The Magic Flute (1975 film)

Ingmar Bergman directed The Magic Flute for Swedish TV, apparently intended as a sort of holiday gift to his countrymen.  The opera was shot on 16 mm film and broadcast on January 1, 1975.  The film was later reprocessed into a 35 mm print that was shown throughout Europe in that same year to great acclaim.  (I recall seeing the movie in the theater when I was at the University of Minnesota).  Bergman's film doesn't simply record an actual opera -- instead, Bergman with his singers and an excellent chamber orchestra pre-recorded the score in early 1974.  The plan was to post-synchronize the score with an elaborately edited and cinematic re-enactment of the opera specially filmed at the rococo theater at Drottningholm, a royal palace near Stockholm.  The old theater proved to be too fragile to support the weight of lights and other modern film equipment and, so, Bergman had the space re-created in loving detail at a studio in the Circus building also on the edge of Stockholm.  (The shoot took 50 days and was, according to Bergman, the happiest experience in his life.)  The Drottningholm proscenium stage is very deep but narrow -- only about 24 feet wide.  Bergman's concept, from which he deviates from time to time, is to stage the show within the constraints imposed the royal theater at Drottningholm.  This concept gives the film a tight, almost claustrophobic focus that somehow achieves a high degree of theatricality notwithstanding the intensely imagined cinematic mise en scene that the director employs.  The film is luminously beautiful, appearing on the new Criterion disc, in a pillar-boxed format, similar to the aspect ratio that we see in old German films.  Of course, the opera is wonderful and Bergman's ingenious production is strangely inspiring, even, uplifting.

I won't devote much attention to the opera's complicated and highly eccentric plot.  As everyone knows the opera concerns two pairs of lovers who must endure trials in order to consummate their passion.  Tamino and Pamina are noble lovers.  Their love story is complicated by what can only be described as a fairy-tale custody battle.  Pamina is the daughter of the Queen of the Night, an embodiment of lunar femininity estranged from Sarastro, a figure that allegorizes the solar light of masculine reason.  (These gender values are encoded in the opera and, although both the film and the opera transcend them from time-to-time, the viewer will have to accept these Jungian archetypes of male and female as fundamental to the narrative.)  Pamina's mother with her Moorish henchman, Monostatos (adding racism to the opera's sexist agenda) are locked in mortal combat with Sarastro's brotherhood, who happen to be Freemasons.  Indeed, the Queen of the Night hates Sarastro so violently that she is willing to sacrifice her daughter to attempted rape by Monostatos to achieve dominance over her ex-husband.  In one chilling scene, she demands that Pamina kill her own father, Sarastro and hands her a silver dagger with which to accomplish the deed.  (The deadly dagger is the counterpart to the life-giving magic flute.)  In counterpoint to the elevated and potentially tragic love of Tamino and Pamina are the comic low-status lovers, Papageno, the cowardly and feckless birdcatcher, and his lusty consort, Papagena.  The consummation of the noble lovers' passion is friendship and occult wisdom.  The comic low-status lovers, by contrast, achieve fecundity by their passion -- the opera ends with Papagena and Papageno crowing about the host of offspring that they are about to produce.  Mozart's genius is to portray musically both high and low as equally beautiful -- the tribe of children produced by the birdcatcher and his lecherous wife is a happy ending no less beautiful than the acquisition of supernatural wisdom by the noble lovers.  The opera's roots were humble -- Emmanuel Schikaneder who wrote the libretto wanted Mozart to compose some incidental music for a Viennese Sing-spiel intended to capitalize on current interest in freemasonry.  About a third of the lines in the opera are spoken and not sung.  (In effect, the show is more like a Broadway musical than a typical opera composed in the last part of the 18th century).  Of course, the outcome of the unlikely partnership between Mozart and Schikaneder is the most popular opera ever composed. 

The principal theme in The Magic Flute is that wisdom can not be achieved without Eros.  The Neo-Platonic subject of the opera (actually Platonic as well since the idea originates in Plato's Symposium) is that all knowledge is, at its heart, carnal -- that is, that love is the royal road to wisdom of all sorts, beginning with bedroom techniques and ending in the highest empyrean of the Ideal.  The opera also bears a resemblance, oddly enough, to the novels of Jane Austen -- love isn't complete until it is tinctured with friendship and subordinated to reason.  The female realm is that of appearance, the glistening and lovely surface of things.  Appropriate to this realm is violent passion.  The opera exemplifies this thought in one of the most remarkable plot twists in all of literature -- the Queen of the Night initially appears to be the victim of the cruel and tyrannical Sarastro; we are inspired to sympathize with her pathos and support her plight to recapture her daughter from her ex-husband.  Like Tamino, we want to come to her rescue.  But there is something a little sinister in her high-pitched shrieking coloratura and, in the second half, we realize that the Queen of the Night's rage is, indeed, deadly, unreasonable, and destructive -- from being the opera's heroine she becomes something like its villainess.  But this must be qualified.  Opposing the Queen of the Night's passion is the sober realism of the solar knights, the brotherhood of Freemasons that Sarastro leads.  They are involved in constructing elaborate tedious ordeals and spend their time in dusty crypts full of bones.  Reason, particularly as staged by Bergman, has something morbid about it -- too readily, grey reason can decline into being some sort of death cult.  And, so, the opera stands for the proposition that the male and female elements of reason and passion, although incomplete in themselves, comprise a perfect unity when each embraces and regulates the other.  To this end, we are shown Tamino's growth -- in the opening scene, he is pursued by a ludicrous paper-mache dragon and collapses in a swoon on the stage.  By the end of the opera, he has evolved into a courageous figure who has subdued both death and despair in his spiritual development.  Mozart's music is all of a piece -- this means that most of the arias sound more or less alike, although all are fantastically beautiful.  The opera devises for us a sonic world that is comprised of intelligible elements that cohere with one another.  The score gives the impression of agitated motion (passion) that is also grounded in perfect stillness (reason).  This effect is achieved by the listener's perception that music, no matter how frenetic, will always resolve in a perfect, classically harmonic moment of complete repose.  Somehow, we seem to sense the end of an aria or duet from the piece's first note.

Bergman's direction is intensely cinematic.  He reverses the dimensions that we expect in opera.  Generally, with opera, we have the sense that a great distance divides us from the strange figures bellowing their songs in outlandish costume on stage.  Bergman eliminates the distance -- almost all of the opera is filmed in enormous close-ups.  (These close-ups are so huge as to be unflattering -- we can see each blemish and tiny scar on the faces of the leading ladies:  for instance, Pamina has three minute pock-marks above her upper right lip.  These tiny marks appear like lunar craters in the microscopically detailed close-ups that fill the screen.)  The effect of these close-ups is to destroy the audience's sense of space in some of the sequences -- the imagery seems dreamlike, happening within someone's reverie and not in any real or identifiable space.  Some of the sequences shot in close-up are fractured into cubist assemblages of full-frontal and profile images.  The scene in which the Queen of the Night implores Pamina to kill Sarastro is shot like Bergman's Persona -- the images are drowned in icy blue darkness and consist of huge mask-like friezes of women's faces, sometimes superimposed upon one another.  The mise-en-scene is replete with witty effects:  when Tamino plays the magic flute, charming human-sized animals come from hiding to cavort before him.  (He is a kind of Orpheus.)  These shots culminate in a brief image of three bats hanging from the ceiling upside-down and dancing like Sesame Street characters.  The characters are, often, glimpsed off-stage -- when Papageno is first introduced, Bergman shows us a subliminally short image of Papagena waiting off-stage for him.  The singer playing Papageno is taking a nap when the opera begins and almost misses his cue -- we see him roused from sleep and rushing through the labyrinthine backstage to appear just in time before the audience.  In a reprise of one of his most famous images in The Seventh Seal, Bergman shows the players acting the roles of Tamino and Pamina playing chess backstage during intermission.  We also see some of the supernumeraries furiously smoking directly under a sign that tells them that smoking is forbidden.  At intermission, Sarastro (played indelibly by the Swedish opera singer Ulrike Cold) studies a score of Wagner's Parsifal while a little boy who is one of Monostratos' henchmen reads a comic book beside him.  The allusion to the Wagner opera is not happenstance -- in the second act, Bergman stages a number of scenes with the Masonic brotherhood, posing the freemasons in their robes and cowls like celebrants at the Last Supper.  This staging reminds us that both Parsifal and The Magic Flute involve celibate brotherhoods of pure knights tempted by female lust -- in other words, there is a connection between the cults of purity in both operas.  A kind of heightened realism animates the scenes where Pamina and Tamino are united -- we see Sarastro's pride intercut with shots of the Queen of the Night who seems matronly and dignified with ladies in waiting:  it's as if both of the warring parents have set aside their feuding for the wedding.  (Immediately, after the wedding, of course, the Queen of the Night and Monostatos mount a full-fledged attack on the bastion of reason but are repelled without any discernible effort by Sarastro's and his brotherhood.)  More questionable, perhaps, is Bergman's staging of the Overture.  After some limpid shots of great oaks trees on the Drottningholm palace grounds, the overture is accompanied by rhythmically edited shots of an ideal audience comprised of all the nations on earth -- Bergman shows people who look like Eskimos, European philosophers, Asians and Africans gravely attending to the music.  The meaning is obvious -- Mozart writes for all mankind.  And this notion, although questionable in some ways, is suitably uplifting.  Less effective, I think is the ongoing leit-motif of images of radiant little girl -- she looks like a pre-pubescent Liv Ullmann -- smiling cherubically as the show progresses.  This seems a stretch to me and overly obvious and manipulative.  But it's a minor defect.  (Watch the montage of people in the overture closely -- you'll see a flash of Bergman and Sven Nyquist, his great cameraman, among those close-ups.)

The Criterion disk comes with some fascinating extras.  Peter Cowrie has interesting insights into the opera and Bergman's staging.  (He points out the Brechtian influence in some scenes involving aphorisms presented on flip cards for the audience's delectation.)  Even better is an interview between the haughty, aristocratic-looking Bergman and a little troll of an interviewer who seemed hell-bent on getting under the great man's skin.  "Why would you film The Magic Flute?" the troll asks.  "Everyone knows its boring as hell."  There is a wonderful documentary about the making of the film.  In it, we see several female singers in minor parts, apparently knowing full well Bergman's propensity to sleep with the actresses in his films, casting an appraising and openly lascivious eye on the director.  Bergman is endearingly like every high school music director that you've ever known -- he is avuncular, comically passionate about the project, tyrannical, deeply manipulative, and charming at the same time.   

Sparrows

Sparrows (1926, William Beaudine) is a Mary Pickford vehicle cunningly engineered by its star to deliver maximum entertainment to the most people.  The film is the silent equivalent of a blockbuster like Avengers:  Endgame -- not exactly art, but supremely artful, a manipulative, revved-up machine that yields about one memorable bit every minute and climaxes in an action sequence (a pursuit through a swamp) that a thousand later films have imitated for better or worse.  If you could think about this film while watching it, you might find yourself hopelessly conflicted -- the picture exploits the audience mercilessly displaying toddlers in mortal danger while pausing, now and then, for exhibitions of stunningly mawkish religious sentimentality.  But you didn't get to think while watching a movie like this -- it's one damn thing after another.

It's not ironic, but, rather, somewhat appropriate, that an full-throated and hysterical exploitation film is, itself, about exploitation.  Grimes, a vicious old cripple, operates a so-called "baby farm" in the heart of a lethal southern swamp.  (Although the setting is never established with any precision, the place involves moss-draped willows, quicksand, ante-bellum mansions, and black lagoons full of alligators -- presumably, this is supposed to be Louisiana.)  A "baby farm" doesn't produce babies -- in fact, its victims are unwanted children, orphans or infants given up by their mothers, or, even, kidnapped.  The babies work on the farm, weeding vegetables under the supervision of Grimes, his slatternly wife, and Ambrose, the proverbial red-headed stepson, a gruesome-looking freckle-faced teenager who acts as the infant concentration camp's Capo.  The farm itself is pictorially defined in all its impressive squalor -- it sits on a islet surrounded by moats of loathsome-looking mud percolating with methane bubbles and has a stockade, a willow tree, a tumble-down house and a ramshackle barn.  "Hawgs" are for sale and, when visitors arrive, Grimes or his wife ring a bell signaling that the wretched orphans, barefoot and clad in rags, must scramble into the hayloft to avoid being seen.  There are ten children working the farm, including "Mama Molly", a teenage waif played by Mary Pickford. The children are systematically starved and worked to death.  And there's a sick baby in the group as well.  In the film's first scene, the waifs are flying a kite to which they have attached a message, something to the effect of "Come and Save Us!".  But the kite gets caught in a tree and the brutalization of the children continues.  (The title Sparrows refers to a leit motif:  the Gospels tell us that God's eye is on the sparrow and that not one of them, sold two for a penny, is beyond His love -- and, so, why is God so conspicuously absent from this hellish acreage on which innocent children are mercilessly exploited?  Indeed, for the first third of the film, the movie seems to pose a significant, if imponderable question:  why does God allow children to suffer?  Of course, this question has confounded far greater minds than Mary Pickford's -- Dostoevsky for example -- and the film's apparent solution to the quandary is not particularly persuasive:  God likes perfect things and since the swamp and Grimes' "Baby Farm" are perfectly evil, God allows them to abide out of professional respect for the Devil's craftsmanship.)  Mary Pickford, who controlled all of her pictures made for Universal Artists with an iron-fist, never lets the horror overwhelm the entertainment value of the picture -- an error, in her eyes, that would be pretentious and counter-productive.  And, so, she interlards the grim proceedings with shots of cute kids and animals as well as surprising amounts of slapstick comedy.  The little kids are resourceful and have the ability, although limited to fight back -- they torment the vicious Ambrose.  Molly reads them Bible stories and they pray together for God's deliverance in scenes of such sentimental extravagance that have to be seen to be believed.   The kids get punished for stealing potatoes and Molly tries vainly to feed the baby some sort of gruel through a discarded whiskey flask equipped with a nipple made from the finger tip of a rubber glove.  Cradling the sick baby, Molly dreams that the wretched wall of the prison barn  has become a green pasture where Jesus is watching his flock.  The Good Shepherd steps out of the picture-book meadow and takes the baby from Molly, withdrawing into the Sunday School image.  When Molly wakes up, of course, the baby is dead.  But life goes on:  in the next scene, there's slapstick comedy about Molly giving the surviving children a bath in what seems to be a mud puddle.  Throughout the film's first half, Pickford and Beaudine carefully manage the quotient of horror to comedy -- when it gets so grim as to be painful, they insert some comic high-jinx involving the spunky waifs.

The second half of the film is essentially a chase thriller.  Grimes errs by accepting the kidnapped child of a wealthy man who lives alone in a vast plantation-style mansion.  Search parties comb the swamp.  A little boy who stutters (disability was often the source of comedy in old movies), Splutters, has been sold to neighboring farmer for "hav the price of a hawg".  The posse finds Splutters and he tells them about Grimes' baby farm.  Meanwhile, Molly gets into a fight with the bully Ambrose -- in a startling scene, she repeatedly puts her head down and butts him like billy-goat.  This leads to reprisals and, when Grimes finds out that the dragnet is closing in on him, he decides to throw the rich man's toddler into the quicksand.  Molly learns about this from the injured Ambrose and, then, besieged in the barn, builds a causeway of hay bales and miscellaneous junk across the quicksand moat.  Leading the eight children and with the toddler tied to her back, Molly flees through the perils of the swamp -- they are pursued by savage dogs, have to cross quicksand pits by wriggling single file across narrow, fragile tree limbs, contrive a swing to leap across a pond, and, finally, creep over an abyss that is chock-full of fat, angry-looking alligators.  There are gun battles and, even, a ship pursuit across a harbor with the coast guard firing shells at the little skiff where Molly and the kids are hiding out with a couple of gangsters.  Of course, all's well that ends well.  Molly and the waifs end up as a well-dressed choir singing "Shall we Gather at the River" in the rich man's mansion. 

The film is not without weird defects, although these failings don't detract from the movie's raw energy.  Mary Pickford was 33 when the film was made -- she plays a strangely asexual 14 year old girl in the film.  (David Thomson says that Pickford's cameraman, Charles Rosher, developed new and intricate lighting effects to make Pickford look younger than her real age.)  Pickford was apparently tiny -- some of the toddlers tower over her -- and she has a weird-looking body:  she seems to be some kind of dwarf or midget in the film.  In several scenes with Grimes' slatternly wife, a broad-faced, high-cheeked woman who looks either mostly Swedish or half-Cherokee, the lighting isn't effective in concealing Pickford's age and she seems actually older and more care-worn than the villainess.  The film is also oddly celibate -- there's not the slightest hint of any kind of sexual tension between anyone:  I suppose Pickford made the sensible decision to eschew sexual exploitation or rape as one of the implied horrors of the 'baby farm' -- that material, I'm guessing, would have been a "bridge too far."  On the other hand, a director like Griffith wouldn't have hesitated to mine this lurid material for sexual content and would have, certainly, staged rape or attempted rape scenes involving his leading lady.  Pickford and Beaudine don't take the film in that direction which is somewhat surprising given the horrific nature of the movie's subject.  In fact, unlike the uncannily chaste Gish sisters, who seem often to be threatened with rape, Mary Pickford is never presented as the object of anyone's desire and, in fact, she seems downright odd looking.  Grimes is played by Gustav von Seyffertitz (a great name) and he is genuinely frightening, a figure in black with a crooked body and crooked-looking jaw and a crooked walk.   The actress who plays Grimes' beaten down wife is also excellent -- we keep expecting her to show some sympathy for the oppressed children but she never does.  The film is most marred, in my view, by Pickford's performance:  she does little dances to amuse the kids (we are not amused), rolls her eyes to heaven repeatedly imploring God's aid, and, when frightened, runs around in little prancing circles signifying that she doesn't know what to do -- this trick is something she learned from Lillian Gish who uses the device sparingly in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919).  Pickford does this about 6 times in the move -- and it's five times too many.  In the midst of spectacular chase, Molly doesn't hesitate to call a recess in the frenzied action and have the children kneel on the banks of noisome swamp to give praise to God for their deliverance.  Maybe this impressed someone in the audience in 1926, although I suppose most people had my response:  you want to strangle someone.     

Memories of Underdevelopment

"Dialectic" is a term often used in discussions of Marxist ideology and esthetics.  Generally, when I hear some learned fool deploying this word, my eyes glaze over -- I'm not sure what exactly it means and, most of the time, it's evident that the person using the word is also uncertain as to its definition.  The concept, however, seems inescapable when considering Tomas Gutierrez Alea's 1968 film Memories of Underdevelopment, one of the landmarks of Castro-era Cuban cinema.  Since I have been critical of the use of the word "dialectic", I think I had better define the term:  I take dialectic to mean a type of irony in which some phenomenon is analyzed from several, mutually opposing, perspectives.   This is probably inexact, but will suit our purposes.  In general, I think, the broad rhetorical concept of irony subsumes "dialectic" -- but since Alea seems to use a dialectical approach to his subject in Memories of Underdevelopment, it's probably worthwhile to consider his film through the critical rubric under which it was conceived.

In Memories, Sergio is a lanky, saturnine, handsome fellow in his mid-thirties.  The film begins with a documentary sequence at the airport -- Cuban bourgeoisie are fleeing Havana.  The sequence is alarming and heart-rending as family members bid farewell to one another, as we now know, never to be reunited.  (Throughout the film, Alea integrates documentary footage into his film -- this is one aspect of dialectic, the contrast between what is fictional and staged and footage that is obviously documentary in nature.)  The airport sequence that initiates the film also induces a conflicted response in the viewer -- the scenes have a fearsome intensity and the chaos seems tragic.  But, as we will come to see, the tearful separations at the airport represent a process that is purging Cuba of what we will come to see as an undesirable element -- an oppressive ruling class closely allied to the film's great bugaboo, the United States.  Sergio is properly sorrowful as his wife and parents board a jet for Miami.  But within a few minutes, we see that his decision to stay in Cuba is less political than personal -- he is unburdened of a nagging, unpleasant wife and, now, free to pursue his own ends in his luxury apartment overlooking Calle 23 and the Havana harbor.  Sergio looks a little like Marcello Mastrioanni and he's obviously a surrogate for the good-lucking and skinny Alea, who will appear, more or less, as himself later in the film.  Sergio is a lothario with a vivid erotic imagination -- he lustfully caresses an image of Botticelli's Venus and prowls the streets looking for girls to pick up.  Initially, he fantasizes about seducing his maid, Noemi (despite the Revolution, the old class roles continue to rule Sergio's part of society).  Noemi is a Baptist and Sergio amuses himself by imagining her in the river, her clothing slicked tight to her breasts, as he submerses her in the stream.  At loose ends, he drives around Cuba with his buddy Pablo discussing American cars and his friend's plan to flee the country.  On his way to a screening one morning, he encounters a young woman named Elena and entices her to his apartment.  She resists Sergio's seduction, alternately drawing him closer and, then, violently pushing him aside.  The girl wants to be an actress and Sergio's friend is a film director and there is an element of the casting couch in their relationship.  At ICAIC, the Havana center for revolutionary cinema, Alea is screening a reel of film consisting of sex scenes censored during the  Batista era.  "What will you do with this footage?" Sergio asks Alea.  "I will probably find a way to make a montage of it in one of my films," Alea says.  And, of course, this is precisely what we see in Memories of Underdevelopment.  From time to time, Alea interpolates other documentary montages into the film -- we see gruesome imagery of people killed and tortured during the Batista regime, photos of Bay of Pigs guerillas being marched to prison, harrowing pictures of starving children.  In the film's dialectic, this austere and grim footage co-exists with sequences of Sergio vigorously prosecuting his love affairs.  Sergio would be an enemy of the Revolution if he were political at all -- wandering downtown Havana, he mourns the destruction of his favorite department store:  with the store in ruins, Sergio mournfully intones:  "Now, Havana is just another provincial city." 

Sergio's love affair with Elena turns out to be a mistake.  The girl is dimwitted and can't enjoy the art that Sergio shows her.  Musing about her intellect, Sergio whispers to us that it is just another element of Cuba's "underdevelopment" -- the inability to achieve any coherent perspective on life.  (But this critique, it seems, applies to Sergio more than his 16 year old girlfriend; Sergio is 38.)  While touring the Hemingway house, Sergio ditches the girl.  European tourists take pictures and the house, which represents Yankee cultural imperialism, has been loving preserved for visitors.  Sergio attends a sort of critical roundtable on the question of "underdevelopment".  Intellectuals in suits and ties pontificate while poor Sergio looks alternatively bored or baffled.  The author of the novel on which the movie is based, Edmundo Desnoes, appears on the panel and isn't spared -- he offloads gibberish into the already overheated atmosphere of the discussion.  Finally, an aggressive American stands  up, demands to address the forum in English, and, then, denounces the intellectuals for talking instead of taking action.  (It seems that the Americans are better at everything, including revolutionary rhetoric.)  Sergio muses on a German girl with whom he had a love affair -- the notion "underdeveloped", here seems to equate to pre-pubescent teenage girls.  In a genuinely scary sequence, Elena's brother appears, accuses Sergio of rape, and he is tried criminally.  Elena's mother punches Sergio in the courtroom claiming that her daughter came home from being deflowered by the film's protagonist with her panties "full of blood."  The trial devolves into the question of whether the girl was a virgin when Sergio had sex with her and the hero, if  you can call him that, is acquitted.  Equally frightening is a scene in which officious administrators interrogate Sergio, at length, about his luxury apartment -- it's pretty clear that the Revolution is about to confiscate Sergio's digs.  Sergio seems oblivious to this -- his criticism of Elena seems apt for him as well:  he can't connect the dots.  But Alea's approach is scrupulously fair and analytical -- the Revolution can't connect the dots either:  Sergio's luxury apartment is confiscated but he's still allowed to collect income from several other apartments that he owns and rents to others.  Sergio realizes that staying in Cuba was an enormous mistake:  he has, as he puts it, "no family, no wife, no work, nothing."  He initiates a desultory affair with his Baptist maid.  The Cuban missile crisis ensues and Sergio peers out over the darkened city -- tanks have mobilized and there are military vehicles on the sea-side boulevard and a black-out has been decreed.  Sergio fully expects to die for a Revolution in which he has no interest at all. 

Memories of Underdevelopment is handsomely shot in lustrous black and white.  It contains all sorts of interesting footage including a strangely endearing sequence in which an American serviceman at Guantanamo Bay does a little dance for the Cuban surveillance cameras and the flips them the bird.   As a political artifact, the film is intricate, highly intelligent, and scrupulously fair-minded -- it certainly isn't propaganda for the Revolution and, indeed, seems to regard Castro and his minions with amused contempt.  (Andrew Sarris, on the evidence of this film, claimed inaccurately that Alea was censored by the Castro regime -- this was untrue and, in fact, the film community in Havana revered Alea.  He was never censored and made the films that he wanted to make -- a critic of the Revolution, he was, of course, a more thorough-going and harsh critic of the oppressive conditions that led to the Communist take-over.  The only time he was ever in 'hot water' with the regime was when Sarris made his misguided statements about him.)  Alea's genius in Memories of Underdevelopment is to ensnare the audience into identifying with someone who is, if not an enemy, to the Revolution, at least, profoundly indifferent to it.  Identification is not admiration, however, and the film leaves us with more questions than it answers.

Widows

Widows is an exhausting 2018 heist movie set in Chicago and featuring an impressive A-list Hollywood cast.  The film is directed by Steve McQueen, the British film-maker responsible for 12 Years a Slave and other prestige productions.  McQueen and his screenwriter, Gillian Flynn, are nothing if not ambitious and the movie is packed with trendy subject matter -- there are takes on Black Lives Matter, current immigration policy, gun violence, and Chicago's notorious political corruption.  In fact, I think there's simply too many characters, too many subplots, and too many intricate narrative twists (some of them downright implausible) for one movie.  The picture rockets around Chicago, showing us Black preachers preaching, various bars and bowling alleys, upscale private clubs, political rallies, steam baths and slum tenements, gun shows, a car auction, and a hair salon that is a front for criminal activity.  Of course, there are dingy and cavernous warehouses, deluxe apartments on Lake Shore Avenue and mansions in Hyde Park with elevated trains clanging sonorously in the night.  Other than Michael Mann's Thief, I don't know any other movie so tightly rooted in the Windy City.  It's all very convincing with outstanding acting, good atmospheric camerawork and crisp editing.  The problem with the film is that it tries too hard -- it aspires to thematic profundity on subjects like race and political corruption, topical issues that impede and immensely complicate the simple, lurid genre pleasures that we expect from a well-designed heist movie.  The film deserved a bigger and better audience when it was released -- I don't think it's a wholly successful movie, but it's epic in its own way.


Widows begins in media res -- a robbery has gone wrong and the crooks are fleeing pursuing cops.  From the outset, McQueen establishes his ambitions.  The exciting cops and robbers stuff is confounded by flashback sex scenes between Liam Neeson (the beleagured crime boss) and his African-American wife, Veronica (Viola Davis).  The robbers hide in one of those generic Chicago warehouses full of combustible materials and, when they switch vehicles to flee, are confronted by about 200 SWAT team cops who riddle their escape van with machine-gun bullets and create an incendiary inferno.  The four robbers killed in the warehouse have left the titular widows.  No sooner have the wives buried the fragmentary and charred remains of their husbands, then, thugs start calling on the four grief-stricken women.  It turns out that the robbery depleted the funds of a corrupt Black politician who is locked in an electoral race with the Irish politician Jack Mulligan.  The African-American kleptocrat wants his money back and begins harassing the widows.  The women, who have not earlier known one another, form an alliance and, in fact, plot to get back the money from where it is hidden in Mulligan's Hyde Park campaign headquarters.  The movie is quick and fearless in its narration and, only later, does the viewer grasp that the picture is replete with coincidences and holes in the plot.  The film develops as a pretty standard heist movie, complete with sequences involving preparations for the robbery, reconnaissance and the like.  The movie's only deviation from standard operating procedure is that the criminals are all women -- "No one thinks we have the balls to pull this off," Viola Davis says.  The four women can be categorized as brains, beauty, brawn, and desperation.  Viola Davis, Liam Neeson's widow, devises the plan using a notebook that her late husband has left for her -- Liam Neeson is too important an actor to be killed off in the first scene and so he makes little cameo appearances throughout the picture, sometimes in flashbacks or as an imagined mentor to the female gang led by his wife.  His continued presence in the film perturbs it and most of the plotting problems result from his involvement in the picture. Beauty is played by an actress named Elizabeth Debicki, someone whom I have not seen before and who makes an indelible impression in this film.  Brawn is supplied by Cynthia Envio, playing a hyper-athletic hair salon operator -- she's the one member of the gang who is not recently widowed.  (This is for reasons too complex to explain here and that would constitute spoilers as well.)  Desperation is played by Michelle Rodriguez, the hapless owner of a shop that her late husband's gambling has put in peril.  There are a host of other actors -- Robert Duvall in a showy turn as a bigoted old-time Chicago pol and Carrie Coon as the one widow who won't participate in the heist. It looks to me like Sally Struthers (uncredited) plays the part of the Polish girl's mother -- she blithely encourages her beautiful, if odd-looking daughter (she's wraith pale and about seven feet tall) to become a call-girl.  Lots of incidental characters get roughed-up, tortured, or killed.  There are many impressive Black actors playing gangsters and politicians in the movie -- I recognized them but can't tell you their names.  Because McQueen is busy keeping so many balls in the air, he neglects some of the genre pleasures implicit in a heist movie -- the contract with the viewer is that we should get to see the woman playing the "muscle" role exercise her brawn and the "beauty" should get to seduce someone.  McQueen's too sophisticated for this sort of plotting and, so, perversely, I think, he denies the audience some elements of the genre that we expect and, even, yearn for.  The raid on the Hyde Park mansion is pretty much underwhelming, the big reveal and climax is completely unsurprising, although staged in a clever way, and the film is so complex that some of its final scenes are inadvertently confusing.   At the end of the movie, the heroines now much enriched have to figure out how to divide up their booty.  Viola Davis' Veronica Rawlings says:  "I want to donate a million dollars for a library wing dedicated to Maurice."  This is the last line of the movie.  It had me scratching my head:   "Who the hell is Maurice?"  Ultimately, I figured it out, but only a half-hour after the movie was over.

Triple Frontier

The rough tough warrior males in J. C. Chandor's Triple Frontier (2019, Netflix) all have U.S. Army special forces training.  Unfortunately, that training, while constituting graduate school level instruction in murder and mayhem, didn't include geography.  Any mission that involves hiking over the Andes Mountains "to the sea" in the course of three or four days is likely to fail.  Trust me, I've eyeballed the Andes -- it's not a three day stroll over the peaks to the Pacific.  The uncertain geography afflicting Triple Frontier and the protagonist's apparent ignorance of their location is exemplary of the narrative credibility problems afflicting this high-prestige Netflix production.  Written by Mark Boal, and originally slated for direction by Katherine Bigelow, the picture bears some of the characteristics of the execrable Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow's celebration of warrior-male derring-do incidentally about the execution of Osama bin Laden, but really just a tribute to murder, torture, and the egregious violation of international law.  The absurdly confusing and dull Zero Dark Thirty was a big deal when it was released -- it's gung-ho combination of jingoism and revenge appealed to the post 9-11 crowd braying for murderous justice and the picture won a lot of Oscars including Best in Show.  But it's a dog and I don't think anyone would voluntarily watch that movie today.  Triple Frontier, which never bothers to explicate which three international borders are breached, complicates the gung-ho savagery of Zero Dark Thirty with huge doses of magical thinking, and, after an entertaining first hour, slips into implausible, even, inexplicable fantasy.

Triple Frontier begins with an assault by a death squad on some high altitude favela, possibly in Brazil, although the movie is too lazy to identify the place.  It's a new look for this kind of picture, a kind of Alpine meadow through which a road and river runs, with hillsides lined by improbably steep, impoverished neighborhoods.  After some impressive drone shots, the movie gets down to business which is showing people being killed.  The quasi-military death squad attacks a squalid disco that is a drug emporium for Leola, a violent narco-trafficker.  Pope, a CIA operative and advisor, leads the raid and, in fact, fires a rocket-launcher delivering the coup de grace to the bad guys -- he, then, attributes the shot to one of the soldiers.  I think they are supposed to be Columbian troops. There's a girl in the structure that gets blown up and she's a sort of confidential informant (as we discover after a ludicrously strenuous chase through the vertical village -- the chase is the first sign that the film's plotting is suspect:  if there was a CI in the drug house then why did the troops blithely fire indiscriminately at the place with rocket launchers and, then, why does Pope chase the girl on foot for about a mile when, instead, the two of them could have established contact and given up the fiction of the pursuit after about two blocks.)  Pope forms a plan to raid the jungle mansion of the big drug lord Leola.  He has everything worked out and inscribed in a loose-leaf notebook.  The concept is to assassinate the evil narco-lord and steal  his money -- apparently more than 250 million dollars.  To this end, Pope recruits four other ex-special forces rangers -- these include a washed-up realtor specializing in shabby seaside condos, a drug addicted pilot, a military liaison who lectures special forces troops on PTSD and urges them not to sell their skills as mercenaries (something that he blithely does himself), and an Ultimate Fighting champ who is apparently not too successful in the Octagon.  With this team of heroes, Pope hustles to the Brazilian border, reconnoiters the bad guy's mansion, and, then, mounts a quasi kill-Bin-Laden raid on the compound, killing everyone in sight.  After the manner of Ozark, the walls of the house turn out to be stacked high with greenbacks, "Benjamins" as Congresswoman Ilhar Omar would have it, and the special forces guys fill up about 200 bags with folding money. (The military man who give lectures against mercenary work get shot through the side, a wound that leaves a gory hole in him about the size of a coffee-mug -- it's no problem; he just stuffs the gaping wound with bandages, shows a stiff upper-lip and soldiers on none the worse for wear.)  Our heroes, then, hurry to a hidden air strip and with the beautiful confidential informant (and her kid-brother)  and commandeer a helicopter to take them over the Andes.  Unfortunately, they have seized too much contraband money.  The cash is too heavy to successfully fly over the main range of the Andes which, as one might say, is a bit lofty -- the film claims the peaks are 11,000 feet high.  Here is where the movie's geography begins to spin out of control.  The foothills of the Andes are 11,000 feet high; Cuzco is at that altitude.  Of course, the actual massif is much, much higher.  The pilot does some calculations and determines that immutable laws of physics don't allow the helicopter to fly at the necessary altitude to cross over the mountain range lugging thousands of pounds of currency. But we're dealing with Navy Seals and Army Rangers, Special Forces one and all, and they determine that the laws of physics don't apply to them or can be overcome by their gung-ho attitudes.  So they load up the vast amount of loot and set forth to fly over the mountain range.  They get to Peru and do off-load the gorgeous CI and her sibling (giving them the address of a safe-house in Australia and three million in cool cash.)  Of course, the laws of physics don't yield to magical thinking and so the helicopter can't get over the icy spine of mountains.  The helicopter crashes amidst the fields of some humble, if bellicose, coca-leaf farmers.  A confrontation develops and our heroes slaughter most of the men in the village, something that understandably upsets the survivors.  (The good guys pay off the grieving villagesr with one million dollars -- this leaves about 246 million.)  Renting some mules, our band of brothers, then, sets off to march across the Andes with their loot.  This is posited to be a three day hike.  (Of course, the march would be about 300 miles, a mostly vertical trek, that would take months.) The mules can't make the last uphill stretch, it's a giant granite rock-fall, and so the boys have to carry the loot up grade, now about 100 bags packed with long green.  There's a shoot-out at the pass and the unsuccessful realtor is killed. (For the rest of the film, they haul his body-bagged corpse around.)  Chastened, the remaining bandits toss the rest of the money into an abyss and stroll down to the sea-shore.  (The ocean has moved magically close to mountain pass.)  At the sea-shore, suddenly, we're in Hawa'ii's sugar cane fields (not the Atacama desert).  There's a chase in the house-high sugar cane, another gun battle on a picturesque (Hawaiian) beach, and our heroes finally escape by sea.  There's a coda in some unnamed country where money-laundering is a principal industry and an excruciatingly idiotic ending.

The film's meanings are precisely the opposite of what it intends.  Designed to show the omni-competence of the heroes, the movie demonstrates that its protagonists are naïve idiots with no command of geography, navigation by air, local mores, or, even, simple arithmetic.  Pretending that the heroes are men of principle, the film shows them to be dangerously trigger-happy thugs.  Insisting upon its verisimilitude, the picture shows us a surreal mélange of landscapes knit together by the spurious magic of editing  -- credits show the film was shot in Hawa'ii (Kaeu'i), the Sierra Nevada, and Columbia:  the one place it wasn't shot was in the Andes.  The problem with this kind of movie is that it remains entertaining in direct proportion to its plausibility -- if you begin a film insisting upon strict realism, you can't totally jettison realism half-way through the picture.  The film's military hardware is probably all accurately depicted, but everything else is completely and obviously made up.  Triple Frontier is now the most popular movie in the US.  And it is half-way entertaining, but the thuggish enterprise founders on the most elemental of problems:  it just isn't believable on any level.

Burning

In Lee Chang-Dong's meditative thriller, Burning (2018), Ben, a wealthy young man, yawns very slightly when a beautiful young woman is telling a story to his friends at a dinner party.  The story involves the young woman's trip to Africa and her participation in a tribal dance.  She acts out the dance and the story is naïve and slightly silly.  Later, Ben repeats his yawn, very slight and half-concealed, while another beautiful woman is speaking.  Ben's antagonist, Lee Jong-su, notices the yawn.  He shows no emotion, but we suspect that Lee Jong-su is inwardly outraged -- what gives Ben the right to yawn at things that others intensely desire?  Lee Jong-su's rage is tightly concealed -- it's boiling beneath his placid, even stolidly docile, surface.  The first young woman, Hae-mi, has a cat that always hides from visitors -- the cat is named "Boil".  "An odd name for a cat," Lee Jong-su says.  In Burning, everything is a metaphor -- the entire structure of the film is a series of metaphors that signify tensions and hatreds that Lee Jong-su can't express until the film's nightmarish ending.  Class hatred and jealousy are suppressed by being projected into a series of oblique symbols. 

Burning is a long film, about 2 1/2 hours.  It's never dull, but the film's pace is intentionally slow.  The movie plays with real-time -- it's fulcrum is a long sequence at the center of the picture in which the characters smoke marijuana and watch the sun set.  This twenty minute scene records in actual time, the onset of night -- the characters begin in late afternoon light and end in the gloaming, twilight darkness.  The progression of the sunset gives concrete meaning to the notion of time passing and, further, embodies the familiar sense that time has dilated, that it expands, when you are smoking dope.  The sequence is integral to the movie, teetering on the verge of monotony, but never quite slipping over that edge, and has a dream-like logic difficult to precisely describe.  Movies involve light and time, but, also, duration -- one of Burning's formal characteristics is that it makes duration manifest.

Lee Jong-su is a young man from the South Korea's provinces.  He's poor and, sometimes, acts like a peasant.  In fact, he wants to be a writer and admires William Faulkner.  (Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning" is a source for the film, although the picture is ostensibly an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's story of the same name.)  Jong-su meets a beautiful young girl from his village.  She is working as a hostess, dancing around with a microphone and wearing a skimpy outfit to get people to enter a glitzy retail store.  This girl, Hae-me, claims that Jong-su saved her when she fell down a well.  She was seven at the time and Jong-su has no memory of this incident.  She tells Jong-su that he made fun of her appearance when she was in seventh grade -- "I've now had plastic surgery," she says, perkily.  Hae-mi is going to Africa for three weeks and so she needs someone to watch her cat, Boil.  She invites Jong-su to her apartment, an odd-shaped tower under a hill that receives light only once a day when the sun reflects off a huge transmission tower on a hilltop.  Hae-mi invites Jong-su to have sex with her -- this is a long scene, also shot in real-time without much in the way of edits.  Then, she vanishes, apparently to Africa.  (She wants to see the Bushmen in the Kalahari who differentiate between the "little hunger", that is appetite, and the "great hunger", that is a metaphysical yearning for meaning in the world.)  Jong-su misses her and masturbates in her bed and at her window when he comes to the apartment to feed her hidden cat.  Later, Hae-mi returns.  She has picked-up a handsome young man, Ben, at the Nairobi Airport -- they're departure was delayed due to a terrorist attack.  Ben's fine features are always on the edge of a smirk and he is mysterious -- Jong-su, who knows his American literature, calls him "the Great  Gatsby."  Ben drives a black Porsche and lives in a spectacular, if somewhat vacant seeming, apartment in Gangnam, apparently a very wealthy neighborhood in Seoul.  Jong-su's father is a stubborn man who owns a little farm and has beat up an official.  He is in jail, awaiting sentencing for his crime.  The Judge tells him that he can receive a reduced sentence or, even, no punishment at all, if he apologizes for the crime, but he is obstinate.  Jong-su is staying at the family farm, a ramshackle apartment and barn where there is one forlorn calf in the dung-filled barn.  The phone keeps ringing but there is nobody on the line.  The farm is so close to the North Korean border that Jong-su can hear propaganda broadcast over the border, a shrill voice speaking unintelligibly in the distance.  Jong-su is eerily polite and indifferent to the fact that Ben has stolen his beautiful girlfriend; he doesn't seem to react at all.  Ben comes to the farm and, with Hae-mi, they smoke a joint.  Hai-mi strips off her clothes and dances in the sunset.  Jong-su says that his father made him burn his mother's clothes when she abandoned the family -- Jong-su has not seen his mother for 16 years.  Ben, then, admits that his hobby is burning down greenhouses -- Korea is full "of nasty, old smelly greenhouses," Ben says, and he likes to light them on fire.  Ben says that he intends to burn down a greenhouse very near to the place where Jong-su lives.  He tells Jong-su that he needs to be more passionate.  Ben puts his hand over his heart and says that Jong-su needs to get the "bass beating there", an excitement that he experiences when he burns down a greenhouse.  (The gesture of hand to the heart is apparently important in Korea -- as it happened, the night I watched Burning, a boy-band named BTS performed on Saturday Night Live.  BTS is the most popular band in the world.  One of their signature moves is to strike a pose with hand placed over heart.)  As Ben and Hae-mi are leaving, Jong-su angrily says to Hae-mi that she must be a whore to "take her clothes off in front of men so readily" -- we have the sense that he is, perhaps, channeling his father's rage and misogyny.  Jong-su regrets the comment and tries to call Hae-mi but she doesn't respond.  He jogs around the neighborhood looking to see if Ben has burned down any of the nearby greenhouses, but finds no evidence of fire.  Hae-mi has vanished and no one knows where she had gone.  (In South Korea, apparently, all young people are drowning in credit card debt and there is surmise that she has gone into hiding to avoid creditors.)  Jong-su suspects that Ben has done something to Hae-mi.  He follows him around Seoul in his ugly, clunky-looking farm truck.  Ben, who is now reading Faulkner, confronts Jong-su and said that Hae-mi told him that Jong-su meant a lot to her -- "this made me jealous," Ben says, "and, you know, I'm never jealous.  Jong-su goes to party at Ben's apartment and discovers a cat.  The cat answers to the name "Boil."  He also finds Hae-mi's wristwatch in a drawer full of women's necklaces and accessories -- there is a faint, but unmistakable, implication that Ben is a serial killer.  At one point, there is a discussion about metaphors and, we understand, that burning down greenhouses is probably metaphoric for something else, perhaps, murder.  When Ben vowed to burn down a greenhouse "very close" to Jong-su, he may have meant that he intended to kill Hae-mi. 

The film divides into two parts, before Hae-mi vanishes and after her disappearance.  The scenes after her disappearance seem to channel Hitchcock's Vertigo -- there are long sequences of Jong-su in her car trailing Ben's sleek black Porsche.  As in Vertigo, Seoul like San Francisco seems increasingly mysterious and enigmatic.  Ben's motives are impossible to ascertain -- we see him driving into a desolate area with abandoned quarries and farms and, then, peering down at a half-empty reservoir.   In many respects, the movie's encrypted tone and its involute characters resemble elements of films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, including most notably Once upon a Time in Anatolia, a picture also obsessed with sunsets, twilight, and the passage of time.  (Of course, another influence is Antonioni's vanished girl in L'Avventura.)  The picture is full of odd indirections, hints and clues -- although we don't know what the clues mean.  In one scene, mostly shot in a mirror, Jong-su goes to a dance studio and watches people performing gestures that look like Tai Chi.  The dancers sinuously wiggle their fingers and arms in the air, the same gesture that Hae-mi made when she danced naked to the setting sun.  The dancers also clap their hands to their hearts with the same gesture made by Ben when he tells Jong-su that he needs to live with more passion.  The plot suggests that Ben and Jong-su are doubles of some sort -- we see Jong-su, for instance, fantasizing himself as a child watching a burning greenhouse (the greenhouse seems a screen memory for his father demanding that the child burn his mother's clothing); Ben takes up reading Faulkner and seems strangely drawn to Jong-su.  A political allegory is faintly suggested -- the cosmopolitan Ben and the intensely introverted Jong-su seem to represent the two Korean states.  First, Jong-su possesses the beautiful woman, then, Ben -- and, then, together, it seems, they act to destroy her.  This political subtext of competition for what may be viewed as the soul of Korea is, further, suggested by North Korean propaganda bleated out over the border near Jong-su's desolate farm. 

Burning is long and, throughout, nothing much seems to be going on.  It's not a flawless picture -- the subplot involving Jong-su's father is not clearly articulated and a scene in which Jong-su meets with his mother adds nothing to the film and is hard to understand.  But the picture expands in your imagination.  You can't get it out of your mind and many of its images persist in your head days after you saw the film.  It's quite extraordinary. 

Red Angel

Japanese war films, of course, have a different orientation from pictures made in this genre in Hollywood.  A Hollywood war movie, often, laments the destruction of handsome and courageous young men -- war is tragic because it destroys human capital of high value.  Since Americans see their wars as just and, even, inevitable, the pity is that achieving victory has such a high cost. (This is the burden of Spielberg's execrable Saving Private Ryan.)  From the losing side, Japanese war films focus an something more unsettling:  war turns men into animals and so the creatures that are slaughtered on the battlefield aren't even human any more.  By the time, the war destroys them, soldiers have absconded from the human race.  This is gist of Kon Ichikawa's harrowing Fires on the Plain, Kazuo Hara's terrifying documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on, and Yasuza Masumura's Red Angel.  Released in 1966, Red Angel is an extraordinarily savage account of Japan's war in China.  Any summary of the horrors chronicled by the movie will seem risible.  In fact, Red Angel projects an eerie sense of utter detachment -- like most large-scale Japanese films, the movie is beautifully shot and Red Angel's exquisite compositions designed for extreme wide-screen format are ingenious and, even, poetic.  Masumura uses the big screen to highlight areas of action while staging events in deep focus, far from the camera.  One of his signature shots shows a tile roof with vegetation growing in rifts between the tile shingles -- the plants twitch and wiggle in the wind:  it's unsettling like centipedes half emerging from the dark places where they live.  In the upper right corner of the DaieiScope image dominated by the tile roof, we see a corpse lying face-down in a puddle of blood -- the man has just killed himself by leaping off the roof.  The film's stance of omniscient indifference is mirrored in the performance by the stoic heroine, the nurse Sakura Nishi (played by the beautiful Ayako Wakao -- "Sakura", her name, means Cherry Blossom.)  Nishi goes through the film's hell with serene equanimity -- in fact, her libido is intact despite the horrors that she endures and she even falls in love during her nightmare experiences.  At the end of the movie, the sexually rapacious Nishi is, both figuratively and literally, the only survivor. 

To detail the film's plot is to risk comedy.  There's no backstory and no peace-time.  We're pitched into hell headfirst and in media res.  Nishi is assigned to a hospital in Tientsin where she is supposed to minister to a ward full of TB victims.  Many of the soldiers seem to be malingering and, within the film's first ten minutes, Nishi is violently gang-raped by a group of patients.  When she complains to the matron, she is told that Sakamoto, the ring-leader has perpetrated two other gang-rapes on nurses and, therefore, is going to be discharged to the front lines.  Sakamoto petulantly complains that Nishi has sentenced him to death.  Nishi is, then, transferred to a field hospital near the battlefields.  Periodically, trucks arrive full of mangled soldiers.  There's no anesthesia and not enough staff to deal with the horribly injured men.  Combat surgery has reverted to American Civil War standards -- the head surgeon, Dr. Okabe, spends his days and nights lopping off limbs while Nishi struggles to hold the howling victims down.  Wards are carpeted with writhing soldiers many of them begging to be killed.  Buckets fill up with arms and legs and the floor is ankle-deep in blood.  In one protracted scene, Okabe hacks off someone's leg at the thigh, the soundtrack treating us to bellowed screams and the sound of the bone-saw cutting through the wounded man's femur.  The rapist Sakamoto turns up, shot through the belly.  He accuses Nishi of engineering his death and she pleads with Okabe to give the man a transfusion.  Okabe agrees if Nishi will come to his office alone late at night.  (Sakamoto dies anyway, an orderly denouncing his corpse as a "waste of valuable blood." )  Okabe turns out to be sexually impotent although he orders Nishi to sleep with him -- his principal solace is morphine.  Nishi drinks wine with him and, then, shoots him up.  We see hundreds of dead soldiers lying in a courtyard where other men are snipping off their dog tags.  After a stint at the field hospital, Nishi gets sent back Tientsin.  Back in the surgical ward, Nishi meets a young soldier who asks her to "help (him) urinate" -- he's a double amputee with arms cut off at the shoulders.  This soldier, Private Onihara, tells Nishi that the more badly wounded soldiers, particularly double amputees, are kept in the hospital in China long after they have healed -- they can't be sent home for fear of demoralizing the folks back in Japan.  Onihara asks for "relief" from  his sexual urges -- Nishi gives him a sponge bath and masturbates him to climax.  (It's astonishing to recall that this film was released in 1966).  Nishi likes Onihara and, with the connivance of the understanding matron, takes him to a hotel where she has sex with him.  She tells Onihara that this can never happen again.  Onihara is pathetically grateful but, then, throws himself off a tower and dies.  (The matron notes that his death earns him a promotion, he's no longer Private Onihara but Private First Class Onihara.)  Nishi is sent back to the field hospital where she continues her perverse affair with Dr. Okabe.  We see lots of graphic close-up surgery -- at one point, she digs 160 bullets out of smashed bodies in the course of 24 hours.  Dr. Okabe speaks the film's moral:  "These soldiers aren't human beings.  They're just weapons."  We see one casualty who has been gutted -- he swallowed a coded message and the Chinese ripped open his belly to get it. Dr. Okabe proclaims that the man is a hero, but a shot of his contorted features is enough to undercut this sentiment.  Another soldier intentionally allows maggots to infest his wounds so that he will lose his leg and be shipped home.  (He doesn't know, apparently, that official policy is to not send home amputees.)  Dr. Okabe is called to the front lines.  Nishi who loves him goes along with another nurse.  At this point, the film takes a strange right-hand turn.  Both Okabe and Nishi become zealots in the Japanese cause, at this point really just a death-cult.  The director's perspective toward their increasingly patriotic and gung-ho rhetoric is uncertain -- it's not clear whether he approves, disapproves, or is showing a queasy mixture of both attitudes.  Certainly, the context in which this patriotic sentiment is displayed is particularly horrific -- the protagonists are at a squalid outpost where one of the three "comfort women" has cholera.  The bedraggled "comfort women" are half-crazed, haggard, and physically decrepit.  Masumura shows that cholera is a worse way to die than being shattered by bombs and bullets -- the images of the blackened and dying comfort woman are the most horrific thing in the film and the soundtrack is lush with the sound of vomiting and explosive diarrhea.  Ultimately, just about everyone dies of cholera at the moment that the Chinese are implementing a big offensive.  Nishi sleeps with Dr. Okabe and revives his manhood -- apparently, he's able to achieve an erection with her.  (We gets lots of necrophiliac-looking sex scenes.)  She ties him up and refuses his fix of morphine.  He thrashes around for five hours and but seems to kick the habit.  Then, they engage in weird sex games:  Nishi dresses in Dr. Okabe's uniform and orders him around.  Dr. Okabe has his phallus back but this has just turned him into a bellicose warrior.  As the Chinese attack, he rushes to the battle-line arming Nishi as well and proclaiming that they will fight to the death.  There's a big mortar attack and they get their wish -- everyone but Nishi is killed.  She wakes up in a crater and finds that everyone is dead and has been stripped of their clothing.  A Japanese patrol arrives but Nishi warns them off, shouting that there is cholera in the ruined and smoking compound.  The Japanese troops back away.  (The irony is that the victorious Chinese have stripped the bodies of clothing that is undoubtedly infected with cholera and that their victory will kill them all as well.)  Nishi finds the naked corpse of Dr. Okabe, his hand clutching a banzai sword. 

It's hard to know what to make of any of this.  The film is tightly claustrophobic -- even the battle scenes are occluded by black smoke and seem to take place in a closet.  The hospitals are visualized as either infernal writhing masses of tortured men or tiny squalid rooms. The audience feels a palpable sense of relief when we are shown the trucks bumping across the wind-swept moors between the front and Tientsin.  The love scenes are gloomy with chiaroscuro -- we see fragments of limbs both in the operating rooms and during the sex sequences.  Sometimes, Masumura shoots through mosquito nets to give his images an elegant grainy texture.  In the death-by-cholera sequences, the camera is located in a mass grave and buried by troops throwing rigid corpses into the pit.  The film is so appalling that I can't really recommend it, but the picture has the courage of its foul convictions -- it's completely convincing.  Red Angel makes Saving Private Ryan look like a confection by Jane Austen.         

Treasure Island (1934)

More than fifty film versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island exist -- the story has been staged on alien planets, as an anime featuring cartoon animals, by Disney, and in a TV version starring Orson Welles.  This 1934 MGM adaptation is impressively mounted, well cast, and directed in a craftsmanlike, if pedestrian, manner by Victor Fleming.  (Fleming later directed Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.)  Fleming's project was a prestige picture for the studio and a top-notch cast was assembled for the film:  Lionel Barrymore plays the cowardly, ranting Billie Bones; the child star, Jackie Cooper, is cast as the plucky protagonist, Jim Hawkins; Wallace Beery chews up the scenery as the sinister sea-cook, Long John Silver.  Treasure Island, as a novel, succeeds on the basis of its anarchic energy -- the book is a boy's fantasy come to life, full of outrageous cruelty, violence, and terror.  Fleming is too cautious a film-maker, too solicitous of his stars, to authorize the sort of devil take the hindmost approach that this material demands.  His direction is a little bit predictable and, except for some perverse turns by the pirates of the Spanish Main, there's not much of interest in the film.  Furthermore, the movie's ending doesn't work and casts a shadow on the picture as a whole.

As everyone knows, Jim Hawkins works as a serving boy at the Admiral Benbow Inn in seaside Dorset.  A drunk and elderly sailor appears, bullies everyone, and, then, is cowed by the virtuous and brave Judge Livesy (Otto Kruger).  This sailor, Billy Bones, is on the run from a vicious one-legged pirate -- the drunken Bones has a treasure map in his sea-chest.  A mob of pirates attacks the Inn and Jim Hawkins finds himself in possession of the treasure map.  Judge Livesy and Squire Trelawny outfit a sea-going vessel, the Hispaniola, retain a bold captain, Admiral Smollett (played by the dour and intimidating Lewis Stone) and they sail for the desert island where the pirate treasure is hidden.  Unfortunately, the pirate, Long John Silver, has been hired as a sea-cook.  Silver infiltrates the crew with his own pirates and, on the voyage to the treasure island, several of the sailors loyal to Smollett, Trelawny, and Jim Hawkins who is now the ship's boy, are murdered.  At the treasure island, the pirate crew led by Long John Silver mutinies and many of the good guys are killed.  There are several pitched battles, including a siege at a stockade on the island.  Jim Hawkins cuts the Hispaniola mooring and ship goes adrift, crashing onto the island.  He meets a castaway, Ben Gunn, a poor emaciated fellow who looks very much like the castaway that sometimes appeared as a non sequitur in the old Monty Python comedies.  Gunn has hidden the treasure in a cave.  There's more fighting and the pirates are vanquished.  Long John Silver is locked in a cage and faces the gallows.  At the end of the movie, he makes a maudlin appeal to Jim Hawkins.  The boy admires the pirate's courage and charisma.  So he lets the villain escape.  The film ends with one-legged pirate rowing away from the Hispaniola in the darkness, setting up a sequel that Stevenson seems to have planned, but never wrote. 

Stevenson's novel creates a lingering and tense ambiguity about Jim Hawkins' actions and allegiances.  Hawkins is fundamentally a good boy, dutiful and obedient.  But he seems to succumb at times to Long John Silver's dashing, if brutal, magnetism.  Stevenson's book is luridly violent but it's real suspense involves the conflict in Jim Hawkins' soul -- should he cleave to the vicious, but liberating Long John Silver, a free man in all respects, or is it better to remain a servant of polite and law-abiding society?  Fleming doesn't really understand this dynamic and the end of the movie degenerates into mawkish sentimentality -- Wallace Beery made five pictures with the child actor, Jackie Cooper, starting with The Champ (1931), a boxing movie.  The formula is always the same:  Beery plays a gruff, hard-nosed tough-guy who finds his humanity in his relationship with an adoring waif.  Treasure Island was the fourth in this series of films and, at the end, when Long John Silver talks his way out of the cage and escapes, we seem to be seeing a reprise of earlier scenes involving the brusque hoodlum with a heart of gold and the orphaned kid.  Here it doesn't work because the stakes are higher -- Long John Silver doesn't have a heart of gold; he's an egotistical, monstrous mass murderer.  So when the kid starts sobbing and lets him escape, we're more than a little alarmed.  The genre elements in the other films suddenly take over this picture and the movie works itself out in a predictable way -- but it's disorienting to see the villain blithely allowed to escape.  (Stevenson avoided this problem by having the deranged Billy Gunn release Long John Silver.) 

Fleming's direction is stolidly unimaginative.  There is intrinsic grandeur in the shots involving the Hispaniola, a wonderful-looking sailing ship with towering masts and billowing sails.  Many of the shots use poorly integrated rear projection.  The villainous pirates are picturesque.  Fleming gets a sense of Stevenson's raw violence in an early scene in which Blind Pew is run over, carnage staged in not one but two big close-up as his belly is crushed by the wheel of a carriage.  But later, Fleming dilutes the violence -- of course, this is required by the movie's maudlin ending.  There are some stirring, if brief, combat scenes shot in a jingoistic way -- I don't recall Stevenson making a big deal about the hoisting of the Union Jack.  (Fleming seems to be reverting to the world-view in other action films in this era, particularly George Stevens' Gunga Din.)  The best thing in the picture is the unsettling "Dandy Dawson", a pedophile pirate (played by Charles Bennett) who seems enamored with the girlish-looking Jim Hawkins (the boy has an unfortunate hairdo complete with bangs). In one scene, he appraisingly leers at Jim, scanning him from head-to-toe with obviously lustful intent.  It's scary and funny at the same time. 

Wanda

I suppose its heretical to compare Barbara Loden's self-consciously austere Wanda (1970) to TV sit-coms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and That Girl, but there is a meaningful connection.  Both of the sit-com involve a young woman who finds herself, more or less, alone in the world -- she has "to make it on her own" as the theme song tells us.  Wanda starts with a similar situation -- in the first ten minutes of the movie, she gets divorced and surrenders custody of her children.  Alone and penniless, she must fend for herself in a hostile world.  The TV shows were comedies and, at times, Wanda is very funny in a wholly dead-pan way.  At the time, these shows were produced, a man alone was nothing remarkable -- men in TV shows and movies were supposed to be proud, rugged loners.  But a woman without a man, without children, and without any sort of family was a strange anomaly, worthy of the sort of close attention afforded by a TV series or a feature film. 

Wanda is supposed to be scrupulously documentary, but, in fact, the micro-budget film (made for $115,000 and shot on 16 mm) is expressionistically fanciful.  In the first couple shots, we see Wanda bunking on her sister's couch -- the home has a towering heap of anthracite about 100 feet outside the front door.  An old hillbilly lady sits at her window watching the looming mountain of black coal fingering her rosary and, when people step out the front door, they're standing in some kind of open pit coal mine.  (I can't believe any house stood that close to an active coal mine -- it's a bit like Rotwang's  house in Metropolis, a Gothic gingerbread hut plunked down in the middle of a huge, gleaming city.)  In one scene, Wanda walks aimlessly across a vast desolate field of black, shattered anthracite -- she wears an incongruous white pants suit, all the better to stand out against the nightmare desolation where she is strolling.  Where is she going?  Why has she chosen this path?  Won't her white clothes get smudged by the coal dust?  The landscape is obviously symbolic, an image for the desolation in which Wanda finds herself trapped.  Later, she appears in court where she tells the astonished judge that her kids are better off with her soon-to-be ex-husband.  The kids and all her ex-husband's kin are sitting in the courtroom.  (Of course, the Judge would not allow the children to be present for a hearing of this kind.)  During her court appearance, Wanda has her hair in curlers under a frowsy scarf.  Throughout the film, Wanda is shown to be conscious of her appearance -- she likes to look well-groomed although she has trouble with her huge mane of blonde hair.  Thus, her appearance in court in curlers, although metaphorically effective, doesn't make any sense in realistic terms.  When Wanda and her criminal companion stop in an open field near a stream, a couple of dogs come up to nuzzle them and a local teenager is flying a radio-controlled plane in circles overhead -- the plane, I suppose, represents the idea of flight and liberation.  Later, when one of the barroom hustlers with whom she associates tries to rape her, the incident occurs in a brilliantly red convertible -- the camera luxuriates in the velvety red upholstery in the car.  This is symbolic or ecstatic realism -- in the last three or four shots in the film, the imagery seemed strangely familiar to me and I searched my memory for where I had seen this kind of thing before:  desolate wastelands, extreme long shots, grainy images of the inside of bars shot in natural light, homely extras obviously recruited in taverns and local street-corners, the "pathetic fallacy" -- that is, visionary-looking landscapes.  Then, it came to me -- the pictures looks like some of Werner Herzog's films, particularly his documentary-style movie shot mostly in central Wisconsin, Stroszek.  Several of the actors in Wanda seem to be partially mentally retarded.  One scene is filmed at a religious theme park called Holyland a place with a miniature Jerusalem and catacombs where a tour guide points out niches where martyrs were buried.  These elements are not conventionally realistic -- they are like the dowdy tourist attractions in the last scene of Stroszek in which a baffled highway patrolman says:  "We've got a suicide on the chairlift and the chicken won't stop dancing." 

After her divorce, Wanda goes to a bar, gets picked-up by a traveling salesman, who is only too anxious to ditch her the next morning -- she gets a Dairy Queen cone for her troubles.  Wandering around a Latino neighborhood, she takes refuge in a Spanish-language theater where someone loots her purse when she falls asleep.  When she goes into a seedy bar to use the toilet, it just happens that a robbery is underway -- the bandit is a well-dressed man with a scar transecting his face:  he wears tinted glasses and chomps on big cigars.  The man takes Wanda with him and they steal a few cars and rob some convenience stores -- all of this is shown in a grim, matter-of-fact way.  (Loden intended the film as a rebuke to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde.) The criminal slaps Wanda now and then, tells her not to talk, and bullies her -- but he also buys her clothing to make her look pretty.  (Of course, the fundamental incongruity in the movie is that Wanda is played by Barbara Loden, one of the screen's greatest beauties -- she took the role of the Marilyn Monroe figure on Broadway in Miller's After the Fall.)  The crook plans a big heist.  But he and Wanda are totally inept.  (She ends up getting stopped by cop on the street and has to timidly ask directions from him as to the whereabouts of the bank she and crook -- she calls him Mr. Dennis -- are going to rob.)  The bank heist is a ludicrous failure.  Mr. Dennis gets gunned down by about thirty cops who rush to the bank after his idiotic plot (it involves a dummy bomb and hostages) goes wrong.  Wanda is so nondescript that she just walks away from the scene.  Another guy hustles her in a bar and, then, tries to rape her in a quarry.  She fights back, escapes, and we see her crying where she is hiding in a scrubby, dark forest.  Wanda walks into a nearby town.  There's a bar in which a fiddler seems to be playing variations on "The Orange Blossom Special".  She stands outside for awhile, afraid to enter.  Then, a showy brunette in a red dress invites her into the tavern.  In the last shot, we see Wanda sitting among a bunch of mountain-folk drinking beer as the fiddler and his combo play an archaic-sounding dance tune.  The camera freezes the shot and we get to admire her perfect features and tower of blonde hair in the granular-looking air of the dim smoky bar captured on 16 mm film. 

Wanda has no music and very little dialogue.  At one point, Wanda says:  "I don't want anything."  Mr. Dennis replies:  "If you don't want anything then you won't have anything.  And if you don't have anything, you might as well be dead.  You're not even a citizen of the United States."  This more or less states the theme of the movie. A couple of times, Wanda says:  "I'm just no good."  The movie resounds in your memory and is better recalled than watched.  What makes the picture remarkable, of course, is Barbara Loden's performance -- she's completely enigmatic, utterly passive, an empty vessel onto which we project our emotions.  I think it must be a rare feat of acting to appear so utterly vacant. 

The Criterion disk has several interesting features including a very uncomfortable interview on the Dick Cavett Show.  Loden is imperturbable, again eerily vacant, and totally oppositional.  Everything Cavett says, she opposes or objects to.  When Cavett asks her about her childhood and suggests that she was very poor, she replies that she wasn't poor at all.  He tells the audience that she grew up in Appalachia.  "No, no, it wasn't Appalachia," she says.  "It was the mountains in North Carolina."  Then, she makes a distinction no one else has ever made.  "Appalachia is Scranton and East Pennsylvania.  I'm from the mountains of North Carolina."  Loden was married to Elia Kazan.  She performed with Ernie Kovacs and did slapstick comedy on his show.  Wearing a gorilla mask, she was one of the Nairobi Trio.  Wanda is a remarkable first film -- it's not a masterpiece by any means, but it shows real imagination and craftsmanship.  When Cavett notes that she had a crew of only three, she says -- "It's much easier to make a movie that way.  You don't need twenty people standing around doing nothing."  Tragically, she died in 1980 at 48 after a long battle with breast cancer.  She is a precursor Kelly Reichert -- who knows what she might have accomplished had she lived as long as Werner Herzog.   

Flesh and the Devil

Flesh and the Devil is a silent melodrama released in 1926.  The film established Greta Garbo as an important Hollywood star.   The picture was exuberantly directed by Clarence Brown and remains remarkably entertaining.  Brown's esthetic seems to have been that a movie had to deliver a thrill, a rapturous love scene, or a belly-laugh about every five minutes -- he crams the picture with all sorts of business and the mise-en-scene is fantastically ingenious.  Silent films were invariably effectively edited -- most pictures of this era feature short shots, many of them pictorially striking, cut into fast-paced narrative montage.  Flesh and the Devil looks great and it moves like a thoroughbred race horse.

Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the German author whose story affords the basis for Murnau's Sunrise, the film's plot involves an irresistibly beautiful woman who ensnares men, seemingly by accident, and destroys their lives.  Garbo plays the femme fatale and her performance is subtle -- she's both tantalizing and sympathetic.  It's as if she can't help herself.  Silent movie vamps sometimes slump their shoulders and move as if boneless -- the vamp is a serpent in the garden of blissful marriage.  Garbo adopts this habitus toward the end of the film, but she's also assertive and dominates the sequences in which she is featured.  Her co-star (and real life lover) John Gilbert is a vapid, if handsome, foil to her seductive wiles.  But she's clearly in command and Brown's camera dotes on her pale features, so perfect as to seem almost abstract.  Her seductiveness isn't carnal notwithstanding the film's lurid title -- it's more abstract, pre-Raphaelite, and, indeed, almost Platonic.  Her face is the idea of a face:   the visage that is the ideal from which all beauty originates. 

Flesh and the Devil has a clever plot that Brown works out with laudable concinnity.  Two chums from boyhood, Leo (John Gilbert) and Ulrich Eltz are together in the military, serving as cadet-hussars in Rhineland cavalry.  (The film is set in an operetta-picturesque Germany with castles and medieval gates and great manor houses -- the movie is a showpiece of matte effects, that is painting images on the camera's lens to create the effect of towering mountains or Heidelberg castles.) The first twenty minutes of the picture is an entertaining comedy involving mischievous behavior by the youthful Leo and Eltz.  (On KP duty, we see them shoveling manure that literally steams, creating photogenic images notwithstanding the rather mundane subject.)  Returning home to their manors, the boys sail along the mighty Rhine and pass an island that they have dubbed "The Isle of Friendship" -- as little boys Leo and Eltz became blood brothers under a marble monument to two friends, young men clutching at their hearts as they hold hands.  Of course, the viewer has a foreboding that nothing good will come of this -- particularly since Leo has become enamored with a gorgeous young noblewoman that he has glimpsed in the train station.  Eltz' s kid sister secretly loves Leo, but he ignores, or worse patronizes, her.  The two friends, and the young girl, attend a ball where Leo dances with the mysterious woman he saw at the train station, Felicitas von Rhaden.  The two leave the dance-floor for a tryst in a sort of enchanted bower.  As foreplay, they pass a cigarette back and forth between their gorgeous rim-lit profiles.  Then, Leo lights the match and it casts a bewitching glow on Felicitas' pale features.  From the outset, she has cast smoky-looking bedroom eyes on Leo.  They kiss, Garbo submerging her lips in Gilbert's mouth -- this is all filmed in the utmost close-up in intense chiaroscuro and the kiss has an electric charge that is agonizingly erotic.  In the next shot, we see Leo, a sort of kept man, lounging with his head and glittering eye on Felicitas' bosom -- she looks like Salome caressing the head of John the Baptist.  They are on a day-bed, but there is a larger bed under a tent of drapery visible behind them.  Of course, Felicitas is married and there's an embarrassing scene when Count von Rhaden arrives home -- although Garbo is too proud to show much in the way of shame or abasement.  The inevitable duel follows and, of course, the youthful hussar, Leo, shoots von Rhaden dead.  The German armed forces require him to go abroad to colonies in Africa for five years (in recompense for the killing) -- in fact, he's gone for three years.  Von Rhaden wished to spare his name from scandal and so he has sworn to Leo that the true cause of the duel, the unfaithful Felicitas, not be named.  The duelists have claimed that the affair of honor related to gambling, a card game that went wrong.  Leo goes to Africa but first tells his blood brother that he must befriend and help the bereaved Countess von Rhaden.  Needless to say, you don't need a map to know where this is now going.  Disastrously, the honorable Leo has not told Ulrich Eltz about the affair with Felicitas. Three years later, Leo returns to Germany only to find Eltz married to Felicitas.  He tries to stay away from the couple, but she comes to his castle during a snow storm and lures him into a rustic hut where there is a big fire burning, all the better to cast her beautiful features in flickering chiaroscuro.  She seduces Leo again leading to a duel fought in knee deep snow on the Isle of Friendship -- the two blood brothers point dueling pistols at one another standing in front of the stone monument to friendship.  Garbo learns of the duel, rouses herself to run across the frozen Rhine to stop the men from killing one another.  The ice breaks under her and she falls into the dark water.  By this time, Leo and Ulrich Eltz have decided that the fickle Countess is not worth the bloody demise of their friendship.  They embrace in hip-deep snow.  The film's last shot shows the shattered ice on the river with a couple of big bubbles rising to the surface.

Clarence Brown throws everything at this tale but the kitchen sink.  He films Garbo by firelight, in moonlight, and through panes of glass streaming with water.  The first duel is filmed in long shot in silhouette against a misty landscape.  When the shots are fired, both combatants are off-camera.  The film, then, cuts to an image of Garbo being measured for a widow's veil.  The second duel involves a spectacular point-of-view shot aiming down the barrel of a dueling gun that would have made Hitchcock proud.  There's outré imagery involving a demonic Lutheran pastor who knows the cause of the duel and haunts the action.  In his church, Felicitas takes the chalice from which Leo has just received the sacrament and voluptuously licks the edge of the vessel, her eyes half-shut in a swoon.  The camera-work is ultra-expressive featuring gauzy mists, torrential rain and blizzard-like snowstorms.  Several moving camera shots have a visceral effect -- one two-shot featuring the evil Pastor Voss and Leo concludes in jarring dolly into a closer shot of the two men.  You can feel the portentous camera-movement in your belly.  (Voss inserts his cigarette in some kind of eccentric cigarette-holder and sucks in the smoke -- everyone smokes so that the camera can better luxuriate in the foamy and erotic mists haloing the characters.)  Strangely, the movie indulges in burlesque mocking the Teutonic plot and characters -- there are long German words flashed on the screen, a gag involving Voss seeing double (it's really just twins but it puts the drunkard off his beer) and another gag involving four dachshunds waddling one after another out of a tiny dog house.  If Brown isn't tugging at your heart strings, he's engineering vaudeville gags.  The film is pretty explicit about the love affair -- Garbo's lips literally sink into Gilbert's face and, in one scene, he fantasizes about Felicitas, a state of mind resulting in a shot of throbbing pistons on a train, with Garbo's face floating over all the plunging and thrusting while the letters of her name seem to form in steam.  This is an iconic film and far better than I expected it to be -- it's trash, but trash of a very high order.