The End of the Summer

 The End of the Summer (1961) is a very late film directed by the great Yasujiro Ozu.  Ozu's post-War films are all exquisitely designed and emotionally restrained domestic comedies -- although the edge between comedy and tragedy is razor-thin in these pictures.  The End of the Summer is literally represented -- we see people in the Tokyo suburbs suffering through a devilishly hot spell -- the women all stroll around under white parasols and the everyone has fans that they wave incessantly in  front of their chests.  The movie, about 105 minutes long, is uncharacteristically complex and, even, sprawling for Ozu.  It has a complicated plot that I had to diagram as the picture proceeded.  There are many characters and, in one amusing scene, two salary-men working on accounts at a Sake brewery owned by the patriarch of the family question some of the family ties shown in the movie and admit that they can't quite figure out how some of the characters are related.  Ozu's narrative style, very unassuming and reticent, adds to the confusion -- for the first thirty minutes, it's very unclear what the movie is about or how the characters are connected to one another.  The film is shot in carefully managed, somewhat monochromatic technicolor and it's a gorgeous thing to behold -- figures are posed in complex cubist boxes; this is how the Japanese interiors of old wood and paper screens appear in this movie.  Ozu shoots most of the domestic scenes from low angles.  Of equal importance to his story are the so-called "empty frames" -- scenes in which no one appears:  for instance the Sake brewery is shown as an ancient, weathered wall against which are stacked large tubs, an image that creates a formal geometry worthy of Georges Braque, a melange of wood textures, pebbled walkways, and the big round tubs that is singularly beautiful.  In the interior shots, Ozu uses a telephoto to compress rooms into planar surfaces consisting of boxes within boxes.  There are beautiful landscapes as well and many shots contrast old Japan, with its wooden pagoda towers and shrines, with modern light fixtures or utility poles, the incessant chirring of insects in late summer presented with an undertone of commuter trains rumbling to and fro.

At first, the story seems to be about rather inept efforts to find a suitable husband for a widowed woman.  The woman appears to be in her late thirties and has two sons.  She reluctantly meets a suitor in a bar.  The rendezvous is supervised by her rotund and jolly uncle who is far more concerned about her loneliness and future than she seems to be.  The woman, whose name is Noriko, works at an American-style art gallery.  Her suitor, who a bit of a dolt but a nice man, asks her to see if he can find him a nice picture of cows -- he's from the country and collects memorabilia.  Needless to say, Noriko isn't impressed with the man.  The picture then shows us the Sake brewery that is managed by an old man named Mr. Kohayagawa (Mr. K for short).  The old man, who is also a merry sort, has been sneaking away from work on some kind of secret mission.  One of the workers is dispatched by Mr. K's son-in-law to trail the old man to see where he is going.  (The worker is inept and ends up having drinks with his mocking boss).  When Mr. K-- reaches his destination, we learn that he is seeing an old mistress named Sasaki.  They have been engaged in a extra-marital affair for more than twenty years and there's a moving scene in which the two recall some of the past liaisons.  Mr. K-- is reputed to be the father of Sasaki's daughter, Yuri.  Like mother like daughter, Yuri seems to be prostitute, although of the higher category -- her suitors are stiff and polite American servicemen.  Yuri has been taught to call Mr. K-- "father" because this is a way to get expensive gifts from him -- in fact, Sasaki tells her daughter that she doesn't know the identity of her father, but says, practically, that paternity is best demonstrated by the presents that a man gives you.  (Yuri yearns for a mink stole).  Mr. K--'s relationship with Sasaki is well-known to his children - he has three daughters with his deceased and lawful wife.  It turns out that Noriko, the widow, is the oldest daughter; there is a second daughter named Akiko for whom family members are trying to arrange a match, and, then, a third daughter, the censorious and sharp-tongued Fumiko who is married to Hisao, the son-in-law who is heir-apparent to the failing Sake brewery.  Adding to this family group are an aunt and uncle from Nagoya whose exact relationship is obscure (they are the figures the executives in the plant try unsuccessfully to identify); although these characters appear rather late in the film they have several important lines.  During a family gathering on the anniversary of the death of Mr. K--'s wife, the old man has a heart attack.  However, he seems to recover.  (We know that he's better because he gets up with a rag on his head, apparently moistened to cool his brow, and loudly announces that he has to go to the toilet, an act that Ozu, who was no prude about such matters, scarcely avoids showing.)  The old man seems to get better.  In fact, he's well enough to sneak away to see his old girlfriend.  The old roue enjoys betting on bicycle rides and he goes to velocidrome with his mistress.  He wants to go out to Osaka for a night on the town, but his girlfriend suggests that a nice bath together and a few drinks at home would be better.  That night, Mr. K-- dies.  His family has to come to his death bed (he's already deceased) in Sasaki's house -- although everyone is on good behavior.  Asked what Mr. K-- said as his last words, the old call girl tells them that he cried out:  "Is this it?  Is this really it?"  The family gathers for the funeral.  The patriarch's death has liberated his daughters, in fact, the whole family.  K's son-in-law plans a merger of the old Sake firm with a modern brewer.  The widow, Noriko tells everyone that she is quite content as a widow, that she doesn't need a man in her life, and prefers to be allowed to remain single.  Akiko renounces suitors imposed upon her by the family (really proposed business partners) and plans to go to Sapporo where a man that she loves is working as an impoverished teaching assistant.  (In an early scene, we saw his farewell party -- this is a typical Ozu narrative tactic:  we don't know who the young man feted at the party is, nor do we yet know that the young woman who seems to be in love with him is Akiko -- this is only established much later.  The party is odd in that the assembled guests sit in sex-segregated opposite sides of the table and sing verses of what sounds like "My Darling Clementine" -- apparently, the tune appropriated by the Japanese as a kind of farewell song.)  Ozu is nothing if not adventurous with his mise-en-scene -- in the midst of the family's mourning, he cuts away to a man and woman who seem to washing some kind of produce in a saltwater estuary.  These people are performers well-known from many other Ozu pictures but who have not appeared in any capacity in this movie.  The man and woman remark that there are many crows strutting about on the tidal flats and that this surely means that someone has died.  They peer toward a tall smokestack and note that there's nothing emitted -- "they aren't cremating anyone today," the woman says to the man.  There are several scenes of the family members crossing a river on a wooden bridge -- the image of crossing a river, of course, has funereal implications.  The remaining entanglements in the film are resolved and, then, the two people on the river bank, who are unnamed and have no connection to anyone in the movie, note that there is white smoke coming from the crematorium smoke-stack.  The crows strut and preen. Ozu somehow maximizes our involvement with the old man's death and his family while dramatizing that the world as a whole is completely indifferent to what has happened.

The End of the Summer is a late masterwork by a great film-maker.  It's audaciously made and intentionally confusing -- the story is so slight that Ozu seems to want us to be involved by figuring out the relationship between the characters.  (He dramatizes this in the scene with the two salary-men accountants try to work out who is related to whom.)  Although nothing much happens, the film is momentous, about profound issues of life and death.  Old Mr. K-- was a hedonist and spent his life making merry -- one of the old women says this in admiration, but, then, bursts into tears.  A film of this sort has to be seen several times to be appreciated, but I can sense that the movie is excellent and very profound.    

The Heiress

 William Wyler's The Heiress (1949) exudes prestige and importance from all of its pores.  The movie features an ultra-literate, if highly affected, script derived from a success d'estime of the Broadway stage that was, itself, an adaptation "suggested by" Henry James' novel, Washington Square.  The film features an astonishing performance by Olivia de Havilland (for which she was awarded an Academy Award) as well as a ripely theatrical turn by Ralph Richardson as the heroine's soul-destroying father.  Montgomery Clift appears as the heiress' suitor, providing a rather stiff performance -- Clift seems to have wandered in from a Western (indeed, he goes to California in the movie) and his "method" acting clashes with the line-readings of his co-stars.  He seems to  not understand the role -- with the effect, that we don't understand the character either.  But this makes the film all the more effective because the enigma intrinsic in the part played by this character is central to the film, and, indeed, must remain a riddle through the end of the picture.  For this reason, Clift's cluelessness actually enhances the film, and makes it deeper and more alarming.

The Heiress is immediately gripping and, in fact, has something of the fatal mood of horror pictures and film noir of the era.  The movie presents a situation in which the characters are doomed to damage and destroy one another.  (Another picture that the movie resembles is Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons with its theme of helplessness -- the Indians named this place, Welles says, with words meaning that "they couldn't help themselves."  This is a succinct summary of the tragedy that the film presents.)  Everything in the picture is understated and emotions are kept off-screen, but the ultimate effect is quietly devastating.

Catherine Sloper is an heiress, almost middle-aged, and reputed to be quite remarkably plain in appearance.  She has a fortune of $10,000 a year from her deceased mother's estate and expects to receive another $20,000 annually when her father dies.  Catherine's father, Austin, is a prominent New York surgeon and lives in a mansion on Washington Square with her servants, his sister, the chatty Aunt Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins), and daughter.  Sloper idealizes the memory of his dead wife and casually insults his daughter with a serious of derogatory and invidious comparisons with Catherine's adored mother.  Sloper bullies Catherine, regards her as useless, ugly, and socially inept.  And, indeed, de Havilland minimizes her beauty in playing the role and acts mostly with her large, luminous eyes.  (She''s playing the kind of part for which the Academy members are suckers -- the actress is said to be "brave" when performing a role that requires her to seem "plain.")  Catherine is completely dominated by her father:  he mocks her subtly and emphasizes her worthlessness in comparison with her glamorous dead mother.  (The writing is sophisticated and Austin conceals his disdain for his daughter with a veneer of gallantry -- this is characteristic of the film:  the characters speak in one  register, but, we learn that they act in a different way than their words would suggest.  In this film, words are either dissembling or weapons.)  At a ball, Catherine shows herself to be socially incompetent --she can't dance and men of her own class are repelled by her; they literally flee from her..  But, just when things seem most hopeless, Catherine is rescued by the chivalrous and flattering Morris Townsend (Clift).  Townsend professes to be enthralled by Catherine, courts her assiduously, and, after only three or so encounters,proposes marriage.  Catherine is swept off her feet and accepts the proposal.  Suspiciously, we learn that Morris has not first asked for Catherine's hand from her imperious father and that, although he has expensive tastes, seems to be impecunious.  The doctor immediately diagnoses Morris as a mercenary fortune-hunter and takes an instant dislike to him.  Austin interviews Morris' sister, who is supporting the young man , and learns that he has squandered a small inheritance and hasn't contributed to their household -- the sister is, nonetheless, loyal to her brother and extols his virtues.  There is a horrible confrontation  between Morris and Dr. Sloper in which the older man brutally abuses the young suitor and bullies him out of the house.  At this point in the movie, our sympathies are firmly invested in Morris and his loving courtship of the poor, lonely Catherine.  Morris' motives are unclear, but he seems so sincere that the audience wants to believe that he is, in fact, somehow in love with Catherine.  Austin opposes the marriage so vehemently that he and Catherine go to Europe, ostensibly for a six month grand tour.  But Catherine remains true to Morris, corresponds with him and continues the love-affair by mail.  Austin is melancholy because Paris reminds him of his idealized wife -- and so the two return to New York.  There, Morris persists in his courtship and the couple plan to be married.  When Catherine confronts her father, he disinherits her.  Catherine tells Morris that she has been disinherited and they make plans to elope later that night -- but Morris doesn't appear, seemingly dismayed by the fact that Catherine has given up an income of $20,000 a year to be with him.  (She is still entitled to the income of $10,000 a year -- at the time that the movie represents, a large mansion could be purchased for about $3000).  Another hideous confrontation occurs between Catherine and her father.  Austin tells Catherine that "he can't possibly love you.  You have nothing to offer but your money."  Catherine has planned to revenge herself on her father "by disgracing his name"-- but, now, the vehicle of her revenge has vanished.  Catherine repairs to her embroidery and bitterly tells her father that it was her right to be exploited by Morris if this was her desire:  "If I am to buy a man, you should have let me buy Morris," she says.  Austin gets sick and diagnoses,characteristically, his own fatal illness.  Catherine refuses to come to his death bed although he has pleaded for her presence.  She has now become a monster of cruelty.  When her father asks her how she can be so cruel, she says:  "I was taught by masters" -- presumably meaning both her father and Morris.

Morris comes back to New York after a lapse of several years.  He hasn't made his fortune in California and has had to work as a laborer to earn his passage back to Manhattan.  Once, again, he comes to see Catherine who agrees to his visit.  Again, he uses pretty words to flatter her and she seems to encourage his wooing.  She notes that she was not disinherited and that she has, in fact, acceded to an income of $30,000 yearly.  Morris says that he abandoned her years before for her own good -- he didn't want to see her disinherited over his love.  Catherine gives Morris a token of her love (some ruby buttons for his coat -- she purchased these years ago in Paris).  She tells him to return at midnight and they will once again elope.  Catherine's hopelessly romantic Aunt Lavinia is "over the moon" at all this romance and encourages the couple.  Morris returns at midnight and my readers have probably guessed already what happens in the film's denouement. 

There is much to admire in this film.  During the period when Catherine and her father are in Paris, Morris hangs around the mansion chatting up the voluble Aunt Lavinia.  We see that he has very expensive tastes, likes fine brandy and port, and helps himself to Dr. Sloper's expensive cigarettes.  Later, when he returns from California, there's a shot of him swaggering around the sitting room in Catherine's mansion -- he's alone and there's a distinctly proprietary aspect to his demeanor and the way that he eyes the expensive furnishings in the room.  In the first elopement scene, when the couple are planning their getaway, Catherine says that she has voluntarily disinherited herself, that is, given up the additional income of $20,000 a year to be with Morris.  There's a jump cut of the kind that didn't exist in cinema in the late forties and fifties -- the camera maintains the same general frame on the two-shot, but jumps to a closer image.  It's jarring and signifies that Morris is horrified at Catherine's willingness to give up the extra income.  In one scene, when the revenge-crazed Catherine climbs stairs -- the stairs are a sort of leit motif in the film -- we see a very slight smirk of pleasure sneak across her face as she feels herself revenged.  (Earlier when Morris didn't show up for the first elopment, we have seen her creeping up the steps, a flight of stairs that seem endless, a kind  of Calvary that she must ascend.  The film is unsettling because its villain's appraisal of Morris apparently turns out to be right -- however, at no point, does Morris ever actually say anything to reveal to us his true feelings and, in fact, he's the sort of avid con-man who has persuaded himself that he both desires the 30,000 inheritance yet also sincerely loves Catherine.  

The film's mise-en-scene is extremely subdued.  There are no fancy shots, very little in the way of a moving camera, and the picture prefers to make its points through dialogue as opposed to pictorial imagery.  The Heiress has a spectacular score by Aaron Copland that sometimes sounds very much like the composer's "Appalachian Spring" suite -- the ebb and flow of the music is so insistent that at times the film seems similar to films by Spike Lee featuring Terence Blanchard's continuous and, sometimes, invasive, orchestrations. (Lee and Blanchard have both expressed admiration for Copland.)  Copland plays variations on the song Plaisir d' amour, the film's love theme, and this is an effective device.  It is worth knowing that the song's lyrics provide that "the pleasure of love lasts but a moment / but the grief of love lasts a lifetime."    

The Lady from Shanghai

Orson Welles was acquisitive.  One of his acquisitions was Rita Hayworth, renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, the pin-up girl whose face and figure adorned a thousand tanks and fighter planes (and was painted on hundreds of bombs) during World War II, and the much-beloved contract player of Harry Cohn, an equally acquisitive tycoon at Columbia Studios.  Welles married his prize but tired of her quickly enough and, after a couple years, the relationship was defunct.  In 1946, Welles finagled her appearance in his idiosyncratic film noir, The Lady from Shanghai -- this was after their marriage had collapsed.  He vandalized Hayworth's carefully cultivated image, forcing her to cut her red hair for the picture and presenting her as a gaudy platinum blonde.  Hayworth responded by delivering an indifferent, even somnambulist performance in Welles' film.  The movie made no sense and Cohn, outraged at the negligence with which his property had been treated, suppressed the film, not releasing it until 1948 and, then, dumping the picture at the bottom of double bills.  Welles didn't care -- he had lost interest in the project well before it was edited and, by the time of picture's release, was unemployable in Hollywood.  His cut was 155 minutes long.  The picture now exists only in an 88 minute version that makes almost no sense.  Cohn reportedly offered $10,000 to anyone who could explain the movie's plot to him.  I think it reasonable to say that The Lady from Shanghai is the most elaborate and baroque revenge ever exacted upon a discarded object of desire. Welles' portrays Hayworth's character as a scarcely sentient schemer, the engineer of an elaborate misshapen murder plot that goes awry because the heroine (if that's what she can be called) is too stupid to understand her own conniving.  Despite all of its flaws and the film's vexed production history, it is one of Welles' most audacious productions and, certainly, fantastically entertaining in spite of itself.  

Welles stars as Mike O'Hara, an Irish sailor with a rich and sweet brogue (although only some of the time -- the accent is sometimes deployed on-cue and other times absent).  At loose ends in Manhattan, O'Hara, a veteran of the war against Franco in Spain, encounters a silky smooth seductress, Elsa Banister.  While she is taxied by horse carriage through Central Park, a band of ruffians attacks the coach, knocks out the coachman, and is assaulting the woman when Welles intervenes and beats up the three bad guys.  (The fight scenes are so poorly staged as to be risible and one suspects that Welles is implying that the whole "meet" has been designed by the femme fatale or her wicked husband to ensnare the poor Irishman in a murder scheme so elaborate that it can't be exactly described, let alone, understood during the movie's relatively short running time.)  O'Hara ends up as the skipper of Arthur Banister's yacht as it sails around the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and, then, up the beautiful west coast of Mexico toward San Francisco where the last half of the movie takes place.  Banister is a sleazy shyster, an unbeatable trial lawyer and he's played by Everett Sloane in a  plummy, over-ripe performance as cuckold and schemer.  I think Sloane's Arthur Banister is supposed to be homosexual because he's equipped a law partner named Grisby who seems both gay and completely demented.  Grisby's face is a blur of greasy sweat and he has little piggy eyes and an insinuating, simpering manner -- he speaks in a kind of affected whine, taunts everyone near him, and, obviously, despises Banister's wife who seems have displaced him, at least temporarily, in the affections of his boss, the crooked shyster.  (In a couple scenes, Grisby seems poised to actually lick Sloane's face but mercifully Welles cuts away).  On the coast near Acapulco, Banister stages a big picnic -- it's like one of Kane's  parties on the seaside in Citizen Kane.)Banister ignores his beautiful wife and encourages her to seduce O'Hara; Elsa pours verbal vitriol on her husband and his boyfriend, Grisby; Grisby says that the world is going to end in a hail of nuclear bombs and tries to hire O' Hara (who has killed a man in Spain) to actually help him commit suicide -- the scene in which Grisby tries to get O'Hara to accept $5000 to kill him is shot on a cliff with the two men almost embracing next to a horrifying-looking precipice.  The yacht docks in Sausalito, a nightmare location of decaying wharves and brothels, and there's more scheming in which Grisby ends up murdered along with another of Banister's flunkies.  O'Hara is framed for the crime, jailed, and, then, tried in the most utterly bizarre courtroom scene in film history.  Welles has no interest in the jury trial and, so, he stages the proceeding as a grotesque carnival of horrors and idiocy.  The case is a circus with the attorney's showboating in egregious ways, a grimacing judge who seems to have no control over the trial, jurors who spend the whole case apparently giggling or sneezing explosively, the whole thing highlighted by a scene in which O'Hara escapes after an operatically destructive fist fight in the Judge's chambers.  O'Hara has taken some kind of medication, apparently as a suicide attempt -- this makes no sense -- and he's in a delirium.  This authorizes Welles to stage the last fifteen minutes in his most flamboyant, surrealist style -- O'Hara hides in a Chinese opera house in Chinatown (so that Welles can show us an exotic song-and-dance number complete with dueling warriors and a display of martial arts.)  Everyone knows the ending but, in context, it remains astonishing -- O'Hara hides in a amusement park fun-house, careens down a hundred and fifty foot serpentine slide, wanders among uncanny exhibits and, then, runs into Elsa in the hall of mirrors.  Arthur Banister, a sinister cripple ("not even a man" someone sneers) appears on his crutches.  Everyone shoots at everyone else -- except for O'Hara who isn't armed other with engaging, if intermittent, accent..  Someone or, as they say in the law, "some several" get killed and that's the end of the picture.  (No explanation, as far as I can see, as to how Arthur Banister, as crippled as FDR with metal braces on his legs, managed to figure out that his wife and O'Hara were going to meet at the Fun House for the final shootout and, then, manages to get himself there as quickly as he does.)  The fireworks in the grotesque trial scene are, almost as wild and showy as the gunfight among the mirrors (a shoot-em-up that Welles cut to 10 minutes in his version and that, now, appears as an entrancing and shapely four minute tour de force).  Banister, in violation of all known legal ethics, defends O'Hara, who, of course, he hates (but also sort of admires) for cuckolding him.  The DA, knocked into a corner, by the legal shenanigans of the shyster, has to demand the right to call Banister (his adversary) as a hostile witness.  After examining Banister to no real import, Banister, then, demands to cross-examine himself, blithely putting argumentative questions to himself  to which he then proceeds to give equally argumentative answers.  It's utterly ridiculous but lots of fun.

The film is full of rococo images:  there's an aggressive dachshund, a scene in an aquarium in which O'Hara and Elsa embrace in silhouette in front of tanks full of huge sea-turtles and writhing octopuses.  The shoot-out in House of Mirrors has an odd, almost metaphysical aspect -- Elsa Banister's huge image overwhelms Bannister and he appears to be a figment of her own malign imagination.  Everything seems to be taking place inside someone's fever imagination.  O'Hara is just a dupe and exists in order to deliver showy Shakespearian soliloquies about human nature and tells a story from Melville (uncredited) about sharks in a feeding frenzy ultimately devouring themselves.  These speeches are tremendous but don't much fit in with the pulpy atmosphere of the movie.  Mexico is called "a bright guilty world".  O'Hara says that he's "independent" but not "independently wealthy" noting that poverty is "not sanitary."  The bitchy repartee on the yacht in Mexico with Elsa pouting in her white bathing suit, Grisby and Arthur Banister boozing it up while O'Hara looks on longingly are kitsch at a sublime level -- it's like Beat the Devil as written by Edward Albee-- and extremely funny.  Welles wants to do everything.  He wants the film to have a jangly, expressionistic Cabinet of Caligari vibe but with periodic opportunities for the characters to exhale gorgeously written Shakespearian soliloquies.  The different moving parts in the picture don't ever fit together -- Welles vanity and Hayworth's exhausted somnolence, the alarmingly literate arias of quasi-Shakespearean dialogue and the pulp fiction aspects of the plot.  It doesn't make any sense -- indeed, several of the Wellesian aphorisms are gibberish.  But the film is extraordinary on the technical level of spectacle, unlike anything of this kind before the similarly nightmarish, but more coherent Touch of Evil  made about a decade later.  And it's hard to fault the incomprehensible plot -- Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep has an equally incoherent narrative and its not nearly as fun.  Welles lost interest in the project long before it was done, walked off the production, and others had to recut the film into the form in which we now know it.  

  

 

Muenchhausen

 The 25th anniversary of the founding UFA, the German film studio, occurred during a dark time, 1943.  Dr. Goebbels decreed that the 25th Jubilee for UFA would be marked by the production of a prestige film, a new version of the fantastic adventures of Baron Muenchhausen.  A Hungarian director, Josef von Beky, was engaged to direct the film and the picture was written by a famous German novelist and critic, Erich Kaestner.  (Kaestner was under a cloud with the regime as pacifist and his ingenious script was not credited until the 2017 restoration supervised by the Murnau Stiftung).  The movie was shot in AGFA-color, a German technicolor process in which reds and greens are dramatically highlighted by warm, amber or honey-colored browns and flesh-tones.  (AGFA has a peculiar color register and is easily recognizable as the film stock used in German pictures of this era -- when the Russian, Sokurov, made a film about Hitler and Eva Brann at Berchtesgarten, he chose colors approximating AGFA technicolor process.)  Muenchhausen stars Hans Albers as the titular figure and he seems ageless with radiant shining eyes of the kind that are associated with Nazi ideals of leadership and charisma. His performance is roguish and the film is, in effect, a picaresque exercise on a massive scale.  Exactly, how the picture was supposed to aid the war effort is completely unclear -- the film is highly stylized, full of miracles and camera tricks, and its politics are opaque:  the movie was released around the time of the German defeat at Stalingrad and depicts a German nobleman enthusiastically serving as a general in the Russian army.  Presumably, Goebbels thought that the long-suffering German public in the fourth year of a war that had commenced in 1939 needed something to distract them from the problems at the Front.

Muenchhausen begins with a lavish ballroom sequence that seems to be set in the time of Mozart.  (Raspe's Muenchhausen stories were first published in the 1780's).  A young woman engaged to a rather effete prince throws herself at the Baron while he is shooting pool.  She seems ready and willing to abandon her fiance for the charismatic adventurer.  Some nude statuary on a grand stairway seems curiously out-of-place -- it looks oddly expressionist and, of course, we wonder about the talent of the set decorator.  But the appearance of these statues is soon enough explained -- Muenchhausen sends the girl home with her betrothed, first turning on the electric lights on the front the manor to illuminate the Mercedes Benz cars parked there.  In fact, the party is a costume ball taking place in the present.  Muenchhausen's wife seems sad and much older than him; she has silver hair and the party is for her birthday.  The next day Muenchausen with his wife meets the Prince and his fiancee on the resplendent back terrace of the manor.  There, he narrates some of the adventures of his famous forbear, the 18th century Baron.  In this flashback, we see Muenchhausen returning to his elderly father in an elaborately reconstructed German village.  He is with his servant, Christian Kuchenreutter, a sort of Sancho Panza figure.  After some strange adventures at home -- Kuchenreutter has a salve that grows whiskers in a few seconds, some clothing begins to howl like wolves and has to be gunned down, and there's a gun that can shoot 100 miles with a viewfinder to match -- Baron Hieronymus Muenchhausen departs again with his servant, summoned to St.Petersburg.  (We discover that he is one of Catherine the Great's lovers.)  Along the way, women throw themselves at the libertine baron and it's' so cold musical notes get frozen into a post-horn and only emerge to sound as they are melting.  Muenchhausen meets the politically ambitious sorcerer Cagliostro who performs some tricks and suggests that they use their powers to capture Poland.  Muenchhausen isn't interested in anything but wine, women, and song and so he rejects the offer.  In St. Petersberg, Muenchhausen enters a grand ball in which a dwarf inside of a sort of pastry Faberge egg is playing the harpsichord.  He is ostentatiously greeted by the icy Catherine who immediately escorts him to her boudoir.  His romance with Catherine leads to a so-called "Cuckoo duel" with the jealous Prince Potemkin, a fight with pistols in a completely darkened room -- this gives von Beky the opportunity to shoot flashes of action when the pistols discharge and scenes lit by tiny rays of light in the otherwise inky blackness.  Wounded, Muenchhausen is treated by Cagliostro who gives him an invisibility ring and a potion that confers immortality on the hero.  Muenchhausen is sent to Turkey to fight the sultan.  There he acquires the aid of a man who can run so fast that he can make it from Anatolia to Vienna (and back again) in one hour.  The Sultan is a sadistic nitwit and there is much violence and torture in his court where Muenchhausen befriends a fat eunuch who speaks in a high-pitched voice.  The film is notable for its sexual frankness -- the eunuch's plight is the subject of several explicit jokes and the harem girls are often shown bathing, either naked or topless.  Muenchhausen manages to rescue a captured Christian princess and decamps with her to Venice.  In Venice, the couple arrive during the famous carnival and the film shows spectacular scenes of flower-laden gondolas plying the crowded Venetian canals while rains of petals fall from the picturesque bridges.  Muenchhausen's dalliance with the Venetian princess is interrupted by the aging Casanova, a long-time friend of the Baron, who counsels caution because of the depredations of the Inquisition.  And, sure enough, the inquisitors attempt to apprehend Muenchhausen -- he, then, escapes in a beautifully rendered hot-air balloon and reaches the moon.  The moon is a strange landscape of huge garish trees with giant fruit like those in Bosch's terrestrial paradise.  There's a clownlike figure on the moon, a sort of pedantic doctor, who carries a woman's head under his arm like a loaf of bread.  On the moon, heads and bodies are separable -- the beautiful woman has left her body in the safekeeping of others, locked-up so that she won't be tempted to have sex with Muenchhausen.  She and the clown tell Muenchhausen that when a man dies on the moon, he simply turns into a cloud of smoke that the wind wafts away.  On the moon, die Zeit ist kaputt ("Time itself is broken") -- one day equals a year.  Muenchhausen, of course, doesn't mind because he's immortal but poor Kuechruetter ages and, then, dies.  As he dies, his body turns to smoke which, in turn, is revealed to be the cigar smoke of Muenchhausen telling the story, now at twilight to his wife and the young people from the ball.  We learn that Muenchhausen is immortal and that he is telling these stories as personal experiences.  This terrifies the young people who flee in their expensive car.  Muenchhausen says to his wife that he loves her and doesn't want to be immortal any longer.  Then, he blows out the candles on his candelabra and the smoke spells out the words "The End".  I've left out various miracles and tricks, including a famous, if unconvincing, sequence in which Muenchhausen rides on a cannonball a little like Major King Kong mounting the nuke like a bucking  bronco in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.  The film is cleverly written with re-occurring motifs -- for instance, there are portraits that come to life and the image of people blowing (for instance, to make a sailboat fly over the waves) are also repeated at several times in the picture.  There are two duels, both of them comical, and, generally, every trick occurs once and, then, later in a variant form.  The dialogue is literate and, even, at the end, a bit melancholy -- eternal life turns out to be a little tedious (as are parts of the movie).  Near the end, Muenchhausen says of himself Wenn er nicht gestorben ist, lebt er heute ("If he isn't dead, he's still living), a truism frequently used in the fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers.  "A man of great imagination rules the world," Muenchhausen assures us.  One of his lady-friends says:  "Fortune only lends us luck and, then, at high interest."  The film is surprisingly "adult" given its fairytale aspects, although, of course, it's only Disney that makes us think of fairytales as being for children.  As would be true of a Hollywood picture of the era, the film is casually racist, although those elements aren't offensive except if you want them to be.  The set design is marvelous, particularly the craggy moon with craters burping with geysers.  The picture is more highly regarded by film directors than audiences, I think, it's been remade several times including by the great Czech director,Karel Zeman, and, of course, by Terry Gilliam.  There's a slightly melancholy aspect to the movie that is responsible for its faded poetic elegance.    

(Hans Albers was a famous German movie star between 1920 and 1960.  He was also under a cloud because of his Jewish girlfriend, Hansi Burg.  Albers and Burg lived on Lake Stamberg in Bavaria where the Mad King, Ludwig, either drowned or was assassinated.)

Ludwig

 It's a mistake to think that the merit of a film is a fixed and immutable quantity.  Movies are valued for various reasons that change with time and critical fashion.  Qualities of excellence can be found in films that failed when they were first released.  Similarly, films themselves are mutable -- they exist in various dimensions and can be re-cut to the specifications suitable for particular times and places.  With respect to these issues, Visconti's last film Ludwig is an exemplary case.

Ludwig was released in January 1973 after a vexed production.  At the time, the movie was generally derided, particularly in comparison with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Ludwig -- Requiem for a Virgin King, an Andy Warhol-influenced and Brechtian exercise (one that I esteem highly) featuring motorcycle gangs, yodeling, and a guillotine.  Syberberg's career, after a couple of contested masterpieces (Karl May and Hitler, A Film from Germany) declined into crypto-fascist arcana and, although he was a great film maker, he is mostly forgotten today.  By contrast, Visconti had a long and distinguished career, made some brilliant epics (The Leopard and Senso) and his reputation is once again ascendant.  Part of the rehabilitation of Visconti's late work involves a reassessment of his film maudit, Ludwig.  

Ludwig was part of a German trilogy comprised of The Damned and Death in Venice, opulent period pictures with strong homosexual elements made by the aging gay director as an interlude to his magnum opus, a film version of Proust's In Search of Lost Time that was never produced.  Visconti had two strokes while working on Ludwig, his Jupiter spotlights damaged irreplaceable tapestries at Neueschwanstein where he was filming on location, and the finished film was four hours long.  It was cut to three hours for Cannes and released in the United States and other places at a mere two hours -- by this point, slashed to an incomprehensible series of spectacular tableaux.  The film exists in a Blu-Ray edition, one of the Filmjuwelen released in Germany, and can be watched at its original four-hour length if the viewer is capable of reading German subtitles.  (The English version of the film currently costs something like $346 on E-Bay.)  

Visconti's approach to Ludwig's life is stubbornly chronological.  He starts with the boy-prince's coronation and ends on a lingering shot of the dead king, mouth agape after being fished from the waters of the lake at Herrnchiemsee.  The film is sometimes nakedly expository -- there are talking heads who appear at 15 minutes interludes to provide testimony as to what Ludwig is doing wrong (it seems he never did anything right), but, at other times, completely opaque to an American not familiar with the Bavarian King's life (and mysterious death).  Halfway through the film, I consulted Wikipedia to learn the broad contours of  Ludwig's story and construct a schematic diagdram as to the identities and family relationships of the characters.  (I never was able to sort out the various henchmen and enablers in Ludwig's ever-decreasing circle of sycophants -- they're all handsome Aryan types with reddish mustaches and blue eyes.)  I assume Europeans know this story by heart and, therefore, are satisfied to see it reenacted as a series of dramatically static tableaux, most of them invested with an almost unearthly beauty.  But there's no suspense, no drama, and no plot development, in fact, no real plot -- Ludwig just suffers, first as a supernaturally pretty youth and, then, as a ghastly-looking zombie with the pallor of Nosferatu, red-rimmed eyes, and a mouth full of spectacularly rotten teeth.  The film displays with much more force a problem that Bertolucci encountered in his far better and more moving The Last Emperor, an another estimable film from the period -- it's next to impossible to make a movie about a weak protagonist, someone on whom the forces of history act but who is powerless against his destiny.  There's no drama and the film founders in gorgeous imagery.  

At his coronation, Ludwig, then, a broodingly handsome youth (he's played by Helmut Berger), drinks too much champagne.  (There's a priceless shot of his regal and imperious Queen Mother glaring at him as he hits the bottle.)  No sooner crowned, Ludwig begins to squander his money on houses and theaters for his idol, Richard Wagner.  This allows Visconti to lard the soundtrack with fragments of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, atmospheric music that remains, however, in the background.  (Disappointingly, we never see any Wagner productions, although Ludwig subsidized the Ring and Der Meistersinger. )  Wagner and Cosima, the maestro's girlfriend bicker with poor Ludwig about the quality of their housing (they are living in a majestic manor) and there's some kind of quarrel.  Visconti is interested in the Wagner material, but doesn't know how to develop it -- or, perhaps, shot several  hours of this stuff that had to be discarded.  But there's no dramatic arc to the subplot and about an hour after Wagner vanishes from the epic, we see a piano draped in a black veil -- apparently, in honor of Wagner who's death has occurred unannounced and off-screen.  (The great Italian beauty Silvana Mangano plays Cosima and there's a wonderful scene where parts of her Christmas present, the Siegfried Idyll are played on the steps of Wahnfried next to a beautiful Christmas tree -- this is very evocative but has absolutely no bearing on the film; Ludwig has nothing to do with this.)   Ludwig is supposed to marry but, of course, he's queer and so the film lacks anything like a romantic love-interest.  Apparently, the subject of Ludwig's sexuality is still controversial in Bavaria -- when the picture was reconstructed and first shown in a complete form in Munich in 1993, the leader of the Right Wing party Franz Joseph Strauss demanded cuts to censor some of the more overtly homosexual imagery (which is not abundant in the film) and, in fact, the movie feels repressed and coy about Ludwig's predilection for his hunky lackeys.  Certainly, there's no grand romantic passion on display in the film.  In one inadvertently risible scene, Ludwig storms into his mama's grandiose apartments and announces, as if declaring war on Austria, that he is going to marry.  But, of course, he stalls interminably and never follows through, despite a crash course in heterosexual coupling that a lusty actress vainly attempts with him (this scene is intentionally funny).  There's an off-screen war with some neighboring country and Ludwig's younger brother, Otto, ends up with post-traumatic stress disorder and, then, goes completely mad, gnawing on the arms of orderlies in the hospital.  From time to time, Ludwig's aunt, the imperious Sissi of Austria shows up on horseback and rides around with the King.  They seem to be close and it's never explained how or why Austria ends up at war with Bavaria.  Late in the film, Sissi (Empress Elisabeth) appears again, this time in a nice black coach and tours three of Ludwig's castles so we can get some sense of his building mania -- she bursts into uncontrollable laughter when she sees the imitation of the mirror hall in Versailles in one of his castles.  But Ludwig, holed up in the tower at Neuschwanstein, never deigns to meet her and the scenes go nowhere.  (Romy Schneider reprises her famous role of Sissi in a series of kitschy movies made in Austria between 1955 and 1957 -- these are the roles that made her an international sensation in Europe.  She's attractive but has nothing to do in the movie.)  The last hour of the film is devoted to the plot to establish a regency over Bavaria on the basis of allegations that Ludwig was insane and destroying the country with his lavish expenditures.  (This was largely untrue -- although eccentric, Ludwig doesn't seem psychotic until the conspiracy pushes him over the edge and he built his lavish castles using his own money.)  The conspirators appear at Neuschwanstein as a legion of somberly dressed middle-aged men with umbrellas -- they aren't too menacing.  Ludwig fulminates against them and cries out that he will pluck out their eyes;  instead, he imprisons them in one of the fairy-tale towers in the castle and denies them their supper.  Ultimately, he's seized and dragged away to a manor house near a foggy lake.  The conspirators have engaged a prominent alienist to write a report attesting to Ludwig's madness, Herr Doctor von Gudden (he is played by Heinz Moog, a Third Reich actor, and the sinister figure who tormented Karl May in Syberberg's film of that name made a couple years later.)  Gudden seems uncertain as to whether Ludwig is crazy.  They go for a walk together and don't return.  There's lot of rain (and snow) in this movie and the two men go missing in a thunderstorm.  Legions of extras with smoking torches in the rain search for von Gudden and Ludwig.  At last, they find their corpses in waist-deep water in the lake.  To this day, no one knows what happened at Lake Stamberg.  (Reportedly Visconti opted for the assassination by gunfire theory -- there's a little trace of this in the movie when one of Ludwig's tormentors takes a revolver and says he will shoot...although only as signal and just one signal shot when the two men are found.  A few minutes later, we hear two shots.  Cut from the film was a scene in which someone remarks on a bullet-hole in Ludwig's body.)  In his last speech, Ludwig has said that he wants to remain an enigma to the world (and to himself) an ambition the film respects.  Ludwig is all exterior and surface -- we never find out what's inside of  him.

There are several remarkable sequences but they largely rely on the actual locations constructed by the Mad King.  The swan grotto with its color-filtered lights, artificial stalactites and lake, complete with waterfall, is fantastic -- although nothing really happens in that place.  Glowering, Ludwig is just rowed around the little lake in his Lohengrin-inspired swan-boat.  Later, we see a homosexual orgy (or its aftermath, a bunch of handsome youths in lederhosen lying around spent under a huge artificial tree -- this is Hunding's Hut room in Ludwig's castle at Linderhof (also the site of the Lohengrin grotto). A folk song is sung, Ludwig again glowers at everyone from under his black porkpie hat with upcurled brim, and, then, someone plays a plaintive scene on the accordion; the sequence looks like an outtake from Guy Maddin's The Saddest Movie in the World -- it's beautiful and ridiculous at the same time.  Viewed from a distance of almost 50 years, Visconti's film, static and non-narrative, is not that much different from Syberberg's overtly avant-garde epic -- both films are swamped in decor and Wagnerian music.  The difference is that Syberberg's picture is Brechtian and makes a political point -- Ludwig's madness ended with him essentially selling Bavaria to the Prussians.  It is, in Syberberg's imagination, the perverse alliance of Bavarian romanticism with Prussian arms that produced the Nazis.  (And he proceeds to demonstrate this with the latter two films in his own trilogy, Karl May and Hitler, a Film from Germany).  There's nothing in Visconti's film that packs the emotional charge of some of Syberberg's inventions -- particularly, the ending sequences filmed with hidden camera showing Americans gawking at Ludwig's castles.  Visconti has no thesis and the film feels perfunctory. The lavish locations prevent the camera from moving and most often Visconti emphasizes points like a Hong Kong film maker -- that is, by a zoom into the image.  Somehow, the actual locations feel as if they imprison the picture.  The movie is self-consciously important -- for instance, the first performance of a late Wagner piano score takes place in the film -- but it's fatally flawed.  The acting can't really be judged.  The movie was made with an international cast (for instance, Wagner is played by Trevor Howard) and was shot in Europe's lingua franca, English.  The film was, then, dubbed into Italian.  The Italian was, then, dubbed into German in the version that I saw and so I have no idea whether the line-readings are effective or not --  probably not on the basis of what I saw.  (Curiously, German subtitles translate everything into the second-person "du" or familiar case (thou) -- used, as Germans say, to address your children, your mistress, your pets and God; this is because the verb forms for the du case are much shorter and the subtitles, therefore, can be more easily read -- but, if you know some German, it's disconcerting to hear everyone addressed as Sie and subtitled as du.)

  

Sadie Thompson

 Raul Walsh's 1928 silent version of Sadie Thompson is reputed to be the best version of W.Somerset Maugham's story "Rain" (There are, at least, three other film versions).. Walsh himself appears in the movie as a cheerful Marine sergeant, Tim O'Hara, a soldier stationed in Pago Pago when Sadie (Gloria O'Connor) arrives by steamer.  Sadie is reputed to be a prostitute from San Francisco who hopes to establish herself as a shipping clerk on a nearby South Sea island.  She decamps from the boat sashaying along the gangplank to the amusement of the local troops and says that she looks forward to "meeting the army."  Installed at Joe Horn's hotel, she feuds with Lionel Barrymore playing the part of Andrew Davidson, a reforming evangelist, and a prudish fellow who has, nonetheless, a glittering eye and seems to harbor sadistic impulses with respect to Sadie.  There's a smallpox quarantine in effect and Sadie is trapped with the reformer at Horn's hotel while torrential rains continue for most of the movie.  After O'Hara humiliates the preacher, Davidson contrives to get her deported from the island.  O'Hara has an army buddy who has married a San Francisco whore and eloped with her to Sydney, Australia.  Sadie pleads with the governor to let her sail to Sydney and the official says that if Davidson "agrees to this measure", he will revoke his deportation order and let her depart for Australia.  Sadie may be charged with murder or something similarly dire in San Francisco and if she is sent back to that city, she will be convicted and, at minimum, thrown in jail. Davidson locks Sadie in a gloomy chamber in the hotel while the rain pours down incessantly outside.  The shadows gather and there are some picturesque expressionistic effects as lightning flashes outside and Sadie paces back and forth like a caged animal.  When the window is blown inward by the gale, she decides to repent, scrapes off her make-up, and negotiates a truce with the loathsome Davidson.  She falls to her knees in front of him while lightning scintillates about his white profile and, here, the general decomposition of the film stock contributes to the effect -- a whirling vortex of rotting celluloid spins around Sadie and she seems to be touched with Pentecostal fire -- it's an artifact of the desuetude of the old nitrate film as the movie progresses toward its climax, footage that has completely rotted away and been replaced with a half-dozen brightly lit and bland production stills.  O'Hara  tries to rescue her, but is driven away by the half-crazed Davidson.  Sadie is fully resigned to returning to San Francisco and its penitentiary -- she has now becomes saintly in a particularly saccharine and morbid manner, a transformation that is wholly implausible and unpleasantly masochistic.  We see Davidson snooping about with his eyes a-glint.  Apparently, he rapes her and, then, cuts his own throat although none of this visible in what remains of the film.  Comes the dawn and a native fisherman hauls in Davidson's corpse.  There's no viable footage of Sadie's final encounter with O'Hara although a title says:  All men are pigs -- Pigs!  PIGS!  After making this sage observation, Sadie exempts O'Hara from the general rule, sits with him at the sunny turnstile to the hotel, the rain now having ceased, and happily plans her trip to Sydney with him.  The happy ending is, at least, as  implausible as Sadie's sudden conversion from all-time good time girl to the Virgin Mary.  The film isn't particularly interesting, Raoul Walsh's performance is monotonous, and subsidiary parts are underwritten to the point of being examples of blind conformity to Maugham's story, something that no one reads or cares about anymore, but senseless in the larger context of the film.  Walsh's nasty misogyny is on display -- although maybe this is also sourced in Maugham's text:  there's a fat native woman married to Horn filmed in big, ugly closeups solely so that her coarse features can be compared to the softer, more elegantly lit shots of Gloria Swanson.  Despite it's exotic South Seas location in American Samoa, the movie is studio-bound, apparently based on a talkie Broadway play.  The picture scores obvious points against the Christian missionary, a figure of derision even in 1928 -- he has to teach the native's the meaning of sin and is reported to be vainly attempting to keep them from "dancing on the beach" at one point.  But the hypocritical clergy man is a staple of American drama dating back, at least, to Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter and, although Barrymore is an effective villain, it's a very shallow part.      

I have never warmed to Gloria Swanson in her silent roles.  She seems to have been primarily a comedian who was forced into glamour-girl femme fatale roles for which she appears to me to be ill-suited.  She has a tom-boy irreverence and her sexuality always seems like a "put-on", as if meant ironically or merely notionally.  Of course, she's very beautiful and has a fantastic grill of teeth (when she grins she looks like FDR) but she seems curiously chaste, notwithstanding the roles in which she's cast.  In Sadie Thompson, she cavorts around like a girl scout ingenue; her relationship with the Marine seems entirely innocent -- they spend lots of time shaking hands and hugging and Walsh's O'Hara carries her about on his shoulders during a rainstorm as if she were his kid sister.  (The situation is similar in the fragmentary von Stroheim picture Queen Kelly -- in that film, she plays a virginal convent girl with a mischievous streak who ends up in some kind of horrific West African brothel; the film breaks off in the brothel sequences because even von Stroheim doesn't seem to know how to dramatize his wholesome star's depravity:  he makes her the victim of a monstrous male character played by Tully Marshal who has a long distorted body like a crippled spider:  she recoils and the spider advances in an endless series of what look like outtakes and, then, the ruin of the film simply comes to a stop.)  It's hard to judge Sadie Thompson since about a third of the film is missing.  But what's there of the old chestnut isn't much good.

Max and the Junkmen

 Claude Sautet's Max and the Junkmen (1971) wasn't released in the United States until 2012 and, then, was unnoticed.  The film is ostensibly a French crime picture, although, in fact, something much more perverse.  The movie is unobtrusively shot, edited for clarity, and seems overlit -- it has the appearance of a very well-made TV movie of the period.  The mixture of close-ups and longer shots is classically devised and there is nothing really picturesque about any of the imagery.  Compared to the histrionic lighting in something like The Godfather, Max and the Junkmen is bland and clinical.  Yet the film is impressive, features a couple of extraordinary performances, and, on its own terms, just about perfect.  But what are those terms?  The influence of Georges Simenon on French crime films can't be overestimated and I think of the picture as a sort of film dur, the movie equivalent to Simenon's bleak Roman dur (or "hard" novels) -- the portrait of life that emerges from this film is grim, unrelenting, and bitter.

Max is a detective working for the Paris police force.  (Max is played by Michel Piccoli -- he looks gaunt and cadaverous, with his face tinted a greenish pallor; the man looks like some sea creature that lives on the bottom of the ocean.)  Max is upset that a big-time criminal has evaded his efforts at capture and, in fact, added insult to injury by murdering the police informant.  While shaking down a shady used car dealer, Max notices a cheerful two-bit criminal in the shop.  He tails the crook and, then, asks him for a light to make contact.  The crook is an old army buddy named Abel who is now working as a car thief at a salvage yard that fences stolen metals.  The crook admits his low-grade criminal enterprise to Max, not knowing that the man is a detective.  Max is interested in making a bust on the basis of fool-proof and iron-clad evidence.  He meets with another detective named Rosinsky who is responsible for policing Nanterre, a shabby suburb of Paris, where Abel lives.  It turns out that Abel is involved with five other crooks in a chop-shop.  The crooks are all career criminals and, in fact, come from bottom-feeder underworld families -- one of them, a killer, is the son of man who was guillotined; the others are penny-ante pimps or the sons of prostitutes; some of them seem mentally retarded.  Despite their foibles, the crooks are doing okay, seem to be happy with the profits from their petty pilfering, and have prostitute girlfriends who are both loyal and hard-working.  Abel's girlfriend is a German prostitute named Lily played by Romy Schneider -- she's the most attractive of the girls and reigns over them "like a queen."  For reasons that are inscrutable because, in fact, probably insane, Max sets out to entrap the entire gang in a bank robbery -- a criminal enterprise that is far beyond their skill-set.  We learn that Max is independently wealthy, was once a Judge in Lyons, and abandoned that profession to become a cop when he had to release a murderer since the evidence against the man was legally inadequate.  Max is now on a crusade to make a collar that will be a lead-pipe cinch in court.  He uses his own resources to rent a plush apartment, pours money into seducing Lily and earning her trust, and, then, plants in her mind a caper that she, obligingly, conveys to the crooks, inspiring them to plan a big armed robbery (these crooks typically don't use weapons) on a bank that Max pretends that he owns.  From beginning to end, the entire heist is Max's creation, a crime that is completely beyond the aspirations of the petty thieves surrounding Abel.  Of course, the outcome of the bank robbery is disastrous for Abel and his gang -- a couple of them get gunned down and the others are all caught red-handed.  Rosinsky doesn't like what Max has done -- after all, he had his eagle-eye on these crooks and knew that they were essentially harmless.  Rosinsky, then, insists upon prosecuting Lily as an accessory to the crime to punish Max for his misdeeds.  Max has developed feelings for the beautiful hooker and is outraged that Rosinsky is going to prosecute her.  So he kills Rosinsky in the station house and goes to jail with the crooks that he has entrapped.

The film has the feeling of a nightmarish parable.  Max is less like Dirty Harry Callahan or Inpector Columbo than Melville's murderous and obsessed Captain Ahab.  The movie is shot in icy greens and blues except for the scenes at the junkyard that have a peculiar paradoxically idyllic and colorful appearance.  Romy Schneider is hardened and cynical, but extremely attractive and she's an enigmatic character like Max.  The two never have sex; their intimacy is like that of an old married couple but the tragedy in the film is that Max and Lily are, in fact, in love.  Sautet describes the film as "a study in the perversity of theoreticians."  Max and his oddly complicit boss are "theoreticians" of crime and detection -- the more humane Rosinski is just a technician.  At the heart of the picture are two indelible performances:  Piccoli and Schneider:  they carry the film and make it seem close to flawless.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

 Celina Sciamma's  Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire (released in English as Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is a laborious and politically correct.feminist parable.  It's highly regarded due to its exemplary content and has been honored with the full Criterion treatment.  Unfortunately, it's not a very good movie.  It gets an A for good intentions but never persuades the viewer that it has any substance beyond it's rather tendentious deconstruction of the "male gaze" in art (and cinema) by providing a counter-example of "female gaze."  The problem, of course, is that the optical equipment is the same and, at least in the context of art, gazes aren't really gendered -- if the film wants to show that the "female gaze" of the artist is different from the "male gaze", it isn't successful.  The movie makes some interesting points but they don't add up to much more than an occasion for some soft-core and tastefully shot Lesbian sex scenes.  Although the movie proposes to be in dialogue with Jacques Rivette's gargantuan La Belle Noiseuse and Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece", both exercises in showing that the artist's gaze is potentially lethal to both it's object and itself, the picture reminds me more of an extended (and unfunny) version of Guy Maddin's sublime Sissy Boy Slap Party. 

The picture is told as a flashback.  A group of earnest young women art-students are sketching their teacher in charcoal.  The model, the art teacher Marianne, talks back to those who are drawing her, the first evidence in the film that the dominance of the artist over the model will be challenged in this narrative.  One of the students has brought from "stock" -- I'm quoting the subtitles which are atrocious -- a surrealist painting by the teacher showing a moonlit and stormy ocean and a woman with fire burning at the bottom of her dress.  This picture summons to mind the extended flashback that comprises most of the film's two-hour running time.  The narrative is a fable.  The female artist we have met teaching in her atelier is conveyed to an island where it is her assignment to paint a young woman's portrait but without the subject knowing this.  (The painting which is a "commodity" represents the young woman's subjugation to her betrothed, apparently some kind of aristocrat in Milan -- the film seems to be set just before the French Revolution.)   The heroine, Heloise, replaces her sister in this endeavor -- the sister, whom we never see, apparently killed herself rather than be married to the aristocrat and her portrait was never finished:  the face is blotted out.)  For the first half of the film, the artist, Marianne, surreptitiously sketches Heloise and works on her portrait, but without success.  The two women embark on a love affair and Heloise now consents to pose for the portrait which will be deadly to their relationship -- once the picture is done, the portrait will be carted away to the aristocrat and this will, somehow, represent Heloise being joined to him in marriage, that is, as his property like the painted image.  There's a subplot involving a maid Sophie who is mysteriously pregnant -- this is odd since there are no men around, but, maybe, she is with child by parthenogenesis.  The two women with Sophie try to abort the child unsuccessfully and, so, they have recourse to a local midwife (or someone on that order) who pries the fetus out of her while poor Sophie screams:  she's lying on a bed with her knees up with a little baby cooing in her face.  Marianne wants to turn away from the spectacle but Heloise orders her to look and, later, she even makes a drawing of Sophie's ordeal.  The portrait is completed and, therefore, the tender and romantic love affair must end.  There's a coda that shows the two women pining over their lost love a few years later -- Heloise is now married, although her husband remains invisible, and has a child.  During their love affair, Marianne played the opening of one of Vivaldi's Four Seasons to Heloise on a spinet.  Heloise attends a concert in Milan in which this music is played and bursts into nostalgic tears while Marianne watches her across the opera hall, unseen by her former lover.  (The close-up of the distressed Heloise goes on and on and on and it's a tasteless display, vulgar in its obviousness.)

The film dutifully crosses all "tees" and dots all "i's."  Sophie is a skilled embroiderer and the film insists on the aesthetic equivalence between "women's work" in textiles and Marianne's painting.  Marianne says that she's not allowed to paint male nudes from nature.  This is not from some kind of 18th century prudishness but to debar her from using heroic male figures in history paintings -- that is, to keep her from competing with men in that prestigious genre.  When Marianne tells Heloise that she has noticed some of her quirks, the model, Heloise, turns these observations back at her and identifies quirks in the artist of which she has become aware.  (That is, the subject of art is not silenced but allowed or empowered to talk back to the one representing her.)  Heloise's mother is complicit with the patriarchy -- she was also "sold" as a portrait to her husband and insists that her daughter follow this fate.  The male gaze as deadly is portrayed in the story of Eurydice and Orpheus -- when a man transfixes you with his gaze, you are sent back to the kingdom of death.  Marianne has painted a canvas showing Orpheus' gaze blasting Eurydice back into Hades.  She exhibits this picture (under her father's name -- he's apparently also an artist) and talks to little pedantic homunculus in a gallery hall crowded with men (with the exception of a courier and the crew that rows Marianne to the island these are the only men in the film -- and the homunculus is the only guy who gets to talk.)  When Marianne's canvases in a wooden box fall overboard from the boat on which she is rowed to the island, she leaps into the sea and clutches them like a life-raft, thus dramatizing the importance of art in her life. When we first see Heloise, she's dressed in the clothes from her Benedictine convent and she runs full-tilt for the cliffs -- oh no!we think, she's about to plunge off the rocks like her poor sister.  But she tells Marianne, after pulling up short at the edge of the cliff, that she just likes the feeling of running.  On the island, there are no men whatsoever, just women who gather in a coven around a bonfire (this is where Heloise accidentally gets set on fire) and sing in a close harmony, performing some kind of keening 18th century rap music.  Sisterhood is powerful, but, in the end, the invisible patriarchy destroys the love affair between the women and they are left only with their memories.  

The movie is caught between realism and fable and ends up unsuccessful on both counts:  it's not sufficiently stylized to work as a fable and insufficiently plausible to be adequate as realism.  The island has no men and the massive castle-like structure in which the action is set has no exterior:  apparently, Sciamma construes establishing shots as proprietary and, therefore, patriarchal and she doesn't use them in the film.  (This results in the odd feature that the doughty lads rowing the boat ashore just  drop Marianne off on the cobble strand without even telling her how to get to the castle -- "it's up there in the trees," someone vaguely says.)  The castle is mostly bare inside and has a weird unlived-in quality, doubtlessly intentional but rather puzzling.  The paintings don't look anything like 18th century art -- they have the patina of glib, 20th century society portraiture and the surrealist image of the woman on fire on the beach looks like it could have been painted by Max Ernst or Leonora Carrington.  The characters are obviously emblematic:  Sophie looks like a serving girl out of a Chardin painting and has no character other than being unhappily pregnant.  The sorority between the three women (which includes the serving girl) is implausible.  In Sissy Boy Slap Party, set also on some exotic island, a rugged old geezer tells a dozen or so boys, all of them obviously gay, that he doesn't want them to be "slapping each other" while he's away in town (buying condoms as it happens).  Of course, the boy's can't resist a slap party.  It's the same thing here:  mom says to the two young women that they should work conscientiously to complete the task of the painting -- but the girls get up to all sorts of mischief in her absence.  Nonetheless, she returns and restores order.  "Boys, boys, boys!" the geezer says in Maddin's film, "I told you not to be slapping one another."    

Piccadilly

Piccadilly is an very entertaining show business melodrama.  It's one of the last silent films, released in 1929.   The production is international.  Although she receives second billing, the film stars Anna Mae Wong, an important Asian-American actress, principally famous for her work in silent pictures.  (Of Chinese ethnicity, Wong is also an exemplary victim of American racism in casting -- routinely, she was passed over in starring roles that were instead cast with non-Asian actresses.)  The movie was shot in England and directed by E. A. Dupont, a famous German moviemaker, best known for his documentary-style Variety, shot in Germany in 1925, a melodrama about circus trapeze artists.  Dupont is a flashy director with an inventive wise-ass mise-en-scene --  he uses lots of whip pans, dollies in for big dramatic close-ups, and moves the camera fluidly through elaborately lit sets.  A point of view scene in which a impresario tours a disreputable Chinese restaurant and gambling joint is exemplary --  the camera tracks the Caucasian impresario, tilting right or left to mimic his perspective as he glances at the various denizens of the grotto-like place.  The film's titles are raffishly shown as advertisements on the sides of double-decker buses coursing through the entertainment district of Piccadilly Square.

Piccadilly's plot involves romantic triangles.  First, we are introduced to the dancing duo, Vic and Mabel, performers at Valentine Wilmott's Piccadilly night club.  ("Why is it called a club?" someone asks.  "To make it seem exclusive," another answers.)  Vic loves Mabel and egotistically assumes she loves him back, but, instead, she is courting Wilmott, apparently for mercenary purposes.  Wilmott fires Vic after punching him in the nose to get him out of the way.  But a title has warned the audience that the only reason women come to the place is to gawk at the handsome, if smarmy, Vic.  So the business starts to fail after Vic leaves.  Wilmott has seen a Chinese dishwasher dancing on a table in the scullery.  This is Shosho, a girl who lives in the Chinese ghetto in Limehouse.  When a surly patron has complained about a dirty plate (the customer looks like the obese diner offered a postprandial dinner mint in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life), Wilmott fires Shosho.  She's wily and seductive and the film suggests that she has sex with Wilmott to get her job back.  Wilmott tricks her out in an elaborate Balinese Temple Maiden outfit and has her perform.  (Her boyfriend and, possibly, pimp, Joe plays some kind of Asian zither to accompany her.)   Her act is wildly successful.  But this upsets Mabel who resents the competition with her performance and histrionically faints when Shosho gets a standing ovation.  Shosho takes Vic on a tour of her neighborhood and the couple end up at a crowded dive.  When a jauntily dressed Black man dances with a White woman, there is an angry confrontation and, almost, a  riot.  This leads to Vic and Shosho fleeing the place since they are also a mixed race couple.  Vic goes to Shosho's flat, an exotic lair with huge gold fish swimming in bathtub-sized basin and a weird wall-hanging that seems to show a Buddhist Bodhissatva with multiple arms.  There's a soft focus clinch, lit as if by von Sternberg, all baubles and bangles glinting in the murky darkness, but the racism of the period precludes any images of Vic and Shosho actually kissing.  When Vic leaves the place, he seems to pay Joe as if to confirm that this man acts as Shosho's pimp.  (Actually, the meaning of the gesture is unclear.)  Mabel shows up at Shosho's apartment to plead for her man.  Shosho contemptuously humiliates Mabel and there's a shooting, the actual event again concealed by obtuse lighting and staging -- it's like the kiss, more or less, off-screen.  A coroner's inquest is convened and the film devolves into a courtroom scene, leading to the revelation that Shosho was actually murdered by Joe in a sort of honor-slaying -- perhaps, he's Shosho's brother and not her pimp.  (Shosho treats everyone with contempt -- she has earlier made poor Joe model her Balinese Temple-girl outfit.)  The last third of the picture is unsatisfying.  The courtroom sequences lack visual zest and are interrupted by point-of-view restagings of the shooting -- a familiar device today but probably relative innovative in 1929.  With Wong out of the picture, the film deflates and becomes less interesting.  Furthermore, the women seem to fighting over an inadequate prize -- Vic isn't much of anything and has very little on-screen magnetism.  The ending is amusing, again in a wise-ass street-smart sort of way -- a street vendor is selling newspapers with big headlines about the case involving Shosho's shooting.  A guy expresses great interest in the paper but that's only because he wants to see the horse-racing results -- he's got a bet outstanding.  He throws down his cigarette butt which is retrieved by a bum wearing a sandwich-board:  it's advertising a new revue called "Life Goes On."

Anna Mae Wong is tall with very long legs.  She has a completely flat chest and is very slender.  Her dancing basically consists of hula-girl hand gestures and wiggling her butt.  Nonetheless, she's an extremely charismatic figure, particularly because she seems highly intelligent and conniving.  Wong vacillates between feigning helplessness and calculating with icy determination her next move.  She can seem innocent and virginal, friendly, and frighteningly inscrutable and villainous is the same short scene.  The film is just variant on the "Dragon Lady" theme, but Wong has that indescribable quality of stardom -- the camera loves her and she's entrancing.

Extraction

I have an old house without central air-conditioning.  Window air-conditioners are noisy and, therefore, when I watch TV, I usually engage the subtitles so that I can reliably understand the dialogue in the show that I am watching.  Sometimes, to improve my German, I will watch a show using subtitles in that language.  It was very hot and humid when I watched the Netflix original Extraction (2020) with the air conditioners in the room blasting out a cool breeze and so I watched the picture subtitled. The subtitles also indicate music and sound effects.  Thus:  [tense music playing], [grunts], [groans], [panting and groaning], [nose cracks], [groaning loudly]. [bone breaks]. etc -- I think you get the point.  

Chris Hemsworth, who produced the film and plays the hero, Tyler Rake, is a stoic, good-hearted, suicidal mercenary.  Grieving the loss of his six-year-old son to lymphoma, he has lost his desire to live and is willing to take risks that no one else would accept.  Thus, he is dispatched to Dhakar, a city in Bangladesh, to "extract" the son of an Indian mobster who has been kidnapped by rival gangsters.  The boy's father is in prison in Mumbai, although running his operations from that place, so he can't go himself to sort this out.  The Mumbai gangster's lieutenant, a family man named Saruj is told to recover the boy or his own family will be massacred.  Saruj hires Rake, who has a number of mercenary colleagues in his posse, to rescue the kid.  The movie is extremely simple -- in fact, the plot is so streamlined as to be either classically lean or moronic depending upon your taste for such things.  Rake goes to Dhakar, kills about a hundred bad guys and members of the local police who are helping the mobster who, apparently, runs the city.  After decimating both the enemy gang and the Dhakar constabulary, Rake and the boy are rescued from their hiding place in the Bangladesh sewer, described as "the filthiest sewer on the planet."  [gagging], [tense music]  By the midpoint in the movie, we learn that Saruj doesn't have enough money to pay Rake for his work and, now, is freelancing -- Saruj plans to kill Rake, something that is not readily accomplished, and bring the boy home himself.  Rake's rescuer has been corrupted by the 10 million dollar bounty on the kid and he tries to snatch him as well.  Rake kills his old Kandahar army buddy who rescued him from the sewer and goes on the run again, this time with the entire Bangladesh army chasing him.  All  checkpoints are blocked and Rake has to get the kid across the river -- apparently, India lies on the other side of the river although this isn't ever made very clear.  Saruj has now been enlisted as an ally, even though Rake and Saruj beat each other silly the day before.  Some helicopters get blown up and Rake with Saruj kill hundreds of anonymous Bangladesh cops and soldiers; they also gun down the head of the Bangladesh security services.  The kid gets extracted by helicopter.  Saruj and Rake are shot about fifty times before perishing.  Rake, in fact, is able to dive into the river, vanishing underwater so that a sequel to the picture (which has proven wildly popular) may be in the offing.  In fact, in the final shot, there's a suggestion that Rake is back in Mumbai, still in the land of the living.  

Here is the film's moral:  No one drowns by falling in the river.  You die by remaining submerged.  This piece of wisdom is illustrated three times:  Rake dives 100 feet into a picturesque lagoon at the start of the film and is shown resolutely squatting at the bottom of the pond; the kid dives into a pool in Mumbai, sits on the bottom for a half-minute, but decides to surface; of course, Rake dives off the bridge heaped with corpses and burning vehicles at the end of the movie.  The picture begins in media res with Rake slaughtering enemies on the bridge -- there is a flashback to "Sixteen hours earlier"to set up the action.  The picture has a classical five--part structure:  there's a prologue that dramatizes Rake's suicidal nihilism and the boy's kidnapping, then we have a protracted bloodbath and chase involving Rake's escape through Dhakar with the boy in tow (this involves fire-fights in tenements, on the roofs of houses, violent truck and car chases, and, finally, the escape into the sewer), there's an interlude in which Rake talks to his old army buddy (who will betray him) and the secondary hero Saruj is humanized by being shown talking on the phone to his own small son.  Act Four is a massacre on the city streets, more chases, and the blood bath on the bridge.  There's a short epilogue in which the boy chooses not to remain submerged and the implication that Rake has survived.  

The action is reasonably well-directed and there are some exciting long-takes of Rake driving vehicles through the crowded Dhakar streets and marketplaces while gunning down dozens of bad guys.  The gunfights often involve rapid fire through glass or vegetables (lots of melons and produce get murdered) and are staged after the manner of John Woo's action sequences.  This film will not do much for Dhakar's reputation as a tourist destination -- the city is filmed in a sepia and amber haze of smog so that the whole place looks like it's submerged in sewage.  Saruj's character is intended to appeal to Indian audiences (I'm not sure the teeming masses in Bangladesh get Netflix and so they can be slaughtered with impunity.).  He's heroic and keeps the film from devolving into hopeless racism:  one Australian dude kills five-hundred dimwitted Asians.  The film is an international co-production seemingly designed for Indian, Thai, and Chinese audiences as well as action fans in the U.S.,U.K., Europe and Australian.  The exotic locations were filmed in India and Thailand.  It's not clear to me that anything but drones were used in Bangladesh.  The movie's violence is so extreme as to be utterly implausible and the outcome is never seriously in doubt so there's no suspense -- if one guy can kill half of the army in Bangladesh, it seems pretty unlikely that anyone is going to stop his mission (particularly when he has lethal colleagues supporting him, including a very comely Indian lady sniper).  The film is stylish garbage.  It's also Netflix most popular recent release.

 

Arrowsmith

John Ford directed Arrowsmith for release in 1931.  It's an elaborate production, almost entirely studio-bound, and not characteristic of the work that made Ford famous.  But the film, adapting a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis is impressive, has a good cast, and was nominated for a number of Academy Awards.  It's an odd picture and seems somehow compromised by the source material -- it's obvious that Ford felt compelled to work fairly closely with his screenwriter to prepare an adaptation of the novel that would be at least, approximate to the book's plot, but the picture has strange lurches as well as interludes that lead nowhere that suggest that parts of the novel have been elided or reduced to a single gesture or shot.  (There's an inscrutable subplot involving Myrna Loy as a seductress on a Caribbean island afflicted by the plague:  we see her moping around in lingerie and observe Arrowsmith, played by Ronald Colman, apparently yearning for her, but this detour in the narration goes nowhere.)

The film begins with an image that is trademark Ford:  covered wagons crossing the prairie.  He cuts to a close-shot of a wagon driven by a doughty tough-looking tomboy.  When her ailing father suggests that they stop along the way to see some kin, the girl vetoes his suggestion and, on they go, to the promised land.  Martin Arrowsmith, the girls grandson, is said to have this pioneer resolve and independence.  At Winnemuca College, he asks to be advanced into classes taught by a great scientist and microbe-hunter, Dr. Gottlieb. (Winnemuca is Lewis' surrogate for Minnesota).  Gottlieb tells Arrowsmith to get an MD and, then, work in medical research.  With his MD in hand, Arrowsmith meets a plucky nurse who is scrubbing ward floors as punishment for smoking on the job and "being fresh."  Although Arrowsmith bullies her at first, he recognizes her gumption and they are, later, married.  For some reason, this precludes Arrowsmith from following Dr. Gottlieb, an emaciated German scholar, to the McGurk Institute in New York City -- a world-famous center of research. Arrowsmith's wife, played by the very annoying Helen Hayes, is from South Dakota and so the hero goes to her hometown to work as a country doctor for a few years.  Leora (as the wife is named) gets pregnant but miscarries.  Arrowsmith loses his first patient to diphtheria.  Later, as a lark, he invents a serum vaccine that cures "Black Leg" disease in dairy herds.  His experiment requires that he immunize one half of the herd but let the other half die -- something that appalls the local farmers until the cure is available.  On the strength of this work, Arrowsmith and wife move to New York and he  joins the McGurk Institute, housed in impressive offices with mighty foyer, forty-foot high bronze doors, and a reception room that is all terrazzo tile for the length of a football field.  At the Institute, he is reunited with Dr. Gottlieb.  After two years of continuous work, Arrowsmith discovers some sort of anti-bacterial agent and is about to become famous as a benefactor of humanity when it is learned that a French researcher has beat  him to the punch.  Rats spread the bubonic plague in the West Indies and Arrowsmith goes there to fight the plague.  He announces that he is going to inject half of the study population with serum vaccine but not treat the other half of the patients -- this alarms the local authorities who prohibit the study as inhumane and barbaric. But there is an African-American doctor, Dr. Marchant, watching from the balcony in the hall where Arrowsmith's proposals are rebuffed.   Marchant, an alumnus of Howard University, offers the Black population on a remote island for the study -- the Black people, in effect, become like the sacrificial cattle in South Dakota, half of them will not be treated as a control group against which to measure the success of the experimental vaccine.  (For modern audiences, this aspect of the story is shocking:  we recall that the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that were conducted in the same way on Black men.)  Arrowsmith leaves his clingy wife, Idora, back on the main island and goes to the epicenter of the plague.  His mentor, Dr. Sandulius, a Swedish microbe-hunter and valiant man of medicine, dies from the plague.  Meanwhile the plague attacks the capitol city.  Arrowsmith's wife dies -- she's been an irritant throughout the movie and so her demise is pleasing to the audience.  Poor Marchant also dies.  In his grief, Arrowsmith abandons the experiment and vaccinates everyone wholesale.  The gamble pays off and the plague is fought to a standstill.  Back in New York, Arrowsmith is feted as a champion of medical science,but he knows that he has failed Dr. Liebgott  by abandoning the control group in the experiment on the island.  It doesn't matter because Liebgott has had a stroke and his mind is destroyed.  Arrowsmith can't confess his failing to him.  With a close friend (who is obviously alcoholic), Arrowsmith departs the prestigious McGurk clinic to start his own laboratory.

Racial aspects of this movie are disturbing.  But Ford deserves credit for putting these issues in the foreground, although he's generally on the wrong side of issues of this sort.  (In most films of this era, race questions wouldn't be raised at all.)   All the doctors smoke cigarettes continuously and everyone responds to either success or disappointment by getting deliriously drunk, also an irritating feature of Ford's films.  Ford fills the screen with non-English-speakers and immigrants whom he stereotypes in various  ways:  the pedantic German doctor, the sorrowful and humble Swedish farmer, the rambunctious Italians.  The claustrophobic  studio settings are interesting and the scenes during the plague have a dream-like Expressionistic intensity:  the local people wander around like zombies in dense mist intended to conceal the fact that the jungle is made of cardboard.  Glaring light creates chiaroscuro effects in enclosed darkened rooms -- the light sprays through jalousies and mosquito nets.  In two remarkable shots, Ford films the rats in negative -- they appear as silvery apparitions scurrying across a black background. A very low-angle shot that shows Leora collapsing alone in her room on the island is harrowing and seems to foreshadow similar camera-work in Citizen Kane.  Everything looks feverish and foggy and, in this hothouse environment, the weird abortive subplot in which Dr. Arrowsmith is tempted by the sultry Myrna Loy seems almost like a delirium dream.  The film is organized into a classical five-part structure:  after an introduction (part one), the picture breaks into three extended sequences:  South Dakota practice, the McGurk institute in snowy New York City, and the febrile sequence involving the plague.  There is a short coda in which Arrowsmith, now a widower, departs the McGurk institute (which has been shown to be corrupt) to start his own research laboratory -- this plot point enabled by the disability of the incorruptible  Dr. Liebgott.  

The film has a very strange binary structure:  every plot point is presented as an either/or situation.  You can't be a research scientist if you are a newly married man.  (Why not?)  Research is inimical to medical practice.  If you are working hard, you can't sleep or eat.  Work opposes marriage.  Kind and neighborly medical practice is inconsistent with the ruthlessness of science required to end the plague.  When Leora has her miscarriage, this loss is presented within this binary system:  the loss of the child means that Idora will have no children and that the marriage will be childless.  Men are adventurers; women guardians of the household and ne'er the  twain shall meet.  Arrowsmith, in effect, sacrifices his wife to medical science.  You can be happily married or stop the plague but not both.  And most fundamentally, we have the primordial clash between Black and White -- the Black people are mere bodies upon which to be experimented; the White people are the scientists and benefactors who perform the experiments.  Given this ruthless system of binary oppositions, it's no surprise that everyone drinks to excess.  And, at the climax of the film, Arrowsmith gets drunk enough to abolish the binary system necessary to having a control with respect to his anti-plague vaccine:  he vaccinates everyone.    

Ford was drinking heavily when the film was made and the producers ultimately threatened to fire him if he continued boozing.  (He is said to have accelerated the production to get back to the bottle.)  Helen Hayes despised Ford.  The film is remote from the novel.  In Sinclair Lewis' book, Arrowsmith is a prickly serial womanizer.  He goes to school on his first wife's money, then, abandons her.  He has love affair and marries another woman.  At the end of the novel, he abandons wife and child to open a laboratory in the wilds of Vermont.  All of these aspects of the book are sanitized. Lewis' Arrowsmith is an egotistical anti-hero; Colman is the very soul of decency.  (Lewis wrote the book with the collaboration of the microbe hunter Paul de Kruif who was paid 25% of the royalties; he turned down the Pulitzer Prize awarded to him for the novel.)

Paracelsus

When I was about 21,I saw G. W. Pabst's Paracelsus (1944).  Certain sequences in the film, which I recalled as being tedious, have remained in my memory for more than 44 years.  Recently, Kino Lorber issued a Blu-Ray digital restoration of the film and I have now watched it.  Paracelsus isn't fully successful, but it is, indeed, a remarkable movie and well worth study.  Pabst, who had been jocularly called der rote Pabst ("the red Pabst or "Pope", the meaning of his surname), was a man of the Left, certainly a Socialist if not a Communist.  His Leftist credentials were impeccable -- he had worked closely with Brecht on a 1930 version of the Dreigroschenoper ("The Three Penny Opera") and many of his most famous films involved working class poverty and social commentary on subjects such as prostitution and the exploitation of soldiers and working men.  It's not wholly clear to me how he ended up in Germany during the Hitler period, but, in fact, he seems to have been press-ganged into service to the regime and made two pictures under the close supervision of  Josef Goebbels.  The first, a period farce called The Comedians (1941) is generally accounted harmless, a bit of mildly amusing "fluff"; Paracelsus, made with prestige stars and a big budget, is another matter -- critics have generally derided the film as abhorrent Nazi propaganda and the legacy of the picture post-war was catastrophic to Pabst.  He spent the rest of his life trying to direct anti-Nazi films to establish his perquisites as an enemy of Fascism -- but Paracelsus irremediably damaged his career.

Viewed from our current vantage, the Nazi ideology in the film is low-key and, almost, invisible:  there are some speeches about the superiority of German to academic Latin that are not remarkable except in the Nationalistic context of the War -- this sort of stuff would go unnoticed if the film had been made in the twenties or sixties.  The Fuehrer imagery involving Paracelsus is so muddled that we can't tell if the hero is supposed to be a potential precursor to Hitler or an anti-authoritarian rebel.  There's no anti-Semiticism in the film; however, the involvement of Werner Krauss playing Paracelsus casts a shadow on the picture because the actor was a well-known and enthusiastic Nazi and starred in Veit Harlan's rabidly anti-Semitic Jud Suess.  Pabst eschews the most obvious ideological gesture available in the context of the film -- he could portray the plague allegorically as an aspect of the invasion of Fortress Germany. (Fritz Lang's imagery of the rat-like scurrying hordes of Mongolians in Kriemhild's Revenge, the second part of his 1924 mythological epic based on the Siegfried stories in the Niebelunglied contains much more offensive imagery of invading Asiatic pestilence.  An enthusiastically Nazi-inflected Paracelsus could surely have portrayed the threat of the plague as equivalent to the invading non-Aryan Russians or the Jews, but there is no whiff of this sort of imagery at all in the movie.  The German people (Deutsches Volk) are portrayed as prone to hysteria and gullible -- certainly, not a message that the Nazi regime would have  regarded as helpful to the war effort.  So, we are left with a film with a couple of vaguely disquieting speeches but one that is, generally, inoffensive from an ideological perspective.  And, indeed, I think that the movie is directed to clearly subvert any propaganda messages that Goebbels may have wished to insert into the picture.  

Paracelsus was a 16th century Swiss alchemist and healer. Inadvertently he pioneered the scientific method with his laboratory experiments.  (He seems to have been primarily interested in occult studies such as astrology, divination, and the alchemical pursuit of quintessences).  The film portrays Paracelsus as a proto-scientist and humanist.  (Upon seeing a beautiful woman, he proclaims:  "The greatness of man... is man.")  Paracelsus is opposed by a cabal of nasty physicians, all clad in black and physically hideous -- they are led by a noxious doctor played by Fritz Rasp, a reliable heavy in German films from the silent era through the sixties.)  At the outset of the film, the leader of the town doctors plans to amputate the leg of Froben (the historical Frobenius).  The surgeon arrives with a terrifying saw and is about to cut off Froben's leg, something that will certainly kill him.  After a suspenseful interval, Paracelsus intervenes in the nick of time and heals Froben with his herbal remedies.  Froben, a book publisher, agrees to print Paracelsus' treatises on medicine and the natural sciences -- but, first, he has to cast type for German Fraktur or Gothic letters; this is because his type-faces are all designed for publishing books in Latin.  There is an academic debate between Paracelsus and the evil physician in which the alchemist shows that he knows Latin better than his opponent.  The plague is approaching and Paracelsus demands that the city's gates be closed and the place quarantined. A greedy merchant, however, bribes the sentries to allow a convoy of wagons carrying merchandise to enter the city.  The plague comes with the trade goods, only to be promptly quashed by Paracelsus (how he does this is not at all clear and the irresolute, even confusing, conclusion of this episode is one of the many narrative defects in the movie.)  The merchant's beautiful daughter is supposed to be married to a powerful aristocrat, but she falls in love with Paracelsus' famulus -- that is, his lab assistant.  When she is told that she must marry the old nobleman, she falls into a swoon.  Paracelsus heals her by having his famulus embrace her in her sickbed -- it's what might be called sexual healing and the episode is exploited for a sort of smarmy prurient interest.  The famulus, puffed up with pride, tries to heal Froben who has become dangerously ill again.  He uses an untested elixir on the man who promptly dies.  A hue and cry is raised for the arrest of Paracelsus who is blamed for Froben's death.  A sinister juggler, Fliegenbein (the name means "Fly-Leg) owes Paracelsus a favor -- the alchemist healed his case of the plague.  Fliegenbein appears out of nowhere to create a spectacular diversion so that the hero can be smuggled out of the City.  Fliegenbein pours money into the town square to create a riot -- he also performs a tight-rope act high over the city's streets.  In the film's final scene, Paracelsus is working in a sort of stable.  He is told that the people need him.  He walks out of his rustic laboratory to see a great crowd of the sick and crippled waiting for his ministrations.  Declaring that he "needs" the people (Volk) and that they need him, Paracelsus summons the halt and lame to him to be healed.  

The film is episodic and a bit incoherent.  Pabst was versatile and the movie operates within a wide range of situations and emotions -- there are grave scenes involving death and suffering, bawdy tavern sequences, weird instances of the uncanny, and broad comedy.  The casting, particularly of the minor characters, is brilliant -- the film presents an array of grotesques and "low" characters redolent of figures that one might see in a painting by Brueghel.  Many of the compositions involve images that are derived from from Albrecht Durer as well.  There are bizarre oddities:  after the handsome, if stiff and simpering, famulus has healed the wealthy merchant's daughter (apparently by having sex with the unconscious woman), Pabst cuts to a basement laboratory full of bubbling alembics that are highly suggestively shaped (they have phallic appendages or womb-like receptacles); there is a nipple shaped vessel prominently displayed in the foreground and low flames that boil fluids in the alembics.  When the heroine curiously approaches one of the alembics, it ejaculates, spraying a white, creamy froth all over.  Again and again, Pabst presents us with images or scenes that undercut any ideological message that the film might propose.  Most notably, there is a bravura sequences in which the incredibly agile Fliegenbein appears in a tavern, dances around everyone and performs various acrobatic or gymnastic exercises.  (The performer is the exceedingly slender and flexible, Harald Kreutzberg,, an exemplar of modern interpretive "free dance:  one wonders how he survived the regime, since the figure seems to be overtly homosexual and the practitioner of an Expressionist kind of dance -- he was trained by Mary Wigman -- that it is hard to imagine the Nazi's supporting in any way, shape or form.)  In the cellar tavern, Fliegenbaum suddenly begins to twitch and he, then, starts a dance that looks like some of the more outre moves in Michael Jackson's Thriller video.  It's obviously a Danse Macabre and, before long, everyone in the room is following Fliegenbein's lead, twitching and grimacing and staggering like zombies over the tavern floor.  Paracelsus, who struts around carrying a big broadsword, enters, descries the horrifying spectacle as a "mad house" and recognizes that this is the convulsive St. Vitus dance that carries off victims of the pestilence.  He diagnoses Fliegenbein as an asymptomatic carrier of the plague.  Fliegenbein collapses in Paracelsus arms, creating a statuesque limp Pieta formed from the healer and the juggler.  Then, Paracelsus hears a grinding sound, looks up with horror (Krauss was a superb mime) and sees a black clad, hooded figure sharpening a scythe.  In a huge close-up, we see the skeletal figure of Death.  Death swings his scythe and, in an indelible gesture of defense, Paracelsus parries the blade with his great broadsword.  It's one of the greatest sequences in film history, hidden inside a Nazi-era film that very few people will ever see.  In a final subversive gesture, Pabst has Paracelsus escape the city (as Fliegenbein creates a distraction) in a tiny cart that is draped with a fool's tassels and motley.  The cart is drawn by the smallest donkey that I've ever seen, a miniature donkey no larger than a big Labrador retriever.  The old woman, the tiny ass, the motley on the cart behind which Paracelsus hides, all combine into some kind of strange visual joke -- but who is the joke on:  the authorities or Paracelsus who makes  his escape in this profoundly unheroic way?

The film comes with an obtuse commentary by a woman named Samm Deighnam.  She's a Goth girl and, apparently, a fan of gore and horror movies.  About a third of what she says is completely wrong.  For instance, she notes that the historical Paracelsus spent much of his career trying to discover remedies for syphilis.  She says:  "Of course, this is theme that the film can't touch with a ten-foot pole."  This is untrue and, in fact, causes one to wonder if her print of the movie contains a major scene on this subject -- and, in fact, an episode that proves the assertion that Pabst is using the movie to undercut Nazi ideology.  Ulrich von Hutten was a German humanist and poet, as well as a prominent early supporter of German nationalism.  Von Hutten supported the Protestant Reformation and proclaimed the hegemony of the Deutsch language over Latin.  He also is frequently cited in the Romantic era as a proponent for the revolution of the peasants or farmer class.  Casper David Friedrich, the great landscape artist, painted his grave as an emblem of the defense of Germany against invading French armies.  In the movie, Ulrich von Hutten appears to Paracelsus and asks the great alchemist to heal him.  Ulrich's appearance is overtly based on the doughty Knight in Durer's engraving "The Knight, Death and the Devil."  Ulrich tells Paracelsus that he is suffering from Morbus Gallicus, a disease that is killing him painfully and that he acquired in "the Camp" two years earlier.  Paracelsus confirms the diagnosis and says that the popular 'quack' treatment, administering gum of Guaniac (a New World tree) has just driven the disease "deeper into him" -- he goes on to tell the heroic knight that he should have been treated with "mercurius" or sublimated mercury.  Of course, Morbus Gallicus is the "French disease" -- that is, syphilis  So Pabst is so bold as to show the great, redeemer knight of the German people as infected with syphilis that will surely kill him.  Somehow, Deighnam completely misses this point, something that should be integral to any theory that the movie is subversive of Nazi propaganda.