Back to the well

Ricardo Montalban in Battleground.

For some reas­on, I thought that it might be fun over the Christmas hol­i­day to give myself more work. With little to noth­ing going on in terms of “real” work dur­ing this peri­od, I figured I’d go on a sort of cinema vaca­tion: revis­it a group of films just for the hell of it. Actually, only par­tially for the hell of it; I thought, the bet­ter to revive the enthu­si­asms that led me to write about motion pic­tures in the first place, I’d revis­it pic­tures that were essen­tial to the form­a­tion of my sens­ib­il­ity. A rather mord­ant sens­ib­il­ity, it turns out. What’s up with that? I was crazy about movies for a very long time before I even began to con­ceive of form­ing a crit­ic­al appar­at­us with which to deal with them, but I knew from almost right off the bat (the first movie I remem­ber watch­ing in its entirety was The Haunting) what I wanted from movies. I did not go to cinema in search of beings akin to me (God for­bid that, in fact), but I was not look­ing for a non-mindful form of  “escape;” rather, I wanted intox­ic­ants, nar­cot­ics. This is one reas­on why, whenev­er I am com­pil­ing some kind of “greatest ever” movies list in private, I some­times have to remind myself about, say, Rules of the Game. A great work of art but not one that affected me in the same way as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, if you get what I’m saying.

This was not a hard rule regard­ing my selec­tion, though. As you’ll see, there was a Current Events Pretext for pick­ing one film, and the World War II movie popped into my head via a stray social media remark from my friend Tom Carson. As for the oth­ers, though, they were/are each in some way parts of my per­son­al pan­theon, oth­er people’s work that nev­er­the­less hangs in The Museum Of Me. Would spend­ing time with them invig­or­ate my enthu­si­asm for The Work? Interesting ques­tion. Below are the obser­va­tions I made on each of them.

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack [and Willis O’Brien], 1933)

The movie seems a lot less inno­cent the older it, and I, get. Not that this is a source of great con­cern to me; in a sense I find its relent­less malevol­ent lur­id sen­sa­tion­al­ism kind of admir­able, and I under­stand why some of the Surrealists did too. It’s also funny in the way the dieges­is begins with a heap of delight­ful idio­mat­ic sassy Pre-Code dia­logue (“I go out and sweat blood to make a swell pic­ture,” etc.) and then a long cent­ral sec­tion of the movie lead­ing up to Kong’s rout of Skull Island seems to have lit­er­ally noth­ing on the soundtrack but harsh screams and anim­al noises and the crackle of Kong break­ing that dead dinosaur’s jaw. And yes, of course the movie is a com­plete mess of racial­ism. I wondered, idly, as I watched, the extent to which the com­pletely African-American-free depic­tion of Manhattan was actu­ally cal­cu­lated. Also note­worthy was how the giant animat­ron­ic Kong head used in close-ups is an entirely dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter from Willis O’Brien’s clearly more beloved full-body mod­el Kong.

The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

I picked this because why not, giv­en all the chat­ter about The Interview and the com­par­is­ons (spe­cious, it can con­fid­ently be said even if one hasn’t seen The Interview, which I haven’t) and all that. Ron Rosenbaum hates this movie, con­sid­er­ing it both arrog­ant and a squandered oppor­tun­ity. By the same token, as much of a geni­us as Chaplin was, I ima­gine he’d have to be even more of a geni­us and some­thing of a saint in order, by 1938, to per­ceive Hitler in a pos­i­tion of utter detach­ment from his own (Chaplin’s, that is) ego. (Note this obser­va­tion from around the same year, in the Spectator, cited in David Robinson’s bio­graphy of Chaplin: “In Herr Hitler the angel [i.e. Chaplin] has become a dev­il. The sole­less boots have become Reitstiefel; the shape­less trousers, rid­ing breeches; the cane, a rid­ing crop; the bowl­er, a for­age cap. The Tramp has become a storm troop­er; only the mous­tache is the same.”)

It is almost impossible for any­one alive today to ima­gine a pre-Holocaust Hitler, but that is, for bet­ter or worse, the Hitler Chaplin was address­ing with his film, and that com­bined with Chaplin’s ego-driven indig­na­tion at the effrontery of this char­ac­ter are large parts of what make the film fall flat, seen today. Another prob­lem is that while Chaplin was great at par­ables he’s not that good with satire (“kill off the Jews…wipe out the bru­nettes,” ugh) and, as smart as he was, he wasn’t quite what you call an intel­lec­tu­al. His ambi­tion, which in this film includes the desire (slight, admit­tedly) to be seen as one, wreak hav­oc with his bet­ter artist­ic instincts here; a sink­ing feel­ing intrudes as one endures the pain­fully unfunny Great War pro­logue. Interestingly enough, the movie only begins to find its foot­ing when Paulette Goddard shows up. There is no oth­er film about which this can be said, I think. (Not to dis­respect Miss Goddard, mind you.) Roberto Rossellini called Chaplin’s much-maligned 1957 A King In New York “the film of a free man,” this, too, is the film of a free man, albeit a free man flail­ing.  Certain of its infe­li­cit­ies are kind of fas­cin­a­tion: Chaplin’s Mack Sennett-derived con­cep­tion of storm troop­ers has some inter­est­ing side effects, one of them being that Billy Gilbert makes more sense here than he does in His Girl Friday. For all that…I do find the movie’s clos­ing speech strangely stir­ring, and I felt (that is, registered) Chaplin’s desire to be sin­cere in an almost awk­ward way as I took these notes from it:  “The power they took from the people will return to the people…you are not machines…you have the love of human­ity in your hearts…don’t fight for slavery…the power to cre­ate happiness…”

Battleground (William Wellman, 1949)

This sketch of the siege of Bastogne is a great stealth Christmas film, and also a mar­velous kind of “hang out film” des­pite the con­text being one that you’d nev­er want to hang out in. Atmospheric, quiet, almost no “plot.” Equal meas­ures of lyr­i­cism (Montalban’s char­ac­ter, Rodrigues, has nev­er seen snow before), warmth, and dread. Even the seem­ingly manufactured-for-uplift coda (sound­ing what Paul Fussell called the “one optim­ist­ic and morale-sustaining voice” of the Hollywood WWII film) is handled in a down­beat, matter-of-fact fash­ion. There are remark­able per­form­ances from all the mem­bers of what Jeanine Basinger dubbed “the uni­ver­sal platoon.”

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

In its levels of detail and immer­sion, pos­sibly the most con­vin­cingly nov­el­ist­ic movie ever made. How did they do all that action stuff in that rain (real or man­u­fac­tured as it might have been)?

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

All things con­sidered, maybe I shoulda watched The Murderer Lives At Number 21, a much earli­er Clouzot pic­ture I haven’t seen before. Not that this was bad, not at all, but it didn’t hit me in the way I was hop­ing. And any­way, the whole point of this exer­cise was to watch stuff I HAD seen before.  Despite it com­ing after Wages of Fear, Diabolique has stretches in which if feels way less assured. A good deal of the French Provincial stuff is really kind of cringe indu­cing, e.g. the innkeeper’s his­tri­on­ics when the clanging of the pipes is mak­ing it impossible for him to hear his radio show. Jesus. The point’s sup­posed to be one of sus­pense: is he going to get so mad that he’s gonna go upstairs and see S. Signoret and V. Clouzot with a dead guy in the filled tub? Instead Clouzot lets Nöel Roquevert make a full-fledged “com­edy” routine out of it.  Hitchcock would have nev­er allowed such a thing, which is one reas­on Hitchcock’s a consistently/demonstrably bet­ter dir­ect­or than Clouzot. Still. There’s some pretty strong stuff here. What are you gonna do.

Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

I believe J. Hoberman has called this “a per­fect film” and he is indeed cor­rect. Not only is there noth­ing wrong with it, there’s everything right with it. So much is going on, and yet all of it seems effort­less, com­fort­able in mas­tery and drollery. The chop­pi­ness of the cuts in the open­ing “dream” sequence is bra­cing (and remin­is­cent of the ded­ic­a­tion cere­mony scene in L’age d’or some­how) but also weirdly sets the film’s fluid­ity of tone. Also note­worthy:  the way Buñuel both sends up and respects the prerog­at­ives of the “women’s pic­ture” and/or melo­drama. It’s kind of stag­ger­ing, too, espe­cially giv­en Buñuel’s admit­ted delight in indul­ging his own kinks/fetishes here, how non-“masculine” or macho the film is. In a sense the auteur is like Flaubert, and not just in a “Madame Bovary, ç’est moi” way. Part of it is his refus­al to be heavy-handed, as in the way he cuts from a cli­ent of Severine’s dis­cov­er­ing “you like the rough stuff” to a shot of Mme Anais and her girls play­ing gin rummy. (I don’t ima­gine you will find any­thing even vaguely equi­val­ent to this trans­ition in the film of Fifty Shades of Derp.) I love how the buzz­ing box bran­dished by the nonsense-speaking Asian cli­ent is treated as a throwaway, as is the rob­bery com­mit­ted by Francisco Rabal and Pierre Clementi that intro­duces those two knuckle­head char­ac­ters. The pic­ture is also full of weirdly numin­ous dia­logue: brothel maid Pallas say­ing “I even dream about you some­times” or Rabal’s “I’d slit my father’s throat for less.” Also: the elab­or­ate dolly-then-zoom in the duel dream sequence. Clementi’s steel teeth. God, this movie.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

If Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick on Mad Magazine, Clockwork is Stanley Kubrick on Zap! Comix, or some­thing like that. Almost all of Kubrick’s films have a car­toon­ish ele­ment, but I think there’s three of them that qual­i­fy as full-on com­ic books of a sort: Strangelove, Clockwork, and Lolita. Right, I know what you’re think­ing: my put­ting Lolita on that list is as quirky and bril­liant and pro­voc­at­ive as Robin Wood say­ing, “But Scarface belongs with the com­ed­ies.” Wait, you’re not think­ing that? Anyway. The first fif­teen minutes of the movie are just one in-your-face viol­a­tion of taste and pro­pri­ety and mor­al­ity after anoth­er, and there’s no point in deny­ing the extent to which Kubrick enjoys the spec­tacle. In John Baxter’s bio of the dir­ect­or, act­or Adrienne Corri, who was a social friend of Kubrick’s, recalled lob­by­ing for the part of the vic­tim of the bru­tal rape in the movie’s first sec­tion (I don’t recall that either Corri or Baxter cla­ri­fies why on earth any sen­tient being would act­ively lobby for that part, but hey) and hav­ing Kubrick respond “But Corri, what if I don’t like the tits?” Do not hold it against me for noti­cing that the, um, tits dis­played through­out the film are all highly likable. In point of fact maybe they’re the only out­right attract­ive fea­tures in the film. There’s so much here that’s dis­pir­it­ing, puzz­ling; there’s an amaz­ing amount of bravura, too-bravura, film­mak­ing done in the ser­vice of a vis­ion so nar­row and mono­chro­mat­ic that it’s almost…hell, I don’t know what it is. Things I flashed on: The frost-breath of Alex as he invites Billy and his gang to fight. The pan as the would-be vic­tim of Billy’s gang runs off stage. The Pythonesque styl­ings of the chief pris­on guard played by Michael Bates. The shot of the light­ning, very Universal Pictures…and Alex’s voi­ceover reflec­tion dur­ing a Ludovico ses­sion “it’s funny how the col­ors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,” which may just be what the whole damn film is really only about anyway. 

Elke Sommer in Lisa and the Devil.

Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava, 1973)

I loved Bava’s images—a coach float­ing through a men­acing forest in slow-motion, Barbara Steele’s haughty-cheekboned grinning/grimacing face bear­ing the punc­tures of a medi­ev­al tor­ture device—before I knew who the man even was. So of course I became a rabid fan once I did know. This 1973 vis­ion exis­ted for years only in a ris­ible, mutil­ated ver­sion that still had plenty of oneir­ic mojo. As with so many International Co-Production Genre Pictures there’s a realm of com­prom­ise in which even the undi­luted vis­ion dwells, one in which the view­er is obliged to accept a lollipop-snarfing Telly Savalas as the embod­i­ment of death and/or evil. His inter­pret­a­tion of the respons­ib­il­ity is largely…interesting, but I can’t get past the nag­ging feel­ing that he’s just not tak­ing his job very ser­i­ously. Such is the puz­zle­ment faced by not just this Bava fan, I think. On the oth­er hand: one can­not deny the treat­ment of space that’s as acute in its way as Antonioni’s, the way Bava shoots the lovely Elke Sommer as if she’s a man­nequin through­out, the way the labyrinth­ine plot­ting recalls both The Old Dark House and Castle of Blood, the late rev­el­a­tion that between Alida Valli’s final moments here and the cli­max of Black Sabbath’s “A Drop Of Water” sequence, it had to be Bava who inspired Ernest Dickerson to con­coct the rolling-walk show with Spike Lee…and so on. Always just a mag­ni­fi­cent exper­i­ence, Lisa is.

I did not, I have to admit, come away from all this con­sump­tion with a sense of the World Remade Anew. I mean, I sup­pose it’s nice for me that I have such “inter­est­ing” taste, or at least taste that sat­is­fies cer­tain aspects of Cinephile Conventional Wisdom on the one hand and devi­ates from that in “inter­est­ing” ways which are still, you know, accept­able, but so what. There are a lot of people out there with taste. I was read­ing a piece by David Ehrlich in Slate the oth­er day about the irres­ist­ible rise of Jennifer Aniston’s Best Actress Academy Award nom­in­a­tion odds; in that piece he describes the pro­cess by which things came to this appar­ently sorry pass, and refers to Deadline Hollywood’s Pete Hammond, who appar­ently got this ball rolling, as “a humanoid pull-quote machine whom the stu­di­os pass around like the office stapler.” A funny line, and pos­sibly not an inac­cur­ate char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion, but for some reas­on I flashed back to 2009, when Robin Wood died, and an Internet “colum­nist” wrote some­thing vaguely dis­par­aging about Wood’s affec­tion for Rio Bravo, and who chimed in with a com­ment in defense of Wood, a com­ment that showed a pretty thor­ough con­vers­ance with the critic’s work? Well, Pete Hammond, whose cur­rent line of work doesn’t call for such appre­ci­ation, when you come right down to it. And yet, there it was. A few weeks ago I was in the midst of read­ing a pretty thick tome about a rel­at­ively eso­ter­ic branch of African-American music, which I had with me at a screen­ing; the book was noticed by a guy who’s pretty well-known on the screen­ing cir­cuit and who’s some­thing of a fig­ure of fun to young­er and/or more gain­fully employed/socially adept writers, and God knows I’ve had occa­sion to have ungen­er­ous jest at his expense. “I’d like to check that book out,” he said, after he had wres­ted its title from me, who dis­played I sup­pose con­sid­er­able awk­ward unease at hav­ing to con­duct a con­ver­sa­tion with him. “That music meant a lot to me when I was younger.” 

I remem­ber, in Money, Martin Amis’s John Self pro­claim­ing “’Confidence’ I now regard as a psy­cho­path­ic state. Confidence, it’s a cry for help. I mean, you look at all that out there, and what you feel is con­fid­ence?” And I also remem­ber, not in Money, the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I.” All of this was buzz­ing in my head after I watched my eight films, and before the events in Paris. That’s where I ended up after going back to the well.