There is no doubt that multi-award winning playwright Luis Valdez is a brilliant playwright, earning his stripes with his innovative “Zoot Suit,” which premiered in 1978 at the Mark Taper Forum and subsequently made history by becoming the first Chicano musical to hit Broadway.  His newest play, “Valley of the Heart” was greatly anticipated, but alas the production does not live up to the brilliance of his iconic “Zoot Suit,” which is not the fault of the script.

Let’s start with the script, which is very well written and begins in 1945.  It tells the story of two immigrant families  – the Yamaguchis, a Japanese-American family who own a farm in California’s Santa Clara Valley known today as Silicon Valley. They share the land with the Montaños, a Mexican-American family who are sharecroppers living in a small, quite rural farmhouse adjacent to the Yamaguchis.  Both families are friendly with each other and are determined to give their American-born children a slice of the American dream.  Unbeknownst to the respective parents, the first generation Americans from each family are secretly in love with each other.

In view of the White House’s draconian action against immigrants, this eerily timely story is told through the prism of World War II when Japanese citizens were ripped from their homes and put into detention facilities, which were ill equipped concentration camps. Their crime?  Being Japanese.  And for that, they were considered the enemy of the United States of America who was at war with Japan following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.  So far.  So good.  The script captures the painful words and action this Japanese family endured as they prepare to leave for the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming with just whatever they could carry. Their Mexican neighbors give them moral support, assuring them that they would take care of the farm until their Japanese friends were returned home.

In addition to a beautifully crafted script, the production values are outstanding, beginning with David Murakami’s projection design taking you into the surrounding vistas such as shots of crops and the pastoral country setting.  Each of the family’s homes are well designed by scenic designer John Iacovelli, who makes maximum use of the space, with Pablo Santiago’s lighting design and Philip G. Allen’s sound beautifully enhancing the action at hand.  So, we have an outstanding script and outstanding production values.  Sadly, what we don’t have is an ensemble of skilled actors who could delve deeply into playwright/director’s Valdez’s characters and deliver polished professional performances.

However, there is one excellent performance given by Lakin Valdez who as Benjamin Montaño is also the narrator of the story.  He is in love with Thelma Yamaguchi, poorly played by Melanie Arii Mah, who gave what amounted to line readings.  The actress never delved below the surface to reach the subtext of her character’s lines and mostly indicated* her emotional moments.  The story takes us through the interment, Benjamin and Thelma’s marriage and the birth of their child, Benjamin’s determination to get reunited with his Japanese family, the homecoming, a few musical and pantomime numbers that seemed dropped in for effect and so it goes until the end.  All this said, I have the utmost respect and admiration for Mr. Valdez and look forward to whatever project he has on his backburner

Other members of the cast gave performances ranging from rank amateur to possibly college level with some of the dialogue not even understandable.  They include, Moises Castro (Ernesto “Tito” Montaño,) Justin Chien (Joe “Yoshi” Yamaguchi,) Randall Nakano (Ichiro Yamaguchi,) Joy Osmanski, (Hana Yamaguchi,) Rose Portillo(Paula Montaño,) Daniel Valdez (Cayetano Montaño,) Christy Sandoval (Maruca Montaño,) and Scott Keiji Takeda (Calvin Sakamoto).  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mariela Arteaga and Michael Naydoe Pinedo, the mysterious figures draped in black from head to toe.  They portrayed Kurogos, stagehands in traditional Japanese theatre who incorporate Kubuki-style movements.  They moved on cat feet and gracefully aid in prop and set changes, as well as standing at attention as formidable guards looming in the background.

The big take-away is a reminder that the interment of the Japanese people is one of the blackest marks in American history and one we thought we would never witness again.  Alas, a similar black mark is unfolding right before our eyes as we see immigrant families torn apart and most recently mothers and small children being tear gassed as they attempt to cross the border.  Valdez’s play sharply illuminates the agony inflicted upon innocent people when a government unilaterally decides that a race of people is a danger to the nation’s security.

*“Indicating” is an acting term meaning when an actor fakes an emotion instead of having it emanate from a truthful place.

Mark Taper Forum
135 N. Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Run:

• Tuesdays – Fridays:  8:00 pm
• Saturdays:  2:30pm & 8:00 pm
• Sundays:  1:00pm & 6:30pm
• Closing Date:  December 9, 2018

Tickets:  $30-$99 (ticket prices subject to change) 628.2772 or www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

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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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Director:

Writers: James Goldman (screenplay), James Goldman (play)

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Music: John Barry

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, John Castle, Nigel Terry, Timothy Dalton, Jane Merrow

The Lion in Winter – A Look Back

By Walt Mundkowsky

Every chronicle play is a reduction of history. In a great chronicle play, this reduction means compression of events, intensity, selection — an artistic vision of history; Marlowe’s Edward II concentrates 24 years (1307-1330) into five credible acts. The Lion in Winter is another sort of reduction: It diminishes a struggle for the English crown into situation comedy. Since James Goldman wrote the original play as well as the movie script, the inanity of the former is preserved in the latter.

The action takes place at Christmas, 1183. King Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole) decides to name his successor; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), whom he has imprisoned for 10 years, joins him. So do his sons — Richard the Lion-Hearted, the scheming Geoffrey, and nitwit John. Also present are 17-year-old King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton) and his sister, Princess Alais (Jane Merrow), who is Henry’s mistress. Early on Henry says of Eleanor: “She knows I want John on the throne and I know she wants Richard.” The rest of the film is the clash of their wills. At the end of the holiday nothing has been resolved, and Eleanor is returned to her confinement. Henry tells her, “You know, I hope we never die.” Eleanor: “I hope so, too.” Henry: “You think there’s any chance of it?” The movie ends with both of them laughing boisterously as her barge pulls away.

Problems inherent in this stuff are nearly insuperable; drama in which character is constantly sacrificed to the quip cannot be substantial, especially when both fall as flat as they do here. One-liners like “Has my willow turned to poison oak?” and “Well — what shall we hang? The holly or each other?” are plentiful, and Goldman plops a speech loaded with big ideas into the bitchy infighting (“I’ve found how good it is to write a law or make a tax more fair or sit in judgment to decide which peasant gets a cow. There is, I tell you, nothing more important in the world. (…) I am sick of war”). Modern locutions clang all over — “Fragile I am not; affection is a pressure I can bear.” Goldman’s attempt at history’s verdict sits uneasily, containing as it does a compliment to himself (Henry’s “My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived”).

Anthony Harvey’s direction supplies the coup de grâce. His first film, Dutchman (1966), contrived to coarsen the LeRoi Jones play — no small achievement. I cannot imagine how that prepared him for this, but the toolbox of arty clichés runs unchecked. The film opens with a shot of the sky; suddenly crossed swords meet in the frame — cut to a close-up of Henry. “Come for me!” he shouts. As it turns out, he is just dueling with John. Or, after threatening to disinherit all his sons, Henry collapses next to a castle wall, the camera zooming back until he becomes a tiny, almost imperceptible figure. Several scenes begin with burning candles or torches; much of the film has a murky look, as if Harvey is trying to establish a Medieval visual style. Annoying overuse of the zoom lens emphasizes his priorities; the movie isn’t allowed to unfold naturally. The camera zooms in from long shot to close shot, or zooms out from irrelevant close-up (a fist knocking on a door, the beak of a stone bird) to establishing shot, rather than taking us swiftly to the heart of the scene. Sometimes Harvey reminds us of other, better films — the gargoyles in close-up behind the opening titles are not unlike those at the end of A Man for All Seasons. But what worked there — cutting from the sound of the headsman’s axe to the camera tracking silently past darkened gargoyles, accompanied by dry narration — is mere affectation here: unrelated to what follows.

This picture carries the marks of respectability and money. Peter Murton’s art direction and Margaret Furse’s costume design couldn’t be bettered. The music of John Barry has its moments (the opening credits, the choral elements) but is often sticky. A book would be necessary for Douglas Slocombe’s camera triumphs (he passed away in 2016, aged 103). His restrained work for Harvey makes eloquent use of dark, rich colors. I’d put some cornball set-ups on the director. (“May I watch you kiss her?” Eleanor asks. In the foreground, Henry in right profile and Alais in left, facing each other; in the background, Eleanor facing the camera. Henry and Alais embrace. The camera zooms past them into a close-up of the weeping Eleanor.)

O’Toole’s Henry is elusive (many effects, scant continuity or line), with Hepburn always on the verge of bursting into tears, every speech like a lecture. Can an Oscar be far behind? The sons Richard and John aren’t much help, but John Castle makes an adequately oily Geoffrey, perhaps a bit lacking in the “wheels and gears” Henry speaks of. He does contribute a nice touch, however. “Be Richard’s chancellor,” Eleanor proposes. “Rot,” he answers, gliding away. I have never heard a more mellifluous “Rot.”

To escape the continual racket from the leads, we turn to Jane Merrow’s Alais, a gentle creature fiercely refusing to be used by anyone. Her pleas to her lover (“You mustn’t play with feelings, Henry. Not with mine”) and to his wife (“You love Henry but you love his kingdom, too. You look at him and you see cities, acreage, coastline, taxes. All I see is Henry. Leave him to me, can’t you?”) touch us if not her listeners. Timothy Dalton is her equal as the young French king. His part is small but multi-faceted — unsure of himself on the surface (“I am a king; I’m no man’s boy”) but possessing a natural gift for intrigue, cold and calculating beyond his years. Had the whole enterprise been infused with the feeling and smarts of Dalton’s acting, we’d have something.

I’ll take O’Toole’s “Henry II, Part I” by no great margin. That would be Becket (1964).

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Directed by

Screenplay: Harold Pinter

Based on the novel: “The Go-Between” by L.P. Hartley

Cast: Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave, Dominic Guard, Edward Fox, Jim Broadbent (Uncredited: Spectator at cricket match)

Cinematography: Gerry Fisher

Music: Michel Legrand

Losey’s The Go-Between

Walt Mundkowsky

The Go-Between (1971, Columbia) is the third film Joseph Losey has directed from a Harold Pinter script. Its virtues and defects are so much those of the first two (The Servant, 1963, and Accident, 1967) that Pauline Kael’s judgment on Accident fits — “a fascinating, rather preposterous movie, uneven, unsatisfying, but with virtuoso passages of calculated meanness.”

This film is an intelligent, respectful adaptation of the 1953 novel by L.P. Hartley, which Martin Esslin has called, rather excessively, “a minor classic and a masterpiece.” Henry James comes to mind (he would have deepened the psychological implications), but Hartley possesses his own vision and tone of voice. The story is simple enough. During the summer of 1900, a middle-class schoolboy named Leo Colston spends three weeks with the family of his friend, Marcus Maudsley. Leo forms a crush on Marian, Marcus’ beautiful older sister, and comes to serve as messenger in her affair with Ted Burgess, a neighboring tenant farmer. On Leo’s 13th birthday the affair is discovered and Ted shoots himself.

An extraordinary passage illustrates, I think, what the novel is about: “Something of the sadness of human life came through to me, its indifference to our wishes, even to the wish that calamity should be more colourful than it is. The ideas of acceptance and resignation were hard for me to entertain: I thought that emotions should be more dramatic than the facts that caused them.” The movie never finds its way to that, but the concise beauty of Hartley’s prose would resist translation in any case. Nearly all of Pinter’s dialogue is from the book, much condensed. This process of selection doesn’t reduce the novel to its essence, it strips the story of its first-person viewpoint and that elaborate psychology.

Two scenes will suffice. The cricket match is shot and edited with surging exactness, but fails to symbolize the larger issues which inform the novel (“a struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it … between one attitude to life and another”). At the supper after the match Leo sings Handel’s “Angels, ever bright and fair” — “I was proud of being able to sing it, for it was in the most uncompromising minor and the intervals were very tricky….” In the film Leo, in one long close-up, butchers the song. Losey discards the original point — “the sensation of soaring that the music’s slow ascent so powerfully evoked” — in favor of a cheap laugh.

Losey admires Resnais, and the handling of time sets the film apart from the novel most strongly. In the book Leo, in his mid-sixties, comes across the diary he kept during 1900. He narrates the story in the past, from the vantage point of the present. In the epilogue he returns to Brandham Hall to find out what has happened in the intervening 50 years; he visits Marian, now a very old woman. Losey has dropped the prologue, and throughout the film he slips in flashes of Leo’s journey to the past we see; the fragments are jumbled, but as they lengthen the design becomes clear: The whole movie is a careful build-up to Leo’s meeting with Marian in the present. Clearly Losey has learned from Hiroshima mon amour and La guerre est finie: the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated image and sound, a soundtrack from the present over visuals from the past and vice versa, the flash-forward technique. As is usually the case except for Resnais, it works better in theory than in practice. Leo and Marian are riding along in a carriage and we hear Leo as an old man, “You flew too near the sun and you were scorched.” The line is drawn from a lovely conversation in the book between Leo at 12 and Leo at 60-odd. Used alone, it is too blatantly ominous, as are the flashes-forward — overcast, rainy skies; a black limousine gliding about; the trick of nearly always showing Leo with his back to the camera.

As in The Servant and Accident, a pivotal female role in The Go-Between is badly cast and acted. Julie Christie, as Marian, is not believably upper-class for an instant, and at 31 is too old for the part anyway. Richard Gibson’s Marcus likewise fails to persuade; Losey has no feeling for the nuances and ever-changing hostilities of the boys’ repartee and scuffling, which play an important role in the book. Usually Losey pays great attention to the music in his films. Here he has entrusted the score to Michel Legrand, who produces a series of formal pieces for piano and strings — devoid of any period sense and startlingly indelicate.

Some of the goings-on are resolutely clouded. Leo fancies himself a magician; the novel treats his experiments with a touch of amusement after the passage of so many years. The film, however, strains to make them vaguely menacing — its sole “Pinteresque” touch. When Leo tries “to break the spell that Ted had cast on Marian,” the obscurity gets so thick that it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, is happening. Fundamental events like Leo’s last meeting with Marian are presented in needlessly puzzling fashion — Julie Christie’s dubbed-in old-lady voice; the watery blues of the photography; the off-center editing, which focuses on Leo even though he says hardly anything. Hartley’s effect is missed by a mile: “A foreigner in the world of the emotions, ignorant of their language but compelled to listen to it, I turned into the street. With every step I marvelled more at the extent of Marian’s self-deception.” A worthy theme — the primitive cruelties hidden behind civilized gestures — but Losey and Pinter dissect the class humiliations and general rot with a relish that makes their work part of what they are attacking. Distinctions get blurred.

Still, The Go-Between has undeniable if finally insufficient strengths. The film retains Hartley’s unforgettable opening line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” and its finest achievement is the way it charts that alien ground. Carmen Dillon, the art director whose work on the contemporary Accident was so meticulously right and revealing, makes Brandham Hall and its surroundings perfectly convincing to the last detail. This is not just a question of historical authenticity — not very difficult to arrange — but a matter of choosing the most unobtrusively striking facets of décor. Ms. Dillon succeeds; if you remember anything about this film, it is likely to be the setting.

Joseph Losey (right) was the recipient of the Palme d’Or for The Go-Between at 1971 Cannes Film
Festival. To his left, Luchino Visconti, whose film Death in Venice was also in competition.

In this she is aided by Gerry Fisher. Accident was his debut as lighting cameraman — and an impressive triumph; in the five years since, he has established himself as one of the more expert and tasteful color cinematographers. It’s hard to see how he could have gone wrong among all those costumes and the Norfolk countryside. The outdoor scenes could be further removed from mere prettiness, and on Leo’s trips between the Hall and the farm the zoom lens gets tedious (Leo trying to outrun the music?). But the interiors are splendid: The colors are toned down to the neutral range — beiges, soft browns and greys — and are properly seductive.

Losey is often skilled with actors and these performances are first-rate (exceptions noted). Best of all is Dominic Guard. The director has exploited the stiffness and unease of the inexperienced child actor to great advantage; Leo is a stranger who feels out of place. He is awkwardly anxious to please, with an edgy hostility beneath the surface. Guard gives the film what cohesion it has. Alan Bates works admirably against the Lawrentian mist Losey tries to throw around Ted, but the result is no more than the standard Bates performance.

The aristocrats receive more attention, scornful though it may be. Margaret Leighton is a faultless Mrs. Maudsley; when she questions Leo about the letters he has been carrying for Marian, the cloak of politeness drops off and we see the fury which has been lurking all along. The actress manages the transitions so subtly that we are as shocked as Leo. As her ineffectual husband, Michael Gough has the correct bearing and voice. His dialogue is amusing, verging at times on caricature. Edward Fox (his brother James was the young master in The Servant) plays Viscount Trimingham with nonchalant grace and sure technique. He captures especially well Trimingham’s relationship with Leo, alternating between genuine interest — treating him almost as an equal — and lofty, tolerant condescension.

Losey and Pinter are up to the casual destruction of Leo’s innocence; they fall short of the sharp feeling of loss Hartley creates. In the prologue Leo thinks that “had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room, where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold rain beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the past and the duty it imposed on me to sort it out.”

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Directed by

Screenplay: Alan Trustman & Harry Kleiner

Based on novel, “Mute Witness” by Robert L. Pike (Robert L. Fish)

Cast: Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Don Gordon, Robert Duvall, Simon Oakland

Cinematography: William A. Fraker

Editing: Frank P. Keller

Music: Lalo Schifrin

Frank Bullitt, Establishment Nonconformist

Walt Mundkowsky

As an entertainment (“chewing gum for the eyes,” to apply John Mason Brown’s view of TV), Bullitt (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) must be considered “a good buy”: It holds the attention for the whole of its 114 mins. Problems are mostly concealed by the film’s hip stances.

Detective Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is assigned to guard Johnny Ross, a Chicago gangster who is to testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing on organized crime. A none-too-subtle politician named Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is overseeing the protection. (He tells Bullitt, “A Senatorial hearing has a way of catapulting everyone involved into the public eye — with subsequent effect on one’s career.”) Bullitt gives Delgetti (Don Gordon) and Stanton (Carl Reindel) the first two shifts and goes out with his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset). During Stanton’s watch two gunmen burst into the room and shoot both him and Ross. The mobster is given “no more than 50/50” odds of survival; Chalmers is furious. He tells Bullitt, “In your parlance — you blew it.” Ross dies during the night, and Bullitt vows, “I want the men that killed him” — less because they have committed murder than because they have made Bullitt look bad.

Fearing that Chalmers will close the case, Bullitt sneaks the corpse out of the hospital and refuses to confess its whereabouts. Chalmers serves Captain Bennett (Simon Oakland), Bullitt’s superior, with a writ of habeas corpus; Bullitt is ordered to reveal Ross’s death and is given only one more day to clear up the case. Eventually it comes out that the dead Ross is not Ross at all. As Bullitt waits for the real Ross at the airport, Chalmers isn’t through (“We both know how careers are made — integrity is something you sell the public”). Bullitt kills Ross in a gun battle. When he goes home, he finds Cathy asleep in his bed; the film ends as it should, on a close-up of Bullitt’s gun and shoulder holster.

Peter Yates, a 39-year-old Englishman, has directed Bullitt with cleverness and some imagination. (Reportedly his Robbery with Stanley Baker secured this assignment.) Two sequences stand out. An 11-minute auto chase through the streets of San Francisco is movieland fantasy. The suspension of disbelief would be better served if this were a quarter of its actual length. The other is the shotgun murder of Ross’s impersonator. Rather jerky close shots of the frantic victim (“No, wait — now look — he told me —”) are intercut with close-ups of the assassin slowly squeezing the trigger; the blast hurls the bloodied Ross against the wall with tremendous force. It seems to last an eternity, and is harrowing. Yates produces many brief strokes which, after their initial impact, leave one with a feeling of rightness. The camera tracks through the hospital ward as Bullitt goes to visit his wounded officer; it comes to a stop on the tense, agonized face of Stanton’s wife at his side. She looks up at Bullitt, eyes asking why. The San Francisco locations work hard to match the McQueen coolness factor, how successfully I cannot say.

The McQueen mannerisms are present — the tight little smile, the studied nonchalance — but count as humanizing touches when the script offers so little. Robert Vaughn was not all that keen on playing Chalmers, but his silky timbre gives great pleasure. As Bullitt’s sidekick, Don Gordon is loyal and patient but not thick-headed, and Simon Oakland captures the essence of quiet strength.

Jacqueline Bisset is good enough as Cathy that she enlarges the focus of the film — an error in that it introduces themes it is ill-equipped to resolve. She drives Frank to a motel where he will question a woman, and waits in her car. When the cops converge on the motel she runs in, thinking he has been hurt. The woman is dead, and Frank is talking calmly to his partner on the phone (“Yeah? Yeah, it’s a strangulation”). Her fear for his safety travels through shock, revulsion, and finally anger. “Do you let anything reach you — I mean really reach you? You’re living in a sewer, Frank — day after day. (…) What will happen to us in time?” The film and hero seem embarrassed to have stumbled across this (and her?).

Bullitt should be seen as a manifestation of the Bogart-style private eye. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “The private eye was the realist’s hope for intelligence and some justice against the uniformed forces of stupidity. He stood in relation to the police as the man who really sees the score against those who see only the rule-book, and his life-style suited his life-view.” When this rebel is neatly tucked back into the Establishment, he loses most of his force and relevance. Within the power structure, the validity of an individualist like Bullitt is largely drained; he resembles a panther that is engulfed and finally smothered by cobwebs.

William A. Fraker’s glossy Technicolor camerawork is a fine job, despite a tendency to dwell on irrelevancies and trivia (close-ups of the nose of a Boeing 707, a microphone, a red light, some baggage tickets; weird angle shots; a shot through a rained-on window). The editing (Frank P. Keller) moves things along smartly without the exciting forward surge of, say, Boorman’s Point Blank. Peter Yates has made Bullitt about as well as one can make a film about nothing; too bad he isn’t allowed to aim any higher.

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And just in time for Halloween…

Directed by: Dario Argento

Writer: Dario Argento

Cast: Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Mario Adorf, Enrico Maria Salerno, Eva Renzi, Umberto Raho, Dario Argento…Murderer’s Hands (uncredited)

Music: Ennio Morricone

Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

By Walt Mundkowsky

Dario Argento’s debut feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (UM Film Distributors), is assured, inventive, put together with a self-renewing energy and glee. No explanation is necessary and none should be permitted.

An overhead shot — the screen is almost completely black, the only exception a small desk lamp illuminating a typewriter in use. It clatters slowly and softly; we cannot see the typist. White titles flash abruptly on and off the screen.  Closer, over the typist’s shoulder; he wears black leather gloves. He pulls the paper out of the machine and we can read it: “Sandra Roversi, age 18,” and the plans for abducting her. The camera tracks along with the target — delicate, almost bony face, dark hair cut boyishly short — and tilts down to observe her plaid miniskirt and knee-high boots. The whirr and click of a delayed-action shutter, and the shot freezes into a still seen in a viewfinder. Others follow: the girl’s face framed dead center in the picture, then from farther away she is caught on the extreme right side of the frame. In telephoto long shot she crosses the street to wait for a bus, and as she is about to climb on, motion is horribly arrested. The killer brings out a drawer full of cutlery and selects a long, gleaming butcher knife. Gloved hands examine black-and-white blow-ups of the victim, and a large red “3” is marked on the top photo. He slips the weapon inside his shiny leather coat and replaces the drawer. The desk lamp is switched off: total darkness and a scream.

Shortly after the opening Argento ups the ante. Sam Dalmas, an American writer living in Rome who has sunk to doing a manual on the preservation of rare birds, is walking home; from across the street he sees two figures struggling on the mezzanine of an art gallery. He strays out into the street to get a closer look — and is nearly run over by a passing car. They are fighting for a knife; the woman (Eva Renzi) is stabbed and staggers down the staircase, while the attacker flees through a side door. Sam rushes to the glass door across the front of the building and the assailant closes the outer door, sealing him in the entry to the gallery. Frantic, he tries to hail another car driving past the gallery but fails. Inside, the girl is crawling towards Sam (superbly conveyed with ground-level setups); she lifts herself up for a moment and we see the blood soaking her clothes. He calls to her, “How do I open the door? I can’t get in” — but she cannot hear him through the glass. A hawk-nosed onlooker appears at the door behind Sam and understands the message — “Call. The. Police.” The girl’s sobs fade as she blacks out, and Sam sits down to await the police.

That précis cannot do the scene justice. The décor of the gallery is stark: severe lighting, grotesque black sculptures, white interiors. The attacker wears a black hat and coat, while his victim’s white jumpsuit bares her back and shoulders. The horror is in the situation — being so close and yet unable to offer assistance. Some of the cuts are dramatic, but they never jolt with unwarranted movement. The scene contains the key to the mystery. Sam replays it in his mind continually, in flashbacks pointed and valid. He is in bed with Julia (Suzy Kendall), his fashion-model mistress, and three times he returns to the girl reaching her blood-smeared hand out to him. The first lasts only a fraction of a second, the next two are progressively longer. Motion is rapidly frozen and unfrozen, which distorts time and heightens the sense of activity, of life. Several of these flashes begin as blurs slowly brought into focus. The original scene is presented mostly from Sam’s point of view; the flashbacks show the details as he remembers them, in disordered fashion, but the movie does not cheat: All the relevant information is there from the start. The central base without which the film won’t work — Sam’s obsession — is established so that we not only comprehend but share in it.

Argento has a secure feeling for pace, and events are carried aloft by a mass of precise, often witty physical detail. The police have their Honeywell computers, oscilloscopes and tape recorders; their labs are brightly lit and immaculate, peopled with buoyant (“Now look at this, here. It was our most exciting discovery”), smug (“You see, every human voice, no matter how well it’s disguised, has a distinctive pattern of harmonic intensities in the vowel sounds”) technicians. Sam’s flat is on the top floor of a derelict building about to be condemned. An Einstein poster watches his bed. The camera style is baroque — a great fascination for panes of glass, stairways, doors, surfaces of all kinds. Scarcely anything is glimpsed straight on. This is not burdensome, but bends the horror / suspense conventions combined with texture of unusual depth. As Julia reads the newspaper clippings of the murders to Sam, Argento cuts in a series of monotone enlargements of each corpse as it was found. When she gets to the third — “That was a student” — we see the girl from the credits: her eyes and mouth opened wide, throat hideously slashed. The murder is the most abstract, and easily the most troubling. The killings we see are highly stylized, both graphic and perverse, and well-placed within the story. As if this were not enough, I must mention Argento’s keen touch for the camera movement that clinches a scene — for instance, the little arcs the camera makes following Inspector Morosini as he walks around his desk while questioning Sam.

The script (by Argento) is neatly constructed — the movie seems to end four times — and has many surprises. Its best feature is the procession of bizarre minor characters: a policeman with a profile like that on an old Roman coin; the gay owner of an antique shop, bald and fat (“It was said that she preferred women. I couldn’t care less. I’m no racist!”); a jailed pimp with a crippling stammer whose name is (inevitably) Garullo; an informer who contradicts each statement he makes with the next (“Uh, when will I hear from you?” Sam asks. “Never! Maybe tomorrow morning”); a painter who lives off the cats he is able to catch and fatten up. Most psycho-killer films want to explain their monsters, but Argento places the TV interview (“… evident paranoiac tendencies … severe trauma … disturbance remained dormant for ten years … to the point of being … psychotic”) over amusing, snappily edited shots of jets turning around and taxiing down the runway, heat-wavy backgrounds and all. We are leaving. To the friend who touted Italy for its peace and tranquility, “May he roast in hell.”

The cast is decent. Tony Musante’s high-energy Sam Dalmas is generally credible if not very interesting. Julia is Suzy Kendall, a Julie Christie type with a look more refined and less arresting than the original. She can express terror (as in The Penthouse), so the scene where the killer tries to breach a thick door to assault her comes off impressively. Perhaps the mussed-up hair helps. You might recall Eva Renzi as Samantha Steel, the Israeli secret agent in Funeral in Berlin. Argento has used her special feline grace very handily; she does some affecting work, quiet and insolent. Enrico Maria Salerno is solid as the no-nonsense, purse-mouthed inspector. As a possible suspect, Umberto Raho is a dead ringer for Antonioni. Likely an admiring reference, as Argento locates the menace in modern architecture for his own purposes. The gruff, lofty painter of Mario Adorf (Major Dundee) is a treat. Attempting to saddle Dalmas with a dusty canvas, he announces, “Early Consalvi — very rare.”

With this technical polish and firm sense of line, it came as a surprise that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is Dario Argento’s first film, but his father Salvatore is a well-known producer. Vittorio Storaro extracts the maximum from the Techniscope format. The many stunning shots (I have cited only a few) seem anything but isolated cleverness; a coherent strategy and a definite visual style are apparent. Why Ennio Morricone’s thriller scores receive less attention than his Westerns baffles me. Here the non-blend of conflicting elements is unsettling — blaring trumpets, choral sighs, electronic hums and whines, eerie shivering, tingling sounds that collide … gently.

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Directed by

Writers: Carole Eastman (screenplay, as Adrien Joyce), Bob Rafelson (story), Carole Eastman (story, as Adrien Joyce)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, Billy Green Bush, Ralph Waite, Sally Struthers, John Ryan

Cinematography by: László Kovács

Five Easy Pieces

By Walt Mundkowsky

Fogged with the Easy Rider air of self-defeat, Five Easy Pieces is much stronger on feelings than on insight. It’s not art but still affecting; the actors under Bob Rafelson’s direction lend a certain truth.

There’s no plot worthy of the name; it gives us several weeks in the life of Bobby (Robert Eroica) Dupea, a former piano prodigy who fled his aristocratic family years ago and is now working in a California oil field. He is living with a none-too-bright waitress named Rayette Dipesto who dreams of becoming a country singer. (His dissatisfaction with her and his existence is conveyed in a few keen details. Over the titles we hear “Stand by Your Man.” As Bobby comes home, he too hears the song, played on a phonograph. He pauses at the door as one might in front of an activated bomb. Once inside, he helps himself to a beer. The chorus blares forth as he walks into the living room; he stops and glares at the record player for several seconds.)

Bobby enjoys the pleasures at hand — bowling, drinking, whoring — without a hint of conscious slumming. His friend Elton confides to him that Rayette is pregnant, and “she’s all torn up about it, which I hate to see.” “I tell ya,” Elton continues, “somewhere along the line you even get to liking the whole idea.” “Keep on telling me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke.” Bobby storms off. Elton is taken away by the police for jumping bail after a robbery that’s a year old. It is the last we see of him.

Bobby drives to a studio to visit Tita, his concert-pianist sister; she obviously worships him and hopes to convince him to return (“I want to talk to you about so many things”). In a telling shot Tita, in sharp focus, looks at Bobby, slightly blurred in the foreground; she gives him the bad news: “Robert … I have to tell you. Daddy’s very ill — he’s had two strokes.” He doesn’t want to hear about it and doesn’t want to go back, but she won’t relent — “But don’t you think it’s right that you should see him at least once?” He agrees to drive up to the family place, on an island in Puget Sound. Rayette comes along, but Bobby drops her in a nearby motel. He finds his father reduced to a vegetable state, alive but not living. (“He doesn’t even know who the hell I am,” Bobby snaps.) Also at the house are Tita; her condescending brother Carl, recovering from a painful neck injury; his fiancée and student, Catherine Van Oost; and Spicer, the ex-sailor male nurse. Mealtime conversations nearly equal scenes in Losey’s Accident — hostility under a veneer of politeness. “One thing I find very difficult to imagine is how one could have this incredible background in music and then just walk away from it without giving it a second thought.” The threat is implicit, and Bobby returns the volley: “I gave it a second thought.” He pursues Catherine and, bristling with anger, she succumbs.

Uh oh. Rayette shows up in a taxi and Bobby seethes, though the situation is of his own making. He dashes out and gets drunk. The next evening a woman invited to the house is spewing fake-intellectual gibberish and patronizing Rayette; Bobby finally explodes. Later he asks Catherine to leave with him. She sensibly refuses: “It’s useless. I’m trying to be delicate with you, but you just won’t understand.” A painful, touching monologue follows: Bobby tries to justify his life to his mute father, but keeps breaking into tears. He and Rayette leave, heading south. They stop at a gas station; Bobby examines his face in a large mirror. The process takes perhaps a minute: a tiny but detectable change of expression. He leaves his jacket behind (he has given his wallet to Rayette) and hitches a ride on a big logging truck.

What the film chooses to do, it generally does well; problems arise in what it omits. If we are to experience loss over the violence Bobby does to himself and those around him, we need to know in some tangible way what is discarded. How good a pianist might he have become? At the end of his monologue he says, “We both know that I was never that good at it anyway,” but he is defending the decision he made long ago. More important, what kind of person is he? Bobby is absent from very few shots in this movie, but much about him remains annoyingly unclear.

That monologue merits examination because, sharply written and acted though it is, it raises more questions than it answers. Bobby begins nervously (“Are you cold?”), already sounding defeated at the start (“I don’t know if you’d be particularly interested in hearing anything about me”). He thinks the very attempt is futile: “I’m trying to imagine your half of this conversation. […] It’s pretty much the way it got to be before I left. I don’t know what to say.” The key lines are: “I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay. Auspicious beginnings, you know what I mean?” This is unrelated to what we have seen. How did Bobby meet Rayette and why has he stayed with her? What drove him away from his family and music?

Particularly puzzling is Bobby’s seduction of Catherine. She wants everything he left home to get away from; they are constantly sparring. (“Well, it must be very boring for you here.” — “It is,” he replies. — “I find that very hard to comprehend. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored.”) The scene where she rejects his offer is full of the same crackling aggressiveness, Bobby asking her impossible questions and Catherine parrying them. Earlier she seems affected, convention-bound, smug. But she is a dedicated musician; the first thing she asks him is, “You no longer play at all?” I fail to grasp why he should be so interested in her, given what we know about him, and why he should regard her as his potential savior. Her refusal to leave Carl for Bobby is the most intelligent choice any character in the film makes. She is perfectly aware of the situation: “You’re a strange person, Robert. […] When a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love for his friends, family, work, something, how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?”

One guesses Bobby is victimized not by the world but by design; the closest he comes to criticizing the society which traps him is in a freeway traffic jam, but none of the people he encounters is truly up to his level and many are caricatures. The two life styles — oil rig worker and concert pianist — are sketched without inside knowledge of either. Take your camera into a small town at dusk and point it at a garishly hyped nudie theater, a barber college, the nearly deserted streets with expanses of neon, the desolate headlights of the few passing cars. Slap a solo piano on the soundtrack (a wind instrument can be substituted), and you have captured indelible images of the emptiness of modern life. Five Easy Pieces has this standard sequence, and it cuts as deeply as expected (i.e., not at all).

The drive home from California is crammed with incident. The lesbian hitchhiker’s diatribe (“I had to leave this place because I got depressed seeing all the crap … people’s homes, just filth … people are filthy … I think they wouldn’t be so violent if they were clean…. I don’t even want to talk about it”) is linked thematically to Bobby’s final escape north, but outstays its welcome. Bobby’s battle of wits with a crusty waitress is also too amusing for its own good. Some of the material is arbitrarily “shaped” — it begins to involve us with interesting relationships and then patly cuts them off. Bobby and Elton walk it off after arguing, but moments later the police come to take Elton back and Bobby rushes to his aid. What would have happened between them if melodrama had not intervened?

Still, the film is frequently arresting and sometimes truthful. Lois Smith gives the most complex, inventive performance as Tita, Bobby’s sister. When she sees him at the recording studio, she bursts into tears. “You always do this to me,” she sobs. “Well, I don’t mean to,” he counters. She refuses to admit that her father’s condition is likely unchangeable (“He has ways of communicating, Robert. I can tell when he’s expressing approval or disapproval, just by his eyes”). When Bobby’s attempt to reach the old man fails, he leaves abruptly. She intercepts him, and her accusation — “You were going without saying goodbye to me” — pierces us to the heart. Karen Black’s Rayette has been overvalued; the most I can say is that she firmly resists tugging for sympathy, and brings some depth and detail to a stock role. One splendid delivery sticks — she brays at Bobby, “Why don’t you just be good to me for a change?” Susan Anspach, an actress from the theatre, is an ideal Catherine; her arresting features, at once blunt and delicate, reticent appeal and cool, edgy voice are exactly right. She gets Catherine’s maddening natural elegance with ease. With less screen time, Billy “Green” Bush (Elton) and Ralph Waite (Carl) impart openness and a sublime ability to annoy, respectively.

That takes us to Jack Nicholson, on whose Bobby Dupea the film stands or falls; it stands, sort of. One can almost hear a motor humming inside the character. The best moments are those when Bobby is not doing anything, yet his mind is clicking away. After a scene with Rayette in a bowling alley, Bobby stares down at his feet only to be interrupted by two local hookers. At the end, sitting in the logging truck, he mutters to himself, “I’m fine”; again, the same words, this time softer; he mouths “I’m fine” a third time as the truck starts up, blotting out his words. Nicholson never finds an inner consistency for the character despite the many excellent moments; but one can hardly ask the actor for what is nowhere indicated in the script. He fits into the oil field better than into the music room, especially his voice. A major performance, even if all its facets do not mesh.

I yield to many in my evaluation of László Kovács’ camerawork on Easy Rider and Getting Straight, but Five Easy Pieces is more straightforward. Not that it is wholly free of the arty: Bobby walks away from the oil field in an over-composed shot — elaborate cloud formation, row of sunspots on the lens, oil pumps Bobby walks past resembling Easter Island statues, camera position and lighting chosen to render the thing Beautiful. And one overripe sunset wouldn’t be out of place in David Lean. But most of Kovács’ work here is intelligent and understated. The editing (Christopher Holmes, Gerald Shepard) is in the same vein; transitions are generally unforced, and two of them deepen our comprehension of connections. Bobby is enticing the two pickups in the bowling alley: “I sure wish I had more time to talk to you girls, but … uh … I have to … I’ll … uh …” — cut to him walking across the parking lot to a hurt Rayette waiting in the car. Bobby chases Catherine into the house at the conclusion of some silly game, both of them laughing — cut to a similar shot, this time the camera moving in the opposite direction: A taxi pulls up to the Dupea house and Rayette steps out. The sure cutting also heightens the impact of the good performances.

Five Easy Pieces has that curse, the promising film; but it breaks its promises as it makes them. We shall have to wait and see where Rafelson and Carole Eastman (script, as “Adrien Joyce”) go from here.

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Directed by

Writers: André Pieyre de Mandiargues (novel), Ronald Duncan (screenplay)

Cast: Marianne Faithfull, Alain Delon, Roger Mutton

Cinematography by: Jack Cardiff (photographed by), René Guissart Jr. (as René Guissart) (lighting cameraman)

The Girl on a Motorcycle

By Walt Mundkowsky

“For the first time in the pub all the men noticed her. She had the sensuality of opposites — the youth and experience, the leanness and voluptuousness, which invited both protection and sadism.”

— Nicholas Mosley, Impossible Object

The Girl on a Motorcycle (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) is not a title likely to attract studious filmgoers, and on the whole it is perhaps just as well. But the movie succeeds at what is seldom attempted — re-creating a poetic novel’s imagery in visual terms.

That novel is The Motorcycle (1966) by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, on its own small scale a masterwork. If it reminds one of anything in cinema, it might be the films of Resnais: extreme technical confidence and refinement, behavior informed with a strong sense of ritual, jumps through time and space which deepen one’s understanding of events, formal completeness. Rebecca Nul, the 19-year-old wife of Raymond, a dull, passive French schoolteacher, leaves his bed early in the morning and squeezes into a fleece-lined black leather jumpsuit (“Skin, it’s like skin. I’m like an animal”). She roars off on her motorcycle to see her lover Daniel, a commanding fortyish intellectual who is a librarian (in the film a professor) at the University of Heidelberg. He gave her the enormous black Harley as a sardonic wedding present. During the ride from Haguenau, in Alsace, across the border to Heidelberg, Rebecca recalls her four-month affair — it’s twice as long as her marriage. Finally reaching the outskirts of Heidelberg, she is killed in a highly poetic collision with a truck.

The book was called porn, even by some of its admirers; if they meant the unstinting celebration of the erotic, the tag was apt. The motorcycle, really the main character, is “a tempest subject to its rider, who controls it at her caprice by a tiny movement of her foot or hand and thus its rôle is subordinate and reduced to that of a procuress in the service of a great predator.” At times, though, the machine becomes more than the symbol and projection of Daniel and could replace him — “She felt the rhythm of the explosions in the center of her belly as under the crown of her skull, and since she had closed her eyes she experienced once again the impression formerly and painfully suffered at the dentist’s of being unremittingly subject to a strident and perforating machine.” Singular metaphors abound. When Daniel ravished Rebecca in the snow, “she saw herself burnt by the fire of a stake, like a saint or a sorceress.” Afterwards “He detached her hands from their supports with a gentleness and a gravity which would not have been out of place in handling a dead body.” The approach is cool, immaculate, unsettling.

Jack Cardiff, who directed and photographed, was an imaginative and versatile cameraman; while none of his subsequent films as director is genuinely first-class, Sons and Lovers (1960) remains a much better shot at filming Lawrence than the wildly exalted Women in Love — Trevor Howard’s Walter Morel is a performance to treasure — and all his work is dotted with stunning images. Here he has allowed some surprising problems to go unchecked. Most obvious are the trashy psychedelic effects that mar the fantasy sequences and tone down the more daring sex scenes. This violates the novel’s purpose, which is to present the bizarre rising out of the commonplaces of everyday life. The poor back-projections add their bit of annoyance. The structure, largely from the book, fails to affect one as it should; the flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, are strangely unobtrusive — nothing more than a convenient way to organize the material at hand. In the novel, the free and random-seeming associations strike sparks off each other; they count for much more than themselves. An abrasive, detached score would have been a great help, but Les Reed’s music is one long blare.

The main fault lies elsewhere. The adaptation (Cardiff), screenplay (Ronald Duncan) and interior monologue (Gillian Freeman) all but undo the film at the start. In the book “she felt relieved, as though of her own will she had abolished them by turning the acceleration grip.” It becomes “A twist of the throttle and I obliterate this muck — and turn myself on.” When the screenwriters are not making the source crude and prosaic, they are overturning it. As Rebecca enters the café, “no one shows any sustained curiosity about her, no one seems to notice the singularity of her appearance, its oddness in such a place”; in the film she could hardly cause more of a stir if she walked in naked. Daniel tells Rebecca, “Your body is like a violin in a velvet case,” a line rightly given in the book to the unimaginative Raymond. These may not seem crucial, but the novel is an accretion of details, moods, nuances, tones; consistent lapses unravel the whole.

They keep trying to “explain” the characters, to provide each of them with a dossier of motivations and traits. Rebecca’s essence is a void, “she had been and would always be no more than an object in transit.” The film transforms her into a Mod creature, anti-war and pro-rebellion. Her internal conflicts are flattened into movie conventions — “I married him as a protection against you. I tried to make him happy.” Scenes nicely handled are sometimes hammered to death. When Daniel sneaks into the hotel room, assaults Rebecca and leaves without a word, she has to add, “He didn’t even look back.” Yes, we noticed.

Equally damaging is stuff not in the book, Raymond losing control of his geography class and Daniel conducting a seminar discussion of free love; they would be wrong even if brilliant, which they aren’t. (The point about Daniel is his veiled complexity.) The tinted stock shots of motorcycle racing (Daniel is an enthusiast) also misfire: What’s important is not the subject but how his words move Rebecca (“and above all the meticulous daredevil John Surtees, the driver with the seminarist’s manners, for whom he confessed to a special admiration”).

What can be held up against all this? If Cardiff the writer / director falls flat, Cardiff the photographer triumphs. The camerawork, particularly in the exteriors, grasps the core of a novel much concerned with the surfaces of things. Take the first shot after the credits, of Rebecca’s fog-shrouded house; the colors — Nicolas de Staël grays, really — are so undefined they seem about to run together. Or the confrontation with a hostile customs official, the focus shifting from Rebecca’s anxious face to “a rather curious ring he is wearing on his third finger, a tiny silver serpent with a body striated to represent scales, the head nastily flattened” and back again. Obviously Cardiff has taken great care to preserve the book’s imagery, which makes the writing all the more bewildering. The tracking shots past mist-covered cemeteries, statues of military heroes, and towers truly convey a sense of doom; hard to believe that anything good ever happened in such a place. “I must ask Daniel why bridges all look like mousetraps,” Rebecca muses, and the accompanying subjective shot traveling down the bridge appears endless; the distortion carries a claustrophobic charge. Some interiors are striking, like a love scene played out in front of a rain-spattered window running the width of the screen, in diamond-hard light.

In a clumsily shot disaster, we know that an extreme long shot equals Lyrical. Such shots here of the speeding mechanical brute are lyrical because Cardiff has an eye for the tensions between landscapes and people. These are among the finest things in the film: a long camera pan as Rebecca hurtles across a towering bridge and turns down a road running alongside the river, the motorcycle frequently obscured by girders, fences, trees, buildings; roaring across an overpass as a train clatters by underneath; her image reflected by a block of glassy flats as she whips past. The ending is up to the strangely tranquil violence of the book — “An exorbitantly smiling space is about to swallow her up (and contemplates her with an infinite delight, which is the equivalent of a limitless melancholy), a human or superhuman face, the last, perhaps the true face of the universe.” Rebecca glances off the side of a truck and is rocketed headfirst through the windshield of an oncoming car. Two angle shots of the crumpled motorcycle. The camera withdraws from the fiery accident, moving back and up. Shots of empty, quiet Heidelberg streets are intercut with the camera moving slowly toward the tower clock striking eight in the morning.

The story does not require much in the way of acting, which is fortunate. Aside from her long blonde hair, Marianne Faithfull is quite the Rebecca I had imagined; her scant range of technique suits this part. Cardiff makes telling use of her face — soft and childishly sweet in her father’s bookshop, aggressive and proud on the motorcycle, both hurt and ecstatic with Daniel. Alain Delon is a peculiar choice for Daniel; horn rims and a pipe do not an intellectual make. (Was Bruno Cremer not available?) Roger Mutton does okay with Raymond, and Jacques Marin has a deft moment as an admiring gas station attendant.

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Directed by

Writing Credits: Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo

Music by: Ennio Morricone and Gillo Pontecorvo

Cinematography by:  Marcello Gatti

Cast: Brahim Hadjadj, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi

The Battle of Algiers

By Walt Mundkowsky

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (Allied Artists) was the hit of the 1966 Venice Film Festival and enjoyed a highly successful run in New York the following year. The film would be welcome at any time; considering the junk we have been asked to watch so far this year, it is an especially great pleasure.

The title is apt. In the main, this is a reconstruction of the street fighting in Algiers between 1954 and 1957 (a coda informs us of Algerian independence on July 2, 1962). The film should not be taken in any way as a record of the Algerian struggle: Virtually no mention is made of the fighting in the mountains or of political developments in Paris, both of which were at least as significant as what we are shown. But Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas have generally chosen well. Their focus on a single facet of the conflict illuminates some complex recent events.

Hardly anyone has failed to notice that The Battle of Algiers has been made to resemble a newsreel. Marcello Gatti’s black-and-white photography is the best of its kind I can remember. The quasi-documentary look, with its graininess, subdued tones and functional, sometimes hand-held set-ups, is contrasted with sweeping camera movements of beauty, elegance and wit. Which is to say that I’ll never see newsreels of such refinement. Gatti does a brilliant job of photographing walls: The sunlight that so captivated Camus is more powerfully conveyed than in the film of The Stranger. The editing of the Marios Serandrei and Morra is blessedly free of special pleading and wearying, grubby little touches; image and sound are matched or counterpointed with imagination, and no sequence is permitted to overstay its welcome. Each makes its point and departs. The almost entirely non-professional cast does not act its roles, it inhabits them.

Front de Libération Nationale rebels are individuals; their leaders’ understanding of the situation varies widely, from those who appreciate the political difficulties to Ali la Pointe, an illiterate petty crook who advances to FLN section head and just wants to kill Frenchmen. Two of these actors must be mentioned. The rebel boss is played by Yacef Saadi, the film’s Algerian co-producer and an actual FLN leader condemned to death three times by the French and saved by de Gaulle’s general amnesty. Brahim Haggiag radiates fanaticism as Ali; truly a man on fire.

Pontecorvo gets the main facts right, as far as I can tell. After the FLN organizes, it embarks on a string of terrorist acts, indiscriminate murders of policemen. The first plastique bomb is exploded by the French; a police commissioner, in misplaced revenge against the rebels, sets it off after curfew in the Casbah. The FLN replies by exploding three bombs in the French sector — in a crowded café, an equally jammed milk bar and an air terminal. (Here the film cheats a little. The rebel bombings are made to appear a reflex action; in fact, they took place two months after the first bomb, when no arrests were made.) Pontecorvo’s point is that wars of liberation, while inevitable, leave only victims; that the victims of Arab bombs and French bullets are equally dead. Justice and history may be on the side of the rebels, but it is tough for him to see past the corpses piling up.

The impact of the film derives from the way Pontecorvo implicates us in the drama. Each terrorist killing is prefaced with a title giving the exact time of day; thus we are elevated from unknowing onlookers almost to accomplices. As the final seconds tick by, the exquisitely caught and edited shots are agony to behold: a little boy licking an ice cream cone and having his face wiped, lovers at a table, teenagers dancing, the white-coated man behind the counter laughing. A young girl is carried out after the explosion. At first all we can see of her are long legs and chic shoes; then the front of her stylish dress bobs into view, soaked with blood. Gripping, natural detail inhabits Pontecorvo’s direction throughout. Frequent use of those modern clichés, the freeze-frame and zoom lens, is fresh and valid.

But it would be just a superior historical re-creation without the French paratroop commander, Lt. Col. Philippe Mathieu. I do not know how much the part owes to the famous Lt. Col. Trinquier and how much is fiction, but the result is rich and complex. Mathieu is played by the one professional actor, Jean Martin, well known in Paris for his work in Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter plays; he never makes a wrong move in this long and demanding role. The colonel learns that the FLN structure is pyramidal: Each rebel knows the identity of only three others, his superior and his own pair of subordinates. They have been ordered to remain silent for 24 hours after capture, after which their information is useless. “But interrogation is a method only when it guarantees a reply,” Mathieu tells his officers. Mathieu is no brute, but a learned and sensitive man who stops to pay tribute to the moral force of his enemy. His wit is irreverent and almost self-deprecating. (“Checking identification is ridiculous. If anyone’s papers are in order, it’s the terrorists’!”) He grasps the FLN tactics (“Bombs make more noise; in the FLN’s place, I’d use them”) and defends his own — “Does bombing in public places show respect for legality? It’s a vicious circle.” Mathieu asks a reporter, “Why are the Sartres always against us?” and the question says everything about him. A few exchanges make plain the French military’s obsession with avoiding another Dienbienphu. But as a captured FLN leader says, “The FLN has a much better chance of beating the French army than the army has of changing history.” For Mathieu, it can be reduced to an epigram: “Our duty is to win.”

Few films can have benefited from music choices like this one — it’s essentially an interplay of image and music; the text is less important. The soundtrack strikes a fine balance between natural and created sound. The music, by Ennio Morricone and Pontecorvo, consists of four modes: taut, rattling sections over the French attacks, scored for snare drums and piano; a tinny little martial tune for Mathieu’s briefings; fervid Arab drumbeats for the FLN bombings; and formal religioso pieces for the torture scenes and bombing aftermath. All stirring and appropriate. Pontecorvo seems to have composed the film with this music in mind, instead of tacking it on as an afterthought.

I have a few qualms. It never puts on the heat and tries to con us the way Costa-Gavras does, and of course it is worlds better than that. The savage ironies of recent history are respected, but still one occasionally wants to shout at the screen, “It wasn’t that simple!” The film does romanticize these events a bit, particularly in light of post-independence Algeria: All that heroism and blood gone to produce Ben Bella and Boumedienne! Still, warts of perspective aside, the film is warmly human and wondrously alive.

Editor’s note: The George W. Bush administration studied The Battle of Algiers in an attempt to understand terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare in Iraq.

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Directed by

Writing Credits:  Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza,  Boleslaw Sulik

Director of photography:  Charly Steinberger

Cast: Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Karl Michael Vogler

Jerzy Skolimowski’s
Deep End

By Walt Mundkowsky

Deep End (1970, Paramount) is Jerzy Skolimowski’s seventh film, but the first to get a run in these parts. In 1968 Christian Braad Thomsen called him “probably the most explosive and original film-maker in Eastern Europe.” That is a bit much (Jancsó? Makavejev?), but his work is important and Deep End is representative of it.

Skolimowski is a very interesting fellow. An ex-boxer, he brought out two volumes of poems and a collection of short stories at 22. He wrote dialogue for Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers, a bitter look at modern Polish youth, and Polanski’s Knife in the Water. I have not seen Skolimowski’s first two features. He enrolled in the Polish State Film School in 1960; he says, “I was seized with a great uncertainty. I was afraid of botching everything, of being a zero, or of spending long obscure years at being an assistant, which was scarcely better. Before those sad possibilities for the future, I began to ask myself how the devil I could get out of the situation.” He made his short films at the School in such a way that, once assembled, they would form a full-length film — Rysopis. Cahiers du Cinéma described Walkover, his second, as “one of the most rapid films that can be seen, crammed with things that one must seize in flight, or by deduction” — all the more remarkable because it was shot in very long takes: The 78 minutes contain only 35 cuts. Barrier was impressive: a precarious love affair and a ferocious criticism of Polish society. It is scornfully accurate about the chasm between those who remember the Nazis and the young people who don’t, and don’t want to. Skolimowski has a vivid eye for framing and imagery: crisp, laconic, nimble, tossed-off. In 1967 he made Le Départ in Brussels without knowing any French at all; the improvising got so anarchic that he required two interpreters to tell him what the actors were saying. Hands Up! was banned in Poland, and The Adventures of Gerard, adapted from Conan Doyle’s Napoleonic War stories, was another casualty. It sounds like a film that defies classification, which distributors hate.

Deep End also evades neat categories. Ads suggest a horror thriller like Repulsion, and the opening plays on and frustrates that. The first titles appear in red over a gray background. A drop of blood, enormously magnified, hits the gray and runs towards the bottom of the screen, which turns red as Cat Stevens wails, “But I might die tonight!” Geometric camera movements follow tubing, gears, chains. The blood turns out to be paint: a boy painting his bicycle. The gray background is the bicycle in extreme close-up.

The story takes place within about a week — longer than usual with Skolimowski. Mike, a 15-year-old who has left school, gets his first job — attendant at a public bathhouse and swimming pool. He quickly falls for Susan, a sexy, somewhat older girl who looks after the women’s section. She is amused by his attentions and alternately entices and abuses him. Mike slips over the edge into lunacy — a mad crush gone truly mad — and Susan fails to realize the lethal nature of his attachment.

Its triumph is that, as Charles Thomas Samuels writes, the “meaning is absolutely conterminus with its form” — observations and style are one. The agile hand-held camerawork reflects the characters; fidgety walking pans and tracks match the restlessness of the people. Skolimowski does not want to analyze or explain love and its workings, he is after metaphors for states of feeling. The bathhouse is almost too good to be true; supposedly used for cleanliness and recreation, we see a succession of sexual rites: an elephantine blonde associating soccer and screwing, a coach feeling up the schoolgirls in his swimming class as he guides them into the water, the boys’ dirty remarks about Susan. The place is done up in hideous green, yellow and blue tiles. “I thought it would be all white,” Mike says when Susan shows him around, and it is only the first of his idealized views to be thwarted. Susan coaxes a dog in the park closer, then stings it with a snowball — exactly what she is doing to Mike.

The closing minutes form an ever-tightening pattern. Mike sabotages the tires on the coach’s car, which Susan is driving. She gets out and gives him a sound thrashing, but loses the diamond from her engagement ring in the process. They cannot find it in the snow. Mike comes up with an idea, childishly elaborate and impractical. They scoop the snow into trash bags and carry them back to the bathhouse for meltdown. As if these symbols — the snow: Mike’s original belief, now overturned, in Susan’s purity, and her coldness towards him now; the ring: the materialistic nature of her fiancé’s claim on her, and the shallowness of her affection — were not enough, Susan suggests that to find the diamond they strain the melted snow through her tights!

The climax carries all this to a formally — but not emotionally — satisfying conclusion. Susan leaves to call her fiancé and tell him she will be late. When she returns, Mike is lying nude under a pile of towels with the stone in his mouth. As a reward, she offers herself to him but he seems unable to perform. She wants to leave; he wants her to stay and talk. The janitor is filling the pool for the next day. They struggle as the water pours in, and in anger Mike swings an overhead light fixture at her head. She faces him, stunned. The swinging light knocks over some cans, and red paint splashes down the wall and into the pool. (The spilled paint manages a more powerful effect than looking at the bleeding Susan would.) She starts to sink, and Mike clings to her as they both go under. The Cat Stevens refrain from the credits returns. Slow fadeout.

I am of several minds about this ending. It shows mastery — like Susan, Mike’s violent attack took me by surprise — and some shots hit home (her yellow vinyl maxicoat sinking beneath the surface). But it’s also monumentally contrived, and the skill lavished on it diminishes the characters, indeed the entire film. Coolness bordering on freakish has always been a part of Skolimowski’s style; here it unsettles, as I wonder if he takes these characters less seriously than I do. Susan is perceived with horrible sharpness, and Jane Asher’s performance fits the contours of the character so exactly that it does not seem acting at all.

Mike’s reactions are muddled: He idolizes her, yet wants to possess her. One brief, penetrating scene makes this clear. Susan is beside the pool in a black bikini, eating lunch. Several schoolboys are ogling her. Mike batters one boy who knows him, but he has been thinking the very same thing. The boys throw Mike into the pool and, under the water, he imagines Susan gliding past him, naked.

Later, he sees a life-sized cutout in front of a nudie theater; the girl looks something like Susan, and Mike steals it. He confronts her with it (on the subway!), visions of her innocence severely dented — “No, you’re not like this, Sue!” She deadpans, “Oh no, I’m much worse than that.” He throws his surrogate Susan into the pool, undresses, and dives in after her. The editing transforms his tussle with the cardboard lady into a fierce imaginary copulation with the real Susan.

John Moulder-Brown is good as Mike — the right look and voice, and he handles most of the various swerves fairly well. The film’s viewpoint wobbles, and at times we are invited to share Susan’s valuation of him: an insignificant little punk who is fun to toy with.

The usual Skolimowski gifts are very much in evidence. Charly Steinberger’s color photography conveys even the smells of the bathhouse; certain of the pictures are Red Desert-gorgeous without the fussiness (Susan framed against a wall painted in blotches of green and orange). Some of the gags are inspired by a uniquely Polish non-logic (Mike cuts his hand and goes to a medicine cabinet that’s empty; a painter is first seen in the background, as a disembodied arm wielding a brush). Music is central to Skolimowski’s art, and Deep End has the best-employed rock score (by Cat Stevens and Can) I can remember — economical, haunting, relevant. Some of Can’s contribution (not enough!) is on their Soundtracks album (Mute).

I have made Deep End sound better than it is; for me it avoids so many pitfalls so well. Skolimowski films have their self-destructive side, none more than this one. The writers (Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza, Boleslaw Sulik) are Poles, and the dialogue appears largely improvised. Scenes that depend on talk can trail off into nothing — too much like actual conversation, in fact.

A good many scenes are not as funny as Skolimowski thinks they are. In particular, a gag involving a Chinese hot dog vendor is instantly excruciating and keeps being reprised. Others are rather cheap — a prostitute with a cast on one leg, the sex-movie theater manager who calls Mike “you perverted little monster!” The film strives for lightness — to set off the ending more strongly — but its humor often stalls.

London in Deep End looks vaguely like the real thing — quite a feat considering most of it was shot in Munich, with Germans later dubbed in English in the minor roles. Some of the movie exhibits a baffling sort of carelessness; I can’t always tell when it’s bad with a purpose and when Skolimowski simply can’t be bothered.

But I would not like to end on the negative. Deep End has its flaws, some of them large, but it proceeds from a vision of the world and a personal signature. He stacks the cards against himself unmercifully on this occasion, but he succeeds in his goal — to express a character’s obsession in poetic terms.

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