Sidney Lumet | 12 Angry Man / 1957

reasonable doubts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reginald Rose (screenplay, based on his teleplay), Sidney Lumet (director) 12 Angry Men / 1957

 

A tired and disinterested judge gives the jury his final summation, and they are locked away in the concrete box called the jury room. It is a hot and humid day, about to rain, and the fan does not seem to work; the windows are difficult to lift. The twelve men about to sit down to decide the fate of a young teenage boy are, as the title suggests, all angry—except perhaps for three or four who gradually reveal more temperate personalities.

     Director Sidney Lumet shoots these early scenes from high above, with the camera looking down on these seemingly insignificant beings. Gradually, as they begin to discuss the case, the camera joins them, closing in upon their faces until the audience is made to feel the claustrophobic atmosphere of this intense space.

      As anyone who has seen this melodramatic and creaky confection knows, the men begin their deliberations by discovering that all but one of them is convinced of the defendant's guilt. Only Juror #8 (a role brilliantly downplayed in a kind of "aw shucks" manner by Henry Fonda) believes there is a reasonable doubt that the boy is innocent, and, gradually over the 96 minutes of this film, convinces the other jurors, one by one, to see it his way. As he admits several times, "I really don't know what the truth is."

      The intent of Reginald Rose's teleplay transformed into screenplay, quite obviously, is to give credence to American jurisprudence, to demonstrate the importance in the process of the twelve jurors to reach a unanimous viewpoint before convicting a man.

     For me, however, the slow unmasking of Juror #8's eleven opponents is absolutely horrifying. What Rose's work reveals is just how strongly bigotry, personal jealousies, selfishness, fear, and just plain ignorance influence a jury's, any jury's, decisions. The fact that there is not a single man of color on this jury (white immigrant Juror #11, George Voskovec, substitutes) and no women represented may account for some of the open hostility expressed, particularly by Juror #10 (Ed Begley) and sadistic and failed father (Lee J. Cobb). The 1957 film seems to indicate, however, that even these kinds of men, given the rational consensus-building of Juror #8, can be turned around or, at least, made temporarily to see their own mistakes. Yet one finds it hard to believe that this rather soft-spoken individual could sway the votes of some of these unreasonable beasts. Today in our highly polarized political society that would certainly be near impossible.

      Perhaps that's why it is so important to have the protection of unanimity, but what it suggests is that, whatever the outcome of the process, true justice is a nearly impossible thing to accomplish, particularly given, in this instance, Fonda's concession after the first round of discussions to go along with the others if there is not another one among them who will change his vote. Certainly Juror #8 would not today have been permitted to explore his own investigation by locally buying a knife similar to the one that killed the boy's father, and he would never today be allowed to bring it into court. I fear, moreover that, in reality, some jurors might join with the majority, as does Juror #7 (Jack Warden), simply to escape the process and get to a beloved baseball game or other event.

      Yet we do know that some people having served jury duty describe the experience as uplifting and even spiritually moving, and believe that the men and women with whom they served tried as best they could to make a fair and just decision.  Perhaps Americans are not as truly divisive and inwardly angry as writers and the media portray them.

     If so, it seems even stranger that 12 Angry Men—which I recently revisited on the television screen—is so routinely touted as an American classic, a work chosen, for example, for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Rose's depiction of the jury process is a fairly mannered expression of a series of different viewpoints, as well, as I've argued, as representing a frightening vision of the American common man, unless we see Fonda as the only paragon. And, if so, who are all those other men filled with such anger, even hate? Why is it that today more Americans are in jail than almost any other country in the world? Maybe the accused might be better served by the admission, as in some cultures, that no group can truly be unanimous when it comes to innocence or guilt.

    

Los Angeles, April 1, 2010

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (April 2010).                                

Mack Sennett | A Busy Day (aka The Militant Suffragette) / 1914

the violent suffragette

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mack Sennett (screenwriter and director) A Busy Day (aka The Militant Suffragette) / 1914

 

Charles Chaplin appeared in clothes generally worn by the opposite gender—a popular gimmick for males and females in silent films—three times, twice in 1914, in the six-minute long A Busy Day and in the 14-minute work The Masquerader, and in July of the following year in the two-reel movie A Woman.

    The first, in which he convincingly and without attempting to establish a male identity played an increasingly enraged woman, might almost be seen as a kind of warm-up to the more complex obviously “drag” roles he performed in the other two films.

    The radical differences in style and how Chaplin related to others while playing the role might have something to do with the fact that the first short was directed by Mack Sennett and the other two by Chaplin himself. Clearly A Busy Day doesn’t fully use the gender switch as an important comic device since he is merely a female impersonator, while the other two are focused upon the transformation Chaplin makes from man to woman.

    Filmed at the San Pedro Harbor pier during a military parade, A Busy Day* begins as a couple sits down in the stands to watch the parade of soldiers. The wife (Chaplin), apparently a  “militant suffragette” (as the original title of this short characterizes her) is a rather roughly hewn woman, who clumsily falls back in the bleachers almost the moment she is seated and when she finds, seconds later, herself with a runny nose, uses the hem of her dress to wipe it dry—much to the disconcertion of the woman who sits next to her, who attempts to hand her a hanky as an alternative.

 

    Almost from the moment her eyes are trained upon the marching soldiers, her husband (Charles Swain) slips away with the woman (Phyllis Allen) who is sitting on his other side. His wife rises it anger, surveying the crowd to determine where he might have stolen off to and soon after marches onto the street of the parade itself where a camera crew is set up to film the celebrations.

     She interrupts the filming of the event and is told to get out of the way, quickly kicking the camera man (Mack Sennett himself) and doing the same to a policeman (Billy Gilbert) who also tries to move her away from the route of the parade. As in many a Chaplin film it ends up in a kind of free-for-all, with the wife lifting up her skirts several times to take out her anger on those who attempt to control her rage.

      Soon, however, as she spots her husband at a short distance with the woman with whom he has stolen away, the wife turns her attention back to the matter at hand, racing up behind the couple to jab the interloper with her umbrella.

      The woman runs off as the wife scolds, slugs, kicks, and beats her husband over the head with her umbrella, he finally shoving her back to the parade bandstand, where she crashes into the lap of another policeman who throws her back to her husband for another kicking, shoving, and boxing bout between the couple.

      Finished with her husband, the suffragette returns to the policeman to again box his ears, and push and pull him, herself landing on the bandstand where she dances for a few moments and where, now having become so wrought up, she eventually slugs a nearby woman and her husband, the latter of whom pushes her into the ocean where the story stops.

     As a post accompanying the San Francisco Festival of “Silent Films and Suffragettes” correctly noted: “the film promotes the stereotype of suffragettes being belligerent, unreasonable, and ultimately unlovable women.”

 

*Some DVDs, the would-be viewer should be warned, combine this film with another Chaplin movie, Mabel’s Busy Day in order it to create a more normal seeming early half-realer. The two films, however, are not related.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2021

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

 

Luchino Visconti | Il gattopardo (The Leopard) / 1963

a long sleep

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, and Luchino Visconti (screenplay and adaptation, based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa), Luchino Visconti (director) Il gattopardo (The Leopard) / 1963

 

Winner of the 1963 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, The Leopard is certainly one of the most visually beautiful films ever produced. Visconti's Technicolor evocation of Risorgimento Sicily is perhaps the most cohesive and convincing aspect of this almost languid epic, a vision that easily attracts one to the film again and again. The very beauty with which the director evokes the falling nobility of this lost world is, in part, the subject of the book and film narrative, revealing what is being lost far better than the Prince at the center of this work, Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster), could ever express it. 

    Don Fabrizio is a sensualist, a lover of the world he inhabits while simultaneously perceiving—perhaps even reveling in—its faults. His discussion of his wife with the local priest, Father Pinone (comically realized by Romolo Valli), is a sad commentary on domestic life; although he has had seven children with Maria Stella Salina (Rina Morelli), he proclaims he has never seen her navel! Of the Sicilian people themselves, the Prince is only too aware of what he calls their "desire for death":

 

                 Sleep, my dear Chavelley, eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And

                 they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring

                 them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very

                 strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its

                 luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish

                 for death. Our sensuality, wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings,

                 a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged

                 sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is....for death again.

 

     Visconti's film begins with a living room mass in Fabrizio's villa, interrupted by the voices of servants who have just discovered the body of a soldier upon the estate. Momentarily, news arrives in the form of a letter and newspaper account of Garibaldi and his "redshirts" attack on Messina and Palermo. The news of the attack terrifies Fabrizio's family, particularly in its suggestion that they shall have to abandon their palace, perhaps even escape Sicily or face exile. Fabrizio, however, greets the news with an amazing placidness, calming his family, and arranging his own travel the next day. His ideas about the "revolution" are summarized in his statement:

 

                 You know what is happening in our country? Nothing...simply an imper-

                 ceptible replacement of one class for another. The middle class doesn't

                 want to destroy us. It simply wants to take our place...and very gently.

 

Or as he puts it at another time:

 

                 Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.

 

     It is Fabrizio's sense of inevitability tied up with his noblesse oblige, in fact, that both protects his family and dooms it to destruction.

     Although the Prince accepts the growing tide—he has little choice but to do so—his views are nonetheless radically different from his young nephew Tancredi Falconeri (the dashingly beautiful Alain Delon) who stops by the palace on his way to join Garibaldi's forces, determining to help create a new Italian nation that will mean the nobility's (and, incidentally, his own) downfall. His rash decisions and immature energy are both charming and frightful, setting afire the heart of a lady in waiting, Concetta.

     In the end, however, Falconeri is a kind of comic hero, as he and his friends arrive at the end of a brutal battle against the soldiers protecting Palermo. For such a lushly filmed work it is almost shocking to see war up so close, as the rag-tag squadrons of redshirts rush forward with hardly any leadership, to shoot and kill the local forces at random. Most of the citizens support the Garibaldi forces, at one point chasing and running down a local who is said to have been a police informer. Despite his attempts to outrun the crowd, we soon see his body hanging from a nearby post. By the time of Falconeri's arrival there are only a few loyalists remaining, one of who—almost by accident—shoots the young volunteer near his eye, transforming him suddenly into a hero. We perceive that Falconeri, in his all his beauty and bluster, is a man who will take advantage of any situation throughout his life, when, a few scenes later, he shows up in a splendiferous soldier's costume, having abandoned Garibaldi's men for representing the King of Italy's forces.

     Fabrizio and his family, meanwhile, refuse to abandon their annual summer pilgrimage to the small town of Donnafugata, a voyage temporarily interrupted by Garibaldi forces, but which is allowed to continue through Falconeri's commands.

     The nephew joins them in their summer retreat, much to the delight of Concetta. Always a realist, however, Fabrizio insists that Concetta will not be suitable as a spouse for his nephew, a man whom, he proclaims, will be a world leader visiting other countries. Such a man needs a brilliant and beautiful woman—most importantly, a woman who comes from a wealthy family, particularly since Falconeri and his mother, despite their roles as nobles, are penniless.

     Donnafugata offers up just such a woman in the guise of a local wealthy politician's daughter, Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale). Unlike the pious and disapproving Concetta, Angelica is a lusty and open girl, who shocks everyone at the first dinner party with her absolutely joyous laughter at a story told by Falconeri.

    The last fourth of the film is devoted to the couple's romance as they chase about the Fabrizio palace in Donnafugata and attend a grand dinner and dance at the home of local nobility. In this scene, Visconti might be said to have staged the final grand gasp of the Sicilian nobility, with all its beauty and grandeur as well as its silliness and stupidity. At one moment, men and woman brilliantly and elegantly perform the local dances, while at the next we observe a gaggle of young women and girls bouncing and consorting about on beds. Malicious gossip is interchanged with witty conversations, grand dishes served up to sometimes unnoticing guests.

     In the novel, the later part of the work is devoted to the death of Fabrizio, but here, in the film, the Prince does not die, but simply grows short of breath and feels ill at the grand event, refusing to eat and leaving the party to walk home alone. In the stunning series of events at this ball, the director reveals all to us: it is the beginning of everything new and the end of all the old.

    

Los Angeles, September 30, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2011).

Christian Tafdrup | En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008

i know how you feel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Tafdrup (screenwriter, from an idea by Jonatan Spang, and director) En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008 [39 minutes]

 

Christian Tafdrup’s En forelskelse (Awakening) creates an even more difficult situation for a young man who, after discovering his sexuality, is quite ready to enjoy its new possibilities. That is primarily because the man who accidentally reveals the young teenage boy Carsten’s (Allan Hyde)

same-sex desires is his girlfriend’s father Stig (Lars Brygmann).

      From the evidence of the film’s narrative, you would never know that Carsten is not a happy heterosexual making out with his girlfriend Melissa (Jule Grundtvig Wester). In the first scene of the film the two high schoolers have just come from a costume party, he dressed as Aladdin, she, perversely, as Hitler—which may say something about her rather domineering relationship with him—Carsten presumably in the process and dropping her off at her home. Melissa suggests he meet her parents, but the boy is rather embarrassed for his outfit. The clearly open-minded Stig and Birgitte, however, not only invite him in, but encourage him to stay overnight with his girlfriend in her bed. High school sex is obviously not a problem with this liberal couple, but the fact that the kids can hear the parents in the next room having sex poses some uncomfortableness for the youths.

      The next morning, when Carsten rises early he encounters Stig, who serves him breakfast, and taking him into another room, offers him a sweater to wear over his open Aladdin blazer on his way home. Spotting two stuffed ducks in the room, Carsten asks about their presence whereupon Stig describes the joys of duck-hunting which he sees primarily as a way of communing with nature while enjoying some quiet time alone. But we sense something else going on between the two that we cannot quite explain, but which even Melissa perceives when she later suggests that his parents liked him and have invited him and her to their summer house.

       Melissa apparently has no desire to take up their offer, but Carsten clearly wants to get together with Stig again and subtly manipulates his girlfriend into perceiving that it might give them time to be together alone, without the pressures of their high school activities and friends.

        Once more Carsten is greeted with friendliness, and Stig invites anyone who wants to join him on a duck hunting foray the next morning. The women immediately bow out, but one can see that Stig is ready to take him up on the offer, until Melissa refuses for him. Yet that morning, the boy rises early and seeing Stig packing up the car, carefully removes himself from his girlfriend’s embrace to join the father. They journey pleasantly to the spot, not saying anything of great importance, Stig realizing as they park that he may have left his duck-call device back at the house, leaning over the boy to find it in the glove compartment; the very next instant he suddenly plants a kiss on Carsten’s cheek.

       Carsten sits stock-still without registering either protest or even amazement as Stig repeats the kiss, this time head on, before apologizing for the clearly inappropriate action. Still in some shock, the boy watches Stig take his gun and kit out of the car and begin to walk off. Finally, he too leaves the car to follow Melissa’s father, who suddenly realizing the consequences of what has just happened suggests they call off the hunt, as they return home with vague explanations to the women of why they have so immediately returned.       

     Nothing is said, but that night as Carsten helps Stig by drying the dishes he is washing, the boy whispers an apology, as if somehow he were the one who has behaved badly. And perhaps he has, in his own thinking, for not having responded to the man’s kisses in kind. What is clear is that he no way found the kisses objectionable.

        A few days later as the boy and his girlfriend sit together, she again repeats how much his parents like him and it is obvious that he, in turn, enjoys their company. At first, he concurs. But when she repeats it once more he briefly loses his temper, wondering why she need reiterate the fact. Surprised by his reaction, she pulls away, as he apologizes, wondering when, given her busy racquet-ball schedule, they can again share some time alone. She lists a schedule of activity that will keep them apart for several days.

 

        Knowing that she will not be home, the next day Carsten stands before her parent’s doorway. He is about to turn and leave when Stig finally appears. He asks the question he already knows about Melissa being home, but has another excuse ready by returning her father’s sweater. Stig invites him in, and the two begin a totally meaningless conversation about how the two teenagers make the perfect couple. Almost mid-sentence, Carsten breaks down into tears, expressing what perhaps he has never even carefully thought out, let alone previously spoken:

 

                     I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t understand.

 

    Stig hugs him close in an attempt to calm him, repeating that he knows what he feels. Inevitably, the two find their hands slipping down into each other’s pants, both attempting to salve their frustrations with a moment of grabbed love.

      Before they can continue, they hear the entry of Melissa and her mother returned home since the court was overbooked, Melissa’s racquetball contest cancelled. The men quickly tuck in their shirts and re-buckle their belts, as Carsten is led up to Melissa’s room.

      They kiss but she senses something is amiss when he breaks away, finally admitting that he has “met someone” who he’s “been with” presumably meaning sexually.

      Steeling herself, Melissa asks: “Who is she?”

      His answer is so honest that even the viewer is a bit startled: “It’s not a she. It’s a guy.”

     Furiously she commands him to leave, which he does, returning to the living room to whisper to Stig that he and his daughter have just broken up. Stig is obviously shaken by the news, but when Carsten asks him if the two of them might get together again, he responds as we know he would and must: they can never again meet, there is now no way to see one another ever. Stig opens the door, Carsten starting out, once more apologizing but nonetheless stating that it has been a pleasure to know him. Stig agrees that that knowing him has been special, briefly hugging him before the boy leaves the house forever.

      It is interesting that because Stig remains locked in a lie, living a closeted life, it is Carsten who must suffer. If Stig also suffers—as we know he does—it is of his own making. Carsten will quite obviously meet someone else. But the adults of the films of this genre, just as Stig, have little recourse to experience other such “precious moments” with the youths who in their straightforwardness have broken the chain of living hidden lives.

      We know nothing of Carsten’s home situation, yet we can assume that the elder male could not offer them anything more than the first kiss and other attendant sexual activities, serving merely as the sought-out agent of the younger boys’ successful coming out.

      This Danish film of 2008 is one of the most open and accepting films that explores how young boys sometimes need the help of an older mentor/lover to bring them into sexual realization, an issue not readily discussed in contemporary US cinema.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

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

Rachel Ward | The Big House /2000

dropping the soap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Ward (screenwriter and director) The Big House / 2000 [24 minutes]

 

Among a very long list of male prison love stories including William Dieterle’s 1928 masterwork Sex in Chains, Jean Genet’s Un chant d'amour (1950), Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Harvey Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), Wolfgang Peterson’s The Consequence (1977), Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s I Love You Phillip Morris (2009), Sebastián Muñoz’s The Prince (2019), Josza Anjembe’s Freed (2019), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021)—these representing but a handful—Australian director Rachel Ward’s 2000 short The Big House is not insignificant and is visually much tougher. Filmed in the real Maitland Goal of Australia, the work dares to truly reveal the prison conditions and activities. A short, however, as both Anjembe’s film and Ward’s work are reveals the form as perhaps not the best medium for a subject in which the dominant motif is about serving what seems like an endless period of one’s life. Indeed, in both these works there is a sense that the prisoner about to be released might wish, given his love interest, to stay a while longer—which, in fact, is the theme of both Freed and Great Freedom.

     In Ward’s work new prisoner Sonny (Kick Gurry) is almost immediately saved by his own good looks and long-term prisoner Williams’ interest in him; Williams evidently has permission of the entry guards to pick his new roommates. And he has a reputation, apparently, of choosing well, given the general chaos that occurs when he passes with pretty boy Sonny the caged prisoners suddenly appear to behave like excited gorillas, hooting, masturbating, and showing off their bums. Ward creates a palpable tension by refusing to show Sonny to the audience until we finally catch a glimpse of him in Williams’ cell mirror.

 

    In his very first shower, Sonny is almost raped by four burly men headed by William’s competitor, Jacko, as he plays the game based on the long-held myth of dropping the soap in a prison shower, used here as a purposeful in-joke, if you can describe an actual attempt at rape as being something of humor.

     Williams not only picks his cellmates carefully, however, but protects them, saving their virginity for his own more gentle techniques which begin as a long massage and a night of cuddling before he fucks his new boys.

 

     Recognizing that he is better off under Williams’ mentorship—if you can describe it as that—than the brutal lust of Jacko, Sonny quickly comes to accept his situation, just as the young man did in The Prince. And gradually he not only grows to love his cellmate, if it can be described as  such, but extends his own form of protection by teaching his illiterate roomy how to read. Over his 9 months of imprisonment, indeed, the two form a kind of bond that might be described as love, Sonny in particular getting to know the man who has fathered his own son who may now be just a little younger than Sonny.

     If Ward smooths some of the prison violence over, there is still plenty of occasion for potential rape and Williams’ needed protection, and her vision of a prison is a lot more realistic that Hart’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, with its witty transvestite repartee or Requa and Ficarra’s comic prison love affair in I Love You Phillip Morris, and she wisely delimits the sexual longings that characterize the works by Genet or Peterson’s man/boy love affair of The Consequence. If Sonny develops a love for Williams, it is no deep affair of a lusting heart, but simply a respect and admiration for the man who fucks him in return for his protection, perhaps not so very different from Muñoz’s far more complex The Prince.

     After hugging his lover goodbye upon his release, Williams wastes no time at all in picking out an even younger boy, Shay, for his next cellmate, a boy that might indeed be the very same age of his son. We wonder if it might, in fact, be the boy whose photo he has kept so long on his wall. And when the newbie asks who the other boy is, Williams quickly tears up the photo Sonny has left behind.

     Ward’s work may be somewhat simplistic, but then it does more in its 24 minutes than some of the dozens of prison films do regarding male-on-male sex over hours.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).