Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
$495
Lost it at the
r<
I
4/
.
/'
\ti
Pauline Ks&L
1<
LOST IT
AT THE MOVIES
I
idMMMMXVVVl'JiWV VJ V
'.j.
v.
PAULINE KAEL
BOSTON
TORONTO
COPYRIGHT 1954,
PAULINE KAEL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL
MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER,
EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A
REVIEW.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 65-IO908
B
"Throwing the Race"
"The
is
Marienbad"
.
is
Parties:
reprinted from
ATLANTIC-LITTLE,
BROWN BOOKS
ARE PUBLISHED BY
LITTLE,
IN ASSOCIATION
WITH
by
Little,
&
Acknowledgments
my
wish to express
its
president,
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Zeitgeist
and
Poltergeist; Or,
to Pieces?
I:
BROADSIDES
29
31
44
On
board Jungle
Commitment and
Room
62
the Straitjacket
Hud, Deep
II:
78
95
The
in the
Earrings of
Madame
de ... (1953)
Summer Night
La Grande
Illusion (1937)
97
101
(1955)
105
108
111
VU1
III:
CONTENTS
bhoeshine (1947)
The Beggars Opera (1953)
114
116
119
BROADCASTS
Breathless,
(1954)
and
REVIEWS,
1961-1963
12 5
127
The Cousins
*3 2
Canned Americana
136
141
L'Awentura
148
150
The Mark
*55
Kagi
160
The Innocents
163
Note on The
Children's
The Day
The
172
176
Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe
Parties:
at Marienhad,
179
A Taste of Honey
196
Victim
201
Lolita
203
210
Jules
and Jim
Replying to Listeners
Billy
Budd
216
Man
222
225
228
2 34
Yojimbo
239
Devi
245
CONTENTS
How
Race
256
8V2: Confessions of a
IV:
Movie Director
POLEMICS
Is
261
267
Circles
and Squares
INDEX
269
292
319
347
IX
Introduction
and Poltergeist;
Or. Are Movies Going to Pieces?
Zeitgeist
suit/' said
phoning
me
before
who was
my
"And remember,
didn't have
and
one
change of clothes/'
was completely out of my depth: I just said I would join
him at 2:30 and hung up. Somehow I didn't want to come
right out and say that I didn't have a change of clothes in the
evening sense that he meant. Los Angeles dislocates my values,
makes me ashamed of not being all the things I'm not and
don't ordinarily care to be. Each time I get on the jet to return
to San Francisco it's like turning the time-machine backward
and being restored to an old civilization that I understand.
Los Angeles is only 400 miles away from where I live and so
close by jet that I can breakfast at home, give a noon lecture at
one of the universities in LA, and be back in time to prepare
dinner. But it's the city of the future, and I am more a stranger
there than in a foreign country. In a foreign country people
don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which
is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be
different because they don't recognize any values except their
own. And soon there may not be any others.
cocktails in
Now
INTRODUCTION
in
San Francisco,
arrived at
the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, sans bathing suit or change
And
as I
it
was
They
who was
expensively undressed.
themselves.
In
San Francisco,
vulgarity,
"bad
taste,"
ostentation
are
would
like
It's
sour
grapes.
What
preposterous, unreal
and
most
culture
its
movie-centered
residences.
But pioneers
the people
terrible
tic:
explosion."
suffer
met
in
from
stresses
we
don't
know
about, and
The
it,
about their
with
day
all
them
me
like lifelines,
INTRODUCTION
talking culture while deepening his tan,
horror movies.
and
Zeitgeist
Poltergeist;
to Pieces?
and
our
common
We
fairly
bite,
coffins,
the
strategy of the
heart versus the rays of the sun as disposal methods, the cross as
vampire repellent,
et al.
mock
erudition
is
when the
said, in
the greatest
man
And he
answered, "Because
make any
sense,
and
it's
taste,
preferring a
classics, I
Warner
gasped, "But
completely irrational.
It
why?"
doesn't
But
mean
his attitude,
that
agree that
Fingers
is
great horror film, but that his enthusiasm for the horror that
Without a Face, which had arrived in San Frandubbed version called The Horror Chamber of Dr.
Faustus and was playing on a double-horror bill in a huge
Market Street theater. It was Saturday night and the theater,
which holds 2646, was so crowded I had trouble finding a seat.
Even dubbed, Eyes Without a Face, which Franju called a
"poetic fantasy," is austere and elegant: the exquisite photography is by the great Shuftan, the music by Maurice Jarre, the
superb gowns by Givenchy. It's a symbolist attack on science
and the ethics of medicine, and though I thought this attack
as simpieminded in its way as the usual young poet's denunciation of war or commerce, it is in some peculiar way a classic of
Franju's Eyes
cisco in a
horror.
Pierre Brasseur, as a doctor, experiments systematically, re-
It's
as his mis-
Franju's style
is
dislike the
satire like
it
The Bride
and Ernest
Thesiger toying with mandrake roots and tiny ladies and gentle-
men
in glass jars. It's a horror film that takes itself very seri-
ously,
silly, I
thought
its
intellectual pretensions
INTRODUCTION
They were
Then
the
And
The Bridge on
how
is
that
it
dis-
happened
at the
end
Was
it
no longer cared
if
a film
was so
thriller,"
In recent years, largely because of the uncertainty of producers about what will draw, films in production
from one
script to another, or
And
may be
the oddity
may
that
it
shift
key
doesn't seem
parts of 55
Days
at Peking.
couldn't
tell
acquired them.
way
The audience
for
understanding
how
little
having, or of
is
was that they distracted you from the loopholes, so that, afterhow you'd been tricked
and teased. Perhaps now "stories" have become too sane, too
explicable, too commonplace for the large audiences who want
sensations and regard the explanatory connections as mere
"filler"
the kind of stuff you sit through or talk through
between jolts.
It's
cuts,
dial
that
complications to
first
its
conclusion, which
inoffensive genres
like
The
is
perhaps a child's
and
it
are
no longer com-
may be
that audiences
10
INTRODUCTION
civilized,
likely,
thrill after
titillations of a
Mondo
falsifica-
Cane, one
to motivations
The
John Huston,
an
11
intrigu-
now
to
be
How
may be
Following clues
too
much
of
an
The Haunting
house" that
is
is itself
takes
it
who,
They want
more than
ghosts to
an
evil presence,
and
is
dark
usually inhabited
by ghosts or evil people. In our childhood imaginings, the unknowable things that have happened in old houses, and the
whispers that someone may have died in them, make them
mysterious, "dirty"; only the new house that has known no life
or death is safe and clean. But so many stories have used the
sinister dark house from-which-no-one-can-escape and its murky
gardens for our ritual entertainment that
we
learn to experience
how
frightened
we used
to
women
are
more
who
is
are trapped
fear;
and
helpless.
men
is
(Although the
male comedian
like
Bob Hope
in
The Ghost
Breakers. Russ
is
hear you
variant
of
will
festivals
the
and
art
if
you scream."
trapped-in-the-old-dark-house
genre
(BunueFs The Exterminating Angel is the classic new example), but the characters, or rather figures, are the undead or
zombies of the vampire movies. "We live as in coffins frozen
side by side in a garden"
Last Year at Marienbad. "I'm dead"
12
INTRODUCTION
the
heroine of
Mare. "They're
dead in there"
the
hostess describing the party of La Notte. Their vital juices have
been sucked away, but they don't have the revealing marks on
the throat.
II
all
We
get the message: alienation drains the soul without leaving any marks. Or, as Bergman says of his trilogy, "Most
They
lost
This "art" variant is a message movie about failure of communication and lack of love and spiritual emptiness and all the
we've got to a new genre but it
old dark house was simply there,
The
but these symbolic decadent or sterile surroundings are supposed to reflect the walking death of those within the maze.
The characters in the old dark house tried to solve the riddle of
their imprisonment and tried to escape; even in No Exit the
drama was in why the characters were there, but in the new
hotel-in-hell movies the characters don't even want to get out
of the maze - nor one surmises do the directors, despite their
moralizing. And audiences apparently respond to these films as
modern and relevant just because of this paralysis and inaction
and minimal story line. If in the group at the older dark house,
someone was not who we thought he was, in the new dull party
gatherings, it doesn't matter who anybody is (which is a new
horror).
some
socially
to contribute to science in
in
this case to
(The
scientist
haps Margaret
who wants
is,
somewhat
Mead
inexplicably,
an anthropologist;
per-
philosopher
or, for
13
he explains the
lore
and
from
poltergeist
and
so on.
And
mad
assistant:
Dwight Frye
is
traught wife
who
And
there
is
the
scientist's dis-
insane
It
that
the source of
evil.
certainly wouldn't
have thought
The
was hostile as
toward crude, bad movies. People are relaxed and tolerant about
ghoulish quickies, grotesque shockers dubbed from Japan, and
near
me
arguing
him
the
man
woman
that something
INTRODUCTION
14
cal,
if
a movie without physical action or crass jokes or built-in sentimental responses has nothing for them. I am afraid that the
young
is no
worked out
was developed
terror for
modern audiences
if
a story
is
carefully
lists
like.
And
left
if I
may
return for a
moment
to that producer
that Irma
La Douce
film history?"
is
he asked
me
ment
"Did
at
man
what
comedy
in
in the droning
really involved in
whom
you know
someone who's
I said,
"but
is it
even
It
is
to
have
different to narrative.
disintegration are at
obvious that
many
What
work
become
in-
more
is
confusing.
Why,
at the
end of Godard's
pimp
is presumably gunning
manship? If we express
we
perplexity,
we
But a cross-eyed
fate?
And why
My Name
ill
15
to Live,
bad marks-
to die.
My Life
it's
is
Is
simply
there so
fate,
little
Ivan with
she had
question-
at art houses,
and
it
less likely
Bergman's methods.)
The
accepts clumsiness
and confusion
as
"ambiguity" and as
critics,
style.
may
feel that
Knife in the Water or Bandits of Orgosolo, to the current acceptance of art as technique, the technique which in a movie like
This Sporting Life makes a simple, though psychologically confused, story look complex, and modern because inexplicable.
has
become
easy
the audience to
know
if
l6
INTRODUCTION
when
and
it
necessary to slap
who
should
know
better will
movie
is
cinematic
when they
they
art,
don't under-
stand what's going on. This Sporting Life, which Derek Hill,
among
made in England,
The chunks are so
an odd way, disturbing, that we
isn't gracefully
fragmented,
it's
smashed.
Communist, and
lesbian;
is
with so
the
life,"
and the
protest, like a
come" and
leaving
it
to
you to
fill
in your
"We
own
and
Shall Over-
set of injustices.
would
spell
him
physically
me
and the
of
(I
for us.)
my
real roots
he seeks are
confusion as a schoolgirl
when
a jazz musician
introduced to
me
17
during
the break called out "Dig you later" as he went back to the
stand.
is
in the
Eng-
rence and Orwell and Hogarth, but not in our cinema like this
before. This Sporting Life
is
it is
really subverbal."
trees
is
notorious;
still,
isn't telling
a story,
method
It floods
resonance as though
it
way
one
of the film
is
spirit
or another, almost
The
will tell
...
INTRODUCTION
There's not much to be said for this theory except that it's
mighty democratic. Rather pathetically, those who accept this
Rorschach-blot approach to movies are hesitant and uneasy
about offering reactions. They should be reassured by the belief
that whatever they say is right, but as it refers not to the film
but to them (turning criticism into autobiography) they are
afraid of self-exposure. I don't think they really believe the
theory
it's
An
come out
people
seen, or even
may
stun
tell
you
Only
frivolous
Or
it
in conventional
new method
of conveying
We
if
to explain
why
to learn
how.
19
The spokesmen
for this
=
=
is
also turned
essay
swinger.
Of
we can
course
reply that
among
screenings
is
if
become a
real
becoming
Los
irrelevant. In
films because
it,
who
could not
LSD
re-
and
is
much
like
the lethargy of
may
ex-
plain
and conferring on
status of art.
and
rides
very least.
it
all
his
Miss Sontag
like
is
who
Slim Pickens,
it's
at the
20
INTRODUCTION
It's
call for
new
want such a
if
Deren's
suie that
you know
Movies have changed in
disastrously in the last few years; they have be-
they are,
I like
all
come "cinema."
At the art-house
level, critics
I like stories,
dis-
Time
the
Muriel "another
absorbing exercise in style." Dwight Macdonald calls Marienbad " 'pure' cinema, a succession of images enjoyable in themselves." And Richard Roud, who was responsible (and thus
guilty) for the film selection at the New Yoik Film Festivals,
goes all the way: films like La Notte, he says, provide an
principle of ineffability.
calls Resnais's
Once matters
it
performance. Someone
is
film, like a
poem, is." Or smile pityingly and remind you that Patroni Griffi had originally intended
to call II Mare "Landscape with Figures"; doesn't that tell you
how you should look at it? It does indeed, and it's not my idea
of a good time. After a few dismal experiences we discover that
when we are told to admire a film for its pure form or its structure, it is going to exhibit irritating, confusing, and ostentatious
technique, which will, infuriatingly, be all we can discover in it.
And if we should mention that we enjoy the dramatic and narrative elements in movies, we are almost certain to be subjected
to the contemptuous remark, "Why does cinema have to mean
something? Do you expect a work by Bach to mean something?"
The only way to answer this is by some embarrassingly basic
paraphrasable content?
out that words, unlike tones, refer to something and that movie images are rarely abstract or geometric
analysis, pointing
2)
actions, they
scenarist of
tion,
when the
film
when we go
in to see a
movie
though
we
we may
the structure of
be the
art,
we
many
of the
films
is
somehow supposed
to
allowed to question or
pret
new
are frowned
criticize.
We
The
leaders of this
new
who
sets
how
curious
way
it
accompanying eroticism)
explain
who
fragmented universe*
is
its
helps to add to
it). If their
characters have a
it
will
be evidence of your
interest in
22
INTRODUCTION
culture
civic responsibility if
you go to the
movies.
The
may
"new."
It's
easily
perfectly true
how
My
little
what
attitude to
ambivalent.
is
happening to movies
my own
is
more than
preferences or the
and wit and feeling are goMovies are going to pieces; they're
disintegrating, and the something called cinema is not movies
raised to an art but rather movies diminished, movies that look
"artistic." Movies are being stripped of all the "nonessentials"
preferences of others for coherence
ing to
make much
that
that
is
difference.
light
joyful.
They
everything
(The
and movement in some of the New American Cinema
films (there is sure to be one called Stasis). It's obvious that the
most talented film artists and the ones most responsive to our
time and the attitudes of Camus and Sartre are the ones moving
(The
Eclipse), sound
Silence),
in this direction.
The
trivial, ludi-
and
in meaning,
it
few
be desperately and hopelessly trying
to bring
23
back to
life,
as they are
The
theater.
Clancy Sigal's
Endgame
(admiring) account of Beckett's
might have been
written of Bergman's The Silence:
parallel course
is,
occupy a claustrophobic
Endgame*s two main characters
Outside, the
space and a deeply ambiguous relationship.
world is dead of some great catastrophe.
The action of the
play mainly comprises anxious bickering between the two principal
characters. Eventually, Clov dresses for the road to leave Hamm,
and Hamm prepares for death, though we do not see the moment
of parting
none of the actors is quite sure what the play is
.
know
way
or
is it all
that the words of Play should be spoken so fast that they can't
When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy
and have opinions about, lose their connection with song and
dance, drama, and the novel, when they become cinema, which
people fear to criticize just as they fear to say what they think
of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting, they will
become another object of academic study and "appreciation,"
and will soon be an object of excitement only to practitioners
of the "art." Although L'Avventura
is
a great film,
had
been
to.
,"
^4
I
INTRODUCTION
might
easily
own
hisses,
which he didn't
when La Notte
explanations
really
revealed that
thus making
liars
all.
When we
to film,
see
Dwight Macdonald's
when we
become a
who
care"
more
is
his
believes that "a work of High Culture, however inan expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are
idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as
individuals." No. The "pure" cinema enthusiast who doesn't
react to a film but feels he should, and so goes back to it over
and over, is not responding as an individual but as a compulsive
good pupil determined to appreciate what his cultural superiors
say is "art." Movies are on their way into academia when they're
turned into a matter of duty: a mistake in judgment isn't fatal,
Macdonald
ept,
is
but too
for
much
High Culture
is
becoming
debased art
is
kitsch,
If
is.
a ritual.
perhaps kitsch
may become
Our
may be redeemed by
work transforms
makes art out of it; that is the peculiar greatness and
strength of American movies, as Godard in Breathless and Truf-
honest vulgarity,
kitsch,
art.
best
Falcon
D. W.
drama
a classic example.
is
Our
first
and
25
The Maltese
Griffith
much more
gesting that
we want
new and
to see
Cimarron, another
Quo
Vadis?
who wants
And meanings
to see the
new
don't have to be
and
just a
stories
to Eternity,
People go to the movies for the various ways they express the
experiences of our
lives,
we
and
means
as a
This
feel.
and
town boredom,
it
in terms of
may be
of avoiding
may
also
modern big
he
generally
be considered
city life
and small
and postpon-
isn't interested in
new kind
of film-
great
many
it
may
explain
why
who
are look-
me
informed
me
it
was
it,
me
When I
to tell
just slapstick.
he was
more than
needn't
told
him
irritated;
he
a waste of time,
26
it
INTRODUCTION
Those
life.
vitality of
offensive,
find
an
outlet,
mark
It
two-reelers
and
has become a
Mack
Sennett
Who's Been
The
own with
the silent
classics. I
enjoyed
to go see Charade,
confectionery
trifle
as artificial
and enjoyable
isn't serious,
that
it
in
it isn't
its
way
as
The
important, that
alive to nourish
it and movies still have a little blood which the academics can
drain away. In the West several of the academic people I know
who have
least
By
way
hands
and by publishing
i.e.,
theirs,
inter-
Dark"
had never
and by indicating
critics.
27
will
be working over
will
be the cinema
they deserve.
[1964]
Broadsides
form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitiviand their liberalism. (Obviously any of my generalizations
are subject to numerous exceptions and infinite qualifications;
let's assume that I know this, and that I use large generalizations
in order to be suggestive rather than definitive.)
in the
ties
Resnais's Hiroshima
art houses,
Mon Amour
reached
32
BROADSIDES
it
decided that
"a masterpiece/'
"it establishes
informed
fessor
speak to
me
me
again.
that
if I
he would never
Macdonald wrote more and went
D wight
further:
It is as stylised as
as
and
sophisti-
it
blasphemy.
Surely movies
some
sort of ineffable
The
picture
as symbolic
bomb
ash, but I
was supposed
to be "sweat, ashes and dew.") Then the French girl said she had
seen everything in Hiroshima, and the Japanese man told her
she had seen nothing in Hiroshima. Then they said the same
things over again, and again, and perhaps again. And I lost pa-
it.
accepted
(Later
it
discovered that
it
My
reaction
with
it."
is
Now,
mood
simply,
this
is
why
"OK,
got
it
33
writers
or underlines
obviously not
how we
outright fraud
man
didn't
at the truth
he was supposed
Where
to represent.
first
love for a
German
soldier,
how
he had been killed on the last day of fighting, how she had been
dragged away and her head shaved, how she had gone mad and
been hidden away in the cellar by her shamed parents, I began
to think less and less of the movie and more about why so many
people were bowled over by it.
Was it possibly an elaborate, masochistic fantasy for intellectuals? Surely both sexes could identify with the girl's sexual
desperation, her sensitivity and confusion and had anyone
dreamed up worse punishments for sexuality? Only a few years
ago it had looked as if James Dean in East of Eden and Rebel
Without a Cause had gone just about as far as anybody could
in being misunderstood. But this heroine not only had her head
shaved by people who didn't understand her love and need of
the German, but she went crazy and was locked in a cellar. You
can't go much further in being misunderstood. And, at the risk
of giving offense, is this not what sends so many people to
-
analysts
The
ing:
the
he
says
may be
go crazy
if
Japanese,
it
noted,
is
rather dull
34
BROADSIDES
sounding board.
And
if,
being Japanese, he
supposed to rep-
is
clinic.
woman
(beautifully as
Emmanuelle Riva
inter-
many
isn't responsible: it is
it
who
far
35
Graham was
villes
against
who's selling
it?
noticed
Lo
arti-
Cinema and Kenneth Anger's Hollywood BabyBoth books are like more elegantly laid-out issues of Confi-
Eroticism in the
Ion.
dential
and
all
hideously outsized
mammary
the latest
posed to be chic
book
features
stills
explodes inside a
sailor's fly.
His
own book
36
BROADSIDES
that makes her breasts look like long strips of cooked tripe. The
book itself is a recounting of the legends (that is to say the dirty
stories, scandals, and gossip) that Anger heard while growing
up in southern California.
What struck me about these books, which function as entertainment to what might be called highbrows, was that their chic
seemed to consist largely in a degradation of the female image.
The stars and starlets are displayed at their most grotesque, just
as they are in the cheapest American publications (in fact the
photos are probably derived from those sources). This female
image is a parody of woman
lascivious face, wet open mouth,
gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality:
she's blonde or brunette or redhead, as one might consume a
martini, an old-fashioned, or a gin and tonic.
Now I am told that even the junior-high-school boys of America use photographs like these as pinups, and that this is their
idea of the desirable female. I don't believe it. I would guess
that they pretend to this ideal because they're afraid they won't
if
spongy,
subhuman
And
in the
women
to the
and
free
they
my
37
When
them.
way
to admiration
The
"babes." In
the faithful dog, and the uncorrupted clarity of the good clean
peasant, looks at each character in the film
what he
is.
The
for
man she's
the
female of the species of the strong, silent hero, but she's also the
traditional
The
lier
gold.
Her performance
final
in
if
The
life
Verite
almost as
La
it's
like
Of Human Bondage
38
BROADSIDES
we
truth, the
The
title
and the
Misfits
to
(These ladies are then congratulated for their histrionic achievements in playing themselves; certainly they are perfect in the
roles
no one else could play them so well
but then, could
they play anyone else?) This confusion of art and life which
takes the form of sensationalism is becoming very popular in
this
book by Simone de
La Verite
of having read
book by de Beauvoir.)
It is supposed to be daring and modern to make these messedup accounts of messed-up lives
though they may seem very
much like the old Sunday supplements with their daring exa
poses. In this
come
fantasies,
Mon-
an implausible
but delicious affront to respectability) and Bardot (the distillaroe (once a calendar
tion of
never
and
to
comic
strip life,
who may
all
know
girl
that
human
beyond
potentialities
their
much
for their
(former or
mer
or present)
comedy
public-private lives
confused
physical
ills
The
and La Verite would have been regarded as disgusting. It is disgusting, and the condescending
type of sympathetic "understanding" which is now widely purin films like
Misfits
veyed
is
an
insult to
frivolous,
absurd old
now
bathe in tears of
while
self-pity
39
they
understanding typewriters.
The "mass"
down
audience looks
tory.
They
all
sympathetically, as
stew in their
own
On
is
if
narcissism.
The mass
audience
program Ed
Sullivan clucked sympathetically at Brigitte Bardot and told her
how much he sympathized with the hard life of glamour girls
like her and Monroe and Taylor, and, final irony, told her how
much he admired the way she had "handled herself."
is
a recent television
slovenliness
marks them
orderly world.
the seduction
Tony
as misfits
who
Curtis while hanging out of her dress both fore and aft
expects his
girl
friends or wife to
well-
house
for
in the
Upon
occasion, the
an American
American
picture, particularly
if it is
advertised
40
BROADSIDES
and almost no soft lines, was, of course, devised so that advertising would be clear and effective with a minimum of cost. In
movies, a photographic medium, complexity and variety and
shadings of beauty are no more expensive than simplification.
But modern graphic design, which has built an aesthetic on
advertising economics, has triumphed:
The
new
man who
can design the whole movie to look like a highpowered ad. At present, the movie that begins when the packaging is out of the way is in a different, and older, style of advertising art. This style was summed up by a member of the
audience a few weeks ago when I was looking at a frightfully expensive, elaborately staged movie.
The
what he thought
than not he
"It got
will reply,
masses. Actually,
drama was
it
The
social
Men
is
perfectly at-
the
one
against the
eleven
is
but strong;
And
the boy on
he
ity,
is
their hero.
is
dream of a victim: he
of
is
on the screen
they love
They
in
how
cite
as evidence that
It is
mean
awareness (Antonioni
plain of
hero
and
as the
and
41
L'Awentura) but
social
isn't
explicit,
machine-tooled, commercial-
and
reas-
doc-
so
unworldly and lovable that they take the poor frustrated sap for
a satyr (almost as deadly in
its
"humor"
as
little
people are
little dolls;
The Apartment
and corrupt and unfaithful to their wives as well. The moral is,
stick at the bottom and you don't have to do the dirty. This is
the pre-bomb universe; and its concept of the "dirty" is so oldfashioned and irrelevant, its notions of virtue and of vice so
smugly limited, that
it's
whom
The
"social
is
may
is
so unwieldy, so overstuffed,
well catch
up before the
though
intellectuals
surely
many
42
BROADSIDES
The
like
that love
is
back, propaganda
out,
is
and
it's
all
right to like
Russian movies because the Russians are really nice people, very
much like us, only better. These sentiments have been encouraged by the theaters and by the cultural exchange agreement,
and at showings of The Cranes Are Flying there was a queasy
little
up, "But
was happy
it's
six
which piped
examples of nineteenth-century patriotism and nineteenth-century family values; neither seems to belong to the
period at
silent era.
all
Communist
And
of the
would laugh
at in
American movies.
It's
long time since audiences at art houses accepted the poor, ravished unhappy heroine who has to marry the cad who rapes her.
They go even farther toward primitivism at Ballad of a Soldier:
who
(how would these two react if they caught the wife sleeping
with a German, like the heroine of Hiroshima Mon Amour?).
Ballad of a Soldier takes us back to the days when love was sweet
and innocent, authority was good, only people without principles thought about sex, and it was the highest honor to fight
and die for your country. These homely values, set in handsome,
well-photographed landscapes, apparently are novel and refreshing
perhaps
to
art-house audiences.
It's
a world that never was, but hopeful people would love to associate
it
with
life in
We can
43
made up to look
Academy Award Show it was
there were so many little tin Lizzies.
and
hard to
tell
more
at the
gauge the
difficult to
class morality.
first
A congressional
a
to learn
is
"Welcome."
is
is
known
as America's lead-
Dangereuses,
may be
moral structure
that
Communist
is
to say that
undermine American
Americans are being offered
plot to
become degenerate,
Communist
threat. Mrs. Grancombat
to
the
ahan has stated that the social, cultural and moral standards of
France are among the greatest impediments to a strong NATO
a preoccupation with sex so that they will
corrupt, too
weak
Communism.
must be a Puritan
state,
and
American
could be cleaner
in
is,
jazz
is
nineteenth-century terms
Communist
Moscow Film
than
Russian
The
Trials
Wilde
44
BROADSIDES
Everywhere
explain that
in the
a great lesson to us
it's
for
that Rome
La Dolce Vita
because of
fell
May
han
line? If all
and the
Stalinist drive to
all
we
are
how good
we
now
how
Has Puritanism
would be
in heart?
[1961]
The Glamour
of Delinquency
On the Waterfront9 East of Eden*
Blackboard Jangle . . .
much
of anything.
What
is
there in
it
says not
Line,
Man
stir
The
Called Peter,
an audience out of
man
fighting a vulture
Not
Prodigal or
its
apathy
and
45
who
cares?
And who
really cares
The United
States has
now
achieved what
critics of
socialism
have always posited as the end result of a socialist state: a prosperous, empty, uninspiring uniformity.
exactly
thing so close to
ing goal.)
What
it
we do not have
we do have some-
(If
classless society,
is
certainly
no longer an
allur-
life,
and baby
sitters,
ingredients that are absent from the daily lives of patrons. But
if
films
that
moved
formalized as ballet
a series of repeated
this point).
When
a film with
more ambitious
film makers
want
to
make
46
BROADSIDES
dramatic
conflict,
embodied
in the crazy,
mixed-up kid.
if
it
in the
the gangsters were not the only rebels, there was a large
active
films
explanation of delinquency
that a job, a
the trouble.
One
the
itself
life
in our films,
new
dissidents
it is
when
them
who
aren't
say
worth
ity
and
prosperity.
The
reaction
is
quite archaic
as
if
Alienation
Alienation, the central
everything
else,
theme
of
modern
artist-
47
A Song to
Moulin Rouge, Limelight; the
Remember, Rhapsody
in Blue,
good
he's so
life.
artist suffers
girl;
The
a catch that
irony of the
one day
movie
know
that
solemnize his
will
at
guess
work
in
one degree or another, projected alienated non-artist heroes and heroines in some of the best, though
films have, however, to
The
Stars
merely the
illusion of cynicism or
The
subject matter of
mulated
his position
cowardice which
17.
On
alienation at the
the Waterfront
From Here
("If a man
On
the Waterfront,
made
it, is
don't go his
in his
On
The
is
as those
who
the effort
for-
he's
risks.
had
own way,
is
The attempt
is
to Eternity Prewitt
hero of
dispelled
is
Casablanca or a Stalag
come up
to create characters
mass audience
is
a chal-
is
who move
us by their
humanity
Our
films,
if
we
human
condition:
We
want
heroes,
we
human
upon.
It's
don't want
cowards.
insist
48
BROADSIDES
fiat.
that's that;
On
the implication
that
is
if
read this
it
that those
who made
and want
antisocial,
in
Schulberg,
into a
drama
of man's defeat
fits
own
drama
It's
much
as a
them
is
a call to action as
the audience
Kazan,
of man's triumph.
how
the film
share
evil;
though
much
less
bound
to demonstrate
this
than
if
it
had
to take
home an
unre-
its
drama
if it
in triumph,
it
49
If
America
would be failure.
From Here to Eternity did not convert
its
accepted leader, did not reduce issues to black and white, and
it
success.
But
curred in the course of the film: Prewitt's fate as hero got buried
in the
commotion
it
and it was
what hap
On the Waterfront is
scheme
is
monplace.
those
who
more ambitious
film,
though
No
see
film,
is
its
moral
a film com-
and many of
The
selfless
girl is
50
BROADSIDES
And
avarice.
crucifixion
is
used in
The
priest speaks
become
is
facility
The
ing of saints
film
is
more acceptable
to Catholics.
On
one who
When
is
all:
Terry
tells
the priest
we know
will shortly
be redeemed.
The
mythology provides an
devices
figure to another.
only dramatic
The
all
artists
effect,
his staging
is
Kazan,
simple and he
when
is
lets
the material
the
really
51
tells
you that these effects are supposed to do something for you, but
you may be too aware of the manipulation to feel anything but
admiration (or resentment) for the director's "know-how."
The
men from
within
its
this priest
is
he has
at times (and
The
protective coloration.
moment
crucial
it
stops,
priests,
his
musical score
and the
is
excellent; then at a
fails
"staged" to be convincing.
allow for elements that are tossed in without being thought out
(the ship owner, an oddly ambiguous abstraction, possibly cartooned in obeisance to the labor-union audience) or tossed in
without being
and the
girl
felt
end
at the
sensibility, into
converted,
pure plaster).
Many
by a deficiency of
artistic
script, of
for the
make
assets
out of
liabilities, forces
sibility.
If
one
feels
bound
the Waterfront
it
is
to
facilities
of
On
girl in
we have had
:
a character.
in
is
great. Brando's
52
BROADSIDES
number
attracts a startling
theater, gratified
by
of
They
gestures
and
girl;
is
They have
and gufcom-
its
who
excites
it is
when Terry
not Terry as a
those
this imaginatively
compelling
is
not the dramatic complement the figure deserves. Terry has his
own kind of consciousness; he is too compelling to act out their
consciousness and to
fit
becomes a social hero. Does moral awakening for a Terry mean that he acquires the ability to change the
external situation, or does it mean simply an intensification and
a broadening of his alienation? We know that movie heroes can
always conquer evil, but in the early sequences we didn't know
that Terry was going to be turned into this kind of "regular"
hero. The other protagonists have been oversimplified until they
seem to be mere symbols rather than human beings who might
have some symbolic meaning. As dramatic characters they lack
is
credible until he
Our
social
problems are
much
too com-
who made
The
And
they do
right to
show
The myth
53
The myth
social
Time
for
September
it
if
treats
and American
27, 1954,
is
from the
al-
total
An
item
New
York
business.
to the point:
On
the Waterfront), quit his $io,ooo-a-year job last year to fight the
International
new
why
alienation
is
such a powerful
theme in our art: if, for the individual, efforts to alter a situation end in defeat, and adjustment (with decency) is impossible, alienation may be all that's left. Would Terry seem so
compelling if his behavior and attitudes did not express a profound mass cynicism and a social truth? More goes into his
alienation than the activities of a John Friendly, and his character is powerful because it suggests much more
the desire of
ments
an
54
BROADSIDES
is
drama
and many more derive, not merely from a corrupt union, but
from the dislocation of youth in our society, and ultimately, if
one takes a pessimistic view, they derive from the human condition. The betrayal experienced by the boy who kills the pigeons
is not altogether mistaken. With On the Waterfront alienation
reaches the widest audience at the level of the raw unconscious
hero
who
social levels.
The
artists
who wanted
about did.
Artists who aim at nobility may achieve something pretentious
and overscaled, but their aim tells us something about the feeling and tone of American life that is not wholly to be deprecated. Abroad, it is deprecated, and the excesses of On the
Waterfront gave European critics a gloating edge of triumph. Is
it
festival
Americans,
as
when you
if
try to
do something
bigger,
you
you expose
there
is
films,
differentiation in
it is
merely in product
difference in casting or
it
special appeal.
Within
55
the temples of
theater,
mouldy
in
once" you know that those responsible for the film have long
since surrendered their greatest gift. A bad film can be a good
joke, as Duel in the Sun once so delightfully demonstrated; but
Valley of the Kings, Garden of Evil, The High and the Mighty
are not even very good jokes. Despite its defects, and they are
On
major,
If
one
remembers
also that
most
films provide
no experience
at
one
all.
Romance
The alienated hero acquires a new dimension in East of
Eden: James Dean's Cal, even more inarticulate and animalistic
than Terry, is a romantic figure, decorated with all sorts of
charming gaucheries, and set, anachronistically, in a violent
reverie of pre-World War I youth. At one level he's the AilAmerican boy (and the reverse of the usual image of the artist
as a youth )
he's not too good at school, he's sexually active,
he's not interested in politics but has a childlike responsiveness
to parades, he doesn't care about words or ideas. Yet this lack
:
of intellectual tendencies
and purity of
is
confused
efforts
American
films:
is
new image
in
does,
Maybe
to;
full of
love he's
all
that
beautiful desperation."
The
violent
film
is
overpowering:
moments and
it's
if
the teaser
is
Kazan's special
56
BROADSIDES
genre?).
When
blow
if
as
sionism
Cain
strikes Abel,
may be
followed by a pastoral
of Americana; an actor
may
romp
or an elaborate bit
melodramatic
flux.
But from
is
small reason
a director's point
seems especially
it is
humanism,
barrel
perspective:
it's
a little like
it's
relief at
coming out of
a loony bin.
boy's
stood
may
East of
When
alienation
is
catches up with the cult realities of city parks and Turkish baths;
clear
explicit
of
human
desperation
is
who
is
was so
misunderstood. (And
who
all,
because he
we
Terry was a
little
what
in the audience,
the
is
now
it is
The concept
of
of his need,
and
is
him
57
by demon-
help
as a hero
is
a complete negation of
the crazy,
by being treated on an
film
it
more
to
And
infantile fantasy:
by his
infantile level.
is
he displaces
his brother
and
an
at last accepted
is
father.
In theater and film, the mixed-up kid has evolved from the
depression hero, but the explanation from the thirties (poverty
it's
if
in
attached: the
of
Eden
love
girl loves
the
man who
fights for
makes
right,
and the
girl
loves
be loved.
Films can, and most of them do, reduce
and
coercions, desires
and hopes of
social
all
the deprivations
and individual
ex-
The Young
58
BROADSIDES
is
warm and
feels all
(Most
artists are,
of course, bitter
Day and
we get
Grahame
in
The Cobweb:
she
is all
fixed-up
and able
to
save her marriage (and square the Production Code) once she
knows her husband really needs her. (Lauren Bacall gives her
no real competition: she has been analyzed
she is mature and
doesn't need anybody.) The convenient Hollywood explanation
for alienation
for
failure to integrate in
hostility to authority
and
society
is,
when
you're unhappy,
it's
now what?)
Snow Jobs
Nobody
is
quency, but
satisfied
who
social workers
fault,
in Sunshine
Land
and teachers
The
psychiatrically-oriented
be
in-
him
ing against?
and though
a snow job.
pistons
rival.
it
inglessness of misunderstood
59
mean-
girl;
the
them out
drama. Delinquency
is
treated as a
they're
tion
for not
element
fear
is
The
strongest film
there's
which adjusted,
away or never had
had drained
an assault upon the society that has no use
itself
some youth
center.
it
off
for
it.
He
60
BROADSIDES
The
we understand something
of
if
we
identified
and
and
was an enemy;
rival or,
when
cornered, shot a
rational.
But
cop. Just as
who
quent's violence
who
may
strike
no resistance
offers
is
we
Negro hatred
of whites
any one of
as likely to
us.
The
be beaten
hold-up victim
as the
one who
something,
The
first
time, to call
it's
as in
Prodigal,
and success
Though
films take
6l
up
new commitments.
it
in
who have
nature; Americans
ment
lost
facts,
ac-
accepted
convictionless acceptance
which
When
is
only a hair's
language
is
debased
is
relations
interpersonal virtuosity
which
Why
care
fantasize, the
file
to the analyst.
clerk
who
WTiat a
relief to
it
it
is
it
in atit.
It's
explosively present.
Though
in a society
which
is
It's
that these kids are only in conflict with themselves or that they
62
BROADSIDES
theme
is
magazines, just as he
model of
is
in his
movie
he can become a
band
fans want to kill his
roles;
But won't
his
pigeons?
[1955]
Strait jacket
Room
is
reality:
the
streets,
the fac-
and towns, houses and backyards of grim, modern, industrialized England. The young English authors and directors are
tories
striking at social
thirties,
life.
fatal-
In Hollywood, in the
socially
conscious
63
Cinema." In the
modern
mid-fifties,
cities,
life,
seaside resorts,
by a group of
Richardson, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson.
young critics
But unlike the French New Wave group of critics who became both directors and scenarists, when the English critics
began to make features, they did not prepare their own scenarios. They joined with some of the new English literary figures
John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Wolf Mankowitz,
and others. Their features are not so cheap as the French ones
nor so individual in style and subject matter. They share the
documentary look of the Free Cinema shorts; in fact, the five
Freddie Francis
big films are all the work of two cameramen
photographed Room at the Top, the first feature by Jack Clayton, Sons and Lovers by Jack Cardiff, and Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, the first feature by Karel Reisz; Oswald
Morris did Look Back in Anger, the first feature by Tony Richardson, and his second, The Entertainer.
The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an
ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics
the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in
which so many films are appraised for the degree of the direcfactories,
first
films shot
commitment
tor's
bad
if
(good
if left
wing,
is,
in itself,
upper-class characters
want
to
come
is
is
somehow
"evasive"
that
it
and
with
doesn't
critics
64
BROADSIDES
conviction.
few
some new
praised
Penelope Houston,
is
and
finest
magazine
is
and
critics are
too predictable
movement
this
is
to these critics
when they
new
confront a
when he
corruption, and
The
sane.
tries to
expose
it,
he
is
considered
in-
indulge in
He
he's
that mustache
was always an oddly lower-middle-class adornment on Hitler;
this shop steward is lower middle class in his habits, but he's a
self-serious.
wears a
little
Hitler mustache
He
speaks in a self-educated
The movie
satirizes
practices of his
union.
critics still
know what
them as
regard
both underdogs and sacred cows. The reviewer for Films and
Filming said, "Something rather frightening has happened to
the Boulting Brothers. They have turned sour. Ym Ml Right,
Jack is the latest in their run of social comedies. I hope it is the
." Earlier satires by the Boultings, the critic went on,
last.
.
this
STRAIT JACKET
6$
ingly cynical."
In
its
Houston wrote,
".
up with what,
as Stanley
Houston goes on
social satirists
that give
all their
class?
"... they
Miss
are not
them something
to laugh at.
One would
hate to share
as
satire
there
Bongo, a
is
satire
on entertainment
comedy
Matby Wolf
The
script
is
66
heroes
The
BROADSIDES
is
Entertainer.
by Gordon Heath.
son, played
When
You may
itself falls
into a prejudicial
we
some
but
we
Most
Negro
of the Negroes
Negro
parts
streets
I
it's
know
certainly a blessing
and hence, not acceptable as the heroine of an expensive production, was rectified by casting Millie Perkins in the role. Soon,
Jeffrey Hunter, like H. B. Warner before him, will make Jesus
Christ more socially acceptable. (You may have observed that,
although Christ is always played by a Gentile, a Jew is frequently cast as Judas.)
Another
ley Mills
thriller,
is
the
a large con-
67
island.
Room
tious
at the Top is the good old story of the bright, ambiboy from the provinces who wants to make good in the
Red and
it
it
The
in the beginnings
The theme
Room
at the
Top
is
is
the
four-letter words.
Look Back
in
polysyllabic discourse
68
BROADSIDES
British understatement
I'm afraid
stated.
must
it's
is
is
marvelously over-
Look Back
Anger is obviously a
mess in any number of ways, I think this mess
and The
Entertainer, also a mess
are the most exciting films to have
come out of England in this period.
During the years when I was programming for the Berkeley
state that although
in
Cinema Guild,
people to come
I
to see a picture
Back
in Anger.
wrote that
number
was
it
of people to look at
Look
is
asked,
"What
are
wild one.
Why
ignore
did people
Look Back
who were
in
Anger?
so
It's
he
happy with
true, Joe
Room
Lampton
at the
is
simple
man
Jimmy
with a goal
which
Lampton
Top
a relatively
is
and
tells
us
incapable
baby,
who cannot
environment, and
won't
me by
69
critics:
We
It's
new
man who
Look Back
tions of a
in
Anger
man who
is
feels
about the
and
failures of
film.
suffering
is
about
class
is
what
And
it is
absence of courage.
about
sensitivity
others. It
human
It's
defeat. Richard
"Do
not go gentle
into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."
70
BROADSIDES
And
the sordid
scape
when he
"Will
Mummy
stands for
all
flat
Jimmy
cries
like it?"
he taunts
injustice, stupidity.
his wife.
Her
"Mummy"
it is
the
If
and be
which has the splendor of wrath and of wit.
talented.
The
Look Back in
was well received. The New
Brendan Gill took care of it in a
Yorker gave
it
mean
a great send-off:
it
The
Entertainer
is
a very
it is
STRAIT JACKET
71
life
or
cares?
No
Is it
the function of
critics
to congratulate
them on
gesting that
cut?
The
all
critic
who
by
sug-
New
York Times, as
"a hollow, hypocritical heel
too shallow and cheap to be
worth very much consideration." In this country, the movie
reviewers are a destructive bunch of solidly, stupidly respectable
mummies and it works either way, maternal or Egyptian.
Archie Rice is no hypocrite; he is a man in a state of utter
despair
but he is too sane and too self-aware to ask for pity
or sympathy. He is one of the few really created characters in
modern drama or films. And the movie, if it gave us nothing
but Olivier's interpretation of this character, would be a rare
and important experience. The Entertainer is not a satisfying
whole work. Tony Richardson may not be the film director people hoped he was: in both these Osborne films, he tries to set
American
And though
and although the material of the drama has grown out of these
locations and is relevant to them, Richardson can't seem to
achieve a unity of style. The locations seem rather arbitrary:
they're too obviously selected because they're "revealing" and
photogenic.
It
is,
overwhelmingly
72
BROADSIDES
was
Midlands. The director, Jack Cardiff, was formerly known as one of
the finest cameramen in England. The script is mainly by Gavin
Lambert, formerly the editor of Sight and Sound, and easily the
best of the English film critics; and the cast, except for Dean
Stockwell, is also English. Sons and Lovers is one of the best
movie adaptations of a major novel
still, when you think it
over, that isn't saying as much as it might seem to.
The camera work by Freddie Francis, in black-and-white
CinemaScope, is extraordinarily beautiful; the pictorial qualiSoils
made
it
ties,
rhythm
is
off
It's
make
a stronger impres-
exquisite as
it is, is
neither Lawrentian nor a visual equivalent or even approximation of Lawrence's prose. The visual beauties aren't informed
by Lawrence's passionate sense of life. The artist's fire simply
isn't there
the movie is temperate, earnest, episodic. Perhaps
the writer and director are too gentlemanly for Lawrence, too
hesitant. They seem afraid of making some terrible mistake,
and so they take no chances. But it's like The Beast in the
nothing happens, and that's the most terrible thing
Jungle
of all. The movie becomes a rather tepid series of scenes illustrating Lawrence's themes, carefully thought out and, mostly,
in very good taste.
The movie fulfills a genuine function if it directs people to
the book
but this is a boomerang. Pick up the book again at
almost any point, and the movie simply disappears. There's a
richness and a fullness in the novel. So many of us for years have
been referring to it casually as great, then you start reading again
and it really is great. But the movie has beauty for the eye,
and the image of Trevor Howard as Mr. Morel is something to
carry in
memory
forever.
From
73
two sequences of
this
The
first
mitted
is
sacrificially
having hated
woman who
movie embarrassing,
it.
and
and
they're
even grotesque.
who
girl
has sub-
The second
is
all
of himself.
Lawrence does have scenes like this, but they're the culminations of relationships that have been developed over hundreds
of pages; they're not really adaptable to the theatrical convention
two people
their relationship
and why
it's
know
film,
it's
as
if,
exactly what's
got to end.
What
as
soon as
wrong with
happens to the
rather like
is
in another film
The
de-
sits
up,
"I didn't
Vadis."
The
press treated
New
struggle for
74
BROADSIDES
sacred
ducing
its
is
is
in Saturday
same Midlands a
half-century later. Industrialization has swallowed up the whole
working class. The movie is supposed to be a young man's coming of age and accepting adult responsibility
becoming, to use
the wretched new cant
"mature." But when you look at what
he's going to accept, your heart may sink. He has spirit and vitality, and he has a glimmer that there should be some fun in
life, and maybe a little action. What does he do to express his
dissatisfaction? He throws a few spitballs, he has an affair with
a married woman, and he announces that he's not going to become like his parents. But he picks a proper, porcelain bride
with an uplift so high it overreaches her mind. Caught in this
gigantic penal colony of modern industrial life, she looks ahead
in those
good
life.
primly.
"Why
The
her,
it's
for
when
the movie
the
him
over but to
fall
ing stupor of his parents, get drunk, quarrel with his wife, and
resign himself to bringing
It's
easy to see
up
little
working-class brats?
it
is
class attitudes
STRAIT JACKET
75
both financial failures they don't talk about anything outThey re concerned
But
it's
hard to
telly,
know why
the American
critics
in
should be so
this country,
it's
ham
factory worker,
view.
and the
film
is all
the hero
is
a Notting-
told
critics
English picture of
all
time,"
The
film
is
brilliantly
don't
as the
most
know what
photographed
is very good
is all
called
man beaten
up.)
*]6
BROADSIDES
but these
lives are so
are
The
and taken
guar-
The
become
The
worker
automation
He knows
ity,
that
if
he
stays
where he
is,
he has protection,
secur-
medical care.
Humphrey
who
girl. It
official values;
he
turns out
just didn't
is
An
artist's
commitment must be
on working-class
values.
There
is
liv-
may encompass an
life is reality:
the
lives of
the priv-
77
industrialism
in life or in art
lish dress
is
Time magazine, perhaps by the use of God's eye, sees Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a "stirring tribute to the
yeoman
spirit
eternities of
that
still
working
life in
redbrick
if Sillitoe
farther out.
Isn't this
Welfare State
life just
less
seem very
different
from the
under
is
not
required to be enthusiastic.
feeds the
78
BROADSIDES
And
in these films, for all their sex, the only satisfactory love affair
is
in
Room
tion.
at the Top
and the hero sacrifices that for posiI'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this
[1961]
who
materialism"
when
had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and
Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. And
as the cultural treasures they brought over with them were likely
their having
wax
new
world.
who came
in sight,
concluded
don't
make movies
just for
money."
this,
but
HOLLYWOOD
79
of the cabana
live
movie audiences
and
it
glorification of materialism
because
it
which
probably ap-
confirms their
own
feel-
Hud may
This response to
80
BROADSIDES
ference
"It's
pleasure-loving
modern
man who
girl
and he doesn't
change!"
who have
actors
relish
Newman, who
it,
as
in addi-
seeks to protect
a
mean
materi-
shouted
last
"The
sooner or
it
later,
principles of the
in
The
generalized pious
no body.
can't
be sure of
much
as I did. It
was
whom we
whom we
and
still
liked
(because they
even when
they reformed.
earlier commercial writers and diwere self-deceived about what they were doing: they
were trying to put something over, and knew they could only go
so far. They made the hero a "heel" so that we would identify
with his rejection of official values, and then slyly squared everyIt's
rectors
HOLLYWOOD
thing by having
to
him
friends)
And
it
seems
we
enjoyed
it
8l
for
at
its
of
Our
Lives or
pean art, or films like Gentleman's Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of the Hollywood "problem" picture, which is
life
She Done
82
BROADSIDES
Taking
Hud
commercial movie,
reflect that
Hud
as a Stanley
And
saries
The
setting,
it
was comic
like
the sluggish
Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real
West. The comedy was in the realism: the incongruities of
Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes,
Dr. Pepper signs, paperback books
all emphasizing the stand-
My West
it
ice
cream
parlor.
West
and
so
many
my
came out
83
escaping
of
didn't
down from
is
cardboard role of representing the spectator because Newman's Hud has himself come to represent the audience. And I
this
Somewhere
the people
in the
back of
who would
my
Hud
mind,
began to stand
for
Homer was
an upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather typiweakness of the whole message picture idea that the
good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a
clearly
cal of the
fuddy-duddy, worse,
sequence when he
Hud, the
except
isn't a
is
less
"friends"
Hud at serious
some
cases, as a tragedy.
In the
even in
Herald Tribune,
integrity, and,
New York
Judith Crist found that "Both the portraits and the people are
and
therein
is
84
BROADSIDES
Hud:
Hud
a rancher
who
and
germs
and sickening modern man
And the place where he lives is not just Texas. It is the whole
country today. It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture that
nurtures indulgence and greed. Here is the essence of this picture.
While it looks like a modern Western, and is an outdoor drama,
indeed, Hud is as wide and profound a contemplation of the
human condition as one of the New England plays of Eugene
is
is
fully
O'Neill.
with which
The
it
striking,
unreels.
The
spare
is
sureness
.
and
integrity of
seldom
felt
helps
from any
fill
film.
It
the clarity
are as crystal-
it is
it
is
deliberately
and
duti-
theme of
infection
and
Homer
it is
HOLLYWOOD
85
man who accedes to what is necesAnd is all this emotion apof animals who were, after all, raised
the good
and would,
in the
the government
pays for the killing of the animals and their market value.
difficult for
It
But
relief
with impact, even though the emotions don't support the mean-
They
it
didn't matter
what
meant.
So
it's
clarity
and
integrity, or
in the Observer,
America
"Hud
is
Gilliatt's
The line of it is very skillfully conwhen Melvyn Douglas's diseased cattle have
Was Homer,
wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful seneeded to jack up the action values, a disaster is used
for all the symbolic overtones that can be hit
and without
any significant story meaning. I don't think the line of Hud is
the film
quence
is
is
so
much
seriousness
It
and
success.
86
BROADSIDES
cattle
that
is
young people
The
English
critics
got even
experienced a "catharsis" in
John Dyer
in Sight
more out of
it:
Derek Prouse
as did Peter
to react to cues
from
it
does
is
worth a
covery of the
little
first
herd, to Homer's
dead
examination.
heifer, to the
"From
the ominous
dis-
die,
inheritance of a
human
oil.
Dyer
Hud's emptiness
Hud
didn't pas-
Hud
HOLLYWOOD
87
blamed
for just
own
barren future."
Why
couldn't
it
if
there
was a dog on the ranch, and it had worms, Hud the worm would
be the reason. Writing of the "terse and elemental polarity of
the film," Dyer says, "The earth is livelihood, freedom and
death to Homer; an implacably hostile prison to Hud"
though
it would be just as easy, and perhaps more true to the audience's
experience of the film, to interpret Hud's opportunism as love
of life and Homer's righteousness as rigid and life-destroying
and unfair. The scriptwriters give Homer principles (which are
hardly likely to move the audience); but they're careful to show
that Hud is misunderstood and rejected when he makes affec-
actions
and behavior:
for ex-
Why
as
when there
"instead of"
if
and he dodged it
is nothing of the kind in the film? And what would the pigwrestling be a metaphor for? Does Dyer take pigs to represent
women, or does he mean that the pig-wrestling shows Hud's
swinishness? Having watched my older brothers trying to catch
there were bronco-busting to do
how
took
town
life is,
justify
when they
Any number of them
details morally?
88
BROADSIDES
to bed with the wife. But he couldn't very well make love to her
when her husband was home although that would be par for
the course of "art" movies these days. The summer nights are
hammock on
my
cover while
didn't
from
stir
playing cards.
thing about
Oz book from
their card
game.
Dyer
cover to
get tired of
There
isn't
much
else to
They
it.
do some-
do
the
it
life
women." What
doesn't
"his ap-
alternatives are
Alma
as
McMurtry
described the
ing
women
to
Hud's chas-
conventions and myths, and as the film was flouting these conventions and teasing the audience to enjoy the change,
occur to
as "bad."
self
me
But Crowther
didn't
is
"one of the
it
sure,
Is this
didn't discover
it)
unmistakable
HOLLYWOOD
89
against
still
don't understand:
it
was not
communal
af-
If
(or as
is
massacre,
a box-office value.
No
doubt in
is,
as Stanley
Hud
we're really
Kauffmann says,
assault." But in terms
it
a frustrated rape
cerned
who
"saved" her.
Alma
Lon the
inno-
90
BROADSIDES
necessary to break
was
different.
though
DuBois did
was enough,
The
it
was
scriptwriters for
critics
really
Hud, who,
know
vil-
both want the same things and that it is their way of trying to get them that separates one from the other. They impart
lains
this knowledge to Alma, who tells Hud that she wanted him
and he could have had her if he'd gone about it differently. But
this kind of knowingness, employed to make the script more
clever, more frank, more modern, puts a strain on the credibility
and embellishes.
of the melodramatic actions it explicates
Similarly, the writers invite a laugh by having Alma, seeing the
nudes Lon has on his wall, say, "I'm a girl, they don't do a thing
for me." Before the Kinsey report on women, a woman might
say, "They don't do a thing for me," but she wouldn't have
prefaced
it
with "I'm a
girl"
known
women.
Gilliatt considers
it
HOLLYWOOD
their technique in
Hud
some
"No
is
method
The Long
91
new
skill
my life,
don't
like a
may admire
and
precise
and unadorned, so
Hud
is
is
we
name
of
Champion, part
Edge
so appar-
skeletonic, that
(And
it is
who
pre-
also part
92
BROADSIDES
When Time
be made
to
The
says
is
it
out. In the
its
makers,
Hud
is
key word
tegrity of
film brazens
"It's
Hud
bound
is
brazenly.
Gill writes,
reward, but
money
is
minds." Believing in
nice, too,
this
coincidence
is
like believing in
Santa
wood, a "picture with integrity" is a moneymaking message picture. And that's what Crowther means when he says, "Hud is a
film that does its makers, the medium and Hollywood proud."
He means something similar when he calls his own praise of the
film a "daring endorsement"
as if it placed him in some kind
of jeopardy to be so forthright.
innocent as
ican
Way
not works of art but works of commerce and craftsmansometimes fused by artistry? Is a commercial piece of entertainment (which may or may not aspire to be, or pretend to
be, a work of art) necessarily a poor one if its material is con-
works
ship,
its
stated
who
made
it?
My answer
is
more fun
it
93
no, that in
or the
HOLLYWOOD
may
be.
The
process
by which an idea
for a
My
like
lar.
The
film itself
flirts
with
this realization:
when Homer
is
berating
schools
fear
its
international policies.
call
them
at
94
the
BROADSIDES
hint of a prowler: they are
first
lion ways.
and
split,
and
it
shows in a mil-
like
careful
really screwing
it.
[1964]
II
Retrospective Reviews:
Movies Remembered with Pleasure
. .
(1953)
Madame de, a
for her
when she
no more feeling
diamond earrings
her extravagance and debts.
husband than
falls in
she
sacrifices
them
as
earrings
if
life
it:
and of the
unto death.
flirtation and
from romance, to passion, to desperation is, ironically, set
among an aristocracy that seems too superficial and sophisticated to take love tragically. Yet the passion that develops in
this silly, vain, idle society woman not only consumes her but is
strong enough to destroy three lives.
The novella and the movie could scarcely be more unlike: the
austere, almost mathematical style of Louise de Vilmorin becomes the framework, the logic underneath Ophuls's lush, romantic treatment. In La Ronde he had used Schnitzler's plot
structure but changed the substance from a cynical view of sex
as the plane where all social classes are joined and leveled
(venereal disease is transmitted from one couple to another in
this wry roundelay) to a more general treatment of the failures of love. For Ophuls La Ronde became the world itself
a spinning carousel of romance, beauty, desire, passion, experi-
passes
98
stable, recurrent
many
element
and
mean something
hands,
move through
they, as they
Madame
she brings to
de
the
more
actress
particularly rare
sex kitten)
little
now than
finest
an
earlier when,
memorable Mayerling
almost
too, she had played with Charles
The performances by
beautiful
twenty years
Boyer.
as
and Vittorio De
in the
film,
may
performances.
novelist
what appears
How much we
to be a continuous
movement from
"99
ball to ball.
By
the end, they have been caught in the dance; the trap-
become the
trap of love.
us anything.
We
Karenina in reverse;
shallow and empty; Madame de's life has been so shallow and
empty she cannot get her lover. She is destroyed, finally, by the
fact that women do not have the same sense of honor that men
do, nor the same sense of pride. When, out of love for the
Baron, she thoughtlessly lies, how could she know that he would
take her lies as proof that she did not really love him? What he
thinks dishonorable is merely unimportant to her. She places
love before honor (what woman does not?) and neither her husband nor her lover can forgive her. She cannot undo the simple
mistakes that have ruined her; life rushes by and the camera
moves inexorably.
The
very beauty of
used against
it:
The
Earrings of
Madame
de
is
often
artist.
Style
great
personal style
is
so rare in
but, in the
modern world,
tumes
is
style has
become
moviemaking
when they
a target,
see
and be-
and decadent. Lindsay Anderson, not too surprisingly, found him "uncommitted, unconcerned with profundities" (Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas is committed
with being
trivial
lOO
all right,
but
is
it
really so
Earrings of Madame de
in Sight
and Sound, he suggested that "a less sophisticated climate might
descending review of
The
It's
is
coming to make a
Watteau or
pink chalk and paint real
not, after
all,
The
Ophuls's work
siecle grace of
for the
was
the
nostalgic fin de
If his characters
if
trate
own
name because
in 1902 (he
in his
changed
his
he
worked as an actor and then directed more than 200 plays before he turned to movies in 1930. His first film success, Liebelei,
came in 1932; because he was Jewish, his name was removed
from the credits. The years that might have been his artistic
of family opposition to his stage career)
movies
in
couldn't be completed.
Italy, in
He managed
to
make
a few
lOl
La Ronde
is
There was little in his own lifetime for which he could have
been expected to feel nostalgia. Perhaps the darting, swirling,
tracking camerawork for which he is famous is an expression of
the evanescence of all beauty
it must be swooped down on,
At
that
we
all,
to
we
roles
reality
-that
we become
Jean Renoir's
is
comedy
out a
The
conscious of the
play.
who
is
no more of an
artifice
actress
of love
and
ap-
Anna Magnani,
than any of
us, tries
we become caught up
102
with the
idly discounted a
and relaand they had the technique that comes out of experience. The Golden Coach, Renoir's tribute to the commedia
dell'arte, is an improvisation on classic comedy, and it is also
tradition that provided taken-for-granted situations
tionships,
Anna Mag-
nani.
At her
mon
humanity.
Renoir
is
is
is
whether
it
parallel
contains her or
Though he
it
is
for her,
it
be forever debatable
this
puzzle
comedy.
Perhaps only those of us
who
and
others,
ence, the
most "real" of
gusto and
its
woman
who
can wonder
actresses
she
is,
is
its
then
of us
must wonder.
Renoir has shaped the material not only for her but out of her
and out of other actresses' lives. Talking about the production,
state of depression
is
falls.
."
IO3
itself,
suffer.
In
The work
each a good
try,
tale,
and a fable
hit:
light
to say, art)
is
is
And
pours out
inventive,
The
feel of the
prepos-
awkward
side,
"Mama mia!"
flaws.
Some
passages
theatre
in the dialogue
may be blamed on
end and
Much
life
herself, in
magnificent,
some
her
first
of the strained
artist.
rhythm
And, though
English-speaking role,
is
vocally
which
Magnani
begin?"
The
some
"interna-
never really seems to work; at the basic level they don't speak
IO4
more
And
When
trifles.
in the story,
act,
make-believe.
Magnani announces
that
realize that
we have been
it is
at a crucial point
a formalized stage
enchanted, that
when
When,
we had
of the creator
set,
we
forgotten
becomes
visible,
in
is
not
life
but
many movies
we are brought up short, brought to conmovie that proclaims its theatricality. And
is like a
Renoir and Magnani
the presence of the artists
great gift. When, in the last scene of The Golden Coach, one of
pretend to be
sciousness,
by
life
that
this
is
moments on
film,
on
stage,
loneliness seems to
[i
96i]
SMILES OF A
Smiles of a
SUMMER NIGHT
Summer
IO5
Night
(1955)
Women
(originally called
The Waiting
Women),
tempts or drafts. They were all set in the present, and the themes
were plainly exposed; the dialogue, full of arch epigrams, was often
clumsy, and the ideas, like the settings, were frequently depressingly middle class
and
as
if
and
were sketchy
full of flashbacks.
Smiles of a Summer Night, but the plot threads were still woolly.
Smiles of a Summer Night was made after Bergman directed a
stage production of
the film a
it
threads of intrigue.
a gust of
i06
Eva Dahl-
Euch
des Lebens";.
as a blonde,
spired suspended
moment,
singing "Freut
as in
unhappy
Margit
roles;
eager virgin.
are
admit
set in
I
must
man's question,
her response,
"What
"Women
can a
woman
ever see in a
man?" and
sides, we can always turn out the light." I would have thought
you couldn't get a laugh on that one unless you tried it in an
old folks' home, but Bergman is a man of the theater
audiences break up on it.) Bergman's sensual scenes are much more
to
Women
elevator of Secrets of
Smiles of a
Summer
actress
and
when they
Night. Everything
is
subtly improved in
man
convincing the
man
ing male
to stray.
the
woman
just a
as
earth-mother
who
is
"
SMILES OF A
SUMMER NIGHT
But
"The
Summer
in Smiles of a
IO7
said to
Woman Battleship."
Night, though the roles of the
of love;
is
lasts,
different. In this
is
game
When Eva Dahlbeck, as the actress, wins back her old lover
(Gunnar Bjornstrand), her plot has worked
but she hasn't
really won much. She caught him because he gave up; they both
on.
know
is
a tragi-comedy; the
man who
strand)
tells
as she puts
suffering
it,
"We
or,
Smiles of a
it.
(The Seventh
Seal,
The Swedish
critic
Rune Waldekranz
mental premise
that
ridiculous in love
is
Summer Night is a
most important meaning of the word. It is an
arabesque on an essentially tragic theme, that of man's insufficiency, at the same time as it wittily illustrates the belief
expressed fifty years ago by Hjalmar Soderberg that the only absolutes in life are 'the desire of the flesh and the incurable loneli-
comedy
in the
108
La Grande
Illusion
(1937)
La Grande
In form,
think of
it
tive story.
Grande
this
way?
The
Illusion
Illusion
It's like
great
is
an escape
a perceptive study of
is
story; yet
human
who would
Rex
is
a detec-
categories.
La
among a group of prisoners and their capWorld War I. The two aristocrats, the German
commander von Rauflenstein (Erich von Stroheim) and
during
prison
common
class
doomed by
is
they must act out the rituals of noblesse oblige and serve a nationalism they do not believe
life for
men he
in.
The Frenchman
the
sacrifices his
plebian Mare-
(Jean Gabin)
These
ironies
toward a
common
LA GRANDE ILLUSION
men he was
addressing
would
La Grande
be
Illusion
as
ephemeral as so many
it is not limited to
poetry:
is
its
IO9
larger subject
its
is
the nature
greatness.
Compare
war.
Eisenstein's in Potemkin,
cari-
who
might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups
von Rauffenhe simply isn't concerned with swine. His officers
were at home in the international sportsstein and de Boeldieu
manship of the prewar world, but the skills, maneuvers, courage
and honor that made military combat a high form of sportsmanship are a lost art, a fool's game, in this mass war. The war,
ironically, has outmoded the military. These officers are com-
base humiliations.
They
lost
and
in the
it is
for
his
off,
Von
Cyrano had
the
his
district officer in
Mau-Mau. They go
in style.
HO
he
is
ance in
you
The
are,
is
way
Stroheim,
of life that
is
dedicated to superbly controlled outer appearances. Try to imagine an exchange of roles between, say, Gabin and Fresnay,
how
and you
see
also, for
and acting
these characters,
who
speak in their
are.
This
is
true,
It's as if
The
is
(is it
achieve?)
result
is
the
FORBIDDEN GAMES
greatest achievement in narrative film.
It's
111
a little embarrassing
but very
perfect
work
different,
(in fact,
There was no
reason for Renoir to tap this vein again. His next great work was
is
not
La Regie du
becomes a macabre
it
difficult to assess
Jeu,
which accelerates
fantasy.
Renoir
commonly identified as the son of the great Impresown light, which has filled the screen for almost
is
sionist, as if his
How
Renoir
us,
he
is
because
it's
gives everything
he has.
we can
And
give
it
this generosity
is
so extra-
Forbidden Games
(1952)
This
is
neither,
director,
it
La Grande
Rene Clement,
is
well
M.
known
is
one of
Games
Forbidden Games
is
in
mood
none of
Nor do
it
becomes
his
or style; the
The
presentation
Illusion
is
here
lacerating.
method
of
the intuitive,
112
almost
lyric
bestial
human comedy
is
an act of kindness to
we would
dissolve in tears
all.
taste
refugees.
(Brigitte Fos-
become playmates
dead animals
their
game their
passion
and
is
for this
to collect
game, they
The
film
is
insects
we
to that
we may
It
is
only
if
we wish
and attachment
to
game
is
FORBIDDEN GAMES
113
from contrast-
arise
It is a
own
The
acters
of Marcel
warm, earthy
char-
they are
They
take Christian rituals and symbols at the most literal level; they
is
betrayed by his
which
Nobody
points out
even
in
an ironic aside
what
is
in-
The
of lost
game
in our imaginations
Parisian,
is
game
as lost
with the peasant family a few miles from Paris as she would be
with a tribe in deepest Africa; the peasants with their Christian
To
ju-ju
is
II4
Shoeshine
(1947)
When
one of those
went
to see
incomprehensible despair.
came out
of
it
alone after
one in a
state of
girl
no longer
certain
whether
my
I felt
tears
I felt
SHOESHINE
115
have not been worked-over and worked-into something (a pattern? a structure?) and cannot really be comprised in such a
receive something more naked, something that
structure.
We
when he
peared;
it
De
it?
They
didn't even
was a
than a million lire but in
Italy few people saw it as it was released at a time when the first
." Perhaps in the U.S.
American films were reappearing
people stayed away because it was advertised as a social protest
go to see
it
in Italy.
picture
which
is
little like
advertising
Hamlet
as a political
Shoeshine has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatand this is so rare in film works that to cite a
comparison one searches beyond the medium
if Mozart had
ness of feeling,
star.
it
became
baker;
Franco Interlenghi
Il6
own
destroyed by their
when
sent to
intense,
is
all,
humane.
[1961]
The
came
Beggar's Opera
to
be written
after a suggestion
make an odd
by
pretty sort
its
to
the idea in a
new form:
existing music.
To
words.
The
in which dialogue
is
This
is
ballad-opera
dialogue and songs are distinct and sepamore people than would care to admit it
the
117
rivalry of
and Lucy referred to the feud between two leading acThose targets are now a matter for historians, but the
the corruption and hypocrisy of manlarge butt of the joke
kind
still sits around. And by 1953, a new set of conventions, as
tired and inflated as Italian opera, were ready for potshots: the
Polly
tresses).
the
phony
realism.
is
Hood
a mordant
suppose
it's
custom-
ary to call the latent savagery of the material. Arthur Bliss ar-
we come
out
humming
mocking,
raffish
spirit
but
freely,
retaining the
And
the
an embalming
many
may have
greatest virtues:
it is
suffered even
unrealistic in style,
Il8
jailers
much
tempt
is
Most movie
too
directors at-
Fairbanks films
delight
Pirandello productions
is
in the film
there a
life
more
in
exquisite stylization of
We
save Macheath,
(Olivier's stature
may,
'of course,
he always plays
Macheath
his
leaps
production.
Although
Lockit), are
is
inoffensive.
119
in
movie
[1961]
In
The
mod-
120
em
human
cooperation, the
and defended,
which
more wonderful
a
village
handfuls of
who
rice.
An American
pre-
even
against
it
is
who
critic
will
be joined.
art,
to assess
its
constraint.
qualities as a
Kurosawa has
work of
said,
"I
haven't read one review from abroad that hasn't read false mean-
my pictures." I might feel more uneasy about my ignorance of Japanese traditions and the "false meanings" I may
read into Kurosawa's work had I not learned that Kurosawa
ings into
by Yankee cunning
blunders,
my
by occasional
interpretation of his
errors.
calculate that
For example,
if
is
And
can't
the
understand the Japanese code of sexual honor
intense shame of the farmers' wives who, having been abducted
really
As
if
121
is
The Japanese
now
is
the movie
we can
see.*
And
point of view, and cut for our short span of attention (or was
it
it's
incomparable as a modern
There
Samurai
is
is
poem
an additional problem
of force.
for this critic:
The Seven
is
propose
the weak-
masculine genre.
it
make
action
122
when
street for
figures
desperate faith in
less
ordinary men.
the
humor
them
Kurosawa
is
his
perhaps the
use of the
all active.
In
static,
figures
productions.
The
musical score
is
There
is
no
specifically
much
for
is
what sounds
it.
The
European music.
to us like a parody of
tionist of putting
for
music
for westerns,
is
and
is
a minor weak-
ness.
There
is
a major weakness.
theme, when
it is
When
violence
itself
becomes the
is
literally
we
futile
sword death
But the
principal
123
like
many another
Kirk Douglas.
It
great
is
a comic turn.
cliches: his
The
role
Kambei
is
And
there
is
sage,
who
lose
crously inadequate.
It's
as
if
little
thoughts
Here
is
we
i.e.,
evil
to take seriously, or
we
commonplaces of a shopworn, socially conscious frame of reference which tries to give depth and meaning to the ritual and
suceeds only in destroying its beautiful simplicity. The Seven
Samurai triumphs over these problems by pouring all its energies
into the extremities of
but
it still
human
experience
into
conflict itself
124
"
seem to be a virtuoso
exercise.
Perhaps Kurosawa,
like
his
[1961]
Ill
Breathless^
the Daisy Miller Doll
and
Breathless, the
most important
is
New Wave
a frightening
film
little
which has
chase
comedy
crimes along the way. Meanwhile, the police are chasing him.
But both Michel's flight and the police chase are half-hearted.
Michel isn't desperate to get away
his life doesn't mean that
much to him; and the police (who are reminiscent of Keystone
Cops) carry on a routine bumbling manhunt. Part of the stylis-
tic peculiarity
ing
it,
it's
of the
light
and
work
its
art
is
it
silly.
It
What
is
coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the imper-
vious, passively
as the shiny
crimes.
new
ing one
who
And
race,
way
or another about
it
or anything else.
The
is
car-
heroine,
grief
128
and nothing,
moment;
at that
at the
hero states the truth for them both: "I'd choose nothing."
critic,
Americans
them
live
among
it is.
And
The
And
possibly because
we
just
tling as
may
not, at
first,
seem quite so
star-
title refers to
title
Two-Way
Stretch
The
thing but
who
to the next.
own
And
as the film
seems
seem
created.
If
light,
Certain scenes are presented with utter candor, lacking in form and
room
is
repetitious
whom Belmondo
but extremely
lifelike.
And
claims to be in
is
is
120,
sensitive.
stand.
The hero
enough
all
damn. And
that's
is
who went
and managed
mark
it
recalls
young
the
re-
a well-groomed, blue-rinse-on-the-
How
Well,
is it
ogies at
all,
they
much
atten-
is
all
And
the stand-
130
and amusingly
individualistic, until
this indi-
ence to
is
human
values.
this, as it
isn't interested in
motives:
it's all
kill,
a squealer: a
killer yes, a
Le Moko and
as true to love
is
as
romantic as Pepe
is
just as
ironies
as the representative
now
American
girl
131
but
qualities of the
American
girl.
She
is,
no sense of
imagined: she
responsibility or guilt.
is
She
experience.
to
way
of
ably stronger. )
"I don't
doesn't
doesn't
if
and she
we
is
one
we
get nowhere."
who
emotions,
earlier,
An
"When
updated
destroyed so
many
132
96 1-1 963
known
as
father to the
movement
is,
"What
is
to die."
The Cousins
The Cousins was so badly received in this country that my
liking it may seem merely perverse, so let me take it up in some
detail.
film
is
critics
who
this skillful,
complex
see-
it.
The
ineffable Bosley
THE COUSINS
rectors.
His attitude
Youthful
it.
disillusion
The movie
is
is
and that
is
The
133
it
treats
doesn't pose
in the Nation:
is
The
Cousins, a
lives
and
latest of the
The
imports
picture
is
affairs
Time put
it
down more
is
Made
for
$160,000 by a 27-year-
on
a switch
the story of
the country
mouse (Gerard Blain). In this case the city mouse is really a rat.
Enrolled in law school, he seldom attends classes, spends his time
shacking up with "can't-say-no" girls, arranging for abortions,
curing one hangover and planning the next. When the country
cousin, a nice boy but not too bright in school, comes to live with
him, the rat nibbles away at the country boy's time, his girl friend
(Juliette Mayniel), and his will to work. In the end, the country
cousin fails his examinations and the city cousin casually shoots him
dead with a gun he didn't know was loaded. And that, the moral
would seem to be, is one way to keep 'em down on the farm after
they've seen Paree.
The
critical
Time's reviewer
the Catholic
134
The Hoodlum
review of
its
laudatory
upbeat
pens
when
the priest
tells
the
Time:
Suddenly, wonderfully, a
new dimension
and
of reality surrounds
and
.
hope
it flickers
that the spectator not only shares the victim's agony in the
gas
illusion of immortality.
is
Why
did American reviewers consider the honest, plodding, unimaginative, provincial cousin the hero? Possibly identification
What
is
like
exciting about
its
content
is
It
is
istic
who
is
the antithesis of
The Cous-
all
nihilist
who
The
it is
and
them
ideal-
the
bourgeois virtues.
cousin,
they
life
is
are
for
it
The Cousins
is
someone
we
first
see
to look at.
And
him made up
like
Tou-
THE COUSINS
Blain in the
difficult role of
actress, Juliette
Mayniel,
135
who
scene
is
smooth and
travagant
and the
milieu
command
elegant. Perhaps
of the
it is
medium the
movement
and
moralist
who
serious,
though
The
he
is
with
136
or disgusting. There
is,
whom,
first,
think
The
own
deserves to be called
of,
way they
The
take
can
all
title suggests.
Chabrol shows that the old concepts of romance are inadequate to a world of sexual ambiguities, and he shows that, from
the point of view of the bright and gifted, and in our world
try cousin
as
little
much as the future, is uncertain a counwho plods to make good and get ahead must be a
boy
not really so
is
all his
antique
is
just
an
intellectual
she would like to be able to believe in a pure, sweet and enduring love.
self.
The
figure
It
would be
others treat
from the
so
much
prettier
him with
a gentle nostalgia
as
toward a
past.
Canned Americana
In older films, protagonists were fighting their impulses,
try-
Now, Freudianized
writers tell us
CANNED AMERICANA
137
more about their people than the people themselves know, and
they are shown as smart, or as gaining insight, when they discover what we have already been posted on their sexual desires, their fears and anxieties. The authors condescend to us, at
the same time putting us in a position to feel superior to the
people in the movies
who know
so
much
characters are
more
less
than
who
we
do.
The
could be called
exactly caricatures
Una Merkel
in
who
is
a caricature.
The
only
gives
when she
steps free
and becomes a character. This makes me wonif perhaps one of the reasons why character is disapthat audiences don't want to respond or feel. It's
of the caricature
der a
little
pearing
much
is
easier to
laugh at or
isn't
it tells
us
than
feel
how
to react?
It's
Down
and Gothic
the familiar
is
that
is
of fantasy in
territory
homespun
It's
women
(schoolteachers
138
visual
lie
fantasy, popular
among
is
based on a neo-Freudian
come out
to sexual experimentation;
it
grown-
ups for failure to understand that these two kids are in love, and
for failure to value love above all else. In other words, it's the
with lots of
old corn but fermented by Kazan in a new way
screaming and a gang-bang sequence, and blood and beatings,
and
girls
pawed on
getting
why
the movie
is
may
explain
Wood
probably
heroine of
wispy
little
fire
inside
Alma, the
t'ain't
smoke that
Holy
fire in
the movie.
The movie
looks
CANNED AMERICANA
artistic,
but
it's
the opposite of
art: it dulls
39
cate shadings
and no
that's so meticulously
it's
is
surprises.
way
Who wants
all deli-
to see a performance
it's
finished,
and Zasu
Pitts.
subject matter of
up exchanging
loose
little
QED
company
she becomes a
who
man.
It's
roles:
a dedicated, selfless
characters. There's
one
is
lethally funny,
mind
of Stanley Kowalski. If
old-maidish
old virginity.
filmed
of Mrs. Stone
seem
woman
140
that?"
"No,
can't be that?"
it
96 1-1 963
"What
in
the
dili-
gently to
and
director
writer, Jose
We
interest in her.
could accept a
woman
is
buying
the
kill all
love,
but
is
paying
grotesque
sion.
crazy
Mrs. Stone
."
old
Norma Desmond
more
is
explain so
it all
women
to go to
novella
stories)
is
to
life, it is
of the
Rome
sex
unintentionally grotesque.
is
Why
drift
like Elsie
who
learns that
The movie
is
It's
who
The Deep
too bad because the role seemed ideal for Vivien Leigh,
think the
trol
Roman
spring
Neal
is
amusing
she seems to
be
WEST
SIDE STORY
think
it's
mind
141
don't
is
end when a
man
It's
truckdrivers
and,
as this
is
women
all
too
Sunday or something
When
else
you'd
much
rather forget.
The
who
didn't
the
pressions of taste
trains
This
is
My Beloved?"
it
would be better
if
if
if
this
man and
were
142
really as close as
it's
he suggested or
You
it's
nobody
great
of
form
says
West
Side Story
is
a good
it is
a "mere" musical
time) that
all
Well,
presented. It aims to be so
like Singin' in
who
it is
comedy. It is not
concerned with the musical form as a showcase for star performers in their best routines; it aspires to present the ballet of our
times
our conflicts presented in music and dance. And, according to most of the critics, it succeeds. My anxiety as I entered the theater was not allayed by a huge blow-up of Bosley
as lightness, grace, proportion, diversion,
West
that
had
me
clutching
my
head.
Is
by science and technique, and by the highly advertised new developments that they accept this jolting series of distorted sounds
gratefully
on the assumption, perhaps, that because it's so
unlike ordinary sound, it must be better? Everything about West
Side Story is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size, the
wonders of its photography, editing, choreography, music. It's
it's
nology.
feat: first
Juliet
WEST
SIDE STORY
Laurents, Ernest
heim.
The music
Want
to Live.)
The
143
Somebody Up
Lehman, and, for the lyrics, Stephen Sondsaid to be by Leonard Bernstein. (Bernstein's
is
"You
when you criticize Bernmusic do you expect people to jump in outrage as if you
were demeaning Moses or Maimonides.) Surely, only Saul Bass
a Leonard Bernstein." No, indeed, nor
stein's
titles for
in-
sound men, editors, special effects men, and so forth than you
might believe possible
until you see the result. Is it his muchvaunted ingeniousness or a hidden streak of cynicism
a neat
comment on all this technology that he turns the credits into
graffiti?
The
that those
is
my
exchange
is
in
Black Orpheus:
Eurydice."
"My name
"Then we must be
is
in love."
Orpheus."
When
"My name
Tony,
floating
on the clouds
doesn't look as
"O,
am
of
if
come up
144
96 1-1 96 3
Do
not
they do not
call
name "Maria"
mislead you
for
cries.
has the
wisdom
of
She
lightly.
all
is
women, she
game
thereby assured.
is
West
makes a
it
but
city life,
it
finally be-
Dead End kids dancing and without much imhumor of the Dead End kids.
many
critics have fallen for all this frenzied
can
How
so
like
provement
in the
my
music forever,"
listening to
it
daughter answered
little
Now
will play
it
in the
Knight
Review
mann
The
called
in the
it
Jets
in the
Saturday
and the
have been
win.
"We
move down
When
West
set-
and song
that
lifts this
WEST
capsule
is
this film
SIDE STORY
ought to be
know how an
and
to
145
the humanity in
some
in-
artist
some
of
its
ugliness.
gangs. For, of course, the Puerto Ricans are not Puerto Ricans
and the only real difference between these two gangs of what I
am tempted to call ballerinas is that one group has faces and
hair darkened, and the other group has gone wild for glittering
yellow hair dye; and their stale exuberance, though magnified
by the camera to epic proportions, suggests no social tensions
more world shaking than the desperation of young dancers to
even at the risk of physical injury. They're about
get ahead
as human as the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Maria, the
sweet virgin fresh from Puerto Rico, is the most machine-tooled
clever little Natalie Wood. Like the
of Hollywood ingenues
new
scends
its
it
tran-
(it
love-goddess
so
Wood
is
the newly-constructed
I46
96 1-1 963
woman named
Natalie
Wood's Maria.
What
is
of virtue
and white,
unearned by
increment
The
dream of having
just
a young,
Tony can be
identified as a Pole.)
this
is
West
last
The
be urgent and important: it is supposed to be the lyric poetry of the streets, with all the jagged
rhythms of modern tensions. The bigger the leap the more, I
on the theory that America
suppose, the dancer is expressing
dancing
is
also designed to
Who
WEST
SIDE STORY
147
would come back this way? Add social ideas to geometry, and
you have the new West Side Story concept of dance. And just as
the American middle classes thought they were being daring
and accepting jazz when they listened to the adaptations and
arrangements of big orchestras that gave jazz themes the familiar
thick, sweet sludge of bad symphonic music, and thought that
jazz was being elevated and honored as an art when Louis Armstrong played with the lagging, dragging New York Philharmonic (under Leonard Bernstein), they now think that
American dancing is elevated to the status of art by all this arranging and exaggerating
by being turned into the familiar
"high" art of ballet. The movements are so huge and sudden, so
dancing
is
kinds of movement.
And
looking at
all
it's
American dancing
in jazz music,
is
at
its
feel,
the dances in
medium
After
its
West
is
it's
not
are not
The
expanded
"Why
lost
is
best but
say,
What
of dance as an expressive
Forgotten
The
in a
much
possibilities
in
West Side
few decades
like hilariously
West
Academy Awards
as
one reason" it won "was that its choreography, music, and direction were devoted to the serious theme of the brotherhood of
man." A few weeks ago, in a talk with a Hollywood director,
when I expressed surprise at the historical novel he had undertaken to film, he explained that the "idea" of the book appealed
to him because it was really about "the brotherhood of man."
I averted my eyes in embarrassment and hoped that my face
I48
96 1-1 963
the
It's
Some
"brotherhood of man."
a great conversation
suggested
man
Is All."
Sometimes, when
read film
critics, I
think
can do without
brothers.
LrAvventura
In answer to the question,
is the best film of 1961?"
"What
had begun
It
to look as
if
work-
tries,
discovering
anything
of
it had all been done before. For those with great traditions behind them, the only field to explore seemed to be comedy
at that
by making
ern
his
is,
easily,
Seal.
movie about
man demonstrated
this very
problem
UAwentura
is
a study of the
mising
man afflicted by
betrayal.
The
depleted
mod-
exhausted.
which suggest
Cousins, Smiles of
levels, a
short
yet
the
Too
if
sex
is
their sole
means
AWENTURA
149
and finding
there.
it
They become
reconciled to
one capable of
only by
life
love,
defeated
is
a barren view of
life,
but
it's
is
man
But modern
tragically: rightly or
artists
we
when
wrongly,
feel that
society, a
an
oblique,
we
are
and
is
gullibility are
fall
man
is
we
defeat ourselves
how can we be
noble?
(that
is
treated accumulatively
tangential
it
meanings,
it
bit off.
is
melan-
its
subtle
and
suggests the
And
perhaps
means
by humiliating
D. H. Lawrence. Most of all, I think, it
suggests the Virginia Woolf of The Waves: the mood of L'Avventura is "Disparate are we." Antonioni is an avowed Marxist
but from this film I think we can say that although he
may believe in the socialist criticism of society, he has no faith
in the socialist solution. When you think it over, probably more
of us than would care to admit it feel the same way. A terrible
calm hangs over everything in the movie; Antonioni's space is a
kind of vacuum in which people are aimlessly moving
searchers and lost are all the same, disparate, without goals or joy.
For those who can take movies or leave them alone, La Dolce
black-out, as a
someone
else, it
of escaping self-awareness
suggests
Vita
is
"vice" (the
else acts
name
fantasies
own
those orgies.
all
their
its
when somebody
hands
in horror
and
150
is all
Saul Bass
you
girl
he trying to tell us something about the picture? Is his come-on really a warning to stay
away? Bass says, "A successful communication entices the viewer
to participate. The minute you re in a position of getting him to
pick up a shovel and hurl a spadeful in the pile, you're beginIs
most universally
so far as to call
Twain.
it
it
praised: in
an
on. One,
"irresistible
evocation of the
mood
of
Mark
151
Horst Buchholz doesn't wear any shorts, she says "Doesn't wear
any shorts! No wonder they're winning the cold war!" Her little
who
daughter,
is
when Cagney
"assets";
is
on
their
as "My Fuehrer"; there is much humor about the SS background of various characters, and we are invited to laugh at the
Russians for rejecting a shipment of Swiss cheese because it was
full of holes. There is the by-now-to-be-expected female impersonation bit, with the man wearing balloons for boobies, so that
the sequence can end with that weary old punch line, "I never
saw one yellow one and one green one before." If you find these
jokes fresh and funny, then by all means rush to see One, Two,
Three, which will keep shouting them at you for two hours.
It's like you-know-what hitting the fan.
Though I haven't seen anything but rave reviews for One,
him
Two, Three, I think that, like Saul Bass, the reviewers give the
show away by their tone, by the quality of the language they
use in praising
it.
is
Coca-Colonization,
acy,
story."
is
and color
peaceful
lines, of people's
and
noexistence,
demockerthe
Deep
Southern concept that all facilities are created separate but equal.
What's more, Director Billy Wilder makes his attitude stick like
Schlagobers slung in the spectator's
the high precision of hilarity that
ball classic
But
kisser.
He
purposely neglects
whambam
style of a
man
swatting
flies
Surely
it
to as
writing,
Time quotes
these remarks
152
Cagney's wife (Arlene Francis): "But she can't stay long. Doesn't
You never know." Cag-
when
munist, bitterly:
"Is
is
have
everybody in
Communist, thoughtfully:
There
my room
know
"I don't
Times
Com-
Second
everybody."
back?" First
world corrupt?"
this
remark to a
reviewer.
bit of self-
almost incon-
It's
way about
a film they'd
really enjoyed.
And
The
here
is
Brendan
Gill in the
New
Yorker:
Diamond and Wilder have had the gall to manufachundred outrageous wisecracks about the desperate duel that
Russia and the West are currently waging
the whole German
Messrs.
ture a
people, as
if
and we
sit
somehow know
ordinarily de-
works" but
slope;
what
can get
else
is
there to do?"
What
else
is
picture
few of us
think
it's
will object to
is
is
over,
laughter,
it all,
You
we are
there to do!
it's
and
don't
the coercive,
As
Gill said,
wisecracks.
Time and
New
the
it is
is
In Hollywood
1$$
tell
us
whose work
tells
called
us a lot
world aspires
to,
but
is
this
degraded view of
political conflicts
its
targets
HellzapoppirC in Berlin?
humor was
characters
154
"
illusionment,
in his
96 1-1 963
comedy shocks
us into a
new
main-
right): 'Our marriage has gone flat, like a stale glass of beer!'
"
Cagney: 'Why do you have to bring in a competing beverage?'
an old man singYes, it's all like that. There is one nice touch
ing "Yes,
Have No Bananas" in German, and there's also
the dance of a behind on a table that's quite a "set piece." But
even the portrait of Khrushchev slipping from its frame, revealing Stalin's picture beneath, was a reprise of a dimly remembered gag. And the three Commissars whom Wilder revived
from his earlier script for Ninotchka have become coarsened
with the years - another indication of the changing climate of
Hollywood. They were grotesquely pathetic and sentimental in
1939; now they are even more grotesquely crude than the Cagney character. And buried beneath all this there is the almost
We
This being the age of the big production and the big promois a tie-in with Coca-Cola which provides truck ban-
tion, there
ners,
laughing at
whom? The
target has
Who
is
THE MARK
155
the picture)
is
that
we
in the audience
were
all
being manipulated in
some shameful way, and that whenever this feeling might become conscious and begin to dry up the laughs, Wilder showed
his manipulative skills
by throwing
even more ugly in their way than the "wisecracks." Arlene Francis
woman who
role,
"My
character
is
a warm, sensible
on the
satirical dia-
a movie that
wit.
The Mark
The advertising campaign for the Anglo-American production
The Mark includes this statement:
SENSATIONALISM BE
DAMNED
HERE'S
THE TRUTH
We
dramatic.
And
into
they're words
to
tries to
do
just
1^6
tries to
work up prurient
interest in the
the term
is
an-
The
monster-mother and the rejected, castrated father certainly suggested the development of a homosexual. And in that rather
touchingly sweet scene in which the hero, having at last made
it
I was irresistibly
young man I once knew, a New York dancer,
who talked to me late one night about how much analysis had
done for him. He wasn't queer any more and he didn't need to
feel humiliated and weak and afraid of people. He told me that
after his first night with a woman, he'd awakened to the new
day and the first thought that came to him was, "Now I don't
have to be afraid to shake hands with people." Well, a week
after this eulogy of heterosexuality, he was beaten up and robbed
by a Negro he'd picked up.
The good taste of The Mark is what's pleasant about it; it's
reminded of
most
it.
humane
likely to
thesis picture.
be without any
any chances
it's
When
you're seeing
made with
It
has
Maybe
all
it,
you're
and decent,
it's
it's
as
good
real imagination, or
as a
movie
without taking
order of intelligence.
Could
THE MARK
movie that
really dealt
57
The Mark
discretion
is
carried
nothing
is
left to
in prison. Yes,
feel
it's
plausible, but
because
maybe
more
isn't it a lot
who
anything
When
you think
it
over,
The Mark
falls apart.
You
can't help
wondering why the film makers have evaded the actual commission of a sex crime:
for a
compassionate study
What
is
man who
has expi-
one up on
all
of us,
and
he's being
still,
by
society.
capital
be
punishment the
man who
is
are mistreated
by
sadists
and
bullies are
human
beings.
We can
shown
as
tempered or nasty, or
really guilty of
it,
in the
hands of
Stuart
Whitman,
we
M,
bad-
and
bullies.
visualize Peter
attacker of
if
if
also desperate to
and,
finally,
Would
when
trapped, screaming
*58
sion
if
by some
he,
enlightened
it
fluke,
provided
first-rate
charged
him
I'd say
as a hero,
and
we
all
most
social consciousness
dark
because
it
it
really enables us to
commendable, enlightened
side.
must admit
progressive,
times that
man
also that
we were supposed
"A
public-relations firm"
I've
Whit-
man dull
skill.
(That was
one reviewer
called
it
couldn't
what
it
was:
the creative
decided
life in
it
business.)
collapsed.
to
would have
be sympathetic because
traits
of character,
some
irrelevancies that
THE MARK
committed
life as
it is
he
a character;
is
He
59
has no
a walking anxiety.
It's
The
had
and
away from it
in the love affair and other relationThe Mark, the emotions that one would expect
rhetorical
ships. Here, in
Rod
The
audi-
erosity
all its
affection to
rather eccentric
is
creetly Freudian
problem,
is
is
dis-
eccentricity, or behavior
man
Steiger's
being
i.e.,
Or
is it
afford to
charm
still
He
to the analyst?
can
be lovable. Unfortunately in
en-
joyed
the
ugly;
the obvious;
in
such symbolic touches as the broken dish, with the hero bending
down
wish
one.
it
to pick
were a
up the
really
just a
life.
wish,
commendable
l6o
Kagi
Among
by the
critics
is,
perverse
making
and highly
Odd Ob-
and worked
out with such finesse that each turn of the screw tightens the
whole comic
it's
structure.
a bit reminiscent of
material.
is
make
them, by
artificially
By
making himself
jealous,
observing
the old
man
is
The comedy,
of course,
and
human
by Machiko
and she coKyo, is the traditional, obedient Japanese wife
operates in her husband's plan. She is so obedient and cooperative that, once aroused by the young doctor, she literally kills
her old husband with kindness
she excites him to death. The
ambiguities are malicious and ironic: the old man's death is
both a perfect suicide and a perfect murder. And all four char-
comedy
it
is,
is
The
not
fit
body
title
Kagi
the key
fits
new
jest.
is
spying on everybody
his motives
and
actions,
else,
nobody
fooled.
The
screen
is
our
KAGI
keyhole, and
we
at each other.
wife,
he
gives
l6l
When
them
the old
to the
whose reaction
is
But a further
layer of irony
is
The mother mysterious, soft, subtle uses her traditional obedience for her own purposes. She never says what she
thinks about anything when she starts a diary she puts down
girl.
The
and she
is
who
is
infinitely
explains
what
is
just as corrupt as
skirts,
is
When
she
is
tells
being practised
by her mother and the young doctor, she seems simply ludicrous;
her mother can lower her eyes and murmur distractedly about
and excite any man to
the terrible things she is asked to do
want to try out a few.
The director, Kon Ichikawa, is probably the most important
new young Japanese director. His study of obsessive expiation,
The Burmese Harp, was subjected to a brutal, hack editing job,
was?)
Kagi,
in
made
Cannes
Festival
l62
96 1-1 96
is
don't think I've ever seen a movie that gave such a feeling of
flesh. Machiko Kyo, with her soft, sloping shoulders, her rhythmic little paddling walk, is like some ancient erotic fantasy that
is more suggestive than anything Hollywood has ever thought
up. In what other movie does one see the delicate little hairs on
a woman's legs? In what other movie is flesh itself not merely
By
erotic joke
she
is
girl,
is
an
and
maneuvers in
lives
humor
in the
they're interested
aspects of sex.
its
injections,
For Kagi has nothing to do with love: the characters are concerned with erotic pleasure, and medicine is viewed as the means
of prolonging the possibilities of this pleasure. So there is particular humor in having the doctors who have been hastening
the old man's death with their hypodermics try to place the
blame for his death on the chiropractor who has been working
on his muscles. They have all known what they were doing, just
as the four principals all know, and even the servant and the
nurse. The film has an absurd ending that seems almost tacked
THE INNOCENTS
on
163
the book);
(it isn't in
sitting together,
comedy
too bomb-scarred
as usual in Japan. In
with liquor,
on
it's
not
saki, it's
takes place
had a chance
is
the
first
Japanese
judgments of incompetent
when
will
we
get another?
for Kagi.
The Innocents
When
critics, is
incom-
164
prehensible to them.
They
it.
From Paine
Knick-
The Innocents
is
born
after Freud,
shows that
who
she's really
in love with
interest dissipates."
pleasures of elegance
is
wonderfully reassuring:
when
all
THE INNOCENTS
there,
and
165
way
so magnificent they're
Screw).
don't
sprang from.
(Room
to be his
is
at the Top,
In this case,
get the
most
Who,
for
it is
who
should
credit.
Miss
Jessel's
ghost?
we
We
peer at these
are transfixed
by
their
memory
her long hair floating as she kisses the boy, so that as her fright-
ened
lips
draw back
in confusion,
we
below
The Innocents is not a great movie, but it's a very good one,
and maybe Deborah Kerr's performance should really be called
great. The story isn't told quite clearly enough: the elegant setand our story sense lead us to expect a stately plot line, but
moving in a clear developmental rhythm, the plot advances through sudden leaps, as if the film makers have concentrated on the virtuoso possibilities of the material. There is
a beautiful montage sequence, exquisite in itself, but too long
and elaborate to advance the story; what is even worse, the sequence comes too fast upon us; and the abrupt developments
ting
instead of
l66
and some
analyzing what
is
thinking
it
over,
we can
set
simply that,
is
up
it
again.
film with our missing reader's pauses for reflection that slightly
and the
the
game
monomania
of the
over them.
The fun
of
it all
is
represented in the film by the tear that the ghost of Miss Jessel
drops. All else can be
more
little
stories;
James
ghosts in terms of
what most
distance.
wet
tear,
pearl of ambiguity.
ful
little
The
What
is
is
frightens us.
intensifies this
we
we
perceive the
really beautiis
at the right
is all a game of a
domain the ghosts
we know
wouldn't dream of doing anything so vulgar as themselves impinging on the action. James was a man of taste, and the film
makers, even
And
rors
is
cannot be resolved.
which
the distance
It is the unreality of The Innocents
makes the whole concept work. The further away the ghosts are,
the more truly ghostly. Close scenes, like the dialogues between
the governess and the housekeeper (which have the all-too-care-
THE INNOCENTS
fully-placed middle-class sounds of radio
167
with
children
are
too familiar.
We
listen attentively to
it
the
we
when
the arch
assent: yes,
we
half-see
that comes
something in the
is
that
(Quint
is
is
who
has the
we have
is
responsible for
Henry James
ful to live.
He
is
a true creature of
This beauty
is
ghost movie I've ever seen: the beauty raises our terror to a
l68
stories. It is
movie that they perceive the qualities of the Jamesian method: we are not simplybeing tricked, we are carried to a level where trickery
that is
this
is art.
know why
the
don't
ably unenthusiastic
wrote in the
ity of
New
many of
about The
so
critics
The Ambigu-
is
possibility
If this is
the case,
doubly
it is
American
in
"Now we
an unconscious allegory!
ature, writing
liter-
are engaged in
a small civil war, testing whether that notion can long endure.
.
The
that there
only one
is
way
it
does settle
in
This
when
self to
I
is
for
seen than
when
who
tries to
literature
its
be-condemned
an
is
irresistible
desire to visualize
Eustacia
Vye
or
and
certainly not-to-
works we love.
we want
It is
perhaps
to cast a beau-
We may
squirm when we see the work we love on the screen but surely
we must
his love.
And
squirm:
no
in the case of
The Turn
The
Innocents,
don't have to
simplification or vulgarization. It
literary
we
its
is
and
this is
an interpretation of a
THE INNOCENTS
169
Shakespeare from the stage to the screen shows his love for both
One
can understand,
monotony
new medium.
not be very sympathetic toward, the
if
that Shakespeare
Henry James
game: try to think of
five good movies not adapted or derived from any other medium.)
But Kauffmann's suggestion that radio is the only possible mepurist
is
dium
is
positively freakish.
Brendan
ence with a
intrinsically pictorial."
intrinsically pictorial;
ture
for the
story,"
nor
just a pictorial
is
movie
paragraph "the
am
just
what
story
medium. The
story
is
is
pic-
a suspense story;
is
own
pictorial qualities,
Time magazine,
raises
I
what
were
the
religious I think
would
cry
into
as a
Some
of that profundity
is
hell-fire
with only
Time
to burn.]
170
and
so forth.
am
Time
96 1-1 963
digging, filling
it
of
all
"desperation."
The
film
arises
novel.
Some
say the ghosts are irreally real; others say they are
hard,
tion.
ture,
normal, everyday basis for the ghastly phenomena, they must inevitably relieve the spectator of his nameless horror of
what hap-
pens.
it,
like other
It is
the evil
mination;
it is
don't see
so
many
of the other
if
it
were a
invented presumably
new-fangled modern way to read James
almost
any
story by James
by Edmund Wilson. Pick up
the material
is,
precisely,
THE INNOCENTS
James because of the
what
about
The Turn of the Screw is not any difmethod: what made it a "potboiler" in James's terms
really
is
171
ferent in
going on.
was simply the use of spooks rather than the more conventional
"influences" of his other work
the heiresses and villains and
social climbers who try to possess your soul, marry you for
money, or drain your energy. However you interpret either The
Turn of the Screw or The Innocents, the theme is the abiding
Jamesian theme: the corruption of innocence. And the trickery
is Jamesian
not letting you be sure whether the children are
innocents who are corrupted by the servants who once had control over them, or whether they are destroyed by the innocent
who now
controls
them
may
expect
chil-
The
the
ferent
that
fuss
it is
who complain of slanting are all complaining of difslants. Some of the reviewers have made a good deal of
critics
on the mouth
any
direction.
I've never
don't see
how
kiss
been so mauled in
my
the govern-
life:
six
weeks and
me
trap
child
Unless
Time
is
is
evil is in
by the
don't see
how
the spec-
172
encompass.
much
discussion, but
it
Hour
View from
think
maybe
the Bridge
is
although
year-old niece.
country
he doesn't know
He
illegally,
it
with
betrays both
pearances
important
family,
proletarian
dramas.
It
is
to
a special
judge by ap-
supposed to be a more
which,
be a
liberal,
educated audience
respects
critic
who
says
"But
isn't
it
any good!"
173
The
is
converse
is
that
regarded as a snob
who
and
certainly a
makers who do
care.
Miller's intention
is
what we
see
is
full rich
all just
We get
doesn't
man)
we
inevitability.
we
see the
is
trying to do,
is
just
poor playwriting.
drives, or
it?
own
of
make
this
passes at their
nieces,
174
'
Eddie
96 1-1 96 3
door but
like
all.
when
A man
When,
would have
behaving
like
to
be blindly
Arthur Miller's
official view of a good normal wife, she asks her husband why
he doesn't want to go to bed with her, you fairly want to cry out
for him
"Because you're so damned unattractive." You will
who
man
is
is
which the working man is good and monogamous and the rich
are corrupt and lascivious; Miller has much in common with
Wilde's Algernon Moncrieff
set us a
"Really,
if
is
performances
is
very good.
The
little
preview
Lumet and
Miller,
is
completely
wrong
175
There
error.
is,
him
boy
Why,
him.
boy
The
is
accusation is supposed
supposed to be completely
The
charge
is
if
game
Eddie
of psychologizing,
as a
man
would
may
indulge in a
little
probably be delighted
and
Lumet
oppressively clumsy.
The
Children's
stereotypes.
Hour
is
William Wyler's
making) that
pro-
Hollywood movie-
176
her abominably.
Where
come from,
an older person, says, "I've been wrong, I'm sorry, what can I
do to make amends?" you take the hand they hold out to you.
I've never understood Lillian Hellmanland, where rich people
are never forgiven for their errors. But then, has Miss Hellman
even recognized hers?
mentioned on the
pointed in
The Day
last
broadcast that
had been
disap-
would
discuss
177
The Day the Earth Caught Fire is not a very good movie.
And perhaps I can make this a little stronger by saying that
no,
its
On
the
Beach" This
is
The
film
shall always
is,
It is
isn't
it,
that dwarfs
On
for
The Day
still
open?"
I was so puzzled
by the ecstatic reviews that I did a bit of research. There had to
be some reason why Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a think piece
with such glowing embers as, "Life today is filled with tragic
choices" (one of them was his decision to become a film reviewer), and why this film was being treated so seriously. As
science fiction it isn't nearly so amusing as, say, The Time
Machine, and as drama it doesn't exist. I think I found a partial
answer in Variety:
After seeing
to sell
Film
its
axis
The
is
and out of
horror
is left
its
orbit,
headed
unresolved at fadeout.
for the
178
Anxiety in the
profit
echelons
they're convinced
is
can, obviously
it
As
first
and such.
Pic has already been screened for such groups as the National
Committee
Press Club,
for a
World
Federalists,
than twice the purchase price of the film on the promotion, and
that the schedule of preview screenings had set a
makers
Universal
we
is
is
opinion
it
mind
though at
film,
new high
the
were
the film
footage
least
it
much more
disposes of the
myth
to say
about
this
of city-room wit.
of the
So many newspaper
critics
is
average
men
who want
suppose they
to
do good, portray
men
are so limited
One
we
is
react
on
their
commonplace
level,
179
a dud.
are
moving
in a
must be asked,
is
there something
When
new
filmic direc-
in
them, or
La Notte
is
is
that
supposed to be a study
in the failure of
this
if
For the past year on the radio I had tried to persuade, goad,
and even shame people into seeing UAvventura, which I think
Then La Notte opened in San Francisco and peophoning and writing to tell me how marvelous it was
and to thank me for opening the world of Antonioni to them.
They hadn't much liked UAvventura, but they loved La Notte
is
a great film.
ple were
felt
that
better word.
Antonioni
vidualistic
is
a master of the
medium but
He
in a highly indi-
l8o
are frozen.
woman
During La Notte, a
sitting in
back of
me
kept explain-
to the
distasteful
and
offensive in his
whole
conception. There
is
l8l
How
exquisitely bored
is
used as a handsome, mindless mask, the actor as mature juvenile, the experienced, tired, fortyish man of all these films (he is
in
alien.
His face
And
fails
to
of an artist's mind.
Moreau walking
away from the camera. Jeanne Moreau is a brilliant film actress
and her face is a marvel of sullen boredom that can suddenly
be brought to life by a smile, even a forced, meaningless reflex
of a smile; but what are we to make of this camera fixation on
her rear? In Marienbad I had laughed at the views of Delphine
Seyrig's elegant backside, with its delicate Swiss-watch movethere
is
took
it,
we
and
from the back, walking around the
city. What kind of moviemaking, what kind of drama is this?
Is the delicate movement of the derriere supposed to reveal her
Angst, or merely her ennui? Are we to try to interpret the movement of her rear, or are we to try to interpret the spacial and
atmospheric qualities of the city streets
and the only kind of
interpretation we can draw from the settings is, for example,
are supposed to be interested in Jeanne Moreau's thoughts
feelings while
we look
at her
l82
Moscow?"
women
But
didn't
in movies like
nated.
The mood
of the protagonists,
we can
if
call
them
that,
amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat. They are the post-analytic set they have done
is
lassitude; there
is
perhaps squirming
almost no
is
more accurate
else,
and
dedication.
fore,
conflict,
It's
"They
we know what
is
is
meaningless
fig-
is
artists. Steiner's
La Notte,
Vita
is still
The
party from
La Dolce Vita
Marienbad of
have very
still
going on in
going on in Marienbad.
is
little
deliberately treating
them
as
pawns). They
and famous
La Notte
is
no con-
supposed to be a
writer,
we
accept
him
if
as a writer?
writer,
we
assume,
is
involved in
life
ically acquires
character in no
And
way
his
justifies.
here, perhaps,
we
183
man.
Fellini
the
they show us
life
as
if
lives,
rich;
nothing
is
easier
The decadence of aristocracy and its attracBohemia, are nothing new, not especially char-
to attack or expose.
and
tion to
acteristic of
we can
for
do
is
much
way
of
then
life in ourselves,
all
we
decadent upper
life; it's
as
if
enjoy poor health, she has nothing to do but savor the dregs of
old experiences as she wanders aimlessly in her melancholy.
Day
when
character
middle-aged
don't think
things a
all? I
the Ail-American
feel
more
let
girl
but
who
human
experience
life.
Surely this
is
the
last
the best
in resigning
gasp of de-
184
pleted academia. In
intentionally cre-
life.
The
Why
sponse?
are they
shown
whom
as so
And
isn't it rather
if
they have no
whom
re-
If it
Why
try to
make
is
if
this transiency
somehow
so
we
defined
thought
it
nobody except
magazines, to which
bility:
we do
we must apply
some
criteria
institutions, like
a failure because
it
The symbol
it is
interminable.
and the
failure of
human
is
Whose
meanings
it
suspect
modern
life
or
that
is
is
185
can't carry?
many Americans
are attracted
by
this
view of fabu-
American who
all
champagne,
more
lobster,
And
isn't it
usual, there
is
These movies
this
are said to
kind of high
life
much
as-
who
it?
I'll
admit that
once
them by
using his
up
boredom as
staying
me and
am
come-on a
But
would
l86
want
to fascinate him, to
trance.
The term
transition to Last
Year at Marienbad
or
good
think, a fairly
Sleeping Beauty of
snow job
mous, luxurious,
come
The mood
much
"Oh,
off it."
is
distended narration;
set
it's
all
art.
Once
is
The author
is
no more than
fore."
The
The
man
if I
187
a chess
game
or a recurring
by
ters.
He
says
is
right
think this
all
exactly
is
is
giving us:
what he
all
the mechanics of
Resnais: "Perhaps
to
some people
to
'non-essentials'
.
My
films are
plot,
an attempt,
still
very
l88
to
are
we
faintly
comic?
If
dummy
and
to another,
how
femme
Evelyn
Dietrich in a Von Sternberg setting
this
posturing like an early movie siren
if
fatale in feathers,
Brent or Marlene
is all
that
is
in her
a parody derived
periods, but
know
don't
(is this
plane, by
some
on which
directors like
worked?) and
don't
D.
W.
Griffith
know what
battles will
seem
to be a few skeletons
The
only
now
it's
called
"Jungian."
"Make
of
it
right."
89
lightweight.
hour and a
half.
all alike
anything
and
all
if
chopped into
The fragmentation
pieces like
of conventional chro-
making
(It has,
how-
it
confusing
that Jonas
exercise in decor
who had
the specific
unspecific).
were,
built
screen
who might be
is
when
if
glimpsed
on for
from
living
detail
an hour and a half, the figures abstracted
all
become as tiresome as shadow dancers. Lousy story, but great
sets. The trouble with sets like this is, what possible story could
just briefly or in
be told
190
1 96 1-1 963
garde" film circles, can pass for new and daring and experimental in art houses. And those familiar with "avant-garde"
film program notes with their barmy premise that what can't
be seen in the film is what makes the film important, will recognize Robbe-Grillet as the definitive, classical practitioner of the
genre.*
The
message are too big for the subject matter: tabloid sensationalism and upper-class apathy and corruption. Fellini is shocked
and horrified
like the indignant housewives who can't get
enough details on Elizabeth Taylor's newest outrage, and think
she should be banned from the screen. I don't think he's simply
exploiting the incidents and crimes and orgies of modern Rome
in the manner of a Hollywood biblical spectacle, but La Dolce
Vita
is
a sort of a
Ben Hur
more, sophisticated.
And
for the
in attempting a
modern
much
parallel
with
who
eternal hell
life
fire.
doesn't
who have
191
a lot of
or drunk or
is
as, for
way
middle-class
feel virtuous
on their children. Is Fellini really so appalled by the rich girl and the hero
making love in the prostitute's room, by the transvestites, by
the striptease which gives the woman gratification? Is he at heart
a country boy who can never take for granted the customs and
follies of the big city? Perhaps, and perhaps also a showman who
knows that these episodes will be juicy fodder for the mass audience
middle-class and working people always hungry to learn
the worst about the terrible dirty rich.
The movie is so moral in its emphasis that all vice (all noninnocent fun?) seems to be punished by boredom and defeat.
But why are people looking so eagerly at the movie, hoping for
their frustrations
ever
more
The
life is just
he
to ''expose" vice,
who
who
i.e.
capture
all
and
192
96 1-1 963
it's
sometimes
that
is all it is.
Perhaps
it
ination of
human
folly:
perhaps
or
outlets
effective, as,
And
the feathers.
you
vices, if
will
who
as
men, who
silly
if
and
same
Wall
Street
(maybe
Why
it
use the
follies?
The
rich are in a
position to act out our fantasies, but surely an artist like Fellini,
middle
class to cluck
just
La Dolce Vita
is
semi-abstract kind of
around
movement
in
Marienbad.
And
to confuse them. If
hotel of
is
fooling
I'd better
it's
so easy
was
it
in
in the big
episode of
193
by the same actor. Who can rein which movie? The rich
hostess of La Notte, who greets her guests in the garden, and
points to the house, saying, 'They're all dead in there," might
just as well be pointing at the hotel in Marienbad. Are the
people who play the Marienbad game any different from those
who play games on the floor in La Notte? Did they meet last
year in La Dolce Vita?
The episodes in these films don't build, they are all on the
same level. The view is panoramic, and there's even a rather
peculiar concept of documentary
many people playing themselves, some using their own names, or names like their own, or
no names (names, like definite characterization, seem to be re-
same
member who
whom
did what to
much
is
plicable.
films, so
We
important, but
we
can't tell
if
Emma,
life-force
is
sup-
girl in
eternal feminine.
in recent
English
movies,
it's
it is all
game
a dream,
is
it is
The Rules
of the
Game
[1939]
devising interpretations of
bad dream.
I
but how
194
was:
"
was a
it
The
And how
different
its
La Notte
Who
Vita and
of the
Game: Chanel
are.
They
are im-
portant, not because they are great movies (they are not) but
ence
may be enormous
Fellini,
(as for
La Dolce Vita)
its
or small, but
tell-
means they
are obscuring problems in a way that people like to see them
obscured. The message of La Dolce Vita or La Notte isn't very
different from what they might hear in any church, but it looks
different, and so they are being struck and moved by all sorts of
ing people what they
want
we
to hear, which,
think,
death,
we have
and
all
lost the
that).
if
we can
call it that
why
near a
sandtrap.
couldn't
thoughts:
friend answered,
"Maybe
that's
can't
why
know
195
interior
how
can
far
we go
in following a director
who
who
is at-
of desire, that he has lost the sense that people share other inter-
these movies
so
who murders
Steiner,
is
people
who
empty
as
find
of suggestion?
La Notte
They
(I
"beautiful," they
dialogue as art.)*
Is
but
nymphomaniac
with
its
in the hospital)
titilla-
and
its
he builds
it:
feel
oh,
pair,
the pity of
it all.
And
above
and
it
gifted,
own
emptiness
it all.
Antonioni's
been up
all
dawn
night;
is
it is
* Even while I was saying these words on the radio, I was aware that
they weren't adequate, that I was somehow dodging the issue. Though I
believe that whatever moves people is important, I am, perhaps by temperament, unable to understand or sympathize with those who are drawn
to the
La Notte view
of
life.
196
it is
there
no new day
is
symbols are
know
that
just
human
itself off as
condition
is
with
life.
A Taste
The
of
Honey
little
men
in the audience.
The new
its
refresher
may be A
Taste of Honey.
The
inex-
Taste of
Honey
all
the
more
for
achieve
its effects; I
movie treatment
is
do
like
it
it. I
didn't
much
like
rather coarse.
Tony Richardson
is
beginning
A TASTE OF HONEY
1QJ
direction
is
He
the play.
terial of
and build
has learned
everything
filled in
drama.
The
play, written
The
cashire
girl,
story
is
think
story
it
about a
is
little
mock
paradise that
The
the mother
lost:
is
comes back and throws Geoff out, but Jo has had her taste of
the honey of sweet companionship. A Taste of Honey is a fairy
tale set in
Geoff in
modern
this story
as well.
a combination Peter
The
girl
Jo
is
herself a Peter
Pan
figure: stub-
the world,
music
children's
songs
interests her.
The background
the
The
The
humor
and
rather old-
Farrell in
me
of
I98
in
too,
were
poetry in
it.
The
sweet
man
is
now
a motherly little
was
is
queen who
the same as
it
and
the woods
thirties
the
who need
last scenes
suddenly
fascinated
take us
by the children in the street, then moving off alone
right back to a Chaplin finale, but now "the little fellow" is
carried to
its
psychosexual extreme.
modern charm,
not
like
is
sister
is
but
And
Jo
and Geoff
a bit of a
this
the older
what
more
is
are
Geoff
sister, in
previously experienced.
What's the matter with the film? Perhaps I can get at this
Have you ever, after an exhausting all-night party or
conversation, taken a walk at dawn? It's cleansing and beautiful
and you decide that you'll change your way of life, get up early,
breathe the fresh air. But by nightfall, your drinking companions are good and who wants to go to bed in order to get up
early? If you think at all about the clear air of dawn, it's with a
shudder. How awful it would be to have to get up to go out
into it, and you laugh at yourself for having thought it was
your air. Well, the movie is about the way the morning air feels
for those who naturally get up in it, but it appears to be made
by people who stayed up all night and then, tired and hung over,
discovered the morning air and thought it was a great thing and
more people should know about it.
you may have
It's not as if it were done in Hollywood
indirectly.
A TASTE OF HONEY
199
Hollywood
level,
can't find the innocence or the imagination or the style that the
boisterous, contagious material deserves
too
much
camera emphasizes
seems overdone.
If
The
only
we
work
lyric qualities in
Rita Tushingham's Jo
but Richardson doesn't give us credit
for enough vision (perhaps because his own eye isn't very
much
of her
her aging
flesh in
the bathtub?
Do we
Do we
need to see
treats
it
like
may want
to quip
"odd
girl
little
out"
As a
director,
for the
he can drive home, for larger social nuances
obvious that he finds so meaningful. (The working-class author
couldn't be expected to have the social consciousness that an
for points
educated
liberal
he wants
to
can supply.)
make
200
much
96 1-1 963
help to
tell
There
an attempt to
is
tell
first,
a remarkable
and upset-
is
makes a pest of
storm
is
herself
is
an en-
many
social
comment:
all
it
too obvious as
has
now become
With
all
Delaney's dialogue
so
many
is
as clear
unimaginative directors.
It's like
gathering together
all
A Taste
but
it
queen
of
Honey
the
new
their sympathies
The
sad-eyed
prived"?
They can
feel
man
VICTIM
can
girl
feel safe
with
is
man
at
all.
The
201
role
life.
Romance
and comedy are one: the hero is the butt. And the audience,
having had him both ways, feels worldly and satisfied.
Victim
up an English newspaper and see
that the review of Victim was entitled "Ten-letter word"
but
as it turned out, the Observer was referring not to Lenny Bruce's
much publicized hyphenated word but to the simple term
"homosexual," which it appears is startling enough in a movie
to make the Johnston office refuse to give Victim a seal of
It
was a
approval.
I
suppose
it's
wanted
to rape a child
is
The Mark
man who
The
lesser characters
make
from the
it
"Nature played
me
the
one
vicious, bitchy
We
Jews and Negroes. It's difficult to judge how far sensitivities will
go Remembrance of Things Past may soon be frowned upon like
Huckleberry Finn and The Merchant of Venice. Social progress
makes strange bedfellows.
Victim manages to get past other censorial bodies by being
basically a thriller, a fairly slick suspense story about a black:
202
it's
making homosexuality
a crime,
victims
thriller structure,
As
the mor-
the film
alizing
sticky.
number
it
is,
is
if
is
its
a classic
own
to
in a free market.)
Times
it
be that heterosexuality
attitude to the
for worrying:
last a
coyly
and, what's
homosexuality
theme
that homosexuality
is
a serious
There
is,
and unconvinc-
order of emotion
LOLITA
ing in every
all
way than
his wife.
And
find
it difficult
203
to accept
who
it's
hard
even as a
thriller
is
concealing their homosexuality; but actors, and especially English actors, generally
it's
hard to be
granted in
surprised at
this
suspense context of
comfortable feeling
got that
we were supposed
to feel sympa-
feel
The
is
that Dirk
life.
liOlita
The
ads asked
"How
make
few days
movie of Lolita
mark was moved, and the ads asked "How did they ever make
a movie of Lolita?" and after that, the caution: "for persons
over 18 years of age." Either way, the suggestion was planted
204
"
96 1-1 96 3
The
advertising has
with Lolita"
It
turns out
and so
is
(now that
much
of
it;
they didn't really like the book, they don't want to see the
movie because of
all
ing
it
much about
it
into a comedy.)
superfluous (they
and
of it);
if
tron?
in
made
the book.
who
was
really
de trop?
said,
"She looks
to
be a good
seventeen," and the rest of the press seemed to concur in this peculiarly inexpert
up the
Lolita doll
and
it
its
review with
"Wind
is
."
.
novel had been "turned into a film about this poor English guy
who
the
is
New
Nabokov
sly
young broad." In
at least as
is
it is
equally clear
is
clear that
He
has
medium
LOLITA
deserves
."
After
who would
all this,
205
the film?
The
surprise of Lolita
is
how
enjoyable
it is:
comedy with
you laugh.
tern
An
it's
the
it's
it's
surrealist.
It
you gasp
new comic
and
there's
even a
the wit
mouth?
The
when
is
Critics,
who
reviews are a
remained
as
pat-
commentary
so "hip"
new
when
first
in the forties
after
feel
comedy
of gray matter.
Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.'s,
ex cathedra judgment
that Lolita
The movie
funny
adaptation
something so
far
beyond the
206
who can
the point, writes that "Mr. Kubrick inclines to dwell too long
Mr.
who
slight
world
purpose"
is
trail."
a conception to talk
The
tines of silent
comedy
they
comment on
film.
it,
and
comment
this
critical
is
the
new
forward,
action of the
condescension toward
Sellers,
critics'
character.
is
Now
Sellers
who
trail"
He
is
indeed
and
he digs
bury, and pre-
man
It
is
a little
The Wind,
in
which Lillian Gish digs a grave for the man she has murdered
and then, from her window, watches in horror as the windstorm
uncovers the body. But in Lolita our horror is split by laughter:
Humbert has it coming
not because he's having "relations"
with a minor, but because, in order to conceal his sexual predilections, he has put on the most obsequious and mealy-minded of
masks. Like the homosexual professors
American
who
LOLITA
ing their unconventional sex
be troublesome
to
lives
worm and
Quilty knows
207
on any im-
Humbert
is
it.
has
somehow managed
into an advantage
cal assets.
is
thirties
Even
he
all
much
sinister
reserves
of energy)
is
man
in his mid-
flaccid, so that
sly,
body
without physi-
paper-pushing middle-class
his facial
man
he always looks
of a response.
The
rather
almost
He
Quilty
the
who
who
de-
and then
cares
comic
style as
the English
commander who pretends to have gone over to the Russians in A Touch of Larceny. And now, in Lolita he's really in
command of a comic style: the handsome face gloats in a rotting
smile. Mason seems to need someone strong to play against.
naval
He's very good in the scenes with Charlotte and with her friends,
and
especially
208
96 1-1 963
ence"
imagine being so drained of reactions that you have to
be aroused to distaste! ) but his scenes with Lolita, when he must
dominate the action, fall rather flat.
Perhaps the reviewers have been finding so many faults with
Lolita because this is such an easy way to show off some fake
kind of erudition: even newspaper reviewers can demonstrate
the movie
different,
stories)
you'll
much
probably
find that even the characters that are different (Charlotte Haze,
especially,
who
has
become the
culture-vulture rampant)
know what
enough
is
Sue Lyon
is
until
perhaps a
it
recalls Blake's
is
are
is
"You never
but
than enough
not be-
America
lately?
The
classmates of
some
is
ten.
Sue Lyon
herself
it is
is
good
gestive of a miniature
fourteen-
them look
insufficiently writ-
Elvis
my
of
is
amusingly sug-
Presley)
strapless
bathing
suits
and have
figures.
on the
classic
is
chase theme
Quilty as
new
Humbert's walk-
Humbert and
is
chased
LOLITA
209
mad
is,
unfortunately, lost: the film badly needs the towns and motels
It suffers
It
may seem
like a dreadfully
"un-
when he
real-
new
talents in
and
at his worst at
is
structured
it
areas
what
brilliantly
is
it
nerv-
so clumsily struc-
tured that you begin to wonder what was shot and then cut out,
why
first
It's as if
the wonder
is,
in,
it is
Kubrick
that with
all
he
did,
it's
no wonder;
makers
to
that has
become consecrated
is
a wilder
comedy
for being,
run theaters, "for persons over 18 years of age" does not mean
that children are prohibited but simply that there are no reduced
prices for children. In second-run
panied by a
member
Humbert Humbert.
of
is
210
96 1-1 963
Breathless to
and
Monogram
fifties.
Like Godard,
Pictures, Truffaut
is
who
dedicated
young, and he
211
youth.
And
is
no doubt
setting
its
who
Charles Aznavour
turned actor
rather
like Sinatra,
he
ject.
an American underworld
from Philadelphia to France.
is
a popular singer
is
like
is
like a tragic
embodiment
of
own
he
off:
experi-
it
he thinks that if he doesn't do anything he won't
and he won't cause suffering to others. The girl, Marie
Dubois
later the smoky-steam-engine girl of Jules and Jim
is like a Hollywood forties movie type; she would have played
ing of
feel
well with
honest
girl.
to Godard's Breathless;
gangster thriller
is
human comedy. A
not hopeless,
much
we can
pleasure in
the sardonic
life
little
enjoy
it.
man who
ence, even
if
the
man
is
The
little
is
a tribute to
is
so
piano player,
negate experience.
is
himself a
human
experi-
and
the
212
have
When
am
an absence of
it.
and
nihilistic, I
teachers.
mood,
They want
New
villains
"the moral,
if
floors;
Time
decides that
might, at
least,
but Time
is
like
led reviewers to
that strange.
critics
mann
isn't
seem
it
who
Jules
is
move with
the times.
They
are full
and defeat
all
compounded
not
arbitrarily as
and
the
of Shoot the Piano Player, as of Breathseems small and unimportant compared to the big themes
of so many films, but it only seems small: it is an effort to deal
less,
is
for a writer.
And what
writer does
A number
of reviewers have complained that in his improvisamethod, Truffaut includes irrelevancies, and they use as
a gangster who is running
chief illustration the opening scene
away from pursuers bangs into a telephone pole, and then is
helped to his feet by a man who proceeds to walk along with
tory
Only
if
which
you grew up
this
life.
Is it really
21
so irrelevant?
well-made play in
bystander would have to reappear as some vital link
But
to set us in a world in
is
excitement of drama, of
ironies crisscross
a scene too
far. It
a virtuoso
familiar
The modern
when we
is
fit
in place,
we
are aston-
ished and
214
to the
plain that the plot isn't neatly tied together like Great Expectations, as to
it
isn't
What
think
is
jell,
but
was an exhilarating
it
is
try."
that
it
the mixture except in a far-out film like Beat the Devil or Lovers
pictures.)
critics
is
and audi-
a peculiarly
American element in it
the romantic treatment of the man
who walks alone. For decades our films were full of these gangsters,
the
them
all
moviemaking
we
tually respectable.
might love
And now
it
here
but
it
it is,
inspired
by our movies,
to us via France.
on
his behalf
and he
into
it.
is
21
it
out."
He
brought
is
it;
man
a changed
fair play,
is
initiative,
save his
girl,
and conquer
it,
situation
and takes
the consequences.
again defeating.
is
who
acted upon. Yet the world that surrounds the principal figures
in these
two movies
is
similar: the
is
is
so
What we
much
like
react to
own
our
is
the sentimentalist
Belmondo
in
Aznavour here
and I think there can be no doubt
that both Godard and Truffaut love their heroes.
There are incidentally a number of little in-group jokes included in the film; a few of these are of sufficiently general interest to be worth mentioning, and, according to Andrew Sarris,
they have been verified by Truffaut. The piano player is given
the name of Saroyan as a tribute to William Saroyan, particularly for his volume of stories The Man on the Flying Trapeze,
and also because Charles Aznavour, like Saroyan, is Armenian
Breathless,
(and,
would surmise,
name
embracing writers).
named Chico,
of one of the
One
most rambunctious of
life-
as a tribute to the
Marx
Brothers.
And
is
is
the im-
called Lars
the
known
to us
21 6
known
to others
activities in Paris.
If a
will help:
a character
is
or a philosophic explanation
intensely
human and
others,
and with
sympathetic,
whom
we, as
humanity- he
re-
And
Jules and
When
Jim
condemned
Jules
and
suffer
it
was
casuistry.
The
21
Le-
gion isn't wrong about the visual amorality either, and yet, Jules
and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made,
and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed
as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral. Truffaut does
not have "a definite moral viewpoint to express" and he does not
use the screen for messages or special pleading or to
sell
sex for
money; he uses the film medium to express his love and knowledge of life as completely as he can.
The film is adapted from Henri-Pierre Roche's autobiographical novel, written when he was seventy-four, with some additional material from his even later work, Deux Anglaises et le
Continent. If some of us have heard of Roche, it's probably
just the scrap of information that he was the man who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso
but this scrap shouldn't be
discarded, because both Stein and Picasso are relevant to the
characters and period of Jules and Jim. Roche is now dead, but
the model for Catherine, the Jeanne Moreau role, is a German
literary woman who is still alive; it was she who translated
Lolita into German. Truffaut has indicated, also, that some of
the material which he improvised on location was suggested by
Apollinaire's letters to Madeleine
a girl whom he had met
for a half-hour on a train.
The
to believe in her love when she most desShe kills herself and him.
The music, the camera and editing movement, the rhythm of
captivated, Jim
perately offers
fails
it.
2l8
is
why
is
overstated
New
.
with the reason for being there." Truffaut, the most youth-
and abundant of
fully alive
all
much
as Picasso needs a
And of what
maker could a reference to a studio be less apt? He works
everywhere and with anything at hand. Kauffmann says of Jules
and Jim, "There is a lot less here than meets the eye," and
Dwight Macdonald, who considers Kauffmann his only peer, is
reassured: "one doesn't want to be the only square," he writes.
If it gives him comfort to know there are two of them
reason for picking up a brush or a
lump
of clay.
film
What
is
It's
is
the enchantress
At the end,
in to everything in
we
all
made
on
his
when we
houseguest? The dullness
is
has earned
it.
Catherine
is,
of course, a
little
crazy,
become
but
that's
not too
fanatics, maniacs.
And
Catherine
is
part of a
modern woman,
new breed
219
man
that
woman
woman
satirized
She
and
to increase
is
by Strindberg, who
who
is
the
entered Western
rights that
Catherine.
Catherine, in her way, compensates for the homage she demands. She has, despite her need to intrude and to dominate,
the gift for life. She holds nothing in reserve; she lives out her
desires;
Catherine
free
visible
odd
little
says
is
than
of
lie.
many
devoid of
were
aspirin.
free spirits
if it
is
she
lies,
right
220
96 1-1 96
as
you catch
them
much happens
in
you don't
take more than a fraction of the possible meanings from the
material, you still get far more than if you examined almost any
other current film, frame by frame, under a microscope. Jules and
Jim is as full of character and wit and radiance as Marienbad is
empty, and the performance by Jeanne Moreau is so vivid that
the bored, alienated wife of La Notte is a faded monochrome. In
Jules and Jim alienation is just one aspect of her character and
we see how Catherine got there: she becomes alienated when
she can't get her
if
universal condition as in
in it)
it is
become
specialists in
who grow up
some
The war
field,
portraits of artists as
is
life.
or journalists;
becomes the
they
civilizing influence in
Bohemian
life;
both
and Jim are changed, but not Catherine. She is the unreconstructed Bohemian who does not settle down. She needed
more strength, more will than they to live the artist's life
and this determination is the imcivilizing factor. Bohemianism
Jules
when
self-destruction
last
moment
221
in the car,
is
the
them
to her
is
self-
begins
it
movie ever
much
earlier).
Catherine jump-
who
women,
is
work of
lyric
way
its
as the paintings
when
art
school of Paris
it is
and
based on.
It is
were synonymous;
Paris
filmically
is
a new
You go
The young
it is
cinema.
literature
artists
can
is
in a fancy trance,
but oh,
how
make movies!
It's
and Jim and Catherine are the ones who "make their way in
whirlpool of days
round and round together bound."
And, in the film, the song is an epiphany: when Catherine sings,
life's
222
rolling
is
crystallized,
on the
hill,
is
simple
and
you put the music on the phonograph, like the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata, it brings
back the images, the emotions, the experience. Though emotionally in the tradition of Jean Renoir, as a work of film
craftsmanship Jules and Jim is an homage to D. W. Griffith.
Truffaut explores the medium, plays with it, overlaps scenes,
uses fast cutting in the manner of Breathless and leaping continuity in the manner of Zero for Conduct, changes the size
and shape of the images as Griffith did, and in one glorious act
of homage he recreates a frame out of Intolerance, the greatest
movie ever made. Jules and Jim is the most exciting movie made
phere;
it is
so evocative that
if
West
in the
earlier
any of them. I think it will rank among the great lyric achievements of the screen, right up there with the work of Griffith and
Renoir.
Hemingway's
Adventures of a Young
I
Man
Young Man
as
is
Norman
cover
flavor of a
right
from the
tin. It's
man
223
is
torn
integrity of neither
I
is
And
leave only obscure writers with lives they can call their own.
so easy to do
and
writers' early
work
is
it
all
life
has drawn
It's
is
and
meanings
all
him
to the
it's
modern
are
more
interested in exploiting
trying to find
some way
life
making a movie that would do anystyle and method. There has rarely been
of
224
"
96 1-1 963
even an approximation of the particular qualities of Hemingway's work in the films based on his novels
the closest was
perhaps the
first
closest,
the
first
Adventures of a Young
The Snows
The Killers,
The Macomber Af-
Man
in
we can
sanctifi-
who
pulled himself
FIRES
makers
who
22
own
water.
am
about superlatives,
it
it,
rushes up
on the Plain
minutes of
an obsessive,
is
is
strange or bizarre:
it
men
as
a cannibal,
and
and
disgust.
after a
few
like
modern man
Fires on the Plain,
subject
it
demonstration that
is
The
It
When
all
violence
ap-
The
setting
is
Leyte.
is
one of the
Japanese army
strag-
terrified
tubercular,
no one wants
his flesh.
bonfires ambiguous
fires?
Perhaps
is
still
226
artists of
include
Kagi. Fires
on the
based on the book by Shohei Ooka, the greatest Japanese novel to come out of the war, which, as the translator Ivan
Plain
is
Morris
says,
of the
Mass."
on the Plain
Fires
hell.
The
a passion film
is
and
new vision
Tamura is
of
so
intense, so desperate
painfully close to
from what
is
The atmosphere
remote from our normal world: there is nothing banal, nothing extraneous to the single-minded view of man
of the film
also
is
And what
in extremis.
is
terrible
sense, beautiful
for life even in
kawa's film
is
World War
II,
is
or the experiences
We see
post-nuclear-war film
And
inferno.
men
live
There
oddly,
only to
is
when
survival
live, survival
men
are enemies.
comes
seem
when
irrelevant.
beyond
own
life
self-interest;
anyway.
He
he becomes
is
act
can be
human because he
human because he is
passionately
instinctively
and
in-
FIRES
He
civilization.
this
this practice
is
man
because
human
flesh
because
a destruction of
nibalism
is
227
how men
is
It is
girl,
but can-
obsessed
istic";
that
left.
"unreal-
(if
he
is
is left.
Just as Ivan
and hope. In
apparently inevi-
it
The
novel
ous
self-inflicted
line:
he
eats
human
flesh,
or
Each
is
of us
that "all
must
men
are cannibals,
all
women
228
if
as a result of
hunger human
with
the epilogue.
As an
humanity,
man's description
in the
New
mankind devouring
meat," here
is
its
John Cole-
Fires
as
Tamura
is
right
and
all
men
are cannibals.
Replying to Listeners
I
am
carry over
want
don't want to
let
me
discharge
communication
from a woman listener. She begins with, "Miss Kael, I assume
you aren't married
one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one's
voice when one learns to care about others." Isn't it remarkable
a few debts.
to say a few
words about
REPLYING TO LISTENERS
that
are
now
just as
to pride themselves
on
229
their chastity,
They've read Freud and they've not only got the idea that being
married is healthier, more "mature," they've also got the illusion that
that
it
full
Why,
is
so concerned
name preceded by
a Mrs.
if
marital state,
others
may
considered
how
difficult it
is
for a
The
latter accusation
is
generally
woman
is
like to console
semi-masculine.
Victorianism in
her
mind
is
its
placid
trying to
com-
will tell
you
is
It
for
in the shadows.
Doe and her sisters who write to me seem to intermean that intelligence, like a penis, is a male
The true woman is supposed to be sweet and passive
Mrs. John
pret Freud to
attribute.
she
or
whole complex of
is
the Freudian-
230
and
I'll
take
know something,
my
don't
first,
you will need a pair of balls." Mr. Dodo (I use the repetihonor of your two attributes ) movies are made and criti-
tion in
REPLYING TO LISTENERS
cism
is
23
I suggest it is time
you and your cohorts stop thinking with your genital jewels.
There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-
much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don't-you-make-movies.
know
if it
tastes good. If
it
You
makes
who
take a
I'd like to
received yesterday:
haven't been listening to your programs for very long and haven't
heard
all
while
its
its
De
evening about
reservation
until
But even
as
write this,
can almost
feel
you begin
to tighten
self,
"Well,
how about
Is
it?
it
true or not?
Am
really biased
apart?"
You
see,
haranguing you.
see
I'm not
it
as
it is
or do
When
am
trying sincerely
232
to
be of help to you.
reviewer.
But
96 1-1 963
am
now
more
you
as
until
seriously,
May
me
instead
it's
this
kind of
me mad.
my
But back
It's
enough
potential
to the letter
to
as
And
I
so
don't like?"
on he goes
thought
this
for
man was
pulling
my leg;
as
all.
Dear
man, the only real question your letter made me ask myself is,
"What's the use?" and I didn't lean back in my chair and look
REPLYING TO LISTENERS
up
at the ceiling,
self a
good
How
of the
critic
stiff
233
drink.
when
critic
The Parent
praise
Trap.
You
consider
it
is
don't
"name" movie
campaign, the same kind of
all
number
of
people.
margarine.
With
"name"
I
try
picture.
not to waste
air
may
be;
and
movies because you're not going to see them anyway; and there
wouldn't be much point or sport in hitting people who are
already down.
234
There were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letthe last broadcast on "The New American Cinema."
Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail eating the
tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the
critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty,
envious of the creative fire of the artist, and if the critic is a
woman, she is supposed to be cold and castrating. The artist is
supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care
and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is
pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.
I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this
age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative
than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous
letter writers, if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult
to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest
you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so
ters after
many poets.
Some of you
write
one
last request:
first
time
true.
it's
if
me
flattering letters
grateful,
is
You make me
feel as if I
but
the
if it's
and
Billy
Billy
one
It
and I'm
Budd
is
Budd
a clean, honest
work of
intelligence
it is
a very good
and craftsmanship.
Budd
Bounty
is.
core of
Billy
it
ex-
Mutiny on the
line; it
has a
and
intellectual excitement.
BILLY BUDD
and
method the
more
clearly
narrative line.
than
235
come through
if
The very
its
The
tell
much
performance in the
fine
so
The
Max Ophuls's Caught, the projecClash by Night, the central figure in God's Little
Acre. Considering that he is a very specialized physical type
his variety of
the tall, rangy American of Western mythology
the vicious millionaire in
fire,
tionist in
characterizations
he
is
the type
is
who
home
in
reviewers of Billy
performance. But
it is
may even be
236
evil
comprehensible.
works, but
him
it is
The
evil
96 1-1 96
he defines
is
the
makes
necessary for
he coyly puts
it,
Billy's
is,
among
other
is
so beautiful.
Budd:
it
it
is
all
wrong; his
is
BILLY BUDD
tries to
hang
understand
way
"in a
Billy.
237
why Vere
dictated by usage
in so
The
to the admiral."
it
surgeon
who
and exclaims,
not so
much
is
Claggart's
the
is
we
but he
is
man whose
we can spot,
detect: the
the Captain,
saints
we cant
evil
Billy's friend,
who
it is
must be destroyed.
"A
titled
Among
Digression," which
its
is
peculiarities
is
a chapter en-
tween the
ship's purser
Their subject
is
why
Billy's
ejaculation
mous death
zov.
is
don't want
to
and Dostoyevsky,
so closely
but it's
contempo-
own
phenomena
of death. Billy
at the
Budd,
moment
more and
of
less
is
robbed of
me
so forcibly the
first
time
it
238
96 1-1 963
comprehend
the universe
is,
is
the spasms of
common
and beautiful
The Idiot.
to
He
be subject to
musculature.
I
evil in
It
is,
it
bears
more obvious
rela-
Myshkin. It may be
worth pointing out that in creating a figure of abnormal goodness and simplicity, both authors found it important for their
Myshkin is epileptic, Billy stamhero to have an infirmity
mers. In both stories the figure is also both naturally noble and
as a character that Billy resembles Prince
found
Myshkin
in a silk-lined basket.
And
man; there is the other side of the human coin, the dark side.
Even with his last words, "God bless Captain Vere," Billy demonstrates that he is not a man he is unable to comprehend the
meaning of Vere's experience, unable to comprehend that he
:
What's
because he
is
innocent.
the reason
it is
a very
is
What
how much
is
its
of
all this is
one
is
that
extraordinary beauty
YOJIMBO
struggling to say
say
239
to say, struggling to
great writers;
no accident that
speech
Billy's
is
blocked. Dostoyevsky
can't articulate,
he
in all directions.
flails
trying to say,
is
is
be-
we respond
to his
is
is
just a victim of
unfortunate
justice.
not there.
Yojimbo
Kurosawa has made the
jimbo (The Bodyguard)
is
Our Westerner,
first
who
kills
the bodies he
is
hired to
fastest
draw
in the
24O
96 1-1 963
killer looking for employment, walks into a town divided by two rival merchants quarreling over a gambling concession, each supporting a gang of
killers. The hero is the Westerner all right, the stranger in town,
Nobody
whom
skills
alle-
weak are
simply weak.
The Westerner
called in
He
is
how
them because they disgust him. This black Robin Hood with his
bemused contempt is more treacherous than the gangsters; he
can defend his code only by a masterly use of the doublecross,
and he enjoys himself with an occasional spree of demolition
("Destruction's our delight").
The
excruciating
humor
of his
We would
ing;
it
ex-
YOJIMBO
his master's grave in
Shane,
who
241
and
new
delight, so that
when
the hero
Other
directors
where he
is,
tries to free
we
air,
giggle in agreement.
story, to
may be
we react
we
his action so
we
is
now,
are forced to
is
partly
the result of using telephoto lenses that put us right into the
fighting, into the confusion of
He
we know;
tachment
Of
this, all
is
all art
our senses
is
more
alive
not
Ironic de-
The
Sr.,
have
mocked
new techniques
melodrama.
George Stevens' Gunga Din, a model of the action genre, was
so exuberant and high-spirited that it both exalted and mocked
242
way
of
life.
The
we
cliches
we
has
come
to
pictorially
it's
If,
by now,
because "great"
composed. We'll be
of the
West
or, for a
The Gunfighter
and High Noon (the message is that the myths we never believed in anyway were false). Kurosawa slashes the screen with
action, and liberates us from the pretensions of our "serious"
Westerns. After
all
The Western
life
defender of justice
is
that
is
The
lessness
is
last
of justice.
samurai
is
system of justice
is
honor and
of the
for a ride.
all
that,
last of
The
but no
the line
not because law and order will prevail, but because his sword
for hire
is
already anachronistic.
Guns
are
coming
in.
One
of his
YOJIMBO
who
243
is
a gun-slinger,
Method
ican
actors.
That
looks
and
acts a
ridiculous little
by
fire;
human
The
haps.)
life,
in
company include
stock
seem
a giant
a bit mentally retarded, perwhimpering, maimed and cringing are so vivid they
what
sive
joyful;
is
in life
beautiful.
Still,
should
244
96 1-1 963
his images.
stylist,
The
poem of
is
is
incomparable as a modern
a vast cele-
toward parody.
Ikiru
is
the
Throne
Wood
come
to Dunsinane.)
(which makes
it
Movies
are, happily, a
mean
that people
D wight Macdonald
sacrifices his
must look
to
them
who
wouldn't give a
("He'll waste
it
man
for confirmation
The
prissy liberals
on drink") are
just
the ones
number
Candidate and
when
why
they hated
is
in
to a
The Manchurian
is
killed,
does
medium
why
understand
difficult to
popular
it:
they think
it's
who
a mistake, that
it
are sen-
couldn't
DEVI
245
Kurosawa
dares.
Devi
The Apu
which indeed
its
it is,
release fewer
the
coldness of intellectuals.
Husbands
who
who
fail
their wives
don't understand us
who
drive us nuts
it's
when
movies their
those
shouldn't, do.)
his
to
more
rational philosophy
still
respond
246
"the meaning of
96 1-1 96
life," his
Kurosawa,
simplicity
is
Ray
is
his
is
from
his experience;
but
feeling. It
which
who
simplicity of those
is
it
is
is
up
it
is
a "heartfelt" experience,
so easily because
It's a
it
appeals to feelings
phenomenal
box-office success,
"artistic" the
have invented
this
eminent
critic
away
"angled to be
(One of the delights
of life in
cultural chauvinism of
New
now
that the
San Francisco
York from
Western
Nabokov could
show
satirist like
whose
is
is
observing the
expected in
edition of the
New
York Times
New
calls
DEVI
247
Eastern banks, not the Western minds, that are destroying our
movies.)
The concept
man who
of
humanity
is
landlady
is
we do
we do
not
take
is
almost unthinkable.
We
we can
plicity of
De
human
experience
the
i5
sim-
almost
method
is
He
no passes
at the
does not
He made
al-
film today
the
critic
named
and then
to
know him." The lives of Ray and Renoir interwhen Ray, a young painter working as a layout
sected in 1950,
248
a film treatment for Father Fanchali, and Renoir was in Calcutta filming
The
perhaps a genre in
mote
itself
the
its
weaknesses
is
re-
to present
Jean
Renoir,
who
"insisted that
The Apu
modern
film like
Man
beauty, a
more primitive
:
DEVI
249
magazine
in Bengal,
he
left
don't
know how
it
hap-
with them
look."
What
story.
I
I
was
it
after
he had
on the
screen.
life,
but
itself,
knew
six
which was a
that this was
While
far
from
.
nevertheless opened
catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns
of speech.
You wanted
to
is
an opportunity
for a classic
example of
his style
and perception
25O
loosely
poverty does not nullify love and that even the most afflicted
listless in
tempo
as this
Any
one
is
Hollywood." In a review
of Aparajito, Kingsley Amis, then Esquires movie critic, thought
that "Satyajit Ray, the director, seems to have set out with the
as a
rough
cut' in
The World
of
promiscuously.)
Each
of the films of
The Apu
think a development, of
style.
Unfortunately, those
who
re-
DEVI
it
appeared,
now
251
no
would say of Devi, "This is the greatest Indian film
ever made." And if there had been no trilogy and no Devi, I
would say the same of his still later Two Daughters, based on
Tagore stories, of which the first, The Postmaster, is a pure and
simple masterpiece of the filmed short story form. (The second
has memorable scenes, beauty, and wit, but is rather wearying.)
Ray's least successful film that has been imported, The Music
Room (made early, for respite, between the second and third
other films are smaller in scope. But,
if
trilogy, I
we must
revise
standards
it
isn't a
constructed; but
its
good movie:
it's
it's
a great experience.
It's
it's
poorly
a study of noblesse
ing.
We are forced
greatest
moments
and egomania
same time we are forced
and
at the
The
hero
is
of our
to see
great because
Ray
sometimes (for us Westerners, and perhaps for Easterners also?) a little boring, but what major artist outside film
and drama isn't? What he has to give is so rich, so contemplative in
film
is
approach (and
medium except
this
we
we begin
moments
we
feel for
epic poems.
252
Although India
movies
it
is
produces,
Ray
is
did not
if it
some
exist.
Ray could
own, and then judge the wealth, the prodigious, fabudraw upon. Just
because there has been almost nothing of value done in films in
India, the whole country and its culture is his to explore and
express to the limits of his ability; he is the first major artist to
draw upon these vast and ancient reserves. The Hollywood director who re-makes biblical spectacles or Fannie Hurst stories
no matter
for the third or sixth or ninth time is a poor man
call their
first
West
spoken by
than
less
not
their
India produces so
acy;
films
if
many
illiter-
it's
for
impractical to
dub
DEVI
doubtful
It's
Ray could
if
255
without the
all
it's
shock-
ingly small
and everything
films (everyone
and
false that
in
them
its
view of Indian
ernment
is
official
life.
is
so clean
is
TV
is
who removed
We
is
set in the
and shiny
commercials )
misleading
mean
that,
young heroine
is
don't
know why
the Indian
shame
at Kali
worship
particularly
makes
The
clear, Kali
is
film has so
when
generally called
"Ma."
that
me
was not
empty
"Think what Bunuel would do with this."
I'm grateful that it's Ray, not Bunuel, and that the undertones
stay where they belong
down under. Bunuel would have made
it explicit. Ray never tells us that this is the old man's way of
taking his son's bride away from him; he doesn't tell us that this
is the old man's way of punishing his Westernized, Christianized son; he never says that religion is the last outpost of the
old man's sensuality, his return to childhood and "Ma" love.
But we experience all this, just as we experience the easy drift
surprised
theater muttered,
in the
254
of the lovely
silly
young
96 1-1 963
girl
is
might
call
adores;
when
is
girl
a goddess,
who
fails
is
certainly beau-
is
finds
it
not too
to cure the
what we
see
is
the
girl's
much
difficult
nephew she
tian oversimplification:
lieve,
She
a goddess.
tiful
is
a Chris-
readiness to be-
pride as a desire to
please-the culmination, we suspect, of what the culture expects of a high-born girl. And, surrounded by so much luxury,
what is there for the girl to do but try to please? The whole
indolent life is centered on pleasure.
Ray creates an atmosphere that intoxicates us as well; the
household is so rich and the rich people so overripe. The handsome, soft-eyed men in their silks and brocades are unspeakably
fleshly; the half-naked beggars on the steps outside are clothed
in their skins, but the rich are eroticized by their garments. And
perhaps because of the camera work, which seems to derive from
some of the best traditions of the silent screen and the thirties,
perhaps because of the Indian faces themselves, the eyes have
depths
and a disturbing look of helplessness
that we are
unused to. It's almost as if these people were isolated from us
and from each other by their eyes. It is not just that they seem
them
film,
it is
this religion
when
is
(Tagore's
dess; she
is
exquisite, perfect (a
roles.
manage
And
idols,
and, in the
great-granddaughter),
both these
Hindu
the
men
is
lost be-
fourteen
word
so
that they
DEVI
now
to see
them
Ray was
many
able to convince
decays.
its
to
The
The
past
is
setting of
just before
it
we not perhaps
who knows
people that
life;
Devi seems
255
that his
(Can we
distinguish
drawn
its
to a film in
collapse of beliefs. It
still
is
seem
part of our
"real"
and
upper-class decadence
it is
it;
Ray's feeling
it is
way
of life that
them
makes
made
hateful; they
Ray, by giving
and
The
rich,
dreamy
sensuality as Apu's
tain his
way
of
life
own
as
is
human
in his
new
pressures;
and
matter
how bad
affirmation of
De
it is.
life,
Sica,
without fear
Ray
says,
"we must
to the richness of
its
Ray
is good no
which is an
of becoming maudlin. But is
power to
reveal."
256
Sillitoe's
Runner
gestive way.
is
The
short story The Loneliness of the Long Disvery good in a simple but disturbing and sug-
who
is
writing his
or another,
we
all share,
own
one degree
and
fears
spiteful
It's all
yours."
He is
he's not
and
at the
he's
becoming
more
clever, a big-
ger thief.
The
society,
father
who
it
up
and died
kill
He
and
represents,
we
rejecting
this
He
as unyielding.
is
the chance.
with his
is
in horrible pain
would
with some
like a lord
lived miserably
257
he had
tells us, if
is
art,
share,
about.
He
asks
no quarter and he
whole man.
He shows
our view of
life if
gives none.
we were
hatred
is
care
consistent
as
consciousness
He
we
us
all
up
in the
which we know to be
He
is
the
modern urban
at least partly
valid.
The
Sillitoe,
turns
him
into a socialist
himself:
explains that
dis-
he
didn't get
the profits.
Tom
Sillitoe's
movie
script
and Tony
class
warfare
The
its
public school.
And
the film
is
is
full
the
of easy ironies
Borstal
The
bite of
the original character was that Colin wasn't merely at war with
258
The
film,
tries to
To make
make
He
much
social inequality
once
easier point
under capitalism.
when
time of his
life
with some
tarts
is
his
become
girl. In the movie he's calcuand resentful only with representatives of the authoritarian society; he's gentle and defenseless and loyal and naive and
touching with his own kind
though stern as the ham in
Hamlet when his mother misbehaves ("You brought your fancy
man into the house before my father was cold"). He's a sensitive, good boy; he's even given a gamin-like charm and a
sudden, crooked smile that lights up the withdrawn, aged,
"Why,
downtrodden face. I think we are supposed to feel
look, he never had a chance to be young. He only steals for a
lark, for a bit of a good time, for fun. He's really innocent and
lating
harmless."
The
implication
is
good Colin, which the movie suggests is the true Colin that society is crushing, would take over.
He's defiant, not as in the story because the ugliness and mechanization of modern life make work and adaptation seem like a
social system, this basically
because of social
injustice.
In making Colin
beautiful,
us that
girl,
259
modern
life,
madman's view
that forces us
to see
We
ness.
when we
but
story,
its
power
is
in
its
narrow-
we can no
longer wholly
about Colin's
where
see
it's
leading us,
He
he throws the
He's tough
site
girl;
his happiness
race, the
of "tough"
is
"spaz."
A spaz
is
is
a person
full of soft
who
is
courteous to
adults
still
call
and
a square;
his nervousness
more
brutally graphic
way
26o
don't, of course,
have to
steal;
with methods that, from what I've observed, are as cold and
spiteful as Colin's thieving.
I
have been horrified hearing these kids talk about their own
They
more compassion-
aliveness
effort. It
experience, something as
Why,
with
subhuman
as
it
life.
many important
reducing a
major
and platitudes
of proletarian youth battling against the prigs and bullies of the
capitalist system? Perhaps because Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning, also based on Alan Sillitoe material, had been the biggest box-office success in England in 1961, The Loneliness of
the Long Distance Runner was reshaped for the screen to ex-
conflict in morality
and
Perhaps Sillitoe
thought that the story he had written was less important than
the opportunity the screen provided for class-warfare propaganda. So far as I can see the film succeeds only with the liberals
of the art-house audience, those
trained to salivate
tions.
Had he
who have
SV21 CONFESSIONS OF A
MOVIE DIRECTOR
261
wonder
much
on the
if I
offense.
them
call
bourgeois morality.
Many
of
it
is
very
much
attitudes.
may be
theme of Sillitoe's story in which the rejecbecomes a way of life upset even the
author, that he preferred to clean it up for the movies, to make
It
that the
The
pity
is
some
of
its
firmed in
and
instead recon-
its
their hero:
8 M/2 : Confessions of a
Some
is
Movie Director
handsome, narcissistic actor who was enterabout his love affairs with various ladies
and gentlemen, concluded by smiling seductively as he antaining
years ago a
me
with
stories
262
nounced, "Sometimes
The
director-hero of SV2
is
who know
it
final,
and
me
as
it
in
am"
is
is
Just as
the world
(it's
never
of "giving
his
once he finds
it
away,"
i.e.,
having
it
stolen
between
is
we
his love for his wife, the pleasures of his mistress, his
ideal of innocence,
tion of a
work of
and
art
his
may be
SY21 CONFESSIONS OF A
precondition to "creation"
popular Freudianized
It is
in film
is,
MOVIE DIRECTOR
(and of everyone
lives of artists
else).
when
a film
maker
263
applicable to film?
What movie
modern
writing; but
is
block?
No
nating in
itself,
or
interesting way.
It's
is
more
little
most
connection with
likely to
be
solitary,
some-
with a
stick,
is
the
new
cant
it,
it
founda-
tions encourage
it
it,
colleges
embarrassing
satire
on
when
it's
big, expensive
how can we
distinguish
movies
it
from
is
its
itself
When
target?
When
man makes
264
own
to laugh. Exhibitionism
joke,
is its
own
Fellini's
1 96 1-1 963
we may
feel
too uncomfortable
reward.
major one
is
it
commercial
has a
raised.
failure
difficult
A movie director
and commercial
busi-
he
The Leopard), Show reported that "In terms of lire spent, they
have nearly been Italian Cleopatras. But what Hollywood bought
What the Italians
dearly in Cleopatra was a big empty box
got in 8V2 was a work of immense visual beauty and impressive
philosophy, a sort of spectacle of the spirit that was more than
they had paid for. A masterpiece is always a bargain." Show's
"philosophy" is the kind you look for, like Fellini's "ideas." 8V2
does indeed make a spectacle of the spirit: what else can you
.
SY21 CONFESSIONS OF A
house:
if it
place and
or the
When
we no
it
reflect personalities
we may admire
we
life,
tastes.
involvement
or,
265
in the story;
MOVIE DIRECTOR
to relate to lives
and
it
has
feelings.
home movie was Nights of Cabiria; 8V2 is a madwho celebrates La Dolce Vita, i.e.,
"What marvelous casting/' his admirers exclaim,
in finding
them. That
is
all
only in literature, or
on
critics
who
who
the more need to express it? Or, as the wife said to her
drunken husband, "If you had any brains, you'd take them out
and play with them."
And the "spa" is just the place to do it, as Marienbad demonstrated. Those who honed their wits interpreting what transpired Last Year at Marienbad now go to work on 8V2, separating
out "memories" and fantasies from "reality." A professor who
teaches film told me he had gone to see 8V2 several times to
test out various theories of how the shifts between the three
less self,
266
96 1-1 963
answer.
When
self-absorption as "creativity."
"Umbrian
angel."
Now
Fellini
taking
up the
Claudia Cardinale, a rather full-bosomed angel with an ambiguous smile. Fluttering about diaphanously, she's not so different
from Cyd Charisse or Rita Hayworth in gauze on the ramps of
an
or Columbia production number. She becomes a
showman's ideal of innocence- pulchritudinous purity, the
angel-muse as "star" (of the movie and the movie within the
movie) a stalemate endlessly reflected, an infinite regression.
MGM
IV
Polemics
Is
Or,
"day"
is
is
first
the sort of
man who
establishing that
it is
in
The time-honoured
artistic
we get
to this:
differentiation
analysis of story types. It is true that in any given case these two
components of the work of art interpenetrate each other insolubly:
each content includes form elements; each form is also content
But it is no less true that the concepts "form" and "content" have a
basis in the properties of the artistic work itself. And the near.
is
27O
POLEMICS
With complex live entities the accuracy of definitions does not suffer from the fact that they retain
rather a point in their favour.
maximum
precision
which
must be
attempt to remove their seeming vagueness for the sake of semantically irreproachable concepts is thoroughly devious.
What
limation,
film
is
is
And
Kracauer's theory of
much
He
what he
likes (that
presents a theory
mentation (dogmentation,
is
it.
The
a tendency to
who wants
of
on the
all,
But we may
feel too cheery about where things are heading when informed that "The following historical survey, then, is to provide
the substantive conceptions on which the subsequent systematic
considerations proper will depend." Doesn't exactly sound like
an invitation to a party, does it? So many people who fled
from Hitler, stripped of their possessions, seem to have come
not
German pedantry in
their heads.
Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality is expensively got out by Oxford University Press; it is, I suppose,
Kracauer's major work since that Freudian-Marxian heavy entertainment From Caligari to Hitler, which is always referred to as
a landmark in film scholarship
I suppose it is, in the sense that
nobody else has done anything like it, Gott sei dank! The book
carries such dust-jacket blurbs as Paul Rotha saying it is "The
most important work to date in the English language on the
IS
Richard
It will
Museum
And
Modern Art
of
work supersedes
271
a deep impact
regarded as an art."
is
Film Library,
make
all
previous
There
is,
in
any
art, a
monomaniac
more confused
and single-minded and dedicated (to untenable propositions)
the theorist is, the more likely he is to be regarded as serious and
important and "deep"
in contrast to relaxed men of good
sense whose pluralistic approaches can be disregarded as not
fundamental enough. During the years in which dialecticians
were stating the thesis that "the art of the motion picture is
montage" some very good movies were being made that had
nothing whatever to do with "montage." (And those who were
making a religion of the theory usually pointed out as examples
the films Eisenstein made long after he'd abandoned
or been
forced to abandon
"montage.") Related monomaniac schools
developed
for example, Sight and Sound wants movies to be
"firm" (a term one might think more applicable to a breast
into a
or a conviction).
he believes
is in the great, lunatic tradition
"animated by a desire to picture transient
Siegfried Kracauer
material
at its most ephemeral. Street crowds, involunand other fleeting impressions are its very meat
life, life
tary gestures,
.
is
medium
..." He
medium
it
..."
is
mean? Either
assump-
it's
a general
movies have
272
POLEMICS
move
same: would
a photographic
is
medium,
an
it
must
history are
all
bears
little
resemblance to the
However
if it
It fulfils itself in
am
phenomena
for their
own
sake.
puzzled to
know how
this ripple of
could possibly help us to see into the art of the film: often the
worst and most embarrassing part of a film
is
the accidental,
exhibits
moment may be
fiftieth take.
its
un-
a twitch of
There are
ac-
cidental" that
is
"cinema"
without
referring to
How
some other
can you say
IS
273
comedy what
and
is
deliberate anarchy
What
it
or neo-realism
the look of so
What is
this
nature that
is
appealed
to, a
this
many
book
be-
more
professionals as
"natural."
Why?
"Film," he
and "the
us,
tells
artificiality
of
medium's
the
medium
this
declare
its
preference,
is
is
at
first
amused
What
are
we
to
make
a task which
it
like reproduction
life-
any transaction in real life ...'"? Well, I can't say that the
film camera has ever disowned this task, any more than it ever
claimed it. But I can certainly cite numerous people who have
used
it
and Eisenstein,
for
who
a movie.
ever
made
example
and
When
just
about everybody
else
is
it,"
photographed in "reality"
he is including whatever is
empty generalization
or try-
either
an
274
POLEMICS
reality,
is
once
mind by which he
"gravitates" i.e., is drawn
to
toward
his idea of
be.
"Imagine a film
is
more
specifically a film
than
one which utilises brilliantly all the cinematic devices and tricks
to produce a statement disregarding camera-reality." But what is
camera-reality? What can it be but the area of reality he wants
the camera to record? To put it simply and crudely, Earth is no
more real than Smiles of a Summer Night. Kracauer is indulging in one of the oldest and most primitive types of thinking
he's like a religious zealot who thinks his life of prayer and
fasting is more "real" than the worldly life of men in big cities,
and that "nature" has somehow dictated his diet of nuts and
berries.
"It
films
is
realistic
tendency." Obviously
Can tautology go
once he has convinced himself that the
definition of cinema.
much
by
all
his
But then,
motion picture
further?
art of the
and commands,
next step for
recording obligations"
to
he'd be the
first
to turn
you
is
in
it is
the
all directions.
IS
we might as well
when it misbehaves.
that
it
start looking
275
what cannot
we can
translate this to
mean
becomes
magical
should
"uncinematic"
"Mary
definition.
game
in playing this
dull
by
girl
back to
and
But
why
of arbitrary
pudding."
choice, like
lines of
demarcation.
He
finds, for
example,
and
all
in
is
medium; no
line of
demarcation
is
276
POLEMICS
Chaplin's
"Murphy bed"
routine in
One
AM.
is
my mind
over
it); it
probably could
either
funny
"The
cinematic subjects."
Who
them among
cares
aesthetics in
their special
out their
you
territories
stick
Who
started this
which the
different
Florida?
tiates
him from
other animals, or
if it's
so very important.
And
what motion picture art shares with other arts is perhaps even
more important than what it may, or may not, have exclusively.
Those who look for the differentiating, defining "essence"
generally overlook the main body of film and stage material and
IS
much
277
is
almost no "dif
d'Arc and
Day
of
ups, long-shots, fast cutting are all possible on the stage, even
though they require somewhat different techniques. And there
is no more reason for a stage director to avoid fluid techniques
that resemble movies (he can't avoid them in staging, say,
Shakespeare or Buchner or Peer Gynt or To Damascus) than
for a moviemaker to avoid keeping his camera inside one room
can take pleasure
if a room is where his material belongs.
in the virtuoso use of visual images in Dovzhenko's Arsenal or
Gance's Napoleon; we can also take pleasure in a virtuoso performer like Keaton simply changing hats in Steamboat Bill, Jr.
We
is
his desperate
be
all
explain that
pedant.
it is
How
Astaire's
touching he becomes
man
when he
him
but
naughty
friends
into
heaven.
278
POLEMICS
a movie unless
it
its
life's
of his existence
link with
Once
not
in
it.
again he
falls
consummate dancing
"Astaire's
The
"meant."
crucial
word here
think
it
is
may be
life." Isn't it
enough that
the vicissitudes of
life
but
because
"...
it
is
ballets issue."
raw material of
in the finished
art
is still
work
visible (or
he can pretend
it's
visible)
all art and go back to "nature"? His "aesthetout with any intellectual rigour, rejects art. If you
what could be more inseparable from that flow (of life) than
'natural' dancing?" some nebulous conception of "nature" has
become your standard of art. It is, of course, on this same basis
that reviewers of musicals often praise works like
or
West
Side
Story and
nothing
is
On
the
Town
Wagon though
patently
efforts to
IS
make
it
279
The
the story.
dialogue becomes as
Tom's Cabin
is
the theatrical
ballet; the
production like
into
little
effort to
make
stylization of
and depiessing.
It is this
clumsy
many
we
we
What
matters
much
talent or artistry
The
it
is
seemed
simply
to
lengths to which
You may
many
plot.
form of convention or
stylization
is
if it
28o
POLEMICS
who would
rather day-
And how is this for another effort to justify dancing by reference to the "candid" camera? "Records of dancing sometimes
amount to an intrusion into the dancer's intimate privacy. His
may show in queer gestures and distorted
which are not intended to be watched
However, the supreme virtue of the camera consists precisely in
acting the voyeur." But the supreme virtue of an Astaire is
precisely that you don't see the sweat and grimaces and months
of nerve-wracking preparation: you see the achieved elegance.
Astaire has the wit to make the dance appear casual and, as
self-forgetting rapture
facial expressions
audience,
we recognize
We are never
is
is
Here
is
it
just
for a
minute taken
in
by the
it is
partly because
we
recog-
spontaneous;
convention that
we
enjoy the
happened.
an example of Kracauer's
critical
method at work on
"To be or not to
No
tator experiences
something
like a shock.
He
little
scene
is
are likely to
as a
resent the
more
you have to be
an intrusion: it intrudes on the styland enjoyment of the Shakespearean conventions, and it adds an extra, visual layer of
meaning to the soliloquy itself by introducing a redundancy
Of
ized sets,
it
is
IS
281
want
demean the
don't wish to
them
moment
is
Romeo and
is
exquisite
ous, brazen.
What
consciousness
.
is
we have
of the
moviemaking?
medium
phenomena overwhelming
overwhelmed, what becomes
.
consciousness
[If
of phenomena?]
medium
this predilection?
If so, it is
Is it
the "me-
phenomena in
and Peace, Beethoven in his
symphonies, Goya in his Disasters of War, Picasso in Guernica.
Was it the film "medium" that showed a predilection, or is it
that artists like Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Kurosawa wanted at certain times in their creative lives to deal with
such phenomena, just as they might want at other times to express more personal emotions? The Shakespeare who wrote:
that does. Shakespeare dealt with such
War
282
POLEMICS
Macbeth
less
also
cinematic than
The Birth
is
Broken Blossoms
Griffith's
of a Nation or Intolerance?
ject
matter
We
is
Odessa-steeped film
critics
tell
and
this battle
hymn
has become
1961 New
Ernest Callenbach writes "a letter to a young film
fall
maker" and says "Get thee to Cuba, and after that to Latin
America elsewhere, and then Africa." Would the same advice
be given to a young writer or painter? Why are moviemakers
violent
He'll probably
tive of
an
make
artist in
Callenbach, like so
any medium
many
is
to
make
first
preroga-
a fool of himself.
Italy
and
Richard
Griffith's selection of
this
kind of theory in
critical
evaluations as
IS
"masterpiece"
Grande
(over
Illusion
was
he
Million!)
and
his
decision
that
283
La
ment. Nevertheless, the film was a determined attempt to comment upon events and if possible to influence them." That tells
us what counts in making movies, doesn't it? You can mitigate
your crimes against the "medium" if you attempt to influence
history
histories
still
Probably de Broca's
unless he goes to
discovered in
it.
Gone with
the
lost
her
feet,
now
V, Olivier has no
hair, often
reissued with their color drained away, the focus blurred. Just
as silent
One man's
man's
"reality"
reality
Some
the ears.
is
is
human
relations.
sex.
critics are
284
POLEMICS
appearances
Why
lie
doesn't he just
is
movies:
De
Is
when he
it
thinks art
medium"
Emma
mentioned
in the
book)?
Is
real
things,"
in
as
handling masses
cinema by a
real
in
Metropolis
can
only be
justified
episode) are staged veraciously and rendered through a combination of long shots
and
close shots
IS
285
of
is
dialectic, of course)
also
is
Think of such
De
story films as
emphasis
much
is
particular individuals as
drama or
people
we
in film
There
who
don't get to
the
not so
types representative of whole groups
us; their protagonists are
isn't
a type.
And
the
The
preference for
closely related.
The
inferences
professor
who
become
much more
Emma Gramatica.
is
"real."
performance as Umberto
The
is
in the
(If a
286
POLEMICS
rejects.
"stagy
And
are tossed
fantasy"
with them go
producing an uncinematic
effect."
marvelous
new
such "inner
Un
areas in art.
life"
We hadn't
interests
about Cocteau
straight
the
all
recognized,
it
"a
rather
litterateur
seems, that
He
ignore camera-reality.
sets
than a
us
film-
not a movie at
is,
by
his
system of
defini-
all.
The Medium
is
"caught in a terrifying
a theatre.")
Couldn't we introduce, at
instead of these essences
The
and
estranged from
suffers
itself" or
this point,
Hoffmann
that
its
for film
many
and
is
not that
imagery
blight so
retrogressions
is
"it
stagy,
is
cinema
but that
it
to
is
natural
prefer the
IS
287
enchantments of an obscure railway station to the painted splendour of enchanted woods/' Couldn't we say simply that as
anything a camera can record is "natural," nature is not a
criterion in judging movies? An obscure railway station may be
enchanting, so
Reinhardt's
cal
may
moment on
film
indicating
that
is
what
an
is
in
exquisite, magi-
arts
(which
it
has never
left,
except in film
288
POLEMICS
God and
want
to go.
The
is
".
superstitions
quisitive
it
mind
by the
and the outright scepticism of
of the knight
in-
his
whole.
He
Obviously English
is
him
"mental
reality") that
it
how can
classifica-
mean
What
them?
How
IS
He's
when he
of surprises:
full
de force"
this
is
calls
a term of opprobrium:
(The Grapes
of
it
(Madame Bovary
in the Jean
which
in
is
Would you
ever hit
human
Renoir
what would be
on "a difference
289
Stein-
"First,
farm workers, thus revealing and stigmatising abuses in our soThis too falls in line with the peculiar potentialities of
film." Not only wouldn't I ever guess - but to go back a step, I
ciety.
remember Valentine
Madame
Renoir's
classic of
of the oppressed."
How
On Approval
To
Preston
He
it.
as "borderline cases"
or
should
it
be forgotten
that, like
Bunuel,
many an
avant-garde
artist
How
can
we make
courtyard" in he Sang
dun
him
"un-
all
his
290
POLEMICS
rippling leaves?
The
And what
memories.
resemble.
his
what
movie
is.
It's
a timid
newspaper account of
it
an
almost surrealist
little ballet
with
moment
of acting, even
almost
anything
life. It is
art
IS
29
we can
when we
from the
we go to see a distillation.
How
that
can so
many
be
little interest in
improper to
it?
possibilities?
How
the
is
it
like
one
Menilmontant? (What
of the dazzling master-
And
embedded
"The Re-
we
philosophy.
How
is
it
that the
"medium"
when even
And how
is it
that in a period
how
292
POLEMICS
on writing about
look as
if
made by
cameras, though
many
them
of
were
if it
written by typewriters.
There are men whose concept of love is so boring and nagif that's what love is, you don't want it, you
want something else. That's how I feel about Kracauer's "cinema." I want something else.
l 9^ 2
ging that you decide
Circles
and Squares
the
first
competence of a director
ond premise
is
the technical
is
as a criterion of value.
The
sec-
The
third
and
ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.
Interior
meaning
is
director's personality
and
his material.
Walsh has
pleasantly unpretentious
until
one incongruously
293
intense scene with George Raft thrashing about in his sleep, re-
High
Sierra
Andrew
Sarris,
Perhaps a little more corn should be husked; perhaps, for example, we can husk away the word "internal" (is "internal
meaning" any different from "meaning"? ) We might ask why
.
the link
is
"crucial"? Is
it
something deeper on Walsh's part? But if his merit is his "pleasantly unpretentious manner" (which is to say, I suppose, that,
recognizing the limitations of the script, he wasn't trying to do
manner like
bad
is
We might also
"essentially feminine":
is
it
play-
resist
ask
the
why
more fem-
woman becomes
a sympathetic
This
is
how we might
critic
294
POLEMICS
'
but
this joy of
But
and point
from
techniques, and themes re-
artists
others)
devices,
is
(as well as
an
artist
is
is
films
ical
Or
shall
we
take the
more
cyn-
his
movies?
If
we may be permitted
a literary analogy,
we can
visualize
who,
by the application of something like the auteur theory, would
emerge as a much more important writer than Dostoyevsky; for
is
tech-
is
Consent or
What
295
it.
way they do
directors,
It
theory
Sarris's
is
Which
take to
absence of a
critic
and
to aesthetics,
it
hope
Sarris's
argument.
his double-edged
ency, then
may be
is
necessary in the
is
new approach
If his aesthetics
is
based on expedi-
it
takes extra-
theory in the
becomes a
among
arts,
rigid
auteur
critics).
in
The
Ammra may
and
intuition, ratfr er
i,
work
and i,~i~:
helping others
1
i.1
j.
to see.
The Outer
Cirele
premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value.
.
the
first
This seems
less
commonplace
when he paraphrases
2g6
POLEMICS
this
his greatness
sion
and
is
style.
And
just as there
own
were writers
who triumphed over various kinds of technical incompeand who were, as artists, incomparably greater than the
Dreiser
tence,
appear
a^ew
Just as
toward grandeur.
already done
new work
in other arts
is
it
violates the accepted standards and thus seems crude and ugly
and incoherent, great new directors are very likely to be condemned precisely on the grounds that they're not even good di-
cases,
to
is
know
they don't
rectors, that
true,
but does
it
matter
hindrance, leading
of their
them
their "business."
when
to express in films? It
director
may
some
even be a
Cocteau may be
at least,
The
in
for yourself."
Which,
is
right:
his films
he produces
out knowing the standard methods, without the usual craftsmanship of the "good director," then that is the way he works.
I
would amend
Sarris's
premise
to, " In
wor ks of a
lesser ra nk.
297
auteur
critics
are
is
on
who
this
they
their understanding)
The Middle
Circle
the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.
Up
when
any
art,
down
the personalities of
all
itself
tainly
does that
more
is
more
make
it
be
The
distinguishable in
is
cer-
Man
Out,
Islands,
if
The
for
Fallen Idol,
298
POLEMICS
works?
is
it
a beautiful film;
we can
The
Madame
Earrings of
but Le
Plaisir
work
Madame de
in
rector
about the
director's personality;
When
at the movie,
a famous di-
we
when he makes
When
much
we
if
that's
(it
has be-
when he makes an
atrocity
and
and
else to
ality"
It
we
come
don't think
a stinker
watch.
like
of Ophuls,
.is.
de
is
gets
them reveal
from
not so
the
much
feedback he wants
a personal style as a
critics
respond
respond. This
critics call
is
just as
artist
but a
prestidigitator.
The
not so surprising
often
to apply "the
because
to brazen his
And, by the way, the turning point came, I think, not with Moby Dick,
but much earlier, with Moulin Rouge. This may not be
so apparent to auteur critics concerned primarily with style and individual
*
as Sarris indicates,
"Huston
is
virtually a forgotten
behind him
."
high-style thriller
man
is
not a director's
film,
then
how can
is
299
classics
Huston both
film
what
is?
And
the
if
a criterion of value,
so
The
unmistakably in
like
is
Key Largo?
If
a director's movie?
Isn't
ton's movies
some
and of
fine film
achievements and
we
we
we
Then,
the Devil,
after
we
see
Our
Beat
United
States,
than
auteur theory
it
almost de rigeur to
re-
How
is it
say,
be rejected along with his mediocre recent work, but Fritz Lang,
being sanctified as an auteur, has his bad recent work praised
along with his good? Employing more usual norms, if you respect the Fritz Lang who made
and You Only Live Once,
if
style
it is
touches, because
300
POLEMICS
an
cates that
It
an
is
his good;
insult
it
indi-
either.
sity of California
When
work of genius."
asked
work of
my
he
how he
"Why, of
friend
said,
it
as "a
could so decourse,
he does
is
it's
work
a priori.
good. (This
is
not so
far
as the
judgment
this
Dior, so
is
critics
is
it's
work,
either.)
it is
as
own game
it would be more
he also tried to make a case for Huston's bad pictures? That would be more consistent than devising a category
called "actors' classics" to explain his good pictures away. If The
Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of Sierra Madre are actors'
classics, then what makes Hawks's To Have and Have Not and
as to dismiss
consistent
The Big
ties
if
of Bogart
Sarris
elan
come from?
It's like
is
barbarous.
Where
else
should
forever
and
rectors' careers;
only
make
it
well,
they can
who he
up
cal insight.
critics if
3OI
and who
way out by
arbitrary
not merely not based on their theory; their decisions are beyond
criticism. It's like a
woman's
it
forever.
But
this
"elan"
is
moviemaking,
from
and other
artists
cannot be wrenched
from
tors
their historical
May
critics
reduced to a
is
suggest that
environments (which
is,
Elan
as the
permanent attribute
more meaningful
he
working
is
description of elan
spond
to in
works of
really
done
it" or
art
is
May
what
powers
to put
it
can only be
Sarris posits
in
idiocy.
if,
direc-
suggest that a
man
and
feels
when
what we
re-
when he
got
had
it
him
in
to
do anything so good,"
creativity.
Sarris experiences "joy"
when he
recognizes a pathetic
little
them and
to
which they
all
the
life
their
302
POLEMICS
The Inner
The
Circle
third
of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema
an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material.
as
This
is
we have
a remarkable formulation:
it is
arts,
this theoretical
is
province of film.
Their
directs
mifpiir
iHflal
any
Dy shoving; bits
"style"
is
much the
why there
is \]\e.
m an
who
handed
of style up the
script that's
to
him and
better
more
has been so
evpresses himself
cr eyqsspg
nT+U/*
pr
If his
matter, so
Now we
much
pWc
s ubject
can see
term which seems so inadequate when discussing the art of Griffith or Renoir or Murnau or Dreyer) a
routine, commercial movie can sure use a little "personality."
this aesthetics (the
Now
that
we have reached
turns out to be an
see
why
the shoddiest
(so long as
it
which
critics
who
is
important subject
to
his
do something he
begin to understand
mise-en-scene.
cares
why
about
is
The
a square.
irrelevant
director
Now we
on to the
who
fights
can at least
Moby Dick
its
that failed;
303
why Movie
considers Roger
Corman
material
he might be
Baby
Jane,
Reed
is
is
superior to Aldrich's
detected,
and
rejected, as a
Cukor who works with all sorts of projects has a more developed
Bergman who is free to develop his own scripts.
Not that Bergman lacks personality, but his work has declined with
abstract style than a
equaled his
examples
other
mastery.
up the
technique never
sensibility.
By
of
contrast,
scale
stylistic
the de-
consistency.
How
neat
it all is
world, that
it's
as well
when
life;
and
3O4
POLEMICS
tivity.
But
this
the opposite of
is
is
how an
artist
is
no more
Cukor has a range of subject matter
that he can handle and when he gets a good script within his
range (like The Philadelphia Story or Pat and Mike) he does a
good job; but he is at an immense artistic disadvantage, compared with Bergman, because he is dependent on the ideas of
so many (and often bad) scriptwriters and on material which
is often alien to his talents. It's amusing (and/or depressing)
to see the way auteur critics tend to downgrade writer-directors
his
who are in the best position to use the film medium for personal expression.
Sarris does some pretty fast shuffling with Huston and Bergman; why doesn't he just come out and admit that writerdirectors are disqualified by his third premise? They can't arrive
at that "interior
What
is all
this
something
else that
for?
Are these
some form
this
sion in
critics
is
Howard Hawks's
films?
When
Where
he has good
is
the ten-
material, he's
like
Friday; and in
305
ri-
like
Only Angels
beyond the
critics see in it
Nuns Story).
I
suppose
* In
we should be happy
another sense,
it
is
for Sirk
perhaps immodest.
and he
and Preminger,
would
will
say, give
know what
ele-
Cukor
do with
seems almost
to
My
306
POLEMICS
and that the only way you could tell he made some of his
movies was that he used the same players so often (Linda Dar-
tions,
nell,
et
his
is
anyway, because
if
Preminger shows
Carmen
stylistic
Jones,
al.,
gave
ludicrous
consistency with
Anatomy
of a
Mur-
great director
for
and
consistently superficial
auteur "masterpiece"
top rating
directed.
many
seems
That
is
not so
to say,
much
Preminger-directed as other-
it
different groups as
facile.
Ian
something
something
An
for
editorial in
intelligence active
but
The
I
auteur
critics aren't a
assume that
necessary
causal
Sarris's
theory
relationships
is
absent),
(It's
and we'd
be
really
in hell,
perhaps?) These
give
some semblance
critics
trying to
on Forty-second
more
307
Street
and
restless, rootless
in the
the
Tenderloin of
our big
all
cities
suggest that they don't serve a very different function for Sarris
or Bogdanovich or the
up
work pretty hard to
educated
to
Was
a Male
their time.
An
War
Bride (which,
What
underbrush of
some
Is
a Film Critic?
He
Sarris's aesthetics.*
says, for
what
example, that
don't
know
a "universal entity"
sensitivity ,
p erceptions
f ervor,
magina-
* This might help to explain such quaint statements as: Bazin "was, if anything, generous to a fault, seeking in every film some vestige of the cinematic art"
as if cinema were not simply the movies that have been made
and
are being
entity. If
308
POLEMICS
the
with great gitlCS The role of the critic is to help people see
what is in the wpjr what is in it that shouldn't h e w hat is not
in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work th a n they could see for themselves:
he is a great critic if by his understanding a nd fee|jnfr for rhe^
,
work by
,
experience
is
more of the
(Infallible taste
against?)
He
is
^^ ppnpU
arf rhar
is
en that f^ey
want
fn
He
critic if
inconceivable;
is
bad
criti c
if
art to others.
I
thinks a theory
"great"
critics.
and powers.
the
critical func-
Mark Shivas
know more about
and
all
new breed
of specialists
human
experience
isn't it
If
they are
men
little
believe that
form (and
cism
is
our judgments,
a scrambling
and
intelligence,
of their "detailed
No Return?
best to
mean
is
of feeling
ashamed
flexible, relative in
does not
least a
if
if
we
if
work
we
in
any
art
are pluralistic,
But
are eclectic.
is
this
Eclecti-
the selec-
single theory,
is
is it
If
meet
how
And
309
up
to or
an ideal to be achieved,
an objective standard, then what does elan have to do with it?
(The ideal could be achieved by plodding hard work or by inspiration or any other way; the method of achieving the ideal
fail
to
would be
his ideals?
if
there
is
As
Sarris uses
of their narrowness
lost
people
"But what
swers that
who
is
in itself perhaps
an indication
inevitably approach
new
is
and confusion;
how
.e xperienc e
what he has to bring to new works th at makes the critic's reaction to them valuable the questioners are always unsatisfied.
They wanted a simple answer, a formula; if they approached a
chef they would probably ask for the one magic recipe that
,
could be followed in
And
it is
all
cooking.
i s excitin
g ust because there is no formula to apply just because
you must use everything you are and everything von know t hat
Jg relevant, and that film criticism is particularly exciting just,
,
critics;
is
they seem
310
POLEMICS
in isolation
own
experience.
work,
how can
his-
torical continuity,
films of the
films,
how
group
like
is
capped.
an intellectual club
And when
is
is
bad
Sarris
its
aes-
Movie
joke: the
man
it
is
is
in his environ-
ment?
Some Speculations on
of the
If relatively
the Appeal
Auteur Theory
we wanted from
all
that
a
something far less
good, dull, informative, well-written, safe magazine, the best
film magazine in English, but it doesn't satisfy desires for an
too narrow,
its
It isn't, it's
Its
much up
critics
for us;
its
intellectual range
(If
we
recall
an
is
article
what
almost an obsession
With
the auteur of
inexplicable fondness
detailing plot
trivia.
done
is
3II
all
movies to
It is
for
show an
(all
an aesthetics
the most serious charge that can
possibly be brought against an aesthetics. The auteur theory,
which probably helped to liberate the energies of the French
critics, plays a very different role in England and with the
Film Culture and New York Film Bulletin auteur critics in the
United States
an anti-intellectual, anti-art role.
The French auteur critics, rejecting the socially conscious,
problem pictures so dear to the older generation of American
critics, became connoisseurs of values in American pictures that
Americans took for granted, and if they were educated Americans, often held in contempt. The French adored the American
so) but that
anti-art.
And
it
is
this, I think, is
gangsters,
all
girl,
after going
fectly right
far
more
these were
often
one
oil fields, or
sense, the
much more
building a
French were
skillfully
per-
made and
than
which
meant
anyway.
usually
Where
drama
melodrama,
intellectual
312
POLEMICS
it,
in
own movies
and
to
our movies
our last
frontiers,
bi-
tion.
We see
We also
many
French
critics,
sensitive to ours.
thirties.
silent period,
There was no
and
special reason
And
it
that, in
France,
more comparable to
those of a dramatist or a composer, critics would become fixated
on American directors, not understanding how confused and
where film
directors
work
in circumstances
and
research consultants
story
all
the rest of
who may
them
even
the producers,
the marketing
and stars
in Hollywood. For the French, the name of a
was a guide on what American films to see; if a director
director
313
name
director's
tive,
as
even though
some
we
sort of guide,
is
little
more
when they
whom we
what
Don
ican directors?
deep meanings
for
And how
sensible
trate
ing"?
on
It's
faces,
probe for
in these products?
critics,
hammerlock on Amer-
enough
to
and
"interior
mean-
it's
a harmless
hobby
is
that
314
POLEMICS
If
they
human
to express
material,
masterpieces.
am
away
far
also
from
New
(consciously or unconsciously)
are
a kind of social
trial civilization
is
a period
art
and
comic
are the
supreme
tradition. It
is
truth, the
supreme
joke." This
Film Culture with Sarris's auteur theory there is a lavon "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of
Maria Montez"
a fairly close movie equivalent for that outsized can of Campbell's soup. The editor, Jonas Mekas, has his
kind of social comment. This is his approach to editing a film
magazine: "As long as the 'lucidly minded' critics will stay out,
issue of
with
all
tance'
new
everything will be
'art,'
most dangerous,
feel welcome,
most sensitive stage." Doesn't exactly
does it? I'm sure I don't know what the problem is: are there so
many "lucidly minded" critics in this country (like Andrew
soul
is
still
a bud,
still
going through
its
make one
315
Sarris?) that they must be fought off? And aren't these little
"buds" that have to be protected from critical judgments the
same little film makers who are so convinced of their importance
what
they,
no doubt, regard
social
as the ultimate
rising.
Those "buds"
often behave
Sarris
who
writes
that he
is
America.
obsessed by
When Mekas
it
it
or hate
fit
is
both
and a symbol of
don't want any part of
announces, "I
Game" he comes
it? I
even closer to
Sarris.
And
doesn't
much
film history.
The "independent
who
film makers,"
don't
know
Lord knows,
the auteurs; a
damage
critics'
their egos.
is
They
a square
who
if
is
anyone
on images and
$l6
POLEMICS
a function of economics
is
and techcamera
16mm
with good synchronous sound gets on the market, the independent film makers will develop a different aesthetic.)
The
auteur theory,
ous theory
the
critics
not
silly as it is,
only because
who employ
it,
it
but because
artists
its
it
offers
who may be
do someSamuel Fuller's
trying to
celebration of
auteur
cinema
is
"What
like that."
This
is
right at
it
is it
is,
home
it
in
man
Well, the
Film Culture,
al-
though
317
Sarris
from a
purist, formalistic
tastically self-indulgent
it's
we
anyone to
possible for
criticize his
selves?
When
Sards
the auteur
critics
of the Fifties
who
fifties?
sides,")
concept of
there
part about
is,
it all is
critical
for example,
where
It's
Ron
my
The
"And the
critics,
beautiful
scream protest
the same sky, and know Exknows where he's at about as much
all fly in
Rice:
dear
31 8
POLEMICS
who
as
Stan Brakhage
it
again.
down
To
says,
there?
and
the auteur
critics,
both
in
England
on
virility?
(Walsh is, for Sarris, "one of the screen's most virile directors."
In Movie we discover: "When one talks about the heroes of
Red River, or Rio Bravo, or Hataril one is talking about Hawks
himself.
Hawks
boils
don't think
down
critics
woman
scribe a
special nature )
who would
the auteur
cause,
them this way (just as when we deand feminine, we are indicating her
as sensitive
suggest,
something too
is
it is
some kind
virile writer?
But
for
of assurance that
he
is
not
try-
Hawks "makes the very best advenhe is at one with his heroes.
Only Raoul
deeply an adventurer as Hawks.
Hawks' heroes
Walsh
is
are
all
big
game
as
scientists,
sheriffs,
who know
cattlemen,
their capabilities.
They know
exactly
319
The
given.")
auteur
critics are so enthralled with their narcissis(Movie: "Because Hawks' films and their
heroes are so genuinely mature, they don't need to announce the
tic
male
fantasies
schoolboy notions of
male
human
seem unable
to relinquish their
fe-
boyhood
and adolescence
that period when masculinity looked so great
and important but art was something talked about by poseurs
and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also
their way of making a comment on our civilization by the suggestion that trash is the true film art? I ask; I do not know.
[1963]
get the
girl.
The
320
POLEMICS
who make
film politics
is
period decor
Night People
is
sell.
knows how
is
kidnaped; he
(Gregory Peck)
They
is
who
are "head-hunting
The
film
is
given a
superficial credibility
soldiers,
earlier anti-Nazi
production
The Moon
be adequately designated
as just plain
is
Down
many
could be de-
"Dick Tracy."
Were some
of the
victims observers for the U.S. and where does observation stop
and
intrigue
is
up
the
become
a simple convenience to
"Communism"
is
321
the film
Communism
Night People
other movies
is
they're
made
lot of
cynically
and West into the capable hands of Dick Tracy: the film wasn't
really written, it was turned out. And the audiences that buy
standardized commodities may be too sophisticated about mass
production to believe films and advertising, but they are willing
to absorb products
and claims
with
suspended
You buy
Who
and
And when
you accept
it,
would
it in,
Audi-
belief.
it
on
believe in
emerges sing-
political tone.
Acceptance
as
let it
not
go at
toward an ad) to
tion,
is
it
political
belief,
but acceptance
that and
may
feel as cynical
and "knowing"
effort, atten-
and involvement.
The
bit
guards are
as
S.S.
familiar
new
world situation
is
POLEMICS
322
seem
realistic
because
so familiar.
it is
The
make-believe that
it
becomes a
is
real
Zenda,
same appeals
"new" look
If
we
also
the
familiar with
enough.
because we do
and variation into infinity
The
to get
ing decor
is
it
its
the
point.
once would be
It is
repetition
classics;
its
claims accepted.
melodrama
is
advertis-
advertising,
sets
advertising art
and
Marry a Millionaire (another Nunnally Johnson production) and they merge into each other:
they belong to the same genre. The new young Hollywood heroine is not too readily distinguishable from the model in the Van
tent of advertising. Put together an advertising photograph
a movie
still
Raalte ad;
same
girl.
from
if
How
the ad
is
to
is
the
man
for other
She
is
both a commodity
for sale
as
and a
sales-
not an actor at
all;
he
is
a model,
consumption patterns,
same way
tising in
social attitudes
motion.
life
with
323
tional
Break
down
the hero's home, the manufacmother playing catch with her son,
and you are looking at pages in Sunset, Life, and Todays
Woman. Then open Time, and there are the actors from the
it
into
shots
'I
use
my
"CamDicta-
tell
glance.
flattery
is
The new
to himself as
it
all in at
may
a
if
new
shirts and
Night People
is filmed in CinemaScope with Stereophonic Sound. Can we
balk at technical advances that "2000 years of experiment and
research have brought to us"? New "technical advances" increase
not only the physical accessibility of cultural goods, the content of the goods
becomes increasingly
accessible.
The
film's
voice,
surgically reconstructed
(actresses
have
figure has
been
us. Just
one thing
is
lost:
the essence
In contrast with the situation in the film, some of the actual problems
might provide material for farce: how to make
furniture that will collapse after a carefully calculated interval (refrigerator
i.e., designing
manufacturers are studying the problem of "replacement"
*
of furniture manufacturers
replacement in te.n years rather than fifteen or twenty years) or that will be outmoded by a new style (automobile
people just don't yet
manufacturers are wrestling with consumers' lag
understand that the 1950 car is to be discarded with the 1950 hat). The
designer-hero of Executive Suite can be a real menace to American business:
refrigerators that will necessitate
good designs
last
too
lop/z.
324
POLEMICS
is
primarily to entertain
(by excitation)
itself
in.
social
the
artists
325
for
violence.)
of the
the effort did indicate the moral and political disturbances, and
it
was anyway
labeling
and
make
it
it
The
political
facts
of
life
may
of
Consumer
Reports.
POLEMICS
The
villains are
326
know
are
subhuman.
enemy are
some qualms about the free dispensation of strychnine (he must feel as sure as Hitler that those
opposing him are beyond reconciliation ) Film melodrama, like
political ideology with which it has much in common, has a convenient way of disposing of the humanity of enemies: we stand
the hero of Night People did not
If
might
cannibals, he
that the
feel
to live. Fear,
is
more
The
villains are
inhuman-
who
is
always a hero,
is
human
rarely called
any emotion whatever. The devil can be exis a stick of wood.) The villains are not
human; if they were, they'd be on our side. When historical
circumstances change and our former enemies become allies, we
upon
to register
pressive,
let
Thus the
little
now
human
estate.
bunch
This
And
of lice.") Political
is
it is
has political
for
effect.
thirty years,
thought as well
as
films
it
of popular American
At the Army-McCarthy
conscious of the radio and television
are a
reflection
an influence upon
audience, find
medium
it.
political
Army by
327
suggesting that
if he knew
what they were, he would hate them: he lacks the hero's sureness. McCarthy draws political support by the crude, yet surprisingly controlled, intensity of his hatred of Communists; the
intensity suggests that he, like Intelligence Officer Peck, knows
how to take care of rats, and his lack of scruples becomes a
political asset. Further knowledge is irrelevant; the hero does
evil.
Communism.
Is
we
fear
that a close look will not only expose us to destruction but will
rats,
tive explanation
is
that
his
man beings.
The morality
play had meaning as an instructive dramatizaan externalization of the conflict within man. Our popular
culture and popular politics and even our popular religion take
tion,
simplification has
328
POLEMICS
know how
to
do
it
McCarthy would
listening to the
"Are you
my
idea of entertainment." It
is
the
who
react
figures
so that
if
Stevens admitted
When
of a
a
man who
man
role to play.
When
He
is
the
and identifies anyone who opposes him with the Communist conspiracy, he carries the political morality play to its
paranoid conclusion
a reductio ad absurdum in which right
and wrong, and political good and evil, dissolve into: are you
for me or against me? But the question may be asked, are not
this morality and this politics fundamentally just as absurd and
just as dangerous when practiced on a national scale in our
commercial culture? The world is not divided into good and evil,
enemies are not all alike, Communists are not just Nazis with
a different accent; and it is precisely the task of political analysis
(and the incidental function of literature and drama) to help us
understand the nature of our enemies and the nature of our
opposition to them. A country which accepts wars as contests
between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the
right
Some
political theorists
would
way
like to
to
manipulate
this delu-
combat Communism
is
to
329
God on earth and the Communist countries, the antiSuch a "useful myth" may very likely, however, be
purchased (for the most part) just as cynically as it is sold. Is
represents
christ.
myth
Or
myth
it
without conviction?
for
God
fights in a
whether
or not.
history as
his point.
dazzled by the width of the screen they feel it can only be filled
by God. Their primitive awe is similar to that of the public
which is attracted to "big" pictures. Though it is easy to scoff at
the cast
magnitude in
number
of millions spent
itself
The whole
family goes
arguments on
warfare
is
all sides
so big
(Night People
is
it
God
can explain.
The democratic
upon the
330
POLEMICS
what
it
wants.
The
real
danger
is
that
we may
space which are the experience of art and thought. If the public
becomes accustomed to being pleased and pandered to, the
content is drained out of democratic political life. (The pimp
who peddles good clean stuff is nevertheless engaged in prostitution.)
What
they
But they didn't reject the formula, they settled for a change of
the same way Hollywood may well exhaust anti-Communism before it has gotten near it. Night People is just the
beginning of a new cycle
a cycle which begins by exploiting
public curiosity and ends by satiating it.
All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become
labels. In
so much a
know what
part of our
it is
life, is
propaganda
so pervasive, that
for.
Somehow
it
we
just don't
rolling
Propaganda Salt
One wonders
if
of the
33I
Earth
the
stance, simply a strong pro-labour film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the
and the
critic of
Mexican-Americans with
whom
News had
it
deals,"
this to say:
Communism makes
Communism
Englishman) can
each region appears to be divested of its
in
Soviet accoutrements;
fail
its
aspect
is
or
It is effective
because
it
critics, it is
go to see Salt
it
it is
whose
political
it's
a different story.
and
progressives
is
thirties.
it
332
and
POLEMICS
in.
reality,
Many
WPA
with so
much
doesn't look
advertising
real.
it
is
integrated
seems a sham
in,
it
they see
and neat
little
possible setting
What
cottages
looks ugly
prosperous
is
and tend
as
home
of
its
its
is
Communists
way. But
is
it
making
fascism.
rest of
in the U.S.A.
are not so
Union
much
is
really
interested
as in destroying
Euro-
pean and Asiatic faith in the United States. Fifteen years ago
it would have been easy to toss off a film like Salt with "it's
worse than propaganda, it's a dull movie." Flippancy makes us
rather uneasy today: Communist propaganda, seizing upon our
failures and our imperfections, and, when these are not strong
can
are realities to
life
The
333
in discredit-
the
artists
who
and programmatic
as the films
Here
is
made by
those
who have
collec-
upon them.
heroine, Esperanza:
her back
fire,
is
to the camera,
staggering under
is
its
weight.
eternal
."
It
slow, her
"How
that has
is
yet
start
shall
begin
if
we're
my
story
the telling of
all
that
334
polemics
The
miners of Salt of the Earth are striking for equality (prinbut the
is
It is inflated
is
it
Ramon
Ramon
it
Some day.
Not just Juanito.
good.
(half-whispering)
too, Esperanza.
We lose
strike.
the union.
And
the
it
good
We
a few demands.
You'll have
strike.
Hope
win
(groping for
This
is
nothing from
this strike?"
speaks of her
own development:
everything up with
Earth
is
used in
its
me
as
go.
"I
.
want
."
to
cosm
And push
rise.
come a
micro-
coming revolution.
If the author had cut up a pamphlet and passed out the parts,
he wouldn't have given out anything very different from this
of the
Esperanza:
They
They printed
lies
the
men
said
property.
335
they did.
Alfredo (dreamily)
Antonio: Talk about wide open spaces! Far as the eye can see
no Anglos.
Ramon
Ramon: No Anglo
bosses.
much
Ramon
thirties, is
main-
these
strik-
constructive lessons.
Here
for instruction
little
Ramon: ...
If I
didn't
know
a picture of
was an awful
George Washington,
dumb
Mexican.
Frank (deeply chagrined): I'm an awful
you'd say
dumb Anglo
I've
line."
up
live or die.
they
like animals!
"They,
(A
pause.)
Remember
Remem-
well." (She
the road.)
Another
term payments.'
336
POLEMICS
The
story
is
deputy
sheriffs
company
in
is
interrupted by
an eviction
gets
is
the nighttime
we
order,
When
the
"dumping
graph of Juarez
"smashed
is
in the dust." If
first
see Esper-
upon
Detail
detail
responsible critics
it
will
fail
to see
what
How
as
it
can
thing has been added to this old popular front morality play,
The
it
new
credibility.
Ramon "down
to size." The
moments later,
gives the signal to four deputies
Vance, Kimbrough and two
others. They arrest Ramon (who offers no resistance), handcuff him
and thrust him into their car. Vance, "a pale, cavernous, slackjawed
would be nice
it
to cut
sheriff
man,"
is
mouth,"
as
to talk to a
Ramon
runs
down
Vance says
white man."
sits
hand comes
softly,
"Now
up, swipes
his chin.
The two
Ramon
deputies in front
across his
ain't
no way
trickle of
sit like
blood
wax dummies,
is going on in back.
Kimbrough: Hey, Vance. You said this Mex was full of pepper.
He don't look so peppery now.
Vance: Oh, but he is. This bullfighter's full of chile.
He drives a gloved fist into Ramon's belly. Ramon gasps, his
Vance strikes him in the abdomen again. Kimeyes bulge.
brough snickers.
Ramon is doubled up, his head between his
.
legs.
Ramon
(a
mutter in Spanish):
I'll
no way to sit.
you all, you lice.
ain't
outlive
"
Vance
He
(softly)
strikes
How's
Ramon
that?
What's
Ramon
in the belly.
337
choked
gives a
cry.
Ramon
Ramon: Mother
As
if
this
of
gasps in Spanish:
God
have mercy.
Ramon
being
she gives birth. Finally, "the two images merge, and undulate,
treatment
is
newborn
infant."
and
legally the
it is still
its
sins against
The Communists
vulnerable.
is
that America
"The
tells
The
explanation offered
is
piti-
Anglo
you get more than the Mexicans.'
Ramon replies, "Okay, so discrimination hurts the Anglo too,
but it hurts me more. And I've had enough of it." This catechism of Communist economics has a creaky sound. A rational
Ramon in a film set in 1951 might very well ask: Why can't this
fully inadequate:
locals
well
is,
company
To
at
least
afford equality
when
so
many
others can?
community
is
no microcosm
is
of
grotesquely far
from typical. The film's strike has not been placed against the
background of American life which would provide prespective
and contrast. It stays within a carefully composed system of
references. (Esperanza describes the help the striking miners got
pany president
a
"Man
is,
the miners
of Distinction" ad.
come
One
bills
know who
of work-
the com-
across a picture of
of the
men
is
in the
him
in
union truck
a Negro;
when
338
POLEMICS
miner comes over, "the Negro leans down and shakes his hand
warmly.")
Let's take a look at the film's claims to truth and "honesty."
The union president (who played Ramon) has written that a
Production Committee had "the responsibility of seeing that
our picture ran true to
from
life
we had
just shot
was not
to
think
was
1951-1952
strike.
"We
for our
'thirties,
men who
organized
it.
writes:
Thank God
Back
in the
company property
off
strike (1951-1952).
people's lives
And
it.
If
it
would
still
all.
is
higher,
lives,
plain
and symbolic of
and bribes from
the bosses symbolizes government as capitalism's hired man;
the company officers represent the decadent quality of American
business; the love story of Ramon and Esperanza symbolizes the
step,
vitality of
Can
their struggle
sheriff
who
is
typical
takes orders
the people
who had
a "constructive"
hand
in the script
339
Or
is it
"hope")
all
suffering
who
them?
all like
think
them,
we must
We
method.
decide
city
begs
to be
that a true account of Negro life in a Northern
done.
take the simple story of a Negro girl led into a life
of vice and crime by a white business man who seduces her and
follow her to the
then casts her off on his corrupt cronies.
brothel where she is forced to work (our brothel scenes are the
first authentic record of a brothel to be included in a work of
art).
take incidents from actual newspaper stories (the
Just for fun, let's try out Salt's realistic
We
We
We
police
own
it
The
girls
are rather a
buxom
noble Negro prostitute)* suggests endurance and infinite pa* Miss Rosaura Revueltas (Esperanza): "In a way it seemed I had
waited all my life to be in this picture. My own mother was a miner's
daughter."
34O
POLEMICS
tience.
and, as there
all
The
When,
girls.
finally,
the
room
girls realize
is
to the
rooms
that in solidar-
madam
(a cold,
Negro
clientele,
way
down
the street
and hence
under
relations
to
is
America
is
we want
to
know something about the treatment of minorwe don't look at one community,
and
phenomenon
institutions.
town the
Armenians or Portuguese
peck the
Italians,
among
last in
chicken
minorities.
We look at
the
Irish
cities,
more symbolic
Compare
life
we
whose name
is
life
of
Ramirez.
of artists
tions of
Americans
who
Milan
De
Sica,
whose
grand
34I
stacked his
on a
least,
evil,
the vio-
just
could not be contained in the moralistic framework of Intolerance. These artists use the film as a feast for eye
The
is
and mind.
The hero
is
is
role.
He
is
man who
they
and
can learn.
The
all
villains are
the
more human.* He
must be taught a
lesson.
Though they
is
not so
much
and they
They
are
a sermon as a guide to
is
or,
Communists have
or sympathizer
orthodoxy; he
their
is
the excitations of
symbolic.
own
member
The
glorification of the
him up
oppressed at
concept
is
all,
342
POLEMICS
he jeopardizes
ideas,
may infect
his
own
"Social realism"
reality.
The
negligible
reality
than
art
is
The
and
seem "true" to people who have been in
the Imperial Valley or New Mexico or the southern states. They
have seen shocking living conditions and they may feel the moral
necessity to do something about them. Communist propaganda
takes this desire and converts it into a sense of anxiety and distress by "demonstrating" that all of American power supports
this shocking situation and thus uses this situation for a total
condemnation of American life. The moral sensibility that has
given vitality to American principles is manipulated by these
propagandists into a denial that America stands for those principles, and into an insistence that the real principles of Amersetting.
ican
life
helpless
to
him
person
identifying
The moral
his
moral
interests
in a
commercialized culture
that these people the ones who made the film and
who believe can find nothing else in American
the ones
life to
it
trodden.
offered
is
class.
no doubt,
feels
They
which
They
are,
downridiculously and
it
higher truth
and,
who make
it
believe in
it.
They
serve a
what
artist
so tight?
fist
closed
343
The
Editor, Sight
Had
Sir,
and Sound
me
no doubt your
corre-
lus
is
The
is,
ilies,
We
." etc.
For
told.
artist's
commonplace," the
The
miners
would take
it
344
'
polemics
are
in the "zone."
To
"moved by the
struggles of the
at least.
it
propaganda
identifies Cadillacs
tify Cadillacs
G. M. Hoellering
who made
tells
with
capitalists,
Americans iden-
with Negroes.)
the film,
is
to
it.
not
Esperanza
known
flowers,
345
in the birth of the little worker. How else is mediocre propaganda to achieve symbolic stature? When "the oppressed" see
themselves as a chosen people, and they certainly do in Salt,
they become as morally and aesthetically offensive as any other
any of those
ideas. Is
it
in
United
States,
Communists
who would
set
defending
as witch
hunting?
freedom
up an image of
a fascist
for anti-
Communists and fellow travelers have been subjected to some abuse in the United States, they are therefore
exempt from analysis of their methods, purposes, and results.
Is one not to call a spade a spade, because Senator McCarthy
lumps together spades, shovels, and plain garden hoes?
Are we to pretend that there are no spades? Are we to look
at Salt and say with Mr. Brunei, "All right, so it's propaganda
for a better understanding between races! But why, then,
does the film caricature the Anglo-Saxons and why are the representatives of business and government all Anglo-Saxons? If Salt
that because
is
supposed to be an accurate
States,
what explains
with the
The
this split
statistical facts of
which
American
is
at
United
complete variance
life?
When
a film
is
as
critic is
obliged
346
to
POLEMICS
examine what
it's
aiming
at.
Or
and sound
is
as
the film
if
critic supposed
they had no relation to
meaning?
Yours
faithfully,
Pauline Kael
San Francisco.
[^54]
Index
24,
Ace
The
in the Hole,
153
The, 305
282, 296
Addams, Charles, 86
Advise and Consent, 294, 306
African Queen, The, 24, 299
Agee, James, 19, 26, 114, 295
Robert, 303; dir., What
Aldrich,
Down,
250-251,255
Archibald, William, 165, 170
Arsenal, 277
Astaire, Fred, 24, 81, 145,
Auric, Georges, 165
37-1 38
Alloway, Laurence, 26
All Fall
Awentura, U,
277-280
282, 2g6
Aznavour, Charles, 211, 215
Donald, 121
Anderson, Lindsay, 18, 63, 99-100;
dir., This Sporting Life, 15-18;
Bacall, Lauren,
Bad Day
at Black
300
Rock, 296
58,
Whitney, 74
Balliett,
Bandits of Orgosolo, 15
Band Wagon, The, 278
dir.,
Fireworks,
35
195, 296;
dir.,
LaNotte,
12, 20,
148-
J.
M., 106
35
INDEX
Bloom,
Beau
12,
15,
22-23,
Lesson
Women,
105,
Love,
105;
Seal,
Berkeley, Busby,
Bernstein,
in
48,
Bow,
Clara, 138
Boyer, Charles, 98
Braine, John, 63
Breathless,
146-147
Leonard,
143-144,
Robert,
22;
7,
133-134
304
Budd, 234-239, 316
Birds, The, 10
Billy
287
Bringing
Up
The 8
t
Brink of Life, 15
Brook, Peter,
119,
131;
dir.,
Blain, Gerard,
Buchanan, Jack, 65
Buchner, Georg, 277
133-135
The
Arthur, 117
The
dir.,
285
Big Sky, The, 305
Big Sleep, The, 26, 81, 214, 300,
Bliss,
198
106;
Seventh
dir.,
A Man's Castle,
Heaven, 197;
INDEX
290, 340; dir., The Exterminating
Angel, 11; Viridiana, 15, 17; Los
282-283,
278,
A Nous
Im
298;
135,
dir.,
Port
298;
Le
Clayton,
Jack,
Room
at the
111
Montgomery, 46, 49
Cary, Joyce, 10
Clift,
73
Castellani, Renato, 281; dir.,
Juliet,
Romeo
Le Beau
Verite,
Cocteau, Jean,
7,
132,
275,
dir.,
286,
Orpheus,
dir.,
dir.,
37>38
Cobweb, The, 58
290, 296, 343-344;
281
The
Le
101
136;
290;
Liberte, 282;
Shadows, 48,
Jour se I^eve, 298
Ren6,
dir.,
Cardinal, The, 9
Cardinale, Claudia, 266
Clair,
Albert, 22
and
305
Cimarron, 25
Citizen Kane, 24, 110, 288
Cameron,
of
Calhoun, Rory, 45
Camus,
Chandler, Helen, 13
Chandler, Jeff, 45
42
Cagney, James,
Champion, 91
Burnett, Carol, 26
35 1
Serge,
ribles,
135132;
343
35^
INDEX
Cornered, 325
Courtenay, Tom, 257
Cousins, The, 132-136, 148
De Beauvoir, Simone, 38
de Broca, Philippe, 283; dir., The
Five-Day Lover, 170, 283
Deep Blue
Corbluth,
J.
D., 343
Crist, Judith,
83
Crossfire,
235
Crowther, Bosley, 68, 71, 77, 78, 84,
85-86, 88-89, 92, 132, 142, 146,
163-164, 206, 243, 246, 249-250
Cukor, George, 303-305, 312; dir.,
Pat and Mike, 81, 304;
Born,
The
207;
Star
is
Philadelphia
Bhowani Junction,
305; Les Girls, 305; The Actress,
305; A Life of Her Own, 305;
The Model and the Marriage
Story,
Broker,
305;
304;
My
Edward,
305;
A Woman's
Son,
meo and
Juliet,
Life, 305;
305;
Double
de Maupassant, Guy, 98
dir., The
Ten Commandments, 329; The
Greatest Show on Earth, 9, 329
Deren, Maya, 20
De
231,
247,
341;
dir.,
Umberto D, 149,
The Bicycle
Women,
Two
Deux
305
Curtis,
Tony, 39
Dial
Dan, 223
Diamond,
I.
290
Dalio, Marcel, 108
Diczry of a
Country
Darrieux, Danielle, 98
Dolce Vita, La, 44, 119, 149, 181184, 190-196, 262, 264-266, 283
David and
Dali, Salvador,
Lisa,
245-246
in the Country,
133
Campagne), 111
Wrath, 2-jj, 324
Day the Earth Caught
Double Indemnity,
(Partie de
81,
129,
131,
277,
160
Double
Life, A, 305
Douchet, Jean, 306
Dcry of
176-179
Days of Glory, 325
Priest,
Day
A. L., 151-153
Fire,
The,
Dovzhenko, Alexander,
INDEX
281;
nal,
Down
277
There, 210
Etranger,
U, 1 30
Every Day Except Christmas, 99
Every Night at Eight, 292-293
Dracula, 6
Dreams, 105
Dreiser, Theodore, 67, 296
Dreyer, Carl, 6, 275, 277, 302, 318,
324, 344; dir., Vampyr, 6, 275;
Passion of Jeanne d'Arc, 277;
The
Day
353
dir.,
of
Wrath,
2j-j,
324
Dm,
Joanne, 318
Dubois, Marie, 211
Duel
329
Duras, Marguerite, 33
Duvivier,
111;
Julien,
Flesh
dir.,
25
Earrings of
Madame De
.,
The,
97-101, 298
Earth, 248, 274
East of Eden, 33, 46, 55-57
Federico,
180,
183,
185,
190-196,
262,
264-266,
Easy Living, 24
Eclipse, The, 17, 21-22, 24
Edge
Edge
SS Days at Peking, 8, 10
Film Culture, 293, 311, 314, 316-
of Darkness, 324
of the City, 91
Edward,
My Son,
? i8
305
Egyptian, The, 55
8V2, 262-266
Eisenstein,
248,
Sergei,
32,
271,
273,
255,
109-110,
Shook the
dir.,
276;
Ekberg, Anita, 36
Endgame, 23
Enfants Terribles, Les (The Strange
Ones), 132
En/o, 161, 226
Entertainer, The, 63, 68, 70-71, 74,
Eroica, 148, 153
Finney, Albert, 75
on the Plain (Nobi), 225-228
Fires
Fireworks, 35
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 221
Fitzgerald, Zelda, 221
dir.,
Nanook
Man
of the
Flaming Creatures, 19
Flesh and Fantasy, 188
Fonda, Henry, 40, 242
Fonda, Jane, 305
Fool There Was, A, 131
354
index
Forbidden Games,
1 1
1-1 1
Long Gray
Line,
44;
Gill,
dir.,
The
The
In-
My Darling
dir.,
Eyes With-
Frankenstein, 13
Fresnay, Pierre, 108, 110
Freud, 11
Gilliatt,
164
Gish, Lillian, 206
Glenville, Peter, 138, 313; dir.,
47, 49,
Sum-
37-1 39
Going My Way, 9
Gold Diggers of 1933, 147
Golden Boy, 143
Golden Coach, The, 101-104
Gomez, Thomas, 1 39
169
283, 329
Samuel, 316
Furneaux, Yvonne, 119
Grahame, Gloria, 58
Grahame, Margot, 119
Gramatica, Emma, 284-285
Granahan, Kathryn, 43-44
Grande Illusion, La, 22, 108-111,
2 77
Garbo, Greta, 193
Greatest
54> 93>
35
Frye, Dwight, 6,
Fuller,
226, 283
Garden of
Evil, 55
Show on
Green, Guy,
Angry
119,
Silence,
dir., The
The Mark,
159;
119;
Way Down
Gentleman's Agreement, 81
287;
tolerance,
Earth, The, 9,
3 29
222,
East,
277,
Hugh, 119
199; In-
282,
341;
INDEX
dir.,
Lovers
He Who Must
Gunga Din,
Guns of the
24, 241
Trees, 189
Hill,
Derek, 16
Wendy, 73
Hale, Sonnie, 65
Hiller,
Hiroshima
Gar-
dir.,
to Alaska,
297
Haunting, The, 10-13
Hawks, Howard, 300, 304, 312,
318-319; dir., His Girl Friday,
24, 304; To Have and Have Not,
24, 81, 214, 300, 304, 324;
The
tieth Century,
Have Wings,
305; I
307;
Was
Red
Twen-
Only Angels
304;
305;
Mon
Amour,
24, 31-35,
42
tari!,
355
Hepburn, Katharine, 4
282-283
The Big
a Male
War
Sky,
Bride,
318
Hawley, Cameron, 323
Hayward, Susan, 34-35
Hayworth, Rita, 266
Heath, Gordon, 66
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 299
Hegel, 272-273
Hellman, Lillian, 82, 175-176
on a Train,
Strangers
Saboteur, 294;
The 39
Steps, 294;
Billie,
116
Hollywood Babylon, 35
Priest,
313
The, 134
Hope, Bob, 1
Houston, Penelope, 64-65
Howard, Trevor, 72
How to Marry a Millionaire, 322
Howe, James Wong, 91
Huckleberry Finn, 201
Hud,
24, 79-94
Hudson, Rock, 41
Hunter, Jeffrey, 66
Hustler, The, 24, 159
Huston,
John,
The
Hellzapoppin' , 153
dir.,
senger,
11,
List
298-304;
25,
of Adrian
10-11; Freud,
11;
Queen,
24,
299;
Maltese Falcon,
25,
214,
African
300;
The
Treasure
of
Mes-
The
The
299Sierra
356
INDEX
fits,
40,
Moulin
299;
The Roots
299;
of Heaven, 299;
Allison,
299
Want
Was
War
Kagi,
160-163,
148,
161,
226;
226;
(Nobi), 225-228
The, 238
Idiot,
Ikiru, 170,
307
Jules
93;
Streetcar
57,
Named
138
Keaton, Buster, 277
Kelland, Clarence Budington, 2942 95
244
Ym Ml Right, Jack,
Ym No Angel, 81
Kelly,
64-65, 77
Kelly, Patsy,
Inge, William,
292
137-138
Innocents, The, 163-172
Killers,
In This
Our
Life,
Destruction
of
The, 224
The, 209
Kind Hearts and Coronets, 289
King and I, The, 279
Killing,
299
Invention
(The
2 75
Irma
la
Douce,
Ivens, Joris,
60,
Desire,
10,
14
289
Maurice, 7
Johns, Glynis, 305
Johnson, Nunnally 320, 322;
Kubrick,
Jarre,
dir.,
209;
dir.,
24,
239-246, 281;
dir.,
The Seven
INDEX
Samurai,
119-124,
244;
244;
Rash-
Ikiru, 170,
239-245,
316;
Life of
Limelight, 47
11
Lo Duca,
dir.,
Metropolis,
M,
146,
1 57
Los Angeles Daily News, 331
Losey, Joseph, 303
JuOuisiana Story, 276
Lover Come Back, 233
H57^57>
MacArthur,
dir.,
dir.,
Long
Night,
25;
into
149, 224
Lehman, Ernest, 143
Leigh, Vivien, 51, 82, 140, 283
Lesson in Love, A, 105
Mervyn,
74,
*97
Days
Laura, 298
Laurents, Arthur, 143
Lawrence, D. H., 17, 72-74, 140,
LeRoy,
into Night, 25
21, 24,
246
Lassally,
217,
Long Distance
the
299-300;
299;
157,
203-209,
of
Lancaster, Burt, 49
Lanchester, Elsa, 7
57,
35
24,
Loneliness
Fritz, 146,
The, 10-
Lolita,
Lang,
357
Quo
2 99
Douglas
General
A.,
161
Macbeth, 282
Macdonald, Dwight,
Unknown Woman,
100
Lewis, Jerry,
Professor,
26;
dir.,
The Nutty
26
100
37,
Madame
Madame
Mad at
Bovary, 289
de Mauves, 170
the World, 60
358
INDEX
Maiden, Karl, 51
Maltese Falcon, The, 25, 214, 299-
300
Between, The, 303
Called Peter, A, 45
Man
Man
Manchurian
Candidate,
Men, The, 47
Menilmontant, 291
The,
24,
Mankiewicz, Joseph
39
Miller, Arthur,
Miller, Henry,
Mills, Hayley,
Moby
Mayerling, 98
Mayersberg, Paul, 306
Mayniel, Juliette, 133, 135
McCarey, Leo, 307; dir., Going
Model and
Way,
dir.,
19,
Guns
189,
My
326-
Mondo
303,
314-
234-239,
296
Melville, Jean-Pierre, 132; dir., Les
Broker,
54
Cane, 10
Moon
The, 305
Molnar, Ferenc,
McMurtry, Larry, 88
Mead, Margaret, 1
Medium, The, 286
318;
The
345
Mekas, Jonas,
58;
9
Joseph,
66
Misfits,
McCarten, John, 69
McCarthy, Senator
173-175
210
3 2 8>
The
Castle, A, 198
Mansfield, Jayne, 35
Marcorelles, Louis, 128
Marx
dir.,
Midsummer
21 5
Mans
Medium, 286
Last Summer,
INDEX
Morrow, Vic, 46
295,
303,
306-307,
310,
316, 318-319
Muni, Paul, 62, 85
Munk,
Andrzej,
153;
dir.,
Eroica,
MM53
Muriel, 20, 23
dir.,
15
is
204, 246
Napoleon, 277
Neal, Patricia, 88, 140
Never on Sunday, 141
New Republic, 205
New York Film Bulletin, 311
New York Herald Tribune, 32, 68
New York Times, 14, 16, 204, 246,
33 1
New Yorker, 153, 325
Newman, Paul, 79-80, 83, 89, 91,
22 3
No Exit,
North
to Alaska,
Not as a Stranger, 45
Not Tonight, Henry,
Olympiad, 287
On Approval, 289
On the Beach, 177
On
On
the
Town, 278
93
Open
City,
The
dir.,
De
290
Ophuls,
Earrings
Madame
.,
from an Un-
Orpheus,
8
of
100
Oppenheimer,
297
Nosferatu, 6
359
Notte, La,
Movie,
7,
J.
Robert, 328
360
INDEX
48, 135,298
Porte des Lilas, 290
Portrait of a Lady, 170
Preminger,
The Three-
mann, 286
Campagne (A Day
in the
men
Jones,
Murder,
Country), 111
mer,
That Lady
II
20;
dir.,
322, 325-327
V.
F.,
66
308
Peyton Place, 33
Philadelphia Story, The, 304
Picasso, Pablo, 32, 217-218, 281
Pickens, Slim, 19
Pierre,
Zasu,
39
Place in the Sun, A, 81
Plaisir,
Anatomy
Centennial
306; Forever
in
of a
Sum-
Amber, 306;
Presley, Elvis,
208
The, 26
Pudovkin, V.
I.,
281
Queen
Kelly, 109
Quiet One, The, 285
Quo
237
Pillow Talk, 41
Pink Panther, The, 25
Pitts,
303,
Perkins,
298,
No
Perkins, Millie,
306;
306;
130,
Within), 343
Partie de
Otto,
Pky, 23
184
dir.,
Rhapsody
Poitier, Sidney, 91
politics,
90-91
Days at
Ray, Nicholas, 307; dir.,
Peking, 8, 10; Rebel Without a
Cause, 33
INDEX
Ray, Satyajit,
Apu
245-255;
dir.,
The
Aparajito,
250, 290;
248,
World
The
The
ters, 251
Raye, Martha, 196
361
Mon
199-200,
196-197,
123,
258;
The
dir.,
257-
Loneliness of the
Long Distance Runner, 16, 256261; Look Back in Anger, 63, 6771, 74, 197; The Entertainer, 63,
Honey, 196-201
Richard
III,
Stars
Man
An
Out-
The
The Third Man,
Reisz,
Karel,
63;
dir.,
Saturday
188,
193-194,
248,
255,
289,
300,
222,
302,
247318;
194;
Madame
Bovary, 289
189, 194;
dir.,
186-
Leni,
Riefenstahl,
umph
Taste of
281
The
dir.,
287;
Tri-
dir.,
Olym-
piad, 287
Riesman, David, 321
Rio Bravo, 318
Rioli, Ricardo,
Ritt, Martin,
104
90-91;
dir.,
Hud,
24,
Young Man,
91, 222-225;
Edg e
of the City, 91
Riva, Emmanuelle, 34
River, The, 104, 248
190
Robbins, Jerome, 142, 144
Robe, The, 329
Robinson, Edward C, 62
Roche\ Henri-Pierre, 217
Rodgers, Richard, 143
Rogers, Ginger, 24, 81, 145, 278
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The,
139-140
Romeo and
Juliet, 142,
281, 305
362
INDEX
245, 288
Room
at the
Athene, 119
Seyler,
78, 165
Shakespeare,
dir.,
188
Shadows, 73
Open
142,
154,
169,
244-
City, 290
Rotha, Paul, 270-271
Roud, Richard, 20
du feu),
m,
193-194
Russell, Bertrand,
289
Show,
Saboteur, 294
Salinger, J. D., 10
Show
331-346
San Francisco Chronicle, 128
San Francisco Examiner, 129
Showboat, 322
Shuftan, Eugen, 7
Siegel, Don, 313
Sapphire, 66, 77
Saroyan, William, 215
Sigal, Clancy, 23
Sight and Sound, 63-65, 72, 271,
Sarris,
310, 316
The, 22-23
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22
Silence,
Sillitoe,
Schlesinger, Arthur,
Singin
fr.,
150,
177,
205
Schmidt, Lars, 215-216
Schnitzler, Arthur,
97
Schulberg, Budd, 48
261
M5>
the Rain,
in
Siodmak,
Robert,
The Crimson
142,
Killers,
224,
dir.,
313;
The
224
The
dir.,
Wind, 206
Smiles of a
Summer Night,
22,
105-
205-207
Sennett, Mack, 26, 151, 227
Serre, Henri, 217
Snows
81,
24,
278
tures,
dir.,
Flaming Crea-
19
So Big, 143
INDEX
Some
Like
It
South
172
Pacific, 144,
Spiegel,
363
233
Sam, 48
2 53~ 2 54
Tagore, Sharmila, 254
Tales of Hoffmann, 286
Tamblyn, Russ, 11
Stein, Gertrude,
217
Tessier, Valentine,
Stendhal, 67
Stephens, Martin, 167
Sternberg, Josef von, 188, 248
Stevens, George,
241;
dir.,
Gunga
Army Rob-
Storey, David, 18
Bravo,
296;
The Mag-
Escape from
Bad Day
at
Lady Eve,
327-328
Stockwell, Dean, 72
Fort
Thesiger, Ernest, 7
Thin Man, The, 81
240-241
289
24, 81
Time,
>
The
73, 77,
90-
9 2 13^34. 5
5* 169-171,
202, 204, 212, 224, 323
To Damascus, 277
364
INDEX
81,
24,
Top Hat, 24
Torre Nilsson, Leopoldo, 22, 24
Touch
Touch
View from
Viridiana, 15, 17
Visconti,
Luchino, 264;
of Evil, 277
Leopard, 264
Vitti, Monica, 188
of Larceny, A, 207
The
dir.,
299-300
of Arc,
Trial of Joan
The, 22
Wilde, The, 43
Triumph of the Will, 287
Tropic of Capricorn, 214
Truffaut, Francois, 24-25, 132, 210Trials of Oscar
222, 312;
Jules
Turn
Night,
Sierra,
Way Down
East, 199
251;
West
What
Ever
Happened
to
Baby
Ugetsu, 163
Umberto D,
149,
247,
284-285,
290
Ustinov, Peter, 235-239;
dir., Billy
Woman
Knows, 106
Bed?,
Valli, Alida, 7
Wilder,
6,
37-38
Every
Whirlpool, 298
Whitehall, Richard, 89
26
275
Variety, 9-10, 69,
2 33> 2 4 6
Vendetta, 100
What
Vtrite, ha,
High
Vampyr,
292-293;
293-294
War and Peace, 281
Warner, H. B., 66
Waves, The, 149
Wayne, John,
168-169, 171
Tushingham,
177-178,
204,
It
Vertigo, 297
Victim, 201-203
Two, Three,
150-155;
Ace
in
INDEX
World
365
dir.,
The
Wings
Want
So Big, 143; Executive Suite, 143, 323; Somebody Up There Likes Me, 143;
to Live, 35, 143;
The
Set-up, 235
Wizard
Woman's Face,
Wood, Natalie,
A, 305
138,
145-146
Woodward, Joanne, 91
Woolf, Virginia, 106, 149
Zeman,
25, 305;
ber of the Wedding, 47; High
Noon, 242
Zolotow, Maurice, 37
L\
Film
Sun Times
4816