War and Peace

Sergei Bondarachuk's War and Peace (1967) is a massive, grandiose production, completed as Mosfilm and premiered in the West in 1968 -- I saw the film at the Suburban World Theater in 1969 when I was fourteen:  the six hour move was shown in two installments on consecutive weekends.  (The movie was awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1968).  At the time of its release, I was astounded by the picture and still admire it immensely -- although, perhaps, there is a mixture of unhealthy nostalgia in the regard that I have for the movie.  It has been recently re-released on a Criterion Blue Ray and this version seems to be complete, about two hours longer than what was shown in the theaters in Western Europe and America.

Bondarachuk was anxious, it seems, demonstrate his knowledge of advanced film techniques and make the move as up-to-date in style as possible.  Accordingly, War and Peace contains many jump cuts, shots alternating from extreme long shots to close-ups, slow motion and fast motion, freeze frames and sequences shot in different types of film stock.  In many ways, the handheld camera and the quick, jerky editing betrays a fascination with the French New Wave -- in fact, I think the film's style can be fairly characterized as an extravagant blend of New Wave pyrotechnics and old school Soviet film making evoking Sergei Eisenstein.  Often Bondarachuk uses ironic analytical montage, for instance, in a sequence alternating between scenes showing the death of Count Bezukhov and the Natasha's father doing the "Daniel Cooper" dance at her family's palatial estate.  Furthermore, the color scheme often seems influenced by the strange palette used in the technicolor sequences in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Part Two).  Faces appear waxen and cadaver-white against glowing backgrounds infused with deep greens and purples -- Prince Andrei stalks through the soirees like a zombie, pale and white amidst the plumage of the other guests; the scenes in which Count Bezukhov is shown dying are clearly derived from imagery in Ivan the Terrible and have a horror-film expressionism about them. After the film's ecstatic and pantheistic invocation of Mother Russia's verdant landscape, we see the famous party scene that begins Tolstoy's novel -- the second shot in the sequence, showing dandified aristocratic Russians in a stark and artificial tableaux is pure agit-prop and could have been extracted from a film made in the twenties:  the image has a weird silent movie powdery sort of appearance.  But, in general, the film is pretty apolitical -- it's a prestige product for export and not intended to be offensively Communist. 

The first section of War and Peace involves Prince Andrei.  Inevitably, the viewer who knows Tolstoy's book looks to the film for exemplary highlights -- that is, favorite passages as staged by the director.  We see madcap drinking parties, Andrei and Pierre wandering the white night at St. Petersburg, Pierre's stilted courtship of the bovine Helene as well as Pierre's first encounter with the radiant Natasha -- the second half of the film shows the battles at Schoengraben and Austerlitz (these were cut into a single sequence in earlier American versions of the film but here are specifically delineated):  of course, these sequences are majestic and disturbing at the same time.  Bondarachuk captures Tolstoy's view that war is fundamentally alien to human nature and the battle scenes have a terrible inhuman and science fiction-like aspect.  The first part of the movie, about an hour and forty-five minutes long concludes with Napoleon on horseback surveying the fallen and paralyzed Andrei, draped in a flag that he was carrying when he was shot, remarking "A splendid death."  (In fact, on additional viewing, I find that the first part of the film -- "Movie One" as it is named -- extends for another forty minutes, encompassing the harrowing death of Andrei's wife in childbirth, Pierre's duel and, then, his separation from his wife, Helene, some philosophical dialogue with Prince Andrei (illustrated by more swooning aerial shots of the watery Russian landscape) and, at last, Andrei's first encounter with Natasha.

The second movie is entitled Natasha Rostova.  It's shorter than the first installment and follows Natasha's adventures between about 1807 and 1812.  There are no battle scenes in this part of the film which is about an hour and 38 minutes.  Bondarchuk pulls out all the stops, however, in the famous ballroom scene at the imperial palace and, then, stages some spectacularly melodramatic episodes involving Natasha's planned elopement with the serpentine Anatoly Kuragin (the brother of Pierre's wife, Helene).  After dancing with her at the Czar's ball, Andrei becomes infatuated with Natasha and proposes to her, after first soberly discussion the matter with the young woman's mother.  (His own elderly father, the fierce Prince Bolkonsky, is opposed to the union and makes himself ridiculous dramatizing this opposition.)  Andrei is concerned about Natasha's age and inexperience (appropriately enough) and puts off the marriage for one year.  Natasha is resentful and bored.  She spends the period waiting for her marriage to Prince Andrei by engaging in weird soothsaying activities, cross-dressing for sleigh parties, and riding to the hunt in a bravura scene involving a desperate wolf and packs of handsome-looking Borzoi hounds.  After the hunt, Natasha dances to the balalaika at her uncle's rustic chateau, another famous scene both in the novel and Russian cultural history -- in a voice-over Tolstoy's narrator marvels that this daughter of privilege, "raised by French governess" could be so "thoroughly and completely Russian in every fiber and vein" when she dances to the music made by peasant instruments.  At the opera, a highfalutin' affair that Tolstoy compares adversely to the folk music at the hunting cabin springing, as it were, from the Russian soul, Natasha's pretty head is turned by Anatoly Kuragin and she makes plans to elope with him.  These plans are thwarted by her family members who lock her in her rooms and repel the attack by Kuragin.  Pierre, who loves Natasha, almost beats Kuragin to death, but, then, buys him off.  Prince Andrei coldly concludes his relationship with Natasha,  Pierre declares his love for her and Napoleon, standing on a river bluff, admires three enormous columns of troops crossing the river into Russian -- the invasion is an event, Tolstoy says "both contrary to human reason and human nature."  A comet shines in the sky and the peasants think the end of the world is at hand.  Bondarchuk applies every possible film technique to this episode -- he uses split-screen both for grandiose effects (the treaty between Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and for intimate scenes:  Andrei and Natasha at their respective abodes excitedly telling others of their love.  There are long spooky scenes in which action just stops -- these equate to similarly weird and surreal sequences in the novel that dramatize Natasha's boredom waiting for the year to elapse before her nuptials with Andrei.  The wolf hunt filmed in an autumnal palette is spectacular -- the camera gliding along the tawny hillsides behind the horsemen and packs of ravening hounds.  There is much voice-over, mostly whispered asides by the characters -- Natasha, at the Ball, wondering if anyone will dance with her, Nicolai, her brother, hoping desperately to distinguish himself by taking the wolf, and, even, the wolf himself memorably speaking in a voice-over:  "Forward? Backward? It's all the same."  Tolstoy's art is to give everything voice and Bondarchuk follows the author's lead -- at times, the movie seems like a precursor to Terrance Malick:  the whispered voice-over asides, the half-spoken prayers on which we eavesdrop -- this technique is similar to the ubiquitous voice-overs in Malick's films, particularly The Thin Red Line.  Tolstoy's characteristic estrangement effects, his ability to make the familiar seen uncanny and bizarre, are hard to replicate on screen -- for instance, Tolstoy's novel describes the opera at which Natasha is seduced as if an anthropologist were patiently narrating the events to a Martian:  it's his thesis that the profoundly unnatural ambience of the opera seduces and almost ruins Natasha..  But this sort of thing can't be effectively caught on film -- film is too literal a medium for many of Tolstoy's estrangement effects and, of course, a movie can't really do justice to prose that is based, in large part, on irony.  Natasha, as played by the Bolshoi ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva is radiant and charming (she resembles Audrey Hepburn who played the same role in King Vidor's 1956 version) -- one can readily see why all the men in the film are in love with her.  It's a bold performance, like one of Griffith's heroines, she literally flits about scenes, dashing this way and that with youthful effervescent energy -- Bondarchuk takes this to the verge of what is plausible (it's an expressionist performance) but never tilts over into absurdity.

"Movie Three" as identified in the Criterion two-disk box is entitled 1812.  This installment is the shortest of the four pictures, clocking in at about 1 hour and 21 minutes.  About two-thirds of this episode involves the Battle of Borodino, an awesome if, somewhat, repetitive and obvious spectacle that seems to have involved tons of pyrotechnic ordinance and about half the Red Army (apparently, some scenes employ 130,000 extras).  Before the battle, we see the daunting Prince Bolkonsky who has now become senile -- he is confused and restless and dies begging forgiveness from his long- suffering daughter.  (No priests are anywhere in evidence at Bald Hills where the old man dies -- he's a man of the Enlightenment and an atheist.)  Pierre again expresses his love for Natasha and, then, wearing a ridiculous white top-hat and cream-colored suit departs for the Front. Bondarchuk's exhaustive presentation of the huge battle is consistent with Tolstoy's novel --  Borodino occupies about a hundred pages in most versions of the novel and Tolstoy took pains to present the battle on the basis of the best-existing historical accounts.  In many ways, the battle is central to Tolstoy's conflicting theses about history:  first, the chaotic fighting shows the idiocy of carefully devised military strategy (as Mike Tyson used to say:  "everyone's got a plan until you get hit in the face."); second the battle contrasts Napoleon's icy and inhuman calculus with the warmth of the Russian general Kutuzov.  Kutuzov is a big fat man, apparently a lecher, drunkard, and glutton  -- we see him lasciviously eyeing a plump serf who is holding a big roast chicken for him.  But Kutuzov is kind, cares about his men, and, ultimately, understands that battles are won by those who are willing to sacrifice themselves and are persuaded of the justice of their cause.  No one has invited the French to Russia and Kutuzov, who falls asleep at councils of war, gnaws on chicken during Borodino, frequently kissing people and weeping, vows that he will make the French "eat horsemeat."  Napoleon paces around giving orders while his armies of toy-like soldiers march up and down the green hills as orange explosions rivet the horizon.  The difference between the two men is that Napoleon thinks that he controls the battlefield; Kutuzov has no such illusions -- as the day progresses, the battle takes on a horrific life of its own, monstrously murdering men by the tens of thousands.  Bondarchuk stages the battle as a kind of pageant at first -- armies of men build trenches and embankments for artillery batteries, the icon of the Virgin of Smolensk is carried among the troops and Kutuzov himself kisses the ground beneath the ancient image, then, vast numbers of men form into groups of two or three hundred and march this way and that, all keeping in step, while cavalry darts back and forth over the green fields and cannons spout fire in all directions.  Bolkonsky's men are held in reserve.  (He has rejected Kutuzov's offer that he stay near him as a member of his staff -- Bolkonsky wants to be commanding his troops on the battlefield even though he knows the battle will likely kill him.)   As the battle scene progresses, the imagery becomes more agitated and confused -- ultimately, the screen roils with clouds of black-powder smoke, impenetrable walls of cordite fumes and fire billowing up over heaps of corpses.  In one long pan to the left, the camera tracks the embankment where batteries are firing, one after another, under lowering clouds of smoke and fire -- at the end of the tracking shot, one of the cannons rolls off the embankment almost hitting the camera as it explodes.  The camera, then, tracks to the right, a series of shots showing  cavalry attacking through walls of orange fire -- more batteries flash and dozens of horses smash to the ground pitching riders through the air.  In a burning village, the camera tracks to the right for hundreds of yards, rolling through fiery stables and houses, passing by duels between frenzied men with bayonets, ending in plumes of explosion and fire that fill the entire screen.  The sky darkens and still the nightmarish battle rages, chiaroscuro of fire and blue sub-aqueous shadows.  Bolkonsky is badly wounded.  Pierre's white hat and suit are smeared with mud and gore.  At a field hospital, Bolkonsky watches as surgeons ampute the leg of the screaming Anatoly Kuragin, his nemesis.  The battle is unlike anything ever shown on film and, certainly, a tremendous and horrifying assault on the audience (although it is not nearly as gory as a modern version would be) -- this was all done before any kind of CGI:  the explosions and burning villages at the horizon, the towering clouds and the fog of gunsmoke, the thousands of men running desperately in one direction and, then, another, all of this is palpably real -- this chaos was staged over what appears to be locations four and five miles deep and as many miles broad.  You can't tell who is killing whom and, of course, this is ultimately Bondarchuk's objective, that is, to render the whole thing as an incomprehensible chaos like a storm at sea or a volcano or earthquake.  The episode ends in intellectual chaos as well -- a voice-over representing Tolstoy proclaims two completely opposite and irreconcilable concepts:  Napoleon, an evil man, is the architect of all this violence, solely to blame for what is mass murder on an apocalyptic scale, and he is defeated because the Russians are good and merely defending their motherland.  But Tolstoy also declares:  the battle is beyond all human control and, in fact, represents the fact that history proceeds according to quasi-statistical rules:  there is no causation and so-called "great" men, despite their megalomaniacal urge to control things are the victim of supra-human forces unleashed, more or less, at random. 

The last film in the quartet of pictures comprising War and Peace as originally released in 1967 is called Pierre Bezukhov after the character whose story is threaded through the entire epic history and family chronicle -- Bezukhov is the homme moyen sensual whose adventures unify the novel and the film, a character who represents Tolstoy, I think, and serves as a surrogate for the audience as well.  War and Peace, in large part, is Pierre's search for metaphysical meaning among the tragic and stupefying chaos of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.  Unfortunately, a sort of fatal exhaustion afflicts the film's final hour and forty-five minutes -- Bondarchuk is faced with illustrating interior states of mind, conversions, and ecstatic revelations, that don't have clear visual correlates.  The attempt to portray what is essential invisible and deeply personal thwarts the mighty film's last episode and the viewer is left with a baffling series of images that seem rushed, tentative, and incompletely imagined. (I suspect that Tolstoy's Russian Orthodox piety exemplified in many passages near the end of the novel may have been suspect to the Soviet authorities and may have inhibited Bondarchuk's approach to this material.)  Whereas the first four hours of the film, and, even, within the limitations of battlefield spectacle, the third installment, seem to tell a story, the fourth episode in grandiose but, also, strangely vague and uninvolving.  The intense emotional connection to the characters forged in the first two films -- exemplified, I think, by Pierre's duel that is viscerally horrifying because of our fear that the hero will be killed or maimed -- now seems attenuated.  By this point, as well, some of Bondarchuk's visual devices have grown stale -- one of his trademark camera motions is to begin with the lens hovering high over the scene, usually a battle or pictorially spectacular landscape (for instance, the wolf hunt):  Bondarchuk launches the camera on what seems a zip-line soaring over the spectacle but also inexorably diving down into the chaos.  (In some instances, at least, twice by my count, these shots simulate cannon balls falling in a deadly trajectory to the earth and end in big explosions.)  He uses this showy camera device several times in this episode as well and, by this time, we've seen the dizzying zip-line descent from high overhead to the earth enough to be slightly jaded.  The shot is so showy and spectacular that repeating it a couple of times in each episode tends to defeat the point.  The destruction of Moscow by fire is a massive spectacle, shot with frenzied handheld camera that repeats the pattern of editing and imagery in the Borodino sequence -- what begins as a relatively comprehensible sequence of images ends in a roaring conflagration that fills the screen with pillars and clouds of fire.  This part of the film also feels a bit derivative -- Bondarchuk uses Goya as his model for some horrific execution by firing squad scenes -- the man are being massacred in a cabbage field.  He repeats Goyaesque compositions a little too readily and the images are too showy and "artistic" to have the terrible force that is intended.  (I compare to their detriment these scenes with the images of the partisans being murdered in Rossellini's Paisan -- there's nothing "artistic" about these pictures; they are strictly documentary and, therefore, all the more terrible because of their plainness.)  Pierre's death march as a French prisoner is not sufficiently horrific.  His interactions with the peasant Platon, from whom he learns something of the meaning of life, are reduced to a few allusions -- this makes Pierre's later ecstatic discovery that "man is made for happiness" ring a bit hollow.  This simple truth is something that Platon has established with his endless peasant proverbs -- this is another aspect of Tolstoy's novel that probably couldn't be filmed without a modern audience wanting to strangle the peasant sage.  Tolstoy was obsessed and terrified by death and he returns repeatedly to scenes involving dying characters -- people dream about their deaths and we see their visions.  Unfortunately, these images incline toward the bombastic and unpersuasive -- this is particularly true with respect to Prince Andrei's extended death scene.  There are many fine and memorable things in this part of the film -- Bondarchuk's instinct for imagery doesn't wholly desert him.  Natasha and Andre's sister, Princess Maria are, often, filmed against luminous glowing voids -- the effect is more than a little like icon images of saints hovering in a fog of gold.  A final scene showing the French staggering out of Russia in an endless beleagured column, a drizzle of frozen corpses in its wake, is horribly impressive, particularly when accompanied by a belligerent and pompous speech by Napoleon on the soundtrack.  Finally, an image of freezing soldiers congregating in great ragged circle around a bonfire embodies many of Tolstoy's themes, particularly those relating to the brotherhood of man, in a memorably spectacular shot.  But there's an awful lot of aerial photography of Mother Russia, lots of trees and flowers blowing in tempests, lots of enormous sky-scapes and fields through which huge rivers drain.  The last part of the movie labors inevitably under the memory of the atrocities of World War II and its unpleasantly jingoistic (and, therefore, not at all like Tolstoy) with respect to its rather vengeful patriotism.  And, then, the movie just comes full-stop to an end -- we don't even get to see Pierre and Natasha together in the final scenes. 

Deeply flawed, Bondarchuk's War and Peace establishes the standard for the film epic.  It contains things (mostly huge battle scenes) that will never be duplicated.  Some of the film is a folly and it is grandiose, of course, because of the way the Soviets produced movies.  But it retains (and rewards) the viewers attention richly enough for me to recommend that people devote the time necessary to watching (and arguing) with this film.  It is beyond doubt one of the most impressive adaptations of a great literary work ever attempted.

Film group note: I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur

I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur


A Dutiful Son

Jacques Tourneur was the son of a famous film maker, Maurice Tourneur.  Maurice Tourneur was born in Paris in 1876.  He appeared as an actor in the Paris Theater and, then, made some short films.  Some of these movies caught the attention of the Hollywood studios and Tourneur was recruited to work in the American film industry.  Beginning around 1914, he directed a number of silent films, almost all of them lost.  His style was said to be poetic, relying heavily on careful lighting and tinting effects.  His best received film was The Last of the Mohicans (1920), an artistic and box-office success although much of the film seems to have been actually directed by Clarence Brown – Tourneur suffered from ptomaine poisoning on location that side-lined him for much of the shoot.  (Maurice Tourneur also received critical accolades for his direction of an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlincks’ symbolic drama The Blue Bird).  Tourneur clashed with the studio bosses in 1926, walked off the set, and moved to France.  He directed a dozen or so films for various French studios, many of them highly regarded at the time but forgotten today.  His son, Jacques, whom his father called “Jack”, worked on some of his father’s French films as a cameraman and second unit director.  In 1934, Tourneur returned to Hollywood, where he had been raised, and immediately found work with the studios.  He directed a number of shorts and very low budget feature films, gradually achieving a reputation for no-nonsense dependability.

Maurice Tourneur was always considered eccentric.  In 1924, he wrote an essay in a film review magazine in which he declared that not only were films “not art”, they “would never be” – he justified this view based on the fact that films are made by committees of men who are beholding to a business that must compromise to sell the greatest number of tickets.  Notwithstanding this opinion, Tourneur later wrote a letter to Variety, praising his son “Jack’s” work for MGM and signing the correspondence “the Michelangelo of the movies” also known as “the Frank Sinatra of the Riviera.”  Maurice Tourneur was terribly injured in a car crash in 1948, the year that he made his last picture – a suitcase roped down atop his car came lose, fell onto the road, and, when Tourneur tried to retrieve it, another motorist ran over him.  His leg had to be amputated.

Maurice Tourneur lived until 1961, spending his last years translating American crime novels into French.  In 1951, Tourneur worked with an old actor who had been directed by his father in the 1919 film, The White Heather.  Tourneur told the old man that he would be “happy if he was half as great a director as his father.”

Digression: Albion, Nebraska – 1942

My mother detests cats.  She has been afraid of the creatures all of her life.  She attributes this phobia to a fright that she received in 1942.  She recalls that she went to a movie about a woman who turned into a cat and murdered people.  The movie appalled her and she left the theater shaken – she was, then, about six years old.  As she walked home, someone crept up behind her and threw a hissing and spitting cat at her.  That event marked her for life.

The movie that my mother attended was Cat People, Jacques Tourneur’s first horror film produced by Val Lewton for RKO.


Some doubts about the auteur theory

Who is the “author” of a film?  Movies are made by groups of people working under the supervision of directors, producers, studio bosses.  American film historians note that studios such as MGM or Paramount had “house-styles” – that is, a certain “look” with respect to camerawork, sets, and couture.  In most instances during the classic Hollywood era, the studio style was more obvious than the directorial flourishes and signature touches.  Of course, there were exceptions and film had director auteurs long before there was a fancy French word to name these artists: D. W. Griffith put his monogram on each intertitle, signing his films in that way, as did his competitor Thomas Ince.  Audiences were encouraged to enjoy the so-called “Lubitsch-touch” in the Viennese (and later Hollywood) director’s sophisticated sex comedies.  Preston Sturges and John Ford were bankable directors and their films were distributed under their names.  But, generally, the movies released by Hollywood were products, most often anonymously constructed as vehicles for the stars under contract to the studios.

In the late thirties, Tourneur worked for MGM under David O. Selznick.  He was assigned Second Unit work with Val Lewton, Selznick’s story editor, on A Tale of Two Cities.  It was a prestigious assignment: Tourneur was in charge of directing action sequences, some of them involving as many as 3000 extras.  With Lewton, he contrived spectacular scenes dramatizing the tumult of the French Revolution – in fact, the studio was so impressed that Tourneur and Lewton were given a special on-screen credit for “arranging...Revolutionary Sequences.”  Some historians think this credit was intended to give the film a greater cachet of authenticity because of Tourneur’s French name.  Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that the best things about the big and expensive Ronald Coleman historical epic are the second unit street-battles, the rioting and the storming of the Bastille.

Lewton was a Russian immigrant, born in Yalta and the son of a Jewish moneylender.  (His birth name was Vladimir Leventin.)  He came to the United States in 1909 and worked as a journalist.  He was an enthusiastic progenitor of “fake news” and, in 1920, was fired from a newspaper for inventing a story (something about the death of a truckload of kosher chickens) from the whole cloth.  Lewton formally studied journalism at Columbia and, then, worked writing pulp fiction.  His 1932 book, No Bed of Her Own was adapted into a risque pre-code film No Man of her Own.  Lewton had been working at MGM as a script doctor but quit the job when his novel became a best-seller.  He wrote three other novels without making much money and, then, returned to MGM where he was employed as story editor with Tourneur on A Tale of Two Cities and, later, Gone with the Wind.  (The famous scene in which Scarlett O’Hara walks from a train station into a field hospital where thousands of wounded men are lying on the ground – possibly the most famous crane-shot in film history – was invented by Lewton.)  Tourneur said that Lewton was “a dreamer.  He had the most fantastic ideas.  But I always had to talk him back to reality.”

In 1942, Lewton was lured away from MGM to work as a producer at RKO.  Lewton was paid $250 a week, told that he had to make horror films for less than $150,000 a picture, and advised that the titles for the films, selected to make the pictures as marketable as possible, were under the control of the studio.  No film was to be longer than 75 minutes – the pictures were devised as the B movie for double features.  Working within these constraints, Lewton produced nine horror films that are now regarded as among the greatest pictures ever made in that genre.  The first three pictures were directed by Jacques Tourneur: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943).  Also in 1943, RKO released under Lewton’s supervision, The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson) and The Ghost Ship, also directed by Robson.  In 1944, Lewton produced The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel to the extremely successful 1942 film that inaugarated the RKO horror cycle; The Curse of the Cat People was directed by Gunter von Frisch with the assistance of Robert Wise.  Between 1945 and 1946, Lewton produced three films with Boris Karloff, among that actor’s very best performances – Karloff said that Lewston had “restored his soul.”  The Karloff films are The Body Snatcher (directed by Robert Wise), The Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson) and Bedlam (Mark Robson).

Although these films are all ostensibly written by various hacks employed by RKO, no doubt exists that Lewton was responsible for the final script and supervised the direction of these movies so closely that they all bear the unmistakable traces of his style and sensibility.  (Several of the Karloff pictures are actually credited to Lewton – however, the credits are fanciful: Bedlam’s credits claim it was written by William Hogarth, the 18th century engraver of The Rake’s Progress – one of the prints in that series shows the notorious insane asylum.  Isle of the Dead is based on a painting by Arnold Boecklin.)  These films are all excellent, a quality product that is literate, suspenseful, and remarkably atmospheric given the poverty-row budgets within which Lewton worked.  And these films raise serious questions about “authorship” – it’s generally thought that the auteur with regard to the nine RKO horror pictures is Lewton.  This idea seems corroborated by the fact that several of the directors credited on the films were workmanlike but dull in their other work – Mark Robson and Robert Wise never did anything as good as their films made for Val Lewton.  Working in other conditions, their movies are efficiently directed but generally conventional and tediously inert.

Jacques Tourneur is a different case – he was a first-rate director in his own right.  After The Leopard Man, RKO split up Tourneur and Lewton, allowing Tourneur to work alone on several films.  Tourneur noted that the studio motivation was mercenary – “we were making so much money for RKO that they thought they would double their income by having us work separately.”  At RKO, Tourneur made Experiment Perilous (1944), a suspense film starring Hedy Lamar that is one of his best pictures.  In 1946, he directed Canyon Passage, a superb Western set in the Pacific Northwest.  Working with independent producers, Tourneur then made Out of the Past (1947), a quintessential film noir with Robert Mitchum.  Stars in my Crown, Wichita, and Great Day in the Morning are all excellent low-budget Westerns.  Anne of the Indies was made in 1951 for 20th Century Fox as was The Way of the Gaucho (1952) made in Argentina, both films highly regarded today.  Finally, in 1957, Tourneur directed The Night of the Demon in England, an extraordinary horror film based upon a story Montague R. James.  All of these films, and a half-dozen not listed, show that Tourneur was an extremely reliable and often brilliant director.  He is a film maker’s film maker – Martin Scorsese in particular reveres him.  Tourneur began drinking heavily at the end of his career and his last several pictures made in the early sixties are pedestrian.  Working in TV, he did, however, create one impressive episode for The Twilight Zone, “The Night Call” in 1963.

Tourneur died in 1977.  (Lewton had died from series of heart attacks in 1948.)  Looking back on his career, Tourneur said: “I’m a very average director.  I did my work the best I could; we’re all limited in one way or another.”  Asked what he thought his role would be in cinema history, he said: “Nothing, none.  There is nothing more evanescent that an image on celluloid.”

The leading exponent of auteur theory in American criticism is Andrew Sarris.  Sarris ranked Lewton as a third-rate director under the rubric “expressive esoterica.”  American auteur critics were unimpressed by Tourneur – he “lacks thematic coherence” and the only unifying principle in his work is “strict adherence to the text” (of the script).  In the late seventies, critics like Manny Farber expressed the idea of “termite” art – that is, low-cost, competent, popular film making that eschews grand ideas and grand statements of principle.  Tourneur, who worked successfully in all genres, was proclaimed as one of the best of the “termite” directors.  This remains his reputation today. 


I Walked with a Zombie – production notes

Lewton and Tourneur shot the film two months after completing Cat People.  (The movie was premiered in April 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio the home of the author who ostensibly inspired the film, Inez Wallace.)  The movie was shot before Cat People was released.  Production took place between October 26, 1942 and November 19, 1942 – the budget was described as “shoestring.”

The studio insisted on the lurid title, derived from a magazine article about voodoo in Haiti written by Inez Wallace for American Weekly Magazine.  Other than the title, the magazine article has nothing to do with the film.  Wallace’s story involves the assertion that plantation managers in Haiti made use of zombie-labor – that is, persons who had been drugged and hypnotized to the point that they had no volition of their own.  Lewton insisted on detailed research and spent several weeks studying voodoo while the script was being written.

The script, very loosely based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is credited to Ardel Wray and Curt Siodmak.  Lewton undoubtedly contributed to the final version of the script as actually filmed.

Ardel Wray was a woman script-writer who worked with Lewton on I walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam.  A former model, she first worked in the film industry as a script writer and story editor beginning in 1933.  She followed Lewton to RKO immediately after his arrival at that studio.  She wrote her last script for Lewton in 1945 when she was pregnant.  In 1948, she returned to the movie business and wrote a very highly regarded script for a film about Lucrezia Borgia – the movie was not produced. (She also wrote a film about the pirate Blackbeard, similarly never produced.)  In the early 1950's, she was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC during the McCarthy hearings on communism in Hollywood.  She refused to name names and was “grey-listed” – her name was taken off a film with Alan Ladd and, for twelve years, she was denied any screen credits.  Her appearance before HUAC was probably the result of her brief liaison with Dalton Trumbo and her   work with him on his notorious anti-war novel Johnny Got his Gun (1938).  In the sixties, she worked as a story editor and screenwriter for a number of television shows produced by Warner Brothers including 77 Sunset Strip.  She died 75 years old in 1983.

Curt Siodmak, the other screenwriter, was a German Jewish emigre to the United States.  He came from a mercantile Leipzig family and studied mathematics at the University of Berlin.  After graduation, he published several novels but with interested in producing films.  He invested in film royalties in a movie written by Billy Wilder and directed by his brother Robert Siodmak and Edward G. Ulmer, both later well-known for their work as directors in Hollywood.   The resulting film, made in 1929, Menschen am Sonntag (“People on Sunday”) is one of the best of the movies made during the waning days of the Weimar period.  (The film is a slice-of-life, ultra-realist portrait of the activities of four young people in Berlin in the day-off-work, Sunday.)  Siodmak wrote many novels and produced scripts for several science fiction films made in Weimar Germany prior to 1933.  In that year, he heard an anti-Semitic rant by Dr. Joseph Goebbels and decided it was prudent to leave Germany.  He moved to Hollywood and secured employment with Carl Laemmle, the producer of horror films at Universal heavily influenced by German expressionist cinema.  Siodmak wrote the script for The Wolf Man in 1941.  He later wrote scripts for The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) about the hand of a murderer grafted onto a pianist with dire results and several other iconic films, including The Earth v. Flying Saucers (1956), the progenitor of the UFO genre.  Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (1942) tells the story of man’s brain preserved after his body is destroyed; the brain, extracted from a vicious megalomaniac financier, gradually seizes control of those around it, hypnotizing them into doing criminal acts.  The story, ridiculous on most levels, has had an immense appeal – Orson Welles dramatized the tale in a radio broadcast in 1943 and the novel has been filmed, at least, three times.  Siodmak died at age 98 in Three Rivers, California.  I Walked with a Zombie is surprisingly restrained for a script by Siodmak and, it seems, that Ardel Wray’s influence is probably predominant in the finished product.

Sir Lancelot was a calypso artist from Trinidad.  He was hired to devise a sort of choral commentary on the action in I Walked with a Zombie.  A number of scenes were shot in which Sir Lancelot’s music and lyrics comment on the action.  That footage was largely scrapped – all that remains is his indelible performance where he sings “Fort Holland”(actually a tune called “Shame and Scandal”, a big hit from 1940)) song in the outdoor café.  (Tourneur recalled that he was like a “Greek choir” strolling about an commenting on the action in “eight or nine scenes” – only one such scene remains in the finished 65 minute cut.)    Lewton recognized that Sir Lancelot had a tremendous screen presence – he appears in The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People.  In both of these films, his contribution is mostly acting – in the second Cat People film he doesn’t sing at all.  Sir Lancelot was classically trained, lived in New York, and was initially known for his performances of opera arias and German lieder.  He was politically active, a Leftist and involved in the promotion of Civil Rights.  Sir Lancelot continued performing and working as songwriter through the mid-sixties when he retired – he was tapped to perform the title song for Gilligan’s Island, a jaunty sea-shanty written very much in his musical style.  (Unfortunately, someone else recorded the tune for the iconic TV show.)  Sir Lancelot Pinard (his real name) was a faithful Roman Catholic – his last record was called Pinardhymns in which he is identified as a “Knight of the Holy Trinity”, the first and only experiment in the genre of “religious calypso”.  The singer is credited with being the first musician to popularize calypso music in the United States – in the forties, he was a fixture of Greenwich Village music venues, including The Village Vanguard. 

Zombies and Vodoun

Tourneur experimented with make-up to create zombie effects in the film.  The results were unconvincing – some still photographs show characters in rags and exaggerated minstrel-influenced Black face with staring eyes.  Lewton wasn’t satisfied with the appearance of these monsters and, so, he agreed to purchase the services of several actual zombies.  An RKO purchasing agent traveled to New Orleans, met with some Voudon priests (Houngan) in that city, and, ultimately, issued a shipping order for two zombies, cash on delivery from Port au-Prince subject to a letter of credit from a bank in Santa Domingo guarantying payment.  (Relevant documents are on file from the RKO production records for I walked with a Zombie.)

The zombies were received in two wooden shipping boxes filled with excelsior.  When Tourneur pried the boxes open, he discovered that one of the zombies was badly damaged in shipping, was missing limbs, and could not be revived to act in the film.  The other zombie was intact, but, also couldn’t be resuscitated from its dormant state.  Accordingly, Tourneur and Lewton had to retain the services of specialists to revive the zombie sufficiently for its appearance in the film.

To understand these problems, it’s important to draw some distinctions.  Haitian zombies differ radically from the lumbering undead featured in films like Night of the Living Dead.  A Haitian zombie is ordinarily an agricultural laborer who has offended some powerful person on the sugar plantation where he is employed to work.  Persons who have offended the plantation manager are kidnaped and, then, treated with so-called “zombie powder”.  This powder is a gritty and abrasive substance made from dried and ground up puffer fish, mummified human remains (also macerated and, then, ground to powder), hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, and pulverized glass.  The powder is rubbed into the victim’s elbow, the glass particles breaking down the skin, and allowing the psychoactive agents in the substance to enter the victim’s blood stream.  Puffer fish contains a powerful paralytic neurotoxin called tetrododoxin.  This substance paralyzes the victim, slows respiration, and, then, causes coma – in this comatose state, the putative zombie seems to be dead.  However, the victim is conscious, fully sensate, but simply unable to speak or move or show that he is still alive.  A specialized Houngan, called a Bokor, applies the compound to the victim, abrading the skin to poison the person.  The seemingly dead person is, then, afforded Catholic rites of burial and interred alive in a simple wooden casket.  (Usually, a large tarantula is put in the casket with the zombie to “keep him company.”) The night of the burial the living corpse is exhumed, taken from the casket, and, then, another compound, this called a deliriant (delirium-producing agent), is blown into the zombies nostrils using a reed-straw.  The deliriant is made from Hyla tree frogs, a powerful mania-inducing hallucinogen.  This substance, once inhaled by the zombie, counteracts the paralytic qualities of the tetrododoxin and revives the person, although only to a limited extent.  The zombie remains in a state of chemically induced psychosis, delirious and profoundly disoriented.  In this state, the zombie can be forced to work along side others similarly situated, comprising a kind of nightmarish midnight shift of agricultural laborers at the sugar plantation.  At dawn, the zombies are treated again with paralytic, stored in vaults underground, and, then, revived with the inhaled deliriant at sundown to continue their work.

The difficulty confronting Lewton and Tourneur was that the one undamaged zombie was paralyzed and the shipping bokor had failed to send the vivifying Hyla (tree fog) inhalant with the creature.  The risk was that the zombie would gradually resume consciousness and, then, run amuck in the absence of a substance to eliminate its volition.  Tourneur did some research and summoned to the studio the most knowledgeable authority then existing as Haitian Voudon.  This was Katherine Dunham, the celebrated African-American anthropologist and folk dancer from the University of Chicago.  Dunham was corresponding that time Eleonora Derenskowka (later known as Maya Deren).  Maya Deren was then living with her husband, a cinematographer, in Los Angeles.   She accompanied Katherine Dunham to the RKO studio to observe the work on the zombie.  Dunham and Deren found the zombie comatose, exhibiting classical signs of locked-in syndrome – that is, completely paralysis of the skeletal muscles.  The mode of injection was clear: a scabbed-over patch at the antecubital joint caused by powdered glass abrasion.  Surmising that the paralysis was similar to that induced by so-called “pot curare” (Amazonian curare packed in terra cotta pots), Dunham suggested an intravenous injection of an anti-paralytic, neostigmatine delivered in a nicotine solution.   (These drugs had been in use beginning the 1930's as an antivenom agent for snake-bite.)  The snakebite anti-venom was injected with the result that the zombie began to blink its eyes, twitch violently, and, then, sustain seizures with concomitant loss of bowel continence.  Although the zombie had suffered some muscle atrophy from prolonged paralysis, the creature ultimately was able to walk, albeit with assistance.  A physical therapist from Los Angeles County Hospital, on a secret retainer to the major studios, was summoned to the RKO set to provide exercise treatment designed to improve the creature’s gait and enhance muscle tone.  This therapy, provided over the course of four days, was largely successful.

Unfortunately, other problems immediately ensued.  The zombie was incoherent at first, but later began protesting his plight in Haitian creole.  No one knew the lingo and, so, Katherine Dunham, who had done field work in Haiti, was recalled to the studio.  She was able to assure the zombie that all was well and that he would be sent back to Port au-Prince when the shoot was concluded and, in fact, paid for his labors by being provided a 1941 Pontiac Streamliner shipped by steamer to the island.  Needless to say, the zombie was very hungry after a month of poison-induced paralysis and dined, more or less, continuously at the RKO cafeteria.  Agnes Moorehead, then at the studio as an actress in Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons writes in her memoir – ‘You saw all sorts of exotic folk in the studio cafeteria.  I particularly remember a very tall and haggard zombie working on one of Val Lewton’s horror films.  At first, I was immensely impressed by the exquisite make-up work done to render this animate corpse as a realistic, flesh and blood apparition.  But, then, when I spoke to the fellow (he answered in something that sounded like barbarous French), I realized that the specimen was not made-up, but was, rather, some kind of living and grotesque human anomaly.  Despite his oddity, the zombie was very popular with the girls and seemed to be possessed of an enormous, inordinately exuberant appetite.  It was majestic and awful to see the creature tucking into a plate of spaghetti and meatballs or devouring trays of stuffed cabbage with jello dessert.”  As one might expect, the zombie (now nicknamed “Doudou”), gained weight.  Studio photographs show the cadaverous monster with a pot belly and a double chin.  This was quite unacceptable and Lewton ordered that another dose of paralytic be administered to Doudou to render him more tractable to direction.

Formulating this additional dose of paralytic proved to be difficult.  Puffer fish was occasionally available at Asian markets but only expert chefs knew how to extract the poison from the animal’s flesh and swim bladders.  (Puffer fish is a delicacy in Japan).  The leading Japanese specialist in preparing these fish was inaccessible – incarcerated with other Nisei at an internment camp in the Owens Valley near Lone Pine.  Tourneur himself made the drive through the Mojave Desert and up the valley to the place where the internment camp was located, a dozen miles below the icy and serrated Sierra ridge at Mount Whitney.  The famous chef was depressed and angry and refused to cooperate.  Tourneur went back to Los Angeles and decided to dose Doudou with curare.  To everyone’s surprise, the improvised curare potion (made from wood ivy and largely used in vivisection experiments) was effective.  Doudou’s appetite reduced radically and he became much more amenable to Tourneur’s direction.  (Tourneur remarked that it was not really much different from the studios administering enemas and Corpu-leans or Redusol diet tablets containing 2,4 dinitrophenol to their starlets to keep them trim.)

Tourneur and Lewton slimmed down the zombie and planned to shoot Doudou’s scenes (he was to play Carre-Four in the film) at the end of the production schedule.  But, then, another completely unexpected problem ensued.  The Screen Actors Guild (S.A.G./AFTRA) intervened, claiming that the use of zombie actors by RKO violated the applicable collective bargaining agreement between the actors and the studios.  (S.A.G. was founded in March 1933 and was always closely observant of the horror film genre due to the presence of Boris Karloff on its Board of Trustees from the very inception of the Union – he was motivated by Hollywood’s use of actual monsters in early Universal films, particularly Tod Browning’s Dracula and thought the practice abusive.)  Remarkably enough the S.A. G. steward who inspected the RKO set in late 1942 and discovered Doudou’s employment was Ronald Reagan, then, an outspoken Screen Actors Guild activist.  Reagan and S.A.G. threatened an NLRB complaint alleging unfair labor practices.  Under pressure from the Union, Lewton agreed not to use Doudou in the film and, instead, hired Darby Jones to play the part of Carre-Four in the film.  Accordingly, the entire difficult and expensive attempt to use an actual zombie in I Walked with a Zombie turned out to be futile. Nonetheless, Tourneur's ill-fated attempt at documentary realism had a number of interesting consequences.  Maya Deren was confirmed in her lifelong interest in Voudon worship. After making several very famous avant-garde and experimental pictures in the forties, most notably The Meshes of the Afternoon, she traveled to Haiti to make The Divine Horseman, an important documentary about Voudoun religious practices. Ronald Reagan acquired prestige with S.A.G. as a result of his intervention in the labor dispute with RKO -- he later said that his union work, particularly the episode with RKO, encouraged him to enter politics.

Doudou never returned to Port au-Prince.  Lewton kept him mildly sedated and he served the producer as a butler and personal valet at his Laurel Canyon mansion.  (Lewton used the studio physician for sedatives who was much later implicated in the death of Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Hyman Engelberg.)  Doudou was a hit at parties and was said to be quite a ladies-man – he is supposed to have fathered no less than ten children during his six years serving Lewton.)  He grew enormously fat, favored Havana cigars, and was found mysteriously drowned in Lewton’s swimming pool in 1949.


Carre-Four

In the film, the zombie Carre-Four represents the petro loa (angry divinity) le Maitre Carrefours.  Le Maitre Carrefours is a wrathful version of Papa Legba.  He favors drinking rum laced with gunpowder.  Carrefour is thought to be a version of the West African lunar deity, Kalfur.

A Houmfort is a Voudon temple.

Darby Jones who plays Carre-Four was born in Los Angeles in 1909 – he was a child actor and performed in Hollywood from the time he was nine until the mid-fifties.  Jones reprised his role as Carre-Four in the comedy Zombies on Broadway (1949).  He played Pullman porters, waiters and bellman, and African tribesman – generally the only roles available for Black actors during most of his lifetime.  He died in1986.  Before his death, he was interviewed and remembered his work for the studios fondly – although he realized that the roles that he played were demeaning, he says he didn’t mind because the pay was good and he got to prowl around the studios watching films being made.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino's long and affectionate tribute to 1969 Hollywood is mostly gentle and understated.  In fact, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) is mostly an idyll that avoids the over-the-top provocation in most of the director's other pictures.  It has a gory climax, about five minutes of ultra-brutal mayhem, but, since the people getting mutilated are bad guys, indeed, even loathsome, your sympathies are with the people inflicting injury:  you're rooting for the good guys to exterminate the villains.  If you close your eyes for that sequence, the rest of the two hour and forty-eight movie is pleasantly engaging, nicely acted, and, notwithstanding the picture's length, trots along at at a nice pace -- it's never boring even though some of  Tarantino's eccentricities are a wee bit annoying.  The film involves the tenuous intersection between a TV western star (Rick Dalton played by Leonardo di Caprio) and his sidekick, his stuntman Cliff (Brad Pitt) and members of the Manson family.  If you think through Tarantino's past films,  particularly Inglourious Basterds, and deliberate on that material, I wager that you will be able to figure out how the movie ends even before the first shot -- I had no difficulty guessing what would ultimately happen in the film on the short drive from my office to the theater.

The picture doesn't have much of a plot and is mostly bucolic, a sort of pastoral.  Rick Dalton was famous for his role as a bounty hunter in a TV show in the late fifties, Bounty Law.  When the movie begins, he's been playing the roles of "heavies" -- that is, villains -- for several years. (Bounty Law has been canceled.)  A talent agent, played by Al Pacino, meets him in a bar and advises the cowboy star that he is being eased out of his career -- playing villains is a one-way ticket to nowhere.  The agent urges Dalton to go to Italy and star in spaghetti Westerns.  Dalton resists the idea and even bursts into tears at the notion that he's washed-up.  He's been drinking too much and is having trouble reciting his lines on-camera.  Dalton's best friend is his long-time stunt man.  Cliff has to drive Dalton around Hollywood because the actor has too many drunk driving convictions to be allowed behind the wheel.  Cliff is a good ole boy loner, a man with a bad reputation who is said to have murdered his wife (and gotten away with it.)  Dalton tries to get Cliff assigned to the TV shows on which he's working, but the stunt man is too volatile --in one  scene, he beats up an Asian kung fu master who is playing Cato on The Green Hornet.  (Of course, this gets him fired.)  Intercut with the buddy-story of Rick and Cliff are a series of vignettes involving Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.  We see Polanski and Tate at a Hollywood party where the Mamas and Papas are performing -- and Steve McQueen muses sadly about the fact that he never had a chance to seduce the beautiful Sharon. The scenes with Polanski, Tate, and Jay Sebring are inconsequential and really don't go anywhere.  But, clearly, Tarantino is much taken with Sharon Tate (or, at least, his image of her) and his camera tracks her with something approaching chivalrous love.  In an extended sequence, she picks up a hitchhiker (to no effect at all) and, then, wanders around Beverly Hills alone before going to a matinee of The Wrecking Ball, a Dean Martin quasi-James Bond picture in which Tate appeared as something like comic relief.  We see Tate watching the movie and deliriously happy, not with vanity at seeing her image on the big screen, but with something much more engaging and charming:  she's delighted that other people in the audience seem to enjoy her acting and are laughing at her antics on-screen.  Polanski is cipher in the film -- we seem him dressed as an Edwardian dandy in the party scene, but he's really not on-screen for more than a few minutes. (Rick longs to be cast in one of Polanski's films and hopes that living next door to the director will benefit him in this regard.)  One of Tarantino's conceits is that the characters have traits that rhyme with one another.  For instance, Sharon Tate takes off her shoes and puts up her bare feet on the seat ahead of her at the movie.   The hippie girl who lures Cliff out to the Manson ranch puts her bare feet and toes on the windshield of the car Cliff is driving (of course, it's owned by his buddy Rick Dalton).  In one sequence, we see Sharon Tate sleeping and the camera lovingly tracks along her body, all the time the soundtrack records her snoring loudly.  Similarly, Rick's new Italian wife is shown snoring when she returns jet-lagged to Hollywood and falls asleep immediately in the bed at her big new American house.  Tarantino's plotting and narrative is as loose as can be, in fact, almost non-existent for long periods in the film -- this is not to say that the incidental details aren't fascinating and, often, very engaging.  But this is not the kind of movie that inexorably builds to a carefully devised climax -- instead, the film is more about accident, happenstance, and serendipity.  There's a showy sequence in which Brad Pitt climbs up on top of Rick Dalton's house to fix the cowboy star's TV antenna -- the scene lets Cliff remove his shirt and expose his fabulously handsome torso.   The sequence establishes the relationship between Rick's mansion and the home where Sharon Tate is living -- and, in fact, there are two showy crane shots in which the camera rides up over the house to look down on the home rented by Polanski (the film ends with this shot).  But we expect something to occur in this sequence, the images to have some kind of connection to the rest of the film, and, in fact, there is no real relationship to the rest of the movie -- it's as if Tarantino wants to be fair about supplying "eye-candy":  he's shown Sharon Tate in a number of loving posed shots and, so, now he wants to give the ladies in his audience something to see and so he unveils Brad Pitt atop Rick's house.  It's a generous gesture, and, in fact, the film is very generous in providing the viewers with things that they want to see, but it is awfully loose and most of the scenes in the first two-thirds of the movie don't go anywhere.  There's a lovable mutt whose role in the film's climax is obvious from the moment the beast waddles into view --it's Cliff's pit bull mix.  (Cliff supposedly cherishes the dog but also seems to abandon the pit bull for six months at a pet kennel -- this seems cruel:  it's a minor plot point, but one that Tarantino obviously hasn't thought through.)  Many sequences seem constructed to signal importance but end with anti-climax.  The hero, Rick Dalton clearly takes the affection and loyalty of Cliff for granted:  the movie shows Rick enjoying all sorts of privileges denied his stunt man (he flies first class while Cliff sits drunk in coach) and one waits for Cliff to show some sort of anger or, even, mild irritation about his status as a perennial "second banana" -- but the scene never occurs.  (In fact, Rick even humiliates Cliff -- he makes him push a huge stack of his luggage through the airport when the two men, with Rick's new Italian wife in tow, return from Europe.)   Furthermore, the film's bloody climax occurs after Rick has told Cliff that he no longer needs his services -- Rick is now like Clint Eastwood, a powerful Hollywood star; Clint lives alone in what looks like an Airstream trailer next to a shabby San Bernadino drive-in movie theater.  Cliff is the man who has made Rick's derring-do possible -- but, in the end, he is abandoned:  Rick doesn't even go to the hospital with the badly wounded Cliff but instead parties with his Euro-trash neighbors next door.  The unfairness of the situation is manifest -- the loyal friend  whose qualities never really secure him the advantages to which he is entitled, but, oddly, enough Tarantino doesn't develop this theme.  The strange thing is that he doesn't look away from it either -- he emphasizes the unfair dynamic between the two men but seems to accept it as simply the way things are.  Ultimately, Rick Dalton takes the agent's advice and goes to Rome where he makes movies with Sergio Corbucci -- a particular hero of Tarantino.  Rick's career gets a jolt and he comes back to Hollywood on the night that Manson's family makes it raid on Hollywood, armed to the teeth and giggling with bloodlust about killing "piggies."  The events of that night are carefully detailed, more or less in accord with actual facts (up to a certain point) and we see Sharon Tate, now heavily pregnant, with Abigail Folger and Jay Sebring (as well as a Polish friend of Polanski's) at their home.  It's a hot night and, of course, murder is afoot.

Several scenes stand out as particularly effective, although all of the movie is very well done, if a bit aimless.  In one sequence, already mentioned the rough and ready, stunt man Cliff tangles with Cato -- Cato is like a two-bit Bruce Lee and he has boasted that if he fought Cassius Clay, he would end up "crippling him."  Therefore, it's a lot of fun to see the karate champ get his comeuppance.  Several scenes in which Rick Dalton interacts with a preternaturally alert and brilliant child actor (not "actress" as she reminds us) are very touching and show a sentimental streak in Tarantino that is unanticipated but welcome.  A scene set at the Spahn Ranch where the Manson family is holed-up is extremely suspenseful and brilliantly staged -- and we get to see Bruce Dern chewing the scenery in this sequence.  (In fact, the scene at the Spahn Ranch is probably the best sequence in the movie -- and it's about forty-five minutes or more before the bloody climax.)  A hippie girl that Cliff picks up and, then, refuses her blunt sexual overtures is indelible -- I don't know what actor (not "actress") plays this part but she is wonderfully sexy and, then, menacing.  The Spahn ranch scene, however, also illustrates a peculiarity of the film that is annoying and hard to justify:  as Cliff is beating up one of the Manson gangsters, one of the girl's rides up into the country where another Manson devotee, Tex, is leading a trail ride with three tourists.  Tex is summoned to ride down to the confrontation occurring Wild West style at the Spahn movie ranch (it was used as set for Hollywood Westerns for many years).  Tex rides hell-for-leather to the ranch -- we get six or seven montage shots of him spurring his horse down steep slopes into the canyon where the ranch is located.  But when he gets to the ranch, Cliff has driven away -- the whole wild horse chase was for nothing:  the sequence ends with an anti-climax that is curiously disappointing.  Tarantino has gone to great lengths to characterize the tourists on their rented horses (one of them looks like Connie Stevens) and stages an impressive series of shots with the galloping horse, but to what end -- it goes nowhere.  We are supposed to feel menace, I suppose, when Sharon Tate picks up a ragged-looking girl hitchhiker but that scene goes nowhere either -- it's not suspenseful, not developed for suspense, it's just a throwaway.  Similarly, the film is full of what I call "showdown walks" -- these are the iconic moments in Hollywood Westerns when a gun fighter walks the empty streets to a duel with the bad guy.  We constantly see people's shoes and boots as they portentously walk various places.  But the film doesn't have any real show-downs and so these lovingly detailed sequences, some of which are quite long, don't have any point at all.  Tarantino almost never edits the film as one would expect in a classical Hollywood picture -- and the rest of the film with respect to camera angles, camera placement and general mise-en-scene is very classically Hollywood "invisible style" (most of the film could have been directed by an unobtrusive movie maker like Howard Hawks).  He never cuts away from people walking or traveling from one place or another -- about a fifth of the movie consists of freeway shots, cars motoring here and there while music plays (these scenes do give Tarantino a chance to install plenty of late sixties pop hits in the movie); another fifth of the movie consists of people portentously walking from one room to another.  Clearly, Tarantino admires the Hollywood (and spaghetti Westerns) from the period and wants to invoke them in the way the movie is made -- but I don't recall as those films, many of which were cheaply made, being as wildly profligate with, more or less, pointless images of people and vehicles going from one place to another. Despite these flaws, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an excellent film and, even, a bit inspirational, but it seems very oddly muted -- Tarantino uses the world "hippie" as an expletive and term of abuse (it's similar to his use of the word "nigger" in his other films).  He takes an oddly sadistic pleasure in  detailed shots showing brawny men inflicting vicious and disfiguring injuries on women -- this is an element of his sensibility that is on display during the film's climax and similar to the endless abuse heaped on the prisoner and sole woman, Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Hateful Eight -- it's distasteful but with Quentin Tarantino you have to take the good with the bad.  There's even a bit of substance in one scene in the film -- one of Manson's brainwashed soldiers, a young woman, points out that she is the child of TV and that every single TV show "except I love Lucy is about murdering people".  So the killer meditates, I've been raised to be a murderer and, of course, I will murder people.  A lot of Tarantino's movies strike me as gratuitously mean-spirited and nasty -- this was view of Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Inglourious Basterds.  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood  isn't like this at all -- I think it's rather sweet, optimistic, and gentle. 

Us

Horror is the dark twin of Science Fiction.  The latter genre is liberal, even progressive. Dystopia, at least, presumes that mankind has a future and, generally, every dystopia contains rebels who articulate human values.  Horror articulates a condition of monstrosity that is timeless -- there is no future because the human condition, helplessly divided between angel and devil, never changes.  Monsters have no history -- they were, they are, they always will be.  Horror's vision of the world is essentially conservative.  At the end of Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film, Us, the survivors of a sort of zombie apocalypse drive toward Mexico in an ambulance -- but there's no sense that they going forward toward any viable future; Mexico will be just as awful as the USA -- there's no place to run from the realization that we have met the monsters and they are us.  For this reason, the opening shot in Us recapitulates the closing sequence -- it's the menacing overhead, aerial-eye-in-the-sky at the outset of The Shining, a vehicle implacably traveling through a desolate wasteland.  

Us starts with a bravura scare-sequence set in 1986 -- a little girl wanders away from her parents at a sinister-looking carnival located on the beach at Santa Cruz.  The sky is belligerent with lightning and the child sees odd people standing apart from the happy carnival-goers.  She enters a fun-house called VisionQuest built into the side of seaside bluff and encounters what seems to be her double -- then, something awful occurs off-screen and we see the anxious parents seeking counseling for the little girl's obstinate and inexplicable silence.  The counselors tell her parents to indulge her in something that she loves -- in this case, ballet.  Cut to the present, the little girl is a grown-up woman now with a husband and two attractive children.  Her family is prosperous and have enough money to own a palatial summer house on a lake.  Her husband suggests that the family go to the beach at Santa Cruz.   The woman resists this idea -- she recalls being traumatized at that beach and doesn't even like the idea of sand, let alone a return visit to the site of her primal fears.  But the family (they are African-American) go to the beach, meet friends (a superficial and obnoxious White family), and, then, after some odd coincidences return home to their isolated lake cabin.  (At the beach, there's a religious fanatic at the beach as there was in 1986 and a fun-house built into the side of the bluff called "Merlin's Forrest.")  That night, their Doppelgaengers appear outside their house -- there's a big, hulking man, a woman with weirdly automaton-like motions, a little boy in a frightening Jobst mask (covering terrible facial burns), and a teenage daughter.  After a frightening siege, the doubles get into the house, chain up the wife and, then, proceed to try to kill their counterparts with long, gleaming scissors.  All sorts of mayhem ensues.  The family escapes, its members wounded but alive, and flees to the house of the White family, apparently across the lake.  But the doubles of the White family have also appeared out of nowhere and succeeded in stabbing to death everyone in that house.  There's more bloody mayhem.  The Black family now seems to have developed savage traits -- they seem committed to hunting down their doubles and beating them to death with golf clubs or baseball bats.  More bloody mayhem ensues.  At last, the wife pursues her Doppelgaenger into a subterranean world full of eerie corridors and thousands of white rabbits.  There's a big reveal.  The heroine returns to the surface and sees that thousands and thousands of the Doppelgaengers have emerged in a sort of rebellion from under ground -- they have killed their counterparts and, now, stand in a sinister-looking chain, holding hands, a line of people in red jump-suits (like county lock-up garb) that snakes across the country with no end in sight.   Jordan Peele's direction is generally effective; he manages the horror and gore sequences efficiently -- nothing is too extreme and the worst stuff is off-camera, but it's all quite disturbing.  There are suitably eerie images -- one vertical shot of people walking across a beach emphasizes the huge spidery shadows that they cast -- and the music is convincingly grotesque, like a waltz for a sinister puppet theater.  Peele began his career with racially inflected comedy and there's a fair amount of humor in the movie (parts of it are quite funny).  The film has a lot of good ideas -- perhaps, too many, and, in the end, it's energy is diluted into so many different channels that the whole thing seems a little diffuse.  The plot makes no sense by any rational criteria, but you don't go to a horror movie for reasoned argument -- it's an irrational form since fear is irrational and Us' dream-logic makes good enough sense.  The big reveal is well-prepared -- a reveal of this sort isn't effective unless the audience can anticipate it.  I figured out the reveal about twenty minutes before  it occurred -- this is just about right.  The audience must have a good suspicion as to the true horror that is afoot and Peele, who is expert in horror films and their conventions, calculates these sorts of effects exactly right.  (Spoilers ahead...)

The film operates on the basis of a Jekyll and Hyde duality:  there are those of us who are successful, at least, outwardly, and have most of the good things in life.  Peele views wealth and prosperity as a Hobbesian zero sum gain -- what I possess has been taken from someone else.  My joy is someone else's despair.  There is a literal underclass -- people who are exactly like you and me and, in fact, our doubles, but whose lives have been horribly impoverished to the extent that our lives have been successful.  This sort of argument affords the basis for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (with its armies of proles working below the gleaming city) and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in which hideous Morlocks labor in mines far underground and feed upon the beautiful, if helpless, Eloi.  (The same system exists in Wagner's Ring -- the glory of the Gods rests upon the slave labor of the dwarf-blacksmith's in their subterranean caves.)  Metropolis is Science Fiction -- it's a dystopia that involves a slave revolt and ends with the characters finding a way to live together with some semblance of justice.  Metropolis is Science Fiction because the people living in the bright, well-ordered city of the future are the masters of the slave workers below.  Us is horror because, in a startling reversal, the film asserts that the slaves under the earth, in fact, are controlling their counterparts on the surface and, indeed, operating them like marionettes.  Although there are two imago -- the well-groomed prosperous people in their elegantly casual clothes and the underground monsters who move like cockroaches, have raw voices that can barely speak, and wear prison red jump-suits -- each divided being shares only one soul.  And the soul resides in the depths, that is, underground in the labyrinth of hidden chambers and galleries feeding on raw and bloody rabbit meat.  Thus, the surface is all epiphenomena -- it merely imitates a dark and brutal underworld that comprises the real world.  With Peele, racial parables are always present -- and, in fact, aspects of the movie are very similar to the more extravagant passages in Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man.  (That novel also involves people living in sewers underground, rioters emerging from the shadows, and strange industrial operations hidden below the city -- for instance, the weird factory that produces white paint.)  White people, and more generally, the capitalist bourgeois have created an underclass.  But the underclass rules us -- it's passions, jargon, music, and ideas all percolate up into the light to control our reality.  This is dramatized wonderfully in a hilarious, and disturbing, sequence.  The White family lives in a "smart home" called Ophelia, the whitest of all white heroines.  When the White family's doubles are stabbing them to death, one of the victims cries out:  "Ophelia, call the police!"  Orphelia misunderstands the command and says:  "Playing NWA's Fuck the Police!" -- thunderous and profane rap music, then, provides accompaniment to the murders. Needless to say, the police don't show up and the cavalry never rides to the rescue.  

L'Eclisse

L'Eclisse (1962) is admirable, obtuse, and, ultimately, tedious.  It's Antonioni's most characteristic work and its qualities are intrinsic to all of the director's work after L'Avventura.  The film is about things that don't happen:  conceptually, making a movie about nothing, that is, an event, or events, that don't occur seems daring and ingenious.  But, in actual practice, the concept is too thin to sustain a movie that is 125 minutes long -- you can dramatize non-events, it seems, a lot more efficiently; I think an hour would suffice.  One has the sense that Antonioni is treading water -- filling up time with make-shift improvisation to expand the vignette into an evening-length film.  Antonioni is too deliberate a film maker to improvise successfully and the film hasn't aged well -- in fact, some of the movie is obnoxious nonsense.  To pad out the picture, the director gives his heroine two chums.  As an old school Italian, Antonioni has no idea how women talk among themselves -- it seems it's something he has never seriously considered.  Therefore, the scenes in which the women interact are seriously errant -- he seems to perceive the girls as bubble-headed children.  They don't really converse but, rather, play together like precocious children.  It's wholly unconvincing and, further, strays down some curious paths.  One of the women is from Kenya and has an apartment decorated surrealistically with hunting rifles and images of Africa.  (She reminds me of some of the women-warriors in old Laurel and Hardy movies.)  To amuse themselves, the women play drum music on a phonograph and Monica Vitti corks up, painting herself to appear in black face with pale lipstick exaggerating her lips.  She jumps around, thrusting out her ass, and wiggling while making war-like gestures with a spear.  Finally, someone tires of the charade and says:  "Let's stop playing Negroes."  The film is nothing, if not, exhaustive:  Antonioni tours the apartments of his four principal characters and takes care to show us where the heroine and her romantic interest slept when they were children.  His camera lingers lovingly on weird Modernist buildings and eerie-looking construction sites and he stages lengthy scenes in the Roman stock market that make their point in about 45 seconds and, then, go one for 20 minutes.  At one point, the heroine goes with one of her chums on a light prop-driven plane flight to Verona.  It's as aimless as the rest of the scenes in which Antonioni is just killing time.  At the little airport cafe, two Black men sit impassively in the shade, scarcely moving their eyes let alone their bodies and faces -- it's subtly, but distinctly, racist.  An American glances at Monica Vitti, asks her to have a beer with him, and, then, shrugs in the mildest disappointment when she declines.  The women get back on the Cessna and fly back to Rome.  Nothing is accomplished, but, then, Antonioni's movie is about things that don't happen and, therefore, this is par for the course.

It's a hot morning in a desolate Roman suburb -- huge empty streets, science-fiction architecture, veiled construction sites, in short de Chirico updated and with Brutalist architecture.  A woman (Monica Vitti) argues with her boyfriend and they agree to separate.  They have been arguing all night.  Antonioni loving details the man's apartment and the action has at its fulcrum a rotating electric fan.  The woman goes to the stock exchange and meets her mother who has become an avid trader.  She encounters a handsome stock broker played by Alain Delon.  There's more aimless activity.  The next day, the stock market crashes and people lose millions of dollars.  We find out that the stock broker is working for the woman's mother.  Antonioni lovingly details the woman's apartment -- she works as a translator.  The woman goes home to her mother's apartment.  Antonioni lovingly details the mother's dwelling.  The stock broker is interested in the woman and makes overtures to her.  While the two are chatting -- she's on her balcony and the scene is a perverse, passion-less iteration of a similar balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (set in Verona) -- an elegant-looking drunk wanders by.  The drunk ambles down the block and steals the stockbroker's sports car.  The next day, the car  fished out of the Tiber River with the dead drunk still behind the wheel.  The woman meets the stockbroker at the river's edge who callously says that the drunk dented his car and that he will have to get another.  The two repair to the Stockbroker's home -- it's an old dark place inherited from his parents:  of course, Antonioni lovingly details the place showing us its pictures, furniture, and the views from its windows.  The couple engage in some nonchalant fondling.  Then, they go to the stockbroker's office, apparently, closed for the weekend.  They get down to some more serious love-making in this office suite -- the stockbroker has thoughtfully taken all the phones off the hook.  When one of the doorbell rings, however, the tryst is interrupted.  The couple walk around the deserted streets of suburban Rome and agree to meet that night at their appointed place of assignation -- it's the corner of a big, sinister-looking construction site where there is an enigmatic barrel full of rain water next to some dark trees.  But neither one of them shows up for the date -- Antonioni lingers on the empty boulevards, anxious people waiting for buses, the vacant skies, the shadowy trees moving in the breeze, the hulking and silent construction site like some vast mausoleum, the rain barrel breached and oozing water onto the pavement and into a storm sewer, con-trails in the sky, and people on concrete balconies pointing at something off-screen.  A man reads a newspaper with a big headline about the threat of nuclear war.  The street lights come on and the horror movie music rises to a howl and the film is over.  This final sequence is lyrical, frightening, and intensely beautiful -- it's probably the best thing Antonioni ever did, but it can't make up for the vapid 100 minutes preceding the film's end.  And, even at his best, Antonioni cheapens the effect by inserting some topical headlines about nuclear war that have nothing to do with the anomie depicted in the movie.

I suppose the point is that people in the modern world have invested their passion in getting and spending money and don't really have much energy leftover for love.  The stockbroker sort of likes the woman and she sort of likes him back, but both agree (at least by missing their date) that there's no future in the relationship.  It's hard for me to see that this is particularly tragic or significant.  People have lackluster affairs all the time -- you don't always passionately love the person that you're with, but the world doesn't end as a consequence.  Antonioni wants the viewer to generalize the lack of connection between the principal characters and this is easy enough to do because there's really no one else of consequence in the movie -- but their mediocre, uncommitted non-affair isn't necessarily diagnostic of anything.  The false values depicted in the stock market scenes also don't really generalize well -- the market goes up and down.  Today's crash will be replaced by a boom tomorrow.   As the title implies, an eclipse is never permanent.  Monica Vitti gives an impressive if irritating performance -- she's mostly playful, and, even, petulant, but, at times, her face becomes an impassive mask, almost horror-struck at her own indifference.  Antonioni, like many Italian men of a certain age, can't adjust to women freed by birth control to be as nonchalant and sexually casual as men -- he views the prospect of a world filled with such creatures with undisguised terror.   

The Sacrifice (Offret / Sacrifatio)

Perhaps, it's worth re-assessing Andrei Tarkovsky's films.  At least three reasons urge me in this direction.  Tarkovsky's last movie, The Sacrifice was made at a time when many people feared that the world was imperiled by nuclear war -- Tarkovsky shot the movie about a year before the momentous meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykyavik, negotiations triggered by increasing anxiety about the fate of the planet in the context of a rapidly accelerating arms race.  Today, the planet is similarly threatened, although the causes of our impending doom are different.  But Tarkovsky worked in a world that seemed to him increasingly fragile and endangered -- and, I think, this is our condition today.  Second, Tarkovsky is certainly the director who has had the greatest influence on people making serious films today -- his magisterial long takes, his tone of portentous melancholy, his dense allusions to European cultural history, all of these elements in his work have been decisive with respect to auteurs as diverse as Bi Gan and Lars von Trier (the Danish director's Melancholia is almost a remake of The Sacrifice).  Third, we need to be reminded that the liberal consensus, now collapsing in much of the world, is not necessarily fundamental to great art.  Tarkovsky is a profoundly conservative, even, reactionary director, never more mystically Russian than when he was in exile.  It is worth attempting to understand a world view that has literally nothing in common with either the limousine-liberalism of Hollywood or the more hard-bitten left-wing politics of most Indy films.  Tarkovsky lived under Stalin and he hated anything remotely like communism -- this gives his films a texture very unlike anything produced by consensus democratic (small "d") liberals.  

The Sacrifice made on a desolate Swedish island where Tarkovsky was living in exile is grandiose to the point of absurdity.  What makes the film fascinating is that Tarkovsky, certainly, conceived aspects of the movie as comedy.  I have no doubt that the famous ending of the film -- at least, the very long take in which Alexander runs mad like King Lear after burning down his summer cottage -- is intended as some kind of bitter comedy.  I think critics have misread that scene if they see it as a profoundly serious or cathartic image of Alexander's collapse, which, in the megalomaniac context of the film represents the collapse of the European world.  There's no doubt that Tarkovsky sees Alexander's madness as evidence of the destruction of Europe's high culture.  What is misunderstood is Tarkovsky's tone:  he stages this shot as comedy -- on some level, he thinks the film's climax is funny.  

On many different ways, The Sacrifice riffs on themes in the work of Ingmar Bergman, beginning with The Seventh Seal (with its intimations of the apocalypse), continuing through the isolation and sexual psychodrama of Persona, and, also, referencing Shame, the 1968 film in which the collapse of a marriage occurs in parallel with a catastrophic and devastating war.  The film begins squarely in Bergman territory -- a famous actor, now retired from the stage, has retreated to an isolated wind-swept island where he lives with his younger wife and a mute child, nicknamed "Little Man".  Bach's "Erbarme Dich" ("Have mercy on us") played on the soundtrack establishes the apocalyptic context, the notion that the world can be saved only by God's grace.  Alexander is played by Erland Josephson, one of Bergman's stalwart, repertory players.  (He appears as a surrogate for Bergman in his Scenes from a Marriage and, later, made for TV movies, including Sarabande).  The actor celebrates his birthday by planting a tree, more a wind-blasted stake with some naked branches, next to the beach by his summer cottage.  Little Man helps him.  Alexander tells the child an anecdote about a Russian orthodox monk who planted a dead tree but brought the tree to life by ritualistically watering it once a day, at the exact same time, for three years. Alexander, the actor, encounters an enigmatic post man who delivers mail by bicycle.  He and the postal carrier discuss Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal recurrence of the same".  While brooding alone on this notion, Little Man playfully jumps on Alexander who reacts with momentary rage, giving the child a bloody nose.  Alexander's daughter and her nasty husband, Victor, an arrogant physician, appear to celebrate the great man's birthday.  This is not a happy family.  Alexander's wife slinks around in an outfit that looks like a costume from a production of a neo-classical play, something by Racine or Corneille.  She is bitter that Alexander has abandoned the stage -- the woman is a mass of seething vitriol, on the edge of hysteria, like one of the domestic vampires in a Strindberg play.  Victor gives Alexander a book of Russian icons, symbolizing, it seems, the old self-assurance and redemptive grace of the Russian Orthodox faith.  The post man arrives with a framed map of Europe, a beautiful piece of cartography made in the 16th century -- this gift establishes Tarkovsky's fundamental notion, that the world is comprised of Europe and European culture and that any other place is literally outside of the pale.  (There are no references to America, of course, and Victor's plan to move to Australia -- the antipodes to Europe -- is met with expressions of unmitigated horror.)  These gifts correlate to an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci, "The Gift of the Magi".  (The sacred book of icons and the map of Europe are the first two gifts -- there is a third gift, as well, although it is offered in what seems to be a dream:  this gift, made by Little Man and the postman Olaf, is a tiny scale-model of the summer cottage where the film's action takes place.)  The film's exorbitant and wildly ambitious scope is implied by this imagery -- if people are giving gifts to Alexander in the context of the Three Wise Men, then, it is obvious that Tarkovsky conceives of his hero as a sort of Christ.  Christ's job is to save the world and its people.  Alexander gets his salvific opportunity when jets scream overhead, the movie tilts into a monochromatic sepia, and a huge globe-like vase of milk (the world? Mother Nature?) falls from the cupboard and bursts on the floor.  The end of the world has come and the people on the island, hearing stammered messages of calamity on their radio, sit around disconsolate, some of them sedated by Victor, awaiting their deaths.  Alexander, however, conceives the notion that he can save the world:  he prays to God and makes a vow that he will sacrifice everything that he loves to bring back the world as it existed before this awful apocalypse.  Olaf, the post man, offers a more pragmatic solution -- he tells Alexander that the actor's eerie-looking maid, an Icelandic woman, is a powerful witch and that if he rides his bike around the bay to sleep with her, she will be persuaded to restore the world.  Alexander embarks on this mission and has some sort of encounter with the spectral-looking Icelandic witch.  After some debate and Alexander threatening suicide, the witch embraces him and they float in the air over the dark tortured landscape of her rumpled bed.  A little later, Alexander awakes -- he's back in Kansas again.  The power is on and the telephone works.  The sun is shining brightly.  Alexander believes that he has saved the world and so, true to his vow, he stacks up all the chairs and furniture in the cottage and lights the place on fire, possibly intending to burn up Little Man in the process.  His wife and daughter have been vehemently debating Victor's move to Australia and have wandered off.  When they see the summer house burning, they run back and remonstrate with Alexander who has apparently gone completely mad -- he looks like an insane samurai wearing a Japanese robe with a yin-yang sign on its back.  An ambulance arrives and hauls Alexander away as the house collapses in a fiery vortex.  Little Man is alive.  He is laboriously carrying buckets of water to the tree that he and Alexander planted the previous day.  The Icelandic maid rides her bike across the partially flooded landscape.  Little Man reclines under the skeletal tree and speaks for the first time in the movie:  "In the beginning was the Word -- what did you mean by that Papa?"  This ending suggests that whatever crisis afflicted Alexander, and, by extension, the European World, the sun is now shining and a new beginning is possible.  

Of course, the film is fantastically detailed in composition and editing and full of remarkable images.  The middle sequence involving the apparent holocaust is shot in dull, neutral tones -- it has the eerie ambience of the midnight sun in the far north:  the sky is covered in a creamy pall of milky radiance that doesn't seem to have any clear origin.  The cottage is a character in the film.  Like the horror house in Hereditary (a film also influenced by Tarkovsky), the inside of the structure, full of vast theatrical and empty sets, bears no relationship to the rather humble exterior.  Tarkovsky signals Alexander's increasing madness by having his hero climb up and down a ladder to enter and leave the house -- he will no longer cross its threshold.  Whether the world was actually destroyed or whether the apocalypse is merely a nihilistic fantasy of the protagonist is left ambiguous and undecided.  We have seen Alexander swoon and fall to the ground -- a black and white shot, taken from an aerial perspective shows a courtyard with a wrecked car and debris of various sorts covering the pavement.  This image is peculiar to Alexander and seems to be some kind of dream.  The long dark and mostly still central sequences in the film (the end of the world) are orchestrated to faint, twilight cries, whispered music, that we can barely hear, and, sometimes, plaintive Noh flute.  The Noh flute signifies Alexander's fury and madness -- it wails as he runs about in flailing circles after lighting his home on fire.  The movie, Tarkovsky's last (he was dying of cancer), is a compendium of the director's signature shots:  there are pans over muddy swamps full of rotting leaves, obscure spring-like gears, documents, hoards of coins under the water; we see the main set reproduced as a tiny model; lovers float in mid-air; people present themselves to the camera as luxurious, but faceless, masses of hair; events take place in real time -- Alexander laboriously attempts to light matches to set a tablecloth on fire; we see images that suggest adultery (Alexander's wife with a man lying on his side in an orchard); everywhere there are mirrors, windows that both reflect light and allow us to vaguely see into the murky landscape.  The film's ambitious are epic:  Alexander represents the great artist who must save the West from the forces of irreligious nihilism.  Of course, in order to understand these deadly forces, he must embody them himself -- he is an actor, without a real identity, someone who contains the nihilistic peril within himself.  The great man must save the world by either sacrificing everything he loves or by sleeping with an Icelandic witch or both.  Alexander is uniquely equipped for the task of redeeming Europe -- he is Christ receiving the gifts of the Magi, but has also played the part of the supreme nihilist Shakespeare's Richard III.  In his more Christ-like avatar, Alexander has acted the part of the Idiot, Prince Myshkin.  Someone addresses him as a "Richardian (e.g. nihilist)" and "Idiotist" -- that is, follower of the saintly Prince Myshkin.  

I have said that Tarkovsky intends aspects of this film to be comical.  Clearly, the director views the pretentious Alexander as a monster of self-regard.  Alexander's fatal grandiosity, perhaps, triggers the whole apocalypse -- it's something that he admits that he has been waiting for all his life, a chance to prove his messianic chops.  Several scenes signal that Tarkovsky has difficulty taking Alexander's self-aggrandizing vanity seriously.  Alexander is always collapsing, swooning, falling down -- when he crosses a huge empty set there's only one piece of furniture in the room:  needless to say, he bangs into it, hitting his shin, and almost toppling over.  On an empty road stretching for miles in the White Night, there are two little puddles.  Of course, Alexander on his bicycle steers right for the puddles splashes into them and crashes the bike.  Most importantly, when Alexander goes to see the witch, he tells a long anecdote about how he cleaned out his mother's disorderly garden, hacking and cutting to remove the weeds and undergrowth.  Alexander goes on and on about this activity expressing horror that he destroyed the "natural" aspects of the garden.  The Witch very reasonably asks him:  "Well what did your mother think?"  Alexander evades the question -- he has completely forgotten the premise of his story, that is, that he tidied-up the garden so that his sick and dying mother would have something more pleasant to view from her window.  This scene is actually funny -- you can laugh out loud at Alexander's absurd pretentiousness and that fact that he has forgotten the point of his own story because it had something to do with his mother and not himself.  (In the same scene, when Alexander puts a gun to his head to make the witch embrace him, the viewer has the same response:  Alexander is so childish and self-absorbed that he has to threaten suicide to get anyone to take him seriously.)  Earlier in the film, the post man, who seems some sort of angel, told a story about a cockroach on a table set for an elaborate and pompous dinner party -- the cockroach just ran around and around in circles as if he "intended" something.  At the end of the movie, Alexander is the cockroach -- he runs around and around in circles, plunging into puddles and falling repeatedly, as if "intends" something.  In the end, the men in white (who you expect to deploy butterfly nets to catch him) grab a hold Alexander, get him in the back of the ambulance, although he breaks free a couple of times, and take him off-stage.  We can't say that we miss him.

I think Tarkovsky was spoofing, in part, Ingmar Bergman.  Initially, he sought permission to shoot the film on Bergman's Faroe island off the coast of Sweden -- the Swedish military wouldn't authorize this due to secret bases on the island and Tarkovsky had to make due with another nearby island.  Tarkovsky's assistance cameraman was Daniel Bergman, Ingmar's son, and the film was shot by Bergman's longtime director of photography, Sven Nyquist.  I presume that there was some level of circumspect hostility and aggressive competition between the two men.  An island is a small place to harbor to titanic world-shaking geniuses.  Erland Josefsson literally stands in for Bergman in the Swedish director's ouevre.  Therefore, I think it is reasonable to suggest that Alexander (recall Bergman's autobiographical Fanny and Alexander) is intended as a malicious portrait of the great Swedish film maker.  Tarkovsky may not be wholly conscious of the fact that he is also satirizing his own pan-Slavic and mystical pretensions in this film.