Ferdy on Films, etc.

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

THX 1138 (1971)
Debut film of: George Lucas, writer-director

By Roderick Heath

It’s a little sad returning to George Lucas’ groundbreaking, energizing, dystopian fantasy debut as yet another cash-cow milking Star Wars installment lands in theatres—now fully animated for 90 percent less entertainment. It’s impossible to talk about Lucas’ career without doing it in terms of Star Wars. Perhaps it’s fair enough, considering that four of the six films he has directed have been in that series. Even at his worst—that would be Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999)—with his limitations on display, Lucas is a natural-born filmmaker, skilled at filling the silver screen with detail, composing and editing his shots with fluidic skill and pictorial intelligence. If somewhere along the line his grip on actors wasted away and his avoidance of working with screenwriters of the caliber of Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett sent his reputation into fan-boy limbo, Lucas achieved the feat of surviving, when the vagaries of cinematic fate crushed his producer, collaborator, and friend Francis Coppola’s hopes to define a new independence in Hollywood.

Coppola’s then-new Zoetrope Studios produced THX 1138, adapted from Lucas’ film school short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138-4EB. Peeking under the film’s stringent, conceptual façade, Lucas’ preoccupations come into focus, preoccupations that also fed the nostalgic comedy of American Graffiti and the high-flying fantasy of the Star Wars films. THX 1138 is a tale of attempting to escape a world of strangling conformity and seemingly arbitrary rules (and rule) with verve and humanity. THX, the kids of Graffiti, Anakin, and Luke Skywalker—all attempt to blast apart the numbing trial of their lives in Nowheresville armed with fast machines and romantic notions that soon melt in the light of day. How well they survive then depends on their essential characters.

THX 1138 (Robert Duvall, suitably, intensively dead pan) is a member of a future civilization that has retreated underground. Children are laboratory-grown, and people have been reduced as much as possible to abstract entities. They’re drugged to suppress emotion, allowed to cohabit but prohibited from sexual activity. Hordes of technicians supervise everyone and each other. They’re kept still more numb with media, reduced to the barest of provocations. TV provides either terrible sitcoms (“That was very funny,” THX states at the punchline of a nonexistent joke), or social lectures, or forms of pornography, both violent (one show consists of one of the city’s robotic policemen beating up a man) and sexual (a dancer who flickers whilst THX is worked on by a masturbation machine). Religion provides confessional sessions in a phone booth, with an image of a generic holy man and a recorded voice; priests don’t let anyone into their tabernacles. The workplace regularly sees accidents that wipe out hundreds of disposable employees.

Like most dystopias, it’s actually a particularly scurrilous version of the era it was made in, whilst owing something to Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. The prologue presents clips from an old Buck Rogers serial, an ironic counterpoint to this vision, but also an affirmation of its themes. Like Buck, THX is an ordinary man who beats his enemies by utilizing his fundamental, ordinary human gifts of bravery, verve, and wit. There is no cabal of ruling elite, à la Orwell, with knowledge and interests at odds with the suppressed populace. It’s not a theocracy, fascist, or socialist state. It’s all those things, with catchphrases of such diverse authorities, like “the masses,” and “religious matters,” jumbled into a mélange of substance-free significance. THX is a technician who works with dangerous nuclear materials, and it’s impossible for him to perform without nerve-deadening drugs. But his assigned wife, LUH (Maggie McOmie), tampers with their pills, prodded by suppressed, illegal maternal urges. She and THX are awakened to a terrifying, daunting new life. THX is beset by violent withdrawal symptoms, but is soon suddenly alive to LUH’s body, sex, and feeling. Not just love, but the ambiguity of love, as LUH wonders whether they were properly mated by the computers. It’s amazing, but, as THX snaps, “It can’t go on!”

They are observed by computer programmer SEN (Donald Pleasance), who attempts to intervene in their lives, promising to shield them if he can convince THX to cohabit with him. SEN is searching for a kindred soul who, like him, bends the rules. Whilst at his job, an arrest warrant goes out for THX, and he is “mind-locked” at his work station; this almost causes a nuclear disaster, which is only averted once he’s released and can save the day. He is swiftly tried for violating morals and drug-use laws, and sent, along with LUH and SEN, to a vast white void of a prison. When THX and LUH react to this strange, oddly free environment by having sex, officers hurriedly race in to separate them. LUH is later executed. THX is only spared from execution because of his technical skills, and is left with SEN and other long-term, intelligent prisoners. In a note that satirizes the divide between younger, lifestyle-oriented, counterculture folk and older, goal-oriented radicals, SEN wants to be effective in his resistance, and rejects the notion of intellectual immigration. “When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners, but as men who, for whatever reason, prefer to remain as noncontributing individuals on the edge of society,” SEN formulates to the other prisoners, and warns, “This must not happen!”

THX doesn’t give a damn. He stalks off into the great white to find a way out, SEN trailing him pathetically. They come across the wandering SRT (Don Pedro Colley), who claims to be a hologram who got bored with his program and escaped into the real world, and he shows them the way out of the prison. Escaping into a throng of pedestrians, SEN is separated from THX and SRT, and panics at the thought of freedom. “I can’t start again. I can’t change,” he confesses, and allows himself to be arrested. THX and SRT brave their way into a transport hub and steal police cars. SRT crashes, but THX hits the road.

Lucas is fascinated by the notion of the ghost in the machine—in a literal fashion, the degree to which fundamental human, sentient characteristics can interact with the technological, and the way they clash. “He’s more machine now than man,” Obi-Wan Kenobi once murmurs in considering Darth Vader, and the crux of the series, as in THX, is the notion that a spark of human spirit will finally overthrow such technocratic usurpation. The crucial moment of this film comes when THX escapes. He stops his car on the threshold of the city. Duvall’s face subtly registers both his fear of the unknown he’s diving into, and his sad realization that his rebel companions SEN, LUH, and SRT won’t be following. He is vitally alone in his confrontation with existence. This is, at last, being human, and he feels it.

Despite the scifi trappings, THX 1138 has an interior, alienated texture pitched to echo a counterculture atmosphere; it feels like an illustration of a Bob Dylan lyric, like “Visions of Johanna,” or a Borgesian labyrinth tale, with its haiku-spare vignettes and images, and echoes of vast cultural arguments going around in circles. This balances some overt satire and whimsy. As Peter Watkins did in his masterful Punishment Park (1970)—an entirely different spin on a similar parable—Lucas exploits the suspiciously fascistic look of contemporaneous Los Angeles motorcycle cops, styling his robot guardians of the city after them. Yet the policebots are the film’s fount of humor, as they engage in idiotic banter and find themselves easily outpaced by a man without the behavioral restraints they’re used to. In the end, they’re reduced to pleading with THX to come back because they’ve exceeded their allotted pursuit budget.

The Star Wars films are pictorial, illustrative, narrative-driven, whereas THX 1138 is often near-abstract, but both are built from an enveloping mise-en-scène. Lucas cowrote the screenplay with buddy and all-around film wizard Walter Murch, who aided Lucas in creating the film’s suffocating sound textures, an eternal cacophony of blips, beeps, sirens, advertisements, recording voices, droning air conditioning, and a thousand other contributors to subterranean atmosphere. Lucas’ visuals are often fractured, shot through layers of media like video surveillance equipment. The film condenses gradually into a dense blanket of sensory input. This is THX’s world, where private feeling and experience have been reduced to the point where even those who rebel have barely any idea of how they should act or what they should do.

THX 1138 also owes a debt to Kubrick for its thematic glaze of estrangement through technology and the struggle to overcome it. Visually, however, it owes little to anybody, and images from it haunt the imagination afterwards: Maggie McOmie’s shaven head and haunted face; the vast hordes of likewise bald drones; naked THX circled by the policebots with cattle prods, trying to defend himself and his mate; the dribbling philosophical argument in an endless sea of white; the sudden thrill of movement as THX drives to freedom. Lucas is a savant at home purveying the image rather than the spoken word. His most expressive moments are found in image. The very last image of THX 1138, where newly reborn Man rises to the surface underneath a gigantic setting sun, is bound with the other, most nakedly emotional shot in his oeuvre, where Luke Skywalker stares in yearning at the twin suns of Tatooine. Yet it also echoes the finale of American Graffiti, with the car crash in the early morning light suggesting an end to illusions and the brief window of the thrill of the run—from here on is only survival.

It’s easy to call THX 1138 an adult film, and the Star Wars films juvenile, but they’re built from the same nuts and bolts of parable. Star Wars was bent on being accessible and thrilling, where THX 1138 is allusive and mysterious. If THX 1138 is ragged in places, it’s also one of the best science fiction films of its time. Its influence is undeniable. Scifi dystopias arrived by the bushel in its wake, but the likes of Soylent Green (1971), Logan’s Run (1974), and Rollerball (1975) lacked its rigor of style and mise-en-scène, and I doubt Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1981), or The Matrix (1999) would have happened without its example. Lucas occasionally talks about returning to experimental projects like this. I doubt he will. And it’s a shame. l

Grade

Tectonic

Gender Attitudes in Two Revenge Tales: I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and A Question of Silence (De stilte rond Christine M., 1982)
Directors/Screenwriters: Meir Zarchi/Marleen Gorris

By Marilyn Ferdinand

During the late second-wave feminist movement in the United States and its slightly lagging reverberations in Europe, two films of female revenge premiered: I Spit on Your Grave (whose innocuous original title was Day of the Woman), a primal, graphically violent film that was lumped into the popular exploitation genre, and the Dutch film A Question of Silence (literally translated as The Silence of Christine M.), an avowed feminist film with a very civilized veneer in which the murder at its center is never explicitly shown.

These two films with a common theme could not look more different. The former film was roundly trounced as the most disgusting film ever made, was banned in several countries, and has lived on in infamy. The latter film, decidedly more "artsy," cerebral, and, well, foreign, made the festival circuit and quickly vanished. Regardless of their superficial differences, however, these films try to make exactly the same point and in this attempt, fall into a trap of patriarchy that neither of them fully recognizes.

In this essay, I will summarize the plots, attempt to describe the basic gender dynamics at work in the narratives of these two films, reactions to the films, and ways to reframe these narratives to accommodate more advanced ideas about gender roles.

The basic plots

I Spit on Your Grave tells the story of Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton), a would-be novelist from New York City who rents a riverfront house in a small town as a quiet, isolated place in which to work. Before seeing her temporary home for the first time, she stops for gas and encounters four buddies: ringleader Johnny (Eron Tabor), lackeys Stanley and Andy (Anthony Nichols and Gunter Kleemann), and mildly retarded Matthew (Richard Pace). After a slow, tension-building start, the film kicks into high gear, as the men encounter Jennifer floating in a rowboat, grab her out of it, and take her into the woods so that Matthew can have his first sexual encounter. He hesitates, and for the next 45 minutes, we watch Jennifer raped and sodomized by Johnny and Andy in the woods, stalked to her home, raped by Matthew, and beaten savagely by Andy. Matthew is given the task of killing her, but unbeknownst to the others, he only coats the knife he has been given in blood from her face. After two weeks with no discovery of her body, the men go back to the house, one by one, to investigate. One by one, Jennifer kills them. One is hung, another is castrated and bleeds to death, a third gets an ax in the back, and the fourth is shredded by the propeller of an outboard motor. The film ends with Jennifer motoring down the river, only the water divided by the bow visible under the closing credits.

A Question of Silence introduces three women, a housewife and mother named Christine (Edda Barends), divorced waitress An (Henriette Tol), and unmarried secretary Andrea (Nelly Firjda) as each goes about her daily routine. One by one, policemen come and take them away. They are being charged with the heinous murder and mutilation of the manager of a women’s clothing boutique. None of the women knew each other or the manager. Psychiatrist Janine van den Bos (Cox Habbema) is engaged to interview the women to determine if they are mentally fit to stand trial. As she goes about her work, Janine learns that each woman has been demeaned by the men in her life. The murder also unfolds episodically throughout the film, and we see four women of different ages and races observe the murder without lifting a hand or voice to stop it. Janine comes to understand the women—even Christine, who can speak but, like Bartleby, prefers not to—and pronounces them sane. The prosecutor can’t understand how a sane woman could have done such a thing, at which point the defendants, Janine, and the women who observed the murder and are now in the gallery of the courtroom, burst into uncontrollable laughter. An outraged prosecutor and panel of judges remove the defendants from the courtroom and hold the trial without them. Janine walks out and faces the bystanders to the murder. All look silently, understandingly, at each other.

Gender dynamics

The period in which these two films were released marked perhaps the lowest point in male/female relations in the 20th century. Legislative gains made by first-wave feminists were being followed up by challenges to the social and psychological order of things. Consciousness raising, which women engaged in throughout the 1970s, helped to uncover the unconscious, internalized structures supporting patriarchy in America and other societies and provided tools for women to wield in their social relationships. Eventually, these challenges to the social order would create a "backlash" men’s movement that would attempt to organize male rights in an effort to achieve balance in the face of uncustomary female assertiveness.

Within this context, it is not surprising that two films featuring the savage rape of a woman and the equally savage murders of men by women would appear on the cultural landscape. Yet, both films reflect the still-unconscious understanding of traditional male/female roles.

In I Spit on Your Grave, a context for Jennifer’s rape is not given. Just like the murder of the shop manager in A Question of Silence, none of the rapists and would-be murderers knew Jennifer or had any personal reason to hold a grudge against her. Her only "crime" is that she is a woman, and the men claim their control over her body almost as a right. It is only when the shoe is on the other foot that the men trot out the usual excuses that hide the real motive for their attack. No one in the audience at that time would have been puzzled about why an attractive woman like Jennifer would be attacked. Then, rape was still seen primarily as a sex act, therefore, the audience might have been puzzled if the men had attacked a homely woman without provocation. This film might have gone some ways toward demonstrating that rape is a hate crime, however, thus performing a service for some audience members at the time and viewers in the ensuing years.

Both movies, and particularly A Question of Silence, take pains to provide a context and justification of sorts for the actions of their female protagonists. Revenge is the basic motive, of course. Audiences of I Spit on Your Grave generally feel that Jennifer’s mass murder of her attackers is justified. The film wisely ends at the completion of the last murder. To bring in the law at this point would remind audiences that Jennifer did not attempt to redress her grievances through the criminal justice system. According to director/writer Zarchi, he was moved to make this film after trying to help a real gang-rape victim seek justice, only to find the justice system unhelpful and unsympathetic. Given his fantasy of the justice of “natural law,” the film could not have ended any other way. (In a strange move that I will in no way try to interpret [sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar], the director cast his own wife as Jennifer.)

In sharp contrast, A Question of Silence occurs almost entirely under the aegis of the Dutch legal system and serves as a consciousness-raising experience for Janine. None of the accused women resist arrest or deny that they murdered the shop manager. Since there is no apparent motive for the crime or the women’s alliance, the courts assume that the women must be insane. Indeed, Janine’s psychological evaluation seems to be a mere formality. When she comes to see how male prerogatives have denied these women opportunities for financial security, professional advancement, and equality in marriage, she discovers that her own rage matches theirs. Her good marriage to a doctor fractures as the case exposes his self-centered, male entitlements.

Again, Gorris needs to emphasize the complicity of silence about the second-class status of women in Dutch society. She emphasizes that men seem deaf and blind to women’s plight. In one scene, Andrea, who routinely does all the work and research for her boss, gives a reasoned rundown of their company’s unfavorable position in the North African market. A couple of beats later, a man sitting to her right repeats exactly what she said; Andrea’s boss compliments the man on his ideas. The scene would be funny to me if I hadn’t actually witnessed similar scenes over the years and as recently as 2005.

The courtroom scenes exaggerate the buffoonery of the law and its representatives. Certainly the women are angry—so angry that they make a corpse that is unrecognizable and, like Jennifer, engage in castration. Nonetheless, these deliberately ordinary women have contributed to the complicity of silence. Indeed, Christine refuses to speak because, Janine reasons, no one ever listened to her. A Question of Silence may be the first voice of feminist Dutch filmmakers, but aside from refusing to participate in their own trial—like the Chicago 7 refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the court—they give up on trying to educate their society and therefore continue to submit themselves to patriarchy. All they got was a temporarily satisfying revenge. The hint of a revolution to come, however, adds a measure of hope to this first shot in the dark.

Reactions to the films

In a recent review of I Spit on Your Grave, Sam Jordison of the UK’s Channel 4 writes:

"It is strong stuff, not for the weak-stomached. It's also over the top and the frequently clumsy dialogue (which is sometimes even inaudible) and suspect camerawork mean that this film will never be viewed as high art. However, behind the excesses there is a seriousness of intent from writer-director Meir Zarchi, a willingness to confront boundaries and an incisive questioning of the justification of revenge."

Roger Ebert’s review of I Spit on Your Grave is extremely negative but very astute about the film’s reflection of cultural norms of the time. He writes:

"A vile bag of garbage named I Spit on Your Grave is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters…

"I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine. I wanted to ask if she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film's end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed."

An anonymous capsule summary of A Question of Silence at Channel 4 says:

"Despite—or because of—the climax, this is a disturbing and sombre movie, raising questions from a severe feminist stance and not suggesting any easy answers. It makes for gripping entertainment thanks to Gorris's abundant skill in handling a complicated structure and her four central performers."

Janet Maslin wrote of A Question of Silence:

The feminist cause will not be well served by A Question of Silence, a Dutch film that tells of three women who stomp, kick and pummel to death a male shopkeeper. … Why? Well, apparently because he is a man, and the three shoppers have all been ill treated by other men that they know.

It’s a little skewed to choose reviews from a UK site because gender roles have not moved as far as they have in the United States. Unfortunately, reviews of A Question of Silence are hard to come by, and I was struck by what Sam Jordison had to say.

In assessing I Spit on Your Grave, Jordison stresses the extreme nature of the violence and how that might push an audience’s buttons, as well as whether revenge might be justified in this case. Nowhere does he suggest that there is something to think about with regard to the underlying attitudes of the men in the film. His thoughts are turned to judgment of the woman.

Roger Ebert gets at the underlying assumptions of the film that are so repellent, but fails to appreciate the film as anything but an obscene pile of trash. In his own way, he is trying to suppress what the film has brought to the surface—the animosity, even hatred, between men and women shown at its most extreme.

As for A Question of Silence, I think both reviews also reflect an antipathy for the anger of women in male-dominated societies. Janet Maslin is simply dismissive of the film, perhaps believing the old saw that feminists hate men. Hers is a thoughtless, careless appraisal. While the anonymous reviewer acknowledges that the film is thought-provoking, he or she emphasizes that the film represents an extreme feminist point of view. Historic cultures, such as ancient Greece, always gave the devil her due as evidenced by Medea’s murder of her own children to show her displeasure with her husband. I prefer an “extreme” feminism to one that is more polite and, therefore, fairly toothless.

Moving ahead

Progress has been made to some degree in the cinematic arts and in life. Numerous articles and scholarly works have been devoted to a reappraisal of I Spit on Your Grave, perhaps most notably Michael Kaminiski’s article "Is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE Really a Misunderstood Feminist Film?" However, feminist film theory still seems to lag in discussing underlying patriarchal attitudes in many of today’s films and forming alternative neutral or female-centric ethics that provide alternatives or eliminate bias altogether.

Younger filmmakers may lead the charge for change. Kevin Smith is quoted in This Film Is Not Yet Rated as saying he’d like films where women are raped and put in danger slapped with an NC-17 rating. Questioning the moral police of the MPAA in itself is an act of rebellion against movies sculpted to reflect a narrow point of view.

Ultimately, filmmakers and filmgoers must make the “you understood” underlying the assumptions they use and witness to assess what points of view are consciously and unconsciously being promoted. For example, if kickass women in films are always beautiful (as, indeed, they are), we haven’t progressed very far from the sentiment expressed in Jerry Harrison’s 1986 song "Man with a Gun":

A pretty girl, a pretty girl can walk anywhere
All doors open for her
Like a breath of fresh air, her beauty, it precedes her
Wrapped in her beauty, everywhere, she is welcome
First class on the plane, closed door of the club.

In 2009, audiences will be able to see a remake of I Spit on Your Grave. Perhaps that film will be the real litmus test of how far we have or have not come. l

Movies about Movies Blogathon

Show People (1928)
Director: King Vidor

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This is an entry in the Movies about Movies Blogathon, hosted by Mike Phillips of Goatdogblog.

Marion Davies means different things to different people. To those unfamiliar with silent films, which comprise the bulk of her filmography, she may mean nothing at all. To others, she is the mistress of newspaper mogul William Randolph Heart and the model for no-talent singer Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. Finally, to those who love silents, she is one of the silver screen’s first and best comic actresses.

Davies, born Marion Douras, began her career in show business on stage, where she made a great success in a variety of comedies, musicals, and as a chorine in The Ziegfeld Follies. She made her first film in 1917 and three more in 1918, two with backing from Hearst. She worked steady and successfully, promoted prominently by the Hearst newspaper chain. By 1928, she was a major star able to secure the services of the best talents available. MGM’s Show People was produced by “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, directed by the great King Vidor, and features cameos and short scenes by such big stars as John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin playing themselves—a true insider look at Hollywood. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that this film is lit from within by the comic gifts and down-to-earth charm of its star Marion Davies.

Show People, a quintessential movie about the movies, tells the story of Peggy Pepper (Davies) a southern belle from Savannah, Georgia, driven cross-country by her daddy, General Marmaduke Oldfish Pepper (Dell Henderson), to become a big star in Hollywood. Bumping along the uneven roads in their open-top jalopy, the General and Peggy, looking all the world like Col. Sanders and Little Bo Peep, finally find their groove in the streetcar rails that run past the major film studios of the day—Fox, First National, Universal. The Peppers pull up at the gate of Comet Studios, where Peggy tells the guard that she wants to speak to the president. “What about?” he asks. “I want to be in the movies!” “Casting office,” he replies, pointing to his left.

Full of enthusiasm, Peggy and the General walk past the other wannabes to the receptionist’s window. “I want to be in the movies,” she declares. The receptionist calls one of the casting directors (Tenen Holtz) over. “Can you act?” Oh yes, the Peppers assure him, and the General hands Peggy his handkerchief. She raises it in front of her face. When her father calls out an emotion, “Sad…Angry…Yearning,” Peggy lowers the scarf to reveal her interpretation of each feeling. They’re laughingly bad. Peggy is so sincere, however, the assistant gives her a card to fill out.

Weeks go by, and Peggy’s big break still hasn’t come. She’s not even getting extra work. At the studio canteen, she and the General try to make their 20 cents go as far as possible. They sit down near a pleasant young man who recognizes a starving artist when he sees one. He introduces himself as Billy Boone (William Haines), a working actor at the studio. Peggy says she has hopes of becoming a dramatic actress. Billy shares his meal with them. Overjoyed, the Peppers befriend Billy. He later delivers on his promise to get Peggy work on one of his pictures.

Peggy’s first day on the job has her weaving her way through various sets to find the one where she belongs. She ruins a take by tiptoeing across a set as a torrid love scene ensues in the foreground, and narrowly escapes a drenching as bathing beauties splash in a pool. Finally, she locates Billy, who introduces her to the director (Harry Gribbon). He gives her her direction—come through the door and look surprised. She goes to the other side of the door as the other actors practice various pratfalls, with one of them getting knocked to the ground several times. Finally, the director calls action and cues Peggy to come in. When she steps through the door, she is hit from across the set with a stream of seltzer water. Her surprise is genuine, as her gape-mouthed drenching has the cast and crew in stitches. Peggy, however, is humiliated and runs off in tears. She wails to Billy that she wants to be a dramatic actress. He tells her everyone has to pay their dues and encourages her to be a trouper and go through with the film. Summoning all her strength, she prepares to come through the door again for some close-ups of her “big moment.”

When the film premieres, Billy takes Peggy to see it. She watches the audience laugh hysterically, and gains a bit of pleasure from it, even as she winces painfully to see herself hit with pies and being chased by Keystone Kops. After the screening, as Billy and Peggy stand in the vestibule of the theatre, a producer and a little fellow named Charlie Chaplin converse. “She’s really got something,” the producer exclaims. Chaplin spies her and Billy, and goes over to them. He pulls out his autograph book and asks them to sign: “I’m just crazy about signatures!” Peggy is annoyed by the intrusion, but Billy gladly signs and hands the book back. “Who is that little fellow?” Peggy asks as she watches him get into a limo. “Charlie Chaplin!” Billy exclaims. Peggy faints into his arms.

Peggy continues to churn out comedy shorts, but eventually the call comes from High Arts Studio. She and Billy enter the studio grounds. A car pulls up, and a man and woman get out. “Who is that?” she asks Billy. “Marion Davies,” he answers, and Davies as herself looks around. In an endearing bit of self-deprecation, Peggy shows that she doesn’t think Davies is all that much. The pair forgets about Davies, and goes to the office. Trying to calm Peggy’s nerves, Billy says he won’t sign if they don’t take her, too. Alas, when the receptionist calls for Miss Pepper, they both get up. “Miss Pepper only,” says the receptionist. Peggy says she won’t sign if they don’t take Billy, but the crestfallen Billy encourages her to go on.

On her last day with her old gang in the comedy unit at Comet, Peggy becomes tearful and promises not to forget them. Billy, however, is not at the farewell party. She finds him waiting outside the soundstage door so he can speak to her privately. He says his good-byes and seals them with a kiss. Tearfully, Peggy goes off to become a star. And boy does she ever! At the advice of her leading man Andre Telefair (Paul Ralli), a phony count who used to be Tony the pizza slinger, she changes her name to Patricia Pepoire (a reminder of Marion’s own change to the Anglicized “Davies” on beginning her stage career) and transforms into a diva. She rarely sees Billy or her father (who, strangely, has been MIA until the scene below), so Billy calls her up to invite her over for dinner. Her pretentious buffoon of a maid (Fanny Brice lookalike Polly Moran) answers the phone:

One day, Peggy is shooting in the same location as Billy’s film unit. He sees her and stands out of sight to watch her play. After the director yells cut, he approaches her and starts kidding her about the old days, pushing at her until she snaps. She’s humiliated by the sight of him and never wants to see him again. Billy, hurt and thoroughly chastised, slinks off to become a part of “Patricia’s” buried past. Trying to put her beginnings completely behind her, Peggy is set to marry Andre. But as her attendants put the finishing touches on her wedding attire, she flashes back to all the good times she had with Billy. She calls off the wedding.

In the end, Peggy, her swollen head shrunk down to size, asks King Vidor to cast Billy in her next picture. When he reports for work, Peggy hides and instructs King not to say that she is in the picture, too. When Billy comes to the door of a cottage on the set, Peggy walks through it. The lovers are reunited, both having learned valuable lessons—Peggy, about humility, and Billy, that keeping audiences laughing is a safe career path but one he has outgrown.

This fictional film within the real world of Hollywood, dotted with its biggest stars playing themselves, is both a lampoon of what happens to star-struck, naïve kids when faced with fame and fortune and a flattering gaze at Hollywood's elite. The film certainly touches on the broken dreams that are the lot of most of Hollywood’s hopefuls, but sticks within the Jazz Age ethos of glorifying high society. We completely believe Marion as a goodhearted soul who lets her image get the better of her—in fact, Marion Davies was said to be just as good-natured despite being surrounded by the rich and riches associated with Hearst. Nonetheless, the film is obviously an inside job, one that probably thrilled audiences of stargazers while promoting MGM’s human “product.”

My favorite scenes are between Haines and Davies. Great friends in real life, they are able to be emotionally open to each other. When Billy comforts Peggy, the scene is longer than I would have expected, giving the pair ample room to talk through her trauma in a very realistic way. In addition, when Peggy banishes Billy from her life, her anger and cruelty come vividly off the screen. Haines deftly plays Billy’s bewilderment and incomprehension and brings his sad resignation slowly and painfully to the surface. It’s a devastating scene that might provoke a few tears.

Beyond these stellar attributes, it’s a genuine thrill to see the real facades of the great Hollywood studios, particularly since some of them are gone or merged with other studios. Watching Peggy tiptoe through set after set shows exactly how active the studios were churning out every variety of entertainment. And when Billy’s troupe comes upon Peggy’s High Arts production, we get a feel for the location shooting that was the norm in the silent era.

Show People is a truly fine film that showcases the enormous talent of Marion Davies, a talent that would fade from movie screens in only a few short years. I think of it as both a love letter to Hollywood and to one of the greatest funny women it ever produced. l

A Child Is Waiting (1963)
Director: John Cassavetes

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I saw a rather strange film the other day, a part of John Cassavetes’ oeuvre with which I was unfamiliar. The film, A Child Is Waiting, combines Hollywood’s Golden Age star Judy Garland with modern golden boy Burt Lancaster and several of Cassavetes' stock players from his independent work (his wife Gena Rowlands, John Marley, and Paul Stewart) to tell a gloves-off story about the place of the mentally retarded in mainstream American society. The film’s producer, Stanley Kramer, certainly was no stranger to “issues” films, having previously helmed On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremburg, and The Men. Cassavetes liked to make pictures about families and the emotionally damaged. The picture they made together has a schizophrenic tone and point of view, and casting Judy Garland in the role of a failed pianist looking for meaning in her life by becoming a teacher of mentally retarded children was a bit of a stretch. Ultimately, however, Garland would be less of a problem in telling this tale than the differing philosophies of its producer and director.

The film opens on Jean Hansen (Garland) entering a large building. A high longshot of her in a hallway emphasizes her smallness; we will learn that she is “drifting,” unable to find herself, and that the task she is trying to undertake may be too big for her. Her friend Mattie (Gloria McGehee), who has invited her to apply for a teaching position at the institution, meets her in the hallway and begins to show her around. Jean is accosted by curious students with every stripe and severity of mental disability, including a fair number of children with Down’s Syndrome. Her discomfort is obvious, one that was said to be the genuine reaction of Garland herself that she never quite shakes.

Jean meets Dr. Ben Clark (Burt Lancaster), a psychologist and head of the institution. He learns from interviewing her that she has no experience or special connection to the community she wants to serve. Mattie’s recommendation is the only thing Dr. Clark can go on, but it’s enough. She is hired and assigned to work as a music teacher and monitor for one of the cottages in which the children live. We don’t actually see her do any teaching or other work until near the end of the film. Instead, we watch her grow attached to a mildly retarded boy named Reuben Widdicombe (Bruce Richey) who won’t speak or follow the instructions of the teachers and Dr. Clark.

Wednesdays are family days, and Jean helps Reuben get into his best suit. All the children go outside to meet their parents. One by one, the children go off for the day. Only Reuben, sitting forlornly on the curb, has no visitors. Jean tries to comfort him, saying that his mother must have gotten lost or been delayed. Another teacher named Miss Fogarty (Elizabeth Wilson) comes by and says Reuben’s mother never comes. “He’s been waiting for her like that for two years.”

Jean asks Dr. Clark about Reuben. He says Reuben is very special, “one of our most notable failures.” Jean asks him to call Reuben's mother; he flatly refuses. And he doesn’t believe that teachers should form bonds with the children. Garland’s attachment to this boy (one of only three children in the cast—Billy Mumy and Butch Patrick are the others—who is not mentally challenged) is convincing, as she no doubt identified with his loneliness and apparent mistreatment by Dr. Clark.

Jean steals Reuben's file and starts to read it. In an awkward voiceover by an official-sounding man, we learn that Reuben was the first child of Sophie and Ted Widdicombe (Gena Rowlands and Steven Hill). The film flashes back to the Widdicombes enjoying baby Reuben in his crib. The voice tells us his birth was normal and he had chicken pox and measles before his second birthday. The only thing notable was that Sophie took a medication for a thyroid condition when she was pregnant. The cause of his retardation is a mystery.

In full flashback mode, the Widdicombes are becoming concerned that he doesn’t appear to be as mentally aware as other children. Sophie wonders why her two-year-old isn’t walking when a younger child down the hall is running. Ted brushes her off, saying his brother didn’t walk until he was three and is now running a big company. Unfortunately, the facts can’t be ignored forever. Ted takes Reuben to specialist after specialist looking for a different diagnosis. When he doesn’t get one, he drives Reuben, wildly, recklessly, to the state institution run by Dr. Clark. He looks as though he wants to kill them both—and indeed, he does.

Back in the present, when Dr. Clark finds out that Jean has Reuben's file, he is livid. She asks Dr. Clark angrily why he wants to take the comfort she provides to Reuben away from him. He states his belief that these children are served best by being taught to be self-reliant. She begs him to call Mrs. Widdicombe, now divorced from Ted and remarried. He tells her he will let Reuben’s parents see him when he thinks it is right.

Jean disobeys him and calls Sophie. She lies that Reuben is very ill to get Sophie to come. Sophie shows up with her second husband (Laurence Tierney). When she finds out about Jean’s deception, she refuses to see Reuben, saying that she loves him too much, that she couldn’t bear to see his pain at being different and rejected all over again. Rowlands always plays instability and vulnerability very well, and this performance is no exception. Reuben spies her as she returns to her car and runs after her. Later that night, he runs away. We get some signature Cassavetes shots of Reuben hiding in a bush as a blur of headlights and a blare of horns bring the moment viscerally to life. Unfortunately, we also are treated to the polemical sight of what Reuben faces in the outside world, when some boys include him in a football game and then kick him out when he shows he doesn’t know what they’re doing.

After Reuben is found and returned to the institution, Dr. Clark takes Jean to a part of the institution she has never seen—the men’s ward of the hopeless cases. It looks like Bedlam, perhaps a bit of a cliche but effective. He says these men were loved too much, kept at home and had their every want fulfilled. “Their parents didn’t bring them to us until it was too late”—too late to be trained to stand on their own two feet and create some kind of a life for themselves.

Jean is converted to Dr. Clark’s way of thinking and becomes cool toward Reuben, who still clings to her as a surrogate mother. She prepares her music class for a Thanksgiving pageant. Ted shows up after talking with an administrator at the institution, the symbolically named Goodman (Paul Stewart), and is moved that Reuben can recite a poem in front of an audience. Father and son are reconciled.

Many of society’s attitudes in the 1960s are on display in this film. Dr. Clark argues with state inspectors about their desire to divert funding from the institution to other programs. The pragmatic Dr. Lombardi (Mario Gallo) cold-bloodedly reasons that the state’s money is better spent on people who can become productive, not those for whom folding laundry may be the epitome of their ambition.

Burt Lancaster shows Dr. Clark’s compassion for his charges even as he espouses a tough-love approach to their development. He believes all mentally challenged children should be institutionalized so they can get the proper help and avoid smother love. The philosophy is a bit of a muddle that would become more refined with progress in society. Indeed, I hardly knew what to think listening to him combine a strange Freudianism (blaming mothering) with the more modern approach of helping these children achieve their potential, and then advocate institutionalization, highly idealized in this film as being compassionate and rehabilitative.

This confusion was no accident, as Stanley Kramer recut the film behind Cassavetes’ back. In Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the director discusses the two versions of the film:

The difference in the two versions is that Stanley's picture said that retarded children belong in institutions, and the picture I shot said retarded children are better in their own way than supposedly healthy adults. The philosophy of his film was that retarded children are separate and alone and therefore should be in institutions with others of their kind. My film said that retarded children could be anywhere, any time, and that the problem is that we're a bunch of dopes, that it's our problem more than the kids'. The point of the original picture that we made was that there was no fault, that there was nothing wrong with these children except that their mentality was lower.

The single best scene in this film is the one between Steven Hill and Paul Stewart I mentioned above. Below is the clip (bear with the shakiness of the video; it settles down):

While this film is dated because of changing attitudes toward the mentally challenged—we even have professional actors with Down’s Syndrome now—it still provides a jolt to the system for people who don’t interact daily with the disabled. The look is unflinching and almost completely free of preachiness. Lancaster fights for his charges, but not in a way that makes us feel we’re being scolded or taught. We’re all the better for seeing he has a genuine passion for his work, that it is possible to love working with children most of us never see and some of us would rather not see. A brave film that in its very making became a battleground over the rights of the mentally disabled, A Child Is Waiting is a unique and worthy work in the Cassavetes canon. l

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Director: Sidney Lumet

By Roderick Heath

For he past half-century, Sidney Lumet has been modern American cinema’s master of fine-grained mise-en-scène. His sense of life being lived, particularly in big cities, is often unerring, and thus,his touch has always been at its surest in urban dramas and noir films. His recent career Oscar and the ensuing tide of reevaluation has brought him to the brink of the recognition he deserves, but he’s still patronised to a surprising degree. Perhaps it’s the fact that Lumet insisted on having an old Hollywood hand’s type of career, taking on diverse projects for the sheer hell of it, and working steadily through creative barren patches, that’s diluted his appreciation. He is also, to a certain extent, a filmmaker at odds with much of the popular conception of great directors. He’s rarely flamboyant, technically showy, or self-important. He generally uses only the bare minimum of shots he needs to explain a point, and if something can be done in one long take, he’ll shoot it.

Lumet began as an expert adaptor of stage works, and yet he grew swiftly out of theatrical transcription. His movies are distinguished by their lean, actor-centric, matter-of-fact sensibility, and yet they’re always slightly more stylised than you think, with his imaginative use of lenses to emphasise altering perspectives, used most showily in films like Murder on the Orient Express (1975). In this tendency to ever so slightly magnify the ordinary, Lumet achieves something very much like classic American naturalism as defined by Twain, Norris, and Crane. In terms of modern cinema, Lumet is closer not to high-style contemporaries like Kubrick and Frankenheimer, but to Ken Loach and British-style realists.

Lumet’s career is studded with forgettable films that did not mesh with his fundamental gifts, like The Wiz (1978), The Group (1966), as well as with the overrated Network (1976). Yet, his roll of honour represents some of the most rigorous, tough, and intelligent works of American (and British) film: Twelve Angry Men, The Fugitive Kind, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, The Hill, The Offence, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, The Verdict, Daniel, and Running on Empty. The ’90s were largely a sorry time for Lumet, apart from some interesting misfires like Q&A and Night Falls on Manhattan, which were all the more sad for fumbling to recapture old greatness.

Working from a script by debut screenwriter Kelly Masterson, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is easily Lumet’s best film since Running on Empty, a welcome return to the dark-saturated, tragic melodrama of his great works. It’s the tale of Hank (Ethan Hawke) and Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman), two sharply defined brothers who decide to knock over their parents’ jewelry store to extricate themselves from financial woes. Hank hires a sleazy stick-up man, Bobby (Brian F. O’Byrne), who gets himself shot by the brothers’ own mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), but shoots her, too, before expiring. Unsurprisingly, it’s all downhill from there.

This film is, assuredly, a melodrama. Plot complications stack up with extraneous relentlessness, and most of the characters are defined by a single dominating trait. Yet Lumet and his cast endeavor to bring to the film a Grecian weight with a pared-back, intensive technique, and succeed; the tale and its moral conclusions are blacker than the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. Lumet lays out the details of these men and their lives like an assassin laying out the parts of his rifle before assembling it—and then proceeds to shoot them dead with it. The film’s biting thesis contrasts self-conscious “loser" Hank with his brother, whose hot wife and higher position in the real estate company they both work for make him apparently more successful, but who is actually an even bigger loser. His debts are larger, his failures broader—how much more he has gained only adds up to how much more he has to lose.

Then there’s grizzled patriarch Charles (Albert Finney), who is confronted first by terrible loss and then an even more terrible discovery that does not dissuade him from pursuing vengeance. Charles is both cheering and chilling in his dedication to restoring a fundamental sense of order to the world once his has been smashed, even to the point of murdering one of his own boys. Before he learns the truth, Charles attempts to apologise for his failings as a father, and Andy attempts to displace his own failings willingly onto his father. But something infinitely malignant, glittering in the dark, has grown between this pair, and becomes pure toxicity when combined with social values and personal desperation that drive a man to seek money at all costs. The main victim is Andy and Hank’s own mother—Harris is an actress who mysteriously manages to become more beautiful every year—who, ironically, displays a level of bravery and pith that gets her killed, but also brings everything else crashing down. All deceits and betrayals are laid bare because she is present where she shouldn’t be, and does what she should not. The old woman who counts for nothing in this drama of masculine fear and rage is actually its catalytic force. Aeschylus would have been happy with the building blocks of this story.

Lumet’s film has some close cousins in contemporary cinema, for example, the recent works of James Gray and Clint Eastwood, in attempting to artfully reproduce the compulsive plot patterns and analytical stereotyping of classic Hollywood melodrama in order to exploit their potential for corrosive social critique. Lumet surpasses these directors in both his refusal to indulge actors and his immunity from sentimentality. Hoffman and Hawke, two thespians prone to showboating, are kept on the strictest of leashes. The reward is some dazzling performing, like the way Hoffman shivers and stutters when he converses with Andy on the phone and realises everything’s gone to hell. Hawke gives his best-ever performance, free of the hipster archness he never before disposed of entirely. Finney continues his incredible late-career resurgence. It’s mesmerising to watch these characters engage in realistic, offhand behavior, like the way both Hawke and Hoffman reveal underneath their attempts to fit into a white-collar world, a fundamental working-class unease—the moment they relax, they pull their shirts out of their trousers. There’s also an eye-catching part from veteran character actor Leonardo Cimino as a hellish minion in the guise of a diamond merchant, all too eager to inform Charles just how evil the world can be.

The film isn’t a true, profound tragedy. It states, rather than explores, the dynamics of the family that’s produced this situation, and the various character relationships are locked in the state they continue in, if more urgently, to the climax. We’re not introduced to the whole Hanson clan together, and so gain little feel for how they work as a unit. Andy outlines his alienation from the group dynamic of mother, father, sister and brother, and Hank has long settled into seething mutual contempt with his ex-wife (Amy Ryan) and daughter (Sarah Livingstone).

The role of Gina (Marisa Tomei), Andy’s gorgeous wife, is curious, and ultimately fudged. The film begins with her and Andy in a moment of pure carnal thrill, a marker, reminiscent as it is of Jaime Sanchez and his girlfriend cavorting in The Pawnbroker, of Lumet’s career-long fascination with the brittle excitement and intimacy of the casual lover’s shag. It’s a kind of twilight idyll for them that Andy attempts desperately to maintain, despite the fact that his coke and heroin habits have been rendering him intermittently impotent. Gina mistakes this for lack of desire for her, so she’s been regularly bedding Hank instead. Yet Gina never develops beyond a plot trope, and Tomei is left floundering like an offended valley girl when she finally abandons Andy, a desultory conclusion for an aspect of the story that begins so vividly.

But the plot of Before the Devil is essentially retrospective in that it deals with consequences to interpersonal disaster that have preordained worldly disaster. This justifies the film’s approach, which continues circling around the robbery and its grim conclusion, following each character on their separate descent; it’s as if time has stopped, and fate throws up its labyrinthine barriers at every turn. Hank and Andy are wonderfully half-assed criminals. It would take a kind of existential resignation such as James Caan displays in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) to escape it, but neither Hank nor Andy have the kind of strength required to either avoid or extricate themselves from this situation. Andy comes close, in a final ruthless drive, but his last hesitation and swerving from his purpose to cosset his wounded pride, costs him his life.

Hank survives, at the price of having to run for the rest of his life because of a remaining scruple—he won’t let Andy shoot an innocent woman, and she returns the favor. Ultimately, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is not entirely pessimistic, in that the “right" values do prevail, but Hank’s act of selflessness and Charles’s final act prove that whilst justice can still rule even in the cruelest situations, it can still entail facing the near- inconceivable horror of being exterminated by a loved one, and thus be only one more cruelty. l

The Giant of Marathon (La Battaglia di Maratona, 1959)
Director: Jacques Tourneur (uncredited: Mario Bava)

By Marilyn Ferdinand

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to contribute to a blog called Natsukashi. The blog’s current series is movies then and now. Participants are supposed to think of a film they saw when they were young, write down all their memories of the film, then rewatch the film and see what kind of a difference a decade or more might have made to their appraisal of the film.

My youth is very far behind me, so my memories of what films I saw, let alone what I remember from them, are extremely spotty; the only fairly reliable memories are from movies I saw as a teen. In addition, I’ve rewatched many of the musicals I saw as a child, like The Sound of Music, more recently than the 10-year limit Natsukashi imposes on contributors.

Nonetheless, I managed to dredge up one film that planted three scenes indelibly in my mind: The Giant of Marathon. Because the film came out in 1959, when I was 4 years old, and it’s not the kind of film that would have been revived only a few years from its premiere, I’m sure I didn’t see it at a theatre. I’m almost positive I saw it on TV because I generally I spent my Saturday afternoons in front of our TV in the basement. A very popular type of film for the networks to show in those days were Italian sword-and-sandal epics. I watched Greek mythology and history paraded in front of me week after week and took great delight in trying to see how well the English dubbing matched the lips of the mainly Italian performers. It was during these afternoons that I became intimately acquainted with the special effects of Ray Harryhausen, whose films I still take pleasure in viewing today. Somehow, the only one of those films that really stuck with me, other than the Harryhausen films, was The Giant of Marathon. Even though I hadn’t seen it since the 1960s, I remembered its name and these
images:

1. The tiny figure of a man lifting a giant boulder and throwing it onto the Persian army fighting below on an open plain.

2. A dark-haired woman running from some burning bodies and being struck in the back with an arrow. Her blue, chiffon dress turned purple as a perfect circle of blood oozed from her back.

3. Men underwater being struck through and through with arrows fired by men in a boat above them.

So, this past week, I placed the DVD of this movie in my player and rewatched The Giant of Marathon to see if the rest of it looked familiar and whether my memories were accurate. To the first part of that sentence, the answer is “no." To the second part, I can say “yes," but the first two scenes didn’t happen the way I remembered them.

The giant of the title isn’t really a tall man but rather a very strong man named Philippides. He is played by former Mr. Universe Steve Reeves, who made a career in Italian movies of this type and who became the definitive screen Hercules. When we first meet him, it is in Olympia, where he is demolishing the competition to become the overall winner of the Olympic Games. Although he is a peasant, winning this honor opens doors for him in his native city of Athens.

He returns to Athens, which is under threat of invasion by the Persians. Two members of the Athenian council, Theocritus (Sergio Fantoni) and Creusos (Iva Garrani), are sympathetic to forming an alliance with the Persians. They also are close because Creusos and Theocritus’s father promised their children to each in marriage when the Theocritus and Andromeda (Mylène Demongeot) were children. Unfortunately for the pair, they do not love each other, but a bargain’s a bargain.

One day, Andromeda is playing in a field with her girlfriends. Of course, they’re wearing their play togs, which are barely there short togas. Philippides comes upon the group by chance. He and Andromeda are instantly attracted to each other. She shows him that one of the balls, which looks like an overgrown whiffle ball, has lodged in a tree. She asks him to try knocking it down with another ball, warning him that it’s not easy. Philippides shakes the entire tree, and the ball falls to the ground. “That wasn’t so hard," he says. Then he throws it, but his superhuman strength sends it soaring miles away. He asks her what her name is, but she refuses to tell him, knowing that her marriage contract makes a relationship with him impossible. Nonetheless, she tells him that she will be praying at the temple of Athena that night.

Theocritus is plotting to win Philippides, as newly appointed captain of the Sacred Guard, to his cause. Theocritus believes that if he can recruit Philippides, the Athenian council will vote for the alliance and the Sacred Guard will pose no threat. He asks Karis (Daniela Rocco), a prostitute, to seduce Philippides and win him over to the Persian alliance. This she tries to do with an invitation Philippides thinks is from Andromeda. He shares her wine, watches a dancing girl perform for him, but declines the sumptuous feast and, of course, Karis. He departs for the temple, anxious to meet up with the girl who has bewitched him already.

Karis reports her failure to Theocritus, who then persuades Creusos to invite Philippides to dine with them. Of course, Andromeda is unmasked when introduced as Theocritus’s fiancée. Theocritus tries to persuade Philippides to join their cause, but as a patriot, he refuses. Theocritus notices Philippides’ ardor for Andromeda. He promises to give Andromeda to Philippides if he accepts the proposal. “Does Andromeda agree to this?" asks Philippides. “Of course," lies Theocritus. This craven bargain turns Phlippides against Andromeda.

The Persians are on their way to land at the shores of Athens. By now, Karis has fallen in love with Philippides and wants to warn him of the impending invasion. Theo- critus takes her and Andromeda hostage as he prepares to aid the Persian leader Darius (Daniele Vargas). The Athenians hope to persuade Sparta, their historic enemy, to join with them to fight the Persians to avoid their capture of all of Greece. Philippides starts off on horseback to reach Sparta with the appeal, but while crossing a river, his horse is swept away. He makes it to shore and runs the 26.2 miles to Sparta, thus giving birth to the marathon, which we run today. He gives a stirring speech to Sparta, is supported by one of his competitors at Olympia, and gets Sparta to agree to field troops. He returns to Athens to help prepare the Athenian army and Sacred Guard for battle. Of course, Athens wins the day, and Philippides wins Andromeda.

Nothing in this film suggests the artistry Jacques Tourneur brought to his films with Val Lewton—Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man. Nor do we get the suave personality of his classic noir Out of the Past. The Giant of Marathon is a late-career film for Tourneur, no doubt made for money, and not a great reflection of his directorial style.

However, a relative newcomer to Italian cinema, Mario Bava, makes his mark felt with his cinematography and special photographic effects. The skewed angles that depict the Olympic Games bring us close to the strain of athletic competition. The battle sequences make full use of the open plane where strategically resplendent and graphically violent battles between the Persian army and the Athenians take place. The scene that really shows Bava’s ingenuity and experimentation is when Philippides and the Sacred Guard (unfortunately wrapped in what look like diapers) dive underwater to plant enormous stakes in the ocean floor to pierce the hulls of the Persian ships. Further, when the Guard moves to manually punch holes in the vessels behind the impaled ships, many of them are killed by arrows shot into the water. Bava ensures we see arrows and spears piercing straight through their bodies, eyes, limbs, with pretty swirls of blood fanning out from their wounds.

Reeves is a believable hero with a body that makes one believe there are supermen after all. My memory of a giant boulder hoisted aloft by Philippides was faulty, but he did push boulders down on the Persians from surrounding hills, still an impressive feat of strength. As Andromeda, Demongeot reminded me in looks and style of Sandra Dee, only slightly plucky and very girly. She stands helplessly against a rock as Philippides and his men rescue her from the Persians, who tied her like a figurehead to the front of Darius’ ship to prevent an attack by archers, and fight hand to hand to the death. Rocca, the brilliantly stupid wife in Pietro Germi’s wicked comedy Divorce, Italian Style is weirdly made up to look like Mr. Spock. But she gives a memorable performance, playing both a woman spurned and one who sacrifices all for love anyway. She was indeed killed with an arrow to the back among the burning bodies of dead Persians, though my memory of a circle of purple on her dress was faulty. I really liked that her ashes were scattered in honor on the battlefield for her heroism, though mortally wounded, in bringing word of a surprise attack to the Athenian army. “She fought as one of us."

If I had to say why this film stuck with me, it is because of the thrilling action sequences. Catapults, rows of spears behind body-length shields ready to impale the cavalry soldiers, boulders crushing soldiers, underwater battles as ingenious as any I’ve ever seen, and a heroine in Karis definitely stirred my imagination. I enjoyed it just as much on viewing it now as I did as a kid. There is a mocking version of this film by The Film Crew, and the cheapness of the production and very odd costuming certainly lend themselves to ridicule. Nonetheless, this film is a solid genre piece filled with pleasures I was happy to experience again. l

A podcast of my reactions to revisiting The Giant of Marathon is available here.

“Our Backstreets" #21
What's That Smell?

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Arianna Huffington's come to town. Actually, she's brought her "local" Huffington Post to my town specifically, but she intends to spread her wings and fly to metropolitan areas all over the United States in the months ahead.

The Huffington Post is something of a juggernaut on the blog scene and one that many bloggers of a liberal persuasion read regularly and blogroll on their sites. Plenty of nonbloggers read HuffPo as well. So did I. I even signed up for HuffPo's OfftheBus project, in which ordinary people cover the election stories that Big Media can't or won't report, because I thought the idea of participating in the democratic process was an important action I could take. I also thought that because I was one of Barack Obama's Illinois constituents, I'd have a more well-rounded view of a candidate who, frankly, the liberal world has gone gooey over.

I wrote a piece called "Obama's Green Screen" that was critical of Senator Obama's conspicuous absence when Lake Michigan was under threat of becoming, yet again, a dump for Big Energy's waste. Opposition in Illinois to BP's plans to dump waste from their Northern Indiana refinery was bipartisan, but our junior senator was absent and silent. We've seen now that this ducking and weaving from issues that might hurt his chances of election comprise part of his game plan. Back then, however, many of us believed his rhetoric of change, and for many of us, that meant taking unpopular or politically risky stands.

The Huffington Post was not yet headquarters of the Obama for President fan club, but that didn't last long. The shriller the site's boosterism, the more disenchanted I became with it. I stopped reading it and decided that my civic energies could be spent doing more effectual things than trying to report evenhandedly about Barack Obama for OfftheBus, hosted on The Huffington Post Web site.

As some of you know, our site is affiliated with The Beachwood Reporter. I went to listen to some panel discussions at the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication conference held last week in Chicago, one of which included Steve Rhodes, the founder and general manager of The Beachwood. Afterwards, Steve, another journalist, and I chatted, and one topic that came up was the advance work The Huffington Post was doing to get writers for its Chicago site. I was not approached, but both of them had been and were asked to work "pro bono," in other words, for free. Arianna Huffington is a multimillionaire, yet she is asking professional journalists to work for free. We all thought this was outrageous. If she wants to give space to unqualified celebrities like Deepak Chopra to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that's her business. They don't need the money, but they like the visibility.

However, asking professionals to consider her site one that serves "the public good" (which is what pro bono translates as) to which they should give willingly and liberally of their time is the ultimate in cheek at best and something that looks an awful lot like what liberals are supposed to be against--the labor abuses of Big Business--at worst.

Today, Steve posted a letter that appeared on Romenesko, a hugely popular site for journalists hosted by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists. Since most of you probably don't visit this site, I'll duplicate the letter and Steve's comments from The Beachwood:

"From KEVIN ALLMAN: Phil Rosenthal's (Chicago Tribune media columnist) story on Arianna Huffington's foray into the local blogging market included this line: 'Writers work pro bono.'

"'Pro bono' means 'for the public good.' What Rosenthal should've said is that Huffington wants writers to work for free so she can sell ads around their work. That ain't the public good. That ain't good, period.

"The Huffington Post has been a winning formula, because it gives platforms to Huffington's D.C. and L.A. buddies who need vanity exposure more than they need money. But when she comes into communities and applies the same formula, there's another word for that formula, and it's exploitation.

"It's hard for me to take any 'progressive' site seriously that expects people to work for free while the founders make money. At least Wal-Mart pays minimum wage."

Steve Rhodes said: "Like everyone else and their dog in Chicago, I've been asked to contribute to the new Chicago version of Huffington Post - for free.

"So let me get this straight. Arianna Huffington is incredibly rich and you want me to work for free to make her richer? And to help her put me out of business? Let me think about this while eating my ramen dinner and reading Arianna's latest post about how the Republicans don't care about working people.

"How about this? If Arianna writes for me for free, I'll write for her."

Regardless of whether you agree with letter-writer Allman or Steve Rhodes, they do make a case against Arianna Huffington's business model. I have one more reason to oppose it.

The Huffington Post-Chicago premiered today. The comments thread under the site's introductory post were very positive, thrilled that Ms. Huffington chose our terrific burg to splash down in. That'll teach New York and Los Angeles who The Second City isn't! I thought I'd like to greet HuffPo a little differently by posting Allman's letter with my own comments. I'm still a registered HuffPo blogger from my brief stint with OfftheBus, so it should have gone up unmolested. It didn't. I watched the "Comments Pending" number carefully, seeing it go up and down and eventually reach zero. Strangely, my post didn't appear. I wrote another post that said HuffPo was censoring my comment, and it didn't appear. I tried another approach and responded to another comment with information that HuffPo doesn't pay its writers. It didn't appear either. I sent a final comment announcing my intention to write about this disgraceful disregard for working people and the censorship that seemed to be underway to ensure a lovefest for HuffPo's entry into the Chicago market.

Two established sites, Chicagoist and Gapers Block, have been covering the local scene for several years. The Beachwood has been doing the same for the political landscape for nearly 3 years. Now, like megabucks Sam Zell's slash-and-burn approach to his recent acquisition, The Tribune Company, Arianna Huffington is ready to run over our local bloggers. Those who are cheering her today may regret it tomorrow when, like Clear Channel, she becomes the dominant voice in Chicago-centric Internet publishing. It's probable that local sites with fewer resources will dry up and blow away when HuffPo steals their advertisers.

HuffPo may seem liberal, but it doesn't smell that way to me. When the odor reaches your city, duck and cover. l

Pump Up the Volume (1990)
Director/Screenwriter: Allan Moyle

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I have a soft place in my heart for teen movies. Perhaps it stems from my adolescent crush on Mercutio (John McEnery) in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of that perennially updated classic of teen romance Romeo and Juliet—a crush that never really went away. I’ve commented favorably on the 80s takeoff on this classic, Valley Girl, and can still be found, hopelessly out of place, in lines waiting to get into teen movies, particularly if they involve dancing.

The 80s were a heady time, optimistic about a new “Morning in America," as Ronald Reagan’s campaign ads liked to say, and teen movies of that era generally reflected the zeitgeist. Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, even The Breakfast Club managed to create happy environments in which kids got over on their parents and adult authority figures with relatively harmless ease. Pump Up the Volume follows the familiar formula of teenagers finding ways to thwart adult power, but its tone and eventual outcomes are much darker, much more a reflection of the new Lost Generation to come that elevated anger and cynicism to new heights of lyrical rebellion.

“Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? “ says Mark Hunter (Christian Slater), aka Happy Harry Hard-on, the pseudononymous DJ/radio host of his very own illegal, underground radio show. Mark, a recent and unwilling transplant to Paradise Valley, Arizona, has already sipped at the fountain of existential angst in the craven environs of New York. He finds his classmates at Hubert H. Humphrey High School repressed, oppressed, and out of touch. He feels like a stranger in a strange land and can’t talk to them face to face. So every night at 10 p.m., Mark lights a sign depicting a hand flipping the bird, activates his hopping penis toy, spins his theme song—that great song of defeat, “Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen—and becomes Happy Harry, a raunchy, rebellious prophet, a teenage Howard Beal.

I’d say “much to his surprise," but I think it’s no surprise at all to Mark that he builds a following. He’s even set up a P.O. box to receive mail from his similarly pseudononymous listeners. If they include phone numbers, he calls them. When he learns some dirt on school administrators—which he can because his father (Scott Paulin) is the district superintendent and leaves his mail lying around—he broadcasts it. One night, he reads a letter David Deaver (Robert Schenkkan), the head of the school counseling department, wrote to suggest a student’s expulsion. He also has the faculty’s private phone numbers, and calls up Deaver. After initially playing to Deaver's vanity, Mark starts to grill him about why he ratted out a student who spoke to him in strictest confidence. Not surprisingly, Deaver hangs up. Happy Harry Hard-on becomes public enemy #1 at Humphrey High, with the Machiavellian principal Loretta Creswood (Annie Ross) pulling every dirty trick she can to find out his identity so she can expel him.

Christian Slater, though full of mannered movements (he’s in a perpetual slouch when in the company of his peers), is a sexy, charismatic presence on screen. His personality combined with his rap on the plight of the nation, in general, and teenagers, in specific, make for some compelling listening, not only for the kids on screen but also for the movie audience. He coins several lines that rightly turn into memes in the film: “So be it," and “Thought is a virus." When he receives a letter that asks, “Should I kill myself," he opines, “You hear about some kid who did something stupid, something desperate; what possessed him? How could he do such a terrible thing? …The terrible secret is that being young is sometimes less fun than being dead." Unfortunately for Mark, he didn’t take the suicide threat seriously; the next day, the student is found dead, and Mark feels responsible. Thus, the darker side of letting it bleed on the air (shades of Jenni Jones and Rush Limbaugh) gets a hearing in this film.

His foil, and the only person who discovers his identity, is Nora Diniro (Samantha Mathis, in her screen debut), a girl transitioning from Pippi Longstocking wannabe to Goth rebel. She is turned on by Harry and sends him sexually explicit mash notes as the “eat me beat me" lady. She spends a good deal of the movie harassing him to pay attention to her and encouraging him to go on after the suicide and as his alarm at the revolution he has started keeps growing. As a couple, Slater and Mathis have a lot of chemistry (they became an item in real life), but Mathis is, frankly, pretty bad in this movie; she only captures attention because she’s so pretty. If I had to use Rod’s rating system for film debuts, I’d give her an “unpromising"—which would be inaccurate because she has become a pretty good actress. The pair’s almost-sex scene is embarrassingly bad—both topless, circling each other and licking their lips. Only Slater’s swoon on the ground after Mathis leaves breathes real sexual energy into the scene.

Paige Woodward (Cheryl Pollak), cast as a preppie-looking achiever, but really an unhappy girl overstressed by everyone’s high expectations of her, has a real scene-stealing moment. Harry, extolling his “troops," says, “Go nuts, go crazy, get creative! You got problems? You just chuck 'em, nuke 'em!" Paige takes him literally. Pulling the Yale banner off her wall, gathering up her cosmetics and other aids to perfection, she carries the lot into the kitchen, tosses them in the microwave oven, sets it, and sits at the kitchen table watching it explode and burn. It’s a great scene of teen rage, and I really appreciated that director/writer Moyle gave it to a female.

As might be expected, the adults in the film are caricatures—clueless parents, cool teachers, evil guidance counselors, and ineffectual enforcers of the law. At one point, Arthur Watts (James Hampton), the head of the FCC, comes to Paradise Valley to apprehend the radio pirate. He stays lamely near his limo as his radio trucks, brought in to triangulate Mark’s broadcast signal to find him, spin like bumper cars trying to follow the now-mobile Mark, his broadcasting set-up rigged to his mother’s jeep. Eventually, cool teacher Jan Emerson (Ellen Greene) finds incriminating evidence against the principal, allowing Mark’s father to redeem himself somewhat by suspending her. Only Annie Ross was able to modulate her performance to avoid playing a cackling witch, only to have it spoiled by a clichéd showdown with Mr. Hunter.

The film has a strictly meat-and-potatoes look. Aside from some interesting low camera angles that create some skewed perspectives, the shooting and editing is fairly unimaginative. Wardrobe shows the lingering fashion-victimization of the 1980s, complete with shoulder pads, horizontal striped tights, and pegged, viscous rayon slacks.

What sets Pump Up the Volume apart as a true film for the 90s is the hopeless tone of its message and its soundtrack. All Mark can muster in the way of encouragement for his disaffected audience is, “We're all worried, we're all in pain. That just comes with having eyes and having ears. But just remember one thing—it can't get any worse, it can only get better. High school is the bottom, being a teenager sucks, but that's the point, surviving it is the whole point. Quitting is not going to make you stronger, living will. So just hang on and hang in there." Gone is the conventional wisdom that “the best years of your life" happen when you’re young. The music he chooses to narrate his philosophy includes the Beastie Boys, Bad Brains with Henry Rollins, The Pixies, and Sonic Youth. David Was’ “Dad, I’m in Jail" is Mark’s appropriate choice as the police chase after his mobile studio and finally catch him at the edge of the field where his listeners congregate every night to share his broadcast.

Finally, “Stand," performed by Liquid Jesus accompanies Mark’s call to arms as he and Nora are arrested:

I'm calling for every kid to seize the air. Steal it, it belongs to you. Speak out, they can't stop you. Find your voice and use it. Keep this thing going. Pick a name, go on the air. It's your life, take charge of it. Do it, try it, try anything. Spill your guts out, say shit and fuck a million times if you want to, but you decide. Fill the air, steal it. Keep the air alive.

Many people who were teens in 1990 were listening to their version of a speech that has been said a thousand different times across a thousand generations. And despite their more-hopeless-than-usual disaffection, they have perhaps gone the farthest in heeding Harry’s words. Welcome to the Internet generation, folks.l

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

Red River (1948)
Director: Howard Hawks
Debut film of: Montgomery Clift, actor

By Roderick Heath

A beautiful, young actor first appears on the screen in Red River, listening with a kind of wide-eyed, excited, but strictly measured attention. It’s Montgomery Clift, a wonder boy fresh from a Broadway splash, suddenly thrust into cowboy gear and standing between two other actors, John Wayne and Walter Brennan, constituting a trio of actors it’s almost impossible to find more diverse.

Debut screen-acting performances, where a fresh talent immediately arrives in a starring role, like Clift here, or Marlon Brando in The Men, or Katharine Hepburn’s in A Bill of Divorcement, don’t come along so often these days. That’s largely because the kind of career momentum those actors built up on the Broadway stage and transferred directly to the screen is nonexistent now; almost every actor has done a spot of TV or film work in building a career. Even for Clift, there were some wrinkles in his swift promotion to screen stardom. Red River, his first feature starring role, was filmed in 1946, but held back from release for nearly two years. So the public at large first saw him in Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 film The Search.

Red River needs little introduction as one of the cinema’s great Westerns, a frontier myth easily described as a variation on Mutiny on the Bounty reset on the range. However, as was director Hawks’ way, the drama is essentially a study of the intricacies of human relationships and the essential ambiguity of morality as it meshes with character. In this way, the tyrannical captain of the great cattle drive, Thomas Dunston (John Wayne), is not a cardboard figure of sadistic power, but a haunted, embittered patriarch whose ever-greater efforts to hold onto his dream see it slip further and further away. It’s only saved by his adopted son, Matthew Garth (Clift), who risks his neck and a prickly kind of love with the older man to save it for all of them, their surrogate grandfather Groot Nadine (Walter Brennan), and the men who entrust them with their lives and livelihoods. Matthew and Dunston come into conflict when Matthew intervenes to save the lives of men Dunston wants to hang for trying to bail out on his great, desperate quest.

It’s hard not read subtext into Red River. Hawks’ films are generally typified as being about men doing manly things, idealizing masculine codes of behavior espousing stoic taciturnity and economy of emotion, virtually verboten in modern pop culture. Yet Hawks loved to explore ambiguities in such behavior. Men who had flunked the code, like Richard Barthelmess in Only Angels Have Wings, could yet live up to it; other men, who seem to exemplify it, end up flunking badly, like Dunston here. Then there is, of course, the famous Hawksian lady, here embodied with steely verve by Joanne Dru as Tess Millay, a dancer hooked up with a wagon train of gamblers and prostitutes heading to set up a proto-Vegas, and also by Fen (Coleen Gray), as the lady love Dunston loses early in the film.

The central clash of characters between Dunston and Matthew drives the entire film, though so much of its visual rhetoric seems merely to be about shifting cattle across the land. It’s vital because the question of the film is this: though this is man’s work, and the country a man’s country, what kind of man is the best at fulfilling this near-Homeric quest? A repetition in the narrative places Dunston and Matthew in their respective, divided positions. Both meet their true loves in wagon trains (which move east to west, whereas the cattle drive moves south to north). But Dunston walks away from the train, only to see it and his lady burn. Dunston thus turns his back on the steady march of civilization, and heads out into the wilderness without women or laws or religion or comfort to forge an empire in the Texas plains. His kind is needed to begin this great project, this American range. Matthew rides to the rescue of another wagon train that is under attack by Indians, and saves Tess in the process of rescuing the fruits of Dunston’s labor from himself. This is the crucial gap. Dunston is a destroyer, a quick draw pioneer who leaves behind civilization and womankind. Matthew’s kind is needed to complete the quest.

Hawks seems to have played on the fact that he cast a gay actor (or at least, acknowledging the fact he’s an awfully pretty one) in Matthew’s tangled relations with Dunston. Their relationship is mostly like that of a vengeful father who loves his son but wants him to grow up in the “right" way as his kind of authoritarian patriarch, independent and remote. And yet he casts Matthew, with his youth and beauty, as the closest thing to a woman in his life. He establishes these warring impulses, this sickly confusion of masculine and feminine qualities, by giving Matthew Fen’s wristband, not as a sexual surrogate, but as an emotional one. Nonetheless, Dunston ultimately casts Matthew in a feminine role and imbues him with a more complex identity fundamentally at odds with his own that he can’t stand when it makes itself apparent. The film makes a bold and valid point, that Dunston’s hyper-macho behavior, supposedly hard-headed and naturally effective, is, in fact, defined by hysteria, a wild, stunting refusal to regard human or natural concerns with acceptance.

Hawks seems to have been acutely aware of Clift’s new kind of energy. Replace him in the part with a more traditional male presence like Gregory Peck or Wayne himself 10 years earlier, and a lot of the film would instantly start seeming ridiculous. The film’s gay—or, more precisely, bi—subtext asserts itself when Matthew compares guns and shooting styles with Cherry Vallance (John Ireland), a more macho man but with a strikingly effeminate name, to Groot’s prediction that “that pair are certain to tangle some day." Perhaps they do, but not in the fashion Groot means. Cherry becomes Matthew’s stalwart supporter, helping his coup against Dunston and later trying to intervene in their final clash; his being swatted aside almost casually by Dunston is reminiscent of wicked homophobic patriarch Patrick McGoohan hurling his son’s gay lover out the window in Braveheart.

But Cherry is also a transitory companion for Matthew. Cherry splits up the double act when he goes searching for womankind, and instead ends up digging up one for Matthew. Later, it’s Cherry whom Tess relies on to learn about the man who taunts and intrigues her. If Tess, the Hawksian woman, combines a dose of masculinity with her femininity and creates an ideal, so, too, does Matthew prove that a man with a large dash of the feminine is equally ideal. His concern for others, his willingness to explore the road less traveled, his breadth of emotional reach make him a better, braver leader of men than Dunston in the end, when what is required is not the man who smashes and shoots and digs.

Clift developed a core persona in his starring roles as a man of febrile intelligence, passive manners, ill-fitting emotional and social status, possessed of civility and a hazy type of ambition. Because of this persona, he is presumed to be weak by the he-men, but when he finally fights back, he proves to have an iron character. This broadly fits his characters here and in I Confess, From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, and Raintree County. His acting style later became striking for his capacity to portray high emotion subtly, as if he’s slicing off pieces of his soul one by one and feeding them into his art, at its height in A Place in the Sun and Judgment at Nuremburg. This force of will strains to crack that beautiful face, and after it was marred in his car accident, he became even more volatile as a portrayer of neurotics, shivering wrecks, and hurting, conscientious men.

"No, no you won't."

In Red River, he maintains the same cool taciturnity as the rest of the cast, except in his wide, intrigued eyes, receptive as radar dishes, soaking up detail, registering alternately amused, appalled, incensed, and finally unblinking in facing up to Dunston’s wrath. When he responds to Dunston’s plan to hang three deserters, “No, no you won’t," he reads the line without melodrama or scowling, but with a clear, simple diction, establishing that he has reached a point of basic refusal. Indeed, Clift’s performance is largely defined by its stillness, his becalmed face and naturalistic postures. He does not mould his body and face to the demands of the screen, like Wayne with his adamantine grace, or to highlight the individuality of his character, like twitchy, rubber-faced Brennan, but rather to express the inner stylings of Matthew’s mind. His performance wells from within, requiring us to intuit his thinking and feeling. Although he was preceded in Hollywood by John Garfield and William Holden, Clift was the first of the vanguard Method actors to alter the energy of the cinema screen. To some extent, though, Clift also updates the fundamental approach of Gary Cooper, who also used stillness and intuition in his acting.

The film builds to a finale that is controversial in its swing from thunderous tension to comic anticlimax, as Dunston, on the warpath, cuts down Cherry and proceeds to taunt Matthew, every inch the alpha male set on abusing the girly-man usurper. Matthew is happy to remain passive when there’s a chance of them actually killing each other in the course of Dunston’s hysteria. Dunston instead starts to beat him. Matthew puts up with this for a while, until, finally, he hits back, with such startling force Dunston pitches back goggle-eyed and wide-mouthed. They begin pummeling each other until Tess breaks up their brawl by firing a gun in the dirt between them, angrily calling for an end to the spectacle. Groot delights in Matthew’s finally proving his grit to Dunston, but Tess recognizes he’s been drawn into playing Dunston’s game; she subverts their hyped-up masculinity by forcing both men to bow before a strong woman, and realize their differences are fundamentally childish. In this regard, the climax is perfect. l

Grade

Tectonic

Nobel on Film
Film interpretations of works by Nobel Laureates in Literature

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970)
Director: Caspar Wrede
Nobel Laureate: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This past Sunday, literary giant and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died. His 89 years on this planet were dramatic and eventful—a true, larger-than-life Tolstovian existence. During my Russian literature phase, Solzhenitsyn was my favorite. He was contemporary, he wrote about lives I couldn’t begin to live, but to which I could somehow relate. He was a towering figure who lived in exile in my country during the years that I read his novels—I never thought he would return to his beloved Russia. But he did, and thankfully, that is where he died.

The first novel he published, in 1962, was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which chronicles his own experiences as a political prisoner in a work camp in Kazahkstan. The film of this work appeared the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other versions have been filmed since then, but none took the risks director Caspar Wrede did by filming in the snow and cold of northern Norway and creating equally inhospitable sets for his players.

The film opens on a long aerial shot of pinpoints of light in a sea of darkness. As the camera moves us closer, the outlines of a prison camp emerge. Soon, as though we had been air-dropped into the camp, we enter a barracks and the mind of a man, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov (Tom Courtenay). It is the beginning of his day, the reality of his life in bondage, and he longs to stay asleep. In voiceover are words from the novel:

Ivan Denisovich always got up at once. Not today, though. Hadn’t felt right since the night before—had the shivers, and some sort of ache. And hadn’t gotten really warm all night. In his sleep he kept fancying he was seriously ill, then feeling a bit better. Kept hoping morning would never come.

But it arrived on time.

Ivan Denisovich dallies in his bunk, an infraction that is punished, of course. Every human action that deviates from the deeply circumscribed routine of each day in the gulag is punished.

The inmates, once roused, are herded by work team into a ramshackle mess hall where they are served boiled grass and a disgusting-looking bowl of fish soup filled with bones the men chew laboriously to get whatever nourishment and relief from their gnawing, empty bellies they can. Ivan Denisovich balks, however, when he finds a large fish eye in his bowl. He shifts to his bowl of boiled grass, “Somebody’s bright idea, serving it instead of meal. Seemed they got it from the Chinese." Never fills you up, but its one virtue is that it tastes like nothing.

Ivan Denisovich goes to sick bay, worrying that his team might be sent to a frozen wasteland called Sotsgorodok to begin construction on a cultural arts center in a place with no people. The orderly on duty says he can only exempt two people a day, and he has already done that. Ivan Denisovich insists he doesn’t feel well “all over." “But I’ve already drawn the line." Ivan Denisovich’s temperature is only 99.2. He’ll have to join his team.

“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?"

Before the team is allowed out of the camp to the work site, they must be inspected for contraband. The inmates are forced to open their jackets. Anyone wearing more than one shirt must strip it off on the spot. One of the men (Eric Thompson) protests. This will cost him later in the film the worst of all physical punishments—10 days in an unheated cell without any blankets. The team is marched to the brick building they are constructing, hands behind their backs, four abreast, warned not to step to the left or right, as it will be considered an escape attempt. Once there, they must pound at the frozen tundra with pick axes to get material with which to make mortar.

On the work site, the team leader (Espen Skjonberg) must push his men to get their quota of work done so they will be paid the best price. He also must manage to keep his men alive and out of trouble with the authorities with everything from bribes to trickery. He tells one of his men to find something with which to cover the open windows. Ivan Denisovich steals off with one of the men, who has hidden some roofing sheets in the snow for just this purpose. Then, the hard labor of hand-tossing and carrying bricks, hand mixing and carrying flats of mortar up a flight of stairs, and laying brick as rapidly as possible commences. Ivan Denisovich finds a broken tip of a hacksaw; delighted, he slips it into his coat.

One of the “capos," seeing the roofing covering the windows, threatens to report the theft of the roofing materials. The team leader, confronting him, says that if he squeals, that day will be his last day on earth. The capo backs off, knowing that informers often are found with their throats cut. As darkness descends and the various teams from different parts of the area start their march back to camp, Ivan Denisovich works even harder to try to make the team’s quota of bricks laid. The team leader tells his men to cover the remaining mortar with snow to hide it from inspection. Ivan Denisovich and the team leader must run to rejoin their team, but make it back in time. One of their number, however, is brought in by guards. He was asleep on a scaffolding and late to rejoin the group. The officer in charge tacks another 10 years to his sentence on the spot. People rarely leave when their sentences are served.

More scrambling for dinner, as Ivan Denisovich gets separated from his team and fights his way into the mess hall ahead of the other teams. Packages from home are inspected, destroyed, or confiscated, and the remains are handed back to the recipient. Before lights out, guards empty the barracks to inspect for contraband. Ivan Denisovich helps one of his team hide his cache of goods. As they get ready for bed, the guards do a second inspection. When it really is time for lights out, each inmate wraps himself sleeping-bag style in the thin blankets he is provided and hunkers down for the night. Ivan Denisovich bites into a small sausage the team member he helped gave him.

At the end of the day, Ivan Denisovich is feeling pretty pleased with himself:

A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole (cells). The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at the search point. He'd earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he'd bought his tobacco.

I’ve duplicated text from the Russian-to-English translation of the book for this review, but the screenplay by Ronald Harwood mentions few names and uses the Russian-to-Finnish-to-English translation as the basis for his screenplay. This depersonalization of most of the characters except for Ivan Denisovich was intentional, according to Harwood:

"We were charged, therefore, with creating an understanding of one man’s existence, one man’s fate, so that a cinema audience could feel for him and with him, and at the same time grasp the enormity of the background, which was the herding together of people in great numbers, with the result that one ceased to think of them as human beings. This, we had heard, endorsed Solzhenitsyn’s belief that the problem he dealt with in ‘One Day …’ was not specifically Soviet, but a universal dilemma, and the main one of our time. At its crudest, we understood this to mean any system which, wittingly or unwittingly, causes human beings to be divided into people, individuals on the one hand, and things, objects, animals, sewage on the other."

The small things that the inmates do to keep a measure of their humanity—refusing to pick cigarette butts off the ground, using a handkerchief as a placemat at meals—seem futile in the face of such atrocious living conditions. Yet, in the few conversations that take place, personalities emerge. Two men argue about the artistry or hackery of Sergei Eisenstein, one denouncing Ivan the Terrible, the other describing in fond detail the Odessa Steps scene in Potemkin. Ivan Denisovich talks about prayer and reveals his peasant background by repeating his belief that the moon is created anew every month and that stars are made from the exploded moon.

Despite these interludes and assertions I’ve read that this film is life-affirming, what comes out most clearly is just how reduced a life these men lead. Ivan Denisovich says he was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned in 1942; he can’t remember what his wife looks like. He does favors to get favors in return. This seems to work out for him in the film, but in the book, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that there are so many volunteers, so many people wanting to exchange favor for favor. Are there real friends in this film or only people using and abusing each other to survive?

It was difficult for me to understand a lot of the dialogue because every actor spoke with an accent, some more recognizable than others from the British/Scandinavian cast. Copies of this film are hard to come by, so you get what you get. The images on the VHS tape I got from Facets were murky, and the colors were distorted. Many scenes take place in the dark, which can make for some difficult viewing on tapes like the one I saw. All of these inconveniences can take one out of the film to some extent, but it is the brutality of the life that had me wanting to run away, yet forcing me to keep with it. This isn’t a redeeming prison film like The Shawshank Redemption