Godfather – Mafioso

I finally watched The Godfather (1972) all three hours of it.  One of my motivations was the discussion over at Man 0f Roma in which I participated.   As I watched,  I couldn’t help comparing it to Mafioso (1962), a truly marvelous film.  Now that I’ve seen The Godfather, the only thing I want to do is read the Mad Magazine satire of it.

I’m sure that Copolla knew Mafioso well, and scores of film noir movies too.  There seem to be many parallel elements, perhaps homages, perhaps simple allusions, perhaps just coincidence.  To me, The Godfather was, first of all, boring, and second, extremely pretentious.  It cements Coppola’s reputation in my mind as a vastly overrated guy who loves movies and is really good with a camera.  If only he’d left the idea part to somebody else.  (Maybe one day I’ll make myself watch again Apocalypse Now.)

Both films have a returning son.  Michael Corleone returns from WWII, in uniform, as a hero, and with a blonde New England love in tow.  (I have to be honest:  Dianne Keaton always evokes in me a a sensation of hearing fingernails scratching a blackboard.)  He tells her about his family – doesn’t seem to phase her, although she’s taken aback a little bit.  He doesn’t want to be part of  “the family business,” he says.  Then his father, Marlon Brando, in a role I just couldn’t take seriously – but then, perhaps, I’ve seen too many caricatures over the years – is gunned down.  It’s as if Michael’s genetic base takes over, and he acts as if he’s been a mafia hit man his entire life.  The transition is instantaneous.  Or was he like that before?  In which case, his re-entry to the “business” is robbed of all the dramatic tension it’s supposed to have.

After he kills the guys responsible for his father’s shooting, he is sent to Sicily for a prolonged stay, away from the gang war that ensues.  There, he embarks on a Odyssean idyll (he should be in NYC with the guys), traipsing about the country with his faithful protectors, elegantly courting a local beauty, discovering the mysteries of his violent Sicilian roots.  “Where are all the men?” he asks during a visit to his ancestral hill town.  “All dead in vendettas – here are their memorial plaques.”

We see him happily strolling away from the camera, down a country road with his love, followed and supervised by her family, a few paces behind.    (Later, we will see him walking down a New England street, towards the camera, with no attendants, talking to his WASP-love object, convincing her to marry him.  There are other such oppositions.  For instance, on his wedding night, his modest, virtuous wife drops her negligee revealing her nubile breasts before they embrace.  Michael’s hothead brother, constantly unfaithful, consorts with sluts who are always shown having sex fully clothed, or slopping about in similar lingerie, loosely in place.  The natural, the earthy vs. the corrupt and urban, yeah, yeah, yeah…)  After a passionate wedding night and some happy days,  the violence of America catches up with him and his wife dies in a car bomb meant for him.  (Is this a direct quote from the Big Heat?  In that movie, the blonde, loving wife of the crusading detective is killed in the same accidental way.  The actress in that movie was Marlon Brando’s sister!  Surely, not another accident?)

Oh Italy!  Oh Sicily!  So dark, so tragic and violent, yet so beautiful!  Oooooh!  Indeed.

In Mafioso, Antonio returns to his home town after years away in Milan, where he has found success as an industrial engineer.  He is a modern Italian, rational, super-precise, perfectly in tune with the capitalistic economic miracle lifting Italy out of its post-war impoverishment, except for the South, of course.   The film begins as a comedy, playing on the prejudices of the the northern Italians about their uncivilized peasant cousins in the south, a farcial clash of manners.

Antonio brings his wife – a beautiful northerner, light and blonde – and two pretty daughters to meet his family for the first time.  She offends them first by smoking, and then by not eating ravenously at the banquet they prepare.  After a while, she grows to like the place, and the family warms to her.  She enjoys the sun, the scenery, the food, the intense and comforting embrace of family, kin, community.

On a walk through the town on the way to pay homage to the local Don, Antonio’s wife asks innocently, “What are all those plaques?”  Embarrassed, Antonio tells her they are memorials to dead men.  They pass a wake – “How did he die?”  “Two bullets!”  He hurries his family away – it’s funny, but ominous.  They stop for ice cream with some old school chums of his.  “Here comes so-and-so, don’t speak to him!”  Antonio obeys, but his wife cannot understand why he shuns an old classmate, not understanding that he is now a marked man.

Unlike Kay, in The Godfather, who sees what’s going on and just seems to accept it, or asks to be happily lied to, Antonio’s wife is kept truly in the dark.  Antonio is the one who is filled with anxiety about the truth – he doesn’t want her to know.  The truth of the mafia is like a growing dark, horrific cloud, gradually moving over the landscape.

Antonio finally is given an offer he cannot refuse – he must perform a hit for the Don.  He is transported to America to carry it out, after a brief, exhilarating sight-seeing drive through New York City.  The Old World brings its filth to the new, in contrast to The Godfather. He returns to Italy, his wife and everyone none-the wiser, thinking he’s been on a hunting trip to the country.  He is now trapped in a horrific nightmare existence, a murder on his conscience, unable to tell anyone, especially those he loves, the truth.  And who knows when he may be asked again to perform a “little service for” them?

I have never seen any other movie like Mafioso.  Disturbing, funny, horrific. I regret the three hours I spent watching The Godfather, a “soap opera for guys,” as one colleague, who likes it, dubbed it.

The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) reminded me of Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel in a way.  A group of middle-class people find themselves in a nightmare world bounded by the edge of a room, or railway car, from which they cannot escape.  This one has a happy ending.

The movie gets off to such a slow and corny start, I almost gave up on it.  There’s the rich playgirl, getting ready to return to London to settle down according to Daddy’s wishes, and marry a “check-chasing blueblood.” A pair of stereotypical, cricket-obsessed Brits who keep up a steady idiotic patter, a charming, handsome, and brash musicologist  studying local folksongs, and a slightly batty old English lady governess.  They are all trapped by an avalanche in a remote backwater of some fictional central-European country, waiting for their train connection back to England.

   

Once on the train, the playgirl and the governess become friendly, and when the girl wakes up from a snooze, the old lady is gone.  Simply gone.  Everybody claims to have never seen her!  It becomes a somewhat labored cat-and-mouse game between the girl and the passengers:  she trying to get evidence that the woman did exist; they implying or saying straight out that she’s crazy.  A bit of physical evidence convinces the music man, and they make a team.  It turns out that the passengers are in a conspiracy to abduct and kill the old lady with an elaborate switcheroo involving a fake medical expert, a nun in black high-heeled pumps, and an Italian circus performer.  Then it gets weird.

After the heroes rescue the governess, the bad guys separate the train cars and direct the passengers and the engine onto a small line that runs into the forest.  They stop the train and surround the car with armed men.  After a failed ruse to get the passengers to disembark, they direct a fusillade at the car.  Why are all these people suddenly fighting for their lives in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a rail car, simply because of some old lady? 

A pretty woman with her lover, both fleeing spouses, demands that her man use his gun to defend them.  He thinks it’s all insane – the only sensible thing is to surrender and explain everything.  She grabs his gun and starts firing.  The two Brits rise to the occasion, without visible emotion of course, and turn out to be crack shots.  One grabs the pretty lady’s gun saying, “I’ll put it to better use,” and proceeds to pick off the attackers.  With each shot, the woman starts with fear while he, surveying the situation, calmly remarks, “I’m sure that there’s a rational –bang!- explanation – bang! – for all of this.”  Indeed there is.

  

Happily returned to London, the playgirl abandons her gold-digging fiancé and surrenders to the ill mannered, but charming music man in an embrace that is not what I expect from a Hitchcock film

        

I can’t hear you…

Lots of commentaries on Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, make much of the fact that it contains many allusions to Dante.  Is this surprising, that an Italian artist should do this?  No more than that an English speaking writer would quote Shakespeare or the King James Bible.

A long film, a rich film, a simple story.  A man searching for…a way out of the shallowness, ennui, and spiritual desolation of his life.  A beautiful woman loves him, but maybe she’s the wrong one for him.  She needs a little more sophistication to wrestle him to the ground, so he grinds her up and spits her out.  He is disgusted by his “friends,” but who else does he have?  The man he seems to admire commits a grisly suicide.  His father?  He hardly knows him, and genuine article that he is, he has a few of his own illusions to deal with.  Maybe Marcello is just too handsome for his own good.

At the end, he encounters again the beautiful young girl from a little cafe he met earlier.  A profile like an angel.  She beckons to him, but he can’t hear her across the waves.  He goes back to his degenerate orgiasts who are leaving the beach where they were gawking at an enormous “sea monster” the fishermen brought in.  Might there be a shred of hope left for him?

The most famous sequence features Anita Ekberg and the Trevi Fountain in Rome.  Another beckoning blonde, but his is no angel from an Umbrian frescoe.  It’s a Swedish-American pagan goddess offering erotic transcendence.  At least until the municipal authorities turn off the fountain’s water supply…

There’s our man!

I am watching The Life of Émile Zola (1936), corny and stirring by turns, starring Paul Muni.  The movie focuses on his trial for libel that resulted from his publication of J’accuse..! his dissection of the sham conviction of Dreyfus for treason.  Virulent hatred of Jews was at the center of the case, so it’s interesting how the film treats the subject of anti-semitism.

The words “Jew” and “anti-semitic” are never spoken in the film.  The theme is all very sotto voce.  When the general staff is looking for a fall guy to take the blame for the spying they have detected, they examine a roster of it’s members.  The religion of each is noted.  The head points to Dreyfus’s name and says, “There’s our man.”

When Zola is brought before the kangaroo court for libelling the French military, there are several long shots of the assembled dignataries and spectators. A huge painting of The Crucifixtion makes the point that church and state are not separate in France.

 The violent anti-Dreyfus mobs are shown, but there is no indication of their vicious anti-semitic bent.  Nor is the anti-clericalism of the Dreyfusards hinted.   You have to know the history to read the subtext of the film.

     

A really fatal woman!

The Big Heat was enjoyable for its enveloping atmosphere of corruption and the psychological tension in Bannion, the hero.  Too Late for Tears [YouTube clip]is a treat because it features the most thoroughly characterized, and completely evil femme fatale that I’ve ever seen in noir.  She is played by Lizabeth Scott, who had a string of such roles.  She looks mean, even when she’s trying to be nice, and she has a voice even more husky than Kathleen Turner’s.

This movie wastes no time – the first scene has Scott and her husband driving to a dinner party when she starts complaining that she doesn’t want to go because the hosts will look down on her, they’re so snooty.  She finally grabs the wheel in an attempt to force her husband to turn around and go home, and he skids to a stop.  A car drives by and hurls a leather satchel into their back seat.  It’s filled with cash.  There you have it – her deep-seated psychological unease about her social position, her violence and impulsivity, and a pile of money to set them ablaze. 

After evading the crook who tries to catch up with them to retrieve what was supposed to have been given to him, the couple fights about what to do with the money.  He wants to give it to the police – she wants to keep it, spend it!  They compromise, and he deposits it in a locker at the train station, hoping she’ll calm down and give in. 

Nothin’ doing!  She starts spending money on luxuries, and hiding them in the kitchen cabinets.  Minks, dresses, accessories.  When he gets a call from his banker about the state of his checking account, he confronts her.  She reveals her deeply wounded childhood:  “We were poor.  Not hungry poor.  Middle-class poor!”  (That’s worse!)  People always looking down at them because they couldn’t keep up.  It’s what drives her, but hubby is a little too simple to see what a beast he has by the tail.  Dan Duryea, the crook who finally catches up with her to demand his blackmail loot is smarter.  He gives her the nickname, Tiger,  and he finds out he has her by the tail, and only barely.  Her lust for loot is terrifying.

Finally, near the end, she makes off for Mexico with the cash.  Hubby and the crook have been dealt with.  We see her checking in at a fancy hotel, and her delight at finally reaching the sphere where she belongs is almost girlish.  She is having the time of her life.  Crime really pays!  Funny, it’s rare in films that you ever see the bad guys enjoying their ill gotten gains.  Of course, her high time doesn’t last long.

Virtue’s Reward

   

One writer on this film, Fritz Lang’s noir thriller, The Big Heat, comments that it inverts the usual femme fatale narrative device and makes Bannion (Glen Ford) the male exterminating angel, shall we say.  I don’t see it quite that way.

Bannion is a police detective who works in a city totally in thrall to the local mob boss, and his commissioner is trying to get him to lay off a case.  Seems a cop killed himself because he couldn’t stand being on the take anymore, and he left a detailed letter for the district attorney.  His calculating wife sees a chance to ride the corrupt gravy train for ever, and instead of mailing the letter, hides it away and uses it to extort a monthly allowance from the mob.

If Bannion is un homme fatale, he’s an innocent one.  He just wants to get the thugs out of the city.  The bar floozy who starts him off on the case is murdered – she’s no. 1.  Tortured first by Stone (Lee Marvin in a ghoulish turn) who delights in using hot objects – cigarettes, coffee – to damage pretty women. 

The thugs decide to eliminate Bannion (as Stalin said, “No man, no problem.”) but Larry the hitman messes up again and ends up car-bombing his wife instead.  She loved Bannion – she’s no. 2

When he’s digging for leads in a bar called The Retreat, Bannion sees Stone venting his irritation on a girl in a crap game by burning her hand.  Nobody else seems to mind – it’s all good fun, but Bannion stands up to him and scares him away.  Stone’s girl (Gloria Grahame) is always twitting him and his thug cronies for being little men terrified of their big boss, so she takes a liking to Bannion and his virile self-confidence.  She follows him out and gets herself invited up to his room.  Maybe with his wife gone, he needs a little company, but he’s not interested.  When Stone finds out, he figures she gave something away to him and he scalds half her face with a pot of hot coffee.  She’s on her way to being no. 3, but it takes a while longer.

These three women are all beautiful and attracted to Bannion, at least enough to give him their confidence.  (No. 1 never makes a pass at him.  She just gives him a lead, which he rejects at first, because he thinks she’s a dishonest hooker looking to cash in somehow.  Perhaps we should call this flick, Bannion: Or Virtue Unrewarded.)  But before we see Bannion as the inverted femme fatale, let’s remember that he really doesn’t entice these dames at all, not on purpose.  But he does seem to be the figurative kiss-of-death for the young, beautiful, and female.

Then there’s Mrs. Duncan, the wife of the suicide, who entices him,  and she dies!  She’s no. 4, or actually no. 3, since Stone’s coffee gal comes for a visit with her “sister under the mink” and plugs her first.  Bannion, however, was completely taken by her fake distress when he questioned her immediately after hubby drilled his own head with a bullet.  Notice, she’s not a young, sexy, silky-skinned thing – she’s middle-aged. 

Finally, there is the interesting old lady who works in the junkyard where the mechanic who rigged his car with dynamite used to work.  She overhears his conversation with her boss who is tight-lipped, and she follows him outside for a surrreptitious encounter by a chainlink fence that sets him off with another lead.  Then she helps him nail the thug who planted the bomb by getting him to the door and making him drop his guard.  She’s too old to be in the sexual running, so she just does what’s right.

 

Exterminating Angel

Another Bunuel film:  this one about a group of upper class (bourgeois) in Mexico City who come to a dinner party and can’t ever leave.  They can’t leave the room – can’t step over the threshold to the next one where the front door is visible.  Nor can anyone outside come in and get them.  Nobody knows why.

Not all that unlike those discretely charming ones I was watching last week.  They too are immobilized, in time, in the world, in their little world, and undone by dinner parties.  As Bunuel said in the interview printed in the pamphlet that came with the Criterion Collection DVD, “I am a man of obsessions.”

While the guests are “trapped” in the parlor, they slowly descend towards savagery.  The idiotic and not so idiotic pretensions of their upper crust culture fall away and are replaced by despair, hunger, the desire to find a sacrificial victim, and rank disgust with one another.  Not a new theme, not a deep theme, but a good theme!  And treated with humor and biting sarcasm by LB.  Of course, lots of strange, inexplicable images too, like why did that guy tie a blindfold on a sheep that got into the room?

One other thing about the interview that struck me was that the critics often presented rather involved or esoteric interpretations of things in the film, asking for a “Yes, that’s it“, or a”No” from Bunuel.  Most of the time it was a “no.”  We are so eager to explain, or have explained to us the weird or the mysterious.  Especially from artists, whom we assume must know what they mean and have a clear message (even if it’s a clunky Cold War political allegory that seems utterly incredible – one explanation of the bear’s antics in the adjoining room – he represents the USSR threatening the bourgeoisie!)  More often than not, Bunuel said something like, “Well, I just wanted a strange image,” or “it just happened that way, and I really liked how it looked.”

And here you will stay…

How did I not know that Richard Sala’s Delphine No. 4, the final issue in his reworking of the Snow White story, had been published?  I just happened to wander into Forbidden Planet, and there it was, with some looking, on the shelf!

The story is sort of like Snow White from the Prince’s point of view, and it’s dark, gothic, and a downer.  Did you think there would be a happy ending?  (That’s as much as I’ll give away.)  No, Sala is into the rich soil of the real stories behind the Disney fairy tales.  They are not that hard to find – just go to Brothers Grimm.  You may be surprised at how goth they are!  (And for a wonderful essay on fairy tales in the raw, check out Robert Darnton’s book, The Great Cat Massacre.)

Sala’s style here is at its most muted, more ”realistic,” less far-out weird than his stuff has been in the past – this suits the tone and pace of the story.  His art in Delphine is like a subtle basso continuo that sets off the hysterical, shrieking, hilarious weirdness of earlier pieces like One of the Wonders of the World. It’s  one long tone-poem on obsession, frustration, longing, illusion, fear, and some other not too pleasant topics.

One reviewer commented:

He is a sorely under-appreciated storyteller and I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps because his influences are decidedly anachronistic, out of pace with current pop culture in spite of the work being deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore

I hope he’s getting the attention he deserves, but I don’t keep tabs on the comics business world.  The reviewer makes a fine point when he touches on the paradox that Sala is out of sync with todays pop culture (explicit sex, vulgarity, explosions, violence, knowing irony and sarcasm…am I a crank?) while his work is “deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore.”

Sala doesn’t make “references” or “allusions” to “pop icons.”  There’s nothing knowing or arch about him.  He has absorbed vast realms of imagery and literature, and he writes and draws what he loves – in this sense, completely “in genre.”  (What is his genre, though?)  I see him as an exemplar of the personal mythologist, and as it happens, his myths are very sympatico with mine!  A very brief and incomplete list of “influences” that I detect in reading him:

Judex, Dante’s Inferno, Dashell Hammet, Film Noir, Grimm Brothers, Surrealism, Max Ernst, literary grotesque (depictions of monstrous transformations) and Gothic, Louise Brooks, Poe, Kafka…

And speaking of Kafka, at his new site, Sala has an old story, Herman, the Human Mole, that brings to mind that author’s story, The Hunger Artist. (Also Nightmare Alley).

This story is in my favorite Sala vein and style, and has now supplanted Wonder of the World as my all-time favorite.   It features a variation on this character from 13 O’Clock, another favorite.  Outcast, Peter Lorre-, sensitive-type.

Reading this story is like diving into a maelstrom of genre-moods:  noir, geek stories, tortured adolescent, loser kid, crazy misunderstood artist, mama-fixated psycho, I-was-framed-for-murder, culminating in a sick and hilarious reprise of the feral-child cum geek.  Is this what artists are?  Is this a self-portrait?

Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville’s portrait of a small group of French Resistance fighters left me shaken.  The film has very little violence in it, but it produces a non-stop feeling of acute tension.  In his “minimalist” directorial style, Melville’s characters rarely discuss their feelings or motivations.  They rarely discuss anything.  The Germans are methodical, brutal, and occasionally openly sadistic.  The fighters move around in the death-maze created by the Nazi occupation, carrying out their missions and trying not to get caught…yet.

They sense that they will all be caught, eventually.  Life and death frequently hinge on split-second decisions, or just plain chance.  In an early sequence, the main character finds himself on a bench in Gestapo headquarters sitting next to another man waiting for questioning.  The only outcome of interrogation is death.  With a few words at an opportune moment, a plan is formed.  The hero escapes, and the other?  Did he escape the machine gun fire we hear?  We, and the hero, never know.

The army is one  of shadows, in the shadows, but also of shadow-people.  To preserve security, no one knows much of the history of anyone else.  An important figure in the organization is a family relation to another, lesser figure.  Neither knows of the other’s work. The less known, the less said during the inevitable torture.  That’s if you don’t get the chance to swallow your cyanide first.

Sounds like a thriller?  It’s not like any other.  The people are ordinary, made extraordinary by their ordeal.  No heroic missions – it’s not even clear how much they accomplish – so much of the action centers on their responses to the arrests of their associates.  During one halcyon segment, a local noble provides his estate for use as a nocturnal airstrip for British planes, and all goes remarkably well for a while.  The man was a reactionary before the war, but he came around.  We are told matter-of-factly that the Germans rounded him up with his private militia of local farmers and shot them all without trial.  Back to the alleyways…

I read that some left-wing critics in 1969 (the year of its release – it was not successful and was hardly seen until its recent restoration) called the film “Gaulist propaganda.”  De Gaulle was considered by many, at that time, to be a reactionary obstacle to progress in France, his glory days as the leader of the Free French were far behind. 

There is a scene in the film in which de Gaulle is featured briefly, pinning a medal on a Resistance leader who is clearly moved to be in his presence.  But as for la politique quotidienne – everyday politics, that is – I think the film is way beyond that.  In an early scene, when the main character is in a prison camp, he addresses a young fellow inmate, an inexperienced, self-identified communist, as “comrade.”  The young man, surprised, asks, “Are you a communist too?”  “No,” he replies. “But I have comrades.”  They make an escape plan.

The sequence of images below is from the climactic scene at the end.  Mathilde (Simone Signoret) the mastermind of so many operations is compromised by the Nazis.  She must be eliminated.  She accepts her fate.  It is the only way.

[I don't want to give too much away, but on at least one occasion, Melville's style was so minimalist, I was confused about a fact that provides a powerful emotional statement.  The scene takes place in the dead of night, but because, in film, there must be some light, I was left somewhat in the dark!]

Baby Doll

This film came to my attention on reading the obituary of Karl Malden – it got his career off on its very long run.  Elia Kazan directed, Carol Baker and Eli Wallach starred as well.  Tennessee Williams provided the story of corruption, repressed, seething sexuality, vengeance, race relations, and a whole lotta other stuff.

Some discuss this film as a comedy, a campy masterpiece, but I see it as much more than that.  It’s a finely wrought drama about three strong, conflicting characters in a moral quagmire.  It has humor, but it’s kind of sad.

Archie Lee is married to Baby Doll – her daddy wanted to provide for her as he was dying.  She wasn’t ready for marriage, so he extracted a promise from Archie not to touch her until her twentieth birthday.  She sleeps in the nursery, in her old crib, in a broken down plantation mansion that Archie Lee bought to convince her daddy he was coming up in the world.

Archie’s plans to expand his business and restore the house fall victim to Mr. Vacarro, a recent arrival who bought up some old farms and cottin gin mills and cornered all the local business, including Archie’s.  He’s not well liked, but he is respected for his business acumen.  During a party he throws for the community to try and smooth over hard feelings, Archie, the only local planter not attending, torches his mill.

Vacarro vows to get his own justice.  He contracts with Archie to gin his cotton, and then moves in on his “wife.”  Does he want to sexually possess her, or just get her support for a legal action against Archie?  In the end, he does both, but he doesn’t “touch” her either.  He knows she’s “just a child” and he has some decency – but there is, as he admits to Archie when insisting that he “took nothing else from her,” an attraction between them.

All the actors do a wonderful job, but Carol Baker, in her first big role, is remarkable.  Malden is great, and a figure of pathetic fun, but she and Wallach are amazing in their sexual pas de deux.  Much of the humor in their exhanges comes from her ridiculous affectations of proprietry, despite her obvious, wilting fascination with Mr. Vacarro.  When he offers her a pecan nut he cracked with his teeth, she demurs, “Oh, Mr. Vacarro.  I could never accept a nut that had been in a man’s mouth.”  He replies, “You’ve got many refinements.”

Baker’s career was rocky, and she eventually left Hollywood for Italy.  Before she left, her second husband fashioned her into blonde bombshell sex symbol, and she starred as Jean Harlow.

Some clips of my favorite scenes are linked below:

Man with a Movie Camera

Odessa, USSR, c. 1929 as shown to us by Dziga Vertov.  Another movie so famous, I’ve been hearing about it forever, and I finally watched it.  I expected a socialist agit-prop documentary film, mixed with self-conscious avante garde sensibility, but I found a dizzying and exuberant – and self-consciously avante garde - portrait of the people of the USSR.

The film uses just about every special effect available at the time:  freeze frames (I immediately thought of 2001, the final trip to Jupiter), split screens, double exposure, time-lapse photography, stop-action animation, slow motion, fast motion, unusual angles, and lots of clever editing.

I was struck by the playful self-referential nature of it all:  The man with the camera who is everywhere, recording all of Soviet life (supposedly in candid takes, despite the enormous machine he lugs around) but he himself is recorded.  We see him, walking around with his machine and setting up.  We see him, on a motorcycle, racing around a track with a camera mounted on the handlebars filming the scenes we were shown just before and will see just after…and then we see a theatre, full of people, seeing the film that we are seeing!  Don Quixote complaining about the stories he’s been reading about himself couldn’t do it better.

The film shows the Soviet man and woman at work, in factories and mines.  (In one crazy scene, our camera man is wedged into a narrow mining passageway filming a worker…but who is filming him?)  Most of the film, to my surprise and delight, is about life of the everyday.  Women having their hair done, athletic events, people drinking at a bar (and the camera man rises right out of their beer mug!), giving birth, watching horses, riding motor bikes, traffic in the city, playing chess (with some nice reverse footage of a board magically setting up from a pile of chess pieces) and listening to the radio.

This last scene comes a minute or so after a picture of Lenin is viewed on the outside of a worker’s club.  The only image of him I noticed in the whole film!  Stalin?? None.  How did this guy survive the 30’s and 40’s unscathed?  (He died of cancer in the 50’s.)

A favorite passage of mine shows children, then freeze frames of their faces, sewing machines, a woman at a workbench editing film, the film we are seeing.  She stitches the images together like a seamstress.

Some stills from throughout the film – click the images for enlargements:

the man with the camera

split-screens

the cameran goes everywhere

beautiful hydraulics

flying above the weir

beauty of machines

in a tight squeeze

slow motion

freeze frames

at the horse races

high dive

earthy pleasures

camera man cools off

Is this the Soviet worker?

He is everywhere, even in your beer!

Lenin

the media speak, and are heard

animated camera

animated tripod walks off

How self-referential can you get?

The Wages of Fear

A French melodrama from 1953.  Does it detract from film to classify it that way?  A long film that is one sustained gut-punch with a blow to the head thrown in for good measure.

Four guys trapped in a miserable fleabag town in South America somewhere accept the  job of trucking nitrogycerine over 300 miles to an oil field where it’s desparately needed to blow out a raging derrick fire.  The pay is darn good, but the chances of being blown sky-high are too.  You get the situation, existential in the extreme…

The pretty waitress, played by director Clouzot’s wife, is dimwitted and abused, but then, aren’t all the characters?  They know it too – When one remarks that some fellow looks like a “walking corpse,” Mario (Yves Montand) replies, “You think we aren’t?”

The setup to the fatal drive is very long, and has a weird character.  Strange juxtapositions:  naked Indian natives taking showers; brutal fights in the one lousey bar in town; actors playing representatives and employees of the American oil company, S.O.C. who sound like they’re from…anywhere; social comment; anti-Americanism; socialistic criticism offered up in the vulgar comments of the miserable crew of losers and underworld thugs who consider the company’s offer – it’s pretty odd.  The four drivers slowly take their cargo of jerry cans filled with nitro on their joy ride to death or escape.

The film is remarkable for its handling of suspense sequences.  Each one revolves around a specific incident in the journey – a boulder in the road that must be carefully blown up with some nitro; a rough stretch of road that must be traversed at either very low speed or very high speed – to go in between means vibration and KABOOM; and the final obstacle, a crater left by the explosion of the lead truck fills with oil from the broken pipeline and must be carefully traversed.

Along the way, Jo, the criminal tough guy who sets himself up as mentor and partner to Mario, descends into jibbering cowardice.  The supercool Bimby and the likable Luigi (already dying of grey lung, shown with Mario above) are blown to Kingdom Come without warning.  Crossing the oil pool, Mario, fed up with Jo, and fearful that if he slows down, he will be helplessly stuck in the oil, knowingly runs over the leg of his erstwhile hero and pal (below).  It’s a dog eat dog world in the wage slave economy.

While they are trying to get the truck out of the oil, they must swim around in it – two men, are they men? – covered in black goo, they look like demons.  See what men are!!  Mario cradles the dying Jo on his shoulder as they are just about to reach the oil field.  They talk of neighborhoods in Paris they know.  They both are from the same area!  What about that tobacco shop?  What was next to it?  A lot..?  Wasn’t there a fence?  What was behind that fence?  I never saw what was there, says Jo.  As he dies, he cries out, “The fence, there’s nothing!!“  Alas, God is dead, and so is Jo.  Heavy…

After sleeping for a day and gettng cleaned up, Mario, $4000 richer (he got his pay and Jo’s – the oil company guys play fair even if they are exploitive and brutal profiteers) and in a spanking new S.O.C. uniform, jubilantly begins to drive back to the fleabag town, contemplating his escape to civilization.  The waitress hears the news by phone – the whole bar erupts in celebration – it’s a miracle that he made it!  They begin to dance to The Blue Danube Waltz.  Mario is listening to the waltz on the radio in the truck and is transported by the music.  He is dancing with the truck.  Twirling the wheel about, he swerves from side to side of the road with the music, he’s getting a bit carried away.

Yes, well, it had to end that way.  The waitress is dizzy with spinning and falls to the floor – an oddly mystical note in an otherwise brutally hardboiled film.  Simultaneously, Mario looses control, and his truck plunges off a precipice in a spectacular crash.  His lifeless hand clutches a Metro ticket to la Pigalle (the Paris red light district) his talisman of home, lovingly carried everywhere.

I was struck by the extended use of The Blue Danube – how could it fail to  bring to mind Kubrick’s 2001?  Both are examples of man-machine interactions set to music, both with ominous overtones, although in Kubrick, it takes a lot longer for the irony to be revealed.  Is there something about the waltz, the spinning, the evokes mechanistic imagery, people reduced to whirling elements in a clockwork escapement..?