Big Ideas Simply Explained - The Movie Book

FEAR AND WONDER 149 What else to watch: Ninotchka (1939) ■ How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) ■ Sabrina (1954) ■ The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) ■ The Apartment (1960) ■ Irma la Duce (1963) ■ The Fortune Cookie (1966) ■ Tootsie (1982) As “Josephine” and “Daphne”, Joe and Jerry hope to blend in with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators on a night train to Florida, but there’s no mistaking who plays the ukulele. describes her body. Yet Monroe’s performance delivers something truly magical. In one scene, during a lull in the action, Monroe sings I Wanna Be Loved By You straight into the camera: she’s seductive, sweet, and wistful all at once, and she succeeds in transforming Sugar’s cynicism into a childlike vulnerability. When she kisses Joe on the yacht, he is transformed, too—from seducer to seduced. While Joe cavorts with Sugar on In Some Like It Hot, everybody is Flaws and frailty a yacht—in Curtis’s memorable desperate to get their hands on Some Like It Hot reputedly suffered spoof of Cary Grant—the dress- something, and in Marilyn Monroe from behind-the-scenes tensions. wearing, tango-dancing, but the movie has the most lusted-after Monroe was initially unhappy with decidedly heterosexual Jerry gets star in Hollywood history—“Like being filmed in period-style black engaged to an aging but genuine Jell-O on springs!” is how Jerry and white, and Curtis famously millionaire, Osgood (Joe E. Brown). said that kissing Monroe was “like “You’re a guy! Why would a guy kissing Hitler.” Whether the actor want to marry a guy?” asks Joe meant it or not, this illusion- when he finds out. “Security!” shattering jibe echoes Wilder’s great replies Jerry, without missing preoccupation with human flaws a beat, his eyes moony at the and frailties. Nobody’s perfect, it thought of all that cash. seems—not even the legendary Marilyn Monroe. ■ In the end, Jerry drops the act and tells Osgood the truth. “I’m Jack Lemmon Actor a man!” he admits with a growl. But Osgood isn’t bothered. “Magic time” a star. He was often one half of a “Nobody’s perfect!” he beams, was how double act; key collaborators and Jerry shoots the camera a Jack Lemmon included zany comedian Ernie “Well, whaddyaknow?” look as (1925–2001) Kovacs, actor Walter Matthau, the movie fades out. described acting. He would and filmmaker Billy Wilder. mutter this phrase to himself before stepping onto a stage or Key movies in front of a camera. Lemmon worked in television and light 1959 Some Like It Hot entertainment before finding 1960 The Apartment his feet in movies, where his 1968 The Odd Couple everyman qualities made him 1992 Glengarry Glen Ross

YOUR PARENTS SAY YOU’RE ALWAYS LYING THE 400 BLOWS / 1959



152 THE 400 BLOWS M uch has been written I demand that a film express by critics about The 400 either the joy of making IN CONTEXT Blows. Indeed, the movie’s cinema or the agony of director, François Truffaut, was one making cinema. I am GENRE of France’s best-known film critics not at all interested in Drama before he decided to show the world anything in between. how he thought movies should be François Truffaut DIRECTOR made. He and the other filmmakers François Truffaut who led the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s believed WRITERS that a director was an author François Truffaut, (auteur) and the camera a pen (a Marcel Moussy “camera-pen,” or caméra-stylo). STARS Semiautobiography essay, using the thoughts and Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire The 400 Blows is in part a painfully feelings to express his own Maurier, Albert Rémy, personal memoir describing emotions, he is punished by a Guy Decomble Truffaut’s Parisian childhood, with teacher. It’s an act of homage certain names and events changed, condemned as plagiarism, and BEFORE not to disguise the victims, but to Antoine’s response is an act of 1955 Truffaut’s first short, The express something new and true. delinquency: he steals a typewriter Visit, is the tale of a bungled The young Truffaut becomes from his stepfather’s workplace. proposal of love. It is screened Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), only for a handful of friends. a fledgling troublemaker who is Recreating adolescence constantly accused of distorting There is often romance in youthful AFTER the facts. “Your parents say you are rebellion, but The 400 Blows is 1960 Jean-Luc Godard follows always lying,” says the psychiatrist not a nostalgic work. It does not his colleague Truffaut into sent to figure him out. “Sometimes look back on adolescence from cinema with À bout de souffle. I’d tell them the truth and they still an adult’s point of view, but rather wouldn’t believe me,” replies the recreates it in the present tense, 1962 Truffaut’s Jules et Jim is boy, “so I prefer to lie.” a story of a love triangle set at the time of World War I. Antoine reads the works of Honoré de Balzac, and when he 1968 Jean-Pierre Léaud adapts the author’s work for a school reprises the role of Antoine in Stolen Kisses. François Truffaut Director It’s a brave film critic who picks the director as a movie’s author. up a camera and directs a movie Truffaut was critical of most of their own. François Truffaut contemporary French movies, did just that with The 400 Blows, earning the nickname “The and his courage paid off—the Gravedigger of French Cinema.” movie was hailed as a But after The 400 Blows, his masterpiece, and Truffaut went reputation was transformed. on to direct more than 20 movies before his death in 1984. Key movies As a journalist writing for the 1959 The 400 Blows influential film magazine Cahiers 1962 Jules et Jim du Cinéma, Truffaut pioneered the 1966 Fahrenheit 451 auteur theory, a controversial 1973 Day for Night school of thought that identified

FEAR AND WONDER 153 What else to watch: À bout de souffle (1960, pp.166–67) ■ Shoot the Piano Player (1960) ■ Jules et Jim (1962, p.334) ■ The Wild Child (1970) ■ Two English Girls (1971) ■ Day for Night (1973) ■ The Story of Adele H. (1975) ■ Small Change (1976) Minute by minute 00:35 01:07 01:24 Antoine’s parents turn After stealing a After a discussion 00:05 up at school after he has typewriter from Antoine’s with the judge, Antoine’s Antoine is held back after lied to the teacher about stepfather’s workplace, mother agrees to send class when he is caught with a his mother having died. Antoine and René try him to a detention center picture of a girl. At the end of His stepfather slaps him. unsuccessfully to pawn it. for three months. the day, he swears he’ll take his He decides to run away. revenge on the teacher. 01:38 00:45 00:00 00:15 00:30 01:00 01:15 00:25 00:54 01:15 01:35 While playing hooky In French class, Antoine Antoine is locked up While the boys with his best friend René, is accused of plagiarizing in a police holding cell are playing soccer, Antoine sees his mother Balzac. He is sent to see after his stepfather turns Antoine escapes from kissing a man in the street. the principal, but runs off him in to the police. the detention center. to hide out at René’s house. He is fingerprinted and photographed. as it is felt, in all its agony, act of escaping. He heads for the the ocean, then turns back to the uncertainty, joy, and heartlessness. sea, which he has never seen, and land and looks straight into the The movie’s enigmatic English title runs down country roads until he camera. Truffaut freezes the image comes from the French phrase arrives at the beach. The camera, and zooms in on Antoine’s face. faire les quatre cents coups, which like the boy, is constantly moving, mean “to raise hell,” which Antoine keeping track of his flight. Antoine It is a bold and ambiguous certainly does. He doesn’t steal sprints into the surf, dips his toe in period at the end of the first chapter the typewriter so he can use it— in Antoine’s life (Truffaut would ❯❯ he plans to sell it and finance his escape from Paris. Truffaut is We’ll put him in an orphanage unafraid to color his protagonist so I can have some peace! as a mercenary as well as a lover of literature. Gilberte Doinel / The 400 Blows When Antoine has second Antoine thoughts about the theft, he is caught attempts to return the typewriter, as he tries but is caught. His stepfather to return the (Albert Rémy) decides to hand typewriter he him over to the police, and the stole from his boy spends a night in a jail cell stepfather’s with prostitutes and thieves. workplace. The police take a mug shot, and the movie freezes for the instant in which the photograph—and Antoine— are captured. “Around here to escape is bad enough,” says an inmate at the institution to which Antoine is eventually sent, “but getting caught is worse.” Truffaut mirrors this freeze- frame with the movie’s final shot, which captures Antoine in the

154 THE 400 BLOWS The poster for the movie’s cinematic release shows Antoine staring back at the land as he reaches the shore and can escape no further.

FEAR AND WONDER 155 continue to chronicle the character’s common. Antoine doesn’t know The 400 Blows charts Antoine’s adventures in a series of movies). who his biological father is, and he descent into delinquency, from When he reaches the water’s edge, lives with a distant stepfather, just classroom jokes to imprisonment, he can run no further. The final, as the director did in his youth. as the adult world rejects him. frozen moment as he turns back Antoine runs away from home, as seems to say that, far from having Truffaut did when he was eleven. Antoine fools escaped, he will remain forever Antoine tries to convince his around in class captured. The impression it makes teacher that his mother has died is one of hope mixed with defeat. (one of his outrageous lies). The Steals from parents young Truffaut claimed that his and classmates Escape to the movies father had been arrested by (pens, money) Antoine finds another means of the Germans. escape: the movies. He slips into R.I.P. a movie theater whenever he can, All movies comprise outrageous to lose himself in the dark of the lies, and conjure worlds of illusion Lies that his theater’s seats and the images on and pretense populated by people mother has died the screen, much as the young acting as someone they are not. Truffaut himself did. But Truffaut’s debut movie proves Runs away that, when arranged for a certain from home It is here that the character’s purpose and related with heart, life crosses irresistibly into the life lies can reveal and illuminate of his creator. There is the constant the truth in a way that the bare sense that the director is trying to facts cannot. It was this truth, explore or exorcise his own past, as well as the promise of escape, redefining it with shots and scenes that excited those French borrowed wholesale from other filmmakers who dipped their movies, such as Zero de Conduite toes into the New Wave. ■ (1933, pp.50–51) and Little Fugitive (1953), in the same way that After Antoine sets fire to his Antoine borrows from Balzac to shrine to Balzac, his favorite make sense of himself. It’s not just author, his stepfather threatens to a passion for the movies that send him to a military academy. Antoine and Truffaut have in Plagiarizes Balzac for a French essay Steals stepfather’s typewriter and tries to pawn it Spends the night in jail before being sent to a juvenile correctional facility

REBEL REBEL 1960–1974



158 INTRODUCTION French New Wave The Berlin Wall goes up While America’s growing Musicals continue to breathes new life into and the USSR takes the civil rights movement charm: The Sound movies with À bout de lead in the Cold War fights racism, so too does of Music breaks souffle, as does British New space race by sending lawyer Atticus Finch in international Wave with Saturday Night the first man into space, the movie adaptation of box-office records. and Sunday Morning. To Kill a Mockingbird. 60 years after A Trip to the Moon. 1960 1961 1962 1965 1960 1962 1964 1966 Italian epic La Dolce Vita In the year of the Dr. Strangelove Shot in newsreel spurns conventional Cuban Missile Crisis, satirizes Cold War style, The Battle of narrative in following one spy mania runs amok as paranoia, while the Algiers exposes the man’s search for love and 007, British secret agent Vietnam War escalates happiness among the café James Bond, makes his and the US introduces brutal realities of guerrilla warfare, in an society of Rome. debut in Dr. No. the draft. era of decolonization. R eleased in the last The film of tomorrow will of TV in Western homes during moments of the 1950s, be directed by artists for the 1950s. Cinema’s response was François Truffaut’s The thrilling. Many of the greatest 400 Blows was the bridge into the whom shooting a film movies of the era were born out decade to come, and the seismic constitutes a wonderful of a mood of bubbling outrage. In shake ups that would arrive with and thrilling adventure. the US, the young genius Stanley it. From the very beginning of François Truffaut Kubrick took a jab at the ongoing the 1960s, cinema was, like its insanity of the Cold War with Dr. audience, set on breaking rules. witty, it immediately made Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers everything that had come before paid homage to Alec Guinness’s New Wave look hopelessly old-fashioned. multitasking in Kind Hearts and The impetus came from Europe, Coronets by playing three different in particular from France, where All this was at a time when characters. Later, as demands for Truffaut’s colleagues from the many observers thought cinema change coursed around the world, movie magazine Cahiers du was dying, doomed by the spread the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo Cinéma were creating a whole new would influence a generation of language for movies. The era of the filmmakers with the incendiary Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) would The Battle of Algiers. be embodied by director Jean-Luc Godard, a gifted ball of mischief Counterculture who would release his own first Elsewhere, the politics were less feature in 1960: À bout de souffle overt but the air just as thick with (Breathless). Stylish and extremely restlessness and the rejection of

REBEL REBEL 159 Sex gets surreal in Luis New Hollywood hits Cinematic violence is Kung fu goes Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, the road with Peter taken to new extremes global, and Hong while Hollywood teases Fonda and Dennis by A Clockwork Orange, Kong actor Bruce Lee social taboos in The The French Connection, acquires cult status in Graduate, and smashes Hopper in Easy Rider, Enter the Dragon. and Jon Voight and and Dirty Harry. them wide open in Dustin Hoffman in Bonnie and Clyde. Midnight Cowboy. 1967 1969 1971 1973 1968 1970 1972 1974 Space-age science fiction MASH and Catch-22 Francis Ford Coppola Chinatown’s neo-noir thrills audiences in target the insanity of redefines the gangster goes head to head 2001: Space Odyssey war, while Le Boucher with The Godfather: and in the erotically explores the impulses genre with the first of Part II, while Gene charged Barbarella. The Godfather movies. that lead to murder. Hackman eavesdrops on The Conversation. old orders. In Britain, another New Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), cinema dazzlingly intricate use of sound, Wave made hard-edged portraits of was in the middle of a creative free- while his saga of family and crime, working-class life, such as Saturday for-all. It was hardly surprising to The Godfather, is an all-time classic Night and Sunday Morning. And a find the ever-subversive Luis Buñuel that still holds audiences in its grip. new, boldly unsqueamish attitude at large in such an atmosphere, as does The Godfather: Part II, the to screen violence took hold as the filming The Discreet Charm of the prequel that follows Vito Corleone decade went on. Taking its cues Bourgeoisie (1972) half a century from the Old World to the New. from Godard and its story from the after Un Chien Andalou. lives of two wild young outlaws in For an era that began with the Great Depression, Arthur Penn’s New Hollywood Truffaut and Godard gleefully Bonnie and Clyde set a benchmark In response to the prospect of losing riffing on Hollywood tropes, it was of stylized bloodshed. young audiences to television, the fitting to close with a relentless Hollywood that had once kept such crisscross of influence between While the movies got on with a tight grip on its filmmakers now Europe and the US: visions of Boris what they had always done best— handed over a measure of control Karloff amid the Spanish Civil War entertaining mass audiences— to a new breed of singular talents. in The Spirit of the Beehive; the some filmmakers also tapped into relocation of German-born Douglas the avant-garde and upended ideas The results were American Sirk’s lush melodramas from of what a movie was. From the movies shot through with cynicism Hollywood to 1970s Munich in post-nuclear time-travel feature and irresolution. Some are best seen Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: La jetée (The Pier, 1962), made up as historical documents, but others Fear Eats The Soul; and Chinatown, almost wholly of still photographs, to are enduring masterpieces. Francis a noir exposé of the black heart of the teasing Last Year At Marienbad, Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is southern California, directed by the (1961) or the split screen of Andy a mystery of surveillance with a Polish émigré Roman Polanski. ■

YOU ARE THE FIRST WOMAN ON THE FIRST DAY OF CREATION LA DOLCE VITA / 1960



162 LA DOLCE VITA I n April 1953, the partially The movie poster casts Marcello clad body of a young woman Mastroianni as a paparazzo in the IN CONTEXT was discovered on a beach shady underworld, searching for light near Rome. Had Wilma Montesi in the form of his perfect Eve. GENRE accidentally drowned or committed Satire suicide, or had she been murdered? It’s a chilling image that is both The police investigated, and so grotesque and sad—the final entry DIRECTOR did Italy’s rapacious media. Gossip in Fellini’s catalogue of lost souls. Federico Fellini and conspiracy theories snowballed into a national scandal as the Seven sins WRITERS corrupt, hedonistic underworld of La Dolce Vita was released seven Federico Fellini, Ennio postwar Rome was illuminated years after the death of Wilma Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, by the flash bulbs of the city’s Montesi. It takes place on the Brunello Rondi, Pier paparazzi. Politicians, movie stars, seven hills of Rome, its narrative Paolo Pasolini gangsters, artists, prostitutes, divided into seven nights and fading aristocrats—they were STARS living la dolce vita, “the sweet Marcello Mastroianni, life,” a whirl of drugs, orgies, Anita Ekberg, Anouk and general depravity that had Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux spun tragically out of control. BEFORE La Dolce Vita became the title 1945 Fellini cowrites Rome, of Federico Fellini’s satire of this Open City, Roberto Rossellini’s turbulent period in the history gritty Nazi-occupation drama. of his beloved Rome. The movie contains a veiled reference to 1958 Marcello Mastroianni the Montesi affair in its closing gets his big break in the scene, when a group of characters stylish crime-comedy Big emerge from a beach-house orgy Deal on Madonna Street. to find a dead manta ray washed up on the shore, a metaphoric AFTER reference to Wilma Montesi. They 1963 Fellini’s autobiographical gather around the corpse in the comedy-drama 8 1⁄2 follows a dawn light, the sea monster’s eye director (played by Mastroianni) staring back accusingly at them. suffering from writer’s block. Federico Fellini Director Born in Rimini, Italy, in 1920, Fellini’s work combines baroque Federico Fellini moved to Rome imagery with everyday city life, when he was 19 years old. He went often depicting scenes of excess. to study law, and stayed to make He was fascinated with dreams movies that would immortalize and memory, and many of his the city. His early adventures as later movies tipped into the a reporter and gossip columnist realm of psychological fantasy. exposed him to the world of show business, and in 1944 he became Key movies the apprentice of famed director Roberto Rossellini. In the 1950s, 1952 The White Sheik Fellini made movies of his own, 1954 La Strada and established himself as one of 1960 La Dolce Vita Italy’s most controversial artists. 1963 8 1⁄2

REBEL REBEL 163 What else to watch: The Bicycle Thief (1948, pp.94–97) ■ L’Avventura (1960) ■ Juliet of the Spirits (1965) ■ Amarcord (1973) ■ Cinema Paradiso (1988) ■ Celebrity (1998) ■ Lost in Translation (2003) All art is autobiographical. cafés, and after-dark debauchery, and publicity, that Marcello The pearl is the searching for happiness in the glimpses perfection. In the shape of an idealized love. There movie’s most celebrated scene, oyster’s autobiography. are several contenders, including Sylvia wanders into the waters of Federico Fellini his suicidal fiancée, Emma (Yvonne the Trevi Fountain after a long, Furneaux), and the mysterious carnivalesque night on the town. The Atlantic, 1965 Maddalena (Anouk Aimée). But She calls to Marcello to follow her it’s not until Ekberg’s Sylvia arrives in, and the viewer sees Sylvia in the city, amid a riot of adulation through Marcello’s eyes: the ideal ❯❯ Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is smitten with Sylvia, but they can only spend one night together. seven dawns. If you look hard enough, you’ll also find that it contains the seven deadly sins and allusions to the biblical story of the seven days it took God to make the world. Religion is core to Fellini’s work. When the movie’s hero, a nocturnal journalist named Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), falls for the beautiful movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), he tells her, “You are the first woman on the first day of Creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home.” It’s up to the viewer to decide on the significance of La Dolce Vita’s religious overtones and apparent obsession with the number seven. What is more certain is that the movie is concerned with the nature of men’s relationship with women. Marcello spends his nights on Via Veneto, 1950s Rome’s street of nightclubs, sidewalk

164 LA DOLCE VITA woman, unearthly in her radiance, La Dolce Vita takes place over seven days, nights, and a vision of light in the dark city. dawns. While day appears to offer Marcello hope, night But then dawn arrives and the leads him into depravity, and dawn brings rude epiphanies. magical spell of nighttime is broken, just as Sylvia anoints • Marcello follows Christ • Meets Maddalena at • Finds fiancée Emma Marcello’s head with water from statue flying over Rome club; sleeps with her overdosed at apartment the fountain. The next day Sylvia leaves Rome, and Marcello must • Climbs St. Peter’s • Dances with Sylvia • “Anointed” by Sylvia begin his search again. dome with Sylvia at Baths of Caracalla in Trevi Fountain The chaos of Marcello’s night- • Reports on children’s • Witnesses stampede • Observes mourning wanderings is reflected in the vision of the Madonna at site of fake miracle for trampled child movie’s meandering, episodic story structure. His adventures take • Encounters Steiner • Attends Steiner’s • Hears Steiner has killed him all over the city, from a field in playing Bach in church literary salon himself and his children which two children claim to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary— • Sees angelic waitress • Sets up father with girl • Learns of father’s stroke the archetypal elusive, idealized Paola by the sea woman—to the domestic bliss of • Sleeps with Jane at • Spies matron at Mass Steiner’s house. Steiner (Alain • Spots Paola beckoning aristocratic house party Cuny) is Marcello’s best friend, to him from riverbank, • Reconciles with Emma and the epitome of all that Marcello but can’t hear her • Argues with Emma envies: Steiner is stable, happily • Discovers sea monster married with two perfect children, • Instigates beach orgy washed up on beach and enjoys a balance of materialistic comfort and intellectual fulfilment. A man who agrees to live like this When Marcello visits Steiner’s is a finished man, he’s nothing but home, he ascends from the dark a worm! underworld of the streets, clubs, and basement bars, into a kind of heaven. Marcello / La Dolce Vita Illusion of happiness like me. Salvation doesn’t lie within lapse, we see Marcello at the beach But, just as Sylvia and the Virgin four walls.” That there is no comfort house in Fiumicino, owned by his Mary turn out to be illusions, in either a sheltered, intellectual, friend Riccardo, where the all-night Steiner’s domestic happiness is domestic life nor the hedonistic party descends into mayhem. also a lie, as Marcello discovers “sweet life” is the existential As morning approaches, he finds when Steiner tells him, “Don’t be conundrum Marcello wrestles with himself staggering across the in the face of Steiner’s subsequent beach, where the staring eye of the suicide. After an unspecified time dead manta ray is waiting for him. Minute by minute 00:50 01:33 02:23 Sylvia wades into Marcello introduces his Marcello rushes to 00:17 the Trevi Fountain and father to Fanny, a dancer. She his friend Steiner’s Marcello and Maddalena Marcello follows. They takes Marcello’s father back to apartment, where he is make love at the residence of a return to her hotel, where her apartment, but he suffers a told that an awful tragedy prostitute. He returns home to find her fiancé, Robert, slaps her minor heart attack. has occurred. that his fiancée has overdosed. and punches Marcello. 00:00 00:30 01:00 01:30 02:00 02:30 02:54 00:33 01:29 02:02 02:48 On the balcony of the Working on his novel Marcello bumps into On the beach, a dead dome of St. Peter’s, Marcello at a seaside restaurant, Maddalena at a party. ray is pulled out of the gets a moment alone with Marcello meets Paola Drunk, she asks him to water. Marcello sees Sylvia. He takes her dancing. and tells her that she marry her, but is soon Paola in the distance, looks like an angel. distracted by another man. but he cannot hear her.

REBEL REBEL 165 The final scene of La Dolce Vita Marcello is repeatedly drawn to Marcello Mastroianni contains a second allusion. The Maddalena (Anouk Aimée), but his love Actor fisherman who hauls the ray out for her cannot lead anywhere. She asks of the sea says the bloated, rotting him to marry her, only to fall into the Following a brief period leviathan has been dead “for three arms of another man moments later. of theater work, Marcello days.” In the Bible, this is the same Mastroianni became famous period of time that Jesus spends in dangling benignly from a helicopter with a role in Big Deal on the tomb. La Dolce Vita is a carnival with Marcello following it in a Madonna Street. He was of Roman Catholic imagery and second helicopter, caused outrage Fellini’s only choice for the symbols, much of it controversial when the movie was first screened. role of Marcello Rubini in La in its use. The opening sequence, in Dolce Vita. The studio had which a golden statue of Christ flies Although two Christ figures (the wanted Paul Newman, but over an ancient Roman aqueduct, statue and the manta ray) bookend Fellini fought to keep his the narrative, they fail to offer hope friend, and the pair went In sum, it is an awesome or salvation to any of its characters. on to make six more movies picture, licentious in content In fact, Fellini constantly connects together. Mastroianni often religious myth with disillusionment. played a version of the but moral and vastly Marcello is looking for his Eve, director in these movies. sophisticated in its attitude the first woman on the first day of Creation, an angelic figure A suave and darkly and what it says. untainted by the corruptions of la handsome figure, Mastroianni Bosley Crowther dolce vita or any earthly experience. became closely associated “I don’t believe in your aggressive, with the glamour of Rome and New York Times, 1960 sticky, maternal love!” he tells its beautiful leading ladies, Emma during their endlessly especially Sophia Loren (who recurring fight. “This isn’t love,” he shared the screen with him screams at her, “it’s brutalization!” in 11 movies). He earned two And so whenever he dives back into Academy Award nominations the chaos of the Roman night, he during his career, one for the knows that Eve doesn’t really exist; comedy Divorce Italian Style all he is doing is trying to forget in 1961 and the other for A what he knows. ■ Special Day in 1977. Key movies 1958 Big Deal on Madonna Street 1960 La Dolce Vita 1961 Divorce Italian Style 1963 8 1⁄2

166 DON’T USE THE BRAKES. CARS ARE MADE TO GO, NOT TO STOP À BOUT DE SOUFFLE / 1960 IN CONTEXT J ean-Luc Godard’s À bout de Before he began directing, Godard souffle (Breathless) marked was a critic for the radical movie GENRE a turning point in cinema. magazine Cahiers du Cinema, French New Wave Not everyone liked its hectic and he pays homage to earlier cutting, loose plot, and disdain movies again and again in À bout DIRECTOR for conventional morality. But even de souffle. For example, Michel Jean-Luc Godard Godard’s critics were struck by idolizes Humphrey Bogart and has his innovation, and directors such a giant poster of him on his wall. WRITERS as Scorsese and Tarantino have Jean-Luc Godard, François acknowledged their debt to him. But for all his references, Godard Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and the other young filmmakers In the movie, petty thug Michel of what came to be known as the STARS (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), Jean-Paul Belmondo, policeman. He hides in the apartment such as François Truffaut and Jean Seberg of American student Patricia (Jean Claude Chabrol, were determined Seberg), who is unaware of what to overthrow what they saw as BEFORE he’s done. Eventually, Patricia turns cinéma de papa (dad’s cinema)— 1941 Humphrey Bogart’s Michel in to the police, who shoot studio-bound productions with performance in The Maltese him in the street. little to say about modern life. Falcon provides the inspiration Rather, they saw themselves not for the character of Michel in simply as directors but as auteurs, À bout de souffle. who would create a new, personal style of cinema, filming on location AFTER and tackling tough social issues. 1964 Owing much of its style to À bout de souffle, Richard Godard has spent his life A gun and a girl Lester’s Beatles movie, A Hard confronting issues central Godard was adamant that a movie Day’s Night, has a huge did not need a well-constructed influence on British movies. to the future of cinema. plot. “All you need for a movie,” he Derek Malcolm famously said, “is a gun and a girl.” 1967 Arthur Penn’s Bonnie The story of À bout de souffle is and Clyde introduces the The Guardian, 2000 loosely based on the real-life story French New Wave style to of Michel Portail, who shot dead a mainstream US cinema. motorcycle cop in 1952 and who, like the character of Michel in the

REBEL REBEL 167 What else to watch: The 400 Blows (1959, pp.150–55) ■ Last Year at Marienbad (1961, pp.170–71) ■ Jules et Jim (1962, p.334) ■ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) ■ Band of Outsiders (1964) ■ Bonnie and Clyde (1967, pp.190–91) ■ Pulp Fiction (1994, pp.270–75) I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy. Patricia / À bout de souffle movie, also had an American transition between shots, splicing À bout de souffle was the first girlfriend, but Godard wrote them together in a fast-moving movie of the French New Wave. the script as he filmed. montage. In one scene that follows Its bold visual style and break from Patricia driving in a sports car, the classic studio style were implied He was deliberately chaotic the background jumps instantly in the movie’s poster. in his shooting method, filming from one place to another as on busy Paris streets, snatching different shots are spliced shots on the run, and improvising together. The jump cut has now dialogue. To work in this way, he become a staple of filmmaking, needed to shoot with a handheld but at the time critic Bosley camera and in low light conditions, Crowther complained that it and this is partly what gives was a “pictorial cacophony.” the movie its high contrast monochrome look. It also led to It was not just the movie’s a distinctive new cinematic jump cuts that created technique: the jump cut. controversy, but also its coolness. Its young hero’s self-obsessed Jump cuts detachment and disdain for Previously, one of the requirements authority became hallmarks of for a well-made movie had always movie for the new generation. As been complete continuity between the 1960s began, filmmakers and clips shot from different angles or audiences embraced rebellion over on different days. However, Godard the self-sacrificing heroism portrayed made no attempt to make a smooth in previous decades. ■ Jean-Luc Godard Director Jean-Luc Godard was born in (1965)—and politically, in movies Paris in 1930. In his early 20s, he such as A Married Woman and joined Paris’s ciné-club scene and Pierrot le Fou (1965). In the late took up film criticism. Encouraged 1960s, Godard walked away by François Truffaut, another from commercial cinema young critic turned filmmaker, completely, but continued to Godard began to make his own make movies that pushed the movies. His first major movie, À boundaries of the medium. bout de souffle, took the world by storm with its new style. But Key movies Godard’s work soon became even more radical, both in look—with 1960 À bout de souffle movies such as Contempt, Band of 1963 Contempt Outsiders (1964), and Alphaville 1964 A Married Woman

168 THAT’S WHAT ALL THESE LOONY LAWS ARE FOR TO BE BROKEN BY BLOKES LIKE US SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING / 1960 IN CONTEXT K arel Reisz’s Saturday Night class not as victims, but as and Sunday Morning individuals with their own GENRE brought working-class aspirations and frustrations. Reisz British New Wave Britain to the screens in a way that was a leader of the British New had never been seen before. Based Wave of filmmakers that paralleled DIRECTOR on a semiautobiographical novel the French New Wave. Both Karel Reisz by Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie focuses Doreen and Arthur meet in secret. WRITER on the story of young Arthur, who While they rebel against their parents, Alan Sillitoe wants more out of life than a factory whom they consider “dead from the job. This was one of the first British neck up,” they are not immune to reality STARS movies to focus on the working when Arthur gets another girl pregnant. Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field, Rachel Roberts BEFORE 1947 Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, a gritty tale set in London’s East End, is a precursor of the British realist dramas. 1959 Look Back in Anger, directed by Tony Richardson and based on a play by John Osborne, is the first British “kitchen sink” drama movie. AFTER 1965 Starting with his TV docudrama Up the Junction, Ken Loach makes a series of movies mixing working-class drama with documentary.

REBEL REBEL 169 What else to watch: Look Back in Anger (1959) ■ À bout de souffle (1960; pp.166–67) ■ The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) ■ Billy Liar (1963) ■ This Sporting Life (1963) ■ Alfie (1966) ■ Kes (1969, p.336) ■ Naked (1993, p.340–41) portrayed by Albert Finney, is determined not to be diminished by the limitations of life as a lathe operator at a bicycle factory in Nottingham. He rebels against the drudgery of his class. The poster style was influenced in its inclusion of adultery, abortion, Bucking expectations by that of the French movie À bout drunkenness, and violence as Despite his declaration “That’s de souffle, made in the same year. everyday realities. Fifty years what all these loony laws are on, such dramas are the staple of for, to be broken by blokes like movements aimed for a more British television soaps, but in 1960 us,” Arthur is neither a political authentic approach to filmmaking they were new. Arthur, brilliantly rebel nor a criminal. He simply by venturing out of the studio and bucks expectations by having an into real locations. affair with Brenda (Rachel Roberts), the wife of an older colleague, British New Wave filmmakers, while two-timing her with young however, were less concerned with Doreen (Shirley Anne Field). Even innovative cinematography than this small personal rebellion is their French peers. The realism they brought low by reality when sought was in their subject matter: Brenda becomes pregnant and the personal lives of the working is forced into an abortion, and class. The first of these “kitchen Arthur is beaten up by Brenda’s sink” dramas on film was Look husband and his soldier friends. Back in Anger (1959), adapted from Yet Arthur’s spirit is not crushed, John Osborne’s play. It spawned the and although harrowing, the film so-called Angry Young Man movie is ultimately uplifting. ■ genre of the 1960s, featuring working-class heroes. What I’m out for is a good time—all the rest is propaganda! Yet while Look Back in Anger is relatively theatrical, Saturday Night Arthur Seaton / Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Sunday Morning is matter-of- fact, almost documentary, in its Karel Reisz Director depiction of the troubled lives of its characters. It pulls no punches Born in Ostrava, movement, which strived for a Czechoslovakia, less class-bound, more politically in 1926, Karel aware British cinema, and began Reisz was sent to direct his own movies in 1960. to Britain when he was 12, just before Nazi Key movies Germany invaded his country in 1939. His parents died in 1960 Saturday Night Auschwitz. He served in World and Sunday Morning War II and studied chemistry at 1964 Night Must Fall Cambridge, then became a film 1981 The French critic. Reisz led the Free Cinema Lieutenant’s Woman

170 I HAVE NEVER STAYED SO LONG ANYWHERE LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD / 1961 IN CONTEXT B eautifully shot in black and agreed to leave her husband M white and in widescreen, (Sacha Pitoëff) the following year. GENRE Alan Resnais’ Last Year A denies his claims, but X persists, Experimental at Marienbad has a glacier-paced in between playing rounds of the coolness. Lacking any conventional mathematical game Nim with M, DIRECTOR narrative, it deliberately challenges which M always wins. Alan Resnais preconceptions about how movies should work. This approach has For Resnais, the movie was an WRITER influenced a generation of directors, exploration of time and memory. Alain Robbe-Grillet including Stanley Kubrick, David The script, written by experimental Lynch, and Peter Greenaway. novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, fuses STARS past and present in a series of Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio The movie is set in a palatial surreal, almost nightmarishly Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff hotel in rural central Europe. Here, repetitive tableaux. Resnais turns a handsome stranger known only these scenes into a dreamlike BEFORE as X (Giorgio Albertazzi) insists to world in which all is reduced to 1955 Night and Fog is a beautiful fellow guest, known as appearances and games of mirrors. Resnais’ contemplation A (Delphine Seyrig), that they met Life goes on in a seemingly ritualistic of the memory of the Nazi and fell in love the previous year in way, full of allusions and symbols concentration camps. the resort of Marienbad, where she that leave the viewer continually 1959 Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais Director Resnais’ first big success, deals with memory and Born in Vannes enigmatic and poetic movies forgetfulness in the wake in Brittany in about time and memory, which of the Hiroshima bomb. 1922, French some celebrate as masterpieces filmmaker and others find pretentious. AFTER Alain Resnais Resnais died in 2014. 1977 Providence, Resnais’ continues to divide critics. movie about the memories of Later in life he focused more on Key movies an aging writer, is hailed in farce and comedy, but in the France as a masterpiece but first half of his career he worked 1959 Hiroshima mon amour panned by critics in the US. with leading modern writers 1961 Last Year at Marienbad such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and 1977 Providence Marguerite Duras to create

REBEL REBEL 171 What else to watch: Un Chien Andalou (1929, p.330) ■ L’Avventura (1960) ■ La Dolce Vita (1960, pp.160–65) ■ Pierrot le Fou (1965) ■ The Shining (1980, p.339) ■ The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) ■ Open Your Eyes (1997) ■ Flowers of Shanghai (1998) I must have you alive. Alive, as you This famous scene, in which the have already been every evening, for figures cast shadows but the trees do weeks, for months. not, highlights the dreamlike, unreal nature of Last Year at Marienbad, and X / Last Year at Marienbad of much of Resnais’ work generally. unsettled, unsure whether it’s all matter of fact, is the The midnight chime that opens the in X’s head, or A’s. The movie is a story of a persuading [une movie is heard again at the end, continual interplay of reality and persuasion],” according echoing life’s endless loop of illusion. In one famous scene, shot on to Robbe-Grillet. “It acceptance and rejection, as X is an overcast day when the trees cast deals with a reality rejected by A, and vice versa. As A no shadows, the people arranged which the hero creates says, “I have never stayed so long elegantly along an avenue all project out of his own vision.” anywhere.” Famously, Robbe-Grillet long shadows across the ground. To has stated that “the entire story of achieve this effect, actors’ shadows There is no sense Marienbad happens neither in two were painted onto the ground. of time or the story years nor in three days, but exactly moving forward—the in one hour and a half”—that is, the Story of a persuading plot, such as it is, is time span of the movie. Resnais said that the movie’s circular and repetitive. effects were an attempt to recreate Last Year at Marienbad has the way the mind works, while Delphine Seyrig, been interpreted in various ways, Robbe-Grillet insisted that viewers playing A, was in terms of Jungian or Freudian will get lost if they look for a linear memorably costumed psychology, and using narrative. “The whole film, as a for the role by fashion poststructuralist analysis, but legend Coco Chanel. agreement on the movie’s meaning is rare. Nevertheless, for many critics, it is a high point of the experimental fervor that drove the French New Wave to expand the possibilities and goals of filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it remains influential to this day. ■

172 THIS IS THE STORY OF A MAN MARKED BY AN IMAGE FROM HIS CHILDHOOD LA JETÉE / 1962 IN CONTEXT L a jetée (The Pier), by the plans—the movie’s only dialogue. enigmatic director Chris It is in this stillness and quietness GENRE Marker, is a science-fiction that the terror lies. Science fiction classic that retains its power to chill and unsettle, despite being La jetée uses time travel DIRECTOR overshadowed by its big-budget as a device to examine the Chris Marker remake: Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys philosophical nature of memory. (1995). The two movies could not, The protagonist witnesses and WRITER however, be more different. participates in moments from Chris Marker the past—a trip to a museum, Less than 30 minutes long, and a romantic encounter, and, most STARS with a narrative composed entirely importantly, the traumatic early Jean Négroni, Davos from still photographs, La jetée is event that shaped his character— Hanich, Hélène Chatelain, about a man traveling back in time yet feels that his awareness of the Jacques Ledoux to witness a tragic and defining event dilutes its reality. The movie event from his childhood. implies that once something is in BEFORE the past, it only exists in a glimpse, 1953 Marker works with A half-forgotten dream or as a photograph, hence the director Alain Resnais on The postapocalyptic world movie’s stylistic structure of using the controversial movie about portrayed in La jetée disturbs still images. La jetée balances the African art, Statues Also Die. with subtlety. A softly spoken emotional journey of its protagonist voice-over narration puts the with this thematic intellectualism AFTER viewer in the protagonist’s place to create one of the most distinct 1977 In A Grin Without a Cat, as he overhears amoral scientists imaginings of the end of the world Marker documents political whispering and muttering their that cinema has ever offered. ■ radicalism in the aftermath of the student revolts of 1968. The man doesn’t die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue. 1983 Marker stretches the documentary genre with Sans Narrator / La jetée Soleil, a meditation on world history and the inability of What else to watch: The Omega Man (1971) ■ Soylent Green (1973) ■ the human memory to recall Mad Max (1979) ■ 12 Monkeys (1995) ■ The Road (2009) context and nuance.

REBEL REBEL 173 GUY I LOVE YOU. YOU SMELL OF GASOLINE THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG / 1964 IN CONTEXT T he second in a trilogy The beautiful Geneviève works with directed by Jacques Demy, her mother in their failing umbrella GENRE The Umbrellas of Cherbourg store. The music is by Michel Legrand, Musical (1964) is an innovative movie that and all the dialogue is sung. combines the fantasy of a Hollywood DIRECTOR musical with the French New Wave’s and she is persuaded to marry a Jacques Demy focus on the everyday. rich jeweler to save her mother from financial ruin. Years later, she and WRITERS Demy’s insight was to see that Guy meet by chance. By this time Jacques Demy the ordinary people being filmed he is married and has a son. The by New Wave directors had dreams pair’s exchange is almost mundane, STARS and aspirations as romantic as but the swooning music creates a Catherine Deneuve, anyone’s. He took a simple story of moment of true heartache for the Nino Castelnuovo thwarted love in a small town, and life that might have been. ■ turned it into a musical fantasy. BEFORE The story hinges on such New 1931 Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy, Wave concerns as teen pregnancy Marius, Fanny, and César, and prostitution, but Demy tells it inspires Demy’s trilogy of in song, on cotton-candy sets. seaside movies. Catherine Deneuve plays 1958 Vincente Minnelli’s Geneviève, the daughter of an musical Gigi is an American umbrella-store owner. She is view of France that Demy bursting with love for a young cleverly parodies in The mechanic, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). Umbrellas of Cherbourg. When he is shipped off to fight in Algeria, there is an extended train- AFTER platform farewell, underpinned by 1967 Demy’s The Young Girls the movie’s soaring theme tune. of Rochefort unites Catherine But Geneviève’s story is a story Deneuve with Gene Kelly. of real life. She learns that she’s pregnant, Guy fails to write back, 2001 Baz Luhrmann recreates a French musical fantasy world What else to watch: Singin’ in the Rain (1952, pp.122–25) ■ Gigi (1958) ■ in Moulin Rouge! The 400 Blows (1959, pp.150–55) ■ The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

174 THERE’S GOLD IN THE SEA BEYOND BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL / 1964 IN CONTEXT Director Glauber This movie Rocha once said is Glauber GENRE that “Everybody Rocha’s Drama wants to kill Glauber fictionalized Rocha. They did not account of DIRECTOR forgive me for making the adventures Glauber Rocha Black God, White Devil at the age of 23.” It was not of real-life WRITER simply his precociousness bounty hunter Glauber Rocha or lack of humility that put Antonio his life in jeopardy; a fierce das Mortes. STARS pioneer of social realism, Geraldo Del Rey, Yoná Rocha saw movies as a tool Brazil. A humble ranch hand named Magalhães, Maurício do of change and an integral Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey) believes Valle, Lidio Silva part of the working man’s the preacher is the incarnation of struggle. Indeed, shortly Saint Sebastian, but his wife, Rosa BEFORE before his movie was (Yoná Magalhães), is more sceptical 1962 In Rocha’s debut feature, released in his native Brazil, and frequently challenges Manuel’s Barravento, a man struggles a coup ushered in a military belief in the man he follows. to rid his home village of the government whose actions later reactionary mysticism he drove him into self-imposed exile. Manuel tries to improve his and thinks is holding it back. Rosa’s lot in life by selling his cattle Committed cinema to his boss, but several die on the AFTER Rocha despised Hollywood, and it way to market, and the boss 1966 Italian director Sergio shows: it’s hard to believe that this refuses to pay. In a fury, Manuel Corbucci’s Django, a bleakly abrasive movie was released in the kills his boss with a machete, savage spaghetti Western, same year as Mary Poppins. Like and he and Rosa go on the run, owes a clear debt to Rocha. his debut, Barravento, it is more following the charismatic and concerned with ideas than action increasingly powerful Sebastião, 1970 Chilean director or character, and it continues the the “black god,” who promises Alejandro Jodorowsky’s earlier movie’s exploration of religion. El Topo features a gunslinger on a transformative journey Sebastião (Lidio Silva), a across the desert. preacher, is rallying the poor of the sertão, the barren outback of north

REBEL REBEL 175 What else to watch: Barravento (1962) ■ Barren Lives (1963) ■ Soy Cuba (1964) ■ Entranced Earth (1967) ■ Antonio das Mortes (1969) ■ El Topo (1970) ■ City of God (2002, pp.304–09) ■ Carandiru (2003) Glauber Rocha Director influence on Rocha. As the movie draws to a close, the black-clad Born in Bahia, Earth and Antonio das Mortes. figure of das Mortes has the almost Brazil, in 1939, Exile in the 1970s saw Rocha totally insane Corisco in his sights. Glauber Rocha shooting in Africa and Spain, discovered and though his views and Rallying cry movies, politics, his experimental style were Sadly, time has not been too kind and journalism in his teens, controversial, he remained a to Rocha’s movie. The acting often quitting law school to pursue hero at home. Within a year of seems mannered or, worse, simply filmmaking at 20. Inspired by his final movie, The Age of the amateur, while the undoubted the French New Wave, he led Earth (1980), he died of a lung passion of the director’s vision boils Brazil’s Cinema Novo (New infection at 42. over into moments of thundering Cinema) movement of the 1960s, melodrama, hammered home by a and competed in the 1964 Key movies sometimes overly bombastic score Cannes film festival with Black by composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. God, White Devil. This was the 1964 Black God, White Devil But in his strange compositions, first in a class-conscious trilogy 1967 Entranced Earth complete with crash zooms and that continued with Entranced 1969 Antonio das Mortes jump cuts, Rocha created a unique rallying cry for land and liberty, salvation and the day when “the changes dramatically, and what exposing the way that workers dry lands will turn into sea and the began as a neorealist drama are manipulated by church and sea into dry land.” Rosa continues mutates into an increasingly state alike. to question the preacher’s banal experimental and surreal polemic, utterances, but Manuel follows more in the absurdist vein of “A man is a man when blindly, carrying out ever more playwright Samuel Beckett than he uses his gun to change mindless and brutal tasks to satisfy the politically committed drama his fate,” says Corisco. his new master. The Church of Bertolt Brecht, who was a big “Not a cross [but] a dagger hierarchy, alarmed by Sebastião and a rifle.” ■ and the massacres that are engulfing the region, turn to bounty hunter Antonio das Mortes (Maurício do Valle) to eliminate him. Absurdist turn Sebastião is killed, and the fugitive couple press on, stumbling into a camp run by the vicious Captain Corisco (Othon Bastos), the movie’s “white devil,” who rechristens Manuel “Satan” and folds him into his shambolic army of bandits. At this point, the style of the movie Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey) carries a rock on his head as he climbs Monte Santo on his knees, in thrall to the preacher Sebastiaõ (Lidio Silva). The rock is loaded with symbolism.

176 GENTLEMEN YOU CAN’T FIGHT IN HERE. THIS IS THE WAR ROOM! DR. STRANGELOVE / 1964 IN CONTEXT I n 1963, Stanley Kubrick out on the big screen—and he decided to make a movie expected them to laugh. Originally, GENRE about the Cold War, which was the filmmaker had intended to Black comedy heating up at the time. The West produce a straight thriller based and its enemies in the Eastern on Red Alert, Peter George’s 1958 DIRECTOR Bloc had been locked in a staring novel about a US Air Force officer Stanley Kubrick contest for almost two decades, who goes crazy and orders his and the superpowers were getting planes to attack Russia. But, as he WRITERS twitchy; if either side blinked, worked on the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick, Terry everybody died in a thermonuclear writer Terry Southern, Kubrick Southern (screenplay); holocaust. This was the basis of found the politics of modern Peter George (novel) “mutually assured destruction,” warfare too absurd for the military strategy for peace that drama; he felt that the only STARS was beginning to sound like a grim sane way to get across the Peter Sellers, George C. promise of oblivion. The Cuban insanity of accidental self- Scott, Sterling Hayden, Missile Crisis had been averted a destruction was a farce. Slim Pickens year before, but only just—surely the apocalypse was coming? In Kubrick and Southern’s BEFORE screenplay, the plot of Red 1957 In Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Cold War satire Alert is given a nightmarish a World War I officer defends When Dr. Strangelove opened to comic spin. The novel’s madman his men from false charges. an unsuspecting public in January becomes Jack D. Ripper (Sterling 1964, Kubrick invited audiences to Hayden), an American general who 1962 Lolita is Kubrick’s first see this doomsday scenario played blames his sexual impotence on a collaboration with Peter Sellers. communist plot to poison the water AFTER Gee, I wish we had one of 1987 The military’s absurdities those Doomsday Machines. are again targeted by Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket. General Turgidson / Dr. Strangelove

REBEL REBEL 177 What else to watch: Paths of Glory (1957) ■ The Pink Panther (1963) ■ A Clockwork Orange (1971, p.337) ■ Being There (1979) ■ The Shining (1980, p.339) ■ The Atomic Café (1982) ■ Threads (1984) The War Room, vast, impersonal, and punctuated by the ominous circular table with its hovering ring-shaped lighting, was designed by Ken Adam as an underground bunker. supply with fluoridation. Ripper sends a fleet of bombers to destroy the Soviet Union, and then sits back to wait for Armageddon. Sexual metaphors which sets off the Russians’ This is a man’s world, in which Dr. Strangelove is a political satire, Doomsday Device. Kubrick’s stark everyone gets off on mass but it’s also a sex comedy about the black-and-white imagery bristles destruction. The shadowy Dr. erotic relationship between men with man-made erections, from Strangelove (Peter Sellers again) and war—the “strange love” of the nukes, gun turrets, and pistols to wields a tiny cigarette, which may title. The movie, which is subtitled General Ripper’s thrusting cigar. tell us everything we need to know How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, opens with “I do not avoid women,” he about his motivations. the romantic ballad Try A Little explains to the RAF’s Group Formerly known as Tenderness and ends Captain Mandrake (Peter Dr. Merkwürdigliebe, with Vera Lynn Sellers), blowing mushroom singing We’ll clouds of smoke, “but I do Strangelove is a Meet Again over German émigré an orgasmic deny them my essence.” montage of scientist. The models atomic for Strangelove explosions, were Nazi rocket ignited by the scientists now in nuclear bomb the US, such as ridden by Major Wernher von Braun. “King” Kong He has a mechanical (Slim Pickens), arm with a mind of its own—whenever talk General “Buck” turns to mass slaughter Turgidson (George or eugenics, it rises C. Scott) imitates involuntarily in a Nazi salute. a low-flying B52 Strangelove has trouble keeping this particular erection under “frying chickens control, and at the prospect of the in a barnyard.” world blowing up, he jumps out of his wheelchair with a shriek of joy. “Mein Führer,” he ejaculates, ❯❯

178 DR. STRANGELOVE Dr. Strangelove’s sinister black their tryst is put on hold due to the (Marquis de Sade). The bombs, glove, worn on his errant right hand, crisis, she is instructed to wait: too, have been named “Hi There” was Kubrick’s own, which he wore “You just start your countdown, and “Dear John,” signifying the to handle the hot lights on set. and old Bucky’ll be back here beginning and ending of a before you can say... Blast Off!” romantic relationship. “I can walk!” He is literally erect: sexually awakened, potent, and Many of the characters’ names Superpower egos about to see his Nazi plan for a refer to themes of war, sexual In addition to Mandrake and supreme race of humans, where obsession, and dominance, from the Strangelove, the mercurial Sellers there are 10 women for every obvious Jack D. Ripper (prostitute plays a third role: President Merkin man, put into action. murderer Jack the Ripper) to Muffley (another sexual innuendo), Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky who attempts to manage the crisis There is only one female from his war room. In this vast, character in the movie, Tracy Reed, Dr. Strangelove outraged the echoing forum, the US leader meets who plays Miss Scott, General Pentagon, though it was with an all-male cabal of diplomats, Turgidson’s mistress-secretary and unofficially recognized to soldiers, and special advisers to also the centerfold “Miss Foreign be a near-documentary. decide the future of humanity. Affairs” in the June 1962 copy of Frederic Raphael Playboy, which Major Kong is seen The movie’s central comic set reading in the cockpit at the start The Guardian, 2005 piece involves Muffley telephoning of the movie. In what was one of Kissoff, the Soviet Premier, to a number of “insider” references warn him about the imminent throughout the movie, the issue attack; Kissoff is drunk at a party, of Foreign Affairs draped over her and the conversation descends buttocks contained Henry Kissinger’s into petty squabbling. Sellers’ article on “Strains on the Alliance.” monologue is hilarious, but The mix of sexual and military also terrifying, because the connotations persist between Miss “red telephone” had only recently Scott and General Turgidson. When become a reality. The hotline

REBEL REBEL 179 I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. General Turgidson / Dr. Strangelove between Washington and Moscow you can’t fight in here,” says a Stanley Kubrick had been set up in 1963, and horrified Muffley, “This is the War Director Kubrick’s movie nudged the Room!” It is silly, clever, and, deep concept toward its logical down, full of rage. Kubrick clearly Born in New York in 1928, conclusion: a Cold War reduced hated these characters; the men Kubrick spent his early years to the vying for dominance of two in Dr. Strangelove are a bunch of as a photographer and a chess men’s wounded egos. “Of course clowns, pathetic and deluded, hustler. These two interests— it’s a friendly call,” Muffley pouts and the director originally intended images and logic—would into the receiver, “if it wasn’t to end his movie with an epic inform his career as a movie friendly then you probably wouldn’t cream-pie battle. He filmed the director, which began in 1953 even have gotten it.” These jokes sequence, then changed his mind, with Fear and Desire. Kubrick must have chilled the blood of and swapped the pies for nuclear cast his analytical eye over contemporary viewers, and they warheads, in case anyone thought several genres—historical still unnerve today. these clowns might be harmless. ■ epic (Spartacus), comedy (Dr. Strangelove), science fiction A less sophisticated spat occurs The poster for the movie shows (2001: A Space Odyssey), later in the movie, between the the presidents of the two most period drama (Barry Lyndon), gum-chewing General “Buck” powerful countries in the world, horror (The Shining)—giving Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the who squabble over the telephone them a unifying theme of Russian ambassador (Peter Bull): like children. They are powerless human frailty. He was perhaps the Cold War reduced even further, to prevent the nuclear catastrophe. less interested in humans to a schoolboy scuffle. “Gentlemen, than he was in machines, not just the hardware of cinema but also society’s obsession with technological progress. His unrealized final project, the science-fiction epic A.I. Artificial Intelligence, would have offered his last word on this subject. It was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2001, two years after Kubrick’s death. Key movies 1964 Dr. Strangelove 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey 1971 A Clockwork Orange 1980 The Shining

180 I CAN’T SEEM TO STOP SINGING WHEREVER I AM THE SOUND OF MUSIC / 1965 IN CONTEXT T oday, screenings of The and, gradually, the captain’s Sound of Music are often heart. Set in 1938, and based on GENRE billed as sing-alongs, at a true story, the movie continues Musical which audiences who know every to resonate, perhaps because lyric enjoy a sense of shared it represents values that were DIRECTOR nostalgia for the songs. Yet behind almost extinguished in one of Robert Wise the fun there is a significant movie. Europe’s darkest periods. WRITERS The story of a misfit postulant, Vulnerable innocence Ernest Lehman Maria (Julie Andrews), who leaves The movie’s first half focuses on (screenplay); Maria von her abbey to become governess Maria’s acceptance into the von Trapp (book); George to the seven unruly children of Trapp family and the dilemma she Hurdalek, Howard a stern widower, Captain Georg faces when the captain begins to Lindsay, Russel Crouse von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), fall in love with her, despite his (stage musical) unfolds in the bucolic, chocolate- engagement to an aristocratic box setting of the Austrian Alps. socialite, Baroness Schraeder STARS Maria’s good humor and musical (Eleanor Parker). Distraught at Julie Andrews, Christopher inventiveness win over the children Plummer, Eleanor Parker Robert Wise Director BEFORE 1956 Ruth Leuwerik stars in Born in 1914 in Still (1951) and The Haunting The Trapp Family, a German Winchester, IN, (1963). Later in life he worked adaptation of von Trapp’s book. Robert Wise on musicals, most famously was 19 when he making West Side Story and 1959 The Sound of Music got a job as a The Sound of Music. Wise died opens on Broadway, composed sound and music editor at RKO at 91 in 2005. by Richard Rodgers with lyrics radio pictures, and he eventually by Oscar Hammerstein II. became Orson Welles’s editor on Key movies movies such as Citizen Kane AFTER (pp.66–71). Wise’s first directing 1945 The Body Snatcher 1972 The musical Cabaret job was on The Curse of the Cat 1951 The Day the Earth is set in Berlin at the time of People (1944), and he went on to Stood Still the Nazis’ rise to power. direct many notable B movies 1961 West Side Story such as The Day the Earth Stood 1965 The Sound of Music

REBEL REBEL 181 What else to watch: Singin’ in the Rain (1952, pp.122–25) ■ From Here to Eternity (1953) ■ Gigi (1958) ■ West Side Story (1961, p.334) ■ The Haunting (1963) ■ Mary Poppins (1964) ■ Cabaret (1972) ■ Les Misérables (2012) Captain von Trapp is bemused to find his seven children dripping wet and dressed in loose-fitting clothes made by their governess, Maria, out of the floral drapery in her room. the situation she has created, in several instances the songs are The movie’s overwhelming Maria flees back to the abbey, used to overcome fear or to ward optimism does not simply derive but the abbess encourages her to off danger. My Favorite Things from the hills being “alive with the return to her new home. To the is sung when Maria tries to calm sound of music” (in the words of the children’s delight, the captain the children during a violent storm, titular song), but from its message marries her, and the movie might and in the final set piece, when that honesty and goodness are have ended happily there. Instead, the family performs on stage at defenses against evil. When however, it continues in a markedly a festival in Salzburg, they are Captain von Trapp rouses the different tone, its focus shifting singing to buy time as danger festival audience to sing Edelweiss, from the family’s domestic situation closes in around them. While Nazi a tender song about the Alpine to its place in the wider world. As officers watch from the front row, flower that symbolizes Austria, he the Nazi Anschluss of Austria there are soldiers waiting in the is affirming his loyalty to a country threatens to sweep away all they wings to prevent the family’s that has been annexed by a ruthless cherish, their fate becomes linked escape and to force Captain von foreign power, and standing up in with that of the country. Trapp into military service the defense of everything that he sees moment the show is over. as decent and good. The danger is most poignantly represented by Rolfe (Daniel In a sense, then, Maria and the Truhitte), a local boy who is in love captain are protecting not only with von Trapp’s eldest daughter their children, but a whole way of Liesl (Charmian Carr). Rolfe’s arrival life, and their final escape over the one day in a Nazi uniform shocks mountains carries the hope that both the family and the audience, this way of life will survive. ■ and serves to demonstrate the way in which innocent youth can be corrupted and turned to malign ends. The captain tells him, “They don’t own you,” revealing his fear of what is happening to the country and its people, and reminding Rolfe that he has free will. But Rolfe nevertheless betrays the family. Songs of comfort Much of the singing in The Sound of Music is about finding joy in the ordinary and the commonplace, but When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window. Maria / The Sound of Music

IT’S DIFFICULT TO START A REVOLUTION THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS / 1966



184 THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS IN CONTEXT T here are With its use of documentary-style many ways filming techniques, the movie’s GENRE to tackle war large crowd scenes resemble War, political and political strife in real newsreel footage. fiction. Filmmakers DIRECTOR can approach it from a as the title suggests, the story Gillo Pontecorvo humanist perspective, of the Battle of Algiers. Director following civilians as Gillo Pontecorvo’s camera mimics WRITERS the external conflict that of a photojournalist on the Gillo Pontecorvo, escalates around them, streets, capturing events from Franco Solinas or follow rank-and-file an objective remove. soldiers as they carry out STARS their duties, and examine Jean Martin, Brahim the moral crises they face Hadjadj, Yacef Saadi in doing so. BEFORE The majority of movies 1960 Pontecorvo’s movie Kapò about conflict tend to is one of the first attempts take one of these two to depict the horrors of the perspectives. The Battle Holocaust on screen. of Algiers, however, adopts a journalistic AFTER perspective instead to 1969 Pontecorvo’s Burn! stars follow Algeria’s attempts Marlon Brando as a British to gain independence from agent who manipulates a the French. That is to say, slave revolt on a Caribbean it approaches the conflict island to pervert it in the forensically, its narrative interests of big business. following the progression of significant events. While it does 2006 Ken Loach’s The Wind have prominent figures in its that Shakes the Barley tells the narrative, particularly Ali La Pointe, story of Republican fighters in one of the leaders of the Algerian the Irish War of Independence. resistance, it is not the story of any one individual. The movie is, Minute by minute 00:36 00:55 01:44 In response to Colonel Mathieu arrives The FLN leader 00:10 the killing of police in Algiers to take charge Djafar surrenders. While in prison in 1954, by the FLN, the of the operation against the However, Ali La Ali La Pointe witnesses the police chief plants FLN. He plans Operation Pointe is still free. execution of a man who a bomb in the Champagne to take place shouts out independence casbah, which kills during a strike called by slogans. Five months later, a number of children. the FLN. he joins the FLN. 00:00 00:20 00:40 01:00 01:20 01:40 02:02 00:18 00:41 01:32 01:52 It is 1956 and the FLN Following the bombing of the At a press conference, After Ali La Pointe refuses to announces bans on alcohol, casbah, three FLN women in Western Mathieu praises FLN surrender, the Colonel blows up drugs, and prostitution. It clothing plant bombs. One is in a bar, fighters, including arrested the house he is hiding in. He enforces the new rules another at a disco, and a third at the leader Ben M’Hidi, for declares that “the head of the within the casbah. airport. They kill scores of people. their commitment tapeworm has been destroyed.” to their cause.

REBEL REBEL 185 What else to watch: Battleship Potemkin (1925, pp.28–29) ■ Kapò (1960) ■ All the President’s Men (1976) ■ Reds (1981) ■ Waltz with Bashir (2008) ■ Zero Dark Thirty (2012) Give us your bombers, and you can and ends with an Algerian man, have our baskets. tortured beyond comprehension, dressed humiliatingly in a French Ben M’Hidi / The Battle of Algiers military uniform. Colonel Mathieu, the ranking officer in charge of The cost of terror their hijabs and remove any trace bringing down the resistance In its depiction of the horrors of of their cultural and religious movement, chastises one of the conflict, The Battle of Algiers raises identity for the greater good as soldiers when they mock him for questions about right and wrong they would see it. They kill random his appearance. This moment in war that are still relevant today. Europeans, upon whose faces the mirrors the later bombing, where Pontecorvo portrays both sides camera dwells before the blasts, Mathieu indicates that something very evenhandedly. The Algerian but there is no triumphalism from of themselves—their pride, their independence fighters, the FLN the women—in their eyes, they moral high ground—has been given (National Liberation Front), lack are committing a necessary evil. up in pursuit of victory. The movie the means or manpower to views both sides’ losses with ❯❯ confront the occupying French The French military make their military police in direct battle, so own compromises with morality, as Ali (Brahim Hadjadj, right) is instead they resort to guerrilla they resort to violent interrogation recruited to the FLN by Djafar (Yacef warfare and terrorism. They employ and torture in order to obtain the Saadi, second left). Saadi fought with children as messengers and have information required to bring the FLN, and the character Djafar was devout Muslim women Westernize the FLN down. The movie begins partly based on Saadi himself. their appearance in order to gain access to the European quarter. Their targets are not military, but rather civilian areas such as cafés and airports that are frequented by Europeans. The sequence with the women is particularly telling as to the cost of the fight, as we watch while they cut off their hair, rid themselves of The Battle of Algiers is a training film for urban guerrillas. Jimmy Breslin New York Daily News, 1968

186 THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS How to win a battle against equal regret, as the same mournful decides that their next move will be terrorism and lose the war of music is played over the massacred a strike, in which all operatives are ideas. Children shoot soldiers French civilians as the dead to lay down their weapons. The at point-blank range. Women Algerians after military raids. It restless Ali questions this action, plant bombs in cafes. Soon asks the question: what matters but is informed by his superior that the entire Arab population more in warfare, winning or to win the freedom they desire, keeping your soul in the process? they must make the transition in builds to a mad fervor. And it asks the same question of the world’s eyes from terrorists to Sound familiar? both sides. freedom fighters. Poster for screening at The role of the media Mathieu’s approach is similarly the Pentagon, 2003 The Battle of Algiers poses several media conscious, and he confronts questions about the role of the a room full of journalists about media in modern warfare. Both their “have their cake and eat it” sides seem to understand that attitude to the conflict. They just as important as winning disapprove of Mathieu’s methods, the physical battles is winning the hearts and minds of the media and Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) is thus the world. After a series of sent to Algiers to defeat the FLN in violent and terrorist acts, the FLN the wake of an escalation of violence from both sides.

REBEL REBEL 187 but believe France should remain Key incidents in the Battle of Algiers in Algeria. He points out that his methods are the only way to Barberousse Ali La Pointe’s achieve that. He understands the prison hideout pyramid cell structure of the FLN, and that torturing suspects is the CASBAH Rue de Thèbes only way to move up that pyramid to the leadership—as he puts it, to Milk Bar Cafeteria KEY “cut off the head of the tapeworm.” Stadium FLN attack The 20th century saw the world EUROPEAN CITY become a global community, in French attack which advances in communication Special Centers of French technology meant that no war interrogation military operation could pass out of sight, no violent (torture) unit act be hidden. The Battle of Algiers proposes that winning a modern questions it poses about the lines right to independence, but at the conflict is not necessarily about people cross for what they believe same time has respect for Mathieu’s might. Mathieu is a stronger are still extremely pertinent and honesty, dignity, and competence. tactician than the FLN and difficult to answer. It is also In the end, it even allows him a gradually defeats the group on the perhaps the most clear-headed moment of decency as he pleads ground, and yet, ultimately, Algeria movie about war ever made, not with Ali to allow the teenage boy in still gains independence, because swayed by the emotions that might his company to leave the field of the FLN’s action ignited public cloud the issue, interested in the battle. This moment defines the opinion about the country’s right to cold tactics of both sides without whole movie. War is not simply self-determination. Mathieu won overtly demonizing either side. The about having a just cause. It is also the battle in Algiers, but ultimately movie clearly believes in Algeria’s about what we do in its name. ■ the French lost the war. The nature of war The Battle of Algiers is a movie about the Algerian struggle for independence, yet it is also a movie about the nature of conflict. Its themes are universal, and the Gillo Pontecorvo Director Gillo Pontecorvo was born in remained true to his Pisa, Italy in 1919. His first job documentarian principles, in the movie industry was in Paris however, hiring mostly working as an assistant to Joris nonprofessional actors, including Ivens, a Dutch documentary the ex-FLN leader Yacef Saadi. filmmaker with Marxist views. Pontecorvo died from heart Pontecorvo shared Ivens’ politics, failure in Rome in 2006. becoming a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1941. He Key movies was primarily a documentary filmmaker, and The Battle of 1960 Kapò Algiers was one of the few times 1966 The Battle of Algiers Pontecorvo ventured into more 1969 Burn! overtly dramatic work. He 1979 Ogro

188 WHO WANTS TO BE AN ANGEL? CHELSEA GIRLS / 1966 IN CONTEXT S oon after Andy Warhol naturally—talk, bitch, do drugs, and Paul Morrissey’s have sex, listen to music. This GENRE experimental movie Chelsea eccentric clique became known Experimental Girls was released in 1966, critic as the Warhol Superstars. They Roger Ebert wrote, “Warhol has included singer Nico, photographer DIRECTOR nothing to say and no technique to Gerard Malanga, and actor Ondine. Andy Warhol, say it with.” But few movies have The title of the movie comes from the Paul Morrissey ever reflected so strongly the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan where moment in which they were made. many of them hung out. Other WRITERS locations included Warhol’s Factory Andy Warhol, Chelsea Girls was a provocative studio and various apartments. Ronald Tavel look at New York’s counterculture. To make the movie, Warhol and Voyeur viewing STARS Morrissey filmed the lives of his The camera was a deliberately Nico, Brigid Berlin, friends as they did what came intrusive presence, and the movie Ondine, Mary Woronov, captures its subjects’ narcissistic Gerard Malanga It’s the movies that have relationships in an unsettling way. really been running things The shooting is rough, so we are BEFORE always aware that they are being 1963 Sleep, one of Warhol’s in America, ever since filmed, a technique Warhol called first experiments with “anti- they were invented. “anti-film.” Warhol and Morrissey film,” consists of five hours of Andy Warhol ended up with twelve 33-minute footage showing his friend movies, half in color, and half in John Giorno sleeping. monochrome, which they joined together into a single split-screen 1964 Warhol’s Empire is an movie. As the audience’s eyes flicker eight-hour-long movie of the between the screens, the effect is Empire State Building at night. to reinforce their role as voyeurs watching these people during their AFTER moment in the spotlight. ■ 1968 Lonesome Cowboys is Warhol and Morrissey’s What else to watch: Scorpio Rising (1963) ■ 8½ (1963) ■ Blow-Up (1966) ■ raunchy take on Romeo and Performance (1970) ■ I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) ■ The Cremaster Cycle (2002) Juliet, satirizing Westerns.

REBEL REBEL 189 LET’S SEE THE SIGHTS! PLAYTIME / 1967 IN CONTEXT F rench comedian Jacques At the time it opened, Tati combined a gift for Playtime was the most expensive GENRE sight gags and silent French movie ever made, due mainly Musical comedy with a unique and to its huge, purpose-built set. eccentric cinematic vision. His DIRECTOR comic character Monsieur Hulot At one point, Hulot looks down on a Jacques Tati inspired huge affection. vast floor of identical office cubicles. It looks at first like a nightmare WRITER There is little plot in Playtime, vision. Yet Tati shot this movie on Jacques Tati the third Hulot movie, and for many high-definition 70-mm movie, to of Tati’s masterpieces. It simply be seen on a big screen, and if you STAR follows the encounters of Hulot and a look very closely, you can see here Jacques Tati group of American tourists during and there in the cubicles a few a day in Paris. But the Paris in the other Hulots with their trademark BEFORE movie is Tati’s own vision—he trilby hats. Hulot is not alone. ■ 1949 Jour de fête, about a created it with a gigantic futuristic mailman who stops his rounds set that came to be called “Tativille.” to enjoy a fête, is Jacques Tati’s first major success. Lost in Tativille Tativille is a supermodernist view 1953 Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday of the city, with mazes of straight introduces Tati’s most famous lines and shimmering glass and character Monsieur Hulot. interchangeable office spaces, in which the bumbling Hulot is lost 1958 Mon Oncle is Tati’s first again and again. In some ways, it is color movie, and wins him the a satire on the dehumanizing effects Best Foreign Film Oscar. of the cities of the future. And yet it is also a delightful celebration of the AFTER irrepressibility of the human spirit, 1971 Traffic is Tati’s last and that spark of oddness that Hulot movie. knocks uniformity a little out of line. 2010 Sydney Chomet’s The What else to watch: The General (1926) ■ Modern Times (1936) ■ Illusionist is based on an Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) ■ Mon Oncle (1958) ■ Being John Malkovich (1999) unproduced script by Tati.

190 THIS HERE’S MISS BONNIE PARKER. I’M CLYDE BARROW. WE ROB BANKS BONNIE AND CLYDE / 1967 IN CONTEXT Bonnie and Clyde marked Arthur Penn’s story of a young the arrival of a new couple on a bank-robbing rampage, GENRE generation of American based on the real-life crime spree Crime thriller directors whose freer style of of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker filmmaking was a departure from between 1932 and 1934, exhibits DIRECTOR the old studio conventions of a more realistic violence than had Arthur Penn classical Hollywood. Expensive previously been seen on screen. productions such as Cleopatra It also treats its outlaw protagonists WRITERS had flopped, bankrupting the sympathetically, giving them David Newman, old Hollywood studio system, an innocence and a naivety that Robert Benton which loosened the studios’ grip represented a new way of telling on production. Desperate financial stories about bad people. STARS times meant greater creative Warren Beatty, Faye freedom, and everything about Tabloid stars Dunaway, Gene Hackman Bonnie and Clyde, from the movie’s The movie frames its characters as frequent use of unsettling close-ups tabloid newspaper stars, who are BEFORE to its jagged editing style, was first glamorized and then vilified. 1965 Arthur Penn and Warren designed to upset the status quo As each of their escapades is Beatty team up for the first of traditional filmmaking. reported in the next day’s press, time with the Chicago-set thriller Mickey One. Arthur Penn Director AFTER Arthur Penn and blind activist Helen Keller 1970 Faye Dunaway stars discovered an that he had previously directed opposite Dustin Hoffman interest in on stage. Penn’s most prolific in Penn’s Western Little theater when years came in the late 1960s. Big Man. stationed in He died of heart failure in 2010, Britain during World War II. on his 88th birthday. 1976 In Penn’s The Missouri His first movie was The Left Breaks, Marlon Brando stars Handed Gun, a Western Key movies as a ruthless lawman on the starring Paul Newman, but trail of a gang of horse rustlers his first major success came 1966 The Chase led by Jack Nicholson. with The Miracle Worker, an 1967 Bonnie and Clyde adaptation of a play about deaf 1970 Little Big Man

REBEL REBEL 191 What else to watch: The Defiant Ones (1958) ■ À bout de souffle (1960, pp.166–67) ■ Easy Rider (1969, pp.196–97) ■ Badlands (1973) ■ Taxi Driver (1976, pp.234–39) ■ True Romance (1993) ■ Natural Born Killers (1994) Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), Clyde situation becomes increasingly Bonnie and Clyde pose for a photo (Warren Beatty), and even Clyde’s desperate, the barrage of lies told with their hostage, Captain Frank brother Buck (Gene Hackman) see about them in the newspapers Hamer (Denver Pyle). In real life, Hamer how the papers sensationalize the begins to wear Clyde down, most did not meet either of them until the facts and exaggerate the crimes. noticeably when an article falsely day his posse killed them. accuses him of robbing the Grand At first, Clyde laughs off the Prairie National Bank—which leaving them powerless to present attention, and he and Bonnie enrages him so much that he their true selves to the world. Only take playful, gun-toting photos of promises to actually do it. as the movie nears its bloody end are themselves for the press, playing they given a reprieve of sorts, when along with the media game and The relentless attention of a short, charming poem Bonnie enjoying their celebrity. But as the media ultimately robs the has written, telling of her pride in the law closes in, and the pair’s two thieves of their sense of self, knowing a decent man like Clyde, is published in a newspaper. Their They’ll go down together / They’ll side of the story is told, just once. bury them side by side / To a few, it’ll be grief / To the law, a relief / But it’s death Like other movies of the time, for Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde makes it hard for the viewer not to root for its amoral Bonnie Parker / The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde protagonists, sympathizing more with their media manipulation than the victims of their robberies. ■

192 I’M SORRY DAVE. I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY / 1968 IN CONTEXT All science fiction is about the Completed a year before the first unknown, but few movies Moon landing and 30 years before GENRE have embraced it as fully as a chess computer beat the world Science fiction 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley champion, Kubrick’s space-age vision Kubrick’s journey to the dark side of remains extraordinarily compelling. DIRECTOR the solar system. While he and Stanley Kubrick cowriter Arthur C. Clarke draw on The movie is loosely structured familiar science-fiction story around a series of turning points in WRITERS elements—the dangerous mission, human evolution, but despite the Arthur C. Clarke, the homicidal supercomputer, grandiose five-note fanfare of Stanley Kubrick humanity’s first contact with alien Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake intelligence—Kubrick arranges Zarathustra—the movie’s famous STARS them in an unfamiliar way to give musical motif—these moments are Keir Dullea, Gary audiences something unique and not epiphanies. They only serve to Lockwood, William unforgettably strange. deepen the mystery of humankind’s Sylvester, Douglas Rain Its origin and purpose are still BEFORE a total mystery. 1964 Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick’s Cold War black comedy, shows Mission Control’s last words / 2001: A Space Odyssey man’s self-destructive nature. 1968 Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes sends an astronaut (Charlton Heston) into the future. AFTER 1971 A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s darkly comic vision of a near-future dystopia. 1984 2010, Peter Hyams’ sequel to 2001, returns to the mystery of the Monoliths.

REBEL REBEL 193 What else to watch: Destination Moon (1950) ■ The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) ■ Planet of the Apes (1968) ■ Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ■ Alien (1979, p.243) ■ Gravity (2013, p.326) ■ Interstellar (2014) Douglas Trumbull Special effects supervisor The picture that science- Douglas Trumbull was just to win Oscars for his work on fiction fans of every age and 23 years old when he started Close Encounters of the Third in every corner of the world working on the special effects Kind, Star Trek: The Motion for 2001. He had come to Stanley Picture (1979), and Blade Runner. have prayed (sometimes Kubrick’s attention for his work forlornly) that the industry on a documentary about space Key movies might some day give them. flight called To the Moon and Beyond. He was one of four 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey Charles Champlin special effects supervisors on 1972 Silent Running 2001, and was responsible for 1977 Close Encounters of the Los Angeles Times, 1970 creating the psychedelic star Third Kind gate sequence. He went on 1982 Blade Runner role in the universe. 2001’s opening Bowman when given an order. “I’m and is then transformed into the scene centers on Moon-Watcher, a afraid I can’t do that.” Here Kubrick Star Child, a strange, fetal being prehistoric ape whose tribe is is showing the audience another floating in space—and this is where fighting another for water and comes turning point in humanity’s the movie ends. As a final image, the into contact with a mysterious black evolution—the point at which the Star Child is both obscure and object known as the Monolith. The tools begin to turn on the apes. crystal clear. We don’t know what it appearance of the Monolith triggers is, or how it came to be, or where it is a shift in the apes’ culture; they turn Mystery and meaning going, but we know what it means: old bones into tools—and weapons— As Discovery’s mission descends hope, and the beginning of another and the human race’s long journey to further and further into disaster, journey for our species. ■ the stars begins in earnest. the Monolith appears again. What can it mean? Is it the emissary of an From ape to astronaut alien race? Proof of the existence of This odyssey is represented by God? The scientists are baffled, and a now iconic cut from one image so is the viewer. Kubrick refuses to to another, as a bone hurled by supply any easy answers; he’s more Moon-Watcher becomes a spaceship interested in taking the audience twirling through the void. Suddenly on a journey than he is in revealing the action shifts to the future, where the destination. astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) are on The final act of 2001 abandons a mission to Jupiter in the spaceship conventional storytelling as the Discovery. Their lives are in the care audience follows Bowman through of Discovery’s computer, HAL 9000 a tunnel of light and into an (voiced with chilling detachment by otherworldly chamber, possibly the Douglas Rain), who malfunctions construct of an extraterrestrial host, and grows politely mutinous. When where the Monolith is waiting for the crew try to shut him down, HAL him. He sees himself as an old man fights back. “I’m sorry, Dave,” he tells Bowman finally finds himself alone in the space pod. Time appears to become warped as an older version of himself appears, followed at the end of the movie by the fetuslike Star Child.

194 WE’RE GONNA STICK TOGETHER JUST LIKE IT USED TO BE THE WILD BUNCH / 1969 IN CONTEXT T he Wild Bunch gleefully machine gun at the center of the final deconstructs the ethos shootout, presaging the slaughter GENRE of the traditional Western. that was to come in World War I. Western The lines between heroes and villains are blurred, and characters In awe of violence DIRECTOR are not always rewarded for doing Each time a character is hit with Sam Peckinpah the right thing. a bullet, no matter how minor, the moment of impact is filmed in slow WRITERS Set in 1913, the story contains motion. We see the blood spurt out Walon Green, Sam certain motifs of the traditional of the back in close-up, as the body Peckinpah (screenplay); Western. The aging thieves—the contorts toward the ground. The Walon Green, Roy N. “bunch”—arrange one last bank sound drains out of the scene until Sickner (story) job, which inevitably goes horribly all we hear is the character’s death wrong. They are chased into Mexico rattle. Slow motion does not appear STARS by their old comrade Deke Thornton in any other context. William Holden, Ernest (Robert Ryan), who has reluctantly Borgnine, Robert Ryan, switched sides and is leading a The violence of the old West Warren Oates group of hopeless bounty hunters. was notorious, but The Wild Bunch The old West is fast disappearing, is the first movie to stand back and BEFORE a fact made clear by the German look on it with such awe. The movie 1961 Peckinpah’s first movie as director is The Deadly Sam Peckinpah Director Companions, a classic, low-budget Western. Sam Peckinpah earned himself a reputation was born in for bad behavior on set. He AFTER California in suffered alcohol problems, and 1970 Peckinpah’s next movie, 1925. After died of heart failure in 1984. another Western, The Ballad of serving in the Cable Hogue, shows a change US marines in World War II, Key movies in pace with far less violence. he worked as an assistant to Don Siegel on movies including 1962 Ride the High Country 1977 Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron Invasion of The Body Snatchers 1969 The Wild Bunch is an unflinching portrayal of a (1956). His first movie as director 1971 Straw Dogs soldier’s life in World War II. came in 1961 with The Deadly 1974 Bring Me the Head Companions. Peckinpah soon of Alfredo Garcia

REBEL REBEL 195 What else to watch: The Searchers (1956, p.135) ■ The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) ■ Bonnie and Clyde (1967, pp.190–91) ■ Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, p.336) ■ Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) “We gotta start thinking beyond our guns,” one of the bandits observes; “Those days are closing.” The movie celebrates male bonding, but the sun is setting on this bunch of outsiders. begins and ends with anarchic in these scenes, just a struggle The Wild Bunch questions the set pieces of violence. In each to survive. This was perhaps a motives of the law while also scene, innocents are caught in more honest portrayal of the West displaying sympathy for the the cross fire as both sides shoot than the moralizing take of the outlaws, their loyalty and self- almost blindly at anything that previous generation of Westerns, in reliance. The movie’s final moves. There is no right or wrong which the good prevail in the end. confrontation is set in motion by the bunch’s decision to try to save their captured comrade, Angel (Jaime Sánchez). Many of the law enforcers that trail the bunch, by contrast, are shown to be incompetent and corrupt. The movie becomes a humane exploration of the cost of living in amoral times, presenting outlaws as a product of their surroundings. It finds a compassion for its characters that the Westerns of old could not. ■ Tector (Ben Johnson), Lyle (Warren Oates), Pike (William Holden), and Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) walk out to save Angel. They will stick together to the end. We’re after men. And I wish to God I was with them. Deke Thornton / The Wild Bunch

196 THEY SEE A FREE INDIVIDUAL IT’S GONNA SCARE ’EM EASY RIDER / 1969 IN CONTEXT F ew movies seem Easy Rider helped to to capture a spark the New Hollywood GENRE moment in time phase of filmmaking in Road movie more completely than the early 1970s, in which Dennis Hopper and directors took a more DIRECTOR Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider. authorial role, and Dennis Hopper It’s the quintessential innovative publicity American road movie, WRITERS with two youngish men, techniques were used. Peter Fonda, Dennis half hippy, half Hells Hopper, Terry Southern Angels, setting off on a big commercial journey to freedom on their successes with the STARS Harley-Davidson motorcycles. younger generation. It seemed only Peter Fonda, Dennis natural to combine the two themes, Hopper, Jack Nicholson End of the 1960s biker gangs and drugs, in one movie. There’s no real plot or emotional Fonda brought in screenwriter BEFORE journey, and the movie’s vague Terry Southern to help with the 1953 The Wild One, in which symbolism may seem dated now. writing and hired Dennis Hopper Marlon Brando smolders as But there’s no denying its cultural as his co-star and director. a motorcycle gang leader, was status at the time. The year it Hopper may at first have the first movie to focus on the was released, 1969, young people seemed like a disastrous idea of outlaw bikers. were proclaiming their rejection choice as director, as the of the values of the old generation shoot threatened to 1960 Jean-Luc Godard’s by growing their hair long and À bout de souffle prefigures dropping out to listen to music and Easy Rider with its couple of take drugs. Easy Rider reflected young outlaws on the road, this mood, but it went further. and jump-cut editing. Peter Fonda, the producer and AFTER star, came to the project from 1976 Easy Rider inspires playing the rebellious leader of a a number of road movies, gang of Hells Angels in the movie significant among them Wim The Wild Angels (1966), and a TV Wenders’ Kings of the Road. ad director who takes LSD in The Trip (1967). Both movies were

REBEL REBEL 197 What else to watch: The Wild One (1953) ■ À bout de souffle (1960, pp.166–67) ■ Pierrot le Fou (1965) ■ Woodstock (1970) ■ Kings of the Road (1976) mire in drug binges and shouting drifting drug dealers heading east Dennis Hopper matches. Fonda even threatened to because there’s no longer a Wild Director/Actor abandon the project. But it may be West. Their bike bags are stuffed that very anarchy that made Easy with money made from selling A multitalented actor, writer, Rider an icon of its time. Hopper felt drugs to Mr. Big, and when they are director, and photographer, he was part of a revolution. The joined by a sharp-suited drunken Dennis Hopper carved out a disorganized nature of the project lawyer (Jack Nicholson), he ends up name for himself as one of the was a rude gesture of rebellion. seeming far more rebellious than wild cards of Hollywood. Born them. The title conveys an image in 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, The rough cut is said to have of chilled-out bikers, but it actually he showed early promise as run for over three hours. Hopper comes from the slang for living off an artist, but was soon drawn chose to cut out story details to the earnings of a prostitute. to acting and studied at the leave behind a series of loosely Actors Studio in New York linked images and moments, held Easy Rider’s bleak violence under the legendary Lee together by a pounding sound track. ensures that the movie is no hippy Strasberg. He initially made trip, but rather an incoherent blast his name with television work, West to east of frustration. In reality, it signaled but it wasn’t until he directed In some ways, the two bikers seem a disillusioned end to a previous and starred in Easy Rider that like modern-day cowboys, riding generation’s idealism. ■ he became a celebrity. In later off to find freedom, and their names years, Hopper’s problems with Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy Wyatt and Billy hide the cash alcohol and drugs stalled his (Dennis Hopper) recall the Western they’ve made from drug smuggling progress, although he did heroes Wyatt Earp and Billy the in the stars-and-stripes-adorned direct and star in the excellent Kid. In fact the bikers are nothing fuel tank of a chopper, and head to punk drama Out of the Blue. so noble. Rather, New Orleans for Eventually, after entering they are a pair of Mardi Gras. a rehab program in 1983, his career took off again with riveting performances in such movies as Blue Velvet (pp.256–57), and numerous Hollywood bad guy roles. Hopper died in 2010. Key movies 1969 Easy Rider 1979 Apocalypse Now 1980 Out of the Blue 1986 Blue Velvet

198 ARE YOU FOND OF MEAT? LE BOUCHER / 1970 IN CONTEXT I n French director Claude Hélène (Stéphane Audran) first Chabrol’s thriller Le Boucher meets Popaul (Jean Yanne, on her left) GENRE (The Butcher), the stark title at a wedding. They strike up a close Thriller immediately raises expectations relationship, but it remains platonic of brutality and gore. Played by the despite his clumsy efforts to woo her. DIRECTOR curiously sympathetic Jean Yanne, Claude Chabrol the Butcher is Popaul, a veteran not least because the woman has of the French colonial wars of the been stabbed to death with knives, WRITER 1950s in Indochina and Algeria, who the tools of his trade. And when a Claude Chabrol works at a butcher shop in a rural second body is found, discovered town. At a friend’s wedding, Popaul by one of her own pupils during STARS meets Hélène (Stéphane Audran), an idyllic picnic, Hélène finds a Jean Yanne, who becomes strangely fond of him. lighter that she herself gave Popaul Stéphane Audran Popaul is open and sensitive about as a present. But instead of his past, talking of an abusive father handing it to the police, Hélène BEFORE and the cruelty of battle. keeps it, and she is relieved when, 1943 Alfred Hitchcock’s later on, Popaul lights one of his Shadow of a Doubt tells the When a woman is killed in the many Gauloises with what appears story of a young girl who forest, however, Hélène begins to to be the original lighter. discovers a terrible secret. think of Popaul a little differently, 1968 Chabrol’s Les Biches stars Stéphane Audran and Jacqueline Sassard as two women who form a lesbian relationship before both falling for the same man. AFTER 1970 Chabrol’s next movie, La Rupture, features Audran as a woman whose husband’s family is hatching a deadly plot against her.