Martin Scorsese | After Hours

oz

by Douglas Messerli

Joseph Minion (screenplay, based, in part, on a radio monologue by Joe Frank), Martin Scorsese (director) After Hours / 1985

Martin Scorsese’s sadly underrated 1985 film After Hours begins with situations that suggest the film might be a romantic comedy in the manner of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. An unsatisfied computer programmer, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), working in an office in upper Manhattan, is teaching a neophyte to the company, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), how to enter the system and set up his program, during which we immediately perceive just through the movement of Paul’s eyes how utterly bored he is in his role as mentor. But then everyone in this working world—let us call it “Kansas”—is equally seeking a way out from where they feel frozen into space. Lloyd admits that he sees his job as only temporary, expounding upon his dreams of opening up a small publishing house. At a nearby café where Paul goes after work, the cashier (Rocco Sisto) moves in a silent pas de deux and spin, obviously practicing his movements for his study of ballet. Even later, he encounters a waitress in SoHo’s Terminal Bar, Julie (Terri Garr), who leaves him a message “Help, I hate this job.” 

    Paul is himself rereading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer which recounts Miller’s sexual adventures, far outside of anything the reader obviously has experienced. What is interesting about the autobiographical fiction, in the context of this film, is that it particularly reveals Miller’s repressed homoerotic desires which are wrapped within a dark sense of homophobia.

    At the café Paul meets another admirer of the book, Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette), who joins him at his table as they discuss it. She mentions that she is staying in SoHo with a friend, Kiki Bridges (Linda Florentino), who creates sculptures, and asks if he might be interested in buying one of her friend’s Papier-mâché bagel and cream cheese paperweights. Giving him her friend’s SoHo telephone number, Marcy disappears into the night. But Paul, having written down the number, calls her and they plan for an immediate meeting in the SoHo loft: Buzz in under Bridges, she tells him, only “the Bridges is crossed out,” suggesting what we will soon discover to be our innocent hero’s fate as he quite literally finds, in his voyage into a world he has never before imagined, that he has burned his bridges to the past in the process.

    A bit later in the film Marcy tells Paul of her sexual experiences with her former husband, who was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz and could not help himself from shouting, upon orgasm, "Surrender, Dorothy!"

 

                     Marcy: Instead of saying something normal like, "Oh, God," or

                                 something normal like that, I mean, it was pretty creepy!

                                 And I told him I thought so, but he just, he just couldn't

                                 stop, he just, he just couldn't stop, he just...couldn't stop.

      Without being too literal in its connections, After Hours might be said to be an updated version of that great American fantasy, wherein Hackett becomes a desperate Dorothy after a whirlwind taxi ride that ends with his landing in a strange new place where everything he knows is turned upside down. In writer Minion's somewhat perverted and misogynist retelling of the tale, the witches are closer to man-eating S&M harridans with their flying monkeys represented by the SoHo vigilante mobs in search of a victim.

     The Scarecrow without a brain, the Tin Woodman without a heart, and the Lion without any courage are perhaps encapsulated in the one central figure, Paul, rather than split into parts. But the images of fire, air, and water which dominate The Wizard, are all here, in the mysterious references to burn victims by Marcy, Kiki, and Paul—who as a child, after having a tonsillectomy was put into the burn ward of the hospital with blindfolds so that he wouldn’t have to witness the misshapen patients—as well as Gail who wants to burn off some of the Papier-mâché  debris attached to his skin, and, of course, the first stanza of Peggy’s Lee’s famous song “Is that All There Is?” which closes the movie.

    The miserable rain-storm which Paul must endure and the overflow of the bartender's Tom's toilet, along with the numerous glasses of the liquid he is served and offered throughout the film clearly serve as reminders of H2O.

     And the wind’s robbery of his $20 bill early in the film, and the air-headed desperation of waitress Julie and the mad Mister Softee truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara) send us into the stratosphere of absurdity.

     Like Dorothy, all Paul wants to do, as he explains over and over, is "to go home." But having lost the $20 bill—his only cash—and having not even enough change to pay for the fare (hiked to $1.50 at midnight) for the subway, he is unable to escape, and is forced to remain in this world that seems, as Marcy has put it, "unable to stop." No one apparently sleeps in this Oz.

     If, in fact, the original Baum story is an allegory against the Gold Standard and the greed of the Wall Street millionaires, we recognize that Scorsese's story is also centered about the haves and the have-nots. The robberies taking place throughout this SoHo neighborhood are being committed by an unlikely pair, Neil and Pepe (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong), who are clearly just attempting to survive—although in Minion's satiric version, even they, like nearly all the citizens of this neighborhood, are intensely seeking art:

 

                                Pepe: Art sure is ugly.

                                Neil:  Shows how much you know about art. The uglier

                                          the art, the more it's worth.

                                Pepe: This must be worth a fortune, man.

 

     If art is money in this world, it appears that it is only through "art," in a creative re-envisioning of the world, that one can find a way "out," the way to survive. The trouble with Paul is that he has no imagination—in short no brains, no heart or empathy, and no moral courage—although, as in the original tale, he eventually proves that he has all these qualities. His ridiculous attempt to find an easy "lay" ends up in her death and his own entrapment. The SoHo figures may look ridiculous, but in their S&M outfits, their 1960s hairdos, and their Mohawk haircuts, they are at least attempting to remake themselves into something other, creating a kind of kitsch—or we might say, populist—art. In this world, Paul is nothing, like his almost empty apartment, is too bland to survive.

     The problem of the film is how the inhabitants of the brave new world into which he has stumbled will be able to show the normative-thinking Paul how to think, love, and find enough bravery within himself to hike his way back to 91st Street. 

 

      The SoHo-ites, through their very differences from anyone else he has met help him to open his mind simply in order to comprehend what his happening. When the entire community begins to suspect that he is the criminal who has stolen their treasures, he is forced to cunningly find ways to escape. The dozens of coincidences that befall him teach him to make connections and resolve contradictions in order to show him how in this world people are interrelated: the Marcy he meets and who commits suicide upon his sudden abandonment is the same Marcy who the bartender Tom—who offers to give Paul the money for his fare home—loves and who may or may not have been the same  “boyfriend” Marcy has told Paul raped her for six hours; Paul’s desperate would-be lover Julie is the same artist and poster-maker who has plastered Paul’s likeness throughout the area, calling him out as the villain.

     Helping Paul to find his heart is perhaps the most difficult of the SoHo inhabitant’s tasks. Oddly, this heterosexual runs from nearly every woman he meets, Marcy, Kiki, Julie, and later Gail, finding them all too strange and complex to remain with them for even a single night of sex. The promise of “romance” is made meaningless in his new environment. Oddly, it is the males who succeed in showing him what love and caring truly is. The bartender’s offer of money demonstrates a kind heart. The two Tom of Finland-like leather boys endlessly kissing on the nearby barstools also show a deep empathy with Tom when he discovers that Marcy has died. The man (Robert Plunket*) who Paul unintentionally “picks up” is ready and willing to be gently introduced by the stranger into the mysteries of gay love.

    If there is a Glinda in this tale, a Good Witch, it is the near-invisible June (Verna Bloom), who sitting each night drinking in the raucous noise and filth of the Club Berlin, lives in a basement apartment beneath it. Trapped by his inner criminality, Paul dares to return the Club which threatened to transform him into one of them, and for the first time employing his brain, opens his heart to the lonely and lovely June, communicating true sympathy with her through a shared cigarette and a quiet dance. Touched by Paul's seemingly inexplicable kindness, she takes him into her cavern, transforming him from a human being into an artwork that looks similar to Kiki's Edvard Munch-like image of The Scream. Of course, Paul, entombed by these layers of Papier-mâché (images of which are repeated throughout this film), is screaming out for help, but, when June covers his mouth to protect him from discovery, he is finally silenced. The robbers snap him up the moment June has left the room, Neil proclaiming the absurd truism of this world: "a television is just a television; art is art!"

 

    Undergoing another cyclonic voyage, Paul, now as an artwork, falls from the truck precisely where he has begun his journey, at the front gate of the company where he works. Like a mummy come to life, he cracks open his shell, marching to his desk to be greeted, like a friend, by his computer: "Good morning, Paul!" Surely he must ask—after what has had to be the longest night of his life—as Peggy Lee does in her song played in the film only a few moments earlier: "Is That All There Is?" Surely he will return, either in body or in spirit, to the world in which he was greeted by real human beings.

 

*After playing in another couple of small film roles, Plunket wrote the highly acclaimed picaresque fiction, My Search for Warren Harding in which the central character is a gay man trying to get more dirt on the love affairs of the so-called “worst” president in history.

     

Los Angeles, October 16, 2011

Revised Los Angeles, December 21, 2020

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

 

 

John Landis | Into the Night / 1985

out of control

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Koslow (screenplay), John Landis (director) Into the Night / 1985

 

In the same year as Scorcese's After Hours, director John Landis filmed his Into the Night, both works sharing numerous similarities, notably the portrayal of their heroes as nebbish-like failures, cast out into a world they could not possibly have imagined and are not fully able to comprehend.

     Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) is having trouble sleeping, and, as he admits to his friend and co-worker Herb (Dan Aykroyd), something is wrong with his home life. His wife leaves him each morning with a purposeless kiss, wishing him "a nice day" the way a bank teller might speak to her customer. His insomnia is beginning to interfere with his work (he has missed the fact that the engineering group with whom works, has announced a different set up of frequencies weeks earlier). A trip back home in the middle of day, reveals that his wife is having a affair with a co-worker. Although he is dismissive of Herb's coarse advice to fly out to Las Vegas—"There's a girl there who do 'anything you want' for fifty dollars an hour." "Will she bring me a pony?"— he suddenly finds himself at the Los Angeles airport without any real destination.

      By accident Ed witnesses a brutal murder of a handsome young Iranian, Hasi, and an attempt on the life of Hasi's companion, Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) by SAVAK (Iranian secret police controlled by the evil Shaheen Parvici [Irene Papas]). Many of the minor characters of Landis' film are played by fellow film directors, including Landis serving as one of the SAVAK bunglers.

     Throughout these figures are presented as racial stereotypes, foolish and incompetent; but given the number of murders they and others actually accomplish by the end of the film, they are definitely dangerous fools, despite Okin's often casual disdain for all that happens around him.

     The moment he drives Diana into temporary safety, he is trapped into a nightmare scenario where the SAVAK agents track them throughout the city; a Frenchman, Melville (Roger Vadim) and his henchman (David Bowie) try to kill them; Diana's brother, a gay Elvis imitator, is completely indifferent to their survival, and has already given away her car to his boyfriend. She, in turn, steals, his Elvismobile.

       Landis somehow balances all the blood-letting with wit and humor as Ed and Diana incredulously manage to outwit and outrun the evil forces attempting to destroy them.

     Diana has been unwittingly involved with the appropriation of some valuable jewels which the Shaheen is determined to retrieve in order that she can make escrow on property. The obvious and ridiculous greediness of this underground world makes for some comic book moments as Ed meets challenge after challenge with a wry sense of humor. Even Melville's man, Colin (in one of the best scenes of the film) marvels at Ed's nonchalant style:

 

Colin Morris: [Ed is waiting outside the Tiffany store for Diana] You're very good. You're really very 

     good. I'm amazed we've not met before.

Ed: I beg your pardon?

Colin: I've been watching you ever since you left Caper's yacht. Very impressive.

Ed: Oh yeah?

Colin: You can stop performing now, Ed. If that's your name.

Ed: Heh, I don't know, what are you talking about?

Colin: OK. I represent Monsieur Melville, and I can assure you that he will be far more reasonable than 

     the SAVAK.

Ed: The SAVAK?

Colin: The Shah's secret police. Death squad. Iranian gestapo. *Shaheen's* boys.

Ed: ...Shaheen's boys...

Colin: Heh, heh, I like you Ed. I do like you. You're very good.

[Draws pistol, puts it in Ed's mouth.]

Colin: The stones.

Ed: What?

Colin: Where are the stones?

Ed: I can't help you.

Colin: [Cocks pistol] We do understand each other, don't we?

Ed: Uh, I don't know.

Colin: [Sees police car approaching, puts pistol away] Very good. Very impressive. I'm sure we'll chat again.

  Much like early film comedians such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, there is a complete innocence, almost an idiocy about Ed, that both saves him (and Diana) and gradually transforms him into a kind of loveable fool.

     The character Diana, on the other hand, ultimately, is one of the most merciless manipulators possible. Although Landis attempts to make her also a near-innocent, unaware of any of the larger effects of her relationships with men like Hami and the wealthy Jack Caper (Richard Farnsworth) upon herself and others, she is anything but uninvolved. With no vacillation she uses her friend, a wanabee actress, to hide her jewels within a secret pocket of her coat, which later results in the woman's brutal murder by the SAVAK. Nonetheless, Diana breezily returns to the house after the after the attack to pick up the coat, using a passing policeman as a way to escape Melville.

     Just by showing up at the apartment of Hamid, she causes his murder and that of most of his family and servants. Everywhere she goes, including a short visit to her brother, mayhem and murder follow. If Ed previously has fretfully found life uneventful, in the two nights he spends with Diana (one of them in a dark culvert), he encounters a whirlwind of destruction far deeper and more perverse than Scorcese's computer nerd, Paul, encounters on his long outing.

     "She is a woman who will go with anyone," Shaheen tells Ed; but this time, it appears, she has no one else left who might save her. Ed, sadly, is her only hope.

     In a final attempt to contact Caper, her former lover, she breaks into his house, only to discover that he is gravely ill and his wife has returned to claim his estate upon his death. Caper suggests yet another "caper," a meeting between Ed and Shaheen to make a deal for the return of the stones.

    Again, Ed's oddball lack of consequence saves the day, convincing the mad Medea-like villain that she has no choice but to go along with their plan: Diana has hidden the jewels within dozens of bouquets of roses at the flower market under the name of Parvici, allowing the couple time to escape.

     But the trip to Mexico is delayed, as the captain explains: the plane is malfunctioning, and the couple has no choice but once again to face the murderous forces of Melville, SAVAK, and this time, government police, brought in presumably by Caper. A standoff results, and suddenly the humor that has been partner to the film's horror, turns sour. Ed, once more with a gun pointed at his head, begins with his usual banter: "This is ridiculous. Big shot, huh? You got a gun. Now what? Shithead, you. Huh?"

     His next word, however, says it all. The possibility of the "real" world has dropped away. The man he faces is a "maniac." And suddenly we recognize the level of despair out of which Ed has survived these horrific days and nights: "Let me ask you something. Maybe you can help me. What's wrong with my life? Why is my wife sleeping with someone else? Why I can't I sleep?"

     His very personal plea resonates even with the maniac, as he turns the gun upon himself and shoots out his brains.

     Before Ed and Diana have even had time to recover from these new circumstances, FBI men whisk them away, as the couple fear another kind of arrestment. Landis returns to humor as the FBI agent dumps a suitcase of money before them upon the bed: it's all theirs. Which, in the director's cynical view, is slightly contradicted as the agent picks up several packages of bills, stuffing them into his own pocket. "Who's gonna tell?"

     For the first time in this pummeling, pulsing movie, the "lovers" are left to themselves. But instead of falling into an embrace and sex, Diana luxuriously cleans her blood-stained body, while Ed finally falls into a profoundly deep sleep.

     A sharp bang declares a new day, actually the afternoon of the following day. Diana has disappeared—just as we might have expected. Only this time, things are different. Perhaps she has turned a new corner, cleaned up not just her body but her life. She comes bearing gifts, the suitcase, tickets for a Mexican escape. It is hard to say whether this couple will fall in love or simply experience further lunatic adventures. But perhaps Ed, at least, can finally sleep at night. And nobody will ever again be able to tell him "Have a nice day."

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2011).

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

Sam Mendes | Skyfall / 2012

alternative bonds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan (screenplay, based on characters by Ian Fleming), Sam Mendes (screenplay) Skyfall / 2012

 

Changing my usual pattern when speaking of the movie I have just seen, I am going to try to resist telling most details of the plot. Of course, in any James Bond movie plot is important in that the vicarious vicissitudes of the spy’s exciting adventures is at the heart of any episode. Given the complete diffidence of the early figures—particularly Sean Connery, but even Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan—who portrayed Bond as a suavely sexual, testosterone-filled male, who, in the service of Her Majesty’s Kingdom—were basically invulnerable as they drank, gambled, and sexually enchanted every woman they met, be she friend or enemy—however, I don’t believe plot was ever essential in these Ian Fleming-based fables. The Bond image, established by Connery, was an impervious penis, who plotted, gunned down, and wittily dismissed the numerous evil villains out to destroy him with a penetrating glance, along with any other tools with which Q might have provided him. Despite all the manically devastating tortures that might face him, there was no fear that 007 would not come through, his thinly tuxedo-wrapped body intact, with yet another girl on his arm or, more explicitly, impaled upon his hirsute chest.

      In the remake of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (a movie, I must admit, I never saw) Daniel Craig as Bond, changed everything. Both of these films made the Bond image over, without particularly emphasizing it, into a more vulnerable, certainly less heroic figure, without sacrificing the heroic events and womanizing of the original—at least superficially. Somehow, even in those first two films with Craig, it wasn’t just vulnerability that defined his character, but a willingness to explore terrains Connery could never have thought of. Craig, for the first time, made Bond feel less like a cartoon figure than a real human being, a troubled, sometimes confused, almost existentialist hero who, despite his smaller physique and, at times, even grizzly appearance, had all the pluck of the former Bonds without their absolute athletic abilities. Craig as James Bond was a kind of remarkable everyman, and even without all that beautiful body hair and rippling abs and the polished Scottish accent, was far sexier in his bodily clinging suits than the patriarchal debonair Connery or pretty boys Moore and Brosnan (although Brosnan has since revealed himself as a far more capable chameleon who might almost have been able to make the same transition that Craig has achieved).     

      While the previous two films merely hinted at the radical shifts of the Bond figure, Mendes’ Skyfall takes the whole Bond transformation on as its very subject, analyzing it from the shift from the cold war spy tactics to the inevitable alteration of world politics, where the evil forces are no longer moles, with their molls and evil overseers from opposing countries and political forces, but are now figures of shadowy world, where the villains are never who you might expect them to be—and, accordingly, far more dangerous and unpredictable.   

      Raul Silva (Tiago Rodriguez) (played by the powerful actor Javier Barden) is just such a figure, a former member of the British Secret Service, one of M’s favorite operatives, who has gone rogue when she abandoned him to the Chinese, who painfully tortured him. Even then, as we learn, he refused to give up information, ultimately using the cyanide pill embedded in his tooth to relieve his suffering—and release him from his discovery that M (the always admirable Judi Dench) has betrayed him. Unlike all the villains of past Bond adventures, Silva’s goal is not world domination, money, gold, or any worldly possessions—just simple vengeance, and, accordingly, he is the most dangerous villain of any Bond adventure to date. Just as in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Bardem takes evil to new levels; he is unstoppable, determined to track down his enemies and all their associates with a ploddingly mad insistency.

      Early on in this somewhat long fable, Bond is revealed, as is M, to be outdated—both mentally and physically—figures who have outlived their value to the system which they have served. M refuses to abandon her position even though under her watch, and through Bond’s effectiveness, they have allowed files listing the major spies embedded in international terrorist organizations to be stolen and utterly compromised. Indeed, their encrypted computer systems have been high-jacked, we soon learn by an international terrorist (Silva), one of their own. Early in the film Bond is shot and is presumed dead, the results of which have great significance of his possible continuance. When he, “resurrected,” as he puts it, returns, he fails all his tests; but M, mysteriously if predictably, protects him, allowing him to remain in his position despite her—and everyone else’s—serious doubts. In short, Craig as Bond is as different from Connery (Moore or Brosnan) as you can get. He can’t even shoot, let alone lure any woman to him with great success. His brief affair with Sévérine (Béréice Marlohe), a woman saved from the Macau sex trade by Silva, ends in her death—perhaps not that different from the endings of several previous “Bond women,” but sadder this time, simply because Bond is totally unable to save her from Silva’s determined murder through a perverse enactment of the William Tell myth, with, instead of an apple upon her head, is replaced by glass of Bond’s favorite whiskey as the target. Craig’s Bond, as might be expected, misses the target, shooting high, while the villain purposely does in the beauty.

      In short, instead of reiterating the Bond franchise, this special 50-year version, the 23rd or 25th Bond film (depending upon whether one includes the early spoof, Casino Royale and the unofficial Never Say Never) utterly redefines the central and subsidiary characters as both the story and figures of contemporary British politics openly debate their relevance and necessity within the culture at large. It’s a brilliant device that allows the Bond franchise both to link the new world, represented by Craig, to its past and to disassociate itself from Connery and other impersonators of that role. This movie wants it both ways—and gets it.

      On the one hand, Skyfall pulls out the stops to connect the Craig version with the Connery one—if only the audience might imagine a taller, more hirsute, more dapper figure having fallen through age into a slightly smaller, less handsome, but determinedly energetic other self. Connery’s links with Scotland, particularly in this film through the last dark scene in Bond’s childhood home, Skyfall, are retained. His long-term connection with M (as Judi Dench) has been brought forward from previous movies. Throughout the film, Mendes goes out of his way to reference several of the previous Bond films, subtly employing the memorable Bond themes, this time in low orchestral rumblings, spectacularly referencing Bond’s always international travels (some of the best scenes of this film were shot in the neon-lit Shanghai cityscape and in a recreated Macau backdrop), and, for the sixth Bond film, bringing back Connery’s silver-birch Aston Martin D85 car.  Even Miss Moneypenny, this time a beautiful and sexy Black woman, Eve (Naomie Harris) who has previously worked with Bond “in the field,” instead of the white, slightly old-maidenish woman of the early Bond movies. There’s just enough there, if you are willing to suspend your belief, to trace that earlier Sean Connery Bond to this broken down and likeable Daniel Craig version. Upon viewing this film on Christmas day, my companion Howard asked, bemusedly, are we supposed to believe that Eve Moneypenny is Miss Moneypenny’s daughter? If so, I answered, Miss Moneypenny must have been much more exciting that she appeared on screen, to secretly have sex, apparently, with a black man.

       The film fortunately does not truly dwell on this aspect of its continuity of Bond-related events, instead creating what might be described as almost an alternative universe for the famous spy hero, establishing Daniel Craig as a very different—if simultaneously related and similar mythical hero. 

     As I’ve already suggested, the Craig version of Bond is not at all diffident, removed, invulnerable, but is a totally human being about to be abolished, along with his boss. By film’s end, in case you haven’t seen this movie, M. is killed. The world she represents is destroyed, while Craig’s Bond has clearly created a new world order. Sure, he remains a ladies’ man—just like Connery—as suggested in his shower scene with Sévérine. He wins big at the Macau tables. He drinks endlessly, especially in the early scenes after he has been presumed dead. But this Bond is a moral figure, attracted to Sévérine because of his recognition of her dilemma, disgusted by his own drinking, and slinking back in embarrassment and self-loathing into M’s home. This Bond is not at all impervious to destruction: he is shot several times, almost killed, presumed dead.

      In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, tied up to a chair where the evil Silva almost undresses him while he fondles the chest wounds that he has inflicted upon him, the following conversation occurs:

 

                           Raoul Silva: [Silva unbuttons Bond's shirt and peels back the shirt

                               to expose the scar tissue where Bond removed the bullet] Ooh!

                              See what she's done to you.

                           James Bond: [suspicious] Well, she never tied me to a chair.

                           Silva: Her loss.

                           [Silva begins caressing Bond's neck.]

                           Bond: Are you sure this is about M.

                           Silva: It's about her... and you, and me. You see, we are the

                               last two rats. We can either eat each other... mmm... or eat everyone

                               else.
                           [Silva strokes Bond's neck]

                           Silva: How you're trying to remember your training now.

                           [Silva smiles].

                           Silva: What's the regulation to cope with this?

                           [Silva strokes both of Bond's upper legs]

                           Silva: Well, first time for everything.

                           [Bond smiles]

                           Silva: Yes?

                           Bond: Hm. What makes you think this is my first time?

                           Silva: [sits back] Oh, Mr. Bond.

     The very idea that Sean Connery’s Bond (or anyone of his immediate impersonators) might have responded as Craig does is inconceivable. This is truly a new man, vague as he remains, in whom we can only be interested. This time round, without any marvelous new technological weapons and without any of the youthful agility he might have to support him, he survives to plant a simple but efficient knife in the back of this marvelous villain.

      The makers of this engaging action movie have also embedded enough clues to future Bond films, asking questions such as “why Bond’s parents were murdered?” and who, actually, is the new M, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, to pique our interest for future manifestations of the franchise. Even more intriguing to me, is the possibility of once again encountering Bond’s family’s former gamekeeper, Kincade. It is so wonderful to see the heavily bewhiskered elderly Albert Finney once more on British soil that it recalled for me his puckish, slightly pudgy, adorably cute Tom Jones all over again.

       I look forward, for the first time in decades, to more Bond episodes, with the vulnerable but eternally encased action hero in his uncreasible silk suit on my local screen. His aging heroics are quite perfect for our time—an agéd population after all.

 

Los Angles, December 26, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2012).

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard | Pygmalion / 1938

the toy

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Bernard Shaw, W. P. Liscomb, Cecil Lewis (scenario and dialogue), Ian Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald and Kay Walsh (uncredited dialogue), Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard (directors) Pygmalion / 1938

 

Nearly everyone who has seen the hit musical and film My Fair Lady, knows the story of Shaw's  Pygmalion: it's a tale of a young, cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller), who meets up with Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard), a master linguist, who insists that he could teach even her how to speak proper English: "Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!"

     The next day, she takes up his challenge, offering to pay for English lessons! Her stay in Higgins' house, along with Colonel George Pickering (Scott Sunderland)—a fellow dialect specialist Higgins has run into outside the opera (whom you might even describe as a "pick up")—results in the musical version, in a growing love-hate relationship between Higgins and Doolittle. In the 1938 film version, however, things are kept at a lower temperature, as the two men, Higgins and Pickering, dally with Eliza as if she were a toy, Higgins almost torturing her as she suffers through his cruel teachings (a sequence shot by a young David Lean, on his first assignment as editor).

     While in this dramatic version, we delight in their gradual transformation of their toy into a beautiful and well-spoken woman, any sexuality this film permeates exists between the two elderly "confirmed bachelors" rather than between girl and Higgins. True, even in the musical version it takes a long time before Eliza's resentment of Higgins begins to turn into dependence and, finally, a restorative love. But in Asquith's and Howard's version of the Shaw play, the work centers not on romantic fireworks but on the author's insistence that language makes the person. Asquith, a closeted homosexual, focuses his camera in the film primarily upon his two male figures who in the scene when Eliza finally gets the right accent, fling themselves into dance, as opposed to the complete involvement of Eliza in the later incarnations. 

      Today we wouldn’t hesitate to simply describe their relationship as homosexual, two elderly gay men who have happened upon an attractive woman who they determine to develop into a first class female servant. Perhaps that kind of attention explains why Higgins’ other servants appear to be so devoted to him.

     Eliza's would-be lover in this version, moreover, Freddy Eynsford-Hill (David Tree) is such a buck-toothed dimwit that we cannot for one moment believe Eliza would have him. This Freddy does not even haunt the street where she lives. But neither do we believe that there is any real possibility of romance between her and Higgins

     Her escape from the Higgins household after the two, Higgins and Pickering, celebrate her success at the great ball as primarily their doing, seems the only choice she might have made.  There is no room for her in the all-male world Higgins has created. His wish for her to return—"Get out and come home and don't be a fool!" to which Higgins' mother responds "Very nicely put indeed, Henry. No woman could resist such an invitation"—hints at no romantic intentions, but merely the fact that he and Pickering have become dependent on her as a kind of feminine form of entertainment. Aren't most dolls (with the exceptions of Ken and G.I. Joe) female?

    Eliza's return, accordingly—an ending which Shaw himself opposed—is utterly ambiguous, as is Higgins' response: "Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?" It suggests that if she is to stay, nothing will change. As Higgins' put it earlier to her: "If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate."

     Yet for all the film's misogyny, it is an absolutely first-rate presentation of Shaw's great play, with Shaw, having himself written the dialogue, winning the 1939 Academy Award for Writing of an adapted screenplay. If in her looks Hiller is no Audrey Hepburn or even Julie Andrews, her plainer features make her appear less vulnerable than the later incarnations of Eliza. Indeed, she has, in part, gotten what she sought: the ability to become a "lady," a woman who through her language and bearing can, by work's end, stand up to the worst of tyrants.

     It has always struck me, moreover, that Higgins is, at heart, the greatest of prigs, a man who transforms both Eliza and her father, Alfred (Wilfrid Lawson) from unwashed creatures of the street into figures fit for the middle class. It is no accident that the first thing that he insists after he agrees to take on Eliza as a pupil is that she wash up, to which she pleads, "I'm a good girl, I am!" But he, as we soon learn, is not necessarily a good man. For Higgins remains an outsider, not even welcome in his mother's house. Which may explain Shaw's original desire to cast the less attractive Charles Laughton—whom one might say specialized in playing demented characters such as Nero, Dr. Moreau, murderers, and other such types—in the role of Higgins.

      In the end, Eliza may stay on in the Higgins-Pickering household for the warm room it provides her, but we can be certain that she will never receive her much desired kiss. And we’re not too sure that she mightn’t have been better off as a flower-seller or even a squashed cabbage leaf, in whose embrace, so filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché showed us in her 1901 film Midwife to the Upper Class, new-born babies are nurtured.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012)