FILM FILINGS 8-18-23
POSS ON OPPENHEIMER
WITTY: UNFORIGVEN
STEPHENS: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
GILMORE: THREE REVIEWS
POSS ON OPPENHEIMER
Over on his blog Jordan M. Poss has reviewed the summer’s big biography film, Christopher Nolan’s twelfth feature film Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. A sample:
Oppenheimer is an accurate title. Despite the big budget, world-historical sweep, and powerful story, it’s fundamentally a character study tightly focused on J Robert Oppenheimer. Fortunately, its subject, by virtue of his unique role in American history and the course and conduct of World War II, gives the film both scope and depth. And though the film’s marketing leaned heavily on the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and the Trinity test, the film encompasses a huge swath of its protagonist’s life.
Check it out!
WITTY’S UNFORGIVEN REVIEW
The wonderful Chris Witty, who runs both literary and film page and who devotes his career to bookselling excellence, gives us a nifty review of Spielberg’s early The Sugarland Express (1974). Not only that but provides us with an unusual and fun poem in the form of an Outlaw Ballad. Fun stuff, so please don’t miss out on his excellent Substack and instagram pages. Witty recently reviewed Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western classic, Unforgiven. The review:
Eastwood's best film as director-star, Unforgiven takes the "man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" ethos of the Western and shows the psychological repercussions of a life lived as an outlaw and killer. Eastwood plays William Munny, a reformed character struggling to raise his children and work a pig farm after his wife's death. Given the chance to make some money as an assassin, he and his friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) accompany the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to gun down two cowboys who cut up a prostitute in Big Whiskey, a town ran with an iron fist by sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman).
What I love about Unforgiven is how it shatters the romanticised image of the outlaw, most notably in the stand-out scene of Little Bill giving a less flattering version of events to pulp western writer Beauchamp (Saul Resnick), who has chosen to act as biographer to English Bob (Richard Harris), and whose poetic retellings of Bob's gunfighting days are far removed from the reality. But who is telling the truth? Bob has suffered a beating at the hands of Bill and is unable to defend his reputation. Munny, too, has a past he can't clearly recall, and the Schofield Kid is a short-sighted (literally and figuratively) liar who boasts of being a killer. It's only when Munny is forced to kill out of revenge that we're allowed a glimpse of the cold-blooded killer he was as a young man.
With the lead cast all aged around sixty, and with opening and closing shots of a sun setting over Munny's homestead, there's a sense that time is catching up with them as they enter a new, more civilised age. Usually, at the end of a picture that has a younger man riding with an older, seasoned outlaw, the younger will see an opportunity for him to make a name for himself once the elder hangs up his spurs. Here, though, the Schofield Kid, realising that killing a human being takes a bite out of a man's soul, relinquishes his gun and rides off into the night, leaving Munny to do what only a man whose soul is already half way to Hell is capable of. The final reel, with its thunderclaps, lightning and a propped up corpse, plays like a horror film.
STEPHENS: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Writing what Lawrence of Arabia means to me means writing about myself in different stages. It turns out to be a useful template for looking at the film.
The first stage is basic and sensory. I am young and the images and the feeling of the music do all the work. The length of the film is irrelevant at that age. I flit in and out of the room and the movie is still going. In the teen years the running time does weigh on you a bit, but the sheer audacity of filmmaking is breathtaking--now you understand about "behind the scenes" (a feature that Lawrence helped invent), and you comprehend the accomplishment of the mediums of art. You want to be an artist (a director) yourself. In your early twenties you know about subtext. Did a communist really write this script? Yes. Does it matter to the story--does politics interfere with the enjoyment of art? Resentment rarely fits well with enjoyment. A balance has to be achieved. Then there's Lawrence. Always the hero, always the whirlwind personality who pushed his Arab friends to get their own portion of their nation, and yet a self-destructive tendency. In your thirties, maybe finally, a full appreciation for the satire. Not the cheap kind that makes fun and leaves nothing unlaughed at, but the kind that closely resembles real life, a tragicomedy of defiant will that becomes a self-rebuking resignation. No wonder the real Lawrence family resented the portrayal.
There's also the connection between Lawrence and Sharif Ali. They begin on opposite ends, Lawrence the genteel soldier-poet with a vision for success, and Ali still attached to petty tribal spats--he kills Lawrence's guide early on because the man drank from his tribe's well. But gradually the two minds meet and agree as Lawrence's successes continue to impress on Ali the possibility of a real country. He begins reading books about democratic government just as Lawrence descends into bloodlust and messianic delusions. "You love him!" Auda Abu Tayh accuses Ali in regards to Lawrence. Not any lame subtext, but a sincere expression of Ali's ideals being dashed against the rocks as the man he looked to becomes a shell of his former ideals. Lawrence gives up on Ali and the Arab Cause and retreats home, broken and wiser, finally able to embrace the hero's welcome of his own country from which he felt so estranged in the beginning.
We could end there, and there is so very much more to say, but I want to finally point out the moral position that the British officers play in this film. From the start we are meant to doubt them--they fall far below Lawrence's intelligence and moral compass. The other officers are bootlickers or simpletons, the middle brass are desperately dependent on the generals, and the generals are just hoping something good will happen so they can leave.
That creates a vast wasteland of difference between Lawrence the Idealist and the Army Realists as they go into Arabia. Lawrence understands the Arabs. The other British keep them at arm's length or regard them with outright prejudice. But a very interesting thing happens. Later in the film General Allenby and Colonel Brighton are discussing Lawrence privately, wondering if he's "gone native." A real phenomenon on which to wonder, for other British explorers and soldiers had done that. As Lawrence descends, however, it paints the British army types in a much better light. Lawrence has become unhinged not only from posh roots, but from himself, relying increasingly on the tribal and barbaric methods that he first told the Arabs would hold them back, would keep them forever "a little people, greedy barbarous and cruel." This is most emphasized in one of the very last scenes where Lawrence stumbles on an abandoned hospital--there are no doctors, nurses, no water--only flies and blood on bodies. Lawrence looks on in disgust and horror at what has happened, but he is worn out and, only just coming down from his delusions, finds himself inept and unable. Just then a British doctor arrives on the scene. This doctor is the most Colonel Bogey of them all, and he is exceedingly outraged--far more than Lawrence--at the conditions of the hospital, and proceeds to berate Lawrence, who in his garb is dressed like an Arab, believing him to be one of those cruel little people.
GILMORE: THREE REVIEWS
Night of the Hunter (1955), dir. Charles Laughton. Many great or classic movies have a veneer of respectability. They treat of great ideas, they preach noble truths.
“Night of the Hunter” is of lowlier parentage: a critical and commercial failure, a rakish rascal of a movie, concerned with lowlifes and thieves and murderers and a switchblade-wielding preacher. The scent of Flannery O’Connor hangs heavy about this film.
A serial killer movie before the invention of the genre, “Night of the Hunter”, to straighten out its weaving storyline, tells the story of a picturesque riverside town haunted by a serial killer on the hunt for a hidden fortune. The complicating factor is that the killer is a man of God.
This might be seen in a movie of its time as irreverent, maybe even sacrilegious. Look at the way Laughton permeates his movie with the ringing sounds of old gospel and folk songs, often sung by the murderous parson himself. Song after song plays, lulling us, distracting us.
Then, the payoff of fear doesn’t come through cheap jump scares, but subtle, simple things, like a conversation between a little boy and a gentleman, or a groom and his bride. But the strange and bitter contexts are fearful: the man is a killer, the groom is a psychopath.
The black and white photography lend a frightening sense of realism to the scenes of backwoods Pentecostal fervor— as if these images were lifted from Life magazine. The way the camera moves is full of foreboding as well; often it moves along the ground at foot-level like a viper. There is a striking shot where Mitchum stands in a beam of light coming through his bedroom roof, whose walls look like a chapel. The wife he has just beaten murmurs dreamily that he must have been sent by God.
In the next scene he is unctuously quoting Proverbs about the temptations of wayward women. See how bold this movie is, in the middle of the 1950’s! How close it tiptoes to the line of black comedy, without once veering into self-awareness, but sometimes nimbly leaping into broad comedy, as when the Preacher gets his fingers shut in a door.
Gritty realism is not the aim here. “Night of the Hunter” is a thriller, a fable, a farce and a fever dream rolled into one. Spider webs catch and hold characters running away as in a cartoon. The children’s journey down the river has something of the classic adventure story Disney was fond of in the 50’s and 60’s, but with a bitter and menacing undertone— forest creatures gather and the boy wonders if he might kill and eat one.
The plot is picaresque and episodic, and this allows the menace to hide behind Rockwellian scenes of bedtime stories, household chores, family life. Just as readily, it flips: menacing shadows and jagged triangles of light, as two opposing characters join in singing the same hymn in a round. If the plot is loose and broad, the technical artistry is tight, masterful, so supremely confident that it can toy with us. As soon as you’ve gasped at the suspense, you’re chuckling at the levity. Mitchum, the killer-cum-preacher is rakishly handsome, looking like Gregory Peck’s wayward brother, smiling as unctuously as a cat. We know what he is capable of, yet we do not fear him— we watch in delicious anticipation of what he will do next. Even the musical cues are dripping with an irony wholly absent from most movies of this era.
“Night of the Hunter” is decidedly not most movies of its era. It is suspenseful and hilarious, creepy and rollicking, old-fashioned and cynical, all at once. It is the most fun of any 50’s movie I’ve seen.
***
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), dir. Jacques Demy. Musicals are not usually my bag. Even less so the kind of musical that has no or few actual songs and just has sung dialogue. “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” is exactly that kind of musical. The singing begins early and doesn’t stop, with one basic, lilting tune that allows for long musical interludes. It is sung-through, which I have found grating in other musicals, but this one works.
The plot is very simple: a young man has fallen for a young girl and all seems perfect. They love each other and float through their days on that effervescent bliss that only young people in love know.
Then, inevitably, he is called to military service. Here, at the first conflict, the music shows off its agility. The motifs are the same, the theme is the same, but now it bends faultlessly into a melancholy air.
Just as nimble is the knowing glance the movie gives us in the face of its own sentimentality. There are no villains, no true heroes. The themes are love and loyalty, the vicissitudes of the human heart, and from these more familiar themes, the movie builds something truly great.
Geneviéve is a young girl helplessly in love and crushed when her lover leaves, but her mother knows how it goes: “People only die of love in the movies… have you had dinner?”
Still, the movie is beautifully evenhanded: not once does it belittle Geneviéve for her feelings, dramatic and callow as they might be. Her world is over and the music supports her, swelling to a sad and romantic crescendo. One of the lovely things this movie does is give every single character their reins, their own perspectives, their own reasons. Geneviève’s other suitor is not a despicable interloper, but a sad and gentle man, hurt by love himself.
Geneviéve is an immature young woman, but so very sympathetic— who wasn’t immature at her age? She begins to second-guess herself in Guy’s absence: she loved him, but did she really know him? Will he be the same person when he comes back? The heart of her character is a twisted knot of insecurities and inordinate passions, exactly like a young woman in her situation would be.
When she gives in and marries the second suitor, the church organ plays a reprise of the theme, but with a foreboding sense that leads perfectly into the final act. Guy returns, learns the truth and is understandably bitter. Again, we spend time with this young man, seeing the world through his eyes for a moment: he is angry, lashing out, and heartbroken.
And when he tentatively finds love again, it is with a serious, earnest young woman, not as pretty as Geneviève, but perhaps with a better head on her shoulders.
For all its technicolor artistic style, this is a movie wise to the world and its aches. One wonders, in the final snowbound scene, if Geneviève remembers her mother’s words. She has not died of love; indeed, life, as it tends to do, has gone on.
(In a lovely piece of irony, the theme song is titled “I will wait for you”.)
***
Kes (1970), dir. Ken Loach. “Where the Wild Things Are”. Anyone who’s read “Angela’s Ashes” or the nastier bits of Roald Dahl’s “Boy” will recognize the tone of “Kes”. I am not familiar with the “angry young man” as a genre of British film, but I do remember from much of my childhood reading the brutality of certain schoolmasters, the helplessness of young people in the face of it, and the blithe acceptance of it by parents and society at large.
The movie is not a kid-and-animal flick in the way that “Old Yeller” or “My Friend Flicka” is. It’s not a kid’s movie at all, though it concerns children and adopts a point of view above all sympathetic to children. The tenuous, fitful relationship between young Billy Casper and the wild kestrel is clearly an escape from his stultifying, dead end life, and is the main interest of the film, but the auxiliary relationships of his family, his family to him, and his family to their own peers are given every bit as much time and respect. The bird takes up relatively little screen time; the camera is not merely concerned with that one relationship, but with the move and flow of real life around the relationship.
The characters that make up a school drama are, by now, archetypes: the central Boy, his peers, a cast of teachers, some more brutal, some more kindly. One of the kindlier ones is an English teacher who listens to his story, and is interested in it and in him. And he tells his story to the class and to us. Not in some Shakespearean soliloquy, not in some heartrending burst of eloquence, but in the lilting brogue that is natural to him.
That’s the word that comes to mind about this movie: “Natural”. Both in the naturalism of the movie and the dialogue, but also in the material. There is a beguiling conversation between Billy and his teacher about the meaning of “tame”. Billy’s falcon is not a tame animal, and Billy doesn’t want her to be. He accepts her for the wild animal that she immutably is. Billy is not a special kid, not precocious or precious or prepossessing. He’s just a kid. His falcon is not the biggest, most beautiful thing in existence— but she is his. The bird belongs to him, not because he has magic powers or a special way with animals, but because he has invested his time, his effort, his energy and his feelings into building a relationship. And in the limits of his deprived, limited world, she is the only thing he possesses.
The end of the movie snuck up on me. I didn’t expect it to end when or how it ended. But that made it all the more true to life. With the persistence of a homing falcon, “Kes” tells the truth.
