VOLUME 09 - NUMBER 04 JULY-AUGUST 1973

•~ Jdnus FILITIS 745 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 212 PL3-7100

STAFF VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 editor JULY-AUGUST 1973 RICHARD CORLISS book editor / assistant editor CONTENTS MELINDA WARD JOURNALS graphic design Parisi Jonathan Rosenbaum Los Angeles / Beverly Walker MARTHA LEHTOLA page 2 managing editor STANLEY DONEN AUSTIN LAMONT interviewed by assistant managing editor Stephen Harvey page 4 SAYRE MAXFIELD advertising manager KING VIDOR part 1 NAOMI WEISS by Raymond Durgnat page 10 correspondents THE BIG PARADE London RICHARD ROUD page 11 Los Angeles STEPHEN FARBER THE CROWD Paris JONATHAN ROSENBAUM page 15 SHOW PEOPLE assistants page 17 research MAR Y CORLISS HALLELUJAH! page 19 design LINDA MANCINI STREET SCENE subscriptions MARY WESTROPP page 23 subscriptions NATALIE SILLER Y THE CHAMP page 26 editorial board OUR DAILY BREAD JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director page 31 THE WEDDING NIGHT Film Program , Ohio University page 36 THE CITADEL JAMES A. BEVERIDGE, Director page 40 Programme in Film , York University NORTHWEST PASSAGE page 42 HOWARD SUBER , Chairman, Critical Studies H. M. PULHAM , ESQ . Motion Picture / Television Di vision, UCLA page 47 WILLARD VAN DYK E, Director FILM FAVORITES Department of Film , Museum of Modern Art Robin Wood on THE TALL T Th e opinions expressed in FILM COMM ENT page 50 are those of the individual authors and do not Joseph McBride on THREE GODFATHERS necessarily represent the opinions page 53 of the editor, staff or publisher. BOOKS FILM COMMENT. July-August 1973. reviewed by Chip Rossen , Volume 9 number 4. published bimonthly Elliott Sirkin , Dudley Andrew by Film Comment Publi shi ng Corporation . 42 Dustin Street . Boston MA 02 135 USA. LETTERS Second class postage paid at Boston . Massachusetts. page 64 Copyright ' 1973 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation . All rig hts reserve d. This publication is fully BACK PAGE protected by domestic and international copyright. inside back cover It is forbidden to duplicate any part of this publication in any way without prior written on the cover: Renee Adoree and John Gilbert in THE BIG PARADE. permissio n from the publishers. photo : Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive. Subscription rates in the United States: $9 for six numbers. $17 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere: $10 .50 for six numbers. $20 .00 for twe lve numbers. payable in US funds only. New subscribers please include yo ur occupa tion and zip code. Subscription and back issue correspondence: FILM COMM ENT box 686 Village Station . Brookline MA 02147 USA. Editorial correspondence: FILM COMMENT 214 East 11th Street . New Yo rk NY 10003 USA . Please enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope wit h manuscripts. Microfilm editions available from University Microfilms . Ann Arbor MI 48106 . Printed in USA by Printing Division . AVCO Corporation . Distributed in the USA by Eastern News Company . 155 West 15th Street. New York NY 100 11 . International distribution by Worldwide Media Service . 386 Park Avenue South . New Yo rk NY 10016 USA. Di stributed in Great Britain .by Moore-Harness Company , London . FILM COMMENT participates in the FI AF periodical indexi ng pl an. Library of Congress card number 76 -498 .

IeurtohpreeaenI .JOURNALS directors PARIS L.A. Jonathan Rosenbaum Beverly Walker JAMES M. WALL, Editor Good News About New Cinemas: For Several of the negotiating points be- the first time, a French film magazine has hind the current writers' strike vividly The importance of film as a a special salle all its own . The Quintette demonstrate the new power of the medium of both artistic and Positif-part of a five-theatre complex just screenwriter: soci al expression is in c reasingly off Boulevard Saint-Michel-is currently being recognized , due in large showing Irvin Kershner's LOVING , its third 1. The term \"a film by ... \" shall not measure to the strong influence attraction; its first two (Oshima's THE CER- of contemporary directors. EMONY and Hondo's SOLEIL 0) each had be permitted unless the name following Here are illuminating essays on successful eleven-week runs . Studio that description-be he directororproduc- three of Europe's most famous Christine 2, only a few short blocks away, er-was also a cowriter of the script. film directors: Luis Bunuel (by offers another precedent: \" For the fi rst Peter Schillaci) , Frederi co Fel - time in France ,\" say the ads, \" a cinema This will effectively eliminate absurdities lini (by Roger Ortmayer) , and dares to specialize in the presentation of such as \"A Film by Arthur Hiller \" appear- Francois Truffaut (by James M . Underground films from allover the ing at the front of Man of La Mancha Wall) . Each includes a complete world .\" The opening program , under- (although Cervantes would undoubtedly list of the films made by the standably , plays it somewhat safe by be pleased to let that credit stand). director, as well as a bibliography mainly restricting itself to some of the of books , major articles , and re - more popular American Underground 2. The Writers ' Guild shall have pri- views. Though each writer ap- classics (Kenneth Anger, George Ku- mary power in negotiating the terms of proac hes his subject differently, char, Robert Nelson , etc .); but UNSERE a hyphenate contract. ( \" Hyphenate \" re- all are concerned to clarify the AFRIKAREISE is also included , leading one ferring to the growing number of people major themes presented in the to hope that. if Peter Kubelka has already who write as well as produce or direct.) work of the director, and to com- arrived, Snow, Jacobs, and Frampton ment on his vision as it is ex- (not to mention Brakhage!) may not be 3. The writer's name must be includ- press ed in his films . Three Euro- far behind . Indeed , I'm told that a massive ed prominently in al/ advertising and pub- pean Directors is a timely and series of American Underground films is licity. sign ificant contribution to cine - also being planned for the fall at the matic awareness. Cinematheque. The re-opening of the There are a number of other bread- Olympic cinema, now multiplied into two and-butter issues relating to residuals but 1'\"\"'- - (Salle Marilyn and Salle Pigozzi) is an- these three points dramatically illustrate other happy event; at the moment the that the era of the writer is at hand . And At your bookstore. Paper , $3 .95 Marilyn is running a Hollywood festival there are other indications: Time Maga- called \"The Parade of Stars\" while the zine now lists the writer in addition to Pigozzi features a two hour and forty-five director at the top of its reviews ; it seems minute version of Kurosawa 's THE IDIOT. likely that others will follow suit. Critics now pay special attention to the screen- Good And Bad News About The New play. In several instances , the writer has Cinema: Jacques Rivette's perpetually received the bulk of the kudos or slams , unreleased and virtually unseen OUT with the director seen as either his victim (thirteen hours long) and SPECTRE (four or astute translator. This is particularly hours long)-both derived from the same evident in the writing of Pauline Kael- footage, and both starring Bulle Ogier, never an auteur theory advocate-who Jean-Pierre Kalfon , Jean-Pierre Leaud, praised Don Carpenter's script for PAY- Juliet Berto and Michel Lonsdale, among DAY, slammed Walter Hill for THE GETAWAY others, but reportedly quite different and THIEF WHO CAME TO DINNER and mur- films, not longer and shorter versions of dered John Milius for JUDGE ROY BEAN, the same one-continue their semi- DIRTY HARRY and JEREMIAH JOHNSON. This legendary existences. A ten-page inter- is a highly dangerous practice for critics view with Rivette about both films in La are not in a position to know who contrib- Nouvelle Critique # 63 (April) makes fas- uted what to a film . As Joan Didion point- cinating reading , and further leads one ed out in a recent New York Review of to suspect that enlightenment of some Books article , the \"deal memo \" is more sort is on the way . But when , and where? likely to shed light on the situation than If rumors all over Paris are to be believed, any evidence from the screen . For ex- the French Underground is alive and pro- ample, JEREMIAH JOHNSON was extensively ductive but just about totally invisible; rewritten by Edward Anhalt-but Milius was made the culprit-and it is well- continued on page 61 known Hollywood gossip that the ending of THE GETAWAY was the creation of Mr. Steve McQueen. Further, it would be well for critics and commentators to take a hard look at the new status of the star in Hollywood . Ac- cording to Mike Medavoy, a top writers'

representative, the star is almost single- handedly responsible for bringing the screenwriter into power-and the old adage \" he who pays the piper calls the tune \" applies here. For instance, almost every film Clint Eastwood has starred in over the past four years was filmed under the \" Malpaso \" banner. Malpaso is East- wood's company and no one should be deluded into thinking he does not get exactly what he wants-regardless of who wrote or directed . Redford, Newman, Marvin , Streisand and many other top names all have their own companies and exercise considerable influence over a final shooting script, regardless of who is credited . Therefore , it would be wise- for critics and viewers alike to wait until a writer has a half-dozen or so scripts under his belt before making pro- nouncements. There are now an unprecedented number of original scripts being sold- one estimate is three books to each origi- nal-and they bring a much higher price than an adaptation . The highest price ever paid for an original script was $400,- 000 , for BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID-but scripts selling for between $200 ,000 and $300,000 are not as unusu- al as they used to be . (This does not contradict the point made in the first article about the screenwriter-that the majority of young writers are working for peanuts .) Rarely more than $150,000 is ever paid for an adaptation. The first evidence of this oncoming tide popped up two years ago at Warner Bros ., under the aegis of John Calley . Calley signed about a dozen young writ- ers to a contract, gave them a weekly salary, a place to work and a lot of sup- port. The median age of this group was about 26; most had just rolled out of film school with a pronounced bias for the American film . They admired the likes of Ford, Hawkes, Walsh and found Anto- nioni and Bergman hardly worth speaking about. \" Marcello, I'm So Bored \" was the thesis film for John Milius, this group's superstar. It doesn 't take much sleuthing to guess the Marcello to which he re- ferred-or the directors whose films he was knocking. Although-ironically-not a single film was made from scripts written during this period , each of the contracted writers is now at the top and some are doing in- teresting work. The aforementioned Walter Hill was amongst them ; others include Brian dePalma (HI MOM , GREET- INGS, SISTERS), David Giler (MYRA BRECK- INRIDGE), Terry Malick (POCKET MONEY), David Odell (DEALING), Paul Williams (THE REVOLUTIONARY, DEALING). DePalma and Williams are also directors, but Malick's writing led directly to a directorial oppor- tunitY-BADLANDS will be released shortly -and Milius wrote and directed DIL- LINGER . Also in this group were director Vernon Zimmerman (UNHOLY ROLLERS) co ntinued on page 62 FILM COMMENT 3

~~A~[l~~ [I)~~~~ interviewed by Stephen Harvey Stephen Harvey works in the Museum of Modern assistant stage manager, he arrived in Hollywood Art Department of Film. while barely into his twenties and proceeded to labor as assistant choreographer on such films as COVER Now that auteurism in the American cinema has GIRL, ANCHORS AWEIGH , and TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL been transformed from heresy to cliche, it may seem GAME . Quite to his surprise , he was given the oppor- on first glance as though the quest for unearthing tunity to co-direct ON THE TOWN with Gene Kelly in the priceless treasures of yet another unsung direc- 1949, and for the next eight years worked almost tor has reached the point of negligible reward . In exclusively in the musical field , directing such spirit- the last ten years, more has probably been written ed and innovative films as SINGIN' IN THE RAIN , SEVEN on the deathless contribution of Fannie Hurst via BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS , IT'S ALWAYS FAIR Douglas Sirk than on the collected works of the WEATHER and FUNNY FACE . Striving to create a mod- three Bronte sisters, and undoubtedly more time has ern equivalent to the Thirties musicals of Rene Clair been spent perusing the esoterica, expressive or and Astaire and Rogers, Donen set a standard only otherwise, of Budd Boetticher and Joseph H. Lewis matched by auteur-favorite Vincente Minnelli. than was consumed in shooting all of their respec- tive movies. However, despite the reams of meticu- And Donen's career has, if anything , increased lous scholarsh ip expended thus far, the work of in stature since his last musical was released in some major American filmmakers has still apparently 1958. In the past fifteen years , Donen has tackled been neglected. One of the most obvious casualties a variety of genres, and the results have been has been Stanley Donen . At best, he has Qeen extraordinary. With INDISCREET he directed a comic relegated to a footnote in the history of the develop- romance that measures up to the standards of ment of the screen musical , and even then he has Lubitsch , and with CHARADE he brought off a humor- been somewhat overshadowed in the eyes of many tinged suspense entertainment second only to critics by the contribution of his frequent collabo- Hitchcock's achievements in the field. Even more rator Gene Kelly, who of course has had the advan- recently, Donen proved equal to both the bittersweet tage of appearing on the screen as well as toiling dissection of marriage found in TWO FOR THE ROAD behind the camera. and the uninhibited social satire of BEDAZZLED-two of the most memorable films of the past decade. In fact, Donen 's impact on American films has Even such lesser efforts as ONCE MORE WITH FEELING been far richer and more varied than that. His early and ARABESQUE are marked with a visual elan and commitment was indeed to the screen musical ; after verbal sparkle unmatched by his contemporaries. a brief career on the stage as a chorus dancer and This interview was conducted last November in

London, where Mr. Donen has maintained his pro- just saying that they did it and we liked it. And I Dancing duction base since INDISCREET. With very short ad- think that still comes through in this movie , the vance notice, he graciously consented to this meet- feeling of appreciation of what had been done with through ing although he was deeply immersed in movies . preproduction work on his first film in four years , Donen 's a musical adaptation of Saint-Exupery 's fable , The Did you work very closely with Camden and Little Prince. Even by his standards it is an ambitious Green in preparing the film before it was shot? musicals project, for although his pre-eminence in the musi- cal genre has long been established , Donen seems We met quite a lot to discuss what would be made, are Cary Grant increasingly eager to create something more than at first the remake of BOMBSHELL. Mostly it's a lot the stylish \" bubbles \" for which he is noted . The of lies, what they ' re saying in their preface [to the in INDISCREET, result should be something worth waiting even four published edition of the SINGIN ' IN THE RAIN screen- years for. play]. It isn 't true , none of it is true . Adolph is saying Russ Tam blyn that they went off and wrote that script and then STEPHEN HARVEY: How did the idea of making sent it to Gene and that Gene then said he would in SEVEN SINGIN ' IN THE RAIN first come about? '~ do it. The total opposite is true ; we all met for weeks BRIDES FOR in California and talked about it, Gene was going SEVEN STANLEY DONEN: Arthur Freed sold his cata- to be in it, they were writing a part for him . It's not BROTHERS, logue of songs to MGM, and the idea was to make at all what they ' ve said , I don't care really, but it's a musical using those songs. Since they were songs peculiar. Gene Kelly in from the period of the early talkies, obviously the movie to be made would have to be about the early When you and Kelly worked on films together did SINGIN ' IN musicals. And then we thought we would remake you work in tandem on the set together or did you THE RAIN , an early talking picture ; one of them that we consid- do certain things and Kelly others? ered I remember well was BOMBSHELL, the Harlow Donald O'Connor picture . We ran many other early talkies, because No , we really worked as a team-we didn 't say, this was in ' 51 , I guess , so we were talking about , \" I do this and you do that.\" No , not a bit. Even and strangely enough , roughly films made twenty years through rehearsing the numbers, when everything before , and today this is more than twenty years would really get complicated I would be with him. Gene Kelly in since , The big change in movies was the difference When there was real pressure to get a lot done in between ' 3~ and ' 50 , much greater than between terms of rehearsal , I would rehearse in one hall and SINGIN ' IN ' 50 and ' 70 . he would rehearse another number, but then we THE RAIN , would switch and I would go supervise his number All of us loved movies. That's the thing about and he would come to do mine. So it really was Kay Thompson SINGIN ' IN THE RAIN that I still find is nice, that we a collaboration. There was no question about it. didn't look back on the early talkies or silents and and Fred Astaire say that we were superior to them , We looked back GIVE A GIRL A BREAK came soon after SINGIN' IN THE on them with great affection and appreciation , We RAIN, didn 't it? It seems to have been made on a in FUNNY FACE. weren 't saying , \" We're doing it better. \" We were rather small budget. All photos: Very small. Even SINGIN ' IN THE RAIN wasn 't ex- Museum of pensive, except for that one big number towards the end. But GIVE A GIRL A BREAK was a much cheaper Modern Art / picture. Film Stills Archive

The film 's title number, sung by the three principal composer's biography-doesn 't seem to have been girls in split screen while preparing for their audition, congenial to your talents. seems to anticipate the staging of \"Bonjour Paris \" I hated it! I hated it then , I hate it now. I hated in FUNN Y FACE a few years later. many of my early pictures. Yes, it was. But I haven 't seen it in so long that Irs ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER seems in many ways a I can 't even remember what I did . sequel to ON THE TOWN, with the three servicemen meeting again ten years after the war. As a former choreographer yourself, have you worked very closely with the choreographers on It was certainly intended as such , to see what your films , such as Michael Kidd on SEVEN BRIDES? happened to these three people ten years later, disappointed in their lives after having set out with Yes, sure. But more than that, SEVEN BRIDES was the highest ideals. It was an awfully good idea. a picture on which I did work on the script and on the preparation of the film , and on the whole thing It has a distinctively bitter flavor for a musical. of getting Michael Kidd and those dancers, Jacques d'Amboise, Matt Mattox, Russ Tamblyn and Tommy I don 't think it's bitter, it's just that they are Rail-that was the big struggle. The thing was to disappointed with their lives. A lot goes on in ten get the producer to agree to do that, because the years , particularly in those ten years , from the time studio said to me, \" You can 't be serious, you're you ' re twentyish , when you're really young and going to make a picture about backwoodsmen with idealistic , until you ' re in your mid-thirties and the people from the Ballet Theater, what are you going reality of what you are really able to do with yourself to have, pansy backwoodsmen?\" That was a huge hits you. Again , I think it was a good idea; it's not struggle. Then they said, \" Who 's going to dance? a particularly memorable picture , but in terms of What do you need with a choreographer?\" Jack what Com den and Green presented it's a very good Cummings, the producer, for a long time wanted concept for a picture. Some of the satire of television American folk songs and I wanted to have a full- worked nicely, though . blown musical-not a sort of backwoodsy treatment of Americana, but a real , energetic musical story. I was struck by the creative use of split screen and other techniques exploiting the newly devel- Were you pleased with the results on SEVEN oped wide screen and CinemaScope lens. Did you like working with them? BRIDES? I liked that shape all right , yes, but they weren 't Only modestly. I hated dOing a lot of the things very good lenses. They aren 't used any more be- that were actually done, such as dOing it in the studio cause they were cumbersome and restricted one's at all. All of the barn-building scenes were done choice of shots. But now you've got very good in the studio because it would have taken a lot longer anamorphic lenses, terrific ones. and cost more money to make the film through the seasons on locations in real places. It would have Kelly's dance on roller skates after he has left been a very time-consuming process, so I had to Cyd Charisse is very reminiscent of the title number bow to the pressures and do the best I could . Now in SING IN ' IN THE RAIN. it looks very phony, but it was a huge success at the time. I think it was the biggest of all of them He's happy and in love and dancing down a up to then. street. It's hard for people to realize that it's a very difficult thing to get any situation for a dance number Was it easier then for you to do more of the things as good as someone dancing because they're you wanted to direct? happy-because that really is the best , and almost only , reason that people actually dance in life . You No , not a bit. [He laughsl- very rarely dance when you're sad or in despair or trying to express something other than joy. When Is DEEP IN MY HEART an example of this? you ' re joyful you feel like dancing. The difficulty in That was a huge success ; well, really it depends doing dance numbers is that you cannot simply, on what you mean by that word. If the measure of continuously do one dance number after another it is the number of tickets sold , then it was a big based on being happy, although dancing is happi- success. If you mean critical acclaim , it was not ness. That is basically what happens in all these successful, nor should it have been. themes you noted that are centered around the idea That particular musical genre-the schmaltzy ---- .--~ 6 JULY 1973

of camaraderie; these fellas like each other and are making FUNNY FACE probably more than any other A sequence having fun , like \" Moses Supposes \" in SINGIN ' IN THE picture I've ever worked on , because it gave me RAIN. Just happy-dancing happy. That's the simi- the opportunity to explore a lot of things I wanted from larity in all these numbers. to do and now had a chance to try. But just because I enjoyed making it doesn 't mean that I have to think IT'S ALWAYS FUNNY FACE was shown last summer at the Muse- it's a great piece of work-it's not. FAIR WEATHER um of Modern Art in New York and was an enormous success. The audience really responded to its charm What was George Abbott's contribution to THE with Dan Dailey, and visual chic and to Astaire and Hepburn 's lovely PAJAMA GAME as co-director? Michael Kidd performances. Terrific. I admire him greatly-he's certainly and Gene Kelly. Well , I've seen SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and FUNNY somebody who has done more for the musical FACE again within the last three weeks and I found theater than anyone else. He 's a man of enormous FUNNY FACE painful to watch . Not because of Fred talent and achievement; how could I do anything and Audrey ; they were both marvelous. But it is such but admire him? I thought the play had been well- a creaky , old , sick script, and to have made a picture directed , and it was I who asked him to co-direct out of that! ... no situations, nothing, nothing, it with me. That was after we were in rehearsal for nothing, just going on air. That picture really travels the movie-I kept asking him , \" What did you do? on the charm of those two people. It's just not How does that go?\" Eventually I said, \" George, you enough for a movie to rest on those performances, know I've co-directed other pictures , let me put your the Gershwin songs , and how marvelous it is to look name on the screen .\" And he said , \" I don 't want at. That 's not a movie. What's missing is the whole to, I don 't want to have to be around .\" And so I spine of the picture. And that is a shame , because replied , \" You don 't have to be around , I just want you could make a picture about a fashion pho- to have the ease of knowing that when I talk to you tographer if you have that to start with, but we didn 't that you have the same position I have.\" He wasn 't have it. around very much , only in the mornings-he liked to play tennis then. That's how it came about. Did Richard Avedon work very closely with you on designing the visual style of the film? When you 're planning a musical, do you prefer using original material or adaptations from the Yes, very closely. We became very close friends, stage? and we still are now. I appreciated him and admired him and I used him as a very close collaborator-in I don't like to do adaptations. There 's no fun in the same way I try to use everybody. I mean the it, you ' re too locked in . I do them if they're good whole idea of having someone to work with you is and I'm without something else I'd rather do. But to get as much out of him as you can get-not to as for what I prefer, I surely prefer doing originals. keep them away but to bring them in . All the ones that I like the best and that you like the best have been originals, such as SINGIN ' IN THE When the film came out, some people called it RAIN , IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, SEVEN BRIDES, FUNNY anti-intellectual . . . FACE. I know they did. It's probably true in retrospect , KISS THEM FOR ME was the first of four movies you although it certainly wasn 't intentional on my part. made with Cary Grant. The co-star, Jayne Mansfield, But as I look at it now I can see why they felt that seems so unlike most of the leading women you way , it is true . Of course , to call the picture anything choose for your films. is already a miracle, because FUNNY FACE is a bubble. It's not enough of anything . I'm delighted that they I had very little to do with the first Cary Grant called it anti-intellectual-called it something at picture. When I came into it the script was written, least! the people had been cast, except Suzy Parker and a few of the supporting men . It's not my favorite Even so, most of the contemporary reviews were picture. I don't hate it, but it's not as good as it could have been. rapturous. It was looked upon as a great exercise Your second picture with George Abbott, DAMN in style. YANKEES, was your last musical up until now, with It certainly was that, I don't deny it that. But I THE UTILE PRINCE. Why was this? don 't think that's enough , that's all I' m saying. That's what I enjoyed about making it, its style. I loved FILM COMMENT 7

There were very few musicals being made and too big , too important, they sort of weighted it down . those that I was asked to do have been ones to People thought they were going to see something which I didn 't think I could bring anything-like THE like THE BIG COUNTRY , not a little bubble. When you SOUND OF MUSIC . I'm sure it wouldn 't have been as saw those four big names you really thought they good a movie if I had done it, because I didn 't really were too heavy for it to support. So the picture didn 't appreciate the material , I didn 't really love it. Ob- really have that kind of substance in it-it never was viously , Bobby Wise loved it. If you don 't love a movie intended to . I wasn 't terribly pleased with it. I think it's very hard to do it well. I mean , I didn 't love the it's very stagey-it doesn 't feel like a (Tlov ie. play , so it would have been very hard to do it well on film . HELLO, DOLLy-the same thing . I couldn 't The years 1957 through 1960 were very produc- really bring myself to do it. tive for you, with eight films of yours released in that period. Did you work on INDI SCREET before shooting began ? Eight films! You ' re not serious! Yes , I did too much. Oh , yes . Now you ' re really up to the place where from here on I have to take all the rap , as I also Then there was a hiatus of three years before produced INDISCREET. I co-produced DAMN YANKEES CHARADE. Why was this? and PAJAMA GAME too , but the real beginning of my being able to say \" Now I' m in charge and this is I couldn 't find anything I really liked. You ' see, what I want to and am going to do \" was with now I was in charge ; it was all down to me , so in or- INDISCREET. der to make a film one had to be really sure about it. Was that why you started to produce at that point, Many people have noted Hitchcock 's influence because you wanted that sort of control? in CHARADE and in ARABESQUE , particularly in terms of his NORTH BY NORTHWE ST and TO CATCH A THIEF. Yes, everybody wants to make his own movies. That's the kind of control you want, to make the I certainly knew that I was making a comedy- kind of movie you want, the way you want to make adventure, and I certainly was aware that he had it. You can only do that if you ' re in control, and made them . I don 't get annoyed at people finding if you are in control you may as well be the producer an influence of Hitchcock in these pictures. I just as well. get a little annoyed at people thinking that he in- vented the comedy-adventure picture, or that he has Wh y did you de cide at this point to make a film any copyright on it. There have been plenty of comedy-adventures that have been good that aren 't completely abroad for the first time, changing the Hitchcock's. The best one of his, I think , is NORTH locale of INDI SCREET from Washington to London? BY NORTHWEST, which is a great movie. I take nothing from him , I just don 't think that he has the lock and I tho ught Washington wouldn 't have been a very key , that nobody else can touch something of this romantic locale; for them to be wandering about genre. That's nonsense. He didn 't invent it, other in th e streets of Washington-there seemed to be people were doing it before him-such as THE THIN someth ing rather cold about that. London gave it MAN . He was doing serious mysteries at that stage , a sort of international Lubitschy feeling . That was heavy ones, or frightening ones. Not that he doesn't it, just that. do light films well . . . but Hitchcock's only made one good one. Cary Grant seems the perfect actor for the airy, sophisticated films you have made. One of the nicest things about CHARADE is the freshness and spontaneity of the relationship be- I thought they were both absolute perfection . If tween Grant and Hepburn. we hadn 't had them , we would have had a miserable movie. But that goes back to what I said before: Their charm is infectious. Of course , it was care- when you work with people, you want to get the fully rehearsed . There 's nothing improvised in the best out of them , and Cary Grant and Ingrid Berg- film. There never is anything improvised on film , I man were absolutely born to play that story at that don't think. It's all been worked through and re- time. They were just mature enough-it was a story hearsed and planned and thought about and regur- of people that age falling in love . gitated . But still , the word improvisation is a very strange word because everything initially is impro- You followed this with another adaptation of a vised , it has to start somewhere but you just consider it a while before you put it out. Anyway, I liked Broadway comedy, ONCE MORE WITH FEELING, which CHARADE , I still like it. I think it's an entertaining is particularly memorable for Kay Kendall 's lovely movie, and I think it more or less succeeds in what final performance. we tried to do. I liked the plot of ONCE MORE WITH FEELING I didn 't ARABESQUE seems an attempt to reformulate the like the movie. It should have made a marvelously same successful mixture of tension and humor. romantic love story. If I could make it over again today , I could make a lovely movie out of it. It's I don 't think it was a succe~s . But it was quite a very funny plot, a hilarious plot and a lovely a different kind of movie; I was trying to emphasize background , but there are many reasons why the a series of physical action sequences , which in itself film isn 't what it should be. One of them was certainly is unlike CHARADE . CHARADE depends on perform- Kay Kendall 's illness, another was filming it in Paris , ance and its lightness whereas ARABESQUE has got a third was casting Gregory Ratoff-a lot of reasons. sort of set-piece ideas. Those things were okay, the sort of action , visual side of the picture was quite Do you feel the same way about your subsequent good . What isn 't good in it is the script. It never film with Cary Grant, THE GRASS IS GREENER? It wasn 't a huge success, but you couldn 't really call it a failure. One trouble was that the cast was 8 JULY 1973

was good and I always knew that, but I got so far STAIRCASE, both thematically, as a study of homo- into it that I couldn't get out of it. Also , the chemistry between Peck and Loren doesn't work as well as sexuality, and in tone, in its almost unrelieved Grant and Hepburn. But again it isn 't quite the same kind of movie . In the sense that NORTH BY NORTHWEST sadness, seems rather a departure from everything is different from , say, REAR WINDOW, CHARADE is different from ARABESQUE. But the main point is that that came before in your career. you can 't make a good movie out of a bad script. ARABESQUE has the same problem , in my opinion , I liked the play and what it had to say. I don 't as FUNNY FACE . Both of them fall down where they should be at their strongest. If both of those pictures know whether I think it succeeds as a film. I wasn 't had had good scripts they would both have been terrific movies, with the same amount of effort and happy with the film , but it certainly had things in imagination and people put into them. it that I liked. I hate the way the film looks ; it's very Two FOR THE ROAD is arguably your best and most complex film. Andrew Sarris has called it your most off-putting for me to look at it. I think Richard personal film. Are you fond of TWO FOR THE ROAD? [Burton) was good in it, and I think its attitudes about I'm not fond of Andrew Sarris! I am somewhat fond of the film. A lot of people like TWO FOR THE the human family are good ones , and I am glad I ROAD, and I'm grateful ; somehow they feel there's something very personal to them in it, about the made it. relationship of marriage and so on , a lot of which is true and real. In a strange way I don 't think TWO I know you are about to start work on a film FOR THE ROAD succeeds in itself because I chickened out. It should be a much more serious film than it adaptation of Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, and is, because it really is a film that examines the basis of the marital relationship-unlike INDISCREET, which I 'm curious to know your approach to material that is a bubble of a romantic movie. Two FOR THE ROAD attempts to truly examine marriage, but I made it is based on fantasy and would seem to lend itself too entertaining and didn 't really probe as deeply as one could have within the context of what we more to animation than live-action. were working with . I blame myself and only myself, really. But yes, I think it's a good movie; I'm not It is a fantasy, and it is a difficult project to trying to rap TWO FOR THE ROAD , but if I could have done it again I could have done better with it. There's translate to film , and I'm worried sick about it! I don 't, too much sweetness. It's too untrue. The picture has marvelous moments of reality in it, and then of course, know whether I'm going to make a good it's sugarcoated . It gets romantic in a false sense, not a true feeling of love, but a feeling of romantic movie. But Lerner and Loewe have written an abso- movie-love, interspersed with the reality of what loving and relationships and the struggles are. The lutely superb score and the script is enchanting . picture is not good enough . It has the possibility of being a great movie, really You might be interested to know that your subse- quent film, BEDAZZLED, constantly resurfaces in re- a great movie. Only Richard Kiley has been cast vivals on college campuses in America and has emerged as rather a cult film . yet. I don 't have the little prince, I don 't have any- I like BEDAZZLED. I've seen it again and ·1 think body, I'm desperate! BEDAZZLED has got a lot in it. If Andrew Sarris knew me as well as I know myself, he would have Have there been any projects that you wanted to say that the truly personal film is BEDAZZLED. to film but for one reason or another didn 't? BEDAZZLED was a terribly, meticulously worked- on movie, and the one of mine that has more to Loads of them . Loads . [Donen laughs .) I wanted say about what I feel are the most important things in the world . I mean you can 't get a better point to do AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS . I would like around which to focus a movie than a man selling his soul to the devil , because you can speak out to have done FIDDLER ON THE ROOF . There have been on a considerable number of things which are vital. And I got to say a lot of things that I wanted to millions of them. 11111111 say with BEDAZZLED: What is selling out? How do you know when you're selling out, and how devious · Because of technical difficulties (a cantankerous tape recorder), a process is it? And what happens to you if you the first few minutes of the interview session were not preserved. do? What are the terrible sort of soul-killing things They cover Donen 's early years in Hollywood up to SINGIN ' IN THE that you do in life? Also I liked its attitude about RAIN .-ed . God and religion and the Devil. I like all of it. STANLEY DONEN FILMOGRAPHY (1924- KEY: AUD Macmillan Audio Brandon ; CCC Cine- Craft Company; COU Cousino Visual Educational Service; CWF Clem Williams Films; FNC Films Incor- porated; ICS Institutional Cinema Service ; IDE Ideal Pictures; NAT National Film Service; ROA Roa's Films; SWA Swank Motion Pictures; TFC \" The \" Film Center; TWY Twyman films; UNI Universal 16; WHO Wholesome film Center. 1949 On the Town (with Gene Kelly) FNC ; 1951 Royal Wedding FNC ; 1952 SING IN ' IN THE RAIN (with Gene Kelly) FNC ; Love Is Better than Ever; Fearless Fagan FNC ; 1953 Give a Girl a Break FNC; 1954 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers FNC ; Deep in My Heart FNC; 1955 It's Always Fair Weather (with Gene Kelly) FNC; 1957 Funny Face FNC; The Pajama Game (with George Abbott); Kiss Them for Me FNC; 1958 Indiscreet; Damn Yankees (with George Ab- bott); 1960 Once More With Feeling AUD , CCC, CWF , IDE, NAT, ROA, SWA , TWY ; Surprise Package CWF, ICS, TFC, TWY; The Grass Is Greener UNI; 1963 Charade CCC , ROA, SWA, UNI ; 1966 Ara- besque CCC , COU, CWF, SWA , TFC , UNI , WHO ; 1967 Two for the Road FNC; Bedazzled FNC ; 1969 Staircase FNC ; 1973 The Little Prince (to be re- leased). FILM COMMENT 9

Part I by Raymond Durgnat King Vidor , Raymond Durgnat tells us, \" contained multitudes.\" In a forty-year career that paralleled the growth of American cinema from a charmed adolescence to a tenacious, if tenuous independence, Vidor directed almost every kind of film (comedy, western , war movie, weepie, message film). And many of his pictures (THE BIG PARADE, THE CROWD, SHOW PEOPLE , HALLELUJAH!, OUR DAILY BREAD , NORTHWEST PASSAGE, DUEL IN THE SUN, WAR AND PEACE) remain popular and museum classics . But Durgnat, in this book-length study written especially for FILM COMMENT, is talking about something else: the multitude of threads of the American character that are woven into the director and his films. Vidor was a populist and a transcendentalist, a puritan and a sensual lyricist, a conservative and a liberal. In tracing the roots of these complexes and contradictions , Durgnat has in effect written a critical history of American social and political thought. And because Durgnat is equally a film historian and a social critic , his insights into Vidor's work are as informed as they are idiosyncratic. His extended comparisons of Vidor with virtually every Pantheon director are particularly enlightening. Indeed, like the filmmaker he so admires, Durgnat contains multitudes. -Richard Corliss \" On the name Vidor, cinema histori- cratic humanism of his films before World around which Vidor 's thought has also ans have once and for all stuck the label War\" scarcely accords with his adapta- 'epic poet' . . . \" So Etienne Chaumeton tion of Ayn Rand. Complications rapidly turned, never quite coming to re st. writes in Cinema 56 , before a long and in - appear: not just between films but within teresting comparison between Vidor and them, at their very core. The notes which follow try to clarify Gance ( \" in ·which , \" one is relieved to dis- cover, \" Vidor clearly comes off best . .. \"). Given the standpoint of the social and some of the contradictions and par- moral criticism which permeates his work In film criticism, \" epic poet\" still sug- (in exact conformity with his insistence adoxes-the small print, the finer points, gests a certain simplicity of message that on a moralizing purpose), it's particularly Vidor 's films , however powerful, never startling to find his film s ' affinities, cir- the ce ntral conflicts-which comprise a quite accept. even on first viewing. And c umscribed but profound, with certain radical preoccupations. One example: record of Vidor 's love affair with America. one turns, with a surprised sense of dis- Paul Goodman's Communitas, with its emphasis on local liberty and a new pop- It was a love affair variously (o r simulta- crepancy, from the libidinous emphases ulism, its declaration of a Jeffersonian for which certain Vidor films became anarchism , its faith in the nature of man. neously) idyllic, recriminatory, indulgent, (perhaps unjustly) notorious, to the Goodman 's statement, \" Remove authori- stream of gentle, almost pious sentiments ty and there will not be chaos but se/f- and imbued with a passion often as quiet and scruples of his autobiography and interviews-and to certain suggestive el- regulation and natural man,\" is a pivot and subtle as philosophy. It's easily as- lipses or intimations therein . The demo- sumed that powerful emotions are less discriminating than rational thought. My assumption here has been that certain emotions may be signals from \"intuitive \" or \"preconscious \" thought-the kind of thought that seems vague or imprecise only because of a genuine difficulty in verbalizing it. -Raymond Durgnat 10 JULY 1973

The 'Big 'Parade which prizes industriousness above man- advance played off against a continuous liness, and which somehow seems to fear. The first scene features the open (1925) have crushed the animal spirits of his road and the open sky; the second brings \" good \" brother (or , conversely , by which us into the wood , with the verticals of men Vidor saw THE BIG PARADE as the story his less spirited and merely \" good \" of an average American , neither overly brother has allowed himself to be and trees . In the first scene , the wounded patriotic nor 3 pacifist, who goes to war crushed). The mother's boy rediscovers lie on the road , rocking in pain ; in the \" for the ride and tries to make the most fraternity , in the true sense , with the riv- second , they just fall. The relative ly static of each situation as it happens.\" In the eter; and through the French girl he dis- camera of the fi rst scene becomes a event, the film has to give its hero one covers his \" other\" father. As her grand- sostenuto tracking in the later. The con- of many possible backgrounds rather father reads letters from the front, his trast of elements-of space, of light and than another, and its James Apperson patriotically sported saber proves so ob- shade, of visual tempi-is essentially (John Gilbert) is one of Vidor's privileged trusive that the young doughboy falls \" musical ,\" and Griffithian . The screw is heroes. An amiable , perhaps spoiled idler backwards off his chair avoiding it. The given a further twist with the enemy's use (whose social temptation to a lazy lan- humor in this profoundly Griffith ian scene of poison gas. After our sensitivities have guor is symbolized by the hot towels over is on both the nations and the genera- become attuned to an xious eyes, to flesh his face in the barbershop) , James has (awaiting the bullet), and to forest scents, remained perhaps more empty, certainly tions. the men must don respirators . Their eyes less responsible , but also spiritually more The baptism of fire in Belleau Wood become aghast, staring panels of cello- open than his joylessly industrious phane ; their flesh is sealed off under brother. If he volunteers upon America 's can , if one so wishes, be read as the bestial snouts; and before removing them entry into the war in 1917 , it is quite consummation of manhood. Just be- altogether, they sniff the air, apprehen- without real commitment, rather bemu- cause war is hell , it is also purgatory, the sively, sedly, as if the brash style of intervention- nitty-gritty initiation by everything an ist propaganda sparked off in him some enemy can throw at one. I remember a If this pattern of contrasts seems im- confused yet vivid need to involve and 1963 audience laughing derisively at probably cerebral for a Hollywood movie transcend himself. (Perhaps his closest what presumably seemed to them no of the Twenties, the comparison with movie cousin , or rather nephew, is Dean more than an archaically clear-faced Griffith is a useful one. The question can Martin in THE YOUNG LIONS , years later) . American boy marching boldly forward , also be approached from the common- and enjoying an improbably charmed ex- sense , or showman like, angle , By way of To his brother, James loses the girl istence, while the intimations of dis- prologue to the march through Belleau whose frivolous beauty seemed right for comfiture on his countenance signified Wood , one needs an incident on the him. And in return he finds , not, like some ham silent acting. Yet the scene may same theme, but sufficiently different not of his English contemporaries , \"the have another meaning. Almost too dazed to sap the shock of the climax. Hence rough male kiss of blankets ,\" but a more to be terrified , the unblooded volunteer- an episode is devised which will contrast robust and humorous camaraderie . His one typical of many-is driven on in a all the elements of the climax except the buddy in the ranks is a riveter and all the cause which isn't his own . theme. Equally , once the phYSical atmo- exhilarations of social leveling are para- sphere of the wood has been evoked , the phrased (with, perhaps, a disappointing Two things keep him advancing , filmmaker seeks a series of physical sur- imprecision) by slightly slapstick brawl- rather than allowing him to scatter and prises , in exactly the same way as he ing. In an estaminet punch-up Apperson run , as would be logical from a strictly might seek a series of dramatic surprises. ends up hiding in a barrel , an image right individualist point of view (although al- And , as I shall argue in a little more out of the rustic side of slapstick. ready we are beyond a meanly sober detail later, the surprise of the \" twist\" - logic more characteristic of Apperson 's whether in drama or mise-en-scene- His \" sentimental education \" is ex- brother). Real individualism here is a mat- corresponds to the shock in Eisenstein 's tended by his encounter with Melisande ter of discovering, and proving , moral meaning of \" montage,\" (Renee Adoree) who , as woman , as Eu- fiber. And the film concentrates less on ropean, and as working peasant, is his the army machine of which Apperson has Although THE BIG PARADE (like its En- social and spiritual antithesis, and com- become part than on his open , soft, anx- glish counterpart, Anthony Asquith 's TELL plement. Ignoring all the ooh-Ia-Ia and ious eyes, asserting the fears against ENGLAND) was a little too rapidly assumed amenable village girls unleashed by WHAT which Apperson advances. The powers by critics to be \" anti-war,\" Vidor's com- PRICE GLORY?, Vidor honors the \" Women driving him on are of a transcendental ments suggest that its stress on war's of France \" who plow the fields in their order , so long as the word \" transcen- horrors was the precondition of its menfolk's absence , and are well worthy dental \" is disassociated from the idealism heroism. And, while one must trust the of comparison with America's log-cabin of the bodiless spirit, and related to some song and not the singer, the film doesn 't matriarchs. When the playboy snatches categorical imperative of the life force seem to me to imply a tragic-ironic con- a kiss she knocks him down , and then itself. For Vidor's emphasis on the physi- demnation of the futility of war in general picks him up, since her response is an cal (the brawls, the baccy chewing, the or indeed of that one in particular-albeit Amazonian common sense rather than a contrast of hot towels and naked embar- it certainly sets its face against cheap negative puritanism . For this Diana em- rassment) is also an emphasis on the heroics, in an engagement which , ten barrasses the men by catch ing them nervous will-or, rather, the spiritual in its years after the time , many Americans naked, and laughs amiably at their em- animal expression . might well have held as readily in respect barrassment. as the Battle of the Alamo . Earlier, the untried troops marching Apperson 's mother loves her bad boy, along the roads in rigidly orderly columns Although discipline as such is impor- a little too indulgently for his own good , are attacked by enemy aircraft. They tant (Apperson must march off in step one fears at first; she tempts him to re- sc'atter. They re-form , Hesitantly, morale with his company) , the theme of a \" com- main a ladies' man , a mother's boy. His -as a morality-asserts itself, by way of pany of buddies\" -so carefully worked father seems disapproving of his non- prelude to the march in Belleau Wood through the comedy, and kept distinct commitment to that Samuel Smiles ethos itself. The two sequences are anagrams from the stress on mindlessly tough disci- of each other. The earlier, in long shot, pline so prominent after 1945-finds its stresses the mass, its disruption and re- moral consummation after Apperson 's riv- formation . The later, in closer view , em- eter buddy Slim (Karl Dane) returns from phasizes an individual , and a continuing a foray, carrying the tin hats of those FILM COMMENT 11

whom he has killed (trophies like scalps). crudely \" tough \" ) maleness has the cali- an aura of supernatural forces , and the There is certainly an admirable exuber- ber to accept. His manhood now affirmed, implication certainly seems to be that ance, perhaps even a certain hubris, and injured , and in the midst of masculine (whatever their good works) either Chris- about Slim 's quiet prowess as a killer. As negativity and sycophancy , it is female tianity or the official, established forms he lies wounded out in No Man 's Land , of it are sterile compared with the family the erstwhile playboy is inspired to a strength and resolution which revives the magic of mother and son , of two human compound of self-sacrificial rashness life force in him . Her command could beings united by blood and sexuality, and (\" Greater love hath no man \" ) and its seem merely optimistic, but it involves somehow compelling the universe to antithesis, a revengeful rage . Disobeying other factors as well : a loving mother's respond with a concession-a miracle. orders, Apperson slips out of his trench giving away her son to an \" alien \" woman ; Thus the individual , as linked by love , may in an act of insubordination which later her confidence in \" that girl ,\" which is a prove himself both natural and supernat- became routine in Hollywood military maternal, magic prescience; and her ural. movies, presumably as constituting a sending her son on a quest which re- guarantee that the hero's acceptance of quires from him the force to defy his And this seems to me the film's overall authority has not crushed his indepen- mutilation and despair. sense, rather than an affirmation of peace dent individualism . But the man whom he and love as against war, which , after all , finds in No Man 's Land is a wounded Earlier, Apperson's regiment moved enabled Apperson to meet his Meli- German-perhaps the man by whom Slim off from its billet to the front line; and sande . Why go to war? Because it is was killed . Apperson 's humanity triumphs Melisande, clinging to him, pulled a spare there-or, rather, because man must n\"t over his rage , and the cigarette which he boot from his pack , and was left in the just test but perfect himself one way or gives his enemy may remind us that the road, clasping the boot to her bosom. another. His absence of rational milita- poor little rich boy was taught the rough This is the first of the three scenes in ristic enthusiasm may well have arisen as virility of chewing plugs of baccy by the which marching is asserted against po- a result of, or functioned as an accom- man whom he set out to avenge. tential disruption. And , given the magic modation of, the isolationist feelings of female love in a world whose romanti- which , in 1917, were sometimes mixed In this assertion of human compassion cism is the fruit of a transcendental vision with pacifist inclinations. Thomas Ince's some might see a condemnation of war, rather than of a mechanical optimism , it's CIVILIZATION was avowedly anti-interven- others merely a homage to the spirit of perhaps the strength given to that boot tionist, and it's tempting to ask whether the Geneva Convention . And it's proba- by Melisande 's embrace which-rein- some such sentiment doesn't underlie bly worth bearing in mind , cynically no forced by the love of a mother too gener- the apotheosis of Griffith ' s INTOLERANCE. doubt, that a substantial proportion of ous to be a rival-gives him the strength It would be surprising if isolationism , as American spectators, being of not-so- to limp back to her. The young Vidor's a traditional American attitude, never remote German descent, might well , war romanticism is more optimistic than it will found accommodation on the screen . fever over, appreciate Apperson 's hu- later become, but we might have expect- (And at least one neutral 's film , Holger- manity. Before Pearl Harbor, Louis B. ed this poet of the earth (fields, desert, Madsen 's HIMMELSKIBET [THE SKY SHIP, Mayer was insistent on showing the cap- swamp) to have made a great deal of 1918], from Denmark , strikes me as, on tured Luftwaffe pilot in MRS. MINIVER as death in the trenches. But the predomi- balance, both pacifist and pro-German- a \" good guy,\" forcing William Wyler to nant theme is marching-the stamp of not surprisingly , if one considers where argue that if he had two Germans he Anteus forever spurning Mother Earth , its main market was likely to lie.) Insofar could show one as a good guy , but since yet sustained by her. as any clear moral about war is con- he only had one he ought to be a bad , cerned , THE BIG PARADE is absolutely am- Nazi one . While it 's possible that Mayer Obeying, Apperson finds his Meli- biguous, and Vidor's real concern seems had some dramatic pattern of his own in sande. It's not easy , and yet it's as if to be a man 's need to face risk and mind, I don't think one can dismiss the by magic . As he recognizes her from afar, danger if he is to grow and yet to remain possibility that his considerations includ- and hobbles on his crutches towards her true to the roots of his strength , his family. ed a concern for German Americans- over the fields , it is as if a combination maybe even a certain isolationism . At of maternal and manly energies had A book about family tensions in Ameri- any rate , the majority of spectators would somehow compelled time, space, destiny can movies is long overdue , but I suspect presumably admire both the murderous- itself to yield . It is always difficult to judge that the \" mother\" theme, here as in many ness of Slim and the forebearance of his how artificial a set seemed in its time , and American films and songs of the Twen- friend. Here , as later, Vidor 's readiness particularly in the emotional context of its ties , is far from being merely a facile to appreciate apparently opposite forms time (for the cinema's entertainment exploitation of sentimentality. On the of moral expression obscures the extent mainstream can fairly be described as contrary , it attempts a desperately \" inspi- to which he is also a puritanical moralist. hallucinatory, given the readiness with rational \" answer to specific social ten- In what sense of the word \" puritan \" we which feeling is expected to override ac- sions: between immigrant parents and shall try to be more precise . curate seeing). But it seems to me that would-be all-American offspring; be- here Vidor has emphasized , rather than tween traditional peasant or European Spiritual education always comes ex- underplayed, a non realism for which , in notions of the family and American indi- pensive; in fact its price is life itself. The HALLELUJAH! and OUR DAILY BREAD , he will vidualism ; and the accelerated fl uidity of war leaves Apperson shorn of a leg and fi nd , by Seventies criteria , subtler and American society-notably the \" internal embittered in spirit. \"You look fine! \" en- more effective means. immigration \" from depressed rural areas thuses his dishonest brother. \"Oh shut to the cities. up, you know how I look! \" His mother, Thd conclusion yields its fuller mean- seeing her mutilated son , weeps. And it ing when contrasted to Apperson 's earli- Years later (1968), a specifically hawk- is to her honesty that he turns. \"Mother- er attempt to find her. Half-delirious, he ish and pro-militarist film , YOURS MINE AND there 's a girl in France , . . \" \" You must struggles up from his bed, in a church OURS , will bring together the only ap- find that girl! \" The gift of truth , the gift turned hospital, while, behind him, a pa- parently distinct themes of THE BIG PA- of tears, the gift of faith-they belong tient so delirious that he has had to be RADE-the family and the armed forces- together, they are his mother's power. If strapped down seems the symbol of his as when Henry Fonda is flown back from Apperson once seemed in danger of be- helplessness and his crazy initiative. But an aircraft carrier off Vietnam for the birth coming merely a ladies ' man , it was also his attempt is futile , and it is not until his of yet another son. In his documentary because femaleness has that power return to his mother's faith and the pseu- MARINES, Franc;:ois Reichenbach men- which his generously impressionable (not do-sanity of bitterness that he can find tions the vulgar-Freudian hypothesis his beloved. The combination of delirium, that, if so many young Americans readily madness, and a church setting creates 12 JULY 1973

volunteer for harshly disciplined training, THE BIG PARADE . John Gilbert and Renee Adoree. it's in order to assert their manhood against Momism. But film examples apart, Unless otherwise noted, all photos: Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive it's obviously schizoid to assume , as in our attacks on sentimentality we too often THE BIG PARADE . Claire McDowell and John Gilbert. do, that by becoming part of an army you cease to be your mother's son any more THE BIG PARADE. John Gilbert and the wounded German soldier. than you cease to be your wife's hus- band ; having raised the point one needn 't, I hope , dwell on it. Certainly the triangle (son-mother-toughness) is ob- sessive in gangster movies (SCARFACE , LITTLE CAESAR, PUBLIC ENEMY, WHITE HEAT) , and in the first two films the immigrant theme is absolutely clear . THE BIG PARADE inverts the theme : the American WASP finds a foreign wife. But ambiguities remain . Just as Meli- sande resembles a log-cabin wife, so the French grandfather, with his saber, re- sembles a veteran o\"f the Civil War in a Griffith film . Doubtless Vidor is taking an easy line against an easy assumption that foreigners are either ridiculous or sinful or lacking in true grit. The \" foreignness \" of Southern tradition affords him a useful common denominator, particularly since he is a Southerner himself; and Vidor's intermittent interest in \" overprivileged \" sons may have some autobiographical root. Not that national differences are al- together forgotten. Just as Slim teaches Apperson to chew baccy, so Apperson teaches Melisande to chew gum, and maybe there 's a kind of hierarchy of virili- ty here , counterpointed though it is by Slim 's death and by Melisande 's Ama- zonian response to a first kiss. Baccy , gum , and kiss are all initiations; and the series of oral acceptances is continued by the Cigarette which Apperson gives his wounded enemy-whiCh as a gesture of compassion , of relenting, of valediction , is in a sense a reverse of initiation. Criti- cism is sometimes too quick to assume that symbols which are all of a kind must point in the same emotional direction . Yet that familiar word \"twist\" indicates that sudden , subtle changes of direction are well known in dramatic structures. And clearly the same search for quick strong contrasts is applicable at every level of imagery. The change from baccy to gum also implies a switch from the rough-and- ready he-man American style to some- thing softer, blander, slicker. Apperson uses the chewing-gum lesson to prelude his successful seduction of Melisande into a kiss; thus the \" pioneer\" woman is tricked-and eased-into a loss of integri- ty which is also a womanly fulfillment. The irony parallels the way Apperson is se- duced from his aimless comforts into signing up-by a somewhat callow, fervid propaganda . The irony is, eventually, re- versed into faith . It was right for Apper- son , and Melisande, to yield-even if the vulgarity of the means strikes a discor- dant note. FILM COMMENT 13 ?

This mixture of impressionability and Its survival of the ravages of time may which inspired slapstick. Although Ameri- resolution is the moral theme of the film. be partly a matter of Vidor's Napoleonic can cutting soon slows, the slower cut- Apperson doesn't make much of an issue luck. The failure of some more dated ting goes with a brisk narrative pace and of commitment to a particular choice: scenes to involve us is congruent with relatively fast acting. Conversely, Rus- \" death or glory,\" \" make or break ,\" \" be Apperson 's mixture of partial detachment sian actors tend to be static rather than a coward or a man ,\" etc. The alternatives and his surprise at his own involvement mobile, partly because the cut tends to hardly exist for him, and perhaps his (although , no doubt, the film involved its fragment (and maybe even arrest) move- closest relatives in the ambit of film cul- audiences in its time-earlier, fuller , and ment within the shot, which mise-en- ture are Renoir's elusive corporal , his with a steadier progression than it does scene allows a fuller continuity and blos- Captain Georges, and his Captain John us). Nonetheless , Apperson 's relation- soming. To take a very simple example, in THE RIVER . In terms of persistence ship with worlds which at first he finds what was called the \" Russian cut\" would against the world and acceptance of it, strange, and to none of which he per- show a man rising from a chair in two Apperson comes halfway between the manently commits his spirit, remains set-ups . An eye-level or high-angle shot first man and the last; and , like the man slightly like Harry Langdon ' s. He 's a little of the seated man , whose head rises out in the middle , he is brave , responsive outside it, as are we , albeit affectionately. of frame , followed by a second shot, of (particularly to the moral authority of the This lucky chance would be inadequate the space which he promptly filled . The female), decent and dependent. indeed without the unifying effect of two American preference was normally for a aspects of Vidor 's style. shot suffiCiently distant to contain both Vidor's real subject is not so much phases, since, though visually \" slower,\" morality as morale , and an affirmative The first , deployed most obviously in it was less distracting (and cheaper). abandonment to nature-cum-fate. One the Belleau Wood sequence, is what acquiesces in nature by asserting one's Vidor terms his \" favorite obsession \": \" si- A second scene is that in which Meli- own nature (and not one's social ego!) lent music ,\" which may be defined as sande clings to Apperson as he leaves respectfully against nature , yet within it. visual rhythms in the sense both of cut- for the battlefront. It's important, of Interestingly, Vidor and Renoir both show ting and of the whole orchestration of course, that the theme of marching pantheistic tendencies. Both have a rep- physical movement-mise-en-scene as recurs, and that the fondled boot pres- utation as lyricists of sexual love, al- well as montage. Such formal , stylistic ages the lost leg. But Vidor's unabashed though their range is wider and they are inventiveness might seem to result in a way with emotion belongs with Griffith often critical or ironical about passions, \" lyrical \" quality, a simple , easily sum- and Chaplin rather than with his nearer even while respecting them. And the marizable feeling . But it is quite as likely contemporaries Wellman and Hawks. honor which both directors accord moral to work on the contrasts within the overall Ford, like Vidor, also comes between the unself-consciousness suggests that, for feeling , just as an overall emotional ten- two; but Vidor comes nearer to the more them (to paraphrase Keats' observation sion is often the product of conflict , i.e. archaic pole in which strength of feeling about poetry) , \" if morality doesn't come contradiction. Thus the depiction of cour- is felt to be a natural concomitant of as naturally as leaves on a tree, it had age requires the vividness of actual or strength-which is implied , and not ques- better not come at all. \" potential fear . We have indicated some as- tioned , by enthusiasm and tears, and pects of this \" alternating current\" in con- which doesn 't really need to be distin- Despite Hollywood 's subsequent fi xa- trasting the air attack and the Belleau guished from weakness by any display of tion on toughness , Vidor isn 't alone in Wood sequence, and will consider an- impassiveness or toughness . There is a asserting the need for the \" masculine\" other in discussing the clima x of OUR faint incongruity in John Gilbert's pres- man's acceptance of female strength , DAILY BREAD . ence in the barracksroom world ; the in- although critics anticipate the general congruities are a source of our uncer- public 's feeling that Momism is sentimen- THE BIG PARADE owes much of its tainty and interest. The film affirms the tal or positively regressive . Hence THE BIG strength to its director's combination of integrity and solidarity of human exis- PARADE is remembered largely as an tightly controlled tempi, lyrical acting, and tence all the more pOignantly because it \" anti-war\" film , and its family-sexual strong mise-en-scene-qualities whose suggests that it's only through normally theme virtually forgotten. Yet the latter meanings are far from being tautologous untapped reservoirs of life force, of feel- didn 't seem to me to have dated any more to each other. The sense of speed coun- ing, of \" magic ,\" that the world 's deeper. than the comradely brawling. If anything, terpoints (sometimes overrules, some- unity can be asserted against its all-too- it seemed fresher, simply because so times concentrates) that of the acting, obvious \" incongru ities\" -contrasts, many films by Ford , Hawks, et a/., had while the organization of visual elements conflicts , and ruptures . Sim ilarly , done all the variations on the Flagg-and- often asserts another aspect of experi- throughout the thirty years or so when Quirt bit (a) more lyrically and (b) to ence altogether. Vidor retains and devel- Hollywood normally classified films as death. By 1963 (when I first saw it) the ops the aesthetic of Griffith into what is, men 's films and women 's films, Vidor's theme of family vitalism , and its style, in a way , the American counterpart of the had a curious way of being both at once were old enough to be new. And by 1973 Russian silent cinema. The contrast has -pOSSibly because he accepted, quite most of Ford 's THE QUIET MAN celebrates been stated in terms of Murnau versus lyrically, the weaknesses of men and the its coming of age by looking quite as Eisenstein; but Murnau isn 't the clearest strengths of women. empty and contrived as the one or two instance, since the moving camera facile passages of Vidor's film . usually creates a condition intermediate Apperson never loses his spiritual dif- between fast cutting (montage) and visu- ferences from his comrades, yet his con- It's unsurprising that the Belleau al development within the static shot tact is real with his spiritual antitheses- Wood sequence has become the best (mise-en-scene) . In this sense, the Bel- the business-minded brother , the remembered. What surprises, in view of leau Wood sequence comes closer to the ferocious hardhat, the peasant girl. The the film 's unevenness, is its power to Murnau style, while the air attack is closer film 's discursive structure is appropriate survive as a whole structure and to move to mise-en-scene (the role of depth of to its eventual , precarious affirmation of consistently. While, clearly, the better se- focus in Renoir and Wyler). a man 's elan vital deepening and consoli- quences in any film may transform our dating itself by a risky interaction with apprehension of the rest (and vice versa) , The unself-conscious physical reac- disparate milieux and values-mother's the discursive structure of THE BIG PARADE tions of Griffith's heroes, of Chaplin and love and the trenches, the rich boy and might seem to minimize any such effect, Lillian Gish , find their counterpart in the the riveter , responsiveness as both and reduce it to one or two anthology strong sense of bodies in Eisenstein and weakness and transcendence. This gives pieces best seen divorced from their con- Pudovkin-albeit geared to slow peasant it its extraordinary central position , at a text. solidity rather than the nervous speed 14 JULY 1973

crossroads between the \"tough\" world rate , one is likely to do Vidor equal injus- mo c ked. Dress ed as a clown , he sp orts of Hawks or Walsh , the male tear-jerkers tice by approaching him either as merely the legend: \" I am alwa ys happy be cause of Ford, the romanticism of Borzage, the a kind of epic lyricist, devoid of ideas, I eat at Schneider 's. \" Visiting the c inem a, stoic ironies of Sternberg, the sense of or as an essentially transcendental he laugh s at a screen c lo wn with fran k rural self-help in Wellman . Vidor 's film thinker who is content to assert simple enjoyment. with neither bitterness n or becomes a kind of \" layman 's progress\" ideas. For he frequently explores, with a superiority-and clearly the audience in through a vitalist world . And the precari- critical fascination , the embroilment of the film is the audien ce of th e film . ous balance of weakness and courage complications and contradictions which in Apperson 's self-giving and self- is the human lot. Since the critical em- THE CROWD belongs to an international withholding is a poignant and daring one. phasis has lain on the lyrical Vidor, ours wave of populist films , if we use popu- will rest, for once, on the underlying lism \" not in the usual political sense, but The difference of caliber between ideas. in the film one , as being about the petits Vidor and Hawks may be indicated by gens, the lower middle classes and lower. contrasting THE BIG PARADE with SERGEANT The notion of Vidor the merely emo- The cycle flourished from just before the YOR K. Hawks's initially rustic , puritan , tional lyricist also does scant justice to beginning of sound until the mid-Thirties, pacifist hero makes his private's progress Vidor the dramatist. For in a sense drama when a mi xture of economic stagnation to an Old Testament doctrine (of picking is the conflicts arising when different and preparation for war shifted the em- off the evil Hun from the rear , like duck- feelings (or attitudes, or drives) collide phasis different ways in different coun- shooting) and finally enters the pres- and can 't merge. If the self-consciously tries . Some German filmS-BAC KSTAIRS ence, if not of God, then at least of God 's lyrical dramas of so many Victorian poets and THE LAST LAUGH , for example-tend Own Country's President. But it's some- flopped , it was because, in their desire to be too quic kly subsumed under the thing in Hawks, rather than the require- to build· up the lyrical intensity, they un- label of \" expressionism ,\" their other ments of wartime propaganda, which derestimated both the lyrical force of aspects remaining underrated; and the leaves his straightforward conversion sudden contradiction (the overall feeling splendid volume on the German realist story with a sense of emotional problems of a structure of feelings) , and the extent cinema by Borde , Buache , and Courtade slickly solved . THE BIG PARADE , only inter- to which the greatest romantic lyrics, like still hasn 't provoked a w idespread aware- mittently more perfect in its surface tex- Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, abound ness of such fascinating films as BERLIN ture , has a profounder movement. In in varied and contradictory emotional ALE XANDER PLATZ and ASPH ALT (which I much the same way, Wellman ' s PUBLIC conflicts. The drama has already pene- found briefly reminiscent of Vidor in visu- ENEMY is built on contradictory ideas, and trated the lyric , or , rather, generated it. al style). Hollywood never overlooked seems to me far more interesting-and To be sure the lyric can accept or sub- America altogether (vide Gloria Swan- therefore moving-than Hawks's SCAR- sume the various elements; it is, as it son ' s comic subway ride in Allan Dwan ' s FACE, whose perfection of atmosphere were , a moment, perhaps a crucial one , MANHANDLED), and much early Populism goes along with a single- and simple- in a continuing drama. But. like every may be grouped under the \" small town \" minded put-down of a scapegoat for other moment of that drama, it includes or \" rural American \" theme ; but Paul rather more diversified forms of corrup- all the elements of that drama. It is neither Fejos 's LONESOME , and Vidor 's THE CROWD tion-which is the rea l reason why Hol- an abstraction devoid of conflict nor a and STREET SCENE clearly belong to this lywood had such difficulty in stopping its sentimental defense against conflict international category. French populism public from admiring even its gangster -two attitudes that produce bad lyrics remains the best remembered-with villains . and worse dramas. Vigo 's L'ATALANTE , Clair's sou s LES TOITS DE PARIS and LE QUARTORZE JUILLET, Re- Is a narrow lyriCism , or a fidelity to the The Crowd noir's TONI and THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR texture of unexamined experience, artis- LANGE, Carne 's H6TEL DU NORD and LE tically more valid than a structure (1928) JOUR SE LEVE . For a mi xture of excellent sufficiently tension-riddled both to under- and trivial reasons , the same cinematic mine simple, intense , and obvious John (James Murray) begins life with current was rebaptized \" neo-realism \" \" moods\" and to substitute another kind an indulgent father who means to give when it resumed after 1945, although of excitement? This question still hasn 't him all the advantages. But with his fa- Becker 's ANTOINE ET ANTOINETTE indicates been properly debated. Both the parti- ther 's untimely death comes the great the continuance of the earlier strain. The sans of lyricism (those who prefer the middle-class nightmare so vividly de- postwar course of populism in the U.S.A. Hawks to the Wellman) and the aesthetic scribed by George Orwell, and John is was different altogether, for a variety of precipitated down among the croWd. An reasons, although obvious descendants structuralists (whose connections with obstinate, foolish , and admirable ambi- of THE CROWD include MARTY and STUDS the left might have bred a preference for tion sustains him through his marriage LONIGAN , THE MARRYING KIND and THE those structures which involve strong and the birth of a daughter until, as she APARTMENT , the last featuring an explicit contradictions) tend to assume that ideas lies dead, he convinces himself that she homage to the open-plan office of Vidor's and emotions, ideology and lyricism , are is merely sleeping, and tries to quiet the film . separate realms or systems , rather than traffic so she won 't awaken. But one can 't being closely integrated ones. Another expect to hush New York. Although Vidor A particular motif of this screen Popu- useful example is the curious way in attributes to New York none of the posi- lism-the theme of the crowd-pervades which many of the critics who declare tive cruelty that an expressionist might the cinema between the wars , for a vari- themselves \" apolitical \" not only resent have underlined, the scene still reads as: ety of reasons (ranging from the Europe- radical criticism of the status quo, but \" With all the best will in the world, crowd- an recognition that the poor are not a become uneasy even when political ori- ed cities are unneighborly plac es. \" mob, to the internal immigration within entations of any kind are so much as America from depressed rural areas to noticed. Yet if they were really apolitical Demoralized, John finally acquiesces the cities ). The sense of the crowd as a they would find radical criticisms alto- in his responsibilities, and takes the job dauntingly impersonal mechanism, swell- gether acceptable , if only as representing as a sandwich man whom he had once, ing and subsiding at machine-speed some people's experiences and feelings. in his ebullient arrogance, thoughtlessly rhythms and routines , inspires Rutt- mann 's BERLIN ; and its Hollywood equiva- My own feel ing is that the most valu- lents are , amazingly enough , such Busby able works of art allow one neither just Berkeley numbers as \" 42nd Street\" in a pleasant wallow in one's favorite emo- tions nor just a merely intellectual dia- gram of some thematic circuitry. At any FILM COMMENT 15

42ND STREET and \" I Only Have Eyes for tragicomic THE APARTMENT) or compla- General becomes a film extra) . Such films You \" and the chorus-girls ' aubade in cency (as in Cukor 's THE MARRYING KIND , may well have special reference to the DAMES. What Ruttmann and Berkeley have which , sensitive as it is , cheerfully re- difficulties of survival or cultural shock in common is a kind of semi-abstract nounces the challenge and depth which experienced by immigrants to the city , cinema ; indeed , Berkeley qualifies as a its scenario renders a theoretical possi- whether from across the Atlantic or from Broadway constructivist. bility) . This common enough entertain- within America herself. Some aspects ment device prevents realism from be- peculiar to foreign immigration are Some parallels between Berkeley and coming too drab or depressing. And touched upon by Chaplin in THE IMMI- Vidor are intriguing too. What we think though it may slightly vitiate some early GRANT , and later by Vidor in THE WEDDING of as Berkeley 's \" vi sual choreog- NIGHT (see my remarks in that chapter on raphy \" is wh at Vidor has called \" silent passages in THE CROWD , it 's given a dif- \" Sons of the Pioneers? \" ) and AN AMERI- music .\" And in both directors one finds ferent quality by Vidor 's characteristic an inspired , unself-conscious eroticism energy , and impregnated by all the latent CAN ROMANCE . born of a generalized exuberance. Berke- possibilities established in the prologue. ley ventures into social comment too , in When the shift in tone comes , it is all the In most films , however, the shock of the \" Remember My Forgotten Man \" more devastating. But, on the whole, the big-city life is usually experienced by a number in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 . In THE gagsmanship formula serves to underline stranger from the virtuously WASP Mid- CROWD, Vidor 's camera moves up the the temptations into which Vidor's film west. Such a hero offers fewer problems offi c e block and then in through one doesn 't fall. MGM 's nervousness about it of identification, particularly given the particular window among thousands-a is illustrated by the fact that eight different sensitivity about foreign origins to which device shared with Berkeley , as well as endings were shot. and that it was offered George Seaton attributed the box-office with Rene Clair. In THE BIG STORE (Marx to exhibitors with the choice of an ending failure of his ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN as late Brothers, 1940), Tony Martin's rendering happier than the standard one. Vidor is as the early Fifties . Perhaps , too , it was of \"The Tenement Symphony\" trans- justifiably proud that only one exhibitor risky to criticize the way of American city poses and trivializes the theme into senti- requested it. Perhaps Vidor's secret is life from the point of view of any but that mental operetta terms , only too charac- that his sense of human energy gives the of an unimpeachably American type. teristic of the genre 's decline in wartime most anguishing sequences a scandal- Hollywood. ous vitality which , as in his postwar ex- The white man-redskin love-hate af- cursions into film nair, gives even the fair so brilliantly described by Leslie The su bway sequence in MANHANDLED unhappy endings their exhilaration. Fiedler has, I suspect, more behind it than offers a useful example of everyday exas- Rousseauvian romanticism or exoticized perations translated into gags which, In its concern with morale, THE CROWD homosexuality; it's also a suitably without altogether occl uding the real ten- parallels other films of the Twenties, no- escapist transposition to problems of sions of urban existence, encapsulate tably Sternberg 's THE SALVATION HUNTERS, blood-brotherships across WASP and them by a crisp humor that may be shad- UNDERWORLD, and THE LAST COMMAND ethnic group lines. Conversely , Slim , in ed towards either sarcasm (as in Wilder 's (which is also the tale of a social fall : the THE BIG PARADE, collecting steel helmets like scalps, briefly \" becomes\" an Indian , THE CROWD. James Murray and Eleanor Boardman. 16 JULY 1973

prefiguring the coldly efficient Indian ma- Tod Browning , produces what is surely is not just a possibility but a natural rec- chine-gunner in Norman Mailer's 1942 the extreme statement of the possibilities ognition of everything that body and ges- short story \" A Calculus at Heaven .\" of maintaining one 's morale in situations ture can reveal about a mind . THE CROWD tempting to paralysis and self-pity. One achieves a delirious integrity of pain In Vidor 's New York , the ethnic theme suspects that Jannings's angst, like which isn 't merely a spiritual negativity; is , at least by Seventies standards, con- Garbo's, went increasingly against the and , in so doing , the film is rare in an spicuous by its marginality , immigrant- developing American trend away from already too rare genre. tragedy , which would be resented as tenement childhoods undergoing the \" self-pity \" if indulged in without some Show 'People usual sea change upwards into a native, balance of hope, or toughness , or the middle-class detachment from the city. ingredients of the soap opera . THE CROWD (1928) Which is a comment on the film 's rela- certainly looks like a deliberate rejection tionship with its New York audiences, of self-pity , its integrity lying in the extent SHOW PEOPLE was ostensibly produced rather than an unfriendly criticism of a to which it indulges it before the hero by Marion Davies-i.e ., by MGM for Wil- perspective close enough to Vidor's own . rallies his forces. (One wonders if, just liam Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane to as Billy Wilder remembered the office for some. Vidor, stuck with a stage play If the expressionist staircase of John 's THE APARTMENT , so Preston Sturges re- which he couldn't bear to finish reading , stuffy childhood home reminds one of membered Vidor's film for the conclusion decided to draw a little inspiration from something from THE MAGNIFICENT AMBER- of SULLIVAN 'S TRAVELS , whose ironies are the career of Gloria Swanson . His Peggy SONS , it is an anachronistic reminder , exhilaratingly abrasive rather than inspir- Pepper (Marion Davies) begins as a butt since an expressionist strain had ap- ing .) for custard pies, rises to greater dignity peared in Twenties Hollywood . This strain as Patricia Pepoire , and is recalled to her was stirred by a variety of factors , among While Welles is fascinated by a gigan- down-to-earth senses when Billy Boone them emulation of the German art film tesque life force in hollowness or decay , (William Haines), the actor whom she left and the influence of expressionist theater and presents attained success as some- toiling at the B-features treadmill , catches on all the dramatic arts . It was also partly how monstrous, Vidor is more likely to her in the face with a custard pie which , due, I suspect, to the connections be- celebrate that normal parental love which in view of Hearst's objections , became tween an individualist Romanticism would bestow all the advantages upon its instead \" a forceful stream from a syphon (whose middle- and lowbrow forms loom children. The ebullience of the film's fa- bottle .\" so large in the American cinema) and ther is reflected in his prosperous station , Expressionism-which can be consid- normally enough, given a Samuel Smiles The film historians' emphasis on the ered as Romanticism shorn of its individ- optimism about worldly success . And the more stylized forms of silent comedy ualism by Europe 's changing scene, but son shows the same energy and resil- (slapstick or Lubitsch) has inclined to still concerned with the cosmic in man 's ience as well as an arrogance , which may eclipse SHOW PEOPLE and its ilk-the moral spirit, at bay against a stifling and be a flaw but is a normal and not unlikable straightforward comedy which dips corruptive society. The rough pattern one. Struck by misfortune and then trag- good-naturedly but not unpointedly into continues when the film noir evolves its edy, that ebullience fulfills itself in a philo- satire and near drama. (Cukor 's IT SHOULD tight-lipped expressionism to evoke the sophic acceptance which is a profounder HAPPEN TO YOU affords a more recent city's pressure on such deviant idealists s pi ritual fu Ifi II ment-and \" i nspi ra- example .) While the Hollywood setting as Chandler's Marlowe. tionalist\" rather than \" reformist \" in that provides interest and an aura of glamour, it all but explicitly rules out the jealousy , it remains (pOintedly no doubt, in view of Nonetheless, American cinema ex- bitterness, sadness, or protest which the wide-spread contemporary criticism pressionism remains relatively stylized, other artists might feel appropriate. But of Hollywood 's immorality) a place in for expressionism proper requires an in- this ultimate optimism is achieved after which the usual moral flaws exact their teraction of individual social and too much tragedy to be even briefly com- usual retribution , or forgiveness. philosophical tensions which Hollywood placent; and as Professor Bosanquet optimism and individualism tend to chill puts it, \" Only that optimism is worth its The matter is pointed by an anti-satiri- or to restrict to certain mood-states or salt which can go all the way with pessi- cal , anti-Pirandellian scene where, at the genres concerning supposedly anoma- mism and arrive at a point beyond it. \" MGM stars ' table , MGM 's stars all be- lous subcultures (horror films or private- It's easy to see why Vidor's affirmation have just like their screen selves. The eye thrillers). A rhapsodic expressionism should have meant so much to Hol- tautology is too evident not to have a hint appears only fitfully, as in THE INFORMER , lywood's most scintillating cynic. of deadpan irony, as when Marion Davies John Ford 's study of guilt in civil-war-torn as Peggy Pepper stares at Marion Davies Ireland. Welles, in particular, blurs the It's a tribute also to Vidor's daemon as Marion Davies, and is suitably im- boundary between lyricism and expres- that , at a glance, he should have recog- pressed . The irony is democratic also , of sionism by studies of megalomania which nized his lead actor in James Murray, an course. When Billy mocks the romantic can be taken as liberal , but also Nietz- inexperiented extra whose life story ex- kiss in BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT (which schean, criticisms of American ambition emplifies a systematic negation of Vidor's Vidor had directed two years earlier), and individualism. THE CROWD begins philosophy-with his defensiveness, his Vidor isn 't criticizing him for it or implying roughly where THE MAGNIFICENT AMBER- apathy, his self-destructive drift to a sour grapes any more than he's agreeing SONS leaves off, at least insofar as it picks bum 's condition . It is as if something in that it's a reasonably down-to-earth point up the theme of the oppressively well-to- his soul never recovered from the lowest of view. do family 's willful young scion being point of John 's depression . It would be thrown into the world , getting his come- highly paradoxical to cite the negation of Aspiring film actors wait outside the uppance , and learning to muck in . a film 's philosophy by its leading actor casting director's office, all slumped, pa- as an enhancement of its authenticity . tient or passive. But spunky Peggy and Vidor's ending evokes, perhaps, Perhaps their common factor is nothing her pa step right up to the hatch , won 't more than merely the title of Lon Chan- more definite than a certain reck- take no for an answer, and do their stuff. ey's LAUGH CLOWN LAUGH (made in the lessness, to which alternative courses It 's all very Harold Lloyd in principle , same year, for the same studio) . Chaney were open. Perhaps, too , it was this except that , by a nice irony, their stuff's was a kind of home-grown Emil Jannings, which Vidor, most physical of directors, albeit drawing more from a kind of mid- recognized at a glance, just as he insists. dle-to-Iowbrow Gothic which , like expres- This critic agrees that love at first sight sionism, was a development out of Romanticism (Dumas , Sue and their suc- cessors). In FREAKS Chaney 's director, FILM COMMENT 17

as bad as could be . Her demonstration haps, in the postwar period , Vidor 's con- in Renoir 's Les Cahiers du Capitaine of different emotions-with its resourceful cern moves nearer to social criticism , Georges.) And something of the same use of an unfolded handkerchief to cor- without quite arriving at it. But the calm appears in Billy 's conspicuous lack respond to a cut, and the casting-office youthful Vidor's emphasis is on the way of envy or resentment at Peggy's suc- hatch as a close-up frame-is such a in which life at every level offers its pro- cess , although it is her success which mi xture of the ingenious and the awful tections against pretentiousness. The parts them . This absence of resentment that the casting clerk can 't but stare, commensalism of the stars ' table is one ; in conspicuous enough , I think , to strike boggle , laugh , and let her in . life has its Vidor's affable ironies about BARDELYS those spectators who don 't get around winners and its losers. Talent without THE MAGNIFICENT are another. And: \" Hey, to thinking of it as a corollary to the initiative is nothing , whereas initiative Billy, leave the sob squad and come jump conclusion of THE CROWD , or relating it without talent has at least a chance of off a rock .\" Billy is ready enough to to the constructive faith of the bad girl's proving itself to be something it didn 't replace the exhausted stuntman and mother-figures in DUEL IN THE SUN and know it was (i.e . awful enough to be stand-in for Toni, the spaghetti-house RUBY GENTRY. It 's a crucial moral affirma- amusing) and gradually becoming good waiter turned delicate star . Of all SHOW tion . In his way , Billy continues to love enough for Hollywood hokum . For PEOPLE 'S characters , only the comic is his Peggy, he doesn 't pine, and this resil- Capra's slickness and Cukor's fluid consistently himself. And Vidor's affable ience is managed in a way that hasn 't warmth, Vidor substitutes a deliber- ironies about BARDELYS aren 't illogical. the coldness of the \" cool. \" ateness and an energy from which a For, the exigencies of professionalism certain placid ruthlessness emerges. A apart, there is a deeper synthesis , akin Vidor also manages the rather daunt- sufficiently trenchant irony (Peggy and to that underlying THE CROWD 'S John ing task of poking fun at slapstick, a feat her father , each lost in a private , looking and laughing at the clown which achieved thanks to his sensitive eye for disparate style of pretension) also has a \" is \" his degradation. If THE BIG PARADE physicality. (The jumps which the cops quality of quiet patience, almost gentle- ends in an affirmation , it certainly is not do as they run are just a bit too deliberate , ness, as if no energy and enthusiasm one of romanticism without knockabout, too heavy .) A similar nuancing of comic could thrive without a certain self-cen- of buddy love against mother love, of business occurs when Peggy, having teredness . They involve sins which are Apperson 's compassion without Slim 's been brought to her senses, continues natural enough , and so can be purged expertise at killing. the funny business in a manner which more readily and naturally than isn 't exactly reverent but is imbued with meanness and other twists . In the end , When Peggy 's mutation into La a quality of spiritual liberation. In an earli- inspiration and illusion are heads and Pepoire separates her from her lowly and er scene, the director instructs her, tails-a matter not so much of morality as sensible Billy, they bid adieu against \" Don 't anticipate,\" and we anticipate her of a life force whose roots go deeper than back-lot scenery. The apparent inno- anticipating , which is a neat and subtle morality as human beings can frame it. cence of their sexual relationship thus far is an acceptable convention , which Vidor twist. Certainly, pretentiousness is the chief shows no signs of wishing to undermine An amazing comic chase , where ev- of Hollywood's occupational hazards, by even so much as a wink and a nod and is the vice of Peggy 's courage ; this or a fancy-dress party sequence, let erything runs along including a laid-out corresponds to the callowness which is alone one of those verb. sap. fadeouts corpse, anticipates the more Boschian the debased form of John 's eventual re- on a big close-up kiss-which meant as flights of Tex Avery (although this was, silience in THE CROWD . The line between much or as little as each spectator chose, of course, the era of the great Ub Iwerks an occupational hazard and criticism of but certainly evoked the swooning sensa- and other crazy cartoonists). Although a system (creative or social) is bound to tions of the ellipsis in \" Their lips met .. .\" Vidor is hardly remembered as a comic be somewhat hazy, but Vidor's interest Surely the man who can admire Meli director, SHOW PEOPLE 'S smooth nuances centers on the individual's response . In- sande's Amazonian intransigence in THE enable it to be seen forty-five years later deed , the suggestion here is that social BIG PARADE can also admire the calm , with very little \"making allowances,\" criticism is, if not altogether irrelevant, at unstrained relationship of a couple even of the intuitive sort which one prac- least secondary , so long as the system whose feelings for each other exist calmly tices unconsciously-and it whets one 's is free enough to allow individuals their alongside a kind of rich yet latent sensu- appetite for all those other early Vidors choice, including that of opting out. Per- ality. (A corresponding patience is evoked which weren't remembered by that most unreliable of oracles, the critical consen- sus . SHOW PEOPLE. William Haines and Marion Davies. Marion Davies and Dell Henderson. 18 JULY 1973

Hallelujah! work, and family individualism) the Puri- Twenties is bound to be less clear-cut than the legal disallowance of it. And a (1929) tan ethic. certain ambivalance about it is natural But things aren 't quite so simple. and normal enough, not least on one Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) lives with his who, like Vidor, combines individualism Vidor, interviewed by Positif, described and a sense of spontaneous community . mother 's family in a ramshackle one- Pity and self-control , as countervailing the film as a contrast between sex and factors to the impulse for revenge , are room hut in South Carolina . When he also universal moral matters for Vidor, not goes up-river with his younger brother to religion , and a \"strugg le \" between good racial ones-a point strengthened by the sell the year 's cotton crop, Zeke meets ferocity of Jewel , the white preacher, in up with Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), who and evil. But interview remarks can 't RUBY GENTRY , as well as by a parallel rapidly persuades him to gamble the fam- always be taken as definitive , for a variety infatuation in OUR DAILY BREAD. Vidor is ily 's money away to her lover Hot Shot clearly right in assuming that Zeke wi ll (William Fountaine) . Zeke won 't let his of reasons.' This description implies a far retain our sympathies despite his crime . family be robbed so easily, even when Hot Shot, who isn't all that anxious for less interesting intrication of factors than The moral might seem purely conven- a showdown, pulls a gun. But Zeke 's very that given in his autobiography : namely , tional, except that our sympathies are not courage is one of the factors that get his so much split as doubled between an ero- younger brother killed, and he returns to his sympathetic interest in the southern ticism which is at least a deeply moving the village with his body. Plunged into an Negroes whom he knew as a youth-not counterfeit for passion, and a religious ecstasy of grief and guilt, he discovers vocation which, being a product both of a vocation as revivalist preacher. Chick only in \"the sincerity and fervor of their family grief and of frustrated infatuation , comes to sneer and finds herself stirred; is equally a counterfeit for the deeper, but after Zeke has baptized her by total religious expression ,\" but also \" the hon- everyday piety represented by Zeke ' s immersion in the river, the two elope, family and community. Forty years later, Zeke finding work in a sawmill. Chick is est simplicity of their sexual drives,\" such Vidor saw the film again and found Zeke's bored by her day-long solitude and her vocation admirable, as a positive reaction man 's poverty and fatigue , and abandons that \" the intermingling of these two acti- to suffering . This admiration is evinced him when Hot Shot returns for her. Zeke in the film itself, although the story line pursues them; the carriage sheers off a vities seemed to offer strikingly dramatic continues by suggesting that the reviv- forest road; Zeke throttles Hot Shot; and alist vocation is somewhat hysteric and Chick, injured in the crash , dies in his content.\" And I would certainly agree that the family represents a more stable arms. Zeke serves his prison sentence human effort. It is, of course , an open and returns to his family-all passion with the Catholic critic Henri Agel that, question as to whether this is a general spent, all crime purged, his conscience statement about religion on Vidor's part, cleansed, strumming his banjo. ferocious as Vidor 's film is , its impression or simply what's best for Zeke. But the repudiation of narrow and self-conscious This long-cherished project of Vidor's is of an unleashing of elemental forces religion , as against human participation , could only be realized when the advent seems imp licit in some of his other films . of sound persuaded MGM to gamble on rather than of evil in its fundamentalist the popularity of spirituals and jazz as the That this involves something very dif- film 's musical accompaniment. So senses. Charles Barr sees Vidor's film as ferent from Hays Code piety is suggested there's much to be said for John Kobal 's by Zeke ' s crime passionel and its psy- contention that it's really a musical. While a genuine tragedy-a conflict between chological consequences (or inconse- I'd argue that it is and it isn't (since the quences) . As Chick and Hot Shot speed music accompanies rather than ex- two rights rather than right and wrong. away into the forest in their horse-drawn presses most of the climaxes), its story carriage, Zeke blasts away at them with is clearly a progenitor of Hollywood ' s It 's true that the scenario is dominated his shotgun, as if ready , in his rage , sideline in Negro religiosity (GREEN PAS- by an obvious moral polarity , family affec- to risk killing the girl whom he might have TURES, CABIN IN THE SKY) on the one hand , felt he wanted to rescue . His pursuit on tion vs. an apparently passionate sex- foot of a horse-drawn carriage could be aand sexual operettas la CARMEN JONES hopeless, were his terrible willfulness not uality. For Agel , the \" tragic flaw \" of lending wings to his feet. for he runs with and PORG Y AND BESS on the other . Negro vitality is a volati lity of all passions , almost magic speed. (One suspects that The cotton-picking Negroes, content- Vidor indulged , however slightly , in fast good and bad, so that Chick, Zeke , and motion effects , just as he did at the end ed on their little patch of land , don 't carry of OUR DAILY BREAD.) Thus Zeke is gifted Uncle Tom overtones, for Vidor cele- perhaps even Hot Shot become , through with a superhuman , inspired effort of the brates the same life style for the enter- kind that compels fate (and corresponds prising white community of OUR DAILY the very strength of their paSSions, the to Apperson 's limping pilgrimage after BREAD . This film 's contrast of rustic fru- Melisande). gality and slick cheaters corresponds to childlike instruments of an evil which re- the city-country dichotomy featured in Zeke 's \" prayer\" is answered (by a innumerable American films (from WOMAN mains beyond and outside them .' It would ferocious Old Testament God?). The car- OF THE WORLD through SUNRISE and MR . riage sheers off the road , and though DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, right on down to be surprising if Vidor saw a specifically Chick lies injured , he leaves her lying its pointed rebuttal in MIDNIGHT COWBOY), where she is, while he attends to Hot and featured more consistently in Vidor's racial trait here. Emotional intensity char- Shot. At this excited moment , one is more work than most. Here , certainly, the film likely to notice Zeke's putting hatred be- affirms the values of the family, the land, acterizes most of his principal charac- fore concern than to think of some long- the rural community, and (at least in its range rationalization (e .g . Hot Shot, the emphasis on diligence, frugality , hard ters , and neither Slim the hardhat in THE snake who might creep off, is the demon lover who is Chick's homme fatale, so BIG PARADE nor Colonel Rogers in NORTH- WEST PASSAGE proves any less remorse- less than his Negro blood brother. Zeke 's revenge situation is crucial to Vidor's morality-revenge being both a natural impulse and a destructive one, and of varying degrees of legitimacy depending on its social context. Accepted as a moral duty in Wild West movies, its moral per- missibility in a backwoods context in the ' Anyone in the fi lm business may have good (or bad) reasons for not telling the truth, the whole truth , and nothing but the truth . Artists cannot always articulate their ideas except through their art. The human memory is very fallible . One may wish to please, or at least not upset , a cr itic-inter- viewer 's ideas . The interviewer's assumptions or personality may impede or confuse an artist . It is difficult to recall subtle but crucial issues on the spur of the moment . A man at seventy may be very different from , even hostile to , himself at thirty. ' Agel was writing in the relat ively innocent days of 1963; but, while his use of \" race \" may be very imprecise, it might now be worth remarking that Agel's notion of racial childishness wou ld put him in a peculiar theological tradition , and a rather unsavory anthropological one . It hardly fits the reasons why the Society of Friends came to be called Quakers, or the hysteric congregations for which early English Methodism was notorious. Not that I have any particular objection: in principle, to the proposition that general temperamental differences between the races might turn out to exist; if anything , I would welcome its diversifica- tion of human possibilities . But it's still worth recalling that the phlegmatic Engli sh were par- oxysmatic in their religious emotion when fear , brutalization , and poverty were doing their work. FILM COMMENT 19

killing him might be freeing her). All the and filled with a childlike terror\" (We will slicker treachery, improvidence, and same , it ' s doubtful if Vidor is criticizing see the ambiguity in Lewt's manner of greed (to contrast with rural diligence the indiscipline of rage more than he's dying in DUEL IN THE SUN.) The moral and thrift) such that her and Hot Spot's allowing us to admire a human and moral underpinnings here seem to me to be death is a case of the heathen being rage which , however ambivalent or hys- both an almost amoral transcendentalism smitten hip and thigh-both excused by terical , (1) would be justified in Western (freed of ego, her energy becomes pure) their background and predestined by it and hillbilly dramas , (2) is a crime pas- and a maintained morality (death is terror to a nasty end. But Chick expresses a sionel, and (3) is a passionate hubris because she is selfish) . One says \"be- kind of truth also. Her conversion in- rather than a subhuman or an inhuman cause she is selfish \" rather than \" be- volves a \"bad faith \" of a subtler kind than response to a man whose own violence cause she has sinned. \" Perhaps man 's mere pretense , and it involves something was largely responsible for Zeke 's Original Sin , wished on him by his body 's which isn 't quite bad faith at all. An im- brother 's death as well. isolation rather than by its desires, is the portant element in Chick's capitulation is uncertainty of solitude, which only a tran- the fact that she who came to mock the It seems likely that Vidor 's ambiva- scendental sense of oneness can over- pious is suddenly the only \" sinner \" who lence (the assertion of conflicting values come. ' Thus, even deathbed terror is hasn 't repented , which puts her in a posi- between which Zeke is torn) is not a deprived of all those overtones which , tion of acute social embarrassment. And criticism of Zeke but a condition of the whether Puritanical or Catholic, empha- Zeke 's rhetorical power and presence is scene's pity and terror-not least that ter- size being taken to account for acts. By compounded by the exultation of a wh91e ror of conflicting guilts and pities which the process of dying, Chick is forgiven , community, a kind of meta-family, making drives too many of us to simplistic moral and freed. her a little child again. codes. Zeke, like an agent for the Old Testament God , is , in retaliation , both Equally subtle is Zeke 's fall from his It might be said that Chick is driven just and unjust. Hence the scene's terri- preacherhood. For a question arises. by herd feeling and sensuality (two bad ble exhilaration. For anguish and satis- Why shouldn 't he marry Chick, and carry reasons) to a conversion which (because faction-which logically might seem to on preaching? She could play the part they are bad) ends tragically. But are they mitigate each other, to create a negative of a minister's wife while his vocation so unequivocally bad? What is communi- feedback-can also be so patterned as affords her, as presumably it might, the ty , in the deepest sense, without them? to produce a positive one, and escalate excitement and the money she requires. So , if secular rather than sacred reasons into a passionate acceptance of oppo- No doubt there are very real obstacles inspire Chick's quasi-conversion, they sites, a \" marriage of heaven and hell. \" in her scandalous past, her relationship are also reasons as positive and human And from this vicious circle Zeke with Zeke 's brother's killer (so far as his as those that inspired Zeke 's vocation ; emerges, by the boldest of twists , his family is concerned) , and her fixation on and her confusion is just as honest as crime expiated , his soul freed , his loyal- city-slicker pressures. All this enables the his. The cries called forth by her feigned ties renewed. Also startling is the com- incompatibility of his infatuation and his (or sincere, or genuinely ambiguous, or pleteness of his emancipation from an vocation to pass without question. But naturally overdetermined) sensations of attachment which one can never believe such incompatibilities, given Vidor's regeneration by grace, in Zeke's arms , was merely sensual, and the exuberance sense of sturm-und-drang, might exist become the ecstatic wails of love, of with which he returns to a future of do- only to be overcome. surrender, and-by no very great stretch mesticity and toil. of the imagination-orgasm. For sensu- The real obstacle is indicated by the ality lurks in the very temple of religion , It retains a certain ambiguity , since the details of Zeke's succumbing, which perhaps because each plunges its roots prison sentence asserted by the narrative reveals to them two key factors: her ab- so deep into human nature as to draw is denied by the cinematic continuity. solute dependence on immediate sens- its strength from the other. Which is why We 're told that so many years of jail gave ual excitements, and Zeke's moral Vidor's solution becomes family affec- Zeke a chance to come to terms, perhaps weakness. Her \" bad faith\" during her tion. with remorse and morality. But what we conversion is not of a gross and obvious see is an almost insolently carefree mur- kind. Ambivalent as is the ecstasy of her But Chick isn 't the only woman in derer returning to the bosom of his family cries as Zeke dips her in the waters of HALLELUJAHI whose inspiration becomes to live happily ever after. Prison couldn 't baptism , her impressionability is not confusion. A middle-aged woman is over- break him either. Thus a hypothetical a kind that we can easily or contemp- come by hysteria and has to have a moral chastisement is denied by our ex- tuously disown. But when he succumbs bucket of water flung in her face by two perience of the last of a series of dramatic to her provocations , in a forest, without deacons, who are standing ready for just reversals. Rapid and strong, they maintain question of marriage, his reckless acqui- this everyday emergency. This \" anti-bap- an ambiguity that must be distinguished escence exposes his sense of his mor- tism \" is also a touch of comic relief, but, from melodramatic imprecision . Is Zeke 's al unworthiness , and he unhesitatingly like much comic relief, it hints at a life- apparent absence of remorse childish? or abandons a vocation which less honestly long, frustration of instinct by a harsh childlike? or hysteric? or maintained by spontaneous souls might have continued world. These purificatory immersions- an antisocially puritancial fury? or a to affect. Zeke's moral integrity is all the erotic or comic-amidst meadowland, confidence in God 's forgiving crimes more remarkable given the notorious will- contrast with Zeke 's murder of Hot Shot passionels? or conscientiously justified? or ingness of revivalist preachers, black and in marshy forest. insolently unrepentant? A variety of pos- white, either to enjoy the consolations of sibilities dance in our minds ; the last three sistren so deeply moved that their feel- As the buckets of water may remind loom largest in mine. Equally, Chick 's ings transcend fundamentalist prOhibi- us, any revivalist preacher is aware of the dying cry ( \" Oh Zeke, I'm broken in two! \" ) tions, or to tolerate hypocriSies which are ambivalence and instability of the all-too- generates tension for its alternative pos- no more serious for being sexual than human emotions involved in the conver- sibilities. Is this her feminine wheedling those with which the more decorously sion experience. So Chick is as much a or her dying pain? established churches so depressingly victim of seduction by the whole revivalist contrive to coexist. situation as Zeke was of her sexual pres- Nor is this ambiguity resolved by the ence. His ministry abounds in images immediately succeeding surprise: the Up to a point, Chick expresses a city- which one may possibly find appropriate style of her dying is such that , as Agel to the simplicity of his flock, but which notes , she seems \" washed of all perver- ' I looked at this from another aspect in The Or- one may also find cheaply rhetorical (se- sity at the moment of quitting the earth, giasts, a brief introduction to the French philoso- ductive), or more akin to show business pher Georges Batailie, in Books and Bookmen . June 1972. than soul-saving. Thus Zeke rides on an 20 JULY 1973

ass , surrounded by children robed in King Vidor seated in the foreground with the cast and crew of Hallelujah l white . This GREEN PASTUREs-type produc- tion is immediately appealing , but I rather hoped Zeke would prefer a more modest- ly and honestly committed and physical human involvement. This is not to dismiss his evangelical style as gratuitous or merely a sham . The whole situation of the river baptism in front of the congregation expresses, or counterfeits, the values of family, com- munity, and inspiration which are the film 's other moral pole. They find their most stable form and their most beautiful expression in the overcrowded , patri- archal shack, when Mammy takes each of her younger children on her lap , in turn , and sings them to sleep. The promptness of their response isn 't just a gag (though it is that too , of the gentlest kind) ; it's also evidence of a magic power to bestow contentment and a magic gen- erosity going far beyond the grasp of jealousy. Man's real God is his earthly parents, and they 're black-she's black- and there 's enough love for all their chil- dren to be soothed and content. When Zeke \" rocks \" Chick on his knee into the river of salvation , he is touching on the same emotions in her , emotions which only a real family , and an evolution into the parental role , can satisfy. Mammy adopts a friend 's daughter, \" Missie Rose ,\" as her own daughter (in a sidelong reference to the broken family patterns so common since slavery) , so that Zeke can grow up alongside her, come to love her, and marry her. (The parallel with Mrs. Apperson's command , and with the direct family continuity, is clear. And so , perhaps , is that with the incestuous rage of Ruby Gentry's brother). Later, Rosie sings Zeke to sleep , as his mother had done for his younger siblings. And , on losing him , she clings to his knees, or searches, wailing , for him , through the forest (like Apper- son 's Melisande). Her womanly parox- ysms and her strong patience contrast with Chick's childlike, sensual, and impa- tient attack . After all , it is possible to imagine that, with a little more restraint on Chick 's part, the premature seduction in the forest would never have taken place, and that Zeke's \" bad faith \" would have remained unrevealed to him . We may take this train of thought fur- ther . Chick 's impulsiveness is honesty, a touchstone that reveals Zeke's dishon- esty and frees him from a false vocation , to his real piety. But the film 's individual moments and private confrontations are so powerful in immediate impact that it is easy to overlook both the moral ten- sions arising from the shocks they create as they succeed one another, and the power of all the scenes of community- the one-room home, the funeral , the bap- tism , and Zeke 's return to the bosom of his family . In contrast, the saloon crowd- at first jolly enough (with Victoria Spivey FILM COMMENT 21 ,

singing a jazz blues, and giving it that for the fun she craves. And something gether warmer and in the best sense dignity)-scatters as soon as a shooting as hard , prosaic , and familiar as physical animal-nearer , in fact , to what Norman looks like trouble. fatigue in a workaday context was well Mailer called \"hip \" in his essay, \" The on its way out of Hollywood 's ken . I sus- White Negro.\" The general differences The feelings of true community, at the pect that, after an initial period of \" stage between Vidor and Mailer hardly need funeral , are as orgiastic as any others . stylization,\" the sense of prosaic physi- comment, and the interest of our compar- And if one considers Zeke 's vocation a cality in American films follows a falling ison lies precisely in the fact that Vidor false one , they are also misleading, satu- curve from the Twenties through the Thir- must transcend a framework which is rated as they are with family contrition . ties to a nadir in the Forties , where its essentially rural , Te xan , and \" square ,\" Maybe Vidor is criticizing the negative nearest equivalent is the emphasis on while Mailer's definition of \" hip\" depends excesses of community feeling , and an oppressive bourgeois interiors. The Fifties on city anomie. Both converge, however, excess of guilt and shame. At this point, brought it back, with Method acting and on a sense of nervous will , of violence error becomes so natural that one can Elia Kazan (whose complementarity to and bodily resilience, of body-mind re- see why Vidor's transcendentalism has Vidor will be touched on briefly later). flexes attaining unity with a cosmic pulse, to be founded on a dynamism of resil- of man 's difficult mi xture of interchange ience, rather than on the ideals of impec- Here, the scenes stressing Zeke's with and resistance to his surroundings. cability which come only too easily to sawmill fatigue also happen to turn into rationalism. Here, perhaps, Vidor's vision a little documentary on work-processes. The simultaneity of religious and erotic reveals one of the tension points which It's not simply because of the strong sensations during Chick 's baptism by are its inspiration. On one hand , man contrasts-within-continuity which such Zeke is both a hip insight and a transcen- needs a strong community and a strong processes may allow, if forcefully cut, but dental one. The overlap between the two morality. On the other hand , community for the same reason underlying Vidor's may seem less freaky if one thinks how and morality both involve obligations earlier combination of what is , in effect, Whitman 's vitalism can be projected in which may limit a man 's freedom. By and an exposition of the processes in cotton one direction towards the ethic of nation- large, Vidor's heroes choose freedom preparation , with a musical number. and Character-building by work , and in rather than community; THE WEDDING Vidor 's interest in work is altogether more the other direction towards polymor- NIGHT condemns the sense of community down-to-earth than usual in Hollywood at wh ich HALLELUJAH! upholds. Perhaps the the time , as may be suggested by a com- aphous joys la Ginsberg. The transition earlier film crosses the color-bar as an parison w ith Victor Fleming 's RED DUST . unconscious expression of its nostalgic That film 's tourist-exotic equivalent- figure between Mailer and Vidor is Hem- impossibility for Vidor, while his \" ideal\" details about rubber preparation in the ingway ; in certain respects , Vidor's community-the one in OUR DAILY BREAD- tropics-doubles as , believe it or not, a NORTHWEST PASSAGE is \" School of Hem- involves a pointed repudiation of the past. series of allusions to Jean Harlow's ingway.\" The rural , puritan side of Vidor bosom! (It's a series of references too is more clearly and simply displayed in Henri Agel compares Chick's frailties complex to detail here , but it involves the Wellman , and although Vidor condemns to Eve's. Maybe such a reading comes fanning of ewe's udders to turn their milk the citified hipsters in HALLELUJAHI , the more easily to Catholicism than to Puri- to cheese .) sense of contradiction inspires Agel's tanism; for Puritan piety-more concen- admirable qualification of the film , for trated on the family , and on teaching at For today's spectators Vidor's interest all its speed and discipline, as some- mother's knee-can tolerate misogyny in cotton as work may be eclipsed , initially how \" baroque\" -a description perfectly rather less than can the Catholic hier- at least, by sentimental associations with catching its complicated moral and dra- archy of celibate males. But Biblical pat- cotton as emblem of the South 's slave- matic strains. terns don 't apply too exactly here, since based prosperity, and by early sound it is not God the Father who fashions a equipment which boxes the musical While the film 's affirmation of the Puri- mate for his \" son ,\" but rather a strong numbers up into long (or static, or group) tan ethic is of the essence , French Cath- and gentle matriarch who conceives as shots, minimizing the choreography that olic and Cahiers critics tend to remain well as nourishes all her children , and became possible a few years later. Other- satisfied with a general description of who can find a bride for her first-born . wise the film moves fast , even by Thirties Vidor's films as \" Puritan \" in a way which Nonetheless, Agel 's comparison conveys standards; and Seventies audiences, ac- begs a multitude of questions. Which all the affection which , for all her frailties , customed to slower tempi or more force- particular aspect of which particular vari- Zeke and Vidor (and we) cannot but feel ful close-ups , may lose a quarter of an ety of Puritanism has the critic in mind? for the woman whose mercurial provoca- hour or more in adjusting to its pace and Certainly Vidor's Puritanism can 't be tions are her vitality's response to the relaxing their guard against a sentimen- equated with original \" grim \" Puritanism , exasperating and anomic conditions tality which (particularly at that speed) whereby only a repressive theocracy- which are all she has known . As it is, they may be difficult to distinguish from and work considered as a curse , a curb , criss- cross HALLELUJAH 'S deeper moral stereotype . Its classic status is likely to and a duty-can save man 's depravity slant effectively enough for the film to be be first apparent from Vidor's keen eye from itself. Seastrom 's THE SCARLET LETTER read (as Ado Kyrou reads it) as a celebra- for supple and adaptive energy; for reli- suggests that such Calvinism wasn 't alto- tion of desire . It can also be read as a gious sentiment in its phYSical mode ; for gether a spent force in America in the double tragedy , of the disrupted love im- se xuality as an exasperated scream of Twenties. In OUR DAILY BREAD , Vidor 's plied by Zeke's instant response to her the spirit; for the exuberance of the ras- study of a tightly cohesive community, the and by her surrender to his preaching- cally and the ferocious. sinner-girl makes a getaway to the city the nearest to belonging she is ever to where presumably her callow soul will get. One need only compare Nina Mae Vidor often seems to be , like Blake's be a little less miserable . And liberty of McKinney's forked-lightning charm , as Milton, of the devil 's party-without know- escape is clearly as essential to Vidor 's Chick, with .her merely decorative pres- ing it, although no doubt suspecting it- position as it is contrary to Calvinism 's ence in Zoltan Korda 's SANDERS OF THE and entertaining a more than sneaking double predestination . RIVER . sympathy for energy, even when destruc- tively misled, rather than dull correcti- At any rate, Puritanism was profoundly If Vidor 's sense of bodies is most easily tude. Even Vidor's idea of the family ac- influenced by the alternative Protestant recognized in its erotic mode , it is part cords with Blake 's notion of the diabolical option-the Deist or Unitarian one-which of a fuller range of physical sensibility. (that is , the divine) in being founded , not was to stress the closeness of man 's Money apart, Zeke is too tired by working on morality, still less on society 's need nature to God. Thus, it countered the in a sawmill to take Chick out at nights for stable units, but on something alto- notion of total depravity with an equally extreme opposite : a belief in man's natu- ral goodness, which led towards \" noble 22 JULY 1973

savage,\" democratic, romantic , and tran- drink, or Communism-is at once abso- it to bathe in the aura of the gangster scendentalist positions. One of the prob- lutely everywhere and so alien as to be film . It' s d ifficult to tell how muc h of lems in discussing what may be meant expellable through the brief enforcement STREET SCENE is Vidor , how mu c h is Elmer by Puritanism or Protestantism in twen- of a rigid theocracy . Transcendentalist Rice , how much is from the original stag e tieth-century art is the extraordinary vari- tendencies to high ideals can also be production ( much of whose cast it ety of contrasts and combinations possi- expressed in grimly Puritanical terms shares), and how much is producer Sam- ble between the two positions. Broadly, about the unacceptability of whatever uel Goldwyn . however , the great American ex- isn 't extremely ideal. \" We needs must pansiveness seems to have given an love the highest when we see it\" can Goldwyn 's work lends itself surpris- optimistic cast to the Protestant ethic, rapidly become a pretext for punishing ingly well to the auteur theory, wi th his work coming to seem both self-fulfillment those who prefer another hierarchy, or parallel themati c s. On the one hand , he and a way of improving society by self- need a longer acquaintance than one offers us the Goldwyn Girls-early ep ito- salvation . To this extent Vidor 's films quick look. Indeed, transcendentalism me of deodorized (and , on e suspects , generally seem to belong to the Hol- and grim Puritanism are probably natural de-ethnicized) American womanhood- lywood Old Guard (or rather to the Ameri- bedfellows, happiest when neither can and the spectacular musicals. On the other hand , he produced relatively can cinema which Hollywood all but pull all the blankets on its own side . \" Populist\" films like STREET SCENE, THE WEDDING NIGHT, and PORG Y AND BESS . Both killed) in seeing work as a fulfillment of In Vidor 's films one can see the opti- ROMAN SCANDALS and THE SECRET LIFE OF WATER MITTY take the dichotomy into their human instincts in a way in which \" fun mism of an Emerson or a Whitman taking own structure , whereby a mi xture of wish morality\" cannot be. on a much, sharper, more Nietzschean fulfillment , paranoid melodrama, and edge. It's easy enough for a phrase like humor alleviate a realistic mediocrity. When the Cahiers critics call Vidor a \"self-reliance is God reliance ,\" to imply Later , Goldwyn 's concern with the fam ily Puritan they seem to have in mind a sort or accommodate \" And the devil take the in STREET SCENE and THE WEDDING NIGHT of Bible Belt fundamentalist, relying heav- hindmost,\" or Vidor's \" I don 't like fail- reappears at a higher social level , in the ily on the more bloodthirsty Old Testa- ures.\" Vidor, like Whitman , contains mul- suburban family series of the Forties, ment verses about the punishment of titudes . In the THE BIG PARADE , he admired which uneasily yokes ingredients from sinners and heathen . It is to this attitude both Apperson's forebearance and the THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES with Korean that Robert Aldrich pays lip-service in War era complacency. It's interesting to wonder what Vidor would have made of SODOM AND GOMORRAH , where America , riveter 's killer instincts; in HALLELUJAH I PORGY AND BESS , or Sturges or Wilder of WALTER MITTY . (And at this point we aban- like the Hebrews, should go its rural way , both Zeke 's piety and his ferocity deserve don auteur theory again , even in its ex- tension to producers, and have to discuss while the cities of fun morality are wiped our respect , as complementary rather rival Hollywood theories about what the audience wanted. We certainly need a out for effete self-indulgence. than contradictory aspects of an underly- study of the box-office rules of thumb underlying the mi xture of realism and To me the transcendentalist strain in ing elan vital. Perhaps something like a wish fulfillment, intimacy and melodrama, in the spectacular musical-notably Vidor's work seems to be stronger than transcendentalist criticism of Puritanical DAMES , IT 'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER , FORTY- SECOND STREET , THE PAJAMA GAME , OKLA- this-as strong , indeed , as in Moby Dick, narrowness and otherworldliness under- HOMA! , and WEST SIDE STORY .) whose spiritual mainspring is surely the lines Zeke 's pseudo-vocation and his fall At any rate , STREET SCENE rapidly centers our concern on young Sam 's conflict between the grimly Puritanical from grace, while the crime passionel need to escape and better himself. His primary duty is to renounce his narrow, and the transcendentalist options. Hasn 't affords a grimmer variation on constricting loyalties, and consecrate his fully-developed talents to a newer , Ahab become more evil than the Great Nietzsche's \" A little revenge is healthier broader, younger America-an American America, without the ethnic divisions and White Whale? Isn 't this one aspect of than no revenge .\" Puritan individualism all the hangovers from tired old Europe, which are embodied in his father 's des- nature, to whose rich , pre-moral contra- may have lent itself only too easily to the potism and his neighbors' frustrated, stagnant, or confused lives. Perhaps the dictions it is disturbingly difficult to allot secularized competitiveness of \" the sur- surest guarantee that his individualism isn 't mere selfishness is that his decision moral categories at all? I doubt whether vival of the fittest;\" but Vidor prefers to cuts him to the quick, and that we can imagine him , after all, returning from his any modern reader can avoid asking him- celebrate vitalism whereby work is a college education to fetch his Rose. self whether Moby Dick-far from being mode of reconciliation between individu- Ethnic vignettes : An operatic Italian and a gloomy Dane perpetuate a point- as evil as critics generally seem content al , community , and Nature . less and backward-looking argument about whether Columbus or Leif Erikson to accept-doesn 't correspond to Blake's discovered America. The Italian couple can 't have babies, and the negated as- Tiger, Tiger; and whether Ahab's whaler sumption of pullulating bambini may be pat but is poignant enough . An embit- isn't a dark satanic mill. My own sympath- tered wife, turning to adultery to live out a little of her frustrated life force, has ies are quite clear. Ahab is a contami- Street Scene considerable sympathy from the film (and nated hero , and Moby Dick is a white knight, the champion of his own kind , the (1931 ) true representative of God at sea. And I would have plunged a knife in Ahab ' s back to save the whale. Elmer Rice 's play centers on young It's obvious how the very misanthropy Sam (William Collier, Jr.), who must of the grim Puritan must involve him in escape from the New York tenements to tremendous difficulties when it comes to achieve the education he deserves. But, hating the sin but not the sinner. But the in his struggle to free himself from the transcendentalist can 't escape them ei- environment whose prisoners his friends ther, for man 's nearness to God doesn 't and neighbors have become, his dead- save him from the nastier propensities , liest enemy is his love for Rose (Sylvia of which evidence is only too abundant. Sidney). And he has almost to be forced The smiling face of transcendentalism from the tenement nest to keep faith with tends to remain blind and silent before himself, and so, perhaps, with those he the jungle snarl of Social Darwinism , or loves. the transmogrification of double predes- STREET SCENE , another essay in tination into Manifest Destiny , or theories screen populism , anticipates DEAD END , of justification by crude life-force, or and wears very much better .'As so often brute cynicism. Indeed, the transcen- happens, though, the slighter film was dentalist vocabulary of freedom and faith more successful-not only commercially in humanity may rapidly turn into notions but also critically-presumably because whereby evil in some form or another- its theme , juvenile delinquency, enabled FILM COMMENT 23

prefigures BEYOND THE FOREST) . Another have been , later, by PORGY AND BESS) . side one another , in abrasive coexistence obstacle to Sam 's self-emancipation is Vidor finds himself with what is virtually (which is altogether more insidious and the severity of his father, whose concepts a single set the street and the front evasive) . They have a common antago- of family are still rooted in Central Euro- facade of an apartment house. This spa- nist in \" the city. \" The problem lies in the pean peasant culture (which prefigures tial constraint isn 't particularly helpful in network of unity (everyone is at bay THE WEDDING NIGHT). tracing the interaction of family groups, against the city atmosphere), disunity though Vidor's camera movements and (each apartment isolated), and conflict If Sam 's spiritual father-figure is the alterations of angle are as exceptionally (as Sam surmounts obstacles and temp- Irishman Moran , this corresponds well resourceful as one would expect. tations). enough to the historical fact that the Irish, as the last of the Old Migration , did play The limitations within which he has to In a sense , the film has a \" collective a considerable role in helping later immi- work may be illustrated by reference to hero \" -it is an omnibus version of John 's grant groups adapt to America . Moran is Renoir's roughly comparable THE LOWER fate in THE CROWD . But to the individualist a kind of transition figure between the DEPTHS . While the latter is hardly a tidy American tradition , and to Vidor, the Irish gangster and the Democratic party film , its bums and failures are both indi- more individualist form comes more easi- machine of Tammany Hall. But he 's linked viduals and a group. A sense of negative ly. John and Mary, like their homonyms with neither; and as an ordinary, honest coexistence and occasional, unreliable, in OUR DAILY BREAD , are as generalized American , he can guide Sam into an or involuntary interaction between sepa- as their Christian names imply , but can individualist ambition . That ambition is rate (indeed , anomic) individuals is eased never conflict with each other , which is balanced by Moran 's altruism in urging by the very structure of the sets-a court- where the crunch begins . In STREET the youth on to values which he himself yard and a dormitory-which have an SCENE, our identification with Sam and cannot comprehend-a relationship, of a extensive existence in depth. Similarly, Rose suggests a deeply moving struggle son surpassing a devoted father, that THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE juxtaposes between them , which the minor charac- evokes THE CHAMP. a printing-works, a courtyard and a ters constrict and interrupt. Conversely, laundry-three continuous areas. the minor characters remain cameos, so Sam , his neighbors, and the film itself, limited in their own spiritual potential as emphatically reject old Abe Kaplan , the New York tenement streets and fire- to be neither altogether tragic nor alto- atheistic Jewish Marxist, who at first escapes in summer could equally be a gether relevant. The faithless wife is not seemed set to be the younger's guide, kind of \" courtyard.\" One can imagine quite what Rose might become if Sam philosopher, and friend. The burly Moran Vidor-with or without the precedents of abandons her forever and she marries wants to punch Abe for his heathenish BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING or SO US LES another. We identify with Sam 's rebellion , ideas; and the film seems to feel that TOITS DE PARis-extending his own track- but very much less (if at all) with his Moran 's impulse, although anachronisti- ing movements in THE CROWD , and group- father 's pain . And so on . A major film cally crude , and wrong , is so natural , ing the apartment windows in a manner becomes a minor one-but a minor one virile, and healthy at heart that it's spiri- prefiguring Hitchcock's way with a similar teasingly implying more than it can ever tually justified. It's the gut response of facade in REAR WINDOW , with its brilliant quite say. Unlike Chabrol , I prefer the inarticulate honesty to all the insidious re-introduction of the third dimension failed great film to the successful minor double-talk of intellectuals (vide MR . beyond a facade. But one suspects that one. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN) . At any rate , it's the such a vision of New York would have rough-hewn Moran who takes spiritual cut against Vidor's grain. Behind its failure lies a long American charge over the sensitive, fervent boy. tradition , whereby America's expansion- What is at issue is not, as Lindgren-era ist fluidity and her individualist creed , Thus STREET SCENE is not only Sam 's theory might have supposed, some cine- reinforcing one another, combine with a story, but also (as its title implies) a cross- matic imperative whereby the disunities sense of national greatness to impose section , a slice of life, an omnibus film . of space and time must be observed as particular confusions on studies of In theory at least, it constitutes a neatly dogmatically as human fidgetiness can groups and communities. STREET SCENE unified dramatic structure, involving the contrive . There is, after ali, an infinity of is a melting-pot equivalent to Winesburg youth 's escape, the aids and obstacles camera angles and opportunities for cuts Ohio or Our Town. and in these works contributed by his neighbors, and the even if the subject is only a sleeper immo- also one is struck by the absence of a big-city pressures which frustrated or lim- bile in a chair. The problem is rather one straightforward and functioning social ited them, and may do the same to him. which Vidor, as a lyricist of individualism , framework . They are studies in loneli- If the film had achieved this , it would have isn 't temperamentally best suited to re- ness, or else the dead appear so that a been exceptionally sophisticated for its solve: the reconciliation of individual moral-cosmic reference occludes the so- time. As it is, it comes so near as to decisions and destinies with a cial pattern of purpose and cross-pur- provoke , in this critic at least, an abso- socio-environmental pressure which is at pose. (Whereas Faulkner elongates what lutely unjustified impatience-an obses- once continuous and relentless , but are essentially social-moral chains of sion with its failure. The concentration on which is expressed through a diversity of cause-and-effect into long, devious con- an individual hero , and the wider canvas, human predicaments-Sam 's friends and nections which feel more like Greek trag- come to cross purposes rather than a neighbors. edies underpinned by an Old Testament counterpoint. And there 's probably a sense of sin.) multitude of reasons why the film gives It isn 't merely a rl'atter of \" the individu- the effect of being both direct and side- al versus the mass .\" Merely to pose the In contrast , European films have long, deeply moving yet never quite mem- issue in those terms would be to forget usually found it easier to manage cross- orable , almost neo-realist (Sam seeks an HALLELUJAH! , OUR DAILY BREAD , and sections and pluralities of coexistence, education as the \" bicycle thief\" seeks a NORTHWEST PASSAGE . In these three films whether urban-pastoral (LE QUATORZE bicycle) in theme , yet profoundly anti- the individual fulfills himself within a JUILLET) or pessimistic (HOTEL DU NORD). neo-realist, almost anti-Populist, in spirit. thoroughly cohesive group in which he Wyler 's THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES is Perhaps the American scene, then, was shares one direct, common relationship something of a tour de force in its adapta- too complex for anyone to clarify within (the family) or purpose (the military expe- tion of a European theme to American any Hollywood framework-or anyone dition) . But STREET SCENE depends upon styles. (Wyler's mixture of virtuosity, cau- artist's mind. a diversity of purposes within an apparent tion , and moral solidity is another matter, group. Each individual, or couple , strug- and I think he has many of the traditional Vidor feels he was hamstrung by Sam- gles to retain a private integrity, not only bourgeois virtues as well as an out-of- uel Goldwyn 's excessive respect for a against one another (which , as direct fashion bourgeois caution.) Eventually, of prestigious stage play (as he seems to conflicts, are easier to handle) but along- 24 JULY 1973

course , \" omnibus Populism \" became an STREET SCENE. American genre also (see my remarks on STREET SCENE. REAR WINDOW in my book , The Strange STREET SCENE. Case of Alfred Hitchcock). It might be illuminating to consider STREET SCENE as a Chayefsky-Delbert Mann subject, done in the style of BACHELOR PARTY . One must of course remember that German and American populism , of one sort or another, precedes the French variety , and that , so far as social issues go , Clair is much remoter than Capra or Vidor. Nonetheless, Hollywood populism faded in the mid-Thirties. Meanwhile, its French counterpart rose to its apogee along with the Popular Front, the war years inspired the English to MILLIONS LIKE usand IT ALWAYS RAINSON SUNDAY , and Ital- ian neo-realism thrived in the postwar years, before Hollywood remembered a genre it had forgotten . In STREET SCENE one can sense the reservations which brought Hollywood populism into eclipse .' Fluidity and individualism apart, the pitch for American screen populism was further queered by the problem of ethno- cultural plurality, quite apparent here. The Moran-Kaplan animosity in STREET SCENE has some reference to religious animosities and earlier plays or song titles (Abie 's Irish Rose, \" Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean \" ) as well as to the Democratic party's rejection of Socialism . Moran's tough-guy style , all looming hulk and meaty fists , harks back to EASY STREET and BROKEN BLOSSOMS , and its somewhat anachronistic perpetuation through the blarney (not to say kitsch) of John Ford 's Victor McLaglen. If Hollywood hadn 't maintained its remarkable distance from America (for a variety of reasons, some of which are the public's fault as much as the producers '), ethno-cultural issues would surely have loomed much larger in movies than they seem to have done , and in forms less cryptic than those at which we shall glance when discussing THE WEDDING NIGHT. But , as Hitchcock observed, America's cultural plurality posed special problems, driving Hol- lywood to the alternative strategy, con- centrating on a few stock types, contexts, and comic-sentimental modes, and replacing real social connections and frictions by stylized high-class WASP set- tings or individualistic social vacuums. STREET SCENE is hard hit, forcing it to raise issues which it must encapsulate in cameo or jest. (The running gag about Italian vs. Danish versions of history stands in for , and negates, more violent running battles.) The issue is not merely one of social realism , but of catching the whole warp and woof of intimate personal experience. 'Now that film history is being extensively rewritten we may well find buried treasures which would make the preceding sentences too emphatic . Even so. critical idolatries and myopias are part of a consensus , of a climate , and themselves need accounting for. FILM COMMENT 25

This isn 't to insist on social general- Vidor 's may well have intervened in ac- At the same time , the intensity of the ization in every story . (In any c ase , this centuating rather than minimizing the couple 's feeling for each other is depen- film 's ending has one , as it is: the individ- disparity between Sam and his neigh- dent on , precisely, the film 's refusal of ualist's duty is to himself.) It 's as much bors . Vidor is confronted here with a the sentimental toughness with which a matter of tracing the ascendancy and gallery of passive, negative, stagnant, or Hollywood frequently disguised the vulnerability of emotion between individ- backward-looking characters. Yet his harsher aspects of the creed of self-per- uals, to which Vidor might seem one of sympathies go largely to those with will fectibility . As in SHOW PEOPLE , Sam and the best-suited American directors. and drive, to the resilient and the protest- Rose each have their own unique desti- \" What's my career matter when I could ing rather than to the permanently in- nies ; and it is life, as much as New York , be with you?\" sobs the young STREET jured, who become comic or dangerous that tears them apart. But fidelity to one's SC ENE student to his beloved . And Vidor or just plain mean . In contrast with its potential-which is also one 's relation- isn 't afraid of his weakness , perhaps be- European equivalents, the American film ship to the infinite-takes pride of place, cause (unlike Hawks, Walsh , and other seems to condemn most of its characters, perhaps, even over the social duty of directors whose tough dead-pans are as to see them as stick-in-the-muds self-improvement. To that extent, STREET drearily restricti ve as the English stiff- deficient in life force , and to give them SCENE is as anti-Borzagian as it is antithet- upper-lip) he accepts grief and volatility some quick pity, maybe, but much too ical to Renoir 's THE LOWER DEPTHS . Yet as among the forms of strong life force , little interest in savoring their quirks-in the life energy in each of the STREET albeit still to be tempered. Of course, the way that Pagnol , say, savors those SCENE lovers creates a gravitational pull Vidor's studies of enthusiasm maturing of Raimu in the MARIUS trilogy . Worse , so powerful that the separation is pain ; don 't have the compassion of John Ford, rather than struggling and failing with and the \" comic \" tenement creatures are who, as master of the male tear-jerker, these failures, we just look back at them . also real enough to be just a little knows that even hard-as-nails working- And in this falling off from THE CROWD we cramped and sad. class audiences will accept a lachrymose are perhaps seeing one reason for the hero , so long as his enduring toughness drying up of American populism in favor The division into acts is palpable , with has been established, and especially of crime films and Rooney-Garland pas- a \" director's cadenza\" here and there . when his grief is occasioned by the frus- teurization . The handful of montage accelerandi are tration of some stout-hearted desire, like effective enough: the heat; people start- never retiring from the U.S . Seventh Cav- In itself, STREET SCENE 'S bracing mo- ing into the frame as if to reiterate the alry. It may be that Hollywood toughness rality might imply a certain elitism of life echoing of a shot; and Rose 's descent was exaggerated by the cynicism of ado- force. Environment explains nothing, the from the \" el, \" which is more than merely lescents in big-city tough districts . argument goes, because some people a visual bravura piece, since the struc- Country-and-Western music is full of Wil- are able to escape from it; those who ture over the street, the crowded life in lie the Weepers; maybe Vidor's \" country cannot must bear some kind of \" collec- the street, and the loved one among the and Western \" roots have something to tive guilt. \" In even more primitive terms , crowd are like a climactic summation of do with his willingness to show male \" environmentalist \" arguments may be all the forces that might hold Sam back . \" weakness \" in family and love situations. turned against themselves thus: To ex- cuse people on the grounds that they are The film 's slice of life is suffiCiently We approach from another angle the victims of their environment is to imply moving to provoke a critical obsession complex question of Hollywood's oscilla- that they are as corrupt as their environ- with why the current of genius hasn 't tion between extreme sentimentality and ment. This can lead directly into a kind flowed through it. Perhaps the reason is extreme toughness-or, rather, violence. of Social Darwinist predestinarianism: its achievement of dramatic suspense The contrast between the two was a heathenism and Communism alike breed and braCing morality at the expense of staple of the gangster movie of the period a corrupt \" race \" who are virtually irre- a loss of identification with most of the (cf. PUBLIC ENEMY , LITTLE CAESAR , SCAR- deemable . Or , in Old Testament terms : cinema's spectators . It 's as if John in THE FACE , in descending order of merit), and Every citizen of Sodom and Gomorrah CROWD has lost interest in the clown in closely intermeshed with immigrant deserved death because his character THE CROWD . STREET SCENE remains a themes (Cagney is Irish-American , but was shaped by Sodom and Gomorrah , moving companion piece to THE CROWD ; Robinson and Muni, both Jews, play Ital- and any civic virtues he might have pos- but in the later film , Vidor preferred a ian immigrant figures). The idea of a sessed were either only apparent or out- deep moral perspective to a deep emo- Chicago gangster loving his ma strikes tional focus, and divided the winner Seventies audiences as absolutely hilari- weighed by corrupt motivations and sheep from the loser goats. It would seem ous, while the notion of emotional consis- applications. Thus, the superficially opti- that Hollywood ' s audiences were tency implicit in their hilarity seems to me mistic doctrine of human perfectibility prepared to despise screen images which stupid. The Hollywood contrast, however can accommodate a moralized cal- corresponded to their own reality rather clumsy , is at least an indication of the lousness , borrowing from the grim Cal- than to their own ideals. complicated tangle involving both the vinist notion that all but the elect are ethnic-group conservatism of an immi- radically depraved. The Champ grant generation and the adaptation by their sons to the seamy side of the Social No such condemnation appears in (1931 ) Darwinist jungle. It's worth remembering STREET SCENE , explicitly or implicitly; nor that STREET SCENE and DEAD END are two could it, without enraging its audience . In Tiajuana , a has-been boxer (Wal- sides of the same coin: youth's responses Nonetheless, the film 's close identifica- to a combination of city pressures and tion with Sam , mi xed with a certain dis- lace Beery) regularly begins his long the obsolescence of one 's parents' code. tance from everyone else (except Rose, climb back up the championship ladder. Vidor imbues the aim of going to college who , as a woman , is partly exempt) , And, as regularly, falls two rungs back, with a spiritual purposefulness which constitutes a careful avoidance of into the saloon-for all the efforts of his does have a real meaning . One need only conflict between an identification with son Oink (Jackie Cooper) and Oink 's recall the fate of Sylvia Sidney's other boy failure and a withdrawal of interest for gang. But the ex-champ 's sallies into a friends , who chose the other career , in those who are either insufficiently dy- FURY and YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE . namic or undeserving. Vidor had also to gaming saloon do win him a race horse; contend with anti-immigrant prejudice left All other problems apart, a certain over from the Twenties, in the conte xt of and, at the track, Oink meets his mother tempermental or attitudinal preference of which the film's very subject matter may Linda (Irene Rich). Long estranged from itself be a positive affirmation . the boy 's father, she has married a pros- perous businessman, who bribes the 26 JULY 1973

champ to let her see the boy. The threat Gang \" (which did appear in British com- accept the terms of the world upon which of losing Oink spurs the champ into a it depends, so that-by one of those logi- supreme effort, and he wins the fight ics), through the Dead End Kids and their cal paradoxes with which dramatic struc- which proves to be his last. He dies of tures abound-the moral dangers of the mutation into the Bowery Boys , up to their city world endear it to us against the a heart attack in the dressing room ; and exhortations of moral prudence. Better to British comic transposition as \" Lord live dangerously than not know how to Oink, wailing \" I want the champ,\" is live . swept up in his mother 's arms. Snooty and His Pals.\" This theme of the This balance is very lightly empha- THE CHAMP is a late-comer in the cycle inter-ethnic gang , which is American in sized by two minor details. First: the of waif stories that seems to have courts have given the champ custody of abounded in ~ollywood ' s early days. One origin , marks a third aspect of the family- the child ; maybe a plot convenience , it thinks of Chaplin 's THE KID with Jackie certainly implies desertion or misconduct Coogan , of Griffith 's BROKEN BLOSSOMS in-the-melting-pot theme. by the mother. Second: her husband 's with Lillian Gish , and of Sternberg 's THE appearance (sleek, smoothly musta- SALVATION HUNTERS, where an unattached The marriage of the champ and Linda chioed, smilingly complacent) puts him somewhere among the rich villain of the kid tags along with the boy and the was a hasty, romantic affair between CUl- cinema's innocent age, the B-feature rich woman . The theme here, of the impro- rancher , and Douglass Dumbrille vs. the vised or asymmetrical family , clearly tural incompatibles: the bride a wealthy Marx Brothers in A DAY AT THE RACES and complements the family 's disruptions in THE BIG STORE .' All the same , Linda has the bubblings of the melting pot (STREET WASP who has now outgrown her bold clearly lived down her wild-oats irrespon- SCENE, THE WEDDING NIGHT). THE CHAMP sibility, and Dink's prospective father-to- combines aspects of both genres. One flapper's pseudo-romanticism; the bride- be behaves very well. Pointedly, the film might also make an analogy with THE LAST makes nothing of the tempting and rele- COMMAND , and call it THE LAST KNOCK-OUT. groom , rejected by the socialite world vant theme of the asphalt jungle poten- Thematically , its closest relative is STREET tially corrupting the son as well as the SCENE : against his will , the boy must leave because of his failures in the ring , now father. Dink seems set to survive , his home background for a strange new smoothly enough. His pals are as amiable social world whose powers can develop returning to the asphalt jungle whence as his father. He 's sensible and disci- his fuller , truer , freer self. Although Vidor plined; and a gambling-saloon manager celebrates individual freedom , the antith- he came. The film thus involves itself in is much less rapacious towards the esis-of spiritual growth by failure , by champ than an easy moralism would have constraint, by fate-is never far away . a topical cultural schism. This distinction allowed . THE CHAMP was made before the -between wea lthy, rustic - suburban Conversely, the film repudiates the repeal of Prohibition , and perhaps the reverse pattern , exemplified by the story belongs a little more naturally in do-gooders and the struggling asphalt- present-day sequence of Griffith 's INTOL- some pre-Prohibition American city, or ERANCE , with its malevolent do-gooders among city strata. But a natural accept- junglers-recurs in DAMES .' In THE CHAMP , separating the waif and her love child . ance of illegal drinking and gambling THE CHAMP 'S Linda has exchanged her would arouse pressure-group outcries, or both types are generous and well-mean- old flighty irresponsibility for a beautifully goad Prohibitionist audiences into controlled impulsiveness. In one lovely misreading its principal characters as ing and the conflict is poignant precisely scene, a bored and tired Dink leaves his criminal riffraff. So the movie takes place childishly optimistic father at the dice because their life styles are mutually self- in Tiajuana-which is almost America table , finds an abandoned gambling anyway, being a resort colony just over exclusive, the story being a tragic conflict table , swings up on to it with the aplomb the California border-and, apart from the of long experience, lies out, tilts his Stet- opening mention of the Mexic an setting , between two mixtures of right and wrong .' son forward over his eyes, and falls im- and one brief shot of a Mexican police- So far as moral impeccability goes mediately to sleep. It could look like a man , one might as well be in pre- or classic example of atrocious childhood post-Prohibition America. Only the auto- towards winning our sympathies (which environment. Yet family love survives mobiles are anachronous. under such makeshift conditions, as isn 't very far) , Linda and Dink 's stepfather superbly as it does in Zeke 's one-room Vidor rarely mentions the film; maybe shack (in HALLELUJAH!). Linda's husband , he thought of it as just an assignment. would win hands down; but that's a rather The roots of its sentiment certain Iy who happens to be there , looks down on plunge into that popular iconography less vital matter than the warm and fallible the boy and discreetly switches off the which seems to have appeared first in light against which Dink's hat had imper- American newspaper comic sections loyalty of father and son . Dink is distinctly fectly shaded his eye . In that unposses- after 1890, and rapidly spread into mov- sive concern , that quiet acceptance, that ies.. A big , burly, kind-hearted brute is unimpressed by what Linda's life style neat control over environment, Dink's either unconsciously destructive or hi- father-to-be is established as a man who lariously slow-witted . The spiritual kith offers, and his subjectivity largely deter- generously makes his wife 's \"immoral\" and kin of this uncouth father-figure errors his own concern , and who accepts range from the Lon Chaney characters mines our rooting interest. We have a and cherishes her mistakes as his. The mentioned in our remarks on THE CROWD , film is both wise and tragic in accepting through Moran in STREET SCENE , to King double stake in their world: his father 's Kong , Lennie in OF MICE AND MEN , and ' Stupefyingly enough , the Marx Brothers manage even Desperate Dan , the cowboy-cum- success, and its effects on them both. a race horse in the first film , and accept handouts logger of The Dandy. (A British kids ' from a wealthy feminine do-gooder-none other comic character, his American style owes Our sense of that world 's temptations than Margaret Dumont. On this basis it's easy less to strip syndication than to the movie enough to imagine a joke Marx Brothers version influence.) And Dink's pals borrow from (drinking, gambling , a certain brutality) is of THE CHAMP . The multiplicity of parallels here and contribute to the inter-ethnic kids- helps explain complaints about Hollywood's love gang theme-from Hal Roach 's \" Our balanced by the obviously viable freedom of stereotype and cliche. of Dink' s life . And our involvement in the champ 's moral success demands that we ' DAMES is emphatically anti-do-gooder, but insists that its asphalt-junglers are lily-white suburbanites , too . All they do is look at innocently healthy showgirls w ho live together like pasteurized bach- elorettes . The film 's very emphasis on scoptophilia is made innocent by the cheeky vi tality of which it is a part. Much later, around 1950, Wolfenstein and Leites devoted a chapter to various oddities on the theme o f Performers and Onlookers. At about the same time, commentators noted that show business-an individualistic narcissism-was beginning to predominate over such \" useful '\" vo- cations as medicine, teaching , and social work . Since then , the emphasis has shifted to protago- nists of moralized brutality: sheriffs , cops, cowboy avengers . Perhaps Forties idyllism and Sixties blood-lust are linked by an amalgam of isolation, individualism , megalomania , and competitiveness . Oddly , REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE offers a useful transitional title and theme: the misfit, rejecting popularity (narcissism), does in fact find a cause , by assuming a father-figure role towards a school- mate who is wantonly shot down by the police . ' Later, the Hays Office ban on sympathy going to immoral characters will loom large among the factors which impel Hollywood to its ludicrous emphasis on conflict as the consequence of either goody-baddy polarities or misunderstandings , with an amazing etiolation of common-sense areas in between. At least, misunderstandings paraphrase an ambient irritability-people don 't wait to hear explanations , or they respond in a parano id way, rather than trying to understand different ethnic value-systems and styles . English critic James Agate is acute and caustic on the resulting infanti- lism of Forties Hollywood drama . Later still , a pseudo-Freudian line about complexes perpetu- ates the crudely individualistic denial of social diversity, with the mid-Fifties marking a significant reversal of this attitude. FILM COMMENT 27

THE CHAMP. Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery. the proposition that love and kindness may exist in radically incompatible terms 28 JULY 1973 -which wasn 't so common in Hollywood during the next thirty years. While accepting (as of course the \" wets \" wou ld also have done) that alco- hol destroyed many people's lives, the film attains a similar moral balance about gambling and betting , which were also contentious issues. Yes , the cha mp loses his race horse by gambling; but that's also how he won it in the first place. Maybe because his hopes are associated with a reliance on luck rather than on the discipline of physical training, luck can- cels itself out. After galloping with the fast motion of (the boy's) inspired will, the horse falls and loses the race . Luck giv- eth , and luck taketh away. Nonetheless, it is at that race that Dink meets his mother. So maybe that modest degree of mo ra l effort is rewarded by provi- dence-although in initially disturbing ways. Meanwhile, Linda's husband's money keeps the champ going. A close-up em- phasizes the hand-out theme. Is a decent welfare to the deserving poor preferable to the pseudo-self-reliance of gambling and betting? Do the rich have a responsi- bility to their poor \" cousins,\" even when the poor aren 't especially impeccably de- serving , but rather floundering along in a hand-to-mouth , worse-than-usual way? Or are we watching the secret, furtive reliance of the old , boisterous America, somehow degraded, on a step-family rep- resenting an alliance of only apparently innocent do-gooders and only apparently smooth Big Business?' Does the race- track encounter establish on-track bet-· ting as a socially respectable affair that's not really so different from its illegal offtrack cousin or from the gambling sa- loons? Does it thus insinuate a rough- and-ready moral democracy between the respectables and the disreputables? Or merely that His Eye Is On The Sparrow- everywhere? Hints of military school, if Dink goes with his mother, mayor may not seem to threaten American liberty more than they promise to firm up American man- liness. (Vidor went to one, and might just be ambivalent about it.) But the question does arise as to whether Dink's gam- bling-bed hasn 't an equal and opposite excess, or worse alternative, elsewhere. The champ 's death in triumph makes the film something of an elegy to a lost, free , rascally America , in which Wallace Berry' s female equivalent would be Mae West. The complementary argument to this nostalgia can be found in La Cava's MY MAN GODFREY: that progressivism and 'The alliance between reformism and capitalism (Margaret Dumont, Douglass Dumbrille) antici- pates Chr istopher Lasch 's observation , in The Decline of the American Left. that progressivism generally had the support of Big Business, a fact that didn 't always help its cause .

Big Business must provide planned hous- Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney. In- dressing room , where one observes the ing for those who may seem just bums deed, later child-moppet love duos are terrible ambivalence of truth . For the but who, given half a chance, won 't be- anticipated in THE CHAMP when Dink champ's moral triumph-as much for the which is just about how the balance meets his half-sister. Though one may be boy ' s sake as for his own - and his death works out in THE CHAMP . Dink 's future is reading back from later pseudo-precoci- reduce Dink to his mother's boy at last. with the charitable rich , whose military ties, the girl's provocative interest and the academy might constitute too orderly boy's disdain of \" Dames! \" do sexualize Against its nostalgia for naughty- the scene gently, prettily, and a little bawdy-sporty Tiajuana, and overriding healthy a future for him . But if Vidor incestuous ly. (Can a half-sister be a fu- any qualms we may have about military accepts that moral worth has nothing to ture wife , like the adopted sister in HALLE- discipline, is the film 's moral , which is do with the usual do-gooder notions of LUJAH! , or by analogies in Genesis?) Dink broadly progressive and reformist. It in- it, there 's still no sign of his seeing any goes on to treat his mother with the same volves several specific references to obligations other than those existing disdain. First she seeks to kiss his mouth , controversies, about the effects of envi- within the biological-adoptive family. I'd and then , quickly, realizing his feelings , ronment on character, which were raging doubt whether the film is to be read in averts his mouth from her own to her at the time . Wellman 's PUBLIC ENEM Y also a welfare sense. The hand-out close-up cheek . We are almost back in that ambig- makes this clear: Tom Powers (Cagney) also has that note of shame, even in uous area explored by Goldwyn's KID has a virtuous brother, a plot device sug- Depression times, that's so pOintedly de- MILLIONS, when the plug-ugly who 's pre- gesting that general social environment nied by the first word of HALLELUJAH, I'M tending to be Eddie Cantor's long-lost is only a small part of the story , and that A BUM. father goes to kiss him on the mouth . This Tom is responsible for his own normal-enough peasant family salutation psychopathy . In much the same spirit, THE CHAMP relates also to the theme (at moments of intensity) seems to have Dink and his pals have-so far, at least- of \" immigration shock\" (on the analogy become increasingly embarrassing, pre- survived an awful environment with their of \" future shock\") indicated in the notes sumably because the WASP scruple had essential innocence untainted ; but on STREET SCENE. Dink understands life, made the mouth-kiss exclusively sexual there's nothing to stop spectators from and society, and has adapted to it rather in Ameri ca at this time. Family contacts seeing the theft of sweets as leading to better than has the older-generation were becoming dephysicalized. delinquency and maybe Father Flana- figure as incarnated by the \" Irish \" Wal- gan 's BOYS TOWN , or Dink 's disdain of the lace Beery. It's the boy who acts as the Earlier, the boy strips his hung-over maternal principle leading him towards father's infinitely tolerant conscience father down to his long johns. Later, when the territory inhabited by Lewt (Gregory about drinking; who undresses him when the father begins to undress the tired-out Peck) in Vidor's DUEL IN THE SUN . Certainly he's hung over; who never loses hope boy, Dink asserts his independence- the champ's death is felt as a traditional and faith ; who trains alongside him as if more than his mOdesty-by undressing human tragedy , and THE CHAMP (like THE to keep him going; who even drives the himself. The undressing theme is capped CROWD) is moving precisely because automobile. I don't know what Mexican when Dink lets his mother remove his Vidor's sense of the city carries a sense laws were at the time , but my distinct shirt (to his bare chest, a new touch), but both of social pressure and of individual impression of anomaly seems related to objects as she 's about to drop his freedom . It's a freedom in which mo ral the simultaneous discussion of whether trousers; and she very sensibly respects success may be snatched from the jaws Dink accepted sweets from his mother his frail , manly modesty , rather than fol- of defeat, and in which morality retains (which the champ would resent as a lowing the expectedly rigid middle-class its almost pagan sense of self-control and bribe, and which Dink would disdain as line about hygiene. In the print of THE the integrity of life force-which in the end charity from a dame) or swiped them CHAMP I saw , an admittedly awkward- goes ironically beyond the individual's (whic h they both would agree is quite all looking cut suggested that Kink kept his existence. right). trousers on all night, no doubt defensive- ly. This certainly looks like the fi rst cau- The images here recall the grubby The scene of the actual theft is punctil- tious dawn of a new intimacy. realism of THE CROWD and STR EET SCENE . ious in its detail. Dink monologues aloud And the space, although free enough to as if to reassure us that he 's stealing to But the fullest expression of physical be appropriated at the characters ' own give to his friends as much as to himself; contact occurs as father and son , both discretion , is also subject to quick, fluid and this generous absence of distinction in their underwear, share a bed. The camera movements of the sort one finds between friends and self easily redeems father , rolling over in his sleep , captures in contemporary films by Lewis Milestone the equal absence of distinction between all the blankets; the boy mutters irascibly, and Jean Renoir (as improved sound others ' property and one's own . The then rolls around to dovetail himself into equipment allowed the cinema to revel child-father relationship is a heroic dis- his father 's form , from shoulder to ankle; once more in an earlier fluidity) . The order, complemented by the kids ' gang then he pats his shoulder with a slight result is a fascinating conjugation of as a peer group that's often in harmoni- physical awkwardness that redoubles the smooth, sharp, no-nonsense tracks and ous internal disagreement. A parent-child effect of emphatic fraternity. It's simple, pans, which evoke city busyness, and of relationship is not at all hubris ; it's its it's everyday, and it's full of decisions the city's subservience to the film's char- reverse , a tour de force that's finally and surprises, including the conscious acters when their will or feel ings take defeated and resolved by the tragic twist acceptance of another's egoism-which command. which makes the little man a child again , once more makes the child Dink the as he \"s hould \" be . Paroxysmatically, he parent. (The scene is doubly moving for Dink's clambering over balconies and cries \" I want the champ! \" (l ike \"We want rejecting that developing taboo on non- signaling from rooftops at his mother's the champ!\"), and can find no consola- sexual physical contact.) California home is partly hooligan free- tion in the adults and children around him dom , partly a drift away from his pursuing until his mother's arm , swooping around Conversely, after the champ's horse half-sister, and partly the appropriation of him and sweeping him away, seems vi- falls, he reassures the boy that the horse a home to whose spaciousness he is sually to promise a gradual consolation is all right, long before either he or we unaccustomed. He finally reaches an and a new hope. can possibly be certain of it. This mixture apex from which he can signal to his of lies (peace at any price) and protective- father, dozing at the wheel of their car. In terms of movie cycles, it's easy ness is also quite beautiful. All these This exploration of rooftop freedom is as enough to see in Dink a median term contacts and distance-keepings build pointed as that of the rebels in ZERO DE between the silent-era waifs and the pre- towards the boy's final collapse in the CONDUITE , and it doubtless expresses the cocious, adult-manipulating moppets of FILM COMMENT 29

spirit in which Dink will greet his brave almost quivering as if to spread and curve catch a rough convulsiveness , an impo- new world . Like THE BIG PARADE 'S Apper- and enfold him like wings against her tent protest , an incredulous futility-all son , Dink will retain a sympathetic de- breast. Yet she keeps her hands behind transmitted physically, yet related to a tachment from any sort of academy. (Did her back , carefully restraining herself in philosophical context, via his friends and a \" bad \" environment protect his basic respect for this young stranger's man- parental feeling. freedom? Perhaps .) Confronting his liness ; she is an ideal Vidorian mother. mother in her drawing room , Dink appro- Dink 's hands are in the same position . Parado xically, THE CHAMP'S age shows priates \" his \" space defensively, by At last, in the dressing room , Linda's long mainly in its acting . Wallace Beery 's soft throwing his cowboy hat across to the arm scoops across the space between voice purveys feelings a little more sofa and then holding a cushion over his them , pulling him into her side. broadly than we are used to . Jackie knees as if to keep her at bay; meanwhile , Cooper seems just a little too unsoiled her body visibly craves to touch him (in For luck, the boy spits on his father 's and , as it were , presuburbanized . Sponge a prefigurement of the undressing cash-in-hand , on his fists, and on his (Rosco Ates) , with his stammer, smacks scene) . And as Dink visits the champ in gloves. The gesture is laden with the of Runyonesque kitsch . Of course, styles prison, with the father so ashamed that characteristic ambiguities of a struggling of physical behav ior change as fast as he doesn 't want to see his son, a close-up class. Spitting, of course, expresses con- anything else, and the critic should be has the prison bars boxing the boy's face tempt; but to be spat upon by a loved wary about making definitive judgments, in , as if he were in jail. one can express both preemptive expia- even if he suspects which way Hollywood tion and an absorption of fraternal inso- stylization was likely to err. What do most Only environmental sounds are used lence, thus bringing into the fray one's of us know (except from films, and a few throughout the film , until the last, quick, own goodness and the loved one 's exceptional photographs) about the convulsive swelling up of a snatch of strength . During the fight, Vidor spares gestures and cadences characteristic of \"There 's No Place Like Home.\" As Dink us those typical , boring shots of the inter- New York in this era , and about signifi- lies in bed he hears mellow ragtime ested party rooting at ringside; here, Dink cant deviations from the norm? All the played on a saloon piano, and later he is made a \"second ,\" and given things to same , this critic was struck, equally, by alludes to his pleasure in hearing the do: yes, spitting on the champ 's glove, certain modernities. In three-quarters music as he drifts off to sleep (another but also holding his rinSing bowl and profile, Beery looks oddly like Charlton of the natural beauties of an environment (dangerously) nearly throwing in the Heston . At other moments, he recalls fuller in vitality than the pious can under- towel for pity 's sake-all of which is as W.C. Fields, with that gruff repudiation of stand). During the pre-fight ceremonies, slick and quick and precariously bal- pretentiousness .' the only sound is the roar of the crowd . anced as anything Hitchcock ever con- The context gives this noise an ambiva- trived. But Vidor (or his writers, or his way Although Vidor's autobiography is si- lence characteristic of Vidor films , in with the writers ' master scenes , or all lent about THE CHAMP, the film's emotional which sympathy and indifference, good together) gives this succession of twists impact survives our relatively sophisticat- and evil , or their counterfeits, are so often a sense of impulse, of ambivalence, and ed awareness of the Hollywood formulae inextricably mixed. The crowd likes the therefore of a resolution and discipline and trends which it accommodates. In champ, and they want a ferocious fight- quite unlike Hitchcock's colder calcula- 1973, a group of English art students, in which he'll die. tion. who share their generation's suspicion and contempt of sentiment, found them- Perhaps the antitheses of Dink's Tia- In the prison , the champ smashes the selves gripped , disarmed , convinced by juana bedtimes are provided by the boy across the mouth in a gesture whose THE CHAMP . I certainly found it not at all champ 's dressing-room death and by the sudden , fierce, offhand diagonal curve unworthy of THE CROWD and STREET boy's first visit to his mother's house. The across the screen is all but a converse SCENE. Within its limits, it succeeds rather champ's triumph-and-death form a pair to that of the mother's embracing arm at better than STREET SCENE . Indeed, THE so long expected that Vidor has prepared film 's end . As the champ lies dead , and CHAMP may well number among (or be surprises to enliven them , quite as care- no one dares tell Dink, the boy screams ranked very close behind) the best city- fully as Hitchcock could have done. First, with all the protest of his love against the life films of Hollywood's still-underex- the champ's horse has lost the race, so truth , and beats his little body against the plored populist cycle, and its foreign we're not completely certain that the dressing room wall , just as the champ had co unterpa rts. champ won 't lose this fight. Second, the smashed his own guilty hand against the champ's physical vulnerability has been prison cell 's stone wall. In his grief, the 'Much later comes Mr. Magoo (a middle-class W. in our minds from the beginning of the boy circles the dressing room , confront- C. Fields), whose complacent myopia has replaced film, and is clearly stated by an uncon- ing one person after another and soothed the misdirected and injured pretentiousness of a cerned doctor just before the fight. by none-although he 's almost calmed , rougher time and place. Imaginations will undoubt- Throughout that fight, Vidor can play cat for a few seconds , by the Negro, who is edly boggle at our hypothesis of a network that and mouse with us over the heart attack, dearest to his heart. And if that detail would place Wallace Beery at the center of lines delaying until the fight is well over and recalls HALLELUJAH! , the sequence of of possibilities leading to Charlton Heston on one the dressing room almost reached. One quick, violent, convulsive confrontations rad ius , Emil Jannings and Lon Chaney on others , might ask why Vidor doesn't wait even anticipates the choreography of Kirk and W. C. Fields and Mr. Magoo on still others-all longer. Perhaps so that the champ's sud- Douglas 's saloon sequence in Vidor 's linked by tangents. In doing so, I am attempting den fall in the corridor can occur starkly , MAN WITHOUT A STAR . to indicate that part of the bUSiness of criticism unexpectedly, in contrast with a quick, is to make surprising (but true) suggestions about natural movement. Indeed, a notable, The champ's death and Linda 's ges- opposite psychic or socia-psychic options. Critics sideways-on shot of his entourage shows ture are keyed to the rhythm of the se- have too often been content to make immediately them abruptly frozen in an ongoing pos- quence, with a brusqueness more sug- obvious connections between tautological exposi- ture , with one man almost in an on-your- gestive of strong, deCisive feeling than of tion and aesthetic or moral evaluation. And yet , mark position, horror on his face. The an unfeeling deadpan . Like Hawks, Vidor all the complexities of miscasting and replace- champ ' s fall is a cheap , sleazy shock knows just how to cut short a moment ment-casting await further exploration . It's worth between two worlds, and it is climaxed the audience expects-to \" bat it and go remembering the rumors that MGM developed Cyd by a quick, grubby \" funeral procession\" on. \" But, because he is an infinitely Charisse as a \" threat \" (potential substitute) to into his dressing room. greater artist than Hawks, Vidor inserts discipline Ava Gardner, while Columbia developed it in a context , not of mere deadpan Kim Novak as a threat to Rita Hayworth. Thus , In Dink 's first visit to his mother's restraint, but of intricately counterpointed unlikes are also likes . Commentators have already house, Linda wooed the boy, her back experience. Dink's body movements remarked on Heston 's long line of Biblical (quasi- patriarchal) roles ; Moses, though Jewish , was the WASP 's \" immigrant father\" who died on the threshold of the promised land. The differences between Beery and Heston are just as interesting, particularly since both are potentially hardhat characters of the kind Hollywood usually avoided studiously. But the influence of Heston both on and off the screen probably qualifies him as an actor-auteur, perhaps near the Branda class. 30 JULY 1973

Our Dail~ Bread tions. But to leave matters thus would be own money . Criticism of big business is to remain anodyne and boring. Vidor's (1934) problem here was to select just such both a popular plank of the Democ ratic points , and treat them in just such a way , John (Tom Keene) and Mary (Karen that an underlying ambiguity does not platform and normally associated with the impair the excitements of conflict, shock, Morley) are a young city couple brimful and challenge. Thus converse political Populist movement, which verged on So- attitudes may be combined in such a way of high spirits and cheerful drive. Came as to cancel each other out ideologically cialism and might indeed have taken it the Depression. But at last they got that while producing a double surprise dra- stroke of Napoleonic luck which apathet- matically . OUR DAILY BREAD offers some up if it hadn 't become incorporated into ic or embittered souls would have let slip ingenious examples. (And , in describing them , I am using the terms \" left\" and the Democratic party instead. through their fingers. They inherit a small \" right \" in the journalistic , but generally received , sense whereby the right em- But our left-right, Republican-Demo- spot of land somewhere out in the Middle phasizes the individual 's property rights , West and have the guts to go out there and the left an egalitarian community cratic dichotomy breaks down insofar as, and somehow make it pay. On their way spirit.) they pick up fellow drop-outs and fugi- in America , a radical criticism of big busi- tives of all kinds until the twosome has 1. John is ready to cede ownership of the land to the co-operative (a very left- ness is a right-wing tradition too . And OUR become a co-operative. John makes over wing gesture), which the co-operative feels it would be ungrateful to accept (a DAILY BREAD asserts , not the need for the control of his land to the group; and, right-wing attitude) . The reciprocal ges- despite a politician 's advocacy of a ma- ture creates an atmosphere of dynamic some sort of \" anti-trust\" spirited control jority vote system, the group acclaims the goodwill, and the dramatic surprises make the political ambiguity look like a by the government over the banks , in the idea of a strong leader-John, who had series of political challenges. name of the people, but the poor man 's contributed the vision, the initiative, the 2. John is ready to abide by a majority property, and the faith in others. vote (a left-wing principle) but the co-op- self-help-a VOluntary , corporate , morally erative demands a strong leader (a right- Rapidly the co-operative runs into wing attitude, though one which the left inspired form of rugged individualism. difficulties, some internal, some external. is normally ready to cede in a crisis situa- A bully tries to corner some land, but is tion , which this may be felt to be) . The film seems to me to align its city- cowed by the tough escaped convict, who becomes the community's unofficial The advocate of the democratic prin- versus-country dichotomy with a Popu- \"cop. \" The banks are altogether unsym- ciple is a pompous , demagogic politician pathetic, and the community has to (democracy as demagoguery being a lism (in the political sense) which asserts struggle along with so little money that right-wing attitude), but the antidemocra- a \" little man 's,\" farmers ', and artisans ', the convict offers to give himself up so tic principle is democratically acclaimed as to get in a claim to the reward money. (so democracy is not demagogic). The individualism against the tentacles of The community won 't hear of it, but he image of corrupt vote-catching politi- is betrayed by Sally, the attractive, cians loomed large in Republican denun- banks and big business . It asserts an old , perfidious city girl, who means to keep ciations of both Democratic city ma- the reward for herself and for John, with chines like Tammany Hall and Southern established, perhaps obsolescent grass- whom she has fallen in love . As Democratic corruption . There is also an everyone's spirits flag, John becomes implication that the American democratic roots conservatism against what Richard infatuated with her, and even flees the system is corrupt, and should be left co-op, utterly demoralized. But he returns alone-which might seem an apolitical Hofstadter calls the \" pseudo-conserva- contention (idealism turned desperate!) after seeing a vision of the convict. And or a special form of Republican \" immobi- tism \" that preaches \" What's good for lism\" as against Roosevelt's New Deal (in as the seemingly interminable drought which governmental intervention loomed General Motors is good for America .\" The dooms the crop, he initiates the digging controversially large). As in Capra 's MR . of an irrigation canal from the nearby DEEDS GOES TO TOWN , private enterprise film is ambiguous as to whether the com- river during the forty-eight hours after has both the means and will to pull itself which the corn must die. up by its own bootstraps and put the poor munity represents some kind of dropping back on their own two feet. In this there This outline obviously bristles with im- is nothing specifically anti-Democratic, out of the big business-dominated sys- plications which are not merely ideologi- since the New Deal program was cal but directly political. OUR DAILY BREAD thoroughly eclectic and pragmatic. But tem altogether, or whether it represents was in fact widely criticized as left wing so long as a need for government or state by the Hearst Press (ironically, after intervention isn 't raised. it's hard to see an internal counterweight within the sys- Vidor's association with Marion Davies) how a film can be said to support the New and as right wing by elements on the left Deal against those aspects of it to which tem itself.\\ (the latter being less acrimonious-the even its opponents didn't really object. film was too right wing to win the First Vidor's Populist streak interacts in prize at a Moscow Film Festival , but it was The film may seem left wing insofar awarded the Second). as the banks feature prominently as vil- complex ways with his mixture of Emer- lains. And certainly this attack on big This ambiguity is a result of a careful business was so controversial that all the son ian transcendentalism and rugged in- technique, inherited by Hollywood from big studios-fearful of the banks on which show business generally (and indeed they depended for finance-refused to dividualism . And there is a compatibility from political rhetoric itself), of seeking finance the film , forcing Vidor to find his out and dwelling on the factors common 'The following quotations from a symposium on to as wide a range of beliefs as possible , Populism in Government and Opposition. Spring and suppressing or skimming lightly over 1968, relate interestingly to Vidor's film . Peter divisive or embarrassing aspects and op- Wiles : \" Populism was a moderate anarchy ... Un- ited States populism was a capitalist popu- lism ... It concerned small enterprises as a gener- al rule , but not only peasants .. . emphasis should be placed on the word \" co-operation \" and ... it should be defined as the agreed ownership, on a small scale , in localities , in a democratic manner, of some of the means of production... . There was a large amount of purely co-operative Popu- lism . Once that word was firmly defined, was there any case for saying that there was any Socialist populism at all? Was not even Russian narodni- chesvo co-operative and profoundly non-Social- is!? \" Peter Calvert : \" ... basically it was a rural movement seeking to realize traditional va lues in a changing society ... the characteristic of a Populist movement was to take on the ideological color of its surroundings .\" Donald Macrae: \" The theory of personalism was most typical of popu- lism . Populism claimed that the individual should be a complete man . Complete men , living ideally in independent agrar ian virtue , would agree with one another. The paradigmatic man of populism , unlike his communist cousin , was fi xe d, static , engaged in hi s Faustian quest to conquer all Nature. .. Populism ... went beyond democracy to consensus ... it distrusted the state and the bureaucracy ... even if populism co uld be indivi d- ualistic it was always against any form of compeiti- tive individualism ... \" In contradistinction to those who saw Populism as a strand within Socialism , Peter Worsley \" would extend the label to cover many kinds of radicalism-Poujadism , Nazism, McCarthyism and the North American phenome- non of the entrepreneurial , capitalist farming operation.\" Macrae says that Populism often showed \" Preference for inflation, easy credit, cur- rency reform rather than economic planning.\" And Worsley adds that \" Populism was a development ideology par excellence . It was an ideology of transition from ' rural idiocy ' to modernized soci- ety . \" FILM COMMENT 31

OUR DAILY BREAD. Karen Morley and Tom Keene. between Populism and a competitive ideology, despite the former's insistence OUR DAILY BREAD. Center are John Qualen , Tom Keene and Karen Morley. on \" a fair chance\" as against the heredi- tarian callousness of Social Darwinism. 32 JULY 1973 Indeed, the social forces making for the latter may explain why American Popu- lism could never quite become Socialist or Fascist, as its European counterparts did-despite waverings in both directions. The coincidence of ownership and lead- ership in OUR DAILY BREAD may be just a convenience for the purposes of political ambiguity; or it may express aspects of Jeffersonian democracy, which empha- sized the yeoman farmer as the backbone of democracy, distrusted Eastern mer- cantilism and anticipated later reactions against big business and demagoguery. The co-operative differs from a limited company only insofar as its shareholders put their work where their money is (or instead of money). In this sense it repre- sents a kind of primitive capitalism , in- volving , to borrow Donald Macrae's phrase , \" the full man \" (although this has the Puritanical overtones of a full moral commitment rather than academic- humanist ones). Populism 's absence of emphasis on large-scale planning ap- pears also in the fact that , as a French interviewer observed , OUR DAILY BREAD ' S dramatic structure hinges on the co-op- erative producing an abundant corn crop during the Depression , a period of catastrophic under-demand during which farmers were notoriously burning the very crop which Vidor's co-operative was la- boring so heriocally to produce. Had the film centered on a more self- supporting community, it might have been economically more realistic . But it would presumably have offered less scope for that love of expansion-that act of faith in , if not the big business system , at least the American system . And it would have registered as a negative with- drawal rather than an exhilarating expan- sion . In fact , attempts at producers ' co- operatives had been a feature of American history, but (as in England) had mostly floundered, since independence from economic systems isn 't easily at- tained. Nonetheless , the film 's hope in something unconventional and non-indi- vidualistic could seem New Deal-like in spirit. But its combination of extreme va- gueness about market forces and ex- treme precision about property rights suggests a right-wing basis to Vidor's (and perhaps his audience's) thought. The co-operative is morally redemp- tive , as the criminal 's self-sacrifice sug- gests . And clearly Vidor is evoking that American tradition whereby life in the West offers a fresh start to any man whose force has been frustrated, de- based , or perverted by the city jungle. But the film 's hard case is slinky young Sally , playing city music (jazz) on her phono- graph a few hours after her old man 's death. She proves incorrigible, and quits.

Here Vidor asserts his usual resistance of a bull. It 's more than a simple celebra- copulating with the fertile mUd . This is to scapegoat solutions . She isn 't the one tion of virility-work, love, lust, with almost an inversion of the images of the rotten apple that rots the whole barrel. woman in a subservient role . It's as if his copulating couple in L'AGE D' OR , and cer- John is attracted to her insofar as his own work had imbued him with a new appreci- tainly a spiritual antithesis of other Vidor resolution is weakening-as the commu- ation and a new maleness, the two going swamp images (Hot Shot's death in the nity's sudden enlargement threatens to together, for now his passion has no need forest in HALLELUJAH I , the swamp deaths diffuse its cohesion , and as difficulties of the vamp , but grows from its own roots , in RUBY GENTRY). But if man may here amass. The John-Sally relationship paral- in his body, towards his woman . And abandon himself, childishly, a little crazi- lels that of Zeke and Chick-a byproduct woman is by no means restricted to a ly, to the embrace of Mother Earth , it is of \" bad faith ,\" eventually purified , with passive feminine role ; for her sisters, like by way of recompense for his effort of the community 's internal difficulties re- the pioneer matriarchs of old , hold their will against the desert. Charles Barr ob- solved , not simply by success in the vul- torches high for their menfolk to work serves that earlier, John and Mary settle gar sense , but by a hard-earned moral through the night, and wield shovel and down to sleep , but cannot do so until their success. This may explain why the brief, picka xe by their side . In a curious con- bodies are touching; and the image is final image of rustic joviality seems so verse of the romanticism of lust (which , immediately followed by John 's spade overheated. By trying to transform a Sat- certainly, is not absent from Vidor's digging the earth. Not so much a Freu- urday Evening Post success-image into work), the detail implies that true male- dian symbol as suggesting the systole an expression of spiritual vitality, while ness is the basis of family stability , for and diastole of self-abandonment and also capping the preceding climax, Vidor it responds to any woman , not imperson- self-assertion , of emotion and will , of the inadvertently produces an incongruous ally , but as herself, and has no need for Dionysian and the Apollonic , of the com- blend of Mid-western prosperity and extravagant provocation and promiscu- munal and the diverse. Negro gospel fervor. The film could have ity. The image of John as 'stud ' stallion afforded a gently anticlimactic note, carries the opposite sense from that It's easy to be cynical and to complete stressing contentment and viability rather which \" fun morality,\" turned competitive both the film 's title and its climax with a than a kind of uproarious success, which or permissive , may be too quick to read much later film about New York life: Ed- was already sufficiently established in the into it. ward Dmytryk's GIVE us THIS DAY, whose extremely beautiful images of rejoicing as hero dies in the wet cement pouring on the parched crop is refreshed by the river \" I believe that the climax of OUR DAILY him in a building accident. But Vidor's film water. BREAD ... is an e xample of film sense in goes beyond any specific political, eco- its most comprehensive form ,\" writes nomic, or social position to celebrate (1) Similarly, the good girl-vamp dichot- Vidor. \" Digging a long ditch in straight , man 's relationship with his Mother Earth , omy now seems somewhat out-of-key, pictorial action \" is the problem with (2) an honest assertion of honest capital- which his climax is faced . And it is virtual- ism , and (3) a classic of the Russian silent and conventional in the worst Hollywood ly impossible to do justice to the inventive- cinema. For despite the accents and the sense. The good gingham girl-next-door ness and variety of his mise-en-scene rhythm (which is not at all a peasant is quite as attractive and glamourized as without at least one frame-still or sketch rhythm) , its parallels to a collective farm the vamp , who's merely slinkier, more of every set-up. Vidor, going far beyond story are evident enough . provocative, more experienced. So when Hollywood's professional rules of thumb, the hero makes the right decision he 's reveals himself here as a director in the The disparity of rhythms between OUR able to renounce his cheesecake and class of Eisenstein or Pabst. In strictly DAILY BREAD and THE GENERAL LINE is as have it too . Despite the very real spiritual realistic terms , the action has its real or crucial as the contrasts, within Eisen- difference between the two women , the apparent implausibilities; e.g . the route is stein 's film , between the Cubo-Futurist hypocrisy is obvious. But if Vidor allows still being surveyed after digging has elements (the cream separator, the dyna- his country girl a too-Hollywood face , he begun . But the movement is as strictly micized numbers) and those glum, suspi- nonetheless allows more than just a hint rhythmed (with a metronome and a drum) cious, peasant faces , lit like Rembrandts to the effect that it is for the community , as any of Busby Berkeley 's production and verging on Breughelesque carica- rather than for Mary alone, that John numbers; the lines of sweating men cor- ture. Populism 's attempt to perpetuate renounces Sally's attractions, and re- respond to les girls-or to the forgotten past virtues in the present also involved turns . Although , in the final shot , the men . Berkeley's visual ideas find their a search for new forms of assertion; and couple's bliss seems unalloyed, it re- counterpart in the astonishingly varied OUR DAILY BREAD is also about mechani- mains a focal point of the communal succession of topography, activities, zation. The \" caterpillar tracks\" of men loyalty, rather than a root of it. The com- postures, and movements which Vidor with picks and shovels, moving across munity-as well as , or rather than , the invents and choreographs. The crocodile the countryside at their implacable individual couple-seems a principal of bending and straightening men ad- speed , are not just a gang but a visually generator of happiness. In this respect vances as steadily as a Roman phalan x. reminiscent converse of a factory con- the film keeps its discreet but welcome The surveyors assert spaced , stiff, immo- veyor belt, a mass production line. They distance from the suburban ideal , bile verticals. The \" Iaborioso\" of the dig- are so many John Henrys calling on Tay- whereby a community is built out of atom- ging is suddenly counterpointed by the lorism to match the steam drill 's speed . ic couples. \"allegretto \" of the women rushing with They come over the brow of a hill almost flickering torches. One man faints in a as strangely as the tank in Pabst's WEST- Any contemporary intellectual audi- dust cloud ; a leak in a ramshackle aque- FRONT 1918. The simultaneity of surveying ence can be guaranteed to laugh , Freu- duct pours water over a man's bare and digging is inspired by the same ap- dian-wise , as John and Mary watch their chest. The felling of a tree involves two- peal to industrial speed, from which rustic first little shoot sprouting . But the scene handled saws (a criss-cross of horizontal America learns a trick or two, but without is of fertility in the truer sense , whereby , movement and an immobile vertical) . The selling its soul. In this respect , OUR DAILY if the shoot is a phallic symbol , the phallus two struggling men are suddenly rein- BREAD evokes both Disney's insistence is also a vegetation symbol. The green forced by the arrival of an automobile, on the jollity of modern methods when fire that through the flesh-fuse drives the slewing neatly in an implied curve along properly domesticated by Mickey Mouse juice ... In a brief pause during the race the horizontal. and his friends and the feeding machine to irrigate the crop, Mary hands John a of MODERN TIMES. mug of coffee ; and , as he gazes gratefully The co-op 's triumph is celebrated by at her, the steam from the coffee , min- men somersaulting in the irrigated soil , It's obvious that all three filmakers gling with his breath in the cold night air , or lurching motorbikes through it, as if are working from different viewpoints: is like the steam rising from the nostrils Vidor from an authentic Populism , Disney FILM COMMENT 33

from a more sentimentalized position, and violence, and the super-tough hard- the prostitute's hearse. (Ford takes the and Chaplin from a left-anarcho- hat of FIVE EASY PIECES rapidly quitting his same attitude towards the unemployed of liberalism . Bizarre as the range of films oil field to return to the idle rich whence THE GRAPES OF WRATH , who inherit no land may seem , it is natural enough that meth- he came . Yet what a subject, for Vidor from their parents but lose it to the bank, ods which transform societies should or anyone else , exists in Edmund Wil- and the \" white trash \" of TOBACCO ROAD .) recur as seen from innumerable perspec- son 's account of the Iroquois who be- Judge Priest achieves a faSCinating bal- tives and throughout a variety of genres. came construction workers! ance between the Abraham Lincoln One would have to add , after all , the image and the Tammany Hall-type dema- Eisenstein film , Clair's A NOUS LA LlBERTE, Of the Thirties films I know, the nearest goguery of THE LAST HURRAH , and this , I Lang 's METROPOLIS, and (as I tried to think , may be why this is Ford 's favorite suggest in my book The Crazy Mirror) , in spirit to Vidor's is Ford ' s THE GRAPES film. And although critics were charmed the high-speed slapstick of Mack Sen- OF WRATH (which was also made despite out of their wits by Ford 's Westerns and nett. When mechanization took com- the banks) . It emphasizes the dignity of the military nostalgias of the Seventh mand , it galvanized the popular the manual worker, and even in his ex- Cavalry (which Ford , along with Hol- imagination , not merely as a theme in propriation from the land and his reduc- lywood generally, accepted as an ersatz itself, but also as an element determining for a community spirit whose contem- its vision of other themes. Eventually, Cyd tion to the servility of working for others. porary civilian forms seem to have been Charisse 's ironical remark in IT'S ALWAYS And this trio of Populist films is completed curiously difficult to celebrate), the Civil FAIR WEATHER- \" Yes , of course , I'm a by Renoir 's THE SOUTHERNER , which , least War veterans' organizations which loom machine\" -points to Andy Warhol 's \"I lyrical of the three, compensates with its large in the social structure of Judge wish I was a machine. \" dourly realistic social and dramatic Priest's old Kentucky Home are carefully process: the gradual, tentative growth of \" demilitarized \" by switch-overs of frater- Ironically enough , in the two most dy- a guarded, cynical neighborliness and nity between now-reconciled veterans. namic nations , the U.S .A . and the a consumers' co-operative (which suc- U .S.S.R., anything like a realistic picture ceeded as regularly as the producers ' Both OUR DAILY BREAD and THE SUN of labor virtually disappears from the co-operatives failed) .' SHINES BRIGHT concern themselves with screen in the early Thirties . Truck drivers problems of moral leadership and moboc- and steel men take pride of place in a few Vidor's co-operative is \" religious \" in- racy. Ford 's answer isn 't, in broad out- films between 1935 and 1945 like THEY sofar as it's an association of people who line, very different from Vidor's. Judge DRIVE BY NIGHT , MANPOWER , and PITTS- have freed themselves from their past. Priest ruins his chances of re-election by BURGH ; but the setting is usually a pretext This is only one aspect of Vidor's reiterat- alienating every group in turn ; he stops for melodrama, or for war-effort pieties, ed belief that the past is something the the Tornado boys from lynching a Negro, and any interest in the experience of healthy and great-souled can always re- and he alienates the righteous by giving manual labor is conspicuous by its ab- ject. Its formulation in terms of a regener- a prostitute a decent burial. The dead girl sence. Tay Garnett's knockabout melo- turns out to come from a respectable drama WILD HARVEST (1947), with its battles ative community renders it a fascinating family, and the Tornado mob support between rival teams of mechanized har- converse to THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT , Judge Priest because \" He saved us from vest workers, qualifies , enjoyably ourselves. \" Yet there seems a difference enough , as a bizarre perversion of Vidor 's Ford 's own favorite among his films, and of emphasis. Vidor asserts the quick, long-cherished project, an epic of wheat. as personal to him as OUR DAILY BREAD spontaneous rightness of the strong The only tools to interest postwar Hol- is to Vidor. With these two films , one can leader. Ford 's leaders are more con- lywood are small arms (WINCHESTER '73, trace an almost embarrassingly comple x cerned with reconciliation and equity; COLT .45 , the Bowie Knife). The last Hol- and complete comparison between op- they are at once slower and more cynical; lywood incarnation of American posite points of view-or reverse angles- they accept, and all but relish, dema- proletarian tensions is the boxer (THE goguery as part of the political game. SET-UP , THE CHAMPION , BODY AND SOUL) , across a common territory. until Kazan presents the ex-boxer- Ford emphasizes tradition rather than Both directors are careful to gratify turned-docker of ON THE WATERFRONT. The small cycle of films it sparked off dynamism, relaxation (even drunken both the hero-principle of individualism were really about labor racketeering , not fecklessness) rather than the Puritan and a belief in the responsible decency, labor. Hollywood depicts America as a ethic, mutual acceptance and coura- at bedrock level, of the croWd. Where society of consumers and gangsters, in geous tolerance rather than strenuous Vidor emphasizes superhuman efforts which virtually all productive work hap- self- and group-help, the nobility of eco- crowned with success, Judge Priest's pens at desk-set level. For any real sense nomic failure , and the respectful ritual of last line is \"It's time I took my medicine of anything else, one has to turn to rene- funerals. He deploys all the paraphernalia to start myoid heart going again. \" He gade productions like Vidor's film, Dmy- of rural Americanism: the flag , parlor walks slowly away from us through a tryk's GIVE US THIS DAY , Biberman 's SALT hymns, the myth of the West , sexual recession of dark doorways, as the image OF THE EARTH, and maybe even Cy chivalry, the Puritan gravitas of Abraham both counterpoints the dialogue to assert Endfield's HELL DRIVERS and SEA FURY Lincoln and Wyatt Earp. Yet he divests staying alive as a lonely duty and recalls which , despite their ostensibly English Young Mr. Lincoln 's acceptance of his settings, do paraphrase the rage, pain , them of their Americanist prejudices to personal loneliness and his political des- and cynicism of proletarian life as de- achieve something rather different. The tiny. Earlier, Judge Priest threatens to do scribed by writers like Mailer and Bu- what the law forbids a judge to do by kowski , and which blast forth from the Mountain Men in THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT swearing himself in as a deputy and car- shotgun-carrying truckdrivers of EASY stand in for any group of no-gOOd rying out a citizen 's arrest, a line whose RIDER . Not that Hollywood 's labor musi- scruffies-i.e ., ultra-WASPs for immi- hilarious ingenuity moves me aestheti- cal, THE PAJAMA GAME , hasn't its charms. grants. Judge Priest insists on the human cally, intellectually, and morally-partly But even a semi- or post-Hollywood dignity of moral failures when he follows for outrageOUSly exploiting the letter of American cinema continues to be rather the law, lynch-mob style, and partly for tricksy about labor, with such films as ' In EASY RIDER Peter Fonda watches the young profoundly respecting the spirit of the NOTHING BUT A MAN resuming the subordi- commune, inexpert city-dwellers , scratching the law. The prevailing implication seems to nation of a laboring life to issues of race dry soil , and asserts, with more hope than convic- me to be (if I'm not reading my own tion , \" They 'll make out. \" In connection with both political partialities into it) that the law as films one might refer to a passage from Max it stands is perfectly adequate for all Stirner: \" In the association , you will affirm the worth of all your strength , all your capacities , and your self. Society, on the other hand, ex ploits the value of your work , you exist as an ego ist, but in an association as a man, that is to say , religious- ly .\" The conjunction of communes and co-opera- tives , fugitives from the Depression and drop-outs from the system , of hippie-style group love and Vidor's Puritan ethic , and of Max Stirner 's ideas, is intriguing, particularly in view of current debate about Stirner's complex and ambiguous position on the right and / or the left, an ambiguity corre- sponding to the possibilities in Populism . 34 JULY 1973

OUR DAilY BREAD. John Qualen and Tom Keene . FILM COMMENT 35

decent purposes, and that more sweep- life force coursing through both sexes. PARADE. There, love crosses all bounda- ing powers would betray America's tradi- And it wouldn 't require a great leap of ries ; here , it is frustrated by them . Where tional liberties. the imagination to hypothesize (although OUR DAILY BREAD asserts an escape into for speculative interest rather than from rustic community , THE WEDDING NIGHT as- In other words , THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT conviction) the influence of Irish celibacy serts a tragic failure to escape from it. is a defense of the Constitution against on Ford ' s work; and , in Vidor 's, the loving The various positions aren 't inconsistent, the revisions and the negligence promul- ambivalence of an honest dynamism re- given the differing nature of the commu- gated by the McCarthy spirit, which was cognizing that only through challenge nities , usefully indicated by a quotation still riding high when Ford made this and temptation can a spirit grow-and from Henri Arvon's discussion , in his little (veiled) protest against it, in the very that fear and rancor are as pointless as book on L 'Anarchisme, of Max Stirner's terms most likely to move McCarthy's remorse . The Ego and His Own: supporters . In political terms , Judge Priest's \" other \" face is doubtless that of The \" That life in society is our natural Charles Laughton in ADVICE AND CONSENT . Wedding Night state, Stirner concedes. One need only But Ford 's film , like his sense of the past, look at the child 's dependence on its is as much a moral example as it is mere (1934) parents .. ..But Society ...is but a social nostalgia; his general position would life which is petrified, immobilized , seem to be a Democratic conservatism.' Author Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper) hypostatized, which subjugates the Ego instead of serving it. ... It is not up to Ford 's nostalgia is more topical than retires to a country cabin, largely to salve Society to impose social duties on us, it it seems, being a continuing restatement is up to us to demand from Society the of the liberal-democratic roots of Ameri- an ego mortified by the critical drubbing satisfaction of our needs. Let us therefore can tradition . Vidor 's topicality is more accorded his latest book. He is attracted transform 'Society' into .Association. ' In traditional, or archaic , than it seems, by Manya (Anna Sten), and by the com- Association , asserts Stirner, you affirm depending as it does on the assumption munity of Polish immigrants living nearby. your will , your capacities, and your Self, that America retains a primitive, \" pre- At first, she, and the simple life of her whereas in Society your capacities for Constitutional \" vigor, spontaneously hospitable family, seem an idyllic alterna- work are exploited . . . . In the former , you continuing and creating its own forms in tive to the city smart-set and intelligent- fulfill yourself, in the latter, ycu live like response to circumstance. This compari- sia. Mollycoddled by city sophistication a man , that is , religiously. Association son relates to only one aspect of artistic as he might have become, he is nonethe- exists for you and through you, whereas caliber. In any case, Ford 's film is twenty Society claims you as its chattel and even years younger (that is , older) than less able to build a wood fire in the cabin exists without you. In brief, Society is Vidor's . In 1934, Ford was very far re- sacred , and Association is your well- moved from his later, more profound, hearth to warm his beautiful visitor-an being. Society consumes you , whereas more oblique, and very cautious over- act which is almost sacramental in its you profit from Association.\" tones. His iater preoccupations may be acceptance of traditional American do- seen as a restatement of original Ameri- mesticity and practicality. His new-found The Polish community of THE WEDDING can ideals against both the cynicism of humility helps him to stop resenting criti- NIGHT is Society, easily criticizable with the film noir and the pseudo-conservative cism and instead to learn from the truth its feudal , peasant remnants. The proper- backlash-a Fordian affirmation no less in it. Although he is attracted to the idea ty-respecting co-operators of OUR DAILY poignant for the unimpeachable Ameri- of a country life, free from city vanities, BREAD are an Association of recipro- canism of its terms. Film nair wrenches to renew his inspiration, an ominous note cating and generous Egoists. Tony Bar- Vidor out of his Thirties affirmations into is introduced by an immigrants ' meal, at rett 's New York coterie may abound in a much more exacerbated mood. Oblique which the children sit hungrily watching anomic egoists (egoists in the usual , petty as it is , our comparison of OUR DAILY until, their elders having finished, they are sense, quite different from Stirner's!), and BREAD and THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT does allowed to rush to the table. The tips of constitutes a far from perfect society. But seem to separate two contrasted, contin- the horns of Old World authoritarianism at least one can escape from it, and uing streaks in American conservatism . are rapidly followed by the remainder of return to roots in which one is not impris- the beast. Compared with the WASP who oned. Both men have their generation's might steal their village beauty, her Polish respect for women , although Ford 's gal- lover is paranoid, jealous, and drunken, Vidor's autobiography expounds lantry differs from Vidor's awareness of and, on their wedding night, her groom some of his problems with the different their magic force. Ford 's heroes are often is bestial to the point of rape. Meanwhile acting styles of Gary Cooper and Anna either solitary and celibate, or soft-heart- the writer 's city girl comes after him, Sten , and the result is a conventional ed men's-men , or moral steel like Lincoln revealing the honesty underlying a so- paSSion which we take on trust as much and Priest-almost Calvinistic \" monks in phistication which is merely skin deep. as we feel. Having elsewhere emphasized the world \" -although Ford's concealed, Barrett realizes that his Arcadian dream the role of phYSical plasticity in film acting personal model may be priestly celibacy (quite apart from obvious cases like Chap- transposed into a WASP key. The whore has done its work. Manya dies in a tragic lin and Keaton) , I was pleased to see is a lady at heart, or is at least to be Vidor making, as a matter of course, a treated with that courtesy; and the accident, still in love with him. And per- distinction between an actor's dialogue woman-taming antics of THE QUIET MAN haps Tony must have it on his conscience and his \" pantomime. \" If this remains a seem rather vapid compared with the that, though she helped him to find him- minor film in the Vidor canon, it's still of more volatile ambivalence of Vidor's particular interest given the shadows into heroes towards their women , whether as self, he abandoned her to a life which which Hollywood's bright lights plunged inspiration , temptation , or Amazonian an important aspect of America's evolu- challenge. her glimpse of American liberty, through tion . him, rendered unbearable to her. But life, Vidor's responsiveness to female sex- and art, go on . On the one hand , city individualism uality goes with a sense of an identical encourages a petty egoism in the writer. The New World-Old World relation- On the other hand, the Polish community ' In Motion No. 6, I quoted an item in Positi' which ship is in antithesis to that of THE BIG proves savagely restrictive. The golden stated that Ford had supported Goldwater-an mean between the two is a certain mix- assertion which , according to one interviewer, ture of mobility and rootedness: the writer pained him greatly, and which I ought to take this can move between city sophistication opportunity to withdraw. 36 JULY 1973

THE WEDDING NIGHT. Ralph Bellamy, Anna Sten and Gary Cooper. and country simplicity in a way which , or which particular degree of predomi- is, can come no closer than a nostalgia given less moral seriousness on his part, nance between both responses, should which is pain and which liberates or could be evasive and foster self-delusion , be taken as the \" real \" one, My own exiles him forever from New York or any- but which he is honest enough to turn suspicion is that, while spectators whose where else , so that he is at home no- to full moral purpose . In a sense, Manya immigrant family experience is fresh in where , and everywhere. . becomes the substitute victim of this mo- their memory will be keenly aware of bility. Certainly the film emphasizes an- Manya's fate as a tragic anomaly, others Maybe it is unfair to expect some such other cause of her tragedy: a bestiality (and these will be the majority) would sophistication from the film , given its time that could be taken as the logical conclu- have veered rather nearer the anti-Polish so soon after rural America, with its wide- sion of the immigrant group's cohesive- response, To wit: \" While Polish immi- spread and endemic Depression, had ness, as its essence, as its Old World grants may eventually be capable of reacted to the New Immigration with such decadence unveiled. The spectator may aspiring to Americanism (as young alarm that the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act of course prefer an alternative reading: Manya does), old Polish ways are not virtually stopped any further immigration , that Manya 's fate is a tragic anomaly, merely different, they are bad . If Manya THE WEDDING NIGHT doesn 't quite call into which no more reflects on its communi- is a tragic figure , and not a vamp , as a question the optimistic \" melting pot\" ty 's real spirit than Rod Steiger's nasti- coarser film might have made her, it is theories-whereby the diversity of immi- ness reflects the real spirit of OKLAHOMA! ' because her natural goodness has al- grant talents would contribute to a ready responded to the possibilities of uniquely American richness-but it cer- It's not evident to me which response , America , If she isn 't exactly a 'good tainly (and quite correctly) asserts that Injun ,' her plight is entirely her communi- the process of fusion will be longer and 'The comparison is interesting because everything ty's fault, for its maintenance of European more difficult than melting-pot theory to do with the Rod Steiger subplot sticks out of decadence and tyranny.\" had supposed, and that it will involve a Zinnemann 's film like a sore thumb, maybe be- cultural shock which is regularly harsh cause Zinnemann , or Steiger , or both , are trying In the context of a general revival of and painful for all concerned ' It's also to underline the presence of another, uglier, moral interest in racial and ethnic issues , one worth remembering that many immigrant side to rustic life, while at the same time carefully is likely to wish for a more complex moral commun'ities brought with them reaction- preventing it from contaminating the obvious idyllic movement, whereby, however alien and ary and illiberal attitudes, which gave their image . Thus , the bad guy becomes abstracted harsh the old Polish cu lture may initially young people an extremely difficult time, from any community pressures , and his nastiness seem, Barrett comes to recognize and becomes as gratuitous as the callousness with respect its raison-d 'etre. And his feelings ' Some aspects of the process are usefully sum- which the community reacts to his unpleasant fate . for Manya would be a response , not, as marized in Margaret Mead 's The America n Char- He might be read as a sort of Mephistophelean here, to the American-style glamour acter, in Geoffrey Gorer's The Americans (particu- figure , updated to fit a vulgar Freudian line about which sets her so far apart from her larly the chapter on \" Europe and the Neglected sexual frustration , and corresponding to the Devil fellow-Poles, but for those qualities of Father\"), and in the books later cited in connection who appeals to Daniel Webster 's avarice in ALL hers which could only grow in their CUl- with NORTHWEST PASSAGE and the interplay of vio- THAT MONEY CAN BUY-only here he wants to sell ture-and to which Barrett, being what he lence between the gangster (city) and Western the heroine into a brothel. The film seems to be (country) genres . trying to humanize him , but in a social void . Bor- zage treated the same moral dichotomy very much better in Moonrise, and Sydney Pollack and John Schlesinger resume it in THIS PROPERTY IS CON- DEMNED and MIDNIGHT COWBOY . FILM COMMENT 37

One respects THE WEDDING NIGHT for nation with European decadence and a only secondarily a victim ; and a prema- raising the issue of new immigrant cul- projection onto fore ign cosmopolitanism ture Iron Curtain of ethnic anonymity or tures at all , and it is one of those unjust of American city decadence and the WASPishness begins to descend over ironies of critical response that the film 's dawning fun morality of \" flaming youth ,\" everyone's facial , vocal , and behavioral near uniqueness (so far as I know) makes but a transposition of immigrant problems styles. me steadily more irritated as the minority into the characteristic entertainment and culture is steadily blackened in order to dream forms of wish fulfillment (the rich The gangster film indicates a counter- conform to easy spectator prejudice. European aristocracy) and of reversal pattern , and initiates Phase II of the immi- Nonetheless , to have raised the issue so (whereby foreign decadence is reassur- grant theme in Hollywood. Swarthy exot- clearly makes the film very much more ingly associated with the Twenties wan- ics (Muni, Robinson) are foreground profound than the love story as which it ing of the WASP Puritan ethic) . villains who contrast with law-abiding is usually discussed or dismissed in the communities (the gangster's mama). critical histories. The film is certainly of Melting-pot theories were optimistic James Cagney is clearly an Irish gang- its time , for foreign-sounding names like about all the cultural possibilities: reci- ster; but however heinous his crimes, or Novarro and Valentino were all but disap- procal adaptation , assimilation , and deranged his psychology, he contrives to pearing from film-star credits, and would pluralism. But the metaphor inadvertent- be lovable enough to identify with . It's not reappear until Brando and Novak fell ly gives itself away. To be tossed into a interesting that the Irish represented a into synch with the internal questionings melting pot wouldn 't be a very pleasant late wave of the Old Migration (in which of WASP culture symptomized by REBEL experience. In fact, THE MELTING POT they were very low-status), but had WITHOUT A CAUSE in the mid-Fifties. wouldn 't be a bad title for THE CROWD , sufficiently established themselves to be whose sense of anomie , failure , and pain \" Americanized \" in relation to the New It is precisely because of the enor- typifies a cycle of films that might include Migration . Thus , Tammany Hall organized mous disparity between the immigrant Sternberg 's THE SALVATION HUNTERS (with successive waves of immigrant votes. Or, experience in America and its rare ap- its very different treatment of a Chaplin- in movie terms , Irish cops chase Italian pearance on Hollywood screens that any esque scenario) and THE LAST COMMAND . gangsters (Thomas Jackson 's Lt . Tom The theme recurs in UNDERWORLD, where Flaherty after Robinson 's Caesar Enrico proper study of real ity vs screen echoes the gangster acts as spiritual champion Bandello) . of the demoralized; and the theme of would require a book. Still, a few pointers foreignness is reiterated by the nickname George Bancroft represents the older, might help put THE WEDDING NIGHT in its \" Rolls Royce \" (an English product that Irish-bruiser style in UNDERWORLD. And an place, and add \" theme theory\" to auteur, was subsequently to do service as the ambivalent view of the Irish is perpetu- genre, and cycle theories. Theme criti- villain 's car in Hollywood movies). In the ated via lovable villains lik-e Victor McLag- cism clearly belongs here, since the other intensely personal terms of the gangster len and James Cagney. Where Old-style theories depend partly on spotting cer- genre , UNDERWORLD catches the process Irish fighters like Bancroft and McLaglen tain combinations of themes, often at the whereby several gangsters become the loomed heavily over their victims, Cagney expense of the originalities and nuances heroes of their own ethnic group. loomed under them. Half-gangster, half- with which many of the more enterpris- leprechaun , the yin-yang of his cheek ingly human films explore new combina- Something of the flavor of this early and his crime generates a powerful \" al- tions and contradictions between genres. melting-pot period lingers in Sternberg 's ternating current\" in one movie after an- I would also suggest that divisions that SHANGHAI EXPRESS and BLONDE VENUS . The other. The suburbanization of the Irish is define genres arose not only to establish former, particularly, stresses Marlene exemplified by Louis B. Mayer's Mickey valid conventions but also to avoid un- less than one might expect, and in its Rooney, and the Bancroft-Cagney-Roo- comfortable connections. (For example, broader theme the Shanghai Express it- ney progression arouses a suspicion that the gangster film offers a safely narrow self functions as a melting pot, in that the Thirties cycle of films about happily form of social criticism .) The most honest initially antipathetic or self-obsessed or cozy Victorian families represents an and insightful films may be those which self-enclosed individuals come to respect escape not only from Depression inse- refuse genre conventions altogether, or and help one another. (Try to imagine a curities but also from the vexation of at least distort them in a way that either similar variety of American and immigrant heroes' having a New Migration family deprives them of box-office success or types meeting in a stagecoach , with Indi- background . Generally in early-Thirties attains a success too precarious to ans for Chinese.) Sternberg's foreigners movies there seem to be more foreign- inspire imitations, derivations, and varia- tend to be either high-prestige Old Migra- accented or foreign-typed character tions. tion ethnic groups (upper-class French, roles (usually elderly) than in Forties or English , German) or low-status New Mi- Fifties movies. Sons of the Pioneers?-Immigrant gration groups rendered exotic (Anna themes seem to fall into three main May Wong , who was for the Chinese what Given America's isolationist and un- periods. During the silent era, melting-pot Pola Negri was for the Poles). European policies between the wars, it's optimism prevails. A kind of innocent difficult to see why audiences should confidence wins out (just) in Chaplin's The Chinese girl typifies another re- have been so interested in \" foreign \" THE IMMIGRANT. The Tramp is both Old curring device. She is differentiated from themes except as melodramatic , senti- Migration-English (because Chaplin was the villainous patriots of her own class , mental, or exotic versions of internal so- English) and New Migration-poor-Jewish and even kills one for the sake of her cial processes. Geoffrey Gorer theorizes (by appearance) . He comes from every- American friend-a switch-over that cor- that the American-born immigrants' sons where and nowhere. He is the universal responds to Manya's yearning for the rejected the alien , old-fashioned ways of immigrant. American style in THE WEDDING NIGHT. In the foreign community. This would corre- this connection , it's interesting to suggest spond to Hollywood's ambivalence about The tensions of immigration may be that Griffith 's BROKEN BLOSSOMS may be such European father-figures as Dr. Ehr- paraphrased by an exoticism which is as much about ethnic issues as is THE lich and Louis Pasteur on the one hand facilitated by the prestige of literary ro- BIRTH OF A NATION: the 1919 film is about and , on the other, figures like Edward G. manticism. All those silent stars with the working-class Irish-types abusing the Robinson (Ehrlich) and Paul Muni (Pas- foreign names (Theda Bara, Nita Naldi, Puritan Anglo-Saxons even as they oblit- teur); their dark, complicated faces and Pol a Negri , Nazimova, Valentino , Novar- erate the Asiatics. One might also say that psychologies are virtual identikits of the ro , et al.) may have one meaning at one THE WEDDING NIGHT is an anti-LAST COM- non-WASP who, although he has become cultural level , another at another. Often MAND . In Vidor's film , the unadapted im- partly assimilated , remains \" different\" in snobbish, authoritarian , or rapacious, migrant culture is primarily a villain and one way or another. For reasons indicat- they might represent not merely a fasci- 38 JULY 1973

ed in our remarks on THE CROWD , the WASPery of most suburban settings, the BROKER is a much stronger story if one non-WASP father is regularly inverted psychological strains begin to break forgets the concentration-camp \" expla- into the ultra-WASP father: snobbery through , although they were considered nations\" and makes him just an old- being one-way , the non-WASP is read ier as individual problems only, without fashioned New York Jewish meanie-son to identify with higher-status groups than much reference to ethnic subcultures. of the owner of THE PAWNSHOP in wh ich the WASP is with lower-status groups. The third Hollywood period begins as a Chaplin smashed a famished customer's (Hence Clifton Webb and Vincent Price psychological era, of introspection and clock. Lumet's film certainly touches on as celebrated snooties of the Forties . hysteria (The Method, Jerry Lewis), and Negro-Jewish tensions early in the day. Between the two types Charles Laughton broadens as initially personal and familial represents a kind of \" rogue-WASP \" fa- tensions mingle with increasingly insis- In the April 1961 Films and Filming, ther-figure, while S. Z. Sakall incarnates tent social tensions (REBEL WITHOUT A George Seaton discussed the problem of the Central European \" granpappy.\" ) CAUSE). Ray ' s film 's evocation of three essaying an immigrant theme a little too parallel problems with father-figures early and a little too clearly: If we leave aside the themes of color (Dean 's is too weak , Wood 's is too stern , prejudice and anti-Semitism , one of the Mineo 's is absent) involves an ethnically \" Do you remember a film called ANY- few fi lms to face the issues of white anonymous family (Dean's), a WASP-Pu- THING CAN HAPPEN? It was about George immigrant groups in a quite straightfor- ritan style (Wood 's), and a non-WASP Papashivily, a Georgian , a little man ward way is Joseph L. Mankiewicz 's style (via Sal Mineo 's looks and name; (played brilliantly, I thought , by Jose Fer- HOUSE OF STRANGERS (1949). A variation Mineo also has a colored mother-figure). rer) who didn 't belong in his own country on the King Lear theme, it looks with but so desperately wanted to belong some compassion on the founder of an In an interesting reversal of nostalgias, somewhere . It won a United Nations Or- Italian bank (Edward G. Robinson) who the conspicuously non-WASP male takes ganisation award ; the corps of Foreign can 't adapt to American legalism , and on a positive father-role-in ZORBA THE Correspondents in the United States sees the kindest of his sons marry a GREEK. The mantles of Paul Muni and loved it; and on the whole it got good non-Italian society girl (Susan Hayward). Edward G. Robinson are resumed by Rod critical notices. But it was a colossal The film begins with the brother (Richard Steiger and Anthony Quinn, and a con- commercial failure. People actually came Conte) returning from prison to claim his spicuously non-WASP white like Elvis out of their homes and went down to the share of the family wealth , and it deliber- Presley (Italian? Spanish? Mexican? local theatres where it was playing just ately creates expectations of becoming Creole?) effortlessly succeeds all Hol- to stand outside and say, 'Let's not go a Mafia story before quietly dropping its lywood 's counterconcoctions in the in .' I should know , because I made it. gangster theme. Arthur Miller's All My blond , well-scrubbed key . In the early Sons (1947 , filmed 1948) looks more Thirties, Cary Grant contrasted with most \" And having made it, and having seen sternly on the manufacturer (Edward G. of Hollywood's Englishmen (Clive Brook, how I completely failed to communicate Robinson l) who has assimilated only the Ronald Colman , Herbert Marshall) in that with a mass audience, I quit film-making least scrupulous American ways, and his slick, clipped, quick style seemed well for a while to try to find the reason why. can't understand the indignation of his adapted to the sub-WASP world. He was I worked for the International Refugee son (Burt Lancaster) over the shoddy a transition figure , just as James Cagney Organisation of the U.N ., and one of the workmanship which has enriched the combined the audacity of the Irish gang- refugees it was my duty to receive was family at the expense of the lives of Amer- ster with the sneakiness of the Wop one. an old man from Poland , whose sister had ican air crews. With Death of a Salesman When Tony Curtis parodies Cary Grant's been living in the States for several years. (1949 , filmed 1951) Arthur Miller turns his accent in SOME LIKE IT HOT, it's partly the moral guns through 180 degrees to bom- parody by an \" Italian\" (Jewish) New York \" Everything , I thought, would be easy . bard the reigning WASP ethos of tran- type, of an older, still faintly snobbish There would be a happy family reunion. scendental dynamism and fun morality. style. But ethnic tensions are yielding to The old man would be welcomed into his status tensions-which may be one rea- sister's household; and I would do a quick At about the same time, Joseph son why the ethnic tensions are allowed dissolve into the background. How wrong Losey' s THE BIG NIGHT makes a specific to reappear at this period: they're no I was! The facts were that the sister didn 't reference to its hero 's Polish-American longer so laden with cultural controversy want him . She had actually sent him a background ; nor does Losey' s THE BOY and painful emotion . letter saying , 'We Americans don 't want WITH GREEN HAIR concern merely the color any more foreigners , so go back where problem . A sentimentally liberal but lik- THE YOUNG SAVAGES makes some sort you come from .' able acceptance of ethno-cultural plurali- of sense of the nonsense of WEST SIDE ty informs several of Dore Schary's B- STORY. Capra 's A HOLE IN THE HEAD still \" I learnt the sad lesson that no one productions at MGM (GLORY ALLEY, MY seems relevant enough , with the assimi- is more anti-foreigner than those who MAN AND I, LADY WITHOUT PASSPORT) . But lated, ambitious son (Frank Sinatra) hav- until recently were 'foreign ' themselves. such films are in a minority. And the ing to escape from the visibly very Italian My film had come too near to reality. I tough , tight-lipped heroes rule the Forties style and ideas of his elder brother (Ed- had identified too closely. Too many roost-nomadic monads, enigmatic and ward G. Robinson!) . Elia Kazan has been Americans saw themselves and their im- reluctant to reveal their emotions or particularly conscious of immigrant sub- mediate family on the screen ; and instead weaknesses or roots. Robert Mitchum cultures , from PANIC IN THE STREETS , of feeling pity, they felt animosity .\" and Robert Ryan are among the most through the Eli Wallach-Karl Malden interesting non-WASPS. Humphrey Bo- confrontation in BABY DOLL, to AMERICA The Polish connection returns us to gart is a fascinating \" identikit\" non- AMERICA. By 1965 it begins to look as if THE WEDDING NIGHT. And that film 's pessi- WASP , with a young man 's force and the a New York Jewish nerviness has been mism about assimilation is retained , over emotional versatility and vulnerability of unself-consciously accepted as a sort of a quarter of a century later, in Hitch- Edward G. Robinson. To the late and portmanteau non-WASP style (much as cock 's TORN CURTAIN , with its Polish unlamented left-wing cult of John the New York Irish style had been so baroness whom the tyrannical Commu- Wayne 's manly walk, I would oppose the accepted twenty years earlier)-vide Jack nists would allow to leave but who can't awkward and therefore sensitive para- Lemmon, Peter Sellers-possibly for good find the sponsor required by the land of hardhat shamble of Burt Lancaster. reasons (the Jewish as a well-adapted the free. Pitiable as she is , Hitchcock urban style) as well as for an ultra-cau- makes her a spiteful grotesque, too. Once a common style which is neither tious one (\" Some of the smartest peo- Losey's concern for his Polish-American WASP nor anti-WASP had been pie ... \" ). Sidney Lumet's THE PAWN- hero in THE BIG NIGHT becomes more achieved , in parallel with the obvious meaningful when one relates it to the about-to-dawn era of ethnic-status sick jokes. (\"Why are there only two pallbear- ers at a Polish funeral?\" -\"Because a FILM COMMENT 39

dustbin only has two handles.\") Obnox- feeling that older cultural patterns subsist were to be followed through by the medi- ious as such cracks are , they may well under newer forms rather more persist- cal profession itself. indicate a mixture of awareness and ently than had once been thought, or frankness which signals a shift of attitude leave a kind of spiritual void if they don 't. The \" English Medical Association \" and a revision of ethn ic-status prejudice, And , as Arno Karlsen observes in his might seem to suggest the \" British Medi- rather than their aggravation . useful survey of sexual mores: \" Our total cal Association ,\" and to that extent the inheritance is as much Celtic , Teutonic , film remains faithful to the book's attack The last sentence of George Seaton 's Iberian and Slavic as it is Hebrew, Roman on the mercenary spirit of the medical statement chimes ironically with the fact and Greek.\" profession . As often , what from a Europe- that Samuel Goldwyn, the producer of an perspective looks rather like a left- THE WEDDING NIGHT, was himself a Polish The Citadel wing overtone , proves to be compatible immigrant. But though Vidor 's name is with right-wing Populist attitudes-op- not unfamiliar to us under its Polish spell- ( 1938) posing real, generous, neighborly indi- ing of \" Wajda ,\" any real connection is vidualism with a conveniently foreign less direct, for Vidor is primarily a Magyar A na\"ive idealism has inspired young fragment of Old Corruption . The miners' name. Despite the long-standing frictions Manson (Robert Donat) to his doctor 's mob is a little more destructive, and any between Poles and Hungarians in vocation. His disillusionment begins with hope of progress would seem to lie, not Europe , it would seem reasonable to as- his discovery of the insanitary conditions in mass movements of any kind , but in sume that Vidor 's Americanism was inde- tolerated by the obfuscating bureaucracy a technical medical breakthrough by a pendent of any inherited animosity; and of a Welsh mining village. One evening dedicated individual. Certa'inly the left there is no reason to assume that he had he and a colleague, intoxicated and wing 's tendency to idealize the masses been involved in a Central European au- inspired, dynamite the village 's most viru- is unreal enough to warrant a great deal thoritarianism like that depicted in THE lent sewer. But when the miners them- of contradiction , excessive though selves turn on him, fired by superstitious Vidor 's terms may seem to be (their inspi- WEDDING NIGHT. fear of his medical research, Manson ration apparently deriving from the moves to London where he attempts to Priestly riots which occurred over a cen- All the same , cultural tendencies often set up a kind of doctors ' co-operative to tury earlier). And yet, the film 's view of continue more deeply than their inheri- benefit the London poor. Instead, he what the individual can hope to accom- tors realize, and it's perfectly possible finds himself quiet/y, imperceptibly, se- plish is a sober rather than a heroic one . that Vidor's Texan expansionism isn 't duced by an Establishmentarian Old-Boy In this sense , THE CITADEL represents a without its family-transm itted , European- Net, whose only concern is their fashion- gradual evolution towards the chastened immigrant undercurrent. For in the East- ability among the rich. Eventually a inspirationalism of H. M. PULHAM ESQ . ern European forests and plains, no natu- drunken associate operates on Manson 's ral boundari es protected ethno-cultural best friend and kills him. Sacrificing his From one angle, the film 's sobriety groups. They preserved their identity and career by denouncing his smartest col- reflects the post-Depression stagnation their community through \" cavalry\" au- leagues, Manson returns to a mining vil- which Arthur Mayer and Richard Griffith , dacity or by communal will during those lage, to resume his research into silico- in The Movies, describe as having contin- centuries of struggle or occupation . With sis, its causes and cure. ued until rearmament for World War\" the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Em- began to get the economy moving again. pire, that tradition (which entails a sense The film is something of a link between Perhaps it represents something of a of the human will as at once natural , two genres, or rather cycles: Warners' drawn match between Vidor's heroic op- communal , and arbitrary) clearly reveals biographies about medical idealists (no- timism and A. J. Cronin 's dourer English its reverse side: an expressionism of the tably Doctors Pasteur, Ehrlich and, as view of the slowness of change. One absurd (from Kafka to Borowczyk). If the film noir looms, Clitterhouse) , and two certainly prefers it to the pusillanimous muscular and nervous tone of Vidor's other Welsh-mining films: Ford's HOW antireform ism of Ealing England 's post- transcendentalism differs so profoundly GREEN WAS MY VALLEY and Carol Reed 's war counterparts, notably the \" grin-and- from Emerson 's, it may well have a double THE STARS LOOK DOWN, both of which it bear-it\" moral which betrays Pat Jack- rather than a single (Texan) source. anticipates. While Ford tends to see his son ' s otherwise promising WHITE Welsh villagers as Irish-American pioneer CORRIDORS . SO far as acceptance and Vidor makes relatively little of the \" fan- folk, Vidor comes to think of them as criticism goes, THE CITADEL seems a hy- tasy of good will ,\" counting , rather , on hardcore Bible Belters; and while Reed 's brid between Vidor's most personal films a spontaneous, willful identity of individual film leans to the left, Vidor's veers to the and the aSSignments he accepted and community interest. And this diver- right. The principal obstacles to the throughout his career. And its inspiration gence from the usual emphases forced miners' health are bureaucracy and the remains at a similar level : half and half. on American thought by the encounter miners as a superstitious mob , rather of its individualist and Social Darwinist than the healthy capitalistic instincts of If we take THE BIG PARADE , THE CROWD , currents may owe something to that Eu- the mine-owners, which carry the weight HALLELUJAH! , and OUR DAILY BREAD as the ropean sense of commun.ity cohesion . of the blame in Reed's film . The idea of most personal of Vidor 's prewar films , The communities of HALLELUJAH! , OUR a doctors' co-operative as a solution to they seem to imply that the individual's DAILY BREAD , THE WEDDING NIGHT, and the problem of medicine for the poor isn 't relationship with the social system is a NORTHWEST PASSAGE are all communities simply a paraphrase of the idea of a dialectic of acquiescence to it and a of the spirit, of the will. Vidor is conscious National Health Service (introduced in resistant indifference to its routines. The of their economic infrastructure (which is Britain seven years later). It is primarily system is not the primary responsibility why his films interest Marxists), but its an alternative to it-a demonstration that of the individual ; he must play his part importance is regularly presented as an Socialism would be unnecessary if only in it, but can do so only by following the expression of moral fiber (which defuses an \" inspirationalist\" change of heart logic of his own moral growth . And it is any economic materialism). a common transcendentalist act of faith that a kind of moral egoism may be so- The hypothesis of a \"hereditary\" Eu- cially cohesive in the long run , even if ropean influence on Vidor can be made it imposes something like dropping out only tentatively, with something of a feel- in the short run . On the other hand, the ing that ancestry may be so touchy a individual requires community, and what subject that it's less likely to mislead distinguishes a free community system anybody if wrong than to be dismissed from a despotic one seems to be whether too rapidly and resentfully if it's right. But social anthropologists seem to have the 40 JULY 1973

that community cherishes or stunts the THE CITADEL. Robert Donat. individual 's growth. If, at its best, Ameri- ca 's community system cherishes indi- vidualism more than any other, then at its worst it abandons the individual to his own devices-as in OUR DAILY BREAD and THE CROWD. Nonetheless it allows response and escape, whether to a new community or to moral spaces within the system . In both respects , it differs from the old European community of WEDDING NIGHT. Above all , the rural American spirit unites individual, family , and community, and urges the individual's life force into more generous moral forms which , far from repudiating selfishness, transcend it. And its concern for the individual 's freedom is the very reason why generosi- ty should take the form of loyalty to it. There is thus subtle (and abusable?) dialectic , ·or yin and yang, between the individual 's eluding of the system and his contribution to it. In THE CITADEL, the system is an Old World one, like the peasant family in WEDDING NIGHT . And although it 's true that the English may seem closer to the average American than the Poles, it's also true that the upper-class English style may create as broad a gulf between character and spectator as , say, the ultra-WASPishness of Clifton Webb. Given Hollywood's freely admitted dis- like for controversy, it seems unlikely that MGM would have considered making an equally incisive attack on American medi- cine. Perhaps the CITADEL exemplifies an intermittent American genre, whereby components of the American scene- which make good dramatic material but might run foul of resentment-can be hived off onto the Old World . Later essays in the genre would include Stanley Ku- brick's (and equally Kirk Douglas ' s) PATHES OF GLORY , Swinging London sex- mores films, and Sidney Lumet's THE HILL (the last using the British military setting to say in the overground cinema what THE BRIG said about the U.S . Marines in the underground one) . Some spectators will take the point, and mutter \" Whom the cap fits .. .\" Others can allow their conviction of America's general moral superiority to override any other parallel. My intention isn't to exonerate the British scene from American criticism-as my comment about WHITE CORRIDORS should make plain-but simply to suggest that THE CIT- ADEL has as much to do with the American scene as THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY (where I have a faint suspicion that I can see the hypochondriac Tashlin expressing a radical discontent about unsocialized medicine while Jerry expresses his inspi- rationalist belief that, apart from the em- barrassments of overearnestness and the old and shameable Mr. Big, things are at heart quite all right as they are) . But my suspicion that this American CITADEL really is about America would suggest that imperceptiveness on Vidor's FILM COMMENT 41

part isn 't the real reason for his Welsh ceptive system-using its forms, yet re- ic islands. Once our tough guys get into miners turning into Bible Belt rioters, not deeming them. The film refers to these action they'll slaughter redskins or yel- so many years after the Scopes \" monkey \" supernaturalist\" intoxications without lowbellies before you can say \" geno- trial. \" Vidor is postulating his co-opera- convulsion or expansion of style, not cide .\" The real battle is that grueling long tive ideal as the middle way between the through any failure , but because it is in haul of the will against fatigue, hunger, moral dangers of Socialism and the prob- the nature of medicine, as of any voca- rage , weakness, insubordination, and a lems implicit in an aggressively merce- tion , to link the sacred and the routine , certain excess of zeal which in Vidor's nary medical service-an issue to which the magic and the everyday. The theme film is incarnated by one man 's reversion he returns in BEYOND THE FOREST a dec- of a \" secret transcendence\" of routine to cannibalism . Also more dangerous ade later. But the hour of film nair has will be taken even further in H. M. PULHAM , than Rogers' human enemies, the Iro- yet to strike. The combination of moral ESQ. quois and the French , are his allies, the victory and social defeat in THE CITADEL weak and treacherous English who marks an intermediate stage between the One wishes that whoever planted the wouldn't mind at all if the Americans were affirmation of OUR DAILY BREAD and the bombs for which the Angry Brigade were led astray or scalped in their tents by un- more somber view of BEYOND THE FOREST . condemned, along with other would-be reliable Mohawk guides. As in MERRILL'S terrorist groups, would take their inspira- MARAUDERS, there is a quick, excep- The film 's style , like that of H. M. PUL- tion from the dynamiting of the sewer tionally violent battle halfway through ', HAM, ESQ ., is relatively sober-almost as here instead. (It's curious how often ter- against an enemy whom one is uncompli- if, in these two films , Vidor were retreating rorists indulge a secret misanthropy by catedly required to pulverize-by patriotic into himself, no longer so confident in his attacking people indiscriminately- duty, by self-preservation , and by their earlier affirmations, yet refusing to re- sometimes even the classes they claim basic nastiness. But that success brings nounce a sense of internal, spiritual free- to be pledged to defend-rather than grimmer, more intimate, stoic, and fright- dom . THE CITADEL'S clubland setting , its functional emblems of their oppression.) ening matters in their wake-the internal somber mood, and the Gregg Toland Just as OUR DAILY BREAD anticipates the battles of military necessity. Should influence all might have suggested dark, interest in communes of the EASY RIDER one slaughter one's wounded or leave stuffy, oppressive interiors as its visual period , and just as THE WEDDING NIGHT them to the enemy's tortures? Can one key , picking up on the staircase of THE anticipates a renewed interest in ethno- bully one's demoralized men through the CROWD . But Vidor prefers to place his cultural problems , so here does Vidor's swamp? How can one reconcile the mili- characters in whitish , loose space. He is theme-the reformation or disruption of tary autocracy implicit in the corps' reserving their right to move in any emo- a system-link with the left-wing anar- names (Rogers ', Merrill 's) with democra- tional or moral direction they may chism of the Sixties . In its pale , methodi- cy? And both films share the visual motif choose , rather than making it seem natu- cal , bland way, the film maintains Vidor's of green-Clad men sweating , stumbling, ral for them to succumb to atmospheric spiritual vitality , not only in its joy in direct floundering , killing through the foliage. pressures. The groupings and the acting action , but in its counseling of an irreduc- similarly stress individual distinctness, ible patience. \" Pessimism of the intelli- Vidor was certainly in the vanguard of rather than the Old-Boy network, and gence; patient optimism of the will.\" a mood, deploying what were to become Vidor tends to watch his redoubtably ex- \" Left\" and \" right \" in politics close into favorite motifs of later war films (with pert actors being fascinatingly English , a circle, not only in Nazi and Stalinist Fuller bringing up the rear) . Rogers instead of tailoring their style to his conti- totalitarianism , but also in the dimension (Spencer Tracy) takes a personal interest nuity (as he regularly does in his of anarchism ; Puritanism and utilitar- in each and everyone of his men (an \" American \" films). ianism may lie encoiled within each other idea which , plausible enough here, to balance or betray. reaches a nadir of sentimentality in THE But more than exotic interest is in- TANKS ARE COMING , a Korean War-epoch volved; there's a similar sense of space cNorthwest recap of World War II , which may have in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , despite its lonelier Passage reassured American Moms, but had Brit- and gloomier key . In both films , Vidor's ish squaddies falling about laughing) . space shows a certain \" instability\" that (1939) With him comes young Langdon Towne indicates both moral freedom and moral (Robert Young) , a civilian whose role , as uneasiness, although remaining boldly artist-cartographer, suggests something individualistic. Rosalind Russell lets the of the title 's historical associations. He side down by admiring the hero's ambi- hasn 't had the benefit of backwoods tions as if he were her little boy doing toughening; his military father-figure well on Prize Day, and the beautiful Vi- must wheedle him (\" Come on . .. \"), taunt dorian theme of female-maternal power sinks almost without trace under Momism The film's title is slightly misleading , ' GONE WITH THE WIND provides a third example of being normally associated with explora- a film situating the large-scale set-piece , which a la Forties. tion around Baffin's Bay, whereas this would conventionally be thought of as a climax, story's theme and location ought to carry halfway through , and then following its conse- Vidor's caveats about the intoxication the title NORTHWEST TERRITORY. Perhaps quences \"compressively\" (in terms of internal of inspirationalism are indicated by two that phrase was taken up in the second psychology) rather than \" expansively .\" It's an drunk scenes . In the first , two young part, initially planned, and then consid- unconventional form , but not, as some critics have G.P. 's are inspired by alcohol to blow up ered to be too static for a film which argued , an incompetent one . In fact I'm tempted the pestilential sewer. In the second , an is, at least, organized around an epic to press the argument as far as suggesting that operation is botched and an innocent march and a Canadian association. the real spiritual climaxes of many Hollywood person dies. In another scene , a (really movies occur at the beginning , or in the pre-credits or apparently) dead baby revives, as its Its use of the novel's original title , sequence, where they establish anomalies which mother prevails upon the doctor to per- Rogers ' Rangers, would have underlined the rest of the film exists to see put right-too form a \" miracle\" which he attempts- this movie's ancestorship of Fuller'S MER- reassuringly. It's often instructive to eXChange partly because her love inspires him to RILL'S MARAUDERS. As Spencer Tracy's beginnings or middles with endings . Thus Fuller's his best, and partly to live up to his own men trek and fight their way through the RUN OF THE ARROW ends with Steiger renouncing reassuring, bedside-manner lie, which he Injun-infested forests up from Idaho, so his Sioux nationality to become an American again. makes true . The ideal, though a lie, be- Jeff Chandler's slog and slug it out Imagine the reverse option and one arrives at some comes truth, as love and desire ricochet through the Nip-infested jungles of Pacif- Red Indian equivalent of the Black Muslim move- from one person to another in a commu- ment . Middles and beginnings are often more nity internal to and separate from a de- revealing of undercurrents in a nation's culture than endings , because endings tend to be reassur- ing whereas the anomalous state of affairs which exists to be put right is what an audience fears might happen . And sometimes does . 42 JULY 1973

him (with the idea of another man having them , with equally ambivalent effect, in brace themselves for the coming struggle his girl) , and command him (\" Left! Right! with an extremely ferocious enemy, Nazi Left! Right! \" ) to make him , temporarily, MAJOR DUNDEE , where , oddly, the enemy Germany. On the other hand , Rogers ' an automaton of refle x obedience , a sol- extremely unreliable enemies are the En- is again the French .) glish , and his extremely perfidious ene- dier briefly, for his own good. Given the context of its period setting , mies include the French-so that the Thus the theme provides a tougher moral is just as likely to be isolationist. Vidor's film celebrates the early American This ambiguity would be a natural method variation on the theme of THE BIG PARADE , gift for radical improvisation in matters of of steering clear of contemporary paral- with fate reduced to human moral pur- lels. One catches a general mood, but pose and morale. When there is wide- government and constitution . Tragic mis- contradictory implications either cancel spread disagreement with the hitherto or balance out. Thus, each spectator can autocratic Rogers, he allows a vote , is takes are made ; their cost is heavy . But select whichever meanings help him defeated, and defers to popular judg- enjoy the film , and either overlook those ment. As a result, a quarter of the men effective adaptation to principle prevails which would offend him or lightly dismiss are lost, horribly tortured by the French- them as historical details that are no men 's Indians. The preference for the over the dead hand of principle-even longer relevant. Indeed, the disap- strong leader as against a pettifogging pearance of past hostilities may engen- democracy is reaffirmed from OUR DAILY though the pragmatic turn of mind has der exhilaration , without similar reflec- BREAD. Rogers doesn 't merely save his tions dulling enthusiasm about present men , but makes them more than men: to brace itself for a certain, not so much hostilities. \"Men-we 've been trapped before . And we 've got out of it by doing the impossi- utilitarianism as \" brutilitarianism .\" After Most spectators normally respond ble. We're not going to stop now.\" Thus the McCarthy period , it is difficult to forget along such lines, mainly for the sake of the resort to quick motion at the end 9f enjoying films ' excitements-although HALLELUJAH! and OUR DAILY BREAD finds the affinities between this aspect of the critics who don 't approve of a film , its brusquer, brasher equivalent. whether on aesthetic or other grounds, pioneer spirit and the revisionist attitude are likely to overlook all those aspects Any criticism of the democratic princi- of which they might approve, and notice ple is canceled out by the special context , towards Constitutional rights so aggres- only those they detest! One reason why of military discipline in the first place , of patriotic epics regularly revert to the past requirements of specialist knowledge sively maintained by the \" pseudo-con- is that unwelcome contemporary dissen- (Rogers ') in the second place , and of the sions are dissolved in a general air of number of volunteer scoundrels who ac- servatism \" described by Richard Hof- traditional unity, as with HENRY V, ALEX- cepted the expeditions ' conditions in the stadter . The \" switchover\" in NORTHWEST ANDER NEVSKY, et al. And the old-fangled , third place. Nonetheless, the question of mean, Tory-like style of the English in the majority principle is raised , and the PASSAGE is impeccable: Rogers assents NORTHWEST PASSAGE insures that British film clearly intends to inflict on the aud i- audiences won 't identify with them either: ence the exhilarating shock which so to the majoritarian principle, just as John they 're yesterday' s tyrants for Britain as often distinguishes the audacious enter- in OUR DAILY BREAD is ready to cede his well as for America. Thus the film is quite tainer-artist from the mere entertainer. capable of being taken as a call to inter- (The latter exploits a consensus without property rights. In the general context of vention by interventionists, and as a call exploring the internal tensions which art- the NORTHWEST PASSAGE story, no demo- to strenuous self-reliance by isolationists. ists touch on because they, in their hon- This convenient ambiguity (plus the fact esty, are profoundly perplexed and torn- crat who isn 't also a dogmatic anarchist that, around the time of the film 's action, consciously or unconsciously.) the Canadian provinces were thought to will object to the expedition's autocracy. pose a threat to the U.S.) suggests that, Given the paternalist aspects of the throughout history, America's only real context, the film celebrates the superior- Nevertheless, the general thrust of the ally-and her only real enemy-has been ity of the superior man (Rogers), and the herself. joyful aquiescence in his superiority of thought here clearly includes the kind of those whom he benefits; it comes from To say that NORTHWEST PASSAGE ac- a reciprocation of magnanimity between Nietzschean elitism that Vidor will affirm commodates isolationism (rather like THE the leaders and the led. To obey is per- BIG PARADE) is not to say that it urges it. It haps to be ennobled by the accept- still more emphatically in THE FOUNTAIN- just has no quarrel with it. A generation ance of another's strength. In equating of Cold War after the film , it's easy to \" democracy\" with insubordination, and HEAD-although , of course , elitism in a forget that isolationism was a serious insubordination with weakness , Vidor is political option , even if we distinguish it challenging (almost before it has fossil- democratic conte xt differs from an elitist from nonmilitary interventionism. The lat- ized into a stereotype) that species of ter did indeed prevail politically, for all of Hollywood sentimentality whereby an in- authoritarianism tout court' Roosevelt 's secret schemes, until 1941 , subordinate streak expresses a virile Towne, the artist-mapmaker-civilian, when Pearl Harbor gave the patriotism independence. It may also be that military which underlay isolationism no choice contexts afforded a particularly stylized may correspond to THE BIG PARADE 'S Ap- but to turn militarist-and later, of course, setting for pervasive tensions of peace- to adopt an anti-Communism so expan- time competition , anomie, and Depres- person , with his detached , contemplative sionist that American conscripts took the sion , and largely accounted for the popu- humanity (an aspect which will be re- Northwest Passage to Korea, the South- larity of the war film after 1945; even Ford west Passage to Vietnam , and the East- idolizes the Seventh Cavalry, whose pri- sumed in WAR AND PEACE 'S Pierre , as he ern passage to West Berlin. Isolationism mary job was to harry and persecute the was so prevalent in 1941 that Britain 's Indians. At any rate , NORTHWEST PASSAGE watches the battle); and Rogers' purpose Ministry of Information commissioned THE raises the democratic principle in the FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL (another story of military context as if to point to the very may remind us of the born killer in Slim. the Canadian border) to combat it, and tensions which later films were to smooth over. (Much later, Peckinpah resharpens But the quality of mercy to be found in THE BIG PARADE is conspicuous by its absence here. One wonders if NORTH- WEST PASSAGE is urging Americans to ' Postwar anti-Communist crusades tended to mute American criticism of the principle of unreserved democracy . But they weren 't so rare between the wars , when Walter Lippmann denounced as a \" false assumption ... the mystical democratic as- sumption that the citizen can be taught to under- stand what is going on about him, that he and his fellows in the mass can , through the electoral and parliamentary process , give an educational and rational gu idance to the conduct of the state .... What we are trying to arrive at is the point where we abandon that purely mystical con- cept of democracy which encourages the illusion that ten million amateur thinkers talking them- selves incompetently to death sound li ke the music of the spheres.... We do not want people to know everything about everything all the time , because it is impossible. We do not want the peop le to make up their minds on spec ialized problems , because that is asking too much . We do not want to see them given as indi viduals a false notion of their freedom in society, and have them paralyze action with the infinite din of their amateur judgments. In particular we do not want to see encouraged a din in which the people's own best interest cannot be heard .\" The affin ites or disaffinites between this rat ion- alist, elitist viewpoint and Vidor's . own inspira- tionalist, Populist one aren 't too difficult to discern . But the Lippmann passage, with its ingenious confusion of specialized knowledge and general social awareness , indicates how the pragmatic principle can be used in a brutilitarian fashion against the democratic one, often with conSider- able demogogic effect. FILM COMMENT 43

NORTHWEST PASSAGE. Spencer Tracy and Robert Young . Hitchcock was undoubtedly doing his British duty in making FOREIGN CORRE- NORTHWEST PASSAGE. Robert Young . SPONDENT (for Walter Wanger, a Hol- lywood interventionist, not to say a \"pre- NORTHWEST PASSAGE . Robert Young and Walter Brennan . mature anti-Fascist\"). 44 JULY 1973 A recent article by Michael Howard in the London Sunday Times reminds us that, while the English and the French tended , from 1939, to assume America's sympathetic su pport , the view from across the Atlantic could be very dif- ferent: \" They had already been had once, British propaganda and diplomacy had got them into one war to defend democ- racy. The result had been democratic humiliation , domestic bitterness , a rav- aged Europe and a vastly increased Glrit- ish Empire. Why should they do it again?\" With this in mind , NORTHWEST PASSAGE looks to me, on balance, like an expres- sion of faith in America and in America only; no need therefore to wage a Euro- pean war. (It would be pleasant to see it as a retort, by an ex-colony, to British imperialist films like THE FOUR FEATHERS and THE DRUM , with which another ex- Hungarian , Sir Alexander Korda , was as- saulting the American market, in the name of his adopted country.) Once again, Vidor's stance contrasts in an intriguing and comple x way with John Ford ' s. Ford 's THE LONG VOYAGE HOME takes Eugene O 'Neill 's sailors across the Atlantic to be menaced by U-Boats and strafed by Heinkels while carrying munitions to Britain~an act by which the Germans were understandably provoked , and which Roosevelt was using to make \" a shooting war inevita- ble .\" But Ford as an Irish-American might be expected to remember the Black-and- Tans, and his remarks in a recent BBe television interview with Philip Jenkinson left little doubt that he had a certain anti-British animus on the tip of his mind, thirty-five years after THE INFORMER . Wh ich may explain why THE LONG VOYAGE HOME features a contemptuous carica- ture of a Blimpish Tory Briton who takes it for granted that American merchant- men should brave the U-Boats for the sake of a nation which (as the wartime I.R .A. tended to argue) had oppressed the Irish quite as systematically, and for centuries, as the Nazis intended to oppress Europe. At any rate, this early brief encounter in Ford 's movie is light- weight compared to its climactic anti-Nazi emphasis (it's another Wanger pro- duction); but Ford 's endorsement of a pro-British , anti-Nazi policy isn't without its concessive clause . NORTHWEST PAS- SAGE , for all the grim exuberance of its military adventure , strikes me as less a call to arms than a caution. True patriot- ism entails America ijber alles-or, to use a more neutral phrase: America First, Last, and All The Time . Nonetheless, both NORTHWEST PASSAGE and THE LONG VOYAGE HOME were de- signed, for obvious commercial reasons,

to maintain a certain ambiguity. And it's contemporary, city setting, that much of foreground issue). I can 't help suspecting quite clear that the whole question of the Hays Code ire was directed . It seems that the Mafia is currently be ing used to what constitutes a film 's \" real\" meaning worth advancing the hypothesis that it distract attention from the far wider in- is due for revision. Is it the meaning that was the issues aroused by this setting volvements in racketee ring , and a very only one critic has been able to see, by which upset the Hays Office. After all , so more prevalent cynicism , along the lines the light of a uniquely accurate reading much of the Hays Code now looks ideolog- sketched by Daniel Bell. A full analysis of a text? or that which most of its specta- ical , in its intentions as well as its effects , of these comple x interactions would re- tors saw in fact (even if they were leaping even though it could be accepted in its quire a book, and involve conSidering the to conclusions unjustified by the text)? or time as largely a matter of sex-and-vio- Nazis and Communists as gangster-sur- some compromise between these posi- lence morality. rogates of their periods; as well as fan- tions? or what? It might help to distinguish an \" intrinsic\" (textual) meaning from a The gangster film diversified in various atasy-thrillers la James Bond , with their \" prevalent contemporary\" reading, but ways. But the gradual weakening of its it's quite obvious that further complica- sense of shock and scandal was accom- not always altogether abstract interna- tions must appear, and my own hunch panied by the return of the Western , tional politics, racism , and technological is that NORTHWEST PASSAGE is one of very which stole , i.e . perpetuated , the gang- paranoia . many Hollywood films which ex- ster movie's blood-and-thunder, while emplify them . It's meant to be read in plaCing it in a context which was reassur- Vidor had been ahead of the Hol- different ways by different spectators. ing both as myth and as moral rural lywood game in his admiratio_n of violence And although I'd guess that Vidor's pref- puritanism. But the increased intensity of ( in its destructive as well as constructive erence went to the \" isolationist\" reading, the violence reveals an underlying pre- mode) when , in 1930, he proposed to no logical grounds exist for dismissing monition of film noir. In this connection Irving Thalberg a version of BILLY THE KID the possibility that the ambiguities are it is worth remembering that two film nair in which , it seems , the outlaw kills one meant to defuse and distract from any Westerns , THE OUTLAW and DUEL IN THE person after another, always with some possible meaning, and that it expresses SUN , were ahead of their time in success- sort of justification according to the Code either uncertainty or neutrality or both on fully defying the Code and the pressure of the West , such as an insult to his Vidor's, or MGM's, part. One should also groups whose notions it represented. mother. Thalberg insisted on watering it differentiate an appropriate recognition down, but Vidor cites a gangster film , of ambiguity from dogmatic assumptions My suggestion is that gangster and PUBLIC ENEMY, which appeared the follow- that entertainment films are never politi- Western movies are complementary ing year, as the box-office vindication of cal (contrary examples are too numerous genres-unsynthesized thesis and antith- his original idea. and obvious), or that political meanings esis , as it were . If they continue separate are never seen (OUR DAILY BREAD shows existences, it is not only because of the In NORTHWEST PASSAGE , briefly-re- that they are) , as well as from a lazy country-city dichotomy traditional in counted tales of Indian atrocities are solipsism . One has to acknowledge the American thinking, but also so as to spare sufficient to justify the extraordinary plurality of cultures and views among everyone involved the controversies sense of violence in the punitive attack spectators, but without reverting to that which might arise, were their synthesis on an enemy village in Canada . Cannons pseudo-objectivity which in fact denies all achieved. For such a synthesis would are fired into the sleeping officers' rooms, subjectivities but one. sooner or later involve many of the very the tents are set ablaze while their touchy social issues traced in Kenneth occupants sleep, the others are herded The film probably registers, and per- Allsopp 's The Bootleggers, Andrew Sin- into a square so that volley after volley haps primarily, a hardening of mood clair's Prohibition, and the chapters on may be poured into a virtually defense- whose origin is domestic rather than in- the respectability and normality of crime less mass of flesh . The whole sequence ternational. For one reason or another, in America in Daniel Bell's The End of is so rapidly and tightly rhythmed that it Hollywood generally was reviving the In- Ideology. might almost have been planned with a dian wars on a lavish scale (vide De metronome and a drum, like the \" visual Mille's THE PLAINSMAN and Ford 's DRUMS Intermittently, fragments of such a syn- music\" of OUR DAILY BREAD and the \" ballet ALONG THE MOHAWK), although only as part thesis do appear on the screen. Thus the of death \" in THE BIG PARADE . Only this time of a wholesale resurgence of Westerns Western baddy often imports his most we 're dishing it out instead of taking it, generally, the Wild West being a very evil gunman from the city (so that the an experience which is more exhilarating convenient area for violence enjoyed for cities were wilder than the West) . And the or more disturbing or both, according to its own sake and abstracted from any banks which are robbed by Bonnie and moral taste . It isn't as easy as criticism controversial context. Clyde have just foreclosed on a tenant sometimes assumes to spirit oneself back farmer , like the bank which sets the Joad thirty years in time, and to imagine with The whole study of cycles throughout family on its reverse (East-to-West) odys- what mi xture of the two emotions an the Thirties is rendered very difficult by sey in THE GRAPES OF WRATH . Bonnie and audience would have received the scene. the double intervention of the Hays Code, Clyde are, of course, rural gangsters, not And certainly a 1973 reaction doesn 't which quite artifically curtailed or weak- city ones, and WASPs rather than Wops. represent \" posterity\" -only another, ened certain themes and genres, and the maybe less relevant period . pressure of Hollywood ideology. Hol- The popularity of both genres eventu- lywood's rightwards bias was only inter- ally coincided during the Si xties. This At any rate, the audience of this film 's mittently conspicuous (as in the movie may well have been largely a result of time was less used to wholesale slaughter campaign against Upton Sinclair, or the loss of the less violent family audience than is today ' s. I've a suspicion that two Fox's having to conceal the real theme to TV , but the same genres loom large years later, in SERGEANT YORK , Howard of THE GRAPES OF WRATH from its financing enough there, and the doubled popularity Hawks took some trouble to prepare a bank , or Vidor's having to finance OUR of screen violence preludes a decade of mise-en-scene in which the ex-pacifist DAILY BREAD himself on account of its obvious social crisis, which for the first war hero picks off unsuspecting Germans criticism of banks), but was presumably time was felt as a matter of nationwide only slightly from behind but still very continuous. morale rather than city-vs-country. much from one side, rather than shooting them right in the back, which the Western When, around 1930-'34, the gangster If the gangster film was most heavily code didn't allow although the rules of film attained its first zenith of popularity, leaned on by the censors, it was presum- war do. But Hawks's film involves itself the Western was in relative eclipse , and ably because it most readily involves topi- in a peculiar entanglement between the it is toward the gangster film , with its cal social criticism (in which respect ON manly-rustic code and mass warfare , in THE WATERFRONT is particularly bold , a way that NORTHWEST PASSAGE doesn 't. maybe because labor racketeering is its Hawks smoothes the tensions over, FILM COMMENT 45

whereas Vidor allows an underlying un- by its violence in a way in which the enemies and treacherous friends. And easiness to be felt , which is one reason tactfully abstract bloodbath at the end of clearly no American-vs-British moral con- why his seems to me a vastly preferable STAGECOACH or the very highly moralized trast is intended when I say that it's a film. The Code of the West (which only Injun-killing of the heroic civilian commu- relief to turn from all the tough-minded applied among white men anyway) for- nity in DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK does moral half-truths of the American tradi- bade shooting a man as he slept, but not-which seems to me to be certainly tion (Vidor-Ford-Fuller-Peckinpah) to Vidor brazenly, sensibly applies the mili- to its artistic credit, and perhaps also its Peter Watkins 's CUllODEN, which re- tary code to an enemy that deserves to moral one. Vidor is not quite as innocent stores one 's faith in the cinema's ability die for its military slackness-or for that as Ford pretends to be. to mingle a disturbing honesty with a other, altogether amoral military reason : decent compassion (the Scottish clans as having the bad luck to come up against My hunch would be that, in its time , Indian tribes) . At any rate, Vidor's NORTH- the even more effectively ferocious this carnage provoked a reaction wherein WEST PASSAGE makes THE ALAMO look as enemy which every army strives to be. exhilaration and triumph were upper- phony as a De Mille disaster. Here (as again when Rogers lovingly bul- most, but accompanied by an undertow lies the mapmaker into step, to save him of horror which , while too weak to reverse Since the ending of Vidor 's film was from collapse) , a certain military pride our sympathies, is sufficiently strong to shot by another director, and Vidor dis- and life force become one. evoke a sense of excess, of hubris, such likes it, it's difficult to know to whom to that it's not just the morally squeamish attribute the dialogue, or, no less It is perhaps this film which ushers in who may feel that the hardships of the significant, the tone of voice employed, the thirty-year period during which Ford , long trek back are endowed with an al- as the mapmaker all but longs to leave Hawks, and Hollywood generally keep most expiatory quality. A hero maddened his bride and to set off on another (carni- returning to the military detachment as by his physical suffering secretes an Indi- vorous?) expedition. (Baden-Powell the symbol of loyalty and community in an head in his kit and nibbles at it for draws blood-as he meant to.) There are a manner suggesting, not merely the glob- subsistence, sharing with his buddies nostalgias of one kind , and of another, al military presence of which America felt what they think is meat. (One innocently and one can imagine more careful direc- required between Pearl Harbor in 1941 says, \"I 'll have a bit of the red. \" ) As a tion making the \" same \" scene rather less and the end of the Vietnam war in 1973 , madman , he has to die, but Rogers sa- callow. This \" militarist \" emphasis is the but domestic issues summarized and lutes him as a brave man for whose generous \" weakness \" of a youth who given an optimistic conclusion , notably in mental wound no one, or only the enemy, has found his father-figure and con- Wyler's THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and can be held responsible . Cannibalism is quered fear; and it could administer as Kelly-Donen's IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER . a more eccentric and private form of salutary a shock to the too-easy assump- Or (as the French Fascists Bardeche and atrocity than those which warfare only tion that suburban \" happy-ever-after\" is Brasillach wrote of Renoir's lA GRANDE too regularly unleashes , and it opens up preferable to any other life style. Certainly IllUSION) \" It is neither [Renoir's] fault nor gradually after 1945, until the savagery the era of Hollywood misogyny was about ours, if some men were able to experi- wreaked upon an Indian 'S woman 's to begin , and the film may be touching on ence [in war] something which they have breasts in NEVADA SMITH turns into some- been unable to experience since .. . \" thing quite recognizably like the involve- the links-established, and possibly ex- Having turned his back on the tenement ment of women and children in My Lai aggerated , by many American writers- jungle, a gifted youth like Sam in STREET in SOLDIER BLUE. ' But the cannibal theme between American womanhood and pac- SCENE finds relief from the nervous ten- intermittently appears in American litera- ifist attitudes. Up to this point, at least, sions of the lonely crowd only in the rigid ture , notably Melville 's Typee, as the fly a certain warmth and responsiveness in community and uncomplicatedly exter- in the ointment, or the worm in the apple, Tracy's style makes Rogers another man nalized aggression of another kind of of the noble savage, whose proclivities altogether from the man whom John servitude et grandeur militaires. in that direction may not altogether con- Wayne , say , would have created . A pity, demn him , but do represent a substantial then , that when Tracy is required to say Of all Vidor 's films , NORTHWEST PAS- concession by American romanticism to that his troops will set off \" as soon as SAGE most clearly demonstrates how vital- a Calvinist, or common-sense, notion of the last glow of the evening sun has left ism may, by imperceptible stages, shade human depravity. the sky,\" he nervously resorts to a quick into that variety of Social Darwinism , red grin, as if sensing that this touch of Grif- in tooth and claw , which one may call In NORTHWEST PASSAGE, the enemies of fith 's poetic gravitas, which has somehow patriotic or chauvinistic or jingoistic, the Americans are an alliance of the remained in the script, had outlived its depending on whether one is a brave overcivilized (French and English) with time. A development of this sense of American, a slaughtered Frenchman, a ignoble savages (Iroquois and Mohawks). dignity brings us back to that sense of treacherous English gentleman , or an Between these two extremes the Ameri- both sides as, in some sense, honorable, Indian. The film 's moral balance might cans, if they're hardly a golden mean , which Griffith could bring to the battle have been more audacious still had the nonetheless do just contrive to hold a scenes of THE BIRTH OF A NATION . enemy not been presented as morally natural, decent, affirmative human norm . debased; had the battle been between Vidor's Indians are in equally bad moral Part of the tragedy might indeed have sides as morally matched (as individuals) odor whichever side they 're on-savage been that the Americans, the French , the as Northern and Southern soldiers in the English . and the Indians were all behav- Civil War. Then , Vidor might have had to ' One doubts whether even John Wayne wou ld ever ing according to different senses of the call on the profounder spiritual resources call a film CALLEY 'S CRUSADERS (or should it be concept \" honor\"-a concept still contro- of a transcendentalism , in tension and Kalley 's Krusaders?) . But it shouldn 't be too versial when it made its postwar bow with balance, perhaps, against a Social Dar- difficult to make a film taking an understanding THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. For even winist acceptance of realpolitik and a view of it all, if it weren 't that those pesky liberals transcendentalism , by its alliance with an merely personal, that is, a human, trage- would make an ideological fuss outweighing the expansionist Puritanism , can accommo- dy.' Even so , the film leaves one shaken kommercial profits. The tactics a diehard hawk date an identification of everything alien might adopt are exemplified by the klimax of Tay with the morally inferior who are destined 'One recalls Stonewall Jackson's reply, on being Garnett's ONE MINUTE TO ZERO, which explains why for the rubbish heap of history. The asked whether he felt certain qualms as he U.S. Army Kolonel Robert Mitchum was absolutely boundaries between \" rosy\" and \"black\" watched his fellow-American Yankee enemies right to slap U.N. Observer Ann Blyth into submis- transcendentalisms are never easy to dying under his hail of shot and shell. \" No. Shoot sion before shelling the South Korean refugee draw. For just as the apparent \" accep- them all . I do not wish them to be brave.\" families among whom North Korean spies and tance\" of pantheism may lead also to an soldiers are infiltrating the U.N. lines . All the same, Garnett's film deserves our somewhat ambivalent respect for giving a not quite unworried expression to the race hatred reputedly common among U.S. troops in Korea and Vietnam . 46 JULY 1973

.. acceptance \" of amoral sturm-und- make our transition obvious enough . And If their complementary disaffinities drang, so doctrines of wise resignation if \" hot \" expressionism is a desperate to fate may lead to a \" wise \" acceptance form of romanticism , with an undeniable inspire a love affair, they also doom it; of one's own side's atrocities (although connection to Emersonian transcen- one nonetheless tends to be indignant dentalism, then the Vidor and Jancso his rigid individuality jars with her nervous about the enemy's) . And if all brave war- films are like two rivers flowing in oppo- ambition . riors return their life force to the cosmic site directions from a common source. cycle, what price a Geneva Convention? Another common factor may be found in Yet perhaps, in the end, Harry 's Nietzsche; Janko Lavrin stresses some of weakness reveals itself as an involuntary The artists whose work , in its chal- Nietzsche's Eastern European connec- expression of integrity, an instin c tive self- lenge and frankness, makes us most un- tions and sympathies, and Emerson 's preservation. It closes one path, but it easy are often those who best help us Essays acknowledge his influence. The opens another. Deadened as he has be- to live out aspects of those problems films of Jancso, at once expressionist which no moral philosophers have yet and absurdist , are all but Kafka 's very come, it takes only a gesture from his settled to universal satisfaction . Tran- un-Vidorian pessimism translated into scendentalism and Social Darwinism may very Vidorian terms of ferocious action wife (Ruth Hussey) for him to realize that calion each other's rhetoric for mutual in heroic exteriors . he need only become alive to her to live, camouflage ; nevertheless , NORTHWEST PASSAGE (even more than its nearest With WAR AND PEACE , Vidor will return to recover a modicum of happiness, of counterparts by Fuller and Peckinpah) to the balance of THE BIG PARADE . The brings us close to that honest uneasiness assertion will be , not of pacifism against self-respect, and of that clear conscience which denies us the complacency of imag- aggressive defense, nor of aggressive so dear to Bostonian rectitude. Subse- ining that we can answer the problem by defense against pacifism, but rather a quently, his morning walk through the some general moral prescription about complex, indeed a virtually dialectical in- park seems less dull. the spirit in which war should be waged. teraction between a pacific detachment and a communal responsibility . NORTH- Some of Vidor's favorite themes are As Michel Delahaye observes (in the WEST PASSAGE and its successors , H.M . clear enough. To the city girl Harry best of the Cahiers articles on Vidor), PULHAM , ESQ . and AN AMERICAN ROMANCE , prefers his home and spiritual roots. His Vidor 's orchestration of the elements in- all but constitute a trilogy dedicated to rediscovered life force makes his plain volves a fascinating complexity. NORTH- an acceptance of the American status wife as fetching as the other woman; and WEST PASSAGE depends on parado xes of quo-and its vindication against the criti- here there isn 't the glamorizing which is the elements: the men are marched cism or the uneasiness which is still al- a tiny flaw in OUR DAILY BREAD . His fasci- across the torrential river as if it were dry lowed to appear, although more forcefully nation with an attractive but selfish land, while the whale boats have to car- avowed , in most of his other important woman is found to be not romantic but ried through forests . In OUR DAILY BREAD films . an indication of misdirected vitality. The consistency becomes excess (drought) , stuffy discontent that imprisons him in his and men must work like madmen to re- H.M. humdrum sensibility may have its origin store the proper intrication of the ele- 'Pulham, Esq. in his being a \" poor little rich boy\" -a ments (the irrigation ditch ). In RUBY John who was never drawn down into the GENTRY the town's enemy seems to be (1941 ) liberating vulgarity of the crowd. Still , one the sea (the marsh, drownings, floodings) doesn 't need to be ruined to change , and but is really the town 's pusillanimity. In Each morning Harry Pulham (Robert Harry's final acquiescence in what he has HALLELUJAH! the revivalist service-which Young) performs his complacent, mid- become is not an easy and complacent is at least an image of Heaven-involves dle-aged routine. Fussily he turns his surrender to passive conformity, but a breakfast egg in its cup and slices off its rebirth as crucial as John 's laughter at the green pastures, the river Jordan, and shell. The deathlike clicking of the clock the clown in THE CROWD . the ritual descent of the human body, only underlines the distance between his guided by the spirit, into the saving spouse and himself. But in his walk to This film 's challenge is precisely its waters (rites of another kind of passage). assertion of suburban routine and of the In NORTHWEST PASSAGE, what Vidor calls work through the park, a minimal but pious virtues, when deliberately chosen , \" human chains\" across the swollen river as one of the forms of profounder free- are another kind of baptism-into military potentially crucial responsiveness ap- dom . The film 's whole structure is dedi- manhood. Of the connection throughout pears: he throws bread to the squirrels. cated to this twist. Its deft, rapid Vidor's work of forests, swamps, and kill- flashbacks seem to be leading up to some ing , something has already been said. An invitation to a reunion with the liberation , whether by a new romance, or just by flight, or maybe by a gesture of We may further pursue the dubious companions of his college days sets him rebellion in the spirit of J. P. Priestley's but interesting hypothesis of an Eastern reviewing, in flashback, his past life, LAST HOLIDAY. But if a sudden nostalgia European inheritance in Vidor's vision. which seems hardly more inspiring than is necessary to provoke the pain of scru- The slaughter of the dazed, half-asleep, his present one. He reviews his conflicts tinizing a lifetime lost, its very keenness virtually helpless enemy, and the troops' with his prosperous father (Charles Co- absolves Harry from what might have demoraliz ing retreat, in NORTHWEST PAS- burn); his college days and hopes, and been a provocation, by guilt, toward a SAGE, evoke certain themes of Jancso : his gradual disillusionments; and his af- merely destructive renunciation. the atrocities, the numbness of mind , the fair with Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr), an nihilistic braveries. In their very contrast, immigrant's daughter working ambitious- From another angle , H. M. PULHAM , ESQ . the differences between Vidor's powerful marks a significant juncture in the pattern \" rooting interest\" and Jancso's cold eye ly in a New York advertising office. She, of Hollywood genres and cycles. It repu- on chivalry and tyranny correlate exactly at least, is determined not to remain a diates both the exotic vamp cycle (from with their different viewpoints. And both the silent era, lingering on through may strike one as slightly subversive, face in the crowd, and her hectic New Garbo, Dietrich, and Hedy Lamarr) and even as to \" our side 's\" right to shoot York worldliness contrasts with Harry 's the soft yet dynamic romanticism of Frank down \"the other side\" like dogs. reserved, private, quietly stuffy existence. Borzage. It centers on a Bostonian WASP hero-or anti-hero, since Harry Pulham I have suggested elsewhere that the could be interpreted from an un-Vidorian art of the absurd is a cold mode of ex- position as something of a man without pressionism ; and the novels of Kafka individual qualities. The choice of an ultra-WASP tradition seems more specific than the paraphrase suggested in our discussions of THE CROWD and THE WEDDING NIGHT. For, with business picking FILM COMMENT 47

H. M. PULHAM, ESQ . photo : MGM executive suites where selfish opportun- overmuch with the Johns and Marys and ism seems fittest to survive . In its elegiac Pulhams and Vidor's humble yet tran- up in 1940, the American middle class aspect, H. M. PULHAM relates also to a little scendental men , it is because he chooses could congratulate itself again on their cycle of domestic dramas (notably THE to reduce apparent successes to their America, which had survived the Depres- MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, CITIZEN KANE , proper size. And if Vidor rarely seems sion and all those threatened upheavals THE LITTLE FOXES) set against the back- preoccupied with \" the great,\" it is be- which some thought the New Deal would ground of stuffily respectable upper-mid- cause he chooses to endorse the Ameri- bring. dle-class life , whose bleak , exclusive can dream-at least in its moral terms. values are menaced, or captured, or sur- From this angle , H. M. PULHAM repre- rounded , or infiltrated by commercial vUl- But the most obvious variation on sents an early essay in a genre whose garities and cynicism-qualities these Vidor 's theme is Albert Lewin's THE MOON best-known example is THE MAN IN THE films present as newer than the economic AND SIXPENCE , whose hero renounces his GRAY FLANNEL SUIT. In both films , a man historians might altogether agree. ' gray-flannel existence for a South Seas with a set of moral principles he fears exoticism in which Vidor had already ac- have become outdated must compose an CITIZEN KANE also takes the form of a complished one well-remembered exer- essay which becomes a moral self-exam- review-not by a diary but by a mass- cise : BIRD OF PARADISE, a last gasp of the ination-the last expression , almost, of media exteriority (\" News on the March\") late-silent vogue for Polynesian romance the diary-keeping New England con- and a private-eye figure (the reporter). (WHITE SHADOWS OF THE SOUTH SEAS , science. Pulham performs this self-invigi- There the spiritual cousin to Harry Pul- TABU). From the Vidor film 's noble-savclge lation to present himself to a community ham and Tom Rath is Kane 's drama re- ethos, Lewin derived a Decadent (Wil- from which he has strayed. (Thus, on viewer Jed Leland , who represents dean) rather than a Symbolist meaning, another social level , Sam in STREET SCENE Kane 's integrity , and who is also tested worlds apart from the contemporaneous might, twenty-five years later, have met by the writing of an essay: about a per- degradation of the earlier cycle into For- once more wi th the fr iends and neighbors former (Susan Ale xander Kane) who is ties kitsch on the Dorothy Lamour-Betty of his youth .) Nunnally Johnson 's hero , both another of Kane 's alter egos and a Tom Rath , must invade his own privacy puppet of publicity . (It isn 't difficult to Grable level. H. M. PULHAM , ESQ . and THE by constructing a factitious autobiog- imagine Joseph Cotten as H. M. Pulham MOON AND SIXPENCE share the light, white , raphy for a prospective employer; the in Vidor 's film.) Sharing both a year of flat lighting that seems to have been an still-small voice of the d ia ry may be obli- release (1941) and the flashback form , attractive alternative to the more oppres- terated by the publicity image. Rath com- CITIZEN PULHAM and c. F. KANE , ESQ . each sive, claustrophobic styles favored by bines the two, achieving success by be- survey their own slice of Americana. Welles and Wyler, for reasons touched coming average-and private. Pulham , What Welles would have had to say about on in discussing THE CITADEL. More fitting confronted with the advertising girl , also Pulham would doubtless be as ironic and to Vidor's theme than Lewin 's, it seems withdraws. as pitying as what he had to say about to set the key of Vidor's brief ventures Kane . If Welles scarcely concerns himself into phYSical sensation-the love scene Each of these two f ilms moves in its in the snow; the sudden appearance of own orbit around a common problem. 'One might hypothesize that the \" cozy\" Victorian a naked newborn babe (as in THE CROWD Pulham 's world has survived (whence his family films of the Thirties branched off (or rather and THE CITADEL); the gray sobriety of reborn spirituality) , but he has survived crossbred with other genres) along three different Pulham 's mien , as if his clothes were part into an America in which the Sams and evolutionary lines : (1) MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS , SUMMER of him and he would be denatured without the Manyas, like Marvin Myles, have HOLIDAY, and their swan song in MGM musicals; them. The film twins with THE CROWD created their brighter, more anomic city (2) \"oppressive\" family dramas like those cited insofar as a babe who enters this world , world . City America has triumphed; the above ; and (3) the film nair ( DRAGONWYCK , etc.). trailing clouds of glory, or rather potenti- virgin forest has become a well-mani- The reversals of cozy Victorianism into nair Vic- ality, all but fails in his self-appointed cured park ; and individual integrity is torianism occurred with Goldwyn 's and Wyler 's tasks, and yet saves his soul , which is, thought to be stuffy or suicidal in the at least, a corner of the universe. /I taut WUT HERING HEIGHTS. cultiver son arne. In this respect it reiter- ates , in less striking terms , the public defeat and private victory of THE CITADEL. The inhumanity comes not from ambition within and indifference without, but from complacency within and routine without. Manson's defeat in THE CITADEL is taken even further, for there, at least, his efforts end in limited successes . Pulham loses and wins himself moral- ly, so that Vidor's individualistic transcen- dentalism coincides with a kind of velvet- gloved Puritanism whose very challenge lies in the subtlety of the conflicts and the manner in which self-salvation coun- terfeits conformity. If Pulham is less a moral exemplar than John in OUR DAILY BREAD, he 's not one of Vidor 's moral losers. For Pulham to labor under guilt and shame over his lost impulses and his lost years would be to renounce the free- dom of spirit which makes him the spiri- tual peer of Zeke (HALLELUJAH I) and Sam (STREET SCENE) and all of those Vidor heroes who renounce the constrictions of their past for a wider, more impalpable unity. He does so within the framework 48 JULY 1973