Alfred Hitchcock | Foreign Correspondent / 1940

minefield

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison (screenplay, with uncredited contributions by James Hilton, Robert Benchley, and Ben Hecht), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Foreign Correspondent / 1940

The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther, a man with whom I seldom agree about anything, certainly got it right when in 1940 he described Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent as “over the edge,” which today we might restate as “over the top.” Crowther summarizes it nicely:

                

                   Never, we venture to suspect, has there been an American news

                   scout abroad who got himself so fantastically involved in international

                   monkey-shines as does Mr. Hitchcock's bewitched and bewildered Joel

                   McCrea. And never, we know for a fact, has Mr. Hitchcock let his flip

                   fancy roam with such wild and reckless abandon as he does in the present

                   case. Instead of a young reporter covering Europe methodically for his

                   sheet, Mr. Hitchcock is giving us a picture of Europe—or, at least, a

                   small but extremely sinister sub-sector of same—doing its most devious

                   best to cover and destroy Mr. McCrea.

     The gang of at least five credited and uncredited authors (including Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, James Hilton, Robert Benchley, and Ben Hecht) conjured up enough coincidental events in this film that by the end we nearly lose touch of some of the main elements of the plot. In the early part of the movie the central figure seems to be the shadowy World War II Dutch politician Van Meer (Albert Basserman) whom our hero, the rookie American foreign correspondent Huntley Haverstock—alias Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea)—coincidentally meets as he shares a car ride with the celebrity to a luncheon sponsored by the International Peace Society. That accidental meeting is crucial, since soon after Van Meer, suddenly a no-show at the luncheon, is shot and killed on his way to a conference which will reveal whether or not Europe will go to war. Although the old man does not seem to recognize our young correspondent just before he is shot, Haverstock witnesses, quite close up, the murder and, throwing caution to the wind, chases after the fleeing murderer.

 

     At that previous luncheon Haverstock (also accidentally) meets a beautiful young woman, Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) who he believes is the publicist for the Peace organization, but is actually the intelligent daughter of that organization’s founder, Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall). Again by coincident—the element that connects all this film’s incredible events—the car he overtakes in order to follow Van Meer’s supposed murderer contains Carol Fisher and another young reporter—who soon becomes a central figure in our story—Flolliott (George Sanders). The entire chase—one of Hitchcock’s most wondrous displays of his cinematic mastery (for much of the pre-car chase we observe the progress of the chaser and the chased merely through the movement of unfurled umbrellas)—ends with the near miraculous disappearance of the assassin’s car outside of a rustic Dutch windmill.* While both the police and Haverstock’s new friends move on in frustration, the rookie reporter stays, observing the windmill’s sails suddenly moving in the opposite direction—a signal, we soon discover, for an approaching plane to land in a nearby field (recalling the comings and goings of a plane in North by Northwest)

     Dauntlessly, our young adventurer enters the mill not only to discover the missing car wedged in a ground-level parking garage, but a gang discussing their mysterious plans. In a side room Haverstock spots a very much alive Van Meer, now, however, drugged and unable to reveal what he knows except through cryptic references to birds (obviously a hint at his soon-to-be flight).

      What our young Quixote has uncovered, so early in Hitchcock’s story, is the existence of an underground Nazi organization who will soon intend to extract secret clauses from the proclamation Van Meer was about to reveal at the conference. But by the time he convinces the local policeman and his returned friends, Carol and Ffolliet, to check out the mill, everyone has disappeared. Even the car has been whisked away. As in so many Hitchcock works, all evidence—except for the fact that an itinerant man found sleeping in the mill, inexplicably rubs his hands in the soil—has been obliterated, and (like Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest and Manny Balestrero in The Wrong Man) Haverstock is completely discredited.

     In fact, one might almost see Foreign Correspondent as a kind of early playbook in which Hitchcock tries out cinematic maneuvers which he will employ in later of his films. And, in that sense, we might almost see the 1940 film—his second American production—as a kind full-throttle exploration of devices that might work to sustain his audiences’ interest.

     Soon after, Haverstock’s life is threatened by the sudden appearance of spurious Dutch policemen at his hotel room; recognizing that his phone line has been cut, the reporter (like John Robie in To Catch a Thief) suggests that he should shower, escaping through a back window to play out another of Hitchcock’s brilliant, if a bit unsubtle, shots: as Haverstock makes his way around the ledge of his hotel, Hotel Europa, he accidently dislodges the “el” of the hotel’s neon sign—signaling to all that Europe has suddenly become “hot.” Whether the director means that politically (which he certainly might) or sexually (since Haverstock is dressed only in a bathrobe and is about to break into the bathroom of the woman he now loves, Carol), we are not certain.

     He and Carol escape the villains (through a gathering of hotel employees in his room that recalls the stateroom convocation of staff in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera) taking a ship back to England and her father. On board the two declare their love for each other, proposing almost simultaneously to one another.

     Once in England, the story seems—at least for a while—to turn in another direction, as Haverstock suddenly discovers one of the Dutch windmill villains, Krug (Eduardo Ciannelli) at the Fisher’s breakfast table. We now recognize that Carol’s father, the founder of the Peace organization, is actually at the head of the Nazi organization. But Haverstock, still presuming him to be innocent, reports his knowledge to Fisher, who, in turn, hires a man (Edmund Gwenn), presumably to protect the reporter, but in actuality, to kill him.

  

   The long scene atop of Westminster Cathedral, while the “protector” plots to push Haverstock to his death, calls up several similar situations from Hitchcock’s films, including Suspicion and Vertigo. At the last moment, as he rushes forward to lunge at the reporter, the murderer himself falls to his death—although the director wittily suspends this information for a few more moments.

     Later, after Ffolliett again shows up, he reports that he suspects Fisher of being involved with the German cause. To help in revealing this fact and in hopes of uncovering the location of the missing Van Meer (remember him?), the two plot to “kidnap” his daughter by taking her away from London while implicating her in a kind of hostage situation. While the soon-to-be married couple enjoy their day and afternoon in Cambridge, things get sticky when Ffolliett, unable to reach Fisher, suggests that Haverstock will have to keep her there overnight. Overhearing her fiancé’s attempt to obtain a second room, Carol, convinced he is attempting to force her into a sexual situation, angrily returns to London, agreeing to return to the US with her father the following day.

 

    Despite this unfortunate turn of events, however, Ffolliett is able to follow Fisher’s car to the backroom construction site where the Nazi’s have taken Van Meer. Tortured by music, played day and night, and bright lights shined 24 hours into his face, Van Meer seems almost ready to reveal the hidden passages of the treaty to Fisher until, unexpectedly, Ffolliett shows up, insisting that Fisher is no friend of Van Meer’s. Haverstock and his fellow correspondent, the inept Stebbins (Robert Benchley), show up moments later, only to find that Van Meer has been spirited away—this time, however, to a safe clinic, where he will be protected and detoxed (reminiscent of Alicia Huberman at the end of Notorious).  

     The film, now free of the Dutch politician, flies free via a scene within a plane to the US, with Carol and her father as well as Haverstock and Ffolliett aboard (in a scene that the director uses again in Torn Curtain). Fisher’s interception of a message meant for Ffolliett reveals that he will be taken into custody upon his arrival, and, having now to face his betrayals, he admits his German allegiance to his daughter, soon after which the two news reporters reveal themselves as being aboard. Carol, still believing the worst of Haverstock, does not greet him as a friend and now, even more so, because of his involvement with her father’s exposure, is indignant; that is, until the plane begins to be strafed by a German submarine, which eventually results in the plane’s crash. In the final scenes of the very convincing depiction of terror as the plane goes down over the ocean, we find Carol, her father, Haverstock, and Ffoliett, along with a few others, clinging to a piece of the plane’s wreckage (a scene which has some quick parallels to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat). When the others are not looking, Fisher slips into the water and his certain death.

     Now aboard an American rescue ship, the survivors are told that they cannot phone out any information concerning their downing—except to express their safety to relatives. Calling his editor in New York, and leaving the phone hidden off the hook, Haverstock relates his experiences with Van Meer, Fisher, and their plane’s crash to the captain in pretend protest, permitting his New York newspaper to get the greatest story of the day!

    The tacked-on last scene moves yet in another direction, as Haverstock, accompanied by who he now presume is his wife, begins his night report from London to his American audience. When the sirens intervene and the lights go out, he delivers an all-out plea for Americans to remember their English friends being bombed in their homes, an effective propagandist piece that even German propagandist Joseph Goebells recognized as a masterful conclusion to the film.

     If Foreign Correspondent, accordingly, is often unbelievable, nearly incoherent in its multiple plot shifts, and a baggy monster in its quick shifts from comedy to thriller, drama, adventure tale, and full-out propaganda, it is also a kind of joy ride for any audience willing to take the voyage as this masterful director tests out some of his best filmic tropes, a field he would mine for the rest of his life.

 

*A humorous scene during this chase involves a local man who attempts to cross the road, upon each attempt encountering yet another vehicle until, in frustration, he gives up and returns home, a situation repeated in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2014).

 

Alexsandr Dovzhenko | Арсенал (Arsenal) / 1928

where is the enemy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexsandr Dovzhenko (screenwriter and director) Арсенал (Arsenal) / 1928

 

Depending upon which side of the early 20th century fight between the nationalist, Petliura-led Ukrainians, the Russian Reds who had ruled Ukraine for hundreds of years and were desperate to keep it within the Russian borders, and the newly-developed Ukrainian Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian workers, in general, sought some of the values of Russian politics but also fought for an independent Ukraine. The boundaries between these three battling forces were not always clear and, the Bolshevik position, in particular—the position from which Alexsandr Dovzhenko’s important film, Arsenal seems to be arguing—was seen by the nationalists as traitorous, and in fact probably did help in weakening the nationalists and helping the Russians to overtake Petliura’s troops.

     Perhaps we should simply say that Dovzhenko tells his story of the 1918 uprising of Bolsheviks at the Kiev Arsenal featuring a hero, Tymish Stoyan, who seemingly supports the Bolshevik position. But the complexity of Dovzhenko’s work, particularly its use of the classical Ukrainian literary form, “the duma” (an oral lament), makes it difficult to characterize, just as in in his Earth, as a simple embracement of new Soviet values—despite the fact that the Russians themselves saw Dovzhenko’s “Historical-Epic” in that way, and, particularly in the Red-Russians’ charge across the Ukrainian landscape in Episode Six, the director tells the tale through the methods of the older tradition. 

     In fact, Dovzhenko makes his case for a far-more pacifist view in the very first of his seven episodes as the warring World War I troops attack an empty trench, while Tymish (Semen Svashenko), as a young soldier, arrives to find no one there, crying out as he tosses away his rifle, “Where is the enemy?”

    Half-embedded corpses are scattered throughout the landscape; in another short sequence we see a German soldier, suffering from laughing gas, slowly going insane. Despite the continued assaults, the battles we observe are already over. But before the soldiers can even assimilate that fact, new battles are being plotted as Tsar Nicholas, writing a letter in St. Petersburg, seems to have no perspective of larger issues, writing instead of a hunting expedition and the weather. So devastated are the surviving members of the populace, some simply stand in a stupor, one not even registering the sexual assaults she suffers by hands of a local official; a mother who has lost her three elder sons, beats her young boy and daughter; a seemingly docile village man beats his own horse before reclaiming it and pulling it off. 

      The soldiers from the front have not even returned home before they are rounded up and forced to sign up for service in Petliura’s forces; of his peers, seemingly only Tymish refuses to sign up. Asked who he is, he describes himself as a “demolished soldier. An Arsenal worker.” When asked whether he is a Ukrainian (i.e. a nationalist) or a worker (i.e. a Bolshevik), Tymish cannot even comprehend separating the two. He is unable, as the insightful on-line critic Ray Uzwyshyn points out, to divide himself into two opposing beings. As Dovzhenko makes quite clear, however, the Petliura forces do not represent the workers as much as they do the Ukrainian capitalists; the director insists on bringing up the question that few loyal Ukrainians of the day could ask themselves: are we better off as a free nation of landowners or a free nation of workers?

       Going even further, as Uzwyshyn observes, the holy trinity of the nationalist forces are represented not only by General Petliura and a supporting “Petliurite” from the “Haidamak Kish” (dressed in a cossack’s sheepskin cap), but also by what is far more surprising, a sailor with a cap that cannot but remind one of a sailor from the Black Sea Fleet of the Battleship Potempkin as portrayed in the posters of  Eisenstein’s film, Bronenosets Potemkin by Rodchenko and Lavinskii, images that by the time of Dovzhenko’s film had become so iconic that everyone might identify them, and were certainly known by the Ukrainian director.

     In short, Dovzhenko asserts, at least subliminally, that the Ukrainian nationalist’s forces were in tandem with the Soviet-led Black Sea Fleet, which would ultimately abandon the Ukrainian cause to support the Soviet domination.

      When Tymish joins the Bolshevik strike of the Arsenal, moreover, it is with less political commitment and zealotry than out of a sense of his identity with the working class, which throughout the film, Dovzhenko dramatically represents in dichotomy to dithering, confused capitalists who throughout the film shout out unheard speeches that demand total allegiance to their blather. As most critics have observed, Arsenal is less about the actual uprising than an internal battle between Tymish and himself, as representative of the workers. Indeed, nearly all the figures of Dovzhenko’s film are types, symbols of their positions rather than realist figures who act out deeds of psychologically-perceived values. And Dovzhenko’s style and methods are far closer to the late 20th century director, Sergei Paradjanov, who, also using traditional narrative story-telling methods, created films that relied on a series of emblems, short scenarios dependent upon the visual more than action.

 

  In the end of Dovzhenko’s film, as Tymish, attempting to battle the nationalist forces, finds his gun is empty, the character ceases almost entirely to be a “real” human being, and is transformed into an image that stands for all of the insane destruction which the country, and by extension, the world, that he has been forced to face. The attackers’ guns no longer can kill him, as he tears open his shirt, rising up—as Uzwyshyn argues—as a visual icon of Edvard Munch’s 1910 painting The Scream. Whether or not Dovzhenko was actually thinking of the painting or not, the image represents that emotion and reveals that the director perceives his “character” less as a figure who stands for a political point of view than as a symbol of the oppression such views impose upon their populaces. In the end, both the reactionary Ukrainian critics of the director’s own time, nearly all of whom damned the film, and the Soviets who saw in this director’s work a viewpoint close to their own, missed, it seems to me, the true message of Dovzhenko’s stunning cinema-making.

     Making films when he did, Dovzhenko had always to carefully balance seemingly political statements with his own, often avant-garde, film-making procedures. It meant that often he could not make the films he might have desired to shoot, but it also meant that he survived the years of Stalin’s purges without completely abandoning his own values in art.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).

William Wyler | The Best Years of Our Lives / 1946

period of adjustment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert E. Sherwood (screenplay, based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor), William Wyler (director) The Best Years of Our Lives / 1946

 

Winner of seven Academy Awards in 1946, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives is the kind of film that both critics and audiences love. It is one of the most attended films of all time, and revived nearly every year on television for Memorial Day, when I generally watch it once again.

     The film’s beautiful long focuses, its superb actors, including three of my favorites, Myrna Loy, Fredric March, and Teresa Wright, with wonderful performances by Dana Andrews and Harold Russell enhance its weighty subject, the return home from the war of three men and their difficulties assimilating into the post-war culture. This work is so likeable, in fact, that it seems down-right Un-American not to describe it, as The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther did, upon its premiere, as “superlative entertainment” that is also “food for quiet and humanizing thought…”

     Yet each time I see it again, I find this weepy melodrama a bit staler than the last viewing, and I have never admired it much. Perhaps it is its very meticulousness that bothers me, those touching scenes between the former seaman, Homer (Russell)—who has lost his hands in an aircraft carrier bombing—his family and girlfriend, Wilma; the intensely quiet love between the former air force captain, Fred Derry (Andrews) and the young and radiant Peggy Stephenson (Wright); and the more than supportive family of Sergeant First Class Al Stephenson (Frederic March)—each of them in their turn reiterating like a Hallmark card small town American values. For Homer, obviously, the central problem is his disability, for Fred it is both a bad marriage and the fact that, with little prewar job experience, he must now report to a man who once worked for him. Al finds it hard to return to his loan officer job at the bank, where he is now personally committed to offering loans to former soldiers without collateral, an action opposed by the bank itself; Al also spends a little too much of his time with alcohol. Together, the three run into each other time and again, seemingly preferring one another’s company more than the wives and girlfriends to whom they have returned.

     In fact, when they cross paths, trouble seems to be stirred up: Al’s daughter falls in love with the married Fred, and Al is forced to demand Fred stay away from her. Fred, socking out a man who has taunts Homer, loses his job. At a banker’s banquet, a slightly inebriated Al argues for his belief that the bank must stand with the vets, endangering his own position.    

     Yet despite of all the “difficulties” which this film expounds, these men, who have given up “the best years of their lives,” seem relatively unfazed. The women in their world, except for Fred’s wife Marie, are all loving and supporting, and their families are willing and ready to help them to readjust. Not one of these men suffer posttraumatic stress disorder (although an early version of the script was to have included that) and none of them are terribly violent nor depressed. They do not even feel sorry for themselves, and even the victimized Homer comes around to feel safe with Wilma to help him, marrying her in the end.

      If the script seems to demand our sympathy and even tears, in the end, it all appears to have been to no avail, as everything gets tidied up, Peggy finally linking up with Fred, and Al nicely readjusted in the arms of his loving wife (Loy).

      Like so many of Wyler films, this movie is simply too slick. Everything is done so gracefully and stylishly that we ultimately feel little emotion and even less need for rumination, let alone deep thinking. This film, unfortunately, hardly dares to take on its own subjects. And Wyler makes no attempt whatsoever to explore what might have been the loneliness and isolation of those left behind at home.

       As David Thomson has subtly expressed it: “It would have taken uncommon genius and daring at that time to sneak a view of an untidy or unresolved American past Goldwyn or the public” of the day. Yet it is just that “untidy” and “unresolved” world which might have made The Best Years of Our Lives a great film, allowing it to truly explore the issues it broached. I believe that Wyler had neither the daring nor genius. As it is, his work simply glows out like well-lit room, encouraging its heroes to come inside and get back to normal life.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2013)

Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky | Шахматная горячка (Shakhmatnaya goryachka) (Chess Fever) / 1925

a danger to family life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nikolai Shpikovsky (screenplay), Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky (director) Шахматная горячка (Shakhmatnaya goryachka) (Chess Fever) / 1925

 

Playing a kind of Soviet Harold Lloyd-like character, Vladimir Fogel is a chess-obsessed man about to get married. Even on the morning when he is to meet his future wife at the “registry” finds him busy playing chess with himself, comically rushing from one side of the table to the other. A note tied to his arm reminds him that he must leave for the marriage license, but he simply cannot resist moving the chess figures a few more times and reading from one of the numerous books on chess that his pockets contain—along with his several kittens.

       Once on the streets he passes a chess shop and, like a piece of metal to a magnet, is lured back in space and time. Every checkerboard pattern in the world draws him into another game.

       Meanwhile, his poor would-be wife (Anna Zemtsova) is pouring out her heart to another friend, who warns her that chess ”is a danger to family life.” When the man finally reaches his lover, she attempts to spurn him in outrage, while he pleads for forgiveness; but another pattern upon the floor merely leads him to begin another game, and finally she rejects his pleas, gathering up some of the numerous chess manuals in his pockets and throwing them out the window.

       Each of these fall of the hands of unsuspecting passers-by who are equally taken up with the game, as obsessed, apparently, as our hero! It is as if everyone except the girl is a chess addict. So isolated from the world around her, the woman determines to poison herself, while the hero declares he will drown himself.

       On the way to the pharmacy to purchase her poison, the girl meets a sophisticated and dapper man, who displays his admiration, and she joins him in his limousine, clearly determined to find a new life and lover. The irony—what we know from the very beginning of this short film—is that her new “lover” is none other than the real-life chess world champion, José Raúl Capablanca.

          Meanwhile, the sullen hero also fails in his attempt to commit suicide, and returning to the streets encounters a poster announcing a new chess event in which anyone who registers may participate. He runs to the venue to list his name, where he encounters his former lover, now utterly enchanted with the complexity and beauty of the “game,” as she watches with fascination Capablanca facing off with a foe. The two—our hero and his girl—reunite, she now perfectly ready to share his passion.

 

      Shot in the middle of Pudovkin’s filming of his Mechanics of the Brain, Chess Fever was born out the 1925 Moscow chess tournament. Receiving permission to make a documentary of the event, Pudovkin and Shpikovsky filmed footage of the tournament, pretending to make the documentary, but later reinserting it into their comic tale, a kind of dissident action which Pudovkin would seldom take again in his long involvement with Stalinist film-making. And one is saddened seeing this and others of his early films for his later more overtly propagandistic works, making us realize what a potentially innovative and original filmmaker we lost.

 

Los Angeles, February 23, 2014

Reprinted in International Cinema Review (February 2014).