Terence Young | Serious Charges / 1959

out of bounds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mickey Delamar and Guy Elmes (screenplay), Terence Young (director) Serious Charges / 1959

 

Anyone who has read these pages would perceive that I am interested in genre, and fascinated by its various manifestations and transformations. Yet I would never argue it necessary for any film to fit or be delimited by genre, and I might even claim that some of the greatest cinematic works defy generic definitions, blending genres or ignoring them altogether. It is often when directors and their cinematographers break with generic conventions that new forms and more vital methods of expression arise.

     There are some films, however, that use generic conventions to their advantage and others that introduce several genre issues which create a sense of confusion and lack of focus rather than blending or transforming them. British filmmaker Terence Young’s 1959 movie Serious Charge is just such a case in point.

 

     On one hand this might be defined as a film about a forging of a relationship between church and youth in the manner of the several Spencer Tracer and Bing Crosby priest and boy series of works such as Norman Taurog’s 1938 film Boys Town and Leo McCarey’s 1946 movie The Bells of St. Mary’s. In this work the new local vicar, Reverend Howard Phillips (Anthony Quayle) is determined from the beginning to help the young teens of his village to escape the nearby coffee house, their rock-and-roll dance marathons, and their gang affiliations in one fell swoop by starting up a church supported center where young men can dance, learn how to box, and do any number of manly activities under his supervision. Like the well-intentioned but definitely “squaresville” figures of the community center in West Side Story (1958) he genuinely believes that he can get any warring gangs together and work out their differences.

     Only in this small town there is only one “gang,” headed by 19-year-old thug, petty criminal, and local heart-throb Larry Thompson (Andrew Ray) who has already gotten one young innocent girl, Mary Williams (Leigh Madison) pregnant and led his innocent rock-singing brother, Curley (soon-to-be British rock-phenomenon Cliff Richard singing one of his hits in this movie, “Living Doll”) into trouble. The vicar explicably takes a special interest in the cute boy Curley, attending court to speak out for him and take responsibility for his reformation. Richard even gets the opportunity to belt out three songs in this film, despite that fact that he hardly gets a line of dialogue and seems almost to be forgotten until the end of the story.

     Featuring a man who tries to understand the new rock-and-roll, gum-chewing, leather-jacketed generation of the 1950s, Young’s film also calls up the numerous teen angst films of the 1950s from Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950), Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955), and Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle (1955), to Thomas Carr’s Dino (1957), Robert Altman’s The Delinquents (1957), and John Frankenheimer’s The Young Savages (1961).

     For a moment, given the Vicar’s wartime experience as a paratrooper, his boxing abilities—he is able to defuse a gang situation by putting a headlock on one of their members and downing another, and later he knocks out the Thompson boys’ violent bully of a father (Percy Herbert) when he attacks him—and the fact that inexplicably this young vicar is also a champion soccer player you might almost think this film is going the direction of a movie about a grand athlete in ecclesiastical drag.

     Since the ex-vicar’s spinster daughter Hester Peters (Sarah Churchill) has the hots for the new vicar (as well as his young French maid Michelle [Liliane Brousse] and several gang girls) and his slightly dotty mother (Irene Browne) wants to get him married there are also moments when this man’s man might get caught up in the kind of slander that Walter Pidgeon suffered in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941) or Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess! (1953).

     With so many possible genres vying for the directorial direction, and with one truly rotten apple in the barrel to rub the entire story into action, something has to give, and in this case it’s the poor small town athletic-driven, reform minded, boy loving, woman-fearing, well-intentioned vicar’s sexuality.

      When Mary, meeting with the vicar in private, reveals that she is pregnant with Larry Thompson’s child and, upon seeing him on the street making out with Michelle, walks distractedly into her death by crossing the path of a car, all hell breaks loose (hence the film’s alternative title A Touch of Hell) as the vicar pulls aside Thompson to accuse him of being an accessory to Mary’s death at the very same moment that the busybody Hester stops by to observe a woman leaving from the back entrance of the house and a boy running from the front door, his shirt half torn, declaring that the vicar has “tried to interfere” with him.

     A bit like the forever gossiping community of Wyler’s The Children’s Hour this British town suddenly makes judgment without even the intention of a fair hearing.

       The movie goes out of its way for the rest of its narrative to prove to us what we already know, that the vicar is totally innocent. But in its endless pleading of vicar Phillips’ case, the vicar’s refusal to fully defend himself further, and the fact that we know that Hester, despite her total misperception of the facts, is indeed speaking the truth in testifying to the boy’s lies, we too have to begin to look of the reality laid out before us with some suspicion. Much like Basil Dearden’s 1961 film Victim—the film with which Serious Charge has the closest kinship—once the charge has been made, the vicar has already become something else than a human being seeking out the truth, but has become a “victim” which no matter how much is later revealed—and in this case, through Hester’s efforts Phillips is eventually completely exonerated—will never not also be perceived as a possible child molester. If nothing else, we certainly must suspect that— despite the fact that Young’s movie attempts to provide us with a “happy” ending, three women coming together to outwit the innocent male with the intention of eventually marrying him off to Hester—Phillips is a gay man.

      As a British Film Institute site on unknown British gay films suggests, it is fascinating after seeing this film to look for the various clues to the vicar’s homosexuality—without even hinting what those clues might be.

      We might begin in such a search by looking at the scene in which the frustrated Hester, desperate to gain the vicar’s sexual attention, impulsively—probably the first such act in her entire life—to kiss him. Normally, a man disinterested in this spinster’s sexual attentions, might simply pull away and suggest that her attentions are inappropriate or that he is simply disinterested in a sexual relationship with a church worker associate. But our young man, quickly pulls back as if for the first time ever he witnesses a woman having been attracted to him (and this despite the fact that his mother has already forewarned him of the girl’s intentions) and in some shock declares “Oh my dear girl. I’m so sorry. I think you better go.”

      In his statement of being “sorry,” it is hard to believe that he is expressing simply empathy for her having mistaken his sexual interest in him. The sorrow here seems more to be a confession, a sorrow for his own lack of desires, a realization that she has deemed him to be “fair territory” when in fact, so to speak, he plays for another team. After all, he has even been quite oblivious to the allure of his sexy servant Michelle.

      And speaking of sports metaphors, why does the narrative continue to repeat the fact that during the televised soccer event he kicked in an important score when, even he admits, he was “out of bounds” or “offside.” I’ve seldom heard a scoring sportsman, who the referees have not called out, declare he won illegally. That’s not even good teams-manship.

     Why, moreover, even after Hester has even risked rape by Larry Thompson in order to find out the truth of the boy’s charge of having been assaulted by Phillips, does the vicar still remain determined at film’s end to move away from this “Peyton Place”—even after nearly everyone has trotted through his door to plead with him to stay on?

     And what is it about the cuter of the Thompson boys, Richard’s character, that so engages him that he is willing to appear in court again and again to stand up for and serve as the boy’s sponsor, while falsely accusing the far blander looking Larry of having “killed” his ex-girlfriend and being responsible for her murder. Larry might be seen as unfeeling and uncaring being who was largely responsible for the girl’s mental condition which caused her death, but he is not a true murderer?

     Finally, it is not Hester and Mrs. Phillips who momentarily divert his attention from continuing to pack up and leave the place, but the arrival of the dykish probation officer (Judith Furse, who often performed such roles) to demand he appear in court on “unfinished business” to save Curley Thompson from prosecution, that, at least momentarily, stops him in his tracks.

      Let’s face it, the noted rocker Cliff Richard was a looker who spent years of his career adamantly denying that, despite the fact that he never married, he was not gay. It’s more than a little ironic that in in his 2001 autobiography he admitted that his partner for the past seven years had been John McElynn, a former Catholic priest. You can’t make these things up!

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Richard Fleischer | Compulsion / 1959

murder for sport

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Murphy (screenplay, based on the novel by Meyer Levin), Richard Fleischer (director) Compulsion / 1959

 

Compulsion, directed by Richard Fleischer, is certainly not a great film. In its attention to the actual events surrounding Leopold’s and Loeb’s 1924 murder of an innocent 14-year-old, Bobby Franks, Fleischer’s film focuses far more on the psychological problems of two villains than on the actual series of events, except for an early scene when, just for the fun of it, they rob a fraternity house and attempt to rundown a drunk on their way home. But the rest of the film demonstrates their emotional immaturities through their relationships with their siblings and parents, their fellow students and teachers. Leopold’s attempt to rape a fellow woman student ends in failure. And we never see the actual murder, only its aftermath.   

     Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope of a decade earlier—a far less faithful rendition of events—in which the homosexuality of the figures is made quite apparent, their ideas are discussed at greater length than their sexuality, and Loeb’s macabre toying with discovery becomes the focus of the film—Fleischer’s version seems at times to slink around the corners of Judd Steiner’s (intensely acted by Dean Stockwell) and Artie Straus’ (audaciously performed by Bradford Dillman) relationship, presenting the pair more patently as two rich kids with brilliant minds but with juvenile patterns of behavior. Their murder of the boy is almost characterized as a lurid prank.

      In Rope the discovery of their ghastly deed is almost an accident. That their former professor, played by James Stewart, simply finds their behavior as suspicious and the absence of a guest as odd and, accordingly, returns to their apartment to challenge them, has always seemed to me as highly unbelievable, almost as if it is a tacked-on ending. In some senses, he hardly cares; we know what they did it, and are far more interested in seeing how the two attempt to get away with their deed.

    Compulsion, on the other hand, is almost entirely driven by the Perry Mason-like search for evidence by District Attorney Harold Horn (E. G. Marshall). The glasses, which will ultimately track him directly to Steiner, at times seem to get lost as Strauss, in open collaboration with the police, steers them in several false directions, which includes digging up the street in front of his family’s grand house. And it is only when the cub reporter, Sid Brooks (Martin Milner) and Horn enter the scene that Fleischer’s movie begins to come to life. Horn’s subtle manipulation of entrapment of the boys is fascinating to watch.

      But it is the rather didactic end, wherein the lawyer Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles), based on some of the 2-day long summary by the real Leopold-Loeb lawyer, Clarence Darrow, that the film comes something truly worthy of watching. As film lecturer Kevin Jack Hagopian describes it:

“Orson Welles’ portrayal of the Darrow surrogate Jonathan Wilk borrows the spirit (and some of the very phrases) of Darrow’s epic closing, and strains it through Welles’ own towering style. His

final speech to the judge, at fifteen minutes in length, is one of the longest by a single character in the American cinema. Welles wisely underplays Wilk, making him world-weary and inward-turning, banking the fires Darrow himself had let roar up. Wilk is the calm center of a film that seethes with the unspoken fears of a postwar era that had already known mad bombers, lipstick killers, spree murderers, and silent stranglers, each wearing the winning smile of the boy next door.” 

     Pleading guilty for the boys, Darrow, believing he could not find 12 men or women in all of Chicago—after the press had stirred up such hatred for the young duo that they literally stood in the shadow of the gallows—who would not want to hang the young murderers, demanded the case be heard by a single judge, and after the State rested its case, argued quite brilliantly against the death penalty, particularly given their ages and brilliance, despite their sociopathic immaturity.

     The judge gave them life imprisonment, and for his good actions throughout his long term, in 1958—in part because of this film and testimony by men like Erle Stanley Gardner and Carl Sandburg—Leopold was freed, although he attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue the film’s makers for their unflattering portrayal of him. Loeb, not such a model prisoner, was killed in a prison knife-fight in 1936.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).

Alfred Hitchcock | North by Northwest / 1959

the other man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Lehman (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) North by Northwest / 1959

 

While watching North by Northwest again the other night for the 50th time (I do not exaggerate, and probably I have seen this film more times than that) I tried to puzzle out why, at the highly judgmental age of 12, the year I first saw this film, I did not like it. A year earlier I had seen Vertigo at the same movie house and was completely enraptured by it. While the 1958 film had confused me, made me even question whether it was an appropriate movie for someone of my age, I had still loved every moment of it, and sat through it twice.    

     Vertigo is still my favorite Hitchcock film, but now, obviously, I find North by Northwest highly watchable and engaging. While viewing it this time, it suddenly became apparent that, in part, it was the form that had put me off as a child. At the time, I had long been reading novels, and begun my passionate commitment to the theater, reading plays by Beckett, Albee, Ionesco, and Genet. Given my literary experience — and ignoring the issue of whether or not I was able to truly comprehend these works — I could understand the psychological structure of Vertigo. Despite its strange double-helix narrative and its languorous cinematic love-affair with the city of San Francisco, I knew it was centered on the hero, Scottie. And the multiple meanderings and confusions of the plot were those of his mind. I may not have understood his obsessions — particularly his voyeurism — but I got the idea right off.

      North by Northwest, on the other hand, was neither romance nor psychologically grounded fiction. The bond between Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) involves no mysterious workings of the mind. They are immediately attracted to each other physically and proceed to do something about it — even if later, to protect herself, Eve must throw him to the wolves, so to speak. And he, in a reciprocal gesture, returns to her, even though he knows by that time that she is somehow involved in his intended death. No, this is most definitely not a “psychological thriller!”

     There is little about the mind in this film. Roger does not know why he is being mistaken for another man, and by the end of the film may not even recognize his former self. If information is withheld from the viewer it is not so that the character will gradually perceive and reveal it. We find out everything when he does; and we are simply told the information by the CIA head (or whoever Leo G. Carroll is supposed to be) as if in a report. Eve, like her namesake, is purposely and necessarily duplicitous, engaged as she is with both the serpent of the film, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and the thorn-laden hill (the route out, so to speak) she must climb in order to escape her life of sin, the “climb” Roger must endure to move away from his former self.

       Rather, the plot is driven by the mad linear movement of its characters on the run, from New York to Chicago and prairie environs, to Rapid City and on, finally, to the home of the symbol of American values: Mount Rushmore. They are on the run, it is clear, from their past identities.

      The structure is really quite a simple one, akin to the picaresque. Indeed, as in the traditional form, we meet our hero upon his metaphorical birth, so to speak, as he exits the dark cavern of the skyscraper office where he works as an advertising executive.

      It is hard to imagine the affable and handsome Roger as either an executive or a man who composes advertisements. Less important than his writing ads, he is a walking advertisement of American virility. “Do I look heavyish,” he asks the secretary, who treats him as if she were his nanny. “Remind me to think thin.”

      Like a child, Roger is completely selfish: his first action in the movie is to take over a cab from another would-be customer. And his dedication, like all children, is to his beloved and bemused mother. This Roger, the real man before he becomes confused with someone else, might be described as a true mamma’s boy, devoted to his job. Even his previous wives found him boring as this middle initial, “O” suggests; he is apparently a zero in life and in bed. Indeed, it is his interruption of an all-male business meeting to cable his mother that leads to his being kidnapped. As in a Charles Dickens children’s fantasy such as Oliver Twist, Roger is whisked away from home and family into a world of corporate castles—which he appropriately seems to know little of—confused identities, and American mid-western landscapes where we can assume he has never before set foot.

       After he receives the magic elixir (an overdose of bourbon) he escapes into the hands of the police, who like all authority in this kind of narrative, want only to lock him up and help to make things worse.

      After one last meeting with the increasingly disbelieving mother, he has no choice but to hit the road, like all 17-year-olds who suddenly discover that they’ve surprisingly outgrown their mother’s love.

       Throughout much of the rest of the film the villains, quite ineffectively, attempt to do away with the man who they are convinced is someone other than he argues he is. Hooking him up with a seductive temptress and sending him out into a cornfield where a crop-dusting plane attempts to riddle his body with bullets and poisonous fumes, Vandamm and his associates clumsily, although quite cinematically entertaining, attempt to get rid of the man they are convinced is someone other than who he really is. As film commentator David Melville Wingrove quite brilliantly puts it: “For me it [North by Northwest] is a Surrealist fever dream of homosexual paranoia. A covertly gay man (Grant) is pursued remorselessly by two overtly gay men (Mason and Landau) who keep insisting he is somebody he insists he is not. Sound familiar? It is.” It is almost as if, in reverse of the usual process, they have outed Roger as a latent heterosexual. 

      And so does our adult boy hero, what one might almost describe as a budding homosexual, discover other worlds as adventure follows upon adventure until together the two lovers finally climb their thorny hill, in this case represented as the literal faces of the American ideals personified by the great US presidents memorialized in the stone of Mount Rushmore. Roger even “dies,” (several times) the way all picaros generally do. At least he should have died were he in a more realist work. Hanging from the ledge of his monumental values, he is quite literally stomped out by the villain’s henchman. But in such fantastic works, we all know, death is not a true option. As genre theorist Northrup Frye has mentioned in his observations on the picaresque, although the picaro may die, he retains always the possibility of resurrection.

      It is also necessary for the sinful Eve to fall to her death; and she too, having “slipped,” is left hanging in a position that seems quite impossible. We never see her actual salvation, only the simulated one, aboard the train, as the hero invites her into his bed at the very moment the film ends.

      In short, this was a film not so very different from Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby of 21 years before in which a gay man is lured out of the closet by the prototype of Eva Marie Saint’s Eve, Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn) with a leopard in tow instead of a serpent.

      Moreover, North by Northwest was another Hollywood telling of how queer boys might be turned into real men, how a zero might transformed in a mysterious wanted man now suddenly found desirable by women as well—something I clearly could not comprehend back in 1959 and in some respects can still not fully comprehend. And I haven't yet mentioned the far more apparent homosexual relationship between Vandamm and his loyal right-hand man, Leonard (Martin Landau) who also kills himself, symbolically, to prove his love to the villain of the piece and, by film's end, like all homos who can't "convert," meets his necessary Hollywood end with a shot through is head.

    In a strange way, one might describe Bringing Up Baby and North by Northwest, as well as a great many other Cary Grant movies as Hollywood’s version of gay conversion therapy. Dangle a beautiful crazy and dangerous woman before the confused mamma’s boy, and you’re sure to bring him to his senses, particularly if you lock him a tiny “sleeper car” and shut him up in upper bunk where he is forced to perceive just how suffocating it is to live a closeted life.

    We now might recognize this return to older and hybrid forms as part of our postmodernist sensibility. And Vertigo seems, in contrast, to be a far more “old fashioned” movie, a sort of angst-ridden portrayal of the existentialist man in the manner of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and artists such as Alberto Giacometti.

      One also now comprehends the comic genius of North by Northwest and enjoys the movie for the pure adventure of traversing the US landscape. And in this sense, the movie is (along with Shadow of a Doubt and The Trouble with Harry) Hitchcock’s most American work. The next year the great director would return to more European forms in the Gothic horror tale told from the viewpoint of a the psychologically disturbed iconic figure of Norman Bates.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2003

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, III, no. 1 (October 2005).

Michael Gordon | Pillow Talk / 1959

over the line

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin (screenplay, based on a story by Russell Rouse and Clarence Green), Michael Gordon (director) Pillow Talk / 1959

 

Watching Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk again the other afternoon, I recovered an old memory from youth. My mother and father seldom attended films; I can remember only about 10 times in their entire life when they did, three or four of those times with the whole family in tow. But in 1959, I remember one morning after which they had gone to see Pillow Talk—while I cared for my brother and sister—my mother recounting the entire story with great joy, giggling—something this not so happy homemaker seldom did—as she relayed the details of the plot. My mother loved both comedies and romantic dramas, the latter of which my father disdained. At the ripe age of 12, I was even more dismissive that he: I, who had become enamored with the plays of Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett and Albee, would never have attended such “fluff,” and could never have imagined that someday I might even choose to discuss the film.

      Now that I have watched this film numerous times, I realize that my mother, as much as she had enjoyed the movie, had not perceived any of the film’s darker aspects. Indeed, when I first saw Pillow Talk, years later, and the two Rock Hudson and Doris Day films that followed it, I was a bit shocked. Not only did Pillow Talk reconfirm what I had long suspected—and which, being the “good boy” I was, kept me from having intercourse with the opposite sex straight through my college days—that the male was expected to forcibly rape a desired woman, was even encouraged by policeman to haul their bodies off to their apartments through the New York streets, but that women—at least the smart, good-looking, working women who Day represented—had to be lured through plots of great deception into the arms of men in order to accomplish the sexual “act.” No wonder I had been a virgin all those years! Sex was so inexplicably complex. Who had time for anything else? With a guy, I soon discovered, all you needed to say was “let’s have sex or (forgive my oh so incorrect days of sexual behavior!) just grab his cock.”

      Just as startlingly, I perceived, like several of the films of Cary Grant, the authors had embedded jokes and situations throughout their script that alluded to and played with the fact of Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, creating a kind of “other” film hidden below the surface of the first—the one that most Americans, like my mother, had so enjoyably read.

       Accordingly, while seemingly a story of love or, at least, “attraction,” Pillow Talk, in my reading was a story of deception, indeed numerous layers of deception. Songwriter Brad Allen (Hudson) has a busy life seducing and deceiving various women, singing a ditty he has written to all of his “loves” by simply changing the name each time he sings it, a trick overheard by Jan Morrow (Day), with whom he shares a party line, as she attempts to make and receive calls. Frustrated by Allen’s telephonic trickery and angry with his holding the phone line hostage, she reports him to the telephone company, who send out an agent, who herself is seduced by Allen. (Jan: “Can you believe that? They sent a woman. That’s like sending a marshmallow to put out a bonfire.”)

      Working as an interior decorator, Jan is being wooed by one of her wealthy clients, Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall), who, unbeknownst to her, is also the financial backer of Brad Allen’s musical shows on Broadway. What she and the general audience doesn’t know is that despite all of his attempts, including the purchase of a car which he is willing to hand over to Jan, Randall is, at heart, a nervously closeted gay man, a character he plays in several of the 1950s movies (Randall was himself gay, even though late in entered a heterosexual marriage.)

     At the party of another of her clients, Jan encounters a young soon-to-be Harvard grad, Tony Walters (Nick Adams) who insists upon driving Jan home from his mother’s Scarsdale mansion. They are only a few miles into the voyage before Tony is pawing Jan, and she, to sober him up and quiet him down, allows herself to be taken to a small supper club, where, by coincidence, Brad sits with one of the club’s performers, one of his girlfriends. Overhearing part of Tony and Jan’s conversation, and realizing suddenly that the attractive, dancing woman is also his formerly invisible telephone sparer, he begins the long series of seductions by playing a shy, gentlemanly Texan, Rex Stetson, lonely in New York.

 

     Easily disposing of the drunken Tony (as he later does with Jan, Rex simply picks him up and carries him off), the two drive away in a taxi, beginning a series of dates where, using reverse logic, Brad makes utterly no advances, appeasing Jan’s good-girl defenses. Their phone sparring sessions continue, during which she admits she has found a lover, he querying his behavior, at one point even suggesting that Rex may be a homosexual—a man who “collects recipes and little bits of gossip—a screenwriting insinuation that employs the actor to openly question his own sexuality.

      Still attempting to marry her, Jonathan also reveals his love for Jan to Brad, who uses what he learns to good effect, thus deceiving not only Jan, but his best friend.  At another point when visiting his friend’s office Brad/Rex spots Jan leaving, he ducks into a nearby doctor’s office, a doctor who just happens to be an obstetrician. When the nurse queries him if his visit is for his wife, Brad insists he himself has not been feeling “right,” a joke which implies that it he is who may be pregnant. Reporting the fact to the doctor arouses a kind of dizzy wonderment in both nurse and doctor that is played out not only once, but three times in the film (Doctor: “There may be a man who has crossed a new future.”). I guess we must presume that Hudson was what is called a “bottom,” a man who likes to get fucked.

      Obviously—this is, after all, still 1959—Brad must get his comeuppance, as Jan discovers in a Connecticut hide-away to where he has lured her for the “kill,” that Rex Stetson and Brad Allen are one and the same, as, just in time, Jonathan arrives to save her. She cries all the way back to New York.

 

    But Brad, this time around, has truly fallen in love and approaches Jan’s dipsomaniacal maid, Alma (Thelma Ritter) for a clue to how he may return to Jan’s good graces. She suggests that he hire her to decorate his own apartment. To keep the firm for she works from losing the money, Jan agrees, using all of her designer skills to create rooms that suggest a tawdry, carnival-like exaggeration of Brad’s sexual behavior.   

    As I suggested earlier, her revenge is reciprocated by his literal “rape” in that word’s original meaning of “carrying away a person by force,” as he takes her to his apartment, revealing that he has cut himself off from his old life, she employing his own traps (locked door, unfolding bed) to keep him from leaving as she falls into his arms with the happy ending of pillows and implied babies rolling behind the credits—assuring my mother, I am certain, that everything had turned out just swell, but leading me to believe that the writers’, characters’ and directors’ deceit had just begun, reifying as it had, everything they had previously satirized and mocked. It’s the kind of late 1950s entertainment, to my way of thinking, that not only crossed the line (both the telephone lines and the sexual line), but lied, while winking, even to itself.

    

Los Angeles, October 24, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2012).

 

G. W. Pabst | Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) / 1931

able to forget

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Balázs, Léo Lania, and Ladislaus Vajda (screenplay, based on a musical drama by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Kurt Weill) G. W. Pabst (director) Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) / 1931

 

                                                         Only that man survives

                                                         Who’s able to forget.

                                                                                            —Kurt Weill

 

G. W. Pabst’s expressionistic production of Brecht’s and Weill’s Threepenny Opera has many failings, and perhaps for the director’s excising of most of that work’s original songs, he deserved to be sued, as he was, by its creators; however, they lost the suit. Although the film contains a fair amount of dialogue and reproduces several of Weill’s noted songs, for the most part Pabst uses the tropes of silent film making, shooting many of his scenes in the melodramatic overstatement of a time before the “talkies.” He basically presents the songs, moreover, as dramatic commentary by the musical narrator.

     Nonetheless, Pabst’s carefully framed sequences do capture the overall sense of the Brecht-Weill original, and the excellent performances by Carola Neher (as Polly), Rudolf Forster (as Mackie Messer), and Lotte Lenya (in her signature role of Jenny) redeem his rhetorical approach. In a sense, of course, the theatrical conventions used by Pabst recreate some of the Verfremdungseffekt (the alienating effects) of Brecht’s original.

     For the first half of the musical, we go along with the suave manners of the anti-hero as the narrator sings of Mackie’s seemingly coincidental, and apparently unproveable, involvement in a series of robberies, murders, and sexual escapades. His clumsy wooing of Polly as he sweeps her into an underground bar, where he intimidatingly stares down two men, a Laurel and Hardy-like pair who we later discover are his own henchmen, in order to take over their table, demonstrates his true temperament. The important thing in these scenes is that Polly appears to be a complete innocent about to become prey to Mackie’s machinations.

     The hilarious preparations for the suddenly announced wedding between the two, including the arrest, soon after, of one of the gang members while carrying a wedding present of a stolen grandfather clock, ultimately reveal Mackie’s close friendship with the Chief of Police, Tiger-Brown.

     No sooner has the viewer recovered from that revelation than the script lets us know that the innocent seeming Polly is the daughter of “the poorest of the poor,” the wealthy Beggar King. Suddenly Polly is wise to all of Mackie’s doings, asking outright: “Is all of this stolen, Mackie?”

     Polly’s powerful explanation of why she has married Mackie is one of the high points of Pabst’s production:

 

                      You must be cold and heartless as you know

                      Or else all sort of things happen

                      You must say no.

 

But because Mackie has not offered any of the nice things a young lady in her position might expect, because he has been so crude and clumsy in his attempts at romance, she admits she had no choice this time ‘round but to say yes: “You can’t be cold and heartless now!

    Discovering that his daughter has run away with Mackie, the Beggar King Peachum demands that Tiger-Brown bring him to justice, and when the Police Chief wavers, he threatens to interfere with the Queen’s coronation by organizing a staged protest by the beggars, who marching toward the Queen will be somewhat impervious from violent threats—after all, what will it say of the Royal family if the police heartlessly shoot down these poverty-stricken citizens as they attempt to “pay homage” to the Queen?

     Hearing of her father’s intentions, Polly convinces Mackie that he must escape. And he, in turn, hands over the operation of his underworld activities to his wife. Returning to his prostitute friends, Mackie is betrayed by Jennie and, after several attempts at escape, is arrested. One of the best moments of this film is Mackie’s sudden appearance upon the brothel’s rooftop minutes before we observe his arms and hands maneuvering along the building’s drainpipe.

    While Peachum plans his protests, Polly takes the gang’s ill-gotten money and purchases a bank. Dressed now as bankers at a board meeting, Polly and the former gang members clearly demonstrate Brecht’s theorem that there is little difference between robbing a bank and controlling others' money.

 

    When Peachum’s wife announces that Polly and Mackie will be attending the coronation, sitting in the stands near where the Beggar King’s minions plan to attempt to interrupt the event, Peachum runs off to stop the march. Pabst’s brilliant presentation of their slow robot-like forward advance makes clear that Peachum has unleashed a monster in riling up the masses! The Queen’s absolute terror in facing her people, moreover, explains everything, particularly the survival of those who can forget. In Pabst’s handling nearly all the action takes place while the screen goes dark, reiterating Weill’s observation: “Some men live in darkness, while others stand in light.”

     At film’s end, Peachum also willfully forgets, joining forces with his banker-daughter and Mack the Knife. Together they will rule the world, the wealthy and the poor alike.

 

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2009

Both essays reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).