Aleksandar Petrović | The Master and Margaret / 1972

satan in moscow

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani, Aleksandar Petrović, and Roman Wingarten (screenplay, based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov), Aleksandar Petrović (director) The Master and Margaret / 1972

 

When I first received this film on Netflix, I was somewhat peeved by the Anglicizing of the film’s title. The Russian novel, which I had read decades earlier, was translated as The Master and Margarita and the Serbo-Croatian title of Petrović’s Yugoslav production was Maestro i Margarita, and the Italian title, the language in which the cinema was filmed, read Il maestro e Margherita. Why, therefore, did we have to describe the English-language version as Margaret? But after seeing the film, and realizing that there have been some dozen other adaptations of Bulgakov’s great fiction, I now feel it is quite appropriate to call this, only tangentially related version, by its American-sounding monniker.

 

   Unlike Bulgakov’s mythological and fantasy-like adventure into a sometimes metaphysical landscape, while keeping the characters of Woland (Satan) (Alain Cuny) and his two associates Azazello (Pavle Vuisić) and Abadonna, along with black cat Behemoth, the director of The Master and Margaret removes most of the supernatural events in order to create a tighter satire of Soviet bureaucracy. The Master’s (Nikolaj Afansijevic Maksudoy, played by Ugo Tognazzi) great historical novel on Pontius Pilate is transformed into a play in Petrović’s version, a rehearsal of which the movie begins, the Master in attendance. After a few lines, particularly those describing the nature of “truth,” the theater director and a spy for the Union of Proletarian Writers protest, calling up the Head of Literature to report the Master’s infractions. Little do they know that the head office has already been infiltrated with Woland, and by the time the true head, Berlioz (Fabijan Sovagovic) gets wind of the Master’s “political” infusions into his work, things have gone too far. Offered a trip to Yalta for his health so that they can create a reason for the play’s cancellation, Maksudov refuses. There is no solution but to hold a trial, at which speak jealous authors and government lackeys, accusing the Master of having gone out of bounds. It is not long until he finds that critics, not having even witnessed his play, have denounced it. His regular table at a nearby café has been given over to others, and even his home is taken away. Worse, he is taken away to a small “clinic,” where he is put into a straight-jacket for his “paranoid” behavior.

      Add to this the Master’s recent acquaintance with a beautiful woman, Margaret Nikolajevna (Mimsy Farmer), who seems only too ready to give herself up to the Master, and who admits upon her second visit to his apartment, that she has been “stalking” him for some time because of his troubled appearance and that she is the wife of the Chief of Police, and the viewers themselves become a bit paranoid. Is she also spying on the Master—or, as we later see her in the company of Woland—in league with the devil himself.

      Woland, meanwhile, turns the tables on some of the bureaucratic figures, sending the Secretary of the Union of Proletariat Writers to Yalta in the midst of a cold rainstorm and stripping him of his clothing: he is doomed to catch a cold. Another of the Master’s enemies Korovjev, is beheaded when he is hit by a tram.  

     The master suddenly finds that the restraints of his straight-jacket are loosened, the door his cubicle is open and so, too, is the door of the “clinic.” He is taken to what appears will be a performance of his play.

     But at a prelude to the play has been added, with Woland and his friends creating a show of wizardry in which Margaret models Western clothing that miraculously falls from the ceiling the awaiting crowd below, who delight in the sudden shower of new dresses, shirts, blouses, coats and other garments, which they greedily sweep up. But when they attempt to leave the theater, many of the theater-goers suddenly discover themselves naked, and are forced to hurry into the street to find taxis that can hide them from further public exposure.

      In the last scenes we see the Master lying upon his “clinic” bed, his eyes being closed, and a shroud being laid over his head. In short, neither the great artist no the hackneyed creators are saved. In a society controlled by such evil, all creative acts end in destruction.

      Although this work has little of the majestic sweep of the original, determined to focus, instead on a more naturalistic satiric aspect of Bulgakov’s work, Petrović’s film functions as a frightful statement of what happens when the truth no longer can be spoken. This film was the Yugoslav entry for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 45th Academy Awards, but was not selected as a nominee.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2012).

William A. Wellman | Nothing Sacred / 1937

obscuring the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hecht (screenplay, based on a story by James H. Street), Robert Carson, Moss Hart, Sidney Howard, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, Jr., George Oppenheimer, Dorothy Parker, Budd Schulbert, David O. Selznick and William A. Wellman (uncredited writers), William A. Wellman (director) Nothing Sacred / 1937

 

Willliam Wellman's 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred is arguably one of the most popular of the genre. And overall, it is wonderfully entertaining. Yet I have always felt there is something a bit off-kilter about this work, while its humor is almost Capraesque in tone, by which I mean outright corny. There are moments of Hecht sophistication, but one has to endure some of the most silly of skits to get there. Perhaps the fact that Hecht left the production after Selznick refused to use Hecht's friend, the alcoholic John Barrymore, for the role of Wally Cook, and ten other writers are said to have contributed to the work accounts for its sense of occasionally losing its way. Yet something tells me that the great director Wellman wanted the film, at various moments, "to get lost," to hide the very story it was pretending to tell.

     

     The film begins with a totally meaningless and somewhat racist scene wherein an ordinary black American (Troy Brown) is deceiving a charity celebrity crowd, hosted by The Morning Star newspaper, by playing a wealthy African nobleman, the Sultan of Marzipan, identified mid-event, by his wife, Mrs. Walker (Hattie McDaniel) and two children. The deceit gets reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) demoted to the obituary editor in an office location where everyone on staff must push, punch, walk over, and pour files upon him. Only his discovery of a story-in-making about a young Maine woman, Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard), who is dying of radium poisoning, frees him from this silly purgatory.

     Why Hazel is suffering from radium poisoning in the small town of Warsaw is never explained, and Wally must endure a whole village of "Yep and Nope"-sayers before the film can truly begin. Hazel has returned to her local doctor only to discover that he has made a mistake, and she is as strong as an ox. But the news that she must now give up her trip to New York—leaving the uncommunicative folk of Warsaw—brings tears to her eyes. Asked by Wally, "You've lived here all your life?" Hazel answers, "Twice that long."

    On behalf of the Morning Star Wally invites Hazel to fly to New York on the paper's expense account, where he plans to use her as lure to sell copies of the paper. She readily agrees, but, again unexplainably, insists they bring along the reporter-hating doctor, probably so the director might use Dr. Enoch Downer (Charles Winninger) as a comic figure throughout.

     In their very first conversation, moreover, Wellman does something even stranger than introducing extraneous events into the plot, but this at least helps us to begin to comprehend some of the film's ramblings. A part of the couple's conversation is blocked from view by a large tree limb, and we lose not only their faces, but what is being said. It is almost as if the director were attempting to obscure the action. And perhaps that, in turn, explains why so much of the humor of this film is irrelevant to the story itself.

    The plot is almost ridiculously simple, and we have already had almost everything revealed. Hazel is not really sick, and so, even though she has entered a world of con-men (as the doctor has previously described reporters: "The hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn't elevate one of them to the depths of degradation!"), she is, herself, a fraud. And so, too, is the doctor!

     Even though Hazel and the doctor dupe Wally, so does Wally, through his newspaper, pretend great admiration to gain sales. The city hands Hazel its key, organizations alter their activities, the whole of Manhattan, so it seems, opens its heart to the dying woman. But behind it all, as Wally suggests, is hypocrisy and sentimentality. Wellman's New York is a cynical world where everyone does what is best for himself.

     The couple attend a wrestling match, where Wally explains to Hazel that the wrestlers are simply performing, playing a sham. They attend a nightclub, taking in a hammy performance of the great women of history: Lady Godiva, Helen of Troy, Pocahontas, and Katinka, the Dutch girl who put her thumb in the dyke among them:

Master of Ceremonies: [introducing on stage performer on horseback] Katinka who saved Holland by putting her finger in the dyke. Show them the finger babe.

Katrinka: [extends bandaged middle finger to audience]

 

     By the time Hazel is invited on the stage, she, feeling more and more guilty for her deceit, is drunk.

     Again the director interrupts his story with more extraneous events: the doctor dropping by to feed the hung-over patient raw eggs, a children's chorus performing in her doorway while a squirrel, escaping from one of the boy's pocket, terrorizes Hazel by crawling across her pillow. Like the scenes before it, they are not as funny as they are distracting. They obscure our vision, so to speak. They hide the "awful" truth.

     So dispirited is Hazel, particularly since she has tricked Wally, a man she now loves, she concocts yet another fraud: she will drown herself, leaving a suicide note, and escape with the doctor waiting in a small boat.

     Once more, Wellman throws out a bit of extraneous fluff before he proceeds. As Hazel sneaks away to throw herself into the river, the Black man of the first scene sneaks into her room to gather up some flowers for his wife, discovering the suicide letter in the act.

     Hearing of Hazel's intentions, Wally rushes to the river just as Hazel is about to dive in, propelling her and himself into the dark waters. Hazel must come to his rescue, since he cannot swim.

    The scene following is again inexplicable as the couple feel the need to hide in a crate. What they're hiding from is not explained, since Wally could simply claim that he had saved her. But the scene reminds one of the early shot where the couple were blocked out.

     This time, however, we can hear them, as Wally proposes marriage and she, compliantly accepts. A firefighter observes them and speaking in a kind of Swedish or Norwegian accent, laden with words beginning with J and spoken with Y's, brings them out of hiding, allowing them to ride back to safety in the fire truck.

     The entire story has now almost been played out. All we need is to see the couple married off.

    But before that occurs, she is visited by three comic doctors of international renown, who ascertain that she is not suffering from radium poisoning, reporting the fact to the newspaper editor.

    Wally, called into the editor's office, is kept under house arrest, while another tough watches over Hazel. The editor, Oliver Stone, is about to take revenge:

 

                  Oliver Stone: I am sitting here, Mr. Cook, toying with the idea of

                  cutting out your heart, and stuffing it, like an olive!

 

A call from Hazel's room, however, saves the day. She has pneumonia, and is running a high fever. Stone prays for her death.

     Wally rushes to her room, soon perceiving that she has again deceived everyone by heating up her thermometer. To bring up her blood pressure and a sweat in order to convince others of her illness, Wally mocks a fight, finally slugging her out.

                  

                  Wally Cook: Listen, my dying swan, this is no time for faking! You're

                  going to have pneumonia and you're gonna have it good!

 

But Stone has been behind him to observe the entire scene:

 

                   Wally Cook: You mean to say you stood there and let me beat

                   a defenseless woman?

                   Oliver Stone: I did, Mr. Cook.

                   Wally Cook: Where's your sense of chivalry?

                   Oliver Stone: My chivalry? Aren't you a trifle confused, Mr.

                                         Cook. You hit her!

                   Wally Cook: That's entirely different! I love her!

 

    What to do with Hazel? Her desire to just go away is rewarded, as the couple are seen kissing—again with objects obscuring their faces—aboard a ship on their way to their honeymoon.

     Through both story and images Wellman does his best to obscure their happy fate, showing us only the ugly lies of their lives head on. It is almost as if the director and his writers behind this cynical satire, were trying to block out everything that brings these two beings together: mutual attraction. In the end we have to ask ourselves, which is the truth, the fraud and deceit or  love that binds them?

     Awakening from his alcoholic stupor, the doctor peers through the porthole, confusing the facts one more time:

 

                 Dr. Enoch Downer: Hazel! Hazel!! Run for your life! Run for your Life!

                 The hotel room is flooded!  

      It is ironic that in this film shot by the director who of the previous decade was so open about his male characters' homosexual desires, almost purposely, after the Code restrictions, hides nearly all of the occasions in this movie that might portray heterosexual attraction and love. He has, in fact, coded and cross-out what Joseph Breen and his board would have surely approved of, heterosexual romance. One can only ask if this possibly represents a thumbing of his nose of the Film Production Code's restrictions? When you can slug a woman openly on the screen, but refuse to the reveal a heterosexual kiss between a soon-to-be-married couple, something is occurring that, as I have long sensed, is certainly odd. 

       It's also fascinating that the next screen appearance of Hazel Flagg was with Jerry Lewis playing the role as Homer Flagg across from Janet Leigh as reporter Wally Cook who marries the accompanying doctor, Dean Martin. To allow the marriage and keep his close friendship with Martin's character, Lewis'  Homer dives even further into the mendacity of the plot by successfully pretending to drown.       

   

                      

Los Angeles, March 8, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2012).

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | A Londoni férfi (The Man from London) / 2007, USA 2008, 2009

over his head

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai (based on the novel by George Simenon, screenplay), Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky (directors) A Londoni férfi (The Man from London) / 2007, USA 2008, 2009

 

One is tempted to include Béla Tarr's masterful The Man from London in a discussion of films such as those I have gathered under the rubric "Crime Pays," for at film's end the London inspector awards both the wife of the thief-murderer Brown (Ági Szites) and the opportunist-thief and murderer Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) a monetary award. But, as usual, Tarr turns any generic relationships with other films on its head, creating an original work that cannot quite be compared with others. In the majority of the "Crime Pays" genre, although the heroes may feel an occasional pang of guilt, their "getting away with murder" is a thing of pleasure, a joyful overturning of an already corrupt system. The heroes of these works are generally masterful crooks—or at least comically bumbling ones—whose careful and crafty maneuvers give us more pleasure than the authoritarian attempts to check their actions. We side with the crooks, and the fact that they come away unscathed demonstrates just how little they (and we) disrespect what is usually an equally corrupt moral code.

     In The Man from London, however, Tarr permits us very little joy in Maolin's dark and brooding gestures. From his position high above land and sea, working as a railway pointsman, the middle-aged worker moves with a Frankensteinian plod in a kind of zombie-like voyeurism, watching through the various viewpoints available to him incidents on ship, land, and water, ponderously evaluating their meaning and, ultimately, taking advantage of the situation at hand.

     A ship has docked, and in a drawn-out sequence of visual repetitions, Tarr ponderously forces us to observe, for long periods, what seems to be inaction. Yet the slow pace is purposeful in demonstrating not only the intensity of Maloin's voyeurism, which we are sharing, but signifies the meaningless boredom of that worker's nightly life, a man working alone, whose only major act is, once it has filled up with the ship's passengers, to set the train upon its designated track. Nothing much else happens, but what does occur is obviously an enormity of activity compared to the uneventful emptiness Maloin must endure night after night.

     Two Englishman can be heard talking, one evidently (since we hear only fragments of their conversation) warning the other of consequences. Slowly one of the men exits the ship, showing his papers and, instead of moving, as most of the others, into the awaiting train, walks forward along the edge of the dock. Eventually we see him standing a ways from the hull of the ship, where suddenly a briefcase is tossed from ship to shore, with him retrieving it. With briefcase in hand, he walks along the quay, disappearing into the fog. A few minutes later, however, we see two men wrestling at the edge of the quay, shouting at one another, fighting evidently over the contents of the same briefcase. One man is thrown into the ocean along with his briefcase. The other hurries away to a nearby cafe.

 

     Tarr almost hides the fact that what we have been observing for nearly the first half-hour of this film, is also being observed by the pointsmen. We hear his footsteps, see bars of black and white as he moves sideways along the window patterns, but know little else about his existence. It is only now that he comes into being. With a long tow-hook in hand, Maolin slowly descends from his sanctuary, moving to the edge of the quay, and, with the help of the incoming tide, eventually retrieves the briefcase. Inside, as we discover once he has returned to his aerie, are stacks of British pounds, 55,000 we later discover. One by one, the methodical worker sets them upon the stove to dry.

     So begins the downfall of an everyday, hardworking man, living in a decrepit apartment in this port town (originally filmed in Corsica before Tarr had to move the film company elsewhere). Maolin has no easy life. At daylight he slowly trudges back home, discovering along the way that his daughter, working as a clerk in a nearby butcher shop, has now been forced to clean the floors backing the alleyway. She is no beauty, and it is not an impossibly difficult job, yet he is outraged; for him, clearly, it is yet another insult in a life of small abuses, abuses which he, in turn, transfers to both daughter and his hard-working, loyal wife (Tilda Swinton, in the version of the film I saw, dubbed into French). His absurd logic is expressed in a chauvinist proclamation: everyone can see her ass. And a few days later he acts on his ridiculous perceptions, forcing his daughter, Henriette (Erika Bók) to leave her employment without notice.

     In what might almost be seen as a kind of incestuous pride, he takes her to the cafe for a drink and, on the way home, using some of his personal savings, buys her a fur stole. The purchase is a ridiculous one, the thin robe of fur looking quite absurd around the neck of the horse-faced Henriette, but the act obviously helps to salve the years of silent abuse he has endured. His wife, quite understandably, insists he has lost his mind, that he is mad! But after all the abuses she hurls at him, it is clear in Swinton's silent facial frieze—a gesture only Tarr's patient (some describe it as "glacial") camera could capture—that her anger arises not only out of the foolishness of the act but a deep envy, a feeling of neglect for the years of cooking and serving and saving she has had to suffer. 

     At the heart of Maolin's anger and meaningless acts, we realize, is his growing sense of guilt, a feeling—reinforced by being trailed by one of the thieves, Brown—that he has gotten in over his head. Maolin may not yet understand the consequence of his acts, but he senses something amiss, suddenly, in his life. He has money that he dare not and, because it is in British pounds, cannot expend. The appearance of Inspector Morrison (István Lénárt), the man from London, further unsettles him. Having tracked down Brown, Morrison lays out his cards, explaining why they suspect him and offering him his freedom and two weekends of theater sales if he returns the money. Brown's answer is to slip from Morrison's watch, escaping into a world of hunger as he goes on the lam.

    Morrison's next step is to bring in Mrs. Brown, painfully explaining to her the situation, and encouraging her to play along as he concocts a story of her son's illness, hoping to lure Brown back to her and into his net. Szirtes tearful reaction to Morrison's revelations are one of the emotional highlights of this dark tale in which feelings are otherwise mostly hidden and bottled up.

      Overhearing much of these cafe conversations, Maolin is increasingly made uneasy, so much so that when the clever inspector pays him a visit at the train-tower, he is clearly ill at ease, setting a pot of hot water upon the burner where he had previously dried out the bills in order to steam the windows over as if to hide the view from which he has observed the crimes. The discovery of the body of Brown's cohort, however, can only further hint that there was something to be observed.

     In a sudden twist of the plot, Henriette reveals to him, back in their apartment, that a man has entered their oceanside storage hut; she has locked him in. Gathering a few provisions, wine, bread, etc., Maolin slowly trudges off to the hut, opening the lock and entering. Again Tarr does the unexpected. For several long minutes we hear little and see nothing. What is going on inside is left to our imaginations.

     When Maolin exits, he is short of breath. In the very next scene he appears before Morrison, the briefcase in hand, admitting to Brown's murder. Ordering the cafe owner to keep Mrs. Brown there, he and Maolin return to the hut, Brown's wife disobediently following.

     The film ends, as I have suggested, with both Brown's wife's and Maolin's rewards, along with his being given a clean slate. Neither openly accepts the money, as Morrison slips the bills into her purse and into his pocket. Both their faces remain blank as they stare off into a future that cannot free them from their own falls from grace.

     Tarr's study of the moral breakdown of order and society, along with the individual's involvement in that collapse cannot exactly be described as subtle, but, in its long visual manifestations of the turmoil of the inner soul suffering in such a world, is certainly powerful and cerebrally moving. That the film, time and again waylaid by individuals and corporations seemingly determined to see that it would never be shot, still evokes such a powerful message is almost a miracle. And if it is not quite up to the cinematic levels obtained by the director's Sátántango and Werckmeister Harmonies, it only reiterates how brilliant Tarr is as a filmmaker.

 

Los Angeles, April 24, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (April 2012).

Wayne Kramer | The Cooler / 2003

walking away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Hannah and Wayne Kramer (screenplay), Wayne Kramer (director) The Cooler / 2003

 

To describe Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) as a loser is to misunderstand the meaning of the word. In order to lose one has to have taken chances, failed in opportunities chosen. Lootz has let his drunken wife carry off his son and passively allowed himself to be involved in petty thievery, and finally been enveloped into the mob through his “friendship” with Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), who, to cure Bernie of gambling, has taken a baseball bat to Bernie’s knee, crippling him for life. Bernie’s life has so spiraled downward (the camera shows him “going down” the casino elevator at several points in the film) that he literally emanates failure, the perfect “gift” for a casino “cooler,” a man who, standing even a few feet from winners, immediately sours their luck, whether they are playing the machines or gambling with dice. In one of the first lines of the film a casino employee calls out: “Where’s Bernie, they’re killing us. Yeah, we need him right away.”

    

     Bernie, after having a cup of coffee—the creamer always seems to be empty when he seeks to add any richness to his drink—walks to the table and squelches the man’s luck.

     At his run-down motel studio apartment, the plants have died and his cat has run away. The neighbors keep him awake each night through sexual romps as they whoop out their pleasures and rhythmically beat out their sexual actions against the wall. Bernie is less a looser than a disaster; as Shelly later describes him, “Lootz is kryptonite on a stick,” an explosion waiting to happen.

     For those numerous critics, accordingly, who disliked this film because of being “pretty hokey,” they seem to miss the point. Despite Baldwin’s quite brilliant tough-guy Actor’s Studio-like performance, Kramer’s film is pure fantasy, having as much to do with reality as Las Vegas has to a suburban neighborhood. If the film seems, from time to time, to create a mood of film-noir, it is lit up with the lurid lighting of the Vegas strip. No need to look too deeply into the shadows cinematographer James Whitaker has created.

     Even Shelly, the loveable-hateable head honcho of decaying Shangri-La, is, as the smart young gang Ivy-leaguers who argue for a complete makeover of the casino, describe him, a museum piece, an old-timer who believes in the values of the original Las Vegas, presumably the personal bullying he, time and again, employs. No need for such an old-fashioned concept of a “cooler” for them, just paint the walls a mute color, make sure the servers are well-endowed, and play a musical score under which are woven the words: lose, lose, lose. They offer Shelley an architectural rendering of what they see as the new transformation, but Shelly believes that, behind his violent bullying is at least the hope of a truly mystical world of eternal pleasure—in return of which he takes in 135 million each year. His reaction to their kitschy vision of the new Shangri-La is predictable:

 

                     Kaplow: [about the Vegas strip] What? You mean that Disneyland

                           mookfest out there. Huh? Come on, you know what that is?

                           Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that

                           used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced

                           hooker with an exclusive clientele. Then along comes that Steve

                           Wynn cocksucker and knocks her up and puts her in a fucking

                           family way. Now she’s nothing but a cheap, fat whore hiding

                           behind too much fucking make-up. I look at her and see all her

                           fucking stretch marks, it makes me want to cry—because I

                           remember the way she used to be.

 

No matter how Satanic Shelly later becomes, you gotta love a man who thinks like that!

     We know, however, that, going against the current, as Shelly does, will ultimately mean his end. He, as several of the film’s characters later point out, is the real loser. Except for his inept gambling, Bernie never even tried and is even now appreciative of his friend’s brutal act.

     Yet Bernie, despite everything, still has hope, as deeply buried away as it may be. At the beginning of the movie, almost having paid off his gambling debt to Shelly, he is planning to simply “walk away,” to escape the world of no clocks or windows, the world where there is no time or place in which to live. Attracted to a young server, Natalie Belisario (Maria Bello), who at first understandably ignores his kindness, he is suddenly amazed by her interest in him. A sexual encounter is evidently his first in a very long time, and he can hardly believe his “luck.” He is startled to discover her still with him in the morning.

     The relationship between the two gradually begins to deepen, each amazed by the other’s gentleness and seemingly genuine feeling. The writers, however, give Bernie another hit on the head when his no-good son Mikey (Shawn Hatosy) and his lying girlfriend, Charlene (Estella Warren) suddenly show up, she pregnant and the couple without money.

   Always ready to play the smuck, Bernie gives them his only savings, $3,000, which they immediately play at a Shangri-La table. Surprisingly, they win, and Bernie’s attempt to cool them this time fails: he’s been having, as he tells Shelley, “on and off” days.

     To settle the situation, Shelly politely asks the couple up for a drink in his office, code, as Bernie knows, for the brutal attack in store for them. He has no choice but to intervene, as Shelley begins beating Mikey. When he reveals that the kid is his son, Shelly pounces, forcing him to pay hundreds of thousands for their lives and, simultaneously, indenturing Bernie to him for several more years. Bernie agrees to the ridiculous situation, but not before Shelley destroys both the boy’s knees and kicks the pregnant girlfriend in her stomach to reveal a pillow instead of a swollen womb.

 

    Bernie should have known, clearly, there is no way to simply “walk away.” Earlier in the film, the washed up lounge singer Buddy Stanford (Paul Sorvino), after getting his fix, describes to Shelly an animal show he has seen numerous times where the head lion, as he ages, his ousted by younger members of the pride, forcing him to go alone in the jungle and die. If only he could have known, Buddy whimpers, if only he could have walked away to die proudly. Knowing that the upper brass would have killed him, Shelly gives the drug addict a murderous dose, allowing him to leave without even knowing it. Yet there is clearly no way, once one is involved with the mob, of simply “walking off.”

     Despite Bernie’s new problems, however, he and Natalie grow closer, vowing their love to one another. When Natalie is distressed about her looks, Bernie responds: “Hey. You look in the mirror, you don’t like what you see, don’t believe it. Look in my eyes. I am the only mirror you’re ever gonna need. You look in my eyes, Nathalie.”

     As the days pass, so too does Bernie change. The costume designers describe how in the early scenes, Macy was dressed in overlarge sizes that were gradually replaced with more fitting outfits, shirts and ties of more appealing colors. Lighting and make-up gradually turn Bernie into a joyful being. Bernie smiles, almost sings to himself. He now has no effect whatsoever on winners. He is himself suddenly a winner in life. Even his cat returns.

      Noting the changes, Shelly calls in Nathalie, who reveals she has fallen in love with Bernie; he warns her away, and for a few hours she leaves, Bernie accepting the handwritten note with the tired forbearance he has greeted all else in his life. She soon returns, however, and his luck grows even stronger. Both are determined, despite their recognition of the near impossibility of the act, to walk away.

      A visit to Natalie by Shelly and his henchman, send her crashing into the mirror she was told by Bernie to ignore, badly cutting her face. When Bernie returns home, she reveals to him that she has been paid to be nice to Bernie, Shelly hoping to keep him in Vegas. Nathalie also admits, however, that she has truly fallen in love, handing over the $3,000 she has been paid by Shelley so that she and Bernie might go off together.

     Bernie pays a visit to Shelly to tell him of his plans, promising him to continue the payments, so honest is this now lucky man. Yet, Shelly makes clear to him that he will never get away, that if he walks he must die.

     As he is about to return to the waiting Natalie, Bernie suddenly decides to gamble with the money, staking everything, once more, on a game of luck. No longer a “cooler,” Bernie is suddenly hot. He wins, wins big, with Shelley forced to attempt the role as the cooler. Returning to Nathalie, Bernie drives off, quite literally, into the sunset. But some ways out of town he must stop, vomiting up all the fear he has swallowed and revealing to her their big winnings.

     If it is hard to perceive what Bernie has pulled off as a crime, one must remember that winning such amounts is, nonetheless, treated as a crime in world in which he and Natalie lived. A cop suddenly comes up to the car, orders them out, forces them to their knees and is about to shoot them dead, Shelly and his cronies waiting in a nearby car. Amazingly—one must remember that this film is pure fantasy—a drunken driver, passing by, crashes into both the waiting car and the cop, killing everyone except the doomed couple, who now truly can walk away.

     Back in Las Vegas, the Ivy-League mobster, Larry Sokolov, speaks: “Gentlemen, I want to thank you for your vote of confidence. As the new director of the casino operations I want to make a personal guarantee to each and every one of you that your investment in the Golden Shangri-La will be well looked after. The future looks very bright, gentleman. Very, very bright.”

     Crime has paid off, apparently, for everyone.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2012).