Angery Young Man

American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger is probably best known for Hollywood Babylon, a cruel and unusual book about what the golden age of Hollywood looked like with its pants down. Born in 1927 or 1930 (depending on whether you listen to his biographer or himself) he started making films at age 11 or 14. The majority of his early work apparently does not survive, having been burned by its author in a fit of pique in 1967. Anger has become notorious for revising and re-editing the films that remain—four versions of his Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome have seen the light of a projector—and since 1967, the aim of his cinema seems to have been to ensure that his most enduring creation is the myth of Kenneth Anger, mystical visionary.

The nine short movies that Anger has decided will constitute the cinematic portion of that myth have been gathered together in the so-called Magick Lantern Cycle, which will be shown in two parts this Wednesday and next at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From the evidence that’s on display, the man works better with his pants down than with his mysticism up.

The earliest film preserved is 1947’s Fireworks—a definite pants-down item—of which Anger has written: “This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.” It comes off today as an experimental piece by a young filmmaker with a yen for muscular guys in sailor suits, who has watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin a few times too many. Its roughness is overwhelmingly redeemed by the outrageous obviousness of its visual metaphor (the film could have been subtitled ‘hello, sailor’), and pure gutsiness. Emotionally, Anger put everything on the line; it must have taken a lot of nerve for a 17-to-20 year-old kid to traffic in such in-your-face gay iconography in 1947. It still provides quite a bang 50 years later.

1953’s Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome (the 1966 “Sacred Mushroom Edition” is now the video release of record) is more like an MGM musical gone mad. By now, Anger had become a disciple of British occultist and bisexual visionary Aleister Crowley, and what hits the screen is a celebration of Crowley’s flamboyant Dionysian faux-religion: if Freemasonry had grown out of a pact between Timothy Leary and the surrealists, a documentary about one of their year-end orgies might have looked something like this. Luridly and beautifully photographed, Inauguration is triumphantly pushed past the jaw-dropping absurdity of its visionary agenda by a soundtrack based on the louder bits of Janácek’s Galgolitic Mass. (It’s a close thing, though—one can only imagine what Anger’s mid-70’s revision with a score by Electric Light Orchestra must have looked like.)

1963’s Scorpio Rising  is a series of closely observed and gleefully nasty field notes on biker culture set to popular songs of the day. It’s both Anger’s most exhilarating pants-down film, and the closest he ever came to a social statement—depending on how thoroughly you want to deconstruct the iconography, it’s about gay Christian Nazi bikers on a one-way road to death. Or maybe it’s America that’s on the road to the apocalypse: Anger has called it a “death-mirror held up to American culture... Thanatos in chrome, black leather and bursting jeans.”

He was never to make another film like it. (A similar project, Kustom Kar Kommandos, was abandoned for lack of funds.) On October 26, 1967, Anger took out a full-page obituary in the Village Voice which read: “In Memorium Kenneth Anger 1947-1967”. Unfortunately, it seems the man was right—films after Scorpio Rising show the observer turned evangelist. The most unfortunate example of this is Lucifer Rising, a project that had been in the works for decades and was finally released in 1981. By now the obsession with Crowley has lost even its camp value and the film itself—vaguely Egyptian types cavort around the statues of the Pharaohs—is a bore. Anger was at his best commenting on the death-force at the heart of the American Babylon he was born into and horrified by. His visions of a new occult age show us the filmmaker as a hobbled mystic—collateral damage of the Age of Aquarius.

There have been no new films from Anger in nearly two decades, and sadly, given the evidence of Lucifer, this may be no bad thing. It may be that he has found the good sense to shut up and try and leave us with an uncluttered view of his earlier work. There is still a lot of clutter in the Magick Lantern cycle, but not too much to get in the way of Fireworks, Inauguration and especially Scorpio Rising—a wonderful reminder that for half an hour in 1963, Kenneth Anger was the most watchable filmmaker in America.

—Published in the Globe and Mail. 1997

No secret to Mike Leigh's appeal

New to video this week, Secrets and Lies offers the neophyte a painless and rewarding introduction to the distinctive work of offbeat British writer/director Mike Leigh. Leigh has been active in British television and cinema for 25 years but has largely been confined to cult status on this side of the Atlantic, mostly in communities served by more discriminating video stores. Nominated for five Academy Awards this spring, Secrets and Lies has finally catapulted Mike Leigh into the North American mainstream.

Nobody else makes films quite like Leigh does. They tend to revolve around a series of common themes: the slow death of British working class life; how people in families tend to destroy each other; the monstrous side of human nature; and—potentially most disturbing—how utterly hilarious all of the above can be, provided you’ve a mind to see it that way. A visit to a Mike Leigh film is a visit to the post-Thatcher human zoo, a place where budget cuts have forced the keepers to mix incompatible species together in cages, where they all drive each other crazy.

Leigh’s films are also largely collaborative efforts: for the most part, he and his stock company of actors come up with the whole script in rehearsal. They will start with a basic idea or theme, improvise around it for weeks or months, expanding and polishing characters and action. Then Leigh writes it down as a conventional script, everybody goes in front of the cameras, and they make a movie.

This way of doing things tends to produce movies for actor-watchers rather than plot-watchers; films where feelings and emotions are more important than narrative. Watching the final product is sometimes unnerving; like being invited to observe a two-hour experiment in which the lunatics are invited not only to run the asylum, but to write the rules and design the therapy as well. You are never unaware that something very different from your average Hollywood script is unspooling before you.

The strength of this process is—when the experiment comes off successfully—that you are presented with the kind of characters which rarely come from a screenwriter hunched alone over a typewriter. When it doesn’t work—and there are places in all of his films when it doesn’t—you get characters who the natural-selection process of normal scriptwriting would have consigned to extinction. It’s as if both actor and director fall prey to Stockholm syndrome during those months they’re locked up together, and some material sticks around that really should have been spiked. You also get storylines that are pretty whacked out—or at most a provisional actors’ aid: characters show up, get into each other’s way, and people cry.

All of the above are on display in Secrets and Lies. Secrets and Lies was the winner of the 1996 Palm D’or at Cannes (which it didn’t entirely deserve) and Brenda Blethyn won the award for best actress (which she deserved in spades). It is perhaps Leigh’s most conventional and accessible film to date, even having what could be described as a plot: Hortense—middle-class, black and cultured—when her adoptive mother dies decides to search for her biological family. Her pursuit leads her ultimately to Cynthia—working-class, white, unstable and completely unprepared for this intrusion from her past, particularly for the unflattering light it throws on her current unhappy life.

As you might have guessed from the title, Secrets and Lies is a movie about families, silence and untruth being simultaneously the glue that holds them together, and what makes life within them miserable. This is not exactly a startlingly fresh insight into the human condition, (“We’re all in pain,” Cynthia’s brother complains, “why can’t we share our pain?”) but it’s a thoroughly reliable starting point for great bits of actor-business, and actor-business is what the man’s movies are all about.

The most brilliant, ferocious piece of actor-business in a Mike Leigh film was rendered by David Thewlis in 1993’s Naked—another performance honoured by the Cannes festival. Thewlis—who looks like a drowned rat that somebody’s had a go at with a pair of garden shears—plays Johnny, a borderline psychotic and paranoid philosopher who cuts a swath through the lives of his ex-girlfriend and a half-a-dozen others one ugly weekend. Naked is a comedy—or at least there are some set-pieces that are as insanely funny as anything you're going to see on a screen this year—and yet it's also the bleakest movie you may ever have laid eyes on. Naked is what you might call kitchen-toilet drama; think of a Tom Stoppard-scripted evening of bear-baiting and you’ll get some idea of what you’re in for.

Thewlis later reported that he approached nervous-breakdown territory on the set of Naked, and you get a sense of that kind of actor commitment throughout the Leigh canon. Life is Sweet, High Hopes, Abigail’s Party and (if your video shop is particularly zealous) half a dozen other Leigh titles together offer more dedicated, interesting performances than we are likely to get from a year’s worth of Hollywood product.

To venture through Mike Leigh’s back catalogue is more often than not to glimpse the best of what low-budget filmmaking can be; to have a tantalizing look at what a cinematic universe would be like if the players in the drama had to do all those mundane things like developing plot and narrative, and actually coming up with their own words. As you might expect, it’s a wild and anarchic place with flights of profundity and dead ends butted up against one another.

And yet it all has the inescapable feeling of reality to it: in the lives we actually live, we too are actors in a sometimes bleak comedy that has no writer. Mike Leigh makes films the way we live our lives—making it up as we go along, on a modest budget, and with a lot of help from our friends. His is the cinema of human solidarity.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Adaptations and Jane Campion

Jane Campion is surely one of the most impressive talents to have arrived on the  cinematic scene in the last ten years. She is a complete filmmaker: her images are exciting and literate; her stories original and absorbing. Her first three features—Sweetie, An Angel at my Table and The Piano —together memorably showed not just great promise but the arrival, fully-formed, of a tremendous contemporary cinematic artist. So why then did she go and try to film Henry James’ virtually unfilmable novel The Portrait of a Lady?

The cheerless result of this attempt arrives in video stores this week, and it is not a happy sight. Sumptuously mounted, (so much devotion and hard work goes into the visual design and art direction of any period film that to criticize is to feel the crunch of innocent spines under your boots), decently cast and intelligently presented, Portrait is nevertheless so complete a failure that it leads you to question the idea of adapting classic novels to the screen at all. If Jane Campion can’t get under the skin of a great book, who can?

Or perhaps the real question is, why try? Those books generally regarded as world’s great novels have never made the world’s greatest movies, and adaptations of classics have never proven to be any director’s best work. In 1992 Sight and Sound magazine polled 200 critics and filmmakers to draw up their list of the 200 or so greatest films ever made, and precisely two were (loose) adaptations of classics: Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight—based, respectively, on Conrad and Shakespeare.

The urge to adapt classic novels to the screen is a habit that filmmakers fall into and out of periodically, and lately we seem to have been through a flood stage. Adaptation has usually been a reaction against the cinema of the day by someone who wants to be literate and respectable—something like Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Wuthering Heights comes to mind, as does as the entire career of James Ivory. (The only thing necessary to note about the parade of recent Jane Austin adaptations is that none of them have made particularly compelling movies. They have been stolid, safe entertainment for those weary of the Die-Harding of Hollywood, or people who might have read the books if reading were less work.)

But Campion’s attempt at adapting James smacks of a more reckless agenda. Given the constraints of a theatrical feature—that is, telling a story in visual terms in no more than about two hours—you should film a classic only when you know it will make a good movie. (This is often not much more than picking the right dead white guy to adapt: Kipling makes good movies; Henry James doesn’t.) Campion is after tougher game: she desperately wants to put across to the viewer what she got out of a memorable book. “If only I could make a movie out of this,” she must have thought, and with that impulse Jane Campion regressed from a filmmaker into an evangelical reader.

To allow reader aesthetics to overpower hard-nosed filmmaker logic like this and try and film the unfilmable is to inevitably court viewer bewilderment: People who read the novel will think that the book was better; people who didn’t read it won’t be able to figure out what the hell you’re after. Campion surely must have anticipated this. Or perhaps she didn’t: I have a friend whose ambition is to transfer great works of literature to the screen. She has never seen a good movie made from a book she has liked. She still thinks it a viable ambition.

Last year’s Jane Eyre was not so obviously the work of an evangelical reader, but the unfilmability is similar, even though as one of literature’s great dysfunctional romances it seems tailor-made for the 90’s. The abused title character is locked up in an attic by her Aunt Hideous and then packed off to the Tuberculosis School for Orphans. Here she spends years so wretched that by the time she’s ready to enter the workforce she’s unable to express any emotion whatsoever. She gets tangled up with the master of Dismal Mansion, who also has cold coffee running through his veins, and a terrible family secret scrabbling about in the attic. When he finally proposes to her you expect him to say something like “darling, won’t you be my enabler?”

But there are only one or two ways you can translate material like this into even remotely cinematic terms. First, you can abandon fidelity with the novel, give it to David Cronenberg and go for the psychotic love story to end all psychotic love stories. Or—if you prefer that your project make back it’s investment—you can do what the producers did here and give it the Suffering Brad Pitt treatment—Legends of the Fallen.

As such, it’s terminally underpowered: as with Portrait, most of the important action is internal—things there that the characters can’t express but that the narrative voice of a novel can reveal. Director Franco Zeferelli can show nothing more than surfaces, which are mute and truncated: major emotional moments pass so quickly that only somebody raised on a steady diet of TV commercials could really be moved by it. The final product is neither good Bronte, nor good cinema.

And unfortunately, that’s the choice awaiting the filmmaker who wants to adapt a classic: you can make either a bad paraphrase of a novel or a good movie. Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady is a bad paraphrase of a novel, and you have to hope that it’s failure kills that evangelical reader within her and drives her back to her regular job—making good movies.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Sylvester Stallone is my Kind of Man

There may be no actor alive today who has managed to survive as many bad films as Sylvester Stallone. For that matter, few stars have survived being an indifferent actor with as much panache; certainly no one in the history of cinema has as endearingly triumphed over being so mediocre an actor/writer/director. I like the man: with 25 starring vehicles in 20 years—14 of which he wrote and five of which he directed himself—Sly is the lumpen filmgoer’s very own renaissance dude.

Alas, fate has not been as kind to Stallone lately, as a quick viewing of Daylight—released on video this week—will attest. Daylight is not the ideal stripped-to-the-waist Stallone vehicle: Sly’s hero is somewhat subdued and unsure of himself, and his performance fails to distract you from the sinking feeling that what you are watching is not much more than a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. It has most of the old Irwin Allen thumbprints: It’s set in a collapsed automobile tunnel between New York City and New Jersey; it’s got fires and rising water; and it’s got a supporting cast of caterwauling idiots who appear to have been locked up in a room and forced to watch The Towering Inferno for about six weeks. It’s got everything except Shelly Winters, and she is profoundly missed.

She is missed almost as much as the loud, over-the-top Stallone character that used to be Sly’s sole stock-in-trade. It was the one thing he did that was fun to watch and it has been largely missing from his recent work. It is as if he became suddenly embarrassed to be making $20 million a picture just for doing what comes naturally, wanted to try his hand at real acting, and the studio hacks were dumb enough to give him a shot.

It is perhaps the most expensive failed experiment in recent Hollywood memory. Sly’s crisis-of-conscience cop in Daylight and the quieter, gentler killers he is asked to play in movies like The Specialist and Assassins and are simply boring. When Stallone is quiet, he disappears; he needs to be noisy in noisy movies, going hand-to-hand and chin-to-chin with monsters or machines or flamboyant bad guys even bigger and more obnoxious than he.

You can boil it down to a rule: If it would look out of place on the cover of a Marvel comic book, he shouldn’t do it. In Daylight he pulls extras and supporting players around a set, argues, and looks worried. It’s a role that would give even a real actor trouble; getting Sly to do the existential shtick is like asking Shopenhauer to write the first draft of Die Hard.

He is not much fun to watch in The Specialist, either, playing a free-lance bomb designer who spends a lot of time communicating with other people through e-mail—the cinematic equivalent of watching paint flake off a stove. Stallone characters should never be given a quiet profession: You don’t ask Batman to run a soup-kitchen and you don’t ask Sly to operate a laptop computer and furrow his brow. The only interesting bit he participates in personally in The Specialist is a bit of clutch-and-grab with Sharon Stone in a hot shower, where he and Stone appear to be comparing pecs. (He wins.)

Ironically, the producers have chosen to give the bulging-eyes-and-neck part in The Specialist to Rod Steiger, who single-handedly almost saves the picture by delivering Hollywood's most preposterous racial impersonation in years—a Cuban Mafioso, decked out with a Frito Bandito accent where "you" is pronounced "Jew". The scriptwriters then sprinkle the word "You" into his lines like grass seed: "Jew want to kill me, Jew bastard? Well, Jew gonna die!" It sounds like an anti-Semitic rant every time he opens his mouth.

There is no such levity to save Assassins—bad guy Antonio Bandaris really is Spanish and for the most part leaves his accent in the dressing room. Once again, Stallone is virtually inaudible and invisible, leaving the viewer to ponder some of the movie’s more questionable conceits—like casting Vanya on 42nd Street’s Julianne Moore as an action heroine. This proves a less satisfactory experiment than its converse might have been, i.e., casting Stallone as, say, Uncle Vanya or Richard III. (Actually, it’s a shame Al Pacino didn’t bring Sly along for a few scenes in his Looking for Richard. It would be interesting to see Richard III given the Stallone twisted-lip and knotted-temple treatment: Imagine Rambo declaiming “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” and try to keep a shiver of excitement from running up and down your spine.)

It would work, I swear it: With the iconic Stallone acting at full steam, there is no good or bad performance; no appropriate or inappropriate role; the jollies you get from Sly as Richard III are exactly the jollies you’d get from Sly as Rambo III. It’s an in-joke on the part of a pectoral type with the gift of self awareness; an actor who knows that—like Rocky’s—his stardom is a fluke, a cosmic joke not to be taken very seriously.

When he moves outside the icon, he vanishes; he’s not fun to watch any more. The unfortunate trend established by his last few movies looks likely to reach some kind of apotheosis in this summer’s Copland, a serious actor project for which he’s gained weight and surrounded himself with people like Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. His performance in Copland promises to be restrained, earnest, and nothing that a hundred other real actors couldn’t do a lot better. Copland is not just the end of an era, it’s three movies past the end of an era.

I think I’ll prefer to remember Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd—a lousy movie but the archetypal Stallone performance: overblown, overwrought—most of the time it looks as if the cords in his neck are about to explode—and over-everything. Judge Dredd is the most splendid Stallone performance of all for a very simple reason: in a movie full of bombs going off, property destruction without end, and a soundtrack designed to make your ears bleed, Sly is still the biggest, loudest thing on the screen. We shall not hear his like again.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Broken by the Waves: Lars Von Trier in 1996

A movie, according to Danish writer-director and ex-wunderkind Lars Von Trier, should be like a stone in your shoe. His latest film, released on video this week, is called Breaking the Waves and it fits the description perfectly. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for its lead actress Emily Watson, and has generated a lot of critical acclaim. My reaction was viscerally contrary: I thought Breaking the Waves was designed to make me feel like I was having nails driven through my feet.

The struggle between style and substance is never very far from the surface of Von Trier’s work—and consequently the surface is unfortunately never very far from anything else. This is not a problem in a film like 1991’s Zentropa—which won both a Special Jury Prize and the backhand-complement ‘Grand Prix de la Technique’ at Cannes. Zentropa is pure Cannes-bait; a calling card for its maker as the most terrible enfant of them all, and it succeeds at every level it deigns to pursue—mainly superficial politics and deep flashiness.

The pursuit of deep flashiness is a problem in a work like Breaking the Waves, which stakes out tougher ground: Von Trier is chasing a Christian metaphor here; a parable of faith, piety and redemption, none of which have ever reared their heads in his work before. In a 1995 interview he let on that he might not have the appropriate tools for the job: “With Breaking the Waves, we are treading on the verge of kitsch—it’s melodrama’s answer to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Unfortunately, that’s an apt description of the movie. Breaking the Waves tells the unhappy story of Bess, a simple and pious soul from a tight, religious Scottish community with little of the congeniality that Bill Forsyth found there in films like Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. Indeed, you might call this Severe and Joyless: Bess is looked at with extreme suspicion by the community elders when she marries a Scandinavian oil-rigger rather than one of the young men from her own town. Isolated and extremely lonely, she prays one day for her new husband’s speedy return from the North-Sea oilfields, and gets her wish in the most terrible way possible: he has an accident and comes back paralysed and on the edge of death.

For reasons that are hard to remember after the fact, Bess’s husband asks her to indulge in a strange regimen of morale-boosting: she is to take on a series of lovers and then describe the goings-on to him; in a perverse way, she’ll really be making love to him, and that will keep him alive. That at least is the theory.

The gimmick is that it seems to work: she picks up guys; he gets better. After a while, she notices that she doesn’t even have to tell him about her trysts; it is as if merely through her self-sacrifice and self-debasement the mercy of the lord shines upon her husband.

It’s around this point—perhaps even earlier, depending on just how committed you are to a religious vision based on sacrifice and degradation—that Breaking the Waves starts to unravel; that a religious film in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Von Trier compatriot Carl Theodore Dreyer morphs ominously into a religious film as given us by Cecil B. DeMille.

Bess’s behavior naturally gets the community up in arms; she is persecuted and abused, and we are shown that her faith is pure as the driven Ivory Snow while the village’s is ring-around-the-collar corrupt. Ultimately, she makes her way to a personal Calvary where, Christ-like, her sacrifice redeems the one she loves. Even if you do believe in God, the final frames of Breaking the Waves are pretty hard to take—Frank Capra does The Passion of Joan of Arc. There is a big, ugly barrier reef lurking at the end of Breaking the Waves and Lars Von Trier crashes into it, taking all hands down with him.

The video archive provides a happier prospect. Virtually all the Von Trier that matters is available, and that amounts to two films: the aforementioned Zentropa (a real treat if you’ve got a big screen and hi-fi, or better yet, a rep. cinema showing it up the block) and The Kingdom, a 4 1/2 hour project for Danish television which, along with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, is perhaps the best TV miniseries ever made.

Described by dust-jacket publicists desperate for North American reference points as a combination of E.R. and Twin Peaks, The Kingdom is a apocalyptic, occultish medical drama set in a decaying, byzantine Copenhagen hospital. It is not the most heroic of places: a malingering patient fakes symptoms so she can conduct seances for the patients; a doctor who has taken up residence in the basement runs a black market in vital goods and keeps a mock graveyard of patients killed by incompetent surgeons; the ghost of a child murdered years ago haunts an elevator shaft; and so on and so on—two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome periodically pop in to keep the audience informed about just what is going on.

The Kingdom is probably the best introduction to Lars Von Trier’s work—it is certainly the most flat-out enjoyable—and it reveals in Breaking the Waves a spiritual wrong turn in the career of someone more suited to social satire. The Kingdom displays a variety of spirituality more in line with its creator’s talents: we live our lives surrounded by spirits all right; but this time they’re pissed off and determined to give us grief. Rather like the director himself.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Shed No Tears for Douglas Sirk

When a popular artist finally gains critical acclaim it’s tough to decide who to cheer for first: the artist now justly recognized or the critics who have finally smartened up. Such is the case with director Douglas Sirk, whose career is being exhaustively profiled in Cinematheque Ontario’s “Masters of Melodrama”—along with a mini-retrospective of his most enthusiastic disciple, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Sirk was critically derided during the 1950’s as a mere purveyor of lushly mounted “women’s pictures” with paperback-profound titles like Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind. Over the last couple of decades, though, his oeuvre has been reevaluated by the critical-academic community and is now more highly regarded than that of most of his “serious” Hollywood contemporaries. What’s happened is that they have caught up to a public that was in Sirk’s corner all along: All his films are stupendously watchable; they made money—many were hits—and he was probably able to get more profundity and style on the screen through the side door than somebody like Orson Welles was ever allowed to shovel in up front.

But it’s not hard to see why a serious-minded Eisenhower-era critic raised on a diet of East of Eden and On the Waterfront might find Douglas Sirk a bit difficult to digest. Consider the storyline from Magnificent Obsession: Mr. Irresponsible, millionaire playboy, survives a boating accident with the speedy intervention of an emergency crew equipped with the community’s only resuscitator. On the other side of the lake, a beloved physician-philanthropist dies because the needed resuscitator isn’t there. Mr. Irresponsible, wracked with guilt, decides he must take Dr. Philanthropist’s place as the community’s quiet benefactor. Overplaying his hand, he also tries to take Dr. Philanthropist’s place at home with his wife. Spurning his advances, Mrs. Philanthropist is hit by a car and is struck blind. While recuperating, she develops a friendship with a guy she meets on the beach, unable to see that it’s Guess Who.

Mr. Irresponsible anonymously pays for her to see the finest specialists in Europe. He visits her there, and she falls in love with him. He tells her who he actually is. She breaks off the relationship. The European specialists turn out to be powerless, so Mr. Irresponsible decides to give up this millionaire thing, goes to medical school, and becomes a famous brain surgeon. Not too many years later he learns she’s fallen into a coma. He rushes to the scene, operates, restores her sight, and is there at her bedside when she awakes. A heavenly choir sings, and our serious-minded critic loses his lunch on the way back to his typewriter.

I can sympathize. To one raised outside the melodramatic loop, an encounter with Magnificent Obsession—or any other of his 50’s films—can be pretty disconcerting: The speed with which plot complications pile up against each other is breathtaking (like a video of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead stuck on fast forward); characters just up and say what’s on their minds directly and bluntly; and the search for love and its myriad setbacks is the centre of existence for everyone—maybe even for God as well. It’s philosophically simple and easy to digest—all the crackers are from way down there in the heart of the barrel, where they’ve had a chance to get all warm and fuzzy—and Sirk aims straight for the heart, using strictly below-the-belt techniques.

To spend time in the company of a Sirk film is to be seduced into accepting melodrama as legitimate artifice, and once you’ve bought into the process—for me, it happened about midway through the opening credits to Written on the Wind—it proves an astonishingly flexible genre. Take A Time to Love and a Time to Die, released in 1958 and one of the best (and least-known) American war movies ever made. It is a startling film: In an era of chauvinistic U.S. war movies peopled by caricature Nazis and the clones of Sgt. Rock, Sirk chose to shoot a paraphrase of All Quiet on the Western Front in actual bombed-out German locations, giving us WW2 from the point of view of the losers, both military and civilian.

Not surprisingly, he finds the most important action away from the front, in a romance between a German soldier on leave and a woman he meets while searching for his parents through the rubble of his home town. Their affair is tragic, on-the-run, and portrayed with enough conviction to make you believe that what they are going through—not gunshots exchanged between soldiers—is the real tragedy of war. A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sam Pekenpah’s Cross of Iron directed as if it were Kings Row—which turns out to be an even better idea than it sounds.

Being even better than it sounds is a trait of Sirk’s work, especially for one unfamiliar with the real sophistication of his apparently weeping universe: Behind every tear is a dig at contemporary society; bubbling up through the soap is a wail of horror at what people will do to remain unhappy.

What seems little more than a parade of well-off women’s romantic misalliances is more like a cry of dismay at the hellish trappings of contemporary American life: all the men who aren’t Rock Hudson are weak, alcoholic or deceitful; the suburb is a women’s prison; and kids are like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (When two grown children abandon their mother after destroying her romance in All That Heaven Allows, they buy her a television set. “Turn the dial,” they tell her, “and you have all the company you want.”) Even the titles are heavy with social irony: There is no tomorrow in There’s Always Tomorrow; in All that Heaven Allows, nothing is allowed.

Given this implicit social critique, it has been fashionable of late to dress Sirk up as some sort of a lefty subversive. This does him no favor, since he’s after something potentially more difficult, and that is taking melodrama seriously: Our emotional lives are what is most important to us; social convention does kill the quest for love; the stuff that glues us together as a society does tear us apart as individuals. To him, these axioms obtain no matter who’s on top socially; there is no implication that the poor have it any better. (The rich certainly get no help from their social position: In There’s Always Tomorrow, wealthy toy manufacturer Fred MacMurray feels like a robot in his suburban existence. You can almost see his eyes mist over when he runs into old flame Barbara Stanwyck—no doubt reminiscing about the good ol’ days when life meant something and the two of them plotted to bump off her husband in Double Indemnity.)

Sirk’s films still work forty years on because he reaches us in the way we prefer to reach each other. To accept them on their own terms is to open yourself up to all sorts of unexpected delights—like Rock Hudson in his pre-Doris Days (if he had been hit by a car in 1959 he might well have become the thinking woman’s James Dean); or the magnificent suffering of Jane Wyman and the burnt-out seductiveness of Dorothy Malone (overheated in Written on the Wind and downright overdone in The Tarnished Angels); or an astonishing visual style where characters run an obstacle course through a world of suburban interiors lit as if they were dungeons from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cumulatively, Sirk’s movies are as close to self-recommending as you are likely to get: Designed for the multitudes, they are finally starting to catch on with the merely smart.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

John Ford: The Last Roundup

John Ford directed something like 100 films of all varieties over a 50-year career, but he is best known for his westerns: movies like Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine set the Western archetype for a couple of generations of filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Yet as the Cinematheque Ontario retrospective that starts tonight makes clear, Ford’s time as a vital force in the art of cinema has long passed. Cinematheque should call this series “The Last Roundup”—it’ll be difficult to see the need for anyone doing another Ford tribute any time soon.

Unlike, say, Orson Welles, whose still-inspiring career was on display in the Cinematheque series immediately preceding this one, the work of John Ford has become largely irrelevant to contemporary cinema. All the usual film-society suspects—Welles, Renoir, Ray (Nicholas and Satyajit), Fuller, Antonioni... even Robert Bresson—all have their disciples. But nobody wants to make movies like John Ford any more.

This should not come as too much of a surprise: we are even farther in years from 1956’s The Searchers —the film generally acclaimed as Ford’s greatest—than The Searchers was from the invention of the feature film. Ford was lionized by the French critics in the 50’s, the majority of the academic debate over him took place 35 years ago, and his critical reputation peaked about the time of his death in 1973. Cinema has evolved in the meantime: Nobody has written a serious theoretical piece on Ford in 20 years. The man is now a subject for the biographers, not the theorists; and his movies are now museum pieces from the days when dinosaurs ruled the west.

Some of the artifacts have held up better than others. When Ford had a good script, he made a good movie. The Searchers, The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (both 1940); Wagon Master (1950)... these are all good films; capable of being enjoyably absorbed as the heirlooms they are. They are movies that display the virtues for which he has been justly praised: a great cinematic eye and an invisible, self-effacing visual style.

The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers especially stand out: Grapes for a sense of conscience largely absent from the rest of Ford’s work; The Searchers because it actually is the way your fond childhood memories of the other Ford westerns feel. Both are for the most part also blessedly free of the self-indulgence and sentimental gas about cavalry and frontier life that mars so many of the rest of his movies—they offer us Ford without embarrassment.

Time has unfortunately made embarrassment the dominant response to far to too much of what remains. The man who could make Henry Fonda look beautiful just walking up a street in My Darling Clementine could rarely make John Wayne sound comfortable speaking English. His sentimentalism in Young Mr. Lincoln is almost alarming—the movie feels something like a Frank Capra life of Christ, and is so full of icons that the editors of Cahiers du Cinema were able to invent structuralist analysis on the basis of that movie alone.

In his westerns he was prone to repeat himself shamelessly: Watch too many in a row and you begin to believe that there is a lost tribe of actors wandering in circles around Monument Valley. His racism hardly seems an issue any more: what sticks in your craw now is the absurd way he always has his Indians fall off their horses when they get shot. The relationships between his leading men and women (for example, Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, or John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in just about anything) make Popeye and Olive Oyl look like Tracy and Hepburn.

When Ford was coasting, which was often, the blarney-and-bullshit can become almost insufferable. (A hint: if you see Andy Devine’s or Victor McLaglen’s name in the credits, you’re likely in for trouble.) Rio Grande—the third in Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” has its first moment of real drama about 80 minutes in. Until then, it’s cavalry life as a bunch of yuks between good ol’ boys, interrupted by the occasional visit from a woman nobody knows how to react to. If Rio Grande is anything to go by, Ford’s view of the history of the west is one long, awkward look back at his own adolescence.

All of this reaches some kind of zenith in 1952’s The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne plays a boxer who returns to Ireland, ultimately to do battle with Victor McLaglen (drunk, yet again) for the hand of Maureen O’ Hara. The Quiet Man is all faith-and-begoria and calcified blarney; surely the most outrageous movie ever to win its maker an Oscar for Best Director. (Ford won four of them in all.)

The lingering image from an extended encounter with the work of John Ford is a feeling of a real, natural talent done in by indiscipline and questionable taste. When directing the right script he was capable of what felt like an elegant, plainspoken honesty which admirers like Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray were able to bring even more effectively to their own films.

When left to his own whims, Ford inevitably leaned on the cliché—cliché’s which have been deemed excusable by his admirers because he invented them. But critic David Thomson has put this notion of inventing the cliché in it’s proper perspective: “Sheer longevity made Ford a major director.”

The elevation of Ford to the pantheon of cinema’s master directors has been a historical peccadillo that did neither him nor his audiences any favors. Perhaps it’s now time we relieved Ford of the responsibility that comes with being called a great filmmaker, and took what the man said about himself more seriously. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ford claimed that “...the only thing I always had was an eye for composition. But I never thought about what I was doing in terms of art or anything like that. To me it was always a job of work—which I enjoyed immensely—and that's it.”

In a 1973 tribute to Ford, Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray tells the story of the 1958 meeting between Ford and the much younger British director Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was showing Ford a copy of Every Day Except Christmas, his documentary mood-piece on the behind-the-scenes action at the Covent Garden Market. After watching silently for half an hour, Ford finally turned to Anderson and said, “when are we going to see those Goddamn vegetables?”

It’s a phrase that makes a good epitaph. It cuts through the academic double-talk and sums up the real virtues of the filmmaker: John Ford was the guy who gave us the vegetables.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

Michelangelo Antonioni

In an era where movies about ocean-liner catastrophes make hundreds of millions of dollars at Christmas, how shall we make a case for an art-film writer-director whose chief claim to fame was being a middle-class soul in anguish? It may be hard to remember now, but thirty-five years ago Michelangelo Antonioni may well have been the most acclaimed filmmaker in the world. It is a spirit that Cinematheque Ontario is clearly out to rekindle in their exhaustive retrospective, Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni.

In a career spanning 16 feature films—he is 85 years of age but apparently at work on another movie—Antonioni’s critical reputation rests for the most part on three he made between 1960 and 1962: L’Avventura, La Notte [The Night], and L’Eclisse [The Eclipse]. These are the movies where he succeeded most completely in the two chores he set for his cinema: to chronicle the breakdown of modern emotional life, and to do so in a way uniquely cinematic and firmly under the control of the director on the set.

From a three-decade remove he looks to have been more successful in the second chore than the first. The critique of modern life running through Antonioni’s work can be summed up in a single phrase: “it won’t work”. The archetypal Antonioni film resembles soap opera for intellectuals who have been unlucky in love: it is full of love affairs that go nowhere and marriages that run on for no reason; people so emotionally delicate that a loud conversation might make them explode, and people so emotionally dead that the explosion probably wouldn’t wake them.

People in Antonioni movies don’t do normal, sensible things—like call the police when they find dead bodies in the park, or refrain from attempting impossible love affairs. They seem beyond rational self-control, as if life to them is just a movie they’re watching, where they are powerless to affect the plot and changing channels is not an option. Antonioni’s characters—and by extension, his idea of most participants in modern life—are quite simply unequipped to properly handle matters of any moral consequence. We merely go through the motions of a moral life, unaware of what we do and unhappy about it.

Introducing his classic L’Avventura to the public at Cannes in 1960, Antonioni was quite explicit about this, speaking of the “heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help, they create problems without offering us any possible solutions.”

Thus the main characters in L’Avventura are a man and a woman who become romantically entangled while searching for a missing person: his lover—and her best friend. “It can’t be right. It’s absurd,” cries Claudia. “Good,” Sandro replies. “It’s better if it’s absurd. It means there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Virtually all of Antonioni’s characters are similarly ill-equipped for surviving modern life, if not so similarly forthright about it: In Blow Up, a London fashion photographer whose life is as glossy and as emotionally substantial as a photographic negative is paralyzed with inertia when he realizes he has photographed a murder. L’Eclisse is an apocalyptic version of A Man and a Woman where a couple enters a relationship both know is doomed. In La Notte, a burned-out writer tries to convince himself that he still loves his wife—but his wife knows better.

(You get the feeling that if Antonioni had directed Casablanca, Bogart would have had an adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman, suffered massive guilt, and then walked into the Atlantic ocean while Paul Henreid and Claude Rains got drunk at Major Strasser’s headquarters. What’s frightening is that it would probably have worked.)

Antonioni’s is a depressing attitude (and not even a particularly original one, reaching back to Neizsche and possibly even to St. Benidict) yet one so beautifully presented that it is utterly convincing—at least while the theatre lights are down. No other director hitches his philosophical wagon so completely to the image he puts on screen, and no other director gets as much benefit from it. A lot of Antonioni’s films look perfect because they look perfect.

It’s that look that stays with you, and it’s intended that way. The images, not the actors, carry the emotional load: what characters do is less important than the spaces the director puts between them. To a viewer raised on the orthodox Hollywood style (i.e., all of us) Antonioni’s camerawork looks self-consciously artsy, almost self-parodying. Yet, look at a still from any of his films, and you know exactly what’s up between his characters.

This is the most elemental communication cinema is capable of and it’s Antonioni’s bread-and-butter. He wants to use film the way we use English; not as a medium for the expression of an idea, (we don’t think up an idea and then express it in language) but with the medium as the idea. The man talks with his camera—what’s up there on the screen is exactly what he’s saying, not describable in terms any more basic than the images. You look, and you understand. (You may have trouble explaining to somebody else what you have understood, but that comes with the territory.)

What he talks about with that camera, in a word, is isolation. His frames are full of empty space, inhumanely and architecturally divided. Streets and public spaces always seem to be empty; his characters alone in the world, isolated for closer observation. People cling unhappily together for comfort against the isolation, fearful of solitude yet unable to handle intimacy. You get the feeling that Antonioni’s ideal film set would be a desert, populated by two people who are afraid to look at one another.

Sooner or later, though, enough alienation is enough. Two decades ago, critic Pauline Kael wrote that she wished Antonioni would, just once, use his talent frivolously—perhaps in a trashy mystery or something.

He came close in 1975’s The Passenger. Here, Jack Nicolson inhabits what for another director would be an action movie scenario: a journalist, sick of his life, trades identities with a dead man he fortuitously resembles. The dead man unfortunately turns out to have been an arms dealer, and dangerous people soon come calling. Things proceed at a very leisurely pace (this is a movie that you can transcribe in longhand as you watch) towards an enigmatic conclusion that makes you wish Antonioni would go even further and do a movie with Bruce Willis—Die Hard: An Outline of Identity.

That not likely being in the cards, we are left with a canon of unmatched seriousness, best taken in moderate doses. At his best (which is often) Antonioni has made films that are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and—provided you are a delicate liberal—emotionally engaging. If they are old news they are at least true news; beautiful artifacts produced by the best eye for cinematic composition since Orson Welles.

How will the hard-nosed 90’s respond? Antonioni might note that all the problems he speaks of are still with us—perhaps even more acutely than ever. On the other hand, easy transcendence seems to be a way of life for us now. If Antonioni were to show up for a press conference in front of CITY-TV tomorrow, the Speaker’s Corner crowd would probably grab him by the shoulders, give him a gentle shake and say, “hey, just get over it, buddy!”

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Pietro Germi

In all the standard cinematic reference books, one looks in vain for the name of Pietro Germi. A popular and renowned filmmaker in Italy during his lifetime, he achieved international fame during the 60’s, winning an Oscar for Divorce, Italian Style and the Cannes Palm d’Or for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. Yet after his death in 1975 Germi seems to have vanished from the collective memory of international cinema—passed over especially by those of us whose business it is to remember.

How can a filmmaker who made so many memorable movies have been so easily forgotten? Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso and The Legend of 1900, recently hazarded an explanation: “Germi’s offense was that he made films that the public at large wanted to see. An Auteur was somebody who devoted himself to a single theme right from the start and stuck with it to the end. A director who moved around, changed, and then went back to a previous theme or genre wasn’t considered ‘deep’.”

Germi was dubbed “the great carpenter” by Fellini, a co-screenwriter of several of his movies from the early 50’s, and the tool-belt fits: Germi’s movies are splendid works of craftsmanship—structurally taut, visually striking, and possessing a splendid sense of time and (especially) place. His cine-carpentry produced distinctive films in a variety of genres—the neo-realism of The Way of Hope; In the Name of the Law, a western with debts divided equally between John Ford and Sicily; the detective story (The Facts of Murder), and the series of dazzling social satires with which he closed out his career (Seduced and Abandoned et al.)

Yet even a brilliant carpenter can raise a sense of unease in the heart of the Auteur taxonomist, partly because he resists integration into the grand scheme of authorship by which so many critics understand cinema. Critics like their great filmmakers to be artistically obsessed—all else is mere craftsmanship.

Such a critic’s plight is not an unsympathetic one. Confronted as a series, Germi’s is not an integral body of work; you don’t get much help understanding the artistic merit of a particular film by looking at any of the other movies he made. After a while, they start to look like the product not so much of a distinct artistic sensibility, as they do of a particular psychological profile—many seem to be the work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

There is therefore no benevolent artistic place to pigeonhole the films that don’t connect with you; you tend to write them off, rather than think them through more carefully as you might the work of a capital-A Auteur. Robert Bresson’s weakest film can still ride the credibility of the rest of his catalogue. Pietro Germi’s weakest films have to stand on their own.

Consider The Railroad Man—a 1958 entry in the strange and hard-to-adapt-to genre of the Italian political weepie. An amalgam of neo-realism, bitter libertarian politics, and industrial-strength Hollywood-style soap, The Railroad Man is a popular entertainment seemingly designed to drive proletarian Italian family men to tears. (Enough tears were elicited to make it one of the most popular films in Italy the year of its release.)

A man commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The unfortunate engineer who was in control at the time—Germi cast himself in the leading role—is demoted for his negligence. His union doesn’t support him, and during a subsequent labor dispute, the engineer briefly becomes a strikebreaker. For this, he suffers terrible guilt and his life falls apart. As seen today by a North American, there’s little for a modern viewer to fasten onto; the tension between Hollywood-style melodrama and Italian slice-of-life begins to feel anachronistic and the film becomes a curious time capsule; neo-realism brought to the level of television.

By all accounts a solitary and difficult man to deal with (off the set he would often respond only to notes pushed under his door), Germi made films that feel like the work of an outsider. He displayed a great sympathy for the worker thrown out of a job; the man forced by poverty into crime; and above all for people whose lives are made absurd by their country’s even more absurd laws and codes of honor. His comedies were bitter and satirical; his dramas pessimistic. Billy Wilder said that he found in Germi a kindred spirit; probably because the work of both filmmakers points to a universe largely broken beyond repair.

His style was deliberately out of step with the international Italian cinema of the time; he was unsympathetic to Visconti (to whom Germi’s melodramas are often unfavorably contrasted) and downright hostile to Antonioni (for whom the feeling was apparently mutual). Yet if his yoking of popular Hollywood forms to local cultural realities was largely a device to please his audience, the combination also produced some unique artifacts of international cinema.

For example, In the Name of the Law, Germi’s third film, is an out-and-out western set in contemporary (1948) Sicily: A new magistrate comes to an isolated town and finds it’s local government corrupt, and the local aristocracy in cahoots with the Mafia to keep the citizens unemployed and powerless. In the classic western tradition, the lone man cleans up the town. But the film’s charm comes mostly from its confounding of our expectations: this is a western where there is no concept of a frontier and where strapping on the guns is not an option for the law-and-order man. It is both Hollywood and Sicily; perhaps the only real Italian western ever made.

Made a year later, The Way of Hope follows a dirt-poor group of Sicilian miners as they make their Grapes-of-Wrath way to France. It is a singular film—not least for its combining the ethical urgency of neo-realism (Rossilini called it “being on the side of those who suffer”) with a sense of visual composition that would find a home in Battleship Potemkin, and a Hollywood sentimentalism worthy of Spielberg at his ickiest. The Way of Hope is both brutally frank about the misery to the Sicilian poor—the best hope of a Sicilian is to escape to France—yet it ends with what in cinematic terms amounts to a miracle. Hollywood wins out over neo-realism in the end: the good guys must win, even if they really couldn’t.

Best of all is The Facts of Murder, dubbed by Variety magazine on it’s 1959 release as “the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy”. This is faint praise: Hollywood-tough and Italian-characterful, The Facts of Murder is as good as any detective movie ever made, and better than most. If it’s cinematic cabinet-making, it’s great cinematic cabinet making—you wish the man had turned out more of them.

The list could probably go on. The collection currently being presented includes just over half of the films Germi directed and makes a respectable case for the carpenter as worthy subject for a retrospective—although not without a certain irony. Taken as individual films, a gratifying number of Germi’s works stand the tests of both time and watchability. But as a body of work, they are collectively just obscure enough for the man who made them to be lost between the frames.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

Marcello Mastroianni

It is rare for a cinema-society to stage an actor retrospective, but Marcello Mastroianni was a rare actor. He was pretty, prolific, and profound, and starting tonight Cinematheque Ontario presents 22 Mastroianni titles selected by Anna Maria Tatò, his companion of 22 years. It is a presentation that goes a long way towards illuminating Mastroianni’s particular genius: the actor emerges cinematically triumphant while portraying every imaginable human failing.

Is Mastroianni the most important actor in the history of cinema? He has certainly left the most attractive legacy. More believable than Bogart; more attractive than Brando, he has bequeathed to us the truest cinematic icon of the 20th century’s closing half: the ineffective male in all his many varieties.

No other star has been so attractive exhibiting doe-eyed inadequacy, although Cary Grant was occasionally allowed to came close. Mastroianni’s stock in trade is being overpowered and overmatched, whether as the intellectual labour organizer out of his depth in The Organizer; as Sophia Loren’s hopelessly outclassed ex-lover in Marriage, Italian Style, or in Dark Eyes, as a wastrel at the end of his life who has abandoned romance for simple inertia. What emerges from his work as a whole is Mastroianni’s closely-observed three ages of Man: as perplexed by the world, by women, and ultimately by himself.

Mastroianni is most famous in North America for two collaborations with Federico Fellini from the beginning of the 60’s: La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. 40 years later, both movies provide a startlingly up-to-date portrait of the man of today—or at least the way the man-of-today feels about himself. Mastroianni gives us men to whom things happen, who have lost the power to meaningfully initiate action. In 8 1/2 he is Fellini’s self-portrait: a burned-out filmmaker no longer in charge of his life or his creativity, who desires nothing more than to stay upright in hope that somehow, clarity will reassert itself.

It does not—although Fellini is more optimistic about the consequences at the close of 8 1/2 than by the denouement of La Dolce Vita, where the battle against disorientation is deemed hopeless. There, one character sums up the struggle: “We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside time, detached.” Unfortunately, they succeed. All that’s left to do is give up on life altogether.

As intractable (if ultimately more bemusing) a struggle is the Mastroianni Man’s tortured association with women—call him the reluctant ladykiller. If he seems bewildered by women, women are certainly not bewildered by him: Matinee-idol good looks, a voice so beautiful as to make the dubbing of foreign-language films seem a crime, a sense of worldliness held in check as if by memories of pain.... What’s to resist? The Mastroianni Man can have any woman he wants—except, as it turns out, the one he loves.

Take Visconti’s White Nights—a superior weepie from the director of such light classics as The Damned and Death in Venice. This is soap-opera for guys, with Mastroianni suffering in the Jane Wyman role: Boy, out wandering the evening streets, rescues girl being harassed by bikers. He’s interested in her, but she’s preoccupied. We learn that she’s carrying a torch for Mr. Wrong—a tall, tough and handsome guy who had to go on the lam from the law but who promised to meet her on a bridge over the local canal at ten o’clock some night in the indefinite future. Every evening, she goes there. So does our boy, who gradually sways her towards himself. Then, the very night she finally falls for Mastroianni, who should show up and whisk her away? No, it’s too terrible to even contemplate....

What is surprising is how easily the second-billed Mastroianni dominates the movie, even though he’s in the passive, secondary role. Showing a kidnapper’s ability to get his captives emotionally on side, he effortlessly co-opts us into his suffering.

It is a skill he relies on, nowhere more effectively than in Il Bell’Antonio, another good, healthy measure of industrial-strength suds. (Confounded by the Catholic guilt attending every good Italian boyhood, Antonio can perform sexually only with women he doesn’t like. With the woman he loves, he is impotent. In a society that demands children, he must therefore renounce love.) Yet, with an alchemist’s expertise, Mastroianni turns this purplest of melodramas into the purest white satin.

There is technique to his alchemy as well as truth. The technique is simply the actor’s knowing exactly how to make himself look cinematically good. When he’s on, he doesn’t simply look good, he looks perfect. He is the only possible subject in the frame, and he draws your eye, no matter who’s around him. (This is an extremely useful ability in a movie like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, where an actor could any time be upstaged by a group of singing and dancing midgets.) Your sympathy is his, and he will make you care even when you shouldn’t.

It’s an ability he found even more useful in his later career. Actors, unlike directors, must grow old, and with age it seems the Mastroianni Man gives up the fight against bewilderment. The wolf, having worn sheep’s clothing for so long, decides he likes the life, and settles in to the role of the philanderer aging gracefully. “Let me tell you a story” he says to a stranger in a restaurant in Dark Eyes. And he tells us of the time where he almost experienced the great love of his life but that somehow it slipped from his grasp.

He has a great storytelling face, and the director returns to it again and again, the face now providing the counterpoint to the matinee-idol’s skill. Suddenly we notice the truth in that face, especially at the climax of his story, when it displays a sudden self-awareness that, for reasons he still can’t fully grasp, our narrator has just lost everything of real value to him. It is the semi-perplexed look of a man realizing that he has had the best moment of his life, but he has mostly missed it. It is a look of amusement and regret, of mastery lost and not to be regained, a look of farewell.

It is the truth in that look, more than anything else, that connects him to us. It sums up a character’s life, and it sums up Marcello Mastroianni’s career. His screen life documented for us the passing of credible cinematic manliness. His face on the screen is a snapshot of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999

Shohei Imamura: An Introduction to Anthropology

When Japanese writer-director Shohei Imamura was announced as the co-winner of the Palm D’Or at the 1997 Cannes film festival, a lot of people in the audience—the TV audience at least—probably thought “who?” North American knowledge of Japanese film generally begins and ends with Akira Kurosawa (not least because so many of his films have been remade by western filmmakers—Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and so on). Imamura, even though three of his last four movies have won major prizes at Cannes, remains unknown—virtually none of his films have enjoyed even a reasonably-sized North American release.

That is about to change. “Pigs, Pimps and Pornographers”, a complete retrospective of Imamura’s pre-1997 theatrical features, begins an 11-city tour tonight at Cinematheque Ontario. Cinematheque is also concurrently launching the first English-language book of essays by and about the director, called, simply, “Shohei Imamura”.

The man is worth the hoopla: Imamura surely belongs in the pantheon of the world’s leading filmmakers—he is certainly the greatest one that nobody seems to have heard of. Over four decades, Imamura has produced a consistently excellent body of work peppered with half-a-dozen masterpieces; his persistent absence from the art-house repertory is a crime. It’s an omission on the order of magnitude of ignoring Fellini—and I’m not certain that the comparison doesn’t favour Imamura.

After taking in a few of his movies—one doesn’t so much watch as be taken hostage by them—it is possible to scrape up some sympathy for a distributor. They are a tough sell: they are in a language that is not only foreign but utterly foreign, they deal with a culture with few connecting points to our own, and the occidental neophyte may simply have trouble keeping track of Asian faces. (Following the action sometimes requires heroic attention: the ensemble of characters in Eijanaika makes Ben-Hur feel like My Dinner With Andre). Most obviously though, they are movies about people or groups of people who, frankly, just ain’t very nice—or as Imamura puts it: “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure”.

In the right combination, both turn out to be pretty interesting places. The idea seems to be that the best way to get at the heart of a society is to sniff around at the edges, so Imamura movies tend to be peopled with hideous husbands and murderous wives, prostitutes, radiation victims, and people on the outer reaches of civil society with no desire to get to the inside. “You’re old-fashioned,” declares a character in The Pornographers. “We all want to be animals. No one wants to be human; we want to be free but society won’t let us.”

There is a hint through all of Imamura’s work that we aren’t really all that much more than animals—albeit animals with the gift of consciousness—and he seems to delight in showing us how little progress we’ve made as a society, or even as a species. Life’s chief preoccupation is simply getting by, and “food and sex are life’s only pleasures” according to another character in The Pornographers.

Food, sex, and what people do to get by are certainly Imamura’s chief preoccupations. The simple struggle for food is the centre of community existence in The Ballad of Narayama, the story of a village in northern Japan where in a tough year children get tossed into snowbanks or sold, and the aged are hauled up to the local mountaintop to die. In The Insect Woman, a woman struggling to escape a Narayama-like rural existence moves to Tokyo and finds her calling as the boss of a call-girl service. In Intentions of Murder, a housewife struggles against a violent, unfaithful husband, his mistress, her spiteful in-laws and a burglar who first rapes her and then falls obsessively in love with her. (She wins.) In The Pornographers, a little man is driven mad by his life in the porn business. In Black Rain, Hiroshima survivors muddle through a class system where social standing is now based on health rather than wealth. It’s all just getting by.

All this leads to a paradox: There may not be a single noble act on any character’s part in the entire Imamura canon—morally it’s all on about the level of home movies of Stalin wrestling alligators—yet they are the most elevating movies imaginable. How does he pull that one off? There is of course the awful possibility that he’s simply right and our pleasure is simply the joy of self-recognition.

I prefer to think he’s got making movies down right. Imamura makes films like an anthropologist raised on Aristotle’s Poetics: even though there isn’t a hint of tragedy in his work—sometimes it feels like there’s nobody behind the camera—he gets from his characters what Aristotle demanded of tragedy. They arouse pity and fear in you: pity for creatures at the edge of human existence; fear that you aren’t so very different from them. You feel a great intimacy with that which was until recently strange, and you are moved by it. His characters take a rough journey and it’s we who are left feeling a basic humanity as a result.

This is not to ignore all the other miscellaneous delights of Imamura’s films: The marvelous 60’s feel to the gorgeous black-and-white widescreen photography of the early movies; their deadpan wallowing in the unacceptable; their irrepressible humour even at what seems the end of the world (parts of Black Rain, a movie about Hiroshima, suggest what Fellini’s Amarcord might have looked like if the bomb had been dropped on Italy) and their farcical delight in depravity (by comparison to The Pornographers, Boogie Nights is an exercise in wholesomeness and good taste.) They are a complex experience, as life is: profound, exciting, moving, funny and ultimately, exhausting.

Mostly exhausting. Shohei Imamura is one of cinema’s greatest artists for perhaps the simplest reason in the world: he gives you everything. His films are complete—the whole story of life in every package. They fill you up and you leave the theatre suffused with gratitude for this vision of a civilization heretofore a mystery to you. Indeed, the best subtitle I can think of for this series is “everything I ever needed to know about Japan, I learned from Shohei Imamura”.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

The Passion of the Peckinpah

No director made movies more passionately than Sam Peckinpah, and aside from Orson Welles, no great filmmaker suffered more at the hands of the studios for whom he plied his trade. Between 1961 and 1983 he made 14 feature films, many of which didn’t make it intact to their first release. He’s usually thought of as a ‘lost’ artist; robbed of half his career by alcohol, personal demons and studio hacks. Yet as Cinematheque Ontario’s retrospective Bring me the Films of Sam Peckinpah makes clear, he gave us everything he had, and everything he had was enough.
The zeitgeist has been much kinder to Peckinpah recently than he ever was to himself: In the last few years, the studios have re-released virtually all of his movies to the DVD catalog; more importantly, they’ve repaired most of the damage they’d done to them as well. With the upcoming release of a restored Cross of Iron, every one of Peckinpah’s most important movies will be available to the viewing public, more or less the way he’d intended us to see them.
At his peak, he was generous with his genius: Between 1969 and 1973 Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Let’s put that in perspective: in the same amount of time it will have taken the producers of the James Bond franchise to bring Casino Royale to market this fall, Sam Peckinpah made six extraordinary films. How could we have been that lucky without noticing it at the time?
Watching them as a group today is an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience: The passion Peckinpah had for both the western and the idea of the west leaps through the screen from his heart directly to yours. You’re emotionally held hostage with no hope of being ransomed, because you’re being kidnapped by a kind of filmmaking that’s gone forever. So it’s very easy to develop a tendency to look back at Peckinpah’s westerns the way Peckinpah looked back at the fin-de-siecle west. When you contemplate the Jerry Bruckheimers and the Michael Bays currently cranking out films in the action-adventure genre, you may find yourself suddenly identifying with Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch: Surveying the motley posse he’s been saddled with to bring the Bunch in, he spits out: “We’re after men—and by God, I wish I was with them!”
For better or (occasionally) worse, seeking out some men is Peckinpah’s blood-and-butter. And unlike, say, Howard Hawks, he’s not concerned so much with what a man does when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but rather where a man can go if he simply wants to be a man. For Peckinpah, manliness is more of a place on a map than a state of mind. If, like Joel McCrae in Ride the High Country, all you want is to enter your house justified, where do you build your home?
The answer to most Peckinpah men is somewhere within hailing distance of Mexico: All of Peckinpah’s most effective films feature Mexico as a background motif; a source of inspiration and moral compass. Peckinpah’s men are outsiders; refugees from authority and compromise; gun-toting Holden Caulfields laid low by middle age; and they’re people for whom Mexico represents the only remaining frontier worthy of the name; the only place that’s both untrammeled and has in it the kind of people with whom you’d want to share a bottle of whiskey. It’s where the Wild Bunch finds both paradise and death, and it’s where Billy the Kid refuses to run and is killed for it. Major Dundee’s Major Dundee goes there and nearly becomes Heart of Darkness’s Colonel Kurtz; and it’s the place Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are getting away to in The Getaway. (Virtually every movie of Peckinpah’s could probably be called The Getaway.)
When escape to Mexico is not an option, you get something like Straw Dogs. Infamously described by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as “the first American film that’s a fascist work of art,” 35 years later Straw Dogs looks more like the Paul Verhoeven version of Home Alone—a potentially defensible thesis about a reasonable man’s capacity for violence, done in by screenwriting straight out of Basic Instinct.
In the context of the films he surrounded it with (the gentle Ballad of Cable Hogue on one side; the genial Junior Bonner on the other), Straw Dogs is a bizarre artifact; Peckinpah besieged by his own demons with no frontier to escape to. It also marked an intrusion of the modern into his work—as if he’d finally looked around and noticed Nixon and Vietnam—and he was never entirely able to shake it off.
Thus, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is as much about America in 1973 as it is about New Mexico in 1881. Mutilated beyond credibility in its first release, the 2005 restoration allows it re-entry into the pantheon of Peckinpah’s’s greatest achievements; as the valedictory to the western he was never allowed to deliver in person. An even better and less sentimental distillation of all of Peckinpah’s themes than The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is a melancholy farewell to the west and the western, both for the director and for cinema itself. Nobody makes westerns any more at least partly because in 1973 Peckinpah saw to it that there’d be nothing left for them to say.
But where is a director to build his home when he’s just made the last western that would ever need to be made? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the sight of a filmmaker tearing his guts out coming to grips with the answer. Apocalyptic, obnoxious, and sometimes downright campy, Alfredo Garcia is the great Peckinpah Burnout Movie. In it he pushes every cinematic thesis he’s ever developed past the point of credulity—seemingly over the edge of the earth. Goddard tacked the words “Fin du Film; Fin du Cinema” to the end of his Weekend in 1967, and they’re words that surely could have closed Alfredo Garcia as well—in blood-red letters.
No other substantial filmmaker—except perhaps fellow cinematic wild-man Samuel Fuller—ever wore his guts so unashamedly on his sleeve or made so career-destroying a movie. It’s hard to tell at that stage whether it was a matter of spiritual authenticity or temporary insanity. One thing is certain: For Peckinpah, getting his vision onscreen didn’t just matter, it was a matter of life and death. And ultimately, with a few more indifferent movies—and a lot of help from whiskey—the struggle killed him.
But we should resist the urge to see Sam Peckinpah as a martyr. Film critic David Thompson saw Peckinpah’s screen work as a metaphor for its author’s sufferings in Hollywood, but the truth is exactly the other way around: The studios did him in just as surely as the ranchers did in Pat Garrett, but Peckinpah used his suffering at their hands to perfect the myth he put on screen.
He wouldn’t have had it any other way: For us his life represents the last of a line of men stretching from Ride the High Country’s Steve Judd through Pat Garrett to The Wild Bunch’s Deke Thornton. Sam Peckinpah was our last Western hero.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2005