Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray | Macao / 1952

lonely, worried, and sorry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Stanley Rubin, and Robert Mitchum (screenplay), Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray (directors) Macao / 1952

 

I think most critics today would agree with early commentators of Josef von Sternberg’s exotic adventure-tale Macao who found the story completely unbelievable and the direction confused. In the midst of shooting, producer Howard Hughes found the narrative plot so incoherent, in fact, that he got rid of the original director, replacing him with Nicholas Ray, and asking actor Robert Mitchum to help create some logical links between scenes, a process that almost seems to have doomed the work to critical disdain.

     There is no doubt that a great deal of this film, set in the exotic Macao, the former Portuguese colony now part of China, is pure hokum. Without any true explanation three seemingly suspicious people find themselves on a boat heading toward Macao, each keeping something from the others. Nick Cochran (Robert Mitchum), a former US serviceman, has a mysterious secret which involves, evidently, a murder and a red-head; Julie Benson (Jane Russell), a woman of many past careers—including even fortunetelling (the source of her ability is knowing that everyone is “lonely, worried, and sorry.”)—is now a nightclub singer inexplicably on the run or in search of something she can’t identify (as she cynically tells the local gangster Vincent Holloran: “my trust fund ran out”); and Lawrence Trumble, a self-admitted traveling salesman, who deals in silk stockings and contraband, but secretly, we soon discover, is the most duplicitous of the three, being a detective trying to lure the Macao-casino owner, Halloran (Brad Dexter), beyond the three mile limit in order to arrest him for numerous crimes, including the robbery of a priceless diamond necklace which he has sent on to Hong Kong. And then there’s Halloran’s current girlfriend, Margie (Gloria Grahame) who serves at times as his henchman, but at other times becomes an ally to Cochran.

      Hardly have these three exchanged verbal barbs than they are investigated, threatened, and nearly arrested, Cochran quickly being perceived by Halloran as the detective, while Benson is swept up into his personal world when she is suddenly offered a job singing in his casino. The plot, we quickly realize will be a playing out of their roles, confused by the evil forces in charge of decadent city.

     Despite the producers’ determination, however, to get that story properly sorted out, it really doesn’t matter. We already know that someone or everyone will attempt to murder Cochran, that Halloran will fall in love with Benson, and that Benson will fall in love with Cochran, while Halloran will surely be lured out of “the three-mile limit” into his arrest—or at least some variation of that!

     If that is your focus, however, you might as well forget it. This is not Casablanca; in Macao you get robbed even before you get off the boat. What it is, in hindsight, is a first-rate film, filled with a brilliant series of sarcastic-leaden and sexually charged interchanges between the sultry Benson and the always laconic Cochran, a dialogue, at times, that outshines many of the seemingly more sophisticated comedies of Garson Kanin, Preston Sturges, and others of the 1940s. And in some respects, one might describe this 1952 film, along with Orson Welles’ 1958 work, Touch of Evil, as the last of the great American film noirs. In one of their earliest encounters, for example, Cochran challenges the icy Benson: “Why don’t you take that chip off your shoulder?”

 

                                Julie Benson: Every time I do, somebody hits me over

                                                       the head with it.

 

After another icy encounter, Julie sends Nick flowers, resulting in this interchange:

 

                                Nick Cochran: Thanks for the flowers.

                                Julie Benson: [sarcastically] I couldn’t afford a

                                      wreath.

 

     Even minor characters get clever lines: as Lt. Sebastian (Thomas Gomez), who notes of Julie Benson: “Besides her obvious talents, she also sings.” And Halloran and Margie have a similarly light interchange:

 

                                Holloran: You don’t want that junk. Diamonds would only

                                      cheapen you.

                                Margie: Yeah. But what a way to be cheapened.

 

Or as Margie quips to Nick (who the night before has lost all of his money, even with loaded dice): “You’re up early for a loser.”

      At other times this film comes alive as a dark and sinister adventure tale, as Halloran’s murderous stooges chase Nick through the darkly lit streets, across rooftops, and through a whole flotilla of net-covered moonlit Chinese junks, a thrillingly shot episode that ends with the “accidental” stabbing and murder of Trumble—utterly ironic since the pursuers think they have got the wrong man. The inevitable battle between Halloran and Cochran, which occurs half on boat and half in the water, is brilliantly staged, as, in the end, the police scoop up the evil casino owner, and Cochran swims back, like an early James Bond, to collect his prize, Julie, still aboard.

      Macao may not be a profound movie, but it is most certainly an entertaining one that perhaps had both the film’s makers and critics been less focused on story, they might have recognized it for its numerous qualities. I’ve now seen this film three times, and I’ll gladly watch it again just to watch the sparks fly from the positively and negatively-charged leads through their loaded verbal comments. For if Corcoran-Mitchum is a born loser with dice, he is a born seducer with words: “My fatal charm. Never misses—except with women.” Benson-Russell’s response: “Well you annoyed me a little when you belted me with that blonde!”

      Frankly, I’ll take that kind of language over a fussy plot any day!

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2013).

 

Federico Fellini | Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits) / 1965

a human saint

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits) / 1965

 

It’s curious to read Roger Ebert’s 2001 review of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. Ebert sees the film as the first of the director’s decline, and, in retrospect, as a work even less interesting than it originally seemed to be:

“Juliet was released in America in 1966 [my usually reliable IMDb source says 1965], and some audiences no doubt attended in an expanded state of consciousness. They were in the right show: a head trip, as they said. Seen in 2001, when the party is long over, it’s like a streamer from last summer’s dances: still bright, still gaily waving to echoes of forgotten music.”

      My experience of this film was quite the opposite. I don’t recall whether I saw the film when it originally appeared in theaters, but I certainly saw it within a couple of years after its American premiere. Although I had already enjoyed La Dolce Vita and was awed by (at the time the utterly impenetrable) 8 ½, I found Juliet of the Spirits to be fairly conventional, particularly in its psychological fantasies. I also probably misunderstood the film’s satire of its jet-setter’s fascination with all things spiritual and vaguely new-wave as advocating those values—values I found intolerable. The very idea of a room full of disciples of someone like the hermaphroditic Bhisma in a house stuffed with individuals playing out their sexual fantasies, as was Juliet’s next door neighbor Suzy’s, seemed merely absurd. During that period, I had also rejected the kind of simple surrealism which is at the heart of many of Fellini’s nevertheless memorable images. I do recall finding the film quite beautiful, and I always enjoy Nino Rota’s remarkable scores, but overall, I felt disappointed with the film.    

     Over the years, however, I have watched it again several times, and the other day, in viewing it once more, I realized how truly wonderful this film was, particularly given the amazing performance of Giulietta Masina as the suffering housewife. Ebert describes the character, Giulietta Boldrini, as being primarily a bourgeois woman who is withdrawn and melancholy, a kind of “party pooper.” But I now see her attempts to please her philandering husband and her intrusively bossy mother and sisters as a vision of gracefulness in a world where nearly everyone else goes grotesquely traipsing through life. Despite her obvious fears, her spiritual searches, Giulietta is a remarkably open to the crude world around her. It is she, after all, who hears all their voices.

      I now also have come realize that, although Fellini’s films seem always to present characters so exaggerated that they might exist only a side show of the circus (his major fixation), in fact they are just larger-than-life perceptions of a landscape of the Italian world, which as dancer Carolyn Brown has written, really did exist during those days in Europe. Fellini simply put a kind of magnifying glass on the people who surrounded him, which in this film we first encounter as Giulietta’s quiet world—in which with her two servants she awaits her husband’s return from the office for a private birthday celebration—when her home is suddenly invaded, in every sense of the word, with loud and noisy revelers, a clearly gay medium, a sex-charged sculptor and her current boy-toy and numerous others, who cannot stop for a moment to let anyone else speak. The silent Giulietta has no choice but to put on a smile and go with the flow, as they all attempt to simultaneously make over her life. 

     Similarly, her overdressed mother and sisters the very next day do the same by telling her how to make up her face and hair and fuss over her simple but quite elegant dress. A doctor friend pontificates about the housewife’s “problems,” real and imagined. Into this already nearly unbearable landscape comes her next-door neighbor, Suzy, with an entire retinue of servants and admirers who create for her, as if she were an Arabian sultan, a tent into which she can lay her nearly nude body to rest.

      Giulietta’s cheating husband Giorgio (Mario Pisu) often does not even return home, but when he does it is nearly always with this circus of life. If this, as critics argue, is Fellini’s statement of his own values played out in opposition to those of Giulietta, his real-life wife, it is certainly presented without a strong sense of satire and criticism. For it is Giulietta, gardening, cooking, gossiping with the maids, who alone retains any real elegance and centeredness in this film. Only with her mother’s and sister’s intervention does she finally seek out a detective service to track down her husband’s mistress.

      It all now reminds me a great deal of the extravagant selfishness of that period, in which I was certainly a participant as I have written elsewhere, but which I see now for its emptiness. It is not her erring husband who wins out in the end. His urbane friend, played by José de Villalonga, is far more the type of being with whom Giulietta should be involved, a romantic who enjoys poetry and solitude, and wonders at the beauty of her garden.

 

     As Bosley Crowther wrote when the film first premiered in New York, Giulietta’s “psychological problem is not too elusive or complex.” She has simply been compelled as a child to face death dramatically by the terrifying nuns of her school, a performance violently interrupted by her church-hating grandfather. Her fears can nearly all be related back to her childhood—the domination by her father, mother, church, and later of her sisters, husband, and friends. She has never had the opportunity to create her own vision of life.

      By film’s end, Fellini, presents her as a kind of Alice in Wonderland, finally freed from her insanely imposed conditions; but we have no comprehension, other than she will now move beyond her husband and acquaintances, where she will go or how precisely she will define that life. As Giulietta, in the film’s last images, walks off into the nearby woods, Fellini suggests that she may now be open to the sexual lessons of her friend Suzy. But Masina herself felt it meant simply that she was alone, “abandoned and lonely.”

      Seeing it again this past week, I also felt that wherever she is headed and whatever she will do, it will be with a quiet grace that few others in this film have been able to achieve. In a world of such freaks, Giulietta stands out as a human paragon of love and caring. And that, in turn, transforms Fellini’s film from a gaudy recreation of what Ebert described as a “head trip,” into a sensitive exploration of what it means to be a human saint in a distracted world, the role in which the frightful nuns had cast her even as a child.

 

Los Angeles, May Day, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2013).

Frank Capra | It Happened One Night / 1934

detours

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Riskin (screenplay, based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams), Frank Capra (director) It Happened One Night / 1934

 

I stand somewhere in between those critics who praise the realism of film director Frank Capra’s presentation of everyday Americans and those who simply cannot abide the stereotypes and platitudes of his often corny view of the world. I guess if I had to choose between the two sides, I’d agree with the “Capra-corns,” who mock his sentimental point of view. Certainly there is nothing at all “realistic” about his view of the rich and the poor. The heroes of his films, nearly always the down-and-out, love baseball, bus and train sing-a-longs, and take great pleasure in the mobs of folk who people his busy streets. The rich, fat and haughty, are either outright evil or, at the very least, in need a good comeuppance, if not a swift kick in the pants. At their best, Capra’s likeable films (and there are several that I find quite unlikeable) are fables for an imaginary everyday man, the John Does of Depression desperation.

      Even the movies that one might describe as examples of near-great film-making—It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—play out standard stock plots, with scripts that stink of the stable. When he gets his hands on a fairly witty screenplay, as he did in Robert Riskin’s adaptation of Samuel Hopkins Adams’ story, It Happened One Night, the director does nearly everything in his power to transform cleverness into the mundane.

      Both his central actors in this work, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, were rumored to hate the story, with Colbert, in particular, angry about even having to work with Capra, showing it in numerous tiffs and tantrums throughout the shoot. After finishing the film, Colbert complained to an acquaintance: “I just finished the worst picture in the world,” and, determined that she had no chance of winning an Academy Award, was on a cross-country train at the very moment the Oscar ceremony announced her as the Best Actress of the year. Harry Cohn sent studio assistants to “drag her” off the train before it left the station.

      Capra, in fact, worked with their enmity for him, beginning his movie with the boredom and rebellion of Ellen “Ellie” Andrews (Colbert), who has been captured aboard her father’s yacht in order to prevent her from marrying aviator, fortune-hunter “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas), and the drunken journalist Peter Warne (Gable) having just been fired. True love seems the furthest thing from these characters’ minds, and, in fact hardly is mentioned thereafter.

    Within moments, however, the film, begins its seemingly endless journey forward, as the characters, swim, bus, walk, hitchhike, and drive in the forward rush of this “on the road” drama—the comedy of the work sneaks in between the cracks, so to speak, in the characters’ disdain for one another—that ultimately takes them where neither really want to go. But that is just what is so delicious in this work—that Ellie, in attempting to reach her would-be husband, and Peter, in his black-mailing attachment to the wealthy socialite, are forced on a voyage to nowhere. The only events they experience involve “detours.” As critic Daniel Eagan describes the film’s plot:

                            A bag is stolen, a ticket is lost, a bus swerves off the road.

                            Money goes missing, rewards are offered, a car needs gas,

                            rain washes out a bridge….

 

     Neither of these figures, moreover, is particularly appealing: Peter is a “self-important,” cynical newsman who, as I mentioned, attempts to blackmail Ellie. As Ellie, herself, describes him: “Your ego is absolutely colossal.” His answer, “Yeah, yeah, not bad, how’s yours,” says everything. Ellie, in turn, is an entirely self-centered consumer. As Peter describes her: “You know, I had you pegged right from the jump. Just a spoiled brat of a rich father. The only way you get anything is to buy it, isn’t it?”

 

     Together, the two lie to small-town motel operators and detectives, use sex to catch free rides, and steal a car (although only after the driver has stolen their own bags). Neither of these figures—except in the visualizations of them by cinematographer Joseph Walker—is presented in romantic or sexy contexts. Despite their sharing a motel room, a simple blanket hung between them is enough to keep them out of each other’s arms and beds: Peter admits that because he has “no trumpet,” the wall of Jericho will not come tumbling down, as if hinting at his sexual impotency. A night in the hay results in little but straw clinging to their hair.

      What the director seems to comprehend is that if you put two lovely actors in the same room for—not just the one night of the title but—several nights without even a kiss, the audience will all the more desire a consummation of the actor’s unspoken love. It is only at the very last moments of this voyage, as Ellie makes her way down the aisle to her doomed marriage with the groom who has just easily and flawlessly flown in—the only character who has had a pleasant time in travel—that she takes yet one more detour, running off once again, this time into the arms of the man with whom she has already shared a life-transforming journey. In short, it is not the destination that either of them was really seeking, but the trip itself. In Capra’s unpredictable story, love does not, in fact, bloom in “one night,” but through many days and nights, through hunger, poverty, and exhaustion—through the “better and the worst” events of life.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2013).

Akira Kurosawa | 羅生門 (Rashomon) / 1950, USA 1951

suddenly the sun went away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto (screenplay, based on short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa), Akira Kurosawa (director) 羅生門 (Rashomon) / 1950, USA 1951

I first saw Akira Kurosawa’s great film Rashomon many years ago, but realized, that except for its structure, I had remembered very little of it; I welcomed the opportunity yesterday to revisit the film. Most filmgoers will recall that this movie presents reality through the views of four different figures: a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the woman he rapes (Machiko Kyō), her husband, whom the bandit kills (Masayuki Mori), and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who first discovers the body of the dead husband. This minimalist plot is truly all one needs to know, the recounting of the differ versions each serving the individual who tells the tale (the dead man tells his tale through a medium).

 

      Kurosawa brilliantly films this work in three major locations: the court—a pebble floored white space—a sun-dappled forest, and a decaying, half-dilapidated gateway. Two of these sites are brightly lit, while at the gateway there is a heavy downpour of rain. The rape and murder indeed occur in the bright sun, into which Kurosawa’s cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, often directly points his camera—all of which leads me to concur with Japanese critic Tadao Sato, who argues that, Kurosawa has reversed the standard use of light and dark, light here represented as a stimulant for lust and violence, something that obscures the truth, while rain and darkness finally results in truth’s revelation. Almost all of the characters are shown heavily sweating in the sunny forest, and at one point in the testimony where the realization of the consequences of a treacherous act is perceived, a figure notes that “suddenly the sun went away.” The fact that Kurosawa had planned to end the film with a cloud overhead—the cloud they awaited never appeared during filming.

     And in this context, recalling that original Emperor of Japan was believed to have been the child of the sun goddess, I think we can also perceive the director’s attitude toward his own culture in the immediate post-World War II context in which the film was made. Predictably the film was not well received in Japan, while winning awards at The Venice Film Festival and The Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts.

       Clearly the testimonies given by all four of these figures in the white-washed court are filled with lies, the woodcutter declaring that he came upon the dead body long after the event; the bandit bragging that after tricking and tying up the samurai husband, raping the woman before his eyes and dueling with the man after; the wife suggesting that she has stabbed her husband with her own dagger for his refusal to even acknowledge her after the rape; and the samurai claiming that after rejecting his wife, she seemed determined to go with the bandit, he killing himself in shame. These last two versions, particularly, paint a truly misogynistic picture of the husband, who plays out patriarchal and macho attitudes regarding the wife, suggesting, at l east in Kurosawa’s version, a disdain of this proto-feminist perspective.      

     The final truth, however—and I do believe we can perceive the woodcutter’s second version of the story is the truth—exosts somewhere between the testimonies of both husband and wife. As if confessing to the priest, and admitting that he had previously lied, the humble woodsman now admits that he had seen it all, the rape and battle, that after raping her, the bandit begged to woman to go with him, and in answer cut the ropes that bound her husband. When he refused to fight for her, she egged on both men, demanding they act like real men by fighting for her. In the fight, we see the terror and clumsiness of both men, and the bandit wins the battle only through luck, with the samurai begging for his life before his was killed, the woman running away.

     Many critics, and Kurosawa himself, however, seem to shy away from declaring any of these “five” versions as truthful. But it seems to make sense that the woodcutter, growing angrier and angrier as he tells his story to the commoner, enjoys telling it the second time; he no longer has anything to gain, and by admitting that he had previously lied suggests that his retelling the story is an attempt to free his own conscience. His argument for why he had lied, moreover (“I didn’t want to get involved”) makes perfect sense. Kurosawa seems to point this up by showing the woodcutter to be, at heart, a good man, chastising the commoner for stealing a kimono and amulet in which a crying baby has been wrapped, and offering to take the child into his own family which already includes six children. 

 

     So, although the film and original story, may have seemed somewhat experimental or even postmodern in their anti-linear subjectivity, in hindsight Rashomon seems far more related to psychological modernism, wherein we get four versions of reality that can be explained by the inner thinking and self-justification of its central characters. Only in the end, are the woodcutter and priest willing to abandon self-serving realities.

     Had the cloud that Kurosawa sought to darken the sky at the end of his tale appeared, we might clearly recognize that the sun god was no longer looking down upon them, and with it, the imperialist aspirations of Japan—filled with actions of greed, murder, and mendacity. However, even with the somewhat “sunny” ending, we realize, in the woodcutter’s gentle gesture of taking the baby into his arms, that he is acting against all that has preceded it.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2014).