Provocations
Page 15
In another smooth segue, the two men conversing at the rail become aware of an eerie calm on the water and then an odor of dead flowers: they are approaching the fearsome island of the Sirens. We see a broken ship, then dismembered skeletons strewn on rocks. The latter might well be impressive on a theater screen, but in miniature video format, the bones just look like random paper litter under a boardwalk. Homer visualized it much more horrifically—the Sirens sitting in a meadow heaped with rotting male skeletons, from which the withered skin still hangs. Having ordered himself tied to the mast, Ulysses is tormented by the Sirens’ song, which, in a nice touch by the screenplay, takes the alluring form of the voices of his wife and son, urging him to come ashore, for this is “Ithaca.” Deceived, he screams in agony and grief, his neck muscles bulging as he struggles to get free.
Altering the poem’s sequence of events, the film next brings Ulysses to landfall on Circe’s island: she herself has pulled the ship off course. When she first appears, Circe is standing eerily in the dusk in an archetypal rocky cleft on a hill. She wears magical sea-green veils over a svelte beaded gown; even her hair is sea-mist green. Silvana Mangano gives Circe all the serene, evil magnetism that Bernadette Peters utterly lacks. Circe lives not in a stone house, as in Homer, but in a cavern dripping with underground water, like a mineral-encrusted Gustave Moreau painting. Once he falls under her spell, Ulysses loses track of time. When his men come to berate him, six months have passed in the blink of an eye, and he is paddling in Circe’s indoor pond, with its floating, forgetfulness-inducing lotus blossoms (as in the miniseries, borrowed from the omitted episode of the Lotus-eaters). Emerging, he narcissistically primps in a mirror and dons a metallic-green robe—signifying his enslavement by Circe. This hedonistic transformation and loss of manhood are made completely believable by Douglas’ nonchalant charm.
The screenplay sinks Ulysses’ ship and drowns his men when the latter try to leave Circe’s island. When he finally steels himself and starts to build an escape raft, Ulysses (like Jesus in the wilderness) is subjected to the wiles of the Tempter: Circe offers him immortality—a detail, like the raft, transferred from Homer’s Calypso idyll. The screenwriting here is splendid. Circe declares, “This very night, Olympus shall welcome a new god—Ulysses.” He pauses with tool in hand, a look of wonder on his face. But then comes his firm answer: “No. There are greater gifts: to be born and to die—and in between to live like a man.” Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston are among the very few, genuinely masculine American actors who can give such stirring lines their proper sturdy sound.
To try to convince him, Circe now summons the dead, so that Homer’s voyage-preceded descent to the underworld is collapsed into this single scene by the raft. Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles, in full armor, step out of the fog to urge Ulysses to stay with Circe and accept her offer. But just as he starts to yield, his mother—ever the wet blanket!—arrives to put the kibosh on the idea. Circe furiously yells at Anticleia but (as in modern Italy, where mothers still rule) must concede her greater power over her son, whom Circe bitterly releases to return home.
The screenplay immediately takes us back to Phaeacia, where Ulysses’ memory is now fully restored, just as the frantic wedding party discovers him on the shore. To young Nausikaä’s poignant disappointment, he cannot take a new bride, when another wife waits for him in Ithaca. Ulysses’ dramatic homecoming is done with enormous energy, but Homer’s details have been trimmed. There is neither swineherd nor scar, and while Argus does appear, he seems to be resting comfortably indoors instead of abandoned on a dung heap. If this recognition scene seems muted, it’s because it had to be shot fifteen times: the blasé Italian dog kept exiting as Douglas entered and finally had to be drugged. Argus’ undetectable acknowledgment of his master (Douglas has to grip and fondle its snout) unconvincingly produces the passing Telemachus’ recognition of his father—perhaps the film’s weakest moment, though the men’s bonding is touchingly quickened and sealed by the sound of Penelope weeping upstairs.
The contest in the great hall is presented with due formality. Penelope descends, elegant in white, and the film conveys what the miniseries, despite lovely Greta Scacchi, does not: the blindingly charismatic desirability of this ultimate trophy wife, whose classiness makes the relatively well-born suitors look like clods and ruffians, much like early medieval warriors before the spread of chivalry and the courts of love from southern France. The beggar Ulysses is mocked, scorned, and spattered with wine; Quinn as Antinous is properly loathsome, kicking the beggar’s alms dish out of his hands. The bending-of-the-bow scene is long and riveting; Antinous comes closest to succeeding—and is later, as in Homer, the first to die, with an arrow gorily piercing his throat. Vengeful Ulysses goes into full furor, even yanking out an ax-head to chop a cringing suitor savagely in the face.
Running to her quarters, while the battle still rages, to thank Athena for Ulysses’ return, Penelope flings herself down on an enormous, thick, white sheepskin blanketing the steps beneath the goddess’s image. This seems to be a substitute for the marriage-bed motif, which is otherwise missing. Below, the hall is in total shambles—with corpses, cushions, robes, vessels, and utensils heaped and thrown about. The film understands the importance in Homer’s poem of the house, another symbol for civilization. Surveying the mess, Douglas magnificently delivers, with raw, throbbing voice and simple, expressive gestures, these superb lines: “Many terrible things have happened to me, Telemachus, but none more terrible than to bring death into my house on the day of my homecoming. Tell the servants to purify the room with fire, and may the revenge of the dead never overtake us.” After washing his bloody hands and arms, Ulysses goes upstairs to embrace his wife, and the story crisply ends.
Despite its strident dubbing and plot omissions—I particularly lament the absence of Calypso, as well as the gods—Ulysses is a model of well-paced, emotionally rich, and intelligent moviemaking about ancient culture. Even the film’s final image is arresting. A script unrolls: “For the immortality that Ulysses refused of a Goddess was later given to him by a poet….And the epic poem that Homer sang of the hero’s wanderings and of his yearning for home will live for all time.” Then “THE END” is superimposed on Penelope’s shroud: it is woven with authentically period figures of a man in a long Greek robe driving a bull pulling a plow, watched by a quizzical dog and a woman with a babe in arms while a vine of grape leaves swirls overhead. The scene seems to allude to the post-Homeric legend of Odysseus, who feigned madness to avoid going to Troy and was exposed by the warrior Palamedes’ trick of tossing infant Telemachus before his father’s plow. But in historical context of the film’s production in ravaged postwar Italy, the image seems to celebrate the return to love, family, fertility, and prosperity, made possible by peace.
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If Ulysses, with its lean narrative and psychological astuteness, makes NBC’s Odyssey seem fragmented and superficial, what can we say about Helen of Troy?—a pretentious, American-Italian extravaganza based on the Iliad that, at its superheated release in 1956, aimed for greatness and fell flat on its face.
Starring as Helen is Rossana Podestà, whom we last saw as Nausikaä in Ulysses. Others in the cast include Stanley Baker, Cedric Hardwicke, Harry Andrews, and a very young, brown-haired Brigitte Bardot in a bit part as Helen’s slave, Andraste. It’s hard to say which is more awful, the screenplay or the direction. Remarkably, Robert Wise, the director of Helen of Troy, is one of the most accomplished figures in Hollywood history: he edited Citizen Kane (1941) and directed The Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), The Andromeda Strain (1971), and Star Trek (1979). But whatever special combination of skills is needed to direct a successful ancient epic is woefully beyond Wise’s repertoire.
On the same tape as its color video of Helen of Troy, Warner Home
Video has released four black-and-white publicity segments produced for television and introduced by a very dapper Gig Young as host of Warner Brothers Presents, a short-lived ABC drama series that ran from 1955 to 1956. In the first, Young touts the spectacular wide-screen CinemaScope of Helen of Troy, which was to be presented in a first-time-ever worldwide premiere, opening simultaneously in (a presumably numerological) 56 cities. Young steps over to a placard propped on an easel: it’s a cutaway section map, “Walls of Homeric Troy—Built 1500 B.C.,” showing the city’s pancaked levels from the Stone Age through the Roman period.
In the second segment, Young in his sleek business suit jauntily visits a makeshift Trojan battlement, where he is accosted by a soldier in full armor who barks, “Whence came you?”—the standard corkscrew Hollywoodese that passes for archaic diction. Unfazed, Young ambles over to chat with Helen, the glowingly fleshy, petite, white-blonde Podestà, who was being groomed as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike but whose career never took off. (She more resembles the winsome Arielle Dombasle of Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach [1983].) In the next segment, Young appears posing with a Greek bow, then takes us to visit the sound engineers who must reproduce the twang of an arrow leaving its string or the thud of it striking flesh, illustrated by a clip of Achilles felled by Paris. The technicians are also shown simulating iron doors echoing, siege platforms dropping, chariots charging, and the footsteps of kings on marble floors—as Young grandiloquently puts it, “the sounds that haven’t been heard for 3,000 years.”
In the final segment, we’re treated to the in-theater trailers or “coming attractions” announcing the film’s release: “Her name was burned into the pages of history in letters of fire.” We then see the yellow script of the title, Helen of Troy, literally catching on fire! We’re promised “All the Storied Wonders of Homer’s Immortal ‘Iliad,’ ” which include “the sweeping saga of the mortal struggle between the legions of imperial Greece and the forces of impregnable Troy,” not to mention “Bacchanalian revels of unbridled abandon.” However, even as our hopes are raised, there’s something dispiriting about the brief glimpses we get of the Kewpie doll Podestà (shades of Bernadette Peters) and her equally artificially blonde co-star, Jacques Sernas, who seems a bit too Troy Donahue to be a credible Paris.
Helen of Troy is prefaced with a five-minute “Overture,” designed to increase suspense as theatergoers were taking their seats and fiddling with popcorn. A grand columned ancient hallway occupies the screen, with a weird statue at the far end that looks inappropriately Hindu. Meanwhile, generic movie music is pouring at us—probably the most mediocre score in Max Steiner’s illustrious career. The story begins with a booming voiceover, as we are shown a map of the Hellespont and informed of its commercial importance. The first person we see is the Trojan prince Aeneas pulling up in a chariot—and we might as well bolt into the aisles and go home. For such a high-budget film (it was shot at Cinecittà near Rome), the flimsy costumes, wiry wigs, and cotton-candy beards are dreadful beyond belief.
The opening scene takes place in the council room of King Priam, whose wavy-backed throne (like Odysseus’ in the miniseries) is a copy of the Minoan one found at Knossos. Hector seems awfully long in the tooth, and Paris has great biceps and pecs but looks like he’s wandered in from an Alan Ladd movie. Like Hippolytus, Paris is chided for worshipping Aphrodite too much. Lining the chamber is a row of what look like white papier-mâché statues of gods: a hideously ugly Athena grimaces, and Aphrodite seems to be vaguely waving. Right from the start, the movie takes the Trojan side: the Greeks are coarse, greedy, quarrelsome Nazi fools without German organizational sense, and the Trojans are mellow, cultured, peace-loving innocents (though their taste in sculpture needs improvement).
The initial plot device is that Paris, who sets sail on a diplomatic mission to Greece in a wonderful ship awesomely outfitted with two tiers of oars, gets marooned after he bravely climbs a mast in a lightning storm and is knocked into the sea. Shamelessly pirating the Nausikaä episode of the Odyssey, the movie has the Spartan queen Helen discover the unconscious Paris washed up on shore: ex-Nausikaä Rossana Podestà must have felt she was stuck in a casting rut. Paris thinks she’s Aphrodite and then, when mutual attraction kindles, accepts her story that she’s a slave. This is probably a cautious 1950s device to whitewash the blatant adultery of the famed romance. Paris determines to buy the comely slave from her owners so that he can make her “princess of Troy” (“Oh, sure,” I said to myself. “That’s just how Trojan princesses were made!”).
Paris’ political timing could not be better, since at that very moment a council of Greek kings is meeting up at Menelaus’ palace. They all look pasty, paunchy, fuzzy, and ill-dressed, but they love to josh each other with macho brio. Odysseus, a cross between Abe Lincoln and a leprechaun, is teased for the babe-in-the-furrow tale, and Achilles, a repulsive braggart, takes his licks for dressing like a woman on Scyros until Odysseus collars him. When the shipwrecked Paris is dragged in, he must prove his identity by an ad hoc cestus match, where he fights Ajax and wins. On the sidelines, however, the overconcerned Helen—prettily dressed in a pink and blue costume based on the Archaic korai of the Athenian Acropolis—blunderingly betrays her love to the much older (and predictably dark-haired) Menelaus, who glares and plots.
There’s a pleasant scene where Bardot as Andraste (who’s never without her pet whippet) is combing Helen’s hair, but one starts to feel that this movie that’s supposedly about Troy is taking forever to get out of Sparta. The best thing in this sequence is the queen’s big heavy bronze doors, ornamented with Medusa’s face; they get clangorously pounded on, to the credit of the sound engineers kvelled over by Gig Young. Running away together, Paris and Helen leap off a cliff into the sea, while an orgy rages back at the palace, which is presented like Elsinore disarrayed by morose king Claudius’ beer parties in Hamlet.
When the lovers arrive at Troy, thanks to a Phoenician rental bark, not everyone is thrilled with Helen. “Her name is Death!” snaps Cassandra, an unexpectedly pert, freckled, button-nosed teen in the Anglo-American style of Kathleen Widdoes. The fickle people quickly turn against Paris (who does look spiffy in leopardskin), and the city prepares itself for war. Now there is a rushed montage of armaments manufacturing that could have been truly brilliant. Hephaestus knows the production expense of these scenes!—smiths hammering iron and forging gleaming rows of sword blades; forests of spears being sorted and propped on racks; wood being cut for bows, then plunged in treatment baths and gathered up after air drying. This fascinating material about artisanship represents the very substance of premodern life. But the makers of Helen of Troy—we don’t know exactly who; directors sometimes lose control during editing—gave these technical scenes brusquely short shrift, in the general haste to return to Helen and Paris’ soggy, tedious affair.
When the Greek ships arrive, it’s night, and there is a wonderful scene of Priam and the other elders, summoned by signal gong, as they stare out from the battlements at the sight of hundreds of lights ominously glowing in the harbor. An unnecessary expenditure was surely the laborious footage of the Greeks assembling their wooden siege engines, which are unremarkable objects that don’t photograph well. The Greeks on the march definitely make a good impression, with their sharp assortment of round shield designs—geometric emblems of bird, snake, horse, and so on. But don’t look too closely at the battalions, since the budget clearly didn’t stretch to arming the rear rows of extras, who trudge along in plain burlap tunics.
Considering the size of the opposing forces, it’s quite coincidental that rivals Menelaus and Paris, as well as Achilles and Hector, manage to come face to face for some tense swordplay in a stairwell after the Greeks first pour over the wall—an engagement from which the latter abruptly flee, though suffering no discernible reverse. Just to make sure the audience stays on the right side, a voiceover informs us that the Greeks later “looted and raped the
small surrounding villages”: we get a few shots of girls doing excessively enthusiastic, midair butterfly kicks as they are hauled away by their raptors.
An indeterminate amount of time must have passed, since we next see Helen at home complaining about air pollution: “Must the Trojans always put their funeral pyres so near this house? How long will they accuse me?” No wonder she’s aggravated: her view out her patio-balcony is spoiled by rising smoke columns. I loved this scene, since it seems inspired by Gustave Moreau’s Helen at the Scaean Gate (1880; reproduced in Sexual Personae), where like a promenading mannequin, Helen turns her back on the heaps of bloody corpses and smoldering pyres. The very dignified Queen Hecuba, meanwhile, is quite warm and welcoming to beleaguered Helen—unlike the way Elizabeth II, I groused, treated the Princess of Wales. We begin to warm up to Paris, since the clean-shaven, neatly tressed Sernas (a mildly homoerotic, gracefully athletic Jean Marais type) doesn’t force us to look at bad wigs and mossy face fur.
The occasional excellent scene makes us more impatient with the rest of the film. For example, the aborted surrender of Helen to her husband must have looked superb on the big screen: outlined against the sky as they rigidly stand, exuding hostility, on an open road, Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Menelaus, clad in their splendid armor of contrasting hues, look as statuesque as the Colossi of Memnon. So unforgettable a tableau reminds us how rarely these films capture the proud, disciplined spirit of Homer’s glamorous warriors. The classic scene, on the other hand, where the armed Hector tenderly takes leave of his wife Andromache is strangely mishandled, so that their son is frightened not, as in Homer, by a great nodding plume on Hector’s helmet but rather by an ordinary broom-style pate brush that could double as a tidy whisk.