I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  When you think it over, The Mark falls apart. You can’t help wondering why the film makers have evaded the actual commission of a sex crime: would he somehow not be a suitable subject for a compassionate study if he had actually attacked the child? What the movie turns out to be about is a man who has expiated a crime he hasn’t committed: in other words, he’s morally one up on all of us, and still, he’s being branded and mistreated by society. So many of these movies with what purport to be daring themes manage to dodge the issue. In a movie attack on capital punishment the man who is sentenced to death cannot be guilty; in race relations movies, the Negroes and Jews who are mistreated by sadists and bullies are men of such transcendent heroism that they are scarcely recognizable as human beings. We can only assume that if Jews or Negroes are shown as bad-tempered or nasty, or if the boy accused of homosexuality were really guilty of it, the movie would suggest that they should be in the hands of sadists and bullies. Suppose that instead of Stuart Whitman, the innocent white-collar hero of The Mark, we visualize Peter Lorre, the miserable, sweating, fat child-attacker of M, also desperate to be caught and knowing that he can’t control himself — and, finally, when trapped, screaming that he can’t help himself. Would the audience feel compassion if he, by some fluke, were turned over to a prison so enlightened it provided first-rate group therapy, and was then discharged — because maybe he could now control himself? I’d say audiences would have a hard time accepting him as a hero, and they might easily identify with that horrid, sensation-mongering newspaperman who makes a scandal when he sees the hero of The Mark playing with a child. Isn’t it our knowledge all the way through, not only that he hasn’t done anything but also that he no longer even wants to and that he certainly won’t, that makes all the chit-chat about probabilities so easy to assent to? We can feel virtuous for being on his side and feel superior to the people who are suspicious of him simply because we are in on the lowdown: we know he is innocent. The movie tells us that we all have our dark impulses; but it really enables us to identify with our most progressive, commendable, enlightened social consciousness because it has taken the danger out of the dark side.

  I must admit also that I got the uncomfortable feeling at times that we were supposed to feel sympathetic toward Whitman because he was such a pained, unhappy, dull man — dull despite his indicated intelligence and business skill. (That was quite a business, incidentally — I’ve never worked for one like that. “A public-relations firm” one reviewer called it — I couldn’t tell what it was: I decided it was just a moviemaker’s dream of the creative life in business.) But about Whitman’s anxious expression — I had the feeling that had he showed a frivolous side, had he ever forgotten his problem or showed a desire for drink, or even a hobby, the concept of the film would have collapsed. Weren’t we being asked to be sympathetic because of his desperate, single-minded anxiety rather than for his humanity (which might include some other traits of character, some irrelevancies that would give him human relevance)? One difference between The Mark and Dostoyevsky, between thesis and art, is that Dostoyevsky would have given the man so many other dimensions. This hero never forgets the crime he almost committed — it is the only focus of interest in him. He has no life as a character; he is a walking anxiety.

  It’s interesting to note that in The Hustler, the movie had tension and excitement at the billiard table and was diffuse and rhetorical away from it — in the love affair and other relationships. Here, in The Mark, the emotions that one would expect to go into the love affair go into the analytic sessions. The audience transfers all its affection to Rod Steiger’s Brendan Behan–like analyst; in the only personally characterized of the roles, he is warm and lovable, and it is suggested that such human generosity is rather eccentric — he’s a droll fellow.

  I suspect the irony is unconscious that in this ever so discreetly Freudian view of things, the only person allowed any eccentricity, or behavior not directly concerned with the hero’s problem, is the analyst. Are people only free to show some human feeling and spirit when they’re post-analytic themselves when they’ve been through the scientific fire and been tested? Is it only then that you can act like an old-fashioned human being — i.e., in the screenwriters’ terms, a “character”? Or is it perhaps that the film makers have such a dogged devotion to analysis that they transfer all charm to the analyst? He can afford to have weaknesses and still be lovable. Unfortunately in their plot concept, he alone can afford to be human.

  Even simple, intelligent films are becoming rare, and I enjoyed The Mark. But I wish that it hadn’t so carefully plotted the human soul and then handed us the blueprint; I wish it had used insight to explore a character, instead of using the data of psychiatry to sketch one; I wish Stuart Whitman’s head, particularly from the side and back, weren’t so remarkably thick and ugly; I wish the director, Guy Green, had an eye for more than the obvious; I also wish the scriptwriters had not indulged in such symbolic touches as the broken dish, with the hero bending down to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. I wish, I wish it were a really good movie instead of just a commendable one.

  Kagi

  Among the good films ignored or ludicrously misinterpreted by the critics is, currently, the Japanese film Kagi, or Odd Obsession, a beautifully stylized and highly original piece of film making — perverse in the best sense of the word, and worked out with such finesse that each turn of the screw tightens the whole comic structure. As a treatment of sexual opportunism, it’s a bit reminiscent of Double Indemnity, but it’s infinitely more complex. The opening plunges us into the seat of the material. A young doctor, sensual and handsome, smug with sexual prowess, tells us that his patient, an aging man, is losing his virility. And the old man bends over and bares his buttocks — to take an injection. But the old man doesn’t get enough charge from the injection, so he induces the young doctor, who is his daughter’s suitor, to make love to his wife. By observing them, by artificially making himself jealous, the old man is able to raise his spirits a bit.

  The comedy, of course, and a peculiar kind of black human comedy it is, is that the wife, superbly played by Machiko Kyo, is the traditional, obedient Japanese wife — and she cooperates in her husband’s plan. She is so obedient and cooperative that, once aroused by the young doctor, she literally kills her old husband with kindness — she excites him to death. The ambiguities are malicious and ironic: the old man’s death is both a perfect suicide and a perfect murder. And all four characters are observed so coldly, so dispassionately that each new evidence of corruption thickens the cream of the jest.

  The title Kagi — the key — fits the Tanizaki novel, but does not fit the film, which might better be called the keyhole. Everybody is spying on everybody else, and although each conceals his motives and actions, nobody is fooled. The screen is our keyhole, and we are the voyeurs who can see them all peeking at each other. When the old man takes obscene pictures of his wife, he gives them to the young man to develop. The young man shows them to his fiancée, the daughter, whose reaction is that she can do anything her mother can do.

  But a further layer of irony is that she can’t. For the film is also a withering satire on the Westernized modern Japanese girl. The mother — mysterious, soft, subtle — uses her traditional obedience for her own purposes. She never says what she thinks about anything — when she starts a diary she puts down romantic hypocrisy worthy of a schoolgirl — and she is infinitely desirable. The daughter, a college student who explains what is going on quite explicitly, is just as corrupt as her mother, but has no interest or appeal to her parents or even to her fiancé. In her sweaters and skirts, and with her forthright speech, she is sexually available but completely unattractive. When she tells her father that nothing so simple as adultery is being practised by her mother and the young doctor, she seems simply ludicrous; her mother can lower her eyes and murmur distractedly about the terrible things she is asked to do — and excite any man to want to try out a few.

  The direc
tor, Kon Ichikawa, is probably the most important new young Japanese director. His study of obsessive expiation, The Burmese Harp, was subjected to a brutal, hack editing job, and has reached only a small audience in this country; Enjo (1958), based on Mishima’s novel about a great crime, the young Zen Buddhist burning the Golden Pavilion, has not yet played here. (An earlier film of Ichikawa’s — a puppet version of a Kabuki dance — was destroyed by MacArthur’s aides because, according to Japanese film historian Donald Richie, they regarded Kabuki as feudalistic. What did they think MacArthur was?)

  Kagi, made in 1959, took a special prize at the Cannes Festival in 1960 (the other special prize went to L’Avventura). Kagi was given “Special commendation for ‘audacity of its subject and its plastic qualities.’ ” I’ve indicated the audacity of the subject; let me say something about the film’s plastic qualities. It is photographed in color, with dark blue tones predominating, and with an especially pale soft pinkish white for flesh tones. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that gave such a feeling of flesh. Machiko Kyo, with her soft, sloping shoulders, her rhythmic little paddling walk, is like some ancient erotic fantasy that is more suggestive than anything Hollywood has ever thought up. In what other movie does one see the delicate little hairs on a woman’s legs? In what other movie is flesh itself not merely the surface of desire but totally erotic? By contrast, the daughter, like the exposed, sun-tanned healthy American girl, is an erotic joke — she is aware, liberated, passionate, and, as in our Hollywood movies, the man’s only sexual objective is to get into her and have done with it. With Machiko Kyo the outside is also erotic substance.

  Ichikawa’s cold, objective camera observes the calculations and designs, the careful maneuvers in lives that are fundamentally driven and obsessive; and there’s deadly humor in the contrast between what the characters pretend they’re interested in and what they actually care about.

  Kagi is conceived at a level of sophistication that accepts pornography as a fact of life which, like other facts of life, can be treated in art. The subject matter is pornography, but the movie is not pornographic. It’s a polite, almost clinical comedy about moral and sexual corruption. It even satirizes the clinical aspects of sex. Modern medicine, with its injections, its pills, its rejuvenating drugs, adds to the macabre side of the comedy. For Kagi has nothing to do with love: the characters are concerned with erotic pleasure, and medicine is viewed as the means of prolonging the possibilities of this pleasure. So there is particular humor in having the doctors who have been hastening the old man’s death with their hypodermics try to place the blame for his death on the chiropractor who has been working on his muscles. They have all known what they were doing, just as the four principals all know, and even the servant and the nurse. The film has an absurd ending that seems almost tacked on (it isn’t in the book); if it ended with the three survivors sitting together, and with Machiko Kyo reading her diary aloud, it could be a perfect no-exit situation, and the movie would have no major defects or even weaknesses.

  Reading the reviews, you’d think that no American movie critic had even so much as heard of that combination of increasing lust and diminishing potency which destroys the dignity of old age for almost all men; you’d think they never behaved like silly, dirty old men. Japanese films in modern settings have a hard time with the art-house audience: perhaps the Americans who make up the foreign-film audience are still too bomb-scarred to accept the fact that business goes on as usual in Japan. In Kagi the beds — where a good part of the action takes place — are Western-style beds, and when the people ply each other with liquor, it’s not saki, it’s Hennessy. Kagi is the first Japanese comedy that has even had a chance in the art houses: if the judgments of incompetent critics keep people from seeing it, when will we get another? Crowther finds the husband of Kagi “a strictly unwholesome type.” Let’s put it this way: if you’ve never gotten a bit weary of the classical Western sex position, and if you’ve never wanted to keep the light on during intercourse, then you probably won’t enjoy Kagi. But if you caught your breath at the Lady Wakasa sequences in Ugetsu, if you gasped when Masayuki Mori looked at Machiko Kyo and cried out, “I never dreamed such pleasures existed!” then make haste for Kagi.

  The Innocents

  When you see The Innocents, you think how amazing that this crew of film makers could take such familiar material and make it so fresh. Then you read the reviews and discover that this material, far from being familiar to movie critics, is incomprehensible to them. They don’t even get it. From Paine Knickerbocker in the San Francisco Chronicle you will discover that The Innocents “is dominated by the idea that two children — a brother and his sister — may be developing very unhealthy attitudes toward one another” and that it deals with “their incestuous love for one another.” (As a friend remarked, “Now we know why Miles was sent down from school: that sinister business is all solved — he’d snuck his sister into the dormitory.”) If you read Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, you will find a new enigma: the children “. . . are played with glibness and social precocity, but it is difficult to grasp whether their manners are actually adult or the figments of the governess’ mind.” If you look at Show Business Illustrated, you may have this illumination: “What unnatural, hypnotic hold have Quint and Miss Jessel over the children? What was their relationship with these otherworldly tots? Homosexuality has been one of the favorite guesses among those who have had a go at the James riddle.” (Maybe . . . but not in relation to The Turn of the Screw!) In the Observer, you will find Penelope Gilliatt, the most erratically brilliant of modern film critics, at low ebb: “In the book, the governess is vaguely attracted to the uncle who hires her; Jack Clayton, born after Freud, shows that she’s really in love with one of the children. . . .” And in the New Statesman, John Coleman, stuffily rationalistic, says: “Perhaps the children . . . are possessed; and, on these perhapses, intelligent interest dissipates.”

  Don’t let these new developments in Jamesian scholarship keep you away from the movie — which is closer to Henry James than you might think from the reviews. It’s a movie with the pleasures of elegance and literacy. The little girl’s song by Paul Dehn before the titles and then the hands with the titles are marvelous; from the very first scene, we know these people know what they’re doing and we can relax. It’s going to be all right: there may be mistakes, but they won’t be vulgar or stupid mistakes. The presence of Michael Redgrave and Deborah Kerr is wonderfully reassuring: when they speak, the nuances are all there, and just the right note of suppressed hysteria in the voices. The house and the park are magnificent — so magnificent they’re rather unreal (unreal in a way that’s right for The Turn of the Screw). I don’t know where this photographer Freddie Francis sprang from. You may recall that in the last year just about every time a British movie is something to look at, it turns out to be his (Room at the Top, Sons and Lovers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — in each case with a different director), and what he has done for The Innocents seems at times almost more inspired than the work of Jack Clayton, the director; Georges Auric, the composer; and William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer, the scenarists. It’s always difficult in a movie to judge who should get the credit, who the blame. In this case, it is simply a matter of trying to judge who should get the most credit.

  Who, for example, thought of using those curiously frozen, indistinct long shots of Miss Jessel’s ghost? We peer at these images with the governess’s eyes, and we are transfixed by their beauty. They’re like the memory of an old photograph; we retain a definite impression even though it’s impossible to describe what was in it. And did we even see it or did we just hear about it and think we saw it? Or did we only see something like it?

  And who thought of the marvelous shot of Deborah Kerr with her long hair floating as she kisses the boy, so that as her frightened lips draw back in confusion, we see the hairs hanging below her chin like the sparse beard of an old Chinese?

  The Inno
cents is not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and maybe Deborah Kerr’s performance should really be called great. The story isn’t told quite clearly enough: the elegant setting and our story sense lead us to expect a stately plot line, but instead of moving in a clear developmental rhythm, the plot advances through sudden leaps, as if the film makers have concentrated on the virtuoso possibilities of the material. There is a beautiful montage sequence, exquisite in itself, but too long and elaborate to advance the story; what is even worse, the sequence comes too fast upon us; and the abrupt developments and some noisy, easy effects tend to disturb the pleasures of analyzing what is going on. Perhaps the problem is simply that, reading the novel, we can set the book down, smile and enjoy thinking it over, and then take it up again. Here we are rushed along without time for reflection.

  It’s probably the combination of a rather jerky rhythm in the film with our missing reader’s pauses for reflection that slightly (but only slightly) interferes with our enjoyment of the possible interpretive levels of the material — the game the film makers and the original author play, of suggesting that the apparitions the governess sees may have some horribly unspecified kind of control over the children, or may be evidence of the intensifying monomania of the governess who has terrifyingly absolute power over them. The fun of it all is the deliberate mystification — represented in the film by the tear that the ghost of Miss Jesse’ drops. All else can be more or less comprised within the system of the repressed governess’s madness; but not that little wet tear, that little pearl of ambiguity.