Living in Britain, subject to its natural resources and its television, Kubrick not surprisingly felt drawn to the eighteenth century as a kind of board game on pragmatism and cruelty. But why did he fix on Thackeray’s novel? And how is there not more gathered moral force and human energy in the telling?
The one strength of the film is its supporting cast. The more O’Neal glowers and glares, the more likely it is that a scene will be rescued by Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Diana Koerner, Murray Melvin, Frank Middlemass, André Morell, Arthur O’Sullivan, Godfrey Quigley, Leonard Rossiter (who would have been better as the lead), Philip Stone, and Leon Vitali.
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers has its ups and downs. Oh, it only looks like a documentary, some opponents say, so don’t miss how far it is rigged, or contrived, or set up—as if movies have not always been an insouciant mixture of honesty and sham, of photograph and theater. Then there is the ebb and flow of history, the times when it seems a little hard to stomach the way the film may have been used as a training manual by insurgents. Then time passes, the insurgents win, and it seems all the more evident that The Battle of Algiers understands the cruel logic of these events.
Pontecorvo’s picture covers the mounting turmoil of the 1950s in Algeria, with the emergence of the FLN in 1952, the increased severity of the white colonists’ resistance, and the eventual compromise or betrayal that brought De Gaulle back to power and that settled the future of the country. As such, it is a story of street fighting, guerrillas, and suicide missions opposing an organized army, led with more or less brutality and less and less understanding of guerrilla warfare.
In 1965, it was quite natural that Pontecorvo should employ the practices of cinema verité, and it’s to his credit as a dramatic filmmaker that they make so tidy and forceful a picture. Indeed, the inevitability of what is going to happen is handled with great restraint, and in many ways the film resembles Otto Preminger’s Exodus of 1960, which says, Put your partisanship aside, look and see, and isn’t it plain what will happen? The Israelis pioneered fighting techniques that were inherited by the Palestinians. What Pontecorvo had on his side was the nature of the Casbah—a tradition that went back as far as Pépé le Moko—and a great eye for sharp, frightened, hostile faces. The paramount immediacy of the film is in those faces and the way the casting went to types and known political sympathies.
Beyond that, everyone behaves badly, beyond excuse or vindication. In the same way, it is quite apparent that the insurgency will win, for armed soldiers in civilian situations look archaic, foolish, and like targets. It is no way to handle an army, or a military purpose. In short, insurgents are defeated only by the politics that can provide what they want without seeming to give up the ghost.
The film doesn’t enlist sympathies, even if Pontecorvo was of the left. Instead, it shows armies to be dinosaurs, the monsters of the past, increasingly abject in an age when anyone can carry a bomb or know the rudiments of torture. After that, films like this—films that re-create live terrorist incidents with suspense and character—are helplessly on the side of the lone-wolf terrorists. That a film like The Battle of Algiers was available through most of the years of Vietnam and all of the time of Iraq only demonstrates the ruinous stupidity that overtakes armies when they do not have political control of their work. One day, every “soldier” will realize that it is his destiny to be an insurgent.
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
In the ice pack of the Cold War, at Brussels in 1958, Potemkin was voted by an assembly of film critics as the greatest film ever made. Considering the films made in just the late 1950s, that vote is a measure of how little critical thinking was going on. Only two years after the Hungarian uprising, the Brussels result spoke to aging, left-wing attitudes that could not forget (or place) the excitement of Soviet cinema of the twenties. But the dynamic of Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema—of drastic composition and editing fusion—had been displaced (thanks to Murnau, Renoir, Welles, Mizoguchi, Ophuls, and so many others) by fluidity, movement, and duration. There was also the feeling, pointed out by critic Pauline Kael, that “great as [Potemkin] undoubtedly is, it’s not really a likable film.”
Of course, that can promote the argument “Be careful what you think now, because in fifty years the opinion may look foolish.” But Citizen Kane’s dominance in so many best-film polls is sixty-five years old now, and while many people recognize something unproductive in always approving Kane, still, that film is no less impressive or intriguing than it was in 1941 or 1962. And there’s a key point: Starving sailors and massacring people on the Odessa harbor steps are not nice things. We hardly need “great cinema” to convince us of that. Yet the spectacular visual and rhythmic nature of Potemkin began to seem formalistic (the Soviet criticism) or too satisfied with technique to notice the slaughter. On the other hand, Charles Foster Kane is a muddle of a man over whom we still have mixed feelings.
But Eisenstein and his colleagues were working in Russia in 1925, with the horror of tsarism recent enough to demand remedy. And Eisenstein was an illustrator of astonishing power. Moreover, in seeing cinema as a matter of so many angled compositions or “shock shots,” he was locking himself into an editing style that was always cutting away and that would never appreciate real time or space. In fact, this issue was being solved in German cinema, where expressionistic composition was already giving way to contextual camera movements (you can see that in Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau).
It’s not that Eisenstein was entirely without influence. Alfred Hitchcock had a very similar melodramatic way of composing and framing, and Hitch and Eisenstein did their real work with pen on paper—storyboarding. (Hitch was more interested in people.) The storyboard brought to life is Eisenstein’s real achievement, and you can find him in such odd places as the paintings of Francis Bacon and the history of the graphic novel. But in the history of cinema, he was a dead end, and the way Potemkin lasted as a sacred cow is still a measure of how far in the rest of the world the movies followed quite different subjects, like love and money. Potemkin is about being right, and it was important in that it came to a people who hardly knew they existed. So being right was the first step to being wrong, which is usually the most testing state of peoples, and people.
Beat the Devil (1954)
I suppose that a great documentary on the making of Beat the Devil might be more entertaining than the real thing. The shifting party that attended its making is rare even for the romance of European coproduction. But the film we have is close enough to the notion that a movie is seldom as foolish or as entertaining as the record of its making. So the first advice on watching Beat the Devil is to see it as John Huston’s laughing observation of the crack-up in the picture business and the first shuddering intimation that films are going to be made anyway—that chaos, lack of preparation, narrative disorder, and willful mistake are no deterrent. It’s as if Huston had glimpsed this truth: that the urge to make a comic caper movie is enough—there’s no need to labor over the real thing, no need to take it seriously.
A great deal of the comedy, I think, rests in the way this was in part a Santana Production. In other words, it was part of Humphrey Bogart’s desire to make a packet of money for himself. Huston was his friend, I suppose—they had certainly been through a lot together—and you can feel Huston’s stifled mirth all through the picture that Bogey is seeing his fortune dry in the sun while trying to maintain his cool, surly manner.
Where did the film come from? From a novel by James Helvick (a pen name for Claud Cockburn); from a script by Truman Capote, more or less written a few hours ahead of the shooting; and from Huston’s give-up-the-ghost grin. Is that why Huston teases David O. Selznick (never far away from the set) by giving Jennifer Jones blond hair and a sense of humor? (With Selznick she might have had the first but never the second.) And is Gina Lollobrigida actually meant to be sexy, or the
impossible sexy Continental star who walks behind her own breasts the way a gangster chief follows his bodyguards?
The alluvial wealth of the picture rests in its supporting cast. Above all, Robert Morley and Peter Lorre together are like Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, except that there is the extra comedy of Morley’s serene social disapproval of Lorre, which never comes close to preventing the infection of madness. Then add in Edward Underdown and Ivor Barnard—one stupidly dangerous, the other lethally stupid.
And yet… I have to say that the pleasure one finds in Beat the Devil can die in the throat, if only because there is too much despair here. It’s as if, by 1954, if you please, enough knowing people had got the sure sense that it was all over, that more or less everything that followed was going to be a camp version of some lovely, foolish memory of the golden age. That anxiety has not yet been dispelled. Equally, who is to say that every film fan is not now as daft and as isolated as the Arab prince who hungers for word of the great Rita Hayworth?
Being John Malkovich (1999)
In the enchanted village of Manhattan, Craig (John Cusack), a man who performs with puppets, takes a job at Lester Corp., on floor 7½ of an office building. He has been pushed into this by his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), but Craig falls in love with another worker, Maxine (Catherine Keener). Because the floor is only half a floor, it has low ceilings. It may be the regular crouched stance that helps Craig discover a door and a hole that lead into the head of the actor John Malkovich or, as the credits insist, John Horatio Malkovich. Craig takes that trip, and for fifteen minutes he is in the head of our most mannered and supercilious actor. Then he is ejected somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This is the setup for perhaps the most startling and innovative American film at the end of the twentieth century, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. And maybe best of all, it is what you want to make of it. I proposed the enchanted village of Manhattan in that this story covers the territory from fairy story to Kafka. Nor is it accidental that the central figure is trying to make a kind of puppet play (operating from the outside) in which he is led to see the possible advantages—and insanity—of internal possession. So this is a film about acting as much as pretending, and it is truly a kind of critical essay on John Malkovich to which Malkovich has loaned himself with an absence of ego that is all the more striking in view of his work. Critic Jonathan Romney asked us to consider what the film would have been like had it been Being Jeremy Irons or Being Charles Dance? Or Julian Sands? Mr. Romney is our kind of subversive.
Well, with respect to those gentlemen, I think “A good deal less,” is the proper answer, just because this film dwells exquisitely on the gulf between the languid hauteur of a John Malkovich we have learned to get along with onscreen and this very patient, long-suffering head that permits a great deal of coming-and-going traffic without more than a sigh. And again, it is Kafka-esque, the literalism of being inside someone’s head and hearing the different timbre of sound effects from inside, as opposed to outside.
I daresay there were some audiences, happily accustomed to the mainstream fare of the day—say, The Insider, by Michael Mann—who wondered how a whole film could simply be this odd, show-offy, and pretentious? After all, what kind of insiderism, really, was this, next to the metaphor of “insider” in which Russell Crowe informs on a tobacco company? But the alleged and massive sanity of the Michael Mann film is all very well. Everyone acts in his own interest in that film, until you realize that the film exists only because millions of people are smoking—an irrational, neurotic behavior. Being John Malkovich, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to make a fantasy factual. It seems to me not just more alarming than The Insider but a great deal funnier. And it’s only when peril gets neurotic, and comic, that people start to smoke.
The Bellboy (1960)
For ten years, from 1946 to 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the most successful double act in American show business. They had met in 1945—Dean Italian, from Ohio, a crooner; Jerry Jewish, from Newark, a comic—when they shared little more than ambition and going nowhere. Though it never translated adequately to film, they were inspired together. In part, they were the straight guy and the idiot. In part, without really knowing why, they were hugely successful when they had not been—and that meant a lot of money. But it was a live act in which the cool (and very good-looking) Dean would eventually crack up at Jerry’s antics. And when that happened, they were not just home; they were brothers. They liked each other—and that is not always true in double acts.
In nightclubs and on television, this act was a sensation of the late 1940s. They would sometimes run on for hours if the mood took them. But soon enough, a clash developed. Dean was truly cool, lazy, casual, a natural—he could get a laugh just like that. Jerry was a worrier, a fusspot, and a tyrant, and he was endlessly concerned about getting “it” right. And being in charge. He wanted to rehearse, while Dean thought just being up there together was enough. Dean found Jerry’s excess of sentimentality overpowering and fake—he knew that Jerry the crier could be a killer, too. Jerry thought he was doing everything: Dean said Jerry on his own would be too much for any sane audience.
Brought together by Hal Wallis at Paramount, they made seventeen films that are lackluster and tend to confirm Dean’s faith in spontaneity. So they broke up (rather than kill each other). Dean became a pretty good actor, a world-famous singer, a stage drunk, a member of the Rat Pack, and an increasingly sad and lonely man. Jerry, in going solo, started the muscular dystrophy telethon, a monstrous exploitation of his own emotionalism. But he never really had a solo live act. Instead, he became not just a director of films, but an auteur—by which I mean that he was regarded in France as a genius, and he developed a taste and a knowledge for talking about film that had no equal.
The Bellboy is the first film he directed, and in many ways it is a harking back to the history of silent film. Set at the then fairly new Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, it is a series of set-piece routines in which Jerry plays a bellboy. They are physical bits of business, conceived and carried out with a total allegiance to the camera. In that vein, Jerry had a very successful career through the 1960s, but then his taste for material became mawkish, and young audiences apparently deserted him. Despite much ill health (he seems like a creature of illness in so many ways), he soldiers on, and I suspect he has little more than half a dozen ideas a day. But The Bellboy is a masterpiece of visual comedy in which Jerry is still a simpleton while the mind that sees the jokes is a mathematical genius.
Belle de Jour (1967)
Why not? By the mid-sixties, years famous for their fusion of love and radicalism, it was time for the bourgeoisie to have a discreet look at sexuality. What happens? Well, it is exactly like the box that the Japanese man brings to the brothel. Do you remember? He has a box, which opens, and when it does, we see nothing but we hear the intense whirring of… a scorpion on a leash or a demented dildo? After the film was released, and famous, director Luis Buñuel reported that at all manner of social events he was approached by a great range of women—society ladies to tramps, the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly—and without fail all of them wanted to ask him about it. “Well?” they said. And when he replied, “Well, what?” they all asked, “What is it inside the box?” And the maker of the box answered, “Whatever you want it to be.” We are talking about desire—which is not necessarily the same as love, and certainly not marriage.
Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is a well-to-do woman married to Pierre (Jean Sorel), who is pretty but boyish. They have a friend Husson (Michel Piccoli)—rather sinister, a little too odd and intimate—who implies that he knows things about Séverine. He suggests an establishment where she might gain rather more satisfaction than comes from her marriage. But when she realizes the place is a brothel, she is shocked at first (isn’t she?) and frightened away. But she tries again, and she wins the favor of Anaïs (Geneviève Page), who runs the place. They make a
n arrangement.
You see, Séverine is really only free in the afternoons. In the evening she must be home for Pierre. But she could work as a “belle de jour,” couldn’t she? I ask these little questions because the great delicacy of Deneuve’s extraordinary performance is that she hardly seems to have the choice; she is, after all, a wife, in whom obedience is a treasured asset. So she does what she can, what she must, and it is left to us to gaze on that very beautiful, polished face and deduce where frenzy meets necessity.
In time, she encounters “ugly” clients, not just the Japanese man, but a lout, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), violent, dangerous, and hopelessly in love with Séverine. Marcel cripples Pierre out of vengeance, and Séverine cares for her husband until Husson tells the helpless man the truth.
The film comes from a Joseph Kessel novel and was scripted by Jean-Claude Carrière, in his second collaboration with Buñuel. But this film is in very pretty color: it is a world of interiors such as the bourgeoisie cherish (design by Robert Clavel, photography by Sacha Vierny). The color is a key part of the glossy stylization being practiced here; it goes with witty dialogue, starry players, and a dainty perfection in performance. But do not be deceived. The deepest, dirtiest questions are being asked in the age of feminism—like what do you desire? Do you need to see your husband crippled by a monster from the gutters? It’s whatever you want it to be, and one of the very few great films.
La Belle et la Bête (1946)
'Have You Seen...?' Page 14
