André Téchiné | Impardonnables (Unforgiveable) / 2011

life in venice

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Téchiné and Mehdi Ben Attia (screenplay), André Téchiné (director) Impardonnables (Unforgiveable) / 2011

 

Although André Téchiné's 2011 film, Unforgiveable, was fairly well-received by critics, it still was not seen to be as likeable or coherent as his early films such as Wild Reeds or The Witnesses or even a later film like Being 17; as The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, for example, observed: "Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details."

     The wide range of characters who weave in and out of novelist Francis’ (André Dussollier) life—his sudden wife, the real estate agent Judith (Carole Bouquet), his daughter Alice (Mélanie Thierry), who just as suddenly abandons her own daughter, Vicky (Zoé Duthion), the female, heavy drinking detective, Anna Maria (Adriana Asti), who previously had a lesbian relationship with Judith, the wealthy spoiled small-time drug dealer, Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi), with whom Alice is deeply in love, and Jérémie (Mauro Conte), Anna Maria’s violent, possibly repressed homosexual son, who Francis hires for follow Judith after he suspects her of extramarital affairs—almost all seem to be dropped into this stewpot of a story without any explanation of how they have come together or what their feelings are for one other. You only need to read the almost incomprehensible plot summary on Wikipedia to perceive the utter zaniness of the story, in which the characters shift back and forth in the French and Italian languages, the tale inexplicably taking place on a distant island, Sant' Erasmo, near Venice.

      I won’t even try, in this case, to reiterate why the characters are doing what they are and how they arrived into their complex relationships. The movie doesn’t seem to know and certainly does not attempt to explain it. But I think that is the point. These figures might as well be out of the novel Francis is frustratedly trying to write. They are somewhat melodramatic, and, except for Francis, are beautiful imaginations of figures trapped in a world in which nothing is truly knowable.

 

     A bit like the characters in Gilbert Sorrentino’s epic fiction Mulligan Stew these creations speed up and down the Venice cannels without any real purpose except to attempt to get closer to each other. They are figures of the imagination: the authors’ (the story was based on a fiction by Philippe Djian), our own, and their own—all out of control. All are totally unfit for their assigned professions, perhaps even Francis who seems to be orchestrating their interrelationships.

     Although Judith might be an excellent real-estate agent, she is simply, in her beauty and youth, not appropriate as Francis’ island-bride, temporarily bedding down with the boy who is following her; Alice is neither a good daughter nor a capable mother; Alvise is incompetent as a member of the Venice aristocracy, as a petty drug agent, and as a lover; the self-hating beauty Jérémie is as clumsy in his detective duties as Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau; the vodka swigging Anna Maria might be better sitting at a bar and swilling down drinks on a couch.

      And yet, somehow Téchiné, along with his impressive cast, turns this nonsense into a fascinating human farce in which you actually care for all of their outcomes. In the end, all the film’s characters have some kind of reconciliation. Francis finishes writing. Anna Maria returns from France after having successfully found Alice. Upon Alvise’s imprisonment, Alice returns to Francis. And Francis finally serves as a kind of father to Jérémie, not only saving him from a suicide attempt but forcibly disciplining him for his inability to love his mother and for his violence for people whose ideas he finds threatening. By film’s end, Francis invites the lovely Judith back into his own Paris world.

     Perhaps art is greater than life; or, perhaps life triumphs over art. In this beautiful work, we can never be certain. Are these all figures of Francis’ imagination or has he, through his writer’s block, been able to finally integrate his life with the ghosts of his present and past?

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

     

 

Krzysztof Kieślowski | Trois couleurs : Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) / 1993

the good woman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Żebrowski (screenplay) Krzysztof Kieślowski (director) Trois couleurs : Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) / 1993

 

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s first work of his Three Colors, Blue begins with what seems like a joyful ride in the country, in which the heroine, Julie (Juliette Binoche) is riding with her husband, Patrice, and daughter. On a curve in the road, however, the car quickly goes out of control, hitting a tree, and killing both Julie’s husband and young daughter. She survives, after hospital care, with only a few bruises—and after a failed attempt at suicide—returns home soon after. There she calls up one of her famous composer-husband’s friends and occasional collaborator, Oliver (Benoît Régent)—who has long admired her—and almost without much emotion invites him into her bed, as if sex were a form of saying goodbye.

 

     By the time he awakens the next morning, she has destroyed most of her husband’s compositions, including his still unfinished symphony dedicated to the unity of Europe, and has ordered the mansion in which lives and all of its contents be sold, the monies to be sent to her mother, living in an institution with progressing Alzheimer’s Disease. Packing a single bag, Julie is off to Paris, where she chooses a modest apartment which she fills with contemporary Ikea-like furniture.

     From the composer’s desk, Olivier, however, retrieves a score for the symphony and a stash of photos hidden within it.

     Little is said, and we are not even told what Julie did in her life, but it is intimated in a news report, early on, that she may also have been a collaborator with her husband, and has actually composed many of his famous works. But here the movie almost goes mute, as Julie attempts to adjust to a new life. What is clear in Binoche’s beautifully expressive acting, is that Julie has so loved her husband and daughter that she has now attempted to cut herself completely off from anything that might remind her of them, that her grief is so unassailable that she has gone into a kind of hibernating state, cutting herself off from everything else in life.

     When Olivier finally tracks her down, she immediately sends him packing. Julie’s own mother (quietly played by the great Emmanuelle Riva) does not even recognize her as her daughter when she visits her, confusing Julie with her own sister.

 

    The only object Julie has carried with her is a mobile of blue beads, apparently belonging to her daughter. As the director indicates through the predominance of that color throughout the film, hers is now a blue world, a world of pain and sorrow. Kieślowski has also expressed the idea, however, that his three “Color” films are based on the French flag, representing the French Revolutionary ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” So, we recognize that Julie’s new life is potentially a world of liberty, even if she cannot yet recognize it.

     Gradually we perceive that Julie is not the cold-hearted woman in grief that she first appears to be. Although she has not yet been able to cry, she is naturally kind-hearted, refusing to sign a petition by the other tenants of her building to oust her neighbor, a woman who is having an affair with her next door neighbor and who performs nude in a male club, Lucille (Charlotte Véry); and in that act she gains the woman’s deep friendship, and later comes to her rescue when Lucille spots her own father in the all-male crowd at her club.

     Julie also meets with the decent young man who, having observing the crash, has pulled her from the car and called the ambulance. He has found a small cross nearby, which he now is  happy to return to her; after hearing her husband’s last words, however—the punch-line of a joke they had just shared—she gently rewards the cross to the boy for his help and kindness.

 

    Through these simple acts—the visit to her mother, her conversation with Olivier, the attention she gives to a local street-performer who plays a recorder, her friendship with Lucille, and her gentleness with the boy—we come to see that Julie is a naturally kind person who, in her need of others, will not be able to live long in the retreat from the world she has attempted to create for herself.

       After over-hearing a news interview with Olivier, who displays Patrice’s score and corrections along the photographs hidden within, and proclaims that he is working to complete it, Julie confronts him, demanding that he not attempt to finish the composition and asking him who is the lovely woman in the photographs. He explains that she was Patrice’s mistress.

      Obtaining the woman’s address, Julie encounters Sandrine (Florence Pernel), who is pregnant, she discovers, with her husband’s child. Clearly, she is hurt, but, demonstrating her true personality, Julie offers the still unsold mansion to the woman and her soon-to-be-born son in recognition of their relationships to her former husband.

      Returning to Olivier, she promises to work with him in finishing the symphony, knowing of her husband’s plans for a final chorus from First Corinthians, singing of Saint Paul’s praise for divine love.

     The film ends with a revived Julie, finally crying, having realized that her husband’s simple humanity and her own place in his life as a “good” person, as Patrice, himself, has described Julie to his mistress. Patrice was not a saint she has discovered, and Julie can now go on in her new liberty, sharing her own love with others.

   Working very much in the tradition of Bresson, Kieślowski forgives his characters while simultaneously revealing their sins and errors. The world, he demonstrates, is not made up of heroes, but ordinary men and women trying to live out their lives with joy and fulfillment. If Julie has not, as it has been previously suggested, co-written her husband’s compositions, it has now become the reality, and in that act, she has found a new meaning to life.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017).

 

Miloš Forman | Hoří, má panenko (The Fireman’s Ball) / 1967

the horror of celebration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jaroslav Papoušek (screenplay), Miloš Forman (director) Hoří, má panenko (The Fireman’s Ball) / 1967

 

This year, on April 13, 2018, the Czech-born film director, Miloš Forman died. I’d seen several of his American-produced films—after the post “Prague-spring” crackdown he determined to stay in France and, later the US—including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which I quite enjoyed) and Amadeus (of which I am not as fond). I determined, however, in celebration of the filmmaker to focus on his last Czech film, The Fireman’s Ball, a hilarious satire that, without actually being structured as an allegory of Czech Communism, nonetheless speaks volumes for the ideals and, most importantly, the general cynicism of the society.

 

    At the center of this comic masterwork is the Retired Fire Chief (Jan Stöckl), who at 85 is now suffering from cancer—although the volunteer firemen working under him are not certain he knows of his diagnosis, since current doctors refuse to tell their patients the worse new about their health (much, one supposes, like the politicians who run the government). Nonetheless, a group titled “The Committee,” (headed by Jan Vostrcil) determine to celebrate their former leader in a big way, including a grand dance replete with a lottery of foods and smaller trinkets—perhaps as a way of paying for the event—as well as a beauty pageant. They also have purchased a ceremonial fire axe brandishing a special commentary of praise to the retiree.

     Even in the film’s very first scenes we suspect that this seemingly joyful tribute might very well end badly, given the fact that, like the school-board members of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, these provincials cannot agree on anything, and have no potential to become a barbershop quartet. And indeed, once they have agreed to never mention their former head’s illness to him and that they will all work together to make the best celebration possible, they move, more and more quickly, into choppy waters.

   From that moment everything begins to go wrong. While creating a banner for the event, the artist, using a flame to char the banner’s edges, presumably to suggest their vocation, falls from a high ladder, while a small fire consumes his art. Another committee member perceives that some of the consumables laid out on the lottery table are now missing, a bottle of wine and, later, a large piece of headcheese (which he ultimately discovers in his wife’s purse).

 

     As the large audience begins to dance, some of the younger women and men get more and more inebriated, resulting in under-table sexual events and numerous other pratfall situations, including a kind of banana-peel incident when one of the women loses all her fake pearls—one by one.

      The Committee members begin to go on a hunt to find eight women for their beauty pageant, some preferring to explore legs and faces from deep within the crowd, while others take to the balcony to spot the women dancers’ bosoms. But, in the end, they find it difficult to find even eight beauties, while fathers and mothers attempt to intercede on their choices, insisting their own daughters be included. When they do find at least 8 women, the girls seem quite plain and truly awkward in even having been chosen. Only one, who is late because she has gone home to get her bathing suit (about which nothing has previously been said), has any panache, as the elderly fireman ogle her, finally locking the door to protect their activities.

      When they do finally attempt to parade the women before the crowd, the shy local girls rush away from the supposed festivities, locking themselves in an upstairs bathroom, embarrassed now by their sudden if momentary celebrity.

       Fed up with the chaos, the dancers themselves begin to nominate their own companions, bringing them forward in chairs and arms, while the women cry out in distress. A real fire, fortuitously, interrupts events as the firemen and the entire audience rushes out to the house of an old man, whose large home is already burning beyond control. Only a few pieces of furniture and the old man himself is saved.

       In sympathy to what has happened to the man, the crowd returns with him to the ball, giving up all their lottery numbers so that he may have first choice. By that time, however, the Committee discovers that almost everything upon their table has been stolen. They offer the possibility that they will briefly turn off the lights so that people may return what they have illegally taken, but no one except the Committee member whose wife has stolen the headcheese returns it, caught unfortunately when the lights go up again. 

      When they finally attempt to award their former chief their ceremonial hatchet, they open the box to discover that it too has been stolen!

      One can easily comprehend how such a dark satiric message suggesting that nearly everyone in this small community is corrupt, despite at a few moments of meaning well, would not go down well in Forman’s home country. And several small-town Czech firemen strongly protested the film’s presentation of their kind. When the new Czech freedoms were squelched, Forman’s film was banned “forever.” Presumably the Czechs can now show this film, particularly after the film’s nomination for the 1967 Academy Award for best Foreign Film. But I might imagine that its darkly cynical view of his countrymen still rankles some sensibilities.

     The only moment that this small community actually come together with a sense of communal purpose is during the great fire, but even here we suspect it is more for the spectacle of the event than for any empathetic concern—although some do encourage the fireman to turn the old man away from his view of the fire now destroying his entire life. And once the event is over, as we see, they are perfectly ready to leave the now homeless and fortuneless man with nothing. Forman, in a surrealist scene, shows the old man returning to his bed, now sitting in a snow-filled field near the desolation of his former house. Already another man lies in the bed, which he is simply now forced to share with the intruder.

 

      In a world of even best intentions, as Forman has written, nothing can work out when the leaders attempt to import their own shared notions of what is right: “That's a problem of all governments, of all committees, including firemen's committees. That they try and pretend and announce that they are preparing a happy, gay, amusing evening or life for the people. And everybody has the best intentions... But suddenly things turn out in such a catastrophic way that, for me, this is a vision of what's going on today in the world.” As Forman’s friend, and co-screenwriter for this film, Ivan Passer, has shown us in one of his own films, even an invitation to dinner can suddenly become a threatening reality when one cannot refuse the invitation.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2018).

 

Andrew Haigh | Lean on Pete / 2017, USA 2018

will you still love me?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenplay, based on the book by Willy Vlautin) and director Lean on Pete / 2017, USA 2018

 

Like all previous Andrew Haigh movies, his newest Lean on Pete (from 2017, 2018) is a quiet study about characters. There is something so honest and straight-forward about Haigh’s films that you almost don’t want to intrude upon them; they seem to be documents, without the apparatus of “documentation,” of real people so deeply felt that it’s hard, at moments, to watch—despite the fact that they are never for a moment sentimental. The folks he portrays are tough survivors, a young British gay man living a relatively straight life, but dipping each night as he escapes his straight friends into local gay bars; a couple who suddenly are faced with an event before their marriage wherein they must face a love beside their own; and in this work, a gentle hometown boy—living basically in a neglected relationship with his philandering father—who falls in love with a now-old and not-so-glorious race horse.

 

     Charlie (the wonderfully underacting Charlie Plummer) lives with a father who, without the director saying it, is truly abusive. He does not sexually or physically abuse his son, but basically ignores him. Leaving the 15-year-old alone for most of his days in a small rented apartment where there are so many roaches that Charlie keeps his breakfast cereal in the refrigerator to protect it; when the father Ray (Travis Fimmel) does return home, it is usually with a woman with whom he retires with into his bedroom.

     Haigh never once calls it abuse, and Charlie doesn’t even perceive it as such, but we recognize it for what it is. And in the morning, when one of Ray’s take-homes, a secretary (Amy Seimetz) in the company for which he works, actually cooks the two breakfast—a sad version of airport food of scrambled eggs and packaged sausages—the young boy is so appreciative we immediately recognize the parental figure he is missing in his life. You can see from Charlie’s rail-thin frame that he simply is not getting a proper diet, which Haigh subtly reconfirms when, after Ray’s one-time girl-fried leaves the table, and before his father can claim it, he spears the small sausage on her plate she has left behind. He is starving—although the director does not overdramatize this—for food and love.

      Yet, Charlie seems almost unable to complain. He was, apparently, a football and perhaps racing hero in his brief education at a local school, and he stills runs long distances every morning, putting him in touch with a nearby Portland racing track. Looking for a job (his father gives him only a few dollars on which he might survive the day), Charlie encounters a horse-trainer, the more than slightly sleazy Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), who has a stable of horses which he literally runs to their deaths, winning sometimes in small tracks from Oregon to Mexico, but quickly selling his race-horses when they have lost their abilities to run into their deaths for conversion to horse-meat or glue.

      Del loves the young man for his eagerness to work, mucking out the horse shit, and willingly leading the horses to their trailer for the voyages south and north. The fact that Charlie is willing to sleep in the car or on the straw of the horse bin gives us another insight into how difficult his life has been; besides Del pays him 50-60 dollars for each event, a huge amount surely for a boy who has never previously had any money to even buy himself a lunch.

      And even if Del, when it comes to horses, is more than detestable, when it comes to Charlie he does, in some respects, serve as a kind of father, scolding Charlie for his table manners as the kid chows down what he is served in a local restaurant the moment the plate is put before him. Again, we comprehend, without the director telling us, just how starved this boy is. But Dell’s upbraiding him as having no manners is also one of the first times, we recognize, that Charlie has ever received any parental advice. The scene is so painful and uplifting, that we want to cry and applaud at the very same moment. Haigh is able to achieve these contradictions by simply presenting his characters in a way that we recognize their flaws and their failures simultaneously. Judgment is not really in Haigh’s vocabulary.

       Soon after Charlie meets a woman, jockey Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), riding Del’s horses, who might have served as a strange kind of maternal figure in his life, except that working over the years as a small-time jockey has made her so cynical that she cannot help the boy with anything more than the advice to not become too attached to his favorite horse, Lean on Pete, (“he’s just a horse,” she reminds him), a gentle being—unlike some other horses owned by Del—who also has clearly taken a liking to his new caretaker. Her advice is not heeded.

 

      After winning a couple of races, Lean on Pete, who comes in last in a race in which Charlie has begged Bonnie to ride instead of the final winner, on whom she had previously sat.

       If things weren’t bad enough for young Charlie, his father is brutally beaten by the husband of the secretary who he has brought home, and the boy, demanding a neighbor call 911, visits the hospital to discover his father in serious condition. Forced to work now just so the two of them might survive, Charlie returns to the hospital to find his dad has died.

       When he hears that Del has just sold Lean on Pete to Mexico his heart, driven now by pain and loss, forces him to escape with the horse with Del’s van in an attempt to reunite with his aunt, obviously kept out of his life by his father, fearing her attempts to claim that she should care for his son.

        The movie thus transforms into kind of “on the road” film, in the tragic manner of Thelma and Louise. Fortunately, they do not leap off the Grand Canyon, but in their long trek from Oregon to Wyoming to a destination of which Charlie is not very sure off, they suffer the problems that might make anyone leap off a cliff. When the car breaks down, the boy is forced to abandon it, walking his horse through a territory with often little water and food. The boy is starved, but so is the horse, and at one unpredictable moment, leaps away from his caring human to be hit by an automobile which kills him.

      In a kind a classic Haigh scene, Charlie attempts to revive the horse who is quite clearly now dead, while having to just as quickly remove himself from the scene before he is discovered. Once again, the director, retreats from what might have been bathos, through the inevitable instincts of the young boy, who has thoroughly learned to evade the dangers in which he has so long been embraced. Is it a crime to love? the film seems to ask.

       After a great deal of difficulty, he does finally discover his aunt Margy (Alison Elliott), who greets him with open arms, truly willing to care for him. But the now disillusioned child can only ask, if he needs to go to jail will she still care for him. Charlie, we perceive, is a child destroyed by the world around him. We can believe in his salvation or not. Haigh doesn’t provide us with an easy answer, thank heaven. It is up to us, with our personal doubts and empathy to provide the answer.

       I suggest that if you see this movie (and you should), you also read Jaimy Gordon’s important book Lord of Misrule, a fictionalized version of a young woman who lived apparently a life in racetracks not unlike that of Charlie Thompson.

      It’s interesting to note that Gordon is bisexual and the director of this film, Andrew Haigh is gay. Yet nothing it the film itself speaks directly to the LGBTQ+ community. Charlie is perhaps simply too young to even imagine himself as having a “sexuality.” Yet even more than Haigh’s last film, 45 Years, which also veered widely from his previous and later gay offerings, this film does not even wink at homosexuality.

      Yet any gay individual can immediately see that the young abused boy, an outsider to society, taking a voyage back to his Auntie Em, and psychological involved with a horse that cannot but call up memories of Peter Shafer’s Equus—which presented it’s young hero’s love of horses as being symbolic of his homosexual desires—that we have entered queer territory despite Haigh’s refusal to send his character down any version of the yellow brick road. It is not that we suspect that Charlie may grow up to be queer, he already is in the sense that he has been from birth doomed to be ostracized from the kind of normative love his aunt Margy might represent. Pete the horse is doomed to death not because it has stood witness to any sexual failure the boy undergoes, but simply because he is so loved by a societal outsider who has no right to love him so deeply.

     If it might be a mistake to describe Lean on Pete as a gay cinema, it would be a major omission to not make note of its kinship to queer film.

Los Angeles, August 4, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2019).

Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone | Our Hospitality / 1923

in enemy territory

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell (screenplay), Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone (directors) Our Hospitality / 1923

 

The Hatfields and the McCoys become the McKays and the Canfields—families who have been feuding with and killing each other for so long that they can longer remember the reason—to shoot it out in Buster Keaton’s memorable 1923 adventure comedy, one of his very best.

     With the death of her husband, Mrs. McKay (Jean Dumas) takes her one-year-old child (Buster Keaton Jr.) north to New York, living on an idyllic farm owned by her sister. The mother dies, and his aunt raises him in peace until one day, Willie (Buster Keaton Sr.) receives a letter asking him to claim the old estate; little does he know that what he imagines as a Southern mansion, in fact, is a decaying one room frame house. He determines to make the voyage by train, despite his aunt warning him of the dangers of the ongoing feud between families.

      If the plot is somewhat thin—with the kind of twists that involve his meeting the Canfield daughter, Virginia (played by Keaton’s wife, Natalie Talmadge) and falling in love, her brothers’ and father’s determination to kill Willie only after he leaves their home (Virginia has invited him to dinner), and a series of river misadventures right out of The Perils of Pauline (doing all his own stunts, Keaton nearly drowned in California’s Truckee River)—what makes the film so special is Keaton’s impeccable comic skills and his attention to period details.

     Just for the film, Keaton recreated a replica of one of the earliest trains, Stephenson's Rocket, which consisted of a small engine car and carriages that look like those generally pulled by horses, and a caboose rider with a horn that appears more like something out of a fox hunt than a machine rocketing through the countryside. Indeed, this train moves on wooden tracks so slowly that even Willie’s pet dog tags along the long trip from New York to Kentucky, running under the wheels the train and, eventually, speeding ahead of it to its destination. Indeed this “train” seems to get along better when it slips off the tracks onto a local road. Keaton’s father, Joe, plays the frustrated engineer.

 

    That long scene of the voyage is one of the best of all film history, and, of course, hints at the central events of Keaton’s masterpiece, The General.

     There are plenty of later wonderful scenes, including the directors’ views of the 1830s wilderness, Willie’s refusal to leave the Canfield mansion (by doing so would be put into jeopardy by being out of their family “hospitality”) in which his dog also plays a role, and the wonderful river adventures where Willie saves his Canfield girlfriend. Of course, they get married and the Canfields and Willie lay down their several guns.

    I won’t get into the argument about whether Keaton was better than Chaplin, but there is no question that Keaton was a truly American director and was a far better commentator on the US experience. Because of his combination of historicity and comic histrionics, Keaton creates such memorable scenes of US culture and mayhem that today his films seem to be brilliant American treatises on various issues: love, marriage, violence, home, honor, and the land itself. 

    In Our Hospitality he focuses, once again, not only on some of the differences between the American North and South, but also on the particularly American penchant for guns and violence. You might almost read this film as an ironic reference to the kind of violent hospitality to which one might be treated in the good ole USA, a hostility to outsiders that is expressed through our obsession with guns.

    Keaton’s film argues, there is a true “inside/outside” sensibility in much of USA life. Willie is safe only inside, despite his being a true outsider, and it is only when he marries into the family that he can find true protection.

    The ancient war between the McKays and Canfields must have had something to do with sexual transgression, with the poor McKays long ago surreptitiously attempting to enter the world of the rich Canfields. If the film itself doesn’t reveal its history, we see it playing out again in the constantly bewitched, bothered, and bewildered face of Willie, who knows that his only way out of the Canfield enforced “hospitality” is to become, in this world of sexist chivalry, a woman.

     Putting on a woman’s dress Willie goes on the run, with a series of events involving the Canfield’s attempt to kill him following. At one point a Canfield lowers a rope to help Willie climb up a cliff off which he’s fallen, only to try to get a better shot at him, before himself falling and dragging Willie, tied to the rope, with him. Willie even steals a train (foretelling events from his later The General) but it dumps him into the river, itself rushing toward the rapids. Spotting him, his lover Virginia tries to save him by rowboat, but is herself swept toward the rapids, requiring Willie to swing, as if on a flying trapeze, to catch her mid-fall and return her to the ledge of the cliff.

    In the end, the couple no longer feel the need to ask permission to marry, an act which they accomplish in the very house which the menfolk have abandoned to further stock their prey. By the time the Canfield men return, Willie and Virginia have accomplished the deed, the southerner joining the northerner, Canfield wedded to McKay in a manner that forces both sides to realize that what was outside is most definitely now part of their own community. Once more, moreover, as in a number of these early films, we recognize that cross-dressing is often a fortuitous way to help save the situation.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2018).