly, German planes swoop down and strafe the refugees. A delicately beautiful five-year-old girl (Brigitte Fossey) gets up and wanders away from the dead bodies of her parents, clutching her dead puppy in her arms. A farm boy (eleven-year-old Georges Poujouly) finds her and takes her home to his crude, backward peasant family. The two children become playmates: their game — their passion — is to collect dead animals for their private cemetery, and for this game, they steal crosses from churches and graveyards.

  The film is a tragi-comic fable on the themes of love, innocence, Christianity, war, and death. Its methods are suggestive rather than explicit. For example, there is no explanatory voice to tell us that Paulette is displacing emotion from her dead parents to the dead dog, and then to other dead animals and insects — we experience the displacement. It is only if we wish to that we may interpret Paulette’s discovery and attachment to the symbols of death as a parody of the Church’s fixation on death; in this interpretation, Paulette’s and Michel’s game is secret and forbidden because the cemetery game has become the province — the monopoly — of the Church. As a parallel, we have the peasants’ confused, helpless attitude toward death, which is revealed in the film’s comic highpoint: a mother’s attempt to give her dying son a purge.

  These contrasting attitudes toward death arise from contrasting kinds of innocence — each illuminating the other. Paulette’s purity contrasts with her coquetry toward Michel, her inflexible dedication to the game. It is a babes-in-the-woods kind of innocence — only the woods are a cemetery. She and Michel are gentle with each other, and though helpless when attacked by adults, they are impervious and wise: they know adults are enemies to be manipulated or feared. The peasants have their own horrifying innocence: they are not the warm, earthy characters of Marcel Pagnol; though well-intentioned, they are quarrelsome, animalistic, stupid, superstitious, ignorant. They take Christian rituals and symbols at the most literal level; they haven’t enough mental range or religious feeling to understand other emotional uses for these symbols. Michel is betrayed by his father not from malignance but out of that true abyss in which parents don’t think the promises they give to children count.

  Nobody points out — even in an ironic aside — what is indeed an ironic aside to the whole conception: that the adults, so shocked by the theft of the burial crosses, are not at all shocked, or even much concerned, by the game of war and death happening a few miles away.

  The film plays a subtle game in our imaginations — a game of lost and found. Paulette, the orphaned Parisian, is as lost with the peasant family a few miles from Paris as she would be with a tribe in deepest Africa; the peasants with their Christian symbols are as strange to her as witch doctors throwing ju-ju bones. To the peasants she is a charming toy, but irrelevant to their lives. With Michel, Paulette is happy and safe — emotionally she has been found. When is she more in contact with “reality”: when she is with Michel or when she has been separated from him — when the “authorities” of the Red Cross have her marked (and incorrectly identified)? Forbidden Games ends in pure tragedy — in one of the most desperately painful of all closing sequences. The ending is an opening into chaos: our normal complacencies, our little reassurances, are stripped away, and we, with the child, are lost.

  [1961]

  Shoeshine

  (1947)

  When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, “Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? My identification with those two lost boys had become so strong that I did not feel simply a mixture of pity and disgust toward this dissatisfied customer but an intensified hopelessness about everything . . . Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.

  Shoeshine was not conceived in the patterns of romance or melodrama; it is one of those rare works of art which seem to emerge from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose — the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs. James Agee’s immediate response to the film was, “Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see.” A few months later he retracted his evaluation of it as a work of art and wrote that it was not a completed work of art but “the raw or at best the roughed-out materials of art.” I think he should have trusted his initial response: the greatness a Shoeshine is in that feeling we get of human emotions that have not been worked-over and worked-into something (a pattern? a structure?) and cannot really be comprised in such a structure. We receive something more naked, something that pours out of the screen.

  Orson Welles paid tribute to this quality of the film when he said in 1960, “In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer. But what De Sica can do, that I can’t do. I ran his Shoeshine again recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life . . .”

  When Shoeshine came to this country, Life Magazine wrote, “New Italian film will shock the world . . . will act on U.S. audiences like a punch in the stomach.” But few Americans felt that punch in the stomach. Perhaps like the college girl they need to be hit by an actual fist before they can feel. Or, perhaps, to take a more charitable view of humanity, they feared the pain of the film. Just about everybody has heard of Shoeshine — it is one of the greatest and most famous films of all time — but how many people have actually seen it? They didn’t even go to see it in Italy. As De Sica has said, “Shoeshine was a disaster for the producer. It cost less than a million lire but in Italy few people saw it as it was released at a time when the first American films were reappearing . . .” Perhaps in the U.S. people stayed away because it was advertised as a social protest picture — which is a little like advertising Hamlet as a political study about a struggle for power.

  Shoeshine has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in film works that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium — if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty. Shoeshine, written by Cesare Zavattini, is a social protest film that rises above its purpose. It is a lyric study of how two boys* betrayed by society betray each other and themselves. The two young shoeshine boys who sustain their friendship and dreams amid the apathy of postwar Rome are destroyed by their own weaknesses and desires when sent to prison for black-marketeering. This tragic study of the corruption of innocence is intense, compassionate, and above all, humane.

  [1961]

  The Beggar’s Opera*

  (1953)

  The Beggar’s Opera came to be written after a suggestion by Swift that a “Newgate pastoral might make an odd pretty sort of thing.” (His coupling of Newgate, the notorious London prison which held its executions outside the prison walls — to the delight of huge crowds — with the term “pastoral” might be likened to a more recent usage. In her most famous song, Billie Holiday described a Negro body hanging from a poplar tree as a “pastoral scene of the gallant South.”) John Gay worked out the idea in a new form: a musical play with the lyrics fitted to existing music. To Londoners, weary of
the bombast of Italian opera (described by a character in a contemporary play as “squeaking Recitative, paltry Eunuchs . . . and trills of insignificant, outlandish Vowels”) Gay’s corrupt gang of thieves, highwaymen, whores, and informers were the fresh, sweet breath of England. And most of the music was already popular: Gay and the composer-arranger John Pepusch assembled and composed some 69 songs including the favorite carols, airs from operas, dances and tunes of the period, for which Gay wrote new words.

  The English were happy with the form — the ballad–opera — in which dialogue is dialogue and songs are distinct and separate songs. (Probably more people than would care to admit it feel the same way: the recitatives of “grand” opera are what drive us to drink in the intermissions.) The Beggar’s Opera, produced in 1728, was so successful that it started what in Hollywood is known as a “cycle”: there were about fifty ballad-operas produced in the next decade.

  The Beggar’s Opera is a many-leveled satire. John Gay satirized not only the familiar heroics and absurdities of Italian opera, but the politics of the day (Macheath the highwayman represented Robert Walpole, the most powerful man in England — famous for his talents and innovations in fiscal policy), is well as the foibles of well-known personalities (the rivalry of Polly and Lucy referred to the feud between two leading actresses). Those targets are now a matter for historians, but the large butt of the joke — the corruption and hypocrisy of mankind — still sits around. And by 1953, a new set of conventions, as tired and inflated as Italian opera, were ready for potshots: the conventions of the movies — the westerns, the swashbucklers, the musicals, the chaste heroines, the intrepid Robin Hood type heroes, the phony realism. Although the story is a mordant mixture of Hogarthian corruption and revels out of Breughel, this production does not emphasize what I suppose it’s customary to call the latent savagery of the material. Arthur Bliss arranged the score so that we come out humming the light, sweet airs; Christopher Fry adapted the text freely, retaining the mocking, raffish spirit — but only for our pleasure. And the actors are having such a good time playing scoundrels that their zest for villainy is infectiously satiric. The Beggar’s Opera is more fun than any other neglected movie of the past decade.