"I spit on metaphysics, sir"

I hate to shill for any upcoming product, but the release of an extraordinary set of DVDs of a sf classic does have me excited. For years, people have been talking about a possible multi-disc set of the various versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and it's finally going to happen. Several editions of the edition itself will be available, with this as the most elaborate:

Accompanying some versions of the DVD is the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner. A trailer for it, as well as four clips from the film, is available here.

Blade Runner is a seminal film, despite its being dated already as sf (if LA turns into a city with a polyglot language, it will be based on Spanish, not Japanese). The look, the feel of the film is film noir placed in the future (something the Philip K. Dick novel it was based on totally lacked.) This shot from the movie shows an iconic part of noir imagery, Venetian blinds, the shadows of which reveal that the characters are not as free as they might imagine.

And besides, any movie that has Edward James Olmos utter the line that is this entry's title has to be cool.

Farewell to the Master

Ingmar Bergman, who investigated like no other artist the agony that silence can bring, is finally silent. But his films will still be eloquent.

What they got right

Peter Jackson and his team--that phrase should be understood throughout what follows, but from the documentaries that accompanied the various DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings, it's clear that the ultimate decision-making power for most areas of production rested with Jackson. Plans were not developed, concepts not pursued, models not made into reality, unless they were "approved by Peter."

(And I write from the point of view of a thorough-going, unadulterated fan of the novels. I read the works when they were initially--and unethically--published as paperbacks by Ace in America, and have read most of everything else by Tolkien published since then, multiple times, including the twelve volumes of The History of Middle Earth, although I have yet to get to the two volumes of drafts of The Hobbit. Once someone told me that she never got into Tolkien. I replied that I never got out of him.)

• Production design and realization. The key to the success of the movies. If they had got the look of Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age wrong, it would have ruined everything else. The wisest decision they made was to base the designs on the visions of the two best artists working on Tolkien today, Alan Lee and John Howe. And then they brought them to New Zealand, so their designs could be organically placed within the various New Zealand landscapes selected. From Hobbiton to the beacons of Gondor to the Grey Havens, from Frodo's clothes to Eomer's armor to the Orcs' weaponry--everything looks right. And down to the smallest detail--as Miranda Otto said when she picked up the cup that she was supposed to offer to Aragorn in Edoras, "It's heavy!" No need to act like it is.
• Casting. After numerous reviewings, I can't think of a single casting decision or performance I have a problem with. (I do have a problem with some of the lines they have to say--more on that later.) Some work so well--Ian McKellan as Gandalf, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, and Elijah Wood as Frodo--that I can't envision anyone else in the parts. I'm especially glad that McKellan's career achievements were finally recognized. I remember when the execrable Alec Baldwin Shadow came out in 1994 thinking, "Here's one of the greatest actors in the world appearing this piece of sh*t." Now if he appears in a piece of sh*t, it's because he wants to, not because he has to.
• Music. These movies needed a big, late Romantic score, with a variety of echoes of other kinds of music, and plenty of motifs and "tunes," all of which Howard Shore provided. Not only have I bought the soundtrack albums when they came out, I've been picking up the complete recordings, which contain all the musical cues in the works, and run around three hours each. From Dwarvish chants to the forlorn gallantry of Gondor, Shore gets close enough to the essence of what he is portraying (the two personalities of Gollum, for example) to be very effective.
• Direction. This might seem a given, but in all the arguments raging over the film, I think Jackson's skill as a director got lost. I realized this the last time I watched his remake of King Kong. Since I wasn't so heavily invested in it, I was able to watch more objectively the way he put a scene together, such as the offering of Naomi Watts to Kong: the camera angles, camera movements, editing, perspective, combination of music and action, the overall vision. When I watched the end of The Fellowship of the Ring recently, I freshly noticed all the touches: the slow motion as Aragorn approaches the Uruk-hai; the cut to regular speed with the first sword slash; the camera on a trolley as the Uruks run to Boromir; the use of silence as Lurtz shoots Boromir; the performances he gets out of Mortensen and Sean Bean. Jackson has learned the lessons of the masters well.

One more to go: the changes.

"Even the smallest person can change the course of [movie] history"

Thus (almost) says Galadriel to Frodo in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring: a non-Tolkienian line, but movies have never shied away from being explicit. Before I plunge into Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise, I thought I'd set down my thoughts on Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which is, I think, on the whole, brilliantly successful.

Now I never got into the pissing matches on the Net before, while, and after these movies were released; it just wasn't worth it. Minds were often made up before the movies were even seen--it's like the person on Amazon.com who gave the latest Harry Potter book one star before it was published. I found that time, as it usually does, brought clearer reflection. Some points became more obvious; some weaknesses more apparent. But these movies became awfully useful to me in writing classes, as I used them as a method of showing how to provide examples to support a thesis--even their Appendices--and while doing so, engendered further thoughts on the motives behind the production.

The main point to remember--and one that the Harry Potter motives have reinforced for me--is that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens decided to make a successful movie. To do that, they had to draw in as an audience people who had never read Tolkien. The latest Potter movies show that their makers are relying more and more on the audience's having read the books. To recoup the staggering costs of production, Jackson and his team had to engage a mass audience, not just the fans--who would probably come to the movie anyway.

The second point is related. When Bob Shaye at New Line gave Jackson the green light to make three movies, certain structural problems became evident. The team had to rewrite their two-movie screenplay. The first two books end on a cliff-hanging event, and I think Jackson did not want to alienate those members of the audience who might not even have realized that two movies followed The Fellowship. Thus each movie has a rounded ending--the last movie's being too rounded for some.

The third point is again related. How do you make a successful Hollywood movie (even in New Zealand)? Learn how to write a screenplay from a master: in this case, Jackson and Walsh attended a scriptwriting seminar given by the modern guru of the art, Robert McKee, author of Story, who is so famous he was portrayed by Brian Cox in Adaptation. All modern screenwriting manuals emphasize a character "arc," that characters change over the course of a movie (or three). Thus some characters in the novels with immutable personalities become more plastic in the movies, usually weaker (in some aspect) before they can become strong.

More to come...

Random Notes

• That was the title of my favorite section in Rolling Stone in the days of Ralph J. Gleason and Hunter Thompson and Ben Fong-Torres and John Mendelsohn and Lester Bangs, so I'll happily steal it for here.
• My mind has finally recovered from the after-effects of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The emotion was akin to the come-down after a sugar-high, or the sadness a child feels on Christmas afternoon, knowing that that state of ultimate expectation that Christmas excites will not return for another year. Did the novel meet the hype? Mostly yes, although Rowling almost swamped the novel with again more exposition about a mythology that she invented. At least by the middle of The Return of the King, for example, you don't find out that the fellowship maybe should have gone out and discovered Sauron's technicolor dreamcoat.
• Criterion keeps making excellent choices in the movies it is selecting for its editions. In October, these will include Godard's Breathless and a personal favorite I've written about before, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Not to mention Robinson Crusoe on Mars in September (big guilty pleasure).
• More reviews are appearing of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, and it looks better and better each time I look over the inclusions: films by Fred Zinneman, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, and John Sturges, with commentary tracks for each film, including one by James Ellroy for Crime Wave: all this for about $4 a film.
• The Frodo Franchise, a book on Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings by Kristin Thompson, an academic film critic who actually writes readable, interesting English prose worth reading, has been released early, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Goodness, Gracious, Great . . .

While watching a Billy Wilder documentary that accompanied Ace in the Hole, I was reminded that Wilder and Charles Brackett had done the screenplay for Howard Hawks's screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Since that was in my stack of DVDs-to-be-watched, I pulled it out and had a wonderful couple of hours watching a movie in which an English professor gets to be the romantic lead--and played by Gary Cooper, no less.

Of course, much of the comedy lies in listening to the normally laconic Cooper deliver the professor's sesquipedalian verbiage in his clipped bursts; much of the rest lies in the gulf between the slang that Cooper's character is trying to nail down and his own vocabulary, as well as that of the other seven dwarfs--I mean, professors. (The resemblance of its plot to that of Snow White is intentional; "Heidy Ho!" says Barbara Stanwyck as she greets the professors). Some of this humor must have flown in under the censors' radar, as Cooper explains the slang etymology of "Sugarpuss" O'Shea's first name as referring to her face, while those with more lecherous minds muse upon a more venereal location.

What was surprising--and also delightful--about the movie was its cinematography by Gregg Toland. He employs his deep-focus technique very effectively, such as in the still above, with Cooper and Stanwyck in the foreground, three professors in varying degrees in the middle distance, and one sneaking down the stairs in the background--all clearly in focus. The scene in which Coooper first mentions his attraction to Stanwyck is even more striking: Cooper confesses this attraction just as he is about to throw her out, that he particularly noticed her the previous day when she was standing in the window and the light hit her hair. Stanwyck moves back a few feet until she is framed by the window, and poof! it glows. No CGI, just a knowledge of light, lenses, and film, and how to combine them.

Wilder said that after he wrote the script, he hung around the set to watch Hawks direct the film, a kind of "working vacation." Wilder admitted that he became a director to have ultimate control over his scripts, and told the anecdote about Charles Boyer and the cockroach again ("If he won't talk to the cockroach, the sonovabitch won't talk to anybody!"). But he also said that he became a director because that's where the fun in movie-making is. Writing, he tells the interviewer, is, "to quote Winston Churchill, 'blood, sweat, and tears.'"

Amen, Billy.

Five down, two to go

A few thoughts after seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

• These movies are being made for people who have seen the books: little exposition or backstory is given, and what is offered is spoken by the younger actors, who do not have the clearest enunciation in the world. And even if you have read the book, you'll be digging around in your memory for names of characters, spells, and objects. Important flashbacks flash by. One character who will become enormously important later is hardly introduced at all; you suddenly realize, "Oh, she's the one who's going to become Harry's love interest."
• This series is really being carried by an group of excellent British adult actors: Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Ralph Fiennes as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney (the last two almost cameos), Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, plus series newcomers Imelda Staunton and Helena Bonham Carter (who adds a nice dollop of mad sex appeal to the mix), as well as Brendan Gleeson (oops! he's Irish) and David Thewlis. I left the best for last: Alan Rickman as Snape, whose line readings are striking and unforgettable. In his performance, diction becomes a weapon.
• The set designers once again deserve a large portion of credit for making disbelief more easily suspendable.
• The special effects are fine, but really just an extension of concepts that have been around since the 1930s. What comes out of a wand? Out of a ray-gun? Glowing stuff. The results are just less laughable now.
• I still found myself moved at the end. One of the main messages of the Harry Potter books is the same one as Tolkien said was contained in The Lord of the Rings: "the ennoblement of the humble."

Now to see if the last book will make the last two movies worth watching.

How's by You?

I had been planning to do a little piece on Timothy Carey anyway, but the mood I've been in lately is perfectly summed up in this still of Carey in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which Carey plays one of the three French soldiers (along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel) shot for their unit's refusal to fight during a battle in WWI.

I first noticed Carey in One-Eyed Jacks, a Western initially directed by Kubrick, but then directed by its star, Marlon Brando, after a falling-out between the two. Carey plays a thoroughly odious piece of work whom Brando kills after Carey attacks a girl. His character seems just intelligent enough to be evil.

In Paths of Glory, Carey is more pitiable than hateful, but in his other work for Kubrick, he plays Nikki Arane, a racist member of the gang of robbers in The Killing. This wasn't the only time Carey worked for an A-list director; he was also in John Cassevetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Carey also did a lot of television work; he appeared in a couple of episodes of Columbo as the proprietor of a greasy spoon--typecasting, if you ask me.

Carey has been dubbed a "Method character actor," and Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to him. Carey also worked for years, a la Orson Welles, on his own auteur project, The World's Greatest Sinner, in which he plays an insurance salesman who...ah, it's too ridiculous to summarize.

I was thinking about Carey because one of his films, Crime Wave, is being released as part of Warner Bros. fourth volume of Film Noir classics. And if you need any more proof of Carey's, ah, unique qualities, just check out his publicity still on IMDB.

"La, la , la, la, life goes on"

A lot of what I'm doing lately is so immense (such as reading a three-volume, 1200-page novel written in fragmentary modernist mode) that I don't want to talk about it until I have gotten farther along. One longer viewing experience I can comment upon and recommend highly is Michael Apted's "Up Series," a seven-movie series of documentaries. Few documentaries have been constructed around an individual's chronological life as it is lived: this one does it with a group of people.

It began as a 1964 documentary about a group of seven-year-old British children selected for differences in social class, geographic location, and gender. One boy grew up on a Dales farm, three boys went to a exclusive prep school, three girls are friends at an East London school, two boys are from a children's home, two boys from a Liverpool suburb--the backgrounds and personalities are nicely varied. Most of the program consists of interviews with the children, but the narrator does come in at the end and announces the Jesuits' maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

This bothered me--not because the Jesuits didn't say it (they did) and not because it isn't true (q.v. James Joyce). But I thought the series, which returns to this group of young Britons (and even that fact changes fairly quickly) at intervals of seven years, would show more the accuracy of Wordsworth's statement in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "The child is the father to the man." In other words, we'd see how much of a personality, a character, was present already in childhood and would remain in adulthood. Character is destiny--or would we learn differently?

But as the series wears on, as the filmmakers return to the same group every seven years, I learn that both points are true. What has been ground into these children as thoroughly as their gender roles are their positions in a class-demarcated society. Also, a lot of the adult is present in the child. But those are the generalizations. The heart of the series--and I'm up to 35 Up now--are the individuals. Some people's lives change abruptly--divorce, an unexpected child--some stay the same. I don't want to get into many specifics because, like fiction, one of the joys of "reading" these lives is to see what happens.

But life is not fiction in that it doesn't have an Aristotlean plot. Austen, Dickens, and other novelists often end their fictions with a marriage--but for many people, that's only the beginning. What is the shape of a life as it is lived? Its weight? And in this sense the "Up Series" resembles U.S.A.

The word that keeps returning to me in attempting to describe this series is deep. It is deeply moving at times, deeply human, and deeply humanistic. One story in particular is almost ineffably sad. I'm holding my breath, so to speak, for the last two installments.

Ain't No Caine on the Brazos

To get the taste of the last blog post's subject out of my mouth, I decided to watch the HD-DVD version of Batman Begins. I forgot, or more accurately relearned, that video and aural bells and whistles ("mixed metaphor there, doc") cannot strengthen a meandering script--in the case of this film, who's the real villain. I liked the actors, but the action was too choppy and disjointed, so I spent my time trying to figure out which portions of Chicago* were real, and which portions the product of CGI. (Lower Wacker Drive--again!?)

Michael Caine's effortlessly polished performance as Alfred, the butler ("Nevv-ah!"), though, led me to pop in a movie I had been meaning to watch, Get Carter (NOT the abominable remake with Sylvester Stallone). In the original 1971 production, Caine plays a London gangster who journeys north to Newcastle to investigate the death of his brother. My ulterior motive for watching this was the portrayal of a Newcastle gangster chief by John Osborne--his only appearance, as far as I know, in films.

Well, Osborne's performance was languidly reptilian and Newcastle's industrial grunge pictorially fascinating (was that why they picked Seattle for the remake?). But the movie as a whole was unsatisfying, maybe because it was too knowing. On the train ride north, Carter is reading Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely--the title is shown twice, in case you miss it. OK, nice in-joke--except a spiv like Carter would read Mickey Spillane if anything--not Chandler's simile-sodden prose and period wisecracks. And the plot itself, while suitably quest-like (and it's Chandler who names a character Orfamay Quest, and in FML, Mrs. Grayle), just gets too numbing. And director Mike Hodges overuses telephoto shots--why use that lens in an over-the-shoulder shot when the blur of the person in front obscures the face of the speaker?

But one moment of pure movie acting made my viewing worthwhile. After bedding a northern gangster's girlfriend, Carter turns on a 16mm porn movie for some entertainment. As the movie goes on, Carter realizes the identity of one of the participants, and the way that Caine shows that dawning revelation, both cognitively and emotionally, is masterful. In that moment of pure film, I "got" Carter.


*It's ironic that here they use Chicago as a model for Gotham City, because in the comics Gotham City was modeled on New York, and Metropolis on Chicago. Smallville was in Illinois.

Four-letter Word that Begins with "C" and Ends with "P"

This was supposed to be a light-hearted, witty romp through the wreckage of Queen of Outer Space, a 1958 science-fiction movie starring, as you can see, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Eric Fleming. I would love to make jokes at the expense of those responsible, but the sad truth is that this movie is simply too bad to even be ridiculed.

At least two of those people should have known better. The idea was attributed to Ben Hecht, probably the greatest script-doctor in the history of Hollywood, and I wonder why he didn't cash the check and deep-six the credit. The script was by Charles Beaumont, generally an excellent writer for Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. However, director Edward Bernds was previously a director (and not a good one) for the Three Stooges and the Bowery Boys, and the crew (and cast) go down from there.

One thing I hadn't noticed the only time I saw this before was the obvious recycling of costumes and even the lettering of the opening credits from an excellent sf movie, Forbidden Planet.

Truly funny camp is only possible when all involved take themselves seriously, whether as participating in an original work or in an imitation. The moment the eye starts to wink or the tongue moves toward the cheek--camp becomes crap. Yet somehow I have the feeling La Gabor thought her talents could deodorize this ordure.

Excuse me--I have to join the editorial staff, who are still retching in the corner.

"Equinox Flower"

I did not mean to give the impression in a previous post that I am inimically opposed to spectacular blockbuster motion pictures. I treasure those moments that only the wide screen and a large vision can give: the ship seeming to move on top of the dunes in Lawrence of Arabia, the star child looking at the Earth in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the lighting of the beacon fires in The Return of the King. The problem occurs when people think that such moments are all movies can (or should) give us, and the cinema's smaller pleasures and insights are forgotten.

I've mentioned Criterion Films a couple of times before in this blog, and I've just started to sample the third volume of their Eclipse Line of no-frills releases, The Late Ozu. I've seen several of these films before: I'd even subscribed to an Internet dvd rental place called Nicheflix to borrow copies of Ozu's films that had not been released here to play on my region-free dvd player.

The movie I chose was Ozu's first color film, Equinox Flower. Ozu was like Charlie Chaplin in that he did not take to technological advances like sound films easily, but once he did, he proved to be a master of them. The film's plot is simply told: a father eventually agrees go along with his daughter's decision to marry for love and not participate in an arranged marriage.

But what moments unfold on the way.

In general, Ozu's camera was locked low to the ground, particularly in interior scenes, at about waist-high for someone who would be seated in the traditional Japanese manner. His actors often look directly at the person they're talking to. Here's a still from Equinox Flower that illustrates this:

Also, Ozu always cuts between shots and scenes: no dissolves, fades, wipes, etc. This can make for some abrupt transitions at first, but viewers soon get used to them. More famous are what became known as Ozu's "pillow shots." These at first seem to be the equivalent of establishing shots: an exterior location that characters are approaching or will arrive at--like the heads at Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest. But in Ozu they take on a spatial symbolism and a rhythmic importance: the angularity and straight lines of buildings; the curves and sinuosity of landscapes. Here's another example from the film:

The magic that occurs in an Ozu movie is when we realize the emotional importance in a scene that simply shows a woman walk quickly down a corridor in her house, turn abruptly around, and sit down. She is deliriously joyous, and if you told that to someone who had not seen what led up to that scene, she would think you were delirious. Similarly, the same character just gently drumming her fingers on a table to traditional Japanese music on a radio. She radiates happiness. This is the other magic of movies: that we can see into one another's souls for a time, and share in the events and emotions of ordinary lives.

What is even more wonderful is that Ozu so effortlessly communicates all this across cultures. I'm not all that familiar with Japanese culture, but I understand these characters. fully, deeply, even madly. I love movies when they make the adrenaline flow and the jaw drop, but I also love those that make my heart and my eyes fill.

O Lucky Man!--II

I said before that I hoped someone would upload on YouTube the last version of Alan Price's song "O Lucky Man!" in the eponymous movie by Lindsay Anderson.

And luckily, someone has, but this someone is at the very least obsessed with Helen Mirren, because he is uploading rips of all the scenes she appears in from all her movies. That's why if you want to see the more rocking version of this song, you have to wait until the last two minutes of this clip.



The finale of the movie is like one huge wrap party, in which first Lindsay Anderson, the director, and then various actors in the film, such as Mirren and Rachel Roberts, greet Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell.

Unfortunately. O Lucky Man! has not been released on DVD, but the first Mick Travis movie, If..., has just been, by Criterion, and I'll probably have something to say about it later.

"Don't you always?"

"Are you sure you're in this class?"

The Dogs of Summer

I can't remember the last time that a summer roster of movies has left me so unimpressed. I have not felt the slightest urge to see any of the 3's that have filled multiplexes so far. I'm even more disappointed that two directors whom I used to respect, Sam Raimi and Steven Soderbergh, have become so enwrapped in the Hollywood love affair with the blockbuster that they have stopped pushing their talents and forgotten the risk-taking that produced such classics (to me, anyway) as Army of Darkness and The Limey.

One movie I am looking forward to is Pixar's Ratatouille. Its director, Brad Bird, was the guiding force behind The Incredibles, a movie that was so right on so many levels, yet so different from other Pixar triumphs as Toy Story and Finding Nemo. The only problem with watching Ratatouille here is that I will probably have to make a 180-mile round trip to see it in a decent theater, since the local theater owner automatically puts any movie remotely classifiable as kids' fare on a screen that is insufficiently lit, with a monaural sound system to boot, on the grounds, I suppose, that the kids won't care about the conditions.

Bring on the rats.

Real Cool Killer

With apologies to Chester Himes for the title of this post--

Once if the nice things about a blog is that you can think on the "page," as it were. My last post, on Jean-Pierre Melville, led me to line up and arrange some ideas in my mind about him and his movies, which I have always liked, but without being able to state precisely why. None of my thoughts are particularly original, but they help clarify and deepen my viewing experience. So I decided to re-view Le Samourai, perhaps Melville's most influential movie, which stars Alain Deloin as Jef Costello, a contract killer.

Never have blue eyes been blanker, more glacial, more affectless. Costello is a samurai in that he lives alone, and by his own code. His hat and his coat become his uniform, and like the gunslinger Wilson in Shane, when he put his gloves on, he's ready to work. Melville's deliberate pacing of the plot makes the action, when it erupts, all the more startling. Both the police and the men who hired him pursue Costello, and there is almost, but not quite, a Langian equation of the two (as happens in M). Both groups are ruthless towards women, and it is Costello's code towards women that dooms him.

Le Samourai was released in 1967; Bullitt, with Steve McQueen, in 1968. A chase occurs in each as police pursue hitmen; the cops pursue Costello on the Metro in Paris, and Bullitt pursues the black Dodge Charger in his green Mustang. The latter is adrenaline-inducing; the former engages higher brain functions. Both chases--on a subway and in a car--occur in The French Connection, but it is the car chase that is remembered, which is unfortunate, because Melville's meticulousness, his precision, deserve to be as influential.

But then again, Hollywood always goes for the glands.

Melville--but not that Melville

Jean-Pierre Grumbach so loved things American (particularly its movies) that he changed his last name to Melville, and it's under that name that he directed a brilliant series of movies about the French underworld of killers and thieves, including four of his last five movies. The series begins with perhaps the best of them, Le Samourai, starring Alain Delon as a contract killer with his own code (the movie is also important because it forms another link in the stylistic chain of fashionable criminals from Gun Crazy to Face/Off). The movie not about criminals in that group of five is 1969's Army of Shadows, a film about the early French resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II. It was not shown in the United States until last year, and when it was, it was hailed as a lost classic. Criterion recently issued a characteristically outstanding DVD of the restored film, and having seen it, I have to agree with the general consensus.

At first, though, it's hard to understand why. Most movies about a resistance movement are chiefly engaged in generating suspense, yet Melville is so methodical, almost architectural in building his scenes, that little tension is generated. What then becomes interesting is character.

In one scene, the active leader of the small cell of resistance fighters has been captured by the police and is about to be shot without trial. A long scene in a jail cell shows him distributing the last of his cigarettes to his fellow prisoners; as the camera follows the pack around the cell, we see from each prisoner's face how he will face death. They are summoned from the cell, and during their slow journey to the death-room, the leader meditates on how he will face death. Their shackles are deliberately removed; the guards leave them; they face a machine-gun some 50 feet away. They are told to run in the opposite direction: the first one who reaches the wall will be spared until the next execution. The leader refuses to run, until the German officer shoots at his feet. He runs; stops because of smoke bombs that bar his path; notices a rope hanging from a side wall; escapes. As they are driving off, one thought dominates his mind--that the German officer knew he would run.

All this is presented almost clinically, almost--dare I say it?--existentially. The escape is as surprising to us as it is to the leader, but it's not exhilirating in any sense. In fact, we realize that if he hadn't run, he would have been dead. By displaying courage, he would have doomed himself. The movie is full of moments like this, where we are forced to evaluate motives, causality, character.

What is trust? What is true loyalty? Can a mathematics of morality be achieved? These are the questions Melville asks in this somber movie about ombres, and indeed, throughout his crime pictures as well.

Heaven is in the eyes

I have been wracking--probably wrecking too--my brain for movies to show at this upcoming workshop, since I almost immediately made the decision to show movies of more artistic or social importance than merely those that had a tangential connection to this immediate area. So, John Ford's The Searchers--that's a given; and to give the opposing point of view, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, a movie I was very happy to get to know.

So that leaves--what? Shane? Maybe, because then one can play the later Eastwood cards of Pale Rider and especially Unforgiven against it. But I also want to show the same historical event through the refractive lens of the movies, show how a legend is built--or deconstructed. So six gunfights at the O.K. corral, from Ford's black-and-white chiaroscuro in My Darling Clementine (Victor Mature as a consumptive!) to George Cosmatos's almost apocalyptic Tombstone (which, incidentally, is the one probably closest to the "truth"--Doc Holliday actually answered the cowboy who said, "I have you now, you son of a bitch," with "You're a daisy if you do.")

Then I watched Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, and was completely bowled over again by the beauty of its cinematography (supposedly shot by Nestor Almendros, but a lot of work was also done by Haskell Wexler). Most of the movie is supposed to take place in Texas, but, as is usually the case in these degenerate times, America's pristine landscape is played by--drum roll, please--CANADA. Much of the outdoor shooting was done during the time when the sun has not yet risen or has just already set, and the land glows. Even the actors' beauty becomes part of this theme, especially that of the males--the young Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, even the ragged, time-lined face of Robert Wilke. Few movies remind me more that the cinema is a medium of the senses, primarily the visual, but also the auditory, with Enni Morricone's delicate score, supplemented by Leo Kottke's guitar. The only weakness is the script, the initial version of which, I'm not surprised to learn, was thrown out, so the actors could find the story. Linda Manz's voice-over narration, which verges on the edge of incomprehensibility at times, has all the strengths and weaknesses of improvisation.

But those images overwhelm any weaknesses.

"A grope is a grope. It's not the Annunciation."

The History Boys is one of those under-the-radar movies that caught my attention because of an Internet review, and word-of-mouth from an Australian friend in a chatroom. It's a wonderful movie, which, as the back of the DVD declares, is about "the true meaning of education and the relative values of happiness and success." And it's sort of sold that way, as a group of British grammar-school boys (the equivalent of US seniors in high school) vie for scholarships and admittance to Oxford University. The design of the front of the DVD implies that these boys will cut corners--perhaps cheat--to get there.

What is not mentioned in any of the ads is what presumably caused American posters on IMDB's message boards to write "This movie is disturbing" and "Unable to finish this movie." That would be the homosexual crushes, longings, and emotions among the "boys" and two of their male teachers. I think it's all sensitively and wittily handled, and interlaces with the overall theme of the movie (just what is history?) as well.

Scriptwriter Alan Bennett (who also wrote the play the movie's based on) has also so loaded the movie with quotations from poetry, philosophy, and popular culture, that most US audiences would baffled as to what they're talking about (I was asked "What's a nancy?" as we watched a scene in which W. H. Auden was quoted). In one scene, a picture of Rupert Brooke is visible over one of the boy's shoulders (Brooke is also quoted). How many Americans would know why Rupert Brooke would be important in a movie with such themes, or why two of the boys enact the end of Brief Encounter in one class?

I am not doing justice to the wit, subtlety, and range of this movie. The cast is superb, with Richard Griffiths almost stealing the entire film as the seemingly pitiable yet heroic Hector, and the always delightful Frances de la Tour (whom I fondly remember as Reggie's secretary in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) as the history teacher, who absolutely nails a wonderful speech about women in history. (It is she who tells Hector the lines of this post's title.) The boys themselves are uniformly excellent.

Hector is the character who will linger longest in my mind. There's a beautiful scene in which Hector goes over Thomas Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge" with a student. Why do we teach students about literature, or "general studies" as Hector's class is called? His explanation of the deepest joy in reading moved me to (crybaby!) tears.

And his use of popular culture in his classes was somehow very endearing to someone who, when asked to put together something to show how attractive the study of English could be to first-year college students, showed "Battle of the PBS Superstars" from SCTV to prospective majors. Every once in a while, we do have fun, and then we have to think about how it all fits together. That's the lesson the history boys ultimately learn.

Uses of Rock in Movies--What not to Do, pt. 2

The Yardbirds are a fabled group because of their trio of lead guitar players--Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. I stumbled across them in the Beck era; I wore out the grooves of their Having a Rave Up With the Yardbirds LP. My favorite song from that album was "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" which, fortunately, is one of the few Yardbirds live (not lip-synched) performances preserved from that era at a concert sponsored by a British publication. The song is always notable because of the way Beck on guitar and Keith Relf on harmonica imitate the eponymous train and trade licks with each other. But in this performance, Relf at one point looks like he's ready to blow that lonesome whistle, while Beck goes softer.



Fast forward to--well, the same year, 1966. Michaelangelo Antonioni is filming his indictment of Swinging London, Blow Up. He wants to get the Velvet Underground, but can't, so he gets the Yardbirds. By now their bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, has left the group (to produce, among other people, Cat Stevens), so their rhythm guitarist, Chris Dreja, becomes the bassist, and the new guitar player is a rather callow but enormously talented Jimmy Page. For their scene, the group does "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" but probably for copyright purposes it is titled "Stroll On." This clip has become so famous that one version of it on YouTube claims it comes from the Yardbirds movie.



Another poster claims that this is an accurate portrayal of London in the Sixties. Bull. It's Antonioni riding his hobby-horse that modern Western society is vapid and vacuous. The audience stares listlessly at the group, two people dance as though they were stepping on ants, and one girl has regressed to an infantile state. The crowd only emerges from its narcolepsy when Beck destroys his guitar--then it's a bunch of savages. I liked this message better in L'Avventura.

To show that even film commentators can be full of the same material as posters, I listened to the commentary track for this scene on the DVD. The commentator said that the Yardbirds were a proto-punk group known for destroying their instruments. Sorry--that's the Who. I'm surprised he didn't talk about the neo-colonial implications of the club's name (Ricky Tick).

The most interesting fact to me is that I have always thought that the bystander who picks up the guitar neck and throws it down after Hemmings has discarded it was played by--Jeff Beck.

William Demarest--an appreciation

I grew up watching a lot of sappy versions of American family life on television, including the mildly depressing My Three Sons, starring Fred MacMurray, who was always better as a heel than a good guy (as Billy Wilder proved in Double Indemnity and The Apartment and MacMurray revealed in The Caine Mutiny). When William Frawley's alcoholism caught up with him, he was replaced on the show as the old mother-figure (it's hard to guess what was on the scriptwriters' minds by having the father a widower and an older man playing the mother-hen role) by William Demarest as Uncle Charley, who to me was just a scolding voice bleating out under a particularly bad toupee.

And I didn't know it, but in doing so I wronged an actor who turned in at least two immortal performances--in Hail, The Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek--as part of Preston Sturges's stock company. In those pictures he became the voice of demotic public wisdom. In the former, he played Sgt. Heppelfinger, who comes up with the idea of turning the 4-F Woodrow Truesmith into a returning hero, and then saves him when the truth inevitably emerges. In the latter, he plays a befuddled widower whose elder daughter has become preganant without proof of marriage, and whose younger daughter, it's hinted, will prove even more of a challenge to public morality. In both pictures he delivers Sturges's acerbic dialogue with impeccable timing, in a flat voice that manages to echo both the urban and small-town banter of the time. He is also a suprisingly adept physical comedian, as shown in Morgan's Creek, when he pulls a stunt I have only once witnessed in real life, when my mother tried to deliver a kick in the pants to myself and my sister--with the same ineffectual, but painful, results for the kicker.

Uncle Charley, I hardly knew ye.