'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Violette Nozière (1978)

  In 1933, a teenager, Violette Nozière, poisoned her parents and killed her father. They had lived in a wretched two-room apartment in Paris. Violette had been a wild girl, going out at night and coming back with syphilis. She said she had inherited it from her parents. She stole money from them, and had her eye on their savings. She was a dreamer, and it is not always clear what is fact in her life and what is fantasy. She has an imaginary father. She will say her nominal father raped her. She was arrested in August 1933 for the murder of her father. The mother denied the rape charges. In October 1934, she was condemned to death. But the case had provoked great public concern. The surrealists acclaimed Violette as a heroine in the battle against hypocritical bourgeois life. The death sentence was commuted and reduced to twelve years. She married the prison clerk’s son. Just before her death, in 1963, her civil rights were restored.

  This is one of the great unsolved crime pictures—and one of the best portraits of our attraction to figures like Violette. Director Claude Chabrol had said, “I fell in love with Violette long before I understood her.” But do we ever understand anyone we are in love with? Thus, there is a fascinating tension between Chabrol’s gaze (personifying those figures who may not even have existed—like the imagined father) and the bleak, impassive face of Isabelle Huppert as Violette, staring at herself in the mirror, waiting to see which face will blink or blush first. Mlle. Huppert was twenty-two at the time, and any viewer could see the struggle to disentangle a great new actress from a woman who might be a mercilessly selfish monster.

  The film was scripted by Odile Barski, Hervé Bromberger, and Frédéric Grendel from a nonfiction account of the case by Jean-Marie Fitere. At every turn, that script is at pains to make the period authentic—and that is backed up in the look of the film (production design by Jacques Brizzio, set decoration by Robert Christides, and photography by Jean Rabier). The claustrophobia of the family apartment is odious, and Rabier said that he used lenses that existed in 1933—so it’s arguable whether the color was well advised.

  For most of his life, Chabrol has been intrigued by the myth of the femme fatale and the underlying reality of the woman who feels she is caught in a fatal trap. This is one of his greatest films, because it presents a conflict between Violette (the new actress) and her mother (played by Stéphane Audran, Chabrol’s wife once and the enigmatic actress in many of his films). The viewer feels that antagonism, just as he or she cannot avoid the feeling that, whereas Audran was a good actress, Huppert is a phenomenon. Very little is explained. There is never a recess in the structure, where Violette confesses. The hard, lovely face of Huppert nurses the warning message: Try to decide.

  With Jean Carmet as the father, Mario David as the prison director, Lisa Langlois as a friend, Jean-François Garreaud as Violette’s boyfriend, and Bernadette Lafont.

  I Vitelloni (1953)

  Born in Rimini in 1920, and raised in that seaside town, Federico Fellini had made a name for himself as both actor and screenwriter before he began directing. His first few films—Variety Lights and The White Sheik—did not do well, but I Vitelloni was the picture that made his name. It is a striking companion to 8½ in that it shows Fellini discovering the lesson that, when in uncertainty, go back to yourself and what you know. And thus we get a hint of the ceaseless clash in Fellini—not always worked out comfortably—between the allegorical approach to life as a kind of traveling theater, and the simple stress on me, me. It remains a matter for history how far this indigestion will be appraised as the work of a master or a show-off. Now, spared the dazzling charisma of a Fellini alive, in person—Federico!—the jury is out.

  In a lackluster Adriatic resort town we meet several young men, adolescents going on twenty-five, wasting away their days and lives, full equally of trite rebellion and inane hopes. (It comes as a welcome, tranquil corrective to American movies about such rebels in the 1950s determined to save the world by remaking it.) Fellini has little other concern or interest than whether any of these loafers can really get away and start a life. Meanwhile, they hang out and talk; they play practical jokes; they flirt with girls and prospects; but they are devoted to their own immaturity. In America, the film was called The Young and the Passionate, an early sign of America’s flattery of its young. In Italian, it means “the big calves.”

  So the heroics, the melodrama, and fool’s gold of young love are in short supply here. Fellini is generally despondent when he studies real people—until he can see them as kinds of archetypal actors. I Vitelloni is one of the good films about boredom and a view of life in which politics and education are by the way, and in which the passage from youth to whining old age seems very brief. The forlorn atmosphere is helped a lot by the photography of Otello Martelli and the score by Nino Rota.

  Obviously, though, it’s the guys that count, and Fellini’s fond observation of types he has known and barely escaped being that really gives the film flavor and feeling. These actors are Franco Fabrizi, Alberto Sordi, Leopoldo Trieste, and Franco Interlenghi (who had been a child in De Sica’s Shoeshine). This last character, Moraldo, is closest to Fellini—the director has said that he is the basis for Marcello in La Dolce Vita. I Vitelloni played widely throughout Europe and in America. Its comic-sad mood was just right for the time, in the way that La Dolce Vita caught the mounting metaphysical unease of the late 1950s. And surely Fellini learned the importance of keeping adjusted to that pulse.

  Viva Zapata! (1952)

  Εlia Kazan had had thoughts of making a movie about Emiliano Zapata since 1943 and his first visit to Mexico. He was attracted to the real story, and he was in love with Mexicans, he said. But he also felt intrigued by the revolutionary who succeeds but is then confounded by real power. As he talked to John Steinbeck about doing a script, they both felt that the Zapata story traced their early romance with Communism and then the growing disillusion. Or was that just Kazan’s retrospective tidiness and his ability to treat life as his mirror?

  Steinbeck’s script was confusing to Darryl Zanuck, but he pledged Fox to the venture—if Zapata had a white horse. At that time, Kazan took it for granted that he would film in Mexico itself, in Morelos province, where Zapata had been raised. But on a trip to Mexico, he met with Gabriel Figueroa, the cameraman, and a spokesman for the Mexican industry. Kazan was uneasy: He disliked the florid way Figueroa photographed things and his sentimentalization of the working class. But Figueroa was uneasy, too: Would Kazan’s “gringo” Zapata (Marlon Brando) meet with government approval? So Figueroa disappeared with the script for a few days and came back with a government official and a lot of doubts. Kazan heard in all this the voice of those Communist Party officials he hated. But Figueroa was speaking for a country demoralized and in some ways warped by having its history fabricated by a powerful neighbor.

  In the end, Kazan elected to shoot on the border, but from a base in Texas. With cameraman Joseph MacDonald, he achieved a wonderful, harsh look to it all—we believe we are in Mexico. But at the same time, Kazan felt this was his first “autobiographical” film—in other words, he was Zapata. At which point, we should add that this is the picture made just before Kazan decided to name names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952.

  It’s a very mixed result, far more “Mexican” than, say, Viva Villa! or most Hollywood pictures about that unlucky country. But how can these two countries understand each other living side by side but in such absurd inequality? As so often with Kazan, the hero is his own ego—and it’s clear that the director was really more responsive to the details of Brando’s performance than to Mexican history. Moreover, in casting Anthony Quinn as the brother, Kazan was stirring up the rivalry between two Stanley Kowalskis—Quinn had played the part in the touring company.

  But the film is impressive: for Brando’s intransigent, sulking simplicity, for Quinn’s urban braggadocio, even for Jean Peters, who is surprisingly plausible as the wife to Emiliano, and for Joseph Wiseman a
s the loathsome commissar figure. Even the white horse works. And in the final scenes, with the epic death of Zapata and the stallion running free, Kazan comes close to his declared ideal—of the old Soviet way of filming. It’s a high-bred venture through and through, as uneasy as Mexican-American relations are always likely to be. Brando was nominated, and Quinn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

  Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

  “Il faut se prêter aux autres et se donner à soi-même.” It is the motto from Montaigne that precedes the twelve chapters of Vivre Sa Vie, and it means, “We must lend ourselves to others, and give ourselves to ourselves.” And I think that still the most obvious meaning to that—and the one that signaled Jean-Luc Godard’s first great film—was the extent to which the film had offered an entrance to Anna Karina and to her character, Nana. The hint had been there in Le Petit Soldat, but I don’t think Godard felt then that he could ask Karina to carry a film. Equally, in À Bout de Souffle, Jean Seberg has a brazen stare, an armor, that may be her Premingerian training, her marriage, or her having a quarter of the budget to herself. In Vivre Sa Vie, Godard seems to relax, and he lets the woman conduct the film, or has it respond to her conduct. And just as he was helping her, or giving her kindness, so the spurt of benevolence surely refreshed his dry, bitter soul. He became, for the first time, attentive; he saw beauty.

  And all of a sudden, his intense flirtation with the inner details of film style—with shots and cuts—becomes a far graver study of form. People with their backs to the camera; with their faces full on; in profile—like a drawing master, he goes through the opportunities. Nana writes a letter. Nana sees a movie. Nana dances to the music. There are set pieces of behavior, which though casual and mundane, become epics. Thus, her dance around the pool table is unquestionably one of the great scenes in the history of the musical.

  There is also a documentary on the practice of prostitution, and obliquely, there is a speculation on how easily a girl trying to get into the movies—like the girl Godard himself had met, Anna—may come to imitate a prostitute. There is a darkness waiting, and we know now that in Godard’s discriminating mind she would come to behave like a whore. But if acting is helpless, then surely sometimes direction must be responsible.

  But still, there is the cleanliness of tragedy here, superbly photographed by Raoul Coutard again and the first really controlled score in a Godard film (by Michel Legrand, against his lyrical grain, and with a song, by Jean Ferrat and Pierre Frachet). Once more, Paris is the version of life that belongs to everyone, gray and abrasive, and sometimes looking positively ancient in this film.

  The conversations are literary and philosophical, and no one would call them natural—and yet the film has a loving attention to passing moments and sheer noise that may be the closest Godard ever came to Renoir. As for Karina—whether looking at Falconetti or giving her impression of Louise Brooks—she is a sad beauty gazing at herself, at the camera and her stricken relationship with its owner. Yes, it is a film about a girl slipping into professional prostitution; but the same girl, in the same glances and moves, is passing into the heaven of filmmaking. It is a great film, and it is the only film of Godard’s that does not seem to be locked up as just his.

  The Wages of Fear (1953)

  For a few years, in the early fifties, The Wages of Fear was the very model of a “foreign” film that could find an international audience. It was, in many respects, a film about the nihilism left by war—the four characters are all refugees from that war, on the run or stateless or just alienated, and driven to realize that none of the advertised codes (the right, the left, duty, for country, for mankind) function. They are on their own in a jungle, or in a rat-warren community, with only themselves and luck to rely on. This is one of the first modern films in which the Céline-like maxim is followed—you have to gamble with your life to give it value.

  So the story outline begins, “In a wretched South American town, four men…” The country where this is happening goes unnamed, but Henri-Georges Clouzot never took his unit farther than the South of France (in the areas of Nîmes and Martigues). So the first achievement (thanks to art director René Renoux), was to convey the look and mood of a steaming jungle, high mountains, and crumbling towns through light and décor. One way to look at this film is as being in the school of Only Angels Have Wings—though Clouzot is far tougher on his guys than Howard Hawks ever managed to be.

  The four men are Mario (Yves Montand), Jo (Charles Vanel), Luigi (Folco Lulli), and Bimba (Peter Van Eyck). Without prospects, they take an assignment: for $2000 each they will drive a truckload of nitroglycerine over the mountain to an oil field where the explosive is required to stop a burning well. “Nitro” was a new word and idea in 1953—a kind of magic—but its risk was that it could explode at just a bump in the road. And in this terrain, even in the South of France, the trick is to find the road in the bump.

  It was all based on a novel by Georges Arnaud, and Clouzot did the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi. But it was Clouzot’s own cold-blooded attitude that treated the men as rats and which stressed the suspense in so sardonic a way. In some respects, this was like an old Hollywood film, but the view of the men was so reduced and de-romanticized—and only one of them will survive. Moreover, Clouzot saw a big film—156 minutes—with several sustained suspense set-pieces and a clear pattern of ordeal and relief.

  The exciting camera-work was by Armand Thirard (in black and white), the editing was done by Madeleine Gug, E. Muse, and Henri Rust, and Georges Auric wrote a fine score. But it was Clouzot’s triumph, a bold, nearly insolent adventure film that fit the troubled mood of postwar Europe and was full of tough performances—with Véra Clouzot as about the only woman in sight.

  Not only did the picture do great business. It took the Grand Prix at Cannes (in a crowded year)—and Charles Vanel won the acting prize. Years later, William Friedkin tried a remake—Sorcerer (1977)—and the lesson was clearer still that Clouzot had had the instinct, the timing, and the luck to do it in 1953.

  Wagon Master (1950)

  A wagon master, or wagonmaster (both titles persist) was a man hired on by wagon trains starting out from the Midwest for Western liberties and new lives. He was not the leader of the traveling community, but he was captain of its ship, setting the course, maintaining the speed, and negotiating local difficulties. And so, by rights, he had probably made the trip before. If not, then he had to act sagaciously.

  The story goes that while making She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford had got talking to some Mormon extras and admired their spirit and their story. So this wagon train is Mormon folk, led by Elder Wiggs (Ward Bond). They are kicked out of Crystal City by a reactionary sheriff happy to push all the dross, scum, outlaws, and outsiders into the capacious West. The wagon masters are two amiable cowboys: Sandy Owens (Harry Carey, Jr.) and Travis Blue (Ben Johnson—who had won Ford’s faith as a rider first and then gradually as an actor).

  It’s the story of the journey the Mormons make to Utah in which the greatest danger is the Cleggs—a family of unwashed criminals who leech onto the wagon train. The Indians are friendly, and this is a prairie minus white outlaws. It has to be said that the journey is also without the inner, familial tensions that make a masterpiece out of Red River. Truth to tell, we don’t really get characters in Wagon Master so much as landscapes with epic figures, safely set as good or evil (as if the Mormon vision were reliable). Ed Buscombe has written that the people are “less characters in a drama than figures in a pageant,” and Lindsay Anderson regarded it as “one of the most purely lyrical films Ford has yet made.”

  That’s sound commentary, but it leaves the film close to simpleminded, as something like a legend for Mormon children. The script was done by Frank Nugent and Ford’s son Patrick, and Ford allowed that he liked it so much he actually shot a few pages of it! It is as easy to think that on location in Utah in November–December 1949, he let Bert Glennon exploit the sunny winter light and enjoyed himself in
finding unusually splendid landscapes. It is a touch too picturesque, though there are awesome scenes of the wagons being hauled up a mountainside.

  Along the way, they pick up traveling actors (Alan Mowbray and Joanne Dru), and Ford has a nice sense of actors joining in with all the other refugees. The Cleggs are Victorian nasty without being really threatening. Overall, the film glosses the extraordinary achievement of taking a wagon west, and it’s regrettable that the Mormon characters are prim, almost clerical, instead of people who believed they were living a miracle. There are very few Hollywood films that touch on Mormonism or the religious fundamentalism that inspired many of these journeys. We need a film that has room for that God and for Donner-like sacrifices.

  Walkabout (1971)

  A father drives his two children—a girl of fourteen, and a boy of six—into the Australian desert. The kids think it is a fun outing, a picnic. Nothing ever explains the father’s behavior—nothing, that is, except for the earlier splicing of radio small-chat with pieces of Stockhausen’s “Hymnen” (the banal and immense meaning, and the offense that the one has caused the other). But he starts to fire at his children with a pistol. When that fails, he sets light to the vehicle and kills himself. There may be traces of grief and terror, but it may also be a measure of the father’s sense of failure that his stranded kids simply begin to endure.

  And so begins Walkabout, the first solo feature by Nicolas Roeg, and a film that could not have been more eagerly awaited after Performance. And surely the result is a tour de force, with Jenny Agutter and Lucien John (Roeg’s own son) exposed to outback, desert, and jungle, to say nothing of the terror in being so abruptly separated from civilization. Roeg did his own photography and there is no question about the beauty of small figures in the large landscape. In time, the couple will meet and be saved by David Gumpilil, as an aboriginal youth on “walkabout,” the ritual ordeal that will prove his manhood.