VOLUME 07 - NUMBER 01 SPRING 1971

I MAG I NERO . [(~llphotos by S ergio Barbieri ] two-man crew to move about capturin g t he reality of a sit uation a nd usin g t he in terview method to death. But of co u rse, t his is used mostly in order to ma ke \" issue\" film s, where t he point of view is a lways et a priori, and t he shooti ng is done to cor- roborate t he t hesis or problem at ha nd . H owever, t he eterna l search of t he Ameri can a udience for superficia l stimul ation has pretty we ll killed a ny efforts such as t hose made by Flaherty, which, a l- t hough everyone claims t hem to be classics, in com- peting wit h fast-paced TV series, hysterical com- mercia ls, and co ncentrated information , his films are not often shown beca use t hey have a slow tempo by our prese n t standards. They delve deeply in to t he t hin g of everyda y life, and in man y ways capture t he true feeling of a cul ture that genera lly has a different co ncept of time . It's strange how this time sense affects me while filming a given cul t ure. There a re films that rea lly clip a long, gay ly and effortlessly because the people there are ca refree and happy . But when yo u shoot t he desert, yo u nat ura lly pause, and then t he problem arises as to how you cut such a film . When t h e sy nc-sound system is used for docu- mentation of ethnographic a nthropologic pheno- mena , t here is a tendency to leave t he camera rolling for t he full ten minutes it affords, perhaps moving aro und to capture details here and t here, if t he ca m- erama n is good. But havin g been train ed in t he cine- matic possibilities, and then tending toward the eth- nographic field, I think it is mu ch more rewarding to draw out th e dramatic elements t hat a ll situ atio ns presen t, and let the characters express t hemselves on film by giving us the clues. This is almost intuitive in a good filmmaker. You decide that you will have no preconceived ideas; yo u document what seems to be t he core of t he ·situation ; you record on t he sound track what they think you should know; you delve into subjects th at will clarify our understandin g of them. SUBER: I imagine some will criticize the film because it dosen't take sides, doesn 't exploit the obvious social message or messages in the material. PRELORAN : Oh , but if I wanted to editorialize, if I went in to the home of Hermogenes to film a bout a poverty-stricken old man who has to m ake images to survive, I 'd be distorting t he rea l trut h in favor of making my point, and in the act, I'd be using H ermogenes as an object rather than as a person. I have often thought that the purpose of my film on Hermogenes was really to sh ow it to him and hope that he be pleased wit h it. If so, I would h ave accomplished my goal, and co uld t hen show it to a general audience without qualms. As Alan Lomax has said, the raison d'etre of making ethnographic films sh ould be primarily for the use a nd benefit of those documented, rather than to show the rest of t he world h ow interesting, quaint or colorful primi- tive people can be. This attit ude h as led him to propose 'a plan to use t he ten films I have sh ot in the Puna area, and have t hem projected repeatedly throughout the whole region for the people they document, to see if eventually t his will help to strengthen their culture, which is being threatened by our a ll-engulfin g materia l cultu re, killing t he FILM COMMENT 49

folklore and mores of a people whose traditions have 1960 been unchanged for cen turies. This \"cultural feed- back\" could be done at t he same time we were making Soba Man 40 minutes, black & white. Production new films , and we would be editing t he work -print of the Motion Picture Department at UCLA. Direc- in t he field , guided by t h e subjects t hemselves. They tor of Photography, Preloran. would also h elp determine the content . This wo uld Delirium Tremens 20 minutes, black & white. Exper- give them access to a medium that otherwise wou ld imental film on the halucinations of a wino . be forever inaccessible to t hem, and would certain ly 1961 help us get a better insigh t in to t h em and t heir Reserve in Action 35 minutes, color. Filmed at a culture. summer training camp for the US Army Reserves showing a wh ole division on maneuvers, and is being Alan 's project appeals to me especially, for I would used to recruit vo lunteers. gladly j ump at the opportunity of staying in the Puna Death, Be Not Proud 12 minutes, black & white. An for 3 to 5 years, following several characters without experiment in sound and editin g on t he terrors of the pressure of h a ving to finish films, bu t letting t h eir a soldier in combat and his flight. Composed in three interactions develop a nd evolve on t h e screen , whi le movements as a sonata. Silver medal, Dubrovnik , documenting t he cha n ge this culture is undergoing. 1966. Perhaps we can try to find out what wou ld really EI Llanero 25 minutes, co lor. On the Colombian rider help these people, who are now semi-citizens because of the plains. For the Tinker Foundation. t hey are denied access to our sophisticated tech- 1962 nochratic society. The Argentine Gaucho Today 30 minutes color. In- trodu ction to a series of films on t he Argentine rider: SUBER: What are you working on now? The Gaucho of Salta 50 minutes. PRELORAN: Two other projects that I have been The Gaucho of Corrientes 45 minu tes. filming for some years now are the documentation The Gaucho of the Pampas 55 minutes. of the Ona India ns of Tierra del Fuego, who at These fi lms, produced for t he Tinker Foundation for present number on ly 7; and a tribe of Araucanian t h e Hall of the H orsemen of the Americas, at the Indians, wh o live deep in a hidden canyon of the University of Texas (Austin), document t h oroughly southern Andes. t he life and customs of the Argentine rider. In En- In 1969 Colin Young invited me to film in Vene- glish version t hey have been widely shown on NET. zuela for t he Ethnographic Program at UCLA on the Costumbres Neuquinas 10 minutes, color. Some Warao Indians of t he Orinoco Delta, which I did. typical customs and celebrations in the n orthern area Then I came to UCLA to teach in the winter and of the Neuquen Province of Argentina. spring of 1970, and to finish t he film. Now, I have La Patagonia Argentina 45 minutes, co lor. Many get out in t h e field again. extraordinary features of t his, one of t he least known SUBER: When you graduated from UCLA in areas of tIle world. 1960, you immediately disapp eared into the wilds of 1964 Argentina. The next you were heard from, you had Potencial Dinamico de la Republica Argentina 20 completed 42 film s, with an absolute minimum of minutes, color. In animation , shows t he development equipment, financing and crew. A re you going to keep of Argentina since its first population census in 1869, on this way? and a projection to the year 2000. Based on a work PRELORAN: Well, I hope to have better equip- by Juan Carlos, expert in Regional Science, Univer- ment and more money. I don't want to work with sity of Pennsylvania. much larger crews, t h ough . I like t he freedom of t his La Costa Patagonica 11 minutes, color. Shows t he kind of filmmaking ... the sense of not really know- geographic characteristics, fau na and flora of t he in g wh at will happen tomorrow. There is no real true Atlantic coastline of Argentina. security. There is no fear either, just t he excitement 1965 of knowing you 'll be meeting marvelous people, and Trapiches Caseros 13 minutes, color. The primitive that you are there to understand; not to teach, way of making sugar honey with wooden mills in condescend or expose. troduced by t he Jesuits in the early Colonial days. Anfibios, Reproduction y Desarrollo 10 minutes, JORGE PRELORAN: FILMOGRAPHY color. Explains for high school level, the external The films listed have been directed, photograph- reproduction system, the embryos development and ed, edited and sound by Preloran, except where it specifies otherwise. final metamorphosis of the Bufo Arenarum toad. 1954 Purmamarca 16 minutes, color. At a n elevation of Venganza 30 minutes, black & white. First Prize 8000 feet, t his small village in Northwestern Argen- Beginners Festival Cine Club Argentino, 1954. t ina comes alive for t he celebration of its patroness 1957 Santa Rosa de Lim a, August 31st. The Unvictorious One 20 minutes, co lor, Experi- La Biologia Experimental 10 minutes, co lor. Various mental film about t he life of a Black using ballet simple experiments in a biology laboratory , for high as a medium an d only one dancer. Filmed in Heidel- schools and vocationa l orientation. berg, Germany. Ocurrido en Hualfin a trilogy : 1959 Cuando Quede Silencio el Viento 14 minutes, black This Is UCLA? 40 minutes, co lor. Shows t he various & white. Don Temistocles Figueroa is 94 a nd blind. student activities in a satirical manner. He te lls of his early life, whi le idling away one day . 50 SPRING 1971

Greda 15 minutes, black & white. Doila Justina Fi- shows the regiona l products, narrated by a Coya gueroa, 83, makes earth enware. She tells of the past generation and the prob lems of emigrating men and Indian. women from the valley. Elinda del Valle 15 minutes, co lor. The present gen- Viernes Santo en Yavi 19 minutes, co lor. Documents eration Antonia weaves and retains on ly her young- est daughter who will co ntinue with her tradition. one of the most moving ceremo nies of Argentina. 1966 Reptiles Fosiles Triasieos de la Argentina 16 min- Sma ll groups of women converge on Yavi to take utes, color. 180 million years old , the Triasic fauna of repti les evolved into mammals. The changes are part of the processions that all night go through the explained and we see paleontologists digging up fosilized bones from Ischigualasto, Argentina. vi llage. Remnants of the Jesuit influence of the early Claudia y Yo 7 minutes co lor. A free improvisation of a 5 year old child and the camera, who cavort, Co lonial da ys. play, get mad and finally end in a chaos of activity. With superimposed a mation and a leatory music. Dinosaurios 20 minutes, co lor. Through drawin gs, Maximo Rojas, Monturero Criollo 17 minutes, co lor. The manufactoring process of a saddle by a whole graphs, and the whole process of reconstruction of fami ly, in age-o ld tradition . In the foothi lls of the Andean Mountain Range. an early dinosaur, their characteristics, various typ- Casabindo 17 minutes, co lor. The first town founded in Argentine soil by t he Conquerors, it boasts of the ica l specimens a nd the reasons for their complete only bull ring in Argentina. The celebration of the year is the patroness Virgin of the Assumption, August disappearance are all explained . 15. Second Prize, La Plata, 1968. EI Estudio de los Vegetales 11 minutes, color. The Medardo Pantoja 16 minutes, co lor. One of the most systematic study of plants, from the fie ld work to the archives. representative Argen tine painters of the interior, he Salta y su Fiesta Grande 22 minutes, color. The festivity of the Lord of Miracles attracts hundreds lives and paints in Tilcara. of thousands on September 15 from all over t he Northwest Argentina. First Prize, Tucuman, 1967. 1969 1967 Artesanias Santiaguenas 16 minutes, co lor. Various Hermogenes Cayo [Imaginero-The Image Man] 70 craftsmen of the region of Santiago del Estero in central-north of Argentina, and t heir ways of life. minutes, color. An image-maker of the Andean pla- EI Tineunaeo 16 minutes, color. The celebration of the Meeting of San Nicholas of Bari with the Christ teau near the Bolivian Border, H erm6genes was an Child dressed as the Major of the city of La Rioja. It is one of the most co lorfu l religious celebrations extraordin ary man in his complexity and philosophy. of Argentina, on December 31. Chuealezna 22 minu tes, color. A small community During one and a half years he was documented as of t hirty families, in the Humahuaca Canyon, of Northwestern Argentina, is brought together by the he went through the cycle of the seasons, with his rura l schoo l in which the children paint. Their work has drawn attention in International Art Festivals. own comments spo ken throughout. [Released in the First Prize, La Plata, 1968. Quilino 17 minutes, color. A small village North of US as IMAGINERO-THE IMAGE MAN , 52 minutes. Dis- t he Cordoba Province of Argentina has developed an original straw and feather craftsmanship. Howev- trib uted by Image Resources, 267 West 25th Street, er, t he socia l problems they face are so stark t h at t he film stresses their plight and work. New York Cit y 10001. Sa le $550, rental $50.] 1968 Feria en Simoea 9 minu tes, color. A sma ll town in Iruya 21 minutes, color. A very remote little village the Provin ce of Tu cu man , in the sugar cane area , it is t he center of a large popu lation concentration in forgotten canyons that had been the main roads of cane·growers, that merge on Saturdays to a very unique market. of Colonial days, Iruya has remained a sort of Sh a n- Un Tejedor de Tileara 18 minutes, color. Documents the two ways of weavings prevalent in Argentina , gri-La. Still retaining the flavor of a Spanish villa, a nd especially the hori zontal way. La Feria de Yavi 11 minutes, co lor. The barter market it celebrated in October the feast of its patroness, of t his marvellous little vi llage on the Bolivian border t h e Virgin of t he Rosary. During t he celebration a pantomime reminiscent of t h e Autos Sacramentales and Mysteries is reenacted unchanged. Sefialada en Juella 21 minutes, color. Documents one of t he most In caic ceremonies existen t now in Argentina. During t h e Carnival days, the marking of the smaller cattle is done in each little h ome corral, with relatives and friends invited to participate. The whole rite is centered on rendering cult to Pachama- ma, the Mother Earth. Rodeo en Valle Fertil 16 minu tes, co lor. The round- up of stray cattle in fence less plains in Western Argentina against t he Andean foothills, is docu- mented at Va lle Fertil, where silent introverted riders go through their rough work with ease and grace . Fiestas en Volean Higueras 30 minutes, color. After a 12 hour mule ride east of Iruya, this little sprinkle of huts ce lebrates San Santiago and Santa Ana in naive and simple ways. Una Joya Alada 25 minutes, color. Documented dur- ing 9 months in Northwestern Argentina, it shows the mating season of the Sappho Sparganura hum- mingbird. Los Warao Indians of t he Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, that hun t and fish for a livelihood, and live in pa laphitic houses in large communities. in preparation Ruea Choroy, on an Araucanian Indian tribe of Western Argentina, it is an exhaustive study of their way of life and religious beliefs. Onas, on t he remaining 7 Ona Indians of Tierra del Fuego. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 51

ITAMIJE§ WIHIALJE by Paul Jensen Paul J ensen teaches at the State University of the Hollywood studio system and never received a New York at Oneonta. screen-writ ing credit. Yet there is considerable evi- dence tha t he at least \"conferred\" a great deal with It certainly is becoming harder a nd harder to keep his writers, and sin ce he entered the field a successful track of the auteurs, especially now that more and stage director whose first mo vie was also successful, more lost films are reaching presen t-day screens. he no doubt had considerable say as to what projects Directors who once existed so lely as names without he would undertake. (One need only recall Whale 's identity now must be evaluated on the basis of a winning of FRANKENSTEIN from R obert Florey to body of work long unknown. James Whale is one realize the extent of his influence. ) such filmmaker. E ven t hough a few of his film s- FRANKENSTEIN ,THE INVISIBLE MAN, BRIDE OF FRANK- One indication that Whale exerted substantial ENSTEIN-show up fairly often on television, these creative control over his film s is the fact that he works are only a fraction of his output; and the fa ct tended to work with the same people more than once. that they are all horror films causes him to be typed He didn't have a stock compa ny in the Ingmar Berg- as an effective but limited genre specialist. Some of man sense, and he didn 't work with any single writer his films are still out of reach and others are rarely as closely as Frank Capra did with Robert Riskin , screened (this writer is particularly indebted to Wil- but there is enough overlap to confirm that when liam K. Everson for privileges in this area), but many he found someone with whom he could work he made are now available and enough is known about the it a point to keep him around. The best illustration others to warrant educated guesses. is that of R.C . Sherriff, the playwright for whom Whale directed the stage and screen versions of Actually, Whale 's decade-long career encompassed JOURNEY 'S END. Later, Sherriff worked on the scripts an impressive variety of styles and subjects. He has of THE OLD DARK HOU SE, THE INVISIBLE MAN , ONE viewed war from the trenches (JOURNEY'S END) and MORE RIVER , and THE ROAD BACK, as well as a few from London during an a ir raid (WATERLOO BRIDGE), unfilmed projects. While Whale was working on and he has followed some yo uthful German soldiers Howard Hughes's HELL'S ANGELS, he met Joseph home when the war ended (THE ROAD BACK , Erich Moncure March , the dialogue writer on that air epic. Maria R emarq ue's sequel toAll Quiet on the W estern Decidin g that March knew his job, Whale and pro- Front) . He made the second version of K ern 's and du ction supervisor George Pearson went out of their Hamm erstein 's SHOW BOAT, a biography of actor way to obtain his ser vices in a dapting JOURNEY'S END Da vid Garrick (THE GREAT GARRICK), a feature based to t he screen . Similarly, playwright Benn Levy on Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy (PORT OF SEVEN worked on the scripts of both WATERLOO BRIDGE a nd SEAS), an adaptation of Dumas' THE MAN IN TH E THE OLD DARK HOU SE. Art hur Edeso n photographed IRON MASK, and a version of John Galsworthy's last five Wha le filnls , John Mescall fi ve, an d K arl Freund novel (ONE MORE RIVER). To these ca n be added a three. jungle picture (GREEN HELL ), a Lubitsch-style so - phisticated co medy (BY CAN DLELIGHT ), a co me- As for performers, certain ones t urn up with in ter- dy-roman ce set in a h ospital (IMPATIENT MAIDEN), esting frequency. Co lin Clive was leading ma n in four a comedy-mystery (REMEMBER LA ST NIGHT?), a court - films, a nd E.E. Clive provided comedy relief for four. room dra ma (THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR , which Mae Clarke, Gloria Stuart, and Lionel Atwill ap- he also remade as WIVES UNDER SUSPICION ), and a peared in three film s each , while quite a few others shipwrecked- on-an-isla nd story (SINNERS IN PARA· can be seen in at least two: John Boles, Frederick DISE). Clearly, Whale's career is quite a bit more K err, Paul Lukas, Ern est Thesiger, R egina ld Denn y, varied than might at first be assumed. Frank Morga n, Wan'en William, Joan Bennett, Andy Devin e, a nd (unfortunately) Una O'Connor. From But a wide variety of subjects does not assure a loo k at other Universal film s of t he period, it seems a director of individu a lity; indeed, it could easily be t hat t his co nsistency is less a case of studio contract a sign of an eclectic personality with no real in terests players being inj ected in to film s than of a director of his own. Yet despite co nsiderable differences, making as many perso nal choices in casting as he Wha le's films do conta in co nsistencies of content and technique that should encourage a ny auteur-seeking could . critic. Other diffi culties may arise beca use Wha le, P erha ps the most diffi cult kind of auteur to be though an Englishman , directed a ll his films within is one wh ose films rely a great dea l on their scripts, 52 SPRING 1971

which are written by others . Whale's career in par- A sequence ticular has an unabashed li terary to ne to it: his films of shots from are a lmost a lways adaptations of plays or novels THE INVISIBLE by respected authors like R ober t E. Sherwood, H .G . W ells, Mary Shelley, Sherriff, Galsworthy, Re- MAN marqu e, and Pagnol ; and when a man like Sherriff William Harrigan provides a script it is usually equipped with adroit and Gloria Stuart. a nd witty dialogu e. What, then, ma kes Wha le's han- dling of these scripts different from or better than anyone else's? For one thing, the mere fact that he co uld select t his so rt of script, and co uld film it with a sensitivity to its virtues, sets Whale apart from ma ny of the other directors wo rking in Hollywood. His British restra in t produ ces a style best described as refin ed, gracefu l, well-bred; his directorial technique refu ses to draw attention to itself, yet is extremely confident and competent. All the mechanical devices of cinema are used-cutting, moving camera , composition - yet with a civilized discretion and an emphasis on subtle character revela tion. One rev iew of JOURNEY 'S END (Outlook , June, 1930) expresses this quality : \" The man who directed t he stage produ ction s in England and in this co untry a lso directed the picture-James Whale. With a lm ost the first shot you get the feeling that he knew just what he was doing and just how to do it: yo u can surrender yourself without any fear that fumbling and un certainty and inadequacy are going to bob up and spoil things. He has not done anything revo- lutionary or even novel in technique-in fact the production may easily be made a theme for argument among t hose who like to discuss t h e relative merits of stage and screen. For myself I find that the screen brings t he characters closer to me ... \" Even though JOURNEY'S END was officially Whale's first film , and that should be soon enough to expect this kind of praise, his skill was actually illustrated even earlier. In 1929 Whale had been hired by Howard Hughes to supervise the numerous dial ogue scenes of HELL 'S AN GELS , and supposedly it was he who had t he story changed and who directed these parts. (His credit line reads: \"Dialogue staged by James Whale.\") These scenes, viewed today, have a surprising q uality of co nciseness which is co nsistent wit h Whale's handling of FRANKENSTEIN and ONE MORE RIVER . Man y scenes last for little more than a minute and contain very little dialogue; overtly, not much seems to happen , but a great deal is re- vea led nonetheless. The direction is fluid, with a considerable number of long, medium , and close shots-with t he la tter two dominant. There is even counterpoin t between sound and image, and some tracking sh ots during delivery of lines. Among se- quences shot in 1929, these stand out as not micro- phone-inhibited, as looking like \" normal \" scenes or even somewhat better, as lacking se lf-conscious speakin g and pausing. In one such vignette, from HELL'S AN GELS a ha nd in close-up delivers a letter to one of the main char- acters, a German yo uth nam ed Karl. This is follow ed by a medium shot of t hree boys standing around a la mp as one of them, Karl, reads the letter to himself. One of the others asks, \"Someon e ill?\" The now -

drafted Karl hands him the letter; the friend reads care about it functions as a dramatically charged it, then exclaims, \"Karl!\" Fade out. moment, whereas having the Monster get up and stumble about would be pushing credibility too far. An earlier scene introduces the two British heroes, still students at Oxford; it gives us needed informa- Whale's commitment to truth and to good hu- tion about the personalities and social situation in mOl·ed British restraint also robs his films of the im- a natural, casually indirect way. Two young men in pure and simple villain, since even characters who do a room are prompted by a newspaper headline to bad things are rounded and human enough to be discuss the war. A third, Monte, sits reading on a somehow sympathetic. This is obviously true of the couch, occasionally interrupting to tell the others Monster and scientist in FRANKENSTEIN. In BRIDE to be quiet. The first two continue talking. Eventual- OF FRENKENSTEIN, the satanic Pretorious has charm, ly , Monte interrupts to ask how to spell \"ecstatic. \" wit, and some justifi cation for his bitterness. The Fade out. inhabitants of THE OLD DARK HOUSE are quaintly eccentric, and even the homicidal maniac is help- Probably the shortest, most concise episode has less-looking and ingratiating, while Karloff's butler Roy rush excitedly into the students' room. \"I've only gets violent when he is drunk. Arrogant and enlisted, Monte-Royal Flying Corps!\" Monte replies, dangerous individuals like Griffin in THE INVISIBLE \"You're a fool , Roy .\" Fade out, and on to the next MAN or the husband in ONE MORE RIVER usually have scene. other sides to their personalities to make them fuller figures, and the personal dignity and charm of their In tnis fashion Whale goes to the heart of a narra- actors (Claude Rains and Colin Clive, respectively) tive without wasting time or space. And yet, this aid in creating this effect. ability is combined with his obvious pleasure in a leisurely pace, and a fondness for observing the small These virtues no doubt originated, or at least details of person and place that might not be needed found support, in the theatrical milieu of which to tell the story, but which do give social and psy- Whale was a part before (and after) entering films, chological texture to it. By saving time on the narra- and other aspects of his work also indicate a sense tive, Whale is able to provide these \"extras\" while of \"theatricality\" that gives the films a distinctive still making an efficient, short film that encompasses tone. His occasionally perverse sense of humor is seen a great deal of character interaction. in bits of business that are straightforward, unex- pected coups de theatre. Fritz's pause on the stairs Probably the best example of this is ONE MORE to pull up his sock (in FRANKENSTEIN) and Horace RIVER, which brings in a governmental crisis, the gold Femm's tossing of his sister's flowers into the fire- standard, an election, comments on British divorce place (THE OLD DARK HOUSE) fall into this category. laws, a trial, and numerous characters the relation- ships between whom must be clearly established. In A penchant for pointing out the roles and poses the midst of all this, Whale is still able to digress of characters also indicates a sensitivity to the by showing how a cloakroom attendant remembers \"phoneyness\" of performing. The clearest example of which hat belongs to which customer, or by having the stiffly polite Reginald Denny get slightly (unspo- this is in FRANKENSTEIN, when the scientist explains kenly) irritated at the many women who stop at his to his visitors what he is about to do. In Whale's restaurant table to greet the recently returned Diana own words: \"He deliberately tells his plan of action. Wynyard, since he has to stand up each time. At By this time the audience [in the laboratory and in their best, Whale's films offer many such bonuses. the movie theatre] must at least believe something is going to happen; it might be disaster, but at least Apparently Whale was quite aware of this aspect they will settle down to see the show. Frankenstein of his work, and consciously aimed to achieve it. puts the spectators in their positions, he gives final Speaking of JOURNEY'S END in one interview (New orders to Fritz, he turns the levers and sends the York Herald-Tribune, December 3, 1944), he noted diabolic machine soaring upward to the roof, into that \"the suspense was made up of very small things. the storm. He is now in a state of feverish excitement But the audience cared so much about the actors calculated to carry both the spectators in the wind- in it; whether one of them drank tea or wanted coffee mill and the spectators in the theatre with him. \" mattered enormously.\" Earlier he had said, \"When it comes to human emotions people are the Clearly, Whale viewed Henry Frankenstein as a same .. . and the simpler a big situation is presented director-performer manipulating his dual audiences. to them the harder it strikes. The whole foundation In a letter to Colin Clive about the character, he of JOURNEY 'S END, to my mind, is that it presents notes that \"in the first scene in his laboratory he an unusual situation in a most appealing way. Some becomes very conscious of the theatrical drama.\" critics have said that it violates the ethics of the Frankenstein is even given the following dialogue, drama. It does not, because the essential element \" Quite a good scene, isn't it? One man , crazy ; three in all drama is truth ... \" (New York Times, Sep- tember 8, 1929) very sane spectators,\" and the scene is staged to emphasize this performer-audience division. The feeling that truth is most convincingly pre- sented through simplicity might be seen as a guiding Other illustrations of this side of Whale are less principle in Whale's work. Recall, for example, that obvious, but grouped with the above they do seem the success of Henry Frankenstein's original experi- consistent. Ernest Thesiger must have aroused ment is presented solely by showing the Monster's Whale's interest, because after directing him in THE hand moving. This in itself is unimpressive, but be- OLD DARK HOUSE he put him in BRIDE OF FRANKEN· cause the characters are people we believe in and STEIN, thus establishing the film's overall outre tone. Yet Thesiger's style is totally mannered and quite 54 SPRING 1971

unrealistic; he is obviously acting, with this exagger- A sequence from ation partially justified by making it the character BRIDE OF who is speaking in this artificial, ironic sty le. Inter- estingly, the \"eccentric\" aunt played by Mrs. Patrick FRANKENSTEIN Ca mpbell in ONE MORE RIVER is a n onl y slightly less From left, extreme female version of Thesiger, which points up Colin Clive and the stage origin of this entertaining sty le . Similar is Ernest Thesiger. Whale's fondness for the broad playing of British character actors like Frederick K err and E.E. Clive (and the fatal fascination with Una O'Connor), as well as Americans like Andy Devin e. Conveniently, Whale's discrete and gentle handlin g of these per- formers often managers to blend them smoothly into the rest of the film . Other elements of Whale's films deserve a closer look for what they might reveal about the director's awareness of artificiality and poses, and occasionally of the things they cover up. A \"truth game\" is played in THE OLD DARK HOUSE , forcing the visiting charac- ters to be honest about themselves, and there is a considerable contrast between the weak and gentle appearance of the Femms and their very real, and qui te dangerous, insanity. THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR and its remake WIVES UNDER SUSPICION hinge on whether or not a seemingly \"normal\" man might be dri ven to commit murder; and the appear- ance-reality contrast of the Frankenstein Monster is well known . Reflections, usually in mirrors but occasionally, as in BRIDE, in a pool of water, keep turning up to emphasize someone's external \"image.\" Whale's ability to handle the visual side of his films is often taken for granted, because it isn 't flam- boyant, yet it should be discussed since it is totally under control and unusually expressive. His back- ground as a newspaper cartoonist, and as a theatrical set and costume designer, equipped Whale for super- vising the appearance of whatever he planned to photograph, and helps to explain his fondness for a semi-expressionistic vision of characters silhouetted against a stark sky, as though standing on a hilltop with no visible land in the background. This is of course important to Whale's Frankenstein films, but it also can be seen in the laborer shots in SHOW BOAT'S \" Old Man River\" number. Whale also had a well- developed sense of camera movement, yet he was never so fond of a tracking shot that he wouldn't cut away from it before completion if it seemed to have served its purpose. It is the editing that gives Whale's best pictures their quite special flow and grace. However, his cut- ting is not noticeable unless a viewer is looking for it, since its purpose is to support and reveal the content rather than to distract from it. Whale's secret is simply that he is willing to go to the extra trouble of securing multiple camera set-ups-not from different angles, necessarily, but from different distances. As a result, he will cut from a medium shot (mid-groin to top-of-head) to a medium-close shot (mid-chest to top-of-head) during a character's speech; the shots are similar enough to each other that the cut goes unnoticed, but they are not so similar that a jump-cut results. Whale often used this cutting when introducing a character, as in the long shot-medium shot-close

shot-extra close shot series as the Monster backs into thunder, fearful of the dark, and yet you have the laboratory and turns around in FRANKENSTEIN. written a tale-\" A variation on this occurs when the butler (Karloff) 18 cut to close-up of Mary. Byro n 's voice: \"-that in THE OLD DARK HOUSE gets dangerous and Whale sent my blood into icy creeps.\" Mary lo oks up cuts from a close-up of the face to tight close-ups and laughs. of just the eyes and the mouth. Other examples are 19 cut to medium shot of Mary on the left, Byron Griffin's entrance into the pub in THE INVISIBLE MAN on the right. Byro n co ntinues: \"Can yo u believe and the deserted husband 's arrival in ONE MORE that bland and lovely brow co nceived of Frank- RIVER. The agony of the Monster's semi- cru cified enstein-\" position when captured by the mob in BRIDE is em- 20 cut to medium shot of Byron : \"-a monster phasized by this sty le of editing, while a conversation created from cadavers ou t of rifled graves?\" between Dr. Pretorious and Henry Frankenstein in 21 cut to long shot of the three, as Shelley return s that film cuts between several different but very to his original position . Byro n continues: \" Isn 't similar camera angles. it astonishing?\" 22 cut to medium shot of Mary: \"I don 't know why The opening thirty shots Mary Wollstonecraft- you should think so.\" Percy Shelley-Lord Byron episode of BRIDE is a 23 cut to medium shot of Byro n . Mary continues: lengthy illustration of how this technique can be used \"What do you expect?\" in a dialogue scene as a cinematic equivalent of a 24 cut to close-up of Mary. Mary co ntinues: \"S uch stage director's attempt to analyze a line and \" point an audience needs something stronger than a up\" the more significant parts. and direct the audi- pretty little-\" ence's attention to the subject of the line when ap- 25 cut to close-up of Shelley. Mary continues: propriate. \"-love story.\" 26 cut to close-up of Mary. She co ntinues : \"So why 1 long shot of building; camera tracks in. shouldn't I write of monsters?\" 2 dissolve to exterior of window: Byron is seen 27 cut to long shot of the three. Byron: \"No wonder Murray's refused to publish the book; he says looking out, the other two sitting within. his reading public would be-\" 3 dissolve to long shot of interior: characters are 28 cut to close-up of Mary. Byron : \"-too shocked.\" Mary: \" It will be published, I think.\" in same position s, but seen from the side. Cam- 29 cut to medium shot of Shelley. Shelley: \"Then, era tracks in. darling, you will have much to answer for.\" 4 dissolve to right side of room: Byron in center, 30 cut to close-up of Mary in profile: \"The publish- Shelley on left, window on right. ers did not see that my purpose was to write 5 dissolve to medium long shot of Byron as he a moral lesson, of the punishment that befell says: \"How beautifully dramatic! The crudest, a mortal man who dared to emulate God.\" savage exhibition of Nature, at her worst with- out, and we three, we elegant three, within.\" Byron then recalls certain parts of the story, as While talking Byron walks to the left; camera we are shown short sections of the first film. Soon pans to follow, and final shot includes all three. after, Mary starts to tell the rest and we are into 6 cut to medium shot of Byron: \"I should like the main body of the film. to think that an irate Jehovah was pointing those arrows of lightning directly at my head- \" This complicated but smooth editing technique 7 cut to close-up of Byron : \"-the unbowed head is something that only the director could have im- of George Gordon, Lord Byron, England's great- posed on the film; there is no indication of it in the est sinner.\" original shooting script. It is in this way, as well as 8 cut to medium long shot of Byron standing on in the others already described, that Whale deserves the left, Shelley sitting on the right: \"But I to be classified as a director of personal films, despite cannot flatter myself to that extent. Possibly the fact that he used scripts credited to others. As those thunders are for our dear Shelley-\" for his career as a whole, it is still impossible to say 9 cut to medium close shot of Shelley: \"-Heaven's for sure just how many of his films are good, and applause for England's greatest poet. \" how many reveal his individuality. It is enough, for 10 cut to slightly different medium close up as the moment, to conclude that in general he reveals Shelley replies: \"What of my Mary?\" a maturity and sensitivity of content and style that 11 cut to medium close up of Mary, sewing. Byron's should assure him of our continued respect. voice: \"She is an angeL\" Mary: \" You think so?\" 12 cut to medium long shot of Byron and Shelley. JAMES WHALE Byron : \" You hear? Come Mary, come and watch 1930 the storm.\" Hell'S Angels. United Artists. Director Howard 13 cut to medium close up of Mary: \" You know Hughes; dialogue director James Whale; screenplay how lightning alarms me-\" Howard Estabrook and Harry Behn ; from a story by 14 cut to close-up of Mary : \"-Shelley darling, will Marshal Neilan and Joseph Mon cure March; pho- you please light these candles for me?\" tography Tony Gaudio, Harry Perry and E. Burton Steene; cast Ben Lyon, James Hall, Jean Harlow, 15 cut to long shot of the three as Shelley crosses John Darrow. in the background. Byron: \"Astonishing crea- Journey's End. Tiffany-Gainsborough; scenario Jo- ture!\" seph Moncure March ; from the play by R. C. Sherriff; 16 cut to close-up of Mary: \"Aye, Lord Byron?\" 17 cut to medium shot of Byron: \"Frightened of 56 SPRING 1971

cinematography Benjamin K lin e; cast Co lin Cli ve, ward Arnold , Constance Cummings, Sa lly Eilers, David Ma nn ers, Ian MacLa ren, Anthony Bushell, Billy Beva n. Robert Yo un g, Robert Armstrong, Reginald Denny , 1931 Waterloo Bridge. Universal ; screenplay Benjamin W. Ed Brophy, Gustav vo n Seyffertitz , Arthur Treacher, Levy; continuity T om Reed; from the pay by Robert E . Sherwood; cinematography Arthur Edeson; cast E. E. Cli ve. Mae Clarke , Kent Douglass, D oris Lloyd, Ethel Grif- fi es, Frederick Kerr, Bette Dav is. 1936 Frankenstein. Universal; script Garrett Fort and Fran cis Edwa rd Fa rago h ; adaptation John L. Ba l- Show Boat. Un iversa l; screenplay Oscar Hammer- dersto n ; from the play by Peggy Weblin g and the no vel by Mary Shelley; cinematography Arthur Ede- stein II ; from the play by Hammerstein ; lyrics Ham- son; cast Co li n Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Boris Kar loff, Edward Van S loan, Dwight Frye , Frederick merstein; music J erome Kern; from the novel by K err. 1932 Edna Ferber; cinematography John Mesca l!, John Impatient Maiden. Universa l; screenplay Richard Schayer and Winnifred Dunn ; from th e no vel The P. Fulto n ; cast Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Charles Impatient Virgin by Don a ld Henderso n Clark ; cine- matography Arthur Edeso n ; cast Lew Ayres, Mae Winninger, Paul Robeson, H elen Morgan , Donald Clarke, Una Merkel, John Halliday, Andy Devine, Ethel Griffies. Cook, Hattie McDaniel. The Old Dark House. Un iversal; script and adapta- tion Benn W. Levy; additional dialogue R. C. Sher- 1937 riff; from the novel Benighted by J. B. Priestley; cine- matography Arthur Edeson ; cast Boris Karloff, The Road Back. Universal; screenplay R. C. Sherriff Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton , Gloria Stuart, Lillian Bond, Ernest Thesiger, Ra ymond Massey. and Charles kenyon ; from the novel by Erich Maria 1933 Remarque; cinematography John Mescal!, George The Kiss Before the Mirror. Universal; adaptation William Anthony McGuire ; from a play by Ladislaus Robinson; cast John King, Richard Cromwell, Slim Fodor; cinematography Karl Freund; cast Nancy Carroll, Fra nk Morgan, Paul Lukas, Gloria Stuart, Summerville, Andy Devine, Louise Fazenda, Noah Walter Pidgeon, Ch arles Grapewin, Donald Cook. The Invisible Man. Uni versa l; script R. C. Sherriff; Beery Jr., Lionel Atwill. from the novel by H . G. We lls; cinematography Ar- thur Edeson ; cast Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, Wil- The Great Garrick. Warner Brothers; screenplay liam Harrigan , Henry Travers, Una O'Connor, For- rester Harvey, Ho lmes Herbert, E. E. Clive, Dudley Ernst Vajda; cinematography Ernest H a ller; cast Digges. 1934 Brian Aherne, Olivia de H avill a nd, Edward Everett By Candlelight. Universa l; script Hans Kraly, F . Hugh Herbert, karen de Wolf, and Ruth Cummings; H orton, Melville Cooper, Lionel Atwill, Henry from the play by Siegfried Geyer; cinematography John Mescall ; cast E lissa Landi , Pau l Lukas, Nils O'Neill, La na Turn er. Asther, Dorothy Revier. One More River. Un iversa l; script R. C. Sherriff; from 1938 the no vel by John Galsworthy; cinematography John Port of Seven Seas. MGM ; screenplay Preston Stu- Mescal! ; cast Diana Wynyard, Frank Lawton, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Jane Wyatt, Colin Clive, Regina ld r ges; from the plays of Marcel P agnol ; cinematog- Denny, C. Aubrey Smit h , Henry Stephenso n, Lionel Atwill, Alan Mowbray, E. E. Clive. raphy Karl Freund; cast Wallace Beery, Frank 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Universal; screenplay Wil- Morgan , Maureen O'Sulliva n, John Bea l, J essie liam Hurlbut and Jo hn L. Ba lderston ; suggested by the novel by Mary Shelley; cinematography John Ralph. Mesca ll ; cast Boris Karloff, Cli n Clive, Valerie Hob- so n, Elsa Lanchester, O. P . Heggie, Ern est Thesiger, Sinners in Paradise. Universal; screenplay Lester Dwight Frye, E. E. Clive, Una O'Connor. Remember Last Night? Universal; screenplay Doris Cole, Harold Bu ckley, and Louis Stevens; from an Malloy, Dan Totheroh, and Harry Clork; from the novel \"The H angover Murders\" by Adam H ob- orig inal story by H a ro ld Bu ck ley; cinematography house; cinematography Joseph Valentin e; cast Ed- George Robinson ; cast Ma dge Eva ns, J ohn Boles, Bru ce Cabot, Gene Lockhar t. Wives Under Suspicion . Universal; screenplay M yles Connolly; from the play by Ladislaus Fodor; cinematography George R obinso n ; cast Warren Wil- liam , Gail Patrick, William Lundigan, Constan ce Moore, R a lph M organ . 1939 The Man in the Iron Mas k. United Artists; screenplay George Bru ce; fro m the novel by Alexandre Dumas; cinematography Robert Pla nck ; cast Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett, Warren William , Joseph Schildkraut, Alan Hale, Miles Mander. 1940 Green Hell. Universal; story and screenplay Fran ces Marion ; additional dialogue H arry Hervey; cine- matography Karl Freund ; cast Dou glas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Bennett, Joh n H oward, George Sanders, Alan Ha le, George Bancroft, Vin cent Price. 1941 They Dare Not Love. Co lumbi a; screenplay Charles Bennett and Ernest Vajda; from the story by Jam es Edward Grant; cinematography Fran z Pla ner ; cast George Brent, Martha Scott, Pau l Lukas, Roman Bohnen . 1949 Hello Out There (never released ). Huntin gton Hart - ford Produ ctions; screenplay George T obin ; from the play by Willia m Saroyan; cinematography Karl Struss; cast Ma rjorie Steele, Harry Morga n, Lee Patrick. 11111111 FILM COM M ENT 57

RndrewJorriJ that its antlers will frame the mysterious horseman (Alan Ladd) in the distance. But then SHANE is story- on book (and storyboard) myth par excellence whereas THE SEARCHERS is lived-in epic with the kind of land- TheJeorcheu scaped pastness across which the characters hang up their laundry and other hang-ups. Andrew Sarris is the film critic of The Village Voice. Among his current projects are books on the THE SEARCHERS is concerned as much with a Th irties in Hollywood and on John Ford. peculiarly American madness and wanderlust as with anything else . Some of the characters start THE SEARCHERS was generally misunderstood by out mad , some achieve madness, and some have American reviewers in 1956. Adapted from the Alan madness thrust upon them . Ford 's world accommo- LeMay novel by Ford 's family scenarist Frank S. dates madness as it accommodates everything else , Nugent, THE SEARCHERS represents Ford 's ultimate and with madness there is wisdom and robust divergence from the dramatic ironies of Dudley Ni- humor, as with Mose Harper (Hank Worden) , a cer- chols to the epical directness of Nugent. The Fifties tified lunatic who asks only to while away his last marked the breakdown of traditional dramatic forms days in a rocking chair by a fireplace , and who gains by a, new surge of stylistic ambitiousness. 1956 was his rocking chair for services rendered (to Ford as the year also of such official big pictures as George well as to John Wayne 's Ethan Edwards.) Stevens ' GIANT, John Huston 's MOBY DICK, William Wyler's FRIENDLY PERSUASION and Laurence Olivier's There is a fantastic sequence in THE SEARCHERS RICHARD II I. But even to the conventional reviewers (I wrote some years ago) involving a brash frontier of the period , there was something flawed , unwieldy character played by Ward Bond . Bond is drinking and heavy about these preconceived classics. And some coffee in a standing-up position before going so the critical consensus settled upon AROUND THE out to hunt some Comanches. He glances toward WORLD IN 80 DAYS, a producer's package of highly- one of the bedrooms, and notices the woman of publicized cameo vaudeville bits glossed over with the house tenderly caressing the Army uniform of the superc iliousness of an alleged S. J . Perelman her husband 's brother. Ford cuts back to a full-faced script that later became the cause of litigation with shot of Bond drinking his coffee, his eyes tactfully two other screenwriters. Between the official clas- averted from the intimate scene he has witnessed . sics and Michael Todd 's camp classic there were Nothing on earth would ever force this man to reveal a group of genuinely picaresque movies which were what he had seen . There is a deep , subtle chivalry fully apprec iated only in France . Among these were at work here, and in most of Ford 's films , but it is THE SEARCHERS , Alfred Hitchcock 's THE MAN WHO never obtrusive enough to interfere with the KNEW TOO MUCH , George Cukor's BHOWANI JUNCTION , flow of the narrative. The delicacy of emotion ex- Budd Boetticher 's SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, King pressed here in three quick shots, perfectly cut , Vidor 's WAR AND PEACE and even Cecil B. De Mille 's framed and distanced, would completely escape the THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. And the best of these is dulled perception of our more literary-minded film still THE SEARCHERS , which manages to sum up sty- critics even if they deigned to consider a despised listically all the best of what Ford had been with genre like the Western. The economy of expression all the best of what he was to be. that Ford has achieved in fifty years of filmmaking constitutes the beauty of his style. If it had taken The innate pictorialism of Ford 's style, evident him any longer than three shots and a few seconds as early as 1917 in STRAIGHT SHOOTING , finds in THE to establish this insight into the Bond character, the SEARCHERS a majestically familial context in the very point would not be worth making. Ford would be first shot of a door opening onto the screen and false to the manners of a time and a place bounded the world and the past, extending outward to a by the rigorous necessity of survival. solitary figure inching his way forward to the enclo- sure, the sanctuary, the long-lost home, the full Yet when Peter Bogdanovich asked Ford \" Was measure of his aching aspirations. However, Ford 's the scene, toward the beginning, during which pictorialism is just angular enough and windswept Wayne's sister-in-law gets his coat for him , meant enough to avoid the too contrivedly concentric to convey silently a past love between them?\" Ford compositions of George Stevens ' SHANE in which answered somewhat gruffly (in John Ford by Peter an antelope turns its head at that precise moment Bogdanovich produced by Design Yearbook Limited for Movie Magazine Limited , 21 Ivor Place, London , N. W. 1.): \" Well , I thought it was pretty obvious-that his brother's wife was in love with Wayne ; you couldn 't hit it on the nose, but I think it'·s very plain to anyone with any intelligence. You could tell from the way she picked up his cape and ·1 think you could tell from Ward Bond 's expressiofl and from his exit-as though he hadn 't noticed anything .\" The scene may be \" obvious\" now that we have been alerted to the larger implications of THE SEARCHERS, but in its own time , the scene , like Poe's purloined letter, was overlooked because of rather than in spite of its very obviousness. The intended 58 SPRING 1971

From left: Walter Coy, Pippa Scott, Lana Wood , John Wayne , Dorothy Jordan. All photos: Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. From left: Ward Bond , John Wayne , Dorothy Jordan. FILM COMMENT 59

emotion seems early and misplaced. We have just as he despised the reactionary politics of John met the characters involved , and we have no inkling Wayne he could never help but be moved by the that this will be absolutely the last opportunity for emotional sweep of the awesomely avuncular ges- a faded frontierswoman (Dorothy Jordan) to ex- ture with which Wayne gathers up Natalie Wood press, however covertly, the forbidden feelings of after having given every indication that he wished a lost love . We are dealing here with lives that are to kill her for defil ing his sacred memories of a little almost over, and the dreadful constriction of time girl accepting his medal as a token of his chivalric running out is felt in the pinched awkwardness and devotion to her mother. Deep down we don't really cramped closeness of the domestic scenes involving expect him to kill her, any more than we expect a group of people variously doomed to slaughter, Wayne to kill Montgomery Clift in Hawks 's RED RIVER , captivity, revenge before the final moments, two but nonetheless the denouement of THE SEARCHERS hours (screen time) and several years (narrative is infinitely more moving and artistically satisfying time) later when a man picks up a girl in his arms than that of RED RIVER , even discounting the in- and is miraculously delivered of all the racist, re- trusion of Joanne Dru 's dea ex machina in the latter venge-seeking furies that have seared his soul. film . Part of the disparity of emotional effect can be attributed to the philosophical distinction be- Jean-Luc Godard once observed that as much tween two visual styles-Hawks the eye-level vision of man as the measure of all things , Ford the double vision (through classical editing) of an event in all its vital immediacy and yet also in its ultimate memo- ry image on the horizon of history. Hence , the dramatic struggle of THE SEARCHERS is not waged between a protagonist and an antago- nist, or indeed between two protagonists as antago- nists, but rather within the protagonist himself. Jef- frey Hunter's surrogate son figure in THE SEARCHERS is the witness to Wayne 's struggle with himself rather than a force in resolving it. The mystery of the film is what has actually happened to Wayne in that fearsome moment when he discovers the mutilated bodies of his brother, his beloved sister-in-law, his nephew, and later his niece. Surly, cryptic, almost menacing even before the slaughter , he is invested afterward with obsessiveness and implacability. We in the audience never see the bodies or the actual slaughter, only the smoke passing across Wayne's face at the moment of discovery, a cosmic composi- tion of man ravaged by revenge-seeking emotions in the aftermath of an atrocity, but that cosmic com- position reprinted so often in specialized film maga- zines never breaks the flow of action, but instead accelerates the development of characters, and cracks open , as violence traditionally does in drama, all their massively encrusted psychological secrets. THE SEARCHERS is rich in the colors and sub- stances of the seasons and the elements, from the whiteness of winter snows to the brownness of sum- mer sands. When Wayne pledges his implacable presence at the last hiding place of his niece 's Comanche captors \"as sure as the earth turns,\" the film switches seasons with a swiftness that aug- ments the metaphysical majesty of Wayne's turn of phrase. And with the change of seasons, come changes in the searchers , changes of costume, mood and even silhouette. The startling sight of Wayne in a sombrero is the final confirmation of psychological adaptability obliterating the conven- tions of a genre. The mere litterateurs who still infest the field of film reviewing may tend to overlook THE SEARCHERS as just another western . The fact remains that few westerns even in the so-c·alled modern mold are so resolutely untraditional in their trappings . Ward Bond 's head Te xas ranger wears a stovepipe derby, and the rifles are sensibly if tackily sheathed 60 SPRING 1971

to keep out the dust. The only bona fide gun fight between good guys and bad guys ends with the bad guys shot in the back and robbed besides . Ford and Wayne tried back as long ago as STAGECOACH (1939) to introduce suspenders to the standard western costume, and they failed miserably. Ford 's humor is something else again . I must confess I found it eminently resistible back in the Forties and Fifties in that period when I, like most of the critical establishment, was unable to adjust to and discern the emotional connections in the new direction that Ford had taken . Nowadays I welcome the rugged frontier slapstick in THE SEARCHERS as a necessary humanizing modification of characters otherwise too excruciating to watch in their more serious pursuit. The community involvement, to which Ford 's slapstick tends (with the help of reac- tion shots, that banal bugaboo of modern cine- astes), reduces some of the overwhelming solitude felt by the protagonist, and thus intensifies our own awareness of feelings that are all the more vivid for being momentarily relieved . It is much easier to see now than it was in 1956 that if Ford had been more solemn , THE SEARCHERS would have been less sub- lime. It is our misfortune as film critics that we must discuss a film one-thing-at-a-time when on a screen so many things are happening and reverberating at the same time. How to evoke, for example, the conjunction of a geometric convergence of three columns of horsemen , two Indian, one Texan , with the evocative magnificence of Monument Valley, Ford 's own slice of stylized Nature. All we can sug- gest is that Ford began filmmaking as a painter and added drama and music as he went along. In these terms , THE SEARCHERS is his greatest symphony . 11111111 THE SEARCHERS 1956, Warners, 119 minutes. director John Ford ; producer Merian C. Cooper; Screenplay Frank S. Nugent; from the novel by Alan LeMay ; photography Winton C. Hoch (Technicolor and VistaVision); art direction Frank Hotaling and James Basevi; editing Jack Murray; assistant direc- -.----- tor Wingate Smith; music Max Steiner; title song (\" A Man Was Born to Wander \" ) Stan Jones. CAST: -~~- - -~ . - .:- ----=----~------------~~~~~~~----------~~ John Wayne Ethan Edwards Jeffrey Hunter Martin Pawley Opposite page top : Vera Miles Laurie Jorgensen Jeffrey Hunter. Ward Bond Captain Reverend Clayton John Wayne and Natalie Wood Debbie Edwards Natalie Wood, John Qualen Lars Jorgensen Olive Carey Mrs. Jorgensen Bottom : Olive Carey, Henry Brandon Chief Scar John Qualen Ken Curtis Charlie McCorry and John Wayne . Harry Carey, Jr. Brad Jorgensen This page top : Antonio Moreno Emilio Figueroa John Wayne, Pat Wayne Lieutenant Greenhill Beulah Archuletta Hank Worden Mose Harper and Jeffrey Hunter. Lana Wood Debbie , as a child Walter Coy Aaron Edwards Bott om: John Wayne . Dorothy Jordan Martha Edwards Pippa Scott Lucy Edwards Beulah Archuletta Look FILM COMMENT 61

mileJ I(reuger Note : To assist the preparation of my boo k, The American Musical Film, 20th Ce nt ury- Fox gen- on erously gra nted me permissio n to come to its Holly- wood st udios every day fo r a mon t h durin g t he S um- ItiC;(eo~ mer of 1969 a nd screen abo u t 25 musica ls made by t he compa ny between 1930 a nd 1934. Most of t hese ~obeRlive fi lms have been unseen by th e public since their ini tia l releases several decades ago a nd are now often Raul Roulien red uced in number to one existin g print on highly and peri shab le n itrate sto ck. Gloria Stuart Alt hough th ere is now a program to preserve t his priceless library, I fe lt at t he ti me t hat I might H erbert Mundin act ually be t he last person a li ve eve r to see some a nd of t hese pictures. T he privilege of being able to see t hem brought wit h it a n im plicit obli gation to set R aul Roulien down in prin t as mu ch detail as possibl e, just in case t he labs got to t he pict ures a bi t too late. Two on a match. F r om left : My book, which will be pu bli shed by E. P. Du tton , chronicles each of t hese mu sicals in detail; a nd t he Gloria Stuart, following excerpt from its text is a stud y of one of Raul Roulien t he most interesting (th ough perhaps least presti- a nd J oan Marsh. gious) of a ll t he pictures I saw. [A ll photos: -Miles Kreuger Mus eum of Mod ern Art In 1933, Fox produ ced a bizarre musical called IT'S Film Sti lls Archives. ] GREAT TO BE ALI VE , di rected by Alfre d Werker , wit h dia logu e by Arthur K ober, a nd based on t he silent 62 SPRING 1971 film , T H E LAST MAN ON EA RTH [Fox, 1924], starrin g E arle Foxe. Completely misunderstood by t he crit ics a nd ignored by t he public during its own t ime, IT'S GREAT TO BE ALI VE is a n early a nd choice exa mple of t he \"screwba ll comedy,\" a generic fi lm style which fl ourished du ring t h e late 1930's a nd early '40's. The picture begi ns modestly a nd convent iona lly wit h Carlos Martin (R a ul R oulien ), a yo ung, polo-playing ma n-about -town, a nnouncing to his valet (Herber t Mundin ) t hat he is engaged to be married a nd hence- fort h would have nothin g to do wit h other women (\" Goodbye Ladies\" ). At t he engageme nt party t h at evening, he promises his fi a ncee, Dorothy (Gloria Stuart) , a ha ppy life (\"I'll Build a Nest\"). We learn t hat the girl 's fat her, Dr. Wilto n (Edward Van Sloan ), a fa mous scientist, is engaged in discovering a cure fo r t he dreaded plagu e, masculi tis, which is killing off t he entire ma le popula tion of t he Orient. Durin g t he party, Dorothy becomes jealous when T oots (J oa n Marsh ), one of Carlos ' former fl a mes, flirts wit h him. After t he guests retire to t heir rooms, Carlos a nd his valet sing a bout t h e stra nge behavior of \"Women,\" as t hey drown t heir sorrows in booze. In t rying to locate his own room, t he t ipsy yo ung ma n stumbles mist a kenly in to T oots' bedroom. Not recognizin g hi m in t he dark, she screams so loudly th at t he guests all rush in . When Dorothy sees her drunken fia nce in a nother girl's bedToom, sh e breaks t h e engage ment. U nt il t hi s mid-point in t he plot, t he film is simply a brisk bedroom farce, not unlike a ty pical Cheva lier vehicle. Bu t t he realm of improba bili ty begins to expand steadily. T o sh ow Dorothy t h at he can be independent with- ou t her, Carlos sets out in a frail pla ne to fl y so lo across t h e P acific Ocean . An xious for his safety and a bit repenta n t, Dorothy sits by her radi o, as he

addresses her by short wave. Suddenly, there is a of the world cannot have him, at least one woman bang; a nd hi s voice goes dead. should. And t he lovers embrace, presumably to the terminal frustration of all the other women ali ve. Three years pass. It is 1936, a nd we are now in the future. At a meeting of the world's greatest scientists, The shape of IT'S GREAT TO BE ALIVE is one of its Dr. Prodwell (Edn a May Oliver) , a stern old bird, most absorbing features; for it begins with tight, rigid listens to reports on the world-wide spread of mas- convention and steadily expands into a wilder and culitis. To a lengthy speech in garbled German , she wilder vision of life. Although it evo lves into an replies succinctly, \" I agree with yo u com pletely. I e nt irely unpredi ctable cartoon, it does unfort un ately admire yo ur se ntiments.\" She deflates a flowery lack the direction of a master cartoonist, like a Leo French report with, \"After all, that is merely one McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch or a latter-day Richard man 's opinion.\" And, upon completion of a report in Lester, to transcend the literal script material and Japanese gibberish, she chides, \"This is no time for achieve a cinematic comedy style to match. In addi- levity.\" When Dorothy's father rises to speak, he tion, it might have benefitted from a more evocative suddenly falls dead across the table. title and a more inventive plot ending. Furthermore, it is never quite clear if Carlos returns a n honored The years con tinue to pass. It is now 1938, five years celebrity or simply a prisoner of state, obliged to in the future. The entire male population ofthe world perform his biological acrobatics for the women of is dead. Female women and masculine women alone the nation. populate the world. Happily, the virtues outweigh the flaws. Edna May In a great town square, thousands of women tensely Oliver's horse-face and acid sarcasm provide first-rate await Dr. Prodwel\\ 's most remarkable scientific ex- comedy; and the casting of skinny, little Raul Rou- periment. She is about to bring to life a synthetic lien as the ultra-desirable last man alive naturally man , whom she predicts will be \"even more satisfac- heightens the absurdity. Also, the rather sophisticat- tory than the original.\" Like Dr. Frankenstein him- ed songs by William Kernell are a reminder that this self, the redoubtable researcher turns on the juice, Fox staff composer-lyricist has been too long ne- as lightning bolts fl y around the still figure, encased glected. in a clear plastic tube. The Prodwell Ray proves too strong, and the synthetic man goes up in smoke. Lacking the box-office appeal of big stars, IT 'S GREAT Just then, a hardy aviatrix bursts in with news that TO BE ALIVE was a commel'cial catastrophe and lies in fl ying over a deserted Pacific Island, she has spot- ted a lone man and has a photo to prove it. It is long-forgotten, awaiting the kind of rediscovery that Carlos, wearing a bushy black beard, a loin cloth, and very little else. Dr. Prodwell declaims that he has ranked MILLION DOLLAR LEGS (Paramount, 1932) must be brought back for the good of the nation . a major screwball comedy, despite its initial failure. Meanwhile, in the back room of a local saloon, Al Moran (Dorothy Burgess), a tough little cookie in The depiction of women-women, women-men, female pin-striped suit and fedora over one eye, snarls to her mob of miscreant maidens that she plans to pull bartenders, aviators, bouncers, gangsters, scientists a snatch. She phones a fellow felon , Sleepy Sadie, and orders her to take off in a seaplane and kidnap and statesmen is an ironically inadvertant prediction Carlos, before the \"feds\" can reach him by steamship. of the unisex trends of the early 1970's. 1111111 1 The gang retrieves the bewildered derelict and rounds up all the wealthy dowagers in town for an auction. IT'S GREAT TO BE ALIVE, When one elderly matron offers $100,000 for the quavering Carlos, Al snaps, \"That's talking, fat lady.\" Fox, 1933, 69 minutes. Just then, the cops break in and raid the joint. Director, Alfred Werker; Story by, John D . Swain; Carlos is established in a fine hotel, where he is wined and dined by the state (\"It's Great To Be the Only Adaptation by, Paul Perez ; Dialogue by, Arthur Man Alive\"). Hearing of his rescue, Dorothy realizes how she has wronged Carlos and rushes to his side. Kober; Lyrics and Music, William Kernell; Pho- They escape past his guards and flee in her private ~tography, Robert Planck; Fro cks, Royer; Sound Re- plane but are finally captured. corder, Alfred Bruzlin; Settings, Duncan Cramer; Meanwhile, all the other nations have heard that oDorothy Wilton a man has been found, and they all demand equal Dance Direction, Sammy Lee; Musical Direction, visitation rights. In a spectacular finale musical number, not unJike the courtroom scene in DUCK Samuel Kaylin; Edited by, Barney Wolf SOUP, Dr. Prodwell presides over \"The World Con- gress of 1938.\" CAST One nation after another, represented by a sexy, Carlos Martin Raul Roulien show-girl ambassador, states its claims in Gilbert and Sullivan-like song and dance; but Carlos refuses all Gloria Stuart their offers. When the voluptuous president of the 5Toots United States purrs her piece, Carlos can stand the Dr. Prodwell Edna May Oliver tension no longer. He produces a pistol and threatens to shoot himself, unless he is permitted to marry Brooks Herbert Mundin Dorothy. Dr. Prodwell agrees that as all the women ~AlMoran «IIIDr. Wilton Joan Marsh Dorothy Burgess Mrs. Wilton Emma Dunn Edward van Sloan Perkins Robert Greig \\L Policewoman Helene Madison ESONGS Goodbye Ladies, Raul Roulien; I'll Build a Nest, Raul Roulien, Gloria Stuart; Women, Herbert Mun- din, Raul Roulien ; I'll Build a Nest, Raul Roulien; It's Great To Be the Only Man Alive, Raul Roulien ; The World Congress of 1938, Edna May Oliver, girls, Raul Roulien ; Finale: I'll Build a Nest, Raul Rou- JIJ lien , girls, Edna May Oliver; IT'S GREAT TO BE ALIVE is based on a 1924 film titled THE LAST MAN ON EARTH . FILM COMMENT 63

Eleanor Perry: OneWoman in Film Interviewed by Kay Loveland and Estelle Changas LAST SUMMER. \" From left: Richard Thomas, Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison. DAVID AND LISA. Keir Dullea, Clifton James, Janet Margolin. 64 SPRING 1971

Kay Loveland is the Administrator Coordinator of flawed . The major way my writing has changed is the American Film Institute 's Center for Advanced that it has simply become better with more experi- Film Studies in Beverly Hills, California . Estelle ence, more appropriate to the film medium , leaner. Changas, who has written for Film Quarterly, is now on the rating board of the Motion Picture Association QUESTION: As one of the few well-known women of America in Hollywood. screenwriters, how have you managed to survive, and how have you been able, finally, to get to mate- Eleanor Perry, the subject of the following interview, rial which interests you? is distinguished in several major ways from most PERRY : First of all because one or the other of us women screenwriters of the past and present. Apart was always able to make enough money to provide from being one of the few active and articulate for at least survival , which in turn made it possible women screenwriters in America today (and there for me not to make cynical choices. I've never writ- are few indications that any young , talented women ten a screenplay that wasn 't about something that are entering the field), she has been able to escape moved me or entertained me or that wasn 't on a being trapped in lightweight entertainments-family theme that I admired or believed in . Since I wouldn 't fare and women 's films and specialized genres like do this when we really needed the money, I certainly the western-which have ensnared so many women won 't do it now, which means that I have turned writers in Hollywood . Perhaps because of the au- down a considerable number of \" commercial prop- tonomy she enjoys in selecting material through erties.\" I hope this doesn't sound smug or conceit- collaboration with her husband, director Frank ed-all I' m saying is that I've been lucky . A few years Perry, her screen work reflects a range of serious ago I accepted a good solid advance fee from a contemporary themes seldom evinced by many studio and embarked upon a screenplay. After a women more prolific than she , who have been writ- couple of months I discovered that I didn't really ing for much longer periods of time. like the basic material. With my resisting and ashen-faced agent, I went to the head of the studio Like some of our most interesting and intelligent and insisted upon returning the money. Unheard screenwriters, Eleanor Perry began writing for film of naivete, but it was worth it just to see the gentle- only after a wide and varied career as a novelist men 's eyes bulge in disbelief, and to feel my own and playwright. Her theater work includes Third Best surge of heady release. Sport, produced on Broadway by the Theater Guild and Momento Mori, presented at the Nottingham QUESTION: When you began your career, what Theatre in England . A graduate of Sarah Lawrence kinds of obstacles did you face just because you College , she took her Master's Degree in Psychiatric Case History at Ohio's Western Reserve University. were a woman? Do you feel Hollywood has changed Several of her short plays on mental hygiene and psychiatric subjects have been published and pro- at all in this regard? Are there still prejudices that duced by the Cleveland Mental Hygiene Association. restrict the kind of work you are able to do? We can see the reflection of these concerns in the PERRY: Directly after the success of DAVID AND LISA psychological intensity of her work and the recur- I was offered several jobs. The novels all dealt with rence of themes of disintegration and madness in retarded or mentally ill adolescents or were sappy, films like DAVID AND LISA, THE SWIMMER , LAST SUMMER , soapy stories which the producers called \"women's and DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE. Her interest in psy- pictures.\" The term infuriated me then and still does chology and psychiatry led her to a case history when I read it in the trades: \" for the femme audi- of two disturbed adolescents by Dr. Theodore I. ence\" -always referring to some sentimental tripe. Rubin , from which she developed the screenplay We were so unhip at the time that the kind of thing for DAVID AND LISA, the Perrys' first film. we wanted to do was The Fall by Camus. (We 'd still like to make a film of it .) Our second picture, Though she has remained outside of Hollywood LADYBUG , LADYBUG , an anti-bomb, anti-war film got throughout her screenwriting career, Eleanor Perry clobbered (this was seven years ago!) so the offers has still had to face many of the problems that have stopped coming . always plagued women in the industry , and her serious concern about the position of women The next project I really wanted do, The Swimmer screenwriters led to this interview. by John Cheever, met intense resistance not be- cause I was a woman but because it was an eight- QUESTION: How has your writing changed since page story with metaphysical overtones which no your earlier films? Do you feel you have had an one at all believed would make a movie. (Finally Sam opportunity to probe deeper into subjects that inter- Spiegel thought so, but only on condition that he est you? had complete control over script and production and ELEANOR PERRY : My experience is probably dif- that he had final cut and a male superstar as' the ferent from that of most screenwriters since I was lead .) never employed by studios or Hollywood producers. Frank and I employed me (on speculation , I might Recently I have worked on two screenplays which add); thus I was able to choose only subjects which would not fall into the \" woman 's picture\" category. interested us and to probe into them as deeply as My hunch is that I got these assignments because we wanted to. Even after our initial success I was the director in one case and the producer in the rarely asked to write what might be called a \" Holly- other needed to dominate the script entirely and wood\" film so I have never really suffered from any figured it would be easier to do this with a woman kind of restrictions. Except for THE SWIMMER when writer. Since LAST SUMMER I have been getting nu- we signed away our controls over the film in order merous offers, mostly novels about what is thought to get it made (a great mistake) , we are responsible to be a \"Now\" woman 's problem, like a woman who in our films for whatever worked and whatever was wants to marry a Roman Catholic priest, or a woman who finally achieves a pleased husband by learning every sexual trick in the manuals-and a few more no one has hitherto thought of. FILM COMMENT 65

Right after LAST SUMMER a producer gave me the American actresses, more real. My God , they are galleys of a novel he owned in which the major even allowed to have an enlarged pore! characters were college kids, although the story was not set on a campus. I thought it was one of the QUESTION: Why were you drawn to DIARY OF A MAD best film \" properties\" I'd ever read-suspenseful , HOUSEWIFE? relevant , funny-and very exciting . I ached to write PERRY : Because at one time I was a mad housewife the filmplay. However, the producer's partner, a myself and because a few years ago I had written fiftyish gentlemen with hippie clothes and long hair, several drafts of a play on a similar theme called vetoed me. He said he didn 't want a middleaged Toys and Fictions . Incidentally , Walt Whitman said woman to write the screenplay; he wanted \" a mean it all very well a long time ago in a poem addressed young man .\" (Who the hell did he think wrote Ma- to women : \" Put aside your toys and fictions and dame Bovary?) go out into the world as men do .\" So there are prejudices which restrict the kind of DIARY seemed to be about everything I had known work I want to do, as in this particular case . Mer- and thought and felt about marriage in a certain cifully this idiot idea of typecasting writers is getting affluent American middle class. Not only about mar- less prevalent. The intelligent and gifted producers riage but about the insanity of the male and female don 't operate this way at all. roles and the generally accepted and preposterous assumptions about what makes a woman womanly. QUESTION: Most films tend to simplify women . At last somebody was telling the truth about the Could you comment on the probable reasons for soul-killing activities of housewives whose kitchens this? Is it because men have been writing most of and closets and garages are stuffed with the artifacts these films, and as a result, have created women of \" the good life.\" I thought Miss Kaufman said it compatible with their fantasies? all and said it splendidly with wit and insight. PERRY: I think that until recently most films have tended to simplify men , too. As audiences become QUESTION: It is rather revealing that when Tina more sophisticated and more selective, these one- Balser, the young housewife in DIARY, casts about dimensional characters will probably disappear. Al- for a means of liberating herself, she moves into though we've been aware of Freud for some time, we are constantly becoming more perceptive about an affair with a sadistic lover-i.e., she discovers the unconscious, about the complex motivations of behavior and belief. For example, early pictures her identity not by involving herself in some profes- about mental illness tended to be mechanical, re- sion or by pursuing some artistic path, but through ducing the cause and cure of sickness to some the men she meets. Tina still seems to be totally obvious case book formulae. Now we know that dependent on men for whatever sustenance she within the scope of a two-hour movie we cannot needs. really untangle the psychological wilderness of a human being. The audience is becoming used to PERRY: Exactly. The point we hoped to make is ambiguity, to stories which are open-ended like life, that so long as a woman is dependent on a man which give them a chance to think and fill in for for her self-image or her self-esteem she will remain themselves. We can 't blame men in general for the without any sense of her own worth-can never be way women have been treated on the screen-we a fully realized human being. Obviously, when a can only blame untalented men or hung-up men . marriage is failing , a new man, an affair, is not the I agree with your implication that most of the cre- answer. (Even worse, Tina, because of her maso- tinous plastiC sex-objects in screenplays are the chistic hang-up, seems to be attracted only to sadis- result of male fantasies . Sad for those particular tic men at this stage in her life.) What she finds males . out during the film , we think, is that she must be- come her own woman and that to exist only as the QUESTION: Do you see any marked change in the reflection of some man is an intolerable way of life. way in which contemporary American cinema has treated women in contrast to films of the past? QUESTION: As the first of its kind, DIARY OF A MAD PERRY: Not really . Not a change in treatment so HOUSEWIFE may represent the beginning of a new much as in concerns. In the not too distant past movement in films which deal seriously with women we had Doris Day's virginity to worry about. Recently in contemporary American society. It will very likely we've had the sex-crazed Mrs. Robinson. Both ex- call to the attention of filmmakers the fact that there tremes are dishonest. Both deny any humanity to is an enormous, untapped audience for this kind the women characters. The changes are really com- of subject material. Do you foresee more films of ing about now in the attitudes of our society . Char- this nature and are there additional issues concern- acters who are recognizable women are Just begin- ing the social and personal crises of women which ning to appear in scripts. you would like to explore in future films? PERRY: I think the appearance and spread of the QUESTION: Do you find any substantial differences Women 's Lib movement in the past couple of years between European films and American films with indicates exactly that. When it becomes apparent regard to the portrayal of women? that an enormous untapped audience is interested PERRY: I usually feel more ecstatic, more moved, in films which deal seriously with women in contem- and more thoughtful after seeing a good European porary SOCiety-those films will be made. There are film. It seems that some European writers and direc- several realities about women in our society that tors recognize that women as well as men partake might be fascinating to explore. What about the of the human condition . Perhaps also women In women who live on a much lower economic scale some European films appear to be more honestly than Tina for example? Why are they so resistant portrayed and more interesting because the ac- to the goals of Women 's Lib? Who has sold so many tresses who play them are more interesting-less women on the passive-female role? Why are they stereotypes in appearance and personal quality than so amenable to the kind of manipulation which con- vinces them that a refrigerator is a thrilling Christmas present, that their wash must be whiter than white , that the boys they ' re going to marry must buy them 66 SPRING 1971

DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE. Carrie Snodgress and Richa rd Benjamin . Ph otos : Universal Studios . FILM COMMENT 67

a diamond ring , etc. What about the situation of your work (DAVID AND LISA, THE SWIMMER, DIARY OF more mature women , fifteen or twenty years older than Tina , whose children are grown? Is baby sitting A MAD HOUSEWIFE)? for grandchildren (presuming there are any) sup- posed to fill another three decades for a woman PERRY : Actually DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE is not who is free , in her prime , energetic and educated? about madness. Tina is certainly in the grip of neu- If not educated , educable? Isn't the role of parasite rotic conflicts, on the edge of drinking too much degrading to women? Why should women simply and altogether fragile , but she is less crazy-mad than assume that men will or must support them while outraged-mad. Perhaps I am drawn to such themes they contribute nothing to our society or anyone because of the general madness and angst which in it? All these situations and countless more are are the condition of our lives today. Between the inextricably tied up with the roles of men today too , news broadcasts and newspapers and the daily and finally inextricably connected with what our lives incidents of existence in this disordered city , I find are all about , regardless of sex. I believe that \" the myself constantly muttering \" It is not to be be- unexamined life is not worth living \" and what a lieved. \" But it is all to be believed , of course , if one glorious medium film is on which to conduct our trusts eyes and ears and brain . A psychiatrist told examinations! me once that soon the only so-called \" normal \" people in our society will have to be schizophrenic . QUESTION: What additional insights do you feel you These themes attract many writers, I thin k-that is, brought to the screenplay of DIARY which were not writers who deal with interior conflicts rather than suggested in Sue Kaufman 's novel? stories of plot or adventure. It is believed that there PERRY: I don 't think I added to Sue Kaufman 's is very little drama or conflict in happiness, but if insights so much as deepening them or dramatizing happiness is what Colette defined as \" merely a them for a visual medium . We had to leave out a changing of troubles,\" perhaps it too would make lot of marvelous incidents and greatly compress a good theme for a film . Some happy writer ought others-but what we did use is now all mi xed up to try. in my mind between the novel and screenplay. I suffered jolts and twinges of recognition on every QUESTION: In LAST SUMMER it is interesting that you page of the novel-so perhaps that intense empathy have two heroines-the beautiful but destructive came through. Sandy, and the awkward, sensitive, but helpless Rhoda. What comment were you trying to make QUESTION: What were you hoping to suggest by through this very sharp dichotomy? having DIARY end with the group therapy scene? PERRY : Rhoda is, of course , the classic example PERRY : The only part of the novel we were positive of the Outsider. I was aware of the dichotomy but we wanted to change was the ending . Sue Kaufman tried to make it not too sharp or too mechanical. keeps Tina and Jonathan together and implies that That is, I hope that in no sense was it saying that the marriage will become solid and workable once beautiful-and-sexy equals wicked , and home- he achieves some insights through psychoanalysis. Iy-and-sensitive equals good. I tried to demonstrate The author also , in what seemed a complete reversal without too much exposition what made Sandy the of point of view to us, had Tina make up her mind way she was, and she certainly wasn 't all bad . On that what she truly wanted to do with her life was the other hand , Rhoda was often a drag , self-right- to be a good housewife and mother. Our feeling eous and smug about her own virtues. She almost was that Tina would eventually not stay married to asked to be victimized . Jonathan (analysis doesn 't change the basic char- acter) and that she would find more in life for herself QUESTION: Some people feel the ending of LAST than the traditional feminine role. (In the novel she SUMMER was slightly forced and melodramatic. was a painter.) I searched for a conclusion to the Could you comment on this? film for a long time, wanting always to keep it open- PERRY: I felt the ending was right and inevitable ended. I think the group therapy scene does just in the book and even more so in the film . We also that while also stating several reactions we had have heard these complaints about \" melodramatic\" heard about the book-all variously worded disap- and could never understand them. The preparation provals of Tina from men and support of Tina from for the rape was so carefully laid in , so many clues women . This clear-cut division was very illuminating. were given in the way Sandy continually turned-on The group therapy scene not only shows Tina the boys sexually, so many things in the earlier searching for help but it also indicates how aroused sequences pOinted to a callousness towards the and passionate assorted people can become over feelings of other human beings, even of the sea gull , the problem of the housewife which in turn indicates and towards impulsive acts and a tendency towards how important and explosive a problem it is. violent behavior-we were always surprised that the ending surprised anybody. Perhaps the people who QUESTION: In DIARY you seem to be dealing with were most upset had been projecting some fan- a milieu similar to that in THE SWIMMER-e. g. , affluent tasy-wish that these beautiful kids were essentially married couples. Do you feel there are thematic innocent. Incidentally, it was usually adults who similarities in the two films? raised objections to the end . The young audiences PERRY: Yes. It occurred to me while I was writing all too frighteningly verified the reality of the rape DIARY that Jonathan Balser will be Ned Merrill in scene. about fifteen years. Everything that Jonathan wants Ned had achieved by his mid-forties and Ned had QUESTION: In LAST SUMMER, too, you were dealing achieved , too , all the inner desolation that goes with with the destructiveness of affluence. This theme those meaningless possessions and superficial re- seems to run through most of your work. Is this lationsh ips. conscious on your part? Was this social criticism crucial to your conception of LAST SUMMER, or was QUESTION: Is there any explanation for the recur- it incidental? rence of themes of diSintegration and madness in PERR Y: Totally conscious and absolutely crucial to our conception of LAST SUMMER . The destructiveness 68 SPRING 1971

of affluence is what I know most about simply from logue which sounds natural, sounds the way people happening to have lived in certain American com- talk but which is really worked over and cut to the munities where I could observe it first hand . After bone. Incidentally, I think the skill for writing good numerous summers on the beaches of Martha's dialogue is one part of the craft that cannot be Vineyard and the Hamptons , it seemed to me that taught. If one has it, it can only be refined. Evan Hunter's novel about idle, affluent (and neg- lected) children was frighteningly real. QUESTION: Would you like to direct films eventual- QUESTION: At a time when most youth films are ly? Do you work with your husband on the direction idolatrous of the young, LAST SUMMER seems sur- prisingly harsh. Were you deliberately trying to chal- of your films-i.e., casting, editing, working with lenge the sentimentalization of the young that is so prevalent today? actors. PERRY : The words \" surprisingly harsh \" puzzle me. One of the weekly news magazine reviews of LAST PERR Y: An interesting question because si x months SUMMER stated it was made by people who \" hate kids. \" A few people told us they reacted so nega- ago I would have answered with a hasty denial: tively towards the three major kids, they couldn 't like the film . Our feeling towards the characters was \" Certainly not! Men direct films . I'm absolutely con- one of compassion . We liked them tremendously and were both sorry and angry there were no adults tent to be a writer .\" Today the answer is yes . My in their lives to like them and care about them and devote time to them . We thought these kids could consciousness has not so much been raised as potentially grow into terrific human beings and , since they were so young , totally salvageable if uncovered by the pieces I have read about the anyone gave a damn enough to try . We weren 't deliberately challenging the sentimentalization of women 's liberation movement and the few meetings the young in films-but we also wanted to do more than simply blame parents for the acts of their chil- of assorted groups which I have attended . All film dren . We wanted to say that children of this age are responsible themselves for knowing the dif- writers by the very nature of their work direct on ference between right and wrong, for their destruc- tive behavior, for their lack of conscience . In many paper anyway . The trouble is that the film my hus- group discussions about the film it was usually the adults who got terribly angry and negative (I guess band eventually makes of my script is always so they dug the implications), while the young people approved of the film and overwhelmingly agreed with much better than the one in my head . I'm not at us. all sure I have the skills and special talents of a QUESTION: Did you encounter any difficulties in making the transition from theater to film? director, but when the appropriate piece of material PERRY: None. Maybe because I was too naive to know a difficulty when I saw one . I think my major comes along , I'd love to try . In the meantime my trouble at first was over-writing . As I gained more experience I saw how a close-up on the face of a husband has been extremely generous.in giving me skillful actor could eliminate a lot of dialogue and how a talented director could use actors and camera lessons, so to speak. He has allowed me to work in such a way as to eliminate pages of script. Also I have learned to trust the audience. They are very very closely with him on our films and is completely clever, very perceptive, they know how to make connections without having everything spelled out open to my opinions and suggestions , although it for them . Recently, it seems to me, they have come to accept and even prefer not knowing all the an- is understood , as it should be , that the final deci- swers. That is, they want films to be more like life and less like bed-time stories. sions are his own . Not, of course , because he is When I wrote my first film play I didn 't know enough a man , but because he is the director. 11111111 to worry about special techniques like camera di- rections: \" tracking shot,\" \" reverse shot, \" \" medium ELEANOR PERRY two shot ,\" etc. I wrote only what is called \" master \" 1960 scenes and simply described what I thought should SOMERSAULT Screenplay by Frank and Eleanor Perry. be seen on the screen . Since then I've d iscovered This first effort was never made into a film. that is what most screenwriters do today . There is 1963 no longer any mystique about script writing. One DAVID AND LISA Continental. Directed by Frank Perry. puts in visual ideas when one has good ones , ideas Screenplay by Eleanor Perry. From Lisa and David for cutting when one has good ones. The most by Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin . With Keir Dullea, Janet helpful thing I learned in the theater was to write Margolin , and Howard Da Silva . LADYBUG, LADYBUG scenes that made some kind of valid advance either United Artists. Directed by Frank Perry. Screenplay in the story or exposition or revelation of the char- by Eleanor Perry. From an article They Thought the acters. I learned the importance of dialogue that War Was Over by Lois Dickert. With Jane Connell , does not stand still and hop up and down , dialogue William Daniels and James Frawley. that is spoken (as in life) against the emotion , dia- 1968 THE SWIMMER Columbia. Directed by Frank Perry. Screenplay by Eleanor Perry. From the short story by John Cheever. With Burt Lancaster and Janice Rule. 1969 LAST SUMMER Allied Artists . Directed by Frank Perry. Screenplay by Eleanor Perry. From the novel by Evan Hunter. With Barbara Hershey, Cathy Burns, Richard Thomas, and Bruce Davison . TRILOGY Allied Artists . Directed by Frank Perry. Screenplay by Eleanor Perry and Truman Capote. From stories Among the Paths to Eden, A Christmas Memory, and Miriam by Truman Capote. With Mildred Natwick, Maureen Stapleton , and Geraldine Page. Originally produced for ABC television . 1970 DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE Universal. Directed by Frank Perry . Screenplay by Eleanor Perry . From the novel by Sue Kaufman . With Richard Benjamin , Carrie Snodgress , and Frank Langella. LADY IN THE CAR Columbia. Directed by Anatole Litvak. Screen- play by Eleanor Perry and Richard Harris . FILM COMMENT 69

LOST & FOUND by Richard Koszarski, George Lobell and Richard Corliss. THE KID BROTHER. Harold Lloyd and J obyna Ralston. LOST AND FOUND is a column on recently dis- All pho tos : The M useum of Mo dern Art! Fi lm Stills Archive. covered \"Lost Films,\" most of which have not been appraised since they were released thirty to forty years ago. Film students can benefit enormously from the reappearance of films such as THE MYS- TERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, THE FRONT PAGE, and THE EMPEROR JONES, but only if their exalted reputations are exposed to the light and heat of contemporary criticism. The column will appear occasionally, and will draw on the knowledge of curators, collectors and critics alike. As with our \" gripe\" column-now known as \"The Front Lines\"-we welcome contributions from readers who can offer a new slant on these resurrected films. Richard Koszarski, George Lobell, and Richard Corliss are all members of New York University's School for Cinema Studies. The films they de - scribe were shown in last September's American Film Institute retrospective at the 1970 New York Film Festival. .....-~THE MIRACLE WO MAN. At right: Sam Hard y and Barbara Stan wyc k. THE KID BROTHER (1927) In this study of Harold Lloyd published in the Premier Plan series Raymond Borde writes: \" Au- cune Cinematheque ne possede THE KID BROTHER .\" Thus, a rare piece, which turns out to be one of Lloyd's most disarming films. The high pressure go-getter of SAFETY LAST and the other established Lloyd classics is here replaced by a country bump- kin, a bespectacled and rather more ingenius Charles Ray type. (We might say that Lloyd looks just a bit too old for the title role here-he was 36 at the time .) The film takes pains in establishing mood and characterization in the first part, and recreates quite lovingly the milieu of country life. But in the second half it gets on with its comic business and Lloyd lives up to his reputation as the biggest laugh-getter of all the great comedians . He may not have a very complicated statement to get across, but he i,s more charming than Keaton and less pre- tentious then Chaplin . The photography in this late silent is truly fine (one thinks of the best of the pastorals produced in such numbers in the twenties) and Lloyd and his director, Ted Wilde, knows how to use the camera for best comic effect, if not exactly with the panache of a Keaton . But one connot deny the charm , and the film remains a lovely Lloydian allegory on the rewards of virtue. For years Lloyd has sat Fafnir-like on his horde of films; we can only hope that perhaps now he will begin to share some more of these treasures with his public.-R.K . THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1932) This is one of those wonderful films of the early thirties which attacked all the rotten , sacred things the studios could think of. So many of them have disappeared over the years that it would really be- hoove an archive like the Museum of Modern Art to round them up and hold a series of Social Films of the 1930's as an antidote to their watered-down 70 SPRING 1971

descendants of today (and if you don 't think they ONCE IN A LIFET IME. are watered down just compare FLAP to Alan Cros- land 's MASSACRE). THE MIRACLE WOMAN is an attack Seated , fro m left : on the chiselers in the religious revival business, w ith Russell Hopton, Barbara Stanwyck as the Aimee Semple McPher- A li ne Mac Mahon, son-cum-Elmer Gantry heroine. Capra cleverly de- Jac k Oakie . velops the ability of Stanwyck and her promoters to capture public interest through the broadcasting cy and enthusiasm earns him almost immediately med ium and a flor idly theatrical staging of revival a job as a Hollywood director. In his first assignment he not only manages to direct the wrong picture meetings; and these show business attributes have but also ru ins the soundtrack by his cracking of only grown more pointed over the years . Indeed , nuts; each seems to offset the other, however, when this large scale radio evangelism of the thirties the critics praise his effort for its very naturalistic seems so alien today that many in the generally background sounds. As Herman Glogauer, the young aud ience seemed to regard it as near fabri- manic, Laemmle-like studio boss, Gregory Ratoff cation , yet a study of the lives of McPherson or successfully takes advantage of every bit of lunacy Father Coughlin would seem to indicate it as under- permitted him. With a heavy German accent, his statement. Unfortunately, the young Miss Stanwyck nonsensical outbursts become outrageously funny. was unable to pull off the important revival scenes The studio sets and decor are a caricature of Ger- in the Tabernacle , and the spellbinding quality man Expressionism-if such an outrageous form can needed for success here was completely lacking. indeed be caricatured . Actually, in demonstrating Capra seemed to realize this, for he underplayed that Hitler's architectural style of enormity and vUl- what might have been the film 's most effective garity had precedent, the sets look as if they could scenes . Some script weaknesses sabotage THE MIR- be described as a whole , separate period : Martian . ACLE WOMAN as well , and a romance with a blind aviator (an eerie performance by David Manners) In its best moments ONCE IN A LIFETIME most close- is a promising idea which somehow never rings true. ly resembles (of the current satire) the comedies Still , the film does display the later Capra preoc- of Mel Brooks, with their inspired, raucous lunacy. cupations in incipient bloom , and is a much better Unfortunately, all too often the pacing lags, expos- example of his work than DIRIGIBLE , which was the ing tedious gaps that undermine the high points of previous year 's selection .-R .K. humor, and the fi lm ultimately succumbs to its own ONCE IN A LIFETIME (1932) excesses.-G .L. MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) ONCE IN A LIFETIME is an overly ambitious , sporadi- cally hilarious misfire. Fairly faithfully adapted One of the strangest surprises of the festival was under the direction of Russell Mack from the George this Michael Curtiz film-a work long regarded S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play, the film attempts as a \" legendary horror classic ,\" and so referred to to satirize the many vulgar extravagances of Holly- in a program note. A viewing today indicates that wood in a poorly chosen , scattershot fashion ; the the film is instead one of the finer examples of the resulting wounds, though many in number, are only Warner-Brothers New-York-newspaper-reporter- superficial. In failing to choose its targets carefully foils-fiend ish-killer melodramas. The film is not and lacking any precise vision on the part of the called a \" mystery\" for nothing , for Warners were director, ONCE IN A LIFETIME becomes-like most uninterested in filming horror fantasies in those current satire-a loosely plotted and freely connect- days. None of their products of that period could ed string of improbable characters and situations. even remotely be referred to as a \" horror film \" in For example, Aline MacMahon gives a very sharp, the sense we apply that term to the Universal clas- funny performance as the shrewd , wisecracking May sics . DR . x is another film about a reporter and a Daniels, who is the touchstone of sanity in a mad killer, THE WALKING DEAD is a thinly disguised topsy-turvy world-at least in the first half. In the gangster picture ; SVENGALI and THE MAD GENIUS are latter half, however, she suddenly changes charac- hardly horrifying . WAX MUSEU'M is most closely relat- ter, as she grows strangely saccharine and with ill- ed to DR . X, a Curtiz film made the year previously , suited smiles becomes a transparent witness to the also using Technicolor, and also designed by Anton antics of Jack Oakie and Gregory Ratoff. Grot, whose expressionistic diagonals run wild in both films. Both feature reporters on the trail of a This failure illustrates, in part, the general short- mad killer , but in the earlier film the emphasis is comings of the play. As recent stage revivals have on the efforts of Lionel Atwill in the title role to solve demonstrated , most Kaufman material of the twen- ties and thirties tends to age rather rapidly. His characters, and in particular their motivations , so locked in their era , strike one now as being quite incredible . ONCE IN A LIFETIME only exaggerates this fault , since almost all its characters are extrava- gant caricatures. Despite all the shortcomings, though , there are a number of hilarious moments-with fine casting abetting matters. Jack Oakie is funny as the nut- munching George Lewis, whose equal blend of idio- FILM COMMENT 71

MYSTERY OF THE the mystery, and Lee Tracy's reporter serves a fluous, unwanted fiance(e). The first situation was WAX MUSEUM . number of secondary purposes. Here the focus is generally played for comedy. The second was comic on the reporter, Glenda Farrell in one of her most if the Third Party-who was either cold , silly or In center : engaging performances as a wisecracking female dull-could be gently disposed of, and melodramatic \" newspaperman \" who must convince editor Frank if he (or she) managed to marry the heroine (or Lionel Atwill. McHugh of her abilities. Although given third billing hero).Thesewere rules established more byWili Hays she easily outshines Fay Wray, whom Curtiz gives than by Aristotle; the Production Code, which was even shorter shrift than he did in DR . X. written by CathOlics, forebad divorce and sentenced celluloid adulterers to a full ninety minutes of self- But the outstanding feature of the film is of course reproach and unfulfilled dreams. the color, a magnificently preserved example of the two-strip Technicolor process. That such results In the 1932 BACK STREET, directed by John M. could have been achieved with the system seems Stahl, Irene Dunne undergoes so much noble suf- nearly incredible, especially in comparison with the fering-at the hands of SOCiety in general and John garish KING OF JAZZ . Green shadows sweep menac- Boles in particular-that one is tempted to promote ingly over the inclined planes of Grot's settings, and the film into some rarified realm of bourgeois surre- the soft blues remind one uneasily of Chabrol. Since alism . Either it is a symbolic masterpiece on the the two-strip process cannot render color values in subject of woman 's sacrifice for the unworthy male, an absolutely true fashion , Curtiz here uses it or else it is one of the silliest and most meretricious unrealistically for dramatic and symbolic purposes, films of its kind. It certainly cannot be taken seriously and the effect is strikingly modern . Indeed, the whole on the realistic level inhabited by such masterpieces film seems strikingly modern, with the New York of the female-weepie genre as CAMILLE , PENNY police grilling a junkie until he collapses into near SERENADE, NOW VOYAGER , or AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER . delirium, and Fay Wray and Glenda Farrell model- Irene Dunne is lively , flirtatious and proud , but when ling what this season are the most fashionable of she falls for stuffy, conceited John Boles she sup- midis. presses her natural vitality , while he remains as imperviously selfish as ever. He gives her nothing- A final confusing element of periodicity involves not even, on the basis of Boles' mannered man- the use of color itself. While the film is apparently nequin performance, his love-and denies her the designed and composed in the classic Warner one thing she begs for, a child . \"What more could Brothers fashion of the period, it is suddenly in color, you want? You have me.\" (At least John Gavin , in and the aesthetic shock which is generated is sub- the more sensible 1961 remake , acted as if he cared stantial. (Imagine seeing a sparkling color print of for Susan Hayward , a feat far more difficult than LITTLE CAESAR or I AM A FUGITIVE and you may be loving the beautiful Miss Dunne.) able to get some idea of this, for the color does not have that patina of age which , say, MGM musi- Is this, as Andrew Sarris says of a later Stahl film ,. cals of the forties wear so proudly.) Thus , MYSTERY \" the cinema of audacity to the pOint of madness\" ? OF THE WAX MUSEUM emerges as one of the few Or is it the cinema of pathos to the depths of bathos? important discoveries of the season , but not for the Stahl makes remarkably few directorial comments reasons everyone had expected .-R .K. on the outrages and coincidences of the story. Nor, BACK STREET (1932) when he has the chance, does he redeem Irene Dunne's suffering by nestling it in the haze of a BACK STREET combines what are probably Old long-lost dream . After Boles has died, Miss Dunne Hollywood 's two most popular plots: the rich-boy has a reverie of the plot mechanism that allowed poor-girl romance , in which the conflict arises from Boles to marry. She was to meet him and his mother family pressures and life-style differences; and the at a concert in the park , but Fate intervened . Now, lopsided triangle involving two lovers and a super- she imagines that she did meet him that fine summer day, and , as she walks triumphantly toward him , the dream begins to fade. Ending the film here would return a shred of dignity to the Dunne character, and underline the dream's importance in sustaining her through a miserable, wasted life. But no. Stahl must have Miss Dunne 's death, just as Boles robbed her of life. That's a shame, for this final gesture might have given BACK STREET a semblance of life in its Lincoln Center revival.-R.C . THE FRONT PAGE (1931) THE FRONT PAGE was the most eagerly anticipated film in the AFI Show, a fact due largely to the tenaCity of its owner, Howard Hughes, in retaining all known American prints. (Some day Hughes will forgive Hollywood for condemning THE OUTLAW, ignor- ing Faith Domergue, and producing THE CARPETBAGGERS, release THE FRONT PAGE and SCAR- FACE as a double feature, and make an extra couple of bucks.) THE FRONT PAGE proved a disappOintment, 72 SPRING 1971

partly because it was so breath lessly awaited and , that we often don 't know who 's speaking, let alone what he's saying . Great pains are taken to establish indeed , partly because of the lamentable quality of that the press-room does indeed have four walls; its sound track-but mostly because it suffers so there are meaningless shock cuts to the gallows in comparison with the Howard Hawks-Charles Led- outside; the camera is on the move far more than erer remake, HIS GIRL FRIDAY . any of the characters . It's a case of too many tracks spoiling the froth . Milestone's greatest indulgence This is not the place to limn the virtues of HIS is a follow-the-bouncing camera effect that accom- GIRL FRIDAY (which is easily Hawks ' best comedy , panies the reporters in song , and which nobody I've and quite arguably his best film), except to note the asked can justify or even understand. Hawks never challenges Hawks and Lewis Milestone faced and shows us the press-room 's \" fourth wall ;\" but by then the ways Hawks' approach was preferable. Robin the film has moved from Walter's office to his city- Wood has perceptively analyzed the benefits Hawks room to a restaurant, so there 's no need for a hy- accrued when he changed Hildy Johnson , Walter perthyroid mise-en-scene later on . Further, since Burns' ace reporter, from a man to Burns' ex-wife. everything in the pressroom is played against one But the inspiration in this switch can be exagger- wall , the desk in which Earl Williams hides, fearing ated , since literally dozens of thirties comedies fea- for his life, is almost always in sight, and thus his tured man-woman reporting-romancing teams. Nor predicament is kept in mind even as Walter courts should Hawks' influence on what even Wood cites Hildy in his own peculiar fashion . as \"the film 's chief virtue-its brilliant dialogue \" be overemphasized . Much of HIS GIRL FRIDAY 'S success Maybe it's unfair to compare THE FRONT PAGE with can be traced to screenwriter Lederer's brilliant HIS GIRL FRIDAY, at least in the condition the former development of Walter, Hildy and Bruce Baldwin was exhibited at Lincoln Center. According to (Hildy 's fiance) in the film 's early scenes ; these have Dwight Macdonald , THE FRONT PAGE \" was widely almost nothing to do with the original. Hawks was considered the best movie of 1931 ,\" and critics must fortunate in having as collaborators some of Holly- have been grateful for a film that moved, if only in wood 's wittiest scribes-Ben Hecht, Jules Furthman , the wrong direction and for the wrong reasons. But Dudley Nichols, Brackett and Wilder-but they were a Hawks picture of the same year, THE CRIMINAL just as lucky to have a director who could be trusted CODE , can be seriously preferred to THE FRONT PAGE to realize their scripts in the fullest and pithiest way for its natural use of the moving camera and its possible. sophistication of dialogue delivery. We can at least be pleased that THE FRONT PAGE has been made In nearly every scene , Hawks proves his superi- available for study and comparison , and more ority to Milestone as a director of both actors and grateful still that it existed to be remade into the camera. Hawks' famous, frenetic pacing of dialogue best newspaper comedy of them all .-R . C. is actually slower than Milestone 's. But, whereas the performers in THE FRONT PAGE tend to speak very THE KING OF JAZZ (1930) loud and fast, with stagey pauses after each If you can appreciate the studio \" revues \" of punch-line, Hawks has his actors speak at a lower level ' and slightly slower, but with no pauses. On 1929-30, or are a student of John Murray Anderson the most immediate level , Hawks makes it easier for and the American musical theatre of the twenties, the audience to catch what is being said , while- then THE KING OF JAZZ is a fabulous find . Speaking even granting the occasionally maddening sound for myself I can answer \" yes \" to both of the above, track of the AFI print-the FRONT PAGE audience has but for most audiences the film can be an arduous to strain to hear or make sense of the dialogue. experience , and THE KING OF JAZZ was not favorably (Milestone may have been trying to beat the record received. The pre-Berkeleyan musical is very special set by George S. Kaufman , whose direction of the sub-genre, and a taste for it must be cultivated . stage version was notoriously fast-paced .) More- Those among the audience who came expecting to over, Hawks' attitude suggests a respect for the see a Ruby Keeler extravaganza in Technicolor were dialogue and provokes a more benign state of ex- immediately turned 'off when they found the sets haustion ; in HIS GIRL FRIDAY , the dialogue is not moving about the cameras, instead of the other way faster-paced but the film is. What these newspa- around . But if the conventions of KING OF JAZZ are permen are saying, after all , often lurches past jour- completely theatrical-even to the extent of having nalistic sarcasm into genuine misanthropy, and production numbers take place on a curtained ttage Walter Burns' ploys have a touch of the clever psy- -at least this lends the proper flavor to what is chotic about them. Hawks' steady pace never gives unashamedly the recreation of an Anderson revue . us time to question the characters' motives: Molly This is as close as we will ever come to seeing The Malloy jumps out the window and is promptly for- Greenwich Village Follies, or any of that legendary gotten ; Walter kidnaps Bruce's mother and is showman 's other work, and taken with that grain promptly forgiven . Only in retrospect does this de- of salt its entertainment value is not inconsiderable. lightful comedy reveal itself as the most subtlely The Technicolor work is interesting to watch , and cynical film Hollywood has produced . was given a heavy advance buildup by the Festival promoters , but it is certainly primitive in comparison Hawks' camera observes these inanities and in- with the controlled hues of MYSTERY OF THE WAX sanities with the detachment of a visitor to the MUSEUM . The limitations of the color process are Marat-Sade play-within-a-play, again letting us con- readily apparent when \" Rhapsody in Blue\" emerges centrate on the dialogue and situations. But Mile- in shades of aqua, and all this was not helped by stone is so busy trying to make THE FRONT PAGE filmic FILM COMMENT 73

the cond ition of the print, which was not the best EMPEROR JON ES. Paul Robeson (left) and Dud ley Digges. imaginable. Still, some of the numbers are staged with a modicum of cinematic intelligence, and many after escaping from all this does Jones wind up on of the tunes are quite delightful. On the technical h is island . Perhaps the introduction of all these side there is an early color cartoon sequence (the stereotyped situations was thought necessary to earliest in Technicolor?) and some interesting trick make the film commercially viable (and give Robe- work with a miniaturized orchestra that must have son something to sing) and thus salvage the play been a remarkable achievement. The problem with at all. If so , then the purpose was admirable, for Whiteman , of course, is the validity of his claim to in salvaging the play they also salvaged Robeson's the title ' 'King of Jazz\" in the first place, his reputation performance, certainly the most remarkable piece being based largely on rather elaborate orchestra- of acting in the whole retrospective. Robeson some- tions which are today considered diametrically op- how radiates cunning, arrogance, charm and con- posed to the true ' 'jazz\" of the Twenties. At any rate , tempt all at the same time , and he moves through in the film 's big \" Melting Pot\" number an attempt is the role with an unforced assurance quite rare in made to illustrate how jazz is the music of the Amer- screen acting of the Thirties. Director Dudley Murphy ican melting pot, formed by the confluence of many must also take much of the credit, especially in the national cultures . A wide range of alien musical development of the symbiotic relationship between elements with a rather dubious connection to jazz Jones and Smithers (a really fine characterization are introduced into Whiteman's melting pot, includ- by Dudley Digges). Cramped by an obviously under- ing Russian balalaikas and Scottish bagpipes, sized budget, Murphy makes the most of what he among others. Notably overlooked is any African has. Although he doesn 't go all out in copying the contribution, but perhaps that is as it should be play's expressionist outlook, he does keep the ac- here-for African music must have contributed very tion flowing by using enough strong visuals to main- little to the starched elegance and formal musicality tain more than just surface interest. He shoots Ro- exemplified in THE KING OF JAzz .-R .K. beson constantly from low angles, in one shot fram- KING OF JAZZ. aing him against a crown , fa Kerensky and the laurel THE EMPEROR JONES (1933) DuBose Heyward and the ravages of time have boughs in OCTOBER. Bar motifs are fatalistically im- posed on Robeson in the imagery: at the Harlem turned inside-out Eugene O'Neill 's powerful work, cabaret he is marked with the shadow of a beaded but we should still be very thankful for the patched curtain and in his mad flight through the jungle he and scrappy copy of THE EMPEROR JONES which has is traced threateningly by tropical vines-both rather come down to us. The action described in O 'Neill 's clear echoes of the prison uniform of the chain gang play doesn 't get under way until the film is half over, sequences . It is only in the final scenes of the jungle and the beginning is padded out with an amalgam terrors that the film breaks down , both literally and of all the cliches of Negro life imaginable. After figuratively . Heyward has removed all of the Jungian singing a few spirituals Jones leaves his country visions , such as the slave ship , and replaced them church for the Pullman porter job, winds up in a with spectres of incidents from the first half of the Harlem cabaret where we see some fancy dancing , film , thus monumentally minimizing the film 's effec- then down South for some crap shooting , a knifing , tiveness , as well as destroying O 'Neill 's conception . and a term singing again on the chain gang. Only Here, too , the badly battered and patched up print is really bothersome, for we see only a couple of the five lead bullets fired and the rest are obviously lost (the print was laboriously reconstructed from a number of incomplete copies , and is evidently still incomplete, as the running time was well under the announced 7'2. minutes) . Although not what it might have been , THE EMPEROR JONES is a find valuable enough to justify sitting through all of the gaps and spl ices to enjoy.-R .K. 74 SPRING 1971

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UNDERGROUND FILM: A CRITICAL HISTORY his notion of the \" pad film. \" But what is the \"pad film \" ? BY PARKER TYLER Tyler makes use of the independent filmmaker's way Grove Press, 1969; hardcover, $7.50; paperback, of working , which IS frequently within the confines of $1.75; 249 pages; illustrated. his apartment or loft, as a way of criticizing what he does with film. Following from this, irrelevant of the REVIEWED BY REGINA CORNWELL mode of working or the concerns of the individual filmmaker , he blots out all distinctions and categorizes Regina Cornwell is writing her Ph.D. thesis on the together as \"pad \" artists , Andy Warhol and Jack Smith avant-garde cinema for Northwestern University. with Stan Brakhage , Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, and even Peter Kubelka. Tyler also uses \"pad\" with its Unshakeable convictions are demanded of the artist now. colloquial connotations of beatnik, hip, drug , and sex- ually \"liberated \" culture. Such flippant and critically But what I say is , tomorrow will shake what is unshakeable unacceptable terms as \" pad \" and \"peephole \" expose his sexual preoccupation . This preoccupation is trans- today , and only he is alive who rejects his convictions of formed into critical criteria which enables him to dismiss certain films for their particular use of or lack of sexual yesterday. -Kasimir Malevich (1913) content. Malevich, the Russian Suprematist artist and art critic In his consistent view of the recent \" Underground \" is of course talking about the need for the artist i~ as a vast \" playroom\" or \" pad,\" Tyler devotes a chapter the 20th Century to continually consider and reconsider entitled \" Popularizing Peepholes: The Infantile Gim- his art and to move forward at a time of radical change mick\" primarily to Brakhage and Warhol, talking less In the arts and in culture in general. It goes without about their films than about their personalities and saying th~t Malevich's statement is equally valid today, temperaments. He is critical of both , but particularly and not simply In reference to the artist but to the critic of Warhol , and contrasts the two as a paradox of of the arts as well ; yet, all too lamentably and all too extremes with Warhol 's \" radically restrained move- frequently the critic of film , particularly the commercial ment\" on the one hand, and Brakhage's \"radically film critic, when attempting to approach the avant- propelled movement\" on the other. (page 27) Tyler garde , is deaf to such wisdom. While Parker Tyler has holds up Brakhage's technical sophistication and certainly dealt with the avant-garde and the American knowledge in order to criticize Warhol for his methods Independent Film on numerous occasions in the past, rather than allowing for their differences and discussing the fact IS that he falls into the same category in his the theoretical and formal consequences of the two book, Underground Film: A Critical History, for he is and all the subsequent film projects which they have unable to deal with the work of this present film phe- influenced. He writes: nomena in critical terms which are both applicable and adequate to it and therefore must delimit it from a Warhol's rejection of the mature vocabulary of filmic effects, perspective of previous avant-gardes, but also, from including varied editing rhythms, may remind one of a young an even more delimiting system-his own pseudo- child 's trancelike , arbitrary fi xation on certain subjects. Tile Freudian terminology, linked with legislative \"oughts\" very different streamy-dreamy rhythm of Brakhage's work is of what he would wish the avant-garde to be . Mr. Tyler surely provocative and serves up unexpected-all too momen- is disappointed and disillusioned with the current trend tary beauties. (page 28) in independent film because he cannot come to terms with it and thus chooses in his book to attack it in And a few paragraphs above he writes of Warhol 's early a most unscholarly and critically distasteful fashion. work: Warhol had, among other things, rolled back the history of Why does he use the term \"Underground\" in his title the film to certain artless , primitive beginnings (paradoxically and throughout his book? When Sheldon Renan pub- artificial in effect) that would be obno xious to anyone bred on lished his book, An Introduction to the American Un- the ingenuities of the historic avant-garde. (page 26) derground Film, in 1967 the term was much more commonly accepted; in 1969 or 1970 it isn 't. It seems In a recent catalog by John Coplan entitled Andy Warhol safe to say that Mr. Tyler chooses \"underground\" over from a Warhol exhibit at the Pasadena Art Museum, independent, New American Cinema, or avant-garde, Jonas Mekas has a critical essay, \"Notes After Resee- even while nebulously equating it with the latter, be- ing the Movies of Andy Warhol,\" analyzing certain cause \"Underground\" carries connotations of, among aesthetic concerns intrinsic to Warhol's film work, other things, illicitness, illegality and particularly clan- among them: structuring in time , the importance of destine sexuality and titillation . This in turn becomes duration, and the meaning evoked through such struc- the vehicle on which he can hang his pseudo-Freudian turing; the paradox of Warhol'S permissiveness an.d labels such as \"pad films ,\" \" playroom films, \" \" fetish control in working ; and the creation of a unique and footage,\" \" infantilism,\" \" pathological infantilism,\" other relationship between the viewer and the work \" toggery for 'seeing new',\" and \"voyeurism.\" of art. Mekas also defends Warhol 's primitivism. Quoting his own writing from Film Culture (No . 33 , 1964), Mekas In fact , Mr. Tyler begins his book by positing the writes: \" Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins , camera as potential voyeur able to capture the \" taboos to the days of Lumiere, for a rejuvenation and a cleans- of reality ,\" with the \"Underground Film \" assuming this ing. In his work , he has abandoned all \" cinematic \" form and subject adornments that cinema had gathered function. He concludes his opening paragraph : around itself until now.\" (Coplan , page 143) Moreover \" ... and if what is shown is rare , tempting , unusual, he points out: \" At the same time , he became the first thrilling , it is only because big commercial film has so modern film artist, who went back to the origins for a long neglected its natural opportunities. \" (pages 1-2) readjustment of his art, for the refocusing of the me- An interesting statement exposing his real attitude to- dium. \" (Coplan, page 143) ward independent or avant-garde film within the total film medium as well as his emphasis on content and Throughout his book Tyler frequently refers to War- subject matter, particularly of a sexual nature, over hol's and Warhol Factory productions, dwelling on their considerations of form. With voyeurism as his frame- sexual content and alluding to the \" Superstars,\" their work, he maintains that a classic function of all avant- garde film is \" peephole entertainment\" which leads to \" playrooms \" and \" pads. \" It is one of his ways of prov- ing his thesis that the Underground is \" a great big toddler\" (page 30) and that: \"The current avant-garde has a vice: wish-fulfillment psychology masquerading as a system of aesthetic values .\" (page 25) I chose to dwell on Warhol here (though I could have referred at some length to Tyler's criticism of George Landow or Michael Snow or his back-handed praise of Paul Sharits among others) to demonstrate his 76 SPRING 1971

short-sightedness and to point out several of the key \"human \" as well as plot and myth and symbol are blocks to his book. On the one hand , as already dis- apparent. cussed , is his unfortunate choice of pseudo-Freudian labels and methods of demeaning through positing One can see further that not only is the more pure \"infantilism \" which throws no real critical light on the mode of abstraction a preparatory school for the com- films in question , and on the other hand is his severe mercial and / or narrative film , but indeed he seems to limitation in dealing with form and his attitude toward see the avant-garde in general as such a preparation . plot, abstraction , and modernism in general. Because they too had the \" filmic know-how,\" Kirsanov , Clair and Bunuel from the early avant-garde and Mary Tyler reveals the source of his problem in dealing with Ellen Bute (who worked with abstraction in the thirties) the current avant-garde when he discusses form: went on to commercial film. Tyler, with his penchant for plot and all its accouterments, cannot see why the The myth as literature implies a brief story from the lives of \" Undergrounders\" don 't wish to abandon their \" infan- the gods; doubtless its most ancient form was a chant , or tilism \" and work commercially or narratively, and in words declaimed to musical chant. If film , no matter what the his thinking, it must be because they lack the \" know- theme , is not to be considered a cle verly animated photo- how. \" graph album , then (quite aside from its frequent use of speech ) it exists in t ime sequence just as the novel does. Mr. Tyler clings to plot or \" surplot\" as its extension , ( page 191 ) and finds the Dadaist and Surrealist traditions of the Hence all distingu ishable general forms , in literature or film , early part of the century \" meaningful\" because he can come under the one head of statements meaningful in term s extrapolate the \" human\" from them, yet he can only of a complete action. These forms are not static and wholly correlate recent avant-garde film with Neo-Dada and exclusive of each other but represent typical and fle xible Pop Art, while finding them technically unsatisfactory concepts of human behavior and consciousness. (page 192) and conceptually \" infantile\" in contrast to other and He compounds and crystallizes his definition of form earlier work . He does so because he views film history, a little further on in the book : particularly the avant-garde in terms of an ethic : The profoundest sense of film form is not merely an instinctive If, as I contend , the ritual forms , the epic sensibility , the myth ic and musically replete rhythm but moreover a sense of human premise, the identifiable human situation are mutually indis- action as importantly centered in certain ritual incidents and pensable to the true history of the Underground Film (Under- episodes which can be ordered by such a rhythm . (page 205) ground Film being an evolution of avant-garde film ), then we have to evaluate that history as I have been trying to evaluate That is why Tyler can write of ·the \"pad film \" qua it. (page 208) Happening , saying that the Happening is \"the only form These are the terms through which he wishes to see discovered by this still active school of film ... \" (page 190) He sees this as the only form having emerged film . from the \" Underground\" because he sees it as con- nected with plot or story in one way or another and Toward the end of his book, Tyler writes: involving \"human action. \" Via Underground Film , modernism has brought the twentieth century art movement full circle from anti-illusionism and But are there no other formal concerns for Tyler? What antirepresentationalism to this downright narcissism-more or of abstraction? For the most part, Tyler's considerations less illusionist-of a given elite : the Undergrounders, the hip- of abstract form and form in general involve time, partic- swingers and the cool-cool babies, the warholites and the ularly in terms of rhythm , and harmony-two certainly mekassianics. .. (page 233) antiquated and unsophisticated musical and poetic analogues for any adequate critical film vocabulary. He finally comes out and says it: modernism with its Yet, even granting his use of these terms , for Tyler anti-illusionism is anathema to him , so much so that there still must be something \" human \" to attach them he is blind to the kinds of concerns and developing to , for he finds pure abstraction to be futile . With this forms which have come to the film avant-garde from in mind , it comes as a surprise when he mentions a modernism in recent years . He can 't understand Mi- fairly well known film of the '60 's, James Whitney's chael Snow's WAVELENGTH and ~ or the work of LAPIS, and says that it is one of the \" most satisfying \" Landow or Jacobs or Kubelka and so criticizes them abstract films he has ever seen . Yet, he cannot leave as \" infantile\" and sees only certain Freudian images it at that and closes his comments with: \" There is a in Sharits ' work which serves to make that filmmaker 's kinaesthetic feeling of constant swelling and subsiding compulsiveness legitimate and meaningful to Tyler. that recalls the motion of respiration , so that the im- mense yantra of the screen easily becomes an image In his attempts to correlate film with the other visual of the human heart serenely compounding the flow of chemicals throughout the body,\" (page 156) so that arts , why doesn't Tyler move beyond Neo-Dada and the film is only a metaphor for human movement and Pop? Structural, process and conceptual film are relat- nothing in itself. Nor can he speak of Len Lye ' s 1958 ed to occurences in the other visual arts and these FREE RADICALS as a film in itself, but must posit it as preoccupations are very much involved with what the \"a morally motivated pun on Marxist dialectic as for- materials of film really are and need be, just as painters mulated in montage by Eisenstein \" and as a reference have been preoccupied with what the essential proper- to political radicalism. (page 154) After mentioning ties of their art are, and all of the problems , solutions several abstract works of the'20s such as Duchamp 's and possibilities evolving from that. Moreover, as Mi- ANEMIC CINEMA and Ralph Steiner's H20 , and others of chael Fried points out in his catalog , Three American a formal impressionistic and plotless nature like Rutt- Painters (Harvard, 1965), since the late 19th Century, mann's BERLIN , Tyler comments: \" Well might all such painting has become more and more conscious of films be accused of 'formalism ' and 'aestheticism'!\" concerns intrinsic to itself, involving a constant self-cri- (page 144) ticism and refining of the problems and a perpetual search for solutions. (pages 7-8) Fried quotes Clement One can infer from Tyler's writing that indeed if it Greenberg (from \" After Abstract Expressionism ,\" Art is not to be a kind of dead-end , abstraction must lead International, VI , 8, page 30) : elsewhere ; in fact, he more than hints that he sees Under the testing of modernism more and more of the con- its justification as a kind of training ground for narrative ventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be or commercial film or the combination of the two. Hans dispensable , unessential. By now it has been established it Richter becomes his example of one of the abstract would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art con- filmmakers who, because he had the technical facility sists in but two constitutive conventions or norms ; flatness and and \"know-how\" went on successfully to commercial the delimitat ion of flatness ; and that the observation of merely work; and , as more evidence in his case against ab- these two norms is enough to create an object which can be straction, Tyler remarks that while Richter continued experienced as a picture : thus a stretched or tacked-up can vas his own film projects on the side while working com- alread y exists as a picture-th ough not necessarily a success- mercially, his personal work became less and less fu l o ne. (Fried . page 45) abstract with such films as DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY and 8 x 8. In other words , more and more of the Greenberg 's statement easily translates itself into the contemporary avant-gp,rde concerns in film . The spec- trum over which these formal questions and solutions are spread is vast. As an example , on the one hand FILM COMMENT 77

is Andy Warhol working illusionistically , going back , as partial success , for it is , of course , the best stills which Jonas Mekas po ints out, all the way to Lumiere , throw- have been published the most. There are , indeed , some ing out tried and tested conventions and building a unusual beauties , but too often Griffith makes do with new narrative form or forms . With other artists it is bland stUdio protraits, dull behind-the-scenes photo- different. On the other extreme , what could be more graphs or stiff publicity stills which misrepresent the film minimal and anti-illusionistic than a black and wh ite in question and whose interest, if any , is strictly sub- flicker film such as Kubelka 's or Conrad 's. Sontag camp. Tyler exposes his penchant for the American avant- Nor is there always a balance between the number garde of the '40 's and early '50 's such as the work of photographs chosen to represent an actor and the of Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Curtis Harrington, actor's prominence in film history or in the te xt itself. Charles Boultenhouse (including his 1963 DIONYSIUS) , Greer Garson is mentioned at length twice but she gets and James Broughton 's early work, and ultimately re- one photograph . Paul Jones , who isn 't mentioned at veals himself as an extremely conservative critic who all , is seen twice. Gloria Grahame is mentioned but can only deal with the \" Underground \" by reducing it to never appears. Judy Garland is discussed in four dif- his own terms which are more often than not, not its ferent chapters , but she is seen only once in a small , own terms. Perhaps Parker Tyler was the man to write unflattering photograph, pages away from Griffith 's about the avant-garde of the forties and fifties which discussion of her. was for the most part preoccupied with myth and ritual and heavy symbolism, but when he tries the same There is also the definite impreSSion that the book has techniques on so much film of the si xties, which clearly been crammed with photographs less to illustrate the deals with other questions and demands a different text than to satisfy the conventions of this genre of critical perspective , then he is bound to fail. book. Before each major chapter , there is a page of photographs entitled, rather coyly, \" Selected Short THE MOVIE STARS Subjects.\" In some cases , but by no means all , these photographs illustrate stars to be mentioned in some BY RICHARD GRIFFITH part of the text preceding or following them . Then , for no discernible reason except to pad the book Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1970; hard- photographically, we find sections on \" Youth \" (which cover, $25 .00; 498 pages; illustrated. opens with a still in which the young Gary Cooper looks REVIEWED BY GARY CAREY surprisingly like James Dean), \" Beauties ,\" \" Love,\" Gary Carey is the author of Lost Films. \" Action Stars \" and so forth-74 pages with no text except for sketchy captions . One might justify this, I Several years in the writing , Richard Griffith 's The Movie suppose , by saying that Griffith is attempting to cover Stars arrived just in time for coffee-table-book season , the whole gamut of stardom . Nothing is left out, but also known as Christmas. Like all coffee-table books, as is typical with the movie-star picture book , nothing it is bulky, too large to read in any of the positions usually is really covered . Griffith hasn 't transformed his format, assumed by the book-reading body, too large for the as one hoped he might; he has succumbed to it. average bookshelf, and heavy with an expensive chic that glares at you as relentlessly as light does from But what of the text? To beg in with , it is riddled with its over-glossy pages. picayune, but nonetheless real and irritating errors. I had compiled a full page of them before I decided that One does not expect too much from the average coffee- it was unfair to take Griffith to task for errors he would table book besides pretty pictures . But this is also a undoubtedly have corrected had he lived to see the Richard Griffith book, and so, on this occasion, one book through its polishing stages. But Doubleday does have high hopes for the te xt. And some of them should receive a resounding slap on their corporate are fulfilled . As expected , there is much more te xt than behind for not commissioning a knowledgeable copy- one usually finds in books of this genre. And Griffith editor, particularly since the author could not do his writes superbly . His prose is stylish, witty , erudite and , own double-checking. The publisher also deserves a best of all , enthusiastic . Unlike Richard Schickel 's The tweak on the ear for a bad job of indexing . Stars, Griffith's book doesn 't have the feel of an author doing a good job of cribbing from all available sources In an acknowledgment, Griffith states the thesis of his in order to supply the text for a book that interested book: \" the willful progress of the medium to date has him only because of a publisher's advance. Unlike those taken place primarily as part of the progress of the TV-dinner-table books , Citadel's The Films of . . . series , audience, and only secondarily as a result of the efforts The Mo vie Stars shows an undeniable response to and of others concerned ... \" Though extremely well put, feeling for those stars whom Griffith chose to discuss there is no shock of recognition here. It is not a new at length . thought; indeed it is a truism that has been used by the industry for years to excuse a multitude of sins. At best, As Griffith readily admitted , the real reason people buy Griffith 's \" theory\" is a blanket generalization conve- this kind of book is for the photographs . Therefore , nient for writers who do not wish to be bothered by to start with first things first, it must be reported that, these scruffy \" ifs\" and \" buts \" that lie just below the photographically , The Movie Stars is a disappointment. smooth surface of their topic . It seems to me a very Griffith did not live to work on the lay-out of the book moot point as to whether the nickelodeon audiences and , alas, it is no tribute to his memory . The photo- really wanted the close-up or the fade-in . Or whether graphs as arranged on the printed page are frequently silent audiences really hankered for sound. Or whether too crowded , or there is too much white space. Often their children cried out for the wide-screen or wanted they are badly placed in relation to the te xt: in one to be deafened by stereophonic sound or voted to see instance, the author speaks of eight actors whose life through Technicolor glasses. There seems to me pictures are supposed to appear on two adjoining to be a strong possibility that audiences have been pages, but on those two pages appear only seven more docile than Griffith would allow. At very least, actors. The captioning is atrocious. Either the stills are I think it's a question of the chicken and the egg and inadequately captioned or over-abundantly so, with the which came first. result that the eye becomes weary from trying to dis- cover which section of the small print describes which Even in the realm of stardom , where the audience's picture. whims were more strongly felt than in any other depart- ment in film , Griffith's thesis is still subject to qualifi- Although the lay-out frequently destroys whatever ef- cation . John Wayne , who resides in the first rank of fectiveness the stills might have had , it is also true that Griffith stardom , perhaps got there less from his imme- the choice of stills is not the best. Griffith has tried diate appeal to the audience than from his ability to valiantly to find photographs which have not been withstand their indifference. SomehOW (through the reproduced ad infinitum , but his attempt leads to only persistence of John Ford, one suspects), Wayne man- 78 SPRING 1971

Louis Malle's \"City of Dreadful Night\" Calcutta \" Let us take off our hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smokey, the magnificent. .. \" (Rudyard Kipling) For Kipling, Calcutta was the supreme city of the Empire. It was founded by the East India Company in 1690 and in 1774 made official capital of the British Empire in India. The poet was one of the fi rst Westerners to see Calcutta's manifold horrors within its \" magn ificence,\" and to give these horrors poetic expression, even though there were some \" which could not be written or hinted at. . . .\" Louis Malle has now made CALCUTIA and it isas if Kipling's anxious verses have become Malle's extraordinary images. The film dramatizes universal human problems as if it were a Greek tragedy.The population crisis and its accompanying ecological catastrophes are set in front of the audience and the effect is electric. One is struck with the ways in which CALCUTIAechoes the senti ments of Kipling's best writing. Malle finds now, as Kipling did then, a \"City of Dreadful Night,\" bypassed by time, yetexisting sti II. .. .Thus while Malleand his team encounter and film a contemporary Calcutta, they continually find that the city's secrets and identities are inextricably bound up with the past. In the daily living conditions of its eight million inhabitants, in the over- whelming presence of religion, in Calcutta's relation to the rest of India, Malle's film finds the city' s quality of immutability. If conditions were \" impossible\" twenty years ago, they are now even more impossible; this is the harsh irony of Calcutta and, to some observers, also her fate. In the same way that Sartre asks his readers to \" have the courage\" to read Fanon, so does CALCUTIA require courage in its viewing. In watching and listening carefully to the fi 1m, one takes risks. We risk opening ourselves to new thoughts about the world and its problems. And we risk a certain confidence in our belief that people cannottruly die in the streets, unattended in their pain. Thus CALCUTIA insists on the integrity of its images- and these images are, throughout, those of human ity.They are honest, clear and frighteni ng. Available in 35mm and 16mm. Eastmancolor. Running time 115 minutes. For rental information contact EYR Programs, 78 East 56 Street, New York NY 10022, (21 2 - 8 3 8 - 1 3 76). ~PROGRAM

aged to hang around so long that he couldn 't be ac- gowns (which actually were a great deal wittier than counted for in any other way than as one of the more she ever was) , Griffith still sees Swanson as that soi- perverse phenomena of the star system . gnee creature who thrilled him in the past. When he gets to the later stars, his interest dims and his prose Despite such objections, it must be admitted that Grif- becomes bland blurb-writing , or as in the case of Cary fith 's thesis is a workable one-or so it seems until it Grant (who he presents as a debonair bungler), so begins not to work. He begins by discussing such hopelessly wide of the mark that one doubts if he general topics as \" Where Do They Come From?\" and responded at all to the star in question . \" Is It Beauty? \" \" Is It ' It'?\" etc. Then we come to the great stars-Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Swanson, Too many of Griffith 's judgments are blinkered by a tradition that he didn't feel the need to reexamine. For Norma Talmadge , W .S. Hart, Valentino , Garbo, Craw- i~stance , we are told that Helen Hayes was a beloved ford , Wayne and Bogart. No surprises here (until you film star of the thirties. She wasn't. Her career lasted start thinking of the ones he left out) . They all were as long as it did because critics and producers believed great stars, and Griffith's Valhalla is as predictable as her stage fame lent prestige to the movies. But the Birgit Nilsson as Brunnhilde . He analyzes what it was public never really warmed to her Simply because she about each of his personal deities that touched the wasn't effective as a film actress. And once again poor public nerve . This leads to an account of the star's Marion Davies is ridiculed ; Griffith rehashed the Citizen reign of popularity with all its attendant panoply, and Hearst legend for a paragraph before adding , as an then . .. the first wnnkle (reported with Henry Hart afterthought, that she had some flair for comedy. But ghoulishness), ignominious box office returns the in films such as THE PATSY, SHOW PEOPLE and BLONDIE drinking, the drugs, the attempts at comebacks. Good OF THE FOLLIES , Miss Davies proved that she could be grief, it's Phataplay! one of the screen 's most charming comediennes. A full-scale reevaluation of her career is needed to help Along the way, Griffith tells a lot of stories which till us discover if her declasse reputation was actually now have been whispered only out-of-school, or in the due to lack of talent or whether it was a moralistic pages of the National Enquirer and Hallywoo.d Babylan. judgment pronounced by fans and moguls on her For instance, we learn that Carole Lombard thought relationship with Hearst. We may find that tradition and Clark Gable was a lousy \" lay\" ; that Gable made a Orson Welles have been grossly unfair to Miss Davies. habit o.f \" one-night stands \" with hash-house waitresses (which may have been his retart to Miss Lombard but Griffith 's analysis of the stars' appeal-that their acting isn't recorded as such); and that he caddishly told ability was less important than their star quality-is also friends that Pauline Frederick acted, while they were a most vulnerable truism . It also has the built-in disad- tau ring together, as though she wauld never see a man vantage of excluding Griffith from any other avenue again . The prose is also laced with much sexual allu- than that gossipy biographical one which has already sion-a style less titillating (as I think was intended) been travelled too frequently. Sometimes Griffith gives than depressing, because it inadvertently advertises the impreSSion that all the star needed to do was stand Griffith 's feeling that this material must be goased if there and be his resplendent self. Star quality was it's going to play. indeed vital to create a lasting first impression . But, as Griffith eventually makes clear, the stars themselves It doesn 't work. Nothing can disguise the fact that the knew the importance of acting ability: it was the only material is all so deja vu. The very thoroughness of way of prolonging their careers past the last blush of the attention Griffith has lavished on the stars and their youth . Joan Crawford , for example , realized in 1940 system provokes the devastating realization that we've that her reign 'as Glamour Queen of MGM was ap- read it all too often , and nane of the new trivia ar gassipy proaching an end , and cajoled the studio to play the innuendo. he trots aut can make it seem fresh . Griffith unflattering but meaty role of A WOMAN 'S FACE. Most is merely perpetuating the old Hollywood legends. Some of the stars Griffith discusses did learn to act. And many of them were true, of course; others were nothing more that he ignores like Hepburn, Tracy, Davis, Fonda, than press-release puffery which , aver the decades, Colbert, Stewart, Arthur always COUld. One suspects have acquired the patina of truth. Too much of this that Griffith excluded them from his Pantheon because book reads like a fan magazine, though one raised to they could function both as actors and stars. But even the Nth power of intelligence. Ironically, Griffith 's fanat- if Griffith 's Elite never encompassed an emotional icism serves as the source of both the book's weak- gamut larger than Dorothy Parker's A to B, they learned nesses and its strengths. Fram it stems not only the to run that particular track with infinite shading and engaging enthusiasm of his style , but also. his inability dazzling dexterity. Griffith acknowledges this and , on to escape the allure of his childhood gods and gad- occasion , he analyzes an individual performance with desses and re-evaluate them in the light af today. wit and inSight. Then , and then alone, one sits up and begins to pay real attention . It has been mentioned by other reviewers that Griffith 's choice of the great stars includes no actor who ap- But there is little of it. Griffith evades the crucial ques- peared on the screen later than the mid-1930's. More- tion-how much genuine acting exists in star acting?- over, he writes really well anly about those who had just as everyone has done so conveniently for years . made their debut by the end of the 1920's. As is the Someday someone is going to have to answer the question , as completely and dexterously as Griffith has case with many who attempt to. write \" seriously\" about skirted it. To do so will be to open a can of worms; but we can 't go on talking about the can though it movies, the stars who meant the most to Griffith were were empty , as though there were no worms to be put those he saw as a child and adolescent. The Chaplin under the microscope. piece is excellent; the Pickford chapter is good ; so is the one on Garbo until Griffith bogs it down with some Griffith's approach also leads him to view the star 's nonsense about his desire to see her on the stage as career not as a series of separate films but as continu- Shakespeare's Cleopatra. These chapters may read ing epiodes in one massive aeuvre. And because there better than the others because they concern stars who. is so little mention of the part played by director or writer or photographer in these films , it seems at times still have the power to. fascinate modern audiences. as though the star were their sole author, that they sprang out of his or her head full-blown . Even when When he writes about a star like Swanson , whose hold on audiences has been less tenacious (and who today one film is distinguished from the next, there is often is effective in only twa or three of her films) , he cannot no suggestion that the improvement might be due to make her seem anything ather than a rather silly, pas- happier collaborators . In his discussion of Joan Craw- turing glamaur queen in a style of glamour so tarnished ford 's career, Griffith calls Cukor's attempts to get the lady to act those of a \"martinet\" who did not succeed. that it can barely be recognized. He can 't bridge the gap between the way Swanson looked to moviegoers of the Twenties and the way she looks to today's audi- ences-probably because ·for him there really isn 't much of a gap. Despite the fact that he ridicules her 80 SPRING 1971

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Later on he remarks that A WOMAN 'S FACE marked Craw- novations in sound and color , before assimilating the ford ' s best performance in the period, evidently obliv- works . At that, his ingenuousness is clear: \" There 's ious to the fact that Cukor directed it. no single cinema that could be called typical of the new cinema because it is defined anew by each individ- However historically valid this view may be, however ual filmmaker .\" Roughly, synaesthetic cinema is any cogent it may be to a general comprehension of the personal cinema that isn 't boring or trite or much yet pre-1950 Hollywood film , it still seems to me badly out- copied . of-joint with the times. Looking back over film history, we select from it those special films that rose above The survey begins with a discussion of Kubrick's \" Star- the continuum of the star vehicle, even if, at the time gate Corridor\" in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Jordan they were made , they were intended as nothing more Belson 's mystical personal films. Throughout, Young- than another streamlet to feed the flow. (Griffith seems to imply that films were made for no other reason .) blood 's interviews show great sympathy towards the There are very few stars, past or present, who interest artist's personal vision , as in Belson 's seeing his images us enough to go and see anything in which they hap- as transcendental truths : \" You have to cross pened to appear. There are even fewer who can still over. .. mental , psychological barriers. It' s a kind of provide their own meaning , but in lieu of that we have breakdown of the personality . .. It sort of boils out and found other meanings. The films that were created as the next th ing you know you 're in heaven .\" Belson \" star vehicles \" still live because of the charm of their believes that his abstraction SAMADHI depicts the human comedy or the force of their drama, because they were well-written or sharply directed or beautifully acted-by soul , and was surprised he didn't die after finishing it. actors, not by stars. Next, various approaches to using the computer to Despite Griffith 's occasional admission that certain make films are shown , beginning with a discussion of films weren 't up to snuff, he gives the impression that the sort of teamwork eventually possible between artist he rarely saw these films as anything more than star and robot, as well as straightforward computer copying . vehicles, and that the degree of difference between Youngblood has a long dialogue with the Whitney fam i- good and bad is very slight indeed. At one point he ly, whose seniors specialize in complex , many-topped writes of the \" classic dialogue between the surrealist tables which spin and levitate, producing films of shift- who exclaimed 'Only the marvelous is beautiful ' and ing symmetrical shapes like multicolored swimming, di- his critic who replied 'Yes , but since everything is viding amoeba-like doilies. The next generation of marvelous , everything is beautiful. '\" Was Griffith the Whitneys are working directly with the computers, play- critic of this anecdote? For him too, the stars were mar- ing them \" like pianos\" to produce shifting shapes and velous, so everything or nearly so that they did was beautiful and vice versa . Well , it just ain 't so . dancing colors. One of James Whitney 's more interest- ing products is LAPIS , a series of symmetrical rotating Griffith fails to make the stars or the films in which doily shapes forming and dissolving out of shimmering they appeared any more meaningful for us. Despite dots of changing colors, to a slow tamboura , John his gorgeous prose and our good will , he fails to be Stehura, another computer innovator, has combined more than minimally entertaining, perhaps because, computer-created images and live action shots in short finally , there really isn 't anyth ing new under that stellar films , while Stan Vanderbeek has created by mach ine system . As a coffee-table-book, The Movie Stars is only enormously detailed moving mosaics which look like adequate . As Richard Griffith 's final book , it is a very crawling Persian rugs seen from high overhead . Last, sad disappointment. And as the latest word on the a scientist named Peter Kamnitzer, using the NASA star system , let us hope that it is indeed the last word . computers, has actually put a mathematical description of an imaginary town into a machine , so stored he can EXPANDED CINEMA make films of what a driver or pedestrian would see as he went through , in terms of buildings and squares BY GENE YOUNGBLOOD always in proper perspective , actually creating a film of Simplifiedopolis though it has never been built. In the Introduction by R . Buckminster Fuller; E. P. Dutton , far future , a computer using similar prinCiples may be able to assemble whole television shows from stored New York, 1970; hardcover $9.95; paperback, $4.95; plans and descriptions, giving the visual image literally infinite variety . 432 pages; illustrated; b ibliography; index. Youngblood next explores television itself as a creative REVIEWED BY NORMAN KAGAN medium, now clearly limiting himself to the purely tech- nical, abstract innovators. After a short technical de- Timelapse clouds run across magenta's bull's-eyes. scription of ordinary TV , he goes into the various video equivalents of film 's visual tricks: videotronic mixing, Horses charge in slow motion through solar flares. The wiping , keying , film and still chains . Th is is all fairly technical (Youngblood 's style is half transitorized , half hands of a clock run backward . The moon revolves tantric), but he makes his point: the purely visual games that can be played with TV are nearly untouched. around the earth in a galaxy of Op Art polka dots. Synaesthetic videotape projects , often very close in mood to the film and computer experiments, are then Flashing trapezoids and rhomboids whirl out of Bud- discussed. For example, KQED used a Robert Creely poetry recital in which the poet's substance gradually dha's eye. Pristine polygraphic forms are suspended peels away from his silhouette, faster and faster, writh- ing and spinning in convoluting geometric patterns, in a phosphate void. Exploding isometries give birth giant sweeping flak burst of light worrying the poet's to insects. A praying mantis dances across an Orier:ltal image until only a shimmering wh ite glow remains . It' s symptomatic of Youngblood that he doesn 't bother to garden. Spiraling cellular cubes crash into electric- tell the poem Creely was reciting when the mixer disin- tegrated him . Another more integrated and amusing green fossil molds. The organic symbiosis of universal project, MUSIC WITH BALLS, is described as \" a rich man- tra of color, light, and sound,\" with huge spheres trail- man... \" -from Expanded Cinema , page 394 ing shimmering ruby, emerald and amber arc past or pierce or collide while the composition rises grace- The above may suggest some of the feel and the flaw fully from serenity to cacophony to bubbly melodious- of Gene Youngblood's book, a survey of some recent ness: \" Acoustical space, physical space, and Video very personal and technological artistic efforts in film space become one electronic experience. \" and related areas (pages 139-419). Atop this mostly competent and perceptive study Youngblood has The last pages of Expanded Cinema are a roundup added a simple-minded McLuhanesque unifying syn- thesis he terms \" synaesthetic cinema,\" (pages 1-138), which is a little like trying to sum up the thematic richness of L'AVVENTURA by splicing on Bugs Bunny's \" That's all , folks! \" Youngblood 's reportorial work is always good . Even when he starts by using DOGSTAR MAN , CHINESE FIRE- DRILL, 7362, EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE and several other very personal films to display aspects of his own synaesthetic cinema, he begins by describing the images themselves, their organization and impact, in- 82 SPRING 1971

of the less neatly categorized projects in this area, from the works of Belson and the Whitneys will never sell Les Levine 's television environments (closed circuit tvs like Mick Jagger or Frank Sinatra. shooting and / or distorting the spectors), to the image environments at Expo (floors high multiple screened Most seriously, Youngblood hides from the possibilities films) to the sensory nightclub Cerebrum (people wear of new content for the new media-as if it were already sheets and try to be spontaneous) , to holographic film the Millenium, and there was nothing worth transcribing and television (prospects look dim). The coverage is into art but dope dreams of abstract patterns and wiggly perceptive and detailed , but for some blindspots that electron ic missives from computers . Talk about the widen through the book-the author's avoidance of the Millen ium-if Gene Youngblood the reporter would look problem of content, his sidestepping of commercial at a newspaper some time, he might find things of aspects, and his all-encompassing but really very partial , greater import than the scintillating flying flapjacks of ahistorical and theoretic aesthetics. But these problems the Wh itneys even today. should bediscussed in termsof-\" synaesthetic c inema.\" It's an old story , but what' s wrong w ith Youngblood is what went wrong with McLuhan . They 're both men \" Personal cinema becomes art when it moves beyond with no formal education in cinema or visual art and no bel ief in culture , who thought they had bright ideas self expression to encompass life expression. Art is and tried to make a killing. After a wh ile, their theories are shown as suitable only for a guileless Millenium , not created ; it is lived . The artist merely reports it. with no standards or intelligence. To Mr. Youngblood I would ask his next book be based on this question: Synaesthetic cinema is not filmed so much as experi- What happens to our definitions of - \" intelligence \" when 3000 years of culture is called enced onto film and videotape .. . It's simply the first totally irrelevant? utterance of human beings who 've found a new lan- - \" man \" when his social life, conflicts, greeds , weak- guage.\" -Expanded Cinema, page 133 nesses are not worth depicting? - \" environment\" when social responsibility and leader- The above is a modest if unacceptable version of ship is called obsolete? Youngblood 's ideas. Unfortunately, almost his entire - \" nature\" when conflict and suspense are called essay on \" synaesthetic cinema \" is a far bolder , smug \" non-informative' '? - \" creativity \" when it consists only of weird abstrac- and obnoxious case of \" the McLuhan gambit\" -a total tions on an oscilloscope? irrational attack on ordinary criticism and socialized ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE art, hoping to win the reader over with terror tactics LETTERS OF DALTON TRUMBO, 1942-1962 EDITED BY HELEN MANFULL and sheer vicious audacity: M. Evans and Company, New York (distributed in total illogic: \" Drama means... suspense on the expec- association with J . B. Lippincott Company) , 1970; tation of known alternatives. One cannot expect the unknown. .. hence drama is non informative.\" (page 64) hardcover, $12.50; 576 pages; index; no illustrations. total rejection of artistic forms: \" The commercial enter- REVIEWED BY HOWARD SUBER tainer must give the audience what it expects. . . which is totally conditioned on what it previously received .\" Dalton Trumbo is once again one of the most famous, (page 64) most highly-paid screenwriters in Hollywood . But then , he's been on this trip before. As the writer of, among pathetic flattery: \" a decade of television watching is others , KITTY FOYLE, A GUY NAMED JOE, THIRTY SECONDS equal to a comprehensive course in acting , writing , and OVER TOKYO , and OUR VINES HAVE TENDER GRAPES , filming .\" (page 59) Trumbo was at the height of Hollywood success in 1947, holding down a $3 ,000-a-week contract at MGM. Then , rejection of socialized art: \" Commercial art is a ritual he blew it all with his appearance before the House which destroys the audience's ability to appreciate and Committee on Un-American Activities . He , along with participate in the creative process .\" (page 59) nine others, refused to tell the representatives whether he was or had ever been a member of the Communist McLuhanisms : \" Television is the earth 's superego .\" Party or of the Screen Writers Guild. (For those who (page 78) have been waiting breathlessly these 23 years for the answers , they are in the book.) MGM suspended him The underlying supposition of all this is Youngblood 's permanently , and in 1950 he went to prison with the notion that all social , personal , moral and rational ideas rest of the group which had by then become famous are about to become worthless. On page 52 he wails : as \" The Hollywood Ten. \" \" What happens to our definition of: 'intelligence ' when computers are the size of transistor radios , - 'man ' That was the beginning of the blacklist which terrified when our ne ighbor has inorganic parts, - 'environ- the motion picture industry for well over a decade. Many ment' when our video extensions bring us. .. the solar of the approximately 250 persons who were ultimately system , - 'nature ' when this happens , -'creativity ' banished took their fate in not-so-quiet reS ignation , when a computer asks an original question , - 'family ' went into other occupations, and have not been heard when intermedia brings... the world into our home,\" of since. and so on . Youngblood feels that because tech- nological progress is so rapid and all embracing , the But not Dalton Trumbo. Within two months of his being traditional arts and artistic forms have nothing to tell blacklisted , he was making undercover deals to write us , and only very subjective avant-garde artists who screenplays-at a small fraction of what he had been steep themselves in technological techniques can pos- making a matter of weeks before. He kept working in sibly be relevant to our concerns . All his theories go this black market for the next several years, taking any on from this assumption-the stranger and more tech- kind of writing job he could get, working within a very nological the personal artist's vision , the closer tightly-confined circle of independent producers who Youngblood sees it to the truth. In his \" Paleocybernetic were glad to get his unquestionable talents at so nom- Age,\" only the few new lonely spirits have anything inal a sum , even if it meant resorting to some of the that can really help us discover who we are, or can most complicated cloak-and-dagger tactics ever used make the experience of life meaningful. in this industry so long accustomed to the most imagi- native forms of duplicity. I think Mr. Youngblood is probably half aware of his basic error: that the past, and the forms it has devel- More than any other man, Dalton Trumbo was respon- oped , have nothing to tell us. It shows in his totally sible for the breaking of the blacklist. It was not simply abstract style-he will spend pages explaining why dramatic forms have nothing to tell us any more, but will not stop to discuss why a specific work , Who 's Afraid of Virg inia Woolf or L'AVVENTURA or Portn oy 's Complaint or the Beatles, not to speak of Dostoyevsky and Sophocles, are of little merit any more . He recoils from the commercial side , which is to say the distribu- tion side of the media-perhaps he dimly knows that FILM COMMENT 83

that Trumbo won the Academy Award for THE BRAVE the reason , we sometimes have letters that add nothing ONE in 1956 (he won an earlier award under another to our enjoyment, understanding, or data, and merely name, which people still don 't know about). More im- make the book overlong. portant than the much-celebrated \" Robert Rich \" affair which revealed Trumbo as the real Academy Award This , however, is a minor fault once you get into the winner was the fact that Trumbo had embarked upon book. You won 't learn much about the movies them- a carefully-thought-out campaign to defeat the blacklist selves by reading Additional Dialogue; but you certainly through the use of public relations . will learn more about one of the wittiest, most incisive minds at work in the movies today . Trumbo had come to realize that the blacklistees might be winning friends, but they certainly weren 't influenc- D.W. GRIFFITH: THE YEARS AT BIOGRAPHY ing people in their roles as martyrs. There had been BY ROBERT M . HENDERSON momentary flurries of support for those who fought the Farrar, Straus and Girou x, New York , 1970; hardback blacklist, but these had quickly subsided as people lost $7.50 ; 250 pages; illustrated. interest or became afraid for their own careers. Trumbo REVIEWED BY DAVID SHEPARD shrewdly calculated that the way to defeat the blacklist was not through the courts-which in all the lawsuits David Shepard is Associate Film Archivist for the Amer- brought against the studios had refused to legally ac- ican Film Institute . knowledge the existence of the blacklist, nor through an appeal to freedom of thought and expression-ac- Much has been written about D.W. Griffith 's films ; the cused Communists , in most people 's minds , to this day best of them continue to be seen and studied as technical have not had that right in the Un ited States. The way and commercial milestones and as works of perennial to defeat the blacklist, he realized , was to make it and energy and charm. But the basis of Griffith's art and those who upheld it the laughingstock of the motion style developed in just over five years with the American picture industry and the nation. And that's exactly what Biograph Company , during which he directed an in- he did . When , through rather careful managing of the credible 463 films, from four to sixty-four minutes each news, it became public knowledge that Trumbo had in length . Griffith and his colleagues invented , adapted , written both SPARTACUS and EXODUS, the public reaction experimented , copied and synthesized at a frantic rate, was more delight than shock, and the movies became but out of the Biograph experience, they hammered enormously successful at the box office, proving that the art of the moving picture. the fears of public rejection of blacklistees had been groundless. Astonishing quantities of documentation survive from which one can trace the development in Griffith's work Today, at 65, Trumbo is Hollywood 's oldest new direc- almost week by week from 1908 to 1913. Much of tor. His production of his own 1938 anti-war novel, Robert Henderson 's research was in primary sources JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN , Trumbo 's first venture into direct- never before quoted at length , including an unfinished ing, will shortly be released . It is possible the film will autobiography of D. W. Griffith , notes by his cameraman force us to again revise our evaluation of the man. Billy Bitzer, and Biograph camera and story logs; all preserved in the Museum of Modern Art. Henderson Barring that, it is quite possible that Dalton Trumbo 's also draws heavily on a 1925 book by Mrs. D. W. Griffith , letters may outlive his screenplays. Despite his position When the Movies Were Young; on an interview with as ·one of the top Hollywood screenwriters, it is doubtful Blanche Sweet , who appeared in Griffith Biographs ; whether any of Trumbo 's films will go down in history and on recollections of Lester Predmore , who as a boy as great American film classics. At most, they seem was eyewitness to the making of many films shot at destined to provide interesting footnotes to the taste Griffith 's summer location at Cuddebackville , New York. of filmmakers and film audiences of their times-good, perhaps, for continued revival on television , but not Out of all this and more, Henderson compiles a factual among the films that have profoundly influenced either and occasionally lively chronicle of where, when , how ourselves or the history of the art. and with whom the Griffith Biographs were made . He outlines their themes and describes, very sketchily, Trumbo 's letters, however, may turn out to be quite some of their individual contributions to Griffith 's devel- another story. Here one finds not only a first-hand opment of style . account of the blacklist and how Trumbo overcame it; one finds as well a first-rate mind and a totally-en- Although this book is too informative to be shunted gaging personality at work. Here, amid letters to friends, aside , D. W. Griffith 's years at Biograph deserve more business associates, creditors, merchants, PTA officals and better than Henderson has given . The author is and his own children , one finds a wit that has almost a librarian, and brings an unfortunate prejudice in favor gone out of American life, a rapier-like intelligence that of the written word to his screen history. He has evi- constantly and with great effect bursts the bubble of dently seen only a few Griffith Biographs, although official ethics and pomposity-and of Trumbo's own several hundred survive ; thus he tends to evaluate pride and pretense. Griffith 's work by quoting or paraphrasing other critical accounts, rather than by rediscovering Griffith 's cre- Here, above all , is an honest man , who tries-not always ative growth through the films themselves. Henderson successfully-to see things clearly and without self- made no visible contact with Biograph survivors like conceit or self-deceit. Here is a man passionately con- William Beaudine, Donald Crisp , Anita Loos or Jimmie cerned , not just with issues, but with the individuals Smith (Griffith's brilli·ant film editor from 1909), any of involved in them. His unconscious self-portrait, drawn • whom might have added as much to his story as did from twenty years of intense living amidst almost perpet- Lester Predmore. Though Henderson claims to dis- ual conflict and tension , provides not only an important count the recollections of film pioneers, believing them look at the times within the motion picture industry; tainted with press-agents ' legends , he quotes as fact but also a delightful glimpse of a human being worth a press-agent's \" history \" long acknowledged as part knowing intimately. myth , Terry Ramsaye 's A Million and One Nights. Nei- The bo~k itself has some faults. It is outrageously ther in the text nor in the bibliography does Henderson overpriced , considering the expenses involved in its refer to Kemp R. Niver, who has restored over 3 ,500 production . And it is too long . Helen Manfull 's editing , early films (including some 300 Griffith Biographs) and normally extremely helpful in filling in background and has written four books on his discoveries. There are circumstances , could have been used to delete about numerous small errors of fact. for example , Henderson a hundred of its 576 pages. The letters from prison , calls WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD \" When Knighthood was for example, could have been severely cut. One would in Flower· \" he omits THE LONEDALE OPERATOR from the think a man in jail would have something interesting appendix' iisting Blanche Sweet's credits, although he to say, but Dalton Trumbo doesn 't-probably because discusses her role in the text; he calculates running the prison censorship wouldn 't let him say it. Whatever 84 SPRING 1971



times of films on a basis of 90 feet per minute , \" sound East Germany, France, Italy, Mali, Cuba, Chile, and speed ,\" although Biographs run fast even at a \" silent speed \" of 60 feet per minute. Only meager attempts North Vietnam . Some of them , like A VALPARAISO , and are made to place Griffith 's work in the conte xt of other LA SEINE A RECONTRE PARIS , blend a love of humanity films of the time. with a poetic use of the camera unexcelled by any documentarist, but too many employ a simplistic view Because D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph is written of revolutionary struggles depicting all workers as in dry, term-paper style , one gets a better sense of noble, wise, and incorruptible. I suspect this attitude the enthusiasm and adventure of the Biograph years serves none of us well. Perhaps things are not that from Mrs. Griffith 's old book, newly reissued in paper- simple. back. Robert Henderson has told us things about these works of art , but he has not told us what these works As far as it goes, the book is well written and espeCially of art are about. perceptive when it describes the excitement of a young cameraman exploring the potentialities of his instru- THE CAMERA AND I ment for personal expression . It is unfortunate that the experiences Ivens had after 1944 are not described. BY JORIS IVENS We can only look at the filmography and guess, for many of his later works are unknown in this country. International Publishers, New York, 1969; paper- One , however, is in release here. THE 17TH PARALLEL, a co-production of North Vietnam and France, made back , $1 .95 ; 180 pages; filmography ; illustrations. in 1968 is a propaganda piece that gives us slogans REVIEWED BY WILLARD VAN DYKE instead of people. If Ivens had approached his task Willard Van Dyke is Director of the Film Department with his own mind and heart, using his considerable of the Museum of Modern Art. talents to help us to see the Vietnamese people as they are , rather than as cut-outs from an early Soviet Joris Ivens is a pioneer of the socially committed docu- poster, he would have better served his med ium and mentary film . He and his camera , together with his warm his cause. love for mankind, have been active on nearly every revolutionary front during the past forty years , yet his In spite of its lacks the book is a useful addition to first films were pure poetry and remain today as fresh the scant literature on documentary film makers. Of as when they were made. special interest to Americans is the full account of making POWER AND THE LAND . This autobiography was written for the most part in the early forties, and is an incomplete record of Ivens' SERGEI EISENSTEIN AND UPTON SINCLAIR: THE work after 1944, but the story of his early years is a MAKING AND UNMAKING OF \"QUE VIVA MEXICO!\" fine account of a young Hollander exposed to the poetry of Henny Marsman, the music of Hans Eisler and the EDITED BY HARRY M. GEDULD AND films of Richter and Ruttman while he was developing his own camera style , a style which culminated in THE RONALD GOTTESMAN BRIDGE and RAIN . Ivens understood the unique observa- Indiana University Press , 1970; hardback, $15 .00; 449 tion only possible when the camera is hand held long pages, illustrated. before cinema verite made it popular, and in 1928 his use of the tiny Zeiss Kinamo brought a fluidity of move- SEASTROM AND STILLER IN HOLLYWOOD ment to THE BRIDGE that has characterized his best work BY HANS PENSEL to this day. When Ivens' films have failed , and there Vantage Press , New York , 1970; hardback $3 .50 ; 106 have been failures as well as successes , he neglected pages; illustrated; filmographies; bibliography. the camera's special qualities and used it as an in- strument for propaganda. REVIEWED BY HERMAN G. WEINBERG Herman G. Weinberg is the author of Saint Cinema , In 1929 the great Russian director Pudovkin visited reviewed in this issue . Holland . He had already made MOTHER and THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG and his films had created great Among the most touching life stories of great artists of interest among the young Dutch film enthusiasts. Ivens modern times, like Oscar Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec and was the only one of his group who had achieved some Sergei Eisenstein , that of Eisenstein in our own time continuity of film experience, and although Pudovkin is as deeply moving as any , especially the tragedy was only allowed to stay in Holland for 24 hours, he recounted in Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The looked at THE BRIDGE and an unfinished version of RAIN . Making and Unmaking of \" Que Viva Mexico ! \" With the He must have been impressed, for he invited the young multilation of Stroheim 's GREED , the abortion of QUE VIVA Hollander to visit the Soviet Union to show his films. MEXICO! represents the most famous (infamous) cause This trip, which lasted three months, took Ivens into celebre in screen ·annals . Framed by the authors' pro- Kiev , Tiflis , and Armenia as well as into Moscow and logue and epilogue , the bulk of the account is taken Len ingrad. He del ivered more than a hundred lectures up by the Eisenstein-Sinclair correspondence, other and met many of the great Russian directors, but the correspondences and documents from the archives of criticism he received from audiences of workers seems the Lilly Library in Bloomington , Indiana , to which Sin- to have made the greatest impression. The questions clair had consigned them . Here is the whole harrowing he was asked ignored the qualities the films abundantly story of what began as a beautiful dream , to make a displayed and centered on such irrelevancies as \" Why film symphony of the Mexican ethos , and end~d as a don 't you explain what cities this bridge links, why don 't disaster, surely' contributing as much as anything else we see any people on the bridge?\" Or, referring to did to the untimely death of Eisenstein at the age of ZUIDERSEE , \" How much do the workers on this project 50 . Ironic is it that , as in the case of GREED , where earn? How much butter are they allowed? How much Hollywood, the only place that could afford to indulge cement is put into the rotary mixing machine? How Stroheim in his extravagances (i f extravagances they much concrete can it make in an hour?\" One can were), was also the one place that was the worst for understand a working class audience be ing more inter- him in which to realize his great visions, so it was With ested in facts than in aesthetics , but it is difficult to Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair. Sinclair, the one who accept Ivens' reactions, for he took the questions most made it possible for Eisenstein to embark on the real- seriously . It is as if Jonas Mekas were to show his ization of his beautiful dream of QUE VIVA MEXICO! was DIARIES to an audience of hard-hats and then listen also the one who aborted the venture. And the last to their comments ; even more , to act upon them . An hope , that the Soviet government, which had g i ~en artist must follow his own vision , if he is to remain an Eisenstein leave, would salvage the project by bUying the footage from Sinclair for Eisenstein to edit in Mos- artist. cow, was to. remain unfulfilled. The same Stalin who later decorated Eisenstein for ALEXANDER NEVSKY re- Ivens went on to make films in Spain, China , the USSR , fused to have anything to do with the Mexican film . Belgium , Australia, the USA, Czechoslovakia, Poland , 86 SPRING 1971

- . .~.·f· .. ... . . ............. \" ...r ,.\" .. to .. .. ' .. .,,\" SMOKE A LOT LESS. American Cancer Societ, ® THIS SPACE CONTRIBUTED BY THE PUBLISHER

Not even the Mexican government, whose heritage it anthology glorified, was interested. No one wanted it-no one wanted the most glorious film imagery that there ever film was, no one except its creator, and they wouldn 't let archives him have it. So Sinclair sold it piece by piece and the director of these pieces wanted to commit suicide. And By Melinda Ward and Richard Corliss Sinclair, and Moscow and Hollywood had their own way with it. Big deal. .. This is the story that Professors Geduld and Gottesman of Indiana University tell , which makes it just about the most enthralling reading on the mystique of cinema genius currently around. You 'd better read it; it's no use your reading anything else on films without knowing what went on in the matter of QUE VIVA MEXICO! It is a filter which colors all else . Seastrom and Stiller in Hollywood is self-explanatory. Take your stand for what you like. That's the only way to While Seastrom in Hollywood was a success story, really get into something : to like it. That 's the meaning of Stiller in Hollywood was not. Again we have the pathetic \"cliques\" in art. They say : Oh , you are a clique , the un- spectacle of a fine artist up against forces he cannot derground : you like only your friends ' movies. Yes, glory control. Compounded with illness, Stiller's intransi- to the cliques in art. Cliques, movements in art are concen- gence with arrogant \" studio policy,\" his real passion trated wedges into the consciousness of man. The un- for wanting to make fine films , not just commercially derground of the 60's was such a wedge. The French successful ones, and , perhaps, his crush on Garbo, avantgarde of the '20s was such a wedge. whom he had discovered and whom he had to leave on the ascendency of her career in America while he Jonas Mekas (The Village Voice , November 26 , 1970) went back to Sweden , defeated , to die. .. all this makes for very sad reading . There is a photo of him (facing The Anthology Film Archives , wh ich opened in New page 62), youthful , handsome, eager, on the thresh hold York City on December 1, 1970, an':! of which Jonas of life , that is heartbreaking when you realize what it Mekas is a co-director, represents in cinema a unique all came to . Of the five films he worked on in Hollywood, way of taking a stand. Its purpose is not to collect and only one , HOTEL IMPERIAL (perhaps because of producer Erich Pommer's protection?) represented an almost preserve as many films as possible , nor to select films fully realized work by him . And yet , as far back as 1920, representing various periods, genres, and nationalities; in Sweden , Stiller had made , in EROTIKON , a sly comedy but to bring together and present films which are com- that Lubitsch once confessed was the inspiration for plete works of art. what he was later to develop in America as \" the Lu- bitsch touch .\" What stood in \" Moje \" Stiller's way , then , Although this basic premise sounds very general , it has to be the success that one of his temperament would a special significance given the present state of film have liked to be in Hollywood? His intelligence, naturally. criticism in America. The majority of film critics in this \" Happiness,\" said Jean Rostand , \" is never intelligent. \" country concern themselves , for the most part, with narrative, feature-length commercial films . They use a SAINT CINEMA: SELECTED WRITINGS 1929-1970 critical vocabulary and sensibility borrowed from other disciplines such as drama, literature, and sociology, BY HERMAN G. WEINBERG with the crucial exceptions of painting and music, the aesthetics of which have probably the most in common Preface by Fritz Lang ; DBS Publications, New York, with film . This borrowing in itself isn 't bad if done with 1970; hardcover, $8.95; 354 pages; no illustrations an intelligent degree of discretion and an emphasis on what is relevant. However, too much so-called film or index. criticism reflects more knowledge and interest in a particular social milieu or a social statement than in REVIEWED BY GEORGE AMBERG the aesthetics of fil m. Anthology Film Archives takes its stand against this kind of criticism and by way of George Amberg is Chairman of the Department of its institutional structure and critical values, proposes Cinema Studies at NYU. to clear a path for a purely aesthetic consideration of cinema. This unassuming collection of short, informal pieces contains more information and substance than any But just how specifically do they go about accomplish- number of weighty, learned studies, aside from provid- ing this? First of all , they have constructed a theater ing infinitely more pleasant reading than almost any called the Invisible Cinema designed by filmmaker Peter of them . In the first place , it is the record of a profound Kubelka to help each viewer absorb and confront the and loyal love for the cinema, sustained over the major visual and aural images. Ninety seats are arranged so part of a life-time. By definition , it is a chronological that no part of the screen can be obscured by other selection of film writings, both critical and contempla- tive, factual and lyrical , covering a period of forty years , members of the audience. The seats are built with hoods it calls forth vivid recollections of the older ones who remember and it arouses the curiosity of the younger that act as blinders to prevent distraction from extrane- ones who don 't. In either case it is a highly rewarding ous movement going on in the theater. Everything in experience. For the lapse of time has neither diminished the cinema is black including walls , rugs , seats and the immediacy of the author's response nor invalidated ceiling so that the image is isolated in space . Unlike the soundness of his judgment. The invisible man, any other theater-a movie palace, a suburban ce- known to every movie goer from the subtitles to ment-block theater, or a school or museum auditori- hundreds of foreign language films , emerges here as a real person : a gracious writer, an honest critic and um-the Invisible Cinema encourages the communal a respectable scholar. It is in the latter capacity that feeling of an audience while meeting the viewer's re- he rescues H. d 'Abbadie d 'Arrast from oblivion in the quirements for undisturbed perception . In other words , most important single piece of the collection . But it the Anthology Film Archives emphasizes through the is impossible to enumerate the countless happy sur- structure of the film theater itself, a special and particu- prises the reader will encounter. It is a book to own lar way of viewing films. To quote from their brochure: and to cherish. \" The emphasis here is on the ritual aspect of film viewing; for one responds to the anticipation of art with a different posture than to the expectation of an enter- tainment. \" It's conceivable that this kind of serious consideration of the aesthetics of film viewing will have its influence on other movie theater architects . A second unique aspect of Anthology Film Archives 88 SPRING 1971

is the arrangement of the screening schedule which Kirsanov (1), Peter Kubelka (5), Mike and George Ku- is also designed to encourage a certain kind of film char (2) , George Landow (5), Laurel and Hardy (1) , viewing . Three separate programs are screened at 6, Fernand Leger (1) , Louis and Auguste Lumiere (1 pro- 8, and 10 o 'clock, daily except Monday. The Archive gram per cycle), Len Lye (4), Willard Maas (1) , Chris- collection now includes approximately 250 films , all of topher MacLaine (1), Gregory Markopoulos (7), Jonas which will be presented repeatedly in six week cycles Mekas (1), George Melies (3 programs per cycle), Marie (the operating idea here is that films should be seen Menken (6), F.W. Murnau (1) , Robert Nelson (2) , Yasu- more than once) giving the serious film student an jiro Ozu (2), Sidney Peterson (4) , Vsevolod Pudovkin opportunity , if he or she should live in New York, to (1), Man Ray (3), Jean Renoir (1), Ron Rice (1) , Hans see the films several times in a year. The student who Richter (2), Leni Riefenstahl (2) , Roberto Rossellini (2), lives outside of New York can be confident of seeing Paul Sharits (2), Harry Smith (5), Jack Smith (2), Michael all of the films by coming to New York for a six week Snow (2), Frank Stauffacher (1), Erich von Stroheim (1), period, something that really can 't be done in any other Karl Valentin (1), Dziga Vertov (5), Jean Vigo (4), Andy archive in the world due to screening schedules and Warhol (4 programs per cycle), John Sibley Watson the size of the collections . One disadvantage is the and Melville Weber (1), Orson Welles (1), James Whit- closeness of the screenings: six hours of viewing night ney (1), James and John Whitney (3). after night, especially as the films are provocative and demanding , can wear out even the hardiest of film The films are shown in their untitled versions. Synopses enthusiasts. Nonetheless, assuming that one's involve- will be provided when necessary. The Anthology feels ment with film is a long-term commitment , it is good to that many of the films that require translation are avail- know that a certain body of films will be available for able from other sources such as 16mm distributors and constant referral in the manner of any good anthology. commercial theaters , and that there should be one place where the films can be seen in their original form . To give an indication of the range and focus of the In keeping with the idea of showing a film as the film- collection , there follows a list of directors and the maker conceived of it , each film is projected in its number of their works included in the collection as it original aspect ratio. I might add also that Anthology now stands: James Agee, Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb has 35mm , 16mm, and 8mm equipment as well as an (1), Kenneth Anger (7), Bruce Baillie (5), Stan Brakhage excellent sound system. (24), Robert Breer (5), Robert Bresson (6), James Broughton (8), Luis Bunuel (4), Alberto Cavalcanti (1), The collection will be expanded as the Selection Com- Charles Chaplin (8), Rene Clair (1), Jean Cocteau (4) , mittee plans to meet three times a year to report on Bruce Conner (3) , Tony Conrad (1) , Joseph Cornell n.ew finding and to rediscuss films initially excluded (10), Douglas Crockwell (2), Maya Deren (3), Alexandre or not available at the time of the opening. As becomes Dovzhenko (5) , Marcel Duchamp (1) , Carl Th. Dreyer obvious when perusing the list, there are exclusions (7) , Viking Eggeling (1), Sergei Eisenstein (4), Louis of filmmakers such as Godard , Resnais, Mizoguchi, Feuillade (3), Robert Flaherty (2), Hollis Frampton (1) , Hitchcock, Emshwiller, Epstein, and Antonioni among Georges Franju (1), Jean Genet (1), D.w. Griffith (1) , others whose work one hopes will eventually appear Alexander Hammid (1), Marcel Hanoun (1), Jerome Hill on the list as well as additional films by filmmakers (2), Ian Hugo (1), Kenneth Jacobs (3), Larry Jordan already represented. Another notable aspect of this list (5), Humphrey Jennings (1), Buster Keaton (3), Dimitri is the total abandonment of commercial questions. In other words , no distinction is made between the fea- *- FILM HERITAGE Film Heritage is an illustrated quarterly devoted to articles on films. Film Heritage has published essays by prominent film critics, including: John Simon on \"James Agee\" Dwight Macdonald on \"Agee and the Movies\" Andrew Sarris on \"Jean-Luc Versus Saint Jean\" Don Daniels on \" 2001: A New Myth\" Michael Dempsey on \"If . .. \" Charles Thomas Samuels on \"An Interview with Antonioni\" Richard Corliss on \" Leni Riefenstahl: A Bibliography\" Joel E. Siegel on \" Between Art and Life: The Films of Jean-Luc Godard\" Herman G. Weinberg on Joseph von Sternberg Norman Mailer on \"Hollywood's Th e Naked and the Dead \" subscribe now: One year-$2.00 ( ) FILM HERITAGE Two years-$4.00 ( ) box 652 Name University of Dayton Address ____________________________ Dayton Ohio 45409 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _-LZip

ture-Iength and short film and no question is raised order because of the selection of films, the conditions about the collaborative nature of films produced within under which they can be seen , and the self-important the industry because the emphasis is on those films puffery used to promote the venture . where the filmmaker was in complete control. This is not to say that some of the films weren 't produced within It's probably kindest to dismiss the Selection Commit- the \"system\"-films such as CITIZEN KANE and the tee 's burblings about \" pure\" cinema and the \" art of works of Rossellini and Ozu certainly were-however, the film \" as attention-getting devices designed to at- these seem to represent the exceptions where the tract the widest possible range of clientele and founda- system worked to the advantage of the filmmaker rather tion support. How else do you explain the exclusion than to his disadvantage. of Ford , Godard, Hitchcock, Truffaut and Antonioni, as The emphasis on innovative, independent, and avant- well as the most perfunctory nods to Griffith , Stroheim, Murnau , Renoir and Welles (one film each)? Either you garde cinema reflects the shared aspirations of the assume that the Committee believes that Brakhage (24 Selection Committee which is comprised of five men , films) , Broughton (8) and Kubelka (5) are filmmakers Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Ken whose works blaze with greatness from their proximity Kelman , and James Broughton , all of whom have been to the flame of \" pure\" cinema-they also happened deeply involved in and associated with the American to comprise 3/ 6 of the original Committee-or you avantgarde cinema for many years. This involvement suspect that Anthology was originally, and quite sensi- does not represent a single critical point of view or bly , conceived as a showcase for the avant-garde, only taste, illustrated by the fact that the committee had to to be expanded ever-so-slightly to include narrative give up their original idea of selecting films unani- films that would broaden its appeal. mously when that became impossible and instead let the majority rule . What they do have in common is stated Unfortunately, this kind of pompous and preposterous in the brochure: \" . .. they share a principle: that a high prose-all too typical of most writing on independent art of film emerges primarily whe'n its artists are most film-tends to convince the potential enthusiast that, if free . They understand too that in art no rule is absolute , avant-garde criticism is so turgid , the films themselves including the last. This committee does not purport to can 't be very exciting . For the genre to escape its represent the full spectrum of film criticism . This is cultish confines, it demands, ultimately, that the front- inevitable and desirable. Anthology Film Archives is line critics of traditional film (Sarris, Wood , Durgnat, philosophically oriented toward the pure film, and it Kael, even Simon) start to lend their considerable influ- takes its stand against the standards of contemporary ence and insights to independent cinema; otherwise, film criticism .\" infidels will continue to think of avant-garde criticism as the unreadable in pursuit of the unseeable . But for The above statement will be elaborated and clarified the moment it will suffice for proponents of \" pure \" by Anthology Film Archives by way of an encyclopedia cinema to talk less about purity and more about cinema. in which a description of the collection and the critical acts involved in building it will be published. Every film The concentrated vitality of the best independent films will be included ; documented by articles , interviews , is indisputable, as is the Committee 's contention that synopses, and / or scenarios. They also plan to publish these works must be seen over and over to be fully four books a year, the first three to be Annette Michel- savored. Why, then , does the Committee schedule (for son 's Feuil/ade, Jonas Mekas' Andy Warhol, and Stan- example) a Jordan Belson film , a Tony Conrad flicker, dish Lawder's Leger and the Cinema . Film Culture and three Bruce Conner movies on a single program magazine which has been the source of information with no repeats? How can a novice get anything more and theoretical writing on avantgarde cinema and has than a visceral response from COSMIC RAY by seeing it, once every six weeks, sandwiched between a quartet been irregularly available in past years due to financial of dazzling , demanding films? Here the Committee is difficulties will be partially supported by Anthology Film far too traditional. It needs scheduling innovations of Archives in order to guarantee its regular publication . the kind Amos Vogel made when he would begin and Another way of perpetuating and encouraging interest end an evening of avant-garde film with A MOVIE. The in film as an art similar to Anthology Film Archives ' first time around , the Conner film would perplex an own is the formation of a library which contains books , uninitiated audience ; the second time , both the film articles , clippings, and scenarios as well as notes and itself and independent film in general would suggest other written materials deposited there by filmmakers. the delightful and audacious possibilities of a novel Critics and advanced students may apply to do re- cinematic form. Anthology might try repeating the most search in the library and if accepted will be assisted difficult films at the end of a program . Or it might follow in every way possible in obtaining books and films for the showing of several works by one filmmaker with their projects . The facility is not as generally available a discussion led by a Committee member, occasionally as The Museum of Modern Art's Film Study Center, garnished with an appearance by the filmmaker. Or but is designed to meet certain needs and interests it might simply allow a short break between films, which not satisfied as completely in any other single place . would give the viewer a chance to think about it or talk it over with a companion . The present scheduling All of the above, the theater, the collection, the publica- policy is no more daring than that of the Rugoff Theatres. More important, the bunching together of tions, the library, and the people involved together make such concentrated films gives certain programs a frivo- lous tone that is obviously unintentional. the Anthology Film Archives a very important and signal The Committee's almost Griffith-like obsession with event in the history and aesthetics of cinema. As a purity has led it to show only unsubtitled versions of foreign films-a bias made respectable by Henri Lang- unique and innovative enterprise , it should serve as lois. For the avant-garde films (most of which are Amer- ican), this presents no problem, but it renders the a challenge to all who are seriously concerned with film narrative features (most of which are not In English) all but inaccessible . The visual style of the great tradi- art. To use Jonas Mekas' phrase, the Anthology Film tional directors doesn't function independently of the plot and dialogue ; it complements them. And, w~ile Archives should become a concentrated wedge in our Yasujiro Ozu's visual style deserves hours of sublime contemplation , seeing I WAS BORN , BUT ... Without sub- consciousness, because only by deeply exploring, de- titles encourages frustration more than sublimity. Imag- ine seeing CITIZEN KANE without knowing any English! fining , and taking stands can the level of cinematic (In its savage ignorance of \" commercial\" cinema and its myopic acceptance of some Underground directors consciousness be raised and serve to further the devel- opment of the medium that has so infatuated the 20th century. Glory to the Cinema. And glory to the Anthology Film Archives! -Melinda Ward Any organization that provides the viewing public a ready opportunity to see and study the cream of avant- garde film is certainly deserving of the hosannahs and Hare Krishnas that have greeted the opening of the An- thology Film Archives . Still , a few reservations are in 90 SPRING 1971

as \" free artists ,\" the Committee manages to overlook At ARNO PRESS, some of the best material on the fact that Andy Warhol-represented by 4 complete cinema that we know of was \"born yesterday.\" prog rams per cycle-has about as much to do with most of his films as Walt Disney had to do with the ARISTOCATS. ) These books, magazines, and other works encom· pass the earliest writings for and about cinema and Anthology Film Archives is planning a library of films are vital reading for an understanding of the history, and books , which will be made available to the serious student who might want to remember more from COSMIC theory, criticism and aesthetics of an industry·be- RAY than naked girls , fireworks and Mickey Mouse . This come art. Yet many have been out of print or gen- facet of the Archives is in an embryonic stage at the erally unavailable for twenty years or more. When time of writing , so further comment must be deferred . it comes to spotting works of such distinction, you For the immediate future, the Museum of Modern Art's Film Study Center, at which the graduate film student can be sure that ARNO wasn't born yesterday. or scholar may view some of the more than 1000 films ARNO gathers up these materials in their entirety in the Museum 's collection , will have to make do. Out- (complete with their illustrations, many of which of-town students may even prefer to spend their si x constitute some of the rarest assemblages of fi lm weeks of concentrated study in New York at the Muse- photographs available) , and reprints and binds them um (where for $5 or $12.50 extra he receives unlimited according to the highest library standards. Here access to the daily film showings in its auditorium) are some of ARNO 's finds : rather than spending $1 each for 108 diffe rent programs THE LITERATURE OF CINEMA-48 books-(Martin to run through \" a concentrated history of the art of film \" at the Anthology Film Archives . S. Dworkin, advisory editor) CLOSE UP-I0 volumes-(Kenneth MacPherson and The American independent cinema is too important a Winifred Bryher, editors) film form to be demeaned by a critical attitude that THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD 1907-1911-10 vol - has less to do with encouraging enlightened apprecia- umes (forthcoming) tion than it does with proving the power of arrogance. FILMS: A QUARTERLY OF DISCUSSION AND ANAL- Glory to the Independent Cinema! And gloriosky to the YSIS, Nos. 1-4 (Lincoln Kirstein, Jay Leyda , Mary Anthology Film Archives! Losey, et al. ) THE FILM INDEX: A BIBLIOGRAPHY (A Museum of -Richard Corliss Modern Art publication in reprint) ART IN CINEMA (Frank Stauffacher) The Anthology Film Archives is located at 425 Lafayette EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA (Seymour Stern , Lewis street, New York NY 10003. Box office phone is 212 / Jacobs, editors) 677-3197. Three different programs are screened each THE FILM DAILY YEAR BOOK OF MOTION PIC- night, at 6, 8 and 1OPM , except Mondays . Half the seats TURES 1918-1969 (51 volumes) are sold in advance, half go on sale one hour before each program starts , at $1 each . Absolutely no one For detailed information about these publications write is admitted late. The programs are repeated every si x weeks; a printed schedule is available for $1 a year. ARNO PRESS For information about the research library, please call P. Adams Sitney at 677-2460. Box 169, 330 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017 A Publ ishing and Library, Service of e~t!it\\u!!or1diimto Manny Farber- The last 25 years of British cinema the first man to call h ave b een a mirro r of ch an gin g English mor es, underground films \"underground films~~- shifting middl e-class v i ews of E n glish l i f e, per- has h eld an audience of film buffs and just plain plexing m etam orph oses in the nati onal ch ar- fi lmgoers captive f or years w ith his entertain- ing, opinionated, informative- an d of ten acid- acter. This i s film criti c Ray m ond Durgnat's critici sm s and critiqu es of the m ovi es. Now, t wenty -five year s of M ann y F arber at his b est i s th eor y and thesi s as h e interprets such films as available in a singl e v olume th at r eflects his originality, w ide range of exp eri en ce, and aston- In Which We Se rve, The Blue Lam p, R oom at i shing accuracy of jud gm ent. \" Manny Farber has such acute perceptions th at even when he's the Top, an d Look Back in Anger. Startling and t earing up things one likes, h e makes them more v i v id.\"-PAuLINE KAEL, \" In the list of Ameri- f ascin atin g. $11.95 can film criti cs, Manny Far b er i s one of the handful of essential names.\" - W ILFRID SHEED A MIRROR FOR $7.95 ENGLAND NEGATIVE British Fihns fronl SPACE Austerity to Affluence Manny Farber on the Movies Raynlond Durgnat praeger 111 Fourth Ave nue New York, N.Y. 10003 FILM COMMENT 91

film schedules February 10 These listings contain advance programming informa- 1970 tion which is tentative in all cases. Specific film titles, programming changes, and more detailed ticket infor- ( 1969) mation can be obtained by telephone a few days before the scheduled start of each program. Now Available For Non· Theatrica I Los Angeles County Museum of Art Showings The Finest 5905 Wiltshire Boulevard Los Angeles CA 90036. 213 / Exp loitation 937-4250 extension 265. Ticket office hours: Tuesday- Films Friday, 11 AM to 4PM . Screenings Friday and Saturday at 8:30PM and Sunday at 3PM . very popular on March 5-21: A Tribute to Mary Pickford April 2-25: Sixth International Animated Film Exhibition college ca mpus May 1- June 6: King Vidor Cycle Museum of Modern Art ... WOMEN WERE THE ONLY THINGS CHEAPER THAN UFE 11 West 53rd Street New York NY 10019. 212 / 956- 7094. Daily screenings at various times. Admission to send for film is free with museum admission . information March 1-April 14: The Films of Allan Dwan EASTMAN COLOR,·' Peripheral Films April 15-April 30: Stan Brakhage 201'/2 E. Grand May: To Be Announced A WES TERN WITH THE SCOPE AND QUALITY OF THE LARGEST River Cineprobe; Tuesdays at 5:30PM E. Lansing, Mich March 9: COMING ATTRACTIONS and STRAIGHT AND NAR- STUDIO . .. AND THE BLATANT ROW by Tony and Beverly Conrad RAWNESS OF A SATURDAY 48823 March 23: Films by George Landow NIGHT S MOKER FILM April 6: HONEYMOON KILLERS by Leonard Castle April 20: RUBY by Richard Bartlett - F R O M O l YJr,4P1C INTERNATIONAL FllJ.AS_ May 4: To Be Announced May 18: TRAGIC DIARY OF ZERO THE FOOL by Morley Markson June 8: MAIDSTONE by Norman Mailer June 15: Films by James Broughton Whitney Museum of American Art classified advertiSing 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street New York NY 10021 RATES: $3 per line, 2 line minimum. For info write: 212 / 249-4100 extension 19. Daily at 12 noon, 2PM and ADS FIlM CCM1ENI' 100 WALNlIT PLACE BROOKLINE MA 02146 4PM and Tuesdays only at 6PM and 8PM. Admission to film is free with $1 museum admission . Classified deadline for next issue: 30 April 1971. Programming \"New American Filmmakers Series\" of studies features and shorts, a new program each week. These films are not generally in theatrical release. Film Seminar in London for graduate students, July 5 coming in the summer to August 13. Temple University offers its second annual Seminar in the British Film, featuring British FILM COMMENT film directors, writers, actors, producers, critics, articles and criticism on scholars and government officials. Six graduate credits. Auditors accepted. Enrollment fee is $395.00, exclusive of travel, lodging and food. Applicants must be 21 years or older. Write to Dr. Raymond Fielding, Dept. of Radio-Television-Film, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122. Orson Welles books and magazines F. W. Murnau CINEMABILIA - NEW YORK'S FILM BOOK CENI'ER - CINEMABILIA (Act of October 23, 1962; Section 4369 , Title 39, United States All current and out-of-print titles, periodicals in- Code) 1) date of filing 25 September 1970. 2) title of publication cluding back issues, and numerous related materials and Film Comment. 3) frequency of issue quarterly. 4) location of ephemera. New catalog #4 available now at $1.50. known office of publication 100 Walnut Place Brookline MA 02146. Inquiries welcome. Cinemabilia 10 Cornelia St(off W4th 5) location of the headquarters or general business offices of &6th Av) NYC 10014. 212/989-8519. Open 1-7 Mon-Sat. the publishers 100 Walnut Place Brookline MA 02146. 6) Names FIlM-TELEVISION-RADIO-New, current, out-of-print, and and addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor; publisher foreign books and periodicals on every aspect of fiJ~, television and radio. Comprehensive book search service. and managing editor Austin Lamont 100 Walnut Place Brookline Catalog 25¢. BOOKLORD'S, Dept. FC, PO Box 177, Peter MA 02146 , editor Richard Corliss 100 Walnut Place Brookline Stuyvesant Station, New York, New York, 10009. MA 02146. 7) owner Film Comment Publishing Corporation 100 Walnut Place Brookline MA 02146 , stockholders Austin Lamont film festivals 100 Walnut Place Brookline MA 02146 . 8) Known bondholders, 1st Wash. Nat'l Student Film Fest. sponsored by AFI & mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 Un. of md. Deadline April 16 1971. Write Dr. G. Weiss, percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other Fest. Dir.- Un . of Maryland, College Park MD 20742. securities none . 10) extent and nature of circulation: actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date average number copies each issue during preceding 12 months • total number copies printed 4500 5000 personals paid circulation , sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 2008 1900 PRIVATE COLLECTION FOR SALE paid circulation, mail subscriptions 1142 1326 total paid circulation 3150 3226 16mm features &shorts/sound &silent/domestic &foreign free distribution by mail, carrier or other means 250 250 Inquire: Box 364, Jackson Heights, New York NY 11372. total distribution 3400 3476 office use , left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing 1100 1524 4500 5000 total

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