Don't Look Away from the TV: Horror Marathon October 2006

Sure, Christmas is great because of the presents and all, but my favorite holiday is Halloween, my favorite month October, my favorite season the fall. Each October I try to cram as many horror movies as I can into the month, and while this month I failed to fulfill the impossibly ambitious list I set for myself (watch one movie from Australia, one from Eastern Europe, one from Africa, etc.), I did watch a much higher percentage of films that I had never seen before, and at least it's fodder for this blog to give a run-down with some capsule reviews. I'm including the 3 episodes of the Showtime TV series "Masters of Horror" because they are essentially short (1 hour) films; I'm excluding the terrific new horror series "Dexter" on the same channel.

- 1 -
Psycho (U.S., 1960) * * * *
D: Alfred Hitchcock

Well, of course I'd seen Psycho before. Too many times, in fact. Each time I watch it, I'm certain it's one of my favorite films, although as time passes I'm sure to shove more snobby choices above it. In truth, though, each time I see this film I'm studiously attentive, aware of each camera movement, squinting to catch the details in Norman Bates' bedroom or basement, gasping not at the shocks but at the head-slapping brilliance of Anthony Perkins' casting, though it pretty much ruined his career, typecasting him for the rest of his life. The film's single flaw--the final psychoanalysis scene--has been isolated countless times by others, but obviously, in a film so radically stark and unsparing to 1960's viewers, it was necessary. To my mind, the whole thing is perfect cinema. I don't know if it's Hitchcock's best film: he has about ten of those, and this usually gets short shrift by scholars who would rather put forward Vertigo or Shadow of a Doubt (Hitch's favorite) or Notorious. Horror--or, specifically, the slasher film, which this birthed--is still considered a gutter genre, nothing but "entertainment" with minimal intellectual value. But Psycho is a highly intellectual film, engaging with the viewer's expectations, questioning them, and savagely turning on them. When Norman Bates moves the innocuous painting to glimpse through a crudely-carved peephole, not only was the genre raised to a new level, but so was the game of the auteur. (This is the only DVD in the Alfred Hitchcock boxset to not feature a documentary on its making; a shame.) I watched this on the 1st of October almost as ceremony.

-2-
Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch-House (U.S., 2005) * * *
D: Stuart Gordon

This Showtime series was born out of the semi-annual meetings of a society almost self-mocking calling itself the "masters of horror," and consisting of the likes of John Carpenter, John Landis, Joe Dante, Wes Craven, George A. Romero, Mick Garris, and others. They would gather to drink and talk about whatever they felt like talking about; the Showtime series pays tribute to them by giving (some of) them one-hour films to express their imagination. The personal indulgence of master of horror Stuart Gordon (who recently directed the David Mamet adaptation Edmund, starring William H. Macy) is to adapt the work of H.P. Lovecraft; to date, Gordon is about the only director to get Lovecraft right, from the morbidly funny Re-Animator to the fantastically grotesque Dagon. (The other director I'd nominate, Guillermo del Toro, has yet to actually direct a Lovecraft adaptation, though Hellboy seems to be an audition for the job.) So to see Gordon adapting my favorite Lovecraft story, "Dreams in the Witch-House," is a dream. And he gets it pretty much right, again. The premise is the same: a young man rents a room in the top floor of an ancient house, and becomes mathematically obsessed with the peculiar and unique angle that the walls and the ceiling meet; turns out, it's a portal to another dimension, from which comes a baby-sacrificing witch and her rodent familiar, who has a human face. It manages to be bleak, weird (in the pulp-fiction sense), and gleefully mischievous pretty much at once and throughout--a tough note to strike without going over the edge. One of the best episodes of this series' first season.

-3-
The Unknown (U.S., 1927) * * * *
London After Midnight (Restoration; U.S., 1927)
D: Tod Browning

For a while--in college, I think--Tod Browning was my hero, my past life, a visionary who could compel otherwise respectable members of the audience to pay strict attention to--and even sympathize with--outcasts and monsters. Freaks, of course, is his manifesto: a one-of-a-kind film in which were are initiated into the secretive world of circus sideshow performers, and in which the delineation between outcasts and outright monsters is made clear (the villain of the piece is actually a sadistic, hateful woman who just happens to be physically perfect). Before working in sound pictures, before Freaks and Dracula, Browning made films with Lon Chaney, and each pushed the other to the pinnacle of his craft. The Unknown might be that pinnacle: Chaney plays a strangler impersonating an armless man (his hands are tied down by a girdle beneath his shirt) to elude the authorities; while working in a circus, he falls for a beautiful woman who cannot stand the touch of a man's hands, and who feels safe near him. Despite his machinations, she falls in love with the team's new strongman, and (I spoil) adjusts to human contact just as Chaney cuts off his own arms to complete his new identity and to be with her. Chaney's performance is astonishing; in many scenes, his legs act as arms and are every bit as emotionally expressive. London After Midnight is one of the lost films of the silent era, and one of the most eagerly sought-after, as it's one of Chaney's "make-up" films (he plays a vampire). The reconstruction produced by Turner Classic Movies lasts about an hour and exhaustively pores over archived production stills while running through the script, effectively proving what those who have seen the actual film have claimed: that's it's standard "old dark house" fare and pretty dull. (For more on that genre, see the film of the same name, below.)

-4-
Nosferatu (Germany, 1922) * * * *
D: F.W. Murnau

Each October the Alloy Orchestra performs a live musical score at the Times Cinema in Milwaukee; although the Times has become less of a repertory theater and more of a first-run arthouse since it was taken over by new management this year, they brought the Alloy back again for a double feature of this and Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (which I'm not including as "horror," but which a spectacular moviegoing experience nonetheless). The Alloy not only tour across the country throughout the year, they also compose original soundtracks to accompany the DVDs and television screenings of various silent films, and are regarded as the best folks out there doing so (in fact, the print of The Unknown which I watched featured an Alloy score). Last year's performance of The Phantom of the Opera was a hit with the Times crowd; this year, they seemed strangely bored and distracted, unless my subjective reading was incorrect. But it was still a great time. You can read my thoughts on Nosferatu here.

-5-
Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell (Japan, 1968) * *
D: Hajime Sato

This one has a fervent cult following that includes Quentin Tarantino, but the only thing it really has going for it is a frenzied approach to narrative that results in lots of humor both intentional and (predominantly?) unintentional. Consider the pre-credits sequence. A plane is flying against a strangely ruby-red sky. The pilots have lost course. A bomb threat is received. Birds begin to commit suicide by smashing against the plane. A psychotic political assassin fights with the pilot. A glowing UFO streaks past, and the plane careens into the ground. Granted, the pace slows a bit after this, but only a bit. And there's a real triumph in that all of that actually begins to connect into a cohesive plot...well, sort of (it involves aliens that crawl into your skull through your forehead and turn you into a vampire). My wife and I got most of our entertainment from the American female passenger, who shouts in English "My husband died in Vietnam!" again and again while the Japanese characters look confused. I guess you can expect this from Criterion in the future, since the Janus logo was attached to the TCM print.

-6-
The Black Cat (U.S., 1934) * * 1/2
D: Edgar G. Ulmer

Edgar G. Ulmer is considered one of the kings of B-movies, and the apex of his output was the 30's and 40's, when he turned out one zero-budget film after another, the most notable being the accidental film noir masterpiece Detour. The Black Cat is notable too, chiefly because it brought together horror icons and rivals Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Right from the opening credits you can see whose career was taking off: Karloff is listed just by his last name, but Bela must suffer both names. They play two bitter enemies--Karloff is a Satanist priest, Lugosi an ex-pupil who blames him for the death of his wife--and it's impossible not to think of them just playing comic book versions of their Hollywood personas, two ghouls fighting for the crown of King of Horror. It's entertaining enough, but the story is so absent that the events happen almost as nonsensically as those in Goke: the characters wander into the frame, bicker, scream, encounter preserved corpses or black-robed worshippers, and wander out. It has nothing to do with the Edgar Allen Poe story that supposedly inspired it, although Lugosi's character shrieks at the appearance of a black cat. (Actually, Stuart Gordon is taking on the Poe story in his installment of the second season of Masters of Horror.)

-7-
Jigoku (Japan, 1960) * * 1/2
D: Nobuo Nakagawa

Criterion has just released this truly bizarre (okay, not Goke bizarre, but bizarre nonetheless) Japanese horror film from the same year that brought Psycho and Peeping Tom. It begins with a brief vision and description of the Buddhist Hell, but then retreats for a full hour to tell the story of a young man, the girl he loves, and his bullyish friend who seems intent on bringing his dreams to ruin. Things get delirious, and a bloated ensemble cast begins to quickly die off, before the main event: forty minutes or so of our protagonist wandering through Hell, trying to find his beloved, battling off demons and witnessing a phantasmagoric vision of the various levels of Hell, each radically different from the other, but involving some mesmerizing, nightmarish vision. The special effects are quite good, and the sights are certainly memorable, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what this movie is about.

-8 & 9-
Plan 9 from Outer Space (U.S, 1959) *
Bride of the Monster (U.S., 1955) *
D: Edward D. Wood, Jr.

This month Turner Classic Movies debuted TCM Underground: a cult film (or double feature) hosted by Rob Zombie and airing Friday nights at midnight PST. His first picks were two by Ed Wood, and having not seen these in many years, I can say that I agree with Zombie's statement that Ed Wood may have been a bad director, but he had a vision, and his films are more worthwhile than much of what comes out of Hollywood these days. But his films are worthwhile because they're enormously entertaining in unintended ways. Plan 9, for example, is a comedy masterpiece; it just so happens that we're supposed to take it seriously. It's the way Wood draws out his "special effects" sequence of paper plate UFOs flying over Hollywood: he really thinks he's Ray Harryhausen. Or the way the actors deliver lines like: "You humans are so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!" Or the way Tor Johnson fails to deliver any line successfully, but sounds instead like Frankenstein's monster (he's actually playing a police chief!). The dialogue is so ambitiously bad that there really isn't a good way to deliver it, but you must admit, it's delivered in the most entertaining way imaginable. Bride of the Monster isn't quite as enjoyable, but worth it for the octopus-wrestling sequences, or Lugosi's "race of atomic supermen" speech. On the commentary track of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, the screenwriters note that after watching Burton's film, you view Wood's work more sympathetically, and that's true. But it's still astoundingly terrible stuff.

-10-
The Woods (U.S., 2006) * * *
D: Lucky McKee

McKee is my favorite of the new generation of horror directors, primarily because he doesn't set out to ape anyone else (most new horror directors, including Rob Zombie, are intent on remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left); instead, he's establishing his own voice: sardonic, modern, colorfully cinematic, and keenly interested in the female psyche. His film May followed a young introvert (Angela Bettis) at an animal hospital whose obsession with dead things frightens away her would-be boyfriend, leading to drastic measures to repair the relationship; wit infuses the film not just through its observant dialogue but through its soundtrack and even the movement of the camera (horror has finally found its Scorsese). The finale, with one simple movement of an arm, was horrifying, whimsical, and touching--not a mixture you get from most modern horror films. McKee's segment for Masters of Horror, "Sick Girl" (also featuring Bettis) wasn't a let-down but a hilarious satire involving lesbians and insects; my wife found it to be one of the best things she saw all year. Unfairly, McKee's follow-up to May, The Woods, was released directly to DVD in October. While it's deliberately lacking in the broad satirical strokes of his earlier films, the McKee touchstones are still there: a prominent soundtrack (notably featuring "You Don't Own Me"), female leads (the cast is almost entirely female, with the exception of Bruce Campbell as the character's father), and one wise touch after another. Heather (Agnes Bruckner) is brought to a school for gifted girls in a secluded forest in the mountains; the year is 1965. As with Dario Argento's classic horror film Suspiria, she begins to suspect that the teachers are really witches; meanwhile, the girls begin to disappear from their beds, replaced by an assortment of fall leaves. Heather bonds with a friend, stands up to a bully, and suspiciously scrutinizes the head of the school, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson). The plot isn't surprising, but it's not meant to be: McKee is a revolutionary in this genre because he actually wants you to care about the characters and where they end up. I can only imagine that it was dumped on DVD because it wasn't a horror film in the mold of Saw, Hostel, or The Hills Have Eyes remake. The gore is kept at bay until the grand guignol finale, which is still as abstract and impressionistic as something out of Jigoku or another Japanese ghost story of the 60's.

-11-
The Old Dark House (U.S., 1932) * * * 1/2
D: James Whale

Now here's a horror film that's short on sense and thoroughly charming. Some tourists travelling through Wales become trapped by a landslide on the proverbial dark and stormy night, and are forced to take shelter in a home where they're not welcome: a family tormented by the psychotic Morgan (Boris Karloff), and unspoken personal demons. James Whale (Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein), ever the artist, combines elegant camera shots that evoke German expressionism with wry, Thin Man-style comedy. It's a wisp of a film but it glows.

-12-
The Tenant (France, 1976) * * * 1/2
D: Roman Polanski

The highlight of last year's horror marathon was a Times Cinema screening of Rosemary's Baby on Halloween; this year I showed my wife The Tenant, which seems to be a reimagining of that film with Polanski playing the Mia Farrow role, and with a twist to the premise: that nothing supernatural is happening at all, and that our protagonist is simply unravelling. Of course, toying with that theory is one of the things that makes Rosemary's Baby so enjoyable; but The Tenant reminds you that Polanski is, after all, an adamant atheist and skeptic, and paints a picture that is harsher, riskier, but just as darkly satirical. Polanski himself plays Trelkovsky, an introverted Polish immigrant who moves into an apartment previously rented by a woman who threw herself out the window. Bossed by his "friends," lectured and threatened by his fellow tenants (who cannot tolerate the slightest noise), he eventually begins to unravel and lose his sense of identity--and begins to think that he's becoming the former tenant. And this was Polanski's follow-up to Chinatown! He's coming off the height of his craft, and will shortly be trapped by a scandal that will haunt the rest of his career, but The Tenant is a polished little indulgence, a whim by a director who seems incapable of making a bad film (although I haven't watched Pirates in many years).

-13-
The Hills Have Eyes (U.S., 1977) * * *
D: Wes Craven

This is one I caught on the Independent Film Channel a few years ago when they were running a streak of horror films of the "independent" persuasion such as Martin, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Argento's Deep Red. This one stuck out as a film made on a very low budget but using its limitations as its strengths. It takes its time setting the stage and gets you to invest emotionally in the characters, whether you realize you're doing it or not; you may cringe at the racism and bullheadedness of this vacationing family's patriarch, but it only builds your sympathy for those who have to put up with him. As the family's camper breaks down in a dead-end road in the middle of the Nevada desert, and becomes the target of some radiation-affected cannibals hiding in the hills, you agonize over their deaths, which don't come in quite the expected order. (There's also genuine tension because a helpless infant is involved.) After watching this film a second time, I was struck by how much grief the film contained: when a member of the family dies, the others react very realistically--they don't just pick up and move on. But this isn't torture to sit through. It's a smart thriller that's not short on social comment--and unlike Wes Craven's earlier hit, The Last House on the Left, this is fairly unpretentious commentary, worked naturally into the narrative, that I can swallow. It's also answers the question of what a horror film directed by Sam Peckinpah might look like (watch this and Straw Dogs back to back, if you can stomach it).

-14-
Hostel (U.S., 2006) * * 1/2
D: Eli Roth

Roth directed Cabin Fever, an empty, if diverting, funhouse; this follow-up was much more financially successful (Roth is filming a sequel), and it has a little more substance, but it sacrifices logic along the way. The premise, at least, nicely locks into the current cultural and political climate, as some of the best horror films do: two college kids, accompanied by an Israeli tourist, look for sex and drugs in Amsterdam, then take a tip to Eastern Europe to visit a secluded town and a hostel supposedly occupied by hot, easy women. At first it seems that their dreams will be realized, but the hostel is actually a venus flytrap in which those with enough money can pay to torture the captured tourists. (It costs the most to torture an American, which is why these kids are so highly prized; but the most sadistic torturer in the film is, significantly, an American businessman out to get some thrills.) Ultimately, Roth is talented but immature. That adolescent immaturity serves him well in the opening half, but the final scenes are illogical and over-the-top, if not just stupid. The best scenes exist right in the middle, as the two protagonists begin to sense that there's something sinister just below the surface, and try to find their missing Israeli friend, and I will say that this is the one film of the marathon whose disturbing images wouldn't leave my head after I watched it, whatever that's worth.

-15-
The Return of the Vampire (U.S., 1944) * * *
D: Lew Landers

Noticeably misguided by the monster mashups of the 40's (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and so on), this knockoff of the Universal horror pictures is still far more interesting and entertaining than it has any right to be. It's most notable for being a Bela Lugosi vampire movie: Lugosi actually seldom played vampires after Dracula, being afraid of typecasting (career-wise, he should have embraced it instead). Here, he is Armand Tesla, an occult historian who plots vampiric domination from his headquarters in a foggy cemetery, and served by a werewolf (the makeup rips off the Jack Pierce work on Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man). The whole thing takes place in England during the war, and the Nazi blitzkrieg of London is actually worked into the plot. You forgive its weaknesses because of its fast pace and interesting digressions; it has more atmosphere than many of the Universal cash-ins from this period, and, despite its setting and Lugosi's advancing age, has some of the quality of a 30's horror film like Dracula's Daughter.

-16-
Masters of Horror: Imprint (U.S., 2006) * * 1/2
D: Takashi Miike

I might raise this rating in another month, since with each passing day I become convinced its a better film than it seemed while I was watching it. Miike is the Japanese auteur so prolific that the IMDB currently credits him with 70 films made since his debut in 1991. He is not strictly a horror director, although his imagery and subject matter in his horror, gangster, and action films are so extreme and shocking that he has quickly become the crowned king of "Asia Extreme," the Americanized term for those Hong Kong and Japanese directors who seem to try to top each other in tackling the taboo. The best film of Miike's I've seen is Audition, which I would readily recommend to the adventurous. He's also made Visitor Q, a film that made me want to scrub my eyes and brain with heavy-duty soap. Showtime elected not to air his episode of Masters of Horror in the United States (it went on in the U.K.), but that's a shame, because his contribution to the palette of the series' "horror" is invaluable. Anyway, the only thing that keeps my opinion harsh on this installment is the performance of American star Billy Drago (the rest of the cast is Japanese, speaking English, sometimes brokenly)--it's simply one of the worst performances ever put on film. But this twisting ghost story is beautiful to look at, even in its many grotesque scenes, as it recounts the horrible history of two prostitutes in a netherworldly brothel.

-17-
The Devil's Backbone (Spain, 2001) * * * 1/2
D: Guillermo del Toro

Del Toro is a true "master of horror," though he hasn't contributed to the Showtime series. He began making films in Mexico, with the vampire film Chronos, and made his American debut with the monster movie Mimic. Before making his excellent comic book adaptation of Hellboy, he released this film under the radar. Set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, it begins as a young boy, Carlos, is abandoned at an orphanage/private school in the middle of the desert; an unexploded bomb sits upright in the center of the courtyard, menacingly. As Carlos attempts to fit in with the other children, he quickly becomes aware of another presence in the ancient building--the ghost of a child, who seems to be seeking Carlos out. The film is co-produced by Pedro Almodovar, and one can almost feel his hand on the film: it's a film of warmth and humanity, with richly developed characters and a nostalgic sense of childhood tempered by tragic violence. But Del Toro deserves all the credit, and the vivid cinematography and the ghoulish sensibility are entirely his. Like the best ghost stories, it really has a gripping story to tell about histories, tragedy, and greed.

-18-
Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing (U.S., 2006) * *
D: Tobe Hooper

Hooper is a long way from his best work--The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Poltergeist (1982)--and his episode from the first season's Masters of Horror was pretty mediocre. "The Damned Thing," the premiere episode of the second season, is much better, but still a distance from anything worthwhile. The story--reportedly based on an Ambrose Bierce story, though I have no idea how faithful it is--begins well, as a family shares warm laughter around a dinner table, and then, a minute later, some black matter drips on the father's hand, he panics, swears that "the damned thing" is back, and shoots his wife with a shotgun. After pursuing his son into the yard, he is ripped apart by an invisible creature. But from there, the story and characters become sketchy: the boy has grown into Sean Patrick Flannery (from "Young Indiana Jones"), and his wife has left him because he's never fully recovered from his childhood tragedy. His paranoia becomes justified as strange, sudden bursts of violence and erratic behavior begin to afflict the townspeople, eventually leading to riots and murder. Pretty quickly. Perhaps if another half hour were added to the middle of the film, it might feel more like a complete story: we need to know these people in order for their mental breakdowns to affect us. Still, while I might shrug off the climax, the very final shot takes Hooper's latest pet technique--blurring and distorting the image while the camera shakes, to emulate chaos--into the realm of the pure abstract. As a family is attacked in their car, shattered glass flies about the frame and almost seems to hover, while we hear feral growls and terrified screams. Nothing much else to find interesting here.

-19-
Night Watch (Russia, 2004) * * *
D: Timur Bekmambetov

The first of a planned trilogy (the second installment has already been released in Russia), this adaptation of a Russian fantasy novel begins with visions of an epic war between the people of the "light" and the people of the "dark," and it really looks like a lower-budgeted Lord of the Rings. But it's not that kind of a fantasy. After the dense narration drops us off in the present day, we begin to follow the story of Anton Gorodetsky, a reluctant agent of the "Night Watch"--supernatural creatures, living among humans, who keep a close eye on those creatures whose sinister activities take place at night. You know, vampires and such. With its bitter humor and sensational camera work, this actually reminded me of the Hungarian film from last year, Kontroll (about subway ticket-takers who work third shift). The supernatural elements are fascinating at first, particularly in the elliptical, unexpected way that they're introduced--my favorite is the girl who has been trapped in the form of an owl--but eventually it all adds up to a silly clash on a rooftop that's straight out of a Highlander film. Here's hoping the sequels foster the imaginative side, instead; so far, it's a great introduction, and now we just need to see these characters take a journey.

-20-
Session 9 (U.S., 2001) * * *
D: Brad Anderson

I have a soft spot for haunted house films, and one of my best Halloweens was spent watching The Legend of Hell House, The Haunting, and The House on Haunted Hill almost back-to-back. Session 9 is a haunted house film with some significant differences: the haunted house is an abandoned mental institution that dates back to the 19th century; it's a real place, and was really shot there; and the characters are not psychics or detectives, but working-class asbestos removers. I've always wished more horror directors would pick up where Stanley Kubrick left off with The Shining, and it's a pleasure to see that Brad Anderson's doing it. Granted, sometimes he copies a little too closely (title cards announcing the day of the week, for example), but the important thing is that he captures the stillness of a haunted house, and gives the audience time to wonder what might be lurking around the corner or at the end of a dark hallway. For much of the film, nothing happens at all. They bicker. They eat lunch. They complain about each other's music. They remove asbestos. But one of their number begins to investigate the recording archives in his spare time, working his way through each of the nine interview sessions with a young woman with multiple personalities. Another of their team seems to be mentally unravelling. They only work during the day, but when one of them decides to visit at night...well, this movie scared the hell out of me, and for that I recommend it.

-21-
The Crazies (U.S., 1973) * * *
D: George A. Romero

Sort of a sequel to Night of the Living Dead a few years before he made its real sequel, this has no zombies, but follows the same theme of the disintegration of a society in the face of a viral threat. The specific point is made that the military and government structure that is meant to contain and eliminate a plague outburst actually just exacerbates the chaos; the problem, you see, is that there's no way to tell who's been infected and who hasn't. One day, as in "The Damned Thing", someone simply has a breakdown and begins killing. But unlike Hooper's film, Romero doesn't spend a lot of time on dramatic mental breakdowns. He's more concerned with how functioning societies fall apart. You see this in microcosm, as we follow a group of townspeople attempting to escape from the quarantined area by travelling across the countryside, and in macrocosm, as government officials and scientists talk past each other and get caught up in the panicking mob. An effective and intelligent low-budget thriller, proving Romero was way ahead of his B-movie peers.

-22-
Vampire Circus (U.K., 1972) * * *
D: Robert Young

Halloween began with a late-period Hammer studios horror film. The plot begins with a lengthy prologue in which a vampiric count is slain by a mob (he has been seducing the wives of the villagers), his mistress/victim brutally beaten. She vows revenge and keeps his body preserved in a cave. Over a decade later, the revenge is enacted upon the children of the mob, and the retribution comes in the form of the titular circus, which offers disconcerting magic tricks such as animals turning into people right before the eyes of the audience. (There's a lot of nudity and body paint, bringing to mind Cirque de Soleil--another circus of vampires.) I wanted to watch something light, cheesy, entertaining, and Halloweenish while dealing with trick or treaters, and this sufficed nicely, though it's considerably more sexy and gory, by turns, than I'd remembered.

-23-
Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria [from Fantasia] (U.S., 1940)
D: Wilfred Jackson

Iconic Halloween entertainment, this: I vividly remember it playing during the Halloween specials on either the Magical World of Disney ABC network show or on the Disney Channel, squeezed between similarly holiday-themed shorts from the Disney studios circa the 1940's. We watched this segment between films to enhance the mood. I maintain that Fantasia is the greatest animated film ever made.

-24-
House of Usher (U.S., 1960) * * 1/2
D: Roger Corman

TCM was showing Vincent Price movies all night; we passed on The Masque of the Red Death, which we actually saw theatrically about two years ago, for the second feature, another Poe/Corman film, House of Usher. This has a really impressive pedigree: not just the presence of Corman and Price, but a faithful script by Richard Matheson and a score by Les Baxter. The only problem is that the script is too faithful (a mistake Corman wouldn't repeat, certainly). It just doesn't have enough plot to sustain feature length. Another problem is that the pivotal character of Madeline is treated like a typical 50's glamour queen; she should look empty of life, decimated. But the finale is handled well, and there's something very pleasing and comforting about watching an old dark house film with Vincent Price--and shot in Scope, with bright colors. You've also got to dig those paintings of all of Roderick Usher's relatives...straight out of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride!

Witches' Hammer

Witches' Hammer (Czech Republic, 1969) * * * 1/2
D: Otakar Vavra

At one point in Otakar Vavra's document of a 17th Century witch hunt in the Czech Republic, an accused witch, tied to a stake, screams through rising smoke, "I was made to acknowledge my guilt! I was tortured for nine days." The Inquisitor, watching the proceedings with the esteemed lady of the estate, assures her, "That's a lie. She was interrogated with the usual application of thumb-screws and boot. Of course, that's quite common."

In October 2006 it's difficult to watch this scene without thinking immediately of the Bush administration's queasy attempt to redefine the word "torture" as well as the Geneva Conventions, with the intent of interrogating accused terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons abroad. A common argument levelled by critics of the administration is one that forms the central obsession of Vavra's powerful film: when someone is tortured, they will say anything. The information should not be acted upon. Furthermore, it is more likely to be inaccurate and spoken only to cease the torture.

What does torture really mean? The Inquisitor, one Boblig of Edelstadt, believes that thumb-screws are not torture, but in his own secret court he applies even crueller punishments, so perhaps he only parses the word out of diplomatic respect in the presence of fine persons. Say what you want in the light of day, as long as you can do what you wish at night. The lady certainly doesn't want to hear any of it. The Bishop, who appointed him, remains aloof and deliberately separate from Boblig's witch-hunt, only expressing alarm when his friends attempt to defend those who have been accused of witchcraft. Forming an argument about the method of torture is meaningless when the one person in the position to stop it will end the conversation at the mention of the word "witch." Everyone outside of Boblig's immediate court clears a path out of fear. Those within, like Boblig himself, indulge in every hypocrisy because they gain the spoils of the hunt.

It's a matter of social climbing, and Vavra might overstate his case, for he has made Boblig the central character of his story, and follows the man from a filth-covered innkeeper (retired from a position as director of Inquisitions) to the most powerful man in the community, wallowing in his greed, throwing feasts for his close friends; meanwhile, they plot to see whose estate they can claim next by accusing the owner of sodomy with Satan at nearby "Peter's Rock." Inquisitions are expensive, Boblig carefully explains when he is first interviewed for the job, but Inquisitions pay for themselves, as the witches' belongings and homes are claimed for the court. When a skeptic scoffs, "A fat lot we'd get out of those beggars," he makes clear that he has no idea how quickly the flames of a witch-hunt can spread, and how lucrative it can really be. Soon Boblig is deliberately targeting enemies and anyone for whose power or privelege he's become jealous. Those who express a privately-whispered protest are reassured that Boblig has "forty years' experience." And anyone who speaks up to defend an accused is immediately put under suspicion: why would you defend someone in league with Satan, who already has a flock of bloody-thumbed witnesses?

"Witch" is the sensitive word. "Witch" is the word to seize power. It might be "terrorist," or, if that doesn't grant you what you need, "enemy combatant." Every law has loopholes. In fact, in one scene the Deacon, the man with the firmest moral integrity in the narrative, and the rare religious man with a deep and studious regard for law and science, pulls one of Boblig's books from the shelf to directly point out the very loopholes that allow Boblig to torture his accused, promise them cessation and peace if they name names, and burn them at the stake anyway.

The Deacon is the subject of intense, if unspoken, jealousy by Boblig and others in Velke Losiny because of his ravishing young cook. He's single, and much is read into their relationship; in fact, much of it is true, but he is still one of the most respected men in the community. He has actually ended their affair to devote himself to his duties as a clergyman, but, as he says late in the film, he will not discuss his relationship with God to the lowly ones who deal with the Inquisitor. He is brought down. First his friends, then the young cook are taken before the court and tortured into confessions. When he is arrested, he asks to see his accusers, assured that they will not lie to his face. In the most compelling scene in the film, each is brought before him, accusing him, then begging for forgiveness. He studies their bloodied limbs, forgives them, and refuses to admit anything to Boblig. Finally, the cook begins repeating the testimony that has been scripted for her by the wardens, but can't bring herself to address the Deacon directly with the lies; when she sees him, she breaks down. Then the Deacon is taken away.

Vavra is clearly influenced by Carl Theodor Dreyer (which is like saying that a novelist is influenced by The Odyssey--who isn't?), but the parallels to The Passion of Joan of Arc extend from the loving (and economically necessary) use of black-and-white, to the close-ups of anguished faces, and to the fact that much of the courtroom dialogue is taken directly from transcripts. Still, the license of the Czech New Wave allows him to illustrate more explicitly the motivations of the cruel men. He begins with our narrator--a fevered man sitting in a dark cell, describing in sordid and too-fantastic detail the methods of Satan's disciples--whispering, "Sin reached the world through woman. Woman is sin." We are quickly shown a woman's fully nude form slipping out of a bath, and Vavra cuts across this giddy utopia of nude or semi-nude women bathing, gossiping, nursing, laughing. In the early scene in the church, there's a throwaway shot of a female at worship, her hands folded in prayer squeezing against her chest, while the parishioner standing next to her steals a furtive glance of the moving breasts. Later these passions will be freed for all the priveleged who sit on Boblig's court, as they leeringly inspect the pretty young cook for the Devil's mark. While Vavra might initiate you into the sin game in the opening scene, he's not in the exploitation business; the opening scene is poetic, lively--the later scenes acting as a righteous call for outrage.

Mercilessly, this play happens as it happened, and travels along to its necessary, despairing and cynical end-point. Boblig, rising drunkenly from his banquet table, the others passed out from the orgy, almost addresses the camera when he declares that now no man is above him. Was it all just a matter of wounded ego? In fact, the witch-hunt began in the smallest imaginable manner: an old woman steals away her sacrament in a folded cloth; when questioned by the furious clergymen, she says a witch instructed her to give it to her cow, so that it would give milk again. Although the Deacon tries to assure everyone that local superstitions are common and harmless, he isn't heeded, and the wheel is set rolling.

It can be a bit heavy-handed, as any screed can be, but Vavra's approach is, for the most part, measured. The film clips along, and he finds ways of sharply defining even minor characters--everyone has a moral crisis, for in the days of a witch-hunt, everyone must choose a side. When Vavra calls for outrage in the film's final scenes of torture, you're ready to take your marching orders. There are no witches. The Devil, as the Deacon tries vainly to explain, is only in the hand that harms.

The existing, 2003 U.S. DVD from Facets is badly in need of an upgrade. The titles are lazy and fail to keep up with the action, not to mention riddled with grammatical errors; the packaging is absurdly exploitative, rewriting this stunning film as Euro-sleaze for the grindhouse theaters. It's still worth hunting down.

Satantango

Satantango (Hungary, 1994) * * * *
D: Bela Tarr

I arrived at ten to noon, having decided not very much before that I would attend, and hastily packing some hidden bottled water and a collection of Marvel Comics' 1970's "Son of Satan" for the breaks (this was Satantango, after all). I wanted to find something like an airplane pillow, but had nothing around the house that would suit. It was a rainy day, a "Bela Tarr" day, as Tom Yoshikami, curator of the Cinematheque, put it. He was there to greet us as we stood outside, huddled like grim Bela Tarr characters, waiting for the morning politics & commerce conference to be let out; Tom, by contrast, was hellishly excited, and when we did pile in he snapped pictures of the lot of us, the damned passengers on the S.S. Satantango. By David Bordwell's count, there were about 35 of us at the start. Surprisingly, not so many would leave by 9pm, when Tarr's 435-minute, 26-reel film would be completely unspooled. As Tom explained, the film would be shown as the director intended: in one sitting, with two "intervals"--a ten-minute break for some much-needed stretching after the first two hours and twenty minutes, then an hour-long break for dinner after the next two-hour segment. The final segment would be a marathon three hours. (Tom, having--like the rest of us--never seen the film before, actually got the segment running times mixed up, and told us that the middle section was three hours. Not that it made much of a difference, as you lose track of time within the film.) At an earlier Cinematheque screening during the Godard series, Tom had promised some kind of certificate would be printed up and handed out to everyone at the end of Satantango, but no such luck. Anyway, by the end, the rewards of the film were obvious. Although whatever I say about the film must be preluded by mentioning that David Bordwell, at the end of the dinner break, was telling us to keep Satantango's secrets to ourselves, and that if our friends who didn't come asked us how the film was, we were only to say that it was the greatest filmgoing experience of our lives.

Well, it's up there. Bela Tarr is one of the few contemporary directors to make work so directly inspired by the brilliant Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Zvaygintsev, director of 2003's The Return, is the only other director to seem as influenced by Tarkovsky). Tarkovsky's films are of a singular style: extremely long takes and tracking shots, with an emphasis on nature--falling rain, the wind, running streams--and with signature motifs: stray dogs running through the frame, intense portrait studies as his characters stand stock-still, looking off into the distance, and a touch of the fable, or magical realism, in the plotting. Almost all of these traits--even the stray dogs--are incorporated into Satantango. But Tarr is too unique a director to owe everything to Tarkovsky--it's only that Tarkovsky is the easiest frame of reference (Robert Bresson is another, in the way Tarr directs his actors to show little to no expression while delivering their lines, and the way he lovingly frames their stark and stock-still faces in black-and-white.) Tarr has his own hallmarks: most obviously, he is obsessed with creating a sense of everything being filmed in "real time." His edits are almost invisible, when they do occur, and Satantango reportedly only contains approximately 150 shots. (Most films, a fraction of the length, contain thousands and thousands.) His landscapes are always despairingly grim--here, a muddy and stormy wasteland that its farmers must take pains to traverse, strapping on boots and layers upon layers of clothing. And the buildings in the world of Bela Tarr always look uninhabitable, with the paint peeling off the walls and the floors covered in dirt and cigarette butts. It's as though Tarr must create the most unsparing landscape in order to achieve his moments of transcendental beauty.

Satantango is based upon a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Apparently in synch with the source material, it is arranged like a tango: six steps forward, six steps back (but not in that order). Some scenes advance the plot, while others step backward and show the same scene from a different character's perspective, so the audience slowly learns what is happening to multiple characters concurrently as they criss-cross each other's paths, each trapped in his own world to the point of obsession and paranoia. In this, the villagers and farmers are not very different from the citizens of the village of Werckmeister Harmonies, the more accessible feature that Tarr subsequently made; in Werckmeister, the villagers are in such a panic at the coming arrival of "The Prince"--a sideshow freak who delivers fascist speeches to accompany the presentation of a preserved whale--that their fear of riots and violence almost seems to make the mayhem happen. Nothing is so pronounced in Satantango, but the idea is similar: two men, Irimias (Mihaly Vig), described at one point as a "wizard," and his lackey Petrina (Putyi Horvath), were thought to be dead, thanks to the rumors spread by a young thug in their employ, but one day are rumored to be "resurrected" and on their way back to the small farming community that Irimias once lorded over. The announcement of his coming and its effects upon the paranoid, frightened farmers dominates the first two segments. Schmidt, Mrs. Schmidt, Kraner, and Futaki--who's sleeping with Mrs. Schmidt, as much of the village seems to be--were on the cusp of escaping from the village with a pool of cash; Halics, a timid schoolteacher, tries to make plans with Mrs. Schmidt of his own; but all these plans seem doomed upon Irimias' arrival. The proprietor of the local tavern is in an outright panic over Irimias: he thinks the man will want to claim ownership of the bar, as Irimias can, in an indirect way, claim credit for the man's modest wealth. On one drunken night, all of these characters and more gather at the tavern to dance to a maddening, broken tune played by accordian, feverishly stewing in their pot, while just outside, two strays--a young, damaged girl with some rat poison, and a doctor who relies upon the care of the villagers to sustain his life--stagger through the night and, freed from anyone's care, tangle with death.

We do see Irimias and Petrina as they journey to the village. Most stunningly, in one long shot we follow them down the avenue of another town, while a windstorm sweeps garbage up from behind them, as though they themselves are the billowing wind. We actually meet them as they're being reprimanded by a police captain--told that they're outlaws, and asked to contribute to society. Petrina calls Irimias a poet; what people seem to fear the most about Irimias is his charisma, for he seems able to command anyone to do anything. But he's also deeply disturbed, and in a mad fit in a local bar not far from the police station declares that he'll blow up everyone, as a droning hum which only he can hear builds and builds. (The idea of a "calling" noise which only one person can hear is repeated, crucially, a few more times in the film.) Sometimes he is treated as a Jesus, but he warns one character that he will liberate no one, and it becomes clear that he has more diabolical aims as he arranges for the purchase of some explosives from a dealer who is, it seems, faced with a pretty stark moral choice. The final, three-hour stretch of this film spins in unexpected directions, and we are left with plenty of time to ruminate on the film's themes of fear, moral crimes, and penance.

What's most astonishing about Satantango is that, at seven-hours-plus, I can't imagine removing a single scene. What seems insignificant or like "padding" early on gains greater meaning at the film's conclusion; it's actually a tightly plotted film that could be longer, and more obvious, but is trimmed lean. What accounts for the film's length are those very long shots in which very little happens. We watch characters recede into the distance on errands, or disappear into the darkness on doomed journeys; we study the wretched existence of the doctor for an endless interval as he struggles to support his drinking--and his voyeurism (for he plots the comings and goings of every villager in exhaustive notebooks, while living a deeply internal life); we follow the mad satan's tango on that pivotal, drunken night until every dancer collapses--and still the accordian player summons the strength to continue another tune. There is a lot of talk about "eternity," particularly from Irimias--humorously, at one point a policeman, editing one of Irimias' screeds, says "cut all that about 'eternity'"--and certainly Tarr wants to play with the viewer's conception of time. It's as though he knows you were dreading the viewing of Satantango, and knows that you expect to spend a lifetime in this theater, so why not discuss it? By opening up that end of the discussion, Satantango becomes much more than a film about fear: it becomes a film about time and lifespans and the long crawl everyone takes toward death. Like The Brothers Karamazov, Satantango is a work of great length that is able to incorporate a great variety of ideas within its chapters. By the time it's over, you do feel as though you've spent all day reading a novel from beginning to end, and the result is just as disorienting and just as satisfying.

We staggered out of the theater, our newly formed club, our elite, at 9pm, and it was snowing: the first snowstorm of the winter. (Devilishly enough, the film is even set during the last weeks of October.) I had been inside so long that a whole season had passed by. By next morning, the images did not leave my head. I still see the horses escaping the slaughterhouse, clopping through the empty town square. I still see the little girl thrashing cruelly with the cat, exercising her power. I still see the lunatic ringing the knell. Even parts that seemed irrelevant, confusing, or infuriating seem to have sealed to the greater image. There is a great clarity to that 435 minutes, and every minute seems vital. It's a wonder that Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr's next film, could cram so much incident into two-and-a-half-hours (so much more than happens in Satantango). I wonder how much more weight and meaning it would have had at twelve! Susan Sontag said about Satantango that she would "be glad to see it every year for the rest of [her] life," but even as I prepare to face Tarr again in a month's time (with his considerably shorter film, Damnation), I think it will take at least another year before I'm ready for Satantango again.

Remarkably, Facets is releasing the film on DVD. I can only think it would suffer, given that at home there is no compelling reason to stick with the film through thick and thin, and more distractions are likely to intrude. Still, I'm glad it will get more viewers, and my advice to everyone: set aside a day, turn off the cell phone, get comfortable, sit it out to each of its two "intervals," and open yourself up to Tarr's hypnosis. It's a masterpiece, but you must meet him more than half-way: you have to walk the full length of that muddy road, to that church-tower, that speck in the distance.

A big thank you to Tom Yoshikami for sharing the photos: above, we await entry to Satantango; below, ready for the screening (I'm four rows back in the black sweatshirt, glasses and gray hair, dead center; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson are front and center, as always)

All You Need is a Girl and a Gun, Part 3

Band of Outsiders (Bande a part) (France, 1964) * * * *
Alphaville (France, 1965) * * 1/2
Pierrot le fou (France, 1965) * * *
D: Jean-Luc Godard

At this point in the Cinematheque series of the early films of Jean-Luc Godard, you can see Godard arriving at a crossroads. While continuing to receive great critical acclaim (if not exactly box-office success), he finds he can continue to produce a couple of features a year with a relatively low budget and a great deal of creative freedom. Yet after what might be his greatest cinematic achievement, Band of Outsiders, his next films seem to be treading water, however entertainingly.

Band of Outsiders was a film I admired when I first saw it on television a number of years ago; but it's a revelation in a theater packed with enthusiastic Godard fans (old and new). Like Breathless and Contempt, the genius of it is that it manages to combine comedy and satire with an underlying sense of tragedy--even if nothing outwardly tragic happens. And all the while, Godard continues to invent new, delightful cinematic tricks. Godard's "muse" (and I put it in quotation marks because it is now her nickname) Anna Karina plays a seemingly much younger girl, Odile. The benefactors with whom she is staying keep a giant stash of money in an upstairs wardrobe. She lets this bit of information pass to newfound acquaintances Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), two young rogues who quickly draw her into a plan to rob the house. Odile goes along with the plan half-heartedly; more, one suspects, out of loneliness than anything else. She seems to have led a sequestered life, and while her past is not filled in by Godard, one surmises from Karina's alternately shy and carefree performance that she's had a few friends, a few enemies, and a boyfriend or two, but has never had a great night out. She seeks to remedy that with her two rebels: in the film's most memorable scene, she dances the Madison with Franz and Arthur--Godard occasionally removes the music so that we only hear the tapping and stomping of their feet and the panting of their breath--until, winded, first Franz drops out, then Arthur; Odile continues, as entertained to have no partner as she was to have two. She is completely absorbed in her own universe. This may be why Godard referred to the film as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka." Odile would be a perfect substitute for Alice--she is also driven by curiosity--but there is an underlying dread that is signature Kafka. The dance must end, the robbery must be done, and Arthur shows his true, darker nature when they are alone in the house and confronted with the act. Still, there's farce to come, and an ending of dizzying elation, much in the spirit of the opening of his friend Truffaut's film Jules and Jim. But my favorite wrench thrown into the works is the narrator's penchant for attributing cosmically profound observations to each of his characters at comically random moments. That narrator, naturally, is Godard.

Band of Outsiders is the film where Godard got his formula right (however he may have been resistant to the very idea of a formula). The anarchic, youthful spirit of Breathless and A Woman is a Woman is perfectly tempered by a wiser, more well-rounded treatment of its young cast: the characters are much more interesting, and more believably real. Godard's treatment of human relationships, post-Contempt, becomes more sophisticated with this film, and it is the apex of his art. From here, Alphaville seems like a half-held thought, something hastily scribbled in his notebook, and deliberately put to film before the thought took too much structure, and spoiled its surprises. Alphaville is Godard's science fiction film, and seems to form part of a New Wave sci-fi trilogy alongside Truffaut's adaptation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Chris Marker's seminal short film La Jetee. I love French science fiction, but the problem with Alphaville is that Godard does not. He seems to detest the genre. Granted, this leads to the brilliant and influential decision to merge the genre with one that he does love: the crime picture. This may be the first science fiction film noir, and without Alphaville, you probably would not have Blade Runner (a film that more closely resembles Godard's than the novel upon which it's based). But one conceptual stroke of genius does not necessarily elevate an entire 90-minute film to the level of masterpiece. Godard decided to cast Eddie Constantine as his long-running character Lemmy Caution--sort of a 40's equivalent to Bogart's Sam Spade. Constantine was older, and had aged; with his wide, black eyes and pale, pockmarked face, he looks like he could have been better suited to playing The Lizard in a Spider-Man film. The charm seems to have also weathered over time. Lemmy Caution travels through "intergalactic space" to Alphaville, on a mission to thwart a professor who's building a deadly weapon. Instead, he falls for the professor's daughter (Anna Karina, obviously), who has succumbed to the emotionally sterile environment of Alphaville, in which sex is provided as readily as fast food, poets are executed (poetically, off the diving board of a swimming pool), and a master computer has installed itself as a dictator, barking commands with the froggy, straining voice of a tracheotomy-patient. That last part gets really annoying by the end of the film. While one can forgive Godard his central conceit--despite the futuristic setting, no special effects are used, and the audience is expected to apply its imagination to fill in the details--the fact is that the story's plot was already stale by 1965, and Godard was too disinterested in the SF genre to bother enriching it in any way. This isn't unexpected: Godard was never too interested in plots, which he offers, in both Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, as summarizing fragments told in staccato by the narrator, but rather in human relationships. But this is sabotaged by the plot: Caution is not in love with the professor's daughter, and we know this, however much Godard might insist. Those who had a problem with the Deckard-Rachel love affair in Blade Runner will never buy this one. So there you have it: without a plot that's worth caring about and which Godard abandons at the starting gate, and without characters that are at all appealing or convincing, you are stuck with a stylistic experiment that will either spark your cylinders or leave you cold. La Jetee, with its high-concept plot and a love story worth caring about, is much better, and over an hour shorter.

After that experimentation, Godard returns to the familiar with Pierrot le fou, yet another film about two young criminals falling in love while on the run from the law until violence intervenes, and unsurprisingly starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It's shot in Scope and saturated with color, like Contempt (both Alphaville and Band of Outsiders are black-and-white). You get the feeling that Godard wanted to go back and remake Contempt without the compromises forced upon him by his financiers. No Bardot here: the comparitively boyish Karina is actually far more attractive, and that probably has everything to do with Godard's camera, which is capturing his "muse." Not to mention that she's an incomparably more gifted actress. Pierrot le fou, which is divided by its author narrator into chapters, begins as a domestic satire: Belmondo, as Ferdinand Griffon, barely tolerates his socialite wife; as he's dragged to one of her parties, he drifts among the attendees, eavesdropping upon absurd conversations--some of them merely product endorsements! Surely the party scene in The Graduate was influenced by this. (He even meets director Sam Fuller, who compares filmmaking to war.) When he offers to take the young Marianne Renoir (Karina) home, she divulges her intense love for him, and although he doesn't seem to pay her much attention, he's quickly drawn into a gun-running scheme possibly tied to the Algerian war--possibly not--and becomes a Clyde to her Bonnie as they steal cars and cash and go on the run and into hiding. All of this happens quickly and deliberately nonsensically; Godard doesn't expect you to believe the mechanics of the plot that get them where they'll go: the important thing is that they get going. Eventually the love affair intensifies, some songs are sung (unlike their earlier "musical" collaboration, A Woman is a Woman, they actually get to sing in some lovely sequences--but the music never rises, and seems to be played on a toy piano in the distance, as this is Godard and nothing can ever be 100% conventional). Finally, there is a kidnapping, some grisly killings that foreshadow Week-End, a key betrayal, and a spent finale, in which Belmondo resigns himself to his sad clown reputation with a series of tragic decisions.

Pierrot le fou is not Godard at his best, yet it seems to be a clip-show of Godard past and (immediate) future. The songs call to mind A Woman is a Woman, the plot Breathless and Le Petit Soldat; the technique of using blue-sky beauty to counterpoint the dissolution of a relationship owes to Contempt, and the distracted, almost disinterested narration owes to Band of Outsiders. But the broad, antiseptic satire and the splashes of brutal violence foreshadow both Week-End and the overtly political films to come. One suspects that Godard is about to make a drastic change in his approach, but in the meantime, Pierrot le fou seems a bit like treading water. Most distressingly, he's beginning to show the seams in his bag of tricks. At one point, as though worried that his audience might be involving themselves too much in the plot and characters, he flashes the neon word "Cinema." Much like the incessant flashing of the neon "E=MC2" in Alphaville, this is pretty lame. Godard was a critic before he was a filmmaker, and at this crossroads, one can wonder if Godard will finally allow himself to surrender to the techniques of storytelling--bourgeois, yes, but they work--or continue to distance himself from the audience by sabotaging any hint of rhythm or emotional investment with the characters. I'm worried I might know how this one ends.

All You Need is a Girl and a Gun, Part 2

Le Petit Soldat (France, 1960) * * * 1/2
Les Carabiniers (France, 1963) * * *
Contempt (Le Mepris) (France, 1963) * * * *
Operation Beton/Une Histoire D'eau (France, 1954/58)
D: Jean-Luc Godard

The Cinematheque series on the pre-1968 works of Jean-Luc Godard has continued over the past two weeks with three films released in 1963, proving, if nothing else, that Godard was one of the most prolific directors of the French New Wave. (Actually, Le Petit Soldat was completed in 1960 but withheld by French censors until 1963.) The films also make clear the astonishing variety of subject matter Godard was attempting to tackle in his early years, while keeping his very particular stamp on each film. You could see three random clips from Le Petit Soldat, Les Carabiniers, and Contempt, and identify each as a separate film, but at the same time identify none but Godard as the auteur.

Yet the first two are "war" films. Le Petit Soldat ("The Little Soldier") would make an ideal double feature with the better-known (and, indeed, more highly regarded) Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo--both are set during the Algerian war as Algeria struggled against its French occupiers for independence. Bruno (Michel Subor) is a young man very much like the one played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless: an anarchic punk on the run. Ostensibly he belongs to a right-wing, anti-Algerian group, and is ordered to kill a spy sympathetic to the Algerian cause. He falls in love with another Algerian sympathizer, Veronica (Anna Karina, making her first film with Godard), which causes his fellow right-wingers to suspect him of being a double agent. It's a noir film, it's a political film, and it's a quasi-documentary, with Godard adopting the techniques of cinema-verite. But ultimately it is a film about a girl, and a man who finds himself being brutally tortured more or less because of her: he is a martyr for the cause of the girl, and not Algeria or France. The war was still going on when the film was completed, so understandably the French government suppressed the film until Godard's reputation was won and the war lost. I missed the screening of both this and Les Carabiniers due to a schedule conflict, but having seen it a year ago on Turner Classic Movies, what stands out is the transition from the iconic Godardian mix of young gangsters, existential romance, and cinematic experimentation in the early scenes, to the brutally realistic and drawn-out torture of Bruno in the final scenes. The effect is of philosophy and romance being simultaneously stripped away and seared into the flesh.

Les Carabiniers ("The Riflemen"), though grouped by the Cinematheque as another "war film," is by contrast a savage satire and fantasy along the lines of Godard's later film, Week-End. In a country that might as well be a more gritty version of the Marx Brothers' Freedonia, two farmers (Albert Jeross and Marino Mase) succumb to the propaganda of their country's army--a war is being arranged, and soldiers are needed--so they enlist under the promise of seeing distant countries, and the opportunity to kill and rape anyone they please. What follows is rather jaunty. We see postcards the boys send back to their cheerful wives. We witness the chaos and the murder. Eventually, the anarchic joy subsides and the weight of the war begins to crush them. Seldom seen, it's actually started making the rounds on TCM over the last couple of years; it's a sharp satire, if a bit obvious and heavy-handed. But when seen in the shadow of the Iraq war--and in particular the reports of American soldiers raping and killing an Iraqi girl, and slaughtering her family, before officers attempted to cover it up--it becomes even more distressing. This is essential Godard, if for no other reason than to see the beginning of a path he will follow for much of the rest of his career, sacrificing subtlety for confrontational politics. I think it works here, because it's kept timelessly simple, almost allegorical.

The first Godard film I ever liked was Contempt. Based on the Italian novel Il Disprezzo ("The Ghost at Noon") by Alberto Moravia, it's set in Italy, on the sets of the renowned Cinecitta Studios, where Fellini was making his classic films. This is considered Godard's attempt to make a mainstream, Cinemascope production with a name cast, and as such seems to have split Godard fans between those who consider it one of the greatest films ever made (it usually appears very high on Sight & Sound's critic-polling top 10 list) and those who merely consider it good. Godard, though still married to Anna Karina (his marriage was on the rocks), this time substituted a world-famous star as the film's muse--Brigitte Bardot, whose best-known film to this day is Roger Vadim's mediocre And God Created Woman. Here she is a "typist" married to the older, cynical playwright Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), who, by contract with Godard, dresses like he's in a film noir and lights a cigarette in every scene. He also carries a gun, fulfilling Godard's notion that "all you need is a girl and a gun," and opening up the threat of violence in what is otherwise a very languid, brightly-lit, Mediterranean film. Paul is hired to rewrite a script for The Odyssey which is being adapted by the legendary German director Fritz Lang (playing himself). The American producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), wants more sex and action, and less of the arty stuff. (Famously, he says, "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I get out my checkbook.") While Paul seems bilingual, his wife Camille only uses the language stumblingly; this doesn't seem to bother Jeremy, intent on seducing her. Jeremy knows very little French, but grins lasciviously while she talks. Fritz Lang is fluent in English and French, but seems the most isolated of all of them, concentrating only on his film, and bemused by these creatures that keep fluttering around him and getting in his way.

Language presents just one barrier for this quartet at the center of Contempt. Paul, Jeremy, and Lang argue over whether or not Ulysses' wife Penelope was faithful while he was away on his long voyage. Paul, meanwhile, encourages his wife to spend time with Jeremy, and she suspects him of having an affair with Jeremy's assistant Francesca (Giorgia Moll). He is afraid of losing her, but at the same time lets her leave. Is it because it is the easy and correct thing for his career, and hers? Similarly, he greatly respects Lang, but has been hired to mutilate his film. To follow the path to success is also to tragically destroy--in one case, a work of art, and in the other, a relationship. The secreted gun is never fired. At one point, Francesca is discovered toying with it; later, Camille unloads it, essentially emasculating Paul while she runs off with Jeremy. She doesn't run off because she wants to--rather, it's the only option left to her. This act, and the tragic violence that does follow, offers up the ironic possibility that now Fritz Lang will be able to complete the film to his own artistic ideals.

Behind the scenes, Godard was forced to compromise by producers who may have been directly parodied by the caricature of Jeremy Prokosch. The rough cut did not present the quantity of Bardot flesh that they were expecting. As a result, Godard agreed to shoot a sequence at the beginning of the film which depicts the husband and wife in bed, the only time the relationship will be seen at a tranquil, happy stage. Bardot lies with her behind exposed, and the camera seems to caress her repeatedly while Godard satisfies his avant-garde impulse by exchanging different lenses, as though to show the different moods that can be evoked within a scene. While the scene jarringly interrupts what could have been a very smooth transition from the opening credits (Francesca, the assistant, walking down an Italian street while a film crew shoots her) to the first significant meeting with Jeremy Prokosch (on the same streets, as Francesca turns a corner and introduces them)--it does seem necessary to see the lovers at rest before their relationship begins to decay over the next two hours. Without this scene, Georges Delerue's despairing score would have no context. And about that score: though this is his "mainstream" film, Godard again satisfies that avant-garde impulse, and plugs the score in repeatedly, and at seemingly inappropriate scenes, to demonstrate how the score alters the mood, impact, and meaning in what might otherwise be banal. In a drawn-out scene in which the lovers nap, read, bathe and dress while talking (seemingly a Godard motif ever since Breathless), a point comes when Bardot is simply crossing a room and the score lifts, a propos of nothing, and then vanishes when she reaches the other end of the room. If you are moved by the stirring score, then why? Nothing happened. Yet several times during the film, Delerue's score is exceptionally moving, and adds the necessary weight, such as when it repeatedly regards Bardot's face as her husband lets her leave alone with Jeremy. Paul addresses the moment on the level of the banal: it's okay, he's the producer, what could happen, you're an adult, see you in the afternoon, etc. She witnesses it on the level of the tragic, and level with Delerue's score.

The final scene, when Paul climbs the stairs--which call to mind the stairway to heaven in Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death--to the top of a villa where Fritz Lang is shooting Ulysses against the backdrop of a wide, blue sea, and Lang (or someone) shouts "Silencio!", is one of very favorite final shots in a motion picture.

After Contempt two early short films were screened. Operation "beton" was Godard's first film, an industrial short made to prove to financiers that he was a competent filmmaker. It's a dry depiction of the construction of the Grand Dixence dam in Switzerland. While mildly interesting (in particular I was struck at how young the workers were, and how dangerous the work), it would be naive to try to cherry-pick Godardian themes from the 17-minute film. Une histoire d'eau ("History of Water"), on the other hand, is delightful. Francois Truffaut shot two actors fleeing a flooded village for Paris, and Godard was given free reign to write his own narration. He has the actress lecturing on all manner of topics, from referencing Raymond Chandler to the comment that sound is more important than image! The print the Cinematheque received, from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had no subtitles, so the organizers ripped the subtitle track from a Korean DVD of the film and projected it overlapping the French print. Similarly, last year several of the prints in the F.W. Murnau series had no English translations to the intertitles, so one of the professors would read a translation aloud to each. This is why I love the Cinematheque.

Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungary, 2001) * * * *
D: Bela Tarr

There should be more filmmakers taking the approach that Bela Tarr takes in Werckmeister Harmonies--and if I picked up a camera, it is the school I would follow, the same school of which the late Andrei Tarkovsky is still principal. It is to film the action, no matter how fantastic or strange (both Tarkovsky and Tarr tell stories with dollops of magical realism), as it happens and with complete realism; rather than rushing events, to plunge the viewer into the film's space by stripping away the D.W. Griffith language of cinematic editing. In other words, to simply point the camera and follow the characters as they go about their business, which is also to tell the story at a much slower pace. Ideally, the viewer should begin to forget that it's just a film, and will seem to occupy the world within. Then--as the viewer becomes lulled by the spare use of music, the very long takes, inaction or dulling repetition--something happens with an impact that would not be as effective if any other approach were taken. I'm thinking here of the very last shot in Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my favorite scenes in any film, or a key moment at the climax of Werckmeister Harmonies, which should not be described.

There is a plot, and it is an interesting one that holds you through the 145-minute running time: in a nameless Hungarian village (the film takes place in a modern setting--there are helicopters and giant trucks--but the village is rustic, the cobblestone streets often empty), the innocent courier Janos (Lars Rudolph) is witness to a growing panic among the townspeople on the approach of a circus that brings the dead body of a giant whale, accompanied by someone called "The Prince"; the rumors go that riots and destruction accompany the circus, and that the Prince, the instigator, has three eyes. Janos visits his Uncle Gyorgy, a music theoretician attempting to reconstruct the original method of tuning the keys of a piano, before it was corrupted by Andreas Werckmeister's standard of tuning, and is charged by his manipulative aunt to urge his uncle to head a commission to investigate the (supposed) looting which has begun to occur throughout the city; but his uncle is less interested in restoring order than in continuing his research. Janos witnesses the arrival of the whale--stored in a giant truck--and is deeply impressed and humbled by it. But the rest of the villagers refuse to step into the truck, and instead begin to gather outside, building bonfires, and gathering weapons in anticipation of orders from The Prince. The film is an allegory (based upon a novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai), but for what is left up to the viewer. Certainly it dwells on the theme of order versus chaos, reason versus fear. But the film is so awe-inspiring that it's best to leave the themes hanging in the gray mist, beautifully photographed in black-and-white, and in the awestruck eyes of Janos as, standing in the darkness, he gazes at the dead, glassy eye of the whale.

All You Need is a Girl and a Gun, Part 1

Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (France, 1959) * * * 1/2
A Woman is a Woman (Une Femme Est Une Femme) (France, 1961) * * * 1/2
My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie) (France, 1962) * * * *
D: Jean-Luc Godard

This semester the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque is hosting the first half of a Jean-Luc Godard retrospective, this one, "All You Need is a Girl and a Gun," highlighting his films made before 1968. I have pledged to see as many Cinematheque films this year that I can; the summer only offered a brief series on contemporary African films as well as American road movies, of which my busy schedule just allowed me to see two in the latter series (Two-Lane Blacktop and Road to Morocco). This fall/winter they're also doing a series on the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, films of the 1910's, martial arts movies, and the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, whose seven-hour-long Satantango promises to be grueling and/or life-transforming.

I've always been ambivalent toward Godard. The first film of his I saw, Breathless, should have been the perfect introduction to the seminal New Wave director; instead, I was indifferent, and felt it was just an excercise in style--here is a "great" film that may have worn to threads with age. For Primer I also watched Contempt, which I loved, and which made me briefly consider that I was wrong to dismiss him, though I was already devoted to Truffaut, as though one had to take sides in that battle (I saw the two sides as "story" vs. "style"). Contempt pressed me to give Godard several more chances: Notre Musique, Les Carabiniers, Alphaville, Le Petit Soldat, Band of Outsiders, Week-End. Regardless of my varying reactions to those films, none of which I hated, by that last film I felt I had seen enough, and with Primer over, thought I could begin exploring other French directors such as Rohmer, Melville, and Rivette. Then, a few months later, the Cinematheque announced that its director of the season was Godard, and I was handcuffed to plunge.

Appropriately, the first film of the retrospective was Breathless.

The screening changed my mind. I was wrong to watch this at home. The tiny Cinematheque at Vilas Hall was "sold out" (all screenings are free, and naturally draw a mix of students, film buffs, professors, families, and hobos), and by the scheduled start-time the organizers were turning people away at the door. Consider that they could walk a few blocks to Four Star Video Heaven and rent it on DVD. But that's what I did the first time, and the experience doesn't compare; Breathless must be seen with an audience, and preferably--like this one--a very green audience.

When you go to the first film of the fall semester, you get a lot of freshman who are seeing, perhaps, their very first foreign film (or, at least, their first foreign film to not star Jet Li). You get the requisite unintentional laughter. That laughter changed rapidly as they began to laugh with Godard rather than at him: he was too quick for them. He was making a film for the young; he was only 29 when he made the film, after all. The infamous jump-cuts (removing frames of the film to create "edits" in the middle of a sequence) have been appropriated into weekly dramas on TV ("Homicide," notably); they pass almost imperceptibly now. No, it was Jean-Paul Belmondo, the crooked-nosed, impeccably immature young French actor who was the hit of the evening. Maybe it was how he was given to address the camera directly, or suddenly leap out of a taxi in order to lift up a passer-by's skirt, or maybe it was the fact that he kind of looks like Owen Wilson, I don't know. But whatever he dished in spoonfuls they were eating up. He plays a casual criminal--emphasis on "casual"--who seems to rob and point his gun for the joyful spirit of anarchy more than anything else. His girlfriend is played by Jean Seberg, who I just saw in a very different role in the Peter Sellers vehicle The Mouse That Roared. There, she was Hollywood, sexlessly glamorous. By contrast, Breathless seems to be the behind-the-scenes documentary of Seberg, catching her looking completely natural: there was one moment when she was merely climbing a staircase, and I had the strange feeling that she was unaware of being filmed. But that's the point: Godard is trying to transform the banal. The bravura setpiece of the plotless film is one long evening (and the following morning) spent in an apartment while Belmondo pleads for sex and Seberg dismisses him. He seems like a child at first, his pleas hopeless, but by the end of this stretch we see how dearly Seberg seems to care for him. Nevertheless, the nature of their relationship is constantly in question, and the famous finale is classic Godard cynicism.

The film's weakness is Godard's naive tendency to put a point on matters; his characters frequently underline what the film is about. "We always talked about ourselves but we should have been talking about each other." (Godard wrote the screenplay but Truffaut is credited for the story, which is pretty spare.) But what struck me about this second viewing is how deliberately vulgar it is: Godard was delighting in offending the older, straightlaced generation. His film points the way to the varying rebellions of the 1960's generation, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, as he defined it. If you didn't get his film, if it was too violent, too anarchic--then you are the enemy; what's worse, you're old. There's still a little of that spirit in his most recent film, the otherwise solemn Notre Musique. (And I couldn't help but think that the extended scene in which Seberg interviews a renowned intellectual, and he disdainfully tosses off his world-summarizing pronouncements, directly, and probably unintentionally, parallels the scene in which Godard himself looks down his nose and makes pronouncements to a classroom of students in Notre Musique. He's finally become what he seemed to admire.)

"Groundbreaking" is the word for Breathless, but it doesn't offer that much more; but the well doesn't have to be that deep in the second film of the series, A Woman is a Woman, which is kind of like if The Umbrellas of Cherbourg had none of the songs. This "idea of a musical," as Godard once called it (thank you, program notes) stars Godard's muse, Anna Karina, as a young woman whose boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) doesn't take well to her new obsession over having a baby. Distraught, she turns to another friend, "Lubitsch" (Belmondo again, who at one point, expressing his disgust, says he's going home to watch Breathless on TV). This is Godard at his most audience-pleasing, and expectedly, the Cinematheque crowd had a blast with it, treating it with as much enthusiasm as The Road to Morocco had received. Yes, Godard is witty here, and addresses the artificiality of the production as much as Bob Hope did, but there is a weird conceit that dominates everything: it's a musical with no music numbers. Well, there is one, within a set context. As Karina strips (her day job), she sings a song by Michel Legrand, who wrote the music to Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, and composed the scores to other French New Wave classics such as Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7. Even here, there's a conceit: each time she actually sings, the orchestration drops out of the soundtrack, and we're left with Karina's pale voice whispering the seductive words. Godard's attempt to sabotage the song somehow enhances it. Imagine what Marilyn Monroe could do with the technique. Of course, Godard is fond of screwing with the soundtrack, and frequently in A Woman is a Woman you can hear him playing with the mute button on the score. Here is sweeping music, here are the sounds of the street, here is the same sweeping music, here is the dialogue--Godard wants you to think about the process of creating a film, and wants to draw attention to the artificiality. He always wants to do this, which is why I always thought a little of Godard goes a long way, but I'm slowly changing my mind: you can be buffeted about from one Godard film rather deliriously. It's true, as the presenter said before the screening of Breathless, that each Godard film is radically different than the one that came before. True, he's always in the act of deconstructing, alluding, and sabotaging, but if you treat his films as cinema commandeered by Spy Vs. Spy, you can get in the spirit of things.

A Woman is a Woman is, in fact, a cartoon for adults. The peek-a-book nudity, the discussions about sex, the playful infidelity all suggest a tone which A Woman is a Woman cheerfully avoids: nothing here can be taken too seriously. My wife has picked this as her favorite Godard (the other, I think, is Band of Outsiders), and I can see why; no wonder she also loves The Young Girls of Rochefort. This is a lot of fun, and the Lubitsch reference is appropriate.

How perfect that it was on a double-feature not with a Jacques Demy musical but with the film's negative-image, My Life to Live. (It's even in black-and-white.) Here Karina is cast as a woman too pretty to be as desperate for money as she is; with hopes of an acting career dwindling, she turns to prostitution, but always with a philosophical attitude (this is Godard, after all): the situation, perhaps, will not be sad and desperate if she refuses to see it that way. Or perhaps not. The key scene here is when Karina talks to an acquaintance who resorted to prostitution to make ends meet, and eventually married a successful actor; the hopeful story is immediately offset by a shooting in the street, and a bloody victim staggers into the cafe before Godard cuts to the next "chapter." (The film is in 12 parts, with descriptions of the action before each.) Individualism can carry you so far, until you're set against another, stronger force, and the threat of violence hangs over this prostitute's life as it does in other treatments on the theme, such as Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan. If the story is well-trod, at least the style is refreshing. Godard tones down his distracting styles, allowing you to lose yourself in the character's journey. That's not to say there isn't the Godardian, rigorously intellectual approach to camera movements. For a film that reveres the close-ups in Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which Karina goes to see at one point, it deliberately keeps the camera distant, and in the opening cafe scene hides the faces of Karina and her husband, instead eavesdropping from behind as they discuss the end of their relationship, as though we're just sitting a table away. Karina is consistently isolated in the frame throughout, culminating in an abrupt final shot that is deliberately pathetic. Yes, it's a very sad film, but it's elegantly constructed, and reminds of Robert Bresson's Mouchette or Au Hasard Balthazar. It is a film that is so passionately made that it cannot be considered "depressing." I could watch Karina's seduction dance over and over: she tries to pick up a young man at a pool table by playing a song on a jukebox and dancing hypnotically around and around the room. I could use more Godard like this; it seems more essential, and seems to have more to say, than the later Godard experiments I've seen.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Incredible Shrinking Man (U.S., 1957) * * *
D: Jack Arnold

Every night on Turner Classic Movies is a theme night, and last night's was, somewhat inausipiciously, Jack Arnold Night. No slight to Jack Arnold, it's just that he's not frequently the subject of movie marathons. Best known, perhaps, as the director of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the last of Universal's great monsters, Arnold also directed films as varied as The Mouse That Roared (the other film I watched last night) and Tarantula. He quickly retreated into television work, and his last credits include episodes of "The Love Boat."

The Incredible Shrinking Man might be his seminal science fiction film, and one of the most distinctive of the 1950's. For that reason, as a lifelong science fiction fan, this was a much overdue viewing. I already knew the ending, which is rather famous. It's everything that precedes it that was foreign.

Grant Williams turns in a surprisingly interesting performance as Scott Carey, a--um, white guy--who is sailing with his wife when he passes through a radioactive cloud (she's busy belowdeck, and doesn't suffer the exposure). He wipes some glitter off himself and doesn't give it much thought, until he goes to his doctor to find out why all of his clothes have lately seemed a couple sizes too large. "Have you been exposed to any radiation lately?" Actually, it's the combination of exposure to insecticide and radiation that caused this particular condition, which I suppose explains why other people just get, you know, cancer from radiation exposure. (So remember that combination, kids: DDT and radiation!) After a while he begins to look like Lily Tomlin in that big chair, and he's downright adorable, but he also feels like a freakshow, and takes solace with a midget carnival performer (April Kent) who, wouldn't you know, is just played by an actress also sitting in a big chair. He can't believe his luck, and neither can we. But as he prepares to cheat on his wife with someone his own size, the shrinking (which comes in waves) returns, and he becomes so small that his wife keeps him in a doll house, leading to the famous scene where he's attacked by his household cat. Which makes the viewer immediately wonder how his or her own domestic animal would treat the owner when suddenly shrunk to doll-size. Judging by the leisure activities of my own two dogs, I can only assume they would whip me back and forth and then chew until they found my hidden squeaker. At any rate, Scott is tossed into the cellar and now must contend with new problems--such as how to remove the cheese from the mousetrap, and how to avoid the giant tarantula.

All of which is redeemed by Richard Matheson's screenplay. Matheson wrote many of the most fondly-regarded "Twilight Zone" episodes, though among genre cultists these days he's best known for his novella "I Am Legend," which was filmed as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man (and was the uncredited inspiration for many an apocalyptic zombie film). I tend to regard Matheson as the genius who wrote Hell House, one of the creepiest haunted house novels ever written; he wrote the screenplay of the pretty-good 70's adaptation, The Legend of Hell House, which is ripe for a remake by someone other than Jan de Bont. Robert Osborne, introducing The Incredible Shrinking Man, cited Matheson as the guy who wrote What Dreams May Come, to which I reply by throwing a book at the TV. With Shrinking Man, Matheson treats the premise as a post-film noir science fiction film: there's no way out for the shrinking Scott, no cure to be found, and no martyred death, either. That's what makes this a cut above most genre SF films. Scott is forced to adapt to each new size on its own terms, and--as he directly observes in the film's voluminous voice-over narration--each time he shrinks he's forced to grapple with a completely alien world. The entire second half of the film takes place in the basement, as he waits forlornly for his wife to come downstairs, scavenges for food, makes a home out of a matchbox, and then, weak from starvation, struggles to climb toward a piece of cake that sitting abandoned by a window (for some reason). When he shrinks again, he can finally pass through the grate and walk outside into the vast jungle of his backyard--and here the film ends! Poor Scott tries to be an optimist about the whole thing, and the ending narration is optimistic, hopeful: he'll be a pioneer in one new world after the next, and soon the rest of the human race may be joining him, should they continue to experiment with new and strange sciences. The ending is actually very reminiscent of the end of The Time Machine, as Wells thrusts his time traveller ever forward, past the Eloi and the Morlocks into new future worlds, past the end of the human race. But the time traveller does so willingly. Scott has no choice, and will soon be exploring among the microcosmic.

Perhaps I've been watching too much film noir lately, but it all seemed very noirish, from the voice-over narration to the forlorn outcast walking past the nighttime carnival (think Nightmare Alley) to the despair of finally being cornered by one's Fate, and resigning oneself to the end. But, of course, he doesn't end. The final line is remarkable, because it is, at once, hopeful and terrifying: "I still exist!"

Sergio Leone's Man with No Name Trilogy

Roger Ebert points out, in his "Great Movies" review of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, that the famed "Man with No Name Trilogy" by Sergio Leone isn't really about a man with no name, and could possibly be about 3 different characters; Eastwood is "Joe" in the first film, A Fistful of Dollars, "Monco" in For a Few Dollars More, and "Blondie" in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Well, yes. But Blondie is clearly just a nickname because the guy has no other name to go by. Furthermore, we can assume by the titles that Few Dollars More is a sequel to A Fistful of Dollars, so the always-poncho'd Eastwood is playing the same fella; the fact that he uses a different name in each film implies they're only aliases. He is, after all, a cold-blooded killer.

The fact that he is a cold-blooded killer, yet by default the hero, is just what makes the Dollars/No Name trilogy so much fun. He frequently shoots people in dishonorable ways simply because they'd kill him first. Sure, he kills for the money, but he is hunting down the grimiest, sweatiest, black-toothed villains in screen history.

I saw Fistful of Dollars many years ago, on TV, cropped, and with commercials, I'm sure. I found it exciting at first, and then sort of dull. I always wanted to return to Leone, but thought I'd grown out of it before I got a chance. Like most folks these days, I didn't think I had much time for Westerns, not with all the great novels to read and the acquired pretensions of college. It was only when I started my "Primer" project of watching first 100, then 500 films, that I came to love the genre. I even loved John Wayne movies, something that seemed as likely as suddenly coming to love Elvis. But it wasn't Wayne that I loved so much as his directors and the vehicles in which they placed him: Stagecoach, the iconic and prototypical Western, is thrilling thanks not just to Wayne, John Carradine, and the other players, but because John Ford knew how to pace the action with the nostalgic prairie scenes, just as he does with The Searchers; Red River, which I will always think of as "my favorite Western except for the last, terrible ten minutes," glows with Howard Hawks' striking use of characterization, which he applies to more sardonic effect in Rio Bravo. All of these films I adore, in addition to the non-Waynes Destry Rides Again, Seven Men from Now, Winchester '73, and The Gunfighter. Now I'm more of a typical film buff, in that I'm always open to watching a Western when it comes on TV.

The Leones work much better with all that preface of film history. He subverts every Western trope, strips them (mostly) of their nostalgia, and gets right down to the nitty-gritty. When you see Eastwood, his unshaven face that seems to be chiseled, the squint, the teeth chomping down on the cigar (always), you're amazed at how iconic and original the image is, like a moment out of one of Kubrick's 60's films, instant film history. It arrives out of nowhere. Yes, James Stewart was playing some cold-blooded folks in Anthony Mann films, but at least he had a stuttering, soft-spoken history in films with which audiences could identify; Eastwood, inexplicable, is capable of anything.

A Fistful of Dollars--like all the "spaghetti Westerns" (a genre that began here)--was an Italian production set in the American West, filmed in Spain and Italy, and entirely dubbed. The dubbing was a thing of necessity for Italian productions: low-flying planes near Rome's Cinecitta studios made live recording virtually impossible. Regardless, Eastwood provides his own voice on the English track, and his words match his lips, so it's not too distracting. (It helps that his lips don't move much, with that cigar perpetually in his mouth.) The film, like The Magnificent Seven, is a Western remake of a Kurosawa samurai film. While The Magnificent Seven borrowed just the outline of The Seven Samurai, Leone's film copies Kurosawa's Yojimbo very closely--so much so that if you'd only read the screenplay, and didn't bear witness to Eastwood, Leone, and composer Ennio Morricone, you'd think the film unremarkable. A man whose only talent is killing arrives in an isolated town run by two rival gangs; essentially, a powderkeg. The killer, desperate for cash, decides to maximize his profits by working for both sides, playing one against the other. Eventually, the plan backfires, and he's beaten and tortured to death's door, only to recover just enough strength to enact a revenge. The reason Kurosawa's films were among the first Japanese films to become popular in America is that his characters, setting, and style were not so foreign; films such as The Hidden Fortress deliberately transposed American genre trappings into Eastern culture, so naturally they can easily be adapted back into a Western culture. Leone's love of American genres rivalled Kurosawa's, and so A Fistful of Dollars, this bizarre Euro-American-Japanese hybrid works like a charm.

But let's get to the point: it's Leone's show, and his distinctive over-stylization, defined by its quick and detailed cutting, so that every action scene is dissected into pieces like the shower scene in Psycho, is matched only by Morricone's score, which deliberately imitated the form of pop music. Morricone's music, when heard in full on a soundtrack CD, is actually just a really solid Western score, with plenty of harmonica, fiddle, and even a square dance number. Of course, no one remembers that. It's the opening titles that Morricone made so iconic; animated--showing gunslingers blowing each other away--they're set to Morricone's whistling Western pop song with no lyrics except for the occasional shout of...something, I'm not sure ("Whip that flag?" "Wave that bat?"). Originally conceived as a lullaby, Morricone transformed it into one of the most famous pieces of Western film music of all time, only surpassed by his theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

For all this, Fistful does drag a bit, even to these adult eyes. (To be fair, so did Yojimbo.) The sequel, For a Few Dollars More, has nothing to do with the sequel to Yojimbo, which is probably a wise choice, as Sanjuro would not have made for great Leone; instead, it slightly improves on the original by keeping one's interest held throughout. Lee Van Cleef plays a bounty hunting rival to Eastwood's returning gunfighter--they're so well-matched that in the film's most memorable sequence, they face off in a deserted townsquare at night by simply shooting at each other's hats, like two animals snapping their jaws to prove their ferocity without actually inflicting harm. They're both pursuing "El Indio" (Gian Maria Volonte), a psychotic killer recently escaped from prison, and plotting a major bank heist. (For some reason, the biggest bank in the Old West, and his intended target, is in a deserted village with no discernable commerce.) After a long courtship, Eastwood and Van Cleef reluctantly team up and hatch a plan: Eastwood will infiltrate El Indio's gang as one of their own, while Van Cleef will wait in ambush near the bank. How their plan unfolds--and unravels--is one of the real joys of Fistful, so I won't spoil it. Needless to say, it all comes down to another shootout in the street, but this time it's between Van Cleef and El Indio, who will both draw when a tiny music box winds down. With For a Few Dollars More, you can sense Leone attempting something slightly greater, with deeper characterization and more emotional impact. For one thing, the villain has a crippling anguish over something in his own history, which is gradually revealed through the course of the film--a technique that will be repeated, to better effect, in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Eastwood pretty much sits the climax out, though he has a great final scene.

When Leone made the final film in what was now a "trilogy," the first two films had been such an international success that he had a much larger budget with which to work. Appropriately, the scope of the film is expanded: at almost three hours in its recently-restored "director's cut," it's a veritable epic. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are defined on-screen in the opening twenty minutes of the film (a really long opening credits sequence, really). Surprisingly, Van Cleef here returns as "the Bad," and it took me a space to realize he's not playing the same character as in the last film; a relief, really, as that character would have had to take a pretty tragic turn to become this bad--on the trail of a treasure, he kills innocents in cold blood in the opening minutes of the film. "The Ugly" is, unflatteringly, Eli Wallach, the character actor who had played the villain in The Magnificent Seven. A scoundrel with a preposterous criminal record, he works with Eastwood to perform a scam on one town, then the next: get arrested so that Eastwood collects the reward, prepare to get hanged, and get freed by Eastwood at the last second, so they can split the cash. The problem, as Wallach belatedly realizes, is that too much of the scam depends upon Eastwood following through on his side of the bargain, and as Eastwood leaves Wallach high and dry in the middle of the desert, the words "The Good" brand Eastwood as he prepares to ride off, a devilish grin on his face. This is Leone's world, where there is no purity to be found, but shades of gray at best.

One of the reasons that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is my favorite of the trilogy is that it's a quest narrative, and I'm nothing if not a big sucker for those. Eastwood, Wallach, and Van Cleef are all after some stolen gold buried in a Confederate grave. Eastwood and Wallach both stumble across the gold's location, although because of (improbable) circumstances, neither can find it entirely on his own, forcing them into an awkward partnership, each ready to betray the other should the opportunity arise. Van Cleef has been hunting the gold from the start, and smugly attempts to manipulate the two killers to reach it. That's all there is to the plot. What's left is an episodic journey in which positions of power shift among the three, and we see a Wild West torn to tatters by the Civil War. Long stretches pass without shootouts, but when they come, they're exciting as hell. The final showdown is stylized--and drawn out--to such an extent that you think Leone wanted to make this the Last Spaghetti Western Ever. It wasn't, but it's still the best.

The keen interest in amorality gives the Leone Westerns a direct connection to the heritage of American Westerns, despite the fact that his use of amorality is meant to subvert that heritage. After all, the best Hollywood Westerns were existential dramas, in which the "right thing to do" isn't always so obvious, particular when the Law is so often in a helpless position, if not completely absent. On one end of the spectrum, there's a B-movie like Tin Star, with Anthony Perkins as a spineless sheriff who needs to learn from Henry Fonda to be a bully, if not a killer, in order to save the town from bandits and act as a force of good. On the other, there's the John Wayne of Red River, a good guy who becomes the villain when his ideology and anger conquer his reason and his morality. More distinctly existential is The Gunfighter, with Gregory Peck as a wanted man who's reformed his gunslingin' ways, but can't return home to the girl he loves, since every would-be Billy the Kid wants to be known as the one who finally shot him: dread drapes this film even more effectively than in High Noon.

But yeah, the heroes of Leone's Westerns might be wounded by a trauma in their past, as Charles Bronson's character is in Once Upon a Time in the West, but they don't anguish over whether or not to shoot somebody. In that sense, Leone's films belong to the second stage of Westerns, dominated not just by his films but by Sam Peckinpah's. In this stage, the life of violence is the issue to be explored. (I see a third stage to be vaguely defined by McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the recently-cancelled HBO masterpiece, Deadwood.)

My wife was quick to point out that there's no prominent female characters in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the women are relegated to roles as extras; for this reason, she prefers Once Upon a Time in the West to this film, though she enjoyed both greatly. I think Leone thought women would complicate the already stripped-down motivations of the characters: these guys are after money, and women would give them something else to fight over. At three hours, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is astoundingly simple--as all Westerns are. Nothing Dickensian about the Old West. In the vast, uncluttered landscape that Leone imagined, men stand in silhouette in clouds of dust, wait for the hyena-like Morricone music to suddenly silence, draw, take the cash, and ride off. Amazing how many playful permutations Leone could find in these three films, or that he could turn it all into something resembling profundity! There's no shame in loving these films.