VOLUME 10 - NUMBER 05 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1974

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FILIVI CIOIMIMIEINIT published by THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER VOLUME 10 NUMBER 5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1974 STAFF CONTENTS editor Festival Journals RICHARD CORLISS Cannes/Mary Corl is s page 2 associate editor MELINDA WARD Berlin/Richard Roud page 4 director of finance & production Zagreb/Leonard Maltin SUZANNE CHARITY page 6 graphic design Robert Altman TONY RUTA The Empty Staircase and the Chinese Princess GEORGE SILLAS by Michael Dempsey SUSAN DOBBIS page 10 contributing writers Jacques Rivette RAYMOND DURGNAT interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum , Lauren Sedofsky, and Gilbert Adair page 18 STEPHEN FARBER ROGER GREENSPUN The End of the Road JONATHAN ROSENBAUM Dark Cinema and Lolita by Alfred Appel , Jr. RICHARD ROUD page 25 ANDREW SARRIS AMOS VOGEL ROBIN WOOD contributing editor Midsection STUART BYRON The Industry: \" Print the Legend \" by Stuart Byron page 32 advertising manager N.Y. Film Festival Previ ew: Ri c hard Roud on THE SPECTRE OF LIBERTY NAOMI WEISS page 34 Fe stiva l Preview: Lou is Malle on LACOMBE LUCI EN administrative consultant page 36 SAYRE MAXFIELD Festiva l Prev iew : David Robinson o n A BIGGER SPLASH page 37 research assistant Festi va l Previ ew: Jan Dawson on STAV ISKY MARY CORLISS page 38 Independents: Amos Vogel on the New Documentary Th e op inions expressed in FILM COMMENT page 39 are those of th e individual authors and do not Gene Hackman necessarily represent Film Society interviewed by Pete Ham ill oi Lin coln Center polic y or the opinions page 40 of the editor or staff of th e magazine. FILM COMM ENT, September-O ctober 1974. Volume 10 number 5, publi shed bi monthly by The Film Society of Lin co ln Center 1865 Broadway, NY, NY 10023 USA Second class postage paid at New York, New York and addi tion al mailing New Directors/New Films by Roger Greenspun offices. Copyright © 1974 by The Film Soc iety of Lin co ln Center. All rights page 44 reserved. Thi s publi ca tion is fully protected by domes ti c and international Moving Pictures copyright. It is forbidden to dupli cate any part of this publi cation in any Cinematographer Hal Mohr, interviewed by Richard Koszarski way w ith ou t prior wr itten permi ss ion from the publishers. page 48 Subscri ption rates in th e United States: Tristana $9 for six numbers. $17 for twelve numbers. El sewhere: $10.50 for six by Raymond Durgnat numbers, $20.00 for twe lve numbers, pa ya ble in US fund s onl y. New page 54 subscribers please include yo ur occupation and zip code. Sub scr ipti o n Books and back issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT, 1865 Broadwa y, Cinema in Revolution, reviewed by Stuart Liebman New York, N.Y. 10023 USA. page 64 Editorial correspondence: FILM COMMENT, 1865 Broadway, New York NY 10023 USA. Please send manu scr ipts upon request only and include a stamped self-addressed envelope. Microfilm editions avai lable (rom University Microfilms, Ann Arbor MI 48106. Printed i n USA by Acme Printing, Medford, MA. Di stributed in the USA by Ea stern News Company, 155 West 15th Street, New York NY 10011 . International distribution by Worldwide Media Service, 386 Park Avenue South , New York, NY 10016 U SA. Distributed in Great Britain by Moore-Harness Company, London. FILM COMMENT partici pates in the FIAF periodi cal indexing plan. ISSN: 00 15-119X. Librar y of Congress ca rd number 76- 498. on th e cover; Back Page Elliott Gould and George Sega l page 72 in Robert Altman's CA LIFORN IA SPLIT ph oto: Columbi a Pictures

ufacture, to sell, to criticize). Like any NADA, with Chabrol's sleek anarchists merchandise, some of the films ped dled talking like Elisha Cook, Jr. (and his pro- along the Ru e d' Antibes are tagonist, Fabio Testi, bearing a remarka- JOU& haute-qualite, others are defective. But ble resemblance to a distinguished New NALS compulsive comparative shoppers can York film critic). And for the mackintosh CANNES JOURNAL e nj oy browsing, appraising different brigade, a two- for-one exploitation film: by Mary Corliss styles, rummaging about for a good buy. LORNA THE EXORCIST, in which sa dism Cannes is not just a Film Festival; it' s a And when a superior film shows up on and satanism fight for the body and soul concentrated Film City, offering as much varie ty in its two- week exhibit as Man- the Marche, it' s like finding a Cartier of an overripe teenager. The match ends hattan movie h ouses are likely to pro- gram in a year. One could roughly equate diamond in Gimbel's basement. in a tie. the competing films in the Palais des Fes- tiva ls to th e twenty or so films s hown Some of the Rue d'Antibes thea ters This year as every year, the main fash- annually in the New York Festiva l, and quite favorably compare the Cannes Di- ha ve their own specialties. The Vox is ions on the Marche were sex and vio- rectors Fortnight with a typical New Cinema retrospective at the Museum of re nted b y the Canadian delegation , lence. The violent films offered nothing Modern Art; the Critics Week of first and second films with the Film Forum screen- where provincial pride more often than new-except for a bizarre allegory, THE ings; and the Perspective of French Cinema show with the American Inde- not overwhelms commercial considera- CARS THAT ATE PARIS (Australia), which pendent work programmed at the Whit- ney Museum. tions. The Rege nt features Swedish inexplicably attracted a small cult-but That still leaves the Marche du Film, a films , ranging from Bo Widerberg's the sex scene was a bit different. Last sprawling melange of genres and aspira- tions that offers several hundred addi- \"c harming \" STUBBY, about a s ix- year, the Americans dominated the tional film s to the curious , bored , or jaded critic. The Cannes films that usu- year-old Stockholm boy who becom es a hard-core market: BEHIND THE GREEN ally generate the most column inches of critical copy are those shown in one or professional soccer star, to new examples DOOR and IT HAPPENED IN HOLLYWOOD another of the official series-Resnais' STAVISKY , Makavejev's SWEET MOVIE, of Sweden's puritanical porn. were the hottest tickets in town. This Jack Hazan 's A BIGGER SPLASH, Rivette's CELINE ET JULIE-and mo s t often The twin Star Theatres show a mixed yea r, the long-awaited European (though not always) these are indeed the films worth writing about. But the bag of sex comedies (the Dani s h premiere of DEEP THROAT had to compete plaints voiced about the poor quality of this year's films at Cannes have already BEDROOM series, anemic CARRY ON-style with explicit offerings from France, Italy, been heard; to echo their nega tive groan would be boringly redundant. So this farces wi th buxom starlets and oafish and Germany. journal will focus on the Marche, the market-place for those seeking a rep- leading men), horror film s (mostly I'm not sure whether these films are resentative sampling of current world cinema, and a film showcase unsur- Spanish and Italian), and English spy being shown theatrically in their coun- passed for its eclecticism . spoofs . The Star also played the occa- tries of origin. Perhaps their hard-core Emerging from the Palais des Festivals after a wonderful film (a rare experience, sional unspon sored Soviet film , such as scenes were shot purely for the enjoy- but it's h:lppened), and looking out on a Mediterranean as blue as Paul PIROSMA NI, which the Moscow-oriented ment of cast, crew, and Cannes jour- Newman's eyes, one can become intoxi- cated by the limitless potential of film as Russian delega tion didn' t push because nalists and distributors. If so, it seems an art form. But most of the Marche films are shown in the less exotic commercial it was from the Republic of Georgia. unlikely that they will be picked up for cinemas along the town's main shopping street, the Rue d'Antibes. There, one Sadly, the Fran<;ais Th ea tre, with- its American release, for the y are as crude immediately realizes that, for everyone who's come to Cannes (directors, pro- sandwich-and-beverage bar a nd its en- as our own initial hard-core films were. ducers , distributors, journalists), film is basically a product (to create, to man- closed viewing area for smokers, was not The French sex films were especially dis- Mary Corliss runs the Film Stills Archive at the showing Festival films during dining appointing for those of us who think of Museum of Modern Art. hours . Cannes' only theater-restaurant the French as the world's most sexually was conSiderably missed. attractive people. Every seedy Parisian m a le over fifty, and every plain girl under thirt y, seem to have been dragooned into performing in front of the clinical camera. The Europeans may still have a lot to teach Americans about the art of sex, but they could learn a few things from Americans about the art of sex movies. Where they succeeded-and where they have always surpassed their im- » ita tors elsewhere-is in the soft-core sex § drama. Two Old Masters of suggestive ;ofii eroticism, Max Pecas and Jose Benazeraf, were exhibiting their wares on the ~ Marche this year. Pecas' DICTIONARY OF T is for Trio: Sandra Julien (center) and Jan ine EROTICISM is of that vanishing breed of Reynaud (ri ght) in Ma x Pecas' JE SU IS sex film that sports luscious photog- FRIGIDE-POURQUOI? ( LET ME LOVE YOU in the raphy (lots of red), beautiful people, and U.S.), from the anthology film DICTIONAR Y OF non-violent erotic impulses . Its success is not in the anatomical-textbook mode EROTICISM. of currently fashionable hard- At the Paris, one could see a selection core cinema, but rather in a \" dated,\" of commercial French cinema: every- controlled use of camera and narrative thing from Marco Ferreri's Custer that is ultimately more sensual and ap- pie-in-the-face, DON'T TOUCH THE WHITE pealing. In a way, Pecas' film-an an- WOMAN, to Maurice Pialat's excruciat- thology of sequences from five or six of ingly detailed study of the effect a dying his earlier productions-is almost woman has on her husband and son, THE elegiac: a muted epitaph for a OPEN MOUTH. There was a French- movie-time when people made love dubbed version of Georges Franju's with every part of their expressive bodies English-language MAN WITHOUT A instead of having disembodied organs FACE; and an English-dubbed version do all the work. of Claude Chabrol's French-language continued on page 66 2 SEPTEMBER 1974

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seriousness with which it is played that literary classics . If you're used to making creates the illusion of having spent a gold from lead, it must be hard to know hundred and ten minutes in a what to do when you start out with pure JOU& never-never land, a nineteenth-century gold. NALS dream world-and yet one to which it is The new Wim Wenders film was not BERLIN JOURNAL difficult not to relate. Miss Caven's sing- only a delightful film in its own right: it by Richard Roud ing of \"S hanghai\" and \" You Came was also a pleasant surprise. One had There have been bad Berlin Festivals before, but 1974 was some kind of a rec- Along\" was particularly appropriate to a feared that Wenders needed the support ord. Still, there's no point dwelling on the poor quality of almost all of the films , Festival that featured a retrospective of of Peter Handke (on whose novel Wen- since there is little likelihood that anyone w ill ever see them again. the films of Lillian Harvey, the British ders' THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PEN - Appropriately enough, the three in- actress- singer from the early Thirties ALTY KICK, shown in the 1972 New Direc- teresting films were either German or German-speaking: Wim Wenders' ALICE who succeeded in raising out-of-key tors series, was based). Not true: here he IN THE CITIES, Dani e l Schmid's LA PALOMA, and R. W. Fassbinder's attempt singing to a high art. has written his own story, and one which to crack the mass-class market, EFFI BRIEST. LA PALOMA had already been Now to Fassbinder: I found EFFI BRIEST is surprisingly similar to PAPER MOON . shown in the Critics Week at Cannes, but it was given a special late-night screen- a great disappointment. Those who have Pure coincidence, it appears; Wenders ing in the Zoo-Palast as a representative of the Critics Week. Schmid's first film , seen only his best film s -three or four didn' t see the Bogdanovich film until he TONIGHT OR NEVER, was seen in New York at the 1973 New Directors series; LA ou t of his a mazing total of was halfway through shooting ALICE . PALOMA is a much more \"entertaining\" film , but it still partakes of the eighteen-may find my disappointment But not entirely coincidence: the two di- hyper-kitsch aesthetic that was first ad- vanced by Werner Schroeter. I personally hard to believe. Nor was my view com- rectors are linked by their reverence for prefer LA PALOMA to Schroeter's more rigorous films. Underneath (or is it pletely shared; those who have never the work of John Ford. above?) the super-camp aspects of the film , there is more feeling for cinematic liked Fassbinder rubbed their hands to- ALICE begins with Wenders' narrative, as well as a more universally acceptable emotional content. gether gleefully, saying, \"At least he's hero-Felix , a German journa- The story, or pretext, of LA PALOMA is made a real film .\" Ma ybe so; but the film list-going to the U.S. to do an in-depth our old friend La Traviata/Camille. In- grid Caven (Fassbinder's ex-wife) plays has few of the qualities that made THE think-piece on The American Land- Viola (d. Verdi's Violetta) Schlump, a.k.a. La Paloma. She is a tubercular MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS or RECRUITS scape. Instead of writing the piece, he nightclub singer who is pursued by Count Isidor Palewski, a chubby parody IN INGOLSTADT so affecting. spends most of his time taking Polaroid of Robert Taylor's Armand Duval. The film diverges from Dumas in tha t his love snapshots; and in the sleazy motel where for her effectuates a miraculous cure- which lasts only until she succumbs to he spends his nights, he watches YOUNG Isidor's best friend, who comes to visit them in their mountain chateau. From MR. LINCOLN on television. (At the end of that point, we swing into Grand Guig- nol, alleviated only by an epilogue that ALICE, we see him reading an obituary of pretends it \"was all only a dream.\" But it has been a dream that no one is likely to John Ford, entitled \" Lost World. \" ) forget. The PAPER MOON aspects of ALICE Like Schroeter, Schmid makes exten- sive use of classical and popular music. begin when Felix, summoned back to The idea of \" ceremony,\" so crucial to TONIGHT OR NEVER, is present also in LA Germany by his irate editor, meets Alice PALOMA, but in a more vivacious form . And there is a productive tension be- and her mother at the Pan-Am counter. tween the silliness of the plot and the They are all German, and they decide to return to Germany on the same plane . But when the flight is about to take off, Mother is nowhere to be found . She has left Felix a note asking him to take nine-year-old Alice with him on the plane; they will all meet up in Europe in a day or two. Of course, she's not there, and Felix is stuck with Alice. First they try to find her grandmother. They never ~ do; but the point of the search is that, ~ somehow, contact with Alice brings Felix z to a better understanding of who he is ~ and what he wants. ~ Much of the film consists of ~ wanderings-first around the States, ~ then through the Ruhr district of ~ Germany-and Wenders' sensitive re- ~ sponse to places serves him well. Hanna Schygulla as Effi Briest. Yella Rottlander as Wenders claims that there's no deep Alice (in the Cities) . philosophical meaning to the film; but all \" journey\" stories have a built-in One explanation could be that Fass- philosophical meaning, of odyssey, binder usually finds his subject matter in quest, or whatever. ALICE IN THE CITIES the lower reaches of literature, if not in tells us a lot about America and the tabloid newspaper; his genius has Germany, and still more about that been to transform these trashy postwar generation of Europeans for news-items into something profound. whom America was some kind of Here, however, he has started with a miraculous El Dorado. In fact, the film great novel, the German equivalent of could be considered as an early example Madame Bovan;; and it doesn't seem to of the Grand Tour in reverse-the story have inspired him in the same way. He of a European who had to go to America has been very faithful to the novel, pre- to find himself-just as the heroes of so serving much of its dialogue-but the result is not that far from Irving many of the past century's novels had to Thalberg's \"tasteful\" adaptations of go to Europe to discover who !hey were, and where they came from . ~ 4 SEPTEMBER 1974

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JOU& Life-Cycle Film.\" There were funny the week it was obvious when a really life-cycles (WONDERFUL LIFE, Herbert good film unspooled that this was a per- NALS Schramm, Hungary), frightening fect marriage of form and content, life-cycles (EVOLU, John Leach, Canada), neither overburdened with its message ZAGREB JOURNAL meaningless life- cycles (EXERCISE, R. O. nor so concerned with flashy technique by Leonard Maltin Blechman, USA), dull life cycles (DRAWN that there seemed no real purpose to the IN BLUE, Lorraine Burbar, USA) and project. There was a little bit of everything at many others too numerous to mention. Zagreb this year: films by kids ... films As it happens, several prize- about kids .. . Communist films .. . Other categories which conceivably winning films did involve revolutionary Capitalist films . .. Disney films .. . could have been organized for special visual ideas, but within the framework of anti-Disney films, etc, etc. One hundred awards were: a strong overall concept. fifty-seven films in and out of competi- tion, another sixty or so in retrospective Most Heavy-Handed Ecology Film. British political cartoonist Gerald showing, and dozens more in special Plenty of competition here, ranging from Scarfe embarked on his first film en- programs of student films, experimental the absurdly oversimplified FABLE (Gro deavor with the aid of an impressive new films, and miscellany. Strom, Norway) to the ponderously machine which enables the artist to draw overdone IT' S OUR WORLD, AFTER ALL directly onto a frosted frame of 70mm Almost three hundred films with one (Katja Georgi, East Germany) and back film. Creating six frames per second in- thing in common: they were all ani- again to the sophomoric EVERY LITTER BIT stead of the usual twelve for animation mated. HURTS (Michael Hyatt, USA) . continued on page 8 To some people, animation is an end Cuddliest Children 's Film. These are al- in itself, judging from certain films ways a problem. One is tempted to dis- - _.- --.-. -- - - screened during the week. As Bob God- miss the feeling of ennui since such films frey commented at a closing press con- The first book ever to document ference, \" I've seen some brilliant anima- are really designed for the three-year- fully the many faces and careers old mentality. But then one decides of Elia Kazan. From his days as an WONDERFUL LIFE (West Germany) . that even a three-year-old would be actor and director in the Group bored stiff by such condescending, dog- Theatre of the '30s to his triumphs tion [this week], but I've seen too few gedly cute fables . with On the Waterfront and East films that engaged my emotions; I've of Eden, right up to and including seen too few ideas . .. and ideas is what Most Pretentious . This takes in a lot of his new role as a novelist, here is animation is all about.\" territory, including the aforementioned Kazan, speaking about his life, his SECRETS (Phillip Jones, USA) and an ab- Rarely during the festival was it felt surdity called ALICE DOWN WONDERLAND V'a-zanwork, his politics, and his con- that a great idea was hampered by inef- (Bastian Cleve, West Germany): nine fectual technique, but there were all too minutes of live-action time-lapse ~c:r~e~a~t~~iIvity.~ many films with plenty of technical ex- photography of a girl's face. It became a pertise but nothing underneath. One simple matter to foresee such films by on Kazan interminable American entry, called reading the descriptive comments sub- by Michel Ciment SECRETS, purported to show cosmic mitted by the filmmakers for the official Black-and-white photographs variations on a human face, for thir- program. A writeup like the one for $7.50 cloth; $3.50 paper (F26) teen minutes. GALAXY by Sabin Balasa of Rumania (\" A Also available: visual poem of man in space and time\") VISCONTI This was part of a sub-genre that by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith dominated the week's programs, \"The was a sure tip-off. Black-and-white photographs There were other problems to contend $6.95 cloth; $3.25 paper (F3) with during the week. It was generally THE VIKING PRESS agreed that there must be a way to con- sider educational animated films with- 625 Madison Avenue New York. N.Y. 10022 out actually having to watch them-this after plodding through a four- teen-minute Halas & Batchelor history of electricity called CONTACT, profession- ally and competently made but by any standards, dull. Another surprising problem involved segments from Sesame Street and The Electric Company, American television programs which have fostered some of the most imaginative and endearing animated films made in this country dur- ing the past few years . Unfortunately, these minute-long pitches for the letter '']'' or the upper-case alphabet had no relevance to the Zagreb audience out of context, and floundered unfairly in the midst of the programs. Filmmaker James Simon, who entered two such films , rec- ognized the problem and vowed \"Wait till next 'time!\" He plans to return with material that is more festival-oriented . As to what constitutes an ideal \"festi- val film,\" the prize-winners seemed to reflect generally-shared opinions by au- dience and journalists alike. Throughout 6 SEPTEMBER 1974

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ZAGREB JOURNAL but equally compelling, DIARY invites week of animated films good and bad and requires multiple screenings in reaffirmed the preeminence of Zagreb continued from page 6 order to be appreciated. Shown near the Film as perhaps the finest cartoon studio purposes, the machine automatically end of the festival, the film illustrated the in the world. These talented men know provides the interlinking dissolves. what they're doing every step of the Furthermore, it projects the previous SISYPHUS by Marcell Jankovics (Hungary). way; their films are spirited and creative image underneath the drawing surface, without ever becoming precious or like a light-box, permitting perfect re- difference between a young, ambitious self-indulgent. gistration, and features a monitoring de- animator going haywire, and a more ex- vice which enables the filmmaker to perienced and talented artist controlling Yugoslavia's neighbor, Hungary, also check on the finished product as he goes his volcanic imagination and structuring provides a high percentage of quality along. The process is immediate, and a brilliant film . animation, including another festival Scarfe envisions the device being used winner, SISYPHUS, made by Marcell Jank- for \" instant cartoons,\" perhaps ani- There were some eyebrows raised at ovics (who entered an enjoyable comic mated political cartoons for nightly tele- the idea of the festival hosts walking off short, THE WATER OF LIFE , as well). vision broadcast. with two of the major prizes (for DIARY SISYPHUS was made in what he ca1ls an and THE SECOND CLASS PASSENGER), but a old Chinese style of drawing, showing a He used the machine to record a visual human figure pushing a huge boulder diary of a six-week stay in Los Angeles; up the side of a mountain-the figure'S the film is called THE LONG, DRAWN-OUT muscles expanding and contracting from TRIP, a scathing view of Californian (and, the pressure involved, his voice huffing largely, American) life and lifestyles, as and puffing to the extent that the viewer seen in a constant metamorphosis of im- shares his fatigue! Jankovics revealed ages simple and complex, ranging from a that it was his voice on the soundtrack, two-headed Nixon-Agnew creature to and fellow animator Borijov Dovnikovic Mickey Mouse freaking out into a phan- jokingly queried if it had been recorded . tasmagoria of spacey colors and during the exertion of making his film. shock-waves. continued on page68 Curiously, another prize-winning film was also an American journal called THE FOREMOST AUTHORITY ON DIARY , b y one of the Zagreb studio animators, Nedeljko Dragic, who made FILM CARE AND REPAIR some thirty thousand separate drawings SCRATCH REMOVAL. INSPECTION in order to communicate the chaotic ex- COMPLETE FILM REJUVENATION plosion of sights he absorbed during a cross-country trip . Less pointed in its PEERLESS PROCESS FOR NEW FILM PROTECTION attacks than THE LONG DRAWN-OUT TRIP, FILMTREAT INTERNATIONAL } 730 SALEM ST • GLENOALE CA 91203 • 2131242-2181 250 W64 ST • NEW YORK NY 10023 • 212/799-2500 RICHARD CORLISS' long-awaited reference work on the role and function of American screen- writers as film-makers. A revolution is under way, radically revising the views of film most widely held for the last decade and charting new ground in film criticism in gen- eral. A brilliant young critic, Richard Corliss, has undertaken to revise the parochialism of the auteur theory , which credits the Hollywood director as the sole artist. Attempting to identify the screen- writer as the crucial missing link in the creation of American films, Talking Pictures examines 100 Hollywood film s, written by 38 major screenwriters -from Garson Kanin , Dalton Trumbo , and Ben Hecht to Mike Nichols , Buck Henry , Terry South- ern , and Benton and Newman . It is a work away and beyond auteur criticism into a field as fertile as it has been uncultivated . Preface by Andrew Sarris 434 pages $15 .00 THE OVERLOOK PRESS Lewis Hollow Road Woodstock, New York 8 SEPTEMBER 1974

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Two moments in Robert Altman's ity by accident or by design, spins a web completely. Hawkeye, Trapper John, movies may hold the key to their true of fantasy in which to live . Brewster, and the other madcap medics waste no nature. In one, the conclusion of Thieves Cathryn, the thieves, Marlowe time disposing of Hot Lips and the chief Like Us, travellers in a railroad station wool- gathering through a stoned reprise surgeon; they are too professional to climb a staircase to a train . The film goes of Bogart, Roger Wade suicidally caught worry about chains of command in the into slow motion, and Father Coughlin up in a parody of Hemingway-all trap midst of chaos. gives a populist speech on the sound themselves in destructive illusions. Even track. Finally, the people disappear, leav- M*A *S*H has its dreamers, Hot Lips and The other movies provide secondary in g only the stairs. In the other, an the chief surgeon, two pompous hypoc- characters whose sophistication or episode of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a few rites who pla y authoritarian games as if mundaneness mocks the quirks and ec- cardplayers have heard that a contingent they were back in boot camp instead of centricities of the dreamers. Cathryn's of whores on its way to the remote swamped in blood. M*A *S*H and Thieves husband, Hugh, patronizes her; Mattie Northwestern town of Presbyterian Like Us stand aside stylistically from their listens scornfully to the gleeful babbling Church includes one Oriental woman. fantasizers; visually they are plainer, of the robbers; Keechie curses Bowie for Some declare that she is an \"a uthentic more depoeticized than the other films, not abandoning crime. Her contempor- Chinese princess\" who, like all others, is which try to show the world as their be- ary cousin is Brewster's girlfriend deliriously sexual. Others scoff, but one leagured dreamers experience it. Suzanne, her eyes garishly made up like man clinches it with a story about a those of Clockwork Alex with spiky friend who paid five dollars to find out, The most effective scenes of Brewster claws of mascara, her tongue wagging \"and it's true.\" McCloud center on the Astrodome, from with plans for parlaying the wings into a the outside a UFO designed by an interp- fat fortune and a mansion on River Oaks Most American directors, when they lanetary Bucky Fuller, from the inside a Boulevard. These realists never lose have a multi-megaton hit like M*A*S*H, cavernous cage in which Brewster's touch with ordinary life and its try to detonate a series of still bigger wings flap pitifully. Every phantas- day -to-day concerns. They serve as 1HE EMPTY STAIRCASE AND 1HE OIINESE PRINCESS by Michael Dempsey blockbusters. Instead, Altman has made magoric landscape, every jagged cut in lightning rods for the audience's skepti- a group of offbeat, personal films which Images is filtered through Cathryn'S dis- cism about soaring like a bird or wander- explore the genres-fantasy, Western, orientation. The soft, hallucinatory col- ing in a realm of ghosts. psychological melodrama , thriller, ors, the white nights redolent of smok- romance-that they nominally inhabit. ing joss sticks in The Long Goodbye reflect Although just tracing the themes Brewster McCloud throws its bird-boy Marlowe's spaced-out confusion as common to these films will not serve this hero into hard, gleaming Houston in- much as they do a recognizable aspect of purpose, it is a necessary starting point. stead of yellow-brick O z. McCabe and Los Angeles. Their characters, in one way or another, Mrs. Miller turns a straightforward are always looking for some kind of Western into a wispy mirage . Images Quite a few of these dreamers-from community or trying to protect the one makes us lose our bearings inside the the chief surgeon freaking out over that they already have. Many of the best mind of a schizophrenic woman. Philip taunts about laying Hot Lips , to Chick- moments in Thieves Like Us occur in the Marlowe is bemused and dreamy in Th e amaw growling manically because hide-outs of its three bank robbers, Long Goodbye, lost in a city and a crime Bowie's press is better than his-end up Bowie, T- Dub, and Chickamaw, w here too labyrinthine for him to understand losing their minds. Altman's easygoing, they bide their time after breaking out of until too late. Thieves Like Us almost to- naturalistic techniques, which use realis- prison or plan their next heist. Instead of tally denies us the kiss kiss bang bang tic details for impressionistic effects, showing them knocking over the banks that we expect from stories of lovers on sometimes make people think of him as a or careening off in getaway cars, Altman the run. tender humanist, much as Jean Renoir's concentrates on their homey life in bet- comparable methods have also won this ween jobs. They catnap, drink, lounge These thumbnail sketches probably praise. Yet Altman has a preoccupation around, chortle and bicker over descrip- explain the commercial failure of each with the destruction of humanity's most tions of their exploits in the papers, t€ll movie, not to mention the sharply con- vulnerable members, whom he offers lit- corny jokes, join in the family life of tradictory responses they have aroused T-Dub's sister-in-law Mattie, her ob- in critics, who generally call them mis- tle solace. noxious son James, and her baby-moll hmashes or masterpieces. Everyone ag- Not every Altman character falls into sister Lula . Mattie's household oscillates rees on their M*A *S*H -derived techni- between numbing respectibility and ques: improvised lines and scenes, over- this category; others cast the cold eye of quirky outbursts like the robbery that lapping dialogue, roving camera, avoi- the realist on the delusions of the Chickamaw makes them enact. dance of standard plots, throwaway dreamer. These hardnosed realists humor. But no one has investigated what -the squabbling flatfoots of Brews ter But beneath everything flows a persis- meanings they convey, or how. McCloud stumbling over corpses and tent undercurrent of running men desir- analyzing birdshit for clues, the hoods ing shelter and stability. Affable idiot Equally persistent is the figure of the and plotters who bamboozle T-Dub marries dummy Lula, who en- dreamer who, cut off from the commun- Marlowe-swarm around the beSieged joys parading around in dime store fantasists . In M*A *S*H, they take over 10 SEPTEMBER 1974

sheaths like a cloning of Jean Harlow. But only M*A*S*H allows them a startling. Without for o ne minute goin g Chickamaw, a bord e rline psyc h o tic , clear-cut victory; alone among Altman's along with Hot Lips and her mania for grows restless amid domesticity but still movies, it celebrates the realists unam - the rulebook, we can reasonably view dreams of settling in Mexico. Bowie, the biguously. Hawkeye and Company are Hawkeye and the oth ers as bastards for youngest thief who stumbled mindlessly the Good Guys, Hot Lips a nd th e the way tha t they expose her naked in into crime while an impov e ris hed s urgeon are creeps, and that's th a t. th e s hower . They a re quite self- teenager, takes up with placid, unim- M*A*S*H remains funny, but its senti- righteous in thei r determination to re- aginative Keechie out of a yearning for mentality about military camarade rie form her, but the movie never ques tions the ordinary romance and hom e life sticks out now that its wisecracks a mid them as it does the myopic Catholic cha- which his criminal record denies him. spurting arteries no longer seem so plain, Da go Red. H ot Lips' un co nvin cin g The other films follow parallel routes throug h se ttings far from Depres- sion-bound Mississippi. Th e Long Goodbye meanders through the glittering ba sin of Los Angeles , the classic non-community of major American cities. Yet, unlike the Houston of Brewster McCloud, it tantalizes us with the possi- bility of a new kind of community. By night from on high, its blinking constel- lation of colors can seem like an en- chanted realm capable of making the old lures of sun, wealth, ease, and stardom come true . As the film progresses, characters apparently unrelated to one another-pretty boy Terry Lennox; bel- lowing blocked novelist Roger Wade; his queen bee wife Eileen; Marty Augustine, the slick-agent show biz thug master- j\\ row: THREE EARLY ALTMANS. Tom Laughl in in THE DELI NQUENTS (1957), James Caan fully updated from Raymond Chandler's and Robert Duvall in COUNTDOWN (1968), Sandy slimy \"hard boys\"; Dr. Verringer, a steely Dennis and Michael Burn s in THAT CO LD DAY IN blond runt of a psychiatric quack; even THE PAR K (1969). Top: Carl Gottlieb, David Arkin, the cops-turn out to be linked, while Tom Skerritt, John Schuck, Donald Sutherland, goofy, dazed gumshoe Marlowe tries in Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H. Bottom: Sally Keller- vain to fathom their maligna nt menage. man; Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland in In Brewster McCloud the cops tracking M*A*S*H. the hero, who has strangled several ex- pendable bit players for interfering with his scheme to build outsized dovewings and fl yaway, form a ramshackle group. So does their quarry with his mysterious guardian angel and his two odd girlfriends. The emotionally isolated Cathryn of Images works up a dream world for herself of husband, real and imaginary lovers, and a young girl who resembles her. M*A*S*H pivots on a community of Army doctors and nurses struggling to save lives in a fragile tent city three miles from the Korean front . Sometimes genuine, sometimes false, always precarious, these communities are the persistent centers of movies that, at first glance, seem bewilderingly var- ied. FILM COMMENT 11

ALTMAN CONTINUED these procedures create a sense of com- filmmaking means as much to Altman as flipflop from martinet to good old broad munity among the actors, technicians, the end result . It is as though he were gives the show away . Nobody connected and aides, one that is heightened by trying to soften the feeling of transience with the movie seems to have imagined Altman's practice of retaining many as- that goes with gathering a company, that so me people might no t fall in love sistants (cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond, making a movie, then watching the par- with its cuddly cutups . film editor Louis Lombardo, production ticipants all go their separate ways. At designer Leon Ericksen, composer John the same time, improvisation, casual The other films have more resonance Williams, assistant director Tomm y comedy, and overlapping dialogue ex- (without nece ssa ril y being better) be- Thompson) and an irregular stock com- press the free-and-easy give-and-take of cause th eir lines of demarcation between pany of actors (Elliott Gould, Shelley a lively, thriving community. dreamer and realist are not so rigid. Duvall, Keith Carradine, Sally Keller- Brewster McCloud satirizes its gang of man, John Shuck, Bert Remsen, Rene Altman's movies-particularly stumblebum cops, fashion plate sleuths, Auberjonois-among others) from film McCabe and Mrs. Miller , The Long Good- dimwit ted flunki es, and narcissis tic to film . bye, and Ima ges -are seductive, politicians. Bubblebrained Suzanne diaphanous visual slipstreams. But their sends the hero to his d ea th by tipping off As happened with Godard before his sound lends them their peculiar distinc- the police, yet Altman retains a measure political phase, making and finding a tion. Plenty of directors nowadays have of affection for her sa ucer-eye d efferves- movie become almost synonymous; you their performers all talk at the same time cence and her giddy vulgarity. sometimes sense tha t the process of without bothering to sort out the lines. Keechie comes throu gh similarly, af- MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. fectin g in her wary attraction to Bowie, depressing in her scorn for his attempt to Top: the town of Pres- spring Chickamaw from jail, an adven- byterian Church. ture that leads to his death when Mattie Middle: the killers sets him up for an ambush. Their unde- (Hugh Millais, center). ceived , illusionless approach to life, un- Bottom: Warren Beatty, touched by imagination or spirit, seems Julie Christie, Robert Altman. drab and mean , as limited in its way as the criminals' childish fantasies. In both 1I11ages and Th e LOllg Goodbye , the princi- pal realists-fusty, boring Hugh and chrome-plated, cynical Terry-fall to vengeful dreamers, and the audience certainly sheds no tears over them . Realism is not an unalloyed virtue in Altman's films. If fantas y leads to de- struction, realism may result in amoral- ity, w ith ha rdl y a greater guarantee of survival. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Altman's dreamers generally end up dead or crazy . We leave Brewster and Bowie crumpled on the ground, one splintered amid the wreckage of his wings while a circus swirls around his body, the other hidden in a quilt with his blood leaking through it into the dirt. The others live on but at a murderous cost. Chickamaw brutally destroys a harmless old prison official; Ca thryn knocks her husband down a waterfall, derangedly supposing that she has an- nihila ted her alter ego. In the controver- sial ending of Th e Long Goodbye , Marlowe finally learns how contemptuously Len- nox has used him under the guise of friendship and responds by killing his betrayer. This climax may be questiona- ble, yet more harshly than any other Altman conclusion it does deliver his basic message to dreamers: kill or be kil- led . These concerns are implicit in Altman's production methods and tech- niques. An intuitive director, he relies heavily on whims, the chemistry of his casts, sudden inspirations, the unex- pected qualities that an actor (or a non- actor) brings to a part. Preconceived con- cepts, grand designs, tight scripts, and rigid shooting schedules go by the boards as much as possible. Very likely 12 SEPTEMBER 1974

But for most of them it is only a chic a light touch that none of his imitators Or take the moment in Th e Lon g mannerism. can match. McCabe's affable manner Goodbye when Marlowe, called \" th e best helps him win over the townspeople, neighbor we ever had\" when he buys For instance, Cinderella Liberty (on who have heard vague rumors that he is brownie mix for some candle-dipping, which Zsigmond, Ericksen, and Wil- a dangerous gunfighter and would steer yoga-practicing, se mi-nude beauties, liams worked) uses throwaway lines in clear of him if he stood around hard sel- mumbles, \"Got to be the best the Altman manner (its director, Mark ling his jokes like a sleazy comic in a neighbor-I'm a private eye. \" Naturally, Rydell, having agreed to play Marty Au- night club. His quips, like the one about this tells us Marlowe's racket, but who gustine in The Long Goodbye to learn squaring a circle by shoving a 4x4 up a needs to be told how Bogey's mutant son Altman's ways), but pointlessly because mule's ass, must have had whiskers earns his living? It' s Marlowe's tone of the throwawa ys are just ordinary even in 1906, but his charm makes them voice, conveying both confusion and movieish quips . Altman's technique zany delig ht in his own cleverness, that plays a complex role in the creation of his seem witty. makes it funny and beautiful. vision. Most obviously, it creates a sense Altman generally avoids milking of swarming life, capturing the tetchi- Techniques like these are incredibly ness and energy and mulishness of peo- jokes. Whether it be Painless, the risky because they leave the audience ple ricocheting off one another. Loosen- M*A*S*H dentist, saying, \"Well, big day, unusuall y free to respond or not . More ing the actors' tongues lets them interact got two jaws to rebuild,\" or Marlowe controlled styles may miss the freedom more spontaneously; they make us be- trying to flimflam his cat into accepting a and spontaneity of Altman's approach, lieve that they really are a community new brand of food (two examples out of but they also guide the viewer with a instead of a bunch of hired hams reciting dozens) , his actors touch our fun- firmer hand. Directors as different as memorized dialogue. nybones deftly and move on. They never Hitchcock, Bresson, Kubrick, and Rus- slaver and sweat and shout, \" Laugh, sell leave practically nothing to chance in A prime example of this occurs in you schmucks, this is funny! \" the way their movies, the good ones or the bad McCabe and Mrs. Miller when McCabe Mel Brooks and his cast do in Blazing ones; Altman leaves just about gingerly enters Pat Sheehan's ratty Saddles . Altman's people never fall into everything to chance . As a result, if pas- saloon for the first time . The gamblers this trap, which is fatal to either comedy sing moments and details fail to be fresh and barflies buzz and mumble all around or communal sentiments. and exciting in themselves, all we have him; though we can't make out their pre- left is a lifeless skeleton of \"themes\" or cise speech, its tone conveys their suspi- Besides this, Altman's sound, espe- cion of him , as it does the dissolving of cially dialogue, has a more elusive, less \" texture. \" their wariness when he stands the house pre-plannable effect: reverberation in The ideas and emotions of Hitchcock, to drinks and breaks out his orange our minds like a memory. Quite often, poker-tablecloth. particularly in McCabe and Th e Long Bresson, Kubrick, or Russe ll movies can Goodbye, a line will be less important survive local inadequacies that would Meanwhile, we do hear what we need than the wayan actor speaks it. The vag- destroy an Altman movie, which de- to hear, as when McCabe goes outside to ueness of much Altman dialogue, the pends more than they do on moment- piss and some drinkers discuss his way that the speakers don't worry about to-moment life. Lately, Pauline Kael and Swedish gun. In an instant, we realize well-timed pauses or bell-like enuncia- Norman Mailer, writing on Last Tango in that McCabe's pistol causes comment tion, often gives it a mysterious echoing Paris, have exalted improvisation as the because no one in this godforsaken hole vividness, even though it may have no highest form of filmmaking, and obvi- is armed. This points up the isolation of literary content. ously the more controlled approaches the town, foretells McCabe's hold on the can become cold, manipulative, and collective imagination of its citizens, For instance, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller rigid . But Altman ' s films, like foreshadows their terror at the giant rifle one whore gets sick of another's bitching Bertolucci's, often display the pitfalls of slung on the horse of the hired killer and cries, \"Of shut up, Eunice, you're improvisation . As Jay Cocks remarked in Butler, and undercuts the audience's always bloody well complaining!\" The his Time review of Thieves Like Us, they idea of a traditional Western, in which line, perhaps improvised, does not ad- sometimes fall into \"a casualness and everybody packs guns. Plot, theme, and vance the plot or develop the whore's vagueness about ideas.\" mood advance quickly and obliquely, character; since she is hidden in a crowd, without elaborate dramatic contri- we can' t even be sure who speaks it . Yet Brewster McCloud is an all too obvious vances. the sound of her voice leaping suddenly example. Thematically, the movie may out of the squabbling gives it an impact hang together. (See Roberta This sequence also indicates how all out of proportion to its literal mean- Rubenstein's thorough analysis in Film Altman's use of sound gives his comedy ing. Quarterly, Winter 1971 -72 .) Yet it obsti- Left : Cathryn Harrison (as Susannah) and Susannah York (as Cathryn) in IMAGES. UN ITED ARTISTS and Nina Van Pallandt in THE LONG GOODBYE. FILM COMMENT 13

ALTMAN CONTINUED Cathryn's psychology turns out to be code, get his $25 per day. nately refuses to work. For on e thing, barbershop Freud: she wants a baby to Chandler merely dabbles in the ro- Altman's improvisory touch ha s clearl y save her marriage, simultaneously does deserted him. Most of the performances not wa nt one, feel s guilty over this and mance of being a loser so that Marlowe are mecha nical, one-joke cartoons, and her promiscuity, therefore assumes that won't seem slick and phony, like other awfully tire d ones at that. To cite a pair, Hugh must also be involved in hard- boiled shamuses. His remark that Michael Murphy and William Windom extra-marital sex, retreats to reveries of style \"can exist in a savage and dirty age, parody Steve McQueen a nd Robert her lost childhood, her \"so ul. \" but it cannot exist in the Coca-Cola age\" Vaughn in Bullitt, a was te of time if the re is glib and sentimental beneath its ersatz ever was one. Worse, the central figure, This schematic characterization recalls social comment. If this were true, then Brewster, is so nebulous that the film Pabst's Secrets of a Soul; the film 's mud- Marlowe's style, such as it is, could not ends up fl ying apart in all directions, like died romanticism of derangement sug- exist either. Gregory praises Chandler a centrifuge crumbling as it s pin s. C. gests A Safe Place; and there are parallels for doggedly upholding the virtues em- Kirk McClelland's diary of the produc- to Repulsion (a knifing), The Whisperers bodied in Marlowe, and certainly he was tion reveals that Altman did not seem to (bizarre voices), and The Beguiled (many right to do this . But he was wrong in how know what kind of movie he wanted to lovers in one bed). In Ms., Phyllis Ches- he did it, through an appealing but basi- make. Evidently he never found out. sler perceptively wrote that Cathryn's cally pulpy figure of fantasy utterly confusion of the men in her life certifies irrelevant to defending these virtues in This is also partly true of Thieves Like her insa nity, although many men treat the real world-of the Fifties or the Us, even thou gh it is Altman's quietest, women this way without being thought Seventies. most austere movie so far. The film is loony. Beyo nd this, why does she pick te nder and funn y, ye t a little fl at. It lacks these stiffs? Why did she marry a dolt The movie goes wrong because Alt- the almost magica l re sonance of McCabe like Hugh? Wind chimes and colored man loses control over the connotations and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, even lights replace the answers to these ques- of his conclusion . He seems to intend bits of Im ages, not to mention the tortu- tions . Marlowe's action as a gesture of rage, ous complexity and brooding power of one that he shares, against the de- Faulkner, to whose work Kael in explica- Compare this to Kenneth Loach'sFam - humaniizng slickness of people like bly compared it. Actually, Thieves is Bon- ily Life which, whatever its possible over- Lennox, whose manufacture is almost an nie and Clyde minus the ba njo music, the simplifications and special pleading, industry in Los Angeles. Yet it also sug- hopped-up acting, and the mythic over- creates a shattering depiction of a gests, not tha t Marlowe stupidly ga ve his ton es. Paper Moon also reso unds in its woman's slow immersion in madness . loyalty to one obviously unworthy of it, sound track, a pastiche of snippets from Beside the anguish and terror of this but that loyalty to friends is stupid. such radio serials as \"Ga ngbusters\" and film , in which Sandy Ratcliff resembles Perhaps this second implication was ac- \"Steve Gibson of the International Sec- Susannah York and far surpasses her cidental; the final \" Affectionate remem- ret Police.\" Barring a la pse or two , Alt- portrayal of schizophrenia, Images is just brance for Dan Blocker,\" cast as Roger man avoids the mach- a fancy finger exercise; intrica te Wade before his death, and the film 's ine-tooled gags and the push-button psyc hology, like the botched car chase in generally affectionate treatment of Mar- hearttu gs that Peter Bogdan ovich dotes Brewster McCloud, requires the sort of lowe both contradict it. on, but he still doesn't bring the movie to scripting and planning that wars with full life . Altman's methods. The confusion arises because Altman did not think through one key change The characters, their situations, the The Long Goodbye poses a more slip- that he made in the story. The novel observa tions of quirky Americana, moral pery problem because, however stresses that Marlowe puts himself out atrophy, and rural banality are a trifle simple-minded its attack on contempor- for Lennox even though they hardly shopworn, and not simply because Ed- ary immorality ma y be, it is also a mer- know each other. Throughout the book, ward Anderson's novel had already curial, free- fl ying , virtuoso perfor- people express astonishment that he been filmed in 1949 as They Live By Night. mance. Limited space forbids a thorough would endure three days in jail and risk a With simple camerawork and limpid study of its imagery, which would have murder charge for a virtual stranger; one color, Altman undercuts the tenebrous to include Roger Wade's death in the hood jeers at his \"cheap emotions.\" romanticism of Nicholas Ray 's film noir . nighttime sea while Marlowe and Eileen Chandler's affirmation of his hero's loy- But he doesn ' t find enough to put in its madly try to reach him from the shore, alty was linked, it has been suggested, to place. Keith Carra dine and Shelley and the fascinating use of the picture the McCarthy-HUAC witch hunts; it Duvall are better actors than Farlay windows in the Wade beach house to constituted his tacit rebuke to informers, Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, yet their create effects oddly similar to certain a point underlined by having Marlowe brief idyll is less moving. It never equals moments of Playtime. stand up for a mere acquaintance instead Night's tight close-up of O ' Donnell as of a longtime friend. she reads a letter from her dead lover and For a long time the film's visual rich- then turns sorrowfully away from us, ness made me resist Charles Gregory's Updating the story to 1973 eliminates her flowing hair filling the screen. criticism (in Sight and Sound and Film this element and thus requires of Altman Altman's muted style will not allow for Quarterly, both Summer 1973) of the what he fails (and Chandler had no lyrical touches like this, yet without film's revision of Chandler's Marlowe, need) to supply: an explanation of them his characters are too attenuated particularly in the ending. Gregory feels Marlowe's friendship with Lennox. We and his set pieces-especially a blazing that Altman has destroyed a hero with- are clearly not supposed to question noctural car crash-too self-contained. out understanding him . Yet Marlowe is their bond in the film , yet right from the almost as ineffectual in Chandler's Long start Lennox is so repulsive, so incapable Images, on the other hand, is intensely Goodbye as he is in Altman's. The cops do of genuine friendship, that we wonder lyrical. Its throbbing music, its rococo more to solve the mystery than he does; why Marlowe cannot see through him. narration, its eerie shots of a blood red they even fool him into serving as a (Repressed homosexuality won't do for lake, an incandescent house glowing in decoy so that they can catch some gang- an answer in this case.) Marlowe may be the twilight, an enchanted storybook sters off guard. Obviously, Chandler had romantic, but he isn't dumb. As a result, meadow, a sunstruck valley traversed by come to see his hero much as Altman the movie blurs at the outset and, by the cloudshadows in procession are utterly sees him, as a pawn and a loser, however time the ending arrives, has grown fun- mesmerizing . In fact, their strangeness admirable. But Marlowe never really damentally incoherent. becomes the movie's true subject when finishes last in the book; in the end he does unravel the crime, vindicate his In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman pulls all his gifts, themes, and tech- 14 SEPTEMBER 1974

niques together. More directly than the closures to open spaces form a motif too Money taints every relationship. The other movies, it focuses on the possibil- consistent to be entirely accidental. The whorehouse, even humanized , still sells ity of establishing a true community in credit sequence, showing McCabe riding flesh; McCabe must buy his way into an indifferent world. Altman sets this up to town through a trackless forest, is a Mrs. Miller's bed' Sheehan plots to take a by repeatedly showing isolated indi- subtly orchestrated series of crane shots cut of all new businesses and ends up viduals forming a group or outsiders which, like the lofty angle that later yielding immediately to the mining car- joining the town. McCabe's arrival at shows him bringing the three whores to tel, leaving McCabe stranded. The Sheehan's is the first example. Later, town, works directly on our emotions, human connections possible among the when he leads his first three whores into makes us feel the exhilaration of finding characters have been curtailed in ad- a clearing in the woods where miners are rest after a harsh journey or clearing out vance by the premise on which their building up the town, the men gather a haven in a desolate wilderness. community is founded . round uncertainly, afraid to expose their desire. By the time that a similar gather- Throughout the movie, isolation The townspeople, dimly realizing this, ing greets Ida Coyle and Mrs. Miller threatens the community, which never depend on illusions to numb the upon their arrival in Presbyterian quite embraces everyone. The Chinese malaise. The principal one is McCabe's Church, the onlookers also include the mineworkers live in the town but the \" big rep.\" Everybody \" knows\" that women of the town. town will have no part of them . From McCabe killed Bill Rowntree; some even time to time, we glimpse their placid, claim to have known Bill Rowntree, or at The film plays variations on this chord opaque faces and their squalid least friends of his. Of course, none of at Bart Coyle's funeral, with the second Chinatown. Other strangers the town them did, any more than any of them wave of whores helping to sing\" Asleep warmly accepts; these strangers remain personally investigated the sexual magic in Jesus\"; after their arrival, as they outsiders even though they already live of Chinese princesses. But somebody splash and laugh together in a wooden in the town-with one ironic exception, somewhere along the line saw both-or tub; at the end, when a disorganized the \"Chinese princess.\" something else-and passed the story mob becomes an efficient bucket brigade along. Now, almost like an oral tale of to put out a fire in the church. These The town's minister, baleful in his Anglo-Saxon times, it has become a vir- episodes are not unqualified celebrations black cloth and saturnine scowl, also tual myth, embellished with each repeti- of the community. The men staring av- peers at the life of the community from idly at the three whores also expose the the fringes of shots; isolation from it is tion. cruelty and exploitation of the arrange- driving him mad. But, unlike the Even when McCabe proves to be only ment. Ida would not even be in town if Chinese, he isolates himself, stewing she had not been a mail order bride, self-righteously because nobody goes to a pleasant, gabby bumbler, the bought like whores. his church. Bart Coyle's death pleases townspeople's image of him as a top gun him as the just punishment of another persists. They want it to be true. The Bart's funeral and the ending sinner, and he avoids the funeral. He glamor of it, the pOSSibility that one da y foreshadow the disintegration of the drives McCabe out of the church with a McCabe will confirm its truth right be- community. Still, the ideal haunts the shotgun, pontificating about the \"house fore their eyes, adds a pinch of excite- movie as more and more strangers ar- of God\" and vengefully refusing to help ment to their bleak lives. rive, and Presbyterian Church gradually defeat the killers. If the community took replaces its tents and shacks with the him seriously, he would poison it with In his offhand way, Altman seeds the fresh-cut planks of new buildings, par- his purism and powerlust. Yet his con- movie with other, more individual illu- ticularly the whorehouse, which be- torted, lurking figure , reminiscent of the sions and teases those that the audience comes the heart of the community. hunched drug addict in Alice's brings to a Western. Some are innocu- Restaurant , expresses an anger that the ous, amusing pretensions (a man sol- Along with the movie's sound track, communal ideal cannot assimilate. emnly pondering a new style for his its color and camerawork develop its beard, a fatuous miner strutting like a themes almost subliminally. The basic But all of the townspeople are isolated master builder); others turn out to be contrast between the snowbound ex- from one another for a deeper reason: perilous (Butler lording it over the locals, teriors and the warm, glowing, their community is based more on busi- his feral young sidekick waiting to kill orange-yellow, honey-brown interiors ness than on fellow feeling . Presbyterian someone, a blabbermouth lawyer suck- states the nature of the community: be- Church would not even exist without its ing McCabe into his daydreams of \" bust- leagured people huddled together zinc mines; McCabe comes to town to ing up these trusts and monopolies\") . against an inhospitable landscape. In make a killing on whores, gambling, and addition, the colors are so lulling that we booze; Mrs. Miller arrives with even Altman casually violates Western con- experience the sensuality of their life and more ambitious schemes in mind; and ventions, as when McCabe approaches a envy them. finally the mining company takes over to horseman for the classic fastdraw show- get control of the zinc. down only to find a gawky kid looking Several camera movements from en- for the whorehouse. Altman's parodies of cliches like this parallel the ways that, Left: Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, William Windom in BREWSTER MCCLOUD . Right : Susannah in the movie, life destroys illusions as York in IMAGES. illusions destroy lives. But the movie also honors the needs that illusions fulfill, without ever preach- ing like the O'Neill of The Iceman Cometh. The fantasy of the Chinese princess, spoken as they splash and sing in their bath, turns lumpy, bedraggled whores into beguiling creatures. In the same way, the church which the bucket brigade struggles to save from fire may not really be an important part of the community. But the townspeople, al- though they are unreligious, implicitly think that it is, and the force of their belief beautifully affirms the communal dream. FILM COMMENT 15

ALTMAN CONTINUED sen preserves, his derby, his gold tooth, twisted brokenly around her, his grin and the stogie that he twirls in his mouth bent into a queasy crinkle as he fastidi- The techniques of McCabe and Mrs. and wraps a nutty grin around, he is a ously takes a knife away from Miller-the qualities of the images, the tin horn to his bone marrow, yet a stylish her-Warren Beatty brilliantly captures editing, the camera movements, the prancer-dancer as well . It is completely the vulnerability and the contradictions sound-suffuse it with the evanescent believable that the townspeople project of his character, just as he does in Bonnie beauty of illusions. The entire movie is a their fantasies onto him. and Clyde when Clyde defends himself long reverie and , within it, certain indi- against Bonnie's sudden anger at his im- vidual shots stand alone as emblems of But his cockiness barely conceals his potence by weakly raising his arms to his dreams, transience, pain, loss: a rider- fears, and so he also plunges into illu- chest. less horse galloping softly through deep sion. He gets caught up in the town's snow, reflected dancers gracefully mis- fantasy of his being a fancy dude and a McCabe and Mrs. Miller are an almost shapen on the glass of a player piano. flashy gunslinger, even though he mut- schematically polarized couple; if we ters \"businessman businessman\" when warm to him because he is so charmingly Others-a lone man on a footbridge, a Sheehan probes him about his occupa- foolish, we focus on her because, alone horse' s hooves piercing the ice of a fro- tion. He cultivates the town's ideas, among the townspeople, she seems to zen stream, a shy girl facing some plays with them, tries to live up to the big have no illusions whatsoever. It is almost miners-are less overtly dreamlike. rep, while the town humors him, hopes an inversion of John Korty's The Crazy They affect us more because the rhythm that the big rep is true, and plays on his Quilt , in which \"the illusionless man and of the editing takes them away so swiftly; vanity. the visionary maid\" form an inprobable, like the sound effects, they resonate in unstable alliance. our minds like epiphanies . The movie's But his illusions run deeper than the concentration on snow, wind, rain, and town knows. Even when menaced by That is more than McCabe and Mrs. ice helps give it a softly flowing tempo the killers, he can swallow the lawyer's Miller ever do, because she is too tough that gently pulls us into its world, like pretentious rhetoric. He tries to dazzle and intelligent to conform to his senti- the strangers drifting in to mingle their Mrs. Miller as he does the town, and mental view of womankind. Unlike him, dreams with those already present there. again illusion cripples him. He wants her she understands the hard truths of life. to live up to an adolescent fantasy of She tells him bluntly that \"you have to When McCabe enters Presbyterian dainty feminity, even as he watches her spend money to make money\" and as- Church, he immediately becomes the wolf down a meal in a most unladylike sures Ida, upon recruiting her for the center of attention; we are drawn to him, manner and then knock him out with her brothel after her husband's funeral, that too, as we never are to Bruce Dern's simi- rapid spiel on all that he doesn't know sex means nothing, that whoredom lar character in The Kin g of Marvil1 about operating a high class sporting compares favorably with marriage as a Gardens. That movie fails partly because house. He can down a double whiskey superior business arrangement. Her in- Dern's dreamer is never anything but a and a raw egg in one gulp (drawing telligence and realism, which connect cloddish, two-bit hustler. But McCabe gasps of amazement from the audience) her with contemporary attitudes without charms and intrigues us; he is childish, but, though he doesn't mind her profes- making her an anachronism, consis- but also childlike, a pimp but never a sion, he cannot get over her matching his tently challenge McCabe's posturing. scoundrel. etiquette or outdoing him as a \" businessman businessman\" by un- Yet they do not render her any more His motormouth is always racing with scrambling his ledgers. capable of ruling fate than he is. \"Take gnomic sayings about frogs and eagles your hat off the bed, it's bad luck,\" she and money and pain and \"butternut Fatally dependent on fantasy, he orders him (like Catherine in Jules and muffdivers\" and girls trickier than \" a makes a sad, comic spectacle of himself Jim), an odd thing for an illusionless per- goddam monkey on a hundred yards of in his efforts to win fame and love. In one son to say. And, in fact, she does have a grapevine.\" He enjoys playing silly especially moving moment-when he personal route to comforting fantasy: games and putting on airs; with his dam- disarms a hysterical whore, his arms opium. Only when drugged does she finally sleep with McCabe and share his THIEVES LIKE US. Left:Mary Waits, Rodney Lee Jr. , John Schuck play cops and robbers. Right: Louise optimism about worming more money out of the mining company for his Fletcher, Shelley Duvall watch Bowie die. UNITED ARTISTS property. At another time, she uses opium to escape a birthday party because she can- not endure its joy; her very toughmin- dedness gives her an unbearable vision of how transient it is. In one of his sub- tlest strokes, Altman enriches the movie by gradually associating the soothing browns and oranges of its interiors with opium, as though their warmth and fes- tivity and humanity were illusions seen through the mind's eye of someone deep in a drug-induced daze. During the concluding sequences, de- tails and motifs that earlier portrayed the birth of the community become ironic witnesses to its death. The three killers are also strangers, but they don't join the community-they shatter it. The. townspeople separate apprehenSively when the gunmen appear. Even the con- cluding slow zoom to Mrs. Miller in a dope den reverses previous camera movements. McCabe learns how wrong 16 SEPTEMBER 1974

he was to imagine himself as a Gambling, which CALIFORNIA SPLIT this critical standby may be) they evoke \"businessman businessman\"; compared celebrates, must have seemed like the the richness and fulness of life. Altman's to the killers and the invisible corpora- work evokes its final emptiness, a truth tion they represent, he is a ridiculous which he tries to disguise by making his images and sounds as mysterious and amateur. alluring as possible. Mrs. Miller faces a deeper reckoning. Still, each film has at least one moment The ruthlessness of the mining company when the disguise falls away. In shocks even her, yet it underlies their M*A*S*H , Dago Red tries to give Ex- similarities, for what is \" you have to treme Unction to a dead patient; a doctor spend money to make money\" if not a calls on him to help operate on another classic businessman's motto? Like the casualty; he hesitates, since Catholic corporation, she has tried to base all dogma teaches tha t a person dying with- human relations on money, but the sad- out last rites risks eternal damnation; the ness of the community and the needs of doctor barks, \" That man is dead , this others pierce her defenses; she cannot man is still alive; now that's a fact.\" In escape her ultimate vulnerability to Brews ter McCloud , a circus pitchman them. What formerly highlighted her reads off the names of the cast, en~ing cool intelligence now revelas the fear of with \"Mr. Bud Cort\" as the camera intense involvement with others that ac- zooms to the hero's corpse. Death and companies it. She comforts McCabe on water preoccupy The Long Goodbye and the night before the gunfight, as much to McCabe and Mrs. Miller; we see two deny how moved she is by his plight as to ease his pain. perfect Altman premise. Charlie Walters characters of each floating lifeless, and This gesture, the central moment of (Elliott Gould) gambles the way Altman water spreads ominously across the Julie Christie's performance, captures makes movies: taking chances and run- screen after the murder of Terry Lennox. the instant of Mrs. Miller's awakening to ning free . Because Charlie plays for the Brewster McCloud reminds us that its her own illusions about herself. One of sheer crazy hell of it, Altman prefers him dead hero is only a posing actor; the the things that makes her a compelling to his uptight partner Bill Denny (George others emphasize corpses as matter. In character is that we cannot condemn her Segal). When Bill wins $82,000 at the either case, they are only \" images, \" fear of involvement with others; it is all crap table, he mopes dispondantly be- which could be the title (or the subtitle) too justifiable in a world like hers. But we cause \" there was no special feeling\"; of each Altman movie. realize, and so does she, that her illusion- Charlie dances and raps like a happy Altman may be trying to disguise this less realism is as fu tile as McCabe's lunatic. Each is both dreamer and realist, vision of life's hollowness from himself romantic dithering. Neither attitude can living in a community of transients, from as much as from his audience; it certainly save them; the dreamer and the realist the matronly veterans of Orange County seems to spring from intuition more than are one. poker parlors to the high rollers of Reno. thought. Novels like Camus ' The McCabe fights for his life, vainly and But Bill broods over the emptiness of the Stranger and Gide's The Immoralist ex- alone. So it is doubly ironic that he life , while Charlie accepts it and rides the press this consciousness through charac- proves to be an inept gunfighter and yet intensity of the moment. ters whose intense awareness of death manages to take all three killers with This ma y make CALIFORNIA SPLIT awakens them to the magnificence of him. He vindicates his big rep when no sound like a masterpiece; actually, it is a physical reality. But the novels articulate one is around to see him do it; the slack, languid disappointment, one this consciousness intellectually, townspeople are too busy celebrating the more demonstration that improvisation whereas Altman appears to stumble rescue of the church and Mrs. Miller is has its limits. Joseph Walsh's script onto it unconSCiously. too far gone on opium. (which I accidentally got to read before Perhaps this is one reason why, de- The concluding gunfight, a messy and the film started shooting) was already a spite their measure of common ground, protracted affair that debunks the melange of scenes as easy to shuffle as a the books are compact and his films are chess-like stalkings and duels of most deck of cards. With its gaming jargon, sprawling. When he does try to be com- Westerns, expresses the victory of isola- sloppy descriptive passages, and casu- parably spare, as in Thieves Like Us, he tion over community, the film's funda- ally dangling plot lines, it seems like a achieves nowhere near their depth be- mental illusion. During it, a blizzard be- scratch pad for Altman 's scribbles. But cause he has not really thought it out. gins , and the falling snow makes the im- aimless scribbling is all that he has done; Similarly, McCabe and Mrs. Miller falls ages grainier and grainier, as though and so the movie emerges as an ex- short of greatness because McCabe's il- they were being blown up, as though tended doodle composed mainly of ac- lusions are not deep enough to touch us they were slowly dissolving, disintegrat- tors' shticks. Once he establishes the as profoundly as the illusions exposed in ing, drifting away. Soon they, too, come contrast between Bill and Charlie, Alt- these novels do. The film 's blemishes, to resemble Mrs. Miller's opium reveries man does nothing but repeat it, and he especially the overuse of Leonard until the boundaries between them blur sentimentalizes gambling by Cohen's sometimes beautiful but just as and, like Franz in Godard's Band of soft-pedaling its compulsive side . The often forced songs may be traceable to Outsiders , we no longer know whether film even down plays the script's mini- this \" casualness and vagueness about the world is becoming a dream or a mal climax at the crap table and then ideas,\" as though Altman were not sure dream is becoming the world . pans limply to a roulette table for its un- of his meaning. This conclusion is Altman' s most open earned conclusion. Yet his meaning is plain; his films are acknowledgement of what his complex CALIFORNIA SPLIT is all behavior and arabesques around voids, in which (to of stylistic devices ultimately means: life no ideas, a bad hand no matter how you quote Godard once more) \" Life is sad, is only images, beneath whose surfaces look at it. Altman has done no more than but it is always beautiful.\" The lies nothing. Comparison with Renoir play it as it lays, in other words try to slow- motion evocation of \"the people\" only underlies this point. His films re- improvise his way out of an intellectual in Thieves Like Us is unconvincing, be- semble Altman's in their rich profusion vacuum. This movie proves that even cause Altman does not believe in \"the of images, sounds, events, details, spontaneity can become a tiresome for- people\" but in the empty staircase. But characters. But (however oversimplified mula. he also believes in the Chinese princess ..~? ~------------------------~ FILM COMMENT 17

PHANTOM INTERVIEWERS OVER by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, Gilbert Adair Last Jun e, I invited two of my Juliet Berto , Jacques Rivette, Dominique delier (in the role of Opale). In PARIS, it is friends-Gilbert Adair and Lauren Labourier during shooting of cEliNE ET JULIE Mabuse who maintains the upper hand: Sedofsky-to join me in an interview not only the characters but most of the with Jacques Rivette. All three of us had VONT EN BATEAU . actors portraying them seem to be suffo- been dazzled by CELlNE ET JULIE VONT EN cated by the machinations of the script. BATEAU (CELI NE AND JULIE GO BOATING), LA RELIGIEUSE (THE NUN), Rivette's sec- In THE NUN, Anna Karina's acting as well to the point of conSidering it the most ond film. Ironically, it was the banning of as her role describes a heroic attempt to important new film we've seen in years , this film by the French Minister of Infor- discover freedom, and the depth of her and it seemed exciting to extend our folie mation in 1966 (a decision eventually re- performance already marks an advance versed) and the ensuing scandal that first in Rivette's development. But it is only a trois to a meeting with the director. introduced Rivette's name to a wider with the volcanic creations of Kalfon and public. But as often happens in such Ogier in L' AMOUR FOU that he truly finds Rivette arrived at my apartment in cases, it was a reputation essentially his metier, reformulating his aggressive- early afternoon, and with disarming di- based on a misunderstanding. The real ness by displacing it from script writing rectness put himself entirely at our dis- scandal came one year later, when to editing, and seeking to make the posal. When I presented him with a copy Rivette abandoned traditionally con- shooting in between as free and open as of the May-June FILM COMMENT , he structed cinema to embark on the semi- possible. leafed through it with interest and asked nal adventure of L' AMOUR FOU, a about the commercial fates of the last two 252-minute fresco with Bulle Ogier and \"Someone like Rivette, who knows Altman films in America. He ex- Jean-Pierre Kalfon that was shot in day- the cinema much better than I, shoots plained-always in French-that he'd to-day collaboration with cast and crew, little; one doesn't speak of him, or hardly recently become interested in Altman and then edited to juxtapose love with ever .... If he had made ten films, he after viewing THE LONG GOODBYE , and madness, 16mm with 35, and theater re- would have gone a lot farther than I.\" had already seen THIEVES LIKE us twice. hearsals with domestic psychodrama. My records don't tell me when Godard Throughout the afternoon, he spoke of said this, but it is more than relevant cinema as a devoted moviegoer, some- Every Rivette film has its today when we consider that next to one who \" keeps up\" as strenuously as Eisenstein/Lang/Hitchcock side-an im- Godard's two dozen . or so features he did when he was a practicing critic, pulse to design and plot, dominate and Rivette has made, to date, only six. The and continues to have precise and articu- control-and its Renoir/Hawks/ relative durations of the oeuvres is less late opinions about what he sees. (For Rossellini side: an impulse to \"let things disproportionate: by rough calculation, whatever it's worth, I've seen him more go,\" open one's self up to the play and Godard's is about thirty-seven hours often at Cinematheque screenings over power of other personalities, and watch long next to Rivette's twenty-eight. But the past five years than all other local what happens . Rivette is explicit about taking into account the length of time directors I know combined.) this distinction in the last part of our spent by Rivette between films, the two interview, but all his films display some careers are not really comparable. Rivette might be the slowest of the measure of both aloofness and interac- Rivette has embarked on a tournage only New Wave directors to attain recogni- tion . The tension felt is one between out- five times, but the entire output of some tion , but historically he is the first of the sider and insider, voyeur and particip- of his contemporaries-including Chab- important Cahiers critics to have em- ant, the \"plotting\" of Lang's Dr. Mabuse rol, Truffaut and Rohmer-contains less barked on a feature film . PARIS NOUS AP- and the \"acting\" of Renoir's Dr. Cor- radical development than the distance PARTIENT (PARIS BELONGS TO us) was re- separating any two Rivette projects. Six leased in 1960, the year after BREATHLESS steps in all, but each step has been a giant and THE 400 BLOWS, but it was made be- one: even, to judge from reports, the one tween 1957 and 1959. An anguished por- taking place between OUT and SPECTRE. trayal of a milieu of outsiders-an im- (It is relevant that after the completion of poverished but ambitious theater group, the former, Rivette devoted something a paranoiac American expa tria te , and like a year to the editing of the latter.) other marginal figures occupying seedy one-room fiats-PARIS is the most The three features Rivette has made oppresively Langian of Rivette's films, since L' AMOUR FOU are described below oscillating between poetic visions of by my colleagues. Unquestionably, it grandeur (d. the title) and alienated was the experience of OUT and SPECTRE nightmares of despair (reflected in the that made CELINE ET JULIE pOSSible; opening epigraph, \"Paris belongs to no perhaps, it'll be the audience's experi- one\" ). ence of the latter film that will help to make the earlier two accessible, materi- The frustra ted search for a Master ally as well as conceptually.* Together Scheme that motivates the heroine of and separately, these three films are al- PARIS is partially echoed in the efforts of most certainly the most significant Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina) to find meaning in 18th-century convent life in 18 SEPTE~BER 1974

events in the French cinema since the contemporary acce pta nce of phe- toward representation, but bo und by ex- May Events in 1968. no menological incom ple ten ess. In ercises a nd experiments in their own ex- SPECTRE h e works actively agai nst all to- pressive potentiality. Lauren Sedofsky: OUT/SPECTRE is very talizing principles, including his own, much a work of its time. It tends to turn th ereby dissolving the plot (understood Theater has been central for Rivette the overwrought canons of modernism as conspiracy and narrative). beca use, as h e has noted , it is in the on their ears in its ironic acceptance of thea ter that truth and lies are a t issue . Flaubert's complaint that \"We have too More radical still is the ex te nt to w hi ch The utopia n pl o t is its mirror pretext, many things and not enough forms.\" It Rivette has dispensed with the referen- w hich congeals a nd dissolves largely to is precisely a desire to maintain \" too tial aspect of film . His research is very display the sensua l values on the screen, much,\" the excess which overflows any much a part of a time w hen the world is which are purely th ose of spectacle. closure, that informs OUT and its shorter n o longer given as eviden t or accessible, SPECTRE is largely a meditation o n th e reorganization, SPECTRE . Rivette 's six when the work can no longer refer to actor and his natural capacity to genera te weeks of shooting and some thirty hours reality, but mu s t construct it . Hi s fiction, a nexus of m eanings in which the of rushes were harnessed by a particular h ypothetical lo ca tion of SPECTRE in spectator is caught and from w hich h e relation between chan ce and design which \" Paris and its double,\" then, must make can em erge with a critical response, in makes his effort an extraordinary one think of Artaud (Le Th ea tre et son post-Brechtian fashion , only by discern- cinematic instance of the \"open work.\" Double). Like Artaud, Rivette ha s created ing th e lapses, the h esita ti on s, the cracks The design for Rivette consists in a to- a \"nontheological space\" (Derrida) in the surfaces. Only the breakdown in tally arbitrary framework o n which which admits the tyranny of neither text artifice, th e d econ struction of the pl ot chance ma y play in its infinite va riety . n or a uteur. It is a space in w hich the can identify the film as fabulation. Only Like the arbitrary parameters of 16mm actor's gra mmar of gesture and voice the recogniti on th at the film doesn't camera, 35mm camera and the thea ter in may play creatively, without impedi- \"work,\" tha t it poses all question s and L' AMOUR FOU, which generate infinitely ment. Unlike the rehearsals of Andro- answers n one, ca n point to the absence rich cross-references of representa tion , maque in L ' AMOUR FOU, Michele Moretti's at the center of all fiction . the choice of actors in SPECTRE and their preparation of Seven Against Th ebes and freedom to invent their characters, to Michel Lon sdale's of Prometheus Bound But this sp ectacl e gen erated to s up- improvise their own definition s, lea ds reveal groups not moving inexorably ple men t the absence strikes the specta tor naturall y to a series of encounters and a with erotic force. As Rive tte has said, it system of exchanges. OUT ONE: SPECTRE. Top : Jean-Pierre Leaud and Eric Rohmer. Bottom: Lea ud and Bulle Ogier. To set these elements in motion, Rivette empl oys an animating device, Balzac's Histoire des treize. Only through the messages from Balzac and Carroll's \" The Hunting of the Snark\" -gratuitously received by Colin (Jean- Pierre Leaud), a sham deaf-mute, and leading to his suspicion of a utopian conspiracy-can the actors' proj ections begin to interact. Colin's attempts to de- Cipher these messages, which parallel the spectator's desire to penetrate the film 's mechanism , ironically reactivates, however feebl y, the connections be- tween a number of paranoid universes. Further complications are brought about by the blackmailing venture of Frederique (Juliet Berto), another mar- ginal character whose monetary in- terests accidentally lead her to conspire against the seeming conspirators. If Rivette's work is \"open\" by virtue of the special concept of the film as a group venture, it is also \"open\" by virtue of a recognition of the implicit infinity of edit- ing potentialities. SPECTRE is a film en marge, created out of the same material as OUT, but one third its length and in- tended to be as different as possible . In its difference, it proposes to the spectator a plural vision, a tolerance, not of shifts in time and points of view already common in cinema, but of thoroughly indepen- dent \" cuttings\" of reality, no one of which is more privileged than another. To this extent Rivette participates in a \"The 760-minute OUT, subtitled NOLI ME TANGERE exists today only as an unprocessed workprint, ha~ been screened publicly just once-over two days in Le Havre, in 1971-and, alas, neither my col- laborators nor I have seen it. A release print can be made only if and when enough money can be raised to furnish the lab costs. U·R.) FILM COMMENT 19

RIVETTE CONTINUED OUT ONE: SPECTRE. Left: Franc;:oise Fabian and Juliet Berta. Right: Juliet Berta. carries all the weight of significance \" as would a statue, a building or an enorm- do not simply proceed from left to right, JO~ATHAN ROSENBAUM : How ous beast.\" And the teasing density of as it were, in front of his eyes; each act was CELINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU the shots of Place d'Italie toward the end generates that which follows it-as, in prepared? What was the initial motive? of SPECTRE, like the black page in Tristram Alice, when she cries, her tears form a Shandy , arouses our desire by refusing all pool, the animals race to get dry, JACQUES RIVETTE: Simply the de- interrogation. This tantalizing, fugitive etc. -so that the narrative \" procession\" sire to make a film. To get out of the element acts as a kind of philtre, eliciting appears rather to advance C!t a right angle dumps that we all felt we were in, make a our critical and creative consciousness . It to the spectator, forcing him to chase film for as little money as possible, and, is the m ysterious dark underside of fic- after it. we hoped, amuse people . Because the tion that lea ds to t~e amazing erotic adventure of OUT didn ' t turn out very parthenoge nesis of CELINE ET JULIE VONT The spectator is assisted in this chase well, from the point of view of public ON BATEAU. by the movie's richly allusive texture, reception-there was no reception. It both cinematic (Cocteau , Minrrelli, was almost impossible to show the film. Gilbert Adair: It is not the least charm- Chytilova ' s DAISIES) and literary; one Meanwhile, there had been another pro- ing aspect of CELINE ET JULIE VONT EN thinks of Henry James (less the obscure ject [PHENIX] which we couldn' t do be- BATEAU that its \"plot\" is almost impossi- play that served as inspiration than of cause it was too expensive, which Juliet ble to relate. The critic faced with such a some odd marriage between What Maisie Berto was also involved in. When we task can only seek refuge in the all too Knew and Th e Turn of the Screw) , Borges, realized about a year ago tha t we fragile protection of quotation marks, and even Kafka. And the piece of candy couldn' t bring this project to fruition, I whose resemblance to raised eyebrows is not only Proust updated (worth not- spoke to Juliet one evening and we de- has never been more apt. For the whole ing, in this respect, that the little girl's cided to do something else. Something movie, like a dream, is se t between quo- name is Madlyn, which contains both which would be on the contrary very tation marks; like a dream, it is an anag- the Proustian madeleine and the highly cheap, as easy to make as possible, and ram of reality, open to as many interpre- appropriate madly) but also acts as a kind fun to do. The first idea was to bring tations as there are spectators, a of \" go-between,\" permitting access to together Juliet and Dominique, who Rorschach ink blot, with which, the past, that \"foreign country\" in were already friends: I'd often seen them moreover, it shares the same curious which, as L. P. Hartley wrote, \" they do together. mirror silhouette. Anyhow, here goes: things differently.\" For this \" country,\" Julie (Dominique Labourier) is a librarian Rivette and Eduardo de Gregorio have ROSENBAUM: There seems to be a living in Montmartre, whose existence is found the perfect language, deliciously Hollywood aspect to CELINE ET JULIE upset one day by the intrusion of Celine stilted and demode , especially when it is that's quite different from your earlier Ouliet Berto), a lady magician who per- sent up by the cartoon-inspired antics of films. forms in a cheap nightclub. After a brief the two heroines Ouliet Berto in particu- flirtation (in a sense as sexual as you lar, a splendidly filled-out Tweety Pie), RIVETTE : Yes-but Hollywood please to make it) the two girls move in giving the final sequence in the house, twenty years ago, certainly not today. together and the film properly begins. for example, something of the night- We thought of it in reference to certain Celine has a story to tell-but is she mak- marish quality of Tex Avery's blending things, such as everything concerning ing it up?-about a house in which she of animation and live action . the house . Contrary to what some critics plays nurse to a little girl, around whose at Cannes thought, our ambitions life glides a strange trio, consisting of CELINE ET JULIE is a kind of Tangram, weren't along the lines of parody, but two languid young ladies (Bulle Ogier the Chinese puzzle in which a player, rather a pastiche of an old-fashioned sort and Marie-France Pisier) and a no less given seven basic elements-five trian- of cinema. For instance, the use of wide \" phantom\" gentleman (Barbet gles of varying sizes, a square, and a angles and deep focus. I thought during Schroeder, also the film's producer). parallelogram (which might correspond the shooting that the film was a little bit here to the three \"ghosts,\" the little girl, like an RKO movie of the Fifties, but in Next morning, as a title helpfully in- the piece of candy, and Celine and Julie color-those films that more or less suc- forms us, Julie sets off and is ushered in themselves)-has innumerable figures cessfully imitated Wyler'S. There was a turn into the mysterious house, from to make out of them, most difficult of all fad between 1945 and 1950 to use which she subsequently emerges, dazed being a perfect square . But, as anyone mise-en-scene in depth, particularly at and with a piece of candy in her mouth, who has played the game will know, all RKO-the Gregg Toland influence. In to be whisked off in a waiting taxi, like are difficult and yet all are possible. the film's details, we thought of several the Rolls-Royce of the Princesse in American movies. At the end, for exam- ORPHEE. By sucking on the sweets which they never fail to discover on their tongues after a visit to the house, Celine and Julie are able, in a kind of bizarre \"priva te screening,\" to re-view the drama, solve the mystery and, in a sequ- ence both hilarious and disturbing, exor- cise the demons therein. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice . And the movie has much of the crazy logic we associate with Lewis Carroll's masterpiece. In order to make sense out of its partially improvised narrative, the spectator, too, must be prepared to im- provise, to constantly renew his expecta- tions, never able to settle down in his seat with the comfortable idea that this is, once and for all, a comedy, a mystery, or even a fantasy. The events of this film 20 SEPTEMBER 1974

pIe, the idea was to have a slapstick shot, I don' t do that any longer-not then everything taking place in Julie's finish. In fact we were thinking a bit of since L' AMOUR Fou-and I have no de- apartment. Hawks, although we did it quite differ- sire to do it again. ROSENBAUM: Why did you decide to ently from the way Hawks would have. We began by elimination: we didn't use a scriptwriter and not depend com- One of Hawks' favorite remarks is that want to make a serious film; we didn' t when he's found a subject, he first of all want to make a film about the theater pletely on improvisation after the ex- tries to make a comedy out of it; then , if because we'd done that too often; we he doesn ' t succeed, it's a serious film. So didn't want to make a film about current perience of OUT? . we decided that the end would be com- events or politics. But we did have the pletely open; it could be very dramatic or desire from the very beginning to do RIVETTE : OUT and CELINE ET JULIE are whatever we wanted. I wanted to have a something close to comedy, and even slapstick finale because it seemed more frankly commedia dell 'arte. And the first related, but in the end quite different. In amusing. thing we did after two hours of conversa- tion was to look for the characters' OUT there was a canvas , but inside the There are several scenes in the film names. And we stopped there that eve- which I had to edit a lot because they ning. So finding the names Celine and canvas was raw improvisation . But even played on looks and reactions-I had to Julie was our starting point . .. do much more editing than in L' AMOUR in this case I wasn't alone: I did it with a FOU or OUT. And from the moment you The first stage consisted of conversa- start editing, you're obliged to think tions with Juliet and Dominique, when friend who was also my assistant direc- about what Hitchcock would have done quite quickly the two girls organized in similar circumstances. But it's only in their own characters. Then came the idea tor, Suzanne Schiffman. I like having three or four sequences that we frankly of their meeting, how the two con- attempted to follow the principles of nected. But then there was a stage-after someone by my side, anyway, as a kind Hitchcockian editing. For the first fifteen the first half-hour of the film as it now minutes , we wanted to have the imagi- stands-where we didn't have a clear of referee, not an arbitrator but someone nary Montmartre of a studio, like the idea , where there were all kinds of pos- Montmartre of AN AMERICAN IN sibilities. We hesitated for about two who has other ideas. So Eduardo was PARIS-which is why we used the sec- weeks with Eduardo [de GregoriO], who ond title, PHANTOM LADIES OVER PARIS, had joined us by that time. We already there almost from the start. But I didn't which is also the title of the interior film , felt that a second story was necessary if you like .1 within the first, for which I wanted Bulle ask him to come as a scriptwriter. I asked [Ogier] and Marie-France [Pisier], in ROSENBAUM: Were cartoons an order to have another feminine pair, him just to come and talk with us o'n the both in opposition and in relation to the influence? first. But we didn ' t know at all either same level, and he was present during all RIVETTE : Oh, yes . Definitely. But it what the second story would be or the mechanism between the two-tha t' s the shooting. was important as an idea only at the be- what took the longest to organize. It was ginning . If we'd had more time and by approximation, groping. It was ADAIR: It wasn't that you wanted money we would have pursued it more Eduardo who suggested the Henry systematically. Although it might not James novel [The Other House] which we someone to write the dialogue in the have changed anything. And the actres- started from, which he hadn't read him- ses had this in mind all the time, espe- self but had heard about. In fact, none of house? cially Juliet. Everything she does is al- us has read it because we couldn' t find it. ways very visual, physical. Her move- Eduardo read only the dramatization, RIVETTE : Not really . Maybe a little . ments are very staccato-the way she which is apparently very boring; and I walks, the way she eats the candy. don't read English well enough. When you' re having discussions like GILBERT ADAIR: And FeuiJIade? We didn't want this to be a realistic that, it's always useful to have several RIVETTE : Not at all . I don' t find the investigation-we sought a less realistic film very Feuillade-like. The scene with principle. We thought of lots of things, people to toss out ideas. Eduardo had the girls in black tights was just a gag, like Bioy Casares-Morel's Invention . The lasting only thirty seconds. da y when we were really happy, when I already worked with Suzanne Schiffman ADAIR: But the whole idea of fantasy felt we'd found the trigger, was the da y in the open air . . . we had the idea of the candy. Because on the PHENIX project, and we were used RIVETTE: Yes, but that's because we that was what permitted us to bring ev- were broke. It wasn't at all a theoretical erything together. to discussing things together very in- position . When we were looking for the house, we wanted it to be very homey; in formally. It wasn't at all work. In fact, fact, it's a completely normal house, but we filmed it in such a way that it seems a during the shooting, Eduardo wrote two scenes in their entirety; everything else was done with us . The scenes in the house had to be written; those between the two girls were largely written by the actresses themselves . Their dialogue wasn't definitive, but a sort of canvas on which we improvised afterward. After all, there were many precise things that had to be said; it couldn' t be totally im- provised. And there was a whole system of repetition in the house, so that had to be completely written. Marie-France, Bulle, Eduardo, and I wrote out the prin- cipal scenes. But Bulle's monologue when she's bleeding and the scene just after, between Marie-France and Barbet [Schroeder], were done only by Eduardo. ADAIR: In OUT there are explicit refer- ences to \"The Hunting of the Snark,\" and the whole of CELINE ET JULIE is satu- rated with the spirit of Lewis Carroll. What role did Alice in Wonderland play in the conception of the latter film? little unnatural. And we were lucky to ROSENBAUM: When did you shoot RIVETTE: We thought of it in the first find the cats there . We didn't bring the scenes in the house? scene. We wanted Juliet's dash in front them . All the cats are in the film simply RIVETTE: In the middle of the shoot- of Dominique on the park bench to re- because they were there. ing. At first we thought of doing it later, mind one a bit of the White Rabbit. The ROSENBAUM: When was script writ- and then for all sorts of practical idea was that Dominique would chase ing introduced into the project? reasons-because both girls had to talk her and they would both fall, not into the RIVETTE: There never really was a about the house in their scenes rabbit hole, but into fiction . written script. What is a scenario, after together-we had to shoot it earlier. On ROSENBAUM: Why did you choose all? If it's a project for a film, or, on the the whole, the shooting was in three the title OUT? contrary, something written and then parts: first we shot more or less every- RIVETTE: Because we didn't succeed 1. Eduardo de Gregorio has informed me that the thing corresponding to the first part of in finding a title . It's without meaning . film's conception was also directly inspired by Frank the film-all the exteriors (the chase, Tashlin's ARTISTS AND MODELS, which he saw with etc.) and the \"annexes\" (like the It's only a label. Rivette during the summer of 1973. O.R.) cabaret); then the scenes in the house; LAUREN SEDOFSKY: And SPECTRE? RIVETTE : I wanted the shorter version FILM COMMENT 21

RIVETTE CONTINUED nificance. Some things that I couldn't we tried to make it as different from OUT to have its own title. I seriously looked use in SPECTRE are all right in the longer as possible, working with the same mat- for one. There are so many readings pos- version. The w hole actor-spectator rela- erial. We didn' t quite succeed since, con- sible that finally there's none . tionship is totally different in OUT, be- trary to what I thought, there were ADAIR: How much was th e cause there the actors are much more things that couldn't be changed. The spectator's comfort a consideration in actors than characters . There are many center of the four-hour film resembles OUT? more scenes where the sense of improvi- that of the twelve-hour version quite a RIVETTE: To begin with, we never re- sation is much stronger, even to the bit. On the other hand, the first and last ally envisaged making a twelve-hour point of admitting lapses, hesitations, hours are quite different. Not film. We had the idea of dividing it into and repetitions . There are some of these dramatically-we couldn ' t alter the parts to be shown on televisi on-which , in SPECTRE, but relatively few , because chronology of the sequences or it would I realize now, would have been a disas- we treated it much more as a fiction have turned into something I didn't ter. The ideal form of viewing the film about certain characters. In the longer want to do, something along the lines of would be for it to be distributed like a version, the dramatic events are a lot Robbe-Grillet. The feeling of time is book on records; as, for example, with a more distant from each other, and be- quite different, of course, because in the fat novel of a thousand pages. Even if tween them are lon g undramatic long version almost nothing happens for one's a very rapid reader-which, as it stretches. the first three or four hours. It's only happens , is n ' t my case-one never ADAIR : For yo u, is the \" ideal\" spec- documentary sequences of the two thea- reads the book in one sitting, one puts it tator someone who sees the actors as ter groups, Jean-Pierre [Leaud]'s dis- down , stops for lunch, etc. The ideal actors, or someone who . . . tribution . of envelopes on thing was to see it in two days, which RIVETTE: No, he's someone who's Champs-Elysees, or the various petty allowed one to get into it enough to fol- taken in. In any case, there's no \"ideal\" thefts committed by Juliet [Bertol. OUT low it, with the possibility of stopping spectator. Even when one sees a film a also ends with very long sequences in four or five times. second time, one is always a different which each of the actors more or less \"goes to pieces\" in front of the camera. It was impossible to keep extracts of this, since the interest of this was in the total duration of each scene. But contrary to what most people believe, one doesn't learn any more in the long version than in the short one. I'd hoped to make not one but several films of normal length, one on each of the actors, but we discovered that it was necessary to relate them all the time . And when we started CELINE ET JULIE, our intention was to make a film of nor- mal length. We even had to swear to it in the contract. But we didn't succeed. Perhaps next time we'll manage to make - .. ~ \" a movie that's an hour and a quarter! . ., .\" SEDOFSKY: What is the meaning of , . fl. the opening title in SPECTRE, \" Paris and ll. '.~ \"\";'-,\" \"\\ its double\" ?2 ~ RIVETTE : I wanted the two titles to ~ f '. indicate that the film was shot in April Left: Bulle Ogier in OUT ONE:SPECTRE. Ri ght : Dominique Labourier in the cabaret in cELiNE ET JULIE . and May 1970-that, for me, is the im- ADAIR: What were the reactions at Le spectator. At least that's what interests portant thing, since there are many allu- me when I see a film again. SPECTRE, in sions in the dialogue to that period. It Havre, when it was shown that way? any case, needs more than one viewing. should be evident that the group of thir- RIVETTE: Of course, length changes It's too complex the fi,rst time; it has too teen individuals had probably met and much information . CELINE ET JULIE, on talked for some time until May 1968, everything. And the reactions were the other hand, is a film one understands when everything changed and they more emphatic, subjective, and indi- the first time. But to return to the ques- probably disbanded. vidual than for a film of normal length. tion , the \" ideal\" viewer is one who a- Some people left before it was over, grees to enter the fiction: it's the least ROSENBAUM: In the final sequence some arrived after the beginning; and that one can demand of a spectator. of PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, set in the among those who followed it from be- When I go to the cinema, I adore films country, there's a brief inserted shot of ginning to end, there were some who which draw me into their fictions , al- the Seine in Paris. Is the function of this wanted to see it as a test of endurance, though it doesn't happen very often. But shot at all related to that of the repeated others because they gradually got in- as SPECTRE progresses , this so-called shots of Place d'ltalie at the end of OUT? terested. But in any case, it was impossi- \"ideal\" spectator should gradually begin ble to judge. After you've gotten over the to realize-during the last third or RIVETTE: No. In PARIS it was a kind of hump of the first four hours, you mainly quarter-that the fiction is in fact a trap, psychological flashback, to remind one feel inclined to stay and see it through. that it's full of cracks and completely arti- of an earlier scene on the Pont des Arts, But that's a facile solution, because all of ficial, in every sense of the word, and has while in OUT the shots of Place d 'Italie one's criteria for what is good or bad were inserted with no psychological im- disappear , a~d one is experiencing plications, but frankly as empty spaces. purely the dure. only been a vehicle. 2. The action of SPECTRE is preceded by three in- There are some sequences which I ROSENBAUM : To what extent is a troductory titles, which read as follows: \" Hypothesis-location of the story: I Paris and its think are failures, but after a certain viewing of OUT necessary to an apprecia- double. The time: I April or May 1970. Meaning of number of hours, the whole idea of suc- tion of SPECTRE? cess and failure ceases to have any sig- RIVETTE : When we edited SPECTRE, the story:\" a ·R.) 22 SEPTEMBER 1974

As a kind of visual silence, like the si- the same in the other films. Because even So in CELINE ET JULIE we made a great effort to control that, after the experience lences in modern music. But it wouldn't in PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT and OUT of OUT, and remain as much as possible within a comic framework . Certain have been possible to have a blank (L' AMOUR FOU was an exception) we scenes between Dominique and Juliet became much more dramatic than we screen for tha t length of time. I find these went through the same process: begin- anticipated-which is just as well, be- cause they were only moments. But shots very disturbing. ning with a certain number of characters, there's no more \"truth\" in this film than in the others . The only truth is that of th e SEDOFSKY: In both films , there is also with certain relations between them , and filmstock and the actors. a use of still shots . . . then arriving at a stage in the preparation ADAIR: But it is nevertheless remark- able that what you call only a mechanism RIVETTE: There's no relation . In of the project where there was very little in both PARIS and OUT-the idea of a conspiracy-obviously permits a thema- PARIS, the scene we shot with the Finnish dramatic action. The characters have re- tic reading. model is one which I didn't like at all, lations, they meet and so on, but they and the stills were inserted only because really belong to different worlds. And the film that we shot was unusable. On then there's a stage-which was the the other hand, the stills in SPECTRE were same for CELINE ET JULIE as for the the result of our naive hope that our others-which comes later, sometimes twelve-hour version would be shown on very late, that involves using a kind of television as a serial-in eight episodes fiction which I always see at first as a lasting an hour and a half each. So at the background and a mechanism, not the RIVETTE: I could have found another beginning of each episode we used about underlying motivation. Purely a narra- mechanism , I suppose. But in OUT I fifteen stills as a kind of visual summary tive mechanism. It simply happened that didn't want to repeat PARIS , but to do a of the preceding episode. They aren't when I wrote PARIS this mechanism be- critique of it. When I decided to use His- single frames, but simply production came too important: this fiction of the toire des treize, it was as a critique of PARIS , stills. When we tried a shorter version, Organization, which was really there which tried to show more clearly the van- our first montage ran five and a half only to connect all the elements, became ity of this kind of utopian group, hoping hours. Then to make a commercially more important than I had planned . to dominate society. It begins by being feasible length, we used the stills to In OUT, I was already more careful, fascinating and tempting, but in the tighten the editing, much the way that because the idea of the \"thirteen\" came course of the film comes to be seen as Jean-Luc uses titles more and more in his rather late. For a long time we thought futile. films, as in LA CHINOISE. Every time there that the characters might never meet; • was an editing problem he had recourse perhaps there would be five or six com- ROSENBAUM: After your experience to a title. But finally we spent more time pletely different stories. We just didn't of directing La Religieuse on the stage, 3 on these photos than on anything else, know. Still, I had the idea that some- does improvisational theater hold any because there were a priori so many pos- thing should bring them together, and so interest for you? sibilities. We wanted the relation be- it was Histoire des treize. But it was just a RIVETTE: No. La Religieuse was an op- tween the film and the stills to be neither mechanism . In PARIS and, even more, in portunity that presented itself, and it too close nor too distant, so it was very OUT, I don't take the whole idea of the wasn't very successful. Luckily, there difficult to find just the right solution . search for meaning seriously. It was a was Anna Karina, who wanted to play Then we added the sound to the stills. convenience to bring about the meet- the main part. She gave an interest to the They didn't work without sound, be- ings, but it didn't work with either film, play, which was otherwise quite unsuc- cause the silences interrupted either because they were taken to be films cessful. In any event, it was a totally trad- noises that were very loud or others that about a search. I tried and failed to make itional theater piece. For me, the theater were just murmurs. Silence didn't pro- people understand, as the film progres- is much more a subject for films, as a duce the effect we wanted. I wanted sed, that this search led to nothing: at the metaphor of jeu and a meeting place for something purely artificial: what we end of PARIS, we discover that the Or- actors which allows for interaction . have is just a meaningless frequency, as ganization doesn't exist; and the more ADAIR: And the film, LA RELI- if produced by a machine, which inter- OUT progresses, the more evident it be- GIEUSE-what does that represent for rupts the fiction-sometimes sending comes that this new organization of the you now? messages to it, sometimes in relation to thirteen which appeared to have been RIVETTE: I haven't been back to see it what we've already seen or are going to formed never really existed. There had for years. It's far from a success. It was see, and sometimes with no relation at only been a few vague conversations be- the film where I had the greatest means all. Because there are stills from scenes, tween completely idealistic characters at my disposal, but still not enough, espeCially toward the end, which don't without any real social or political roots. which is the worst situation-so it was appear in the body of the film and are In each case there was a first part where the hardest to make. One can get by with frankly quite incomprehensible. we assembled a story of a search, and a very little money if one's making a con- ROSENBAUM: Do you find that the second part where little by little we temporary film, but insofar as this was a \"search for meaning\" that creates a ten- wiped it out., costume film, with a script, it was noth- sion in SPECTRE and all your other films is For me, CELINE ET JULIE is not very ing but problems. During the shooting, resolved at all in CELINE ET JULIE? different, except insofar as the decision we were completely submerged in prob- RIVETTE: In comedy we pretend to to make a comedy is more emphasized. lems of decor, costumes we didn't resolve things. And in non-comedy one To my mind, OUT is also a kind of com- have ... we had to pretend, to create an ends with a non-resolution. But it edy. It's less obvious in SPECTRE, because illusion. It was a very difficult shooting doesn't seem at all evident to me that the condensation dramatizes it much and moreover, I'd been turning it over in there's a resolution at the end. After all, more. And even the fact that we impro- my mind for too long. Having said that, I in the last scene the girls' roles are vised led to an atmosphere of psycho- should one day like to do a film of reversed-but of course that's just a drama, and was more likely to create a mise-en-scene in costume. 4 LA RELIGIEUSE pirouette . .. situation of aggression and violence. It's may appear to be an uncharacteristic SEDOFSKY: Can we say, perhaps, very difficult to arrive at something more that the theme of the search in your ear- subtle. Because violence is the simplest 3. Presented at Studio des Champs-Elysees in 1963, two years before Rivette shot the film based on lier films has become, in CELINE ET JULIE, way: this is what's been happening in Diderot's novel. a.R.) a formal problem? the theater for the past fifteen years. The 4. In fact, Rivette's PHENIX project is a costume film set in the late nineteenth century, with a central RIVETTE: It's purely a question of film easiest thing in the world is to roll on the role designed for Jeanne Moreau. (J.R.) construction. Let me add that for me it's ground. FILM COMMENT 23

RIVETTE CONTINUED many whom I greatly admire. It depends when one has ambitions that are at the work, but it isn't one for me. on the moment: six months ago I would same time very vast and very vague. ROSENBAUM: There seems to be a have said Fellini, but AMARCORD was like Then, as soon as one begins to work on Bressonian side to the film .. . a cold shower after the extraordinary the practical side, one is faced with very SATYRICON and ROMA. Jancso, in his last concrete problems-relations with those RIVETTE: Perhaps, but that wasn't my films . .. Straub. The latest Bresson whom one is working with, especially idea at all. It was much more ambitious . [LANCELOT DU LAC] I find magnificent. the actors, followed by even more con- Toutes proportiol1s gardes , it was my idea And [Werner] Schroeter, whom I didn' t crete problems in the shooting and to make a film in the spirit of Mizoguchi. like at first, excites me more and more; editing. But it's not Mizoguchi. There was an at- above all, THE DEATH OF MARIA tempt to make a film with extended takes MALIB-RAN and EIKA KATAPA. And Car- SEDOFSKY: But obviously the con- or even one-shot sequences, with a flex- melo Bene .. .. Resnais' STAVISKY is a crete problems don't efface the clearly ible camera and rather stylized perfor- beautifully filmed object, limited by a theoretical structure of your films , the mances . So for me it was a deliberately laborious script. \"play of elements\" which is a \"produc- theatrical film. But because we didn' t tion of significance\" ... have more time and a more homogene- ROSENBAUM: What do you think of ous cast, the theatrical side was seen by film criticism in France today? RIVETTE: There are two principle everyone as a fault. Whereas it was in ways of making films. One can make it fact deliberate to have such a theatrical RIVETTE: There isn't any . I was very alone as an auteur, if you like; make a style of acting, with a very frontal excited by everything Cahiers du cinema product, a fabrication which corres- mise-en-scene in relation to the camera . had begun several years ago, but this ponds as much as possible to one's re- But this would have required more time was subsequently left hanging for the flective activity. There is a family of such for rehearsals, to harmonize actors from sake of something much less interesting directors: Murnau, Dreyer, Eisenstein, a very different professional backgrounds. and quite utopian. certain part of Godard, Bresson, Straub, and in a certain way Schroeter, von ROSENBAUM: To turn to other direc- SEDOFSKY: Do you find any relation- Sternberg. And then there is another tors' films ... How do you feel about the ship between your cinematic research way, which consists of making the film \" American Underground\"? and the work of such writers as Derrida, with others, meeting with certain other Kristeva, or Barthes? RIVETTE: I would like to see a lot people. This \" family would be Griffith, more; I've seen very few . I had certain RIVETTE: I really don' t want to talk reservations about this kind of cinema, about it ...[Laughter.] Renoir and Rossellini . And as for myself, which for me was associated with film- I have no desire to make a film of the first makers whose work didn't interest me at SEDOFSKY: But when you've de- method. Even with LA RELIGIEUSE, it all, like Kenneth Anger or certain old scribed the mechanism of SPECTRE, here wasn't completely mise-en-scene . Even films by Curtis Harrington. It's only re- and elsewhere, you have used terms PARIS isn't really in that vein, and cer- cently that I've come to see some com- which make one think of semiological tainly since L' AMOUR FOU I've realized pletely different films: two by Michael discourse .. . that working the first way, as Snow which excited me very much, BACK metteur-en-sc'ime , didn't interest me, in AND FORTH and LA REGION CENTRALE, al- RIVETTE: Perhaps I've been influ- fact bored me to tears . though they bear no relation to the kind enced by my reading ... But of course I of cinema I do. I've also been very struck haven't done a serious reading of Der- In any event, I don't know how to do by films of Ken Jacobs (TOM TOM THE rida, Kristeva, or Sollers. The only one it. There are others who know how: I PIPER' S SON) and Peter Kubelka (UNSERE I've read completely and continue to simply don't. So I looked for another read with pleasure is Roland Barthes, method to get a better result. And there AFRIKAREISE) . perhaps because he is the most accessi- was the coincidence, very strong for me, ble. And he has certain things to say that just after LA RELIGIEUSE, and the ROSENBAUM : And the French which do relate to cinema, more in my whole business of the censorship, I had cinema now? case to SPECTRE than to CELINE ET JULIE . occasion to direct several television The few things that Barthes has written programs on Renoir. 5 They were delib- RIVETTE: Now, I don't know . I used about the cinema I find accurate, be- erately made very simple, because what to be very excited by Garrel, in 1968-69, cause, like me, he's more sensitive to the was interesting was to place the camera when he made all his important films sort of things that escape an overly rigor- in front of Renoir and let him speak, and one after the other. And Tati is magnifi- ous semiological approach. to show extracts from his films . First of cent. If we're going to talk about direc- all, we had fifteen days of shooting with tors who are widely respected, there are With any film, at the beginning there is Renoir in the country; we stayed with a very theoretical, very abstract stage him, lunched with him, so had plenty of time to speak to him. Then came three o months of editing with Eustache, in which we had time to view sequences again and again, to choose the ones we wanted. To see films which I thought I knew very well, which a priori would hardly seem to assert themselves on the movieola as much as films by Hitchcock or Eisenstein, for whom editing is much more important. But despite everything, the fact of seeing Renoir's films on the movieola made me see things differently . .~ ·~ 5. Three programs entitled Jean Renoir, Ie Patron for the program Cineastes de notre temps , in 1966, the CHINE ET JULIE. Left: Juliet Berta and Dominique Labourier. Right: Marie-France Pisier and Bulle year before L' AMOUR FOU. It may also be worth not- ing that Rivette worked as an assistant (stagiaire) to Ogier. Renoir on FRENCH CANCAN in 1954. O·R.) 24 SEPTEMBER 1974

DEAD MAN ' S FLOAT. William Holden in a pool just off SUNSET BOULEVARD. Alfred Appel, recently immortalized with a news- tial, dignified alley of huge provides a happy instance in which the break in The New Yorker, is Associate Professor of trees-degenerated into the despicable accomplishments of high and popular English at Northwestern University. This article is haunts of gigantic trucks roaring art may be considered in the very same excerpted from Dark Cinema , to be pu blished this fall through the wet and windy night.\" terms. by Oxford University Press. Nabokov's mise-en-scene, his prose Because the film nair is not a genre, its \"If you want to make a movie out of equivalent of deep-focus, creates a veri- properties cannot be defined as readily my book, have one of these [criminal] table dark cinema here, for the most or exactly as those of, say, the Western . It faces gently melt into my own, while I evocative aural and visual descriptions is a kind of Hollywood film peculiar to look,\" says Humbert Humbert (of in Lolita are in the manner of classic For- the Forties and early Fifties, a genus in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita), studying the ties films noirs, with their oppressive the gangster film/thriller family. The \"Wanted\" posters in the post office. It rain-washed nightscapes and their de- taxonomic tag first introduced by French seemed incredible to Nabokov in 1954 sperate, driven men-seemingly decent cineastes of the Fifties is appropriately that such a film might be made, yet it is people who have irreparably committed impreCise-film nair is a matter of not surprising, if only for one reason . themselves to their dreams, passions, or manner, of mood, tone , and Nabokov is an intensely visual obsessions, and are suddenly criminals, style-though its cultural attitudes are writer-\"I see in images, not words,\" he their respectable selves dissolved into concrete enough, its psychological ap- says-and his work abounds in images the \"Wanted\" poster imagined by Hum- peal quite direct. and scenes that are cinematic by deSign. bert. Although the most memorable of early \"Houses have crumbled in my mem- Humbert's thin guise of bourgeois films noirs-sHADOW OF ADOUBT, LAURA, ory as soundlessly as they did in the normality, links him with the central THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, DOUBLE mute films of yore,\" he writes in his characters in several films noirs, particu- INDEMNITy-variously penetrate the memoir, Speak, Memory; but in Lolita he larly some of the non-gangster roles masks of middle-class probity, many favors more sinister effects and an played by Edward C . Robinson. But other films noirs are, in the outlines of iconography which bring to mind more Humbert's affinities with nair characters their plots, indistinguishable from tradi- recent films. Describing his tormented are obvious enough, and any extended tional gangster films or thrillers (thus the first conjugal night with Lolita, Humbert comparison would reveal differences as 1946 version of THE KILLERS, and GUN recalls how, after all the hotel guests well as similarities; he is more a rhetori- CRAZY). SCARLET STREET, a domestic \"were sound asleep, the avenue under cal than a visual figure . A comparison of tragedy, and THE BIG HEAT, ostensibly a the window of my insomnia, to the west film nair with the quotidian world of big city crime and corruption melo- of my wake-a staid, eminently residen- Lolita is far more rewarding because it drama, both directed by Fritz Lang, sug- FILM COMMENT 25

APPEL CONTINUED films nairs of the refugee directors. worked more quietly than the nair gest that a capacity for betrayal and vio- Nor is the chiaroscuro of the American directors of the late Forties and early Fif- lence is human rather than \" criminal,\" ties, who often filmed on location, his and the expressive low-key lig hting of films of these directors simply an in- effects are sardonic enough, and truly the two films establishes a consistent dulgence of techniques left over from the subversive. \"A Boy Scout is never tone. heyda y of the UFA studio. It is instead scared,\" says the scout to the newsreel the cinematic expression of stark and camera in THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW What unites the seemingly disparate sorrowful and pessimistic attitudes that after he has discovered the body of the kinds of films nail's, then , is their dark had been confirmed if not heightened by man whom Edward G. Robinson has visual style and their black vision of the exigencies of their own historical cir- murdered and dumped in the woods; dispair, loneliness , and dread-a vision cumstances. Often effected more ele- Lang finds the chubby boy's ethic less that touches an audience most intimately gantly than it had been in Germany than amusing. And when a terrified because it assures them that their sup- (here, perhaps, the Sternberg influence), Robinson turns on the radio to hear any pressed impulses and fears are shared this melancholic visual style is also in- news about the murder, he must endure human responses. It is no wonder that formed by a mordant eye for the kind of an interminable \"Castola Rex\" laxative these old movies \" hold up\" so well cultural details that had been overlooked commercial. today, and that at lea s t one yo ung by most native -American directors. If moviegoer of the Forties should have some of their later American work would An equally unbearable and grimly found them strangely comforting. OUT seem slack (Preminger), careless (Lang), humorous tension is created in SCARLET OF THE PAST is a title tha t enca ps ula tes the or casually cynical (Wilder), it may well STREET. Hen-pecked Robinson, a frus- elements of loss, nostalgia, and anxiety be because their films of the Forties and trated painter, cowers while his monstr- as common to the film l1air as they are early Fifties had profited from the fact ous wife listens to \"The Happy Home atypical of what Humbert terms the that they were the product of an artist's Hour\" or \"Hilda's Hope for Happiness,\" \" grief- proof sphere\" of Hollywood . exhilarated response to a radically new her favorite soap opera. Robinson's own Masked as genre entertainments, the culture. hopes rest with Kitty (Joan Bennett), but finest fi lm s nairs are \" escapist\" works her initial appearance in the film augurs only in the sense that they consistently \"1 read a lot of newspapers [after my poorly for their future. Clad in a trans- avoid and challenge the se ntimentality, arrival in America], and I read comic parent plastic raincoat, she is less a piety, and propaganda , the programmed strips-from which I learned a lot. I said woman than a piece of packaged goods, innocence and optimism of most Hol- to m yself, if an audience-year in, yea r though it is Robinson who will be con- lywood films of the period. out-reads so many comic strips, there sumed. must be something interesting in them . The best and most influential film nair And I found them very interesting. I got Throughout SCARLET STREET, Kitty's directors and technicians were German (and still get today) an insight into the vulgarity is counterpointed by the or Austrian refugees . Although F. W. American character, into American soundtrack's rendition of her favorite Murnau and other directors susceptible humour; and I learned slang. I drove number, \"Melancholy Baby.\" The song, to dollars had introduced the Germanic around in the country and tried to speak always a joke to musicians, is no roman- style in their Hollywood productions of with everybody. I spoke with every cab tic descant here; it underscores the the late Twenties, refugee directors such driver, every gas station attendant-and dreariness of mass culture. Many films as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siod- I looked at films.\" The speaker might be nairs use music in a similar fashion. A mak, Max Ophuls , Otto Preminger, and Nabokov describing how he prepped for juke box dominates the opening and Curtis Bernhardt transformed the \" look\" Lolita ; actually, it is Fritz Lang, rehears- closing scenes of Preminger' s FALLEN of the American cinema of the Forties ing his own Americanization. ANGEL, and the cheapness of waitress and early Fifties. * Happily enough, a Linda Darnell's dreams is defined by good deal of their more Gothic baggage That Lang and Nabokov should have \" Slowly,\" the corny tune she continually did not survive the move to Hollywood, responded so similarly to the lies and demands . An animating if not animate and the blatant devices of Expres- trivialities of the popular arts is sur- object, that juke box is the cultural center sionism, which many of these directors prising only if one believes that directors of Preminger's small town, and its con- had abandoned long before Hitler's ad- merely pander to their audience, that tents and \"gonadal glow\" (to quote vent, persisted mainly in American hor- movies are incapable of criticizing mass Humbert) are an incessant, oppressive ror films . culture . A movie screen is the ideal space presence in the films of the refugee direc- on which to project such a critique. Al- tors; their soundtracks, frequently or- Characteristic of their films nairs is the though the studio-oriented Lang more refined and poetic Stimmung (mood) of the German cinema, which PRECURSORS OF FILM NOIR. Left: Marlene Dietrich in Joseph von Sternberg's SHANGHAI EXPRESS. utilized mannered lighting, rather than Right: Emil Janning s in F.W. Murnau's THE LAST LAUGH. bizarre sets, to render the \" vibrations of the soul.\" The chiaroscuro of this Stimmung might seem to have been per- fected in Thirties Hollywood by Sternberg's famous cycle of Dietrich film s; but their campy charms were de- cidedly lIon-Germanic, and their exotic settings were the fantasias of their creator rather than a refraction of familiar American surroundings, the solidly lo- cated domain of even the most stylized • Hitchcock's English birth dooms him to a foot- note, but he would reassert the Germanic style of his English thrillers of the Thirties in his American nojr masterpieces, SHADOW OF A DOUBT and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. The sharp eye of the expatriate is exer- cised in the former film , which also gave scenarist Thornton Wilder a chance to view Our Town from a different, less sunny perspective. 26 SEPTEMBER 1974

chestrated by other recent arrivals from that almost every otherwise idyllic to commemorate the beloved pets of Europe, stress the cloying qualities of American community now has its own movie stars. standard songs in a manner reminiscent prototypical Southern Californian com- of the Berlin musical caprices of Brecht mercial street, with its motel or motor Witness the hard-edged visual style of and Weill. court, its discount stores and garish DOUBLE INDEMNITY, one of the first film s Da-Glo signs, its gas stations festooned l1airs to use actual Los Angeles locations. \"AIways\" is used ironically in Robert with the competing banners of a price The furtive , initial rendezvous of Barbara Siodmak's black CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY, war, its glass and chrome quick-service Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray was and a jarring rhumba arrangement of lunch counters and its pseudo-ethnic filmed in Jerry's Market on Melrose \"Dark Eyes\" is offered as Circe's song in eateries, unpalatable in every way, their Avenue in Hollywood. The neat and an- the nightclub scene of the same bizarrely designed buildings topped by tiseptic surroundings mirror the dispas- director's CRISS CROSS. Projected by a dis- an enormous plastiC pizza or sombrero. sionate manner in which they plot her tant radio, the eerie and haunting strains But not everyone knows the degree to husband's murder. A close-up of Stan- of \"Tangerine,\" the narcissist's anthem which the film nair's view of roadside wyck, her eyes shrouded by dark glass- (\"Yes, she [Tangerine] has them all on America anticipates Lolita and the Black es, positions her expressionless white the run/But her heart belongs to just Humor Lolita would beget in the Sixties . face against a pyramid of baby food one-Tangerine\"), drift through the boxes, whose multiple cherubic images claustrophobic final scene of Wilder's These films in turn have their literary radiate the life that the childless woman DOUBLE INDEMNITY as Fred MacMurray precursors: Nathanael West's The Day of would deny, reducing her to a flat confronts, murders, and is himself mor- the Locust, and, more importantly, since image-a Pop Art Death 's Head, L.A. (as tally wounded by his double-crossing their findings were less freakish, the yet unpainted). accomplice, Barbara Stanwyck. hard-boiled California writers such as James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler Surface authenticity resounds Belles Dames sans any merci are a con- (whose education and residence in Eng- through films l1airs from DOUBLE stant menace in films nairs. Ella Raines' land made him a kind of internal emigre INDEMNITY through TOUCH OF EVIL. Its grotesquely \"glamorous\" get-up in when he returned home) . Their unremit- infernal or fallen world is ironically glos- Siodmak's PHANTOM LADY , a burlesque ting and gloomy depiction of a commer- sed by actual signs awaiting the arrival of of Hollywood \"sexiness,\" finds its musi- cial culture is especially telling inasmuch Welles' cameraman-\"Hotel Ritz\" (a cal equivalent in the cacophonous and as their stories and novels were, like run - down place), \"Jesus Sa ves,\" uncontrolled jazz performed by Elisha movies, offered as light genre enter- \"PARADISE.\" A blind woman sits by a Cook's band, and the lovely melody of tainments, often enough in the pages of sign that announces, \"If you are mean ''I'll Remember April\" is linked with a popular or pulp magazines such as Lib- enough to steal from the blind Help murder. In TOUCH OF EVIL, directed by erty and Black Mask. It is not surprising Yourself. \" \"WE DELIVER\" \"MORE FOR Orson Welles, the most Germanic of that several works by Cain and Chandler LESS\" read the run-on twin signs on the American stylists, rock 'n' roll is clearly readily became excellent films nairs , rear wall of Jerry's market, a happy acci- Lucifer's music. Played on the radio at though some literary critics, following dent that ironically frames the two lov- top vol ume to cover- up a motel crime, its Edmund Wilson's lead in \"The Boys in ers, whose murderous insurance swin- shattering decibel count is fitting be- the Back Room\" (1941) , continue to hold dle will cost them their lives. cause TOUCH OF EVIL is the culmination of this fact against the hard - boiled school. film nair. Crises of society and self merge DOUBLE INDEMNITY is perhaps the in the foreground of TOUCH OF EVIL, Like West and, subsequently, high point of the first period of l1air . Di- which was filmed in that graveyard of Nabokov, Cain didn't have to invent rected by Billy Wilder and adapted by American aspirations, Venice, Cali- bizarre phenomena pictured in his scenarists Raymond Chandler and Wil- fornia-a tawdry and decaying remnant novels. \"The Victor Hugo,\" described in der from a short novel by James M. Cain, of an eccentric millionaire's attempt to Mildred Pierce as \"one of the oldest and it is the result of a Signal conjunction of re-create architecturally Europe's glori- best of the Los Angeles restaurants,\" is talent. The film changes the novel con- ous past. an actual place. And viewers who dis- Siderably, and improves it by making miss as an obscene invention the funeral MacMurray a less cynical and more When the film nair went outdoors, its of Gloria Swanson's pet monkey in Average American who is unwilling to vision of America became more severe, a Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD have doubt- kill, if only at first-one of several subtle sci-fi forecast of the future, as dictated less never visited the elaborate tomb- shifts that draw upon the actor's by the realities of Southern Californian stones erected in Forest Lawn cemetery light-comedy screen persona and em- locations. Doubtless everyone knows phasize the viral nature of materialism. SIGNS AND MEANING IN THE CINEMA. Left: Stanwyck and MacMurray in Jerry's Market (DOUBLE \"America was promises,\" declared INDEMNITY). Right: Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT. Archibald MacLeish in the Thirties, and the film l1air records the erosion of the fabled open American road. A genera- tion that has suffered through the Viet- nam war, Watergate, and the ecological crisis quite rightly \"reads\" these films in the dark light of the moment. But mere- triciousness and deceit did not yet ap- pear to be the law of the land in 1954, when Lolita was completed, and Nabokov justifiably laments the way it \"was welcomed, particularly by left- wing Europeans, \" as an \"anti-American book.\" Lolita's tone is far too complicated for its attitudes to be reduced so flatly. Re- viewing the itinerary of the twenty- seven thousand miles he spent on the road with Lolita in 1947-48, Humbert says, that \" our long journey had only FILM COMMENT 27

APPEL CONTINUED to have absorbed something of the at- with frightening dispatch, truss together mosphere and visual style offilm noir and those innocent men. The scene in which defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the profited too from the example of its com- the fellow [Burt Lancaster] awaits his fate lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous pact yet trenchant mises-en-scene. in a tawdry, shadowy rented room was country.\" One could argue that Lolita Nabokov doesn't reme mber many film excellent, too. But the remainder of the belies Nabokov's conscious intentions, titles, but he does admire Murnau's THE film added a good deal to Hemingway, yet the emigre novelist's gratitude as well LAST LAUGH-a wellspring of noir didn't it? Gangster stuff ... [Nabokov as his naturalist's sense of wonder and style-and is not unaware of film noir, as grimaces] .. .more conventional, but beauty do shine through the narrator's I discovered inadvertently during a visit very well done . I did the screenplay of \" sa tirical\" observa tions . to Switzerland in November 1972. Lolita in order to guard it against such liberties. What did Hemingway think of The American continent in Lolita is not Returning from a walk, Nabokov and I them?\" about to be consumed by hell-fire or sink entered the dimly lit bar of the Montreux GERMAN SHEPHERDS. Top row, left to ri ght: Michael Curtiz; Otto Preminger, with cinematographer Harry Stradling (resting on camera) on set of ANGEL FACE ; Billy Wilder directing Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD ; Robert Siodmak directing Dorothy McGuire in THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE. Bottom left : Curtis Bernhardt directing Joan Crawford in POSSESSED. Bottom ri ght: Fritz Lang (ascot) directing Henry Fonda in YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. into the slime of Judgment Day, as it is in Palace Hotel. Standing at the bar, he or- According to his biographer, Carlos The Day of the Locust and TOUCH OF EVIL; dered a scotch, and I asked for a well- Baker, THE KILLERS \"was the first film Nabokov's contempt is aimed at the known aperitif which was not in stock. from any of his work that Ernest could manipulators who would homogenize, \"Good!\" said Nabokov, \" that's no drink genuinely admire.\" Its compelling noir despoil, or corrupt the \"enormous coun- for a man .\" Our rather tight-fitting over- qualities seem literally to have over- try,\" with its \" trustful\" inhabitants . coats still on, we began a three-way shadowed any objections to those con- Lolita personifies an innocence that was badinage with the barman on the un- siderable \"liberties,\" which are not en- surrendered in advance of Humbert's availability of that aperitif. \"We're like tirely scorned by Nabokov, either, his foul assaults . A \" tender charm\" Hemingway's killers,\" observed grimace notwithstanding. The killing of nevertheiess manages to linger about the Nabokov, speaking out of the corner of \" tragic\" nymphet, a casebook victim of his mouth in mock-gangster fashion . Pop culture whose youth has been claimed and denied by two armed forces . Pointing to his wide-brimmed gray Although Nabokov may not share the fedora, placed in gentlemanly fashion on extreme pessimism of the film noir, a bar stool, Nabokov said, \" I should re- Lolita's definitive indictment of a corro- turn it to my head, no?, and heighten the sive mass culture is very much in the realism. I loved 'The Killers' and the spirit of film noir. [initiaU film version, too [1946, Siodmak] : the first scene in the diner was superb, Humbert is no \"underworlder\" fan , each detail so exact, the unappetizing yet his research-oriented creator seems kitchen in which the killers, working 28 SEPTEMBER 1974

Quilty parodies some of that \"gangster tion . BRUTE FORCE and POSSESSED are America from 1944 to 1954. The seduc- stuff,\" of course, but the death-dealing cases in point. Some of Lolita' s first read- tion atThe Enchanted Hunters occurs on dark sedan which rushes through the ers (1955) may have remembered those a \" soggy black night\" ; rain marks black nigh t of THE KILLERS, one of several 1947 films , but their functional thematic Humbert's unhappy reunion with Dolly fateful vehicles in the film version, pre- relevance is now as obscure as the Schiller; and the thunde rstorm which figures Humbert's paranoid vision of an storied background of one of Milton's accompanies him to Quilty's Pavor endless American road coursed relent- players. Manor heralds a downpour of effects lessly by an automotive \"McFate,\" a which are \" Germanic\" in only the worst \"Proteus of the highway.\" Humbert, who cherishes the tattered sense . The commercial success of THE KILLERS photo of his lost Riviera love, has much Humbert is as threatened and tor- in common with the prisoners of BRUTE mented by machines as he is by thunder: prompted its producer to advertise his FORCE , whose female cellmate is also an \"And sometimes trains would cry in the inanimate object, a pinup picture that monstrously hot and humid night with BRUTE FORCE as a sequel. \"MARK HEL- provokes their own sexual fantasies. heartening and ominous plangency, LINGER TELLS IT THE KILLERS WAY!\" de- That it should be a composite portrait of mingling power and hysteria in one de- clared the pre-au teu r lobby posters, the kind of actresses admired by Lolita is sperate scream\". The aura of \"steam, which for once did not lie or exaggerate. a fortuitous coincidence. Humbert's Featuring the same actor (Lancaster) and dreams of vengeance upon Quilty never smoke [and 1infernal confusion\" which directed by Jules Dassin, BRUTE FORCE is equal BRUTE FORCE'S image of the stool the most noir of all prison movies be- pigeon being driven under a steam Nabokov recalls so vividly from the train cause it focuses on personal obsession as hammer by convicts wielding blow- wreck in THE HA NDS OF ORLAC also sur- well as violent action. torches, but that fate might well have vives in film s noirs such as Raoul Walsh's entered Humbert's terrible musings. WHITE HEAT, BRUTE FORCE (with its im- To compare it with Lolita is more than a ages of careening, enflamed vehicles), stab in the dark. Humbert, writing his POSSESSED , an excellent film noir and the sam e director's THIEVES ' \"confession\" in prison, describes how directed by refugee Curt Bernhardt, is HIGHWAY. Dassin's nightmarish visual- he returned alone to The Enchanted more immediately appropriate . Joan ization of the rampaging and roaring Hunters, the scene of the crime, three Crawford plays a neurotic nurse whose trucks combated by a weary driver years after Lolita's disappearance, five hopeless and obsessive love for Van Hef- (Richard Conte) might well be glossed by years after their stay there. Having given lin drives her into a loveless marriage Humbert's descriptions of his own fear- up all hopes of tracing her and her \" kid- with widower Raymond Massey. When ful nocturnal locomotions or roadside in- naper,\" he tried to recapture the past in Heflin pursues her new stepdaughter, somnia: \" At nig ht, tall trucks studded \"autumnal Briceland.\" Leafing through Crawford slowly goes mad, has terrify- with colored lights, like dreadful giant a \"coffin-black volume\" of the 1947 Brice- ing hallucinations, and finally murders Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness land Gazette, he noted that BRUTE FORCE Heflin. Discovered wandering about Los and thundered by the belated little and POSSESSED were to come to the two Angeles , she is institutionalized. The sedan. \" Briceland theatres the week following plot and chiaroscuro speak to the condi- his \"honeymoon\" sojourn with Lolita. tion of Charlotte, destroyed by Along with Th e Am erican s (Robert Humbert's diary, and obviously apply to Frank's epochal book of documentary One would assume that Nabokov had Humbert, too, who repairs to a photographs) and Lolita , film noir culled these fitting titles from a news- madhouse a year after Lolita's depar- established a contemporary iconography paper ad or an uninviting theatre mar- ture. of the American road that forced its na- quee. \"No, no,\" he says, \" I saw both tives to see their environment with a new films, and thought them appropriate for BRUTE FORCE and POSSESSED , the allu- acuity. The concept of icongraphy, once several reasons. But I don't remember sions that got away, are a small matter to the sole province of art historians stolidly why . . .50 many years have passed. Was be sure, yet they do underscore the prob- limning the religious symbolism of Old one a prison picture? I guess I should lems occasioned by any allusive matter, Master paintings, has sometimes been have said more about them.\" Indeed high or low . It is safe to say that Lolita applied rather loosely by cin eastes. yes. nevertheless survives, as does the anal- Although the film 110ir tends to inspire ogy with film noir, buoyed perhaps by open-ended definitions, it does possess John Milton was able to assume that Nabokov's remarks about THE KILLERS . a pattern of imagery recurrent enough to his narrow seventeenth-century audi- The acute observation of roadside form an iconography as coherent and ence shared the same education and America typified by THE KILLERS and the recognizable as the \" underworlder\" rel- would \"get\" the classical and biblical al- Germanic Stimmul1g of film 110ir are ics burlesqued in Clare Quilty' s death lusions that now necessitate crowded everywhere in the novel, if not the film scene (cigars, guns, black clothes). The footnotes. The modern writer, as op- version. awe and respect with which Americans posed to unemployed scholiasts, is not regard their cars surely warrants the so fortunate . Lolita's most important That mood is, in a word , 110ir . grand designa tion \"icon,\" and the literary allusions, to Poe and Carmen, can Nabokov had employed German light- iconography of the car is central to Lolita, be recognized by a reasonably well- ing tricks in a few scenes of Mary (1926) , film 110ir, and The Americal1s . educated reader, but the meaning of but the \"endless night\" of Humbert's more commonplace materials may be despair called for open-air nocturnal ef- Quilty's tireless pursuit, his \"cycle of lost, since one generation's popular cul- fects , and they are sustained in the best persecution,\" is made more harrowing ture is another's esoterica. style of DOUBLE INDEMNITY , SUNSET by the constantly shifting rainbow pro- BOULEVARD, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, and fusion of his rented vehicles: Aztec Red, Billy Wilder used only the melody of other films 110irs tha t were not fettered by Campus Green, Horizon Blue, Surf \"Tangerine\" in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and the restrictions of indoor shooting. \" She Gray, Crest Blue, Chrysler's Shell Gray, the effect, a kind of aural shorthand, is had entered my world,\" says punster Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's more subtle than if he had allowed Humbert, \" umber and black Humber- French Gray, and so forth. The car hues words; like Milton, he could assume that land,\" the shadowland of memory and are very funny, but \"I didn't invent his audience knew the lyrics of a recent desire. them,\" says lepidopterist Nabokov, who hit song. But Thomas Pynchon's allusion cruised the country each summer in a to \"Tangerine\" in Gravity's Rainbow, that Crucial scenes in Lolita are inevitably series of secondhand cars chauffeured massive Pop inversion of Milton's marked by rain, as in numerous films by his wife Vera . \"I borrowed those col- method, is meaningless to anyone in noirs of the period, which give the impre- ors from commercial manuals on cars ob- Pynchon's audience who hasn't had the ssion that a steady monsoon deluged benefit of a democratic Forties educa- FILM COMMENT 29

AUTO MOTIVES .. From left : Van Heflin and Joan Crawford in POSSESSED ; Edward G . Robinson and Arthur Loft in THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW ; John Dall and Peggy Cummin S In GU N CRAZY. APPEL CONTINUED war car advertising, touting the millen- be removed from Melmoth and transfer- tained in Ithaca, New York, circa 1952.\" nial arrival of new models, took advan- red from his mobile cell to a real one, tage of that famine , as did film nair. where he has already died of a coronary Humbert's own car, a \" Dream Blue thrombosis. Melmoth,\" recalls many film s nairs and After killing Quilty, Humbert drives the vagabond cars which serve as home across open country. \"Since I had disre- Many films nairs are also narrated by and haven , death chamber or prison cell , garded all laws of humanity, I might as dead or dying men (LAURA, for example, all set in motion against the lonely land- well disregard the rules of traffic,\" writes DOUBLE INDEMNITY, or D. O . A . , whose scapes of urban and rural America. In Humbert, explaining why he then cros- hero, Edmund O'Brien, has been slipped OUT OF THE PAST, for example, Robert sed to the left side of the highway. \"In a an antidote-proof poison), a narrative Mitchum is never at rest or at ease, is way, it was a very spiritual itch. Gently, device which undercuts the old- never pictured in his house or apart- dreamily, not exceeding twenty miles an fashioned idea of \"story\" by revealing its ment; where daes he live? , one wonders . hour, I drove on that queer mirror outcome. What remains is the unfolding A car seems to be his sole possession, side .. . Cars coming towards me wob- of a terrible, fated action, the fleshing in and it is there that he confesses his past bled, swerved, and cried out in fear . . \" of the outlines of human pain and panic. to Virginia Huston (through flashbacks) . Then in front of me I saw two cars pla_cing Nabokov's account of the novel's This setup is repeated in the final themselves in such a manner as to com- origin, which may even be true, offers a scene, femme fatale Jane Greer in Miss pletely block my way. With a graceful moving and signal metaphor. \"The first Huston's place, the confessional booth movement I turned off the road, and little throb of Lalita ,\" he writes in its Af- transformed into a death cell; they both after two or three big bounces, rode up a terword, \" went through me late in 1939 die violently inside the vehicle. Like the grassy slope, among surprised cows, or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I car in the opening sequence of THE BIG and there I came to a gentle, rocking was laid up with a severe attack of inter- HEAT or the glossy corpse-bearing Pack- stop,\" as helpless as a car-boundfilm nair costal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the ard fished out of the wa ter at the end of hero/victim. initial shiver of inspiration was some- THE BIG SLEEP, Mitchum's car becomes a how prompted by a newspaper story coffin. The forward motion of the narrative about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes has stopped, too-a conclusion analog- The equation of cars with violence is ous to the end of another mordant [zoo 1who, after months of coaxing by a obviously not new, but distinctions grand-tour of the country, Frank's The should be made, for the film nair did in Americans. Its closing image pictures a scientist, produced the first drawing fact expand and enrich the iconography young woman and a boy, their faces ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch established by the gangster films of the blank from fatigue, huddled in the front showed the bars of the poor creature's thirties. Except in Lang's YOU ONLY LIVE seat of a cluttered car parked by the side cage.\" ONCE , a precursor of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT of a bleak highway in Texas. \"I was soon and BONNIE AND CLYDE, the gangster's to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, Refugee Humbert, the \"aging ape\" car functioned in narrow, expected thanks a lot, old fellow),\" writes confes- writing from prison, whose impossible ways: as an arriviste gang lord's \" status sor Humbert, a more resilient traveler, love figuratively connects him with that symbol\"; a chase or getaway car; an ex- who capers in prose for a putative judge pedient place from which to fire a and jury. EPITAPH . Orson Welles in TOUCH OF EVIL. machine gun. \"And while I was waiting for them But film nair personalized that vio- lence, removed those cars from a pa- [the police and the ambulance people 1 tently criminal ambience and serviced them in average filling stations, which to run up to me on the high slope, I made the fated action more immediate. evoked a last mirage of wonder and By drawing upon wartime realities, film hopelessness,\" another moment along nair quite literally drove its dark themes the highway during which Humbert had homeward. A five-year moratorium on realized the enormity of the loss suffered the production of cars had domesticated not by him but by Lolita. Eloquent and the American auto, had made it into a straightforward, in no way undercut by familiar worn figure, a member of the parody, the long passage represents a family whose own nutritional needs \" mirror side\" reversal of the reader's as- were also subjected to rationing. Post- sumption that the \"spiritual itch\" of morality is beyond Humbert. Released from his obsession by love, Humbert will 30 SEPTEMBER 1974

VENETIAN AFFAIRS. From left: Charles Bickford and Linda Darnell in FALLEN ANGEL ; joseph Cotten eyeing another merry widow in SHADOW OF ADOUBT; Lana Turner and john Garfield in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE . PHOTOS: BRITISHFILM INSTITUTE imprisoned animal, learns the language can movies, the consistent signature of \"r seemed to have shed my clothes and and records his \"imprisonment,\" and nair stylists in the wake of Murnau . his book is the \"picture\" of the bars of the slipped into pajamas with the kind of poor creature's cage, visualized literally THE LAST LAUGH records the decline of fantastic instantaneousness which is im- by a device borrowed from the cinema . an old man (Jannings) whose identity is plied when in a cinematographic scene Numerous directors and cinematog- dependent upon his \"status\" as a raphers have enjoyed the prison-bar Prussian-style doorman at a Berlin grand the process of changing is cut; and r had chiaroscuro created by light projected hotel. Unable to unload heavy trunks through the slats of lattices or venetian with his former aplomb, Jannings is already placed my knee on the edge of blinds. The device is far less blatant than stripped of his rank and demoted to the bed when Lolita turned her head and even the best stills might suggest, since washroom attendant; a heavy nair stared at me through the striped they are isolated, frozen moments of a rainfall has augured his fall. The film was shadows .\" moving picture. supposed to end with Jannings slumped in his mirror-lined cell, a condemned She had wanted to go to the movies Horizontal or oblique angles are fa- man sealed off by the striped shadows of that evening, a request realized ironi- vored because vertical shafts of light and a debilitating humiliation. (The subse- cally by the unreeling of the \" seduction shadow would be too obviously prison- quent epilogue, a \"happy ending\" scene,\" with its baroque nair mirrors and like. When they are employed dramati- foisted on the film by its producer, it as \"striped shadows,\" its campy horror- cally and economically as a metaphor for unconvincing as similar gratuities in film close-ups (\"my tentacles moved to- entrapment or a clue that all is not well in Twain and Dickens.) wards her again,\" and so forth). the seemingly calm world of the film , the Nabokov's camera follows Humbert to barred shadows are truly iconographic. Sternberg' s SHANGHAI EXPRESS, star- If they are merely indulged to interrupt ring Dietrich as Shanghai Lily (\"the and from the bathroom: \"r re-entered the the visually boring surface of a wall, as in white flower of the Chinese coast\"), sus- routine TV thrillers, the results will be tains Murnau's expressive visual. The strange pale-striped fastness where interesting only to students of interior shimmering bars of light that transform Lolita's old and new clothes reclined in decoration. the corridor of the train into another various attitudes of enchantment.\" As prison cell are a visual correlative for the bewitching as anything worn or shed by Although it is impossible to say who femme fatale ' s spell and the various de- Shanghai Lily, they are also a convict's first introduced this device, it is clearly ceptions that lock each character into clothes. present in the films of German (Wiene, himself. Nabokov greatly admires \"the Murnau) and \"Germanic\" (Stroheim, wonderful stylized chiaroscuro\" of these Toward the end of the novel, Humbert Hitchcock, Sternberg) directors of the two films , and his is not empty praise . recalls some \" fabulous, insane [sexual] Twenties and early Thirties. By the mid- The most illuminating iconography of exertions that [had] left me limp and dle Forties it was omnipresent in Ameri- THE LAST LAUGH and SHANGHAI EXPRESS , azure-barred\" from the silvery neon a dominant presence in film nair, also lights outside their room (p . 287). This POST MORTEM . james Mason in LOLITA. flickers from the pages of Lolita . cinematographic effect, which looks back to The Enchanted Hunters, sug- Humbert's first night with Lolita con- gests the extent to which Humbert is im- tains vintage nair footage : prisoned in \" the pale-striped fastness\" of obsession. \" The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton Stanley Kubrick's version of the glow came through the Venetian blind seduction scene is faithful to Nabokov' s from the outside arclights; these inter- film nair visuals, and the movie's open- crossed rays penetrated the darkness of ing close-up of Humbert painting Lo's the bedroom and revealed the following toenails, repeated in a subsequent scene, situation. is also nair enough. A direct allusion to the same ritual of enslavement as man- \"Clothed in one of her old night- aged by Fritz Lang in SCARLET STREET, it gowns, my Lolita lay on her side with her at first seems to suggest by way of ham- back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her mage that Kubrick's LOLITA will self- lightly veiled body and bare limbs consciously attempt the definitive film formed a Z. She had put both pillows nair. Although Kubrick improved upon under her dark tousled head; a band of Nabokov by having Charlotte die in the pale light crossed her top vertebrae. rain, a very nair scene, the most curious and disappointing aspect of his LOLITA is that it finally chooses not to follow the main roads traversed by film nair. ~';' FILM COMMENT 31

THE the market, always tries to be seen in the films-or even extremely successful most favorable light. ones. The notion that THE EXORCIST was IN· destined to become the biggest-grossing DUS· Whatever else can be said of Norman film of all time has continued to be Mailer's Marilyn, its concept of the \"fac- nurtured-and appears again and again TRY toid\" is useful. The film industry lives on in print-even though it's been obvious factoids, though those connected to the since March that the film is unlikely to ''PRINT 1HE LEGEND\" financial end of the business tend to be reach that height shorter-lived than those concerning the by Stuart Byron life of a star. Indeed , some last only bet- But the hype even affects the industry ween the time a feature finishes editing itself; it is folly to think that its decisions Is there a cure for pop journalism? Be- and the time it is released. In his book are made entirely, or even mostly, on cause of its familiar glamorous aspects, The Studio , John Gregory Dunne tells rational bases. Exhibitors booking films, because it is both an art and an industry, how Hollywood careers get going. Be- studios making deals, pictures being the film business continues to receive an fore your film has opened, while it is still cast-all of this is highly dependent on amount of attention from slick making the rounds of the private screen- what is, or feels , \"hot\" at the moment. magazines which never accrues to more ing rooms in the sumptuous homes To be the talk of Beverly Hills that even- mundane categories of capitalism . known as the \"Bel Air circuit,\" you try to ing, a production chief need only snare There's obviously a public out there get the word around that everyone the seeming- successful. And is it not the eager to read about the financial ups and thinks you have a hit. (\"Arthur P. Jacobs goal of every Hollywoodian to become downs of Hollywood as long as the prose saw it and he loved it!\") With luck, you've famous for hunches? Anyone can sign is laced with dramatic highlighting of signed contracts all over town by the up the obvious comers. colorful personalities. That failing, the time the movie is released to disastrous trend story can be concocted-a predic- business . So expectant am I that consumer tion, on the basis of a few recent exam- magazines will totally tow the publicity ples, of the direction of the film industry. More permanent factoids are created line when it comes to the business end of by cleverly confusing a picture'S gross movies that I was dumbfounded by the Obviously, \"The New Hollywood,\" or receipts with its net rentals. The gross is some such title, makes (as they say in the what a picture takes in at the box office; Ted Ashley, Superstar. magazine trade) for a \"sexier\" cover than net rentals (or just \"rentals\") are that does \"The New Soap Industry\" or even portion of the gross which is the dis- general accuracy of Time's cover story on \"The New Detroit.\" Trouble is, the ac- tributors' share-and it's the only mean- THE GREAT GATSBY earlier this year. If tual stories have to be sexy, too . ingful figure in determining how well a there's one thing that the uninformed Specialists in the field , whose back- particular picture has done com- will buy, it's that exhibitor advances to ground in the industry's history lead mercially. I've almost never known a re- distributors really mean something. Time them to look at any reputed \" new\" de- porter outside of the trade press who greeted Paramount's boast that it velopment with a jaundiced eye and was aware of the difference . couldn't lose on GATSBY because of an who know how figures can be manipu- (Admittedly, even the trade press can be alleged $18 million in advances with the lated, are not wanted . And so these confusing; Variety' s weekly list of the top proper skepticism, and found out from stories continue to be written by easy pictures is based on grosses; its year-end other studios that such monies are al- dupes of the film industry's publicity tally of \"biggest-grossing\" films is based ways negotiable after the fact if the people. on rentals.) movie in question flops. It should never be forgotten that it is in When I worked at Embassy Pictures, I In comparison, the supposedly hip the nature of the film business to have New Times struck out with its GATSBY vastly sophisticated advertising and once amused myself by going through post-mortem by Paul Gardner, which publicity. A movie company has twenty the files to discover that every profile proved, if anything, that an effort to ex- to thirty new products a year, and each ever done of Joseph E. Levine-even pose hype can be just as dangerous as one must be accorded a separate cam- Fortune's-reported that he had put falling for it. With a self-serving intellec- paign. Tareyton cigarettes can go for a himself on the big film -biz map by gros- tualism, Gardner assumed that the decade on slight variations of its \" I'd sing $20 million with HERCULES in 1960. GATSBY \"disaster\" has shaken Hol- rather fight than switch\" campaign, In fact the rental figure was more like $5 while during the same period a film million=-impressive enough for a company creates literally hundreds of dubbed Italian cheapie, but no her- campaigns. And each one must peak at a culean figure. specified time that is psychologically op- timum in terms of exhibitors or the pub- In 1968, John Wayne told The New lic. Moreover, the collapse of the studio York Times' A. H. Weiler that THE GREEN system has created the necessity for BERETS had grossed $18 million, and that intra-industry hype, too. Major com- figure was printed without comment. panies are constantly competing for Soon enough two conservative so- properties and projects, almost all of ciologists based an article partially on the which are free to end up anywhere. factoid that BERETS was second only to (Even in publishing, it is common for THE GRADUATE among popular movies of authors to be under exclusive contract to the previous year. Its rentals were actu- one house at any given time.) ally $9.7 million, and it ranked Talent-directors, actors-is always on 13th-which is about where, during that era, the most popular Wayne picture of any year would rank . Recently the Boston Globe quoted Gordon Parks, Jr., to the effect that his SUPERFLY ($6 million in ren- tals) had \"grossed $25 million.\" You might think that such twisting of the truth has no real effect, but actually it's designed to generate additional bus- iness for moderately successful 32 SEPTEMBER 1974

lywood to its foundations-as if that city cent corporate upheaval. This was cer- good copy to point to WB as a company ever thought that bad reviews alone a tainly what Columbia wanted Wall Street which puts commercial reins into crea- disaster make. Near the end of his piece, to hear, but it was obvious to informed tive hands, puts them where film buffs Gardner acknowledged grudgingly that observers even at the time that the com- have always wanted them to be. well, ... yes ... GATSBY will at least break pany would simply be the last to go even-without realizing that this admis- through an agonizing reappraisal. And But that wouldn't make for good New sion destroys the thrust of the article, here it is 1974, and new management has York copy. You can almost see this Karl been imposed on the company by a Fleming twisting and badgering his which is supposedly about the film as a bunch of bankers who were tired of red prose into shape in order to fit a precon- commercial rather than artistic entity. ceived notion of a \"Hollywood story.\" ink. This entails finding a colorful figure (in In point of fact, the GATS BY story lies But it is when New York is correct in this case, Ashley), making him into a precisely in its demonstration that you driving whiz kid who can be explained call \"buy grosses.\" That it will end up outline but thoroughly soggy-headed in via pop psychology (Ashley tries to among the twenty-five per cent of detail that it is most frustrating, because compensate for being short), and whose movies which make a profit (however of the opportunity lost. My heart lept up success can be attributed to factors small), that it was a film that everyone when I saw \"Who Is Ted Ashley? Just the which, however misleading or incom- hated but that everyone had to see-all King of Hollywood, Baby\" emblazoned plete, can be easily comprehended by of this indeed proves that the worst the across the June 24 issue of the magazine. the general reader. new kind of supermovie can do is break For surely the Warner Bros. success story even, and no doubt means that we shall since Ashley took over the studio in 1969 Thus, the \"secret\" of Warners' success be treated to more such films. It's curious is one that needs elaboration . To one under Ashley is attributed to those fam- to see a serious journal like New Times observer, the tale is basically one of ex- ous low budgets-the factor trotted out indulging in the worst sort of highbrow treme commercial intelligence in picking by any writer who knows that his read- wish -fulfillment while a popular one like the pictures to make, and the director ers may have trouble understanding in- Time has its feet on the ground. and cast to make them. And unlike telligence but none understanding ex- Paramount's, Warners' success in recent travagance. What isn't told by Fleming is I'm probably reacting too strongly in years cannot be entirely attributed to a that all Hollywood studios have given up favor of Time because I've learned not to blockbuster policy; a lot of Warners' big budgets since 1969, and Warners less expect much from it and was thus biggest-grossing pictures have to some than most. It's hard to think of a recent genuinely surprised. Back in the days extent been sleepers. Hollywood movie whose budget can top when I worked at Variety, we used to the $12 million spent on THE EXORCIST or howl in disbelief whenever one of the The New York piece is written by one the $10 million on MAME (though MAME news magazines manufactured a Karl Fleming, a neophyte in regards to was co-financed by ABC) . \"trend\" for a cover story. Newsweek put motion picture journalism. Surely it Jack Nicholson on its cover and declared would have been easy-and Ashley is then lauded for choosing that Hollywood was turning toward the fascinating-to get Ashley to talk about John Calley, a \"third rate producer\" at small- budget art film just when the just how WB came to certain decisions. the time, as his production euphoria which followed EASY RIDER was How did it know? How did it know to chief-leaving readers with the impres- beginning to pall. Time invented a \"re- make THE EXORCIST and not THE OTHER? sion that this appointment was highly turn to romance\" on the basis of RYAN'S DELIVERANCE and not ZARDOZ? WHAT'S unusual. Yet it is difficult to think of any DAUGHTER and LOVE STORY, though UP, DOC? and not DAISY MILLER? KLUTE current studio vice-president who was everyone I knew in the industry consi- and not LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE less obscure at the time of appointment; dered these films as aberrations amongst DAMN THING? BLAZING SADDLES and not in this era of independent production, the continued drift towards Mel Brooks' previous or subsequent pic- any famed producer had more to gain by male-oriented action-adventure. tures? SUMMER OF '42 instead of a score being on his own and collecting percen- of other no-name projects? tages . Is Fleming suggesting that But for me the biggest laughs have re- Paramount's Robert Evans was much sulted from the efforts of Clay Felker's There was, obviously, thought behind more than a nobody when he started New York to bring the glittering world of these decisions. Richard Lederer, there? Calley, as Martin Ransohoff's Hollywood to its upwardly-mobile Warners' advertising-publicity vice- working film producer, had been, at the readership. In line with its usual manner, president, once analyzed the time Ashley brought him to WB, either film-biz stories in New York are \"ups,\" DELIVERANCE success for me, pointing associate producer or producer of such demonstrations of heroism, inside dope out its very particular blend of highbrow movies as THE LOVED ONE, THE on how one man can beat out a tide run- veneer and rather standard AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, and THE ning against him. No attempt is made to action-adventure elements, and then CINCINNATI KID. translate what may be very dry or dull explaining how the advertising had reasons for success-such as simple in- struck just the right tone and the very True to the heroic mold, Warners is telligence in picking properties and slow release pattern maximized the po- painted as \"virtually moribund\" prior to projects-into terms comprehensible to tential. Ted Ashley Superstar's arrival on the a slick magazine readership. Instead, scene, a move that came about when that success (which is usually exager- Then there's the fact that Warners Kinney National Services, a conglomer- rated) is attributed to factors that are under Ashley has been more a directors' ate which owned Ashley's talent agency, hardly unique to the company or person studio than any of its competitors. No acquired WB in 1969. Fleming carefully in question. Ray Stark, no Bert Schneider, no Hal implies-if he doesn't actually Wallis, no David Picker, no Mike Frank- state-that Kinney took over the studio And that's assuming that New York is ovich holds forth there; it is difficult to from old Jack Warner himself. In point of correct in its general prognosis of a think of a WB picture of the last four fact, Seven Arts bought out the pioneer studio. Three years ago, Christopher years which had a more famous pro- in 1966 and ran the company as Warner Welles' panegyric to Columbia got every- ducer than director. In his book on the Bros.-Seven Arts for three years, during thing wrong. That major was seen as an making of THE EXORCIST, William Peter which time such pictures as BULLITT, island of prosperity in a sea of Hol- Blatty explains that he lost every argu- RACHEL, RACHEL, THE DAMNED, and THE lywood gloom. Its businesslike, ment to William Friedkin precisely be- WILD BUNCH were made. WB-7A might low-keyed management was seen as the cause Warners-unlike some other not have come on like gangbusters, but it reason why Columbia, alone among big studios he names-will always side with film companies, had undergone no re- the director. Surely it would make for continued on page 66 FILM COMMENT 33

NEW YORK been that extraordinary eighteenth- (only) a sunset view with a great red sun FILM FESTIVAL century Polish novel, The Manuscript dominating the picture. They go on PREVIEW: Found at Saragrossa, and the works of the being reminded of various sexual experi- twentieth - cen tury French writer ences, as card follows card-and each Richard Roud on Raymond Roussel, about whom Olivier one is revealed to us as the Sacre Coeur, de Magny wrote: \"His rhetoric of the the Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Triumph. The Spectre of Liberty imagination was thrown like a net into the teeming depths of the irrational, to Night falls. Brialy is not looking well, Luis Bunuel's recent films are the su- come up with an enigma that was co- his wife suggests; he really ought to have preme justification of the politique des herent, yet endlessly prismatic.\" This is a check-up. That night, he tosses fitfully. auteurs-perhaps the only one. Let it be a film Ii tiroirs : one story leads to another His bedroom is succeSSively invaded by said in passing that the politique was just which leads to another. They are not a postman on his bicycle, with a letter for that: it was never a theory, only a policy, stories-within-stories, and they are not him, a rooster struts proudly across the an hypothesis. One of the axioms was flashbacks; instead .. . well, listen. rug; finally a most disturbing ostrich that the great directors became greater as waddles towards him with a baleful eye. they grew older, that their recent films The film begins with Goya's painting After this terrible night, he does go to see were better than their earlier ones. It was of the Execution of the 3rd ofMay under the his doctor-who tells him that it is all a generous-minded, well-meaning no- credits, and the first sequence is an- nonsense. If Brialy wants to waste his tion, but in most cases it was simply not nounced as taking place in Toledo in money he had better see a psychiatrist. true. THE ELUSIVE CORPORAL was not bet- 1808. The Napoleonic armies have \"But I can show you the letter,\" cries ter than THE RULES OF THE GAME; CHIMES over-run Spain, bringing with them Brialy. As he is about to do so, the doctor AT MIDNIGHT was not superior to THE ideas of revolution and freedom. They is called out of the room. His nurse MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS; and even are fiercely resisted by the Spanish, not (Milena Vukotic) wants a few days off; BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, for all its only for patriotic reasons, but also be- she has just heard that her father is very Rivette-like fascination, was inferior to ca use their libertarian ideas are ill in the country. Of course, says the pre-war Lang. unpopular. The film begins with an doctor, and off she goes. execution-and as the Spaniards fall, But in the past few years-ever since they cry out \"Down with Liberty\". This On the road, she is stopped by an BELLE DE JouR-Bunuel has constantly is an historical incident, the only differ- army roadblock-actually a tank-and been extending himself; the culmina- ence being tha t they actually shouted the the soldiers ask if she has seen The tion, one thought, had come two years even more frightening line: \"Long live Foxes. No, she says; well, keep a ago with THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE chains.\" look-out for them, they warn. It is quite BOURGEOISIE . Now I have just seen THE late when she finally stops at an inn. SPECTRE OF LIBERTY and in it he has gone The execution has taken place in a There are other guests, too: four monks, still further. It has always been true that church, and the lieutenant stands mus- a Spanish dancer and her guitarist, a some artists \"peak\" early, while others ing over a sculpture group of a husband peculiar Belgian gentleman from Ostend are slow developers; but in Bunuel's and wife. He admires the figure of the (Michel Lonsdale), with her sinister as- case, there are a number of circum- wife, and his hands roam over her mar- sistant, Mlle. Rosenblum . There is also a stances which explain his having contin- ble forms . Suddenly, the arm of the beautiful young man with, we discover, ued so spectactularly to surpass himself. husband's statue rises, and conks the his old-maid aunt (Helene Perdriere). lieutenant over the head. In revenge, the One of them has been his return to lieutenant decides to disinter the wife's Soon Milena has got the monks play- France, where he has had access to better body and to spend the night with it. The ing poker iF! her room, using scapulars actors than were available to him either body is duly exhumed, and 10 and be- and rosaries as chips; it is revealed that in Spain or Mexico. Another contribut- hold!, it is in a state of perfect preserva- the son and the aunt are in love with each ing factor has been Serge Silberman; for tion, not only her body itself, but all her other in spite of the age difference, and Bunuel, he has obviously been the ideal par-a - pher- na -Ii -a. that he is trying desperately to get her to producer: supportive, encouraging, go to bed with him. She finally consents even conspiratorial. Most important of \"Par-a-pher-na-lia? What does that to at least show herself naked to him but all, however, would seem to be his mean?\" asks a woman sitting on a park when he turns round after she has un- French script collaborator, Jean-Claude bench in the Paris of 1974-putting dressed, we see that she has the body of Carriere. No one will ever know just how down the book she has been reading. a girl of 21. But, she repulses any further much Carriere has contributed to Her friend explains, and they part when advances. Bunuel's later films: one anecdote will the less literate nursemaid goes to pick give an indication of the special quality up her charge. But meanwhile, the child At that point Lonsdale invites them all he has brought to these late films . has been approached by a suspicious (they keep meeting in the corridor, for looking man of fifty; he offers to give her there is only one bathroom on the floor) The original title of Bunuel's last work some postcards, special postcards, on for a little port in his room. \"I like these was to have been THE CHARM OF THE condition that she doesn't show them to little impromtus,\" he says, as he sud- BOURGEOISIE. Why not call it THE DIS- her parents. She agrees, and is led off denly appears to them encased in black CREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, sug- home. leather from head to toe, with only his gested Carriere-and they did. A mere enormous naked buttocks exposed. detail, but one which leads one to think Mother (Monica Vitti) and Father Then Mlle. Rosenblum swings into ac- that Carriere has been responsible for (Jean-Claude Brialy) are sitting in the tion and starts whipping him. \"Go on,\" pushing Bunuel just that little bit more, living-room fretting like some Antonioni he urges, \"I'm no good, I deserve it.\" for encouraging him to take that extra couple as the girl comes in. Ignoring her The others, horrified, beat a hasty re- step-which is all he has needed to pro- promise, Veronique shows mother the treat. When the nephew gets back to his duce this extraordinary late flowering cards. A look of horror comes over her room, he finds that his aunt is now ready (Bunuel is now seventy-four years old) . face, and the nursemaid is immediately for anything. Whatever the alchemy that operates be- sacked. Vitti and Brialy start looking at tween the two men, the result has been the cards more closely: \"You remember The next morning, Milena is ready to staggering. that night in Milan,\" she says, \"when we leave when a stranger asks her for a lift to were just married.\" \"Yes,\" he replies, the next town; she deposits him at what Never more disquietingly so than in \"wasn't it wonderful?\"-and tosses the turns out to be a school for policemen. the new film. Its narrative technique is card aside. And we discover that it is There he delivers a lecture on the differ- unique. Its only predecessors in art have ence between laws and customs, point- 34 SEPTEMBER 1974

Goya ' s The Executions of Ma y 3, 1808, featured in THE SPECTRE OF LIBERTY . ing out the relativity of customs, and well-equipped tomb) to ask him to visit the coffin), Rochefort's prognosis, and the final slaughter. suggesting to the bored policemen sup- her in the family vault, if he wants to un- plemenatary readings in Margaret derstand \"the real mystery of death.\" The point of the film, it seems to me Mead . Then he gives an example from Finally, both prefects become reconciled, after a single viewing, lies in yet another his own experience. Last week, my wife and go off on a para-military operation \" double\" : liberty/sla very. Liberty is and I were invited to dinner, but when against the \"resisters\" in the Zoo; when something that everyone in theory we got to our friends' house, we found \" they\" are shot down, they too cry out wants, but of which most are afraid: long that the dining room chairs had been \"Down with liberty,\" but the final car- live chains, indeed. Surrealism as a replaced by toilets . Everyone quite nage is seen only in the unblinkingly movement was above all an exaltation of naturally dropped their trousers and cruel eye of an ostrich. A disturbing end- freedom, but Bunuel seems to be sug- lifted their skirts, and sat down for ing to a disturbing film. gesting here that another view exists . \"dinner.\" At one point, feeling hungry, Liberty is a spectre which continues to he asked to be excused, dressed, and The style of the work is mise- en-scene at haunt mankind, and Bunuel is perhaps was directed to a little room. There he sat its most invisible . The very simplicity, saying that this life- force is countered by down on a dining room chair, opened a the clarity of the technique contrasts another force, the fascination with en- little hatch, and began furtively to eat. with the puzzling complexity of the sub- slavement, with death. In the film , death ject matter: an old surrealist technique . would indeed seem to be the winner. Meanwhile, one of the police- And THE SPECTRE OF LIBERTY is the man-students had been called out on triumph of surrealist cinema-more so It's very easy to say this is a very road duty, and he stops a man speeding than L' AGE D'OR, even-because of it's Spanish view, but, for all that, it is. \" The through a small town at a hundred miles dream-like matter-of-factness, this dream of reason produces monsters,\" an hour. The man explains that he is on casual rendering of the nightmarish. said Goya; the dream of freedom does, his way to Paris to see his doctor. And it's too. Nonetheless, Bunuel would proba- true: he (Jean Rochefort) is next seen talk- Most of the episodes can be seen as bly say that this is no reason to abandon ing to his doctor (Adolfo Celi), who re- examples of the split between appear- the notion of either reason or liberty. veals that. . . but I'm going to stop here. ance and reality. There are the numerous Perhaps he is reminding us that these It would be a shame to give away the \"doubles\": the two prefects; the Italian two notions (both typically eighteenth- whole film . Part of its fascination is in the woman and the dead sister; the ostrich in century ones, be it noted) are more com- way one thing leads, insanely, to Brialy's bedroom and the \"real\" ostrich plex than most of us realize. Liberty another. at the end; the two doctors, one who means choice, and choice is frightening. assures his patient he has nothing wrong The last half is packed with equally with him, and the other who tells his The true greatness of the film resides bizarre incidents. There's a child who is patient he has terminal cancer of the in that it is not immediately understanda- supposed to be lost, and who stands liver; the Goya painting of the credits ble. 1t is an object for meditation. Writing there patiently waiting while her de- which turns up again on the wall of the about Raymond Roussel, Andre Breton scription is noted for a police call. There false Prefect of Police; there are two little said, \"I have always maintained that a is the animal-loving sniper who guns girls, the one given the post-cards who certian number of poetic works are im- down dozens from the top of the Mont- might have been abducted but who portant essentially for the power they parnasse skyscraper. There are the two wasn't, and the one who is said to have have to appeal to a faculty other than Prefects of Police, one real (Michel Pic- been abducted but wasn' t either. Sex intelligence.\" Beneath its lucid exterior, coli), one false (Julien Bertheau). There is makes two appearances, once in the beneath its classical style, THE SPECTRE OF the Italian woman (Adriana Asti) seen in form of sado-masochism, the other with LIBERTY is one of those poetic works: a a pub who reminds the false prefect of the gerontophile young nephew. coherent enigma, inexhaustibly prisma- his dead sister who used to play Brahms tic . f.'~. in the nude-and who suddenly calls But death is the star of the film : To- him on the phone (presumably from her ledo, the sniper, the tomb of the dead sister (her hair coursing through a slit in FILM COMMENT 35

Fll..M FESTIVAL tions, that I really got interested, and I prefer to work with nonprofessional PREVIEW: decided to start with this idea of a writers; I mean, I don't like too much to peasant boy from Southwest France work with screennwriters-except for Louis Malle on who ends up working for the Ges- one, Jean-Claude Carriere, whom I tapo. And then the film was enriched worked with twice, and whom I en- LACOMBE LUCIEN by the relationship of this boy with the joyed working with. But, for example, Jewish family-the essential of the film: Modiano is a novelist, very young, Louis Malle was interviewed in June by Jan Daw- the opposition between different social twenty-six years old; he's written three son at the National Film Theatre in London. classes, between this boy from a farm- novels, and he'd had nothing to do ing famil y and these Parisian with film before LACOMBE . It was in- LACOMBE LUCIEN actually grew out bourgeoises hiding in a town in the teresting: he kept telling me, \"I don't of three abandoned projects. One was Southwest of France. know how to put it, \" and I told him, taking place in Algeria, at the end of \" Don' t bother, just write what you the Algerian War; the next in America, I had expected the film to be a think, and then I'll manage, because at the time of the Vietnam War; and the commercial flop; it' s a long, difficult I'm supposed to be the director of the last one in Mexico, recently. I w as in- film with unknown actors. I felt that, picture!\" It's much more interesting to terested in describing a character like after thirty years, it was possible to ignore the rules . In fact, rules don' t Lucien Lacombe, but I wasn' t to sure in look at the French past without rais- exist; the language of cinema is still which historical context to place it. ing such a big turmoil. There have, being invented. But some famous After the clash between the students after all, been films like LACOMBE LU- screenwriters I've tried to work with and the Army in Mexico in '68, before CIEN before, which didn' t raise any have very set patterns. They would say the Olympic Games, it was very violent controversey. It's probably the impact \" You can' t do that for such-and-such and bloody. The Mexican President, a of this film-which is very strong reason.\" Very mechanical. And most of very tough man called Diaz Ordaz, and -that got people quite worried. the time they were better writers than the Mexico City police organized a I, so I felt insecure. group of young boys-eighteen, nine- • teen, twenty years old-from the For me, the most interesting part of slums, the lumpen of Mexico City, and I don't want to dispense with writ- manipulated these boys into a sort of ers, because I find it very difficult to being a director is directing the actors. civilian police force , with guns, very write. I hate writing. What I like about highly trained, and mixing it up with making films is working with a lot of the students in the demonstrations. For people. Working alone, just writing, I two or three years they were very ef- find very frustrating. But it's difficult ficient. for me to explain to a writ- er what I have in mind, so I have to Then in 1970 there was a new Presi- write a first draft: that's what I did with dent, Echeverria Alvarez, who was LACOMBE LUCIEN . I wrote a sort of more liberal; so the press started to synopsis , and then I asked Patrick speak about the scandal of these boys. Modiano to come and rescue me . Echeverria said that all the light, the MURMUR OF THE HEART was different: it truth would be exposed-and finally it wa s written in a fe w days, it just came was entirely covered. I was in Mexico suddenly. When it was finished I read at this time, in 1971, and came out very it to a few friends, and they liked it, naively with my idea for a film. They and I shot it. For LE FEU FOLLET I did had gotten these boys to practically the adaptation of the La Rochelle novel, disappear, to keep them from meeting but it wasn' t difficult: it was practically with journalists. But through friends I recopying the book. managed to meet with two of them, and talked with them, and started writ- Top : Pierre Blai se (Lucien) and Louis Malle. Bottom : LACOMBE LUCIEN . ing a story about one of these boys. Luis Bunuel was in Mexico at the time, and I remember telling him I was going to try to make that film . And he laughed: \"You 'll never make this film in Mexico. Even for a Mexican it would be difficult-but for a foreigner it would practically be impossible.\" And he was right. So I tried to make it in Chile, in the days when it was possible; but Chile was really so different from Mexico that it was not, in fact, possible. Then I tried to make it in Venezuela, but that was not easy either. So I drop- ped the project and came back to France. But I still wanted to go further with this theme. And then I had the idea of putting it in the Occupation period. I started researching, studying about the period, which I found really incredible. It's a period that's so confused, so complicated, with so many contradic- 36 SEPTEMBER 1974

(It took me some time to find that out!) FILM FESTIVAL ropolitan Museum sits on a sofa and freezes into the familiar painted image; And the most important part of direct- PREVIEW: the sunlit California boy satyrs of the drawings become reality; Peter emerges ing the actors is choosing them: the David Robinson on from the water to find himself in that strange swimming pool surrounded by casting is, I think, sixty per cent of the A BIGGER SPLASH glaring hunting trophies, still presided over by the serene lady of Hockney's performance. I don't believe in direc- A BIGGER SPLASH, directed by Jack Hazan painting of it. in collaboration with David Mingay as tors getting miracles out of the actors; I co-writer and editor, defies comparison Even apart from this exploration of with any other art film or study in specific images of the painters' creation, don't believe in the \"magic\" of the di- documentary biography. It appears to Hazan's color photography evokes the have taken both its makers and its sub- visual aspect of Hockney's universe: the rector. I have an enormous respect for ject by surprise. The painter David clear colors, the meditative regard of a Hockney thought that the quiet young door or wall or window or cut-out tree. actors, because I think what they do is men with their camera, who trailed him for the better part of three years, were You have the feeling (which the people extremely difficult. And for the screen making \"the sort of film where pictures in the film are ready to corroborate) that revolve to bits of Bach\"; and the makers this is not exactly the way things were . actor, there is always this moment of started out with a much more recklessly And yet it is more like the way they were, fictionalized impression of the artist in in the sense of being an artistic distilla- truth: when, after all the preparation, mind. (The plan at one time seems to tion of events and emotions. Hockney have been to show, without any basis in had collaborated with the media of the you say \"Action!\" and he is alone in fact, Hockney disillusioned and giving Sixties to build up a protective public up painting altogether.) It turned out to image, a clown face to dissimulate the front of the camera. So what I do is to be a portrait of the artist-in his relation- lucid intelligence and sensibility of his ships with friends, work, and emot- work. Here, by contrast, he is exposed in try and help them as much as possible. ions-of an intimacy which is nothing the most personal aspects of his emo- short of startling. tional and creative life-aspects which I've found that, sometimes, you have are most directly connected and most The filmmakers found Hockney at a vividly revealed in a scene(shot at the to direct actors in the same scene in a critical moment. A three-year affair with moment of the break-up) where he is a young Californian, Peter Schlesinger, sketching Peter, and in which the inten- different way . In LACOMBE LUCIEN, had just broken up, leaving the painter sity of the effort becomes a statement of unhappy and restless at the moment he love as powerful as any cinema can ad- there's a scene involving three was trying to prepare a New York exhibi- duce. tion. In the film, his frustrations are fo- people .One of them, the father, is a cused on particular difficulties with a A BIGGER SPLASH is a unique document painting, \"Peter by the Poo!,\" which he and an astonishing first feature. (Hazan Swedish stage actor, who was so afraid destroys and redoes. (Hockneyexplains had previously directed a number of that his real-life difficulties were entirely shorts, including one or two more con- of overacting in front of the camera that technical, with no emotional basis. The ventional are subjects.) Even allowing event remains, however, a valid sym- for the conscious and controlled values he was underacting. Which was surpris- bol.) of the film-the often breathtaking rightness of the image, the subtle jux- ing, because actually I had chosen him Reportage (of continuing events), re- tapositions, the perceptions of the construction (of memories of Peter), and camera-observer, the cool sensitivity of for his extroverted manner-something impressions (by the painter's anxious the handling of homosexual love-it is friends) mingle subtly and inextricably. an effort which, depending as it does on between a gentleman and a butler. So I Often the film takes off into surrealism as a particular chance combination of per- it follows Hockney into dreams-or car- sonalities and circumstance, the film- had to sort of push him, which I didn't ries the spectator, with the people in the makers are perhaps not likely to repeat. film, in and out of the paintings them- The fact remains, though, that Hazan have to do with the nonprofessionals . selves. Ossie Clark strides purposefully and Mingay proved equal to what into the Tate Gallery to stare back at his It's my job to get them to function portrait; Henry Geldzahler of the Met- chance offered. oJ: together; it's like being a conductor, more than anything else: trying to get the right tune. I don't mean that actors are instruments; they are instrumen- talists. • For LACOMBE, we used an Ariflex camera, a portable, synchronous-sound camera. Perhaps two-thirds of the film was shot with a hand-held camera; I had a very strong cameraman! And it really helped the actors. They didn't have to bother about the technique . We tried to solve problems of lighting and camera movement beforehand, so I wouldn't have to bother with them dur- ing shooting. Then, the essential is to get the best out of the actors. More and more, the technical problems are sec- ondary for me. None of the members of my Jewish family are really Jewish. I think it's childish to worry about having actors who are Jewish play Jewish parts, especially for what is really a mythical Jewish family. Only, Theresa Giehse, who plays the grandmother, is Jewish-but she told me she was Jewish only at the end of shooting. She's a fantastic woman. She created Mother Courage in Switzerland during the War. She had been quite a well- known stage actress in the Thirties in Germany. And Hitler, who as you know was very fond of actresses, once said that he admired Theresa Giehse because she was the perfect example of the great German actress. And the very next day she sent him a letter saying, \"Fuck you, I'm Jewish,\" and left the country. She's very famous in Ger- many for that! :{. FILM COMMENT 37

FILM FESTIVAL base); the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz, the authorities try forcing him to dis- where his wife Arlette poses beside a avow; Stavisky has a past which he has PREVIEW: Hispano with an autocratic Spanish unsuccessfully consigned to oblivion. arms dealer; Stavisky's aptly-named Their lives overlap, not just from the Jan Dawson on \"Empire\" Theatre. coincidences of geography or dates on a calendar, but because they represented, STAVISKY Like MARIENBAD, STAVISKY is con- in 1933, the alternative courses which cerned primarily with facades, though Europe might have followed. With the debatable exception of JE the crumbling structures they serve to T' AIME, JE T' AIME-his weakest work conceal are revealed not merely through The first time we see Belmondo- precisely because time, memory, and ob- the suggestions of a mesmeric camera, Stavisky, Trotsky's car has just driven livion are initially introduced as the for- but more concretely in balance-sheets uphill and out of frame; Sacha is de- mal constituents of a science-fiction con- and indelible dates. Isolated images still scending in the Claridge's elevator, ob- undrum rather than as the inextricable have a frozen, \"tableau\" quality, but this served by a vertically panning camera. ingredients of a perpetual present which time there is no escaping the volatile With wonderful iconographic econ- they both shape and warp-Alain Res- forces behind the magazine poses. Even omy-and the vertical movements will nais' metaphysical constants have gen- the flowers which become seducer continue throughout the film to provide erally been filtered through the labyrinth Sacha's trademark are as redolent of a powerful gloss on the broad lateral of his characters' consciousness. death as of romanticism; the limousine of sweeps of the action-Resnais evokes white orchids for his wife suggests an AI the system of balances and conflicting Indeed, it is not farfetched to view Capone hearse adapted to a more cos- interests which will form the real and Resnais' previous features as elaborate mopolitan elegance; and indeed the hidden subject of his film. ~:; psychodramas whose real subject is film's penultimate image is of a bouquet mind rather than matter (Delphine left outside a Paris prison by the last of Seyrig's in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD , Arlette's faithful admirers and the most Helene's and Bernard's in MURIEL). Even faithful of her husband's victims. the political preoccupations of HIROSHIMA-through the camera's sub- Death is an almost asphixiating pre- jective somersaults and the literary sence (a recurring shot of the funeral egocentricity of Marguerite Duras' pyramid in the Parc Monceau; Alexandre script-emerge primarily as stumbling ending his birthday celebrations by lying blocks in the conscience-crisis of a on the tomb of the father he had driven middle-class adulteress. to suicide seven years earlier), and the E'.~uivocal suicide in the Chamonix snow This time, with a script by Jorge Sem- is prefigured from the start. The film de- prun (whose credits since LA GUERRE EST scribes a rendezvous with death, and the FIN IE have included both z and THE wider implications of Stavisky's destiny CONFESSION), Resnais stands his estab- are also present from the first frame: of lished formula on its head. Despite the the exiled Trotsky arriving in Cassis. As title, his STAVISKY makes no attempt to his young disciple announces: \"Une climb inside the schizophrenic mind of page d'histoire est tournee .\" the high-society swindler whose expo- sure and subsequent suicide nearly top- Only toward the end is the connection pled the Third Republic in 1934. between the swindler's fate and Trotsky's-and with it the fate of Euro- Stavisky's life-style and false values pean Socialism-formally spelled out. (literally false, in the case of his most Yet the aggreSSively criticized inter- famous bond fraud) were at once the cutting between the private lives of these product and the symbol of a hypocritical two public figures is indispensible to the economic and political system, which film's meaning. Trotsky has a past which would be caught \" unprepared\" in 1939 when forced to confront the conse- STAVISKY. Top: The Claridge elevator. quences of its own contradictions and Bottom : Jean Paul Belmondo and (with viewfinder) Alain Resnais. whatever empire-building fantasies Stavisky realized in his lifetime. His mysterious death and the cover-up in- quiry into his friends in high places were sufficient for the Left to resurrect him as a martyr of the regime he had so adroitly emulated. STAVISKY is still a film about a state of mind . But the mind Resnais explores is not that of an individual but that of an era: the Depression and its aftermath of frenzied speculation. Not from contrari- ness, but from a circumspect method of arriving at the \"truth\" of each phenome- non by the study of its opposite, Resnais ignores poverty, unemployment, the workers (except for the Police, whose dusty dossiers echo Resnais' TOUTE LA MEMOIRE DU MONDE), and instead rivets our attention on the emblems to which the age so obstinately clung: the Hotel Claridge in Paris (Stavisky's operational 38 SEPTEMBER 1974

INDE- words and the decor and landscapes ject, P.O . Box 315, Franklin Lakes, N .J. PEND- they inhabit: the plastic retirement vil- 07417 .) ENTS lages of the Southwest (in which even the lawn is artificial), the kitsch hotels for SOUTH VIETNAM-A QUESTION OF TOR- Amos Vogel newlyweds (nude couples drinking TURE (Michael Beckham) Factual, de- champaign in heart-shaped tubs), the tailed report on the continued and cur- on documentary films rent use of political torture in South well-fed young Jesus freaks of Califor- Vietnam turns into an indictment of The stylistic reformation of political nia, the Muzak executives who confirm America's clear involvement both finan- cinema, begun with light-weight one' s worst suspicions . (26 minutes , cially and administratively. Produced by cameras and portable synchronous Films Inc, 1144 Wilmette Avenue, Ill. Amnesty International. Interviews with sound, has lessened the stranglehold of 60091.) doctors and victims provide visual data static documentary materials and difficult to refute; and a group of voice-over that used to be the dull hall- DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES (Abe paralyzed ex-Tiger cage prisoners, pain- mark of earlier productions, giving us Osheroff). Sad wisdom, disarming hon- immediacy and verisimilitude instead. esty, a muted yet clear radicalism per- --fully pushing themselves along floors But behind these technological advances meate this disturbing work. A former lurk the old aesthetic problems of form, American fighter in the International / montage and rhythm (the must truthful Brigades returns to Spain to discover thesis can make the dullest film) and whether his struggle against Franco had ATIICA PRODUCTIONS even more ancient problems of distribu- indeed been in vain; what he finds and tion: for if the insurrectional or reformist how (with rare documentary materials) (no wheelchairs, needless to say) remain filmmakers proceed to anti- he recounts both the story of that war in one's memory . (27 minutes, Granada Establishment films, the Establishment and America's role and continued in- Television International Ltd, Suite 3468, defends itself by rendering their exhibi- volvement creates a unique history les- 1221 6th Avenue, New York, N .Y. tion impotent or restricting it to the mar- son for a new generation not yet ac- 10020 . ) gins of society; in less \"democratic\" quainted with this indispensable lesson societies, the film is forbidden, the film- in turpitude and betrayal. (60 minutes, You HIDE ME (Kwate Nee Owoo). Sear- maker jailed. The history of all political New Yorker Films, 43 West 61 Street, ing indictment of the \"rape\" of African cinema, however, has proven its viabil- New York, N .Y. 10023.) art by its forcible removal (by colonialists ity and absolute necessity; \"dents\" are and missionaries) to the basements of made in the consciousness of some and THE FRAMEUP OF MARTIN SOSTRE the British and other museums; unseen truth oozes into unexpected layers of (Pacific Street Film Collective). This new in the West, unavailable to the Africans. society. If you want to be part of this film by the makers of the outstanding The anti-imperialist militancy of the nar- oozing, a 16mm sound projector and RED SQUAD (available from the same ration suddenly assumes further payment of rental fee will bring any of source) brings to wider attention the fate urgency when these artifacts in museum the following recent examples to your of a Black militant apparently convicted storage are revealed as ravishing, home, club or school: on trumped-up drug charges to 41 years . sophisticated masterpieces of world art. The evidence presented is detailed and (20 minutes, Tri-Continental Films, 333 ATTICA (Cinda Firestone) Winner damning; the interviews with pros- 6th Avenue, New York, N .Y. 10014) (with I. F. STONE'S WEEKLY). of the 1974 ecutors and others revealing; most sur- John Grierson Award for Best Documen- prising, however, is Sostre himself: a A CHEMICAL FEAST. Ferocious cooking tary Film, this important, feature-length charismatic, incisive, highly articulate lesson by Marshall Efron in which this work recounts the chilling, fateful leader-type, an impression further subversive concocts an utterly synthetic episodes of an American tragedy in strengthened by his tireless, often suc- lemon pie by simply mixing together all newsreels, original documentary foot- cessful attempts to change the prison the chemical ingredients listed on the age, interviews with inmates and prison system \"from within.\" A thoughtful, package. (11 minutes, Benchmark Films, officials. The film concludes that this important work. (30 minutes, Pacific 145 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, \"secret\" place, briefly catapulted to na- Street Film Collective, 58 Douglas Street, N.Y. 1051O.}~-: tional prominence and now once again Brooklyn, N .Y. 11231.) invisible, is in reality a basic symbol of America today. (80 minutes, Attica CAMPAMENTO (Tom Cohen and Films, 789 West End Avenue, New York, Richard Pearce). A reasoned, radical N.Y. 10025.) study of a \"utopian\" city entirely created by poverty-stricken squatters from the AMERICA: EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER Chilean slums who, under Allende, oc- DREAMED OF (Rhody Streeter, Tony cupied unused Church land to fashion a Ganz) Working entirely with (savagely new commune-type society. Their en- edited) documentary materials, Streeter thusiasm, originality and humanity have and Ganz are unquestionably the most since been transmuted into a somber important proponents of slashing, satiri- memento; one wonders what happened cal political cinema in America today, to the leaders, forever \"indicted\" on specializing in tendentious, acid self- film. (26 minutes, Impact films, 144 indictments of people through their own Bleecker Street, New York, 10012) L F. STONE'S WEEKLY (Jerry Bruck). Bril- liant, witty, hard-hitting visit with an ex- traordinary American -impassioned journalist-ferret-subversive LF. Stone, who believes all governments are run by liars and employs \"maniacal zest and idiot zeal\" to catch them. This affection- ate, moving revelation of a man- already a contemporary classic- is a memorable achievement in political filmmaking. (62 minutes, LF. Stone Pro- FILM COMMENT 39

HACKMAN Eugene Alden Hackman is forty-three and was born in San Bernadino, California . His by Pete Hamill fath er, a vetera n newspaper reporter, re- turned th e family to Danville, Illinois, where his paren ts separated when Gene was thir- teen . Hackman remained with his 1I10ther. Wh en he was sixteen, he lied about his age and joined th e Marin es, and SOOI1 found him- self in Tsingtu , China , in 1948, where he worked as a disc jockey for his unit's radio station . After discharge, he worked in a number of radio and TV stations \" in the boondocks\" until he moved on to New York to study acting. He married Fay Maltes e, a bank secretary, in 1956, and theJj lived in a sixth- floor walk- up, while Hackman worked as a doorman , a furniture mover and at other jobs, while scrall1bling for acting parts. He made his first Broadway success in 1964 with the lead in Any Wednesday. Earlier, he won the Claren ce Derwent award for his per- formance in Irwin Shaw 's Children From Their Games, which folded after one per- formanc e. At that performance, director Robert Ros- sen was impressed, and later cast Hackman in a small role in LILITH with Warren Beatty. Three years la ter, Beathj remembered Hack- man and cas t him il7 BONNIE AND CLYDE as Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother; it brought Hackman his first Academy Award nomina- tion , for Best Supporting Actor. He received another nomination in 1970, for I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER and won th e Best Actor Award for his portrayal of \" PopeJje\" Doyle in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. His other films include DOWNHILL RACER, PRIME CUT, CISCO PIKE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, SCARECROW, THE CONVERSATION, and ZANDY' S BRIDE. He is currently filming BITE THE BULLET, with Richard Brooks as director, and will follow that with FRENCH CONNECTION II, for John Frankenheimer. Earlier this year, he com- pleted NIGHT MOVES for Arthur Penn. This interview was done shortly before the opening of ZANDY' S BRIDE, which was the first American -made film directed by Jan Troell , who directed THE EMIGRANTS. The interview was held in Hackman 's ranch-style home in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children. ''~:\"\";: ZANDY'S BRIDE? I don' t know. I'm the world's worst judge of my own work, ~ and you get very close, and I always get very involved with the director, you u know, to the point where I don't know 1.5 wha t the hell is happening. So that sometimes, I couldn't tell you what is ci good, bad or indifferent. 0- Jan Troel!. Well, there was a language problem. He doesn't know the idiom. He 0 knows the language, probably better than I do, but it's a matter of expression. •1E Especially if you're doing a period pic- ture, where some of the words are trans- ~ posed, and the characters don't speak good grammar. And most of the people ~ around a film know when some thing 40 SEPTEMBER 1974 Gene Hackman in THE CONVERSATION.

strikes the ear right in terms of that doing when I got there. Or could I have the harvest alon g wi th Billy [Fried kin] period, whether or not it's really accurate gotten there earlier? Or was I supersed- and so me o ther people. But if there's an or not. I suppose it's not so terribly im- ing my tal ents? One never knows. I keep attraction , that's w hat it is. \" I know portant, but he would come to a place wanting to stretch, a t leas t within th e Gene Hackman. \" They' re able to say and just have to ask: \" Is that right? Why context of my ability. But you just don 't that, in some funny kind of way, you couldn't we say such and such?\" And it know how much of yo urself yo u 're know, \"Yea h, I know who that g uy is .\" would be very good grammar, but not using. At lea st I don' t. And that works both positively and nega tively, I think, because w hat it does particularly apropos. But I was strangely philosophical is give yo u a kind of familiarity, wi thout We finally got to a place where we about my work. Or defensive. Because I th e mystique-which is wha t people are never really felt I was being he ld back. I really attracted to, I think . worked quite well together, where we built up a kind of defense that said, \" If I kind of respected each other. But I also get it, fin e; if I don't, that' s fine too .\" I There's severa l kinds of movie actors think, besides the language problem, he have vestiges of that left over. I never get who are popular. There's the kind who is the kind of director who has a too hooked on something, unless I'm ac- have the mystique. Cary Grant is a good tunnelized vision of what it is that he tually getting ready to do it. I suppose all exa mple . I would no t begin to tr y to tell wants; and when you are working in of us who put ourselves in the position of you who h e is, w ha t he's abo ut person- someone else's country, it's sometimes trying to sell ourselves have done that, in ally. But I kn ow from watching him that hard to communicate that. But most of order to save ourselves. Except that I he's a great actor and does what he does the great directors, most of the good think that the guys who are really .fin e better than anybody has ever done. So directors, have that kind of singlemind- artists don't do that. They really take the there's that kind of mystique. Then edness, that kind of purposeful attack on chance and lay themselves out on a limb there' s the other end of the pole, w hich is things . All in all, I think he' s very and say, \" Here I am. That's the wildest guys like myself. And the n th ere are thing I can do and if yo u don't like it, guys who probabl y fall in be twee n , who talented. then it's your problem.\" ha ve a little bit of what I have, maybe, The first big star I worked with, seven and also have developed a kind of mys- Of course, that' s something you can't tique, thro ugh whatever it is they do in or eight years ago, was Burt Lancaster. really see for yo urself. Something you their private lives. And I found a lot of people would defer think is middle-of-the-road may be to him in ways that-I was from the the- far-out for somebody else. I don' t know. Sure, what happens offscreen affects ater, you know-that I'd wonder, \"Why your performance . Working for so many don't they argue with him a little bit? The fame? I don't think I really handle years you achie ve a kind of profes- What, is he gonna punch them out or it; I think it handles me. Because I find sionalism. So tha t a lot of things tha t you something?\" No, not necessarily, be- myself continuing to work, and I keep are feeling through your day's cause he's a bright guy. But it's just that saying to myself, now I'm gonna take six work-whether or not you are doing it you reach a certain level and people get months off. And I have taken off for on purpose or not-come through as frightened of your money or your three . But even then there are proj ected part of the character. They give you power, or both, yo u know. And when I pictures after that, so it really is handling another la yer, another level, that you found myself doing that, when I found me . And I think part of that is fear of not weren't even aware that you were doing. myself getting my way without some- being asked after that next picture . Be- As long as you are free e nough to let that body really pushing against me, I really cause I still believe in some of the cliches: happen, it's a kind of plus. It can work started getting worried. Because I think You know , yo u're only as good as your the other way too. that's one of the really dangerous things, last picture; or, the public are schmucks, when you get in a certain position of they'll forget. It's a terrible kind of I can see a piece of film , where some- being able to say just anything, and peo- energy to have to use-for your every- thin g was shot on a certain da y, and I ple say: \" Yeah, right, bring it in.\" That's day life , you know? To have to worry know that I'd had an argument with a bad. about whether you're gonna work again. director just before we shot, or a big I really don't have to worry about that, laugh, and goddam, it has affected that I'm consciously struggling with that. but there is a kind of compulsion there, a scene in some minute way. But it added It's easy not to do it. It's much easier to kind of need to succeed, to stay at a cer- another level. And you might possibly, playa little right of center, a little hard, tain level. subliminally feel more about that scene you know, and you get your way. But than was really there. That's not the way you finally don't get your way, because it The body has certain mechanisms that I work. I don't set out to find those finally comes back to haunt you. defend you against a lot of that. You things . But I'm very willing to let that either cut out, draw a blank, pull a wall happen, to let those layers build . I'm kind of an untrusting guy, for down. Or yo u make terrible gross errors whatever reasons, I think probably be- that can't be anything but on purpose. I really didn't appreciate movies until I cause I had such a hard time in New You know. And I've probably done a lit- got into pictures myself. Until I really York. I guess I've been making a living as tle of all that in the last two years. I've understood what it was to be a motion an actor for seven, eight years-and taken things I shouldn't have, I've com- picture actor, and what it takes, and when I say a living, I mean a pretty good pletely cut out for a while, you know, what nuances you can use, and about living-but there was a fourteen-, men tally. And . . . well, this last two years underplaying. I never really appreciated fifteen-year period in New York when I doesn' t seem like two years to me . It it until then. It was like comedy. I wasn't was doing almost everything in the seems like a very, very brief time . really aware until my last two years in world except acting; but trying to act. New York, when I started doing a lot of And, you know, when you go through I guess the audiences respond to the comedy, how much more expertise and that many rejections, that much of kind proletarian man they see in me: the real judgment it takes to do real comedy, of being sloughed aside, you start not working guy who's doing vicariously rather than drama . Because drama in trusting other people's judgments. Be- what they would like to do. I think that' s many ways is arbitrary: you can choose cause you realize that so much of what why essentially THE FRENCH CONNEC- not to cry in a scene where everyone else was happening to you was generalization . TION worked. I don't have any illusions is crying, and that's a choice. And you can You weren't getting parts just on age/ural about my being the only actor who could defend that choice to your death, saying level. So you tend 'not to trust people's have played that. A lot of guys could that it's a character who is cut off, a immediate reaction to your work. have . And it really is a director's character who is doing a whole different medium, as we all know. But I was the number. That's defendable. But in com- It's very confusing to me, even now, to guy who played it, and I kind of reaped really discern where I was then, and was I really ready to do any more than I was FILM COMMENT 41

HACKMAN CONTINUED reality of tha t is so jarring that I just come for sympathy, or intentionally del ve into edy, if the laugh doesn ' t come, there's no back and be realistic ... the heartstrings of the audience, you're way you can defend that. I mean there gonna get shot down. 'Cause they're just just isn't. You must play somethin g that I think one of the grea t tests for mos t gon na sense tha t in a second . They're works, in comedy. It does n't mea n you ac tors is yo ur choice of wha t yo u do. gonna say, \"That's dishonest, I don't must always work in result terms. But Your choice of wha t yo u d o really reflects know what it is, the .gu y los t me there yo u must make choices that are gonna w ha t you think of yo urself. I think tha t so m ew here .\" And th ey're o fte n not create results. In drama , you can relax, can change. I think one ca n come to think sophistica ted to know what it is that you can fool around, yo u have all kinds more highly of oneself an d eleva te one's turn ed the m off, but they'll pick it up . of areas. You ca n fool around with the level of performa nce and of character. Just like we do in life. We pick up on words in dra ma a lot, too . But yo u can' t But genera lly my judgm en t of actors, people that are n't straight and honest in comedy. many times, depends on what they with us, in some funny way . Just some choose to do. Also of directors. If they strange way that we know there's so me- I really started in the business because choose to do poor material-it could be thing wrong there. of Brando, I suppose . I saw in Brando for a number of reasons , of course-it some kind of kinsmanship, not because means tha t they don' t have a good idea I don't work a lot on scripts. Maybe I of the way he looked, but some thin g in- of th eir va lue as a performer, or a direc- should do more. I read them. I read them side him that let me say: \" I ca n do that. \" tor, or writer, or w hatever the perso n is. when the y're s ubmitted to m e, if there's I'm sure that's why he has such a follow- a deal in volved, and I make a d ecision on in g. People see in him some kind of Why did I do ZANDY'S BRIDE? I thought first reading whe ther or not I want to do strength, some kind of strength that the relationship was not necessarily ter- it. If the deal is put toge ther, I'll generally cou ld be an everyday a ttitude. Although ribly unique, but it was some thing that read it ma ybe six weeks later, or a month he's not a common man a t all. He's not was unique for me, as an ac tor. I think later, and generally I never look at it your ordinary off-th e-street guy. I mean , those characte rs have been seen again until we're ready to shoot, unless there's a lot more to him than tha t. before-not in that guise, not in that there's a rehearsal. locale, n ot in all those circum- When I first saw him in films-I gu ess sta nces -but the y are not really that dif- The process I go through is just kind of it was THE MEN-I'd already s tarted to ferent. What attracted me was that I had thinking about it a great deal, almost work as an ac tor, but then tha t really never playe d that kind of rela tion ship. continuously. But without sitting down convinced m e that I could maybe do it, I'd played the same kind of one-sided and saying \" Well. I'm gonna spend this that maybe there really was an area for characters before, but never with the next two hours here thinking about this me ... added thing of having some romance, character. \" I don' t do that. I just live with and th en being able to tum at the end. Or it. In my early da ys as a kid , I was at least change so m ewha t, w hich is al- bananas about all the swashbucklin g ways kind of exciting for an actor: to be I never worry about lines because , gu ys, Errol Flynn and that kind of thin g. able to make some change in the charac- after a w hile, at least in a feature film , Not rea ll y understa nding w ha t it was ter, or le t the audience see some chaRge, there isn' t a n y amount of lines for one they did, but just being attracted to the whether the character knows about it or da y's work that yo u ca n't handle. If adven ture. I had a terribly high fantasy not. It's always more interes ting if th e you 're d·oing a courtroom scene, or an life in terms of movies . I think I really had character doesn't know, but the audi- operation, where there's a lot of techni- my accepta nce speech for the Academy ence sees the change. cal language, and the scene we nt on for Awards w he n I was about twelve . But six or seven pa ges and they were gonna stra ngely, I had a real spl it abou t goin g But it's difficult to know how much of break it up into three or four days, but off and doing some thing about it. Be- that crudeness an audience will accept, they were gonha try to get a mas ter of tha t cause I wasn' t in the Glee Club, or the or w heth er they will sta y w ith Y0U until scene maybe in the first day, then you 'd chorus, or the community players. I was yo udo change. Until you sh ow them that maybe ha ve to do some real hard work. terrified , just terrifie d. But I still had this you are a reflection of so mething tha t's Walter Mitty thin g in m y head that sa id, bad in them, tha t they would n ot like to But generally to me it's kind of chal- \" Oh, I can do that if I wa nt to, but, ah, see, or vice versa. It could be that yo u lenging to come on a set unprepared. I you know, it makes me a little nervous, sh ow th em some thin g good in them- know there'd be some directors who'd so I'll wait a while .\" And I did . I waited selves t.hat they've been hiding, too . It's go through the roof, you know. But I just until I was ... oh ... twenty-four. fascinating to me to probe into that area, like to work that way, unprepared. as an actor, to find out how far yo u can Knowing w ha t the character is, but being I'm the la st one w ho ever puts d own go with an audience. like a spon ge in some way. Being able to anybody w ho wants to be an actor. I come on and meet your co-star or who- don't encourage an ybod y. But I know One of the thin gs with FRENCH CON- ever you're gonna work with-maybe from m y own experience that I couldn't NECTION that was frightening to me was for the first time-a s you do sometimes have been less well eq uipped to be an to open the film bea ting up a black g u y, in film . Or the second or third time . Cer- actor. In terms of attitude and discipline, using the words \"spick\", \"wop ,\" and tainly not knowing a hell of a lot about and whatever else it takes to be an actor. \" nigger\", you know, and ... well, you the m . And not knowing a hell of a lot But I guess one's will and d etermination start off a film in the first five minutes, about the director, and how he works, have more to do with w hat yo u d o in life layin g that out for an audience, and then unless you've worked with him before. than any kind of real equipment that you you say to the audience: \"You're gonna And starting to build from there. ha ve. We've all see n a lo t of actors, and stay with this guy for two hours and you other creative people, who have no tal- finall y gotta like him , yo u gotta respect I generally respond to the environ- ent atall, but have a grea t deal of will and him, yo u gotta feel something for him .\" ment. I try to, a t least. But environment determination , and arrive at where the y That was frightening to me, and ye t it doesn't seem to be as important to me as want to be, because of that. was challenging. the people I work with. At least I get most of my ideas from the other people. The great equalizer for me is when I go One thing you must do if you' re gonna No t that they verbalize them . But most of to see m yself. That's why I hate to watch playa character like tha t is you gotta play what I do is so mehow an instinctive myself. I think of m yself as being him absolutely fucking full , so full that thin g. Or it's a bounce-back from what twenty-one, twenty-two, I really do there's never any doubt tha t what you're I've thought about the character, and imagine that's the way I look, because I saying is what you believe . If at any point how he would react, and what he wants feel that way . But then when I see myself in the characterization you m odify him, to do to that other character, or what he I look like my father. [Laughs.] And the or try to go for sympathy, inten tionally go 42 SEPTEMBER 1974

A folio of Hackman roles. Clockwise from bot- tom left : with Ann Wedgeworth in SCARECROW; with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE ; with Jennifer Warren and Melanie Griffith in NIGHT MOVE S;' with Ernest Borgnine in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE ; in THE FRENCH CONNECTION; with Lee Marvin in PRIME CUT. Center: with Melvyn Douglas in I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER . wants to say about what the author has ever else is sitting there with us when or a public address. There are certain said. we're going through it for the first time. things you have to say, you have to in- troduce certain people, you have to ... I'm a great believer in the author's in- And it really doesn't take any more Well, you know, to do that you have to tent. What he wants out of that scene. time. Because, as we all know in films , stay up a couple of hours and really learn And what I can bring to that scene, there's hundreds of things to be done, that. I couldn't do it; I'm not equipped to within the context of what he's given me and they're never ready, and you're sit- do that. to do. I like that challenge. I like the ting there doing your work when you're challenge of working within the box. supposed to be doing your work, as op- When I first started to act, we used to And then being as wild as one can be posed to doing it the night before. And do things like Brenner and Th e Defenders within the context of that. that's how you end up with some hard and Naked City, and that kind of stuff in idea in your mind and you come in with New York, and I would maybe have only Generally directors are somewhat ap- this great idea about the character, and five or six lines. But man, I was Mister palled that you have the script in your this person that you' re working with also Tension. And I' d come on and hands. [Laughs.] But I never start sat up all night and did the same thing . blaaaaaaaghhhhh, God-I-hope-I-can- apologizing by saying, \"Listen, I don't And you find yourselves diametrically get-these-things-out-in-one thing so I know this.\" Because then the guy's opposed, you know? There's just no way can go home! Until finally you realize gonna say, \"Go ahead, we'll give you an you're gonna get together. You're just what you're doing and you say: \" Wait a hour, we have to set up anyway, we goin' like that and you think, well, one of minute, why do I want to be an actor if I have to set some lights, go ahead and us is gonna have to give . So it's much want to go home? It just doesn't make work on it.\" I never do that because I easier, and I think much more creative, any sense.\" So as soon as you start relax- don't want him to go away . I want to sit to come in not knowing . It's not a weak ing, the more apparent it is that the pro- there, I really want to read through it and kind of thing. cess is not one of driving against the really be Mister Dummy. I want to be as lines, but of absorbing what's there. I'm blank as a piece of paper. And get it all I've done it the other way, staying up a great believer in relaxation in terms of right then , get it all from the page, and all night, and what happens is you get from him, and from her, and from who- yourself so tense, it's like doing a speech FILM COMMENT 43

HACKMAN CONTINUED or ambiguous writing. And that's dif- NEW any creative work. I think you can't ficult for me . I prefer to work where the really think unless you relax. Acting is piece is finished , and passed on to the DIRECfORSI thinking and feeling . director-if he chooses to , and is of that bent-makes his changes as he goes NEW FILMS Directors who think we're tools of along, with the help, maybe of the ac- their vision? As an actor, I say they're full tors . by of shit, we're not tools at all, we ha ve something to contribute. And yet some There's a funn y kind of family atmos- Roger Greenspun of the really good directors feel that way. phere on a film that is generally created Al fred Hitchcock: I don't know if he feels by the director. And many times that Three years ago, when they started the personally that way about actors, but I family balloon can be punctured quite New Directors/New Films series at New know his way of working is as if an actor readily by an outside influence, an out- York's Museum of Modern Art, they lit- is there to be manipulated, to be told side force , and many times the writer is erally couldn' t give tickets away. That where to stand and what to say and get that outside force. If you're working on a year the series featured Alain Tanner's on with it. scene and you see out of the corner of LA SALAMANDRE and Thomas Gutierrez your eye a foreign object, that has a head Alea's MEMORIES OF UNDERDEV- Personally, if I were to direct, I on it and looks like a writer [laughs], ELOPMENT, which subsequently made it wouldn't enjoy that because I don't think standing b y the camera or something, I, onto several ten-best lists, along with a I have that kind of contribution to give as for one, get a little tight , unless I'm close few other films, such as Barney a director. My contribution , if I were to with the guy. I get a little tight. I start Platts-Mills' PRIVATE ROAD, that I espe- direct, would be the understanding of thinking, \" Gee, I wonder if this is the cially liked. the way actors work. And my under- way he intended this or not?\" And al- standing of the script, my interpretation though as an actor I prefer to work con- This year they sold lots more tickets, of that. That would be the limit of what I sciously with the author's intent in sold out some programs, and, though on could do as a direc tor, beca use I have no mind, I know I have to make it my own. the whole the films weren't as good as technical expertise . There are plenty of they had been three years ago, everyone guys you could hire who could do that. I forget the punctuation and I never was individually reviewed by The New read stage directions. Unless it's a plot York Tim es. By any reasonable standard When I do have a gu y like that, I fight point. Stage directions are only the of measurement, the New Direc- like a fiend. I guess because I've never writer's way of getting you through the tors/New Films series, now an annual met anyone who I respected who di- door, and over to the window, and over spring event, has arrived. rected that way. I've worked for a couple to the sto ve or wha te ver. And I think I of directors I didn't have any respect for can find m y way over there with what- The series has developed out of the who worked that way. And we fought ever line's given, and whatever pauses I New York Film Festival. It is constantly. You know, guys who had the want to take, and w hatever feelings I get co-sponsered by the Museum and the scene completely blocked out on paper, from the other people , and from th ~ at- Lincoln Center Film Society, and it is completely thought out, along with mosphere or the situation. So if I'm wor- partly intended to help fill the gap left notes and pictures that had been drawn, ried about stage directions, or I'm wor- some time ago when, for lack of money, down to w hat line yo u would pick up a ried about grammar, that's a detriment they had to drop all the free side events coffee cup and w hat line you should get to me. And maybe that's my own prob- that made the Festival such an interest- up to move. That galls me to the point lem. Other gu ys can maybe work right ing and frustrating exercise in what to where I can't work. I just don't have the through that. But I heard something the see and what to miss and what au- intelligence to remember all that shit. other night, that's maybe pertinent. A ditorium to go to next. The New Direc- You know, I act on instinct, from years of guy said to me: \" How many times have tors series isn't free, and it isn't nearly as having done it, and from ways I taught you ever heard a husband say to a wife, challenging as what used to accompany m yself how to do it. And suddenly to 'Let's go out tonight and hear a movie'?\" the Film Festival. But it is relatively have to rely on a guy who has thought all cheap ($2.00 maximum) and it enjoys a that out in his head, and to move on a Yes, I'd like to direct. When? Well, the bit more freedom from the demands of certain line . . . . I can do it-I'm being fame , the stardom, whatever it's called, pleasing an audience than does the par- facetious when I say I can't do it-I can has given me a kind of distorted view of ent Festival. do it. But I really wouldn't be comforta- where I am. So I can't tell how much time ble, nor would I bring anything of myself I have left. I know that in the open mar- That freedom hasn't been especially to the part. People seeing it would say: ketplace nobody needs me as a director. productive. Nothing in this year's New \"Hmmm . I don't know why they You know. I could go out and spend as Directors series seemed as daring as much time as anyone else would take, Jean-Marie Straub's HISTORY LESSONS, bothered to get him.\" trying to get a film to direct. So if I want Jean Eustache's THE MOTHER AND THE You can't change a line in the theater to cash in as a director, I have to cash in WHORE , or R. W. Fassbinder's THE BITTER while I' m still kind of hot as an actor. TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, all from last without the writer' s permission . And that's the kind of thing where I October's Film Festival. But the require- Whereas in films, once a writer sells his don't know where I am yet. I would like ment of the series isn' t audacity; it is screenplay, then it's no longer his. You to wait a while before I direct. But I don't newness . Each film must be the first or can do anything you want to it. But hav- want to wait too long, to where I don' t second feature by the director to have ing the writer around while you're have the juice to direct. shown in this country. More often than shooting . .. I don't know. I really don't not, it is simply a first or second feature. know. I think a guy has to be super- I wouldn't direct to give up acting. But And, in movies as all the other arts, first talented and very objective about his I'd like to phase out. I'd like to not have steps tend to be pretty imitative. work in order to make a contribution, to stay at a certain pitch as an actor. You once it has passed out of his hands. know, there's a certain reality you have Selection of the series is shared by the to face: you are a commodity; and yo u're Museum and Lincoln Center. That If you have the Kazan-Schulberg rela- not gonna be at the same level the rest of means it is shared by a curator, Adrienne tionship, that's marvelous. But for a wri- your life; and you want to kind of pre- ter to work with a director without that, pare yourself, to be able to do other well, it's just death. As an actor, you're things . I'm lazy. And you know, after caught in the middle of that thing: two forty , you start backing off. ~: directors, or two writers, or half of each. You start getting ambiguous directions, 44 SEPTEMBER 1974

Mancia , and the Fe s tival' s pro g ram thea trical feature, the combination of going o n. You don' t expect to see mas- director, Richard Roud . Roud 's influence Goldie H aw n , Ben Johnson, and half th e terpieces (th ough yo u don't mind if yo u has come in for so me criticism, as ha s his police cars in Texas d oesn ' t quite add up d o); yo u do ex pect to see eight or ten new taste ; but I think h e has b ee n to an obscure little art film . When yo u movies that yo u probably couldn ' t have extraordinary-energetic, pragma tic , compare the American entries in la st seen oth erwise. It is a n ed uca tiona l ex- catholic, and highl y intelli ge nt. fall's Film Festival-MEAN STR EETS, perience of sorts , a nd li ke a ny ed uca- However, there does seem a distinct lack BADLANDS, KID BLUE-Spielberg's movie ti onal experie nce it sh ouldn' t have to be of competition between the two major seems at leas t as commercial and, to my too mu ch fun. non-comm ercial showcases for fea ture mind, just as good as the bes t of the m . I I a m therefore proper!y gra teful tha t films in New York; and it would be in- have already written a good deal a bou t the New Direc tors series a year ago ex- teresting to know, for example, by wha t SUGARLAND EXPRESS , and I s h a n ' t posed me to Shin suke Ogawa 's protest criteria it is decide d whether a ne w film re-review it, except to say that I like it d ocum entary THE PEASANTS OF THE SEC- by a new director goes to the series or to very much. ON D FORTRESS-though I h ated a ll the greater exposure and surely greater But the rea son-or the excu se -for two - a nd- one -half ho urs of it (a mere prestige of the Festival. the New Directors series isn ' t to fragment; the whole thing runs for abo ut Patterns of di s tribution ma y have disco ver, say, G o ldie Ha w n in six h o urs)-a nd offered me my first so mething to do with it. Steven SUGARLAND EXPRESS. I don't know that it glimpse of the new Bulgarian cinema. As Spielberg's SUGARLAND EXPRESS opened is eve n to di scove r so m e thin g lik e it turned out, the new Bulgarian cinema commercially rig ht after its premiere MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT, wasn ' t half bad. A m ovie by Metodi An- kicked off the New Directors series. It w hich has been rather over-discovered d on ov ca lled THE GOAT HORN , it is a rustic was the only America n movie in th e in the past two years. The reason is much historical adventure story full of nudity, . series, and, though a sure-enough first simpler; itis to keep in touch w ith w hat is murder, rape , repression , and revenge . There was nothing quite like it in this year's series-of ten films , not coun tin g SUGARLAND EXPRESS-though all the ele me nts crop up in Sergio Citti's BAWDY TALES, wi th less passion (a nd less repression) and in a different style. Citti collaborated on the screen-plays for many films by Pasolini (wh o in turn col- laborated on the scree npl ay to BAWDY TALES) , a nd his m ovie looks like a so mber, m ore bitter, and more diffuse imitation of the master. Being no grea t adm irer of the m as ter, I prefer the imita- tion. Superficially, SAWDY TALES rese mbles THE DECAMERON , except that man y of the ac tors ha ve a ll their tee th (or all somebody's teeth) and the women are conSiderably more sed uctive than the men . The behavior patterns may be early Italian Renaissa nce (multiple infid elities, cruelties, lu sts, greed, etc. ) but the actual se tting is early nine teen th century, a Roman tic view of an essentia lly pas toral Italy dotted with noble ruin s soften ed by tim e. The protagonists, a pair of pe tty crooks, meet in a cave, a sort of under- world community out-house, and as they relieve the mselves the y begin tell- ing stories . They continue tellin g stories after they have murdered one of their victims, and even when they are in jail and w hile they are being carted to the scaffold-wh ere they die happy because ~ they have just told one another a couple ~ of good stories about the best way of 9 conning an entrance into the Kingdom of ~ Heaven. z The content of the stories is fairly ~ standard-lecherous priests, amorous ~-( s heep, insatiable wives, despairing ~ husbands -and more than a little repe- ~ titious. The quality of cruelty reaches Gl w hat may be a new high (one youn g w ife unknowingly munches the broiled kid- ;2 neys of her late lover w hile her husba nd, who ha s just cooked th em for her, looks ~ on in simple contentment), but it all re- Top left: BAWDY TALES . Top right: Darlene Gloria and Paulo Porto in ALL NUDITY SHALL BE PU NISHED. Bottom : BUT WHERE IS DANIEL VAX? FILM COMMENT 45

GREENSPUN CONTINUED Above : THE CASTLE OF PURITY. Below: BLACK HOLIDAY. mains anecdota l, un-universa lize d , and thus un available to bo th easy moralizing peasant land struggle, fought under the lightful apartment, his lovely wife and a nd easy cynicism . BAW DY TALES almost banners of Marx and Lenin , and doomed his little child come to live with him. The is the un tain ted artifact tha tat som e level to failure. commissioner urges his reform- of decadent so phis tication it surely ation-nothing to sign, just to say that yearns to be. About sixty per cent of the film con- he submits to a regime that they both sists of processions-religious proces- kno w will pass, as all regimes have In any case , I find Citti's deca dence a sions, processions of the downtrodden passed ... And so on until a crisis of lot more accepta ble than tha t of Theo proletariat, of the proletariat militant, conscience-the ill-concealed murder of Angelopoulos, whose DAYS OF 36, a triumphant, defeated-and clearly this one of the communist prisoners-and se mi-fi cti onal treatm en t of political is where Littin intends cutting. But even the professor departs, secretly, so as to sca ndal and repression in Greece o f the as it is , the heavy pageantry of THE enter the history he studies th~ only way TJ-.irties, draws a bit from the period look PROMISED LA ND, which comes complete it can be entered: headlong. of Bernardo Bertolucci (THE with a full-sized statue of the Virgin CON FORMIST), a bit from the melodrama- Mary that springs to seductive life from BLACK HOLIDAY is by turns obvious tic pl otting of Costa-Gavras, and quite a time to time in order to mislead the Peo- and awkward, and rich and surprisingly bit from the pompous visual mechanics ple for the benefit of the State, is not moving. Its people are people rather of Miklos Jancso-to produce w hat was without its somber boring beauty. than emblematic counters. Marco Leto's the most elegantly pointless fi lm of the sense of history is not doctrinairely radi- se ri es. The beauty that attends Marco Leto's cal, and his sense of cinema seems ra ther BLACK HOLIDAY , the second of the -two pleasantl y, individualistically old Centering around an incident in which Italian movies in the series, is of another, fashioned. In the context of the political a member of the parliament is h eld cap- more difficult, more rewarding nature. A films in the New Directors series, this tive for a day in the cell of a su spected looks like a minor moral victory. political assassin w hom he has gone to fiction film , but also se t in the political visit (a nd with w hom, it is learned, he Thirties, BLACK HOLIDAY deals with a Two films in the series treat reali- has had a long, homosexual relation- young professor who, because he re- ties-including political realities ship) , DAYS OF 36 attempts a recreation fuses to take a loya lty oath to Mussolini, not of the issues but rather of the moods, is imprisoned on a Mediterranean is- -of the present. The West German OVER the spiritual, emotional, even physica l land . Neither a criminal nor, exactly, a NIGHT, written, directed, and produced climate of a Mediterranean country be- political prisoner (as the island's avowed by a prodigiously untalented young ginning to stir with revolutionary Communists are), the professor finds woman named Karen Thome, details the change. Its method is to observe , us uall y himself instead in a kind of delu xe exile. life, loves , thoughts , and grimaces of a from a distance and in brief and enigma- It is rendered all the more bearable by the slightly superannuated post-Godardian tic segments, the signs of life that ac- island' s commissioner (a finely con- waif, pla yed by Karen Thome . It was the company the kidnaping-in the city trolled performance by Adolfo Celi), a dullest movie in the series. Its audacity, streets, in the offices of government, one-time student of the professor's consisting in a desparately anarchistic above all in the prison w here th e act ha s father and a highly cultivated man sin- stylistic helplessness, and its intimacy, taken place. cerely pained by the vulgar Fascists he so consisting in the oft-repeated sight of blandly serves. Karen Thome undressed, seem equally The method is decorative rather than without ideas or redeeming anti-social dramatic. It yields a few lovel y vignettes, Little b y little , the professor's value. as when the deputy's aged mother goes amenities are increased. He takes a de- to visit the equally aged conservative party chief; a t a loss for what to say or do they begin to reminisce, and then they sing old songs together. But more fre- quently the method simply yields to pic- turesq ue ways of filling up the screen-galloping horseme n rushing nowhere, men diminished against the sand-brown walls of the prison, the geometry of troops in file-the whole repertory of flash y, long- take cinematics that is virtually a trademark of Jancso and that assumes (as I don ' t) that the pan, the crane, the tracking shot are, like virtue, their own reward. Mig uel Littin's THE PROMISED LAND, which comes out of Allende's Chile by way of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, is just as de.::orative, but a good deal more forthright about its sympathies. I don' t think it is a good movie, but since the director disowns the print the print shown in the New Directors series as still not completely edited (and God knows it needs editing), I'm not prepared abso- lutely to say. Littin deals with an event in Chilean history (again the Thirties; the Third World also exploits nos talgia - politicized nos talgia), a 46 SEPTEMBER 1974

On the other hand, THE RED TRAIN, by pompous hypocrite but a truly tragic fig- human assoCIatIOn s on th e one hand a Swiss director, Peter Ammann, is over- ure, threatens to kill the whole sin- and , on th e o ther, so mething rather like loaded with ideas and values-most of ridden household. But in the nick of time the map of Canada. The terms of this them borrowed. Nominally a documen- the police arrive-to bring Dad to justice drama are all but unima ginable outside tary about Italians working in Switzer- for selling rat poison without a proper the movie s (and o utside Ca nad a), which land who travel back to Italy to vote license. As he is carted off to a mental is why ORDINARY TE NDERNESS for all its (usually to vote Communist, hence the ward, everyone else walks out into the technical re ticence, ma y be th e most name of the movie), it is intercut with cinematic film in the se ri es. scenes of an open-air performance of spring rain .... Schiller's William Tell, a school-kids' out- But for me th e be st film in the series ing on Lake Lucerne, a watch factory, a ALL NUDITY SHALL BE PUNISHED, how- came from Isreal: Avra m Heffn er's BUT funeral in the rain, a grand-opera per- ever, keeps redeeming its serious satire WHERE IS DANIEL VA X? I'm not co mpletely formance of Rossini's William Tell , a with a kind of frantic sexual melodrama sure to what ex te nt this is critical judg- watch museum, an Italian religious pro- that is-and is meant to be-genuinely ment and to what ex tent it is the sh ock of cession, a newspaper printing plant, a funny. Herculano, a rich pious middle- at la st seeing an Isra eli mo vie I can stand. little-theater performance of Alfonso class businessman who will not stop In either ca se , the enthusia sm is ge nuine Sastre's avant-garde play Th e Sad Eyes of mourning the death of his wife (he is enough. The film scarcel y has a story; William Tell, and so on. \"Brazil's only disconsolate widower\") , is rather, it has an anecdote on which to prodded into a meeting with Ceni, a hang a few adventures. An open-ended found-objects high-spirited whore, with whom he has documentary (with special attention to the misfortune to fall in love. Ziv, a well-known pop singer, returns the situation of Italians in Switzerland, to Israel with his gorgeous new Ameri- which doesn't seem half bad), THE RED Ceni also falls in love with him, and can wife . He runs into an old pal, a Dr. TRAIN is a potentially interesting movie they begin not-quite living together Lipkin, who invites him to th eir high- that finally succumbs to the appeal of its while he attempts upgrading her to his school reunion. The reunion is a bust, images. The result is a structure by de- crazy notions of normality-like saving but it serves to remind Ziv of another fault: in a large way, the multi-layered her so he can deflower her on their wed- friend , the class marvel Daniel Vax, who fate of William Tell; in a smaller way, ding night. For many more reasons than has disa ppeared from everyone's view . such ready-made poetry as the slow de- that, the relationship is doomed. I mean In a desultory way, with time out to try a parture of a paddle-wheel lake steamer genuinely doomed. Throughout the few unsuccessful seductions, Zi v sets movie Ceni sits upstairs dying, a slow about finding Va x, which he eventually Infrom its docK. a sense the movie itself suicide, while downstairs Herculano sits does. Vax is balding, pudgy, happil y transfixed, listening to her confession of married to the girl who is the cla ss celeb- does very little. The ship does every- misery, literally screamed out at him rity (because she was supposed to have thing; Sastre-Schiller-Rossini do every- from a tape recorder. committed suicide at an early age), and thing. And Ammann lacks the control of teaching philosophy in whatever is the his material that would enable him to The prevailing tone of ALL NUDITY is a Israeli equivalent of a provincial univer- turn what they do to his own purposes. distraught frenzy which the director, sity. To Ziv, Vax is still a marvel. Arnaldo Jabor, a good half the time suc- The four remaining films are all ceeds in transforming into a peculiar, There is a kind of sub-plot to this domestic dramas, though two of them, unsettling, and fairly interesting style. non-plot. Lipkin's father-in-law dies, the Brazilian ALL NUDITY SHALL BE The other half the time the bathos of his and, after some bitterness, the dea th PUNISHED and the Mexican CASTLE OF subject matter and the uneasiness of the serves to reunite him with his estranged PURITY, have allegorical overtones. Ar- satire (I suspect that the film is at least as wife. He is exceptionally decent, and so turo Ripstein's CASTLE OF PURITY is so middle-class as any of the nonsense it is she. Even Ziv, who is something of a silly that I am amazed anyone has taken means to discredit) keep him from realiz- boor, begins to learn decency in the pro- it seriously-though it seems one of the ing the potentials of that style. cess of time. Time really controls the few movies in the series that may be movie-in the fact that somebody dies, picked up for commercial release. I wish that the French-Canadian film that everyone is getting a bit older, in all (BAWDY TALES, BLACK HOLIDAY , and of in the series, Jacques Leduc' s ORDINARY the conventional and serviceable signs of course SUGARLAND EXPRESS came into the TENDERNESS , had been shown in its orig- mutability. But time also brings the quiet series with distributors behind them.) inal 35mm print rather than in a 16mm nights that people spend together, and dupe, because I understand that the the desultory afternoons. The \" castle\" is the home-workshop- color of the original is beautiful and that prison of a curious family kept seques- it has been largely lost in the transferral This film could also have been called tered from the world by a stern and to 16. Like many French-Canadian \" Ordinary Tenderness,\" and the Israeli idealistic father (Claudio Brook) who movies I've seen, ORDINARY TE NDERNESS Heffner shares with the Quebecois names his three kids Utopia, Future, and depends a good deal on a precise dif- Leduc a feeling for the hours that pass Willpower; teaches them the principles ferentiation between qualities of through a place, rendering its life vul- of sound mind in pure body; and leads bleakness-say, between the sparsely nerable, a little sad, and very precious. them in strictly vegetarian meals. In re- furnished indoors where you can be Both films are elegiac, and both have no- turn they work for him all day, manufac- warm enough to survive and the awe- thing to mourn except the imperma- turing rat poison which is packaged in some barren outdoors where just possi- nence of their own valuable content- biodegradable paper bags-no plastics. bly you cannot. ment. Nobody leaves the house except the father, who peddles the poison and, to The story is very simple: a husband I prefer Heffner's movie because it is his own despair, continues to snitch sets out on a long train and auto trip from more normative in its vision, more at- meat tacos and also an occasional roll in his job in the far north, home to his tractive in its characters, and more com- bed with a buxom whore. young waiting wife. By the end of the plex in its action. But both demonstrate a film he has not yet arrived. He journeys sense of space and light that makes it The family proceeds in its moronic with friends; she waits at home with a seem that cinema really might revitalize way until one night the father catches friend, a somewhat older woman who a classic visual art all unawares. They are Future dreamily arousing his nubile sis- prepares for the reunion by baking a what a New Directors/New Films series ter Utopia, the only nubile girl he has cake. There are some flashbacks and is put together for. They justify its exis- ever seen. Then all hell breaks loose, and much cutting between the situations of tence and, despite some resistance, Dad, who is supposed to be not just a the man and the woman. But the film ' s make me happy to have gone. ~~ real tension seems to lie between all FILM COMMENT 47

Roy O'Arcy in Paul Leni's THE LAST WARNING, photographed by Hal Mohr. ALL PHOTOS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED: COURTESY OF HALMOHR To Hal Mohr, cinematography was a time, including Michael Curtiz, whose cash , A novel (1916) which had been technological challenge: a test in which dazzling first American film THE THIRD turned into a dark-house style play cameras and men tackled visual prob- DEGREE he shot in 1926 (see The Silent (1921), it was considered excellent mater- lems not just as a job of work, but for the Picture#18 for an interesting analysis of ial for Paul Leni as a follow up to THE CAT sheer, extravagant fun of succeeding at this neglected work). But it was in -his AND THE CANARY , Again we have the cast the impossible. While masters like Lee films with Paul Leni (one of the less gathered together in a spooky, Garmes, William Daniels, and Charles heralded masters of German expres- long-deserted building-here a Rosher concentrated on the fine art of sionism) and Paul Fejos (a Hungarian theater-with a bonus in the form of a painting with light, Mohr and a few research biologist turned filmmaker) tha t grotesque \" phantom\" who prowls about others-Gregg Toland was one-drove we find his most astonishing creating mayhem of various sorts, (The their m ac hines to impossible lengths , re- work-little known films that, perhaps theater interior used is the old PHANTOM fining the mechanics of the camera ap- even more than Murnau's SUNRISE, CITY OF THE OPERA set.) Studio records indi- paratus to visualize on screen the wildest GIRL, and TABU, were the most forceful cate various treatments were submitted imaginings of their director- examples of Hollywood expressionism. between June and December 1927, then collabora tors . two more in June 1928. The gap between The following article attempts to shed these dates is probably connected with Although Mohr excelled as a cinema some light on these little seen, seldom the addition of talkie sequences to the portraitist (THE WEDDING MARCH, A MID- discussed works by providing some hard otherwise silent film, which was re- SUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM , and the Tech- background data as well as first- person leased on January 6, 1929 , It was the last nicolor PHANTOM OF THE OPERA are recollections of their creation . Mr. film of Paul Leni, who d!ed on Sep- among the most beautiful Hollywood Mohr's comments are excerpted from an tember 2 of that year, films of the Twenties, Thirties, and For- interview with him I conducted on June ties), it was pushing the camera to its 11, 1973 while researching Carl It is doubtful if the part-talkie version farthest limits that especially attracted Laemmle' s Universal Pictures. This of this film still exists (although it was him . For example, he shot BULLETS OR work is being carried on through the mistakenly listed in a recent 16mm BALLOTS and THE GREEN PASTURES with a American Film Institute Film History catalogue) but the surviving prints of the deep-focus device of his own invention Program under the sponsorship of the silent version reveal it as one of the most five years before KANE. But, from the be- Louis B. Mayer Foundation, thanks to visually striking works of the period, On ginning, camera movement was his par- whom I was also able to screen all the one level the film is concerned with a ticular fascina tion . 1m pressed by the films discussed in the introductions . A night in a haunted theater, and the plot moving shots in the Italian CABIRIA, he complete Hal Mohr filmography can be makes use of all the tricks of the devised perhaps the earliest tracking found in the Summer 1972 FILM stage-people disappear through trap equipment to be used in any American COMMENT; the best general interview is doors, and so on, But Leni and Mohr studio for his film PAN'S MOUNTAIN in in Leonard Maltin's Behind the Cam era. load the film with the tricks of the 1914. But like many an independent pro- Thanks for direct help on this article to cinema , From the dazzling opening reel duction even today, it was not bought for John Hampton, David Bradley, and the of in-camera superimpositions of distribution and remained unseen. staff of the oral history program at Broadway and its nightlife, we realize Greystone . that the visuals, and not the narrative, His most astonishing feats of camera are to be the main attraction here , motion , however, were accomplished in THE LAST WARNING Cameras fly around in all directions, and the late Twenties in the wake of the great in the wild conclusion actually swing on German films. Mohr worked with many Universal bought screen rights to The ropes with the \"phantom\" from balcony of the great European imports at this Last Warning on June 13, 1927 for $15,000 48 SEPTEMBER 1974