I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The only filmed opera that is light, playful, and sophisticated, it may have suffered at box offices from the (deservedly) bad reputations of the many filmed operas that use the stage-set like an embalming table. It may have suffered even more from its greatest virtues: it is unrealistic in style, and the brilliant, unabashed theatricality, the choreographed chases and betrayals and captures, the elegant march to the gallows, the dazzling, macabre ballet under the titles at the end as the prisoners and jailers whirl amidst their stocks and irons, may have been too much of a jolt for movie audiences. Most movie directors attempt to conceal their artifice in a realistic surface; here, artifice is used with the carefree delight and audacity of early Douglas Fairbanks films — delight in the film medium. Not even in Pirandello productions is there a more exquisite stylization of the derangements of art and life than in the hanging scene. We wait for the rescue, we know something must save Macheath, and something theatrically perfect does: Macheath as the actor playing Macheath simply refuses to be hanged. Only Filch, the obscene dwarf, holding a mirror on a long stick so that he can see the hanging, could be disappointed. Or perhaps movie audiences who expect to see vice exploited and then castigated, not satirized with grace and wit.

  The star of The Beggar’s Opera is Laurence Olivier, the champion of the English-speaking theater, the actor who so rarely has an opportunity to demonstrate that he is, in addition to everything else, a great comedian. (Olivier’s stature may, ironically, have contributed to the film’s failure: the critics were so happy to pounce on any possible weakness in an actor of such heroic dimensions — and Olivier’s pleasant baritone, though adequate to the demands of the score, is not a great voice). He has never so freely entertained himself — and us — as in this role of the lecherous Captain Macheath escaping the law and the doxies. A wide range is not necessary to a screen actor (Humphrey Bogart did not have it, and was nonetheless admirable for what he could do) but Olivier’s range is truly astonishing. The Observer remarked, “He is the only leading English actor of whom even the most malicious tongue has never said: ‘of course, he always plays himself’ ” His Macheath is a brilliant caricature of the romantic bandit; he has a glance that makes a wicked point and a gesture to counterpoint, and his exuberance — his joy in the role — leaps through the whole production.

  Although Olivier, and Stanley Holloway (a magnificent Lockit), are almost the only ones who do their own singing, the others perform in such an offhand and unpretentious manner that the dubbing is inoffensive. The dubbing even comes in for a bit of parody when Dorothy Tutin, as dear Polly Peachum, sings while rowing a little boat: she obviously isn’t singing as someone rowing would; she smiles like a cat who has swallowed a canary, as indeed she has. In a more flamboyant parody of movie tricks, Olivier carries on a love duet (“Oh what pain it is to part”) while fighting off hordes of enemies.

  Athene Seyler is a great Mrs. Trapes; George Devine is Peachum, Mary Clare is Mrs. Peachum, Daphne Anderson is Lucy Lockit. Margot Grahame, as The Actress, is less ethereal and more buxom than in The Informer of almost twenty years before; several of the other players have recently become much better known — Hugh Griffith (The Beggar) for his work in Ben Hur; Yvonne Furneaux (Jenny Diver) for La Dolce Vita.

  Peter Brook was celebrating his tenth anniversary as the “grand old enfant terrible” of the English theater when he directed this, his first, film; he was twenty-eight. In the theater Brook is something of a one-man production crew: he has been known to do his own lighting, decor, and even music. He is the only English theatrical prodigy comparable to the American Orson Welles. Both came a cropper in the movies, but with a difference: Welles had his wounds licked by the critics, Brook had his face stepped on and it was seven years before he returned to films, and even then not in England. But, ironically, the cameraman Guy Green has since become a well-known English director (The Angry Silence, The Mark).

  [1961]

  The Seven Samurai

  (1954)

  In The Seven Samurai, the greatest battle epic since The Birth of a Nation of 1915, Akira Kurosawa achieves what modern American and European epic makers vainly attempt: the excitement of the senses. Laurence Olivier had charged the screen with glorious exultation in Henry V; Kurosawa makes this exultation his theme. Fighting itself is the subject of The Seven Samurai — an epic on violence and action, a raging, sensuous work of such overpowering immediacy that it leaves you both exhilarated and exhausted.

  It bears a resemblance to the Hollywood western. The beauty of the western genre is its formalization and stylization: the clarity and simplicity of the actions and motives. Although The Seven Samurai is brilliantly complex visually, and although it can be interpreted in terms of such complex themes as the problems of honor, the meaning of human cooperation, the interlaced responsibilities of defenders and defended, it preserves the chivalric simplicity of the western plot which is even more wonderful in the nuclear age. Seven hired knights defend a village against forty mounted bandits — their pay, a few handfuls of rice. Everybody knows what the fighting is about, who the marauders are, who the protectors are, and the particular piece of land where the battle will be joined.

  An American critic attempting to describe what kind of movie The Seven Samurai is, and to assess its qualities as a work of art, may experience some constraint. Kurosawa has said, “I haven’t read one review from abroad that hasn’t read false meanings into my pictures.” I might feel more uneasy about my ignorance of Japanese traditions and the “false meanings” I may read into Kurosawa’s work had I not learned that Kurosawa himself was responsible for the framing device of Rashomon: by Yankee cunning I calculate that if he could rise above such blunders, my interpretation of his work may not be destroyed by occasional errors. For example, is the setting fifteenth or sixteenth century Japan? I can’t tell the difference. And I can’t really understand the Japanese code of sexual honor — the intense shame of the farmers’ wives who, having been abducted by the brigands, are so dishonored that they choose death rather than rescue and reunion with their families.

  As if the disadvantage of not comprehending Japanese tradition were not enough, there is another handicap. In the now standard reference volume The Japanese Film, Anderson and Richie point out that “The West, having seen only a much-cut print under the title The Magnificent Seven, has not yet seen what Kurosawa intended to show. The complete . . . film has an epic-like quality, due in part to skillful repetition of events, which in the opinion of many puts it among the best films ever made, not only in Japan but anywhere in the world.” But all we can discuss is the movie we can see.* And even distorted by our point of view, and cut for our short span of attention (or was it cut so that people could get in and out of theaters faster?), it’s incomparable as a modern poem of force.

  There is an additional problem for this critic: The Seven Samurai is the kind of action-packed, thundering-hooves, death-dealing spectacle which is considered a man’s picture. I propose to turn this hazard to my advantage by suggesting that the weaknesses of the film are closely linked to the limitations of this virile, masculine genre.

  The Seven Samurai took over a year to photograph and cost a half million dollars; it was the biggest film made in Japan up to that time, and Toho, appalled at the time and costs, considered abandoning the project. Kurosawa employed a wide range of technical devices: an experimental use of super-powered telephoto lenses to make action and objects seem overwhelmingly close, deep focus, giant close-ups, slow motion, amazing tracking shots. The effect of these photographic methods and of the raw, fast editing is that The Seven Samurai doesn’t seem like a historical or “period” film at all: everything is going on now, right on top of us. Kurosawa can create diversion that doesn’t divert from the subject: when the farmers scan the street for hungry samurai, he presents a little scherzo of elegant figures moving through humbler humanity. The stance, the formalized carriage of the samurai, gives substance to the farmers’ desperate faith in them: surely th
ey could dispose of countless ordinary men. The pace and cinematic feeling, the verve, the humor are completely modern. Kurosawa is perhaps the greatest of all contemporary film craftsmen: his use of the horizon for compositional variety, the seemingly infinite camera angles, the compositions that are alive with action, the almost abstract use of trees, flowers, sky, rain, mud, and moving figures are all active. In The Seven Samurai your eye does not rest — you do not see any of the static, careful arrangements, the crawling, overcomposed salon photography of Hollywood’s big productions.

  The musical score is considered to be one of the best Japanese film scores ever written, but that really doesn’t say much for it. There is no specifically Japanese tradition for film music, and the budgetary allowances for composers are minuscule. The result is what sounds to us like a parody of European music. Audiences for Rashomon have sometimes accused the projectionist of putting on a record of Ravel’s Bolero; the music for The Seven Samurai is often absurdly anachronistic — with premature echoes of “Ol’ Man River,” Ravel, American movie music for westerns, and others. This, however, is a minor weakness.

  There is a major weakness. When violence itself becomes the theme, when it is treated with such extraordinary range that we are caught up in what is literally an epic of action, we need protagonists commensurate with the pictorial grandeur. There is one: Kyuzo, a swordsman who has no interest in life but the perfection of his swordsmanship. His early scenes in stills and slow motion — a fable of swordplay which must then become futile sword death — are among the most beautiful in the film. But the principal characters are far more familiar — and at the creative level, familiarity should and must breed contempt. As the braggadocio link between the farmers and the samurai, Toshiro Mifune gives the movie much gusto, but he overplays: like many another great ham, he calls too much attention to himself. No actor can do more with his knees and his behind than Mifune, but he also bares his teeth almost as often as Kirk Douglas. It is not merely that his defects as an actor jeopardize his spontaneity and uninhibited energy, but that his overacting exposes the clichés of the role — which is basically a comic turn. The role of Takashi Shimura is also a series of clichés: his Kambei is the idealized father-leader figure — sage, kindly, selfless, mature, just. And there is the callow young hero who gets his sexual initiation, and so forth. When the battle is over and the village saved, one of the remaining samurai remarks, “Again we survive.” Kambei corrects him: “Again we lose — the winners are those farmers, not us.” To have come so far for this! Raging, stampeding violence — scenes of slaughter and devastation that, as Tony Richardson remarked, are “not unworthy of the Goya of Los Desastres” — and then this little “deep thought” which is not only highly questionable but ludicrously inadequate. It’s as if the epic makers didn’t realize that what we have witnessed overpowers such flabby little thoughts (which bear a dismal resemblance to the “humanistic” thinking of “message” westerns).

  Here is the problem of the men’s action pictures: either we get the ritual conflict of slick bad men versus strong silent heroes, i.e., evil pitted against good in a frame of reference too silly to take seriously, or we get the ritual conflict set in the commonplaces of a shopworn, socially conscious frame of reference which tries to give depth and meaning to the ritual and succeeds only in destroying its beautiful simplicity. The Seven Samurai triumphs over these problems by pouring all its energies into the extremities of human experience — into conflict itself — but it still looks for social “truths” beyond the action and provides an explicit content so banal that the epic beauties seem to be a virtuoso exercise. Perhaps Kurosawa, like his obsessive master swordsman, has no thoughts beyond the perfection of his craft. Action is all — the pity is that he doesn’t seem to know that in The Seven Samurai it is enough.

  [1961]

  III

  Broadcasts and Reviews,

  1961–1963

  Breathless,

  and the Daisy Miller Doll

  Breathless, the most important New Wave film which has reached the United States, is a frightening little chase comedy with no big speeches and no pretensions. Michel, the young Parisian hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo), steals a car, kills a highway patrolman, chases after some money owed him for past thefts, so he and his young American girl friend can get away to Italy. He finances this chase after the money by various other crimes along the way. Meanwhile, the police are chasing him. But both Michel’s flight and the police chase are half-hearted. Michel isn’t desperate to get away — his life doesn’t mean that much to him; and the police (who are reminiscent of Keystone Cops) carry on a routine bumbling manhunt. Part of the stylistic peculiarity of the work — its art — is that while you’re watching it, it’s light and playful, off-the-cuff, even a little silly. It seems accidental that it embodies more of the modern world than other movies.

  What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engagingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the impervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it or anything else. The heroine, who has literary interests, quotes Wild Palms, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” But that’s just an attitude she likes at that moment; at the end she demonstrates that it’s false. The hero states the truth for them both: “I’d choose nothing.” The characters of Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots. The European critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as “total immorality, lived skin-deep.” And possibly because we Americans live among just such people and have come to take them for granted, the film may not, at first, seem quite so startling as it is. And that’s what’s frightening about Breathless: not only are the characters familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.

  If you foolishly depend on the local reviewers to guide you, you may have been put off Breathless. To begin with, where did they get the idea that the title refers to the film’s fast editing? That’s about like suggesting that the title Two-Way Stretch refers to the wide screen. The French title, À Bout de Souffle, means “Out of Breath,” and it refers to the hero, who keeps going until he’s winded. Their confusion is, however, a tribute to the film’s fast, improvisatory style, the go go go rhythm. The jazz score, the comic technique are perfectly expressive of the lives of the characters; the jump-cuts convey the tempo and quality of the activities of characters who don’t work up to anything but hop from one thing to the next. And as the film seems to explain the people in their own terms, the style has the freshness of “objectivity.” It does seem breathlessly young, newly created.

  If you hold the Chronicle’s review of Breathless up to the light, you may see H-E-L-P shining through it.

  Certain scenes are presented with utter candor, lacking in form and impact in their frankness. A long encounter, for instance, in the small room of Jean Seberg, with whom Belmondo claims to be in love, is repetitious — but extremely lifelike. And then young Godard suddenly will present another scene in which a police inspector is tailing Miss Seberg and searching for Belmondo. This is staged so clumsily that one wonders whether parody is what the director intends. But Belmondo’s peril is grave and his reaction to his predicament is sensitive. . . . Always energetic and arrogant, he still suggests both a lost quality and a tender humor. This is his facade to shield his small cynical world from all that he does not understand.

  The hero of the film understands all that he wants to, but the critic isn’t cynical enough to see the basic fact about these characters: they just don’t give a damn. And that’s what the movie is about. The Examiner’s critic lamented that Breathless was a “hodge-podge” and complained that he couldn’t “warm up” to the characters — which is a bit like not being able to warm up to the four Mission Dist
rict kids who went out looking for homosexuals to beat up, and managed to cause the death of a young schoolteacher. For sheer not-getting-the-point, it recalls the remark recently overheard from a well-groomed, blue-rinse-on-the-hair type elderly lady: “That poor Eichmann! I don’t think he’s got a Chinaman’s chance.”

  How do we connect with people who don’t give a damn? Well, is it really so difficult? Even if they weren’t all around us, they’d still be (to quote Double Indemnity) closer than that.

  They are as detached as a foreign colony, as uncommitted as visitors from another planet, yet the youth of several countries seem, to one degree or another, to share the same characteristics. They’re not consciously against society: they have no ideologies at all, they’re not even rebels without a cause. They’re not rebelling against anything — they don’t pay that much attention to what doesn’t please or amuse them. There is nothing they really want to do, and there’s nothing they won’t do. Not that they’re perverse or deliberately cruel: they have charm and intelligence — but they live on impulse.