John Huston | Wise Blood / 1979

savage demands

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benedict Fitzgerald and Michael Fitzgerald (screenplay, based on the novel by Flannery O’Connor), John Huston (director) Wise Blood / 1979

 

John Huston’s 1979 film, Wise Blood, received mostly positive reviews, many of them arguing how faithful the film is to Flannery O’Connor’s legendary first novel. In many respects, one would have to agree that this film, surely a difficult work to achieve within the Hollywood definition of what is a saleable film—Wise Blood had German and US backing—comes off far better than one might have suspected. All of O’Connor’s strange players reappear in their compelling and compelled roles in the small, mythical Southern community of Taulkinham, including the war veteran Hazel Motes, the “blind” preacher, Asa Hawkes, his sex-crazed daughter Sabbath Lily, the lonely and lost boy Enoch Emery, the religious-spouting conman, Hoover Shoates (re-baptizing himself as Onnie Jay Holy), and the scheming landlady, Mrs. Flood. And most of these larger-than-life characters are quite convincingly acted, including Motes (Brad Dourif), Emery (Dan Schor), Hawkes (Harry Dean Stanton), Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), Shoates (Ned Beatty), and Mrs. Flood (Mary Nell Santacroce)—particularly given that their roles are so much larger than life.

     For the most part, Huston downplays the shocking encounters between these figures, steering his narrative away from what might have been absurdly exaggerated types at the best, and campy versions of Southern degenerates at worst. A work in which the central character, preaching against organized religion, argues for a new “Church of Christ without Christ,” in which “the blind can’t see, the lame don’t walk, and the dead stay that way” in the midst of world quite literally fermenting in religiosity, is a hard line to tow in a medium that generally pushes everything off the cliff of realism. Add to that a blind preacher who can see all too well, his daughter, determined to marry Motes (“I'm just crazy about him. I never seen a boy I like the looks of any better.”), a lunatic friend, Emery Enoch, with the mind of child, who steals a mummy from a local museum to present Hazel with the symbol of new church and later steals a gorilla costume and attempts to shake hands with the natives, and, finally, a landlady determined to get Hazel into her bed, and one immediately perceives the director’s immense talent to be able to transform these “freaks,” as O’Connor herself might have called them, into figures about whom we still care.

     Huston seems to have, in particular, sustained our belief in the hero, Hazel Motes, who raised to be a kind of preacher, cannot resist the task, despite his desperate attempts to denounce his and his community’s beliefs. Throughout, the film focuses on his faith in a world in which he proclaims is doomed. Despite every evidence to the contrary, Hazel continues to sing the praises of the run-down car he has purchased (“This car is just beginning its life, a lightning bolt couldn't stop it.”) up until the very moment a passing policeman sends it to its death in a local lake (in the book, the car’s end is even more ignoble). 

 

     Hazel may try to free himself of disciples, yet he quickly finds a willing believer and follower in the simple-minded Emery. Although he seems basically disinterested in the opposite sex, he immediately attracts the eye of the prostitute, Leona Watts, the embraces of Sabbath Lily, and the motherly fondles of Mrs. Flood. If Asa Hawkes does not have the nerve to blind himself as evidence of his beliefs, Hazel does, ending his life as a blind man whose body is ravaged through his self-imposed bodily tortures and his suffering through a stormy night out of doors. In short, Hazel’s whole life gives lie to his credo: “I don't have to run away from anything, cause I don't believe in anything.” Huston convinces us that, in fact, Hazel believes in almost everything, that he cares enough about the truth to even kill for it.

    Also central to O’Connor’s parable, however, is the amazingly childlike faith of Emery, who not only is able to bring Hazel a kind a Christ-child in the form of the stolen mummy (which Sabbath Lily immediately takes to breast, as if she were the Madonna of the ancient Bible tale), but ends the work as a version of Yeats’ “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem to be born anew from his gorilla-like existence. But here, and in other such spots, Huston’s film falls apart as composer Alex North (whose excellent score I recently reencountered in the stage version of Death of a Salesman), after rousing renditions of nearly every Southern-born hymn, strikes up a banjo-twanging hillbilly accompaniment that diminishes Emery’s role and turns him, along with others such as Sabbath Lily and Hoover Shoates, into a bunch of stupid crackers. Accordingly, while the film has successfully struggled with the profound contradictions of its central figure, it marginalizes and even mocks the men and women surrounding Hazel who give credence to the powers of his ministry.

 

     Emery’s final gesture of shaking hands, while dressed in his gorilla outfit, with a couple waiting at a bus stop—a meaningful attempt to link the miracle of his newfound faith to everyday folk through a simple handshake—is played here for its comic ridiculousness rather than presenting it as an act of absurd significance.

    In the end, consequently, Hazel Mote’s last gasps, while the chattering Mrs. Flood plans out his future in her bed, seem quite meaningless; in Huston’s world he has just been, after all, another fool, a kind of kooky con-man, who, as the chorus of Iowa hucksters of The Music Man might proclaim, “doesn’t know the territory”—while the fact is that Motes knew his world better than even he might have imagined, recognizing the savagery of its demands.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2012).

Jan Gruyaert | De vlaschaard (The Flaxfield) / 1983, USA 1985

the unforgiven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Gruyaert (screenplay, based on a novel by Stijn Streuvels), Jan Gruyaert (director) De vlaschaard (The Flaxfield) / 1983, USA 1985

 

With a grim, slow-moving story, Jan Gruyaert’s excellent film makes up for it with a series of beautiful images. True, as The New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted in his 1985 review, the images portrayed are almost all predictable: the muddy fields, the waving flax,” tight close-ups of the creatures that inhabit the earth - ants, worms, snails, grasshoppers.” But given the world that the old farmer Vermeulen (Vic Moeremans), his son Louis (Rene van Sambeek), and Vermeulen’s wife Barbele (Dora van der Groen) inhabit—a world that absolutely depends on predictability—how else might the director conveyed the film’s truth?      

 

   The farmers of Flanders determine everything by pattern, by detecting the gradual shift of the soils, the fairness of winds, the growing movement of insects to know when to sow their crop. But in the particular year which this film recounts, old Vermeulen has suddenly become unpredictable, refusing to sow his crop on the higher ground his devoted son suggests and waiting beyond the time other locals have already planted.

      Vermeulen is a hard task-master, a cold-hearted authoritarian who has reached an agreement with his wife that he is always right. Louis has come of age, and is suddenly a handsome, vivacious young man who should long ago been awarded for his obedience and diligence a least a hand in controlling the farm. Like an Old Testament figure, however, Vermeulen detests the very intelligence and sensuality of the boy, particularly the young man’s infatuation with a working girl living on the farm, Schellebelle (Gusta Gerritsen).

      Schellebelle is everything that the Vermeulen family is not; light-hearted, almost radiant in her appearance, somewhat of a flirt, she is the very manifestation of youth and joy. For Vermeulen, accordingly, she represents the devil himself. As Louis becomes more and more involved with her—innocent as that relationship is—the old farmer grows more and more troubled, finally determining to use his life’s savings to buy a neighbor’s decaying farm for his son; he orders his wife to find an appropriate bride for the boy.

      While Vermeulen is at auction, however, the rains come, suggesting that it is time to harvest the flax before it is destroyed. Louis, taking responsibility, orders the grain to be reaped. The lovely scene in the fields is one of the most poignant in the work, ending with a dance, Louis choosing Schellebelle as his partner.

      Returning home, the old farmer is outraged that things have proceeded without him, and, as the son moves toward the lovely maid, strikes his him down with a hoe.

      The horrifying last scene shows the boy in a coma upon the bed, the old man sitting in a chair to attend him. Finally, he has found a way to overcome and dominate the spirited youth once more.

      Gruyaert tells this grim tale without any of the sentimentality present in the original text. While that may distance his audience, it has the effect, almost in a Brechtian manner, of allowing us to more fully perceive the moral absurdity of Vermeulen’s cosmos. His struggle with his son is an age-old story that gets played out in hundreds of tales and analyzed on Freud’s couch. But in Gruyaert’s objective telling it suddenly seems surprising fresh and is more horrific for that reason. Louis, never truly disobedient but always well intended is destroyed for those very qualities. He is unforgiven simply for being what he was raised to be, a loving and loyal son.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).

Jan Krüger | Welcome to the Candy House / 2013

the problem with always going out with sis

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Krüger (screenwriter and director) Welcome to the Candy House / 2013 [5 minutes]

 

Poor Hänsel (Martin Hansen) and Gretel (Marlene Melchior) are lost, this in an urban German city, once more. They hear the noise of a circus carnival and share a delightful ride on a merry-go-round, but it’s getting late and it’s time to find a bed for the night.

 

    They try to find a room in a cheap local hotel, without luck. Even the local hostel turns them away, as they, caught in the dark of the night are afraid they will be left out in the dark. But a friend old crone (the first Witch is Toby Ashraf, no. 2 is Vasilis Thanasis, and no. 3 is Tim van Nuland) hands out a small leaflet which eventually leads them to the site of “Ficken 3000”—which the audience of the premier showing of this film immediately applauded.

     Once inside, things are even more strange as they wander the dark downstairs corridors where naked men, many dressed in witch masks appear every so often from the porno warrens.

      When Gretel isn’t looking, one of them grabs Hänsel and pulls him into a stall. Gretel, missing her beloved brother, goes in search for him, finally finding her naked brother being sucked off by one of the “3000 films’” loyal tenants. We gather from her comment, “Hänsel, not again!” that her poor brother has had a tendency in the past to eat the candies or be eaten by the “candies,” attracted evidently as he is to such underground homosexual activities.

      She pulls him away from danger, as the two rush off, the other gay “witches” following after.

     Finally, they reach the street, hail a taxi, and, giggling in relief for their escape, suddenly become aware that their own taxi driver is also a Witch.

      There’s no moral in terrifyingly charming German children’s film by Jan Krüger, except, perhaps, that Hänsel should clearly get out more often without his sister around to protect him.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Steven Spielberg | Lincoln / 2012

euclid’s first axiom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tony Kushner (screenplay, based, in part, on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals), Steven Spielberg (director) Lincoln / 2012

 

Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln is so much more ambitious and intelligent than any other American movie of the year that one would have to a cynic to deny its worth. True, there are numerous sentimental moments, particularly when Lincoln (the brilliant Daniel Day-Lewis)  nears the presence of his beloved son, Tad (Gulliver McGrath); and there are numerous scenes of clumsy exposition early in the film, such as three black soldier’s recitation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to his face and Lincoln and his wife’s (Sally Field) reiteration of their son’s death and her near insanity—however necessary these are to provide us with information we need to evaluate the president and his situation. Tony Kushner, our best epic and political playwright, however, has done a remarkable job in creating a literate and basically focused script that, in turn, has encouraged the director to tamp down his often-unbridled sentiments—which have tended to turn most of his works into behemoth pop cultural icons—and fully reveal his considerable filmmaking talents.

     Spielberg’s and Kushner’s determination, moreover, to concentrate their story upon the final four months of Lincoln’s life as he attempted to end the Civil War and pass the Emancipation Act, freeing the slaves, transforms the film from a lumbering biopic into a stunning reenactment of American politics.

     That the political scene of the day was even more entrenched and far more contentious and bawdier that it now is, makes this film, accordingly, a timely statement that clearly demonstrates, as Doris Kearns Goodwin had in her book, Team of Rivals, just how brilliant a political force Lincoln was. Unlike most depictions of Lincoln, finally, this film—while reasserting the man’s monumentality—does not portray the president as a saint; Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is a flawed man, a gawky giant of a being, who could be contentious, insistent, and, particularly, moody, caught up as he was in the bloody slaughter of so many of his countrymen. If he was a wit, so too was his humor often so homespun that it bordered on the corny. His numerous maxims at times seem vague and pointless. Even he described himself, at moments, as a preacher who was too lazy to stop his sermon.

     In short, this Lincoln is very much a human being, a man, although determined to bring equality into law who was not always sure he was comfortable with the black culture for which he was battling. As he tells the ex-slave, Elizabeth Keckley, a White House dressmaker and confidant of Mary, after she questions him whether he will accept her and her people as equals, “I don’t know you”—although tempering it with a phrase from King Lear, suggesting that since blacks appear to be, like himself, “bare, forked animals,” presumably he will become used to them. Spielberg’s and Kushner’s Lincoln is a man not above selling, through the film’s three comic figures, with William N. Bilbo (James Spader) at the center, political positions in return for votes.

       Even the most morally outspoken center of the work, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), an absolute abolitionist, whom we discover near the end of the film, sleeps with his black housekeeper, describes Lincoln as a “dawdler” and fears Lincoln will “turn his back on emancipation.” Lincoln and his Republican supporters must draw in Steven’s “compass point” morality—as Lincoln explains, the compass always points due north but it does not tell you what chasms, swamps and other natural phenomena lie between—demanding that he argue that the amendment does not assure blacks’ equality in social and voting rights, but simply assures equality before the law. The painful scene in which Stevens backs away from his belief in universal equality brought tears to my eyes in observing how righteousness has necessarily given way to political expediency. Attacked by a fellow radical abolitionist for his changes in position, the nearly destroyed Stevens can only admit that his goal is simply to get the bill passed; when asked if there was anything he might not say for that purpose, his only answer is a grim admission: “Seems not.”

      The dilemma at the heart of this remarkable drama is that, although he wants the bill passed, Lincoln is even more impassioned to end the war. When Confederacy leaders send a delegation to discuss peace, he—particularly given Republican founder Francis Preston Blair’s pressures—he cannot simply dismiss talking with the rebels. If the war ends, however, there is little chance that emancipation will be passed, and blacks will inevitably return to their roles as slaves. When the Democrats get wind of a possible truce, the House demands a postponement on the very day of the vote. Playing with partial truths, Lincoln assures the legislative body that no such delegates are in Washington. And we recognize in this half-truth just how far Lincoln has himself come in his determination to see emancipation happen.

      Part of the reason this movie is so excellent is its superlative actors who totally embody their roles. Daniel Day-Lewis, in particular, not only creates an utterly believable Abraham Lincoln, but seems to have almost transmogrified himself into the historical figure. In his long, deep silences particularly—moments in which it seems that Lincoln has gone into speculative hibernation—the actor is so convincing that we cannot even imagine the President himself enacting his life better. At a moment when Lincoln is almost ready to choose peace over freedom, to sacrifice his moral position to the desirable social and political expediencies, his casual conversation with his two Morse code operators changes everything. Are we fitted to our times or simply living our time out are the issues which underlie his questions. One man, responding that he is, by education, an engineer, triggers a memory in Lincoln of when he first read Euclid’s axiom: “Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.” The implications of that statement, in the context, are suddenly immense. If people, black and white, are both “Bare, forked animals,” as he has told Elizabeth Keckley, then they are axiomatically “equal to one another.” The pondering leader suddenly changes his message: the Southern delegates are to be delayed in their voyage. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution passes the House of Representatives, moving on to become national law.

      As we know from history, Wilmington and Richmond were vanquished, hundreds more soldiers died, but the War did finally come to a close. Lincoln’s tour of the South with his son Tad, as he himself notes, is indescribable: “I have seen nothing like it.” Lee surrenders to Grant. We all know what happened next, but this restrained film does not show it. Rather, the young Tad, attending an operatic production is forced to hear the news from a slightly hysterical theater manager, who announces at this second theater that the President has been shot. The boy clings to the edge of his balcony booth in horror, until finally an adult pulls him away. Although writer and director repeat yet another of Lincoln’s speeches, truly nothing else need be said.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (December 2012).

 

Clarence Brown | Intruder in the Dust / 1949

pride and prejudice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Maddow (screenplay, based on the novel by William Faulkner), Clarence Brown (director) Intruder in the Dust / 1949

 

Although Faulkner tells wonderful stories, the power of his works lie in the language he uses to tell those tales, language that stretches out ideas, retelling them in different ways, and turning the ideas connected to them back upon themselves, so that what might be a simple event, a lynch-mob gathering around a small-town jail, as his Intruder in the Dust, takes on new and different meanings as his central characters react.

 

     Given the complexities inherent in Faulkner's works, it is almost impossible to imagine a film, particularly a Hollywood, narrative-driven film, to create the same impact. Yes, Faulkner's tale is about small-town prejudice and about a proud black man, Lucas Beauchamp, who refuses to play the role of the "darkie" and almost loses his life for that. The book is also about a murder, but Faulkner is not as interested in the discovery of the murderer as he is in the relationship of his central figures—two young boys, Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and Aleck (Elzie Emanuel), an older woman, Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson), and a lawyer reticent about getting involved, John Gavin Stevens (David Brian)—and how they perceive and interact with the black central figure, Lucas (Juano Hernandez).

      The genre of Clarence Brown's movie is clearly more of a whodunit, with ancillary focus on the moral implications of the characters' involvement. And in pursuing the narrative thrust of Faulkner's work instead of following the psychological interrelationships between characters, Brown and screenplay writer Ben Maddow, as some critics have noted, erase the complexity of figures. The young black boy, Aleck, is portrayed in the film as much more passive and indeterminate than he is in Faulkner's book. And that most certainly effects the way we see blacks in the film. Since almost all the black characters here are passive, Lucas Beauchamp's stubborn pride, his refusal to reveal to the Sheriff and lawyer Stevens what he knows of the murder and proclaim his own innocence, accordingly seems even more inexplicable.

      Also lost in this film is the gradual awakening of conscience for Chick, as he faces his own frustration for not being able to make restitution to Lucas for having given him shelter after falling in a creek. By refusing to grant a white payment for the act, Lucas has clearly put himself apart from the rest of the black community with which the boy is acquainted. The relationship here, at least in the book, is a subtle one of both resentment and respect, a kind of hatred and a hushed, unaware love that is difficult to portray in a straight-forward narrative. And the young actor chosen for that role, perfect for conveying his sense of innocence and unawareness (just right for his earlier role in The Yearling), has a face that often remains too inexpressive and flat, making it hard to imagine that he is slowly growing in comprehension as the film proceeds.

 

     Yet for all that, Brown does capture some of the strange transformations through his splendid cinematography. In the scene where Chick returns alone to confront Lucas, we see first Lucas' eye behind the wooden bars of the cell, and then are shown the view from within looking out at Chick. The implication, of course, is that both Lucas and Chick are imprisoned, in different ways, by racial relations. But there is also, in both cases, a special way of seeing one another, a shared respect and admiration which is why, clearly, Lucas trusts Chick to solve the case over the adults, whose views have already hardened into outright prejudice.

      Brown's ghoulish presentation of the night voyage to the cemetery, the horse's refusal to enter the stream because of quicksand (in the film, Chick announces this, while in the novel it is Aleck who recognizes the horse's alarm), and the digging up of the empty coffin by Aleck, Chick, and Mrs. Habersham quite chillingly represent an act of not only irreverence, but actions that  these societal "outsiders" take to convert their desecration into a kind resurrection—at least for Lucas, since it proves that someone else has been involved in the crime.

      Similarly, the director intensifies the scene where Mrs. Habersham stands up to the leader of the lynch mob, challenging him even as he pours out gas and is about light a match. The show-down quality of this scene helps to remind us that, although most of the town's citizens seem to have joined the mob or at least have no compunction for watching the lynching as a sort of entertainment, that this feisty survivor of a more graceful past, stands in opposition to the contemporary mindless prejudice.

     And then there is Juano Hernandez's magnificent portrayal of Lucas as a strong bull of a man willing to die rather than abandon his sense of moral righteousness. His portrayal of a proud black man, long before Martin Luther King and the vocal advocates of black pride, is perfect.

     It is not surprising that black author Ralph Ellison described the film in his The Shadow and the Act as being the only one of four recent race-themed movies that a Harlem audience could take seriously and with which black audiences could truly identify.

    If in the end, accordingly, some of richer nuances of Faulkner's novel have been lost, the film Intruder in the Dust still is a strong portrayal of the author's concerns. In the context of my objections to To Kill a Mockingbird, it is clear that Brown's Intruder offers a solution to many of the same issues that Harper Lee's novel and Mulligan's film did not. Although Atticus Finch may share some of the gentle values of Gavin Stevens, the children and outsiders of that world could not save the innocent black man from either being destroyed or even destroying himself.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).

Robert Rossen | All the King's Men / 1949

inevitable results

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Rossen (screenplay based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren), Robert Rossen (director) All the King's Men / 1949

Robert Rossen's All the King's Men, given Broderick Crawford's gruff and rough, full-steam-ahead performance, is a much less elegant and convoluted work than Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel of the same name. But the film is more powerful for that very reason. Rossen's vast crowds of simple-minded "hicks"—as Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) describes his constituents—has elements of German Expressionism, but the story is a pure good-to-sour American political tale, and reminds one at times, in its representation of the masses, of Frank Capra's simple-minded expressions of the populace, particularly in Meet John Doe.

 

   What saves Rossen's work and lifts it above Capra's caprices is the acting of its supporting characters, particularly John Ireland's thoughtful playing of the journalist-gone-politico, Jack Burden, and Mercedes McCambridge's tough fast-talking Sadie Burke, the woman behind Willie Stark, his would-be lover. McCambridge won an Oscar for her role (so too did the less subtle Crawford), and she deserved it, for whenever she is in the picture, the energy-level of the film goes up by two or three notches, particularly when, unable to sleep, she joins Burden and Stark to swig down a couple of heavy drinks before telling him what a boob he has been.

     Stark (a just slightly fictionalized portrait of the real hick Louisiana Governor, Huey Long) begins his trip to hell as a country rube who, as the newspaper editor Madison describes him, is "special."

 

                     Jack Burden: What's so special about him?

                     Madison: They say he's an honest man.

 

Encouraged by his long-suffering wife, Lucy (Anne Seymour), Stark tries to run for local office, but fails pitifully due to the criminal actions of those already ensconced. When the corrupt pols cheat on the construction of a local school, however, the collapse of a stairwell killing several children brings Stark, after having studied law, into the forefront, winning the love of the local masses.

     His first attempt to run for State Governor also ends up in failure. But, as he puts it, it has taught him something: how to win. The solution, apparently, is to buy up the corrupt officials and employ them. As Jack Burden observes: "You throw money around like it was money." Almost from the beginning, we perceive that in order to win, Willie Stark has had to sell out. And the rest of the film behaves like a spinning dervish toward Stark's inevitable collapse.

     In opposition to the political brouhaha of the Louisiana backfields and Baton Rouge backrooms, Burden has grown up in the posh isolation of Burden's Landing. As he puts it:

 

                   ....Burden's Landing is a place on the Moon. It isn't real. It doesn't exist.

                   It's me pretending to live on what I earn. It's my mother trying to keep

                   herself young and drinking herself old. It's you and Adam living in his

                   house as though your father were still alive. It's an old man like the judge

                   dreaming of the past.

 

Yet it is just this place that breeds the four major characters, some of whom help Willie get where he does and others of whom help to destroy him.

     Jack is perhaps the most contradictory of the group. Despite his early recognition of Stark's corruption, he continues to stand by him almost until the end. He is a grand failure in terms of action. While the Stanton's, Anne (Joanne Dru) and Adam (Shepperd Strudwick), and their uncle, the Judge (Raymond Greenleaf) live through ideals, Jack is a born skeptic, refusing to judge or reveal any moral position, even when he might have helped save Stark from himself. The difference between the brother and sister is merely a difference of judgment: Anne is taken in by Stark simply because he is different, and her view of him is clouded as she perceives him as a kind of white knight.

      Stark does, in fact, accomplish a great deal, building a new state hospital, improving roads, building dams, etc. But Adam perceives the other side of the picture, and, at first, refuses to take the position of top surgeon at the new hospital, despite Stark's offer. His uncle also resists Stark's offer for him to become State Attorney General, but finally caves in, swept up in all the hoopla and, perhaps, by his own pride of his past.

     In short, the whirlwind that is Willie Stark sweeps up all the characters into his wake, altering their lives through his own self-destruction. Anne falls in love with the monster, rejecting the ineffectual love of Jack Burden. But, in a sense, she is wise to do so, for Burden is utterly passive, a storyteller, not an actor in any tale. At least Stark is alive!

     So too is Stark's wife left alone after the tornado of her husband's life, and their adopted son, Tom, is destroyed through his own rebellion against his father, paralyzed through a drunken driving accident that kills his female passenger. When one of Stark's appointments, Pillsbury, is caught up in graft, the Judge, told he cannot prosecute, resigns, and it appears that Stark's fall is near.

     Yet Stark pulls through by pleading with the electorate who have brought him to office. Like a conjurer, he creates a circus atmosphere that washes even over the legislature. But winning is itself a kind of "burden," as Stark is forced to find corruption even in the life of the noble Judge. When Stark reveals his knowledge (uncovered by Burden) of a long ago event of corruption in his life, the judge kills himself.

     Just as Stark is convinced he has won again, a man—Adam Stanton—moves toward him with a gun and shoots him dead. Stark's fawning assistant, Sugar Boy, kills Stanton. If there is something almost too pat about the ending of this cautionary tale, so too was it in real life. Some behaviors, Rossen and Warren suggest, simply create inevitable results.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012).