VOLUME 09 - NUMBER 05 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1973

FlfCM COMIMENT

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ee • S4 Ttil: Lt=GIL(M)LS(())t=W~~ • : MUI: : ee eeeee eeee Mankiewic:;'s GUYS AND DOLLS starring Marlon Brando Now availahle ex~lusively froID Ma~lDillan Audio Brandon Vidor's CYNARA-STELLA DALLAS-THE WEDDING NIGHT (Also avuilable: DUEL IN THE SUN-RUBY GENTRY ) Hawks's BALL OF FIRE - BARBARY COAST Wyler's THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES-DEAD END- THE LITTLE FOXES - WUTHERING HEIGHTS Ford's THE HURRICANE McCarey's THE KID FROM SPAIN - dances by Busby Berkeley Preminger's PORGY AND BESS Other New Releases: THE ARRANGEMENT - THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE-THE BIRTH OF A NATION-BONNIE AND CLYDE-THE GRADUATE-THE PRODUCERS- SOLDIER BLUE -STAGECOACH -A STAR IS BORN- TO BE OR NOT TO BE - YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE Write Dept. FC for New 630·page International Cinema Catalog - Just Published! MACMILLAN AUDIO BRANDON 34 MacQuesten Parkway South, Mt. Vernon, N.Y. 10550

STAFF VOLUME 9 NUMBER 5 editor SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1973 RICHARD CORLISS book editor / assistant editor CONTENTS MELINDA WARD JOURNALS graphic design Cannes / Jonathan Rosenbaum Berlin / Richard Roud MARTHA LEHTOLA Los Angeles / Stephen Farber managing editor page 2 AUSTIN LAMONT LEO McCAREY assistant managing editor from Marx to McCarthy by Charles Silver SAYRE MAXFIELD page 8 advertising manager ADVICE TO READERS AND CRITICS NAOMI WEISS by Otis Ferguson page 12 correspondents London RICHARD ROUD KING VIDOR Los Angeles STEPHEN FARBER part 2 Paris JONATHAN ROSENBAUM by Raymond Durgnat page16 assistants DUEL IN THE SUN research MARY CORLISS page 17 THE FOUNTAINHEAD design LINDA MANCINI page 29 subscriptions MARY WESTROPP BEYOND THE FOREST subscriptions NATALIE SILLER Y page 35 RUBY GENTRY editorial board page 37 JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director MAN WITHOUT A STAR page 41 Film Program , Ohio University WAR AND PEACE JAMES A. BEVERIDGE, Director page 43 Programme in Film , York University SOLOMON AND SHEBA HOWARD SUBER , Chairman , Critical Studies page 46 Motion Pi c ture / Television Division , UCLA ENVOI page 49 WILLARD VAN DYKE, Director Department of Film , Museum of Modern Art The Good Dumb Film THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE The opin ions ex pressed in FILM COMMENT by Lawrence Shaffer are those of the ind ividual authors and do not page 52 necessarily represent the opin ions The Bad Smart Film of the editor, staff or publisher. SUCH GOOD FRIENDS and UP THE SANDBOX FILM COMM ENT, Sep tember-October 1973. by Elliott Sirkin Volume 9 number 5, published bimonthly page 56 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation , 42 Oustin Stree t, Boston MA 02135 USA. BOOKS reviewed by Marshall Deutlebaum Second class postage paid at Boston. Massachusetts. page 62 Copyright ' 1973 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation . BACK PAGE All rights reserved . Th is publication is fully page 68 protected by domestic and international copyright. on the cover: Jean-Pierre LE§aud and It is forbid den to duplicate any part of this FranGoise Lebrun in Jean Eustache's publication in any way without prior written THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE . see Cannes Journal, page 2. perm ission from the publi shers. photo: Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Arc hive. Subscription rates in the Un ited States: $9 for six numbers, $17 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere: $10.50 for six numbers, $20.00 for twelve numbers, payable in US funds only . New subscribers please include your occupation and zip code. Subscription and back issue correspondence: FILM COMM ENT bo x 686 Vi llage Station . Brookline MA 02147 USA. Edito ri al correspondence: FILM COMM ENT 214 East 11 th Street, New Yo rk NY 10003 USA. Please enclose a stampe d self-addressed envelope wi th manuscripts . Microfilm editions available from University Mic rofi lms, Ann Arbor MI 48106. Printed in USA by Acme Printing , Medford, MA. Oistribu ted in the USA by Eastern News Company, 155 West 15th Street, New York NY 10011. Intern ational distribution by Worldwide Media Service . 386 P ~rk Avenue South , New York NY 10016 USA. Distributed in Great Britain by Moore-Harness Company. London. FILM COMMENT participates in the FIAF periodical indexing plan . Library of Congress card number 76-498.

.JOURNALS CANNES BERLIN L.A. Jonathan Rosenbaum Richard Roud Stephen Farber If TOUCH OF EVIL, as Paul Schrader has Not content with being divided into two No one knows who goes to movies any suggested , is film noir' s epitaph , Jean parts , Berlin has a film festival that is also more, or what makes people want to go. Eustache 's LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN (THE divided in two : the International Competi- Surveys say that most moviegoers are still MOTHER AND THE WHORE) may well turn out tive Festi va l and the International Forum under thirty; college graduates go more to be the last gasp and funeral oration of Young Films-the A and B festivals , as often than high school dropouts; the habit of Nouvelle Vague-the swan song of a it were . Exce pt that this year , at any rate , is usually broken after marriage . But that genre / school that shatters its assump- B was best. doesn 't tell very much about the prefer- tions and reconstructs them into some- ences of the people who do go. The thing else , a newer model that is sadder In fact , apart from LES NOCES ROUGES average moviegoer attends only about but wiser and tinged with more than a (BLOOD WEDDING), Claude Chabrol 's haut once a month today. Reaching that unre- trace of nostalgic depression. MCCABE bourgeois reworking of James M. Cain liable audience has become the most AND MRS. MILLER , for that matter, may be territory , all the main festi va l had to offer difficult problem for movie distributors, the Western 's epitaph , or at least one of was the new Satyajit Ray film , DISTANT and although I don't want to excuse their the prettier flowers to have grown out of THUNDER . And that was something worth haphazard promotion , I can sympathize Tombstone Gulch . In very different ways , waiting for . The time is 1942, when Singa- with their bewilderment about the unpre- all three films tell us a lot about what pore has fallen , and Burma is about to dictable tastes of the contemporary audi- growing older feels like, and chide us go ; the place is a remote village in Ben- ence . We know there is an audience for both for what we are and what we used gal, with Brahmins and peasants alike violence and nostalgia . But is there an to be. No doubt for this reason , they tend feeling the first hunger pangs that may audience for more innovative, demand- to irritate people , which is perhaps only soon grow to famine proportions. We are ing , unconventional films? Does the just: irritation with the way things are is worlds away from the charms of 19th- \" youth audience\" that shook the industry what mainly appears to motivate them. century Calcutta , or those lovely days four years ago still exist? and nights in the forest. But with his usual A major reason why LA MAMAN ET LA blend of subtlety and strength , Ray has Teenagers and college students may PUTAIN irritates is that it runs for three and come to grips with the alarmingly astro- not go to kiddie movies like TOM SAWYER a half hours; and I, who generally feel nomical problems of the subcontinent. or LOST HORIZON , but they seem to line partial to long films, spent a lot of the first DISTANT THUNDER is in co lor , and the up for most of the same movies that lure two wondering why Eustache insisted on brilliant effects-a girl in a red sari against their parents out-LOVE STORY , THE GOD- stretching it out to such a thin consis- the tall waving grass, the recurring image FATHER , THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE , THE tency. Jean-Pierre Leaud , St. Narcissus of orange butterflies-serve to intensify GETAWAY , CLASS OF '44 , DAY OF THE JACKAL, of the New Wave , sits endlessly in cafes , Ray 's contrast between the beauty of the PAPER MOON. Some of those are solid restaurants , and other people 's apart- landscape and the horror of what is being entertainment movies, but none of them ments, and talks, talks, talks-ruefully done to it. can be taken seriously as an example of with Isabelle Weingarten (the heroine of a lively, mature film art. Of course the Bresson 's FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER) , not The B festival was dominated by Jac- studioes know how to promote those very much with the older woman he lives ques Rivette ' s 250-minute film OUT ONE / movies; their machinery clicks when with (Bernadette Lafont), and quite a bit SPECTRE . This is not a condensation of they're working on a POSEIDON ADVENTURE with a promiscuous nurse he meets Rivette 's 1971 13-hour film , about which or a PAPER MOON . They don't know how (Franc;;oise Lebrun) and starts sleeping Jonathan Rosenbaum has written in sev- to sell CR IES AND WHISPERS-which is why with. Talks with, but mainly talks to-a eral Paris Journals; rather, Rivette has all the major stUdios turned it down . But fairly continuous performance composed used elements from it to make a new film . even if promotion were more sophisticat- of neopoetic rambling and casual postur- The reason is obvious : the thirteen hours ed , is there a market for film art? ing , complete with film references reek- were originally destined for television or ing of Fifties Cahiers, that has filled many cassettes , and neither medium has That question has disturbed me in more Leaud films than I care to re- knocked itself out to exhibit the film . thinking about the fate of some interest- member. Some of this is nicely handled- ing recent movies. Both Robert Altman 's like a scene in a restaurant at a train The experience of OUT ONE / SPECTRE THE LONG GOODBYE and James Frawley's station, where Leaud explains that Mur- is mind-blowing . Tw o days have passed KID BLUE got some very enthusiastic reac- nau's films are about transitions-and I since I saw the film , and it is still etched tions at early audience previews-and didn 't feel compelled to leave; but I did in my mind , hauntingly, like a bad dream . when I saw the movies, the audiences spend a lot of time wondering about why As with PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT and seemed to have a good time. Yet when L'AMOUR FOU , OUT ONE / SPECTRE is struc- THE LONG GOODBYE opened in Los Angeles I was staying. tured around a theater group rehearsing last March , business was so bad that If Truffaut's slick and entertaining LA a play ; but here it's two plays, both by United Artists pulled the film out of circu- Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound and The lation after only three weeks. (And , as of NUIT AMERICAINE (also shown at the festi- Seven Against Thebes) . And as with PARIS July 1, it had not opened in New York.) val) begins the process of demythifying NOUS APPARTIENT, it's about a conspiracy , It will re-open this fall with a new ad some of the old Leaud image , LA MAMAN real or imagined . But unlike either film , campaign , but nobody is very hopeful. ET LA PUTAIN surely hammers the point it 's an extraordinary attempt to tell sever- home: for once , the character is finally al parallel stories at once-what one KID BLUE , completed about a year ago, continued on page 4 continued on page 64 continued on page 66 2 SEPTEMBER 1973

THE Maybe you're shooting documentaries. WHOLE Or features. TV news. Or commercials The works: You can extend your (live or animated); travelogues ; sports; wildlife; educational films; macrocine- basic equipment almost indefinitely with photography or cinephotomicrography, SHOOTING a wide range of accessories. you name it. Bolex can provide you with For instance : if you choose a spring- exactly the right camera body, lenses MATCH. wound camera, you can automate easily and accessories to assure you ' ll have with anyone of three auxiliary motor just what you need when you need it. drives, for time-lapse or animation, for (And at prices that may surprise you with their economy.) variable speed shooting or for filming The cameras: You get to choose with sync pulse generator or crystal. from five rugged camera bodies designed for hand held or tripod use. The system offers you tripod; monopod ; With either three-lens turret or bayonet mount, with spring motor or electric camera grips; blimps; an automatic drive, with 100' to 400' film capacity, for silent filming or sync sound with sync The lenses: With the Bolex system, fading device; cable releases ; matte pulse generator or crystal. And that's just the beginning . you can choose from 7 fixed focal length boxes (complete with masks); an Consider features like: automatic lenses, ranging all the way from 10mm underwater housing; attachable exposure threading , flickerless reflex viewing and focusing with complete depth of super wide angle to long 150mm meter; 400' magazine; closeup lenses; field control, a filter slot behind the lens, single-frame counter, unlimited film telephoto. And they all have built in extension tubes ; optical magnetic rewind, variable speeds for accelerated and slowmotion filming , single frame macro focusing, automatic depth of field sound projector. filming, variable shutter with automatic control possibility, registration claw scales and diaphragm presetting so It's quite a list. But that isn 't all. The for total accuracy in picture steadiness even when films are blown up to 35mm. you can step down the aperture without full story of Bolex's whole shooting taking your eye off the reflex finder. match fills a 32 page book. Which we'll You can choose a lens as fast as f11.1 , or be happy to send you. Just write to one that can focus down to one inch Paillard Incorporated , 1900 Lower without accessories. Road, Linden, N.J. 07036. You ' ll get a The system offers you seven zoom very professional response. Other lenses with zoom ranges from 5:1 to 10:1. products : Hasselblad cameras and Oneof those is the Vario Switar 100 POE-4 accessories. with built-in power zoom, automatic light measuring through the lens , focusing as close as four feet and picture sharpness equal to any good fixed focal length lens. eOLEX IS PAIL.L.AR=

*************************** given enough rope to hang himself-a reaches an apogee of sorts in a scene form of self-e xposure that results in his set in the Beethoven Museum , where the available most mature and interesting performance heads of both of the leads (Gene Evans , to date. Christa Lang) are cut off by the top of FILM COMMENT announces the frame in order to give one of the the publication of an index Like many autobiographical first Master's pianos a privileged place in the to its first eight volumes novels, Eustache's marathon seems to composition . Some of the personal / filmic 1962-1972 have a compulsive fidelity to its familiar references get pretty Baroque, too : a clip The index is based on in- subject which precludes omitting any- of RIO BRAVO dubbed into German ; a snip- dexing rules adopted by the thing, the sort of blind confidence that pet from ALPHAVILLE to reveal an earlier Federation of International can say \" I'm going to tell it all \" and really acting part of Christa Lang , Fuller's wife Film Archives (FIAF), and is mean it. Mutatis mutandis, Whitman , (seen as a prostitute servicing Akim Ta- annotated. It is divided into Dreiser, O'Neill , and Stroheim all had miroff); Stephane Audran doing a guest four parts: a subject index, some of this conviction , and so, it ap- bit, if I remember correctly , as a lesbian a film review index, an au- pears, do Ginsberg , Pynchon , and Cas- named Mme. Bogdanovich. If this all thor index and a book re- savetes ; Rivette and Eustache provide sounds like a movie freak 's nightmare , I view index. The 20-page French models of the same tendency. can only confess that Sam seemed to index can be bound with They can all bore the hell out of you with have a whale of a time making this two-bit FILM COMMENT and costs their obsessions, but sometimes they can classic , and I for one had a whale of a $1.50, postpaid anywhere in also achieve a degree of emotional ca- time watching it. It may not have produc- the world. tharsis that would not be possible without tion values like ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE , a this dogged persistence. LA MAMAN ET LA conformist crowd pleaser shown in the IF IIL IM IIC IO IM IM IE IN IT I PUTAIN is one of those rare occasions . Grande Salle-a film that aims to out- gross the high grossers by synthesizing Order from Viewers in variably react to the person- at least si x other \" hits ,\" heartily recom- FILM COMMENT al intensity of this film in a very personal mended to all viewers with like tempera- Box 686 Village Station way : some call it misogynous, while ments-but by God , it has style . As is Brookline MA 02147 USA others complain that the Leaud character customary with Fuller, the acting veers is an insufferable bore . In fact, all three from woodblock hard to awful-ugly (auto- MOVIE POSTERS leading characters are so fully rounded matically turning every face into a mug that one responds to them as variously shot) , the violence is corrosive , the dou- PRESSBOOKS-STILLS -PROGRAMS as one would to real people. As Eustache ble crosses mutual , the implications per- Actual Posters Used By Theatres himself pointed out in his press confer- fectly bananas , the imagination fertile . As Thousands of Titles Available ence, each has a vocabulary of about fifty a modest entry in the Louis Feuillade words that is endlessly reiterated ; these tradition, this is a minor joy. CATALOG $1 .00 ( Refun d ed w ith order) repetitions serve , in effect , as themes for the actors to run variations on . In an Two films at the Directors' Fortnight The Cinema Attic - Department GT explosi ve , moving soliloquy by Fran<;:oise interested me enough to see them twice: P.O. Box 7772 - Phila., Pa. 19101 Lebrun-a remarkable newcomer who is James B. Harris 's SOME CALL IT LOVING and the major revelation of the film-so many Nelson Pereira Dos Santos 's WHO IS BETA? changes are run on the words baiser The Harris film in particular was an un- (fucking) and putain (whore) that they usually bold surprise from the producer finally start to mean something . (Although of some of Kubrick 's best films (THE KILL- the film 's angle of vision is essentially ING , PATHS OF GLORY) whose only previous Leaud 's, the Lebrun and Lafont charac- directorial effort-THE BEDFORD INCIDENT ters are to my mind a lot more sympa- (1965)-was scarcely better than a more thetic and intriguing than he is .) Shot in intelligent version of Stanley Kramer. old-fashioned black and white, and main- ly oriented-both physically and spiri- The plot of SOME CALL IT LOVING is tually-around the milieu of St.-Germain- deceptively simple: a wealthy jazz musi- des-Pres , LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN virtually cian discovers a young woman (Tisa seals the disillusionments of a decade Farrow) who 's been asleep fo r seven into one heavy package. Running it as years in a sleazy carnival exhibit, where an offi c ial selection at the festi val was a male spectators are invited to kiss her (in nice idea. the hope of awakening her) for the price of a dollar. He purchases this Sleeping In theory, the Marche du Film is merely Beauty, carries her back to the mansion one division of the festi val out of many he inhabits with two other woman , and (official selections, Directors ' Fortnight, waits for her to open her eyes . Finally she Critics ' Week , etc .); in practice , every film does , immediately falls in love with him , and every person attending is on the and soon becomes a part of the erotic marketplace , to purchase or be pur- fantasies that the two other women con- chased , and all the rest is journalistic tinually perform for him . (A black sidekick euphemism . It was there , at any rate , that and admirer played by Richard Pryor I came across Samuel Fuller's latest film . serves as another improbable accom- plice to his dreams.) But the more that Not all of DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN she conforms to his ideally projected STREET is peaches and cream , but the images-visions that mainly seem to beginning is extraordinary-a brilliant come out of high school yearbooks-the burst of action that illustrates the title in more dissatisfied he becomes, until he lightning flashes-and the mad finale in finally puts her back to sleep and returns a weapons room is not far behind . Fuller 's habitual obeisance to the title composer 4 SEPTEMBER 1973

IMAIIIIJOIIIE The Sorrow and The Pity UVR- . .- .-••••••••••••••••••••••••• MYSTERIES ••• ••• OF THE ORGANISM .-- -.-..•• ••• Now available in 16 mm from Cinema 5 -16 mm 595 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022 - (212) 421-5555

ALLEN, WOODY her to the sideshow, warning the crowd girl named Beta ; in the evenings , they like his carny predecessor that \" to wake amuse themselves with a memory ma- BERGMAN the Sleeping Beauty, you run the risk of chine that he has built, which casts movie being awakened yourself. \" images of their past into a screen of BERTOLUCCI smoke. From time to time , he communi- Working against the langorous melan- cates with some \"central station\" by CAPRA choly of this solipsistic fable are a lyrical means of a tiny radio. musical score and gliding camera move- de BROCA ments that constantly locate the action The remarkable thing about Pereira in a realm of romantic possibility that is Dos Santos 's treatment of this multifacet- DOWNEY never consummated-indeed, the sort of ed allegory (which seems to have a lot romanticism that exhausts itself before to do with modern Brazil, fertility myths, FELLINI any carnal step is taken-weaving an consumer society, the political power of arabesque around the stasis and void sound and image, and affectless vio- FORD embodied by the dreaming hero , who lence , among other things) is how ordi- remains the only real character in the nary and everyday he makes it all appear. FRIEDKIN story. Much like his handling of cannibalism and nudity in HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCH- FULLER To call this flagrantly unrealistic film MAN and madness in THE ALIENIST, his \" an old-fashioned [movie] with stunt sex quiet, ironic comedy effectively desensa- HUSTON superimposed,\" or something \" only dirty tionalizes the material , allowing us to look middle-aged men of a certain generation and understand before we judge. KUBRICK in America could even begin to under- stand ,\" as Molly Haskell and Andrew When the mysterious Beta decides to LEONE Sarris have done respectively , is to leave the shelter, and the hero goes in misread it entirely : Harris is concerned search for her, this leads us into an PONTECORVO with the internal processes and conse- adventure story which complicates the quences of dreaming more than its ob- plot beyond my powers of paraphrase: it I- jectS-With no sex or nudity on the should be noted , however, that a charac- Z screen , what are we supposed to be ter , who is alternately Beta and another W RUSSELL ogling?-and taking the ritualistic erotic woman who is pregnant, returns to the charades literally is a bit like regarding shelter in the last reel ; that the tiny radio ~ Plato 's Parable of the Cave as a treatise is eventually eaten by the hero and his on spelunking . If traditions are to be companions ( \" Let's eat it like sugar\") o~ invoked , the theme is not very different when they can 't find any other way of u SCHLESINGER from that of FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER , keeping it quiet, while dozens of the Con- and the ending (as conceived and shot) taminated peer adoringly at them through ~ has much in common with that of LOLA all the windows and doors of the shelter, ..J MONTES; but Harris makes the romantic in an image worthy of Kafka ; that the film TRUFFAUT sensibility look a lot more disturbing than concludes with the actress who por- u:: either Bresson or Ophuls by detaching trayed the American girl (Noelle Adam, c the dreams from any humanistic refer- Chaplin 's granddaughter) flying away on ence: the eye is much colder . In his press a jet. Endlessly suggestive and always a .2 conference, Harris indicated that he pleasure to watch , WHO IS BETA? stays C chose to make his hero a jazz musician afloat as a tribal comedy of manners Q) in order to characterize a mentality that while spiraling off in all sorts of directions prefers \" playing variations \" to \" playing at once: like most of the best futuristic toE the melody ,\" and jazz , as we know , is a fables , it is very abstract and very con- notoriously unfashionable music, per- crete at the same time. Q)Q) haps because it occasionally requires its audience to think. But the melody of SOME Philippe Garrel 's ATHANOR , which ZAPPAII) CALL IT LOVING is there to be heard for reputedly started out as a feature , has those who care to listen . been edited down further and further by ..Q. Garrel until it presently runs-in the ver- WHO IS BETA?, subtitled NO VIOLENCE sion shown at the Fortnight-for the II) BETWEEN US , is the third Pereira Dos length of an average short: a series of ..Q) Santos film I've seen , and in every way beautifully composed tableaux in which the strangest. Science fiction informed by the actors remain virtually motionless. II) an anthropological viewpoint, the cryptic With no apparent narrative continuity re- plot concerns a postnuclear civilization maining, one almost wishes that Garrel ;: composed of two distinct classes, the would pare this down further to single Q) Contaminated and the Noncontaminated. frames and distribute them as posters . > The Noncontaminated , an elitist minority, \"a live in shelters and devote most of their As some of the above comments may -to time to shooting the approaching hordes indicate, I tended to be more intrigued of the Contaminated , who wear brightly this year by the films that bewildered and o Call or write lor FREE catalog colored togas and advance pretty much confused me rather than serve up an- like lemmings, offering no form of resis- other version of something I'd already CI 729 7th Avenue, New York , N.Y. 10019 tance. The Noncontaminated hero (Fred- seen ; from this point of view , Bill Gunn's ;.;C::: (212) CI 5-6000 Ext. 251 eric de Pasquale) lives in a beautiful GANJA AND HESS and Nicholas Ray 's WE United Artistsc shelter designed by himself with an CAN 'T GO HOME AGAIN were both exciting ~l9lIl1irf_Q) American girl and , later, also a Brazilian events because they wound up defying ~~ L- continued on page 62 _ _ _ _ _ EntertaInment from _ _ _ _~ _Tr_ans_am_ef_lca_Co_rp_ora_tIo_n 6 SEPTEMBER 1973

L'Avant-Scene, France's leading publisher of books on fi Im and the theater 170 films 70 cineasts 720 slides 500 plays Complete film clips with in seven volumes of taken from films. Six Complete texts with many dialogue and shots taken l 'Anthologie du Cinema, albums, each containing photographs taken from from some of the greatest the most outstanding 120 slides in library actual productions, Press classic and modern films, contemporary encyclopedia binders, reviews. All French and published in of world cinema. All the films of authors: lonesco, l'Avant-Scene Cinema. 70 directors and actors, Montherlant Anouilh, 4000 pages( Renoir (1924-1939) Arraba!. Billetdoux, Achard, UN CHIEN ANDALOU 2 000 photos. Eisenstein (complete Roussin, Thierry Maulnier, L'AGE D'OR works) Marguerite Duras, L'ANGE EXTERMINATEUR Welles (1941-1969) Jean Cocteau, Giraudoux, Godard (1958-1969) Thomas, Obaldia, Marceau, . . . . \" \" ......!>. . . .. ' Fellini (1951-1969) Camus, Husson, Neveux, Bunuel (1928-1955) Claude!. Sartre... l'Avant-Scene Theatre, ) u.... blN.[ If . BUNDEL' U II {H ISII Price: $ 1,60 each issue. Price : $ 13 each volume. Price: $ 42,50 each album. Complete catalogue on request. (Air mail included) Price : $ 1,60 each issue, L'Avant-Sceme, 27 , rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, Paris 75006, France.

Leo McCarey from Marx to McCarthy by Charles Silver Leo McCarey. photo : Museum of Modern / Art Film Stills Archive Between 1933 and 1939, Leo McCarey made five to eliminate subplots and extraneous harp and piano superlative films , and those films in turn made Mc- solos was a wise one. Carey a strong candidate for Best Director in that glorious Hollywood decade . The following is not Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby had been the intended as an exhaustive study of McCarey, or even principal writers of McCarey's Eddie Cantor vehicle, of those five films. I do hope, however, that these THE KID FROM SPAIN , and of the Marx Brothers ' HORSE musings might spark the interest of other scholars FEATHERS (the plot of which bears a resemblance and that the director's erstwhile reputation might to DUCK SOUP , as in the equivalent use of football be resuscitated . Frank Nugent did not, after all , signals in the former and war plans in the latter). ex press an uncommon sentiment when in 1939 he In DUCK SOUP the satirical possibilities of a Lu- wrote that McCarey \" directs so well it is almost bitschean ruritanian republic , replete with grandiose anti-social of him not to direct more often .\" sets and costumes , seem to have set Kalmar and Ruby on a distinctly Gilbert and Sullivan bent. I am \"Well, who are you going to believe- thinking specifically of The Mikado, with Groucho me or your own eyes?\" playing Koko (as he WOUld , three decades later, on television) to Margaret Dumont's Katisha. \" Hail , I have never really cared all that much for the Fredonia \" -sung by the chorus every time Rufus T. Marx Brothers-despite the fact that, of my three Firefly (Groucho) makes a grand entrance-is the best male friends, one talks like Groucho , another Kalmar-Ruby variation on \" Defer to the Lord High looks like Harpo, and the third is given in drunken Executioner.\" At one point, Groucho rolls up his moments to performing musical numbers with a pants legs to look like Koko 's pantaloons. And the Chico panache. (This has left me with something Fredonian legal system , as administered by Firefly of a Zeppo comple x; and there are times , when we in the courtroom sequence , surpasses even the are all gathered together, that I think only Margaret illogic of Savoyard Nippon. Finally, when a sacrifice Dumont can make us whole.) But I would not dispute is called for , Chico weasles out of it with all the the commonplace that DUCK SOUP is the best of the aplomb (if not the nobility) of Pooh-Bah . Marx films. McCarey has been justly praised for his contribution as director, although what his contri- McCarey brought to the project the experience bution actually was has remained somewhat nebu- from scores of Hal Roach 's Laurel and Hardy films . lous. Certainly McCarey had a demonstrated flair DUCK SOUP features innumerable bits of business for comedy ; and certainly the decision (McCarey 's?) that can be traced to the Roach films McCarey inspired, supervised, or directed. Edgar Kennedy recreates the slow burn for which he became famous under McCarey's tutelage. The progressive destruction in the peanut- and lemonade-stand se- quences are variations on two McCarey-supervised 8 SEPTEMBER 1973

T mini-masterpieces , BIG BUSINESS and TWO TARS . The for its contribution of the team of Mary Boland and appearance of Harpo in Kennedy 's bathtub recalls Charlie Ruggles. One can trace an obvious line from the famous shot of Max Davidson sitting nude in this henpecked household abroad back to the Will a three-sided tub in CALL OF THE CUCKOO. And Harpo Rogers-Irene Rich duo in THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS in bed with his horse is right out of ANGORA LOVE . (1929), only one of many instances which suggest There is even a moment when Kennedy affects an McCarey's debt to Frank Borzage. Charlie Ruggles ' Oliver Hardy strut , as he walks away after tipping persona is something of a visual homage to Mark over the wagon in which Harpo has roasted his hat Twain ; and much of his innocent naughtiness harks amidst the peanuts. When Chico triggers the piano back to Laurel and Hardy. And , in this transitional top to fallon Harpo's hands, one remembers Stan McCarey film , it is appropriate that Charles Laugh- Laurel dropping a piano , with a horse on top of it, ton 's first assertion of independence should take on Ollie in the McCarey-directed WRONG AGAIN . All the form of a kick in stuffy Lucien Littlefield 's der- of which is not to categorize DUCK SOUP as merely riere-a throwback to the director's anal-slapstick an expanded Roach comedy-but it is evident that origins. those elements for which McCarey gained promi- nence in the Roach films are still with him. They An interesting essay will someday be written will remain with him for many films and years to comparing RUGGLES OF RED GAP with ALICE ADAMS come . (which followed it by six months) , the finest film by George Stevens, McCarey's Roach cameraman . In spite of Kalmar and Ruby 's infernally brilliant These fragile pieces of Americana are so similar in use of language by way of Groucho and friends , style, pacing , and content-and Katharine Hep- some of the best things in DUCK SOUP are silent. burn's performance is so contextually related to The splendid three-Grouchos-on-a-mirror sequence Laughton 's-that, if one didn 't know better, one (inspired by the McCarey-written BRATS , with two might suspect that McCarey was at the helm of both Laurels and two Hardys? or an even earlier Max films. Stevens ' reputation was eventually to eclipse Linder short using the same premise?) is surreal that of his mentor, but his talent never really ap- visual madness with no counterpart in any other proached McCarey 's. In those rare instances where Marx film. Indeed , there are enough parallels be- their paths again crossed , such as the linking of tween DUCK SOUP and the contemporaneous films Cary Grant and Irene Dunne , PENNY SERENADE can of Rene Clair and Luis Bufiuel to substantiate Wil- be seen as THE AWFUL TRUTH gone astray . liam K. Everson 's claim that WRONG AGAIN (which , in addition to the horse on the piano , contains an RUGGLES is ostensibly a film about freedom and Ollie-repaired nude statue with anterior buttocks) manners. When Laughton is lost to an American was derived from UN CHIEN ANDALOU . in a card game , he voices apprehension about going to \" a country of slavery\" -until he's reassured that It would be wrong to give all the credit for the someone , probably Pocahontas, recently set the success of DUCK SOUP to Leo McCarey. Only by the slaves free . When Laughton gets drunk, and Miss wildest flight of auteurist obscurantism could it be Boland accuses him of being an anarchist, his only considered mainstream McCarey thematically. In- defense is a sheepish \" I coarsely gave way to the deed , much of the film 's anarchism would seem to brute in me. \" The film's dramatic high point is be antithetical to his personality. What McCarey brought to DUCK SOUP was a superior craftsmanship Laughton 's barroom recitation of the Gettysburg and antic skill , a sense of timing and rightness . In Address, and its assertion of \" a new birth of free- his book on the Marx Brothers, Roy Armes says of dom ,\" which prompts this gentleman 's gentleman Groucho 's dialogue in THE COCOANUTS : \" It is the to unknot his traditional ties and become the fleeting impressions made on the mind that count. \" independent proprietor of an Anglo-American Grill. I think this statement can be broadened to include the entire Marxian canon-except for DUCK SOUP. And yet it is evident , from what we know of None of the other films seem of a piece . They are McCarey's closet authoritarianism (he comes out clever bits of business, cuts, twists of language, tasty screaming in MY SON JOHN and SATAN NEVER SLEEPS) , morsels of madness-all strung together by a tenu- that he is dabbling here in democracy as , in DUCK ous filament that occasionally generates enough SOUP , he dabbled in anarchy. It is all well and good current to heat up, but often leaves the viewer with to knock over Strawman Littlefield for rubbing his long , qUiescently stagnating passages. It's McCarey hand clean after finding out that he has just shaken who makes this DUCK SOUP effervesce. His tureen the hand of a servant-just as , in MAKE WAY FOR runneth over. TOMORROW , an otherwise uptight character is shown to be vaguely anti-semitic . But there is something \"You're all a bit of O.K.\" a bit too schematic about it all. Chronologically , RUGGLES OF RED GAP falls mid- I write this as the Big Good Watergate Wolf huffs way between DUCK SOUP and McCarey 's most per- and puffs at the house Ni xon built with tricks ; and sonal and successful films , MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW there is some question as to whether we won 't again and THE AWFUL TRUTH . It follows directly after SIX have a living ex-President by the time this appears OF A KIND (W.C. Fields , Burns and Allen) and BELLE in print. At the moment , it is hard not to be cynical OF THE NINETIES (one of the best Mae Wests) . SIX about a glib affirmation of the virtues of American OF A KIND is very slight, but it is relevant to RUGGLES democracy. Yet , on some level , RUGGLES OF RED GAP miraculously works . I think this is almost entirely the product of McCarey's genius-far more evident here than ever before-for directing actors. The film marked a considerable departure for FILM COMMENT 9

Laughton , whose previous performances had All of this may make MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW ranged from the bizarre to the grotesque. As the sound pretty grim. It is not. The fiiin was written barely neurotic (much less psychotic) Marmaduke by Vina Delmar, who also wrote THE AWFUL TRUTH , Ruggles, Laughton became more endearing and one of the funniest films ever made. The scenes accessible than he had been before-or has been between Bondi and Moore , as they visit the hotel since . The Laughton of RUGGLES is a near cousin at which they honeymooned fifty years before, have to Michel Simon , the great French actor whom he a rich humor about them which leave the viewer physic ally so resembled ; and Laughton 's drunk feeling the way the two characters become on their scenes have a Boudu-like roguishness (\"the brute old-fashioneds- \" a little tipsy. \" Both Moore's irasci- in me \" ) . ZaSu Pitts performs with great charm as bility with a young doctor and Bondi 's squeaky the widow whose fondness for the Englishman can- rocking chair are at once hysterically funny and not quite encompass his mild criticism of her meat pungently sad . As McCarey once told an interviewer: sauce. This relationship between Prunella and her \" I like people to laugh , I like them to cry . Marmaduke marks our first successful glimpse at that lovely delicate romanticism flowing from Mc- When he wanted to , McCarey could certainly use Carey at the peak of his powers: the grace of Beulah the technical resources of the cinema to achieve Bondi and Victor Moore in MAKE WA Y FOR TOMORROW , desired effects-as with the low-angle shots and of Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer in LOVE AFFAIR , spatial relationships in the superb scene when and-perhaps most moving of all (in the same film )- Bondi , anticipating the crushing blow of being sent of Maria Ouspenskaya and her memories. to the home for aged women , requests that son Thomas Mitchell send her there. Time and again , \"If I really have talent however, McCarey falls back on and is redeemed by his direction of actors. Perhaps no other major this is where it appears.\" director save Chaplin depends so little on mise-en- McCarey made his two best films in 1937. He scene and so much on his camera's ability to magi- preferred MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW to THE AWFUL TRUTH , and so do I. It is a film of so devastating cally capture the elan vital of human beings, to an emotional impact, of such indescribable inner preserve on celluloid the sublime spark of two souls beauty , as to make a critic throw his typewriter out rubbed together. the window in frustration over his inability to capture in mere words the feelings McCarey 's sensibility Certainly, there are diverse themes in MAKE WAY evokes. Only the director's sometimes awkward FOR TOMORROW. Family ties were always important visual style prevents it from ranking among the to McCarey, the fidelity-conscious Catholic, and this cinema 's greatest masterpieces (and , even then , not preoccupation was to carryover into THE AWFUL by much) . It seems to me superior to that other TRUTH and LOVE AFFAIR. In the latter, Irene Dunne 's brilliant treatment of the generation gap, Ozu 's Jewish landlady warns her that children always grow TOKYO STORY . Part of this is due , I am sure , to the up to be ashamed of their parents, especially if they cultural alienation I still feel even after seeing go to college. This becomes the dark obsessiveness hundreds of Japanese films , but MAKE WAY FOR and possessiveness of MY SON JOHN , where Robert TOMORROW is also more precise . Every element in Walker rejects religious-oriented maternal domina- it is essential. As one sees more and more Ozu , tion and is led astray by intellectuals . one becomes aware that he really made only a single film in his career , each individual title being but a But MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW is too deeply felt chapter, often containing extraneous details and for this kind of heavy-handed schematizing . It is a distractions which can be accepted as privileged film that is not simple-minded but rather authenti- moments necessary within the context of his total cally simple. In the end we are left with the totally work , of the wo rld he was creating . McCarey made romantic and painfully spare image of an old lady only one brief film on old people , and he confronted standing beside a moving train , waving goodbye to his material dead-on and uncompromisingly . As her man of fifty years as it bears him away. On the Beulah Bondi says in one of the film 's more poignant soundtrack , unashamedly and perfectly , is \" Let Me moments , \" when you ' re seventy ... about all the Call You Sweetheart,\" an instrumental reprise of fun you have left is pretending there aren 't any facts the duet they have just sung together . As Leo to face .\" Victor Moore is constantly seeking a job McCarey makes us cry , we know as they do that which would allow him to retain a measure of it will now be solo for all their tomorrows. independence and dignity, his version of the Anglo- American Grill , but there was no more solution for \"There's nothing less logical old age in 1937 than there is today , and McCarey than the truth.\" showed rare courage (the film caused Paramount to fire him) in not taking an easy way out . He knew THE AWFUL TRUTH is one of the nicest of screwball that the only way out was in a bo x. comedies , certainly the best outside of Hawks. It marks something of a synthesis between McCarey's slapstick beginnings and his now-mature romanti- cism . Sadly , it is also probably his last completely 10 SEPTEMBER 1973

satisfying film . Already in LOVE AFFAIR there are signs Dunne, and Maria Ouspenskaya cast a mature ro- that he is losing the very fragile balance which holds mantic spell worthy of late Chaplin , Renoir, or his finest work together. Ophuls. The actors inhabit a world of misty ship- decks, sunlit Madeira gardens and silent chapels Many of the farcical elements in THE AWFUL TRUTH where \" it's a good place to sit and remember .\" are borrowings from DUCK SOUP (such as the radio Ouspenskaya tells Dunne that she is still young and which won't turn off) and the Roach films. The has to create her own memories, and she offers her business of Cary Grant and Alexander D'Arcy mis- Boyer: \" There is nothing wrong with Michel that a takenly putting on each other 's hat is right out of good woman could not make right .\" It is all almost both WRONG AGAIN and WE FAW DOWN , two of the too beautiful. four Laurel and Hardy shorts directed by McCarey. In WE FAW DOWN Hardy 's nose is slammed by a door, By the very necessities of its plot , however, LOVE much as Grant's is as he hides behind it while Ralph AFFAIR begins to fall apart. Dunne and Boyer decide Bellamy rec ites his love poem to Irene Dunne. to split to test the strength of the ir relationship (they Grant's discovery that he sent California oranges are separated for an interminable thirty minutes of to Miss Dunne when he was supposed to be in Florida screen time which destroys all the momentum and is paralleled in WE FAW DOWN , with Stan and Ollie inevitability of their rightness for each other which returning home to their wives , blissfully unaware that has been painstakingly developed), and Ouspens- the theater they were supposed to have been at- kaya dies. While they are apart, we suffer through tending has burned to the ground . Indeed the dou- the absu rdities of plot contrivance (Dunne being run ble talk which helps to abet the reconciliation at over as she goes to her appointed rendezvous w ith the end of the film sounds like it could have been Boyer after si x months , and Boyer becoming a sign written by Stan Laurel. McCarey knows his comic painter), a foretaste of heavy-handed McCarey rel i- catechism by heart, and is building on it. giOSity (Dunne confessing to a priest what a bad girl she had previously been , and grossly fawning The director is helped by both Grant and Dunne, over some orphanage brats auditioning for THE at their peaks, giving two of the most superbly timed BELLS OF ST. MARY 'S) , and the uninteresting pres- and improvised performances in all cinema . Neither ences of Lee Bowman and Astrid Allwyn . had wanted to do the picture ; it is arguable that neither would ever be better or more lovable. It is In the final scene of reconciliation McCarey at- we who are happy when Dunne finally concedes tempts to recoup the ground he has lost, and he that \" I' m still in love with that crazy lunatic , and does so predictably through reliance on the chemis- there 's nothing I can do about it .\" Herein , I think , try which exists between his stars . It is a great lies the special quality of THE AWFUL TRUTH . Although testament to the director's justifiable faith in an its form may be screwball comedy, its characters actors ' cinema that this scene , an entire reel of have real flesh and feelings-they make us laugh but screen time , is realized almost entirely by interac- they also matter. Even Ralph Bellamy who had been tion and dialogue between Boyer and Dunne. There playing \" the other man \" at least since Raoul Walsh 's is almost a Dreyeresque spareness to it , although WILD GIRL five years before is allowed to be more one wishes that McCarey possessed the Danish than a caricature-a yokel perhaps, but a three- Master's consciousness of visual qualities and dimensional one. avoided some of the ugly cross-cutting which slight- ly mar the scene . The only device is the painting Beyond the excellence of the performances, the of Dunne and Ouspenskaya by Boyer (which serves film 's warmth and depth springs from McCarey's essentially the same purpose as the portrait of Janet very genuine involvement with his material ; i. e. Gaynor as the Madonna in Frank Borzage 's STREET fidelity, faith , and (Asta and disrespectful progeny ANGEL) . Ultimately, we are reconvinced that the notWithstanding) the need for a family to bolster Boyer / Dunne romance is as true and sure as that these two . In the films of almost any other director, between Grant and Dunne . We believe that she will the final sequence (in which Grant and Dunne are walk again . The movie has left us happy, for in the reunited moments before their divorce becomes wonderful romantic world of Leo McCarey circa final) would seem overly contrived . Here , it has an 1939, as the songs goes, \" wishing will make it so. \" inevitability to it, free from the religiosity of later McCarey. In 1937, the director's creed was still one McCarey's prominence-perhaps pre-eminence of wit and charm , of that imperfect truth that is free in Hollywood 's Golden Thirties-was as fleeting as of dogma, that intuitive rightness of Cary Grant for the tenuous equipoise between his very genuine Irene Dunne, that inspired spirituality that is art. talent and his oppressively Catholic sentimentality. The latter would eventually burgeon into a quasi-fa- ''Wishes are the dreams we dream scistic anti-intellectualism during the director's Mc- when we're awake\" Carthyite Fifties , and would obliterate much of his art. Better to remember him before the seductive The first half of LOVE AFFAIR is probably as good nudge gave way to a didactic shove , when fall ing as anything McCarey ever did . Charles Boyer, Irene in love was the strongest act of faith in McCarey's missal , when the director's politics encompassed four Marxes and no McCarthy, and his poetics embraced all the world of laughter and of love . 11111111 FILM COMMENT 11

Otis Ferguson Advice to Readers and Critics The follo wing three pieces by Otis Ferguson , film every issue of the Herald Tribune . In brief , I assume critic of The New Republic, 1934-1942, have never that since there are some intelligent people interest- before been published . Robert Wilson , editor of The ed in the flowers of the trade , and since all the Film Critic ism o f Otis Fergu son (Temple University flowers are at present growing on the same dunghill , Press , 1971) says of them : \" I find them as fresh I am go ing to report ind ividual posies as they come and pertinent-dealing as they do with seemingly along , and not merely say week by week , This stinks, eternal questions in film criticism-as the day(s ) they this stinks, this stinks, referring to the dunghill. were written almost forty years ago .\" Dorothy Chamberlain , Ferguson 's widow, has generously And this brings up the point of usefulness, which made them available to FILM COMMENT and made it is quite important for the Constant Reviewer to some minor co rrect ions . Cop yright :£' 1973 Dorothy get straight. Movies, you agree, naturally reflect the Chamberlain . All rights reserved . present system. Then you seem to imply that criti- c ism of them should work toward the end of making Film Reviewing (1934) them the \" powerful force \" for enlightenment that Letter written in late August or early September, they could be. But under what system are they going to be a force? How are you going to change the 1934, to a man who had written that Ferguson 's movies without touching the system they inevitably reflect? reviews were not in the spirit of the New Republic and that he should see film s only in a sociological If you want to change the film industry, change light. the system , change the world. That is the dope for the Constant Reviewer . Let him not think that in Your letter of criticism has been passed on to sitting around on his tClil reviewing films he is a me , and I wish to thank you for it, criticism usually warrior in the struggle . The struggle is elsewhere . being more valuable to get than to gi ve. Not having If he wants to be a fighter , let him join it; if he wants got the known world charted yet, or become other- a better society , there is a way to get it , though wise set in my w ays , I'm free to confess that I shall not a very safe one . And that way is not the setting profit by some of your suggestions. up and knocking down of some grand straw man every time he goes to press. I shall be just as free , however, in confessing that I should have been brought up shorter, and possibly I am getting pretty si c k of the straw-man lancers. have profited more , if you had read my re views and They have no audience where their warnings will the problems they imply more closely. be taken seriously, Hollwood knows them not. They have not the guts to fight , nor to admit it; they sit In doing mo vies , I follow the same line of social about and roar. This gi ves them the sense of utility , awareness that I should , for example , in re viewing perhaps. They stamp up and down , with a great novels in the New Republic-for wh ich , as a matter show of rage , on the reflection of a mirror on the of fact , I do as many as anybody . That the films floor, proposing thus to break the mirror. are natural reflections of the system in which they are produced has occurred to me . I realize that they But all this , please , is not to overlook the neces- are vehicles of ruling-class propaganda , and real ize sity that movies, as you say , be watched . I merely further that this holds for all films , not a few , not wish to indicate that if films are to be regarded only this or that series, not the bad ones merely. as sociological documents , then there is hardly place for the individual reviews of them . I simplify But the point with me is , who doesn 't? Readers for the sake of argument, and perhaps too much . of the New Republic are certainly familiar with th is There is a documentary importance to the industry fact . and I should be doing them small service in in general , and this I have to some extent neglected saying of every film : Here is still another movie in my column , I fear . As a ma~ ter of fact , I have showing bankers in a favorable light. this is vicious . written reams of comment on one aspect or another it ought to be stopped . Hollywood is lousy . There of films under review , only to be faced with the is no more point in reviewing four or five movies necessity of letting something go by the board in a week and saying the same thing about them than order to meet space restrictions. And I have found there would be in establ ishing a column to review 12 SEPTEMBER 1973

that this comment could be implied by my attitude and flash of movement. I should have spoken of toward the subject matter better than could some- them as \" these two British comedies \" if I did not thing else. And thus the explicit material has gone have to be more attentive to facts before sounding under the knife , the implication still remaining . off . The facts in this case were that THE LAD Y IS WILLING was made by an American company (Co- After all , you know , it is no easy job covering lumbia) under an American director (Gilbert Miller), a two weeks ' batch of movies in a column and a and that if I had not stuck in the term Hollywood half or so, for their aesthetic possibilities alone. And to indicate American Film Industry, I should have after all , I am writing for people who want to know , been in danger of getting letters starting \" A minor, Is it worth seeing . I can 't give a good answer to but, to my mind , inexcusable error. \" [Phrase used the question and provide footnotes as to how it by writer of critical letter, who said Ferguson should mirrors capitalist society in the manner of every have known film was British .] other film , both . Not in my space . Then the matter of HERE COMES THE NAVY ':' being The audience that is interested in Hollywood a recruiting spectacle. Mr. Ferguson did not seem simply as sociology , simply as they would be inter- to be aware of it, as you pOinted out, partly because ested in the progress of a strike , should have reports of a dislike for placard-criti c ism , partly because the in some other form than that of a review column , term would not fit . That the film was the first to show I feel. An article in the main body of the paper , for the service in an unfavorable light (Cagney was the example . An occasional editorial paragraph . This sympathetic character , got his nose rubbed in it, audience , as I say , I have been neglectful of. To and told the boys off for the truckling bootlickers be frank , I have been doing movies only since last they were in a certain ineradicabl e way) I did not January, and have used most of my time to the end mention , fearing to mislead impressionable people of getting my feet solidly under me in my own into thinking it to be as damning as it might have medium . I have treated the social aspect of such been ; but I did poke fun at the silly attempts to films as seemed to be predominantly important for whitewash the ending . To call Hollywood 's exploita- having one (a paragraph on OUR DAILY BREAD ':' in tion of the glamour of battleships conscious propa- the issue now on the stands , and others like it) as ganda in favor of recruiting when quotas and waiting they came along ; I have not yet done an article on lists make it difficult to get into the service just now general trends , though it may interest you to know even if you wanted to-this wouldn 't be very w ise, that I am working on one , and that your letter has would it. shown it to be overdue . This failure to go below the surface of the re views As to newsreels , I have been wanting to do you specifically mention makes it possible for me something for a long time. The plain truth about to hope that your strokes against my work in general that is, I haven't been able to control my nausea aren ' t too mortal. While as I say I am primarily for long enough to make a thorough survey of any interested in providing reliable reports on the value month 's batch of them. The same for quickies. of current pictures, I should not like to think I was missing many tricks, and I shall certainly try to be Well , this clears up most of the points raised by more specific about social viciousness, within the your letter that were of a nature to be cleared up. limits set by space and function. When you say that acting \" is the least important thing in the movies \" (the people of the films , when And I should take it very kindly if you were to they are any good , are the most important means suggest any \" series \" of films that might be covered of expression ; they take the place, to a large extent, more fully , editorially or otherwise-the one you refer of both writing and character creation is a novel); to as dealing with the Wall Street crash , for ex ample . when you speak disparagingly of the movies as Of the hundred and fifty odd pictures I have seen \" entertainment\" (entertainment being one of the in the last si x or seven months I cannot recall any prime bases of art); when , describing yourself as that would fit that description . (Except , in a faint one who \" takes the cinema with some degree of sort of way, STAND UP AND CHEER , w hich I abused seriousness ,\" you feel it to be obvious that it cannot for over a column , perhaps.) I have treated Hol- produce much of aesthetic value as yet ; and when , lywood 's attempts to treat the workingman as they moreover, you suggest that such bad films as THE came along , and I have been waiting for a chance LAD Y IS WILLING ':' are important for anything besides to nail such recent touches as the supererogatory their being empty and unimportant and unfunny introduction of the quarrelsome Communist, and I (their whole appeal being that of light come- have let such ennoblements of bankers etc . as dy)-when you say these things , you are on the other neither stood out from the usual run nor had any rim of the circle , and I don 't suppose there is other interest, pass with the simple recognition that anything I can say more than Well , I heard different. they were lousy; but I have an idea there is danger in the tendency to read malicious and harmful intent There are some factual matters that can be into an innocent and ineffectual aping of models cleared up , however. If you had given much atten- seeming to have popular appeal. While you can call tion to my paragraph on THE LAD Y IS WILLING , you HERE COMES THE NAVY armament propaganda , and would have seen that I was comparing it in \" accent, be to some extent right , I have an idea that the tone , cutting , etc .\" with FOR LOVE OR MONEY , a picture as a whole walked right out from under their picture that was more British than the British , it just noses , leaving an impression of more abuse than reeked of Punch and all that. What I complained praise. of in both of them (almost companion pieces , I said) was just that lack of what you call Hollywooden But your letter will put me more sharply on guard , slickness and what I call an occasional brightness FILM COMMENT 13

in any event, and I take this means of partial if introduced (these are the generalizations); make extensive rebuttal to thank you for it. your point and then start particulars. Any Movie Reviewer (1937) Under acting , you ' ll list how the boy carried off Unrevised draft of a letter, written in early 1937, this , the girl that , the extras something else (a good appreciation of a player gives a certain flavor of the to a beginning film reviewer who had requested \"a part played). Under writing and direction, you can usually remember (best to jot notes right after the few rule-of-thumb guides.\" screening) how he put this line over, how that situation was built up. From here on , it will be a For a daily, you can review and be damned ; for mix-up of departments-camera, sound , dialogue a weekly or monthly, you have to find something writing , and all that. The thing to remember most worth making an essay out of. Both have advantages is that when you describe some effect, you must and drawbacks; I have the chance to revise, recon- know where it comes from. Most people are very sider, but also the unspoken responsibility of turning ingenuous about this , thinking that all they've got in a piece that is revised and considered , which to do to transmit a scene to readers is to make a piece must look revised and considered even precis of it. Whereas the fact is that the actor turned though (the uncertainties of release and the pro- as he said the line (probably the director threw away crastinations of human nature being what they are) 300 feet of him turning in the wrong or right way), it has to be written on preview night, which means the camera moved up , the lights went down, the I stay up all night and talk horribly to our make-up wind blew in the sound machine , the set made a man toward a deadline. I really think the daily re- design with his shadow-whatnot. I mean , if you can viewer has the best of it, piece by piece , for I often analyze what about the scene made it effective, you pick out a good daily review after seeing a picture, stand a good chance of making a reader feel it as but know there must be more put into it. But the effective. daily guy fails in kudos . And the upshot of this care in apportioning all I. Learn medium . How effects are got. What they things to their proper department is that people will are worth. The ABC of production: director, produc- have a better idea of what actual life the picture er, cutter (concept and execution). lived than if you had taken a column and a half to plod through each turn of the plot. Story: possibilities missed or opportunity made. Film situation and dialogue. Bothers: giving credits, mentioning all quirks, combining (in all this analysis) those things which Content: remembering that content is part de- invariably will be said in two or three different places sign, direction , and the actor (both typed and good). but yet on second reading seem to be partial repeti- tions . A lot of jockeying is necessary, but the main Technical : Camera-clarity, invention. Sound- thing to keep in mind is brevity-with-effect. If things use of noise and music. Sets-from too ambitious won 't be interesting to readers, they should be cut. to too penurious, let alone taste, invention . If one statement can be made to do the work of two, the second should be cut. II. You can learn from the feature stories in the supplements a lot about problems, devices; learn And in general : Watch out for harping , watch out from Variety and from audience reaction the exploi- for pet phrases , watch out for prolixity (I always write tation of films , who makes which for how much-and at least fifty percent over my actual maximum , hav- their use in the community. ing found that there is nothing like stern necessity for clearing copy of dead wood , spurious conceits, III. Good knowledge of the effect and how it is and uncalled-for wisecracks). gained should give respect for the medium. Plus a knowledge of other art forms-with appreciation And above many other things, remember that a of how they are made. Don 't have then to apologize, play is not a book and a movie is not a play , a book , get on the defensive, or preen with unbalanced a tattoo on a sailor's arm, or anything but a movie. acclaim . If an effect is got on people, whether the story , acting , music , or photography each taken by itself IV . Keep at it: see the old ones missed ; see others is banal and sterile , then there has been some new for comparison ; see a doubtful picture again . (In combination arrived at , and it is up to you to describe fact, there can 't be a better training than going to what it is and whether as such it is worth notice. a good picture three times with your eyes open .) All such things as mood , historic importance, Now, in reporting : Clarity , color , authority , and truth , form , and originality can only be treated as definiteness of judgment. Give the story, the point the critic of any art should treat them-once he is or (if important) lack of it-but not to the point of versed in his medium. boredom . Write the story out; then cut it way down . Writers, directors, actors, etc., are interesting, but Helpful hints: all can 't be mentioned (people are as much bored Get Variety regularly; cut out the credit box on as awed by lists of names), but when any of the each picture you have seen (you won 't see the pix talents definitely seem responsible for this or that, Variety doesn 't review) and mou nt them on three- give the names. by-five-inch cards, ordering them by type, degree of goodness, company , or whatever (I once had If you can write at all , incidents and good gag categories reading Fine, Funny, Foreign , Foolish , lines make brighter copy than literal resumes . Say Flops, and Fustian , which was for my own bad the story is about a cigar salesman who missed religion and got the girl ; say that the story is largely carried by the characters built up and situations 14 SEPTEMBER 1973

memory; but it only served a year). Thumb back can say directly what is in their minds ; but as far through the file occasionally , and you ' ll often find that an actor, director, writer, producer, or even as any basic understanding of the arts in long-term company has been responsible for more good or ill than you could gather from an individual picture . effects is concerned , they are out too . The others Notes on Criticism (undated) are frauds , professors, artistic feebs , or any combi- Perhaps a confession would clear the air. I make nation of the three. my living by criticism and have done little else , and so can hardly be accused of the usual author's bias; In jazz music it is somewhat better . There are , but what I say is , professional criticism , by and large , amounts to little more than parasitism and futility . except for John Hammond , very few who have zest, If a man has a true loyalty to his medium , a concern for what is being done in it , and some zest for its competence, and the wherewithal to express them . pleasures-as pleasures , not as pegs for his own grave rhetoric-then if he has a healthy set of reac- But there are very few frauds-perhaps for the rea- tions and some mind, he will be valuable, because ex perience is sadly demonstrative of the inability of son that jazz is completely a low-caste sort of thing , most professionally creative artists to make anything but boobs of themselves in the analysis of the work and there is no reason for being interested in it of others . But if he is frank with himself, even the good man with a mind and heart and trained per- unless it moves you to interest. The best ex ponents ceptions , he will have to admit that it is a little shameful to be always on the fringe and all the time of this art, peculiarly, seem to be mature , sunny talking , talking . people but intellectual ciphers (true in lesser degree The more established arts attract, from time to time , men who are in every way competent to deal of most arts , if we 'd admit it ); the best appreciators with them critically. But the new, raw, and vulgar arts , where there is still a great deal of life and a know what they like, but not exactly why. great excess of popular tripe-these are most unfor- tunate . Their most genuine ex ponents are as empty All chestnuts pointing to the fact that a man can of theory and the ambidexterity necessary to tell a good egg without being able to lay one; to ex press a thing that is done in one form in terms of another as twelve-year-olds ; their popular com- the contrary , no criticism is valid that is not done mentators are little more than apologetic press agents; their intellectual admirers are either inartic- of how a thing is made , step by step , as well as ulate or the Hound & Horn type of precious fadd ists . of its function and effect (which is to say , most The movies are one example , being so universal as to have a representative from all the different criticism is invalid , profound and empty speculation , groups but the best, attracting newspaper reviewers in scores . There are some good minds employed a blindness to much beside the airing of self). on the analysis of moving pictures, but they are either empty scholiasts, fish out of water, or they A good artist cannot bother trying to get recog- are ashamed of the form , for its vulgarity , and stand endlessly apologizing even in their highest praise , nized by the fiercely discriminative gents of the yearning for the respectability of the nearest re- spectable art that is allied to them-in the case of higher reaches of brow , or by the muddleheads on movies, the art of the stage. the dailies, supreme in the cheap politics of their I came to the movies (as art) rather late, and I took them up in the nature of a sporty venture-but trade and supremely addled in the requirements of that was lost quickly enough , do not doubt it. Any- one in the same position could not but be amazed their art, or even by the more solid backing of the and made humble by the sheer present excellence and potential beauty of the form ; and as to movie buying public. criticism as it was and is being practiced , he would be a poor fellow if he were not sickened . There is A good artist cannot plan to do more than do not a critic practicing from the highbrow angle today who can express, or apparently cares to express, the thing he loves and hope that somewhere there the thing in terms of how it must be made to get its special effect. The journal Variety has the out- will be attracted to his work a body of those people standing group of men who really understand pic- tures; but their attitude, while refreshingly hard- whose loyalties cannot be bought and whose mem- boiled , is that of the analyst of commercial values . These men know pictures upside down , and they ories go farther than last night's highball , tying up somehow with that more un iversal memory which keeps the most fine and cunning works of the human mind as alive and as natural as a tree with leaves , hoping that that inarticulate and as yet unregistered body of voters will come upon his work , to be touched by it into delight or pity , and to remember it with affection . There may be only ten from among such a group accessible today, and so the box office and the best-seller list (though shrewd talismans ) are never final ; and there may be thousands registered in bo x offices and best-seller lists , none of them in the position of high criticism (which is never so much a talisman as an aggregate ego , blind with tradition , timid before fads , and loud with authority) so that criticism will register nothing at all. A good artist may hope for worldly success and get it without being the less a fine fellow ; but in his dearest efforts to ring the bell he should not expect to hear any true bell ringing , to get his satisfaction that way . His satisfaction must bulk not in ex pression of himself, per se , or the appreciation of the same , per se, but in the ex press ion of himself to some true aud ience , satisfying himself in it as a man would without further thought give himself over to a woman he loved , to cherish her powder and store-boughten hair. IIIIIIII \" Re views o f these films are reprinted in The Film Criticism o f Otis Ferguson . FILM COMMENT 15

Part II by Raymond Durgnat A VIDOR GAL LER Y. Top . from left : STRANGER 'S RETURN with Irene Hervey . Miriam Hopkins and Franchot Ton e ; LA BOH EM E with John Gilbert and Lill ian Gish ; CYNARA with Ron ald Colman and Ph yllis Barry ; Center . from left : JAPANESE WAR BRIDE with Shirley Yamaguchi and Do n Taylor ; DUS K TO DAWN with Fl orence Vidor ; STELLA DA LLAS with Barbara Stanwyck and John Boles . B ottom , fr o m left : WINE OF YO UTH ; COM RADE X wit h Hed y Lamar r and Clark Gable ; ALIC E ADAMS with Florence Vidor . Claude Gi ll ingwater. Margaret McWade and Harold Goodwin . all photos: Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive 16 SEPTEMBER 1973

'Duel in theSun it's visibly his-among others? For in im- isn 't a recognizably Vidorian film . But it's portant respects , the expectations other people's film too . And no doubt a (1946) aroused by simple unadulterated auteur complex game of approval and disap- theory are confounded by what one can proval , of double origins, determined its For many years Vidor 's critical image read of the film 's genesis. Vidor feared creation . Which underlines certa in was dominated by the liberal interpreta- that Lewt 's happy nonchalance about dangers in the auteurist habit (estab- tion of affirmative films like THE BIG PA- violence might turn the audience against lished decades before Cahiers) of attrib- RADE , HALLELUJAH ! and THE CROWD . Per- him , and objected to the \" bad taste \" sex uting specific elements in a film to which- haps against its director's intentions , (Hollywood 's first French kiss). Selznick , ever creator repeated them in his DUEL IN THE SUN initiated a second phase , celebrated as proponent of famil y senti- preceding or succeeding efforts. In this in which the destructive possibilities mentality in the Thirties and of wo men 's case it looks as if Vidor-a director al- which earlier were narrowly overcome weepies in the Forties , insisted on piling ready exceptionally conscious of spiritual are unleashed. A series of studies in on the mixtu re of sex and vio lence which vitality expressed through the body , but exasperated ambition or eroticism are earned the film such angry critical (and as elements in different moral and there- saved from the dread fate of being too trade) verdic ts as \" Lust in the Dust \" and fore emotional patterns, experienced a depressing for the box office only by their \" THE OUTLAW in bad taste. \" In effect , the certain distress as a Selznick-Sternberg- exhilarating energy and excess. Many Puritanical transcendentalist was Dieterle consortium not only gilded the critics resented the new combination of chained to the mill , or yoked to the rose of sensuality but allowed it to blos- pessimism and scandal (although it 's ar- chariot, of a producer who, occasionally, som into the film 's least negative emblem guable that scandal was long , and may could lift the soap opera to the leve l of of the life force. Apparently surprised , but still be, the condition of mass media trag- I'amour fou (cf. the connection between impressed , and alarmed by the public 's edy achieving any popular success). LO VE LETTERS and PORTRAIT OF JENNIE). ' acceptance of the film 's balance of moral forces , Vidor subsequently repeated Vidor's evolution from an affirmative There was , it seems, talk of lawsuits these elements, but only to place them to a negative emphasis requires some before directorial credit was finally as- in contexts facilitating stronger intima- exploration. Critics , displeased by the signed. Other directorial participants in- tions of sensual exasperation as spiritu- change , just consigned Vidor, as a lost cluded William Dieterle and , given his ality gone wrong -while remain ing tragi- soul , to the Hollywood ruck, offering Hol- contribution to the other two films , his cally finer than a spirituality gone placid lywood 's notions of what product best style may have come closest to Selznick 's because subdued . RUBY GENTRY is clearly pandered to an (implied) decadent public ideas , or he may best have understood taste. Later auteur theories often and translated certain of Selznick 's in- a reprise, wi th another significance , of cherished a monotonous consistency tentions (whether the second way of put- DUEL IN THE SUN. rather than the differences between a ting things would imply that he isn't an director's films , and found Vidor's, with auteur is a nice point; it would imply that Collaborators must share certain their variety and contrast, hard to handle. Selznick was). Josef von Sternberg was affinities if their va rious qualities are to Hawks, Walsh , et aI., were easier going . called in as special consultant for pho- \"ta ke ,\" even against their w ills. Presuma- Of Vidor's individuality-sometimes quiet- tography and lighting-the latter an area bly Selznick , as impresario of the enter- ly evolving , sometimes in abrupt change in which Vidor's films regularly show prise , took as crea ti ve a role as Diaghilev . -sufficient evidence is provided, by in- more cameraman 's flair than directorial Narrow auteurist theory tends to see all terviews in the early Sixties and his com- consistency. But Sternberg was also spe- a director's collaborators as merely his ments on the spiritual \"confusion \" un- cially active in eroticizing the images of puppets-i .e. , the only creative role is that derlying his film noir period . Nonetheless, Pearl. On the printed page Vidor's ac- of a Svengali .' But the affinities of collab- one can , I think , find an internal logic count of his colleague throwing buckets orators are part of a larger issue, namely linking it with the earlier, more affirmative of water over Jennifer Jones to imbue her the extent to which, particularly in a rela- films, such that negated possibilities-a with the right excess of sweat suggests ti vely close-knit system like Hollywood 's , sense of tragic waste-inform what are amused disapproval , rather than (eve n everyone will respond to some of the only superficially descents to the spec- reluctant) admiration of an auteur at moods and issues in the American air. tacularly morbid. \\ work. By another \"paradox,\" therefore , Although Hollywood is definable as a at least some of the sensuality which collective \" atmosphere,\" or climate of Zeke 's crime passionel(in HALLELUJAHI ) criticism has rightly seen as generally opinion , it also unites different individuals and NORTHWEST PASSAGE might have characteristic of Vidor, was here provid- with different backgrounds , and the prepared one for the violence of DUEL IN ed , in this particular form , against his crisscross of affinities and differences THE SUN. If critics cherished Vidor's ve n- wishes , by an artist whose inspiration is must make co llaboration as unpredicta- tures in social realism , Hollywood long usually associated wi th an altogether ble , and interesting , as marriages. Many admired his romantic yet bracing way different icon-the bedecked, composed- films , like babies , are the product of more with passionate and tragic themes and ly enigmatic , almost fleshless Marlene. minds than one. with spectacular scenes. From Hol- And Dieterle 's ROPE OF SAND (not a Selz- lywood 's angle, DUEL IN THE SUN could nick picture) had , if I remember it aright Vidor strenuously objected to a scene seem entirely Vidor's film . And certainly after five-and-twenty-years, a powerful in which Lewt (Gregory Peck) , after blow- sense of physical sensation and pain . Nor ing up a freight train , rides away w histling 'Vidor found some critical champions , certainly, is Jenn ifer Jones a purely passive screen \" I've Been Workin ' on the Railroad .\" And personality, for a mercurial furia creeps the completed film leaves me surprised notably the French Surrealists . Ado Kyrou was into details of her playing in Nunnally that, if Vidor objected to that , he didn 't deeply moved by his poems of star- (or rather Johnson 's studiedly subdued THE MAN IN object more strenUOUSly still to Lewt's society-) crossed lovers, while remaining wary of THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT . callous gunning down of reluctant gun- his \" questionable \" political views . Certainly , men Charles Bickford and Joseph Cot- Vidor 's celebration of agrarian effort , of family and Th is isn 't to say that DUEL IN THE SUN ten . Unless the film , at certain stages , country , of inspired contentment in one 's statio n, looked altogether different from the could look very like Fren ch right-wing lines , even 'Somewhat rhetorically insisting on the producer's before THE FOUNTAINHEAD clarified the right-wing role as auteur , I described PORTRAIT OF JENN IE as ' I'm not implying that critics are projecting the ir aspects of Vidor's individualistic emphases . \" 99 % Selznick , 1% Dieterle,\" which may we ll have own repressed creative megalomania onto their been very unfair to Dieterle . But a wide range of fa vorit e c ulture heroes. But the model for their proportions is quite compatible with the co-auteur th ought is too often that of a novelist creating his principle . entire world out of his own imagination , or at least out of observations, memories. and myths which are (or become) individually his own . FILM COMMENT 17

re lease version , I can only surmise that point of view, it falls into a psycho- misogyny as a disease, albeit one so Vidor felt these killings to have (like analytical pattern not unlike Wellman 's. endemic as to be only normally abnormal. Zeke 's , or his Billy the Kid 's) some sort Charming psychopaths are contrasted Rita Hayworth 's celebrated song in GILDA , of emotional justification , both by their with sober, weaker brothers, are exploit- \" Put the Blame on Mame ,\" is altogether status as crimes passionels and by their ative of women and ambivalently con- ironical, a counterattack on Glenn Ford 's conte xt in the Code of the West . Perhaps demned and indulged by parent figures understandable but unreasonable suspi- the attack on the freight train could seem who are either too stern or too indulgent. cions about her behavior. At any rate , the c o\" :,..:l eteI Y senseless . And yet it has a Lewt can also be defined in relationship misogyny theme becomes obsessive at motive not unlike a mi xture of Zeke 's to a Selznickian theme . He's swaggering just about the same time as Capra 's fan- killing Hot Shot or THE CITADEL'S Manson 's Southern gallant Rhett Butler gone mad, tasies of goodwill go astray amidst LOST blowing up the sewers-the family loyalty and expressing himself about it in terms HORIZON , and it's tempting to see the in the first , and sabotage of a \" bad \" (as of gross physical brutality (as James misogyny as an inarticulate and mi xed-up he sees it) system in the second . For the Mason's villains in the two English films paraphrase of the sociopsychological railroad company, backed by the U.S. had done, although Selznick softened frustrations symptomatized by the film cavalry, forced its way across Lewt's fa- that side a little ). 5 noir.6 th e r's land . Vidor spea ks of a previ ew audience detesting the scene, and • ~ . - •?-= --.. . Both THE OUTLAW and DUEL IN THE SUN speaks of th e death of the fi reman and are the products of a determined produc- th e engineer. The English release version Kin g Vi dor and Spencer Tra cy on er and his multiplicity of directors. If the -in Britain , at least-showed the stunned lo cati on for NORTHWEST PASS AGE . first survives as rather listless fun , DUEL but not-too-badly-injured conductor and So far as misogyny is con c erned (and IN THE SUN comes within an ace of being engineer sc rambling from the loco motive I think Jacques Siclier has clearly dem- to ward an American romanticism (the cab, and, by cutting then , left the implica- onstrated its virulence in Forties Hol- West) what its near-contemporary , LES tion that they weren 't too badly injured. lyw ood ), DUEL IN THE SUN has another ENFANTS DU PARADIS , is to French romanti- Wh ic h is w hy , afte r a fe w moments of clear pre c edent in Howard Hughes ' THE cism (Balzac 's Paris). It 's with some mo ral tension to w ind up the spring , w e OUTLAW , which first shifted the ambient difficulty that one refrains from a blow-by- can fully unleash our relish for \" nice misogyny of the film noir into Western blow explication de te xte, whose disasters ,\" and years before the BONNIE terms . THE OUTLAW had also had a great justification would be the extent to which AND CLYDE era , Lewt 's anarch ic insolence deal of directorial and censorship trouble most spectators ' memory of DUEL IN THE got our delighted admiration , though not (perhaps through the surprises created SUN 'S plot is obnubilated both by the our unqualifi ed approval. ' by the crisscross of genres and of men 's sadomasochistic finale and by Vidor 's and women 's films , which were important visuals working on Selznick's spectacle Maybe Vidor , at least in th e early days Hollywood distinctions at the time). But (so that the train crash may be read as of the film 's making , was thinking in term s wh ile the Hughes film delights in its mi- merely \" the sort of thing outlaws do,\" like THE CHAMP . The do-gooder, Jess , is sogyny , Selznick, the producer of so rather than the destructive social conse- in sharper ( but still fraternal ) ri valry with many women 's films, criticizes misogyny quences of a narrow family loyalty). the fighter , Le wt, w ho gradually becomes as a major source of the tragedy . It seems as savage as Billy the Kid . But as the film to me that Siclier underplays the extent But whatever the confusions attend- developed , the sense of the Code of the to which the \" misogynistic \" film noir ant on the film 's genesis, the final cut has West was lost , and , without it, Lewt 's generally acknowledges its heroes ' an exceptionally \" classical \" linear pro- aggressiveness sharpened . From being a gression . Its fault would be that it 's rather \" tragi c rascal \" he became what , it 'One can't but wonder if the British films hadn 't too plodd ing , like Selznick 's script for THE seemed, Selznick wanted. For Selznick taken th ei r cue fro m Rh ett Butler in the first PAR ADINE CASE . This combination of im- was already thinking along the lines of place- and gone beyond him , in term s of British provisational methods and a too-method- a figure who was to loom steadily larger history turned Western (tomboy into highway- ical result isn 't so parado x ical. Working as the Forties became steadily more fas- woma n). Obviously Hollywood prod uct influenced piecemeal and in a hurry , one tends to cinated by the demented violence of the British films oft en only too much , especially wi th repeat things , so as to be sure one has potential hero. Lewt's moral position Rank aiming at the American market . And the said them . Fortunately, the thinness of exi sts somewh ere between Burt Lancas- success of th e Gainsborough series apparently DUEL IN THE SUN is camouflaged by its te r' s in Norman Foster's KISS THE BLOOD astonished Hollywood. So iI' s common sense that dramatic-visual style-as an ironic result OFF MY HANDS and James Cagne y's in th is sort of intern ational, inter-auteur infl uence by of which critics have usually assumed WHITE HEAT and KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE . \" ricochet\" would operate. that spectacular or scandalous scenes Perhaps Selznick had also noticed the were just crudely juxtaposed . big bo x-office success in America of two British prec edents-THE MAN IN GREY and A th ird difficulty, of another order, THE WICKED LADY , both centering on arises from the difficulty which the film 's James Mason 's insanely brutal , villainous genre , or idiom , still offers to spectators heroes . w ho are in c lined , or taught, to expect from art a certain cultural mi xture of ear- It 's surprising that Vidor , who , later at nestness, education, and what Andrew least, justifies his \" unexpurgated \" ideas Sarris calls \" humanism \" (but which I for BILLY THE KID by reference to THE would call a narrow liberalism), When PUBLI C ENEM Y, didn 't think of Lewt as confronted by melodramas with violent corresponding to James Cagney's psy- and scandalous elements, viewers may chopathic gangster in a film on whose reject the kiss-kiss-bang-bang (or in this theme Cagney , shortly after DUEL IN THE case, bang-bang-kiss-kiss) confronta- SUN , provided two further variations . And tion-climaxes , and fail to notice those if we think of DUEL IN THE SUN from Lewt's 'One must also remember that cinema audiences 'Was Vidor's memory of th e scene at fa ult? Were were reckoned by Hollywood to average out at cuts made for th e \" milder\" British taste in violence about seventeen years old , so that misogyny (just as some Ken Russell fi lms have differently would largely record special adolescent fr ustra- edited British and American versions)? Did Selz- tions, and that pre-1945 fam ily dramas might be nick respond to preview audience distaste by paraphrasing wartime fam ily breakups but in a cutting a shot, or a scene , before th e men's death , dreamli ke form . Psych onalyti cally , th e logic of and thus altering the moral situation profoundly? transpositions makes sense: wish-fulfillment re- versal (the tight family for separation , malevo- lence for wartime em ergen cy.) 18 SEPTEMBER 1973

finer points and human challenges which detective story, whose beginning, middle, giving himself in return . He has also in- are , in fact , their mainsprings of conflicts and end are a question of thematic as verted McCanles's attitude to women . which , dramatically, are not too simple to much as of chronological structure . McCanles retains his wife , possessively, take on a \" lyrical \" strength , at least at Th roug h-th e- Loo ki ng-G lass prog re s- and despotically, despite his jealousy, the hands of a gang of half-showmen , sions appear in epics also , which often and his resentment of her superior CUl- half-craftsmen , half-poets. begin in medias res and later jump back ture . Le wt lusts for Pearl as for beauty to the beginning whil e movi ng on to the in general , won 't give himself recipro- I take melodrama as meaning , normal- end . The elongation of the earlier motive , cally, and despises her inferior origins ly. drama which re volves around either or a counterclockwise move ment from (she ' s a half-breed) . Belle is refined to some violent physical action (the West- event , as riddle to cause , is a natural a fault ; Pearl is tomboyish to a fault. But ern) or some knockdown emotional consequence of the search for suspense. the love- hate theme , common to them equivalent ( \" passion \" in some big , im- For instead of interrupting the suspense both , suggests not only that the older precise, global sense) . Indeed , violent by explanations , these films make the generation 's tragedy is a cause of the physical action is a special kind of emo- explanations suspenseful by withholding younger people 's, but that both tragedies tional haymaker prompting only equally them . At best they ' re much more than a arise from unnecessary conflicts be- crude avoiding action . But mere melodra- McGuffin: once achieved, they can put tween cultural or racial distinctions and mas may have other beauties ; melodrama the preceding story into a ve ry different a male egoism that has turned overdom- is to drama as farce (including slapstick) light. inant, detesting the feminine principle is to comedy , and there 's nothing to pre- wh ich involves a more conciliatory hu- vent a film being both a melodrama and McCanles believes that, years before, manity. McCanles and Lewt represent a drama . Hollywood theory produced alternative outcomes for a basic wi ll- many movies which , like this and JOHNNY Belle left him to elope with Pearl 's father , fulness-the tyranny of the older genera- tion , the irresponsibility of the young. GUITAR comprise hybrid forms between Scott Chavez (Herbert Marshall). Gallop- the two ' The films may be roughly com- ing in pursuit, McCanles had fallen from At least, that's probably how Selznick parable , but DUEL IN THE SUN uses a rather his horse and was crippled for life. His saw it. Maybe , for Vidor, Pearl and Le wt less explicatory idiom than Philip Yor- remorseful wife returned to him , only to are both victims of the impulsive sensu- dan 's script. and relies on ambiguities find the domineering ways from which ality arising from their social irrespon- which . although stated , are pretty spon- sibility and isolation-Pearl as underdog she fled compounded by bitter retrospec- and orphan , Lewt as oppressively spoiled taneous responses to the evolution of the tive jealousy. Their ironic , lifelong togeth- son . Both are abandoned to isolation- situations as they go . erness is thus equivalent to Pearl 's and passion without community and without Lewt's mutual separation . Love-hate is self-discipline . In default of work , duty , The climax of DUEL IN THE SUN parallels the factor common to both . But as Belle and belonging , theirs is not une passion an earlier deathbed reconciliation be- lies dying , McCanles finall y confesses his disciplinee. If one thinks of Belle and tween Pearl 's foster parents, Belle (Lillian love. Belle assures him that, though she McCanles as being quite as ill-matched Gish), and Senator McCanles (Lionel fled , it was not to Scott , or any other man , a pair as Linda and the Champ , then , Barrymore). This earlier scene is itself the and , her hair hanging as loosely and taken to an extreme , one can imagine climax of a parallel love story, a triangle wildly as Pearl 's, crawls down her bed that Vidor's concern for fam ily , communi- or apparent triangle , between Belle, Mc- to her husband in his wheelchair by its ty , and honest work as the roots of stable Canles , and Pearl 's father , Scott Chavez . side. Thus the edge of his jealousy is feelings might lead him to question Much of this story happened before the taken off, and their love can be freel y whether such disparate characters as film opens ; and the references to it or declared in one of those deathbed recon- Pearl and Lewt should fall in love , and insinuations about it defy chronological ciliations whose spiritual meaning isn 't w hether their attraction isn 't merely an order , or clear definitions , almost as merely a sentimentality. The dying exasperated nostalgia , aroused by ab- thoroughly as do the last sequences of woman 's struggling movement (across sence of attachment and the Puritan Jan Nemec 's DIAMONDS IN THE NIGHT-an- her bed toward the husband paralyzed work-will. Their tragedy resembles the other example of the surprising fre- by his jealousy) anticipates Pearl 's dying culturally heterogeneous infatuation quency with which avant-garde struc- movement (across the sand toward her operating betwee n Chick and Zeke in tures correspond to background demon lover who is immobilized also , by HALLELUJAH! ; between H. M . Pulham , Esq ., structures in arriere-garde art. Schemati- the stomach wound which she has just and his sleekly ambitious city girl; or cally , however, and in general thrust , it's conferred upon him) . Vidor re ve rses the between New York writer and Polack fair to say that this earlier triangle story movements: Belle going right to left, Pearl immigrant in THE WEDDING NIGHT. But isn 't told achronologically so much as left to right. A transitional scene , also Vidor's concept of work-will also involves partly clockwise and partly counterclock- indoors and by night, occurs when Pearl , a tendency towards cultural miscegena- wise , the clockwise part enclosing the clinging in her soft nightdress to her tion , since the honest adaptability of the counterclockwise part in such a way that departing lover's leg , allows herself to be truly passionate is emphasized in THE BIG the second concludes a split second be- dragged pleadingly across the floor-in PARADE , and is implicit in the move from fore the first. Bizarre as such a structure a gesture which Vidor, who understands city to country in OUR DAILY BREAD , in seems in theory , it 's both simple and passion , no more despises than he Dink's adoption by his mother in THE familiar, closely resembling many detec- despises Melisande's desperate clinging CHAMP , and in Vidor's respect for the tive stories which , schematically at least, to the departing Apperson in THE BIG blacks in HALLELUJAH! and THE CHAMP . are told both forwards (the detective de- PARADE, and ending up abandoned in the tecting) and backwards (from corpse to road , clasping his boot to her bosom . Still , the finished film certainly crime). Sometimes the counterclockwise depends on our feeling that the Belle- movement contains a second clockwise The Similarity of the resolutions warns McCanles pair, and the Pearl-Lewt or one (from motive to murder) or a second us that the two stories which may appear Pearl-Jess pair , could and should defy all counterclockwise one (from murder to itlematiwrtty unconne-clea , or merely incompatibilities to come together. A chat motive). It's amazing how many time- contrasted , also carry important affinities. between McCanles and the local sheriff layers and directions go to make up a McCanles, a rough willful pioneer, detest- points the moral. McCanles could , and ed the Eastern finesse (sensitivity , piano should , have appreciated and accepted ' In Film s and Feelings I took Nicholas Ray 's JOHNN Y playing) by which, perhaps , he had initial- coexistence with values which , being dif- GUITAR as an example of how th e crudely obvious ly been fascinated . In Lewt , his father 's ferent from his , threatened his will to moral and physica l contrasts w hich set up so favorite and spoiled son , McCanles 's dominance. Given the period 's touchi- strong a polarity between the good guy (Sterling urge to carve a corner of the world out Hayden) and the bad guy (Ernest Borgnine) coexist for himself is debased into a violent will- (even so far as the naivest spectator was con- fulness , a wish to possess women without cerned) with similarities sufficient to challenge the automatic ratification of Wild West complacencies . FILM COMMENT 19

ness about miscegenation, it may be sus- equal , opposite excess of \" stabili- thus become, this isn't illogical , since piciously convenient that Pearl doesn 't ty \" -dominance . And his paralysis from Jess's motive is not a bold , manly , flag- marry Jess and live happily ever after (as the waist down emphasizes the destruc- waving patriotism , but a result of several she does in the novel) . Certainly , both the tion , by dominance , of sexual power. Al- things: his Eastern legal training-an im- synopsis of and , it would seem , certain though the state matters more than the personality like the railroad 's; his comments made about Vidor's JAPANESE event , the film recapitulates the event in mother 's gentleness in a harder, maier WAR BRIDE suggest that Vidor 's concern a way reminding us that McCanles 's mix- form ; his sympathy for the weaker small with roots could involve in passing mis- ture of megalomania and vulnerability is men who oppose McCanles , too; and his givings about miscegenation which cer- his own undoing. It does so via Hol- putting objective moral principles before tainly weren 't far from Hollywood's mind , family loyalties. He incarnates an attitude in the epoch of BROKEN ARROW and PINKY. lywood ' s classic style of recapitulating an which it's altogether in character for Old Even the bold homage to Negro vitality Man McCanles to detest, as school- in HALLELUJAH! could , at a pinch , be rec- \" archaic \" event not by a flashback but marmish , cold, unfilial, even unpatriotic. onciled with reservations about interra- by a reminiscent event at a reminiscent Similarly, Robert Frost once defined a cial marriage , while THE WEDDING NIGHT liberal as a man who can 't take his own quite positi vely lends itself to WASP moment. McCanles's second fall occurs side in an argument (i.e ., the earnestly snobbery about Poles. Nonetheless, after his vulnerability (his respect of the moral aren't very virile, as compared to Vidor , in an interview , was distinctly, and American flag) leads him to back down good old red-blooded selfishness) . Jess's without prompting , unhappy about such spiritual grandson appears in Kazan's readings , for he continued to insist that before the cavalry and as his megalo- WILD RIVER, with Montgomery Clift as the JAPANESE WAR BRIDE was the story of an manic turns his rage against Belle's fa- New Deal federal agent who tries to per- unhappy marriage like any other unhappy vorite of their sons , Jess (Joseph Cotten), suade a proud old matriarch (a female marriage . McCanles) to give up her land. who prefers her moral sensitivities to his But the crucial factor in DUEL IN THE SUN proud egoism. Such recapitulations have Clearly McCanles 's double fall from seems to me to be that the half Indian the effect of (1) providing a visual reminis- the saddle suggests , in archaic moral girl is our principal identification and her cence of an invisible moment, (2) adding terms , poetic justice, and , in Freudian fulfillment our main concern . In itself, of to this scene some of the emotions of that ones , accident-proneness , i.e \" self-pun- course , this wouldn 't mean her ambitions moment, and (3) generating the tension ishment, earning him our sympathy for his and hopes weren 't tragically misguided . of its (visible) contradiction. Hollywood frustrated vulnerability. He is unhorsed by So it 's especially important that Belle-an made much use of recapitulative events , massive jealousy and a sense of betrayal authoritative mother figure who repre- scenes or objects , since so long as mo- by his son . His willfulness is hubris. He sents , like THE CHAMP'S Linda , the flower notony is avoided , they enable films to also becomes divided (against himself), of WASP culture (and another Southern move faster and accumulate emotion in and falls, when confronted with the flag's Belle , too)-should want Pearl to live hap- appeal to his sentimental , that is, his pily ever after with one or other of the moving toward a strong climax, whose finest side . Like tragic heroes, he is scions of the WASP way of life. McCan- strength is generated by the entire film . worthy of the chastisement which he re- les 's overt race prejudice is clearly part ceives , Worst of all , he lives to see the of his embittered brutality. It 's true that (Hence climaxes are often , in extract, code by which he lived debased by his Pearl 's bad side is associated with her weaker and briefer than preparatory best-loved son. Lewt provokes and Indian mother, but McCanles and Lewt scenes.) shoots down, first, a white-haired suitor make an unsurpassedly mean pair for the of Pearl 's, Sam Pierce (Charles Bickford), WASP. DUEL IN THE SUN is virtually a We have suggested that Belle evokes and then his own brother. Both acts are forerunner of the Fifties cycle of race two more \" civilized \" styles : Eastern cUl- extensions of McCanles's own harshness prejudice films , whose liberal principles ture and (more vaguely) Southern ele- (his resolve to kill Scott Chavez , his repu- I would regard with a little more sympathy gance , as against Senator McCanles , diation of Jess). The Senator's confes- than nowadays they usually get. sion of his life laid waste , on his porch , whose Texas pioneering combines the with the sheriff (who , as local community Vidor 's sense of roots seems to pioneer spirit and Southern paternalism. law and order , is his \" friendly enemy \" ), depend on a cultural life style in which But his own efforts have called forth the is the film's liberal moral-although not, a generous and inspired adaptability greater, less personal power of Yankee as we shall see , its only one . looms large . The Polish girl in THE WED- industrialism. The railroad plans to cut its DING NIGHT could have changed , as Dink way across his land and is backed up by Jess (Joseph Cotten) represents the will. The Polish community represents a a Federal order. McCanles confronts America to whom the future belongs , or rigid system, and Pearl 's extra handicap at least ought to belong , His woman ' s is her (to put it mildly) , broken home . But them with two hundred armed cowhands, Christian name isn 't insignificant, given she asserts her spiritual integrity by her an impressive private army , but swiftly his closeness to his mother, and his con- quick recognition of the right values when matched by the U.S. Cavalry. What really cern with the rights of the \" little man\" she sees them , and on this point Vidor conquers him , however , is the flag under is liberalism in the form Populism is most comes near a Quaker optimism about which he once fought and on which he likely to accept. When , eventually , he decent treatment meeting a quick cannot fire now. The courage that goes returns to the ranch , it is on the train , response . Thus the film's principal theme with his lust for power would be suicidal with a quiet, delicate-featured girl (from becomes the frustration of her naturally the world of , perhaps , THE MAGNIFICENT good aspirations , which might have sta- if it weren't sapped by sentiment , i.e ., by AMBER SONS , when they were young and bilized her naturally good animal pas- loyalty ' He nonetheless turns on Jess, for flourishing) . It is Jess who might, as Scott sions-about whose expression (rather siding with the flag against his father and , and Belle both wish , make a \" lady\" out than essence) Selznick was less puritani- intriguingly complex though the issues of Pearl. He is on his way to the East with cal than Vidor. And maybe Selznick went her platonically , when Lewt calls him out. further in approving , as passion , what ' The flag as the only symbol of community to w hich Jess confronts him , unarmed, on princi- Vidor felt was passion exacerbated by an heroes can bring themsel ves to feel an undivided ple, refusing even a self-protective con- upbringing which assures its victim of our and virile loyalty is another Holl ywood constant. cession to gun law, i.e. , violence without sympathy. It connects , no doubt , w ith the military life as the moral and communal sanction, and prime symbol of fratern ity in Ford 's postwar films maybe also trusting in even his brother 's Senator McCanles represents the (not to mention Fulle r' s RUN OF THE ARROW , which ranks alongside the Selznick-Vidor as a ferocious Western masterp iece). Doubtless the tin star runs the flag a close second . But local commun ity also tends to be summar ized in terms of law and order enforcement-a kind of civi lian arm y. Various mix- tures of uneasiness and affirmat ion underline the current crop of police movies-THE CHASE , IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, MADIGAN , BULLITT (America 's answer to THE BLUE LAMP), et al. The connection with civil rights and other aspects of internal str ife hardly needs stressing , and although the emphasis on violence accommodates environmental themes the general centering on crime testifies to Ni xonian preoccupations . 20 SEPTEMBER 1973

residue of decency. But Lewt, very sensi- DUEL IN THE SUN . Jennifer Jones and Lillian Gish . tively, has brought a spare gun for Jess DUEL IN THE SUN . Gregory Peck and Joseph Cotten . with him , and offers it to his brother, thus DUEL IN THE SUN . Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck . clearing himself at least by the Code of the West, although (and this is what helps condemn the Code of the West) not by common-sense notions of natural justice (since Jess is no fighter and Lewt is an expert one). But the law would surely have cleared Jess on grounds of self- defense; and as far as natural instinct goes, one may sense a general atmo- sphere to the effect that Jess 's moral courage goes with , not a death wish exactly, but a slackening of life wish. Divided one falls. Lewt, though more subtly , is even more successfully self-destructive . He is destructive, also, of the social values by which he might have been exc used . Rather than respect family loyalty, he sets out to murder Jess for the sake of a girl whom he refuses to make part of the family (thus , ironically, also outdoing his father 's line in domestic tyran ny). The intolerance of others which the McCanles spirit breeds ravages the McCanles famil y itself. It 's part of Jess 's sadness that , in resisting the McCanles excess of egoism , he seems to have lost a certain joie de vivre. and the confidently exuberant form for his passion . For this film reverses the relationship betwee n the brothers in THE BIG PARADE . There , the withdrawn , \" cor- rect ,\" industrious brother wrongs , in his mean way, the almost spoiled , but outgo- ing , one. Here, Jess opposes , to the Code of the West (whose infinite abusability accounts for much of its fascination ), a more scrupulous suburban peaceable- ness so that the law must monopolize violence . All the same , Jess's moral scru- pulousness shows more than a touch of disguised and misdirected aggression , that is , paranoia , when he refuses to believe that Pearl didn 't wi llingly yie ld to Scott, that half her heart belongs to Jess -all of it , if only he will help her to make herself into w hat he and Scott wo uld like her to be . His own self-control has bred a mistrust of the heart's animal, sensual side. And Jess 's lack of faith in Pearl 's better nature is all the more pointed by contrast with Belle , who , rightly trusts Pearl 's goodness of heart just as Mrs . Apperson trusts an unknown French girl in THE BIG PARADE . What , for Selznick, was probably a useful and effective story- telling device (a morally ambiguous c'har- acter is sanctioned by a trustworth y and apparently antithetical one) dovetails with Vidor's theme of the magic power of mothers and mother figures (c f. THE BIG PARADE , HALLELUJAHI , and RUB Y GENTRY ) . It's a moot point whether or not Belle is overly sentimental in accepting Pearl 's word that nothing happened after Le wt kept her cowering , nude , in the rock pool and finally allowed her out. The film leaves matters ambiguous , as it had to , FILM COMMENT 21

precisely because , in Hays Code days , half-recovers by accepting Sam Pierce, atrocities with finer and family feelings. a kiss was very likely to imply more than Lewt guns him down in the saloon . Sav- (PUBLIC ENEMY offers a convenient ex- just a kiss , especially when a hiatus in age , if simple jealousy . But when (4) ample .) But the continuous presence of the story continuity follows it (as it has Pearl , for a mixture of reasons (including a certain sensitivity in Gregory Peck 's to , here) . My own suspicion is that once passion) . offers to follow him into his out- screen presence is another way of Lewt embraced the naked girl, she ac- law existence , he kicks her away, since fulfilling this function , and creating a con- cepted his warmth gratefully, and that even allowing her to be his camp follow- tinuous ostinato of sympathy in counter- one th ing led to another. In this view Pearl er-in defeat-is too much like belonging point to his escalation into self-destruc- is lying her head off to Belle about the to her. Now we 're in the realm of the ti ve savagery . (In THE BIG COUNTRY , physical details, but the desperation of paradox intimated in an earlier , quieter William Wyler 's essay in a Vidorian key , her lying arises from the sense of self-be- scene, when , with mingled regret and Gregory Peck plays the pacifist , i.e ., the trayal whic h also asserts the spiritual indifference , he mused over her apparent \" herbivorous\" character, corresponding truth behind her lie , so that even if Belle preference for Jess. There , his could to Jess, and Charlton Heston plays the is wrong about details, she 's right in seem the lightest of loves -but now- \" carnivorous \" one corresponding to essence . A kiss causes Jess, at a crucial killing her for a girl whom he hides away? Lewt. The rest of the casting can be filled moment , to wi thdra w from fighting for (5) His passion seems to disappear alto- out ad lib , starting with Carroll Baker as Pea rl , just when she most needs his sup- gether as his destructiveness escalates a WASPy Jennifer Jones.) port, and this passivity here strengthens (attacking the train) and, if that can be the negative aspects of his refusal to ascribed to family loyalty , (6) his shooting The softness which gives Pearl her defend himself (and therefore Pearl) of Jess has him killing his nearest and compulsive hope in Lewt is there all right . against Le wt with a gun . Pearl is so dearest-one worse than Scarface, who But in her it has remained self-indul- anxious to love Jess that she virtually doesn 't turn on his sister. And when gence , it has turned in on itself, irredeem- does love him , and his withdrawal from finally (7) he can trust Pearl enough to ably . But Lewt isn 't so narcissistic that , her, like the deep mistrust which inspires let her bring him supplies , she shoots at underneath it all , he doesn 't love Pearl , it (or at least I hope it's a deep mistrust-a him , with deadly accuracy, not merely for unbeknownst to himself, in a full and rigid disapprova l of heavy necking wou ld the sake of re ve nge but also to protect perversely committed , self-involving way be merely petty) renders him , in his cool- Lewt and herself (the constructive and -as, at last, the Indian legend confirms. er, subtler way , almost as treacherous to altruistic aspects of her motivation are Maybe Vidor found Lewt going too far into her as Lewt. important). His individualism certainly selfish vio lence for his violence to be both isn 't an honest-to-goodness animal in- passionate and moralized , like Zeke 's The forlornness of his and Pearl 's lost stinct. It's riddled with both status-con- and so forgivable . But Vidor goes beyond love is evoked again when Jess returns sciousness ( Pearl is a half-breed) and even the enlightened (and all too rare) to take Pearl East . His bride is with him , with negative vanities that turn to rage Puritan tradition of hating the sin but and , although kindness remains , all pas- and frustrate the lust which he was too loving the sinner. Certainly his morality sion for Pearl is spent. In this sense , his confused to recognize as an honest infat- hasn 't that mi xture of fear , suspicion , and renunciation of his past infatuation ex- uation , and his family loyalties, and his rancor which drives so many puritans to presses a resilience worthy of earlier, and freedom , and the decent aspects of the regard energy itself as evil and excess later, Vidor heroes (John in OUR DAILY Code of the West . Indeed , the sheriff, in emotion as unforgivable. If anything , the BREAD , Harry Pulham , Pierre in WAR AND Pearl 's bedroom , seems set to get it in Vidor of the Thirties is more likely to PEACE) . Thus Jess 's bride is one of Vidor's the back, and there 's no hint that Lewt exc use extreme violence on the grounds \" second-best\" but firmer loves, capable planned to give his man time to draw . We of morality and energy. of becoming more passionate than any can 't blame Lewt for (8) shooting back exasperated infatuation . As OUR DAILY at Pearl (less forebearingly than Jess) But Vidor knew that an insensitive BREAD and HALLELUJAH! imply , the pro- until his last reactions solve the riddle of Lewt would have ruined the film , reducing foundest love is not the agitations of all these contradictions . Pearl 's feeling for his to a masochistic sensuality . Only in the bosom of the con- mistake rather than being also the intu- tinuing family can otherwise conflicting For Lewt has a streak of tenderness itive recognition of a potential , and there- urges be merged and reconciled . Still , the which is real enough , albeit unapplied to , fore tragically frustrated , generosity. On scene is heavy with a sense of sad dimin- and unstrengthened by , any particular some unconscious level , Lewt is Pearl 's uendo . And one begins to wonder if, from responsibilities. His way with horses has right mate , so that her journey East Pearl 's point of view, death isn 't a con- a certain tenderness , at least in the con- seems set to be a melancholy one , an summation devoutly to be preferred-as te xt of mastery , and in spite of his power exile, with both her loves lost and her life eventually the Indian legend evoked in to coax and tame , easily degenerates to force subdued by a \" ladylike \" style which the final shots affirms. mere seductiveness. Once or twice he might never become more than a coun- cries out after Pearl with a real feeling terfeit. (The implications touch on a para- Lewt's individualism doesn 't just ra v- of hurt (whic h is n't quite free from child- dox in the American dream . On the one age his fam ily , but becomes even more ishness). The casting of Gregory Peck hand the possibilities of infinite self-im- punishing than his father's . Lewt could as Lewt is already a statement about him . provement are virtually axiomatic and have possessed Pearl but , be ing an indi- The crisp , soft, thoughtful features that Twenties \" progress \" has become intro- vidualist , he couldn 't bear to be pos- made Peck so handsome a liberal or verted as Sixties \" mature and well adjust- sessed by her. And so he loses her. And pacifist here are somewhat at odds with ed .\" On the other, Pearl 's formative years because he can't bear to let any other this homicidal psychopath . But it is pre- and race prejudice may well ensure that man have her either, he loses himself. cisely from this softness that Lewt derives she 'll never quite pass as a lady , and only The point is made by the escalating an ambiguity which is certainly not mere get the worst of both worlds . And if sex meanness of his reactions. Though at miscasting and may be rather more than appeal and feeling mean what Selznick first, (1) he despises and seduces Pearl , a slightly clumsy method of making Lewt hoped , we prefer Pearl as she is to what- it's a callow reaction which isn 't beyond call forth some tender feelings , particu- ever Eastern WASPishness may make of possible change and improvement. But larly from the female half of the audience. h e r .) when (2) Pearl tries to make him keep It would not have been difficult to write his promises, and announces their en- a scenario in which Lewt-played by If all hope of a fine balance were ruled gagement at the Grand Ball , he scorns some more ambiguous character, per- out , of course , then Jess would be an her publicly . We 're still at the stage of haps John Garfield or Robert Walker- id iot , which he isn 't. And indeed Pearl 's redeemable caddishness. But when (3) amazes us by hysterically alternating the struggle with a subdued , alien culture Pearl , deeply hurt, half-retaliates and would make another \" American ro- mance \" or, to paraphrase a later Vidor 22 SEPTEMBER 1973

title , I WAS A HALF-BREED WILD WEST BRIDE . the film provokes psychological issues same way, intimating possibilities which The postwar Vidor might well have made and tensions which, in an archa ic idiom , must await subsequent resolution-or of it a criticism of respectable mediocrity ; it doesn 't discuss . prove ominously abortive. it might have come to look like RUBY GENTRY . If one makes Ruby a half-breed , 1. When Pearl promises her father that 2. While responding to Belle ' s faith in changes some childhood details, shifts a she ' ll learn to be a lady like Belle , the her, Pearl can 't help responding also to few peripheral details back sixty years , fervor with which she does so has an Lewt's contempt (a neat balance of con- then the fact that Jennifer Jones plays intensity which may be natural (he 's trary motivations). Belle 's delicacy, her both heroines is completed . The later film about to die ) and is also oedipal (he killed piano pla yi ng , are all the feminine vi rtues . is all but \" Duel in the Swamp .\" Howeve r , her mother, her other side). But it also But Pearl also tries to counter Lewt 's within the earlier film 's context, the impli- suggests a volatility which renders her appeal to her female sensuality by claim- cations of Pearl 's submissiveness to vulnerable , in circumstances which might ing a masculine equality . Her claim that Jess 's ideas of her future have a melan- undermine her desperately sincere reso- she's just as good a rider as he , and just choly tone , rendering her death , after all , lution. The possibilities-sincerity or vola- as good a shot , implies both weakness \"so quick, so clean an ending ,\" so black tility , natural feeling or protesting too (c hild ish competitiveness ) and vul gar and yet so right and brave . It is a/so a much-open a va riety of responses (and strength (a spitfire ' s) , although again , in happy end. aren 't mutually exclusive, since human the rough world to which her mother de- beings are not just ambivalent but multi- graded her father, her provocative tom- Cruelly forced as she is to choose , va lent, and do retain different reactions boyishness is both necessar y self- Pearl 's inner conflicts are apparent simultaneously). This scene establishes defense and moral integr ity. But Lewt enough , and described in an archaic , Pearl as her parents ' daughter and her sneakily terrifies and humiliates this Ama- lowbrow idiom which isn 't so false . There vehemenece suggests childishness, zonian soul sister of Melisande by putt ing are two sides to her character. Her good which recurs in her natural nervo usness her on an exceptionally ferocious mount side comes from her love for her father, as she arrives at the McCanles 's. Jess which no man but he can ride . Thus he Scott Chavez . His \" English gentleman\" has come to meet her, and expects , for treacherously reduces her to a feminine ways make of his surname an emblem for some reason , a seven-year-old . He just helplessness. When she still maintains his descendance from an aristocracy, hangs around and when he finally ap- she can shoot he just laughs, and so do proaches her she thinks he 's trying to we . Until the climax , when he finds out which in this case would be the Spanish pick her up and insults him , although the hard way . colonial aristocracy , twice defeated (by eventually his serious politeness reas- the Mexicans and by the Americans). sures her. Thus his expectations match 3. Having humiliated her masculinity, Unlike Jess , he is too sensitive to survive . her hidden feelings-underlining her Lewt proceeds to humil iate her feminin ity . He becomes infatuated with a harsh weakness , which the script, with Hol- He catches this child of nature bath ing , woman ' s energy , and he marries an Indi- lywood 's skill at dramatic surprise , at noon , in a poo l. He sits on her clothes . an saloon girl (Tilly Losch ) from whom presents in the form of destructive At dusk she ' s shivering wi th cold , and Pearl 's sensual side is inherited . Eventu- strength . When Jess approaches her, she he 's still there , thus winning the battle of ally maddened by insolent infidelities , puts him down ; her an xie ty to be her wills. Jess is defeated by both sides of Scott slays her. And literally under the father 's girl and not a slut like her mother her bisexual ity; Lewt defeats them both . shadow of the noose , he commends his makes her humiliate Jess as her mother Pearl earns a small re venge by pushing daughter to Belle 's care . Pearl desperate- humiliated her father. Her unjustified sus- the chicken which he 's eating into his ly wants to be her father's girl , although picion of the worst is normal enough but face (which , inc identally , is a converse she is also , as she knows , her mother's in this context it also expresses the tough of Cagney pushing the grapefruit in his daughter. But the two brothers force both life she 's had to survive at the saloon . girl 's face in PUBLIC ENEMY) . But the her sides to blossom-and the contra- Here, too, she projects onto Jess the weakness of the retaliation is Pearl 's diction tears her apart. Jess, who most sensual intentions which her mother ex- inner weakness. She daren't go further. resembles her father , is too quick to see pertly provoked . And insofar as he ' s its her as all mother and no father . Lewt , who least suitable recipient it also marks her The film is bu ilt on a pattern of social is as cruel as her mother , exploits the as paranoid , although it's normal for peo- ascendancies vs . ascendancies of life abusable weakness she has taken from ple from tough lives to be paranoid about force , and its morality is , finally , Nietz- her father. But it is also the orthodox sweetly reasonable middle-class cour- schean-aspects, and not always the female handicap , the \" real \" Pearl. The tesy , which may strike them as creepy highest, of which are very common point is underscored when , after Jess 's and inexplicable and therefore doubly throughout the popular arts, whether folk, departure , a \" sin killer\" (Walter Huston) , sinister. This opening encounter creates commercial , or hybrid . They ' re not a sort of roving evangelist, arrives and an interesting , because delicately bal- unique to Vidor. Of course , his lyrical shrives' Pearl of her sinful (Indian?) po- anced , crisscross of ascendancies : his energies make them particularly sharp tentiality in a manner so savage that it by background , hers by life force . The and vivid , as does their interaction with becomes a curse. The Hays Code was kindly man and the sp irited woman may what is in some ways a \" bourgeois \" work certainly sensitive to ideological over- make a fine pair or she may prove too ethic and a Whitmanesque transcen- tones, and the criticism of the \"sin killer\" much for him . And in the event the sur- dentalist tolerance , like Whitman 's, of the character controverted the spirit of its plus of life energy in her that Jess 's polite life force , with its sometimes contra- injunction that the Christian religion shall reasonableness can 't satifsy, Lewt can. dictory, aspects. Puritan-based and over- not be criticized . It was presumably to Later, their roles are reversed (Jess ly rationalistic moralities are apt to fail to assuage the Hays Office that the film overstresses her sensuality) and re- recognize the Nietzschean morality as a carries a subtitle disassociating such versed again (Jess's passion becomes morality at all , let alone spot its presence disreputable characters from the re- friendship). in the individual vision woven by Vidor spectable churches. from a variety of sources, presumably not Scenes (and chains of scenes) like always artistic ones. Although Vidor's The duality of all the characters this are likely to be scanned by critics mi xture of the two is a different one , creates a sliding scale of possibilities, for their quotie nt of psycholog ical infor- Lewt's ascendancy of life force over Jess which is carefully maintained so that if mation , and , of course, say nothing represents a Nietzschean concession to any event resolves an issue it does so definite. But given the film 's idiom that Social Darwinist principles, a concession only to open another related one . Simple doesn't make them otiose . Innumerable underlined by Vidor's degree of assent as the characters seem to be , their reac- scenes in RED DESERT (an accidentally to the Ayn Rand philosophy in his subse- tions are always \" open \" and a few spot appropriate countertitle ) work in the quent version of THE FOUNTAINHEAD . examples may clarify the ways in which 4. Just as Lewt's kindness incorpo- FILM COMMENT 23

rates a subtle rejection of Pearl, so Belle 's tions comprise a kind of dialectic-one this Liebest6d in fact carries a crisp suc- ready trust in her goodness exposes her excessive reaction provoking another- cession of contradictions and alterna- protege to demoralization. The sin killer rather than a simple logical consistency- tives . persuades the pious lady to rouse Pearl an assumption which tends to disappear from sleep , and Pearl appears hastily as art comes within the aegis of academic That such synthetic and ambiguous wrapped in an off-the-shoulder Indian rationalism . Hence critics tend to disap- structures have their raison d'eHre as blanket. Belle, too unsuspicious of an prove of this kind of popular art's uncon- against analytic and information-giving intruder who transposes her husband 's cern with specific psychological informa- reasons must be clear enough. For they brutality and prejudice into the religious tion about motives or other single catch the way in which we experience plane , exposes Pearl to this Ahab of the elements in its stories . And so they often most of the feelings that we don 't clearly outbacks. Conversely , Pearl 's hasty pro- experience as thinness of texture , or im- understand. These are most of the pow- tection of her modesty looks like an plausibil ity, or just as contrivance , what erful feelings which most people have outrageous pro vocat ion : the pattern of the popular audience experiences as a' (unless you think that most people have misunderstanding corresponds to her shock which , exhilarating in itself, also clear, definite, and accurate experience first meeting w ith Jess , only here their rings true , and has no need of explana- of their minds , which might be Cartesian common subject is her se xuality rather tion , since emotional irrationality and but wouldn 't be Freudian and which than her childishness . Is this a criticism excess is accpeted as a normal hazard would certainly contradict phenome- of do-gooder trustfulness in general (be- of living . This is why a pattern can func- nological and existentialist criticisms of hind every do-gooder, a tyrant)? or of tion as an equivalent of explicit analysis. false consciousness as either natural or Belle 's human fall ibility? Is it a dramatic Of course, it's temptingly easy for critics endemic in Western culture). DUEL IN THE iron y? or an accusation of Puritan insi- to pour scorn on the \" irrational \" behavior SUN clearly belongs to the type of narra- diousness? The scene reads all four of characters, but often their expecta- tive which in my book Films and Feelings wa ys, although THE CHAMP seems to rule tions of \" rationality \" are quite unreason- I labeled \" the tale\" and which I contrast- out the first. But one would apply deduc- able, or verge on a kind of liberal totali- ed with the moral-cum-psychological ti ve log ic out of conte xt by trying to tarianism , a parallel to one-dimesionality novel , whose features were too often establish which one sense the scene sought in movies (or indeed novels) possesses . It touches on them all , just a la Marcuse .) which had quite other ends in view. (I as a chord touches several notes at once . remember unintentionally hilarious at- 6. In e xactly the same way , it is never tempts to justify Gawayne and the Grene The contrasts and twists which we made quite clear whether Lewt, on realiz- Knight by reference to the criteria as- have noted , as representati ve of many ing his wound is a fatal one , calls for Pearl sumed by Dr. Leavis .) So far as psycho- kinds , are far from being merely contriv- because he loves her, or merely because logy goes , the tale is synthetic rather than ances or glibnesses or tricks. For they he 's a spoiled boy who , suddenly panick- analytic , the defi nition of the exact mo- correspond exactly to Eisenste in's con- ing on realizing that he 's going to die tive , or battery of motives, takes second ception of the dialectic in his theory of alone, wants a mother figure to cuddle place to other interests such as the tex- montage, and to his formulation of con- as he falls asleep . There 's no particular ture of extreme physical experience ex- tent as the shocks inflicted on the spec- reason why both motives shouldn't be pressed in a melodramatic idiom tator. For story lines, also , are analyzable operating , and I take it from his tone of sufficiently sensitized for drama to meet into terms of montage . Two ideas create shock and surprise, that the latter triggers myth . a third , which is all the more forceful for off the former, thus releasing it , at last , being unstated-for displaying no corre- from the egoistic vanities which have In psychologically analytical films , or sponding sign , but originating , dynami- dominated his life. That a frustrated love novels, the defi nition of exact motivation cally , as it were , in the spectator's mind . is the correct e xplanation is hinted at by and its precise consequences looms very And this \" synthesis \" is not , as Eisenstein the sequence itself, although not finally large. This preoccupation has various usually seemed to assume , one-s im- confirmed until the Indian legend reas- roots , notably the Puritan emphasis on ple-ge n e ra 1- id ea-w it h-a d ded -e motio n a 1- sures us , but only afterwards-like the sincer ity , and the Cartesian emphasis on punch . It is a compound of factors , a senator 's weep ing . In both cases a key clear and distinct ideas in consciousness synthesis in a nondialectical sense , of a moment has been not so much desen- as evidence of the indubitable . The merging (whether by shock or gentler timentalized as menaced by an intern- checks applied by Puritanism to rationa- fusion ) of a variety of elements, often al antithesis-a ho llow-a montagelike , lism probably expla in why George Eliot, more than two, simultaneously. (And why twist. for example , is so much more of a mora- not, after all , triolectics , or nlectics , where lizer than Stendhal. With Proust and Equally, the attempts at reconciliation Henry James, analytical techniques be- n is the total number of factors in vol ved? after the final shoot-out are honey- came so refined , and so full , that the combed by suspense as to whether (a) narrator kept suggesting alternative rea- When the parts are rearranged , the Lewt is only tricking Pearl again , in which sons or adding motives, and had difficulty meaning of the whole is totally trans- case we hope she won 't expose herself in choosing between them . In other formed .) by trusting him , or (b) Lewt is sincere , words, a \" moral-analytical\" approach-a in wh ich case we hope she won't distrust concern with the moral calibre of 5. During their deathbed reconcil- him . The suspense isn 't a simple \" will the real reason-was once more becom- iation , Belle expects Senator McCanles she-won 't she \" matter. We 're torn ing \" synthetic ,\" to accommodate the to look at her as she dies . But , whether between two contradictory hypotheses multiplicity of motives, often morally con- through shame, remorse , or residual ob- and two contradictory emotions. And tradictory. Since then , the development stinancy, he cannot. The expression of when at last we 're reassured (mainly by of psychology by Freud (and many other their reconciliation remains incomplete Lewt's sitting sideways to what would be schools) has usurped this role of litera- and suggests that the reconciliation may his natural shooting position ), and Pearl ture , and a nonpsychologcal, conspicu- be so also . Or , at least, that Belle , in her crawls painfully toward him , the se- ously austere style has returned (Robbe- dying moment , is cheated of the knowl- quence still isn't a simple affirmation , Grillet, Beckett, etc). edge of its completeness. After her death, since it 's imbued with suspense as to the patriarch weeps like a baby , an act whether she ' ll reach him before he dies . Nonetheless, literary and film criticism which isn 't at all incompatible with a And after his death we are no less an x- long took it that , if a work wasn 't a simple lifetime's brutality towards his dead wife , ious that she should die too , an attitude lyrical song or epic or some such stan- any more than a lifetime ' s brutality is not exactly devoid of parado x. Far from dardized genre it must be psychologically incompatible with a profound but frustrat- being the simple blood-and-guts wallow analytical in intention . Even Shake- ed love . (Again , the film expects its spec- which critics of the time seemed to see, speare 's plays were subjected (by F. H. tator to understand that conflicting emo- 24 SEPTEMBER 1973

Bradley and his devotees , still flourishing obscure or complex motives. But an ment is visually none xistent but it's an at schoolroom level ) to a search for pre- overall complexity can be reinstated in extremely strong psychological reality , cise motivations or their extroverted various ways. Thus terse dialogue can be the fear it induces being as strong as, equivalent, single-factor causes. Shake- sufficiently at odds with itself to goad the if not stronger than , the satisfactions of speare 's remarkable inability to establish spectator to alternative interpretations B. Similarly, the comedy in comedy often anything precisely enough to satisfy more and to make deductions. exists off the screen, contradicting the than one critic (or, conversely, his re- alarm shown thereon . Again , facial ex- markable ability to accommodate a wide The popular idioms of film have suf- pressions provide a clue to a character's variety of critical analyses) is already a fered from another high cu lture assump- feelings , but the feelings themselves are hint that the psychology of his plays is tion , i.e ., that the cinema spectator pas- not shown , being in visible , and require synthetic rather than analytic . (This isn 't sively watches an action, accepting most the spectator to contribute a compromise to say that they don't have unitary of what he sees but asking no questions, between projection , surm ise , and w hat- themes : clearly they do. Truffaut exag- making no criticisms of what his principal ever sociocultural conventions strike him gerates when he says that any good film identification figures do, and thinking as relevant to the story in particular and can be reduced to a one word theme; but only what is clearly evident, on the the medium in general. Again , temptation many do reduce to one proposition , al- screen, becoming, in fact , so totally im- plots depend on the spectator antici- beit, abounding in subordinate , including mersed in each moment of the action that pating the character doing what he hasn't concessive , clauses. And that complex he can 't think back or ahead , let alone done yet, or may never do , or may do proposition is n 't the experience , or the wonder about \" sophisticated \" things like in an unforeseen manner. Another of content, of film but merely a synopsis contradictory consequences or motiva- Hollywood 's professional skills lies in en- thereof : the trellis not the vi ne , or the title tions. This was compounded by assump- suring that if what is foreseen actually not the poem .) In a synthetic work like tions of the sort identified with Ernest happens , it happens in a way so surpris- DUEL IN THE SUN the situations deve lop Lindgren: that some emphasis by purely ing that it's almost as strong a twist as as they do , not because one \" real \" mo- cinematic style was necessary to activate the unforeseen happening. Montaigne ti ve or feeling overrides or underlies all the potential of content. Oddly enough , observed that \" the art of good wri ting is the others, but because batteries of mo- semiology (as she is too often spoke) has to skip the intermediate ideas,\" and this tives are not just crucial to-indeed , but tended to revive this approach , simply by explains why a semiologically \" com- are of the essence of-human behavior riveting our attention on what happens plete\" text would be so unutterably bor- and experience. Although the Freudian on the screen , whereas it's essential to ing that everyone except lawyers vastly concept of \" overdetermination \" allows remember that the spectator's mind is off prefers the risks of being misunderstood . for this, Freudian-based aesthetic criti- the screen . And his or her mind is n 't a There 's a danger that current interest in cism has often failed to distinguish be- place where nothing happens except a signs may eclipse their function as stimu- tween , to improvise an ad hoc distinction , passive , emulsion like recording of what- li , or as cues , the pOint of a cue being (a) overdetermination , i.e. , things hap- ever's placed in front of it. As Eisenstein that the response is not tautologous to pening for many reasons , each of which quite rightly insisted , the dialectic of the sign, but as different from it as a parry montage creates a tertium quid which to a thrust. would be sufficient by itself, and (b) multi- displays no sign, being the product of the determ ination , i.e., things happening for mind leaping to conclusions about the None of this is intended as a radical many reasons, none of which would be connections between adjacent signs or criticism of semiology, only a comment sufficient by itself-last straw situations (to enlarge the concept so as to include on the temptations of a semiology so being a very simple example. This confu- narrative structures as well as editing) firmly riveted to notions of logical com- sion led to endless trouble, partic ularly reminiscent signs. pleteness (a nd control?) that it overlooks a sort of \" nothing buttery,\" with too many the activity of the spectator's psychology. forms to trace here (although it's worth In other words , what happens on the Yet the filmmaker can be confident that, mentioning the use of Freud ian theory to screen is only part of the content of a on the screen even more rapidly than off suggest that only unconscious reasons film . It is , so to speak , an infrastructure it, people will, unless otherwise distract- are real and that conscious, interperson- for the structure which exists in the mind ed, ask questions like \" Why is she doing al , or social ones are irrelevant or merely of the spectator ; and since this is , after that? \" or \" What will she do ne xt? \" And rationalizations ). all , its intended destination , it's the best I doubt whether any of the batteries of possible place for it. It 's true that this contradictory motives I've suggested for One way or another, critical attach- enables each mind to color or alter the Pearl , Jess, or Lewt are beyond any adult ment to analysis of some kind was used film in ways the artist didn 't foresee and spectator 's intuition . A film is like an ice- in an exclusive way which obscured the might not like , and that the one film exists berg , nine-tenths of it existing under the variety, force , and contradiction of syn- more or less differently within each mind . surface of the screen , or rather, beh ind thetic films . Yet even in most of the novels But only perfectio nists would dismiss this the spectator's eyes. Sometimes a cer- and films which pass muster by psy- as solipsism , even though it means that tain time is required for the audience to chologically analytical criteria (as some artistic communication is rather less think of the various possibilities, so that of Hitchcock's do), the statements of effective than we like to think. But if it what an uninvolved critic construes as precise motive are merely one point in were as perfect as we like to think , criti- \" flabby \" cutting may , in fact, be essential a synthetic pattern or, indeed, just one cism and discussion and reflection about \"atmospheric \" detail among others. They art would also be much less interesting if shot B is not to intervene before A + I are a kind of circumstantial detail no more and annoying than we also like to think . essential than , and often less expressive non-B and subsequent alternatives than , the lyrical implications of the sce- The idea of the spectator as merely (hope-against-hope), have had time to nery, or the sort of detail a character passive to what happens on the screen form in the spectator's mind . It isn't infre- might notice in a stream-of-con- can 't even account for that most banal quent for opposite possibilities to present sciousness novel. An individual 's motive of elements, suspense. For this depends themselves simultaneously (as when is only one factor in any experience , if on the continuous and vivid existence in Pearl may be too unsuspicious or too that experience is fully described . If the the spectator's mind of things which don 't suspicious of the dying Lewt). Thus A point is worth dwelling on , it is because happen. The hero's car doesn 't swerve the popular cinema's frequent combina- off the cliff as shot A suggests it might , generates A + I non-B(1 ) and A + I non- tion of a poorly educated audience, terse but gets back on course in shot B. During dialogue, and external visual action , all shot A, therefore , the spectator invents B(2) although both are not only different militate against the precise statement of what he thinks shot B will be ; the deduced from each other but mutually exclude each other. To overlook these \" ghost\" and sign less idea , A + I non-B. This ele- shots is to read as \" sadomasochistic wallowing \" what is , in fact , a crucial and FILM COMMENT 25

tragic moment: love triumphing over \" miscasting \" of Gregory Peck as Lewt above the novel 's literary one . If such a paranoia, but only after death has oblit- pro vides another such structure , and so , comparison has obvious limitations, erated egoism . Once we 've admitted that perhaps , in its time , did the casting of they 're not , I think , more crippling than Hitchcock c an produce and sustain such Jennifer Jones (straight from THE SONG those of the assumption that a film adap- patterns of contradictions it becomes lu- OF BERNADETTE to Pearl) in a film which tation has a reasonable chance of being dicrous to suppose that Selznick and concludes , moreover, with a pagan mira- reasonably \" faithful \" to the spirit of a Vidor were incapable of managing simi- cle to celebrate a sensual, adulterous, novel , even though it can 't be , since larly comple x structures . and sadomasochistic miscegenation . If I pictures are ab initio different from words. seem to be re vv ing logic up into a delirium Moreover, the film generates its ow n sub- To return to DUEL IN THE SUN : it's rapidly of interpretation , I need only point out that tle yet strong vibrations of mingled self- apparent that Belle is a sensiti ve and the Legion of Decency did , in fact , set and social-criticism , of excessive individ- fastidious woman, that her values differ out to boycott the film and that the \" pro- ualism deplored yet revered . Lewt and from everything Pearl understands, and fanation \" of Jennifer Jones's Bernadette Pearl crawl through sand and stone like that she would be only human if she saw image was thought to have been a sub- the scorpions in L 'AGE D 'OR , and \" sting \" Pearl as a threat to both her sons . Al- stantial factor in its rage . And if it takes one another to death . But theirs is also though bitter colli si on s between them deliriums of interpretation to explain re- I'amour tou which Mother Nature ac- might be expected , Pearl and Belle are actions to films , then they cease to be knowledges by a pagan miracle. immediately attracted to each other; Belle deliriums-e xcept insofar as Hollywood becomes , in a sense , Pearl 's moral movies tend to be delirous as well as Thus the film 's final balance is very champion as well as her ego ideal. Far calculated . ambiguous. For though Lewt's insanely from this \" contradiction \" be ing \" illogi- e xcessive individualism is unreservedly cal \" and merely an implausibly sentimen- Although we 're probably far from pos- deplored , it is his love , not Jess 's, which tal device , it depends on the fact that the sessing a semiological analysis of what Mother Nature honors, while Jess's world continuous contrast makes its psy- distinguishes \" generous \" (in a Nietz- looks like being a grayer, duller, less vital chological \" working out\" superfluous-in schean sense ) faces and styles from place . And Lewt's culpable exaggeration helping the spectator experience Belle 's \" mean \" ones, one can certainly hazard of irresponsible individualism involves actual reaction as cultural rigidity and the intuition that a covert but present another ambiguity, since the spectator jealousy transcended , i.e ., as moral conflict is introduced by the face and can take it as either so extreme as to beauty, and in vol ving maternal magic like style of Jess 's bride-with her delicate leave all other forms of individualism un- Mrs . Apperson 's in THE BIG PARADE (yes , features , her sharp green eyes, her soft, criticized or as a \" significant extreme \" - Pearl would do for Jess and is too good gently firm voice . The green eyes imply an exposition of individualism 's hidden for Lewt ). It 's also worth noticing the the jealousy that she might be expected potentialities and realities , which the \" synthetic\" nature of the factors underly- to feel of Jess 's other love as well , of spectator recognizes as relevant by his ing our expectations of conflict. For they course , as the jealousy which Pearl might own involvement in this story . As McCan- also represent a characteristic Hollywood be expected to feel of the woman who les's discussion makes quite clear, the response to the problem of fi Immaking for now has everything she wanted. Will film is in some sense about the dangers a market with the variety of moral and th ese two jealous women fight? The pos- of pioneering drive becoming coarse, other codes, which America presents. sibilities are interesting, since Pearl has brutal , and inappropriate in a more mod- (Hitchcock observed that a film that a much more evident life exuberance , ern America . But perhaps for Vidor, even works in all American subcultures will while the physical delicacy of the other after his disillusionments about AN AMERI- work allover the world . It's an exaggera- is conspicuous . Would she respond (or CAN romance , the moral of DUEL IN THE tion but has its point.) Synthetic contrasts will she attack) by a subtle yet effective SUN is not so much a generalization about have the advantage that if an audience spite? or by an appeal to Jess 's con- egoism as a warning against letting remains indifferent to one symbol or science (or his more priggish side)? or egoism become slack and self-indulgent. value , another exists alongside it to catch with a hatpin? Or will her apparent Perhaps Pearl is moving towards an its imagination and sustain the tensions . weakness prove real and Pearl produce \" American \" balance of vivacity and mod- The result, at its worst , is that the conflicts further complications by vulgarity and eration , each of which her respectively are heavily weighted-all the good points guilt? In fact, Pearl is broken and Jess 's barbarian and aristocratic parents pos- on one side , the bad on the other-and bride is kind . This twist is followed by a sesses in excess . And the main \" Ameri- become simplistic and standardized, second , in which the refined , school- can \" temptation is McCanles's self-indul- achieving only a lowest common denom- marmish girl, watching the cattle obstruct inator. Hollywood's better artists also the train on their way to the railway sta- gent weakness towards his favorite son work to highest common factors . tion , has the idea of building a spur line Lewt, who is himself guilty of having which will enable the cattle to be picked found no socially constructive outlet for Film semiologists tend to restrict up here . Like the writer in THE WEDDING his egoism , and , therefore, no community themselves to thoroughly archaic cod- NIGHT, she 's practical. She 's gently hard- to engage and energize his sensitivities . ings like the bad guy in black and the headed and the girl for Jess. But Jess is not inspired-and there an- good guy in white-which is a pity , since other \" American \" danger lies. If Lewt , the movie moralities often polarize around Once these unstated elements are al- train wrecker shocks us, he also extorts subtler points of gesture, pose, and phys- lowed , DUEL IN THE SUN becomes melo- a McCanles-style indulgence from us as iognomy . A favorite suspense device is drama in the sense that WUTHERING much as from his father . His gangster having the meanest acts and attitudes HEIGHTS is melodrama (Wyler 's version of insolence probably attracted Forties au- perpetrated by the man with the most the novel may have been as important diences almost as much as Cagney 's did . generous lineaments, and longer or as GONE WITH THE WIND in inspiring the shorter narrative structures are built transition from the hopeful romantic films If we 're drawn by Jess and Lewt alter- around this contrast considered as a rid- of the Thirties Borzage-style , to the love- nately, and ambivalently, the result must dle (resolved when , for example , the mild hate themes of the Forties). Agreed , the be a continuous moral suspense . In MON- and friendly \"victim \" turns out to have spiritual perversity of Emily Bronte 's SIEUR VERDOUX , Chaplin achieves a very wronged the hero before the film began ). lovers is infinitely more inspired , inge- comple x mi xture of Jess (the gray, What constitutes a generous counte- nious, and reckless than Selznick's responsible, domesticated lover) and nance isn 't always too easy to analyze, influential but careful blend of Western Lewt (the psychopathic murderer) which particularly with characters like Kirk epic and family drama. Nonetheless, his is all the more disturbing for involving , Douglas in Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE. The or Vidor ' s style seems to me several cuts invisibly but omnipresently, his renowned and then renounced tramp persona. 26 SEPTEMBER 1973

Pearl , as a simultaneously vengeful and be Pearl 's father, although he resembles, compositions , or visual composition wi th- altruistic agent of moral retribution , an- in his kindly patience , an older version in a specific shot.) The twist is enhanced ticipates the heroes of the cycle of Fifties of Jess (he's more mellow than Jess by the switch from an emphatically spatia l \" revenge Westerns \" - with Randolph about her feelings for Lewt, but con fronta ti on to the nostalgic non vis ual Scott (for Budd Boetti che r) or James insufficiently free of the Code of the West one of past loyalty , and th is sh ift of \" me- Stewart (for Anthony Mann) combining not to draw and die) . The pattern is pro- dium \" wi thin the medium corresponds to personal hatred with social rectitude , in jected out into the casting , since Lillian the contrast , with in a shot , bet ween a what were , virtually, edulcorated versions Gish and Lionel Barrymore are obvio usly vi sual element and a dramatic one - e.g ., of the Ahab theme , but wi th a hydra- intended to have a special appeal to older the meaning of a line of dialogue against headed gang of baddies instead of one filmgoers. Their deathbed scene is the an incongruous setting . It continues the white whale . American cinema 's last great burst of diminuendo implicit in the earlier phase Griffithian sentiment and the last master- and it creates an inconvenient anticlimax, Critics occasionally remind us that the piece of American movie primiti vism . in that the battle we anticipated is avert- Greeks knew how their tragedies wo uld ed. A substitute clima x is found by movi ng end, and go on to imply that this made However haphazardly the film was im- a personal consequence rap idly into the the experience more profound , more provised , the impeccable structure of the foreground . McCanles falls from his deeply ritualistic , than that of modern final cut may be illustrated by its use of horse and Jess is banished , leading rap- suspense drama. One 's general agree- the theme of trains . ment is subject to an important reserva- idl y to his too cold abandonment of Pearl. tion, since (a) publicity , reviews, and 1. McCanles confronts the train , the 2. Lewt derails a train , as commented wo rd-of-mouth often fore wa rn us how a cavalry and the flag 9 The camera tracks film will end ; (b) flashbacks may intimate earlier. Gi ven less selfishness and narrow or establish the hero 's doom in the first reel ; and (c) both the tone of the drama David O. Selznick . Joseph von Sternberg and Jennifer Jones on the set of DUEL IN THE SUN . and some act committed by the hero all make it all but certain that the story w ill back along his rank of armed riders to family pride , he might instead , have re- end tragically. With us , as w ith , presuma- show the cavalrymen taking up their posi- conciled egoism and altruism in a useful bly, the Greeks , not merely cu riosity but tions opposite McCanles' rank ends. That destructiveness-blowing up unhealthy real suspense may be deflected onto of cavalrymen goes on . Spatially , a vis ual sewers , like the heroes of THE CITADEL, explanations of the characterizations and diminuendo (o ne line stops ) becomes a or leading attacks , like Colonel Rogers events leading up to the finale . And it is dramatic crescendo (t he balance of in NORTHWEST PASSAGE. these which determine the finale 's real power ). It 's also worth observing that the sense, partly as contributory experi- battle line emphasized by the contrasting 3. Jess 's bride-to-be returns with him ences, partly because they determine forces and backtracking camera is at on the train and has the idea of building whether any human meaning survives- right angles to the previous line of ten- the spur line to facilitate the transport of and if so , which one. While suspense and sion, which was the forward penetration the cattle. Thus, without bloodshed or tragic inevitability may seem logical op- of the railway . (Such mise-en-scene is domination , the McCanles empire can posites, they 're certainly not psy- continue to grow. It's a Vidorian solution chological opposites, being a particular quite as meaningful as a cut contrasting form of a common condition , hope vs. (individualism + acquiescence + enter- fear. Eve n if we know that a film con- ' One ' s assumes that numerical inferiority alone cludes in an across-the-board nihilism , wouldn't daunt McCanles. But whether the flag prise = America 's fecundity and fertility we can pick up enough hope (by our wi thout the ca valry wo uld awe him as it does is = the opposite of the desert). Yet it exists identification with the hero 's hope) for equally uncertain . And part of the film 's interest in a kind of in visible equilibrium with our suspense and inevitability to coexist and is its quick tension as to w hether his motivation feelings of sadness, of flatness , on behalf conflict throughout. is a case of multideterm inat ion or overdete rmina- of both McCanles and Pearl and the ani- tion , or whether the reason he states stands alone. mal vi gor for which they stand. Jess 's From a Freudian point of view , the As it could . Otherwise. it's of a p iece w ith the film 's bride comes from the world of H.M . Pul- geometry of DUEL IN THE SUN'S plot is quite emotional structure that morally contrary reasons ham , Esq ., insofar as deep and reason- astonishing , and an amazing sequence -power and patriotism-should combine to deter- able friendship replaces the infatuation mine his attitude . of corollaries derive from the combination of four Oedipal \" triagulations.\" (1) Pearl loves and is loved by two brothers ; (2) Pearl 's father was the lover of those brothers' mother; (3) Pearl 's real mother is morally her \" wicked stepmother \" (sirice morally Pearl is her father 's girl) ; (4) Pearl 's foster mother is both her prospective mother-in-law and her CUl- tural \" fairy godmother.\" There is also an oedipal-homosexual rivalry (Lewt-Jess- McCanles) whose implications ricochet on through Pearl 's bewildering variety of father figures , some benevolent, some accusatory (Scott Chavez, Senator Mc- Canles, Sam Pierce, the sheriff whom Pearl shields from Lewt's gun , and the sin killer, whose ferocious puritanism bal- ances Pearl 's mother's ferocious promis- cuity). The oedipal undertones are em- phasized by a confusion of generations . Thus (1) Jess expects Pearl to be a little girl and (2) Sam Pierce is old enough to FILM COMMENT 27

of opposites (although its deeper bond be?) She fires into the air. Rationally , it spiritual , on behalf of any particular au- may create more intense fe elin gs ). None- is a signal to Le w t of her arri va l, but, teur. Fifteen years later, John Huston will theless , our concern for Pearl gives the irrationall y, it is the ritual summoning , the scene its sense of a d yi ng fall into a ritual challenge to the dark forces . We work out another permutation of many of paternalist, platonic friendship , of pas- have entered the kingdom of the Border the same elements . THE UNFORGIVEN fea- sionate fulfillment with nowhere to go. - or Appalachian-Ballads, of (given a desert for a fertility myth! ) Gawayne and tures Au d rey Hepburn as the orphan half- Th e steam locomotive already belong s the Grene Knight. And the association , breed reared with two foster-brothers to the realm o f the mythic , and the fi lm by contrast , with a fertility myth is prompt- (Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy) and the has othe r myth ic elements . The sun is ly reversed into a quite obvious fertility foster mother , once again , is Lillian Gish , prefigured in the huge gaming w heel in image, w hen the supernatural elements associated , once again, with a grand whose glare Chavez watches his wife 's (which began with the sin killer) culmi- piano . In the Selznick mov ie , McCanles flirtations-and it casts its hollow black nate in the Indian legend of the cactus bangs his stick angrily against the floor. shadow in the form of the noose silhou- flower w hich blooms , once yearly , in this when he hears her playing (\" Beautiful etted on the wall as Chavez bids Pearl spot only. The cactus flower is , of course , Dreamer ,\" or dreams of Chavez?). In farewell . McCanles and the sheriff recall \" the briar and the rose \" growing on Huston 's film , she plays by way of retort that \" the Indians lit a fire in the night love rs ' graves in English folklore-the to the Red Indians' menaCing war when a c hief's son was dying \" and one dead lovers conjoined. dance .' 0 And as Pearl must shoot Lewt, can sense , even if one doesn 't analyze the most deeply loved and hated of her it , that the chief's son sy mbol ized the One touc h certainly looks like Vidor 's. foster brothers, Audrey Hepburn has to tribal com mun ity 's fertility and that the McCanles hates the wire fences of the shoot her real , Indian brother in the face DUEL IN THE SUN . Jennifer Jones. small ranchers , and it is Jess who cuts when his war-party attack her foster night fi res compensated for h is failing the first strands of his father's wire . But, mother 's log cabin. In the earlier film , a energy by reviving the source of all en- as the wire cutting goes on, a loose ergy , th e sun , in its darkest hour . The strand cur ls around and clutches at the lanky, itinerant preacher (Walter Huston ) differences matter as much as the simi- cutter's leg . The detail is emphasized points out that the half-breed girl means larities (Lew t is the chief 's son , his death although it has no narrative sense , and trouble , and in THE UNFORGIVEN a lanky is a moral one ; and all sense of \" triba l\" no clear meaning . But one might surmise mist-enshrouded rider says much the community, even within the family, has the sense that the in vas ion of pri va te same \" been shattered). The meeting of Lewt the empires isn 't going to be wo n without a outlaw and his self-indulgent father is nasty litt le backlash from w hich the little The dissimilarities of these two films silhouetted against the setting sun . men are going to suffer. Maybe it 's the are innumerable, which confirms that civilized equivalent of the snake along the these common images are part of a CUl- Pearl , trekking out to their Liebestbd, Apache trail. At any rate , Vidor gi ves us tural heritage and not merely the deliber- must \" carryon past the mission station \" the fuller story behind that little detail ate, spiritually plagiaristic variations on a (into regions where pagan , alien , or evil nearl y ten yea rs later-for barbed wi re , successful film in which Hollywood end- forces still rule) and keep \" follow ing the in the battles between big ranchers and lessly indulges . One difference is particu- Apache trail \" (accepting the wildest side little men , is the primary fetish of THE MAN larly interesting , as almost symmetrical, of her nature). Thus her Indian side is WITHOUT A STAR . though . In the earlier film , Pea rl' s Indian justified . A coyote frig htens her horse, blood is an issue throughout , while in the and she must continue on foot, flattening Many of the film 's themes and motifs herself to drink from a waterhole, like the are public property, of course. As part second the tragic necessity of keeping snakes which inhabit the region. (Is that of a culture 's iconography, they are it secret dri ves Lillian Gish to a barbaric snake Lewt, the phallus? or what she , in beyond all possible copyrighting , legal or act-lynching an innocent, albeit malevo- her masculinoid treachery , is going to lent, man . If, surprisingly, the Huston movie, while efficacious enough , can't hold a \" In Hollywood iconography of the Fort ies, the piano (usually ennobled from upright to grand) rep re - sented art in its fam iliar, yet feminine aspect, whereas modern paintings were associated with pretentious and sinister characters . No doubt the reason was that piano lessons were everyday suburban matters while modernistic paintings were not-and art which isn 't understood is qu ickly associated with madness , chaos, moral degen- eracy. The war years were the great period of \" concerto \" pictures , probably because that put men back at a now nostalgically Momistic instru- ment, but masterfully. In THE UN FORGIVEN , the attacking Indians withdra w, taking the piano to be white man 's magic , as perhaps it is white woman 's. THE 5.000 FINGERS OF DR . T. is the locus classicus of piano lesson socio-psychopathology and ex- plains everything . The piano looms large in JOHNNY GUITAR also, and the Momist connections are un- mistakable when Vienna (Joan Crawford ) hides yo ung Turkey from the posse by sitti ng at the piano with the adolescent hidden under her petticoats. \" Similar figures of malevolen t or benevolent wisdom appear in various Huston movies. In the Selznick film the sin-k iller is played by John 's father , Walter Huston . In JOHNNY GUITAR , also, a respectable woman , Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) , vindicti- vely eggs the lynch mob on . One can almost imag ine an apocalypti c script pitting the McCanles ran ch against, not the railroad , but the Sioux with Belle revealing Vienna, whose gambling saloon (where Pearl's mother dances ... ) is lowering the tone of the growing town (and the lowering of a town 's tone is an importan t consideration in the church scene in HIGH NOON). It wou ld only need the young Audie Murphy as Turkey and Jennifer Jones in the Audrey Hepburn part to make a real family reun ion. Nor is it diffi cult to imagine a scene in which Lewt draws a gun on Johnny, who , of course, is armed , only wi th \"a cup of coffee and a smoke . \" 28 SEPTEMBER 1973

candle to the Selznick-Vidor, it's partly The to have lost its faith in that pantheistic because the battle against the Indians fFountainhead energy flooding through the human indi- eclipses the impact of the internal ten- vidual , which may bring him either worldly sions for which DUEL IN THE SUN provides (1949) or moral success through often parado x i- neither scapegoat nor counterattraction . cal forms-from the clown laughing ac- Huston 's style, like Zinnemann 's in HIGH The principal conflic t here lies be- ceptance in THE CROWD , to the self-tran- NOON , is a little too scrupulous , too Forties tween the false egoism and the real. False scendence of military discipline in liberal in its criticisms of the general egoism is represented by Gail Wynand NORTHWEST PASSAGE. But so often in the Western myth , and so it turns a potentially period of the film noir, our hero or his radical critique into a criticism which reg- (Raymond Massey), a newspaper tycoon best buddy is goaded into misplaced fury isters while the film is running , but is by a rage for revenge , or childhood fric- rapidly forgotten in retrospect. The Indi- who can see no further than profit (which tions , or a bad environment, or a festering ans as collectively vi llainous remain far he achieves) and power (which he seeks spirit in the air . more vivid than Lillian Gish 's atrocity , and in a self-defeating form , by pandering to a sort of Indians-should-shoot-Indians fe- the prejudices of the masses). He isn 't Since BILLY THE KID , Vidor had chosen rocity prevails over the film 's nurture- egoistic enough to seek both spiritual not to ask at what point energy becomes over-nature environmental liberalism, profit and social power, which would re- feroc ity , or remorselessness becomes which is implicit in the fact that no one quire him to benefit the community by amorality, or one person 's life force can- knew Audrey Hepburn was part-Indian , leading it. The champion of true , vision- nibalizes or stunts another's . But if DUEL and in her cleaving to her foster family ary egoism is Howard Roark (Gary Coo- IN THE SUN was correct , America had against racial and biological loyalties. per). A genius among architects, Roark come to the point when those questions and his visionary schemes are mocked had to be answered. And Vidor's fear The mixture of Selznick's soft opu- or resented by everyone but his old seemed to be that the answer allowed too lence and Vidor 's energy makes an ex- mentor-whose death, from despair and much of Jess 's weakness and too little traordinary conjunction. The Sternberg drink, leaves him with only one, dan- of Lewt's strength-or too much of H. M. touch seems evident , not only in the gerously lukewarm friend, Peter Keating Pulham , Esq ., before he awoke to the life garish baroque of the saloon se- (Ken t Smith), spokesman for the \" com- force wi thin him , and too little of Billy the quences , but the fall of shadow. Often mon-sense \" path of compromise. Kid . Pearl ' s face is obscured by it , and al- though we see her expression partially, Roark 's projects make him the butt of On a spiritual level , certainly , THE or by glimpses, we must often guess at FOUNTAINHEAD resolves the dilemma . If her feelings by the twist of her hips , the a campaign led by Wynand 's newspa- individualistic wi llfulness loses this world , tension of her clothes, and sensualized it still wins the next. As Vidor delicately emotion going far beyond Jane Russell 's pers; but he finds another, also insidious observes : \"Mora lity is only the first cleavage in the hay. Jennifer Jones 's half-ally in Keating 's fiancee, Dominique level . .\" -which may help to explain succulent, nervous, pantherine move- (Patricia Neal). A leader without a cause , how the director of some extremely vio- ments convey a passionate energy like Dominique chose Keating because, lent sequences can (in an interview) de- a divine madness. And though frustration , being of the superior kind, she felt she clare his lifelong , sympathetic interest in rather than fulfillment, is its key , one can't could never fall in love, and so se lected Christian Science. After all , a secu- help remembering how Vidor in HALLELU- a convenient mediocrity. But now Domi- larized, Puritan strenuousness might well JAHI respected , in his virtuous rustics and nique warms to Roark 's work, and to his combine with an Emersonian transcen- his saloon slickers alike , a kind of exis- tough, honest way with her smooth en- dentalism to produce a vi talism whose tence in the body which from another tourage. A round of alternating and recip- second level emphasizes fullness rather angle approached the wavelength of rocated slaps and kisses finally over- than correctness. In general, Vidor's films Norman Mailer's remarks on \" hip \" and comes her indifference, even as Roark are less concerned with right and wrong the body in \" The White Negro .\" The keeps his spiritual distance. than wi th affirming a disciplined energy convergence is all the more fascinating as eternal delight, and with proposing to in that Vidor comes to it from a kind of When Keating, also an architect, finds both losers and the unlucky that resil- foursquare rustic innocence, and Mailer ience is a better protection than is the from experience of city anomie.\" Several himself faced with a project which obliges appealing (and binding) of oneself to an shots generate astonishing psy- overscrupulous, merely negative justice chological tension from the conjunction him to admit his inadequacy, he begs -whose observance would destroy en- of Vidor 's free space (ei ther epic or un- Roark for help; and Roark, unconcerned ergy in the weak and the strong . stable) with Sternberg's \" secretive \" with fame or money, agrees, stipulating lighting , or from Vidor's bodily exuber- only that his designs be carried out with- Vidor 's transcendentalism is only too ance chafing against the restraining pre- out alteration or compromise. Eventually, vul nerable to infiltration by either Social cision required by Sternberg 's light-and- the project is compromised. Roark per- Darwinism or amoral irresponsibility.' But shade. One suspects that Selznick suades Dominique to dynamite it for him , Vidor 's moral concerns ally in his art with himself dreamed up, or transmitted , cer- and faces trial. Now Wynand 's political lyricism rather than casuistry. Justice and tain tableaulike long shots, given the use and personal involvements set him to equity aren 't his primary subject, but he of tableau like night silhouettes at key attacking and defending Roark alternate- does try not to consent in their flagrant moments in GONE WITH THE WIND (whether ly. But Roark 's impassioned defense of outrage , even as he pursues his primary Selznick suggested them to Victor Flem- the individualistic principle behind his object: the affirmation , in winner and ing there , or remembered them from admittedly illegal action convinces the loser alike , and in a variety of viable Fleming , those who know more about jury. Twelve men good and true stand forms , of a Good that is energetic rather their work will be better placed to guess). firm against mass hysteria. DUEL IN THE SUN certainly looks Vidor's , ' Similar points have been pressed against but it's also good to think of it as collabo- Wynand commits suicide, but not be- Nietzsche ad nauseam , and doubtless would be rative film : more concerto than solo. fore acknowledging Roark 's worth with a against William Blake, were he less obscure . commission for a massive memorial: the Equally , Christian Science is vulnerable to attacks \" Other passages are interesting to compare-and- Wynand Building. The film concludes as like that of Voltaire on Candide 's Pangloss . But contrast , e.g ., NORTHWEST PASSAGE and Mailer on Roark stands atop the towering structure, what Vidor's optimistic Americanism glosses over Pacific jungle patrols. and an external elevator whisks Domi- is not so much \" acts of God \" and natural disasters , nique up to nestle by his side . Thus, in as strenuousness congenita lly turning co mpeti- America, true egoism may still overcome. ti ve, and competition turning cut-throat-with \"o n- ward and upward\" looking ever more like an uphill DUEL IN THE SUN , and the gathering rat race . bitterness of the film noir, seem to have set Vidor a double challenge. First, America (or Hollywood) seemed FILM COMMENT 29

-• - than pious, expansive rather than con- strained , inspiring rather than scrupu- THE FOUNTAINHEAD. lous, pragmatic rather than neurotic- and , when confronted with evil , as 30 SEPTEMBER 1973 destructive as necessary , without com- plexes . Thus , Vidor must have wanted to show some constructive resolution of the pes- simistic tensions of DUEL IN THE SUN . From one angle , the Selznick film is innocuous enough : a tragic conflict between two rights , each excessive . But , in the course of a discussion between McCanles and his \" friendly enemy,\" the local sheriff, the question is quite explicitly enlarged to one of America 's future ; and in this con- text, both rights come close to being radically wrong . The Code of the West is gun law, is psychopathic . Yet to ob- serve \" gray-flannel \" law is to diminish vitality . And in railroad-ridden (modern , industrialized) America, only death re- mains for all those straightforward ener- gies symbolized by the wild Pearl. She might have stood alongside McCanles himself in his log-cabin youth (better per- haps than Belle), or toiled like an Amazon in the vitalist community of OUR DAILY BREAD . But by midcentury , as Vidor must have sensed , few Americans were inter- ested in Arcad ias . The railroad was ev- erywhere, and which side of the tracks you came from mattered more and more. With THE FOUNTAINHEAD , Vidor boldly sets out to storm the citadel . (The earlier title is still appropriate .) That his hero is a visionary architect suggests some sort of synthesis between conflicting ele- ments in THE CHAMP : (1 ) Linda 's sense of environment , now more private in its con- cerns; and (2) the champ 's life force , more sophisticated and formidably con- trolled , but running similar risks , neither lost in individualism nor departing from it. From another angle , THE FOUNTAIN- HEAD brings a Populism based on individ- ualism closer to a synthesis with the posi- tive impulses of Big Business in AN AMERICAN ROMANCE , asserting them through more subtly different circum- stances and in a newly grueling way . In doing so , it acts as a reply to DUEL IN THE SUN . A \" monstrous \" or limitless egoism , it argues , need not be destructive of America , of others , or of self. Indeed, egoism may integrate them all. Against difficulties , it is true . Ayn Rand in her writings , and Vidor in this film 's urgent style , both seem to think that these difficulties, though they were always for- midable , were greater than ever in post- war America . Big Business , with its trusts and its cartels , had been an obvious object for attack at an earlier period , when Popu- lism still had a vestige of Socialism in it, and even during the political eclecticism of the New Deal. But with a rampant McCarthyism smearing even middle- liberalism with the Communist brush (leading to a liberal proclamation of \" the

end of ideology\" ), any radical question- co-operative. And though it's true that the In its concern wi th capitalism and a ing of the morale and morality of society breadwinner-clown in THE CROWD and the society ' s reigning morality, THE FOUNTAIN- in direct relationship to the Big Business humble family in HALLELUJAH! would seem HEAD advances its aggressi vely right- condemned to belong to the mediocrities wing viewpoin t among a cycle of film s spirit was a bold enterprise. Ayn Rand 's of the mass, it's also true that Vidor's w hich include THE BEST YEARS OF OUR novel must have appealed to many who interest (at least since H. M. PULHAM , ESQ .) LI VES (the bank manager 's dilemma) , THE were thoroughly bemused by the obvious centers on those who try to construct MAN IN THE GRAY FLANN EL SUIT , and EXECU- triumph of Big Business at the expense societies, or repudiate them-w ho take TI VE SUITE . Thereafter the emphasis shifts the risk of spiritual egoism. slightly but significantly from principles of the pioneering American morale. At- and conscience to the mechanism of tacking from the right, Miss Rand was Wynand the publisher is nerve less social control , as per A WOMAN ' S WOR LD freer to criticize what capitalism had be- through infection rather than radically ( ugh! ), PATTERNS , and THE BIG KNIFE. come than liberals were to make relatively bad , and his press campaigns are , at Eventually, any sort of approach to the common-sense points. (One such point: least , good by turns-even if they 're as nitty-gritty gets softened w ith the sleight if you continue to preach the self-made fickle as is Dominique 's ambivalent of hand of comedy, musical or otherwise man as an ideal , at a time when power response to Roark. Wynand 's failure lies (THE APARTMENT , STALAG 17, ONE TWO is becoming increasingly centralized in in not becoming the strong leader whom THREE , HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITH- what Eisenhower would later call \" the Americans deserve, and to whom they OUT REALLY TRYING , THE PAJ AMA GAME , military-industrial complex ,\" then wide- respond , at Roark 's trial (a point that etc). Whatever its dogmatisms and spread self-hatred, a generalized bitter- Vidor anticipates during the discussion of roughnesses , THE FOUNTAINHEAD dares ness, or a nihilistic violence must result- the co-operative 's constitution in OUR some radical moral criticisms of the sys- even if fun morality replaces achievement DAILY BREAD) . Keating , similarly, has taken tem , w hich does put it alongside some morality , and softens the edges a little .) the negative path of compromise. But equally underestimated films by Dm ytryk , At any rate, enough Americans clung to both men are exceptional enough to see Wilder, and Fuller : GIVE us THIS DAY , AC E the pioneer myth to make Ayn Rand 's their own failure , and to admit Roark 's IN THE HOLE , and SHOCK CORRIDOR . ( Fuller novel a massive best-seller. pre-eminence. The one really rotten again brings up the rear , w ith a Forties apple in the Paradise of the Virgin Conti- film made memorably in the Sixties ' ) Although her inspiration for Howa rd nent is the intellectual left, represented Roark is pretty generally agreed to have by one Ellswo rth M. Toohey , architecture As it is , the scenario offers an in man y been Frank Lloyd Wright, and one or two critic on Wynand 's paper . He is also ways ve ry interesting four-cornered con- traits about Roark 's mentor may recall trying to unionize its staff and sneak his flict of egoism-cut-egoism (or inner- Louis Sullivan , Miss Rand 's novel is basi- way to powe r by simultaneously collecti- direction-cut-outer-direction , even in a cally an exposition of ideas. Armed by its vizing the paper and mystifying the rich -- managerial society) . Vi dor 's sense of the success, she wrote a screen adaptation two thoroughly parasitical and mean- subtle interplays of assertion and acqui- that was not merely explicit, but quite souled activities. For just as the critic escence required by a profound individu- didactic . It asserted that man 's nature is creates nothing , merely cashing in on the alism, w hether its situation be cruelly brought to its pitch of moral perfection artist's creativity , so the unionist creates abrasive (THE CROWD) or insidiously com- by a SWrm-und-Drang , ego-uber-alles no wealth , but merel y negates and grabs , selfishness . This socially beneficial to build his paltry little \" empire \" of also- fortable (H. M. PULHAM , ESQ .) , makes him egoism is distinguished from a merely rans . one of the fe w directors capable of hu- carnivorous individualism by the blunt manizing a boldly asserted , and propa- assumption that progress throughout his- Rand 's ideas of selfishness show dis- gandizing , ideology. tory is owed to egoistic Supermen who , tinct signs of strain-and Vidor's mellower in the process of benefiting themsel ves, knowledge of the wo rld looks like nuanc- Vidor commissioned Frank Lloyd give their less dynamic fellows the benefit ing it-when the film stresses Roark's W right to execute Roark's designs, but of a little spin-off . It took an implacable fidelity to his and his old teacher 's ideals , was overruled by Warner Brothers , egoism to tame fire, invent the wheel , and even as the dying and disappointed man whose substitutes we re uninspiringly \" fu- drag the mass (or morass) of mediocre recants them , and even if he himself must turist.\" One can only speculate how Vidor mankind from its cowering caves into the face a similar fate . As the ambulance might have responded to Wright's cre- atomic age. The true egoist isn 't the petty streaks along Manhattan streets, the ations-\" rainbows\" to balance the profit-seeker who simply battens on his Cross looms over the skyscrapers. This \" cross \" ? Otherwise , one is surprised that fellows . True egoism is sufficient unto symbol is a counterfeit-in its evocation the combined power of Cooper, Vidor, itself, requires only its own approval , and of sacrifice , fidelity , and altruism-of the and Jack Warner couldn 't prevail to at cannot exploit its fellows ' limitations for one in AN AMERICAN ROMANCE that struck least modify Ayn Rand 's comic-strip dia- merely trivial ends. Alas , today man 's even the Positif critic for its bold nobility: logue. Maybe such clarity could seem to healthy egoism is the victim of mass soci- a rainbow emerges from the Atlantic mist contribute to the film 's air of urgency . It ety , which spreads a psychic plague of as a steamship of immigrants approaches certainly avoids the characteristic Hol- envy, jealousy, impotence, guilty altruism, the New World. Maybe it's precisely lywoo d ambiguities , which would defeat Socialistic liberalism , and Communism. Roark 's un-Christian virtues which sa ve its purpose. And although it's disconcert- \" The world is suffering from an orgy of him from having to follo w the old man ing that the villain should declare himself self-sacrificing .\" Even in modern Ameri- along the way of the cross. But his will- almost as boldly as in a Victorian melo- ca, the very captains of industry, who ingness to go through that, if he must, drama (''I' m the sneaky intellectual , out should also be athletes of the spirit, are makes Ayn Rand 's \" egoism \" look more spiritually debilitated . Either they have like what David Riesman called \" inner- ' No need , I hope , to dwell on the variety of options , been infected by the ambient hypocrisy direction \" -an idea which , I think, accu- with both Vidor and Fuller as deeply worried right- and moralism, or their visions have lost rately embodies what is valid in her ideas . wlngers. By and large it's probably true (with a their grandeur, and they have come to At any rate , the conspicuous symbol , hundred e xceptions ) that , in Hollywood , left liber- pander to the mass instead of leading it. now , is not the rainbow but the cross ' alism is reformist as to law but not authoritarian in spirit , that the center and cent er-right are inspi- In THE FOUNTAINHEAD Vidor clearly ' Although Vidor's sympathy even for \" monstrous,\" rat ionalist (i. e ., there ' s no need for laws to make found a useful tool for expressing some sinful heroes offers a way out, the grandly \" evil\" anyone do anything they don 't fan cy) while the of his own beliefs, though it remains un- are also crUCified by modern life .. and Lewt, not extreme right is inspirat ionalist and int olerant of clear where Miss Rand 's end and Vidor's Jess, deserves both death and Pearl. dissent (vide Ellsworth Toohey). McCarthyism begin. Elements in it accord well enough scattered the left liberals, who found some refuge with his interest in the OUR DAILY BREAD In Westerns ; otherwise they could be ca utiousl y critical but rarely positive. FILM COMMENT 31

THE FOUNTAINHEAD . Gary Cooper. adopts another approach , easier for Negro , is relevant enough .) Bogart's big- lovers of the mellower Vidor to misunder- city associations would also assert Roark to bolster my stunted ego by devious and stand, yet not without interest. The pains as a more powerful successor to Sam in evil machinations\" ), it's possible that a and temptations Roark must face are STREET SCENE-the anti-gangster , who more relaxed , more realistic idiom would established by the old man 's death , which sought new horizons and returned , his have camouflaged such declarations by on paper might seem enough to set up violence undiminished , but disciplined by the brandy-and-cigars frankness which a dialectic with Roark's apparent impas- deeper thought. Roark is a \" private eye \" intermittently obtains among the socially sivity and unflinching arrogance , the with a grander vision: instead of going successful. emotion being all the more powerful be- down those mean streets, one cleans cause he doesn 't express it-strictly ac- them up. He is a \" public enemy \" plan- What 's harder to take is the paucity cording to Kuleshov. Somehow, though , ning, not just to take over the city, but of rationalization, or even of plausible this doesn 't operate, partly because of to transform it from the ground up . His good reason . And Roark is so constantly other factors in the general context: the visions evoke, ironically, two gangster- called a genius that it becomes an uphill \" labeling \" sets up all the characters as film slogans : \" The World Is Yours, \" and struggle for even Gary Cooper to secure one-dimensional (even whe n they later \" Top of the world , Ma .. . \" 5 much identification wi th him , as we turn out not to be!) ; we become more couldn 't but identify with Capra 's modest, interested in this man and his principles Roark's and Dominique's very tuba-playing Mr. Deeds. Ayn Rand 's and forget the dead man 's struggles ; and directness precipitates a struggle for Egoist tops even Aristotle 's Magnani- Coop's Westerner roles recall a \" strong ascendancy whose outcome is near mous Man and Nietzsche's Ubermensch silent hero \" and an out-of-context enough to a draw to constitute 'equality , by bearing no grudge over the past, or stereotype .' Coop can certainly set a thin the only basis on which egoists can come even the present. He always forgets in- mouth in a bleak face , and he adopts a together. Their bout of slaps and kisses sults , and is simply stating the truth when staccato delivery, blending megaloman- is fittingly fierce , real and generous (less he galls Toohe y by telling him that he ia , matter-of-factness , and a subtly emol- ambivalence than speed! ), like the set-to never thinks of him at all (thus depriving lient brevity. between Birkin and Gerald in Women in him of even the warped narcissism of Love, or Melisande slapping Apperson in being despised) . Conversely, Roark isn 't Once the Westerner image is forgot- THE BIG PARADE. But Dominique also be- allowed to be modest even out of respect ten , it seems that Vidor set out to com- longs to the line of later Vidor heroines, for other people's feelings-which would pose a challenge from the speed and from Pearl to Sheba , whose natural femi- presumably be a self-shriveling , insid- control of Roark 's reactions , from his ninity has been exacerbated by some iously demagogic, hypocritical surrender im mediate trust in his disciplined sociospiritual dysfunction into something to the spirit of mediocrity. When he's reflexes . This tactic works well when the swaggering, masculinoidal , and poten- reduced to menial tasks he doesn 't com- dramatic context gives direct help , as in tially destructive. Melisande's affectionate promise, complain , or ask for privilege or that famous bravura passage, the double if effective slap becomes the tomboy's pity . He wields the pneumatic drill down cadenza of slaps and kisses between two rifle of DUEL IN THE SUN and RUBY GENTRY , in the granite quarry, preferring honest fine egoists . Vidor would dearly have or , as here , a society lady's trousers and sweat to Keating 's fear-inspired compro- loved Bogart as Roark, perhaps because riding crop . In full face at least, Patric ia mise. (About Machiavellian compromises Bogart's comple x countenance is more Neal bears a resemblance to Ayn Rand . Ayn Rand is oddly vag ue , as we ll she intellectual and , haunted by past If Keating incarnates the spirit of fearful might be , and one suspects that it 's on sufferings , creates an immediate and compromise , Dominique seems to per- this point that Vidor began wanting to continuous contradiction-montage by sonify something untouched and disdain- alter the book .) Past errors and sufferings physiognomy-against a speed which ful in the American spirit. Morally ambigu- become equally difficult to handle, since would arise not just from the usual city ous (until inspired) , it persists, latent and Rand 's Egoist , here , is such by virtue of insolence, but from something more pro- \" feminine ,\" at every level of American being simple, natural , and uncomplicated . foundly \" hip. \" (The continuity, of Bel- society. And , helped by Roark, the jurors , mondo as Bogart , and Godard as White and the Wynand-Keating guilt complex , One might have expected the Vidor of it may yet save America. THE CROWD and THE CHAMP to humanize ' Of course Gary Cooper had also been Mr. Deeds . this paragon , perhaps by a va riety of brief a fairly relevant comparison . But somehow the Inevitably , their union is complicated and ambiguous gestures, indicating the \" timeless \" Western image su rvived the social by its erotic unity, or rather is constituted spiritual conflicts which might have changes of the war better than an y Deeds-R oark by it. Except for WAR AND PEACE , THE smashed a lesser man . But instead connection . FOUNTAIN HEAD is the last Vidor film whose ( maybe because Ayn Rand is around) , he love story ends happily. And though one might read the disintegration of Czarist Russia in war as an image for a spiritually capsized America, one must then go on and accept Vidor's remark that, at about this time , his interests widened from American man to man . WAR AND PEACE 'The first comes from a neon sign shining down on the slumped SCARFACE , flushed out of the impreg- nable \" penthouse \" of his absolute egoism . The second comes from WHITE HEAT, where Cagney, standing Oed ipally astraddle an oil tank , achieves his self-destructive apotheosis. Both their fates contrast with Roark 's wind-ruffled triumph atop the tycoon 's memorial. One wonders whether Vidor considered Welles for the Roark role . One suspects that Welles 's every magisterial in flection would have turned the novel ist 's hero-worship Inside-out and upside- down and substituted either the Xanadun ian con- cavity of Kane or the wryly egalitarian , not to say subversive, irony of Mike O'Hara, the \" notorious waterfront ag itator,\" i.e ., docker's union leader, in THE LADY FROM SHANGH AI. 32 SEPTEMBER 1973

is a timeless , atopical film , like SOLOMON AND SHEBA , as distinct from the topicality obvious in THE FOUNTAINHEAD . It would be easy to separate the erotic and social themes , and even to group THE FOUNTAINHEAD with NORTHWEST PASSAG E as a c lear male-chauvinist assertion whereby the male's moral vir ility requires him to set about conquering the woman . Like another poet of unity wi th nature , D. H. Lawrence , Vidor's emphasis on energy must lead to problems of male domi- nance , hierarchy and viri le fraternity .' But if , for La wrence , cosmic energy is se x ual , Vidor seems to see erotic energy as an aspect of a generalized energy whic h has other forms and imperati ves . His heroes are , if anything , more likely to sacrifice their passions for their vocation than the other way around ; and curiously enough , it's this sense of separate energies collid- ing or exerting disruptive gravitational pulls at one another that makes Vidor's love scenes so powerful. It 's not just love , but love and wo rk whose balanced forces (centripetal and centrifugal) make the world go 'round . And Vidor's acceptance of all relat ionships as a rough-and-ready res ilient mi xture of attraction and sever- ance , assertion and acceptance , is as different in spirit as in style from the feline perfectionism implicit in La wrence 's pas- sionate exasperation . When , in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , Roa rk en- trusts Dominique with the task of blowing up the imperfect housing project , it could seem a case of \" he for God only, she for God through him \" -for, though dyna- miting is scarcely a traditional female role, the general spiritual ascendancy remains Roark 's . Vidor 's idea of sexual roles and polarities is traditional enough , with con- venience and principle generally aligned in a way which-and this is impo rtant-is none too rigid . It 's carried over into a general feeling that when things are right it 's a man 's job to exert himself as best he can , in love as in work, and so to overcome whatever reasons a woman might have for resisting , but without wronging her. And this traditional chivalry isn 't merely a mask for dominance, but, rather , a pragmatic , male-feminist response against it. Whether or not the notion of log- cabin wife and mother as helpmate, equal , and matriarch is histor ica l myth (and it probably is) , Melisande 's slapping Apperson down suggests that reciprocity constitutes the mainspring of Vidor's view of sexual relationships. This doesn 't nec- essarily mean a symmetrical reciprocity . Zeke 's mother's sharing her love among her potentially jealous children , and Mrs. Apperson 's guidance of her son , indicate ' Although the artists have some other common THE FOUNTAINHEAD. Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper. themes-the spirituality of the practical, the tactility and creativity of wo rk , pantheism , community-the comparison sustains itse lf none too well , Vidor ' s dynamic pragmatism be ing profoundly at odds with the more febrile mi xture of sensuous detail and cosm ic prophecy in Lawrence . FILM COMMENT 33

the possibilities of Dominique's more the theme of AN AMERICAN ROMANCE might position of having to stage Hamlet with- equivocal position in a more comple x have brought up difficult points about society . Both as socialite and journalist, whether big business, or labor, or some out a Prince, and one can accept what her role is that of mediator, of counsellor , kind of individual , or all three, or none , of conscience , which is precisely what had the best moral right to be above the one is shown as a kind of McGuffin . But gives her role as Roark 's co-saboteur and law , or to remake the law in its own he certainly seems to have counted on henchman its point. Roark finds in her interests . Perhaps the film nair flourishes an ideal antagonist, a mate, and the hope just as certain elements of capital , labor, Wright's designs; and one can hardly of an end to his social isolation. Perhaps , and government arrive at a compromise , after all , she contributed to his conde- at the expense of complications and dys- imagine Vidor's response to them , which scending to defend himself before the functions which , while usually criticized jury, and turning a temptation to martyr- from the left, inspire more or less illiberal would surely have become far more than dom (through megalomania rather than attempts at diagnosis from the right, like Mr. Deeds 's despair) into a triumph . which , as so often , defends freedom of models on a table more like \" rainbows ,\" Finally Dominique , as America 's civic speech by attacking it . conscience, crosses, with Roark, the to contrast with the interiors. There , cer- border into civil disobedience and anti- It's intriguing to speculate on some nomianism .' other possible endings . Would Roark (in tainly, Vidor 's sense of vast, unstably bold Vidor's image) have had no alternative In his autobiography , Vidor merely but to acquiesce in compromise , to resist spaces makes an unusual conjunction mentions the film , and , in later interviews , the temptation to even the most grandi- with film nair lighting, and with interna- confesses his dislike of its ending , al- ose of tantrums , and yet remain unde- though he was apparently under contrac- feated within himself, and , therefore, a tional-style angularity at its most boring tual constraint to observe the book 's. continuous presence , always in there Maybe Vidor , having had to compromise pitching , and holding the line against the and inorganic . Several scenes are played so often , and to satisfy himself with saying spiritual littleness of big business? Would something even when he couldn 't say he , after a spiritual crisis as grueling as before large, gaping fireplaces-con- everything, felt that Roark 's perfection- John ' s in THE CROWD , have contented ism was more tetchy than principled , and himself with designing cheap farms for trasting with the lit hearth-and-home of his sociophallic apotheosis too good to hard-working \" little men \" ? Would he THE WEDDING NIGHT . These vacuous , edgy be true . even have resigned himself to building prestige homes for rich businessmen and interiors, heavily carpeted yet unyield- One would have thought that Roark 's well-endowed universities, being paid for exculpation broke the Hays Code, insofar his name whether or not their occupants ingly hard-edge, have , as antitheses , two as Roark and Dominique conspire to were inspired by them? A few years later, commit a crime which is richly rewarded . Vidor's Man Without A Star turns his back open-air shots: one atop a skyscraper; Any partisan of an Ubermensch theory on American society as decidedly as the must show some concern for problems other Kane (Sheriff Kane) drops his star the other in a stone quarry , where , under of leadership and democracy, and in the dust in disgust at the townsfolk at Vidor's favorite answer seems the inspi- the end of HIGH NOON-although , there , a blazing sky (like a pocket of desert from rationalist switch-over of OUR DAILY BREAD it's for their lack of civic sense and mutual DUEL IN THE SUN), Roark batters at the and NORTHWEST PASSAGE . It parallels a help, their excess of mediocre individu- more or less pragmatic putdown of dem- alism without community. stone, wresting something constructive ocratic dogma-though perhaps only in out of Mother Earth , or Dame Fortune, a generally democratic context-and the Vidor wryly asserted that if Roark was explicit dismissal of Socialism in OUR right to demolish his buildings , then he , even at her most grudging-hearted' DAILY BREAD and STREET SCENE . Left-wing the director, should have destroyed his intellectuals are criticized in THE FOUN- film . When he put this point to Warners , Meanwhile New York 's nightscape blazes TAINHEAD , and Positif notices a conspicu- who were insisting on the climactic sabo- ous flatness in all the scenes involving tage , they replied , \" Right , and we ' ll see like a collective vision of these Easter capital-labor conflicts in AN AMERICAN RO- if a jury exonerates you .\" Thus, ironically, MANCE . American democracy seems near the film enters its own moral continuum , Years of the American Dream . breakdown in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , al- negating the faith which it affirmed. And though hope remains that Roark's strong after the problems of AN AMERICAN RO- At once bleak and bold , THE FOUNTAIN- leadership will bring out the jury's basic MANCE , DUEL IN THE SUN , and THE FOUN- HEAD both moves and goads this critic , pragmatism and place the individualistic TAINHEAD , it's understandable if Vidor 's principle where it belongs-above the hopes for America flagged . Its sense of at least, into indicating , at the risk of law . All of which made a pretty pernicious solitude would have been enhanced in brew during the years of Senator Joe a project very dear, apparently , to Vidor's seeming something of an Ellsworth M. McCarthy, of whom Ayn Rand was a heart: THE SPIRIT OF ST . LOUIS , about the vociferous supporter. Profoundly treated, record-breaking solo flight of a man who, Toohey , his own counterposition , which perhaps by chance , became another is somewhere (and I'm unsure where) in ' This tendency , particularly in Amer ica , is more hero of the American right. In the event, strongly associated with transcendentalist move- the subject went to Billy Wilder, whose the same area as the Socialism indicated ments (e.g., the Anabaptists) than with Puritan unexpected resonance with Vidor's so- by Norman Mailer in his Advertisements ones . But it fans out over the whole range of cially critical streak reappears in connec- left-right options , relating particularly closely to the tion with THE APARTMENT (whose open- for Myself. That book's title carefully \" nonconformist conscience \" (with all its affinities plan office is a conscious homage to THE to \" inner-direction \" ) and to right-wing cults of the CROWD) and BEYOND THE FOREST. awards a very high place to an individu- hero, whether artist ic , capital ist , military , or dipl o- matic . There is also a range of common sense Although , on paper , THE FOUNTAINHEAD alist elan vital; and much in Mailer's antinomianisms , from patriot ic Machiavellian ism to is an affirmative film , its experience , as middle-of-the-road pragmatism , whereby the law filmed , is bleaker , and nobler. Vidor with- image can be seen as a bid at a new . allows that the law may be an ass and adapts to out Wright's designs isn 't quite in the synthesis of Populism, partly urban this its gradual disregard by community . One suspects a discrepancy between Rand 's and Vidor's views time, and Socialism , while his campaign of the story-Rand 's more rig id, Vidor's moral to be mayor of New York is well in the heroism tempered with pragmatism. Capra-Vidor tradition (the little man vs. the big machines) , and certainly near FOUNTAINHEAD territory. Surprising affini- ties of opposites must abound when one considers how anarchism , which in Amer- ica strengthens the hand of the right, \"These contrasting images share a sense of Roark 's persistence in hardship as in triumph . The film celebrates , not just a man-and-his-mate phalli- cism , but a sense of cont inuous exertion , which connects with a normal enough male narc issism (the \" bull \" shot of OUR DAILY BREAD). And that , in turn , links w ith the wife-mother 's role , inspiring , indulging, sometimes challenging , the son-hus- band 's feelings. Psychoanalytically, one might connect the skyscraping finale of THE FOUNTAIN- HEAD with Dink 's abandonment of his stepsister for the pleasure of clambering over rooftops and alarming his fraternal , rascally , earthbound , snoozing dad (THE CHAMP) . It's a benign , indeed a necessary, psychopathy. Given the general de- humanization by a mechanico-capitalistico- bureaucratic system , a bold and moralized narcis- sism of male effort and responsibility stands in need of reassertion , concurrently with women's legal and moral equality . Which I take to be roughly analo- gous to Vidor'S sense of independent exertion and romantic attraction, normally transfused into a sense of family as magic , or destructive, but crucial either way . This is an alternative and (to my mind) preferable ideal to theories which would substitute a passive and physical \"whole-body\" eroticism for the more active and outward-turned mixture of the physical, the erotic, the moral and the animal implicit in Vidor 's vitalism . 34 SEPTEMBER 1973

feeds in Europe into the Socialist oppo- Billy Wilder's enthusiasm for it on its first invol ves a criticism of the mercenary sition to big business, and how both soci- appearance. One can see why , principle in medicine as well as a dem o n- eties may be in the throes of redeploy- stration of Mol ine 's strength and tena c ity. ment vis-a.-vis the problems of centralized The Madame Bovary theme has lured power. many a filmmaker into its trap , wh ich is It's not merely a low budget that dic- the peculiar difficulty of representing tates the sparse presentation of Chicago Whatever one 's disagreements with its Emma 's subjective visions (whether of by the song of that title and as a serie s answers, Vidor's radicalism reached the rustic life, of the romances she reads , or of constricted spaces (an apartment, core more effectively than most \" liberal\" of their counterfeits ). Only too quickly the night rain , dark porches , very brief and films of his era (with some e xceptions). spectator comes to share her boredom , confined exteriors ). Such settings all At any rate , the early concern Vidor to lose interest in her callowness and evoke quick, restricted meetings and evinced for rural communities reap- passivity, while being left with too little suffocated feelings , like narrow toeholds peared in the Si xties , among the young room for a compassionate insight into the in the cliff face of a dream w orld to which of the radical left. And to place the theme internal and external origins of Emma 's Rosa clings , The film 's free spa c e is in of OUR DAILY BREAD among the blacks of \" divine [?] discontent.\" In his film , Jean the to w n she d isdains . Chicago , with its HALLELUJAH I-but with the rural slum trans- Renoir concentrated less on Emma 's heavy industry , is also alluded to by the posed into an urban ghetto-would be to subjective experience than on an exter- steam locomotive, whose promise of a combine many (I don 't say all) of Vidor' s nal sympathy for her unhappiness and liberating journey is visuall y belied by its affirmations with a direct and immediate the irony that , as the prisoner of her class , gigantic driving wheels, blocking the relationship to central issues on the radi- she sees only the dull or grueling sides screen while steam jets out into vertical cal left. What sewers , what housing proj- of a rustic life which does have its own and horizontal planes , as if to say : \" Chi- ects remain , overripe for destruction? poetry and finesse . As a result , Renoir 's cago is bleak , heavy industry ; it is built film seemed to waver between its psy- on the hardest work of all , .. \" Such 'Be~ondthe chological center and local color , with a part-brutal, part-bracing values belie the ~orest discursiveness even less welcome in the shallow pop song \" Chicago ,\" w ith its fun Hollywood cinema. moral ity myth . In contrast to the big city' s (1949) harshness , the film takes in its stride (l ike BEYOND THE FOREST cuts the Gordian HALLELUJAH ') what is virtually a little docu- Rosa Moline (Bette Davis) has long knot, with a series of brutal , decisive, and mentary on small-town commun ity , its nursed her craving for city life and wealth , successful strokes . Like RenOir, and un- sawmills and rural industry, which set the and loathes the small country town where like Flaubert, Vidor appreciates the life slow, human pace to which Rosa 's ner- she lives with her husband, Dr. Lewis which his Madame Bovary despises. And vous intensity cannot adapt, and into Moline (Joseph Cotten ). No richer than the contrast between her disdain and its whose neighborly concerns she cannot his patients, he must haggle with the variety of spirtual dynamisms (the doc- plunge her spiritual roots. medical suppliers for badly needed blood tor's responsibility, the Indian girl 's free- plasma for the sick ( \" Oh , all right, send dom) is built into a strong contrast. The We hardly see Rosa 's gentle ri val for it C.O.D. \"). She is tormented by the inso- languors of her consciousness are crys- Neil 's affections : the cool girl, whose tallized into boldly dramat ic attitudes and heart is like the pages of an uncut book- lence of her Indian maid, who, from a action . Vidor 's \" Madame Bovary \" stri ves \" with nothin ' on 'em ,\" Rosa snarls. The to fulfill her dream with a desperat ion plot's pattern can be read puritanically distance, bears so strange a resem- whose selfishness sharpens the morality as small sins leading to larger-from dis- blance to her and who, her work done, but allows pity to exist alongside our content to adultery to murder, and abor- just strolls away to some rendezvous , as fascinated horror. Melodrama (the shoot- tion bringing self-destruction in its train . insolently free of soul as her mistress is ing accident) and sordid realism (the But it becomes depuritanized if one sees trapped. abortion accident) melt into one another, the murder as the Rubicon which Rosa so that the former is transposed into a should not have crossed , and the abor- Rosa hopes that her affair with a Chi- kind of poetic guignol. tion turned self-destruction as its poetic justice-the lesser crime ironically pun- cago millionaire, Neil Latimer (David And so the film becomes a companion ishing the greater. (If abortion , transcen- Brian). may lead to marriage . But her adul- piece to two other studies in the pre- or dentally, might be considered as serious postmenopausal paroxysms of American as murder , it wouldn't normally be terous game is discovered by a game- womanhood : SUNSET BOULE VARD and A thought of as deserving capital punish- Streetcar Named Desire. Its tendencies to ment.) Vidor was dissatisfied with the warden , who is the father of her rival for moral ferocity are undermined by its film 's coyness about abortion , as subse- Neil's love. She joins a hunting party so sense of life force , frustrated and quently edited . If methods as clumsy as as to shoot him. She brazens out the trial, deranged . Vidor is said to have regarded Rosa 's may seem improbable, coming but disgusts and loses her lover, Finding BEYOND THE FOREST , THE FOUNTAINHEAD , from a doctor 's wife , it is still surprising herself pregnant, she attempts to abort and RUBY GENTRY as a trilogy concerned how often sophisticated women resort to herself by another \" accident \" and is with America 's postwar malaise. Only too self-punitively or hysterically or ambiva- brought, badly injured, to the hospital. often (he seems to have thought) the lently crude methods of abortion. Cer- intuitive generosity of transcendental am- tainly they retain a kind of poetic truth- Delirious , she attempts a final journey to bition degenerated into exasperated just as , in Losey 's THE PROWLER, the selfishness , and an essentially moral vi- whole strange sequence of a clandestine her millionaire. Knocking out the nurse sion of growth and effort yielded to mate- childbirth in a ghost town carries linger- who watches over her, she plasters rialism and status consciousness. From ing echoes of the abortion situation which make-up on her feverish face and stum- one angle, Rosa Moline's blind discon- the script would have featured had the bles as far as the station , only to fall, and tent is an equal and opposite sin to H.M. Hays Code allowed . Pulham 's blind deadness. From another lie, dying of peritonitis in the road, a few angle , the film resumes the theme of THE Vidor astonishingly transforms Bette CITADEL, involving as it does an idealistic Davis into a sardonic variation of Jennifer feet from the level crossing across which doctor's rustication . One sequence con- Jones, with her peasant blouse, her hair- the Chicago express rumbles, the lights nects a woman 's prayer for a patient with style , her skill with the hunting rifle , her from its wagons fanning over her dead the blood which Dr. Moline has had such frustrated writhing. But all these emblems face . difficulty in procuring ; it seems to me it take on another meaning, of desperate, Fifteen or so years later, Vidor dis- missed BEYOND THE FOREST as a mere assignment, and the product of a spiri- tually confused period, since outlived. Seeing it more recently , he observed that it had improved with age , and recalled FILM COMMENT 35

BE YO ND THE FOREST Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten . willful clinging to adolescence by a woman well into middle age . And so Rosa BEYOND THE FOREST Minor Watson and Bette Davis. Moline loses the sophistication which we 36 SEPTEMBER 1973 know Bette Davis to have. Her selfishness degrades her potential self. Her rival , as a gamekeeper's daughter, would seem to have risen in the world by the simplest of methods: the straightforward sincerity which Rosa despises as emptiness . Like a Jacobean play , the film depends less on our identification with the heroine than on our sympathetic hor- ror at her villai ny. The physical and moral contrast with the glum, deadstiffupperlip amartyrology la Joan Crawford couldn't be more complete and contributes an- other strain to the women 's films of the period . (Jane Wyman, almost alone, maintains the simple softness of Helen Twelvetrees in the Thirties woman ' s film ; later the genre will evolve into, notably, the PEYTON PLAC E, Lana Turner , and Doug- las Sirk subgenres.) As a study of a woman grasping vainly at romance , BEYOND THE FOREST consti- tutes an American variant on another railroad (or railway) story , BRIEF EN- COUN TER. Today's younger filmgoers seem to find Lean 's reputedly \"realistic \" film quite as bizarre, or embarrassing (still too true to life? ) as contemporary critics found Vidor 's (a n unsmart , unsophisticat- ed Bette Davis was not at all welcome). Certainly Vidor 's contrast between mistress and maid is tauter and truer than Noel Coward's laxly comic lower orders. The interaction of personal morality and social setting is far more complex and interesting . And if the murder challenges the epoch 's critical preference for what is not so much neo-realism as neo- everydayism , it contributes to a film noir expressionism , keyed by Bette Davis 's paroxysmal despair, by the rain , and by the harsh , steaming wheels. BE YON D THE FOREST is rooted-unu- sually for an American film , and still more for an American woman's film-in the sense of a town 's economics . It belongs alongside other studies in regional cupid- ity and greed , notably Wilder 's ACE IN THE HOLE and certain family sequences in BONNIE AND CLYDE . Where Wilder , with his more saturnine eye for America (a nd l or humanity), implies a very uneasy equilib- rium between decency and callousness, Vidor sees Rosa as her own victim rather than the community 's. The film's expres- sionistic atmosphere suggests that Vidor's transcendental optimism leaves him unable to pinpoint any causes for a cynicism sufficiently prevalent to assert the film noir as a predominant tone. No clear line divides the merely symptomatic film from the diagnostic one , but surely Wilder ' s enthusiasm for BE YON D THE FOREST was well founded . The lyrical strength and moral drive of Vidor's movie groups it with the mo re critical and inci- sive interrogations of the American spirit in a confused and critical period .

'Rull~ (jentr~ BE YO ND THE FOREST , where Ro sa Moline , stated , sin ce twi sts and turns of dialogue , after attempting abortion , dies of perito- gesture, and behavior goad the spectator (1952) niti s, just where the steely rai l track into intuitive inference . But once a critic crosses the asphalt road . The desert is despises th e film for its absence of obvi- Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston), the kingdom of Father Sun-where a tom- ous analysis , his lack of invo lvement pre- the son of a decaying aristocrat line , boy half-breed , w hose rifle expresses her vents him from being goaded , and he dreams of reclaiming the swamplands, exasperated virilization , shoots her sees only emptiness where others feel restoring the family name, and enriching demon lover in the stomach and th en interestingly paradoxical intrications. the town. \"A man and his work are the mothers him as they die . It is under the same thing, \" he believes. When the som- fierce sun in the stone quarry that THE Rub y's fury at being jilted is justified nolent local businessmen won 't finance FOUNTAINHEAD' S Dominique , flexing her insofar as she and Boake are mea nt for riding crop , imposes herself as fit mat c h, each other, as her love is intense , as he ' s his schemes , he sets out to marry a ric h accomplice, and mate for the visionary misled her, and as his marriage has its architect wielding his pneumatic drill. The cynical aspects . But it's unjustified inso- society girl. To this end he sacrifices his- outcome of all these opposite excesses far as it ' s not generous, it's backward- is it love , is it a profound sensual attrac- and vigorous interactions is a sense of looki ng and negative with Ruby ove rlook- tion?-for Ruby Corey (Jennifer Jones), equilibrium (Delahaye's word), although ing his idealism and see ing only hi s tomboy orphan from the wrong side of equilibrium can be tak en in too decorous egoism (w hich is per hap s a projection o f the tracks. On the rebound Ruby mar- a sense , for it is an equilibrium requiring her own , and certainly co lored by her ries one of the businessmen, Jim Gentry from man a convulsive effort-a self-dedi- inverted snobbery). She is almost calmed (Karl Malden), after the death of his inva- cation and a self-surpassing-which by her meetings with Laetitia , Jim 's bed- lid wife, Laetitia . When Jim is killed in a make him a part of nature , not so much ridden wife , as a companion for whom yachting accident the townsfolk leap to nature ' s master as its apotheosis . Vidor 's Jim first hires her. The in va lid ' s example the conclusion that Ruby murdered him, sense of struggle and enterprise remains proves that poverty and pariahdom have and ostracize her. She discovers that Nietzschean , without quite deteriorating no monopoly of hardship and handicap. most of them owed money to Jim . She into the crudities of Social Darwin ism . She corresponds to Belle (Lillian Gish) in can ruin them all, Boake included. When Nature is the angel of the Lord with which DUEL IN THE SUN , who , as the foster mother he rejects her approach she has his land man must wrestle. And man 's self-fulfill- of another orphaned outcast , Pe arl Cha- flooded . He rapes her. In an unea sy ment re qu ires a purpose which , both vez (Jennifer Jones again) greets a wild- truce, as if their love for each other were selfish and unselfish, reconciles his own cat and potential riva l wi thout jealousy, instincts, his sense of community , and the without fear , wi thout envy, and all but freed by reciprocal devastation, they go energies of nature, weaving them into a redeems her from her pariah status. transcendental unity. hunting. Boake is shot and killed by Ruby , in her roug h jeans, admires Ruby 's brother, Jewel, a religious fanatic Vidor's sense of equilibrium can be Laetitia's opulent dresses, and, holding enraged by Boake 's wronging of his sis- seen as a dialectic-although , if so , it is one against her, dances with it, taking the ter. Ruby shoots Jewel, cradles Boake 's a vitalist one (standing both Hegel and male part to the ghost of Laetitia's youth . dying head, and seems set to end her Marx on their heads! ) since its highest A simple enough action creates a star- days, expiating her past, in her yacht at term is a life-force pantheism-in a sense , tling and complex situation ; for, as a part sea. a synthesis of Hegelian idealism and of its context, it contrasts Ruby 's insensi- Marxist materialism , so complete that tivity and Laetitia 's potential pain-the The name Boake recalls Roark in THE matter is spiritualized and spirit physical- latter sublimated into a selfless pleasure FOUNTAINHEAD, and the spirit inspiring him ized . Nor is the complementarity of yin in Ruby 's v itality and an unembittered Ayn Rand 's hero rears skyscrapers. Mi- and yang quite appropriate , insofar as nostalgia . And Ruby 's childlike mi xture of to drain the swamp recalls that with which these terms imply a wise pass iv ity to the self-centered (s he is feeling the chel Delahaye has admirably adumbrated which Vidor-who is not only an Occiden- dress) and tactless honesty , is a shock the Bachelardian line to which Vidor 's tal but a Te xan , that is to say , a Wild to Laetitia, but a bracing one. Further- work lends itself. The forests of THE BIG Westerner-prefers the wise-foolish au- more, the contrast between Ruby's sud- PARADE, of OUR DAILY BREAD , of NORTH- dacity of the pioneer spirit. One might den bisexuality and Laetitia's dress as her WEST PASSAGE; irrigation as fertilization in speak , rather, of that mi xture of lais sez phantom is almost ominous. Laetitia 's OUR DAILY BREAD and drainage as fertil- faire individualism and Emersonian tran- selflessness , like Belle's , is something of ization in RUB Y GENTRY; the opposition of scendentalism which occupies a much a tour de force , and all too rare in this skyscraper and quarry in THE FOUNTAIN- larger place in popular than in academic spiritually mediocre world , and maybe HEAD , all promise but in the end disallow philosophy. His hero is homo agonistes , that's why she's fated to die before her easy patterns of associations. For their the wrestler owing his strength , his nobil- example can wean Ruby away from her essence is the importance of encounter ity , his skill to antagonists who , if he is bitterness to something more like the (irrigation), conflict (flooding), and con- fortunate , will be as strong , as noble , as attitude of another rejected , low-status trast (the idyllic forests are all , and again skilled as he-whether nature, or woman, lover of Vidor 's Billy in SHOW PEOPLE. in HALLELUJAH !, venues for killings) . Per- or a fraternal community. haps the marsh is the kingdom of Mother It may also be that there clings to RUB Y Earth , when man lets his head , his body, Though Boake seems to sense that GENTRY a little of the coarser streak in his will , soften and decay . It represents Ruby is his right and proper soul mate- the Ayn Rand philosophy, whereby self- the triumph of the temptation posed by and surely all spectators so assume-he lessness , even when it 's a tour de force , the hot towels pampering young Apper- rejects her for two reasons, a moral one is concomitant with a weakened life son 's face before he marches off to join and an immoral one , their combination force. On this point I'd like to think that THE BIG PARADE, and find a brac ing , rough creating the tensions characteristic of I'm at one with Vidor in repudiating such fraternity . In the uterine embrace of the \"synthetic \" motivation . In discussing an attitude . Nonetheless, I suspect that swamps, male rivals destroy one another. DUEL IN THE SUN I suggested that critics the film would be poorer if its tensions in its time misunderstood that film be- weren 't sharpened by just a souPGon of The physical pattern is reversed in cause they sought psychological analy- the common-enough notions that saintli- sis, a statement of the reason , whereas ness is often masochism and that too little films of its type rely on accumulations and selfishness is certainly socially more con- interactions of reasons. And these aren 't venient but, in vitalist terms , is less healthy, than the reverse . Thus, the FILM COMMENT 37

RUBY GENTRY. Charlton Hesto n and JenniferJones. scenes between Ruby and Laetitia gen- erate a certain uneasiness simply by con- RUBY GENTRY. James Anderson . trasting opposite attitudes, both of which are admirable and both of which are RUBY GENTRY. Charlton Heston and Jennifer Jones. slightly excessive-even though the film 's further shock is not their conflict but its 38 SEPTEMBER 1973 rapid and dynamic avoidance, a higher synthesis . Jim, like Gail Wynand , the publisher in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , seems to be the victim of spiritual indecision , and his mix- ture of weakness and strength creates another line of dramatic and moral sus- pense . He ' s brave , and yet foolish enough to let his jealousy over Ruby goad him into a confrontation with Boake, and he gets both a beating and a humiliation for his pains . Ruby, callously again , cleaves to Boake , who is brutal in his mixture of ego-pride and sexual rivalry . Although the plot suggests that the former looms rather larger in Boake ' s mind than the latter, Ruby 's -and our- reversal of this emphasis is probably more than her (scarcely disinterested) and our (cinema spectators ') notorious sentimentality about sexual possibilities Rather, these perspectives are used to imply the biological norm against which Boake 's heroic single-mindedness is dis- tinctly hubristic . Even Gentle Jim Gentry 's loans to the townsfolk can be seen as misplaced in- dulgence. He has coddled their lack of enterprise, and thus exposed them to the rapacities of his widow . But Boake 's bracing initiative would , it is implied , have enlarged the whole town 's economic re- sources in a more objective way . Jim mourns Laetitia not quite enough , es- teeming her spiritual strength too little. And in becoming infatuated with Ruby he seems to admire the energy and will- fulness which have somehow become lost amongst all the spiritual marginalia of profit-and-Ioss . It is not just his reaction to Boake but, above all , the edgy imma- turity in Karl Malden 's style (prefiguring his role in BABY DOLL, another tale of dynamism and decay) which suggest that he and Ruby won't make a comple- mentary couple, but an ill-matched pair. And his loser status is affirmed when , just as Laetitia died conveniently for him , so he conveniently dies for Ruby. His \" kindness \" is the equal and opposite fault to Ruby's callousness . As it is , the theme of snobbery goading Ruby to a hysteric and profitless revenge , enables the film to feature , and yet to neutralize, what might have seemed quite a forceful anticapitalist message. Ruby, the moneyed despot , is able to ruin the whole town for a whim. But the logic of such behavior is so uncapitalist , so unlike what Bunuel delights to call \" the icy waters of bourgeois calculation ,\" that the accusatory moralizing of Ruby's brother -her plans will put poor people, like she used to be , out of work-inculpates not capitalism but the moral factors running

counter to it: se xu al jealousy , inve rted is worth teasing out. Ruby is a natural Boake 's egoism . He is made up out of snobbery . In any case , Populist traditions name for a girl (like Pearl! ), but Jewel, the negativities of the heroes, and he remain hospitable to attacks upon the in a boy , suggests doting parents , linking bears the same relationship to them as willfulness of one particular individual him with Vidor's recurrent theme of the other celebrated eccentrics, Old Joshua who also happens to be the local Mr . Big . potentially spoiled son (THE BIG PARADE , in LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS and the work- So Jim 's widow here corresponds to the THE CROWD , DUEL IN THE SUN) . Indiscreetly ing-class dwarf informer in THE CRIM E OF big rancher oppressing the small men in doting parents might well engender , as MONSIEUR LANGE . He compounds the sin one Western after another (inc luding Mc- in Lewt, a willful anger , in this case poorly killer and Lewt in DUEL IN THE SUN . As a Canles in DUEL IN THE SUN and another sublimated by hysteric affirmations about prophet , a man wrapped in religious rage , woman Jeanne Crain in MAN WITHOUT A an all-loving Father . The name Ruby is he is the anti- and ultra-Roark-a man STAR) , or , in a more contemporary form , vulgar and lower-class, implying materi- whose inner voice comes from a hideous Old Man Peyton in TV 's Peyton Pla ce alistic ambitions, but at least Ruby can snobbery, a monstrous egoism . And if he (whose criticism of capitalism is as ar- love Boake in a way that would unhypo- permeates the marsh and the mist like chaic and uncontrove rsial as that of critically combine generosity and social a malarial pestilence it is because the Scrooge). climbing without hypocrisy . In this con- whole town's spiritual climate has been text , \" Jewel \" becomes an uneasily transformed. The energy which should Earlier on , the refusal of this lazy worldly name for another of Vidor's have been divine has become diabolical. town 's business community to finance worldly preachers , as if his concern wit h A monstrous hatred speaks with the voice Boake indicates their short-sightedness, homespun virtue were an angry repudia- of those log-cabin pieties which reared their diminution of vi tal spirits . The town tion of Ruby's more natural hopes.' Young Mr . Linc oln . He is everything Vidor punishes itself for its lack of enterprise most detests about the things he most and vision; far from being involved in a Jewel 's a snob too , albeit a moral one. loves ' Charles Barr observes how , in OUR simple love -hate story , Boake and Ruby And as his ideals could be the highest DAILY BREAD , the lovers , uneasily sleep- are tragic vict ims of the community 's me- (in his sense of the spiritual) and his love ing , cannot settle down until their bodies diocrity. Thus, Jewel 's concern for the the broadest (i n his concern for the poor), touch ; and the image of their touching poor only reminds us that the interests so his perversion of them is the narrowest is immediately followed by that of a spade of good capitalists and the poor are nor- and most destructive. Between these two entering the earth . Here , as the lovers mally more or less identical. Since the film extremes he lives , precariously balanced kiss , Jewel levels his rifle . assumes that this proposition is only between vivacity and rage , love and mel- good sound American common sense , it ancholy , jocularly hold ing h is guitar as if This spiritual confusion penetrates can be entrusted to even a mad preacher it were a rifle . And this mi xture of country- even the basic animal instincts , as in that without being discred ited . Its principal and-Western sentiment, of hellfire funda- extraordinary detail whe re Ruby -during function is just to keep the audience ' s mentalism and shotgun morality, enables what appears to be a paSSionate kiss- mind on the capitalist theme , against its him to incarnate the negative excesses has a sixth sense of a stag behind her, notorious general tendency to forget the of the rural puritanism which Vidor's ear- and turns to shoot it. Vidor 's Nietzschean larger issues entirely for the personal lier films asserted against the exaspera- streak might we ll prompt us to admire her ones . tions and abrasions of the city. Illegal as prescience as unspoiled predatory im- it undoubtedly is for him to shoot his pulse . And it ' s certainly an example of The moral and dramatic tensions of sister 's lover in the back , B ib le Belt back- extreme alertness-of, in Mailer 's sense , RUB Y GENTRY are generated by a criss- woods morality, Southern honor and the the savagely \" hip.\" Conversely, Ruby's cross of vices and virtues. Each and Code of the West would all require a man sensitivity is that of a \" terrible mother,\" every character displays the defects of to take up arms against the man who had a woman whose life force , taking a de- his qualities . The contrast is nowhere seduced , jilted , and raped his sister. One structive bent , interrupts what is no more more extreme than in Ruby ' s brother. wonders how the film 's balance of sym- than an exasperated and arid sensuality. This fundamentalist preacher with some- pathies might have tilted had Jewel, in- The substitution , male-stag , is only too thing of a social conscience shoots his stead of lurking treacherously in the mist , evident ; and Ruby 's destructive intuition sister's lover in the back at the precise appeared and challenged Boake openly, renders her an antithesis to Mrs . Apper- moment when reconciliation is possible in full cognizance of Boake ' s be ing a son , with her magic insight, in THE BIG and the town 's prosperity might be re- crack shot. (The situation opens the way PARADE . Later , Ruby does not sense the vived. Jewel believes himself to be the for an intriguing twist. Ruby , to prevent presence of Jewel, who has also gone agent of the Old Testament God , risen the slaughter, throws herself between a-hunting , to fulfill the law of talion re- in his wrath to punish sin by destroying them . Boake , afraid of hitting her , is slow quired by a superegoism as diseased as the man who seduced, jilted, and then to fire. Jewel , having faith in the Lord , her egoism . raped his sister. Their orphan-outcast shoots straight away .) background suggests a certain close- Ruby, having killed her brother, cal- ness , and, perhaps , his incestuous jeal- No doubt the Wild West is just a little lously lets his head fall in the mud , and ousy . This affinity is further reinforced by too far in the past for rustic feuds in cradles her dying Boake 's head against the similarity of their Christian names contemporary settings to seem justified . her breast. But, her extremes of \" mascu- (Ruby , Jewel ), which all but implies that But if Vidor makes relatively little of linity\" and motherliness unleashed , she they form a Jekyll-and-Hyde character- Jewel 's attachment to an archaic code , condemns herself, in her remorse , to a Jewel incarnates Ruby 's repressed it is because that code is a subordinate solitude of sea and white sails. They hatred of Boake , which explodes just as issue to his main theme , which is that recall the circumstances of her hus- her ego seems to assent to the end of Jewel embodies only the extreme point band 's death , as if , despite everything , their hatreds . He 's certainly his own Mr. of an accumulation of weaknesses and the severest, most conventional morality Hyde , for he negates everything he excesses . Jewel compounds Ruby 's now claimed its dues : a lifetime , or many preaches. His puritanism goes with an guilt, the townsfolk's stagnation , and years , of empty loneliness. The white boat incestuous protectiveness. His \" univer- is like a monk 's cell. The earth mother sal love \" (of which his concern for the 'Th is isn 't to say that all names are symbolic-only is lost at sea . Thus morally conquering poor is one aspect) goes with shooting that they sometimes are , and not in any absolute his quasi-brother-in-Iaw in the back . sense even then , but by relation to the general ' Although many Vidor films quietly make a point theme. Apart from any symbolism , they often pro- The names of the siblings suggest a vide information about background , and so bring of not vi nd icating established or narrowly doctrin- fascinating pattern , creating an immedi- a certain cultural atmosphere , which it is natural ate uneasiness, which , gnomic as it is , to read as part of the person 's character or up- al Christianity , it is usually in connection with bringing . Christianity's repudiation of a wider, more vitalist transcendentalism . FILM COMMENT 39

herself, she at last attains what she first Boake compares the sound of the pumps of its strength lies in the contrasts , so that sought by cruder means : the town 's re- to the pulsing of his heart. the changes of activity observe the prin- spect. Like a Biblical scapegoat, she has sent herself forth from the town , its col- Many critics of the time dismissed the ciple of montage precisely as Eisenstein lective sin on her head . And perhaps her film as hysterical and negative (much as observed it in his cutting. (His theoretical w hite sail-of purity , of repentance-will they dismissed Wilder's STALAG 17), pre- recall the townspeople , in their puzzled sumably because they didn 't expect so formulations are something else again .) way , to the spiritual humility and the egal- intricate a mi xture of the heroic and the So , for that matter, do the permutations itarian respect they have lost. corrupt, and didn 't link the confusions on the combinations of the elements thus created with the moral position es- (land, sea , swamp , etc .). And , indeed , The killing in the marsh-black and tablished in positive by Laetitia and in excremental , with its confusion of earth , negative by Jewel. It would be odd if a that apparently merely craftsman like Hol- water, salt, and flesh-contrasts with the country as dynamic as America didn't lywood word \" twist \" can approximate to bleached clarity of solitude , sun , and sea . have some negative tendencies deserv- Eisenstein's concept of montage , in But the relationship of elements and ing moral criticism , and Boake, Ruby, Jim terms, to be sure, of drama or narrative, mood isn 't simple, and that merely physi- and the townsfolk-far from being the cal clarity was foreshadowed (so to melodramatic figments of a convert to but , nonetheless , in the profoundest speak) when Ruby, calling Jim 's name on misanthropy-are very like most of us in sense of the term ' the heeling-over deck, was answered the confusing mixture of virtues and only by the glint of sun on the rails . The vices, of energies and despairs, which RUBY GENTRY is the last, and the most near-sinking of the ship preludes the make tragic outcomes in real life not at tensely lyrical, of Vidor's \" black\" trilogy flooding of the land . The violence of the all uncommon . But although many war- (with BEYOND THE FOREST and THE FOUN- storm becomes the lethargy of the marsh . time critics deprecated Hollywood's mo- TAINHEAD ; and DUEL IN THE SUN and MAN The emotional elements are equally quick notonously happy ends , and its relatively WITHOUT A STAR as its \" outriders \" ). In to turn turtle as changing situations dis- soot-and-whitewash moral polarities, too these films the negative possibilities im- turb their balance . Jim , the (1) un- many Fifties critics were so wedded to plicit in THE CROWD emerge-not indeed suspecting (2) vi ctim (3) lost in (4) the liberal complacencies that they mistook according to older liberal-academic no- sea is avenged by Jewel , the (1) un- the tragic for the morbid, the critical for tions of the tragic spirit, but with some- suspected (2) killer (3) lurking in (4) the the spiteful , and Vidor's lyrical strength thing like a Jacobean sense of cynicism trees . Such jostlings of sea and land are (which was always generated by the and scandal and of idealism perverted echoed when , in a moment of happiness , clash and conflict of emotion) for a sim- Boake and Ruby drive along a moonlit ple-minded complacence. Clearly Vidor into revenge. beach , their car radio playing , and , leav- relies on the way in which our moral Many a film nair of the period was ing the automobile to steer itself like a intuitions , just like our emotional ones , magic steed , they sit up on the back seats may work faster and more subtly than our concerned , like RUBY GENTRY , with an am- and kiss , as it veers off into the su rf , la voiture ivre . . .. The lovers have become conventional moral formulations , so that bient resentment of rich-poor divisions creatures of two worlds-the solid and the the rapid alternation of heroism and (\"the wrong side of the tracks\"). Left-lib- infinite, the real and the magic , for once excess on the part of his characters eral fi Ims tended to stress snobbery , or harmoniously balanced , their reck- leaves us in a state of exhilarated shock , lessness is part of the universal energy , of liberation from preconception. As twist rat-race greed , in such a way that while and faith . follows twist the moral tension is charged the individual wasn 't altogether exculpat- with the same speed and suspense as ed , certain flaws or excesses in the social The climax of RUBY GENTRY contradicts the dramatic tension , and is absolutely system were seen as the root of most of that of DUEL IN THE SUN (marsh for desert, inseparable from it. (Critics often tended the evil , or at least as the point where and, instead of a love-hate confrontation , to be equally resentful when moralists like they could be most effectively tackled. an unseen adversary irrupting). Vidor Stanley Kramer adopted the alternative Right-of-liberal films stressed that the might quite possibly have arrived at it via strategy of spelling out the message very corruptive agent was insufficient moral an intelligent and showmanlike calcula- clearly.) fiber, to which inspirationalist (including tion that elements which pleased an audi- punitive) answers, not reformist ones, ence once were quite likely to please it Otherwise, the ordinary spectator's were the correct ones. Radical films were again , provided they were mixed with mixture of identification and criticism , or scarcely made or soon forgotten (SALT OF elements dissimilar enough to obviate preference and apprehension , combines THE EARTH). The tension between the two obvious repetition . This wouldn 't in any with Vidor's visual energy to produce a emphases is what had made Theodore sense devalue the scene 's authenticity of virulent little masterpiece combining puri- Dreiser's An American Tragedy so no- inspiration-partly because the finale of tanical fervor with the film nair. That DUEL IN THE SUN galvanizes audiences in brutal choreography of the swamp deaths toriously sensitive a subject, paraphras- a manner suggesting that an authentic is so compounded in the twist and gnarl ing as it does the capitulation of the spiritual nerve is being touched , partly of the branches as to constitute a quasi- puritan ethic before social ambition , because artists are not bound to be un- expressionism. There is a sinister glitter envy, and fun morality. George Stevens' comprehendingly intuitive about every- about the sunlight on the sea and the version (A PLACE IN THE SUN) looks to me thing they do, and partly because the very yacht 's rails as Ruby calls her missing similarities enable the new elements to husband 's name. The quieter scenes are like a right-of-liberal answer to the bitter- open up a new perspective and allow no less carefully worked; the slow move- ness implicit in the film nair, being slightly Vidor to present, as it were , his retort to ment of the elevator in the Gentry home DUEL IN THE SUN . In the Western , rugged presages the revelation of Laetitia's ' Montage theory-where the spectator provi des the individualism is associated with exces- illness, and sets a slow rhythm which overall meaning from the contrast between two sive forms which doom it to inevitable briefly disrupts in Ruby 's cruel-friendly concrete signs-is in some respects contradictory defeat. Here , there is still hope , even mock-dance. Another scene affords a to those formulations of semiological theory which today . Boake is less perverse ; and the useful theoretical example . Ruby \" at- stress the visible sign as source of objectively \" epilogue\"-remorse-is a positive act, tacks \" the fireplace with a poker; then analyzable meaning . There 's no real reason why an example , not a posthumous emblem . sits immobile before it; then her foot starts both shouldn ' t be so extended as to be capable The spirit is still that of OUR DAILY BREAD ; tapping. .. In this sequence of activities , of accommodating the other, and indeed both will each contrasts with that before and much remain forever inadequate unless they do, just as American emphasis on crisp, twist-ridden narrative (surp rises-within-a-continuity ) is reconcliable with Eisenstein 's emphasis on a dialectic-of-visual shots. It's a pity that so many theoreticians prefer dis missing the kind of cinema which they find less easily accountable in terms of their theory , to following both theories through to the points where they break down and meet, and then seeing how they can be adapted to accommodate the va riety of film idioms , and spectator responses , and to the other. Too many theoreticians are only con- cerned to transform their fmmediate and unex- amined responses into universal laws. It's a human enough error, but doesn 't produce good theories, nor good criticism when the theories are applied . 40 SEPTEMBER 1973

bolder than most films in tackling the eMllnWithout MAN WITHOUT A STAR . Kirk Douglas. experience of inequality as directly as it does . Even so , a harder-edged fi Immaker II Stllr would surely have made more of a certain corruption among the rich and respect- (1955) able which corresponds to the envious poor boy's moral weakness. Indeed , the Aboard a westbound freight train. very convenient theme of parental com- Dempsey (Kirk Douglas), the veteran plaisance in the amorality of the over- cowpuncher, picks up and protects privileged would have come very near young Jeff (William Campbell) from a Vidor's sempiternal theme of the not- callo us brakeman . The y accept a job at quite-spoiled sons of wealth. a ranch and he initiates Jeff into the realities of Western life, rather than the Of course , it 's hardly unique to Vidor , myths of violence . The ranch 's new being common enough in Hollywood films owner, Reed Bowman , is a beautiful because ( 1) one reason for being rich is woman (Jeanne Crain) who cares only to give one 's children all the advantages, for immediate profits and is quite but (2) their head start is an obvious prepared to overstock the common graz- example of social inequality, while (3) ing land. The smaller ranchers want to both Puritan and Social Darwinist thought protect the grass by enclosing it with insist that ease, wealth , and comforts may barbed wire . Although Reed makes over- make children morally or physically soft. tures to Dempsey, he detests her readi- It reappears in , notably , MILDRED PIER CE ness to ruin the land and resents her (with Ann Blyth as Joan Crawford 's vi - possessive charms, even more than he cious daughter), James Dean in GIANT hates, for some mysterious reason, the (which denounces the moneyed rebel as small-h olders ' wire . In an effort to keep merely a proto-egoist), and Warren Dempsey near her, she captivates his Beatty in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS. ' Indeed , friend. But Demp sey is disillusioned to the last two paraphrase Vidor's cherished find that what the youth most admires projects (lyrical epics to steel and wheat), about him is his killer instincts-and Jeff by their common theme , oil. Both feature is almost killed by Dempse y, in tragically spoiled sons and chastened tycoons , self-revelatory anger. Reed imports gun- while the fate of Kazan 's hero combines men who turn out to be Dempsey 's old three Vidorian themes (hard country- enemies. Catching him defenseless, they work, the second-best girl , and acquies- humiliate him , and he stays to take the cence in hard work and poverty). Again , side of the small ranchers, eventually in WILD RIVER , Kazan takes up themes not a ffirming the moral positivity of enclosure so far from Vidor's heart (the obstinate by wrapping his enemies in the barbed matriarch as a female Senator McCanles, wire which , years ago, had been respon- and its Democratic hero as Jess's grand- sible for his brother's death. And he rides son). on-abandoning enclosure, and civiliza- tion , to follow his lonely star. And , just as AN AMERICAN ROMANCE is , by title , an affirmative riposte to the gen- Although the credits don't say so, Kirk eral drift of Dre iser's An American Trag- Douglas implies that he was this film 's edy, so Vidor 's immigrant theme is producer as well as its star . And since , approached-from a very different angle after DUEL IN THE SUN , we have to concede -in Kazan 's AMERICA, AMERICA! Kazan 's that a producer may sometimes be a films belong to a later decade, but Wyler's film 's part-auteur, general similarities be- CARRIE (a fter Theodore Dreiser again) tween MAN WITHOUT A STAR and LONEL Y has more than Jennifer Jones' presence ARE THE BRAVE are not no more irrelevant to relate it to Vidor 's overall vision. For than Kirk Douglas's onscreen presence while the lower-class girl climbs out of in both films . At any rate , both Kirk Dou- the crowd , the middle-class man sinks glas and King Vidor have expressed their into it . Wyler allows the period setting to discontent, for different reasons, with the take the edge off the story's potentially result of their collaboration . trenchant criticism of (a) a continuing respectable snobbery and (b) the It isn 't easy to decide which of the harshness of the immigrant-era melting film's ideas they held in common , which pot, later, insidious ethnic-group ver- ideas each was glad to accept from the sions. other, which ideas each unwillingly ac- cepted from the other, which ideas each Certainly , the Vidor versio ns of A PLACE accepted in the hope of transforming , and which ideas each was prevented IN THE SUN , GIANT, SPLENDOR IN THE GnASS from developing by the other. Films are the product of collaboration , in which the and CARRIE are all worth a showing , how- producer often sets initial limits and, by ever ghostly , in one 's cinematheque ima- ginaire . Meanwhile, I would rate RUBY GENTRY among the , let us say , ten , most incisive and moving Hollywood movies of its decade. ' It appears , more diffusely, in , for example , Hitch- cock's TO CATCH A THIEF (Grace Kelly 's mother should have spanked her more otten ), and even FIVE EASY PIECES (the hard-hat turns out to be an ex-poor-little-rich-boy). FILM COMMENT 41

MAN WITHOUT A STAR. Kirk Douglas. Jeanne Crain 's appearance, posses- a wider theme , of land as a heritage siveness , and harshness directly recall deserving of conservation , and land as his control over editing , determines the Ruby Gentry's. Douglas and Vidor, the freedom-a wealth whose twofold as- final cuts . Although it is usually possible two incompatibles, seem to have collabo- pects interact as parado xically as se x to see certain characteristic touches in rated brilliantly in concocting and and religion do in HALLELUJAH ! Vidor ' s anyone of a director 's films , it is alto- choreographing Dempsey's snarling interest (and mine ) centers on the more gether dogmatic to assume from them smile , his forked-lightning movements, realistic , economic, everyday aspects of that the film as a whole is predominantly and his astonishing physico-spiritual vi- Western life : the care of one 's horse (a his creation . A further dimension of com- vacity . Among the most dazzling se- personal ecology), or the etiquette of plication is introduced by the existence quences of each artist one must include ranch life (the foreman getting ser'Jed of a collective iconography to which indi- the saloon sequence, where Dempsey first , in nostalgic rather than critical re- vidual artists contribute and from which dances with a quick succession of pas- prise of a corresponding detail in WED- they may also borrow. This collective sionate women (plunking his banjo cheek- DING NIGHT). Not that the film quite cuts iconography is also an auteur . ily behind their backs ) and directly free of the gunfighting myths-instead of switches from teasing them to taunting putting them in their place , Dempsey just Here, Dempsey (Kirk Douglas), the a brute who wants to pick a fight with dismisses fancy twirlings as guns are ferocious, insolent loner, resembles earli- him . drawn from their holsters. er Vidor heroes. But THE VIKINGS (produced by Kirk Douglas , directed by More 's the pity that there 's no per- Certainly Vidor 's skills are conspicu- Richard Fleischer) is quite ambivalent formance in the film with which Kirk ous in exteriors which ingeniously ag- about an unbridled ferocity of life force Douglas's can intermesh. Jeanne Crain 's grandize exiguous resources . Thus a vast as DUEL IN THE SUN ; and one can all but role allows her little scope to be more herd of stampeding cattle is implied by imagine Kirk Douglas 's slave played by than stiffly imperious. Some business with shots whose \" wedge \" grouping makes it Jennifer Jones instead of Tony Curtis a revolving office chair on casters creates look like merely a corner of a larger herd brief excitement. All the dreary restraint (an inference suggested , not by montage , aand , alternatively , Lewt la Kirk Douglas . of the Audie Murphy era overlays the but by the mise-en-scene ). For similar playing of the youth whom Dempsey be- reasons, the Western townships trail The love-hate fraternity featured in MAN friends and protects , until , at last, he rides away against skies , plains , and muddy WITHOUT A STAR certainly seems to come away alone, commending his toughness- streets. What we see suggests the mean from Kirk Douglas rather than King Vidor, obsessed friend to the ministrations of a and miserable townships of the Old West while also being a recurrent, almost young woman who agreeably blends a more poignantly than any other film I've obsessive , theme in Hollywood movies of fresh young femininity with a tomboy gift seen . Events occur in the mid-foreground its time. Again , the banjo with which for breaking in broncos-which action will of a valley sweeping up to a ridge , in such Dempsey affirms his insolent indepen- occur after the end-titles. a way as to recall both the land which dence, had already been associated with is the conservationist theme and the Zeke's cheeky lack of remorse in HALLE- The structure of sibling substitutes beyond, unto which Dempsey clea ves in LUJAH! ; and Lewt was briefly reduced to and the love-hate fraternity seem to inter- the film 's conclusion . The \" traditional ,\" plunking one as Pearl favored Jess. est Vidor much less than one would ex- or archaic , form of the ending is imbued But Kirk Douglas could equally have pect it to interest the producer of THE with a spirit which is all the more bitter brought it with him from Captain Nemo's for refusing to indulge in pathos . More submarine , in Walt Disney's (or rather VIKINGS, which possibly explains Kirk bitter, even , for indescribable stylistic Richard Fleischer's) 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER Douglas's complaints that King Vidor reasons, than the romantic pathos of THE SEA, made the year before MAN WITH- didn 't understand the story and kept set- SHANE . Shane 's dedication was to killing , ting up elaborate shots that had no place while Dempsey 's was to his freedom . OUT A STAR . in it at all. Maybe Vidor strove to establish Fences , which are the small men 's free- dom , are the end of his . He will be driven The barbed-wire theme certainly on until , at last, his and everyone 's indi- springs from that strange, almost gratu- vidual freedom is as invisible and impal- itous , little detail in DUEL IN THE SUN. pable as H. M. Pulham's . No doubt the creator's cross-pur- poses account for the film 's lack of con- cern for the cowhands who, although established as people rather than ciphers in the ranch house sequences , die in the cattle stampede. Although the British censor is clearly responsible for excising several scenes of violence , the sense of violence is intense enough . Yet merely to rate MAN WITHOUT A STAR as superior to nine Westerns out of ten is to fail to do it justice. It lifts its eyes above the horizon of violence, and attains an un- easy, intriguing middle ground between the obsession that dominates even the better movies of Mann, Boetticher, and even Ford , and a sense (critical only because reverent) of property and ecol- ogy . Thus it anticipates , like RUBY GEN- TRY, the conservationist concerns of a younger generation. Although Dempsey ' s relish is un- dimmed , the beyond into which he rides 42 SEPTEMBER 1973

seems an empty one . He concludes as the man without a star; no ideal, no goal. The film indicates , if it does not explore , a transitional stage betwe en Vidor 's criti- cal trilogy of co ntemporary Ameri ca, and it inaugurates a more affirmative trio of costume epics. Not that they are merely nostalgic . In the subsequent films , Vidor 's interests seem to have moved on from America to an internationalized (that is to sa y, a generalized ) philosophical concern-perhaps because , for him , America had become as constricted , as comple x, and as parado xical , as the old world and history had once been . War and'Peace (1956) It's ironic , no doubt, that the director sees , what he feels , and nothing WA R AN D PE AC E. Herbert Lo m (center). of NORTHWEST PASSAGE and AN AMERICAN else.. . We are far away from the center ROMANCE should rediscover so many of of the battle.... \" Vidor 's theme is less (Herbert Lom ) calmly acknowledges his his favorite themes in a novel by a Rus- Pierre's external alarums and exc ursions own tactical error . But his is a minimal sian anarchist who came to preach than the inner journey which brings him human ity . His infantry ad vances bravely pacifism and to denounce private proper- back to the point from wh ich he might enough , then turns and scatters under ty . But Tolstoi ' s thought involves with have started, had he a wiser man . a withering fire . Napoleon perce ives his several Vidorian themes: paradoxes of mistake , but , without compassion , cor- individualism and its transcendence , of The search for moral truth needs rects its \" Send in the cavalry .\" His imper- belonging to a family and a nation, of a stressing because Tolstoi 's moral ity de- turbable obsession expresses something pastoral egalitarianism vs . a corruptive liberately draws on the common stock, demonic . His realism without responsi- system , of the organic rural community , or commonplaces , of what he conceived bility becomes individualism deploying and of a nation in moral travail. as everyman ' s higher wisdom. And the militarism to create a totalitarian unity. resultant moral affirmations may not be If Vidor 's fil m can so easily seem a recognized as such when cast in dramat- The fi lm' s special concern is reserved merely docile transliteration of Tolstoi 's ic form (where polarities of sucess / fail- for the most devious forms of heroism. novel , it is partly because criticism has ure and safety / danger may take prece- General Kusutov (Oscar Homolka ) beats conceived two Vidors (the humanist of dence in the spectator 's mind ). a continuous retreat, refus ing even the the Thirties classics , the pessimist of the Moreover, Vidor is , if anything , less con- least daring chances of counterattack, nair trilogy ) without trac ing the thought cerned than Tolstoi with vindicating and finally \" beheads\" Mother Russia by that links the two. For then HALLELUJAH! Pierre 's as the only profound , or the most abandoning her capital city to the enemy. and RUBY GENTRY reveal their internal human , of moral odysseys, and more Natasha relinquishes , in her sheltered affinities . (Certainly the first isn 't so far concerned with according it a place of existence, the successive subjects of her from CARMEN JONES and the film nair, no honor among an array of attitudes, none infatuation : the young Pierre, Prince An- pun intended .) Equally , the epic sprawl of which he is concerned primarily to drey, the dissolute Anatole (Vittorio of Tolstoi 's novel , and its obvious con- denounce. The film 's secondary charac- Gassman ). Finally she is reunited with trast between the man of war (Napoleon) ters resemble Dominique, Rosa , and Pierre , who , achieving understanding and the man of peace (Pierre), lend Ruby as more or less misguided heroes without cynicism , has become another themselves only too easily to a mi xture also . Prince Andrey (Mel Ferrer) takes up man . His long , devious pilgrim 's progress, of pious sentiment and superficial realism his social responsibilities honorably and characterized by a mi xture of indecision , as tedious as the recent Russian adapta- straightforwardly, even if he remains a vulnerability , and firmness , is a most tion . No doubt Tolstoi's novel had a par- little priggish , a little cold , and is , in the comple x spiritual course . In Vidor ' s work , ticular significance at a time when the end , rigidly unable to forgive his Natasha Pierre comes somewhere between the European world was gearing itself, indus- (Audrey Hepburn) for her youthful folly. cartographer in NORTHWEST PASSAGE (the trially and spiritually , to the militaristic He loses her. Pierre (Henry Fonda), taken man of knowledge learning the discipline horrors of 1914-18. By 1955 the moral prisoner, finds a traveling companion , on of the long march) and Apperson in THE antithesis implicit in its title led to pieties the long winter march , in Platon (John BIG PARADE (the uncertain child of privi- which weaken rather than strengthen the Mills), a peasant-philosopher. His creed lege discovering reality). vital theme. of joyful resignation has its beauty, even if its acquiescence expresses a Pierre begins as an idealist, an an- \" My favorite theme is the search for weakness which , spiritual rather than archist, and a pacifist, seeking to numb truth . It's also the essence of Tolstoi 's physical , allows him to lie down and die his disillusionments in dissipation . This book. It's Pierre who strives to discover contentedly in the snow. And Napoleon apparently simple clash involves a mi x- it. He goes to observe the battle so as ture of idealism , bitterness, irrespon- to observe what lies in the heart of sibility , anarchism , individualism , and an man.... I wanted to show ... what he obstinate negativity. Each aspect of this FILM COMMENT 43

WAR AND PEACE. Audrey Hepburn and Vittorio Gassman . of Shakespearean tenderness, during her first ball. Vidor's bright, lavish spaces attitude comes to be modified, even re- bilitating?) atmosphere of the church , gently ironize over her fragile sensibilities partly by Napoleon 's human greatness, (her success in achieving the disdainful versed , as Pierre gropes his way to a partly by his own scruples, of which , expression, which probably frightens off perhaps , only the last represent a everybody except one old man , who gal- more mature balance. His spiritual jour- spiritually positive force . During a long lantly rescues her from her isolation , but ney involves excesses and aggravations.' march , under guard , in the snow , he is then becomes almost a threat as he influenced by Platon 's simple peasant promises to return again, the twists com- The thesis-antithesis of idealism and faith-even if the mechanical way in prise a succession of surprises). Mean- embitterment-in which Pierre 's nature which Pierre , to keep on doing , counts while Andrey decides: \" If she smiles at seems, initially, set to coarsen and disin- his steps , prevents him awh ile from see- me again on the turn , that woman will be ing the older man fall, and dooms the my wife. \" One hardly needs refer to tegrate-is modified through a series of latter. Finally, Pierre and Natasha are Vidor 's interview , in which he insists not united , in an image whose romanticism , only on the possibility but on the human reactions of which each , until the end , instead of being too easily dismissed as normality of love at first sight, for Na- \" mere Hollywood ,\" should be placed in tasha 's and Andrey's separation to seem is excessive , and must be checked by its specific context-where it occurs at tragic. (Perhaps, one of the film's un- the end of two people's long , difficult, solved problems , given its epic sprawl , external circumstance . His early recall to paradox-bestrewn moral maturation. is the paucity of settings and symbols which might recall specific issues in earli- social values overreaches itself when it Indeed , Vidor draws a distinction here er scenes at the moment of their nega- which would seem close to his heart, tion , and clarify the moral structure.) betrays him into his fascination with , and between a real and a false romanticism . No doubt Natasha's upbringing , shel- Ironically, it is Andrey , the sober, so- marriage to , the coldly beautiful Princess tered and privileged, imbued her with a cially responsible citizen , who , given his Helene (Anita Ekberg). He even fights a Bovaryism whose ingenuousness corre- difficulty in forgiving Natasha , proves sponds to the weaker side of Pierre 's himself the intransigeant moral romantic duel over her infidelity-for Napoleon 's is hesitations . (John , in THE CROWD , takes of the two . And Pierre, who began as an a long time to live down the false convic- irresponsible anarchist, engineers her not the only form of \" militarism \" at large tion of superiority derived from his shel- sequestration so that their eventually tered youth.) Yet weakness and strength blossoming love corresponds to the in society 's structures . He acts in contra- are not so easily distinguished . (A weaker \" second-choice love\" (on both their John might have learned his lesson more parts) in Vidor's earlier films. Eventually diction to his own anarchist tendencies quickly.) And perhaps the film 's most the growth of their love, from domestic beautiful scene is all but an act of worship roots to a plenitude of joy , is celebrated by forcibly preventing Natasha 's elope- to the young Natasha, leaning over the against the splendid exasperations of in- ment with Anatole , whose dissoluteness bowed balcony against the night sky, and fatuation , as in HALLELUJAH ! and OUR DAILY is a colder version of his own . He reacts dreaming of a love so perfect it's like BREAD . The sense of romanticism as a against his own pacifist tendencies, and flying . Such expectation is , in its way , an bloom on the stalk of duty (rather than expression of life 's plenitude; and , if the splendor in the grass!) recalls Charles his merely contemplative role , when he impetuosity of her innocence is vulnera- Barr's evocation of Wordsworth ian love helps to load cannonballs during the bat- bility , it also testifies to her elan vital. in his excellent article on Vidor in the tle. And he remains behind in Moscow Brighton Film Review (now Monogram). The absurdity of Natasha's untem- to assassinate Napoleon-a synthesis of pered sensibility is exposed , with a kind Hesitating between thought and ac- tion , principle and responsiveness , the duel's pistol-shot and the destiny of Pierre 's patience in confusion recalls , often enough, Apperson 's \" passive war. advance \" in THE BIG PARADE . Both his But he is unable to fulfill his purpose , confusion and his freedom stem from his marginal position in a rigid society. The overwhelmed partly by the (inspiring? de- dying Count is honest enough to pay his dues to nature and legitimize the illegiti- 'This is a characteristic dramatic dialectic-since mate Pierre (an illegitimacy anticipated drama , vi rtually by definitio n, is a matter of by the fate of another \" pacifist\": Jess, conflicting opposites being resolved , forming a in DUEL IN THE SUN , who is renounced by synthesis. But the Hegelian and Marxist his father as too thoughtful , too disloyal). preoccupat ion with the energies of physics (as in Andrey interrupts Pierre 's dissipation and the concern with the quantitative becoming qua li- acts as his guardian angel , recalling him tative), and therefore with the simpler sorts of to social and family duties. Society's feu- struggle , is best modified by the concept of the dalism must bear its share of blame, no rearrangement of aspects (parts) permitting very doubt, for Andrey 's harshness to his different total shapes and energy discharges. One bride , and also for Natasha 's personal might speak of a molecular dialectic, a phrase defenselessness (so unlike Melisande 'sl). whose principal advantage lies in emphasizing the And Vidor maintains his usual critical possibilities of analyzing and reassembling the diffidence towards established religion elements in a dialectic rather than erecting a when he is careful to show the Orthodox merely hierarchical structure upon them . priests filing out , in disapproval , as the dying Count decides to legitimize his son. The theme of individual fraternity , irre- spective of \" official,\" social hierarchical networks , is emphasized by Pierre 's obli- 44 SEPTEMBER 1973

gation for his moral education to many and rat-race egoism. The balance be- Pierre and Natasha. Napoleon combines whose creed is pr.esumably less close to tween the former, middle, and last atti- their qualities , in a demoniacal manner. Vidor's heart, and by the relationship tudes may be uneasily combined , in an As in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , true greatness between Pierre and Andrey , who are all opportunistic , ad hoc way . Thus \" What- would be the fulfillment of egoism but complementary characters. Andrey ever is, is right \" may mask the meaning through benefiting commun ity , not by de- dies of his wounds soon after Pierre has of \" Tough-that's the way the cookie vouring it. learned the truths for which he stands . crumbles.\" Remember the lady who was Where family happiness is concerned , mocked by Carlyle for ac cepting the uni- A variety of factors may conspire to the plot allows Vidor and Tolstoi a modus verse despite everything? She may, after make the film at first appear as one of vivendi (rather than agreement), and its all , have shown a concern about its nas- Vidor's less personal efforts. We have uneasiness is briefly crystallized by the tier aspects which many of us would already commented on the absence of sequestration of Natasha. This case of prefer to Carlyle 's \" robust\" (brutal and moral \" markers\" through out the plot's family despotism comes uneas ily close to callous) acceptance thereof. epic sprawl. There is ev iden c e o f difficul- Old Europe 's destruction of the romantic ties with a multil ingual cast and miscast- Manya in THE WEDDING NIGHT-eVen It is evideolt enough in which direction ing ; as a representati ve of worldliness , though , there , New America had its subtle Vidor's idealism tends. But what con- Anita Ekberg is vastly less interesting little share of responsibility in the matter. stantly reminds one of the unresolved than Hedy Lamarr in H.M. PULHAM , ESQ. tensions in the popular morality along It would be difficult for any normal-length Distinct as casuistry and art may be, whose wavelength he moves is not that film to carry the psycho-moral commen- the former is regularly an extremely im- his story lines leads to certain casuistic tary which is an ordinary id iom of th e portant element of the latter; and one conclusions (the idiom with which critics novel. In addition , the moral schema dis- doesn't need Vidor's insistence on the are normally happiest), but that the courages the flashes of alternating emo- importance to him of the moral message switching between resilience and sensi- tion which count for so much in Vidor 's in his movies to consider how the family tivity in his characters ' style is incessant . lyric ism . Peter John Dyer sugg ested that tyranny of WAR AND PEACE could (and This switching , with all its dramatic viva- the film lacked the novel 's sense of com- should) be distinguished from that of THE city, finally balances that streak of the passion ; and perhaps Vidor's concern WEDDING NIGHT. Apart from the different entertainer or the inspirationalist in Vidor with moral survival and moral success , social conte xts , the primary moral po- -a streak that prevents the problems and his more crisply affirmative American larity of all movies whose chosen specta- from appearing as brutally as they do in , tone, conflicted with Tolstoi 's Russian tor is I'homme moyen morale is deter- for example , Losey's THE BIG NIGHT. Orthodox and peasant sense of endur- mined by a balance among (a) the Equally, Vidor's more profound films are ance . emotional generosity and ethical sincerity those which combine worldly tragedy which underlie the characters' attitudes, with moral triumph ; those in which his In the grande armee ' s retreat across (b) the fulfillment or frustration of life transcendentalism comes nearest to ac- the river, under fire, we find another force which would follow from each alter- cepting the answers which the Lord gave variation on the spatial theme of the \" pe- native, and (c) peculiarities of perspec- Job. I doubt whether these paradoxes are tering-out line,\" involved with the de- tive derived from the fact that we see life unconscious on Vidor's part, as he stren- struction of an overblown greatness-like \" in the round ,\" to borrow a phrase from uously endeavors to equate a higher or the cavalry confrontation and the railroad the Cupid-cum-M .C .-e x-machina of more profound egoism , with no more spur line in DUEL IN THE SUN , or , in the Ophuls 's LA RONDE. In film shorthand , the injustice than a proper resilience can converse , automobile 's swerve into the first pair of factors are often declared by endure, overcome, and turn to good ad- sea in RUBY GENTRY , with its short-li ved expressions, gestures, even the physiog- vantage . Thus his films pursue their ten- nomies of the characters concerned . (It's sion-ridden course between realism and atogetherness or egoisme deu x. Vidor worth remembering that , while an act an exhortation to v italism and generosity. occurs only once in a film , the \" charac- certainly challenges the American audi- ter-atmosphere \" is continuous , and The story line of WAR AND PEACE inevi- ence 's longing for violence as he shows looms very large .) The jagged , snaky An- tably involves the issue of individual free- Pierre watching the battle , a flower in his atole : like a degraded version of Dempsey dom and state. The peasants ' immediate hand-like a sissy, or like a flower child in MAN WIT,HOUT A STAR , leaves us in little and instinctive resistence to Napoleon is before his time . Yet Vidor quitely insists doubt of his complete spiritual disaffinity complemented by Czarist conscription that Pierre's contemplation be taken with the wri ter in THE WEDDING NIGHT. and scorched earth-which one might seriously, be identified with , like his later expect Vidor to view with a certain am- flinching at the assassination attempt. Vidor 's stress on the necessity for bivalence , or as, at best, a tragic neces- The insolence of such touches shouldn 't spiritual resilience clearly implies an ac- sity . One is certainly invited , by Tolstoi be underestimated . One need only recall ceptance of those worldly imperfections and Vidor alike, to prefer Czarism to Howard Hawks's declared fury at the fact wh ich might develop toward one , or a Napoleon 's militaristic totalitarianism , as that Gary Cooper should ask for help in combination , of four major options: a presumably the lesser of two evils. Vidor's HIGH NOON , and his decision to make RIO Puritan morality, a common-sense moral- inSistence , in OUR DAILY BREAD as in BRAVO as a proof that your real red-blood- ity, a Neitzschean morality of \" will to NORTHWEST PASSAGE, on the need for both ed American sheriff is always ready to go overcome,\" or a Panglossian denial that strong leadership and enthusiastic it alone ' In its respect for an unrepentant anything essentially amiss can happen in response , might lead to a right-minded pacifism , WAR AND PEACE is something of the world (c .f. Vidor's 1960 declaration of acceptance of conscription , in a good a retort to SERGEANT YORK . his increasing interest in Christian cause, as no more than a \" passing tone\" Science). Although philosophy at the between these two poles of communal Not that one should enlist King Vidor academic levels tends to rule out the last good will. Conversely, or comple- among the pacifists : SOLOMON AND SHEBA two alternatives , popular philosophy is is as unrepentant about the slaughter of not always so unlikely to choose be- mentarily, Napoleon's intervention might the aggressors as NORTHWEST PASSAGE . tween , or combine, the last two alterna- be a blessing for some, and a curse for Nonetheless , Vidor is prepared to respect tives. Thus theories of evolution enable others, depending on the strength and a quasi-pacifist position , just as Wyler an apparently idealistic transcen- direction of the life force in them . Platon does in THE BIG COUNTY and BEN HUR . As dentalism to accommodate the sava- (too unworldly, too docile ) and Andrey geries of Social Darwinism , and enable (too rigidly encased in social cor- ' HIGH NOON , SO quick ly d ismissed as anodyne , also the latter , in its turn to accept realpolitik rectness) are doomed. The socially mar- provoked another retort , from John Sturges . in BAD ginal , the uncertain, the resilient survi ve: DAY AT BLACK ROCK, where Spencer Tracy, after cleanmg up a corrupt town single-handed (literally, smce he's one-armed), gives it a medal anyway , goodness knows why-for being Amer ican , pre- sumably. FILM COMMENT 45

in THE BIG PARADE , widely divergent, even Solomon and moral ferocity entails a ferocity of pur- contradictory, moral attitudes may each Sheila pose . The sense of divinity as energy represent the moral integrity, the tran- greater than consciousness (or even am- scendental participation , of the person (1959) bition) lends itself to a transcendental concerned . Slim and Apperson , Dink's view of the individual, whether mighty or father and Dink 's mother, are equally One might easily see Vidor's careful humble in worldly terms (and Solomon right. And for moral opposites transcen- exclusions of orthodox religious sects becomes as much a victim as John in THE dentalism must maintain a respect which from the more positive acts in HALLELUJAH I CROWD) . And Jehovah 's choice of the is beyond coherent expression , whether and WAR AND PEACE , and the destructive Hebrews lends itself on one level to by utilitarian calculation , by the categori- role of the lay preachers in DUEL IN THE American notions about \" God's own cal imperatives of Kant, or by the hatred SUN and RUBY GENTRY , as evidence of a country ,\" and on a deeper level to the of passion which Vidor, like Nietzsche, consistent distrust of Christianity, problem of any individual 's self-sacrifice finds so destructive in a narrow puritan- whether establishmentarian or inspired . for a people-a tribe-a community. ism . This acceptance (or respect) of op- After which the abundance of pious sen- posite viewpoints softens the obvious timents in his autobiography and in his It is from this second series of factors , moral polarities which are latent in the interviews must come as a surprise . But and the conflicts between them, that story, and makes it seem less concerned just as Vido r' s respect for the life force Vidor 's dramatic confl icts arise . SOLOMON with morality than I believe it is . Vidor is bound up in romantic love inspires his AND SHEBA is the Old Testament according as careful to respect opposite moral atti- fascination with its checks , corruptions , to Emerson , recalling HALLELUJAH! for its tudes as he is to emphasize no moral and counterfeits , so a sense of true conjunction of religious, communal, and points which would banish Tolstoi 's. The religion as something far more deeply erotic passion (the counterfe it of erotic film 's quite moral equivocations are those interfused inspires a constant criticism of passion being imperiousness in love , as of respect, and have their refined beauty. its narrowly exclusive and paraded forms . in all else) . For if Solomon is at once Equally , the moral epilogue of RUBY scapegoat and king , Sheba is another In connection with OUR DAILY BREAD GENTRY ceases to be merely the earthly Ruby Gentry , and her royalty is power and NORTHWEST PASSAGE , we indicated limbo to which defeated lovers are con- enjoyed for its own sake rather than also contrasts and comparisons between signed, and becomes, a/so, a moral as service . Solomon corresponds to Vidor's films and Eastern European affirmation akin to that of Oedipus at Co- Rogers in NORTHWEST PASSAGE ; Sheba is equivalents. Equally, the love-hate con- lonnus . a softer, infinitely more human version of flict of THE FORTY-FIRST with its remi- the spirit of Napoleon in WAR AND PEACE . niscent shoot out , is boringly simpler in We have repeatedly evoked the cUl- its socio-moral issues than DUEL IN THE tural links between three attitudes which If the film 's transcendental meaning is SUN . And the Russian version of Tolstoi 's are regularly assumed to be incompat- as inconspicuous as that of WAR AND Resurrection, with its empty gigantism , ible: the Puritan ethic , Emerson ian tran- PEACE , it is for much the same reason . reveals much which , in Tolstoi 's morality , scendentalism , and an optimistic dyna- Vidor has as much respect for the Holy is simplistic , salutary as its emphasis on mism . Much of Vidor ' s inspiration is Bible as for Tolstoi 's novel. And the tran- moral responsibility and cor.structive ex- generated by the tension between the scendental attitude could eas ily come to piation may be. Elsewhere, I suggested three outlooks , whose common factor is consider certain morally antagonistic po- that Renoir and Tolstoi could be seen , man 's role as the natural expansion of sitions which one accepts-and , by ac- from certain angles , as moral opposites ; God 's or Nature's energies-and are in- cepting which , one grows in humility and and Vidor is , I think , of their stature , volved even in man 's sins , as energy insight-rather than as the enemy to be although perhaps less obviously so , pre- misled . Vidor's sympathy for his Rosa denounced and destroyed . Similarly, cisely because he occupies a middle Molines and his Ruby Gentrys , as against neither Apperson (who shows mercy) nor position . To put it negatively first , Vidor the negative characters of THE FOUNTAIN- Slim (who shows none) is wrong ; and has Renoir's depth without his breadth; HEAD, suggests that the sins of energy are Dempsey, who rides on away from civili- his sense of instinct is linked with will virtues by contrast with the absence of zation , must insist that Jeff stay to be rather than with spontaneous fraternity ; sin in a soul more seriously sapped . This \" broken in \" by his young bride . And and his sense of spontaneous energy idea is occasionally emphasized by or- Vidor 's last two films show an ambiguity contrasts with Renoir's accommodation thodox Christians like Georges Ber- involving , optimistically perhaps, a hope of layers (civilization , theater, etc .). But nanos , but it runs counter to the empha- of moral synthesis. both have individual liberty, and co-oper- sis on restraint and immaculacy which is atives , at heart. BOUDU SAVED FROM normal Christian practice . On another level , one might surmise DROWING and MAN WITHOUT A STAR are that Vidor ' s failure to turn MAN WITHOUT appro ximate pairs , like OUR DAILY BREAD The Old Testament poses innumerable A STAR in the direction he desired engen- and THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE , or problems for Christian moral ity , whether dered a certain defeatism , rendering the BEYOND THE FOREST and MADAME BOVARY. in its moral ferocity ( \" an eye for an eye \"), subsequent costume epics so tactful And just as Renoir, at one stage, declared its sense of divinity as energy unrelated about any divergence from the most pop- himself more American than French (he to intention (the death of Uzzah ), and its ular and conventional moral interpreta- said that \" the Americans correspond to sense of the chosen poeple as the great- tions that they must be counted as among the French of 1910,\" in that they were souled (chastised yet reaccepted for all Vidor's potboilers, however efficient their still free in their exuberance), so Vidor the sins they commit along the way). execution . Certainly THE CHAMP and observed after WAR AND PEACE that he had Given the manner in which historical ac- BEYOND THE FOREST suggest that the line outgrown his narrower Americanism. cretion of Old Testament attitudes has between Vidor 's assignments and his Passing moods, perhaps, of the kind built itself into a narrow Christian funda- most personal films isn 't as clear-cut as which render interviews rather less mentalism , one might not expect Vidor to he , and others, have often assumed . definitive than is sometimes assumed . show a certain ambivalence about \" Old Wh ich doesn 't prove that his last two But both men have responded to their Testament morality\" But the sense of epics are personal films; indeed , specta- times, throughout a long career, while tors without Vidor's preoccupations in they followed-more or less stealthily, mind may well see in them no more than and along-side commercial calculations professional storytelling. and audacities-a personal evolution which has never been a betrayal. But Vidor wouldn 't be the first-or the last-filmmaker to produce a quietly per- sonal film within the film his public prefers to see ; and a transcendentalist might be 46 SEPTEMBER 1973

relatively tolerant of popular and relative- SOLOMON AND SHEBA. Gina Lollobrigida . ly shallow moral meanings . At any rate , SO LOMON AND SHEBA. Yul Brynner. common sense suggests that Vidor- SOLOMON AND SHEBA. Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. being both an artist with a moral message and a Hollywood survivor-would bear both his own meanings and the audi- ence 's expectations in mind , and that neither of our theoriel> is superfluous in explaining this film's mi xture of failure and success . The personal, transcendental mean- ing of SOLOMON AND SHEBA is further camouflaged by its origin as a latecomer in a long Biblical cycle , which began with SAMSON AND DELILAH near the end of the film noir era and ran throughout the Fif- ties . It's a cycle which I am tempted to relate to a Hollywood crise de sujet, aris- ing primarily from a McCarthyite pro- scription of the honest discussion of radi- cal social issues, and secondarily from suburban America 's ignorance of contin- uing social tens ions. For all its qualities , the Forties film noir can be seen as part of a gradual thrusting-out from Hol- lywood 's consciousness of all the social and environmental factors , some of which Thirties Hollywood was at least prepared to debate. Hollywood 's postwar decade was dominated by middle-class terms of reference : (1) the individual psyche, with neuroses and psychopathy as the usual explanations of friction ; (2) the family seen in a narrowly Freudian way (divorced from society); and (3) a mixture of mild reformism (liberal conser- vatism) and hawkishness about law and order , in which calls to civic responsibility tended to end in sheriff 's posses . ON THE WATERFRONT , THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE , and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE loom large among those films which brought the film noir back to social concerns and engen- dered a sense of social urgency. The Biblical films represent an alter- native option . In suburban areas , church affiliations were replacing purely ethnic ties , or, at least, the religious language was looming tactfully larger and the eth- nic language tactfully smaller. Because the melting pot hadn 't done its work as well as was expected , \" Americanism \" fell back on two useful totems : the flag , for its patriotic-militaristic aspect, and (in- stead of the cross, which excluded the Jewish population) the Old Testament, which involved WASPS , Catholics, and Jews in much less controversy. (Even when the New Testament was involved, the tendency , as Thorold Dickinson ob- served, was to make the Romans largely responsible for the crucifixion , reducing the intervention of the Jewish crowd to a little gang of ashamed-looking rabble who were obviously just lumpen in the pay of the high priest-who , by analogy with American pol itical bosses , wouldn 't be the Jewish people as a whole at all.) Christianity had taken on a second topi- cal meaning as idealistic , spiritualistic , and individualistic, and therefore oppo- FILM COMMENT 47

site to atheistic Communism . In their with Huston 's THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN , or pallid-faced , using the same visual icon- global crusade ,the Americans were, more Vidor ' s MAN WITHOUT A STAR. ography as Jean Renoir in FRENCH CAN- than ever, God 's chosen people. CAN to suggest their relative lack of We have already sketched a rough vital strength . By such weakness, the But th e Biblical cycle also provided a division within the genre-between a mediocre morally blackmail the Uber- shock of surprise. Simplistic as these mensch. But if the Ubermensch has it in films might seem in themsel ves , their very acrude survivalist moralism la De Mille, him to resist such \" blackmail ,\" how can choice of theme forced a challenge be- he avoid the equal and opposite pitfall twee n (a)Cllristian idealism and supernat- and the repudiations of worldly violence of irresponsibility (a King cannot be a uralism and (b) the cynicism and scientific in the Wyler and the Fleischer. A th ird , Roark) or a tyranny (like Sheba)? What- rati ona lity w hich loo med just as large in less memorable group is constituted by ever its origins , a trag ic situation is one th e ge ne ral cul tura l amalgam . Th e audi- the relati ve ly cautious revival of personal from which there is no escape without ence wa s startled , not by \" mi sca rr ia ges and ro mantic themes in Biblical dress , an amputation of large tracts of one's of justice\" but by \" miscarriages of such as Raoul Walsh's ESTHER AND THE soul. ' science ,\" as the film s affirmed miracles, KING , Henry King 's DAVID AND BATHSHEBA, visions, and vocations as moral impera- and Frank Borzage 's THE BIG FISHERMAN . Perhaps because Vidor is working ti ves devo id of \" rational \" support . A tra- The involvement of veteran names may against a contemporary grain as stren- ditio nal American id eo log y (C hristian wel l be accidental , but the genre's Fifties uously as in MAN WITHOUT A STAR , this film rationalism) was reinforced, or at least cycle is all but opened and closed by was something of a bad luck film , artisti- re-e nd owed wi th emotional presence , at cross-formations between the personal- cally at least, although its bo x-office suc- precisely its weakest point (Biblical mira- romantic and the survivalist-apocalyptic cess seems to have been considerable. c les). And thi s co nstituted the audacity themes . De Mille 's SAMSON AND DELILAH Those who saw the film both in Paris of their challenge-cu m-affirmation . Clear- wo rks its way from film noir mi sogy ny to (where it was shown on the Cinerama- ly , many Americans must have swiftly a heroi c and mo rall y redemptive destruc- scale system for which it was designed ) transposed the genre 's su pernatural as- t io n . and London (w here it was not) report that sertions into terms of superior moral the latter circumstances seriously dimin- fibers or of manifest destiny (vis-a - vis SOLOMON AND SHEBA also intric ates in- ished the effect of one sequence after Communism , or evil, or anything the y dividual passion wi th w holesa le slaugh- another. I can speak only of the shrunken considered anti-Christian or un-Ameri- ter . But Vidor 's interest isn 't primarily in vers ion . As Solomon , Yul Brynner seems ca n ). smiting the heathen hip and th ig h. Moral emotionally less vulnerable, less mallea- tragedy and corruption begin nearer ble, than Tyrone Power (who died during Nonetheless , it 's doubtful if the cyc le home . Solomon 's (Y ul Brynne r's) dead- the film 's shooting ) might have been . And wou ld have caugh t on if it hadn 't touc hed liest enemy is not some alien totali- La Lollo 's authentically Vidorian attack on tougher, not to say more cynical , taria nis m (Pharaoh , Rome), but his doesn 't seem accompanied by a warmth elements as well. As several commenta- meaner-souled brother (George Sand- of passion . Thus their encounter looks tors noted , th ese Biblical films , unl ike ers), his fai led , envious ri va l in power and more like that of a godly, reserved egoist the ir Twen ti es progenitors , made ve ry lo ve alike . Solomon ' s responsibility is to and a proudly childlike one, with a blur- little use o f their obvi ous opportunities for his community , and wha t might have ring of all the nuances which might arise flaunting sexual temptation (a notable been an Ayn Randian morality (o pposing therefrom-such as Solomon 's purifica- e xc eption , DA VID AN D BATHSHEBA , trans- the equi valents of Howa rd Roark and the tion (at the expense of humiliation) and poses fairly easi ly into co ntemporary sneaky architecture critic) in vo lves a the helplessness of Sheba 's worldliness terms of a tycoon 's love-life). By and broader sense o f responsibility . Nor is (wea lth , powe r, beauty , will) before a large , the genre in vo lved sex and se nti- there any heavy scapegoating onto a wisdo m whic h is not cunning Machiavel- mentality very much less than matters of mediocrity whose failure and envy Ayn lian , or Clausewitzian , but rather a moral , violence , and in th is respect the con tra st Rand , and right- wi ngers generally , wou ld reconciliatory strength . George Sanders between the Twenties and the Fifties ver- postu late as th e real moti vations of egali- plays as coolly as a lounge lizard done sions of BEN HUR is reinforced by the tarianism . Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) has up in fanc y dress, and as simplistically emphases in BARABBAS , THE BIBLE , and a tyra nt's streak, perhaps be cause her as would befit the moral simplicities of SODOM AND GOMO RR AH . The God of the God is not the God o f a peop le . De Mille , thus depri vi ng the film of an- Fifties was th e God of the Atom . And the other source of moral and emotional Bomb, not Hiroshima , was Son Amour. Yet Solomon 's responsibility to God complexity . Without these in ternal weak- This is made quite clear by the grueling and his people is also the source o f his nesses the film might well have chal- fates dealt out to a variety of impious tragedy . His fian cee (Ma ri sa Pavan) dies lenged , more cle arly than it does , the communities. Although Wyler, Fleisc her , in a disaster whic h is partly Solomon 'S pieties and polarities of that Sunday and Vidor maintain something of them- fault and partly a destruct iv e miracle . One School fundamentalism which hardly sel ves aga inst (or wit hin ) the dreary and cannot but question whethe r or not God dares bring itself to criticize the Old Tes- bloody moral conventions of the Old Tes- has in tervened , with minimum and neces- tament view of God-might have compli- tament according to Cecil B. De Mille, it sary brutality, to prevent a further deteri- cated , perhaps even subverted it in the is Aldrich and Huston w ho , amazingly , oration ; or w heth er God rea lly had to style of RUB Y GENTRY. sink without a trace of dissent or doubt. murder the innocent to move the guilty, Throughout SODOM AND GOMORRAH , Al- and w hether Solomon isn 't, after all , the Indivi dual sequences come over with dri ch honors the fundamentalist-Populist v ictim of his own guilt-the vic tim of a characteristic impact-notably Sheba equation of the rustic , God-fearing He- decent human sympathy which , from a wielding her chariot whip to chip lumps brews with the American pioneers, and Nietzsche an angle , might seem a of flesh out of the face of George Sand- of the twin cities with the effete vices of we akness like his brother's envy. Per- ers, who betrays his weakness by stand- the big cities . THE BIBLE deserves no title haps salvation and tragedy are one. better than HOW THE WORLD WAS WON ; its 'Def initi ons of trage dy vary , and some wou ld disal- climactic sacrifice celebrates obedience Whereas SAMSON AND DELILAH con- low the term except in the case of the virt ually without rhyme or reason to arbitrary au- cludes with a destruction so massive, so total disintegration of a hero 's identity or purpose. joyous, and so wholeheartedly accepted Obvious ly our use is more idio matic . \" A drama thority ; the Tower of Babel sequence is by the lovers themsel ve s that it's really with an unhappy end\" would be no more exact very congenial to Bible Belt xenophobia; a happy ending (and less complicatedly a phrase , since Solomon chooses the lesser un- and even the ecological undertones of so than in DUEL IN THE SUN) , SOLOMON AND happiness (his personal one) over the greater (loss Noah ' s Ark come over weakly in contrast SHEBA concludes with a tragic parting ; of moral purpose ). But what matters is the degree , God 's yo ke isn 't easy and his burden is extent , and duration of pain , and the fi lm clearly heavy indeed . Vidor presents both invo lves a li felong an d pa inful loss . George Sanders and Marisa Pavan as 48 SEPTEMBER 1973