Cast:
Jean Marais . . . . . . . . . . . .Avenant/The Beast/The Prince
Josette Day . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Beauty
Mila Parely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Felicie
Michael Auclair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ludovic
Marcel Andre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Merchant (father)
Jean Cocteau (voice) . . . . . . . . . Magic objects (uncredited)
It is one of the most stunningly beautiful films in the long history of the cinema, a film that, in its day, made people fall in love not merely with its gorgeous stars, Jean Marais and Josette Day, but with the very idea of the movies. With its unbearably lush images, borrowed from the Flemish masters, and its symbols imported from Freudian psychology, Beauty and the Beast is a stately and sexy parable of desire, a very grown-up bedtime story.
The film marked the first film surrealist Jean Cocteau had had total control over since the brilliantly precocious short Le Sang d�un Poete in 1930. For his first feature, he chose a fairy-tale that, he said mysteriously, had appealed to him because of what was psychologically true in the story: "I chose that particular fable because it corresponded to my personal mythology." Yet, production was stymied at every turn by fates that seemed dreamed up out of Cocteau's fevered imagination. The film was shot in the summer of 1945, in a France only just beginning to get used to the fact of Liberation. Getting props as simple as white sheets and a deer carcass meant an entrance into the shady world of the black market; cameras and equipment were dilapidated and scarce; raw film stock was precious; studio time was nearly impossible to get, and the electrical power went on and off almost randomly. Casualties among the cast due to accident or illness--actor Jean Marais, and actress Mila Parely--were frequent and serious. Cocteau himself fought the flu and jaundice as the film was being completed. Marais, said Cocteau, deserved the highest praise dealing uncomplainingly with a five-hour makeup session every day for much of the shoot. The only break the film got was when Cocteau stumbled onto the estate of Rochecorbon in Touraine, a manor house perfect for Beauty's unsettlingly romantic encounters with the Beast, and a setting whose stables and exteriors also helped give the film its unique period flavor. Yet throughout the ordeal, cast and crew labored (along with other units then shooting in France, such as Rene Clement's La Bataille du Rail company) not only to complete their own work, but to release from captivity a grand cinematic tradition. French filmmaking had been closely censored by the Germans, and perhaps some of Beauty and the Beast's imagery of anxious incarceration and glorious release may have been an unconscious allegory for a national cinema turned loose from artistic and political bondage.
Throughout filming, Cocteau relied heavily both on justly famous major colleagues, and on nameless but patient technicians. Each of them struggled off the set with the difficulties of his own Liberation days, but Cocteau remembered them as unfailingly patient with their new director. Technical advisor Rene Clement and composer Georges Auric helped Cocteau's very personal vision see the light of day. But two coworkers in particular, production designer Christian Berard and cinematographer Henri Alekan, were essential to making Cocteau's dreamy, sensual, fragile world of the imagination visible. Berard's eerie designs for the inside of the Beast's domain, burlesqued in Disney's cartoon remake, have never been equaled as an uncanny setting for love. Hallways that seem to recede into infinity, mantle pieces composed of actual human faces with unspoken, tragic histories, sconces made of moving arms, beds that look like forest bowers for mad love... Cocteau wrote of one aspect of Berard's work: "His costumes, with their elegance, power, and sumptuous simplicity, play just as big a part as the dialogue. They are not merely decorations; they reinforce the slightest gesture, and the artists find them comfortable." And Berard's ability to conjure up the Low Country magic of Vermeer, Rembrandt, and De Hooch still makes the film an art historian's delight. Henri Alekan gave a delighted Cocteau camera tricks from cinema�s ancient history--reverse motion, fast motion, and flying effects out of the great turn-of-the-century French fabulist George Melies--yet made them seem daring and new. All of Alekan's images were deeply textured and beautifully lit; that he achieved these effects often through momentary improvisation and not days of planning each shot, still amazes. Upon seeing the first rushes, Cocteau said of Alekan's sumptuous camera work, "What's Alekan's work like? Like a piece of old silver which has been polished until it shines like new ... Alekan knows in advance the strangeness I'm after." As he finished the film, Cocteau regretted only one thing about a work he knew was turning into a masterpiece. "What a pity France cannot afford the luxury of color films," he wrote in the diary he kept throughout filming. Finally, the film was done. Out of appreciation, Cocteau elected to screen it first to the technicians at the Joinville studios. In most social situations, Cocteau seemed to glitter with irony, to breathe dry wit and knowing laughter. Yet, at that impromptu premiere on the evening of June 1, 1946, in front of his fellow professionals and a few selected guests, he was beside himself with fear. Asked to say a few words before the film, he was paralyzed and silent, and sat throughout the screening holding Marlene Dietrich's hand so tight he later wondered that he did not crush it. What he saw on the screen, though, sliced through both the chic cynicism of the veteran surrealist, and the stage fright of the tyro director. Now, he clutched for the right words: �The film unwound, revolved, sparkled inside of me, solitary, unfeeling, far-off as a heavenly body.�
Others have found Cocteau's great work of faith and imagination equally affecting; it has been, ever since, a favorite of film critics, film students, and the public, a completely unique visualization of one man's fantastic universe that somehow rings a bell on the heart of everyone who sees it. Beauty and the Beast began for Cocteau a career of unparalleled originality in the cinema. After the success of another of Cocteau's films, an envious fellow director, Henri George Clouzot, delivered an epitaph that could stand in for the entire ouevre founded on Beauty and the Beast. �That film proves that there's no such thing as technique, but only invention."
Rarely seen, The Automatic Moving Company (1912) is one of the most technically accomplished early stop-action films now known. Reminiscent of the magical inventiveness of Melies and the Lumiere brothers, the film, only five minutes long, shows a horseless, motorless moving wagon taking in the contents of a furnished house. Not much is know about the makers of this cheerful film, but their painstaking work of moving bureaus and dressers or plates and spoons, fractions of inches, photographing, then moving again, then photographing again, at roughly ten shots per second of film, has left audiences universally delighted and grateful for their efforts.
Ballet mecanique, produced and directed by French modernist painter Fernand Leger, and photographed by Dudley Murphy (and, possibly, Man Ray) was begun in 1923 and completed in November 1924. Kiki, the famous Parisian model and subject of many of Ray�s photographs appears in the film, as does Dudley Murphy. A classic of experimental, avant-garde filmmaking (including one of the first known examples of loop-printing), the film originally was accompanied by the music of George Anthiel. Accompanying this screening is the music of Erik Satie. As described by Edward S. Small, Ballet mecanique is �a brief, non-narrative exploration of cubist form, black and white tonalities, and various vectors through its constant, rapidly cut movements and compositions. Many of the film�s forms and compositions are reflected in--or themselves reflect--forms and compositions in Leger�s famous cubist paintings from the period.
�The film flashes through over 300 shorts in less than 15 silent minutes. The subjects of these fleeting images are diverse and difficult to quickly catalog: bottles, hats, triangles, a woman�s smile, reflections of the camera in a swinging sphere, prismastically crafted abstractions of light and line, gears, numbers, chrome machine (or kitchen) hardware, carnival rides, shop mannequin parts, hats, shoes, etc. All interweave a complex cinematic metaphor which bonds man and machine.�
It was a time �when sharecroppers dreamed,� wrote memoirist Clifton Taulbert in his remembrance Once Upon a Time...When Were Colored, and their dreams were of escape from the Jim Crow South, of a better life for their children, of finally getting a real stake in the world they had helped to build with their endless toil. Taulbert grew up in a place called Glen Allan, a tiny Mississippi Delta cotton plantation town, and the world he knew--of segregated movie theaters, of steaming blues barbecues, of shining white dresses at eighth-grade cotillions, of forbidden juke joints and cooch dancers, of family trips to Greenwood to see another relative board the train for the one-way trip to Chicago, or Detroit -- that world is gone forever.
Taulbert left the Delta in 1962 as a young man, as hundreds of thousands before him had, thankful to put the racism and lack of opportunity of the cotton South behind him. As he grew older, though, he understood that this time of gross social injustice and rigid segregation meant that Black families and communities had to stick together merely to survive, economically and psychologically. What resulted was an unparalleled closeness among members of a community, a closeness Taulbert is not alone in wishing to see again. In his fond recollections, Taulbert painted a world that mirrors Harper Lee�s To Kill a Mockingbird as a portrait of a small Southern town with its lost folkways and memorable characters frozen in amber.
Actor-director Tim Reid (WKRP in Cincinnati, Frank�s Place) was drawn to Taulbert�s affectionate portrait of Glen Allan, and pulled together financing from many sources (including Black Entertainment Television) to mount a production rich in period detail, and loaded with great performances by beloved performers; there are 83 speaking parts in this film that spans four generations. Reid�s film is not as concerned with any particular moment as it is with all moments, with the reassuring tides of daily life advancing and retreating. Whether it is a fiery sermon in a plain, back country church, a young boy�s treasured ice cream cone, or a breathless Black crowd gathered around a radio to listen to boxer Joe Lewis whip yet another white pretender, young Clifton�s story is one of a thousand bright images. As a result, the flow and texture of Black life in the South is more fully realized in Once Upon a Time... than in Steven Spielberg�s The Color Purple. If anything, Once Upon a Time... harks back to the brief moment of Black family films of the late 1960�s and early 1970�s such as Sounder and The Learning Tree.
The realities of segregation are never far away from Glen Allan. The long shadow of the KKK looms even over the young Clifton, and we watch the community fearfully debate joining the incipient Civil Rights movement. And through it all, Glen Allan labors under the broiling Delta sun, bending its back to the rhythms of the cotton-growing season, planting, chopping and picking... planting, chopping, and picking... planting, chopping, and picking... Working, as the sharecroppers used to say, �from cain�t to cain�t� -- �from when you cain�t see in the morning to when you cain�t see at night.� Eventually, Clifton Taulbert left Glen Allan, joining the human river that flowed North out of the Delta, through Memphis and on to Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York in the greatest internal migration in American history.
Taulbert was one of over a million Black pilgrims seeking a promised land in those years. Now, Delta towns like Glen Allan, once bustling miniatures of Black society, have gone to sleep, perhaps forever; cotton is harvested, anonymously, by huge mechanical pickers, and the slim living the pickers and croppers once pulled from the Delta�s fertile soil is no longer possible. Characters like Poppa, Cleve, and Ma Ponk are gone, too, but their laughter and singing can still be heard on hot, still Delta nights. Now, their voices echo again, through Clifton Taulbert�s book and Tim Reid�s loving adaptation. Both are lessons in remembering. Richard Wright, in his 1941 12 Million Black Voices, pronounced the epitaph on the sharecroppers� life in the beautiful, bitter Delta: �But whether in spring or summer or autumn or winter, time slips past us remorselessly, and it is hard to tell of the iron that lies beneath the surface of our quiet dull, days.�
Archibaldo (Ernesto Alonso) is a kindly potter, who begins the film in a hospital, mourning for his dead fiancee and telling his strange story in flashback to a nun. It seems that Archibaldo had become obsessed with a decorative music box his haughty mother (Eva Calvo) had given him, a music box the boy believes is invested with magic powers. The boy tests the magic he believes lives in the box, and the ensuing chain of events links death to a lush eroticism in a relationship that will haunt Archibaldo the rest of his life. But it turns out that, as in so many of Bu�uel�s later works, the telling of this story itself is a loaded event, for storytelling in Bu�uel can be an act of malice or of love, but it is never simply a tale told without consequences. Here, Archibaldo�s confession is intimately linked with the bizarre cure he invents for himself, a cathartic epic of violence and desire, of the elevation of Freudian symbols to objects of strange veneration not merely for the wild Archibaldo, but increasingly, for us. . . Is Archibaldo�s commitment to his fantasy a cautionary tale, or an indulgent polymorphously perverse daydream? Bu�uel�s breezy, light tone confuses the issue completely, exactly as he intended. The film is told in episodes of mayhem, but these episodes seem to be discrete parables of lust quenched and unquenched, not character studies of a maniac. And Bu�uel�s camera never lingers on the action the way his protagonist obsesses over his music box; instead we seem to float along with Bu�uel�s agile, moving point-of-view. Because we are never allowed to wallow in Archibaldo�s Sweeney Todd life, we have to continually remind ourselves that this is a horrific tale of casual murder. We are so thoroughly stitched into Archibaldo�s world of fantasy that an equally unreal resolution to the film leaves us feeling refreshed and rehabilitated, cured perhaps of some of our own obsessions by watching the singular psychological healing of Archibaldo.
In the modernist high tide of l920s experimental filmmaking, L�ETOILE DE MER is a perverse moment of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its great silent decade than most filmmakers today could ever imagine. Surrealist photographer Man Ray�s film collides words with images (the intertitles are from an otherwise lost work by poet Robert Desnos�) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a sexual encounter. A character picks up a woman who is selling newspapers. She undresses for him, but then he seems to leave her. Less interested in her than in the weight she uses to keep her newspapers from blowing away, the man lovingly explores the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube. As the man looks at the starfish, we become aware through his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for vision itself, in lyrical shots of distorted perception that imply hallucinatory, almost masturbatory sexuality. The moody, sexually self-indulgent tone seen in L�ETOILE DE MER has its descendants in such milestones in experimental filmmaking as Kenneth Anger�s SCORPIO RISING, and in any one of a hundred archly sexual music videos. But L�ETOILE DE MER continues to resist easy decoding, and after 70 years, the man remains, inward-looking and inward-sensing, as trapped in the perceptual world of the cinema as the starfish is in its glass cylinder.
Originally shown between two acts of Relache, a new opera by Francis Picabia, ENTR�ACTE was the collaborative work of the Paris Dada circle, a loose confederation of artists dedicated to a philosophy of satirical public events and aesthetic experimentation. Director Ren� Clair was determined to use the opportunity of this short film to find �pure cinema,� the specific artistic vocabulary which would reveal the essence of the medium. In the process, he was also determined to have fun.
In characteristic Dada fashion, Clair used the devices of random association and playfulness to create an event on celluloid, a collection of images which seemed to mean something, which demanded interpretation even as it purposely frustrated coherence at every turn. The film is a kind of Dada company picnic; Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray play chess, a cannon is fired by Erik Satie and Picabia, and the whole group race about in a fast-motion funeral procession. Clair�s syntax of nonsensical images defies analysis. What is one to make of the film�s many transformations, of a ballerina into a bearded man, of a legless man suddenly gaining mobility? Is this a film about sex? About death? About empire?
Yes, of course it is. The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to assault traditional narrative verities, to ridicule �character,� �setting,� and �plot� as bourgeois conventions, to slaughter causality by using the innate dynamism of the film medium to overturn conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space. In so doing, they knew they would question the ideological underpinnings of the old era which had held the well-made story so dear. It is in the way a society tells tales to itself that one can read its most deeply-held convictions, and in 1924, the Dadaists went out in the streets and onto the rooftops in ENTR�ACTE to laugh in the face of those convictions.
WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN
(American, 1978, 126 minutes, color)
Directed by Karel Reisz
Main Cast:
Converse - Michael Moriarty
Hicks - Nick Nolte
Marge - Tuesday Weld
Anthiel - Anthony Zerbe
Danskin - Richard Masur
Smitty - Ray Sharkey
Critic Clive Jordan, reviewing Robert Stone's 1974 novel Dog Soldiers, praised the book's "mastery of contemporary American dialogue," and its "evocation of dark forces at work in [American] society." Widely lauded by critics, Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award for fiction.
Four years later, however, when Stone's novel was made into the film Who'll Stop the Rain, the reviews were much more mixed. The screenplay, written by Stone and Judith Rascoe, begins on the battlefield of Vietnam, and follows Converse, a jaundiced war correspondent, and Hicks, his ex-Marine friend, on a plot to smuggle heroin back to Berkeley, a plan that sours into bloodshed and ruin.
Who�ll Stop the Rain portrays what Newsweek critic David Ansen called "deracinated, complex characters" caught up in "the death of the counter-culture." Set in 1971, the picture painstakingly portrays the ragged end of the '60s California drug and hippie culture, including shots of Berkeley's famous Cody's Bookstore and, evoking Stone's own experience as a traveler on Ken Kesey's psychedelic school bus, recreating the guerrilla concert hang-outs Kesey's Merry Pranksters set up with the Grateful Dead in the hills north of San Francisco.
Accordingly, one would expect the soundtrack of the film to include performances by the Dead, but at the end of the project studio executives chose the music of the pop favorite Credence Clearwater Revival for the score, including the hit song that gives the picture its decidedly un-Stonean title. At the time of its release, critics were divided over the film's merits. Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic scorned its violence as "childishly bang-bang," while The Progressive's Kenneth Turan, using adjectives that are high praise in movie reviews, described the picture as "a spare, lean film with a nasty, nervous edge."
The performers, too, came in for mixed notices. Nick Nolte, combining the qualities of a Hemingway hero and Beat icon Neal Cassidy was, to Newsweek's Ansen, "a fascinating mixture of raw physical power, courage and pathology, equally capable of heroic loyalty to his friends and of sudden, irrational violence." Kauffmann saw him as "a slightly more flexible reincarnation of Buster Crabbe," while Pauline Kael said in The New Yorker" he portrayed the role "with anonymity."
Michael Moriarty, as the reporter Converse, makes out even worse. "Arrogantly casual" Kauffmann complained, "His ego is spreading over his talent like fungus." Kael called Tuesday Weld "appealing" but complained about the brown caftan she wears in the hide-out scenes late in the film. Ansen liked her "brittle, haunting performance." Kauffmann ripped what he termed "her anguished Kewpie-doll act."
Yet it was Stone's by then four-year-old novel that took some of the worst abuse in the press. Apparently bent on correcting the tilt toward praise of the author and screenwriter, the cinema critics were ruthless.
Pauline Kael was typical: "The actual plot of the film is simple to the point of pulpdom. It comes from an excruciatingly poor novel called Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, which for some reason won the National Book Award."
What the critics took away, they also gave, however. Reviewing the notices two decades later, with Stone's novel a recognized classic of its era, one find's David Ansen providing perhaps the most succinct understanding of Stone's contribution to American literature. Dog Soldiers, he wrote, "may be the strongest novel yet written about Vietnam -- or more precisely, about the war's psychic and moral consequences."
A murderous sleepwalker stalks a provincial town, skulking around jagged corners and fractured archways; a creepy carnival mystic tells a young student that he will live only until dawn; an insane asylum harbors a murderer... Such are the ghoulish accents of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, the 1919 film that set off the beautifully morbid trend called German Expressionism. For a decade the giant studio combine UFA turned out from its Berlin studios a vision of human existence that seemed influenced by the fear and paranoia of Edvard Munch�s The Scream or the graphic works of Max Klinger, or the plays of Frank Wedekind. All portrayed the human mind in the thrall of dark forces whose effects were manifest in shrill, improbable images of decadence, decay, and psychosis. THE LAST LAUGH, VARIETY, THE GOLEM, DR. MABUSE - THE GAMBLER, and the genre�s grotesque monolith, Fritz Lang�s 1927 METROPOLIS -- during the 1920�s the German cinema incubated the world�s best directors, writers, and actors in this style. The crazy angles and bizarre sets, the plots that seemed to come from a psychoanalyst�s textbook, and the grimly cartoonish characters, all got their charter in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. If there is an evergreen of sinister cinema, THE CABINET 0F DR. CALIGARI is surely it.
Yet, as influential as the film was in Germany, it had its most lasting impact in the United States. The film played the prestigious Capitol Theatre in New York in April 1921 to huge crowds. There, the film included a bizarre stage show, perhaps designed to comfort American audiences not used to seeing such a bleak world view. In it, an alleged psychiatrist, �Dr. Cranford,� addressed the audience of the Capitol and assured them that Francis, the tortured hero of CALIGARI, was insane and had since been cured, completely invalidating the film�s witnessing of Francis�s lonely pursuit of the serial murderer! This may have been designed to shield naive American audiences from the implications of the experimental qualities of the film�s narrative. Yet, diagnosing the film itself as insane wound up making DR. CALIGARI even more disconcerting, for the film already had one framing story in which the events are shakily reconceived as merely a dream.
No amount of invention could explain away CALIGARI�S nightmarish implications or its haunting visuals. Hollywood films immediately began to borrow CALIGARI�s angles and shadows, if not (at least, not right away) its disturbingly neurotic plots and characters. In the 1930�s, after Hitler had cleansed the German cinema of its Expressionist urges (he preferred lighter fare, especially German versions of Hollywood-style musicals) many of the most talented members of the Expressionist cohort came to America. Their often grisly obsessions lived on, in films like DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE WOLFMAN, and 1940�s Film Noir. Today, even many of the best of the gore/splatter cinema of directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento can trace their roots back to THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. The good doctor�s cabinet has divulged, ever since l919, an inexhaustible supply of Halloween treats...
In VAMPYR, the sleeper walks, and the vampire wears a human face. And a sad, compelling evil becomes indistinguishable from good. �David Gray� (Baron Nicholas de Gunzburg, who also produced the film) stalks the world at night, a lonely wanderer in search of answers to questions he cannot seem to ask. One night, he arrives at an inn in a small village. Deeply curious about the world beyond the doors of the inn, he goes again into the night, this time on a voyage that will end in his slipping over a nearly invisible boundary, into the world of the unfinished, the unclaimed, the undead. The schizophrenia inherent in the mythology of the vampire, a world split into day and night, life and death, kindness and savagery, is exemplified by director Carl Theodor Dreyer�s decision to portray his vampire protagonist as literally split in two. And just as the barrier between sleep and waking is a permeable one in VAMPYR, so do we find ourselves increasingly drawn to identification with young David. This is no vampire as villain, in the classic Hollywood mold; this is a vampire as unwilling victim.
To help us understand David�s confusion, his terror and his fascination, Dreyer keeps us continually disoriented. The film�s surface retains a sleek, impenetrable whiteness, unmotivated by verisimilitude. Odd noises appear on the soundtrack: bells ring, a child cries, voices mumble and moan. Actors slink through the darkness like wraiths, and the camera silently glides after them, pursuing them deep into their half-realized obsessions. �I wanted to create the daydream on film and wanted to show that horror is not a part of the things around us, but of our own subconscious mind,� said Dreyer of these deft, ambiguous cinematic moves.
Perhaps most provocative is the sexuality that Dreyer freely associates with vampirism, an element used by later versions of the vampire tale, such as the films of Hammer Studios and THE HUNGER. But the effortless transition between sexual styles in VAMPYR is a way of signifying that, in life as in death, the categories we believe are our destiny may be as random as a cloud passing over the moon on a dark night in the Carpathian mountains.
A faithful recounting of the great nineteenth-century novel this is not. The 1930s era costumes and anglicized names are only some of the less obtrusive changes to the original text. Lovers of Dostoevskii�s work will be disappointed to find that in von Sternberg�s film Raskolnikov has only one victim (the pathetic Lizaveta is nowhere to be found) and that he kills her not with an axe, but with a somehow more civilized poker. Raskolnikov�s dank little attic apartment is here a fairly spacious and sun-filled room complete with portraits of Napoleon and Beethoven (?!). Perhaps most disturbing of all, the lecherous sensualist Svidrigailov has been transformed into a downright pleasant Grilov. Sternberg himself said of his film that it is �no more related to the true text of the novel than the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower is related to the Russian environment.� If any connection to Dostoevskii�s novel does remain, it is probably more to be found in certain details of the sets than in the screenplay itself. Note the icons and samovars that litter the pawnbroker�s apartment and the recurrent image of the imperial double-headed eagle, as much a sign of the Russian Empire here as a classic Sternbergian fetish. (Images of imposing black birds and dominating, feathered bird-women are typical Sternberg motifs.)
Coming on the heels of the scandal over The Devil is a Woman, and his break with Marlene Dietrich, von Sternberg agreed to take over direction of an already scripted and cast Crime and Punishment as part of a two-film contract with Columbia. Sternberg gives a biting description of the cast in his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry: �As mixed a collection of human beings as can be imagined is before me ... Some are literate, some are not. Among those present are trained performers and those who have made the jump to the screen from the trampoline of a mattress.� He goes on to note that none of his actors, with the exception of Lorre, had ever read the novel and implies that some of them did not even bother to read the script. A dialogue between the director and his �pawnbroker,� the British stage actress and intimate of George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, is worth repeating:
MPC: I only want to know what I am to portray.
JVS: Your part calls for a pawnbroker.
MPC: I cannot possibly become a tradesperson; my agent said I was to be a vision.
JVS: Your agent must have read the script. You will be a vision, but before this is
possible you will end your career as a pawnbroker by being killed with an
iron poker.
Despite all its problems, the film does contain some interesting, even touching moments (such as the opening sequence in which Raskolnikov graduates with honors from the university and is admonished to �do good� in the world, as he steps out of the shadows into the light), and Lorre�s performance is if not convincing, at least admirable for its intensity and sad innocence.
Josef von Sternberg�s penultimate film with Dietrich (coming between Blond Venus in 1932 and The Devil is a Woman in 1935) has been described as his most striking, most disturbing work, the culmination of metaphoric structuring in his films, and a relentless excursion into style. Carole Zucker, in The Idea of the Image describes The Scarlet Empress as �the film in which Sternberg�s inquiries into the dimensionality of the frame receives the most extended and profound treatment; it is also the film in the director�s oeuvre that relies most heavily on its visual aspects.� Indeed, the film�s imagery is stunning. Present in almost every frame, often utilized as candle-holders or furniture, are examples of the hundreds of statues commissioned by Sternberg and created by his friend, Peter Bullbusch, a Swiss sculptor and later chief of Metro�s Special Effects Department. Bullbusch completed the statues in a few weeks from a mix of epoxy resin and plaster of paris. The effect is ghastly, to say the least, making it seem as though events take place not in the Kremlin, but in the enchanted, frozen kingdom of the evil Koschei the Deathless. Icons are also an omnipresent feature of the sets, but they are more reminiscent of Benois�s nightmarish, Symbolist backdrops for Stravinsky�s ballet Petrouchka, than Russian religious art. Giant-sized chairs, beds, and tables make the actors look like dolls or children playing house, and the Empress Elizabeth�s imperial, double-headed eagle throne looks like a devouring dragon.
Depression-era audiences were horrified by the film�s oppressive elements. The clutter of the mise-en-scene -- eerie statuary, veiled faces, tight framing, frames dissected by diagonal lines of staircases and hangings, and restrictive costumes -- led critics to accuse von Sternberg of trying to �assassinate� Dietrich. In fact, the film traces its protagonist�s trajectory from entrapment to political and sexual empowerment. In the film�s opening scene, we find a young helpless Sophia Frederica, played by Dietrich�s daughter, Maria Sieber, condemned to her bed without any toys, suffering from some kind of spinal ailment. The doctor -- who, it turns out, is actually the royal hangman -- announces that the young princess will have to wear a harness, provoking a nursemaid�s stifled comment, �What is he? A horse doctor?� Upon the doctor�s departure, young Sophia is left wondering if she might be able to become a hangman some day. This, in turn, leads to an attendant telling her stories of Russian royal executioners, the great tsars, Peter and Ivan. As Sophia listens to the tales, we are privy to her sadistic, childish fantasies of naked and semi-naked bodies being broken on the rack, burned at the stake, and used as human bell-clappers. It could be argued that the rest of the film is all an answer to Sophia/Catherine�s wish to become a hangman, to play with forbidden toys, and to break out of her �harness.� Sophia�s metamorphosis is marked not only by her change of name, but by her increasingly Russianized, increasingly masculinized costumes. At the height of her sexual and political power, we see her dressed as a hussar, riding a white stallion up the stairs of the Kremlin and ringing the bell that signals the assassination of her impotent, insane husband, Grand Duke Peter, and announces her new role as the �Messalina of the North.�
With its fairy tale settings, lavish costumes, and music (drawing from Tchaikovsky, but also from Mendelssohn and Wagner), Sternberg�s film is saturated in the mystique of a fantasy Russia -- the Russia of Baba Yaga, Mussorgsky, gypsies, and drunken, decadent Karamazovs, yet many critics have argued that Sternberg�s �Russia� is merely a facade. As film scholar Peter Baxter has argued, The Scarlet Empress is �nothing less than a nightmare version of the American dream as Sternberg had lived it, the dream quite literally of upward mobility that overtakes its subjects, inflates them with limitless ambition, and gives them everything they could want in return for everything that they are.�
WORKS CITED
Baxter, Peter. Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount and America. London: BFI, 1993.
von Sternberg, Josef. Fun in a Chinese Laundry. NY: Macmillan, 1965.
Zucker, Carole. The Idea of the Image. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988.
For years, Lubitsch had wanted to make a film with Garbo; here, finally, was his chance. For Garbo, Ninotchka represented her first foray into American comedy . . . it turned out to be her favorite of all her American films. Later, she would say of Lubitsch, �He was the only great director out there. Ninotchka was the only time I had a great director in Hollywood.� For Lubitsch, Ninotchka marked the beginning of his richest period in film. �Lubitsch Rides Again!� announced the critics.
Appearing during a time when �A� Westerns and historical epics dominated the American screen, Ninotchka has been called the most �historically conscious� and �timely� of Lubitsch�s films. In fact, Ninotchka was already a little out of date when it was first released. Filmed between May and July, 1939, Ninotchka was completed on the very eve of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. Before the film�s release, a new introductory title needed to be added: �This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm . . . and if a Frenchman turned out the light it was not on account of an air raid!�
Lubitsch (born in Berlin, l892, his father having come to Germany from Russia in the l880s) had made a trip to Russia in 1936 in search of his own roots and those of his new wife, Vivian Gaye, whose mother was Russian. There he had been feted by the head of Goskino (the State Cinema organization), Boris Shumyatsky, and found his inspiration for the characterization of Ninotchka in the person of an old friend who had become a die-hard Bolshevik. Nonetheless, what emerged from Lubitsch�s film is less a reflection of the �Russian character� (in its 1920s or 1930s manifestation) or the relation between Soviets and Westerners than a comic investigation into Lubitsch�s favorite question, �To play or not to play?�
When Lubitsch was hired on to the production, the sketch for the script read: �Russian girl saturated with Bolshevik ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.� Yet, in the end, Ninotchka�s basic conflict is not capitalism vs. communism but sensuality vs. selflessness. Throughout the film, Ninotchka never loses her political convictions. Laughter, love, Parisian fashion, champagne -- none of these things can prevent her from standing up and proclaiming the goals of the Revolution, whether it be in Paris, Moscow, or Constantinople, a royal hotel suite, a communal apartment, or a women�s powder room. The hat that Ninotchka first sees upon her arrival in Paris, and describes as a product of the �doomed� capitalist West and which she later buys and wears is not so much a symbol of capitalism as it is a piece of pure impracticality, a symbol of silliness. The hat looks ridiculous on Garbo -- and that�s just the point.
Watching the film from the other side of history (after both the Second World War and the Cold War), the (post)modern viewer encounters moments that are -- to say the least -- uncomfortable. After Khrushchev�s �secret speech� and the revelations of glasnost, it is a little painful to witness Ninotchka�s mock execution and to hear Garbo�s famous line, �The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer, but better Russians.� Nevertheless, the �Lubitsch touch� still works, the witty dialogue still sparkles, and Garbo�s dead pan delivery still amazes.
What a difference four years can make. The Russians who were likable but misguided, cold and ideological on the outside but warm and romantic on the inside in Ninotchka have been transformed into full-fledged martyrs in Milestone�s film. Now an ally in the war, the Russians in The North Star seem strangely un-Soviet. While Ninotchka�s trip back to Moscow was marked by a distinct graying of the set and by posters bearing Stalin�s portrait and words like �INDUSTRIALIZATION,� Milestone�s �village� is curiously devoid of any references to the Soviet era. Lenin himself is nowhere to be found. In fact, despite Milestone�s own Slavic heritage (he was raised in Kishinev), his protagonists are suspiciously Mid-Western American. (One can�t help thinking that if the Disney corporation were to create a new theme park called �Russialand�, it would look something like this.) A �Russian folk song� with music by Aaron Copland and words by Ira Gershwin says it all.
At certain points in this film, it seems as though Milestone has forgotten everything that he taught us in his anti-war masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). At other times, however, Milestone does succeed in revealing the horror and tragedy of war. The abrupt transition from a vision of happy peasants at work, at rest, at school, and at home in the midst of their families to a landscape full of smoke, destroyed buildings, burning wheat fields, and dead bodies is chilling, as are the scenes in which we watch Nazi doctors methodically bleeding Russian children to death. Again, watching this film from the other side of history, Marina�s final judgment is heartbreaking: �None of us will be the same. Wars do not leave people as they are. All people will learn that and come to see that wars do not have to be. We will make this the last war; we will make a free world for all men.�
--Diana Davies, SUNY at Binghamton
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Millichap, Joseph. Lewis Milestone. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.
Weinberg, Herman. The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study. NY: Dutton & Co., 1968.
The Hollywood film industry was enlisted by the White House to clarify murky Soviet-American relations. The films that resulted were Warner Brothers� MISSION TO MOSCOW, MGM�s SONG OF RUSSIA, RKO�s DAYS OF GLORY, and Samuel Goldwyn�s THE NORTH STAR, and each bore the mark of many enthusiastic hands. Like the anti-communist films of the 1950s (I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI, WALK EAST ON BEACON, THE RED MENACE, THE WHIP HAND, etc.) these were works made for a patron momentarily more important even than the mighty box office: in this case, the war effort. What resulted were well meaning but often garbled conglomerations of high school world history, Book-of-the-Month Club politics, and a schlocky version of Mittel-European folk life borrowed from various horror movies and operettas.
THE NORTH STAR�s creative team was a distinguished one. Initially, Goldwyn favorite William Wyler was to direct, but Wyler�s Army service (which would culminate in THE MEMPHIS BELLE and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) intervened, and Goldwyn was able to convince Lewis Milestone to helm the film. Milestone�s career was nearly as fabled as Wyler�s: the universally praised ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and the stylistically daring THE FRONT PAGE had been among the highlights. To write the screenplay, Goldwyn engaged Lillian Hellman, the period�s most prominent Popular Front writer. The cast was composed of Goldwyn�s most prominent young contract players (Farley Granger, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews) and Hollywood character stalwarts like Walter Huston, Erich von Stroheim, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding, and Dean Jagger. Aaron Copland wrote the score, and Ira Gershwin supplied special lyrics to the �Russian folk songs� invented for the film. Margaret Bourke-White, who had photographed the Eastern front, was commissioned to make stills for the film.
What resulted was �a picture about average Russians for average Americans,� as the film�s publicity had it. Unlike, say, MISSION TO MOSCOW, Warner Brothers� tortured adaptation of Ambassador Joseph Davies� memoirs (which �starred� Stalin, Churchill, and FDR, played by impersonators), THE NORTH STAR chose to avoid the byzantine history of Soviet-American relations. Instead, the strategy of THE NORTH STAR was a simple one: to �deexoticize� Soviet Russia, and make Americans recognize in an idealized portrait of Soviet village life a set of outlooks and experiences similar to their own. Thus, if the citizens of the village North Star seem to eschew political discussion, well, after all, didn�t Americans also constantly profess exasperation with the doings of politicians, and prefer to mind their own, local business?
The world of THE NORTH STAR is a nineteenth century one. The film ignores the massive 1920s and 1930s Soviet public works projects, the forced collectivization of farmlands, and Stalin�s ruthless purges of kulaks, generals, and dissidents, locating its warm, simple townsfolk in a precious-seeming countryside, and a harmonious community. Collective activity in the film seems entirely voluntary, a natural outgrowth of the villagers� cooperative agrarian lifestyle. In particular, the account of the complicated, dark Stalinist politics of the 1930s given in the film is intentionally glib. As he dismisses his pupils at the beginning of the summer in 1941, Iakin, the headmaster in a village school, jokingly tells his young charges that he will not ruin their vacation with a political lecture, adding �But this is the summer of 1941, a solemn time. No one of us knows what will happen. I don�t have to remind you that we are a people with a noble history; you are expected to carry on that history with complete devotion and self-sacrifice.� This is virtually the only mention of Soviet (or Tsarist) history in the film, and communism itself is never properly explained. Far more important than its passing, opaque reference to Soviet politics, heavily-freighted moments such as this one put the naive Soviets in the same spiritual place as Americans, who in countless movies made during World War II are seen in flashbacks enjoying the simple pleasures of prewar life oblivious of Japanese and German treachery. Often, these incidents in THE NORTH STAR, such as a lengthy village celebration at the beginning of the film, are loaded with overbearingly folksy touches, yet they are no more indigestible than a score of films made about American village life during the war years. And the picture of Soviet Russia at war in THE NORTH STAR is remarkably unrelenting for an American film of the period, an indirect product of the admiring testimony of journalists such as Bourke-White and Harrison Salisbury. By 1943, the Soviet partisan and the Russian woman soldier were already staples of Allied wartime propaganda, as were accounts of Nazi atrocities on Russian soil. THE NORTH STAR capitalized on audiences� familiarity with these archetypes for added sympathy.
Yet Hellman was incensed at what she believed was a dumping-down of her screenplay. The best explanatory material she argued, was being written out on the set by Milestone, or edited out of the rushes by Goldwyn. (In fact, Hellman�s �explanations� of such issues as collectivization were more in the nature of vague apologies, not much clearer or more accurate than what remains in the film.) Her conflict with Goldwyn about THE NORTH STAR boiled over, and she bought out her contract with him for $30,000. The year THE NORTH STAR was released, she published her original screenplay through Viking Press, a highly unusual practice for the time, and one that guaranteed that her version of the film would be a matter of public record.
Thus began THE NORTH STAR�s strange afterlife. Like other films in the cycle, the late 1940s and early 1950s House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings used THE NORTH STAR as a club with which to beat Hollywood. Novelist Ayn Rand, who had written MGM�s SONG OF RUSSIA, helped establish her credentials as a poster child of the literary Right when she claimed that her film, which featured an elaborate folk musical number complete with girl soldiers as a chorus line, was an obvious fabrication, because average Soviet Russians never smiled. Hellman�s attitude toward the committee was defiant, and both she and director Milestone were quietly �gray-listed� by the industry. Rereleased in the mid l950s as ARMORED ATTACK, the film was savagely recut, and a clumsy voice-over added that made the film a narrative about the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary!
THE NORTH STAR remains a relic wholly of its time, that brief moment in World War II when America allowed itself to believe in the Soviet Union as a place not so fundamentally different from our own. THE NORTH STAR fails spectacularly as an icon about Russia, but succeeds admirably as a common anti-fascist crusade.
Kevin Jack Hagopian, University of Memphis
Tiananmen Square�s pictures are burned onto history�s retina: the faux-Statue of Liberty, fragile, brash, and deeply moving; the starving, sweating students, tough and idealistic, smiling in the sun of a new day; then, gunshots in the dawn and garbled stories from international news correspondents, the sound of fear in their breathless dispatches. And then the final moment in Tiananmen�s Chinese opera, a wordless aria of freedom: a nameless student, reedy and resolute, decides that only human will is required to hold back tyranny, and proves it by standing in front of a tank.
That moment ranks as one of the most expressive in the history of democratic aspiration, but it was essentially a silent one, and directors Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon recognized that as Tiananmen Square�s June 1989 climax began to lose its immediacy, it was time to restore the voice to those from whom it had been stolen, the students themselves. The theft of that voice, of course, had been the vile project of the Chinese dictatorship from the beginning. Thus most of THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE is told in the quiet, stirring words of those who led the attempt to make a new China.
The film knits the complex prehistory of the Chinese democracy movement into the events of April to June, 1989. The film presents Tiananmen as the last act in a tragedy whose plot had grown relentless. Moderate desires for reform are met with some respect within the government, only to be rebuffed as hard liners assume national political power. Students, workers, and intellectuals are hopeful, then frustrated, as they hear themselves spoken of as plotters and saboteurs in a conspiracy allegedly aimed at dismembering the country. In response, the democracy activists harden their own methods in a dangerous chess game played out on Tiananmen�s vast concrete plain. We learn much more than a chronology here -- we discover the little-analyzed (in the west) �third way� of Chinese political reform, a soft path to political change that was crushed, along with so much else, under the tracks of Tiananmen�s tanks.
The film itself became part of the dialectic of reform when its showing at the New York Film Festival prompted Chinese leaders to retaliate by not allowing director Zhang Yimou to attend. Director Carma Hinton was determined, though, that her film, while extraordinarily evenhanded in its treatment of the opposing forces in contest at Tiananmen, would restore their own narratives to the dissidents: �The number-one concern we had was for the film to be a forum for the range of different voices talking about what China needs. One thing that struck me was that hardly any Chinese got to speak� in other Western accounts of the uprising. �Mainly it was American anchors or reporters explaining what the Chinese wanted or did or didn�t do. . . You could hardly hear any Chinese voices finish an idea, or even a sentence.� In order to get to the point of correcting this imbalance, Hinton and Richard Gordon used seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to, as their grant put it, �push the frontiers of scholarship� in modern China studies. The sheer amount of misinformation about Tiananmen, says Richard Gordon, made this preparation necessary, as did the competing versions of history told by the different participants.
Director Carma Hinton was born in China and lived there until she was 21, the daughter of China scholar William Hinton, whose studies of the land reform in the rural village of Low Bow are classics in rural sociology. Her husband, Richard Gordon, is also an experienced China specialist. Together with a team of scholars and participants, they sorted through hundreds of hours of footage dating back to the 1920s, and thousands of photos and posters. One result was the creation of the most complete archive on the events of 1989 in China ever assembled.
Logistics were astoundingly complex, not merely for obtaining footage (CNN, says Richard Gordon, was �just a nightmare to deal with�) but for shooting and researching in China. Only by playing one bureaucrat off another, and by conducting clandestine interviews, were Hinton and Gordon able to complete their labors in China with such success. Indeed, they were so amazed at the bravery of some dissidents still in China that they �pulled the plug� on several interviews which might have put the interviewee�s life and liberty in danger. Meanwhile, while the film was in progress, second-hand accounts of its content drew attacks from the dissident community, several of whom felt that the film went too easy on the Chinese government. It is precisely this ideological stiffness, on both sides, which the film criticizes, though its sympathies are clearly on the side of the protesters.
It is the material shot for the film, especially interviews with participants in exile, that is the most powerful. The heroes of Tiananmen are reserved and quiet, gentle people with small, soft voices. Who could have believed that they could topple a mighty edifice like the Chinese ruling regime, with all its iron strength? We see the activists as leaders in their new homelands, but we also sense a strong feeling of displacement and loss as they tell us of their lives since 1989. How much stronger would their own country�s heart beat if their blood were still in China�s veins?
Kevin Jack Hagopian, University of Memphis
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