Herbert Brenon | Wine, Women and Song / 1933 [Not available]

signed and delivered

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leon D’Usseau (screenwriter, based on his play), Herbert Brenon (director) Wine, Women and Song / 1933 [Not available]

 

This film has evidently not made it into any major film library. Rumor has it that UCLA has a nitrate copy, but has no plans to restore it.

     It made it onto my list simply because of the comments of Richard Barrios regarding the appearance of pansy character actor Bobby Watson who plays the figure of Lawrence, apparently a lisping dancing assistant.

    But one can imagine that this work, directed the Herbert Brenon who also helmed Peter Pan (1925) and Beau Geste (1926), might also be of gay interest if for no other reason that the notorious lesbian Lilyan Tashman plays a washed-up chorus girl, Frankie Arnette, now performing in a risqué dance number in New York City who, a bit like the actor herself, is not at all afraid of any kind of publicity, good or bad.

      Moreover, the male lead, Lew Cody—although married twice, both times for very brief periods, to Dorothy Dalton, and who later married the already tubercular Mabel Normand “on a lark,” the two living apart—held Malibu Beach House parties, according to gay director Charles Walters, that were extremely popular with gay men in the early 1930s. Even the press, after his second breakup with Dalton, seemed to be winking in their description of him as living the life of a “man’s man,” code in this case, presumably, for a male that men of a certain kind particularly appreciated.

      I wish the film was available for viewing, but fortunately TCM has posted a full synopsis, which, along with other briefer descriptions of the plot provided me with the information for the summary below.

      As the film begins, in fact, she has invited her daughter, Marilyn Arnette (Marjorie Reynolds) to leave the refined St. Cecilia School for Girls to finally meet her. Marilyn finds her in a New York burlesque house which on the night of her attendance is raided by the police. When Marilyn finally catches up with her mother whom she finds in jail, Frankie explains to her that she herself has arranged the police raid to cash in on the publicity that is bound to follow.

     Good girl Marilyn is about to hightail it back to her proper Catholic school, but Frankie, knowing that her daughter has been studying tap dance, asks her to accompany her comedienne friend Loretta Oliver Potts, better known as Lolly (Esther Muir), to rehearsals for a new show.

     Marilyn hesitantly agrees, and suddenly finds herself trying out for the show. Dance director Ray Joyce (Matty Kemp) is highly impressed with her dancing while the show’s producer, playboy Morgan Andrews (Lew Cody), is equally dazzled by her legs and other body parts.

 

     Andrews arranges with newspaper columnist Jennie Tilson (Gertrude Astor) to interview their new “discovery,” during which Jennie pretends to be called back to her office so that Andrews can invite the disappointed Marilyn to lunch in his theater-front office.

     In passing, Ray spots Marilyn drinking with Andrews, and grows angry that the new girl he so admired has already been seemingly corrupted, leaving the theater with his star Imogene in a manner that Marilyn can’t miss noticing.

     The producer, meanwhile, awards the new girl with a bracelet of diamonds and emeralds, kissing her as his reward. Startled by the act, Marilyn faints as Jennie enters to undress her, while Andrews sends the rest of his party off to a nightclub so he can give his full attention to the distressed innocent.

      Just freed from jail, Frankie enters at that very moment, demanding Lolly take her daughter home, while she stays to viciously scratch her nails across Andrew’s face. In response he tosses her to the floor. But when she doesn’t get up, he’s forced to call a doctor, who revives her with a powerful capsule which he breaks open, demanding she inhale it.

      Frankie has a heart condition, and well knows that the pill the doctor has just used can be fatal to those with normal hearts. On his orders, however, she is forced to stay in bed in Andrews’ apartment for at least ten days, the perfect set-up for a man trying to get his hands on a mother’s daughter.

     Meanwhile, the chorus girls can do nothing but gossip about the fact that Marilyn has seemingly stayed the night in Andrews’ apartment. And Ray greets her icily. But when the young neophyte explains what really happened all, including Ray, welcome her back to their own circle of friendship, with Ray actually apologizing and ready to tell her how he’s already fallen in love—only to be interrupted by the rehearsal of a new number.

     Back in his lair, Andrews threatens Frankie, suggesting that it will now be difficult to make her beloved daughter a star since he’s been so rudely interrupted in his love-making. And with pure pre-code license, Frankie agrees to sign a contract that assures Marilyn’s sexual compliance if Andrews comes through with his part of the bargain in helping to promote the girl’s career—but with one important caveat: that he promise not to bother her until after opening night.

 

    Agreeing with her logic that the girl needs to keep her mind on her work, he agrees. And on the night of the big opening, Frankie sits at a nearby table watching her daughter performer, making it one of the happiest moments of her life. At that very same moment she breaks open one of her heart capsules and pours the powder surreptitiously into Andrews’ gin. Together they toast to the future, Andrews almost immediately collapsing, hand to his heart, with the realization that Frankie has killed him. Frankie sheds a tear or two and herself dies, having consumed the powder as well.

     As the audience applauds Marilyn’s dance she hugs Lolly to her and kisses Ray behind the curtain.   

    Both of the villains of the piece, Lew Cody and Lilyan Tashman, died within a year of completing the film, Tashman on March 21, 1934 of tumular cancer and Cody two months later on May 31, 1934 of a heart attack. It is doubtful that either of their careers would have lasted on screen once the code was enforced that same year since Cody had long been known as a “male vamp” and Tashman was famous for her naughty women’s bathroom sex behavior.

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

 

Naji Abut Nowar | ذيب‎‎ (Theeb) / 2014, USA 2015

how to become a wolf

by Douglas Messerli

 

Naji Abu Nowar and Bassel Ghandour (screenplay), Naji Abut Nowar (director) ذيب‎‎ (Theeb) / 2014, USA 2015

 

Najai Abu Nowar’s Jordanian-made Theeb is a wonder—not only because it is one of the few high-quality Arab films of the past few years—but primarily because of its use of local, unprofessional Bedouin actors and because before making it, Abu Nowar immersed himself in the Bedouin culture, something few directors might have attempted to do. That, and his complete immersion for more than a year in the landscape of Southern Jordan in Wadi Araba, the desert of Wadi Rum, and Daba, where the last scene was shot, reveals his true commitment to Bassel Ghandour’s original script.

     The real joy of this film is the young figure, Jacar Eid, who played the central figure of this film. Director Abu Nowar admits that, at first, because of his quietude and innate shyness, they did not even consider him for the role; but when he appeared before the camera itself, they recognized his remarkable presence, as he changed into an entirely other being. Seeing him before the camera, there was no question of their casting him as the star.

     In the film he comes off as a somewhat over-curious young boy, who is eager to learn the traditions of his Bedouin culture, but, at the same time, is sensitive to the meaning of what his actions might mean. He has difficulty, for example, in slaughtering one of his family’s goats for dinner; he cannot quite bring himself to kill the man, with gun in hand, who has killed his brother; he is obviously tortured by the death, not only of his recently dead father but of his own brother, whom he is forced to bury in the desert sand.

      Theeb—whose name means Wolf—is anything but the pack-loving killer, ready to destroy—as some of his family members might previously have been—anyone who intrudes upon their community’s space. He is an eager, engaged young boy, seeking constantly to comprehend the world he is suddenly forced to encounter when a British soldier (the only professional actor, Jack Fox) and an Arabic follower (Marji) intrude during World War I, upon his isolated community, requesting a pilgrim guide who can lead them to a far-away water desert hole where they intend to meet up with war-faring comrades.

       Theeb’s brother, Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen agrees to undertake the journey, despite his and others’ stated dangers. The once active route, a former source of financial support for many Bedouin natives, has now been replaced by a railroad line, “the iron donkey,” as they describe it; the former route is now filled with local bandits, many of whom previously worked as pilgrim guides in the trip between Medina and Damascus.

      The younger child, quite understandably, is left behind. But his insistence on being included—particularly given his intensely close relationship to his brother Hussein, established so effectively in the early scenes of the film— determines that Theeb will follow after, meeting up with the group a day later. Since the Englishman is determined to immediately move forward, the child, despite their deep reservations, is included in the voyage, a decision which will involve him in a series of increasingly dire circumstances.

 

     At the appointed well, they perceive their soldier friends have not yet arrived, only to discover they have already been murdered and thrown into the well itself, allowing them no relief from their thirst or possible escape; they are already being watched. The crazy Englishman, clearly determined to stroll “out in the noonday sun,” and bit like a very unromantic Lawrence of Arabia, dismisses the two brothers, as he insists a move ever forward to find his own troops.

      Hussein, the caring guide, realizes that, without him, they will never find the next well, and follows them with Theeb despite their rejection of his services. They discover the next well, but, although it remains untainted, they are there attacked, with both Edward and Marji being immediately killed.

      With Theeb, Hussein retreats to the higher mountains, killing some of the bandits; but, as night comes upon them, they are seemingly surrounded, and, as in the old-fashioned American Westerns, are taunted by the would-be assailants, threatening to kill their camels (their only method of escaping) and themselves.

       Although Hussein comforts his younger brother (“Don’t listen to them.”), he is totally aware of the situation and advises his younger brother to climb even higher into the mountains if the worse happens. But when the villains actually attack, there is no way for escape: they kill Hussein and Theeb is forced into the open, accidently stumbling into the dark depths of the well and possible drowning.

       In fact, the young actor, could not swim, and the director and others had to teach him how to in order that he might survive the actual filming; even worse, the scene, which did not work the first time round, had to be reshot later, when Jacar had recut his hair for his attendance at a local military school. Replacing his original “hairdo” with a wig, he reshot the film, very convincingly, crawling out of the wall only to face the man who had killed his brother and who tried to destroy him, Hassan Mutlag Al-Maraiyeh.

       The man, who he again encounters, has been seriously shot in the leg, just barely surviving. The boy is quite understandably terrorized by the man, but he and his previous enemy have no way of surviving without each other, and they gradually form a kind of truce, where Theeb helps the killer in return for food and a possible way out of his own desert death.

       They both survive, and eventually reach the Turkish-run train station at Daba. But there, when Theeb observes Hassan simply selling the goods he has stolen from the murdered Englishman for a few silver coins—even being himself offered a single coin by the Turkish officer—he suddenly comes alive as a moral figure, shedding all of his childish innocence. As Hassam exits the station with his few silver tokens, the boy, with gun in hand, finally has the courage to kill him, reporting to the Turkish officers simply that the man had killed his own brother.

       As in any American western, justice has been achieved. But, in this case, one can only ask, at what cost? Theeb has not only learned that the western-built railroads have, in part, destroyed his own culture’s major financial source of income, but that the disaffected men of his own world have turned against their own kind. The values of his own family, an apparently highly respected tribe, have been destroyed by the Turks, the warring English, and disaffected Bedouins simultaneously. Although he evidently returns “home,” it is clear that he no longer will have a safe haven to which to return. The young innocent the movie has so brilliantly revealed in the young Eid’s curious actions, has proven, as Edward has warned him time and again as the boy attempts to open the bombing detonation box he carries with him, are more than dangerous: they can, and already have, destroyed everyone’s life.

      Although this film won many international awards, I truly wish such a perceptive and profound Arab-made film might have received the American Academy Award for which it had been nominated. It might have gone a long way to help US citizens realize that culture’s own history and the fears and terrors it still suffers.  

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

Moren Tyldum | The Imitation Game / 2014

a man of secrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Graham Moore (screenplay, based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges), Moren Tyldum (director) The Imitation Game / 2014

 

Given the scientific complexity of what Alan Turing was attempting to accomplish, his personal hidden identity—he was gay in a time when the United Kingdom still criminalized homosexual behavior)—and the governmentally-enforced hidden identities he would be asked to embrace, along with his apparent inability to often comprehend simple human conversations as well the difficulty he had in expressing himself, my title for this essay is surely an obvious one. The moment I had chosen it, moreover, I read a New Yorker essay on Turing and a biography written about him by David Leavitt (“Code-Breaker: The Life and Death of Alan Turing by Jim Holt) that described him precisely as I had: “A man of secrets.” And it is precisely because of these layers of secretiveness that I begin this essay, I must admit, with somewhat of a loss for words. How to enter upon the subject of Alan Turing without first providing a complete history of the man, which, unfortunately the movie I have just seen, The Imitation Game only fragmentarily achieves?

     As A. O. Scott in The New York Times review suggests, the life of Turing, along with its interconnections with World War II deep secret activities along with the shifting socio-political issues of the period “is a lot for a single movie to take in,” requiring a script that “prunes and compresses a narrative” by Andrew Hodges upon which it was based. Despite the often intelligently written Graham Moore script (which topped the Black List for best unproduced Hollywood scripts in 2011), the story played out in this rather traditionally told and even more conservatively filmed bio-pic is, at very best, murky, a work that often does not bother to explain the images it projects upon the screen. For example, it would have been nice to know that when we see the central character, Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), running as if he had just come from a screen test for Chariots of Fire, that the great mathematician had been a long-run marathoner in his youth. It might have been of great significance to have known that the cyanide we see him dangerously scooping up after the robbery and destruction of his bedroom-office, was the same substance he used, through injection into an apple, for his suicide in June of 1954. Although the film is framed, in part, around his arrest for and confession of indecent homosexual behavior, it might have helped us, at least, to imagine how the individual the film depicts as having little facility in communicating with his own species, could have lured another man into his bed.

        Although it may have appeared to be irrelevant to the central story the film presents, it would have been fascinating, surely, to indicate that after Turing had accomplished the breaking of the German Enigma Machine code at Bletchley Park, he traveled to the United States where he worked for Bell-Labs and, perhaps even more importantly, there helped to develop a secure speech device (Delilah) which would become the basis of electronic enciphering of speech in later telephone systems and radios, which today as been applied to protect computer systems in order to break new implanted codes by hackers.

        In his absence, Turing’s apparent nemesis in the film, Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), took over as head of the activities in the now-renowned Hut 8, and upon his return, Turing gladly worked under him as a consultant for cryptanalysis, having little interest in the day-to-day operations of the project. Indeed, Holt argues that, despite Turing’s odd ways, he was quite beloved by his colleagues, a reality one might not have imagined until the very end of Tyldum’s work. 

   It comes as no surprise, surely, that Turing’s real relationship with fellow cryptologist and puzzle-solver, Joan Clarke (Keira Knighhtley)—in truth, argues Turing’s niece, a rather plain woman; but, then, Turing was no Cumberbatch when it came to looks—was not nearly as intense and ongoing as it is presented in the movie. Although he did, in fact, offer to marry her, and, in backing out, admitted his homosexuality, the relationship between the two, as opposed to the way this film portrays it, involved little romance. Such a fabrication, we recognize is to be forgiven for such an old-fashioned film, which requires, obviously, a juicy feminine role.

    Since I later wrote an essay on the Hodges biography that is readily available on-line, I won’t further parse distinctions between truth and fiction. My point is simply that, in the many ways, Tyldum’s and Moore’s film is itself a work of “secrets,” a flirtatious series of half-truths that steers its narrative toward a kind of simplification of events that results in a lovely veneer—the film is often beautiful to look at and appealing to the ear (with a plush orchestral score of the always pleasing Alexandre Desplat)—that seldom allows us the possibility of going beyond the surface of things. 

     When a movie posits its entire psychological evidence for the behavior of its central character upon a childhood incident, in this case the death of Turing’s beloved friend, Christopher—after whom he names his equally beloved machine—we know we’re never going to get to the heart of what makes the hero tick.* If Turing was a “man of secrets,” the movie does very little to help reveal what might lie underneath the layers of self-, social-, and political-deceit. Instead of shellacking over these real-life events, a better film might, a bit like an art conservator, have peeled away some of the varnish already overlaying the “picture,’ exposing the real thing—the actual man and events behind his life.

     There are moments, clearly, when the film does attempt this. Playing what Turing describes as “a game of judgment” (in reality what was called “the Turing Test”) to determine whether the being with which he was communicating was a human or an “intelligent” machine (a remarkable game of logic that reminds one, a bit, like the test used in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to determine whether a being was a “real” human being or a manufactured one) the film’s hero begs his interlocutor to judge him: “Am I a human being or a machine, a war hero or a war criminal.” The poor detective, who has simply imagined Turing to be a Soviet spy, admits his incapability.

     As the movie would have it, Turning is all of these. If he is a human, he also a monster (“a living admonishment or warning”) in his inability to fully feel what humans do; if he has saved the lives of thousands in having been able to decode through his early computer the German Enigma machine, shortening the duration of World War II—according to Winston Churchill, by as many as four years—in his cold-hearted, statistically-based calculations concerning which war-time encounters with German submarines and bombers, allowing him to ignore or circumvent them, he had also to be a kind of cold-hearted criminal. Looking the other way, in numerous instances, from the certain death and destruction of German attacks in order to keep the secret that they had been able to break the German codes, Turing and his associates were forced to play the role of gods, making judgments over the fates of their fellow beings. And the hubris that came from that play-acting may certainly have led them to imagine they alone had won the war in their seemingly invisible hut.

    If we choose to judge Turing guilty, we realize we must also equally judge the government for which he worked and the society which refused men like Turing to even take another man into his arms to kiss and share a moment of sexual bliss. If Turing was a secretive being, so too was the government who for decades refused to even admit Turing’s achievements, as well as the British law which refused to admit his humanity. If the film fails to provide a clear portrait of the man at the center of the events it portrays, so too did the world in which Turing exist refuse to allow him open access to normal life. 

     With regard to Turing’s sad existence, I like to think of the metaphor that author David Levitt uses in his biography on Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much—even though I cannot fully accept it as fact. One of Turing’s favorite scenes from movies, so we are told, was the one in which Disney’s Snow White is given the poison apple by the witch. Levitt suggests that in his suicide the great mathematician knowingly used the story as an imaginative image in destroying himself. In the story, if you recall, Snow White does not die, but falls into a deep sleep, to be awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by a Prince in a future time through the miracle of a kiss. It’s nice to think that Turing, exhausted by the burdens of all the secrets which had already psychologically buried him, imagined that he might one day be awakened into a world that accepted him for what he was: a brilliant thinker who helped to save the Allies in World War II and for developing his “Turing machine” which transformed in what we today describe as the computer, a genius who also led the way for new discoveries in the fields of artificial thinking and morphogenesis, and, finally, a gay man who “in being what no one thought anything of did things that no one could imagine.”

      Any work of art that helps us to rethink and reimagine the life of such a remarkable man is worthy of our attention. And one has to give credit to The Imitation Game for attempting so valiantly to recognize the achievements of its hero. But unfortunately, this film covers up that same figure in yet more secrets rather than working to reveal or attempting to solve them.

 

*Similarly, I doubt whether the word “Rosebud” reveals all we need to know about William Randolph Hearst in Orson Welles’ thinly disguised autobiographical film, Citizen Kane.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).

Christian Petzold | Phoenix / 2014, 2015 USA

the curtain descends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Petzold and Harun Farocki (screenplay, based on a fiction by Hubert Monteilhet), Christian Petzold (director) Phoenix / 2014, 2015 USA

 

Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), is a Jewish singer has just been saved from Auschwitz, and after reconstructive surgery upon her face (she has been shot, evidently at the last moments of internment), is encouraged by her loyal friend, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf) to join her in Palestine to help create a new Jewish state. Certainly, Lene, who has apparently waited out the war in Switzerland, seems to assert that there is no future for them in the haunted world of Berlin, where they previously lived.

     While Nelly heals in Berlin, Lene continues to look into the survival and whereabouts of Nelly’s family and friends, explaining to her that since every family member has been killed in the camps, she will come into a sizable fortune, held by the Allies, but which she can retrieve only if she is willing to move to Palestine.

     Nelly, a near shell of a being, emptied of emotional response and even the ability to once again look like her former self (the doctor has warned her that her desire to look as she did before surgery can never truly be achieved), is clearly psychologically unable to move forward, and responds vacantly to Lene’s new plans and pictures of the apartments she proposes in Haifa or Tel Aviv. Nelly, after all, has survived her internment, in part, by focusing on her love for her husband, Johnny, a Christian who was not imprisoned. Despite Lene’s suggestion that it was he who betrayed her to the Nazis, revealing where she was hiding, and Lene’s revelation that she has seen Johnny, who is now attempting to get hold of Nelly’s money—presuming she has died in the camp—Nelly is determined to reconnect.

      Because she now has to identify in the present, Nelly cannot leave her past, and seeks out her husband, quickly discovering that the ex-pianist is now working as a waiter in a cabaret in the American zone, the Phoenix—its very title a symbol of the post-War German desire to rise immediately out of its ashes.

      Hoss plays Nelly as an almost will-less being, robbed the first night she roams the street by a thug—also named Johnny—who has just raped another woman. The very next evening, daring to enter the cabaret, Nelly is sexually approached by a young American soldier, evidently mistaking her for a prostitute he was to meet. The management quickly throws her out of the establishment, since it is apparent she has no credentials or permission to ply her wares in the bar. But Johnny, now going under the name Johannes, without actually recognizing her, sees just enough of a likeness in her to his wife, that he recuses her, taking her to his hovel of a room, and offering her the back room if she will help him in an elaborate plot to imitate his former wife, returned from the camps, so that we can get his hands on her money, part of which he is willing to share with his new protégé.

      When he reencounters the woman he has salvaged, witnessing her lifeless shuffle and spectre-like stare, he almost calls off the whole affair. Only her pleas to allow her to try to learn how behave as his now dead lover, wins her more time.

     As hard as it may be to believe Johnny’s inability to recognize Nelly, who reports her name is Esther (“There aren’t many Esthers left,” quips Johannes), and as equally difficult as it is to imagine what she ever saw in this greedy brute, we become, nonetheless, engrossed by his attempts to makeover Esther into the Nelly she formerly was.

     It’s only if one perceives this effort as a kind of metaphorical relationship, or—as with Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson’s attempt to transform the ordinary working girl, Judy, back into the beautifully sophisticated Madeline Elster—a delusional condition that cannot permit the would-be magician to see the truth that retains our interest. Petzold presents it almost as a game of cat and mouse, as each for his or her own reasons, pretends—Johnny because he is so desperate to deny the past and to create a new world severed from it; Nelly because she is seeking a regeneration and is desperate to explain the events that nearly killed her.

      Forcing Esther to write out shopping lists in order to imitate Nelly’s handwriting, and dressing her in Nelly’s old shoes and in dresses similar to those Nelly wore (her former clothing was all burned), Johannes keeps his Pygmalion under lock and key so that she will not encounter any of his or Nelly’s former friends. When Nelly does briefly escape to make contact, once again, with Lene, she is met with Lene’s deep anger for her imagining that she might “forgive” the events that led her to be interred. Lene will have nothing to do with Nelly’s attempt to retrieve the past, and gives her a gun which might help protect herself from the present world in which she haunts like some ghost. To paraphrase Chekov, “if you introduce a gun early in a play, you better make sure it’s used before the end.” We wonder, accordingly, how this absurd charade will end.

     In the early scenes it also becomes apparent that Lene’s caring and kindness toward Nelly may go further than that of friendship, that, in fact, she is seeking a deeper relationship with Nelly in their future in Palestine. As with most elements of this movie, Petzold never openly expresses this possibility, but we are forced to puzzle out the film’s truths a bit like a detective story with no reliable investigator in order to comprehend what Nelly, apparently, refuses to. And in this case, we gradually perceive Lene as a lesbian in love with Nelly, which may also account for some of Nelly's reticence about moving to Palestine with Lene. 

    Soon after, when Nelly attempts to visit Lene once again, she discovers that Lene has committed suicide, in a letter to her friend expressing the impossibility of now going forward into the future, particularly without Nelly. With the letter is a document, a divorce decree Johnny evidently signed shortly after Nelly’s arrestment. Not only has he betrayed her to the Nazis, but he has attempted to wipe away all his connections to her.

     The woman now named Esther, however, has gone too far to end the charade, and further plots with Johannes on how to return to Berlin, where he with a few of their former friends will greet her at the train, thus confirming Nelly’s return from the dead.

   When, now, Esther expresses her doubts about her ability to undertake the “deception” by asking, “won’t they ask me all sorts of questions about my life in the camp? What am I to say?” Johannes assures her that they will not be interested at all about the concentration camp, but simply will be amazed and delighted in her return. He even predicts how each them will behave, one them coming forward before the others, another calling her “Little Nelly,” another complaining of everything in Berlin. In short, these new Germans, all former collaborators if not Nazis themselves, will, like him, attempt wipe away the past, secure in the fact that together (given their unvarying identities) they will create a new future that will simply erase the old—precisely, one must recall, what historically almost happened in post-war Germany.

      But Johannes finally crosses the line, we might say, when he suggests that he will have to scar Esther’s arm so that she might pretend to have her concentration camp number cut away! She rejects any such attempt, refusing him entry to the bathroom as she begins to make up and dress for the dramatized reunion.

    Following his careful instructions, Esther, now returned to being Nelly, walks forward from the train, briefly greeting all of her old friends, who express their absolute delight in seeing her again. She walks to Johannes, now her Johnny once more, and, just as he has instructed her, places her head upon his shoulder, waits, and, on cure, joins the others for a celebratory lunch.

     During lunch Nelly says very little, while the others murmur on as if there had been no horrific past from which their friendly revenant has returned. Clearly exhausted by their meaningless chatter, Nelly invites them inside for a brief recital, whispering to Johnny that he should play the Kurt Weill song, “Speak Low.”*

    She begins the song almost as Marlene Dietrich might, in Sprechstimme, before gradually moving, timorously, into a sung melody, finally employing a fuller voice. As Johnny hears the singing, he gradually begins to recognize his blindness, and, ultimately ceases his accompaniment: this Nelly and his former wife are one and the same. Looking up, he (along with Petzold’s camera) notices the concentration camp number stamped across Nelly’s upper arm.

    Nelly quietly finishes the song, which begs the lover to speak of his love quickly before it disappears, and quickly walks out of the room—and out of her own past, leaving those within to face the frightful past of their own creation. To cut off her ties with the co-called “friends,” Nelly doesn’t even need the gun.

     Phoenix makes no grand claims for speaking of the entire German Nazi legacy, but by focusing upon a single being, makes it clear that no matter how the survivors—both those who committed the atrocities and those who permitted them—may attempt to forgot what has occurred, there will be others who will never permit that amnesia. Any love they may have wished to express has indeed come far “too late.” 

 *The lyrics to the Kurt Weill song, written by Ogden Nash, are as follows:

 

We're late,

Darling we're late

 

The curtain descends,

Everything ends

Too soon, too soon

I wait,

Darling I wait

When you speak low to me,

Speak love to me and soon

    

Los Angeles, August 10, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2015).