A Girl and a Gun

Battle of the Titans

If you live in, or near, New York City, or are planning to visit this summer, let me strongly urge upon you arranging to see a terrific play running Off Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre.  It's called "Orson's Shadow," by a playwright/actor named Austin Pendleton; it opened five years ago at Chicago's Steppenwolf Garage, and since then has played in regional theater before its New York opening this spring.  Throughout, the original director and actors in key parts (there are only six) have participated, so you're getting several of the people who created this little gem.

Pendleton takes an historical event--in 1960, the drama critic Kenneth Tynan persuaded Orson Welles to direct Laurence Olivier in Ionesco's "Rhinoceros--and then develops a story from his imagination, based upon what we know and can surmise about the characters.  (In addition to these three, we also see Vivien Leigh, Olivier's about-to-be-ex-wife in 1960, and Joan Plowright, Olivier's about-to-be-next-wife.)  This is not history, but dramatic imagination at its finest, and with personalities as swollen with self-esteem as Welles and Olivier, and as fragile as Leigh, the opportunities for both humor and wounds not to be laughed off are numerous.  Although all the action takes place in theaters, and most of it in rehearsal, most of what is at issue between the players is film: Welles's inability to get Hollywood money for his projects, his conviction that Olivier helped evict him from the US industry, Olivier's almost pathological need for reassurance, debates over the merits of his Henry V and Hamlet, and much more.

The writing is superb, the direction crisp--with lots of risky overlapping dialogue handled with the flair and aplomb of Hawks or Altman in top form--but above all, the acting is as fine as you will find anywhere in this country.  Lee Roy Rogers and Susan Bennett are particularly fine as Vivien and Joan, but the play belongs to the two central characters.  John Judd's Olivier is a seething bundle of insecurities, quick to counterattack after the least slight, however imaginary, but also capable of coating himself with an oily and transparent charm.  The issue is not, was Larry Olivier really "like this," but is this a dramatically plausible and interesting character, and the answer is a thunderous affirmative.

Even better, if imaginable, is Jeff Still as Welles.  I was skeptical about this part, just because Welles is so hard to imitate.  Angus MacFadayen's go at it in Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999) is best passed over in silence.  The one great triumph was Vincent D'Onofrio's four minutes of glory in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), where you could have shut your eyes and been certain you were listening to The Man Himself.  Still doesn't try to go for the vocal imitation that D'Onofrio brought off, but he gives us a compelling, spellbinding character.  He is mercurial, untrustworthy,  capable of being generous and honest and duplicitous and cruel all at once, an enormously creative man whose capacity for self-destructiveness knew no bounds.  Still gets it all in, manages to be very funny and very moving all at once. 

If there's any way you can get to "Orson's Shadow," get.  The Barrow Street Theatre can be reached at (212) 243-6262. 

Doc Boon or Boondocks?

The documentaries are starting to roll in, confirming many predictions that they are coming into their own as credible contenders for a larger slice of the ticket-buyer budget.  In NYC now, we have Mad Hot Ballroom, for which I saw a trailer and immediately rang up a notional saving of seven dollars on a geezer discount ticket (that much saccharine has to be bad for one); Born into Brothels, Stolen Childhoods, Shake Hands with the Devil, and Tell Them Who You Are are also around, none of them tempting me much.  I am also excited to report that there is on its way a documentary on bowling, for crying out loud, and if that doesn't stir you, then you'll certain want to catch the one on wheelchair rugby (this is not a joke).

I did wander into a showing of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a film which sports all the right prejudices--this was bad, it went to the top of the corporation, whose big guys robbed their employees and electricity consumers in the state of California, the Bush administration and family was at the very least "involved," and so forth--and which I'm therefore feeling sorry I didn't like more.  To begin with, the filmmakers couldn't leave well enough alone, telling the story through film clips and interviews; they had to throw in a lot of extraneous footage that is both intrusive and false.  Example: Jeffrey Skilling liked to organize motorcycle trips through the outback with other senior guys, trips over rough country where broken bones and the like were common.  There are a few stills from these childish undertakings, but we also get footage of professional cyclists doing huge loops in the air and other dangerous tricks.  Patently not the Enronnies, who presumably weren't up to such stunts; so why is the footage there?  Example: when quoting from important internal documents or other written sources, the camera closes in on significant sentences or passages, and highlights them.  But it's immediately plain these are not the original documents, but copies made up for ease of photographing and viewing.  The whole idea of employing such sources is to give an air of authenticity, which is undercut by these surrogates.  Example: the suicide of Cliff Baxter, a senior Enron exec caught in a web of shame and guilt, is dramatically staged, which because we know it is a reenactment, and at that on the level of a cheesy History Channel documentary, subverts any power the simple story might have had.

The talking heads are also pretty flat and uninteresting.  None is out-and-out terrible, but there is nobody we want to see again, nobody whose presence lights up the screen and helps tell his or her part of the story with the force of personality along with the substance.  I think of Nathaniel Kahn's mother in My Architect (2003), or (the now late) Frank Conroy in Stone Reader (2002), or Stanley Crouch in Ken Burns's tv series Jazz, to name only some recent strong presences.  We go from one bland account to another, and with the exception of a buccaneering type named (I think) Mike Muckleroy, there are very few human juices flowing. 

Finally, we leap from one peak to another, one Enron reinvention and fraud and outrage to the next, preferably one where we can get some footage of Skilling being embarrassed before Congress, or Lay making a fool of himself in some public statement, or jumping from the California electricity crisis to the election of Arnold, with lots of footage of the latter.  Context would have been much more helpful.  Skilling keeps saying he's not an accountant, so he couldn't say what was going on, which is the same thing Bernie Ebbers said about World Com and not far from what Dennis the K was claiming about Tyco.  How much more useful to have seen a pattern of corporate abuse, lies, and manipulation of which Enron was a part.  There is a clip of W saying, by way of trying to minimize his connection to Ken Lay, that Enron gave a lot of money to a lot of people in Washington.  That is true, but the film doesn't follow up.  How much more interesting to look not at squirming millionaire bilksters but at that wholly-owned corporate subsidiary called the United States Congress.  Enron is two hours' worth of missed opportunities and a film budget squandered on mediocrity instead of incisive reporting and therefore, in my book, memorable principally as a waste.

Two Directors, One with Talent

Claude Chabrol has never been one of my passions.  I respect his talent, admire some of his work but not so much that I go out of the way to see as much of it as possible; I liked La femme infidèle, Le boucher, and Les noces rouges from the years 1969-73, thought his work with Isabelle Huppert terrific--Violette Nozière (1978) and Une affaire des femmes (1988)--until the unfortunate Madame Bovary (1991).  Even in his weaker efforts, there's generally enough material on the edge between comedy and horror to keep my interest, although in all candor when I try to think of an American analogue, I keep coming up--perhaps unfairly to Chabrol, whose oeuvre is in fact far superior--with Brian de Palma. 

La cérémonie (1996) is one of his better movies of late.  It is a kind of reversal of the Cinderella story in which the employers may mildly exploit the maid, but in which she gets hers back in italics.  Chabrol has insisted it's a Marxist film, and the class elements are very strong, beautifully handled with nothing approaching preaching; class is real enough to European audiences that it can simply be presented as a given.  But there are also psychological drivers beneath the surface of the class struggle, an afflicted maid played by Sandrine Bonnaire, a slightly crazed postal clerk played by (of course) Huppert, and everything builds toward a shocking climax rather nicely.

The maid is hired by a wealthy provincial family (Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel) and she is very competent, but also just slightly . . . off.  We learn her secret soon enough, although I'm not going to reveal it because it's so interesting and so unusual.  Anyway, before the family learns it, there are any number of misunderstandings that lead to flare-ups, anger, humiliation, justifiable resentment on both sides (with Huppert siding with Bonnaire for reasons of her own which shall also remain unmentioned here).  Like a good chef, Chabrol brings this all to the simmer slowly, but when it makes the transition to a rolling boil, duck.  The conclusion is operatic in a literal and an ironic way, and conventionally "moral" endings get a fine Gallic nose-thumbing here.

A quarter century ago, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate landed in theaters with perhaps the worst advance press of any film in the post-war era, all entirely justified.  It was a four-hour "epic," improbably described by one of its producers during shooting as like "a western made by David Lean."  The film cost $36 million, hardly enough to finance an Ice Cube blaxploitation piece these days, but big bucks back then, and the loss of something like every single penny sent United Artists glub-glub.  At the time of release, critics developed a sort of parlor game to the effect of "what would you cut?" Pauline Kael did a review responding, "What would you keep?" For some unfathomable reason, the Sundance Channel has decided to air a more or less complete version recently, and for an equally unfathomable reason, perhaps to see if I trusted my judgment from back then, perhaps because I didn't remember much about the film (which I saw in its Manhattan opening, something like 11:00 a.m., in a large hall with precisely eight people). 

There are lots of bad, even very bad, even irredeemably bad films out there going back a century or more, but there are few this bad with this many pretensions.  Take Gone with the Wind, remove all the saving moments or characters (not many there, but take them out); cut the demeaning treatment of black characters; utterly subtract Clark Gable, who actually gave the film an occasional heartbeat; put in lots more Thomas Mitchell, in one of his more dreadful roles as Scarlet's father; multiply the soppy pro-plantation attitude by about a hundred; and put Olivia de Havilland in every scene--you've still got a more palatable "epic" than Cimino's. 

Haven't seen it?  Do yourself a favor and maintain your innocence.  But here's a little trailer of what you're in for if you don't.

Opening scene: graduation at Harvard College, 1870.  Big set piece, to no apparent purpose, with Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt (both supposed to look early twenties, but KK was forty-four and JH forty and both looked it) posturing and flirting with the maidens, a big speech scene for Hurt (but to no point), a big dancing scene for the sake of having a big dancing scene--a big investment for a costume picture that advances the story not one whit, loses a lot of the audience during those twenty minutes or so, and the relevance of which is never explained (probably Cimino didn't have an explanation, but the scenes seemed like such a good idea).

Next sequence: fast forward thirty years to Wyoming, where there is a range war or something, and the Kristofferson character is a straight-shooting lawman.  There is a very long street scene in what is supposed to be Casper, a scene in which the ambient sound of railroad, horsedrawn carts, and crowds on the street completely drown out all dialogue.  I remember thinking in 1980 that Cimino had watched Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller too many times; Altman recorded with multiple tracks and then mixed them with consummate artistry, so that his film had a sort of foreground and background through the sound.  Cimino mixed it so that he had a mess. 

All through here and shortly after: scenes go on forever.  I don't mind long scenes or long takes, sometimes find them exhilirating, but Jeez!  There is an immigrant trek scene here in which we are shown individuals from a dozen angles, then a dozen more inmigrants from another dozen more angles, then . . . well, it never seems to stop.  There is a power-broker luncheon scene with a hundred repetitions, a scene between Kristofferson and his French madame lover (Huppert, far more playful than in her Chabrolian incarnations, but not very believable) in which he gives her a horse as a birthday present--walking it out to her, walking it around, then walking it around again, and then, well why not walk it around once more.  What was Cimino thinking?  Was Cimino thinking?  Was Cimino capable of thought?

Heaven's Gate, which is not to be confused with Errol Morris's brilliant documentary Gates of Heaven (1978), one of the greatest films ever made, was probably produced because Cimino won an Oscar for the vastly overrated The Deer Hunter (1978), a film I found exploitative and sensationalistic in its good moments.  Two years later, he presented a film that was precisely what a cold-eyed view of Deer Hunter would have led one to expect.  Its present value may be limited to a film-school case study in how not to make a film.  What would you keep indeed?  Not a frame. 

What Do Producers Do?

Ismail Merchant died in London today at age sixty-eight.  He was known as half of the Merchant-Ivory team that began making features in 1965 , although in fairness they were part of a triad: their many successes were unthinkable without writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  Jhabvala provided scripts, Ivory put them on film, and Merchant . . . well, people are always asking what producers do, and his career answers the question--i.e. pretty much everything else.  Merchant was a businessman who paid attention to budget, box office (likely appeal, actual returns), marketing, the shape a picture was taking and how that fit with inescapable financial realities, distribution deals, union issues, keeping many sensitive egos from bad bruisings.  You get the idea.  He always had the mien of a warm, charming fellow, the polar opposite of a Zanuck or a Goldwyn, although I wouldn't have wanted to play cards with him for money.  Filmmakers don't thrive for forty years without a tough-minded producer in the mix.  He also cooked, in part because he loved to, in part because Ivory (his long-time life partner) didn't, and also because in the early days the crew needed to eat.  Years ago, he put out a little paperback cookbook of simplified Indian recipes; my own copy, the binding of which has evaporated and the pages of which are nearly all stuck together, is invaluable for those nights when I'm dying for the flavors of the subcontinent without two hours' investment in chopping and hacking. 

For years, perhaps beginning with The Europeans (1979), the Merchant-Ivory films, often based on novels by the likes of Henry James and E.M. Forster, were taken in this country as the acme of film culture.  Their work became like those television programs introduced by Alistair Cooke, whose very presence announced to American audiences that this was certified as culturally sound, with a distinguished literary pedigree, a production team not simply interested in making money on summer blockbusters, and accessible to middle-brow audiences with pretensions to intellectual achievement.  I'm not sure that this aura was something the team cultivated, although I'm also not sure they tried to escape or reject it.  Of their films in this vein, I thought A Room with a View (1985) and Howard's End (1992), both from Forster, were far and away their best work.  Of the earlier efforts, I liked Shakespeare Wallah (1965), with a smashing young Felicity Kendall.  Of the later "big" films, I found The Remains of the Day (1993) almost unwatchable, even less subtle than Ishiguro's novel, and with a badly miscast Emma Thompson.  I haven't watched A Room with a View since its release, and may again, but even if I don't, I've still got that cookbook, and Merchant always has my gratitude for it.

Among the Literati

I return from more than two weeks of torment at the hands of those living dead ISPs, Earthlink and Verizon.  I left the former after some years, dissatisfied with price and service, for the latter; the Big E unhooked me on the 10th but would not clear the line until the 16th, and my new provider refused to provide: while waiting for Earthlink to do its thing clearing the line, they "lost" my installation order, and when I replaced it, informed me it would take a week to be processed once more. 

During the hiatus, I finally caught up with Agnès Jouai's wondrous new film, Look at Me (Comme un image, 2004).  It's only her second feature, but a huge leap forward from the promising but somewhat uncertain The Taste of Others (2000).  Its milieu is the Parisian literary and intellectual set, both elite and aspirant, and the portrait drawn would be devastating were it not also large-hearted, funny, and even-handed.  No character, with one exception, comes off as without flaws, even the most sympathetic ones. 

The central relationship is between Etienne Cassard and his daughter, Lolita.  Cassard is a writer and publisher with enormous prestige and influence, the sort of man everyone in the literati wants to meet.  Lolita, early twentyish, is pretty, a talented soprano, and distinctly on the chunky side.  She tortures herself looking at magazines with photos of slender, stylish Parisiennes, the sort of models who exist on coffee, cigarettes, and one spinach salad (without dressing) every two days.  Women, that is to say, like her step-mother, Dad's trophy number two.  (The French title of the film, which I think of as "Like a Picture," refers to Lolita's addiction to these images.)  She is of course ravenous for her father's love and attention, with both of which he is brutally sparing, except to remark on her weight and to concede that he has yet to the listen to the demo tape she has made for him.  Lolita is compulsively self-critical, can't hear an honest compliment on the rare occasions when one is delivered, and is grinding herself into a seriously depressed pile of dust. 

Other relationships swirl around this one: Lolita and her voice teacher, Sylvia, who is about to dump her as too much trouble when she learns who Lolita's father is, whereupon she is intrigued by the girl's talent; Sylvia and her novelist husband, whom Etienne helps out; Sebastien, the one blameless innocent of them all, who is attracted to Lolita although she refuses to believe it; and others.  Still, Jouai keeps them under control, whereas the multiple relationships in The Taste of Others always verged on going nowhere in particular.  It all builds toward a climax of a concert which Lolita has persuaded her father to attend, and in its aftermath Lolita sees herself clearly--at least through Sebastien's eyes--and Sylvia sees Etienne for what he really is.  Etienne is right where we found him, mesmerized by himself.

Jouai wrote the script, which won the prize last year at Cannes, with Jean-Pierre Bacri, various described in the press as her husband and her ex-husband.  She also plays Sylvia, while Bacri plays Etienne--a juicy role but not easy to make credible.  Bacri makes us accept Etienne's monumental self-assurance with his own conviction.  Informed at a party that the buyer of his publishing house wishes to meet him, he nods and does not move an inch; the intermediary returns and repeats the buyer's wishes.  "Yes," says Bacri, just slightly annoyed at the need to clarify that he is the mountain, not Mohammed, "and I am right here." As Lolita, Marilou Berry is effective, funny, grating when Jouai needs her to be, also able to command our pity. 

Look at Me is on the art house circuit, whence it will doubtless go to DVD in a few months.  If you like smart, intelligent humor--the word "sophisticated" is not out of place here--you won't want to miss it.  If you're leaning but aren't sure, let me add that Jouai has just about the best music in movies today; The Taste of Others has a gorgeous track, with a lovely surprise woodwind band at the end playing the most popular of all French rousing anthems, Je ne regrette rien, and great music not only serves as aural wallpaper for Look at Me, it is a central part of the story. 

El Duque

My thoughts about Errol Flynn (April 22) sent my mind in the direction of action-hero stars of some magnitude, and you don't get very far on a trek like that without running up against The Big Guy.  Broadly speaking, my views on John Wayne are not unlike those about Flynn: he made something like 175 films (including the early silents in which he was essentially an extra), of which I find no more than a dozen watchable.  But in those twelve, where there was a highly fortunate and rare matchup of script, direction, and a commitment of interest by Wayne, he's as good as any action hero gets and better than many male leads of any sort.  He embodied his character outside and in, which is about as much as you can ask of an actor.  Some of those pictures taken as a whole I regard as utter dogs, sentimentalized beyond repair, but Wayne's work is still compelling for all the hogwash that surrounds him. 

He made his bones in westerns, and for me they were the only genre in which he was completely credible (with one exception, noted below).  War films, cop films, sea-faring films, treasure-hunting adventure films, Cold War films, African big game films--no in italics.  He never looked comfortable, he needed the wide open spaces and the unspoken code that a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, a dictum of which he convinced audiences when given the chance.  His acquired drawl (he was born in Iowa and grew up in Glendale, California, attending the same high school I suffered through thirty years later) from endless B and sub-B westerns in the thirties became his natural voice, and it only worked on the plains. 

Wayne's ace in the hole was his ability to suggest a devastating internal force that he was rigorously containing for the common good.  He could obliterate enemies, without doubt, but he was slightly reluctant to use that power unless absolutely necessary.  This gave him a moral stature that dovetailed with his imposing physical presence.  It's no wonder that his breakout role was as Johnny Ringo in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).  Ringo leaves little doubt of his capacity for violence in that first shot of him hailing the coach in the road.  But he doesn't use it, doesn't raise a hand or fire a shot until the danger is urgent, then protects the coach from Indians and pursues the objects of his vengeance in Lordsburg with reluctance, in part because it separates him--and might do so permanently--from his woman.  But a man's gotta do . . .  By the way, the indispensable study by Garry Wills, John Wayne's America, argues that by rights Wayne should have achieved stardom in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930), a film released when Wayne was twenty-three and which I have not seen. 

This power of containment was largely sustained through the John Ford cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), although in the latter we see a hard-driving and uncompromising Wayne character who turns out to have an extremely thoughtful and innovate plan for dealing with the Indians.  Along the way, an interesting development took place in Wayne's career, now at something close to its apex.  In Red River (1948), Howard Hawks cast him as, for the most part, an older man, someone in his late fifties or early sixties when Wayne himself had just turned forty.  It was a great insight that the action hero could also play an authority figure, even one who abused his authority, and Wayne was brilliant in the part, also making co-lead Montgomery Clift--supposedly a "real" actor--look badly out of place.  (One of the stunt managers on the scene, who had grown up in the rural west, was given the thankless task of making Clift "act western," but eventually threw up his hands, saying that when you said "west," Clift thought "Central Park West.")  Wayne's Tom Dunson was a harsh product of his environment, with all the appearances of hair-trigger judgment and an unforgiving temperament.  Yet he never lets us doubt his affection for Matt, the Clift character, and the ending--soppy as it is--makes a kind of sense.  Wayne ordinarily didn't reach for this sort of complexity, but playing the older man with some of the physical presence of the younger seems to have given him a certain freedom.

The older man returned in some later roles, but none more memorably than The Searchers (1956), his greatest and Ford's greatest film.  It's a movie well before its time when it comes to depicting the underside of the old west, the racism as well as the courage and heroism, the unchecked violence and lack of apology for it.  Ford cannot entirely stay away from kitschiness, like a lush who has gone on the wagon but finds he cannot resist the lure of a bottle he finds, but these elements are largely confined to a later segment of the film.  The early scene in which Wayne's Ethan Edwards and his brother's wife, Martha, played by Dorothy Jordan, wordlessly reveal to us their long and enduring love for one another, is a masterpiece of acting and directorial restraint, much assisted by Ward Bond's little piece of finding something else to look at.  Wayne reveals emotional depth in that brief moment which one can never separate from his often throughly unlikeable character, an unusual instance of redemption taking place at the outset and standing up (just) through much that is unforgiveable.  Ethan ages in the course of the film, in some ways becoming more rigid, more apparently set upon eradicating the stain upon his family that his niece kidnapped by the Comanches represents, yet it's hard to believe that he could ever harm the daughter of Martha, his only but still significant vulnerable spot.  At the famous ending, he delivers niece Debbie back to where she grew up, but when all the others go into the house, we see him on the porch, from inside, and he turns away without entering.  It is often remarked that he no longer fits into the frontier he has helped build, but it is also true that he has provided the healing of a great breach, overcome his own prejudices, let love assert itself, and accepted the passing of his time with grace, not bitterness. 

The one non-western in which Wayne seemed to manage was a film in which, tellingly, he played an outsider.  I can't stand The Quiet Man (1952), almost a caricature of Ford's most nauseating sentimentalism trading in Irish characters who seem to come straight out of vaudeville, most especially Barry Fitzgerald's thirsty priest.  But Wayne is believable, a little baffled by the mentalities and mores of these people, trying to come to peace with himself, and given minimally decent support by Maureen O'Hara and Victor McLaglen. 

Once The Searchers was behind him, Wayne seemed to lapse into taking the easy way out, but also he may have been feeling his age (though he was only in his early fifties).  In the hilariously ridiculous Rio Bravo (1959), a Hawks frontier comedy, he walks--and on one or two occasions runs--like a man in his late sixties, stiff-legged and wobbly.  (Perhaps it was all those years on horses, which he hated with a passion; remember, he made more than sixty westerns between The Big Trail and Stagecoach, that is nine years, playing such memorable parts as Singin' Sandy Saunders [and he did sing] and Stoney Brooke.)  There were some nice comic moments in North to Alaska (1960), especially the fight scenes, and Wayne even did a nice ironic turn in The Comancheros (1961), although to watch it you have to sit through 107 minutes of Stuart Whitman, which is more than can be decently asked of anyone.  I know that ardent admirers of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) are thick on the ground, but I thought it was a piece of hack work all around, an opinion stoutly reinforced by a recent viewing.  Strain as I might, I can't see anything there worth watching.  The even later stuff--The Sons of Katie Elder, McClintock, El Dorado, The War Wagon, Rio Lobo, The War Wagon, Chisum, Big Jake, running from 1965 to 1971, with others still to follow--were essentially bait for ticket buyers, Wayne in a western and nothing more, absolutely formula stuff with hardly a care to shape, pace, credibility.  In the midst of them all, True Grit (1969) won him his only Oscar, basically for doing a comic take-off on his screen image from the previous thirty years. 

It seems to me that those blue-state voters who cannot understand the appeal of George W. Bush have failed to look at popular culture over the last fifty years or so.  Wayne was for more than half that time the biggest or one of the biggest box office draws even after he stopped making pictures in 1976, and eventually his place was taken by Clint Eastwood in his cop/western phase: these were strong, silent, unschooled men who were unafraid to resort to violence if necessary, men who were suspicious of people from cities with fancy educations but also had a personal moral compass firmly in place, one on which right and wrong were clearly dilineated.  Just as Eastwood to some extent outgrew that work, in Bird, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, and Mystic River, Wayne stretched its limits in his best Ford films and Red River.  I can watch much of that work over and over--my children have vowed never to forgive me for organizing their informal education some thirty years ago around repeated viewings of and windy little lectures about The Searchers--and never fail to find richness; that's a small vein in a big mine, but it's there.

Grab Bag

In my shut-in condition, I'm confined to DVDs and Tivo pick-ups, a very mixed bunch.  Still, perhaps I can nudge people toward or warn people off, as the case may be. 

Before I go on, a suggestion: if you haven't been reading the "comments" attached to this or that post of mine, I urge you to do so.  Not only am I fortunate in attracting a smart and knowledgeable readership, they are also very good at correcting my errors.  Most recently, for example, a visitor noted that I was mistaken in writing that Michael Powell had not completed the second volume of his autobiography.  I don't know why my own net search should have led me to that conclusion a couple of months ago, when I compiled the notes for that piece, but it did.  More important than a mea culpa is the fact that I have sharp-eyed commenters, and you should check them out.

A Pair by Tavernier . . . Bertrand Tavernier is one of my favorite contemporary French filmmakers in spite of the fact that he misses almost as often as he hits.  Anyone who can give us 'Round Midnight (1986), Laisser Passer (Safe Conduct, 2002) and Holy Lola (2004) gets my attention.  A recent miss was La Fille d'Artagnan (US title, presumably on the premise that American audiences have never heard of d'Artagnan: The Revenge of the Musketeers, 1994), a comedy-action, sword-fighting knock-off of the Dumas tales in which much of the comedy springs from the fact that the four musketeers are now barely on the sunny side of sixty and looking a bit rusty with the blade.  Creaky and distended, the movie is still to some extent redeemed by Sophie Marceau in the French title's role and by three old pros playing musketeers: Philippe Noiret, Jean-Luc Bideau, and Sami Frey.  Much better is the earlier Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, 1981, although A Fresh Start might better have captured what the film is up to), with Noiret, Isabelle Huppert, and Stéphane Audrane.  Noiret plays a colonial policeman in a remote African village during the late 1930s, corrupt, lazy, weak, preyed upon by his superiors.  He finally gets the message: prey back.  He starts murdering his antagonists and seeking refuge behind his reputation as a craven coward.  He maneuvers everyone who crosses him or might implicate him in the killings into a position where they are either blamed themselves or must flee for fear of being blamed.  Noiret is perfect for the part, Huppert and Audrane equally fine as mistress and wife which he must ultimately shed.  Tavernier strays into deep water toward the end where he has the Noiret character begun to indulge in philosophical meanderings and Christ identification, which takes a bit of starch out of a deliciously mean black comedy.  Ignore that and enjoy the fun.

Joint Security Area . . . Park Chan-Wook's first feature, released in 2000, and a beauty, among the best I've seen of contemporary Korean movies.  It deals with a border incident along the contemporary Korean DMZ, one which occurs in murky circumstances and of which we are given several differing versions at the outset.  Since neither the South nor North Korean military authorities are presented as particularly admirable characters, it's pretty much possible to believe that either side might have engineered it.  But just when we think we're in Great-Grand Nephew of Rashomon territory, Park starts giving us background and letting us get to know the characters better.  Now the human element becomes dominant, and what we come to see is going to be the real story takes shape gradually.  It's driven by wonderful direction, beautifully shaped scenes, and acting by Lee Byung-hun and Song Kong-ho (the centerpiece of Memories of Murder, 2003) as the South and North Korean central figures, respectively.  By the time we get the straight story, we're satisfied with both the resolution and the process by which we got there, although I do have some reservations about the disposition of one of the major characters at the very end.  But this film, Netflix-available, absolutely should not be missed. 

The Crimson River . . . This is a French cop movie, a flic flick, if you will, vintage 2000, with Jean Reno.  You now have my sole motivation for watching it: Reno is interesting, even engaging, and here he is paired with the talented Vincent Cassell (think Ocean's Twelve, 2004).  They work well together, and director Mathieu Kassovitz keeps things moving nicely.  On the debit side is an absolutely preposterous story about eugenics, baby-switching, an inbred university down in the French Alps, and God knows what else.  Caveat emptor. 

Hell is for Heroes . . . Don Siegel's claim on posterity comes from his Eastwood movies, cop and caper films, and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).  I watched it because it was the only war film he made.  It was produced just at the point where American World War II films started ever so gingerly to admit that war might not have been that much fun, although there's just enough soppy foxhole humor and silliness to blunt that edge.  (There's even a small part for Bob Newhart, then starting to make a splash as a stand-up comic who specialized in telephone routines; naturally, the picture gives him a telephone routine.)  The picture is a star vehicle, built around the emerging mystique of Steve McQueen, who was coming to prominence from the "Wanted: Dead or Alive" television series and his support for Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven (1960).  McQueen gives Siegel a little sizzle in his role as Reese, the squad hard-ass who does things his way, but the character is narrowly drawn and McQueen makes no visible attempt to broaden him.  Fortunately for Siegel, he also has Mike Kellin and Harry Guardino to lean on, which helps get us through what might otherwise be a pretty tedious ninety minutes.

The Archers

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is running a major retrospective of Michael Powell's work from May 6 to the end of the month, featuring thirty-three films.  For cinéastes in the New York area, this should be a welcome event, one well worth finding ways to squeeze in lots of films no longer screened theatrically, rarely shown on television, and of which only a few are to be found on VCR or DVD.  In my own case, it's mostly an occasion for cursing my bad luck: recovering from a broken leg is a slow process after a certain age (and I'm after it, all right), and getting out of the apartment is a major production number.  This hurts more than the leg, because it means missing a rare chance to see A Canterbury Tale (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Small Back Room (1948), and The Tales of Hoffman (1951).  There follow a few thoughts about the small handful of Powell films I have seen.

Powell had a long career running back into the silent era, and after sound he specialized in rapidly turned-out little thrillers.  We can see flashes of the creativity itching to break out in that special effects wonder of 1940, The Thief of Bagdad, with Conrad Veidt and Sabu, which Powell co-directed.  Not long thereafter, he met a Hungarian refugee (his producer, Alexander Korda, was also Hungarian), Emeric Pressburger, and found in him a kindred spirit.  Powell and Pressburger went from finishing each other's sentences to working on scripts.  In short order, they formed a production company they called The Archers, and Powell insisted on giving them full co-credits for writing and directing.  In fact, Pressburger did most of the writing (although Powell contributed ideas) and Powell did most of what we would consider directing (although Pressburger had some things to say). 

They made a splash of sorts with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, released in 1943 but begun in early 1942, a time when England was under heavy military pressure from the Germans and still in conceivable danger of losing the war, at least in official minds.  (The smart money said that when the Soviet Union and then the US joined the English, it tipped the balance irrevocably in the Allies' favor, but Churchill feared complacency and naturally kept his people hard at it.)  Blimp was, of all things, a cartoon character, one popularized between the wars by the immortal editorial cartoonist David Low.  The Colonel was a walrus-mustached, bluff-and-bluster Tory much given to spouting the eternal verities, insisting on the superiority of his outdated views, and cheerfully contradicting himself; Low had great fun skewering appeasers, witless reactionaries, and military dunderheads with every appearance of Blimp.  Powell and Pressburger turned him into a three-dimensional character named Clive Candy, a professional soldier who won the Victoria Cross as a young man in the Boer War and and lasted to become a brigadier in World War II.  He starts out as a paragon of fair play--it's better to lose a war than to resort to tactics unworthy of a gentleman--who frequently repeats that the Brits "won" World War I (ignoring that the French and the US just might have had something to do with it) playing by the rules whereas the Germans had repeatedly broken them.  By the end of the film--and there's much more to the movie than this--he is brought round to see that against an opponent like the Nazis, you have to play as dirty as they do if you're to stay in the fight.

This was controversial stuff in 1942 and caused The Archers no end of trouble with the Prime Minister, the War Office, and other Blimpish types.  Their film was taken for anti-military even before they made it (the War Office refused to release Laurence Olivier, Powell's first choice to play Candy, from military service), and when it was released, it was quickly cut down from its original 163-minute length.  In truth, the satire on the traditional British military was gentle enough, especially for a society whose ability to kid itself seems to know no boundaries.  Moreover, the real heart of the story was the love he had for two women (both played by Deborah Kerr, all of twenty at the time and soon to become Mrs. Powell) and for a German officer he met in 1902 and remained close to forty years later.  Roger Livesey plays Candy wonderfully well, and his German friend is in the hands of the magnificent Anton Walbrook.  There's a Criterion DVD which performs a stunning transfer of the original Technicolor, which was something of a marvel for its time.  It's widely accepted these days that Blimp is a masterpiece; I can't rate it anywhere near that high, but it's well worth the watching.

I Know Where I'm Going (1945) is something else entirely: the story of a headstrong young woman (Wendy Hiller) placed down in a severe environment (the northwestern Scottish coast) where she meets a man who falls in love with her (Livesey again).  To describe the story at all beyond this introduction is to spoil many wonderful developments you should experience first hand, but the themes are a Londoner dealing with the north, a city person dealing with rural life, and mere mortals imagining they can master intractable, mighty forces of nature.  If you can't experience the first-rate black-and-white photography (by Jack Cardiff) on a large screen at Lincoln Center, get the DVD from Netflix. 

My favorite of the Powell-Pressburger collaborations is Black Narcissus (1947), which the Lincoln Center catalogue wrongly dates as 1940.  It is adapted from a Rumor Godden novel about a teaching and nursing convent in the Himalayas (filmed in Surrey and at London's Pinewood Studios) where the calling of the nuns is disrupted by the occasional presence of two men: Mr. Dean, an Englishman who has taken up permanent residence in the jungle below the mountain top convent, and The Young General, heir apparent to local political power.  Dean is a sexual threat by his unashamed masculinity (he wears only khaki shorts and is often without shirt), the Young General's good will is necessary to the continued existence of the convent.  But plot, while engaging, is utterly secondary to atmospherics: the illusion of mountain top is well sustained, the sense of remoteness--from civilization, but also from God--is inescapable, and the play of strong personalities is enhanced and even distorted by the exotic environment.  Sabu plays the Young General, David Farrar is an unforgettable Dean, and Deborah Kerr is Sister Clodagh, his antagonist, admirer, and a tortured conscience.  I saw this film first when I was ten, by which time it had made its way to Hollywood second-run houses frequented by my latitudinarian aunts who much broadened my youthful cinematic education, and while I missed a lot of the subterranean currents, I was utterly hypnotized by the beauty of the images.  I saw again a few weeks ago on DVD and still believe this may be one of the most gorgeously photographed (by Jack Cardiff) films ever; if you can see it on the big screen--where it almost never appears--you'll have a special treat. 

I doubt I can ruin much about The Red Shoes (1948), since it has been so widely seen, in part thanks to constant television showings and a fine DVD.  It's something of a backstage story with a ballet company, and all the politics and rehearsal business are remarkably well done, pretty much held together by Anton Walbrook playing the impresario.  Moira Shearer is the ballerina who gets a chance to go on in the lead role in the production "The Red Shoes," a fantasy into which Powell enters from an audience perspective but before long is moving about "on stage," fluidly taking us from scene to scene, making us a part of the story instead of its viewers.  It's an amazing achievement, worth more than one viewing.  The ending grows naturally out of what has come before and still shocks.  Top notch romanticism and art-is-life drama.

Finally, the notorious Peeping Tom (1960), another reasonably well-known film, although it doesn't get into theaters much.  Its notoriety stems largely from a subject matter that was considered (by charitable British critics) lurid upon its release, in part because it contained the first nude scene in a British film, and while it may now seem reasonably subdued, it still calls attention to its kinkiness and strange goings-on.  A serial killer who preys upon prostitutes and films them, and their grisly end, with a hidden movie camera, has become a major menace in the London of the time.  This loony is played as a normal man gone haywire by Carl Boehm, an Austrian with pretty good English and a nice mix of the ordinary and the completely wacko.  His faint foreign accent makes him seem sufficiently off-center to be be believable.  Anna Massey is his innocent foil, and Shearer has a smallish comedy part she doesn't handle all that well.  Peeping Tom has historical interest and some entertainment value; it's not a bad film and not a great film.  But it came pretty close to finishing Powell's career (Pressburger didn't work with him on it) at only fifty-five; after fifty films in thirty years, he only made half a dozen features in the next twenty-eight.  Never underestimate the power of a blue nose. 

In a New York Times piece last Sunday, the inescapable Terrence Rafferty made more than a thousand words out of what he sees as Powell's appetite for excess: as long as there's room for more, he says, Powell lards it on.  The man was a romantic and he had a certain operatic aesthetic (I gather this is given full and not entirely satisfying rein in The Tales of Hoffman).  He never denied these tastes, and if you're truly interested, have at his My Life in Films (1986, out of print but available from used booksellers on the web), a partial autobiography; it took him almost 700 pages of paperback text to get to age forty-three and he never took up the continuation.  If he was not quite the titan, in my view, the admirers like Martin Scorsese believe, he was without any question a considerable talent, could be counted for originality of approach and vision, Pressburger vastly broadened his story-telling powers, working with Cardiff produced some of the most memorable compositions and sequences on celluloid, and his work is not to be dismissed.  I am truly chagrined at not being able to see any of this festival; the opportunity is unlikely to come along again in my lifetime. 

Not Quite Deja Vu

Kevin Drum, whose "Political Animal" blog in the Washington Monthly site is a sort of hangout for policy wonks, has a somewhat incongruous but enjoyable little diversion in his April 30 post asking people to suggest remakes of movies that were better than the original.  I'm not entirely sure what a remake is--there's not much question about Algiers  (Hollywood's 1938 shot-for-shot replication of Pépé le Moko [1937]), and using the same title would seem fairly strong evidence of a remake at work, although perhaps not always, but there are an awful lot of ambiguous cases here and I don't have the energy to sort them all out.  Drum's readers (316 at last count) had some off-the-wall candidates, suggesting that Demme's recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate was better than Frankenheimer's original and Hitchcock's abysmal The Man Who Knew Too Much of 1956 gets the nod over his 1934 original, which looks faintly dated now but has much more vigor and zip, not to mention Peter Lorre.  But they had some interesting thoughts as well: Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) over The Front Page (1931); Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992) over the 1936 version starring Randolph Scott, although the old one was a favorite of my youth; Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) trumping the 1958 entry with David Hedison; Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001) besting the Rat Pack's dreadful 1960 self-indulgence; and even Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) improving upon Siegel's 1956 film, a view I can understand but not entirely accept, since I found Siegel's work full of energy and honesty and Kevin McCarthy's acting superb. 

Thoughts and candidates? 

Sans Pareil

In the early and middle 1960s, when I was young and starting to turn at once mildly hopeful and vaguely pessimistic about the world becoming a better place, there was one event which commanded my attention and that of many of my friends like no other: a new film by Jean-Luc Godard.  Since I spent much of that time in Portland, OR, these releases came late, far too long after we'd read the admiration expressed by a handful of sympathetic big-city critics and the dismissals of mainstream jerks, but they were new to us and we leaped.  I lost touch with Godard in the mid-1970s, after Tout va bien, when his work had trouble (for political but also commercial reasons) finding US distributors no matter where you were, even New York.  But a few months ago, I caught up with the wonderful new one, Notre musique, and then the slightly earlier Eloge d'amour, and thought, he's still got it, the old magician.  I doubt that many young people, whatever their admiration for Godard of today or yesterday, have any sense of the electricity which each new release of roughly 1960-67 sent through his audiences.  I didn't doubt then that those years were the most creative, imaginative, innovative, stimulating, and original run that any director--any director, ever--has enjoyed, and a selective viewing of the releases from those years  has done nothing to change my mind.

It's important to keep in mind a fact so well-known that it's sometimes taken for granted: Godard, like several others in the New Wave, came out of a group around the periodical Cahiers du cinéma, and they were all committed to some degree--although few to the extent of Godard--to using film as a tool of cultural criticism with which to examine (and flay) contemporary views on art, politics, sex, social class, anything you cared to mention.  Much of Godard's work sets aside the customary narrative focus of films and devotes itself to this criticism.  What keeps it from being off-putting, for the most part, is both the daunting intelligence and curiosity of the man and his always-at-work sense of humor.

His first feature, A bout de souffle (forever Breathless to English-speaking audiences, but more properly Out of Breath, which is what the hero becomes at the end), opened in Paris in March 1960 and achieved instant attention all over the film world not long thereafter.  Godard had shot if for about a third of what ordinary French films then cost (perhaps $90,000 in 1960 dollars), he shot it with a skeleton crew, without synched dialogue (that was added in sound mixing), and saw no reason whatsoever to observe the conventional proprieties of editing and narrative presentation.  It is the story of Michel, a petty thief who commits a couple of murders, and who runs into Patricia, a young American hanging out in Paris while waiting to start classes at the Sorbonne.  Michel stays one step ahead of the cops while trying--successfully--to get Patricia into bed.  But Godard is not interested in narrative flow; he wants to get at character and interrelationships, at people who are more interested in themselves than anything else in the world, including each other, and--especially in Michel's case--who are constantly adjusting their poses and appearance in order to conform with some idealized self.  This petty thug famously models himself on Bogart, a cinematic image more real to him than anything in life.  Patricia is also trying to find an image that fits, but more distractedly, which leads her to resist and then sleep with Michel, to protect him and then to turn him into the police. 

Godard's rough cut came in at 135 minutes; his producer insisted on a film at ninety.  Out came the scissors, although instead of cutting whole scenes (although that did happen), Godard cut within scenes.  Example: someone is walking across a room or down a street; conventionally, the camera follows the movement from one or perhaps two and even three points of view, but always seeking continuity; Godard would begin with the first few steps, then abruptly show a few frames from later on, the just as abruptly the arrival.  Thus, from necessity, was born (actually reborn, from silent days) the fabled jump cut.  The film made a huge star of Jean-Paul Belmondo, then twenty-six, and owned a little of its popularity to Jean Seberg, who came with pre-packaged pubilicity of her "discovery" by Otto Preminger for a role in Saint Joan and Bonjour, Tristesse.  After 45 years, the film is still as fresh, invigorating, and exciting as when I first saw it, and it's not hard to see how Godard got people to thinking lots of new and different ways about films.

Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier) was ready for release later the same year; but it dealt with the Algerian war for independence, and the resistance of French colonials and colonialists to them, subjects that devoured France at the time the way Vietnam came to dominate American politics from about 1967 until the mid-1970s.  The Gaullist censors watched and said, resoundingly, Non!  It did not appear on screens until 1963, by which time the Algerian war had achieved a negotiated peace.  It tells of a hit man for the pro-colonial side who is operating out of Geneva, Switzerland, and who falls in love with a young woman, a situation which only complicates his professional life.  There are cool, candid scenes of torture--perhaps the number one issue in the political debate over the war--long monologues, profuse quotations from various literary and philosophical sources, and like most of Godard's films from these years, a death at the end.  I have always liked Le petit soldat and found a viewing after nearly thirty-five years rewarding; the film has life and energy and stays just far enough outside the political thriller conventions to be interesting.  It's also his first film with Anna Karina, the Danish model with whom he fell in love, married, and helped into a brilliant but all too brief screen career. 

For someone so rigorously intellectual, politically serious, and high-minded about the functions of cinema, it's amusing to watch Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman), which came out in 1961 and was Godard's tip of the hat and poke in the ribs at romantic musical comedy.  Karina is a young wife who wants a child, but whose husband, Jean-Claude Brialy, is reluctant.  To get him off the dime, she starts cultivating the interest of Belmondo, and with a lot of delicate playing and teasing, it works.  There is singing, dancing, and all manner of charming silliness, with no hint whatsoever at anything adjoining reality: these are actors performing in front of a camera, that and not the illusion is the truth.  Although Godard had wanted to shoot in a real Parisian apartment (a rather plain and drab one, as appropriate to the couple's circumstances), he was finally forced to build a set.   But while sets meant control and the possibility of making the scenes "real," Godard recorded the sounds of the crew moving about and left them in the finished film.  A film impossible to dislike.

Then, of course (and by this time we should have seen it coming), a sharp turn in 1962: Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, although I think Living Her Life is a little closer).  This is the harrowing story, "in twelve scenes," of a young Parisian who has little economic choice but to go into prostitution.  She is wretchedly unworldly, gullible when she should be skeptical, trusting when she should have her guard up, taking financially motivated favors for generosity, gradually losing her grip on anything like control of her life.  The black-and-white photography is unlike anything I had seen to that point: with a clarity, power, and extraordinary compositions by Raoul Coutard, who had begun working with Godard in A bout de souffle and soon became nearly as famous.  Karina has by this point gone from charming to a talented actress, and her portrait of deterioration--at which she never ceases to be astonished--is abundantly moving. 

Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen, 1963) gulls us into thinking we're watching a spoof of war movies, and perhaps of waritself.  Michelangelo and Ulysses are a couple of witless peasants who leave their girlfirends, Cleopatra and Venus, to join up in a war which a distinct Orwellian aroma--two undefined sides fighting over undefined issues and objectives.  Off they go, and gradually we see, in large part from newsreel and other documentary footage, some of the reality of war.  There is senseless carnage and endless destruction aplenty, but eventually the guys return home, not exactly victorious, but exuberant with their experience as it is encapsulated in a huge stack of picture postcards they sent home.  This famous sequence is put on with enormous imagination and humor, as the men show their women all the famous sights they have seen or claim to have seen--thepyramids, the Eiffel tower, the Parthenon, St. Peter's square, museums, natural wonders, and so forth.  We realize that these prefabricated images which are so immediate to them are like so many images--lies of real experience--meaning that the documentary footage we saw earlier falls into the same category.  Images cannot capture the vicious brutality of war; only experience, unmediated by art of an attempt to create enjoyment.  Suddenly, Les Carabiniers becomes a new film.

Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) was Godard's first comparatively big budget production.  He was by now an international brand name of sorts, and Sam Levine put him to work.  The story was about a screenwriter with political and aesthetic principles who compromises them to get work with a philistine American producer, and in the process earns the contempt of his wife.  A fair chunk of the money went into the contract for Brigitte Bardot as the wife.  It may be difficult for younger people to appreciate what a presence BB was in the early '60s; nobody has dominated the media since to such an extent unless it was Princess Diana in the '90s.  It so happened that she was a neighbor of Godard and Karina in the chi-chi Paris 16th arrondissement and agreed to work with him.  Bad idea.  She immediately began playing star, late on the set, pissy about her lines, in short a royal pain in the ass.  To make matters worse, that great, great American actor Jack Palance, who played the producer, decided that Godard had no idea how to make a film and refused to speak to him for most of the shooting, although Godard spoke near-perfect English.  Le Mépris never works very well for very long, but there is a marvelous scene in the couple's apartment where, for about twenty minutes, we get a complete rehearsal and visualization of how the marriage has unraveled, thread by thread.  Fritz Lang plays the famous German director Fritz Lang who has been hired to direct the film, and who, having seen it all, acts as something of a Greek chorus on the insanities of movie-making and how--maybe--something like art can be salvaged from the process.  When Levine saw the rough cut, he blew a gasket: there were no nude scenes of Bardot.  Godard got her back together with the crew and filmed some, then pasted them onto the beginning and end, where they seemed to turn the most famous derrière on earth into a joke.  Henceforth, Godard went back to low-rent but autonomous filmmaking.

He seems to have felt reinvigorated, for next came themasterpiece Bande à part (1964), a lovely little piece about two film-mad young men who are always looking for the easy franc.  They are casing the suburban house where they think riches dangle ripe for the mere plucking, and they enlist the reluctant support of the lovely but insecure and even rather gawky girl who works there.  She finds herself drawn to them--literally: in one remarkable scene she runs through the entire suburban neighborhood to be with them, and we understand how much she thinks she needs them to complete her, for all her misgivings about their project.  It's not really a caper film, but a film about "outsiders" and how they got that way, how they are with each other, how they bumble forward but also backward.  There is lots of conversation, many monologues, but we pick up their internal dynamics through one stunning moment when they dance to a cafe jukebox.  The dance is called "The Madison," Godard dubiously claimed to have invented it, and it is one of the most charming and subtly revealing passages in his work.  Predictably, one of the characters comes to a tragic end, although there are flickers of a possibility of romantic escape as well.

I have always found Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), a day-in-the-life film, and Alphaville (1965), sci-fi/noir mélange, to be rather labored and a little abstract.  They have moments of sharp images and telling, funny comments, but moments only, at least for me.  I think Godard may have been marking time, throwing stuff up on the wall to see if anything stuck, trying to find his way out of a dead end.  This sense is, again for me, reaffirmed by Pierrot le fou (1965), which seems to have been intended as a sort of summing up of where he'd been in the last five years, and which indeed Godard himself described as: "A little soldier who discovers with contempt that one must live one's life, that a woman is a woman and that in a new world one must live as an outsider in order not to find oneself breathless." The earlier themes are here--freedom, death, the centrality of film--along with the quotations and speeches and the inescapability of suffocating from imposed events beyond one's control.  Here, Vietnam has finally replaced Algeria and there is an air of pessimism which extends beyond the fact of death at the end.  Narrative has become even less important: Belmondo plays a married man bored senseless at a party of advertising people who runs away to Karina, a former girlfriend,  who may--I say may--have killed a man (someone is reponsible for that dead body in her apartment).  They steal a car and set off for the south of France, pursued by bad guys of uncertain provenance, but this is no thriller or melodrama.  Godard is building atmosphere, charging the environment with darkness and hopelessness, creating moods which cannot be shaken by story line, and he's immensely talented at it.  I remember people coming out of the theater forty years ago saying, What the hell was that all about?" I could only answer, inadequately, it was about itself, it was about what you saw taken all together.  Can't do much better now. 

If Pierrot le fou was about where he'd come from, Masculin féminine (1966) pointed out some new directions.  It is in fifteen scenes populated by young people roughly ten years Godard's juniors (he was now thirty-six), and deals with their preoccupations with pop culture but alsopolitics, sex but also how to live life decently.  There's no narrative here, just interviews and conversations and monologues designed to bring forth all sorts of information from which we can draw our conclusions ("make of it what you will" in the words of another intertitle).  Roger Ebert (who as a young man "saw" Godard more clearly than most big-city newspaper critics)  has pointed out that while the film's most famous intertitle is, "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola," he thinks much of its sense lies in another line, "We went seeking greatness in movies, and were most often disappointed.  We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live." I think that's this movie, and I think its a masterwork.

I didn't bother watching Made in U.S.A. (1966) or 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her,1967), both of which left me cool at the time and which re-viewings ten years later did nothing to improve.  Similarly with La Chinoise (1967).  Most of the film is conversation amongst a group of French students, and the conversation is fascinating, earnest, thoughtful, butits connection to real-world possibilities hard to find.  There is more than a whiff of agitprop to this film, although Godard remained just independent enough to annoy French Maoist intellectuals of the period (not actually a difficult feat).  Incidentally, the marriage to Karina, which was all but unsalvageable in 1965, had by now ended, although she worked with up through Made in U.S.A.  Godard's gargantuan tempers, his epic jealousy, and his moodiness had become impossible, divorce unavoidable.  La Chinoise starred his latest romantic interest, Anne Wiazemsky, not yet twenty, whom he married after the film's release. 

Later the same year, Godard brought out Weekend, a film with its own burden of agitprop, but which I also regard as one of his greatest works.  The long tracking shot near the opening of a gigantic traffic jam composed of numerous wrecks is as pungent a statement as I have seen of how the end of urban capitalist society might be imagined.  But that society has actually been coming apart from the very opening shots and it continues to degnerate into banditry, terrorism, and even cannibalism at the very end.  It's a grim, but still wildly funny--madcap, screwball funny, perhaps the only kind of funny that one could stand in such a world--view of the end of civilization as we know it, and there's little evidence that Godard regrets its demise.

After Sympathy for the Devil in 1968, the politics more or less took over the films instead of being one of the areas he was exploring.  Producers shied off, and even when they were lured out of the bushes by stars like Yves Montand and Jane Fonda inTout Va Bien (1973), audiences kept their distance.  It was on to the really low-budget productions, digital filmmaking, and any number of other experiments.  He hasn't stopped, and I think we're the better for it.  Still, there's been nothing like those early years, that burst of creativity and energy and joy--even with all the deaths, even with all the gloom--he gave us.  I haven't seen and don't expect to see anything like it again in my lifetime, and you probably shouldn't either.  There have been many great directors, but early Godard was the one indispensable one. 

P.S.  Invaluable resource: Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artis at Seventy (2003).  MacCabe knows Godard, although there as been some separation recently, but worked with him on a number of films in the digital period, and provides a huge amount of information and insight, both personal and artistic.