Mel Brooks | Young Frankenstein / 1974

a roll in the hay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks (screenplay), Mel Brooks (director) Young Frankenstein / 1974

 

I seldom complain about writing a review after seeing a film. Writing gathers my thoughts and helps me to better evaluate the work I’ve just seen, generally allowing me to enjoy the film more than I might have without thinking about it so carefully. But no matter what I have to say about Mel Brooks’ and Gene Wilders’ comic spoof of the Frankenstein movies—scenes from Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and Ghost of Frankenstein were all brought together in his and nostalgic satire—it’s already been said by the movie itself.

    The quick-witted parody toys with everything from slapstick and vaudeville quips to bawdy innuendos and a loving tribute to Whale’s and others’ directorial styles. Brooks even used Kenneth Strickfaden’s original laboratory props from Frankenstein and dressed the hilarious Madeline Kahn in the same kind of fright wig that Elsa Lanchester wore in Bride of Frankenstein.

       About the only thing one can “evaluate,” other than to say that overall the movie is great fun, is to talk about the cast; but then nearly all the work’s actors—Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein  (pronounced throughout the early part of the film as "Fronkensteen" in an attempt to dissociate himself from his lunatic father); Marty Feldman as Igor (pronounced “Eye-gor,” he claims, in reaction to Frederick’s pronunciation); Madeline Kahn as the well dressed and groomed Elizabeth; Cloris Leachman as pained Frau Blücher (whose very name alarms the horses; despite the rumor, the word does not mean “glue” in German); Teri Garr as Frederick’s pretty but empty-headed assistant, Inga; Kenneth Mars as Inspector Kemp; Gene Hackman as the blind hermit; and Peter Boyle as the dancing monster—are all so perfect in their roles that again there’s little to be said. Mars’ rendition of Inspector Kemp is a spot-on imitation of Lionel Atwill’s character, Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein. And Kahn’s Elizabeth, particularly in the early scenes, nicely parodies Basil Rathbone’s well-dressed wife, Elsa, in the same earlier movie. My only very slight complaint is that, at moments, Wilder seems to go a bit over the top in his displays of fear and hysteria.

       The puns and language gaffs are certainly corny, but they’re still funny, including Inga’s reaction to a howl: “Werewolf!” and Igor’s answers “There wolf; there castle”; the adolescent joke as Frederick reacts to the large door handles “What knockers,” and Inga’s answer, “Oh thank you doctor.”; Igor’s spotting to light switches, the first of which, when switched on, early electrocutes Frederick, who responds “Damn your eyes!” and to which the pop-eyed Igor responds “Too late.”

     The numerous sight gags are equally silly but hilarious: Frau Blücher’s insistence that Frederick and Inga stand close to her unlit candles because of treacherous staircase; the young girl whose attempt to play seesaw with monster hurls her into her own bed and into the safe arms of  relieved parents; the clumsy efforts of the blind hermit to serve soup, wine, and light up the monster’s cigar, after he pleads with the monster to stay, “I was going to make espresso”; and Elizabeth’s transformation, after six and seven “quickies” with the monster, into the “Bride”—all work every time I’ve seen this film, which is now dozens of times.

     The most brilliant scene, however, is closer to the late New York “performance” of King Kong and his capturer than to any event in the Frankenstein films. Like the public display of Kong, so does Frederick attempt to show off his “monster” by ridiculously dancing with him in a rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

       John Morris’ score not merely evokes Franz Waxman’s lush score in Bride of Frankenstein, but improves on it.  

      In the end all the slapstick and satire they demonstrate cannot hide the genuine love and caring that Brooks and Wilder show to the original movies and their importance to American filmmaking. If anything, the originals were far campier than are the puns and jokes of the 1974 reimagination.

       To say anything more would truly be, I realize, “Abby Normal.”

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving Day, 2016

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

 

 

 

Alain Resnais | Hiroshima mon amour (二十四時間の情事) Nijūyojikan'nojōji / 1959

war and peace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marguerite Duras (screenplay), Alain Resnais (director) Hiroshima mon amour (二十四時間の情事) Nijūyojikan'nojōji / 1959

 

What was to have been a documentary about the US bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, in the manner of Resnais’ previous work about the Holocaust, his 1955 film Night and Fog, became something quite different. The producers, Samy Halfon and Anatole Dauman had already raised the money, in conjunction with Japanese supporters, to present a tale of the suffering after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But after working with filmmaker Chris Marker, who quickly left the project, and contemplating how he might make a film about the subject, Resnais—at that point still a short feature documentarian—could simply not imagine how to contemplate the issues beyond the very excellent documentaries, many of them Japanese, that had already been done.

     He was ready to abandon the project, until the producers suggested that he link up with French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Françoise Sagan. When she also turned down the project, Resnais was prepared to abandon it. However, an editor and friend of his from Night and Fog, who knew Marguerite Duras, suggested he meet with her, and, after the coincidence of a long tea, the two plotted how they might turn the documentary into a fictional film that would speak far more deeply upon the subject.

      Indeed, the final film is presented as a kind of documentary embedded in a story about the filming of just such a documentary, nested, far more profoundly, within a love story between a former Japanese military officer (Eiji Okada)—whose family died in Hiroshima—who has fallen in love with a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), come to the city to act in a documentary on “peace.”

     By embedding the absolutely painful photos and films of the nuclear destruction of the Japanese city within a larger story of woman who falls in love with a Japanese survivor—while she herself has previously survived being branded as a traitor in her home city of Nevers, France for having fallen in love with a German soldier during World War II—Resnais and Duras have created tale that tells us not just about the horror of the US bombing, but of the horrors of war itself, while presenting us in very specific terms the lasting scars war has on all of its survivors, let alone the people it has brutally destroyed.

   Resnais, in short, combined genres, film documentation and narrative story-telling, to create something that in 1959 no one might quite expect, using images of horror and lovemaking simultaneously to interlink death with love, terror with pleasure.

      Yet, this couple is already doomed, even before they meet. Both are happily married, despite their morally “dubious” pasts, and both have lived their lives through the only way they know how, by lying or simply not admitting to their own atrocities, which, after all, was based on their own needs for love or, as the Riva character admits, a “dime-store” notion of love. Isn’t heroic commitment to one’s country also a “dime-store” notion of patriotism?

       Suddenly, in the sequence of a single evening, and then a drunken traipse through the haunted city in a second, last evening, the two figures—discovering in each other a confidante to whom they can admit their errors—suffer a tortured love. Despite her early declarations that she, too, knew the horrors of Hiroshima, he mocks her: she knows nothing about Hiroshima, he declaring; “You are not endowed with memory.” But later he discovers, as she reveals her story—perhaps telling it again for the very first time, of her love for the young German soldier—that she has, in fact, suffered a fate not entirely different from those bombed by the Americans to end the War. And her empathy for the residents of his own city is not without some deep feeling. By the time they have completed their night and day confessionals, both realize that they share the same shell of emptiness that, despite their “happy” marriages (of which we get to know very little), they have suffered in order to hide the facts of their own lives.

      The Japanese man with whom the Riva character (“She” to his “He”) falls in love, is also a World War II “enemy,” just as was her German lover; and the fact that she has “slipped” again in enemy territory makes her a traitor once more; yet in that fact Resnais and Duras again reveal that love knows no boundary, and that the lines of war are opposed to those of the heart. This is, after all, a movie—as the nurse character Riva plays in her “mock” film—about peace.

       Most importantly Resnais reveals what might have been a slightly melodramatic story not with narrative pathos, but with disparate images, easily eliding the ancient city of Nevers (and even playing, without saying it, on the English-language reading of that city’s name) with the contemporary Hiroshima, which despite its horrors, has seemingly survived. Through a beautiful musical score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and departmentalized cinematography by Michio Takahashi (for the Japanese settings) and Sacha Vierny (for the French), the film is a truly interlinked production, which helps us to understand these two disparate beings as individuals caught, temporarily, under the same umbrella—despite the fact that they both are rained upon.

       Given the director’s own commitment to the remembrance (and ultimate forgetting) of the past, these characters also recognize in their love for one another that they themselves are, in their relationship, both remembering and trying to forget one another. Everything in this beautiful film is about dualities: “You’re destroying me,” muses “She,” before saying, “You’re good for me.” The “He” figure recognizes that he will “remember her as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness.” As if to seal their fates, they drop into a Hiroshima bar named Casablanca, calling up the famed Rick’s American Café of World War II Morocco, which ends in the lover flying away with another.

      Both know that their two-day fling can only result in opening old wounds that will further complicate their lives. But they cannot resist themselves, each exposing the other to the immense pains which they have had to suffer, and telling stories which will perhaps help to erase their pasts—or maybe even imbue their personal memories.

       I first saw this movie as a teenager, probably at the University of Wisconsin, but I am certain I could not possibly have comprehended it. I recall only the early images of the Hiroshima horrors. But it is the love story that truly matters, and, even more importantly, the characters’ own loves—man and country—that defines them, issues that we discover are of importance only with age. Or, perhaps, we realize they are not as important, as old people, as we once might have thought them to have been.

      That the great director Resnais was able to say all of this at age 37 is astounding. And seeing the movie, after all these years, again today, I was startled by the importance of this 1959 film, of which Eric Rohmer wrote:  "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” 57 years later, I think we can safely say that, if it was not the most important, it was certainly one of the most significant films of its time, and one that has clearly held up as a masterwork over all these years.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

Hal Roach | An Eastern Westerner / 1920

east / west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Terry and H.M. Walker (screenplay), Hal Roach (director) An Eastern Westerner / 1920

 

As some film writers have noted, Harold Lloyd’s 1920 film, An Eastern Westerner, directed by Hal Roach, is not his funniest, and, at moments, entirely loses its comic edge. But for me, that is just what makes this short so very interesting.

     The film does have some extremely funny sets, including a long scene where, forced into a poker game, Lloyd, with a perfect hand, leaves the table briefly, using his time to create a mustache as he gets drinks for his fellow players, checking out their hands as he serves them, and, confident in his winning, puts in all his chips—only to discover that the crooked player next to him has switched hands.

     An early scene in New York, shows Lloyd at a large dancing hall whose patrons are celebrating “700 cocktails before the probation hour.” The only thing that seems to be actually prohibited in this hall is “The Shimmie,” a dance with its close bodily contact was thought by many to be obscene, and was banned in many dance halls.  Warned several times for dancing “The Shimmie,” Lloyd seemingly cannot resist repeating the dance’s movements, often with the unintentional help of other patrons.

     Some of this film’s Western chase scenes are as good as anything in Chaplin’s early films.

     But some of the best humor comes from intertitle cards, written Frank Terry and H. M. Walker. Late to arrive home, Lloyd’s parents sit up waiting for him, the mother suggesting “Don’t be harsh on him dear. I’m sure he’s just at the Y-M-C-A”; the card provides her husband’s reply: “He may have started to the Y-M-C-A but they moved the building.”

     When the evil cowboy bully, Tiger Lip Tompkins (Noah Young) is introduced, the intertitle describes his as having broken 8 of the 10 Commandments, and as having “twisted” the other two—which, obviously, forces us to reimagine those commandments to wonder which two he might wanted or even been able to “twist.”    

     But in this film there are even darker elements. First of all, our “hero,” such as he is, is not the middle-class achiever, who Lloyd plays in many of his roles, but a snobby rich boy who tries to get away with whatever he can—the very reason why his frustrated wealthy parents pack him off to his uncle’s ranch in the west.

     We never meet the uncle nor have the opportunity to see the ranch. What we do encounter is a small western village where “you’re not allowed to shoot a man twice on the very same day.” Not only does Tiger Lip Tompkins pile up the bodies in his free-wheeling bar that appears to be more like a Berlin cabaret than a Western saloon; but he lusts after his newest employee, The Girl (Mildred Davis), who has only taken the job to help her dying father and her to survive. Tompkins locks away the old man until he will agree to give his daughter permission for him to deflower.

     Of course, upon his arrival into this den of sin, The Boy (Lloyd) immediately falls in love with her as well; but he’s hardly a capable foil—at least at first—to Tompkins’ violent and gun-toting crowd. Throughout the film, Lloyd wears a suit and tie which, despite the dust, seems unfazed.

      But even worse, when he finally does succeed in procuring the key to release The Girl’s father, Tompkins calls out what is described as “the Masked Angels,” a posse dressed in Klan like masks that seems to include all Tompkins evil coven.

     After escaping the evil “Angels” again and again, sometimes by using them as his own shield and, at other times, by diving into barrels, covering himself with sheets, etc., Lloyd manages to outwit the entire band, rushing after a train which he seemingly catches. The Girl who has also chased after him, cannot get aboard, and, sadly, watches her only salvation speed off to his own survival.

      But the final scene reveals that he has exited from the train from the other side and is awaiting her arrival. A bit like Chaplin’s tramp, The Boy and The Girl walk wearily, but deeply in love, down the railroad tracks.

      Of course, we know that, when he and she finally find their way back East, they will be greeted with open arms and allowed a large inheritance. This time Lloyd’s extravagant antics have not been able to save him from himself.

      And the myth of the two Americas, one a civilized, if slightly naughty world of wealth of privilege, the other of a wild, brutal and violent force that constantly needs to be contained, was repeated and extended even to comedy.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2017).

 

 

Guillermo del Toro | The Shape of Water / 2017

betwixt and between

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vanessa Taylor and Guillermo del Toro (screenplay), Guillermo del Toro (director) The Shape of Water / 2017

 

It is the early 1960s in Baltimore, at the time still somewhat segregated, and, like the rest of the nation, a city very much involved in the Cold War, in heavy competition with the Soviet Union in what authorities characterized as a battle for military and scientific superiority. These very real issues are simply the backdrop, played out in rather stereotypical terms, for Guillermo del Toro’s sci-fi based fantasy, The Shape of Water. Del Toro’s film replaces the military heroes of the day who typically attempted to eradicate outsiders in sci-fi films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and well-intentioned but intruding scientists such as those in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) with everyday figures—in this case an elderly gay advertising illustrator, a mute working woman, and her black cleaning-woman friend—who side with the monster and work together to undermine the power of both the military and scientific work, both now brutal forces at work to control the world.

     I also have always felt that the early 1960s represented some of the most repressive periods of 20th century history (despite even McCarthy’s terrible attempts to control thinking in the 1950s) and have written about it throughout my My Year volumes.

     Yet, I somehow resent del Toro’s presentation of suburban living of the period, particularly as represented by the villain, Colonel Richard Strickland’s (Michael Shannon) family. It’s difficult, at times, to see Strickland as the despicable villain he is meant to be—although Shannon does a remarkably credible performance—given that this man, who would literally prefer an America as a terribly “strict land,” is presented as such a stick figure of complete consumer capitalism, including his purchase of a brand-new Thiel colored Cadillac.

      As a counterweight to his simplistically constructed villains, however, the director infuses his everyday heroes with deeper complexity. The mute worker, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is given a complex background as a foundling with strange markings on her neck (perhaps suggesting some sort of violence in her childhood, which has also resulted in her inability to speak). Elisa, who fortunately can still hear and communicate through sign language, lives a rather delimited life—she rises early to get to her cleaning job at a government installation somewhere near Baltimore—but enrichens her hard-working life by taking care of her neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), who has recently lost his job as an illustrator, who shares with her a life-long love of old movie musicals. Jenkins, worried about old age and the natural decay of his body, has some of the movie’s best lines including his early advice:

 

Giles: Oh! God, to be young and beautiful. If I could go back.

[Elisa Nods]

Giles: to when I was 18—I didn’t anything about anything—I’d give myself a bit of advice.

Elisa: [in sign language] What would you say?

Giles: I would say: Take better care of your teeth and fuck, a lot more.

[Elisa smiles and gently nudges him]

Giles: Oh no, no, that’s very good advice.

 

    The third of this trio, Zelda (Olivia Spencer), is similarly just as hard-working as Elisa, but also must cope at home with a lazy, non-working husband; she also translates for Elisa at the office and stands by her friend, holding a place in line for the check-in even when Elisa arrives late. 

    Each of the figures, unlike most of the rest of the secret research staff, share empathy and kindness.

   On the day in which the film begins, Strickland has brought in a strange container which holds an aquatic monster (Doug Jones) he has discovered in the Amazon, and whom he has tortured with a cattle prod on their trip back to Maryland. The “monster” has gills and a beautiful and colorful coat of scales, and stands, when not swimming, on his hind feet in a human-like stance.

     Other scientists, such as Robert Hoffstetler (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) want to study the beast and discover what he might reveal about survival which could help travels in space or simply in difficult environments, Hoffstetler, particularly, because he is also a Russian spy, and hopes to reveal what he discovers to the Soviets.

     But Strickland warns that the gibberish speaking beast is not at all like a human made in the image of God and hopes to simply kill the thing the local natives see as a god, vivisecting him to discover how he is put together. A visiting general agrees.

      Meanwhile, Strickland, who continues to torture the beast, suddenly loses two fingers as the beast strikes back, and, after bleeding profusely, calls in the two women to clean up his blood. In the process, Elisa views the monster through a glass panel and becomes fascinated with him; the monster himself seems transfixed by her, and they longingly stare at one another, recognizing something neither the military or scientific men have perceived.

     Before long, the two have formed an attachment, she bringing him eggs and signing the word for them, he quickly learning and communicating back the image. And when she accidently overhears a discussion of the higher-up’s plans for him, she becomes determined to kidnap to save him.

     Giles, however, attempts to dissuade her, but she will not bend, explaining her friendship with the water-living beast:

 

Giles: [interpreting Elisa] When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or—how—I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I—am, as I am. He's happy—to see me. Every time. Every day. Now, I can either save him... or let him die.

 

     A still reticent Giles finally gives in, as they plan for him to drive the get-away truck. The plan nearly backfires until, seeing what they are up too, Hoffstetler steps in, killing the guard who has stopped Giles’ truck. Hoffstetler also briefly blows a circuit board long enough for them to make a getaway. His acts will eventually cost him his life, but once again, del Toro suggests that even as a Soviet spy, he too is a kind of unsung hero. Outsiders are the ones who achieve the impossible in this film.

       By this time, most of the audience perceives where this is going, as Elisa falls in love with the beast she keeps in her bathtub—at one point even flooding the bathroom in order to swim with the aquatic creature in the nude, as the two make love. It may be a difficult to swallow this inter-species sexual ritual, but by this time del Toro has taken his fantasy into such extravagant territory that it almost reads as a cartoon; and, after all, the Creature of the Black Lagoon had his Rita, and King Kong his miniature Fay Wray!

      Like the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, Strickland, after first dismissing the idea that the “women wash up piss” could have possibly achieved such a miraculous kidnapping, he soon tortures a dying Hoffstetler and discovers the truth, ready to take out his revenge on Zelda before discovering through Zelda’s timid husband, where the beast is now housed.

      Warned by Zelda that Strickland is on his way, Elisa and Giles attempt to rush her beloved “friend” to the docks, which now filled with rain,” will be open to the ocean beyond.

      For once I’ll spare the reader from a complete revelation of the remaining story. Let’s just say if we’ve already gone beyond the credulity of most fantasies, we move even further into pure cartoonish bathos      Warned by Zelda that Strickland is on his way, Elisa and Giles attempt to rush her beloved “friend” to the docks, which now filled with rain,” will be open to the ocean beyond.

      For once I’ll spare the reader from a complete revelation of the remaining story. Let’s just say if we’ve already gone beyond the credulity of most fantasies, we move even further into pure cartoonish bathos, in which a human being finally transcends her bodily ties becoming one with the myth.

     If del Toro’s cinematographer, Dan Laustsen, beautifully captures the colors and, yes, even shapes of water throughout, costume designer Luis Sequeira deserves a special place in heaven for the creature’s diaphanous scales, and Alexandre Desplat’s music, as always, is a delight, I, nonetheless, am not as enthused by del Toro’s kind of fantasy. The director always seems to have one foot in the real world and other in the fantastical, making it difficult to comprehend his notions—always at the heart of his films—of good and evil. It appears that in a typical del Toro film, the evil is always the real world (or, at least, his facsimile, equally fantastical, of the real world), while the fantasy world is inherently defined as not only “good,” but preferable and better. In del Toro’s vision, it appears, there are no simultaneities, no inscrutable realms wherein good and evil might overlay each other and in which there are simply no easy answers. The imagination is always good, while reality is always bad, which makes our lives, I would argue, as impossible to comprehend or even meaningless, unless we are dreaming.

      These comments may be strange, indeed, coming from a writer who often scoffs at realist drama. But the problem, I would argue, is that del Toro’s work, like Gabriel García Marquez’s and other magic realists, lies in a world that is never truly honest, existing as it does betwixt and between. Lovely as the fantastical stories del Toro tells, they don’t truly have much to tell us about our own much messier and complex lives.

     As several of my friends responded, but “I want to believe in such a world.” And I respect that. But over the years I have grown doubtful of religion or myths, and this one particularly does little to satisfy any desire for any mystical order one might have sought. Even García Marquez’s earth-eating survivors, despite their ability to escape the patriarchal society in which they live, seem to have more humanity.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).