Giri / Haji

Giri / Haji ("Shame" / "Duty") is a British TV series that shuttles frenetically between London and Tokyo.  The program involves armies of murderous Yakuza, lots of throat-slitting and pinky chopping, and protracted, unrealistically lethal, gun battles.  The eight program series is a compendium of just about every crime film cliche that you can imagine amped-out to maximum volume and presented with garish razzle-dazzle -- there are split-screens, animated sequences, lots of slow-motion, rapid-fire changes in aspect ratio and color, MTV-style pop-tune montages, and writing periodically emblazoned on the screen to create Brechtian effects.  The cinematography is gorgeous and the characters are all attractively photogenic.  The show is shallow in all respects but it's compelling viewing, primarily because the acting is excellent and the characters are well developed and very appealing.  Giri / Haji shows how trash can be fashioned into a compelling product and, even, be exciting, compulsive viewing if the spectator cares about the fate of the characters.  In some ways, it would be convenient to announce that G/H succeeds ins spite of its glamorous packaging (it often looks like a TV advertisement); but this would be unfair:  some of the show's pictorial devices are startling and all the flash on display keeps things spinning like a top.  In fact, G /H's glittering surface hides the cliches and gives the shop-worn narrative the patina of the new.

G/H exploits the oldest gangster plot in the world:  there are two brothers, one a sober, conservative family man employed as a cop and a younger sibling who is wild, reckless, and a gangster.  The younger brother is thought to be dead when the show begins -- the victim of a Yakuza gangland slaying.  In fact, the gangster (Yuto) has been dispatched to London to kill the son of a prominent Tokyo mobster who leads a rival gang.  This murder accomplished, the gangsters in Tokyo go to war, slaughtering one another in impressively violent raids and skirmishes.  The embattled cops in Tokyo dispatch Kenzo, the sober older brother to London to hunt down the killer and, therefore, bring the violence to an end in Japan.  (Kenzo thinks Yuto is dead and doesn't know that he will be, in fact, hunting  his own brother.)  In London, Kenzo forms a relationship with a female forensics instructor Rachel Weitzmann, who has been blackballed by her fellow cops for ratting on a corrupt member of the police force.  (This guy just happened to be her boyfriend and the woman's motives for turning in her paramour was that he was about to leave her for another woman.)  Back in Tokyo, Kenzo's daughter Rei, who is a rebellious feminist, runs away from home and flies to London to be with her dad.  (She seems to be about 17.)  Rei adores her uncle, Yuto.  In London, Yuto has been doing some bodyguard work for Abbot, a crooked bar owner and would-be Yakuza. Abbot is  tangled-up in a mob war in London involving hordes of Albanian gunmen fighting crowds of Japanese London-Yakuza.  (I can't recall what causes this  conflict but it  involves lots of assassinations and culminates in a huge gun-battle in the fourth episode).  Kenzo gets recruited by a flamboyant homosexual kid, Rodney, who is half-Japanese -- Rodney needs someone to protect him from his vicious pimp. Rodney is mourning the death of his transvestite lover, Tiff who has committed suicide but he's too hip and proud to show that his heart is breaking and so he conceals his grief behind a mask of Oscar Wilde-style aphorisms and general bitchiness. (while ingesting heroic amounts of drugs.) While Kenzo is slowly learning that he is chasing his own brother through the London underworld, his elderly father dies in Tokyo and his marriage seems to fall apart.  No worry -- he is now in love with the Scottish forensics expert, Rachel, who has become his helper in his investigation in London  (Rachel is Jewish and invites motley crew of Rodney, Rei, and Kenzo to her house for a Yom Kippur dinner.).  Meanwhile, Rei comes out as a lesbian and has a love affair with a British girl -- Kenzo seems strangely unconcerned about Rei associating with the demi-monde in Soho where the action takes place, but I guess he's got other matters on his mind.  It turns out that Yuto was banished from Tokyo because he impregnated the beautiful daughter of his Yakuza boss.  She's had the baby and is held in confinement by her angry dad.  When Kenzo's mother, the grandmother of the baby, learns about this, she and Kenzo's estranged wife manage to free the mother and infant and, then, go on the lam in Japan's hinterland with deadly mobsters chasing them.  And so on and on, until the bloody end of the epic.  

From this summary, which omits a dozen  characters and a half-dozen subplots, the reader will see that the whole thing is a melange of cliches and well-worn plot devices.  Kenzo is the archetypal "fish out of water" in London; a rather slovenly detective from the London force has been sent to Tokyo as an exchange for Kenzo and so the "fish out of water" plot is comically doubled -- it's serious in London and funny in Tokyo.  (Although the minor character of the London cop in Tokyo has a major role in the denouement.)  The odd-couple buddy movie theme is developed in Kenzo's alliance with Rodney, the cynical rent-boy who undercuts Kenzo's sobriety with various quips and snarky remarks.  There's a love affair with Rachel, the Scottish forensics instructor that is pretty standard fare for this sort of crime picture.  This culminates in a funny / tragic scene in which Kenzo says:  "I was a good Japanese husband and father, a dutiful police officer and a happily married man a month ago.  And, now, I'm in London helping my Yakuza brother escape the cops and engaged in an adulterous affair with an English woman."   To which Rachel replies in her best Scottish brogue:  "Well, I'm not an English woman," an answer that baffles Kenzo because of his inability to hear the difference between the various dialects spoken.  (The Japanese is subtitled.  You will need to turn on the subtitles for the British characters as well since they speak in a gangster argot that was indecipherable to me on the soundtrack.)  The series is designed to interim-climax at the end of the fourth episode in a very long and bloody gun battle -- this is gangsters killing each other picturesquely in Tokyo intercut with a bloodbath involving an army of Albanian bad guys and Japanese mobsters in Soho.  

The program works because we are interested in the characters.  Rodney is fascinating, a little pathetic,and obviously highly intelligent -- in the last half of the show he's doing lots of drugs; there's a priceless scene in which he annihilates a drug-abuse Group Therapy session with his eloquent sarcasm.  Kenzo is dour,but dutiful and obviously horrified by the plight in which he finds himself.  Rachel wants sex and is constantly finding herself with unsuitable partners -- she's also sad and a little bit pathetic, although she's resilient.  Yuto obviously yearns to become a solid citizen like his older brother but covers this inclination with a veneer of toughness.  Abbot, the sleazy bar owner, is extremely funny and his efforts to act like a Yakuza are amusing.  Rei is vulnerable and confused, easily exploited by her new girlfriend.  Even the minor characters are interesting -- the two side-kick cops (the fat British guy matched with a fat Japanese cop) are engaging and humorous.  One of the most startling things in the show is Kenzo's mother, who seems to be a typically repressed and silent Japanese housewife -- she turns feral in the film's last couple episodes in which she defends her grandchild; it's evident that the old lady is capable of all sorts of mayhem.  Furthermore, the program's astonishing final scenes involve a Tarantino - John Woo type standoff on the roof of a Soho building, a sequence that is unlike anything that I've ever seen a crime drama of this sort.   Rei diverts the combatants from killing one another by threatening to dive off the building's parapet.  As everyone lunges after her, the film goes to sepia-toned monochrome slow-motion and, then, everyone participates in a modern dance interlude that is probably about five minutes long and that recapitulates in eloquent gestures the major relationships in the film.  (For instance,we see Kenzo's dead father suddenly appear.  He seems to dance toward Kenzo who opens his arms to embrace him but, then, we see that the old man is lunging toward Yuto, his other son, whom he has always preferred to Kenzo -- we have seen this in a harrowing call that Kenzo makes to his dying father in which the old man is confused and thinks he is talking to the absent, presumed dead Yuto.)  I thought that this ballet sequence was profound and extremely moving -- many people may just think it pretentious.  But the ingenuity and audacity of the dance scene is admirable.  

I watched G/H in two-program increments per night..  This is a commitment of 8 hours (episodes are about 52 minutes long.).  Despite its innumerable cliches and improbabilities (there are a lot of unlikely coincidences in the film) I looked forward to each episode and so how can I not recommend the show to you?  

Touchez Pas au Grisbi

Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Don't touch the Loot) is a ferocious 1954 French crime film.  The movie is directed by Jacques Becker and stars Jean Gabin in an iconic performance as an aging thief.  The movie establishes many themes that appear in later pictures and seems to me to be very influential -- it's probable, however, that the movie's influence was diffused into American cinema through subsequent imitations -- for instance, the picture's theme, loyalty between men, is integral to movies like Thief and The Wild Bunch, although it's not obvious that Michael Mann or Peckinpah actually saw the Becker movie.  The picture is also decisive with respect to the gangster movies of Jean Melville, all of which seem to me to be variations on this classic film.  

Becker's style is "invisible" -- that is, he never shows off, but like Hawks and Renoir, generally places his camera in locations that are perfectly designed to illuminate the action.  Like most great directors, Becker's sense of space is remarkable and architectronic -- you could diagram the places in which the film's events occur.  This is particularly true of a bravura gun battle on a remote country road, shot at night, and exquisitely choreographed.  The picture's black and white is lustrous and lucid. Becker's direction often resembles Bresson in that he focuses much attention on people performing actions that seem relatively routine and, even, undramatic -- he doesn't cut between spaces and, often, shots are devoted to seemingly inconsequential imagery of people simply traversing spaces.  But Becker is supremely confident and when he shows you a space by having someone filmed walking through it, there is always an underlying graphic or thematic basis for this gesture.  The film's pacing is peculiar.  At the center of the picture, there is a long sequence in which Gabin's Max shows his buddy, Riton, his hide-out in a luxury apartment.  The two men eat biscuits with cheese, drink a little brandy, and, then, brush their teeth and go to bed.  It's an extended image of almost marital domesticity in the middle of a crime film and one wonders why Becker is lavishing so much attention on shots of people brushing their teeth or Max handing out a towel and pajamas to his buddy.  Later, the film will turn upon Max deciding to sacrifice his precious loot, and, even, possibly, his life to save Riton.  This narrative would not be comprehensible or have any force without the intimate and domestic sequence between the two men at the heart of the film.

Max is a criminal universally admired in the demi-monde.  Although it has not been publicized, Max has stolen 8 bars of solid gold from Orly Airport.  He has hidden the gold in cartridge canisters in  his expensive white car, a big sedan that he keeps in an underground garage at his luxury apartment hide-out.  (He maintains another apartment on the other side of town.)  Max is adored by men, who always comp him his drinks and food, and also enormously attractive to women.  All of the women shown in the film desire him in one way or another.  He is extremely polite, gentlemanly (although he has a tendency toward what would now be called sexual harassment -- but the girls in the movie don't mind and seem to think it's an honor to be groped by him), highly intelligent, always impeccably dressed, and immaculately loyal to his associates.  At the start of the film, Max goes to a night club with a showgirl named Lola and his friend, Rinton.  Rinton's girlfriend is the very young Jeanne Moreau (Josie).  Rinton is possessive and slaps Josie in the car when she snorts some cocaine.  In the milieu of this picture, men are constantly slapping women who seem to regard this as a gesture of affection.  At the cabaret, Max is consulted about establishing a new dope-dealer for the nightclub -- the place is run by a bespectacled fat man named Pierrot, although Max calls him Fatso.  Max has just met a young thug named Marco and he suggests that he take over the dope-trade at the cabaret.  As usual, Max's word is law and so Marco gets the nod to run drugs out of the night club.  Max and Rinton watch old men dancing with young girls and think that this seems pathetic although Rinton is obviously deeply in love with the cruel and impetuous Josie.  (Lola begs Max to go home with her, but he's reached the stage in his life when he prefers to just sleep at night and so he demures.)  Max finds Josie in a clutch with Angelo (Lino Ventura) and figures out that Josey is feigning her affection for Rinton.  This is a  problem because Rinton was Max's collaborator on heist involving the gold and presumably knows where the loot is stashed.  Max goes home and finds that he is being tailed by an ambulance.  (This is Angelo and his thugs who intend to torture Max and Rinton to find out where the loot is located.)  Max escapes 

Angelo's henchmen, calls Rinton, and they hide out at his apartment.  The next day, Max goes to his uncle, a fence, and tries to unload the gold.  There is a key scene in which it's made clear that Max is sleeping with his uncle's teenage girlfriend -- loyalty among men doesn't apply to sexual relations:  women are non-entitites in this intensely masculine world and it's probable that the uncle knows that Max is having sex with his girlfriend from time to time -- as Max says, it's best to keep this kind of thing in the family.  Max has told Rinton that Josey is betraying him.  Rinton is a dim-witted idiot -- he's called a "porcupine head"whatever that means.  Max warns Rinton to stay away from Josey but, as soon as Max leaves the apartment, Rinton goes to see Josey and gets captured by Angelo and his henchmen.  Max, meanwhile, spends the day with Betty, a socialite with whom he is also having an affair.  When Max discovers that Rinton is being held by Angelo, he denounces the man as an idiot and a fool, but, ultimately, decides to try to save his buddy.  He goes to Pierrot's nightclub, machine guns are distributed and the big battle on the country road, then, follows.  At the end of the movie, Max has lost his loot and Rinton, terribly wounded, dies.  Max is with Betty at a restaurant frequented by gangsters.  He takes a call and learns that Rinton has died.  He, then, goes back and sits with Betty concealing his grief.  But, in a final close-up, we see that his eyes are moist and he seems about to cry.  

The film is impeccable in every respect, completely believable, and very exciting.  There's a scene that exemplifies Becker's style.  Max goes into a little bar to use a phone.  Apparently, bars doubled as phone booths in Paris in 1954.  (The phone is next to the toilets.)  Max asks for a 'phone token" but he is rebuffed -- everyone admires Max so much that no one will take his money.  He places his call, leaves the bar, and, on the way out, tosses some notes to the bartender.  The bartender has poured Max's brandy, but he is in a hurry and doesn't drink it -- the bar-keep then takes a funnel from under the bar, pours the booze back into the bottle and says "I wish all of our customers were like him."  This is a tiny sequence, but it exemplifies Becker's fidelity to the truth and contains the very closely observed detail that the bartender keeps a funnel under the bar to pour unused booze back into their bottles.  

When John McCain died, Joe Biden said that he regarded McCain as his brother and that if McCain were ever in trouble he would hop the first plane to wherever the trouble was taking place to join him in the fight.  This is a style of masculinity that animated men of my father's generation -- the war and immediate post-war male ethos.  It's a combination of loyalty that is not blind to the faults of the person to whom one is loyal, plus self-reliance -- you don't ask outsiders to help settle what you should settle yourself.  There's a little poignant glimpse of how women fit into this equation.  When Max recruits the fat nightclub owner, Pierrot, to assist him in the fight, "Fatso", of course, joins the fray without asking any questions and, in fact, supplies the machine-guns.  Fatso's mistress, the madam who keeps the showgirls in line says to Max that Pierrot is all she has and that she "won't have a second chance."  Max says he'll bring Pierrot back alive.  Throughout the picture, we haven't heard Pierrot say a kind or even civil word to this woman whom he seems to bully mercilessly.  But she loves Pierrot and doesn't want him damaged in the brawl.

Orpheus

It's an incongruous observation:  Jean Cocteau's ambitious and classically inflected film transposing the myth of Orpheus to the modern world has something in common with Hollywood's big budget monster and superhero films:  Hollywood productions are driven by their CGI special effects -- the movies exist for the effects; something similar can be said about Cocteau's 1950 film -- the thing that most interests the director are the special effects, "trick shots" as they were called at the time.  Hollywood blockbusters devise effects from the whole cloth:  it's all green screen later sprayed with computer pixels.  Cocteau's effects are implemented using properties of the camera itself (slow-motion and reverse motion), the mirror tricks performed with empty frames and body-doubles, several shots employing eerie rear-projection (some of it either printed in negative or solarized).  Cocteau's effects seem to suggest that there is a secret world, a hidden perspective that can be accessed merely by looking at things from a slightly different angle.  Hollywood creates new, imaginary worlds; Cocteau shows us a reality that is always present but mostly concealed from us.  This concept of exploring reality from a slightly askew perspective is integral to the director's homosexuality -- the film is intensely Gay, coded in ways that make the homo-erotic subtext palpably present in just about every shot.  It is probable that Cocteau's gay sensibility liberates him to see reality from a perspective that is different in fundamental ways than that of many of his "straight" viewers.  Hence, the sense of a secret world within a world that animates this film.  

Orpheus is extremely complicated and anxious.  The film seems generated out of all sorts of concerns, both political and personal, that can't be directly stated.  Cocteau identifies with Orpheus and his plight:  the poet is famous and, therefore, misunderstood; he must defend his esthetic turf against younger interlopers who challenge his authority and, at the same time, must continuously invent something new for his adoring fans.  Cocteau was 60 when he made this film and had been seriously compromised by his problematic response to the German occupation -- he spent a lot of time paling around with people like Arno Brekker (Hitler's pet sculptor) and the aesthete (and German cultural attache) Ernst Juenger.  In fact,  Cocteau's activities during the Occupation were so questionable that he was tried, not once, but twice in the so-called post-war "Purification Trials" -- he had to submit to a tribunal alleging collaboration in the literary community and, then, to a similar Court convened to consider his wartime activities in the theater and movie industry.  Cocteau hashes out these issues in the film and, as one might expect, there's no clear or obvious way to resolves questions of this sort -- hence, the film's complexity.

At the movie's outset, we see Orpheus (Jean Marais) at the Cafe des Poetes, a literary hangout.  He's debating his fame with his publisher when a brawl ensues, arising from the appearance of his rival Casteguc, a young peacock of a poet scarcely 18 years old.  Two sinister, leather-clad motorcyclists blast through the brawl and Casteguc, Orpheus' rival, is killed.  A Rolls-Royce has appeared at the cafe driven by the chauffeur, Heutrebise.  A woman with pale features dressed all in black, the Princess as she is called, exits the car, has the dead Casteguc, put in the backseat and with Orpheus in tow departs the scene of the riot.  (Cops are now beating people up and taking them away in paddy-wagons.)  The Princess is going nowhere on earth -- a train blocks the road (it's the crossing of the Styx) and, then, the car glides through an increasingly spectral landscape to a weird-looking house in the middle of nowhere  It's a tremendously spooky and effective scene that derives ultimately from the Harker's trip to the castle in Murnau's Nosferatu..  Casteguc is revived and becomes the scary dominatrix's servant -- she leads the hapless lad away through a mirror.  Orpheus swoons and wakes up in the ravaged landscape, a limestone quarry.  The limousine driver is conveniently nearby and he drive Orpheus home to his subservient, little blonde wife.  (Cocteau was a misognyist -- the women in the film are either harpies, nags, or doormats.)  The chauffeur who is one of the living dead (he killed himself with gas due to unrequited love) becomes enamored with Eurydice, Orpheus' wife.  Orpheus himself doesn't care much about her -- she's pregnant and but he's so self-centered that he can't even hear the clues she drops about her condition.  (In a close-up, we see him treading on a knitted baby bootie that she has been making -- so much for typical male-female means of  procreation.  The poet is a solitary genius who produces life out of his mighty brain, his own male womb.)  Just after the chauffeur announces his love for Eurydice, the motorcyclist roar by and kill her.  Orpheus, in a completely unconvincing scene, mourns her loss and says that he wants the chauffeur to lead him to the "Netherworld" to recover the woman.  Heutrebise and Orpheus enter the mirror, the chauffeur leading the poet through a gloomy ruins, an anteroom to Hades, called the Zone.  (This term signifies the "occupied Zone" in France and establishes that the Underworld is a version of the German Occupation.)  The scenes in which Orpheus is led into Hades are undeniably beautiful and spectacularly shot -- it's a combination of reverse and slow motion with lyrically shadowy rear-projection of the bombed-out ruins at the St-Cyre military school.  This sequence has been widely influential -- its echoes can be seen most notably in Tarkovsky, who even appropriates the notion of "the Zone" and in films by directors such as the Wachowski brothers (now sisters) and  Christopher Nolan.  There follow several bizarre trials conducted by three nervous-looking Judges with stacks of paper in front of them.  It's revealed that the Princess is Orpheus' death, a figure sent by the Big Death who may or may not even exist.  (The Big Death either manipulates everyone's conduct according to occult Orders or, in the alternative, may be sleeping and simply dreaming the world.)  Heutrebise confesses that he loves Eurydice and has to sign a written admission of that fact.  Orpheus admits that he had mixed motives in descending into the Underworld -- perhaps, it was to encounter the tantalizing Princess who is his Death.  Ultimately, Orpheus and Eurydice are allowed to leave Hades but only on the condition that Orpheus not look upon his wife.  (This is no problem because he has no interest in her any way.)  Cocteau plays the scenes involving Orpheus and Eurydice back in what passes for the real world as a bitter domestic farce -- its intentionally comic with Eurydice hiding under tables so as not to be seen by Orpheus.  This is standard:  even Glueck, in his opera on the myth, wasn't able to keep a straight-face with respect to this aspect of the story.  Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld is explicitly comic.  And Cocteau follows this strategy -- Orpheus and the resurrected Eurydice, who is just a nuisance in the homosexual context upon which the director insists, has to be eliminated.  Orpheus catches sight of her in the rear-view mirror of the Rolls Royce and she vanishes for good.  Orpheus' enemies, including the Legion of Women, braying proto-feminists, appear -- they are enraged because the poet is thought to be responsible for the death of their favorite writer, Casteguc.  (Castegue, by the way, has been dictating poems to Orpheus over the radio in the Rolls Royce -- enigmatic utterances and numbers that resemble British coded broadcasts to the French Resistance during the War.)  Orpheus, now dead, is taken back into the Underworld, again in a spectacular sequence.  There he encounters his Death in the form of the leather-clad dominatrix Princess -- she has the tiniest cinched waist ever filmed.  She rebels against the regime of Death and says that she will make Orpheus immortal out of her love for him.  Then, she is led away by members of the regime to some unnameable torture, since she can't be killed -- she's already dead.  Orpheus is led back to the land of the living where it is revealed that the whole story was some kind of dream and that he's back in Kansas again, even in bed with his little vapid, blonde wife.

Jean Marais, who was Cocteau's lover, is so flamboyantly gay that he's funny -- he has brilliant little teeth, a jutting chin and a fantastic perm-waved hairdo.  (He looks like one of the characters in a Tom of Finland comic book.)  He's always mooning around, casting lasciviously gazes at the other male characters.  The film is set up to suggest that Orpheus will go to the Underworld to retrieve the beautiful blonde boy, Casteguc.  But this doesn't happen -- Cocteau is not willing to go that far to make the homosexual subtext actual text to the film.  Instead, Cocteau puts Eurydice in the film, but systematically devalues and derides her.  She's not Orpheus' object of affection but rather relegated to the role the love-object for the impotent second banana Heutrebise.  In fact, she's superfluous to the film and its meanings and this is obvious to the viewer.  History plays strange tricks.  From the vantage of 2020, Orpheus' travails in the Underworld have something to do with the Nazi Occupation -- the trial scenes have the queasy intensity of the interrogation sequences in Rosselini's Open City.  But, in fact, the system of repression that Cocteau represents in the film was the post-war purge of collaborators.  Cocteau uses imagery that suggests the Occupation, presumable, because to him, both the post-war Purge requiring two "purification trials" and the Nazi period were equivalent -- indeed, perhaps, for Cocteau the post-war purge was worse than anything he experienced during the Occupation.  From this vantage, now seventy years after the movie was made, the Underworld seems to be the Nazi occupation -- the post-war Purge is forgotten.  This is embodied, probably accidentally, in a scene in which the Judges of the Underworld assert that "There is no 'almost' here" and "There is no 'perhaps' here."  This sounds very much like the German "Hier gibt es kein 'Warum'" -- that is, the Concentration camp declaration:  "Here there is no 'why'."  I'm ambivalent about this film -- it's wildly intricate primarily because of subtexts that can't be explicitly announced:  Cocteau's misogyny, his homosexuality, his disdain for the post-war Purges.  Look at Bergman's The Seventh Seal and you will see that the Swede adapts the appearance of the Princess for his figure of Death.  Pictorially, the film is extraordinary and its camera tricks are, probably, its most important legacy.  

NotFilm

NotFilm is a documentary about an infamous motion picture that Samuel Beckett wrote under the aegis of Grove Press.  The movie was made in 1965 and was simply called Film.  (Grove Press intended to produce three films written by its authors Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter -- only the short subject written by Beckett made it to the screen.)  NotFilm is, in effect, high-toned "making of" featurette, expanded to 130 minutes, about 106 minutes longer than the Beckett picture.  The documentary directed by Ross Lippman, a well-known film restorer and archivist, doesn't present the Beckett short subject and seems to assume that those watching the movie will be familiar with Film.  In fact, Film is very hard to see and never screened or shown on TV for that matter.  Therefore, the entire enterprise is a little quixotic.  We are given detailed and elaborate information, much of it very fascinating, about a picture that we don't ever see except in out-takes or fragments.  This is baffling and causes the film to rotate around a mysterious absent center  -- it's a satisfyingly Beckettian dilemma, an entire movie that is more than two hours long and exceedingly earnest constructed around something that we see only in bits and pieces.  

Beckett was interested in cinema and had written to Eisenstein in 1936 asking to be admitted to the Moscow Film Academy.  Fortunately, I think, Eisenstein had better things to do than exchange letters with an unknown Irishman -- all of Beckett's fame was ahead of him:  Waiting for Godot and his other celebrated theatrical works all were published and first performed post-War.  So Beckett didn't embark on a film career but, nevertheless, seems to have been very interested in the opportunity provided by Grove Press in 1964.  He spent weeks writing a script and, then, recruited the director of the American premieres of his plays, Alan Schneider, to make the movie.  There was only one problem:  Schneider had never directed a movie and had no idea how to do this work.  Schneider, however, had two seasoned professionals on his crew:  Boris Kaufman and Buster Keaton -- that is, probably about 80 years of cinema production experience collectively.  The problem was that Kaufman and Keaton weren't really engaged in the project.  Keaton had no idea what Beckett's obtuse script was supposed to mean and was indifferent to the enterprise -- he is said to have refused to engage with Beckett and morosely sat in his car reading the sports page between takes.  Kaufmann  is one of cinema's greatest cameramen -- he shot Vigo's Zero de Conduit and L'Atalanta as well as On the Waterfront -- but he also couldn't figure out what Beckett wanted.  In fact, even Beckett didn't know what he wanted and he was revising the script even when shooting was underway.  (The British Film Institute has apparently shot Beckett's published script in a reconstruction of what the author intended -- but this differs markedly from what Schneider and Beckett actually produced.)  Extensive tests were made but when it came time to produce the film on a sweltering day in New York -- it was 100 degrees -- everything went wrong.  The opening nine-minutes of the film, an overture, as it were, introducing the picture's major themes, had to be scrapped.  After a short minute of so prelude, the picture, as released in 1965, takes place on one set simulating a dilapidated cell-like room.  

Beckett, who seems to have been a monstrous pain in the ass,  overthought the project.  He superimposed layers upon layers of complications on the script, a riff on Bishop Berkeley's notion that "to be is to be perceived" -- that is, esse is percipi.  Beckett wanted one style of footage for the point-of-view of his principal character, a schlemiel called "O" ("Object" of perception); he demanded another style of camerawork for "E" -- that is, the perceiving lens.  This couldn't be accomplished and so lots of smudged and smeared film showing O's "diseased" perspective had to be scrubbed.  Beckett also devised an elaborate geometry for the relationship of O to E -- if the camera angle between O and E was greater than 46 degrees, this perspective was banned.  (Beckett illustrated this with elaborate diagrams in the script and called the 45 degree angle the "angle of immunity).  None of this worked in  practice and people who saw the film at Cannes and then Lincoln Center were totally baffled.  (The only one who benefited from the project was Buster Keaton whose career was revived by the attention that the film garnered -- although no one understood the movie, Keaton always was given standing ovations when he was in attendance.  He would, then, approach the microphone and explain that he had no idea what the film was supposed to be about.)  

Lippman wanders down many paths, most of them quite digressive if interesting, yet misses some key aspects to the film.  In fact, he doesn't seem to understand Film himself.  He devotes time to showing that Beckett was a habitual liar -- he always claimed to have never heard of a farce involving a character who doesn't appear until the last moment of the play:  the character's name is Godot and the farce was by Balzac, a writer with whom Beckett was very familiar.  The hapless Billy Whitelaw, Beckett's muse as an actress, describes her travails in appearing as an illuminated and white-painted pair of lips and teeth in Not I.   But she also makes a bizarre distinction between her "inner core" and the rest of her flesh -- the sort of comment that would set Beckett spinning like a top in his grave.  (It's pretty evident that she didn't fully understand what his works were about although she was sadistically manipulated by her boss, for instance, buried in sand up to her neck or forced to squat in a garbage barrel to the point that she was actually crippled permanently by performing these roles.)  There's a disturbing digression about Keaton's alcoholism -- he said he had drank "oceans of whiskey" -- but this information, although extremely interesting, has nothing to do with Film -- Keaton had been sober for many years when he made that picture.  Schneider was still alive when NotFilm was made but couldn't recall anything -- he seems to be suffering from dementia.  (Lippman likes the fact that most of his informants can't really recall much of anything about the vexed production -- it's a Beckett touch.)  We get some spectacular scenes from Keaton movies -- there's one mindboggling scene in which Keaton dives off the top of a sand dune and turns somersaults in the air as he bounces like a ball off the flanks of the hillside.  Because Dziga Vertov was Boris Kaufman's brother we gets lots of imagery from Vertov's Kino-Eye films -- but this has nothing to do with Film.  Similarly, fantastic images of Billy Whitelaw's lips and tongue and enormous teeth in Not I are impressive but have nothing to do with the Beckett project under consideration.  Film features a moving camera that people see and, then, to which they react with expressions of terror and revulsion.  Beckett's idea was that "to be is to be observed" -- since Beckett's art attempts to reverse the curse of being into non-being, the idea in Film is efface all traces of O's existence by destroying pictures of him as wall as tearing up an image of the God (Berkeley's God here shown as a Sumerian divinity with huge bug-eyes) whose perception confirms  O's being.  Having eliminated all signs of being perceived by anyone, O finally comes face to face with the menacing camera lens.  It turns out, of course, that the lens is the hero's own face and single eye (Keaton is like a camera; he has a single lens and wears an eye patch.)  Beckett thought long and hard about this climax, but the notion that, if we eliminate God and our fellow creatures observing us, we will still find ourselves under the scrutiny of our own consciousness  is sophomoric and you can see this coming a mile away.  The problem that Beckett faced in using Keaton is that the comedian's silent films express more about existential Angst in a more authentic form than anything that Beckett could muster on-screen.  Images of the tiny Keaton pursued by vast armies of avenging cops carrying billy-clubs are far more alarming than anything Beckett could configure for Film.  Furthermore, much of Film inadvertently looks like a low-budget horror picture.  You know the plot:  a man wakes up from strange, unsettling dreams and walks down a busy street -- everyone recoils from him in utter horror, something that we see from the POV of the hero.  In fact, we come to learn that the man has been killed in a ghastly industrial accident and that he is wandering the streets as an undead corpse terrifying everyone with his mangled face and body.  

Lippman ends the movie with a lament for the demise of film in the wake of the digitalization of cinema.  This is poignant but beside the point.  NotFilm contains recordings of Beckett's voice, a great rarity since he evaded cameras and microphones.  (In fact, he was fantastically photogenic.)  The produced smuggled in a recorder and we can hear Beckett debating issues about the film with Schneider.  Someone says that Beckett was a "lyric" Irishman and that everything he said sounded like poetry.  On the evidence of the film, like Finnegan in the song, he "had a beautiful brogue (both) broad and sweet." 

The Endless

The most beautiful and interesting horror films demonstrate that what people most desire may, also, be something that is destructive and monstrous.  Human beings desire immortality, but the dark side of that yearning is represented by the ghastly resurrection of the body shown in zombie and living dead films.  Frankenstein is about the seduction of science and medicine as palliatives to human mortality.  The monsters that stalk the screen are incarnations of the great amoral gods that human beings worshiped before our secular age.  Physical beauty is always in a profound sense mutilating.  We construct our reality upon the assumption that we are free agents, but what if all of our acts were predetermined or controlled by some monstrous entity.  For every human yearning, there is a dark side:  desire knows no limits and is unregulated and this is the zone of the grotesque and monstrous.

The Endless, a effective low-budget horror film, embodies our anxiety about free will.  Two brothers, Justin and Aaron, are at loose ends, living hand-to-mouth and doing menial labor.  They were raised on a commune somewhere in northern California, a place that Aaron recalls fondly but that the slightly older Justin remembers as a vicious death cult.  Aaron yearns for the orderly life at the Arcadia Camp as the place styles itself, the good organic food, and camaraderie.  Justin is skeptical:  he recalls that all the men at the camp were castrated and that some sort of evil presided over the place.  Aaron receives an old-fashioned VHS recording in the mail from Arcadia that shows him and his brother -- this is puzzling and stirs up unsettled memories in the young man.  As you might expect, Aaron's desire to visit Arcadia is opposed by Justin, but, in the end, he agrees that they will go back to the place for a weekend.  (The film's two main characters, Justin and Aaron are Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the movie's co-directors.)

The camp is full of grinning hipsters who haven't aged in the ten years that Justin and Aaron have been absent.  The place is built under a volcano cone near a lake and is surrounded by many miles of wilderness.  Arcadia brews beer, no doubt a very fashionable and astringent IPA, and everyone purports delight at seeing Justin and Aaron again.  But, in classic horror film fashion, it's clear that all is not what it seems at Arcadia.  Some of the members seem lobotomized into bizarre jollity; a man paces endlessly back and forth and a girl sketches images of the camp under the sway of a vast billowing black entity that looks vaguely like a bat.  Obviously, the place harbors dark secrets.  Each night, there are campfires that involve odd games -- someone throws a rope up into the air where some invisible force seizes it and, then, plays tug-of-war with the cult-member holding the other end of the tether.  A cottage is padlocked.  Weird sounds emerge from the dark and there's a Victorian-looking wall-tent in a clearing where a clock keeps advancing five seconds and, then, running backward while the canvas shakes and terrible noises come from within.  One of the cult members has written an elaborate equation on a blackboard but says that he can't solve it.  Sometimes, in the background of shots, trees collapse inexplicably or the air trembles as if with heat waves.  Paths in the camp are demarcated by strange-looking staffs driven into the ground to create seemingly protected pathways.  One of the cult members suggests that the skeptic Justin dive to the bottom of the lake -- there he encounters some sort of inky black monster.  But he retrieves a box in which there is a another video cassette.  The entity apparently communicates by images imprinted on polaroids, VHS tape, film, and cassettes.  The video shows Justin denouncing the cult when he and his brother left ten years ago.  Justin tells the media that the cult is bizarre and suicidal.  One of the cult members is aggrieved and, in the funniest line of the movie, says:  "We just wanted to brew beer and sell it to support ourselves and you made everyone think we were some kind of UFO-worshiping, dickless Heaven's Gate spin-off."  As you might expect, Justin slowly discovers what is going on at the camp and, then, of course, must attempt to escape -- although his brother, Aaron, is ambivalent and would prefer to remain.  (Spoilers necessarily follow.)

The Endless combines two motifs:  time loops and Lovecraftian "Color out of Space" horror.  As it  happens, a malign, nameless, shapeless entity inhabits the area.  This entity ensnares its victims in the time-loops -- for its own diabolical entertainment, the monstrous force creates a "Ground Hog Day" time-loop in which the members of the cult, and, in fact, anyone in the region must die horribly over and over again.  (It's not clear what benefit the entity attains from this exercise, but, as you know, some things are beyond mortal ken.)  The cult members, apparently, are sucked up into the entity and killed, only to be resurrected again for another cycle.  The more enterprising folks in the region try to evade the monster's designs by killing themselves, but this just yields  time-loops in which their suicides occur over and over again ad infinitum.  Apparently, the monster has been influencing people to die repeatedly in looping scenarios for a long time.  We learn that the Victorian era tent is occupied by a 19th century explorer or hunter who keeps committing some kind of gory suicide every five seconds just off-screen in his canvas dwelling.  The philosophical issue arising from this premise relates to repetition and free will -- the suicides claim to be exercising free-will in defying the monster by killing themselves; the cult members are obedient to the entity and allow themselves to be sacrificed, apparently, on a biweekly basis.  The anxieties that the film explores are integral to being  human.  We are  creatures of habit and like everything to be, more or less, the same every day -- but, at the same time, we yearn for adventure and novelty.  The cult is attractive in that it offers the same experiences in a comfortably regulated way day after day.  And, yet, the price of this comfort is foregoing any claim to have agency or free-will.  In the universe of the film, those who assert agency end up just killing themselves over and over again although one of these figures, asserts that his self-murder is, at least, his own free act.  This notion is expressed by films and videos that loop and stop time.  Every photograph, as Barthes has argued, is funereal, an image of death that is fundamentally uncanny.  Religion, if considered in the light of the film, requires rituals -- and what are rituals if not time loops in which the same moment of the encounter with the divine is re-enacted endlessly?  Ultimately, the film is self-reflective -- it's a genre picture, a horror film, and we understand these sorts of movies because they reiterate motifs and themes that are looped to create specific type of film we are watching.  The question that the film's ambiguous ending proposes is whether free will exists or is merely illusory.  

The picture is well-acted.  Justin embodies the concept of agency and free will.  Aaron represents the desire for security and predictability that people find in cults or religion.  The film doesn't require much in the way of special effects and there's nothing gaudy about anything that we see.  The parched semi-desert landscapes and the mountainous volcanic peaks are effectively used.  The movie creates an eerie uncanny mood that is pleasantly scary.  It's a "mumble-core" production and I didn't understand more than about half of the dialogue -- the rest was inaudible.  Some of the big effects don't work -- a lynx or cougar that apparently keeps killing a camper is represented in a CGI effect that is on the wrong side of the "uncanny divide"; it's laughably weird.  An important plot point involves a car battery that is depleted (difficult to escape when you can't start your car).  The heroes have to push the pickup truck while the monster with fiery gaseous tentacles is pursuing them.  The truck-pushing shots seem to have been filmed day-for-night in the studio and they don't match the long shots showing the vehicle on a causeway and the entity billowing after it.  But these are minor distractions and the film is generally entertaining, scary in a loopy kind of way, and thought-provoking.  

He Ran All the Way

My Journey through French Cinema is a 3 1/2 hour documentary superintended by the great director, Bertrand Tavernier.  (Tavernier is one of the smartest men to ever direct a film and his pictures are intensely cerebral, acerbic, and, in many ways, as austerely instructional as some of Rosselini's late works.) Tavernier's guide to the cinema of his nation is extremely personal and idiosyncratic.  When I was little, movies were run continuously and people would often enter the theater in the middle of a feature, watch the movie to its end, and, then, leave when the loop had come full-circle for them -- then, they would announce "this is where we came in" and make their way to the exit.  Tavernier's documentary exemplifies this sensibility -- he begins the film where "he came in" with a 1943 picture by Jacques Becker that he saw as a pre-school child.  Tavernier, then, proceeds to explore films made in France in the late thirties through the decade of the 1980's.  His guided tour leads us mostly through very hard-boiled and grim crime dramas, the pictures of Becker, Carne, Gremillon, Renoir, Melville, and others.  He provides only a sideways glance at the French New Wave, mentioning Truffaut, Godard, Varda and Chabrol -- since Chabrol directed some estimable crime pictures, he is accorded more screen time than the other, more important, in my view, French filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague.  It's a highly personal film, charming and informative and I took copious notes on pictures about which I knew nothing, but that seemed to me to be worth hunting down.  Apparently, Tavernier made a TV series that is much longer and more comprehensive.  The long documentary that I saw on Turner Classic Movies doesn't mention Abel Gance or Jacques Tati or, for that matter, Raymond Bertrand or Jacques Rivette, to name just a few -- there is nothing about French silent film at all.  My guess is that a more comprehensive picture of French film making is provided by the full TV show -- for instance, Jean Cocteau is mentioned only as the director of Les Enfants Terrible and that, only because one of Tavernier's heroes (with whom he actually worked), Melville co-directed that picture.  The documentary is maddening in some ways, but, extremely, interesting.

One of Tavernier's featured directors is a man named John Berry.  Berry was, in fact, an American film maker who spent the second half of his career under the Black List banned from Hollywood work due to his communist sympathies and, therefore, like Jules Dassin, forced to make pictures in France.  I had never heard of Berry -- one must acknowledge that to a dismaying extent the Blacklist was effective.  Although Berry made a fine noir in 1951 He Ran All the Way, he has been essentially erased from American film history.  Tavernier mentioned the picture as an excellent American crime film and, so, on that recommendation, I searched for the picture.

He Ran All the Way is a low-budget but impressively produced noir, clocking in at an economical 79 minutes.  The film has prestigious production values:  John Garfield stars (in his last picture) with Shelley Winters.  The tremendous black-and-white photography is by the great James Wong Howe.  The movie's writers are unknown to me -- and unknown to everyone else:  Dalton Trumbo, who was also blacklisted, wrote the picture under pseudonym.  The movie is modest, crisply written and directed, noteworthy mostly for its brilliant photography and the fine performances by the very young Winters and Garfield.

A penny-ante thug lives at home with his abusive and alcoholic mother -- there's a strong intimation that she has damaged her son beyond repair.  The apartment where they live, sweltering in a New York heat wave, is remarkably squalid.  Garfield's character is so lazy and useless that he can't quite get up in time to meet a mobster who plans a payroll heist -- this is the most important day of  his life, but he is almost missing in action.  The thug, Nick, tells his accomplice that he has had a nightmare about being pursued.  The nightmare comes true a few minutes later.  The payroll heist goes wrong and Nick kills a cop.  He flees to a  local swimming pool at an amusement park -- it's called "the Plunge" and there meets Peg (Shelley Winters).  Needing a place to hole-up, he gets Peg to take him home -- she's afraid of the criminal, but sexually excited by his brutish aggression.  (Winters does a great job showing timidity, fear, and lust all at the same time.)  Peg lives with her mother, father, who is a newspaper press operator, and her "kid brother."  Nick takes all of them hostage while the dragnet closes in around him.  The film's emotional center is Nick's tortured relationship with Peg -- Peg represents a kind of life that he can't achieve:  if he didn't have a gun pointed at her head, she would likely not have any interest in him.  Her bourgeois life contrasts with his wretched upbringing -- the film pointedly compares Peg's neat and orderly living quarters with Nick's nightmarish and filthy apartment presided over by his slatternly mother wearing lingerie and drinking straight from the bottle.  Nick tries to get his mother to help him but she says that as far as he's concerned the police can hunt him down and shoot him as "cop-killer."  There are extended violent clashes with Peg's father, who despises the thug, but can't figure out how to get rid of him.  One of Peg's co-workers (she doesn't know that Nick is holding people hostage at Peg's home), says that the girl should doll herself up, dress seductively, and, then, she can get men to do things for her.  Peg regards this as advice to apply to the hostage situation so she dresses herself in a low-cut gown, has her hair done, and comes home with the intent of seducing Nick.  Nick falls for her ploy and gives her $1500 dollars to buy a car so that they can escape together.  (He's carrying $10,000 from the payroll heist.)  Peg returns from buying the car and acts in an ambiguous way -- it's uncertain whether she really desires Nick and has bought the car or whether she has set him up to be killed by the cops.  The car is supposed to be delivered in an hour, but it doesn't show up.  Nick panics, punches out a window, and begins shouting defiantly at the dark corner below.  Peg's father is waiting in the shadows with a pistol in his hand.  There's a shoot-out and Nick is mortally wounded.  As he sits on the curb, bleeding to death, the car that Peg bought is delivered.

In truth to say, the film isn't much. It's entertaining and brilliantly made.  But, at least, half of the film noir made in this period were well-crafted and, almost, all of them stand up today as being eminently watchable -- they are all more or less alike and all pretty good.  But there are several memorable things about the film.  I have already commented on the performances, particularly Shelley Winters' intricate characterization of Peg as a good girl on the verge of turning very bad.  In one noteworthy scene, Nick has bought a turkey dinner with all the trimmings to feed the family he is holding hostage.  It's a poignant and disturbing sequence, a sort of reverse Stockholm-syndrome -- Nick is using his hostages to replace a happy family that he never had.  Perversely, he orders everyone to eat and, when the father proudly says that he will never eat this food, Nick takes a shot at him.  James Wong Howe's cinematography is extraordinary.  He achieves the blackest of black shadow by putting silhouettes of intense darkness next to glaring light.  When Nick literally dies in the gutter, the shadows on the sidewalk and the light coruscating in the puddles next to the curb, make this the most glamorous and beautiful gutter in the history of cinema.

The Junk Shop and Hupda Zdenek Liska

The Junk Shop (1966) and Hupda Zdenek Liska (The Music of Zdenek Liska) are short films presented as supplemental to the Criterion disc of The Cremator (Juraj Herz 1969).  Both are worthy of attention in their own right.

The Junk Shop was made by Herz on commission -- the film was to be part of a omnibus picture called Pearls of the Deep, featuring the work of several Czech directors associated with the "new wave" movement in that country.  Herz' film was too long and, therefore, wasn't released with the other five short pictures comprising Pearls of the Deep.  Herz, a part German Slovakian, perhaps, was the odd man out in the anthology -- the other directors were alumni of the estimable Czech film school; Herz, a Jewish survivor of Ravensbruck hadn't been admitted to that school and had found his way to film making through an apprenticeship in Prague's idiosyncratic, if influential, puppet theater.  The Junk Shop chronicles one day in the business of an enterprise that accepts all forms of junk, weighs it on a scale, and pays for this detritus by the kilo.  The film is very characteristically Czech -- an eccentric, lecherous group of middle-aged men surrounded on all sides by picturesque chaos.  Prague is imagined to be a sort of funnel to which the entire world contributes its cast-off debris, all of this stuff ending up in the junk shop.  This place looks like a garage with its walls papered with posters and photographs plucked from the garbage.  Half of the room is occupied by "seven metric tons" of paper in a huge pile that is heaped against a wall.  The other half of the room is filled with curiosities retrieved from the waste -- there are musical tableaux that apparently operate by gear and spring mechanisms, fragments of religious sculptures, and all sorts of kitsch in a state of partial decomposition.  The place has a chutes-and-ladders aspect -- people can climb up on the 7 tons of paper to survey their surroundings or, if unwary, fall into the basement below the garage through an open shaft.  The basement is decorated with pornographic pictures pulled out of the trash and more religious icons, heaps of old books, and all sorts of other curiosities.  The plot is minimal -- an attractive middle-aged woman displays her bosom from a balcony above to the delight of the junkmen, another attractive girl gets weighed on the scale (perhaps, we are all just trash waiting to be carted away), one of the workers goes to lunch and, earns his meal, by telling a racy story that he has read in a thrown-away romance novel, a woman depositing a load of papers in the place loses a spread-sheet over which she has been laboring; when she comes back to search for the paper in the mountain of debris, she, then, loses her son -- he is surely one of the most hideous kids ever featured in a movie. In the afternoon, the workers use a saw to cut up figures of saints carved from linden wood; the little boy is crushed into a cube of paper, but rescued and the boss reassembles the decapitated and dismembered wooden saints to make strange chimeras (he does this mentally, in his imagination).  No one works very hard.  The customers are paid in either pennies or lottery tickets.  A large goose serenely surveys the chaos.  The film is based on a sketch by Bohumil Hrabel, the presiding literary genius of the Czech New Wave, and the movie is striking, bizarre, and memorable.  It was Herz's first film and bears the stamp of his impressively imaginative approach to film making.  The intriguing score is by Zdenek Liska.

Liska's music is the subject of another documentary on The Cremator disk, Hupda Zdenek Liska (The Music of Zdenek Liska).  Liska was an early proponent of electronic music, scoring a number of Czech science fiction films with pops and whines and hiss with oscillating tones -- this music sounds like the score to The Forbidden Planet, the American film made in the mid-fifties.  The Czech Sci-Fi movies seem to be amazingly terrible.  Thereafter, Liska worked scoring the pictures of the New Wave, including the Tarkovsky-influenced epics of Frantisek Vlacil . He provided music for about 11 of Jan Svankmayer's surreal short animated pictures and ended up writing film music for the Quay Brothers in London.  Liska could write in any medium.  Some of his scores sound like progressive Jazz or, even, Bebop.  The score for The Cremator and some of the period pictures produced in Czechoslovakia feature choirs of soprano voices and ethereal instrumentals that have a vaguely New Age sound.  Later in his career, he scored Czech TV shows, including the notorious Thirty cases of Inspector Zeman,, a much-derided Socialist crime and mystery show -- apparently, the series Communist propaganda component was so emphatic that the show, which was nevertheless widely popular, was regarded as risible; Zeman's cases were based on actual political crimes against the regime and the show is probably the only TV program in history to feature as its hero a member of the secret police.  (In a case of bizarre nostalgie de la boue, Czech punk bands often cover the perky melody that Lisek contrived as the show's theme music.)  The documentary is an interesting and painless tour of Czech cinema between the late 50's into the last decade of the 20th century and provide a good introduction to the New Wave films in that country.  There are short but fascinating interviews with Herz, Svankmeyer, and the Quay brothers who are shot in their studio qua apartment in London, a murky cabinet of macabre curiosities if there ever was one.  A cutting-edge record store in London is, apparently, planning a ten disc re-issue of Liska's music -- that will be a "hard sell" in my view.  

The Cremator

The Cremator (1969) is a horror film with political implications produced just before the Soviet tanks rumbled into St. Wencelaus Square.  From the time of Hapsburgs through Kafka, the macabre and grotesque has always exerted a powerful influence on the Bohemian imagination and The Cremator exemplifies this sensibility.  The film's eccentric style seems a refracted version of the French New Wave, although much more jarring in its impact:  the stylistic innovations that characterize the Nouvelle Vague are overlaid on a strongly Gallic classical tradition -- French films are eminently rational, even when they chronicle the irrational -- even, surrealism in Parisian hands embodies a kind of doctrine complete with creed and hierarchies.  Czech films are generally more Gothic and contain disquieting images coupled with ghastly behavior.  The Cremator features jarring close-ups, very quick cutting that scatters the images into prismatic arrays of clinical close-ups:  a cat licking her whiskers, the wrinkles in a man's forehead, a mouth shot in enormous close-up devouring  pastry.  The mise-en-scene includes jarring jump cuts, eerie music, and bizarre locations that are veritable Wunderkabinette.  There are alcoves full of odd artifacts -- the crematorium features rooms filled with urns and other macabre knick-knacks and there are bottles of pickled fetuses as well as waxworks depicting all sorts of horrors.  These locations didn't need to be created for the film; they were just there in Prague, waiting to be featured in the movie.  The ornate crematorium with mourning life-size stucco angels flanking its portico and heavy squarish pillars a bit like those you might imagine in a Hindu temple is actually a real place somewhere near Prague -- it's now protected as a national cultural treasure.  The interior of the chapel is a polychrome fantasia with a balcony palisade of sleek organ pipes and a trap-door on which caskets can be lowered down to the inferno below.  This remarkable place, called in the film "The Temple of Death" sits in a funereal park at the center of a great, sinister plaza. 

The film's story concerns the encroaching madness of the Assistant Director of the film's crematorium.  This man is called Kopfrkingl.  He has a very straitlaced wife, who is half Jewish, and two rather grotesque children -- one of them is bland-faced blonde boy with big ears and round spectacles; Kopfrkingl's daughter is a mute Kore figure, beautiful but inscrutable.  Cremator begins with the Germans on the border of Czechoslovakia.  The characters are unsure what this means -- some even intend to welcome the Germans.  Kopfkingl is obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism and preaches a nihilistic gospel of death -- he sees cremation as a practice that frees souls from suffering and facilitates their reincarnation.  Accordingly, we see him preaching that cremation is the way to escape suffering and secure a favorable re-birth.  He has a book on Tibet showing on its cover the Potala Gun, that is, the Dalai Lama's palace, and, sometimes, when he looks out the window, the misty Potala is visible floating over the Czech countryside.  

The Germans arrive and Kopfrkingl, an unctuous conformist, is recruited to join the Nazi party.  There's only one problem: his wife is half-Jewish which makes his children so-called Mischlings (mixed blood part-Jews).  Kopfkingl's obsession with cremation recommends him to the Germans who will soon have a need for his services.  He's called to a meeting with Nazi party officials in which he pontificates in front of a huge reproduction of one of Bosch's hellscapes.  His enthusiasm for burning bodies even alarms the Nazis.  By this time, Kopfrkingl has gone mad -- he is schizophrenic and has split into a Buddhist monk and his acolyte, Rinpoche.  It's clear that Kopfrkingl now thinks that  he is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.  When a Nazi fellow-traveler tells him that he will be barred from the Party since his wife is half-Jewish and his children Mischling, Kopfrkingl decides to eliminate them.  He hangs his wife and burns her body.  His son, a weakling, has become obsessed with boxing and, as a patriot, wants to see the Nazis beat up by strong Czech warriors.  This is obviously unacceptable to Kopfrkingl and so he beats the boy to death with a metal rod, puts the body in a closed casket with another corpse to be cremated, and, then, plans to exterminate his daughter.  The girl escapes and the Nazis arrive to take Kopfrkingl away, assuring him that they "will deal with the girl."  It's not certain that Kopfrkingl is  being taken to a concentration camp to supervise corpse disposal or an insane asylum.  In the end it doesn't matter -- the Potala hovers over the rainy landscape and the world has gone as insane as the film's protagonist.  

The movie success resides in the performance by the actor playing Kopfrkingl.  This actor, Rudolf Hrusinski, was apparently the scion of a famous family of theater people in Prague and, when he was young, he was handsome and a rebel on the order of James Dean or Marlon Brando.  He was 48 when Cremator was made and hadn't aged well -- in the movie he looks like a nightmare fusion between Adolf Menjou and Peter Lorre.  He has bulging eyes like an amphibian and speaks in an obsequious (quite literally) incantatory flood of euphemisms -- everything is "blessed".  He tells the whores that he frequents (he goes to a brothel every Thursday) about his "blessed" and  happy marriage and his fine children.  In the funniest scene in the film, he tells the Nazi party leader how his wife has cooked a wonderful dish of carp "after the European style" -- he is, of course, referring to something like gefilte Fische, a characteristically Jewish speciality, although he seems blissfully unaware that he is implicating himself.  Kopfrkingl is obsessed with blood disease and, after his weekly bouts with the whores, patronizes a Jewish physician for reassurance that his blood has not been tainted.  "Do I have German blood?" he asked Bettelheim.  Wearily, Bettleheim tells him that all blood is the same.  "Just like ashes," Kopfrkingl notes:  "All the same."  Hrusinski's performance is truly horrific.  He has the habit of combing the hair of cadavers about to be burned and, then, drawing the comb through his own hair that seems lacquered onto his head.  

The movie has several surrealist devices:  the cemetery contains a monument showing Kopfrkingl's children in effigy form; on several occasions, we see a flyer with the same patriotic figure admonishing that you are needed --either for the Nazi party or a testimonial dinner or to attend the boxing match or to join the cremation association.  (The flyers are like circulars with Uncle Sam glaring at you and demanding that you join the army or buy war bondes).  A sepulchral woman in a black veil haunts the proceedings.  People walk through a door in one location to appear somewhere else in the next shot.  Kopfkingl has a display of taxonomically-identified fruit flies -- we see him seeming to put up this display case on the wall of the brothel but then the camera pulls back to show that we are in the over-decorated living room at his home.  

The film is shot with fish-eye lenses to create distortion effects (and, also, for the practical reason that many of the locations were very small and had to be filmed in a way to make them looking larger.)  The ghostly woman who haunts the background of several scenes looks like Miss Thanatogenes  in Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965) and many of the shots in Cremator seems modeled on the stark, grotesque black and white in the American film -- I wonder if the director was aware of that picture and had seen it or whether the peculiar "look" of Cremator is simply an independent application of many of the effects in the Richardson movie.

This sort of pitch-black humor can be a bit cloying and inauthentic.  But the director, Juraj Herz, came by his nihilism honestly -- he survived the German concentration camps and was one of the few members of his family to make it out of the Holocaust alive.  Sixty other family members were murdered in the camps.  The picture is flamboyant and very disturbing.  The references to Tibetan Buddhism are effective and the mirage of the massive man-made mountain of the Potala Gun is impressive -- but Tibetan Buddhists didn't usually cremate their dead:  they exposed the hacked-up corpses for sky-burial in the bellies of vultures, condors and buzzards.  Herz wanted to film a coda in which the camera focuses on the "You are needed" poster, this time encouraging membership in the Communist Party.  The camera would pick out Kopfkingl walking on a busy modern street filmed in technicolor -- then, the view would broaden to show the presence of Soviet tanks on the road.  Although this ending was filmed, it was not used -- stills exist but the footage has been lost or destroyed.   It didn't matter.  After a few weeks of tremendous box-office in Prague, the movie was suppressed and not shown again until 2003.  Every year you can attend a special screening in the actual Temple of Death.

Pete Kelly's Blues

Jack Webb, famous as Joe Friday on Dragnet, directed Pete Kelly's Blues.  The 1955 production is bizarre in a number of ways and, also, elaborately designed; shot in wide-screen format, Webb's picture is not the rough-and-ready film noir that I expected.  The movie is beautifully photographed in technicolor and has an all-star cast -- Lee Marvin and Janet Leigh have second billing to Webb who plays the eponymous Pete Kelly.  Featured as well are Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.  You can glimpse Jayne Mansfield as a brunette cigarette girl in the jazz bar, Rudy's --a mobster roughs her up a little when she  gets in the way of a brawl.  Andy Devine is also cast, against type, as a sinister, steely-eyed detective --  his trademark whisper here is an ominous purr.  One doesn't think of Webb much as an auteur, but this is just prejudice -- in fact, he developed a highly distinctive style, particularly with respect to over-the-top hardboiled dialogue and Pete Kelly acts just like Joe Friday, although with a cornet as opposed to a gun and badge. Like Clint Eastwood, another right-wing law-and-order director, Webb has a genuine affection for jazz and stops the show from time to time to let his musician perform in sequences that are shot to flatter them and make the most of their music.  Like Eastwood, he was a musician himself and could play the trumpet well enough to release an album under his own name.  No one is more square that Joe Friday and so it's a bit incongruous to see Webb mouthing the argot of the jazz musician and appearing as an apostle of the cool.  This is part of the film's somewhat kinky charm.  Webb is homely with a huge square head and flat face. (He looks like a flesh-and-blood bobble-head.)  He's very slender in  this film and, though he marches around like a Drill Instructor, he has soft-looking sloping shoulders and a completely unprepossessing physique.  This is also part of the movie's weird appeal:  Webb seems to be blissfully unaware that he isn't leading man material -- in the film, he beats up Lee Marvin, not once but twice (this has to be seen to be believed); even more astounding, he gets the girl, the beauteous Janet Leigh, and, then, proceeds to abuse and neglect her, showing the woman complete disrespect; a glutton for punishment, Janet Leigh is like a whipped puppy:  every time Webb breaks up with her and calls her names, she comes back for more.  It's an astonishingly egotistical performance wholly ignoring the fact that Webb's goblin appearance makes him painful to the eyes.  Webb was always the perfect character actor, but here he's the leading man and it just doesn't work.  The effect is similar to the way that Wim Wenders elevated Harry Dean Stanton to the status of romantic leading man in Paris, Texas.  

If you are expecting cut-rate film noir, the movie's opening sequence will quickly disabuse you of that notion.  We see a Jazz funeral in the south, all weeping willows and clouds of dust drifting in the wind over a graveyard.  On the nearby bayou, a big paddle-wheeler plows through the water.  The technicolor is gorgeous and the film making looks like a big Cinemascope David Lean production.  There's a big African-American choir and, then, a second-line jazz band playing "Didn't he ramble" on the way back from the cemetery.  A cornet, apparently standing in for the deceased, drops off the funeral hearse, fallling to the ground.  We next see the instrument in a freight-train box car where Jack Webb's Pete Kelly wins the trumpet in a crap game.  Kelly is wearing his World War One dough-boy uniform and the picture has a strong post-war ambience -- everyone vividly recalls combat and, at least, one of the characters has shell-shock.  After this bravura opening, the film takes us to Kansas City in 1927 -- this location is characterized by four places:  Rudy's, a speakeasy, Fat Annie's, a rural juke joint presided over by Ella Fitzgerald, a ballroom, and some dusty country lanes apparently connecting these places.  The script is economical:  we never see where any of these people live -- all the action, more or less, is set either in one of these entertainment venues or out in the dark country, shot consistently in implausible-looking day-for-night and reverting as much as possible, even for exterior shots, to the studio.  The plot is simple as well:  a Kansas City mobster demands that Pete Kelly's band pay protection money.  They refuse.  The drummer is a hot-head (you can always count on a drummer to be a trouble-maker).  He beats up a mobster and, then, gets machine-gunned in the alleyway outside of Rudy's.  This murder seems to encourage Pete Kelly to cooperation and, it seems, that a truce is declared between the gangsters and the band.  (For a big part of the film, the murder of the drummer is simply forgotten and doesn't motivate any action; at the climax, Pete Kelly suddenly recalls that the gangster, played by Edmond O'Brien, killed his drummer and, then, belatedly, seeks revenge.)  The mobster has a moll played by Peggy Lee.  She yearns for a family but is a pathetic drunk.  A socialite slumming at Rudy's develops an infatuation with Pete Kelly and pursues him -- this is Ivy played by Janet Leigh.  Incredibly, Webb resists her blandishments and, then, after succumbing, mistreats her throughout the whole film.  (There's lots of smooching between the decidedly unsightly Webb and Janet Leigh -- one wonders what she thought of these scenes staged to show that the real sex object here is not the actress, but Jack Webb.)  When Peggy Lee comes onstage too drunk to perform, the gangster (a bit like Kane with his opera-singer wife in the Welles movie) is enraged and humiliated.  He beats up the singer and, then, she falls down a flight of stairs.  She ends up in one of the most ghastly mental asylums ever shown -- a literal dungeon.  The singer is now completely crazy, cradling a doll, and murmuring pathetic gibberish.  (It's the kind of performance that gets an Oscar nod -- Lee was nominated but didn't win.)  The mad-woman provides a clue as to where the gunsel who ventilated the drummer is hiding out.  This leads to a spectacular shoot-out in the ballroom.  Lee Marvin, who quit the band and, then, has come back, wants to accompany Pete Kelly to the gun-battle.  (The hulking and menacing Marvin plays clarinet of all things and he's bullied by the Webb who looks like the proverbial 98-pound weakling.)  One expects that Marvin, who shows considerable muscle, will be instrumental in helping Kelly wipe out the gangsters.  But Kelly doesn't want hi friend in harm's way and knocks him out with a right-hook to the jaw.  Kelly is quick to use his fists to resolve problems.  In the end, Kelly is back on the bandstand with the adoring Ivy watching him play his trumpet.  

The film is amusing and beautifully shot.  Webb and his cameraman use the wide-screen format very inventively and many of the images are gorgeous in their own right.  Sometimes, Webb puts someone in close-up in the corner of the screen and, then, shows action behind them in deep focus.  At other times, he contrives complicated linear compositions --  for instance, the choir spread out under the willow trees  in the New Orleans cemetery.  The technicolor is very good and Webb, who seems to have been a control freak, shoots in the studio so that he can control all nuances of lighting and color composition.  The sets are nicely dressed if a bit strange -- Rudy's jazz club is also a pizza joint and we get showy shots of the pies being baked and spices being very precisely sprinkled on them.  (Webb liked "realism" although aspects of this film are clearly stylized.)  Race relations issues intrinsic to films of this kind are simply ignored;  as in Blues in the Night, made 14 years earlier, the bands are strictly segregated. It's wonderful to see Ella Fitzgerald, who performs two songs.  She also has some dialogue that she mouths in a terrified, stammering whisper.  Webb, the archetypal square, gets lots of one-liners that are sardonic and laconic at the same time:

On the need to remove the dead drummer from the alley:  "It's rainin' on him."

On a dishonest person:  "They say you got rubber pockets so you can steal soup."

On a shell-shocked flunky:  "After the war, he couldn't set fire to a bucket of kerosene."

On telling an annoying person to leave:  "Dust off; get the night boat to Phoenix."

On a gambler:  "He'd shoot crap on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

On being poor:  "If I wanna post card, I gotta buy it on time."

On a a slim showing at an event:  "You could put the whole crowd in a bathtub and still have room to splash around."

On having no friends:  "If I wanted a friend these days, I'd have to send away to Sears Roebuck."

On his obsession with his jazz, Pete Kelly's girlfriend says:  "You don't want me.  You won't get married until you find a girl who looks like a cornet.  But I'm three valves short."

The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover

Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) is one of those pictures that you read about sometimes, the darling of a tiny, contrarian group of critics.  It delights those who admire Samuel Fuller.  As with Fuller, its characteristics are breakneck pace, startling visuals, and a journalistic, muckraking style.  The movie is caught between honorable intentions and a tawdry sensationalist impulses -- it's not half bad, but seems perversely designed to offend political sensibilities -- it shows FDR and JFK as scoundrels, depicts Bobby Kennedy as a malicious and callow swine, and portrays Hoover, albeit cautiously as a flawed kind of hero.  (The film's not particularly reverential with respect to Dr. Martin Luther King whom we see Hoover blackmailing into unctuous servility.)  Cohen obviously has no respect for anyone in the halls of power and regards politics as a sort of criminal enterprise.  The film is kinder to the mobsters, men that Hoover was said to admire for their brazen courage.

The name of the movie basically tells its tale.  Proceeding like Citizen Kane in flashbacks, the picture begins with Hoover's death and the desperate scramble to shred his private files.  The picture, then, proceeds to scoot along at high velocity disclosing to us the content of those files.  At the end of the film, we are back in the present, Nixon's corrupt regime.  Hoover's companion (and, possibly, boyfriend)Clyde Toland, rescues a half dozen files from the Holocaust occurring after the "Boss'" death.    It's implied that these files contained the secret data that brought down the Nixon White House.  Hoover's various adventures consist mainly of meeting in offices, elaborately decorated rooms, and grim corridors.  

For most of its length, Cohen's Private Files proceeds chronologically.  We see Hoover as a young man aggressively defending immigrants from unlawful detention.  Then, he is recruited to run the FBI, an agency with no real power and badly besmirched due to complicity in Harding's Teapot Dome scandal.  Hoover is portrayed as a dogmatic "straight arrow", a boss who tells people to shave twice a day due "a tendency toward five o'clock shadow" and quite willing to persecute female clerical workers for extramarital affairs or, even, wearing slacks instead of a skirt.  Hoover is incorruptible -- something that the film insists upon throughout its entire length.  When gangsters start slaughtering FBI agents, who don't carry guns, Hoover declares war on them, arms his men with machine guns, and wipes out most of the mobsters.  He's upset that G-Man, Melvin Purvis is getting too much media attention and, so, forces him out of the Agency (Purvis then commits suicide on-screen).  A nice girl tries to seduce Hoover but he goes berserk on her, accusing the woman of trying to set him up -- he thinks she's trying to compromise him.  It's a display of utterly unmotivated rage and paranoia that's unsettling and suggests that there's something wrong with Hoover, at least with respect to sex.  Hoover leaks information to newspapermen, including Walter Winchell and gets filmed arresting Alan "Creepy" Karpis, a gangster.  But the spectacle is botched -- no one  has handcuffs and the G-men get lost on the way to the local hoosegow.  Events follow one another very rapidly, often sutured together by editing tricks -- Hoover is seen walking through one door only to enter a conference room or government office somewhere else a year or two after the preceding scene.  Periodically, thugs arrested by the FBI claim that Hoover is a homosexual, shouting slurs at  him and, as the film progresses he spends more and more time with Clyde Toland, another FBI man.  But the problem of Hoover's sexuality is never solved:  we don't know whether he's just a weirdly misogynistic "Momma's boy", asexual, or homosexual.  He clearly is highly prudish but, also, goes into a sort of febrile spasm when listening to his bedroom tapes of high-ranking politicians and celebrities engaged in sexual misconduct.  The film's consistent theme is that the presidency is corrupt, that all presidents are liars and cheats, and that the FBI has been a constant, and, even, righteous bulwark against abuse of presidential power -- this is shown most directly in scenes in which Hoover argues with FDR about his order to inter Japanese Americans in concentration camps, a decree that Hoover finds appalling.  This theme is continued throughout the Kennedy and LBJ eras and climaxes with Hoover gathering files that will be used to destroy President Nixon during the Watergate debacle. Hoover's vices aren't concealed -- he publishess books under his own name written by subordinates and seems remarkably cosey with Joe McCarthy.  (Both he and McCarthy are vehemently anti-Red -- and Cohen's Communists are pretty much bomb-throwers given to harangues in front of big pictures of Marx and Lenin.) Broderick Crawford is superb as Hoover.  He lumbers around not fully balanced on his big flat feet -- Crawford must have been very old when this movie was made -- and he's less intimidating than simply pathetic.  But he can flex his muscle when necessary, humiliating both Bobby Kennedy (who has earlier bullied him) and Martin Luther King.  For the first half of the movie, Hoover is played by an actor who looks almost as old as Crawford in the second half of the film -- this guy, who is also good, is labeled "Young Hoover", but Hoover seems to have been born old and "young Hoover" seems only slightly less superannuated than the Old Man. The film has a voice-over narrator but this is a bust:  the minor character narrating is so tangential to the plot that I couldn't figure out who he was (I think he's a G-man who gets in trouble for having an extra-marital affair) and his words don't add anything to the movie. 

The film is mildly interesting but it's really too nonchalant to be very dramatic.  There is an incredible opening shot of FBI men blazing away at targets mounted in a two-story facade at night -- this is black and white and a fantastic image;it's pure Sam Fuller.  The rest of the movie is basically confrontations in offices and official buildings intercut with flashy montages of machine guns firing and cars crashing, the sort of gangland imagery that was old when Howard Hawks' perfected this sort of thing in Scarface..  The film could be a template for Oliver North's conspiratorial pictures like Nixon and JFK.  But North makes everything portentous and seems appalled by the corruption shown by his conspirators.  The tone is completely different in Cohen's film -- the whole thing is casual and its simply assumed that politicians and their lackeys are wholly and irredeemably corrupt.  Cohen's picture is breezy and amused --nothing matters too much:  it's a cheerful tour of corruption whereas Stone besieges us with a moral Jeremiad.  I like Cohen's approach much better but the movie is pretty minor.   

Judge Priest

There is something irredeemably tragic about John Ford's 1934 Judge Priest.  The movie was supposed to be a gentle, bucolic comedy, a mild pastoral romance in which nothing really consequential occurs.  It's slow-paced and effectively acted and builds toward a satisfying climax.  There's nothing wrong with the film's logic and the grammar of its editing and mise-en-scene.  But one of America's most iconic directors, John Ford, teams up with the famous humorist Will Rogers to make a movie that can't really be defended:  Judge Priest is shockingly racist.  And, unlike many other films made in its time, the movie's racism is integral to the plot and its themes -- this is White Supremacist film far more toxic than something like Disney's Song of the South.  In fact, the movie really has to be compared with Nazi-era German pictures like Veit Harlan's Jud Suess.  And, I would argue, that Jud Suess, based on a reputable novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, at least, gives its Jewish villain the dignity of his evil -- the Jew in that movie is more akin to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice; at least, he has his reasons.  Judge Priest is a far more alarming film -- it masks its hatred in gentility and, unlike the exceedingly tedious German melodrama, Ford's movie is extremely entertaining and, even, endearing.  I'm unalterably opposed to censorship -- but Judge Priest, full of charming performances and invested with a deep strain of nostalgic melancholy,  is a candidate for such measures, simply because it is a very sophisticated work of White supremacist art.  

Judge William Pittman Priest (Will Rogers) is an avuncular Judge who has served for 25 years on the Bench in rural Kentucky.  When his nephew comes back home from law school (he has been educated in the North, presumably at Harvard), the young man seeks the Judge's advice.  The Judge aids the young lawyer in successfully wooing a neighbor girl who seems to have no father.  In fact, the girl's father was once a convict on a chain-gang in Virginia, but was paroled to fight as a soldier in an artillery company.  The man has come to the small town to be near his daughter who doesn't know of his existence; her mother died giving birth to her.  When a local yokel insults the former soldier's daughter, the man punches the blackguard in the nose.  The scoundrel with a couple of goons attacks the man in a tavern and there's a fight in which the villain's razor (he's a barber) is used to "cut up" the bad guy.  The girl's father is charged with criminal assault and the young man, "Rome" Priest defends the former artillery soldier.  The local minister was the commander of the artillery battery in which the ex-convict served.  He is persuaded to testify in Court as to what he knows about the soldier -- he's called by Judge Priest, who has had to recuse himself from the Bench -- as a character witness for the former Confederate soldier.  He is acquitted, albeit on obviously specious grounds -- the local men are unable to convict a former Confederate soldier who served with distinction in the late War to preserve the Confederacy, as they call the conflict.  The film ends with a memorial day march which is really a celebration of the Lost Cause and the nobility of the Confederacy.  The prosecuting attorney, who is a silver-tongued but bombastic local politician, plans to run against Judge Priest for the position of Circuit Court Judge.  Judge Priest's role in winning an acquittal for the former convict and artillery-man, presumably, makes secure his hold on the office.  All of this is shown to take place in rural Kentucky in 1890.  

This plot, although questionable in many respects, isn't the problem with the movie.  The film runs aground (at least to modern eyes) on its treatment of its Black characters.  The picture begins with the silver-tongued orator prosecuting Jeff Poindexter, played by Stepin Fetchit -- Jeff is sound asleep while he is being tried.  When he is roused to hear a little of the case against him (he is supposed to have stolen a chicken), he testifies on his own behalf and gets tangled up in a story about catching fish with "beef liver" bait on the nearby Sleepy River.  The gentlemen of the Jury, who are all former Confederate soldiers, are dim-witted countrified types and the trial degenerates into a windy debate about whether there are in fact big catfish in the Sleepy River.  We don't see the outcome of the trial.  Rather, the movie just cuts from the Trial to the Judge and Jeff walking to the river with their fishing rods -- they intend to try out the "beef liver" bait that Jeff has suggested.  At the climax of the film, during the trial of the heroine's ex-convict father, Judge Priest contrives a spectacle of son et lumiere -- the Reverend testifies as to the ex-convict's heroism to a patriotic soundtrack.  This soundtrack is Jeff playing a bass drum and harmonica outside of the Courthouse windows -- he is supposed to play "Dixie" and, gradually, as he performs, more and more African Americans with banjos and other instruments join in the song.  When the jury acquits the ex-convict, everyone floods outdoors and marches down the dusty main street of the little town, the African-Americans following along and serenading the marching former Confederates, now all old men with long white beards, with the song "Dixie". By a weird, almost dreamlike slippage of logic, the Civil War becomes a conflict that has the effect of freeing enslaved White men -- that is, the members of the chain-gang who volunteer for service with their ankles still fettered together by iron manacles.  When the men agree to fight for the Confederacy, we see the manacles broken and, then, there is a montage of battle scenes showing their heroic service.  All of this is intercut with images of  ragged and stereotypical Black loiterers and loafers playing "Dixie" outside the Courthouse to illustrate, as if with a film soundtrack, the Reverend's character witness testimony as to the heroine's father.  It's got chutzpah that's for sure -- the Civil War freed enslaved Whites who, then, march triumphantly through the streets of their village, capering to the music played by former slaves performing "Dixie".  The casting simply pours salt into the open wound that is this film -- the Reverend who testifies to save the ex-convict in the Trial is played Henry B. Walthall, the man who played the heroic "little colonel" in Griffith's Birth of a Nation eighteen years earlier.  Stepin Fetchit's performance is shocking.  He speaks in a high-pitched whine that is painful to the ears -- in fact, intolerable.  When we first see him, he rises slowly from where he has been sleeping, reaching up with his right hand to scratch the left side of his head behind his ear -- it's simian gesture that is very disturbing.  At one point, Fetchit's character, Jeff, gets confused and tells the Judge that he may forget to play "Dixie" and instead perform "Marching Through Georgia" outside the Courthouse window.  (Of course, the sons of the South despise Henry Clay Work's "Marching Through Georga" which celebrates Sherman's March to the Sea in which Atlanta was burned -- later to be the subject of Gone with the Wind.)  Judge Priest is angry at Jeff and says that if he plays "Marching Through Georgia" there will be trouble:  "I saved you from one lynching," the Judge says.  "But if you play that song, I'll lynch you myself."  None of this defensible.

The tragedy arises from the fact that the movie has many beautiful set pieces.  Scenes in which the lonely widower, Judge Priest laments in stoic fashion the loss of his wife and family (his children seem to have died in the same epidemic that killed his wife) are genuinely affecting, even moving.  Scenes of courtship between the young lovers under the warm southern skies are beautifully shot and the rituals of the small community -- including an ice-cream social hosted by the Daughters of the Confederacy -- are lovingly filmed.  (A group of Black church ladies provides the musical accompaniment for the ice cream social, singing in very tight, beautifully controlled four-part harmony, a bit like an old Barbershop quartet.).  Hattie McDaniel sings some Blues tunes including a lovely call-and-response number in which Will Rogers performs as a duet with her.  The film is fairly primitive -- it's big scenes are talky and theatrical and filmed with static camera.  There are very few close-ups in the movie, just a couple of shots of the young lovers.  The camera never moves.  The Judge and Jeff are always filmed in middle distance.  (This is necessary in part because Stepin Fetchit has complete dead-looking, even murderous, eyes -- seen in close-shot, he's frightening.)  The sets look authentic and there's lots of magnolias and moonlight in the studio shots that are supposed to depict the graveyard and the church social in the warm, fragrant night.  (Rogers says he loves the smell of the honeysuckle.)  John Ford is able to wrest a great deal of sentiment out of this material and it's never really maudlin.  Furthermore, there is one shot in which the premise of the movie is questioned:  while the Reverend is waxing eloquent on the Lost Cause and the ex-convict's heroism, the camera shows the Judge -- for an instant, he rolls his eyes in dismay at the oratory.  But the film passes by this instant as if it didn't exist.

Judge Priest was a big box-office hit.  John Ford sometimes referred to this movie as his favorite of the films that he directed.  It's utterly fascinating and appalling.