Jean-Luc Godard | À bout de soufflé (Breathless) / 1960

between grief and nothing

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (screenplay), Jean-Luc Godard (director) À bout de soufflé (Breathless) / 1960

 

I first saw Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking film À bout de soufflé (Breathless) sometime close to its original 1960 premiere, and then again several years later, before watching the Criterion 2007 release yesterday. Having watched the Turner Classics Movie showing of High Sierra just the day before, and re-viewing Out of the Past on TCM the same afternoon, I suppose it was inevitable that the Godard film had been waiting for just this moment on my Netflix queue, for it was perfect to see this faux noir between two of the best noirs of the 1940s.

       I must admit that the two previous times I’d seen the Godard film I was not exactly charmed by it; at the age of 13, and then about 10 years later, I was clearly not mature enough to comprehend how one might be able to find a chain-smoking, face-mugging, oddly comical, small-time punk murderer of a policeman as appealing or even intriguing in the way his young American girlfriend found him to be, and which, by extension, the film demanded of its audience as well! Taking advantage of every woman he knew and stealing every American car in sight, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) (also known, in an inside joke, as Laszlo Kovacs, a reference to Belmondo’s role in Claude Chabrol’s À double tour), Michel seemed to my younger self as a kind of “troubled adolescent” that I’d been warned to stay away from; James Dean seemed far more innocent. And, why, I kept thinking to myself, was this film so “chopped up,” filled with what I did not recognize at the time were Godard’s famed “jump cuts.”

  Michel’s gamin-like American girlfriend Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), although more recognizable, was equally puzzling. Although she seemed to have deeper concerns than her thoroughly attractive (although The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described him as “hypnotically ugly”) boyfriend—she is understandably worried about possibly being pregnant with Michel’s child, she reads and quotes one of my favorites, Faulkner, and she asks far more serious questions than her colleagues of the self-enchanted sexist writer, Parvulesco, played by Jean-Pierre Melville (enquiring “What is your greatest ambition in life?” and a question that seems to point to more serious roles for women than his focus on their love and faithfulness)—she admits, time and again, that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking. She often clowns with Michel as if her budding journalistic career meant little to her. She attends the Sorbonne, evidently, to keep the checks from home arriving on time. Although she occasionally spouts somewhat ponderous questions—via Faulkner’s The Wild Palms asking Michel whether he would choose “grief or nothing”—and posting great art works by Cezanne, Picasso, and Klee upon her walls, she seems inept at focusing on any one idea for long. One of the long-standing jokes of this film is her ineptness at speaking French, as she asks time and again for the definition of various French idioms: “Qu’est ce que c’esst ‘dégeulasse’?” (a bitch), “What’s a scumbag?” “What’s that mean ‘puke?’” “What does it mean ‘to make faces?’”—all of which, given our reading them as English subtitles, makes it appear, at moments, as if she does not understand English either.

      Although Patricia ultimately discovers that her lover is a murderer with a stolen car, and is married, she seems willing to go along with him just for the sheer excitement of events, a bit like Bonnie of the later Bonnie and Clyde, willing to take up with the madman simply to escape the more restrained life in which she is trapped. Yet the danger of that way of living, particularly given her restraints of family, language, and possible childbirth, is obviously apparent to her, as she informs on Michel (a role she previously found disgusting, while Michel has a more philosophical view of it all: “Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.”), claiming, that her call to the police is not about him but simply a test of her own love. Both figures are, indeed, ridiculously selfish beings. As Michel himself recalls it, “When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.” And, in the end, as film critic Roger Ebert puts it: “It is remarkable that the reviews of this movie do not describe her [Patricia] as a monster.”

      Perhaps it is because the real monster, as loveable as he may be, is Michel, who would take advantage of the devil if he could. Like so many American child-men, the French Michel is so completely taken up with his own image, his own imagination of being, that he cannot distinguish between reality and life. He is, as he longingly stares at a poster of Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall, a younger Bogart performing in his mind, rather than in the real streets of Marseilles and Paris, an imaginary scenario of living which begins when he addresses the cinema audience as he speeds through the French countryside. Finding a gun in the stolen car’s glove compartment, he takes it out and, like a child playing cops and robbers, mockingly pretends to shoot it at passing drivers before actually shooting bullets into the wilderness, and then, out of fear of being apprehended, actually shooting it into the chest of an investigating cop. For such a being, a child in the body of a grown man, he cannot separate fantasy from reality, and if his quirky behavior thereafter seems, at times, like a charming noir hero, they are, actually, as we quickly perceive, the actions of a terrified child, desperate for money, love, safety, and most importantly, sleep.

      Sleep is the one thing this wonderful film never permits its “heroes.” Even when Michel sneaks into the bed on his women acquaintances, they awaken him or attempt to throw him out. Since, as he jokingly quips, he only stays at the wealthy Claridge, which has no rooms available, he can find no place to sleep in the whole of France. The remarkable thing about Truffaut’s and Godard’s film (a film in which writing and directing truly share equal billing) is its almost constant revelation of motion as characters dress and undress, crawl across beds, curl up and couple under the covers, wander the streets, outrun the police, and literally hop, jump, and skip through space. As Patricia puts it: “It’s sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you’re sleeping together, you’re all alone.”

      Apparently Godard’s heavy use of jump-cuts was an accidental result of having to cut more than a half-an-hour from the final shoot. But the brilliance of these “chance” cuts are that the film spins us through time in a rhythm of leaps and hops as the two seemingly unexhausted children play out their lives in a kind of leonine prowl of the Paris streets, only to finally, in complete fatigue (the “breath’s end” of the original French title), curl up into death, helped along by the frumpy general inspector’s gun. The sleek lions of this world are doomed simply because, in the long night of their adventures, they have been unable to stop. The final long, lonely run down the rue Champagne-Premiere which ends in Michel’s collapse is ironically expressed by his reaching up to his own face in order to close his eyelids, an act that might be usually achieved by a lover or friend. Patricia, on the chase, reaches him, but stands like the policemen who have joined her as part of the phalanx of those who were emotionally, at least, dead already before the chase.

       Unlike Patricia, Michel has comprehended, by film’s end, who he truly is: “After all, I’m an asshole,” a man who clearly prefers “nothing” over “grief.”  Patricia will have to embrace the grief forever.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2013).  

Percy Aldon | Bagdad Café / 1987

a light in the sky

by Douglas Messerli

 

Percy Aldon (screenwriter and director) Bagdad Café / 1987

 

Despite my description of this film as being a “Romanization” of the US West, Percy Aldon’s comedy Bagdad Café begins in a kind of hell, a sad world in which the German couple visiting the U.S. Mojave desert play out the breakdown of their relationship before our eyes. The husband (Hans Stadbauer) is obviously a slob, a selfish man who is drunk in the middle of the desert. The wife, played brilliantly by Aldon’s earlier find, Marianne Sägebrecht—a plump, corseted woman who could only be found in Germany’s Bavaria—is frustrated by her husband’s boorish behavior, determining then and there to leave him, pulling her oversized suitcase from the trunk, and trudging ahead through the desert sands, as he goes spinning off down the highway.

     Miraculously, she finds her way to the only nearby stop, the Baghdad Café (in reality, the Sidewinder Café of Newberry Springs, California), where upon greeting the scowling and unfriendly face of the Café-gasoline stop’s owner, Brenda (a spirited C. C. H. Pounder)—who can hardly believe the sudden appearance of the overweight stranger—she faces what stands in for a Western stand-off, the viewer almost convinced that it is all a joke. Yet the German woman, Jasmin, offers payment in the form of traveler’s checks, and the transaction is culminated, not without some further doubts in Brenda’s unfathoming mind. It is not so much that the black truckstop owner is bigoted as she is completely out of her element, having never encountered a figure such as Jasmin before in her life. Similarly, Jasmin, who has obviously encountered flew blacks in her travels, is slightly terrified by the questioning sentinel who sits before her.

      What we soon realize is that the two women, despite the vast outward differences between them, share a great deal of psychological baggage. Brenda is about to send her ineffectual, child-like husband off, whereafter she will be forced, as she has already been, to keep up the café, care for her beloved but dangerous adventuresome daughter and her piano-playing son’s baby. Although the café has few customers at the moment, the night time truck drivers who stop for dinner, along with the café’s long-term residents, the ex-Hollywood painter Rudi Cox (Jack Palance) and an S&M inclined tattoo artist, Debbie (Christine Kaufmann) keep her more than a little busy.

 

   Just as Jasmin—who quickly discovers that the suitcase she has pulled from the car trunk contains not her clothes, but her husband’s—Brenda is on the verge of a breakdown, which her husband, Sal (G. Smokey Campbell) recounts for the film’s viewers as he watches her through binoculars. Even little things irritate her, the new guest’s attention to her Bach-playing son, Salomo (the musically gifted Darron Flagg), and Jasmin’s gentle friendship with Brenda’s daughter, Phyllis (Monica Calhoun). Finally, she explodes when she travels into town for a few hours for supplies, and Jasmin becomes determined to present her with a wonderful gift by completely cleaning up—and out—the mess of junk and paper that fills the chaotic gas-station office. Furious with the utter transformation, she demands that this German Hercules return all of her “shit” to this “Augean Stables.” The impossibility and ridiculousness of the task forces her to rethink her command as, with the compliments of passing customers and visitors, she suddenly is proud for the changes made in her life.

     Gradually, the two women begin to bond, Jasmin helping to serve dinners and, eventually performing magic tricks she has learned from the magic kit purchased by her husband she has found in his suitcase. Their sleight-of-hand robberies of their customer’s pockets and even hair-dos, along with their song-laced shows, accompanied by Salomo, bring the truckers in by the dozens; for the first time in her life Brenda’s café begins to make money and bring her fame. The buxomly Jasmin, meanwhile catches the eye of Rudi, who insists that he must “paint her,” gradually stripping away her corsets and crude attire to reveal her fecund flesh. The arrival of a handsome young man, Eric (Alain S. Craig), who posting his tent on their property, draws the attentions of Phyllis all help to transform the isolated hellhole where the film begin into a lively outpost, a world so full of life that the negative-spirited Debbie decides to decamp, insisting that the place has “too much harmony.”

      Aldon’s film turns from a depiction of a dry desert spot to a world of glorious sunsets, stunning neon displays and strange displays of light in the sky, some of these captured by the painter earlier in his stay (something similar to what had greeted the Aldon’s, as I mention above, when they first visited this spot, long before the making of the film). Relying on his friend, film designer Bernt Capra, Aldon gets the sense of this lonely yet lovely world exactly right.

 

     A visit from the local sheriff Arnie (native American Apesanahkwat) reveals that Jasmin’s visa has expired, and suddenly she is sent off from this rustic paradise to return to Germany. For a long period of the film, accordingly, things fall into stasis, as the sad citizens of this outpost are forced to simply wait day in and out, accompanied by the only sound to be heard, Eric’s boomerang, itself symbolic of the circular pattern of their days, but also, potentially, of return and resurrection. As the bartender Cahuenga (George Aguilar) tells truckers who ask “Where are the ladies?”: “Everyone has gone. They’ve all gone.”

      When Jasmin does finally return and the two women ceremonially hug in slow motion (one of the weakest moments of the film) in what is clearly now a fully developed commitment to sharing life, the movie, which has made nearly all its statements, turns highly sentimental, replaying the festive performances from earlier on, with even the local truckers (Gary Lee Davis and Ray Young) singing and dancing. On a particularly windy morning, Rudi knocks on Jasmin’s door as, within, she pretends to redress for modesty, before appearing in the nightgown in which she was first dressed. Entering her room, Rudi proposes marriage to the Bavarian woman, who insists that she will “talk it over” with Brenda, which we recognize will end in a marriage that will make certain that Jasmin will never be forced to leave again. We may not be overwhelmed by the melodramatic series of tropes played out in these last scenes, but we cannot dismiss the interlinking wail of Calliope’s performance of Bob Telson’s song, “Calling You,” a song so primal that the relationship between the characters of this film ultimately does seem pre-determined if not predestined.

      If Bagdad Café is highly unbelievable, it is still a highly satisfying romance.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).

Wim Wenders | Paris, Texas / 1984

always running

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Shepard (screenplay, as adapted by L. M. Kit Carson), Wim Wenders (director) Paris, Texas / 1984

 

Out of nowhere, a bearded man shows up in the middle of a South Texas desert, a parched land of no water, the man himself clearly also suffering from dehydration, as, upon swallowing a handful of ice cubs in a desert bar, he suddenly falls into a coma. A doctor is called, but the patient, Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) refuses to speak. The shady doctor finds a telephone number among his possessions and calls the number, which turns out to be the phone of Travis’s brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), who lives in the Los Angeles suburbs. Walt agrees to retrieve his brother, but when, after an air flight and a long car drive to the isolated location, he discovers his brother has disappeared. Travis’ few possessions are returned to him—after the doctor shakes him down for money—and Walt proceeds, discovering his brother a few miles away. At first Travis will barely recognize him, but soon gets into the car, as his younger brother moves forward, stopping for the night by a nearby motel. Hardly has he had the time to pick up some necessary groceries and a change of clothes for his grubby sibling than Travis has escaped again. This time, when he catches up with Travis, Walt demands some communication, some explanation. But Travis remains silent until finally, with a small photo in hand, he speaks one word: “Paris.” Startled, Walt attempts to grasp what Travis means, but is again faced with the one word Paris: Can we go to Paris? asks Travis. That would sort of be out the way, Walt answers, until he discovers that his brother does not mean Paris, France, but Paris, Texas, a place where, so his father has suggested, Travis was conceived. Years earlier Travis has brought a plot of land in Paris, hoping to one day go there and establish a home.

      The pair move forward in a space in which, through its garish colors and camera focus on various elements takes us quickly from the physiological interplay of the two figures into what I have described as a kind of romanticized world of American detritus, things destroyed, leftover, reconstituted; the Wikipedia page on the film nicely summarizes the images of this first quarter of the film:  

 

               The first shot is a bird's eye-view of the desert, a bleak, dry, alien landscape.

               Shots follow of old advertisement billboards, placards, graffiti, rusty iron

               carcasses, old railway lines, neon signs, motels, seemingly never-ending roads.

 

     Although, at certain point in the voyage, Walt attempts to catch another plane with Travis back home, before it has even gotten off the ground, the two are seen exciting. Like a child, Travis cannot abide a flight, and when they attempt to rent another car, he insists that they have the very same car as before.

 

     When they finally reach the Henderson home, Travis is invited into the family, introduced to his own son, Hunter (Hunter Carson)—who they have adopted now for four years—as his true father is graciously accepted by Walt’s French-wife, Anne (Aurore Clément) with gentle hugs and kisses. At first, nonetheless, everything is quite uncomfortable. Travis does not sleep at nights and eats little; the child, even if somewhat interested in this “second” father, is clearly annoyed by his presence; and the couple is fearful of what Travis’ return may mean to their own lives, particularly since they have completely bonded with and love their “son.”

      Although their home, in a fairly wealthy suburb, is quite pleasant, Wenders poses Travis as a night wanderer crossing freeway bridges underneath which the traffic rushes in and out of the great city nearby. Although he occasionally contemplates the natural beauty of the house and its neighborhood, it is also clear that Travis’ mind is busy contemplating more travels, a wandering that might never end.

      Gradually, we begin to uncover some brief elements of Travis’ past, including his deep love with his wife, Hunter’s mother, Jane (the always stunning Nastassja Kinski). We see Travis, Jane, Hunter, Walt and Anne enjoying a day together at a beach in an old, home-made movie, which Walt forces upon Hunter so that he might remember Travis better. But we still cannot comprehend the clearly horrific ending of that relationship which sends Travis to Mexico and Jane into disappearance, with the only the child finding a new anchor.

 

      The vagueness and secrecy of at least the first half of this rather long movie, tends to keep its audience away from the characters themselves—they are simply too fragmented and unknowable to allow us entry—and to once more posit meaning in the physical world around them. Exotic plants, cars, schools, buses, billboards (significantly, Walt is a billboard designer) seem to matter more than the characters themselves, which, despite the specificity of the objects, turns Wenders film increasingly into a kind of abstract study of the relationship between lonely people and the space they inhabit, which also further takes his film into the territory of a romance—almost like a cowboy version of Tristan and Isolde, except that here eros has already arrived, destroyed, and left, leaving behind only a vortex of nostalgia and, perhaps, a possibility of rectifying elements of that violent disruption.

      Without clear explication, Wenders and Shepard draw the characters closer, particularly Travis and his son, so that the boy soon agrees to return to the maelstrom with his father to seek out the boy’s mother, whom Anne has told him has opened a savings account in a Houston bank in Hunter’s name.

      The voyage back, accordingly, becomes a kind a mythic journey by Orpheus into Hades to bring back Eurydice, only here the Orpheusian figures, Travis and Hunter, play no instruments except a walkie-talkie in which they humorously communicate only a few feet from one another. They track-down Eurydice (Jane) in downtown Houston as she makes a drive-in deposit, following her through heavy traffic to her real Hades, a large striptease club. Here she sits in a room, unable to see her customers, as they tell her their stories, demand theatrical sexual and sometimes nude performances of her. But Eros clearly has nothing to do with these interchanges; the management strictly forbids any real-life encounter with the customers.

     Leaving Hunter in the truck, Travis enters this suburban Texas Hell, as he learns the “ropes,” so to speak, perceiving that the performers cannot see him, and discovering that he will be permitted to simply talk instead of engaging in sexual theatricalities. Checking into a downtown Houston hotel, where he leaves Hunter with a pre-corded tape telling him of his love for him but also about his soon-to-be disappearance, Travis returns to the club, asking for Jane, and, turning away from her, just as the myth requires, retells the story of their love, his growing jealousy, alcoholism, and the increasing violence of their relationship that finally explodes into a fire which she has set before escaping him with Hunter. In part, it is Travis’ long tale that represents his musical talents, the carefully voiced tale of love, joy, failure, and self-destruction.

     Jane, in turn, demands that she see him, as she explains how, long after they had broken up, she had continued speaking with him, conversing with him even in his absence, until finally, as she puts it, “Then…it slowly faded. I couldn’t picture you anymore. I tried to talk out loud to you like I used to, but there was nothing there. I couldn't hear you. Then...I just gave it up. Everything stopped. You just...disappeared. And now I'm working here. I hear your voice all the time. Every man has your voice." 

      By becoming “everyone,” of course, Travis has become a no one, the fact which, were he attempt to return to Jane he knows would ultimately destroy both him and her. Accordingly, he tells her where to find Hunter, and leaves the club, only to watch from a long distance as the two come together, hug, and bond as mother and son, sharing the same texture and color of hair, hug within the frame of window.

 

     Below Travis drags himself away, perhaps to be ripped to pieces as the Orpheus of the myth, but at least knowing that he has sacrificed his own desires for the protection and love of his son, even if, as he states in the film, he will be “always running.”

      The only problem with Wenders film is that it leaves as many uneasy questions as engaging solutions. Although Jane has, so she claims, left Hunter because she knew she could not “give him what he needed,” can she now, as a tawdry strip-tease artist offer him a meaningful home life? Mightn’t he be better off with the loving Walt and Anne, even though, given Walt’s intense-living chain-smoking lifestyle, we can foresee problems ahead?  What can she now offer Hunter from her Hades-bound rock that she might have not been able to earlier? And from this perspective, the last scene of the film seems more filled with sentiment that with true resolution.

      Finally, it is hard to imagine, at times, that such a well-adjusted and beautiful child such as Hunter, particularly given his tempestuous background, might even exist. Oh well, Wenders’ work, after all, is a romance. Such a “happy” ending perhaps is necessary.

      Certainly Hunter, the son of actress Karen Black and the screenplay adaptor of this film, L. M. Kit Carson, is one of the wonders of Wenders’ film, a charming figure who quite literarily helps all of the film’s figures cohere. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Hunter has gone on to direct films.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2014).  

Jules Dassin | Night and the City / 1950

on the run

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jo Eisinger (screenplay, based on a novel by Gerald Kersh), Jules Dassin (director) Night and the City / 1950

 

Jules Dassin’s noir nightmare, Night and the City, begins with a scene in which the film’s central figure, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)—it would be difficult to describe him as the “hero”—running through the dark city streets, stopping just long enough among bu what seem to be the ruins of a metropolis to catch his breath, before speeding away once again. Finally, temporarily outwitting his pursuer, Fabian drops in to his girlfriend, Mary Bristol’s (Gene Tierney) flat. Although the door is open, she’s nowhere to be found, which doesn’t stop the thug from entering and, a few minutes later, riffling through Mary’s purse. She discovers him in the act: “Harry, you won’t find any money there.”

     In those few early minutes we get the gist of the whole story. Fabian is a punk, a would-be dreamer constantly running into the lure of pipe dreams while running away from his debtors. This time he tries to convince Mary—a beautiful club singer who inexplicably is in love with the sleazy Fabian—that he just needs a few quid to buy a dog track, a half lie, since he really needs the money to pay off an overdue debt which has necessitated his race through the London streets. He may also want to get money to pursue his newest scheme, but it doesn’t matter: Harry Fabian will never get ahead of his own past.

     Dassin sets up the whole story by having Mary try to convince him to give up his vain attempts, as he puts it, to “be somebody,” wishing that he might settle down to become just an ordinary man who might work just as hard as Fabian has on everyday pursuits. We immediately sense, however, that her request is like asking Fabian to be a real human being. As it is, Fabian is a phantom of his imagination. His charm, if he has any, exists completely in his ridiculous schemes to get rich. He’s a born con-man, wheezing out the foul air of his hallucinated dreams.

     So too is Dassin’s whole film a kind of hallucination, an over the top presentation of outrageously nasty underground gangsters such as Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), owner of the Silver Fox Club; Kristo (Herbert Lom), who controls the fighting scene of London; and Figler, King of the Beggars (James Hayter), a figure right out of The Threepenny Opera, along with their molls, in particular Helen Nosseross (in a wonderful performance by Googie Withers), who puts up with her husband with hopes he’ll soon drop dead, and their soldiers, Fergus Chilk (Aubrey Dexter), who works as Kristo’s lawyer, and Fabian himself, whose everyday job is to bring in wealthy, unsuspecting travelers and tourists into Nosseross’s club. Other than Mary, who performs at the Silver Fox, the only wholesome figure in the entire film is Adam Dunne (Hugh Marlowe), Mary’s likeable if somewhat emasculated neighbor. He begins the film by unsuccessfully attempt to boil pasta, an act, even if a failure, that is unimaginable for any other male in this movie, but just possibly may have won her heart by film’s end.  

      While attending one of Kristo’s wrestling matches—you know, the kind with everyone dramatically leaping upon their opponent’s prone bodies, sometimes two at a time—Fabian overhears a conversation between Kristo’s formerly famous Greco-Roman wrestling father, Gregorius the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko) and Nikolas of Athens (Ken Richmond), and up-and-coming Greco-Roman wrestler taught by Gregorius. What’s clear from the conversation that Fabian overhears is that Gregorius is not at all happy with the kind of wrestling his son is promoting, declaring that he is about to return to Greece with Nikolas in tow. Suddenly, the constantly plotting Fabian has a new scheme: sign Gregorius and his wrestler and create a new sensation that will set him up as the king of the London wrestling scene. Forget that Londoners are not at all interested in the old style, fair-playing wrestling, Fabian’s dreams are always too big for reality. And it’s that sad fact that makes Windmark as Fabian so thoroughly watchable and, yes, just a little, loveable. As Mary and even Helen perceive, he’s not only a truly hard worker, but is an inveterate dreamer; if only he could wrap his mind around a plausible and agreeable task! Unfortunately—or fortunately for the sake of the movie—that’s out the question. And once Fabian wraps his mind around a project, there’s little he won’t do to make it happen. That it’s doomed is precisely what makes him so fascinating as a little man fighting against all odds.

    In this case, Fabian must not only raise enough money to pay Gregorius and Nikolas’ opponent, but must raise the money to pay for an available venue. Apparently there’s no one left in London willing to loan him a farthing, and Nosseros not only dismisses his project but laughingly mocks it. Out of the shadows come Helen Nosseros, with whom Fabian has apparently had a long affair: having sold off a silver fox fur her husband has just awarded her for her faithfulness and hard work as his club’s manager; Helen is willing to hand over her money to Fabian if he will buy her the license she needs to open a new club—without her husband’s knowledge, since she’s determined to leave him. Helen, it appears, made of the same stuff as Fabian, is also a schemer-dreamer, only with a bit more down-to-earth perspective; in fact, given her success with at the Silver Fox, she would certainly succeed—if only Fabian weren’t involved, who quickly uses her money to match a mockingly proffered equal sum by Nosseros, paying off Gregorius and setting up an office, as a legitimate wrestling promoter. The most touching scene of the film, surely, is Fabian’s receipt of a purchased lamp whose base declares, in gold letters, his new position, an object he strokes with more love than he could offer any woman.

     He mollifies Helen with a false permit.

    But how is Fabian going to get around Kristo? Well, he is clever, and having Kristo’s father in his pocket doesn’t hurt. But Kristo still outwits Harry by forcing Nosseros to demand that he’ll continue to support Fabian only if Nikolas wrestles a local figure, The Strangler (Mike Mazurki) in the manner popular in his own rings. To win over the purist Gregorius, he sets up The Strangler to a bullying challenge for Nikolas to a fight. It works, and the fight is on.

     But The Strangler, an utterly stupid bloke, can’t stop his badgering of Gregorius and his disciple. The two get into a war of words that ends in a terrifying fight between them, each employing his own style to try to do in the other—The Strangler slugging his opponent like a crooked boxer, while Gregorius traditionally holds the younger man in a vise-like bear hug. While Gregorius wins, his heart is not only spiritually, but quite literally broken, as he dies in his distraught son’s arms.

     Fabian knows the price he must now pay—Kristo immediately offers a £1,000 bounty—and he is again on the run. This time not only will no one help him, but all are ready to kill him or sell him out. For a moment or two Fabian takes a rest in Figler’s place, only to realize that the Beggar King has already made a call to Kristo: “How much you sellin’ me for?” he asks, on the verge of another breathless escape. Only the black market boat-residing Anna O’Leary is willing to let him rest for a few moments before Mary, catching up with her lover, tries to intercede, insisting that he needs to leave the city. A few minutes later, however, Kristo and his gang have tracked him down, and, as Mary turns to leave, Fabian—who even now cannot resist another scheme—shouts out against his former lover, blaming her for his capture in the hopes that Kristo will award her the bounty money. Mary drops to the sidewalk in despair; she has told him earlier in the movie that not only is he killing himself, but killing her in the process. The Strangler grabs the punk, and living up to his name, breaks his neck, tossing Fabian’s body into the Thames—while Kristo stands on a high bridge above observing the final crucifixion of the man who spent his own life trying to become somebody he could never be.

     A few scenes earlier, after discovering Fabian’s treachery and being forced to return home to her husband, Helen Nosseros discovers he has killed himself, leaving the club and his money to Molly the Flower Seller (Ada Reeve). If she’s still standing, she is no more alive, it is clear, than Fabian. This is a world that has no room for dreamers.

     At least in Hollywood. Evidently the ending in England was a bit more upbeat, so maybe there are still Fabian-like figures haunting the foggy London alleys.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2014).