Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is a riveting film; I think it’s one of the few radical works of the last few years. And you can argue that it is about the conflict between a fevered sexual imagination and Erika’s actual frigidity. But it is also, whether it likes it or not, a film in which celebrity, and unquestioned acting, have brought perilous material before us.
And one thing I want to stress, which may seem minor, is as follows. In the Kino account of it, they claim Erika has a passion for music. That is not stated in the book—and the book, by the way, is better than the film (Elfriede Jelinek is a Nobel Prize winner). Erika is offered as a great, unsentimental, uncompromising teacher. That she may be. But she is indifferent to the music in her being, and so is the character in the film. And here is my point: No one who had come close to Schubert’s music (to pick just one composer) could lead the savagely compartmentalized life that Erika suffers. Therefore, she is a music teacher as a front. Therefore, she is very ill… And I am not quite sure that great acting and great reputation should be given to anything as unique (i.e., as rare in humanity) as such illness. But to begin to argue this matter, you have to see it.
Pickpocket (1959)
Dare one suppose that as Robert Bresson came to make Pickpocket something like an old-fashioned fantasy excitement overtook him—like Howard Hawks with a flying film, or Martin Scorsese in any scene where Joe Pesci is about to launch an unbridled attack on the least deserving person in sight? I do not mean to be facetious. I revere Bresson. But I find it delicious that the man who had applied himself so austerely to the occupations of country priest and would-be escapee in two previous films seems so thrilled by the recurrent actions of Pickpocket. Perhaps it is inevitable: Granted the occupation in question, and Bresson’s nearly neurotic concentration on hands slipping in and out, how could this film not sometimes seem like on-the-job training, if not an encouragement like that in Shane where Alan Ladd teaches Brandon De Wilde how to use a six-gun?
Suffice it to say that Bresson, the model of thoroughness, went from day one and a first idea to opening the picture (75 minutes) in ten months. I can hear Richard Widmark giggling about the guy being a natural dip, and I note (en passant) that the cinema’s two best pictures on this nefarious art end up side-by-side in this book. Yes, there is also Harry in My Pocket, which could have had an educational grant behind it, but no Bressonian intensity.
I would go a little further. Is there not some extra bond or attraction between the camera and the chosen actor (or presenter) in Pickpocket—Martin LaSalle? So much of what Bresson did in casting and directing was to get in the way of our identification with a character. On the other hand, so much also took that furtiveness for granted, and treated it as a forgivable sin. And I think the camera (at least) is in love with LaSalle. Thus, it moves through the film, at his hunched shoulder, with an uncommon urgency or curiosity, eager to assist him yet also preying on and for his being apprehended, or caught red-handed. This is the moment at least to ask the question, Am I crazy, or was Bresson gay? And if he was, can’t we say so at last without the pantheon going into destruct mode? All I am getting at is the hand-in-glove complicity between the pickpocket and the presence of the filmmaking process.
I do understand that the religious allegory requires that he be captured and brought to grace in recognizing the girl who loves him (or his soul). And I am very happy with that treatment, rather than a film that shows our pickpocket getting sleek and cocksure in the job. But I watch films closely, and I love Pickpocket without being driven to exploring handbags on the subway or the texts of the Roman Catholic Church. I think there’s a little bit of Montgomery Cliftism going on here. What I’m trying to say is that cinema has a unique kind of suspense whenever high church gets into the very low. And this is a heaven of a movie.
Pickup on South Street (1953)
What do the humorless slogans of the Cold War mean to the daily grind of a small-time pickpocket? Nothing! And so the dreads and pressures of a bogus era break upon the rocks of Richard Widmark’s crooked grin and fatalistic personality—and the lesson is clear that Samuel Fuller was at his best whenever he had a hero or protagonist nobody would think of taking home to mother. This is authentic pulp cinema—and the pulp is the sediment that might come off the East River and be served up in the smart rat city as caviar; it is the open wound in Candy’s face that, since he put it there, Skip McCoy considers he has every reason and right to explore. And it is the contents of Skip’s mind—greedy, needy, mean and small, but a citizen of pulp, one who knows his rights and loves to snarl them in the face of the cops.
The opening is exemplary: the bored, slut face of Candy (Jean Peters) swaying on a sweaty subway; the insolence of Skip as he looks her dead cold in the eye, while the fish of his hand is in her bag. It could just as easily be up her private passage. And she would likely be as impressed. There’s a wonderful sardonic humor to this hysterical toughness, but an unflinching certainty that that is all these lives are about. Widmark was an odd bird: an actor whose own nature fell aside as he itched to snarl, giggle, and push old ladies and their wheelchairs downstairs. Fuller was nearly alone in later years in knowing just how nasty the decent man yearned to be, and he may have had a great understanding of the masked malice.
But Fuller was just as daring and relentless in knowing that an American movie—one made for Darryl Zanuck, even—could make this Skip more and more loathsome, without ever losing us. Because whatever demon lurked in Widmark, we have it, too. We long to be dangerous, unwholesome, and laughing as the world closes in.
What Fuller supplies is the cheap talk, the scummy urban compositions in which the cockroach makes his sidelong movements, and the amazing battery of moving camera shots—cranes, trackings, and those moments where the camera just muscles in like pressure—that embody Skip’s aggressive, taking attitude to the world. And, as we have been told so often, expect the cockroaches to survive if the Big One ever comes because they know their priorities and they are mercifully free from sentimental allegiance.
If you want more proof of that, just look at the two women in the film: Candy and Thelma Ritter’s Moe, one of the sublime, exhausted hangers-on in film noir, or crime movies or whatever you want to call that genre. Her weary indifference to her own interest still bumps up against the foolish moment of her death. She is an outcast, a scrap of a thing, a nothing, yet she feels herself as grand as Falstaff, and just as subject to pain. She does not want to die, but she’s tired. It is the film’s glimpse of pathos and of a life worth living.
Picnic (1955)
William Inge’s Picnic came to Broadway in 1953, and it ran 477 performances, with Ralph Meeker as Hal, the ex-athlete vagrant who comes back to his small Kansas town in time for the Labor Day picnic, and to shake up so many settled lives. Joshua Logan directed the play, and just two years later there was the movie, at Columbia, with Logan directing Daniel Taradash’s script.
Logan deserves great credit. Inge’s play had been called Front Porch at first, and it never had the extended Labor Day sequences that are the luxuriant heart of the movie. But Logan got Harry Cohn to let the production go to Kansas. That brought in a real grain silo, and it allowed the film to find a meadow and an enchanted river where the flaming day changes (so reluctantly) and we get one of the best twilight scenes in American film.
Give credit also to William Holden, who artfully bends himself into the shape of Hal, without strain or pretension. Holden was a hip, urban type by nature. You suppose that he could handle himself, without being an athlete. But this Hal is beginning to be muscle-bound, to suffer from sports injuries, but when Holden takes off his shirt at one point you can feel every female character waver.
Yet Holden makes Hal decent, kind, sad, so that he wants to be important to everyone he finds in Kansas. He really wants to teach bookworm Susan Strasberg to dance. And he never notices her lush older sister, Madge, coming up behind, like a pink moth in the night.
And then it is, on the do
ck, with the river dark and burnished, that the music shifts from the local band to a studio orchestra playing “Moonglow” (the theme from Picnic, as it was called). Madge picks up Hal’s beat and sidles onto the dance floor. The begging romance of the film’s old-fashioned story is out in the open, and a kind of pure movie glamour lasts for as long as the music.
Kim Novak is Madge (it was Janice Rule on stage, and apparently she was grand). Novak is close to amateurish. When she tries to say “gentlemen,” you wonder why she’s being employed. But then she says “Hiya” to Hal, and you’re watching a Kansas Juno. Her entry into the dance is shy, to say the least, but that suits her character. The movie is a very sweet dream about Hals and Madges finding each other and rescue in the Midwest. (Inge wrote that “happy” ending against his own better judgment.) It’s not too far from shameful rot.
But don’t let Picnic ever fade. There are CinemaScope compositions on the riverbank—one with Madge in a swing and poised goings on in the far distance—as great as Renoir. And the dance scene never loses its charm, even if it leaves you feeling pretty sheepish about settling for charm. Never mind—without charm, the movies would not have lasted. It is the key to the door called dream.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
St. Valentine’s Day, 1900, in the Australian state of Victoria—a glorious summer’s day. A party of adolescent schoolgirls will go from Appleyard College to Hanging Rock for a picnic. Hanging Rock is a volcanic eruption, perhaps millions of years old, a sign of the geological age of Australia and of a silent history in which it might have been many things. Is the rock beautiful or violent? Phallic or elemental? The girls in Victorian costume and corsets celebrate the heat and the festival by climbing up the rock. But at the end of the day, three of them and one teacher are missing. In the succeeding days, one girl is found alive. Another girl, who did not go on the picnic, is found dead, and the owner of the school, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), kills herself because her school cannot survive the scandal.
Joan Lindsay’s book of the same name was published in 1967, and was written and presented with every air of reportage. Everyone took it for granted that such an incident had occurred, until detailed research failed to find any substantiation. The very school had not existed. There was no record anywhere of the deaths. People were not dismayed at this; they saw it as a fable on the relationship between Australian civilization (a pretty ribbon tied around the outside of the country) and the constant need to explain its age and emptiness, whether in terms of human ties to nature, or to some more mysterious or religious forces. It became clear that the book really was a novel, and the natural growth of a country consumed by the imagination and its sleeping hinterland. So you can say that Picnic at Hanging Rock is the festival of teenage girls on St. Valentine’s Day becoming brides to nature. Or whatever you like to see in it.
Peter Weir’s film, and its screenplay by Cliff Green, do not allude to the “fraud” of the novel—if that is the right word. And it’s easy to see the anticlimax that comes with the knowledge—for in truth, this is the kind of case that almost demands a sort of Sherlock Holmes figure if the full clash of reason and the occult is to be made clear. The novel has such a figure in the young man Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), the last to see the vanished girls, and someone who falls helplessly in love with one of them.
The photography, by Russell Boyd, lends itself to the romantic-erotic aspects: the respectable Victorian nymphs in the wilderness; the blaze of the sun and the enigma of nature. So the sinister aspects of “disappearance” are as pantheistic as they are suggestive of crime. But removing people in a film is a tricky business—think of L’Avventura—in which an easy get-out is some kind of murder mystery. Weir does not take that route, and I think it’s clear in the overall pattern of his work that he is susceptible to mysteriousness, without necessarily pressing the “ominous” pedal. So Picnic remains a curiosity, trapped by its own cunning perhaps, yet an admission of—even a volunteering for—the kind of spiritual subtexts to the epic riddle of Australia. A Cry in the Dark—really based on fact—is just one example of the obsessive wondering. So is Walkabout. And in turn that makes it intriguing as to why the American movie has so rarely felt those tremors of intent in the wild and empty places.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Oscar Wilde’s novel, published in 1891, is known yet not often read: In London, a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward (a real painter and an ancestor of Gloria Grahame, whose birth name was Hallward). Gray turns to what the blurbs call a life of vice—though it is somewhat vague in the book itself—and as he grows older, so Gray retains his “perfect” looks while the portrait (a living thing) seethes with the manifestations of his depravity and corruption. To put it mildly, it’s a very moral tale, prim and censorious compared with the glorious liberty of Wilde’s wit. Nevertheless, the novel counts as a classic, and I’m sure it had attracted filmmakers over the years, even if many of them must have shied away at the realization that you could hardly show the portrait without it being a letdown.
Albert Lewin (1894–1968) was not to be deterred. He was a graduate of New York University and Harvard. From being a drama and film critic for the Jewish Tribune, he moved into the industry and became a chief assistant to Irving Thalberg at M-G-M. He produced a number of important films (including Mutiny on the Bounty and The Good Earth) and then rose to become a director, starting with The Moon and Sixpence, in 1942. He then declared that he wanted to make The Picture of Dorian Gray. Louis B. Mayer wondered if he could stand such a thing, but Lewin assured the boss that he had the funds to do it independently if necessary. Whereupon, Mayer said do it at the studio.
Lewin seems to have believed that his greatest asset was the young actor Hurd Hatfield for the title part. (Apparently Garbo was also eager to give it a try.) Hatfield was a stuning looker and a competent actor, and he has a waxen look that serves him well. But it’s difficult to make Gray interesting. What’s far more impressive in the picture is its look, and its design. Gordon Wiles did a number of drawings that were incorporated as very elegant sets—the whole thing smacks of The World of Interiors, or a house where Lewin might like to live. Cedric Gibbons and Hans Peters helped bring this to life, and Harry Stradling’s black-and-white photography is very impressive (he won an Oscar for it).
But early on you get the feeling that Lewin is filming the art, the statuary and the marble floors, instead of the people. The cast is good, but the film suffers from the discretion of the book and the great difficulty in filming debauchery head-on (as opposed to obliquely). Angela Lansbury is outstanding as a singer who is killed, and the rest features George Sanders, Donna Reed, Peter Lawford, Lowell Gilmore, Miles Mander, and Moyna MacGill.
And, yes, we do see the portrait, in a splash of color. It was painted specially for the movie by Ivan Albright, and it’s not the worst job at invoking corruption, decline, and so forth. But the power of that picture depends on the horrified faces of those seeing it. There are far uglier things than Albright’s painting in so many polite salons now. What frightens most of us is the mirror.
Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Like lovers on a beach at dusk, a giddy romance and a political gangster story are entwined, neither one trusting the other. And from the moment of reunion, as the babysitter arrives at the Griffons’ apartment, so there is a lingering glance between the two of them, elasticized by the wide screen, full of longing and affection, but with hardly a glimmer of trust. You look at me with words, and I look at you with feelings, Marianne tells Ferdinand—and that struggle is not just a weather system for the couple, it’s the storm in Godard’s own head between being a writer or a filmmaker. For, if Samuel Fuller—the marooned director at the grisly cocktail party—is right, and cinema is about emotion, then the question hangs in the air: Is Jean-Luc Godard its ideal practitioner? After all, his protagonist can’t read to his young daughter without expecting her to grasp the world of Vel
ázquez and its relevance to Pierrot le Fou. (God damn it, call me Ferdinand, he bites back—as in Céline.)
So it’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline versus Marianne Renoir, sense and sensibility, instinct and intellect, but which is which? Is she really less thoughtful than he is, or does he truly bow to her in terms of sensory immediacy? It hardly matters once we start getting those desperate, smoldering glances from Anna Karina, right into the lens, warning of infidelity and time. For this is the film that marked the end of the marriage between Godard and Karina, and sooner or later that would signify Godard’s withdrawal from the attempt to make a new kind of B movie. Who could blame him? He’d done about a dozen of them in one of the great bursts of radical work the cinema has seen. And he had lifted Anna Karina from pinups to the pantheon.
Pierrot is based on the pulp novel Obsession, by Lionel White. Godard fashioned a story line as the company traveled south through France. But there was never anything as tidy as a script. So we get what they found: street theater; car theft; arbitrary slaughter on the roads; rivers and forests and the feeling of warmth and sun tan; the summer gaze of the South with the death’s head using it as a mask. And the battle between pleasure and the visual goes on against commentary interruption and words—just words written on paper, wordplay, the attempt to order momentary experience. The unifying forces in the rhapsodic untidiness are Raoul Coutard’s photography (feeding on red), Antoine Duhamel’s funeral music and the wistful songs, the wild medley of supporting players (Germanic thugs, a dwarf, the Princess Aicha Abadir, Jean Seberg in a movie house, Raymond Devos on a pier telling an eternal story).
'Have You Seen...?' Page 107
