VOLUME 07 - NUMBER 03 FALL 1971

FALL 1971 51.50 FILM COMMENT

JOHN FORD Portrait lJfa film-making QeJYus These John Ford directed films are available only from Films Incorporated. 1920's 1920 1930's cont. 1934 1950's 1950 Just Pals 1924 Judge Priest 1935 When Wi II ie Comes 1950 The Iron Horse 1926 The Informer 1935 1953 3 Bad Men 1928 Steamboat Round the Bend 1936 Marching Home 1957 Four Sons 1928 The Prisoner of Shark Island 1938 Wagon Master Hangman 's House Submarine Patrol 1939 Mogambo 1962 1930 Young Mr. Lincoln 1939 The Wings of Eagles 1962 1930's 1931 Drums Along the Mohawk 1963 Men Without Women 1932 1940 1960's 1965 Seas Beneath 1933 1940's 1941 The Man Who Shot 1966 Flesh 1933 The Grapes of Wrath 1945 Pilgrimage 1934 How Green Was My Valley 1946 Liberty Valance Dr. Bull They Were Expendable How The West Was Won The Lost Patrol My Darling Clementine Donovan's Reef Young Cassidy 7 Women Send for a free catalog: Nelle Watts, Films Incorporated-Dept. 7 1144 Wilmette Avenue, Wilmette, III. 60091

STAFF u VOLUME 7 NUMBER 3 ~ editor I..i. FALL 1971 RICHARD CORLISS ~ CONTENTS assistant editor MELINDA WARD ~ JOURNALS Paris page 2 graphic designer ... Los Angeles page 2 MARTHA LEHTOLA I JOHN FORD managing editor the late films of John Ford AUSTIN LAMONT B by Robin Wood page 8 advertising manager ~ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance NAOMI WEISS by David Bordwell .a..J:. page 18 correspondents The Civil War Paris JONATHAN ROSENBAUM by Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington page 21 Los Angeles JIM KITSES BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI assistants an interview by Amos Vogel research MARY CORLISS page 24 design LINDA MANCINI SUPERFIGHT subscriptions ANNE LACOCK by James Childs page 30 editorial board GEORGE AMBERG THE DOVZHENKO PAPERS Department of Cinema Studies, New York University by Marco Carynnyk page 34 New York, New York ROGER CORMAN JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director the films of Roger Corman Film Program , Ohio University by Richard Koszarski Athens, Ohio page 42 an interview with Roger Corman JAMES A. BEVERIDGE , Director by Charles Goldman Programme in Film , York University page 49 Toronto, Ontario FILM FAVORITES Joe Adamson on HOWARD SUBER, Chairman , Critical Studies MONKEY BUSINESS Motion Pictures / Television Division , UCLA page 55 Los Angeles, California Richard Corliss Two Affairs to Remember The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT page 58 are those of the individual authors and do not WILLARD MAAS necessarily represent the opinions an interview by George Semsel of the editor, staff or publisher. page 60 FILM COMMENT. volume 7 number 3. fall 1971 . WIND FROM THE EAST price $1 .50. FILM COMM ENT is published quarterly a review by Joan Mellen page 65 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation. Copyright @1971 Film Comment Publishing Corporation . BOOK REVIEWS This publication is fully protected by domestic and international page 70 copyright. It is forbidden to duplicate any part of this publication in any way without prior written permission for the' publishers. CLASSIFIED page 80 Second class postage paid at Boston . Massachusetts. Subscription rates in the United States: GEORGE AMBERG, 1901-1971 $6 for four numbers. $12 for eight numbers: George Amberg died July 27,1971 . elsewhere 57 for four numbers, He has been a friend and advisor to $14 for eight numbers. payable in US funds only. this magazine for many years. New subscribers please include your occupation and zip code . The relationship became especially close last year when he helped to Subscription and back issue correspondence: select our present editor, Richard FILM COMMENT 100 Walnut Place. Brookline . Massachusetts 02146. Corliss. His special love for films and his Ed itorial corresponden ce: warm friendship will be missed. FILM COMMENT 214 East 11th Street. New York NY 10003. This issue is dedicated to his memory. Back volumes of FILM COMMENT have been reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation . 111 Fifth Avenue. New York NY 10003. Microfilm editions are available from University Microfilms Ann Arbor Michigan 48106 . Please write to these companies for complete sales information . Type set by Rochester Monotype Composition Company. Wrightson Typographers and Machine Composition Company. Printed in USA by Willis McOonald and Company. National newsstand distribution: B DeBoer. 188 High Street. Nutley NJ 07110 . International distribution: Worldwide Media Service, 386 Park Avenue South. New York NY 10016. Library of Congress card number: 76-498 . on the cover: THE CONFORMIST. Stefania Sandrelli and Jean Louis Trintignant. photo: Paramount Pictures.

Jonathan Rosenbaum Jim Kitses .JOURNAL.JOURNAL PARIS L.A. Jonathan Rosenbaum lives in Paris and writes for Jim Kitses wrote Horizons West, a study of the The Village Voice. westerns of Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah . He is now teaching film at UCLA. Of all the gang wars waged over the past thirteen years between Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, the latest About four years ago when Don Siegel was just appears to be the most extensive and the least illuminat- finishing COOGAN 'S BLUFF, he was invited to London 's ing. When Truffaut ridiculed Positif for anti-intellec- National Film Theater where a complete season of his tualism and self-serving vanity in 1958, Cahiers ' orien- work was being screened . I was there and noticed how tation was Catholic-conservative while its leading rival pleased Siegel was. The London press, elements of was surrealist and leftist; the former enshrined Holly- which are as philistine and provincial as they think wood while the latter denigrated it as imperialist. When themselves smart, were quick to spot the launching Positif launched a lengthy counter-offensive in 1962 of a cult. Actually, English critic Alan Lovell wrote a (amply documented in Peter Graham's anthology , The relatively objective survey, tracing particular themes in New Wave) , the terms of the equation had already the movies such as the tension between instinct and begun to shift: many Cahiers critics were already the need for rational action , the individual and various beginning to veer away from their backgrounds as they forms of social organization . Although a sophisticated became filmmakers, and Positif was starting to develop and witty guy, Siegel wasn't much prepared to talk at a stable of its own Hollywood auteurs, like John Huston conceptual levels, even suggesting he found the critical and Jerry Lewis. After the May Events of 1968, the analysis overwhelming (although the basic argument divergence between the magazines became even sharp- is certainly relevant to Siegel's obsessive denigration er, with Cahiers-as it underwent an almost complete of studios and producers) . All in all , it was a momentous turnover of staff-gradually adopting a militantly Marx- event for the director, invited to Europe to find all his ist-Leninist and structuralist position , and Positif, de- little action movies being taken seriously. spite at least one Maoist on its editorial board , opening its pages to lengthy interviews with \" counter-revolu- In Hollywood, Siegel is still considered a good com- tionaries \" like Chabrol and Frankenheimer. In 1969 , mercial director, no more and no less. Every now and the renovated Cahiers rekindled the feud by recasting then a subversive idea-that the French, for instance, some of Truffaut's arguments and adding the charge consider Siegel to be Hollywood 's most gifted film- of reactionary fake-liberalism. The latest and bloodiest maker-creeps into Joyce Haber's (our current Louella) round begins in the December, 1970 issue of Positif, breathless column , but no one really believes that kind which devotes over a third of its 72 pages to attacks of thing in this town. Hollywood 's own Pantheon hasn 't by Michel Ciment, Louis Seguin and Robert Benayoun , really been shaken by the critical re-evaluation of accusing their opponents of Stalinism, obscurantism American film that is going on . Stevens , Wyler , Zin- and outright fakery; it is quickly succeeded by angry nemann , Lean , the \" classical guys\" are still tops. Of letters and rebuttals in both magazines. course there's an awful lot of confusion around when embarrassing mavericks like Sam Fuller keep getting A few relevant details: from the beginning, Cahiers ' books written about them. Hal Mohr, for instance , is putdowns have tended to be terse and condescending , clearly bewildered when he has to field questions at Positif's outraged and endless. A collective statement universities about shooting BABY FACE NELSON and by the editors of Cahiers, Tel Quel and Cinethique has UNDERWORLD , USA rather than his Academy Award-win- appeared in issues of all three magazines , describing ning A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM of 1935. Fred Zin- Positif's latest foray as part of a general trend to dis- nemann is reported to have asked a critic who was credit all \" revolutionary theoretical work .\" In large interviewing him why he thought auteur critics didn 't measure, the pivotal focus of Positif's renewed aggres- like his work. Perhaps they don 't see a consistent sion is the extensive coverage Cahiers has given to thematic developing, the interviewer hazarded. 0 but Straub 's OTHON; particular rancor is expressed over there is , replied Zinnemann ; all of the films deal with some of Straub's willful assertions about the film and a character in a situation of stress . . . Cahiers ' respectful glosses. Despite the care he 's taken over BEGUILED , I don't Beneath this rubble of mutual abuse, Cahiers con- think the film will do much to dislodge the reputation tinues to be a magazine of major importance, despite of movie doctor that Siegel has earned himself over its recent masochistic rites of exorcism (e.g ., the the years. Whether this is Siegel's most personal movie collective reconsiderations of YOUNG MR. LINCOLN and is open to question, but certainly every foot of it is MOROCCO , which read like sociological autopsies of exactly as he wants it. Having made movies with shoe- previous diseases) and a prose so difficult to crack, string budgets for years , Siegel was frankly apologetic even for natives, that a joke was already making the that the movie had come in around 3 million . The rounds two years ago that the magazine was coming Universal people were stunned-whatever they had out with a new edition in French; while Positif remains continued on page 68 continued on page 4. 2 FALL 1971

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PARIS a readable, occasionally useful and insightful journal Perrault that includes magic, incest, a seductive witch with somewhat lesser ambitions. Both magazines have and a frog-spitting crone, Demy has ironed out most been so clique-oriented that for years each had their of the potential anxiety with the help of such pacifiers own \"favorite seats\" at the Cinematheque, and at as Catherine Deneuve (the princess) , Jacques Perrin times one is tempted to feel that the squabbling on (the prince) and Michel Legrand (the score) , all three both sides has less to do with films and issues than with the considerable egos involved-another sympton , of whom worked to similar effect in THE YOUNG GIRLS perhaps, of the suicidal splintering and solipsism built OF ROCHEFORT . As with Life Savers , the colors come into the reflexes of the French left. in all fruity flavors-extras and odd parts of the decor are painted blue or red to match their corresponding If the magazines are in agreement about anyone kingdoms-but the aftertaste is bitter with melancholia . subject, this is the incontestable genius of Jerry Lewis , In a \" specialty \" number, Deneuve sings a recipe for and recent reviews of WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? in each a magic cake to her alter ego who prepares it, and magazine may provide a useful index to their personal- the tired brown lump that comes out of the hearth is ities. Benayoun's lengthy discussion in Positif # 122 the sad equivalent to Demy's achievement. and Serge Daney 's five numbered paragraphs in Ca- hiers # 228 both have their moments of ingenuity. A host of invocations to the muse of Cocteau , which Lewis ' latest film concerns \" the richest man in the includes everything from Jean Marais to direct quota- world ,\" played by Lewis, a neurotic named Byers who tion, creates at best the fantasy of a film , not a film counters his rejection from the draft during World War of a fantasy . For the unassuming kid who doesn 't know II by launching an absurd , expensive campaign of his or care who Jacques Demy is and wants an honest own in Italy, manned by a few other rejects he has fairy tale , PEAU D 'ANE is likely to come across as some- bribed, and enacted through his own impersonation thing of a cheat. For the rest of us, I suppose the film of a Nazi general ; they succeed in defeating the Nazis is something that one can brood over, in classic deca- and blowing up Hitler single-handedly, and when last dent fashion . PEAU D 'ANE (\"Donkey Skin\") aspires to seen are busily at work on the Japanese. Both reviews a brand of romanticism that is no longer being manu- treat Byers as an analogue to America 's position in factured because it is no longer believed in . Like Jim the world. Benayoun rather intricately relates the meg- McBride 's GLEN AND RANDA GO TO THE CITY , it is about alomania of the character to that of America and Lewis the death of Wonder Woman, but unlike GLEN AND himself (as writer-director-performer), establishing RANDA , it didn 't make me want to cry. It's too stiff-necked cross-references with Chaplin 's THE GREAT DICTATOR and overstarched to look down into its own abysses, and Lubitsch 's TO BE OR NOT TO BE ; Daney grazes a and when Demy coyly introduces a telephone, a hash few of the same points while tracing a series of puns pipe and a helicopter into his \" fairy kingdom ,\" it is no violation at all , for that kingdom has never begun (Byers = buyers, a character named \" General Buck,\" to breathe on its own . Godard faced a comparable dilemma in UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME when he tried etc.) and adding a few strained ones of his own, gener- to make a \" neo-realist musical,\" and viewers who find ally relegating his comments to semi-abstract notations some emotional solace in that frigid film may want to rather than explications. Both pieces are recommended crawl around in Demy's refrigerator as well. They ' ll find to anyone interested in penetrating the French Lewis a number of wonderfully processed and packaged mystique: as I write in early May , Lewis has just com- products inside: Deneuve-Perrin for the main course , pleted a \" record-breaking \" live engagement in Paris , Marais and Delphine Seyrig (the fairy-witch) as elegant and his reception has generally been so delirious that side dishes, and a rich overlay of Legrand music for one suspects a rapprochement between warring digestive purposes . But they might find it worthwhile Frenchmen might be possible after all. to consider how much of the food ever gets cooked and eaten, and how much remains locked forever in Note for harassed filmographers and auteur critics: cold , plastic-vegetable possibility. Now that many leading French directors are helping to make ends meet by directing publicite films-ads A versatile, not easily classifiable young French used in movie theaters and / or on television-a list of director who deserves wider recognition , Jean-Daniel who has made what might be useful , particularly since Pollet has already directed an unwieldy number of most of these works are unsigned . For the record then , hard-to-see films in the past few years . Having seen Georges Franju has worked for Aspro (a brand of only 3 shorts and 2 features , I cannot pretend to give aspirin), William Klein for Dim socks and stockings, a comprehensive account of his work; but the evidence Jacques Tati for Gervais ice cream, Jean-Luc Godard of LE HORLA and L 'AMOUR C'EST GAl , L'AMOUR C'EST TRISTE for Schick razors, and Robert Dhery for something suggests that there is much to be discovered . called Vapona. Unfortunately , my research hasn 't un- covered the products handled by Claude Lelouch or Within its tightly filled half-hour, LE HORLA (1966) Louis Malle-or by Stanley Kubrick and John Schle- offers some interesting strategies for adapting a literary singer, who are shooting commercials abroad-but I work . Pollet has indicated in an interview that his inter- can suggest one possible area for critical investigation : est in the project was not so much De Maupassant's the use of primary colors in Klein 's ELDRIDGE CLEAVER horror story itself but the problem of integrating the and his ad for Dim , and how these relate to one another. text into a cinematic structure . Part of his solution is to maintain a fluid continuity in the spoken first-person Jacques Demy's PEAU D 'ANE: If I may be forgiven narration while locating this discourse through montage a hyperbole, Jacques Demy's newest movie resembles in three alternating \" relative \" tenses : past (the plot an unholy marriage between Cocteau 's BEAUTY AND THE unfolding beneath the narration), present (the narrator BEAST without the beast and Tashlin 's CINDERFELLA recounting the action into a tape recorder) and future without Jerry Lewis . That is to say, all of its childhood (the tape recorder playing his voice in an abandoned dreams are purged of everything which might be called rowboat) . Thus while the story's chronology and conti- marvelous or frightening or even cumbersome , and one nuity are respected , the montage enables the film to is left with interior decoration-a mural of legends that achieve a semi-autonomous achronological structure no one can believe in. Taking a fairy tale from Charles continued on page 6 4 FALL 1971



PARIS of its own , and the tensions between these coexisting and a grasp of contemporary French manners and forms produces some extraordinary effects-effects, moreover, which serve the original story admirably, moods that few directors could equal. Following the enclosing its intimations of possession and madness frustrated progress of a car designer (Hulot) with his in a rigid continuum of haunting finality . Equally striking cohorts and display model from Paris to an auto ex- is a bold thematic use of color, with the richest blues position in Amsterdam , Tati shapes his plot around all this side of PIERROT LE FOU . the irritations of motorized travel-breakdowns, smash- If the above summary suggests that Pollet is some- ups, traffic jams, customs inspectors-as well as the thing of a purist (a description borne out by his remark- rituals and gimmicks inherent in promoting cars . De- able short feature MEDITERRANEE), the broad, loose spite a predictable amount of hackneyed material, there proletarian comedy of his third feature , L'AMOUR C'EST is an agreeable freshness in much of the execution , GAl , L'AMOUR C'EST TRISTE (made 1968, but released only and certainly no one could accuse Tati of stretching this year), denotes a wholly different manner: the title a Pete Smith Specialty out to feature length. But after perfectly describes the film 's mood and ambition . Sub- the extraordinary ambitiousness of his last film , the stantially served by the morose, gentle ambience of horizons of TRAFFIC seem pretty low , and one suspects Claude Melki, who may be recalled from Pollet's that Tati is mainly biding his time . episode in PARIS VU PAR ... , the comedy is mainly restricted to the quiet agonies of a tailor too naive to PLAYTIME tended to alienate audiences by eschewing realize that his sister is a prostitute and too shy to sex and violence , plodding along at a lifelike and un- declare his love for a girl from the provinces who shares his room . With virtually all of the action contained in dramatic pace, and cramming the 70mm screen with a single two-room flat that is smoothly traversed by so many different things to watch at once that the lateral tracking shots , this fragile material is kept afloat average shot resembled a multiple choice question by sheer craftsmanship and a Molieresque rendering (where is the next gag likeliest to erupt?) . The off-center of social behavior. There 's a very touching cameo timing of several gags compounded this alienation, par- appearance by Marcel Dalio-a ubiquitous, irrepressible ticularly for those expecting the Pavlovian disciplines trouper now in his seventies-and a sweet, non-assuming and guidelines of the Sennett-Keaton-Chaplin school. sense throughout of staying within modest boundaries Much in TRAFFIC seems to work consciously against that firmly places the film in what Manny Farber calls these tendencies : there is \" se x\" (a simpering glamor the termite range . doll in charge of public relations , played by Maria Georges Franju's LA FAUTE DE L'ABBE MOURET: After Kimberly , who becomes more of a \" star\" in the travel- observing the cold brilliance of THOMAS L'IMPOSTEUR ling group than the car itself) ; there is \" violence \" (a only recently , it is depressing to discover that Franju is capable of such flat, undistinguished work as his multiple freak accident as extravagant as anything in latest fi 1m . Without having read the Zola novel from WEEKEND) ; the pace is relatively clipped ; and most of which this was taken , I cannot give an adequate expla- the gags are preselected and framed for immediate nation of how or why the source has been betrayed . consumption . If TRAFFIC works more successfully with The anti-Catholicism of earlier Franju films is certainly audiences-and it seemed to , judging from the laughter, not muted here , but its expression is trivialized by so both times I saw it-this is probably because it does many village-atheist conceits that one looks in vain for most of the work for them . There is still enough of Tati 's the subtlety and irony that underlines his previous quirky habits of selection to create some discomfort- efforts . Th e middle section of the film , chronicling a how can one respond to a director who finds virtually romantic idyll between an abbot suffering amnesia and everything funny, except to embrace this notion uncri- a golden-haired ingenue , is every bit as restrained as tically or run away from it in disgust?-but not enough ELVIRA MADIGAN crossed with Zeffirelli 's ROMEO AND JU- to support a radical vision . All the Kafkaesque ordeals LIET. One brief, stunning Franjuvian moment occurs of the spectators in PLAYTIME were precisely the same when the abbot is lifting a statue out of a crate , and as those of the characters-tourists wandering aim- the framing of the shot, by eliminating his hands, turns lessly through interchangeable buildings of glass and the movement into a magical ascension of the Virgin steel-but when Tati brought all his characters together out of e xcelsior. The rest, unfortunately, is pretty heavy and made them friends , he infused the same land- going . scapes with beauty and awe, making them rich with possibilities. By turning Hulot into another lost wan- Jacques Tati 's TRAFFIC: Being one of the few movie- derer, exempted from his role of \" leading \" the audi- goers in the Western Hemisphere who considers Tati 's ence, Tati compelled anyone willing to play his game PLA YTIME (1967) a masterpiece-a truly innovative film to discover a new way of looking . TRAFFic-like MON whose continued absence in America creates a serious ONCLE , minus its unconvincing upbeat ending-begins cultural gap-I approached his newest movie with fervid and concludes as a catalog of gripes, and teaches us hopes and a fair amount of trepidation . Would the essentially nothing that we don't already know. Only commercial disaster of the previous film goad Tati into a few stray moments ( lunch with an easygoing Dutch a stylistic retreat , an attempt to regain the audience mechanic near a peaceful canal, brief images of Apollo who flocked to MON ONCLE (1958)? Would the more II glimpsed on TV) suggest any way out of the terrors modest budget of TRAFFic-only his fifth film in 24 the complaints imply , and little force is felt behind them . years-result in a safer, more conventional vehicle for Most of the film is concerned with hurry , impatience M. Hulot, the quaint middleclass bumbler? I'm afraid and indifference-a lot of angry vibes about very little- it did. and even Hulot himself occasionally contributes to the bad feeling . The irony is how easily a bemused public Obviously Tati is too accomplished and intransigent will choose this simple pessimism-a prosaic string of a filmmaker to be capable of selling himself down the bead-like gags-over the complex and poetic optimism river, and there is much in TRAFFIC to be grateful for : that preceded it. a rigorously composed soundtrack of remarkable den- sity, some wonderfully sustained and developed gags, ====== Postscript: Recent news that Jacques Rivette 's 14- hour film , OUT ONE , is now completed gives us a lot to look forward to in more wa ys than one . A partial adaptation of Balzac 's Histoire des 13 trilogy in a con- continued on page 68 6 FALL 1971

THE SERIALS BY RAYMOND \\\\/ILLIAM STEDMAN .. . should attract kids 01 all ages who enjoy being held in suspense for one more week.\" Calder Pickett Kansas City Star \" Trivia fans will revel in Stedman's work . . . \" Les Bridges Chicago Tribune Here at last is the \"true-life story \" of that uniquely American and \" . . . a fascinating book, with several hours of seemingly indestructible drama form , the serial. Beginning with del ight in store for c asual readers, buffs and magazine serials , early comic strips, and the early motion-picture researchers .\" serials , whose sequences began enthralling moviegoers in the in- nocent years before World War I, the author describes the radio Murf. adventure serials and domestic \" soaps \" of the thirties and forties , Variety the transfer to TV of the form in the fifties , and its undiminished success in the sixties and into the seventies, as shown by the popu- i l universityAvailable AI Your local Bookstore larity of such productions as Peyton Place and The Forsyte Saga. \\,,~,,1 ofoklahoma Price $9.95 Press 1005 Asp Avenue Norman, Oklahoma 73069 babell MOTION PICTURE LAB DIVISION SILVER TRACK APPLICATES SOUND ON EKTACHROME 7389 PRINT STOCK Now you can get KODACHROME SOUND QUALITY with the advantages of Lower Picture Contrast & Faster Service. babell MOTION PICTURE LAB DIVISION 416 West 45 St. New York 10036 PHONE:(212) 2 4 5 - 8 9 0 0 when writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT

Robin Wood 's most famous works are Howard Slll'I~I~ Hawks, Hitchcock's Films, and Ingmar Bergman. He teaches at Queen 's College in Kingston, Ontario. \"TI~ C_lfl'III~ll '1' HE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE seems to lfl' rl'lll~ me John Ford's last successful movie; yet most of Ford's admirers appear to place a very high value IlI,rl~ll? on thethreefeatures thatfollowed it, finding sustained significance in DONOVAN 'S REEF , explaining away the late films of the weaknesses of CHEYENNE AUTUMN in terms of tJC)II~ I~C)lll) studio interference, and acclaiming SEVEN WOMEN as a masterpiece. Of these three films only CHEYENNE RobinWood AUTUMN strikes me as deserving any great effort of critical attention, the other two seeming thin and was necessary where earlier a major element in the perfunctory; and I have yet to find any convincing creative impulse had been an outgoing love and case made out for them by their professed ad- tenderness for the thing itself. The characterization mirers-a case that doesn't simply take their value in the later film is very much broader, two-dimen- for granted and concentrate on the kind of periph- sional , verging in several cases on the comic-gro- eral felicities one can expect any Ford to offer. This tesque. Fonda 's Wyatt Earp is a far more detailed article is at once an attempt to account for the failure creation than either Stewart's or Wayne's perform- of these films as I see it, and an open challenge ance in the later film . The grotesquerie of the minor to reasoned disagreement, to a demonstration of parts is immediately strik ing if one compares Mar- their substance or stature. vin's Valance with Walter Brennan's Clanton, or Edmond O 'Brien's editor with Alan Mowbray's Sha- One way of defining the relationship of Ford's kespearean actor: this latter comparison offers the late films to his previous work would be to compare difference between an essentially straight charac- THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE with MY DARLING ter-part rendered into caricature by the performance CLEMENTINE . One's immediate reaction to the jux- and an inherently grotesque role given a naturalistic taposition may at first seem paradoxical: that the roundness and complexity. It is difficult to make later film is more complex but less rich . In fact, the these distinctions without suggesting that LIBERTY sense that CLEMENTINE is the less complex work VALANCE is the inferior film , and this is not my aim proves on reflection to be illusory: the impression (I think both reach a level of ach ievement where derives simply from the fact that its complexities are discriminations of the A-is-better-than-B kind be- experienced as resolvable in a constructive way, the come merely petty and academic). All I want is to different positive values embodied in East and West, establish here, as starting point, the different natures in civilization and wilderness, felt to be ultimately of the two films , and to suggest that there is more reconcilable and mutually fertilizing . There is, it is than one possible explanation : one could argue that true , as in all of Ford's westerns a pervading note Ford in his old age had the right to take his previous of nostalgia to be taken into account. But the tone work for granted, that no one should ask him to of the opening and close of LIBERTY VALANCE is more do again what he did in CLEMENTINE when he wants , than nostalgic : it is overtly elegiac. perhaps using CLEMENTINE as a reference-point, to go on to do something quite different; or one could It is, however, the long central section of LIBERTY argue that something very important in his earlier VALANCE that most invites comparison with CLEM- work had been undermined or whittled away, leaving ENTINE, and the difference of tone here is very a gap the new developments, while very interesting marked . It is partly determined by the movement in themselves , cannot fill. Far from being incompat- away from location shooting to studio work in the ible, these two explanations can co-exist, suggest- later film , and partly by the characterization : both ing in their juxtaposition something of the complex- tend strongly towards stylization . The sense of com- ity of the issues involved in confronting late Ford . munity is certainly there in LIBERTY VALANCE-in the restaurant, the school-room scene, the political In fact, LIBERTY VALANCE makes perfect artistic meeting-but it is sketched rather than lovingly sense. The main body of the film has something created . It is not that there is an absence of detail ; of the nature of the morality play, the characters what is lacking in the later film and present in the conceived more in terms of their functions than in earlier is something much less tangible, something terms of naturalistic characterization : Ford had un- perhaps only describable in loose terms such as doubtedly by then developed a much sharper con- \" aura \" but palpably there in CLEMENTINE . One sees sciousness of the thematic level of his work. Before this , I think , if one asks where in LIBERTY VALANCE there is an equivalent of the Sunday morning se- quence where Earp and Clementine join and dignify the dance on the newly dedicated floor of the unbuilt church . The schoolroom scene in LIBERTY VALANCE , though it has something of the same thematic val- ue-the development of civilization within a primitive community-seems in itself relatively cursory, as if Ford were by now content with establishing what 8 FALL 1971

yo .:o~'<:1== = = = = Ireland. Coincidence, perhaps, but I find the simple fact in itself suggestive. The course of Ford 's flight ~ from his own country-I think in artistic terms it amounts to that-to the Pacific, to China, or back John Ford. to Ireland , is interrupted only by his account of the desperate trek of the Cheyenne back to their native one accuses Edmond O'Brien, Lee Marvin, Andy country. The relationship of CHEYENNE AUTUMN to Devine of over-playing or crudity, one should pause the cavalry trilogy (FORT APACHE , SHE WORE A YELLOW to consider the homogeneity of tone of which their RIBBON , RIO GRANDE) parallels that of LIBERTY VAL- histrionic hyperbole constitutes a major element: it ANCE to CLEMENTINE and is even more richly sug- is above all what distinguishes the main body of gestive. The failure of CHEYENNE AUTUMN as a work the film from the framework , where this quality is of art is due less to studio interference than to Ford 's totally absent. The distinction is most obvious in the inability-after so many years working with Indians, playing of Devine, since (unlike Marvin and O'Brien) and despite scrupulous care in research-to create he appears in both framework and flashback : the a really convincing Cheyenne life: his actors may Link Appleyard of the film 's \"present,\" though an be going through all the correct motions but they entirely convincing development of the character, remain wooden Indians. This failure of the imagina- appears thoroughly subdued and demoralized be- tion relates significantly to much else in Ford (indeed side the Link Appleyard of the film's past; he has to many of his imaginative successes) and I shall become sadder and more sensitive, the inherent return to it. The film becomes intensely moving only , pathos has become manifest. In his development I think, when one sees it in relation to the earlier is epitomized the whole relationship between frame- cavalry films, and thinks of Ford rather than of his work and flashback. The Old West, seen in retro- characters. spect from beside Tom Doniphon 's coffin , is invest- ed with an exaggerated , stylized vitality ; in the film's That Ford himself wanted us to be aware of a \"present\" (still, of course, our past, but connected connection is suggested by a number of cross- to our present, as it were , by the railroad that carries references, some of which at least can hardly have Senator Stoddard and Hallie away at the end) all been unconscious. SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON was real vitality has drained away, leaving only the shal- the first Ford film in which Ben Johnson appeared low energy of the news-hounds, and a weary, ele- and the second in which Harry Carey Jr. appeared giac feeling of loss. What is lost for the characters (the first was THREE GODFATHERS, a year earlier) . In is defined in concrete, dramatic terms in the film- it, Johnson is a sergeant and Carey a lieutenant. but there is beyond this a sense that the loss is They are both cavalrymen again (though now mere also Ford's. What Ford had lost becomes steadily troopers) in RIO GRANDE , having also appeared to- clearer I think, through a close examination of the gether in the intervening WAGONMASTER. CHEYENNE three post-LIBERTY VALANCE films; for the moment, AUTUMN not only reunites them as troopers but.nos- suffice it to say that it is what was so abundantly talgically gives to Johnson his two recurring catch- and pervasively present in CLEMENTINE , in the texture phrases from YELLOW RIBBON : \" That ain 't in my de- and spirit of the film as much as its thematic struc- partment,\" and \"I don't get paid for thinking .\" ture. What 's more, Johnson did not appear in any of Ford 's intervening films and had become largely Of Ford 's nine feature films from THE SEARCHERS overlooked in Hollywood movies, so his casting in to LIBERTY VALANCE all but two (THE RISING OF THE CHEYENNE AUTUMN constitutes one in the long line MOON and GIDEON OF SCOTLAND YARD) are set in of Fordian \" resurrections\" of forgotten or passed- America and are concerned to varying degrees with over actors; it is also a resurrection of the earlier episodes and epochs in American history; of the character, though he now has a different name. three made since, only CHEYENNE AUTUMN is set in America, the other two in very remote parts of the This reminder is sufficient to alert us to a number world , and a fourth film started by Ford and aban- of specific reversals of motifs from the cavalry trilogy doned because of illness (YOUNG CASSIDY) is set in (especially YELLOW RIBBON) . In YELLOW RIBBON the Indians' horses are stampeded by the cavalry ; in CHEYENNE AUTUMN the Indians stampede the cavalry horses. In YELLOW RIBBON a solitary white man (Johnson , in fact) is pursued by a party of Cheyenne, and escapes by urging his horse over a chasm which the Indians' horses can 't leap ; in CHEYENNE AUTUMN a solitary Cheyenne is pursued by a party of white men, and escapes in precisely the same manner (here , even the movement within the image is re- versed , right to left in the earlier film , left to right in the later). One of the most touching, and themat- ically central scenes in YELLOW RIBBON is the noc- turnal burial, with full honors, of General Clay, the Confederate general re-enlisted as a trooper after the Civil War; one of the most visually impressive scenes in CHEYENNE AUTUMN is the ceremonial burial FILM COMMENT 9

CHEYENNE of the Indian chief, in which the Cheyenne warriors AUTUMN . move on horseback against the skyline in a way that strikingly recalls certain of Ford 's favorite heroic Richard Widmark. cavalry images. photo : Museum of Modern Art! Film Stills Such specific reversals pOint of course to far more general reversal - patterns in CHEYENNE AUTUMN . Archives There is a significant transference of Christian im- agery. The best reference point here is the climax CHEYENNE of RIO GRANDE. There , troopers Johnson and Carey AUTUMN . (with Claude Jarman Jr.) protect the white children they have rescued from the Indians in a church . Carroll Baker. A little girl summons the cavalry by ringing the photo : Warner church bell, and the troopers actually shoot down Indians through a cross-shaped aperture in the Brothers church door. In CHEYENNE AUTUMN it is shells from Cavalry canons that kill and injure Indian children CHEYENNE who are under the protection of Quaker Deborah AUTUMN . Wright (Carroll Baker), the film 's chief repre- sentative of Christianity. What is striking is not Carroll Baker, merely the reversal but the weakening of the Chris- Dolores Del Rio and tian imagery. Church , bell and cross in RIO GRANDE are integrated in a climax of triumphant force and Gilbert Roland. power; Deborah in CHEYENNE AUTUMN is largely inef- photo : Cinemabilia fectual , unable to do anything amid the chaos of the battlefield but wind a rag as a bandage around CHEYENNE a child 's injured leg without even removing the AUTUMN . blood-soaked clothing already covering the wound. Edward G. Robinson Ford clearly made CHEYENNE AUTUMN with the .aod deliberate intention of righting the balance of sym- pathies and allegiances in the earlier cavalry west- Ri chard Wid mark. erns , and the intention is partly realized in the rever- photo : Cinemabilia sal-patterns. At the end of FORT APACHE John Wayne , having adopted Henry Fonda's dress, mannerisms 10 FALL 1971 and persona, and having contributed to the white- washing of his character, is about to depart on the mission of herding the last rebel Indians back into the reservations . The film seems to me-quite as- tonishingly, in view of what has gone before-to be at that point solidly behind him. At least, it is ex- tremely difficult to detect any irony in the tone of the last scene, Wayne's abrupt (as presented) capit- ulation to the kind of fascist policy and outlook the rest of the film seemed to have been criticizing being linked unequivocally with that continuity of tradition which Ford consistently endorses in his work : a complete analysis of the scene would reveal , I think, the intimate interconnection of its every detail, relat- ing the attitude to the Indians to the naming of Shirley Temple's baby (\" Michael Thursday Yorke O'Rourke \" ). Those who see irony and ambiguity here must concede, I think, that they are arguing against the tone of the scene and trusting the tale, not the artist. Certainly, the ending does violence to the previous development of the Wayne character and to the whole drift of the preceding narrative. CHEYENNE AUTUMN undoubtedly reverses Ford 's de- cision there , at least as far as the Indians are con- cerned . In fact , diverse pulls and impulses have always existed in Ford . At times they can give rise to a rich complexity (MY DARLING CLEMENTINE) or carefully defined ambivalence (THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE) , at others to confusion and self-contradic- tion as at the end of FORD APACHE . An artist need

• not necessarily be a clear thinker, but Ford 's self- SEVEN WOMEN . Margaret Leighton , Mildred Dunnock, Eddie Albert, contradictions can sometimes be very disconcert- Field and Sue Lyon .photo : Cinemabilia ing . Peter Bogdanovich questioning him as to whether the men should have obeyed Fonda in FORT APACHE knowing that he was wrong, elicited the following forthright response: \" Yes-he was the colonel , and what he says goes ; whether they agree with it or not, it still pertains. In Vietnam today, prob- ably a lot of guys don 't agree with their leader, but they still go ahead and do the job.\"':' The interview was made during the filming of CHEYENNE AUTUMN , which contains, in the Karl Malden sequence, one of the most devastating attacks on blind obedience the cinema has given us. (It's not a pleasant thought, but I can 't escape the feeling that the fact that Malden plays a foreigner-a sort of Prussian arche- type-was crucial in enabling Ford to denounce the character and his reliance on orders unequivocally: he is somehow not quite the U.S. army , not quite \" one of us \"). This is not a marginal point: concepts such as duty and obedience are integral to the Fordian value-complex . In SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBoN-greatest of the cavalry trilogy and one of Ford's most deeply satisfying movies-the conflicts inherent in his attitude to duty, to the \" book of rules ,\" are treated in a beautifully complex and flexible way . He is always at his greatest as an artist when he (or his material) can allow his central traditionalist values to be challenged without being radically un- dermined . The attempt to \" tell it the other way\" in CHEYENNE AUTUMN is quite another matter. The rich and complex ethic of the cavalry trilogy is built on interlocking and interdependent concepts of civili- zation, of the Indians, and of ttre cavalry itself; its structure collapses in ruins if the values invested in those concepts are undermined or reversed . I~ ORO 'S WESTERNS have always implicitly SEVEN WOMEN. Margaret Leighton and Sue Lyon .photo: Cinemabilia acknowledged that American civilization was built on the subjugation of the Indians; it is his DONOVAN 'S REEF. John Wayne, Elizabeth Allen and Cesar Romero. attitude to that fact that changes. It is obvious that Indians in westerns are not just a people but a photo : Paramount Pictures concept: they have a basic mythic meaning on which individual directors ring many changes but which remains an underlying constant. As savages , they represent the wild, the untamed, the disruptive, the vital forces that remain largely unassimilable into any civilization man has so far elaborated : in psy- chological terms, the forces of the Id. James Leahy has drawn a parallel (in Movie 14) between Major Dundee's fanatically dedicated campaign against the Indians in Peckinpah's film and Captain Ahab 's mission to destroy the White Whale. The psy- chological attitudes of directors who have made westerns can usually be found accurately epito- mized by or implicit in their treatment of Indians, as one sees if one examines the role of Indians in, say , THE BIG SKY , RUN OF THE ARROW and LITTLE BIG MAN and works outward from that to apply one 's findings to the total oeuvres of Hawks, Fuller and Penn. In Ford 's westerns of the late Thirties and \" John Ford, by Peter Bogdanovich. Movie Paperback, page 86 . FILM COMMENT 11

early Forties , the role of the Indians is relatively intelligent, too honest, and too generous to be quite simple and not far removed from this pure arche- content with that; and he builds up Cochise into type. The presentation of the Indians in STAGECOACH a figure of considerable dignity and moral weight and DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK is almost entirely (though he remains very much the \"noble savage, \" untroubled by any sense of them as individual with the implication that he would behave himself human beings. The allegorical overtones of the if the white men were nice to him). He is sufficiently stagecoach journey in the former help define the a presence to lead us to question not only Colonel Indians' role. There are three coach-stations each Thursday's obviously monstrous attitudes and more primitive than its predecessor. At the first there errors, but the whole validity of building a civilization are no Indians; at the second the supposedly friendly at his expense. It is already the problem of the Indians defect in the middle of the night; the third Indians that constitutes a potential threat to the has been burnt down . When the Indians at last stability of the whole structure of values elaborated attack, Ford produces that stunning visual effect of in the cavalry films . the coach suddenly emerging into the great arid sandy waste; it is stunning not only because of its Comparisons between Ford and Hawks are visual power but because of the symbolic overtones, usually mutually illuminating, nowhere more so than the association of the Apache with barren desert. in their treatment of Indians. In RED RIVER the Indians In DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK the Indians are again merely fulfill a plot function and the presentation of screaming , destructive savages, a concept rather them is conventional and non-personal; it is THE BIG than characters, but a new and very important com- SKY that provides the basis for comparison . Hawks ponent is added to this by way of modification : is scarcely more successful than Ford in creating Ford's paternalism, which continues basically un- a convincing Indian life on the screen, but the im- changed right through to CHEYENNE AUTUMN. As well plicit attitude is radically different from Ford's. When as supplying Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert Ford's heroes move out into the wilderness, they with a devoted Indian servant, the film culminates carry the frontier with them , extending it, establish- in a poetic vision of integration that invariably (and ing civilization. The whole movement of THE BIG SKY understandably) evokes jeers from contemporary is a movement beyond the frontier, into the uncul- audiences , but which is rather touching in its na'l\"ve- tivated wilds, away from what Boone (Oewey Martin) te: Indian and Negro, accepted in their subservient succinctly describes as \"stinking people.\" Boone roles , joining in the salutation of the American flag . ends up accepting his marriage with an Indian girl, and at least partial integration in her tribe: a de- An Indian makes a brief but significant appear- nouement unambiguously endorsed by the film and ance in CLEMENTINE : \" Indian Joe, \" shooting up the unimaginable in Ford (compare the treatment of town in a drunken frenzy , disturbing Wyatt Earp 's Martin Pawley 's Indian \" marriage \" in THE first \" civilizing \" visit to the barber's. Earp knocks SEARCHERS!) . Most striking of all , perhaps , is the him around a bit and wants to know why he's been famous scene of the finger amputation , one of let out of the reservation : in racial terms the scene Hawks' favorite examples of his fondness for using is obviously very unpleasant, but in mythic terms violence or pain as material for robust humour. Jim very meaningful , civilization conceived as demand- (Kirk Oouglas) knows the Indian superstition that ing the rigorous suppression of the untamed forces you can 't enter heaven if you don 't die physically Indian Joe represents. complete; and so, riotously drunk on whisky, he crawls in the dust around the camp-fire with his The paternalist attitude dominates the treatment friends, searching for the severed finger which has of the Indians in the cavalry trilogy : the noble and been casually tossed aside. The white man becomes dignified Cochise in FORT APACHE , and John Wayne's an Indian (just as , earlier , in the town , he picked old friend Pony-that-Walks in YELLOW RIBBON (the up and adopted a Negro dance-step), quite unself- scene of their conference is perhaps the best in- consciously and without the slightest hint of conde- volving an individual Indian in all Ford 's westerns) , scension: there is no suggestion in Hawks ' treat- are in terms of presentation but two sides of the ment of the scene that Jim is debasing himself. Can same coin . As in DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK , the one imagine such a sequence in Ford? contrariness of Indians is typically attributed (in differing ways and to differing degrees) to the influ- The corollary of this opposition lies in the two ence or interference of evil white men ; which is a directors' responses to civilization . Hawks' work, way of at once excusing the Indians and conde- in fact , offers very little by way of constructive atti- scending to them. The presentation of the Indians tude to civilization : most typically, his movies tend in FORT APACHE reveals characteristic confusion to become celebrations of all that civilization can 't (rather than complexity-for the divergent attitudes contain . Metaphorically, his heroes are always mov- are not held in any meaningful balance) : the loath- ing outside the frontier, either (in the adventure some Meacham , purveyor of bad liquor, refers to films) to form their own primitive societies with their them cynically as \" children\" and we are clearly own strictly functional rules for survival , or (in the meant to find the remark offensive. But Ford's own comedies) into an exhilarating and perilous chaos attitude isn 't altogether clearly distinguishable from and anarchy. Ford , on the contrary , is the American its inherent paternalism-Meacham is a nasty father , cinema's great poet of civilization . Where Hawks' Ford supports kind ones-and one is left reflecting world is dominated by the Id , Ford 's is dominated that, after all, it is only the cynicism in the remark by the Superego-though , in the best films of both, that is supposed to be offensive. But Ford is too the domination is not unchallenged . 12 FALL 1971

The ambivalence of Ford 's attitude to civilization Central to Ford 's work is the belief in the value that reaches full ex plicitness in LIBERTY VALANCE is of tradition . This is clearly what attracts him so much implicit in all his work . It is already very clear in to the cavalry-his cavalry , for, despite the authen- STAGECOACH . There, at one extreme, are the Apache , ticity of material details of dress, ritual , etc ., it is like an incarnation of the spirit of the wilderness , obviously a highly personal creation. In the trilogy , savage and irreducible; but the opposite pole is the cavalry becomes Ford 's answer to mortality and transience. Individuals come and go, but the conti- represented by the Purity League ladies who are nuity of tradition is unbroken , the individual gaining (according to Claire Trevor) \" worse than the a kind of immortality through the loss of his individ- Apache.\" Between the two unacceptable extremes uality and assimilation into the tradition . The em- come characters embodying partially conflicting phasis is on continuity rather than development: values between which one feels Ford 's alleg iances indeed , the moral objection to the end of FORT to be divided . The luncheon scene at the first coach APACHE is that it deliberately and perversely eschews station , for example, sets the artificial Southern the possibility of development by inSisting that noth- gallantry of the fallen gentleman Hatfield against the ing in the tradition must change . The civilized values natural courtesy of the outlaw Ringo; and sets the embodied in the cavalry-honour and duty-ar~ es- \" cultivated \" sensibility of cavalry wife Lucy Mallory sentially superego values, expressed through the against the natural sensitivity of the fallen Dallas. ever-recurring rituals and ceremonies that continue At the end of the film , as Ringo and Dallas drive without modification. This is the most important away to start a new life together, Doc Boone com- difference between the concepts of civilization en- ments, \" Well , they're saved from the blessings of acted in the Tombstone of CLEMENTINE and the cav- civilization .\" But Ringo and Dallas are setting out alry of the trilogy, and it perhaps explains why Ford, to start a farm and raise a family: their proposed wishing to reaffi rm a belief in the continuity of c ivi- future embraces precisely the fundamentals on lized values , in a world changing radically and with which civilization is built. alarming rapidity, turned from a developing commu- nity to an unchanging military body for an embodi- The values that are in conflict in STAGECOACH are ment of his ideals. partly reconciled in CLEMENTINE , Ford 's most har- monious vision of a prim itive but developing civiliza- The treatment of love relationships in Ford forms tion. When Wyatt Earp and Clementine dance to- an entirely consistent part of this pattern: one could gether on the church floor, it is as if Ringo were easily relate it, in psychological terms , to the pre- united with Lucy Mallory (except that Earp is the sentation of the Indians on the one hand and the new marshall and Clementine sweeter, and more cavalry values on the other. Suffice it to say here generous and open , than Lucy): the union of the that Ford tends to SUblimate sexual attraction into natural with the cultivated. At the end of the film either gallantry or heartiness: the relationships posi- Clementine-without the flowered bonnet that marks tively presented are always strictly \" wholesome \" her out as the girl from the East, and wearing a and honorable. Romance and courtship have their simple dress of the kind becoming her environ- own rules and rituals , and sexual love is never re- ment-is planning to stay on as a schoolteacher, garded by Ford as a value in itself. It becomes one while Earp hopes to pass that way again sometime: only when subordinated to the concept of marriage it is touchingly tentative rather than triumphant, but and family , conceived less as the relationsh ip of rich in a sense of potentiality. individual to individual than as the establishment of continuity within a civilized tradition . He never treats The Girl from the East turns up again in FORT sensuality positively: he can only tolerate Chihuahua APACHE , in the person of Shirley Temple , and adds in CLEMENTINE when she is shot and dying , where- a further problem to that dense but problematic film : upon he promptly sentimentalizes her (the character if civilization is adequately embodied in Miss Temple , is the film 's one major weakness) . It is symptomatic with her relentless dimpled affectations, is it really also that he is so ill at ease when forced to depict worth defending? Everyone in the film coos over se x ual abnormality : the rapist in SERGEANT RUTLEDGE her effusively , and there is little indication that Ford is conceived and acted in the crudest , most conven- realized that we might not fall in line and do the tional terms; and Ford 's direction of Margaret same . The partial answer is that the film 's drama- Leighton 's Agatha Andrews in SEVEN WOMEN looks tization of the concept of civilization does not de- as if someone had explained to him what a lesbian pend exclusively on her: there is the deeply affec- was five minutes before shooting and he hadn 't had tionate and detailed portrayal of the \" civilization \" time to recover from the shock. Again , Hawks pro- of the fort: the cavalry itself, and their wives and vides an illuminating contrast. The incestuous rela- homes. The role of the cavalry in Ford 's value-sys- tionship of Tony and Cesca in SCARFACE becomes , tem is a comple x one . It is the defender of civiliza- in the last scenes , the most positive force in the tion , but it also embodies within itself what are for film : the catastrophe is provoked not by the \" abnor- Ford civilization 's highest values-honor, chivalry, mal \" feelings but by the characters ' refusal to con- duty, the sense of tradition-so that it almost comes front and accept them , acceptance com ing as a to stand for civilizat ion itself. Yet, clearly, it can triumphant (if short-lived) release-Hawks antici- never quite do this : the cavalry life is in obvious pating Bertolucci by over thirty years! Hawks ' treat- respects too specialized , too much a thing apart, ment of se xual relationships has, of course , its own and what is basic to Ford 's (and most other peo- inhibitions and oddities; with his \" primitive\" lack of ple 's) concept of civilization-marriage , home, fami- ly-is necessarily marginal to it. FILM COMMENT 13

interest in tradition goes-again in sharp opposition in Ford 's attitude to American civilization can be to Ford-an apparent lack of interest in marriage vividly illuminated by juxtaposing his two Wyatt except in the most superficial sense of the term . Earps and the communities for which they are Yet the positive relationships in his films can incor- spokesmen : Fonda in CLEMENTINE , James Stewart in porate eroticism more easily than can those in Ford . CHEYENNE AUTUMN . The very concept of civilizat ion The Wayne / Dickinson relationship in RIO BRAVO, for has dwindled from its rich and complex embodiment example, has a strong , if muted , erotic charge : in in the church-floor dance of CLEMENTINE to the later the Doc Holliday / Chihuahua relationship in CLEM- Earp 's desire to be allowed to finish his poker-game ENTINE the eroticism (very crudely and untenderly undisturbed . An obvious weakness in CHEYENNE handled) is seen merely as part of Holliday 's degen- AUTUMN is Ford 's failure to define a coherent re- eration , as against the purity offered by Clementine . sponse to Deborah (Carroll Baker). Part of the trou- ble may lie in the reported stud io interference with In Ford 's presentation of a growing civilizat ion the casting . Ford told Peter Bogdanovich : \" ... I in CLEMENTINE and a \" permanent\" civilization in the wanted to do it right. The woman who did go with cavalry films , nostalgia plays a key role. It is a para- the Indians was a middle-aged spinster who finally do x of the cavalry films , in fact , that \" the army \" dropped out because she couldn 't take it any more. is regarded as at once unchanging and in the But you couldn 't do that-you had to have a young , past-it isn 't the modern army. Ford 's respect for beautiful girl. \" One can explain his failure with the the past works on various levels , in his casting as character in terms of a clash between his original much as in the lovingly detailed re-creation of time concept and the conventional noble heroine. The and place . In a profoundly characteristic scene of problem is that Deborah most of the time seems FORT APACHE , Dick Foran is let out of the ja ilhouse silly and ineffectual, with her ludicrous inculcation to sing \" Genevieve \" to an audience that includes of the alphabet, but the spectator is never sure that Guy Kibbee, George O'Brien , Anna Lee, and Shirley she is meant to be , so that the foolishness comes Temple (also in the film are Pedro Armendariz , to seem in Ford as much as in the character. Deb- Ford 's old friends Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen , orah 's ineffectuality is the more disappointing in and Mae Marsh). The scene is like an old stars ' that there are signs near the beginning of the film reunion. The words of the song beautifully evoke that she was partly meant to embody values that the spirit of the cavalry trilogy, with its intermingling would effectively challenge those invested in the of historical reality and deeply personal fantasy: cavalry, and especially the Fordian nostalgia: she , ... But still the hand of mem 'ry weaves / The bliss- tells Wid mark in the schoolhouse scene that he ful dreams of long ago .' Of Ford 's thirty-four feature thinks only about the past, but she thinks of the films since STAGECOACH , at least twenty-four are set future . Nothing in the film really fulfills the promise in the past, and nowhere does he show either the of radical questioning implicit in that moment. inclination or the ability to confront the realities of contemporary American life in his work . Centrally revealing in the film is the incident in- volving Sergeant Wichowsky (Mike Mazurki) and his It is easy to argue that , in CLEMENTINE , WAGON- decision not to re-enlist. On the night his enlistment MASTER and the cavalry trilogy, Ford is primarily period expires , Wichowsky gets drunk in his tent, concerned with constructing a value system , only where he is confronted by Capt. Archer (Widmark) . secondarily with depicting various stages in Ameri- He tells Archer that he is a Pole , and in his country can c ivilization . Yet the two impulses are so closely the Poles are persecuted by Cossacks; this, he now interwoven as to be really inseparable. For his vision sees , is what they are doing to the Cheyenne-the to retain its vitality, it was necessary for him to feel cavalry are Cossacks, he won 't re-enlist. Archer can at least a possible continuity between the civilization give him no answer to this . The next morning , as depicted in his films and that of contemporary the troop rides on to continue the persecution , Wi- America. Already in the Forties this must have been chowsky is in his place once again . No reason is difficult; by the Si xties it had clearly become impos- given for his change of mind : perhaps none is nec- sible. What can Ford possibly be expected to make essary: there is simply nothing else for the man to of contemporary American society-whether one do . And this is precisely Ford 's position . The cavalry calls it disintegrating or permissive-where no values values have become shallow and worn : nowhere in are certain or constant , all traditions questioned and the film is the treatment of the cavalry warmed and most rejected , all continuity disrupted , and where enriched with the loving commitment that charac · the army is a dirty word? Yet how could he possibly terized the trilogy . Yet, although Ford sees this well remain unaffected by it, unless his art became finally enough , like Wichowsky he can only \" rejoin \" them . petrified and sterile? What is lost in LIBERT Y VALANCE Faced with the dilemma of the Cheyennes' predica- that was triumphantly present in CLEMENTINE is faith ; ment, he can only come up with the old paternalist hence the film 's elegiac tone , and the sad , and very answer, in the old paternalist figure of Edward G. saddening , lack of conviction in the subsequent Robinson. There is no more poignant moment in films . Ford 's work than that in which Robinson in his bewilderment looks at a portrait of Lincoln and asks, It ETURNING AT LAST to CHEYENNE AUTUMN , we \" What would you do , old man?\" But the poignance can now clearly see the effect on Ford 's struc- derives more from our sense of Ford 's identification ture of values of the reversal-patterns : it is, quits with the character at that point and from our knowl- simply , undermined , and falls in ruins . The change 14 FALL 1971

edge of his past work (particularly , of course , YOUNG DONOVAN 'S MR. LINCOLN , in which Fonda 's performance so REEF. Elizabeth Allen beautifully and convincingly incarnates the essential and John Wayne. Fordian values) than from any success of artistic realization within the context of the film itself. The All photos: . technically poor back-projection in the scene of Paramount Pictures Robinson 's meeting with the Cheyenne was a mis- fortune necessitated , one gathers, by Robinson's DONOVAN 'S unfitness to travel. But in expressive terms it has REEF. a sad appropriateness, adding the dimension of visual phoniness to the scene's general lack of DONOVAN 'S conviction. REEF. Lee Marvin, John Wayne and Ford 's values are not really reversed ; they are just Raymond Warburn. disastrously weakened. His commitment to the cav- FILM COMMENT 15 alry is a commitment to the establishment; when he tries to place the Cheyenne at the center of his value-system , he merely turns them into an alterna- tive establishment, but without the richness and complexity of the cavalry world of the earlier films. The conception remains obstinately paternalist, the Indians' stiff and boring nobility thinly concealing Ford 's condescension. The Sal Mineo sub-plot seems designed to off-set this ; it is said to have been severely cut by Warner Brothers in the final editing , but on the evidence of what is left one doubts whether it would ever have carried much conviction . Only an anti-establ ishment artist could hope to suc- ceed with the kind of reversals Ford attempts in CHEYENNE AUTUMN-as one can see if one turns from that to LITTLE BIG MAN . Penn comes nearer than any other director to creating an Indian life and culture of genuine vitality, and this is partly because his social and psychological attitudes themselves tend to be subversive , because he is fascinated by spon- taneity, by uninhibited natural responses, by the Id impulses. His presentation of white civilization in LITTLE BIG MAN , although its obvious source is in Thomas Berger's novel , may owe something to CHEYENNE AUTUMN 'S Dodge City sequences . But the Dodge City interlude remains just that: it is never satisfactorily assimilated into the overall tone of the film , there is no significant give-and-take relation- ship between the \" civilization \" shown there and the Cheyenne. CHEYENNE AUTUMN is a film without any really convincing positive center that yet never quite dares take the plunge into despair. For all its failures , CHEYENNE AUTUMN is a suf- ficiently rich and sUbstantial film for some sort of positive case to be made out for it, and the interested reader should be referred to the article by Victor Perkins in Movie 12. If I find it much harder to discuss DONOVAN 'S REEF and SEVEN WOMEN , this is because I find both films so weak that I can 't imagine what serious case could be argued in their defense. DONOVAN 'S REEF is, according to Movie, Ford 's HATARI! Certainly , one can see resemblances: both films have an improvisatory feel about them , some- thing of the loose, relaxed air of a prolonged family party; both depict what one might take for their cre- ators ' ideal societies , as imagined at that stage of their careers. HATARI! seems to me considerably below the level of Hawks ' greatest work , but DONO- VAN 'S REEF is sadly inferior to it. Both \" ideal \" socie-

ties show a disturbing tendency towards the infan- represents anything significant in the way of cultural tile: neither, at least, appears to encourage the dev- refinement: the civilization she comes from is briefly elopment of anything one might call full human and grotesquely caricatured (the Boston board maturity . What gives HATARI! its organic life and meeting , which one would set beside the Dodge City formal coherence is the recurrent motif of inter-rela- sequences of CHEYENNE AUTUMN as evidence of how tionships between instinct and consciousness, ani- Ford's faith had crumbled) , and she herself brings mals and humans, the primitive and the sophisticat- nothing to Ailakaowa that it couldn 't do without. The ed . DONOVAN'S REEF is formally a mess: it quite lacks shift in courtship patterns from the gallant to the HATARI! 'S relaxed but unifying rhythm. Its narrative hearty-brutal is surely significant: Clementine wasn 't line is hopelessly broken-backed , Amelia Dedham 's subjected to crude horseplay or the ultimate indig- capitulation to the Ailakaowa way of life being so nity of a spanking to encourage her to submit to rapid (and so perfunctorily charted) that by half-way her man. The church provides the film 's one good through the film there seems absolutely no reason scene-the Christmas Eve celebrations-but again why she should not simply be Told All , and the one finds a coarsening of the values it embodied resulting plot-maneuvers to eke out the narrative in CLEMENTINE . Ford 's religion has always been more before the final denouement become tedious and social than metaphysical ; when he attempts to be irritating in the extreme. This may seem a superficial religious he becomes merely religiose and maudlin. objection-an apparently weak narrative line, after The church floor in CLEMENTINE is, typically, the all , may serve (as in HAIARI!) merely as a pretext scene of a dance, not a service . Yet as a social for a series of thematic variations. But there is a hub it has a profoundly serious significance into difference between the almost unnoticeable narra- which the scene's varied and delicately handled tive of HATARI! and the positive annoyance of that comic elements are easily assimilated without the in DONOVAN 'S REEF , and the slipshod impression the least incongruity. The Christmas Eve sequence in film makes on this level seems to me symptomatic DONOVAN 'S REEF is-in a film largely given over to of a more general slovenliness and unconcern. the Childish-touchingly childlike. But the farcical elements (Marcel Dalio 's clumsy overplaying is The nearest I have found to a reasoned defense symptomatic) are no longer safely contained within of the film lies in the few hints offered in Peter an overall seriousness of effect. The chu rch is no Wollen 's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, where longer the focal point for a society, but a place we are told that \"the auteur theory enables us to where wildly heterogeneous elements assemble for reveal a whole complex of meaning in films such a brief lark . As for the splitting in two of poor Chi- as DONOVAN 'S REEF . . . The \" whole complex of huahua, one can see well enough that Miss Lafleur meaning \" Mr. Wollen has in mind is presumably is her descendant-the similarities are confirmed by outlined in this passage: the way both are unceremoniously deposited in water by the film 's heroes , apparently with Ford's . .. In many of Ford 's late filmS-THE QUIET MAN , full approval. But Mr. Wollen would have to explain CHEYENNE AUTUMN , DONOVAN 'S REEF-the accent is rather more fully what Chihuahua is supposed to placed on traditional authority. The island of Aila- have in common with Lelani who , although she isn 't kaowa , in DONOVAN 'S REEF , a kind of Valhalla for a sufficient presence in the film to count for much , the homeless heroes of THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY clearly has more in common with Clementine , both VALANCE , is actually a monarchy, though complete in personality and in the treatment accorded her, with the Boston girl, wooden church and saloon, and might have provided Mr. Wollen with another made familiar by MY DARLING CLEMENTINE . In fact, of his \" significant \" structural reversals. The passage the character of Chihuahua, Doc Holliday 's girl in quoted is a good example of how the apparent MY DARLING CLEMENTINE , is split into two : Miss Lafleur \" scientific\" rigours of Structuralist criticism can and Lelani, the native princess. One represents the conceal the most extraordinary looseness of argu- saloon entertainer, the other the non-American, in ment . In fact , DONOVAN 'S REEF is only interesting if opposition to the respectable Bostonians, Amelia one ignores the film and concentrates on its ab- stractable motifs; it can be defended only by a meth- Sarah Dedham and Clementine Carter. In a broad od that precludes any close reading of what is actu- ally on the screen . sense, this is a part of a general movement which can be detected in Ford 's work to equate the Irish , The tiresome and protracted buffoonery of DONO- Indians and Polynesians as traditional communities, VAN'S REEF , far from embodying any acceptable set in the past, counterposed to the march forward system of values , merely conceals an old man 's to the American future , as it has turned out in reality, disillusionment at the failure of his ideals to find but assimilating the values of the American future fulfillment. The sadness inherent in Ford 's situation as it was once dreamed. [page 101] reaches partial expression in SEVEN WOMEN , which is why that film is so much less irritating. One can The 'motifs to which Mr. Wollen alludes are cer- produce quite a frisson by cutting , mentally, across tainly present, more or less, in DONOVAN'S REEF . The twenty years , from the moment where Clementine question he fails to ask-and which the Structuralist and Wyatt Earp walk towards developing civilization heresy helps him to evade-is this: how are \" the (in the form of the church) accompanied by a stately values of the American future as it was once and devout rendering of \" Shall We Gather At the dreamed \" realized in DONOVAN 'S REEF? It seems to River?,\" to the moment where Sue Lyon leads the me that , if those values (as I take it) are equated with Ford 's earlier ideals and aspirations, they are consistently and painfully debased , all under cover of the film's rowdy humor. The Boston girl no longer 16 FALL 1971

children out of collapsing civilization (in the form DONOVAN'S REEF of the mission) with a panicky and perfunctory sing- 1963, Paramount, 104 minutes ing of the same hymn. But if the film is Ford 's ac- director and producer John Ford ; screenplay Frank knowledgement of the disintegration of everything Nugent and James Edward Grant; from a story by he had believed in, it is all done at several removes. Edmund Beloin; ·. photography William Clothier He has fled not only to the other end of the world (Technicolor); editor Otho Lovering ; assistant direc- but to (for him) eccentric and partly uncongenial tor Wingate Smith ; music Cyril Mockridge. subject-matter. (It is surely significant that Mr. Wol- CAST: len , in his structural analysis of Ford , nowhere refers John Wayne Guns Dono van to this film) . The result is at best an accomplished Lee Marvin Boats Gilhooley minor work , though that is perhaps a generous Jack Warden Or. Dedham estimate of a film that only intermittently transcends Elizabeth Allen Amelia Dedham the schematic conventionalities of its script. There Dick Foran Australian Naval Officer are numerous incidental felicities of mise-en-scene, Cesar Romero Andre but of the kind that suggest an old master skillfully Dorothy Lamour Fleur applying his \" touches \" rather than an artist pas- Jacqueline Malouf Lelani sionately involved in his material. Anne Bancroft Mike Mazurki Sgt. Menkowicz carries off the central role (the eighth woman?-I CHEYENNE AUTUMN can never get the sum out right) with magnificent 1964, Warners, 158 minutes swagger and assurance, but I hardly think it will go director John Ford ; producer Bernard Smith ; down in film history as her subtlest or most rounded screenplay James R. Webb ; from a novel by Mari characterization . I get the impression that the ac- Sandoz; photography William Clothier (Super Pana- tress , like the character she is playing , looked round , vision 70 and Technicolor) ; editor Otho Lovering ; summed up the situation , and set her mind to doing assistant directors Wingate Smith and Russ the best she could and enjoying herself as much Saunders; music Alex North . as possible under the somewhat discouraging cir- CAST: cumstances. Richard Widmark Captain Thomas Archer My chief impression of SEVEN WOMEN is of hollow- Carroll Baker Deborah Wright ness. The essence of the film is a thinly concealed James Stewart Wyatt Earp nihil ism . The lack of real religious feeling in Ford Edward G. Robinson Secretary of the Interior prevents him from finding any transcendent spiritual Karl Malden Captain Wessels values in the missionaries and their work ; any posi- Sal Mineo Red Shirt tive belief in the mission as a community , or as an Dolores Del Rio Spanish Woman epitome of civilization , is made nonsense of by its Ricardo Montalban Little Wolf futility , by its inner tensions and outer ineffectuality . The only alternatives presented are barbarism and Gilbert Roland Dull Knife the \" tough \" bitterness of Anne Bancroft. Ford 's Arthur Kennedy Doc Holliday barbarians are merely brutes: he can 't conceive of Patrick Wayne Second Lieutenant Scott them as posseSSing any natural fineness , and th e ir Elizabeth Allen Miss Plantagenet vitality is presented as exclusively destructive . They John Carradine Jeff Blair are monstrous Id-figures rising up to take revenge Victor Jory Tall Tree on the worn and faded superego values of civiliza- Mike Mazurki Senior First Sergeant tion . Ford 's presentation of them is very crude and George O'Brien Major Braden simplistic, quite adequately expressed through Mike SEVEN WOMEN Mazurki 's pantomime-giant \" Ho-ho-ho.\" There are 1965 (New York release: 1966), MGM, 86 minutes moments of quiet and touching tenderness, such director John Ford; producer Bernard Smith ; as Miss Argent's farewell and Bancroft's response screenplay Janet Green and John McCormick; from to it; but on the whole Ford 's sense of positive \" Ch inese Finale,\" a short story by Norah Lofts ; human value seems greatly enfeebled. photography Joseph LaShelle (Panavision and Me- It would be ungenerous to end on such a note . trocolor) ; art directors George W. Davis and Eddie My primary aim is not to offer gratuitous insult to Imazu ; editor Otho Lovering ; assistant director Win- the failed late works of one of the cinema's great gate Smith ; music Elmer Bernstein . masters, but to right an injustice; for it seems to CAST: me that sentimentally to hail films like DONOVAN 'S Anne Bancroft Doctor D. R. Cartwright REEF and SEVEN WOMEN as masterpieces is insulting Sue Lyon Emma Clark to Ford 's real achievem ent. That achievement de- Margaret Leighton Agatha Andrews pended on a commitment to ideals which the society Flora Robson Miss Binns Ford lives in has signally failed to fulfill. But that Mildred Dunnock Jane Argent invalidates neither the ideals nor the films. One Betty Field Florrie Pether shouldn 't ex pect Ford to be able to cope with the Anna Lee Mrs. Russell kind of radical reorientation the failure of those Eddie Albert Charles Pether ideals within American society demanded . The late Mike Mazurki Tunga Khan films , certainly , have their poignance , but it is the Woody Strode Lean Warrior product of their failure, not of their strength . 11111111 Jane Chang Miss Ling FILM COMMENT 17

David Bordwell 'l'lll~ IlllN \"TIIC) SIIC)'I' I..IIII~ll'I'Y '~ll..llN(jl~ THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. Vera Miles and James Stewart. David Bordwell is continuing his studies at Iowa Woody Strode, John Wayne, Vera Miles and James Stewart. University while completing a book on Carl- Theodor all photos: Paramount Pictures Dreyer. 18 FALL 1971 Although nearly all of John Ford's Westerns have been about how the West was won , his vision has been neither simple nor static. Only a detailed career survey can adequately map the contours of Ford 's world , but two promontories stand out conveniently. THE IRON HORSE (1924) depicts the dream of crossing the continent by track and trestle. Such a heroic enterprise sanctifies Indian massacres, labor ex- ploitation , and personal misery; the recurring image of the film is of burials and private grief in the fore- ground while in the distance the locomotive , pioneer of civilization , chugs relentlessly toward the horizon. The final scene recapitulates the film 's interlocking of private and public destinies: the hero and heroine walk toward each other along the tracks while a photographer is preparing to take the historic pic- ture of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. Personal happiness linked with progress: this defines the optimistic side of Ford 's vision , a celebration of the glorious legend of a country's stretching to its full length. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE reveals a darker side of that vision . The first image-a train moving through the desert-seems to continue THE IRON HORSE'S theme of epic enterprise. But we wait in vain for those horsemen-against-the-horizon or wagons-fording-the-river shots. The scale has shrunk . Here history is not vistas and crowds but interiors and individuals. The action is uncommonly concentrated and spare for Ford : a range war rages offscreen , most of the crucial scenes occur at night among a handful of people, and occasions of com- munity festivity are entirely absent. It thus resembles the second half of Hawks ' EL DORADO , for both are films about fallen heroes and the twilight of legend . LIBERTY VALANCE is an exhumation and autopsy of the Myth of the West, a somber meditation on the dream that THE IRON HORSE celebrated . The Myth is already dead when the film begins . When Senator Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) arrive in Shinbone , they learn from the aging ex-sheriff Linc (Andy Devine) that the railroad has changed the town. More important. Tom Donophon is ready for burial , bereft of boots and gun . Progress has taken a heavy toll. But a long flashback (the bulk of the film) takes us to an earlier, less tame era . Stoddard , an earnest young East- erner , is robbed and beaten by Liberty Valance (Lee

• Marvin). After being rescued, Stoddard vows to see Lee Marvin and James Stewart. Valance arrested, but he refuses to use a gun to Andy Devine, John Wayne, Jeannette Nolan, John Qualen , Vera Miles and James Stewart. exact vengeance . In the genre it is usually a woman who represents the civilized virtues of the East, but here Stoddard , with his schooling and idealism , brings law and education to the West. Donophon calls Stoddard \" Pilgrim ,\" and some of the bleak dedication of Puritan New England hangs about his mission. As bearer of gentility and civilization , he never rides horseback , on Iy in coaches , buck- boards , and trains. His talisman is his lawbook , his sanctuary his law-office / schoolroom . By the end of the film , though , this na'lve idealist is swept to fame as a killer ; the progress he represents is purchased by deception and violence. Liberty Valance is Stoddard 's exact opposite , the man who rips up the lawbook and sneers, \" I'll teach you law-the law of the West,\" before lashing Stod- dard into unconsciousness. Henry Nash Smith de- scribes the romanticized cowboy heroes as \" noble anarchs owning no master, free denizens of a limit- less wilderness .\" Liberty , as his name suggests , is of their breed , but in him the romanticism has gone sour: he represents the degeneration of the myth . 'His anarchy is no longer noble; his freedom must be controlled . Stoddard 's solution is to oppose Va- lance's anarchy with organization and order, but, unaided , his lawbook is no match for Valance 's whip. A transitional figure arises to resolve the tension: Tom Donophon (John Wayne) . Since he is the first man we see on horseback in the film, his heroic statur~ is immediately established ; but Donophon remains nevertheless ambiguous , carrying in himself a tension between Stoddard 's discipline and Va- lance 's freedom. He is compromising with en- croaching civilization by building a ranch house and planning to settle down in marriage, but at the same time , he, like Valance, maintains that violence rules the West. When he extends his gun to Stoddard , advising that \"Out here the law doesn't work,\" Stoddard is furious: \"You ' re saying what Liberty Valance says. \" Later, Donophon's shooting demon- stration shows Stoddard \" what you 're up against with Valance,\" but he ends up humiliating Stoddard as Valance had . And when Donophon gets drunk and smashes a whiskey bottle, he immitates Va- lance's earlier spree. (Peter Wollen aptly observes that Donophon 's proximity to Valance is corrobo- rated in Ford 's next feature , in which Wayne and Marvin retire together to drink and brawl on Dono- van 's Reef .) Despite Donophon's decency and his desire for stability, his violent impulses and con- tempt for the law taint him with some of Valance 's amorality. Structurally, the film ironically counterpoints two contrasting movements: the growth of Stoddard 's power and the waning of Donophon 's. In the course of the film , Stoddard gradually gathers a following : Donophon 's hired hand Pompey (Woody Strode) attends Stoddard 's class; the editor Peabody (Ed- mond O'Brien) supports Stoddard in his newspaper; and Hallie becomes drawn to Stoddard 's education and asks him to teach her to read . When Donophon FILM COMMENT 19

gives Hallie a cactus rose, it signifies their alliance American politics as well as a corruption of Stod- with untrammeled nature, the wilderness as desert; but for Stoddard , who asks if Hallie has ever seen dard 's populist dream. The sharpest irony comes a real rose , the wilderness must become a garden . Thus Hallie's final acceptance of Stoddard an- when Buck Langhorne ( !) , a cattle baron like those nounces the ultimate victory of the civilizing prin- ciple he represents. who hired Valance, is nominated for Congress . In Paralleling Stoddard 's rise is Donophon 's fall. rides a Gene Autryish cowboy dOing rope tricks to Hallie has asked him to help Stoddard . When Stod- dard repudiates due process and faces Valance in the tune of \" Home, Home on the Range.\" This gro- a gun duel , it is Donophon who secretly kills Valance so that Stoddard and Law can take power. Ironically, tesquerie is all that remains of the nobility of Tom now Hallie sees Stoddard as the perfect fusion of civilized idealism and natural pragmatism . In killing Donophon 's West. When Stoddard goes in to win Liberty Valance, Donophon has destroyed himself. the nomination, the convention doors swing shut These contrapuntal developments are marked in three crucial confrontations which Ford mounts as on Donophon . It is the last time we see him . almost allegorical tableau x. This is why LIBERTY VA- LANCE lacks sweeping panoramas ; values are so \" This is the West, sir,\" says the newspaper editor inherent in the characters that groupings alone point up the thematic development. In the cafe , when when Stoddard has finished his story. \" When the Valance trips Stoddard , Donophon abruptly inter- venes: the shot reveals Valance seated , Donophon legend becomes fact, print the legend .\" His assur- standing , and Stoddard sprawled on the floor among the spilled food . The composition marks the nadir ance is echoed in the progress Stoddard has of Stoddard 's development and the height of Dono- phon 's authority. Later, in the town election meeting , brought; in the train on the way back , Hallie remarks it is again Donophon who faces down the anarchic forces of the townsmen clamoring for drinks; but this that, thanks to Stoddard 's legislation , the desert is time he tosses the gavel to Stoddard , thus transfer- ring his personal authority to Stoddard , who trans- now a garden . But Stoddard is uneasy: he has had forms it into legal authority. The two men's equality is stressed in a shot of Stoddard in command in to deny the legend and adm it some facts-his com- the left foreground and Donophon the enforcer on the right. Still later, in the flashback to the gunfight, promise with his principles, the lie on which his we get the final tableau : Donophon in the fore- ground, Stoddard and Valance facing each other marriage and career are built. But immediately he in the distance. Donophon shoots Valance. The lighting and composition emphasize his authority becomes the drawling politician again , congratu- but also his secrecy and isolation ; Stoddard is left to believe that he is at the height of his power: ordered lating the conductor on the train's service. The legality backed up by force. conductor's reply constitutes Ford 's final irony: With the death of Valance, the film recovers the elegaic tone of the beginning , but with a richer \" Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty sense of irony. When Donophon overhears Hallie tell Stoddard she loves him , Donophon goes into Valance.\" Long-shot: the train chugs into the dis- the saloon , gets drunk, throws Valance 's men out, flings money around, and shatters a bottle while the tance . saloon musicians play \" There ' ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. \" So there will. After Dono- So much , Ford seems to say, for Progress and phon sets fire to the home he has built for Hallie, Ford dissolves from the burning house to a sign the Old West. The sense of a lost honor and nobility (\" Welcome to Capitol City\" ) and a band playing \" There ' ll Be a Hot Time .. .\" The suicidal destruction has never been stronger in his films . The sympathy of the old order, the retreat of Tom Donophon , is linked to the building of the future , whose vanguard is comple xly balanced: Stoddard 's law tames Va- is Ransom Stoddard . lance but also Donophon ; Stoddard's ideals are Ford 's ironies flourish in the Territorial Convention scene, a premonition of the way of the Future. No sound , but they have become debased. No longer wonder Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout in La Grande Aven- ture du Western sees this film as a Western version can the iron horse be seen as pure progress , for of MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON : the florid speech- ifying , the hoopla, and the squabbling over spe- the railroad that links Shinbone to Capitol City runs cial interests mark the convention as a satire on straight to Washington , the new seat of power. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is John Ford 's ver- sion of how the West was won and lost. 11111111 THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE 1962, Paramount, 122 minutes Director John Ford ; producer Willis Goldbeck; screen- play James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, from a story by Dorothy M. Johnson ; Cinematographer Wil- liam Clothier; editor Otho Lovering ; art director Eddie Imazu . Distributed in 16mm by Films Inc. CAST: James Stewart Ransom Stoddard John Wayne Tom Donophon Vera Miles Hallie Stoddard Lee Marvin Liberty Valance Edmond O'Brien Dutton Peabody Andy Devine Link Appleyard Woody Strode Pompey John Qualen Peter Jeannette Nolan Nora Lee Van Cleef Reese Strother Martin Floyd Ken Murray Dr. Willoughby John Carradine Starbukle Willis Bouchey Jason Tully Carleton Young Maxwell Scott Denver Pile Amos Carruthers Robert F. Simon Handy Strong O. Z. Whitehead Ben Carruthers Paul Birch Mayor Winder Joseph Hoover Hasbrouck 20 FALL 1971

rl'lll~ mitigates the distortion by composing in depth , dis- guising his cuts, and consistently arranging things (jIlTII. in triangular patterns ; at one point he puckishly sets up his camera so that the twin pillars of a porch \"~'Il exactly block out the dividing lines between the panels. Ford also avoids the dislocating effect of by Joseph McBride elaborate cross-cutting in his action sequences . The Battle of Shiloh itself is evoked in a few shots of and Michael Wilmington infantry charges and cavalrymen sweeping through a river and in the eerie image of a receding line Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, who are of cannons successively discharging which opens associated with the University of Wisconsin , have and closes the conflict. What Ford said of his Revo- lutionary War project April Morning could also be completed a book on John Ford 's films, from which applied to THE CIVIL WAR: \"It's not really a battle story , it's a character sketch. \" this article is exerpted. Since Ford is a Civil War buff, it is odd that he THE CIVIL WAR, the middle segment of the Cinera- has never made a full-scale film about a major in- ma spectacle HOW THE WEST WAS WON, is a brief cident of the war. Pressed on this question in an sketch about a farm boy's coming of age at the interview, he testily came up with the rather evasive Battle of Shiloh . \" Ballad\" is a word that often comes answer that it's difficult to find a story to hinge his to mind when discussing John Ford's narrative style, ideas on . Perhaps what he really means is that the and it is nowhere more appropriate than here. Barely Civil War was such utter chaos-brother against fifteen minutes long , the episode encompasses sev- brother, the nation ripping itself apart-that he is eral of Ford 's central themes-the disintegration of unable to sort out his feelings and ideas about the family, the sacrifices of war, the ambivalence of war into a coherent pattern , as he has done with legend-with the haunting simplicity of a folk song . the Indian Wars and with World War II. Ford 's Shiloh Like the old marching tune \"When Johnny Comes battlefield is a landscape out of a horror film . The Marching Home,\" heard twice on the soundtrack, events of April 6, 1862, the bloodiest day of the war, THE CIVIL WAR says little and suggests a great deal. are depicted as the grotesque fragments of a na- Its lack of a reputation undoubtedly stems from the tional nightmare. A ghastly cloud of quicklime rises banality of the film surrounding it, an inflated, sim- into the night air as a huge grave is dug for a mound plistic attempt at a national epi\"c told through the of corpses stacked like firewood ; Private leb Rawl- experiences of a single pioneer family. Buffalo ings (George Peppard) kneels staring into a river stampedes, Indian attacks, and train wrecks careen running pink with blood , unaware that moments across the three-panelled screen (it was the first earlier his own father, a colonel, had been pro- story film made in Cinerama) as every Western sub- nounced dead on an improvised operating table as genre is hastily recapitulated . red and slimy as a butcher 's block ; leb saves Gen- eral U. S. Grant (Harry Morgan) from a freakish Spencer Tracy's narration, bitter and pointed for assassination attempt by killing a new-found friend , Ford, seems otiose when spoken over the vast Na- an impulsive Confederate deserter (Russ Tamblyn) . tional Geographic panoramas of federal parks and It is probably not coincidental that Shiloh was the game preserves which dominate the Henry Hatha- battle Ford 's Uncle Mike Connolly was mustered into way and George Marshall sections. In a movie whose when he climbed off the boat from Ireland and was raison d'etre is extravagance , Ford keeps his scenes tricked into the Union Army; at Shiloh Uncle Mike muted and intimate, composing mostly in counter- deserted (as the Confederate tempts leb to do) and point to the snake-like shape of the screen . He hated joined up with the South. Tracy narrates over the Cinerama, complaining particularly about the way digging of the mass grave: \" In the morning, it had the edges of the screen \"curl \" in moving shots \" and looked like a Confederate victory . .But by nightfall , the audience moves instead of the camera.\" He no man cared to use the words 'win ' or ' lose .' \" Ford characteristically interweaves great and small actions, private conflict and national destiny, in developing his microcosm of the war. leb 's doubts (\" It ain 't quite what I expected-there ain 't much glory in seein ' a man with his guts hangin ' out\" ) are mirrored by Grant's torment over the charges of incompetence laid on him after Shiloh . The South caught him by surprise, and only Sher- man's intervention and Confederate disorganization prevented a total rout. Grant temporarily lost his command when the news of his losses and his alleged drunkenness during the battle reached Washington, and the spectre of Shiloh plagued him to the end of his days. In his Memoirs Grant recalled , \" Up to the Battle of Shiloh , I as well as thousands FILM COMMENT 21

of others, believed that the rebellion against the ing storm , and a brief glimpse of a secessionist riot government would collapse swiftly and soon , if a in a border town. From this noisy , lurid encounter, decisive victory could be gained over any of its Ford dissolves to an almost unnaturally placid long armies .. . \" Shiloh destroyed that certainty just as shot of a majestic colonnade of trees , an endless su rely as it destroys the young soldier's delusion corridor of tranquillity , as Corporal Peterson (Andy that the war will be a brief, glorious adventure. With Devine) slowly approaches the camera in a carriage . his predilection for showing \" what really hap- Mindlessly humming \" The Battle Hymn of the Re- pened,\" Ford recreates a celebrated passage from public ,\" the corporal is as ignorant of the future the Memoirs in a few biting images: \" Some time as the boy he is coming to tempt away from home. after midn ight, growing restive under the storm and There is a vague foreboding , too , in the surreal calm the continuous pain , I moved back to the log-house of the Rawlings farm: in the vast field , the distant under the bank . This had been taken as a hospital , view of a broad river, the warm browns and whites and all night wounded men were being brought in , of the family 's clothing which clash so disturbingly their wounds dressed , a leg or an arm amputated with the gaudy colors of the corporal 's uniform . as the case might require , and everyth ing being Peterson 's message to Zeb- \" There ain 't much done to save life or alleviate suffering . The sight glory in standin ' behind a plow\" -is later given a was more unendurable than encountering the grisly echo in Zeb 's words on the battlefield . enemy 's fire , and I returned to my tree in the rain .\" Ford's only license is to replace the rain with a Inevitably for Ford , it is the mother (Carroll Baker) hideous, ink-black darkness, lit only by torches who realizes what the future holds. Her grief over bobbing in the extreme background or flashing past Zeb 's departure finds expression in a few simple the camera in the extreme foreground . movements. Holding a long black cloth , she tenderly adjusts the lapels of his ludicrously undersized dress THE CIVIL WAR is prefaced with premonitions-a suit. Grasping his shoulder, she averts her eyes. shadowy tableau of Lincoln staring out the window When he leaves, she wanders over to the fence of his Illinois law office, contemplating the impend- enclosing her parents' graves, tries to pray, and THE CIVIL WAR. Harry Morgan and George Peppard. photo : Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive 22 FALL 1971

slumps to the ground, her head sinking below the operation . Incredibly, the flashback ends with frame line with only her arm , and the black cloth , Grant's worst disgrace-Shiloh . In Ford 's view , the remaining in view. Zeb himself is tragically unaware fact that a disgraced drunkard has risen to become of the meaning of his actions. Ford frames him in a disgraced general carries a logic above and silhouette from the inside of the home like Ethan beyond the individual 's feelings ; in some peculiar Edwards in THE SEARCHERS ; like Ethan , he is gov- way , the higher disgrace has a nobility all its own . erned by forces he cannot comprehend. Seen Grant's image , like Senator Stoddard 's in LIBERTY through the doorway, he bounds off the porch , VALANCE , has the ability to survive any tarnishing shouting \" Yahoo! \" and kicking his legs like a or exposure , because it means more than the man schoolboy . But then , just as suddenly , he spins behind it. In THE CIVIL WAR Grant looks strangely around and stares after his mother, who is disap- composed beside the wildly dishevelled Sherman pearing into the darkness of the home. This dim (played , as in THE COLTER CRAVEN STORY , by John intimation of his future soon fades from his mind , Wayne) , who talks him out of resigning . Grant wants however, and we see him disappearing down the to quit not so much because of the battle itself, colonnade of trees, bidding his dog not to follow. which both men agree was not really his fault , but His jaunty step is belied by the ghostly chorus of because his image has been destroyed-because \" When Johnny Comes Marching Home\" echoing of \" the general lack of confidence in me \" created like a dirge on the soundtrack. by newspaper accounts of the battle. Sherman ridi- cules the idea in a speech which surely reflects When he returns home from war we hear the Ford 's own attitude: \" A month ago they were saying same tune, now loud and buoyant, but belied again I was crazy , insane . Now they ' re calling me a hero . ( \" We ' ll all be there when Johnny comes marching Hero or crazy, I'm the same man . Doesn 't matter home \" ) by the solitude which greets him: the grave- what the people think. It's what you think, Grant. \" stones of his mother and father have joined those of his grandparents. The first glimpse of his younger Yet , in a subtle way , it does matter what the brother, Jeremiah, carries a subtle echo of Shiloh . As Zeb stands at the graves in the extreme back- people think , although it matters less to Grant than ground, Jeremiah tosses a pail full of water from the porch , and the long graceful arc it makes in to the people themselves. As the generals talk , the the sunlight recalls the macabre image of the bucket routinely sloshing down the bloody operating table foot soldiers eavesdrop behind them ; what happens in the field hospital after their father's death . Zeb is the prototypical American , for despite his experi- in the foreground of history cannot ultimately be ence a,t war and ' the war 's decimation of his family (or because of it) , he must still keep pushing toward separated from the events in the background . When the territory ... as a cavalryman fighting the Indian Wars. Sherman speaks Grant's name, the rebel soldier His motive for re-enlistment is nothing more defi- (who moments before had passed up a chance to nite than rootlessness- \" I just wanta go somewhere too.\" A conscious imitation of his father's pioneering kill Zeb , arguing that \" Westerners \" should stay out spirit , delivered in an imitation of his father's voice , it is a tragic submission to the nation 's empire- of an \" Eastern \" war) raises his pistol. It is as if the building ethos , which is qbout to rekindle another civil war . When Zeb rises from the porch at the end , revelation of Grant's identity, and the myth which resplendent in his military cape , he momentarily strikes a classic heroic pose, head back, leg cocked surrounds it, has suddenly galvanized the rebel into at an imperious angle . After he disappears , Ford holds on the agrarian existence he and the nation a recognition of his own role in history . His move- have left behind : on a tableau of the porch , with a tree limb bobbing gently in the brilliant sunlight ments are zombie-like ; he is no longer an indiv idual. at the far corner of the frame , as his brother , cha- grined and wasted , bows his head in mourning . And when Zeb strikes down his friend 's hand and The bizarre chain of accidents which allows Pri- bayonets him , he too is acceding to his role . It is vate Rawlings to save Grant-and , by extension , the army and the country itself-has the same fateful at this moment that the horror of war takes hold grandeur which elevates the gunfight in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE into the realm of national of Zeb and possesses him like a demon ; dropping myth . Fascinated by the ambiguities of Grant's posi- tion in history , Ford has long wanted to make a film the bayonet, he takes hold of his friend 's inert body about him . THE COLTER CRAVEN STORY , an episode he directed for Ward Bond 's television series WAGON and shakes it madly, demanding , \" Why did you TRAIN in 1960, contains tantalizing fragments of the unmade film . Bond tells Grant's story (seen in flash- make me do that? \" Short moments before, he had back) to another drunkard , a doctor who lost his nerve at Gettysburg , in order to steel him for an been ready to join the rebel in desertion , but the appearance of the generals intervened. Desertion would have implied nothing less than that he quit the stage of history. The role has consumed the man . • THE CIVIL WAR An episode in HOW THE WEST WAS WON , 1963, MGM , 15 minutes. direc tor John Ford ; screenplay James R. Webb ; pho- tography Joseph La She lie; music Alfred Newman and Ken Darby ; assistant director Wingate Smith ; narration Spencer Tracy . CAST: George Peppard Zeb Rawlings Carroll Baker Eve Pres co tt Rawlings Harry Morgan Gen. U. S. Grant John Wayne Gen. W. T. Sherman Andy Devine Corporal Peterson Russ Tamblyn Confederate Deserter Willis Bouchey Surgeon Claude Johnson Jeremiah Rawlings FILM COMMENT 23



BERNARDO (bourgeois) love, the despair of an Italian aristocrat BERTOLUCCI whose world is being destroyed by capitalist materi- alism if not impending revolution. (\"My films are a .. way to exorcise my own fears .\") The red flag and the poisonous beauty of privileged bourgeois exis- an Interview tence are the two constants of Bertolucci's life and work : they are expressed in the schizophrenic hero by Amos Vogel of PARTNER (1968), in which Pierre Clementi portrays both the bourgeois and his revolutionary alter ego, Amos Vogel, the godfather ofindependent cinema in fact one person in the film; in his insistence in in America, writes frequently for The Village Voice. THE SPIDER 'S STRATEGEM (1969) that an antifascist hero may have been a fascist spy ; and, in THE CON- Only rarely has a new talent burst upon the film FORMIST (1970) , on portraying an obnoxious , mur- scene with such brilliance as did Bernardo Berto- derous fascist in the most loving , nostalgic, even lucci with his BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (1963). romantic settings and situations. Though preceded by his more conventional yet extremely promising THE GRIM REAPER (1961), based Bertolucci , the rebel of the Italian film scene, on a story by Pasolini , it was the passionate, violent, instrumental in radicalizing the Italian cinema, lyrical and political BEFORE THE REVOLUTION which comes, with THE CONFORMIST, perilously close to brought the 22-year old to the immediate attention making a perfect commercial film that will be appre- of the international film world and won him the Max ciated by liberal art-theatre audiences everywhere Ophuls prize and the Prix de la Jeune Critique in for its staunchly anti-fascist stance and its loving France . Born 1941 in Parma into an Italian bourgeois preoccupation with the sensuous data of bourgeois family, the son of a well-known Italian poet and film life, the romantic colors and interiors of a social critic , Bertolucci (himself a poet and in 1962 the class in decline , seen by one of its renegade sons. winner of Italy's most coveted poetry prize) quickly transferred his powerful lyrical, romantic talents But what is most original in Bertolucci 's work is from verbal to pictorial images, correctly sensing his totally outrageous and exuberant pictorial sense, where his major talents were. his-aesthetically-revolutionary attempt to create a poetic cinema by means of the most audacious and In 1971 , with the release of his THE SPIDER'S violent editing and camera devices, far in advance STRAtEGEM and THE CONFORMIST , it is abundantly of anything the commerical cinema has to offer clear that Bertolucci 's entire work is permeated by except for Godard and Resnais, and surpassing a profound , continuing and as yet unresolved ten- many of the most potent achievements of the inter- sion between a luxuriant, vibrant aestheticism and national underground cinema. a possibly artificial endeavor to simultaneously create a radical , politically committed cinema; this The pained contradiction that is Bertolucci 's life is paralleled in his own life by the tension between and strength are brilliantly revealed in the following bourgeois background and deeply felt ideological interview, recorded during Bertolucci's visit to the preoccupations. A profound feeling for a tactile, 1970 New York Film Festival , at which he was the sensuous, pictorial cinema of (radical) form , decor, only director to be represented by two works (THE texture, color and composition is balanced in Ber- SPIDER 'S STRATEGEM and THE CONFORMIST) . The tolucci with a strong sensitivity to social issues, a striking success of these two films at the Festival, painful understanding of the contradictions of the their acceptance by a sophisticated-and bour- radical bourgeois confronted with the loneliness and geOis-Festival audience, coupled with their basic horror of bourgeois privilege in a period of capitalist and beautiful ambiguity, clearly points to the danger decline. Unable to give up his class roots, his sensi- faced by this director in his future work : from being tivity sharpens his political radicalism while blunting the outcast independent of BEFORE THE REVOLUTION , it with informed scepticism and profound ambiguity. appreciated only by the happy few, he has advanced The motto that prefaces his most important work to THE CONFORMIST, significantly a Paramount re- to date, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION , at the same time lease; the radicalism of the former work , its profound must serve as the most revealing autobiographical and instinctual originality, has been transformed into statement of his unending dilemma, painfully ex- the muted, more conventional and achieved bril- pressed also in his subsequent films : \"Only those liance of the latter: only the future will reveal whether who lived before the revolution knew how sweet life Bertolucci is to be the staunch revolutionist he could be \" (Talleyrand). aspires to be or the darling of the liberal bourgeoisie. This is why Bertolucci is at his best in describing , AMOS VOGEL: It seems to me that there exist with anguished ambivalence, bitter-sweet episodes of bourgeois life-an evening at the opera, a dancing two kinds of cinema: a visual and a literary one. school, a Bal Musette in Paris, the raptures of young And sometimes I think that the literary cinema is The Conformist. photo : Paramount Pictures not cinema at all, since it only utilizes visuals as illustration for a story or plot; it traffics in words, while the visual cinema deals with images. I see hundreds of films every year and with most of them, I could keep my eyes closed and would still under- stand the story. This is a very strange problem, since these are precisely the films considered most im- FILM COMMENT 25

The Conformist. all photos: Paramount Pictures portant in today 's mass market. Since you are one to put it into the right order. After PARTNER , I realized of the most important new directors of the \"visual \" that I had been too neurotic about this problem . cinema, I wonder what you think of this problem. And so I found another solution for THE CONFORMIST and THE SPIDER 'S STRATEGEM: I employed editing to BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI: I don 't attribute the underline the \" gesticulation\" [gestualite] of the film . same meaning as you do to the term \" literary. \" For me, \"literary \" is very close to \"v isual. \" For what VOGEL: You said you wanted a precise script, you call \" literary,\" I'd like to use a different term- but only to destroy it; but what is in the script-is \" theatrical. \" Or \" filmed theater .\" The cinema is it description of scenes and dialogue or detailed much closer to literature and poetry than to the shot instructions, camera set-ups and movements? theater. I agree with you that often cinema is merely an illustration of a story. That is the biggest danger BERTOLUCCI: It is only a script of situations and you face when you make a film from a novel. That dialogue ; it contains nothing about camera or its was my problem when I made THE CONFORMIST , placement or about the actual shots . The script is which is based on a Moravia story. But anyway, it's a starting point for me-you have to have one-but an every-day problem in the cinema , because many that's all ... filmmakers use their scripts as if they had started from a novel ; they simply make an illustrated film VOGEL : Yet, when one looks at your films , they of the script. On the other hand, I, too, start from are very complex and advanced, not merely styliS- a very precise script-but only in order to destroy tically, but in terms of editing as well. This is why it. For me, inspiration exists only at the moment of I am not quite clear why you counterpose editing actual shooting. Not before . For me , the cinema is to shooting. For example, there is a sc,ene in BEFORE an art of gestures [un art gestueJ]. When I find myself THE REVOLUTION , which involves a young man, Agos- on a set, with actors and lights, the \" solution \" I tino, on a bike. Agostino is distraught and this is find for a certain sequence, a certain situation , does conveyed by means of jagged camera movements, not come from a pre-conceived idea, but from the interrupted action, cutting from long-shot to close- musical rapport that exists between the actors, the up and zoom without any transition . It is a beautiful lights, the camera, the space around them-and I sequence, very short, mysterious and unpredictable, move the camera as if I was gesturing with it. I feel created by the way camera and actors move within that the cinema is always a cinema of gestures-very the frame, and by editing, tempo, length and order direct, even if there are fifty people in the crew. of the shots. The scene could have been killed in the editing. But imperialism is an enemy of these ' gestures ,' of the assembling of the daily rushes into an ensem- BERTOLUCCI: Well, I was there and I happen ble of gestures. The moment of imperialism is the to know how it all happened ; in fact , it's an example editing of the film. This is when one cuts out all of why I feel the film is conventional. I believe that that was direct and \" gesticular \" in the rushes ; this a film should be \" all there \" at the moment of shoot- is the moment when the producer takes over. He ing . When I see a sequence like the one you men- takes the electrocardiogram of the film and cuts out tioned , it smells of manipulation. I had shot this all the high points, in order to create a flat line. I sequence with two cameras-one with a wide-angle know that in America , the producer wants the right lens, the other with a zoom lens. This already in- of the final cut, to change or edit the film after the dicates to me that I was somewhat undecided about director is through with it, even if he leaves the the sequence. I shot it as I would a bo xing match, director completely free during the shooting . When thinking that I would fi x it up in the editing and this I made PARTNER , I had an obsessive idea in my head is not good for me. All you can get from editing and tried to solve it by avoiding to edit the film except is a little bit of manipulation. VOGEL: Well, \" manipulation \" is inherent in any sequence, in the way it was photographed, \" set up \" 26 FALL 1971

and edited to give it a particular tempo and charac- look at this blue wall for another several seconds. Now this is an editing decision . ter. Doesn 't art constantly-and inevitably-manip- ulate reality? BERTOLUCCI : No, it's a shooting decision. VOGEL: But during the editing, you decided to BERTOLUCCI: Not in the shooting ... the shoot- keep this footage in the final film and not to cut ing is just \" a happening \" [in English], it's a rapport when he leaves the frame? between me, the camera and what is present ... BERTOLUCCI: I had already decided this before the shooting ; otherwise I would have told my camera- VOGEL: Do you think all editing is manipulative? man to cut. BERTOLUCCI : The editing of Griffith , Eisenstein, VOGEL : And so the \" divine moment\" is in the Vertov was not manipulative, but a great invention. shooting, not in the editing? VOGEL : But Eisenstein , especially, has been ac- BERTOLUCCI : Not: \" divine\" .. . cused of intellectual manipulation and even formal- VOGEL: The supreme human moment is in the shooting? ism. BERTOLUCCI: Yes, definitely. BERTOLUCCI: No , in my opinion editing be- VOGEL : This is very different from the views of many other directors, including the early Russian comes manipulative only when it is taken over by revolutionary directors . .. according to them , a film the producer. Before that, it's a sublime invention. is born only in the cutting room . .. But even if my producer does not oppress me, the BERTOLUCCI : There is something fundamental editing itself has today become manipulative. I want to say about all this: When there are no ideas in the shots , you cannot insert them by means of VOGEL: But what about independent or under- editing. The idea has to be there during the shoot- ing. Welles ' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS , for exam- ground flimmakers who don 't even have a producer? ple, has long, long takes and no editing and is one of the more extraordinary examples of non-editing; or BERTOLUCCI : In their films there is even more rather, filmic creation at the moment of shooting . . . manipulation than in normal films, because in the VOGEL: But when you call editing an imperialist underground cinema, there is the same refusal to device, it's really not the editing but rather the inter- accept the so-called commercial, establishment vention of the producer you refer to? cinema that certain young bourgeois express BERTOLUCCI : Yes, in fact , I said earlier that against their fathers ; but , as their fathers are , in a editing was a beautiful invention , an expressive sense, far removed from them , the sons are some- device; just like the trade unions were great at one how integrated into society anyway. The under- time; but in the next moment, capital stepped in and ground cinema is merely the other side of the coin interfered in the unions, like in America- of the Hollywood cinema; it's a reaction that remains VOGEL: I am struck by the stylistiC differences, within the framework of Hollywood. In a more banal , between THE SPIDER 'S STRATEGEM and THE CONFORM- Simple sense , there is a great love for Hollywood IST and your earlier BEFORE THE REVOLUTION . Do you in underground films; when they want to be per- consider these new films to be an advance aesthe- verse , or against the official morality, they are as tically or do you merely wish to indicate that the innocent as young school girls. They do all the staccato , avant-grade style of BEFORE THE REVOLU- things their masters told them not to do; now, that TION was only appropriate for that particular, pas- is nice, but it's not revolutionary . sionate, almost autobiographical subject? After all, the style of your last two films is much closer to But remember that I speak of editing here not as a theoretician ; I only express a certain unhap- piness. In ten days, I might change my mind . VOGEL: There is a scene in THE SPIDER 'S STRAT- EGEM in which Athos, the young protagonist, leaves a building . .. he walks to the right, out of the frame; behind him is a startling, very blue wall; he has already left the frame , but you decided to have us FILM COMMENT 27

Before the Revolution. photo : N.Y. Review Presentations Before the Revolution. photo : N.Y. Review Presentations conventional narrative cinema , with lyrical and po- other levels but there did not exist a first level of etic components. reading as soon as you saw it. In THE CONFORMIST, there is such a first level, so everybody enters it BERTOLUCCI : I believe that these films are like and poses no further problems to himself. Instead, three different ways of loving three different women. the film is full of other levels. This is the trick of There are different ways of loving. I made SPIDER'S the great Hollywood directors: in Europe, we needed STRATEGEM immediately before THE CONFORMIST, but thirty years before some young French critics made even though there were only a few short months us realize that the American cinema was something between them , my psychological situation was dif- more than what had been thought of until that ferent . .. and that is why these two films are so moment. different. I made THE SPIDER ' S STRATEGEM in a state of melancholic happiness and great serenity and VOGEL: At your THE CONFORMIST press confer- THE CONFORMIST in a tragic state of great psy- ence, you also said: \" The destruction of structures chological upheaval . . . As to BEFORE THE REVO- LUTION, I do not remember .. in PARTNER is, in THE CONFORMIST, followed by a very VOGEL : It's in the film . . . As to THE CONFORMIST , definite structure.\" But isn't the \" destruction of it will easily be acceptable to the American art-theatre structures \" one of the signposts of contemporary public, both politically-as an antifascist film-and cinema, the cinema of Godard and the under- aesthetically. This is not true of BEFORE THE REVO- ground; and also of modern literature, painting, music, poetry? LUTION , a very private, very special work, in fact, a cult film for a small group of cineasts and critics . .. BERTOLUCCI : Yes, definitely. In the cinema , Go- dard started it . . . in music, Schonberg . .. But THE BERTOLUCCI: I like that very much .. . CONFORMIST arrives at a moment when I myself, VOGEL: That it has become a cult film? looking around in cinema , realize that this destruc- BERTOLUCCI : No, that with THE CONFORMIST , tion of structu res has itself become the new es- can now speak to a wider audience: it is possible tablishment , not only in my film but in those of that I make films because , in real life, I cannot others. I think we need more plot and structure communicate; and this way I communicate with lots now . .. perhaps it is fear , I don 't know. of people. In this sense, Victor Fleming was a very fortunate person .. . he made GONE WITH THE VOGEL: Well, there was plot in PARTNER and WIND .. . [Laughs] Fleming communicates with everybody. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION , too . . . a looser, more dis- VOGEL: But this reminds me of the strange re- mark you made during your New York Film Festival sociated, modern kind of plot . . . press conference following THE CONFORMIST, when BERTOLUCCI: I mean, we need more solid struc- you affectionately referred to it as \" your commercial tures ... maybe this is a fear of aestheticism and a film ,\" \"a bit of whoring \" on your part, and then feeling that the avant-garde is itself bourgeois ... smiled in a devilish way. VOGEL: But radical, revolutionary cinema can be BERTOLUCCI: Yes, I said it and I meant it and either \"agit-prop\" or artistic . .. and I think that your I hope it is true. What gave me a sort of devilish lyrical \" aestheticist\" BEFORE THE REVOLUTION is more appearance is that I know that THE CONFORMIST is effective politically than Godard 's latest agit-prop my most difficult film and that amuses me very much. works . .. It seems to be my easiest film , but actually it is the most difficult because it is the simplest one. One BERTOLUCCI : I don't know . All these films are enters it on a first level of \" reading\" that was missing political and none have political effect because they from BEFORE THE REVOLUTION: that film had many are only shown at Festivals so that they do not reach an audience wide enough to be affected politically. VOGEL: Yes, but your new fear of aestheticism is a danger, because your strength is precisely in your \" aesthetics \" ... 28 FALL 1971

Partner. photo: Film Society of Lincoln Center The Spider's Stratagem. photo : Film Society of Lincoln Center BERTOLUCCI : I know, but I also fear this aes- BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI FILMOGRAPHY (1941- ) theticism , because I know very well that I can make 1962 LA COMMARE SECCA [THE GRIM REAPER] . pro- a film about the quality of wind ... the essence of ducer Antonio Cervi; screenplay Pier Paolo Pasolini , Sergio Citti and Bernardo Bertolucci; from a story wind which is nothing ... and it will make Festival by Pier Paolo Pasolini ; photography Gianni Narzisi; music Carlo Rustichelli ; with Francesco Ruiu , Gian- audiences happy. I am afraid of doing that. Aesthet- carlo de Rosa, Vincenzo Ciccora, Allen Midgette; 100 minutes. icism is always a mistake. Perhaps in Italy this word 1964 PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE [BEFORE THE REV- has different connotations; in Italy, it's a pejorative OLUTION]. production company IRIDE Cinemato- grafica; original screenplay Bernardo Bertolucci ; term. I hope there is just as much need for political photography Aldo Scavarda; music Gino Paoli; with Adriana Asti, Francesco Barilli , Allen Midgette. consciousness in me as there is for aestheticism . Morando Morandini; 115 minutes. 1968 Perhaps I shall make my best films dealing with PARTNER. producer Giovanni Bertolucci ; screen- play Bernardo Bertolucci and Gianni Amico ; from politics without talking about politics. The Double, a no vel by Fyodor Dostoievsky ; pho- tography Ugo Piccone (CinemaScope and East- VOGEL: But don 't you believe that the art of a manColor); art direction Jean-Robert Marquis; editor Roberto Perpignani; with Pierre Clementi, Stefania future, classless society will be a flowering of the Sandrelli , Tina Aumont, Sergio Tofano ; 120 minutes. 1969 most ·varied tendencies, styles and schools; not STRATEGIA DEl RAGNO [THE SPIDER'S STRA- TAGEM]. producer Giovanni Bertolucci ; screenplay agit-prop tracts about how to make more tractors Bernardo Bertolucci , Edoardo de Gregorio and Marilu Parolini ; from the short story by Jorge Luis or how to fight imperialism , but an \" aesthetic \" art Borges; photography Vittorio Storaro (Technicolor); art director Maria Paola Maino; editor Roberto Per- that celebrates life? We should not lose that now, pignani; music Arnold Schoenberg, Giuseppe Verdi; with Giulio Brogi, Alida Valli , Tino Scotti , Allen Midg- even if one fights for a better society. ette; 100 minutes. 1970 BERTOLUCCI : But unfortunately, I think I am IL CONFORMISTA [THE CONFORMIST]. producer Maurizio Lodi-Fe; screenplay Bernardo Bertolucci ; definitely the last one to lose this aestheticism .. . from the novel by Alberto Moravia; photography Vittorio Storaro (Technicolor); art director Ferdi- VOGEL : You haven 't lost it yet, ' have you ? nando Scarfioti ;editor Franco Arcalli ;music Georges Delerue; with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania San- BERTOLUCCI: No ... drelli , Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi , Gastone Moschin ; 112 minutes . VOGEL : But you 'd like to ... BERTOLUCCI: Yes , that's my problem . I am much more complicated than I seem to be. To have been born into the \" cultured bourgeoisie \" is much more complicated than what the young agit-prop kids think. I am against their famous phrase- \" Degree Zero \" -which signifies that we have to start from scratch in building a new society and culture . I find it absolutely idiotic and anti-Leninist. It's even a bit fascist, but much used by the young people . It is a neurotic, masochistic, self-lacerating phrase be- cause to say we have to start from Zero is like saying we have to start from the caves and I don 't want to start from the caves. VOGEL: Speaking of \" empty aestheticism,\" the most evocative scenes in your film are precisely the most mysterious, \" irrelevant\" and poetic ones. Are you going to stop doing this kind of film because you are afraid of aestheticism? BERTOLUCCI : There is a conflict within me .. . a very acute conflict ... and if it weren 't for that I might be dead . 11111111 FILM COMMENT 29

James Childs outside the ring was projected onto the screen . As the credits flashed by a voice explained how SUPER 1'1'11 FIGHT had been put together, and what the computer rationale was behind this film version of what we 'II.T were to believe was the fight of the century. James Childs is film critic for The New Haven Before the first round began, time was taken to Register. Healso teaches film,English andplaywriting. show the fans retrospective film clips of both Ali and Marciano in their fighting prime . The fighters ' It smelled like ringside. There appeared to be a respective advantages were given , and Ali 's were scent, a musky odor of masculinity, produced by truly impressive: twenty pounds heavier, four inches the almost-all-male audience's anticipation and ex- taller, an arm reach fourteen inches longer, plus citement at the impending All Time Heavyweight his renowned speed. Marciano's tenacity and his Championship of the World fight between Muham- pile driving punches were to his benefit; he was long mad Ali and Rocky Marciano. There was a rest- known as a fighter whose courage and determi- lessness , an air of expectation , as the bo xing fans nation never flagged , who fought as if he were a waited patiently for a passe short subject on Casey slow moving windmill driven by some perpetual Stengel and the New York Mets to conclude. The source of energy . During their respective care~rs , rumble of low-voiced conversations could be heard Ali had won only twenty-nine fights as opposed to in close competition with the lackluster preliminary Marciano 's impressive forty-nine victories . It would film , until Stengel 's face finally faded from the be a contest, therefore , between the fastest and screen . Then the tension began to build as the most graceful heavyweight titleholder against one spectators began to anticipate the main feature . of the most powerful heavyweight champions in boxing history. Both fighters had one common de- This was an audience long adjusted to actual nominator: neither man had ever lost the cham- bouts televised on a large TV screen , but no one pionship nor had they ever fought one another. This before had ever experienced a film fiction that pos- last was the raison d 'etre for SUPER FIGHT . Through sessed only a pretense of actuality. this match , moreover, Ali was contesting the result of a previous radio broadcasted computer decision \" Ya hOi \" one individual yelled as the screen by which it had been decided that Marciano was suddenly lit up ; then the chiaroscuro of an empty the greatest heavyweight champion of all time . boxing ring nestled within the deserted darkness To even the bo xing neophyte it was obvious from the very first round that the toupeed Marciano (forty-five years old and balding rapidly), although trimmed down by fifty pounds, was but an imitation of his former self. Ali , fast to begin with , looked superfast throughout most of the fight. In the first round , Marciano , although maintaining pursuit, was unable to counteract Muhammad Ali 's superiority as a defensive fighter; very early he became appre- hensive over Ali 's counterpunching ability. When the 30 FALL 1971

round was over, Marciano was behind nine pOints coming from Ali 's camp . LeBow at this time forced to ten . Half the audience cheered , the other half the disappointme[lt even further into the craws of booed ; both halves responded with great enthusi- Marciano fans when he noted that Rocky looked asm. like \" a bloody pulp.\" Very early, therefore, the pattern for the great That was the way the pattern went, with Marciano championship bout was established , with Marciano just about keeping on his feet, barely holding his at a continual disadvantage in pOints because of own . But patterns have a way of looking whole and Ali 's superior speed , agility and boxing ability. From well , like the colorful , symmetrical design in a child 's then on Marciano had to chase Ali relentlessly, he kaleidoscope ; but bump the kaleidoscope ever so had to fight the long , bruising fight-the classic slightly and the design is knocked askew and Marciano match-attempting thereby to wear down changed to another. The design of Ali 's winning Ali through sheer aggression , sheer power. fight was changed in the tenth round when Mar- ciano , look ing as if an angry glance from Al i would Marciano, however, was a boxer who cut easily, put him away, came on like a battling tiger, cutting Ali one whose boxing-scarred skin broke very easily up and knocking him down . Surprised and hurt, Ali 's and early in a fight , especially about the eyes . After stance thereafter was less certain and he did not a while his nose, too, would flow claret. Blood there- hold his guard up as high or as tight to the body fore became a part of the pattern after the th ird as he had in the earlier rounds . The crowd was round; Marciano began in the rounds thereafter to screaming and cheering and shouting encour- fight with perhaps a hint of desperation , swinging agement to both boxers; many were standing on with what appeared to be sluggish persistence , al- their seats or jumping in the aisles . Then in the though this was belied from time to time by a number twelfth round Marciano quickly punched Ali down of fast combinations and jabs. again with superb body combinations. LeBow's blow-by-blow commentary became inaudible under For his part , Ali 's reach permitted him literally to the screaming voices of the spectators yelling , \" Hit hold Marciano off, a tactic once employed by the ' im , Rocky! \" \" Yeh , Muhammad! \" \" Go , go , go !\" \" Kill first Black heavyweight champion , Jack Johnson . ' im! \" and all the other violent exhortations released In this way Ali battled with Marciano , hurting the by the instincts. older man before retreating to the protection of his fast and long arms. So the fight seemed to go , At the beginning of round thirteen the pattern exciting but not filled with any special moment. had changed drastically: Ali had been hurt consider- Every so often announcer Guy LeBow would say ably by Marciano 's charge and the fighters were now something such as , \" Rocky 's eye is being torn tied for points. Within fifty-seven seconds after the apartl \" and the hopes of the Marciano fans would bell rang to begin the round it was zip , zam , bam! flag . They could see that Ali was slowly accumulat- Knockout! and Muhammad Ali was floored . One 's ing points , that he was winning . boggled mind stared incredulously at the Fancy Dan figure of Ali grasping feeb ly at the ropes in an at- Now and then Marciano would win a round , but tempt to rise . Yet the fight was over and Rocky to the trained eye Muhammad Ali had very little to Marciano , hand held up in victory by referee Chris fear ; he seemed to be just what he always claimed : Dundee , was the All Time Heavyweight Champion The Greatest. It was completely expected , therefore , of the World . when Ali stunned Marciano in the eighth round , knocking him to the canvas . Jubilation was heard FILM COMMENT 31

Of course the fight never happened. reality and his subjective interpretation of it. It is For one thing , Marciano was killed in an air crash the subjectivity and verisimilitude to wh ich we re- near Des Moines, Iowa, almost five months before spond , not to real ity itself. Is it possib le, despite our the film was shown worldwide on the night of Jan- emotional enjoyment of what we see in art , that we uary 20 at 10 P.M . EST. can respond to something artistic as fully as we For another , the ex c itement in SUPER FIGHT was would to the reality that art attempts to depict? I think generated more by superior acting than superb not. Our personal reaction to a funeral would be bo x ing. more fully realized than a film version of one, no SUPER FIGHT was a film fantasy engineered by matter how closely the film permits us to become bo xi ng promoter , film producer Murry Woroner, as familiar with the deceased film character . In film , well as the d ictates of a National Cash Register 315 we suspend ou r belief in reality in order to engage computer. A number of fighting variables were de- our imagination ; in life, we suspend our imagination , termined (for ex ample , spe ~ d , power , stamina , how a subjective state, in order to engage our sense of easily cut , etc .) and sent to over four hundred bo xing reality . experts who estimated Ali 's and Marciano 's score on each . The results of this poll were then consumed But people came away from SUPER FIGHT wonder- by Cashbox HAL, who then provided the filmmaker ing how it was possible for the audience and them- with a script for the complete bout. selves to have believed and responded to the film as if it had been an actual bout. They wondered Woroner, however, was the only one who knew how it was possible for grown men to scream and the decree of the computer while the fight was being jump up and down in an incredible emotional reac- filmed . In order to duplicate the computer screen - tion not to life but to art. play, the two boxers fought, on five different days over a six month period , what would have amounted As a film , SUPER FIGHT was well done but not to over seventy-five three minute rounds. In the perfect. For one thing , there were a number of times finished picture only a little more than six per cent when it was obvious that the editing-although of all the film shot was used . Seen by millions of heightening reality through its ability to provide ex- people in the United States and abroad , SUPER FIGHT treme close-ups of the match not ava ilable in a is perhaps the most financially successful one-hour- televised fight-was covering up a punch that was and-fifteen-minute movie in the history of motion not swung or one that missed by the proverbial mile. pictu res. Coupled with that was the sound track , in which the supposedly striking punches were not always Woroner created exc itement in this film in two duplicated exactly by matched sound . (Regarding ways: first, the ending was a complete secret known the film 's heightened reality in sound , there was the only to Woroner, plus the film editor and sound unbelievable moment in the theater in which I saw engineer. The prints of SUPER FIGHT were sealed , the fight when the volume of sound was increased held in bonded storage and delivered by messenger in the eleventh round , because it was impossible a half-hour before showtime to the theater projection to hear LeBow over the incredible noise of the booths. Second , as Woroner stated in the February crOWd !) Guy LeBow 's running account of the fight , issue of The Ring, SUPER FIGHT \" w ill be a one night, moreover, was about as inspiring as a recitation of and one night only,. showing . The fight will not be Evangeline. Probably any newcomer to the sport re-run in theatres, newsreels, or on television .\" would have noticed that the cruor spilling down (Needless to say, following the overwhelming suc- Marciano'S face was more akin to ketchup than to cess of SUPER FIGHT , Woroner released the film as blood . It was also disconcerting and spell-breaking a theatrical feature .) to see on the screen the two boxers and the referee but no spectators beyond the ropes . There was one The other element that created excitement in final element that should have intruded upon the SUPER FIGHT was the very nature of bo xing itself. suspension of one's belief; this was the computer As Paul Weiss observed in his unusual and excellent read-out that clicked across the screen in mechani- Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry, \" Boxing , wrestling , and cal precision , giving the respective scores for each marathon running are not usually spoken of as boxer for that round , the reasons upon which the 'games' . They are contests . They offer occasions computer based its decision , and the cumulative for men to demonstrate some control over them- points for each fighter as they entered the next selves, [and] because a contest puts primary em- round . phasis on struggle , it is usually more concentrated than a game.\" But damn it, SUPER FIGHT engaged your attention and imagination. It \" felt \" real. Thinking this , howev- Boxing , streSSing the ind ividual , awards to its er, gave one the willies because it smacked of the champions an almost mythic persona ; they become approaching technological possibility of Big Broth- heroes to the bo xing fan comparable to the stature erism , whereby the people are lulled into a sopor of the classical hero. SUPER FIGHT provided its audi- by the novacain of managed , controlled real ity . If ences with two bona fide heroes of the sport, heroes people responded so readily to this film , what similar who were racially black and white, who therefore use might the computer and film be put to in order served as a paradigm of the racial contest in this to evoke a similar reaction , a response which ap- pears to be as emotionally perverted as making love country. to a lifesized, rubber doll? Art reaches for verisimilitude , not reality ; it pos- There are good reasons why SUPER FIGHT created sesses the appearance of truth but not truth itself. The artist wins our approval by his presentation of 32 FALL 1971

the sense of reality that it did . One was the nature known , predicated as they were on good publicity of the sport and the contestants : in this fight you saw a struggle between two boxers of almost mythic and the excitement this fight engendered. What is stature , and myth is related in a special way to reality, striking deeply into the psychic core of truth . most strange in retrospect is that Ali lost the real More important, however, was that the result of the fight was kept secret. By not telling us the end , and fight in somewhat the same fashion that the com- because we are ignorant as to how a computer thinks, Woroner injected into SUPER FIGHT one of puter determined he would lose the surreal one, life's qualities : Fate, the unknown . The finish of an ordinary film we know is man-made, even though namely, Frazier's tenacity and strength would even- its ending is unknown to us ; we know it to be a product of man 's imagination . The end to SUPER tually wear down Ali 's speed , grace, and agility. FIGHT was created beyond man 's ken , perhaps giv- ing the individual the feeling that computer logic There are a few subtle differences between the two is linked to the logic that rules the universe-this despite the fact that NCR 315 only calculated the fights : in the computerized match Ali employed the man-made information fed into it. style for which he's long been noted against Mar- On January 21 , the day after SUPER FIGHT was presented , there were a number of people, film ciano's plodding aggressiveness. This differed producers and exhibitors especially, who were curious as to how this computerization of life might slightly from Frazier's faster movement and Ali 's not be refined and exploited in the regular film storyline. Except for some jesting , off-hand specu- decision during the first rounds to flat-footedly slug lation-a computer determined gladiatorial combat between Nixon and Johnson in the Coliseum-this it out with Frazier toe-to-toe. question can best be answered by the industry. Yet if there is any reason at all for man to be fearful Stranger still was the same definite feel of the of the advance of the machine upon his psy- chological and physical desmene, the audience re- Great White Hope syndrome, which had coursed sponse to SUPER FIGHT might be it. Whether the machine should continue to manufacture something throughout SUPER FIGHT, pulsing noticeably during that for so long only humans have created should be at le'ast questioned . In the name of entertainment, the Ali-Frazier bout. One reason for this has been we may just invent quasi-realities in this cybernetic age that will shove the truth of life aside. When we Ali 's public stance, long a defiant one, a posture are more technologically advanced in the uses of the computer and the media than we are now, will often coupled with his membership in the Black we be able (or permitted) to differentiate between man-made and computer-created realities? Muslims . Frazier was touted as The Man 's fighter , In the final analysis , SUPER FIGHT indicated four and in theater audiences throughout the country things: first , that it could be done, and well done at that ; second , that the outcome as the eye saw watching the fight on supersized TV screens most it was at best improbable; third , that in the future such filmmaking might prove reprehensible; and of the fans-the majority of whom were black-were lastly, that the NCR 315 computer is the Great White Hope. far and away Ali partisans. - . and then the morning after, so to speak . On In terms of image and for obvious technical rea- March 8, 1971, thirteen months after the SUPER FIGHT film fiction took place , Muhammad Ali was involved sons, SUPER FIGHT had a far clearer picture than the in a boxing event strangely similar to the Woroner production , and it was weird feeling to see fiction TV production . Eventually there were clear pictures become fact. of the Ali-Frazier fight , however. In this age of the More precisely, the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier match was between two undefeated champions. instant book, the Ali-Frazier fight ushered in the This created an emotional atmosphere not at all dissimilar to that aroused by SUPER FIGHT 'S promo- instant film . Only two or three days after the bout tion as \" the fight of the century .\" Discounting bene- fit performances, SUPER FIGHT was able to charge took place, theaters throughout the country were one of the highest prices for a commercial movie ticket in film history because of the sensation caused showing the fight as regular fare on their film pro- by and the attendant publicity on the fight. The exorbitant prices for the Ali-Frazier fight are well- grams. Lastly, the enthusiasm of both audiences was no different; in fact , unless my memory is overly dramatic, SUPER FIGHT 'S audiences might have been more excited than the mass of people surrounding me during the real fight. Subjectively speaking , I found that the difference between the two screen bouts had more to do with William Wordsworth. I mean here that in the Ali-Mar- ciano fight one had to suspend one's imagination in order to become imaginatively and emotionally involved . On this basis one may well argue the aesthetics of computerized filmmaking . The Ali- Frazier fight was another matter, because the media for many months had hawked that this match was real , not computerized ; and the winner would be the real , not fictional , champion . There are no aes- thetics to employ to reality, however, only to art, and unfortunately life is not art. In the end result, it is difficult to compare the two fights precisely because aesthetics can be applied to one and a philosophy of life regarding competition applies to the other. As someone who has seen outside his living room only two boxing matches , both with Muhammad Ali as a leading attraction , one of which was seen in a movie theater and the other in a sports arena, I can only say that in this instance the differences between reality and surreality are slight. The com- puterized and actual fights will have an equal , if tenuous , hold on my memory, remaining equal in meaning and moment. IIIIIIII FILM COMMENT 33

THE This article is from a forthcoming book , The Poet DOV2HENKO as Filmmaker, to be published by M.I.T. Press, Marco Carynnyk is also writing two other books , A Hand- PIiPERS book of Eastern European Films (Temple University Press) and Cinematic Politics (Outerbridge and Marco Carynnyk Dienstfrey) . Ale xander Dovzhenko . Self-portrait, 1924. Like Jean Vigo , Ivor Montagu pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement, Alexander Dovzhenko has a very small oeuvre for a major film director. In his lifetime he completed only seven feature films. If we add to this number three early films (which Dovzhenko himself did not count as part of his mature accomplishments) and five documentaries for which he did the editing and narration, the total is still only fifteen films. Dovzhenko 's extensive writings, though still not published in their entirety, give much information about the projects that the Ukrainian film director started to work on but did not complete for one reason or another. In his autobiography (1939) Dovzhenko wrote: Because good scripts were not coming to the studio and because I was isolated from the writers, I was forced to continue writing my own screenplays. Now I have become used to this. Yet I still think this method of work is neither proper nor useful. It over- burdens the director, forces him to perform the creative act twice, and shortens his life. If I had received screenplays in a normal way I could have made many more pictures that I did . In si xteen years, I admit, I have achieved little , but this is not entirely my fault. It's also the fault of the bureaucrats who thought of me as a drudge who would do all the dirty work. The notebooks that Dovzhenko kept from 1941 until his death in 1956 contain many references to the difficult circumstances in which Dovzhenko was forced to work and which prevented him from com- pleting many of his film projects. The notebooks also indicate that in his later years Dovzhenko gradually shifted his artistic allegiance from filmmaking to writing, hoping to express in words what he could not portray on the screen. Thus on April 10th, 1942 Dovzhenko wrote down the following bitter com- plaint: I often think how my life has been wasted . What a great mistake I made when I went to work in the cinema l Si xteen years of penal servitude in this goddamn bourgeois trash can where I am obligated to coexist and cooperate with miserable people who hate me and whom I profoundly despise as unquali- fied and amoral brutes, without a shred of decency, wretches who hate my nation and make it unhappy. How much health and happiness have I lost with people whom I never want to see again! How much time and spiritual strength have I wasted! If I had applied all my strength and passion in these si xteen years to literature I'd have at least a dozen volumes of real literature behind me. As it is, my unwritten books lie like unborn children . What a great pity

that they never will be born , but will remain as Spent three weeks in Paris. Had to live in Montpar- plans .... nasse in your Room 32 . I have luck with your rooms. I also spent three weeks in London , Now I've had And on July 4th, 1945 he wrote: the grand tour, as they say, and in two weeks am I am a film director. In all my working years I leaving for Kiev. Have seen sound films. Have seen have not seen a single one of my pictures in a decent them being made. They make them badly, by the theater on a decent screen , printed on decent film way. I even saw sound equipment on location less by qualified technicians. than a pistol shot away. Bought myself wide The film theaters are miserable, the screens the trousers, a Leica, and a thick jersey-everything a size of postage stamps, as a rule , and it never occurs good tourist needs, even a phonograph with a dog- to anyone that screens can be large and the effect gie. Please don 't confuse the dog with the night- of the picture quite different-grand and beautiful. marish real dogs that swarm on German sidewalks. The sound is scandalous , and the film development It's drawn on the diaphragm of the phonograph . is shocking-dirty and full of reflections. The very White with a black ear or muzzle , hold on , I'll look, thought of viewing a picture always made me ex- yes, with a black ear. Bought myself records tremely sad . The film was always worse than I had - \" Yiddische Momma\" and others. I can leave. conceived and made it. This has been one of the Also bought a fountain pen , although for greater misfortunes of my life. I was a martyr for my work . convenience I am writing to you with a pencil. Not once did I obtain satisfaction or even peace from seeing the results of my immeasurably difficult Various Frenchmen were courting me passion- and complex work. The more time goes by the more ately in Paris , but nothing came of it. Between you I become convinced that the best twenty years of and me, I fled from them and now am glad. I think my life have been wasted . What I could have done! they ' re mean and roguish people. Dovzhenko 's complaints are understandable and justified, but today we can see that his accomplish- I haven 't received any letters from the Soviet ments as a writer, a poet of the printed word, are Union, so unfortunately I can 't send you any gossip. no less than his accomplishments as a poet of the Although I did hear that a massive uprising is going screen. Moreover, the accomplishments in the one on in Leningrad . The postoffice and telegraph of- art are inseparable from the accomplishments in the ficials , the film directors and cameramen have re- other. After all, Dovzhenko wrote all his own film volted . The revolt is being led by the famous pioneer scripts. Later he rewrote the scripts of most of his of sound cinema, Shorin-Bey. It is directed against feature films as film-novels . During World War /I he the equally famous pioneer of sound cinema, Tager, published dozens of articles and short stories. In who has succeeded in attracting to his side the the last years of his life he wrote the cine-romans telegraph and the part of the Kremlin where De- The Enchanted Desna and Poem of an Inland Sea myan's flat is located. It is believed that the struggle (which were made into films after his death by Yulia will be protracted and that the victor will be the one Solntseva), and he worked on an epic novel, The with the stronger nerves-i .e., fager . Or maybe it Golden Gate. will be Shorin-it's all the same to me . As far as I'm concerned , it would be better if they were both The Tsar dead. Because only over their dead bodies will real In his autobiography Dovzhenko mentions three equipment reach the USSR .' unfinished comedies: THE TSAR ( \" my best unfinished Pudovkin is completing his film. According to comedy \"), THE HOMELAND ( \" about the Jews in Pal- Shvedchikov, the film will be silent.2 estine \"), and CHAPLIN LOST (\"about Charlie Chaplin In short , Sergei Mikhailovich , I believe that our on a desert island \"). situation is not so good. I think that it will remain unchanged for a very long time. I will not enlarge Dovzhenko 's voluminous writings contain no on this subject in a letter. I think you yourself know material on the latter two projects, but his work on all this . To the extent that it has become an ines- capable fact it has even ceased to interest me. Now THE TSAR is recorded in notes and letters over a I am thinking about our work in general , about how we will have to break out of the Soviet Union into period of seventeen years. the world market , just as we did in the silent era . I am taking into account the equality of all the other The idea for a satire on Nicholas /I, the last Em- conditions that do not concern the cinema. Taking into account the fact that our people will not (and peror of Russia , seems to have occurred to Dov- can not) enter into a concubinage with German and zhenko about 1928. At that time he wrote out eighty Franco-English firms for trilingual variants. And also numbered episodes and scenes for the script. Un- that no Sergei Minins can speak without an accent.' fortunately, these are buried in his archives and still unpublished. 1 Pave l Tager in Moscow and Al exa nder Shorin in Len ingrad were the inven tors of rival soun d-fi lm sys tem s. The former's system In one of the letters he wrote from Berlin to Sergei was implemented at Mezhrabpomfilm in 1929 , the latter' s at Eisenstein in 1930, who at that time was visiting the Sovkino. United States and Mexico to make An American Tragedy, Dovzhenko presented the idea in a fairly 2 Konstantin M. Shvedchikov-President of Sovki no. complete outline. 3 Sergei Minin-Soviet actor. Dear Sergei Mikhailovich: I am writing to you from the same Pension Maria . FILM COMMENT 35

Not in any language . And most importantly , that the at a military hospital a hundred miles from the front. present sound film will unbelievably diminish the Here he is accidentally awarded a medal and then level of verbal art. appointed as a guard at a camp for prisoners-of-war. Behind the barbed wires are hundreds of strong , We have to think of something . brave men who are now aimless and defenseless. How many good plays are there on the globe-no Over them stands a terror with a rifle-my soldier. doubt you know the Earth is a globe-beginning with The men are afraid of his every move. And now he Sophocles and ending , alas, with Spring Love?' Not gradually begins to become insolent. After the war more than a thousand . That's all that we have ac- he returns to his village. The acquired habit of or- quired over thousands of years. Who hasn 't staged dering others about makes him the terror of his them? But a film exists for three years. And village. He practically wants to surround it with 70 ,000 ,000 people sit in the cinema every day. Can barbed wire. The attempts of the youths to beat him you imagine what will happen when all this nonsense up come to naught against his belief in his own starts talking? Already couples sit in theaters neck- omnipotence. Finally, when he has beaten up a ing and ignoring the screen . Later it will be worse . whole gang of youths who have attacked him , he You know what will come later. falls on the ground and begins to cry. \"Why are I want to make a sound picture in which I will you crying? \" asks an old peasant. The man raises reduce the dialogue to a minimum . Emphasis in the his head : \"Why shouldn't I cry when everyone is dialogue on the phonetic aspect. If only one can afraid of me?\" It ends with his uniform and his find an acting situation that will be comprehensible medals being stolen . He puts on civilian clothes and despite the linguistic incomprehensibility. This immediately becomes just as he was before the war. should make the words on the screen more power- ful , shouldn't it? Maybe in this way we can break I am describing this to you very crudely , Sergei into the market. I plan to film this story around the Mikhailovich, and much of it may seem naive to you . triangle Nobile-Malmgrem , Krasin-Chukhnovsky .s In reality, I think , it is much more profound and more I'm very eager to work on northern nature. By the interesting . However, if you find it boring I shall not way, here there will be a legitimate opportunity to submit it. mix three languages on screen , so that no one will be offended . Since I cannot stay long in Berlin , I beg you to But God knows what equipment I will use. I am reply immediately and frankly by telegram, \" Yes \" leaving here with almost empty hands , and I feel or \" No .\" I'd like to have your answer by 12 or 13 very bitter. I don 't know when and if I'll be able to October. If the answer is no, believe me, I won 't go abroad again . When Shvedchikov was here he be offended. I'll know it's out of the question. If the said that in Moscow they are just about to sign an answer is yes , I shall await the visa and the ticket. agreement with America and that they will be send- My regards to Alexandrov and Tisse. The last of the ing several people there, including one from money-$150-1 have not transferred to Atasheva Ukraine. yet.\" In a day or two I'll send Blumberg instructions . I wrote a letter to Vorobyev asking if he could Yours dispatch me to America directly from Berlin so as Dovzhenko Alexander not to lose time . Vorobyev replied by telegram: \" Do There is unclear evidence that THE TSAR was not object to trip . Vorobyev. \" That's all. Khlestakov scheduled to be produced at Ukrainfilm in Kiev in said it better: \" Let him bear your name .\"6 So I am 1934. For one reason or another (probably political: turning to you , can you , together with our friends , or with Chaplin , or with anyone else , bring me to the regime retained enough of a revolutionary spirit Hollywood for at least a month , sending me one visa and one steamer ticket. I don 't know the lan- 4 Spring Love (Lyubov yarovaga)-a once popular play by the guage , but I'll see a lot, Sergei Mikhailovich . If the Russian writer Konstantin Trenev (1876-1945). Moscow question is settled during my stay there , I' ll return everything to you. Despite everything , I 5 Umberto Nobile , the Italian polar explorer, headed an expedition desperately want to submit one of my scenarios to to the North Pole in the airship Italia, which crashed north of Chaplin . I have worked long and hard on it. If it Spitzbergen on May 25 , 1928. Twenty-two airplanes and eighteen isn't suitable for him , he can at least pick out a ships from various countries (including the Soviet icebreaker few useful things for himself. The scenario cannot Krasin and pilot Boris Chukhnovsky) participated in the search . be filmed in our country now. Its contents are paci- Dovzhenko writes about this film project in his autobiography: fistic, and no Blyakhin could emend the pacificism .7 After returning from the foreign assignment [the trip to We stern Europe during which AD wrote these letters to SMEll suggested Among millions of ordinary people, turned by to the administration of Ukrainfilm a screenplay about Arctic special means into killers (war), I place one average explorers based on the tragedy of Nobile and the loss of Roald man . In fact , less than average . No efforts have Amundsen. The administration turned down the idea and de- succeeded in beating his civilian characteristics out manded that I quickly write \"so mething similar \" about our of him. He hasn't acquired a single military trait. present-day life in Ukraine rather than about the Arctic. I hastily He grows rabid only once . This is when a non-com put Amundsen out of my mind and in twelve days wrote the orders him to thrust his bayonet into a scarecrow unsuccessful script IVAN and began to film it. for the th irtieth time . He stabs it with a terrible bitter- Dovzhenko was to return to the subject of polar exploration ness as if it were the cause of all his hardships . in THE DISCOVER Y OF THE ANTARCTIC, an unproduced script written in 1951-52 that was based on Thaddeus Bellinghausen 's 1819 He is busted from private and sent to serve on KP notebooks . 6 In Gogol's The In spec tor General Dobchinsky asks Khlestakov , who he thinks is the Inspector General, for permission to give his name to his bastard son . 7 Pavel Blyakhin-Soviet writer , in the early 1930s worked at Glavrepertkom , the official body that passed on all plays and film scripts . 8 Pera Atasheva-Eisenstein 's wife. 36 FALL 1971

to oppose even a satirical treatment of the mon- archy) the project was halted. In 1940, however, Oovzhenko returned to the idea in his short story \" The Cross of St. George,\" which appears to have been written as a treatment of one episode in the film. The Cross of St. George Michurin 's wife by Dovzhenko , for MICHURIN. Someone was telling me-I forget who it was-that Bo ri s Pasternak by Dovzhenko , 1945. the Frenchman Helvetius argued the superiority of undeserved awards over deserved ones. There's more sense in mistaken , undeserved medals, he said , than in correct ones . No matter how funny this may seem , I think there 's a lot of truth to the idea. The first Cross of St. George, I must confess , I did not receive by my deserves. And yet this medal had for the whole war, in any case at least for my part in it, a thoroughly positive significance. I' ll tell you the whole story from beginning to end ; maybe our superiors can make use of it in future wars . It all happened like this. At a hospital located in an old girl 's school , in the basement kitchen , where I had been sent for the purpose of peeling potatoes and various other duties, for the most part connected with the problem of carrying out peelings and other garbage, in the kitchen then , the cooks and I got drunk one night on rubbing alcohol and real alcohol , which we had obtained in the laborato- ry from various preparations. Having drunk more than our share, naturally, we began to talk, then the matter progressed to an engagement in fisticuffs and more: I can't even remember what happened after the head cook Kondrat Nesmachny smashed a bottle on my mug . They say I immediately went to sleep . And when I rolled to the floor I knocked over a cupboard , which was heard by the doctor on duty upstairs. Running at full speed into the kitchen , which made all the cooks who could still stand on their legs flee for their lives, the said doctor ordered me carried , still in an unconscious state , to the operat- ing table for the purpose of removing the splinters of glass from my physiognomy and sending me to the stockade, so that there wouldn 't be hide or hair left in the hospital of that drunkard , scoundrel, and good-for-nothing , namely myself. That's the kind of justice we have in this world . I didn 't even hear what he did in the operating room , but when I woke up in the morning I saw that: a) first of all , I was lying on a cot in the ward for people on the critical list; b) secondly , my head and arms were so covered with bandages that only one eye was visible; c) the entire ward was decorated , the bedclothes were clean , and the shirts on the soldiers, myself included , were also white and fresh ; d) and most importantly, someone had arrived at the hospital , someone so important that everyone tip-toed about or lay quietly in bed. Who was it? Now wait just a minute , I'll explain everything. The door opened , and who do you think walked in? Hurrah! It was the Tsar himself, accompanied by Prince Oldenburg and General Voyeykov. Behind His Majesty and Their Excellencies came the sailor FILM COMMENT 37

'- - 7 Derevenko carrying in his arms the heir to the throne, who was holding a basket full of medals and ) crosses. ! After walking through the room , the Tsar stopped at my cot. I don 't know what interested His Majesty 1_ &.-f-\": in my persona : was it the fresh spot of blood on the cotton , or was it the patriotism in the one good I ~~ - eye that peered at him cheerfully and loyally? What- ever it was , he paused at my cot without noticing ,r . that the attending doctor had almost fainted for fear he would talk to me . And His Majesty really did pose f me a royal question: Dovzhenko 's sketches of a sequence for MICHURIN in \" Well , tell me, old chap \" -I swear to God , that's wh i ch Michurin meets M. Kalin i. what he said- \" tell me , old chap , how were you wounded? \" 38 FALL 1971 And so, whether from joy or from sorrow that I had been so mistreated in the kitchen , I up and told him the whole truth loudly and clearly. \" I can 't say, Your Majesty. There were three of them! You should have seen how they jumped me! I couldn 't even get a look at all of them-one, two , three, and bang! \" Then His Majesty turned to the Crown Prince and said : \" What holy simplicity! He can't even describe his feat properly .. . . I am satisfied .\" With that he took a Cross of St. George, Fourth Degree, from his heir'S basket, pinned it to my chest, and disappeared out the door. Now what do you say to that? Do you dare say there was a mistake? Can a royal personage make a mistake? There was no mistake! So after that I immediately-that's a lie, not immediately, but slow- ly-began to realize who and what I was. I became so brave and courageous, I got such a desire to make the enemy's blood flow by the bucket and cauldron that I recovered from my wounds in three or four days and requested to be sent to the front lines, right into the trenches. After all , where should a hero be if not in the trenches? The Atomic Follies A theme that runs like a red thread through all of Oovzhenko 's wartime writings is the folly and inhumanity of war. As a frontline correspondent and documentary filmmaker, Oovzhenko observed and recorded in his Notebooks dozens of incidents of destruction and death in the cruel, long campaigns of the German-Soviet struggle. Toward the end of the war Oovzhenko began to abstract himself from this daily catalogue of human suffering and to spec ulate about the folly of the leaders who had led the masses into the war and about the dangers of the atomic holocaust with which they threatened mankind. (Bracketed ellipses indicate censorial deletions in the original Soviet publication) . 3 September 1945 The world war is over . It has ended with the atom bomb . Forty million Soviet citizens, my brothers and sisters, have fallen. My own eighty-year-old father died from hunger in Kiev , and I myself, severely wounded by my own people , am barely alive .

What do I want? What do I need? Work. I want 7. The creation of their evil genius got into the work. And a bit of joy. I will have work, but I will hands of criminals, cruel, stupid , thoroughly atavis- not have joy. I cannot be happy when the people tic rulers. around me are badly off. I am ashamed , so ashamed, as if it were my fault that they are poor, badly 8. They destroyed civilization . Or maybe even the dressed , and displaced . As if I had tricked them , entire earth. deceitfully promised them something , sucked their blood out, deprived them of their holidays and rest A Soviet Space Odyssey and gentle natures, and made them unhappy. Are In 1954, at the Second Congress of Soviet Writ- they heroes or not? They are heroes. More-they are heroes and martyrs a hundred times over. They ers, Oovzhenko made a speech about interplanetary have choked Germany with their corpses and flight. He said, in part: drowned her with their blood [ ... . J As the most prominent scientists have told us, in the next forty years , that is, by the year 2000 Man By nature I cannot be content. I am with the poor , will have explored the entire Solar System. Within the unhappy, the displaced. I have long observed the lifetimes of a good half of us, maybe even ninety this in myself. It must be due to my imagination and percent of us, the task will be fulfilled . What else , if not film , will transport us visually to these other some ancient traumas [ ... . J worlds? What will extend our spiritual world and our knowledge to fantastic dimensions? The cinema. I want to work. I want to believe with my last What scope is given to the present-day film writer! ounce of strength that mankind will no longer need How many discoveries await him in this amazing stupid generals and colonels, idiotic tanks and can- work l nons, this entire wastebin of atavistic follies , all these statues of great murderers and their horses, these The writers and literary bureaucrats who heard the speech did not realize that Oovzhenko himself Hottentot honors to snipers and marshalls [ .... J was writing just such a script. The scenario-actual- ly, notes for one-with its thematic parallels to Ku- I want to believe that there will be peace. That brick 's 2001 was published posthumously. Oovz- heroes-martyrs will no longer be needed . henkq had entered the last notation just two and a half months before his death. To the creator, the thinker, the defender of human freedom and welfare, to the hero of suffering , to In the Depths of Space: Outline of a Science all who would make impossible the abomination of Fiction Scenario About Flight to Mars war I want to erect a monument together with my Movement of the plot in space : Earth-Mars- brothers [ . ...J possibly one other planet-Earth. Three months later Oovzhenko began to elabo- An error in the flight calculation occurs ; they rate some of these thoughts in a script for a film. spend more than eight years catching up. The scenario was never finished , the film not made. The crew of the space ship: three young Soviet Slavery (Theme for a Scenario) engineers. 1. People, attempts to find the first class . The One o f them is unhappy in his personal life: even flower of the human mind-knowledge. on Mars he will not find oblivion ; even there he will 2. War enveloped the world. The scientists lacked dream his disturbing earth-bound dreams. imagination . They had enough for everything else : The scientific aspects of the flight must be care- electrons, positrons, neutrons. They penetrated the fully developed , beginning with the preparations for secrets of the microcosm with the most subtle anal- the flight and the blast-off. yses . And then they stopped . A great epic of life in space must be shown . 3. What to do? Take the last step or not? Say They approach Mars. Temporarily they become the word , let the atom bomb be? Or not say it? In its satellite. Movement around the planet, ever closer this moment, so fateful for the history of the planet, to it . Solving the mysteries of the seas , the canals , the great scientists were not aided by their hearts . the poles, the vegetation . Incredible tension . Their hearts were mute. They were spiritually impov- The landing . The men step out of the ship onto erished people. They lacked conscience and sensi- the new planet. tivity . They were the slaves of their invention . The Mars. Everything important that can be said and word was said . shown in color on a wide screen . Signs of intelligent beings. Where are they? What 4. Before this they argued at home . And still they are they like? Perhaps they live underground , as did not think on the level that their invention re- in a subway , at a depth of 10 or 12 kilometers , quired . They were the servants of capital. occasionally rising to the surface, as we rise into the stratosphere . Then a journey into the planet is 5. The bomb was tested. Universal resonance . called for. Universal consequences. Only the scientists were What are the Martians like? Do they resemble not aware of them . No one applauded them. Report- dwarfs or teenagers , or are they like us? How are ers did not swarm around them . Newsreel camera- they different from us? men did not film them. An evil spirit wandered Make use in the film of chronicles of World War through the world. II , the great battles , Chinese and Soviet construction 6. They were locked up, separated from their friends and families . They were guarded in lu xurious prisons like the socially dangerous people that they really were . FILM COMMENT 39

projects, massive youth festivals, the flooding of a television camera. With it the crewmembers trans- rivers, gigantic atomic explosions, and natural mit to Earth everything that they see . Thus the peo- catastrophes in Japan (stock shots) . ple on Earth see Mars and the Martians. This chronicle can be used as a contrast to the Here on Earth we can show beautiful scenes of silence of space flight or as a terrestrial visiting card contemplation , commentaries, and the speeches of when the film is screened for the Martians . the crewmembers to the people on Earth , including their families: \" I know that you can only see me and Mention Tsiolkovsky: the birth and death of his my lip movements because I am speaking to you son . The father 's joy and later sorrow in space . from another planet. But I shall never forget my Shostakovich 's music. thoughts or my feelings , and when I return I' ll repeat everything , because I cannot forget . ...\" How old are we? What do we know about our- selves? In all , twenty thousand years , but in fact The television transmits only the image, not a more like seven or eight thousand years. The Mar- single sound comes through , but Professor Soko- tians, let's assume, date their history a million and Iyansky accurately reads the mute lip movements. a half years back. And what is the speed of human thought? Is it Do everything to keep the film from being a tragedy. unbounded or does it go through space in time? Tile film should have special voice-overs and Let's assume the intelligent beings don 't use special interior monologues and dialogues and , as ordinary language. They have been reading each in no other film , the silence of space . It is complex . other's thoughts for millions of years. Then the It can be ordinary silence or musical silence. It can entire interplanetary, or rather extraterrestrial part be the silence of a dream : the sleeping men race of the film will be silent. The only sounds will be through the cosmos, dreaming of earthly songs and the comments of the announcer. visions. It can be the silence of contemplation , the silence of freedom , the silence of fate, the silence Who are they, these intelligent beings? If there of repentence, of estrangement from everything are no such beings, the film will be pessimistic. If petty and transient, the silence of ecstasy, the si- they are superior to us, then there will be thousands lence of reverie. of questions. If they are inferior, will that be interest- ing? Different from us? How? Just like us? That too The plot should involve an astronomical observa- has to be considered . tory on Earth and the astronomy of the other planet. The canals? Yes, they unfurl like endless ribbons. With voice-overs and a suitably short, clear pre- But there are no mountains, no abysses. There is sentation show what is happening on Earth . What nothing like our rivers, free-running and young , and is Maria doing? She waits for eight years, looking nothing like our seas. Wherever you look you see into the sky each night. She has turned gray but only blues and dark oranges . Th:s is a completely still remains young. Time retreats before the different, cold, uncomfortable world . strength of her hope. Do I need to show how excited the Martians are Avoid symbolism in the scenario , but present a when they spot the space ship in their bizarre sky? new poetry, a new heroicism, and the lyricism of Do they hurry to the landing site? Or does the space a new worldview. This film is a poem about Man ship descend into a dead desert and the Martians in the second half of the twentieth century and the appear to be as inaccessible as the deepsea fish fulfillment of his greatest task. By the end of the in our oceans? How to solve the problems of breath- century Man may escape the closed sphere of the ing and warmth? According to our calculations, the Solar System . surface of Mars has a temperature approximately like the temperature on Earth at an altitude of 15 One of the heroes will not return to Earth. He kilometers . will die on another planet or remain there forever. For someone the victory of return will be incomplete. If we make the most exciting assumption-that Someone will stare into the cold , dark sky without the crewmen film their surroundings and the people hope of being welcomed. This will make the film on Earth see everything-what a scope there is for more human. thought. Read everything available about the dark satel- All the colonial policies of terrestrial imperialists, lites of the stars, that is, the planets, of which there all species of nationalism , all wars and blockades , are millions in our Galaxy and the existence of which will appear as such wretched and monstrous signs paints a completely different picture of the popula- of backwardness. The human world will expand . tion of the Galaxy. Everything will increase a thousandfold; con- sciousness will rise to a radiant height. The whole world follows the flight , all the radio stations , all ham operators , all scientists. Astronom- Maybe everything that the television cameras wili ical conferences in Moscow, Paris, Washington , and show will not be true. Won 't this be a universal Rome discuss it. They listen to the radio broadcasts . absurdity, a worldwide hypnotic trance? Maybe Then they learn that \" Mars was not in place.\" What somewhere politicians will order all the television happens then? How does time go by? sets on Earth turned off. For half a year! They ' ll be turned off. Everything will revert to its usual order. Then the signals cease for over seven years, and everything is silent. But then the explorers are locat- Half a year will pass. The televisions will be turned ed , their call letters are heard , and again the whole on again . And again they will all show the same world is excited . image: the silent new world , the different beings, and our spacemen . We will try to include something that is incredible and yet SCientifically valid : the space ship contains 40 FALL 1971

The film's heroes will include important people Michurin by Dovzhenko. of our time, the head of a collective farm from near ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO FILMOGRAPHY Zaporozhe , the mothers of the spacemen . In this way the exciting verisimilitude of the film will be ( -1956) emphasized . 1926 THE HEROES. Unproduced scenario written in I don 't know yet whether these people will say 1926. VASYA THE REFORMER [VASYA-REFORMATORj. 6 anything about the unusual sight on television, or reels. Scenario and Co-direction (with Faust Lopa- whether we will show them at a World Peace Con- tynsky) . LOVE'S BERRY [YAHIDKA KOKHANNYA]. 2 reels. gress, or whether we will play for the Martians Shos- Scenario and direction. 1927 THE DIPLOMATIC POUCH takovich 's Symphony No . 1O? [SUMKA DIPKURYERAj. 7 reels . Co-scenario (with Myk- haylo Zats and B'oris Sharansky) and direction . 1928 Then that immensely important question will ZVENIGORA [ZVENYHORAj . 6 reels . Co-scenario (with Mike present itself in a new light: what is our life and Johansen and Yurtyk Tyutyunnyk) and direction. 1929 death , more accurately , what is being? Will not every ARSENAL . 7 reels . Scenario and direction. 1930 EARTH consciousness become aware of the harmonious, [ZEMLYAj . 6 reels. Scenario and direction. 1932 IVAN . infinite unity of the universe? 7 reels. Scenario and direction . 1934 THE TSAR . Sce- nario and direction. Production halted. 1935 AEROGRAD The progression of the film will make another [AIR CITY ; FRONTIERj . 8 reels. Scenario and direction . thing clear: these intelligent beings are infinitely more advanced in their cultures than we , the inhabitants 1939 SHCHORS [SCHORSj . 14 reels . Scenario and direc- of Earth, are, but only on those planets where they tion . 1940 liBERATION [VYZVOLENNYAj . 7 reels. Scenario have attained Communism . Wherever they have not and direction . SOVIET BUCOVINA [RADYANS'KA BUKOVYNAj . attained it, their planets have been turned into ruins Artistic supervision . 1943 THE BATTLE FOR OUR SOVIET by wars or destroyed by fools and tyrants. UKRAINE [BYTVA ZA NASHU RADYANS'KU UKRAYINUj . Scenario, narration , and artistic supervision . 1945 VIC- The return flight to Earth. The Earth seen from TORY IN RIGHT-BANK UKRAINE AND THE EXPLUSION OF THE Mars. Com ing closer. The landing. Where have they GERMAN AGRESSORS FROM THE BOUNDARIES OF THE come back from? From a fairy tale? They have re- UKRAINIAN SOVIET EARTH . 7 reels. Text for narration and turned from other worlds to the one where they were co-direction (with Yulia Solntseva). This film was exhib- born and where they are fated to die. Because of ited abroad as UKRAINE IN FLAMES but bears no relation this they kiss the earth and cry with joy when they to Dovzhenko 's story or film project of that title . land . SLAVERY. Unfinished scenario recorded in Dovzhenko 's Notebooks. 1946 NATIVE LAND [STRANA RODNAYA]. 5 What is all this for? What is this fantasy? What reels . Narration and editing . 1949 DAWN OVER CHINA is the sense of it? One may affirm that it is needed [SVET NAD KITAYEMj . Unfinished project. MICHURIN . 8 for the development of mankind . This is Man's new reels . Scenario and direction. 1950 FAREWELL, AMERICA creative supertask, the new poem of Prometheus's [PROSHCHAY , AMERIKAj . Scenario and direction . Produc- eternal flame. tion halted. 1951 OPENING THE ANTARCTIC [OTKRYTIYE ANTARKTlDYj. Scenario. Not produced. The film contains immense spaces, and time, and movement in space: a new vision of the world . It The following films , excepting the documentary ALEX- will be of equal interest to scientists and children. ANDER DOVZHENKO, were directed from his scripts and Moscow stories by his wife, Yulia Solntseva. 1958 POEM OF AN 15 June 1954 INLAND SEA [POEMA 0 MORE]' 12 reels . Scenario. 1961 Addition to the Script STORY OF THE FLAMING YEARS [POVEST' PLAMENNYKH LETj . 28 September 1956 Scenario. 1964 ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO. Directed by Yavheniya Hryhorovych. 1965 THE ENCHANTED DESNA One of the three crewmembers does not believe [ZACHAROVANNAYA DESNAj . Based on an autobio- that there 'is life on other planets . The unbeliever graphical story by Dovzhenko . 1968 THE UNFORGETTA- perishes. The believers reach their goal. They win . BLE [NEZABYVAYEMOYEj. 10 reels . Based on stories by I must begin to write. Dovzhenko. The dictatorial restrictions and the bureaucratic frustrations were almost over. Dovzhenko died of a heart attack in the early morning hours of 25 November 1956. A few hours before he had written, somberly and sadly, his last reflections on art, love, and passion: 24 November 1956 Our art is so dull , humdrum , and uninspired pri- marily because the artists stand cold and indifferent on the same level with the facts and subjects of their works. The high mental plateau , the loftiness and clarity of the artist's vision , and the profundity of his world- view, formed by a thirty-year-old energy, have given way to the narrow-minded speculations in realism and indifference of petty reptiles who lack ideas and principles. There is no love; there is no passion. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 41



the films of ROGER CORMAN by Richard Koszarski Richard Koszarski has been awarded a Research marring his earliest work-so we may feel justified Associateship by the American Film Institute to ex- in writing off most of his student period as on-the-job pand on a study of Erich von Stroheim 's career. training . After a three-year retrenchment following the A second period runs from ROCK ALL NIGHT in 1956 appearance of THE TRIP in 1967, Roger Corman is to THE HAUNTED PALACE in 1963, covering twenty- again hard at work portraying that topsy-turvy world seven more films and the greater part of his work . of violence and tension which figured so prominent- These films begin to display secondary and tertiary ly in his ex haustive earlier body of work . Acid ex pe- levels of meaning obviously not intended for Satur- riences notwithstanding , directing forty-five films in day afternoon audiences, although the films them- twelve years is enough to make anyone stop and selves hardly differ on the surface. Experience has take stock of their situation . The results here, how- been gained here so that by now Corman can begin ever, have been worth waiting for : BLOODY MAMA , smiling at his genre conventions and evo king more GASSS , and VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN contain some and more dark humor, culminating in two master- of Corman 's finest and most interesting work, and pieces of self-satire , THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS display a critical self-awareness only vaguely in evi- and ATLAS ( both 1960). The consolidation of Cor- denc~ in his earlier films. The recent forty-two film man 's visual style also occurs here, thanks largely Corman retrospective in New York revealed a star- to his collaboration with Floyd Crosby, who shot tling homogeneity in the films , with the darkish Cor- twenty-one of Corman 's first thirty-nine films. man flavor spreading over things as diverse as the droll GUNSLINGER , the spectacle spoof ATLAS , or that Crosby , it might be remembered , worked with Fla- ultimate gangster movie , THE ST . VALENTINE 'S DAY herty on the abortive SKY CIT Y, won the Academy MASSACRE-each distinct, yet each reflecting the Award for shooting Murnau 's TABU , worked on Pare same strongly personal world-view. Lorentz 's THE RIVER , and even did some work on the \" My Friend Bonito \" segment of Welles ' IT 'S ALL The forty-nine films signed by Corman can be TRUE . He had shot HIGH NOON for Z innemann not divided into genre quite easily in the following man- long before joining Corman on his first film in 1955 . ner: 25 fantasies , 16 modern problem dramas , 4 Corman 's middle period , which also signals the first westerns, 3 war films, and two sports-ATLAS , a serious analysis of his work in various French critical spectacle spoof , and WHAT 'S IN IT FOR HARR Y, a journals , can be said to end with THE HAUNTED PAL- caper-type film. But for the purposes of this discus- ACE , their last film together . sion Corman 's work will be divided into three chro- nological periods, each illustrating a growth of cre- It might be relevant here to point out that Corman ative ability and styl istic awareness, yet each still is one of the handful of Hollywood directors today predominantly concerned with the same acutely who se visual style is easily recognizable , a constant contemporary moral and psychological dilemmas. and graceful flow of tracking movements probably Corman 's immature period covers roughly his first derived through his work with Crosby. But even dozen films , from FIVE GUNS WEST in 1955 to ATTACK without Crosby, Corman often goes out of his way OF THE CRAB MONSTERS the following year. These to work with the best cameramen available, men films are usually straightforward genre efforts in- whose ability to handle lengthy and involved moving tended for the lowest level western and sci-fi audi- shots reinforces one of the director's own predilec- ences . THE UNDEAD falls prey to a heavy-handed tions. This tendency often approaches television effort to introduce greater \" significance\" (here an technique in the way the movements are designed uncomfortably humorless effort to cash in on the to make visually interesting shots of rather long \" Search for Bridey Murphy\" craze), but the others duration , the lengthy takes planned not so much seldom attempt to rise even to these heights. But for aesthetic value as sheer economy . (THE LITTLE Corman had had no previous experience in practical SHOP OF HORRORS , shot by Arch ie Dalzell in 2 Y2 days film direction and admits to a great many flaws in 1960, is the foremost example of this technique in application , although the larger budgets and shooting schedules of the Poe films enable it to be seen there to rather better effect.) Among the cam- FILM COMMENT 43

eramen Corman has worked with are John Mescall coincidentally the film 's editor and star) but Corman (NOT OF THIS EARTH) who had shot the notable BLACK today denies this. His career seems to have initially CAT for Ulmer in 1934 , as well as a series of fine gotten off on the wrong foot due to a preponderance James Whale films , including THE BRIDE OF of westerns , a genre Corman is apparently uncom- FRANKENSTEIN ; Milton Krasner (THE ST . VALENTINE 'S fortable with , but there is a sound economic reason DAY MASSACRE) an ex pert in early CinemaScope for this. B-westerns were still the most easily mar- whose best work includes Lang 's impressive SCAR- ketable film commodity in the middle Fifties , and LET STREET ; Arthur Arling (THE SECRET INVASION) who as a struggling new independent this is what Cor- won an Oscar as part of the team which shot man chose to produce. But his later career would Clarence Brown 's lovely THE YEARLING ; and Nicholas seem to bear out the fact that he is more comfortable Roeg (MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH) then a young conveying psychological tension than handling cameraman , but soon to photograph FAHRENHEIT sheer phYSical action-even in MACHINE GUN KELLY 451 , FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD , PETULlA , and and BLOODY MAMA it is the emotional difficulties , and his own PERFORMANCE . The way Corman has man- not the phYSical action , which is stressed. And in aged to weld all of these strong styles , and others , retrospect these misbegotten Corman westerns ap- into his own personal blend is something which only pear as among the dullest films ever produced . They he could fully describe. But if Corman 's early seem to have leaped on to the vogue for psy- black-and-wh ite standard-ratio efforts were occa- chological westerns, and nearly all their thematic sionally noteworthy, he really hit his stride with the and story values are conveyed through the dialogue, introduction of color and 'scope. The browns and an obviously fatal flaw for a B-western . THE OKLAHO- reds of the Poe films (never without their red can- MA WOMAN is probably Corman's dullest film , and dlesticks) serve to unify the series on even a chro- APACHE WOMAN is close behind , interesting solely for matic level. Crosby 's THE PREMATURE BURIAL is Cor- Crosby's Pathecolor photography. It is sad that too man 's color masterpiece , where everything is suf- much cannot be said about the color of Corman 's fused with an earthy brown that serves to externalize Fifties films, because judging from the prints shown the dread of cataleptic burial suffered by Ray Milland at the New York retrospective the color has badly (the work of designer Daniel Haller, responsible for decomposed . So much of it has run to pink , and more than his share of these effects, will be dis- bled all over the frame , that watChing many of the cussed below). Other notable examples of Corman 's prints is infuriating . The most frustrating example color are TOMB OF LlGEIA (Arthur Grant) with its cool was SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF , in which almost noth- blues and excellent use of natural locations, ST . ing but shades of pink and red survive. What we VALENTINE 'S DAY MASSACRE (Krasner) the most lushly do see, however, are a great number of scenes shot textured Corman as regards both photography and on location in the South Seas at twilight, with long set decoration , and BLOODY MAMA (John Alonzo) a shadows following the players across the sand . I symphony of cool greens and blues capped by one doubt if Crosby was trying to make this the color final flash of red (the marriage of MARNIE and SPELL- version of TABU , but with the surviving prints we ' ll BOUND) . just never know . NAKED PARADISE , shot concurrently, was cancelled in the recent retrospective , and hope- The modern phase of Corman 's career would fully the color values here have held up a little seem to begin with THE SECRET INVASION in 1963, better. running through his other European productions, and finally up to his most recent work . In this period Of the earliest films , FIVE GUNS WEST , the first , Corman has become a major international director, is a moderately successful effort in which a band whose films open international festivals and are the of prisoners are recruited during the Civil War to subject of numerous articles in European critical hold up an important Union stagecoach shipment. journals. Finally he gains some grudging accept- R. Wright Campbell , one of Corman 's favorite ance in America. He ends the series of science screenwriters , repeated the situation in his script fiction / horror films which accounted for so much for THE SECRET INVASION eight years later, changing of his earlier work and retu rns to the modern prob- the background to World War II. This kind of film lem drama , something he was dabbling with in the was eventually popularized into a minor sub-genre late Fifties. This phase possibly may have ended with by Aldrich 's THE DIRTY DOZEN later on . The only THE TRIP , the three year gap between that film and western of even passing interest is GUNSLINGER BLOODY MAMA perhaps initiating a new era in Cor- largely due to the appearance of one of Corman 's man 's evolution , but it is still too soon to tell. (I must favorite devices, the sexual role-reversal. Women confess to not yet having seen WHAT'S IN IT FOR very seldom count for anything in Corman 's films- HARRY?, so far unreleased in America , and so cannot usually they appear only as hapless figures to be figure out just how it fits in here .) menaced by Vincent Price or, in the earlier films , some papier-mache monster. But periodically Cor- Corman first moved into films as a literary agent , man features a woman in the lead due to her as- scriptwriter and producer, having been in the busi- sumption of some decidedly \" masculine\" activity, ness little more than a year before deciding to direct and usually the title signals this role-reversal as his own productions. There has been some con- some sort of freak attraction: APACHE WOMAN , SWAMP troversy as to his first actual directorial effort, some WOMEN , SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF , VIKING WOMEN AND claiming he worked uncredited on his own produc- THE SEA SERPENT , WASP WOMAN , etc. GUNSLINGER is tion of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (a film usually the most interesting of these, sort of a cross between credited to Edward Sampson and John Ireland, 44 FALL 1971

Dwan 's WOMAN THEY ALMOST LYNCHED (1953) and of place established in the cramped barroom set, Ray 's JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) . Beverly Garland is ideal thanks again largely to the phenomenal work of as the sheriff 's wife who takes over his job after Crosby. His contribution to the Corman style be- the local saloon hostess has had him shot, and the comes even more clear in their ne xt film , TEENAGE script by Charles Griffith is easily the best from DOLL , with its hard blacks and whites and glistening Corman 's early period . Occasionally the film even rainy streets at night time, certainly the most hand- shows flashes of the later Corman brilliance, notably some of Corman 's early films . This follow-up to in the sheriff's death over his morning coffee . It is REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE is one of the most effective significant that Corman only returned to the western of the \" juvenile delinquent\" exposes of the Fifties, theme once after this (the abortive LONG RIDE HOME , and a film with interesting parallels to THE WILD taken over by Phil Karlson and released as A TIME ANGELS nearly a decade later. FOR KILLING in 1967) and concentrated instead on science fiction l horror films . The Fifties were the The gang in TEENAGE DOLL (here a girl gang , golden age of such films and Corman, with his usual another example of Corman 's use of the role-rever- acumen in sensing sudden shifts of public taste , sal ) are cornered at the end of the film by the police . abandoned westerns in favor of these fantasies . They have the opportunity of giving themselves up Here physical action sequences counted for less, or escaping , and the gang splits up over the deci- and more time could be spent on the tensions inher- sion-most flee into the night, but a few walk into ent in fantastic situations . the glare of the squad cars and give up their rebel- lious life style for another try at establishment living . THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED is one of a number By the time of THE WILD ANGELS nine years later this of films depicting the survival of a few humans after whole situation has grown noticeably more cynical. a nuclear war (Arch Oboler's FIVE is perhaps the Peter Fonda waits at the grave site while the rest classic ex ample) and in it appears the first instance of the Angels race off, but only because \" There's of Corman 's penchant for wiping out the past no place to go .\" In the earlier film the feeling pro- through violent conflagration and allowing life to duced by the girls' disavowal of their rebellious start over anew. This tendency has recently been sub-culture was definitely upbeat, but in the Sixties elaborated on at great length in \" The Millennic this acquiescience seems a defeat, the crushing of Vision ,\" a monograph published by the Edinburgh the rebel spirit a dubious victory. Both these films Film Festival. The authors argue that the constant are from Charles Griffith scripts, and the excellent elements of destruction and rebirth encountered work of Griffith on thirteen of Corman's most in- over and over in Corman 's cinema are manifesta- teresting films deserves further examination. tions of the myth of the eternal return masquerading behind the facades of B-pictures. Corman himself With Crosby and Griffith , the third notable Cor- professes that the concept of obliteration of the old man collaborator behind the cameras was the de- to make room for the new order is a conscious signer Daniel Haller, credited art director on fifteen element of his style , but is understandably wary Corman films between WAR OF THE SATELLITES and about imputing too much metaphoric significance THE HAUNTED PALACE (and most of the rest were not to this . In these early films some idea of Corman 's credited to anyone). Like Corman himself, he first later thematic preoccupations were developed , and attracted widespread attention due to his work on the black comedy which would blossom in his sec- the Poe films, even though his earlier work was at ond period was being quietly ' introduced in the least as interesting . Haller can make the cheapest scripts of Charles Griffith and the supporting per- settings look elaborately and expensively mounted , formances of Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, all of no small virtue for someone working at Ameri- whom were to make greater contributions later on . can-International Pictures. Supposedly, his control on these films extended nearly as far as that of such With the start of his second period and ROCK ALL classic designers as William Cameron Menzies or NIGHT (1956 ), Corman 's films can begin to bear Richard Day, and his set constructions largely gov- serious discussion . This Griffith script is a witty erned the movements of the roving Corman l send-up of THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE and other Crosby cameras. His graduation to director after THE Saroyan-style barroom tales , and is filled with out- HAUNTED PALACE was undistinguished . It is one of rageous dialogue that strips down to comic-book the major hallmarks of Corman 's modern period- proportions the windy theatricality of such stories. those films from THE SECRET INVASION on-that he The film also provides a showcase for Dick Miller, completely severed his connection with all three of one of the main stalwarts of the pre-Poe stock com- these people (the single exception being Griffith's pany , here completely in his element as a smart-ass WILD ANGELS screenplay) . So we can mark this exact barfly who impudently talks down a couple of cheap date off as the start of his mature period not only gunmen as a cross section of humanity looks on . because Corman then began his big-budget Euro- ROCK ALL NIGHT purports to be a musical , but the pean productions and started attracting major criti- numbers by The Platters and a few other groups cal attention '\" but because he had then outgrown are all lumped together at the beginning and bear the collaborators of his earlier days and proceeded no connection whatsoever with the rest of the film . to go beyond them . The collaborative nature of the (\" The Platters weren 't available when the film was film art is such that a break with old creative partners being shot,\" Corman drily explains today.) Besides is often dangerous , but ultimately necessary in the the exceptional scripting and performances, a major factor in the success of ROCK ALL NIGHT is the sense ' Positif's major piec es on Corman appeared first in the March 1963 and March 1964 issues. FILM COMMENT 45

IT CONQUERED maturation of the prime film artist, the director. Con- THE WORLD. sider the career of Murnau after he parted with Carl Mayer and Karl Freund , who had written and pho- Russ Bender. tographed a great number of his earlier successes. al/ photos: American By 1958 the apposition of culture and sub-culture in Corman 's work evidenced in TEENAGE DOLL be- International came especially pronounced , and continued to grow Pictures. more clear with each film. The most interesting factor, however, is that the resolution of this conflict TEENAGE in nearly every case depends on whether it is set CAVEMAN . in a realistic or non-realistic framework . Take just four examples not yet discussed for illustration: IT Right, CONQUERED THE WORLD , TEENAGE CAVEMAN , SORORITY Robert Vaughn. GIRL and MACHINE GUN KELLY . In each of these films the protagonists are shown in a state of alienation SORORITY GIRL. battling an overwhelmingly powerful outside group: in the fantasies they are able to overcome these Left, outside powers ; in the realistic modern pieces they Susan Cabot. must yield to them . THE TERROR. IT CONQUERED THE WORLD details the struggle of one scientist (Peter Graves) to thwart a Venusian Sandra Knight and invader who is slowly taking over the minds of all Jack Nicholson. the people in a small American town . After the lead- ership of the local police, army detachment, and 46 FALL 1971 other sources of power are under the monster's control Graves' situation seems hopeless, and he is constantly urged by everyone to \" join us.\" But finally with the aid of a friend (Lee Van Cleef) who had at first aided the creature , they succeed in destroying it by burning its eyes out with a blow torch and simultaneously overthrowing its slave so- ciety (the images of fire and eyes are among the most recurrent figures in Corman 's cinema , and also deserve an examination all their own). In TEENAGE CAVEMEN Robert Vaughn plays a young member of a primitive tribe who seeks to break the local taboos and cross the river to the forbidden land . Eventually he does, and the act results in a cataclysmic discov- ery for the people of his tribe. Throughout this film the \" teenagers \" are developed quite consciously as a rebellious sub-culture on the outside of the adult world in the standard Fifties realistic style for such material. But this is a period fantasy , and so Vaughn succeeds in flaunting the societal taboos and, by seizing the initiative, asserts the viability of his group over the stagnation of the adu lt culture. If this same story had been played in leather jackets instead of bearskins (as it easily could have been) the alienated sub-culture would have run true to form and Vaughn would most certainly have blown it in some fashion , being defeated by the establish- ment. Now notice how Corman develops such con- flict in modern dress situations : SORORITY GIRL centers around a bitch named Sabra who makes life difficult for the rest of the girls in her sorority house-actions which, we are led to believe , result from an inability to consider herself a regular member of the group. Inevitably, she gets her comeuppance . MACHINE GUN KELLY is a stock criminal biopic in which the outlaw , after a series of notorious anti-social exploits , is eventu- ally defeated by society in a very explicit manner. In case after case in Corman 's modern dress films , the protagonists (either singly, or as repre-

sentative of some form of alternate culture) are not only a unified body of work , but an expressive defeated by the establishment they hover outside of. Sometimes they have a secret desire to get in- one, reflecting a sensibil ity painfully attuned to the sometimes not. Nearly always they are given at least undercurrents of violence gripping the country even criminal traits to emphasize their alienation . Think in the seemingly placid Eisenhower years . Corman 's of WILD ANGELS and TEENAGE DOLL , discussed earlier films are full of violence, but not the clean violence or I, MOBSTER , a gangster tale in which the criminal of thundering hooves, only the malingering violence is destroyed by his own rivals , or THE INTRUDER , in which the anti-integrationist is destroyed by his own of long suppressed and dangerously seething emo- hubris, or THE ST. VALENTINE 'S DAY MASSACRE , where tions on the threshold of eruption . In this way he AI Capone has died in prison of syphillis , and the enorll1ous \" Rest in Peace \" of his tombstone fills certainly becomes the exploitation director par ex- the screen at the conclusion instead of \" The End .\" cellence, for he has exploited that feeling of coer- But in the fantasies these overwhelming forces can be conquered and bent to the protagonists ' will. In cion and terror in his films to create a catharsis in ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS the creatures are the purest Aristotelian sense, a purgation which successfully defeated ; in VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA allows these undercurrents to be brought to the SERPENT the savages are destroyed and the Vik ings surface where they can be recognized and dealt escape. with. If it was all a question of making a buck , This idea of a seemingly superior group being Corman could have pleased the folks at AlP just defeated and superceded by an apparently weaker as easily with Annette Funicello 's beach blanket as one finds its most interesting expression in Cor- man 's latest fantasy work , the Poe cycle . Th is group with his string of nasty little B ' s. But if the beach of films centers not so much around any societal party might make sense at the bo x office it just clash as around the idea of destruction and rejuve- doesn 't work as a metaphor for modern America , nation first introduced , in primitive form , back in THE at least not the way a good Edgar Allan Poe story DAY THE WORLD ENDED , and here elaborated on as a contest between older established forces and does . 11111111 younger, more virile ones. The destruction of the old , preferably through fiery conflagration, and the ROGER CORMAN FILMOGRAPHY start of life anew completely take precedence here, and even creeps into a related film like THE TERROR KEY: a.d. / art director; pho tl photographer ; ser f (except that there a watery inundation replaces the screenwriter. fire and brimstone of the others) . The Poe films 1954 become a study of the relationship between the past Five Guns West (American Releasing Corporation) ser and the present represented dramatically as a con- R. Wright Campbell ; phot Floyd Crosby (Pathecolor) ; flict between age (Vincent Price) and youth (some cast John Lund, Dorothy Malone, Mike \" Touch \" Con- forgettable ingenues) . HOUSE OF USHER is the clearest example of this , as the \" Morella\" episode nors. of TALES OF TERROR is the finest. Dead spirits of the 1955 past try to reach out and affect the young and living Apache Woman (ARC) ser Lou Rusoff; phot Floyd in THE HAUNTED PALACE and TOMB OF LlGEIA . THE PIT Crosby (Pathecolor); cast Lloyd Bridges, Joan Taylor, AND THE PENDULUM and THE PREMATURE BURIAL show Lance Fuller. The Day the World Ended (ARC) ser Lou how traditions, ideas handed down from the past. Rusoff; phot Jock Feindel (SuperScope) ; cast Richard can affect the living in dangerous ways . The choic- Denning, Lori Nelson, Adele Jergens. Swamp Woman est method of purging musty old influences is to (Woolner) ser David Stern ; phot Fred West (Pathecolor); burn them out, and razing of the ancestral home cast Beverly Garland, Marie Windsor, Carole Mathews. the favored image. The system has become so rit- The Oklahoma Woman (ARC) ser Lou Rusoff; phot Fred ualized that the films utilize the same stock footage West (SuperScope) ; cast Richard Denning , Peggy of burning walls and castle exteriors in a way that Castle, Cathy Downs. is somehow quite fitting and acceptable-especially 1956 so in the compressed context of a retrospective . Gunslinger (American-International Pictures) ser This apparent shift of emphasis is not entirely une x- Charles B. Griffith , Mark Hanna ; phot Fred West (Pathe- pected in Corman 's work , for the early films are full color); a.d. Harry Reif; cast John Ireland, Beverly Gar- of lessons in the need to break taboos-ritualized , land , Allison Hayes . It Conquered the World (AlP) sc r restricting traditions descended from the distant Lou Rusoff; phot Fred West; cast Peter Graves , Beverly past. Typically , they all belong to th e fantasy cycle , Garland , Lee Van Cleef . Not of This Earth (Allied Artists) however: VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT , SHE scr Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna; phot John Mescall; GODS OF SHARK REEF , TEENAGE CAV EMAN . Th e new cast Paul Birch , Beverly Garland , Morgan Jones . The group of Poe fantasies only develops th is idea on Undead (AlP) scr Charles B. Griffith , Mark Hanna ; phot a more sophisticated level. William Sickner; cast Pamela Duncan , Richard Garland , Allison Hayes . Naked Paradise (AlP) ser Charles B. Altogether, this seems quite a unified body of Griffith , Mark Hanna; phot Floyd Crosby (Eastman work for a director given such short shrift by most Color); cast Richard Denning , Beverly Garland , Lisa American critics for his cheap sensationalism . And Montell. She Gods of Shark Reef (AlP) scr Robert Hill, Victor Stoloff; phot Floyd Crosby (Pathecolor) ; cast Don Durant, Bill Cord , Lisa Montell. Attack of the Crab Monsters (AA) scr Charles B. Griffith , Mark Hanna; phot Floyd Crosby; cast Richard Garland , Pamela Duncan , Russell Johnson . Rock All Night (AlP) scr Charles B. Griffith , from a story by David T. Harmon ; phot Floyd Crosby ; a.d. Robert Kinoshita; cast Dick Miller, Abby Dalton , Robin Morse. 1957 Teenage Doll (AA) scr Charles B. Griffith ; phot Floyd Crosby ; cast June Kenney , Fay Spain , John Brinkley . FILM COMMENT 47

Carnival Rock (Howco) scr Leo Lieberman ; phot Floyd Lorre , Basil Rathbone. Tower of London (United Artists) Crosby ; a.d. Robert Kinoshita ; cast Susan Cabot, Brian scr Leo V. Gordon, Amos Powell, James B. Gordon , Hutton , David Stewart. Sorority Girl (AlP) scr Ed Waters , from a story by Leo V. Gordon , Amos Powell ; phot Floyd from a story by Leo Lieberman ; phot Monroe P. Askins; Crosby ; a.d. Daniel Haller; cast Vincent Price, Joan cast Susan Cabot, Dick Miller, Barboura O'Neill (Bar- Freeman , Richard McCauly. The Young Racers (AlP) boura Morris). The Saga of the Viking Women and scr R. Wright Campbell ; phot Floyd Crosby (Pathecol- Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent or) ; a.d. Albert Locatelli ; cast Mark Damon , William [The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent] (AlP) scr Campbell , Luana Anders . The Raven (AlP) scr Richard Matheson , suggested by the poem by Edgar Allan Poe; Lawrence Goldman , from a story by Irving Block; phot phot Floyd Crosby (Panavision and Pathecolor); a.d. Daniel Haller; cast Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Monroe P. Askins ; a.d. Robert Kinoshita ; cast Abby Dal- Karloff. The Terror (AlP) scr Leo Gordon , Jack Hill ; ton , Susan Cabot, Brad Jackson . War of the Satellites phot John Nicolaus (Vistascope and Pathecolor); a.d. (AA) scr Lawrence Lou is Goldman , from a story by Irving Bl ock, Jack Rabin ; phot Floyd Crosby ; a.d. Daniel Daniel Haller; cast Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson , San- Haller; cast Susan Cabot, Dick Miller, Richard Devon. dra Knight. 1958 1963 Machine Gun Kelly (AlP) sc r R. Wright Campbell ; phot X, The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (AlP) scr Robert Dillon , Floyd Crosby (Superama); a.d. Daniel Haller; cast Ray Russell , from the novel by Russell ; phot Floyd Charles Bronson , Susan Cabot, Morey Amsterdam. Crosby (Spectarama and Pathecolor); a.d. Daniel Teenage Caveman (AlP) scr R. Wright Campbell; phot Haller; cast Ray Milland , Diana Van der Viis, Harold Floyd Crosby (Superama) ; cast Robert Vaughn , Leslie J. Stone . The Haunted Palace (AlP) scr Charles Beau- Bradley , Darrah Marshall. I, Mobster (20th Century-Fo x) mont, from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe and a novella scr Steve Fisher, from a novel by Joseph Hilton Smith; by H. P. Lovecraft; phot Floyd Crosby (Panavision and phot Floyd Crosby (CinemaScope); a.d. Daniel Haller; Pathecolor) ; a.d. Daniel Haller; cast Vincent Price , cast Steve Cochran , Lita Milan , Robert Strauss. Debra Paget, Lon Chaney . The Secret Invasion (UA) 1959 scr R. Wright Campbell; phot Arthur Arling (Panavision A Bucket of Blood (AlP) scr Charles B. Griffith ; phot and De Luxe Color); a.d. John Murray; cast Stewart Jack Ma rquette; a.d. Dan iel Haller; cast Dick Miller, Granger, Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney . The Masque of Barboura Morris, Antony Carbonne. The Wasp Woman the Red Death (AlP) scr Charles Beaumont , R. Wright (Filmgroup / AA) sc r Leo Gordon , from a story by Kinta l Zertuche ; phot Harry C. Newman ; a.d. Daniel Haller; Campbell, from the story by Poe; phot Nicolas Roeg cast Susan Cabot, Fred Eisley, Barboura Morris. (Panavision and Pathecolor); a.d. Robert Jones, Daniel 1960 Haller; cast Vincent Price , Hazel Court, Jane Asher. Ski Troop Attack (Filmgroup) sc r Charles B. Griffith ; 1964 phot Andy Costi kyan ; c ast Frank Wolff, Michael Forest, The Tomb of Ligeia (AlP) scr Robert Towne , from the Wally Campo . House of Usher (AlP) scr Richard Mathe- story by Poe; phot Arthur Grant (wide screen and son , from the story \" The Fall of the House of Usher \" Pathecolor) ; a.d. Colin Southcott; cast Vincent Price, by Edgar Allan Poe; phot Floyd Crosby (CinemaScope Elizabeth Shepherd, John Westbrook. and Pathecolor); a.d. Danie l Haller; cast Vincent Price , 1966 Mark Damon , Myrna Fahey . The Little Shop of Horrors The Wild Angels (AlP) scr Charles B. Griffith ; phot (Filmgroup) scr Charles B. Griffith ; phot Arch ie Dalzell ; Richard Moore (Panavision and Pathecolor); a.d. Leon a.d. Dan ie l Haller; cast Jonathan Haze , Jackie Joseph , Eicksen; cast Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern. Mel Welles . The Last Woman on Earth (Filmgroup) A Time for Killing (Columbia) Corman directed the first scr Robert Towne;phot Jacques Marquette (Vistascope few days only, and was replaced by Phil Karlson . 1967 and Eastman Color); c ast Antony Carbonne , Betsy The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre (20th Century-Fox) Jones-Moreland , Edward Wain . Creature from the scr Howard Browne; phot Milton Krasner (Panavision Haunted Sea (Filmgroup) scr Charles B. Griffith ; phot and De Lu xe Color); a.d. Ph il Jeffries, Jack Martin Jacques Marquette; cast Antony Carbonne, Betsy Smith; cast Jason Robards , George Segal , Jean Hale. Jones-Moreland , Edward Wain . Atlas (Filmgroup) scr The Trip (AlP) scr Jack Nicholson ; phot Archie Dalzell Charles B. Griffith ; phot Basil Maros (Vistascope and (Psychedelic Color) ; cast Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern , Eastman Color); cast Michael Forest, Frank Wolff, Bar- Susan Strasberg . What's In It for Harry? This European television film , now titled HOW TO MAKE IT, has not yet boura Morris. been released in the United States. 1961 1969 The Pit and the Pendulum (AlP) sc r Ri c hard Matheson , De Sade (AlP) Corman prepared this film , but direction from the story by Edgar Allan Poe; phot Floyd Crosby was begun and mainly completed by Cy Endfield. Cor- (Panavision and Pathecolor); a.d. Daniel Haller; cast man did finish a few shots with Keir Dullea after Endfield Vincent Price , John Kerr, Barbara Steele. The Intruder had finished shooting. Bloody Mama (AlP) scr Robert [I Hate Your Guts] (Filmgroup / Pathe America) scr Thom , from a story by Thom and Don Peters; phot John Charles Beaumont, from his novel; phot Taylor Byars, Alonzo (Movielab Color) ; cast Shelley Winters , Pat (?) Haskell We xler; cast William Shatner, Frank Maxwell , Hingle, Don Stroud. Beverly Lunsford . The Premature Burial (AlP) scr 1970 Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell , from the story by Edgar GAS-S-S-S (AlP) scr George Armitage ; phot Ron Dexter Allan Poe ; phot Floyd Crosby (Panavision and Pathecol- ( Mov ielab Color); a.d. David Nichols; cast Robert Corff, or); a.d. Dan iel Haller; cast Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Elaine Giftos, Bud Cort. Richard Ney. 1971 1962 Von Richtofen and Brown (UA) scr John and Joyce Tales of Terror (AlP) sc r Richard Matheson , from the Corrington ; phot Michael Reed (De Lu xe Color) ; a.d. stories \" Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ,\" \" Morella,\" Jim Murakami ; cast John Phillip Law, Don Stroud , \" The Black Cat\" and \" The Cask of Amontillado \" by Edgar Allan Poe ; phot Floyd Crosby (Panavision and Barry Primus. Pathecolor); a.d. Daniel Haller; cast Vincent Price, Peter 48 FALL 1971