Category Archives: Movies

WELLES AND SHAKESPEARE: THREE COLLABORATIONS

Posted on by


               
              
              
              
              
         [Photo by Carl Van Vechten]


The
poetry of a play by Shakespeare is characterized by an almost
supernatural density of imagery and invention, wordplay, wit and
insight.  Though designed to fly by in two hours' traffic
upon a stage it simply cannot be absorbed fully on a single hearing or
reading, composed as it is of  a torrent of miraculous phrases and passages that
repay continual study.  The sheer abundance, the sheer generosity
of it is overwhelming.

Orson Welles completed three films based on Shakespeare plays — Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff (Chimes At Midnight). 
His interest, as it became clear over time, was not simply in mounting the plays within the cinematic
medium but pushing the medium to supply a cinematic equivalent to
Shakespeare's poetry.  In Falstaff,
I would argue, he finally succeeded in this ambition.  In the
process he completely rethought the approach to cinema he employed in
his early masterpieces Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

Citizen Kane, though
dominated aesthetically by scenes shot in deep focus and playing in
long takes, in fact employs a grab-bag of cinematic techniques —
process shots involving backscreen projection, models and matte
paintings, double-exposures, faked newsreel footage.  In The Magnificent Ambersons,
Welles experimented with even longer and more elaborately choreographed
single-take scenes, some of which were cut up by Robert Wise at the
behest of RKO when they took the film away from Welles — but Welles
also included pictorial trick shots that violate the aesthetic of the
single-take scenes.

With The Stranger, Welles was
trying to work within the boundaries of a more conventional studio style,
but he eschewed trick shots almost entirely and included one long,
stunning single-take scene made with a crane on tracks in a forest.  In The Lady From Shanghai
he tried his best to stick to location photography and to incorporate
long single-take scenes, but the film was so meddled with by Columbia
that we don't have a clear record of Welles's vision for the film as a whole.

All this was prelude to his first Shakespeare adaptation for film, Macbeth,
made cheaply and quickly for Republic Pictures.  The 23-day
shooting schedule meant that Welles had to limit his technical
ambitions for the film.  His increasing fascination with long
single-take scenes resulted in one extraordinary feat — a
10-minute shot which records the entire episode leading up to and including the murder of Duncan
and the arrival of Macduff, who discovers the crime.  It plays
out on several levels of the studio set, covered by pans, tracks and
crane moves.

There are two other less extraordinary single-take scenes of some
length.  One records the episode in which Macduff learns of the
deaths of all his “pretty ones”.  This is taken from a fixed
camera position on a studio-exterior set without great spatial
interest.  The four actors involved move about in ways that often
feel arbitrary in order to create different groupings of the characters
and heighten the complexity of the shot.  The other shot records the
scene in which Macbeth, on the parapet of Dunsinane, learns of the
approach of Macduff and his armies and then moves inside to discuss
Lady Macbeth's mental health with her doctor.  Again, the studio
sets here don't offer much spatial complexity and the choreography is not
especially dynamic.

Two shorter scenes involving dynamic camera moves are more
powerful.  In one, the camera starts on a close-up of Macbeth, left
alone in the banqueting hall, and moves with him, pulling back, as he
races outdoors to the top of a rock and summons the weird
sisters.  This is followed shortly by a high crane shot that swoops down
slowly onto the figure of Macbeth and ends in a close-up on his
upturned face.

The rest of the film employs a more conventional editing of shorter
shots.  Some of these shots are visually arresting, involving
dynamic camera moves and angles, but many more are merely
utilitarian.  There are a few interpolated shots taken on real
exteriors, a couple of shots employing matte paintings and, in the
final battle scene, a series of shots manipulated with optical
zooms.  Taken as a whole, the visual strategy of the film is
chaotic.

When he came to make Othello
a
few years later, Welles said he planned to shoot it all on built sets
and in long takes — making it, in effect, an extension of the approach
he took with the long single-take studio-bound scenes in Macbeth.  He had been disappointed with the execution of the sets he designed for Macbeth, which do indeed look pretty cheesy most of the time — but he had a superb designer for Othello, Alexander Trauner, who sketched out elaborate sets for the film, meant to
be built at the Victorine Studio in Nice.  Welles was thrilled
with the sets Trauner envisioned and always spoke of them wistfully in
later years.

All of Welles' plans for Othello had to be abandoned, however, when the film's
original financing fell through.  Welles could only afford to
shoot in real locations, few of which were suitable for the entirety
of a given scene.  In addition, limitations on equipment and the size of the crew
meant that he could not shoot long takes, which, as he explained,
require the technical resources of a large studio production unit.

These problems altered Welles' whole aesthetic approach to the film,
since he would not only have to use short takes more or less exclusively but he
would also have to match shots taken in disparate locations within a
single scene.

His response was masterful.  He concentrated the full power of his
visual imagination on the individual shots — almost all of which, however brief, record
deep, dynamic spaces and boldly choreographed movement — and used rhythmic, musical editing in an attempt to unify them
into a coherent artistic whole.

The result was impressive but not uniformly successful.  Clearly Welles was improvising
from day to day, sometimes desperately — the production was halted on numerous occasions when
funds ran out, necessitating changes of locale and the loss of actors
due to conflicting commitments.  The “music” of the editing was
something Welles could not always control expressively — often he was
just trying to keep the beat, to bridge extreme gaps in continuity.

But necessity had led him to new possibilities of invention.  He would deploy them spectacularly in Falstaff. 
In that film he would shoot to the music of the editing he
envisioned, without the technical vexations created by Othello's near-fatal financial emergencies.  There would be no long, virtuoso single-take scenes
but each shot would be dense, beautifully choreographed, with its own
dynamic spatial complexity.  These shots would be utterly
involving in themselves
— and Welles would be able to preserve a sense of spatial continuity
from shot to shot to a degree that had not been possible on Othello — but the images would flow by with a relentless momentum, regulated by the metric of the editing.

Welles would not linger on the rich poetry of his individual shots but
race through them — as Shakespeare races through the rich poetry of his texts. 
The great battle scene in the film offers the most extraordinary
vindication of Welles's approach.  Though made up of scores of
short shots, each is like a film within a film — bold, dynamic,
involving.  You feel you could linger on every one of them
indefinitely.

When he was 19, Welles wrote this about Shakespeare — “His
language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and the moon.  He
wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like
heartbeats.”  It's not too much to say that in the images of Falstaff Welles found a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare's poetry — a true visual complement. 
Which is to say that Welles took cinema as far, or nearly as far, as Shakespeare took the
English language — and that's as far as anyone has ever taken it.

THE MISSING AMBERSONS

Posted on by

Here's some interesting and possibly hopeful news from Wellesnet,
the invaluable web site resource for all things Orson Welles.  It
seems that Beatrice Welles, Orson Welles' daughter and one of his
heirs, made a legal claim against Turner Entertainment over the rights
to The Magnificent Ambersons and a couple of other films.  Court documents tracked down by Wellesnet reveal that the claims with regard to Ambersons have been settled.  This may explain why Ambersons
has not yet appeared on DVD in the U. S. and may be a sign that it will
be coming soon.  Let's hope.  This is one of the greatest
films not
yet available in the format in this country.  Others are:

Greed
The Big Parade
The Merry Widow (silent version)
The Wedding March
City Girl
Falstaff (Chimes At Midnight)
Comanche Station

LOST PARADISE

Posted on by


            
              
              
              
              
              
   [Photo © 1960 William Klein]

An excerpt from a 2000 profile of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody in The New Yorker:



During our interview, Godard referred
to the New Wave not only as “liberating” but also as
“conservative.”  On the one hand, he and his friends saw
themselves as a resistance movement against “the occupation of the
cinema by people who had no business there.”  On the other, this
movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his
peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition — that of
silent films — that had disappeared almost everywhere else. 
Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that
had to be reclaimed.


If love of the silent cinema doesn't point the way to new, revolutionary
work — as love of ancient Greek art sparked the innovations of the
Renaissance — then it's just hobbyism.




In other words, silent cinema can be alive as a cultural force, as it
was for the young French cinéastes of the Fifties, just as ancient Greek
art was alive for the artists of the Renaissance.




The parade has not gone by.

HARRY ON KANE

Posted on by

Below are my nephew Harry's notes for an oral presentation on Citizen Kane for his 9th-grade history class:

February 26, 2008

Citizen Kane

Intro Facts:

-Directed by Orson Wells in 1941.  
-He also starred in , co-wrote and co-produced it
– all at the age of 24
-Previously, had been in radio, creator of the famous War of the Worlds episode for Mercury Theater in N.Y.C.
-Citizen Kane= the first and last major studio film over which he would have total control.
-Considered universally to be one of the greatest films ever created

Some Elements that make this film revolutionary:
 
-use of depth of focus shots (=wide angle lenses to capture the details
of the foreground, middle ground and background without prioritizing)
-depth of focus important because it allows the viewer to actively
investigate the space, make conclusions, see relationships between
characters and their space in more complex ways, spectator is an active
participant in the scene
-use of ceilings and the “fourth wall” = more interesting camera angles, more creative lighting , more real
-camera is inquisitive, as if it is a character itself, instead of a stationary machine that records what’s in front of it
-non-linear storytelling
-narrative told in bits and pieces, out of chronological order
-some scenes are revisited more than once from different perspectives
-story of Kane’s life is revealed as a reporter interviews people who
were closest to Kane in attempt to learn meaning of Kane’s last dying
words
-leads to a richer, more complex portrait of a person

Conclusion:

-On initial release, film was hated by most major film studios. 
-Negative was almost burned
-Wells was persecuted by newspaper tycoon William Randolf Hearst, who
saw unflattering parallels between himself and Charles Foster Kane.
-Wells was blacklisted in Hollywood
-Citizen Kane was never distributed to major commercial theaters
-Sad because this movie defines us – what drives power, materialism, and what we may have lost on the way

After Harry's presentation his teacher said, “We always hear that Citizen Kane is one of the greatest movies ever made — now we know why.”




My notes on the notes:

A superb summary — excellent stylistic and thematic analysis.  I
personally wouldn't call any of the stylistic elements of the film
“revolutionary”, however, since they had all been used before — just rarely
with such brilliance.  It's true that most studio heads hated the
picture, because it offended Hearst and they were afraid of him, but
the Hollywood community recognized its brilliance — it was nominated
for several Academy Awards and won in the category of Best
Screenplay.  The negative was indeed almost burned — Louis B.
Mayer offered to buy it from RKO and destroy it, as a favor to Hearst and to
protect the industry from his wrath.  Welles wasn't exactly
blacklisted in Hollywood — it just became hard for him to work as a
director there after his first two films, and a third which he
produced, tanked at the box office.  Kane
was distributed erratically and never got a chance to prove itself
commercially but it did play at a few major theaters in major cities —
it had its Los Angeles premiere at the El Capitan, which is still
standing.  The El Capitan wasn't the most prestigious house in
town but it was a respectable venue.

Conclusion:

Well done, Harold!

FALSTAFF

Posted on by

Orson Welles once said that if any one of his films would qualify him for entry into heaven it would probably be Falstaff (also known as Chimes At Midnight.)  As credentials for salvation go, Falstaff is probably as impeccable as any — it’s one of the greatest movies ever made, so great that it almost seems to inhabit a new medium all its own.

Visually it’s a torrent of dense, lyrical, consistently exhilarating images — an explosion of plastic invention unequaled since the days of silent cinema.  But it’s a talkie, and its words are not just any words — they’re the words of Shakespeare.  It’s not too much to say that Welles’ images, with their musical rhythms of movement within individual shots and from shot to shot, constitute a co-equal element with Shakespeare’s poetry.  Image and word fly, dance, crack, soar and sing together.  There has never been anything quite like it.

The soundtrack has technical flaws, however, which make it hard to appreciate the full scope of Welles’ achievement.  The production was beset with severe financial problems — almost all the dialogue had to be dubbed, and Welles had to supervise the re-recording at a distance.  The line readings are uniformly superb but the sync is not always perfect and the “room tone” surrounding the dubbed voices is inconsistent and often disorienting.

I don’t know if the original sound elements still exist — if they do, modern digital technology could certainly be applied to correct the flaws, though it would probably cost a small fortune.

As things stand, one needs to accept a slight disconnect between image and dialogue — which is no more than saying  that the Parthenon has sustained a bit of damage through the years.  One makes allowances.

The film is not available on DVD in this country.  There is a barely acceptable all-region Brazilian edition in NTSC format which can be had online, but it’s not optimized for a widescreen monitor and the transfer of both sound and picture is mediocre.  Still, if you’ve seen the film on a big screen, the Brazilian DVD can evoke the experience well enough.

I saw Falstaff at the Paris Theater in New York in the summer of my 17th year.  During the battle scene my hair stood on end — I think I probably trembled with excitement.  I know what cinema is, I thought to myself — the secret of it is here, in this film.  It was more a gut feeling than a practical or intellectual insight, but the moment has inspired all my thinking about movies ever since.  A hundred years from now people will still be studying Falstaff in an effort to apprehend the craft and mystery of movies.

CINEMA AND BELIEF

Posted on by

The second in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

The
one thing that defines the world of dreams, the spaces and the places,
the people and the creatures and the objects we find there, is that we
experience them as “real” — as having the substance and coherence of
the physical world we inhabit when awake.

It is only upon reflection after we awake that we realize how “unreal”
the dream world was we just experienced.  We met the dead there,
perhaps, still alive, we discovered a new wing of the house we had not
known existed, we jumped and sprang twenty feet into the air.

We remake the waking world in our dreams in order to press it into the
service of emotional needs, but those needs would not be served if we
couldn't believe in the reality of the dream world.  We may for
example feel, psychologically, in our waking life as though we are
being pursued by demons — activating primal fears of pursuit by
animals or persons intent on doing us harm.  But we cannot see
those demons, which is disorienting.  In dreams we give the demons
shapes, the shapes of real creatures, and thus ground ourselves in the
familiar.  Of course we feel terrified by those tigers chasing us
through dream streets — they're tigers,
for God's sake, with claws and fangs.  So much more reassuring,
paradoxically, than the unseen, undefined forces in waking life that
seem to be dogging our heels, bent on devouring us.

In dreams we reconcile the complexities of psychology with the
simplicities of the physical world.  Dreams are a kind of
rear-guard action against advanced ratiocination, which takes us into
realms we cannot always comprehend fully or navigate.

This is not entirely a retrogressive process, since dreams re-orient us
towards the dynamics of the physical world, even if those dynamics as
they operate in dreams are not precisely aligned with the dynamics of
the physical world.  There is a twofold consolation, a twofold
wisdom, in imagining psychological fears as physical threats within the
precinct of dreams.  We
are, first, reminded that we live in a world of physical threats,
against which we must take precautions — emotional distress does not
obviate the need to avoid stepping in front of moving cars.  At
the same time we
encourage ourselves to believe that psychological fears can be dealt
with as physical threats are dealt with — by fight or flight.

André Bazin believed that the “ontology of cinema” was rooted in the
absolute connection between the photographic image and its subject — a
connection similar to the connection between a death mask and the face
of a corpse, or a footprint and the foot that left it.  This may
be an inescapable quality of the traditional still photograph, but the
source of the enchantment of cinema lies elsewhere — which is why
hand-drawn or computer-generated animation can be just as cinematic as
a photographically-based movie.

As long as a movie constructs a substantial and coherent alternate
reality it has the power to express and manipulate our emotions. 
As long as it delivers the illusion of a world that is convincingly
real while we are inside it
a
film can mimic the process of dreaming.  Cinema is not about, or
not only about, the mummification of reality — it is about the
translation of psychology into the realm of oneiric reality, and the
essential quality of oneiric reality is that it feels absolutely real.



Jean Renoir said that he saw Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives at least ten times and that it was
the film which inspired him to dedicate his life to filmmaking.  Renoir
said it impressed him with “the possibility of creating
within a film a world that might differ greatly from reality but still
would be experienced as having a wholeness and coherence like that of
the world we live in.”  What else is Renoir describing but the world of dreams?

WORD AND IMAGE

Posted on by

The first in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Nothing
is so inaccessible to mainstream intellectual thought as popular
art.  Popular art derives much of its glamor from the sense that
it is new, at one with its time — to see its roots in the past is to
disenchant it.  At the same time, its very currency, the
perception that it is wholly of the present, robs it of value, brands
it as transient.  Add to this the modernist notion that art with
mass appeal is fatally compromised by commercialism and you have a recipe for
confining popular art to an intellectual ghetto.  It can be
studied as a sociological or political subject, as a stepchild of high art or as
amusing, suggestive ephemera, but it cannot be examined on it own terms.

The modern academy, and the critical traditions associated with it, may
sometimes attempt to examine popular art as an aesthetic and historical phenomenon
but the standards for such an examination are shabby — they would not
be tolerated by any other academic discipline.

The proof of this, I think, can be seen in the fact that we have no
critical language for discussing the unique visual methods of
movies.  The standard critical concepts for discussing movies are borrowed
from literature or painting.  The unique methods of cinema must be
suggested impressionistically or simply avoided.  In their
critical study of the films of King Vidor, Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon state
honestly that they have made no attempt to analyze Vidor's visual
methods, feeling that it's impossible to do so apart from the physical
presence of the films.

Of course it's easier to critique a work of art, especially a work of
visual or plastic art, in the physical presence of the work, but that
is not to say that critics have nothing useful to say about painting or
sculpture or dance — that their physical effects cannot be evoked and
discussed in words.

André Bazin took an heroic first step towards creating a critical
language for analyzing the plastic phenomena of film images but it has
never led to a general system of terms and concepts.

By the same token, there has been no systematic examination of the
aesthetic roots of cinematic technique, except insofar as these were based in the
literature of the novel or the stage.  There has been no
comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of the comic
strip, though the comic strip has been with us since the beginning of
the 19th Century, and no comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of Victorian academic
painting — that is to say, painting in the age of photography. 
Yet the comic strip and Victorian academic painting were far greater
influences on movies, on the aesthetic methods of movies, than the
literature of the Victorian stage, from which movies are customarily seen to have derived.

Intellectual fashion and a territorial segregation of word and image in
the academy have left the crucial arts of our time unexamined.  On
the whole this may be a good thing, since art that is unexamined in
this sense tends to be more innovative and vital than art which feels
itself accountable to an intellectual and academic authority.

Still, we should recognize the state of things for what it is.  We have no substantive intellectual access to and are discouraged from engaging intellectually (in any truly rigorous way) with the most vital and innovative arts of the past century and of our own time.

EL CID

Posted on by

Finally . . . this extraordinary film is available on DVD, in a wonderful edition with lots of extras from The Miriam Collection, a new home video division of Miramax.

El Cid might be be the best of
all the widescreen epics.  It's visual style is bold, elegant and
often stunning, with none of the process photography that dates so
many big films from this era.  The narrative has tremendous momentum
and the melodrama is stark and wrenching, very adult for an epic,
inflected with a mature kind of eroticism.

Its tale of conflict between Christian and Moor in medieval Spain has
troubling resonances today, though the film makes an effort to
distinguish between humane and fanatical Muslims and to posit the idea
of an alliance between Christians and Muslims of goodwill.

The action sequences, stage by second unit director Yakima Canutt, who essentially directed the chariot race episode in Ben Hur,
are gripping and the choreography of the armies on the move and in
battle is both elegant and stirring.  No amount of computer
genius could ever dispose CGI soldiers and armies in virtual space this
beautifully and convincingly.

As a kid on the edge of puberty I had my first recognizably sexual
feelings while watching Sophia Loren in El Cid — she's a
breathtaking incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with a power beyond
rational challenge.  Heston does what he does best — hold his own
plausibly against backdrops (and, in the case of Loren, bosoms) of epic
size.

The film has a dark, macabre undertone but is still wildly entertaining, and a great work of art and craft in the bargain.

HOLLYWOOD: ART VERSUS COMMERCE

Posted on by

One
of the enduring myths of Hollywood is that the town is an eternal
battleground between art and commerce — between studio executives who
only care about money and filmmakers who only care about art.

The truth is that movies have been, almost since the moment they were
invented, a popular art form.  They attracted, for the most part,
popular artists — which is to say, artists who wanted to reach large
audiences.  Long before there was an established studio system run
by corporate functionaries, filmmakers courted a mass audience and
reached it.  The financial returns that followed created the industry that corporations at once set about dominating and controlling.

The art of cinema was created by the same people who created the mass
market for films — Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, Keaton, Lloyd. 
Because they were popular artists, commerce was an intimate aspect of
their endeavor.  The corporate executives who took over the
industry these artists created were by no means more
interested in the box office than the artists had been — they were
interested in power and turning the art form into a more predictable
revenue source . . . interests which often conflicted with maximum
box-office potential.

When executives and filmmakers clashed over the content of films, it
was not a battle between art and commerce — it was a battle between
popular artists who actually knew how to make popular films and
bean-counters who thought they knew better.  Since the
bean-counters quickly gained a virtual monopoly over the distribution
of films, they had the last word, and also the ability to insure that
this word could never be challenged, since the overruled filmmakers had
no practical way of getting films before the public without the
bean-counters' consent.

John Ford fought constantly with studio executives and, by his account,
never won a single battle with them — but does anyone seriously
believe that Ford, one of the most consistently successful popular
artists since Dickens, was fighting for some private, noncommercial artistic vision?  Ford did make a few films, like The Fugitive,
which he may have known in advance would not be wildly commercial, but
for the most part he wanted to address a mass audience as effectively
as possible.  For a genuine popular artist like Ford — or Dickens, or Shakespeare, for that matter — there is no
conflict between art and commerce.

Ford was fighting against executives who could not have created a
popular work of art if their lives depended on it, executives who only
managed and bullied and second-guessed those who could create such
works.  The real issue was not art or commerce — it was
power.  Without their corporate control of the means of film
distribution, these executives would have remained in the realm of
exhibition, from which most of them emerged and where they belonged.

Hollywood in truth has been a battleground between monopoly and a free
market, between corporate standardization and homogenization and
entrepreneurial innovation.  The conflict between art and commerce
has been nothing more than a smokescreen.

CHEYENNE AUTUMN

Posted on by

This
was the next to last feature film John Ford completed, in 1964, when he
was 69 years-old.  It doesn't work as a drama, much less a
melodrama, or as a character study or as an historical epic . . . but
it's one of the most sublime visual poems in the history of movies and
a very great work of art.

It tells the once little-known story of a band of Cheyenne who, in
1879, broke out of confinement on a reservation in Indian territory,
present-day Oklahoma, and made a 1500-mile trek back to their homeland
in Montana.  Pursued and harried by a succession of cavalry
expeditions, starved and near death, the band made it to its old home where
it was allowed to remain.

In his excellent commentary on the wonderful new DVD edition of the film, Ford
biographer Joseph McBride says that Ford originally intended to make Cheyenne Autumn
as a small, black-and-white film, an intimate study of the Cheyenne
pilgrims, but that he was persuaded by the studio to expand it into a
big wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza.  It was, says McBride, a
“Faustian bargain” which led to a film that was neither fish nor fowl,
since Ford lost sight of the Cheyenne characters yet failed to create a
genuine epic.

This may indeed reflect the development of the project but I think it
misses the essence of the film that Ford finally made.  All
of the characters in the film, both Cheyenne and white, recede into the
images, become secondary to the images.  Ford doesn't lose sight
of them as dramatic personae because he has no real interest in them as
dramatic personae.  They're just narrative markers that guide us
through the landscape of the film.

Landscape was always a character in
Ford's Westerns, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the relative
smallness of human intention and desire.  It stood in, one might
even say, for the regard of Eternity, in which human endeavor held an
insignificant place.  It transformed the melodrama of his stories
into tragic
absurdity.

In Cheyenne Autumn, as in
Shakespeare's late romances, the author lost interest in the mechanics
of plot altogether, in the centrality of individual character, and became enchanted by the
mystery of his medium — the magical poetry of words, in Shakespeare's
case, and of images in Ford's.  The
progress of the Cheyenne through the magnificence of the landscape, the
evolutions of mounted cavalry on the march or at the charge, fill
Ford's imagination fully — the characters dissolve into the beauty of
movement itself.  They are elevated into a transcendent glory not
by the specificity of self but by their possession of space.  They
are dancers, sculptures in motion.

This is not an abstract vision, however, a celebration of
technique.  In his old age, disillusioned with the legends of the
West he did so much to reinforce, Ford lost his faith in man's
essential goodness, or at least in that part of it related to his
will.  Primal values, transcending individual human character,
were all he could believe in — the dumb urge to go home, to preserve
community, to do one's duty.

At the center of the film Ford inserted, unaccountably to many critics,
a 21-minute sequence set in Dodge City which mercilessly satirizes the
myth of the Western hero, of the frontier town.  Jimmy Stewart
appears as a corrupt and cynical Wyatt Earp leading the hysterical townspeople on an
absurd pursuit of the phantom Cheyenne, who in truth are nowhere near
Dodge.  The familiar narrative of the old West is deconstructed, revealed as
a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

After this strange interlude, the film switches back to the story of
the Cheyenne, doing what they have to do, and the horse soldiers, doing
what they have to do.  When the Cheyenne are restored to their
ancestral Eden, Ford shows us how much they have lost recovering it,
just as
he shows us how much honor the soldiers have lost in fulfilling a duty
that's been applied to a meaningless and inhuman mission.

The triumph on both sides was only in the journey, the movement, the dream — all of
which vanish in the end, as the eternal landscape looks on impassively.

The
film has a nominal “upbeat” resolution in its penultimate episode in
which
Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, wonderfully played by Edward G.
Robinson, goes to visit the escaped Cheyenne in Montana and promises to
help them stay there.  This scene, oddly, is shot against
cheesy-looking back-projections — such a radical violation of the look
of the rest of the film that it almost seems deliberately surreal . . .
as though Ford was asking us not to take this superficial “climax” too
seriously.  Perhaps it can be compared to the improbable events
that “resolve” the narrative of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,
in which the playwright seems to be asking us to laugh with him at the
conventions of the stage — to remind us that the true heart of his
work lies elsewhere.

DUDLEY NICHOLS AND JOHN FORD

Posted on by

With the notable exception of Stagecoach,
I'm not a big fan of the movies John Ford made with screenwriter Dudley
Nichols, even though these include some of Ford's most celebrated and
entertaining films.

Nichols was an extremely skillful writer, with a sound sense of story structure and a good ear (usually) for
colorful dialogue.  But he also had a self-conscious, “literary”
style — he tended to see situations and characters in emblematic,
metaphorical terms.  This aspect of Nichols' work encouraged Ford
to indulge his gorgeous visual expressionism at the expense of what he
did best — create cinematic spaces and places of mesmerizing
specificity.  The images of The Lost Patrol and The Informer
are supremely beautiful but they grow claustrophobic after a
while.  The desert and the fog-bound city are too obviously
surrogates for existential states, symbolic and airless.

In his best work Ford found ways of imbuing interiors and landscapes
with an uninsistent symbolic quality — we read them as real spaces and
feel their emotional resonances on a subliminal level.  We have a
sense of discovering and exploring these spaces on our own, no matter
how many times we come back to them.  The shadowy streets of Gypo
Nolan's Dublin in The Informer, the merciless desert that swallows up The Lost Patrol, are places we visit with a guide, always reminding us what these environments “mean”.

The streets of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine,
the unfinished church on the edge of town, the maze of the O. K.
Corral, are every bit as charged with meaning and significance, but
Ford lets us tease them out for ourselves — he lets us inhabit them at
our ease, until the places seem to speak to us in their own voices.

SCARLET STREET

Posted on by

This film by Fritz Lang, from 1945, is essentially domestic noir — the story of an unhappy, ordinary middle-aged married man led into a life of deception and, ultimately, crime by a fetching femme fatale. 
It was Lang's favorite among the films he made in America and has a
considerable reputation but I find it curiously dead emotionally and
lacking in real suspense.

The problem is that the fatal femme
is so obviously on the make, so obviously not attracted to the ordinary
man, so cynical and so dumb, that we feel only pity for the guy, a pity
laced with scorn.  We can see what attracts Walter to Phyllis in Double Indemnity
— the two are hot together — and even if we suspect that Phyllis
might be using Walter, part of us thinks it might be worth getting used
by a woman like this.  This implicates us morally and emotionally
in Walter's transgressions, makes us care about his fate.

It's impossible to care about Chris in Scarlet Street
on that level — watching his life come apart at the seams is like
watching a train wreck from a distance.  It's fascinating and
horrifying but we're not involved.  In Double Indemnity, like it or not, we're passengers on that trolley hurtling towards the end of the line.

The ending of Scarlet Street
achieves a kind of tragic power, because things go so horribly
wrong, and Chris's moral collapse is so complete and so bleak. 
It's not a genuine tragedy, though, because in a genuine tragedy we
could imagine ourselves in Chris's place.  In Scarlet Street we're denied that identification, that implication in his fate.

REDISCOVERING PREMINGER

Posted on by

Following
up on a recent post in which I suggested that Otto Preminger was
overdue for a critical re-evaluation, I notice that Film Forum in New
York is hosting a 23-film retrospective of the director's work — which
coincides with the recent release of a new Preminger biography by
Foster Hirsch, which Tony D'Ambra of the films noir site recently
directed attention to here.

The Film Forum site offers this from Andrew Sarris — “Otto
Preminger is still the most maligned, misjudged, misunderstood and
misperceived American filmmaker. His films have stood up better
stylistically, thematically and subtextually than I ever imagined they
would.”

Indeed,
Preminger's films are so interesting and so good that all this
attention should lead to the restoration of his reputation in no time
at all.  (Let's hope it leads to a widescreen DVD edition of Anatomy Of A Murder as well . . .)