Patrick Vollrath | Ketchup Kid / 2013

making a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rob Summerfield and Patrick Vollrath (screenplay), Patrick Vollrath (director) Ketchup Kid / 2013 [20 minutes]

 

The 11-year-old boy, Paul (Finn Bachmann), is known by his friends as “Ketchup Kid” for his love of ketchup sandwiches. But he’s also an outsider in numerous other ways and not happy in school. On this particular day he watches a student he apparently doesn’t know, arrive and refuse

to get out of his father’s car. The child, Aleksander (Matthias Hecht), seems even more troubled by attending school than Paul does.

       Paul is particularly troubled by one bully, Sascha (Max Schachermayer), who has made a cellphone film of him eating his ketchup sandwiches, and the boys fight, with Paul winning the battle. When the teacher arrives, both boys are punished, Sascha insisting that he’s innocent.

       To make matters worse, when Paul goes up to hand in his gradebook, Sascha steals Paul’s ketchup out of his backpack, excuses himself to go the bathroom and pisses into Paul’s ketchup bottle.

      Soon after, Paul himself escapes to the toilet, proceeds to make himself a nice large ketchup sandwich into which he is about to bite as he hears someone in the bathroom whimpering. He stands on the toilet seat and sees Aleksandar in the next stall hunkered down on the floor crying. He also notices that the boy has a knife.

        As Paul returns to the hall he can now hear the boys attacking Aleksandar outside building and observes him trying to run from them. They corner him and throw him into a school dumpster.

         Finally, Alek escapes and tries to make another run for it, but again they corner and begin beating him for hitting one of the boys with his backpack. Observing the incidents, Paul runs to the spot where they’re beating him. Alek pleads with them, but they attempt to take off his pants. Getting on to the top of slide Paul sprays the tormentors with his ketchup and Alek runs off as the bullies go after Paul.

         When Aleksandar turns back to observe, the boys now have his savior in a stranglehold, he turns back, knife in hand. Holding the open knife out he demands they leave both him and Paul alone, but one boy, Phillipe (Skye MacDonald) continues to move toward him, attempting wrestle the knife out of his hand, it the process getting cut.

         Seeing the boy now on ground crying out, Aleksandar tosses away the knife and runs off. For the first time, the bullies are frightened, startled that one of them has been hurt and shout out that someone should call the hospital. Paul, checking him out, pulls up his shirt to see only a small scratch and accuses him of crying like a baby. Paul then turns and runs after Alek, who by this time has reached the train tracks and is sitting on them as a train moves forward. Paul tries to pull him away without success, trying to explain it was only a little scratch.

         The train has actually been moving slowly and stops before it hits the two boys, the conduction screaming after he will call the police on them as finally they run off together. When they stop, Paul calls his new friend crazy, an idiot. He could have died. And finally, Paul simply says thank you, something which no one has probably to Paul for a long while. 

       They sit together for a short while, before Alek invites him over for dinner; on Fridays they have spaghetti with Bolognese sauce, something Paul admits he hasn’t had for a long while. His father, he explains, always made it with ketchup. And where is his father now? He died the boy responds, making it clear that ketchup isn’t perhaps what Paul wants to dine on, but hasn’t a lot of other choices. We hear nothing about his mother; does she work? Is she attentive to her son? If nothing else, the boys have now each made a new friend.

 

         There is no way to know whether either boy is being bullied because of his suspected sexuality; Paul’s outsiderness seems simply to have to do with his eating habits, as do those of Alex, who is overweight. Yet any gay boy knows what it feels like to be bullied just like these two “queer outsiders” do. And this film by the German filmmaker, who shot the work in Austria and Slovakia, would certainly be of significance for any young boy who might be feeling sexual confusion as well—even if I must admit this is not truly an LGBTQ film.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

 

Howard Hawks | El Dorado / 1966

geriatric heroes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leigh Brackett (screenplay, based on a novel by Harry Brown), Howard Hawks (director) El Dorado / 1966

 

Seven years after filming Rio Bravo Howard Hawks produced the second film of his late Western trilogy, El Dorado, a movie, as countless reviewers and film historians have pointed out, extremely similar to the previous one. Here too, a Sheriff (J.P. Harrah, played by Robert Mitchum), in need of help to protect his small community, gains the support of an older deputy (Bull Harris, humorously played by Arthur Hunnicutt), a former friend and top gunman (Cole Thornton played by John Wayne), and a younger man who becomes involved in the acts almost by chance (Alan Bourdilllion Traherne, nicknamed Mississippi, played by a youthful James Caan).

     The only superficial difference in the two films is that this time around the Sheriff, himself, has become the alcoholic—also on account of a "no-good" woman—allowing Thornton/Wayne to step in as a kind of symbolic sheriff. Together this foursome, spurred on by the love of a local saloon operator, Maudie (Charlene Holt), returns the town to order up a shootout between Bart Jason and his men, who are trying to take over the water rights of another local rancher-family, the MacDonalds.

      The various vagaries of the plot, the fact that Thornton refuses to sign on as Jason's gunman and accidently shoots one of the MacDonald boys, are of no great importance, for, once again, the theme here is friendship and the love and heroism it evokes. As in the earlier film, the relationship between the men is embedded in a series of comical homoerotic metaphors. After an encounter with hired gunman Nelse McLeod and his gang, Thornton insists Mississippi wait with him while he warns McLeod and his men not to sign on with Jason. After insisting twice that the impatient young man wait with him in the bar, Mississippi blurts out, "Would you mind telling me why you have such a great passion for my company?"

      Thornton has, in fact, saved his life; had he left the bar alone others of McLeod's gang would have shot him down in the street. By saving his life, moreover, the two men are symbolically wed. Before long, Thornton, insistent upon going it alone, is joined in his journey back to El Dorado with the young man. As they head into town, Mississippi asks Thornton,

 

                             "Well, where are we headed?

                             Cole: To see a girl.

                             Mississippi: To see a "girl?"

                             Cole: Yes, a girl! Don't you think I could know a girl?

 

And when the two men are sworn in as deputies by Bull, the script even presents us with a metaphoric wedding ceremony:

 

                             Bull Harris: Now, raise your right hand [they do as they are told]

                                                I forgot the words, but you better say "I do!"

                             Cole and Mississippi: I do!

 

      If in Rio Bravo the Sherriff and his gunman friend were getting on in years, in this movie Hawks practically turns them into geriatric figures. Thornton is shot early in the film by MacDonald's daughter, Joey, and suffers throughout much of the film from spasms, leaving his shooting hand temporarily paralyzed. Suffering from a home remedy for alcohol cooked up by the enterprising Mississippi, Harrah spends much of the later part of the film doubled over in pain, and, along with Thornton is shot in the leg. The final showdown is hilariously played out as both men hobble down the street on crutches, Mitchum's crutches sported sometimes on his left and, at other times on his right; apparently Hawks shot whatever he felt looked best, and later was forced to add a line to the film noting the inconsistency, as if Harrah suffered not only from gun wounds but Alzheimer's disease.

 

   The two sheriffs may save the day, but by movie's end they are in sad shape. The next generation, represented by Mississippi and his potential relationship with the wildcat Western girl Joey, will clearly be different. While these men and Bull fight out of responsibility and honor, Mississippi, freshly in from the Delta, is fighting another kind of battle, a war of revenge. His best friend, a part-Cherokee river gambler has been killed, and over the years he has been seeking out and killing the murderers. This man of the new generation, moreover, does not even know how to use a gun; Mississippi prefers to kill his victims with a knife. Later, joining up with Thornton, Mississippi proves such a terrible shot that the older man buys him a double-barreled shot-gun that splatters shots at everything in sight. Quoting Edgar Allan Poe's poem "El Dorado,"* it is clear that Mississippi's relationship to the West is a romantic one, that he sees Thornton as a kind of gallant knight who will soon ride through the Valley of the Shadow. Alan Bourdillion Traherne's refusal to give up his friend's river chapeau for a cowboy hat, makes it clear that, like the trumpet-toting Bull Harris—a remnant of the Calvary and Indian days of the early West—the values and heroism of Thornton and Harrah are almost a thing of the past.

 

 

*El Dorado

 

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old,

This knight so bold,

And o'er his heart a shadow,

Fell as he found,

No spot of ground,

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength,

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow;

"Shadow," said he,

"Where can it be,

This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the mountains

Of the moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,"

The shade replied,

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2009).

Basil Dearden | Victim / 1961

the blackmailer’s charter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Janet Green and John McCormick (screenplay), Basil Dearden (director) Victim / 1961

 

Through a half-intentional coincidence, I spent the weekend of international LGBTQ pride marches watching Basil Dearden’s 1961 film Victim, one of the first English-language films to actually deal with homosexuality head on. Yes, The Children’s Hour—based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play—was released in the very same year as Dearden’s, a film hinting, winking, and nodding to a possible lesbian relationship. A couple of years before Tennessee William’s Suddenly, Last Summer played with gay child abuse and cannibalism. And in the following year, the US film Advise and Consent lamely dealt with some of the same issues. As I have shown, moreover, there have many dozens of smaller and larger films that hover around the issues, some of them rather joyfully embracing their would-be/maybe gay and lesbian figures.

 

     But Victim actually confronts it, and with a fairly open-minded head detective who, despite the British laws which declared homosexuality a criminal act, nonetheless seems to want to help save the many gay men who—fearing for their careers, their closeted marriages, and their terror of imprisonment—must suffer what he describes as “the blackmailer’s charter.” His assistant represents the popular view of gays as disgusting beings who all need to be rounded-up and arrested.

      The film begins not with the central character, barrister Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde)—the character’s name alone calling up the gay American author and a sense of his distance from the society in which the barrister is now safely entrenched—but with a much younger working man, Jack “Boy” Barrett (Peter EcEnery), who upon seeing the police arrive at a construction site in which he is working, bolts, calling a friend to immediately remove a package from the back of his closet. That package evidently contains a scrapbook with articles and pictures not only of Farr, but several other respectable businessmen, a barber, a bookseller, a noted actor and others, with whom he has consorted over the years.

 

     If “consorted” seems a very archaic word-choice, it’s perfect here, for the picture with Farr shows them simply in a car, the lawyer’s hand around Boy, who is in tears (a photo, incidentally, that we never actually see, despite testimony of several reviewers that do see it). Evidently the husband and wife writers of this film want us to believe that Farr himself, once a gay man whose university lover (again in a non-special relationship) committed suicide, has since lived in a solid heterosexual relationship with his beloved wife, Laura (Sylvia Syms) without sexually going astray.

     Obviously, even a third grader could read the authorial lie. As Farr later tells his wife, he feared in his “friendship” with Boy that he was almost ready to go “too far” and “wanted him.” Accordingly, when Boy calls him several times, attempting to warn Farr of the police raid, he becomes convinced that his young “would-be” love is himself trying to blackmail him and refuses to answer. We can presume that something similar must have happened with his early male lover. For now, Farr is highly successful barrister, possibly about to be appointed as the Queen’s Counsel.

      Boy attempts to escape to the nearby countryside, only to again encounter the police and be arrested. Even though the police chief attempts to explain that he should explain his activities so that they might find the blackmailer—Boy has stolen £2,300 from his current employer—the young man keeps silent, as do most of the figures of this ultimately tragic work of suspense. The barber, also faced with blackmail sells his business in order to move away, but when approached by mobsters suffers a heart-attack and dies. So Boy, like so many gay men of the day, feels trapped. Sooner or later, he recognizes, the police will shake the truth out of him, and not only might he be imprisoned but many of his previous companions will be taken down as well. He, like Farr’s early lover, hangs himself.

  

    The film might timidly have moved on from here in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or as the early lover of the title character of E. M. Forester’s Maurice did, enwrapping its characters into hidden married existences. Farr might have faded back into his closeted life, protecting his career and the domestic placidity of his home life. But it is precisely here that Dearden’s film grows brave, as Farr determines to track down the blackmailers on his own, involving one of Boy’s friends (apparently a heterosexual), as he follows down every clue.

      Meanwhile, his wife realizes that the call she has intercepted from Boy Barrett to her husband is the same figure which the newspapers have now reported as being dead. She confronts her husband who quite honestly explains the situation (a scene, apparently, written by Bogarde himself), of which she is not convinced, determining that he has gone back on his commitment to a heterosexual life. Despite the fact that he now recognizes he may lose her and all public standing, he nonetheless moves forward, eventually with some police help revealing the blackmailers: I’ll save those details from future viewers, despite my usual propensity to reveal all the plot. It really doesn’t matter, since in those days, apparently, there were hundreds of such figures lurking behind homosexuals, looking for a way to bring in income. And, yes, the word homosexual is actually used in this film. And scrawled across Farr’s garage door is an ugly reminder of the times: FARR IS QUEER.

      Who cares, really, if Farr, encouraging his wife to leave so that she will not be involved with what will surely be an ugly court case, is later reunited with her. He, unlike so many before him, has been honest, admitted a love that was not supposed to have been named. And despite this film’s timidity, in hindsight it proves to be quite brave, facing a storm of protest the British and US censors at the time—as well as homophobic critics.

       For once, I totally agree with Pauline Kael’s comments:

 

“The hero of the film is a man who has never given way to his homosexual impulses; he has fought them–that's part of his heroism. Maybe that's why he seems such a stuffy stock figure of a hero... The dreadful irony involved is that Dirk Bogarde looks so pained, so anguished from the self-sacrifice of repressing his homosexuality that the film seems to give rather a black eye to heterosexual life.”

 

       After several actors (including James Mason and Stewart Granger) turned down the role, Bogarde, who was living with his business manager Anthony Forwood, suggests he may have made one the “wisest” decisions of his life, allowing him to abandon the pretty boys of the matinee idol and comic roles to which he had previously been assigned. He went on to play in Pinter and De Sica films as a conflicted, often gay-oriented figure which demonstrated his true acting abilities.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2019).

Agustina Comedi | Ensayo de una despedida (Playback) / 2019

performing their deaths

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agustina Comedi (screenwriter and director) Ensayo de una despedida (Playback) / 2019 [14 minutes]

 

Argentinian director Agustina Comedi’s 2019 short film Playback takes us back to the city Córdoba in the late 1980s when, for a brief period of time a group of transgender women and men

in drag, performing in a local bar begin to die of AIDS.

      With little public support in the Roman Catholic and conservative community the small group of performers banned together as Grupo Kalas, performing and giving over their ticket sales to a local hospital for AIDS. Adorned in self-made gowns and lip-synching their music in a cell these women, La Delpi now being only remaining living member, created a community that worked to help the large gay community and themselves as, so to speak, lay dying and suffering from police raids.

      Adorned with static and strange spectral colors, the documents of their performances provide a limited view of the period and contributions outlined by La Delpi, Marcos García, and Martín Shanly in tender and almost worshipful commentary.

 

      As this short documentary reveals, there are still far too few such evidences of and witnessing to LGBTQ+ history necessary to comprehend all the love and sacrifices that were made by queers who faced sometimes nearly impossible odds simply in order to survive and share their love with one another.

       As one their group puts it, “We gave ourselves awards, because if we didn’t who else would?”

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Howard Hawks | Rio Bravo / 1959

leaving nothing to chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett (screenplay), Howard Hawks (director) Rio Bravo / 1959

 

The first of Howard Hawks' western trilogy, representing some of the last films he directed in his long career, Rio Bravo is perhaps the best and most complex, despite what at first appears to be a light-weight cast. The idea of crooner Dean Martin, young singing-idol Ricky Nelson, ingénue Angie Dickinson (playing the role of a hardened gambling woman), and a slightly overweight John Wayne teaming up to help save a small border town from the clutches of the evil rancher Nathan Burdette seems, on the surface, almost ludicrous; and there were still titters in the audience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's late Hawks' retrospective that justify those feelings. Nearly all film critics agree, however, that Rio Bravo one of the better westerns in film history.

     Hawks takes us through the few days between the arrest of Burdette's brother, Joe and the inevitable showdown, much in the way that Fred Zinneman did in the classic High Noon. But the differences between these two movies are crucial in their effects. While Gary Cooper, in his attempt to "save" an idealized and quite lovely small Western town from Ben Miller and his gang, is refused help from every citizen he asks to join him, Hawks, in response to High Noon, presents Wayne as Sherriff John T. Chance, supported at first only by his cackling old deputy Stumpy (hilariously played by Walter Brennan), as being ready to tackle the job almost by himself until he is joined by has alcoholic former sidekick, Dude (Dean Martin). The three of them spend much of the early part of the film prowling the streets of the gritty-looking, slightly seedy Rio Bravo, telling other folk to get out of the way. 

      If High Noon's Hadleyville is a spiffed-up village of wood-framed houses filled with proper middle-class citizens, Rio Bravo is as culturally-mixed as any border town probably was in its day: Carlos Robante and his wife Consuela run the local hotel in which the Sheriff sleeps, eats and drinks; Burt, the local undertaker, is Chinese. Other than Chance, Dude, and Stumpy, it appears, the only Caucasians in Rio Bravo are from the outside: Burdette's men, the cattlemen passing through, and the recently arrived card shark, Feathers (Dickinson). When cowboy head Pat Wheeler is killed by Burdette's gang, one of his young assistants Colorado Ryan (Nelson) casts his lot with the Sheriff, as he and Feathers save the Sheriff's life. In short, nearly everyone in this bustling little collection of low-stucco buildings is willing to help, and even those who might only watch the outcome, help to save the Sheriff from being shot down on the street, since they might serve as witnesses.

     Because the outcome of the final shootout, accordingly, is fairly apparent—justice will triumph—Hawks can spend most of his film revealing the interrelationships of these ragtag figures, demonstrating the power of friendship, loyalty, and love that connects them. And love in this drab outpost is not just reserved for the relationships between man and woman (Chance and Feathers, Carlos and Consuela), but—perhaps due in part to screenwriter Leigh Brackett's perspective as a woman—is equally expressed between the men, particularly through the complaining housewife-like role played by Stumpy* (like many a Western housewife the Sherriff has consigned his partner to the back room of their little "house"/jail cell, in this case armed with a rifle to protect it from all intruders), and in the admiration and love between Dude and Chance, the latter of whom has bought back his friend's gun and other belongings when, in his drunken nadir, Dude was forced to sell them. With the arrival of the young Colorado, the prickly trio becomes a happier foursome, as Dude and Colorado break into song.

     Music is quite essential in Rio Bravo; if the cowboy songs "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" and "Get Along Home, Cindy" reveal the isolation and hidden desires of the singers, the enemy's repeated degüello, with its references to the battle of the Alamo, haunts these men barricaded in the jailhouse and torments them with their own failures. But their very fraternizing spirit ultimately strengthens them, cinematically revealed in the class of whiskey Dude has just prepared to consume successfully returned to its bottle without a spill. It is their love and friendship that saves the day.         

     Only after normalcy has been restored to this village frontier, does Feathers get her chance, in more ways than one. But it is she who does the proposing, leaving nearly nothing to Chance, the man, but to bashfully accept their inevitable partnership.

   The delight of Rio Bravo, unlike almost any other Western I've seen, lies not in the characters' heroism, nor even in their dedication to justice, but in their own personal and often idiosyncratic connections with one another. Rio Bravo may be a rundown collection of desert dwellings, but I'd prefer it any day to the clean, white houses and churches of Hadleyville with its Sheriff's Quaker bride.

 

*As the film documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997) made quite clear, Walter Brennan often played the role of housewife or would-be partner to the male hero. If one can’t precisely call his male-male relationships as homosexual, they are most certainly homo-social and anti-heterosexual, as he time and again attempts to keep his male “friends” from of being entrapped in marriage as he does the movie Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper, Cooper himself early on rumored to have engaged in gay relationships with handsome silent actor Rod La Roque and with bisexual Howard Hughes. Brennan played a role with Wayne similar to this one of Red River.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2009).

Satyajit Ray | গণশত্রু (Gônoshotru) (An Enemy of the People) / 1989

the honest suffer most

by Douglas Messerli

 

Satyajit Ray (screenwriter and director, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen) গণশত্রু (Gônoshotru) (An Enemy of the People) / 1989

 

In the small Bengali town of Chandipur Dr. Ashoke Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) is troubled. Several of his personal patients and others in the hospital in which he works have been suddenly contracting hepatitis and other respiratory diseases most often connected with polluted water. Often a writer for the city’s major liberal newspaper, he calls in the paper’s editor, Haaridas Bagchi (Dipankar Dey), to tell him of what he suspects, that the pollution is occurring at the point in the river where the city is most populated, near where the town officials and industrialists have built a holy Hindu temple that attracts thousands of tourists each year. When a test confirms that the pollution is coming from the temple itself, Gupta reports the facts to his younger brother, Nisith (Dhritman Chatterjee), head of the committees running both the hospital and the temple, believing that—although his brother is far more conservative that he—that he cannot but demand the temporary closing of the shrine so that the “leak” or “break” in the plumbing can be fixed.

       Although both Gupta’s wife and school-teaching daughter warn him that Nisith may not see it that way, the doctor is shocked by Nisith’s refusal to take action and his insistence, along with the temple official, on denying that it could be possible, since the water served there contains a certain plant that is “known” to purify the water, part of the Hindu tradition. There is obviously no scientific fact behind the religious superstition.

      Gupta’s response is to write an article for the newspaper about the issue so that the people can perceive the danger and action be taken. But the newspaper editor finally also determines that he cannot publish the essay, that publishing it will result in protests that will bring the under-subscribed paper to financial ruin.

      Gupta determines, accordingly, that he will have to take up his cause with the people directly through a public speech. Nisith quickly makes it impossible for him to rent out any of the major public speaking halls, and Gupta is forced to rely on his intelligent and friendly future son-in-law, Ronen (a character who does not exist in the Ibsen play), who as head of a theater and poetry group, controls the availability of a separate venue.

       Naively, Gupta invites his enemies as well as his supporters to attend, but when his brother shows up, it is clear that he, the newspaper publisher, and its editor will control the proceedings in an attempt to disrupt the speech. Although the attending theater actors and poets loudly plead to hear Gupta’s arguments, others drown them out, and once more he is sabotaged, described in local graffiti as an “enemy of the people.”

 

     Soon after, Gupta’s daughter, Indrani (Mamata Shankar) is asked to resign from her teaching position, and Gupta’s chagrined landlord tells the family that he must ask them to vacate their house. A telephone call from the hospital tells Gupta that, unless he recants, he no longer has a position there. When the newspaper editors show up to also ask him to rethink his views, he demands they leave.

      Seemingly beaten by his entire world, except for the members of his own loving family, Gupta has no choice but to concede defeat, crying out to his wife, Maya, in existential despair: “I have done nothing wrong. Why is this happening to me?”  We truly understand in these scenes one of the play’s stated tenants: “The honest suffer most.”

      That the director Ray is a true believer in human good has always been apparent in his works, and is particularly evident in this film as he transforms Ibsen’s work from a somewhat cynical tragedy into a kind of darkly comic shift of power, particularly when the newspaper’s assistant editor, the wise and intelligent Biresh (Subhendu Chatterjee) visits Gupta with Ronen, explaining he has left his position at the newspaper and as a freelancer will do an interview with Gupta to be published in Calcutta. A few minutes later Ronen announces that he has printed up Gupta’s speech and that he and his theatrical group will distribute it personally to homes. In the background we suddenly hear voices proclaiming their support of Gupta as a hero, the theater group marching upon the city.

      Unlike Ibsen’s play, accordingly, Ray’s film ends with what several critics have described as an unbelievable ending. And, on the surface, Ray’s deus ex machina closing does seem somewhat absurd. The very idea of art coming to the defense of science seems ludicrous in a world where we have lost the ability to perceive the integration of the two. But isn’t that precisely what Ibsen was attempting in his play, to bring through his drama the sheltering wing of protection to a truth-teller such as Doctor Stockmann—or in this case, the perplexed Ashoke Gupta and his family?

      Ray, sick with heart problems for several years before this film, was told by his doctors that he should not do any “location” shooting. And the film, bound to a stage-set, has been criticized by other critics as being non-cinematic. In fact, like several of Hitchcock films (most notably Rope and Dial M for Murder) this work, shot in tight quarters, demonstrates Ray’s cinematographical artistry by focusing his camera on the surfaces and doorways of his rooms and, most importantly, upon his actor’s faces, as they react, sometimes in controlled shock, at other times in total disbelief of the events that transpire between them. Ray’s work reminds us, in fact, that actors do indeed have faces—to restate the comment of Billy Wilder’s Nora Desmond. Yes, Ibsen’s play—even in Ray’s reinterpretation—is, at times, an intellectual exercise—but what a glorious enterprise it is: perhaps even enough to help us drop our absurd superstitions and embrace what knowledge of the vast unknowable world we can claim.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2104

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2014).