#85: Pygmalion

Pygmalion, 1938, directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, written by George Bernard Shaw, W. P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald, and Kay Walsh, from the play by George Bernard Shaw.

Pygmalion is the story of a beautiful young woman who moves in with a pedantic jerk. And yet it was written nearly 100 years before my girlfriend and I found an apartment together. It's one of those pieces of art that most people know only through derivative works. This is not all that rare when something is adapted into a musical after the fact: raise your hand if you've read Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, or even seen the Lon Chaney version. And don't get me started on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Of course, the 1938 film is already a derivative work; a film adaptation of a play. But it's a step removed from My Fair Lady, the musical, and two steps removed from My Fair Lady, the film, and since they're probably not producing the original play anywhere near you anytime soon, this is as close as you're going to get¹. Besides, this is one of the rare cases where the adaptation improves on the original, at least in a few places.

Somehow or another, I assume the story has trickled into your subconscious. Professor Henry Higgins, noted linguist, bets a colleague that he can pass a flower girl off as a duchess. Higgins is played by Leslie Howard, who co-directed the film. The first time we see him, he looks like he's dressed for a noir, though he certainly doesn't have the face for it.

And Eliza Dolittle, the flower seller Higgins transforms, is played by Wendy Hiller.

The film is mostly faithful to the play, especially toward the beginning. Asquith and Howard open it up a little, but only as far as a sound stage:

That's Covent Garden, or its sound stage equivalent, Eliza Doolittle's home turf. She overhears Higgins boast that he can turn pass her off as a duchess to fellow linguist Colonel Pickering, played by stage actor Scott Sunderland, in one of his only two film appearances.

Pickering basically serves two functions in the film: being sympathetic to Eliza and giving Higgins someone to talk phonics with. As you can see, he certainly nails the first part, and the second part is just standing around smiling politely as Leslie Howard gets manic, which he does exceptionally well.

Once Eliza arrives at the Higgins household (where, conveniently enough, Pickering is staying as a guest), the film picks up an undercurrent of weirdness that isn't present on stage. In the play, Eliza is bundled off to the bathroom by Higgins's housekeeper Mrs. Pearce, she reappears a few conversations later, and that's the end of it. In the film, there's an extended "Eliza Takes The Most Terrifying Bath of Her Life" sequence, which includes Mrs. Pearce (played by Jean Cadell) getting her scrubbing brush all ready:

Eliza shrieking in horror as Mrs. Pearce scrubs her down:

Higgins and Pickering reacting to Eliza's screaming:

And finally, more of Eliza screaming her heart out, this time in close-up:

And it's a surprisingly long sequence. I was reminded of the hand-washing scenes in the Coronet educational films David Smart oversaw; I felt like I'd stumbled into a part of the movie that someone in the creative process thought was very important, but I didn't quite get it. And don't get me started on the outfit Eliza wears when Higgins begins her instruction:

Some critical approaches to Pygmalion are best left unexplored, at least by me; suffice it to say that Howard or Asquith or Shaw seem to have some issues with control. It's not just Eliza who gets treated a little unsubtly here (and subtlety is not always a virtue). One of my favorite shots in the film is a jarring rapid push in on Leslie Howard that goes from here:

To here:

While his voice intones, "I shall make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe." from the gramophone. He might as well be wearing a magician's hat.

The film, like the play, has two perfect scenes. The first is when Eliza's father shows up trying to extort money from Higgins. He's played by Wilfrid Lawson as the definitive disreputable scoundrel:

Mr. Doolittle has one of the all-time great monologues in English literature, at least if you enjoy villainy. It's not quite "smile, and murder whiles I smile", but it's twice as charming. Here's how Lawson delivers it:

I'm one of the undeserving poor... Think of what that means to a man. It means he's up against middle class morality, all the time! If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have any." And yet my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than he does; and I drink a lot more... I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I likes it.

I've always thought those lines should be a lot more famous than they seem to be. Wilfrid Lawson's performance is completely scene-stealing. In a modern adaptation, such great lines would presumably go to the star ("He's undeserving! And he means to go on being undeserving!"), so it will be interesting to see what happens to them in the adaptation currently being developed for Kiera Knightly.

The other great scene is Eliza's first attempt to pass herself off in high society, at Higgins's mother's home. Wendy Hiller gives a world-class comic performances here. Her attempt at an upper-crust accent is consistently off-key throughout, and it's a joy to watch her pace herself through the scene. At the beginning, she's constantly slipping Higgins glances of horrified confusion:

Those are funny in their own right, but they're really a lead-in for her to gradually become comfortable, then overconfident, until she's blithely telling the rest of the tea party (in that same kooky accent) that "gin was like mother's milk" to her aunt, who she believes was recently murdered.

Everything comes to a head as Higgins hustles her out of there. When Freddy (the well-meaning dolt standing next to her in the still above) asks if he might accompany her home, she breezily replies, "Not bloody likely! I'm going home in a taxi!" This was, in fact, the first British film to contain the word "bloody," and, as with Snakes on a Plane, the line was part of the marketing. According to Wikipedia, there were ads reading, "Miss Pygmalion? Not ****** likely!".

There's one other notable sequence in the film, although it's less successful. For some reason, the original play does not have a scene of Eliza actually attending the ball she's been preparing for the entire play. Shaw cuts from Eliza failing to convince anyone but Freddy at Higgins's mother's house to Eliza, Pickering, and Higgins returning home after she successfully passes at a garden party, a dinner party, and the opera (all in one evening). It's such an obvious missed opportunity that I can only assume that it was left out of the play for reasons other than dramatic choice (e.g., to cut down on the number of sets for the theatrical production). But the movies aren't the movies unless they have a little wish-fulfillment, so we get to see Eliza in formal wear:

Shaw actually wrote this sequence for the film, and stocked it with one of his less-successful creations, a Hungarian linguist named Karpathy. According to the IMDB, he was based on Gabriel Pascal, who produced Pygmalian. I'm not sure how Pascal felt about the character, who Esme Percy plays as an officious know-nothing.

In real life, Pascal seems to have been savvier than Karpathy; for one thing, he tried to make a musical of Pygmalion years before My Fair Lady, but Shaw forbade it; he settled on making a straight film adaptation instead. Karpathy basically creates a little tension during the ball scene, as the one person who might suss out Eliza's origins and give the game up, but he's so pompous and intolerable that the threat doesn't seem real. So dramatically, this was the least successful sequence of the film. On the other hand, it has the most cinematically successful shot in the whole movie, a proto-Scorsese tracking shot that opens with Karpathy leaving his car (before we know who he is):

Pulls back and follows him as he enters the party:

Then spins as he passes to give us a head-on shot of the dazzling entryway:

And pushes back in as Higgins and Pickering enter the frame from the left and Karpathy greets them, finally giving the audience context for what they've been watching.

It's one of the moments where the film transcends its origins on stage and gives us a perspective that's impossible in theater. There are others; you won't find any montages of Eliza learning to speak in the original play (and I'm not sure what a montage would look like on stage, obviously). When adapting a play for film, there isn't any reason to shoehorn in tricks that only work on film, unless, and this is key, they allow you to come closer to the truth of the characters or situations than you could on stage. This tracking shot is a classic example, taking us from the dark, muddy streets to the pinnacle of British society in a single turn of the camera. It's just as dazzling for the audience as it is for Eliza. And yet the camera is following Karpathy, the phoniest character in the entire film. Well, Scorsese ended the Copacabana shot with Henny Youngman telling terrible jokes, so I guess it's a tradition.

But enough about the camerawork, you're no doubt screaming; the only thing that matters in an adaptation of Pygmalion is the chemistry between Higgins and Eliza. As you probably remember, the two fall madly in love over the course of her tutelage. But you're not remembering Pygmalion, you're remembering My Fair Lady. According to his own introduction to the play, Shaw wrote Pygmalion to bring attention to the importance of phonics. I'm going to say that again: Shaw thought, or claimed he thought, he was writing about phonics. Here he is in his own words:

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.

In fact, Shaw was opposed to the idea that Higgins and Doolittle should fall for each other, saying in an interview, "I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of Pygmalion than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18." When you put it that way, he has a point. Lerner and Loewe respectfully disagreed, of course, but in the film of Pygmalion, there's only one scene that, as Shaw put it, "give[s] a lovelorn complexion at the end to Mr. Leslie Howard: but it is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about." It may be the case, as Shaw has it, that Eliza would be much happier in the long run with the doltish, adoring Freddy (Shaw wrote a lengthy epilogue in which they were married). But it's also the case that Eliza and Higgins bicker and squabble like the romantic leads of a screwball comedy. So I think Shaw is a little disingenuous about the nature of Higgins and Eliza's relationship. After all, he named his play Pygmalion, and Pygmalion married his statue.

Randoms:

• Despite all the stills of sound stages above, there are a few actual exterior shots in the film. They're kind of jarring, though, because the natural light is much brighter than anything else in the film; here's Piccadilly Circus circa 1938:

I think we'd all prefer ads for "Ever-Ready Safety Razors" to the TDK and Sanyo signs that stand there today.


• Higgins's study is filled with vintage audio equipment of all varieties, including this strange gramophone with a cleaning brush. But the brush cleans the record right after it's hit the needle, not before:

Higgins seems to have the ability to cut his own records (he has a stack of albums of Eliza speaking), which made me think this was perhaps a recording device and the brush was to clean up the groove as it was etched. But the record here is clearly already complete. In any event, the pride of the collection is not this turntable or whatever it is, it's the hidden microphone Higgins uses to record unsuspecting guests. It's hard to imagine his guests would be too unsuspecting, however, because the microphone is hidden in a terrifyingly creepy statue that is sitting in the middle of his desk for no apparent reason:

• Wondering about Higgins ability to make his own records, I wandered into an unrelated device I'd forgotten all about, the Voice-O-Graph. It was like a photo booth that produced records; you can see some shots of the machinery at the link above. Most of the visible machinery seems to be used to load and dispense the records (I'm assuming that the drum on the right was for a stack of blanks). Anyway, the point is that the recording equipment itself doesn't look all that complicated, so I guess it's possible Higgins would have something to accomplish this. If you want to see a Voice-O-Graph in action, rent Badlands.
  
  
• David Lean edited the film, and directed the montages of Higgins teaching Eliza. He basically cut them together like nightmares, complete with camera angles Carol Reed would love. I think he used some of what he learned from this film when he shot Great Expectations. They reminded me of the sequence where Pip falls ill. Which is strange, because in Great Expectations he used a long tracking shot, and in Pygmalion they're montages. But both capture a feeling of nausea; perhaps it's the camera angles.
  
  
• Leslie Howard wears glasses that are identical to the "nerd glasses" you can get at any novelty shop.

They make him look more than a little like Dana Carvey in The Master of Disguise.

¹Of course, you can read it here.

#84: Good Morning

Good Morning, 1959, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, written by Yasujiro Ozu and Kôgo Noda.

A day or two after I first saw Good Morning, I received an email from Ozu fan and Criterion Contraption reader Lewis Saul urging me to watch any of his other films before this one. Apparently, Good Morning isn't emblematic of his work, and he was afraid I would get the wrong impression about Ozu if I started with this one. Well, I got the email a day late. I still haven't seen Tokyo Story, or any other films Ozu directed, but I certainly get the impression the bulk of his work is quite different from Good Morning. At the very least, the film seems a bit out of synch with his reputation. Peter Bradshaw, in an appreciation for The Guardian, characterizes Ozu's work as "gentle quietism and transcendental simplicity." I suppose you could argue that Good Morning shares those qualities, as long as you find something gently quietistic or transcendentally simple about the film's opening and closing scene: a farting competition that ends in tragedy when a young boy craps his pants.

Still, you know you're in the hands of a master director from the first frame. Ozu captures all the details a lesser artist would have missed, down to the uncomfortable, shuffling walk.

So this is not, perhaps, Ozu's most transcendentally simple or gently quietistic work. It certainly had a lot more scatological humor than I was expecting. Which is strange, because it's shot in a style you might, in fact, describe as transcendentally simple. When I wrote about Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter), I said he'd developed his own cinematic grammar, which I'd never seen before. Ozu doesn't have a grammar tied to thematic elements, the way Suzuki does, but he does have strict rules for shooting, which seem to have little connection to what's going on onscreen.

The first thing you'll notice about Ozu's style in Good Morning is also the simplest: he never, never, never moves the camera. No dolly shots. No zooms. No tracking around the room. He'll cut to a different angle, but every shot is static. You can't illustrate this with a still, obviously, but it's pretty striking.

The second thing can be illustrated: Ozu often shoots conversations head on. Whether this violates the 180° rule depends on whether or not you think exactly 180° is permitted. For example, he shoots a conversation between Keiji Sada and Yoshiko Kuga by cutting from this:

To this:

I can say at the very least it's a little disorienting. Also note the slightly low angle, another Ozu trademark. Wikipedia refers to this as the "tatami shot," because the camera is placed at about the height one's head would be while kneeling on a tatami mat. Of course, to maintain that angle, Ozu had to get the camera even lower when he was shooting people who actually are kneeling on tatami mats.

Since Ozu didn't have to worry about a moving camera, each shot is very carefully composed. So Good Morning is full of lovely symmetries like this shot of Minoru and Isamu sulking:

Most people list those two kids (played by Koji Shitara and Masahiko Shimazu) as the film's main characters. I suppose that's fair: a major plot throughline involves those two deciding not to speak until their parents buy them a television. But that doesn't happen until nearly halfway through the movie. People remember Minoru and Isamu more than the rest of the film, because after a certain point, Ozu stays with them. It also doesn't hurt that Masahiko Shimazu appears to have been cast in the film after winning the Most Adorable Kid In The World Contest.

But the fact is, a lot of Good Morning isn't about them. The first half of the film follows a group of gossiping housewives trying to figure out what's happened to the dues they were supposed to pay to some neighborhood organization or other. There are enough subplots that it's hard to find a throughline that lends itself to plot summary. So although Minoru and Isamu's strike ties together a lot of the film's themes, I think it's more accurate to describe Good Morning as a portrait of a small Japanese community lurching towards modernity.

The structure of the film bears this up: it's a series of loosely connected comic vignettes, which may share characters and locations, but tend to have narratives of their own that resolve themselves independently of the rest of the film. My favorite of these sequences was not too surprising, given my predilection for con artists. Each of the houses is visited in the middle of the day by a door-to-door salesman, peddling overpriced household goods. When the women aren't interested, he sits down, casually, and urges them to at least buy a pencil. He pulls out a pocket knife and demonstrates how easy they are to sharpen, especially with such a sharp knife.

Not suprisingly, buying a pencil seems a lot more attractive as soon as the salesman pulls a knife. A few hours later, the same women are visited by a different salesman, a nice, much less threatening young man. He's selling alarm bells that can be used to summon the police in case of harrassment by pushy salesmen. Not surprisingly, everyone's interested. Later, we see the two men going over the day's take at a bar. The only household that's spared is the Haraguchis', where the grandmother insists on sharpening the pencil herself. With her own knife.

The salesman looses interest at that point. The grandmother is played by Eiko Miyoshi, and she's hilarious whenever she's onscreen. I also enjoyed Eijirô Tono's turn as a man forced into retirement too soon. His performance strikes just the right balance between sadness, anger, and alcoholism.

Tomizawa's retirement is the closest the film comes to getting serious. Ozu strings a few thematic concerns through most of the vignettes: anxiety about Westernization, lack of respect for the elderly, the way people use small talk to avoid saying what they're actually thinking, youth's sense of entitlement (though Asia hadn't seen anything yet), the forced intimacies between neighbors who would ordinarily loathe each other. It's obvious why problems with neighbors were particularly interesting in Japan of the late 50s: city planners seem to have been trying to duplicate the feel of the Tokyo subway at home:

There's a joke about rat poison towards the end that made me wonder if the movie was about to become pitch-black (it doesn't). The essays I've read about Good Morning make a great deal of hay out of the subtext; the thematic concerns I'm mentioned about. But since virtually every other scene has a fart joke in it, it's difficult to see this as some great statement about Japanese culture. Not that that's a bad thing—I'm ok with fart jokes.

I can't think of any other movie that looks quite like Good Morning(except, apparently, all the Ozu films I haven't seen). But as with Wes Anderson, the salient question is what the style is in service of. In the case of Good Morning, I think there's a disconnect between the style, which seems contemplative and a little sad, and the subject matter.

It's not that the film is without its wistful, thoughtful scenes, where Ozu's style seems appropriate. It's not a farce; it has its moments of languor. But the overall tone is wry, and the basic structure is that of a comedy of manners. I felt like the frozen camera was continually fighting with the subject matter and tone. Even in scenes that were charming and funny, there was something that seemed a little off about the whole endeavor.

It isn't entirely clear to me why some styles of filmmaking should suit particular genres. Obviously, some techniques can reliably produce particular results: cutting suddenly to a shot of the killer right behind the victim will always make an audience jump, point-of-view shots that don't appear to belong to any particular character give a sense of unease, and so on. Shock cuts are not a learned association, they tap into the startle reaction. But the link between point-of-view shots and unease could be learned, because most times you see that technique, a shock cut is just around the corner. I've never seen another film with as completely static a camera as Good Morning, but the closest things I've seen have all been dramas. I wonder if there's something about Ozu's style that is intrinsically better suited to drama than comedy, or if I could have associated Ozu-like camerawork with comedy if, say, Ghostbusters or Airplane! had been shot that way. But they weren't, and Good Morning didn't do much for me. I probably should have watched Tokyo Story first.

Randoms:

• Both Eiko Miyoshi and Eijirô Tono are stealth candidates for "most appearances in the Criterion Collection." She's in in countless Kurosawa films, plus two of the Samurai movies. He worked with Ozu and Kurosawa a lot (if I have this right, he is the kidnapper who staggers out and dies in the begining of Seven Samurai), and is also in two of the Samurai films.
  
  
• Ozu has a head-on shot of Isamu and Minoru watching television, a rarity in the pre-genlock days.

As you can see, he avoided scan lines by cutting out the screen on the original image and pasting in a film image of the show they're supposedly watching. It's pretty apparent that you're not seeing the image on a CRT (it looks very flat, and there's no glare). Ozu's style comes in handy here, however, because the only way this effect can work at all is if you shoot straight on and never move the camera.


• There's a nice, reassuring appreciation of Ozu by Mindy Aloff that ran in the Times in 1994. Reassuring because it took her several films to really get Ozu.
  
  

The Uwe Boll Movie Challenge

I know, I know, I'm supposed to write about Good Morning. Soon. In the meantime, why not enter The Uwe Boll Movie Challenge?

New Line Cinema

As some of you know, I currently work as a systems engineer for New Line Cinema. If you read the news, you know it won't be long before I no longer work for New Line Cinema. I don't know when my last day will be, and I want to work until then, so I get my severance package. But I'm thinking about my next move. I know some of the people who read this blog work in the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles; if any of you know of an opening that you think I'd be suited for, please let me know at mdessem@gmail.com. My IT-related résumé is available online here, but I'm not solely considering IT work, or the entertainment industry. I'm up for just about anything, as long as it doesn't involve watching Salò again.. Thanks!

#83: The Harder They Come

The Harder They Come, 1973, directed by Perry Henzell, written by Perry Henzell and Trevor D. Rhone.

In August of 1973, my father and mother moved into a strange little house on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, where my father was starting law school. The house belonged to an elderly woman who promised her husband before his death that she wouldn't sell the home they'd shared. So while the rest of their neighborhood was bulldozed and turned into office space and retail, her house just sat there. And as Google Maps reveals, it's sitting there today, defying the architecture around it:

My parents had the front of the second floor, which didn't have enough room for a full-sized bed. But like many old houses, this one came with a window seat (pictured) and a terrible curse (not pictured). The curse worked like this: the house was right across the street from the Orson Welles theater. So at least once a week, some moviegoer would park in front of the driveway, blocking everyone in. And that August, the movie that inspired such careless parking was The Harder They Come, which began an unprecedented seven-year run at the theater that summer. My parents have always said that The Paper Chase—opened that October, set at Harvard Law—was sort of their theme movie for the year, but it seems to me that The Harder They Come had a more direct impact on them, in the sense that they kept having to call tow trucks because of it. So full disclosure requires me to point out that this film caused my family actual, measurable harm. But it's impossible to stay angry at a movie with this much low-rent charm.

That's Jimmy Cliff, undoubtedly about to park that car in front of my parents' driveway and make my dad late for class. He plays Ivan Martin, a kid from the country trying to make it as a singer in Kingston, Jamaica. Ivan is literally just off the bus:

And naïve enough that the first thing he does is load all of his worldly possessions onto the garishly decorated pushcart of a young man who is nice enough to offer to help him carry them. Here's the last glimpse he gets of everything he owns:

Ivan has big dreams, but not a lot of follow-through. On his first day in Kingston, he meets a gambler who is having a suspicious run of luck at dominoes, and that pretty much sums up his chances. Kingston's economy is a rigged game, and nobody makes it from here:

To here:

Ivan's no exception to the rules, but he makes a pretty good show of trying. For the first half of the film, he moves from one unsuitable father figure to another. The first is a ferocious preacher played with brio by Basil Keane:

You can imagine how well the preacher gets along with a laid-back reggae fan like Ivan—for one thing he thinks the music Ivan listens to is called "boogie woogie." But living here beats the streets, and Ivan at least manages to scrounge up enough money to buy an unforgettable hat.

You can see where this is going; the preacher has a young ward, Elsa, and his intentions toward her are perhaps not as honorable as he tells himself. She's played by Janet Bartley:

So it's no surprise that the preacher doesn't much like it when Ivan starts taking her out for rides on his bicycle (Sidesaddle! In heels!).

Fortunately, Father Figure #2 swoops in to save the day right when the preacher evicts Ivan. He's a music producer named Hilton, who gives Ivan the chance to make a record, out of pure love for music and enthusiasm about the young man's talent. Look up "avuncular" in the dictionary and there's a picture of Hilton:

I'm just kidding. He does it for the money, giving Ivan a take-it-or-leave-it deal on his single: $20 for all rights in perpetuity. Without Hilton's go-ahead, no DJ will touch the record, no matter how good it is, so Ivan eventually signs it away. That's why you need an entertainment lawyer, kids. You think cars like this pay for themselves?

Shitty deal aside, Hilton does let Ivan record a song, which is as close as he gets to his dream. Here he is in the studio; this footage was shot of Jimmy Cliff actually recording the film's title song.

Which brings us to father figure #3, the only constant, reliable thing in Jamaica:

Ivan gets in on the ground floor in what everyone in the movie just calls "the trade," recognizing that there's little else of value coming out of their country. But as with the preacher and Hilton, he chafes against the raw deal he's getting. Unfortunately for Ivan, authority figures in the drug trade stay in power with harsher methods than preachers or record moguls.¹

After Ivan kills a cop rather than be pulled over again, the second, weaker half of the film follows him on the run. He doesn't get to be famous the way he dreamed, but he's famous nonetheless. Luckily for Hilton, this means Ivan's record shoots up the charts while Ivan shoots up the countryside. Ivan is the kind of celebrity publicists dream of: he runs a pretty competent publicity campaign on his own behalf, sending the newspapers photos to run.

As you can see, he's modeling himself on Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. And things turned out pretty well for them, right?

The Harder They Come doesn't have an amazing screenplay, but it floats by on the strength of its other qualities. Almost the entire film is handheld, giving it a documentary feel, which in a way, it is. Henzell didn't hire actors to pick through a garbage heap for this shot, he just let his camera roll.

The further Henzell gets from this kind of documentary feel, the more the film suffers; compare his footage of the dump to this shot, from the knife fight that for me, marks the film's low point.

The realism of the rest of the film drowns in terrible fake blood. The gunfights don't play very well either. That means the second half doesn't work nearly as well as the first, because Henzell has a lot of plot he has to move along, which isn't his strong suit. But in the first half, the realism pays off in narrative terms. Henzell doesn't spend a lot of time exploring Ivan's desire to be rich and famous, becahse he doesn't have to. He simply documents the vast gulf between the upper and lower class in Jamaica, and that does his work for him. All it takes is a few carefully chosen details: Ivan has a copy of Playboy in the burnt out car he's made his headquarters; the first thing he does when he gets to Kingston is go to a Spaghetti Western, he looks longingly at a Stratocaster in a display window. Clearly, Western materialism is not serving him well.

I'm not qualified to judge the relative accuracy of Perry Henzell's Kingston or Marcel Camus's Rio de Janeiro, but The Harder They Come feels a lot more real than Black Orpheus. It's not just the camerawork; Henzell also let his actors speak in unapologetically Jamaican patois, so you'll want to watch this with the subtitles on. And then, of course, there's the music. Just as Black Orpheus brought Latin American music to the states, this was the first taste Americans had of reggae music. And the soundtrack is amazing: Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, and Toots and the Maytals:

There's no Bob Marley and the Wailers on the soundtrack, but this created a market for "Catch a Fire." I would bet that many more people bought the soundtrack than saw the film, which is actually a pretty fair assessment of their relative merit. The soundtrack is a masterpiece, and the film isn't. But it's still well worth seeing, both for Jimmy Cliff's charismatic performance and Henzell's great footage of Jamaica.

My mother and father would probably disagree with that assesment. In all the time they were in Cambridge, they never crossed the street and bought a ticket. As far as I know, they never bought the soundtrack either. Maybe they didn't want to support the business that kept blocking their driveway, maybe they never found time, or maybe the dealbreaker was my dad's questionable taste in music.² I like to think there's an alternate universe where they saw the movie, decided it appealed to them much more than The Paper Chase, and I had a very different childhood. But even if that's not how it would have played out, there's a shot in the movie that might have given them some perspective. It's of a corrugated fence on which someone has written:

DONT PISS U URINE
at this Gate
People are Living
here
Thank you

There are worse things in life than a blocked driveway, after all.

Randoms:

• The Harder They Come was nearly remade between 2003 and 2006 on three different occasions, with three different stories and three different stars. Sara Risher, one-time President of Production at New Line Cinema and now independent producer, brought the project to New Line. She was kind enough to sit down and talk with me about its various incarnations; together, they form a nice object lesson in the vagaries of the development process. Though she acknowledged that some of the qualities of the original would be difficult to reproduce, she made a convincing case that the basic outline of the story was timeless enough to be adaptable. The music industry certainly hasn't gotten any less rapacious since 1973. But because the original relies heavily on Jimmy Cliff's charisma, the main task was attaching someone who could carry the movie: an actor who could sing or a singer who could act. Three people were involved at various times:

  Mos Def: This version was set in New York City and was to feature dancehall/hip-hop crossovers on the soundtrack. Bryan Goluboff wrote the script, which addressed some of the weaknesses of the original story. For one thing, Goluboff finessed the moment in Henzell's film where Ivan abruptly becomes a cop-killer. I also liked the last image, which would have used a police helicopter's spotlight to directly link Ivan's criminal career to show business. The film had a greenlight, but Mos Def dropped out to make 16 Blocks.
  
  Eve: Risher started from scratch, reimagining the project with a female protagonist. This would have been an interesting take, because Ivan's character is so driven by machismo. Kate Lanier wrote the script, and as before, it was greenlit. Then UPN unexpectedly picked up Eve's eponymous television show for another season, and that was that.
  
  Lauryn Hill: Hill actually approached Sara Risher; she'd heard about the remake and had her own idea for the story. Hill's version was set back in Jamaica, but had an American tourist in the lead. Hill came with built-in reggae credibility; she has five children with Bob Marley's son Rohan. Risher went out to writers for a third time, but before a script was written, Lauren Hill went into seclusion and once again, things fell apart.

  Today, New Line's option has lapsed and the rights have reverted to the Henzell estate (Perry Henzell, a friend of Risher's, died in late 2006). But Risher has the right of first refusal for any future remake, so she may still manage to get it to the screen.
  
  
• This was the first Jamaican film, and so it had a built-in and passionately loyal audience in its home country. It's hard to imagine belonging to a culture that had never seen itself on film, but that's the situation Jamaicans found themselves in in 1972. Perry Henzell reports on the commentary track that audiences were won over in the first sequence, one of those everyday occurances that had never made it to the big screen before. The bus Ivan is taking in to Kingston has a pointless faceoff with a truck on a one lane bridge.

That shot apparently got audiences to erupt into cheers all over the third world.


• The preacher Basil Keane plays is pretty crazy, but he's got nothing on the real preacher at the church they shot at. There's some footage of him in the movie; a lot of yelling and a whole lot of banging his bible. I kind of wish they'd cast him.

• Beverly Anderson has a small role as a housewife; she went on to marry Michael Manley and become Jamaica's First Lady.

She's way better than Nancy Reagan on "Diff'rent Strokes." Come to think of it, she's better than Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo.


• Perry Hanzell got to make the first movie from Jamaica, an shortcut to critical importance that's no longer available to any of you. But don't despair! There are still countries with no local films. The IMDB lists 190 different countries where films have been produced; the CIA World Factbook lists 266. That leaves 76 countries just waiting for someone to put them up on the big screen. And even if we accept that Factbook regions like "Antarctica", "Clipperton Island," and "Holy See (Vatican City)" are unlikely to become the next Toronto, there's still a lot of potential there. Plus, if you're not from a country with no locally produced films, you might be from one of the ten countries with exactly one locally produced film.³ So if you're one of the 1,492 residents of Niue, the world is waiting for you to produce a followup to your country's first and only film.⁴ Or at least the Niueans are.

¹Well, maybe not modern-day record moguls, but this was filmed before Napster.

²C.F. "Herman's Hermits Greatest Hits." On cassette.

³The ten countries with only one film on the IMDB are:

1. Djibouti
2. The Faroe Islands
3. Fiji
4. Lesotho
5. Liberia
6. Niue
7. Oman
8. San Marino
9. Western Sahara
10. Yemen

⁴Mella Lahina's Niue: This Is Your Land, which appears to have been a student project.