The Holdovers

 Alexander Payne's The Holdovers (2023) is intentionally anachronistic on several levels.  The movie is set around New Year's 1971; the Vietnam war is still in progress and kids without college deferments are being killed in action. The Holdover's script channels seventies' influences, most notably Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (based on a Robert Towne screenplay and featuring Jack Nicholson) crossed with the somewhat later movies made by John Hughes (The Breakfast Club seems a particular influence.)  The Holdovers posits that an unhappy, if resigned, older man can have a beneficial influence on a selfish youth -- and that the boy's spirit can reinvigorate his mentor and breathe fresh life into him.  I doubt that people in sophisticated circles believe such things today, but this sort of theme was popular in the seventies and eighties and, of course, still has a naive appeal.  Further, Payne devises his movie to imitate the conventions of seventies' filmmaking -- there's the sound of a projector at the outset of the picture and the movie is shot in handsome wintry monochrome using zoom shots, lateral panning motions, and many expressive close-ups; it's a conventional style but absolutely well-calculated for the outdated and (mostly) predictable material that comprises this film.  Payne is an important film-maker but has shown himself to be conventional in technique and subject matter.  The question arises as to why this rather slight, if pleasing, movie was made -- certainly, we don't need another iteration of the story of the curmudgeon humanized by his relationship with a kind  of rebellious waif, a cliche back when George Eliot penned Silas Marner.  (The film set in an expensive New England prep school also reminds me of novel people read in the seventies, but no longer -- John Knowles' A Separate Peace).  Payne has suffered some recent reversals -- his baffling, if ambitious (and unsuccessful) movie Downsizing cast him into some temporary disrepute (people might exclaim:  What was he thinking?) and allegations, very stale to be sure, of statutory rape committed more than 30 years ago, came close to canceling his career.  My surmise is that Payne needed to play it safe, engineer a film that exploits his strong work with actors and conventional plots, and get some scores back on the board.  The Holdovers is perfectly acceptable, modestly entertaining, and good enough for a weekend night -- it's feels fairly long and has, perhaps, too much material in its second half, but I thought it was okay.  It is not, however, in any sense a necessary movie whatever that might mean.

After a half-hour opening act, The Holdovers evolves into a two-hand movie:  Paul Giamatti is a repressed, embittered, and highly intelligent instructor at a private school  He's buttoned-up and disliked by everyone at the Boy's School where he has taught for the last thirty years (after attending the place when he was in prep school himself).  According to the conventions of this sort of screenplay, Giamatti as Mr. Hunman is the sort of character to whom nothing interesting can ever occur -- until, that is, something happens to dislodge him from his ordinary, stifling routines.  Angus Tully is a rebellious 17 year old, one of Hunman's students in his class on Ancient Civilizations (for the purposes of the movie, Hunman is basically something like a Latin and Greek teacher),  Tully announces in the opening scenes that he is excited about a trip to St. Kitts with his parents over the Christmas Break.  As soon as he tells everyone that he is headed to the tropics, of course, alert members in the audience know that he will go to no such place, and, indeed, find himself trapped with Hunman over the holidays.  When school is dismissed for the semester, Tully, in fact, learns from his mother that she is going on a honeymoon with his stepfather and that he has been abandoned over Christmas vacation.  Hunman is being punished for failing the son of a prominent benefactor of the private boy's school -- as a penalty for his arrogance and disobedience, he's condemned to babysit Tully (and, intially, four other boys) over the break.  There's some interesting and poignant byplay between the other kids and Hunman / Tully:  two of the older boys clash with Tully and there's a fight; one of these kids is overtly vicious and, probably, a psychopath.  The two younger boys are also interesting:  one is a straitlaced Mormon kid and the other is a Korean child too far away from home to be returned to his home country (this poor boy is also a bedwetter and intensely homesick).  This cast of characters is literally whisked away in a surprising plot development about a half-hour into the movie and the story, then, focuses on the fraught relationship between Tully and Hunman.  A couple of subplots complicate the action:  there's a pretty administrative assistant to the noxious Headmaster, implying, perhaps, a romantic relationship between Hunman and this woman.  A Black manager of the cafeteria is crippled by grief for her son who died in Vietnam.  She tries to conceal her sorrow but its gets the better of her.  A series of misadventures, construed as mildly comic, ensue:  Tully gets hurt defying Hunman and has to go to the emergency room (his shoulder is dislocated); at a Christmas party, the cafeteria manager and head chef gets drunk and belligerent and breaks down; Hunman's desire for love and romance, a yearning so repressed that he can't acknowledge it even to himself, is thwarted and, in the show's fourth act (of five), Hunman and Tully go to Boston where they have several other encounters with minor characters.  Of course, a movie like this requires that surprising and painful secrets be divulged and, of course, this occurs in due course.  These events, rather implausibly, result in Hunman's discharge from the school -- something that may be a blessing in disguise in light of the fact that his work at the place has crippled the older man's life and emotional responses to things.  Tully seems to have become a better man as a result of the adventures with the witty, emotionally stunted Hunman.  

All of this (except I think Hunman's firing) plays out convincingly in a minor key.  Colors and events are muted.  There is a moving close-up of Giamatti's face when he learns that his unexpressed, but nascent desire for the boss' pretty secretary can not be realized.  The mixture of self-contempt, sorrow, and relief on his face is perfectly depicted.  The movie has a lot of bad language that would probably not be accepted in a movie made in the seventies or earlier eighties and we are reminded that people smoked a lot in that period -- the cook, for instance, generally has a cigarette dangling from her lip.  On the other hand, movies in the seventies and early eighties were more bawdy, had more nudity and sexual content.  Payne decorously avoids sex in the film and the picture is mostly chaste.  The Holdovers is, as they say, life-affirming, has a good script (and an interesting soundtrack of seventies folksongs), and is beautifully acted. It's the sort of picture, a success d'estime, that predictably garners a lot of award nominations (but doesn't win in most categories).  I thought it was good but not completely interesting.  However, I hope the critical success of this movie will free Alexander Payne to direct something more exciting in the near future.  

(One of Hunman's foibles is that he has a box full of volumes of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a book that he gives to people when he needs to make a gift -- it's his all-purpose gift and he doesn't really care if the book is appropriate for the person to whom he gave it.  One of my very good friends, now deceased, was a prominent college teacher in town and, also, admired Marcus Aurelius.  He was also always giving people copies of the Meditations, a text that he thought would calm its readers into stoic acceptance of things as they are.  But, often, he was unrealistically idealistic about the influence of the book.  If you are seriously distressed or mentally ill, Marcus Aurelius will not penetrate to the heart of your misery.  In The Holdovers, we see that there are aspects of human suffering that can't be assuaged by aphorisms in Latin.  Nonetheless, I always admired my friend for relying on the Meditations as a sort of vade mecum; the remedy was true to him and his spirit and I respected it.) 

The 3-Body Problem

 The 3-Body Problem is a complicated science fiction story crammed with impressive visuals and some effective special effects.  Although derived from a celebrated book by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, said to be rigorously scientific and absorbing, the Netflix series (eight episodes) mostly bundles together well-worn cliches and, ultimately, isn't that compelling.  After a strong start, the show gets lost in the intricacies of its globe-trotting plot and, because the 3 Body Problem is the first of a series of novels, ends in a welter anti-climaxes intended to set up the inevitable sequels.  

Something has gone wrong with the laws of physics, at least on a quantum level.  Chaos rules at the world's greatest laboratories and results derived from huge particle accelerators and other impressive apparatus make no sense.  Physicists take their theories and formulae seriously and the fact that their laboratory results seem randomized has driven a number of these scientists to kill themselves, often in gruesome or picturesque ways.  At first, the show seems something on the order of a detective or crime picture -- the question presented to the hard-bitten authorities is whether the scientists are simply committing suicide in dramatic ways or being systematically killed.  This turns out to be a red-herring since this aspect of the plot fades into insignificance once the narrative begins in earnest.  

Some impressive flashbacks introduce us to a woman named Ye, also a world-class physicist, but a traumatized survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution as well.  (These scenes directly engage with the source novel; however, the rest of the film has been largely transposed to London and the West, featuring a cast that is about half Asian and half European or American.)  After seeing her father beaten to death at a huge public rally, Ye gets sent to a concentration camp somewhere in Mongolia.  She survive and her talents as a physicist are recognized; she is recruited to work on a secret project operated on a mountain top overlooking the vast forests of inner Mongolia.  The Commies on the mountaintop are trying to contact aliens.  Ye figures out how to use the sun as an amplifier (don't ask me how this works) and transmits a message to a nearby star.  In that star system, there are beings called (in the Netflix version) Santees.  These critters are highly advanced and communicate with one another telepathically.  They are interested in the Earthlings and begin communicating with a cult-like order of their worshipers on Earth.  (I wasn't able to figure out how this cult formed or why.  I  think Ye had something to do with it.  The plot seems to suggest that Maoism with its mobs of like-minded robot Red Guards waving Mao's little red book in the air is similar to the group-think of the cult founded by Ye and Santee's collective consciousness -- this is an interesting idea but never developed in the show.)  Unfortunately, one of the Santee servants on our planet reads a a fairy tale to his Lord (the Santee are hive-mind in which "they" is a "he" or "she" depending upon the scene).  The Lord is horrified to learn that the earthlings can lie to one another and, in fact, do this frequently.  Shocked that sentient beings can misrepresent the truth, the Santee cut off communications with the Earth declaring that they are "very afraid" and launch an expedition to attack our planet where they, apparently, intend to exterminate "the bugs" as they now call the inhabitants of our world -- this seems a distinct over-reaction of "Little Red Riding Hood."  (The murderous intent of the space aliens doesn't keep members of the Santee cult from continuing to revere the space monsters.)  Interstellar travel is taxing and we are told that it will take 400 years for the aliens to reach our planet to wipe us out.  All the best minds on Earth are recruited to a secret "Manhattan project" in which counter-measures are developed to repel the Santee invasion penciled onto our human calendar for 400 years in the future.  When she was imprisoned in Mongolia, Ye met a ecology-minded Anglo named Mike Evans with whom she may have had an affair.  Evans, uses his scientific savvy to become an energy mogul -- (everyone in the show is genius of one sort or another).  How Evans morphed from conservationist and ecology crusader to a world-destroying plutocrat is not clear to me.  The show is fairly dull in places and I may have fallen asleep when this was explained.  Evans spearheads the Manhattan project underway to devise means to forestall or repel the Santee invasion.  

I have to make surmises as  to how certain parts of the show fit together because much of the plot is indecipherable -- perhaps, you are supposed to have read the Chinese novel before watching the TV version.  (Although I doubt that this would be too helpful since the names and places used in the Chinese original have all been changed so that the story could be lifted out of China and dramatized as occurring in London and its environs.)  There's a effects-heavy subplot about virtual reality video games that doesn't make much sense and that I didn't understand.  My guess is that the Santee, using proxies on Earth, have devised the VR game, utilizing gleaming steel helmets to deliver the computer content into the brains of the players, to destabilize the Earthlings and lure our best and brightest to their doom.  The game scenes have a sword and sorcery (or Game of Thrones) vibe and feature lots of decapitation, armies of dehydrated zombies who are revived by being cast into the sea, and much dim-witted Dungeons and Dragons bullshit -- this subplot is pretty much an embarrassment and I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean.  Further, the show inexplicably drops the story after about the third installment although in the last twenty minutes someone discovers yet another helmet terminal for the VR game and dons the device.  (I don't recall who this was or why this was supposed to be significant).  The VR scenes establish that planets entrapped in a three sun system (the titular 3 bodies) involve orbits that can't be reliably calculated, leading to long periods of "chaos" in which civilization is impossible -- I surmise that the Santee are trying to destabilize human culture so that our propensity for lying doesn't infect them, that is, induce three-body dynamics on Earth. In the end, there's a space shot in which the disembodied brain of one of the heroes is sent on a mission to encounter the Santee, a ride in a fast conveyance that, even at 1% of the speed of light, will take, at least, 200 years -- the hero's brain is put in a canister and kept in a twilight state of suspended animation during the space trip.  Things go awry and the eight hours of 3 Body Problem end with the protagonists vowing to fight smarter and better in the next series.  

The plot is driven forward by a group of attractive young scientists who are like apprentices on the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.  They're all incandescently brilliant, pretty, young, fit, and prone to wise-cracks.  Several of them get killed for no good reason.  The leader of this cadre of young heroes is a Black man named Dr. Saul Durand -- he's sort of a catalyst around which the characters gather: the others are a snack manufacturer ("Jack's Snacks" is his business) who's horny and cynical -- he gets offed early in the show which is too bad because his character was reasonably interesting.  A beautiful young woman named Auggie has developed ultra-strong and durable fibers -- this is some sort of nano-technology which is so threatening to the Santee that they threaten her with a running countdown projected onto the cornea of her eyes that stops only when she gives up her scientific endeavors.  This woman's technological innovations are central to several big scenes in the show:  the showstopper is a sequence set at the Panama Canal; the sinister and self-loathing cult of Santee worshipers have taken to the seas after the manner of Ron Hubbard and his scientologists (cf. Sea Org).  They are traitors to their species, inviting the Santee to appear and wipe out the "bugs' -- that is human kind.  When the Santee cult on their vessel "Judgement Day" sail through the Canal, tiny, invisible strands of nano-wire are set up to block their passage.  These fibers act as a giant  wire cheesecutter slicing the Judgement Day and its passengers into lateral segments -- this is a gory and impressive sequence that is undeniably effective, although gratuitous; one would think that the objective of stopping the Santee cult could be accomplished without using the momentum of the ship to slice everyone into six inch wide slabs of metal and gore.  Toward the end of the series, the Manhattan project scientists again enlist Auggie to build a "radiation sail" to power their spacecraft carrying the disembodied brain into the lap of the Santee -- what this is supposed to accomplish is also unclear.  Auggie's last scene is in Mexico where she is using her nano-fiber filters to finally solve the problem of bad, diarrhea-inducing water in that country.  Dr. Ye, who loves the Santee, goes back to Mongolia and, apparently, jumps off a cliff next to the ruins of the radio telescope that sicced the Santee on our world.  Her motivations have been impenetrable throughout the show.

3-Body Problem has a big cast.  But the characters are all, more or less, stereotypes, an aspect that is typical of Science Fiction, where the concerns of the narrative don't have much to do with psychology and schematic motivations are characteristic.  There's the avuncular and down-to-earth African American, Saul Durand, the obsessed and driven scientist Auggie, some other science types including a nerdy Chinese girl-savant, and a young man dying of pancreatic cancer who never really dies, long outliving his welcome on screen -- he's an irritating figure and his fate, of course, is a bummer.  These young people have boy- and girl-friends and there's some low level and uninteresting romantic intrigue among them.  The dying guy has bought a star for one of the women (she's going out with a dashing Indian naval officer) -- he's spent 19.5 million dollars to have the star named after the girl but he's too shy to tell the woman about his lavish and futile gift.  Before he can come clean, his brain is excised, stuffed in a flask of what looks like dry ice and shot into space.  On his death bed, the young man is confronted by his sister and her husband and they ask him to make sure that they inherit his wealth -- this sequence is baffling and typical of much of the show:  characters appear with demands of various sort, conflict with one another, and, then, drop out of the plot entirely.  

I think this show is carefully scripted and suspect that it makes sense if closely watched.  But the subject matter is just junk of a predictable variety and, so, although you're entertained it's not enough for you to keep close track of the proceedings.  After a while, you can't really figure out what is going on because the material isn't intrinsically interesting enough for you to undertake the intellectual effort of keeping track of all the intricate, and, seemingly, random plot developments.  Everything seems theoretical, a point that the characters make within the plot as well -- the Santee aren't due to land on Earth for 400 years so why are we all so upset and determined to repel them?  We live in a world in which everyone was warned about climate change for the last fifty years and, yet, no one has done anything, just kicking the can down the road for another couple decades or so.  Why would the threat of an alien invasion four-hundred years in the future cause anyone much concern.  If we haven't been moved to worry about the sea's turning into steam baths and inundating the coast as Greenland's ice-cap melts and Antarctica's ice shelves crash into the sea, why would an alien invasion announced for the year 2425 cause us any concern at all?  My point is that all the epochal and world-ending imagery in 3-Body Problem lacks urgency -- we all revert to magical thinking:  either the aliens will get detoured to some other star-system or we'll figure something out; a solution can always be improvised so long as we don't have to accomplish this feat today.   

Ripley

 Evidently, the life of a charming and murderous sociopath is arduous.  Tom Ripley, the protagonist of the Netflix limited series that bears his surname, spends much of his time traveling by train and ferry across Italy, hiking up and down mountainous stairs at Atrani, Naples, San Remo, and Palermo, and laboriously disposing of corpses on the rock-girt Amalfi coast and, later, the Via Appia in Rome.  Often, we see him mopping up blood, a task that invariably leaves telltale stains; he has to master forgery, write various letters that he ascribes to others, learn painting, book-editing, and idiomatic Italian.  (Patricia Highsmith's source novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, describes the situation exactly in its title -- Tom Ripley is, indeed, talented, a polymath who is a lightning swift study, and a master of fraud and deception.)  The material is a little thin and previous move versions of Highsmith's book (Rene Clements' 1960 Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella"s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley) clock in at about two hours.  But the longer limited series format of Netflix's Ripley allows the director Steve Zaillan to emphasize the hard, repetitive work of being an amoral and murderous criminal -- hence, all of the symmetrical shots of trains and ferries, the coming and going, the protracted encounters with suspicious police officers and private eyes, all of the laborious machinery of hoax and fraud.  The two previous film versions of the story are shot in gorgeous technicolor to exploit the spectacular Italian locations in which the action takes place.  Zaillan' adaptation is filmed in equally spectacular black-and-white and the film is glorious to behold,  Zaillan's photography is exquisitely conceived, frequently dividing the image into two lateral frames -- a fountain or structure occupies half the foreground composition with a remote figure moving or standing alone on the opposite side of the image.  The photography derives from Hitchcock (and Fellini) and features austere vertical shots, majestic dollying movements across piazzos and through stairwells, and dozens (probably hundreds) of "empty frames" -- that is, still compositions generally focusing on baroque objets d' art, flamboyantly expressive terra-cotta statuary, and all sorts of curious knickknacks.  In one scene, Zaillan orchestrates an encounter between a desk clerk and Ripley (and, then, a detective) around a little figurine of a saint lugging a cross (undoubtedly St.Peter of the crossed-keys, the patron of innkeepers); the encounters revolve inserted close-ups of people moving the little statuette from one place to another on a cluttered desk.  The positioning of the figure on the chessboard of the counter seems as important to the narration as the dialogue and plot-points motivating the scene.  Various gargoyles, putti, stone saints and angels and martyrs, all afford a running, if obtuse, commentary on the action, Tom's various crimes that are about as secular as possible -- Italy, it seems, affords a continuous contrast between Ripley's sordid adventures and the landscape of sacred beings and enormous empty palazzos with cloistral arcades and ecclesiastical arches, the places in which these events occur.  The show lags a little in its mid-section and doesn't really have a satisfactory conclusion -- in fact, the ending of the show is, more or less, a launching pad for the next installment of the tale; Highsmith wrote a number of Ripley novels and Zaillan's version introduces John Malkovich into the final episode as a corrupt art dealer, presumably as a teaser for the next series.  Nonetheless, the program is delightful and shows that the fearsome objectivity of the Hitchcock thriller is alive and well.  Highsmith worked with Hitchcock -- the director adapted one of her novels into the 1951 Strangers on a Train  -- and Zaillan stages many of Ripley's bravura sequences after the manner of Hitchcock, deploying exotic settings as the sinister, strangely indifferent backdrops for homicidal action; Zaillan's use of point-of-view shots, eccentric minor characters, and close-ups inserted into scenes to disrupt the flow of events and serve as a sort of cubist commentary on events depicted also closely tracks Hitchcock's stylistic practices.  Ripley is suspenseful in a nihilistic way -- the audience is invested in Tom Ripley's perspective on things and we find ourselves rooting for the peculiarly opaque and affect-less hero.  Ripley just doesn't care about anything but his own survival -- his bland, cheerful demeanor is the opposite of any sort of charisma; nothing is really premeditated; he's a master of homicidal improvisation. (Andrew Scott is excellent in title role.)

We meet Tom Ripley as a penny-ante crook running cons out of a squalid apartment in New York City.  Ripley's sexuality is ambiguous throughout the show.  He seems to be gay, but in a muted asexual way.  A private eye accosts him in a bar and introduces him to a plutocrat, a businessman who runs a ship-building enterprise.  The plutocrat's son, Dicky Greenleaf, is abroad, living in Italy where he aspires to be an artist (although he has no discernible talent).  The shipbuilder believes that his son knows Dicky (and, perhaps, suspects a sexual relationship between the two young men.)  In fact, its unclear that Ripley has had anything to do with Dicky in Manhattan.  In any event, Greenleaf pere dispatches Tom to the Amalfi Coast on a mission to retrieve the errant scion and return him to New York.  Ripley finds Dickie ensconced in palatial digs at Atrani, a lavishly beautiful Italian hill town on the cliffs overlooking the Adriatic Sea.  Dickie has a girl friend, Marge, played by Dakota Fanning, that he mostly ignores -- she's writing a travel book about Atrani.  Ripley admires Dickie's trust fund life-style and, ultimately, murders the young man, bludgeoning him to death with the oar of a rented row-boat and, then, sinking the corpse in the sea tethered to the boat's anchor.  (This murder sequence is extravagantly staged:  Ripley has to hammer Dickie's skull into a bloody mess with repeated blows and, then, gets tangled up in the anchor that he uses to sink the cadaver; he falls out of the boat which spins in circles with its outboard motor rotating around the place where the corpse is sinking to the bottom -- the anchor towed by the out-of-control boat brains Ripley, (temporarily) sending him to the bottom, and he comes within an inch or so of being disemboweled by the spinning rotor of the outboard motor.)  Ripley, then, assumes Dicky's identity, drains his accounts of funds, and decamps to Rome.  In the Eternal City, a louche buddy of Dicky's, the decadent Freddie Miles (he's a playwright) discovers that Ripley is playing the part of his friend.  Ripley has to kill this guy too and most of an hour episode documents his efforts to conceal the gory dead body and, then, desert the corpse in Freddie's Fiat on the Appian Way.  This murder inspires the interest of the police and an investigator (Inspector Rivini) doggedly hounds Ripley, suspecting that he has something to do with the English playwright's death.  More complications ensue and the actions shifts between Palermo, San Remo, and, at last, Venice.  

Zaillan, who senses that there's not enough of a story here for eight hours, introduces a peculiar subplot into the narrative.  Dicky was an admirer of Caravaggio and took Ripley to see one of his paintings.  (A priest appears when Ripley is standing before a Caravaggio canvas on an altar and says gnomically "It's the light" -- this is a mantra that reoccurs in the movie, a gesture toward the extravagantly beautiful chiaroscuro that Zaillan employs in the show's camerawork.)   There is some suggestion that Tom Ripley is a reincarnation of Caravaggio -- the artist was gay, murdered a man, and spent the last years of his life on the run from those seeking to avenge the crime.  Zaillan is not content to merely imply connections between Caravaggio and Ripley, but, in fact, dramatizes this metaphor in a series of tableau-like scenes depicting events from the life of Caravaggio -- I'm ambivalent as to whether this foray into what seems to me to be supernatural terrain is warranted or effective; but it is certainly interesting.  Zaillan seems to suggested that the "talented" Mr. Ripley is, indeed, an artist of some kind (we see him effortlessly mastering all sorts of skills) and that he is akin to Caravaggio in some occult way.  A theme of the show is that Ripley is better at various endeavors than those who claim those activities as their vocations -- he's a better, more charismatic playboy than Dickie and a better artist as well; he turns out to be a better author than Marge; and he outwits the Italian authorities with stylish aplomb.  (A running joke is the Italian inspector who insists on speaking English which he thinks that he is mastered --but his discourse is well-nigh impenetrable with strange locutions and, even, stranger pronunciation of English words; by contrast, most of the film is shot in Italian since Ripley seems to have mastered conversation in that tongue.)

The show features many spectacular locations, possesses a wry black humor, and has a rich rogue's gallery of supporting characters.  (Eliot Sumner is indelibly weird and sinister as a depraved hermaphroditic British playwright -- the actor who uses the pronoun "they" is the musician Sting's...what? son  or daughter?  I can't tell.)  Ripley is slow but full of interesting details.  It documents an era when artists about to become famous and well-known lounged around Italy -- one imagines Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg wandering around Italy and North Africa in the early fifties and there's a La Dolce Vita vibe to the imagery -- Fellini's lustrous black and white cinematography is particularly evident in many of the shots that Zaillan stages.  I enjoyed this series and recommend it.  

Anatomy of a Fall

 Anatomy of a Fall is an intense courtroom drama.  The 2023 film, directed by Justine Triet, is entirely straightforward narrative, in effect, the dramatization of a trial transcript.  The movie is single-minded and wholly self-confident -- there is no reaching for significance, no symbolism and not much in the way of ambiguity. The viewer, used to conventional films, expects the motion picture to expand outward at some point to embrace broader themes or perspectives.  But this never happens.  The movie remains doggedly focused on the crime, the procedural aspects of the investigation, and, for most of its two-hour plus length, the trial itself.  When the trial concludes and the verdict is rendered, the movie has nowhere to go -- its raison d'etre is gone and the film just comes to an end without extracting (or abstracting) any meanings from the proceedings that we have seen.  The protagonist says it better than I can:  at the end of the movie, she says that she expected some sort of release or exhilaration  from the outcome of the proceedings; "instead," she says, "it's just over" and that all there is.  There's no sense of uplift or meaning. As a result the film seems rather futile and unresolved.  But this is intended by the filmmakers.  The facts are all that matters in this rather chilly, alienating film -- most documentaries labor far more strenuously to mine significance from the events shown.  But this isn't the nature of Anatomy of a Fall and it's unfair to criticize the movie for not being something other than what it is intended to to be.  (A friend who watched this movie noted that it seems influenced by Otto Preminger's similarly dispassionate Anatomy of a Murder -- however, in that film, which, indeed, is obviously a precursor, the ending of the picture is ambiguous; we are left in doubt as to whether the criminal law has delivered justice or the truth and issues of guilt or innocence seem unresolved.  The French film doesn't indulge in these ambiguities; the outcome of the trial is shown to be just and reasonable and, indeed, the legal and factual questions posed by Anatomy of a Fall are never really in doubt.)  The movie has a Gallic aspect -- there is faith that if reason is applied, even to the unreasonable, a fair outcome will be achieved.  

Anatomy of a Fall begins in an unsettling way.  At a mountain villa in the French Alps, a famous writer is being interviewed by a young woman, apparently a graduate student at an university in Grenoble.  The two women are drinking wine and there is something mildly flirtatious in the encounter.  Suddenly, music booms overhead, a loud heavily bass and percussion inflected version of Fifty Cent's P.I.M.P performed in an instrumental adaptation.  Then, we hear power tools and pounding.  Conversation between the women is impossible although they are both too polite to allude directly to the loud music interrupting the interview.  The older woman, the author whose name is Sandra, suggests a meeting that seems to be a "date" for later in the week in Grenoble.  Sandra's son, Daniel, is giving the family dog a bath.  With the dog, Snoop, Daniel goes for a walk in the snowy mountain landscape, an impressive frieze of peaks across the deep gorge and hilltop where the house stands.  When Daniel and Snoop return, a man is lying next to the house, his head smashed open.  This is Daniel's father and Sandra's husband.  He seems to have fallen from the attic level of the house where he was using power-tools and hammers to renovate the structure.  The man is dead and, immediately, suspicion focuses on Sandra -- it seems possible that she may have killed him by hitting the man on the side of his head and, then, flinging him from the attic window about forty feet above the ground.  In the aftermath of the incident, the camera angle is low, tracking through the chaos at the scene behind Snoop, the dog. This seems an odd way to portray the scene, but, in fact, is significant -- as it will happen, the dog represents the film's solution.  The two least important figures at the confusing and tragic scene, Daniel and his dog (the animal we later learn is a "seeing-eye dog" since the boy is partially blind) will turn out to be integral to resolving issues at the criminal trial that ensues.  

The authorities suspect that Sandra has murdered her husband.  Sandra engages a lawyer who was formerly her lover.  This was before she was married to Samuel, the husband.  The lawyer is an ethereal, angelic-looking man who seems high-strung and nervous.  In his discussions with Sandra, whom he has not seen for years, the attorney, Vincent, learns that the couple were unhappily married and that, in fact, had a violent quarrel just the day before Samuel fell out of the attic window.  Samuel is also a writer, but an unsuccessful one and he had a penchant for recording conversations, including the horrible quarrel the day before he died -- he uses these recordings as sources for his writing.  This quarrel, which at first Sandra denied, becomes central to the trial that occupies two-thirds or more of the trial.  The question posed by Samuel's death is whether it was murder or suicide -- there are no other alternatives.  In the course of the proceedings, many conflicts in Samuel and Sandra's marriage come to light.  When Daniel was four, he was injured when a motorcycle struck him.  This accident resulted in injury to Daniel's optic nerve and his partial blindness, a condition for which Sandra blamed her husband.  In the aftermath of the accident, Sandra became somewhat unhinged and had several affairs, including a brief sexual liaison with a woman.  The prosecution alleges that Sandra and Samuel quarreled over her ostensible interest in the young woman who had come to interview the author -- this was the fight that resulted in Samuel's death, according to the prosecuting attorneys.  Further, there is evidence that Sandra used material from a failed novel written by Samuel, but unpublished -- she is said to have "plundered" his work for her successful book, at least, this is what Samuel says in the quarrel which, ultimately, degenerates into violence (plates are thrown, Sandra slaps and hits Samuel).  There is also evidence, although it's unclear, that Samuel has previously attempted suicide and a deadly plunge from the third story window is not outside the range of possibility.  Indeed, the film is skewed in favor of the theory that Samuel killed himself, Sandra's defense to the indictment lodged against her; although Sandra is glacially cold, cruel to Samuel, and indifferent to his pain, murder doesn't seem to be within her repertoire.

The film shows the pre-trial investigation and, then, the trial, itself, in lavish detail.  Experts are retained to provide theories and counter-theories of Samuel's fatal fall -- there is forensic evidence involving dummies pitched out of the window of the villa and blood spatter testimony.  A psychologist who was treating Samuel is called to testify and he implicitly blames Sandra for the death.  Caught in the middle of these alarming proceedings is the teenage son, Daniel -- he wants to remain neutral, since, of course, both of his beloved parents, are involved in this matter.  We see him furiously practicing on the piano and his ultimate testimony is based upon a recollection of Snoop's claws clicking on the hardwood floor of the house as he is practicing Chopin.  (The use of sound cues as a trigger to Daniel's understanding of the event is significant -- he is partly blind and has spooky, somewhat cloudy, blue eyes and, so, it makes sense that he would discover the meaning of events on the basis of something that he hears but doesn't see.)  

I don't exactly understand French criminal procedure and so the trial has aspects that are unclear or confusing to someone versed in Anglo-American law.  The proceedings take place in a enormous room in Grenoble in front of an elaborate mural.  The courtroom is filled with spectators because the case is celebrated and reported extensively in the media.  There is no privilege against self-incrimination.  The accused participates directly in the investigation and is called upon to explain factual points, a process that is repeated at trial.  The case is tried to a tribunal of a dozen or so factfinders who sit on a bench above the courtroom and a woman lawyer is the presiding officer.  Although the process is clearly adversary, with battling lawyers, there don't seem to be exclusionary rules of evidence -- all sorts of highly speculative testimony is admitted and there are few limitations as to relevancy.  (Some of these features may be exaggerations for dramatic purpose, but the viewer has the sense that the basic elements of French criminal procedure are accurately reflected.)  In the courtroom, the lawyers ask long, argumentative questions and seem to argue the case as it proceeds.  Although there are apparently closing arguments, it seems that the lawyers continually interject their arguments into the presentation of evidence and the proceedings have a discursive aspect in which there is really no distinction between fact and opinion or between factual proof and argument.  Notwithstanding the unfamiliarity of the process, an American viewer can understand what is happening with sufficient clarity to be involved emotionally in the trial and its outcome.  

The film's dialogue is largely English.  One of the points of contention between Sandra and her husband, Samuel is language.  Sandra is German and Samuel French.  As a compromise, they use English, described as a "neutral ground", in the home.  (There is no German spoken in the movie.)  The trial is conducted in French, but Sandra's command of the language is not sufficient for some of the questioning and exposition required in the hearing -- therefore, she asks leave of the Court to speak in English and permission is granted for that discourse.  Sandra generally speaks English to her French lawyer.  (This film demonstrates the extent to which English is necessary as a lingua franca in Europe; French and German people, including husband and wife, communicate in English as a sort of middle-ground between their respective languages.  The situation is similar in Indian films in which Hindi or Bengali or Tegulu-speaking characters often use English in order to communicate with one another.)  The part of Sandra is performed by the great actor, Sandra Hueller, a German-speaking movie star who is never less than brilliant in her films.  She played the title role in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann (2016), her first film widely known in this country, demonstrating great talent for deadpan comedy.  She has acted in many important German films and, in the year that she performed in Anatomy of a Fall, she also famously acted the part of Rudolf Hess' wife in the concentration camp film Zone of Interest.  Although neither beautiful nor glamorous, she is an astonishing actress, completely natural in every role in which I have seen her.  She is also a fixture of the German stage and has played, for instance, the role of Penthesilia in Heinrich von Kleist's lurid tragedy.  

Before the Revolution (Prima della Revoluzione)

 Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) is a key to the director's later work.  Many of the themes developed in Bertolucci's mature films, including Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, and 1900 are evident in the director's first feature film.  The movie is heavily influenced by Godard and the French filmmaker's rather cubist style of editing dominates the movie -- sequences are divided up into discontinuous shots, often with disconcerting jump cuts and mismatched edits; the film is not cut to serve its narrative, but, rather, broken into images spliced together in a stuttering, fragmentary montage.  The soundtrack frequently doesn't match the imagery and there are jokey musical cues, that sometimes resemble the Godard-influenced work of Richard Lester in his Beatles films.  The music for Before the Revolution was composed by Ennio Morricone and is well worth attending to.  In fact, musical themes predominate in the movie -- there is a lot of harpsichord on the soundtrack and a penultimate sequence involves a performance of Verdi's opera version of Macbeth.  Much of the film, made in black and white, looks like a jerky, covertly filmed documentary -- there is a cinema verite aspect to the picture's rough edges and, in fact, cinema verite as a film style is mentioned in one sequence.  These elements of the film undercut Bertolucci's rapturous eye for landscape and the epic dimensions of his movie-making -- in his later pictures, as with the spaghetti westerns on which he actually worked (he was an assistant director on Sergio Leone's Once upon a time in the West) everything looks larger-than-life, exaggerated for baroque effects and there's a dreamy, swooning aspect to his mise-en-scene.  The languorous and ecstatic aspects of Bertolucci's mature films are not really visible in Before the Revolution except for a spectacular sequences involving a drowning at a picturesquely barren construction site.  That scene is one of the rare sequences in Before the Revolution in which we can detect Bertolucci's big-budget style -- obvious in films like La Luna, The Last Emperor, The Conformist and the enormous arthouse spaghetti Western qua Marxist pageant of 1900.  It's not so much the imagery in Before the Revolution that prefigures Bertolucci's later themes and obsessions, but the subject matter that comprises the movie.

There's a lot of talk in Before the Revolution, much of it poetic or allusive.  Various literary works are cited.  The film comes with several epigraphs including a citation from Talleyrand which says something to the effect that no one can appreciate the sweetness of life "before the revolution" who did not live in those days.  The idea seems to be that the revolution is best appreciated before it is attempted and before the enterprise devolves into internecine fighting and disenchantment.  Something similar, I think, is suggested about love.  The anticipation of love is better than the rather messy and inevitably disappointing erotic encounter itself.  In this way, eros and revolution are linked, a concern that runs like scarlet thread through the entirety of the film.  The movie is about young people fumbling their way through their first love affairs -- therefore, the subject of the picture is lust, erotic betrayal and disenchantment, these latter qualities also defining the characters' flirtation with Communism.

The movie's narrative eschews standard establishing shots or linear chronology (and there are elisions in which key events are not shown to us) and, so, the summary of events in the movie that I now provide is an approximation or estimate (guess) as to what happens in the picture.  A handsome young man named Fabrizio is flirting with another boy named Agostino.  Agostino, who is a blonde waif, is estranged from his family and may be homosexual.  By contrast, Fabrizio seems, more or less, heterosexual, although, perhaps, a bit bi curious, and, although he espouses Marxist Communism, he lives very happily with his upper middle class bourgeois family in Parma.  Fabrizio wants Agostino to join the Party and meet his friend, a high school teacher named Cesare.  Fabrizio mocks Agostino's family and says his father is a thief.  Agostino, who is riding a bike in circles around his friend, seems hurt and repeatedly crashes the bike, injuring himself in a masochistic display of affection for Fabrizio.  Later, we discover that Agostino has drowned himself at a place where some sort of huge bridge is being built over the Po River swamps; his body has been found in a deep spot in some murky-looking mud flats next to a pier or bridge piling.  (This scene is shot very elliptically.  It begins with clothing on the river bank, then, scenes of naked boys flouncing around in the water, and, then, shows someone trying to load a bike into a small car -- the clothes and the bike belong to the deceased Agostino and people are removing his remains from the scene of his death.)  It isn't clear whether Agostino's death was an accident or suicide.  

At the funeral for Agostino, Fabrizio encounters a beautiful young woman, Gina (played by Adriana Asti).  This woman, strangely enough, is Fabrizio's aunt -- exactly how this relationship is configured was unclear to me.  Gina seems interested in Fabrizio and she goes shopping with him in a slapstick scene like something from a Monkees' TV episode -- its eccentrically filmed for whimsy.  The two meet under Garibaldi's statue in Milan where Gina lives.  (They keep just missing one another in another whimsical sequence that will be either charming or infuriating to viewers depending upon your inclinations.)  Gina comes to visit Fabrizio's family who live in a beautiful villa in Parma.  It's Easter holiday and the two sneak off into a ruinous print shop to have sex.  Almost immediately, Gina feels confined and trapped by the relationship.  She goes shopping for newspapers and buys about twenty of them.  The man who sold the papers to her pursues her down the street -- they have exchanged seductive glances at the news-stand -- and he is about to usher her into a no-tell motel when Fabrizio shows up, understandably miffed at Gina's betrayal.  As with Agostino, Fabrizio desires that Gina join the Communist Party and meet with his mentor and friend, Cesare.  Ultimately, Gina does meet Cesare at a rather tortured encounter in the teacher's book-filled apartment.  It's pretty clear that Gina will likely try to seduce Cesare and have an affair with him and the older man doesn't seem inclined to rebuff her advances.  Gina calls someone in Milan and complains about being confined in Parma in the home of Fabrizio's parents.  (She seems to be talking to a married lover.)  Gina and Fabrizio have a quarrel and, later, we see Cesare carrying Gina's luggage across wet and windy Milan to the train-station where she departs for places unknown.  This sequence is preceded by an open-air scene along the river Po involving a painter, an older man (who also seems to be enamored with Gina), Cesare, and Fabrizio -- the older man bids farewell to the river in a poetic scene which seems to suggest that Nature is being destroyed in the service of modern technology and commerce.   When Fabrizio denounces the older man, apparently one of Gina's lovers, she becomes enraged and repeatedly slaps him across the face. Time lapses after Gina leaves Milan.  Fabrizio attends a  Communist-sponsored May Day festival in Milan but is disappointed by the comrades that he meets.  He realizes that its hard enough to influence one person, probably based on his experience with Gina, let alone the laboring masses of the world.  The sequence ends with a parade, banners, and Cesare with Fabrizio reciting by heart parts of Marx's Communist Manifesto.  Later, Fabrizio attends a performance of Verdi's Macbeth sitting in a posh balcony suite with his new fiancee  and her well-heeled family -- she is a gorgeous but dumb blonde.  Gina shows up at the opera, characteristically late, but makes a grand entrance. She's heard that her nephew is going to marry the blonde.  The two meet in the empty lobby after both of them slip out of their seats. Gina would like to disrupt the engagement just for the sheer hell of it, apparently, but they are both too wary of one another to re-invent their love affair.  In the last scene, Fabrizio marries the blonde.  Gina is in attendance.  She approaches Fabrizio's younger brother, who is a carbon copy of the hero, and showers him with caresses and kisses.  

This is what I think happens in the movie.  I've left out an amusing scene in which Fabrizio, unhappy with Gina's tendency to indulge herself with other men, goes to the cinema and sees Godard's A Woman is a Woman.  After the movie, he has a conversation with a cinephile and they discuss the morality of film style.  The cinephile says that life isn't possible without Rossellini.  There's an ambiguous sexual sub-current to the scene, again suggesting that Fabrizio, if not gay himself, exudes gay vibes sufficient to attract homosexual men and the cinephile seems to be trying to seduce Fabrizio.  This sequence is just a divertimento, a subplot that goes nowhere.  It's similar to a scene that we see later in which Cesare, an anti-Fascist, reads an soliloquy by Captain Ahab to his bemused eight and nine-year old students.  This is a striking sequence but, also, goes nowhere.  There's an overtly anti-clerical scene at the start of the film in which Fabrizio searches through the churches in Milan (or is it Parma?) for his pious girlfriend, someone named Cleia -- he never finds her and the scene seems to be to be designed primarily for provocation; Bertolucci has his hero say some nasty things about Italian Catholicism.

I have said that Before the Revolution is a sort of skeleton key to themes in later Bertolucci films. Fabrizio's ambiguous sexuality invokes similar themes in The Conformist.  The perils associated with sex involving little bourgeois girls reminds us that Marlon Brando, a figure portrayed like Odysseus in Last Tango in Paris is killed on the basis of his entanglement with such a person.  The Communist festival that features rather pathetically in the fourth act of Before the Revolution prefigures the grandiose fantasy May Day celebration that concludes 1900, another film that expands to embrace all of the main themes explored by Bertolucci in his mature films.  The incestuous relationship between aunt and nephew becomes full-blown mother-son incest in La Luna, a movie that also concludes with a  performance of a Verdi opera, in this case The Masked Ball (Un ballo en maschera)  -- Bertolucci's interest in Verdi is further highlighted in 1900 which begins with a village idiot, dressed as Rigoletto, proclaiming that Verdi has died.  The misty waterlogged landscapes of the Po River delta seem sketches based on the last episode in Rossellini's Paisan and point forward to the great march of the workers along the river banks in 1900. Bertolucci's fundamental point in Before the Revolution is that sex and politics are endeavors that involve, inevitably, betrayal and disappointment.  One of his great films, The Last Emperor is an epic in reverse -- it might be called "After the Revolution", a movie about the last emperor of China, relentlessly damaged by both sexual entanglements and the Maoist revolution.  Sex and politics are abiding obsessions in human life but as demonstrated both in Before the Revolution and The Last Emperor, hope is better than consummation and, in fact, wisdom requires resignation, a stoic response to the disenchantment that comes with age.   Although wonderfully assured, Before the Revolution is an apprentice work by a great director -- but, like everything by Bertolucci, it is well worth watching.       

The Signal

 The Signal is a relatively compact, well-scripted science fiction mini-series.  Comprised of four hour-long episodes, there's little filler in the show and the intricate narrative is presented lucidly, mostly through flashbacks.  This is a German TV show, exquisitely made and photographed, but rather melancholy -- in large part, the program is about grief.  It's continuously compelling and, probably, one of the few shows recently produced for Netflix to feature a quotation from Immanuel Kant.  (And that quote is spoken by someone tripping on LSD at a nighttime amusement park.)  The show is sober and alludes to some of the current catastrophes in the world and, ultimately, has an uplifting, inspirational (if muted) ending.  When the Germans ceased to be a world-historical people (as Hegel might say), they became a race of mourners, hapless witnesses to the indignities and tragedies caused by human folly, error, as it were, that this nation of prosperous, well-meaning bystanders are powerless to prevent.  Everything about The Signal is serious and presented in good faith, even the show's various misdirections and concealments necessary to its serpentine plot.  

The Signal's premise is that a message from outer space has been detected.  The message is known to an Indian billionaire, an entrepreneur similar to Elon Musk (although female) who understands that the aliens are on their way to our world and that it is her mission to greet them.  Indeed, the billionaire is concerned that the space visitors will be murdered by trigger-happy governments and their militaries and, so, she has groomed a courageous lady-astronaut to monitor the message from the stars and keep her informed as to where the aliens intend to land.  The lady-astronaut is Paula, a brilliant scientist but mentally unstable.  Paula is married to Sven, an actor whose thankless role involves mostly gazing at his wife with worshipful eyes -- he looks like a large faithful retriever.  Sven and Paula have a daughter, Charlie, who is preternaturally wise and well-read -- this 9 year old child is a girl-astronaut in the making and an expert in all things intergalactic and interplanetary.  (The part is a shameless cliche -- the child scientist whose sense of wonder and bravery saves the day.)  Little Charlie is completely deaf; she has to wear a cochlear implant to hear what is happening around her.  This plot device allows Sven to communicate with Charlie without anyone else understanding their sign language.  The story begins in media res:  the astronauts who are on the International Space Station return to earth in a fiery capsule but there is something strange about their descent -- Paula seems reluctant to deploy the parachute and, perhaps, is intent on causing the death of the space travelers.  Later, the plane transporting Paula and her sidekick, Hamid, back to Germany crashes under mysterious circumstances, killing all 178 souls on board including the heroine and Hamid.  Recordings from the cockpit suggest that Paula overcame the plane's pilots and caused the fatal crash.  In their post-modern house in the woods (it's like a Nordic mix of Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen) near the German Alps, Charlie and Sven are besieged by mourners who demand retribution for the plane crash.  Charlie was in contact with her mother while she was on the ISS and she knows the coordinates of the place where the aliens are planning to land.  This information is the MacGuffin that triggers a complicated chase with government agents pursuing Sven and Charlie, grief-stricken mourners attacking them irrationally, and the Indian billionaire also on the trail and, finally, offering them her protection.  After some unanticipated twists and turns in the plot, the space vessel from which the message has emanated returns to earth and Sven with Charlie are present in the Sahara desert to welcome the visitor from Outer Space.

The Signal's plot contains a number of genuine surprises and, so, I won't spoil the story for those who may want to watch this excellent series.  Since these narrative twists account for a large part of the story's appeal and have been carefully designed to be unanticipated, it would be churlish to explain how things develop and conclude in the series.  It suffices for me to note that there are many interesting and compelling features in the show.  The message from outer space is a child's voice intoning "hello...hello...hello...", a spooky signal from beyond the stars.  The scenes on the ISS are brilliantly realized, characters floating as rigid as ironing boards through the cluttered corridors of the space station -- there's literally no up nor down and the ISS sequences are completely credible.  (For instance, people sleep in hanging cocoons to keep from drifting through the rooms and hallways; when someone gets cut, big globules of blood like tiny crimson planets spin and rotate in the air.)  Paula, apparently, is a fan of acid and she seems to have a flashback to a bad trip that she experienced at the amusement park.  The show keeps us uncertain as to whether Paula is just flashing back to her LSD trip or, in fact, suffering a psychotic break.(Here the concept of a "flashback" is both figurative and literal.) The heroine seems unpredictable and, potentially deranged enough to have sabotaged the flight back from the desert where their capsule landed.  The riddle that the show poses is why Paula would have destroyed the plane and committed suicide.  There are some superbly minor characters including a sinister female doomsday prepper who seems to be channeling Peter Lorre in her performance.  The show's message is equally inspiring and mournful -- human potential for altruism and goodness seems unlimited but the horrors of human malice are just as infinite.  

Blood on the Moon

 The Internet recommends this 1948 Western as a source for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. As usual, this plug is misguided and without merit.  I saw no similarities of any kind between Blood on the Moon and the Scorsese film.  Perhaps, somewhere Scorsese, who knows everything about all films, recommended this movie or remarked upon its peculiar film noir photography, but I didn't detect any allusions to this movie in Killers of the Flower Moon and, indeed, the style of the two pictures is very different.  (I'm puzzled about the Internet misrepresentation:  usually articles placed on the internet mentioning films have some economic motivation -- something is being sold.  But I can't figure out why a writer would encourage people to look up a forgotten 1948 picture except I suppose to promote rentals on Amazon Prime; it cost me $4.99 I think to watch this 88 minute picture.)

Blood on the Moon is directed by Robert Wise, a filmmaker who had worked with Orson Welles (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons) and Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher.)  As a young director, he was thought to show promise, but didn't progress and, in fact, ended up as a hack albeit one that was very well-paid --  he ended up directing the film version of West Side Story and The Sound of Music.  Wise's movies, after some early low-budget successes, were largely inert Oscar-bait and most of his work is tedious.  This is true of Blood on the Moon as well -- the picture has an excellent cast including Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Taylor, but it isn't very interesting.  I can't define exactly what is wrong with this movie except to say that it seems overlong at 88 minutes notwithstanding its painfully complicated plot.  Despite gorgeous black-and-white photography and a really wonderful score -- the classic horse opera music is by Roy Webb   -- the film is dull with pointlessly elaborate night camerawork (completely unconvincing) and inexplicable plot twists. The movie's rear-projection work is terrible, almost as bad as Alfred Hitchcock but without master's dreamlike surrealism. 

A drifter, Jim Garry, played with weary nonchalance by Robert Mitchum, has lost his herd of cattle and wanders into a range war in Arizona.  A local cattle baron named Lufton has a contract to sell beef on the hoof to the Ute Indians confined on a reservation.  But Lufton has a rival named Riling (Robert Taylor)  This rancher conspires with a corrupt Indian agent to displace Lufton as beef supplier to the reservation and replace his animals with Riling's herd.  Riling has aligned himself with local small farmers and cattlemen, putting a popularist spin on his efforts to oust Lufton from the lucrative contract with the government.  At first, Garry rejects Lufton's efforts to engage him as a hired gun in the battle with Riling.  Garry has agreed, apparently previous to his appearance in the movie, to assist the villainous Riling.  Garry orchestrates a stampede that scatters Lufton's herd so that the animals can't be delivered in a timely manner to the Utes.  In the course of the stampede, the son of a small rancher named Bardon, played by Walter Brennan in a surprisingly dull performance, gets knocked off his horse and dragged to death.  This casualty opens Garry's eyes to the fact that he is working for the wrong side.  When Riling sends an assassin to murder Lufton and his comely daughter, Amy (Bel Geddes), Garry comes to their defense and switches sides.  This leads to further complications, particularly since Lufton's other attractive daughter, Carol, is having a Romeo-and-Juliet style fling with the evil Riling.  Riling seizes the hero, Garry, and detains him in the high Sierra in a vast, empty, and snowy landscape.  Meanwhile, Riling is planning to deliver his herd of cattle to the Utes and the corrupt Indian agent named Pindalest.  When Garry tries to escape, a renegade Ute knifes him in the belly and he nearly dies.  But he is rescued by Walter Brennan's character, Bardon, and brought to recuperate at his cabin located in a dark forest.  All the bad guys converge on Bardon's cabin and besiege it.  Garry is feverish and half comatose in the cabin, cared for by Amy and the old man.  After a prolonged siege and gun-battle, Garry suddenly recovers his wits and straps on his six-shooters.  He goes out into the forest, flanks the bad guys and guns them down.  Apparently, now, miraculously recovered, he struts across the ranch, proud of having slaughtered the villains.  Amy says that he's now a member of the family, essentially proposing to marry him.  Mitchum's Garry barely reacts, but, now, seems hale and hearty despite having been half-disemboweled ten minutes earlier.  Bardon, seemingly no longer in mourning for his son, decides the celebrate the betrothal by getting out a jug so everyone can get drunk.

The movie is not without its merits.  In the bleak opening scenes, Mitchum's cattle tramp rides through rough country in a rain storm and, when he camps and makes a fire, finds himself almost crushed to death by a stampede -- this is a herd of Riling's cattle coming down off the Sierra.  Mitchum scrambles up a tree to evade the maddened steers and we see the animals thundering by below.  Another stampede in which Mitchum drives Lufton's cattle across the plain causing the animals to scatter is thrillingly filmed and features the gory scene of Bardon's son being dragged to death by his horse. (I suspect this well-orchestrated action sequence was produced by a second-unit director). There are some reasonably good and tense encounters in a saloon and on the dusty main street of a local town.  For some reason, Wise stages most of the action at night, shooting "day for night" footage that is fairly unconvincing.  The final gunbattle in the forest looks like outtakes from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- everything is blurry, velvet leaves, glistening shimmers of moonlight, and out-of-focus filigree of shadow.  It's pretty but the scene's isn't clear and hard to see.  Robert Mitchum's saddle tramp is Robert Mitchum who barely condescends to act at all.  Robert Taylor's Riling is smarmy and has a little pencil moustache like a fifties' car dealer -- he's pretty good but his part, like most of the movie, is underwritten. The women are essentially irrelevant. Bel Geddes looks good shouldering a long gun and she's introduced in the film engaging in an exchange of gunfire with the drifter, John Garry -- it's the sort of lurid meet-cute that would have pleased Sam Fuller, but some reason, this explosive and tawdry scene, doesn't really register.  The landscapes are wonderful -- we get shots of savage-looking mountains shrouded in black snow clouds and the action alternates between the snowy passes through the high country and desolate desert that looks like Monument Valley.  (Much of the movie was filmed in the high country at Sedona Crossing, before that place became a New Age tabernacle.)  I can't really explain why the movie doesn't work, but it's paced wrong and never very compelling. By the way, the movie's title is a  picturesque non sequitur and, in the best Hollywood tradition, has nothing to do with the plot.