Stanley Donen | Charade / 1963

trading up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Stone (screenplay, based on a story by Stone and Marc Behm), Stanley Donen (director) Charade / 1963

 

Stanley Donen’s comedic thriller, Charade, begins with a wealthy young woman, Regina Lambert (Audrey Hepburn), ensconced at a ski resort (Megève) where she admits to her friend, Sylvie, that she is soon going to get a divorce from her husband Charles: there are too many things she does not know about her husband, too many secrets that he has seemingly kept from her. A few moments later a handsome stranger, Peter Joshua (Cary Grant), complains to her about her friend, Sylvie’s water-gun shooting son. The stranger is rebuffed with a clever put-down:

 

                             Reggie: I already know an awful lot of people and until one

                                 of them dies I couldn’t possibility meet anyone else.

                             Peter: Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.

 

When he turns to go, she chides him, “You give up awfully easily.”

      The scene sets up the movie in a nutshell: love, divorce, guns—or violence, at least—will be our focus for the next 100 and some minutes, along with, of course, some tuneful songs by Henry Mancini. And the hero, with whom Regina quickly falls in love, will never properly pursue her, at least romantically. He will give up time and time again, excusing himself simply by changing his identity, insisting that he has only a mother, while refusing to become a true lover. The device is perfect for Grant, who, as a now cinematic gay icon, can accordingly pretend to make constant love to Hepburn’s character while offering her a figure who will just as quickly disappear from her life, only to be replaced by another charming and handsome version of himself.

       Upon her return to Paris, Reggie discovers her entire apartment has been cleaned out, her maid is missing, and, before long, she receives news of her husband’s death, a man murdered and tossed from a train. She can now “meet” that new someone, and on cue Peter Joshua again shows up—a clumsy and basically unexplained plot element that nonetheless seems to make sense, for we already know that they are, by the rules of the plot, destined to fall in love.

       But the reality of the tale is that Reggie has no choice now but to head to the streets, where she spends most of the film, or, at the best, to check into a cheap Paris hotel with Joshua, quite inexplicably, as her “next door neighbor.”

 

      Charade’s ludicrously labyrinthine plot suddenly takes over as we are introduced, one by one—at Charles’ funeral, no less—to the minor characters, Tex Panthollow (James Coburn), Herman Scobie (George Kennedy), and Leopold Gideon (Ned Glass), a group of ex-soldiers, along with Charles and another missing and mysterious figure, Carson Dyle, who together robbed an OSS shipment of $250,000 in gold that was to have been delivered to the French Resistance, and the US government—so Reggie is told by embassy officer, Hamilton Bartholomew—who wants it back. He, as a government authority, as well as the three surviving robbers, are convinced that, since Charles held the money, she must know of its whereabouts.

      Once this ridiculous plot contrivance is set up, the movie settles back into a false romantic comedy as Reggie and Joshua rush about Paris, threatened and harassed, from time to time, by the evil “gang.”  

     Grant, so the story goes, was hesitant about being involved in a film where he (at the 59 years of age) was chasing Hepburn (34), so the writers simply cut all of his lines that suggested his sexual interest in her, and gave them to the character Reggie, the result of which is that Grant plays his character with the most laid-back diffidence of his film career. He seems more bemused by Reggie than sexually interested. In truth, this is the role that Grant played in most of his films.

     As the threats and acts of violence—a burning-match attack in a telephone booth, the kidnapping of Sylvie’s son, a battle between Joshua and Scobie on the roof of the hotel—begin to pile up, it also becomes evident that Joshua is not whom he seems, finally admitting that he is Carson Dyle’s brother, Alexander. At first horrified at his lies—it is lies, we must remember, that separated her from her husband—Reggie quickly recovers her equilibrium and, even more incredulously, her trust in Grant’s character, the authors repeating the same conversation that she had with Peter Joshua, as a standing joke:

 

                            Reggie: Is there a Mrs. Dyle?

                            Alexander Dyle: Yes…

                              [Reggie’s face drops]

                           Alexander Dyle: but, we’re divorced!

                           Reggie [smirking] I thought that was Peter Joshua?

                           Alexander Dyle: I am just as difficult to live with

                               as he was.

 

     Despite the fact that she was ready to divorce her now-dead husband because he was not honest with her, off she now goes with the interloper for more adventures, these ending in several deaths, as the robbers begin to suspect each other. Once more, Reggie and, now Alexander, go through the contents of a small bag Charles Lambert had left behind: toothpaste, a small calendar, a letter, a ticket to Venezuela, and passports in multiple names etc., nothing that seems of value.

     But now, following the instructions of the embassy official Bartholomew, Reggie finds herself in an even more terrifying situation, particularly when he insists that Dyle’s brother died years ago. Soon after the camera pulls back to find the Grant figure in the room with the remaining “gang” members.

     The former Peter Joshua, Alexander Dyle now admits he is simply a professional thief, Adam Canfield. The series of questions is repeated once again, her trust in the man amazingly intact.

   

     As the body count raises, both Reggie and now Adam, follow a clue in her husband’s calendar where they encounter several booths selling stamps to collectors. In a simultaneous instant both she—who has given the letters on the envelope to Sylvie’s young son—and he realize the truth: the money has been used to purchase several rare stamps, which the boy, Jean-Louis, has exchanged with a stamp dealer for a large package of international stamps. When they track down the dealer, he admits the rarity of the stamps, returning them to Reggie.

       But now that they have the “money,” Reggie is in even more danger as Bartholomew, the embassy man, lures her to a square outside the Paris Opera, with Joshua/Dyle/Canfield chasing after. Bartholomew, we discover, is really Carson Dyle, one of the original soldiers who have stolen the gold, and is now about to kill Reggie. Hiding in the prompter’s box Reggie is stalked by Dyle as Canfield, as high above, he tracks his steps across the stage, finally springing open a stage trap door which sends Dyle to his death. I told you the plot was ludicrous and labyrinthine, now becoming quite operatic.

      No matter, Reggie is safe, has the money in hand, and has fallen in love with Canfield. Crime seems to have paid off, even if the stamps, now glued to the envelope, may not have the same net value. Oddly, despite being a professional thief, Canfield, encourages her turn over the stamps to the US embassy.

      As Reggie enters the office of the US agent, Brian Cruikshank, the government official in charge of recovering stolen property, she is suddenly greeted—you guessed it—with Cary Grant, who now admits, just maybe, his real name:

 

                          Reggie: Is there a Mrs. Cruikshank?

                          Cruikshank: Yes.

                          Reggie: But you’re divorced.

                          Cruikshank: No.

                          [Regina’s face drops]

                          Cruikshank: [getting out his wallet to show her a picture]

                              My mother, she lives in Detroit, you’d like her, she’d

                              like you too.

                          Reggie: Oh, I love you, Adam, Alex, Peter, Brian, what-

                          ever your name is, I love you! I hope we have a lot of boys

                          and we can name them all after you!

 

     So, it appears, she has traded in the stamps—which presumably had formerly been the contents of her house—for a new husband. And so many people have died or simply been extinguished in this story, that she will now clearly have room to meet many another in her future life.

     Yet there is absolutely no evidence that “Adam/Alex/Peter/Brian” or any other version of Grant’s personae will hug her close to his chest and take her home as a husband. We need only recall that when he showered in an earlier scene, it was with his suit on, the proper gentlemen whom only a mother could love.

     

Los Angeles, November 10, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2011).

Arthur Penn | Bonnie and Clyde / 1967

along for the ride

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Newman, Robert Benton, Robert Towne [uncredited,] and Warren Beatty [uncredited] (screenplay), Arthur Penn (director) Bonnie and Clyde / 1967

 

With Arthur Penn’s death this year at the end of September, I determined to review his noted film, Bonnie and Clyde, a movie I saw when it originally appeared in the theaters in 1967. Few of the reviews had been particularly positive when I saw the film at Madison, Wisconsin’s Orpheum Theatre. I absolutely loved the movie without really comprehending why I did so. But I remember trying to talk about it with others and attempting to share some of my feelings. In that sense it may have been one of my first attempts at movie reviewing, even though I used my voice instead of a pen.

 

    In the years since, I have seen it a couple of times and watched clips from it on television, but I have not truly given it the attention it deserves. My viewing of the other day was intended to be a correction, and a reinvestigation of the work.

     While I still believe it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, it has certainly lost much of its luster in my older mind. Perhaps the story of a group of misfits, including a beautiful young man and woman—a 30-year-old Warren Beatty (playing Clyde Barrow) and a 26-year-old Faye Dunaway (playing Bonnie Parker)—who, bored with the drab world in which they live, suddenly decide to take a wild road trip, replete with guns, robbery, and, ultimately, murder, doesn’t have the same sense of innocence to it as it did in 1967, a year in which I had just turned 20 myself.

     Using some of the techniques and themes of Jean-Luc Godard and other French New Wave directors (there are elements in Penn’s work of both Breathless and Band of Outsiders), Penn sought to convey the energy and hidden innocence of his characters, despite their often brutal acts. We all knew kids that came from perfectly decent homes—the sons and daughters of ministers and police chiefs—who had been arrested for stealing cars and other petty crimes; in my hometown the head of the police’s son shocked us by stealing a neighbor’s car and driving it into another state! I was the superintendent’s son, just then beginning to perceive that I was gay and becoming involved in political protests. Bonnie and Clyde were simply precursors of what any of us knew we might be capable of. And in the back of our minds, perhaps we all wanted, like Kerouac, to get “on the road,” embarking on the adventuresome voyage of life.

     By romanticizing the original Barrow gang’s story, by turning them into beautiful people who perceived themselves as simply out on a lark, Penn and his writers could use the bleak backdrop of the Great Depression as an explanation for their character’s seemingly rapacious acts: it was a time when few people had anything, so who cared if they stole from the rich? Like 20^th century Robin Hoods they kept very little for themselves.

     These were, Penn underscored, basically “good folk,” as we witness, for example, when they attend, on the run, a family reunion, filmed in red tinted, near stop-cam action, a scene of notable film artistry that pulls these wild Americans out of the white trash rabble and drops them, momentarily, into a simulacrum of the European art film. After all, we are reminded, Bonnie is a poet!

     But Penn knows his American audience well, and while he allows them to briefly rub shoulders, metaphorically speaking, with their European counterparts, he keeps them sexually pure, a necessity if his audience is to allow them for their other lusts. The fact that Clyde is sexually impotent and Bonnie gets off with guns is as American as apple pie, just as are the more generally violent acts which soon begin to dominate.

     At the very moment that this sexless couple’s energy begins to flag, they accumulate others, at first just an idiot gas station attendant, C. W. Moss (perfectly played by Michael J. Pollard), and then Clyde’s older brother Buck (the veteran actor Gene Hackman) and his wife, a minister’s daughter, Blanche (Estelle Parsons), gradually transforming the couple into a "gang."

     As Penn and his writers, suggest, however, that is just when the “fun” begins to dissipate, and they are all swept up into forces of the society they have been attempting to escape. If Bonnie is a modern day Hedda Gabler, a kind of feminist gunslinger, using her “weapons” to destroy the men who threaten, Blanche is just the opposite, an old-fashioned, passive, subservient, and selfish wife, whose every act results in a kind of hysteria, and, indeed, as in the clinical description of that long misunderstood and perhaps sexist dilemma, goes blind (she is shot in the eyes), perhaps even, in her ear-shattering screams, falling deaf! Parsons won an Oscar for her hilariously over-the-top portrayal.

     What such thrill-seekers always forget, alas, is that authority in American culture is just as violent and is far more vengeful and righteous in its behavior. The so-called “good” people are generally more dangerous and, accordingly, nearly always win out over what they define as the “bad.” Using C. W.’s father as a ruse, the police lure the by now worn-out couple into an act of kindness; as they attempt to help Mr. Moss change a worn-out tire, the police brutally kill the two in a blood-bath of hundreds of bullets.

 

    The ending, consequently, hits the audience as an utter shock, so seemingly out of sync as it is with the tone of the rest of the film. Reality, as it must, suddenly hits not only the characters as their bodies fill up with lead, but the audience, who has gone along “for the ride,” with what might have seemed simply as a kind of goofy gangster film, is suddenly forced to understand the result of such societal behavior. For those of us against the Viet Nam War, facing always the possibility of the draft, it came like a slap in the face, an awakening from our presumably innocent childhoods themselves so steeped in Western and gangster myths. It was not that we could not see it coming; we knew it must end that way. But in Penn’s filming of that inevitability, the impact stung us so deeply that it seemed almost that all of our laughter had suddenly and irrevocably been sucked up into one deep, long howl. And looking back, if we might ever want to locate the point of loss of American innocence of the baby boom generation—in truth, I feel Americans are never truly innocent but simply suppose themselves to be—it may not have been the day years later, on September 11th, 2001, but that September in 1967 (the film was released in August, but did not reach most of the smaller American cities until the next month) in the dark of a movie house.

    

Los Angeles, October 4, 2010

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2011) and Reading Film: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Abram Cerda | Somebody Else / 2019

we don’t talk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abram Cerda (screenwriter and director) Somebody Else / 2019 [7 minutes]

 

Like the central figure of this short film, directed by Abram Cerda, I have grown rather tired of watching gay couples, one of whom is still so closeted that he dates girls, while the other impatiently waits in the shadows for his lover to come out. Pacheco turns away from his friend at the end, with every good reason.

     In quick flashes that reveal the situation, Cerda presents us with the gay relationship of Abel (Ulysses Morazan) and Pacheco (Luis Lexander Mejia) who love their sex under covers, but one of whom, Pacheco, can simply no longer endure his lover’s attentions to the other sex.

     There’s nothing deep here, and Cerda’s film repeats what dozens of films before him have reiterated: it’s hard to maintain a queer relationship with a man who is still in the closet, who pretends to be, as the title suggests, “somebody else” from who he really is.

      The only question remains, do we need to see, yet again, another version of this endlessly repeated gay trope, particularly in 2019?

       The two cute boys might have wonderful “chemistry for each other” as the film tag argues, but since one wants a relationship which the other simply isn’t ready for, we know it will go nowhere, and yet another film will end in the screen growing dark if nothing else but from the director’s own frustration.

       Frankly, I’d rather visit their neighbors, even if they are a straight couple who in the dark of night wear Maga hats. Gay people need new subjects and new territory for their stories to be fully told. The first line of the film perhaps expresses my feelings: “It’s bullshit.” We need to move on.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Max Ophüls | La Ronde / 1950

an endless dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur Schnitzler), Max Ophüls (director) La Ronde / 1950

 

La Ronde, originally titled Der Reigen (a round-dance or roundelay, published as Hands Around in English) was first "handed-around" in a 1900 private edition in Vienna. The play, which follows the sexual affairs of 10 couples, one each appearing in the next scene, was recognized as too outspoken even by its author. Schnitzler was, nonetheless, shocked that when the play was produced in 1903, it caused a major scandal, anti-Semitic riots, and the banning of the work. It was not revived again in that city until 1920.

 

    The most recent translator Nicholas Rudall, disliking the notion of being "handed-around"—since it implies the idea of the possible disease of syphilis, the interpretation of that which has delimited discussion of the work's themes—takes his nod from Max Ophüls’ great film rendition of 1950, La Ronde, which retains the concept of the dance while including other "circles" such as the circle of friends that make up the sexual partners of the play. Frankly, one of the weakest aspects of Ophüls' film, for me, is the constant repetition throughout of waltz music, a carousel motif, and even images of the frames of film itself as they weave through the spool of the projector. Personally, I prefer the German title, or even that of the original English, with its social connotations of being handed around or even handed-off, if one can forget that it calls up venereal disease.

      None of the play's characters, despite the intense denials to the contrary, are innocents. The young prostitute of the first scene readily seeks out sexual contact with the sailor, offering her body up to him for free! The young maid of Scene 2, knows very well how to flirt with the soldier while drawing him into the bushes near where they have been dancing. She is equally willing to bed with the young son of the house, who may be inexperienced but is quite clearly "ready" for the attack. Although the Young wife of Scene 4, may need a more careful seduction than the maid, the young gentleman has prepared for almost everything, and even though he fails the first time around, he soon comes alive in her caresses.

      It is, in fact, in Scenes 4 and 5, that the play truly comes alive, and begins to intimate Schnitzler's true concerns. Part of the method that the young wife uses to arouse her would-be lover is to question him, not only about his own past, but his affairs with other women, his own position in relationship to sex. While this is not completely an innocent series of inquiries, we also feel that she is seeking for some sort of understanding, if not about sexuality in general, at least about her own feelings and her own break with cultural taboos. This becomes more apparent in the next scene, where we come to understand the cause of her frustrations—her business-man husband is much older than she and his sexual relations might be described as a purposeful on-and-off again activity, what he describes as an attempt to keep the honeymoon alive!

      He cannot even imagine that she might be unfaithful, and insists that she should dessert any woman acquaintance who might possibly even be thought able to do such a thing. Yet she insistently questions him, it is clear, just to comprehend why these situations occur. Has he ever had sex with a married woman? He grumpily admits that he has—before meeting her. But we see in the very next scene that he is still not himself adverse to having extra-marital affairs.

     All of these sexual couplings are heterosexual, in part, because Schnitzler intentionally presents relationships in which men and women are quite equal, at least in terms of their hypocrisy.

     The last two scenes, however, portray a man who, at least, is preoccupied by something else. In Scene 9, the handsome Count (beautifully portrayed in Ophüls’ rendition by Gérard Philipe) visits the actress midday with the permission of the woman's mother. To her suggestion that they have immediate sex, he is startled, not ready for it, he argues: it's like having a drink in the morning. No, they must wait until after of the theater, after dinner, at the appropriate time and place. Meanwhile, he talks not of love (The Count claims that "there is no such thing as love"), but of his good friend, Louis and other men in his regiment. The actress finally must ask him to remove his sword, and when the seduction scene arrives, it is she who conquers. But even then we can only suspect that he might prefer to talk of his male friends and, just perhaps, conquer them rather than the woman who has just taken him by surprise.

    In the final scene, the Count awakens in the room of the Prostitute, not even knowing who she is or where he is, and certain, given his drunken condition, that the woman in the bed and he have never had sex. The only thing he remembers is that he was in his carriage with his friend Louis. In a final series of questions, he reminds me of the stock-gay-figure: the straight-man who gets drunk to have sex with homosexual men, conveniently forgetting everything come morning.

                         COUNT: (stops) Listen, tell me something. Doesn't it mean

                         anything to you anymore?

                         WHORE: What?

                         COUNT: I mean, don't you have any pleasure doing it anymore?

                         WHORE: (yawning) I need some sleep.

                         .......             

                         COUNT: Last night...tell me. Didn't I just collapse on the sofa

                         right away?

                         WHORE: Of course you did....with me.

                         COUNT: With you...well, I...

                         WHORE: But you passed right out.

 

     Love, even pleasure, is missing from most of these encounters. It's the interchange accomplished through the revolutions of the dance and the attendant dizziness that matters. Schnitzler's consistent term "blackout" at the moment of sexual contact, as established in the play itself, is the perfect device in that it indicates the unimportance of the act itself.  

     Early in the play the Maid with her soldier cries out just before the sexual act, "I can't see your face." In a 1982 translation by Sue Barton, the Soldier retorts, "What's my face got to do with it," while Rudall simplifies the Soldier's words into a question: "My face?!"* I am not interested in judging which translation is better here—Judall's translation seems to me to be a muscular, performable version—but the former does remind me of the title of the famed Tina Turner song, "What Does Love to Do with It?" which I couldn't get out my head while reading this work.  

     The characters of Schnitzler's play talk endlessly of love, but it's the sex they are after, and, in the end, it is their search for it that spins them off a life-long dance. The moment he finishes with the young maid, the soldier returns to the dance hall. The young wife returns to her husband after her dalliance with the young man. The Count surely is reunited with his friend Louis, uncertain whether or not anything happened with the sleepy prostitute, who reminds him of someone he has met long ago, perhaps the actress of the previous scene. In the end, Schnitzler's world is not so much an immoral one as it is a society of dissatisfied beings.

 

*Marya Mayne's 1917 English-language translation represents the Soldier's line as, "Face, hell!"

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (online edition Winter 2010/2011) / revised February 12, 2024.

Kenny Ortega | This Is It / 2009

ALL MY MYSELF

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenny Ortega (director, with performer Michael Jackson) This Is It / 2009

 

Despite the obvious outcries by viewers and critics that This Is It does not portray a performance —indeed there is no audience other than the stage workers, waiting dancers, and others involved in the show—and that it is not even a film—having been intended as a personal documentation of the rehearsals—I found the work to be extremely watchable, if only because its focus, Michael Jackson is, metaphorically speaking, so "blurred out" that he creates an even greater mystery about him than the cause of his recent death.

 

    A boy (even at the age 50), yes, a sensational dancer (indeed, but not necessarily here: although many of his moves are quick and lithe, the overall choreography, particularly in the robot army number, is based more on fascistic-like marches rather than the smooth glide across space we usually associate with Jackson), a singer (true, but although we get various passages from his catalogue of "greats," for the most part the performer is not singing to his full capacity in an attempt to "save his voice"; at one point when he does begun to belt out a song, he interrupts, "Don't make me sing full out.")

     When he does speak, it is, for the most part, psychobabble about his caring for the earth—the worst number in the film is the unbearable "Earth Song"—a hand-joining pep talk with his talented dancers, musicians, and staff, and quiet mumblings when something goes amiss.

     The most insightful moments are when Jackson speaks of his art, of the necessity of waiting between beats, stepping at the right moment into the spotlight, pausing in a musical phrase, getting the precise beat of a song. If nothing else, it is clear that Jackson is a consummate showman.

     Yet we get little insight into the man, and only glimpses of what the final performance might have looked like. Certainly it would have been spectacular, but clearly, also, it might have revealed that the aging Michael was no longer at his top, and the directions in which his art was apparently taking him were distances from the Astaire-like perfections of "Thriller" or his famed "moon walk."

     I know I will be heckled, perhaps even hated by all those who love the "King of Pop," but I feel that Jackson's music was never his great contribution. Most of his best-known songs are repetitive ditties gaffed up by inward gulps of breath and sigh. He was a great dancer, a performer who knew up until the last day of his life how to move his lean body to convey a deeply asexual sexuality that made him into “something” for everybody to love. But This Is It, I am afraid, is not what it/he is or was.

    Who and what precisely Jackson was is, and probably always will be, open to question. Let’s face it, he was probably a gay man who never was allowed to perceive himself as old enough to come out. He remained a kind of Peter Pan, imagining himself perhaps as young as the boys he molested as a pedophile. But then perhaps he never thought as their sleep-overs, their masturbatory interludes as pedophilia, since he still thought of himself as an eternal boy. 

    If anything, the documentary further mystifies us in our search to find out who this "man in the mirror" was. Here he remains only a shadow of a shadow, and one wonders "Does he have any reality away from his audience?" One comes to see him, ultimately, as one of the loneliest beings in the universe, like a frightened child, demanding doctors be there every night to put him asleep. Was he afraid of death or afraid of life?

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009).