Monday, July 1, 2024

Akira Kurosawa | 天国と地獄 (Tengoku to Jigoku) (High and Low) / 1963

the house on the hill

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eijirō Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni (screenplay, based, in part, on King’s Ransom by Ed McBain), Akira Kurosawa (director)天国と地獄 (Tengoku to Jigoku) (High and Low) / 1963

 

In Japanese Kurosawa’s film translates literally as “Heaven and Hell,” two metaphysical positions that can be seen to shift throughout the work, whereas the English language translation of “High and Low” are formally set: the fashionable house on the hill where Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) and his family live quite obviously representing a “high” life, while the crowded slum in which the film’s villain, medical intern Ginjirō Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) exists, revealing the sociological underside of Japanese culture, most definitely the life of the low. Yet Kurosawa’s seemingly bi-partite (in truth, it is more tri-partite) structure sets up a number of reversals right from the start.


     Gondo, his wife Reiko (Kyōko Kagawa), and his young son, Jun, seemingly have all they might desire. As an executive in the National Shoes company, Kondo has a personal secretary, Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) and a live-in chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), and a fabulous view of the surrounding city. But, as the film quickly reveals, the world in which he lives is about to be threatened. Other executives from the company have paid him a visit to ask Gondo to join them in taking over the company from its founder so that they might produce more cheaply made yet more fashionable shoes. Gondo, however, rejects their offer: he would prefer the well-made shoes the company currently produces were simply more stylish, although he knows the profit will not be as substantial. The others see shoes as decorations, like a hat, something purposely made to go out of style quickly, while Gondo believes that quality will pay off in the long run. So, it appears, that Kurosawa has set up his central figure as a man of moderation, an individual arguing for customer satisfaction and permanence rather than simply basing the product on money. The other executives, angered by his refusal, are rudely shown out of Gondo’s house by his secretary.

      We soon discover, however, that Gondo has determined to leverage a buyout of the others, having mortgaged everything he has in order to raise the money to gain company control, believing that he will make back his expenditure with profits. He orders his secretary to travel to Osaka to pay the first installment. In short, Gondo is not at all what he first seems, and is scolded for being so impolitic by his clearly more level-headed wife. When his child, playing cops and robbers with the chauffeur’s son appears, he encourages his son to not simply run as the other shoots, but to trick his opponent through surprise maneuvers. Reiko’s disdain for his attitudes is apparent. The house on the hill may look like “heaven,” suggests the director, but trouble is clearly brewing beneath the surface.


    

     Almost immediately that “trouble” boils over as the chauffeur appears, asking if they have seen his son Shinichi. He has been playing with Jun, they report. The telephone rings, bringing the voice of a man claiming that he has just kidnapped Jun, demanding a large payment and insisting that if they go to the police, he will kill the boy. Horrified, Gondo realizes that he has no choice but to use the money with which he intended to buy out the company for his son’s release. But just as suddenly Jun reenters the house. A few minutes later, the couple and their chauffeur realize that it is Shinichi who has mistakenly been kidnapped, the fact of which the kidnapper, calling again, confirms, while still demanding the money on the same terms.

    Suddenly, Gondo shifts position; he refuses to pay ransom for another’s son, and despite the kidnapper’s threat, he calls the police. Once more we see that Gondo is not at all altruistic, but a man who attempts to manipulate situations for his own gain. The secretary is again ordered to make plans to travel to Osaka.


      Throughout this long scene, Kurosawa films the family and their employees, along with the police, as being trapped within the shuttered living-room of the house while Gondo struggles with his moral scruples, both his wife and his chauffeur pleading for him to pay for Shinichi’s release. To do so, however, would be to lose everything they own, including their beautiful house. Reiko, he reminds her, has been born into luxury and would be unable to survive such a radically changed life. She, in turn, reminds him that he has used her dowry, in part, to buy the kind of life they live, suggesting that the couple also represent a kind of high and low pedigree, Gondo obviously having worked his way up the social ladder.

     Into this closeted, emotional maelstrom, moreover, both the kidnapper and the policemen intrude themselves, the latter spending the night on Gondo’s floor and couch. By morning, Gondo has determined, so he announces, not to pay the ransom. Reiko and Aoki continue to plead, even the chief of police entering, at times, into the debate. When Gondo’s ambitious secretary, however, admits that he has told the other executives about his bosses’ plot, Gondo gives in, ordering the bank to deliver the money in the proper denominations which the kidnapper has demanded.

      Film critic Joan Mellen has argued that this first part of the film—65 minutes of the 143 minutes-long movie—with its “obvious moral message,” is salvaged by the film’s descent in its second part to the low-life world it portrays. But as I suggest, it is not so clear in this film what is high and what is low, whether the life the Gondos lead is one aligned with heaven or closer to a life in hell. Moreover, it is just those moral conundrums of the first part give such intense meaning to the rest of Kurosawa’s great work.


     There is no question, however, when suddenly in the very next scene, where Gondo sits worriedly on a bullet-train seat, the cases of money tightly grasped, that something has radically changed. The very horizontal motion of the speeding train racing across the countryside is a startling shift from the darkened verticality of the Gondo house. If in his own house Gondo appeared to be in control, once he has made the decision to give away his money, descending into the world below and moving from the vertical to the horizontal, he is represented as a frightened being, a true fish out of water.  Cleverly, the kidnapper has not entered into this horizontal world, but telephones to the train, explaining that Gondo will see Shinichi standing by an upcoming bridge and that, upon seeing him alive, Gondo should through the money out the bathroom window. The police aboard the train have no choice but watch Gondo’s tortured acts: the train will not stop until several miles down the track.

      The boy is rescued, but Kurosawa does not focus upon his return to the house on the hill, nor do we immediately follow Gondo’s return to his world. Rather, Kurosawa takes us into what suddenly seems like a new genre different from the psychological film of the first part. Suddenly, we are dropped into a police conference that might have been the inspiration for episodes for the American TV series, Hill Street Blues. One by one, pairs of detectives, each assigned different tasks, report their results, often enough revealing no real information or their informants’ lack of facts, at other times pinning down pieces of obscure bits of gumshoe research that might lead to something. If the Gondo house was “heaven,” we are clearly now in purgatory, a world where nearly everything may or may not be consequential. Here instead of things moving vertically, actions are defined by their circularity, as in the long sequence where, realizing that the chauffeur has taken his son in search of seaside villa in which he was held by partners of the kidnapper, two detectives follow other clues, arriving at the same location via an entirely different route. Within the villa are dead men and women, killed, evidently by injections of “pure” heroin. Realizing now that the kidnapper must have had connections with the medical profession, the detectives circle in on a young medical intern, ultimately following him into the final world of the picture’s title, the hell wherein the kidnapper lives.

     If Gondo, living in “heaven,” spends much of his time looking down into the world below his hill-top house, medical intern Takeuchi is almost always seen in the film as moving up, upstairs to his apartment, upstairs—as the police first glimpse him—in the hospital in which he works. By tricking him to believe that his cohorts have survived their heroin-laced murders, they force Takeuchi to repeat his own crime, sending him, they hope, once more up into the hills where the villa sits. Following him, the police are taken in directions they might have not expected, first to a flower shop (reminding one, somewhat, of Madeline Elster’s several visits to a flower shop in Vertigo) where he purchases a carnation.. The next stop along the way is a crowded bar that might appear to be a literal manifestation of the hellish world in which the intern lives. But even here, carnation in his lapel, Takeuchi sits high above the din of unruly dancers, pimps, sailors, and American voyeurs—a world in which, satirically, the underground policemen seem to be a home. Only when he discerns his “connection,” does the kidnaper descend to the dance floor below.


      His next destination is also into a hellish world, but again one they might not have expected: a dark cul-de-sac where desperate drug addicts await the arrival of anyone who might provide them a high. Only here, finally, are the police recognized for who they are, and made unwelcome at the street gates, while Takeuchi is readily admitted. But why has he stopped here in his voyage to the hillside villa one can only ask?

      As he seeks out a young woman and takes her into a nearby sleazy hotel room, both police and audience suddenly recognize that he has stopped along his way simply to test out the potency of his uncut drug. Before the police can rush in to save her, the girl is dead. But in his attempt to rush away, Takeuchi is apprehended even before he can begin the climb to the villa’s heights.

      Although they find most of Gondo’s money, it is too late, his possessions and his house all having been repossessed. In a brilliant last scene Kurosawa brings to the two men, the former executive and kidnapper, the fallen and aspirant, both men of questionable ethics—although, in an ironic twist of events, Takeuchi has transformed his enemy into a hero—together at a prison visiting window, wherein the criminal attempts to explain his motivations.

 

                       Kingo Gondo: Why should you and I hate each other?

                       Takeuchi: I don’t know. I’m not interested in self-analysis.

                             I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot

                             in summer I couldn’t sleep. Your house looked like

                             heaven, high up there. That’s how I began to hate you.


      Takeuchi, clearly suffering deeply, is the true fool, for he has imagined a heaven that is equally a hell, while through Takeuchi’s acts, Gondo in his fall, has been redeemed. Just as in moving in different directions, the police and the chauffeur and his son have reached the same spot, so too have Takeuchi and Gondo discovered their destinations are similar, even if one is free and the imprisoned, Kurosawa merging their facial images in the glass between them.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2012 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.   

Dave Wilson | Schmitt's Gay Beer / 1991 [TV (SNL) Episode]

gay pool party

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jim Downey (head writer with Adam Sandler as a regular contributor) Dave Wilson (director) Schmitt’s Gay Beer / 1991 [TV (SNL) Episode]

 



In season 17, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler meet up in a new house-sitting job that Sandler has just obtained. Farley is not at all impressed, describing the house as “a dump.”

    “Just wait until you see the pool,” argues Sandler. The two enter the backyard, which at least has flowers, but a totally empty pool.

     Sandler turns the spigot and suddenly, with  the Van Halen song “Beautiful Girls,” they are suddenly transported into gay heaven as a quintet of well-tanned muscle-bound swimmers rise from the fresh blue waters with the effortlessness of a scene from an Esther Williams musical, Farley and Sandler, their dreams come true, their prayers finally answered.


    The swimming muscle boys suggest, “You two look like you need to get wet,” and within moments they and an entire party of others have come together to celebrate the pool party and Schmitt’s Gay Beer, bottles of which they toss to one another, as they show of their tiny bikinis, crotches, and colorful swimwear.

 

     I recall seeing this on the original premier, being almost startled with the audacity of the Saturday Night Live skit. In the original they used the Van Halen song, but on all tapes from Saturday Night Live it is now drowned out by the theme music for the show itself, blocking the original far more satiric piece.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Marcel L'Herbier | L'Argent / 1928, premiered 1929

rise and fall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Bernède (screenplay, based on the novel by Émile Zola), Marcel L'Herbier (director) L'Argent / 1928, premiered 1929

 

Almost from the outset Marcel L'Herbier's magnificent L'Argent is a work about rising and falling. The film begins with the fall of the banker Nicolas Saccard's (Pierre Alcover) financial empire, Banque Universelle, when an investor, Salomon Massias (Alexandre Mihalesco) refuses to go along with a board decision to approve more funding. Massais, it appears, is in league with the banker Alphonse Gundermann (Alfred Abel), who disapproves of Saccard's methods and is out to destroy him. In an attempt to save his bank, Saccard joins forces with a pioneering aviator, Jacques Hamelin (Henry Victor), in financing the first solo transatlantic flight to open up the oil-producing fields of French Guyane.


      Hamelin, having heard of Saccard's vicious banking methods, is not at all sure that he wants to join forces with the banker; but his young, very naive wife, Line (Mary Glory) is awed by the money and social associations that might be provided by her husband's rise and convinces him to sign-on as vice-president of Saccard's board. He does so, however, only on the condition that he be the one to fly solo to Guyane and set up the refineries there—all to the great distress of Line, worried for husband's life and for the long period of isolation.


    For 40 hours the world waits, finally receiving a report that Hamelin's plane has fallen into the ocean. Saccard, however, through the machinations of his personal secretary, M. Mazaud (played later by director-writer Antonin Artaud), has closely followed Hamelin's flight, and has news that the young aviator has succeeded, information Saccard keeps secret, as the bank stocks fall. At a low point in the stock, he and his confederates buy, only to release the good news, making themselves a fortune. But Gundermann has also, secretly, bought stocks in Banque Universelle from several of the cities from which he operates.

      So is the outline of this moral tale of good and evil, or more specifically, this tale of how money corrupts all. In L'Herbier's long, nearly 200-minute movie, there are numerous side stories and dozens of other figures, including Saccard's former mistress, the gambling beauty La baronne Sandorf (Brigitte Helm), who has left Saccard for Gundermann. But the importance of L'Herbier's L'Argent lies not in its story line and variations as much as it does in the cinematic telling. Perhaps the most expensive movie ever made—L'Herbier suggests that it cost nearly four million francs, which would be in the 1978 market, when he was interviewed, about a billion francs—the director spared nothing in capturing a lavish world of wealth and power. Able to film four days during a holiday in the French Bourse, L'Herbier and his cinematographer, Jules Kruger, take their camera to dizzying heights as they look down on the floor of Bourse, showing the more than 2000 extras who play investors as ants spinning around the various centers of money (L'Herbier quotes Zola several times in his statement that money is "the dung on which life thrives"), suddenly plunging the camera to the floor to immerse the viewer into the center of the crowded action. If there was ever a cinematic manifestation of the film's "rise and fall" thematic it is in these scenes.

 

    But just as impressive are numerous other moments, such as the scene early in the film when Massias visits Gundermann's mansion after Saccard's fall, permitted into room after room, with some of the walls decorated in flight patterns of the banker's oil connections, others with opulent scenes, before being led to Gundermann at his breakfast table, quietly dipping into a boiled egg as he pets his two Pekinise dogs, a scene that has relationships with Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad—although in this case it's  a man the character comes to fawn upon instead of a kittenish woman from his "imagined" past.

     One of the most fascinating of the movie's many montages or superimpositions is the twirl of the wheels of Hamelin's plane as it moves forward in space, spinning along with it the whole world of banks and bourse and the grand events in which these two worlds are now wound.

 

    Similarly, Line's night-time view from Saccard's office of the Place de l'Opéra where hundreds of individuals have gathered under the lights to hear of the progress of Hamelin's transatlantic flight, enwraps her in a world of a delirious confusion, ending with Saccard's first unsuccessful sexual attack, creating an equally dizzying sensation which might be said to define Line's frail condition at nearly all times in this film.

     Another scene, the grand party Saccard gives in honor of Line, which includes a special moat-like construction for the orchestra replete with a bridge across which jazz dancers kick their legs high (two of the large female dancers looking suspiciously like males in drag) is awe-inspiring, as we gradually realize this frenetic action is set contrapuntally against a desperate Line hiding out in a side room, separated by a futuristic row of hanging plastic tubes, ready to shoot her host. Strangely, the self-protecting La baronne prevents Line from accomplishing the act, while saving also her enemy's life.

     Saccard, on the other hand, nearly chokes her to death when he shows up at one of La baronne's gambling parties, the reflections of the gamblers overhead played out against the violent environment in which Saccard and the La baronne are enmeshed.


     Some of these masterfully created and always grand cinematically beautiful shots are overkill given the relative simplicity of the good and bad scenarios they embrace. There are moments, one must admit, when one feels he is witnessing the story of "Sweet Nell and the evil villain" being played in a palace setting. Many of the critics of the original showing argued against what they found as scant justification for the indulgent sets and camerawork.  But ultimately, if the cinema conquers the tale, who cares?: it is a momentous thing to behold.

     In the tale itself, Saccard goes to jail, and the young hero, now going blind, returns home only to be arrested for being involved with Saccard's swindle. There is something joyously loony about a blind navigator (blind not only physically but spiritually) and his utterly innocent wife having been so swept up into this international spectacle. They are both so simple and unpretentious (Hamelin is handsome but his face badly scared and Line is, as I have suggested, always about to faint) that it is nearly unimaginable that they could even have come to know a Saccard, let alone be saved by Gundermann.

     As for Saccard—always the evil villain, but also strangely portrayed, at times, as a kind of sad-sack comedian who can find no joy in his lusts—at film's end he has discovered a new victim, the jailer who locks him up! Accordingly, the film closes less as a didactic moral statement (although there is certainly that in the plot) than as a kind of comic revelation that such a grand world often leads nowhere. But there is always a difference, as L'Herbier perceives, between life and art. And perhaps the art needs to be grand where life does not. That this film, updated from Zola's day to the French market of the time, should have been made just years before the international monetary collapse of the early 1930s, is all the more amazing, and revelatory of L'Herbier's somewhat clairvoyant perspective. His art would influence film for years to come.

     The same year this movie premiered, the first talkie The Jazz Singer was shown in France, and, despite L'Herbier's innovative sound experiments (the recorded putters and sputters of the plane, the mumbles of the crown scenes) embedded into L'Argent, within just a few months the kind of impressionist cinema he had helped to create, in which the visual dominated the realism of dialogue-oriented book-bound scripts, L'Herbier's experiments suddenly seemed outdated. And, although the director continued over the next several years to attempt to produce experimental cinema, he ultimately gave up those attempts, himself becoming seduced, perhaps, by script-based film-making. Coherence and realist narrative came to dominate over the theatrical and performative "rises and falls" of his kind of cinematic art.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012).

Orson Welles | Touch of Evil / 1958

some kind of man

 by Douglas Messerli

 

Orson Welles, Paul Monash and Franklin Coen (based on a novel by Whit Masterson), Orson Welles (director) Touch of Evil / 1958

 

Reviewing the 1998 restored version of Welles' underrated film, Touch of Evil, the other day, I was struck by how strangely prescient this film was concerning border relations between the US and Mexico. The hero of this work, Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston), is set to testify against a Mexican drug lord in Mexico City, his life threatened by members of Grande's large family for his actions. The local US authorities, not at all sympathetic to Mexican issues, are satisfied to be arresting Mexican citizens by planting evidence. Although the film seems to be taking place in border towns in Texas it might as well have been in contemporary Arizona, with a Sherriff like Paul Babeu at the helm. The US authorities want to believe in the heroism of Welles' "mess" of a human-being—as his former lover, Tana (Marlene Dietrich) describes him—detective Hank Quinlan, more than they desire truth, whatever that may be.    

 

    The incident that sets off the series of dark events of Touch of Evil is a border bombing of a local American business leader, who has been partying with a whore on the Mexican side of the border, and whose car blows up as he moves to the American side. Walking alongside of that car is a newly married couple, the Mexican Vargas and his American-born wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), as they move among the various honky-tonk establishments, each blaring out various mambos, rock and roll, and jazz music, the effect of which Welles demanded was necessary to establish the tone of his film. At the border crossing each couple, the walking pair and the car-bound couple are briefly stopped and checked before the explosion sets the movie into motion.


 

      Various American authorities come running, including Detective Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), District Attorney Adair (the ever-shining Welles player, Ray Collins), and, finally, Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), the latter looking like an unshaven, unkempt disaster of a human being. All are determined to get to the bottom of the event, with Quinlan—who relies more on the hunches his game leg provides him than the facts—in the lead, attended by Vargas, who is afraid of the implications of the event. As Vargas attempts to explain to his still all-too-American wife.

 

                        Vargas: This could be very bad for us.

                        Susan: For us?

                        Vargas: For Mexico, I mean.

 

     The "us" of his statement is revelatory, for Vargas is a man of international repute, a man who one might describe as caring more for his causes than for the cause of love. Indeed, studio execs complained to Welles and changed some of his scenes on account of what they saw as the unbelievability of Vargas' quick abandonment of his brand-new wife for the chase of the murderer. In a 58-page memorandum, outlining his disagreement with their reediting of his film—a problem Wells would face on nearly every one of his movies—the director explained Vargas' character this way:

 

                          A honeymoon couple, desperately in love, is abruptly

                          separated by a violent incident (the bombing of the car) -

                          an incident which, although it had no personal bearing on

                          either one of them, the man considers as a matter of his

                          urgent professional concern. This feeling of responsibility

                          by Vargas is, of course, an expression of the basic theme

                          of the whole picture; further, his wife [stet] resistance to such

                          masculine idealism, her failure, and even refusal to understand,

                          is human and very feminine reaction which any audience can

                          grasp easily and sympathize with. She is, after all, in a foreign

                          country and has been subjected to a series of indignities which

                          irritate and bewilder her, and which her husband fails to

                          completely appreciate. Vargas' behavior and her reaction, make

                          it necessary to dramatize and underline this temporary misunder-

                          standing between them. By minimizing it; by sweetening their

                          relationship at the wrong moment, and warming it up at precisely

                          where the distance separating the man and woman should be at

                          its greatest, there is a sharp loss in dimension, and both Vargas

                          and Susan emerge as stock characters - the sort of routine

                          "romantic leads" to be found in any programme picture.

 

     Surely we might agree with Welles assessment of his script, but it does pose a problem, again and again, since Vargas' near total abandonment of her and her susceptibility to the local Grande's threats makes if difficult, at times, to comprehend the characters. When Vargas allows her to travel to an isolated hotel, empty in this off-season period, without even checking upon who owns the place (Joe Grande himself), we even wonder about his ability as a detective. Yet it is these very tensions, Vargas' determination to follow along with the corrupt Quinlin even though he has no authority to participate in the investigation, and Susan's feisty but ineffective battles with Grande's malicious young boys and girls that creates the marvelous tensions of the film.


      Both Vargas and his wife are swept up in the corrupt American battles that presume guilt and rely on bigotry and hate. Vargas, discovering an empty shoebox in the apartment of the bombing suspect Manolo Sanchez, is shocked when detectives soon after discover two sticks of dynamite in the same box. Determined to out Quinlin's chicanery, he investigates the American detective's chicken ranch to discover that he has purchased ten sticks of dynamite, two of which are now missing and, after investigating former cases, discovers that in almost all of Quinlin's investigations evidence was found on site that the criminals declared to have been planted.

      To fight back, Quinlin joins forces with the evil Joe Grande to torture Susan and link her—and ultimately Vargas—to drugs. In a kind a terrifying dry-run of Hitchcock's Psycho of a few years later, Janet Leigh as Susan must endure a horrifying attack in an isolated motel, where she is shot up with sodium pentothal (pretending to be a potent drug) and—after being transported back to town—is involved in what appears to be the murder of Grande, an act committed by Quinlan himself in a kind a mad revenge against both Vargas and the long-ago strangler of his own wife.



      As Tana arrives at the scene, she asks "Isn't somebody gonna come and take him away?"

     The interchange between Tana and Schwartz is one that has always intrigued me:

 

                     Schwartz: ....You really liked him didn't you?

                     Tana: The cop did...the one who killed him...he loved him.

                     Schwartz: Well, Hank was a great detective all right.

                     Tana: And a lousy cop.

                     Schwartz: Is that all you have to say from him?

                     Tana: He was some kind of man... What does it matter what

                            you say about people?

 

    For years, I interpreted that line, "He was some kind of man," as suggesting that despite Quinlin's evil failures that he was special, a kind of incredible man. But, for the first time, in seeing this film yesterday, I realized that Tana was not speaking of him as a special being, as a kind of magical "saint" who so many, particularly Menzies perceived him to be, but simply recognizing that he was a failed human being—not a perverse Santa, but a man, a man without a future. It no longer matters what you say about the dead.


*If the character of Menzies is in love with Welles’ character, in real life Welles himself expressed his love and admiration for the actor, Joseph Calleia. Welles observed:

 

"What an actor—Joseph Calleia. I fell in love with him as a ten-year-old boy. I saw him in a play in New York ... a very well-staged melodrama which was an enormous hit for about a year—it was made as a movie later with somebody else. He had the leading role, and I never forgot him. And through the years I'd seen him in movies—little things. And I could never forget that performance of his. He's always played very stereotyped parts in pictures but is one of the best actors I've ever known. I have such respect for him. You play next to him and you just feel the thing that you do with a big actor—this dynamo going on.”

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2012

Reprinted World Cinema Review (August 2012).


My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...