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October 13, 2019

Our Daily Bread (1934)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

Our Daily Bread

In 1928, King Vidor made the silent masterpiece The Crowd for MGM. The film was about an ordinary couple, John and Mary Sims, trying to make ends meet in New York. John’s big dreams are crushed by the city and, at the end of the film, the couple reconciles itself to social insignificance and dissolves in the anonymity of mass entertainment. Vidor reprised these characters in Our Daily Bread (1934), transplanting them to the West Coast, but a lot had passed in the six intervening years. For one, America had plunged into the Great Depression, and men like John found themselves without jobs. In the first scene of Our Daily Bread, Mary (Karen Morley) wards off debtors as John (Tom Keene) returns after a fruitless day looking for jobs, his days of dreaming big far behind him. Mary’s uncle is coming home for dinner, so John trades their ukulele at the meat shop for a bony chicken. Uncle tells John that he has a vast piece of devalued land far from the city and that he’ll let him have it if he could make good use of it. A reaction shot of grateful, enthusiastic Mary and John relays to us that this is welcome news.

John and Mary move to the deserted ranch. The house there is run down, but they make do with what they have. John has no idea about farming, so he opens up the ranch to other depression-stricken, migrant workers passing along the way. A community soon forms at the site, with a host of skilled workers bartering their trade while working on the corn fields. Many of the trades are urban skills with little use on the ranch—trouser-presser, undertaker, music teacher, salesman—but the group manages to integrate everyone according to his capability. They pool in their resources, divide responsibilities and forge a veritable settlement. The settlers include Jews, immigrants and persons with criminal records, poverty being their only commonality. Vidor is evidently attracted by the notion of starting anew, of leaving the past behind, at a time when people have little left to lose. He dedicates several shots to characters sitting around a fire, signalling ideas of community and domesticity in the wilderness. He treats the moment when first corn bud sprouts with a violin-accompanied preciousness. In his first speech to these modern-day homesteaders, John invokes the early pioneers who didn’t need “jobs”, but found a way to work the land and live off it.

There’s a tepid romantic triangle woven over this narrative of communal triumph, with John getting involved with a moll called Sally (Barbara Peppers). But the affair is resolved just before the film’s climactic set piece in which the community has to dig a canal two miles long to irrigate the crops. It’s an exhilarating passage that’s a masterwork of rhythm, composition and choreography. We see men standing in rows, hunched over, digging the ditch and moving sideways in unison like clockwork (Vidor had timed their movement with a metronome). We hear their voices mixed with the sound of their footsteps and their implements. They work day and night, building canals with wood and tin sheets. Shots are composed in deep space with obstacles in the foreground making way for the advancing ditch. As the canal approaches the fields, women cheer in the background and the camera moves along with the workers. The editing quickens and framing become tighter. A violin surges on the soundtrack as the water is released, its crescendo imitating fluid movement. Men follow the flowing water, and use their bodies to stem the holes in the ditch. The violin gives way to a lofty choral passage just as the water enters the parched fields.

Vidor was a filmmaker with a strong visual sensibility—he was also a painter—and it shows even in this modest production. The film opens with a markedly diagonal shot of a staircase in an apartment complex—a diagonality that will reappear in the wipe transitions linking different scenes. This vertical urban space is contrasted later with the horizontal sprawl of the open fields, and the upward movement of the characters in the first scene with the downward movement of the water towards the viewer in the final shot. A champion of camera movement, Vidor constructs his scenes with gentle pans and tracking shots, as when the camera follows the couple into the house after they have expressed surprise at its condition. He often composes outdoor shots with the horizon near the top of the frame, and his low angles produce a sense of wonderment at nature’s bounty. A Christian Scientist, he binds men and nature in a religious aesthetic, with the farmers in the foreground facing the vast fields in the background, whose fruits they have to earn through the sweat of their brow.

Vidor was also a filmmaker with social-realist aspirations that didn’t go down well with the established studios. The Crowd dealt with the struggles of the average Joe and Jane within the alienating machinery of the city during a time of general economic prosperity. Hallelujah (1929) was a production with a mostly African-American cast intending to show Black life in the South. In an introduction to Our Daily Bread, filmed years later, Vidor explains that he proposed the idea for the film to MGM, who were encouraging but didn’t want take the risk. As a result, Vidor had to secure funding independently, mortgaging his house in the process. Produced by Vidor himself under the banner “Viking Productions” and distributed by United Artists with the help of Charlie Chaplin, Our Daily Bread was also one of the earliest films to comply to the production code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the effect of which shows in the film’s coy dialogue and sexual dynamics.

Our Daily Bread was inspired by an article in the Reader’s Digest about people returning to the land following the financial crisis. It’s also a work that resonates with the political climate of the time. President Roosevelt had initiated the economic relief measures of the New Deal the year before. In California, where Our Daily Bread was made, hundreds of cooperative communes just like in the film had formed to tackle the crisis. The story’s theme of collectivisation, its distrust of cigar-chewing banker types and, especially, its assertion of a working-class identity over racial and national identities lends it an obviously communist flavour. And Vidor reportedly modelled the ditch-digging scene on a similar sequence in Yuli Raizman’s Soviet production The Earth is Thirsty (1930). But Vidor was not a communist; he was a conservative who later joined the anti-communist group called Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. It may simply be that Vidor found the idea of a self-sufficient people building a community to be a very American notion.

Conservative studio heads such as MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and United Artists’ Joseph Schenck, however, feared that the film could provide a fillip to the campaign of Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair in the upcoming gubernatorial elections in November. Sinclair was a socialist proposing a programme to End Poverty in California (EPIC)—a radical set of collectivist measures that alarmed the studio elites. Schenck stalled the release of Our Daily Bread in California by several months. Mayer deducted a day’s pay from his employees to fund the Republican candidate. In order to denigrate Sinclair’s campaign, Mayer’s second-in-command, Irving Thalberg, commissioned fake newsreels about bums pouring into California to sponge off the state. Sinclair lost the elections.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

October 7, 2019

John Ford

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Hollywood, Translations | Tags: , , , |
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The Slide of the Admiral

Cahiers du cinéma John Ford special; 1990

7 Women

My article championing The Rising of the Moon was rejected in 1957 by Cahiers, who asked me for an article on Ford in 1990…

—

The first impression upon contact with the John Ford phenomenon is that of immensity: hundred and twelve feature films and about twenty short films. No other great filmmaker has been able to compete with such abundance. No one ever can. Indeed, Ford’s extreme productivity is related to, among other things, his activity in the silent era. Talkies demand more time.

While it doesn’t rule out familiarity, this high productivity seems to refuse the possibility of a synthesis. It takes four months for a necessarily incomplete retrospective since about thirty movies from the 1920s were never found. By the time the last work is screened, the memories of the first ones have already dimmed. Forty years have passed between my first contact—The Informer—and North of Hudson Bay, which I could see a few days ago. Forty years, almost as long as Ford’s working life. The abundance becomes a handicap here: you don’t dare to write on something that overwhelms you, you don’t dare to speak about it. From there to oblivion…

It’s true that this concern for thorough knowledge is a relatively recent demand. Should we go back to the principles of old criticism which based itself only on the most noteworthy works? The first John Ford fanboy, Jean Mitry, used to say that it’s stupid to want to watch all the films of a director. All the more so for Ford… Should we dream, like we do for writers, of a “portable Ford”? The hiccup is that no one agrees on the choices. It’s possible to imagine two books on Ford having no common title in their table of contents. In fact, the books by Jean Roy and Lindsay Anderson aren’t far from this this extreme hypothesis.

High productivity is an important part of the body of work that we can’t ignore or hide.

Even though, at certain times, Steamboat Round the Bend or Tobacco Road get preference in my estimation, I think that my favourite Ford is Seven Women, the last of the hundred and twelve films. Not only do I prefer Seven Women but I what I like the most in the film is its last minute, the triumphant suicide, Ford’s coda leading up to an aggressive, brutal laconism unheard of in his body of work and open to multiple meanings.

I fell in love when I saw Seven Women during its release, when I didn’t know it would be his last film. And I also think Ford (who had other projects at the time and wasn’t the kind that thought of retirement) didn’t conceive it as a testamentary film. It’s thus at once a natural expression—for Ford—and a natural emotion—for me—entirely related to the film and unrelated to the context.

But that it’s the last hour of the longest filmography in the entire history of cinema past and future, the very last minute of some ten thousand minutes of film (work of an old gentleman of flagging health) that moves me the most is something altogether stunning.

I wonder if I could ever, in life like in art, find an occurrence that propels me more towards optimism, a pure optimism free of dross since it’s produced by one of the most tragic scenes.

You’ll tell me it’s a choice peculiar to me. But it’s close to the current critical norm: the referendum organized by the Brussels Cinematheque in 1977 revealed the pre-eminence of The Searchers, the 108th Ford picture, over all others. It established the clear lead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, number 109, over The Informer, once a central pillar, now dispensable.

There is also a very surprising trend in Hollywood cinema, where the late career of “greats” is always a little disappointing or withdrawn (Hawks, Hitchcock, Vidor, Griffith, Borzage, Capra, Chaplin, Mann, Preminger, DeMille etc.) I can think of only Mankiewicz who overcame this challenge, thanks to a somewhat anticipated retirement.

 

Though it would be adventurous to define the silent period about which we know little, it’s permissible to think of it as the break-in period, with some titles more notable than others (Hell Bent), and to say that Ford’s body of work really begins towards his fiftieth film, somewhere near Three Bad Men or Four Sons or Arrowsmith.

It’s the opposite of modern European careers, where the first feature is generally among the best, if not the best, and where one barely reaches twenty or thirty films at the end of the career.

This abundance has produced an experience, an incomparable self-assurance. In his early talkies, Ford seems to be a master of all situations when he takes on the most ambitious projects. It’s hard to imagine him anxious on the eve of a shoot, or during takes, or during the release date. Shooting becomes an everyday reality and loses its importance. Ford makes films like a baker makes bread. The notion of a body of work doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for him. He never lingers on the editing table. He never wastes time at the launch of a film. The pleasure of getting back with his shooting crew can become the primary motivation.

One could evoke Walsh in this regard. But he pushes this laidback quality too far: he doesn’t always come to the shoot. Reading his memoirs, it seems that screwing an actress or fighting with a rival was more important for him that the final product. There isn’t a thematic unity in his work.

Only Mizoguchi—a little less productive—can be compared to Ford. Moreover, it would be very instructive to see Oyuki the Virgin (1935) and Stagecoach (1938), its remake of sorts, one after the other since both films take off from Boule de Suif. Sansho the Bailiff shares the perspective of The Grapes of Wrath. The difference between the two men lies in the great care Mizoguchi demonstrated towards his scripts. On the other hand, Ford sometimes took them as they came, days before the shoot for which he was assigned at the last moment. I think he made no fundamental distinction between his films and those by others for which he shot some difficult shots.

Other differences relate to the pre-eminence of the individual—and women—in the Japanese filmmaker and the small group—and men—in the American. And then Ford was more a raconteur and Mizoguchi a storyteller.

 

Ford’s laid-back nature, which can account for his power, also makes for his weakness. The politique des auteurs found it rather hard to assimilate him since it postulates that great filmmakers manage to ennoble everything they touch. Now if, after the early years, we find practically no false notes in Hawks and Hitchcock, it must be admitted that Ford is something of a concern. He is successful with one in every two films. At sixty, he still finds a way to churn out three insipid works one after the other: Mogambo, The Long Gray Line, and Mister Roberts. Not to mention duds like The Black Watch, Wee Willie Winkie or Gideon’s Day: films that had no chance of success owing to the mediocrity of their raw material, made for money, the desire to travel and work as a team, the presence of a mascot or a pet cause.

We often speak about Ford’s eclecticism on account of the variety of genres he handled. But this eclecticism turns out to be illusory: no musical, no horror film. There is no crime movie except the mediocre Gideon’s Day. Clearly, Ford doesn’t like the detective genre. On two other occasions (Up the River, The Whole Town’s Talking), he dissolves into comedy. Admiral Ford is fascinated only by the navy. If he encounters the army (What Price Glory) or the air force (Air Mail), he diverts everything into comedy.

To distinguish the Westerns from the Irish films is vain: Indians and Irishmen are similar minorities, just like Mormons (Wagon Master) or Jews (Little Miss Smiles), and he sometimes pits Irishmen or Mexicans against Indians.

In fact, the eclectic quality of the scripts is almost always nullified by the polarization along some well-known principles: small groups, mothers, families, comical sidekicks, the ball scene, twilight figures from the last decade. Always the great outdoors, or the small town. New York almost never appears. With a little exaggeration, I could say that Ford has only ever made one film. We are far from the bulimia of a Duvivier or a Tavernier.

 

If one likes Ford, one could be shocked that the filmmaker had no political leaning except those of his clients, or whatever was fashionable. One would’ve loved to find something constantly, deeply moral, to trace anti-racist seeds much before Sergeant Rutledge or Cheyenne Autumn, in the first Westerns or in Stagecoach, to uncover a common thread between the generosity of The Grapes of Wrath or the sectarianism of This is Korea! or Seven Women. Notwithstanding some brilliant theses on this topic—Ford’s bonhomie softening the harshest features of almost all his characters—opportunism appears to be the sole truth. But is it really opportunism? Isn’t it rather a somewhat systematic acceptance, with no ulterior motive, of whatever the era has to offer? A concurrence with the silent majority, which sometimes he precedes by a little (Fort Apache)? Ford, like many first- and second-generation immigrants, has a principled respect for his country of adoption and its beliefs. The very fact of having taken the surname of one of capitalism’s greatest henchmen as his alias is revealing.

 

Ford’s power resides firstly in a dialectic between the presentation of mythologies and familiarity, the absolute and the relative, the thought-over and the lived, the moral and the picturesque, heavy clouds of Fate and hands on the ass. It’s the vigour and spontaneity of McLaglen, Fitzgerald or Ward Bond that help the spectral compositions of August or Toland push through. Not always: monotony looms large, and so does vulgarity.

The picturesque aspect has to do with the abundance of living beings (hence the small group), the multiplicity of their actions in the shot or in the sequence. Ford is perhaps the American filmmaker who has worked the most on the difference in dialects and accents (Doctor Bull).

The expression of mythologies is carried out either through the meaning of actions or through the photography: shadows, back lights, immense settings that diminish man. Mythologies in Ford become extremely dangerous when they are limited to themselves (cf. the clear failures of The Fugitive and The Informer). Photographic overload and second-hand expressionism make the films go around in circles, while most often, the image skilfully serves as the lyrical amplification of realistic everyday details.

We could, however, invert the proposition and assert that the picturesque leads nowhere without the help of mythologies. We have for proof the success of Tobacco Road. But that was an exception. Dialectic nevertheless makes for the greatest part of Ford’s body of work. Its two components can be found in the same instant or be linked by a pan shot or a cut. What counts is the variety of links Ford finds between them.

There are other related forms of contradictory balance within a film, or across films. It could be said that Ford takes wicked pleasure in doing the opposite of what he has just done. His greatest quality is concision, but in The Searchers, he does his best to make us feel the long passage of time involved in a hunt spanning many years, rendering the ideas of revenge and racism ridiculous. In The Rising of the Moon, from one sketch to another, he alternates the impression of rapidity and slowness for both characters and viewers. This probably explains his political fickleness better. Ford, the champion of the macho movie, the maker of two films without women—Men without Women and The Lost Patrol—that were perhaps the first of their kind, also made hymns to mothers and ended his career on a film almost entirely without men (Seven Women), the two male characters being a weakling and a monster.

 

We could define Ford’s art as an art of “sliding between notes”. Hence, the importance of dissolves and other transitions (The World Moves On, The Grapes of Wrath). The viewer shouldn’t realize he’s watching a movie and that the movie has already started. Often, moreover, nothing of importance really happens (Judge Priest, Doctor Bull, Tobacco Road, The Long Gray Line etc.). We wonder what we can say about the films, which sometimes leads to a negative judgment. All very classical values. After all, isn’t Ford the only classicist in the history of cinema worthy of interest? And our critical armada isn’t up to the task to deal with this exceptional case.

One problem remains: this precious sense of “sliding” seems to be the same in both the masterpieces and the failures of Ford. We nevertheless sense a huge difference in quality between them. We could point out the customary concision of a scene in Gideon’s Day or The Long Gray Line, but we could also wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better had he dropped the entire scene, or had he not made the film at all.

Ford’s art seems elusive, impossible to pin down. It’s in the method, but it surfaces only when the material is rich. It takes us back to a very old rule of thumb: to make a good film, you need a good script and then good direction. Isn’t it symptomatic that three of his best films (The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and, more obliquely, Stagecoach) were adapted from high-profile literary works? Isn’t The Grapes of Wrath better than How Green Was My Valley simply because Steinbeck is a better writer than Llewellyn? Ford is the opposite of Hitchcock, who often needed a terrible, totally unbelievable script (Psycho, North by Northwest) to be able to rise above its faults and outdo himself.

 

Why is it that the film version of The Grapes of Wrath has survived in people’s minds more than the book, while there’s no big difference between the two? Is cinema so weak an art that a solid adaptation of a good book can pass for a masterpiece? In contrast, there’s much higher competition in literature. Even so, there are more concessions in Ford’s film, such as the inversion that pushes the most optimistic episode at the government camp to the end of the film; and this immaculate, smooth-talking Fonda (Fonda is outstanding, but that is not the problem) who is clearly a reflection of the Hollywood hero, absent in the original.

The difference is that agricultural migration was dealt with more often in writing and almost never on film. But isn’t all this to the credit of the very idea of filmmaking?

The difference is that Steinbeck rubs it in, harnesses all the possibilities of every scene, while the film skims over the facts, taking their essence and moving quickly to the next scene. It has become the first road movie, a succession of signposts producing an unquestionable, objective curtness that limits pathos. But weren’t these omissions made in order to cut the film down to two hours from six? And isn’t it the scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson who’s primarily responsible for that?

Ford succeeds when he appears to efface himself behind others, behind the material of his films. Might his role simply be that of a supervisor, a mediator? And might not our concern for analysing Ford’s specificity go against the grain of his body of work?

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

October 3, 2019

Joker (2019)

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Joker

(Possible spoilers ahead)

“You were never really here” is what the Joker thinks the world is telling him. It is also the title of the film I was most reminded of watching Joker, nevertheless reminiscent of several other works whose influence it carries lightly. In Lynne Ramsay’s 2017 thriller, Joaquin Phoenix played Joe, a traumatized war vet living in a New York apartment with his eccentric mother. In trying to clean up the rotten system ruling the city, Joe also struggled against an inheritance of malady, a violent disposition that might already be running through his veins. Explicitly channelling Taxi Driver, Ramsay’s film was a meditation on violence and masculinity that offered a critical distance to events Scorsese’s film denied. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro feature in Todd Philips’ new film, but masculinity is hardly the pressing question here, for Joker is the story of a subjectivity reduced to dust.

When we first see Arthur Fleck alias Happy alias Joker, he’s in front of a mirror putting on clown makeup. He’ll be in front of mirrors two more times in the film, but he’ll look at his own image on the newspaper and television all through. There’s a split between Arthur’s external and internal selves that Philips and Phoenix emphasize through a range of formal choices. Arthur is a social outcast, and in the opening passages of Joker, he alternatingly comes across as a threat and a victim. The melodramatic scenes depict him being ridiculed and bullied, while his interactions with decent people forebode an outward aggression. Moreover, Arthur has a medical condition—he laughs uncontrollably in stressful situations—which makes those around him suspect he’s being funny, even though he’s feeling the opposite in reality. Arthur’s behaviour belies the conventional equation of laughter with comfort and control. And Phoenix does a phenomenal job of embodying this duality.

This split perspective of Arthur as a comic and a tragic figure suspends the viewer in an uneasy relation with the character. Scenes of Arthur’s debasement prompt us to sympathize with him and expect retribution, but it’s far from liberating when he does get back at his tormentors. Part of the reason for this is that Philips and co-writer Scott Silver remove the character from the mythos of the comic world and plant him within a realistic discourse around mental health. Arthur is admittedly deranged and acts of vengeance aren’t gratifying or cool; for the most part, they are untimely and disproportionate. Philips, in fact, distances his revenge from any sense of poetic justice. The first time Arthur hits back is in a subway where three Wall Street types are beating him wild. Arthur kills them with the gun he’s carrying, but Philips composes the sequence as though it were an accidental happening. The first bullet goes off during a scuffle under flickering light and Phoenix plays the scene like a survival attempt.

Arthur tries uneasily to comply to social codes, but he’s always laughing at the wrong lines. His internal life, on the other hand, is tenuously held together by a handful of relations: his self-deluding mother living in the past, the man she says is his father, the woman next door he grows close to and De Niro’s comic talk show host Murray Franklin whom he takes to be a father figure. When these relations are proven to be lies one by one, Arthur’s inner life collapses and he becomes a purely external being, a public image without connotation. Joker traces in these disappearing connections to the reality the seeds of the character’s nihilism. With all narratives about himself falsified, Arthur becomes a being without history or future, and the universe emptied of import. The money-burning, neutral chaos that the Joker stands for corresponds to a loss of internal signification. The anarchy he witnesses at the end of the film, consequently, is a pure spectacle without meaning.

When asked about his motivations, the Joker maintains that he’s apolitical and that he has nothing to do with the anti-rich movement his subway murders have initiated all over Gotham city. It’s the world around him that ascribes a political meaning to his actions. To be sure, the Gotham city of Joker is not a morally neutral space. The garbage flooding the town is as much moral as physical—a detail that is established in the first scene in which a teenage gang harasses and beats up a hapless Arthur. The head of the Wayne corporation, Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s father) is a neoliberal figure running for mayor’s office who thinks that the city needs to be cleaned of its super rats and that vigilantes like the Joker are losers hiding behind a mask. Funding for social welfare and healthcare is being cut down—Arthur’s medical visits are forced to end—and resentment about inequality is in the air.

Arthur too shares the sense of disenfranchisement the Blacks around him experience. But the Joker is no Bane. For him, the sight of protesters donning clown masks and taking to the streets has no political weight; it’s a show to be enjoyed. Even though the protesters appear to take him as a figurehead, he doesn’t represent any community and religion is wholly absent in this world. There’s no feeling of injustice (to him or to his mother) fuelling Arthur’s actions, which are merely reactions to an environment trying to erase his existence. Of course, there’s no such thing as a truly nihilistic act. That’s why the film’s climactic passage doesn’t wholly cohere: when Arthur (now self-christened Joker) is invited to Murray’s show to be humiliated, he launches into a screed about how the world is indecent and malevolent—hardly the words of a person who sees no meaning to things. What the harangue does is to provide a cri de coeur for someone who has been proven to be hollow.

This last scene also underscores the film’s starkly non-mythical bent. Though the Joker might be nihilist, the film is anything but. In trying to understand the origins of Joker’s anarchism, the film exhibits the sort of empathy and insight-creation that’s usually the reserve of realist cinema. Given the industrial context of superhero franchises and cinematic universes, which depend on fan loyalty and familiarity for their signification, I think it’s also commendable that Joker offers a self-contained work that uses the Batman mythos only as a remote backdrop, like the way, say, Ben Hur uses the Bible. Compare the film’s sustained engagement with Arthur’s experience to the third-act shift in The Dark Knight Rises, which few viewers outside of fans could find interesting. The result comes close to the semi-independent cinema of the seventies. Philips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher balance warm and cool colours in almost every shot—reflecting Arthur’s split image—to produce textures that, to my eyes at least, resemble 16mm. Their 1.85:1 ratio Gotham city seems painstakingly reconstructed from archival documents of Manhattan. Phoenix, in an evidently virtuoso performance, walks its sordid streets, going up and down staircases, looking up and down television images, contorting his emaciated body in a combination of ballet and tai chi. Thankfully, the film does justice to him.

 

October 3, 2019

Wind Across the Everglades

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On Inspiration and Neorealism

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 483; 19 April 1959.

Wind Across the Everglades

It’s not because—in accordance with his sacrosanct habit of quitting a film on the eve of the last day of shooting when it’s not commensurate with his genius—Nicholas Ray abandoned the “set” of Wind Across the Everglades that it must be considered a lesser work. It’s not a masterpiece and it will figure perhaps at the eight position among the seventeen films of its auteur; but it’s nevertheless above the mean.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those ambitious films intended for an adventure movie market and, in this market, way too far from the norm. If he likes big subjects, Nicholas Ray nonetheless doesn’t consider the adventure movie a minor genre. For him, action, the behaviour of man in the natural world, teaches us everything about the individual and the universe. That was what was novel in Bigger than Life, where each psychological feature was expressed by the most violent of physical gestures.

Contrary to what we might think before seeing it, Wind Across the Everglades isn’t any Hollywood film. It’s an independent production put together by Budd Schulberg, writer of socially-oriented films like On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, who hates nothing more than Hollywood. But the story of this film demonstrates that he hasn’t understood what Ray sought beneath the neorealist principle of the film. For Ray, neorealism is a passkey to profundity while, for Schulberg, it’s neorealism for the sake of neorealism. Since Italians make good films in the street, it’s enough to copy them and sit with your arms folded.

Made on a small budget in the vicinity of a small village in the marshes of Everglades (Florida)—a wild, tropical Bresne—in entirely natural settings, with unknown, indigenous and amateur technicians and actors—it’s a jockey playing the ex-jockey, a boxer playing the ex-boxer, a famous writer playing the man of law—Wind Across the Everglades is first of all a documentary. Ray isn’t satisfied reusing footage from Warner Bros’ documentary stock. He films himself the shots of birds and reptiles which are among the most beautiful that cinema has given us. Beautiful in their violence, in their striking framing, in the poetic movement (which we find again in the scenes played by actors) by which the camera moves towards the animal, in the very manner that Ray directs these animals by making them overcome various obstacles. A Walt Disney crew already went to the region, but couldn’t give us as lively a document.

The subject? Like in all Nicholas Ray films, it’s violence. At the turn of last century, a young professor of natural science, now a guard at the Everglades natural reserve, seeks to stop the massacre of millions of birds that Cottonmouth, surrounded by outcasts, lunatics and convicts, hunts for pleasure in the depths of the marshes. The most surprising aspect is this portrait of beings on the margins of the society that interests Ray, who spent a part of his youth rummaging in the least civilized regions of the USA (even The Lusty Men and Hot Blood focus on bohemian lives and gypsies). But the portrait here is very cruel (cf. the jockey character). The struggle of the young man against violence is only of secondary interest. Ray has already dealt with that subject a number of times, and today he has dedicated himself to seeking the poetry of reality.

And so, the guard takes great pleasure in the lives of his worst enemies. Like in Bitter Victory, whose most subtle scene—the snake and the gunshot—we find reversed here, which also recalls the ending of Run for Cover, Wind Across the Everglades shows us the fever of men and the uniqueness of things. A very 1900s bath in the sea, a baroque pleasure house, an insane feast and a dying Burl Ives calling out to the crows: “Come and get me! Swamp-born, swamp-fattened!” The actors—Christopher Plummer, Chana Eden, Sammy Renick—are excellent since Nick Ray knows how to make them accomplish very natural gestures, which he accompanies with very short camera movements that give the impression of improvisation. In such a feverish life, the hero is always dishevelled, just like the film. The colour is average; the script, editing and music, very mediocre.

Will a more homogenous, more complete work, where the subject is just a pretext, emerge from this return to nature, whose beauties Nick Ray has naively sought to capture with the same love for life as a Griffith (Schulberg, though, hardly likes it)? That’s what happened with Renoir and Rossellini. Unfortunately, Ray is unemployed since a year thanks to a lack of clients.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

October 1, 2019

Sergeant York (1941)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

Sergeant York

Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941), starring Gary Cooper as First World War hero Alvin C. York, was the biggest box-office draw of the year and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Even so, it isn’t cherished the same way the classics of the period are. The film doesn’t feature in critics’ polls nor do cinephiles count it among director Hawks’ finest. There are reasons for this. Produced by the Warner Brothers, Sergeant York is ostensibly a prestige picture, very different in tone from the studio’s lean, mean films about the “little guy”. Intended to celebrate Alvin York’s personality and exploits, it’s too reverential of its subject, taking artistic omission or modification as sacrilege—understandable given that the studio had a tough time convincing York to let them make a film of his life. Moreover, it’s not as muscular and economical as the regular Hawks picture, with its pious solemnity and overlong acts and coda. Yet, Sergeant York is full of those fruitful tensions and contradictions typical of Golden Era Hollywood, that glorious period of film production between the 1910s and the 1950s.

The film opens with a church service by Pastor Pile (Walter Brennan) in a village tucked away in the mountains of Tennessee. As the pastor talks about God’s stray sheep, he’s interrupted by the sound of gunshots. It’s York and his pals, drunk and raising hell on a Sunday morning. Disappointed, York’s hardy, suffering mother (Margaret Wycherly) requests the pastor to pump some sense into her wayward son. The pastor tells York that a “fella’s gotta have roots in something outside his own self”. The sermon doesn’t move York, but he does change. The first half of the film unfolds like a religious parable, tracing a boorish, vengeful drunk’s transformation into a forgiving Christian. The first turning point comes in the form of Gracie (Joan Leslie), the girl York intends to marry. To that end, he works day and night to buy some “bottom land”, a piece of field in the valley more fertile than his barren ranch on the hills. When cheated out of the deal by the landowner, he sets out to kill him, only to be struck by lighting on his way. Saved by what appears to be a miracle, York trudges into the church, having found the light.

This Damascus conversion is only the first of York’s two major transformations. After York, the champion of turkey hunting, turns non-violent, America decides to enter the Great War. The year is 1917 and, after an unsuccessful attempt at abstaining from drafting, York enlists as a conscientious objector. His sharp-shooting skills at the training grounds gain him a promotion, but he refuses it. His superiors have a long conversation with him, handing him a book of American history, and emphasizing the price one must pay for freedom and Christian living. Still unable to reconcile the commandment against killing and his duty to protect life, York retreats to the countryside, where another supernatural intervention turns his attention to Matthew 22:21 in the Bible. This military reasoning—now a foundational belief of American foreign policy—relieves York of his dilemma and he submits to earthly authority with gusto: not only does he kill German soldiers, but he almost single-handedly captures 132 more in a bloody operation.

The film follows York’s outward spiral, from his self-centred individualism to his coupledom, to his community membership, and finally his American citizenship. This corresponds with an opening up of the film’s consciousness as it moves from the secluded life in the hills, to the national melting pot that is the army, and to the veritable international forum that is the war trenches. Hawks is in his elements when dealing with the egalitarian camaraderie of the recruits at the army camp, and the idea of inverting the village topography in the war field is interesting. But for most part he’s clamped down by the material’s reverence. Hawks and his cinematographer Sol Polito shoot a good part of the film in Warners’ house style full of lights and shadows, but York’s transformation scenes are conceived with a preciousness and sentimentalism closer to Frank Capra territory. His second conversion is a baroque sequence filmed on the edge of a rock, with the silhouette of York and his dog set against the sunset, as the conflicting demands of the pastor and the captain on the soundtrack. Once York’s moral quandary is resolved, the film goes down the hagiographic slope.

In his Oscar-winning role here, Gary Cooper refines the naïf character he developed in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1941). Forty years of age, Cooper interprets the character with a boyishness endearing in its absurdity. He grooms himself awkwardly in front of a mirror as “ma” fixes his pants and makes his meals. His characterization as a great shooter who eschews violence gives him a power that pays off at the end. That he could finally kill the German soldiers the same way he shot turkeys back home bestows on him an aura of innocence beyond corruption. Cooper conveys his entire character with a play of his fingers, especially his thumb: he adjusts his suspenders, dabbles with “bottom land” soil on a plate, turns the page with a lick of his thumb, hesitates with his left hand and, more remarkably, wets the aim of his rifle with saliva before shooting—a single gesture that seals his status as a son of the soil untainted by war, business and the big city life.

Sergeant York isn’t significant, however, for Cooper’s performance as much as for its crucial historical situation. It was made at a time when America had not yet entered the Second World War. The political discourse was divided between isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh, who didn’t want America to get involved in Europe and those, like the Communist Party of America, who wanted to intervene on humanitarian grounds. These tensions are palpable in Sergeant York, made by Warner Brothers, the first studio to pull its films out of Nazi Germany. Both producers, Jesse Lasky and Hal Wallis were Jewish, as were two of the film’s four writers. One of the co-writers is filmmaker John Huston, a well-known anti-Nazi. Their film clearly calls for an American intervention. The facts from World War I are superimposed current events. The Germans officers in the film are cunning and back-stabbing, far cry from Jean Renoir’s uprooted gentlemen, while Britishers and Frenchmen are good blokes.

One the other hand, the film is directed by someone known to be casually anti-Semitic and fronted by the symbol of corn-fed Americana, Cooper, who testified against suspected communists in Hollywood after the war. The film’s duality is apparent in its ambivalence towards the York’s village. With their blissful ignorance of the war and geographical isolation, the villagers are depicted as being in the wrong by the script, but Hawks treats them with an affection and respect that files their rough edges. The discrepancy was, of course, resolved by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor months after the film’s release. Now, to be in the war and to be an American and a conscientious Christian were not a contradiction in terms. The film’s success is testified by the soldiers it encouraged to enlist in the army and by the fact that Sergeant York was presented as an evidence of communist influence in Hollywood during Senate hearings in September 1941. By December that year, though, all this was a footnote.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

September 29, 2019

The Naked and the Dead

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Better than the Bridge on the River Kwai

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 474; 15 February 1959.

The Naked and the Dead

South Pacific, 1943. Three protagonists. A sadistic general who professes the greatest contempt for his soldiers and who enjoys throwing his cigarette butt on ground to humiliate his camp officer by asking him to pick it up. He’ll present him lame excuses in the end, lose face before the entire army and resign. A brutal, fascist lieutenant who crushes small birds with his fist, spits his beer on women’s faces, pulls out gold teeth from the Japanese he kills for fun and for reselling the teeth in question. His need for violence will drive him to his death. An idealist and human officer who leads a difficult mission across an island infested with enemies. Injured, he will be saved thanks to the friendship of his men.

Adapted from Norman Mailer’s great war novel that appeared about a decade ago and which has become a classic since, the script of this film recalls another famous film, adapted from another well-known war novel: The Bridge on the River Kwai. The same old song about the ideal of man and the absurdity of war.

But Raoul Walsh’s film trumps that of Sam Spiegel and David Lean solely through the strength of its mise en scène, a constant throughout the film’s 130-minute runtime.

The death of a soldier bitten by a strangely beautiful snake is depicted with a striking violence and realism. All resources of landscape—jungle, tall grass, the rocky peak that the small troupe scales at the end—are harnessed with virtuosity and variety. For once, we are in a real jungle, and the camera weaves in and out of it with as much difficulty as the hero.

In non-combat scenes, it’s the good mood that sustains interest. The relationship between solders is described with a charming bonhomie. The interludes of familial life, full of freshness, grace and poetry, contain some of the best shots ever filmed by Raoul Walsh, whose career nevertheless features more than a hundred films, of which seventy-five are worthy of interest. One must see Barbara Nichols and Aldo Ray play Bulls and Cows, trying to out-moo each other, and especially the extraordinary tracking shot that closes Cliff Robertson’s dream. One must also point out James Best’s excellent performance and remarkable composure. In short, a beautiful film, a super-production that’s also a work of quality and which completely deserves the success the public has given it.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

September 25, 2019

The Quiet American

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Metaphysics of the Arabesque

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 444; 20 July 1958.

The Quiet American

When it appeared in 1955, the Englishman Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American was a big succès de scandale. With the recent guerrilla wars in Indochina as the backdrop, it tells us the story of a typical British journalist, Fowler, who colludes with the communists to plot the death of his rival in politics and love, his friend Pyle, the typical American. Pyle believes that neither the communists nor the French can find a solution to the Indochina problem. He supplies ammunitions to an army of dissidents that represents, for him, a life-sustaining “third force”. This fascist third force increases its horrible attacks, like the one where explosives are hidden in bicycle pumps. It’s because the lives of thousands of innocents are threatened, because Pyle, an always self-assured Bostonian confident of his ideals and convinced of the moral value of his acts, remains unconscious of his actions that Fowler agrees to his murder. The Americans made a hue and cry about this book, which violently expressed the eternal aversion the British have for them. Not without reason: Greene’s partiality crudely pitted the calm, sceptical and praiseworthy objectivity of the Englishman against the ridiculous, criminal and naïve self-assurance of the American. A puerile simplification that’s far from the truth: the particular stands for the general. And it’s obvious that all Americans aren’t like Pyle, nor all Englishmen like Fowler, that each civilization contains good and bad values in equal parts. Moreover, the style left a lot to be desired, with its false journalistic objectivity awkwardly inspired by the first Malraux.

Total change of tone in Mankiewicz’s film. The eighth quarter-hour makes us suppose that Pyle was a brave fellow and that Fowler, the intelligent and lucid Englishman, was taken for a ride by the communists, whose skilful manoeuvres had forced him to judge Pyle guilty. He was only too happy to condemn him: Pyle’s disappearance will allow him to win back the favours of his eternal mistress, whose hand Pyle had just asked. That’s the explanation of the third man, Vigot, the cunning French inspector. The most surprising part is that this interpretation corrects multiple plot holes and improbabilities of Green’s novel. And we’ll still never know the exact truth… Like for The Barefoot Contessa, we can quote Pirandello without being way off.

This dramatic turn of events, this unpredictable reversal is presented with a diabolical intelligence. No dramatic insistence whatsoever: a turn of dialogue just when our attention goes lax reveals the trick; the word “plastic”, based on whether it’s said with an s or without, whether it’s French or English, changes the face of the world. It’s appropriate here to insist particularly on the value of this reversal: some “modern” films and novels—it’s enough to name Orson Welles—go against the idea of the “message”, so dear to ambitious artists, and locate their meaning, just like the exceptional range of their aesthetic, on the destruction of a carefully elaborated message; truth lies way beyond moral stances. Critical towards Pyle and generous towards Fowler, the film finally inverts these values. Pyle’s self-assurance lay on a solid and honourable base. Fowler was just a coward, a victim led astray by the gullible idiocy of tortured, hung-up English intellectuals: the last shots make him a pitiable, ridiculous quiet Englishman. The film is the sum of these two points of view.

This explains the film’s surprising critical and commercial failure: Mankiewicz cheats his viewer, who thinks he’s watching a traditional display of anti-Americanism and gets a confirmation of his prejudices for two-thirds of the film, only to be taken for a ride at the end, just like Fowler. Mankiewicz has perhaps ended his career for having caught false intelligence, which seeks not the truth but to distance itself from tradition at all costs, and the famous fear of being fooled in their own trap. Some claim that the end was more or less imposed by the distributors; in truth, though, we have here one of the most independent films that America has ever sent us since it was even produced by our auteur-director and his company, whose name pays tribute to Beaumarchais.

Moreover, the aesthetic confirms the meaning of the work: it’s in the line of Giraudoux. Arabesques, an affectation and a literary style are its major features. The mise en scène takes pains to reproduce reality in all its forms for us: lightness and “fluidity” make way for dramatic composition and psychological study. The impression is that of liberty: things and beings seem to present themselves to us as though the auteur had nothing to do with them.

The film is more satisfying when objects occupy more space than characters. This can be explained by the literary, and not cinematic, character of the great Mankiewicz, who is only a good metteur en scène. This perfectly neutral Saigon as it presented itself during location shoot, with its suburban look cluttered with scrapyards and wastelands—while our detractors asked for local colour—is very curious. The festival scenes which open and close the film are among the most beautiful moments of contemporary cinema. This ballet with masques, confetti, garlands, monster heads and heroes scattered by the crowd represents in a typical fashion an 18th century universe, which is Mankiewicz’s own. It recalls The Rules of the Game and The Golden Coach without paling in comparison.

Over two hours, our protagonists talk in a room. Mankiewicz was thus hard put to find a novel way of directing actors. We have here a great progress over The Barefoot Contessa: to be sure, Audie Murphy, Michel Redgrave and Claude Dauphin seem to be acting in the same fashion, with their banal looks, creased foreheads and worried faces. But such performance corresponds more with the film’s subject than with the excellent and inventive direction of actors that we usually find in Mankiewicz’s work. In a ballet, individuality is subsumed in the whole.

Finally, one must point out the richness of the dialogue and their constant creativity. Mankiewicz is always on the lookout for the odd and the fantastic. He often plays on language conflicts and ambivalence of words. With him, cinema gives us not a filmmaker, but a genius litterateur. We are perhaps losing out on something there. But what are we complaining about? Even if the opposite is impossible, cinema can always contain within itself both cinema and literature. Even if the latter dominates, we don’t have the right become vociferous defenders of a cinematic specificity which, over the years, has proven to be highly fallacious.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

September 21, 2019

A King in New York

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Austerity of Style

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 408; 10 November 1957.

A King in New York

In this quixotic narrative, whose only point of reference is the central character, various themes intertwine as they do in music. This style goes hand in hand with the expression of a complex reality that words can hardly express: everything can be both irritating and pleasant. “Life would be dull without all these worries”, affirms King Shahdov. Hiding behind the hysteria of rock’n’roll is the beauty and sensitivity of a night club singer. Polemist, Chaplin still is, but having become wiser and more lucid with old age, he towers over events and ideologies.

His style? He presents facts without technical affectation and in a very concise manner (see the revolution scene), but lingers over that which seems secondary to us. Every other scene is a discussion in a hotel room, an interlude but also a reflection of reality: modern life alternates action with the rhythm of a telephone. The triteness with which the scenes are presented without relief only increases the force of the smallest original notation, be it dramatic – the young hero’s tears – or comic – Dawn Addams’ play with legs in the shower – or the king’s abrupt emotional attack.

Like all creators, Chaplin forces himself into extreme austerity. Dramatic surprise is avoided, the gags pitilessly dissected and the end effect predictable from a long way away (see the fire hose). Product of subtractions more than additions, the result is better, bringing to cream pies their intellectual coefficient.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

September 17, 2019

Men in War

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Nothing but Facts

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 383; 23 June 1957.

Men in War

If war movies make for the best box office in America, they are also highly subject to commercial and philosophical conventions. And rarely has this amalgam been rewarding: From Here to Eternity or Attack (whose last shot is reprised here in contrast), despite their audacities, don’t entirely win us over. Men in War, last of the series, rejects both philosophical theories and traditional psychology about the small group. The synopsis is extremely barebones: in the course of the Korean War, seventeen American soldiers separated from their division must, in order to get back on track, conquer “Hill 465”. Only two of them will make it. To mention a few elements of secondary interest borrowed from the original novel – war novels today are constructed on the image of films: the Black foot-soldier with a soft heart, the paralyzed colonel and his hot-headed companion. But these bits of information, rather than being harnessed by the mise en scène, are neglected in favour the mystery that the simplicity of each character’s traits hints at. Anthony Mann likes heroes who are all of a piece since these are the richest. Each of them being more or less crudely stereotyped, it would have been easy for him, as it is for his peers, to fill his hundred minutes of film with detailed psychological analyses, tedious dialogue about homesickness. He didn’t do that: at one point, the exhausted captain looks at the photo of his wife and kids. This simplicity of trait has all the power of evidence.

This new style is to be explained by the fact that we are dealing with the work of a metteur en scène and not that of an auteur. And, for once, it’s for the better. There’s nothing here that isn’t justified by some notion of a purely physical order. For example, the character of the sergeant is a purely cinematographic creation: he is fascinated by the immobility of his paralyzed colonel, which contrasts with this ever-changing world, and devotes great care to him. “Tell me the story of the foot-soldier, and I will tell you the story of all wars”, goes the epigraph. And the story of the foot-soldiers is summarized through an accumulation of facts: the best shots of the films depict soldiers, dishevelled, sweaty but always active, the one scratching himself, the one removing his shoes in fatigue, the one contorting on ground, the one struck down dead with a weapon in hand, like a Hugo hero (played remarkably by Anthony Ray, son of the director); others show us, thanks to excellent photography, all the sparse “black and white colours” across nature, shadows of clouds that cover combatants in darkness, the sun that seeps through the woods, the blades of grass of unreal tones that form the real setting for the battle. One should also note some very nice ideas, the paralyzed colonel getting cured suddenly while mechanically holding the cigarette he smokes, the sergeant who pretends not to see the enemies on his heels and kills them in one blow, the lieutenant’s clenched fist on which the film closes.

Despite inspired by a classicism of admirable reserve, Men in War could be criticized for some overly studied shot sequences, especially the first one, for some borrowings from the crude art of ellipses, the radio face cut in two by the framing, the militiaman’s hand spread over the tree he hides behind, a soldier’s death seen through the movement of his feet. But the discretion of the mise en scène that seeks, most of all, the effectiveness of a simple and unique detail, there where others prefer to disperse interest, succeeds in imposing itself on us. Let’s note, finally, the remarkable musical score by Elmer Bernstein (whose services are sought by the greatest directors today).

Is Men in War warmongering or anti-militarist? I would be hard pressed to say since it’s one of those rare films whose impartiality we can praise. The work of a man preoccupied solely by appearances and their infinite richness, it allows us to see, and therein lies the essential. Up to you to make up your own mind.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

September 14, 2019

The Last Hunt

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Frozen in Hate

Radio Cinéma Télévision no. 392; 21 July 1957.

The Last Hunt

We know that almost all Westerns are of great topical interest. The journey back in time gets the viewer interested in political theses and it gives progressive filmmakers a greater latitude in establishing their ideas.

The Last Hunt, like certain other films by director Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle, Something of Value) attacks racism: it tells us the struggle of two buffalo hunters, who have directly contradictory ideas about their professions, at the turn of last century. Charlie kills for the pleasure of killing; Sandy needs money and is repulsed by the massacre he commits. This contrast explains the attitude of the two heroes towards their fellowmen. Charlie has a profound contempt for Indians, whom he kills every time he has the chance, and for humanity in general. Disgusted, Sandy leaves, taking with him the squaw who refused Charlie’s animal love. The last hunt is not to be, since Charlie, on watch outside Sandy’s refuge one winter night, dies in the cold. This statue of ice from the film’s last images – the evil eye, revolver in hand – resumes in a striking way the sterility, impotence and the ridiculousness of ultimately self-destructive, racist hate.

The intelligence of Brooks’ scenario lies in the fact that it explains the conflicts of a racial order through psychological motifs, through the taste for violence: killing Indians or massacring buffaloes helps satisfy one’s unhealthy needs without being pursued by justice. In contrast to literature, like that of a number of directors from across the Atlantic (Losey’s The Lawless, Biberman’s Salt of the Earth), it refuses pure and simple racism and relates it to the vagaries of individual conscience with great objectivity.

However, the film takes into account only one aspect of the problem, whereas the transposition should have allowed it broach more burning topics without fear of repercussions: if racial prejudice still exists in the United States, it’s to be explained first of all by a certain intellectual movement, typically of academic origin and completely alien to the desire for violence. Discrimination today affects Whites too, who are now victims of Blacks or, especially, dissident Whites, as much as it does Blacks.

Richard Brooks’ well-known honesty, so far rewarded, finds its limits here and the mise en scène affirms both the high and low points of the script. The Last Hunt is a curious Western, extremely slow and barely commercial. Brooks substitutes for the application and inventive sobriety of his previous films a somewhat belaboured sobriety. And there’s no contradiction between these two propositions: it’s a question of placing the characters within a framework that eliminates elements foreign to the psychology and the intentions of the auteur, particularly grand spectacle, fights and situation scenes. But if this kind of intellectual cinema is new and more probing than in the rare films that inaugurated it, is it desirable? Does it indicate progress? It seems to me, perhaps wrongly, that the anti-racist plea would’ve found a greater force in the exploitation of genre conventions than in this rather literary style, which instils – deliberately, I believe – sadness, boredom, barrenness through a sluggish narrative, perpetually dark colour palette and uncertain direction of actors.

These comments don’t stem from a misplaced sense of severity. The suspension of the mise en scène can be explained by the orientation of the script: the film describes beings in flight, real bodies without soul, and their blood-tainted existence. One must recall the splendid final image in this regard, which justifies the film’s style to the letter. None of this is cheerful. If The Last Hunt stands the test of time, it’s perhaps because the cinematographer, Russell Harlan, foremost of the chief operators in Hollywood, has been able to pin down this curious universe in images and because Stewart Granger and especially Robert Taylor, who gets his best role here, have been able to “embody” beings who are tortured and tormented for no reason other than the emptiness of their conscience, beings “devoid of life”.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

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