A Girl and a Gun

Four Weddings (but no Funeral)

As You Like It is my favorite Shakespearean comedy, as its Rosalind is my favorite Shakespearean heroine.  It was written in 1600, just before Hamlet, and it shows the playwright at the height of his powers: he has several parallel and ultimately intersecting plots up and running in no time, there are love stories galore, two sets of villainous brothers who try to do virtuous brothers out of their rightful inheritances, a wise fool who triumphs over a foolish wise man, and ends with four weddings.  It is a classic pastoral, the genre so popular in Elizabethan England, with its poetry-writing shepherds and idyllic countryside, far from the pomp and corruption of city and court, but Shakespeare always liked to have things both ways if he could, and so the play also contains a sharp parody of the pastoral .  I saw it first in London in the late 1980s with the Royal Shakespeare during its stint at the Barbican Theatre, and yesterday attended a glorious new version by Sir Peter Hall, and starring his daughter Rebecca, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  There is also a film version, done nearly seventy years ago in the UK.  Let me turn to that first.

It was directed by Paul Czinner, a German film director who had made his name in silents and who, being Jewish, hit the road in a hurry shortly after January 30, 1933.  I've not seen any of his other films, none of which seem to have created any ripples on the pond of film history.  He did work frequently with a young Hungarian-born and German-speaking actress named Elisabeth Bergner, first in a 1924 film called Nju and they went on to make a dozen pictures with her in Germany and the UK.  Why Czinner was selected to make a film in a language he evidently did not fully command, from an author of subtlety and complexity, remains a mystery.  Less mysterious was why he cast Bergner as Rosalind: once in the UK, they married.  Czinner was able to attract a fair amount of talent to his project: Laurence Olivier took the leading male role, Orlando; the script credit went to Robert Cullen, of whom little has been heard since, but it began with a treatment of the play's text by J.M. Barrie (who grew up to be Johnny Depp) and German emigre Carl Mayer, who wrote The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and The Last Man (1924), two fabulously influential films of the great German silent era; David Lean edited the film, and Jack Cardiff operated the camera. 

But this play rises and falls on Rosalind, and Bergner's performance means we have on our hands a disastrously collapsed souffle.  Her mitteleuropean is fairly thick, the stresses fall in the wrong places, she's far too old for the role (thirty-nine), and Rosalind's fabled intelligence fails to shine through.  To make matters worse, Czinner and his writers didn't seem to understand the play: they offer Jaques' famous "All the world's a stage" speech as though it's the last word in wisdom and simply dispense with the whole counterpoint between Jaques and Touchstone, the fool.  For that matter, they've pretty much eliminated Touchstone, and when he's around, as played by Mackenzie Ward, he's just not funny.  (Lots more gets eliminated, but then the movie runs only ninety-six minutes, and the full text of the play performs at nearly three hours.)  Olivier gets the language right, but he's far too composed for the goofily lovestruck kid who goes about hanging poems on trees.  Best, really, is Felix Aylmer in the small but memorable part of Duke Frederick.  For the sharp-eyed, there is a brief appearance--his first in movies--of Peter Bull as William.  Bull went on to a long and distinguished career of solid supporting work.  Close your eyes and picture the Captain of the Louisa, that German ship that Bogey and Kate blow up on the lake in The African Queen (1951).  Yup, Peter Bull.  Czinner's film shows up every few months on TCM, but surely you've got better things to do--like read the play.

I first saw Peter Hall's work in 1985, when his wildly (and justly) acclaimed Coriolanus, starring Ian McKellan, was playing at the Olivier.  Since then, on various trips to London, I've caught Ibsen's The Wild Duck, King Lear, and Waiting for Godot (with Ben Kingsley--Hall directed the London premier of Beckett's masterpiece in 1955).  He generally works with spare sets and, at least with Shakespeare, great reverence for the text.  This As You Like It can probe into the play's dark side while remaining rich with comedy, the riotously funny Touchstone now returned to his proper stature as the foil to the lugubrious Jaques, and with a very youthful Orlando, capable both of hot anger (he nearly strangles his evil brother Oliver in the first scene) and sillly, gaping awe at his first sight of Rosalind.  (This Orlando is a chap named Dan Stevens, just graduated from Cambridge, in his first stage role.  Wow full stop, as the Brits would say.)  Michael Siberry and Philip Voss play Touchstone and Jaques with such confidence and flair that you wish you could hit pause, rewind, and replay their scenes again and again.  Siberry's answer to the "Seven Ages" speech, the stunning and sidesplitting analysis of "a lie seven times removed" brings the house down. 

Again, however, the play rises or falls on Rosalind, and here it flies.  Rebecca Hall may not make stage historians forget Vanessa Redgrave's youthful work in the role (opposite Ian Bannen at the RSC in 1961), but Hall's range is impressive, from wounded anger to love to stubbornness, to trying to talk her way out of a tight spot.  She's truly extraordinary as she goes into her disguise as the young man, Gannymede, finds herself, as it were, inside a man's prerogatives and uses her own intelligence--which you sense she's only just discovering--to exploit it and establish her influence.  She starts an improvised explanation, and you can see her suddenly being struck by its possibilities; she builds momentum, she gains confidence, enjoys her wit, and wins out.  When s/he hears that Orlando has been attacked by a lion in the Forest of Arden, she nearly blows her disguise by fainting--something men didn't do--and when brought round, talks her way out of it with great ingenuity.  Hall throws in some gestures and body language that complete the explanation and enlarge the character.  Add to all this that she's very funny, attractive, and just the right age for the role (twenty-two).  I have the feeling that she'll be around for a very long time and just getting better and better.  Sad to say, As You Like It closes today at the BAM. 

John Ford: Classicist Coot?

The estimable James Wolcott has (to some degree) backed down from his characterization of John Ford as a “conservative coot” after protest from the equally estimable Lance Mannion, who finds Ford’s politics knottier and less simply categorized. In this, Mannion may be correct. In the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, Ford and scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson (a reactionary on a generous day) emasculated one of the great social protest novels of the twentieth century. To take but one example, in the novel, just before the Joads set out west, Ma makes a little speech about how they’re going to come out all right because they’re “the people,” essentially the stuff and substance of a great country. The ensuing trip, with tragedies piled one on top of another, is a relentless dismissal of this sort of wishfulness in favor of a sort of non-sectarian, large-hearted socialism. In the movie, Ford and Johnson take that speech and put it in the final scene, after all the tragedies, so that Ma is saying, Even with all that’s happened, we’re still not giving in, everything’s going to be all right. I’d call that conservative in any day and age.

On the other hand, as McCarthyism heated up in Hollywood, Ford attended a meeting of major directors called by Cecil B. DeMille for the purpose of rooting pinkos out of the industry. DeMille was a powerhouse in the business, but Ford stood up to him in the meeting (“I’m Jack Ford. I make westerns” his remarks began) and refused to be a part of a witch hunt.

I think the essence of Ford’s art is in his style and not in his politics, which are conventionally patriotic and mostly unquestioning of received opinion about “what made this country great.” He believed, or was willing to support the position, that the US cavalry played a heroic role in westward expansion and that its original inhabitants were, at bottom, noble savages. Wolcott calls Ford “a classicist,” and I think he’s exactly right. Ford was formalist in his vision, dedicated to composition and structure. He adhered to enduring institutions like the Catholic church precisely because they endured and were therefore honorable and worthy of respect. He was formulaic, resorting to pre-established set pieces like his Irish sentimentalism and male rough-housing and corny old songs (“My Darling Clementine,” “Red River Valley”) the way that Homer resorted to “the wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” to help fill narrative space. He also went to the well a bit too often, and some of his later efforts—The Horse Soldiers (1959), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Donovan’s Reef (1963) to name only a few that come to mind—were just about unwatchable. But in the great westerns, from 1939 (Stagecoach) to 1956 (The Searchers), he organized space and movement within it in a way the western never outgrew, at least for me. In later years, whether I was watching movies by Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood, Ford’s way of seeing that time and place was in my head, and it’s probably never getting out.

Boney

One cannot spend seventeen years teaching and writing about modern French history, as I did, without coming to terms with Napoleon Bonaparte. In truth, I found it reasonably easy. Napoleon took advantage of the political chaos that came in the aftermath of the French Revolution and accompanied the long war between France and the rest of Europe, used his military reputation and support among the troops to seize power, first as one of three “consuls,” then as consul-for-life, then as Emperor (snatching the crown from the hands of the pope during the ceremony and placing it on his own head). He “consolidated” the revolution, as it is often said, by which is meant he destroyed not only republicanism but democracy and parliamentary government, instituted a centralized dictatorship, ran the country through the police, murdered political opponents, and dragged France and Europe through sixteen years of more or less non-stop warfare. His feats of arms are said to have brought great glory to France, but mostly they killed and maimed hundreds of thousands; it is true that the Louvre and other institutions have benefitted from the plunder he brought back from abroad. Thought to be a military genius, in fact he fought twelve campaigns as a general and lost six. (All right, he won six too, but “genius” would seem to demand a little better record.) When the European powers, and the Russian winter, finally defeated him, he managed a comeback that cost sixty thousand lives on the battlefield at Waterloo. To make matters worse, he has been the inspiration for countless bad films.

The latest to reach us here is Monsieur N (2003), a Franco-British co-production about his six years on St. Helena, the desolate outcropping in the navel of the south Atlantic where the Brits kept him under lock and key. This episode has (unaccountably, to me) been the subject of numerous histories, novels, and now this film, directed by one Antoine de Caunes, whose previous work is unknown to me and likely to stay that way. It’s an account of those years, full of the struggles between the title character and his jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe (a name which still draws hisses in France), played here by Richard E. Grant, presumably given the part because he can hold a sneer of contempt for two hours of screen time. But the filmmakers decide to spice this rather dull story (spoiler: Lowe won, Napoleon died on St. Helena) but interweaving it with another one taking place in 1840, when Napoleon’s remains were returned to Paris, and a young British officer who had been assigned to keep a personal eye on the prisoner more than twenty years earlier thinks he sees some inconsistencies in the account of Napoleon’s death. There are two problems here. First, the young officer is supposed to be twenty in 1816, though the actor playing him, Jay Rodan, appears to be about twenty-five. In 1840, he would be forty-four, and he still looks mid-twentyish. Second, this “mystery” is a ridiculous Hitler-escaped-to-South-America fantasy, a sort of French version of the Anastasia myth. There’s not a reason in the world to believe it, and the film’s explanation is pure drivel.

What does that leave? Well, there’s Philippe Torreton’s performance as Napoleon. He needs to be chunkier of both countenance and midriff, he needs something like the Corsican accent for which the historical Napoleon was constantly needled, most of all he needs more than mannerisms and tics. We know that Jamie Foxx studied films of Ray Charles for hours on end, added up all the little gestures and quirks, the head tilt, the shoulders, and called the sum acting. (Disclosure: I haven’t and won’t see Ray, but from the trailer it’s hard to conclude otherwise.) Torreton didn’t have videotapes to work with, but there are many large libraries of personal memoirs which give all this material in nauseating detail, and that’s what Torreton feeds back to us—strictly surface. We do get ample time to look at the divine Elsa Zylberstein (I saw her last as Jeanne Hébuterne in the execrable Modigliani), but her role is so ludicrous that even that isn’t much fun. Actually, I can’t find a redeeming molecule in this movie; the only thing it taught me was something I already knew but had forgotten—that sometimes I want to see a movie, not quite any movie but some movie, so badly that I’ll go to anything. Just not Ray.

A.K. 1957

Akira Kurosawa made thirty-one films between 1943 and 1993 (he died five years later, aged eighty-eight). I would rate a dozen of them to rank among the supreme achievements of the filmmaker’s art, a high percentage for any director (we can all name many productive directors who have made not a single film as good as any of those twelve). Equally remarkable, these dozen stretched over more than thirty years, from Stray Dog (1949) to Ran (1985). But the 1950s were his greatest decade, and 1957 perhaps his most extraordinary year, the one in which he released both Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths.

Kurosawa loved great literature, western and Japanese, and had made The Idiot (1951) from Dostoevsky’s novel. Throne of Blood would be his first adaptation of Shakespeare; it came from Macbeth as Ran came from King Lear, and although he followed the original with considerable respect, he made many adjustments so that the story would work within a Japanese context. Throne of Blood, set in medieval Japan, is the story of a man whose eagerness to improve his position in the world is goaded into decisive, tragic action by his wife. There is a cold determinism to the film; freedom exists in this world, the freedom to pursue ambition, but once that course is chosen, each opportunity seized locks Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), a nobleman, into a series of consequences which he cannot escape, and which result in his and his wife’s destruction. There are some astounding action sequences in the film, but its general sense is one of unmoved observation, watching characters propelled toward their fate from a certain emotional distance. It’s hard to be sympathetic to Washizu in the way that it’s possible to be sympathetic to Macbeth; he knows neither remorse nor rue, and ends up destroyed by his own men in a terrifying shower of arrows.

The visual experience of Throne of Blood, which I saw most recently recorded from television, is a persuasive argument for large-screen theatrical exhibition. The black-and-white compositions, and the grainy grays, just don’t have breathing room on the small screen; the ever-present fog likewise needs room to roll and billow and smother. But if television is the only way you can see this film, do it: the majesty of its vision, its pacing, the slow strangulation of its characters, the moving forest of the final sequence, and Washizu’s end would have great power on a postage stamp.

The Lower Depths also came from a western literary source, Maxim Gorky’s play of 1902, a cry of social protest against the treatment of the poor in Czarist Russia. Jean Renoir had made a version in 1936 with Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet which, as might be expected from a film in the Popular Front era, retained some of the protest but also added an unfortunate ending that seemed to have been lifted from a Chaplin film. (Criterion Films has released a double DVD with both the Renoir and Kurosawa versions. In the “making of” documentary included with the Kurosawa, the director mentions that when he was in Paris years after the war, Renoir came to his hotel and took him out to dinner in a small restaurant. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall . . .) Kurosawa put the story in an entirely different frame: he made it a comedy, although an uncommonly dark one.

The opening is staggering. From below, the camera—which rarely moves in Kurosawa’s work unless what it is aiming at moves—looks up from below to a cliff and then executes a 360-degree pan, showing something of the world above and beyond the action of the film itself and picking up where it left off. Two women come up to the edge and empty large baskets of dead leaves over the side of what they call a “rubbish heap,” and we watch the leaves flutter down onto a tenement in mid-19th century Japan. The entire film takes place in the tenement’s single room, its tiny adjoining courtyard, and (very briefly) in the landlord’s house off the courtyard. We have seen the last of the outside world in that first shot, and the ensuing claustrophobic atmosphere takes us inside the characters with great effectiveness.

The people in the tenement are all barely able to scrape together enough to live, but it is not their poverty that distinguishes them. They are all highly practiced self-delusionists who cling to—seem really to believe—that however bad things have become for them, this is not their real life, their actual identity. For some, it is what they claim they once were (a samurai, a skilled craftsman, a lover worshipped by a wonderful man). Their musings on these previous existences, and their none-too-convincing insistence that it really was like that, are not only self-delusion, but also unwitting self-ridicule. Everything they say contradicts them out of their own mouths. The craftsman is nothing more than a tinker, the lover a whore who cannot keep the name of her former lover straight. Then there is an alcoholic actor imagining he can dry out, a thief for whom the landlord’s wife has made a play, and sees himself going up in the world; the wife’s sister, whom the thief truly loves; and the wife herself, who sees the thief as a way to rid herself of a burdensome husband. These people are not clinging to a past, their illusion is a future in which things will get better, a delusion as cruel as those living in the past, and one which can also be mined for abrasive humor. One look at the circumstances of these people and you know none of them is going anywhere better.

Two characters stand outside this trap. A gambler is the ultimate realist, as he sees it, a man who knows that he doesn’t actually gamble so much as he cheats, and who accepts that he has touched bottom, refusing to imagine that unpleasant fact away. He scoffs at the pretensions, past and future, of his fellow tenement residents, and his clarity of vision give him a kind of freedom. Then there is an aged pilgrim, referred to by others as Grandfather, who drops in to the tenement from it’s not clear where, bound for he admits he knows not whither. Far from disabusing the people of their delusions and calling attention to their hypocrisies, he does what he can to provide comfort, telling people he believes their stories, giving quiet, often sound, advice. He, rather than the gambler, is something like the film’s moral anchor, but when he leaves toward the end—the only character with the true freedom to come and go—the roof falls in on the rest of them.

Like so much of Kurosawa’s work, the film is an exercise in ensemble playing. Mifune plays the thief, but it’s not a star role, and he adapts his formidable magnetism to the part, rather than making the part fit his customary style. If the film has a star, it’s Bokuzen Hidari as the pilgrim, with Kamatari Fujiwara as the actor and Minoru Chiaki as the ex-samurai running a close second. The cast rehearsed in full costume and makeup for forty days before shooting began, and their timing became nearly incredible. (Donald Ritchie, in The Films of Akira Kurosawa [1998 edition], calls the movie “a word ballet.”) They are so deep in these roles that nothing gets in their way. In one scene, Chiaki’s woman becomes angry and starts chasing him with a small log in her hand to brain him. As he runs around in the courtyard to avoid her, a strap on his sandal breaks—not in the script. Ordinarily, the shooting would halt, the scene begun again. But Chiaki waits until the woman gives up and throws herself on the ground, then calmly takes off his sandal while going on with his lines and tying up the broken strap.

By the end, chillingly ironic fates await the thief, his would-be girlfriend, the landlord, and the landlord’s wife. The rest go back inside the tenement and start drinking. Drinking leads to dancing, and four, then five, of the remaining men take up a dance to a song about the possibility of it raining money, since money is the only thing that improves life. It’s hard to think a musical number as the conclusion to The Lower Depths, but it’s the final delusion, and it’s performed with such exaggerated self-absorption in the face of the pervasive unraveling of human lives, that it’s hysterically funny. Then someone interrupts to announce that the actor has hanged himself in the courtyard. Shocked and disappointed, the gambler says, “How could he? Just when we were starting to have fun.” End title.

As usual with a film of this stature, I’ve only been able to give the slightest hint of all that is going on in it, of the fabulous acting, the care and ingenuity that has gone into the art direction (by longtime A.K. collaborator Yoshiro Muraki), and the subtle, telling choices of presentation by the director. Some fool on IMDb advises that this film is not the place to introduce yourself to Kurosawa. In fact, it’s one of the greatest films ever made and now that I’ve finally caught up with it, it goes straight into my Best Ever list, down on January 15 of this year, making Kurosawa the only director there with two films.

We know that Kurosawa had seen Renoir’s film when he made his own Lower Depths, but Renoir did not see the Kurosawa film until twenty years after its release. Someone asked him how he compared the two works, and he answered with a dismissive shake of the head, saying, “That is a much more important film than mine.” It was a characteristically gracious assessment, and a true one.

Old Woo, Young Chow

I recall first hearing the name “John Woo” in the late 1980s, attached to a favorable comparison to Sam Peckinpah. Woo was then building his reputation as an action director in Hong Kong, something of a poet of violence and all that, and I vowed I would have to look into his work. Like many vows . . . well, before I could remember that I’d made it, he started doing American productions, beginning with a minor Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle followed by the hugely forgettable Broken Arrow (1996) and the terminally gimmicky Face/Off (1997). Somehow, I summoned the fortitude to avoid the second Mission Impossible (2000). But now, courtesy of netflix, I have gone back to the Hong Kong roots and A Better Tomorrow (1986), which I am told was his first commercial success.

It’s about a gangster whose kid brother is a cop—yes, that tired old nag, swaybacked and spavined from a hundred too many rides, and the plot creaks from the opening until it nearly drowns out the dialogue and the gunfire. Lung Ti plays the older brother, and Leslie Cheung, aged thirty but looking twenty, is the kid, determined to live down the shame of his brother being on the wrong side of the law, hot-headed and pig-headed, but ultimately forced into a reconciliation. The action scenes are OK, which is perhaps more than you would expect from a film nearly twenty years old—nothing dates faster than action. Bodies fly, blood spurts and smears, people absorb a hail of bullets and somehow stagger on, and the camera is cranked up for lots of slow motion. One thing redeems the picture, and that is the performance of Chow Yun-Fat as a loyal colleague of the hood brother, a daring risk-taker who’s always there when you need him. And this picture needs him. He’s by turns dashing, charming, funny, scary, and whenever he’s on screen, he effortlessly finesses the scene into his hip pocket and saunters off with it. Chow was thirty-one when the picture was released and just hitting his stride in Hong Kong cinema, for which he made his first appearance in 1976 and quickly achieved ubiquitousness. Between 1980 and 1989 inclusive, he appeared in fifty-eight films, if we are to believe IMDb. He’s the only reason to see A Better Tomorrow, but a good one.

Oddments and Endings

For the record: Mark Feeney, whose book Nixon at the Movies I wrote about enthusiastically on January 8, informs me by e-mail, “It’s a reasonable assumption that I’m a [Boston] Globe film critic. In fact, I review photography and do various features related to cultural and intellectual matters.”

Ruth Warrick (1915-2005) and Virginia Mayo (1920-2005) died recently, Warrick on January 15 and Mayo on the 17th. Neither was a major screen presence, but either of them could reasonably claim to act the ears off some of today’s young celebrities who are piling up meaningless trophies and plaques, the acceptance of which gives them an excuse to buy (rent? borrow?) a new designer gown. Warrick’s debuted as Emily Monroe Norton Kane, Charles’s first wife in Citizen Kane (1941), where she played a woman who became much older than Warrick’s twenty-six years at the time. She wasn’t on screen long, but she was perfect, like so many of Welles’s supporting characters. She made a lot of forgettable movies in the 1940s and ‘50s, inevitably finding her way into television and a long turn on “All My Children.” Mayo first showed up during the war as the ingenue in Danny Kaye movies. She showed how to balance chorus-line-blonde good looks with just enough personality and individuality to make you see why an imaginative fellow like Danny was excited by her, or, in the case of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), how obsessive his distractions must have been to ignore her. She often played opposite significant leading men: Cagney in White Heat (1949) and The West Point Story (1950), Lancaster in The Flame and the Arrow (1950), and Peck in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951). It’s a pity she couldn’t have gotten fewer parts as the moll/panting romantic foil and done more work of the sort she managed well in Wyler’s overrated heart-tugger, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). When the years started to pile up, Hollywood predictably stopped casting her, but she stayed out of television’s maw for the most part and moved into dignified semi-retirement. Her last movie was in 1997, with a dozen people whose names would be too tough for even the most seasoned trivia buff.

What the #$*! Do We Know?(2004), playing in New York as What the Bleep Do We Know?, is not your run-of-the-mill movie. Directed by William Arntz, Betsey Chase, and Mark Vicente, it’s about quantum physics. Whatever you’re thinking, I got that right: quantum physics, the sub-atomic dimension of physics where strange things happen and the mind-matter distinction seems to evaporate. It’s actually something of a mess: part drama built around the character Amanda, a divorced photographer, and set in Portland, Oregon; part animation, of which some segments are well done and some badly overdone; and (the best) part talking heads, featuring physicists, biologists, psychiatrists, biochemists, and neurological researchers. Their explication of quantum physics, and their thoughtful extensions of it into our emotional lives, were engrossing. The only problems arose when the filmmakers went on to tell Amanda’s story, which seems to have escaped from a particularly low-rent soap opera, or let animations of sex-crazed cells run wild at a wedding reception. Amanda, by the way, is played by Marilee Matlin, who won a best actress Oscar for Children of a Lesser God (1986), then drifted in television after some far lesser roles. Since Matlin has been deaf since childhood, the directors seem to have decided that she can be difficult to understand when she speaks (I didn’t find it hard at all), so that have confined much of her response to facial expressions, which she doesn’t do well. But be patient: after a few of those, the film always cuts back to those fascinating talking heads, and they’re worth your time and reflection.

The Best, Ever

I may grouse when there are no decent new movies around, a situation at its worst in these two or three months and during the summer, but I’m still able to keep the brain pan from flatlining. There is always my first love, reading (really)—currently, Amos Oz’s class-by-itself memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), and Cynthia Ozick’s newest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)—and of course there is a stack of DVDs and VCRs to catch up on, although sometimes I really need to see a film on a theater screen. But I can sometimes claw my way out of these sloughs of mild despond by list-making, and that’s what I’ve done today.

I said a couple of weeks ago that I had a dim view of ten-best lists, but, I should add, that does not extend to all-time best lists of any number. I started toying with a list of films that I would group as the best I’ve seen. I think I could defend any film on it any it as being of superior quality—in truth, there aren’t a lot of surprises; but I won’t argue about things I’ve left out, since I’ve probably forgotten a few, and I’m more interested here in positive recommendations than in implicitly dinging something which is in fact a good film, just not in my opinion the best. There are even a few I should probably see again to to see whether they stack up (City Lights, the Kurosawa Lower Depths, The World of Apu). The dominant criterion is fairly demanding, although somewhat more common than I would have thought when I started the list: something approaching perfection. I’ll stipulate that perfection may not be literally possible in any human endeavour, but I’ve seen all these films more than once, with only one exception, seen them all again in the last few years, so that I can state with confidence that I was not seduced by an immature reaction, and there’s not one of them in which I would change a single frame. Not one. Script, direction, photography, art direction, acting, music: all are, as far as I can see, flawless. Taken on their own terms, I don’t think you could improve on any of them (the occasional remakes of a couple demonstrate how misguided the effort has been).

I haven’t ranked these films, but have listed them by year of release. Naturally, I have a few favorites, marked below with an asterisk, though no single one. A few oddities: a distinct tailing off after the early 1960s; only one from the French or American 1930s, widely regarded as the two great ages of cinema (lots of very good films but very few near-perfect ones?); no musicals, although I circled around Singin' In The Rain for a long time before backing off; nothing from the “revolutionary” American 1970s (I toyed with The Godfather I, but just couldn’t see it in the final analysis); nothing American since Strangelove, for that matter.

The General (1927)
Keaton’s chef d’oeuvre, far more than a collection of funny sketches: a well-plotted film that will have you both on the edge of your seat and falling off it.

*The Rules of the Game (1939)
The best of maître Renoir, a prophetic, disturbing, funny film that announces, accurately, the destruction of a society—a destruction which began within days of the film’s release. Terrence Flaherty did a piece in the Sunday Times last year naming it the best film ever. That’s ridiculous. But if the proposition weren’t inherently unproveable, Rules might qualify.

*To Be or Not to Be (1942)
The greatest of all film comedies, in my personal opinion, is about Nazis. The apex of Lubitsch’s brilliant career, Jack Benny’s only good movie, Carole Lombard’s last. “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt?”

Le Courbeau (1943)
Clouzot’s upsetting and utterly gripping thriller that is about denunciations in occupied France, truth, love, and revenge. A film that still divides viewers along political lines, but not over its artistic merits.

Children of Paradise (1945)
Does anyone truly dislike Carné’s epic? It’s loveable, with an abrasive dimension to it, but Barrault and Arletty are as memorable as any screen couple—though they don’t quite attain couplehood—in screen history.

*The Third Man (1949)
Often thought of as a Graham Greene film, but when you read his story treatment, then see it, you understand that Carol Reed’s direction and Robert Krausker’s cinematography are the real inspirations.

*Tokyo Story (1953)
I’ve seem this film perhaps six times, possibly seven or eight. It never fails to reduce me to tears. Ozu was once thought of as “too Japanese” for American audiences, but as Stanley Kauffmann said decades ago, it was precisely that he was so Japanese that he was universally acceptable.

*Seven Samurai (1954)
Kurosawa on courage, sacrifice, honor, and finding yourself. Still the granddaddy of all those Heroes and Houses of Flying Daggers, and unlikely ever to be exceeded. A Toshiro Mifune film? No, a Takeshi Shimua film.

The Searchers (1956)
I have watched it countless times, taught it, made my children (then four, seven, and ten) watch it at least three times, and still believe that—taken on its own terms—it’s still not only Ford’s best film, but the best western, ever.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
The supreme noir, New York City movie, jazz movie, Tony Curtis movie, Burt Lancaster movie, and James Wong Howe movie.

The Lower Depths (1957)
Kurosawa's dark comedy about the vast human capacity for self-delusion with perhaps the best ensemble playing on film.

*Il Posto (1961)
Olmi’s little diamond: a boy gets a job in the newly rejuvenated corporate Milan, inches his way out of the working class, learns a little something—but not too much. People who don’t know this film (like everything on this list, widely available) are pointlessly denying themselves the greatest enjoyment.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Career best work from everyone involved. The entire cast is sensational, but even if it weren’t, the movie would be worth seeing for Lansbury alone, who gave a performance that will stay with you—forever, I’d guess. I hope that, after his miserable remake, Jonathan Demme has learned to leave well enough alone.

Dr. Strangelove (1964)
The greatest of all political satires on film (not a crowded field), and Sterling Hayden’s entry in the “See, I really can act” sweepstakes. The last watchable Kubrick.

*Before the Revolution (1964)
Bertolucci’s second, made when he was twenty-two, and packed with the exuberance of youth, the craftsmanship of a mature master (much of it borrowed from Godard), the political wisdom of a much older man, the love of his native city—Parma—and a sophisticated understanding of social class. Kael once said that it’s all too much, but added immediately that sometimes only too much is just enough. She knew.

The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)
The greatest documentary ever, in part because so intelligently made, and in part because it is so painful and multidimensional: collaboration and resistance in France, 1940-44. The focus is on the town of Clermont-Ferrand; the subject is humanity.

Shoah (1985)
Claude Lanzmann’s sprawling nine-hour-plus documentary, exclusively trains, which speak volumes without speaking, and talking heads who had witnessed (or suffered from, or administered) the death camps of Poland. It’s an intentionally difficult film, difficult in the sense of vastly unsettling and utterly uncompromising. Lanzmann’s approach is severe, his insistence upon it rigid, his results irreproachable.

In the Mood for Love (2000)
The only film here I’ve seen but once, very recently, and I haven’t quite recovered sufficiently to take it on again. Wong Kar-Wai had made great films before this (Days of Being Wild, made in 1991, although not released here until last year) and has made a great film since (the crypto-sequel, 2046, not yet released in the US but available on DVD), but I wonder if anyone can make a film of this power more than once.

Talk to Her (2002)
Almodóvar’s bid for cinema immortality? From the Pina Bausch dance with which it opens to the Pina Bausch dance with which it unforgettably closes, an engrossing story of love, neglect, disaster, and cautious renewal that is, frame for frame, scene for scene, as watchable a film as you’re going to see.

Los Angeles, via Hollywood

2003 was a great year for documentaries: My Architect, Spellbound, Stone Reader, Fog of War, and Capturing the Friedmans were all fine films. Last year provided little beyond Demme’s The Agronomist, although now I would include among 2004’s best Los Angeles Plays Itself. I missed its New York theatrical release at the Film Forum, so when it showed up at a second-run house in Greenwich Village a few days ago, I was determined not to miss it again. I’m glad I didn’t, for all the reservations I have about it.

As title suggests, it’s about the role of Los Angeles in films, almost exclusively American films, a subject intrinsically worth going into and one I find especially intriguing since I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s and ‘50s. The film was from Los Angeles resident, filmmaker, and teacher (at Cal Arts) Thom Andersen and it’s full of strong, interesting, sometimes peculiar opinions. (The first person narrative, written by Andersen, is actually spoken by a friend and fellow filmmaker, Encke King.) Money problems forced him to shoot much of it on video, and the transfer to 35 mm has not been without significant distortions and fuzziness. It’s long, at just a whisker under three hours, and it’s almost entirely composed of film clips—no talking heads—and the narration is spoken in a flat, uninflected drone, so there’s a risk of some tedium. Andersen has a tendency to make a point convincingly with a few examples, then to hammer the point home with a fistful of similar examples. Personally, I could do without this; I’d prefer Andersen grant me the presumption of some intelligence and concede that I could have gotten the point earlier.

Early on, he makes what sounds like it may be his principal argument: that the Los Angeles almost always represented on film is not the one any observant resident would recognize. He documents this with such points as geographical confusions (or ignorance, or distortions) and radical departures from reality such as using fake telephone numbers (e.g. those with a 555 prefix) or people of modest means living in posh quarters. These illustrations, of which there are (too) many, are of course standard Hollywood laziness or contempt for the audience or risk avoidance (if we give a “real” number, someone will copy it and start calling it and we’ll get sued). Remember when all Hollywood movies used fake money instead of real US currency? But is there anything valuable to be learned from these examples?

It took me a while to regain some confidence in Andersen after these preliminaries, but in time he launches into his three main sections: “The City as Background,” “The City as Character,” “The City as Subject.” Although some of the same tendencies show up now and then, things get a good deal more absorbing. It turns out that Andersen is a reasonably ardent advocate of the theories of cinematic reality propounded after World War II by André Bazin (whose name is not mentioned in the film), the French film journalist and theorist, godfather to many of the New Wave directors. Bazin believed in the primacy of the realistic image, and while his views are of course the source of a half century of spirited debate, they are defensible. While I have respect for Bazin’s views, I also think that Andersen is correct when he concedes that “films aren’t about places, they’re about stories.” Stories are by their very nature fictional, we have been accepting the idea of poetic license for a couple of millennia, and liberties must sometimes be taken to produce the glorious results in which stories can result. (I recommend The Iliad and The Odyssey to skeptics.) In any event, Andersen would have been better served by making those views of Bazin’s, and his own by adoption and refinement, explicit. What happens when people fake things in a movie? How does it affect our response? A good deal of the introductory segment would have played much better, in my judgment, with just a touch of theoretical groundwork—and Andersen can be good at making complicated explanations clear, when he puts his mind to it.

Those three sections are, for the most part and with some reservations, first-rate work. When Andersen tones down his disapproval for common distortions and gets into, especially, character and subject, his film sings. I particularly liked his treatment of downtown Los Angeles, which he finds so much more interesting than the city of the hills and the beaches, and his chronicle of Bunker Hill and its fortunes over the last sixty years is first-rate. When I was in high school, I read in the newspapers about downtown, widely thought to be a den of iniquity; Bunker Hill, dismissed as skid row; the huge black and Latino neighborhoods nearby of which I’d only the vaguest sense, as in the mythology of the so-called Zoot Suit riots of 1943; and all the bars and b-girls in the neighborhood. Consequently, when I borrowed one of my parents’ cars on a weekend saying I was going to drive to Hollywood for a movie, I usually went downtown to see what was going on: a movie, to be sure, but usually an old burlesque film or perhaps a nudist “documentary”; cruising past the doors of bars with b-girls; getting the feel of Bunker Hill. Hollywood was phenomenally boring by comparison.

Andersen also does some revisionist work on “acknowledged classics,” especially Chinatown (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997). Again, it’s easy to take exception; but Andersen has done his homework on the distortions of reality involved, they have political significance, and they’re among the most stimulating and provocative parts of his film.

I was a little surprised that it took so long for Andersen to get to what I thought was his best point: it seems to be impossible to make a movie about Los Angeles without including the police. The story of postwar Los Angeles is a story about police, and long before Rodney King, or even the Watts riots of 1965. The Los Angeles police ran the town, regulated (by supervising) the rackets, and served as a paramilitary force which kept the African-Americans and Mexican immigrants in their place. Not much has changed. Andersen gives all this scrupulous attention.

Los Angeles Plays Itself is really the longest piece of film criticism I have encountered in some time. Like all good representatives of the genre, it’s spirited, debatable, and gets you to thinking, even to wanting to see some things again, or even anew. (Andersen must have seen everything, and by some of the clips he provides, I’d have to see it’s also possible to say, there isn’t anything he won’t see. A dedicated man.) That, for my money, is what film criticism is all about, as opposed to providing views with which nobody can take exception.

Sometimes a Book is Better

Hearty recommendations for a pair of new film books during a time when we're being treated to a rather tentative Michael Keaton comeback on screen.

First, Mark Feeney’s Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press, 2004). It’s not an easy book to describe, and Feeney—a film critic for the Boston Globe—has some trouble with it himself. It may be best to say that it follows the way in which the thirty-seventh president of the US intersected with movies, and popular culture generally, and interprets that mandate broadly. We get movies Nixon saw (and his opinions about them), movies that mention Nixon, movies with characters that remind Feeney of Nixon, movies that dwell on themes central to Nixon’s career, movies that evoke his time and personality and preoccupations even if they didn’t intend to—all arranged more or less chronologically around the main events in his life. It sounds like a huge undertaking, which it is, and one that could easily fall apart in the wrong hands, which it doesn’t. Indeed, much of Nixon at the Movies touches only glancingly on movies but analyzes the man and his behavior as the most important, and certainly the most intriguing, figure in our public life in the second half of the last century.

The movie connection isn’t snatched out of the air. Nixon was born in Southern California in 1913, the same year that Hollywood produced its first feature film (De Mille’s Squaw Man). He was always a movie fan, his wife Pat was an extra before they were married, and movies were the form of popular culture that most interestingly reflected the currents of post-World War II America. When Feeney starts taking apart Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray)—a “long rectangular face, with a prominent forehead beneath wavy black hair and above dark, heavy brows. A professional man or in a business of some kind, he communicates an obvious intelligence—but without being quite so smart as he rather plainly thinks he is. Even a casual observer might see that this man has an eye for the main chance, that he is someone who knows how to get things done, though perhaps a little too expeditiously. A furtive affability characterizes him, his humor being a trifle forced, his bonhomie too obviously reflexive”—we know we’re in the hands of a writer who understands his subject. Precisely because he doesn’t allow his subject to limit him, Feeney keeps finding wonderful way to think about Nixon, what he meant, how he succeeded and failed (and has any president ever done both so hugely?), why he matters so much to us even if, like me, we counted ourselves as rabid Nixon haters. It doesn’t hurt that Feeney seems to have seen every movie ever made.

I have a hunch that Feeney realized he had a viable project when he found there was a log of the more than 500 movies Nixon had screened during the sixty-seven months of his presidency. He devotes one whole chapter to these films, and it’s a great disappointment. It’s when Feeney lets his imagination work, sees Nixon as Mr. Roberts and Sidney Falco (the Tony Curtis character in Sweet Smell of Success) and Harry Caul (the Gene Hackman character in The Conversation) that he sustains real intellectual excitement in his book. He writes pretty well and has a very good eye for the significance of small remarks (such as Nixon’s amazingly telling comment about John Kennedy, a colleague in the Senate: “We were friends, as senators are friends”). He can also write wonderfully concise characterizations. “This is the single most fascinating thing about this endlessly fascinating man: an utter inability to mask his inner self—let alone the restlessness of its motivations and needs—alongside a resolute unwillingness to acknowledge that inner self’s existence.” Once in a while, he lays it on a little thick, as in his discussion of the first two Godfather films and “the gorgeous crepuscularity of Gordon Willis’s cinematography (its umbrageous palette that of a Nixon daydream) . . .” And then there is his baffling riff on Nixon’s name: “the symmetrical n’s, a pair of glowering bookends; that sinister, axial x, poised in the middle, neat as a cross; and the two vowels, so close but in the end not, with that notness violating the perfection of the lexical arrangement and, in the intractable opposition it comprises, representing the man’s own insurmountably divided nature . . .”

Don’t let that put you off. Even if you’re too young to remember much about Nixon, try this book. It belongs on the shelf next to classics about the man, such as Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1971) and Roger Morris’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (1989).

The second book is something else entirely. Focal Press has begun a new series called “Screencraft,” which will ultimately include books on directing, screenwriting, special effects, film music, and so on. The first entry, edited by Peter Ettedgui, is Cinematography. It is built around interviews with seventeen directors of photography, from titans like the aforementioned Willis, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Douglas Slocombe, and Laszlo Kovacs, to lesser known but highly accomplished people such as Subrata Mitra, Robby Müller, and Janusz Kaminski, among others. It’s a large format paperback, gorgeously and generously illustrated, and it’s both informative and entertaining. My guess is that, unless you already direct or photograph films, you’ll learn a lot.

Why So Touchy?

After viewing Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour (2001) yesterday for the first time, I consulted the file of reviews from a couple of years back. (The English title, by the way, is In Praise of Love, which is pretty close, but loses the sad undertone of Éloge. An Elegy for Love might have been better.) The European reviews, mostly favorable though often with reservations, emphasized the themes with which Godard worked and his weaving of visual images and textures in a film that is roughly half black-and-white (shot on celluloid) and half color (shot on video). Almost all the American reviews centered on, or at least gave a prominent role to, the anti-Americanism in the movie. It’s worth mentioning that Éloge had its premier at the New York Film Festival in October 2001 and its theatrical release here a year later. It came, in other words, post-9/11 when many Americans expressed their patriotism not only with flag-brandishing and firefighter worship but also with an acute sensitivity to any form of criticism whatsoever. Godard seemed a convenient and worthy object of their counterblasts because, ever since Vietnam in the late 1960s, he has been a consistent and acidulous critic of many things American.

It’s perfectly true on one level that anti-Americanism, or anti-Britishism or anti-Japaneseism or anyone else, is utter idiocy. It makes no sense to disapprove of an entire people on the basis of what some—or even many, even most—of them do and say. A lot of Americans approve of capital punishment, which offends a lot Europeans. Obviously, that’s no basis for rejecting and condemning all things American. But why are we so touchy? Why can’t we accept a little criticism, a little needling, people making fun of us? Often, anti-Americanism is so stupid as hardly to merit a response and tells one more about the critic than about Americans. (I think of that exaggerated American accent Laurence Olivier employed to mock us, which only made him come across as infatuated with his own plummy tones and superior cultivation.) I think of a French woman I know, a professional and longtime resident of the US, to whom I mentioned the anti-French outbursts of late 2002 and early 2003—the imbecilic “freedom fries” and “weasel” episodes. Her response was to laugh at how ridiculous those people were making themselves, and to dismiss it as childish humor. The joke was really on them for making such fools of themselves. Except: the one thing that horrified her was people in Washington taking bottles of French wine down to the banks of the Potomac and emptying them in the river. “Good God,” she said, genuinely shocked, “they wasted perfectly good wine for no reason.” If you’re going to get upset, at least reserve it for something that matters.

Godard’s anti-Americanism obviously began with US foreign policy almost than forty years ago, but his films from the same time also enshrined older American movies. As the years have rolled on, there are still political outbursts, but increasingly his focus has narrowed to film itself. His objection is that the American film industry, with its wealth and power, has corrupted certain political and moral issues by its portrayal of them. At the top of his list, at least lately, has been Steven Spielberg. Godard takes the position that Spielberg cheapened and distorted the image of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993). His position is that by reconstructing Auschwitz and all the rest, Spielberg was presenting a false picture—certainly true, in that, as Godard argued, he did not starve the actors playing the inmates or in fact film the camps, but sets made to look like them. For Godard, the truth of the image is everything; if you are going to present an historical situation, you must make it clear that it is a reconstruction, a fiction, not “the way it was,” and thus all those distancing devices he has always used to remind you that you are looking at something confected. (Godard’s position on the Holocaust in film is not all that far from Claude Lanzmann’s quarrel with Schindler’s List. Lanzmann insisted that you could only talk about the camps by talking with people who were there, which was how he made Shoah.) It is perfectly appropriate to argue with Godard on these grounds and to reject his criticisms; but screaming in print that he is “anti-American” is not an argument or even an intelligent response. Besides, it leads to dismissal of work, like Éloge de l’amour, which is valuable.

Admittedly, it’s not an easy film to take in, but then Godard has never been easy. I think that is because he has never had an interest in narrative. (Isn’t that what made us jump up and take notice of A bout de souffle [1960].) His interest is in writing poetry, or essays, where the structure is much freer, permitting him to raise themes or associations or feelings, often through images. “Plot” is usually nothing more than a vehicle for the images accompanied by pithy sayings or aphorisms, often quotations from writers both famous and obscure. In Éloge, he begins in Paris, in black-and-white (and gorgeous, pure black-and-white it is), where Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) is trying to work out a project about love, and especially courtly love from the medieval tradition, but can’t decide whether it should be a film, a play, a novel, or an opera. He is also trying to figure out how to include three perspectives in the story: youth, adulthood, and old age. In the course of his pondering and discussions, which include the usual flurry of quotations, Bruno is joined by a young woman lawyer, Berthe (Cécile Camp). At the end of this segment, he wants to find her again and tell her he’s resolved his conflicts and ready to go forward. But he finds that she’s committed suicide—perhaps from personal despair, perhaps because she was also incurably ill with tuberculosis. At this point, Bruno recalls that he first me her two years earlier, when he was doing research on a different project.

At this point, we are bounced into the flashback, which is in color. To call the color “saturated” is understatement; it is substantially overexposed, then played on a video screen, from which it is shot on film. In this segment, Bruno is delving into the most troublesome period of recent French history, the occupation years of collaboration and resistance. The girl is then a law student and also the granddaughter of an elderly Breton couple who were prominent in the resistance, and who are now selling their story to Hollywood—specifically, to of whom represent “Spielberg Associates Incorporated,” and one of whom represents the State Department. (“Washington is the director of the ship,” he announces. “Hollywood is the steward.”) The grandparents are selling their story because they need the money to prop up an inn they have been running in Brittany; Berthe is on hand to give informal legal advice. In the first segment of the film, we have been told that “the Americans have no real memory of the past. They have no memory of their own. They buy the pasts of other people and sell images,” so there isn’t much question what Godard thinks about the transaction. But this is really a part of the story slipped in en passant, a polemic but not the point. (Being Godard, he can’t resist another little joke the expense of our in traditional local costume, circulating a petition to have The Matrix dubbed into Breton dialect.) He’s much more preoccupied with the dilemmas and moral conflicts of the occupation period, and of finding some place to stand amidst them. He represents the positions of the grandparents and of their granddaughter, Berthe, clearly enough; what he’s plainly struggling with is the adult response, the stance we come to when we’re ruled neither by the passions of youth nor the resignation and rue of old age. It’s a struggle worth undertaking, and it’s no knock on Godard that he emerges without a satisfying answer: who could? (His own position has something to do with finding Anglo-French common ground in the tradition of courtly love.)

It is the images that preoccupy, images which are bound to be lost on most American audiences because they are references to relatively obscure episodes of the années noires of 1940-44, to sections of Paris perhaps not well-kinown to American audiences, to French films seen by few here. The sequence in the first segment along the Seine, looking toward Auteuil, backed by a song from Jean Vigo’s Seine film L’Atalante (1934), with Edgar musing about an abandoned factory on the opposite bank, is deeply layered with evocations of French popular music, film, the social turmoil of the 1930s, but also with early history—the invasion of the Romans across the Seine through the forest of Auteuil, of which the only surviving trace is Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. It is this kind of episode that makes me think of Godard as a poet, packing each of his “lines” with imagery so dense and so lasting that his views of Americans, whether dopey or on target, strike me as irrelevant.