'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Yes, of course, the picture is a kind of tribute to French Impressionist painting, despite the black and white. And yes, there is nothing like the sense of airy opportunity as Jacques Brunius pushes the shutters open and light floods into the inn along with a glimpse of Sylvia Bataille standing on the swing in the garden outside. There is no discovery in all of film history as profound as Renoir feeling out spatial relationship—and feel is the only verb to use there, for the optics and the intellect of it all are dependent on the quality of being touched or noticed.

  There is the river, also, with boats making their way on the patient current. And there is the shocking close-up of Mlle. Bataille in sex, in love—as erotic as cinema has yet managed.

  So, here it is, a “spoiled” film from 1936. But maybe in the sum total of everything a film is greater than its basis, more humane and tragic than de Maupassant.

  Essential.

  The Passenger (1975)

  We are passive, we are passengers. We watch, we are voyeurs. We close our eyes, and let ourselves go with the passing adventure on the screen. David Locke is an American who works for British media as a reporter. He is a well-known figure. When he is reported dead in a seedy desert hotel in North Africa, there will be earnest obituaries on London television. His wife watches in pain.

  We never learn much about that marriage, or David’s London life. We never go “inside” him enough to know why it is that after a dispiriting day in the desert he goes back to the hotel and finds a chance acquaintance—a man named Robertson—dead from a heart attack. We do not know why Locke quietly sticks his own picture in Robertson’s passport, picks up the dead man’s diary, and sets out to make the enigmatic appointments he has made. It’s a scene rather like the one in Purple Noon, where Alain Delon tries to become Maurice Ronet. But we know about that: it’s Ripley wanting money, the girl, and glory. Locke just wants to sleepwalk.

  You may not quite agree with my description of the “action.” You may marvel that I call it “action.” There are people who find this a very pretentious, implausible existential thriller. I think it is one of the greatest films ever made: The Passenger, by Michelangelo Antonioni, a thriller, a mystery, and a sweet, faintly sinister parable on being so loose or free to let the vehicle of narrative, or of film running through the projector, carry you away.

  It’s from a Mark Peploe story, with a screenplay by Peploe, Peter Wollen, and Antonioni. You could say it’s an escapist fantasy in which a bored man goes to Barcelona, meets a lovely girl (Maria Schneider) who doesn’t ask any questions—you could say it’s a dream come true. Or you could say that it’s a dark ironic shape in which a searcher, giving up his old way of looking, tries another way and finds it leads him directly into the perilous heart of the intrigue he was hoping to report. But now he is a participant, a part of the story. Maybe the girl is bait in the trap. Either way, it all ends up at the Hotel de la Gloria at the close of the day in one of the most beautiful and suspenseful shots ever filmed—one shot, an acting out of liberty or imprisonment, depending on your point of view.

  It’s Antonioni and Jack Nicholson, and when the film was a flop, for years Nicholson owned it and looked after it. The photography is by Luciano Tovoli. The cast also includes Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, and Steven Berkoff. For myself, I watch it once a year and find that it grows richer and more suggestive, so that—while I think I know it—tiny things of intonation, a glance, or a background action grow like the blooming of the new year. So I am still unsure after thirty years whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. Try to decide.

  La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)

  As the public threatens to become a mob with the burning of the Maid, Warwick orders up fresh weapons. There is a staggering shot—a track and a pan, but part of a wheeling circle—as chain and mace flutter out of the window in a castle by Le Corbusier. The set is abstract, the weapons are authentic; the camera movement is giddy and sickening. This could be one of the deepest evocations of violence in all cinema. And it is from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece on the trial of Joan of Arc.

  Warwick looks like a kind of Mussolini figure, yet the clerics are from Dürer (Antonin Artaud and Michel Simon are two of them). There are at the same time great pains to be true to period—and a stirring, spartan modernism: and so we get shots of the medieval crowd, tumblers, contortionists, jugglers, but framed from drastic, low angles against a white sky so that they are cutouts and cutaways within the flow of imagery (Rudolph Maté did most of the photography). The film is based on two warring structures: the documents of the real trial, and the seething close-ups that justify the word passion in the title.

  And it is a succession of flagrant, composed images: of upside-down soldiers scurrying forward like beetles; of the execution stake, scorched, black with the nail that bore the damning inscription; of Joan hunched over in the furnace; of tears like the worms in the unburied skull, slipping down gross faces; of crows in the sky like kisses at the end of a child’s letter. On and on, without slowing or remorse—a demented certainty that only art can accommodate these terrible events.

  Long after the film is “known” and “digested,” long past the point of its being taken for granted as an obligatory thing, La Passion will shock you. And I suppose that some will make the argument that no film ever came closer to the truth of sainthood, God, and sublime acceptance—so is it religion at work? I don’t feel that. I know that Dreyer was religious in his way, yet I feel the film comes out of a desperate agnostic spirit—filled with conviction over the cruelty of the world and the coarse stupidity of authority. Yet, late at night, on television—Turner Classic Movies believes in the film enough for us to believe in them—its harsh grandeur and breathtaking beauty need only a few moments for the spell to be back. It is one of the most inspiring of films, and its inspiration is more art than God.

  Yes, of course, we must speak of Renée Falconetti’s Joan in a commitment to film and character that is exemplary, ravishing, and tragic. She was a comedienne onstage, it is said. So be it. Decades later, it is her face that touches Anna Karina when she goes to the movies in Vivre Sa Vie. By then, not even Godard had the zeal or the shamelessness to do close-ups in quite that stark way. But the method still leads the medium on. We have not yet caught up with its modernism.

  Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

  Begin at the beginning? How would you know you were there? So start at the end? Well, the end in this case has a habit of changing, and it comes so long after the first ending you can believe it’s starting again. Except that these old friendships and their fights are never over. There is a walled garden in the Western that likes to have its petty arguments over the facts and the legends, and which one ought to lead in the dance. Don’t let these desperate men get in that garden, for they’ll shoot your flowers to shreds and they’ll be merciless in making you see that with everyone such damned liars there are few facts left, but just the range of drink and paranoia and terror and glory in men’s heads. Somehow these heroes have to find a way to forget the terrible tongue-lashing a wife can give them.

  So once upon a time the film began with the last farewell of old friends, Garrett and the Kid, as one says he’s getting a new job and the other says he sees no reason to move on because of that. Nowadays, it has a fraternal beginning some thirty years later with Garrett being assassinated—you can look it up; such things happened; the cattlemen’s ring took its bounty in due course; and of course everybody who had ever known the Kid would be dead one day.

  Meanwhile, this is one of the most complex American films—see it in any and every version you can get, but generally go for the longer versions and on no account accept anything that does not have the scene where Garrett, sweet from the barbershop, goes home and finds a wife who simply tears him to pieces. This is the sharpest scene in Peckinpah where a woman tells one of the men not just to go to hell, but to stay there, because he’s there already.

  It was always a film of episodes, as Garrett tra
cks the Kid, captures him, has him escape, and then goes after him again, headed toward the Pete Maxwell place on the bank of the river—and there Garrett will work it out at last and get the job done. It barely touches the surface to add that this story of pursuit is also one of the saddest of broken-buddy films, where one man has to put on a badge and a mustache while another writes Ben-Hur and another floats by on a river raft with a gun at the ready.

  The film was butchered, of course, and it’s hard now to see that Sam Peckinpah expected anything less. But steak is steak, and whether it’s a jailhouse escape, a shoot-out at the river, or Lew Wallace offering the brandy, the film takes its moments with the rueful expertise of Billy tipping Harry Dean Stanton out of Rita Coolidge’s bed.

  Rudolph Wurlitzer did the script, and it comes out of deep research into Garrett and Bonney. John Coquillon shot the film. A basketball team edited it—give attention to Roger Spottiswoode and Garth Craven. Friends of the film (like Don Hyde) have looked after it. I watch it a couple of times a year, and derive as much strength and helplessness from it as I do watching the light go out at the end of the day.

  Was there ever a better cast? Kris Kristofferson is as plump and cocky as a college quarterback who has five girls getting him sundaes. This is the James Coburn film. Bob Dylan is fancy, odd, and a treat—and his music may be the best a Western ever had. Jason Robards is a man you want to know. And then there’s Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens in a great duet, Chill Wills, R. G. Armstrong as keep-the-change Bob Ollinger, Luke Askew, John Beck, Richard Bright, Matt Clark, Jack Dodson, Jack Elam as Alamosa Bill, Emilio Fernandez, Paul Fix, L. Q. Jones, Jorge Russek, Walter Kelley, and Rutanya Alda (as Ruthie Lee). There are even Peckinpah and his son, making coffins—a steady job.

  Paths of Glory (1957)

  As they made The Killing, Stanley Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris, found a novel, Paths of Glory, by Humphrey Cobb, published in 1935, based on the actual execution of five French soldiers in 1915 for mutiny. Dore Schary would not pursue it at M-G-M, but Kubrick-Harris bought the rights for $10,000 and apparently assigned it to pulp novelist Jim Thompson for a first draft. It was Thompson—if you can believe this—who softened the real ending. He had the five soldiers pardoned, and the wicked general exposed. No one was more shocked by this than Kirk Douglas, when the project came within his orbit. So a new script was done, largely by Calder Willingham, which is close to the unrelenting film we know. So the piece that supposedly opened up Kubrick’s misanthropy might have been a lot softer because of his urge to make a popular film.

  As part of the insane pattern of trench warfare, two corrupt officers, Generals Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and Mireau (George Macready), plan one more frontal assault by the French forces. This materializes as one of the great movie attack scenes ever done, with astonishing tracking shots craning over a landscape already shattered by prior disasters. The lighting cameraman was George Krause, but we know that Kubrick himself was hand-holding a camera during the attack, and it’s probable that he is directly responsible for most of the ravishing photography.

  The attack is a disaster, and the generals conclude that cowardice was the reason why. They decree that three men should be made examples in court-martials and immediate executions—no one doubts the verdicts. The three men chosen are Ralph Meeker, Joseph Turkel, and Timothy Carey, and the officer chosen to defend them was one of the leaders of the attack, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas).

  We know that. Kubrick was very much under the influence of Max Ophüls as he made this film (he had been considering remakes of some Ophüls material), and it’s clear—in the trenches and in the chateau where the staff is quartered—he was imitating the immense, rapid tracking shots so favored by Ophüls. (It is also worth noting that Ophüls died during the film’s shooting.)

  The spectacular movements are matched by a relentless examination of the characters. Dax is a paragon, of course—for Douglas was the star accounting for a third of the budget. But the others, officers and victims alike, are seen like monsters in their cages: craven, dishonest, feeble—it is a panorama of weakness in which the old-fashioned flourish of Menjou and Macready fits perfectly with the unpredictable turmoil of Timothy Carey. Other cast members include Wayne Morris, Richard Anderson, and Emile Meyer (deliberately miscast as a priest—there is no comfort in this world).

  Yet even Kubrick flinched. He could imitate Ophüls’s shots, but he could not understand the feeling in the master’s view of people. Still, he knew this was hardly box office, so he dreamed up the conclusion in which a German girl sings to a crowd of French soldiers. He chose Christiane Harlan—and in time he would marry her. It is an odd sign of sentiment creeping into an immaculately cold enterprise.

  La Paura (1954)

  La Paura, or Fear or Angst—think of it as misery—is the end of the Bergman-Rossellini attempt to present themselves as more than a great, noisy scandal. But the actor playing with Ingrid Bergman in the film, Mathias Wieman, said they were tearing each other apart, and the reviews said enough was enough. As for Bergman herself, she noted, “The world hated the Rossellini version of me, so nothing worked. And he was stuck with me. What did he want with an international star? Nothing. He didn’t know what to write for me. And, of course, by this time we both knew it. It was something we did not talk about. But the silences between us grew longer…”

  Rossellini gave up finally in writing original material for Ingrid. When he did, everyone decided that the tortured story was their mirror. So he found his agonized narratives elsewhere—this time in a novel, Die Angst, by Stefan Zweig, which was turned into a script by Sergio Amidei and Franz Treuburg.

  Irene Wagner (Bergman) is unhappily married to a man who owns a drug company (Wieman). She has a lover, Erich (Kurt Kreuger), but he doesn’t satisfy her either. Then a woman, Giovanna Schultze (Renate Mannhart), starts blackmailing her. Irene thinks Erich is feeding information to the blackmailer, but in truth it is coming from the husband. Irene is devastated. She goes to her husband’s factory and is on the point of poisoning herself with some of its chemicals. But then she resolves to do better and to love her unhappy children.

  Alas, the story is reminiscent of Journey to Italy, where the matter of being delayed by a religious procession is enough to make a change of heart in the unhappy couple—or in one of them. You can feel both parties willing themselves to try again when every piece of mounting evidence argues to the contrary. Journey to Italy is the one film in which the shift may work, but then only because of the accumulated lessons derived from the woman’s survey of antiquities. There is never a piece of action to which a desperate actress could cling. These scripts are infernally intellectual and assertive—and all the while Rossellini refused every offer for Ingrid coming in from other Italian directors, like Fellini, Visconti, and De Sica.

  Of course, the setup is as promising as Stromboli: the use of a drug company might have opened the marital story up to so many other interpretations. But there’s also a stress on the need for confession here that seems like the Catholicism of the lapsed. Irene does grow as a character, and there are moments where her courage mingles with the emotional resolve of a great actress. But by now, how Bergman must have hungered for the facile storytelling of Gaslight and Casablanca. Real story is so restful when you’re lost in therapeutic improvisation.

  Soon after La Paura, Jean Renoir appeared, and he suggested Elena et les Hommes. Roberto will say no, she told him. I’ll ask anyway, said Renoir, and this time Rossellini approved.

  The Pawnbroker (1964)

  “The Pawnbroker is a terrible movie yet I’m glad I saw it,” wrote Pauline Kael. What does she mean by terrible? I think it goes to this conundrum: that the more earnestly you try to do a decent job with this fearsome subject matter, the more calculating or tasteless you may appear. Let’s take an example. Sol Nazerman is a Jewish pawnbroker who works in Harlem. He lost his family in a concentration camp. Every anniversary of the loss is unbearable. A scene come
s up where he tells the Geraldine Fitzgerald character what happened to his family. It is the crucial scene of the film, in that at last we understand the whole story.

  With his production designer, the excellent Richard Sylbert, director Sidney Lumet searched for an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan that overlooked the New York Central railroad yards. And thus, to quote Lumet, “Throughout the scene you can see and hear freight cars being shunted from track to track. That kind of visual and auditory corroboration of a scene’s context is invaluable.”

  Well, I wonder. I know what Lumet means and I can understand the logic of his process, looking for a corollary or an equivalent. So the trains are a reminder of the trains that took people to the camps. But the trains are also a constant abrasion—in the way that living in that apartment might get on your nerves. So isn’t the pursuit of equivalence crass and dumb? Do we need the facts or the idea of concentration camps to be made “expressive”? Or does the “rightness” of the art direction become hideously trivial?

  In the same way, Lumet and his editor, Ralph Rosenblum, experimented with three-or four-frame cutaways to show the intrusive memories of the camps that defy all our processes of suppression. It was a stirring effect—yet I wonder if it didn’t just expose the vulgarity of film when confronting such material. It left The Pawnbroker seeming a very mannered, worked-out film, when maybe only naked simplicity can handle such things. Suppose the window referred to earlier shows just a wasteland, with a three-legged dog running around. Is The Pawnbroker less expressive or more?