Max Ophuls | Lola Montès / 1955, USA 1959

diving into history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anette Wadenant and Max Ophuls (screenplay, adaptation from a novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent), Jacques Natanson (dialogue), Max Ophuls (director) Lola Montès / 1955, USA 1959

 

I saw this film when I was a college student. I recall hardly anything from that early viewing, perhaps a version of the butchered English-language film cut down from the original 114 minutes to 90 minutes and presented almost completely in chronological order, but more likely, while I lived in New York, the Pierre Braunberger restoration, in which the movie had been expanded to 110 minutes and rereleased at the New York Film Festival in 1969, with a commercial release following across the US.

     Fortunately, Criterion has finally released a newly restored version (2009) by Tom Burton and others that is about as close to Ophuls' original as one can get.

 

    It is odd even to think that the original audiences could be so insensitive to this beautiful film. True that the 1950s filmgoers might not be prepared for a work that is so obviously artificed, and that reveals much of its story through tableaux vivants and circus acts. Today, Ophuls' masterpiece—a word I rarely use in writing on film—seems to bear a closer relationship to Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge than to any Hitchcock thriller of the day. Ophuls use of color out-does even Luhrmann's vivid palette. More obviously, Ophuls' work is not a coarse frenzy of action, but a carefully nuanced movement of the camera and actors that almost literally cuts and shapes the work before our very eyes. Ophuls' work fits very nicely, moreover, with the both the thematics and artificed "reality" of theater played out in Jean Renoir's theatrical trilogy: "La Carousse d'Or (1952), French Cancan (1954), and Elena et les hommes (1956). So why did Ophuls' work displease its original audiences?

     I was not there, and I suspect any speculation I might make could be met with more knowledgeable suggestions. What is obvious is that Renoir's relationship with strong, sexual women within highly theatrical settings, is located almost entirely in the past. There is almost a kind of nostalgia, lovely as it, is Renoir's films. The forceful courtesans of his works, it is clear, do not, cannot exist in contemporary life.

 

    Ophuls' Lola, on the other hand, although clearly demonstrating events of long ago, is cinematically placed in a mishmash of time, moving non-chronologically through time and space, from her early affair with Liszt, returning to the present of the story played out with circus trappings, then going even further back to her early to her teenage sexuality, forward again to the circus where the doctor expresses his fears for her future, then back in time to the more recent seduction of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria.         Others of her liaisons—with Wagner, Chopin, Dumas, and Alexandre Dujarier—are only hinted at or not even mentioned. In short, the film does not attempt to focus on her entire life, but only upon almost accidental encounters, memories that flash out before her on this one particular night. Rather than traveling through history, Ophuls shows Lola diving, almost at random, into the fragments of her life. There is, one might argue, no truly historical perspective possible for her, only an emotional and sexual one.

   So too does Ophuls, using his somewhat stolid and stony-faced actress Martine Carol in contradictory ways, present Lola in numerous opposing positions. She first appears almost as a kind of statue, a representation of herself sitting atop spinning platters at the circus, then lounging as a supine trophy in Liszt's coach, unhappy with her state. Through nearly all the Liszt scenes she lies in bed, bored or pretending to sleep.

    Yet later Ophuls and his camera follow her movements vertically and horizontally as she moves straight up, at angles, and out upon the trapeze from which she will eventually make her final dive, which we fear, may end her life.

 

    Although she is described as a dancer, we never see her dance. She glides in and out of rooms—at one point her future circus master, Peter Ustinov demanding that she stand still—she floats into chairs and sofas or into benches of her coach. She hovers over the shoulders of her ardent lover, Ludwig. But only once, does she even hint that she can dance (and Ustinov, in his brilliantly acted visit to her, outrightly denies that she can). No matter how great of a performer the real Lola might have been, the film Lola clearly performs rest in bed. It is difficult to feel sympathy, accordingly, for the emptiness and loneliness of Lola's current life, even if her loves are less those of a money-grubbing courtesan than those of woman seeking true romance.  

     I would not suggest, however, that Ophuls really asks for sympathy, even empathy. All that is wondrous about Lola is that she is nearly unstoppable, that she turns the world into action, immediately leaving anything that is dying or dead behind. Like Ophuls' ever-moving camera, she is a life force, willing to put her own being, every night, on the line. In the end, she dives to survive once again. Our final glimpse of her is behind a cage-like construction to where the males of the circus audience are invited to come forward and kiss her hand, as if the very touch of her might regenerate their lives.

    It might useful be to remember that the real Lola Montés, after having lived even a busier life than that depicted upon the screen, died at the early age of 42.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2011).

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

 

George Abbott and Stanley Donen | Damn Yankees / 1958

a way out

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Abbott and Douglass Wallop (screenwriters, based on the novel by Douglass Wallop), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics), George Abbott and Stanley Donen (directors) Damn Yankees / 1958

 

About twice every summer, Howard and I watch the 1958 movie version of the American hit musical Damn Yankees. In 1995, moreover, we saw the Broadway revival of that musical with Bebe Neuwirth as Lola and Jerry Lewis as Mr. Applegate.    It was only the other night, however, that I realized that this work—which I believe I first witnessed at a community theater production as a child in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—metaphorically expresses the tribulations of those I have described throughout my writings with regard to the American boy-men: adult males who, through their obsession with their memories of childhood activities, particularly sports, appear unable to cope when faced with their older selves. It’s part, of course, of the so-called middle-age crisis, when both women and men, but particularly males begin to question what they have missed out in their lives. Sometimes it even signifies a moment when males realize that they may have been severely closeted gays for all their previous life.

     Women also have a parallel phenomenon, perhaps in the form of the eternal “beauty queen”, but I have particularly noticed this painful condition in American males, the perfect example of which is the character at the center of Damn Yankees, Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer), “the most devoted fan of the Washington Senators.”

     Like many a sports fiend, his relationship his wife has not always been that of an attentive acolyte in even the best of their days. Six months out of every year, he literally abandons his wife (Shannon Bolin) as his attention turns to sports, particularly baseball. But this year, more than ever, he is furious with the Yankees of their string of losses, and is willing to sell his soul for “one long ball hitter.”  

  Suddenly the devil appears in the form of Mr. Applegate (played on stage and in the film by Ray Walton, who died on New Year’s Day this year), whom passing friends of his wife (Jean Stapleton and Elizabeth Howell) cannot even see. To them Joe appears to be aging, muttering to himself. No matter; as fast as you can say Hannibal, Mo., Joe signs away his life, and, transformed into a much younger man (played in the movie by Tab Hunter), who leaves his wife Meg a short note that explains that, while he’ll miss his “old girl,” he must be off.

    Although we recognize that in the movie the separation will likely be only temporarily (after all Joe has insisted upon an escape clause), metaphorically speaking his disappearance stands for the thousands of American boy-men who at middle age suddenly seek out women other than their wives and/or are convinced they must escape the “confines” of their marriages (we’ve seen public examples of that behavior in all walks of life, including several Presidents, and I have personally observed such behavior by some of my relatives and friends).

     Like many such males, Joe, without his marital ties, feels like (and in terms of the play’s device, actually is) a younger man. But we all know that youth, after one has lost it, can never be regained “as it was.” Joe can suddenly hit the ball out of the ballpark, but he is clearly unprepared for his transformation—he literally cannot fit into his shoes—and as he explores his new-found youth, he is as shy and bashful as a virgin.

 

     In his newly discovered role as a handsome young man, he can barely tolerate the advances of Applegate’s minion, Lola, a sexy bombshell (brilliantly played in the original production and the movie by Gwen Verdon) who climbs around, over, and across his body in her attempt to seduce him (“Whatever Lola Wants”). Tab Hunter’s obvious gay discomfort in the role is absolutely perfect, for whatever new-found power and freedom Joe now feels, for he is quite unable to consummate a new relationship, and, consequently, seeks out a way to return secretly to his abandoned wife. Joe the character is not gay, but metaphorically speaking, Joe might as well be since as the young Hunter he inhabits another’s body who is disinterested in young women of his physical age.

       But then Joe as Hunter also has the advantage of looking unlike his previous self, and it is likely that, having rented him a room in her house, Meg, feels some vague sexual excitement herself, even if Joe cannot return it.

      The joy of this work is our observation of the mad machinations of the Devil in disguise, Applegate, as he attempts to cheat Joe out of the agreement and send him on his way to eternal damnation—which in the 1950s was what some folk deemed as the natural punishment for such behavior. And ultimately, Joe feels as lost in his new identity as Lola is in hers—having been centuries ago transformed from the ugliest woman in Provincetown, Rhode Island to the beauty she is now. Ross and Adler’s lovely lament of their condition, “Two Lost Souls,” might as well be described as a homosexual threnody sung by a gay boy and his female best friend when neither of them can find the right lover and, accordingly, they feel of estranged from life.

Two lost sheep, in the wilds of the hills

Far from the other Jacks and Jills, we wandered away and went astray
But we ain't fussin'
Cuz we've got "us'n"

We're two lost souls on the highway of life
And there's no one with

whom we would ruther
Say, "Ain't it just great, ain't it just grand?"
We've got each other!

 

       Enraged by Lola’s betrayal, Applegate transforms Lola back into an ugly hag, and, as Joe reaches for a catch at the end of the final game, he changes him back into the middle-aged misfit he was at the beginning of the movie. Suddenly, they do not even have that lamentable friendship.

      Despite Applegate’s fury, however, Joe does catch the ball, saving the day, dashing off to return to his marriage with Meg.

       As the Devil attempts to convince Joe to return, Joe begs Meg to hold him tightly as he sings of his failed attempt to solve the fears and frustrations of old age:

A man doesn't know what he has until he loses it,
When a man has the love of a woman he abuses it,
I didn't know what I had when I had my old love,
I didn't know what I had 'til I said, "Goodbye, old love!"
Yes, a man doesn't know what he has 'til it is no longer around
But the happy thought is
Whatever it is he's lost, may some day once again be found

    So ends Douglass Wallop’s and George Abbott’s fable about mid-life male heterosexual infidelity in the “Age of Anxiety.” Would that all such suffering men could so clearly perceive their inevitable fates.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2008

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (January 2010).

Jacques Tourneur | Out of the Past / 1947

into the frame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay, based on the novel, Build My Gallows High by James M. Cain, with uncredited writing by Cain and Frank Fenton), Jacques Tourneur (director) Out of the Past / 1947

 

It’s interesting that in the vast majority of American film noirs, it is the women who betray the heroes, usually world-weary gumshoes or seedy punks who are taken advantage of by wealthy crooks or society figures; the women surrounding them lie and murder, leaving the male figures very much “framed” and in the lurch. Never has this fact been made more apparent than in Jacques Tourneur’s masterful 1947 film Out of the Past.

 

     The “hero” of the film, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has, in fact, attempted to escape his shady past with a move to the small paradisiacal town of Bridgeport, California, where he now runs a gas station, fishes in the nearby pristine creeks and rivers with a young boy who can neither hear nor speak (Dickie Moore)—the perfect fishing partner, one might argue—and has fallen in love with a local girl, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston). In this prelapsarian world, he has almost able to create a new life; but before the film can even begin, we are introduced to the hulking figure of Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine), a well-dressed stranger on the prowl for Jeff, whose past, we quickly perceive, has suddenly caught up.

      The rest of the film is swallowed up in the story of that past and its continuing consequences, which, as in nearly all such films, ends, through the fewer and fewer choices available to its central figures, in death. A great part of Jeff’s (whose last name, as he tells Ann, is really Markham) story is presented as a kind of confession to Ann, revealing how he was hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down his girlfriend, after attempting to kill him (shooting him four times) and stealing $40,000 of his money.

      Not really wanting the job, but unable to turn down such a large payment, detective Markham tracks down Sterling’s girl, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) in Acapulco, where, under a more brutal sunlit landscape, Jeff is forced to spend his days drinking as he waits to encounter Whit’s woman friend. When he does finally track her down, it is almost love at first sight—at least for him—as Kathie slowly tells her side of the story, insisting that although she had tried to kill Whit, she has stolen no money:

 

                               Kathie: But I didn’t take anything. I didn’t Jeff. Don’t

                                            you believe me?

                                Jeff: Baby, I don’t care.

 

      Together, the two plan escape back to the States, but at the same moment Jeff encounters Whit and his henchman in Acapulco, checking up on him. Again, Jeff asks to be released from the case, but Whit refuses. Insisting that Kathie has slipped past him on a steamer heading south, he hurries off with Kathie to San Francisco.

      The San Francisco in which this couple hides out, is not the brightly lit city of Northern California but a dark, hidden world, was the two attempt to escape notice. When they temporarily let their guard down, they are spotted at a race track by Jeff’s old detective partner, Fisher, who was to share 50% of whatever Jeff got for bringing by Kathie. The two break up, taking different routes to a rural cabin in order to get Fisher off their track. But when Jeff turns up to the cabin wherein Kathie waits, Fisher is already there. As the two men begin a fistfight, Kathie picks up a gun and shoots Fisher dead, and Jeff suddenly realizes that she has not only lied to him about stealing Whit’s money but has now framed himself for Fisher’s death.     

      So Ann and Jeff arrive, back in the “present,” to the dark grille of Whit’s country estate, the grille itself reminding one of the long act of confession we have just experienced. At Whit’s house, Jeff finds, unexpectedly, Kathie once again living with her former boyfriend. She has made the convenient choice once again.

      This time Whit is in trouble with the Federal government for failing to report taxes, and his crooked lawyer, Leonard Eels, is blackmailing Whit for more money. Again Jeff attempts to escape his fate, but realizes that if he does not help he will be accused for having killed Fisher.

      This time the world-weary Jeff perceives it as another frame-up, and back in an even darker San Francisco tries to warn Eels of the danger he is in. Another woman, Eels’ secretary, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming) is involved this time around. Like Kathie, she is willing to kill her boyfriend, and does, as Jeff slips back into Eel’s apartment to find him dead. Hiding the body, he slips into a nightclub where Whit’s documents are kept—along with an affidavit that Kathie has signed insisting that Jeff has killed Fisher.

      Again on the run, Jeff returns to the nearby Bridgeport streams, joined by his friend, the Kid. But unknowingly to him, Kathie has ordered Stephanos to trail the kid, who leads him to the river where Jeff is fishing. Stephanos, about to shoot Jeff, is spotted by the Kid, who sends the tackle and hook of his fishing rod up to the rock where Stephanos stands, about to shoot, causing Kathie’s henchman to fall to his death.

     Back at Whit’s, Jeff attempts to convince Whit of Kathie’s double cross, trying to convince him of her murder of Fisher. But when he returns again to Whit’s Lake Tahoe house, he discovers that Kathie has killed Whit, and that she is now in charge. Either Jeff joins her or she will accuse him of all three murders! Finally, Jeff has no escape left—except to secretly call the police and warn them of their route.

      Suddenly observing the roadblock ahead, Kathie realizes that she has been betrayed, and shoots Jeff dead. The police kill her, beside her a large cache of money has fallen from her purse.

     After Jeff’s funeral, Ann attempts to make sense of events, while her boyhood lover, Jim, tries to convince her to turn her attentions back to him. Asking the deaf Kid whether Jeff was truly running away with Kathie at the time of his death, Ann eagerly awaits his response. The Kid sheepishly nods his head “yes,” and she turns back to the town and her ordinary life there. The Kid looks up at the gas station sign declaring Jeff’s name—the same sign that drew Stephanos there in the first place—and salutes it, as if, in his act, he has done Jeff’s bidding in allowing Ann to go on in a life removed of regret and grief.

      The plot of Out of the Past, if not exactly clear, at least makes reasonable sense, especially when compared with works such as The Big Sleep, Laura, or Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. But the important structures of this dark work are the film’s movement from light, to a more oppressive light, and into the black of the final last scenes of this film. For the haunted characters, moreover, the work functions almost as a puzzle-box in which door after door closes for each of them, until they are all trapped within each other’s fates. If even one of them had been able to say “no,” or to truly escape—as Jeff has so nobly attempted—all or at least some of them might have been saved. But the events of the past, in this film, are like steel bonds of fate, drawing them again and again closer to each other until they destroy every individual in their claustrophobic circle. Only with the Kid’s final gesture is the past finally over and done with, freeing Ann to remain out its grasp, even while it dooms the true hero to a kind of eternal damnation in the minds of those remaining in the still unfallen world. The only link between those worlds is a young boy who cannot and will not speak the truth. Yet in receiving and hearing Jeff’s confession, Ann has, unknowingly, forgiven him, even if she cannot save him from his past acts, as so too, in attending to this sad tale, has the viewer.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2001

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2013).

 

Ingmar Bergman | Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) / 1957

death is death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenplay, based on his play Trämålning) Ingmar Bergman (director) Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) / 1957

 

Although I greatly admire the films of Ingmar Bergman, and have seen a number of them many times, my fourth visit to his 1957 classic The Seventh Seal had more to do with my attempt to honor the acting of Max von Sydow, who died in France on March 8th of this year.

     I realized in watching this film yet again that a lot of my prejudice against it had to do with how the critics of the day reacted to it, describing it as a symbolist, allegorical, and even s spiritual work.

    Except perhaps for latter, The Seventh Seal, this time around did not at all appear to me as a symbolist work, based on the use of symbols, defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary as “something that stands for or represents another thing; especially an object that is used to represent something abstract.”

      In Bergman’s work, nothing is really abstract: Death is death, the Knight just back from the Crusades, Antonius Block (Sydow’s role) is nothing more or less than a knight. Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), Block’s squire is just a squire, even if he is highly intelligent and creates, like the actor Jof (Nils Poppe), original songs. The rich natural world surrounding these and Bergman’s other characters, although filled with sometimes frightening events, an impending thunderstorm, the silence of all animal life, and a forest possibly filled with thieves, never stands for anything other than what it is; any other qualities attributed to it, as Bergman’s script makes clear, are simply projected upon them, without any authorial intent. The woman who bore a “calf’s head”—a tale doubted by all except for the most simple-minded of Bergman’s peasant folk—is only an imaginary revelation of the horrors the natives are suffering, the Great Plague, who somewhat resemble the flagellants who seek in self-punishment an end to the plague—not a symbol of the tradition of offering up calves to appease the gods.

     Similarly, I now saw no allegorical images in this work, which posits just the opposite. For me, to quote Webster’s once more, “an allegory is a story [or poem] in which people, things, and happenings have another meaning.” In Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queene is allegorical because this queen and much of her court stand also for Elizabeth I and her court. Here once more Death is death, the knight is a knight—even if he is about to go “tender” into that good night. In Bergman’s hands these and the other figures of the work stand for none other than themselves, figures of the Medieval era in which religious believers’ visions of Mary (who Jof claims to have witnessed) and encounters with Death were closer to natural events than to symbolic or allegorical representations. Perhaps only Block’s chess game with Death is slightly symbolic in that the game may determine how close to death he truly is. But even Death is rather straightforward here, in his tricks, having to pretend to be a priest in order to discover Block’s planned moves. Bergman’s solidly-grounded characters do not represent others—except perhaps for the entire human race who must each, at some point, encounter the emblematic “man with a scythe”—but stand for no one but their own temporary being.

     As to being spiritual, one could argue that, particularly for Block, his voyage from the sea-landing with which this tale begins followed by his visits to the seemingly empty church wherein he again encounters Death, his pleasant hiatus with the loving and caring Jof, his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson), and their child Mikael, his later travels through the forest, and his final arrival at his castle where his wife, Karin (Inga Landgré), awaits him, represent a kind of spiritual search. 

    In so many of Bergman’s films, the hero (often played by Sydow) undergoes a loss of faith, which leads him only to despair and the total loss of his enjoyment of life. Throughout this work, Block seems almost indifferent to death; he battles for more time simply to be able to search for the proof of God’s existence that he is seeking, but which is also something he knows he will never be able to find.

     He does come close to that, however, in his brief time with the young actors, who immediately share their humble meal of wild berries and milk with him, while he observes the energetic beauty of the new life they have created. Is it any wonder that when the unlikely visionary Jof spots the knight playing chess with Death, he immediately pulls his wagon away from his fellow travelers to pursue his and his family’s own way through uncharted territory? In short, Bergman suggests, these naturally faithful beings do not even have to believe in God since they themselves are a manifestation of His love at work.

      They too, at their journey’s end, wind up at the edge of the ocean, turning back into the forest to move on to Elsinore (a name created by Shakespeare to stand for the real Kronborg castle in Helsingør, Denmark) where they may or may not—particularly given the director’s own use of anachronistic elements (the flagellants never visited Sweden and the movement did not happen until the next century, the Crusades were over long before the 14th century world Bergman portrays, and Block’s “dread” is far closer to modern existentialist concerns than to the mind-thought of the Medieval world)—encounter another dead world brewed up by Hamlet’s plots of upon from another century. 

      Finally, however, Block’s spiritual search as well as those of his companions who have also been taken into his castle, ends with them all bowing in obeisance to Death, to the nothingness they may now face, rather than delivering a short prayer or even a whimper to God. In the end, any spiritual truths they may have sought come to naught, as death leads them through the traditional “dance of the dead.”

     I love the revelation that when Bergman actually filmed that scene, the actors had already decamped, so that he had to enlist “assistants, electricians, and a make-up man and about two summer visitors, who never knew what it was all about,” in order to create the famed penultimate panorama. No magic symbols or allegorical tropes at work here; these were the clueless people behind the making of the film and representing his potential audience.

      I argue, accordingly, that Bergman’s film is truly none of the above, but is much more a blend of Medieval theatrical forms such as morality plays, farces, and masques than being an amalgam of any of the more Renaissance and Modernist genres often suggested. The more emblem-like scenes—the chess game with Death and the “Dance of Death”—which became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, which critics such as Aleksander Kwiatkowski have used to argue for the work being allegory, are simply overlaid on these earlier genres to give the film a greater visual force.

      And when one loosens this work up from the far weightier genres imposed upon, it The Seventh Seal opens itself up to being a far more pleasurable narrative about different groups of people trying to live out their lives while having to face the terrible plague that loomed always in the near distance.

      When I told my husband, Howard that I was about to rewatch Bergman’s classic on July 4th, he laughed. “What a wonderful movie of watch on a holiday,” he quipped.

       Yet, actually, on an Independence Day in the US that I was not at all proud to celebrate, one that had long excluded blacks and now was brutally being consumed for his own purposes by an apparently mad-man president, not to mention the fact that we too were now daily facing a seemingly out-of-control plague in the Covid-9 pandemic, this may have been the perfect moment to rethink Bergman’s 1957 film. Like its character, Block, I too was charmed by Jof’s jump out of bed to discover a new morning, feeding his horse what appears to be string beans, and his hugging and holding of those he loved so dearly. The spectacular scenes of doubt and terror embedded in this work now seem as mere pageants that momentarily interrupt the pleasures of the little family at the center of this film, as they play out from the back of their wagon more domestic comedies.

       Moreover, for the first time, I became aware of just how many elements of Bergman’s work had later crept into Andrei Tarkovsky’s great masterwork, Andrei Rublev, in which a boy who wants to make bells and a man who desires just to paint icons join forces to defeat all of those around them who stand against creation during the same time-period of the 1400s.

     Seeing this early Bergman success which helped him to realize the many brilliant films that came after, made me far more appreciative of The Seventh Seal than I ever previously been.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).