Murder my Sweet

Edward Dmytryk's 1944 adaptation of a Raymond Chandler crime novel, Murder my Sweet, is an example of the gris films (as identified by French critics) preceding film noir.  To my eye, there isn't much daylight between  gris and noir -- both types of pictures feature mostly urban settings, purport to having been shot at night (it's always after dark in these films) and involve a parade of characters who are either grotesque or sinister colluding in some kind of criminal endeavor.  These are crimes of opportunity or passion remote from the conspiracies involved in a gangster picture, a different sort of enterprise entirely.  Film gris (like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep) are based on novels and have well-written dialogue -- they are less expressionistic and doom-ridden than film noir, less obsessed with the working-out of malign fate.  Film noir can be stylized and schematic, sometimes with relatively simple plots involving flight and pursuit; gris have complicated narratives, often complex to the point of being incomprehensible, and there is an odd "drawing room" quality to many of the encounters depicted.  But, these distinctions are splitting hairs, categorizing movies that are all a single strand in American film culture.

With t he exception of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, I have never warmed to most Chandler adaptations -- The Big  Sleep is a a monotonous slog through a thousand plot points all pretty much indistinguishable to my eye.  The monotone, romantic cynicism of The Maltese Falcon also seems to me mostly mean-spirited, implausible, and misogynistic.  Murder my  Sweet is a less distinguished variant on themes from these films and seems overlong to me and ultimately tedious.  Many crime novels work on this principle:  a hard-boiled private eye is hired to find someone or something; the private dick is also retained by rich villain for some other completely different errand.  As the private eye works these cases, they begin to converge and, ultimately, a single plot-line emerges that combines the two narratives into a single all-encompassing conspiracy that threatens to destroy all protagonists.  It's a time-worn plot, always works well if properly managed, and has driven many films of this kind from Murder my Sweet to Chinatown.  In Dmytryk's picture a thug just-released from prison (after an eight year term) hires Philip Marlowe (played here effectively by Dick Powell -- his baby-face hardened into a mask of callous indifference) to track down a show-girl who seems to have vanished.  Simultaneously, Marlowe is retained by a rich debutante to find a jade necklace that has been stolen from the girl's stepmother, a lascivious femme fatale who has been cheating on her much older millionaire husband.  The two investigations are laboriously made to converge and, in the climactic affray, Marlowe is blinded by a pistol shot that scorches his eyeballs.  He's not sure who was killed and who survives the fight at the end.  The cops have him in custody and, with his wounded eyes bandaged, Marlowe narrates the story in flashback.  The first half-hour of the 120 minute picture is very atmospheric and gripping, but the movie gradually devolves into a series of routine scenes working out the meaning behind the strange and brutal events occurring at the start of the film.  As is almost invariably the case with films of this sort, the explanation behind the weird events at the outset of the film is much less interesting than the events themselves -- the investigation of the various mysteries reveals them to involve relatively commonplace motivations.

As is always the case with film of this sort, the rogue's gallery of supporting characters promise more than they deliver -- but Murder my Sweet is replete with interesting villains.  Most notably, the lovelorn gorilla and ex-con played by Mike Mazurki is particularly fascinating and projects a peculiar quality of menace and haplessness (a bit like some of the roles played by Ernest Borgnine in the fifties).  There's a smarmy homosexual, too louche for his own good, who appears in a dressing gown in Marlowe's office and shortly thereafter gets beat to death with a sap.  Claire Trevor is good as the scheming tart married to the feckless rich man.  A couple of sinister doctors, seemingly ministering feel-good drugs to the LA elite, complicate the action -- they also ooze suave menace, although the film, here inexplicably faithful of Chandler's hyper-complex plot, uses two characters where one composite would suffice.  A surrealist episode in which Marlowe is drugged-up and babbles nonsense while being tormented by odd visions seems to be belong in another film and, indeed, I think the very stylish montage, involving doorways suspended in black space and spider-webs simulating mental confusion, was directed by another film maker.  The sequences set in the evil doctor's sanitarium, all shadowy staircases with odd broken pediments over the doors and monstrous phallic finials on the balustrades are visually impressive -- although again seem to belong in another film.  (It's a bit like Salvador Dali's dream sequence interpolated into Hitchcock's film Spellbound.)  Marlowe is always getting knocked out -- "diving into a spreading pool of darkness", something that the film obligingly, if unimaginatively, shows us.  There are plenty of memorable lines -- a woman is said to be "cute as lace pants" or to "have a face like a Sunday school picnic."  A rich man's glazed and marble loggia is place where one might "buy a crypt in a mausoleum."  Marlowe is insulted:  "you would cut your own throat for six bits and tax."  Just before he passes out, Marlowe remarks enigmatically:  "I felt like an amputated limb."  The villainess notes: "This is the first time I've killed a guy I liked so much."  And I very much liked the detail of Marlowe striking a match off the marmoreal ass of a cupid bearing a bow and arrow outside of the rich man's mansion, a place in Brentwood so big "you would need a compass to get the mail."

All the King's Men

As it happens, I have just completed several weeks of close study of Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel, All the King's Men.  The Pulitzer Prize winning book is big, bullish, pulsing with Great American novel testosterone.  The novel is nothing if not ambitious -- the author wants to devise a mythology sufficient to capture the life and times of the great Popularist Huey Long (Popularist politicians, generally, express Fascist sentiments -- to be convinced of this one only needs to behold the Stalinist tower of the Louisiana state house, one of Long's monuments -- while at the same time posing various theological and metaphysical questions about human nature and the cosmos.  The big existentialist questions of the era are writ large:  how should we act in the default of God and any plausible organized religion? Do men have free will or are they merely automatons?  What do the vexed relations between men and women, mothers and sons, sons and fathers tell us about our destiny?  Robert Penn Warren wants to put his harpoon into all of these big fish while at the same time maintaining a veneer of closely observed, realistic detail:  the book has the patina of Walker Evans' photographs of the deep South during the Depression .  Furthermore, the book has a complicated structure of flashbacks, flashforwards, reveries embedded in memories, historical digressions, and a fancy style that mixes the casually vulgar demotic with highfalutin' rhetoric that would have shamed Faulkner:  at the end of the book, Robert Penn Warren's symbolically freighted hero (and twisted narrator) Jack Burden must face up to "responsibilities" of Time while venturing forth into "the convulsions of History."   A final element of the book is that the author insists reality is a seamless web and, therefore, his prose, poetically inflected with all sorts of leit motifs and extended metaphors, must all be construed as a single seamless flow of narrative.

Of course, these aspects of the famous book render it difficult to adapt into a film.  Today, the book would be reproduced as a Netflix mini-series, maybe 8 or 13 hours long (perhaps like Fassbinder's self-defeating Berlin Alexanderplatz 15 hours long with a coda invented by the director that adds another hour.)  This strategy tends to diminish the work adapted -- most novels can't stand expansion to great length and, literally filming everything in sight, tends to show that most of what's in the book isn't worth putting on celluloid.  Hollywood during the classic era would just re-write the whole thing, relying on the fact that our memories of books that we have read (even those that we love) are pretty damn imprecise.  But this won't work for a novel that has won important literary prizes and that, therefore, is well-known to potential filmgoers.  There's another approach, a literal adaptation that uses a telegraphic style to notate the film -- this radical approach to adaptation relies upon the viewer to know the book so well that he or she can supply narrative and thematic integument that is merely alluded to, albeit objectively and with total fidelity to the source text:  this  is how Straub and Huillet adapted Heinrich's Boell's novel (   ) in their 38 minute micro-budget film Nicht Versoehnt ("Not Reconciled) -- Straub and Huillet push this technique to its ultimate conclusion in later films in which an actor simply stands in a landscape relevant to the text and reads an hour's worth of quotations from the writing.)

Steve Zallian is probably Hollywood's most ambitious screenwriter -- he has written films as various as Schindler's List, Amistad,, Searching for Bobbie Fischer and, most recently, Scorsese's The Irishman.  In 2006, Zaillian released an all-star version All the King's Men with Sean Penn playing the role of Willie Stark (Penn Warren's name for Huey Long).  Zaillan's approach to adaptation is simple enough -- he preserves about half of the key moments in the novel, and, even, films them with slavish fidelity, but he eliminates about 2/3rds of the book.  Penn Warren's book, to the extent that it was a roman a clef, was coy about its source material -- the book happens in some unnamed southern State with city's that are composites of various places in the old South.  Penn  Warren's coy approach to his source is eschewed in Zaillan's film.  He made the picture in Louisiana, shooting many scenes in New Orleans and Baton Rouge -- the State was so eager to see itself portrayed in the movie and much of the film was made on literal location, that is, shot in the monumenta Louisiana Capitol Building and, even, within the governor's inner sanctum, the imperial office suite that Huey Long built for himself.  The book is so eager to declare its truthfulness with respect to the story of Huey Long that it incorporates locations that I don't recall from the book:  Long had a habit of living in luxury hotels and some of the film is shot in an expensive hotel in New Orleans where the governor actually resided.  Zaillan adapts the book as a historical novel -- something that Penn Warren said that it was not -- and one of the movie's producers in the redoubtable and grotesque Cajun political wizard, James Carville.

Zaillan omits the Cass Mastern story -- a thirty page parable that Penn Warren devised to illustrate his notion that history is an inextricable and seamless web; this is not surprising because the story reverts back to the Civil War and reads like (very) bad Faulkner.  The curse of an adaption that operates by omission is that inexplicably certain elements of the novel are references that the director and screenplay have omitted.  For instance, the book contains a long sequence about Jack Burden's marriage to his first wife -- in keeping, with the era in which the book was written, the novel is full of salacious sexual stuff.  At one point, Jack mentions his first wife, but, then, the subject is completely abandoned -- so why have him mention her in the first place?  There are a couple of shots showing Tom Stark (Willie's football hero son); Tom's fate drives the book's tragic denouement but the character is absent from the film.  This eliminates the carefully designed symmetries in the novel's last half -- the wounding of Willie's son on the gridiron carefully designed to echo and mirror, Jack  Burden's act in destroying his own father, and Willie's blackmail using a victim of one of Tom's seductions for political gain -- Penn Warrren's seamless web is partly based on Baroque and elaborate family connections, including the surprise revelation that Jack  Burden is the son of the Judge his blackmail drives to suicide. Not surprisingly, this theme is too complex and so Zaillan omits it but imperfectly -- why put in the scene of Tom playing football unless you are going to use that narrative as part of the novel.  Zaillan adds a couple things to the movie that were not in the book -- there's a weird, implausible scene where a stripper gyrates while Jack and Willie conspire and Zaillan recognizes the weakness in motivation with respect to the final assassination scene.  In the novel, Adam Stanton (played by a gloomy, glaring Steve Ruffalo) murders Willie because he has learned that his sister, whom he idealizes, is sleeping with the corrupt politician and possibly has influenced him to appoint Adam as medical director for Willie's pet vanity-project, a world-class charity hospital.  Readers of the book often find this motivation unconvincing -- Zaillan beefs up Adam's outrage by having him informed that he will be blamed for fraud when Willie reneges on the charity hospital and simply pockets the cash raised for the project (this is completely alien to the novel and, in fact, falsifies a key aspect of the book which is Willie's sincerity with respect to the charity hospital project).  Zaillan finds a visual metaphor, however, better than Penn Warren's book -- the refined Adam plays piano to solace himself and, just before the climax, we see the elegant grand piano completely trashed as a convincing image for Adam's rage and self-destructive fury.  The beautiful Patricia Clarkson doesn't effectively simulate the feral Sadie Burke, Willie's girlfriend and protector in the novel -- in the book, she's described as a frightening but seductive Medusa-like figure with smallpox-cratered face.  Patricia Clarkson is too pretty and nice for the part. (Instead of railing at her scarred face, Clarkson is like a matron in a Tennessee Williams' play, she laments her lost youth.)  Ruffalo is good as Adam.  Anne Stanton, Ruffalo's patrician sister, is played very blandly by Kate Winslet, also an actress to voluptuous and womanly to be convincing in the part -- in the novel, Penn Warren conceives of the woman as a corrupted, austere madonna, a spinster-whore.  The actor playing the thug, Sugar Boy, is very good and looks the part.  James Gandolfini is excellent as the paragon of corrupt politics, Tiny Duffy, although his accent sometimes slips back into Tony Soprano.  (The rogue's gallery of crooks in the book, for instance, Gummy Larson, are absent from the film.)

Viewers will have to make up their own minds about Sean Penn -- the actor is always a polarizing figure.  I don't like his performance but, objectively, it's probably impressive.  Penn is a method actor and he uses a mumbled, bellowing diction for his speeches.  He's fundamentally corrupt from his first scene in the film (in which he insists on drinking soda pop among politicos guzzling beer) -- Penn Warren's conception is that of a naive country boy corrupted by politics.  Sean Penn seems ruined from the first shot to his last dying gasp and I didn't have any sense of a great man with great aspirations brought low.  The DVD doesn't conceal the connection to Huey Long and, indeed, includes an indispensable featurette about the politician -- this is a mistake as far as Penn's performance goes.  Huey Long, on film, is completely fascinating and one can see how he imposed his will on those around him.  First, he's not a method actor -- there isn't a hint of sincerity in anything Huey Long says.  He seizes his audience by shrewd complicity with them:  he's like Trump or Hitler:  you don't believe this bullshit, my friends, and I don't either but lets, for the sake of argument pretend or act like we do.  Long's eyes are totally detached from what he is saying.  He is completely calculation at all times and his gestures are like the histrionic postures that 18th century opera performers used on stage -- totally artificial, even robotic, but, also, weirdly compelling.  Penn imitates Long's motions and some of his diction, but he's simply too authentic.  Because he's a method actor, he believes what he is saying.  But the point about Huey Long is that he never believed anything he said -- every word was spoken to achieve some kind of effect.  When we see Long, in a newsreel, commenting that FDR's acronym-named agencies represent a "St. Vitus dance of corruption", Long smacks his lips a little, and makes his Fred Flintstone face look long and sad for an instant -- but he's obviously very pleased with himself.  Huey Long, at least on film, doesn't scream or shout his words, but speaks in an eerie, ultra-swift monotone like an actor in a screwball comedy or one of the fast-talking journalists in The Front Page.  Penn's acting is simply too good -- he uses every technique to be believable; Huey Long didn't bother about credibility -- he assumed that everyone was in on the joke.

Zaillan updates the movie to the late fifties -- although his sense of time is imperfect; in some of the flashbacks we see Model T type cars from much too early in history, if we accept the proposition that the action is taking place in 1958.  I think Zaillan changes to film's time from the late twenties to the late fifties so that he include many handsome and dignified-looking Black extras in the movie.  (Penn Warren refers to African-Americans as "niggers" and they don't have any role in the book at all -- of course, in the Jim Crow South they didn't vote and so were political non-entities.)  The movie goes wrong in its last ten minutes.  The assassination scene is over-dramatized and includes a totally pointless symbol:  Willie and his assassin, Adam, lie dead on the floor atop a bas relief of the Seal of the Great State of Louisiana.  Their blood flows into grooves in the floor and gradually comes together to coalesce in a stain spreading on the floor between their bodies.  The imagery implies that the two men are "blood brothers" -- their blood picturesquely flowing through veins in the floor to combine.  Penn Warren's book has some fancy rhetoric about Willie and Adam dying in an "agony of the will:  that is, the man of action striving to achieve an ideal and the idealist striving to act in the real, corrupt world.  But that trope doesn't occur in the movie and, so, we have no idea what the commingling of the blood is supposed to mean, if anything, at the end of the movie.

More than an hour of featurettes accompanies the 2006 film -- but no one ever mentions the obvious elephant in the room, the 1949 version of the movie by Robert  Rossen that won two Academy Awards and remains famous.  It's as if the people who made the 2006 movie are pretending that the earlier, and highly celebrated, version doesn't exist.  This is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

In fact, Rossen's bitter and frenetic All the King's Men is immeasurably superior to Zaillan's re-boot.  Rossen understands that in films you must show not tell -- for instance, he depicts the collapse of the fire-escape at the elementary school, the tragedy on which Willie erects the edifice of his political career. (Further, Rossen's depiction is perfectly pitched:  we see a classroom, hear a bell, and, as the teacher announces a "fire drill", the film cuts to students in the hallways and, then, walking down the metal exterior stairs.  Rossen actually plays the tiny scene for suspense, cutting back and forth between the mooring of the steps in the rotten brick and the children descending the fire escape.  When the steps rip free from the brick, we hear screams but don't see the havoc.  If Rossen had shown the children falling and mangled, the film's emphasis would have been all wrong -- the movie would have been diverted into a film briefly about a rural school tragedy.  Rather, Rossen cuts to the funerals where Willie is acclaimed as the one honest politician in the county.  The grief of the parents is assumed but not explicitly shown except in long-shot.  The entire scene is a model of concision precisely calibrated to the emotional necessities of the film as a whole.)  Rossen's adaptation, conceived at the height of film noir, is brisk and tight as a drum -- in purely narrative terms, the plotting is much better than Robert Penn Warren's creaky Southern Gothic devices in the novel. Multiple characters are condensed into a single figure:  the incorruptible Judge Irwin and Hugh Miller, the Lafayette Escadrille war hero and Attorney General, are combined into one role, Judge Stanton (presumably the uncle of Adam and Anne Stanton) -- this makes logical sense, particularly because Rossen eliminates the oedipal plot that requires Jack Burden to inadvertently destroy his own father.  (It's interesting that neither the 2006 nor the 1949 versions wades into these murky waters -- in 1949, presumably, this aspect of the story was thought to be too unappetizing and immoral to be portrayed on film; in 2006, the director and screenwriter perceive that the plot really doesn't go anywhere in terms of narrative -- although it is integral to several of Penn Warren's more questionable themes about human knowledge and the inextricable web of destiny in which we are all entangled.)  Rossen, who, like Zaillan, both wrote and directed the film, hews far more closely to the novel, although eliminating many of the author's subplots and dead-ends.  As in the novel, Rossen's Sugarboy stutters badly -- this was deemed politically incorrect (mockery of the disabled) in 2006.  In the 1949 version, Sugarboy is much more fully realized character -- indeed, part of the film's pathos lies in Sugarboy's deeply felt and uncompromising loyalty to the boss.  Rossen shows us Sugarboy leaping to Willie's defense when he delivers his first great speech about how he is a hick and that someone has to represent the hicks in the State.  Rossen is fantastically economical -- Sugarboy's lunging to defend Willie at the rally is just something we glimpse, but details like this work as cinema, as character expressed in action, and they are very effective.  Rossen makes no attempt to imagine the action in the Deep South.  In one scene, we can see snow-capped mountains and the movie's rural sequences take place in those eerie bald and green foothills to the Sierra Nevada around Dublin and the Central Valley.  The State House is not the giant erection of Huey Long, a massive Art Deco mausoleum of power, but an old county Court somewhere in California -- there are palm trees growing on its lawn.  And, yet, despite the appearance of the film, it is much more political (the 2006 version like Penn Warren's novel is more of a character study) and, in fact, seems to cleave far more closely to the historical facts relating to Huey Long.  This can be observed in Willie's aspirations for the presidency, prominent in the 1949 version, and the little detail of the State police charging the assassination scene with machine guns firing.  (An example of Rossen's fidelity to the novel is the very first shot -- an image of a slab of highway plopped down on rural country:  this corresponds to the first sentences in the book.)

Part of the appeal of a film made from a bestselling novel is that the director (and screenwriter) are licensed to change the plot and, even, suggest that a different ending is forthcoming -- or, at the very least, possible.  Rossen improves considerably upon Penn Warren's narrative leading up to the assassination -- he compresses Tom Stark's iniquities into a single short scene involving a drunk-driving episode in which a girl is killed.  Rossen gives Tom Stark a few speeches that Penn Warren didn't write, creating a strong narrative of conflict between father and son, an improvement on the book.  Willie makes Tom play in the big game notwithstanding a concussion suffered in the car crash -- this leads to Tom's injury and paralysis.  Later, when Willie is impeached, the politician pulls out all the stops and, actually, campaigns against his enemies with both Lucy, his much aggrieved wife, and the crippled Tom on the platform for pathos.  (This is far more cynical than anything Penn Warren imagined.)  It takes the novelist twenty pages and several Gothic scene-changes (including a passage set in an asylum) for Penn Warren to show us that Sadie Burke is behind Willie's assassination -- she has taunted Adam into committing the crime.  But  Rossen is making a film noir and he understands that the logic of the form is inevitable -- of course, Sadie Burke is the villain, the feme fatale who will, in effect, kill  her lover for spurning her.  This is the ineluctable pattern of film noir and Rossen can accomplish the novelist's labored revelation with a single shot -- the haughty and regal Sadie striding remorselessly past the scene of carnage.   She's like Kriemhilde in Fritz Lang's Niebelungenlied.. 

Rossen's narrative is driven by delirious montages.  At  the climax of the film when Willie's acquittal from the impeachment forms a confluence with Adam Stanton's fury, the movie has become a hallucinatory political treatise.  In film noir, the city is a text, it is full of labels and billboards and signs -- writing are everywhere in dream-like abundance, but we can't quite decipher what they mean.  Similarly, the documentary-style montages at the climax all feature texts inscribed in stone, utterances carved into marble facades about justice and the will of the people as well as innumerable signs carried by Willie's supporters.  All of these writing are characteristic of crime films of this era, but they also propel the film forward into its political theme, here not as a subtext, but the full-blown expression of nascent proto-Fascism.  Rossen's montages which seem to fill about a tenth of the picture are dense strings of half-glimpsed images often superimposed over one another to carry maximum meaning.  Everything gives the impression of being tightly packed together -- although the film is shorter than the 2006 version, it feels longer and is so crammed with plot elements that the viewer is a little overcome, even exhausted.  There's simply too much here.  Rossen's cameraman fills the screen with crowds and most of his shots have between three to five figures in the frame.  Everything is in debate or debatable.  The director uses close-ups sparingly so that they have great power -- an example is a shot showing Lucy's face and her sense of sorrow entwined with pride, a complex emotion, when Tom acknowledges his responsibility for the car crash -- and, thereby, defies his father.  Every possible narrative technique is used to illumine the action -- Burden's Landing, a genteel bayou retreat, is here shown in formulaic shots as a place set apart from the activity of the rest of the State; you reach the place, which is an island, by a ferry, a detail wholly invented by Rossen but which is superior to Penn Warren's verbose maundering about that place.  This use of symbolism is combined with other classical techniques -- Rossen deploys a Citizen Kane -style newsreel documentary to provide information to the viewers.  He organizes his shots around objects with the camera pivoting to different views -- generally, the shots are structured around something seen in one image, then, viewed from a different angle in the next shot.  A noteworthy example of this is a sequence filmed in shots that pivot around a still-life of Willie's huge boots in the foreground.  The movie gives the sense of layers upon layers of information with which we are bombarded.

Rossen's film won two Academy Awards -- one for Best Picture and another for Mercedes McCambridge's performance as Sadie Burke.  Broderick Crawford's Willie is very closely based upon descriptions of the book -- for instance, we see his slight wink at Jack  Burden in an early scene.  He seems more of the "happy warrior" than the tormented figure played by Sean Penn -- Penn wanted to impersonate Huey Long; more sensibly, Broderick Crawford just plays the part of Willie as imagined by the novelist.  In the 1949 version, Willie is much more overtly corrupt than in either the novel or the 2006 film.  We get a sense that Willie is a man of immense and implacable appetites.  This is depicted in microcosm in an almost imperceptible close shot at the beginning of the film -- Lucy is talking idealistically and Willie seems to listen, but, in fact, we see that he is entirely occupied, indeed, preoccupied with eating a morsel of food, possibly fried chicken.  His appetite come first and this is exemplified in the final scene in which the dying Willie mutters: "Why'd he do it?  I could have been the whole world."  This questions emphasizes Willie Stark's criminality:  he sounds like a dying gangster in Scarface  or White Heat  -- by contrast, Penn Warren's emphasis is on destiny and free-will and he has Willie say, dying in bed a few days after he is shot:  "It could have been different."  Crawford's Willie dies like a gangster, surprised that he isn't as immortal as he thought he was.  John Ireland as Jack Burden is homely and, in fact, looks like Robert Penn Warren.  Warren's novel is really about Jack Burden's growth as a man -- Willie is secondary to that narrative.  Rossen ignores all of Jack's philosophizing and ignores most of his back-story -- the romance with Anne Stanton is virtually eliminated.  This is because Rossen's All the King's Men is about Willie Stark and not Jack Burden. Mercedes McCambridge is astonishing as Sadie Burke -- she performs the role as a wise-cracking dame from screwball comedy, but with a savage, even feral edge.   She's the embodiment of the woman who succeeds because she is tougher and more cynical than the men around her.  McCambridge delivers her lines in clipped fashion, through tight thin lips and she dresses like a Lesbian dominatrix, sporting men's suit coats with padded shoulders.  In one scene, she glares at herself in the mirror and says that small-pox has made her face hard -- as opposed to the soft features of her nemesis, Anne Stanton.  (The crucial plot element of Sadie's ugliness is completely eliminated in the 2006 version which simply makes hash of the character).  In the novel, Sadie boasts that she has "calmed down" Willie when he gets drunk before his big speech about being a hick -- we know what this means, a sexual allusion that Penn Warren, for once, doesn't feel the need to explain.  In the 1949 film, Sadie makes the boast and, then, draws a brush through her hair lasciviously -- that's all the actress needs to do for us to understand what has happened. 

A good film adaptation doesn't seek to replace the book on which it is based.  Rather, it relies upon the book as closely as possible consistent with being a successful movie.  The movie has to stand on its own two feet, because many (if not most) viewers will not have read the book.  But it also should supplement our understanding of the book -- if we have read the book, we should appreciate and enjoy the ingenuity with which the film adapts its source material.  In this way, the movie improves upon the book from a narrative point of view, while our understanding of the themes of the story is made more profound by the novel.  A novel gives us profundity; a film hints at profundity but relies upon appearances and formulaic plotting --  Rossen's development of Penn Warren's Pulitzer-prize winning book as a film noir, a discreditable genre but one  that is ideal to the story, illustrates how a movie can disclose the inner essence of a novel in a way that doesn't displace the book but, rather, highlights what is excellent and important about it.

Baahubali

My response to Baaubali, an Indian epic film, conceived in equal parts of Hindu mythology, Marvel comic books' action films, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings franchise is puzzling.  Generally, I loathe films based on comic book and, particularly, detest the Marvel cycle which are loud, tedious, and moronic.  But I am about to praise the first half of an almost six hour-long Bollywood super-spectacle that is comprised, mainly of aspects of American films that I dislike.  What accounts for this reaction?

Baahubli, the Beginning is the story of a heroic young man who ventures far from his village into a dangerous landscape of towering peaks and canyons, deserts and avalanches, a crazy vertical chutes and ladders melange of all types of terrain known to man, and a place infested with deadly and cruel enemies.  In the course of the first half of his adventures, the hero, the titular Baahubali, encounters a courageous woman warrior, makes love to her, and, then, ventures into a sinister city, a metropolis that is a bit like Angkor Wat, but comprised of the most baroque Hindu temples imaginable, in order to rescue a Queen who is being slowly roasted to the death by the sun in an iron cage at the center of the vast, pink and yellow conurbation.  After innumerable battles and adventures, Baahubali frees the Queen, who may be his mother, and, then, the tale abruptly flashes back fifty years to supply the context for the dynastic struggle that we have been witnessing.  The film's last third consists of an enormous battle scene, shot at times, it seems, from satellites orbiting the earth, a huge spectacle that ends with Baahubali's father or grandfather, also apparently bearing the same name crowned as king of the realm of Mahistmati, where the action has taken place.  The battle scene, although wildly inventive, is the least interesting part of the movie, although it is a grandiose tour de force in its own right, with warriors of various kinds fighting with all kinds of exotic and awe-inspiring weapons.  This scene is similar in impact to the various battle scenes in Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy and, also, bears a resemblance to some of the combat sequences in Zach Snyder's 300. 

The movie has no intellectual content as far as I can see although there are many song and dance numbers crammed into the picture with weirdly pretentious lyrics about the "river of life" and man's destiny.  The movie is two hours and 38 minutes long and it is entirely slam-bang action -- there are no reflective interludes longer than three or four minutes and, then, the film's next set piece (a violent duel atop a cliff, a love scene, or one or other of the hero's crashing down a slope in advance of an avalanche or swept over a huge waterfall) gets underway.  The fury is more or less continuous.  But it's all fantastically agile, light-weight (despite the film's enormous expense), exuberant, even jolly -- there's no suspense or anxiety because we know everything will turn out all right in the end.  The process by which the narrative subjects its characters to all sorts of outlandish hazards, all of this beautifully and ornately decorated in crystal clear and bright cinematography is what makes the film gripping.  The narrative pace is so ridiculously fast that you can't resist being wholly swept away -- thus, the movie's predominant imagery of vast waterfalls and other sorts of torrents, rapids, and seductions.

In the opening scene, we are shown waterfalls that are thousands of feet tall and about a million times more powerful than Niagara or Victoria Falls, enormous roaring sheets of water that fall from the clouds above.  It's a totally implausible landscape and, yet, one filmed with enormous and precisely observed conviction.  A woman with an arrow embedded in her back carries a baby from within a dark cave.  Some men pursue her, seize her arm, and are about to kill the child, when she draws the arrow out of her spine, uses it to impale one of the men, and, then, seizing his sword cuts down the other enemy.  More bad guys appear and the woman wades out into the middle of the river, vanishing under water but holding the baby in her untrembling hand above the torrent.  The peasants come from their village, virtually in the spray of the falls, and, then, rescue the infant -- the heroic woman drifts down the river, her sari barely glimpsed under the crystal water.  The boy grows up to be a great strong man, a sort of Hindu Hercules.  When his mother vows to pour water on Shiva's lingnam, a giant phallic-shaped pylon of polished granite, the young man aids her by ripping the altar out of the earth, hefting it on his shoulder and, then, carrying the thing down into the river to plant it under a cascade where it will be perpetually washed by the falling water.  (This is the movie's first song and dance number in which the peasants sway rhythmically to the music as a song is crooned about the hero's strength and endurance.)  Later, the young man tries to scale the waterfalls to find where he came from -- each effort ends in him falling hundreds of feet into the river.  At last, he pursues a fairy-girl up the vertiginous heights -- she leads him  to the top of the falls, but when he seizes her sari she dissolves into a cloud of neon-blue butterflies.  Later, we meet the girl again engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an army of villains; she is the leader of the resistance to the evil usurper who is torturing the Queen in the central plaza at Mahistmati.  The girl is wounded, bathes her injured hand in a mountain lake and Baahubali swims underwater, using a reed to tattoo marks around her wrist.  Later, the girl plans an ambush on her enemies -- she draws back the bowstring on her bow and arrow and, then, finds that someone (Baahubali) has entwined a emerald green serpent around her poised arrow -- the serpent entrances the girl and she is motionless as Baahubali tattoos another pattern on her other arm.  Later in the love scene between the two, set among gossamer-Alhambra-esque gazebos, tiny waterfalls, and oozing clouds of dry-ice smoke, the two embrace so that their tattoos form a common pattern, a design that is mutual to both of them -- this is another song-and-dance number with the lyrics expressing things like "I will be reborn a hundred times to delight you." 

And so it goes, from one extravagance to another, all singularly and gorgeously filmed, with fantastically beautiful actors and actresses.  (In Indian films, a secondary sexual characteristic for the actresses are their lithe and expressive bellies often shot in extreme close-up).  In some early scenes, Baahubali must battle a raging bull.  At the base of the shot, the film is marked "CGI" -- we don't want anygood Hindu to think that any  actual bovines were injured in making this movie.  After Bahubali defeats a character named Bhallaldevi (who is apparently his brother), the Queen is freed. Then, the slave Kattappa, a noble character who seems to somehow revel in his slavery, tells the story of the war with the Kalakyas, a race said to have "no limit to their morbidity" -- this cues up the final third of the picture, the huge battle-scene occurring fifty years earlier.  In the course of the fighting, Bhallaldevi, here portrayed as a heroic but ruthless warrior, is about to drive his rotary-scimitar- equipped chariot through a group of peasants dragged onto the battlefield as human shields.  Bahuabali restrains him, has his soldiers hurl bolos to knock the poor peasants to the ground and, then, unleashes a torrent of arrows to kill the vicious Kalakyas who have seized these people.  After the battle the Queen says that a good soldier not only kills his country's enemies but spares the lives of innocents -- thus Bahubali is made king notwithstanding the fact that his rival brother has cut off the head of the general leading the Kalakyas and sent it whirling up into orbit around the earth.  (This mirrors an earlier scene in which cattle are about to sacrificed to Shiva in advance of the battle -- Baahubali, a friend to all cows, slits open his own palm, spills his blood on the weapons, and baptizes them in gore without requiring any of the cattle to suffer.)

The film was shot in Tegulu as well as simultaneously in Tamil.  The version on Netflix where you can watch this thing if you are so inclined is dubbed into Hindi.  Made for 25 million dollars, the film is the most expensive movie ever produced in Bollywood -- it is also the top-grossing Indian film of all time and an enormous hit throughout all of Asia.  Unlike American super-hero films which often have badly designed special effects -- many times, the CGI is dark blue or green to avoid the viewer seeing defects in the programming -- this film is always bright, gaudy, brilliantly colored:  everything is visible but it is all rococo:  when someone bites the dust, the dust is always bright scarlet or purple.  The picture isn't mean-spirited, it's violence is cartoonish, and the actors are immensely engaging.  You must have a taste of this kind of thing.  As I said about LOTR, "it's just a movie for boys" -- but, then, boys are entitled to good movies as much as anyone else.

The New Pope

I would like to claim that Paolo Sorrentino's series, The New Pope, is the best thing on TV this season.  But TV is now so fantastically variegated and globally ubiquitous that no single person can manage to see even a small percentage of the programs on offer.  As far as I know, there may well be some Icelandic thriller or Serbian sit-com, available on Netflix (and broadcast in about twenty languages including Polish, Slovenian and Korean) that is better.  But I doubt that there is any show, whatever it's source, as deliriously scandalous and entertaining  (and funny) as Sorrentino's program.

In the fourth episode of The New Pope, John Malkovitch in the titular role travels to Lourdes where Islamic terrorists have massacred ten pilgrims.  (We see the corpses sprawled in wheelchairs next to an icy, fierce-looking river -- one of the many striking visual spectacles that the show offers.)  A few shots later, by virtue of CGI, we behold about 100,000 of the faithful standing on the stony shore of the lethal-looking river waiting for the Pope to speak.  He stands at a podium and softly says "No", then, repeats himself more loudly, then, shouts the word over and over again.  This is all he does.  The next day, the International Press is abuzz with headlines as to his brilliant stunt in declining to speak and simply shouting one word to the multitude.  At the Vatican, the Pope says cynically that he will acquiesce to the "vulgar need for an explanation" in a few days, but, in the meantime, his mysterious utterance will have to suffice.  This little episode epitomizes some of the appeal of The New Pope.  First, the show decline to explain many of the mysteries that it presents.  It leaves "vulgar explanation" for other forums.   This is a  recognition that many things about the world are, indeed, mysterious and can't always been deciphered in a nyrational way -- indeed, human motivations are, for the most part, obscure.  Second, the Pope's profoundly cynical remarks are characteristic:  the show presents us with the most consequential events, theological and ecclesiastical struggles of the utmost seriousness, but these conflicts are always presented in a framework of Machiavellian machinations that involve completely cynical political calculations.  Sorrentino's programs blend the most remarkably erotic imagery with scenes that are solemnly spectacular -- great conclaves of red-cloaked bishops, nuns in white habits dancing sensuously, beatific faces, the faces of angels involved in sexual orgies.  The show continuously skirts blasphemy and, certainly, many sequences inarguably blasphemous and, potentially offensive.  But blasphemy of a certain kind raises theological questions of extreme importance:  if God is as close to me as my carotid artery, a maxim held by pious Muslims, then, the divine is intimate with the human body, intimate with sin, and intimate with all sorts of sex.  Pious Jews are willing to debate the Almighty as to His ways and have convened trials of God over the holocaust -- if we take religion seriously, we must always approach God with a degree of heart-felt intimacy that invites blasphemy.  What are we to make of Bernini's St. Theresa of Avila swooning in an obvious orgasm as Eros, in the form of sadistic, bratty-looking cherub, penetrates her with a flaming arrow.  Religious ecstasy is a cunt-hair away from sexual ecstasy.  And the notion that the ecstatic love of God is rooted, necessarily, in eros is central to Sorrentino's vision.  His gyrating nuns, pole-dancing with a great neon cross in the opening titles to the series, demonstrate the concept that the love of God is not remote from sexual love and, indeed, the same ecstatic characteristics underlie both emotional states.  A similar confusion between profane and secular arises in the show's political and theological debates -- the institutional church, vastly important to billions of people, must be preserved at all costs.  Indeed, the program posits that the great clerics, the mighty guardians of the Faith, must be willing to do the most loathsome things to protect the Holy Catholic Church -- in this regard, we are continuously confronted with the paradox that the highest officials in the Church must be willing to commit sins that will condemn their souls to Hell in order to serve the highest of interests, that is, protecting and maintaining the Church as a power relevant to this sinful and fallen world.

The situation in The New Pope is this:  the much-beloved celebrity Pope, and the central figure in the precursor series The Young Pope, has fallen into a coma.  He isn't alive and he's isn't dead.  (The Young Pope, the American Lenny Belardo, is played by Jude Law -- he lies on sepulchral bed in a Venetian hospital filled with salacious, sexually hysterical nuns:  I think their wild Dionysiac frenzy signifies the sexual appeal of the handsome, young reformer pope now stricken and motionless in a coma.)  The Vatican conclave initially selected as a replacement an earnest fellow (a bit like the present Pope Francis) who took the Church's vows of poverty seriously.  When he ordered the Church to divest its art works and offer the Basilica as a refuge for African and Syrian refugees, he suffered a mysterious heart attack and died -- it is widely believed that the College of Cardinals on some level had him murdered.  The Church leaders, led by the brilliant Machievellian Cardinal Voiello, travel to England seeking to enlist the English Cardinal John Brannox as candidate for the papacy.  Brannox is played as a kind of decadent sacred monster by John Malkovich -- we first see him, to the tune of the riff from Dylan's "All along the Watchtower", wearing eye-shadow and lounging about like some denizen of an Aubrey Beardsley engraving.  Brannox, who thinks that that "God doesn't like him," refuses to stand for election as the Pope -- that is, until the devious Voiello suggests that the Vatican might be interested in a French nobleman, also a cardinal, for the papacy.  This ploy appeals to Brannox' English vanity and he agrees to go to Rome where he is promptly elected as Pope.  Brannox describes himself as weak and, possibly, an enemy of God and, unlike Lenny Belardo or the poor assassinated Francis, he is no reformer -- at least at the outset.  He recognizes that the most important task facing him is purging the clergy of pedophiles -- a task complicated by the fact that he is surrounded by unctuous homosexual clergy who don't exactly approve of his efforts at Reform.  The new Pope's work is further complicated by the fact that Lenny Belardo may awaken from his coma at any time, creating the dangerous situation of a two popes competing for power.  The main action in the program is flanked by subplots:  there is a nun who has hidden a Syrian refugee in the Vatican for the purpose of continuing her torrid affair with him; the nuns at St. Peter's threaten to go on strike because one of them has been denied the opportunity to travel to Lourdes with her sick mother (the leader of the nuns is a dwarf who suffers from breast cancer); a smarmy Vatican official prostitutes a woman who has sought refuge in the Church -- in a bizarre fairy-tale sequence, this woman (who has conceived immaculately) is hired by an immensely wealthy woman to sleep with her deformed son, a young man who seems to be something like a werewolf.  Further, the situation is complicated by the machinations of the various factions in the Vatican, all of this managed by the wily Voiello, the figure who is the true hero of the series and, certainly, the program's most compelling character.

A summary of the show's fourth episode will give a sense for the program's complexity and strangeness.  Sharon Stone, playing herself, has an audience with the Pope.  (Last week, the Pope met with Marilyn Manson).  Sharon Stone is ordered to not cross or uncross her legs -- a reference to the famous scene in Basic Instinct.  She pleads with the Pope to recognize homosexual marriages.  He declines saying that he is not sufficiently strong to effect this reform.  "Are you porcelain or steel?" someone asks Brannox.  "Why must I be either?" He asks.  "Perhaps, I am fiber-glass.  The terrorist attack at Lourdes requires that the Pope speak there.  He delivers his one-word denunciation and, then, plans for an interview with a powerful journalist.  The pope seems to be intrigued with the beautiful Sophia Dubois, the Vatican's chief publicist -- we frequently see her nude and engaged in various exotic sex acts.  The pope meets Sophia in the catacombs for what seems to be a date.  He tells her that he is an advocate of "the middle way" -- invoking Buddhism apparently -- and says that he is going to allow clergy to marry.  There are some flashbacks to the Pope's childhood on a great manorial estate in England.  As a child, Brannox with his twin brother seem to have captured and raised giant black millipedes.  The young boys pray to the millipedes as God and, from time to time, we see the creatures crawling out of ears or wiggling over the belly of the prostrate and comatose "young pope".  (The millipedes, I think, are in fact a symbol of God's presence).  There are some sex scenes with the nun and her Syrian boyfriend as well as nude scenes (licentiously presented) involving the prostitute in the Basilica.  In a remarkable scene, Voiello, the manipulative Cardinal and Secretary of State, goes to a hermitage where he sees an ancient priest who was old when he was a young seminarian.  The hermitage seems to be in some kind of rocky grotto.  Voiello, who is a great soccer fan, cares for a boy terribly afflicted by mental retardation and cerebral palsy.  The boy is with Voiello and he grunts and moans happily when he sees the ancient, senile priest at the hermitage.  The old priest, despite being demented, also grunts and moans in recognition of the boy's happiness as Voiello looks on joyfully.  Then, the young pope in his coma begins sighing every 416 breaths, then, 415 breaths, then, 414 breaths and so on --- Lenny Belardo's labored breathing is broadcast over the Vatican radio so everyone can hear his every breath and his sighs.  It appears that the Young Pope is, perhaps, about to revive.

All of this is presented with the most fluent and eloquent mise-en-scene imaginable.  The camera glides over acres of marble and gorgeous renascence frescos.  The Pope wears white and swoops around like a great pale bird of prey.  (He wears bright red pointed shoes -- during his audience with Sharon Stone, she leaves her high heels for the Pope as a gift.)  The beautiful people are so transcendentally beautiful that seem more angel than human.  Like Fellini, Sorrentino is a great connoisseur of unusual faces -- the cardinals are either gorgeous or hideous flabby monsters.  Everyone has memorable features or gestures, although often enigmatic.  There are extended montages in which the camera simply glides through sumptuous rooms inspecting the various characters in the film, bringing us up to date, for instance, as to who they are sleeping with or their other machination.  When the Pope calls Sofia, the telephone rings and rings, while Sorrentino's camera visits all of his characters.  Similarly, the Young Pope's labored breathing provides another occasion for an aria of camera motion sliding through the great gloomy halls, surveying the fanatical devotees of the comatose pope sleeping in a piazza, and visualizing Lenny under his oxygen mask as the sacred millipede crawls over his motionless body.

Mysterious and, often, strangely heartbreaking, The New Pope reminds me of David Lynch's sensibility -- but Sorrentino is a surrealist less influenced by late-stage Dali (although Bunuel is an influence) than byGucci, Armani, and the excellencies of Italian cuisine and architecture.  The show breathes the hot-house atmosphere of the high Baroque.  It's altogether extraordinary.

Separate Tables

Separate Tables is a glossy, tasteful, well-executed Hollywood film that is never less than interesting during its 114 minutes duration and that sinks into oblivion in the memory the moment that it is over.  The picture produced by Hecht and Lancaster in 1958, and derived from a celebrated play by Terrance  Rattigan was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning two -- but no one seems to have much cared about the movie:  it has no fans, no one debates its excellence, and there are very few references of any kind to the effect that it had on filmgoers in the late fifties.  It's a movie that seems to have hypnotized its watchers into some sort of benign indifference. This is the kind of film for which TV was invented -- it's not going to be revived any time soon in any film festival.

Despite its all-star cast, the production is clearly compromised.  Rattigan's original text was comprised of two one-act plays ("Table by the Window" and "Table Number 7")  The plays were star-vehicles for the luminaries of the British stage -- the same male and female actors were to play the starring roles in the two one-act plays which have very different themes and plots.  Of course, this device won't work in the Hollywood vehicle cautiously directed by the wholly colorless Delmer Mann.  So, one suspects that there is considerable vandalism with respect to the original theatrical text even before the film's outset.  Furthermore, the picture has a peculiar self-subverting and self-censoring aspect -- the subject matter is obviously gay-inflected (Rattigan was homosexual)  but these elements of the play, as with Tennessee Williams' work, have been transmuted, more or less convincingly, into heterosexual romance.  It's pretty obvious, for instance, that the crime for which the Major is accused -- some kind of groping women in a theater -- is, in fact, based upon homosexual conduct that would have been illegal at the time.  Masking homosexual content by using male and female heterosexual performers doesn't really solve the issues that the film presents and, perversely, seems to highlight the gay implications of some aspects of the script.

The Beauregard hotel (which sounds like a place in Tennessee Williams' play) is a seaside boarding house at Bournemouth on the south coast of England.  A pompous military man, the Major, boasts about his service in Africa, telling war stories to a shy spinster with whom he is conducting a flirtation.  The spinster is bullied by her domineering and bigoted mother.  A young unmarried couple debate their future -- the woman doesn't want to marry and the man seems happy enough that she doesn't propose marriage; she wants to be an artist and he's studying for his medical boards.  A loud American drunk is horrified to find that his ex-wife has come to the hotel, presumably to seduce him.  The drunk got in trouble with the woman five years earlier when he beat her half-to-death and he's been in disgrace ever since.  The drunk, desperate with loneliness, proposes to the innkeeper, a handsome middle-aged woman.  Ultimately, the drunk's ex-wife succeeds in her endeavors and the couple reluctantly (and cautiously) begin their relationship anew.  The Major is accused of indecent advances in a movie theater and it is revealed that he spent WWII behind a desk and not on the battlefield..  At first, the other denizens of the hotel vote to ostracize him, but, in the end, they are too kindly to follow through on this decision and he is (also reluctantly and cautiously) re-admitted to the fold -- he begins his harmless flirtation with the spinster once more, the woman having opposed publicly the will of her bullying mother for the first time in her life. The plot involving the medical student and his artistic mistress is underwritten to the point of non-existence -- this story ends in a way that is unsatisfactory, I think, for modern-day audiences:  the woman renounces her artistic aspirations and agrees to have "three children" with the doctor "as a start."  All of this is presented with maximum star power:  Burt Lancaster plays the American drunk; Rita Hayworth is his scheming voluptuous wife; David Niven won an Oscar for his short role as the bombastic miles glorioso -- Deborah Kerr plays the spinster.  Rod Taylor, a singularly colorless mannequin, plays the doctor -- he's in a lot of films of the era and is a bit like Rock Hudson without the soft-spoken charm. Wendy Hiller takes the role of the owner of the Hotel and there are a host of excellent and familiar British character actors whose names you will not recall.  (Deborah Kerr also won an Academy Award for her performance.)

The film is reasonably daring for its time.  Male writers in the fifties were obsessed with the fact that women withhold sexual favors in order to get what they want -- this is an important element in many novels and plays of the time.  Burt Lancaster's character decries the fact that his beautiful ex-wife has used her sexual wiles to enslave him.  The theme of furtive sexual advances motivating the story of the Major and the spinster is also prominent -- although, as I have said, the plot seems better suited to development as a homosexual theme (in fact, the way Rattigan initially wrote the play.)  The film doesn't have a conventionally happy ending.  Rather, the characters who end up together seem doomed to unhappiness -- at most, they are resigned to way things have turned-out.  It's a highly tentative conclusion and must have seemed "adult" and realistic at the time.  (And, in fact, the film is a well-made and intelligent "adult entertainment" -- not a cartoon of the kind favored in popular films both then and today.)

The picture is overdesigned and some final scenes in which Burt Lancaster engages in dialogue with Wendy Hiller in her "office" involve the characters interacting amidst such a panoply of knickknacks and Victorian gewgaws that the viewer is distracted from what is happening on-screen.  (How long does it take to dust this place? one speculates).  The film doesn't really "open" out the play -- in fact, the whole thing is very obviously filmed in one complex set entirely inside a sound-stage.   If you're my age, the entire film will inevitably remind you of John Cleese's Fawlty Towers -- indeed, many of the characters in that TV comedy seem to be parodic versions of Rattigan's players in this film.  Of course, Fawlty Towers is memorable -- Separate Tables is not.

Archipelago

Joanna Hogg's 2010 Archipelago is, perhaps, best understood as an experimental film.  Hogg's picture tests the proposition that a film can convey great depth of emotion through a series of largely static still life images.  I don't think the movie is successful -- it's simply too constricted and perversely uncommunicative for my taste.  The film shows us anomie, but we never quite know what is behind that anomie.  Nonetheless, the movie is remarkably beautiful pictorially and probably discloses on big screen different dimensions invisible on DVD shown on television.  The film is so austere and resolutely uncommercial that I doubt that many will have an opportunity to watch this picture in the format for which it was intended.

In some ways, Archipelago resembles one of Mike Leigh's "slice of life" pictures, however, refined into something that is almost mathematical in its purity.  A number of scenes are potentially humorous -- Hogg's feckless protagonists are a bit like Leigh's campers or demoralized suburbanites -- but the film's icy mise-en-scene cancels any sense of fun -- we register that scenes could be funny, but they are abstract to the point that we can't laugh.  A middle-aged woman (Patricia) and her bitter daughter, Cynthia, have rented a roomy cottage on one of the Scilly Islands.  At first, we are puzzled as to where the film takes place -- the landscapes are remarkably varied:  stony heath, turbulent harbors, hillsides with majestic trees and, even, some scenes that show palms and even cacti.  The woman's husband and the paterfamilias doesn't show up -- he's detained somewhere and his absence contributes to the growing tension among the principals.  Ultimately, I concluded that the unseen father and husband is separated from his wife and, perhaps, involved in an affair with someone else -- but the film is so laconic this can't be exactly deciphered from what we see.  The son, Edward, appears, arriving majestically by helicopter.  Edward is played by Tom Hiddleston before he became famous in cartoon American films and here he is a shy pre-Raphaelite beauty.  The family has hired Rose, a cook, to prepare meals for them -- she's a robust blonde who seems positioned to be Edward's love-interest.  But Edward is too morose to do more than take walks with her and moon around the kitchen when she is preparing meals.  (Late in the film, he pins a brooch on her shoulder that has fallen off Rose's sweater -- this is the closest the film comes to anything like intimacy and Rose seems pretty uncomfortable when he touches her in this way.  I recall a farce called No sex please:  we're English which pretty much explains the situation in the movie.)  The family has also hired a landscape artist named George to provide painting lessons -- as with Rose, he is positioned as a love-interest (for either Patricia, the unhappy mother, or Cynthia, the equally miserable daughter) but nothing really develops.  In fact, he may be homosexual and more interested in Edward.

Nothing of any dramatic significance occurs in the movie.  There is a lot of wind and rain.  We get a mini-discourse on the sex of lobsters, something discussed by a fisherman with Rose, and, then, she and Edward talk about the most humane way to prepare the creatures for the table -- it's moot to Edward because he is a vegetarian. (The scene reminded me of the funny sequence in Annie Hall when Woody Allen tries to cook a lobster for Diane Keaton, but the reference is frivolous because there's nothing really funny about Rose's sad statement that gradually increasing the heat on the lobsters puts "them into a coma" -- possibly a comment about the disaffected and morose way in which the characters in Archipelago interact.)  Later, Rose plucks and cooks a couple pheasants ("a brace") and, predictably, Cynthia bites down on shot and wounds her mouth. In the end, Patricia has a fight with her husband on the telephone -- but it's all off-stage and we can't exactly hear anything but the hysterical tone of her voice.  Edward is planning to spend 11 months in Africa teaching the people there about safe-sex -- how to avoid AIDS.  (What he knows about sex of any kind is unclear.)  The artist delivers some pronouncements as to art which might be taken as programmatic to the film's themes -- he argues that colors can never be seen in isolation but only in relationship to one another.  There's a gloomy picnic, a trip to restaurant that deteriorates into browbeating the poor chef, much strolling and bike-riding in bad weather, and, at last, Edward departs on a helicopter that is by far the loudest thing in the film -- the soundtrack is entirely non-diegetic, simply wind blowing and surf pounding on the shore and ubiquitous bird calls and bird song.

The movie is visually stunning -- a symphony of subtle greys and greens.  Hogg's master is obviously Ozu, although her domestic drama is much, much less demonstrative.  The film employs many zen-like empty frames -- shots of rooms after people have left them, landscapes from which the figures have departed, and, most notably, a series of shots showing bicycles parked in the courtyard of the cottage, communicating to us who is at home.  The interior shots also invoke Ozu, including a repeated image of a stairwell that is all vertical steps and thresholds.  The film is so refined that is almost non-existent.  The title Archipelago suggests that the characters are all isolated, islands that can't make contact set in a foaming, destructive sea.  Everyone seems bitter in this film except for Rose and the artist, George.  But the family members are well-off people able to afford a splendid cottage in a beautiful place.  So the petty misery of the characters is a wee bit off-putting.  And since Hogg is reticent about what is bothering them -- she seems to take simmering discontent as the default emotion in human life -- we can't really form any conclusions about their state of affairs.

Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro)

Happy as Lazzaro is a Netflix film, apparently commissioned by the streaming service but, as is often the case with international productions, made with the cooperation of a polyglot group of funding agencies involving just about every country in Europe (including Finland).  The film's executive producer, however, is Martin Scorsese and this is a vote of confidence, I think, in the excellence of the endeavor.  And, indeed, Happy as Lazzaro is an admirable film, beautifully made and well-acted, with an unusual premise and an even more ingeniously unusual script.  (The movie received the best screenplay award in 2019 at Cannes.)

Happy as Lazzaro plays a bit like Rip Van Winkel as imagined by Bertolt Brecht.  In effect, the movie presents a parable about oppression, but one that is refreshingly unsentimental and, even, casually cruel in its vision of how exploitation operates.  The town of Inviolata (presumably a symbolic or allegorical name) is a settlement in barren mountains somewhere in Italy.  Inviolata is an odd place -- it has a conspicuously smashed bridge over a stony stream and hillsides that are treeless, but criss-crossed with peculiar paths and terraces.  There are wooded groves on the edge of great precipices and strange tropical river-bottoms where peasants harvest tobacco.  About two dozen serfs work for an older woman who owns a strange tower-shaped chateau, a bit like a panopticon in a prison.  The relationships between the serfs are unclear.  The peasants are surly and use various kinds of magic to taunt their oppressors (as well as spitting into their food) but they are a scabby, toothless, ignorant lot and not too hard-working.  At the outset of the film, we see the peasants, who live in dark hovels, arguing about who will get to use the community's one and only incandescent light bulb.  A couple plans to marry and leave town, although the betrothal ceremony consists, more or less, of an exchange of bawdy insults about the bride-to-be's "fat ass".  A little band of peasants serenades the happy couple.  But, the next morning, in the cold light of day, we learn that the couple can't leave the estate because they owe money to the Padrone.  An overseer appears and renders an account -- the peasants who get their provisions from the female Padrone fall farther and farther in debt each season and, of course, are indentured to the land.  Everyone fears being expelled from the manorial lands, although no one seems to know what this would mean or where they would go.  Although the scenes on the estate, which comprise the first half of the film, seem to be set in the nineteenth century -- the social issues are the same as those motivating the plot of Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of the Wooden Shoes -- there are cars scattered around, although apparently smashed up and immobile, and people have adding machines and there is even a cell-phone owned by the boss' family.

Lazzaro is a beautiful young man with the features of one of da Vinci's angels.  He is sweet-tempe everyone orders him around.   He's the hardest working of all the peons because the serfs themselves use him as their slave.  Lazzaro has no mother and father; his only relation is an old granny who is as small as a chimpanzee and who he has to carry everywhere.  When someone complains about the peasant's being exploited, the mistress of the estate notes that she oppresses the peasants and that they, in turn, oppress poor Lazzaro --and she wonders who he exploits.  When his dog, Ercola, escapes, the son of the estate's owner, Tancredi, encounters Lazzaro.  Tancredi also has contempt for Lazzaro and bullies him incessantly but the poor serf interprets the rich son's cruelty as a form of friendship.  Indeed, Tancredi even claims that he and Lazzaro are brothers -- or "half-brothers" -- indicating that, perhaps, his father raped Lazzaro's mother.  Tancredi hatches a scheme to hide in a cave where Lazzaro has made a small retreat for himself.  He sends a ransom note to his mother demanding that 1 billion lire be paid to reclaim him from the bandits.  Tancredi's mother is indifferent -- she spends her time in religious instruction provided to the children of the serfs, when they are not required to provide child labor for her tobacco operation.  Lazzaro gets sick, and, while feverish, wanders around in the weirdly rugged and barren landscapes (chalky deep ditches and strange-shaped steep-sided bluffs).  He falls from the side of an enormous precipice -- this is like one of those dangers encountered in a dream:  you are ambling about and, suddenly, discover that you are on the brink of a two-hundred foot high crumbling escarpment.  The fall is enormous and Lazzaro simply vanishes from the movie for a while.  We don't know what happens to Tancredi's hare-brained hostage hoax.  One of the peons at the big house calls the police and says that someone has vanished on the estate.  A helicopter skirts over the strangely eroded and scoured hillsides and ravines and lands near the big house.  Then, it is revealed, although only gradually that the Estate is cut-off from the rest of the world because of a flood that has knocked down the one bridge leading into the manor's lands.  The serfs have been essentially imprisoned because, for some bizarre reason, they have been convinced that they will drown if they ford the stream -- it's only about six inches deep.

This is the midpoint of Happy as Lazzaro and the fulcrum on which the story turns.  Up to this point, we have construed the film as a somewhat stylized example of Italian neo-realism, a semi-documentary account of peonage (they call the system "sharecropping") that is some sort of relic of an older, discredited social order.  But, in fact, the film now reveals itself to be a kind of allegory and bizarre dream-like landscape of the manor home and its surrounding lands, now appear to be, in fact, a symbolic wasteland, a desert of oppression.   In fact, the movie has played a clever trick on us -- what we took to be realism is, in fact, highly stylized allegory.

A wolf appears and licks Lazzaro back to life.  He gets up and limps to the manor house that is now deserted, drowned in dust, and full of cob-webs.  Two thieves are looting the abandoned building and Lazzaro obligingly helps them when they claim that they are simply moving men transporting household furnishings to the city.  The thieves won't give poor Lazzaro a lift to the city, but they tell him that if he walks along the road "and walks and walks", he will reach the city.  And, so, he sets out on foot and ends up in the slums of squalid-looking metropolis (either Turin or Milan apparently but it doesn't matter -- this is the generic "city" as opposed to the generic "country" where the movie began.)  He meets a girl who was a child when Lazzaro worked on the tobacco plantation -- she's now about 35 and, so, it's apparent that, at least, 20 years have passed.  Lazzaro has not aged in the slightest.  The peasants are now living as squatters atop a building in what seems to be an empty water tower.  The whole crew is present but they are now much older.  The corrupt and vicious overseer is still around as well -- he's now exploiting refugees by getting them to bid against each other on agricultural piece-work (this form of oppression is even worse that what afflicted the peasants on the tobacco plantation.)  The peasants fall on their knees in front of Lazzaro and, at first, regard him as a ghost or a sort of saint -- I think his name is meant to suggest "Lazarus".  But gradually they fall back into the routine of exploiting him -- this time, he's used as a prop in elaborate con-games involving begging and the sale of stolen goods to well-meaning citizens in the big City.  (In fact, the citizens aren't that well-meaning -- the film's Brechtian cynicism shows that they get hooked into buying the stolen goods through their own greed.)  Lazzaro runs into Tancredi (again via his elderly dog Ercola, now wearing an inverted cone around his neck).  Tancredi, after being astonished at the fact that Lazzaro has not aged, hails his friend as his "half-brother" and, even, enlists him in an investment scheme involving the old manor.  But the bankers are unfriendly and throw Tancredi out of their skyscraper.  He invites the peasants to his apartment for lunch and they pool all of their ill-gotten gains to buy pastry (cannoli and profiteroles) as a gift for their host.  The children of the Estate owner are now grown but they are also poor -- the slavery scheme on the plantation resulted in their land being confiscated and large fines.  Tancredi doesn't come to the door when the peasants arrive for lunch -- but his sister has the audacity to both drive the peasants away as well as importune them for their pastries (which they obligingly leave at the door of the apartment).  Lazzaro goes to the bank, carrying a slingshot that is a memento of his time with Tancredi when the boss' son was a boy.  He makes some inarticulate demands on the bankers but is completely ineffectual. The customers in the queue in the bank turn on Lazzaro and beat him to death.  The old wolf appears, surveys the bloody scene, and, then, is last seen loping through the traffic in the big,  grim city.

The film is an excellent exploration of oppression and how those who are oppressed are not only complicit in their exploitation but more than willing to exploit others weaker than them.  Happy as Lazzaro seems to suggest that oppression is universal and ineradicable, a fundamental fact in the world.  But there is a counter-force represented by Lazzaro's virtue and the old wolf.  It's hard to understand what to make of Lazzaro's unfailing willingness to help others -- he doesn't even have to be bullied; he simply instinctively helps everyone that he meets without question.  Is Lazzaro's submissiveness a cause of exploitation or some sort of symptom of its remedy? This is for the viewer to decide, although the scales are tipped in favor of Lazzaro's sanctity --the violent ending, which I think questionable, is clearly intended as a sort of martyrdom consistent with the torments inflicted on other saints, a subject discussed in the first half of the film.

The director, Alice Rohrwacher, has built a very pretty, beautifully shot and mysterious film.  She doesn't move the camera excessively and, rather, composes each shot for maximum meaning and pictorial splendor.  (The opening shot of the ancient stone hovels where the peasant's live with a wheel-less car in the foreground establishes both the situation and the fact that there is no escape from the plantation.)  There are many interesting supernatural touches -- at one point, the music, made in a church for the private consumption of parishioners who exclude the peasants, travels with them and abandons the church.  One of the peasants can use the Evil Eye to stir up windstorms.  In the sequence in the city, the peasants still have only one light bulb -- although it's a modern energy-efficient bulb.  The movie's two-part structure is intriguing, inviting us to compare events showing oppression on the farm with their counterparts in the big city.  The film isn't sentimental -- the peasants, certainly, aren't romanticized.  This is an important film and the director is a talent to watch in the future.

Flight

Flight is a beautiful and profound opera scored by Jonathan Dove to a libretto by April De Angelis.  The opera was premiered in 1998 at  Glyndebourne and has been mounted many times since that time.  Flight is a work that seems poised to enter the opera repertoire and is artistically more successful than many other recent operas including the much-praised, but clueless Silent Night.  Dove understands the form and grasps that characters must be broadly rendered yet still be recognizably human.  The opera has a classical form, three acts that can be understood as setting up the action and identifying conflicts that must be resolved, a central bridge that represents the issues that the work poses in a more stylized and, even, visionary mode, and, then, at last, a climax that resolves most of the conflicts.  In opera, it's important that the orchestra be accorded a primary role in driving the action, or commenting on it -- Dove grasps this and doesn't merely illustrate the libretto (although he does this with exquisite taste) but, also, provides musical rhetoric that amplifies and complicates his themes.

Flight's form is ancient, harkening back to Boccaccio and Chaucer -- stranded travelers tell one another their stories and interact during a hiatus in their pilgrimage.  The opera is set in an anonymous airport terminal, near the gates.  (In 1998, you could just walk up to a gate -- of course, post 9-11 security is not in evidence.)  The gate area is depicted with reasonable factual accuracy and some of the action involves the push-carts, enigmatic cabinets on wheels, that are ubiquitous in airports.  About 8 screens are stacked up above a steel stairway that represents the jetway to the plane.  The screens, forming a big rectangle, represent the exterior:  sometimes, all screens combine to show us the turbulent sky foaming with big clouds; sometimes, the screens give us a vision of the sky from the cockpit of a flying jet; on other occasions, the screens show separate images simultaneously presenting images of the sky, the control tower, and planes either landing or taking off.  As the action commences, we see travelers, very convincingly represented in sweatshirts and stretchpants, de-planing past a shabby-looking man who seems to be from North Africa.  This is the Refugee, a stateless immigrant who has been trapped in the airport for many months, possibly even years.  He pushes a cart with a sack containing his belongings and idly begs for food or money from the passengers rushing by him.  Tina and Bill are a married couple, planning a holiday in some warm place with beaches.  They are estranged and have decided that the holiday will be their last effort at reconciling -- if only, perhaps, sexually.  Tina carries something like self-help marriage manual and she accuses Bill of being sexually uninventive and unimaginative.  A lonely 52-year old woman has come to the gate to meet her "fiancée" -- actually a young man from some Third World country with whom she had a brief affair and with whom she has been corresponding.  The young man has said he will fly to see her on a Wednesday, but hasn't specified which Wednesday.  A pregnant woman is bound for Minsk with her diplomat husband -- at the last moment, she becomes violently fearful and homesick and can't bring herself to board the plane.  Her diplomat husband goes ahead without her and takes off on the plane -- we see his worried-looking face projected in one of the screen above the stage.  A steward and stewardess in red uniforms are conducting a torrid, purely physical sexual affair -- they couple in broom-closets (although I wasn't able to see the sex scene because my seat doesn't provide me with a line-of-sight to the extreme left of the stage -- this is unfortunate, because the scene was apparently very funny:  everyone else who could see it laughed merrily.)   A thunderstorm blows up over the airport and there is high wind, much lightning, and a downpour.  All flights are delayed.  The second act has a Shakespearean tinge, a bit like one of his enchanted forests in which lovers wander, separating and, then, reconnecting with one another after various misadventures  -- during the period that the passengers are stranded, they get drunk, confess secrets to one another, and get involved in various kinds of mischief.  The diplomat's wife confesses that she is depressed because the baby that she is about to deliver will destroy her freedom; Bill and Tina argue more violently and Bill, trying to seduce the randy Stewardess, ends up in a sexual encounter with the Steward instead.  The 52-year old woman gets drunk with Tina, the diplomat's wife, and the Stewardess who is planning, it seems, to break things off with the Steward.

It's dawn as the third act begins.  The skies are clear and the sunrise is beautiful.  Bill confesses his liaison with the Steward -- he doesn't have much choice since the Steward wanders into the scene wearing Bill's trousers (Bill is without pants).  Tina knocks Bill out with the self-help sex manual.  The diplomat's wife has her baby, immediately after her husband returns, having flown back from Minsk.  The lonely middle-aged woman realizes that her lover is not coming to meet her.  The presence of the baby has a magical effect on the characters:  the infant represents hope and new beginnings and Bill reconciles with Tina (when he wakes up); the Steward and Stewardess fly off on separate planes; the middle-aged lady flies off on a holiday herself, accompanying Bill and Tina.  The trapped Refugee is left alone on stage as the music vaults skyward, fanfares announcing the planes ascending into the clouds.

The pivotal figure in the opera is the Refugee living as a nomad in the airport terminal.  (The story is based on a real event involving a man who was trapped for ten years or more at the De Gaulle Airport -- in 2006, Steven Spielberg used this premise as the basis for his movie, The Terminal).  The Refugee is an exotic magical figure, a sort of melancholy soothsayer, and he is set apart from the others because of his very high counter-tenor voice.  He sings in a register higher than the women passengers, for instance.  The Refugee deals in supposedly magical stones that grant wishes and, in the course of the opera, he gives one stone to each of the couples, wishing them well on their travels.  During the interregnum in Act Two, the women all discover that they have been given, more or less identical stones, by the refugee and feel betrayed and defrauded -- they are drunk literally beat the Refugee unconscious and, then, hide is inert body in one of the luggage bins on wheels.  Later, after the baby's birth has brightened the mood and suggested new hope to everyone, the characters all league together to protect him against an Immigration Agent who has been prowling the airport looking for the Refugee -- the separate strands of the plot all unite convincingly in the scene in which the passengers defend the Refugee.  In the end, the Immigration Agent behaves as well as he can -- he agrees to allow the hapless Refugee to remain in the airport and does not take him into custody.  The Refugee, who is a character with quasi-supernatural aspects, a symbolic figure, has as his correlate t The Controller.  The Controller sings about an octave above the range of most coloratura sopranos -- most of the time, her voice comes from the tower, high above.  She is an angelic or divine presence who wears a red uniform when we see her briefly on-stage.  The Controller has been exchanging gazes with the Refugee and feels she has a special bond with him -- at the end of the opera, the Controller announces her joy that the Refugee will remain in the terminal, her solace during the happiest parts of the day or night when there are no people, no passengers, in the airport.  This is not a warm or fuzzy ending -- we have seen that the Controller is weirdly cruel on occasion and, in fact, seems to despise the people scurrying through her airport.  She is an indifferent God, mostly unconcerned about human suffering and, indeed, even contemptuous of it.  Her high-pitched shrieking arias convince us that the bond between the Refugee and the Controller has sinister implications -- she seems to be a "weird" sister, a witch that embodies malign Fate.

There is much to admire in the opera.  The libretto is composed in a telegraphically terse, internally rhymed poetry -- it's doggerel, what the  Germans call Knittelvers, somewhat similar to the laconic, alliterative poetry that Wagner forged for this Ring cycle:  "The pining wind/ pining us down" -- "The blue around the eyes/ is supposed to represent continuous surprise" (a description of the middle-aged woman's make-up).  The Immigration Officer ties all strands in the opera together with the line rendered to the Refugee:  "You can't fool rules/ They're inexorable/ As hair turning gray or love fading away."  These lines represent the Refugee's dilemma, the middle-aged woman's anxiety about being too young for her "fiancé", and the estrangement growing between Bill and Tina.  When the Immigration Agent sings about a "frozen man falling from the sky like a frozen star", he is referring to the fate of the Refugee's twin brother -- the two men stowed aboard a jet in the exterior wheel-well and the Refugee's sibling froze to death and fell from the plane while it was descending to land.  The reference to stars, however, also echoes poetry about the birth of the baby whose eyes are said to be radiant "stars" as well.  The opera is fundamentally kindly about human nature but it's not sentimental -- the women in the terminal beat the Refugee unconscious before they, later, try to save him.  The concluding bars in the opera are Wagnerian -- the Controllers wild whoops above thunderous music representing the jet taking off are like the cries of the Valkyries as they ride the storm over battlefields in Wagner's Ring.  The orchestral part is very complex, involving electronic sounds like beeps and radar pings, soft passages with xylophone that sound like Indonesian gamelan music, and spectacular vaulting fanfares representing planes taking off and swooping through majestic clouds.  The performance of the opera that I saw on the 2nd of February seemed pretty much flawless -- the only problem that I perceived was that it took the Refugee a few minutes to warm-up his biting counter-tenor and I couldn't hear his initial notes over the orchestra when he first sang.  There's a tremendous aria called "I bought this suit case in New York City" in which the mother-to-be laments her anticipated loss of freedom -- instead of Dior scarves, her suitcase will now have to be full of diapers and baby bottles.  As the song picks up force, the woman is accompanied by chorus of people snoring -- the sounds stylized into a sort of ambient drone.  It's wonderfully effective.  In general, the score features a huge range of sounds and spans as many octaves as you can imagine -- it leaps and lunges like a windhover.  At one point, I saw the musician playing a big tuba insert a yard-long mute into his horn -- this was a spectacular sight and consolation, I suppose, for the fact that, although my seat deprived me a vantage on the sex scene, I can look straight down into the orchestral pit. (The percussion parts must be very difficult:  the several percussionists in the band all beamed with relief when the piece was over and either high-fived or shook hands.)