Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  The others blow three of the domes, but when one of them comes to Lowell's forest to plant the charge, Lowell—carried away in a violent fit of survival in the name of the land—kills him. Lowell then blows the fourth dome with the other two caretakers trapped inside. It explodes and Lowell has committed triple murder to preserve the forest.

  He then plays a game of duplicity with the flagship, advising those in charge that malfunctions aboard the Valley Forge make it impossible to jettison the final dome, and he thinks his companions were in one of the blown domes. Then he pirates the freighter and, kidnapping the forest dome, he plunges into the rings of Saturn to escape.

  With the aid of a pair of memorable drone robots—one other was lost during the wild ride through Saturn's rings—Lowell "runs silent" through uncharted space beyond Saturn, tending the forest, programming the drones to repair his injured leg, teaching them to play poker, and finally coming to grips with his horror at the murders he's done in the name of goodness.

  Finally, Lowell is confronted with the situation of the forest dying. For moments a moviegoer dwells on the fascinating allegorical possibility that the corpse of the man Lowell killed, buried in the forest, has somehow poisoned Paradise. But it is merely that the freighter has sailed too far from the Sun, and the plants are unable to sustain the photosynthetic process needed to keep them healthy. At that point a search party from the flotilla, having been sent around Saturn in search of the Valley Forge, locates Lowell and advises him they're coming alongside to dock. Lowell rigs high-intensity lamps in the forest, tells the remaining drone robot that the responsibility for caring for the forest is now his, blows the dome into deep space where, ostensibly, it will continue on its trajectory to infinity, and alone save for a crippled drone that has become his friend, he assuages his guilt over the death of his companions by atomizing the freighter, thereby committing a kind of noble suicide.

  Patently, the base story is ludicrous. Its errors in logic and science are horrendous. (When I approached director Trumbull, after the first time of the three on which I've seen the film, and asked him why in the world the simplest rules of physical science, rules known to every junior high Physics 101 student, were not observed—like, for instance, when the domes are jettisoned and exploded we hear the sounds in space, when everyone knows space is a vacuum and sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum—he responded that they were telling a kind of "fable" and though they had dubbed the film originally without the misconceived soundtrack explosions, they felt an audience would prefer to have the sounds, it would make the whole thing seem more identifiable. I conceive of this as a dodge on Mr. Trumbull's part, a weak response intended to fend off a criticism that cannot be overlooked. But further, it is a pandering to early-1950s horror film misconceptions of the ways in which sf should be treated. It may have worked to hear rockets blasting in deep space, to hear the sound of wind as meteors whizz by out there in the dead place between the stars, back in the moron days when Zsa Zsa Gabor was always a member of the first crew to the Moon, but 2001; Marooned; Forbidden Planet; Planet of the Apes; THX-1138; Charly; A Clockwork Orange; Colossus: The Forbin Project and a host of others have clearly taken us past such redneck errors in filmed sf.)

  The script is rife with such errors and skip-logic in basic construction:

  If all plant life had vanished on Earth, as the film advises us, the ecological chain would have been broken before anything could be saved; Man would have vanished early on, the rains would have ceased to fall, the oceans would have died, and the story would never have taken place.

  Why orbit the freighters out by Saturn? The cost of shipping even the most essential items into space would make the shipping of whole forests unfeasible by their incredible cost; and even if they could do it, orbiting around the Moon is far more logical than sending a whole flotilla out to Saturn. To what end? Why not Mars or Venus, closer in?

  Our best astronomical information tells us that the rings of Saturn are only perhaps a dozen miles thick, flattened in their rotation around the planet by the enormous gravitational fields; further, the rings seem to be made up of ice particles. A spacegoing vessel like the Valley Forge would have had to be going at least four or five miles per second, and would have passed through the rings in a blink of the eye, rather than the minutes-long rapids-run Silent Running offers, though I freely grant the filmic twisting of astronomical realities made for good visuals.

  Or, even granting the ship its journey, and taking the acceleration rate at a very conservative two miles per second, if it hit even a tiny particle, the impact would have torn the ship to flinders.

  And how did the astronauts manage to keep walking around on the decks when the freighter was not spinning to induce artificial gravity? Why didn't everything float in free fall?

  And how can we accept a science of Man advanced enough to accomplish the unbelievable feat of sending whole forests into space that would also build a drone robot that would catch its "foot" in a strut and get ripped off the gantrywork of the freighter?

  The holes are many and gigantic.

  Yet the film succeeds. Somehow, despite all the idiot errors that could have been so easily avoided had Trumbull and producer Michael Gruskoff merely sought out the technical assistance of, say, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of the Palomar and Griffith Observatories, the film makes it. (Jesus, they needn't have even sprung for an expensive authority like Richardson. Any moderately competent sf writer could have saved them this embarrassment. Even a hip sf fan could have poked holes easily filled during the scripting. But the scenarists, Deric Washburn & Mike Cimino and Steve Bochco were clearly inept choices, and on their heads rests most of the denigration of this film.)

  (The casual reader, knowing this reviewer writes sf, might think I am taking a stance based on special knowledge. Even were this the case, which it ain't because I assure you I am a scientific illiterate who could no more program the correct technical data than perform a prefrontal lobotomy, the position would not be invalid. On speaking to students from Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana—where the film premiered simultaneously with its Los Angeles opening—I was given precisely the same complaints. Many of them rejected the film outright because of these errors, which put the believability of the entire story in doubt.)

  But, again, the film succeeds. It is affecting. It is one of those hybrid fish-&-fowl creations that should fall under its own weight. But it doesn't. It is compelling, inevitably gripping, touching and somehow very true and dead to the heart of the Human Condition.

  I attribute much of this to the stunning performance of Bruce Dern. For with the exception of excellent cameo performances by Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint as the murdered shipmates (parts they honor with the thoroughness of their talents), and the amputees who rode inside the three drone robots, this is Dern's show all the way.

  His Freeman Lowell is a full characterization, hot and cool and trembling. He emerges as the solitary focus of a drama that could so easily have become just another nuts-and-bolts space opera. When Lowell directs the drones to bury the man he has killed, and with his throat tightening with grief says a few words over the grave—via TV intercom—no one can be unmoved. When Lowell, out of the desperation of loneliness and guilt, anthropomorphizes the drones and plays poker with them, there is such a sureness, such a suspension of disbelief on the part of Dern, that it becomes a tragicomic scene filmgoers will always remember. In scenes where the dialogue written for Dern is as cumbersome as a hippo trying to insert a pessary, the actor lifts and flutes and dwells on note after note of the script with the precision of a master soloist. This is a case, one of the rare few, when the actor brings to an intrinsically awful script a genius that must be commended. With this film Bruce Dern steps softly but surely into the front ranks of American actors.

  To comment further on the film would be to confuse myself and you, gentle readers, more than I have already. For it becomes clear that the more one picks at Silent Running, the mor
e it falls apart. Taken in totality, it is a memorable and convincing film. I don't know why. Critical judgments evaporate. It is at once fable and warning and visual experience, and on those levels it was eminently worth doing. All concerned with the project—save those hack scriptwriters—can feel proud and pleased with what they've brought forth.

  This is a step, however faltering, in the right direction for filmed sf; it deals with human problems in human terms, aided and abetted by the trappings of the superscience society. But more, it holds somewhere in its twisted skein, the magic elements that make a film unforgettable.

  And if the review is illogical, chalk it up to future shock, or brain damage or the eyes of childhood that it seems to me are indispensable for looking at special dreams like Silent Running. And Bruce Dern can play on my team, any day.

  The Staff/March 31, 1972

  HARLAN ELLISON: SCREENING ROOM [1973]

  1st INSTALLMENT

  Most blessed of all novelists is certainly Graham Greene. Unlike the shat-upon Faulkner, Hemingway, Cozzens, Roth and Updike who—with very rare exceptions—have had their novels turned to mulch by filmmakers, Greene's books have been widely and handsomely adapted. This Gun for Hire, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Orient Express, Hitchcock's version of The Confidential Agent, The Fallen Idol . . . all were superlative films, though not necessarily big box-office. One is forced to the conclusion that the man's work is purely translatable, and even flubs like The Comedians, The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana have elements to recommend them that clearly emerge from the original material. As a writer who has seen how wrong his material can go in the hands of the inept and artistically corrupt in what is essentially a collaborative art-form, I envy the blessings that continue to be showered on Greene, not the least but at the moment the latest being MGM's transmogrification of Travels with My Aunt from the printed page to celluloid.

  Working from a lean and utterly delicious screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler, director George Cukor demonstrates that even at age seventy-four his talent is as firm and juicy as a pippin apple. Greene's "entertainment" about Henry, a mildewy English gentleman more concerned with his garden than with the joys of living, whose world is turned cockeyed by his swashbuckling Aunt Agatha, does not rush, neither does it stroll. In Cukor's hands it is permitted to slide, to slither, to slip like finest silk from opening sequence to O. Henry ending. It is a bravura performance by all concerned, not the least of whom are the exquisite Maggie Smith (whose makeup leaves something to be desired) and Alec McCowen as Aunt Agatha and Henry. It is a film of pure pleasure, a simple and uncomplicated joy shot with grace and wit and intelligence, and I do not think you will pillory me for urging you to see it at your earliest convenience.

  On the other foot, however, we have Man of La Mancha from United Artists, a debacle in virtually every particular. More, it is a thoroughgoing disgrace. The days of substituting Mitzi Gaynors for Mary Martins in South Pacifics were gone, we thought, and bad cess to them. But with unerring stupidity and an eye for venality unparalleled since 20th remade Stagecoach and took the box-office drubbing it deserved, producer-director Arthur Hiller has cast Peter O'Toole as Quixote in the role made famous by Richard Kiley off-Broadway, and replaced Joan Diener with Sophia Loren as Aldonza.

  It is embarrassing. O'Toole's musical capabilities, light and frivolous and utterly beguiling in The Ruling Class, are here strained far beyond the point of tolerance by those who know and admire Dale Wasserman's musical play. Neither is it to scenarist Wasserman's credit that the interior tension and enveloping humanity of the stage production have been leached out for the big screen. The less said about Ms. Loren, beyond her undeniable and frankly sexist-appealing beauty, the better. Her singing is the pathetic burbling of a titmouse drowning in a milk pitcher.

  Virtually without moment, this is a film that does no one involved with it credit. And the lunacy of shooting scenes that look like backlot setups, in Spain, at enormous cost, is only matched in derangement by the cacophony of O'Toole's British accent, Loren's Italian accent and James Coco's Bronx accent all going down for the third time under the weight of the Impossible Dream. Better the windmill should have won.

  I'm probably the only critic in the country who'll say this, but I enjoyed National General's Barbra Streisand starrer, Up the Sandbox. The third release I've seen from the company of stars who call themselves "First Artists" (about the other two, The Getaway and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, more later), it is a mixed bag of fantasy and reality with Ms. Streisand as an upper-class Manhattan housewife trying to raise her consciousness with considerable difficulty. While I am not the world's foremost Streisand fanatic, I would be less than truthful if I didn't admit I kvelled at Ms. Streisand's performance. (If kvell is beyond you, ask your nearest Jew, of which some of your best friends are.) Irvin Kershner has directed Paul Zindel's script with a madcap berserkness that produces an ambience of fluidity and startlement. The film jumps back and forth between Streisand's dream-visions of what her life might be like and the no-less-intriguing realities of what it is like. Perhaps there are films that appeal to my less intellectual predilections, but Up the Sandbox jibed with the basic tenets of the Ellison Moviegoing Philosophy: it kept me rapt and happy all the while it danced before me. What the hell more can one ask from a mere shadow-play?

  First Artists, however, will have to answer for The Getaway, as nasty a piece of business as I've encountered lately—with the exception of American-International's The Unholy Rollers, a film of pure depravity whose only saving grace is an incredible-looking female named Claudia Jennings who has every reason in the world to be proud of what she looks like with her clothes off. But not even the unnatural lust I feel for Ms. Jennings can keep me from returning to The Getaway with pickaxe in hand.

  Understand: I am a big admirer of Sam Peckinpah's films; no one can express a greater admiration for Steve McQueen; the novel from which the screenplay was taken was written by Jim Thompson, one of the best goddamed hardboiled writers this country ever produced, in some ways better even than James M. Cain, and a man whose work I tremendously admire; but all of them, perhaps at the hands of scenarist Walter Hill or the dictates of producers Foster & Brower, have been served hideously here.

  It isn't the violence that bothers me; in point of fact the violence is rather tame and predictable, hardly as innovative and eye-catching as that exposed in Peckinpah's brilliant Straw Dogs or The Wild Bunch; it is everything around the violence that sucks. McQueen is sloppy in his acting, Peckinpah is laocoönian in his direction, Quincy Jones's music is banal, Al Lettieri overacts, Sally Struthers underacts, and Ali MacGraw can't act worth shit. Perhaps that's where the major flaw lies. With Ms. MacGraw. And I would be a cad to pick up on the obvious straight line about lying with Ms. MacGraw. There's been enough of that crap in the movie magazines; but even so, McQueen will have to take the rap for carrying his girlfriend in this film. It was a sad artistic judgment to put a no-talent lightweight like Ali MacGraw in a role that demanded a young Claire Trevor. Because, Love Story considered, Ms. MacGraw is the sort of actress of whom it can be said, when she comes onscreen it is as though she just went offscreen.

  The Getaway is an utter bore. A failure as drama, as film, as entertainment. It is morally corrupt, artistically arid, conceptually outdated and in sum as thoroughly unredeemable a piece of shit as has been released this year, and the horror and wonder of it, is that it came from such massive talents.

  Universal has added another black film to the current torrential downpour with Trick Baby (from the novel by Iceberg Slim), and it is to their credit that the film is some kinda nother thang! It is a mean film. Tracing the fading moments in the lives and capers of two Philadelphia con artists, Trick Baby manages to escape the already-concretized clichés of black films (after the first seventeen minutes, which are embarrassing and badly acted) to pound its story home like a good club fighter working a Friday night prelim. Mel Stewart, who plays
Blue Howard, the senior partner of the flummoxing partnership, is for my money the hottest black actor in the country. I remember seeing him work in "The Connection" at the old Living Theater in New York, and being impressed with his ease and individuality on a stage. That was almost fifteen years ago. Now he has stepped forward, his time is now, to steal the film from director Larry Yust, from all his fellow actors, from the sensational Philly locations used to limn that special enclave of the black underworld, and he is Blue! The most engaging, outrageous, multifarious grifter who ever worked the pigeon drop! And when he tells a poker opponent trying to bluff him, "Don't con me, man, I'm bullshit-proof," the theater goes up for grabs. It is Stewart, and the growing beat of desperation in his rotting lifestyle that carries this film over and across the backs of the lesser black exploitation films currently glutting the market with a wash of honky blood and brains blown out to verify black machismo.

  Trick Baby isn't Sounder or Black Girl or even Lady Sings the Blues, but it is just mean and tough enough to rip at the real world for 89 minutes and send you away knowing your time was well-spent.