Ferdy on Films, etc.

Love Me Tonight (1932)
Director: Rouben Mamoulian

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Before Jeanette MacDonald paired up with Nelson Eddy to define boring, sexless romance on the big screen, she made several films with that prototype of French bon vivants Maurice Chevalier. Most of these films were made with the fabled touch of director Ernst Lubitsch; the final mating of this threesome, capped by the great operetta compositions of Franz Lehar, is the most sublime of them all—The Merry Widow (1934). Somewhere in the middle, Rouben Mamoulian, whose knockout debut as a director was the melodrama Applause (1929), was given his chance with these appealing stars and fashioned one of their stock stories of an aristocratic woman and her common courter. While Mamoulian falls short of the waltzlike grace and romantic sensuality of Lubitsch, his comedic moments more than make up for it.

The famous opening scene gives a panoramic view of the Paris skyline and then moves in to listen to the rhythms by which the city wakes up—a woman beating a rug, some men cobbling shoes together, smoke stacks churning, and so forth. Finally, the camera moves to Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier), a Parisian tailor readying for his day while singing of the noise of Paris in “That’s the Song of Paree," the first of several delightful—and some memorable—songs by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers.

Maurice reaches his shop as his fellow shopkeeper Pierre (George Davis) comes by to pick up the tuxedo Maurice has made for his wedding. Pierre forces a 2,000-franc fee on the reluctant Maurice, who prefers to give him the suit as a wedding gift. As Pierre goes off to try it on, Maurice welcomes the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles), for whom he has created an entire wardrobe. The Viscount, dressed in his underwear after escaping the arms of a woman whose husband had unexpectedly appeared, needs a suit—fast. Maurice quickly shoos another underwear-clad man—Pierre—out of the dressing room to make way for the Viscount, on whom Maurice is pinning the hopes for his fledgling shop. The Viscount emerges, pleased with the fit. Maurice asks him about the bill. The Viscount, a freeloader notorious throughout Paris, promises to pay him—he is headed to his uncle the Duke’s chateau that very evening for financial refreshment. On the way out, the Viscount touches Maurice for 500 francs. Maurice offers 1,000, pulling out the two 1,000-franc notes Pierre gave him. “Let’s just call it 2,000," says the Viscount, snatching the bills before Maurice can figure it out. It’s an old gag, but Ruggles is such a master of timing that it works.

All is forgotten when Pierre emerges looking like a king himself. His and Maurice’s delight spins into the classic tune “Isn’t It Romantic," which carries from the shop to the people along the street, through the countryside by train and horse-drawn wagon. Each singer tailors the lyrics to his or her individual circumstances in a symphony of clever, particular rhymes. Finally, it reaches Princess Jeanette in her country chateau, who sings the standard lyrics while lounging sensuously in her satin-sheeted bed. In this way, Mamoulian brings the lovers together, letting the audiences know they can expect exactly what they hoped for.

Maurice, spurred on by the other clothiers to whom he referred the Viscount, heads off to the chateau to demand his money. On the way, he hears a woman singing (“Lover"). It is the princess. When she stops he declares his love for her in song, the impertinent and naughty tune “Mimi" (“I’d like to have a little son of a Mimi by and by!"). We watch her full face assume an insulted but gauzily romantic look in the camera of Victor Milner, who shot several films for Lubitsch and knew how to get just the right touch. A small flash of humor crosses Jeanette’s face, but she’s soon slapping Maurice and running back to the chateau—where she passes out cold. The diagnosis? Dr. Armand de Fontinac (Joseph Cawthorn) says, "You're not wasting away, you're just wasted."

We spend the rest of the film getting to the inevitable clutch in most entertaining fashion. Maurice is passed off as a baron by the Viscount to prevent his uncle Duke d'Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith, whose chipper rendition of “Mimi" in one of the film's pass-around song sequences is wonderful) from learning of his debts. The Viscount’s sister, the man-hungry Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy) ("Do you ever think of anything but men?" "Yes, schoolboys."), chases Maurice at every opportunity. Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth), Jeanette’s nebbishy suitor, spends hours pouring over geneology books, suspecting there is no noble family named Courtelin. He also arranges to trip up Maurice on the stag hunt by choosing a challenging steed named Thunderbolt for him. Jeanette, appalled to find Maurice at the chateau as her cousin’s guest, says that she has chosen one instead—Solitude. Maurice, encouraged by the name, gladly agrees to it over the deadly sounding Thunderbolt. Unfortunately he learns that Solitude is so named because he always comes home alone. The gag showing the stall where Solitude is kept—danger signs, loud whinnying, and cowering stable hands—is corny, but funny, particularly when we get Maurice’s reaction shot. Another funny sight gag is when the princess, 22 years old and a widow for three years, shows Maurice a photo of her late husband, a comically posed elderly man (Tom Ricketts). The timing of the edit is perfect, and drew a big laugh out of me.

For a pre-Code film, this one's attempts at suggestiveness are pretty tame. Maurice insults Jeanette’s seamstress for building her a dowdy riding habit. He makes a bet that he can do it better. Then we get to see him remove Jeanette’s unfinished riding jacket and take a tape measure to her every body part. It could have been sexy, but Mamoulian plays it safe. Maurice is all efficiency, and Jeanette doesn’t melt even a little at his ministrations. In fact, Jeanette is pretty stiff throughout this film—including her singing—a portent of what was to come with Nelson Eddy. Seeing her flirty, womanly performance in The Merry Widow was, for me, like seeing an entirely different actress, and again, with Chevalier. Thus, I blame Mamoulian for the tepid romance.

Nonetheless, there’s not too much wrong with this romantic comedy that’s sure to put a smile on your face. The Kino DVD also includes among its extras Chevalier singing his signature song “Louise" with all his cabaret charm. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

By Roderick Heath

1999 was one of the most important years for modern American film, as a rash of works by new auteurs and entries from older ones sparked controversy and conversation right across the new audience of cinephiles. In contrast with end-of-millennium positivism and alt-capitalist dreams of the dot-com boom, political and social cynicism reigned in films after the wasted opportunities of the Clinton administration; the year of the Seattle anti-globalization riots found much rhyme between street and screen. Several of the year’s most striking films, as diverse as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, and Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, presented noir-influenced portraits of social disintegration, wars of anarchy and nihilism played out within psyches, societies, and individuals, in hallucinations and digital realms and fantasy worlds, often within a compressed time period—a dark night of the soul indeed.

Scorsese’s impact on other filmmakers was finally becoming indelible, though audiences seemed to prefer him present in spirit rather than in new works themselves. Taxi Driver’s sociopathic spirit possesses Fight Club; Magnolia marries the disparate influence of Scorsese’s with that of his most serious rival for greatest modern American director, Robert Altman. After Casino, Scorsese made two aggressively noncommercial films that expanded his high-montage aesthetic to examine in the conscientious souls of the world. Kundun (1997), a portrait of the young Dalai Lama, is Scorsese’s most abstract film, conjuring a visual tapestry in observing his hero attain a state of grace in the face of suffering and massive loss.

Bringing Out the Dead is intricately linked with Kundun, and also with Taxi Driver, to which it stands as a kind of response or repudiation whilst diving back into its nocturne-New York landscape. Scorsese had Paul Schrader pen the script, their first collaboration in 11 years, adapting a novel by former ambulance medic Joe Connelly detailing the pressures of that job in early 1990s New York. Where Travis Bickle surveyed his surroundings from his taxi with utmost misanthropy, Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) feels soul-crushing sympathy for the city that pulsates around him with crime, social disasters, and countless ghosts. Frank’s worked as an ambulance medic for five years, on graveyard shift. It’s been months since he saved anyone, since his ill-fated encounter with 18-year-old streetwalker Rose (Cynthia Roman), where attempts to get her breathing again resulted in her oxygen tube constantly going into her stomach instead of her lungs.

Now Frank is assailed by troubled sleep and nights at work alternating between near-hysteria and catatonic observation, jolting back shots of bourbon to get him through, seeing Rose’s face projected onto every potential patient on the streets. The film unfolds on three nights, on each of which Frank has a different partner; on Thursday, chubby, cheery, ambitious Larry (John Goodman); on Friday, evangelizing sex-obsessive Marcus (Ving Rhames), and on Saturday, sleazy nutball Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore), Frank’s ex-permanent partner, with whom he was once “legends in their own lunch hour," as their sarcastic dispatcher (Scorsese) recalls. On the Thursday night, hot and greasy, with a full moon to boot, Frank and Larry are called to a family residence to treat a mannamed Burke (Cullen Oliver Johnson) who’s suffered a heart attack. As the medics labour to restart the man’s heart, Frank advises his family to play music the man likes—Sinatra—mainly to give them something to do. Lo and behold, the man starts to respond. Amongst the family, it’s daughter Mary (Patricia Arquette) who seems both the most anguished and alert; she wants to ride in the ambulance, but Frank instead advises her to drive her family, who need her composure.

Frank and Larry truck Burke to Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, called Our Lady of Misery by the mordant medicos, a Hades whose Cerberus is fierce security guard Griss (Afemo Omilami). He constantly faces down a jabbering army of relatives and hangabouts with his signature threat: “Don’t make me take off my sunglasses!" Inside, charge nurse Constance (Mary Beth Hurt) sarcastically interrogates myriad alcoholics and junkies; the hallways are crowded with casualties; the patient’s arrival is greeted with groans from the doctor on duty, Hazmat (Nestor Serrano); “You told me he was dead, flat-line!" “He got better." Mary recognizes one patient, Noel (Marc Anthony), pest to everyone else but someone her father had let stay in the family flat in his troubled youth. Noel’s strapped to his stretcher, crying for water, which no one will provide as Hazmat has diagnosed him with a liver condition. Mary unties him, and Noel runs to a fountain to guzzle. Mary explains with glassy tears that she can’t stand to see anyone, let alone Noel, tied down.

Partly out of pity and partly because he’s attracted to her bruised and melancholy beauty, over the next two days, Frank buys Mary pizza in between jobsand gives her rides to the hospital. In one gorgeous moment, the pair sits in the rear of the ambulance, rocking against each other, and Mary can barely restrain laughter. Mary offloads her anxieties to the routinely receptive Frank, explaining her and her father’s troubled relationship with her father—she had wished he would die, but now only longs for a chance to talk to him once more. Mary’s a recovering drug addict. “You probably picked me up once or twice," she muses to Frank.

The medics like to ride to the rescue in life-and-death situations, and feel insulted when, too often the case, they merely cart around a regular clientele of substance abusers, mentally ill, and homeless. Also troubling them is a deadly new street drug, Red Death, that is causing a procession of ODs. With Scorsese’s customary propelling soundtrack, most importantly Van Morrison’s scorching blues “T.B. Sheets,"? the film moves within tones of blood red and bright white light against molasses black; Frank feels like he lives in an underworld, and Robert Richardson’s camera aids Scorsese in conjuring an urban tale told by Poe.

Frank and Larry soon deal with Noel again; he’s suicidal and lays in the middle of a street to be run over. Frank gets him to come back to the hospital on the promise of giving him his choice of suicide methods (“Pills. Definitely pills!"). They’re diverted to a multiple shooting in which two young men have been wounded, Red Death vials scattered around them. Frank drafts Noel’s help as he tries to save one in the race back to the hospital; they arrive just as the man, who tearfully vows that he does not want to die and will join the army, expires. Noel promptly runs off at the sight of raw death.

Bringing Out the Dead shows impeccable tonal command. The film could have been a grueling or boring exercise, but Scorsese handles beautifully the alternation of adrenalin-provoking jobs and nocturnal chaos—the sheer visceral thrill and black humor of which keeps the medics, and us, interested—with moments of calm and melancholy, bleary daylight exhaustion and peace-seeking. Frank hopes he’ll be fired by his frazzled, motherly, male boss Captain Barney (Arthur Nascarella). But no one gets fired from this job, they’re too hard-up for staff, and wear and tear on individuals is inevitable; “I promise, I’ll fire you tomorrow!" Barney assures.Frank meditates on the pleasure of saving a life: “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see…God has passed through you…why deny that for a moment there, God was you?"

Frank’s three partners all contrast Frank in their ways of coping, or not coping. Larry plans his meals assiduously and anticipates a day when “it’ll be Boss Larry calling the shots." Marcus radiates religious passion, and the film’s black comedy highlight has Marcus making a bunch of Goths hold hands and pray whilst Frank resuscitates one of their friends from a Red Death overdose. He also taunts prostitutes with handfuls of cash and flirts relentlessly over the CB with Love (Queen Latifah), the alternate dispatcher whom he once took out on a date that ended with her hitting him over the head. When Marcus decides, against Frank’s pleas, to make an extra trip for the night and guns the motor, he crashes, flipping the vehicle on its side, a wreck from which Frank crawls in giddy laughter. Tom Wolls is completely split at the seams, on the far side of the chasm Frank’s trying to avoid falling into; Tom plans to beat Noel to death for being a nuisance.

The film is littered with wry observations of modern American racial and sexual politics; Griss can be seen reading a book called “Black Robes, White Justice"; Marcus claims “I never mixes my seed;" Mary, in her druggy daze, questions if Frank his Galahad attentiveness means he wants to fuck her (“Everybody else has…"). But despite the social-realist concerns of the film, Scorsese gives the film a surreal, voodoo-noir edge. Religious imagery and references are implied constantly—from the Plague cites (its title, the Red Death) inward—not with a proselytizing purpose, but with a conscientious irony. The names of the hospitals, even the schools Frank and Mary attended, present ingrained religious ideas that underlie these strenuous efforts to survive and heal. The pair are both from this neighborhood, but where Mary’s family stuck around, Frank’s took the path of white flight and may account in part for his guilty zeal. Frank encounters a “virgin birth" when he and Marcus help two Hispanic kids in a crack house, the male of whom assures them his girl can’t be pregnant because, as he proudly announces, “We’re virgins!" Frank also attends resurrections—of Burke and the Goth boy—and equivalents of crucifixions.

There’s also a seductive devil. Mary spends a second grinding night at the hospital, with her father constantly going into cardiac arrest, fighting for his life. In the morning, she goes to see Cy Coates (Cliff Curtis), a local drug kingpin, in desperate need of some emotional numbing. Frank promises to watch out for her and eventually follows her up to Coates’ apartment, a tranquil harbor where Cy holds court with his afro-haired girlfriend and various henchmen. Cy is a silk-tongued, effetely friendly magician of intoxicants who decries the Red Death as “poison"; he has his boys looking to deal with its dealers, and proposes himself as a community-minded man, which Mary later ridicules, knowing that Cy or one of his goons put the bullet in Noel’s head that has made him crazy. With Mary unconscious, Frank lets Cy slip him a downer. Frank plummets into a hallucinogenic dream where he struggles to aid an army of ghosts in escaping the earth, and then relives Rose’s death, where snow rises back into the sky. Frank awakens in screaming rage and drags the stoned Mary from Cy’s place, before collapsing in her apartment. When he awakes, he muses beatifically on the joys of washing his hands with her scented bars of soap.

Cage was in one of his periodic disgraces for appearing in too many action films (around this time, I heard Cage described by one critic as a ham and by another as wooden) after his Oscar win for the tawdry, faux-realist Leaving Las Vegas (1996). But Cage fulfills his role as Frank with a haunted grace and hard emotional commitment. Like another underrecognized, late-career classic, Kurosawa’s Red Beard, Bringing Out the Dead is a statement of the necessity of human relationships and altruistic responsibility. Frank seeks fulfillment from helping people, a dedication little rewarded and brutally self-abnegating. As in Casino, Scorsese uses the fate of the villain as a catalyst, except that where Nicky’s grim end underlined a disgust in violence, here Cy presents Frank an opportunity to save a life when the Red Death dealers shoot up Cy’s flat, driving Cy to try leaping from his balcony. Cy ends up skewered on the railing, dangling floors above a crowd crying for a spectacle. The police rescuers who don’t care if he falls or not; Frank risks his life to prevent him plummeting to earth as Cy crows joyfully as the sparks of their cutting torches light the sky like fireworks.

But saving a life doesn’t relieve Frank. He decides what he wants is violence, and, by now terribly strung out, lets Tom talk him into helping him assault Noel, everyone’s victim. This involves following Noel into a red-soaked labyrinth where the homeless sleep. It’s like walking into hell; the image of sin that confronts him is Tom cracking Noel’s bones with a baseball bat. Frank drives Tom away and takes Noel to be patched up. Frank realises he needs to learn to let go, which he enacts by plugging Mr. Burke’s monitors to his own body and letting the man, whom he has imagined is begging for death, die. He then goes to tell Mary of his death, in the course of which he imagines he’s apologizing to Rose as well. “It’s not your fault," Mary/Rose replies.

The final shot is of Mary cradling Frank on her bed, white light flooding the frame. It’s the most hopeful final image of any Scorsese film to that point, especially for Scorsese’s most likable, if troubled, male-female partnering since Charlie and Theresa in Mean Streets. Frank, like Jesus and the Dalai Lama before him in the Scorsese canon, is a selfless figure who is rewarded for his sheer courage in the face of intimidating odds; but Frank is an ordinary guy, rather than a religious icon. He is great simply in his willingness to recognize and still fight his limitations to serve the people around him. Bringing Out the Dead effortlessly outclasses the shallow social commentary of Fight Club or that year’s Best Picture winner, American Beauty, not just in technique, but for its feel for the gnarled, aching landscape of modern urban life. It has a breadth of heart and mind to grant its heroes a true sense of the world beyond their own tawdry frustrations. l

The Naked City (1948)
Director: Jules Dassin

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Long before I knew there was a film called The Naked City I was a committed fan of a TV series that ran from 1958 through 1963 called Naked City. An important element of that show was its narrator, who took viewers through the procedures of a compelling crime case each week and spoke the words “There are 8 millions stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."

The entire template for that popular series, which TV tried to revive in the early 1990s without success, was this unusual movie by one of the best crime-film directors around, Jules Dassin. Influenced by the Italian Neorealist style, the film’s producer, a former newspaperman named Mark Hellinger, was convinced that a movie filmed entirely on location in New York City would create a thrill in audiences unlike any they had yet experienced. And as the film’s voiceover narrator, he comes right out and says so.

In its opening shot, which would be reproduced for the TV series, an airplane flies over Manhattan, from the Battery, over Central Park, along the East River, and past other locations. Cameras at ground level show people going about their daily activities as Hellinger describes their doings—some with no knowledge that they are being filmed; some, characters in the screenplay; and then the money shot. A blonde named Jean Dexter is being murdered in her apartment—strangled unconscious and then drown in her bathtub. In this way, the film sets the stage for a police procedural that manages to capture both the methodical drudgery of investigative police work and the exotic thrills Hollywood is good at delivering to eager fans.

The investigation launches after Martha Swenson (Virginia Mullen), the victim’s maid, lets herself into Miss Dexter’s apartment, picks up a newspaper lying on the floor, rights some toppled knick-knacks, and tries to rouse her employer from sleep. She enters the bedroom, finds the bed rumpled but empty, then notices water on the floor. Martha peers into the bathroom, and then we get the stock close-up of her whipping her head around, eyes wide with horror, mouth twisted in a scream. Soon the police are on the scene questioning her.

In classic fashion, the veteran cop is mated with the new member of the detective squad. I absolutely love Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, the man who’s seen it all but hasn’t quite gotten used to it. The role shows that Fitzgerald, practically bleached of his actory colors by his sentimental rendering of Father Fitzgibbon in the Bing Crosby cornfest Going My Way, knew what he was doing. Even the few Irish ditties he sings while he’s washing up at home seem part of his character, not a page out of the Irish caricature manual. His young partner, Detective Jim Halloran (Don Taylor), is smart, good-looking, and completely comfortable wearing out his shoe leather walking from lead to lead throughout Manhattan. A short scene of character-building shows him coming home to his wife (Anne Sargent), who has donned a sexy summer outfit to coax him to give their son a whipping for crossing a busy street alone. It’s a good sparring match, entertaining, and in keeping with the day-in-the-life style of the film.

As the homicide squad works the case, they turn up Dr. Stoneman, (House Jameson), a doctor who wrote a prescription for the dead woman; Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), a friend with whom she modeled at a dress shop; and Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a man the maid said came by frequently to visit Miss Dexter. They also are searching for a Mr. Henderson, described as a tall, thin, older man, possibly from Baltimore, who called on Miss Dexter and apparently gave her expensive jewelry, according to the maid, who saw a drawer full of jewels in the murdered woman’s dresser. All of the interviewed people say they’d do anything to help capture Dexter’s killer.

Howard Duff plays the spoiled rich kid gone bad with devious precision. He is an incredibly convincing liar. Even after Muldoon quickly and accidentally learns that he has lied during his very first interview—Niles says he barely knows Morrison, then she walks into the interview room and identifies him as her fiancé—he, and we, continue to get ensnared in his web of intrigue. Eventually, it all comes down to a neat conspiracy and a man who plays the harmonica, capped by one of the most exciting chase sequences in film history—one that may have inspired Jimmy Cagney’s run up a gas tower in White Heat just a year later. All along the way, Hellinger interjects comments about what someone might be thinking, what they're doing and why they're doing it, as though he were sitting in our heads and narrating our thoughts.

Some people have called this film a noir, but the femme fatale is the murdered woman, and to me, that’s not noir. Additionally, there is no web of fate drawing unsuspecting pigeons into its trap. Instead, we have several career criminals drawing an amateur, but willing, man (Duff) into their ring and entrapping another in a blackmail scheme. Therefore, what we have is a straight-up detective story handled expertly by Dassin, a director of cracking noirs who made it big in Europe under his own name after he was blacklisted; his masterful Rififi (Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, 1955), a French noir that plays more like a crime caper, captures some of the attention to detail of actually doing a job found in The Naked City, but from the criminal’s point of view.

Hellinger’s narrative grounds this film solidly in the work-a-day world, capturing the motives and movements of its members. But it is the location shooting that really gives this film its vitality—the vitality of New York itself. The kids playing in the water released from fire hydrants are real. When the murderer jumps over fences and darts down alleys with Halloran in pursuit, they’re real fences and alleys. Whether we wish to believe in the robbery ring, which seems to come right out of central casting, we have to admit that this film makes it seem that crimes like these happen in neighborhoods like this.

As much for its time-capsule depiction of New York as for its other fine attributes, The Naked City has received a fine Criterion Collection release. Enjoy this story in 8 million from the Naked City and all the extras. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

Casino (1995)

By Roderick Heath

Casino presents the rare, inspiring sight of a director pushing his capacities, obsessions, and stylistic experimentation to the limit. Scorsese’s attempts to shunt narrative and explore worlds through montage and voiceover, to fuse high and low culture, to gain panoramic insight into America, to show violence as harsh and ugly as possible—all pushed to the far edge in Casino. If The Age of Innocence is Scorsese at his most poised, Casino is Marty gone wild. It’s a film where a shot from within a cocaine snorter’s straw, white flakes hoovered up towards the camera like a sandstorm, seems subtle. The film that erupts in its opening scene—literally, as Robert De Niro seems to be blown sky high by a car bomb to strains of Bach’s “Matthaus Passion"—becomes an opera of the sordid (the credits also represent the last work of the great film editor and title designer Saul Bass). Scorsese’s first film in 12 years without Michael Ballhaus is instead filmed in the bolder colors and light-diffusing style of Robert Richardson. Richardson’s camera drinks in a landscape of bad wigs and make-up caked faces, cocaine and blood, phony glamour and phonier humanity.

For all this, Casino is a film about marriage—bad marriage on a Shakespearean scale undone by what kills most marriages: money, distrust, and infidelity. Casino is another logical step up from the street-level quasi-hoods of Mean Streets. It pointedly lacks the comforting blue-collar attitude of the Goodfellas crew; Jimmy the Gent, Tommy, and Paulie are lovable when contrasted with the at-all-costs obscenity of Las Vegas and its resident hoods. In its cut-up aesthetics and spurning of the subtle, Casino was Scorsese’s angriest, most punkish film since Taxi Driver and joined two other exciting films from the mid 90s—Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls —in offering a purposefully excessive take on the city of excess; like those films, though not as severely, Casino was greeted without adulation.

But Casino is Scorsese’s great burn-it-down statement, the furthest end of his disgust and delight in everything seamy in American culture. He films Las Vegas in all its Technicolor glory and grotesquery, a symphonic swirl of lights, sex, currency, and gore. The film follows the true story of alleged mob tool Frank “Lefty" Rosenthal and Chicago mobsters Tony “The Ant" Spilotro, and Frank Cullotta, rendered here as Sam “Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro), Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), and Frank Marino (Frank Vincent). Sam and Nicky are boyhood friends, the closest the film gets to the “years ago back home" vibe of Goodfellas or Mean Streets. Sam is a great gambler, a scientist of chance, who has, up to the early 70s, made his living as a bookie at the behest of the mob. He leaps at the shot at managing the new Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas, theoretically controlled by developer Phillip Green (Kevin Pollak) who’s borrowed financing from the infamous Teamsters Pension Fund. This, of course, means it’s a mob-controlled development. The Mafia dons, headed by Remo Gaggi (Pasquale Cajano), won’t venture any closer to Vegas than Kansas City, the future of their cash cow requiring a squeaky-clean image whilst their finely calibrated skims bring in titanic revenue.

Sam does his job with micromanagerial finesse and ice-cold authority. His awareness of systems— systems of control, systems of surveillance, and the systems of luck—is brilliantly spelled out by Scorsese’s ever-mobile camera. He knows that, for all the illusions the town presents, the house almost always wins, and even when it doesn’t, it can be dealt with. He can sabotage big winners, as he does with a Japanese high roller, keeping him stranded in town until he gambles away all he has won, and ruthlessly punishes cheats. One gets his hand smashed with a hammer by his partner, who is offered a choice between “the money and the hammer" or walking away. In a fashion, Sam and the rest in Casino also have chosen the money and the hammer.

Sam enjoys his apparent acceptance into elite circles, his status, wealth, and power, which he’s never been allowed before. “Vegas was like Lourdes. All our sins were washed away." Yet Sam isn’t a happy pawn. He wants to be legitimized, gain a Nevada gaming license—requiring years of bureaucracy and bribery—and a wife. He sets his eyes on Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), the most beautiful, sexy, clever, greedy hustler in town. Sam uses the omnipresent surveillance system of the Tangiers to watch her bilking a gambler and steps in to save her when he gets uppity. Ginger is a virtual personification of the city, a mesmerizing surface over a heart of steel, greedy, dishonest, and perversely attached to sleazy beginnings. Sam proves his ardor with a nest egg of a million dollars’ worth of jewelry, which Ginger fawns over with childish glee before it’s locked in a safe deposit box at the bank. For Sam, it’s a pledge of trust and fidelity; for her it’s the golden egg from a goose ripe for the dinner table. He doesn’t marry her until they have a daughter together, Amy (Erika von Tagen), a sure way, he thinks, of binding her close.

When Nicky arrives with his crew of heavies, including brother Dominick (Philip Suriano) and Marino, he’s been sent by Remo to protect Sam and the operation. But Nicky has a very different idea of his Vegas mission. He establishes kingpin status, robbing and intimidating left, right, and center. Nicky soon gets himself banned from every casino in town, and attracts an army of police and FBI agents, forlornly trying to catch him on something. Sam knows what the pint-sized psychopath is capable of: he has seen Nicky stab a man in the neck with a fountain pen for a flash of brusque attitude. Nicky thinks nothing of threatening bankers, working over bookies, or shooting Phillip Green’s litigious ex-business partner—a middle-aged, middle-class woman—in the head. When a gang shoots up a local diner, Nicky is ordered to punish them. He tortures their leader, eventually putting his head in a vice and popping an eyeball from its socket, before cutting his throat. He also gets up every morning to make his son breakfast and eagerly chats with cops watching their sons at Little League games.

Sam is unable to restrain Nicky, and is even resented for his attempts to play Mr. Legit: “We're supposed to be robbin’ this place, you dumb fuckin’ hebe!" Nor can Sam maintain authority over Ginger, who keeps a flame for her first lover and pimp, Lester Diamond (James Woods, defining “sleazeball"), who cajoles her for money whilst keeping her psyche on a short leash. He can hypnotize her over the phone by recalling the “young colt with braces on her teeth" he sold. Sam detests the man as much as Ginger pities and adores him. When Lester taps Ginger for $5,000, Sam gives it to him, but then has Nicky’s goons work him over, to Ginger’s hysterical protest. Ginger descends into drugs and drink. In her unstable, paranoid state, she convinces herself that Sam will have her killed, and begins coming on to Nicky as a potential protector, an act that can only have evil consequences.

Cue what was voted the worst sex scene in screen history by one newspaper’s readers: Joe Pesci screwing Sharon Stone. It’s logical in this film exploring a world of sensual excess. Here, indulgence has long outstripped desire, a substitution which, consistently in Scorsese, is the worst possible sin, and one too readily tempting in rich America. Not for the first time, Scorsese dragged a career-best performance from a star, here Stone, who inhabits her half-mad minx with bodily force. In comparison, Pesci is close to parodic and De Niro’s Sam is a much cooler performance than he usually delivered for Scorsese, fittingly as Rothstein’s relative sympathy contrasts his surrounds, but with some tired lurches into familiar refrains (“Can I trust you?...Can I trust you? Answer me, can I trust you?"). It’s also Scorsese’s last collaboration with De Niro to date.

The poisonous threesome of Sam-Nicky-Ginger sends this tale careening into insanity, but other events help, like when FBI agents, bugging the grocery store of put-upon don Artie Piscano (Vinnie Vella), overhear him bitching about his responsibilities to his curse-shy mother (Catherine Scorsese, in her last part for her son before dying in 1997). Nicky can still run rings around them. Agents watching Nicky in a light plane run out of petrol and have to land on a golf course where he and his goons are playing; they happily pelt the plane with golf balls. But Nicky has unbalanced Vegas’ stability. The casino cash-counters who perform the skimming soon begin pilfering for themselves. Marino soon finds himself piggy in the middle, having to answer questions from Remo over the dwindling revenue and whether Nicky is screwing Ginger. Worse, Sam gains far too much attention when his refusal to humor local redneck nepotism results in failure to get his license. He explodes at a Gaming Commission, rants to reporters, and gives himself a high-profile television host to justify hanging around the Tangiers.

Sam is the only person in the film who maintains relative dignity and sympathy, for his professionalism and especially his fatherly concern for Amy, who, at one point, is tied to her bed by her mother who wishes to go out for the evening. In the screenplay, Sam was to have had Lester killed by Nicky, but this was left out of the film, perhaps because Sam is the story’s only link to common humanity. Like so many Scorsese heroes, Sam is defined by his yearning, his desire to transcend his lot and live his version of the American dream through Vegas, the institutionalized loophole in American post-puritan morality. Yet his ferocious poise in gambling and management is matched by a lack of emotional smarts, and his willingness to employ thuggery in settling a romantic rival’s hash, his unleashed loathing for an establishment of country club blazers and cowboy hats who won’t let a Jewish bookie join their ranks, all doom him.

The recreated cocaine-stained polyester and sleazestache chic of 70s style is noxiously intense (largely responsible for the glut of 70s retro films of the late 90s), Scorsese’s culture riffing alternately playful—like the painfully exact recreation of Sam’s TV show or caricature of Siegfried and Roy—and carefully planned. Like the soundtrack’s use of three different versions of “Satisfaction"—from the Stones’ driving, declaratory original to Devo’s disintegrating, masturbatory edition—Nicky and Sam’s control dissolves in a welter of blow-induced shootings and soul-grinding jealousies. Scorsese honors his locale with typical idiosyncrasy, by casting Vegas headline comedians like Alan King, Don Rickles (as two of Sam’s casino lieutenants, Andy Stone and Billy Sherbert), and Tom Smothers.

Casino fulfills Scorsese’s interest in the mechanics of violence, power, and criminality, and opens up territory suggested in The Age of Innocence and Raging Bull in studying not just social outsiders, but its winners, to study how often in American society that old adage of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s about there being no second acts in American lives, proves true, and why. Sam, Ginger, and Nicky triumph by being the most exacting, enthusiastic, and ruthless in their fields. They are pure entrepreneurs, but their utter confusion of success with plunder destroys all three of them to varying degrees. Ginger and Nicky are seriously screwed-up people, and Sam’s offering all he has to a woman he knows is venal and untrustworthy reeks of masochism. Casino moves from Goodfellas’ true-crime black comedy to a new realm, one of classical tragedy. As in Euripides and Shakespeare, it uses the extreme lives of its colossal characters to reflect on ordinary human faults, allowed to reach an extreme through the scale of their lives. Most people only feel like the world collapses when their marriage busts up, but in Casino it literally does.

Ginger runs off with Lester, taking Amy with her, then crawls back when Lester blows all their money. Sam, fuming, accepts her but bitterly harps on Lester’s waste and finally spits death threats. Ginger only wants to get her hands on her safe deposit box, but Sam won’t hand it over, knowing it’s the only way he can keep her around. His and Ginger’s concussive brawls and mutual abuse result in Sam dragging Ginger by her hair down a hallway and throwing her out, only to have her return in the middle of the night, their rage temporarily spent. Ginger tries to push Sam by declaring Nicky is her new sponsor, but Nicky contemptuously has her thrown out of his restaurant in her hysterical state. Sam, justifiably paranoid that Nicky’s goons will arrive, has Sherbert come with a shotgun. All they get is Ginger instead, repeatedly ramming Sam’s car in their driveway. She uses the police intervention to snatch the key to the safe deposit box, and beats Sam to the bank to make off with her treasure chest, only to be stopped by detectives.

But they’re not after her—they’re drawing the net on the whole operation. They even try to get Sam to grass (inform) on Nicky by showing him photos of Nicky and Ginger together; he shuts the door on them. Still, Remo and the bosses, Nicky, Frank, dozens of made men,and parasites are arrested. In reply, the bosses order a bloodbath. Witnesses, weak links, traitors, and the problematic litter the landscape from Kansas to Costa Rica. Nicky and his brother, released on bail, are met in a cornfield by Frank and their crew. The boys, happy at the chance to remove the scary little creep from their lives, hold Nicky down and force him to watch them beat Dominic to a bloody pulp, and then do the same to him, before burying them both alive in a dusty grave.

It’s perhaps the rawest scene of violence ever in a mainstream American film, and Scorsese finally confronts a limit here, both of what he can get away with and of the lifestyle of these people. This is what’s at the center of the onion he’s peeled, and fittingly for an angry repudiation of violence, it’s Nicky the psycho who’s the suddenly sympathetic victim. The only amusing aspect is that Frank Vincent finally has revenge for the beatings he received from Pesci in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.

What’s left of Casino’s narrative runs out on burning sand, scored with perhaps Scorsese’s most perfect sound-vision fusion by The Animal’s version of “House of the Rising Sun." That most iconic of blues songs—like the film—mixes cautionary tale, deterministic social argument, and ironic sensual celebration. Alan Price’s organ burns away as Ginger, as a groaning husk, drops dead in an anonymous hotel hallway, murdered with a hot dose of heroin, her fortune squandered. Sam, we find, is saved from a bomb planted in his car only by incredible fortune. Our last image of an aging, thick-spectacled Ace Rothstein, is another Scorsese Odysseus washed up on the shore, emptied of torturous passions and laden with experience, happy to be simply alive. As old Vegas collapses flames, he muses with due sarcasm about the laundering of the town; gone is, at least, the sense that the town was run by human beings, guys like himself who had risen from nothing, replaced by corporations. America’s playground becomes another place for the bedazzled and hopeful to give their money away to the giants. l

Deux Fois (Two Times, 1968)
Director: Jackie Raynal

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The French New Wave may be the most famous movement in cinema, but there are seminal forces from this movement—as well as in other corners of French film of the 1960s—that time, film tastes, and sexism have pushed into the shadows. One of them, film editor/director/actress Jackie Raynal, who edited films by Chabrol, Godard, and Rohmer, produced a startling experimental film called Deux Fois as part of the Zanzibar group—a score of young filmmakers given strings-free financing by philanthropist and feminist Sylvina Boissonnas. Deux Fois is both an obvious and extremely challenging film that can be viewed over and over without truly penetrating its “secrets." As I would find out, not even Raynal, who attended the film’s screening at the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival this past weekend, seemed exactly certain of her motives.

The 63-minute, B&W film opens with Raynal stuffing a meal hurriedly into her face while shifting her gaze around the veranda on which she’s seated, directly at the camera, and at an unseen companion. At the end of this somewhat nerve-wracking vignette, she tells us what we are about to see and then says the film will result in the end of meaning. Don’t bother to catalog the scenes as she describes them because not all of them occur. I’ll deal with the end of meaning later.

We are treated to a number of mainly unrelated vignettes thereafter. In one, Raynal enters a room, goes behind a table on which sit a number of cameras. She picks up one and goes offscreen. She returns, puts the camera back on the table, picks up another one and a light bulb, and goes offscreen again. She returns, replaces the objects where they were, and picks up a mirror. She moves it to reflect light into our eyes. This sequence is repeated three times.

In an outdoor sequence, Raynal walks along a dirt path, a very long scarf trailing around her neck and down between her legs. She is seen in a medium shot moving horizontally and then moves toward the camera in a closer shot. She trips over the scarf and out of the frame. This sequence is repeated twice.

Another sequence shows her with Francisco Viader, a handsome Spaniard she met in Barcelona, talking intimately, and they kiss each other on the eyebrow. A later sequence shows Viader, shirtless and framed by what looks like a piece of kraft paper, apparently making love to someone below the horizon of the paper, occasionally looking up to smile into and primp for the camera, and then returning his focus to his companion.

In perhaps the most daringly funny sequence, Raynal stands in the upstage left corner of a room wearing nothing but a pair of black pantyhose. A man identified only as Oscar sits downstage right, scowling. Raynal seems in torment, painful expressions and jerky movements building into a growing frenzy. Her hand moves toward her groin. A moment of hesitation, and then it becomes very clear that she has to urinate. Oscar suddenly moves out of the frame and sticks his face directly in the lens, completely obscuring Raynal. When he moves out of the frame again, she is kneeling on the floor with her head down. She straightens up and a look of relief—and a puddle—appear. Her almost total lack of modesty in this sequence shocked viewers at the time, who vented their hostility on Raynal everywhere the film was shown. It perhaps doesn't occur to them that they likely were enjoying the view of her naked breasts, but that this voyeurism is as over-the-line as watching her pee, the act of which certainly must have given her a sense of relief and pleasure.

Today, audiences have seen it all, so a mainly nude woman urinating barely raises an eyebrow. That is not to say, however, that Raynal’s film seems tame. Although they may have focused on the specific acts in the film, what challenged viewers then is what challenges them now—they cannot rely on Raynal to transmit the “right" meaning of the film to them—hence, the end of meaning she declared as the “purpose" of the film. Human beings like to be told stories; that is the foundation for so many of our pursuits. Without an identifiable story, or frame as it is commonly called now, we must come up with one of our own or feel alienated from the world we are inhabiting. This almost Brechtian distance certainly can account for the chilly reception Deux Fois did and does receive from some people.

Raynal does seem to try to give us something to hang onto. She has one sequence in which she appears to be asleep, but wakes up several times to write down what we presume to be a dream. Then she enacts the dream—the purchase of soap—several times. This is almost a linked narrative, but in the sleeping sequences, a telltale trail of cigarette smoke invades a corner of the frame, letting us know that the set-up of the story of sleeping and dreaming is completely artificial. The act of watching, which we normally would do unself-consciously in a movie theatre, is brought to our attention by the unseen smoker watching Raynal portray an untrue moment. We are not allowed at virtually any time in this film to feel comfortable watching other people perform for our psychological benefit.

There also is a specifically feminine point of view to this film, which also may account for the venom directed at Raynal when it first came on the scene. Women are watched—constantly. The struggle for feminists to end the objectification of women stems from the incredible discomfort and constraints this practice impose. When Raynal shines the mirror into our eyes, it does communicate to a small degree that it is painful to have a light pointed on one all the time. At the same time, the loving regard the camera pays to the sexually exciting Viader allows women in the audience the freedom of carnal observation, but puts men in a position to identify with the feeling of objectification.

It was exciting to meet this pioneer feminist filmmaker in one of my favorite venues, the LaSalle Bank Cinema, which normally opens its doors only on Saturday nights to show films, cartoons, and shorts from the silent and classic movie eras that are normally hard to view. In this sense, Deux Fois was right at home. Raynal did not really recall what she was trying to accomplish with the film; she planned the shots, she said, but my impression was that she was somewhat impulsive and improvisational, moved internally to make certain choices. She told us she meant the film to be a love letter to her boyfriend in Paris, but ended up with something different when she found herself filming it with a new boyfriend in Barcelona. She talked about her feelings of inferiority upon coming to Paris from the south of France, betraying her “lower" origins in her Southern accent. I imagine these feelings may have informed the atmosphere of Deux Fois. Now, many years after she laid her body and her psyche bare, Raynal is more comfortable with herself and therefore less connected to this youthful work, but still a bold woman who said “yes" to the opportunities that came her way. Good for her, and good for us. l

Deux Fois and Vite, a Zanzibar film by artist Daniel Pommereulle were copresented by Chicago Filmmakers, sponsors of the Onion City Festival, and Chicago Cinema Forum, a new group dedicated to bringing rare and hard-to-access films to Chicago audiences. Gabe Klinger, my colleague and former instructor in Brazilian cinema at Facets Multimedia, is one of the founders of CCF. I enthusiastically endorse his organization’s aims and think he’s the ideal person to make them happen. Please support their work. Their website, still under construction, is www.chicagocinemaforum.org.

The Hunting Party (1971)
Director: Don Medford

By Don Jacobson

In the long and honored annals of 1970s anti-Westerns, The Hunting Party doesn’t loom very large, for several good reasons. One is that it was a largely British production shot on shoestring budget in Spain, and although similar circumstances didn’t stop Sergio Leone from making one of the best westerns of all time (1967’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), in this case, MGM's low budget was definitely a bit more indicative of the overall level of artistic endeavor. The other good reason is that it was thoroughly panned upon its release by critics who saw some of the obvious similarities between this film and The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Little Big Man, and the aforementioned Leone efforts, and dismissed it as a violent and derivative revenge-film knock-off done quickly by television-oriented hacks.

Well, yes and no. The Hunting Party does indeed suffer from such flaws as over- and underacting, a lack of character development and inadequate explanation of their motives, and a visual style taken straight from such TV westerns as The Big Valley. But it also serves as a fascinating object lesson about a time period (the very early '70s) when fast-changing social mores and tastes were truly taking hold among moviegoers, and how the major studios, which were still dominated by clueless “establishment" types, struggled to find a formula that would work for them while the future of the entire industry seemed to be hanging in the balance.

One tack they took to find a way to continue to churn out acceptable product for the so-called grindhouse screens, which were still playing an important role in the days before TV saturation reached the point of no return, was to take TV writers, producers, and directors and turn them loose on a big screen where TV censorship did not apply. It was hoped that the movie-going public would find appealing these essentially TV movies with emerging big-screen actors and loaded with sex and violence. Of course, this was a formula that was bound to fail The sex and violence in these kinds of movies always seems horribly gratuitous, the soon-to-be-great actors misused in a form that merely exploited newfound freedoms instead of using them to invent a new kind of socially relevant cinema. It was an attempt by the World War II generation to find a way to connect with the kids before most of the now-legendary crop of '70s auteur-directors really had a chance to get their hands on the controls. For instance, 1971 was the year Martin Scorsese made Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman, Steven Spielberg made the TV movie Duel, and George Lucas was writing and directing a remake of his student film THX 1138.

In that respect, probably the most notable thing about The Hunting Party is that it was Gene Hackman’s last appearance before becoming a poster boy for the auteur phenomenon - later that year, he appeared as Det. Jimmy “Popeye" Doyle in William Friedkin’s groundbreaking The French Connection and never went back to playing second-fiddle roles as he does in The Hunting Party, in which he plays Brandt Ruger, a sadistic Old West capitalist. Ruger’s holdings include an entire county, a bank, a railroad, and a wife named Melissa, played by Candice Bergen, who was just coming off the great success of one of the first films to establish just how the cinematic freedoms of the '70s would eventually be used successfully: Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971).

At the top of the story, it’s revealed that Ruger is impotent. Screenwriter/producer Lou Morheim (best known as the co-creator of the 1960s TV series The Big Valley and The Outer Limits) intercuts a brutal forced sex scene between him and Melissa with scenes of a crew of outlaws led by Frank Calder (Oliver Reed, the real star of the movie) carving up a cow in the desert and eating its meat raw. Of course, it’s Ruger’s cattle they’re killing, another of his possessions. The fact that Ruger doesn’t treat his wife appreciably different from his cattle forms the basis of the story. At its core, The Hunting Party is a very angry anti-Establishment diatribe in the grand tradition of '70s cinema, and in that respect, maybe even moreso than most. Ruger is such a snarling villain and at the same time such a traditional American capitalist that the message is hard to miss: We like to substitute firepower for love and/or understanding, and will lash out violently at anyone (particularly smart, “uppity" women and others who don’t kowtow to the fascist order of things) who make us feel our spiritual impotence.

After leaving Melissa hurt and puzzled over his rage at his inability to perform, Ruger heads out on a two-week recreational trip he’s arranged with his millionaire buddies (played by a wonderful collection of some of most durable character actors of era, including Simon Oakland, G.D. Spradlin, and a pair of Brits masquerading as Old West men of means, Ronald Howard and Bernard Kay). They’re all going to get on a train and partake in one of the most egregious “sports" of the day, using long-range rifles to pick off buffalo as the train parks in the midst of a herd. Also on board are a bevy of hookers. Since he can’t perform sexually, Ruger gets his thrills by burning his, an Asian woman, with a lit cigar - a comment on The Man’s subjugation of other races.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Melissa goes off to help her friend teach youngsters in a one-room schoolhouse. No sooner does she get there than Calder swoops in abd kidnaps her because he needs someone to teach him to read to be able to pull off his next heist. As the outlaws gallop off with her in tow, we’re introduced to the gang, again, another crop of great '70s character actors, including Mitch Ryan, William Watson and, L. Q. Jones, who appeared in five Sam Peckinpah films). Right off, she’s sexually attacked in a moving wagon by Hog (Jones), and Calder takes his sweet time before riding back to kick him to the ground. This is when we get our first real introduction to Oliver Reed’s Frank Calder. Unfortunately for him, Reed’s performance is awful. The British actor is unconvincing using a clipped, dumbed-down Old West accent as Morheim tried to turn him into a semi-silent Clint Eastwood clone. In some movies, such as the Ken Russell films The Devils and Tommy and as one of the Three Musketeers (1978), Reed’s large frame and larger-than-life depictions of rage and humor were well used. His style was dark, complex, and often disturbing, and in a better-written western they may have worked. But here, he alternately underplays and is allowed to go over the top.

When Ruger, still aboard the hunting train, gets word Melissa has been kidnapped, he turns into a killing machine bent on revenge. Instead of sympathizing with her plight, as voice-of-reason crony Gunn (Oakland) urges, Ruger only spits bile. In his best lines of the movie, Hackman immediately rejects the idea he could ever take his wife back, saying, “He’ll give her a kid, and I’ll have a little outlaw bastard running around the house." “Jesus Christ, Brandt," replies a shocked Gunn, “have a little respect for Melissa!" “Well, what the hell do you think he’s going to do with her? Sing church hymns? He'll pass her around. When he’s through with that, maybe 15 or 20 of them, he’ll accept 40 or 50,000 dollars of my money. No thank you very much. I’m not going to have my Virginia-educated, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth wife used like a whore, then I have to take her back pregnant with a bastard!" At this point, it seems he’s out for revenge not only on Calder, but on his own wife as well, a real case of blaming the victim.

He convinces his buddies to join him in a effort to use the telescoped buffalo rifles that he had procured to hunt down the outlaw gang instead, thus making up for not possessing enough manliness to take on the hardened gang one-on-one by being able to pick them off from safe distances hundreds of yards away. This seems to be a fairly cogent comment not only on emotional and moral impotence, but also on the Vietnam-era reliance on “clean" high-tech weaponry, which changed the moral equation of warfare from one of a matter of honor (like hunting animals) to one of efficient massacres (hunting humans), though it could be argued that this depersonalization began with The Bomb.

Much of the rest of the film is about Ruger methodically tracking Calder’s gang down and picking them off in blood-gushing fashion one by one as they are mown down by weapons and attackers they never even see. At one point, one of the thugs even declares, “Who are those guys?" in a line and situation lifted directly from Butch Cassidy. Ruger has Calder is his sights several times, but lets him go for reasons that are never entirely explained, except that it sets up the ending. As the bloodletting becomes more and more cruel and gratuitous, his cronies begin questioning Ruger’s leadership and sanity, but stick with him out of an old-fashioned and ultimately disastrous sense of honor. The Vietnam parallels are hard to miss.

The other main thread then becomes the inevitable romance between the kidnapped Melissa and Calder, who, through long passages that again include a rape scene (that makes three), eventually tames the wildcat and wins her heart as she teaches him the alphabet by drawing letters in the sand with a stick. Calder is a good crystallization of the '70s cinematic ethos of the antihero, a man with a good heart who’s doing bad things partly because he himself is a victim. It is rather thrilling to see Reed, whose tumultuous personal life was a living embodiment of counterculture rebellion, attempt to give meaning to the dignity of an illiterate outcast who has more honor than the “honorable" establishment figure hunting him down. The fact that he is doing so in a Eurotrash exploitation movie only makes it more delicious. He is an actor whose quirky list of contributions to both cinema and the British counterculture has never been truly celebrated like it needs to be.

The ending, which I won’t reveal, is exceedingly downbeat, as was also the tenor of the times. There is no resolution of the moral conflicts, only a realization that not dealing with our shortcomings as a nation of warmongers and greedy capitalists will result in a lot more heartache, especially for the women and nonconformists of the world. l

Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs, 2006)
Director: Alain Resnais

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Alain Resnais is a singular director who, judging by the dreamy interiority of many of his films (most famously Last Year at Marienbad), may feel most at home by himself living in a rich fantasy world. Therefore, the choice of material for his latest film—a sex farce by the wildly popular British playwright Alan Ayckbourn—seems a strange one indeed. Nonetheless, Resnais is nothing if not a Frenchman in love with love, and the title he adopted for the Ayckbourn play, Coeurs, means “hearts." In Resnais’ world, however, the hearts of his players aren’t madly jumping from bed to balcony, but rather are badly bruised and bared in a melancholic atmosphere.

The film takes up the interlocking stories of six people: an engaged couple, the real estate agent who is trying to find them a new apartment, the agent’s live-in sister, a religious woman who works with the agent, and a bartender. We learn that the couple Nicole (Laura Morante) and Dan (Lambert Wilson) are unhappy. Dan was drummed out of the military and has been laying around their cramped flat in a state of resentment and idleness, broken only by his trips to a nearby hotel bar to get drunk and talk to Lionel (Pierre Arditi), who feeds him the drinks and clipped, noncommittal conversation in which bartenders specialize. Nicole visits inadequate apartment after unsuitable apartment with Thierry, the agent, (André Dussollier), pointing out how large rooms have been divided in half into smaller rooms with obvious flaws. The inspections seem to be a metaphor for the way her formerly expansive, loving relationship with Dan has been made small and cramped by time and circumstance.

After another fruitless outing with Nicole, Thierry returns to his glass-walled office, where his colleague Charlotte (Sabine Azéma) cheers him up in her way by handing him a videotape of her favorite television program, a religious interview show called “The Song that Changed My Life." Thierry, all smiles, accepts the tape, then confides to his sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) that he made the mistake of feigning interest in the show and now feels obliged to watch it. This he will do when Gaëlle goes out for the evening with her friends. Unfortunately, Gaëlle is headed for a long night waiting in vain for a blind date she set up through the classifieds to show up at a coffee house. Meanwhile, Thierry discovers that the tape segues from a religious tract to homemade pornography; though he can’t see the woman’s face, he’s sure it’s Charlotte.

In the meantime, Charlotte has taken a second job being the evening caretaker for Lionel’s abusive, invalid father while Lionel is at work. Lionel lives alone, having lost his partner (perhaps to AIDS) and his mother. He feels obliged to care for the father who abandoned him and his mother when Lionel was a teen, but the job isn’t easy. Charlotte soon ends up with soup all over her, broken dishes at her feet, and a string of filthy insults assaulting her from the room where the unseen father has taken leave of his senses.

Now that we have the set-ups, the film rolls out the elements that would have doors opening and slamming in any respectable farce. Nicole throws Dan out, and he ends up with Gaëlle on a blind date. Thierry, after viewing a second tape with an even sexier interlude tacked on, decides to make his move. And Charlotte—well, she makes sure the old man keeps still on her last night of caring for him in a bizarrely humorous way.

Private Fears in Public Places maintains the theatrical atmosphere of the source material. Although Resnais strips most of the farcical elements from what is essentially an homage to the classic French farces of Molière, he seems to call on Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello for inspiration. Like Pirandello’s absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the six characters in Private Fears in Public Places are intertwined, trapped in claustrophobic and intentionally artificial settings. Resnais is given to shooting straight down into the roofless apartments Nicole visits with Thierry, emphasizing the artificiality of the movie set and the ratlike maze in which the characters are caught. Charlotte is seen to be a religious hypocrite and liar, very much in keeping with sentiments common in the works of Molière, but sympathetically human nonetheless. Unlike the unfortunates of Pirandello, Resnais provides his characters with open doors in an acknowledgment of their humanity. Some walk through those doors, other remain trapped, others find themselves unexpectedly freed. In this way, Resnais adds a genuinely religious framework of free will and grace to the proceedings.

Over it all, Resnais blankets his film with pure, soft snow—actual snow on the ground and falling on his characters as they move through the streets of Paris; scene segues that fill the frame with snow; and snow falling inside Lionel’s kitchen and across his and Charlotte’s intertwined arms as Lionel speaks intimately about his family—of course, this last snowfall is metaphorical, signaling, perhaps, a moment of grace. Watching this film is like opening a very special gift from a person who has found exactly the right thing to give you. What that gift might be is for you to discover. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

The Age of Innocence (1993)

By Roderick Heath

Martin Scorsese finally arrived as a Hollywood force with the multiple Oscar nominations of Goodfellas and the big box office of Cape Fear (1991). The latter film, a remake of a 1963 J. Lee Thompson thriller (from a novel by John D. MacDonald), stands as probably Scorsese’s worst movie; the original film’s poised, subversive evil was lost in an exercise in flashy style. Sold as being “more adult," the remake actually diluted the charge by turning Robert Mitchum’s chilly, reptilian Max Cady into Robert De Niro’s ranting, hammy psycho; airbrushing the threatened pedophilic rape of the family’s daughter by making her a goofily rebellious teen; and throwing out believability around the time De Niro straps himself to the underside of an SUV.

Scorsese made the commercial Cape Fear for Universal as thanks for funding The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas. After discharging this obligation, he set out to adapt a novel his friend, the writer and critic Jay Cocks, had given him to read in 1980, claiming it was bound to become his “romantic" piece. The novel was the 1920 Pulitzer Prize winner The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. In the tradition of tightly wrought symbolist studies shared by Henry James, the book is a tale of late 19th century social mores and their corrosive effects on personal happiness.

Scorsese and Cocks cowrote the screenplay, turning down an offer from Gore Vidal, who begged Scorsese to be allowed to write it to keep the adaptation from being screwed up. The early ’90s saw a glut of spit-shine literary adaptations, typified by Ismail Merchant/James Ivory films such as Howards End, as a kind of boutique genre of fin de siècle nostalgia for upscale cinemagoers. The Age of Innocence was lumped amongst them, suspect Oscar bait for Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder, and possibly for Scorsese himself. I hadn’t even watched it in more than a decade. Returning to the film, it rises resplendent out of its period with a lucid, lustrous beauty.

At first glance, it seems as much of a departure for Scorsese as any possible—from wise guys and psycho taxi drivers to the genteel requirements of the period drama. But Scorsese the anthropologist, responsible for the deftly articulated social studies of his great films, was simply taking his fascination with the building blocks of American life about a half-century further back than he had gone before. Scorsese also may have been trying to channel some of the enthusiasm he had for the long-planned project Gangs of New York, announced after New York, New York but perpetually backburnered. The Age of Innocence is about what goes on at the end of Manhattan Island furthest from Five Points. One can spy in its genes the spirit of films beloved by Scorsese, like Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Senso, particularly in the opening sequence (Scorsese’s analysis of Senso in Mio Viaggio in Italia reveals just how much). All provide elegant examples of how to stage the intricate, restrained, fetishistic character of period passions.

Joanne Woodward narrates Wharton’s prose. The tough, ruggedly democratic, idealistic, rebellious mood of the Civil War era has been comfortably anesthetized; the Gilded Era is in full swing. Upscale New York comfortably replicates European social forms with a strict, uptight insistence that betrays its provincialism. It’s a more refined, studious, curiously more intense world than the one we live in; small changes and challenges generate enormous ripples.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), as his name implies, is a man of the New World—vigorous, talented, yearning, inquisitive, morally and intellectually progressive in private, largely conformist in public. We meet him, a young lawyer with impeccable status, at the opera in the company of Sillerton Jackson (Alec McCowen) and Larry Lefferts (Richard E. Grant), two men who fancy themselves weather vanes for the minutiae of form and content in New York society. Newland has just become engaged to May Welland (Ryder), who is present at the performance in another box with her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) and her cousin Ellen, the Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer).

Ellen has just returned to New York, a city she barely knows because her parents had been itinerant bohemians in Europe, where she eventually fell into a nightmarish marriage to a libertine Polish aristocrat. Her return, sans husband, sparks rumors that she had been scandalously shacked up in Switzerland for a time with his secretary. Immediately taken with her, Newland takes up her cause. After the performance comes one of the major social events of the year, the Opera Ball. Its hostess is another relative of the Wellands, Regina Beaufort (Mary Beth Hurt), who married the intransigent, rakish broker Julius Beaufort (Stuart Wilson) in a precarious balance of old name and new money. Ellen’s presence is bound to create a stir; Newland counteracts this by announcing his and May’s engagement.

Ellen is welcomed happily by her family’s matriarch, the bedridden Mrs. Mingott (Miriam Margolyes), but her attempts to present Ellen fail miserably. Newland successfully argues to the last court of appeal for cases like this—the Van der Luydens (Michael Gough and Alexis Smith), mandarins of this scene. They invite Ellen to a dinner they give for a cousin of theirs who is a duke. “When the Van der Luydens chose, they knew how to give a lesson," the narrator wryly notes. Newland argues with Jackson over the rights of a woman to be extended the same privileges as men. If Julius Beaufort can have his scattered mistresses without being bothered, why should Ellen be ostracized if the story of her and the secretary is true?

Newland soon finds himself entrusted with the sticky chore of advising Ellen on the risks of trying to obtain a divorce from her husband—virtual social suicide. Ellen is a fine, strong, but threatened woman, made nervously fluttery by her lack of sureness of the world around her; it’s to her absolute surprise that democratic America is more repressive than Old Europe. “Why did Columbus bother discovering a new world if he intended it should just be a version of the old?" she jokingly, but pertinently questions. This mixture of forthright character and wounded charm entirely intoxicates Newland. He finds himself doubly frustrated by the year-long engagement he’s faced with by May. On observing that Julius Beaufort is aggressively courting Ellen to be his mistress, Newland urgently urges Ellen to confide the truth of her life to him, fondly imaging her embracing him from behind, and becomes angered when Julius, like he has done, follows her to a country retreat on a Van der Luyden country property. When Newland finally confesses his torturous ardor, he finishes up kissing her feet as Ellen strokes his hair. But the narrow window where they might have done something about it closes when May tells him that she’s argued successfully for their marriage to be brought forward.

“The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth," the narrator explains as Newland struggles against the chafing harness his lot puts him in and the burning promise of Ellen’s passion. His business and his private life demand attention to propriety. When Beaufort gets into trouble with his business, he and his wife are brutally dismissed by the society that noted and kept a ledger on his transgressions even as it trusted him with their money. Newland’s continued healthy existence in his rarefied sphere demands adherence to forms he despises. Day-Lewis was, at the time, the most electric actor in Hollywood, and he’s at the height of his art here in a performance that is marvelously contoured with fires of feeling that flare and smolder, particularly in a moment when he spitefully remarks to Jackson, “If everyone had rather she be Beaufort’s mistress rather than some decent man’s wife, you’ve all gone about it perfectly!"

May hardly seems his equal; Newland feels everything seems to conspire to match men and women of intelligence and energy with dullards and cowards to provide a kind of natural friction. Yet May is not dumb, or wrong, or anything less than a charming young woman; it’s just that there’s no doubt in her about the appropriate shape of the world. Unlike himself and Ellen, she is no misfit or rebel; on the contrary, her psyche fits exactly with her prescribed function. Half-consciously, she resists, corrects, manipulates, and controls. May possesses a covert, cunning nature that manifests itself in minute insinuations with an obeisant, girlish anguish, such as when she discourages Newland from inviting an interesting but “common" French acquaintance, Rivière (Jonathan Pryce) to dinner on their tour of the continent on their honeymoon. Newland recognizes that, far from being someone he can enable to become an expansive-minded soul like himself, May will slowly, dully process him to a fretful scion.

Newland is so intoxicated and sensitive in this straitened epoch that the smallest moments become laced with sensual possibilities, as when he thinks he’s found Ellen’s parasol, sniffing the handle for a trace of perfume (it proves to be another girl’s). Kissing her gloved hand is the most physical and powerful moment he has with her. The first time he sees her after returning from Europe, Ellen stands at the end of a dock, staring out to sea in a gold-bathed afternoon. Sent to fetch her, he instead vows only to go to her if she turns around by the time a sailboat passes a neighboring lighthouse; she doesn’t, and he leaves her, but later goes to her anyway, and discovers she was purposely avoiding him that day. The pair edge closer to a proper affair. Ellen admits cryptically that she knows what the far side of the invisible barrier they dance on looks like, that land of freedom and rebellion, a harsh, scary realm that is “no place for us." Rivière turns up, casually recognizing Newland as he visits Ellen at a hotel, and later informs Newland he’s acting as an agent of the Count, her husband, who’s trying to arrange her return to Europe. But Rivière surprisingly implores Newland: “Don’t let her go back!"

Cocks understood Scorsese well in giving him the book. The Age of Innocence crystallizes one of the most consistent of Scorsese’s themes—doomed and impossible passions, and torturous male-female relationships afflict the protagonists of almost all of his films. Newland is a sensitive, romantic aesthete; he reads voraciously (having all the latest books shipped from London), and absorbs paintings, poetry, and books on Japan with a longing fervor for traces of life outside the commonplace—all of which Scorsese’s camera drinks in with the same enraptured poise. Scorsese’s films are always careful to counterpoint individual drama with social environment and cultural evocation, and Newland does this consciously as a character. He studies techniques in the first wave of Impressionist paintings and considers his own place in the ludicrous niceties of the New York upper crust with the same intelligence. Newland seeks something of the same passion, fulfillment, and sensual release he gets from art in his life, and he absorbs the pleasures of his love for Ellen in the same way—standing back and watching, meditating, critiquing, savoring, constantly driven beyond his good sense by the force of his yearning. Newland becomes one the most personal and aware of Scorsese’s heroes. His own ironic relation to his world resembles Scorsese’s reactions to his own background.

Newland and Ellen are finally driven apart irrevocably, as Newland tries to confess all to May, who slyly prevents him from doing so. When Mrs. Mingott suffers a stroke, she concludes her affairs by arranging for Ellen’s permanent independence from her husband, whereupon Ellen abruptly sets about returning to Europe. Newland and Ellen have been seen by Luffets and Jackson on the street, a fleeting glance. May arranges a farewell dinner for Ellen, attended by the scintillating members of society, up to and including the Van der Luydens, and, Newland realizes it’s a purposeful show of support for May in triumphing over her rival, his presumed mistress. Newland announces to May he intends to give up the law and travel—code for his intention to follow Ellen to Paris. But May gains her final victory; kneeling in the passive, entreating manner of a classic Victorian maid, she informs Newland she’s pregnant, and that it was her hinting this to Ellen that caused her to leave.

Some 30 years later, Newland is a widower with two grown children—his daughter married to one of Luffets’ sons, and his son Ted (Robert Sean Leonard) to a daughter of the Beauforts. He is a good-natured, well-seasoned gentleman who has successfully shepherded the family fortune into the budding 20th century. He lets his son coax him on a voyage to see Paris. There, Ted reveals that on her deathbed, his mother told him that Newland “nearly threw everything over" for Ellen, who still resides in Paris. Ted now insists they visit her. But Newland won’t go into her flat, sitting outside, a sundog from her window making him recall watching her on the pier. “I’m only 57," Newland murmurs, but strolls idly away, content with his memories and the new, comforting assurance that May had been “one person who felt his anguish and took pity on him."

The Age of Innocence moves as insistently as any Scorsese film. Michael Ballhaus’s camera swirls and soars with the precise grace of a waltz, and reproduces physical effects (as when Luffets surveys a crowd through binoculars, the editing reproduces the quick refocusing the human eye does at such a moment, rather than just panning) and enjoys the human spectacle. The Beauforts’ ball is a tour-de-force sequence, beginning with a wondrous layering of time-progressing shots, as the room is prepared; then the camera strolls through the halls and rooms of the house, discovering meeting groups, and finally soars high overhead to observe the geometric patterns made by the dancing couples. Color is used carefully, painted with a flat, slightly pressed texture, delicately recreating the texturing of the paintings Newland loves, but without walloping the eye with sheer prettiness (except in the necessarily dazzling dock scene). Such is Scorsese’s control that the film fills with some supreme moments of emotion (and a word of special praise to Elmer Bernstein for his lush, symphonic score).

Newland belongs to the people who owned and ran the world that Scorsese’s and so many others’ ancestors had to fight tooth and nail to penetrate, to win a share of respect and equality. The delicate pinpricks deployed at the top of the social heap manifest as sabers at the bottom; there are things at stake in this social organization Newland never begins to contemplate. But The Age of Innocence is not Ragtime; it’s closer to a dream-memory of an era beauteously decaying, just past the edge of recollection. In the end, Newland drifts away from confronting a past that never worked out, content to keep the pleasant, glorious impressions in mind. He might not have gained everything he wanted, but as all things become with passing time, even the things he wanted were just milestones on a journey. l

Satan Met a Lady (1936)
Director: William Dieterle

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The title of the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950) passed into the language to describe any single incident seen from varying points of view. It’s a useful word, though now falling out of use as familiarity with the film has faded. But I’m half-surprised that some other word didn’t come out of the cinema long ago for such a situation. The abundance of remakes and films based on the same material stretches way back, and the variety of ways a single story can be spun truly boggles the mind.

Take, for example, the venerable Dashiell Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon. There are three film versions of it, and the consensus opinion is that the 1941 John Huston version starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor is the definitive one. I know some classic film buffs have a particular fondness for the 1931 The Maltese Falcon helmed by director Roy del Ruth. And then there is the current film under consideration here at Ferdy on Films, Satan Met a Lady. It is here where the Rashomon idea is most useful, because this comedy—yes comedy—takes this story places it’s hard to dream it could go. I really didn’t believe it myself until nearly the end, when Warren William as Ted Shane (this version’s Sam Spade) utters that classic line, “I won’t play the sap for you." Yes, I guess this is Hammett after all.

You won’t see much in this film that you’d recognize from the other versions. In fact, Satan Met a Lady is basically a B picture with a B cast. Even the great Bette Davis as the femme fatale Valerie Purvis is still an actress in the formative stages who looks and acts pretty much like all the other blonde ingenues of the 30s. But I recommend that you put any preconceived notions aside about what The Maltese Falcon is supposed to be. I had a fantastically fun time watching this respectable example of the screwball comedy form that brightened the dreary reality of the Great Depression.

The film opens on the platform of a soon-to-be departing train. Photographers are swarming for a shot of someone famous who is boarding the train. Shane, standing on the stairs of one of the cars fixes his angular face into a bright pose. Alas, the photographers work to arrange the parents of quintuplets and their offspring for the camera. A 1936 audience would instantly recognize this ripped-from-the-headlines moment as the media circus surrounding the Dionne quintuplets. We return to the marginalized Shane who, far from getting a hero’s send-off, is being run out of town for his shady activities as a detective.

While on board the train, he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Arden (May Beatty) and suggests that she needs a body guard. He recommends the Ames Detective Agency, where it just so happens, he is headed to claim a job from his old pal Ames (Porter Hall). We see a woman sitting with her back to Shane. We can’t see her face, but it’s obvious that she’s listening.

Cut to a door with Ames Detective Agency stenciled on the glass. Shane walks in on Ames and a blonde bubblehead named Miss Murgatroyd (a delightful Marie Wilson), who is packing up her desk due to nonpayment of salary. Shane, an inveterate womanizer, puts the soft touch on Miss M, trapping her into trying to spell her own name. I’m really not sure what this bit was all about, because the dumb blonde routine just doesn’t track. Murgatroyd (if that’s really her name) isn’t nearly as useless as she seems to be. In fact, she ends up being pretty handy throughout this film, and not just as part of a running gag about “having some fun" with Shane when he’s not chasing a lead of some kind or other. Marie Wilson knows how to put a very slight, knowing spin on all her clueless line readings that had me smiling every time she appeared.

Shane tells the financially strapped Ames to relax. A $250 retainer as a body guard will be coming his way any minute. The slightly bumbling Ames takes Shane back into the agency as a rainmaker, though Ames’ wife Astrid (Wini Shaw) had a hot affair going with Shane before she married Ames. Shane is not eager to pick up with Astrid where he left off. In fact, he’s got his eye on classy, innocent Valerie—the woman from the train—who has engaged Ames to find the fiancé who abandoned her. When Ames goes to the hotel where Valerie said the fiancé was said to be, both men end up dead. Shane spends the rest of the film tracking down Ames’ killer, avoiding Astrid, promising to take Murgatroyd out, and keeping up with a complicated race to recover an ancient ram’s horn filled with jewels.

Warren William is perfect as the slick, superficial Shane. His pointy face may have suggested the title of the film, but he’s certainly no Satan. He’s not very principled, but certainly seems to have more scruples than Bogie’s Sam Spade—no extramarital affairs with his partner’s wife (though this might have had more to do with the morality restrictions of the relatively new Hays Production Code than anything else), a more genuine affection for Ames than Spade ever had for his partner Archer, and a thief’s respect for his own kind as each of the horn’s pursuers steps into the picture.

Arthur Treacher as Anthony Travers is a delightful fortune hunter, apologizing like a proper Englishman as he tears apart Shane’s furniture with the zeal of a puppy savaging a pair of slippers. Alison Skipworth plays Madame Barabbas as a shabby-genteel “appropriator" who turns her prim-and-proper act on and off at will but goes to pieces when her infantile gunsel (Maynard Holmes) gets roughed up. Skipworth and Holmes set the tone for Sydney Greenstreet's and Peter Lorre’s similar turns in the later film, but Madame and Kenneth make a much funnier pair imitating an overbearing mother and her mama’s boy.

And what of Bette Davis? Frankly, she’s a very unconvincing liar and makes no real attempt to seduce Shane. I never believed for a second that Shane had any trouble turning her in because neither of them seemed all that interested in the other. A blind man could have seen through her stories. She just seems lost in the film, though perhaps her problems with Warner Bros. that led to a well-publicized dispute with and suspension from the studio the year this film was released accounts for her lackluster performance. That William Dieterle, one of the cadre of great German directors working in Hollywood at the time, couldn’t get more out of her just doesn’t seem possible.

Satan Met a Lady won’t make you forget the classic The Maltese Falcon we all know and love, nor should it. As a rapid-fire comedy with a fascinating cast of types, you can learn to love it as something quite different and delicious. l

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (2004)
Directors: Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Until yesterday, I thought that the only landlocked saltwater sea in North America was the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Now, I know there's another—the Salton Sea—thanks to the informative and casual Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea. Directors Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer bring us the natural and social history of this hidden haven in the middle of the desert, highlighting its ups and downs with archival photos, newsreels, advertising, and newspaper articles, and live interviews with an assortment of residents all across the socioeconomic spectrum.

The sea takes its name from the land on which it rests, the Salton Basin, a desert depression about 50 miles south of Palm Springs, California, that has caught flooding from the nearby Colorado River periodically over the past 10,000 or so years. Overflows large enough to create an enduring body of water—at least for a while—have occurred numerous times, the earliest known dating to the year 700.

What is now the Salton Sea is the only artificially created body of water to have occurred in the basin. It dates from 1901, when some ambitious developers dug canals to provide irrigation water to develop farmland in the rich soil of the Imperial Valley. Unfortunately, these canals silted over, and engineers bored into the Colorado at several places to increase the water flow. They did—a little too well. A torrent of water directly from the river spilled into the basin, threatening a major artery of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It took federal intervention and 15 months to close the breach, and the Salton Sea was born. Agricultural runoff (stored water released from farmers who don’t need it) keeps the sea afloat, so to speak.

In the early years of the Salton Sea, developers flocked to its shores, promoting it as a playground for overheated Californians. Stocked with fish that thrived in the salty Colorado River water and free of sharks, the Salton Sea provided great game fishing and safe water skiing and swimming to vacationers. Promotional films of the time show fishermen holding enormous bonita and mullet, boat races on the water, and lovely ladies lounging near the beach. The Salton Sea supported several thriving resort towns, and plans were drawn and infrastructure built to convert large divisions of land into retirement communities. People made a day of playing near the sea and buying up lots.

Things didn’t go quite as planned. Floods destroyed property, driving off many homeowners and discouraging others from building on the lots they bought. Salt levels concentrated in the landlocked sea, forcing oxygen out of the water and causing die-offs of millions of fish each year. The two-foot high mounds of rotting carcasses drove off all but the most hardy. Now, property values have dropped so that some retirees cannot sell their homes for enough money to afford to buy a home elsewhere. Abandoned sites rot all along the shores. “People just come here to die," a retiree half-quips to the camera. Some people also come to the Salton Sea to live. Welfare families have moved down from Los Angeles to find affordable housing and escape crime.

Meltzer and Springer take us around the sea to meet various residents and hear their stories. Other film critics have focused on the “eccentrics" attracted to the oasis in the desert, for example, Leonard Knight, who for 19 years has been building and decorating an enormous psychedelic monument to Jesus in Niland called Salvation Mountain, and Donald Scheidler, a nudist who stands on a highway in his all-together to spread his gospel of nudism. This attention is understandable, particularly when the film's narrator is John Waters. But frankly, you’ve got eccentrics everywhere, and I was more captivated by the “regular" folk who call the Salton Sea home despite its economic depression, smell, and summer kills of pelicans, which catch botulism from contaminated fish that are more or less endemic to the very warm water.

Walter Gaston, 91 years old, runs Gaston’s Diner in Niland, on the South Shore. Gaston’s is one of the only working institutions left on the Salton Sea. His first claim to fame in the region was catching the first two limits of fish from the sea in 1957. He remembers the good times, though younger residents and movie audiences might have a hard time picturing what a pleasure haven the sea was before the decline. Lechon Rainey is one of the newbies, a welfare mother who left El Centro for Bombay Beach to avoid gang violence. She matter-of-factly states there is nothing to do, that the kids become vandals out of boredom, and that it’s hard for a black person to get a job—what few jobs there are go to the white folks, or so she says. Nonetheless, she feels safe and has a sense of community with the other single mothers in Bombay Beach.

Norm Niver, who lives in Salton City on the West Shore, is the sage voice of reason in the film. He and Park Ranger Steve Horvitz are major advocates for saving the Salton Sea, which began to shrink and develop higher salt concentrations when the state of California forced the community to divert the farm runoff that feeds the sea to San Diego and Los Angeles. Without more water, all of the fish in the sea will die, destroying one of the very last wetlands that large numbers of birds (approximately 3 million migrants a year) have in the area for feeding. Norm thought that the Salton Sea Authority, created in memory of former pop star Sonny Bono, who used part of his time in Congress to push for a measure to save the Salton Sea, would be the answer. Norm laughs a cynical laugh at how do-nothing people can be when they really put their minds to it. I like Norm a lot, and I consider him the best salesman for the cause of the Salton Sea it could possibly have. Too bad he probably won’t be enough.

This film has a very traditional and fairly boring documentary style—talking heads, odd backgrounds, and science animations. There are so many new and much more exciting documentary techniques around I wish the directors would have explored, for example, editing film shot by the subjects themselves. I did like the introduction of the major characters through the use of tinted black-and-white photographs—a rather nice evocation of a vacation postcard. I also thought all the major bases were covered. I went from 0 to 60 in my knowledge of the Salton Sea in only 73 minutes.

The story of the Salton Sea is an archetypal one of the West, and especially California. People came to the Salton Basin with big ideas for their own enrichment. When the sea played out, the prospectors went elsewhere, leaving their boom towns to blister and dry in the desert sun. A few lone coyotes still howl at the moon, but the world has moved on. Will the Salton Sea come back? If you can't go there, catch Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea to see what’s left before it disappears forever. l

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003)
Director: Judy Irving

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Rod Heath, my collaborator on this site, may have a right chuckle when I say that one of the most amazing things about my visit to see him and his family in Australia was looking up in the sky and seeing flocks of parrots flying around, common as dirt, or pecking around on the ground like a rich man’s pigeon. I’ve been a birder for many years and seen a lot of beautiful and unusual birds in different parts of the world, but experiencing the raucous galahs and elegant sulfur-crested cockatoos claiming a bit of tree or sky as a normal part of the day is something I’ll never forget.

Parrots and their genetic cousins don’t occur naturally in the United States and Canada, and many birds and their eggs have been imported, legally and illegally, for those who can pony up a fair amount of money to keep the birds as pets. Unfortunately, keeping an exotic bird doesn’t suit everyone—they’re noisy, given to biting holes in one’s cheek and furnishings, and are likely to outlive their owners. A fair number of pet parrots are given the heave-ho by their owners; some also escape their cages. In this way, wild flocks of these birds have established themselves in the urban areas their former owners inhabit. Here in Chicago, a wild flock of monk parakeets has made its home in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park since the late 1960s, surviving harsh winters and scarce food conditions, and growing to as many as 200 individuals. Similarly, San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill has provided a roost to a flock of parrots, mainly cherry-headed conures, since at least the early 1970s.

Many San Franciscans noticed the conures over the years, but only Mark Bittner had the patience and time to become their friend, champion, and nursemaid. In the process, he brought an end to the 20-some years of chronic poverty and homelessness he experienced while trying to find himself. Judy Irving’s documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, brings us the story of Mark and the conures in a way that manages to be wildly entertaining and touching while still providing valuable information to birders and naturalists interested in exotic species in urban habitats.

The film opens with Mark standing on a path near his home (technically, he’s a squatter who been allowed to stay) surrounded by cherry-heads who are eating unshelled sunflower seeds from his hands. Some curious tourists are asking him questions in French and English about the birds. An American man starts grilling Mark about whether they really are wild birds. “You feed them." Yes. “You have names for them." Yes. “That’s not wild." Yes, it is. The dissatisfied man says “Whatever," and walks away in frustration. “What a turd!" I commented to the hubbie.

In fact, however, although I didn’t like the man’s style, he brought up an interesting point. Clearly, some of these birds had been pets. Mingus, for example, prefers to stay inside Mark’s home; Mark punishes him for biting by putting him outside for a “time out." The birds have become accustomed to feeding at Mark’s side, and he does treat them a bit like pets. Nonetheless, Mark was absolutely right to call them wild birds. Any bird will go to a steady source of food, but if that source disappears, the bird will forage. The conures nest and reproduce in the wild, something the film shows us, and that is not something a pet would do. And the birds exhibit flocking behavior, such as signaling warnings when a hawk is nearby and cooperating in eluding its treacherous claws and beak with defensive flying patterns. Mark has observed quite a lot over the years, learning the basics (his description of how he learned how conures feed their young is really funny) and getting a rare opportunity to study a type of bird that is very hard to track in the wild in its native range in Central and South America.

Irving’s film is superbly constructed. After laying this early groundwork, she gives us more about Mark’s background—the desire he had to be a rock musician that brought him to San Francisco in the first place from his native Washington State; his unwillingness to pursue another career, preferring to rely on his survival skills and the odd job to keep body and soul together; his gradual introduction to the birds and growing fascination with them as individuals and as a flock. Then she introduces us to some of the birds, which Mark has learned to recognize from specific behaviors and physical characteristics. She has Mark demonstrate how close observation can help anyone become attuned to peculiarities and learn to really see what they are looking at. If there is a star conure in the film, it is Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock. Mark describes him as a curmudgeonly, but dignified bird that is kind of cranky because he has no mate nor any other blue-crowneds to hang with. Connor won’t accept preening (feather-cleaning) from the other birds, but he does defend individuals that are being harassed by other members of the flock.

Mark gives us a bit of background on the mating habits of the birds, including their basically monogamous nature. He tells the story of a rare divorce, when a male rejected his neurotic mate for persisting in pulling his feathers out. He also tells us about a red-masked conure that has mated with several cherry-heads and created a new hybrid. His attention to the nuances of each individual helps us to understand that these birds are complex creatures with a social system that compares in many ways with our own. His touching story of nursing a sick conure named Tupelo conveys his experience of the feelings birds can express to those who care for them and leads to a philosophical discussion that seeks to put human beings in harmony with nature. Irving’s background as an environmentalist and maker of nature films helps her capture the right tone to communicate this message without making it seem airy-fairy or preachy.

There are some surprising developments in the story that I don’t want to spoil. Suffice to say that Mark’s experiences with the conures changed him profoundly and helped him find the path he had been looking for both personally and professionally. The flock garnered international attention, so their continued existence on Telegraph Hill seems relatively secure for now, despite one threat to their roosting trees. Hopefully, this film will inspire more people to appreciate the everyday miracles that help make life so much richer. l