Kubrick’s first thought was a film about extraterrestrials. Then he saw How the West Was Won and imagined an equivalent for space, with documentary sections featuring learned heads talking about millions of miles. He was put in contact with Arthur C. Clarke, and the two agreed to collaborate on what became 2001. Their starting point was a Clarke story called “The Sentinel,” about a strange, manufactured pyramid discovered on the moon.
The film has four narrative sections. In the first, set millions of years ago, apes discover a black monolithic slab; the encounter sharpens their curiosity and their aggression. In 2001, a U.S. spaceship goes to the moon base Clavius to see the black monolith just found there; it emits a strange noise. Eighteen months later, the Discovery One is headed to Jupiter with two men, Dave and Frank, when their computer, the HAL 9000, seems to turn rogue; Frank dies, and Dave disconnects HAL. In the last part, Dave reaches the area of Jupiter, goes through an amazing light show, and comes to an antique bedchamber inhabited by himself, decades older; the monolith appears, again in orbit.
I have named characters, but Dave and Frank are no more personal than HAL—and they are not as interesting. HAL has a plot purpose. This is a film in which characters and story have succumbed to apparatus (mechanical) and vague speculation of a metaphysical kind. What it means is up to you, and it was noted at the time that the efficacy of the film seemed related to the smoking of grass in theaters as the light show passed by.
The film was shot at Shepperton Studios, with a novel use of large sets, space centrifuges, and special effects—though the effects were all of the old-fashioned, manmade kind. Despite having a computer as a character, the film was not computer-generated. The staggering photography was by Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott. The special effects supervisors were Wally Veevers (crucial to the film) and Douglas Trumbull. Alex North labored mightily on a forty-minute score, only to find at a preview that it had been dropped for Kubrick’s original idea: bits and pieces of the classical repertoire, including “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, and some pieces by György Ligeti. There are actors—Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood and a few others—but they are merely photographed figures.
The film cost about $10 million and has earned at least twice that in U.S. rentals. The Academy regarded it as a technical exercise, though Kubrick was nominated as Best Director. I believe now, as I did in 1968, that 2001 was a lavish travesty and an elaborate defense of vacancy or the reluctance to use real imagination. Of course, space can still work on film—we have had Alien, E.T., and others—but the lack of humanity is a dead end. So Kubrick was positioned now as a master, but too masterly for known material.
Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
Some people believe in the supernatural; some believe in camera movements—they each shall be rewarded. Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) is a potter. He does good work, and he desires to be recognized and rewarded for it. He has an oafish assistant, Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), a man who dreams of being a samurai. It is a time of war and marauding bandits. The two men decide to take the pottery to town. They set off with wives and children. But the yearning of the two men tears apart the families. It permits separation, so that the two wives, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), are abandoned.
Tobei finds a dead samurai warrior. He takes his armor and weapons and so he becomes a samurai. Genjuro is approached by the beautiful Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo), who says she loves his work. He must go to live with her. He falls in love with Wakasa, who is a ghost. While he has an idyllic retreat with her, his wife and child are killed by bandits. Ohama is raped, and eventually her “samurai” husband meets her again as a shamed camp follower.
At last, Genjuro comes “home”—the man who had believed in ghosts and in camera movements in which a man might go from one state to another. His home seems deserted at first, but then as he moves to one side and the camera pans back again, it discovers a hearth, food cooking, his wife and child. Perfect for a night. But ghosts. Next day the real world begins again.
Ugetsu, which won the Silver Lion at Venice, comes from seventeenth-century stories and from de Maupassant. The script was by Yoshikata Yoda and Matsutaro Kawaguchi. In his excellent book on Kenji Mizoguchi, Mark Le Fanu reveals that Mizoguchi had wanted a harsher ending in which Genjuro returns and finds not even one night’s relief or mercy. Daie, the studio, asked for something gentler and so the present ending was arrived at. I think Daie was correct. There is an irony and a brief tenderness in the way the man deluded once by a ghost now gets a respite because of another. That is a justification. What really “works,” of course, is the single camera movement that transforms the cold and ruined house into a home for one night. The endings in Mizoguchi are magnificent: That in Sansho the Bailiff is unforgiving, helpless, and tragic—though it allows mother and son some time together. The ending to Ugetsu says to all of us—to the audience—to struggle on with the battle between dreams and life. For as long as there is film and hope, the struggle must be reencountered every day just as the potter or the artist begins again.
It follows from all of this that Ugetsu is a film of fateful camera movements—just study the terrible abruptness of the scene where Miyagi meets her end and the enchantment of the whole Wakasa passage. As for Genjuro—artist, dreamer, husband, lover—he is that essential cinematic hero, the one who will define his own comeuppance. He is a man who believed so strongly that he knew and understood things that he gave up on that other duty—“You must see.”
Ulzana’s Raid (1972)
Time passes. Word comes to a cavalry outpost that Ulzana has taken his Chiricahua Apaches off the reservation and started to raid homesteads in the area. This is not because Ulzana believes the old liberties can be regained, or history reversed. It is not that he feels special hatred for the whites he is killing. Rather, escape and raiding is his death wish, for he knows that this action will hasten and ensure his demise. Not that he has ever believed the latter was in doubt.
A cavalry patrol is sent out after him. Its leader is Lieutenant DeBuin (Bruce Davison); its aides are a veteran scout, McIntosh (Burt Lancaster), and a young Apache, Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke). The script was written by the novelist Alan Sharp, who clearly knew his film history enough to be well aware of Apache (1954), the earlier collaboration between Robert Aldrich and Burt Lancaster, in which a rogue chieftain, alone save for his resistant wife, took off into the wilderness.
It was said when Ulzana’s Raid came out that it was a parable about naïve American soldiers going after a lethal native force fighting for survival (Vietnam?). That’s surely there to be found, for DeBuin is close to an idiot in his ignorance of the enemy he must fight, and much of this film is a process of education in which McIntosh and Ke-Ni-Tay feel increasingly close to the man they are hunting. So it becomes a conflict of landscape and strategy, distance and surprise—a little bit like an Anthony Mann film—except that it resonates with Aldrich’s love of doomed heroes. Yes, Ulzana is finished—and when his end comes he accepts it like a Roman—but McIntosh is on his last ride, too, and he has to teach DeBuin to carry on regardless.
Coming after a long decade of missteps—from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to The Grissom Gang—Ulzana’s Raid was an astonishing chance to rediscover Aldrich and for him to reclaim his pungent economy, his natural violence, and his lack of sentiment. Ulzanas Raid is a classic, photographed by Joseph Biroc and with intriguingly sparse music by Frank De Vol. Above all, it is a movie that knows how cruel and demanding life could be on some of the American frontiers, not least the one where civilized ignorance confronted natural severity.
By 1972, Burt Lancaster was no longer the emerging industrial power he was at the time of Apache. But Burt had been as opposed as anyone to that film’s decision to let its hero survive. So the deaths here may be seen as payment of an old debt. Let’s say a word, too, for Joaquin Martinez as Ulzana—he hardly speaks; he is in no way humanized by the film’s approach; he is a magnifi
cent savage; and he is a figure in this film as grand as some of the rock formations and as hard to beat. Note, too, the presence of Richard Jaeckel, an Aldrich loyalist, as a sergeant who has seen everything in his time.
Umberto D. (1952)
Umberto D. is late in the history of neo-realism. Italy was hardly experiencing the worst of times any longer—and the thought may occur that Vittorio De Sica was at something of a loss about how to continue. But then he thought of the dog. To be precise, the story and the script came from Cesare Zavattini (and he got an Oscar nomination for it). Umberto Domenico Ferrari has worked thirty years in the Ministry of Public Works. He is retired now, and his landlady wants him out of the building where he has a room in Rome. Umberto has no relatives in the world. But he has a dog, a mongrel named Flike.
Umberto (played by Carlo Battisti) is silver-haired, but he doesn’t smile much. Indeed, he’s a touch severe or gruff, not endearing, and certainly not possessed of the charm for which De Sica was famous. I think that’s the point. De Sica and Zavattini want us to feel the plight of an old man, without relatives or enough money to look after himself, and without enough movielike personality to win us over just like that. Let’s say he’s as stubborn and as alienated as many old people. Then there could be a grim but testing film about how he is forced to live on the streets. It’s plain that he’s conservative, not open-minded, yet he might have to learn to see vagrants as his fellows. That is a great subject, and it is still one that occurs in many cities.
But there’s the dog. As he contemplates living on the streets, Umberto wonders what to do with Flike. He sees the city pound and the gas chamber. He tries to give the dog to a little girl, but her nurse complains that dogs are dirty and trouble. He tries to lose the dog, but clever old Flike finds him out. He contemplates suicide, and that does trouble the dog. But in the end, the two of them are reunited, and off they go, playing with a pinecone, down one of those long gray urban avenues that De Sica liked so much.
It’s not that the film is less than touching, but it’s Chaplinesque—long before the music wells up, you say to yourself that this is a Chaplin short drawn out to 90 minutes. Then the music comes (overdone by Alessandro Cicognini), and you remember how Chaplin can get on your nerves. The open-air sequences are very well filmed by G. R. Aldo, and as always De Sica has an eye for the city that is graceful. But the dog takes over the film—and surely (I hope) man has better emblems of his fate than his attitude to animals. Old men die on the streets, and I think it’s telling that by 1952 De Sica couldn’t face that subject. Or really address the reasons why old people may end up alone.
A year later, for Selznick, De Sica was directing Terminal Station—and not badly—but suddenly his material and his actors had gone Hollywood. And I fear he never quite recovered. But the place of neo-realism has not been filled, or its questions answered.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Chance decisions play so great a part in the development of the arts. After all, how was it that the novel and the long-playing record avoided television’s natural burden—that of having a little wedge of advertisements placed between two sixteen-page signatures, or in the gap already available between track 1 and track 2? As W. C. Fields noted, perhaps it was simply an oversight on the part of Charles Dickens—a busy man, after all—that he didn’t employ a certain amount of juggling in every novel? How easily we could run on—why do people run forward rather than backward, and why isn’t the talk in every movie sung?
So often, the realist’s complaint about the musical is that awkward moment where the actors take a deep breath, the story goes on hold, and “it” breaks into song. What better cure for that hesitation, or the nausea that attends it, than having every line of dialogue sung? To which, the realist objects, Yes, but people don’t sing all the time in life. Possibly, but neither do people go through life with music playing in their air—I am thinking of the musical “background” that we take for granted, and as our just deserts. How many times have I heard uneasy directors say of their rough cut, Just wait till we put a bit of music on it. In other words, the role of music is in no sense lifelike. Music is what life would have been like if Michel Legrand had been God.
Very well. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a small love story set in that town involving a very pretty girl from the umbrella shop and a sweet boy from the garage. They love. They part. They find others. They meet again. Life goes on. Except that Cherbourg (a pleasant but gray-brown town) has been turned into an enchanted place through a thing called décor, by the presence of Catherine Deneuve when she was so pretty, so adorable, she seemed dipped in liquid cocaine and you understood every fairy story better, and because of Legrand’s score. Now, Legrand had already done two superb, conventional scores for Jacques Demy, in Lola and Baie des Anges, and ahead lay his song suite for Barbra Streisand in Yentl.
Legrand is not Mahler or Brian Wilson or Billy Strayhorn. But he may be the most natural music writer for the movies there ever was. What do I mean by that? I showed a group Some Like It Hot recently, and there is the tango sequence where Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon are having a night to remember. And as a finale, we cut to the tango orchestra and they are blindfolded. Someone asked me why. Well, I said, it’s a joke, a tribute to that couple’s abandon. But I thought harder and said that it’s because they want to feel they’re at the movies, in the dark. Legrand writes music where we need the dark to hide our trashy joy and our shameless tears. And for Cherbourg, with Demy doing the very agile lyrics, he simply opened up a new way for film to go. The team did it again in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (which has ardent admirers). For me, I have to say that walking backward may be a once-in-a-lifetime way home. And as Dickens observed, a little juggling in Copperfield may be in order, but juggling in The Old Curiosity Shop is asking for trouble.
Under Capricorn (1949)
Under Capricorn is probably the least seen of the Alfred Hitchcock pictures made after 1939. In part, that’s because Hitch tended to disown it in the long interview with François Truffaut, admitting that he was near enough infatuated with Ingrid Bergman and so eager to work with her that he paid too little attention to the script. But Hitch was also flustered by the major failure of an expensive venture. Indeed, the picture was reclaimed by the bank financing it, and that may explain why it has been hard to see. And recall that Hitch was once so dismayed by Vertigo that he kept it out of circulation.
Under Capricorn is not as good as Vertigo, but it is a lost treasure nonetheless. It came from a novel by Helen Simpson, for which Hitch hired James Bridie to do the script and then Hume Cronyn to do rewrites. He regretted both decisions, and he blamed Bridie above all for the weak ending. But it’s easy to see why the idea appealed. In Australia in 1830, Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten) is an uneasy member of the upper class. Uneasy because he has been a convict, sent down on a murder charge. But he is married to an English lady, Lady Henrietta Flusky (Ingrid Bergman), so that her status rubs off on him. Her cousin, Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), comes to visit from England, and he will fall in love with Henrietta, seeing Flusky as just a drunken Irish lout, an outlaw dragging the woman down. The truth is far stranger. Henrietta is an alcoholic. She committed the crime for which Sam took the blame. But she has a housekeeper now, Milly (Margaret Leighton), who is in love with Flusky and slowly poisoning her mistress.
The false reading of class, the love founded in terrible sacrifice, and the scheming housekeeper—these are all traits we know from Hitchcock. And at its best, Under Capricorn is filled with the same interest in sadomasochism that drives Notorious. This is still one of Bergman’s great performances, and the long scene in which she confesses to her crime is a tour de force. In part, that’s because Hitchcock was still under the spell of the ten-minute takes pioneered in Rope. But there the camera was burdened with the conceptual gimmick. Here, as if in the mood of Ophüls or Renoir, Hitchcock has actually seen the beauties in duration and moving through space. He isn’t bound to ten-minute shots.
But he is prepared to let the Technicolor camera (guided by Jack Cardiff) take immense, winding courses that are filled with emotional energy.
Sidney Bernstein produced the picture, and it was shot at Elstree, not in Australia. It’s tempting to wonder how far that different air and sunlight might have affected ti. Still, don’t write this picture off. Apart from Bergman, Cotten is deeply troubled as Flusky, and it has a superb performance by Leighton as a Mrs. Danvers–like figure, and a strong British supporting cast that includes Jack Watling, Cecil Parker, and Denis O’Dea.
Underworld (1927)
“Underworld” or “innerworld”? In the hands of Josef von Sternberg, here we are in 1927 (that very provocative year) in which you can see what will be a standard “atmosphere” coming to life before your eyes—we call it “noir.” And yet Sternberg’s odd caprice is so alert to that thing made most precious in 1927—the unsaid—that this is about secret, psychic life as much as criminal undertakings. It was Andrew Sarris who first observed how Underworld was a Cocteau-like picture in which the manifestations of décor, clothes, and action were most eloquent as incendiary, subconscious matches bursting into flame. So here is a silent film itching to speak—yet a film in which people are like islands that might be sending code signals to each other. Above all, Underworld was influential in providing the confidence that the great figures of criminal existence could be beheld on their own without the obligatory confrontation with policemen.
So Underworld is a brooding power struggle between the brutish, yet nobly aspiring “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), and the austere, stylish, and English mastermind figure, the thinking man, “Rolls Royce” (Clive Brook).
'Have You Seen...?' Page 148
