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STAFF \" VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1972 CONTENTS editor JOURNALS RICHARD CORLISS Cannes / Richard Roud Los Angeles / Stephen Farber book editor/ assistant editor Parisi Jonathan Rosenbaum MELINDA WARD page 2 graphic design CHARLIE CHAPLIN : MARTHA LEHTOLA FACES AND FACETS essays by Charles Silver, managing editor Gilberto Perez Guillermo, AUSTIN LAMONT Gary Carey, William K. Everson , William Paul , Stanley Kauffmann , advertising manager David Denby, Stephen Harvey, NAOMI WEISS Foster Hirsch, Emily Sieger, David Robinson correspondents and Michael Kerbel Cannes RICHARD ROUD page 8 Los Angeles STEPHEN FARBER Paris JONATHAN ROSENBAUM CHRONICLER OF POWER Franklin Schaffner assistants interviewed by Kenneth Geist research MARY CORLISS page 29 design LINDA MANCINI INGMAR BERGMAN design GRETCHEN ACKERMAN by John Simon page 37 subscriptions MARILYN WHITE production SAYRE MAXFIELD ASPECTS OF CINEMATIC CONSCIOUSNESS editorial board by Donald Skoller JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director page 41 Film Program , Ohio University JOHN WAYNE TALKS TOUGH Athens, Ohio interviewed by Joe Mcinerney page 52 JAMES A. BEVERIDGE, Director Programm e in Film , Yo rk Un iversity FILM FAVORITES Robin Wood on Toronto, Ontario BIGGER THAN LIFE page 56 HOWARD SUBER , Chairman, Critical Studies Motion Picture / Television Division, UCLA Richard McGuinness on Los Angeles, California RIVER OF NO RETURN page 62 WILLARD VAN DYKE , Director Department of Film , Museum of Modern Art Elliott Sirkin on THE GROUP New York, New York page 66 The o pinions exp ressed in FILM COMMENT CRITICS: Robert E. Sherwood are those of the individual authors and do not by John Schultheiss page 70 necessarily represent the opinions of the editor, staff or publisher. BOOKS by Stuart Liebman FI LM COMMENT, vo lume 8 number 3, page 73 September-October 1972. Price $1.50. FIL M COMM ENT is publisl;led bimonthly by Film LETTERS Comment Publishing Corporation . Copyrigh toi 1972 by page 75 Fil m Com ment Publishing Corporation . Al l rights reserved . Th is publication is fully protected by domestic and international on th e cover: copy right. It is forbid den to duplicate any part of this publication THE K ID . in any way wi th ou t prior writte n perm ission from the publishers. Char li e Chap li n and J ack ie Coogan . FILM COMM ENT partiCipates in the FI AF period ical indexing plan. photo : Mu seum of Modern Art / Library of Congress ca rd number 76-498 . Film Stills Arc hive. Second class postage paid at Boston , Massachu se tt s. Subscription rates in th e United States : $9 for six numbers , $18 for twelve numbers ; elsewhere $10.50 for six numbers , $20.00 fo r lwelve numbers, payable in us funds only. New subscribers please include your occupation an d zip code. Subscription and back issue correspo ndence: FILM COMM ENT box 686 Village Station, Brookline MA 02147 Ed itorial correspondence: FILM COMM ENT 214 East 11 th Street, New Yo rk NY 10003. Back vol umes of FIL M COMM ENT have been reprinted by Johnson Repri nt Corporation , 111 Fifth Avenue , New Yo rk NY 10003. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Ann Arbor Michigan 48106. Pl ease write to these companies fo r complete sales information . Type se t by Rochester Monotype Composition Company, Wrightson Typog raphe rs and Typographic House . Printed in USA by Printing Divi sion , Aveo Corporation . International distribution : Worl dwi de Med ia Service , 386 Park Avenue South , New York NY 10016. Distribu ted in the USA except in San Francisco , Boston and Los Angeles by B DeBoer, 188 High Street , Nutley NJ 07110.
.JOURNALS CANNES L.A. PARIS Richard Roud Stephen Farber Jonathan Rosenbaum This was not the year for revelations This spring , at the Plaza Theatre in April 23: A screening of Dziga Vertov 's at the Cannes Festival. But compensation Westwood , Slavko Vorkapich gave a fas- ENTHUSIASM (1930) , organized by the there was in the form of three superb films cinating series of lectures, \" The Visual magazine Cinethique, at Residence de by directors that I, for one , had long since Nature of the Film Medium .\" The series l'Ecole Centrale in Chatenay Malabry, a given up on. By the time this appears, attracted a sizable audience, mainly stu- suburb of Paris. After taking a train and John Huston 's FAT CITY will doubtless dents, but also a number of prominent a bus , I find myself on an eerie , newly- have opened in America , so you will see Hollywood directors-among them Wil- built college campus-faceless buildings what I mean. Although Huston 's later liam Friedkin , Lawrence Turman and with hardly any windows or doors visible, films had their admirers, I was never one Laslo Benedek-who were willing to ac- each separated from the others by vast, of them . But here, without any nostalgic knowledge that they still have something empty spaces , like solitary islands: more exce.sses , he has returned to the scenes to learn about their craft. creepy and ominous than anything in of his early triumphs-in this case, a small UCLA or Alphaville. After much wander- town in Northern California , with its Vorkapich was born in Yugoslavia , ing around , I find myself on the appropri- sweaty gyms and sleazy bars-and , like and came to Hollywood after the First ate floor of the appropriate building and Antaeus , he has found new strength from World War. A painter, he was always am directed down a long dark hallway. contact with the dust of the sidewalks. fascinated by films ; he first secured work Each door in the hallway leads into a as an actor , began experimenting with classroom, and each classroom-there Hiroshi Teshigahara, on the other films on his own , and in 1928 co-directed are six in all-contains two television sets. hand , has triumphed by breaking away a highly-regarded short, THE LIFE AND Gradually it becomes clear that the film from his past. THE PITFALL and WOMAN OF DEATH OF A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA . Then he will be shown close-circuit on a dozen THE DUNES were considerable achieve- began to work regularly in the industry; sets , and one is free to pick whichever ments , but after that he fell deeper and he worked closely with George Cukor on classroom and set one likes. deeper into Kafkaesque allegory. He him- four films in the early Thirties (including self seems to have realized that some- WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD and A BILL OF Vertov's first sound film, principally thing was going wrong , for SUMMER SOL- DIVORCEMENT) , and went on to become concerned with the spirited group effort DIERS (not to be confused with the the chief architect of montage sequences by miners of the Don coal basin , is a lyri- American documentary WINTER SOLDIER , for RKO , Paramount , and MGM. It has cal articulation of the exhilaration of that which was shown at Cannes to great been erroneously reported that Vor- effort-the fusion of isolated energies and acclaim) constitutes a deliberate decision kapich was a student of Eisenstein's per- personalities into a common force . This to anchor , in plain old everyday reality , haps because of Eisenstein's theories theme is complemented by the discon- his ideas about the difficulty of communi- of montage-which Vorkapich finds highly tinuities that separate the film 's various cation between men of different cultures. questionable), but he says he was more parts , all of which ultimately work towards influenced by Murnau's films, especially the expression of a unified statement. And with a crash of \" Look, ma, no THE LAST LAUGH and SUNRISE . Just as the value of each individual effort symbols,\" he has given us a (reasonably) in a group endeavor is seen . by Vertov straight treatment of the problems of a Vorkapich had a great deal of freedom as indissoluble and indispensable, the G.!. deserter in Japan. Half the film is in in executing these montage sequences, separate values of sound and image, shot English , and one of its attractions is that which he conceived , shot, and edited . He and sequence are each given their due: this part is both convincing and funny , had no interest in going on to direct no single element is permitted to become as grass-roots Jim tries to cope with full-length commercial films, for he says the servant (or master) of another. Thus, Japanese cooking and customs. But Te- he would not have had the same freedom when Vertov joins music to a sequence , shigahara manages to evoke sympathy to experiment visually. His most satisfying instead of tailoring one to fit the length on both sides , as Jim begins more and assignment was on Hecht and MacArth- of another, he lets the music run on, after more to resent being treated as a symbol ur 's CRIME WITHOUT PASSION ; the prologue , the sequence's end, over blank, unex- of the struggle against imperialism , and with its astonishing subliminal cutting , is posed footage; and in a rapid montage to realize that no one cares about him one of his most daring sequences. But sequence, the camera placements, as a person (why should they?), but only the visual experiments in many of his movements and subjects of individual as An American Deserter. other sequences were often ahead of shots call attention to themselves and their time , and they had a great deal of refuse to work merely-as in \"classic\" Miklos Jancso is another director who influence. Referring to a slow-motion lyri- Russian montage-as means towards in recent years seems to m\\3 to have gone cal romp through the woods that he predetermined ends. astray. But now it appears that he was created for DAVID COPPERFIELD , Vorkapich only feeling his way-toward the non-nar- notes wryly, \"Some directors of commer- Keeping both Vertov's social theme rative film , as witness RED PSALM. Unlike cials saw that sequence and have been and his formal separations in mind , the his last few films, which tried uncom- using it ever since, to sell cosmetics .\" projection of ENTHUSIASM on separate fortably to reconcile his penchant for sets in separate classrooms seems abstraction with the necessities of pre- Even though these sequences are strangely ideal. Whether permitted by tending to tell some kind of story , RED highly stylized , in a manner that has be- accident or design, the freedom to chose PSALM has completely jettisoned any at- come unfashionable, they remain ex- one classroom (crowded) over another tempt at plot. There is a theme-a 19th- traordinarily fresh , for they often epito- (empty), a set with dark contrast over a century peasant revolt, defeat, and ulti- mize the exhilaration of discovering the continued on page 76 continued on page 4 continued on page 6 2 SEPTEMBER 1972 'I
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CANNES JOURNAL continued from page 2 presents him in all his self-indulgent, self- Prize-but to me it was a sad falling -off destructive neu roticism , and yet makes from ANDREI ROUBLYEV . Touted as the mate, metaphorical, victory-but the film us feel sorry fo r him when the long-suf- Soviet answer to 2001: A SPACE OD YSSE Y, is more a cantata , an opera , even a fering Catherine finally dec ides she has it was , even to one who is less than a musical . There are sequences in which had enough , and leaves him for good. It's fanatical admirer of the Kubrick film , pon- his manipulation of people and camera the kind of realistic filmmak ing that derous and pretentious. has the exhilarating virtuosity of a Busby depends on the details being exactly Berkeley; there are songs, too , and not right, and even more on total honesty and Meanwhile , back in London . The only \" The Marseillaise \" and \" The In- an understanding of character that tran- ternationale ,\" but also \" Charlie Is My scends what we usually think of as neo- influence of the auteur theory has shown Darling\" ! realism . itself to be all-pervasive , even to those The film won Jancso the prize for Best LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is Direction . Outside the Festival proper, in Werner Herzog 's most recent film , and who are unaware of it. Although Will iam the Directo rs' Fortnight , we saw his TECH- although it deals with a German Helen NIQUE AND THE RITE , wh ich immediately Keller, it bears little resemblance to his Wellman used to occupy a position not preceded RED PSALM . Made for Italian TV , EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL. Rather, it is it portrays the youth of Attila the Hun! It a straight documentary about a 56-year- far below Howard Hawks, few people isn 't entirely successful , but it is a fasci- old woman who travels all over Bavaria nating \" link film \" : a dry- run for RED PSALM , trying to help others similarly afflicted to even talk about him any more. When but without those horsemen who-always find a way out of \" the land of silence and on the move, circling around the peas- darkness .\" If the word had not already Cahiers du Cinema published its first ants-make this \" psalm \" not only a been so utterly debased, y ou could call choreographic cantata, but a true horse it \" inspirational \" in nature , for what dictionary of American directors in 1955, opera. comes out of the film is not \" how different she is from us \" but, despite the double Wellman was treated fairly well: \" Artistic Come to think of it , there wa s o ne affliction of deafness and blindness, what revelation at Cannes, and that was Phil- little difference it ultimately makes. This honesty personified . . . he can give an lipe Garrel 's INNER SCAR . Garrel has been is , as Lindsay Anderson used to sa y, \" a around for several years, and while there film that spea ks up for life .\" extraordinary nobility to mediocre was always distinct evidence of his talent, he has just now turned out a completely God knows , there were enough disap- plots . .. BUFFALO BILL and YELLOW SK Y are satisfying film . Like most of his works , pointments at Cannes. The most crushing INNER SCAR has no story ; but unlike the was Jerzy Skolimowski's KING , QUEEN , among the best westerns ever made.\" others, its sense of spectacle and struc- KNAVE (from the Nabokov novel) with , in ture are so developed that it can do the title roles, David Niven , Gina Lollo- By 1963 and the second Cahiers dic- without very nicely. There are mythologi- brig ida, and John Moulder-Brown . It cal references: when we see Pierre Cle- ought to have been good material for him, tionary, the line had noticeably hardened: menti , naked (as he is throughout the but something went wrong , and the result film), lighting a torch from a lava pool and is acutel y painful. \" His calculating coldness, his respect- bearing it down the mountain to hand over to Pierre Clementi Jr. (aged about The Italians Francisco Rosi and Elio able soberness, and the technical mas- 2, I should say), one can 't help thinking Petri shared the Grand Prize. But Rosi 's of Prometheus . The film is nourished with MATTEI , the biography of an extraordinary tery which seems to take the place of other mythologies too , such as Siegfried Italian who re volutionized the oil-and-gas and St. George and the Dragon . INNER business there , and who may have been heart, give him the air of a Transatlantic SCAR is something of a superproduction killed by foreign oil interests, was dis- for the underground cinema: color and tinctly low-voltage, with the electric ur- Rene Clement, but without the latter's wide-screen ; location shooting in Death gency of SALVATORE GIULIANO and HANDS Valley, Iceland, and Egypt; Nico and the OVER THE CITY nowhere in evidence . Con- qualities . . . irritating , boring, overcool. \" Velvet Underground! A strange mi xture- scientiously plodding , it told us both more as is the sound track , largely in English , about Mattei than we cared to know and , Th e n Andrew Sarris took Wellman down with dollops of French and German from at the same time , rather less . And THE time to time-but it all works. WORKING CLASS WILL GO TO HEAVEN was a few more pegs, attacking the \" funda- one more step on Petri 's downhill road For those who haven 't seen L'ENFANCE that, as far as I'm concerned , began with mental deficiency \" in his good films , and NUE (released briefly in the U.S. as ME)- his first film . Fashionably concerned with and , alas , that covers far too many labor politics , it too often sacrificed plau- characterizing him as \" regressive , gro- people-Maurice Pialat 's WE WON 'T GROW sibility to the all-screaming , all-crying Ital- OLD TOGETHER must have had the force ian bravura effect. tesque, and mediocre\" -Less Than of a revelation . In it he has left childhood behind, but not the lower-middle-class I had looked forward to seeing at Meets the Eye. French world that he characteristically Cannes Kjell Grede 's KLARA LUST , his first chronicles with such critical affection. film since HARR Y MUNTER , but Swedish Now the National Film Theatre has Jean Yanne won the prize for Best Actor reactions were so negative that its pro- as a married man who has been carrying duce rs d idn 't even bother to bring a prin t. begun a gigantic attempt to rehabilitate on a turbulent affair with a young woman I caught up with it in Pa ris , however , and (Marlene Jobert) for si x years ; and no I must confess I do see their point. The Wellman 's reputation , claiming that he better portrayal of a male chauvinist pig first ten minutes are breathtaking , but has ever been put on the screen . Pialat then it gets hopelessly lost in socioreli- has been the victim of a Catch-22 situa- gious mawkishness. tion : He hasn 't been considered distinc- Andrei Tarkovsky 's SOLARIS had many defenders-it won the Grand Special Jury tive enough to merit a retrospective, so we haven 't been able to see just how distinctive he is . Chris Wiking , who ar- ranged the season , agrees with the au- teurists that Wellman is mighty cool ; only he calls it \" lucid .\" On the one hand , he claims that Wellman refuses to force and manipulate his material in the slightest way . On the other , there is the director's \" strong formal intelligence\" which gen- erally produces elliptical, episodic, enig- matic movies, shaped like mosaics which build to astonishingly cerebral and emo- tional patterns. Hmmm ... As I write , the season has just begun . Unfortunately, the NFT's current policy seems to be to show films as far out of chronological order as possible , so no idea of continuity or development can result. I did catch two rarities , NIGHT NURSE and OTHER MEN 'S WOMEN (both 1931 ). They were quite diverting , particu- larly the first, with Barbara Stanwyck bat- tl ing it out with an impossibly evil Clark Gable for the lives of two small children . But there was little evidence of that \" strong formal intelligence \" and , if there were cerebral and emotional patterns, I didn 't see them . I think this round will be won by the auteurists. 11111111 4 SEPTEMBER 1972
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L. A. JOURNAL continued from page 2 sense of forward motion , making the devices be employed intelligently and riders appear to bob up and down in the judiciously , and he is particularly harsh unique resources of film. Vorkapich same spot. In THE INFORMER Ford has a on the indiscriminate use of handheld occasionally contributed to other parts of shot of McLaglen looking up, startled , at camera by younger directors. What the films-he edited one reel of MR. SMITH something he sees ; the cut is to another GOES TO WASHINGTON-though his knowl- shot of McLaglen from a different angle- handheld camera records does not, edge may have tended to make other so that the effect created is that he seems people nervous. He recalls advising Vic- startled to see himself. The concluding Vorkapich insists, correspond to any per- tor Fleming that a shot he was setting up shootout in BREATHLESS is edited so con- ception of reality: \" The ground does not for JOAN OF ARC was from the wrong fusingly that it is unclear from what direc- sha ke in reality . The handheld camera angle. \" The production manager gave tion the police approach, and exactly how only records the palpitations of the cam- me a dirty look. But then Fleming realized and when Belmondo is shot. eraman .\" It can be used when the inten- I was right. \" Vorkapich went on to make tion is to suggest that a cameraman was some short films of his own , with John It may be argued that loo ki ng at se- present-as in CITIZEN KANE , when a Hoffman (who had also created some quences out of context forces one to lose scene of the old man Kane in his wheel- exciting montage sequences-for ex- all sense of the meaning of the film as chair is shot with handheld camera from ample , in SAN FRANCISCO and THE GREAT a whole. Vorkapich sees the. issue outside the gates of Xa nadu . And ZIEGFELD) , and in 1949 became head of differently: \" Deep immersion in the sub- Vorkapich acknowledges that handheld the cinema division at the University of ject matter inhibits visual sensibility. If you camera can be used in a surrealist or Southern California. He has lectured at get invo lved in the story , you may not dreamlike film when the intention is to the Museum of Modern Art, at Princeton , notice these mistakes . I am not opposed create a state of mind ; but he objects to in Yugoslavia , and he hopes to bring his to stories. I c(on 't deny the entertainment its use in many realistic films-for examp- lecture series to Washington next year. value or literary value or documentary le , the bedroom scene in BREATHLESS or va lue of films , but film is not yet an the picnic scene in JULES AND JIM . In his lectures Vorkapich concentrates independent, autonomous form of art. \" on pure ly formal questions , and he Urging closer attention to the unique Among the films that Vorkapich partic- begins by getting back to first principles attributes of film , Vorkapich observes, ularly admires for their cinematic qualities -defining the grammar of film , the basic \" What is done in most films is to w rite are RASHOMON , 8 Y2, and Hilary Harris ' NINE requirements of clear visual expression . dramatic stories and to register dramatic VARIATIONS ON A DANCE THEME . More re- Vorkapich chides the film schools for performances . But dramatic works are cently , moments in WOMEN IN LOVE and failing to provide any training in visual not works of film art , and the re cord of THE MUSIC LOVERS impressed him . \" There perception and film grammar. \" At the an artistic performance is not an artistic were two or three poetic images in WOMEN American Film Institute or other film performance.\" IN LOVE . For example , the scene when schools no preliminary experiments are Glenda Jackson is dancing , and suddenly made to determine what can or cannot The essence of film , he feels , is mo ve - a bull appears-that's a pagan image, be done in films ,\" he points out. ment: \" The form of film should be the art almost mythological. But then Ken Rus- Vorkapich 's principles are extremely of move ment, rhythmical organization of sell moves away from it. \" lucid , and his ideas are all illustrated by move ment. \" However move ment is film excerpts, many from classic films , achieved-through cutting or camera- One of the most daring, provocative sometimes from experiments made by work-it is this visual , kinesthetic aspects of Vorkapich 's approach is his students of his . It is rare to find theoretical aspect of film that interests Vorkapich. willingness to criticize Bazin , already discussion of the vis ual side of films that \" Movement on screen can affect you enshrined as some kind of infallible sage has the clarity Vorkapich brings to his kinesthetically. You reproduce the move- on the subject of film . He feels that some lectures. In the best sense Vorkapich ment in your own nervous system. In a confusion may be a result of the English helps you to see -to look at films instead very crude sense the car chase in BULLITT translation of Bazin . But he also argues of merely \" reading \" and interpreting is an example of kinesthetic ci nema.\" At that, since Bazin never made films, many them as if they were literary works . a higher level film can create moments of his theories are highly dubious. comparable'to poetic im agery-images \" Bazin 's ideal , as I understand it, would One of the most refreshing things where the literal everyday meaning is be no editing at all. Andy Warhol 's film about Vorkapich is that he exhibits a very transce nded through a purely visual of the Emp ire State Building would have healthy disrespect for all the so-called statement. As an example, Vorkapich been the CUlmination of cinema for Bazin . \" masters\" of film-classic figures like Ei- cites the moment in Dovzhenko 's ARSE- At one point he praises Orson Welles for senstein and Pudovkin as well as co n- NAL where the movement of an accordion shooting an entire scene in one take . He temporary directors like Godard and An- dropped during a massacre summarizes said that was revolution in the cinema . tonioni. This is not to say that he and heightens our apprehension of the To me that is decadence .\" considers their films worthless. \" The process of death itself. stories may be ve ry interesting ,\" Vorkapich challenges Bazin 's empha- Vorkapich remarks , but he illustrates vi- To create works of film art Vorkapich sis on \" realism \"; he insists that people sually confusing ju xtapositions and sim- wants to use all the resources of the ple errors in editing or composition (partic- medium ; he rejects the arguments . of or objects are not present in films . \" The ularly in reverse-angle cutting)-moments Andre Bazin and others who want to pare when the visual statement is unneces- film down to a more austere style. \" Bazin only way to create presence on screen sarily disorienting or works directly wrote that we are witnessing the disap- is through movement-the way Hilary against the director's intention . For ex- pearance of optical effects like superim- Harris did in NINE VARIATIONS ON A DANCE ample , in a battle scene a clumsy director positions and disso lves. But all pho- THEME . A shot very quickly decays visually may cut from one group of soldiers firing tographic devices are legitimate if there is no movement ; it dies in about in one direction to members of the same devices,\" Vorkapich counters , and he ten seconds, and becomes a talking pho- army firing in the opposite direction , ut- points to the fact that in CLOCKWORK tograph. After that, you just read the titles terly confusing the antagonists . In ALEX- ORANGE Kubrick uses slow motion , rapid or listen to the dialogue .\" He objects to ANDER NEVSKY Eisenstein shoots closeups motion, even a classic montage se- scenes in Bergman's films in which the of riders against the sky, and the distant quence. \" Maybe Kubrick will even use camera remains fi xe d on an actor for a hom ogenous background cancels all the dissolve , then we mortals can use it long period-for example, the two-minute again .\" closeup of Max von Sydow in THE PASSION OF ANNA . The difference between stage Vorkapich does demand that these and screen acting , he believes , is that the camera cannot record anything we call \" magnetism\" -the quality that makes a continued on page 78 6 SEPTEMBER 1972
.**************************************************************************************************** Faces and Facets **************************************************************************************************** THE SECOND COMING lie 's mother (Film Culture, Spring 1972). And it by Charles Silver doesn 't matter much to me if some people consider me \" shellshock,\" supposed to be. When his mother came to this country . .. they had her over on Ellis Island. When she went over Time is the great author. It always writes the there , they started to question her. And they said, perfect ending. \" Are you the mother of Charles Chaplin ?\" And she said, \" I 'm the mother of Jesus Christ\" ... she was -Calvero in LIMELIGHT \" shell-shock, \" supposed to be. How would the most devout Christian in New York cope with a visit by Jesus to the Plaza Hotel? -Rollie Totheroh How was I to cope with the comparable situation , I knew Chaplin was coming back to America especially living right around the corner as I do? before there was a public announcement. As the In 1964 I was a crewcut virgin from New Jersey. word got out , and as I subsequently discussed the By 1972 I had become a scraggly jaded New Yorker visit with my friends in the film world , I am afraid -closer now to M. Verdou x than to the Little Fellow. I astounded a great many people by saying , in effect, Eight years ago I might have gone to the hotel in that this would be the preeminent event of our all innocence as an autograph-seeking toady . Now, lifetime. For my adult interest and ultimately my even though this no longer seemed properly career in films had begun with the 1964 Chaplin dignified , the temptation was too great. I swallowed retrospective at the Plaza Theatre in New York. my sophistication and went the first night. Never before or since have I been so shaken by Charlie had stayed at the Plaza in 1916, when an artist and his art , and it is unlikely that I will ever he was waiting to sign his contract with Mutual for quite recover my bearings. In weak moments , I have all the money in the world . Now after fifty-six years even fancied changing my middle name from the of the most incredible career any human has experi- rather pedestrian Alan to Chaplin , thus becoming enced , he came back. Sitting beside the elegant his namesake in full recognition of my status as his Palm Court that Monday evening, amidst violins and soulsake. Victorian ambience, I could understand why he had This piece will be nothing if not a delirious and chosen this hotel. Surely if any of the gracefulness shameless love song for the man whom I consider of life in 1916 survives in New York , it breathes most the most worshipful religio-mythological being who freely in the lobby of the Plaza. After a period of has ever lived and , incidentally, the best damn maker cruising about the Palm Court indulging myself in of movies, too . Feeling this way, therefore, I found this luxury, I proceeded to eavesdrop at the front more than a touch of poetic irony in the anecdote desk, query men 's-room attendants, and ride eleva- told by Charlie 's longtime cameraman about Char- 8 SEPTEMBER 1972
*************************************************************************************************** Twelve Essays *************************************************************************************************** tors , finally ascertaining that Charlie had rooms on I had retained enough foolish romanticism to have the twelfth floor. made the effort. I knew that I would see Charlie the next even ing at Philharmonic Hall , and that it would An x ious and sl ightly inebriated , I arrived there be curiously easier to make a public display of my and discovered the corridor deserted except for two love for him than to have done it in private. men walking ahead of me. It was immediately obvi- ous that these were detectives assigned to protect Terry: I still love you. my hero from the likes of me. (This is not to say Calvero: Of course you do . . You always will. that I have a special knack for spotting plain- clothesmen . The fact that one of them had a pair of It is not my purpose here to make a critical case handcuffs dangling ominously from his back pock- for Chaplin 's surpassing genius. If anything defini- et rather gave them away .) Since they knew where tive on that subject can be said in a few brief pages , James Agee and Andre Bazin have already done in the huge rectangle of rooms Charlie 's suite was , it most eloquently. And although I respect the however, and I didn 't, I decided to follow them . efforts of the authors whose artic les appear else- where in this issue of FILM COMMENT , more than By this point , I felt about as comfortable as the likely the case for Chaplin cannot be adequately Little Barber impersonating Adenoid Hynkel and made in a roomful of written words . Andrew Sarris preparing to address the crowd during the An- has pointed out that Chaplin 's face is his mise-en- schluss of Austerlich . I had never been upstairs in scene, and Chaplin 's face is as ineffable as (Gide the Plaza before , and I was impressed as I proceed- says) is happiness . Charlie 's consummate genius ed on my perilous pursuit by the enormous width derives from his ability to reflect his soul in his of the hallways. I thought irreverently that this must eyes-an expression of transcendent, divine, per- be the reason Orson Welles is fond of the place , fect humanity , more sublime and artful than all the having the space here to comfortably navigate the magic and montage at the command of other film- great bulk he acquired by failing to heed Marlene makers. Dietrich 's advice, in TOU CH OF EVIL, to \" layoff those candy bars, honey. \" To remove the emotional element from the con- sideration of a film 's worth is to deny to the cinema After we had gone most of the way around the its most important gift and its raison d 'etre. For rectangle , the cops became aware of my presence those unfeeling hearts and castrated spirits who and stopped to question me as to why I was there. can look at the great masterworks from THE GOLD I told the truth , and so did they: Charl ie and his RUSH through LIMELIGHT and not be overwhelmed , entourage were at a dinner party (Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper 's) and would not be back till late . Somewhat relieved , I went home , happy in the knowledge that FILM COMMENT 9
I can only express sorrow. They are invariably those tation has been reestablished at Chaplin 's expense. for whom the essence of cinema is either a de- Even Sarris has lent his prestige to this campaign tached and pensive study of a structurally-complex by harping on Chaplin 's \" solipsism ,\" this despite cold meatball , or else the instant eyestrain of frag- acknowledging that every Chaplin film from A mented views of Colorado landscapes and vaginal WOMAN OF PARIS through LIMELIGHT was the best areas photographed through lenses smeared with American film of its year. Sarris recently passed up Brylcreem by cameras mounted on kangaroos . And all of Charlie 's works to select Buster's SHERLOCK , they are committed to a \" modern \" aesthetic, the JR . as one of the ten best films of all time . SHERLOCK, ultimate goal of which is a cinema of computer JR . is, indeed , superbly clever in its stunts and gim- printouts on celluloid-cold , irrelevant, antihuman- micks, and it raises a multitude of questions devoid of all those little idiosyncrasies that civilized regarding the respective realms of illusion and reali- man has cultivated and cherished for centuries; de- ty in the cinema . It remains , however, superficial void of the individual personality. Their art is worse and cold , a film of blatantly obvious virtues easy than dead . It is boring! There are no man 's agonies for critics to cite-a film , as Sarris has said of others, and joys visible between the frames . Chaplin , in his \" for anthologies.\" most mature and self-aware films , gives us the most intently-felt and eloquent testament of what it is to As a body , Keaton 's films lend themselves far be a human being . I believe this to be the loftiest more easily to critical analysis than Chaplin 's. Ev- purpose and the highest pinnacle of achievement erything is visible on the surface and simple to de- of all artistic ex pression . scribe. There is a vigor and glory in Keaton 's films , butthey lack the profundity, development, and whole- It has become a cliche to fault Chaplin for his ness of great art. More often than not they reflect lack of bravura technique . As Rollie Totheroh said , the fact that Buster was still a young , unsure artist \" He just didn't have much patience with the techni- experimenting , learning-not yet mature. Films like cal side of it. \" Although one can legitimately argue BATTLING BUTLER , SEVEN CHANCES , THE THREE AGES , that the actual viewing of films like THE GREAT DICTA- and GO WEST are only sporadically inspired , having TOR reveals an astonishing fluidity , in the final analy- a good sequence here, a dull one there. The other sis Chaplin never felt the need to compete with the works , especially THE GENERAL, are better; they are brilliant hocus-pocus of Murnau, Eisenstein , and as good as anything Chaplin did before THE GOLD their gifted protege, Welles. Chaplin's style was pro- RUSH . found in its simplicity , and he was always too preoccupied with depth of feeling to worry about The tragedy, the terrible pity of Keaton 's career depth of focus. can be seen in the collapse evident between the excellent THE CAMERAMAN and the quite bad SPITE As much as I respond to the stylistic virtuosity MARRIAGE . Keaton was destroyed at thirty-three , the of Sternberg and Ophuls , surely Chaplin 's peers in age at which Chaplin had made nothing more for- the realm of romanticism , their films lack the warmth midable than THE KID . What Keaton might have ac- of their Master's. The hearts of Adolphe Menjou complished had he been permitted to make his own (MOROCCO) and Danielle Darrieu x (MADAME DE ... ) films as a mature artist we will never know , and I may break , but we never quite feel our own has mourn for those lost films as much as anyone. To cracked in two as we do at the end of THE CIRCUS. consider him Chaplin 's equal on the basis of what Griffith and Hitchcock are intermittently brilliant actually ex ists, however, is wistful nonsense. (usually when they are at their most manic and per- verse) , but their work , like Chaplin 's own A WOMAN Then live without hope . . . life for the moment. OF PARIS, is frequently too closely bound to the limit- There are still wonderful moments. ing conventions of melodrama. -Calvero Ford and Renoir, my two favorites after Chaplin , There is something a trifle obscene about Chap- have been too erratic in their long careers-they 've lin materializing in the flesh in a hall built for the made too many bad films to reign supreme. Their likes of Leonard Bernstein . Perhaps he should have romantic vision and humanistic orientation seem slightly less pure, contaminated by their association aflown in on angel 's wings la the dream sequence with the studio system and its compromises. Chap- lin 's financial independence did , indeed , give him of THE KID , the film we were to see . Alas , Charlie an advantage , but he gained it through his success . will probably be among the angels all too soon , Ultimately, we must base our judgments on what even if it is his expressed desire to go to Hell-the exists on celluloid , and when all the oeuvres have climate there being much warmer for an old man been run through the projector, I believe one can- than Switzerland . April 4 was not a night for not escape the conclusion that Chaplin has no thoughts of mortality, however; it was the night equal. Chaplin was , as he put it, \" reborn .\" The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is There were those who complained that the buffet the difference . .. between man as machine and was not up to what they ex pected for their $100 . man as angel . . . There were those who wanted a long speech and a live performance in tramp costume . And there -Andrew Sarris were some of us who were ecstatic over the few In recent years , thanks to the fortuitous reap- simple words, the eloquent gestures, and the pearance of his classic films , Buster Keaton 's repu- unique opportunity to look upon that visage which is the quintessence of all that is human . Through the generosity of a wealthy benefactor, I was seated 10 SEPTEMBER1972
in the orchestra among the gentry just below Char- photographic record of what rural America looked lie 's bo x. And as he looked down , threw kisses , and like; as you should go to SHOULDER ARMS , not to smiled the tearful smile reserved (one had thought) HEARTS OF THE WORLD or THE BIG PARADE, for a truthful for Virginia Cherrill , I could not help but feel that rendering of the experience of the war, however the pink face topped with its white mane of antiquity transformed in its externals ; and as you should , for was smiling just for me . And that last kiss blown urban realism , go to A DOG ' S LIFE rather than , I would by that loveliest of male hands-clearly it was aimed argue , to GREED or THE CROWD . in my direction . Consider SHOULDER ARMS. What is realistic about ... human society never accepts him even provi- it? Surely it is as stylized as THE CABINET OF DR . sionally except as a result of a misunderstanding. CALIGARI , surely the sets and the acting are as unlikely as those in the German Expressionist pic- -Andre Bazin ture , to be mistaken for things in the real world . SHOULDER ARMS is , if anything , more set-bound than I suppose it was , in retrospect , too perfect . A CALIGARI, in that it is restricted to fewer sets. Much of the picture , in fact , takes place in a single set , small part of me regrets that Charlie didn 't revert the one depicting the French trenches-and this set is photographed always from the same angle. It is to the Tramp 's character just for a moment and pee a stylized set , with the trenches rendered as a perfectly straight ditch ; the camera always points on all those tu xedoed millionaires and on this pho- along the direction of the ditch to give a stage-like frontal view. All this , you may feel , is too stagey . ney trying to \" pass,\" as the Tramp had done so But it captures the essence. What other camera angles are needed to show us what a trench is like? many times . But Oona would have scolded him , and When Charlie first arrives at the front, the camera by 1972 it was too late for such a grand and elegant moves , following him , in a straight line along the ditch , and then back with him as he turns around gesture. Charlie was old enough now and sentimen- and retraces his steps. That camera movement maps out the world : there is no other direction to move tal enough to want to be loved even on terms his in , no other place to go. The or:e set , seen always from the same angle, conveys not only the monotony former enemies could accept-this was, therefore , and constriction of the world of the trenches, but also its peculiar stability , the fact that it is a place a self-created misunderstanding for the purpose of where men make their everyday existence; the ex- treme conditions of war turn into a kind of normality. saying hello again in order to say a gentle and This is the source of much of the comedy in SHOULDER ARMS : men casually have their lunch while poignant goodbye. bombshells explode around them ; they use the steady fire above the trenches to open a bottle of So we are left with his myth and with his films . wine . Both are only as ephemeral as life is on this planet . Elsewhere in the picture we find the same comic conception : an intolerable situation is treated as if For , if there is a legacy of the twentieth century it were normal. When bedtime comes with the trenches flooded , Charlie goes to sleep in his bunk for which posterity will not damn us , nothing in it -which is completely under water-as if nothing were amiss , as one goes to sleep every day. Similar- is more durable and beauteous than the fifty miles ly, a half-destroyed house is (until it finally collapses) still lived in , with the characters behaving as if or so of celluloid that the Little Fellow left behind everything were in its place , pretending that missing walls are still there . All this , wh ile funny-it is behav- on his way to Hell. 11111111 ior comically inappropriate to the given situation-is also fundamentally realistic : turning the extreme into THE CHAPLIN REVUE the everyday is true to the experience of war . by Gilberto Perez Guillermo Chaplin 's movies are all actor-centered , as has Hugh Kenner , in one of the excellent things he many times been said . They all take their life from has written about the screen comedians , asserted the Chaplin character . But it is not true that they that , in silent movies, \" comedy was the realistic art, are mere vehicles for the actor; at their best, as in which went into the streets; the serious pictures of these three shorts, they are quite well-wrought that era are today madly unreal , whereas Keaton , dramatic constructions . (A cogent case is made for Langdon , Lloyd and Chaplin engaged an actual Chaplin as a dramatist in Eric Bentley's essay , world .\" One can find no better examples of this \" Charlie Chaplin and Peggy Hopkins Joyce.\") What comic realism than ·the three short films that make is true is that they are constructions around the up The Chaplin Revue. character : everything in them is defined in relation to the character . So to say of these three shorts A DOG 'S LIFE (1918) , SHOULDER ARMS (1918) and that they are fundamentally realistic is to say that THE PILGRIM (1922) all engage an actual world . It is not a question of location shooting , the photo- graphic reproduction of appearances; it is a ques- tion of truth , the convincing rendering of essential realities . In this sense , A DOG ' S LIFE , although it was shot in the studio , does go into the streets ; it is fundamentally true to the reality of that world of urban poverty which had such a hold on Chaplin 's imagination. And , in this sense , SHOULDER ARMS , a comedy about the First World War made while the war was still being fought , does go into the trenches; and THE PILGRIM gives us a true picture , bitingly satiric , of that setting so often romanticized in the movies, the American small town . If you want to know what rural America was actually like, you should go to THE PILGRIM rather than to TOL 'ABLE DAVID or TRUE HEART SUSIE , even though in either of those movies you will find a much more extensive FILM COMMENT 11
SHOULDER ARMS . All ph o tos: Museum of Mo dern Art! THE PI LGRIM . photo : Columbia Pictures. Film Sti lls Arch ive, un less o therwise cre di ted. them nevertheless: he makes us see something of a swindle in every church collection . For his sermon their conception of the Chaplin character is realistic . Charlie does a (quite wonderful) pantomime of the This is not to be taken as meaning that in Gharlie David and Goliath story, after which he returns several times to bow before the congregation like we recognize someone we might come across in a music-hall performer before his audience . THE life; still less that Charlie is representative of the PILGRIM was banned in Pennsylvania for being of- average man. (MODERN TIMES has been criticized fensive to the ministry; the only wonder is that because Charlie is not representative of the workers , Chaplin didn 't run into more trouble than he did as if he were intended to be , or had to be for the over this daring movie. movie's social criticism to be meaningful.) Charlie is obviously not a representative doughboy in THE PILGRIM was the last short film that Chaplin SHOULDER ARMS . Precisely because he is not, he is made. I find the Charlie of the full-length films that able to bring out the basic truth in a situation as followed-THE GOLD RUSH , THE CIRCUS and CITY a character closer to the average soldier would not LlGHTS-a less realist ic , mQre romantic character than have. the Charlie we get in The Chaplin Revue, and the films themselves , built as they are around the char- Consider the open ing scene in the movie . Charlie acter, less realistic consequently. There are those at drill , with his waddling gait, wide-apart feet and who , objecting to the episodes with the blind flower preposterously large shoes, can scarcely be ex- girl in CITY LIGHTS because they consider them pected to march in line with the other soldiers (\"Put sentimental, have thought the movie would be better those feet in! \" the sergeant commands) or do an without them . But CITY LIGHTS is all of a piece , and about-face without tripping over his feet. The op- admirably constructed : all of it responds to a more pressiveness of army regimentation comes across romantic-more sentimental , if you like-conception more vividly because of Charlie's singularity. One of the Chaplin character than we get in , for example, is justified in calling universal , as many have done, another city film , A DOG 'S LIFE. I don 't mean merely a character so little representative , because his that Charlie is sweeter and more lovable in the later singularity serves to point up a general truth , some- film ; he is sweet and lovable enough in the earlier thing all soldiers experience. one . But even getting a job is an instance of sweetness for the Charlie of CITY LIGHTS-something Consider, for another example, the church se- he does to help the blind girl pay the rent-whereas quence in THE PILGRIM . Charlie is an escaped convict for Charlie in A DOG 'S LIFE a meal is always a disguised as a clergyman and mistaken , in a small precarious accomplishment , snatched at when Te xas town he goes to , for the new minister the street vendors are not looking and cops are not local congregation was expecting. Needless to say; around , and a job is something one tries to get in the Sunday service he conducts is anything but order to survive. representative. Yet here again the singularity of Charlie 's position serves to get at a more general The more sordid settings of the earlier film-next reality : built around it is an incisive satire on small- to them , the settings of CITY LIGHTS tend to look town churchgoing. When Charlie, the escaped con- laundered-have a stronger physical presence, vict impersonating a minister, imitates the deacon 's evoke a greater sense of tangible reality. Yet they saintly gestures as being what the situation calls are no less manifestly studio constructions, and if for, he brings out by this not only the pompous anything they are more stage-like than the settings hypocrisy of the deacon himself, but the hypocrisy of the later film , rather in the way that the set of of churchgoing generally. The escaped-convict- the trenches in SHOULDER ARMS , as I described it, Charlie supervises the collection of money at the is stage-like. What , more than their artificiality, service with the keen eye of a swindler, making sure makes the settings of SHOULDER ARMS and A DOG'S the collection misses no one in the room , and LIFE resemble the stage is the quality of their space: afterwards hefting the collection bo xes to estimate if feels circumscribed , self-contained , like the space what the take has been . Charlie 's behavior, so little like the way clergymen actually conduct themselves, satirically implicates 12 SEPTEMBER 1972
THE KID , With Jackie Cooga n. PAY DAY. of the theater . The space in all Chaplin films feels streets. Chaplin 's realism does not consist in show- peculiarly like th e theater; it is not the open space characteristic of the cinema, not a space that gives ing real things but in finding conv incing emblems the feeling of extending idenfinitely beyond what we see at any given moment. (It is not , in Andre Bazin 's for them . word , centrifugal. How could it be when everything in it is centered around the actor? ) But the stage-like All this , while true , fails to account for the peculiar qual ity is stronger , the sense of a circumscribed space more consistent , in Chaplin 's sho rt films than conviction the emblems can carry. Food on the in his full-length movies . stage is always a prop , like Bazin 's tree , even if it The shorts have a remarkable spatial integrity which is somewhat lost in the features ; the clarity is real food and even if the actors really eat it: there of their spatial arrangement is adm irable . Chaplin never uses many close-ups ; but in the features , as is always the feeling that the eating is a show put compared with the shorts, he tends to photograph things from a closer distance. In the shorts he often on for our benefit. But in the movies, where trees returns to long shots that encompass the whole area where the action takes place . This area is never very are real , we tend to believe much more in the eating large-with Chaplin we never get the extreme long shots we get with Keaton-and the recurring long the characters do . What of the many scenes in shots give the impression of surrounding it , of mark- ing out a space, so to speak , outside of which the Chaplin 's movies (there are two in A DOG ' S LIFE) action will not stray. where the usually hung ry Charlie eats something , The opening scene of A DOG ' S LIFE is an interest- ing ex ample. There the area of the action is never or attempts to? There is in them a vivid sense of shown whole in one shot , but is encompassed instead in two basic long shots that divide the space food , a physical sense of a sausage or a plate of between them , one showing one side and one the other side of a fence next to which the down-and-out beans as something that satisfies hunger. We be- Charlie usually sleeps. Cutting from one side to the other-as when Charlie , chased by a cop , rolls back lieve in the food Charlie eats , or is prevented from and forth under the fence while the cop has to go around it-allows the action to be displayed with eating , as we never believe in food on the stage ; great clarity as it unfolds within the given , delimited space . eating done within that circumscribed space of The stage is a circumscribed space that is kept Chaplin 's movies feels real as no stage eating does. apart from nature. Walter Benjamin wrote that a working clock is intolerable on the stage , because Somehow nature is not kept off that surrounded astronomical time is incompatible with theatrical time. Things on the stage are props; they are not space as it is off the stage : attribute it to that real , they stand for the real things in the world outside . Even if you put a real tree up on the stage , mysterious power the camera possesses to invest Bazin argued , it ceases to be a tree and becomes the emblem for a tree. No doubt this is what happens the things it reproduces with a quality of reality. The within the circumscribed space of Chaplin 's films : a straight ditch stands for the trenches, the dingy studio~ made world of Chaplin 's films feels more sets of A DOG ' S LIFE stand for actual sordid city present and concrete, more tangible and substan- tial , than stage sets, however naturalistic , ever do. The very clarity of spatial arrangement that serves to give an enclosed , stage-like quality to the settings of such a film as A DOG ' S LIFE serves also to establish them more palpably as material objects-with a strong quality of presence unlike anything on the stage . There are real toads in Chaplin 's films that the imaginary gardens of the theater can never accommodate. 11111111 THE KID (1921) by Gary Carey In 1918 Chaplin signed a $1 ,OOO ,OOO- plus con- tract with the new First National Company to make eight two- or three-reel films . Although it made him the highest paid actor in film , this contract was less generous than it sounds. Chapl in had to pay for production costs out of the million dollars. (The company agreed to pay him extra if he made a film longer than three reels , a clause Chaplin took ad- FILM COMMENT 13
vantage of when THE KID evolved into a feature- serts, and the inadequacy of Miss Purviance. Non- length film .) Chaplin 's first two films for First Nation- theless , this section is of interest since it seems to al , A DOG 'S LIFE and SHOULDER ARMS , were enormous have served as a sketch for Chaplin 's ne xt feature , successes . But SUNNYSIDE and A DAY' S PLEASURE , the historically important A WOMAN OF PARIS. In the which followed , did not do well at the box office ; later film Miss Purviance is abandoned , as she is low-keyed and atypical , they did not please the in THE KID , by her artist-lover. She goes to Paris comic 's fans . Both First National and Chaplin agreed where she slips into the shadows of the demi- that his next effort must regain the affection of the monde. Eventually she repents and becomes a so- Tramp 's public. A poll taken at this time showed cial worker . (In THE KID the opera singer also that only 5% of audiences did not dote on Chaplin . takes up social work .) A WOMAN OF PARIS has its Like most polls, this one was highly misinformative; share of mawkish moments, including uplifting titles there was a much larger segment of the aud ience (\" The road to happiness is in the service of others \") who did not like Chaplin . Women in particular found and a morally inspiring ending . But by this time the Tramp crude, dirty, lazy-a poor example to their Chaplin had gained technical assurance and was menfol k. Mothers worried over their sons' adoration able to redeem the hackneyed story by the deftness of Charlie ; all their lessons on moral uprightness of his visual wit . were defeated by the example of the Tramp 's greasy life-style . THE KID also falls short of A WOMAN OF PARIS in story construction. (This was never Chaplin 's forte: Legend tells us that Chaplin first conceived the in fact, A WOMAN OF PARIS is arguably his best- idea for THE KID when Jackie Coogan winked at him constructed film .) Usually it doesn 't matter that in a hotel lobby. Perhaps this encounter did g ive Chaplin 's films, like Topsy , seem to have just grown . him the specific idea for the film , but Chaplin had Often his features are little more than episodes for some time been considering a project to win loosely organized around a vague central idea, but the approbation of American motherhood . THE KID it hardly matters when the episodes are funny and has occasionally been dismissed as a shameless there is unity of tone. THE KID comes dangerously ploy to achieve this end ; Kenneth Tynan , for ex- near failure on the latter point. One feels the shift ample , wrote that it would be more palatable if between the sections of the film , happily so when Chaplin had treated Coogan as W .C. Fields was later Edna departs and Charlie enters; distractingly so , to handle Baby Leroy. And at the time of its release, when the Tramp dreams his courtyard has become THE KID was criticized as vulgar , the offending heaven . Thematically , this fantasy is irrelevant to a scenes including one in which Charlie lifts a baby 's plot which , after dawdling somewhat, begins to wind clothing to check its sex and another when he to a tight conclusion ; stylistically, it tips the balance experiences diaper problems. Still , even the most between the realistic and the fantastic too far, too antipathetic mother must have succumbed to Chap- qu ickly in favor of fantasy. Indeed , there seems to lin 's genuinely sweet relationship with Coogan-the be no reason for this sequence-except that it is first and best of the cherubs with dirty faces-and the best thing in the film . With its Florine Stettheimer been touched by the pathos of the child 's and the angels and Melie 's devils, it is a dazzling blend of Tramp 's temporary parting . These scenes are im- sophistication and primitivism , one of those exqui- bued with an honest sentiment , something of a rarity site sequences in Chaplin 's films that are , in the in the history of the American film. words of Andre Bazin , \" sufficient unto themselves, smooth and round like an egg. \" The charge of sentimentality often levelled against THE KID could be dismissed were it not for Jean Cocteau remembered this sequence when the frame story, which drips off the screen with he wrote his play Orphee . At the end of the play mawkishness . The film begins as Edna Purviance , there is a stage direction : \" The scene shifts to carring a baby in her arms, leaves a welfare hospital. Heaven \" -a feat of stagecraft that has frustrated \" Her only sin-motherhood,\" a title explains, and anyone attempting to produce Orphee, since it must then we see Christ bearing his cross. Back to Edna, be performed lickety-split before the audience's wandering through a park. \" Alone and without re- eyes. It must equal the magic of that cinematic sources,\" the subtitle reads. Next, Edna watches dissolve that takes the Tramp from tenement door- a bride and groom leave a church . It is a loveless step to heavenly abode. One is prepared for the match , we gather, when a rose petal falls from the shift in 'Orphee , because window-pane wings of the wedding bouquet and is crushed by the loutish archangel Heurtebise (who , in a conscious Cocteau groom . A close-up of Miss Purviance follows. She imitation of Charlie 's short-lived job in THE KID , stands against a church window, her head outlined assumes his terrestrial guise as a glazier) have by a stClined-glass halo. Fortunately, Edna soon always hinted that Heaven was in the ne xt room . abandons her baby and leaves the picture to be- Is Charlie 's glazier meant as a similar preparation come a famous opera diva. But she keeps turning for the fantasy sequence is THE KID? Has Charlie up , and every new appearance is an occasion for always been , in fantasy or in fact , the Kid 's guardian a Griffithesque aphorism or symbol. (For example, angel? one return is heralded by the insert of a book entitled \" The Past ,\" which opens to a chapter called \" Re- It's hard to decide how much Chaplin consciously grets. \" ) put into his films, and how much sprang from his unconscious-or our own . Cocteau , at least, be- These scenes are further hampered by indifferent lieved Chaplin was in full control of his art . In the photography, awkward introduction of symbolic in- preface to his play Les Maries de fa Tour Eiffef , 14 SEPTEMBER 1972
written shortly after the Paris premiere of THE KID , importance noted, but their effect numbed through years of the absorption of such scenes into the he wrote: \" The secret of the theatre, which calls grammar of film. Regardless of the sophisticated content of the film , it doesn 't work because it just for rapid success , cons ists in laying a trap , thanks doesn 't c on vin ce . As in MONSIEUR VERDOU X, the French backgrounds are sketchy and fail totally to to which one-half of the aud ience will rollick at the convey any sense of period or place . Apar t from one or two atmospherically lit interior sets, the whole door, so the other half can take seats inside. Shake- film could have been set anywhere in America . Indeed , one suspects that it was set in France only speare, Moliere, the profound Chaplin , know this because the locale automatically supplied a kid of built-in sophistication , and because U.S. audiences very well.\" Cocteau-who was no less misunder- might not readily accept a basically (if no! strikingly) honest story about the travails of a man and his stood , and no less profound , than Chaplin-was of mistress-without a happy Wedding Bells ending . course talking about himself. But, as he was that Admittedly, the print I saw was a lack-lustre one; even knowing the plot thoroughly, I found the intru- rare man who could be both vainglorious and wise sion of lengthy Russian titles jarring , harmful to the rhythm of the film . A pristine print such as Chaplin in the same dazzling epigram , I am provisionally could undoubtedly come up with would undoubtedly make it a much easier film to see and enjoy-as ready to let his be the final word on Chaplin and would a Chaplin score attached-but I doubt that it could do anything to embellish or even confirm THE KID . Who has said anything better? 11111111 the film 's reputation . A WOMAN OF PARIS (1923) Strangely enough , the film has now receded into by William K. Everson my memory like a half-forgotten dream. Impressions only remain , not clear-cut recollections of individual Through the years , A WOMAN OF PARIS has always scenes . Yet other, far less important films seen at been one of the most frustrating of all the \" lost \" that same screening session , remain much more films-not just because it was the only film illustrat- vivid because, important or not, they were better ing Chaplin 's work as a director in a noncomedy films . It seems that a twenty-rather than a three-year film , but because of its acknowledged influence on gulf separates me from A WOMAN OF PARIS , and Lubitsch and other sophisticates of the Twenties. already I feel the urgent need of are-evaluation! One always had the sneaking suspicion that if it was as good as it was supposed to be , Chaplin would Post-script: May I just refer briefly to one other be the first to bring it back in one of his periodic Chaplin film that seems to have vanished , his 1919 revival packages , and that since he hadn 't chosen two-reeler A DAY' S PLEASURE. One of his First Nation- to do so , he was preferring-quite understandably- al group , it is still under copyright by Chaplin , and to rest on its reputation rather than risk a disillusion- thus has never turned up in any of the various ing re-exposure . Many ground-breaking films risk feature-length compilations of his public domain the same pitfall: that inevitably the films made later, films from the Keystone-Essanay-Mutual years. Ad- as a result of that initial innovational work in content mittedly , it is not a major Chaplin work : it is pure or technique , are subtler and better and tend to and uncomplicated slapstick, some amusing byplay eclipse their inspiration . Griffith 's BROKEN BLOSSOMS with a balky car in a busy newly-tarred street, and and Harry O'Arrast's early talkie LAUGHTER are com- prolonged sight-gag routines aboard a day-steamer parable examples of films far more important for comprising the sole \" plot. \" Jackie Coogan inciden- what they were and what they did at the time than tally is quite winning in a few scenes as Chaplin 's for what they are today. youngest tot. Nevertheless, even half-expecting a disappoint- In a sense the film is somewhat of a retrogression : ment, I was in a state of extreme excitement when it is not as good as his best Mutual comedies , and I went to see it at the Cinematheque in Belgium some in some ways is inferior to them . One of the best few years back . After all , how often these days does gags in the Mutual THE IMMIGRANT was the steerage one get a chance to see a genuinely legendary lost mealtime on a choppy sea , for which Chaplin cons- film? Even if we assume that , in some film ic Shangri- tructed an elaborate rocking set. In A DAY 'S PLEASURE La, a print of every lost film awaits us, pristine and he tries to achieve the same effect much more uncut, how many films of the importance of A WOMAN inexpensively (and less effectively) merely by rock- OF PARIS remain to be rediscovered? Stroheim 's THE ing the camera. But what matter: it's a genuinely DEVIL 'S PASS KEY perhaps? Sternberg 's THE SEA GULL? funny film , and it works superbly well with an audi- ence. Sad to say , my initial exposure to A WOMAN OF PARIS was not only an aesthetic but a physical Since THE IDLE CLAss-not really a very funny let-down . There should be an international law for- film-came to roaring life before an audience at bidding any student of film from seeing important Chaplin 's recent Lincoln Center presentation , A films on the first day of arrival from a different DAY 'S PLEASURE could presumably at least double continent. Travel fatigue and that si x-hour time its laugh reaction . If it's not too late to make the difference are just too much. Here I was, feasting on a film that I had waited (conservatively) thirty years to see-and fighting to stay awake. The next day, recollections of it had almost vanished . Obviously, it had to be screened again , when I was totally fresh , invigorated , and ready for the fray. Sad to relate , the second time around , with the spirit and the flesh much more willing , the effect was much the same. The famous scenes (the suggested arrival of the train at the station) came and went, their FILM COMMENT 15
WOMAN OFPARIS , Carl Miller. suggestion , it would make an ideal subject to be the later films appear increasingly more fragmented . But (in contrast with Buster Keaton 's more organ- shown in tandem with A KING IN NEW YORK-prefera- ically structured films) all of Chaplin 's films , shorts and features alike, can be easily broken down into bly to be shown afterwards, so that audiences are a series of near-autonomous set pieces. The 'one unifying force in all Chaplin films is simply Charlie left with the memory of Chaplin as a happy , gifted himself, and if there is an apparent loss of unity in the later films it derives from the real gains in comedian and comedy-creator, rather than as an the ex pansiveness of Chaplin 's vision . As in the earlier films , the world of THE GOLD RUSH is defined embittered man at the lowest point of his private solely by Charlie 's presence in it. and professional life. 11111111 THE GOLD RUSH begins with a kind of miniature documentary on miners in the Yukon-seven brief THE GOLD RUSH (1925) shots set off from the rest of the film by an iris fade- By William Paul out , all of it filmed in real exteriors to show the real hardships of the miners. Following this quasi-docu- THE GOLD RUSH is a watershed film in Charles mentary footage a title announces: \" Three days Spencer Chaplin 's long career. After it Chaplin was from anywhere. A lone prospector. \" Chaplin then to make only features, and the time between eac h introduces his tramp character walking with his of his film was to grow longer and longer. The long distinctive gait quite unsuitably along the edge of wait between features proved fruitful for Chaplin a cliff in what is clearly a studio shot. Other popular because in that time his vision was ex panding , the comedians of the time, like Buster Keaton and emotional expressiveness of his works growing Harold Lloyd , would never have \" cheated \" with a deeper. The maturity of his later films stems in large studio shot when real locations were readily avail- part from Chaplin 's finally realizing an ability to go able, because both (especially Keaton) were con- beyond himself to other characte rs as something cerned with physical truth . more than expressive projections of his own per- sonality. Charlie walks down the road together with But Chaplin deals with psychological truth , and Paulette Goddard at the end of MODERN TIMES- there really isn 't a question here of whether or not something unthinkable in the earlier films-and THE he thought he could \" get away with \" a studio shot: GREAT DICTATOR ends with a radiant close-up of intentionally or not, the studio shot creates an en- Goddard , herself an independent presence in the tirely different feeling from a real exterior. The con- film . trast between the documentary-location shots of the miners and the fictive-studio shots of Charlie estab- By contrast , Georgia Hale in THE GOLD RUSH lishes an aura of security around the little tramp seems almost extraneous to much of the action. that , no matter how much in danger he might be , Lacking the vibrant independence of Goddard , she never leaves him throughout the film . Keaton and exists almost entirely as an excuse for Chaplin to Lloyd often get into situations so dangerously real express his emotions. The ending of the film-which that their films frequently seem more like adventures takes place on a lu xury liner, where Georgia meets than comedies . The threat to Charlie , however, is Charlie , now a millionaire but still in his tramp never so real. As he continues to walk along the clothes, and tries to hide him-is particulary unsat- edge of the cliff at the beginning of THE GOLD RUSH , isfying in this respect. The film never makes clear a bear begins to follow him , but before he can even exactly what Georgia 's feelings are in this scene , recognize the presence of danger the bear turns if they do indeed extend beyond a simple, generous into a cave and leaves him undisturbed . concern that a poor, helpless stowaway might be caught. But, for THE GOLD RUSH , and in fact for most The world in which Charlie operates in THE GOLD of Chaplin 'S films preceding it, it really isn 't impor- RUSH then is a metaphorical world , the real world tant what Georgia-or Edna Purviance in the earlier continually filtered through and always expressing films-happens to feel at this moment. It is Charlie 's Charlie 'Ssensibility. The real world , with all its attend- emotion that dominates the scene , as it is his emo- ant hardship and tragedy , is never far away-as the tion that becomes the raison d 'etre of the scene. opening shots point out-but Charlie's world is THE GOLD RUSH is a culmination of everything Chaplin had done up to that point. With its close relationship to the short films , THE GOLD RUSH might seem Chaplin 's most perfectly realized work , while 16 SEPTEMBER 1972
THE GO LD RU SH, with Geo r gia Hale. is a sad quality in this shot it derives from the fact that no-one in the dance hall recognizes Charlie . always more hopeful , more optimistic , because The film eventually reverses the static-dynamic con- Charlie himself is so resilient. Whereas Keaton con- trast of the earlier shot. Just before he and Big Jim stantly changes his character to fit the needs of a are to set off in search of their gold mine , Charlie constantly changing world , Chaplin in THE GOLD RUSH , as in the earlier films , reshapes the world to receives a love note from Georgia-which was actu- suit Charlie's character. Chaplin 's unfairly criticized ally intended for another man . In his excitement he visual style then is solely directed towards this end : runs all over the dance hall , even climbing up to a second floor balcony where Georgia stands , as his mise-en-scene might be very simple, occasion- the rest of the crowd stares at him frozen in their amazement. Charlie , still isolated , is now the one ally crude , but it is really more expressive than is to move about as the stilled crowd watches him . usually admitted , more elemental than elementary. In fact , Chaplin 's images of the external world be- The contrast in the one shot of the dance hall come the most poetiC precisely when he is dealing echoes a contrast implied by the two chief settings most directly with Charlie's emotions. of the film : the wilderness, especially the ledge Charlie walks along at the beginning and the ledge Consider Charlie's first appearance at the Monte his cabin teete rs over towards the end , is set against Carlo Dance Hall , his first return to civilization after the constantly teeming bustle of the town and the his long sojourn in the snowy wilderness : in a master dance hall. In some ways , Charlie-alone and shot of the dance hall we see Charlie standing in homeless in the wilderness-is really more at home the center of the frame , his back to the camera, there, so that the ledge becomes expressive of gazing at a group of dancers seen hazily in the Charlie's character: life on the edge of the universe background of the shot. The New York Times critic is life reduced to its most primitive state , dominated in his review of THE GOLD RUSH was particularly by the most basic need of hunger. And Charlie in impressed by Chaplin 's \" acting with his back \" at THE GOLD RUSH is a character who is chiefly defined th is moment, his ability to express loneliness by his hungers, both for food and for love. One through the way he held his head and sholders. As wouldn 't expect a character defined solely by his impressive as Chaplin the actor is here, Chaplin the wants to be especially likable, but Charlie is ap- director also manages a high degree of expressive- pealing precisely because of the simplicity of his ness, establishing an important cor'itrast between emotions , as the emotional directness of Chaplin 's the two key elements of the image: Charlie a dark acting style endows Charlie with a sense of childlike mass against a lighter grey background, Charlie innocence. standing in repose before a frenetically moving crowd. The emotion expressed at this moment, then , There is always such an abundance of detail in is not exactly loneliness. The two masses-dark, a Chaplin performance that his acting might be clearly-defined Charlie versus grey, undefined described as rococo . Yet Chaplin 's every gesture , crowd-are two disparate to permit merger, Charlie every facial expression is so economical that he himself too individualistic , too determinedly an out- always seems to make a necessity of unnecessary sider to want to be integrated into the world around movement, transforming his whole body into the him . expression of one emotion . As he eats a chicken leg after going without food for days, Charlie's whole At the time of the GOLD RUSH premiere , Chaplin body expresses his satisfaction , from the way his told newspaper reporters a revealing story from his shoulders are pinched together right down to his childhood-revealing most of all because he could wiggling fingertips . Charlie stands out in both the still remember it so vividly more than twenty years rural wilderness and the urban crowds because of later. He had gone to another boy 's birthday party, his emotional directness. His innocence lies in the misbehaved there and , as punishment , was put off fact that there is nothing hidden in him ; every in a corner where he wasn 't allowed to partake in emotion he feels finds an external ex pression in his any of the fun . Finally , three boys took pity on him body . and brought him some cake and ice cream . The point is that Charlie can 't ex actly function in society , For all th is emphasis on basic human needs , but he also can 't function without it. What Charlie there is nonetheless a transcendent quality wants most of all is recognition and lova , and he 'll do anything he has to do to try to win them . If there FILM COMMENT 17
glimpsed in THE GOLD RUSH. While it's fairly easy figures is a call for the audience 's collaboration , a to anthologize different parts of THE GOLD RUSH , the two most famous set pieces in the film , in fact the communion in genre that long antedates the inven- two most frequently anthologized-the Thanks- giving Day dinner of the boot and the dance of the tion of film . rolls-are precisely the two that gain the most in meaning from their ju xtapos ition . In the first , Charlie *** turns a shoe into food ; in the second , he turns food into feet . The movement from the first scene to the The latest revival of an old widsom tells us that second is a movement to food transcending its own function. In the same way , Charlie-by going beyond Chaplin 's feature films are not really features, they his basic needs , by transforming the rolls into some- thing more than simply food-transcends himself. are only collections of sketches, stitched-together His body even disappears against the black back- ground so that only his large face is left suspended one-reelers. For this enlightenment (so far as it is over the two small roll-feet , a moment all the more magical because one of the most physical actors true and enlightening), much thanks. The important in films suddenly loses his corporeality . points, it seems to me, are that a richer context of It is in this one aspect , in this transcendent quality, that THE GOLD RUSH might be seen to look plot and character gives even the isolatable ahead to Chaplin 's later films. If his earlier films seem more optimistic , it is because of Charlie 's resilience ; sketches more force , and that th e sketches them- yet it is precisely th is characteristic that grows weakest in the later films. No matter how tough the selves are usually better and better performed than environment nor how oppressive the society in the early films , Charlie is never defeated because of his most of the earlier one-reelers. The boxing se- internal strength . In the later films , however, escape (in MODERN TIMES and THE GREAT DICTATOR ) and quence in CITY LIGHTS is better than the bo x ing in finally death (in MONSIEUR VERDOU X and LIMELIGHT) become the only options left. The progression from THE CHAMPION because we know more about the the dinner of the boot to the dance of the rolls anticipates a progression in Chaplin 's career to the Tramp and why he is fighting . And the Chaplin of more spiritual quality of the later films, from the basic hungers of physical existence to the expression in 1931 is si xteen years better than the Chaplin of 1915. art of man 's need to transcend these hungers . III11111 *** By innuendo , there is a surprising amount of homosex ual joking in CITY LIGHTS . When Chaplin behaves winsomely with his boxing opponent before the fight, hoping to soften his heart, the pug gets worried and goes behind a curtain to change his pants. When Chaplin is in bed with the millionaire, he pats the other man reassuringly like a patient wife. When the millionaire gives him the money for the girl , Chaplin kisses him ecstatically, and the millionaire mimes violent dislike. \" Don 't do that. \" I can 't remember this element in another Chaplin picture . I can 't explain it here, but the hints are inescapable. *** Theodore Huff tells us that Chaplin had a lot of trouble with Virginia Cherrill and tried to replace her during the lengthy shooting . This backstage story makes the results all the more astonishing . Chaplin CITY LIGHTS (1931) got an extremely good performance from her. With - By Stanley Kauffmann out it, the last scene would have been impossible. Some notes on a recent viewing : When the (even more) ragged Tramp stares happily As in THE KID , the slums are not American . They at her through the shop window , she says to her might be London or a continental city, but American assistant , \" I've made a conquest ,\" with just the right slums never had the archways and courts and out- touch of haughty pleasure, the slight air of cruelty side staircases that Chaplin likes and needs. He in the formerly maimed person made whole. A mo- knew London slums; he never really knew American ment later, when she takes his hand and recognizes poverty. Writing in 1931 , Francis Fergusson said of him by touch , she becomes her former self, but Chaplin in this film : \" He is not a star w ith a perfunc- larger. He says , \"You can see now?\" Her face-on tory vehicle , but he is an artist who has managed the reply , \" Yes, I can see now\" -is beautiful. The to set a comic legend in streets and among charac- film has to end with a close-up of Charlie-we'd feel ters that we all know .\" Not true of the poor folks ' cheated otherwise-but, dramatically, the last scene streets . is hers . *** Chaplin did not always succeed as a di rector, But the poor folks are , in a sense that Fergu sson or discoverer, of actresses. Merna Kennedy in THE presumably did not mean , \" characters that we all C IRCUS is a dud , as is Marilyn Nash in MONSIEUR know\" -characters right out of Victorian melodra- VERD OUX. But w hen he succee ded , as w ith Georg ia ma. The blind girl and her grandmother are not Hal e in THE GOLD RU SH and Cherrill here , he trans- remotely intended to be realistic . The millionaire is formed them into something they never touch ed much more so-a man with a comic quirk (amiable again . when soused , distant when sober) that gives him *** at least some psychological validity . But with the De Sica worships Chaplin . Did he get the water- girl and her grandmother, Chaplin was pulling out dousing in MIRACLE IN MILAN from the blind girl theatrical stereotypes as knowingly-one may say , dousing the Tramp? defiantly-as Griffith had done eleven years earlier Chaplin seems to have kept an eye on Rene Clair. in WA Y DOWN EAST . This conscious use of stock Everyone knows about the relation between A NOUS 18 SEPTEMBER 1972
LA LlBERTE and MODERN TIMES . (There was an abor- kept silent and waited for the reaction . It was all tive plagiarism suit by the producers of the former fairly predicable: vast amusement during the factory against Chaplin .) And there 's a moment in CITY satire; ironic cheers when the Tramp picks up a red LIGHTS , when a young man in a cloth cap calls for flag and inadvertantly leads a left-wing parade; sur- his girl in the courtyard of the blind girl 's house, prise and outrage when he thwarts a jailbreak ; that is a sharp quick reminder of SOUS LES TOITS bafflement when he tries to get back into a jail as DE PARIS . Clair 's film is 1930, Chaplin 's 1931. Just a refuge from life outside; general apathy when it time for a nudge, perhaps? became clear that Chaplin was somewhat less com- mitted to social revolution than , say , Che Guevara. *** The disappointment was acute, and after the film some of the students solemnly decided that Chaplin Sentiment is the burden and the blessing of \" hadn 't really gotten it together.\" Chaplin 's work. The durability of the sentimental It 's impossible , of course , to find anything more than a very coy flirtation with radical politics in passages may be a chief secret of his survival. Of MODERN TIMES . The film derives its power from its rejection of twentieth-century urban life, but that his one-time peers , only Keaton-who really is his rejection is largely aesthetic and moral , and we are hard put to deduce any specific political line from peer-is still as affecting . Langdon 's THE STRONG it. For Chaplin , modern times are hard times , and like Dickens ' great novel , the movie is in part an MAN , seen again recently , is a coy bore , begging attack on the killing rationality of industrialism-the mechanical rationality which , humanly, is so deeply pitifully for pathos. Lloyd 's GRANDMA 'S BOY , also seen irrational. But it 's the production line that Chaplin satirizes , not capitalism per se , and I hope I am not again recently , is very much better , often funny , but naive in assuming that , despite his occasional fel- low-travelling , Chaplin would feel the same way never really touching . With Chaplin , the tears still about the working day in a steel mill on the Volga. flow at his command . The movie expresses the greatest possible revul- sion from the public, external side of modern life- In the beginning of CITY LIGHTS , when he discov- the an xious, demeaning , exhausting business of factories , strikes, riots, police, etc . The Tramp's ers that the girl is blind , the film seems to stop for natural fastidiousness has never expressed a stronger judgment of things as they are ; but when a moment. In the last scene , when he gazes at her his existence becomes unbearable he doesn 't turn to protests or organizing his fellow-workers (hOW so selflessly , so happily, he says more than in that could the Tramp organize anything?), but to purely anarchic escape-madness and disruption and whole last speech of THE GREAT DICTATOR . fantasy-and to a private world of loyalty and com- panionship. Still , when the Tramp and \" the gamin\" All during his career, Chaplin was spanked for walk down the road at the end , it is not for want of trying to enter society. In MODERN TIMES , the his sentiment. Rigorous critics were always \" seeing Tramp makes his most determined attempt to lead an ordinary life; we remember the film , among many through \" it. But after one has seen through it-not reasons , because it suggests that even the most conventional desires-for a home and a job-can really such a difficult job-one sees that its transpar- be problematic , even hopeless , in a world no longer suited for human accommodation . ency is part of its effect. The sentimental climax es Like THE GOLD RUSH and so many other Chaplin are contrived , the other characters are stock, but movies , MODERN TIMES wrests its comedy from a background of starvation and disaster. Chaplin has the moment is true, just as in an opera with an said that his humor depends on getting the Tramp in and out of the maximum amount of trouble , and incredible libretto and trumpery people, the validity perhaps we continue to honor him as the greatest of modern comedians because the Tramp's difficul- of a good aria makes a moment true . There is a ties are always so much more extereme than anyone else's, and his resistance so much more heroic. quantum leap from the contrivances that make the Certainly, for those of us who grew up on the paltry suburban discomforts of film and television comedy moment possible to the height of the moment itself, in the Fifties and Si xties , the poverty and dereliction in the Chaplin comedies will always provide an and in that moment we forget what led to it. occasion for awe. Our age is suspicious of feeling , even more so THE GOLD RUSH , with its hunger and greed and its great images of freezing whiteness, is one of the than the \" sophisticated \" Twenties. Yet, after we high points of American cinematic naturalism , have rocked with laughter, wondering how this or that scene can be so funny yet again, the crowning miracle is that , against our foreknowledge and our clear perception of the cardboard and tinsel he makes us cry . Now we can see that it is as g'reat an achievement as his ability to be funny . And it is becoming a rare experience . One can envision , without relish , a future theater-film world in which one has to go to Chaplin films in order ~c~ . U MODERN TIMES (1936) by David Denby When I was a graduate student at Stanford a few years ago , I saw MODERN TIMES with a group of students involved in a long , difficult protest against university complicity in the Vietnam War . Like so many striking students in America during the late Sixties, we were using a film series to keep up morale. It's a rotten way to use movies, and that night's experience with MODERN TIMES showed why . Before the movie started one student stood up and said that Chaplin was a great modern radical and that MODERN TIMES was his most explici~ attack on capitalism. I felt this was nonsense, but nonetheless FILM COMMENT 19
-CITY LIGHTS, with Harry Myers. CITY LIGHTS , with Virgin iaCherrill. whereas in MODERN TIMES the terrible threats to life Obsessed with their own intentions and uninter- and sanity are conveyed through heavy stylization. The factory set-with its clean \" impersonal\" fa- ested in Chaplin 's, the students I mentioned before cades, immense dials and levers, and two-way tele- vision communication-has a definite science- missed out on the true rad icalism, the true bitter- fiction , futuristic look, and at first we may be a bit puzzled since Chaplin makes no attempt to set the ness, of MODERN TIMES. One of the greatest of rest of the movie in the future (\" New Ford V-8 for 1935,\" a billboard teasingly proclaims behind the American comedies is also one of the most pessi- starving hero and heroine). Afterwards, we realize that Chaplin has used futurism as the most accessi- mistic. Give the stress of modern work and society, ble metaphor for the inhumanity of technology. He doesn't need the grime of a real factory because the movie only holds out three choices: jail , insanity, it's the essential character of mass production that he's getting at. Henry Ford had introduced the escape. The Tramp had often been called a assembly line roughly twenty years before MODERN TIMES was made, but the shock of that invention-it's representative of common humanity, but after MOD- implication of man 's final , utter subordination to the machine-must still have been strong enough to ERN TIMES it became painful to think of him that way ; make people wonder if the future had not invaded the present and robbed it of its human grace. for if the Tramp embodies us all and there is literally With his genius for seizing on the leading charac- no place for him except on the outside, then we teristic of a situation and extending and exagger- ating it into satire, Chaplin emphasizes the almost are not at home either. 11111111 obscene physical intimacy in the new relationship between man and machine. The feeding machine THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) is undoubtedly the most hilarious contraption in the by Stephen Harvey American cinema, but this is truly a case of hilarity releasing dread. The machine reminds us of an Seeing THE GREAT DICTATOR immediately after electric chair or some other torture device, and its Chaplin 's utterly captivating MODERN TIMES can indi- physical violation of Chaplin 's body is as frightening cate how much more separates these two illustrious as it is funny. In a counterpart to the feeding ma- works than the mere chronology of four years. To chine , Chaplin is fed into the machine, swallowed be sure, both films clearly reflect the humanity and whole like a modern Jonah . The Henry Ford type ingenuity of the supreme artist who created them . of factory may have been the immediate inspiration Yet there remains an enormous disparity in Chap- for MODERN TIMES, but this particular fantasy of being lin 's conception and his audience's perception of eaten by a machine-with its disturbing mixture of the two works . MODERN TIMES is brilliant and ex hila- horror and voluptuousness-had apparently ob- rating, sweeping the viewer along by the seemingly sessed Chaplin since boyhood . spontaneous flow of invention granted only to the artist who knows at every moment exactly what he In his autobiography he describes an encounter wants to do and how he is going to do it. THE GREAT with a printing press at the age of ten: \" It started DICTATOR, however brilliant , is more exasperating to roll , grind, and grunt; I thought it was going to than ex hilarating . The film seems to veer into si x devour me. The sheets were enormous; you could different, unrealized directions at once, with mo- have wrapped me in one . With an ivory scraper I ments of supreme inspiration perched uneasily be- fanned the paper sheets, picking them up by the side others of startling banality. corners and placing them meticulously against the teeth in time for the monster to clutch them , devour THE GREAT DICTATOR is the transitional film in them and regurgitate until they rolled out at the rear Chaplin 's later work-an amalgam of hilarity and end . The first day I was a nervous wreck from the horror that links two enormously dissimilar films. But hungry brute wanting to get ahead of me. \" more important is its position as perhaps the most experimental of Chaplin 's works , and its resultant 20 SEPTEMBER 1972 mi xture of ex periments succeeding beyond ex- pectation with those that lie stillborn on the editing table. Chaplin 's confrontation with the challenge of sound , as with almost every new element to be found in THE GREAT DICTATOR , is a mi xed blessing . The scathing humor in Chaplin 's parody of Hitler is due largely to the actor's superb vocal resources ; and Hitler-Hynkel 's first speech to his subjects is so memorable-both in itself and in translating Hitler's personality into comic terms-that, for me at least,
MODERN TIMES . THE GREAT DI CTATOR . newsreel footage of Hitler now suggests the record fectly the transformation from Jewish barber to of some provincial actor doing a maladroit impres- demagogue and back again-a feat achieved with sion of Chaplin 's Hynkel. the simple addition of some grey to the barber's temples and (in psychological rather than cosmetic Nevertheless , practically all the film 's other out- makeup) with a schizophren ic sublimity that man- standing comic sequences are conceived in silent- ages to bestow on Hynkel some of Hitler's elephan- film terms. Chaplin had been refining his physically tine grandeur as well as a touch of the Tramp 's elfin filmic humor to perfection for more than twenty-five years. Indeed , THE GREAT DICTATOR boasts several grace. Unfortunately, the existence of two protagonists examples of individual comic sequences adapted forced Chaplin to develop two parallel stories, and from earlier Chaplin films: the opening , which recalls thus clutter THE GREAT DICTATOR with unsatisfying SHOULDER ARMS , and the pudding sequence , which plot devices.Becau sethetranscendence of Chaplin 's suggests the Tramp 's din ing on fillet-of-rubber-sole humor always derived more from comic turns than in THE GOLD RUSH. With dialogue, however, Chaplin from plot turns, the film lacks the spontaneity and was starting from scratch . As a creator of visual unforseen invention that made his earlier work-up humor Chaplin may be unsurpassed , but as a writer to and especially including MODERN TIMES-SO dis- of witty banter he is merely competent. It's not that tinctive. THE GREAT DICTATOR is structurally rigid ; it the verbal humor in THE GREAT DICTATOR isn 't funny , often delights but rarely surprises. just that it pales in comparison with the rest. A far more crucial thematic weakness is the film 's This aspect of the film reminds me of Garbo 's topical nature. Chaplin 's universality is a fact no less performance in ANNA CHRISTIE: the gestures are true for being a truism . MODERN TIMES , for ex ample , majestic, the voice uncannily eloquent; but the cu- meets with the same rapturous response today as mUlative effect is one of overkill . In both films , it did thirty-five years ago because, although its roots unn ecessary words destroy ineffable images. One were planted in the arid soil of the Thirties Depres- embarrassing example in THE GREAT DICTATOR sion , its depiction of the soullessness of industrial occurs when Paulette Goddard delivers an impas- civilizatiori remains as pertinent-and as \" univer- sioned monologue to the immobile camera. sal\"-as ever. THE GREAT DICTATOR is more obviously \" Wouldn 't it be wonderful if they stopped hating of its time , place , and politi c al mood . Fascism has us? \" she cries . \" With all the hardships and the not exactly disappeared from our midst, but viewers persecution , I love it here. Wouldn 't it be wonderful a generation removed from Nazi megalomania may if they 'd let us live and be happy again ?\" This speech be forg iven if they find the film 's impact softened , is not only insipidly written and unconvincingly de- its vision blurred . claimed , it is also redundant ; every syllable of it had been expressed already by the simple, visual evi- What's more disturbing is Chapl in's own spiritual dence of the Storm Troopers ' oppression . By refus- remoteness from the material. He seems to have ing to believe that , as far as d ialogue was con- approached it second-hand , and as a result THE cerned , \" less is more ,\" Chaplin wound up with too GREAT DICTATOR lacks that spec ial resonance of much that was, perversely, not enough . Goddard 's personal experience which emanates from every single epithet \" Pigs! \" (after the Nazis dirty her white frame of his previous work. Chaplin had know pov- laundry) is more moving than any of the film 's erty, loneliness, and the poignance of misguided anti-Fascist tirades. love; he had not known , or even observed , anti- Semitism on Hitler's millennial scale. The Jews' THE GREAT DICTATOR also presents some marked plight here isn 't nearly as agonizing as that of, say , thematic departures from Chaplin 's previous work. \" the kid \" because Chaplin 's sentimentality is more For the first time since the 1921 IDLE CLASS , Chaplin conjured up at will than irrepressibly unleashed from provide himself with two principal roles: Adenoid the soul. Even the ghetto milieu looks false , created Hynkel , Chancellor of Ptomania, and the Tramp, not from bitter memory (as with THE KID) but from here oddly individualized because of his dialogue. an art director's blueprints. Against such a studio- On one level , THE GREAT DICTATOR gave Chaplin his backlot background the ghetto characters are at great opportunity for a tour-de-force performance, pains not to seem artificial. And although we now and the advantage he took of it makes the film the know , as Chaplin couldn 't have , that Nazi con- acting triumph of his career. He accomplishes per- FILM COMMENT 21
centration camps do not resemble overcrowded and kid. A quiet former-banktelle r. A dapper boule- vardier. A murderer. A compartmentalized man who army barracks , the effect is still to make a contem- separates his business from his personal ethics- and therefore he's a nice guy who kills rich old bags porary tragedy seem more quaint than incisive. for reasons which in themselves we would all surely respect. But Verdou x can 't be dismissed quite so In another way-temporally-Chaplin was too easily. He is not merely using evil for ultimately good purposes; it's clear soon enough that the evil means close to his subject. The decades between Chaplin 's are more important, closer to him , than his suppos- edly noble ends: he enjoys the hunt and the kill poverty-stricken childhood and his creation of such more than he enjoys being home with the family. And who could blame him? That wife and child are masterworks as CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES gave awfully dull. him the distance he needed to transform a desperate Verdou x doesn 't see the contradictions of his position . He never seems to realize that his scheme life into comedic art. But the Nazi threat, an event of protecting his family from all external threats has estranged them from him and made them helpless; contemporary with the film 's production , obviated his wife , rather heavy-handedly, is literally as well as symbolically crippled. We learn , in that cryptic any possibility of distance on Chaplin 's part. Thus, reference late in the film , after the collapse of his enterprises , that he has lost his wife and child , but a struggle-between his instinctive comic sensibility he has begun to \" lose\" them from the time he embarked on his wrong-headed plan . and his rational sensitivity to Hitler's horror-per- No , it isn 't the bourgeois ideals which keep Ver- vades THE GREAT DICTATOR and keeps its from dou x hopping on those trains as fast as he can . It 's the pleasure of the \" work \" itself, the challenge achieving the seamless serenity of MODERN TIMES of winning over and subduing pliant women , the sheer fun of role-playing . Verdou x is a consummate or, for that matter, the macabre misanthropy of actor; he 's so accomplished , in fact , that he 's suc- ceeded in hiding his true motives from himself. MONSIEUR VERDOU X. The film 's transitions between Verdou x, then , savors his role of master puppeteer. He's one up on everyone: the inept police , the straight-forward Storm Trooper brutality (their at- uncomprehending priest, the helpless wife and child , the homely or dizzy or loud-mouthed victims. tack on Goddard) and the Nazi-as-farceur scenes Charming , courtly , in control, Verdou x is better than any of them . We like this wrong-headed , double- (their whitewashing of Charlie's shop with the word dealing murderer as much as he obviously likes himself. And Chaplin works to insure our sympathy \" JEW\" ) are awkward at best, and often nonexistent. by seeing to it that the dapper, fastidious Verdou x commits all his murders Off-stage . When he lets Which sequences are supposed to amuse? And a pretty girl \" go \" because he recognizes in her a kindred spirit-one who would kill for love and who which ones appeal? I don 't know; and neither, I in fact loved a cripple-he seems a very humane maniac indeed. think, did Chaplin. But Verdou x is not altogether likable , and he is It may finally be helpful to see THE GREAT DICTATOR justly defeated; our response, and Chaplin's, to this devious character is tricky , shifting , ambiguous. The as Chaplin 's INTOLERANCE . Both films attempt to second time Verdou x meets the young girl-it's the film 's most chilling moment, I think-he tells her to stretch their creators' already unparalleled range mind her own business. Before that encounter, we might have thought that Verdou x's relationship to with weighty themes and complex structural tech- her was the one uncontaminated , the one \" single- layered \" part of his life, but there are no such oases niques; and neither film can be said to have entirely in Verdou x 's world . succeeded . Yet , as with Griffith and INTOLERANCE, A contrast to Verdoux-and, for that matter, to his other victims-is Annabella, the character played we would have been far poorer had not Chaplin by Martha Raye, and possibly the one positive char- acter in the picture. Annabella is an embodiment decided to confront Fascism on his own terms in of the life principle. She 's stupid , all right , and she 's common , but she has a ball . Her financial reck- THE GREAT DICTATOR. Audacious experiments such lessness and her spontaneity suggest evident com- parisons with Verdoux' s pragmatic and artful ma- as these have extended the medium , and made it nipulations. Verdou x doesn 't like Annabella-not refined enough, too horsey-but Chaplin rather likes exciting. And the blemished masterpieces that have resulted are often the most fascinating , if not fulfilling , of all. 11111111 MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947) by Foster Hirsch Agee loved it, celebrating its virtues in a three- part piece which has become about as famous as a movie review can become. More guardedly, but still enthusiastically, Robert Warshow-in another famous piece-discussed the film as a reflection of the zeitgeist and in reference to The Tramp. But in its 1964 release , when the critical and public reaction was as generally ecstatic as it had been hostile seventeen years earlier, Dwight Macdonald loudly and clearly declared : look, the Emperor has no clothes . Is MONSIEUR VERDOUX that bad ? Is it that good? Macdonald 's carping is really quite unchari- table , and Ag~e ' s generosity is quite excessive : he makes the film fancier and deeper than it really is. Warshow was closest to the truth , I think . He sug- gested that Chaplin was not in complete control of the material and that as a result the comple xities of the subject are not tidily handled . The film 's ambiguities or, if you will , its confu- sions, its contradictory impulses, begin and end with the conception of Monsieur Verdoux himself. Ver- dou x is a nice, respectable , solid bourgeois: he 's got the house in the country, he looks after the wife 22 SEPTEMBER 1972
her, I think , and he wants us to like her too , as well mous resourcefulness , I don 't feel that the various as to laugh at her. But whatever Annabella repre- levels of the performance are entirely adjusted and sents, Verdou x can 't conquer it, and , like the loss coordinated , however, and in this it is like practically of his wife and child , this marks a defeat for the ladykiller. everything else in the film. In form , as well as theme and central character , A crafty criminal , a poseur blind to the conse- quences of his game, a poetic, sensitive murderer: MONSIEUR VERDOU X is marked by antagonistic levels what are we finally to think of this complicated of intention . The fun scenes are undeniably the best: monsieur? In the last scenes in the courtroom and the great scene on the lake, Verdoux' s plans sub- in the jail , Verdou x \" speaks \" and he seems to be limely frustrated ; the beautifully timed sequence at speaking the film 's message in the direct manner the garden party, Verdou x feverishly trying to avoid of the traditional raisonneur: those who kill thou - Annabella; that lunge onto the sofa, the teacup sands are heroes, those who are more selective , remaining obediently in place ; the hilarious and cruel and kill only a few people , are murderers. Verdou x' s scene in which Annabella 's maid loses her hair. But methods are being aligned with those of capitalism then there's that long, uninflected scene with the and war , Verdou x 's own doubleness-the benign young girl-Chaplin sentimentality at its worst , and bourgeois surface, the underlying ruthlessness-is a seeming reversal of the film 's burlesque of the being used as an indictment of the split between bourgeois. The scenes of Verdou x at home are the means, on the one hand, and the professed presumably intended to be flat-and they sure are- ends, on the other, of the games of economics and but the same deadliness is all wrong for the meeting politics. with the waif. And where did Chaplin find Marilyn Nash? She's awful-her voice monotonously mid- Chaplin surely isn 't suggesting that Verdou x American , her eyes blank , her gestures mechanical , would have been better off if he had followed Hitler's her tone and pacing at the level of a rank amateur. lead . In fact he isn 't excusing Verdou x at all: Ver- dou x is misguided , he capitulates to the base level Where was Chaplin during the opening scene of his soc iety . L.ike Arthur Miller's Willy Loman , he 's with the squabbling family of one of Verdoux 's after the wrong goals and he goes at them in the victims? The poor actors, stranded by their director, wrong way. Yet Chaplin\"s \" conviction \" of Verdou x are all broad , stiff, hopeless gestures and astound- is ambivalent. He after all allows him a heroic stance ing vocal monotony. Why set the film in France if in the courtroom and the jail ; Verdou x scores you're going to cast it with actors who constitute against the priest ; he has that delightful , life- a survey of small-town American types? Chaplin affirming moment when he sips the rum and walks would have strengthened the case both for and proudly, in the sun , to his execution . The way those against Verdou x if he had provided him with less final minutes are directed and played , I felt morally dotlish adversaries, and if the film had a genuine uplifted , all the time wondering what was so enno- sense of time and place. Flat voices, papier-mache bling about the imminent execution of a man who backgrounds: was Chaplin being Brechtian , trying was no better than his times and who wound up to bring the point closer to home by paradoxically with just what he deserved? setting his lesson in a foreign country? Or is the absence of atmosphere a means of reserving em- MONSIEUR VERDOU X is the first Chaplin film (ex- phasis for character and theme? Or is it just plain , cepting the special case of A WOMAN OF PARIS) in simple economizing? which the protagonist is not also the hero. Unlike the Tramp , he is overcome , by-he gives in to-e x- Visually as well as vocally , then , the film is largely ternal social pressures. That walk away from the unsatisfactory, self-defeating . The insertions of the camera at the end is an ironic variation on the Eiffel Tower to let us know we ' re in Paris ; the banal Tramp 's exit. The Tramp , though , walks, a free man , reliance on the train wheels to signal Verdoux 's down the road of life; Verdou x, surrounded by restless movement; the documentary insertions of towering guards, walks toward his death . He's a Hitler and Mussolini and the stock market crash, one-shot character, not available for future films , which introduce a sense of the real world , and of whereas the continued adventures of The Tramp historical specificity, not supported by the rest of signalled his resilience and his ultimate triumph . the film-all indicate Chaplin 's awesome lack of interest in the small , tedious necessities of filmmak- It's certainly unusual to see a Chaplin character ing , in any facet of the film other than Verdoux capitulating to, and incarnating , social evil-but himself. that's where Verdoux stands . Since he is played by Chaplin , however, he is hardly a conventional villain ; Like the divided critical response to the film , and Chaplin brings to the character his own charm and like its ambivalent title character , MONSIEUR VERDOUX gaiety and light. Chaplin-Verdoux and the rose in is a work of decidedly unresolved antagonisms. If his first scene: has a murderer ever enjoyed a more you want to be kind , you 'd say that it is ambiguous ingratiating introduction? Chaplin gives us winks and ironic ; if you ' re less hospitable, you 'd say it's and assuring nods from time to time; like Verdou x, confused and contradictory. A compendium of Chaplin is playing a part, and he wants us to like sometimes pleaSing, sometimes inharmonious an- him in it. His performance is part satiric (he mocks titheses, the film is obvious and enigmatic , popular the boulevardier), part pathos (the world-weary and esoteric, deliberate and curiously unpolished , bankrupt), part heroic (the curious, complicating flatfooted and fanciful , a deeply misanthropic (and rebel-hero speeches at the end). For all its enor- misogynistic) statement which is yet enriched by the beauty and joie de vivre of the Chaplin persona. FILM COMMENT 23
MONSIEUR VERDOUX , with Martha Raye . Embracing both slapstick and pathos, satire and every movement implied a liberation from constrict- ing thought. And yet , if Calvero is expressing the sentiment, its theme too devious for popular audi- same feelings that move us so deeply in the earlier films, why should his words sound so empty, so ences yet not thought-out enough for serious meaningless, so terribly banal? audiences , MONSIEUR VERDOUX is a cruel romance , They sound empty because Chaplin , in his mel- ancholy LIMELIGHT period , no longer truly believes a polemical farce presided over by a paranoid schiz- that liJe can be lived for itself. He destroyed that idea in MONSIEUR VERDOU X, where he gave a lecture- ophrenic who is played by the most charming actor demonstration on the worthlessness of existence. How, in VERDOU X' S wake , could he create either a in the history of movies. 1111111 world in which life can be simply enjoyed , or char- acters like the Tramp who can inhabit and enrich LIMELIGHT (1952) that world? Chaplin needs all of Calvero 's talk be- by Emily Sieger cause the ideas he expresses aren 't reinforced by the film 's action . Not one 'person acts out of the Charles Chaplin has always been among the most pure love of living. Nowhere is it suggested-through despairing of film artists. In film after film his Tramp gestures or glances or anyth ing except the endless character failed to capture the love and acceptance torrent of dialogue-that anyone can or should be- he struggled for. As time passed, Chaplin 's films have this way . The message of its scenario is became less comic , the Tramp became less sponta- doomed by the action of its characters and the neously joyful, and the expression of a co(s)mic dismal tone of its images. ex uberance gave way to an impression of tragic cynicism . With his increasingly bleak vision of the LIMELIGHT'S two major characters are spiritual world , he found it difficult to allows the Tramp any and physical cripples who are unloved and lonely happiness at all . Chaplin 's murder-suicide of Charlie with no real love or friendship to offer. Calvero , a was the inevitable result . In his place Chaplin creat- five-time loser at marriage, has drunk himself into ed a monster, but one who was all too much like a near-fatal heart attack; Terry (Claire Bloom) at- Charlie : Monsieur Verdou x. tempts suicide after the onslaught of an ill-defined psychosomatic illness. Calvero gets involved with In that bitter \" comedy of murders ,\" Chaplin Terry out of little more than inertia; he clearly feels slaughtered not only some eminently disposable nothing like love for her. Terry, on the other hand, biddies but , more cruc ially and fatally , all the ideals vaults into hysterics whenever she says she loves that had sustained the Tramp. Love? Pity for cripples him ; later, she practically admits that her feeling for and an ex cuse for murder. Kindness? A chance for him is mainly that of pity and gratitude. A fine a girl to become a more successful whore . Exultant romance! vitality? The repulsive voracity of Annabella Bon- heur. All reasons have been devoured in a world The meaning Calvero and Terry do find isn 't fit only for murderers. Verdou x's \" willed \" death is anything Charlie could have understood : it is that thus a triumph , an act of remarkable perception of only art can make life bearable. Indeed , Calvero the moral corruption and imminent physical de- becomes interested in Terry when she tells him she 's struction of the world-the old , \" Charlie\" world-the a dancer and , in a dream performance , discusses whole world . the meaning of life in something like the Tramp 's terms: generous and gentle, humorous and human . And after Armageddon , what? In the new Chaplin Little wonder that Calvero sighs so painfully upon world , where creation is impossible, invention is returning from the enchantment of the dream to his necessary ; where love is impotent, art must be grim reality. Chaplin may not have intended the important. LIMELIGHT'S critics have always noted- contrast to be so striking , but Charlie couldn 't help generally to condemn-the lengthy speeches about but be aware of it. Life. But, if nothing else, Chaplin-Calvero 's stifling garrulousness about living life for itself (\" What do As if conscious of their own self-pitying dullness, you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a all of LIMELIGHT 'S characters devote most of their meaning \" ) suggests LIMELIGHT'S ostensible theme. This is certainly the theme of the Tramp films , since Charlie, like Calvero , cared for desires, not mean- ings; and the audacious freedom of the Tramp's 24 SEPTEMBER 1972
LIMELIGHT. energies to the production of art. Like Neville (Syd- On the whole it is true time seems only to have enriched Chaplin 's other films . THE CIRCUS was ney Chaplin), who sacrifices his last shilling for some always reckoned the weakest of his silent features, but it looks marvelously fresh and funny in today 's music paper, they are motivated solely by love, or light; and who would have guessed that MODERN TIMES , after nearly forty years , would seem still so rather need , for their art. \" This is where I belong ,\" relevant to us and our current preoccupations? says Cal vero , as he prepares for his final perform- Of course A KING IN NEW YORK was something different. Chaplin was already an old man , nearing ance. Terry says, \" But I thought you hated the seventy , when he made it. He had not directed a film for ten years ; and he had never made a film theater .\" \" 1 do ,\" Calvero replie s. \" 1 also hate the in his native England , or worked there since he left it as a promising music-hall clown , before the First sight of blood , but it's in my veins .\" For him , it would World War. He had never, for that matter, worked outside the security of his own studio. Since his last seem , art is life-or at least a tolerable substitute, film , too , he had suffered vicious personal attack in the country which for so many years he had and at most all one can expect. chosen as his home, and finally found himself an exile, a victim of the political hysteria of the times. Unable to gi ve or accept love directly , Calvero It was this last ex perience , lacerating as it was and Terry rely on an artificial stimulant: applause. to him , that he sought to cauterize with comedy. He played King Shahdov, a Central-European mon- It's a sad business when they don 't laugh , he says , arch who seeks refuge in the United States. His ideals of the New World are somewhat rapidly but when they do , \" it's a thrill. \" Yet in the next dashed by a night on the town which includes visits to the cinema (CinemaScope was still new, and there breath , he can condemn his audience as \" a monster was a joke about people 's heads turning like spectators at a tennis match to follow the action ) without a head , which never knows which way to and to a restaurant. Charmed by a beautiful young ad vertiSing agent (Dawn Addams ) he is persuaded turn .\" It's hard to tell whether applause reaches their to appear in television commercials after his Prime Minister has made off with the residue of the Royal hearts or only their egos. Like the earliest, most treasury. primitive incarnation of the Tramp , Calvero and With money, life in America seems brighter , until he befriends Rupert McAdee (the infant Michael Terry must be completely egocentric; unlike him , Chaplin), a ten-year-old whom he has previously met as the horrid prodigy of a progressi ve school. Now they have no joy to compensate for their loneliness. the child is a fugitive . His parents have been impris- oned for contempt of Congress after refusing the Lost in an Antartica of the soul , and unable to walk degradation of naming names before the House Unamerican Activities Committee . On account of his off hand-in-hand like Charlie and his girl in MODERN own association with the child , Shahdov is also called before the Committee; and after a farcical TIMES , they must surrender to the occasionally hearing in which he accidentally douses them with a fire hose, he is cleared . He decides to return to glorious but ultimately hollow sound of two hands Europe and his estranged wife . Taking leave of Rupert , whom he ~as persuaded to return to school , clapping . he discovers that the boy has been broken : to save his parents he has named names . It will all pass, This half-arrogant, half-noble submission to their sullen craft functions as Calvero 's and Terry 's only means of surviving in a wretched , war-torn world. In the last, painful shots of LIMELIGHT , as the camera pulls away from Calvero's dead body to pick up Terry performing her solo onstage, Chaplin finally confirms what the actions and images of the film have tried to say . Not only does art give beauty and mean ing to life , it transcends life itself. It is an uncertain way to live , and a hazardous one both emotionally and physically, but for the Chaplin of LIMELIGHT it seems the only way left. 11111111 A KING IN NEW YORK (1957) by David Robinson It is fifteen years since Chaplin made A KING IN NEW YORK and almost as long since anyone saw it; and of course it is extremely dangerous to write about a film from such long memory (even fortified with notes made at the time ). Times change , we change , and sometimes there seems so:-ne mysteri- ous change in the chemistry of the work of art itself. FILM COMMENT 25
A KING IN NEW YORK , with Dawn Addams. Shahdov tells him in a vain attempt at consolation; brilliance of conception and performance, the quali- one day the hysteria will end . . ties that Chaplin had brought intact from the London music halls which he had known at their Victorian It is hard to believe that Chaplin himself could apogee, were still intact: the hose scene, impeccably have felt so blandly philosophical about his own managed , if inadequate to its moment; some tradi- situation and the future. Yet this at the time seemed tional farce with a bathroom keyhole ; a chase in the odd paradox of the film. Where Chaplin was most which he fled energetically from a supposed writ- immediately concerned , his film seemed least in- server , only to find himself in the arms of a real volved. Looking back, beyond the years when Chap- one . There is a vaguer memory of Chaplin-Shahdov , lin 's grand sentimentality and simplistic world philo- debonaire, dignified even when subjected to absurd sophies seemed embarrassing because discordant indignity; optimistic despite the doomed vagueness with the mood of the times , we can see that the of his idealistic plans for helping mankind through underlying strength of the early comedies was a very the peaceful use of atomic energy; recalling the THE real sense of the rigors of life in mean streets ; that IMMIGRANT as he bravely continued his speech of the strength , too of MODERN TIMES, was a genuine thanks for the warmth of his welcome in America and deep-felt concern over the direction contem- while the immigration authorities brusquely took his porary urban life was taking. Yet all this was recol- fingerprints ; recalling too the Charlie of THE KID in lected or observed from the isolated tranquility of his touching , protective moments with the boy. If the peak of Chaplin's success. He was painfully and when we see A KING IN NEW YORK again , we close to the situations which provided the themes shall probably discover it the least realized and least of A KING IN NEW YORK ; yet the comedy now seemed assured of Chaplin 's films . But it is also sure that we somehow detached, without the central fiber of shall not find in it an artist in dotage or decline. I1I11I1 serious reality. He attacked his targets with no deadlier weapon than some easy superficial slap- A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967) stick; the Unamerican Activities Committee was dis- by Michael Kerbel missed with a fire-hose. The tragedy of the times seemed to defy translation into comedy . Only in the In 1964, Charles Chaplin ended his autobiog- later scenes, where the comedy gave way to pathos, raphy with these words: \" I sometimes sit out on our and Shahdov recognized his own unwitting com- terrace at sunset and look over a vast green lawn plicity with the adult establishment in breaking the to the lake in the distance, and beyond the lake child , did he seem fully engaged in the subject. to the reassuring mountains , and in this mood think of nothing and enjoy their magnificent serenity.\" This at least is what stays in the memory after Two years later, he was back at work , pouring an fifteen years. There were other disappointments, amazing amount of energy into a new film as if he among them a distinct air of shabbiness about the suspected it to be his last. A COUNTESS FROM HONG film . Working in his own studio , Chaplin 's economy KONG , representing Chaplin 's return and the teaming over things like sets had resulted in a characteristic of two superstars , was one of the most anticipated visual style , a supremely effective theater for his own films of all time. It was also one of the most viciously performance. The settings of CITY LIGHTS and attacked works of any major director. Time summed MODERN TIMES have a stylized nakedness that is up the critics ' contemptuous mood: \" An important Ex pressionist in effect. Working in London locations part of being a champ is knowing when to retire .\" that were only too patently not New York, and staging a revolution with a handful of half-hearted This kind of arrogance , offensive at any time , is extras , gave A KING IN NEW YORK the look of a British particularly so in the case of this unpretentious B-feature . comedy , Chaplin 's attempt to look benignly at what he once called (in MONSIEUR VERDOU X) a \" ruthless One also recalls uncomfortably jokes about pro- world .\" But Chaplin had committed the deadly sin gressive schools and commercial television that of making-in the mod Si xties-a film that was ele- were already old and tired ; another about plastic gant, mellow, romantic , subtle in its humor, shame- surgery that was rather nasty; some unhappy dia- lessly sentimental and , yes , old-fashioned . He had logue (\" To part ,\" he tells his estranged Queen , in dared to keep his camera on an eye level , to move a line worthy of LOVE STORY , \" is to die a little.\" ) But then one recalls other scenes in which the old 26 SEPTEMBER 1972
ACOU NTESS FROM HON GKONG . with Marlon Brand o. Both photos: Un ive rsal Pictures . it only when following actors, to cut only after a to become part of society , and Brando as the adver- shot had made its point. And Chaplin 's functional sary who begins by humiliating her, and ends by style was just part of the problem : his content was falling in love . In fact , Natascha-with her baggy- also considered inconsequential. COUNTESS was in pants pajamas , undersized hat, and jacket so tight the disgraced genre of romantic comedy, and critics the buttons pop off-may be called the physical wanted social significance. equivalent of Charlie . And in at least one scene , Loren performs an entire Chaplin routine that sets Of course , Chaplin had been regarded as aes- off a chain of iconographic reverberations- thetically reactionary before, but now he was ac- especially when she fronts the same coy smile that cused of senility. Thus he joined the company of Charlie often affected when threatened by the likes some of the cinema 's finest artists-Dreyer, Ford , of Eric Campbell and Mack Swain , and when , finally, Renoir, Hitchcock, Hawks-whose mature, reflec- she leans her elbow on the edge of a couch and tive, traditional styles had become unfashionable at almost falls off, recalling an identical moment in a time when most movies looked like TV commer- Verdou x's courtship of Madame Grosnay. But Chap- cials . As Andrew Sarris said in his eloquent defense lin is not merely repeating himself. The optimistic of COUNTESS, critics expected to stay young forever , ending of COUNTESS is much more deeply felt , since while only directors grew old . This is not to deny it emerges naturally from all that precedes it. the film 's flaws . Many observers have noted the mismatched cuts, poor process shots, awkward Throughout the film , Chaplin compensates for his expositions and inconsistencies in the story . But absence from a major role by imbuing many of the these are exceedingly minor problems that never performers with a little of his own personality. Bran- detract from the film 's overwhelming feeling. As do is the traditional heavy, but even he retains Chaplin , in his brief appearance , remarks about the elements of Charlie , as when , during a press confer- rough ocean : \" Just a little sloppy-nothing serious. \" ence, he finds himself wiping his forehead with Natascha's torn pajama sleeve. Sydney Chaplin , An additional problem for some may be that who bears a striking resemblance to his father, COUNTESS , like most Chaplin films , is rooted firmly evokes numerous early Chaplin films in the scene in a theatrical tradition . The stateroom in which most where he gets even with an obno xious character of the action occurs, as well as the ballroom , night- by surreptitiously sprinkling water in the man 's ear , clubs , and hotel , exist in a kind of limbo , without then drinking his cocktail , all the while staring reference to place or era, and they provide a perfect straight ahead with an innocent, deadpan expres- background for the stylized games played by the sion . Patrick Cargill , as a butler , also has a wonder- characters . The film has the manner and spirit of fully Chaplinesque moment when , given the chance a French farce, with illogical events occurring rapid- to share Natascha's room for a night, he manages ly in a peculiarly logical progression. The familiar to be lecherous and bashful at the same time. There plot-with destitute Countess Natascha (Sophia are also brief appearances by Chaplin 's daughters Loren) stowing away on a ship bound for America, Geraldine, Josephine and Victoria, and, of course, and hiding in the cabin of Ogden Mears (Marlon by Chaplin himself as the old steward . The few Brando) , a stuffy American diplomat-leads to a seconds during which he opens the door, reels with constant, and constantly amusing , game of hide- seasickness , and exits in bewilderment , transport and-seek. People run in and out of the bedroom , us back to the dizzy days of his best silent comedies. closets and bathroom , and jump up frantically at the sound of a door buzzer. The theatrical style is From the earliest Chaplin films, dancing has emphasized by the incredible number of times doors played a part , often as an exc use for slapstick: in are opened and closed (I counted 164). Undoubt- TANGO TANGLES (1914) , which begins with dancing edly, this could be performed on the stage, but and ends with an unbelievably prolonged series of improvised fights ; CITY LIGHTS, in which a drunken Chaplin 's mise-en-scene, his judicious use of long Charlie becomes irrepressible on the dance floor; THE GREAT DICTATOR , where Hynkel must dance with and medium shots, and his precise sense of pacing , the huge Madame Napaloni . In THE GOLD RUSH , the make all of the stage business essentially cinematic . dance hall is the setting for the tramp 's humiliation ; and in VERDOUX , the most melancholy scene begins The general development of COUNTESS roughly parallels that of THE GOLD RUSH , with Loren as the Tramp who is perSistently rejected in her attempts FILM COMMENT 27
with apache dancers performing a tango , an appro- has composed , sets the mood for the romantic priately decadent prologue to Verdou x's confession that he has given up on life. finale. The two join the other dancers, becoming In COUNTESS , dances ex press all these moods , part of the world once more. Chaplin follows them and more. There are five major scenes involving dancing , placed at crucial points in the story 's for a while, then stops panning , enabling them to development. These may be seen almost as intro- ductions to five distin ct acts or movements , and as dance out of the picture. The other couples, who metaphors for the characters ' emotional states. The opening and closing credits are both superimposed are rounding the floor , all come back into view, but over beautiful , bittersweet scenes of dancing, and the difference in emphasis (the opening is more Natascha and Ogden do not. There will be no fade bitter, the closing more sweet) sums up the entire movement of the film . At the beginning , a sailor out on them ; they will continue dancing in a world enters a dance hall , where he may dance with real countesses for fifty cents . The atmosphere is sad : somewhere beyond the frame. women are lowered to selling themselves , men pay for the momentary pleasure of mingling with royalty. Chaplin himself had danced quite some distance The scene is quite haunting , largely because the people in it never appear again . It becomes some- from the ridiculous slapstick of TANGO TANGLES to thing of an abstract introduction , just as the dance at the end of LES BONNES FEMMES is an abstract coda the sublime romanticism of this tango. The scene (Chaplin moving from humiliation to affirmation , Chabrol descending from idealism to despair). seems entirely appropriate as the final one of Chap- The second dance scene provides the setting for lin 's career: this gentle little man , having found a Ogden 's introduction to Natascha, and begins their relationsh ip. After they talk about her unhappy past, fulfilling romance in his own life, communicates the he asks her to dance, and the camera lingers on them as they start their waltz. The third dance begins joyous possibilities of love to his audience. And if with comedy-a delightful encounter between Ogden and an affected society girl. Suddenly, Na- the audience, and the critics , are too jaded to tascha appears, and this angers Ogden , partly be- cause she is supposed to remain hidden , and partly recognize the profound truth of this scene , it is their because he is jealous of the attention paid to her. He attempts to show his annoyance while dancing loss. For Chaplin 's is not a naiVe optimism , but the with her, but this is a \" change partners\" waltz, and they spend only a short time together. The frustrat- only kind possible in an imperfect world . It is an ing encounter symbolizes Ogden 's mental state as well : at this point , he is beginning to fall in love , optimism that both expects to find happiness and and is frustrated because the relationship will be impossible for his career . In the fourth dance se- understands that it may not last forever. Chaplin quence, the mood becomes totally melancholy: Ogden and Natascha are about to part, seem ingly suggests that we must immediately accept and em- forever . As before, he asks her to dance, but now she refuses , since she is too upset to remain there. brace whatever good comes to us, despite and The apparent end of their relationship is thus repre- sented by their inability even to join the couples on because of its evanescence. the dance floor. Although COUNTESS is undeniably a hopeful film , The final sequence, among the loveliest in Chap- lin 's works , expresses perfectly the bittersweet op- especially in the conte xt of Chaplin 's other works , timism of both the film and its director. This last act begins with a close up-one of very few in the there remains a suggestion of a sad , tentative quali- film-of Natascha crying , as she watches Ogden 's ship departing. The background , in which people ty , almost as if everything we have seen occurred are dancing , is blurred , suggesting Natascha's total isolation from the world to which she has aspired . in a dream . But at least for a time-whether short A short time later, Ogden , who has left his wife and career to join Natascha, enters the room. A tango or long-romance provides a means of coping with begins , in a minor key , as the camera follows him across the dance floor toward her table. Chaplin ex istence . This is something Chaplin has always cuts to a medium shot of Natascha, as she first sees him , and the music suddenly changes to another maintained , even in his most melancholy films. Ver- tango , this time in a major key . The new theme , one of the most beautiful and sentimental pieces Chaplin doux says, \" It's a blundering world , a very sad one . . . Yet a little kindness can make it beautiful. \" Calvero says , \" Then live without hope ... Life for the moment. There are still wonderful moments.\" And perhaps Chaplin 's ultimate message is ex- pressed in these lines, spoken by Natascha: \" Don 't be sad ... that's too easy . Be like me. At this moment, I am very happy ... That 's all we can ask for-this moment. \" 11111111 Charles Silver runs the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art. Gilberto Perez Guillermo teaches film at Prin ceton. Gary Carey is writing a history of Paramount Pictures for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. William K . Everson is the unofficial Curator-in-Chief of old movies. William Paul writes for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. Stanley Kauffmann is the film and theater critic of The New Republic . David Denby writes on film for The Atlan- tic. Stephen Harvey works at the Museum of Modern Art, and has written for Woman 's Wear Daily. Foster Hirsch teaches English at Brooklyn College. Emily Sieger has written on Chaplin for Focus. David Robinson is the film critic of The Financial Times (London) and a frequent contributor to Sight and Sound . Michael Kerbel works at Audio-Brandon and writes for The Village Voice . The one Chaplin feature not discussed here, THE CIRCUS (1928), was ap- praised by David Bordwell in the Fall 1970 FILM COMMENT (volume 6 number 3). 28- SEPTEMBER 1972
Chronicler of Power an interview with FRANKLIN SCHAFFNER by Kenneth Geist Kenneth Geist, a contributing editor to Show and film unit, knowing nothing about anything . I worked at The March of Time ten months. And one day a author of a forthcoming study of Joseph L. Man- guy from CBS called a director at The March of Time . CBS was then New York, Washington and Boston , kiewicz (to be published by Praeger), conducted this if you were lucky and maybe Philadelphia thrown interview with Franklin Schaffner in New York last in . And he said to this man , \" Come on over here winter, soon after the opening of NICHOLAS AND and be a director.\" And the guy said , \" Are you crazy? I' m a director in motion pictures! But there's ALEXANDRA . a bright guy over here, my A.D. , maybe you 'd be interested in seeing him .\" And he said , \" Well , I' m FRANKLIN SCHAFFNER : I never intended to be desperate for anybody.\" a director. I went to college , majored in English , History, Government-Franklin & Marshall College, So I went over and talked to this man , named which has done me the honor of establishing the Robert Benedict, who ran Public Affairs , News, Franklin Schaffner Film Library. I intended to be a Sports, Religious Programs, what have you . He lawyer. The war came along , in which I was for hired me as a director. I said I'd never seen a four-and-a-half years , and when I got out I felt there television camera . He said it doesn't matter. He said , was no time left for four years of law school, two \" Go down and look at the studio and hang around years of clerkship , that kind of thing. I was twenty- for two weeks,\" which I did , and I started by directing four when I got out in ' 46 , and frankly , as a result news , talk shows , religious shows . This was ' 48. One of having been in the war for four-and-a-half years , of the very first things I did was go to Philadelphia I thought that lowed an obligation somewhere, and and work on the political conventions, where I I joined a peace organization for a year-and-a-half became exposed to guys like Ed Murrow, which called Americans United for World Government. It came in very handy for THE BEST MAN. seemed to me that having paid the dues for a year, that was enough, and I quit and started looking During that period, not quite a year later, I had around for a job. done a parade-The Golden Jubilee Parade of New York City. A man named Tony Minor, Worthington I think I must have looked around in this town for eight months, and quite by accident I got hired as an assistant director at the old March of Time FILM COMMENT 29
Minor, saw that broadcast and he said , \" I thought fluenced for a while the theater in this country-in you used some moderate imagination on that thing , the mid-Fifties. how'd you like to go into drama?\" He ran the drama department of CBS-TV . I got shifted and worked in GEIST: What are the relative problems in switch- that , and did a series c alled Where 's We sley? which in g fro m television to the theater to film? was I thin k the first family situation comedy ever on television , written by Sam Taylor . It was on for SCHAFFNER : In those days television was a great about 16 weeks, but never picked up a sponsor, deal closer to theater than it was to motion pictures . and went off the air. At the end of that I said to One of the reasons why I continue to believe that Tony , \" I've paid some more dues. Give me a chance television fell afoul in the late Fifties was because at Studio One.\" He said all right , he 'd give me a it started to copy motion pictures both in technique one-time chance, which he did. And that's how I and story content. That was a bad mistake on its got started . part. First of all , on the production side , it couldn 't conceivably compete with motion pictures. And KENNETH GEIST: What was that one-time second , the material started to soften where it chance? should not have . In those days you used almost a theatrical scheme of rehearsal , almost a theatrical SCHAFFNER : It was The Rival Dummy, starring scheme of choreography . Certainly you used a the- Paul Lukas and Anne Francis, who was then si xteen atrical scheme of lighting , because lighting in mo- or seventeen years old . There were some bizarre tion pictures is totally different from lighting in con- mistakes in the middle of it. Paul Lukas dried up tinuous staging . and forgot his lines. To recover he started speaking in Hungarian , then realized what he was doing , and GEIST: What happened after you were booted said \" Jesus Christ. \" And that was to be my make- off by Henry Kaiser? or-break show! But, in the end , I felt I had done a modestly successful job. SCHAFFNER: I then went out to California. I was constantly commuting to California in the Fifties . I From there, I left CBS and went on to do the did Playhouse 90 for three seasons , and did The Ford Theatre , which was then an hour live antholo- Silver Whist/e, starring Eddie Albert and Bethel Les- gy. Then I came back to CBS and did more Studio lie, and The Cruel Day, among other things . I also Ones . When I left that time, a bunch of us formed did The Caine Mutiny Court Martial for Ford Star a company called Un it Four-which was Tony Minor, Time. That was an ex citing period because it had George Roy Hill, Fielder Cook and myself-and we a sense of some kind of glamour. But it also had did something for the Kaiser Aluminum Company. a certain sense of decay one could begin to smell. We got cancelled because Henry Kaiser said that we had promised to do shows only on Americana THE STRIPPER (1963) and motherhood and what we were doing was GEIST: How were you picked to direct THE personally offensive to him . STRIPPER? GEIST: With directors of such stature, how would SCHAFFNER : By Jerry Wald . I had serious reser- you divvy up who was to do what? vations about that piece. But there was a critical SCHAFFNER: Tony was the arbitor. We had time in my life when I felt that I should be segueing twenty shows and we were each responsible for si x, over-it was time now. That picture had all sorts and somebody else brought two into the pot. We of tragic consequences. Jerry Wald died two-thirds were responsible for getting our own material, which through the making of it. Fox was in economic was unprecedented. extremes-they were making CLEOPATRA at the same time , and the only other picture shooting was THE It's interesting how in your ex perience you devel- STRIPPER . It was then called CELEBRATION . And every op . In the early days of television , you thought your charge in the studio was being thrown against the only obligation was to a cast and to the material , budget of THE STRIPPER . It was the last picture made and when you stepped up into a slightly higher level, in black and white CinemaScope-a very fragile you were now responsible for working with the writer piece at best, with Joanne Woodward , Claire Trevor, and all the other inescapable responsibilities. Some Robert Webber, Louis Nye, Gypsy Rose Lee, and of the people I worked with were Gore Vidal , Regin- Richard Beymer in the last picture he made . Nobody ald Rose , Rod Serling , Mayo Simon , Loring Mandel , took over after Wald died , and I was left to complete Tad Mosel, Horton Foote. the picture. One of the reasons why more directors survived It was at this time that Zanuck took over. I met the switch-over from television to films than produc- him in New York and showed him the film. He didn 't ers , actors , writers , was because the director in say anything , just asked how much it cost. I told those early days of television was dealing with every him I didn 't know. The budget was unrealistic any- conceivable kind of material. He got his feet wet way , far in excess of what the picture actually cost , on almost anything . It didn 't matter whether he was since all those studio costs had been tacked on to right for the material. The fact of the matter is, his it. Zanuck left without a word to me , and went back turn came up and he did it. That was invaluable and told the editor to meet him after lunch. I appre- training. ciated the embarrassing position the editor was in , but I wanted to know what was happening , so I told The other thing I've always pondered about is him that I would call him after five in the afternoon . that the limitations of television in those days en- When I did call , I found out that he had taken the forced a concept of suggestive realism , both in film and gone to California. Zanuck changed the design and staging , which , I am convinced , in- 30 SEPTEMBER 1972
title, and cut it up so badly that Joanne Woodward , THE STRIPPER , Joanne Woodward . photo : Museum of Modern Paul Newman and I swore that we would never make Art/Film Stiffs Archive. another picture for Fo x. But, of course , we all did . GEIST: How did you develop the film from William Inge 's play A Loss of Roses? Did you change the playa great deal? SCHAFFNER : Not a great deal. But we put some rather remarkable small-town color into it. The weakest character was the girl , and all this tended to support the ache of this lady who had to find herself. Of course , all that stuff was cut out, they took out all the plastique, coup de cinema , color. Meade Roberts did the screenplay. GEIST: Did you have much to say about the casting of the film? SCHAFFNER: Not too much . I had reservations about Richard Beymer, but I thought that, in the end , he did a very respectable job of it. Zanuck , on the other hand , thought Beymer was never worse. Beymer was miscast, not as to age or talent, but as to attitude, meaning that he had no idea of what small-town life during the Depression was like. I had to find ways of striking responses that could be translated into terms he understood . But even though THE STRIPPER was a failure , I still got hired for THE BEST MAN . THE BEST MAN (1964) SCHAFFNER : When THE STRIPPER opened in 1963, there were seven newspapers in New York- unanimously bad reviews. The second picture was THE BEST MAN-unanimously favorable reviews. And I thought, gee, it's amazing how the whole thing can turn around. I got up the next day, and walked down Third Avenue , past the Baronet where THE BEST MAN was playing . It was ten o 'clock in the morning and , even at that hour, the police horses were up, because there had been incredible reviews. And I thought, boy, a brand new career. I went to my office and worked all day. At si x o 'clock I called up UA and said , very jauntily, \" Just quote me the grosses.\" And the guy said , \" Nobody came.\" I went home , past the theater, the saw horses were all gone , and nobody had gone to see the picture . That picture hasn 't even recouped its negative costs to this day. GEIST: Was it because of your relation with Gore Vidal in television that you got to direct THE BEST MAN? SCHAFFNER : Conceivably, I don 't know. Origi- nally, that was a property bought by UA and the director assigned to it was Frank Capra. Frank and Gore did an adaptation of the play . Eventually, for what reasons I don 't know, Frank dropped out and I came in . I sat down with Stuart Millar, who was one of the producers, and did a total rewrite on the screenplay. It was close to the original play, but the machinery changed. My own particular taste is that the screenplay was a much better drama than the play. The excitement of the whole political back- ground worked better. It became middleweight in- stead of lightweight. I had done Advise and Consent in ' 60 . When I swung into dOing THE BEST MAN , for a while it looked to me like I was going to be the FILM COMMENT 31
PATTON , Geo rg e C. Sco tt. p ho to : Museum of Mo dern only director who was familiar with the politics of Ar t/ Film Stills Arc hive. contemporary homosexuality, because the deus ex machina of both is precisely the same . 32 SEPTEMBER 1972 I think the most difficult job for a director, in my experience , is the theater, because you ' re not in control of the elements, from time to time, to the same degree as you are in control all the time , first in motion pi ctures and secondly , in television-in terms of script , first of all , because there are certain ground rules by which you play in theater , that have to do with a writer's contract. Second , once that curtain goes up , the director is no longer in control. What is in control is an actor 's response to an audien ce, or conversely , an audience 's response to an actor. These are not nuances that one can play with , as you play with nuances in an editing room , for example. But the one time I was at it, directing Advise and Consent on Broadway, I found it a very gratifying experience, though I never worked harder or was more exhau sted . GEIST: Is it fair to ask what you thought of Otto Preminger 's film ve rsion of ADVISE AND CONSENT in comparison to the stage play? SCHAFFNER: I thought it was vastly inferior. The limitations of theater helped the story by forcing us to concentrate on a fewer number of characters, and consequently investigate those characters in more depth . Preminger used \" color\" to fill in the film , which gave it a false sophistication which was really unimportant. GEIST: And yet, you feel that what helped expand THE BEST MAN as a film wa s exac tly this political convention atmosphere . SCHAFFNER: The machinery. Yes. But I think that was legitimate machinery. GEIST : Had you intended to do more plays subsequently, or has the film career interfered with that? SCHAFFNER : Unhappily, nobody has ever sent me a play, since then , that I wanted to do . GEIST: In terms of the plastique that you men- tioned in relation to THE STRIPPER , are there things about THE BEST MAN that please you ? SCHAFFNER : Yes. One, it was an enormously literate script. Two , it su cceeds visually , even though there were 88 pages of dialogue taking place in hotel corridors in a script of 123 pages . Three , it was a gorgeous cast. The only time I've made a film , in America, where what I will call \" ensemble playing \" worked . Lee Tracy, Edie Adams, Maggie Leighton , Cliff Robertson , Hank Fonda, Shelley Berman . We rehearsed that piece for two weeks. And the last three days all we were doing was starting at the top , and taking it through , precisely like a dress rehearsal. We did expand on the color, but it was still lots of talk. But it was literate talk , important talk . Of all the pictures I've made , I am most fond of that picture . I don 't think it's my best picture , but I'm most fond of it. THE WAR LORD (1965) SCHAFFNER: I had worked with Chuck Heston in television . For one thing , we did a 46- minute
version of Macbeth for Studio One. He was doing 20th Century-Fox to go ahead just with make-up THE WAR LORD , and apparently felt I was right for tests, just to see if a monkey walked into a room this sort of tenth-century material. It was based on where there was a man , and they started speaking a play. I like the script very much. It was a piec e, a common language, whether anybody would pay sadly enough , wh ich was recut by Universal. In- any attention to what they were saying . evitably , what happens in that kind of circumstance , is that they cut out the color-those fragile but We made a test with Heston and Edward G. always terribly consequential subtleties that you put Robinson-who did not ultimately appear in the fi lm in a film , that you take more time to build than you -playing an orangutan . It was originally designed do an action sequence-so terribly important to as a scene where three orangutans perform a lobot- character, motivation and reaction . omy on Heston , but the three orangutans did all the talking , since obviously a man who was having The film did very well critically and commercially a lobotomy would be unconscious. I sa id I thought in Europe, I think it might have been Universal 's th is was wrong because we we re missing the whole biggest grosser overseas. But I think they refused point, and we put together another scene which was to take it seriously in this country because it was a five-minute give-and-take dialogue . It was enor- a costume picture , and so much of that kind of stuff mously interesting. We cut to this orangutan face , that had come out of Hollywood had been so bad. and he would come in and say \" Good evening ,\" The minute you threw a guy into armor, you surren- and there would be one or two giggles, and suddenly dered your credentials. The film 's critics also ob- everybody would stop, and they would listen for five jected to the combination of accents-Maurice minutes to what they were talking about. It proved Evans, Guy Stockwell, Richard Boone, Heston , al- to the executives at Fo x that it just was not going though the disparity was not noted in the reviews to be an outrageous piece of farce that would be of the English press. totally unbel ievable and unmakeable in those terms . Well , obviously , the rest is history . John Collier did the orig inal script for THE WAR LORD , which was terribly long , and then Millard Kauffman The picture was released , there was an enormous came in and did a rewrite . The script was very amount of interest in it. Then two months went by , literate, and I think it was representative of what and all the so-called intellectuals started to get tenth-century language should sound like . It pre- interested . Rather than a science-fiction piece , it sented a difficult problem because archaic language turned out to be a moderately interesting piece of sounds unreal to the ears of a modern audience, satire. That 's why people took it up . It was interest- and we had to avoid that while still maintaining the ing , because the first reviews out said this is a lot proper flavor of the language. of fun . Then , two months later, the in-depth reviews started to come out and saw totally different levels The picture was taken away from me while I was in it. It's certainly more satire than science-fiction . doing a fine cut , and recut by Universal to boost I thought it fair to call it a picture with an exotic the action elements. Their excuse for this was that background , but not a science-fiction piece. Hope- the picture had gone over budget, which it had , fully , it worked on the level that you were sitting because we had to reshoot our second-unit se- and watching a simian society functioning , and it quences. occurred to you , suddenly , that you were in a hall of mirrors, looking at yourself. THE DOUBLE MAN (1967) SCHAFFNER : The picture I did after that was THE PATTON (1970) GEIST: How did you find working with George DOUBLE MAN with Yul Brynner, Britt Ekland and Clive Revill. The screenplay was by Frank Tarloff, with C. Scott? a rewrite by Alfred Haag. It was a spy melodrama SCHAFFNER: I thin k Scott is one of the most shot in England and Austria in 1966. It was nothing special , but since I had a bad commercial track gifted actors on the scene, and I certainly would record in America , I did it as a matter of survival. have no hesitation in joining forces and working with We shot for three weeks and then closed down for him again . Our relationship was almost exactingly six weeks and rewrote the entire script. It made it professional , both on his part and on mine. There better, but it was still not a great film. were no problems he and I had with each other at all. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) SCHAFFNER : I had been invited into APE country GEIST: The opening scene is one of the most audacious, in terms of c ontent and expression, in before THE DOUBLE MAN , and didn 't expect it was American films . Was it always in the script? going to be made. Much to my astonishment I got a call saying they were going to make it. The genesis SCHAFFNER : It was in the script from the begin- of it was that it had been put together by Arthur ning in a version that Francis Ford Coppola did . Jacobs with Blake Edwards and Rod Serling for There were arguments about whether or not to have Warner Brothers in a terribly expensive package. that speech up front. Scott wanted to move it be- Warners felt it was too ex pensive, and Blake Ed- cause he felt that it didn 't belong there , and that wards felt if it were to be done less expensively , going in to the two hours and forty minutes to follow , it shouldn't be done at all. Jacobs showed this thing he could never top it; therefore he wanted to move allover town , and nobody bid. Finally, he persuaded it to a realistic spot about twenty-five minutes into the picture. It seemed reasonable to keep it where it was , as a prologue , not as part of the picture , FILM COMMENT 33
PLANET OF THE APES , Charlton Hesto n. in the sense that there is that highly unrelated photo : 20th Century- Fox. moment at the very end , which is the epilogue , of the man walking off toward the windmill. NICHOLAS AND ALE XANDRA, Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman . photo : Columbia Pictures. But it seemed to me that if the picture were to work, one had to have ground rules from which to NICHOLAS AND ALE XANDRA, To m Baker (Rasputin) and view it. And I don ' t think that you can layout ground Janet Suzman . photo: Columbia Pictures . rules in ex position , I think that you have to lay them out in character . And I think in those terms that that 34 SEPTEMBER 1972 speech works as a prologue , because people who see it unconsciously avail themselves of the ground rules with which to watch the picture. Always, the same thing happens-it happens even before he comes up on the stage, when that huge American flag comes up-you can feel in the audience that there 's one pole that says that's the greatest pop art I've ever seen , and another pole that says that's the greatest American flag I've ever seen. Then he makes the speech and you respond in those terms. The picture is for you on some level. Friends of mine thought I was a fool to make the picture . But when they see it they think it is a great picture , and understand why I made it. We started it in ' 68 and nobody could believe that somebody was making a war picture , in terms of what the political temperment was and is in this country. And you 'd say, \" Well , Jesus Christ, it's not a war picture. \" And they 'd say, \" It's about a Gener- al. \" And you 'd say, \" Well, he could have been Chairman of the Board of Sears & Roebuck, a newspaper tycoon or a religious leader. The fact that he happened to be a general is just a fact of history. Wait till you see the character. \" The back- ground is war, but I hope it's an anti-war picture . I believe it is. Here was a man who spent all his life training to be a single thing that he wanted to be. And that was to be the world 's greatest general , nothing else-no political ambitions, just the world 's greatest general. And in a two-year period of his life , because he happened to be around , he gratified that ambi- tion . I would say that, without any sense of contra- diction , we were at the period of history lucky to have him around . GEIST: Not subsequently? SCHAFFNER : No. We ' re not fighting a war against an obscenity right now, which happened to be Nazi Germany. And in terms of that period in which he served , it was an absolutely valid contribu- tion that the man made. NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA (1971) SCHAFFNER : I was in the middle of editing PATTON in August of '69. I picked up the trades one day and read that so-and-so had been set to direct NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA. And I allowed myself a moment of great self-indulgence. For about thirty seconds, I got absolutely irritated because I felt that I should be directing the picture, that I was much \" righter \" for it. But they were aboutto start shooting , and I was in the middle of editing. When I finally was offered the picture, I had a moment's hesitation . I wasn 't sure I wanted to do a picture of this scope, right on top of another \"big one.\" Besides, I was still weary from the last picture.
I wasn 't sure I wanted to be separated from my family NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, Mi chae l Jayston and for a year and a half. And I wasn 't sure that an Janet Suzma n. All photos on this page: Columbia Pic tures . American directing a British cast in a Russian story was the best chemistry. You end up asking how NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, From left, Janet Suzman , Jean-Claude Drouot unhappy you ' re going to be if you say \" no. \" (behind Ale xa ndra). Katherine Schofield , Lynn e Frederic k , John Hallam , Fiona Fullerton, Ania Marson, Candace Glendenning and Michael Jayston. On the other hand , you have to analyze your response to the material , your sense of security in NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA. Fro m left, unidentified guard , Leon Lissek , dealing with it, the validity of the material , whether Ania Marson, Fiona Fullerto n, Michael Jayston, Candace Glendenning, you feel it communicates as a movie, how involved Roderic Noble held by John Hallam , Lynne Frederick and three unidentified you are with it . Most important, you have to ask if guards. you honestly think you can pull it off. If the answer is \" yes ,\" then you do it. GEIST: What did draw you so strongly to the material? SCHAFFNER: Well , an incredible personal rela- tionship on a very mature level. You know, these were not young folks when they headed into most of their problems. I think they were both forty-si x when they died. Therefore, they were mature people dealing with terrible problems both about them- selves and the state. And one of the things, when anybody asked me what I wanted to do , I said I always was casting around to find a mature love story. Elements of this satisfied that wish. I've always been interested in history. Also , it was a costume piece , which I feel comfortable with. What's more, there isn 't any question that what happened in 1917-1918 has radically changed history ... All that really attracted me. GEIST : In terms of the composition, you used some conscious devices, rather painterly ones, in fact. Did you have this stylization in mind for the whole film , or just in relation to this family? SCHAFFNER : Well , in the scene of the girls at their easels, I wanted a very stylized introduction to the daughters once they 've grown up, because you only see them briefly twice before, and I wanted a stylistic, romantic presentation of them at the ages they were at that point in 1911. Also , it was a transitional device because the scene before ends in 1905, with Trotsky saying he is going to go to Petersburg and win the revolution. Then you have the abrupt stylistic change to show that time has passed and what was predicted in the previous scene has not come to fruition . GEIST: I was disturbed by the introduction of historical characters like Lenin and Trotsky in what was almost a \" You Are There \" manner. SCHAFFNER: I am quite happy , as a matter of fact, with the contrapuntal injection of the various revolutionary scenes . Most particularly , in the later scenes where you come out of the despair of Nicho- las and Alexandra, and go into the despair of Lenin feeling he 's never going to make it. I think there is an appropriate balance . It is not, after all , the story of Lenin-you can take any of these characters and make a whole two-hour film about them . But , it seems to me, that the places which they occur are justifiable, and the weight which is given to them-I'll use a bolder term-is successful. And it was never contemplated stepping out of style if one wants to call this a formal picture-and I would agree, I think it is an absolutely formal picture. But I would like to take it a step further , I think FILM COMMENT 35
it is quite sophisticated in its very clean telling . One as to quality and taste . He is a man whose best, of the great tem ptations always is to depart and it has always seemed to me, is exemplified in the indulge , and I think everybody resisted that. As a kind of things of substance that he makes. I thought result of this , it may at times seem slow, but I don 't that we got along rather remarkably well , because think anyone can fault it for its being separate from I' m a very stubborn man and he is a very tenacious its intention to be true to itself. It has its concept man. And I would say this , in all fairness-and I' m of truth which is stuck to ... I think that the actual sure Sam Spiegel would support this-that our dif- formality of it works well in this particular story- ferences made NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA a better telling. I wouldn 't know how to do it differently, picture . though I'm sure another director would. I think the concept of color in the first part is right for it. The Most particularly in the U.S. , film is a collaborative concept of diminishing color in the second part effort. It's very difficult for people in Europe-where works for it. I think that the balance between the they produce some genuinely auteur films-to un- people and the re vo lutionists works for it. I think derstand this , because they come up with terms that the balance of causalities, which have no about motion pictures which are highly-romantic, and conclusion in the first part , works for it. they love to write in terms of coup de cinema and all this, right? And it's very difficult for them to grasp GEIST: In terms of the romance , it 's a very the collaborative juice that runs in a motion picture curious relationship . For example, when Nicholas in the U.S. , which doesn 't really happen in other stands up to Alexa ndra and says, \" I have been countries. Part of the responsibility for this is be- placating you for years,\" I was taken aback. That cause it's the only non-subsidized motion picture recognition , about what she 's been dOing to him industry anywhere. Part of this, one could say with validity, is because of certain commercial pressures. for a long time, seems to belie the recurrent motif But, U.S. filmmaking is the most international of any of their running hand-in-hand, like a pair of adoles- kind of filmmaking . And that the whole history of our contribution in this particular art form , coming cent lovers. I'm not sure that I understand the whole out of theater, has always been that. And it isn't psychology of their relationship. so in most other areas . I feel , indeed , that the best motion picture making really does come out of SCHAFFNER: Well, I'm not sure that either of collaborative effort. There are very obvious excep- them did . tions to that, but I think that gl?nerally speaking it 's true. Going from the basis that the man never wanted to be Czar, that he was probably a weak but proud GEIST: I don't know if you have final cut . .. man-he was conSistently given to greeting minis- SCHAFFNER: I don 't. I don 't think anybody in ters and telling them what a fine job they'd done, the U. S. of A. , who makes a film for a major and two days later they'd get a note on their desk distributor, has final cut. saying , \" You ' re fired ,\" because he was chemically GEIST: Is there any recourse for a director? unable to look a man in the eye and say \" I' m unhappy SCHAFFNER : What you do is fight to get as many with you .\" He was deeply in love with this woman , cuts as pOSSible , believing that, with the material but in the position of being always defensive about and with the people with whom you are working , her, both with his family and with his empire. you are going to arrive, in the end , with your cut. Once you hit a certain level-generally it's true-your Conversely, Alexandra-frustrated , lonely, bear- cut is the one that's shown. And it hasn't been ing four girls , finally bearing a male heir, who is different from that in my last four pictures . not healthy, with a disease, hemophilia, which could GEIST: In terms of the state of the economy, the only throw fright into anybody, and her chief obliga- cost of the picture, and the kind of picture it is, tion being that child. Deeply loving this man , unable, doesn 't NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA represent a very I suspect, to expose to the world the strains of big gamble for Columbia Pictures? strength which she did have, knowing that she was SCHAFFNER: I don ' t think so. I think this is going hated , knowing that theirs was basically a very stiff- to be an enormously successful audience picture . 11111111 upper-lip , Victorian relationship-it is immensely surprising to me that the relationship survived as FRANKLIN SCHAFFNER FILMOGRAPHY well as it did until the very end . There was no 1963 THE STRIPPER Films Inc. 1964 THE BEST question about the character of it. MAN United Artists 16. 1965 THE WAR LORD Cine- Craft Company, Cousino Visual Education Service, Therefore , I, as a director, can understand this Clem Williams Films, \"The \" Film Center, Universal man , at a given moment in the second half, turning 16, Wholesome Film Center. 1967 THE DOUBLE and saying , \" I do what you tell me to do, but nothing MAN Cine-Craft Company, Clem Williams Films, works \" -and , in terms of facing that, being able to Institutional Cinema Service, Roa's Films, Swank make some kind of decision. It's like a director who Motion Pictures , \" The\" Film Center, Wholesome comes home after a terrible day with agents and Film Center, Willoughby-Peerless. 1968 PLANET OF everybody else, deciding whether to do a picture, THE APES Films Inc. 1970 PATTON. 1971 NICHO- and his wife says, \" Are you going to do the picture?\" LAS AND ALEXANDRA. And he turns on her and says, \" Will you get off my fucking back? You ' re always on my back . Yes , I' m going to make the picture.\" And , in that moment, he's made the decision. GEIST: How did you get along with Sam Spiegel? SCHAFFNER: Sam is a very tenacious producer- in getting a project going and seeing it through , 36 SEPTEMBER 1972
Ingmar Bergman by John Simon John Simon is the film critic for The New Leader than any other art, including the theater, whose and the theater critic for New York . This essay is vis ual discourse is somewhat more limited . part of his book, Ingmar Bergman Directs, which will be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich later Now though a filmmaker who masters the visual this fall. Copyright © 1972 by Harcourt Brace Jo- possibilities of cinema is to be admired , the true vanovich , Inc. All rights reserved. lord of the medium is he who controls equally sight and sound, whose word is as good as his image, Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully consid- and , above all , who can manipulate the two in such ered opinion , the greatest filmmaker the world has a way that they reinforce each other and perform seen so far . I take film to be a totally visual and in unison or harmony, contrast or counterpoint , at totally aural medium-in this ambidextrousness lies the filmmaker's beck. Bergman seems to me the only its glory-and I consider utterly mistaken the nostal- absolute master to date in both modes , although gic sentimentality of those exalters of time past who Fellini in his first films , and Antonioni in a couple would put the silent film above the sound , or in any of his best, can stand up to him. (So , too , perhaps, other way minimize the importance of the ear in the can two or three Japanese directors, although utter enjoyment of film. Although I would not slight the unfamiliarity with the language makes me hesitant functions of the other senses, I do think vision and about sweeping pronouncements.) But Bergman audition are the ones by which we communicate has, I firmly believe, achieved the perfect fusion best and the most. To the extent that film can make more often than Antonioni and Fellini combined , and untrammeled use of both those avenues of commu- he is the only one of the trio whose work continually nication , it can absorb us more masterfully and grows and develops, for whose high-water marks variously (though not, therefore, more importantly) one does not have to turn wistfully backward , for whose present one need not feel apologetic , and to whose future one can look forward with FILM COMMEN T 37
confidence. I have by no means given up hope for gent of stating an uncompromisingly personal ver- Antonioni , but I can face another film by Fellini only sion of anything .\" Which is rather like accusing with trepidation. And I can find even in a failure James Joyce of having no personal vision , or Proust of Bergman 's, such as HOUR OF THE WOLF , more of having no personal style. interesting details than in, say, FELLINI SATYRICON or The superficial , popular notion of Bergman , ZABRISKIE POINT. sparked perhaps by such irresponsible criticism , is as of a maker of misty, symbolic, pretentious in- But as Bergman himself says , he did not spring scrutabilities (examples: THE SEVENTH SEAL, THE ready-made from Jove's brow, and he had to work MAGICIAN), or tormented sexual battles to the death on quite a few films before his genuine directorial between bored spouses or neurotic lovers (exam- talent became manifest. And it was not until 1953, ples: WILD STRAWBERRIES , THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY). with GYCKLARNAS AFTON , '-, that Bergman achieved his There is just enough foundation for this view to make first masterpiece. He was thirty-five years old. I have it one of those sinister half-truths that obviate the not seen the first three films Bergman directed , but need for thought. Let me try to set the record straight I did see the following two , NIGHT IS MY FUTURE and about Bergman 's fundamental concerns. PORT OF CALL , and though the latter has a nice feeling for simple people , neither of them is noteworthy, Like most true artists , Bergman is bent on as- let alone annunciatory of future greatness. sessing the quality of life: life, which he finds ardu- ous and often insufficient, and death , which he finds It may be useful at this point to glance at the not only terrible but also possessed of a terrible misconceptions that have gathered around his fascination . Yet he is also aware of the deep satis- name like barnacles and that, to some extent, still factions to be derived from nature, work, and , above crop up among the pseudodo x ia of our time . Typical all , love-at least when the weather is good , the work of the muddled thinking about Bergman was an progresses satisfactorily, ' and love is not corroded article by Caroline Blackwood in the April 1961 issue by neurosis. There is, to be sure , nothing particularly of Encounter entitled \" The Mystique of Ingmar original about this basic view, except perhaps a Bergman ,\" in which we read , among other things , somber glow it often gives off-the originality is in \" Cecil B. de Mille gave the public ' Religion and Sex '; the way the vision is embodied , applied-but that Ingmar Bergman has now simply come up with a makes it all the more recognizably that of a fellow more esoteric formula, the Supernatural and Sex, human being, rather than that of a derailed fanatic decked out with Symbols.\" The article concluded : like Godard , a modish shaman like Pasolini, or a \" Maybe by now only the Lord God can deliver brilliant monomaniac like Bresson . [Bergman]-as well as us-from his philosophical ghoulies and ghosties and things that go Bump in Bergman has pursued his inquiry into human the dark. \" This was a remarkably wrong- nature and the human condition mainly along three headed view even for 1961 ; but as late as 1964 we lines: (1) Is there a God and an afterlife? If so , of find Richard Schickel , now film critic for Life, writing what kind? (2) If the solution to our problems is love in his book Movies, \" Bergman is both boring and between men and women , what kind of love? And boorish . He is like some distant kin who has turned how can it be achieved? (3) If we can find peace up at a holiday feast (which is what the cinema in work , artistic creation , closeness to nature, the ideally is) and insists upon the revelers ' attention circle of friends or the family circle, just how do while he weightly discusses existential questions we go about accomplishing this? The only type of without ever quite getting to the point. \" Schickel inquiry that tends to be marginal and implicit in has since come around to a better way of thinking Bergman 's films is the social or political-with the than this Ancient-Marinerish view of Bergman , yet important exception of war, which is considered his treatment of him still tends to be grudging-but peripherally in such films as THIRST (THREE STRANGE after all that holiday feasting it must be a little hard LOVES), THE SILENCE , PERSONA , A PASSION , and cen- to eat crow. trally and intensively in SHAME. Even as late as June 1970, Andrew Sarris, in his But no filmmaker-or novelist, or painter-should column in the Village Voice , complains concerning be expected to concern himself with all facets of A PASSION (THE PASSION OF ANNA) about \" so much human experience; nor need he examine more than undigested clinical material [spewed forth] to so one at a time. Bergman 's concerns have shifted from little artistic purpose\" We encounter again the old period to period of his life and even , however slight- saw about \" fumbling metaphysics for which [Berg- ly, from film to film-although connecting threads man 's] art is inadequate,\" and the familiar charge run through all his works. Thus , for example, the of \" obscurity and opacity.\" There is an inveterate question of God , which was paramount in the films hatred in movie fans and certain reviewers for films from THE SEVENTH SEAL to WINTER LIGHT , is not central that force them to sit up, concentrate, and think to the films before and after, if it arises in them at rather than vegetate, soak up trivia, and concoct all ; currently , it has ceased to interest Bergman addled theories about it at leisure. They will go as altogether. Another important theme, parents and far as Parker Tyler, that idiot savant of film garrulity , children , has, conversely, not been bunched to- who considers Bergman \" disdainful or simply negli- gether in one period , but crops up intermittently throughout the oeuvre. Even the basic form that \" The aw ful , ex ploitat ive Ameri c an title of this film , THE NAKED Robin Wood (in Ingmar Bergman, Praeger, 1969) NIGHT, is not to be c ounten anced . The British title , SAWDU ST AND perceives in \"most of Bergman's best films ... the TIN SEL , is better, but only the Swedish on e, THE C LOWN ' S EVENING , form of a journey,\" is applicable only very loosely conveys Bergman 's intentions. 38 SEPTEMBER 1972
to some of the films , and not at all to others . The PRISON . Birger Malmsten and Doris Svedlund . best films , in fact , do not deal w ith jo urneys in the ordinary sense , but they all , without exc eption , con- THE CLOWNS EVENING [The Naked Night]. Harriet Anderson and Hasse Ekman . cern interior journeys: journeys into the soul of a character , or into the souls of two or more related SUM MERPLAY [ Il licit In terlude) . Mai Britt Nilsson and Berger Malmsten . characters . All photos: Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive. But, differences aside , the sense of continu ity in this oeuvre is unparalleled in the work of any other filmmaker . This continuity is espec ially apparent in Bergman 's more recent films . Though even the ea rly ones were full of his characteristic idiosyncrasies, the later ones truly form fragments of a spiritual autobiography, and could almost, but not quite, be viewed as sections of a roman fleu ve . The continuity is manifold . It is a continuity of place , such as the island where Bergman now lives, which has become the locale of several of his most recent films . It is also a continuity of faces, those of the excellent repertory company that keeps reappearing in Berg- man 's films-some of them almost constantly, others at longer intervals . There is also the cons istent dependence on the same technicians, most notably on Sven Nykvist, who has become Bergman 's regu- lar cinematographer; and even the pers istence of certain devices , such as the minimiz ing or elimina- tion of the background score to emphasize the dramatic importance of natural sounds and silences. If we survey briefly the themes of Bergman 's principal films, we get a clearer picture of his preoc- cupations and of the interconnectedness of the films . In PRISON (stupidly renamed THE DEVIL ' S WAN - TON ), we find the doomed prostitute Birgitta- Carolina, a girl who can do nothing but be exploited , suffer, and kill herself-a crude symbol of the helplessness of the simple soul. Counterpointing and sometimes meshing with this theme is that of Tomas, the writer-journalist, who fights with his wife , Sofi , but , after an unsuccessful dalliance with Birgit- ta-Carol ina, goes back to Sofi for better or worse. And there is the frame story of Martin , the film director, who considers making a film suggested to him by a former teacher, Paul , just released from a mental institution , and dealing with the Devil as the lord of the world making human life a continuous hell on earth . In the end of the frame story , Martin declares that such a film cannot be made , because it would end with a question instead of a solution. But, ironically, the more independent and secure Bergman was to become, the more his films became open-ended , abutting on unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions, and the more, we are free to conclude , they are depictions of a world ruled by the Devil. His first words upon coming to power, according to Paul 's projected film in PRISON , were : \"I command that everything shall continue as be- fore .\" In THIRST , for which Bergman did not write the screenplay , but which is as Bergmanesque as any of his films, the principal couple , Bertil and Rut, remain together even though they bore and exas- perate each other to the point of attempted murder. \" I don 't want to be alone and independent,\" says Bertil , finding that to be worse \" than the hell we are living in . After all , we have each other.\" Viola , the other principal character , is alone ; a born victim , FILM CO MM ENT 39
she is rejected by her lover, widowed, and both her in his face . . . I shall hate him till the day I die.\" analyst and an old girl friend she meets again want This scene , in Erland's cloistered apartment, with merely to seduce her. She drowns herself. There darkness falling and Erland promising to teach are two hells on earth , Bergman is saying in this Marie how to immure herself within her skin , is so interesting early film: one is called Together ; the terrifying , coming as it does after the summer idyll other is called Alone , and it is the worse of the two . that ends in disaster, that nothing afterward can quite break its somber spell. Later, the ballet master, These films date from 1949; 1950 saw the coming dressed as Dr. Coppelius , reinforces the gloom by of what is generally thought to be Bergman 's first his insistence on uncompromising dedication to fully achieved film , SUMMERPLAY (as it should be one's work and no further rewards after retire- called , or SUMMER GAMES , but not ILLICIT INTERLUDE, ment. as it was released here). This film , which Bergman considers his first mature work , is one that I have Over against this, however, we are given the final never been ab,le to accept as a whole . A superficial image of hope: David , presumably softened by his reason for this might be that MaiBritt Nilsson lacks reading of the diary, watches from the wings Marie the depth and plasticity of some other Bergman dancing the role of Odette in Swan Lake. She comes leading ladies. A more serious trouble with SUMMER- off stage and , raising herself en pointes, kisses PLAY is that it is one of those films in which Bergman David , and then , on the same toes that lift her to tries to come up with an answer rather than merely art as to love, dances out on stage , where , in the ask his disturbing , extremely important questions, ballet, love frees the heroine from the wicked magi- and , as I already noted , his answer films are weaker cian 's power. It is a fine image, but does it convey than his question films. the \" idea that one must fully confront and embrace one 's despair before it is possible to move beyond The question in SUMMERPLAY is , broadly speaking , it,\" as Robin Wood interprets the sense of the film , how to make life prevail in the face of encroaching or even , as Jarn Donner puts it, that \"when she death ; and also , if one is an artist , how to make has relived everything , [Marie] can both forget and art enhance rather than enslave one's existence. remember in the right way , that is . . . go on living \" ? The heroine, Marie, is a ballerina , withdrawn and That , certainly, is what the film is about, that \" there embittered by the tragic end of her first love. This is no other answer except to go on living ,\" as was a summer romance in the Archipelago with Donner puts it, but has the acceptability, let alone Henrik, a young student whom she was going to the exhilaration , of this stoicism been sufficiently marry , but who died at summer's end in conse- dramatized and visualized in the closing passages quence of an ill-judged dive into shallow water. After of the film? I think not. this, Marie drifts into a strange relationship with a mildly sinister uncle, Erland , formerly her mother's From this point in Bergman 's development we lover, and becomes a successful but unhappy bal- can look back at his various themes and see them lerina. She is now involved with David, a journalist, converge on his first masterpiece, which we are now but finds him less poetic than Henrik, which indeed ready to examine, skipping over such interesting but he is . As the film begins , Erland has sent to Marie lesser films as SUMMER WITH MONIKA and WOMEN Henrik's journal, which he had confiscated before WAITING (SECRETS OF WOMEN), with its brilliant third Marie could find it. She now reads it for the first episode in the stalled elevator. The year is 1953, time, then goes back on a pilgrimage to the island and the film is THE CLOWN'S EVENING. where she and Henrik were lovers. People and sights there bring back the past: troubled, idealistic, fran- It is in THE CLOWN ' S EVENING that Bergman for tic , tragic , and , above all , sweet. Erland appears , the first time creates one of those films of his in too , revealing in himself the ravages of loneliness, which past and present, the human world and the and when Marie returns to the Stockholm Opera, animal world , the realm of art and that of pseudo- the ballet master confronts her with some hard or non-art, male demands and female needs con- truths . She gets David to read Henrik 's diary. As front one another: run frustratingly parallel, engage the film ends, Marie has relived and absorbed her in humiliating conflict , or interpenetrate furiously , past , incorporated a little of Henrik 's spirit in the wistfully, achingly-in brief ecstasy or gradual, matter-of-fact David , embraced her work with ripening reSignation . It is a film about couples, or, greater acceptance, and is now able to face the more properly, The Couple, and the gaudy avenues future more resolutely and contentedly. or tortuous back alleys along which each member of the twosome tries to escape toward The Third , The difficulty with this film , very much as with only to find out painfully that the solution is carrying THE SEVENTH SEAL, WILD STRAWBERRIES , or THROUGH on together. A GLASS DARKLY , is that the words and images of lost happiness and of despair at its loss are far too So far from being \" heavy, mawkish expression- strong for the conciliatory, resigned or optimistic, ism circa 1920 ... powerfully awful ,\" as Pauline volte-face to cancel out. At the nadir of her fortunes, Kael labeled it with crass incomprehension , THE Marie becomes her uncle's mistress, and Erland CLOWN ' S EVENING is all subtle suffusion of images answers her anguished questioning with , \" No, my and ideas leading cruelly but chasteningly toward little one , there is nothing that , in the long run , has a final guarded affirmation . This affirmation is re- any meaning .\" Whereupon Marie, with icy calm , flected in the very sky so poignantly captured by declares, \" I do not believe that God exists. And if Hilding Bladh's camera: a luminescence somewhere he does, I hate him. If he stood before me, I'd spit between night and day, failure and possibility, despair and hope-in heaven as it is on earth. 11111111 40 SEPTEMBER 1972
presents A IN WAYNE FESTIVAL 48 FILMS FEATURING THE SCREEN'S o
ALL THESE TITLES ARE AVAILABLE FOR RENTAL ONLY THROUGH IVY FILMI16, EXCLUSIVE WORLD·WIDE DISTRIBUTOR 1. RIDERS OF DESTINY (1933) 59 min. 13; RAINBOW VALLEY (1935) 58 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed by Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Lucile Browne, LeRoy Mason With Cecilia Parker, George \" Gabby\" Hayes RENTAL CATEGORY 1 2. SAGEBRUSH TRAIL (1933) 63 min. 14. PARADISE CANYON (1935) 59 min. Directed by Armand Schaefer RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Carl Pierson RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Marion Burns, Yakima Canutt With Nancy Shubert, Lane Chandler 3. WEST OF THE DIVIDE (1934) 60 min. 15. THE DAWN RIDER (1935) 59 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury With Virginia Brown Faire, Yakima Canutt RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Marion Burns, Reed Howes, Jack JonesRENTAL CATEGORY 1 4. LUCKY TEXAN (1934) 60 min. 16. WESTWARD HO (1935) 55 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed b y Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Sheila Mannors, Yakima Canutt With George \" Gabby\" Hayes, Earl Dwire RENTAL CATEGORY 1 5. BLUE STEEL (1934) 60 min. 17. DESERT TRAIL (1935) 61 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed by Lewis D. Collins With Eleanor Hunt, George \"Gabby\" Hayes RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Mary Kornman, Paul Fix, Henry Hull RENTAL CATEGORY 1 6. THE MAN FROM UTAH (1934) 59 min. 18. NEW FRONTIER (1935) 55 min. Directed by Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Carl Pierson RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Polly Ann Young, Yakima Canutt With Muriel Evans, Warner Richmond 7. RANDY RIDES ALONE (1934) 59 min. 19. LAWLESS RANGE (1935) 56 min. Directed by Harry Fraser RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Alberta Vaughn, Yakima Canutt With Sheila Mannors, Yakima Canutt 8. THE STAR PACKER (1934) 59 min. 20. THE LAWLESS NINETIES (1936) 56 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed by Joseph Kane RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Verna Hillie, George \"Gabby\" Hayes RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Ann Rutherford, Lane Chandler 9. THE TRAIL BEYOND (1934) 59 min. 21. KING OF THE PECOS (1936) 56 min. Directed by Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Joseph Kane RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Noah Beery , Verna Hillie With Muriel Evans, Cy Kendall 10. 'NEATH ARIZONA SKIES (1934) 59 min. 22. WINDS OF THE WASTELAND (1936) 54 min. Directed by Harry Fraser RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Mack V. Wright With Sheila Terry , Yakima Canutt With Phyllis Fraser, Yakima Canutt RENTAL CATEGORY 1 11. LAWLESS FRONTIER (1935) 58 min. 23. THE LONELY TRAIL (1936) 54 min. Directed and Written by Robert N. Bradbury Directed by Joseph Kane RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Ann Rutherford, Cy Kendall With Sheila Terry, George \" Gabby\" Hayes RENTAL CATEGORY 1 12. TEXAS TERROR (1935) 59 min. 24. PALS OF THE SADDLE (1938) 54 min. Directed by Robert N. Bradbury RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 With Lucile Browne, LeRoy Mason With Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune IVY HAS OVER 55 FULL-LENGTH REPUBLIC SERIALS. WRITE FOR OUR DETAILED CATALOG.
TO ORDER ALL FILMS CONTACT: IVY FILMS, 165 W. 46th St., N.Y., N.Y. 10036 (212) 765·3940 25. OVERLAND STAGE RAIDERS (1938) 54min. 37. IN OLD CALIFORNIA (1942) 89 min. Directed by George Sherman Directed by William McGann RENTAL CATEGORY 2 With Binnie Barnes, Albert Dekker With Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune RENTAL CATEGORY 1 26. SANTA FE STAMPEDE (1938) 55 min. 38. FLYING TIGERS (1942) 101 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by David Miller RENTAL CATEGORY 2 With Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune With John Carroll, Paul Kelly, Tom Neal 27. RED RIVER RANGE (1938) 54 min. 39. WAR OF THE WILDCATS (1943) 103 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Albert S. Rogell RENTAL CATEGORY 2 With Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune With Martha Scott, Albert Dekker 28. THE NIGHT RIDERS (1939) 60 min. 40. THE FIGHTING SEABEES (1944) 100 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Howard Lydecker and Edward Ludwig With Ray Corrigan, Max Terhune With Susan Hayward, Dennis O'Keefe RENTAL CATEGORY 2 29. THREE TEXAS STEERS (1939) 56 min. 41. FLAME OF THE BARBARY COAST (1945) 91 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Joseph Kane With Carole Landis, Ray Corrigan With Ann Dvorak, Joseph Schildkraut RENTAL CATEGORY 2 30. WYOMING OUTLAW (1939) 56 min. 42. DAKOTA (1945) 82 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by Joseph Kane RENTAL CATEGORY 2 With Donald Barry, Ray Corrigan With Vera Hruba Ralston, Ward Bond 31. FRONTIER HORIZON (1939) 55 min. 43. ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (1947) 100 min. Directed by George Sherman RENTAL CATEGORY 1 Directed by James Edward Grant With Jennifer Jones, Ray Corrigan With Gail Russell, Bruce Cabot, Irene Rich RENTAL CATEGORY 3 32. DARK COMMAND (1940) 95 min. 44. WAKE OF THE RED WITCH (1948) 106 min. Directed by Raoul Walsh RENTAL CATEGORY 2 Directed by Edward Ludwig With Qaire Trevor, Walter Pidgeon With Gail Russell, Gig Young, Adele Mara RENTAL CATEGORY 3 33. THREE FACES WEST (1940) 83 min. 45. THE FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN (1949) 100 min. Directed by Bernard Vorhaus RENTAL CATEGORY 2 Directed by George Waggner With Sigrid Gurie, Charles Coburn With Vera Hruba Ralston, Oliver Hardy RENTAL CATEGORY 2 34. WHEEL OF FORTUNE (1941) 83 min. 46. SANDS OF IWO JIMA (1949) 109 min. Directed by John H. Auer Directed by Allan Dwan With Frances Dee, Wallace Ford, Ward Bond RENTAL CATEGORY 2 With John Agar, Forrest Tucker, Adele MaraRENTAL CATEGORY 3 35. LADY FROM LOUISIANA (1941) 84 min. 47. RIO GRANDE (1950) 105 min. Directed by Bernard Vorhaus RENTAL CATEGORY 2 Directed by John Ford RENTAL CATEGORY 3 With Ona Munson, Ray Mi ddleton With Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson 36. LADY FOR A NIGHT (1941) 88 min. 48. THE QUIET MAN (1952) In Technicolor 115 min. Directed by Leigh Jason RENTAL CATEGORY 2 Directed by John Ford With Joan Blondell, Ray Middleton With Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald RENTAL CATEGORY 2 FOREIGN FILM DISTRIBUTION INQUIRIES WELCOMED
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Donald Skoller Aspectsof Cinematic Consciousness \"Suspense\" and Presence / Dis-Illusion / Unified Perceptual Response Even when we arrive at the conviction that ft-ee will as if it were somehow wrong to find such a relation- is nothing but an illusion, we still find l-e pugnant a ship. con clusion, thence, that the self is a complexity; so greatly do we feel it a unity - so great is the impression I refer to this as a \" peculiarity of the situation \" of unity which we get from it. What prevents us from rather than a \" peculiarity of the moment\" because supposing that the instants of the sensation of being this has long been an area of reti c ence. Writing in succeed each other, in us, as rapidly as the fragmen- 1927, Kasimir Malevich was moved to make a similar tary images of the cinema, which in their su ccession observation with regard to painting. \" Painting has produce the illusion of life? hitherto been looked upon and treated by critics as something purely 'emotional ',\" he wrote, \" with- REMY DE GO URMO NT, out consideration for the particular character of the environment in which this or that art work came into Dust for Sparrows being ; no analytic investigation has ever been un- dertaken which was able to explain what causes A preoccupation of the present moment in art the development of an artistic structure , in its rela- in general , and in cinema particularly , is the question tion to the environment affecting it. The basic ques- of illusionism . The positive values of illusionistic tion , as to why a certain color system or construction experience have been under reconsideration was bound to develop within the 'body' of painting, throughout the past decade. The question of illu- as such , has never been treated .\" sionism is virtually as old as art itself, but it has asserted itself with special intenSity in these recent Each of these issues comes home to roost with decades. Whatever benefits seemed to have been special pointedness in cinema, possibly because of derived from illusionism have apparently entered a the synthesizing quality of film , the comprehen- phase of critically diminishing returns . This is sig- siveness of its aural and visual elements , and the nalled by the emergence of \"anti-illusionism, \" ways in which narrative, graphic and plastic dynam- \" non-illusionism,\" and , say, \" illusion-defeating \" as ics combine in cinema to activate these problems techniques or approaches having a parado xi cally to an almost orchestral extent. It is especially in- positive ring to them in usage and application . teresting to apply Malevich 's question to one of the most vital movements in cinema today , what has It is as if we have arrived at a moment not only been referred to most frequently as \" the structural in the history of art but in the history of culture , film. \" In an exploratory treatment of structural film , as well , in which the function of illusionism within P. Adams Sitney referred to four characteristics: \" a the aesthetic experience has undergone a radical fixed camera pOSition (fixed frame from the viewer 's change. Those things that illusionism seemed to perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing (the give art access to appear to have become secon- immediate repetition of shots, exactly and without dary. Focus has shifted to the act of perception itself, variation), and re-photography off of a screen .\" as if the good servant were suddenly exposed as Sitney added that \" very seldom will one find all four the villain (the butler did it), and as if ultimate truth characteristics in a single film , and there are struc- depended upon understanding and revelation of the tural films which avoid these usual elements.\" nature of the \" culprit,\" Illusion . One peculiarity of the situation is a reluctance to place this develop- It is impossible to avoid notiCing how each of ment within the cultural context of the present, to these characteristics is anti -illusionist in tendency . relate it to the environment in which it is taking place . These and the general emphasis upon the overall When one attempts to do this , one meets res istance, \" shape\" of the film piece produced , to the subordi- nation of its \" content ,\" suggest that an essential Donald Skoller teaches film at the City College of impulse of the structural filmmaker is to place em- New York. phaSis upon elements immediate in a concrete way FILM COMMENT 41
VERTI GO. James Stewart and Kim Novak. confrontation with cinematic illusion occurs in the photo : Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive. most distilled and discrete form I've yet to en- counter . But his film is an ex ercise in compression , to what is ac tually o cc urring on screen as a material so couched in the modes and dynamics of emerging phenomenon. This is so crucial to the nature of cinematic consciousness that it must be followed these films , and to the experience resulting from through its gradual emergence historically. That is seeing them , as to suggest a radical alteration in why this exploration necessarily traces through a the overriding quality and condition of con- line of films more than casually involved with the sciousness that they evoke. It is also plain to see process of illusion-and dis-illusion . This will be how each of these characteristics or techniques presented in two installments. The first, in this issue , moves the image in the direction of becoming an traces the quest for \" presence\" and dis-illusion object or event , right there on screen in the real through works by Hitchcock, Resnais, and Michael time and space of the viewing situation , rather than Snow; the second installment, to be published in an \" image \" representing or soliciting illusionistic the March-April 1973 issue, will concentrate on the transport to a facsimile elsewhere. Applying Male- work of Morgan Fisher. vich 's question , we are led to ask why this has developed at this time within the body of cinema . t We s h all no longe r hold that perce ption is incipie nt Rather than being idle or gratuitous, the question places fo c us upon th e deepen ing adventure of cine- scien ce, but conver sely that classica l science is a form mati c co nsc iousness. It seems , at long last , to of per ception w hich loses sight of its origins a nd be- move us into confrontation with essential cinematic lieves itself complete. The first philosophical act would dynamics-the energies of film-beyond cinema's appear to be to retur n to the world of actual experience role as late-born child emulating older sibling arts, whi ch is prior to the obj ective world, r estore to things aping theatrical and literary modes at the expense their concr ete physiognomy, to organisms their indi- of devel o ping its own identity . vidual ways of dealing with the world, and to subjec- tivity its inhere nce in history. Our task will be, more- With this in mind , it is my intention to further over , to rediscover phenomena, the layer of living expl o re questions implicit to the issu es raised abo ve. experience through w hich other people and things are They invo lve matters of illusion , \" presence ,\" ob- fit\"st give n to u s, the sys te m of ,Se lf-othe r s -things' a s jecthood and allusi ve ness-issues that have not it comes into being; to re awaken pe rception and foil been sufficiently pla ced w ith in the cinematic ex peri- its tri ck of allowing us to forget it as a fact a nd as ence and the cultural moment in wh ich they have pe r ception in the inte l\"est of th e o bj ect which it emerged . I am most interested in the structural film presen ts to us and of the r a tion al tr adition to which and its relationship to the problems of illusionism . it gives rise. I am even more interested in just what environmental and cultural-historical impulses have led us toward M AURICE M ERLEAU-PONTY, the systematic reduction of illusion found in these films as exercises of consciousness. But I do not Phenomen ology of Perception bel ieve that th ese are new problem s o r questions. For a long time I was intrigued by the idea of Rather , they are intrinsic to cinema in g eneral ; and showing a triple feature consisting of VERTIGO, LAST comi ng to an understand ing of the ir most re cent YEAR AT MARIENBAD , and WAVELENGTH. I wanted to forms is ve ry much a process o f noticing , in the call the bill \" Three Masters of Suspense.\" The elements composing an individual film , the evolu- impulse was triggered by resemblances I'd noticed tionary development of a certain line of films. between MARIENBAD and VERTIGO, so that back then -this was close to half-a-dozen years ago-I played The original intention of th is artic le was to present around with the notion that MARIENBAD represented , a study of the work of a young filmmaker, Morgan in part , an exercise in the cubistic transformation Fisher, with special reference to his film , PHI PHE- of the Hitchcock film . Certain content factors sug- NOMEMON. Along with \" persistence of vision ,\" the gested this at first. In both VERTIGO and MARIENBAD , phi phenomenon is the basic illusionistic mecha- the male lead is occupied with convincing the female nism through which the \" moving image\" takes lead to accept and / or assume an identity he obses- place . Fisher has created a piece in which the sively wishes her to have. Resnais provided the interior echo of Hitchcock graphically by plastering a life-size cardboard cut-out of Uncle Alfred sus- pended-feet off the ground-against an elevator shaft during the opening minutes of MARIENBAD. Hitchcock also \" appears \" in Resnais' MURIEL, again as a life-size two-dimensional cut-out figure , dressed as a chef outside a restaurant. The desire to put these films together and see them and have others see them (I was teaching film at the time) was very strong but only vaguely under- stood. I told Michael Snow about it, hoping , through expected repudiation , to end my own obsession- especially since VERTIGO had been withdrawn from 16mm rental. But Snow liked the idea. Over a period 42 SEPTEMBER 1972
of time I traced the relationships between the films LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD . to a more definite core . Each of these films , in terms Un c le Al f red by th e e levat o r. p hoto: Audio Brandon. of the manipulation of consciousness to which the viewer is exposed , is an exercise in the reduction having split the atom of the Hitchcockian world , of of an illusion . But each of the films engages us at MARIENBAD being some wild but affinite nuclear a different plane of consciousness by organizing fission of VERTIGO. The deliberate energies of VERTI- and then neutralizing the illusion through different GO (Hitchcock 's \" slowest\" thriller) explode and cas- modes of presentation . cade throughout MARIENBAD with barrelhouse ba- rococo reverberations. In VERTIGO the director is preoccupied with the manipulation of an illusion at the narrative or story One thing should be said , however: regardless level of his film . His protagonist is made the foil of of the confusion and deception worked upon the a murderous deception : Jimmy Stewart falls in love hero of VERTIGO , the audience is never for a moment with Kim Novak after having been hired by an old deprived of a solid narrative \" banister \" to hold friend of his to protect Miss Novak from her own onto throughout the film . It is interesting to hear suicidal impulses. The old friend represents Kim to Hitchcock's own words on this decision , the deci- be his wife . She 's really his mistress and what he sion to change the plot of the Boileau-Narcejac is planning to do is to kill his real wife . Stewart is novel which the film otherwise follows closely . In necessary to the plot because of his acrophobia. the novel , the reader doesn 't learn that the second The old friend accomplishes his murder scheme by \" look-alike \" girl is the same girl as the \" suicide \" pushing his real wife to her death from a church until the very end. Hitchcock , in the Truffaut inter- steeple after Novak has ru n to the top and then view , says: stepped aside. Stewart has freaked out at about the second story with his reliable vertigo . \" In the screenplay we used a different approach . At the beginning of the second part, when Stewart Many months later, Stewart-a broken man from meets the brunette, the truth about Judy's identity loss of the only woman he ever really loved-hap- is disclosed , but only to the viewer . Though Stewart pens to see Novak walking down a street in San isn 't aware of it yet , the viewers already know that Francisco . She's a brunette and her appearance is Judy just isn 't a girl who looks like Madeleine , but sleazier than in her earlier , elegant incarnation . At that she is Madeleine! Everyone around me was first , Stewart hasn 't the slightest notion that she is against this change ; they all felt that the revelation the woman he lost-the \" suicide\" was that convinc- should be saved for the end of the picture. I put ing-but the girl he sees on the street turns him myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling on so fiercely that he goes after her, establishes him a story . When there 's a pause in her narration , a relationship and then proceeds to persuade this the child always says , 'What comes ne xt, Mommy?' \"other\" girl to transform her appearance into that Well , I felt that the second part of the novel was of the lost woman. She changes her hair color and written as if nothing came next, whereas in my style and he buys her clothes like the ones the formula, the little boy, knowing that Madeleine and \"original \" had worn. (This is done with an incredible Judy are the same person , would then ask , 'And intensity and it is hard to argue against VERTIGO Stewart doesn 't know it, does he? What will he do being Hitchcock's greatest fi 1m .) The finishing touch when he finds out about it? ' \" is provided by Novak herself when she uncon- sciously wears a piece of jewelry that she had kept What I wish to point out about Hitchcock's state- as a souvenir of her earlier escapade. When Stewart ment is the way in which it provides the viewer, and sees it, he knows what's been going on . the degree to which it accommodates the viewer, with a conceptual grasp of phenomena happening Although they collaborated closely and with ex- on screen . Hitchcock sees it as a way of generating traordinary harmony, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet yet another suspense element: \" What will he do agree that the only interpretive element that they when he finds out about it?\" But in an even more share in analyzing the film they made is that it is telling manner it organizes the cohesiveness of his about a \" persuasion .\" And , indeed , though mean- screen material into much more highly defined re/a- ings and \" aboutnesses\" keep bubbling up from LAST tiona/lines . The viewer is given an omniscience that YEAR AT MARIENBAD , what the screen shows is an puts handles around the entire plot configuration , extensive exercise in which the male protagonist , \" X,\" tries to persuade the heroine, \" A,\" that they had met a year earlier , fallen in love, but agreed to a year's wait before making a full commitment to one another and rearranging their lives and the lives of those with whom they have been involved . It is impossible within the space limits of this article to begin to discuss the implications and effects that spin off the basic situation created by Robbe-Grillet and Resnais-especially in terms of how or in what ways there are further grounds for somehow bring- ing MARIENBAD and VERTIGO into reflective pro ximity to one another. Seeing them and thinking about them together, I get the strong sense of Resnais FILM COMMENT 43
conceptual handles which unavoidably subordinate rience and phenomena . And I am tempted to point all sc re en phen o mena to the storyline unravelling . out further that in LA REGION CENTRAL-which ex- In MARIENBAD , there is a deliberate and rigorously pands ~ as an action into \" All Around \" -Snow exec uted usurpation of story dynamics to which the provides our consciousness with an exercise in audience has been accustomed by long expos ure graphic omniscience after which the normal , unaid- and habituation to the conventional plot's cause- ed receptions of the eye are forever put in their very and-effect relatio nal patterns . Hitchcock is making un-omniscient place. It is also worth noting that his film for an audience he knows ve ry well , and Snow isn 't limiting his comments to \" matters artis- he does everything he c an to gi ve that audience tic \" in the conventional sense of the term-how one what it needs and expects in order to enjoy what brush stroke leads to another, or one frame or scene he is going to show them . Resnais and Robbe-Grillet to a next. He is pondering general, questions of know that audience well , too , and they seem to strive perception and meaning . But it is also strongly part to effect an almost alogical overload that will drive of the overall sense of his writing that there is a the viewers into a graphic-perceptual mode of look- \" back-and-forth \" relationship between art and real- ing at their film . They undermine conventional rela- ity , almost as if he were pursuing a Coleridgean tionality patterns and liberate graphic energies probe into the nature of consciousness itself. bound up in expected conceptual packages by exploding the usual syntax of logically unfolding It is important to follow Snow's developing images on a screen within a story frame. \" skepticism \" in the piece quoted earlier. \" I just don 't know enough to truly experience,\" he cries out at In terms of our earlier reference to these films one point . \" I' m not scientific . No 'ends ', no 'goals ', as \" suspense \" films-as exercises in the reduction no use. This vague yearning to codify is being of an illusion-the locus of consciousness moves reacted to only in the action of noticing 'how one through a predominately narrative realm in Hitch- thing leads to another' , I do not have a system , I cock 's film , with the director doing everything he am a system . There won 't be any summing up. can to maintain the audience's distance from losing Perhaps there will. These observations are in my its bearings and being confronted by an uniden- life with my work. \" And then he makes a distinction tifiable graphic object; everything on screen can be between the media in which he mostly works and named and placed within a logical framework . In literature: \" In literature 'one thing leads to another', the Resnais film , the locus of consciousness moves yes , but what we are discussing is noticing how through continually unexpected juxtaposings and ' many events lead to many others '.\" In making this transformations of graphic materials that resist, distinction with regard to literature, Snow seems to rather tenaciously, surrendering individual integri- be seeking to relieve the non-literary of this function . ties on the level of the shot and the scene-occa- After all , a good story is totally concerned with this Sionally the sequence-to the overall abstraction of business of how \" one thing leads to another.\" the story configuration. But earlier we spoke of Beginning , middle, end-in that order! Once upon \" Three Masters of Suspense.\" True . And in WAVE- LENGTH the resistance to relational subordination is a time . . . even stronger. Let's follow Snow's musing further: \" Experience 2 \"... I've been trying to give some attention to of an event can only be anticipatory, actual , and how 'one thing leads to another' or more accurately: post facto . Or prophetic, intentional , guessed, 'the ways in which one action leads to another,' \" planned or total or historic, reminiscent, analytical. \" Michael Snow has written and then immediately (The formal scenario for MARIENBAD!) Now Snow has gone on to say, \" That isn 't much clearer.\" put literary / relational values in the place he feels Snow's concern about \" how one thing leads to they must have as he continues his exploration. And another\" and his qualification of \" thing \" into \" ac- as he continues he finally breaks into the clearing tion \" is something that would very naturally be on where, it certainly would seem , his own work begins: the mind of the maker of WAVELENGTH . (To say nothing of ~ [BACK AND FORTH] and LA REGION \" Behind this attempt at orderly noticing do I have CENTRAL.) He goes on to say : \" Apparently certain a horror of the possibility of chaos? Would chaos types of events and in myself certain states of mind be an inability to tell one thing from another? Is bring about attention with this kind of emphasis. My sanity only the ability to identify and to name? perception of the nature of a situation (result of a Cultural? Is ordering the 'disorder ' an order? Can vague yearning to codify 'how one thing leads to there be order without repetition? Is there someth ing another') if clear, includes everything. Ha ha.\" necessarily fatalistic but also 'religious ' in affirming Snow, unlike Hitchcock , does not deal in omni- (quoting?) that disorder must be only a type of order science-or, rather, the illusion of omniscience as the nature of which is not yet comprehended ...? generated th roug h that network of cause and effect But the eye of the 'beholder ' . . . not only is order concepts that we call \" narrative.\" projected but all is order ; all is ordained? The reason Certainly this is the case at the WAVELENGTH stage for the shape of my nose the same as the reason of his work . It is worth noting that Snow 's films , a bus just passed this building ... Oh, that's going especially ONE SECOND IN MONTREAL, ~ , and LA too far. REGION CENTRAL all work to show the limitations of the eye 's field and capacity in encompassing expe- \" Events take time. Events take place. \" Named, scheduled events: bus ride, concert, Christmas , eclipse , etc. This is not what I'm interest- ed in. Sub-events: not 'what is ', not ' what is not', but what happens in between . In this case: ' not'. \" 44 SEPTEMBER 1972
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