#35: Diabolique

Diabolique, 1954, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi, Frédéric Grendel and René Masson, from the novel Celle qui n'était plus, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

It's extremely rare for a marketing department or critic to hail a film as the best ever made, or the funniest, or the saddest, or anything else, with one exception: movies are routinely marketed as the most frightening. What's more, there seems to be some consensus about what the most frightening movies were at any particular time; Nosferatu had the title for a long time, as did Psycho. These days, I've heard again and again that Audition is the most frightening film ever (I haven't seen it yet). I think people are able to make this distinction for horror films in a way they can't for comedies or dramas because a good horror film can keep you creeped out for days, in an involuntary and not necessarily pleasant way. This provides a relatively objective measure of how frightening the film was. Anyway, from 1954 to 1960, Diabolique was the undisputed champ.

For a modern viewer it's more of a thriller than a horror film; there's nothing particularly terrifying outside of the last ten minutes or so. But by modern standards of thrillers, it's exceptional. The plot is the star, more than the individual performances or direction or cinematography, so the plot is what I'd like to talk about most. However, the movie has a surprise or two in it, and Clouzot ended it with the following admonishment: "Don't be DEVILS! Don't ruin the interest your friends could take in this film. Don't tell them what you saw." So I'm not going to go into great detail about the second half of the film, which means this will be an incomplete review.

Paul Meurisse plays Michel Delasalle, the principal of a French boarding school with a relatively great life. He's got an attractive wife and an attractive mistress, he makes a comfortable living off his wife's fortune, and he keeps himself amused by bullying people around him. And because he works at a school, he's got plenty of targets. However, his wife and mistress are both less than amused and less than trustworthy. Here's the whole happy family:

L to R: Simone Signoret plays Nicole Horner, the mistress. She's wearing sunglasses because Michele gave her a black eye. Vera Clouzot (the director's wife) plays Christina Delasalle. And Michele is on the right, amusing himself at the women's expense.

As you might have anticipated from the still above, Nicole and Christina team up to exact a hilarious revenge on Michel. It's kind of like First Wives Club. Below is Michel after falling victim to one of their little pranks. See if you can spot the difference between the two stills:

That's right: in the second picture, his suit needs ironing. Also, he's been drowned in a bathtub. Not a pleasant end, but then Clouzot goes to extraordinary lengths to show the audience what a bastard this guy is. He beats his wife (who he affectionately calls "my little ruin"). He beats his mistress. He mistreats his employees. He buys rotten fish for schoolchildren (no, really!). If anybody ever had it coming, it's Michele.

So you're sympathetic to his wife and mistress; you want them to get away with this murder. They have a pretty good plan, too: they drug Michele, drown him in a bathtub while he's passed out, sneak him back into the school grounds and dump him in an unused swimming pool, where he disappears beneath the algae-covered surface. By the time he surfaces, everyone will assume he got drunk and drowned himself.

Except he doesn't surface. Days go by and the body doesn't turn up. Finally, they drain the pool, but the body is gone. As the murderesses begin to turn on each other, someone seems to be having a joke at their expense: Michele's suit is returned from the dry cleaners; someone has rented a room in his name. And that's before the supernatural stuff starts happening. I won't go into the plot in more detail here, but suffice it to say you'll find it more accessible and absorbing than most movies made today. I love Psycho, but I'm not sure it should have taken Diabolique's place in the pantheon of horror movies. Psycho will make you afraid of showers. Diabolique will make you afraid of water.

Randoms:

• The structure is different than it would be today. Michele is killed roughly an hour into the two hour movie, and the bulk of the time before that is spent establishing how truly awful he is. Today you wouldn't have to motivate the murder so well, and you'd want to get to the part of the story that everyone will remember (the missing body) in the first fifteen minutes if possible. I haven't seen the 1996 remake (with Sharon Stone in the Simone Signoret part), but I'd be willing to bet the murder happens much sooner.
  
  
• The last ten minutes of this movie have clearly influenced every horror movie that followed. Or at least every good horror movie that followed. When you're watching it, pay particular attention to the exceptional sound design.
  
  
• Hitchcock tried to buy the rights to this novel, but Clouzot beat him by a few hours. Boileau and Narcejac wrote their next novel specifically for Hitchcock; he filmed it as Vertigo.
  
  
• Robert McKee (author of Story and character in Adaptation) uses Diabolique as his prime example of image systems. An image system, for McKee, is a recurring set of related symbols that increase the viewer's emotional response to the film. In Diabolique, the recurring image is water (as you might imagine in a movie about drowning). The titles are over an extreme closeup of rain falling in a mud puddle, it's constantly raining, and we keep hearing rain, faucets, drains, liquid being poured; it's in every scene.
  
  N.B.: I don't think image systems are particularly helpful at the screenplay stage of making a movie; they're more of a director thing. And they're something that script readers watch for now, so if you write a script that opens with a shot of a bird and doesn't have birds in lots of later scenes, you'll be accused of "establishing a false image system." Thanks, McKee!
  
  That said, McKee is right about Diabolique. It's an extraordinarily wet movie. And it successfully associates water with decay and death, which is a reversal of its normal symbolic value. You can see the same value switch being tried in The Ring, down to the wet footprints from the end of this movie.
  
  
• The wife and mistress seem to have an exceptionally close relationship. One of them has short hair and wears a lot of business suits. The other has long hair, often braided in pigtails, and favors dresses of the "Dorothy in Oz" variety. I have no further comment on this. Pervert.

#34: Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev, 1966, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, written by Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky.

Here's a minor incident in Andrei Rublev that illustrates the film's moral landscape. A Russian prince is building a new house; he hires stoneworkers to do part of the construction. They finish the work on time and under budget, but the prince isn't happy; he wants the whole place redone because the colors aren't bright enough. The contractors won't do it; they have been hired for another job. As it happens, they're supposed to go work on a house for the prince's brother, where (they unwisely inform the prince), no expense is being spared, and the quality of the stone will be better. The prince shrugs his shoulders, resigns himself to being outshined by his brother, and sends them on their way.

Then he has his soldiers meet them on the road and gouge their eyes out.

A forest filled with eyeless men screaming in pain and crawling in circles: that's the backdrop of cruelty against which Andrei Rublev operates.

The film is a fictional version of the life of Russia's greatest iconographic painter, and in many ways it's as strange as iconography itself. It's a movie about a great painter in which you never see anyone painting; the title character is usually peripheral to the action (if not entirely absent); it has not three but seven clearly delineated acts (plus a prologue and epilogue), and the first clear footage you see of one of Rublev's paintings occurs roughly three hours and twenty minutes after the film begins. That's right, three hours and twenty minutes (total running time: 205 minutes). So have some coffee ready. The movie deserves both the time and attention it demands, however. Tarkovsky raises questions about power, suffering, theology, and art in a richer fashion than any other filmmaker. I expect to have Andrei Rublev floating around in the back of my mind for a long time.

If you're not familiar with Rublev's work (I wasn't), he lived from around 1360 to 1430. Here's the one surviving painting that's entirely his own, the Old Testament Trinity (the image depicts Abraham's three guests in Genesis 18):

(Click for a high-res version from Wikipedia)

For me, the invention of linear perspective is a bright line between painting I really appreciate and painting that seems more mysterious than approachable. Of course, Eastern iconography isn't meant to be approachable in any sense of the word; part of the point of its strangeness is to remind the viewer that what it depicts is not the world we know, but spiritual truth. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox church had (has?) a set of very strict rules for iconography, established in 1551. The model from which these rules were drawn was the work of one Andrei Rublev. So Rublev's influence was not limited to artists independently imitating and learning from him (as is true of every other artist); his style of painting was church law.

That's all background to the movie, and honestly you don't have to know any of it to appreciate the film. Rublev's personal artistic development is at best a secondary concern; the main concern as I see it is dealing with a world in which the exercise of power, whether by God or man, is unjust and arbitrary. Again and again, Tarkovsky presents the viewer with scenes of people being punished. Sometimes we know why: a jester is arrested for singing an obscene song about a boyar (and dropping his pants). Sometimes, we have no idea: the second act opens with a monk walking across a city square as a man in the background is tied to a rack. He protests his innocence, but we never know what he's innocent of.

Tarkovsky has an eye for the way cruelty and power are exercised. You can see it in the bored faces of the guards in the first act as they smash the jester's face into a tree, or the false bonhomie a Tartar warlord maintains as he marches toward a city he will utterly destroy. Tarkovsky is also keenly aware of the ways the powerless console themselves, from Theophanes the Greek's nihilistic wish for apocalypse ("We'll burn like candles") to Rublev's withdrawal into asceticism. But then, growing up under Stalin would give anyone an unusually strong grasp of the way the powerful use cruelty, terror, and pain.

For me, at least, it was impossible to watch this movie without thinking of Stalin. Tarkovsky was born in 1932; for the first twenty years of his life, he knew no other political leader. Martin Amis has written that Stalin's cruelty "was not medieval so much as ancient in its severity." Well, Andrei Rublev has plenty of medievally severe cruelty. Some of it is difficult to watch. And in the Russia that Tarkovsky grew up in, medievally severe cruelty simply wasn't severe enough. Medieval severity just wouldn't do. It should be no wonder that what could have been a traditional biopic became a meditation on the artist's role in an unjust society.

All this makes the movie sound at once more cruel and faster paced than it really is. Art is part of Rublev's story, and it's not entirely a story of suffering. You can see Rublev struggle from beginning to end with a question which must have had personal significance for Tarkovsky: does an artist have a responsibility to the powerless? In the first act, Rublev says nothing as the jester is taken away; in the third, he stumbles onto a pagan celebration and later says nothing as soldiers round up the revelers. He is hired by the same prince that gouges his coworker's eyes out, and again does nothing. When he finally does act, killing a Tartar during the sack of Vladimir, he is wracked with guilt and retreats entirely from the world, ceasing his painting and taking a vow of silence which he does not break for years. The question of when artists should bear witness, when they should intervene, and when they must forgive hangs over Rublev's life from beginning to end. It's not a great stretch of the imagination to imagine that it also hung over Tarkovsky's.

The cinematography in this film is spectacular. Tarkovsky and his D.P. Vadim Yusov have a genius for camera movement, and there are shots in this film that rival Scorcese or Welles at their most elaborate. The best example of this is a shot toward the end, during a sequence in which a cathedral bell is about to be raised from the hole in which it has just been cast. This is one continuous shot, broken down into frames, and worth going over in its entirety.

The camera begins rougly above the bell, looking at the line of cables that will be used to pull it from its hole:

The camera follows the cables up, revealing the walls of a city in the distance and putting a procession on horseback crossing a bridge toward the center (this is the prince who has commissioned the bell, leading an Italian ambassador up to hear the bell ring for the first time, but we don't know this yet):

We follow their path across the bridge and up into the middle distance:

The structure of a building appears in the left part of the frame and the camera leaves the procession to track along the roofbeams...:

...Revealing that the building is, in fact, the forge where the metal for the bell was fired (we've seen it in an earlier scene).

Tracking the beams all the way across reveals a group of men gathered around a winch further left:

The camera centers on the winch...

...and then begins a vertical pan along the rope they are pulling, until a man's head appears very near the foreground:

He's standing on a wooden structure directly below the camera; one of its beams cuts straight across the frame as we track back:

Until we are looking down into the pit the frame encloses, and can see the bell far below us, with all the ropes attached.

I love two things about this shot;. First, its scale varies incredibly rapidly. The city walls must be a mile away; the man on the bell structure is a few feet from the lens. You can see kind of the same thing in some of Peter Jackson's best work on Lord of the Rings. The other thing about this sequence is that the camera's movement seems to be motivated more by geometry than by anything human. If you look at the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas, part of what makes it so inviting is the way the camera tails Ray Liotta, like you're someone who also gets to go into the back entrance to the Copa (the same holds for all the shots that ripped it off after then). This is different; the camera seems to pick up a geometric shape in the image (the lines of the cables, or the roofbeams, or the bridge) and tracks it until a more interesting line to follow appears. It's spectacular but not intimate, not human. Tarkovsky's detatchment here reminds me of nothing so much as iconography.

Randoms:

• The eye-gouging is by no means the hardest thing to watch in this movie. The sack of Vladimir in the second part is nearly impossible to watch. It seems to be based at least in part on Guernica, and has many shots that are truly horrifying (a cow smashing around a stable in terror, its skin on fire; a horse falling down a flight of stairs, struggling to its feet, and collapsing backwards as its broken legs convulse; blood jetting from a young boy's neck). It ends with a villager (a priest?) being tortured to death inside a church. He asks to be allowed to kiss a cross before dying; his tormentors agree, then melt a silver cross down, hold his mouth open, and pour several cups of molten metal down his throat. The gurgling sound he makes has already appeared in one of my nightmares.
  
  
• Vlada Petric quotes Tarkovsky in one of the extra features as saying that what makes a film epic is when each character is his own center of the movie. I think this is a valuable point. When I'm working on an outline for a screenplay, I know I'm on the right track when I can tell the story from the perspective of any of the main characters and get a coherent movie with a beginning, middle, and end. Andrei Rublev takes this to a real extreme; Rublev is arguably not the main character in almost every act of the movie. But from the perspective of any character the film stays with during an act, there's a real story, beginning, middle, and end.
  
  
• I went all the way through that one shot of the bell and I didn't even mention what was, for me, the most beautiful sequence in the movie: Andrei Rublev's vision of the crucifixion. It's pretty traditional, with one exception. It's in Russia in the middle of winter. One still from this hauntingly beautiful scene:

• The release history of this film is troubled; for some reason, the Soviets didn't want something that could be read as critical of the Soviet experiment on the market. For an example of why they didn't like it, try to read this description of the Pharisees (from the voiceover to the crucifixion scene) and not think of the Russian Revolution:

  The Pharisees were masters of deceit, educated. They had studied to gain power, to take advantage of the people's ignorance. We must remind people more often that they are people. Russians, of the same blood, of the same land.

  As a result of passages like these, the film was shelved upon its completion in 1966 and not publically shown until the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (when it was shown semi-illegally, over protests from the Soviet Embassy). This gap between completion and screening is why the IMDB lists the film as being from 1969, the Criterion Collection from 1966.
  
  

#33: Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North, 1922, written and directed by Robert J. Flaherty.

When I was maybe four or five years old and I'd get bundled up to play in the snow, my parents used to say that I looked like Nanook of the North. It was one of those things that delighted me at that age; it was so weird and silly and fun to say. Try it: Nanook, Nanook, Nanook! Of the North! Anyway, I got it in my head that Nanook was some sort of character from a book. Which is close enough for a four-year-old, I guess. As it turns out, Nanook was an actual person, the subject of one of the first feature-length documentaries, a model for every documentary and ethnographic film that followed.

Flaherty made Nanook of the North in 1922, shooting members of the Itivimuit tribe in the Hudson Bay area; it's subtitled "A story of life and love in the actual arctic." His aim was to capture the traditional life of the Itivimuit before it vanished. He shows Nanook and his family doing all the things Itivimuits do best: hunting walruses, spear fishing, building igloos, eating Eskimo Pies, and so on. The film purports to be a faithful attempt to capture the Itivimuit way of life before it disappeared. However, as Dean W. Duncan points out, it had already disappeared; Flaherty staged sequences, made the Itivimuit he was filming wear traditional clothes they had abandoned by that time, and by all accounts played fast and loose with the truth. Nanook wasn't even related to his "family" in the movie; they were simply the best looking Eskimos Flaherty could find. On the other hand, you can't fake this:

Or this:

Modern audiences are inured to movies about arctic life (or any far-flung corner of the globe) but we have people like Flaherty to thank for it. Imagine seeing this movie for the first time in New York City or Paris in 1922 and being taken to a part of the landscape like those above. It might as well have been another planet. I think bringing back these kinds of images is one of film's highest callings: Show me something I have never seen before. Flaherty understood that, and all the fakery and false romanticism in Nanook of the North doesn't change that basic thing he got exactly right.

All this talk of fakery makes Nanook of the North sound much more condescending than it is. Nanook and his family may be essentially a fictional creation, but Flaherty packs the film with details that have a powerful cumulative effect. He shows the viewer, step by step, how Nanook ekes out a life from his inhospitable surroundings, and some of it is revelatory. For example, I've always thought spear fishing must require superhuman reflexes; how else could someone hit a moving, slippery target like a salmon with a spear? The answer, it turns out, is to use a spear shaped like a fork; the reverse wedge of the outer prongs draws the fish onto the spear, and an approximate hit will do the job.

Spear Fishing with Nanook.

Similarly, Flaherty captures enough practical details of hunting seal and walrus and igloo construction to demystify Nanook's life. It's almost enough to make you want to have a go at northern life, until you remember that Nanook starved to death shortly after the film's completion.

There's obviously a great case to be made for the historical importance of Nanook of the North, but I don't think historical importance is ever a good reason to see a movie. Obviously, you can also learn a lot from the movie if you're planning on becoming an Eskimo. But can you learn anything from it as a filmmaker or moviegoer? My roommate thinks this is one of the most boring movies he's ever seen; I certainly wouldn't call it the most exciting thing I've seen (I thought about writing a review that read, in its entirety, "Nanook of the North? More like Nanook of the Boring!" but then thought better of it). I took back two lessons from this movie:

1. Process matters. If you have a character doing something interesting, showing exactly how it is done can make for a fascinating scene. In Nanook, this is obvious in the igloo-building sequence and most of the hunting and fishing scenes. You can see this idea carried out in narrative films in most heist movies; audiences love it when they figure out the solution to a problem. My favorite moment like this is in Rififi: a group of robbers are attempting to rob a bank with a motion-detetion system on the floors. It's sensitive to vibration, so they can't step on the floor or drop anything. They come in through the ceiling, as in Mission Impossible; you see them drill a small hole, sending plaster dust to the floor. The alarm doesn't go off, but you can't imagine how they'll make a big enough hole without triggering the alarm. Then one of the crooks lowers an umbrella through the hole and opens it, creating an instant bowl to catch the chunks of plaster until the hole is big enough to pull the opened umbrella back out. It's an Aha! moment for the audience and is incredibly satisfying; seeing Nanook's three-pronged spear produced the same reaction, as did the creation of a window in the igloo (I'll leave that mystery for you to see for yourself).
   
   
2. If you can't see it, it's more frightening. This is an obvious point, and one you see in every horror movie ever made. But there's a specific scene in Nanook of the North that I think would be great to steal for a horror movie. Nanook finds an airhole in the ice, about the size of a quarter, that's used by a seal. By waiting for the seal to come up to breathe, he is able to harpoon it. What follows is a several-minute tug of war with an unseen adversary, as Nanook struggles to avoid being pulled into the water. All you see is him pulling on this rope leading into the ice; bracing the rope against his leg, struggling backwards, being pulled toward the hole. You don't see the seal at all.

Nanook v. the seal

Of course, as it turns out, the seal he eventually hauls up was already dead, and Flaherty had people off camera pulling the rope. Still, I think you could use this scene to great effect in a "they came from below!" type movie like Tremors or The War of the Worlds. (For all I know, they did use this scene in Tremors, which I haven't seen recently enough to remember).

I guess that's actually more like one lesson and one scene to steal. Which isn't enough to make for a very strong recommendation. I enjoyed Nanook of the North, but the pleasures it offers are all pretty austere. If you're the kind of person who finds old home movies of people you don't know to be poignant, you'll like this; I am, and I did. There's something magical to me about seeing someone who died before my grandfather was born laughing and mugging for the camera, imagining what it would have been like to live his life, with its completely alien details. It's a testament to Flaherty's skill that he makes that imaginative identification possible, given the absolute strangeness of Nanook's life. Measured against that achievement, what's a few staged scenes between friends?

Randoms:

• How many Eskimos does it take to screw in a lightbulb? I don't know either, but you can fit five of them in a kayak if you make three of them crawl into the front and back, completely inside, have one, sit normally, and one lay on the top hanging on for dear life. The sequence where they all get out is better than a clown car.
  
  
• This movie is sometimes referred to as "the first documentary." Which is nonsense, since many of the earliest films were documentaries in the sense of documenting real events, people, and places. For a personal favorite, check out Electrocuting an Elephant, an animal snuff film directed by Thomas Edison. For more on Topsy, the star of Edison's movie, see here.
  
  
• Why does the Edison movie seem so fast and jerky? Why are lots of old silent films in fast-motion? Because of indifferent projectionists and warring standards. The current projection rate of 24 frames per second wasn't standard until around 1930; until that time, film was shot anywhere from 12 frames per second (e.g., some sequences of Birth of a Nation) to 44 frames per second (Edison's original suggestion, although Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have been cranked slower, assuming the mpeg above was transfered at 24 fps). Silent film cameras had hand cranks that controlled the speed, and it was anybody's guess whether projectionists would play a film back at the rate it had been shot. Often, a video transfer of a silent film is done at the wrong frame rate; this produces the jerky, fast motion effect you see on old newsreels. This was the motion picture industry's first format war, and like the current battles over digital projection, it pitted theater owners against studios (theater owners wanted to project everything as fast as possible, to move people in and out of the theater; filmmakers wanted things to look right). This version of Nanook of the North was transfered at a projection speed of 21.5 frames per second. The preservationists worked backwards from the running time of the film as originally projected to arrive at this transfer speed. For a fascinating article about projection speeds, complete with a chart showing examples from various years, click here.
  
  
• For a modern viewer, silent movies like this live or die by their score. If you've never seen a silent with a good recording of a contemporary score, you've never seen a silent. I recommend the Alloy Orchestra; their version of Nosferatu was what made me see that a silent movie could really be horrifying in the way a modern movie can be. They tour widely (performing live with projections of the films) and have several movies available on DVD. The score for Nanook of the North is by Timothy Brock, and it's adequate, although not startlingly good. It really takes off during the sequence where Nanook goes walrus hunting; the rest of it didn't blow me away. But the point is, if you're watching a silent movie and listening to a tinny recording of someone noodling on a Wurlitzer, you're being cheated.
  
  
• The DVD also features an interview with Flaherty's wife, made for National Educational Televison (PBS's predecessor). The interview itself is nothing special, except as an example of educational television in (I would guess) the late 1950s. But the interviewer is Robert Gardner, who was a documentary filmmaker in his own right. He was director of the Film Study Center at Harvard for forty years, and his movies were loved by a smaller, more literate crowd than Flaherty Now Flaherty's fan base is, at this point, pretty small and literate itself. But Gardner's movies were written about by Octavio Paz, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Lowell; now that's literate. From the interview on the disk, he seems to have been the kind of public intellectual who has almost entirely vanished today. So I'll close with a portrait of a way of life that's as long-forgotten as Nanook's:

I'm Robert Gardner, from the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Within forty years, no one will be able to introduce themselves like this with a straight face. Still, my suit and narrow tie are cooler than anything they will ever be able to buy, vintage stores or no.

Just kidding. I'll close with one of Robert Flaherty's still photographs, also included on the DVD, which stand up next to Ansel Adams for nature photography or Dorothea Lange's portraits. This one you've probably seen, and I always thought it was Adams. Nope.

Talk about alien.

#32: Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist, 1948, directed by David Lean, screenplay by Stanley Haynes and David Lean from the novel by Charles Dickens.

John Howard Davies plays Oliver, a workhouse-raised orphan who escapes from his apprenticeship, flees to London, and falls into the clutches of his evil half-brother and a nearly-as-evil thief named Fagin. This is Lean's second Dickens adaptation, made two years after Great Expectations. I think it's a more impressive adaptation, although I liked it a little less as a film. Great Expectations was a later Dickens novel (begun in 1860; Oliver Twist began publication in 1837) and I responded pretty strongly to the doomed romanticism at its core (its core being, of course, Miss Havisham's rotten wedding cake). And although Great Expectations is certainly a Victorian novel, the endless series of betrayals that make up its plot seem very modern. In Oliver Twist, depicting the criminal underclass seems to still be a novelty for Dickens and he doesn't give Fagin or Sikes (or even Nancy) the kind of complexity he would later give Magwitch.

Which brings me to the genius of the screenplay. Since the villains are flatter than they are in Great Expectations, Lean turns Oliver Twist into something very close to a modern thriller. In Great Expectations, the screenplay more or less followed the events of the novel in the order they occurred; a great many incidents, subplots, and so on are omitted, but the general arc of the story remains the same. There's no such fidelity to the text in Oliver Twist; the great bulk of what happens onscreen is taken from the first book of the novel, in which Oliver goes to London, falls into the clutches of Fagin, escapes, falls back into the clutches of Fagin, and escapes again. The critical scenes from books two and three are wedged into the first book wherever they will fit, and anything that doesn't bear directly on Oliver is either omitted entirely or changed to focus on him. By doing this, Lean and Haynes solve what I see as a great structural weakness in the original novel: in the second and third books, Oliver himself does almost nothing. In book two, Monks begins his pursuit in earnest, bribing, threatening, and cajoling his way through the London underworld. Meanwhile, Oliver lies in bed and recovers from a gunshot wound. In book three, there are murders, fires, mobs, shootings, and all the thrills a moviegoer could want. While all this is going on, Oliver makes two trips by carriage and, in his most active moment, visits Fagin in his cell. After all the plot threads have been resolved and evil has been punished. And even that is too much for him; he nearly faints and has to sit down for an hour before he can summon the strength to walk out of the prison. It's decent reading, but not exactly cinematic. At the very least, a faithful adaptation would make for a strange movie, in which the main character disappears almost completely a third of the way in. Lean's version is tighter and more focused in a way that his version of Great Expectations was not; in Great Expectations you feel that large chunks of plot are missing, but Oliver Twist doesn't have that problem.

The film is also much different in tone than the novel. Once Sikes murders Nancy, it turns into a straight thriller, and his attempt to flee the mob pursuing him by escaping from the roof is as suspenseful as anything in a modern movie. Jack Harris edited both movies and did a spectacular job here; Sikes's death is one of the best sequences. And the sound editing and foley work that seemed overbearing in Great Expectations is very good here; when Sikes falls from the roof, the sound of the mob yelling drops out, and all you hear is the rope he's caught on sliding over the roof tiles until it cracks his neck. Those five seconds are the best of any of Lean's films.

The problem with making a movie of Oliver Twist is you've gotta do something with Fagin, who's right up there with Shylock on the list of unfilmably antisemitic characters. In the novel as originally published, he is more often referred to as "the Jew" than by name, and nearly every time Dickens has the opportunity to make a minor criminal Jewish, he takes it. Lean doesn't go as far as Dickens did with the character; there's no reference to his religion in the whole movie. And he cast Alec Guinness, who'd done such a great job as Herbert Pocket two years earlier, and is as British as can be. So far, so good. But the movie on the whole takes its visual cues from George Cruikshank's illustrations. Here's Cruikshank's Fagin:

And here's Alec Guinness:

Kind of a problematic makeup job. Guinness actually does his best to make Fagin as human as possible, and it's a pretty good performance. It's kind of hard to get past the gigantic prosthetic hook nose; the only time Guinness really transcends his makeup is in Fagin's final scene, where he howls with fury at the crowd outside as they break down the barricade he's built. I'm don't think you could make a version of Oliver Twist that felt like the novel without having Fagin be kind of offensive. And yes, it's faithful to Cruikshank's illustrations. But still: jeez.

One last thing: this movie is very well cast. Every character looks the way you'd imagine them. I didn't find this to be true at all in Great Expectations, so it was a relief here. The best example is Francis L. Sullivan, who I thought was horribly miscast as Jaggers in Great Expectations. I imagined Jaggers to be tall and thin, like the knife his name suggests, not a great fat man. On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine someone tall and thin whose name is Mr. Bumble. And Sullivan's Mr. Bumble is a pleasure to watch anytime he's on screen.

Competence, thy name is Bumble!

And here's Anthony Newley's Artful Dodger:

It's not an issue here of the costumes so much as the faces; all these characters looked just the way I imagined them. That still leaves Fagin as a problem; but no more or less than he is in the novel.

Guy Green's cinematography isn't as showy as it is in Great Expectations, but it's still very good; here's just one of his very nice compositions. The Artful Dodger is explaining to Sikes that Nancy has betrayed them; the Dodger's to the left, Fagin is center, and Sikes is on the right, with his eyes about to pop out of his head with rage:

It's a nice, weird shot; what's strangest about it is that the camera starts the shot horizontal and kind of rolls back into position, looking up at Sikes, as he moves toward the Dodger. There's a lot of camera movement in the movie, usually when we're seeing things directly from Oliver's point of view. This technique doesn't always work for me; I think it tends to draw attention from to itself and take you out of the movie. I much prefer shots like the above, where you're sort of seeing things from the Dodger's point of view but it's not direct.

That's all for this one. If you can get past the antisemitism, there's a lot to learn from Oliver Twist. If you can't, well, you'll always have Great Expectations.

Randoms:

• There's one great "Hey, it's that guy!" moment in the movie, when you see the proprietor of The Three Cripples. Here he is:

It took me the rest of the movie to place him; it's Peter Bull, who plays the Russian Ambassador in Dr. Strangelove (he's also in The African Queen).
• John Howard Davies, who played Oliver Twist, went on to become a television director, working on "Mr. Bean," "Fawlty Towers," and "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
• Fagin caused an understandable stir when the film came out, and it wasn't released in the U.S. until 1951 and then only in a version in which twelve minutes or so of Fagin had been excised. The movie was also banned in Israel for being antisemitic. It was also banned in Egypt, for not being antisemitic enough. I'm not making that up.

#31: Great Expectations

Great Expectations, 1946, directed by David Lean, screenplay by David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Kay Walsh, and Cecil McGivern, from the novel by Charles Dickens.

Novels rely greatly on tone and style, which don't have exact equivalents in filmmaking. Films rely on structure and plot. I think this is why Dickens is appealing to filmmakers; his novels are very plot-heavy and very carefully structured. But Dickens does two things that you can't do on film; his humor relies on understatement and he condenses the hell out of things. Which maybe you don't believe, looking at the length of his novels, but consider this scene; Pip has just seen his aunt's friend Mr. Wopsle give a truly disastrous performance of Hamlet and invites him back to his apartment for dinner:

...he sat until two o'clock in the morning, reviewing his success and developing his plans. I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end with crushing it, inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft and without a chance or hope.

That's the dinner scene in its entirety. If you tried to film it, you'd be looking at a minute or two of screen time, and you'd have to show Pip's irritation and contempt through dialogue. Pip's brief summary of Wopsle's speech is funny, but listening to him give it would be murder. And after spending two minutes on it, you'd still have the tone wrong. Granted, this isn't a pivotal moment in the film; I doubt anybody remembers Mr. Wopsle and his theatrical career when they think of Great Expectations; I didn't. But Dickens is filled with little, two-sentence scenes. And if you're making a movie you have time for none of them.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that Lean's adaptation is a radical streamlining of the novel. Orlick is gone, Mrs. Joe dies of natural causes, Herbert Pocket doesn't seem to have a family, Bentley Drummle is a jerk for no apparent reason, and on and on and on. If you haven't read the novel recently, you won't miss any of it; Lean boils the plot down to the bare minimums: Pip's betrayal of family in search of wealth, Abel Magwitch's shadowy malevolence, Miss Havisham's doomed existence. I think he succeeded brilliantly; this is one of my favorite adaptations.

Great Expectations should, of course, be judged on its own merits as a film, not on any kind of imaginary scorecard comparing it to the novel. The movie won two oscars, for Guy Green's cinematography and John Bryan and Wilfred Singleton's art direction and production design. I think it's worth just looking at a few stills, to see how carefully crafted every shot is. Here's Magwitch on the boat back to the prison ship:

I looked at this in Photoshop; that's true black in the corners, and that sharp diagonal composition must have required a lot of planning to get right. Note how noirish and sleek that shot is, and compare it to the overstuffed, Gothic horrors of this one:

This is Pip entering Miss Havisham's room for the first time. The door that you see on the left opens on this scene. In the commentary for The Silence of the Lambs Jonathan Demme says that there's nothing scarier in the world than a tracking shot down a hall to a closed door (you can see one of these shots in Jame Gumb's basement). This is that shot's ancestor, and it's incredibly creepy. Notice how much stuff is in this room, and still how carefully it's framed so that the curve in the spiderwebs from the chandelier is mirrored by the archway to its right. Here's another door shot:

This is Jaggers arriving at Joe's forge for the first time. You see Pip and Joe working on the forge in silhouette, and then the door opens and Jaggers steps in. It's a facile visual metaphor (he's going to come between them!) but it's a quick shot and you don't notice that. The one other thing it accomplishes is it holds off on revealing Pip. Five years have passed since the last time the audience has seen him in the movie; up to this point he's been played by Anthony Wager, who was 14 when the movie came out. From here on, he'll be played by John Mills, who was 38. So having Pip in silhouette prepares the audience for his drastic change in appearance.

Miss Havisham's dining room. That's five pages of description from Dickens, mapped out to a few seconds of screen time. You can see in this shot how much Sunset Blvd. drew from the production design. One picky thing: the wedding cake on the table is an anachronism; tiered cakes were a later nineteenth century innovation. But still: wow. And then there's this:

The court where Magwitch is sentenced to death. As in the earlier shot of Magwitch on the boat, note the strong diagonal composition. But also notice how detached this shot is; the attention is on Magwitch, who is sitting at the far left of the bar, not visible. It's almost like a diorama. Compare it to the establishing shot of the courtroom from M:

That's a little more direct, no? I could go on about the diagonal compositions pulling the eye away vs. the head-on grid of the bench and columns in M, but that would be misleading; Great Expectations does have some moments that directly confront the viewer, usually to heighten fear. Here's a shot of Magwitch from the initial scene at the graveyard:

That's about as direct as it gets. Lean is pretty smart about when to shoot a scene close and when to be at a distance. One thing I've learned from this movie is how the same kind of careful composition can give your actors room to play a scene, especially for humor. Here's Pip, Joe, and Mrs. Gargery at the dinner table, very early in the movie:

This scene is basically a static shot in which Joe tries to communicate with Pip without Mrs. Gargery knowing. By putting them all in the same frame and just leaving the camera rolling, the actors get to play it to the hilt; you always know where Mrs. G. is looking, and it's one of the funniest parts of the movie. Increasingly I think good direction and editing depends on knowing when to trust your actors to carry a scene; all the humor in this would be lost if it were edited.

No more stills; a few more random observations:

• They foleyed the shit out of this movie. There's not a single footstep or clank of a chain that you don't hear; it's really pretty distracting. Sometimes it works, as in the howling wind in the initial graveyard scene. Sometimes it's cool, as when Mrs. Gargery yells "Pip!" and instead of hearing her, you hear a whistle in the score.¹ And sometimes it's just silly, as when Pip steals food for Magwitch and the voices in his head are on the soundtrack. Dickens wrote about the way each creak of the stairs seemed to Pip to be warning Mrs. Gargery to wake up; in the movie you hear a creak edited into a voice. I appreciate sonic experiments, but this one doesn't work.
  
  
• The long tracking shot through the streets of London when Pip becomes sick is clearly something a lot of horror directors picked up on. It ends with that same "closed door at the end of a hallway shot" that Demme loves so much, followed by that "head laying down on pillow" shot that Lynch used in Mullholland Dr.
  
  
• A lot can be said about the ending, which is very different from the novel. As above, it's something that a lot of horror directors picked up on; Estella's placid creepiness stays with you long after you see the movie.
  
  
• Ok, I lied. One more still. Here's Herbert Pocket explaining dinner manners and Miss Havisham's tragic past to Pip. This is, incidentally, a scene where Lean nails the dry humor of the novel exactly. But check out Herbert; it's Obi Wan himself:

That's all for this one. I read the novel before watching the movie; the next movie in the series is Oliver Twist, directed by Lean two years after Great Expectations; I'll be watching the movie before reading the novel, which I think will make it easier to judge the film on its own merits. That means I'll probably be talking less about the adaptation process, but I can't promise there won't be a lot of stills.

¹My roommate Eric informs me that interaction between non-diagetic music and characters onscreen is called "Mickey Mousing" the soundtrack, from those scenes in Disney cartoons when the sound of Mickey walking up the stairs is picked up by notes going up a scale.

#30: M

M, 1931, directed by Fritz Lang, written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang.

Wer ist der Mörder? Who is the murderer? That question is the starting point for any number of serial killer movies, from The Lodger to Identity. And the answer is usually pretty structurally simple: "That's him, officer," or "It was you, all along!" But although we see this question again and again in M, the movie isn't that interested in the answer, unless the question means something closer to "What is it like to be the murderer?" Even that's an oversimplification that doesn't cover the scope of Lang's achievement in M. This may be the best serial killer movie ever made; it also is one of the greatest police procedurals, portraits of a living city, movies about the criminal underworld, critiques of the media, and films noir.

Fritz Lang made M in 1931, but it is shockingly modern in tone, subject, and technique. The plot is relatively simple: Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckhart, who is compelled to kill little girls. The police can't catch him; newspapers keep writing about him (his repetitive compulsions feed the news cycle), and the public is outraged. Increased police presence in the city is bringing organized crime to a standstill, and so both the police and the criminals are desperately searching for Beckhart. The audience knows who he is and where he is from the beginning: we see him the first time we see a "Wir ist der mörder" poster. The question and the answer are in the same shot.

Lang has a real awareness of the myriad delicate relationships that keep a modern city moving; between upper and lower classes, between police and criminals, between the media and the public. You can see this most clearly in the scene of a police raid on a bar; Otto Wernicke, playing Kommissar Lohmann, checks the papers of everyone there, one by one. Lang lets the scene play long; we see three people go before the Kommissar, one with forged papers, one with real papers (but wearing a fur coat he's recently stolen) and one with no papers at all. Lohmann's interactions with these people are delicately played, but they show the very complicated power relationship between a good cop and career criminals. There's a certain fatherly affection present when Lohmann looks at fake papers, winks, and tells the bearer "You've been cheated." Although this is one of the most obvious examples, the movie is suffused with scenes in which complicated power and class dynamics are sketched out in very short order. He shows how these dynamics, carefully maintained, are pushed out of balance by the arrival of the child-murderer played by Peter Lorre; it's in everyone's interest that he be caught.

When you look at a movie like The Silence of the Lambs, it's clear that everyone involved in the project intended Hannibal Lecter to be charismatic and appealing. Even Kevin Spacey's killer in Se7en has his charm; he's just trying to teach us all a lesson. I always feel a little queasy about "cool" serial killers as characters, especially when surrounded with what's meant to be gritty reality (Se7en is a particularly bad offender here; in The Silence of the Lambs everything's so gothic that it's easier to discount Lecter). That's a little bit of a problem here; Lang doesn't ask or want you to sympathize with Beckhart; he's an evil man who does evil things. But Lorre's magnetic performance, particularly in the final scenes of the movie, makes him real in a way most on-screen killers are not. Here's his last monologue in its entirety. He's been captured by organized crime and is standing trial before a kangaroo court of criminals. He's just said that he can't help what he does, and someone in the crowd yells out that they all say the same thing when they're before a judge:

What would you know? What are you talking about? Who are you, anyway? Who are you? All of you. Criminals. Probably proud of it, too—proud you can crack a safe or sneak into houses or cheat at cards. All of which it seems to me you could just as easily give up if you had learned something useful or if you had jobs or if you weren't such lazy pigs. But me? Can I do anything about it? Don't I have this cursed thing inside of me? This fire, this voice, this agony?
...
I have to roam the streets endlessly always sensing that someone's following me. It's me! I'm shadowing myself! Silently...but I still hear it! Yes, sometimes I feel like I'm tracking myself down. I want to run—run away from myself! But I can't! I can't escape from myself! I must take the path that it's driving me down and run and run down endless streets! I want off! And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children. They never go away. They're always there! Always! Always! Always! Except... when I'm doing it... when I... Then I don't remember a thing. Then I'm standing before a poster, reading what I've done. I read and read... I did that? I don't remember a thing! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like inside me? How it screams and cries out inside me when I have to do it! Don't want to! Must! Don't want to! Must!

It reads a bit talky and overblown on the page, but when Lorre howls these lines at you, you can see the constant, unbearable pain Beckhart is in. In interviews, like the one with William Friedkin on the second disc, Lang says he doesn't intend for the audience to feel any sympathy for Beckhart; that said, he rarely cuts away from Lorre during the last scene, and when he does, it's usually to members of the criminal court nodding in agreement. Even Schränker only wants to kill Beckhart as a political exediency; he can't risk that he ever goes free again.

This was Lang's first sound film; he'd done fifteen silent movies (including Metropolis) and resisted the coming of sound, refusing to add sound to Frau im Mond despite the producer's wishes. Seymour Nebenzal talked him into it for M, though, and Lang didn't waste any time mastering the medium. In early sound films, the soundtrack is usually synched to what you're seeing on screen; Lang wasn't the first director to disassociate the two things, but he did it masterfully. He also understood that you didn't need sound at all, necessarily; witness the absolutely silent footage of police preparing for a raid. Lang keeps these scenes silent until a police whistle blows and then suddenly there's sound everywhere; the tromping of boots, people running to escape, shouting, more whistles, &c. It's fantastic. Some other experiments with sound are less successful; Lohmann's voiceover describing a police investigation while we're seeing the investigation doesn't add much (though it's better than a similar sequence in High and Low). Here's a closer look at a sequence where everything comes together, right at the beginning.

We've seen Elsie Beckmann bouncing a ball down the street after school; seen her meet Hans Beckert (she's bouncing the ball against the poster in the shot at the top of the page); seen them make small talk, seen him buy her candy and a balloon. This is intercut with footage of her mother wondering where her daughter is as time passes (we know pretty precisely how much time has passed, thanks to shots of the clock in Mrs. Beckmann's apartment—this movie is filled with literal ticking clocks). Mrs. Beckmann goes to the window and calls out "Elsie!" and then we get this series of shots:

The stairs of the apartment complex (this stairway-as-maze shot should look familiar; it's been used a million times since). Over this, we hear Mrs. Beckman call "Elsie!" again. This, and the shots that follow, are basically still images; there's no camera motion.

The attic of the apartment building. Again, "Elsie!" Nothing moves in this shot, there's no breeze on the eerily still clothes.

Elsie's place at the table. For the last time, increasingly desparate, "Elsie!"

This shot is silent. Elsie's ball rolls into frame and stops. We're on this for maybe five seconds; long enough to really feel a sense of dread.

This shot isn't as long. Elsie's balloon comes into frame, gets snagged on the power lines for a few seconds, and then blows away.

We then get a dissolve to black, a few seconds of complete blackness, and then fade in on a newsboy yelling "Extra! Extra!" as he races down the street selling papers with the lurid details of Elsie's demise. It's a virtuoso sequence. A few take home lessons:

• Static shots can be used to increase a sense of dread. They also invite the viewer to look for what's missing, so in a sequence like this they work beautifully.
  
  
• Letting the viewer imagine what's happening to Elsie is far better than showing it, especially if the viewer has to make a few mental leaps (that's her ball, that's her balloon). Put the viewer in the mother's mental state immediately before and he or she will imagine the most horrible thing ever.
  
  
• Use sound judiciously. Some shots are better without it.

This is a movie I'll be coming back to again and again; there are hundreds of practical decisions Lang made that are easy to suss out and I imagine (and hope) they will inform my screenwriting from here on out.

Randoms:

• The new two-DVD set was something I had to buy; nobody in Los Angeles was renting it. I'm very glad I did; it's an embarassment of riches. For one thing, the movie itself was restored from the original camera negative; all earlier restorations were done from later prints.
  
  
• You'll notice in the stills above that the aspect ratio is pretty narrow. Early German silent film was shot at 1.33:1, close to Academy ratio. When they added sound, they simply put an optical soundtrack on the filmstrip, cutting into the picture and producing a 1.19:1 ratio. All earlier restorations were done with a telecine set to 1.33:1, which produced a white cropping line across the top of the image. This includes the earlier 1 DVD Criterion edition. The new, 2-disc set was done correctly and it looks great, as you can see in the stills.
  
  
• The information above is from the second disc, which includes "A Physical History of M", a rundown of all the various cuts and transfers of the film. Most interestingly, it includes footage from The Eternal Jew, a Nazi propaganda film that pointed to "the Jew Peter Lorre's" performance as an example of the kind of depraved character jews were naturally inclined to play. The section of the movie included is a rogue's gallery of decadent Jews, including "the relativity-Jew Einstein, who concealed his hatred of Germany behind obscure pseudoscience." I think Einstein would have had something to say about that if Germany had stayed in the war a little longer.
  
  
• One other lesson from M for filmmakers and especially editors: cutting on an action, that's cool. Cutting on an action that's followed through by another character in a different scene to connect the two character, that's very cool. Having a crime boss say the first half of a sentence and begin a sweeping arm gesture, and then cutting to a police chief finishing the sentence and completing the gesture: that's unbeatable.
  
  
• I much prefer commentary tracks where all parties are in the same room talking to each other; Criterion so far has frequently used commentaries that are edited together after the fact. I like knowing how the people talking feel about each other (Fight Club is a great one for this; Chuck Palahniuk clearly loathes screenwriter Jim Uhls, and their joint commentary is a masterpiece of passive aggression; plus David Fincher and Edward Norton do all they can to ignore anything Brad Pitt says). Anyway, on this DVD, Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler share a commentary track, and they don't get along too well either. Rentschler is very bare-bones; Kaes goes on and on a bit. The basic structure is that Kaes will make a point, and expand on it for a while, until Rentschler gets frustrated and tells him he's wrong. Sometimes, Kaes bounces back from this, and the results are spectacular. For example, Lang tells a great story about meeting Josef Göbbels, being offered the mantle of Nazi filmmaker, and fleeing Germany as soon as possible (you can hear him tell this story on the second disc, in Conversation with Fritz Lang, a movie William Friedkin made about a year before Lang's death. Unfortunately, the story isn't true; Lang went back to Germany several times after his "flight," and he may not have met Göbbels. After Rentschler points this out, Kaes says—and I'm not making this up—something to the effect of "but regardless of the 'truth-value' of this story, don't you think the way Lang tells the story says something about his greatness as a filmmaker?" "Truth-value." Really!

#27: Flesh for Frankenstein

Flesh for Frankenstein, 1973, written and directed by Paul Morrissey, characters created by Mary Shelley.

Paul Morrissey made this movie immediately before Blood for Dracula; I liked it less, although it's pretty good. (I do mean "immediately before," incidentally—they wrapped Flesh for Frankenstein one fine morning, had lunch, and started shooting Blood for Dracula). As with Blood for Dracula, Morrissey has nothing good to say about modern permissiveness. Flesh for Frankenstein has one thing Blood for Dracula doesn't, though: Spacevision 3-D! Which means you get shots like this:

Udo Kier as Dr. Frankenstein, with his heart on his sleeve and his stomach on a pole.

A bit about 3-D; as you probably know, 3-D works by presenting the left and right eye with a different image, photographed simultaneously with two lenses that are about as far apart as the human eyes. As in the real world, the brain interprets the slight differences in perspective between the two images as depth, and thus images seem to stand out from the screen. The differences in various 3-D formats have to do with how the images are isolated in each eye. I've seen four 3-D movies actually in 3-D, and three of them were at Disney theme parks (Captain Eo, Honey, I Shrunk The Audience, and The Muppets Present: Medea! Ok, I can't remember the name of the Muppet movie). The fourth 3-D movie I saw was The Creature From The Black Lagoon, which used the analglyph duo-color red-blue system. If you've ever seen an analglyph duo-color 3-D movie or image, you know the effect is not so great, the depth of color is limited, and your eyes get tired from watching them. So my impression was always that the Disney systems required a very expensive projector or some sort of heavy equipment to use polarized light;¹ I didn't think there was ever a mass-market format that used that kind of 3-D effect.

I was wrong. The first 3-D process, NaturalVision, used polarized light. It also required simultaneous projection using two projectors, and was therefore prone to go wrong. Most movie theaters could do dual projection (they had two projectors for reel changes), but if the projectors weren't in sync, the 3-D effect was spoiled. Poor presentation quality may, in fact, be what killed 3-D off as a commercial medium; I shudder to think what the format would look like now that there are so few theaters with even moderately skilled projectionists. If you're interested in the history of 3-D film, there's a good summary here.

SpaceVision was a one-strip process, designed to eliminate the errors that two-strip projection introduced (my understanding is that the projector had a specialized dual lens); but like NaturalVision, it used polarization rather than a duo-tone system. So as you can see above, you get the same depth of color you would with any one-strip color system of the time. Plus it's in 3-D!

Except, of course, it isn't. Televisions can't show things in SpaceVision. So this is the first Criterion DVD where the image on screen is not just inevitably worse (because lower res) than a theatrical presentation, but different in kind. So if anyone ever screens this in SpaceVision near me, believe me, I'll be there.

So the end result of watching a 3-D movie on a television is that there are lots of strange shot compositions that don't make much sense; there's always something in the foreground and people keep waving flowers, knives, and organs directly at the screen. Also, in contrast to the deep colors of Blood for Dracula, this movie seemed overlit to me. Morrissey talks on the commentary track about how much he hates underlit films and naturalistic lighting; in both Blood for Dracula and Flesh For Frankenstein, he just kind of throws lights on his actors. Which looks great in a 30's sort of way, in Blood for Dracula, but feels overdone here.

The movie's a pretty far departure from Mary Shelley's story. In this version, Dr. Frankenstein (Udo Kier, who's great as always) is trying to create a super race of racially pure zombies. As a result, he's reanimated not just one corpse, but two, both designed to be irresistably beautiful. His goal is to get them to breed; he has a LaMarkian understanding of genetics, and believes their offspring will be as perfect as they are. The female monster, played by the ridiculously attractive Dalila Di Lazzaro, is an unmitigated success. But as the movie opens, he's still looking for a perfect head for his male monster. He wants a sexual powerhouse, so he hangs out outside of a brothel looking for someone with unstoppable, racially-pure sex know-how. Unfortunately, he goes looking for his head on the same day that Joe Dallesandro convinces his friend Sacha to try sleeping with girls before becoming a chaste monk. In the brothel, Sacha completely ignores the girl he's with while sending longing, languid looks in Joe's direction—so guess whose head ends up on the monster?

It's certainly a funny enough variation, but Udo Kier's Baron Frankenstein never quite rises to the level of tragic the way his Dracula does. Perhaps Dracula is just inherently sexier than Frankenstein, in the same way that blood is sexier than shit. Because man, is this movie ever interested in human viscera. I would guess that 75% of the on-screen deaths are by disemboweling; the only exceptions are Sacha and the Baroness. And these aren't subtle deaths; the effects are by Carlo Rambaldi, who went on to design effects in Alien. Let's just say he used a lot of animal organs in this movie; the still above is one of the tamer examples.

So it's not as good, on the whole, as Blood for Dracula. That said, it has one moment that's funnier than anything else in either movie; Frankenstein's monster has chased him out of his own laboratory and slammed the gate on his hand, severing it (you can see above that Kier's left hand is missing). The doctor staggers back in and retrieves his hand; he tries to reattach it, fails, realizes that he's dying, and throws his own hand at Joe Dallesandro in a fit of rage. Which is pretty much exactly how most people would react in that situation. Kier does this sort of spoiled-child routine as part of his character in both movies; that's its apotheosis.

That's all for this one; sorry about the extended, wonky discussion of 3-D. I leave you with the following still; SpaceVision at its most terrifying:

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

¹There is, in fact, a more expensive and complicated system for separating images than using polarized light; IMAX produces 3-D movies that use glasses with timed LCD shutters, so that each eye sees every other frames (i.e., for frame one, the left eye's lens is opaque, for frame two the right eye lens is opaque). However, the difficulty of syncing the glasses with the projection make this even less practical than a dual projector polarization system in terms of costs and projectionist training.

Update (9-20-2006): I was fortunate enough to see Flesh For Frankenstein in 3-D Saturday night at the Egyptian Theatre here in Hollywood as part of the second World 3-D Exposition. It was a new print, but a strange one, in that it seemed to be a letterboxed 4:3 frame. In any event, it was in 3-D, which was an entirely different experience than watching the DVD. Kier's death speech is fantastic when the spear that's run him through is hovering in front of your face. Best of all, Udo Kier was there for a pre-movie Q & A (he told the same story Morrisey tells on the commentary track about casting him in Blood for Dracula), and watched the movie with the audience, the second time he'd seen it in 3-D since it was made.

#20: Sid and Nancy

Sid and Nancy, 1986, directed by Alex Cox, written by Alex Cox and Abbe Wool.

What can you say about a twenty-year-old girl who died? Well, if she was Nancy Spungen, you can't say much about her being beautiful or brilliant. I don't think she loved Mozart or Bach, and I'm sure she didn't love the Beatles. But she loved Sid Vicious. And I don't think Alex Cox wanted to make Love Story, anyway.

Of course, he didn't want to make The Buddy Holly Story, either. You're kind of setting yourself up for failure when your subjects are Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and Nancy Spungen, the camp follower that he may or may not have killed. Most music biopics (e.g., Ray) take for granted that their subject is talented; the story is usually about them trying to wrestle their immense talent into productive directions. You can't really do that when you're making a movie about Sid Vicious—he doesn't give you much to work with. He was the least talented member of a band that was never famous for its skill. In movies like Ray, the movie takes off when the main character gets their personal goals in line with their artistic ones; in Sid and Nancy things don't really get going until Sid leaves the Sex Pistols. To put it bluntly, Sid's artistic goals aren't very interesting; and his psychotic lack of introspection means his personal goals aren't much to look at either. They're funny, though; here's the scene where Nancy brings Sid to her family's home for an incredibly uncomfortable dinner:

                    GRANPA
          So! Are you gonna make an honest
          woman of our Nancy, Sid?

                    SID
          Well, she's always been an honest
          woman to me, Granpa, so... she's
          never lied to me.

                    GRANPA
          But what are your, uh, intentions?

                    SID
          Well, first off, we're going to go
          down to the methadone clinic on
          Monday and then, uh, Nancy's gonna
          get me some gigs. And then we're
          gonna go off and, like, live in
          Paris, and just sort of go out in a
          blaze of glory. But don't worry,
          though, you know, you'll be proud
          of us.

For what it's worth, Sid achieves every goal but the last one.

The structure of the movie is unusual; it's a straight two-acter. The first half is set in Britain and America and is more closely tied to the actual career of Sid Vicious; it's interesting enough, but it only really transcends the squalor of its main character in the scenes where Cox focuses on Sid's feelings for Nancy Spungen. There's a beautiful sequence during the Sex Pistol's disastrous Silver Jubilee celebration where Sid and Nancy walk through police mayhem like ghosts. It's one long slow-motion tracking shot backwards through the chaos, and it's gorgeous; you really believe these two people have been chosen by fate to love each other.

Cox gives his characters' doomed romanticism full reign in the second half, after the Sex Pistols have broken up. As Sid and Nancy descend into heroin addiction and become increasingly divorced from the world around them, Cox shows them as residents of their own, purely subjective world; notably when Sid's cigarette sets their room at the Chelsea Hotel on fire and the two of them sit in bed watching things burn until they're dragged out. And of course, there's this:

Add a song by Pray for Rain and you're well on your way into mythmaking. The second half of this movie is brilliant; Cox manages to make Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious not just bearable, but tragic.

By most accounts, they were neither. The DVD features footage from D. O. A.: A Rite of Passage, a documentary about punk that features an "interview" with the two of them. Sid, clearly strung out, keeps passing in and out of sleep, mumbling incoherently while Nancy screeches at him to wake up and answer the filmmaker's questions. Sid lets his cigarette burn a hole in the blanket; Nancy's voice is near unbearable. Gary Oldman's Sid Vicious isn't 100% coherent all the time, but he's worlds ahead of the actual article. Chloe Webb's Nancy isn't pleasant to listen to, but she, too, is cleaned up a bit for film.

That seems to be the main problem people who were there at the time have with the film (I base this opinion solely on the commentary track); Cox wasn't true enough to the actual story. Sid often wore a shirt with a swastika; Cox changed it to a hammer and sickle. I don't really buy the argument that a filmmaker has a responsibility to his subjects or the truth or whatever; I think bending the truth to accomplish narrative ends is a requirement. In this case, I'm willing to forgive a lot; for one thing, I'm not sure I'd want to spend two hours with the real Sid and Nancy. For another, I'll support any story that can make the last scene of Sid and Nancy seem earned; it gave me chills.

Randoms:

• Cox may have prettied up Sid and Nancy's story. The marketing department at Embassy cleaned up Alex Cox's story. Here's the same still from above, as it appears on the movie poster:

Notice the vanishing garbage, the chopped off arms, the miniskirt, and Chloe Webb's magical expanding breasts.


• Sid and Nancy marks the film debut of Courtney Love, who called Abbe Wool at home during casting and insisted that she should play Nancy. She didn't get to be Nancy, but she did get to be Gretchen, one of Nancy's American friends. Here she is, pre-diet and pre-nosejob:

• Greil Marcus is on the commentary track, and, wow. He consistently starts with something that seems interesting and then goes off the rails completely. Example: he correctly points out that Sid and Nancy doesn't spend a lot of time placing its characters in a cultural or social context. He's right, and I'm sick of movies that go to great lengths to do this; e.g., Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man. Horses and boxers didn't restore America's broken spirits during the Great Depression. And the Sex Pistols didn't save rock and roll forever, either. So, so far, so good. But Marcus goes on to say that Cox expects the viewers themselves to add social context; that is, to draw the obvious connections between the Sex Pistols and the Gordon Riots of 1780, not to mention the Ranters of the 1640s and 50s. Really, Greil? You think Alex Cox had antinomian religious reformers on the brain when he made Sid and Nancy? And he expects viewers to draw the same comparisons? It takes a lot for me to say someone's intellectually pretentious, but wow.
  
  
• Your actors don't have to look like the people they're playing; Oldman's Sid Vicious is great. But. Here's Johnny Rotten on the Bill Grudy show in 1976:

And here's Andrew Schofield playing Johnny Rotten:

Not bad. But here's Alex Cox during the filming of Sid and Nancy:

I dunno, Andrew, I think Alex just wants it more.

#29: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975, directed by Peter Weir, screenplay by Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay.

I imagine in most video stores this is filed under "Drama," but in my book it's a horror movie. Of course, if I were running a video store, I'd put it in drama, too—I don't think most viewers would find this an adequate substitute for Saw. Still, there were parts of it that scared the shit out of me, and I'm not the easiest scare in the world. It's set in Australia in 1900, and tells the story of a group of students at an all-girls boarding school who go on a picnic to celebrate Valentine's Day... a Picnic at Hanging Rock, that is! On the trip, three of the students and one of their teachers disappear under mysterious circumstances; the movie is about their disappearance and its consequences. It's a mystery without a solution. Although Weir presents a few things that might have happened (there are other people at the rock that day, the area is known for poisonous snakes, &c.), in the end, they seem to have been swallowed up by the rock itself.

I'm not sure if it's really fear that the movie produces; there aren't any monsters (except, perhaps, for the headmistress of the school, played by Rachel Roberts), and there aren't any big shock scenes. It borrows from the grammar of horror movies a bit; there are some unexplained tracking shots and other places where the camera suggests that you're seeing things from someone's perspective, but doesn't tell you whose. On the whole, however, this is a very different kind of horror film. I think the conventional emotional arc of a horror movie is to build tension higher and higher until it breaks; you have these moments of revelation (it's Jason's mom! Samarra is evil! Norman's mother is dead!) where all the clues that have been floating around coalesce. Peter Weir managed here to make a movie where that release is missing; there are moments that feel like those archetypical scenes, but they don't reveal anything to the audience. The classic example would be the actual disappearance scene, which is hard to watch more than once. You know that you're witnessing something bad, or at least unsettling, and it's unbearably intense. But you don't know exactly what it is you're seeing, and you don't find out later, either. The most the movie offers you in terms of an answer are some phrases that are repeated; the sorts of things that seem innocent when you first hear them and then take on, if not a darker meaning, a stranger one. Two examples:

• Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.
  
  
• A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves.

Those two sentences do about as good a job at capturing the tone of the movie as I'm going to be able to. There's not much else I want to say about this one, cause the experience of seeing it is very unique and I think benefits from knowing as little as possible about the movie. I defy anyone to watch the last scene with the headmistress without getting really creeped out.

Randoms:

• The score is performed by Gheorghe Zamfir. Yes, that Zamfir: the Master of the Pan Flute. It's pretty good, though.
  
  
• The Criterion Edition of this is different from the version that showed in theaters in several ways. First, although it's the director's cut, it's shorter than the theatrical version; occasionally (very, very occasionally), directors want to see less of their film on the screen. I don't know if additional scenes were added originally against Weir's wishes, or if he just decided to trim it a bit when given the chance, years later. Second, the DVD is remastered in Dolby 5.1. Which I'm not a big fan of, in theory; I'd like to see it with the same sound it originally played with. In this case, however, I think the movie gains a lot from the remaster, especially with the liberal use of the effects channel during some of the more intense sequences. So I tentatively approve.
  
  
• Peter Weir, of course, has done well for himself in America. He seems to be the master (and commander) of the movie that everyone talks about incessantly the year it comes out, and then everyone forgets completely. The Truman Show is probably the best example of that. Still, that kind of movie makes money. He's currently attached, in theory, to Pattern Recognition, which is my favorite William Gibson novel; it's at Warner Brothers but doesn't have a greenlight. Although Studio System lists it as being in active development, it hasn't had an update to its status since April of 2004, so it may be in turnaround by now. Peter: get this movie made and do it right.