An American Zola

Theodore Dreiser was a Naturalist in the tradition of Emile Zola, but with a twist.  Maybe it was American puritanism, that Calvinist strain, or perhaps some other element of his personality, but man, could he lay on the doom.  Having just finished An American Tragedy, all 900+ pages of it, I feel as if I was run over by a steamroller.  And I’ve been feeling that way since page 100!

Clyde Griffiths (George Eastman in the Stevens’ film adaptation) has had a stunted youth, the child of impoverished street preachers who include him, even as a very young boy, in their curbside music and proselytizing.  Clyde doesn’t feel comfortable with this life from an early age – he always is restless and wanting something different.  Eventually, he breaks away, becoming a bellhop, and he enjoys the taste of the highlife that the job, and the tips that come with it, brings.  During a wild night out with some friends in he is a passenger in a car that runs over and kills a little girl:  he has to skip town, severing his relations with his family yet more deeply.

Eventually, he connects with his very rich uncle, who, feeling guilty about the way his evangelist brother was shafted in the matter of the family inheritance, decides to give the kid a chance in his factory, working from the bottom up.  He tells his family that there is no need to admit him to their provincial circle of the social élite, but Clyde besides being handsome and possessed of charming ‘soft’ manners, bears a striking resemblance to his cousin, the heir apparent at the factory.  It just wouldn’t do to shun him completely:  his face would give the story away and cause talk.  He is granted limited access to the Griffiths family.

Eventually, he breaks the rules and forms a romance with a factory girl:  she is pretty, and Clyde is subject to powerful sexual urges.  He also becomes a regular in the young-smart set of the Griffiths circle, and a powerful flirtation, then a romantic infatuation develops between him and a beautiful girl in that set.  He keeps his multiple romantic relations a secret, dooming him when the factory girl becomes pregnant.  At his wit’s end, his dream of marriage into society, wealth, ease, material opulence threatened, he plots her murder.  She is drowned, mostly through his actions, but there is, to the end, a little shred of ambiguity regarding his intent at the very last fatal moment of he life.

He is immediately caught, despite his ‘careful’ planning, tried, and convicted.  He dies in the chair.  It is all incredibly slow, detailed, crushing in its inevitability.  The characters in this tale are all presented as sympathetically as could be, while the author, from an Olympian perspective, dissects them coolly and dispassionately.  It was written and takes place in the 1920s, so some things are not discussed so freely as today, but more so than they were not long before.  Clyde’s visit to a brothel while working as a bellhop:

Prepared as Clyde was to dislike all this, so steeped had he been in the moods and maxims antipathetic to anything of its kind, still so innately sensual and romantic was his own disposition and so starved where sex was concerned, that instead of being sickened, he was quite fascinated. The very fleshly sumptuousness of most of these figures, dull and unromantic as might be the brains that directed them, interested him for the time being. After all, here was beauty of a gross, fleshly character, revealed and purchasable

And later:

 His was a disposition easily and often intensely inflamed by the chemistry of sex and the formula of beauty. He could not easily withstand the appeal, let alone the call, of sex. And by the actions and approaches of each in turn he was surely tempted at times, especially in these warm and languorous summer days, with no place to go and no single intimate to commune with. From time to time he could not resist drawing near to these very girls who were most bent on tempting him, although in the face of their looks and nudges, not very successfully concealed at times, he maintained an aloofness and an assumed indifference which was quite remarkable for him.

Everyone is ruled by their nature, formed by genetics and the social petri dishes in which they were cultured.  The unconscious, and sex, lurks unacknowledged, but powerful.  Not just Clyde, but the lawyer who sends him to the chair, the jurors, his defense, the doctors who refuse to give his girlfriend an abortion – they are all locked into the suffocating confines of the social machine.  Here’s Mason, the district attorney, determined to see him fry for his crime, and to make a political coup for himself in the process:

Mason was a short, broad-chested, broad-backed and vigorous individual physically, but in his late youth had been so unfortunate as to have an otherwise pleasant and even arresting face marred by a broken nose, which gave to him a most unprepossessing, almost sinister, look. Yet he was far from sinister. Rather, romantic and emotional. His boyhood had been one of poverty and neglect, causing him in his later and somewhat more successful years to look on those with whom life had dealt more kindly as too favorably treated. The son of a poor farmer’s widow, he had seen his mother put to such straits to make ends meet that by the time he reached the age of twelve he had surrendered nearly all of the pleasures of youth in order to assist her. And then, at fourteen, while skating, he had fallen and broken his nose in such a way as to forever disfigure his face. Thereafter, feeling himself handicapped in the youthful sorting contests which gave to other boys the female companions he most craved, he had grown exceedingly sensitive to the fact of his facial handicap. And this had eventually resulted in what the Freudians are accustomed to describe as a psychic sex scar.

In his dreaminess, he has something in common with Clyde, but he was deformed, and now he has that “sex scar.”  And there is the town, the jurors, the face of stolid morality, the herd mentality of the Christian rubes, which Clyde’s defense attorney scorns, but treats gingerly by necessity, as he questions Clyde on the stand:

He was a college graduate, and in his youth because of his looks, his means, and his local social position (his father had been a judge as well as a national senator from here), he had seen so much of what might be called near-city life that all those gaucheries as well as sex-inhibitions and sex-longings which still so greatly troubled and motivated and even marked a man like Mason had long since been covered with an easy manner and social understanding which made him fairly capable of grasping any reasonable moral or social complication which life was prepared to offer.

“Oh, I can’t say not entirely afterwards. I cared for her some — a good deal, I guess — but still not as much as I had. I felt more sorry for her than anything else, I suppose.”

“And now, let’s see — that was between December first last say, and last April or May — or wasn’t it?”  “About that time, I think — yes, sir.”

“Well, during that time — December first to April or May first you were intimate with her, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even though you weren’t caring for her so much.”

“Why — yes, sir,” replied Clyde, hesitating slightly, while the rurals jerked and craned at this introduction of the sex crime.

“And yet at nights, and in spite of the fact that she was alone over there in her little room — as faithful to you, as you yourself have testified, as any one could be — you went off to dances, parties, dinners, and automobile rides, while she sat there.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t off all the time.”

Clyde done wrong, but what were his chances in life?  Society stinks.  Capital punishment is brutal and inhuman.  Public officials are self-serving and venal.  (Mason is honest, but one of his staff plants evidence to further incriminate Clyde.  He needn’t have bothered, but he does anyway.)  The social élite are shallow, smug, and uncaring.  Society is a machine to grind you down, and it starts on page one and goes on, and on, and on…It’s a pretty damn impressive literary feat, if you can stand it!  Dreiser can create a stem winding dramatic courtroom oration as well as he can reproduce the  baby talk of a society princess teasing her beau.

When I began the book, I was struck by how unsympathetically Clyde was portrayed (or at least, without sympathy) compared to the film.  As I read on, however, I came to feel that George Stevens had done a remarkable job of adapting the book and bringing forward to the 1950s, both as a narrative, and in its approach to the audience.  One of the principal differences that I did find a little bit too much to accept in the film, is that Angela Vickers (Liz Taylor) visits Clyde just before his execution, after being kept completely out of view and out of the testimony of the trial.  She still loves him.

In the book, she sends him a brief anonymous, typewritten note that makes clear that she is emotionally distant from him now, although she recognizes how in love they were, and she will not forget him.  It is  in keeping with the ruthless presentation of class relations that is part of the book – she will get on with her social role in the world – and it is the final, crushing blow to Clyde.  As I noted in my post on the film, it is a social melodrama, and such uncompromising realism would have been out of place.

Updike and Out!

I have just read what is considered one of John Updike’s best novels, Rabbit Redux, the second of four telling the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s life.  I found it to border on revolting, almost claustrophobic in its ‘conservative’ resignation to…well, almost everything, misogynistic of course, smug and obtuse about race in America – I could go on.  Updike is obviously an extremely intelligent man, and he writes beautifully, but what is style without content?  What is intelligence without critical appreciation?  Writing a novel isn’t a practical matter, just laying it all out, like engineering!  If you really want a good take-down of the man’s work, you cannot do better than the Gore Vidal in this review of Updike’s memoir and (then) latest novel.

My first exposure to Updike was Roger’s Version, which seemed little more than trash to me, but I was assured by fans that it was the very worst of this prolific writer’s output.  I had read some of his literary reviews and found them sensitive and interesting:  I’d even liked a short story and poem or two that I’d run across.  Time to give him another chance I thought.  While Rabbit Redux is a world away from Roger’s Version, the themes and content are very similar, and I’m done with Mr. Updike.

I had to grit my teeth to finish Redux, it was so deeply boring.  Harry/Rabbit understands little, questions nothing, and acts on instinct, all the while claiming to feel guilt.  I think this is how Updike seeks to portray the beautiful ordinariness of peoples’ lives.  Harry also hits his wife and the eighteen-year old rich drug addict runaway whom he takes in after his wife leaves him.  He and a loony black radical, another house guest  the one pushing dope on the girl, use her as their sex slave while they read Frederick Douglas’ autobiography to one another.  Harry also has a kid who witnesses much of this, whom Harry give beer to drink, and before whom he swears profusely and smokes pot.  He also complains the world is going to hell and that hippies have no respect for their country – go figure.

It sounds melodramatic, and maybe even interesting, but it’s all so flat, so filled with descriptions of the material minutiae of the 1960s, and the people all seem on autopilot, that it is simply excruciating.  Updike is considered a giant of the realist tradition, but to me, none of it seems real: more like the fantasy of reality imagined by an overly literary and intellectual man who is for some reason preoccupied with religion and authority.  Consider:  Harry works as a linotype operator, and comes from a working class family.  His sister goes to Hollywood to become an actress but ends up as an expensive whore.  Everyone in the family seems fine with this:  not a peep about choices, lifestyle, disappointment, anger, whatever, when she breezes home for a few days.  She and Harry chat about fucking a lot.  Just like brothers and sisters everywhere, right?  Maybe I’m naïve…

I could go on a lot about everything in this book that I didn’t like, didn’t believe, or couldn’t fathom, it was so elaborately pointless – the extended descriptions of Harry’s masturbating for example.  The lame discussions of the politics of the Vietnam War.  The constant looming of sex as a instinctual drive that seems to give no one pleasure.  The fact that neither Harry nor anybody else seems to want to try to figure out a way to do something with their lives that satisfies them.  Harry’s love for his son that seems limited to his view of him as a biological extension of himself and that certainly does not involve any care for his welfare beyond asking the drug addicts he harbors not to shoot up in front of him.  And… oh, never mind.

He sure does write sentences well, though.

Waste, Italian Style

Gomorrah (2008), a film by Matteo Garrone, is based on a journalistic account of crime families in the Naples region of Italy, by Roberto Saviano, who is certainly a very brave man, and whom Berlusconi denounced as unpatriotic.  It follows five stories of people whose lives, as are all lives in the region…in Italy? are touched by the mob:  two stupid young kids who dream of big time success as mobsters, and fancy themselves the new Scarfaces of Naples; a master tailor working in the illegal knock-off industry that produces counterfeit haute couture gowns; a young kid who wants to find his future with the local gang while a turf war rages; a mousey accountant who handles payouts and who finds himself in the middle of the same war and wants no part of it;  and a young college graduate who gets a job in the waste disposal business.

The film uses non-professional actors and is produced in a neo-realist, or vérité style:  it is profoundly disturbing.  I suggest it as a pendant to Mafioso for those in thrall to the Coppola-Scorsese melodrama view of the mafia.  Scorsese ‘presents’ this film, and I’m sure he thinks Goodfellas is similarly hard hitting, but in Gomorrah, an MTV soundtrack is notably absent.  For those with a special interest in waste, American or Italian style, this film is informative.  The northern industries send their toxic waste to the south, where it poisons the land.  The managers look the other way, assured that the disposal is clean,as the Americans say.  The price is irresistible.

The action takes place mostly in a neighborhood with architecture that looks like something out of the futurist dreams of Antonio St. Elia.

Demons II: Conclusion

So, Demons comes to an end, but I’m not sure that there was a complete exorcism, although this scene after the murder of Shatov is a start:

…he snatched out the revolver and pointed it straight into the open mouth of the still screaming Lyamshin, whom Tolakchenko, Erkel and Liputin had already seized firmly by the arms, but Lyamshin went on shrieking even in spite of the revolver.  Finally, Erkel, somehow bunched up his foulard and stuffed it deftly into his mouth, and thus the shouting ceased.  Meanwhile, Tolkachenko tied his hands with a leftover end of rope.

Can we say that anything has been resolved, when we have young people like this in town who gape at suicides for fun?

I remember one of them saying aloud right then that “everything has become so boring that there’s no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it’s diverting.”

Stepan Verkhovensky, the stuffy old-time liberal is aghast at the events in the town, and at the role his son played in organizing it all.  He glimpses the truth that his own abstract, self-satisfied intellectual games helped set the stage for it, and shattered by the knowledge, he sets off wandering in Russia, like King Lear on the heath.  Still, he remains absurd, childishly seeking a new female protector in the person of bible saleswoman he happens upon, and he still utters French expressions as would any self-respecting member of the intelligentsia.  So much for finding the real Russia.

Joyce Carrol Oates has written a fine essay on the novel in which she jeers at critics who insist on judging the book by an arbitrary standard, including Nabokov, and where she draws many parallels with Shakespearean tragedy:

Much has been said of the unevenness of The Possessed: Dostoyevsky has been accused of creating caricatures rather than characters, and of exaggerating the imbecilic nature of his “anarchists.”  Several close readings of the novel have convinced me that this is not the case.  Of course if The Possessed—like any of Dostoyevsky’s work, beginning with The Double—is measured against the conventional standards of naturalism, it will seem somewhat feverish and improbable: but so will King Lear and Hamlet.

Oates remarks on the frequent comparison of Stavrogin to Prince Hal, a foolish one, she thinks:  Hamlet is the more suitable comparison.  An exceedingly dark Hamlet, and all the darker for knowledge of the suppressed chapter, At Tikhon’s, in which the jaded superman character, above all normal human feeling, reveals his cruel seduction/rape – it’s not completely clear which – of a twelve-year-old girl who then killed herself.  His demonic narcissism and self-destructiveness makes him a perfect front man, for Pytor’s nihilist machinations, as well as being a figure of magentic attraction for him:

No need for education, enough of science!  There’s sufficient material even without science for a thousand years to come, but obedience must be set up.  Only one thing is lacking in the world:  obedience.  The thirst for education is already an aristocratic thirst.  As soon as there’s just a tiny bit of family or love, there’s a desire for property.  We’ll extinguish desire:  we’ll get drinking, gossip, denunciation going: we’ll get unheard-of depravity going:  we’ll stifle every genius in infancy.

So I wince when I hear anarcho-hipsters singing Pink Floyd’s We Don’t Need No Education, from The Wall.  Those who learned the lessons carried on, but in a more organized fashion.  They had the courage and ego to create a structure to ensure their place at the vanguard of the destructive wave

In the meantime your whole step is towards getting everything destroyed: both the state and its morality.  We alone will remain, having destined ourselves beforehand to assume power:  we shall rally the smart ones to ourselves and ride on the backs of the fools.  You should not be embarrassed by it.  This generation must be re-educated to make it worthy of freedom.  There are still many thousands of Shatovs ahead of us.

But if Dostoyevsky is ruthless in his depiction of the nihilists, their hangers-on, and by implication, their progeny in the revolutionaries of 1917, he is not light on the Establishment.  Governor von Lembke is an idiot – is he the only thing standing between Russia and the abyss?  Well, he has a German name anyway…

And, in the end, what is to be done?  I will go on to read just that novel since it appears to be one of the most influential in the history of 19th century Russia.

Listen, Let’s Make Love

Listen, Let’s Make Love (1967) is an Italian film set in Milan:  the image (on Netflix, of all places!) was grainy, the sound poor, and everyone is dubbed, even though some of them seem to be speaking their lines in English.  Some call it a satire, some an erotic comedy or drama, and some call it Eurotrash.  I’ll go for the satire and erotic drama, although there is no kissing, no nudity, and certainly no sex. (Perhaps it was filmed, then censored – the Italian laws changed at the end of the 1960s, making possible a slew of sex comedies and dramas with the likes of Laura Antonelli).  I’m still not quite sure why I watched it.

The film opens with shots of Milan and some heavy female breathing in the musical score.  There is a funeral, and a countess laments that she cannot attend, though the man who is being buried was her lover for twenty years, because all of Milan would talk.  Lallo (Pierre Clementi – an actor who inspires strong opinions) comes from Naples to attend his father’s burial and take up his profession, that of a gigolo to the social élite – mostly women, but now and then men.  His father left him nothing but his profession, and a room full of nice clothes.

Lallo proceeds to have a series of liaisons, including one with his aunt, before her husband flees with her to Venezuela to avoid prosecution for cooking his books.  In a story with Naples, Milan, financial élite, affairs with aunts, and an oblique mention of Stendhal  in the dialog, The Charterhouse of Parma must come to mind, and maybe even Before the Revolution.  The northern women like to make fun of Lallo’s Neopolitan upbringing, but that doesn’t stop them going to bed with him and showering him with gifts.

Things just sort of happen in the film.  It’s hard to fathom the characters, but then, most of them are shallow socialites.  The characterizations are not deep, and Lallo’s inner life, if he has one, is a mystery.  He slides into his niche as available male quite easily.  At times, he shows a nervy sarcasm:  “I am determined to sell myself to the lowest bidder,” and when he gets a killer look from a woman he dumped for a better client he says, “She gave me a look that mussed my hair!”  He has an early conversation with a friend of his father’s who gives him good advice on how to conduct himself in this business – seeing more of him would have added something to the film.  He only reappears at the end when, losing patience, Lallo kicks his current woman in the ass, sending her sprawling in the snow at a costume party where she’s dressed as a nun:  he appears in a full batman costume and expresses his exasperation with Lallo.

Lallo has fallen in love, truly, so he says.  He wants to marry the daughter of the countess.  She lies to him, saying that the young woman is his half-sister.  He dresses in full regalia to somberly lend his presence to her wedding to another bourgeois.  A jarring note of reality hits you like a brick in the head when the countess speaks the facts of life to her maid and accomplice in deception:  These young people…They can dress as they like, think as they like, have political ideas, and do what they want in private.  But, at least in Milan, money marries money!

The film has a lush soundtrack that veers from sounding like Muzak to commenting on the imagery very well.  The design is a tour of high-end 60s style and fashion, sometimes with an impressive and disturbing look to them.

Gate of Flesh

This B-movie from 1964 is discombobulating.  Trashy pulp?  Arty, subverting cinema?  Retrograde trash?  All of them??  Well, it’s in The Criterion Collection, so it must be good, right?

Four prostitutes in post-war Tokyo, a bombed out, rickety metropolis of crowds and slums, set up house together with some strict rules.  One rule is supreme:  no man gets sex for free.  That would undermine their business, and that means their survival in the violent dog-eat-dog world they inhabit.  Into this world falls Shin (Joe Shishido) a macho returned soldier who navigates the criminal underworld.  They give him shelter while he recovers from a wound, and, of course, they all start to fall for him.   Who will break the cardinal rule first, and suffer the consequences?

Family Scene

She broke the rules

Watching the girls administer a whipping to a rule-breaker, Shin only says, “Nice body!”  He has learned a lot in the war:  now he lives for two things – sex and food!

An interesting interview on the DVD concentrates on the director (Seijun Suzuki) and his production designer:  both are serious artists, the designer with a background in theater design.  Refusing the directorial assignment was not an option in the studio system, and, he remarks, it was not his role to comment on the nature of the film.  Two creative guys trying to make something good out of pretty low-class material.  The studio wanted something “erotic,” something similar to “Romano-porn,” and the censors had to be placated.  Studio actresses, except one, would not take the roles because of the story and the nudity.

Nude, but not quite exposed

The colors and sets are weird, sometimes surrealistic.  There is no attempt at ‘realism,’ it’s all very theatrical in appearance.  The decrepit Tokyo was built on a backlot with hijacked plywood and whatever came to hand – verisimilitude would have blown their B-movie budget out of the water!  A couple kisses and rotates in front of the camera; a prostitute seduces a missionary in Gothic churchyard (the designer comments that such a church would have never survived intact in reality); and the girls administer punishment in a half-destroyed warehouse that sets the mode for innumerable cheapo-porno-S&M imitations.  Even the girls’ dresses, each a bright solid color, were selected because anything else was too expensive.  (The director comments wryly that later critics insisted on finding significance in their costume colors.)

Two kissing on a revolving platform

Self-degradation by seducing her former benefactor

Keeping the rules

There are things going on in this film that are hard to process as an American viewer in 2011.  Why does Shishido look like what one critic called, the world’s most badass chipmunk?  Turns out, he had cheek augmentation surgery.  Yes!  Before that, he was a typecast as a standard romantic lead – he looked the part, all slick hair, matinée idol good looks.  And there’s the portrayal of Americans and the use of the American flag – not at all positive.  Why should it be?  The director notes that he served in the army when all he did was flee; Japan was reeling and on the defensive.  In this movie, his “grudge” was apparent he remarks years later.

The film has many split scenes in which the thoughts of one character are present as a fuzzy image over the main scene, as well as a lot of short takes representing the fantasies of the individuals.  In one striking sequence, the girl who seduced the missionary is determined to have Shin.  She follows him and throws herself down, shouting, “Take me!”  Never mind the rules!  He looks at her, and there is a sequence of black and white newsreel images from the war with nothing but an infernal racket and images of tracer bullets flying.  Shin lunges for her.

All the women in the house want Shin, but he tells them they are children, playing at being tough chicks.  Only the one who still maintains elements of Japanese culture is a ‘real woman’ to him.  He respects and longs for that – a counter to the humiliation he feels at being part of a defeated army in a destroyed and occupied land.

He resists her advances

With her, he finds love for a while

Shin’s ‘real woman’ is whipped into a pulp for breaking the rules, and he decides to get away after making a deal.  He’s double-crossed and shot at the bridge in the center of the neighborhood.  The last thing he sees is a mother playing with her baby on the edge of the ruins.  Japan and life itself carrying on, reborn, perhaps?

Last thing he sees

The End

It was I who killed the official’s old widow and her sister Lizaveta with an axe…

I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment when I was in the ninth grade, and I loved it.  Heaven knows what I understood of it.  Generations later, I have tried to read again all those novels that I devoured then – Karamazov, Demons, Idiots – and I could get nowhere.  I found Dostoyevsky’s style repellant and impenetrable, with the exception of Notes from Underground, which has always been a favorite.  Maybe it was the translation.

I am more than half through the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of this novel, and I am amazed at the novelty of the book, its outrageous inventiveness.  The phrase I find myself coming back to is avant garde.  It seems so, even now, after 140 years – fresh, challenging, bizarre, and direct.  Compared to this, Dostoyevksy’s contemporary ‘realists’ such as Dickens (whom he loved), Turgenev (whom he loathed) and Flaubert (I don’t know what opinions of each other they entertained, but Flaubert and Turgenev were fast friends) seem almost pedestrian.  The point of view shifts, the mood varies wildly, the characters often seem to speak to the reader directly, and there is no sense of a cool, omniscient consciousness directing the action.  More like real life?

The novel observes a lot of the conventions of 19th century realism:  the place and person names obscured with a hyphen as if to protect the identities of the real people; the fully realized portraits of the city, its classes, and the grit of everyday life – but it seems profoundly stagey, literally as if a play, not a novel, which makes it seem unrealistic at the same time.  Characters enter, declaim, moan, howl, rave, and exit.  So much of the action takes place in crowded rooms.  People are forever making decisions, talking, arguing, and falling into reverie on stairs, going up and going down.

Unusual also is the recounting of dreams:  they are utterly credible, in a way that I associate with writing of the 20th century only.  Earlier writers tend towards romantic notions of what the dormant mind produces – Raskolnikov’s are completely believable, especially the first in which he imagines following a man, a man who knows his crime, a man who stops, turns, and waves to him from across the street, saying nothing.

Finally, Dostoyevsky gets the jump on all the existentialist notions that would become trite in generations to come.  Listen to this deliciously funny, dark, exchange as Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov discuss the afterlife and eternity:

“We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast!  But why must it be vast?  Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity.  I sometimes fancy something of the sort.”

“But surely, surely you can imagine something more just and comforting than that!” Raskolnikov cried out with painful feeling.

“More just?  Who knows, perhaps that is just- and, you know, if I had my way, it’s certainly how I would do it!”  Svidrigailov answered, smiling vaguely.

How many episodes of the Twilight Zone, how many adolescent rock lyrics, what pile of scripts and plays start with notions like this?

With the climate of political extremism being what it is these days, I think I just might get myself a copy of The Demons next.

Stray Dog

A stray dog becomes a mad dog.  A mad dog sees only straight paths, and can’t shoot very well either.  This we learn from Stray Dog, a 1949 Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura.  The two actors would later become world famous as samurai, but in this film, they navigate a decrepit, post-war Tokyo during a heat wave, patiently going through the steps of a police procedural.  Shimura has a full head of hair and constantly wipes sweat from his face with rag:  in The Seven Samurai, he’s bald, and does his signature gesture of absent mindedly scratching his chest.

The film is usually classed as a film noir in style, but it seems more like a straight procedural.  Of course, the entire opening credit sequence treats us to the image of a panting dog – that tips us off that things are not the norm.  Mifune plays Murakami,  a complete greenhorn homicide detective who’s gun is stolen from his pocket on a crowded bus.  He’s mortified, and offers to resign, but the seasoned detectives tell him to cut the crap, “This isn’t the army!”  and they assign Sato (Shimura) to help him on the case and show him the ropes.  Sato is a zhlubby family man who dispenses philosophical wisdom and police tips with world-weary authority.

The action takes us through the seamy precincts of the city, a city without air conditioning – everyone sweats buckets.  As Murakami’s gun is implicated in one crime after another, he is consumed with anxiety, foreboding, and guilt over his stupid carelessness.  Sato tells him, if it wasn’t your Colt, it would be another Browning.

Murkami tails a showgirl who knows something and visits her home.  He won’t leave until she talks.  She blames the world for the crimes of Yusa, her boyfriend, it’s so unfair.  Some people have everything while they have to scrounge for scraps.  Yusa had his knapsack stolen on the way home from the army – that’s what set him off into crime:  who would do such a lousy thing!  Murakami tells her that he too had his knapsack stolen the same way:  two paths, a crossroads.  One became a stray dog and chose crime, one the straight and narrow.  That fate thing again.

 

From here the film takes off into another realm, of brilliant poetry, that only someone like Kurosawa can create.  A cleansing rain breaks the heatwave as the climax comes -Sato is shot trying to capture Yusa.  Murakami and the girl hear it happen over the phone.

Sato will live, and Murakami catches up with Yusa.  Murakami has no gun, he left it with Sato, but Yusa has his!  The chase leaves the town, and continues into the woods as they blunder and crash through lush, flowering meadows and undergrowth.  Beautiful flowers everywhere!

 

Murakami catches up with the mad dog who is shaking with fear in this standoff which could be, or will be, right out of Sergio Leone.

Murakami’s shot with his own gun, but Yusa is so scared, he just wings him.

It all happens on the lot of a suburban residence where a woman is playing the piano.  What was that noise?  Who are those men?  Nothing going on – she goes back to her piano.

We get an almost hyper-real set of images of Murakami’s suffering as the standoff continues

The blood drips slowly from his hand onto the pretty flowers at his feet.  Time is standing still…

Yusa is out of bullets:  a little more running through the flowers, and he’s caught and handcuffed.  The hunter and the mad dog lie in the foliage,  out of breath, while children walk by in the background, singing.  The juxtaposition is marvelous, and we know from earlier scenes that Murakami has developed a sympathy, almost sentimental, for his prey.

Yusa, looks at the sky, the flowers, and like a captured dog, begins to howl horribly.  It’s all over for him, he’s finished.  Why did it have to happen this way?

The film is elevated beyond procedural, beyond noir, into the realm of tragic humanism.  Sato tells his young protegé that he’ll stop sympathizing with the poor creeps who turn to crime after he’s arrested a few more of them.

“Attack”

I was wondering Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, so I watched the movie finally.  It’s a sick, dark tale of derangement and family dysfunction, with a heavy dollop of really black comedy.  Of course, the real attraction is Bette Davis in a wonderful star turn, with Victor Buono doing a memorable supporting bit.  He manages to convey contempt, pity, amazement, self-disgust, and greed all with a few twitches of the lips and eyebrows.  The film was directed by Robert Aldrich, who made one of my favorite noirs, Kiss Me Deadly. (The two films use the same stretch of beach for their final scene.)   Looking into Aldrich’s career, I found that he also made the 1956 film, “Attack.”

As this interesting review suggests, the quotation marks around the title of  “Attack” are original with Aldrich.  This is no ordinary WWII film, and it was made on a very small budget with no cooperation from the military.  It is based on a play, and it runs like one – the drama is in the characters and their conflicts, so no need for big budget effects.  The themes are cowardice and corruption; not the stuff of your usual GI Joe flick of that era.

Eddie Albert (later of Green Acres fame) plays Cooney, a captain with no guts.  (In reality, Albert was a decorated combat veteran.) Worse, he’s a full-fledged coward.  In civilian life, he’s a businessman with a big-wheel father who tried without success to beat some virility into him.  As a captain, his fear of doing anything, and his need to cover up his failure,  leads to the needless deaths of nearly twenty men under his command.  One of his men decides it’s time to change the chain of command.

Cooney’s commander is Bartlett (Lee Marvin at his slithery, frightening best).  He doesn’t care what Cooney does or how he destroys his men:  he’s more concerned with keeping in good graces with Cooney’s dad back home in the states.  He despises Cooney, but after the war, he’ll get his payoff for getting Cooney through the war, maybe with a medal.

The review linked above mentions the “rampant” phallic imagery in the film -tank guns, big cigars fondled and chomped, rifles…- and remarks that it is typical of the era.  I’m not so sure that this is not over interpretation.  Below, a German tank on the prowl; the view of the German gunner in the tank as it moves in on Costa; Costa tries to blast the tank with his trusty bazooka, but the trigger won’t work!  You connect the dots if you like…

The brutality of the war is conveyed through spare, frightening combat scenes:  the men make a terrifying run under enemy fire over a long open field; a tense confrontation with a German sniper is resolved with some backwoods trickery and good shootin’; Costa (Jack Palance) screams like an animal as his arm is crushed by a tank.  When the bodies of Costa and Cooney are laid side by side, Cooney’s look likes he’s sleeping; Costa’s face is frozen in an anguished scream, his mouth and eyes wide open.  The men are loyal to one another and fixed on their mission, the proverbial GI grunts.  When they are trapped in a basement in a town during house to house fighting, they resolve to carry one of them, Bernstein, out on stretcher since his leg is broken.  He’s a Jew, and the SS in town won’t take him prisoner.  Cooney wants to surrender, so the men shoot him.

The moral corruption of Bartlett is just as brutal as the combat.  He knows what happened, and he couldn’t care less.  As he kicks Cooney’s body he says, “Well, the judge wanted a son, so I guess he had to loose one to get one!”  He’ll write the coward up for a medal and get the next in command, Woodruff (William Smithers) to sign-off on it.  He’s got no choice…or does he?

Cooney collapses in a heap and fondles his sheepskin slippers, wishing he were home safe in bed.

Woodruff approaches the bodies of Cooney and Costa before deciding what he must do.

One more thing about Baby Jane:  when Jane is a young girl in 1917, a vaudeville sensation, Blanche hates her and smolders inwardly over the favoritism shown her spoiled brat sister. In 1935, the tables have turned, and Blanche is a big film star, while Jane, with no acting talent at all, works in a series of junk B-films.  A few clips of these movies are shown in a scene in which some film executives bemoan the fact that they have to humor Blanche by giving Jane work in the studio.  Boy, that young woman in the clips  sure looked like Bette Davis!  Where did they find her?  Turns out it was Davis, and Aldrich dug up clips from some truly awful films that Davis was in at the start of her career.  Did it hurt Bette to see them up there on the screen?  I doubt the sting was too great, given the acclaim she got for her performance.