I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The Westerner has walked into the gangster movie: both sides are treacherous and ruthless (trigger-happy, they would be called in American pictures). He hires out to each and systematically eliminates both. He is the agent of their destruction because they offend his sense of how things should be: he destroys them because they disgust him. This black Robin Hood with his bemused contempt is more treacherous than the gangsters; he can defend his code only by a masterly use of the doublecross, and he enjoys himself with an occasional spree of demolition (“Destruction’s our delight”). The excruciating humor of his last line, as he surveys the carnage — “Now there’ll be a little quiet in this town” — is that we’ve heard it so many times before, but not amidst total devastation. His clean-up has been so thorough and so outrageously bloody that it has achieved a hilarious kind of style.

  We would expect violence carried to extremity to be sickening; Kurosawa, in a triumph of bravura technique, makes it explosively comic and exhilarating. By taking the soft romantic focus off the Westerner as played by Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd or John Wayne, Kurosawa has made him a comic hero — just because of what he does, which was always incredible. Without his nimbus, he is unbelievably, absurdly larger-than-life. In Shane, the rather ponderously “classic” version of the Western, good and evil were white and black. The settlers, morally strong but physically weak, naive and good but not very bright or glamorous, had to be represented in their fight against the rustling-gambling-murderous prince of darkness by a disinterested prince of light. Shane was Galahad. The Western dog, who howled at his master’s grave in Shane, who crossed the road to frame the action at the beginning and end of The Ox-Bow Incident, has a new dimension in Yojimbo — he appears with a human hand for a bone. This dog signals us that in this movie the conventions of the form are going to be turned inside out, we’ll have to shift expectations, abandon sentiments: in this terrain dog eats man. And if we think that man, having lost his best friend, can still count on his mother, Kurosawa has another shock for us. A boy from one gang, held prisoner by the other, is released; he rushes to his mother, crying “Oka” (ma or mother). She responds by slapping him. Mother isn’t sentimental: first things first, and what she cares about is that gambling concession. This Eastern Western isn’t merely a confusion in the points of the compass; Kurosawa’s control and his sense of film rhythm are so sure that each new dislocation of values produces both surprise and delight, so that when the hero tries to free an old man who has been trussed-up and suspended in air, and the old man protests that he’s safer where he is, we giggle in agreement.

  Other directors attempt to recreate the pastness of a story, to provide distance, perspective. For Kurosawa, the setting may be feudal or, as in this case, mid–nineteenth century, but we react (as we are supposed to react) as modern men. His time is now, his action so immediate, sensuous, raging, that we are forced to disbelieve, to react with incredulity, to admire. (This is partly the result of using telephoto lenses that put us right into the fighting, into the confusion of bared teeth and gasps and howls.) He shakes spears in our faces. This is more alive than any living we know; this, all our senses tell us, is art, not life. Ironic detachment is our saving grace.

  Of all art forms, movies are most in need of having their concepts of heroism undermined. The greatest action pictures have often been satirical: even before Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., mocked the American dreams, our two-reelers used the new techniques of the screen to parody the vacuous heroics of stage melodrama. George Stevens’ Gunga Din, a model of the action genre, was so exuberant and high-spirited that it both exalted and mocked a schoolboy’s version of heroism. But in recent years John Ford, particularly, has turned the Western into an almost static pictorial genre, a devitalized, dehydrated form which is “enriched” with pastoral beauty and evocative nostalgia for a simple, heroic way of life. The clichés we retained from childhood pirate, buccaneer, gangster, and Western movies have been awarded the status of myths, and writers and directors have been making infatuated tributes to the myths of our old movies. If, by now, we dread going to see a “great” Western, it’s because “great” has come to mean slow and pictorially composed. We’ll be lulled to sleep in the “affectionate,” “pure,” “authentic” scenery of the West (in “epics” like My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache) or, for a change, we’ll be clobbered by messages in “mature” Westerns like The Gunfighter and High Noon (the message is that the myths we never believed in anyway were false). Kurosawa slashes the screen with action, and liberates us from the pretensions of our “serious” Westerns. After all those long, lean-hipped walks across the screen with Cooper or Fonda (the man who knows how to use a gun is, by movie convention, the man without an ass), we are restored to sanity by Mifune’s heroic personal characteristic — a titanic shoulder twitch.

  The Western has always been a rather hypocritical form. The hero represents a way of life that is becoming antiquated. The solitary defender of justice is the last of the line; the era of lawlessness is over, courts are coming in. But the climax is the demonstration that the old way is the only way that works — though we are told that it is the last triumph of violence. The Westerner, the loner, must take the law into his hands for one last time in order to wipe out the enemies of the new system of justice. Yojimbo employs an extraordinary number of the conventions of the form, but takes the hypocrisy for a ride. The samurai is a killer with a code of honor and all that, but no system of justice is supplanting him. He’s the last of the line not because law and order will prevail, but because his sword for hire is already anachronistic. Guns are coming in. One of his enemies is a gun-slinger, who looks and acts a parody of American Method actors. That ridiculous little gun means the end of the warrior caste: killing is going to become so easy that it will be democratically available to all. In Yojimbo goodness triumphs satirically: the foil at the point of the sword is a huge joke. The samurai is not a man with a poker face, and he’s not an executioner who hates his job. He’s a man of passion who takes savage satisfaction in his special talents. Violence triumphs whoever wins, and our ideas of courage, chivalry, strength, and honor bite the dust along with the “bad” men. The dogs will have their human fodder.

  Yojimbo is not a film that needs much critical analysis; its boisterous power and good spirits are right there on the surface. Lechery, avarice, cowardice, coarseness, animality, are rendered by fire; they become joy in life, in even the lowest forms of human life. (Kurosawa’s grotesque variants of the John Ford stock company include a giant — a bit mentally retarded, perhaps.) The whimpering, maimed and cringing are so vivid they seem joyful; what in life might be pathetic, loathsome, offensive is made comic and beautiful. Kurosawa makes us accept even the most brutish of his creatures as more alive than the man who doesn’t yield to temptation. There is so much displacement that we don’t have time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically. It’s hard to believe that others don’t share this response. Still, I should remember Bosley Crowther with his “the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese.” And Dwight Macdonald, who writes, “It is a dark, neurotic, claustrophobic film . . .” and, “The Japanese have long been noted for their clever mimicry of the West. Yojimbo is the cinematic equivalent of their ten-cent ball-point pens and their ninety-eight-cent mini-cameras. But one expects more of Kurosawa.”

  More? Kurosawa, one of the few great new masters of the medium, has had one weakness: he has often failed to find themes that were commensurate with the surge and energy of his images. At times he has seemed to be merely a virtuoso stylist, a painter turned director whose visual imagination had outstripped his content. But in at least three films, eye and mind have worked together at the highest levels. His first major international success, Rashomon (1950) — despite the longeurs of the opening and closing sequences — is still the classic film statement of the relativism, the unknowability of truth. The Sev
en Samurai (1954) is incomparable as a modern poem of force. It is the Western form carried to apotheosis — a vast celebration of the joys and torments of fighting, seen in new depth and scale, a brutal imaginative ballet on the nature of strength and weakness. Now, in Yojimbo, Kurosawa has made a farce of force. And now that he has done it, we can remember how good his comic scenes always were and that he frequently tended toward parody.

  Ikiru is often called Kurosawa’s masterpiece. (It does have one great moment — the old man’s song in the swing. Throne of Blood, which I much prefer, has at least two great moments — Isuzu Yamada’s handwashing scene, and that dazzling filmic achievement of Shakespeare’s vision when Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane.) Movies are, happily, a popular medium (which makes it difficult to understand why Dwight Macdonald with his dedication to high art sacrifices his time to them), but does that mean that people must look to them for confirmation of their soggiest humanitarian sentiments? The prissy liberals who wouldn’t give a man with the D.T.’s a quarter for a shot (“He’ll waste it on drink”) are just the ones who love the message they take out of Ikiru, not that one man did manage to triumph over bureaucracy but that the meaning of life is in doing a bit of goody good good for others. I have talked to a number of these people about why they hated The Manchurian Candidate and I swear not one of them can remember that when the liberal senator is killed, milk pours out. Yojimbo seems so simple, so marvelously obvious, but those who are sentimental don’t get it: they think it’s a mistake, that it couldn’t have been intended as a killing comedy. It’s true that even Shakespeare didn’t dare give his clowns hot blood to drink. But Kurosawa dares.

  Devi

  The Apu Trilogy has been widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, which indeed it is, though I would guess that in the years since its release fewer Americans have seen it than have seen David and Lisa in any week since its release. Fewer have seen Satyajit Ray’s new film, Devi, than have seen David and Lisa in any night since its release. Ingmar Bergman, who was also a slow starter with American audiences, has definitely caught on; why not Ray?

  Bergman is sensual and erotic; he provides “stark” beauty and exposed nerves and conventional dramatic conflicts and a theme that passes for contemporary — the coldness of intellectuals. Husbands fail their wives and drive them crazy because they don’t understand them and all that. (Really, it’s not people who don’t understand us who drive us nuts — it’s when those who shouldn’t, do.) But I would guess that what gives his movies their immense appeal is their semi-intellectual, or, to be more rude, “metaphysical” content. His characters are like schoolboys who have just heard the startling new idea that “God is dead”; this sets them off on torments of deep thought. Bergman’s greatest “dark” film, The Seventh Seal, reminds one of the nightmares of life and death and religion that one had is a child; the sense of mystery and the questions that no one will answer suggest the way religious symbols function in childhood and in fear. Bergman’s power over audiences is that he has not developed philosophically beyond the awesome questions: audiences trained in more rational philosophy still respond emotionally to Bergman’s kind of mysticism, his searching for “the meaning of life,” his fatalism, and the archaic ogres of childhood and religion. Bergman is not a deep thinker, but he is an artist who moves audiences deeply by calling up their buried fears and feelings. People come out of his movies with “something to think about” or, at least, to talk about.

  Those who find Bergman profound and sophisticated are very likely to find Satyajit Ray rather too simple. I think that Ray, like Kurosawa, is one of the great new film masters, and that his simplicity is a simplicity arrived at, achieved, a master’s distillation from his experience; but it is — and this may be another reason why audiences prefer Bergman — the simplicity to which we must respond with feeling. It is not the simplicity of a film like David and Lisa — which is simplicity at a pre-art level, the simplicity of those who don’t perceive complexities and have not yet begun to explore their medium.

  People say that David and Lisa is a “heartfelt” experience, but they gobble it up so easily because it appeals to feelings they already had. It’s a movie about mental disturbances that couldn’t disturb anybody. Similarly, Sundays and Cybèle, also a phenomenal box-office success, is gobbled up as “artistic” (it’s “artistic” the same way that Harper’s Bazaar fiction is “beautifully literate”). Bosley Crowther says that Sundays and Cybèle is “what Lolita might conceivably have been had it been made by a poet and angled to be a rhapsodic song of innocence and not a smirking joke.” Surely only a satirist like Nabokov could have invented this eminent critic whose praise gives the show away — “angled to be a rhapsodic song of innocence.”

  (One of the delights of life in San Francisco is observing the cultural chauvinism of New York from a safe distance. Variety informs us that improvement is expected in West Coast movie tastes now that the Western edition of the New York Times brings us Bosley Crowther. And Dwight Macdonald, who calls any place outside New York “the provinces,” has a solution for the problems of American movies: they should be made closer to the intellectual life of the nation — in New York. But it’s the Eastern banks, not the Western minds, that are destroying our movies.)

  The concept of humanity is so strong in Ray’s films that a man who functioned as a villain could only be a limitation of vision, a defect, an intrusion of melodrama into a work of art which seeks to illuminate experience and help us feel. There is, for example, a defect of this kind in De Sica’s Umberto D: the landlady is unsympathetically caricatured so that we do not understand and respond to her as we do to the others in the film. I don’t think Ray ever makes a mistake of this kind: his films are so far from the world of melodrama that such a mistake is almost unthinkable. We see his characters not in terms of good or bad, but as we see ourselves, in terms of failures and weaknesses and strength and, above all, as part of a human continuum — fulfilling, altering, and finally accepting ourselves as part of this humanity, recognizing that no matter how much we want to burst the bounds of experience, there is only so much we can do. This larger view of human experience — the simplicity of De Sica at his best, of Renoir at his greatest, is almost miraculously present in every detail of Satyajit Ray’s films. Ray’s method is perhaps the most direct and least impaired by commercial stratagems in the whole history of film. He does not even invent dramatic devices, shortcuts to feelings. He made no passes at the commercial market; he didn’t even reach out toward Western conceptions of drama and construction, although as one of the founders of the Calcutta film society, he must have been familiar with these conceptions. He seems to have had, from the beginning, the intuitive knowledge that this was not what he wanted.

  In the background of almost every major new figure in film today we see the same great man — Jean Renoir. In France, the critic André Bazin taught a film-loving juvenile delinquent named François Truffaut “first” as Truffaut says, “to love Renoir and then to know him.” The lives of Ray and Renoir intersected in 1950, when Ray, a young painter working as a layout artist for a British advertising firm, was struggling to work out a film treatment for Pather Panchali, and Renoir was in Calcutta filming The River, a movie that despite its weaknesses is perhaps a genre in itself — the only fictional film shot in a remote culture in which the director had the taste and sensitivity to present an outsider’s view without condescension or a perfunctory “documentary” style. Ray has said that “the only kind of professional encouragement I got came from one single man” — Jean Renoir, who “insisted that I shouldn’t give up.”

  There is a common misconception that Ray is a “primitive” artist and although, initially, this probably worked to his advantage in this country (Pather Panchali was taken to be autobiographical, and “true” and important because it dealt with rural poverty), it now works to his disadvantage, because his later films are taken to be corrupted by exposure to “art,” and thus less “true.” The Apu Trilogy expresse
s India in transition, showing the development of the boy Apu’s consciousness from the primitive, medieval village life of Pather Panchali through the modern city streets and schools of Benares to the University of Calcutta in Aparajito, and then, in The World of Apu, beyond self-consciousness to the destruction of his egotism, and the rebirth of feeling, the renewal of strength. But Ray himself is not a primitive artist any more than, say, Robert Flaherty was when he chronicled the life of the Eskimos in Nanook of the North. Ray was a highly educated man at the beginning of his film career, and he was influenced by a wide variety of films, those of Renoir and De Sica in particular. (Sent by his employers to England for three months in 1950, he went to more than ninety films, and he has reported that the one that helped most to clarify his ideas was The Bicycle Thief.) Among his other influences are certainly Dovzhenko’s Earth and Eisenstein, and probably Von Sternberg. Just as Nanook, although a great work, seems primitive compared with a later, more complex Flaherty film like Man of Aran, Pather Panchali has a different kind of beauty, a more primitive kind, than later Ray films. But Ray’s background is not Apu’s: “My grandfather was a painter, a poet, and also a scientist who, in addition to editing the first children’s magazine in Bengal, had introduced the half-tone block to India. My father was equally well known. He . . . wrote, among other works, Bengal’s classic Book of Nonsense — an Englishman might call him India’s Edward Lear.” After graduating from the University of Calcutta with honors in physics and economics, the nineteen-year-old Ray, at the urging of Rabindranath Tagore, went to study at Tagore’s school, Santiniketan. There, he “developed some skill in drawing” and “read widely in the history of art . . . studying in particular Chinese calligraphy.” After Tagore’s death, he left the school (“There were no films there and somehow, I don’t know how it happened, but films appealed to me”). In Calcutta he worked as art director for a British advertising firm: “I stayed with them a long while and went through every department. When I was in a position to do so I introduced into their advertisements a fusion of modern western and Bengal tradition, to give it a new look.”