Screenplay : Peter Everett (based on his novel), Roger Lowry

Cast: Peter McEnery, Diane Cilento, Glenda Jackson

Curse You, Red Baron!

Walt Mundkowsky

Faithful to Peter Everett’s novel, Negatives (Continental) is curiously depressing. (Fifty-one years later, I would regard that as high praise!) The promising central idea clicks only in spots, i.e., when Glenda Jackson commands the moment. It remains a superficial piece of work and yet, and yet.

Negatives tells the story of Theo (Peter McEnery) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson), an unmarried couple who live above the “antiques and second hand furniture” shop owned by Theo’s dying father (Maurice Denham). The couple act out elaborate fantasies as Dr. Crippen, a wife-murderer, and Ethel Le Neve (his mistress) or Belle Elmore (his wife). Vivian is the dominant one, deciding on the game to be played and constantly ridiculing Theo. (“You look ludicrous when you make love, you know that? Such kissing and fondling, such heavy sentiments!”) Their relationship is based on role-playing. (“If we didn’t play a little, we’d have nothing to say to each other,” Vivien offers. “We go on and on. You bore me and I bore you, don’t I?”)

Into this arena comes Reingard, a German photographer (Diane Cilento). “You and the woman have certain … possibilities,” she tells Theo. “She reminds me of a friend I had in Rome once.” Reingard has been watching their games. (“It was like something you’d see in an old silent movie,” she says.) She tries to interest Theo in a new role. (“You are the absolute image of Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen.”) “Anybody can look like a murderer,” she taunts him. Reingard eventually moves in with Theo and Vivien. (“I’m sure that we will all get on very well together. Ja?”) She understands their craving for games much better than they do — “Anybody can be anything on the right kind of day.” Theo and Vivien accept her so completely that she is allowed to photograph them as they play out their roles. Reingard cuts Theo’s hair to make him resemble von Richthofen. “What the hell have you done to your hair?” Vivien asks him. “I cut it last night,” Reingard says. “Don’t you think it looks splendid?” “No, I think it looks bloody ridiculous.”

Vivien senses that she is losing Theo, but is powerless to stop him. After his father dies Theo burns the clothes he wore as Crippen. He then buys an old Tiger Moth plane and transforms it into a facsimile of von Richthofen’s celebrated aircraft. (“You are mad!” Vivien screams at him.) She orders Reingard out (“Bloody German cow!”) and attacks the plane in a fit of anger. Theo knocks her unconscious and she is taken to hospital — a fatal blow for the movie. Now alone, Theo climbs into the cockpit of his plane and imagines von Richthofen’s final dogfight. He appears to suffer a brain hemorrhage, and the film closes with Theo in the same position as the dead von Richthofen, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

As novelist Everett wrote the screenplay, most problems are common to both. The book is almost entirely in the present tense. Very self-conscious, but contributing to the novel’s remarkable photographic quality, recalling Robbe-Grillet’s dictum, “An image is always in the present.” Everett isn’t operating on that level yet; I miss what by design isn’t there.

The dialogue (by Everett and Roger Lowry) has a bad case of the Harold Pinters. In 1961 Kenneth Tynan wrote, “Mr. Pinter has a whole school of dramatists speaking in his very accents; his is the new small talk, and very small, on lips stiffer than his, it can sound.” Negatives is a prime example of what Tynan meant. The speech sounds like something Pinter might have written (“We both knew it would come to that sooner or later. Did they tell you when they’re going to do it? — Next Friday. — One week … one week.”), but it rarely carries any great dramatic charge. Pinter’s dialogue is highly patterned; in Negatives it’s stilted and tiresome.

Considering the dialogue, the acting is quite good. Glenda Jackson shines as Vivien; what interest the movie has can be traced to her performance. Her Charlotte Corday in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Marat/Sade was shattering. But sensational work so early in a career can derail it; I feared Ms. Jackson would spend the rest of her life doing catatonics and spastics. Happily, Negatives destroys that anxiety. She has placed her immense vocal authority and blazing sexuality to a different end. Vivien emerges as a scary real person, destructive and lonely. Her attempt to persuade Theo to return to her and the games they knew is moving. “Listen — maybe we could buy another bottle and get drunk … just you and I … alone … together.”

Peter McEnery is never downright bad as Theo, but he cannot fit the various sides of his performance together — fairly convincing in the scenes with his father, as Crippen, and as von Richthofen, but those aspects of the character remain separate. The touch of evil necessary to make Reingard gripping seems beyond Diane Cilento. Maurice Denham is superb as Theo’s ailing father.

Nothing much can be said about Peter Medak’s direction; he has brought Everett’s world to life with some consistency. The material does not appear to have extended him. Maybe his pretensions are like Everett’s — a tendency towards artiness and excessive technical ornamentation.

Subtlety would be out of place in Ken Hodges’ Eastmancolor camerawork here, but he does achieve some surprising color contrasts and juxtapositions. If Barry Vince’s staccato editing were less determined to kick us in the teeth with each cut, this film would move more steadily. Blame the general exhibitionism of the whole project. The music is a contract job unworthy of Basil Kirchin, but the pervasive rot it generates is most effective.

Negatives can be viewed via No-Frills Theater on YouTube. Not a pristine print.

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Directed by

Writing Credits: Nicholas St. John

Cinematography by: Ken Kelsch

Music by: Joe Delia

Cast: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco,  Michael Imperioli

Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction – A Look Back

By Walt Mundkowsky

The Addiction (1995) is the most stringent product of director Abel Ferrara’s current manner — a highly original morality play about guilt and redemption.

Kathleen Conklin is a Ph.D. candidate at NYU’s school of philosophy. One night she is accosted by a sleek female vampire and hurled down a flight of stairs. “Look at me and tell me to go away,” her attacker taunts. “Don’t ask … tell me.” When her assault is completed, she calls Kathleen her collaborator. After periods of shocking illness, Kathleen takes to the vampire trade, at first extracting her victims’ blood with a syringe. (To her the blood is insignificant — “It’s the violence of my will against theirs.”) As her hunger grows, no one she meets is safe. Eventually she encounters Peina, a veteran vampire who has his habit under control. His grand contempt and self-amused pronouncements are a crucial stop along Kathleen’s path to enlightenment. “Please help me,” she begs. “I’m not that person, believe me,” he purrs, turning her out.

Ferrara and his customary screenwriter Nicholas St. John haven’t much interest in the vampire myth — there’s plenty of blood, but nary a fang in sight. Vampirism stands in for the addiction to absolutes, and to disaster itself. Once she has been infected, Kathleen taps an order of experience that mocks both the philosophers she studies and her victims. In the library (no longer the repository of civilized values) she thinks, “This is a graveyard — rows of crumbling tombstones, vicious libelous epitaphs.” Where her bravado cracks, one glimpses a soul in mourning. She covers the mirrors in her flat because (a nice twist of the knife) her crushing guilt makes her own image unbearable. The obligatory vampire orgy leaves her not triumphant but ready for death (or rebirth), sickened by so much blood.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Ferrara film without a few indecent-to-objectionable jabs — here, documentary shots of rows of corpses from My Lai, the Nazi death camps and the former Yugoslavia. Taste aside, this overkill violates the scale of the narrative, and contributes virtually nothing. Even so, Ferrara’s tenth feature is his best-directed yet. His typically gritty thrust is everywhere apparent; so is a new desire for carefully shaded dynamics. Keen touches abound: the surprising use of rap music, or the way Peina and Kathleen are prevented from appearing in the same shot as he strips her of her defenses. The black-and-white cinematography of Ken Kelsch (another longtime Ferrara team member) works the boundary between wakefulness and dream, stunningly framed and lit but never fussed over.

Lili Taylor has been giving excitingly inventive performances for years, but the part of Kathleen is a feast for her and her admirers. She has essayed spiritual rapture before, in Household Saints (1993). But one also gets gleaming sardonic wit, tossed-off erudition, power supported by tissue-thin fragility, and physical suffering so vivid as to leave one gasping.

If Christopher Walken is a little too perfect for Peina, he doesn’t coast on obvious attributes; his urgency implies that the character has been waiting a lifetime to impart what he knows. Edie Falco is flinty and touchingly steadfast as Kathleen’s best friend. And Annabella Sciorra cuts a stylish swath as the original assailant. Lean and chillingly mean, it’s hard to credit this persona to the actress first seen in True Love (1989).

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Director

Writers:

Laird Koenig… (story)

Denne Bart Petitclerc … (adaptation) &

William Roberts … (adaptation) &

Lawrence Roman … (adaptation)

Gerald Devriès … (dialogue) (as Gerald Devries)

Cinematography: Henri Alekan

Music: Maurice Jarre

Stars: Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Toshirô Mifune, Alain Delon, Capucine

Red Sun

By Walt Mundkowsky

Terence Young is a moderately skillful Englishman who keeps laboring away at the action thriller, always with less than satisfying results. His three Bond pictures (Doctor No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball) had barely an atom of personality, and it would be charitable to describe The Poppy Is Also a Flower and Triple Cross as mediocre. The finale of Wait Until Dark got suitably scary but the whole lacked what marks the best of its type, that sense of pushing us into horror and permitting no escape; its structure was slack enough for the gaps in logic to show. Young tried his hand outside his usual range: In his remake of Mayerling, the costumes and furnishings upstaged the actors; The Christmas Tree was an inept tearjerker. Red Sun (National General) puts him back on familiar ground — an amiable, bloated Western you would probably not hate yourself in the morning for seeing.

The plot doesn’t bend over backwards to be credible, but any excuse for fitting Toshiro Mifune into a Western is a good one. A gang of outlaws attacks a train which happens to be carrying the Japanese ambassador and his two samurai bodyguards. Gauche (Alain Delon), the leader of the bandits, takes a ceremonial sword intended as a gift for the President and shoots one of the samurai. Kuroda (Mifune), the remaining bodyguard, is given seven days to recover the sword; if he fails, he and the ambassador must commit hara-kiri. Kuroda and Link (Charles Bronson), a gunfighter Gauche has doublecrossed, are forced by circumstances into a curious, mutually distasteful arrangement. Link knows the terrain; if he tries to leave, Kuroda will kill him. Kuroda views the hunt as a matter of honor — to regain the sword and kill the man who murdered his friend, not necessarily in that order. Link is interested only in the money. If you have seen as many as five Westerns, the resolution of the story should not surprise you.

The main problems in Red Sun involve its air of expense and respectability. The quirky tone of the better Italian Westerns, a mixture of wide-eyed, childlike awe at the Western conventions and an awareness of their essential silliness, would help this film. Red Sun would be more engaging if it seemed to realize how mechanical and absurd it is; it has no pretensions to seriousness, but it does take itself seriously. And it passes up very few clichés. The two enemies sworn to kill each other who band together to fight off the Indians, the spunky heroine who is captured by the savages, the adversaries who gradually come to respect each other — they’re all here, and more.

Given the apparent budget, some of the film’s technical aspects disappoint. The pacing is dreadful, numerous scenes are padded shamelessly, and the editing of the final battle is both conventional and confusing. The Technicolor work of Henri Alekan (who shot Cocteau’s poetic Beauty and the Beast in 1946) is uneven, but the palette is nicely understated. One would have to be extremely dull not to appreciate the contrasts and wit in the characters’ costumes — the heroine’s carefully torn pink shirt and dark red pants, Kuroda’s steel-blue kimono, Gauche’s classic white shirt / black suit gambler’s attire. Maurice Jarre’s music is a ghastly reminder of the symphonic slush that was used for Westerns in the pre-Morricone days.

Despite these flaws and others, Red Sun is more or less enjoyable because of the actors. Mifune’s glowering samurai portrayal is justly famous, but I’m of two minds about it. He is splendidly versatile, but has been asked for the same thing too often; yet because of the pitiful foreign film distribution over here, we aren’t able to see him nearly often enough. So I am glad Red Sun exists, even though Mifune does nothing in it he hasn’t done to greater point and impact on his home ground. The swordfighting moves he executes are exciting, as always, with their choreographic grace and explosiveness. Likewise, Bronson’s roguish opportunist is old hat for him; he and Mifune combine most amusingly, and the movie is at its best when it depends on the interplay between their contrasting performances.

Delon is often ill at ease outside gangster (or cop) roles, and compared to what Mifune and Bronson provide here, his blue-eyed menace comes up short — not in the same weight class. With the stylish Perfect Friday and this film, Ursula Andress projects some conviction in front of the camera; a charming comic style appears within reach. As the gorgeous prostitute who switches teams, she never does anything to embarrass the others.

Red Sun doesn’t wind up close to Important (it’s also rather tone-deaf in 1971 terms), but its journey has undeniable attractions and pleasures.

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Writing Credits: Shirow Masamune (based on the manga by) (as Masamune Shirow)

Screenplay: Kazunori Itô

Music: Kenji Kawai

Cinematography: Hisao Shirai

Film Editing:  Shûichi Kakesu

Production Design: Takashi Watabe

Art Direction:  Hiromasa Ogura

Art Department: Makiko Kojima  (ink and paint)

Special Effects: Mutsu Murakami

Cast: Atsuko Tanaka, Iemasa Kayumi, Akio Ôtsuka

Ghost in the Shell (GitS) 1995

Walt Mundkowsky

(Mostly written 1996-1997)

Mamoru Oshii’s feature-length Ghost in the Shell beckons for relevance: Original title was Kôkaku Kidôtai (Man-Machine Interface) — my own computer battleground in the past two weeks!

The anime thriller Ghost in the Shell (1995) scarcely needs my advocacy, having sold more than 200,000 copies in the U.S. since last summer. Still, I’m not convinced that everyone who could be receptive knows about it. This tale of a resolute cyborg heroine represents a solid advance over previous genre examples, both in its execution and thoughtful dilemmas.

“Major” Motoko Kusanagi is a top cop at Section 9 (State Security). In addition to superhuman physical prowess, she can tap into any computer network via a quartet of terminals in her neck. For all this augmentation, her titanium shell, or skull, retains her original “ghost” — the locus of memory and intuition that provides human individuality. With her squadmates Bateau (a much-altered veteran) and Togusa (a recent transfer from the regular police), Motoko is investigating a lengendary hacker called the Puppet Master. (He manipulates unsuspecting citizens by planting false information in their ghosts.) As the complex plot spirals into overdrive, the Puppet Master is seen trying to break away from his master, the scheming Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While Motoko prepares to “dive” into his program, she is the object of the Puppet Master’s own search.

Unflinching in action, Motoko is beset by private qualms about her identity. “When I float weightless back to the surface,” she tells Bateau of her passion for scuba diving, “I imagine I’m becoming someone else.” Her tough interrogation of one of the Puppet Master’s ghost-hacked minions (“Don’t you have any happy childhood memories? Don’t you even know who you are?”) eventually turns into self-doubt. The Puppet Master himself, “a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information,” has meanwhile generated his own ghost. He applies to Section 9 for political asylum, even though he has no permanent body.

Just as sophisticated is the attitude toward technology; the usual either / or extremes — blind acceptance and paranoia — are surpassed in a single leap. Early on Motoko explains to Togusa how vital his human presence is to the unit’s success, that if all parts of the whole react in the same way, “you breed in weakness.” The Puppet Master elaborates this theme, stating that mere copies cannot perpetuate his line because “copies do not give rise to variety and originality.” His desire to merge with Motoko is coldly conceptual on its face, but it speaks the language of love: “We will both undergo change, but there is nothing for either of us to lose.” (She isn’t convinced.) Here the movie eases onto the rim of the mystical, opening new areas for examination.

It’s easy to lose oneself in the detailed, energetic drawing and cohesive blue-centered color scheme. (The lovingly rendered reflections in puddles should enchant Ridley Scott.) Smashing combat scenes aren’t unexpected, given director Mamoru Oshii’s past work (Patlabor 1 and 2). I’d rather point to the freshly conceived casual gestures — Motoko flicking the sleep from her eyes and struggling into her jacket, clamping on her body armor while talking, or sweeping back her wet hair as she emerges from a sea dive. Oshii’s dynamic framing and crisp cutting vanquish anime’s frequent flatness of image. The shots of Motoko’s chopper among the ice-blue skyscrapers at night constitute the closest brush with Blade Runner, but emotional gravity is much more specifically tied to character here.

The rejection of routine extends to Kenji Kawai’s music, which left some unhappy. It underlines Kusanagi’s fragility more than it celebrates her skills, but the film’s legion of admirers should have the CD, for when they want to isolate the plaintive, trance-like sounds from the pictures.

Kawai’s melancholy textures could seem wrong — a static procession of drum strokes, bells, chimes and synth effects, but in fact the transparent scoring never clogs the combat and assists the contemplative side immeasurably. (The opening montage of Motoko’s cyborg body being made gets an ancient Japanese marriage ceremonial as soundtrack.) CD tracks follow the order on film, keeping the most riveting stuff together — “Nightstalker” (a biwa melody over synth strings) is the Major’s poignant chopper ride, ending at “Floating Museum” for the climactic battle. A soaring solo vocal covers her heroism. Top-drawer sound for the time (each note emerging from silence) matters.

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Directed by

Screenplay:

Steve MacManus  … (story “SHOK!”) and

Kevin O’Neill … (story “SHOK!”)

Richard Stanley … (written by)

Michael Fallon … (additional dialogue)

Cinematography: Steven Chivers

Editing: Derek Trigg

Music: Simon Boswell

Art Direction: Max Gottlieb

Cast: Carl McCoy, Dylan McDermott, Iggy Pop, John Lynch, Stacey Travis

Richard Stanley’s “Hardware”

By Walt Mundkowsky

(Seen twice first run at a multiplex, and more ideally later.)

For the young filmmaker with a music-video past and large aspirations, sci-fi horror can represent fertile ground. Narrative logic makes minimal demands, while extravagant style and pop nihilism are granted a prominence the mainstream denies. Richard Stanley’s ferociously effective Hardware (1990) was shot almost entirely on a single set for a meager $1.5 million; under its required elements, it fairly bursts with attitude.

Like the murderous robot at its center, the movie gathers debris from the past to produce energy and fulfill its mission. In a blasted post-nuke landscape, it’s Christmas Eve and 110 degrees. Mo has been away for several months. He buys an android head from a scavenger, as a present for his artist girlfriend Jill. (“It’s horrible,” she says. “I love it. What is it?”) The head fabricates a body out of the scrap metal Jill welds into sculptures, and it drains the apartment’s power source. At this point the film and its killing machine become one — relentless, self-renewing, savage. Jill’s final stab at a solution combines computer skills and low-tech vengeance.

Most of these building blocks are endearingly familiar. The killer ’droid is the Terminator reduced to essentials. The ecological nightmare and Oriental refugees come from Blade Runner, and the desert scenes from Mad Max. The dissonant amalgam of futuristic function and ’40s industrial design might have been purchased whole off Max Headroom. Stanley’s innovations involve his heroine. Jill pursues a threatened lifestyle, surviving on odd jobs and welfare checks. When the grubby Mo tries to understand her art, she cuts him off — “It’s not for you; it’s not for anybody.” Earlier she was preparing dolls for inclusion in a sculpture by blowtorching away their faces. (“I just think it’s stupid and suicidal and sadistic to have children right now.”) The monster might almost have arisen from her destructive imagination, which is why she’s able to confront it.

Hardware derives its extraordinary impetus from the push/pull of Stanley’s talents — the care to compose arresting images, and the itch to edit them heedlessly. Cameraman Steven Chivers clearly has a ball with the over-the-top requests. Red-orange is the dominant hue inside and out, occasionally contested by cobalt blue or pure, hard white. In the last category is a stunning shower scene, with Jill emerging from behind Mo — an apparition assuming tangible shape. The climax is also staged there, one of several instances where Stanley knits together shots separated in time. An overhead camera setup inscribes a stately arc as Jill lies alone in bed, drifting away on a drug high. Later, battered and bloody on the floor of a neighbor’s apartment, she is viewed from the same angle, but in contrary motion.

Given the emphasis on camera choreography and rapid cutting, the actors don’t much matter. (Casting Americans in the leads was a contract mandate.) Stacey Travis has ideal attributes for Jill: a take-charge voice, lithe athleticism, innate doggedness. The Mo of Dylan McDermott gets less to do, and is correspondingly less vivid. John Lynch, impressive elsewhere, is wasted on Mo’s indecisive partner, and Iggy Pop (a pirate-radio Jeremiah) and Motörhead front man Lemmy create barely a ripple. But William Hootkins squeezes some fun out of the obligatory fat pervert, and John Lydon’s sneering “this is what you want, this is what you get” vocal becomes the director’s alter ego.

Simon Boswell’s music score is the most enduring element, and it’s marketed intact at the composer’s U.K. website on two CDs.

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Directed by

Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, Georges Pellegrin (Joan McLeod: novel, uncredited)

Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Editing: Monique Bonnot, Yolande Maurette

Music: François de Roubaix

Cast: Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Catherine Jourdan

Melville’s Le samouraï

By Walt Mundkowsky

French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) is hard to pigeonhole. He operated outside established channels (eventually running his own studio) yet he employed movie stars. An inspiration to the New Wavers who liberated French cinema, he remained a consciously classical technician. Abroad he’s best remembered for a trilogy of gangster dramas — Le doulos (1962), Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le samouraï (1967). The last of these is the easiest of the trio to admire — character, structure, and surface are seamlessly joined.

Jef Costello is a contract killer. He daringly completes his current assignment (a nightclub owner) during business hours, relying on an airtight alibi to prevent capture. His girlfriend Jeanne swears that he was with her until Mr. Wiener, the elegant gent who keeps her, arrived. He sees Jef leaving the building, and fingers him for the police. Wiener hopes to sink Jef (he knows his mistress has been deceiving him), but he unwittingly supports the alibi. Even so, the police inspector thinks Jef guilty and has him watched. Things start to crumble for Jef when the bigwig who ordered the hit gets nervous about the cops and tries to pay him off with a bullet. Jef moves ahead on two fronts: to evade arrest while tracking down his employer.

Professionalism is a byword in Melville’s moral universe. Jef not only kills to live, but lives to kill. He stays in a dingy hotel, with a pet bullfinch for company. (The bird is probably closer to him — and more loyal — than any human.) From the moment early on when he refuses to acknowledge a beautiful woman’s smile from a passing car, Jef is sealed within a circle of obsessions. His connection to Jeanne fascinates in its ambiguity; not precisely romantic, it bristles with crossed wires — she wants to be made useful, as he strives to shield her from danger.

Melville’s extraordinary goal is evident in the opening frames: to make a black-and-white film in color. Except for the subway scenes (shot documentary-style), the interiors conform; grays and browns dominate. Outside views are trickier, but the overcast skies (easy to locate in Paris) and nighttime settings help. (François de Roubaix’s music also uses subtle colors, led by a dry trumpet and harp.) The cutting is so assured that the long stretches without dialogue seem pointed and shapely, as the director links his cops and crooks by activity and behavior.

Each panel of Melville’s triptych highlights a particular actor, and Le samouraï is the ideal arena for Alain Delon’s chilly perfection and inward-looking gaze. The less-is-more aesthetic extends to the female co-stars. Nathalie Delon (Alain’s wife at the time) projects nobility and strength as the steadfast Jeanne, and Cathy Rosier’s sleek nightclub pianist is both ally (refusing to identify Jef) and rival. The inspector contains as much of Melville as does Jef, and François Périer is brainy, commanding and crafty. It’s tough to evade the shadow of René Descartes (1596-1650) in describing him.

Back when, I bet a friend that I could review this without mentioning its camerawork by Henri Decaë — important to Melville as early as 1949 (Le silence de la mer) and 1950 (Les enfants terribles), and a key figure for the French New Wave and others. Zero interest in winning that one.

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Directed by

Writing Credits:

François Truffaut … (scenario and dialogue) and

Claude de Givray    … (scenario and dialogue) and

Bernard Revon    … (scenario and dialogue)

Music by
Antoine Duhamel

Cinematography by
Denys Clerval

Film Editing by
Agnès Guillemot

Script Girl:
Suzanne Schiffman

Cast:
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Delphine Seyrig, Claude Jade, Michael Lonsdale

François Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses”– A Look Back

By Walt Mundkowsky

In The 400 Blows Truffaut introduced Antoine, a 12-year-old at odds with the world in which he found himself. Antoine lost his girlfriend to an older and more masterful rival in the opening segment of Love at Twenty. Now, after two failures (not only of execution), Truffaut has returned to that character, but Stolen Kisses does not mark a reprise of his most confident style: The unsticky humor and precise observation are gone, replaced with suffocating “charm” — a vapid title song, numerous lapses into Lelouch-type romanticism, every sort of winking at the audience.

After the opening titles, the camera swoops down from a picturesque long-shot view of Paris to zoom in on a window of a military jail. Inside, Pvt. Antoine Doinel (played as before by Jean-Pierre Léaud) is being kicked out of the army only a few months after enlisting. (“Some men are hopeless,” his commanding officer tells him. “They just clutter up the army.”) After his discharge Antoine goes to see Christine, his girl, but she isn’t home; her parents get him a job as night porter at a hotel, where he is promptly fired. He joins a private detective agency, exhibiting the same knack for disaster. (“I don’t know what to do with you. You’re certainly willing, but you discourage me,” his boss says.)

One day a businessman named Mr. Tabard (Michel Lonsdale) comes in with an unusual request — “Well, nobody loves me and I want to know why … I feel that I’m despised, but I don’t know by whom. I can feel it all around me … my wife laughs all the time — except when I tell a joke.” Antoine is installed in Tabard’s shoe store to find out what his employees think of their boss. After the store is closed Antoine sees Tabard’s wife Fabienne (the beautiful Delphine Seyrig) trying on a pair of shoes. She asks him, “What do you think of these? Too shiny for the dress?” He falls for her instantly, and reports, “She’s superb, a little vague and very gentle”; her face is “a perfect oval, slightly triangular … luminous skin!” Christine is forgotten. “What do you mean, hounding me at the store?” he snarls at her when she stops by to ask why he hasn’t been seeing her. “There’s no reason to be nasty,” Christine replies, hurt.

But catastrophe is never far behind. Left alone with Mrs. Tabard, an epic case of nerves overtakes him. She plays a record — “Do you like music, Antoine?” “Yes, sir,” he gravely answers, and dashes out of the room. When he goes home later, he finds a gift and an understanding letter she has left. Antoine writes to her, and as we hear him reading his letter the camera follows its progress — tracking along underground tubes, flicking from one street sign to the next. Fabienne opens the letter and the camera pans slowly across a street, tilting up for a zoom-in on Antoine’s window; the image freezes. Fabienne goes to Antoine with an offer — “I’ll come close to you now … we’ll spend a few hours together … and no matter what happens we’ll never see each other again.”

Antoine crashes into Christine’s father’s car; he is now a TV repairman. Christine’s parents leave for the weekend; she sabotages the TV set and phones for Antoine. He is cool when he arrives, but his resistance is understandably brief. Truffaut’s camera moves past TV parts scattered on the floor, past Antoine’s work timer, and tracks slowly up the stairs, finally coming to rest on the young lovers asleep in bed.

The next morning Christine and Antoine go for a walk. They are confronted by a mysterious stranger who has been following her throughout the picture, to the accompaniment of a throbbing bass. “I know I’m not unknown to you,” he begins. He has come to confess his undying love: “We’ll never leave each other, not for a single hour … you will be my sole preoccupation.” He glares at Antoine, “But first you must separate from some temporary people.” As he leaves, Christine says, “The man’s really mad!” “Yes, yes,” Antoine agrees, suddenly recognizing his true self. “He must be.”

Truffaut cannot resist his hero as an adorable, romantic, shy incompetent. Applied this conspicuously, charm repels. A freeze frame of Antoine’s “disarming” smile reveals the extent of the miscalculation. Later, blundering attempts at tailing people are conveyed by peering over a newspaper of course held upside down, or peeking out from behind a tree. And the Truffaut of 1960 wouldn’t have milked the death of a veteran private detective (long shot of rows of tombstones; the camera panning down to follow Antoine leaving the cemetery with music rising on the soundtrack).

Stolen Kisses has no real plot; the episodic impression is heightened by the liberal use of fade-outs. This could have worked if the writers (Truffaut and two others) had constructed dense, economical sketches, but nearly everything is trivial; we trail Antoine for 91 minutes, but Truffaut has nothing more to say about him. The old Truffaut pops up here and there. Having lunch with Tabard and his wife, Antoine mentions that he’s learning English with records. “Records are a joke,” Tabard snaps. “You can only learn English in bed with an English girl. I learned with an Australian; her husband was a house painter —” “Comme Hitler,” Fabienne interrupts. “Don’t ever say that,” he warns. “It’s slander. Hitler was a landscape painter.”

For a Truffaut film, Stolen Kisses is visually stale. In the past he has always used the best cinematographers — Henri Decaë on The 400 Blows, Nicolas Roeg on Fahrenheit 451, Raoul Coutard on the rest. Even his worst films have contained flashes of poetry. Here, Denys Clerval’s DeLuxe color camerawork is far from lyrical and equally far from obnoxious. The editing of Agnès Guillemot is unobtrusive and apt. But Antoine Duhamel’s music is poured over each scene like molasses: It has about that consistency.

I’d rather blame Léaud’s man-child affectations on Truffaut, but the actor’s antics have done similar harm elsewhere. Only Seyrig’s distinctive looks and personality are evident in this tritely conceived part. Claude Jade delights as Christine, a mixture of innocence and cunning, and Michel Lonsdale plays the friendless Tabard with a stern, straight face that is very funny.

Stolen Kisses can hardly be said to settle anything about Truffaut’s career: He is only 37 and this is but his seventh feature. But he is covering familiar ground — no striking observations, resonances, or stylistic expression. If the result is more successful than Fahrenheit 451 or The Bride Wore Black, it’s because Truffaut risks so little these days.

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Director

Writers: Roman Polanski (original screenplay), Gérard Brach (original screenplay) (as Gerard Brach)

Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor

Music: Krzysztof Komeda

Stars: Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander, Jack MacGowran, Jacqueline Bisset (as Jackie Bisset)

Polanski’s “Cul-de-Sac”

By Walt Mundkowsky
(mostly written in London, 1969)

By this viewer’s idiosyncratic standards, Cul-de-Sac (1966) is Roman Polanski’s sole brush with greatness, and the only feature to keep faith with the surrealist metaphors and perceptions of his celebrated short films. It’s his most bizarrely funny, as well as his most serious work.

Cul-de-Sac takes a Desperate Hours-style situation (criminals on the run invade a normal household) and turns it on its head. George is a fiftyish English factory owner who has sold his business and retired to a fortress-like structure on Lindisfarne, a barren island (except at low tide) off the Northumberland coast. Teresa, his young French wife of a few months, busies herself homebrewing vodka, raising chickens, and advertising her sexual wares to passing males. Into this amalgam of character and landscape come Dicky and Albert, two gangsters wounded in a bungled robbery attempt. This quartet is reduced to a trio when Albert dies during the night. Dicky waits for Katelbach, his boss, to mount a rescue, but it never happens. The accumulated tensions heighten as a party of George’s former associates drops by unannounced. After George forces them off his property, Dicky calls Katelbach again and realizes that he’s been abandoned.

Polanski is here much influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed, the proceedings might be profitably described as a cast of Ionesco characters, their outrageous humors and quirks on parade, playing at Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The shifting power alliances among this trio are pitilessly observed; more pessimistic still is the sense that each of them is a solitary planet incapable of contacting the others, obeying physical laws they comprehend only fleetingly.

This is by several miles Polanski’s most ambitious and singular directing achievement. His unnerving use of the setting’s potential for entrapment, his instinct for the detail that clinches a line of development, his restless but purposeful editing touch — all these cohere into a moral argument presented in scathing terms. And Krzysztof Komeda’s off-kilter jazz is itself almost an individual personage — catchily melodic, texturally grating.

The lead performances are as much a triumph of casting as of directing; they reinforce Polanski’s view of human nature by having virtually nothing to do with each other. Donald Pleasance’s George is a career best, and somewhat related to his brilliant Davies in Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker. In both we are invited to see the desperation lurking beneath the character’s picky, hectoring surface. Pleasance’s skill at shifting in mid-syllable from a command to a confession still astounds. Teresa is a nearly unactable monster as written — conniving, dishonest, juvenile. Françoise Dorléac (older sister of Catherine Deneuve, and tragically dead in an auto accident the following year) at least gives her a coquettish playfulness that renders the extravagances bearable. Lionel Stander has less operating room than they do, by Polanski’s design. Dicky is a none-too-bright career criminal and a blustering brute besides, but he’s the sanest of this unholy threesome. Stander delivers the primary tones unfailingly. Jack MacGowran, one of Samuel Beckett’s prized performers, makes the most of Albert’s deathbed scene. The young Jacqueline Bisset (billed as Jackie Bisset) is a sharp and snotty delight as the guest who notices too much.

An account of Dorléac’s death figures in Derek Marlowe’s novel Echoes of Celandine (1970, The Viking Press, Inc.) —

“On one page, her face stares out at me (beautiful, alert, almost boyish …). It is the face non-Europeans neither produce nor ever appreciate. It is too strong and yet fragile, too independent, too revealing — not only of the owner but also of the onlooker — and too defiantly feminine. (…) she out-Eves Eve in expression alone. If her body has been left to medical science, her eyes, at least, ought to have been left to Tiffany’s.

“I make a note of the actress’s name and attempt to tear the photograph from the magazine, but it is stapled badly, the picture tears, and I am left with half her face in my hand (right eye, a triangle of soft rain of hair, the crescent shadow of a cheekbone) and so drop the magazine, reluctantly, in pieces, on to the floor.

“It is not my night.”

(p. 91)

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Director

Writer: Dalton Trumbo (novel), Dalton Trumbo (screenplay)

Cinematography: Jules Brenner

Music: Jerry Fielding

Special Effects: Dick Williams

Stars: Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt, Jason Robards, Diane Varsi, Donald Sutherland (As Christ), Dalton Trumbo (Orator), Winston Churchill (Himself – archive footage)

Johnny Got His Gun

By Walt Mundkowsky

The praise that has rained on Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun has a desperate ring, citing it with All Quiet on the Western Front and La Grande Illusion in the roll call of antiwar classics. Trumbo, of course, was one of the Hollywood Ten, refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and eventually imprisoned for 10 months for contempt of Congress. To see this film as short of towering greatness is evidently to be a HUAC assassin.

However highly one values Trumbo’s personal integrity, his profile as a writer is another matter. Pauline Kael aptly described him as “the leading exponent of the dictates-of-conscience and the dignity-and-indomitable-spirit-of-man school of screenwriting.” I can’t think of a Big Theme he or Stanley Kramer hasn’t botched. This film is no different: From the start clichés fall like well-cut pines. Above the credits is a typical newsreel montage, accompanied by the usual snare drums: shots of W. W. I leaders — a young Churchill, Clemenceau, Czar Nicholas II, Marshal Foch bestowing an embrace on a soldier, King George V, Kaiser Bill; troops and cavalry pass in review; Woodrow Wilson waves, Teddy Roosevelt makes a speech, Wilson signs papers. Over a shot of Yank soldiers boarding a ship, the whistle of an incoming artillery shell. We see the explosion and the screen goes black.

The victim of that explosion, a young soldier named Joe, loses his arms, legs and face. He is kept alive as a medical curiosity, and the officer in charge writes, “It follows, then, that this young man will be as unthinking and unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them.” That is not the case (if it were, the movie would be different): Joe remembers and dreams and tries to comprehend his present condition. Already the film gives off a considerable stench. Trumbo’s method has always been to take an uncompromising stand (here, against mutilation) in terms so broad and banal that debate is not possible this side of sanity. This speechless basket case is just about the perfect vehicle for the ideas on display, given their quality. Inarticulate movie heroes (The Graduate, Easy Rider) are always in fashion, and how could one hope to improve on this one? Who wouldn’t feel pity for this “piece of meat that keeps on living,” as Joe calls himself; Timothy Bottoms voices him in his debut.

Worse yet, the prevailing cheapness is rendered unendurable by the sentimental muck piled on top of it. The present is shot in black and white, while Joe’s fantasies and memories are in color. “I don’t know whether I’m alive and dreaming or dead and remembering,” Joe thinks at one point, but the film never suggests the lightning-like play of conflicting, misshapen images that statement implies; everything is heavy, plunked down. Many of the scenes come not from Joe’s consciousness but Trumbo’s — the gross gibes at W. W. I slogans (“Gonna make the world safe for democracy, aren’t you?”). The scene in which Joe delicately deflowers his girl may become a model for the protractedly coy and cutesy. Joe’s gradual awareness of his state (“No eyes … I … I haven’t got any eyes!”) is meant to be horribly moving, but it brought Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587?) to mind:

O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life! no life, but lively form of death;
O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs.

For bombast, the lesser Elizabethans rule. Better (or worse) is the sympathetic nurse, for whom Diane Varsi does her considerable best, hurtling into the grotesque. Joe thinks, “Something fell on me. Something wet. What was it?” A tear. Later she writes “Merry Christmas” on his chest. (I wouldn’t call Trumbo’s touch light.)

Joe eventually hits on the idea of tapping out Morse with the back of his head. The Army brass are astounded, since they would never have allowed him to live if they had thought he wasn’t “decerebrated.” His message to them is “I want out, so people can see what I am. Put me in a carnival show where they can look at me. Let me out.” And then: “If you won’t let people see me, then kill me.” The Army (of course) does neither. Presumably they will not accept responsibility for his present state or for killing him. The friendly nurse tries to kill him but is discovered and sent away. At the end Joe is alive and alone.

One exchange prompted wild applause both times I saw the film. A high-ranking officer asks the chaplain if he has anything to say to Joe. The chaplain answers, “I will pray for him for the rest of my days; but I will not risk testing his faith against your stupidity” — and a great many cheered (the one who applauds loudest hates war the most?). An antiwar film that lets everyone off the hook is by definition a flop. I yield to many in my approval of Godard’s Les Carabiniers, but it is to be commended for its refusal of easy emotional escape-hatches. Johnny Got His Gun sees to it that one leaves with a mind unengaged and assumptions undented. Besides, the tragedy of war is not that perfectly healthy young people are turned into basket cases in a split second; automobile accidents can do that.

George Orwell wrote in 1944: “By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.” If one bothers with antiwar films at all, it should be to learn something we don’t already know, not because we want our sympathies reinforced.

Extra: Timothy Bottoms Interview (2009 Video)

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Director:

Writer: Penelope Gilliatt (screenplay); Ken Levison (uncredited); David Sherwin (screenplay) (uncredited)

Cinematography: Billy Williams

Stars: Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft, Daniel Day-Lewis (uncredited)

Sunday Bloody Sunday – A Look Back

By Walt Mundkowsky

Sunday Bloody Sunday has been praised to a pulp, and that is understandable; it looks so ostentatiously intelligent and restrained. It has no plot, but a set of circumstances: a bisexual triangle in which Bob, a young London artist, is having simultaneous affairs with Daniel, a middle-aged homosexual doctor, and Alex, a divorcee in her thirties who works as an employment counselor. At the end Bob leaves them both and heads for America.

Director John Schlesinger reportedly used the approach associated with Alain Resnais in preparing this film; he asked Penelope Gilliatt, a writer with a definite and highly developed fictional world, to produce an original screenplay, and he influenced the work through discussions but did not contribute a single word himself. The result is of course no more a Resnais film than Midnight Cowboy was. Gilliatt’s dialogue is mostly acute and precise, but the structure is faulty. Its theme, that people in love will settle for very little, is not much of an insight to sustain a 110-minute feature.

The thing about Schlesinger that finally alienates me is the lack of suggestiveness; he is determined to spell out everything, which may explain why reviewers prefer him to other, much more talented directors. When he employs the Resnais technique to get at what the characters are imagining or remembering, it flattens the material instead of enriching it; he doesn’t leave the audience room for speculation. For me, his films have a very arbitrary vibe; I can sense the tumblers clicking into place. (For example, an afternoon in the park stands out for its note of such undiluted happiness that something nasty is bound to occur.)

Schlesinger’s instinct for pace is here less reliable than it was in Midnight Cowboy; on second viewing I found the film tedious. A few scenes come handily to life, particularly a horrible party at Daniel’s house and Alex’s one-night stand with an aging executive who has lost his job. But most of it remains on about the level of competent TV situation comedy: You check your responses to see if they match those of the characters, and that is all.

Much of the acting is excellent, as in all of Schlesinger’s movies. Glenda Jackson is somewhat at odds with Alex, as the part evidently was conceived. She is easily the most complex and interesting of the trio — the only one who seems strongly dissatisfied with the relationship as it stands. Jackson’s customary steel and tension appear to belong in a movie with greater dividends, but nevertheless she makes a powerful impression. Peter Finch’s Daniel is a beautifully worked out performance, if anything a bit too beautifully worked out: It could use more edge and attack. The claims Murray Head makes on our attention are distressingly slight. If being at ease in front of the camera is acting, he is an actor. He renders the triangle more schematic than it actually is; the attraction Alex and Daniel feel towards him is a proposition we have to accept on faith. The smaller roles are superbly managed.

It may be that I have not done Sunday Bloody Sunday justice, but I have seen very little recently which left me so unmoved. Perhaps Bob reveals too much when he tells Alex, “I know you don’t think you’re getting enough of me, but you’re getting all there is.”

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