The Big Parade

King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) is an ambitious, if simple-minded and schematic, anti-war picture.  Vidor always claimed that he didn't care about the critical adulation lavished on the picture; he was more moved by the testimony of veterans to the film's essential truthfulness.

The Big Parade is a curious combination of very slow-moving pastoral scenes and spectacular, if clinical, war imagery.  The picture begins at a breakneck pace, using one or two shots per character, to establish it's three protagonists:  one man, Slim, a big gawky guy with his cheek full chewing tobacco, is a hayseed laborer -- we see him working on a skyscraper and, then, departing for war with his riveter left resting on a girder high over the city streets.  Another glum-faced fellow is a thuggish bartender named Bull.  The main character (played by John Garfield) is named Apperson.  He is the ne-er-do-well son of a great industrialist, a dour tycoon who owns steel mills.  (As in The Deer Hunter, there's a nod to peace-time industry in several showy scenes of steel boiling and fuming in great metal pots and enormous millwork structures leaking smoke into the air.)  Seized by war fever, the three men, who don't know one another, enlist.  Apperson ("everyman" or "a person") conceals his enlistment from his mother.  She grieves for him as his father and brother, who will assume management of the mills, shake his hand -- at last, the playboy has made good.  We see the three principals standing in a big field with guns while still dressed in civilian clothes, then, there is a montage of marching men and an intertitle tells us that the "smiling young men" have gone to France.  Unlike many other films of this is sort, there is no basic training sequence -- the men simply put on uniforms and are next seen marching along the shady lanes of France.

After a twenty mile march, our heroes reach a small French town,  Champillon, where they are billeted in a stable.  There is a lot of supposedly comical byplay -- in fact, it's not funny -- involving shoveling manure, but Vidor stages these scenes so ineptly we can't tell what is going on.  (The way the men do the task makes no sense -- they seem to be shoveling the shit in all different directions.)  The hero, who has a girlfriend state-side, falls in love with a mademoiselle in the village.  These scenes, which are very tedious, have not aged well -- again, there is a lot of groping and pawing from Bull and the hayseed riveter who are competing for the affections of the comely girl.  Apperson takes walks in the meadow with the girl, catches a frog to amuse her, and attends a patriotic meeting in which the Marseillaise is sung and old men posture with swords.  (While this is underway, Bull and the riveter have broken into the wine cellar and are getting drunk.).  This part of the film lasts about an hour and ends with the hero sulking when he receives a letter from his girlfriend in the States.  The bucolic scenes in The Big Parade are, more or less, tedious and seem disproportionately long for their inconsequential subject -- but, in fact, it turns out that this sequence is pivotal in the movie. Apperson's affection for the French girl is vitally important to the movie's climax -- although this may not be apparent to the viewer on first exposure to the film.  After these slow, pastoral sequences,  Vidor wakes up with a call to arms and there is a fantastic sequence of the mobilized troops moving toward the front while the French girl desperately seeks Apperson in masses of marching men and trucks kicking up plumes of dust.  The girl's panicked efforts to find Apperson in the armies of marching men seem disproportionate the rather casual-seeming liaison between them and it is startling to find this tour de force sequence ending with a desolate scene of the abandoned French girl kneeling in despair in the trampled mud and dust of the roadways.

The last third of the film is occupied by enormous battle scenes.  These are very unlike similar sequences in films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Pabst's Westfront 1918 although equally brutal and harrowing in their own right.  Vidor shows endless columns of troops moving toward the horizon on an arrow-straight road -- the titles interspersed in this section are dithyrambic:  wild ejaculations of enthusiasm like " Men! -- Guns! -- Guns! --The Big Parade! -- More men! -- More guns!"  The column containing our three protagonists comes under fire from machine guns mounted on the kite-like biplanes swooping overhead.  There are some puffs of dust on the road and a few men fall face-down but the columns keep moving.  It all seems weirdly dream-like, inconsequential, and the battle-scenes seems possessed of a vast Olympian indifference.  The troops spread out to march through an idyllic woods, but there are snipers and machine-guns and, now and then, we glimpse four or five men falling forward -- there's no sound and so we see muzzle-flashes, dust and litter hopping in the air where the bullets land, and, then, men simply toppling over like sacks of potatoes.  The troops move forward doggedly, leaning into the enemy fire, no one running or trying to dodge the bullets, just endless groups of advancing men.  Gradually, the machine gun fire gets more intense and people are throwing hand grenades to blow up nests of enemy soldiers and, then, gas shells burst on an empty field and the men have to pull goggle-eyed masks over their eyes.  As the scene progresses, the attack continues forward encountering ever more ordinance hurled in the face of slow-moving columns of men trudging into the explosions.  Ultimately, the whole screen collapses into a chaos of fire and smoke and we can no longer see anything.  Slim, Bull, and Apperson are next seen crouching in a shell-hole.  Night is falling and the Germans are raking the field with machine gun fire and lobbing mortar shells into the plowed-up fields ground of them.  Silent films were pre-Code and could be savagely violent -- one recalls "Battling Burrows" beating Lilian Gish to death in Broken Blossoms, the attack on the potato cart in Isn't Life Wonderful?, and various decapitated heads and smashed torsos in Abel Gance's Napoleon -- and, of course, the brutal fight in Death Valley that concludes von Stroheim's Greed.  King Vidor's approach to the small-unit fighting between the American and German lines is similar to von Stroheim's fight scenes in Greed and equally bestial.  An order is delivered by a man creeping like a worm into the shell-hole where our heroes are sheltering.  Someone has to knock out the German mortar.  Slim, the hayseed, volunteers to attack the mortar position, knocks it out with a hand grenade, but is shot.  Lying between the lines, he moans and Bull with Apperson can hear him crying out.  Bull can't tolerate his comrade's cries of anguish and runs forward to try to help him.  He's also shot and dies.  Apperson, then, crawls forward -- these scenes are all shot in deep blue with incandescent flares periodically illumining the cratered battlefield.  A German charges Apperson -- the two soldiers shoot at each other and both men are wounded.  Apperson, then, draws his bayonet and begins crawling laboriously after the German who is also wriggling away, writhing as he tries to escape the avenging  American.  The German topples headfirst into a deep shell-hole and Apperson plans to cut this throat but can't commit the act.  Instead, he gives the German a cigarette, but the man dies with the cigarette drooping out of his mouth.  It's 4 a.m, and the Americans launch a pre-dawn assault.  From a high angle, we see the soldiers swarming out of ruins and shell-holes -- they look like some kind vermin, cockroaches or rats, scampering frantically out of their hiding places.  The attack ends in total chaos with collapsing trenches full of men wriggling around as they hack each other apart and explosions bursting everywhere.  The next shot is color -- a huge red cross painted on the side of a black and white ambulance that is mired in mud.  This is a really extraordinary effect and the battle scene is truly horrific. A title announces:  Another Big  Parade! and we see a line of ambulances extending to the horizon transporting mangled soldiers to field hospitals.  We next see Apperson in a serene, neatly ordered hospital in a cathedral-like Church.  He's been shot in the knee.  Near him is a soldier driven mad by shell-shock trying to tear free of ropes tying him to a bed.  Apperson learns that the battle has surged back and forth over Champollin several times.  Concerned for the well-being of the French girl, he laboriously hauls himself out of bed, breaks through a window, and hops several miles to the ravaged village, now burning and in ruins.  He can't find the girl and collapses during a counter-attack with soldiers darting about the fiery village and shells falling.  A semi-documentary shot shows a long line of refugees staggering across a desolate landscape on a wet road, among them is Apperson's girlfriend, Melisande.

Peace:  Apperson is riding with his father in the family's huge limousine.  He looks haggard and distracted.  At the family's mansion, Apperson's brother is embracing Justyn, Apperson's fiance from before the war.  When Apperson enters the house, we're shocked to see that he's lost his leg.  He is indifferent to his former girlfriend and tells his mother he must return to France to find Melisande.  Cut to France, where Melisande and her mother are plowing -- the men in the village have all been killed.  Melisande is chewing gum, a vice taught to her by Apperson.  Melisande sees a lone figure limping atop a remote hillside.  She runs toward the man, descending out-of-control about a forty foot eroded bank, and essentially rolling down into a stony gulch.  Apperson limping grotesquely hurries toward her and the two embrace.

It's curious that The Big Parade is not more famous.  It broke box-office records and was the most profitable film of 1925.  Although the picture is very dull during the pastoral scenes in Champollin, those sequences are vital to the film's later development -- essentially Apperson sacrifices his leg to an attempt to find Melisande.  And the ending is both desolate and moving at the same time.  The battle scenes are surely among the best ever filmed and the haunting sequence in which all three protagonists are either killed or wounded is both terrifying and exciting.  Vidor's direction is generally subtle, naturalistic, and effective -- the manner in which the viewer is ushered into the hell of the battle, by stages as it were, is also extraordinary.  The is an excellent silent picture and, certainly, one of the finest war films ever made. 

Don't F**k with Cats: Stalking an Internet Killer

At the conclusion of the three-part Netflix series Don't F**k with Cats:  Stalking an Internet Killer,  I booted up a computer to research the ingenious film-makers and writers who had perpetrated this brilliant hoax and parody of the true crime documentary genre.  To my astonishment, I learned that the program is not a parody, that the bizarre events that it portrays all happened, more or less, as shown in the series, and that, in fact, the real story was, even, more lurid and nasty than portrayed in the film.  Some people have called this program the best true crime documentary ever made.  It is fantastically engrossing, although the subject matter is so ghastly that the viewer may feel uncomfortably voyeuristic and, even, defiled to some extent by watching this show.  The appeal is that of highway carnage, freak shows, bear-baiting and public executions. 

In form, the series complies with the norms developed over the last several years for Internet true crime shows.  The program has a danse macabre musical scores -- all disjointed waltzes played over clanking industrial percussion or sinister humming and buzzing.  Every location is established by an ominous drone shot -- the camera gliding over a hill of slag, for instance, to reveal the sun-baked towers of Las Vegas or Los Angeles, Google earth maps into which the camera vertiginously dives to reveal the roofs and parking lots of anonymous apartment buildings, grainy TV footage of newscasters with disturbed expressions on their faces, dim black and white images of interrogations that seem to be taking place on the bottom of the sea, and various commentators staring at the camera with wounded faces and muttering expressions of shock and dismay.  There is an obligatory sequence in which a hardened police detective breaks down and weeps at the horror of the events and we see grieving parents, the superannuated Barbie Doll mother of the accused, herself obviously half-crazed and You-Tube videos intentionally blurred to spare us the worst details.  These shows must be network purchased by the minute because they are often bloated and inefficient -- telling a story that is worthy of ninety minutes across almost four hours.  Since Don't F**k with Cats involves internet sleuths tracking a very bad guy across the worldwide web, there are hundreds of shots showing people logging onto computers, screen shots of occluded passwords being typed, and giant close-ups of messages arriving.  It's all jazzy and high-tech and the fireworks going off more or less continuously on-screen prevent you from sensing how the material has been dilated to fill the available time.  I've seen several of these series and they are extremely formulaic -- each looks exactly like the other:  the only difference is the subject matter which is, more or less, horrific in all cases.

"Don't fuck with cats!" is said to be Internet Rule Zero -- a foundational principle since the Internet is built on cute cat videos.  Accordingly, a group of American cat fanciers are horrified to find on the Internet an eight or nine minute video called "1 Kid 2 Kittens" (it turns out that this is a parody of an extremely viral video called "1 Cup 2 Women" involving coprophagia and vomit gobbling of which I was blissfully unaware -- and which is not cited in the series).  In "1 Kid 2 Kittens", a hooded figure takes two very cute kittens, puts them in a transparent plastic bag, and, then, uses a vacuum-cleaner to suck out the air in the bag, thereby asphyxiating the kittens.  Outraged by this exhibition of animal cruelty, the Internet cat fanciers study the details in the images in an attempt to identify the "cat vacuumer".  The show features a female data analyst for Las Vegas casinos and an anonymous man named "John Green" -- this seems to be an internet tag and his site is marked with an image that seems snipped from a Rembrandt painting, perhaps, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Culp."  The data analyst has a big, bruised-looking face a bit like her Pomeranian pooch and she announces to us that she had just ended a long relationship and was very vulnerable when the cat murderer surfaced on her computer.  John Green is enigmatic, a sort of Sherlock Holmes amateur detectiv -- his favorite expression, repeated at least 20 times is "Holy shit!"  The cat fanciers group discovers various clues in the video and begin developing suspect profiles.  The cat vacuumer learns of their efforts to unmask him and so creates dummy Facebook accounts, so-called "Sock Puppets" to taunt them and send them astray -- these "Sock Puppets" are named after the victims of serial killers and his primary persona goes by the moniker Stuffsalot Inhisass. He also posts a second video showing him drowning a kitten in a bathtub.  The cat fanciers are outraged and identify the killer as a man in Namibia.  They post his identity and he is ostracized and the victim of a campaign of bullying and harassment that leads to his suicide.  But he is the wrong man:  the cat vacuumer posts another video showing him feeding a cat to a burly white python.  By this point, the sleuths have determined that the cat vacuumer is likely an international "jet-setter" named implausibly enough Luka Rocco Magnotta.  Images of Magnotta, who seems to be a high-priced rent-boy, show him cavorting in various luxury hotels and resorts although it is often also clear that many of the images have been doctored.  The sleuths access a vacuum enthusiasts group -- the heroine who goes by the Internet sobriquet of Baudie Moeven (based on a Beastie Boys song) notes that there are groups of enthusiasts of every possible stripe and dimension on the web.  The internet vacuum hobbyists help the cat fanciers by identifying the vacuum used to kill the cats as one sold in Canada.  And, so, the hunt shifts to the Great White North.   The cat fanciers warn the police that a man who begins by torturing animals usually ends by killing people.  But the police ignore the cadre of self-described "Internet nerds."

As it turns out, the cat fanciers are right -- the "cat vacuumer" posts a video showing him killing an Asian man by repeatedly stabbing him with an ice-pick.  A small dog is, then, enlisted to gnaw on the corpse.  (The dog later turns up dead in the trash.)  A few weeks after the video is posted, the police are summoned to open a big suitcase with maggots writhing out of its innards.  The suitcase contains the torso of a man who has been killed by an ice-pick.  Later, the hands and feet of the dead man are mailed to both principal political parties in Canada and to several elementary schools as well.  (We see Justin Trudeau commenting on the postings.)  By this time, it seems clear that Luka Magnotta is the main suspect but he has fled Quebec to Paris.  Baudie Moeven receives an anonymous video that shows her from behind -- someone has been tracking her in the casino in Vegas where she works.  After various adventures and misadventures, Magnotta is captured in Berlin at an Internet cafe where he is studying news reports about his alleged misdeeds.  The Canadian government has to dispatch one of its air force jets, a sleek black number, to pick up the prisoner.  Magnotta won't confess and demands to remain silent.  A celebrated trial is conducted in which he is convicted.  The series ends with some bizarre, but convincing revelations that Magnotta styled his murder on a scene in one of his favorite films Basic Instinct and, indeed, he seems to have had plastic surgery to make himself look like Sharon Stone.  (The grainy interrogation scene in Montreal is cut in a way to suggest connections to the famous interrogation scene in which Stone exposes herself in Basic Instinct).  Magnotta's defense is that he acted as puppet for a sinister dominant, someone called Manny Lopez -- and, indeed, in the python video, we see someone else's hands manipulating the serpent.  But this figure seems to be derived from an alibi used by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.  (The film doesn't provide some of the truly horrific facts relating to the case although what we see, or what is suggested, is bad enough.  Comments that the androgynous-looking Magnotta might be disguised as a woman derive from an incident a few years before the cat vacuum video in which Magnotta served nine months for credit card fraud -- he dressed as a woman, got a credit card under a female alias, and racked up thousands in debt before he was caught.) 

The film ends with hypocrisy of the highest order, although the comment is well-taken.  Baudie Moeven says that the Internet sleuthing merely emboldened Magnotta and that he probably would never have killed if the pet fanciers group hadn't initiated its pursuit of him, thus inspiring him to more and more egregious crimes.  "You should turn off your machines," she says to the camera as the screen goes black. 

The program is disturbing and, even, haunting.  Like all of these shows, the "tease" in the first episode is the best part of the production -- the working-out of all the mayhem and butchery is less interesting and, ultimately, tedious although Don't F**k with Cats is so grotesque that your interest, I'm sorry to report, never flags.  There is a small glimpse of the anomie underlying productions of this sort when Baudie Moeven and "John Green" meet, apparently in a cafe in Las Vegas or Los Angeles -- they have never been together in the flesh.  Baudie Moeven is anxious to make a connection with someone with whom she has corresponded over an intense three-year period in her life.  "Green" is standoffish and cynical and, even, insulting.  Of course, you want these two "Internet nerds" to bond in some way.  But "Green" is indifferent to Moeven and, even, seems cruel to her.  It's just a tiny scene at the end of the show but it speaks volumes about the society that these machines have created.

Little Women

Greta Gerwig's Little Women (2019) is justly celebrated for its fine acting, highly intelligent and aphoristic dialogue and the sumptuous beauty of the film's costuming and photography.  The picture is problematic because of the exceedingly perverse way in which the narrative is fragmented into a complex, prismatic array of short scenes,  An interesting comparison may be made to Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, a movie that arranges the narrative around two periods of time posited as the present -- the protagonist's final days in a nursing home and a decisive road trip that takes DeNiro's assassin to his fatal encounter with Jimmy Hoffa; from these two structural frames the picture proceeds by leisurely flashback in a generally chronological manner.  Although this narrative is complicated, the viewer is never "lost"-- rather, the viewer can keep track of what happened before and after the various moments that the film depicts.  (The great length of the movie, I think, contributes to Scorsese's ability to keep the narrative clear and, even, mostly chronological despite the fact that the structure involves a flashback nested in a flashback.  The Irishman is badly flawed but narrative confusion is not one of its defects.  Little Women is probably a better film, more intricately imagined and more profound in its musings on the changing roles of women in society but, it must be said, the picture is very, very hard to understand as narrative -- on the simplest level, we aren't sure what comes first and what comes later.  Gerwig's script fractures the story into elements that are intercut thematically -- if someone is sick, the film cuts back and forth between different occasions when the person was ill.  When the four "little women" march across the screen to provide succor to the impoverished Hummel family, the director cuts to another scene of the girls marching in the opposite direction during some other moment in time.  Ultimately, I wrote a note to myself that the film's structure was Proustian -- one object or recollection leads the film maker to intercut other scenes involving that same subject or some close variant on that subject.  The effect is that, in order to watch this film productively, you must generally know what happens in the novel and the chronological order of events -- only armed with this information can you decipher what is occurring on-screen.  The director seems to assume that everyone who pays for a ticket to this movie will have read (and loved) the book or have seen other movie versions of the story and remembered them well -- otherwise, the movie is like a superhero show or Star Wars, presented to the viewer with the notion that the audience members will have seen earlier iterations of the story.  An extreme example involves Beth's illness.  Beth has gone to help the impoverished Hummel family and been exposed to scarlet fever.  We see her fall ill, become terribly flushed, and, even, comatose -- but, then, it's Christmas morning and Beth is no longer in bed and she seems to be better:  at least, this is what Marmie announces.  We have earlier seen Beth with Jo at the seaside where Beth is convalescing from an attack of the illness which has apparently decisively weakened her.  Then, we see Beth succumb to the illness and die.  Behind me, several women who had certainly read the novel were whispering to one another -- "it was just a dream," one of them said.  But this narrative is very grounded and practical -- there are no dreams in the picture.   The confusion is that we are seeing events separated by several years with no narrative integument to explain this to us.  Similarly, in one scene, we are surprised to see the eldest sister, Meg, with a man in a small house -- they are discussing household finances.  The scene follows an episode twenty minutes earlier in which Meg was tempted to buy some expensive silk fabric.  At first, we can't figure out the identity of the man with whom Meg is speaking so intimately -- then, someone refers to their wedding and we understand that Meg and this man are married.  This sequence apparently takes place some years after the Civil War although there is nothing to identify the time or place.  About an hour later, we are shown Meg's wedding with her husband.  This is about 15 minutes before the end of the film.  What makes Little Women so challenging in this disjointed narrative format is that there is absolutely no present tense from which the flashbacks and flashforwards emanate -- that is, there is no privileged narrative that is explicated by flashbacks and flashforwards:  it is all a flux of short disconnected episodes,. spanning many years and, in fact, part of the globe -- there are a number of sequences set in Paris and, possibly, London.  It remains to be seen whether this narrative structure is successful on some level.  Certainly, the cubist approach to time and space saps the emotional integrity of the story -- since every scene begins with our questioning when and where this is happening, we can't really identify with the characters.  Gerwig's work is profoundly modernist and, as I have said, Proustian -- but it's so analytically complex that I'm not sure whether Gerwig has made a masterpiece or simply botched the film's story beyond recognition  (At least, one lover of the book told me she didn't like the film because it was confusing).  I think there is something to be said for both points of view.  Certainly, Gerwig has distanced the film and its characters quite radically by splintering their stories in short non-chronological tableaux.

As far as I can tell, the movie involves a woman named Marmie (Laura Dern) who is the mother of four highly talented and beautiful girls.  Marmie's husband, who appears late in the film in first a Union soldier's garb and, then, clerical weeds, is away serving in the Army.  We hear that he has squandered some of his family's wealth by educating African-American freedmen's children.  The girl's father, who is much beloved in his absence, is either wounded or becomes ill.  Marmie goes to Washington to nurse him back to health.  There are many scenes emphasizing Jo's literary interests -- she writes plays for the girls to perform and, later, we see her in New York City where she lives in a boarding house and publishes Gothic stories involving much violence and bodice-ripping.  (The scenes in New York are our first introduction to Jo -- although this occurs chronologically a decade after the episodes at the family house in Concord, Massachusetts.)  Meg, the oldest girl, marries a poor but virtuous schoolteacher.  For her, marriage is the crown of existence and she is happy in her role as a wife and mother.  Amy, Jo's little sister, wants to be an artist.  We see her in Paris in a studio where she takes lessons and paints modestly competent impressionist canvases.  Beth, the youngest daughter, plays the piano and is much beloved as a daughter-figure to a lonely and wealthy widower, Mr. Lawrence, who lives nearby.  She sickens when providing charity to a family of impoverished Germans and, ultimately succumbs to her disease -- although this is after the Civil War when Amy is studying art in Paris.  Mr. Lawrence has a rapscallion grandson or nephew, Laurie (as the girl's call him) -- he falls in love with the free-spirited Jo but she rejects his proposal.  Later, he encounters Amy in Paris.  At first, he behaves poorly, appearing at a grand Ball while completely drunk.  (This scene doesn't exactly work -- Laurie's disheveled garb and drunken demeanor are so out of character for the elegant soiree that he disrupts that it is like the sudden incursion of Adam Driver or Tatum Channing or someone on that order, a young rebel without a cause, into the decorum of the 19th century setting).  Later Laurie learns that Amy has always loved him from afar and they marry on the way back to Massachusetts to attend Beth's funeral.  Jo's fate is more "literary" -- indeed, almost Borgesian.  She becomes a character in her own novel.  Early in the film, she rejects violently and with ill-temper the criticism of a German professor in New York, Friedrich Behr.  Behr thinks she is traducing her talent by writing Sturm und Drang popular stories for the tabloid press.  Jo is outraged by his criticism and reacts very poorly.  Later, however, she writes a novel called Little Women about her experiences growing up -- the "end of childhood" as she characterizes it.  When she takes the novel to the publisher, he urges her to correct the ending by having the character named "Jo" who is also the author get married.  Jo reluctantly agrees although she drives a hard bargain for royalties and the copyright to her novel.  She goes home and writes an ending in which Jo marries Friedrich Behr -- and, of course, this is what we see enacted in the final scenes in the movie.  I liked this meta-narrative ending, which is certainly thought-provoking -- in the final scenes, we don't know whether we are in Jo's life as depicted in Little Women or in some other fictional terrain, perhaps, the life of Louisa May Alcott.  In any event, the film ends with all the surviving sister's together in a large mansion house in Boston where the Amy is teaching little girls art, Friedrich tutoring children (including a Black girl) in the violin, and, presumably, Jo instructing girls in literature and, perhaps, economics.  The film contains several scenes emphasizing the economic structure of women's roles in society, a subject on which the formidable Aunt March (and equally formidable red-eyed Meryl Streep) preaches at length. 

The acting is first-rate and the movie is exceedingly exquisite in its appearance, becoming more and more beautiful as the film progresses.  The superb camera-work invokes equally Thomas Cole, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer.  A sequence on the beach with the women wearing bonnets and the men elegant white hats looks exactly like something painted by Homer and the ballroom scenes with the women arrayed in exquisite silks and satins look like Sargent's dimly lit but sumptuous interiors.  In one scene in Paris, Amy and Laurie converse in a garden.  In the background, a woman and gentleman are seated in the shadows talking.  The woman's dress is a rich and subtle purple and it's simply an extraordinary highlight, a gift to the eyes to the rear of the main characters.  In another scene, Jo and Laurie descend together from a modest height overlooking their village.  They fight and Laurie leaves.  Jo sits in the meadow exactly aligned with a little pointed steeple a thousand yards away -- it's like an improvement on one of Thomas Cole's autumnal landscapes painted from a humble, but picturesque vantage over the landscape.  This is certainly one of the most beautiful films that I have ever seen.  But it can't build up any real emotional power or resonance -- no sooner do we figure out where we are in time and what has happened, then, we are posed with a fresh set of narrative riddles to solve. 

The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs is a 1928 picture, made during the final, decadent flowering of silent films.  (The picture was releases with a synchronized musical soundtrack featuring sound effects as well as the picture'symphonic score.)   Motion pictures have always been big business and The Man who Laughs is a lavish production intended to appeal to all audiences and devised to plaster a big grin of satisfaction on the faces of all those emerging from the spectacle.  The ghastly rictus carved into the hero's face is indicative of the film's intent to paralyze its viewers into some sort of hapless scotophilic response -- the movie is a sharp instrument intended to assuage our desire to look and behold:  the tormented grin on Gwynplaine's face is the oral equivalent of the horrible devices that prop open Malcolm McDowell's eyes in A Clockwork Orange.  

About 2/3rds of The Man Who Laughs is very good.  But the film's last third sags horribly and its incoherent story-line is implausible, even, baffling on all levels.  Presumably, the director Paul Leni, a an alumnus of the great age of German Expressionism, found himself trapped into adapting for the screen aspects of Victor Hugo's source material that either didn't lend themselves to the movies or that were suspect and dubious in the first place.  In any event, the movie's last twenty-five minutes is a complete catastrophe, a mishmash of various elements so egregious, that it casts retrospective doubt on the very good things in the earlier parts of the film.  The picture's desperation seems manifest -- it throws the whole kitchen-sink of swashbuckling melodramatic devices in the audience's face, serves up hordes of agitated extras, and even, features a heroic German Shepherd like a more plump version of Rin Tin Tin, who saves the day.

The beginning of the film has a genuine pathos and horror that is deeply affecting.  James II is a waxen mummy dozing his great bed in a room full of scary-looking life-size carved saints.  His evil jester, the hook-nosed and smirking Baskilphedro, slinks into the room through a hidden door in one of the wooden saints and announces that Clancharlie, apparently a Scottish rebel has been captured.  Clancharlie defiant in chains demands to know the whereabouts of his son, and, taunted by the iniquitous Baskilphedro drops to his knees to beg for information.  He is advised that Clancharlie's son has been sold to the Comparichos, gypsies who surgically mutilate children to transform them into monsters for freak shows.  The monarch has Clancharlie shoved into a spiked Iron Maiden ending his performance in the movie decisively.  The film then cuts to a barren seacoast where a ghost-ship rigged in icy sails is gliding through a dark, snow-draped channel.  A little boy with a scarf drawn over his jaw is abandoned as the gypsies lurch through the drifts and clamber on board the vessel.  The Comparichos are fleeing England under the leadership of their chief surgeon, Hardquannone (everyone in this movie has very weird and difficult names -- an artifact of the ye olde bullshit typical of Victor Hugo.)  The mutilated child wanders around on the frozen coast in a series of extremely impressive studio shots, stylized, theatrical and effective -- for instance, frozen corpses hanging from trees twist and turn in the gale while crows circle warily.  The boy finds a dead woman frozen under a icy swirl of snow that looks like a massive soft-serve ice-milk from Dairy Queen.  The dead woman is cradling a child.  The boy carries the child to the wagon of a traveling philosopher (probably some kind of snake-oil salesman) named Ursus.  Ursus has a German shepherd dog named "Homo" who figures importantly in the latter part of the movie.  It turns out that the baby girl rescued from the soft-serve blizzard is blind.  She grows up to be the beauteous Dea.

Ten years pass and the mutilated boy Gwynplaine is now the famous "Man who Laughs", showing his surgically enhanced smile in a sort of comic play featuring Dea.  Dea, who isn't aware of the hideous grin, decorating Gwyneplaine's chops, loves the playmate of her youth and they are engaged to be married.  The traveling players go to Southwark Fair and there encounter various thugs sent to detain them by the present monarch, Queen Anne.  Anne looks a lot like she does in Yorgos Lanthimos' equally grotesque The Favorite:  she's fat, dowdy, and perpetually scowling.  A courtier carries a parchment message introducing us to the other female lead in the film, the wicked Duchess Josiana (played wonderfully by the Russian ballerina Olga Baclanova).  People have remarked that the platinum blonde Baclanova looks a lot like Madonna during her own platinum blonde phase and she has undeniable sex appeal.  We first see her through a peephole bathing, a scene that foregrounds the movie's obsession with seeing -- there's a forbidden pleasure in looking at monsters and freaks, we spy on the beautiful naked Josiana through a peephole, and the film titillates us with glimpses of forbidden subjects.  After her bath Josiana gives the courtier a quick glimpse of her crotch and, later, at the Southwark Fair she gets drunk and rides on a kind of swing, kicking her legs in the air to again expose her groin.  She is the film's femme fatale and exudes sinister sex appeal.  The movie gets seriously kinky when the mutilated Gwynplaine is conveyed into the Duchess Josiana's boudoir where she is sexually excited by his huge, mangled mouth -- none of this is even slightly ambiguous.  Josiana is enthralled and titillated by Gwyneplaine's vast crescent smile, all red wounded lip and giant horse-teeth and she eagerly kisses him on the mouth.  We keep expecting some conventional pay-off to the scene -- that Josiana is merely pretending to desire Gwyneplaine but it never comes, she never derides his horrible appearance, and, in fact, seems to almost rape the mutilated man.

At this point, the movie takes a turn for the worst.  For some reason, the Queen wants to restore Gwynplaine to this rightful Clancharlie estates.  So Gwynplaine is press-ganged into the House of Lords wearing an elaborate blonde and white wig.  There his supposed peers mock him mercilessly, although this is a bit disingenuous since they are all grotesque fops themselves.  The traveling players are expelled from the City and have to leave England itself.  This sets up reprise of the opening scenes, although now played out against a lavish medieval city built for the movie.  As the traveling players are harried out of town to a waiting sea vessel, Gwynplaine, longing for the beautiful Dea, fights his way out of the House of Lords, duels with a bad guy and, even, performs a Douglas Fairbanks style leap from one castellated turret to another, dangling down over the agitated extras now wielding halberds and pikes.  The noble hero of the film, Homo, the German shepherd, has led the poor blind girl Dea to the House of Lords and, finally, saves the day by swimming to the sailing ship with Gwynplaine in his jaws.  Gwyneplaine is reunited with Dea and the ship sails into the studio-stage sunset.

The ending makes no sense emotionally or dramatically.  Gwynplaine is fleeing from wealth and riches as Lord of the realm to pursue his career as a circus freak.  Furthermore, his flight is away from the beautiful Duchess Josiana who is certainly evil but also fantastically enticing -- in other words, his flight to the chaste Dea repudiates what the film has shown us about Josiana, a woman really turned on by Gwynplaine's deformity and certainly well-equipped to show him a good time.  We know we are supposed to root for the chaste and humble blind girl (Mary Philben) but Duchess Josiana with her own huge and lascivious mouth is much more attractive and promises pleasures that the blind girl can't even imagine.  (In fact, the film seems to focus a lot on people's mouths:  Dea has refined cupid's bow (bee-sting) lips; Josiana has a lavish spread of lip and tooth second only to Gwynplaine's grotesque grin.  The viewer finds himself inadvertently comparing everyone buccal apertures to Gwynplaine's mouth.)  Olga Baclanova ended-up type cast as the bride of the monster -- she appears memorably in 1932's Freaks as Cleopatra who seduces a dwarf in the sideshow while carrying on an affair with the circus strongman.  When she cuckolds the dwarf, the freaks attack her and she ends up as a mutilated hen woman, a sideshow attraction herself complete with feathers, in the film's final shock scene.)  Director Leni and company put every possible genre into this movie and dare you to look away -- there are society comedy scenes involving a dull concert that the hapless Queen Anne requires her court to attend, we get mild pornography involving Josiana, animal antics courtesy of Zimbo the canine actor playing the loyal German Shepherd, Homo -- the film has horror aspects but, also, channels some of the rabble-rousing crowd scenes in Orphans of the Storm and there is a sword fight, some acrobatics and the like.  The movie seems to burst through the technical limits existing in 1928 -- one long scene in which the members of a traveling company simulate a crowd attending one of Gwyneplaine's performances utilizes every possible technique to make its images sound; the montage literally shouts and rings and is so agitated that we can't perceive it as silent.  (In the original it was accompanied by synchronized sound-effects.)  Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine is spectacular and his make-up seems so painful that your own lips and jaw hurt watching him.  (It's not clear to me how the effect of the surgically carved grin was achieved but it was so impressive to one viewer, Jack Kane, that he later imitated Gwynplaine with his character, the Joker.)  The shame is that the film's last half-hour is a sodden mess, not even effectively edited, and this wrecks the movie. 

The Two Popes

Although many, I think, will give The Two Popes a positive rating based on its ostensible good intentions, the film fails even at that level.  In fact, the movie's intentions are dishonorable.  Although Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict and Jonathon Price playing Jorge Bugoglio,  the Argentine who became Pope Francis are pretty good and, in earlier scenes, even thrilling, the picture is ultimately so evasive as to become, illegible.  Despite some early scenes that seem to stake out the positions of the two principals in an illuminating and highly dramatic manner, the picture slips into sentimentality marking a really troubling fundamental malaise -- we don't know what the two men represent or why they behave as they do.  The film's inability to effectively probe motives arises from larger symptoms that concern the role of the Catholic Church in the modern world.  That problem hasn't been solved and, so, of course, the movie also remains unresolved on any meaningful level.  Concluding the film with an extended sequence of the two pontiffs bonding like Milwaukee cheese-heads at Green Bay over a soccer game demonstrates the problem: the fate of the world's largest religion is at stake and these two morons are quarreling over fouls in a football game.

The Two Popes (Ferdinand Meirelles) is principally a biography of Jorge Bugoglio.  (Here the word "hagiography" is literally applicable -- some may argue that the warts on Bugoglio's biography cut against hagiography.  This is not so, any good biography of a Saint must begin with the Holy Man's doubts and errors overcome by the power of Christ.)  Bugoglio is preaching in a slum, among colorful primitive murals, when he is summoned to Rome.  Pope John Paul II has died.  In the conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Bugoglio garners a number of votes.  He isn't campaigning.  By contrast, the formidable Josef Ratzinger, is seeking the papacy -- someone notes that Plato said the chief qualification for high office is not wanting the office.  Ultimately, Ratzinger prevails.  In this part of the film, effective use is made of newsreel footage of the funeral of the old Pope.  A mighty wind sweeps across Vatican City implying that change is afoot.  But, Ratzinger as Benedict is a traditionalist and doesn't do anything to reform the Church.  Instead, he becomes embroiled  in destructive controversies about the Church's banking and its pervasive culture of sexual abuse of minors  (the latter point is downplayed and here we perceive the first evidence of the film's creeping and evasive blurriness).  Bugoglio is disenchanted with his role as Bishop of the Argentine Church and would like to retire to become a "simple parish priest."  He books a flight to Rome to submit his resignation personally to the Pope since his letters requesting leave from the role of Bishop have been ignored.  After getting his plane tickets to Rome, he is summoned by the Pope.  Bugoglio thinks this is because the Pope wants to discuss his resignation with him.  He flies to Rome and is driven to the Papal summer palace, a spectacular site on the edge of a volcanic caldera.  As it turns out the Pope has not agreed to this resignation and refuses to accept it.  He perceives Bugoglio's resignation as an implicit criticism of the Holy See and angrily denounces the Argentine for his liberalism.  There follows a fierce debate between the two men that is the best thing in the film.  Benedict is wearing a fit-bit watch that periodically hectors him to keep walking -- he is trying to walk 10,000 paces a day. (The watch, later also worn by Francis, is a symbol -- it suggests that the Catholic Church most "keep moving," that is progressing with the world around it.) In this debate, Bugoglio advocates (cautiously) for reform and argues that the Church must not remain static because God himself changes; when Benedict reacts with indignation, Bugoglio says that history shows that God is "moving toward us."  This sequence ends with a flashback to 1956, in which we see Bugoglio as a young man courting a woman and dancing the tango.  Bugoglio is working as a lab technician and, on the way to proposing, he hears plaintive music coming from a church -- the spiritual "Nobody knows the Trouble I've Seen."  He enters the Church confesses to a dying priest (the man has leukemia) and, then, accepts his vocation to become a priest.  This is all conventional stuff -- of course, priests must be shown as passionate, even aggressive, heterosexual lovers, before they entered the priesthood, but the sequence is shot in lustrous black and white and one scene featuring a huge jacaranda tree with buttress roots at night in a garden is literally breathtaking.  (Much of the film is physically beautiful).

After their contentious debate, which shows irreconcilable differences between them, the two old men, after dinner (Benedict eats alone) reminisce.  Benedict plays a You-tube clip of Thelonious Monk and, when he misses some notes while playing piano, says that he sounds like "Stockhausen."  Music is important to him and he plays an old Nazi-era cabaret song by Zarah Leander.  (In Durs Gruenbein's great sonnet-cycle about the destruction of Dresden, Porzellan, the sickly-sweet music of Zarah Leander is a symbol for the corruption of the Nazis and their kitsch culture -- in the film, it's hard to know what is meant since the picture is evasive about Benedict's past, particularly his role in the Nazi era.)  Benedict is lonely, humorless, and aware that everyone dislikes him.  He plaintively notes that the more people get to know him, the less they like him.   The Vatican staff regards his culinary tastes (South Bavarian meatballs in lemon soup) as literally revolting -- to the suave Italians Benedict is just a German invader, a barbarian, and, behind his back, people call him "Nazi".  There are more flashbacks, particularly to 1978 when the military junta seized power in Argentina.  This portion of the film is very unclear, poorly shot and edited, and euphemistic in its portrayal of some of the horrors of the era -- Bugoglio tries to protect Jesuits in his order who are protesting the regime, although he apparently does this in a low-key, secretive, and highly ineffective manner.  The result is that a number of priests are tortured for months and, then, rendered unconscious by injection, before being pitched into the sea from helicopters.  Bugoglio has tried to accommodate the tyrannical regime and seems to have supported them -- the film's thesis here is a questionable one:  if you know exactly what Bugoglio did to oppose the regime you would admire him, but you don't know, and he won't tell, and so we're left with public perception that Bugoglio, in fact, supported the regime.  In any event, we see him exiled to Cordoba, poor and mountainous area in the Andes.  There he becomes successful as a parish priest and, gradually, works his way up the hierarchy again to become the Bishop of Argentina.  The film intermittently shows us a barren mountaintop, apparently in the  Andes -- at first, the landscape is puzzling, but we gradually come to see that the mountain represents Bugoglia's personal Golgotha, or better stated, the Mount of Olives where he goes alone to pray and brood over the world.  At this point, the film starts to dissolve into sentimentality -- for reasons that are never clearly stated, Benedict has chosen Bugoglio for his successor and admits that he intends to resign:  "I am a scholar, not a manager" he says, citing a curious supernatural omen:  smoke from a candle that he extinguished flowed down and not up to heaven, suggesting that God has withdrawn his approval from Benedict's papacy.  (Bugoglio cites an omen of his own -- he bought his plane ticket to Rome before learning the Pope had summoned him.)  Benedict is suffering a spiritual crisis and he feels that God is not answering his prayers and doesn't speak to him any more:  "I was alone all my life, but God was with me," Benedict says.  But now he's not sure and has decided to abdicate the Papal Throne.  This is all explicable.  But what is inexplicable, in the terms of the film, is why Benedict has chosen Bugoglio as his appointed successor.  This is contrary to everything we have seen in the initial confrontation between the men and never explained in the movie at all:  God, we are supposed to understand, moves in mysterious ways.

The scene at the Sistine Chapel in which Benedict chooses Bugoglio to be his successor is inadequately written.  Basically, the Argentine repeatedly refuses and Benedict repeatedly insists.  Bugoglio admits that he is a "divisive figure in Argentina" because of his reputation for supporting, or, at least, accommodating himself to the Junta.  At 9:00 am, the army of tourists that daily invade the chapel are waiting outside and the two men withdraw into a white-walled ancient sacristy room.  There, Benedict asks Bugoglio to take his confession.  At this moment, the film's evasive strategy becomes clear:  Benedict begins confessing his sins but, then, reaches a difficult part -- his failure to address the child-rape scandals destroying the Church's credibility.  Remarkably, the director decides to protect this aspect of the old Pope's confession, imposing, as it were, the privilege of priest taking confession over the whole proceedings -- some kind of hum or buzz literally blurs the words and we can't hear what Benedict is saying.  This is a startling lapse, particularly, since the privilege silencing those who take confession has been a powerful weapon in the Church's arsenal throughout the many years of litigation on this subject.  It's amazing the Meirelles invokes that tool to completely evade the question of Benedict's complicity in the scandal and, more morally problematic, to similarly conceal the future Pope's feelings on that subject.  From this point, the film careens sharply downward into bathos.  Now, the candles release their smoke skyward.  We return to the Sistine  Chapel where Bugoglio is duly elected Pope.  As  Francis, he travels to Lampedusa in Sicily -- again, most Americans, even Catholics, will have no idea what this is about.  But, in fact, Lampedusa is ground zero for the interment of African refugees taking their lives into their hands to cross the Mediterranean -- this is the center of the European refugee crisis.  Again, the film evades the issue and, if you are not current on European affairs, you will wonder what this sequence is supposed to mean.  Francis' speech is intercut with drone-images of huge walls in Palestine and on the American border with Mexico,  images that are supposed to make the point with the cognoscenti but that will seem simply extraneous to many viewers.  The refugee crisis, a major moral issue facing Europe and the World, is reduced to some shots of mountainous winter waves at sea and, then, several African tourists, apparently, craning their necks to look at the murals in the Sistine Chapel.  The is the end of the film except for some wanton sentimental kitsch -- Francis teaches Benedict how to do the tango (this has been after all a kind of odd couple "Buddy Movie") and, later, we see the two men drinking wine and eating pizza while watching the World Cup game between Germany and Argentina.

The film is not without its merits.  Much of the footage that seems to show us the interior of the Vatican is spectacular.  The sequences in the Sistine Chapel showing the votes for Pope are vivid and full of pomp and circumstance.  (I suspect that this film has as many special effects as Star Wars -- somehow, the two actors have to be integrated into vast sets that simulate the Cathedral at St. Peter and the summer palace as well as  St. Peter's Square.)  The film has been advertised as a sort of My Dinner with Andre, basically a well-written two actor play featuring the two Popes.  But the movie is much more flamboyant (I think to its detriment):  the narrative is intercut with showy flashbacks, some of them quite spectacular in their own right, documentary footage and the like.  The interaction between the Popes is shot in extreme close-up -- one man talking and the other so close to the camera that his shoulder and profile are blurred.  The cutting is bold:  the flashbacks intervene without warning and there are shots (for instance the boulders on the Andes mountain-top) that are, at first, inexplicable.  The enormous frescos in the Sistine Chapel are, often, shown in close-up, with anguished or joyous figures seeming to comment on the action.  One bravura sequence shows the Sistine chapel from behind the choir's chancel screen -- the place seems dark and moldy until the camera moves back and the light suffusing the upper level of the room illumines the huge painting, now brightly renovated in vibrant blues and greens.  There is lots of interesting music on the soundtrack, tangos and Clair de Lune and other things including "Blackbird" by the Beatles -- the old Pope has recorded an album at Abbey Road and, with false humility, pretends to not know who the Beatles were or that they ever made a record there.  (Of course, he knows full well). The director hasn't thought through the implications of his material -- for instance, he fails to make one obvious visual connection:  the victims of the Junta were tossed into the ocean and washed up on the shores of the River Plate in vast numbers.  Isn't this similar to the corpses of the refugees killed by the Mediterranean and washing up on the beaches in Greece and Sicily and Lampedusa? -- it's a pretty obvious idea, but Mereilles misses the opportunity.

It seems to me that the movie stands for the proposition that the old Pope has outsmarted the Argentine Bishop.  Francis is just a more relatable (to use the modern term) version of the unpleasant and dogmatic hound of Christ, Pope Benedict.  It seems that he will do Benedict's bidding, that is, pretending to reform a Church that is so fundamentally corrupt that it can not be reformed.  This is my cynical interpretation of the film.  It's not clear to me how Mereilles, the director, perceives the film or its moral.

"The Truth may be invaluable.  But without Love it is unbearable."  Thus Francis quoting one of Benedict's own writings to him.

Marriage Story

Many years ago, I spoke with a friend about Chariots of Fire, a movie that featured scenes involving an Olympic sprinter.  Although one would not know it from my appearance now (or then), I participated in Track and Field events when I was in High School and, in fact, was quite successful for a White-boy sprinter.  I pointed out that all of the details shown in the film about sprinting were palpably false.  Furthermore, the representation of the experience of a hundred-yard sprint was also false -- the movie emphasized a picturesque long, loping stride executed with body stiffly upright and head tilted to the side to observe the other races.  In fact, a sprinter ordinarily runs with head tilted forward or down using a percussive short stride -- there is generally insufficient time to glance around to locate the other runners on the track  You don't expand the body; your compress and compact it into a hurtling cannonball..  The fellow with whom I was having this conversation was a Platonist and he argued that Chariots of Fire was effective in that it conveyed the essence of running, that is, the way an audience is likely to imagine running not the actual phenomenon.  (Readers will recall the film's signature shot of scanty-clad young men loping over a beach where surging tides splash underfoot -- an image derived, I think, from the aesthetic of A. E. Housman.)

I am a lawyer but I will concede that it may be churlish to demand legal realism from Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story (2019, Netflix).  The movie is pretty good, closely and well-observed, and features some superb performances.  And, I suppose, the legal scenes which are integral to the film about a divorcing couple, are effective in conveying the sense of helplessness and rage that participants in marriage dissolution proceedings inevitably experience.  But I observe that by any canon of realism, much of the film is rank nonsense.  This criticism is relevant because the film prides itself on being realistic -- people go to the toilet, behave inconsistently and foolishly, and act from impure motives or, even, on the basis of self-delusion.  We are constantly asked to apply canons of realism to the film's action:  we see that the characters are self-deluded:  that is, we are privy to the truth, that is, the real.  The movie's structure relies upon distinctions between America's two foremost urban centers: gritty New York and sun-burnt, sprawling Los Angeles, and these two locations are also lovingly observed with a density of detail that seems quasi-documentary.  Therefore, Marriage Story posits itself as a "slice of life" -- an un-idealized and raw portrait of a failing (or failed) relationship.  In this context, the film's resort to presenting legal proceedings in their essential as opposed to actual form seems a bit of a betrayal.  However, it is my guess that this cavil will not occur to most viewers.  Indeed, I practice Civil Trial litigation and, so, as I watched the movie, I marveled at the performances and enjoyed the courtroom (or contested procedure) scenes; it never occurred to me until several hours later that the film's portrait of divorce litigation didn't make a lot of sense.

Filmmakers in recent pictures seem well aware that most lawsuits end with settlement not a protracted and exciting court battle.  Therefore, these pictures often resort to a curious hybrid proceeding:  the unmediated settlement conference in which characters sit around a table in the presence of their lawyers denigrating one another, shouting vituperation, and, periodically, engaging in bouts of mini-cross-examination between lawyerly harangues.  (In real life, settlement conferences are devised to avoid unnecessary acrimony - it's hard to offer money to someone who just called you or your client a son-of-a-bitch.  Mediators keep the parties separate from one another, prevent the lawyers from jousting, and engage in shuttle diplomacy moving between the various caucuses to keep the settlement efforts from flagging -- but none of this would make for good TV or movie fare.)  These settlement conference scenes (featured in the CBS show Evil and in Marriage Story) basically take the place of the confrontation that we would expect at a trial.  In Marriage Story, many of the scenes involving office conferences with the lawyers are effective enough and, I think, accurately observed.  The attitudes of those entangled in the divorce lawsuit are accurately portrayed.  However, a courtroom scene, presumably some sort of pre-trial conference, quickly devolves into grotesque name-calling and posturing.  Baumbach knows enough about the law to have one of his characters observe that "California is a no-fault" jurisdiction -- this means, that the litigants don't have to establish who was culpable in causing the divorce.  But having paid lip-service to this principle, the lawyers in the show willfully violate that rule and immediately begin accusing their adversaries of fault in the dissolution of the marriage.  With respect to this scene, my objection is purely technical.  On the model of Chariots of Fire, the sequence certainly conveys the feeling of a contested divorce hearing to the hapless husband and wife -- the participants have to sit silently as they are accused of all sorts of awful things, accusations that are all the more painful because, of course, based upon a kernel of fact.  Lawyers are most despised for their partisan ability to twist facts to the advantage of their clients and the courtroom sequence in the film, well-prepared for by earlier scenes in the picture, certainly shows this element of law practice in its epitomized form.  Accordingly, I'm conflicted about the legal process elements of A Marriage Story, some of this stuff (the settlement conference) is just egregious bull-shit, but the courtroom scenes, in their own misleading way, are true enough to the experience of helplessness and dismay that real litigants feel when compelled to appear in court.

In many ways, A Marriage Story, brilliantly acted and effectively directed, is similar to some of Woody Allen's pictures about marital discord, although without the tendency to stretch for a gag periodically.  (In fact, in its portrait of the competing appeals of New York and LA, the film resembles another picture about a dissolving relationship, Annie Hall.)  The niche in American film occupied by Woody Allen, now elderly and in disgrace, seems here seized by Noah Baumbach.  His characters are  hyper-articulate and loquacious, witty and self-aware, and all generally narcissistic and self-deluded.  Charlie (Adam Driver) is a New York-based director, active and well-respected in the off-Broadway avant-garde.  He is married to his leading lady, the intuitive and self-sacrificing Nicole, played by Scarlet Johannson.  Nicole is embittered because she feels that she has sacrificed a promising career in Los Angeles in movies and TV to Charlie's avant garde efforts.  (At the start of the film, we see her as the leading lady in a production of Elektra that involves lots of big-screen video effects and actors carrying one another around on their shoulders -- the dean of New York experimental theater, Wally Shawn, is a member of the ensemble.)  Nicole has a chance to perform in a pilot TV series and, with the couple's four-year old son, travels to Los Angeles.  There she files for divorce.  Charlie is placed in an untenable position -- he can't maintain his theater practice on the East Coast and, yet, continue his close relationship with his son who is in Beverly Hills. At first, Charlie denies the need for the divorce and rejects the advice of a high-powered "pit bull" lawyer (Jay played by Ray Liotta).  But Nicole has hired Nora, an aggressively feminist and fierce divorce lawyer played by Laura Dern.   Nora's approach with respect to the settlement conference and courtroom proceedings is savagely post-feminist -- while making politically correct points, she prances around in seductive and revealing haute couture, exuding sex appeal even as she seeks to eviscerate her opponent.  At first, Charlie thinks that a low-key approach to the divorce is best.  He hires an elderly divorce lawyer (Alan Alda) who practices with his daughter as secretary and paralegal in a low-rent office featuring an equally elderly cat.  Alda's old lawyer is the soul of wisdom in the film and points out that the results are already "baked-in" -- an experienced lawyer can imagine how the Court will ultimately rule and it''s best to avoid posturing and just get to the final outcome without undue and destructive acrimony.  But as things progress, particularly the disastrous settlement conference (which as I have noted would not occur in real life), Charlie thinks he needs more fire-power and hires Jay, the pit-bull.  Of course this escalates the animosity leading to a climactic confrontation between Charlie and Nicole in Charlie's apartment in Los Angeles.  Violence is narrowly avoided but the confrontation seems cathartic. At stake is the contention by Charlie that "they are a New York family" -- Nicole, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, disagrees and this controversy proliferates into questions about Charlie's unfaithfulness and whether he should be compelled to share his recently received McArthur "Genius" grant with Nicole.  A child custody evaluator is retained by the Court to investigate the issues relating to the custody of Henry.  This leads to a funny, if horrific scene, in which Charlie accidentally slashes himself with a knife, bleeds all over everything, while trying to maintain an attitude of gracious sang-froid with respect to the clueless evaluator.  His attempts to impress the evaluator -- for instance he serves a family meal with "garnish" on the entree (leading to a loud protest from his son) -- go hideously awry -- but, as Alda's character seems to have predicted, it doesn't really make any difference.  All will be as it will be.  A year passes, measured between two Halloweens, and, ultimately, the characters negotiate a fragile, but reasonable, truce and life goes on.  Ultimately, the film suggests that Charlie, at least, was fighting for prizes that he really didn't desire -- in effect, he was fighting to salvage his wounded pride.  

There is much to admire in this film.  The acting is beyond reproach on all levels.  Henry is portrayed as a real child, equally frightened and defiant -- a subplot involves his learning to read.  Scarlet Johannson allows herself to be filmed without glamour make-up, hair, or costuming and she is vibrantly real.  A scene in which she answers questions to an offscreen voice (the custody evaluater we think) is particularly naked and resonant and shows the actress' powers at an Oscar-worthy pitch.  The film has a graceful and elegiac classical-sounding score by Randy Newman.  The opening scene in which the movie nimbly illustrates lists made by the husband and wife about their partner's merits (it's an attempt at mediation that fails) is moving, stylized, and highly entertaining:  we see Scarlet Johanssonin in pure movie-star mode as she appears from darkness on a set, idealized and beautiful and very unlike the way she looks in the rest of the movie.  Adam Driver is like a young Marlon Brando and a couple of scenes in which he bursts into tears are fantastically effective -- he isn't like-able, but he's highly intelligent and his arrogance is based upon his assumption, mostly right, that he's the smartest person in the room.  Laura Dern is excellent; there's a priceless moment when the opposing advocate, Jay, intimates that Nicole's efforts in the movies were mostly based upon showing her breasts; when this is said, Dern's Nora peels off her coat to show off her own figure -- she's wearing a skin-tight blouse with pointed darts to simulate her nipples.  The byplay between the lawyers is amusing:  one can imagine the clients' utter dismay as they see their lawyers kiss California-style in the courtroom corridor and, then, chit-chat about celebrity benefits they plan to attend.  The inept, soft-spoken custody evaluator is played perfectly by Martha Kelly, the actress who was excellent as Zach Galiafanakas's girlfirend in Baskets.  The movie isn't without flaws.  There are two musical numbers near the end of the picture that are only half-way successful:  Nicole's song-and-dance number with her mother and sister at a party is very good and shows her recuperation, to some extent, from the wounds inflicted by the divorce.  A Sondheim cabaret-style song, tentatively sung, by Adam Driver at a New York bar just doesn't work -- the level of stylization is inconsistent with the tone of the surrounding scene, a hyper-realistic sequence in which Charlie talks about how he was led into fighting with Nicole about a couch that he didn't even really want.  The point about the couch is valuable and true; the song accompanying that point rings false on all levels.  A gag with a switchblade knife attached to Charlie's keychain is implausible for a simple reason -- Charlie has been flying back and forth from LA to New York:  how did he get the dangerously sharp weapon through airport security?  These objections aside, A Marriage Story is crucial as a film establishing the criteria for award-worthy acting during the next decade -- the performances in this film will continue to resonate notwithstanding other weaknesses in the picture.

Almayer's Folly

Joseph Conrad's first novel Almayer's Folly is an exotic tale involving pirate treasure, the son of a Rajah, and a rebellion in the jungle.  The novel, published in 1895, belongs to the conceptual world of Puccini's Madame Butterfly; it is the story of an Asian woman destroyed by sexual exploitation, although this aspect of the Conrad novel remains at its margins as a "ripping tale" of lust and greed in the mangroves swamps of Malaysia.  Chantel Akkerman repurposes the narrative in her 2011 film to focus more exclusively on the colonialist aspects of the story.  She puts gender and race issues in the foreground and conceives of the picture as an allegory of failed colonialism.  Her film is striking in some respects, but misguided -- by eliminating or marginalizing the adventure story elements (Conrad's "sea-shells and miniature boats" as Nabokov said derisively), she turns the on-screen narrative into an absurdist and incoherent exercise in malaise, more Samuel Beckett than Conrad.  This wasn't Akkerman's original intent -- you can read her plot summary and "statement of intent" at LOLA, a film web-site on the internet:  as described in the precis for the proposed film, Akkerman retains enough of Conrad's story to establish relationships between the characters that are ill-defined, even, inscrutable in the movie as it was actually shot.  The opening frame sequence isn't described in Akkerman's abstract of the film's planned narrative -- and, so, this element of the movie remains particularly inscrutable.  Paradoxically, by emphasizing the elements in the story relating to racism, Akkerman ends up with a film that is implicitly more racist in the way that it portrays the non-European characters than Conrad's rather quotidian late Victorian racial prejudices -- the "white man's burden" and all that sort of stuff. 

Up a river in Malaysia, Almayer lives in an elegant, minimalist wood house, more of a gazebo than a mansion, but a place with polished wood floors and big open windows where curtains billow like the sails of ships.  Almayer has a Malay wife, Zahira, who is sinister and, apparently, completely insane. A Dutchman, someone named Lingard, appears to take Almayer's daughter, Nina, away to the city.  Lingard's relationship to Almayer is uncertain and Akkerman can't be bothered to clarify things -- a casual viewer may think that Lingard is really Nina's father because the Dutchman seems to have somehow transferred his former girlfriend, Zahira (who is mad as a hatter) to the unfortunate Almayer.  Almayer and Lingard are both exemplars of Nordic masculinity with haggard faces, thousand-yard stares, gaunt and blonde and, at first, the viewer can't tell them apart.  They talk in curiously intimate terms about Nina and, ultimately, the eight-year-old girl is ripped from Zahira's arms and dispatched downriver to be raised in a boarding school and educated to assume the role of well-heeled European young lady.  The money runs out.  Lingard goes to the city to retrieve Nina, but dies.  Nina can't pay tuition at the boarding school and, so, she is expelled. She walks aimlessly around the city, an opportunity for Akkerman to deploy her trademark moving camera, dollying alongside the heroine in interminable pointless shots of the young woman doggedly walking through the mean streets of some southeast Asian city.  Nina's odyssey ends when the heel of her shoe gets broken.  Almayer's factotum who was with the dying Lingard, somehow, finds the girl and they go back upriver to Almayer's plantation.  Almayer is continuing to flounder around in the impenetrable jungle looking for something.  On one of his excursions, he meets a figure that materializes from the forest, the sinister Dain Maroola, a handsome "rebel with cause" who has James Dean affectations. Dain falls in love with Nina.  Nina is a profoundly damaged character -- she has been humiliated by the European girls at the Boarding School and hates European culture.  But she's not Malaysian either by reason of her mixed blood.  "I am not White," she keeps saying plaintively.  Now and then, Dain and her mom, the demented Zahira, will also chime in:  "You're not White," they helpfully tell her.  For reasons that make no sense at all, Zahira mutilates a corpse in a typhoon so that the headless body will be identified as Dain.  Dain plans to flee Almayer's impoverished compound with Nina who doesn't love him, but will do anything to get away from her possessive, and increasingly, deranged father.  Ultimately, she and Dain are caught by Almayer but he doesn't shoot the smarmy lover, instead conveying them by his little outrigger with battered outboard motor to a spit of white sand.  The passing boat that plies the river picks up Nina and Dain and they depart forever, wading out to the boat in another interminable (and implausible) sequence.  Almayer sits in the dappled light in front of his gazebo-like house and goes mad with grief:  he recalls that he didn't want Nina to go around barefoot, because she would "get her feet muddy."  The film ends on this disconsolate note of insanity, sadness, and despair.  Nothing explains the film's first five minutes:  in that sequence, we see bar girls sitting in front of a sort of Cambodian beer-hall.  On stage a handsome kid with a mouth like Mick Jagger is lip-synching to a song by Dean Martin.  An Asian guy comes into the beerhall.  He glares at the singer and the group of bar-girls behind him forming a sort of pathetic chorus line -- the girls are swaying back and forth in drug-induced trances, making motions with their hands and hips that look vaguely like some kind of inept hula dance.  The Asian guy stabs the singer -- Dean Martin's crooning continues as the guy falls down with a knife in his heart.  Someone says that Dain has been killed.  Then, the camera moves into a close shot of one of the numb-looking hula dancers:  this is Nina who has been reduced to working as a back-up dancer for Dain.  Nina who seems eerily detached and indifferent sings Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus in a big operatic close-up standing in front of a painted flat depicting the South Sea islands.  Cut to moonlight on a big river and the useless title:  Vant Ailleurs ("Some other time, someplace else") -- then, we hear the opening chords of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde, music that re-occurs in a way that seems random throughout the film. 

Akkerman has obviously transmuted the action to Laos and Cambodia in the nineteen-fifties -- Almayer listens to LP records of Gene Vincent.  The dialogue is conceived as monologues or exchanges of aphorisms, filmed in protracted sequence shots.  Akkerman's formidable style seems here to have decayed into Mannerism throughout most of the film although there are some sequences that are imposing and have real flair.  The picture involves long silences and many completely pointless shots of people walking down dark corridors or gloomy city streets.  There are equally long tracking shots in the jungle showing the characters trudging around aimlessly in trackless brush -- Almayer has lived on this plantation for thirty years and never managed to build any trails through the woods and swamp?  Sometimes, for variety, Akkerman puts the camera on a canoe and pushes it around in the mangrove swamps.  Everything is lush, overgrown and the forests are all flooded as in a Tarkovsky picture.  Everyone is always tramping through knee-deep water that foams and splashes around their ankles.  The characters always stand like figureheads in the prows of the little boats that drag them upriver, even if the boat is as tiny as a canoe.  About a third of the picture takes place in torrential downpours.  Motivations are announced in speeches but never really shown.  We are supposed to think that Almayer has sacrificed everything for the love of his daughter, but we don't ever see the characters together and his passion for her (which has creepy incestuous quality) is strangely remote and abstract   In the beginning of the film, Zahira flees with Nina -- it's obviously an allegorical or metaphoric flight because they don't do anything but jump into the shallows of the river and hide in the underbrush waiting to be found.  There are some effective sequences.  A long showy sequence shot involves fireworks erupting over the remote far bank of the river and, then, a glorious Asian boat, with dragon prow, slowly crossing the dark waters in a bubble of red and gold enchanted light.  This is Abdullah who has come to ask for Nina's hand in marriage to  his son -- the fireworks are commemorating the young man's return from a pilgrimage to Mecca.  This sequence has an otherwordly quality:  here Akkerman deals with Conrad's source material, by just having someone narrate the plot points that the sequence is supposed to make:  these rather prosaic plot points (the marriage offer and Almayer's rejection of it) have nothing to do with the rest of the film and the striking imagery of the dark jungle and waters, the fireworks and the slow, mysterious advance of the fairy-tale vessel across the Stygian black river is memorable, but, ultimately, non-narrative -- it doesn't connect with anything else in the film.  (In the LOLA essay, Akkerman notes that she wanted to see if she could re-make Murnau's Tabu as imagined to occur in the 1950's -- certainly, the spectral approach of the little brilliantly lit dragon ship, a sequence that lasts about five or six minutes, is like a similar scene in the Murnau picture.)  The ending sequence is like Andy Warhol filtered through Josef von Sternberg at his most exotic:  Almayer sits on the stoop of his mansion with the light on his face dappled as it falls through moving draperies of vine and leaf:  sometimes, Almayer's face is mostly in the shadows; at other times, he seems resplendent with light.  The scene goes on and on and on, with Almayer muttering only a few words:  "Don't walk barefoot" and "You'll get your feet muddy."  This protracted scene is effective in that it ties some of the long, tedious sequences of people plodding through mud and swamp-water into a thematic knot -- in fact, even the city scene where Nina finally collapses having lost her uncomfortable shoes can be viewed as a variation on the them established by this ending. 

I have said that Akkerman's approach to this material, emphasizing the agency of the poor, doomed Nina, is inadvertently racist.  This is demonstrated by the final shot in the movie.  The White man is theatrically lit and posed like a haggard Marlene Dietrich, emoting up a storm while the inscrutable Asian servant stands like a statue behind him, half out-of-focus and merely a decorative element in the image.  (Presumably, it is this decorative figure who kills Dain in the opening "frame" sequence.)  Even more troubling is the fact that the movie abandons its heroine.  What does she do after Dain is killed?  How did Dain, the heroic revolutionary, become a mere pimp?  These are issues relating to the fates of the non-White characters and, although Akkerman claims to care about them, her strange narrative emphasis reduces these figures to mere bystanders to the drama involving Almayer and Lingard (who gets a showy death scene).  Like its heroine, the film is a fatal mixture of incommensurate elements -- it's neither fish nor fowl.  Akkerman wants to stage some sequences like the old Hollywood directors but she doesn't have the technical aplomb to pull this off.  The long tracking shots and the ending are from an experimental cinema at odds with the Conrad story.  Elements of the Conrad story, battered and mostly unrecognizable, are like bits of debris washed-up on a South  Seas beach. 

The Confession Killer

Sometimes, when you're driving late at night on the Interstate, you come upon cars inexplicably parked on the shoulder.  For a moment, the car's chrome and license-plate flashes and, perhaps, you glimpse someone standing near the vehicle, but it's raining or cold and you have miles to go before you sleep and so your car carries you on to some place else far away.  If you can believe some of the material in the Netflix documentary The Confession Killer (2019), the vehicle has stopped to deposit a freshly murdered corpse in the nearby drainage ditch or near the field's fence-line.  The major highways coursing across the country are all body-dump zones, sectors where murder victims are thrown away to rot in the snowbanks or corn rows.  There's a local connection:  in 1980, the body of woman who had been tortured and, then, strangled was found near Blue Earth in a shallow pocket in the ground undercut by a stream.  The woman could not be identified.  After Henry Lee Lucas, the so-called Confession Killer claimed that he had murdered her, the woman, known at that time as the Blue Earth Jane Doe, was buried in a local cemetery.  Lucas' confession cleared the case.  In fact, Lucas had, at that time, confessed to over 300 killings and allowing the investigating authorities to clear 210 cases.  There was only one problem:  Lucas was a compulsive liar and almost none of his confessions were true.

The Confession Killer tells a story of human folly so astonishing that it would be inadmissible as the plot of a novel -- the writer would be accused of unduly straining the credulity of the reader.  But this bizarre and grotesque series of events actually occurred.  A one-eyed pathological liar somehow convinced law enforcement that he had killed as many as 600 people (men, women, and children) in a spree that extended from Seattle to Florida and all points in between.  (In one month, according to the implications of Lucas' story, the murderer traveled over 11,000 miles averaging 360 miles daily to kill about 25 people -- this absurd chronicle was regarded as gospel truth by law enforcement authorities in rural Texas, the folks who had the celebrity serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas in custody.  Of course, it was all made-up -- in the end, Lucas can probably be accurately accused of three murders, bad enough particularly when you learn that one of them was his mother (beat to death with a mop stick), but not 200 or 360 or 600 killings as he claimed.   The Netflix true crime show is manipulative in the extreme -- the show creates suspense by withholding information:  the first episode intimates that Lucas was, indeed, a vicious mass murder, but ends with a tease that not all is as one might expect.   The second episode unmasks most of Lucas' lies but concludes with another cliff-hanger tease -- the real bad guys in the story, the Texas Rangers, are poised to revenge themselves against those who have challenged their ludicrous cooperation with every po-dunk cop in the nation trying to clear cold cases in his county.  The revenge of the Rangers is appalling -- they set up a crusading local DA who has denounced Lucas as a liar for indictment and, then, prosecution as a corrupt official.  The DA's travails, which are melodramatic in the extreme, occupies the third program in the series.  In the end the DA, who is like a young hillbilly Bill Clinton, ends up vindicated, with a 58 million dollar libel verdict against the local news media that set him up for the criminal charges.  In the fourth program, Lucas is sentenced to death, but for a killing that he obviously couldn't have committed -- he was a thousand miles away, when the victim, known as "the girl with the orange socks" was killed.  Lucas' lawyer, now the crusading DA who has switched sides to revenge himself on the Rangers, tries to clear Lucas on one of the murders for which he has been convicted.  But the idiot former DA, now flush with his 58 million dollar verdict, chooses the wrong case for his defense -- this turns out to be one of the very, very few cases where it is obvious Lucas did kill the victim.  The former DA turned defense lawyer produces the alleged victim alive and well -- but she turns out to be a psychotic liar who has fallen in love with Lucas as his pen-pal after being spurned by her other romantic interests, the imprisoned Charley Manson (too sane to want anything to do with her), Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy.  The DA turned defense lawyer is disgraced.  But George Bush, then governor of the Great  State of Texas, grants executive clemency to Lucas since it is obvious that the case on which he is going to be executed was a miscarriage of justice.  (Bush actually comes across as one of the few reasonable people in the show.)  Lucas dies peacefully of old age in the Huntsville penitentiary.  He's buried and, at his funeral, his jailhouse pastor, Sister Clemmie, hears a hundred-thousand angels singing -- presumably there is great rejoicing in Heaven when a sinner is saved.  The last episode of the program is the least interesting and, probably, superfluous.  Various next-of-kin who had been part of the lynch-mob braying for Lucas' execution are chastened to discover that DNA evidence clears him of all of the crimes in which any DNA proof could be analyzed.  As we have known all along, Lucas was a liar from boot to brow and everything he said was untrue.  The lynch-mob previously amassed to demand Lucas' death now cries havoc against the Texas Rangers and the good ole boy cops who used Lucas to clear just about every unsolved cold case crime in the nation.  And, so, a good time is had by all.

How did Lucas manage to persuade everyone that he was history's most vicious serial killer?  Several reasons are obvious, if unflattering to rural Texas law enforcement.  First, there is peculiar. affinity between small town criminals and cops -- in fact, the cops usually represent the more dimwitted and cowardly cohort.  Therefore, Lucas was, in some strange way, kin to the police who were supposed to supervise him -- he seems to have got along better with the sheriff of the rural county where he was confined and the loutish Texas Rangers than with anyone else in his life.  There's not much daylight between crooks and cops in small-towns and it's obvious that Lucas and the local good ole boy cops were profoundly simpatico.  Second, rural Texas is a nest of idiots -- most folks are poorly educated and stupid in the boondocks of the Lone Star State.  I recall living in Dallas in the late sixties, and, even, as a kid, being appalled by the ignorance and bad education of most Texans. Texas Rangers, in particular, seemed to be astonishingly stupid and inept.  For generations, the Rangers had specialized in hunting down and murdering Hispanic people, Mexicans as they were called, and wearing ridiculous white Stetson hats and double leather belts heavy with the Seal of the Great State, this paramilitary group always looked great but, generally, acted like murderous fools.  Finally,the cunning and vicious serial killer is a figure with great cachet in our culture -- not just among the buffoons in Texas --  and there seems to have been a great deal of prestige associated with doing errands for the majestically efficient murderer, Henry Lucas. Lucas can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of the dolts surrounding him -- they seem to have plied him with strawberry milk shakes and Pall Mall cigarettes in exchange for the dubious blessings of his "cooperation."  In some scenes, the relationship between the County Sheriff and Lucas seems to similar to the way that Sheriff Andy Griffith treats the town-drunk Otis on The Andy Griffith Show -- the self-proclaimed mass murderer struts around the rural jail like Otis, without handcuffs, swilling coffee and, apparently,trusted so much that it's surprising that he was not given a key to his cell (as on the TV show) so that he could let himself in and out at his leisure.  Lucas' life was horrific, a nightmare of poverty and abuse, and prison seems the best thing that ever happened to him.  He would have confessed to ten-thousand murders if the cops had kept feeding him crime scene photos and police reports and, then, asking if they refreshed him memory, while supplying the pathetic outcast with a bottomless cup of strawberry milkshake.  What is remarkable is the obstinate, willful blindness on the part of the sheriff and the Rangers as to Lucas' guile:   it wasn't too hard to figure out that Lucas was simply confabulating these confessions -- at one point, he tells bemused members of a Japanese film crew on hand to make a documentary about him that he had "done some murders in (their) country too."  The Japanese are polite and shrug their shoulders and, when someone asks him how he got to Japan, he grins toothlessly and says:  "Well, I drove."  This should have been a tip off that there was something a wee bit wrong with Lucas' enthusiastic penitential confessions. 

The show is baroque with plot twists and turns, all of them breathlessly announced.  The surviving member of the Texas Rangers task force assigned to Lucas refuses to admit any fault in their investigative techniques.  The heirs and next-of-kin of victims wail and howl for revenge.  Even the hero, the crusading DA in Waco, seems corrupt and probably compromised.  Every locations is established by a portentous drone shot, the camera gliding over some squalid city or neighborhood like a slow-speed Cruise missile.  Some aspects of the show are, more or less, beyond description.  During part of his crime spree, Lucas, who was intermittently homosexual, had a boyfriend named Ottis Toole -- Toole is unbelievably stupid and obtuse.  When Lucas claims ten murders, Toole claims 20 -- but no one believes him.  Why?  Because he seems too stupid to be able to kill anything.  Lucas talks about his sexual technique of killing a dog or cat before "having sex with the dead animal" -- this was a sexual deviation that he and Toole seem to have performed competitively.   One woman who Lucas was reputed to have murdered, appears alive as can be and says:  "If he says he cut me up and scattered my body parts all over the place, well, you'll see that I'm right here."  It would be all be fantastically funny except for one aspect -- every case cleared by one of Lucas lies, left a murderer still among us, uncaptured and, even, unsought.  In 2001, a religious fanatic named Robert LeRoy Johnson admitted that when he was a member of the Minnesota State Highway Patrol, he picked up a female hitchhiker at the Bricelyn exit on I-90 in Faribault County.  Johnson said he used his handcuffs to restrain the woman while he tortured and raped her, pulling out for fingernails, for instance, to amuse himself.  Johnson said that he drove his squad car to an isolated field near the freeway at Blue Earth and stuck the mutilated corpse in a shallow grave near a creek.  This was the crime attributed to Henry Lee Lucas in the early 1980's and confirmed as his handiwork by his confession.  DNA-testing revealed that the dead woman was named Michelle Yvette Busha -- but this wasn't discovered until 2015.   

The Queen of Spades

Thorold Dickinson was a British director who made 9 feature films.  His luck was bad and he is now mostly forgotten.  Dickinson's most celebrated picture was Gaslight (1940) -- this psychological thriller was enormously successful in the United Kingdom and, then, became a victim of its own fame.  MGM bought the rights to the film, remade the picture in a version that won Ingrid Bergman an Academy Award, and, then, demanded that all evidence of the British source be eliminated -- all negatives and prints of Dickinson's film were destroyed.  (He secretly kept one print and it is from this source that the film is now known.)  Dickinson worked with low budgets and was frequently summoned to productions to salvage pictures that were already vexed in some way -- he was called onto the Queen of Spades se only five days before beginning photography and had to re-write the script to the picture each night after the shoot.  Further, Dickinson was hampered in that he had never read the famous Pushkin short story upon which the film is closely based.  Despite, or, perhaps, because of these circumstances, Queen of Spades is a feverish, expressionistic masterpiece of its genre.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, the officer corps are obsessed with faro, a card game that seems to be entirely based on chance -- there's no skill involved, the player merely chooses a card and, then, the opponent draws cards until there is a match.  Unlike poker or other games of that sort, there seems to be no bluffing involved in the game, no strategy, and no mathematical calculus.  In this respect, the game has an uncanny aspect -- apparently, men risked huge sums on a draw of the card.  The film shows that the game was played by very drunken men with gypsy girls wailing weird songs and dancing in the flamelit shadows of the barrack's casino.  One officer, a German named Herma, refuses to play -- this is because he is poor and can't risk his wages on the game.  Because he refuses to play with his brother officers, Herman is mocked and humiliated.  One snowy day, Herman, who is like the Byronic hero of Stendhal's The Red and the Black -- he fancies himself an uebermensch and has a large portrait of his hero, Napoleon on the wall.--goes to a spooky bookstore to buy a volume about Napoleon's campaigns.  A book falls to the ground, a kind of miscellany containing stories about people who sold their souls to the Devil.  Without any questions asked, Herman buys the book from the sinister Jewish proprietor of the store.  In the book, he reads that a beautiful Russian countess sold her soul for success at cards -- this is shown by interpolated flashback.  The woman was promiscuous and one of her lovers had stolen money from her husband and, so, she ransomed her soul to the Queen of Spades, the embodiment of evil destiny, and was given the secret for success at cards.  Using this secret, she made a vast fortune.  Herman discovers that the bewitched countess, although now in 80's is still alive.  He also learns that the malignant old woman has a beautiful young ward, Lizavetta.  Herman has seen the young woman through the window of the Gothic and decaying palace where the old countess lives.  He sends her love letters and, gradually, earns the young woman's confidence.  On the basis of his relationship, Herman insinuates himself into the household and, finally, tries to coerce the old woman into telling him the secret of the cards.  The old woman dies of fear and Herman seems to have been thwarted.   But, then, he attends the countess' funeral and, while stooping over the bier, the corpse opens its eyes -- we have previously seen the dead woman glaring with glassy hate-filled eyes at Herman.  Later, a strange gust of wind blows into the hero's apartment, knocking over furniture and scattering his papers, and the hero hears the sound that the old woman's heavily brocaded dress made on the floor as she limped along.  The old woman's voice whispers the secret of the cards to Herman and he goes to the gambling hall immediately to try his luck.  He wins a great fortune, but the cards are fickle and, at last, he loses everything.  Herman goes mad and, as he is dragged to an asylum, we hear him muttering the secret of the cards.

Dickinson gives this story a full Gothic treatment -- there are icy snowstorms, sinister  black sleighs whisking through the streets of the snow-bound city, secret passageways, and strange apparitions.  The gypsies sing in a wild, keening timbre and the officers are always staggering around, hurling vodka glasses to the floor to break them.  Dame Edith Evans plays the role of the old Countess and she is a sight to behold -- there seems something deformed about her body, always tightly wrapped in a cocoon of silk and satin.  Her arms seem too short and her torso is like that of a monstrous caterpillar. Her make-up seems derived from that used with Karloff in The Mummy by Karl Freund (1932) -- her face is grooved and lined with age and she seems older than old, ancient, mummified, with bright eyes that stare out of her ruined face and that seem to not miss anything around her.  She is cruel to her ward and aspects of the film have a fairy-tale quality -- the poor tormented girl is always being ordered around by the vicious old woman and she yearns for a kind lover to rescue her from this nightmare.  Dickinson makes the motives of Herman, brilliantly played by Anton Walbrook, as obscure as possible.  If you don't know the story, you will not know how to "read" Herman's actions -- does he really love Lizavetta or is he merely attempting to seduce her to discover the old woman's secret?  This is left unclear and the film is daunting in the sense that we can't locate the hero --  in fact, it seems that the movie has no hero at all, something that surprises us when we consider the date that the film was made and its genre.  The shots are crammed with all sorts of baroque detail and lit expressionistically with jagged shadows playing across walls and flickering flame light in the hearths.  Some of the exotic door ways and corridors seem to have migrated to the film from Sternberg's even more febrile The Scarlet Empress (1934) -- there are hideous carytids, skulls serving at keystones in corbel arches, and Orthodox cathedrals full of eerie icons and massive painted columns (the church looks like some kind of grotto).  The camera is always in motion, lurching here and there in the crowded and claustrophobic sets.  Walbrook's Herman first seems righteous and reasonable, but he becomes more and more unhinged as the film progresses and, at the end, he is ranting in heavily accented English that makes him sound like Bela Lugosi.  Everything is dark and cold, and the narrow streets are always foaming with snow blowing off the rooftops.  The scene in which the ghost of the old woman appears (audibly but not visibly) to Herman in his apartment is an astonishing tour de- force -- a wild gale of billowing curtains, glasses and bottles blown to the floor, furniture toppling and paper flying all around followed by dead, numb silence in which we can hear the countess' grotesque ballroom gown scraping across the floor as her ghost approaches.  In one earlier scene, we see the old woman slumped and shapeless in her chair.  Beside her there is a stand on which her ballroom gown, like some kind of insect's carapace, has been hung -- it maintains its form, a sinister bell shape that visually rhymes with the many bells that we hear tolling in this film.