Stories got out about the sex show that might be coming (this was all in advance of Duel in the Sun—or “lust in the dust”). There was a “rape” scene, plus scenes of the two young leads in the hay. And Hughes began to advertise such dreams in posters that featured an abandoned and voluptuous Jane Russell. All the while, she says, her master never laid a hand on her. And you can believe that, for voyeurism has seldom seemed so forlorn and lugubrious. Actually, the eye of the movie is more forlorn with Beutel.
Briefly, in February 1943, The Outlaw was released—so 1943 could be its day. But it wasn’t properly shown until 1946. Its running time, once 121 minutes, dropped to 103. It could be shorter still, but it has ten minutes or so that are insolent and compelling. As for Jane, she seems very young and uncertain, yet far too intimidated to start laughing.
The Outlaw and His Wife (1918)
The surviving prints of The Outlaw and His Wife are of poor quality, something exacerbated by the heavy tinting of most scenes—so the stark glory of the pure black-and-white image has to be imagined. Still, there are scenes of the vagrant characters shot against such immense natural backgrounds (found largely in Lapland) that the excitement and the pantheism are intoxicating. To be sure, there are fine landscape effects in American film of this time—the battles in Birth of a Nation—but nothing matches the way in which the seemingly infinite wilderness and desolation of the north adds to this story, and animates its way of looking at the characters. You don’t need the tinting when the distance is so majestic.
It’s a melodrama, still, taken from a play by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, an Icelandic writer. Ejvind (Victor Sjöström) is wanted for sheep stealing. Rather than fight the matter out in courts, he retreats to the wild country of the north, with his beloved Halla (Edith Erastoff), a landowner. Halla is a remarkable character—not really beautiful, but very strong in her determination, and in many ways the driving force in the film. Erastoff and Sjöström had recently married—she was his third wife. (There is even a scene near the end, in mounting madness, where he says she looks like a horse!)
In the north, they hunt and fish, they live in stone huts or caves. They have a beautiful blond child. Their retreat is said to last sixteen years before the elements weaken and destroy them. At one time, they have a companion, Arnes (John Ekman), and he falls in love with Halla, so that he nearly kills Ejvind in a desperate crisis. There is a moment then when the film cuts away for just a second or two to a shot of Halla (her breasts exposed) that is a quicker resort to inner life than anything in film at that stage. Arnes overcomes his temptation, but the viewer is left excited by the directness with which thought is waiting to be expressed without symbolism or moral coding.
It’s that real energy from life that makes the film so potent—plus the way the wife sacrifices her child and the absolutely unflawed acceptance of death at the end. In an American version of this film—if it had been attempted up in the Rockies—the “misunderstanding” would have been settled. The couple would have been redeemed and rescued. They would all have lived happily ever after.
But Sjöström’s picture understands that the severity of the drama can match the extremism of the landscape—indeed, it has to. For a summer, the crew went up to remote places and put them on film. I suspect they hardly guessed how much sheer passion and primitivism those landscapes supplied. If Sjöström had known, then the central melodrama could have been less forced. But the sense of madness overtaking people, without a chance of relief, is waiting on his American film, The Wind, ten years ahead.
Out of Africa (1985)
It’s not just Africa we’re “out of”—here is a movie out of its mind with excessive taste, safari dreams, and poshlust. It’s also significantly out of touch with Africa, the world made by whites there, and the very tricky, complicated mind of Karen Blixen. This is where the Peterman catalogue takes over from art or literature, or the alleged verities of light and space in Africa. Though its setting is Africa in the years from 1913 to 1931, it is a sweet evidence of how difficult it had become in the America of 1985 to imagine any other part of the world without resorting to flagrant fantasy. This is the high silliness that could be nominated for eleven Oscars then and win seven, including one for Sydney Pollack as Best Director.
It purports to be the story of Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), who goes to British East Africa to live with her husband, Baron Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer). She learns there what a casual adulterer he is. She acquires syphilis from him. She meets a great white hunter, Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), and travels with him, even letting him wash her hair on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. And she returns to Denmark.
Of course, Karen Blixen was the real name of Isak Dinesen (1885–1962), a great writer and an immense fabulist who, in old age, looked like a Gothic crone rather more deeply affected by syphilis than Kilimanjaro shampoo. Judith Thurman’s biography was one basis for the film, and it makes clear how far Dinesen differed from and intensified Meryl Streep’s very appealing presentation of a Hemingway ideal—brave white woman, good writer, active in sleeping bag, loves Africa, and not too demanding of wandering men. Equally Finch Hatton was not every dream that Robert Redford has ever held of the blond, solitary mountain man he yearns to be known as, but a pinched, disagreeable, vain Tory hunter.
The film claims Thurman’s book and Errol Trzebinski’s Silence Will Speak as sources, as well as every relevant book by Dinesen—all bundled up in a collection of clichés by Kurt Luedtke. In fact, the film belonged most to Pollack’s brave ignorance of reality, to the spectacular photography of David Watkin, the I-want-to-live-there production design of Stephen Grimes, and clothes by Milena Canonero that make safari seem eternally chic.
Streep is very good and clearly striving for something she has found in the research, but is being hidden in the film. Klaus Maria Brandauer is excellent as the baron, and there are good performances from Michael Kitchen (he should have been Finch Hatton), Malick Bowens, Joseph Thiaka, Michael Gough, Suzanna Hamilton, Rachel Kempson, Graham Crowden, Leslie Phillips, Shane Rimmer, and Donal McCann.
It cost $31 million and had U.S. rentals of $43.4 million, so it did well enough in the end, with Oscars as trophies—it won Best Picture, Best Director, screenplay, sound, Art Direction for Grimes, Cinematography for Watkin, and Best Score for John Barry. I find it hard to credit that there is not an “Out of Africa” song (by Streisand), but there is a little bit of Mozart instead.
Out of the Past (1947)
Everyone loves Out of the Past—I even liked it in the old days in England, where it was known as Build My Gallows High. Not that the fatalism of Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) is headed for judgment or execution. One of the pronounced things about this ultramoody picture is its offering no faith in law or order. Jeff is hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to find Whit’s mistress, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who has gone away. Actually she shot Whit and went off with $40,000 of his money. In due course, Jeff will settle with Kathie, but only after he has been in love with her, and crazy about her in Mexico, where he found her.
Of course, that’s not how the story is told. The film begins in Bridgeport, a small town on 395, the road that goes up the east side of the Sierra. Jeff is working there in a gas station: He has a girl he might marry (Virginia Huston) and he has a mute boy (Dickie Moore, aged eighteen) who is his friend. Then two thugs drive by—Whit’s men—quite by chance, and Jeff has to go back into his past to settle old scores and meet his fate like the idiot he is.
There, I have admitted at least the edge of doubt into all the noirista admiration of Out of the Past. Yes, it is terrifically well shot by Jacques Tourneur, and sixty years later it may stand as a definition of postwar modernism in that I still don’t think its economy or impersonal eloquence can be faulted—it is hard-boiled, but full of feeling. And I know the scholarship (by Jeff Schwager) that established that Frank Fenton did the brilliant shooting script after previous work by Daniel Mainwaring—and Mainwaring was the Geoffrey Hom
es who wrote the novel Build My Gallows High.
But let me ask you this: Granted the robust, witty daring we see in Jeff, do we really believe in him holed up in Bridgeport looking for a new life? Does that fit with the guy who can’t help but make a fool of himself with Kathie Moffat at every turn? And here we come to the big question: Were there times—like here—when it was asking a great deal for us to buy Robert Mitchum as so supreme, so omniscient, so lone and secure, and such a chump, too? This is a modest discontent, for I will always like the film—if only for Nicholas Musuraca’s exquisite black-and-white. He and Tourneur together were a marvel of storytelling craft. And it’s not that I dislike the tortuous nature of the plotline, it’s just that I think Jeff needs to be several degrees more vulnerable or mortal. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s playing to the loathing of women and the trust in taciturn machoism that together go so far, sometimes, to spoil noir setups. Never mind, there’s always Acapulco and that time of the evening when Kathie comes walking out of the night into the glow of a café. It’s the place next to the movie house. And it’s a perfect dream of going on the lam.
Outskirts (1933)
At first, Boris Barnet’s Outskirts seems like a rare and loving re-creation of provincial Russian life before the war and the revolution. We are in a small town in 1914 where people have time to watch the shadows shift on a sunny day. A man accosts a woman on a bench, makes off with her eventually, and throws a lurid wink at the camera. A bored horse talks. And Yelena Kuzmina throws her ravishing smiles at us—one of the great smiles in the history of the cinema, even if Kuzmina does little else. (Barnet’s other discovery at this time was Anna Sten, who is far livelier in his films than she ever was for Samuel Goldwyn.)
The style is comic, observant, and mundane—as if to say that was what Russia was like then. There is a strike in the town and Cossacks put it down, but the whole thing is muddled and so much less portentous or violent than similar scenes in Eisenstein. The sound is early and experimental: Individual sound effects are played against great sweeps of music (by Sergei Vasilenko), but many other sounds are simply left out as too difficult yet or too boring. Still, sound changes the perspective and signals the great war with Germany that no one in this Russia understands.
All of a sudden the picture is convulsed—epic battle scenes, wastelands at the front that might have influenced Kubrick. German soldiers are captured and imprisoned, and there is so little food in their camp that they are released to forage. One young soldier meets Yelena and takes up work in the shoemaking shop before paranoia and violence destroy the attempt at fraternization.
The alteration in tone and mood is uncanny, and it is arrived at through Barnet’s steady eye for human nature. It has been observed before that this film “just happens,” and seems coaxed into being by its own progress. But that is a way of masking Barnet’s extraordinary artistic ambition: to show war as being in defiance of every instinct in human observation and contact. If I say the feeling is French, that is a way of guessing that Outskirts must have affected Jean Renoir as he came to make La Grande Illusion only four years later.
But Boris Barnet (whose roots were English) is still a neglected figure in film history. He does not fit the old idea of a Soviet montage maker; for that reason alone, the newcomer is likely to be nonplussed by Outskirts. That in turn only leaves us wondering what the film’s title means (it was also known as Borderlands). But Outskirts shows very little mark of official Soviet intrusion—it is the work of an uncommon artist as much affected by Chekhov as by Bolshevik ideas. The look is like Dovzhenko (the photography is by M. Kirillov and M. Spiridonov). The comedy is near slapstick. And then we are facing the end of the world. To be seen to be believed.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
It is a fable, only 75 minutes long, and the kind of film that may still be played in American high schools in the hope of conveying pity and decency and teaching civics. In 1885, two cowboys (Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan) ride into Bridger’s Wells in Nevada. They find a community that has captured three men on charges of rustling and murder: a young family man (Dana Andrews); an old man, feeble (Francis Ford, John’s brother); and an arrogant Mexican (Anthony Quinn). A lynching is called for and the sheriff is away. We hear the debate and we encounter the range of opinion in the small town. The lynching occurs and then the sheriff arrives with the news that there was actually no crime. Fonda reads aloud the last letter Dana Andrews was allowed to write to his young wife. Is there anyone around who would rather print heroic legends?
It is a novel by Walter van Tilburg Clark, published in 1940. A producer brought it to William Wellman, who ended up buying the property and offering it to Darryl Zanuck. To Wellman’s surprise, Zanuck accepted it (though Wellman had to make two other films on the deal, Buffalo Bill and Thunder Birds). Lamar Trotti did the screenplay, simplifying the novel a good deal and making it more urgent and emblematic. This in turn was enhanced by a shooting strategy that did nearly all the exteriors on echoing sets with nailed-down sagebrush and gloomy studio lighting (by Arthur Miller). So we have no doubt about why we are there: We are witnessing a drama and a demonstration. It is good for us, even if we don’t exactly feel good.
It is earnest, theatrical, and didactic—yet it works. And there, in 1943, is a film that quietly dismantles all the bombast of team spirit and rapid response. And along the way (if only because of some interesting bits of casting) it sheds a baleful light on some other Western movie mythology: Jane Darwell is quite hateful as a laughing bigot; Francis Ford is pitiful; and Fonda, for once, is helpless and stricken. Frank Conroy is the bloodthirsty Southern major, and Harry Davenport is very good as a voice of reason. It also has William Eythe and Mary Beth Hughes.
It was made very cheaply, with a somber folk-music score by Cyril Mockridge, but it was nominated for Best Picture, and of its own accord it came to be regarded as the kind of picture that Hollywood allowed itself every now and then. For Fonda, it leads directly to 12 Angry Men, and you may decide that it is just as rigged as that study of the jury system. But miscarriages of justice are not so rare in the United States as to make the movie seem quaint. It is still watched by hunched teenagers falling out of love with the human race, whereas Buffalo Bill and Thunder Birds are on the shelf. Zanuck was a great judge of what mattered.
Paisan (1946)
Paisan is the Rossellini picture that followed Open City, and if it is less striking or forceful, it is more complex and searching. The situations in Open City are harrowing but clear-cut. What makes Paisan more interesting is that so many of the problems arise from failure of understanding, and from the reliably muddied state of human affairs, especially in war, where fear and insecurity are going to make mistakes. Once again, it is a kind of dramatized documentary, a film that uses nonprofessionals and real settings, but which acts out a series of scripted vignettes on life in Italy as the war reaches its final stages.
In the first, a Sicilian girl meets an American soldier. They can’t talk to each other, because of the language barrier. The GI is shot by German sniper fire. Other Americans arrive and believe the Sicilian girl killed him. In turn, she is killed.
In the second, a boy from Naples picks up a black GI and steals his shoes. The angry GI tracks the boy but finds he lives in caves outside the city in unimaginable poverty. He does nothing.
In the third, some American soldiers enter Rome. A whore picks up one of the soldiers and realizes they met six months earlier, before she had turned to prostitution. The girl tries to revive the past. But her soldier cannot recognize her any longer. Six months in war is an age.
In the fourth, an American nurse realizes she is tending a Resistance leader. But the Resistance itself is damaged because of the false rumor that the leader was killed.
In the fifth, in a monastery, Italians are shocked to find they are looking after three American chaplains—one a Protestant, one a Jew.
And in the last episode, the Germans who are still fighting in
the Po region execute Italian partisans who have been helping the Americans.
As Leo Braudy put it, “this episodic film is fascinated by the failures of relations between people, their separations and their misunderstandings.” After the stirring plea for solidarity in Open City, Rossellini feels bound to admit the destructive climate of confusion. No matter the hope or the courage or the wish, people cannot be sure they are simply fighting for the same thing. The realities of politics are beginning to obtrude—and we are reminded that war is the history of politics carried on by other means.
In its way, it is like the doubts in A Diary for Timothy (1945) coming after the unified determination of Listen to Britain in the work of Humphrey Jennings. Moreover, this is a hint of what is to come with Rossellini: the series of postwar ordeals or tests that face the character played by Ingrid Bergman. The script was by Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, and Marcello Pagliero. The photography is by Otello Martelli. Far less of a banner or a cry for unity, Paisan is a superb portrait of muddle as the essential human condition. But just as uncertain endings put off movie investors, so Paisan is the kind of documentary that has great difficulty getting institutional support. After all, institutions believe in being right and in lasting verdicts.
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Tom and Gerry, they are called. Tom and Gerry Jeffers. They live on Park Avenue and are just about perfect. He is Joel McCrea and he is an inventor. She is Claudette Colbert and she is simply well-dressed. But they are short on the rent and then a rich Texan, the “Wienie King” (Robert Dudley), shows up to rent the apartment. But he likes Gerry—he gives her the rent, in fact, as well as money for new clothes. Tom finds this shocking. But, darling, she protests, being attractive is what I do. I thought you liked it.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 102
