The Kid Who Would Be King

I went to the movie at the Cineplex.  The audience was elderly -- that is, my age.  I wondered why a half-dozen old couples (a big crowd in  Austin) were plunking down good money to see a British film for children.  After interminable ads and coming attractions for sex-murder movies -- odd I thought for a movie for kids -- the film started with glossy second-unit images of flowers in idyllic meadows.  These are the kind of bland eye-candy images that seem untouched by human hands.  I was surprised to see that the British film was produced by Malpaso -- I thought that was Clint Eastwood's production company.  The close-ups of flowers continued, now showing potted plants in what seemed to be a greenhouse.  An old man was working with the flowers.  To my surprise, it was Clint Eastwood.  Inadvertently, I had wandered into his film The Mule .  Alarmed, I jumped out of my seat, spilled some popcorn, and, then, hurried into the adjacent theater.  The screen showed a dark and stormy night and a boy lying atop a pile of brown dirt.   The kid stood up, approached a boulder in the center of the construction site in which a gleaming sword was inserted.  The boy, a plump happy-looking kid, pulled the sword from the stone to portentous music and a light show.  I was in the right theater watching The Kid who would be King (2019), a reimagining of the Arthurian legends set in modern-day post-Brexit England,

The Kid who would be King is targeted to young teens and it is overtly didactic.  Here are the lessons that the movie teaches:

1.  Virtue is not related to wealth or prestige or power:  it is an innate to one's character;

2.  Evil divides, goodness unites;

3.  Always tell the truth;

4.  Be courageous;

5.  Persevere in doing good;

6.  If Evil seems to win the day, do not despair -- the arc of the universe is toward righteousness and justice.

The film teaches other lessons as well, some of which I seem to have forgotten.  These lessons are worthy of being learned and should be held close to the heart for the entirety of your life.  Thus, the movie is worthy in its own right and appealing.  It's also a little bit too long and like many super-hero films has not one but two climaxes when one climax, in fact, would suffice. 

A 12-year old named Alexander goes to a private school called Dungate.  His father is absent, living supposedly in Tintagel.  The boy's mother has told him that Alexander's father "had to fight his demons."  Alexander thinks this is literal -- that is, his father was some kind of goblin-slayer.  (In fact, she means the Alexander's father was a irredeemable alcoholic.)  Alexander finds the sword in the stone, pulls it forth with no difficulty, and, then, reads a book that his father gave him before he vanished -- the tale of King Arthur.  The boy finds solace in the story and, with his friend, sets off on a quest to save Britain from the gathering forces of darkness:  these forces are both literal (an oncoming eclipse) and figurative -- that is, the current epidemic of political cruelty, greed, and intolerance.  Morgana le Fay imprisoned by roots underground unleashes hordes of demons on horseback to harry the boy and his fellow knights, Sir Kay and Sir Lancelot (both of them slightly older kids).  The round-table knights are multi-ethnic and courageous.   They penetrate in Morgana's underground inferno (she's trapped beneath Glastonbury Abbey) and ostensibly destroy her -- this is the first climax.  But she's only wounded and she reappears to lay siege of Dungate School.  Alexander knights his classmates and an apocalyptic battle occurs in the darkness of the solar eclipse.  The final battle is well-staged and the action sequences make sense -- they are choreographed so that you can see what is happening and ingeniously designed.  Indeed, the second climax's climax, the duel of Morgan le Fay who has a become a huge fire-belching dragon with a skeletal face curiously similar to the elderly Clint Eastwood, is quite exciting and, on its own terms, plausible.  England is saved and the sword Excalibur returned to the Lady of the Lake.  In an early sequence, Merlin played by a kid with preternaturally long neck (he looks like one of Pontormo's Madonnas) urges Alexander and his chum to go to a fried chicken place on Boorman lane.  This is homage to John Boorman's wonderful film Excalibur which this movie resembles and, in fact, replicates shot by shot in the final sequence in which the magic sword is returned to the Lady of the Lake and the vasty deep.  You should know that Sir Ian McClellan plays Merlin as a old wizard -- it's a reprise of his role as Gandalf, and imitates Nicol Williamson in Boorman's film, but it's always good to see the old fellow on screen. The Kid who would be King is pretty good and moving in the simplicity of the lessons that it teaches.  It's not wholly successful, but is clever, fairly funny, and means well.  There are many films released about which you can not say as much. 

Lured

Raised on TV, I grew up with Lucille Ball -- until I was 25, one of more of her television shows was in constant re-run rotation.  Lucy's persona was well-established:  she was a wacky, feckless redhead, unsuccessful in love and constantly at war with the physical world around her.  The actress was a rara avis --a female slapstick comedian as well as probably the inventor of the modern sitcom.  (She pioneered the techniques of recording shows before live studio audiences, using multi-camera systems designed by the great German expressionist photographer, Karl Freund.)  The past always presents itself as fait accompli -- that is, gradual revelation of things that are preordained.  But, in fact, no one, including herself, knew that Lucille Ball would be come one of the most powerful and, even, feared businesswomen in Hollywood and that Desilu productions would establish norms for TV comedy that are still relevant today.  Douglas Sirk's 1947 thriller Lured is a reminder that things might have taken a completely different direction for his leading actress:  in the mid-forties, Lucille Ball was improbably beautiful, a "stunner" as the pre-raphaelites would have said, and, indeed, similar in appearance to Dante Gabriel Rosetti's muse, Elizabeth Siddal:  porcelain skin with flaming red hair.  (Sirk is shooting in black-and-white but has characters refer to Lucy's hair-color at least four or five times:  at one point, there is a close-up of a metro police identification cart -- she is working as a "female detective' -- that trumpets that her hair-color is "red".)  Lucy's red hair, pale skin, and enormous eyes suggested that she should be cast as a victim, someone always about to raped or strangled and, in fact, Sirk uses her this way in Lured.  But the actress' toughness and independence is also evident -- Lucy is a pre-Raphaelite Madonna with a big mouth, a line of cynical patter, and a world-weary vein of tough-talking cynicism.

Lucy is named Sandra in Lured and she plays a taxi-dancer marooned in a seedy London ballroom.  The customers openly solicit the women and fight over them and the girls are proudly disdainful of their pathetic patrons.  When one of the girls is killed answering a personal ad, Lucy, who was friends with the murdered woman, is recruited by the police to act as lure, bait for the psycho-killer.  The murderer taunts the police with poems based on the form and rhymes used by Baudelaire in Flowers of Evil.  The film had trouble getting approved by the Hay's Code censors and, in fact, the first half of the picture is memorably kinky.  Sandra responds to a number of salacious advertisements, putting herself in harm's way, while an older undercover cop (Charles Coburn) sneaks around the margins of the frame spying on her.  Even her audition for the part of detective is sexually suggestive -- the chief of police makes her close her eyes and, then, describe him "with complete frankness".  Sandra is used to ploys like this and, when she closes her eyes, she says something like "So now it comes" -- expecting, of course, the inevitable grope and kiss.  There's a sexual charge to Sandra's walk on the wild side and, in fact, she almost gets recruited into white slavery and shipped to South America.  These episodes don't go anywhere but they end with a bizarre confrontation with the cadaverous Boris Karloff playing a fashion-designer gone wholly berserk -- it's like a nightmare version of The Phantom Thread and one wonders whether the equally cadaverous Donald Day Lewis studied Karloff's performance in Lured.  The fashion-designer, driven mad by the plagiarism of his patterns by a competitor, forces Sandra into a stiff evening gown and, then, makes her strut in front of an audience of empty chairs, one ancient bull dog, and nonchalant-looking mannequin.  One of Sandra's wooers is a nightclub owner played with icy insolence by George Sanders.  This character answer the phone and sets up trysts with other women while embracing his current mistress -- he declares himself "an unmitigated cad."  After the buzz of its kinky first half, Lured peters out.  The mystery has to be solved and Sandra's romance with George Sanders develops into a problematic love story that leaves the viewer baffled.  Leo Rosten's script (a lifetime later he became famous for the best-seller The Joy of Yiddish)  is ornate with many flourishes and highly literate, but the pace slows with the love story and massive amounts of misdirection that Sirk has to introduce into the film's last hour primarily because the audience knows the identity of the killer at midway without any doubt.  It's always disappointing when a crime film takes forty minutes to solve a mystery that the audience has already figured-out.  Sirk gets distracted by décor:  the night club is filled with weird phallic curlicues and odd-looking pillars surmounted by lyres, smashed Corinthian capitols, and stucco antlers.  Sirk was a highly cultured man and he inserts a concert sequence involving Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony."  There are gorgeous images of London after midnight, wet cobblestones, and, during the first ten minutes, such a plethora of cleverly deployed shadows that I suspect that Sirk's intent was to parody German and film noir expressionism.  The film's problematic ending shows Sandra about to marry Sanders' night-club entrepreneur.  But Sanders is such a thoroughly unregenerate character that we really can't regard the ending as a happy one.  It's as if the snowy-complected red-head were to marry some kind of Latin-American lothario -- also, I remind, you affiliated with night clubs, perhaps, even the director of a Cuban dance band.  (Sanders is Desi Arnez with a British accent; Desi Arnez is Sanders with a Cuban accent.) 

Sometimes a Great Notion

Coastal Oregon in Paul Newman's 1971 movie adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey's immense Faulkner-haunted novel, is a clean, well-lighted place, mostly sunny and clear.  The interiors of the Gothic house where the incestuous hard-nosed Stamper clan live under old Henry's ferocious patriarchy are similarly clearly lit, tidy and neat.  A sympathetic viewer readily understands this betrayal of the generally soggy and murky milieu so carefully established by Kesey's prose:  Newman has a lot of star power in this movies and audiences are paying to see his stars in action, not their shadows and profiles dimly limned in the mist and drizzle.  Newman himself plays Hank Stamper, the psychotically stubborn leader of a group of "Gyppo" loggers (most of them family members) still cutting trees notwithstanding a union strike that has put all of their neighbors out of work.  Hank's father, Old Henry (Henry Fonda) bellows commands and obscenities at this sons and cackles demonically when the boys pitch dynamite at a union rep come to negotiate with the family.  Lee Remick as Viv, Hank's neglected wife, quietly smolders.  Richard Jaeckel plays the part of the religious cousin, Joby, Hank's lieutenant in the logging business.  And Michael Sarrazin, eyes like huge poached eggs, mutters and snarls as Lee, the family's prodigal son, returned from the East after a comically failed suicide attempt -- Lee's mother has just killed herself by jumping out a window:  she was old Henry's second, much younger, wife who left the Stamper domain twelve years earlier, after a love affair with her step-son, the fourteen-year old Hank.  At first, Lee's appearance on the scene is fortuitous -- unlike the novel, he doesn't seem to have any clear plan.  But as the film progresses, conflict arises between Hank and Lee:  although this is pretty much submerged in the movie, Lee plans to return the compliment to Hank:  Hank slept with Lee's mother and Lee plans to sleep with Viv, Hank's wife. 

The film's script is ingenious and irritating -- clocking in at a taut 115 minutes (in my version the novel runs well over 700 pages), the film perforce leaves out most of the minor characters in the book and retains just the skeleton of the plot.  Just as the point when you feel compelled to "call out" some major deviation from Kesey's book, however, the film will suddenly adhere very closely to its source.  An good example occurs in the film's last minutes.  After an awful logging accident wipes out half the family, Hank sits in stubborn, picturesque isolation in his empty house.  Newman shows us several shots of the hero brooding and alone.  (Newman is at the height of his male beauty in this film.)  This is false to the novel -- in Kesey's book, set in 1961, everyone watches TV all the time;  in that regard, at least, the novel is realistic. (Even an old Indian living in a mud hut somewhere in the mountains is described as watching Have Gun Will Travel.  After the big calamity at the river, Hank is oddly passive, becalmed and watching Thanksgiving football on TV.)  Just as the point when the admirer of the novel decides to declare this inaccuracy, the film provides a shot of Newman, still brooding, but with a Tv screen flickering behind him.   This is an example of the backhanded, sometimes even half covert way, that the film references Kesey's book.  The novel's central theme, the incest between step-son and step-mother, is suppressed but, I think, more realistically managed than in the novel -- the book suggests that the 14 year old Hank is somehow the aggressor in the love affair.  Newman's approach is better:  he makes a point that the hyper-masculine Kesey avoids:  Hank says about the love affair:  "I was 14 and she was 30.  Who was banging who?"

Sometimes a Great Notion is, in effect, war novel -- instead of battles, we are shown raw combat between the Stamper clan and the forests that they cut down.  (Kesey often uses military jargon to describe logging operations.)  Accordingly, in the movie, logging sequences are the equivalent of battle scenes -- they are the fulcrum of action that tests the characters and upon which the plot hinges.  And Newman's portrayal of logging in the Pacific Northwest is wonderfully palpable, violent, and suitably spectacular -- we see vast clear cuts with enormous logs scattered at the bottom of deep, steep ravines.  Hank climbs a tree and tops it to set up a spar or central anchor for the operation -- we see him above the forests and when the top thirty feet of the tree falls down, the huge trunk tries to shake him off like a dog shaking off water.  Logs slip out of harnesses and topple like avalanches down hillsides and the climactic accident is truly horrific -- you may not be able to watch some of this without closing your eyes.  Among the clandestine admirers of logging porn, this film has a high, if secret, reputation -- apparently, when the film was released, people didn't much like it, although the picture was a big hit with lumbermen.  The sequences involving logging are wonderfully vivid and visceral and, in some respects, the screenplay improves on the novel by eliminating distractions and contriving a climax that is both pictorially impressive and better than the novel's ending in some ways.  (However, we are cheated out of the big fist fight between Hank and Lee that ends the book -- but Newman's final sequence is better, if more obvious, than the unresolved conclusion of the novel.)  The movie doesn't feel true to Kesey because it lacks the book's half-random sprawl, its choruses of minor characters, and the prevailing mood of squalid foggy and rainy despair.  Like many adaptation of well-known literary works, the movie occupies unstable terrain -- it's not exactly the like the novel and, in fact, deviates in many ways from Kesey's plot (the book's central symbol of the voracious Wakonda Auge river ripping up the foundation for the Stamper home is completely omitted).  But the movie doesn't stand on its own two feet either.  Adaptation of novels is tricky -- the most successful novel adaptation, Coppola's The Godfather basically required about five hours of screen time.  The viewer's interest in this film will depend upon how much manly activity a viewer can stand -- Newman's "soldier males" are literally armored against the world:  old Hank wears a body-cast and, as soon as he doffs that protective armor, he is literally ripped limb from limb.  The female roles are underwritten to the point of non-existence and a third of the movie is battle scenes -- albeit between man and nature.  The film's existentialism is direct and brutal -- there is no meaning in life but struggle and the struggle is ultimately completely futile and totally destructive.  Old Henry says:  "You're born, you eat, you fight, you shit, you keep on going on -- that's all there is."  The family's motto is "Never Give an Inch" and their banner is a severed arm giving the finger to the world -- an image much better deployed in the movie than in the book.  As a corrective to all this logging porn, I recommend several viewings of Monty Python's "lumberman's song"  -- "I'm a lumberman and I'm okay". 

The Ernie Kovacs Show

In January 2019, Turner  Classic Movies aired several episodes of The  Ernie Kovacs Show, sketch comedy that clearly influenced later shows such as Saturday Night Live and, most directly, Monty Python's Flying Circus.  The two programs that I saw were originally broadcast on ABC in the Fall of 1961 and January 1962, sponsored by Dutch Masters' cigars.  (The black and white video is hazy, as if the scenes were filmed underwater or through a dense haze of cigar smoke.)  Watching these programs as an old man, I am engaging in an archaeological excavation of my childhood.  My father admired Ernie Kovacs and thought that he was a great artist -- my father was a great aficionado of all things TV.  Growing up in the early1950's, TV was the medium of the future for my father's generation -- he liked movies but always suspected that they were a little antiquated:  for him, the box in the living room was the harbinger of great things, the first truly democratic medium, Shakespeare and Matisse for the middle-class.  I probably sat on the floor at my father's feet and watched these programs when they were brand-new, but, of course, my memory of originally seeing these 27 minutes shows is forever lost.  (I would have been six years old.)  Rather, my recollection of these programs is remote and second-hand:  clearly I am remembering a memory of a memory.  From time to time during my adolescence, the Kovacs' shows resurfaced as curiosities, memoirs of the early days of TV and, when these programs were re-broadcast, I believe I saw them, again with my father, and, perhaps, this stirred memories of my first, and childish, memories of these shows.  Like Laurel and Hardy, the Kovacs' shows inspired some sort of holy awe and terror in me.  Seeing Laurel and Hardy on TV from time to time, I find it hard to reconstruct what originally frightened me about those programs -- most recently, I think I have maintained it was probably my identification of Oliver Hardy with my father, the great lawgiver and disciplinarian.  The basis for my fear of the Kovacs' shows is much easier to ascertain.  The programs are, in fact, objectively horrifying.  Most of the skits performed by Kovacs' company are silent, often accompanied by voices singing in a foreign language -- I now know the signature piece is "Mackie Messer" or "Mack the Knife" sung is shrill, harsh German.  (To add to the viewer's disorientation, an oscilloscope wave-form translating the music into an abstract, wobbly white line is often shown in the black-outs between sketches or running along the inky bottom of the frame.)  Kovacs' stock-in-trade is masks, ridiculously flimsy cardboard sets, tiny apertures through which action is filmed, and nightmarish camera angles.  His repertoire company are also masked, although without the benefit of actually pulling anything over their features -- the actors are so utterly impassive, indeed, even catatonic, that they make Buster Keaton look histrionic.  When the actors are not staring blandly into the camera, lit starkly and in huge unflattering close-ups, they mug obscenely.  (The procession of big ugly close-ups sometimes resembles images in a Guy Madden film.)  It's bizarre and many of the images are truly remarkable but it isn't exactly funny -- rather it is a brand of surreal analysis, a kind of meta-critique of TV and its discontents, that is startling, absurd, and grotesque.  In one sequence, Kovacs analyzes TV westerns, beginning with iterations of gunfights that become increasingly weird -- at first, the gunfights, each about five seconds long, are merely filmed from strange camera angles, but, then, the imagery becomes increasingly delirious -- we see shoot-outs on Mars, shoot-outs involving Bavarian cowboys, and, finally, a shoot-out involving a colossal cowboy and his tiny adversary. By the end of the sketch, bullet holes shot through the characters frame the gunmen.  Then, at last, we see a gunslinger on an analyst's couch.  The psychiatrist, who speaks with heavy Viennese accent, interrogates the gunfighter.  The gunfighter says:  "Every one ordered me around -- it was always 'Slim slop the hogs' or 'Slim break those broncos' or 'Slim get on the posse and hunt the bad guys."  The shrink asks:  "So you felt people were dominating you?"  "Yes," the gunfighter says, "And my name isn't even 'Slim' -- it's Sam."  The show is packed with nightmarish effects:  a spidery hand playing ragtime piano is multiplied into dozens of shadowy beasts with five fingers.  Masks are pulled off to reveal other masks.  The zombie-like Nairobi Trio plays a jazz tune -- the musician are robot gorillas, often filmed in scary close-ups:  at the chorus of each tune, the drummer rotates to rap out a tattoo on the head of the central ape.  We see the ape's hideous face contorted in rage.  The skits fly by at high speed and many of them are hard to understand -- I didn't get the point of about a fourth of the sketches.  There are arcane jokes:  a Teutonic version of a cowboy show is called Der Einsam Aufseher -- a  phrase I didn't recognize until the familiar overture to William Tell translated for me:  "the lone Ranger."  In a strangely prescient image, Kovacs chomps on his cigar and mourns the fact that he has four Tv sets but only three networks -- in those days, having two TV sets was an astonishing luxury.  People are always being mangled or horribly injured:  a little man (he looks a bit like Laugh-In's Henry Gibson) approaches Kovacs wearing a grotesque mask.  Kovacs cuts off his head and is shown turning a drill embedded in the little man's skull so that his mask rotates like a  rotisserie chicken.  In the next scene, Kovacs sticks a tee in a reclining woman's mouth, sets his golf ball there and swings -- we hear a sickening thud.  Even Kovacs pastoral imagery is peculiar and disquieting:  one episode, scored to Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite follows a single drop of rain down from the stormy skies into a stream presided over by curiously robotic automaton animals, then, descending over a waterfall, through a hydroelectric turbine, into a pipe, then, a tea pot, then, rising as steam, but falling again into the tea pot to be poured into a drain.  The drop of water then goes underground into an elaborate mock-up of a plumbing system directly beneath a sidewalk on which we see people's legs and ankles passing by, some of them hopping along, others dragging their feet as if marching to their own doom.  At last the little droplet emerges into the stream where it is pecked-up by a bird that flies up into the sky returning to the initial panorama of grandiose clouds.  One sequence shows a poet drawling with a pronounced southern accent -- the poet recites two of his poems which are total gibberish and, then, laughs serenely at his own wit:  I don't know who is being spoofed here, but the sketch is quietly lethal.  Next, we see an abstract artist who happens to be a rural farm house-wife -- she crows about killing 85 pigs just before the interview.  She points to one portrait of a favorite pig -- it's a triangle and rectangle and oval shape all intersecting:  "I painted this a couple years ago," she says, "of course, he looks quite different now."  Next, we see an artist who seems to be imitating Henry Moore -- he's stuck through a doughnut hole in his sculpture.  "You seem to like holes," the interlocutor says.  "No," the artist replies in a Parisian accent, "this is obviously a mistake you fool."  Like Monty Python, the skits sometimes connect to one another:  in one episode, a mad doctor has miniaturized a motorcycle:  only he can see it.  When he touches the palm of Kovacs' hand, the motorcycle starts up and shoots off onto the floor where it zips away.  At the end of the episode, we see the mad scientist creeping about the ground looking for the lost motorcycle which he can hear but not see -- he searches the floor of a house, then, a bar, then, crawls along a sidewalk outside (it's the set with plumbing mock-up below), and, then, is flailing about on the bottom of the sea.  In the last shot, the scientist is wearing a space-suit and staggering across the plains of Mars in search of the motorcycle.

Casting an eerie light over the shows is the fact that the last program, the one featuring the life of the water droplet, was broadcast posthumously. Ten days before ABC aired the show, Kovacs was killed in a car wreck while returning from the christening of Milton Berle's child -- it was January 23,1962 and Kovacs' 43rd birthday.

BLACKkKLANSMAN

Spike Lee's 2018 BlackkKlansman is an angry refutation to President Trump's remarks on civil disorder in Charlottesville, Virginia.  As everyone recalls, Trump proposed a false equivalence between the neo-Nazi demonstrators and ANTIFA-dominated counter-demonstrators, telling the world that "there were very fine people" on both sides.  (His remarks would have been better phrased as "there were violent thugs on both sides.")  Spike Lee's movie is a categorical rejection of the concept that there were "fine people" protesting within the White Supremicist ranks, but he proceeds, as did Trump, by creating a rhetorical system that compares the two opposing groups, drawing, indeed, some equivalences.  For instance, both groups have fiery speakers, are totally segregated by race, and indulge in violent rhetoric -- both have a tendency to raise their arms or fists in the air and are obsessed with ancient grievances.  These comparisons exist however to be invidious to the Klansmen:  the Black activists are all handsome, well-groomed, stylishly dressed, intelligent, and, even, excellent dancers -- the Klansmen are scrawny rednecks or plump, slack-jawed cretins, wearing dirty and offensively-labeled tee-shirts, and all of them are morons.  It's Spike's movie and all of this is, perhaps, fair and, maybe, even, realistic.  But would it offend Lee's sensibilities if one of the feckless rednecks could dance a little.? The Black activists are lead by beautiful young women (no sexism here); the White Supremicists are verbally abusive to their women and the one wife who is allowed a speaking role is overweight and dressed in frumpy clothing.  (We have reached a level of polarization in this country that compels even reasonable-minded people to deny even a shred of humanity to their enemies.  One brilliant writer that I know has publicly decreed that Republicans can't dance -- first, because they are physically uncouth and lacking in grace, and secondarily, because no one in his, or her, right mind would dance with such bigoted  louts.  This seems to be carrying a grudge a little too far.)  These reservations aside BlackkKlansman is an exuberant polemic, filled with interesting expressionistic underlining to points already shouted to the audience both loudly and clearly.  Lee has always been an excellent filmmaker and he, generally, makes movies that turn out better than his rather cartoonish political themes might suggest.  He gets good performances, stages scenes effectively, and, for better or worse, his political agenda is clear, undisguised and lucidly presented -- you know what he's getting at, he makes his points effectively, and you can take it or leave it as you are inclined.  BlackkKlansman  is interesting, has an excellent (if somewhat chaotic) ending, and in an era of political despair leaves its audience optimistic and reinvigorated.

The vehicle for Lee's political and social screed is a peculiar but true story -- Lee inserts a title to the effect that this "crazy shit" is "sho nuff" true.  A Black man named Ron Stallworth applies for work with the Colorado Springs police force.  He is warned that he may suffer racists taunts from other cops and, indeed, some of the police persecute him.  But, by and large, he is treated reasonably and, in fact, recognizing his intelligence, he is assigned undercover work.  His first assignment is covering a rally in which a Black activist, Kwame Ture, the man formerly named Stokely Carmichael, speaks to the college Black Student Union.  At the rally, Stallworthy meets a beautiful young activist and she supplies the romantic interest throughout the film -- Lee isn't really interested in the relationship and gives it short shrift on screen:  it's perfunctory, but does supply a damsel in distress subtext late in the film.  On a whim, Stallworthy calls the local Ku Klux Klan and volunteers himself for service.  To his surprise, the local Klan is enthusiastic and encourages him to join.  (Stallworthy has inadvertently given his real name.)  The police force, happy to infiltrate the Klan, conscripts a Jewish cop, Philip "Flip" Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to impersonate Stallworthy.  Flip goes to Klan meetings and is a big hit with the bigots -- notwithstanding his somewhat Semitic appearance, Flip impresses everyone with the vehemence of his hatred for niggers and kikes.  Hitler used to claim that he could smell a Jew and one of the yokels in the Klan seems to have this ability as well so that he immediately suspects that Flip is an informer.  There are some close-calls but, by and large, the charade is successful.  Ultimately, the hillbilly develops proof that Flip is an imposter.  David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the Klan has come to town, primarily, it seems to welcome Stallworthy into the ranks of the Invisible Empire.  The counter-protestors at the Student Union have invited Harry Belafonte to give a talk about lynching.  He provides a horrific account of a lynching, complete with poster-sized photographs, while the Klansmen, with Duke at their center, watch The Birth of a Nation and cheer for the on-screen hooded knights as they murder and terrorize Black people.  These two events are cross-cut and the action becomes increasingly delirious as the wife of one of the Klansmen attempts to plant a bomb, threatening Stallworthy's activist girlfriend.  Stallworthy thwarts the bombing and tackles the fat white woman carrying the C4 explosive.  But the local cops come to the woman's rescue, and, in an alarming scene, beat up Stallworthy.  Flip comes to Stallworthy's rescue.  There is a coda involving the arrest of the racist cop who has been tormenting Stallworthy.  Lee wants his audience to leave the audience electrified and, so, he saves his big effects for the finale -- there is a knock on the door and Stallworthy and his girlfriend with guns drawn advance down an expressionistically imagined corridor to a window through which they see a KKK cross burning.  The film, then, shows us the cross-burning and the Klansmen in rapturous positions raising their open arms to the flames.  Lee, then, cuts to the fighting between protesters at Charlottesville, shows Trump making his idiotic remarks, and, then, dedicates the film to Heather Heyer, the woman killed in that demonstration.  Throughout the film, Lee insists on the power of movies to make a difference -- if, as he correctly tells us, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, revived the moribund Klan in the twenties, then, so, he implies his film may be it's death knell.  The picture is stylishly directed and takes on the characteristics of an allegory or fable -- Harry Belafonte is very recognizably Harry Belafonte and his appearance in the movie establishes the sense that the issues addressed are timeless in American history:  racism always exists and is always more or less the same.  The dance scenes early in the movie are gratuitous to its point but they demonstrate the grace and athletic beauty of the Black people -- everything is shot in warm red light in a disco and the sequence is filmed in slow-motion at times:  it's an ecstatic account of community solidarity and the notion that "Black is Beautiful."  (Lee has previously dramatized this in a series of gorgeous portrait close-ups during speech at the Union.)  Lee isn't really interested in action and the car chases at the film's end seems merely obligatory.  He plays homage to the Blaxploitation films of the period -- the movie is set in 1971 on the basis of campaign posters for Nixon and Agnew that decorate the Klan meetings (some of Lee's points aren't too subtle.)  At the end of the movie, Stallworthy and his girlfriend are magically transformed into Black avengers, action heroes who are both armed as they glide surrealistically down the long hallway to the door overlooking the faraway cross-burning.  As with all of Lee's movies, the film has a majestic soundtrack by Terence Blanchard -- in one scene, we watch Klansmen blasting away at targets with their shotguns and 45s.  The scene is staged so that we never see what they are shooting.  After the Klansmen depart the firing range, Stallworthy appears in the autumnal forest.  The music swells to a powerful and grave threnody.  At last, we get the reverse shot:  the men have been shooting holes in silhouette pickaninnies mounted in a row against the golden and yellow trees:  the pickaninnies look like Kara Walker cut-outs and the music imparts a powerful sense of both sorrow and defiance to the image.   Lee ends the film with a ballad powerfully performed by the late, great Prince.  Although most of the film is political comedy, the movie also displays a powerful undercurrent of grief. 

Macao

After the debacle of His Kind of Woman (1951), RKO producer Howard Hughes lost interest in exploiting the on-screen chemistry between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.  His Kind of Woman was over-budget, too long, and inadequately profitable.  Hughes had Joseph von Sternberg, the great director of films such as The Blue Angel and The Scarlet Empress, under contract for two pictures and so he cast Mitchum and Russell in a low-budget sub-B picture about criminals and gamblers in Macao, commissioned a largely incoherent script, and ordered von Sternberg to direct the film.  Von Sternberg's poetic style, moonbeams refracted through the shadow of Moorish filigree, clashed with the exuberant, cartoonish sexuality that the two leads projected and, apparently, the shoot was contentious and chaotic.  Von Sternberg had no facility for directing action (it is said that his greatest interest was showing wisps of shadow and light moving across a beautiful woman's face) and he botched the film's climactic fistfight.  Nick Ray was recruited to re-shoot the fisticuffs and other elements of the film that Hughes disliked.  Unfortunately, the film starred Gloria Graham in a secondary part -- Graham was Ray's wife at the time but they were involved in nasty court proceedings at the time:  Ray had caught his wife in bed with his 13 year old son, Tony.  (Tony Ray and Gloria Graham actually were married briefly during the early sixties.)  One can imagine the fireworks that this created between the alcoholic Ray and his equally alcoholic soon-to-be divorced wife. 

In some ways Macao (1952) is a reprise of His Kind of Women, featuring a good cast playing grifters and hoodlums in an exotic resort.  But whereas His Kind of Woman was long, Wagnerian in its aspirations, and wildly violent, Macao turned out to be understated, even vaguely listless, a short 80 minutes, and not particularly violent.  Both films feature yachts piloted by rich criminals, a motif for the yacht-loving Hughes at that time in his life.  In each film, there is an attempt to recreate the "lightning in a bottle" ambience of Michael Curtiz' Casablanca.  The film's are set in warm climates and everyone sweats profusely -- there are expressionistic sets meant to supply an exotic atmosphere on a low budget and the leading lady sings a couple songs to the raffish hoodlums gathered around her:  "all the usual suspects" are hanging around the gambling den and saloon.  In Macao, a pianist who looks like Diego Rivera, fat with bulging eyes and a limp, is called Gimpy and he tickles the ivories for effect -- he's like Sam in Casablanca. (The set for the gambling hell, two-tiered with people using baskets to fish collateral for gambling debts out of the lower level, is similar to more atmospheric set von Sternberg contrived The Shanghai Gesture in 1941). The film's plot has something to do with diamond smuggling although I didn't exactly follow the twists and turns in the story.  A bad guy is holed-up in Macao, running a gambler hell with his moll played by Gloria Graham.  Mitchum, a petty criminal on the lam, has trouble at customs -- in a shipboard encounter Jane Russell, playing a jaded adventuress and courtesan, has picked his pocket, taken the dough from his wallet, and cavalierly thrown wallet and ID into the sea.  The gangster, through a comically corrupt cop, gets Mitchum through customs and plans to use him as a mule to smuggle contraband (diamonds, I think) to Hong Kong.  The heavy-set William Bendix appears as another smuggler -- he's trafficking in nylon stockings (which gives Russell a chance to show off her below-the-waist assets) and, also, obscurely involved in the intrigue.  Bendix turns out to be a cop also sent to Macao undercover to lure the bad guy outside of the three-mile limit so he can be extradited to the U.S.  The gangster employs a couple of Chinese thugs skilled with throwing knives and they have already murdered a cop previously sent on this mission.  Mitchum woos Russell and they go on a sampan tour of the harbor in the moonlight.  This kind of scene is the sort of thing where von Sternberg could work his magic, but the budget was too low and the film doesn't even attempt a day-for-night ambience:  Russell and Mitchum are shot against unconvincing rear-projections of the daylight Hong Kong harbor.  Nonetheless, the chemistry between the two stars is real and they do manage a significant erotic charge in some of their scenes together.  Von Sternberg's talents are on display in only a couple of scenes:  there is a labyrinthine harbor set that is all floating flat-bedded boats, shadowy wharves, black water luminous with Hollywood light and everything draped in a dense,  picturesque spider-web of netting.  The set is like school-yard jungle gym -- it's got lots of opportunities for climbing and walking on narrow planks.  The whole thing is bathtub-sized and so the pursuit that von Sternberg stages in this little tangled landscape of bobbing boats, black water, obscure-looking pylons and shadowy wharves is convincingly nightmarish -- it's like one of those dreams in which you run and run and seem to get nowhere:  the set is so small that you have the sense of the characters spinning in circles as they hack their way through the dense, picturesque webbing of hanging nets.  In the end, one of the Chinese henchmen throws a knife that spears William Bendix (dressed in white suit and panama hat that is identical to Mitchum's get-up).  Bendix croaks out a few words exculpating Mitchum form minor crimes committed in New York and, then, dies.  The bad guy is readily seduced by Jane Russell to travel on his yacht too far out to sea.  The ending is anti-climactic with an imperfectly fierce fist-fight.  The cops catch the bad guy and Mitchum laconically notes that their undercover agent didn't make it, resulting in a comically nonchalant response from the police on their yacht.  You can't say that this movie is any good, although I know efforts have been made to rehabilitate it -- by any objective standard, the film is cheap and pretty wretched.  But it's oddly entertaining, moves along at good clip, and you get to see Jane Russell in her full glamor-girl regalia singing Harold Arlen's song,"Make it one for my baby (and one for the road").  There's also a nicely expressionistic stone stairway filmed from above that looks like something from a Max Reinhardt production, a nice solid if roughhewn set that stands in vivid contrast to the cardboard and shadows of the rest of the film.   

The Fly and The Return of the Fly

Kurt Neumann, an émigré from Hitler's Germany, directed The Fly (1958).  Neumann's first assignments in Hollywood were making German versions of American films for distribution in Europe -- he apprenticed as a sort of cinematic translator-copyist.  Neumann died of a heart attack a few weeks after The Fly was released -- the rumor-mill immediately produced gossip that he had committed suicide, unable to live with himself after perpetrating the horrors of The Fly.  And, in fact, The Fly is convincingly horrible in conception, an ingenious metamorphosis film that claws at the subconscious, much like some of Ovid's more garish tales.  The film is oddly inept, however, in its execution.  Nonetheless, it delivers one of the horror cinema's great shock sequences and, so, is memorable for about 15 seconds of its 80 minute length.


For some reason, The Fly is set in Francophone Montreal -- perhaps, this is a nod to the original short story published in Playboy and set in that place.  Dalambre played by Vincent Price gets a call that his brother has been killed by his wife.  Dalambre goes to the family factory that he managed with his brother and discovers a corpse with its right arm and head crushed into nothingness in a 50 ton industrial press.  The dead man's wife admits to the killing and seems weirdly elated, even nonchalant.  The only possible surmise is that she is insane.  The woman continuously asks how long flies live and seems obsessed with capturing a fly "with a white head and strange leg" -- her little son, Phillipp, has seen the creature buzzing about the garden.  The accused murderess is persuaded to tell her story and the film, then, proceeds in flashback.  The dead man in the power press was a great scientist.  Working in the basement of his suburban mansion, he invented a machine allowing for molecular teleportation -- the subject of the experiment is disintegrated into a stream of atoms and, then, reintegrated in a glassed-in cubicle a few feet away.  The scientist demonstrates this to his wife -- he teleports a piece of china successfully, but the words on the back ("Made in Japan") are mirror-reversed.  This alarms him and he scribbles more formulae on his blackboard and, even, makes calculations while attending the ballet. (We see part of the colorful ballet which seems a non sequitur nod to the wide-screen Technicolor format in which the film is shot.)  Dalambre corrects the problem and tries to teleport the family's cat -- this fails:  the cat meows sadly in the void but can't be found anywhere.  Next, he teleports successfully a guinea pig.  Of course, his last experiment, involving his own teleportation, goes horribly wrong.  A fly gets into the teleportation machine with him and he ends up getting his atoms scrambled with the bug.  Dalambre emerges from the machine with a fly's head and arm -- conversely, a fly equipped with his face and arm buzzes around the house.  Dalambre demands that his wife catch the fly on which his head is mounted, but the insect eludes capture.  Despairing, Dalambre gets his wife to crush his head and right arm in the industrial press.  After telling this story, the criminal inspector determines that the woman is, indeed, mad.  But while sitting in the garden, he hears a faint whisper:  "Help me!"  It's the fly with Dalambre's head crying out from a spider's web.  There's a shocking close-up of Dalambre's white, contorted face with red, weeping eyes, a close-up of the spider's jaws, and, then, the inspector, with Vincent Price watching, picks up a rock and smashes both spider and fly.  Vincent Price tells his nephew, Phillippe, a little boy that his father perished in the pursuit of truth and that "the search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous."  The little boy vows that he too will search for the truth -- a vow that sets up the sequel The Return of the Fly (1959).  In that successor exercise, Phillippe  grown to manhood tinkers with his father's teleportation equipment, now located in the family factory.  The feature of the machine that sometimes disintegrates forms into the void is used to "store" bodies as corpses pile-up (or would if they were not dematerialized) as a result of a dimwitted subplot involving spying and industrial espionage.  After some grotesque mash-ups (a guy ends up with hamster feet and hands), Phillippe enters the teleportation cubicle and gets hybridized with -- of course -- a fly.  As half-man and half-fly, Phillippe staggers around killing the bad guys responsible for his condition.  Ultimately, he returns home, the fly with his head and members is caught and, somehow, the hero is successfully reintegrated, emerging from the teleportation booth as a dapper, handsome young man.  (We don't see what happens to the fly).  There's yet another sequel (produced in 1965) that seems to have been a low-budget excuse to create half-man and half-animal monsters, a bit like the creatures on The Island of Dr. Moreau.  I haven't seen that picture.  David Cronenberg re-invented the concept twenty or so years later with his version starring Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum (as Brundlefly a homage to Phillippefly, as the monster is called in The Return of the Fly.)


Kurt Neumann's initial film is shot in extremely wide-screen cinemascope, a format that he doesn't know how to use and that results in two-thirds of the screen being crammed with distracting tchotchkes and knickknacks.  The 1958 Fly was relatively big-budget and, also, shot in Technicolor.  The film is odd in that it doesn't look anything like a horror movie -- it is all over-lit and pastel without any dark shadows or gloom.  Despite it's odd appearance, the first film is reasonably good -- it delays the entrance of its monster until about ten minutes before the close, a good strategy because a guy limping around with a rubber fly mask on his face is not exactly frightening and, indeed, more risible than horrifying.  Neumann's fly wears a floppy bag-like shawl over his head and fly-hand -- he looks like the elephant man in David Lynch's film and, until the reveal, he is actually pretty scary.  (We see him sucking up milk doctored with rum, head covered, apparently through his proboscis.)  The reveal is in the vein of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, the beautiful heroine snatches off the baggy covering over the monster's face and shrieks spectacularly -- in a moment of witty, pure genius, the film shows us the fly's point-of-view with the scream dissolved into a cloud of prismatic facets.  The scenes involving the industrial press are mismanaged -- we can't tell how the press works or what is happening.  The only part of the picture that is really frightening -- and this is genuinely nightmare-inducing -- is the short sequence where the tiny fly with a human face is menaced by the spider:  that part of the movie, although totally ridiculous, packs a punch that you can't shake.  Vincent Price is basically wasted in both films -- he's just someone to whom a story is told.  The heroine in the first movie, Patricia Owens, is scary-looking in her own right -- her eyes are so widely spaced that she seems somewhat grotesque herself.  The second film, made by a hack, Edward Bernds, is lower budget, shot in extremely wide format but, at least, in black-and-white.  During the opening scenes, involving the funeral of the Fly's wife (and Phillippe's mother), the movie looks like a horror film -- there are bolts of lightning in the sky and the rain pours down on the graveyard.  When Phillippe enters his father's dusty and smashed-up laboratory, the picture is reminiscent of the old Universal sequels -- for instance, the Bride of Frankenstein -- nicely atmospheric with menacing shadows.  But the picture is astonishingly dull and the rubber mask for the fly-monster is even more unconvincing than in the earlier picture -- the actor playing the monster has to stagger around under what seems to be an enormous weight of bulbous rubber.  His shadow shows his silhouette as a huge animate mushroom.  In the first film, the wealthy Dalambre brother played by art connoisseur Vincent Price has a Modigliani on his wall.  In the second film, the family seems to own a Renoir painting of a woman combing her hair. Like archy in the archy and mehitabel poems, the fly can't use the shift button on his typewriter and so he writes in all capitals (archy, the literate cockroach, I think, wrote in all lower case and without punctuation).  Vincent Price says in The Fly -- "we must act now before his mind is taken over by the murderous brain of the fly."  Although repulsive to me, I've never thought of flies as murderous.  Some of the gory Liebestod imagery of the Cronenberg re-make is faintly suggested by the fly's scribbling "I love you" in badly distorted handwriting on a blackboard before his wife takes him to the factory and the 50 ton press.   What are these late-fifties pictures about:  people have to sue heavy-duty radiation goggles to watch the teleportation which involves a flashing proto-computer display, reel-to-reel tape, and a brilliant burst of light.  One of the secondary actors in The Return of the Fly is the spitting image of J.  Robert Oppenheimer -- we see him smoking his pipe, brooding, and waiting for the fly-man's appearance.  It seems that the films, like other pictures of their time, have something to do with the nuclear menace.  Radiation causes mutations and the industrial press is equipped with a huge misshapen red button, the sort of device, one suspects that might be used to launch missiles.   

His Kind of Woman

Howard Hughes bought RKO and its stable of stars in the late forties.  Hughes looked at his properties and decided that he would couple his two most impressive sex symbols, Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in a tough low-budget film noir.  A reliable crime thriller director, John Farrow, was engaged to shoot the movie.  Hughes began publicity right away -- he posted billboards around LA showing Mitchum and Russell in an embrace with fireworks bursting behind them.  The name of the picture was His Kind of Woman.  Hughes mental health was deteriorating at this time and he interfered in the production of the film.  Unsatisfied with a rough cut, he decided that the movie's ending needed more bloodshed and sadism, more "oomph" as it were.  So Hughes fired Farrow and brought on Richard Fleischer to re-shoot the ending. This was supposed to take about two or three weeks.  But Hughes was unsatisfied with initial efforts and began to expand radically the scope of the climax, adding a yacht and various gun battles and torture scenes.  The heavy, initially played by Lee van Cleef, was replaced by a standard issue villain with a pedigree in  B westerns and, then, finally, by Raymond Burr.  The scenes involving the bad guy were re-shot three times with the three actors before finally being approved by Hughes.  The three-week re-shoot became a one year ordeal that ended only when Mitchum went berserk on the set and drunkenly smashed it to pieces.  The resulting film, finally released in 1951, is long, uneven, and fantastically entertaining. 

In a prologue, the film's viewer learns that Ferrara, a mob boss, has been deported to Sorrento but yearns to return to his rackets in the good old USA.  With a sinister ex-Nazi surgeon, Ferrara hatches the plan of kidnapping Robert Mitchum, a man who is about his height and weight, and, then, engineering some kind "face-swap" -- mercifully, the full details of the "face-swap" are never exactly explained.  Using Mitchum's face, Ferrara plans to return to the US, discarding the faceless, one supposes, corpse of Mitchum's character in the sea.  To this end, a down-on-his-luck professional gambler, Milner (played by Mitchum) is recruited for a gig at an upscale resort in Baja California.  (Mexico is the place where you go for illegal operations.)  After being roughed-up by some gangsters (Mitchum gets pummeled about every fifteen minutes  in the film), the hero is taken to a private airstrip where a chartered plane has been commissioned to fly him to a refuge for the rich and infamous, Morros Estate on the Pacific coast of Baja.  At the cantina, Milner meets a comely wench singing a catchy tune "Five Little Miles to San Berdo" -- this is Jane Russell, a grifter like Milner, playing an ingénue socialite.  Of course, she's also on the plane to Morros Resort, bound to visit her married, actor boyfriend, Cardigan (Vincent Price).  Cardigan turns out to be a surreal hybrid of Errol Flynn and the Barrymores -- he's the star of ridiculous Hollywood swashbucklers with aspirations toward Shakespeare.  Morros estate is populated by a pungent cast of rogues and scoundrels -- Tim Holt (now stout) is on hand as an FBI agent undercover and working to stop Ferrara (offshore on a yacht) from coming to the US; Jim Backus plays a wealthy snobbish gambler so well that he spent his dotage playing the same role as Thurston Howell the Third on Gilligan's Isle.  And, of course, there's Morros, the resort-owner imitating the saloon-keeper in Casablanca and Vincent Price chewing up the scenery as the extravagant and flamboyant Cardigan.  After a variety of low energy subplots involving Cardigan's interest in hunting and his infidelity, Jane Russell's attempted seduction of Milner, and Milner's rescue of some young honeymooners who have accrued gambling debts to Jim Backus, the film kicks into high-gear with an extended climax that seems to last about an hour.  Vincent Price, who has always played heroic men in his films, gets to become a real hero -- he engages in a lengthy gun-battle with three thugs, buying time for Milner to infiltrate Ferrara's yacht.  (Tim Holt is face-down dead on the beach by this time.)  Milner fights his way through gangsters on the yacht, only to be captured and picturesquely tortured in various ways by the sadistic Ferrara.  (He gets beat up, flogged with a belt buckle, pitched into a steam-filled hold to be boiled for awhile, and, then, the sinister Nazi-doctor menaces his arm with its veins standing out like ropes with a giant syringe filled with some kind of amnesia serum -- Mitchum is shirtless for the last forty-minutes of the picture.)  In a series of efficiently staged slapstick scenes, Cardigan recruits the local Federales as well as some of the rich playboys at the resort to attack the yacht.  As they embark from the dock, with Vincent Price waving a rifle at their helm, the boat sinks, but they commandeer another, sail out to the yacht, and attack the army of bad guys on the boat.  There follows a battle involving much gunfire, fist-to-fist fighting, and people leaping around on deck.  Ferrara is killed -- we see him lying belly up on the deck of the ship with his eyes baroquely open.  Mitchum ends us with Jane Russell and the rueful Cardigan, now an approved and real action hero, goes back to his wife.  When Jane Russell embraces Mitchum, he neglects a steam iron with which he has been ironing his trousers and the hot metal sizzles a hole through his pants, an apt enough metaphor for the sexual encounter that is about to begin.  (It's a bit like the train roaring into the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest.) 

The plot is ridiculous but the details are wonderful.  When he gets bored, Mitchum irons his money.  Both he and Jane Russell are human caricatures -- they dramatize secondary sexual characteristics in the most exuberant way possible -- and it's undoubtedly fun to see them together:  Mitchum's face is inexpressive, like a rough-hewn piece of granite and his shoulders seem to be about two-yards wide:  he walks stiffly like the Talmudic Golem -- his sexual apparatus is always at ready and hard as a rock it seems, a characteristic reflected in his general posture.  Russell's legs extend all the way up to her huge breasts which are cantilevered into an alarming overhang above thighs and belly -- she is always dressed to kill.  They have a distinct, if cartoonish, chemistry and Hughes was right, it seems, to pair them in this film.  Vincent Price is endearing and excellent, muttering Shakespearian asides as he leads his feckless troops into battle.  The Nazi doctor is sinister and has a number of weird lines -- like all movie Nazis, he is highly cultured and amuses himself with playing solitaire chess.  (Hughes was so obsessed with this character that he personally wrote all of the doctor's lines and, then, provided tape-recording line readings to the actor as a guide to how he wanted the man to be portrayed.)  There's some wonderful comedy, including a scene in which Cardigan, a gourmand has lovingly prepared a duck that he has shot for a dinner with Milner and Jane Russell.  Things deteriorate when the mobsters intervene and Cardigan's wife appears:  throughout the scene Cardigan carries the plucked fowl like a rabbit under his arm.  Raymond Burr gets some alarming close-ups that highlight his strangely tender sadism -- his huge wet eyes glow with joy as he plans to shoot Mitchum in the face.  Unfortunately, like almost all movie sadists, he delights in "haranguing" -- that is, ranting about how he doesn't like to "shoot corpses" and wants Milner to be fully conscious before blowing off his head.  Of course, this harangue gives the injured Milner a chance to recover his senses and he proceeds to deliver a much-needed beating to the bad guy.  The movie has the weird improvised insouciance of Beat the Devil -- it's well worth watching.

The Favorite

Yorgis Lanthimos' The  Favorite (2018) belongs to a genre of films that feminism has rendered obsolete:  dueling divas.  In pictures of this kind, two formidable women fight to the death over some prize that is not worthy of them.  (The prize may be a man or prestige or, in some cases, the two women's agon may simply be a matter of personal pride or perversity.)  Examples of this kind of melodrama include Dead Ringer (Bette Davis v. Bette Davis), All About Eve, the recent HBO film Feud about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Robert Aldrich's 1962 film featuring Davis and Crawford made much in the mood of The Favorite -- both pictures involve a disabled protagonist and a dank palatial house. Lanthismos, who makes disquieting, casually surreal films, has updated this genre paradoxically by making it ancient -- in The Favorite, two ladies-in--waiting to the British Queen Anne literally mangle one another in their efforts to become the gouty and debilitated Queen's favorite.  The film is a costume drama that treats the past with post-modern seriousness -- the past is a foreign country to which different customs and moral standards apply.  Some critics have suggested that the film is anachronistic -- I think this is completely wrong.  There are several anachronistic elements:  at one point, someone accuses another of "paranoia", surely a word that didn't exist in the 17th century; in the another scene, the word "explicit" is used -- also, I think, a term that would not be current with John Milton or Alexander Pope.  A dance scene seems to borrow gestures and steps from the famous minuet between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction -- dance always looks ridiculous, however, and, for all I know, the peculiar hand-gestures and hopping around shown in the film invokes real "figures' made by dancers in the period.  Otherwise, the movie seems scrupulously exact to the period with some surreal departures that owe less to anachronism and more to Lanthimos' taste for the grotesque.  The men wear elaborate wigs of the kind satirized by Hogarth and his contemporaries and their faces are elaborately tarted-up with bright rouge and white powder.  The palace is a maze of long dark corridors, sometimes shot through disorienting fish-eye lenses -- the image often is distorted around the edges or bends at the center.  At night, the world is appropriately dark -- here and there, the flicker of a candle shows part of a face or a trace of garment.  The fields around the palace are vast and vacant -- gloomy forests and miserable-little crossroads where there might be a tavern and a whorehouse.  There is something at stake between the warring divas -- Lady Marlborough, the Queen's favorite when the film begins, is waging a literal war in France.  (Her proxy is the general Lord Marlborough, her husband.)  The war is costly and will require a substantial tax levy likely to cause unrest in the kingdom.  Queen Anne is a cipher -- she can barely move due to gout that causes suppurating wounds on her legs and feat and eats gluttonously.  Her bedroom is full of rabbit cages -- she has suffered 17 miscarriages, still-births, or neo-natal deaths and she seems to have a bunny for ever child that she has lost.  Lady Marlborough manipulates the rather dull-witted Queen (whom she sometimes calls Mrs. Morley) by providing her with sex -- the film uses the euphemism "rub my legs" for sexual activity between the two women.  Abigail, the rival for the Queen's affections, is introduced into the palace as a scullery maid -- in fact, she is a high-born woman who's dissolute father sold her to "a corpulent German with a thin penis" to pay off the gambling debts that have ruined the family.  Abigail is determined to regain her status as nobility.  Initally mistreated by everyone -- her hands are burnt raw by lye that she is forced to use to scrub the floors -- Abigail is plucky, courageous, and ambitious.  (This is a world in which everyone beats everyone else up, servants are routinely whipped, and the only form of heterosexual sex seems to be rape.)  She uses a herbal remedy, initially devised to treat her lye-scalded hands, to palliate the Queen's gout.  Then, at the first opportunity, she "rubs the queen's legs", more enthusiastically than Lady Marlborough, it seems, and enters her favor.  The stage is set for the showdown between Lady Marlborough and Abigail, rivalry that provides the narrative for the last two-thirds of the movie.  The quarrel between the women escalates into combat that leaves Lady Marlborough not just scarred, but disfigured -- Abigail poisons her and she falls from her horse and is dragged for miles behind the animal before being rescued and, then, held hostage for several weeks in a squalid brothel.  Ultimately, the level of violence between the two women requires the queen to choose between them. 

Lanthimos in this film, and his prior The Lobster, equates sex with power and domination.  In this regard he is heir to Fassbinder and, in some respects, The Favorite is very similar to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a melodrama about a lesbian relationship also involving dizzying reversals.  (And like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Favorite also relies upon an elaborate and baroque set, in the case of Lanthimos' film, the palace with its dark stairways and gothic chambers, a claustrophobic warren where the struggle between the women takes place.)  The Favorite manipulates audience expectations.  We begin the film identifying with poor, abused Abigail.  We admire her courage and her stubbornness.  (Spoilers here follow.)  But as the film progresses, she seems increasingly sadistic and, at last, after she has won, we observe her crushing underfoot the sick queen's rabbits just to hear them squeal.  By this stage, the old Queen looks moribund -- a stroke appears to have caused half of her face to droop and she speaks in a distorted, garbled whisper.  It's obvious that her power is illusory and, certainly, there is nothing remotely attractive about her --she's a big, shapeless, heavy-set woman who walks uncertainly with a crutch or must be pushed through her palace in a wheelchair.  Lady Marlborough, who we initially dislike, has a long history with poor Mrs. Morley and what we interpret, at first, as cruelty (she says the Queen looks like "an angry badger") turns out to be merely honesty.  In fact, at the climax of the film, we discover that Lady Marlborough actually loves the old Queen and is willing to sacrifice her advantage over Abigail out of this love.  The film's final shot, a peculiar and rare example of a triple exposure (the images are a close-up of Abigail masturbating the dowdy, half-comatose queen, the Queen's face, and a great proliferation of rabbits, symbolizing the Queen's infertility and losses) shows Abigail's triumph -- but a triumph to what effect:  she can now bully and terrorize the old Queen.  Of course, the Queen's face, to the extent we can read her expression, displays horror -- she now grasps that she has been delivered wholly into the possession of someone who hates her.  (The effect is similar to the ending of Fassbinder's 1974 Martha in which Helmut, the sadistic husband, ends with asserting total control over his paralyzed wife. )  The Favorite is compelling and very dark.  It lacks the ending that the audience desires -- that is, a final reversal of fortune punishing Abigail for her cruelty.  Accordingly, the film leaves its viewers with a faint sense of despair that is slightly unpleasant.  The movie's soundtrack is largely from the period:  Purcell and Dowland although there is a scary and minimalist sound-cue, a tick and, then, an electronic squawk that repeats over and over again in some of the more sinister scenes.  Abigail deteriorates into a cartoonish villainess -- on her honeymoon night, she masturbates her unfortunate husband while scheming against Lady Marlborough:  the masturbation theme is significant to the film but this sequence seems caricatured and, almost, too much.  There is a striking and bizarre scene in which a naked man, smeared with fruit juice, prances in front of a white screen also splotched with juice -- people are throwing fruit at him, apparently pomegranate.  (In the film's credits, we see that the man is a "Naked Pomegranate Tory" -- he is nude except for an elaborate wig.)  This kind of movie rises or falls on the quality of the embattled divas:  Emma Stone plays the icy Abigail, Rachel Weisz is Lady Marlborough, and Olivia Coleman has the part of the doomed, hysterical queen -- all of them are superb.

The Owl's Legacy

The air on the heights of Mount Olympus is rarefied -- at least, most of the time.  And as Hegel tolds us:  The owl of Minerva flies only at twilight.  That is, true wisdom takes wing in the gathering darkness:  thought proceeds from darkness to deeper darkness.  Chris Marker's documentary TV series on the legacy of Greek culture, produced for French broadcast in he late 1980's illustrates these aphorisms.  Marker has assembled a stellar cast of mostly French and expatriate Greek scholars and lets them expostulate for the camera on topics relating to his subject.  French philosophes tend to speak in windy, inexact, and melodramatic abstractions -- great importance is claimed for concepts to which allusion is made only indirectly and, then, through arcane metaphors.  You have the sense that something vastly important is being said but you can't always understand what it is.  (In fairness to the French, the windiest and most metaphysical of the commentators is George Steiner who has written most of his books in English but who bloviates in a belligerent, obtuse manner.  I like Steiner a lot and have read many of his books, but candor requires that I admit that he is a master bullshitter.  Several of his favorite techniques are on clear display in this series:  one thing Steiner likes to do is make huge claims for a concept and, then, completely fail to explain what he means (he airily leaves this for "other thinkers") -- in this show, he alleges that the Greek thought is fantastically important because it dramatizes "three paths" and not just two; he cites the story of Oedipus and the three forks in the path that the hero confronted.  Steiner, then, mysteriously says:  It would be oversimplification to call the paths by the Hegelian terminology:  thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  I agree:  Hegel's notion of a single organism developing by dialectical antithesis has nothing to do with alternative paths.  So what does Steiner think the three paths represent?  He doesn't deign to tell us.  Later, Steiner plays one of his most characteristic games:  he makes a wild claim, retracts it, and, then, restates the claim as if his retraction has proven it.  That is, Heidegger was totally wrong and even Fascist to claim the Germans are the heirs to Greek thought, but, of course, he was also exactly right in making this argument. The only two modern poets who authentically breathe the air of Pindar are Rilke and Hoelderlin.  Hoelderlin is a special case, of course, but the lounge lizard Rilke? Sure, I suppose, if the only poem Rilke wrote was the one about the archaic torso.)  Some episodes of The Owl's Legacy are, more or less, inexplicable -- particularly a couple of early shows; however, a number of the 27 minutes programs are quite lucid and, even, conventionally documentary. 

Marker stages four symposia, drinking parties in Athens, Paris, Berkeley, and Tbilisi, Georgia.  At the symposia, there are a bunch of fat old guys wearing horn-rimmed glasses or pallid young intellectuals interspersed with beautiful young women who seem to be merely "eye-candy".  The old guys make speeches while the young women look on adoringly -- the tables are laden with grapes and wine and the light seems more or less Mediterranean.  (In Paris, the Symposium is at the Sorbonne and takes place above a cellar full of plaster casts of Greek -- actually I think Hellenized Roman -- statues.  Marker equates the statues to people waiting for the "all clear" during an air raid.)  The symposia are intercut with "talking head" interviews with various pundits.  The "talking head" interviews are shot with the speaker always posed in front of some kind of large image of an owl.  (Steiner's case, the professor seems to be talking to a screen on which a woman's face appears turned very obliquely to the audience -- although in one shot in episode  7 we can see her clearly.  A large owl appears over Steiner's shoulder.)  Notwithstanding the metaphysical aspects of some of the shows, the tone of the program is light, even jocular -- at one point, Marker flashes an image of an owl apparently fashioned by the archaic Greeks with the logo That's Owl, Folks!  In the credits, after a credit for "Long Distance Phone-calls", Marker is identified as "Skipper" -- it's like credits for Gilligan's Isle.  The shows are organized according to Greek words -- for instance, "Democracy" or "Nostalgia" or "Amnesia" (about Greek history between 1930 and the end of the military Junta) or Logomachy (about dialectic).  Some of these episodes, for instance, "Amnesia" are quite conventional and will teach the viewer many things that he or she didn't know.  Other episodes are willfully perverse:  the show on Mathematics makes exaggerated  claims for the Ionian Greeks and their invention of mathematics.  But the subject doesn't much interest Marker and so he opts to present its primary points through a glossy and ridiculous series of shots derived from some kind of earlier show about arithmetic:  a beautiful woman filmed in soft focus whispers endearments about math to the camera while bathed in bright light and wearing a skimpy Greek robe -- she's supposed to simulate some kind of goddess.  In this show, there's a Canadian film board short by Norman McLaren about addition (it's like something you'd see now on Sesame Street).  This whole episode has a Steiner-like structure:  huge claims are made for Greek mathematics, then, the talking heads detour into the question of what mathematics represents -- are numbers real?  do we discover them or have we invented them?  After some daunting and abstract discussion of this subject, the film reverses itself and admits that most modern mathematics involves algorithms -- but "algorithm" is not a Greek word:  so computers, etc. are really a Muslim and Arabic invention.  Accordingly, after claiming the Greeks invented math, the show retracts that assertion and puts the blame (or praise) on the Egyptians and the Babylonians.  There are many interesting things in these episodes:  Elia Kazan, of all people, discusses the Greek diaspora and makes some cogent points.  Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek filmmaker, talks about the sense of myth in his movies.  A beautiful Greek singer recites poems and sings a song.  We see clips of old movies, ruins, Heidegger standing at the Parthenon, all sorts of interesting images.  Marker even taps some talking heads for their ignorance -- there is an Australian guy who is interviewed primarily because he doesn't seem to know anything.  If you have patience for this kind of thing( and I enjoy it) this 13 part series is highly recommended. 

Laurel and Hardy on AMC

Unlike many people, I don't recall ever being afraid of Laurel and Hardy.  However, I do remember that the comedians' old films were disquieting and made me uneasy.  Perhaps, this sense of discomfort arose from my relationship with my father.  He was preacher's son who watched Laurel and Hardy two-reelers on Sunday mornings instead of going to church. A heavy-set man with a beard, I always identified him with the rotund Oliver Hardy -- he had been an excellent athlete, despite his weight was light on his feet, and something of a bully.  However, watching several Laurel and Hardy two-reelers as well as Way our West on AMC, I discovered more than a few other aspects to their comedy sufficient to make a sensitive child (if that's what I was) a little nervous.

First, unlike the films of The Three Stooges, or other silent comedians, Laurel and Hardy's stunts are firmly rooted in a realistic physical world.  The injuries that they inflict upon one another involve the laws of gravity and Newton's rule that for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  They are pummeled by heavy falling objects, hurled through walls and the tops of lean-to sheds -- when they pull down an electrical fixture, a torrent of broken plaster and dust always descends with the unfortunate candelabra or lamp.  Similarly, the location for their misfortunes is clearly delineated:  the images are cogent, shot with deep focus, and reveal lower middle-class vistas full of hazard and mischief.  The mishaps in Laurel and Hardy films are, for the most part, plausible, even realistic -- what's not realistic is the fact that the accidents never seem to result in serious injury.  In Busy Bodies, a 1935 two-reeler, "the boys" as fans call them, are employees of a wood-working shop.   We see many different tables saws, spinning blades, planers, and jigsaws.  One can only shudder at the possibilities for mayhem posed by this equipment.   And, about two minutes into the film, a circular saw blade with vicious teeth falls from a wall and conks Olly on the head -- if the saw blade were inclined differently as it fell, it would have decapitated him.  Olly gets a paint brush glued to his face -- this is sheared off by Stan using a planer.  There are a variety of calamities involving chutes, ladders, and spinning blades.  In the Academy Award winning The Music Box (1932) Stan rips open a box and throws a board with a nail through it on the floor.  Olly steps on the board and the nail pierces his foot.  He has to stand on the board with his other foot to pull his transfixed foot off the board.  It makes you wince to watch this.   (A similar injury is depicted to induce horror in A Quiet Place, 2018.   In Way out West (1937), Olly falls through the roof of a lean-to and a big puff of dust rises from within the structure that he has crushed.  A block and tackle crashes into his skull (a gag repeated in The Music Box) and, in a reprise of the famous scene in Un Chien Andalou (which in many ways is similar to a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler), a donkey gets lifted up to the second floor of a building where it smashes a bunch of Victorian furniture.  All of this mayhem is not precisely realistic, but it is, certainly, plausible -- when Olly gets his pierced foot off the board, we can see the nail hole in the ball of his foot.  An inserted close-up shows the injury.

The film's also have peculiar sexual subtexts.  In Way Out West, Olly drops a locket down his shirt and has to disrobe almost entirely to retrieve this trinket.  The camera dwells lovingly on Olly's garments being ineptly peeled off him by Laurel.  Indeed, throughout Way Out West, Hardy is often semi-nude -- in one scene, he is hauled on a travois down a dusty lane half naked, wet clothes drying on poles around him.  In The Music Box, Hardy is a burly work man -- he looks fit and strong.  But five years later in Way Out West, he's majestically fat.  We see  his sloping white shoulders, his belly, his plump, boneless-looking upper arms.  The scene involving Olly being stripped by Stan is echoed in a long sequence in which a female vamp wearing a slinky white negligee tears Laurel's clothes off while tickling him so that he laughs hysterically -- she is looking for a real estate deed, but the image is clearly one that shows some sort of rape.  Stan Laurel, who invented these gags, operates with suggestion and implication that is, often, on the verge of becoming obscene.  So Laurel and Hardy combine serpentine, highly compressed and enigmatic sexual imagery with explicit sequences involving physical injury -- it's a weird mix.  Even stranger in Way Out West are the musical interludes -- Stan and Olly can't hear music without dancing and their graceful motions contrast in an alarming way with the otherwise feckless way of navigating the physical world.  How is it that such skillful dancers can't manage to step up over a curb without doing a pratfall?  (There is a similar sequence in The Music Box in which a player piano plays a medley of patriotic tunes while Laurel and Hardy cavort to the music in an inventive way.)  The child-like singing and dancing suggest other magical powers -- and, indeed, in Way out West, Laurel has the ability to snap his thumb and create a flame burning on that digit sufficient to light their way through the darkness.

Finally, the films, although ingenious and always very funny in one or two sequences, are generally not funny over all.  This doesn't mean the pictures aren't good -- in fact, they are excellent, but they're not exactly funny, at least, not for most of the time.  Rather, the film's involve nightmarish Sisyphean endeavors, trying to push a piano up a huge flight of steps, extricating one's fingers from various window-frames and pinch points, elaborate clothing malfunctions, and endless gags involving ladders, elastic bands, and hoisting heavy objects.  In German, there is a notion called Tuecke des Objeks -- meaning something like "the malice of objects"; this is the concept that inanimate objects aren't really inanimate -- instead they exhibit malicious agency.  This concept is always on display in Laurel and Hardy comedies and it's often not a pretty picture.  Generally, the sense that one has in watching these films is that human beings are enmeshed or entangled with objects that are predictably malevolent and that the human response is engage in combat with these objects, combat that the objects inevitably win.  We may think of other people or society or, even, death as obstacles that impair our freedom and drag us down to perdition -- this is bearable.  But it is, perhaps, unbearable to imagine that a ladder, a flight of steps, and a pulley are all that is really necessary to make our lives into a living hell. 

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil

If you like movies, we live in an age of wonders.  We can now see films that probably would have been wholly inaccessible even five years ago.  This is due, in part, to Netflix and its international outreach.  Netflix streams films into hundreds of international markets and, further, provides financing for content indigenous to those markets.  The result is that, almost nightly, we can watch TV series and genre films that might otherwise never be exported to the United States.  The world is a big place and there are many gifted directors working all around the globe in a variety of forms.  Netflix lets the viewer see this work and many of these films, modestly made for the entertainment of local audiences in places like Indonesia or Spain or Australia, are both exotic and very amusing -- the prestige pictures tour the international festival circuit and are usually released with fanfare; many of the Netflix films are small independently produced pictures, propped up with Netflix money, and some of these films are better than their more famous counterparts shown at Toronto or Cannes or Berlin. 

Errementari, the Blacksmith and the Devil is an example of very well-made, intricately crafted horror movie, shot for audiences in northern Spain and, therefore, made in the Basque language.  The picture is intriguing because it seems to arise from a literary fairy tale, apparently a story written in Basque, that embodies some exotic folk traditions.  The film is charming because of its strangeness.  Yet it is not so strange as to be estranging -- we can generally relate to the characters and their plight.  An opening title establishes the intensely local aspect of the film:  the story's prologue is set during the "First Carlist War."  I have no idea what the Carlist war was, nor did I know that there was more than one of them.  From the movie's images, I assume that the Carlist War took place in Basque country, possibly in the era of the American Civil War -- but I admit to not being certain about this.  In any event, the story concerns a blacksmith who may have traded his soul to the Devil in exchange for escaping a firing squad -- at the outset, prisoners are being shot down in a sequence that seems to derive from Goya's Disasters of War.  The blacksmith survives execution, comes back to his home village, where he finds that his wife has just given birth to a child that he could not possibly have fathered.  There's a big fight and the blacksmith kills the woman's paramour.  She, then, hangs herself and goes straight to Hell as a suicide -- at least, everyone believes this to be the case. The baby girl grows up as a kind of ward of the village, taunted by her playmates because of her mother's suicide.  The doughty blacksmith retreats to a ruined forge deep in the mountains, erecting all sorts of iron spikes, chains, and bear-traps to keep people from intruding on his solitude.  The little girl, Usue, sneaks into the blacksmith's ruinous and diabolical forge.  There she seems a small, strange-looking boy confined in an iron cage.  The walls and ceilings and the fences outside are all festooned with big, brutish-looking iron crosses -- although we don't know what this imagery means, it's there for a purpose.  The girl observes the blacksmith torturing the little boy, pities him, and agrees to let him out of the cage.  But the little boy is really a demon who is hiding in human form, a devil with horns and a flickering tail, a malicious creature named Sartael.  Sartael causes all sorts of havoc.  The townspeople form a lynch mob and carrying torches attack the smithy's sinister forge -- their ostensible purpose is to rescue the little girl, although, in fact, members of the mob are also looking for gold apparently hidden during the Carlist War.  The blacksmith is tortured to reveal the location of the gold.  The leader of the mob turns out to be the King of the Demons, a huge crocodile-headed monster named Alastor.  He's been sent from Hell to drag Sartael back into the inferno.  Usue, the little girl, and the blacksmith end up being cast into a lobby or sort of fiery waiting room next to the Hell-mouth belching flames.  A battle ensues between the Blacksmith and Alastor.  Like Orpheus, the Blacksmith has come to Hell not only to rescue the little girl but also to free his wife who has ended up in these nether regions because of her suicide.  The scenes in the ante-room to Hell are extremely impressive -- the demons are genuinely horrifying in their appearance and the long procession of white robed sinners seems impelled into the Inferno:  when it looks like the doors are closing, the damned scurry to cast themselves into the white-hot flames.  The film's narrative is cunning:  first, we are tutored to fear the Blacksmith as a kind of sinister monster, but he turns out to be the most heroic of heroes.  Sartael is a fearsome enough demon until we see his big brother Alastor, a monstrous being who looks like a an elegant Godzilla dressed in a tuxedo of acetylene-torch flames -- after Alastor appears, Sartael even becomes a good guy of sorts, the fierce little girl's sidekick.  Clearly, the material is rooted in Basque folklore and proverbs.  The demons can't abide the sound of a church bell ringing and they are afflicted by a weird counting mania, a strange defect but one that makes a certain obsessive-compulsive sense.  If you can throw chickpeas on the floor, the devils are wired to cease their pursuit, drop to their knees, and desperately start counting the peas -- this will usually give you enough time in which to escape.  At the end of the picture, Sartael, a handsome serpentine sort of devil, leaps up and shouts at the crowd (and film audience) "You yokels, while you sleep I'll bite off your thumbs" -- a fearsome threat but one that I've never heard before.  The film ends with an inspiring shot of the blacksmith Errementari using a huge bell forged of the Carlist gold as a battering ram to smash into Hell to retrieve his lost wife.  Then, the movie ends with a couplet of some kind:  words to the effect of "That was That / Take a pumpkin and go to the square" -- clearly some kind of fairytale tag used to end Basque tales of this sort.  This movie is no masterpiece but it is evocatively filmed -- the exteriors, including mossy ancient forests, are exquisite and the special effects are beautiful.  The principal demons have a well-groomed lizard-like appearance that is both appealing and horrible.  Like most fairy-tales, the story has a serious subtext about rage and revenge and the danger of acting impulsively.  The picture is also quite funny -- it's very amusing to see fearsome devils hysterically trying to count the peas flung on the cinders in the ante-chamber to Hell.  This kind of film certainly would not have been exported to any theaters in the US ten or fifteen years ago.  It's a minor film but one that is worth ninety minutes of your  time if you like supernatural thrillers of this kind.   

The Tree of the Wooden Clogs

Joseph Frederick Koerner in his great book on Bosch and Brueghel (it adapts his 2008 Mellon lectures), surveying the latter painter's works such as "The Battle between Carnival and Lent," "Children's Games" and others, tells us that Pieter Brueghel was a "great maker of lists".  The same can be said about Ermanno Olmi's Tree of the Wooden Clogs, a movie that I have been meaning to see all my life, and have, nonetheless, successfully avoided -- my aversion to the film may be related to an early embarrassment involving the picture that I briefly document in my essay "On Anderson Cooper's New Years Eve 2018."  After a brief opening sequence establishing one element of the film's minimalist narrative, Olmi sets about documenting as many aspects of  19th-century Bergamo peasant life as he can cram into the picture.  He shows fields being plowed in subtle but luminous colors that look like a fading 14th century Book of Hours.  Men sow seeds.  Hay and wheat are harvested.  Groups of singing peasants, both men and women, husk corn (they call it maize) and, then, transport the stuff to a noisy, rickety-looking mill on a nearby stream to have it ground.  A goose is beheaded and, then, in a more clamorous and chaotic scene, a pig is butchered.  People cook mountainous heaps of polenta and make soups and stews.  The peasants live in great industrial-sized tenements with exterior stairways and ancient field-stone granaries -- these places seem to be ruins leftover from Roman times.  Old men sit by the fireside telling stories about demons and ghosts. (And there are community gatherings for ghost stories told, strangely enough, in the farm's stable.) Small children are bathed in buckets of hot water. A woman tirelessly washes laundry in the river, slapping the cloth violently on time-smoothed stones.  Suitors arrive in cautious groups of three to woo girls in long rustic rooms where, it seems, that the whole community is gathered.  Dogs bark and growl.  A half-crazed beggar wanders the fields, his face distorted by tics -- the old women say that the man must be fed and treated kindly because he is "simple" and the "simple are close to God."  A priest preaches about a miracle that saved the local village, describing events as if they occurred just yesterday -- but, then, we learn that what he is telling his congregation dates back 350 years.  The film's documentary reconstruction of peasant work puts The Tree of the Wooden Clogs into a past that Virgil would recognize -- indeed, some of the images of pollarded trees, irrigation ditches, carefully manured fields and blazing hearths reminds me of material in the Latin poet's Georgics.  But the real influence on the film's imagery seems to me to be Brueghel. Men carrying huge sacks on their backs is a recurring image -- and these pictures show the peasants as faceless, hunched-over, workers with their heads covered by enigmatic, shapeless hats that conceal their features.  The weather is closely characterized:  there are rainy days that fill the peasant farm's huge courtyard with mud, paths through the fields and thickets decorated with pools that reflect the dark sky, snow storms and sunny days in early spring when the fields are vibrant with fresh green buds and leaves.  Winter is appropriately dark -- it's shown in the somber tones of Brueghel's "Return of the Hunters," shadowy, anonymous men wading through the snow and early spring is stormy like the great painting showing a windstorm, men driving cattle through a barren forest while little ships struggle with the tempest.  Natural light is used -- in some scenes, we can barely ascertain what is happening.  On other occasions, Olmi uses expressionistic lighting:  when a poor peasant finds a shiny coin dropped in the mud at a political meeting (a communist is speaking about the future), he picks it up and, then, runs crazily away from the meeting to his home, the man's face illuminated as if with a sense of guilt or doom, as he runs through the dark fields.  In many scenes, Olmi establishes multiple zones of interest.  When a flamboyant fabric salesman pulls his handcart into the peasant's courtyard, he sings in a beautiful tenor and the women, all of whom seem to distrust the man, are obviously fascinated both by him and his wares.  The young woman whom one of the peasants has been very shyly courting approaches and someone mentions that she needs fabric for her wedding dress.  The fabric salesman has sales patter in which he compares his female customers to monkeys -- it seems unflattering, but there is something faintly simian about the women's helpless curiosity.  The salesman has a pet crow in a wicker cage and it is reputed that the animal can speak -- we hear the creature croaking a couple times and the little girls interpreting the animal's cry as "he's saying hello to us." 

From this apparently chaotic material, arranged primarily as a "book of hours" -- that is, a seasonal chronicle of the works and deeds of the peasants -- several narratives gradually emerge.  There is the courtship of the girl by the young peasant who tirelessly tracks her and arranges ways to encounter her as she modestly hurries from errand to errand.  Widow Runc's husband has died and she can't support her six children; the local priest suggests that the smaller girls go to an orphanage, although the mother and her eldest son work themselves to the bone to try to keep the family together.  A cow becomes sick and seems about to die.  The woman who owns the cow goes to the stream, fills a jug, and, then, takes it to a small chapel, a place too poor to have a cross on which to repose the emaciated and bloody wooden image of Christ -- she pleads with God to heal her cow and, in fact, after drinking the water from the jug the cow gets better, standing up again.  The smarmy local priest (he wears little granny glasses with tinted spectacles) has decided that one of the local boys is highly intelligent and must go to school.  But he's not willing to support that endeavor in any way.  (Almost all of the peasants are illiterate -- the only printed items in their lives are cheap rotogravure engravings of Saints posted over their beds or by their fireplaces or in their barns among their animals.)  So the parents commit to paying for the boy's education even though the woman is pregnant with another child.  An old man has contrived a secret way to force tomatoes to grow more quickly than his neighbors -- he uses chicken shit to keep the seedlings warm and works his fields at night.  Other peasants cheat the landlord by loading hidden compartments in their wagons with before they are weighed.  The landlord himself is a melancholy man who listens to opera on a gramophone.  In one puzzling scene, a peasant sees the landlord standing outside a lit window and listening to a young man, presumably his son, playing Mozart's Turkish March (Rondo a'la turk) on a harpsichord - why doesn't the landlord go inside the warm room where the boy is playing to the delight of his relatives, mostly female aunts it seems?  On Christmas Eve, the landlord hires a band of bagpipers to serenade the manor house and the peasants stand in the courtyard reverently listening to the remote music.  Underlying some of the scenes, Olmi uses Bach organ music to emphasize the sacramental aspect of the labor that we see. 

In the film's last third, its vestigial narratives come t0 climaxes of a sort.  The young man weds the girl that he has been wooing and they travel to Milan for their honeymoon.  (At the wedding, the priest asks for the congregation's prayers for the couple who are "embarking on a long and dangerous journey to Milan" -- in fact, the trip is accomplished in a half-day and seems to encompass be less than 30 miles.  Olmi's point is that people lived their entire lives within a ten mile radius of their birthplace and the rest of the world was incomprehensible to them and deadly -- recall that no one knows  how to read.)  In Milan, the young couple see men marching in chains under the supervision of mounted soldiers -- some sort of riot is underway and cavalry dashes down the streets, scattering the people.  Some shots are fired.  The young couple spends the night in the convent where the girl's aunt lives.  The convent is also an orphanage.  The nuns set up a bridal suite for the young people and the next morning, in an astonishing scene, foist a baby boy upon them.  The old man and his daughter surprise everyone in town with their fat and ruddy tomatoes, at least two weeks ahead of everyone else's crop.  The peasant boy who attends school in town discovers that his wooden clogs are broken.  In an act of desperation, the boy's father cuts down one of the trees along the irrigation ditch and fashions some of the wood into a shoe.  The peasant who has put his purloined coin in the hoof of his dray horse finds the precious object missing.  Irrationally, he accuses the horse of theft and punches it.  The horse isn't about to put up with any abuse and so the beast chases the man around the courtyard and corners him -- indeed, you get the impression that the aggrieved horse would have finished the peasant off if the small room into which the man had fled was large enough to accommodate the wagon the beast was dragging around.  This sequence leads to an exposition of folk remedies for madness (since the peasant is accounted insane) that are both fascinating and utterly bizarre.  The landlord discovers that one of his trees has been cut-down.  He sends the bailiff to repossess the livestock in the possession of the offending family and, then, evicts them, including the mother, her new-born child, and the little student who wore the clogs to church school in the next village.  On this depressing note, the film ends.

Olmi's point, probably unfashionable today, seems to be that the peasants are, by and large, helpless, pawns in larger economic games in which they have no stake.  A Communist rants at the local carnival, but none of the characters in the film show much interest in what he is saying -- human greed is a constant and the agitator's speech is undercut by the peasant eying the gold coin dropped in the mud.  (The coin that he foolishly hides in his horse's hollow hoof, the loss of which  results in his bout of madness -- with this episode, Olmi almost seems to be illustrating some kind of folk proverb in the vein of Brueghel's large painting of Netherland proverbs).  In Milan, there is some kind of civil unrest, but we see it through the eyes of the honeymooners and can't comprehend what is happening.  The painful scenes involving the eviction of the Batisti family for cutting down the tree are all shot from the perspectives of the other peasants -- they stare at the eviction from behind their windows, fearful and inert.  Each shot emphasizes the status of the onlooker as inactive, as witnesses only to the injustice committed in front of them.  The peasants are ashamed of their fear, and, it seems, equally ashamed of their supine complicity with the system that has destroyed their neighbor.  Only after the eviction do the neighbors appear abashed and silent in the courtyard to watch the wagon containing all the worldly possessions of the evicted tenants vanishing in the darkness.  Olmi implies that the peasants live in a world that is ahistorical, a world bound to timeless cycle of the seasons and that they are not agents in that world -- rather, they are passive and helpless victims of a polity and environment that God has ordained as just and inevitable.  When the infant from the orphanage is adopted, someone says that the baby might be the offspring of a nobleman -- "but he will be peasant now," the priest says, "raised by a peasant father and he will be happy as a peasant."

Critics generally regard The Tree of the Wooden Clogs as a masterpiece.  Certainly, the film is exceptionally beautiful and well-crafted -- it's dark palette and natural lighting give the movie a look comparable to Jan Troell's equally well-regarded films like The Emigrants.  I'm a little less certain about the film's greatness.  There is no acting in the film -- the movie subscribes to neo-realist doctrine to the utmost:  instead of actors, a credit announces that the parts are "interpreted" by people from the Bergamo district where the movie takes place.  Some of the actors look great, but barely speak -- presumably, because they would have no idea  how to "interpret" their lines:  this is exemplified by the young bride:  she is as beautiful as a renaissance Madonna but has nothing to say, and, after a while, her serene silence begins to get on your nerves.  A number of sequences are very hard to explain:  why would the avaricious peasant hide a gold coin in mud plastered on the hoof of his horse?  Would peasants really spend their honeymoon in a convent?  And why do the nuns use this opportunity to coerce them into bringing an orphan home?  The families are all related and Widow Runc looks almost exactly like Mrs. Batiste, the lady whose family is evicted.  This leads to confusion. Why is the orphaned child called "Batiste"?  The nuns call him by that name before anyone agrees to take him home.  Were late 19th century peasants really as apolitical and cowardly as these folks?  Not only do the speeches seem improvised, but, also, the entire narrative or system of narratives seems oddly arbitrary.  The movie doesn't have any narrative arc at all -- it just begins in media res and ends the same way.  I am a great admirer of Olmi and mourn his death (he died in 2018) but I'm not wholly convinced that this specific film, often said to be his magnum opus, is as good as its reputation.