'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Pierre-William Glenn did the photography. Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jean-Louis Richard wrote the script. Georges Delerue did the lovely music. And the very appealing cast includes Jacqueline Bisset (never prettier), Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Baye, and just about everyone else Truffaut knew or could meet (including Graham Greene as a moneyman).

  Day of Wrath (1943)

  As Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath proceeds, it is easy to think that its subject matter is far from us. At the outset, we have the language of the Day of Wrath spelled out as we see a medieval manuscript. And it may be tempting, at times, to think that because this film was made in Denmark under Nazi occupation, it is a reference to that terror and the place of testimony against others that it encouraged. But the film is more searching than that.

  On a beautiful day in May 1623, with blossoms on the fruit trees, an old woman is put to death as a witch in a small Danish community. There is not the least objective evidence of her wrongdoing beyond the fact that she grows herbs. Under torture, she makes no accusation against others and no admission. But just before death, in anger and a spirit of revenge, she tells the pastor, Absalon, that his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), may be driven by the devil. As the old woman is burned at the stake, the flames are nearly lost in the sunlight.

  Life goes on in the pastor’s house but for one change: His son by a first wife, Martin, comes home. Martin is actually older than Anne, and almost without signs, a love affair develops between them, like plants growing in the sun. They go off to the secrecy of the birch woods and make love. But Absalon’s mother hates Anne—the bride is so young and has an obvious power over Absalon because of it.

  Absalon hears Anne laughing—it is a piercing moment, the laughter offstage and the old man’s face stricken by the novelty of what he hears. It is, if you like, the first brush of stroke. He questions Anne, and suddenly she cannot tolerate the dishonesty. Yes, she loves Martin, and they want the old man dead. His hand starts to shake, and the stroke hits him. But then, at the funeral, Absalon’s mother charges Anne with being the devil’s work, and despite her fear of what will happen, she admits to it all. Martin backs away from her as if now he doubts his own life and prefers to believe in the devil.

  Filmed in austere black and white (the photography is by Henning Bendtsen), with long takes and simple adjusting camera movements, it is like Rembrandt on a strict budget. The psychology becomes shockingly modern at the end. Surpassing not just the seventeenth century but Nazism, it is a record of the way sexual guilt and exploitation can turn into thoughts as delusional as those of witchcraft.

  The men in the film are restricted in their performance: They are upright, impassive, ludicrously burdened by their privilege and spiritual weight. But the women are the life forces. The old woman burned is one of the most pathetic figures in film, Absalon’s mother is a monster we long to see damaged, and Anne is, quite simply, a modern woman trapped by male thought control. With only nuances and gestures, Dreyer is able to let us see Anne as a minx and a saint, a witch and a figure of sanity and responsibility. The influence on Bergman is huge, but no less is Dreyer’s achievement here.

  Days of Heaven (1978)

  Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s second film, is a small period noir story as if seen through the immense cultural telescope of documentarian and historian Ken Burns. It becomes an epic of the prairies in which every blade of grass and every insect has been blessed by Walt Whitman and Exxon Mobil. The result is fascinating and beautiful but perilously given to pretension. In the decades since, it has come to seem like a dead end, even if it is the work of one of the most cultivated men ever to get his hands on a mainstream American film.

  Three kids break out of the factory furnace of Chicago in 1916: Bill (Richard Gere); his kid sister, Linda (Linda Manz); and Bill’s girl, Abby (Brooke Adams). They travel south by train and come to Texas, where they find work on the ranch of a man known only as the Farmer (Sam Shepard). He is a gaunt, shy man, and he falls for Abby. Bill encourages this so that they will be looked after. The Farmer marries Abby. Bill still has her, but then Abby falls in love with the Farmer. So Bill goes off with a circus troupe. He comes back. There is a great plague of locusts and a fire set to kill the locusts. Bill kills the Farmer. Then the three are pursued, and Bill is killed.

  Without doubt, the most striking, dramatic thing about the film is the narrative by Linda. This is a version of Holly’s voice-over in Badlands, but it is bolder because Linda is younger while her voice is more philosophical. Manz gives the best performance in the film, yet it lends a sunset sheen of magical improbability to everything. That is magnified by the lustrously beautiful photography of the landscapes (by Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler), which becomes euphoric or religious in the plague and fire sequences. The beauty is overpowering, symphonic, and enough to leave the meager human action far behind.

  It is hard to say, finally, what this odd film is meant to mean—for the expressive powers of the visuals are intoxicating yet empty. (To illustrate this point, I’d refer to The Thin Red Line, Malick’s next film, where the island of Guadalcanal is so elemental, so beautiful, so God-given that it is a very minor distraction that there should be a war going on there.) Not for the first time, a really promising director seems to have fallen in love with the cinematic and lost all sense of where he was going because of it.

  So what does the title mean—granted that the story makes a small hell in which the one man who loves and works the land dies? Is it an idyll, simply? Is the film saying we are unfit for this land or these days? Or is there an adolescent irony at work? None of these answers is sufficient. Meanwhile, Days of Heaven remains one of the great visual experiences in American film, and a warning that film is more than visual.

  Days of Wine and Roses (1963)

  As I write this, a top Hollywood personality, Mel Gibson, has just been charged with driving under the influence. There is talk that he will be entering serious rehabilitation, which usually means a clinic, and there have been stories that Gibson has had a drinking problem for years. It may be a smokescreen to excuse his other problems—notably his anti-Semitic talk. But anyone who spends time in Hollywood recognizes that the great strain of the business, and of flourishing in it, does drive some people to drink or other addictions. In which case, it is interesting that I can quickly think of only three movies that deal with the issue: The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses, and When a Man Loves a Woman. But if Hollywood is scared of the subject, let’s note that The Lost Weekend scooped the big prize, while Days of Wine and Roses took in $4.3 million and got respectful Oscar nominations for both Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.

  Days was done for television originally, in 1958, as a Playhouse 90 production, written by J. P. Miller and directed by John Frankenheimer. In that version, Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie played the young couple, and Charles Bickford was the girl’s father. For the big screen, Frankenheimer stepped aside—he was at the busiest time of his career—and Blake Edwards took over the direction. Jack Lemmon was apparently very keen to play Joe Clay, and he recommended Lee Remick for the part of Kirsten Arnesen, the girl he marries. But Bickford was retained in the role of Kirsten’s father, Ellis. The strength of the material is to show an honest love affair—with marriage and an appealing daughter—while still knowing the insecurities that will lead to drinking. Kirsten has never quite grown up, while Joe is in a muddle over the career rat race. He introduces his wife to drink and then lives to see her destroyed by the curse.

  The film was photographed in black and white by Philip Lathrop, with art direction by Joseph Wright. The playing is expert and deeply touching, and the subtlest thing about the film is the idea that if these two people loved each other less, they might be able to haul themselves out of trouble.

  In many ways, the domestic situation and the love story take this problem picture much closer to ordinary life than The Lost Weekend could ever be. And, of course, this film
has a tragic ending. The Academy steered clear of the picture, and the only Oscar it won was for a rather sickly sweet song, written by Henry Mancini and sung by Andy Williams. The tune is still well known (it’s a kind of torch song in its structure and tone), and one can’t help but feel that it was meant to muffle the bleak effect of the picture as a whole. Rest assured, the problem lives on, especially in show business, where the chronic urge to be thin puts more emphasis on drinking than eating.

  The Dead (1987)

  The occasion of The Dead is replete with its own stories: Of how John Huston came to what would be his last film in an advanced state of emphysema. Of how he re-created the Dublin of 1907 in the blaze of summer in a studio near the Magic Mountain amusement park, in the hills north of Los Angeles, importing a rich cast of Irish players for the dinner. And of how the dying man bent himself to the noble task of filming the James Joyce story faithfully and surely, if only as a way of staying alive.

  What happens? There is a dinner party in a Dublin house. A number of lives are sketched in, along with the self-consumed society of a provincial city that fancied itself. Huston’s son, Tony, wrote the script with his father, and I don’t think there’s any fault to be found with it beyond its helpless condition of not being the story itself. Wasn’t it nominated for the Oscar in the same kind of futile respect?

  The craft work was very solid and careful: Fred Murphy did the photography in muted color—I’m sure he’d have preferred black and white, but what was anyone to do about that? Stephen Grimes did fine production design, lovingly furnished. Roberto Silvi edited the film. Alex North did some music, content to develop music of the period. And Dorothy Jeakins did the costumes and got an Oscar nomination. Put all of that together and you could quite easily believe you were in Dublin at the time—a thing that film can do, and will. Which is all very well, except that James Joyce, who was in Dublin, had the uncanny ability to be everywhere else or to use words that roamed in time.

  The cast is fine. I can believe that Donal McCann as Gabriel and Anjelica Huston as Gretta are married, and content or not, in the way of the narrative. I took great pleasure in watching and listening to the others: Rachael Dowling, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, Ingrid Craigie, Dan O’Herlihy, Frank Patterson, Donal Donnelly, Marie Kean, Maria McDermottroe, Sean McClory, and Colm Meaney. And what with all of them, there is the air and the sniff of Dubliners and there is the story of “The Dead.”

  But what there is not and never will be is the great rhythm of the Joyce story, the writing, the imagery (such as anyone would be an idiot to try to reproduce), and the sense that literature can give of the past and the memory of it. To tell the truth, it’s not a very good film. To be fair, for all its faith, it’s pretty empty next to this:

  A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

  You see, it was about then that, seeing there were eager souls who could never do the writing, God invented film and so on. And I suppose it was a kindness. But it showed what an idiot He was.

  Dead Calm (1989)

  Dead Calm would be just a suspense film about people on boats, taken from a novel by Charles Williams—as such, it did inspire one of Orson Welles’s unfinished films (the one with himself, Jeanne Moreau, Laurence Harvey, and Michael Bryant). Purists might wish for the Welles film, but the Dead Calm that exists—complete—is no small thing, not with Nicole Kidman in it, as large and freckled as life.

  Not that her being in the film really stands up to any test of reason. She was twenty when she made the film—a rare achievement, yet a disqualification, too. After all, as the film opens, her husband (Sam Neill), a naval officer, comes back from a voyage, expecting to be met by wife and child. But something has happened, an accident in which the child has been killed, a child of four, which suggests that Nicole’s character, Rae, was a freshman in high school at the time of the marriage.

  As part of her convalescence, she and the husband go on a substantial voyage on his yacht. She seems to be getting better. But when she takes a swim off the yacht, she wears a one-piece black bathing suit. The appeal of Ms. Kidman’s body is not in doubt, and I’m sure that there were some basic censorship regulations that applied—but isn’t it remarkable that the wife would not swim naked in that situation? The restraints cannot help but beg to be interpreted. They hint at some limit—some polite barrier—in the marriage (Neill is twenty years older than Kidman). In other words, you can’t show anything in a movie without having the audience interpret it—so you might as well have a reason for everything.

  The story here is very simple. The couple see another yacht in the distance, seemingly out of control. Then a young man—Billy Zane—makes his way to them in a small boat. He is near collapse, but he says that people died on the other yacht, apparently of some kind of poisoning. He falls asleep. And then Captain Sam decides to go over to the wallowing yacht to see what really happened. Should he go? You know the answer—and you can tell without seeing it that his going amounts to another kind of neglect of his wife.

  He finds a lot of trouble on the boat—an engine that doesn’t work and people who have been murdered. Whereupon Billy Zane wakes up and makes off with Nicole. What will he do to her? Can Sam follow them and keep up? Ms. Kidman on camera acts like a brave and resourceful young woman, even if in her efforts to slow Mr. Zane she just about lets him rape her. Or is that it?

  The Phillip Noyce picture is content to be a suspense story, so the matters of character—the questions—are ignored. That doesn’t mean they are settled. So Dead Calm is fishing for subtext. There are many other ways in which it might proceed, and Nicole’s gaze seems to have seen most of them. The trouble with a great “discovery” (in fact, Kidman was already well-known in Australia) is that she can leave your movie looking a bit simpleminded.

  Death in Venice (1971)

  Here, in the course of one film, you can measure the shift from one man intent on making a masterpiece to something like a monstrous parody created by the Monty Python boys. So be careful when you set out with a masterpiece in mind, and think several times before taking on a work as slight yet pregnant as Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella in which Gustav von Aschenbach, writer, aesthete, and connoisseur, takes himself off to Venice in a time of cholera. (We know from the décor that this is the Europe of just before the First World War, and it is part of the film’s gloom that it slots in with that cliché of fatefulness.)

  Aschenbach is of a certain age—probably a little more than fifty, the age at which Dirk Bogarde played the role—in love with youth as he himself loses it. But as if to greet or taunt the man’s repressed sexual urges, a boy, Tadzio, appears, and he is like a watermark in the film. Tadzio is tall, slender, blond, classy, and he feels as Swedish as the actor, Björn Andrésen. I hope Mr. Andrésen is leading a quiet, fruitful life somewhere—it must have been a tough assignment for recovery. For although everything in the picture adores Tadzio, Mr. Andrésen has no idea why and not very much to offer. He is a passive, lofty kid, rather bitter about being photographed, but safely kept at a distance. And as Aschenbach’s desire is thwarted, Dirk Bogarde’s performance becomes a study in torment, degenerating to the point where his mascara begins to run in the rain and the tears.

  Death in Veni
ce still has many admirers, some of whom seem to believe that the Mahler in which the film is washed (the Third and the Fifth Symphonies) must have been written by Visconti himself, inspired by his own footage. Some viewers find the stress on the costumes pretty and significant (Piero Tosi was Oscar-nominated for them); others can only think how quickly white shows the dirt.

  The quality in this quality production is like waterlogging. In some films it is Venice that sinks; here it could be the movie, wallowing more and more as the buildings loom larger. Ferdinando Scarfiotti did the art direction, and Pasquale de Santis did the photography. The cast includes a number of distinguished actors with very little to do or say: Mark Burns, Marisa Berenson, Silvana Mangano. It’s notable, I fear, that at Cannes Death in Venice won only a special 25th Anniversary Prize. Yes, a director had come out of the closet, but with such a burden of poshlust and production values that one longed for the age of discretion.

  You need only go back to Visconti’s Senso, done in Venice in 1954, to see the loss of emotional reality and the sacrifice of storytelling to lassitudinous self-regard. Death in Venice is a very bad film, made with such clarity and vulgarity that one can at least be grateful for its educational warning value—it is an embroidered banner indicating a vast minefield.

  Deep End (1971)

  Mention Deep End in informed movie circles, and everyone thinks you mean The Deep End, the 2001 picture (with Tilda Swinton, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel) a remake of Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment. I like The Deep End, and it came close to making this selection. But I am here to tell you that Deep End, made thirty years earlier by a nearly forgotten figure, Jerzy Skolimowski, is a better film.