Killing Them Softly

 Killing Them Softly is a routine heist film decorated with existential angst.  It resembles a film noir from the fifties, albeit stylishly produced and featuring an all-star cast.  The picture is worth seeing because of two scenes featuring James Gandolfini.  I have moral reservations about the picture's theme and pervasive nihilism.  The film was released in 2012 and directed by Andrew Dominik, an interesting Australian filmmaker best known in the this country for his prosaically titled and intensely morose Western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.  The movie is based on a novel by George V. Higgins, Cogan's Trade, although ostensibly set in Boston, the movie was filmed in New Orleans, including a opening sequence featuring the apocalyptic devastation in the city's 9th Ward.

Two generic, small-time hoodlums conspire with a low-level crime boss named Squirrel to rob a poker game.  The game is proprietary to another criminal, Markie (Ray Liotta), apparently, an employee of the Mob.  Markie has previously staged a robbery of his own game and pocketed the proceeds.  The thugs in Higgins' novels are exceedingly loquacious and Markie has boasted about this exploit.  The two petty criminals believe that Markie will get blamed for this crime as well and that they can commit the robbery with impunity.  

The two robbers, Frankie and his Australian heroin-addict buddy, Russell, successfully knock-over the game.  The mob is upset and a professional killer is engaged to clean up the mess.  This killer, Jackie (Brad Pitt) decides that Markie has to be punished, even though it's evident to him that he had nothing to do with the heist.  Meanwhile, Russell, who has a side gig, stealing dogs and transporting them to Florida for sale, has shot off his mouth and boasted about the crime.  Jackie realizes that Frankie, Russell, and their mentor, Squirrel are responsible for the theft.  He arranges to have Markie beat half to death as punishment and, later, guns him down in a showy sequence filmed in ultra-slow motion -- we see bullets piercing windows in ornate sprays of glass and ejected cartridges twirling through the air like space ships in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. (This Matrix-style mayhem is a complete divergence from the film's otherwise scrupulous meanness and, although impressive, seems to me to be a mistake.)   Jackie knows Squirrel and seems to think it might be a conflict of interest to kill this man himself.  (This part of the movie is unintelligible from a plot perspective.)  Jackie hires Mickie, an aging hit man from New York, to murder Squirrel and, possibly, one or two of the other guys.  Mickie, an once fearsome murderer, turns out to be a disappointment.  He's drinking heavily and holes up in a hotel room ordering room-service booze and prostitutes.  It becomes clear to Jackie that Mickie (James Gandolfini) is useless.  So he arranges for Mickie, a felon in possession of firearms, to be arrested in a "whore-fight" in the hotel.  Jackie,  then, forces information from the hapless Frankie and, with him, guns down Squirrel outside his girlfriend's apartment.  Jackie, then, kills Frankie in an underground parking ramp.  Russell is arrested by the cops when he tries to access his stash of heroin -- he has used his share of the dough to buy drugs.  Jackie then meets his handler, a lawyer or accountant working for the mob, in a bar.  Barack Obama is giving his inaugural address on TV.  The mob lawyer, called Driver in the credits (because he and Jackie always meet in his car in desolate locations), refuses to pay the pre-negotiated price for the three killings.  Jackie is outraged and delivers these famous lines from this film:  "We're livin' in America and in America, you're on your own.  America's not a country.  It's a business.  So fuckin' pay me."  On this cheery note, the film goes dark -- although we hear, as if a faint memory, sounds of people celebrating Obama's election in the distance.  Jackie's final peroration is triggered by Obama's televised speech, particularly the President's assertion that all men are equal and that they form a "community."  

The movie was completed in a 2 1/2 hour version, cut down to about 100 minutes and, obviously, lots of  narrative integument and subplot is missing.  We never see the "whore fight" that results in Mickie's arrest and there is a shadowy figure called Dillon whom everyone fears played by Sam Shepherd who appears in only one short scene -- he gets mentioned every ten minutes, but it isn't clear who he is.  (And we learn in the last scene that he has apparently died -- why this is significant is unclear.)  The mob itself is a remote corporation that does business by committee decision and moves very slowly and erratically.  Parts of the film involving unseen forces controlling the action play out like a crime film version of Kafka.  The governing metaphor is that crime is the business of American -- that is, everyone robs everyone else -- and this point is hammered home by the film's sound design:  we are constantly hearing about the 2008-2009 financial crisis as discussed on TVs operating unseen in the corner's of squalid rooms.  This theme, highly questionable in my view, is obsessively mentioned, but the metaphor that crime and business and politics are all "of imagination compact" as the Bard would have it, is a mere allusion, a conceit that is never plausibly developed.  Allegorically, I suppose, the poker game might stand for the stock market and banking industry, an enterprise designed to cheat the rubes on Main Street.  But, then, this makes Jackie some kind of super-Regulator, an enforcer of banking anti-corruption rules, and this clearly isn't the director Dominik's intent.  The plot is full of odd twists and turns that don't make sense, most notably importing Gandolfini's ruined killer into the story -- that subplot literally goes nowhere and doesn't even pay-off in a scene showing the con arrested by the cops after the altercation with the prostitute.  However, Higgins' novels were nothing more than frameworks on which to suspend showy dialogue laced with arcane criminal lingo and, when this is realized, some of the oddities of the film make sense.  The movie is really just a series of profane conversations that we're supposed to enjoy for their exotic and colorful language.  The dialogue doesn't exist for the purpose of driving the plot; rather, the plot exists as an occasion for the dialogue.  

Nihilism is fashionable and this film is about as nihilistic as can be imagined.  But it's idiocy to contend that America is nothing more than a criminal enterprise and that American history is merely a narrative of theft and rapine.  ("The reason America loves a crime story," says Chris Rock in the TV show Fargo "is that America is a crime story," a picturesque, but equally vapid, formulation of this declaration.) There is really no practical connection between organized crime and business -- the two enterprises are linked by a profit motive but that's about all.  Therefore, the premise of the movie is all wrong and, furthermore, destructive.  Dominik made this film in 2012 when Barack Obama was President.  In the film, he declares that all politicians are crooks and that all human endeavor is theft.  This may be true to some limited extent, but a perception of this sort leads to destructive cynicism.  Indeed, one might argue (incorrectly I think) that this sort of fashionable nihilism led in some ways to the election of Donald Trump -- if all politicians are criminal, then, why not elect someone who is overtly a fraud and mobster?  One shudders to think what kind of movie Dominik would make on this subject now, after the four year reign of terror and incompetence instituted by Donald Trump.  We think of the Obama era as the gold standard for rectitude and justice in politics.  And Killing them Softly is based on Dominik's discontent with that era.  

The movie is full of puzzling features.  The soundtrack uses old songs like "It's only a Paper Moon" and "Life is just a bowl of cherries" to comment ironically on the mayhem that we witness.  Who is listening to these songs and how are they relevant?  Dominik also plays Petulia Clark's "The Windmills of the Mind", possibly a homage to the period in which Higgins set his novel, but incongruous in a film rooted so exactly in 2008 and early 2009.  The figure of the relentless enforcer played by Brad Pitt derives in large part from the role of Harvey Keitel as the equally remorseless and unflappable fixer in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.  The reason that I can recommend the movie are two extended dialogue scenes with James Gandolfini playing the despairing assassin turned alcoholic.  Gandolfini exudes brutish menace but his speeches are surprisingly delicate and, even, poetic -- he desperately fears being returned to prison (which is what will happen to him) mostly because he expects his wife will divorce him.  He is spending his money on booze and hookers, yet, he seems weirdly concerned about his wife and recalls other sexual liaisons with an almost lyrical intensity.  When asked to commit the murders, he simply repeats (Bartleby style):  "I can't go out."  The sequence leads nowhere from a narrative perspective but, it seems, a devastating cautionary warning to Brad Pitt's character -- this, it seems, is the price of the enterprise in which they are involved.

You can learn interesting things from watching movies.  In The Dig, someone finds a "Merovingian Tremissis" -- this is a kind of coin from the sixth century.  In Killing Them Softly, the thugs call people "ginzos" -- a "ginzo" is a no-account Sicilian criminal.  

The Dig

The Netflix original film The Dig (2021) is so fascinating that it drives viewers to additional research on its topic, the 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo treasure in Suffolk.  This, itself, is a signal achievement because the Sutton Hoo artifacts and their historical context are remarkably important, indeed, one of the greatest discoveries in 20th century archaeology.  Simon Stone's film about the discovery of the treasure is exceptionally lyrical and moving.  Despite its manifold inaccuracies, the movie is well worth watching and, indeed, very rich in interesting ideas.  

In The Dig, a middle-aged woman who owns a manor near the sea retains a self-taught "excavator" (he declines the term "archaologist") to dig in several burial mounds on her property.  The excavator, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), has been working at a Roman Villa site for the local Ipswich Village Museum.  Brown, a proud, if unassuming man, rejects the offer made by Edith Pretty, the property owner played by Carey Mulligan, that he work for her in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery on her land -- her offer for wages is too low.  (Pretty says that she bought the land with her husband so that they could dig in the mounds.  However, her husband has unexpectedly died, leaving her a widow with a nine-year old son.)  When Mrs. Pretty increases her offer, Brown agrees to work for her and takes up lodging in an apartment with her servants.  Mrs. Pretty has an intuition that there is something important lurking in the big conical mound rising above a number of smaller earthen embankments on her property.  At first, Brown resists the idea, asserting that soil on the mound is compacted due to earlier looting in which "flutes" (that is, vertical shafts) were dug into the earth.  Some ship rivets are found in an adjacent mound and, then, Brown determines that the center of the big earthwork remains intact -- the looters were mislead by a thousand years of plowing that has eaten away the mound and concealed its true shape.  When he digs in what he now believes was once the center of the mound, he finds the soil undisturbed and unearths the form of a ship buried in the ground.  (The ship's timbers are gone but the outline of the ship's wooden structure is indelibly imprinted in the soil.)  Archaeologists at the British Museum are summoned to the site and a power struggle ensues between the auto-didact Basil Brown and pompous scientist from London, Charles Phillips.  The Museum has sent a crew of young archaeologists to assist Phillips including a married couple Peggy and John Piggott.  The Piggott's are unhappy; John is apparently gay and, probably, carrying out an affair with another archaeologist on site.  Mrs. Pretty's nephew is also present to take pictures of the proceedings.  In the course of the dig, fantastically beautiful treasures are discovered that are ultimately donated to the British Museum.  (I recall seeing them in that place when I was in London many years ago -- the artifacts are wonderful and perfectly preserved and include the famous warrior's helmet that has graced the cover of a hundred editions of Beowulf.)  The British Museum scholars believe that the site represents a Viking ship burial but Brown is convinced that the artifacts are Anglo-Saxon.  Of course, his theory turns out to be correct and the intricate jewelry retrieved from Sutton Hoo is now famous as exemplars of the highest achievements of the so-called "Insular style" itself a hybrid of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon art.  The dig takes place under the looming threat of World War Two and ends when the Germans invade Poland.  The treasures are taken from the site and hidden somewhere in the London Underground.  When they are first displayed in 1948, Edith Pretty is dead and Basil Brown isn't given due recognition for his role in unearthing these treasures.  The film's final shot is an extended image of Brown and a helper burying the imprint of the funeral ship after covering it in a swath of "hessians" -- that is pine branches.  

Anglo-Saxon ornamental metalwork of this era is wonderfully intricate with convoluted intertwined figures of beasts in filigree set against fine cloisonne work.  The Dig is similarly intricate and, although it's central narrative is simple enough, the film's themes are cunningly inlaid and, then, worked out in fascinating detail.  There is, in fact, almost too much thematic material contained within the movie.  It has a disconcerting density of thought and idea worked into its events.  The coming war casts a weird twilight gloom over the plot and one scene, taking place in a blacked-out pub (they are practicing for the war) is literally very dark.  There is a nearby RAF base and old planes salvaged from World War One are continually flying over the site of the dig.  In one scene, a plane crashes in the nearby estuary and, when Mrs. Pretty's nephew, Rorie Lomax, heroically dives into the water, we see the dead pilot like an old knight, seemingly armored in vest and mask, half hidden by great floral wreathes of bubbles rising from the wreck -- it's a strangely archaic image linking past to present.  Basil Brown is denigrated by the people at the British Museum and treated disrespectfully -- this is evidence of "snobbery" as Mrs. Pretty says and class prejudice.  However, her staff won't allow Brown to enter the manor at the front door and he has to come through the door to the servant's quarters at the rear of the house.  Basil Brown becomes a substitute father for the half-orphaned Robert, Mrs. Pretty's son, and several scenes feature the relationship between the boy and old man.  Brown is also an amateur astronomer and he spends much time showing the boy the wonders of the heavens through his telescope.  Peggy Piggott embarks on a love affair with Mr. Lomax, Mrs. Pretty's handsome nephew.  This is her consolation for her husband's homosexuality -- depicted in the film as an open-minded attempt to free her priggish husband so that he can express his true nature.  (This is the least successful aspect of the movie and seems to me to be somewhat mawkish.)  The specter of death hangs over the dig.  First, this is because it is a mortuary site, and, second, because of the looming carnage of the Second Word War.  Further, Mrs. Pretty is dying of some sort of protracted heart disease and becomes increasingly frail as the film progresses -- in some shots near the end she is filmed within the shape of the burial vessel, as if already half-interred.  By the end of the movie, The Dig has established a series of poetic equivalencies:  the Boat is a Queen buried in the earth, but also a vessel for the dying Mrs. Pretty.  To young Robert, who reads science fiction in Amazing Stories, the buried ship is a rocket aimed into the sky, that is, the symbol for further exploration of the universe.  The film is full of understated, if poetic, dialogue and, ultimately, stands for the proposition that we don't dig into the graves of ancient people because they are dead but because, indeed, they are very much alive and have their existence in continuities with us.  

The Dig is beautifully shot and designed.  Many of the landscapes of the flat littoral look like J.M.W. Turner, hazy and impressionistic, and the camera is often pointed up into the humid sky.  The people coming to the dig in the early morning are shot through hazy, ominous mist and they look like soldiers of the Great War trudging to their destinies.  When a trench collapses on Brown, he has to be dug out of the earth and, sheathed in clay, he looks like the corpse of one of the ancient warriors buried in the earth.  The film pauses for poetic dialogue, particularly, a sequence in which a then-famous event is discussed:  while performing on the cello in park, a musician was accompanied by a nightingale.  The nightingale seemed to sing as a duet with the woman's stringed instrument.  Later, all the nightingale's in the neighborhood seemed to have changed their song to echo the music played in the park.  When we first see the buried ship's imprint in the sand, there is a wonderful cut away to Brown sitting on the side of a great tidal estuary watching as an eerie-looking vessel, a kind of unearthly barge, sweeps by on the water.  Chamberlain apologizes for failing to prevent a war.  Someone says the war will be fought in the air and the camera points upward to show us a sky full of wet, floppy-looking clouds,  There's a partial eclipse of the moon.  A woman wears a coin imprinted with Augustus Caesar on her breast.

This is a wonderful movie.  It's very carefully worked-out.  The love affair between the RAF recruit (Mrs. Pretty's nephew) and the Peggy Piggott is carefully foreshadowed.  A sort of pre-war epidemic of love affairs is underway -- people seem to be having sex as a bulwark against the coming catastrophe.  If anything, the film is too tidy in the way that it resolves conflicts and too well-made.  It might be improved slightly if some of mysterious imponderability of the past beyond the abyss of time were allowed to infect some of the scenes.  The picture uses a number of jump cuts that seem slightly disconcerting in the bucolic context of the film and there is an odd technique of overlapping sound over images that don't correlate to what we hear that is a bit intrusive I thought. Everything in the film moves toward a climax at a so-called 'Treasure Inquest' -- we expect a big trial scene at the end but this isn't shown -- a clever narrative device, I though.  The film has some defects,  but, by and large, this movie is exquisite and the acting by the principals beyond any reproach. 

(You can read about the Sutton Hoo treasure on Wikipedia.  Of course, the actual events involving this excavation and its treasures are even more fascinating than the movie.  All of the main characters are historically based -- I think the film is very unfair to the Piggott's who were both estimable archaeologists in their own right.  Mrs. Pretty had her son Robert when she was 47.  She died of a stroke in 1942, not due to the slow onslaught of heart disease that make her increasingly frail as the film proceeds.  She was a spiritualist.  The treasure itself is much more complex than what is shown in the movie.  Furthermore, the film idealizes the ancient Anglo-Saxons -- the burial seems to date to the 7th century.  In fact, the site showed a number of peculiar executions or human sacrifices of very emaciated individuals.  However, the broad outlines of the excavation at the site are accurately portrayed in the film.)   

Broadway

Broadway exists (barely) in several formats:  it is a film made during the transition between silent and sound pictures, released in 1929.  Paul Fejos directed the extravagant production for Universal, making the musical as a silent film (apparently with some kind of synchronized soundtrack) as well as a talkie.  The last five minutes of the movie are in technicolor. Fejos seems to have been a great experimenter with form and technology.  Ultimately, both Hollywood and the European film system were too confining for him. He spent the last half of his life as an anthropologist making documentary films.  Broadway is an awful picture, almost unwatchable, but it is, nonetheless, fascinating, particularly for what it reveals about the movie industry in Hollywood during the period when the movies learned to talk.

Fejos made the movie (the first "million dollar musical") to celebrate a machine.  The film is designed as a demonstration vehicle for an elaborate crane camera-mount with a fifty-foot boom.  The crane was so large and heavy that a special soundstage had to be built for it -- the picture was shot in a cavernous interior with sixty-foot high ceilings (to accommodate the huge crane) and a specially reinforced concrete floor.  Universal apparently used this machine for twenty years as a camera mount -- the device was equipped with mechanisms that kept the camera platform (that could accommodate five people) perfectly level; while swooping up and down, the crane could simultaneously rotate in a complete circle.  The crane was still on-site through the fifties and sixties, although used as a lift for heavy objects and not for camera-work.  As late as the early seventies, the huge machine could be glimpsed on a backlot, dismantled and rusting.  Still pictures taken in 1929 show Fejos with camera personnel standing next to the crane.  There is even a handsome-looking Dalmatian hound  in the picture.  Broadway uses grandiose crane shots about every eight or nine minutes.  There is a particularly impressive shot that serves as an intermission, as it were, between the two halves of the 107 minute film -- the camera shows us an African-American charwoman washing a floor in the vast nightclub where the action in the film occurs; the camera rises to an enormous height above the floor, showing us the huge set and a number of other women, small as ants mopping the floor; then, the camera turns and shows us the other side of the set which has been built for this production in the round, dropping down again toward the floor where other janitorial workers are laboring.  It's a pointlessly spectacular image, devised to show what the crane can do as well the sheer enormity of the set and the sequence remains viscerally exciting even today.  

The film's plot is too thin to support its almost two hour running length and, so, the story is fragmented by various song-and-dance numbers.  The entire film takes place in a gargantuan night club called "The Paradise."  The cabaret is run by a curmudgeonly Greek who struts around in a tuxedo chomping on a big stogey.  A gangster named Steve confronts the leader of an opposing mob and guns him down backstage at the night club.  (There's a startling scene that seems almost neo-realist in which the mobsters drag the dead man out of the club and down the city streets -- these four or five shots are the only scenes within the story proper that take place outside of the Paradise, a welcome break from the ultra-designed and hyper-artificial night club set.)  A detective appears at the club and hangs around sullenly watching for Steve to betray himself.  A desultory romantic triangle arises between the suave and wealthy Steve, an ambitious hoofer named Roy and a comely chorus girl, Billy.  During the first half of the film, there's a subplot in which Billy is tempted by Steve to entertain a bunch of drunken mobsters at a banquet backstage at the Club.  In the second half of the movie, the detective continues to probe the gangland murder committed on the premises but to no real effect -- the conflict is resolved when the dead gangster's moll, also a chorine, guns down Steve.  Billy and Roy dance up a storm in the penultimate number and an agent, recognizing their genius as a song-and-dance team, books them for "Pottsville and Chambersburg", whatever this is supposed to mean.  There's a flashy final dance sequence involving the crane going up and down and whirling around a few times with lots of superimpositions and whip-pans -- this is shot in color, but mostly reveals only that the huge set has lots of red highlights in it:  the general impression is of a pink and red blur.  

The movie is noteworthy for the eye-popping sets.  The night-club is a canyon between two huge fluted towers that support a roof that simulates a sky lanced with searchlight beams.  There are two immense curtains with vaguely futuristic decorations and, backstage, some art deco chambers, one of them with an elaborate staircase snaking down along a sleek white wall.  Duchamp showed a nude coming down a staircase a dozen years earlier and Fejos uses this vaguely cubist set in many scenes with chorus-girls decorously suspended at various heights above the floor; apparently, the idea is that the staircase enhances the visual appeal of the sequences in which it is used.  None of the interior spaces have any ceilings, they just have flats that go up and up and up vanishing out of the top of the frame.  The cabaret's performance floor is a hundred-yard long glistening surface poised between various Babylonian ziggurats and towers.  The sets are all spectacular but so huge that they dwarf the performers and leach the drama out of events occurring between these cyclopean towers -- with the crane camera zooming up and down, the dance sequences, in particular, seem similar to the completely misbegotten dance scenes on the Babylonian wall set in Griffith's Intolerance:  tiny figures vamp and hop up and down under enormous ramparts.  The dialogue sequences are truly awful.  The characters speak in stilted phrases and everyone seems anesthetized and half asleep.  The detective in particular talks in a weird singsong chant that makes every insinuating remark seem like a question.  People say things like "I'm no prude.  I'm for light wines and beer" or this bizarre encouragement to the chorus-girls:  "Hey, hey kids! Cut 'em deep and let it bleed."  The editing makes no sense and there's no overlap in sound -- when there's a cut from a musical number to dialogue, the sound of the music suddenly clicks off and the speeches begin muffled and dead as if broadcast from inside some subterranean chamber.  The musical interludes are filmed from way too far away to make any sense and they are grotesque in any event:  the hero dresses like a little boy in short pants and carries a massive sucker; in some scenes, the chorus girls wear towering helmets shaped like skyscrapers and strange stiff skirts also decorated with miniature city skylines.  People walk stiffly as if with ramrods up their asses.  Backstage where the girls dress and undress, the curtain is decorated with a huge staring eye.  The imagery makes no sense on any level at all.  There are curiously modern touches -- in one scene a woman badgers a telephone switchboard operator, her words superimposed in the manner of Robert Altman's sound design, over other unrelated dialogue.  The sequences that rely on dialogue are very long, static, and tedious.  

The film exhibits a remarkable characteristic of very early talking pictures.  Fejos was a very accomplished director with an eloquent camera style.  But the talking picture form seems to have completely demolished his self-confidence.  The need to make the picture tell a story with a dialogue seems to have utterly destabilized the film's mise-en-scene.  Not only do the dialogue sequences fail, even the visual flourishes seem oddly haphazard and lackluster.  It's as if Fejos has, more or less, forgotten how to make a movie -- even the purely pictorial scenes are edited poorly and ruined by the grandiosity of the sets.  This is unfortunate because there are some bravura sequences before the opening credits:  the camera is poised over Times Square, a million neon lights are flashing and blinking.  Then, we see a strange model of the area, a miniature complete with streetcars and tiny brightly liet marquees.  A giant strides through this miniature city a little like Godzilla on a rampage -- in a superimposed close-up, we see the giant cackling obscenely.  Who knows what this means?  But it's an impressive way to begin a movie.    

 

The Last Performance

The Last Performance or The Twelve Swords is a movie directed by Paul Fejos in 1929.  The picture was lavishly produced as silent film and, then, remade in a sound version.  Both the silent and sound versions as shown in the United States are lost.  Indeed, the film was considered entirely lost until a negative turned up in a private collection in Denmark.  The Danish print is entitled De Tolv Klinger.  With subtitles translating Danish intertitles into English, the film has been released on the Criterion CD featuring Fejos' Lonesome.(and his 1929 picture experimenting with Technicolor, Broadway).  Fejos is an interesting director and The Last Performance, although rather faded and murky, is quite legible.  The movie contains some fascinating sequences, although it's clearly a minor production -- the film as released in the Danish version is an hour long.  (It seems clear that, perhaps, a reel of film is missing although I couldn't tell precisely, or, even, imprecisely, what has been left out..)  The movie is mostly notable for performances of Conrad Veidt as a sinister magician (Erik) and Mary Philbin (Julie) as his lovely stage-assistant.

The movie was made by Universal under the supervision of Carl Laemmle and it is clearly beholding to that studio's earlier, and wildly, successful horror film, The Phantom of the Opera (1925).  In fact, the villainous, if pathetic and lovelorn protagonist of The Phantom of the Opera was named Erik as well and he memorably menaced Mary Philbin, the romantic interest in this film.  Accordingly, Laemmle and Universal come close to plagiarizing themselves with The Last Performance.  The plot is inconsequential.  A famous stage musician is in love with his assistant Julie.  A young man breaks into his apartment and, apparently, starving starts ravenously eating at the buffet in the room.  The young man is somehow associated with Julie, although this is the part of the film that seems to be missing.  Julie and the young man, Mark Royce, fall in love.  Mark clashes with Erik's rather fey and eccentric assistant, Buffo.  (There seems a suggestion that Buffo is homosexual and a rival with Julie for Erik's love.)  Erik invents an illusion involving a chest being pierced with 12 swords while an assistant is locked inside that casket.  When Buffo contrives to humiliate Erik publicly by exposing Julie's love for Mark, it's pretty clear that things are going to go badly wrong with the dangerous stunt involving the 12 swords.  Buffo gets locked in the trick-chest.  Mark slides the twelve swords into the casket.  When the casket is opened, Buffo is dead, fatally stabbed  (There's a bravura tracking shot showing the hysteria in the audience when the corpse is unveiled, the camera moving to the left to climb onto stage with some cops charging in that direction from the auditorium from which the crowd is fleeing.).  Mark is framed for the crime, a bit implausibly because the illusion is the invention of Erik who has supervised the gory stunt on stage.  A trial is convened for Mark and it doesn't go well.  (You know that a trial is headed in the wrong direction when the courtroom artists start doodling gallows and electric chairs.)  Erik demonstrates the trick for the Judge and confesses that he killed Buffo with a dagger concealed in his sleeve in order to frame Mark so that he could enjoy Julie.  (It wasn't clear to me why Erik confesses in open court -- seemingly, it has something to do with his suddenly selfless love for Julie.)  With the confession, the film abruptly ends.

The movie illustrates a feature of American silent films late in the period during which they were produced:  a sort of hypertropy or giganticism afflicts these movies.  They are way too large and expensively produced for their rather slender plots.  The Last Performance has the sort of narrative that we might associate with B-movie, something like the kinds of films Tod Browning directed with Lon Chaney.  But the sets are enormous and the numbers of extras vastly superfluous to the requirements of the story.  Erik performs in elaborate opera houses with hundreds of over-dressed people in the audience.  He lives in a house with marble steps that are a hundred feet high and ceilings that can never been seen --like the opera house, Erik's apartment has no top; the walls just soar out of sight in the frame.  (A corridor in Erik's apartment seems wide enough to accommodate truck traffic coming and going.)  In the courtroom sequence, another hundred spectators are crammed into a vast amphitheater, again with topless rooms and the judge sitting on a bench that seems the size of a freight car.  The film is overproduced on all levels.  There's a startling banquet scene in which the camera dollies along a table groaning with spectacular-looking food for about sixty feet.  In one scene, Buffo theatrically parts a curtain to show the lovers Julie and Mark embracing in another room that has no visible ceiling; when Erik is ushered forward to see the lovers (he has invited guests to the banquet to announce his betrothal to Julie), he casts a colossal shadow, bigger than a house that falls across the embarrassed couple.  The film is far more impressive visually than it needs to be.   

Anything starring Conrad Veidt is worth seeing.  Here he is tall and white as a ghost, cadaverous with flaring bony cheeks.  His eyes are enormous and sunk in pools of supernal darkness.  Mary Philbin is about half his height.  She comes up to the level of his naval.  She's very pretty and delicate with a pointed chin and, in some scenes, she's looks exactly like a very young and undernourished Laura Dern. Both Veidt and Philbin are capable of all sorts wildly histrionic acting.  In one amazing scene, Veidt acts with the veins in the side of his head -- this was the sort of thing silent movie stars could do.  As he receives bad news, he stoically gnaws on his lip while the veins on the side of his head throb and bulge to make his distress painfully visible.  

Lonesome

Paul Fejos' (pronounced Fay -yoosh) Lonesome was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. at Universal, shot between February and March in 1928 and, then, shelved until September of 1929.  (The pictures seems to have been withheld to prevent it from competing head-to-head with King Vidor's somewhat similar The Crowd).  By the time the picture was actually released, movies had cautiously embraced sound and so the film was retrofitted with a pre-recorded musical score and sound effects and, also, provided with three short sequences of dialogue -- they account for six minutes of the seventy minute film and seem contrived to demonstrate how stilted and ineffective early dialogue sequences could be; these static scenes of naive chatter are so bad as to seem some kind of joke, possibly the director's protest against the coming tyranny of sound.  The movie, surprisingly, was a box-office hit and very popular in Europe as well.  However, Fejos is an eccentric figure in the history of film.  He abandoned Hollywood for Europe and, later, abandoned the narrative cinema for a career as an anthropologist and documentary film maker working in places like Indonesia, Siam and Peru.  (Fejos was a restless spirit: he made some movies in his native Hungary, claimed to have worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and spent several years as a lab researcher specializing in biology before traveling to Hollywood to work for a couple seasons with "Uncle" Laemmle and his family at Universal.)  The movie was (poorly) remade as an all-talking feature in 1935 and, in an act of spectacular self-vandalism, the original negative of the film was destroyed by Universal in 1948 with the company's entire silent film archive -- with the exception, apparently, of the perennially popular Phantom of the Opera.  Never quite lost, the movie enjoyed a high reputation among European critics (both Kracauer and Michelangelo Antonioni admired the film) and it was restored by the Eastman House from a French nitrate print in 2012.  

Lonesome is a mash-up of the City Symphony film (lyrical quasi-documentary images of urban existence) and the Everyman slice of life picture -- movies like Vidor's The Crowd and Siodmak and Ulmer's Menschen am Sonntag.  It is shot and edited with great technical elan and represents the height of silent film visual fluidity andpictorial achievement.  The plot is spare, but effective.  A man named Jim rises, gets ready for work (he does some half-assed calisthenics) and rides the subway to his job as a punch-press operator.  A girl named Mary rises as well in her small room without running water or a toilet.  She gets dressed, eats at a cafeteria (while Jim goes to a diner) and, then, works for a half-day as a switchboard operator.  Both Jim and Mary are lonesome as the title shows us.  Both of them reject invitations to go to the beach with their co-workers (all of whom have girl- and boyfriends) and, after work, return to their small airless-seeming apartments.  It's Saturday, July 3 and the eve of a holiday.  Both Jim and Mary see a bandwagon on which African-American musicians are playing "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" and advertising that people should go to the amusement park at the beach.  The first half of the film is an elaborate example of the so-called Kuleshov effect -- parallel editing suggests to us the inevitable:  that is, that the two narrative tracks will merge when the young people inevitably meet.  

Mary and Jim ride a double-decker bus out to Luna Park.  A predatory masher affronts Mary and she threatens him with a deadly-looking hat pin that she wears in a flower on her bodice.  Jim sees Mary and wants to meet her.  He chases her around the crowds at Luna Park and, ultimately, they chat at the beach.  After swimming, they sit together in the sand until it is dark and the amusement park flares with its lights and colors behind them -- an impressive shot involving deep blue tint and bright flashes of red and orange light painted onto the film.  They wander together around the amusement park.  Jim wins a doll for Mary throwing baseballs to knock down  mechanical cats prowling on a simulated city alley fence.  They go into a kind of tunnel of love, "the Honeymoon Ride" pulled into the darkness on a cart by a sad-looking and tiny donkey.  While riding a rollercoaster named "The Jackrabbit Racer", they are separated and, indeed, danger threatens Mary -- the wheel of her wagon sparks into fire.  (This is an amazing effect, a speed-blur of  blood-red flame spinning wildly in the darkness.)  Mary faints from the smoke and fumes and, when Jim tries to reach her, he is dragged away by the cops.  He talks his way out of the predicament, but now has to find Mary among the thousands of people in the amusement park.  They haven't yet exchanged their real names -- Jim has briefly pretended to be a stockmarket tycoon and Mary says she is named "Mary Smith".  Jim can't reconnect with Mary at the chaotic fun fair and, then, there's a thunderstorm with torrential rain.  Both protagonists return to their apartment sad, lonely, and drenching wet.  Jim plays the song to which they danced at the amusement park, Irving Berlin's "Always".  Mary hears the song.  It turns out that they have been living in adjacent apartments all the time and, yet, never met or encountered one another -- such is the indifference of the great city.  There is a final embrace and the film ends.  

As I have said, the first third of the film plays as an example of the Kuleshov effect, enlivened by an tour de force montage of the two workplaces, the switchboard (with superimposed images of people calling one another on the telephone) and the factory where Jim labors at his press.  The images are a cascade of superimpositions with the image gliding right to left and vice-versa to show seamlessly the phone operators and the ballet mechanique of the rotating and lunging machines where Jim works.  (This right to left and vice-versa effect is accomplished by "optical printing" -- the first example of this technique in film history.)  The sequences in the middle of the film are crammed with hundreds of extras all wiggling around frenetically -- everyone is pressed shoulder to shoulder waving their hands in the air, throwing balloons and balls back and forth, frantically embracing and wrestling and pushing and pulling, people spinning in ring-around-the rosy dances, a wild Dionysian display of activity that becomes increasingly oppressive and frenzied as the film progresses.  The crowd scenes take place in incongruous showers of confetti and streamers and make no sense realistically -- it's the kind of ecstatic furor that one sees in paintings by Paul Cadmus, for instance, of crowds at Coney Island and its beaches.  In one scene, Mary loses her antique wedding ring, an heirloom from her mother.  But the lost is found -- a little kid picks up the ring and is playing with it.  The rescue of the ring seems implausible in light of the enormous crowds and the chaos on the beach.  Later, when Jim and Mary consult a spooky fortune-teller, he seems to describe a happy life for Mary with a man who may not be Jim.  This sets up the last third of the film involving Jim's attempt to find Mary who like her ring has gone missing in the nocturnal orgy of the amusement park.  The last part of the movie is abundantly nightmarish and, indeed, seems most similar to the sort of anxiety dreams that everyone has -- I have gone somewhere with someone, but they are now missing and so is my car and how will I ever get back home?  This part of the movie packs a genuine emotional wallop -- we're invested in the characters and want to see them together but how can this possibly happen given the thousands of people milling around in darkness that is further complicated by an immense and torrential downpour with lightning blasting beneath the stylized towers of Manhattan?  The new dimension of sound is invoked to re-connect the characters so that the film can have a happy, if slightly unconvincing ending.  

The Criterion disk containing the movie has an excellent commentary track and Lonesome is continuously interesting and chockful of fabulous special effects.  Ultimately, the movie is impressive but not all that interesting and, probably, noteworthy mostly as an example of one of those rare confluences in which technical innovation and, even, experimental cinema pleased the general movie-going public.  The picture is an antique but worth seeing if you have an interest in film history.  

Three Brothers

Near the end of Francesco Rosi's elegiac and troubled Three Brothers (1981), a little girl finds an egg that a hen has laid in the courtyard of a big farmhouse in southern Italy.  She excitedly presents the egg to her grandfather.  There is a brief close-up of the egg in her hand, a luminous alabaster orb.  The score for the film sobs and oozes sentiment.  The scene is strangely moving even though overtly symbolic.  Rosi has made something important and emotionally powerful out of the ordinary.

At the film's opening, we see an old man walking along a stony path in an arid landscape.  A fat pinkish-looking rabbit is grooming itself along the path.  A middle-aged woman appears and says that she tried to catch the rabbit to cook it for the old man but it was "afraid of death" and escaped.  The old man stoops and picks up the rabbit by its long ears.  The woman walks down the path, putting her foot on the biggest boulder protruding from the trail -- this is the kind of movie in which you notice details of this kind.  It seems odd that  the woman choses to set her foot on the big stone and not step over it.  The old man blinks and, then, the woman is gone.  A moment later, he sees her behind him, standing by a tree with old bench built around its trunk, the ancient rock ramparts of a village behind her.  She vanishes again.  The old man puts the rabbit down and it ambles away.  Later, we see the old man sending three telegrams to each of his three sons to tell them that their mother has died.  

Three Sons is classically simple, built with the rugged austerity of the huge farmhouse where much of the action takes place, a windowless fortress with barns under the living quarters, exterior stone steps that look older than Pompeii, and a large vaulted granary above the chamber in which the old woman's corpse lies on a bed, two tall tapers at her black-shod feet, with local women keening in a kind of rhythmic chant around her body. The film's landscapes are indelible and the viewer is quickly oriented to both the plot and the terrain where the action occurs.  The old man's eldest son is a Judge in Rome about to accept a case involving terrorists who have killed several other judicial officers.  He is afraid and plans to send his family to the mountains so that they will not be threatened with assassination.  The old man's second son is a counselor at a  home for delinquent boys.  He is a kind man who worries about the poor and starving.  When he arrives in town, his first stop is the parish priest who remembers him with warmth.  He has two visions in the course of the film that are central to its meanings.  The third son is 20 years younger than the Judge.  He is married to a woman from Turin, a town to which he migrated from the impoverishes south (Apulia, I believe) to find work. This man works at a car factory and he is labor organizer, not averse to knocking heads when there is conflict with management.  (He says:  "I'm no terrorist.  I rough them up.  We don't kill anyone.")  This man, Nicola, is estranged from his wife -- she has been unfaithful, something that a "we Southerners" as he says can not tolerate.  (He has apparently been unfaithful himself although that is a different matter.).  A bit of a hot-head, Nicola pursues an old girlfriend in his native village.  The woman is anxious to have sex with him but not "on his bed" -- referring to her husband who is away working in Germany and who comes home twice a year:  for Christmas and during the month of August. The sexual encounter with the woman is thwarted and Nicola seems to go back to Turin where he fights with his wife, but, then, sleeps with her.  The status of this sequences is unclear -- either it is a daydream or an actual dream or, perhaps, a flash-forward.  Nicola has driven to his native village with his small daughter, Marta.  There's a peculiar sequence in which Marta has to go to the bathroom and Nicola simply pulls over on the side of the road, on a huge shapely viaduct, probably the worst place for this sort of thing you can imagine.  (I don't know why he doesn't just proceed to the next rest-stop.  Italian highways have many very nice rest stops with cafes, gas stations, and even formal restaurants every few miles.)  The little girl doesn't want to urinate with cars roaring by and so Nicola opens both doors on the side of the vehicle to provide a shield for the child.  This is an odd detail and I don't exactly know what Rosi intends by this scene -- perhaps, he is showing us Nicola's impetuous and impractical nature. Some critics have suggested that the little girl reincarnates her dead grandmother:  we see her sleeping in bed with her grandpa before the funeral and, in one startling scene, she explores the cavernous old farmhouse, discovering an old buggy in which her grandmother and grandfather traveled to the sea for their honeymoon.  During this trip, the bride lost her wedding ring in the volcanic sand on the beach.  The wedding ring is later found when the grandfather, here shown as a handsome young man, pours the sand through a sieve.  In the granary at the farmhouse, actually in an attic above the living quarters, Marta strips off her outer clothing and bathes, as it were, in the amber grain. (This rhymes with the flashback of the grandmother as a bride lolling about in the sand on the beach.)  Later the little girl finds an odd trapdoor through which she can peer down on the corpse of her grandmother in the room with the chanting women.  The symbolic center of the film involves Rocco's visions.  Rocco is the gentle and enigmatic brother who counsels the kids at the delinquency center.  In the film's first shot, we see what appears to be a battlefield strewn with filth where several large rats are feasting -- this is Rocco's dream and it seems to represent Italy in 1980.  Near the end of the movie, Rocco has a vision, also initially shot from a very low angle like his first dream:  many brooms and feet appear and all the garbage is joyfully swept away -- we see heaps of guns and bombs and syringes all swept into a heap by the whisks of brooms carried by the boys at the Reform School.  The scene of this vision shifts from a stylized backdrop of New York (greenbacks fall like snow) then Moscow (the Kremlin with winged commissars like angels circling the onion domes in an actual blizzard), and, at last, the bay of Naples with Vesuvius smoking in the background.  While Rocco is having this utopian dream, his brother the Judge imagines that the terrorists have assassinated him -- he is lying covered in blood in the back of Roman bus from which the other passengers flee screaming down the street.  

The film is full of strange, generous details.  The old man tells the little girl that people his age wake when the cock crows twice (that is around 4 in the morning); children her age wake when the donkey brays -- that is about seven.  He has no need of an alarm clock.  The little girl says that if she stays with him, perhaps, she will learn what he knows -- an image for the reconciliation of the perpetually divided north and south of Italy, a married couple that don't much like one another.  Nicola tells Marta that old people in small villages in the South are never alone because they have "their animals" -- we see that this is true:  a black dog always ambles alongside the old man.  In an amazing scene, Rocco rises, hearing doves cooing in the courtyard.  It's a little before dawn and he goes into the kitchen to make some coffee -- some of the interiors of the farmhouses look prehistoric, antediluvian.  Rocco goes to the window to see that the Judge and his younger brother have both ventured out into the court yard where there are hens and doves fluttering about.  He sees that both man are weeping and his shoulders also shake with emotion -- all of this captured in one impeccably framed shot.  In a flashback, we see an American tank crawling up a hill outside town.  The peasants have come out of their warrens -- the walls are all covered with Fascist graffiti.  The tank is blasting jazz -- "I can't give you anything but love" and the soldiers emerge, speaking Italian and calling the farmers their paesanos. The Judge visits his old wet-nurse and marvels at how small the fig-tree seems in her courtyard -- it's you that have become big, the elderly lady says.  

Everything is admirable about this film, but it leaves me slightly cold.  The movie sets up the conflicts between North and South, the old and the new, the dirty big cities full of dehumanized people and the small towns, terrorism and the gospel, but can't resolve them except, perhaps, in the metaphor of the egg held by the small child.  This isn't a criticism, necessarily, because some dualities are, in  fact, irreconcilable.  But the picture is extremely didactic and schematic as well. The small details that I have mentioned (and there are many others as well) cut against the grain of the speechifying but the brothers seem in some respects to be mere ciphers, symbols for certain aspects of Italian society.  The hellish poverty in southern Italy is invisible or, perhaps, merely very, very photogenic -- I can't fault Rosi for not emphasizing this; he addressed this theme in his earlier film, Christ stopped at Eboli.  But the village does seem a bit idealized.  Some of the scenes are just naked debate in which characters state propositions that the filmmaker wants you to absorb -- the redoubtable Tonino Guerro wrote the argumentative script with Rosi.  There is no doubt that Rosi was one of the world's great directors, too little known in the United States.  His majestic and unsettling Salvatore Giuliano is probably the greatest film ever made about the Mafia, but even in that masterpiece the picture settles in to an instructive (and rather tutorial) mode during its last third.  I've seen several of his pictures and they are all superb, but I find them emotionally remote.  This is probably a defect in my own sensibility. 

Your Honor

 In the seventh episode of the Showtime original series Your Honor, Judge Michael Desiato comes home to a surprise birthday party.  Desiato has been managing a horrifying personal crisis that has compelled him to perform a number of unethical and, even, criminal acts.  He's on the verge of an emotional collapse, but Desiato, brillliantly played Bryan Cranston, is a skillful liar and, even, more effective at concealing his overwrought emotional state.  And, so, he grins at his new girlfriend, glad-hands with a couple of shady local politicians, and embraces his troubled teenage son, Adam.  Just as the birthday boy is blowing out the candles on his luminous-looking cake, the family's old dog staggers into the gathering and vomits our a porridge of human brains on the floor.  Desiato glares at the pooch who seems to be suitably mortified  (In this show, even the dog acts up a storm.).  You couldn't imagine a worse climax to a party.  Then, episode 7 (named, by the way, "Episode Seven") cuts to black.

In 1797, Immanuel Kant penned a famous essay entitled On a Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives.  In this memorable text, Kant argues that "The Truth is a  formal duty of man toward each other."  Since lying could never be elevated to an universaL principle, telling lies is always forbidden.  Kant struggles with this outcome, a logical consequence of his work that flows from the so-called "categorical imperative".  One of the problems that he addresses is the so-called "murderer at the door" hypothetical:  someone comes to the door with a loaded pistol and says that if George is at home, he intends to blow out his brains.  Does the person answering the door have to tell the truth that George is cowering somewhere inside the house?  Your Honor demonstrates the consequences of lying when it seems that there is no other course but to prevaricate in order to save someone's life.  Simply put, lies lead to your dog barfing puking brains at your birthday party.  This seems a bit unlikely, but the Showtime crime series makes this outcome seem plausible.

Your Honor is relentlessly grim and depressing.  It is also extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful.  Right now, it's the best series (to my knowledge) on television.  I temper my superlatives because there is great TV being made everywhere right now and, probably, there is some Finnish or Taiwanese series better than Your Honor (a show that is, in fact, based on precursor Israeli Tv program called Kvem) of which I know nothing and may possibly never learn about.  But, among the TV shows that I follow, Your Honor is superior in all respects.  The show presents a series of misfortunes that continue to ramify, an initial lie expanding beyond it initial limits into the community and remorselessly causing all kinds of awful collateral damage.  Some sequences in the show put a knot into your stomach and leave it there.

Within the first ten minutes, Your Honor establishes its nightmarish premise.  A young man named Adam is visiting a squalid neighborhood in New Orleans, apparently the place where his mother may have been murdered a year earlier.  The young man encounters some local hoodlums and has an asthma attack as he is driving his car.  As he reaches for his inhaler, he loses control of the car for a moment and smashes head-on into a motorcyclist.  The kid on the cycle has his skull smashed open and he dies in the gutter.  Adam is too terrified and (literally) short of breath to successfully complete a 911 call that he places.  And, so, he flees the scene of the accident, transforming a moment of carelessness into a felony hit-and-run.  In his panic, he leaves various clues lying around the accident scene that point to his identify.  

Adam is the son of the highly regarded and honorable Judge Desiato.  When Adam tells his father what he has done, the Judge hugs his boy and, then, drive him down to law enforcement to arrange for him to be taken into custody.  So far so good (or bad, depending how you view these things.)  But at the police station, Desiato sees the cops consoling a bereaved family -- these are the parents of the dead motorcyclist, the capo of New Orleans' most brutal and violent mob, Jimmy Baxter, and his wife, who has been driven half-insane by grief.  Desiato has good reason to not sacrifice his son to the mobster and his minions and, so, he devises a scheme to cover-up the killing.  Here is where the Kant's absolute prohibition against lying comes into play.  Desiato loves his son and wants to prevent his inevitable murder at the hands of the Baxter crime family.  So he contacts a ebullient, but, possibly, disreputable wardheeler and arranges for the hit-and-run vehicle to be crushed out of existence.  To accomplish this the wardheeler sends an African-American kid with his own gangster affiliations (he's part of the Desire mob) to steal the car and transport it to the salvage yard for destruction.  But there's institutional racism in New Orleans and the poor kid gets arrested for "driving while Black" or something on that order.  The car is linked to the killing and the Black hoodlum gets framed for the hit-and-run.  This has a series of horrific consequences:  the Baxter mob assumes that the killing is part of a gang war and firebombs the home of the boy incarcerated for stealing the car -- this results in the incineration of the young man's mother and his two little sisters.  Baxter's other son, a vicious criminal himself is at Angola penintentiary.  His mother pulls some strings and arranges for her son to beat to death the Black kid framed for the hit-and-run.  Ultimately, Jimmy Baxter (Michael Stuhlbarg) concludes mistakenly that Judge Desiato is, in fact, the person responsible for the hit-and-run.  From this point, the plot proliferates into various separate narrative strands.  Adam, the actual hit and run driver, is having a covert affair with his High School teacher -- I'm not sure where this leads.  Adam has also met the dead gangster's daughter and seems to be falling in love with her --this is a ridiculous plot twist in some respects, but it's extremely effective.  Jimmy Baxter's wife  (and the dead boy's mother) keeps stirring up havoc -- she makes Lady Macbeth look kind and gentle.  Meanwhile Judge Desiato has embarked on a love affair with his former law clerk, a much younger woman.  There's a public defender (fired from her big time law job because of her interest in defending the poor) who sets out to unravel the mystery.  And the situation is complicated briefly by a blackmailer -- it's his brains brought home in Judge Desiato's pant's cuff that makes the family dog sick at the birthday party.  

All of this is filmed in Cable Tv's best style.  The film making is powerfully realistic (so it seems if you set aside the convoluted Shakespearian plot) and exploits the atmospheric elements of the Big Easy.  The acting is fine on all levels -- Michael Stuhlberg is particularly frightening as the grief-stricken mobster. The dialogue is snappy and memorable.  When the penny-ante blackmailer is killed, Desiato has to clean up the mess -- hence, the brain in his pant's cuff.  He remarks that it is his birthday.  "I think we've gone well beyond irony here," the mobster's cool redhaired Irish assassin says.  "So I guess everyone's a fucking philosopher," Desiato remarks -- I think this earns him a quick, efficient beating.  The camera style is "invisible" in the sense that the narrative and acting is central to the enterprise, not the hyper-realistic visuals.. The show doesn't indulge in showy arias or music videos -- everything moves along at an efficient and brisk clip.  The show depends, of course, on Bryan Cranston -- there's something suspicious about how quickly and blithely he takes to lying.  It's, as if, improvising outrageous lies is a particular skill that he develops with lightning rapidity, as if he were born to this sort of conniving. But Cranston's character is also horrified at the result of his lies and, at times, we see his face contorted into a grimacing mask that look exactly the mask of tragedy adorning theaters in the good old days.  Cranston isn't afraid to show us the Judge's abject panic and his willingness to compromise all of his principles in order to save his son, an endeavor that seems to be doomed from the start.  

(I'm only halfway through the series, a program that has to be watched the old-fashioned way -- that is, one episode every week.  The next couple nights will be the most perilous for the program -- generally shows of this intensity flag substantially as filler is plowed into the narrative to delay the action until a return to form in the last several episodes.  We will have to see how things work out.  A young Black boy whose family has been killed by Baxter -- as a result of Desiato's lies -- is lurking about the edges of the action and I suspect he will assume importance as a kind of "spoiler" in the last act of this drama.)   

Try and Get Me (The Sound of Fury)

 Try and Get Me also known as The Sound of Fury is a remarkable film noir, like its director a victim of  the McCarthy-era blacklist.  Made in 1950, the picture is an ambitious work rife with novelistic detail.  The director, Cyril Endfield makes didactic points about poverty and crime, yellow journalism, and mob violence -- there is a great deal of preaching in this film, although the subjects of Endfield's sermons are perennially relevant; indeed, watching the film in the wake of the assault on the American Capitol on January 6, 2021 is revelatory -- the threats to our republic that Endfield anatomizes in this movie remain persistent and lethal to this very hour.

As if in recognition of the film's instructive tone, the movie begins with a blind preacher ranting about the end of days.  The man stands outside a church where a crowd has gathered to hear him condemn them as responsible for the evil in the world.  The tone is apocalyptic and disturbing -- there's no clear moral perspective:  we can't tell if the film sympathizes with the preacher or despises him and his alarming message.  The camerawork uses low angles to emphasize the blind man with ravaged eye-sockets raging against the sky.  He falls off his rostrum and tracts printed with his message are scattered on the sidewalk, trampled by the crowd in a shot that presages the equally apocalyptic imagery at the end of the movie.

A man named Howard Tyler is down on his luck.  He's unemployed and worried about his pregnant wife and his son back home.  He hitches a ride with a truckdriver, a narrative device that allows the scriptwriter to provide a lot of background in an economical fashion as the two men talk.  This sequence is shot in high contrast nocturnal black and white.  Characteristic of the film are odd little details, for instance, the truckdriver's insistence that men are trapped by women who force them to deny their fundamental natures.  At dawn, the truck driver drops Tyler off at his home in a small city that seems modeled on Sacramento or Bakersfield.  Tyler's wife and child (an unidealized spoiled little boy) are happy to see him back at home.  But Tyler's wife is clearly worried by his joblessness and has been denying herself pre-natal care to economize so she can feed the family.  They live in a sort of dilapidated bungalow with a a chicken coop in the desolate back yard.  Looking for work, Tyler runs into a charismatic man at a bowling alley.  The man buys him a drink and invites him to his apartment.  This guy is a flashy dresser, boastful, and, as he claims, popular with the ladies -- he's a predatory seducer.  Like Tyler, Jerry Slocum (the bowler) served in the war and claims that he spent most of the conflict chasing women.  Jerry is magnetic but sleazy -- he wears loud clothes and little short ties and he's obviously some kind of psychopath.  There's a peculiar homo-erotic subcurrent in the two men's relationship -- Jerry preens before the mirror that Howard holds for him and there's lots of banter about colognes and hair-styling.  As it turns out, Jerry, despite his affectations, is just a small-time hoodlum.  He specializes in armed robbery of gas stations and tourist motels.  Jerry needs a driver and Howard, desperate to make some money, reluctantly agrees to act as his accomplice.  Not at all integrated with this narrative are sequences focusing on a newspaper writer named Gil Stanton.  Like Howard, Gil is morally compromised -- his greed has led him to become associated as a columnist with a disreputable and sensationalist newspaper editor.  Gil is a college man and he lives luxuriously compared to his counterpart, poor Howard -- we see him at a barbecue, apparently roasting an entire lamb, with a beautiful and gracious wife and a best friend who is an Italian nuclear scientist prone to speaking in moral homilies.  Gil and Howard's stories proceed on separate tracks, but, of course, the plot promises to draw them together.

Howard participates in some robberies of mom and pop (literally) businesses that Gil exploits for columns claiming that the city is threatened by a crime wave.  Jerry Slocum, tiring of these penny-ante exploits, enlists Howard to help him kidnap the son of a wealthy man.  The kidnapping goes wrong and the young man is brutally murdered -- this takes place on an abandoned military base on what seems like an enormous midden of clam shells.  The dead man is thrown into a rancid-looking pool and Jerry persists in the plot, preparing a letter demanding ransom with the respect to their crime victim.  For some reason not completely clear to me, Jerry forces Howard to go with him on a double-date.  Jerry has a mercenary blonde-bombshell show-girl moll.  This woman enlists her manicurist, a mousy little dame who seems pathetically lonely, to be Howard's companion.  The couples go to a spectacularly vulgar night-club with a floor-show featuring half-naked girls and an aggressive insulting comedian who publicly humiliates Howard.  Howard, afflicted by guilt has become a drunk -- he's now pouring booze down his throat as an eye-opener.  Howard doesn't want to besmirch his wife with an admission of his crimes and so he goes to the pathetic, lonely manicurist's apartment and confesses to her that he was involved in the murder of the kidnapped young man  (The woman hopefully thinks Howard is trying to seduce her and the scene is a remarkable mixture of lust and sorrow).  Howard flees home and the cops chase him in a ridiculous and abject pursuit around his house into his chicken coop while his crying wife and little boy watch.  These sequences have a sickening power.  Howard is arraigned and thrown in the hoose-gow and the cops hunt Jerry down.  The film now enters its final and most didactic act.  A mob gathers to lynch Howard and Jerry.  Gil Stanton realizes that his incendiary columns on law and order have triggered the mob's fury.  (The Italian nuclear physicist, who has blood on his hands as well, has been hounding Gil about his journalistic ethics.)  A huge crowd gathers at the courthouse.  The sheriff lets the other inmates out so that they will not be slaughtered in the riot about to ensue.  The mob attacks the courthouse and, at first, is driven back by tear gas.  But someone hooks a firehose to a hydrant and sprays the cops on the courthouse steps, knocking them down, and the crowd surges into the jail, beating back its defenders in a number of scenes of brutal violence (it looks just like the attack on the American Capitol).  Jerry and Howard are seized by the mob and passed along the top of the screaming crowd.  Howard's little boy wakes up screaming from a nightmare.  There are some pious sentiments expressed about mob violence and the film ends.  

Try and Get Me is notable for its performances and small details that decorate its stark narrative.  Lloyd Bridges, eyes popping with maniacal fury, plays the part of Jerry Slocum and he is memorably sleazy but charming in a smarmy sort of way.  At the end of the film, when he is raging against both Howard and the mob, Bridges is genuinely frightening.  Frank Lovejoy plays Howard Tyler -- he's a hapless every man, fretting and sweating, his way through his scenes.  Lovejoy is someone who was in hundreds of movies and TV shows -- he's beefy and doesn't have matinee idol good looks,but you recognize him immediately.  There's a strong edge of hysteria to his performance -- this is characteristic of the early fifties; I think this strain of male madness may have something to do with pervasive post-traumatic stress disorder from combat in World War Two.  (You can see this edge of masculine hysteria in many of Jimmy Stewart's performance from this period -- Lovejoy is like a bargain basement Jimmy Stewart.)  The hapless manicurist and Howard's wife are both superb -- the manicurist is a shy girl and, when she has to pose next to the platinum blonde show-girl in the courthouse (the Press has stalked them to that place), she starts crying.  The movie is full of remarkable little details -- the murder scene on the huge pile of clam shells or whatever they are is extraordinary.  Tyler's wife has had a dream about giving birth to a little girl without any kind of pain.  After the little girl is born, mother and daughter go shopping together in this dream vision.  When the crowd gathers to storm the courthouse, they charge past the blind preacher.  The kidnap victim's car is found parked in a palm grove where a Mexican laborer is mucking around in an irrigation ditch -- the scene has an extraordinary documentary intensity.  Endfield portrays an American scene corrupted by constant representations of violence:  the little kids carry cowboy guns and shoot at one another incessantly.  In Howard's neighborhood, there is a single TV set and everyone gathers in the darkness to watch it -- what are they watching?  We heard wild whoops and gun shots -- it's a TV western, of course.  The film is marred by preaching, but some messages, I think deserve sermons and I didn't really find the picture's themes of empathy and compassion offensive in any way.  The movie rejects the notion of personal responsibility -- we are all creatures of our environment, culture, and the economic system.  

Cyril Endfield (1914-1995) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  He attended Yale and worked in Hollywood until blacklisted in the early  'fifties.  He, then, directed films in England.  (Lloyd Bridges was also blacklisted).  Endfield made many pictures -- some of them are well-esteemed now, including the British noir The Limping Man and Hell Drivers which was awarded a BAFTA prize for best screenplay in 1957.  Endfield's picture Zulu (1964) shot during the height of apartheid with thousands and thousands of native extras is one of the greatest combat pictures ever made -- it is probably racist, however, and I think not likely to be publicly screened although you can see it on DVD.  Anyone who saw this picture as a child has never forgotten it.  His allegorical Sands of the Kalahari (1965) is also a movie that has remained in my memory ever since I saw it on TV in the late sixties.  His films, I think, deserve re-evaluation.   

  

The Glass Key

 The Glass Key (1942) is a proto-film noir that reminds us how strange and perverse movies of this sort could be.  The movie is not particularly impressive but contains some very weird scenes, particularly in its second half.  Some of these scenes are so bizarre and, indeed, disturbing that they provide some rationale for me to cautiously recommend the film to viewers who like classic crime films.

In the thirties, Dashiell Hammett wrote a number of highly regarded crime novels.  Hammett had been a private dick himself and he composed his books in a distinctly hard-boiled style that was highly influential in the genre.  Like other practitioners of this kind of fiction, Hammett's books are full of colorful underworld figures and lots of violent action.  The books also have fantastically complex plots that don't necessarily translate well to cinema.  I understand that movie scenarios adapting most of Hammett's books eliminate characters and prune the labyrinthine branching forks upon forks of subplots into something manageable as a ninety minute movie.  Hammett's novels were bestsellers and so, frequently, made into films.  The Glass Key was first produced as a movie in 1935, a film that is reputed to be pretty good.  Universal had a big box-office success with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire, released the year before, and so those performers were recruited for the 1942 remake of the The Glass Key.  These properties were "hot" in the early forties -- John Huston had just scored a big box-office hit with his adaptation of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, also, as it happens, a remake of an earlier version of the story.  

Hammett had a misogynistic edge -- his books feature wicked women who seduce men into violent enterprises for their own mercenary motives and, then, are punished by the end of the film  Veronica Lake has a role of this kind in The Glass Key.  Hammett also tends toward Gothic plots involving cruelty and betrayal within families -- some of his novels develop themes that Roman Polanski would exploit in his neo-Noir Chinatown with its monstrous and cruel pater-familias.  He also seems to have had a curious and perverse interest in homosexual villains.  There is some outrageously gay material in The Glass Key that has to be seen to be believed.  The story in The Glass Key is to complex to reprise and any attempt at reconstructing the narrative would be, I think, prone to error -- I'm not at all sure I understood the motivations of the characters in some scenes (and the motives of some of the characters are also irrational, sadistic, or insane in a number of sequences in the movie).  It suffices to understand that the film centers on a corrupt gangster who manages a league of voters; this is Paul Matvig.  Matvig comes equipped with a sister, Opal, whom he bullies; she's in love with a foppish gambler and libertine, Taylor Hunter.  Hunter, in turn, is the son of a reforming politician who is seeking a second term as governor of some unnamed and highly corrupt State.  Hunter, a respectable-looking middle-aged gent, has a daughter named Janet (Veronica Lake).  There is a cowardly and crooked DA and a newspaper publisher, also cowardly and corrupt, named Matthews.  These people are in the pocket of another gangster named Varner.  Varner is the sworn enemy of Paul Matvig -- this is because Matvig is in love with Janet Hunter and wants to impress her by attacking the criminal enterprises of Varner (which will inure to the benefit of the reform candidate for governor, Janet Hunter's father.  When the poor abused Opal Matvig spends time with her lover, the callous and perverse Taylor Hunter, Paul Matvig opposes their liaison.  Taylor Hunter ends up beaten to death and all eyes are on Paul Matvig for committing what is, in effect, an honor slaying of Opal's paramour.  The vicious gangster, Varner, wants to implicate Matvig in the murder of Taylor Hunter and has Matvig's factotum and tough-guy buddy, Ed Beaumont (played by Alan Ladd) kidnapped.  A couple of thugs beat Beaumont to a pulp in a scene with odd homo-erotic andsado-masochistic undertones.  (One of the thugs played by William Bendix seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with Beaumont and is constantly cuddling him and whispering endearments.) There are more complications and inscrutable plot developments.  The movie manages to be fast-moving and strangely dull at the same time.  Janet Hunter tries to seduce Ed Beaumont.  Beaumont, meanwhile, who is posited as irresistable catnip to all the females in the movie cuts a wide swath through the other women who cross his path -- including a very lusty and appealing nurse who cares for him after the beating administered by the seemingly gay thug played by Bendixen.  Recovered enough to be mobile, Beaumont confronts Varner at some sort of manor house (and gets slugged again by his boyfriend).  Beaumont cuckolds the crooked newspaperman with his sluttish wife, canoodliing with her on couch as the poor middle-aged publisher watches.  The publisher kills himself and, then, there's some kind of narrative maneuvers involving the dead man's will and a confession or something on that order.  (It makes sense in the moment but is so convoluted as a plot point that you can't keep it in your mind five minutes after the scene is over.) There are some more betrayals and, then, a scene in which Ed Beaumont declines Janet Taylor's sexual overtures with poor Paul Matvig watching -- Matvig sees that Beaumont, his loyal gangster buddy, is smitten with Janet Taylor (whom he loves as well) and so nobly steps aside so that Beaumont can enjoy the lady's favors.  There's an intervening homosexual theme with Bendixen again stroking and caressing Beaumont preparatory to "knocking all of his teeth out."  Bendixen gets betrayed by his boss, Varner, for reasons that are not too clear and he exits the film in handcuffs.  This is too bad because Bendixen is, by far, the best thing in the movie and his scenes with Alan Ladd are astonishing.  (Bendixen has an unruly mop of hair and whines that no one really loves him.)  In the end, the true killer of Opal's dissolute boyfriend is revealed but by this time no one really cares about the resolution of this plot point which has become more and more remote as the film proceeds.  Beaumont woos Janet Taylor by framing her for a killing, a stratagem that forces the real murderer to reveal himself.  Beaumont, like all of Hammett's heroes expresses a sour strain of misogyny -- "I was worried we were gonna have to hang the gal to make him (the true murderer) crack", a romantic statement that strangely enough endears Beaumont to the gal (Janet Taylor).

It's all hokum, of course, and the film is directed in an exceedingly pedestrian style by Stuart Heisler.  Hammett's pathological sexuality is everywhere on display -- the cuckolding scenes are very vivid and the outrageous homosexual banter between Bendixen and the fey Alan Ladd is memorably perverse.  Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are grotesque.  Ladd has a girlish face, the mask of a Kabuki-theater maiden.  He has no whiskers to speak off and the lower half of his visage is completely immobile -- he always speaks through clenched lips without moving his mouth.  The upper half of his face is equipped with slit eyes and very expressively mobile eyebrows that are always arching upward.  He's mostly inexpressive, has no emotional range, and seems to be very, very small -- when Bendixen (who is a bit like Ernest Borgnine) gives him a love-tap he falls over immediately.  Veronica Lake is hideous.  Her face is totally impassive and seems always out of focus.  Her emotions are a weird blur.  She's six inches shorter than Alan Ladd so must be some kind of pygmy.  Her big disproportionate white head is half the size of her scrawny body that has no shoulders and no hips but a big pair of breasts like grapefruits suspended from the bony front her body.  She looks awful and can't act either.  There is no chemistry between her and Alan Ladd; in fact, the two of them seem to despise one another.  Brian Donleavy is good as the avuncular and cheerfully corrupt Matvig.  Varner and the other assorted thugs are all effectively menacing.  It's not much of a movie but, it certainly, has its moments.  

Games

 Curtis Harrington was an interesting filmmaker.  Although he had the spirit of an underground avant-garde director, Harrington was also drawn to pulp and exploitation movies.  He imparts to his genre films an unique and perverse sensibility.  His movies always look fantastic and they are full of unexpected touches.  In some way, his Hollywood work resembles Val Lewton's stylish horror films from the early forties, although the shocks are presented with a more detached, and campy flair.  Harrington always wants to amuse you first; his horror is always highly aestheticized and secondary to the wit.  Openly gay, Harrington pictures have a distinctly homosexual tone -- this is evident in an early scene in his picture Games (1967) in which James Caan wears a fake moustache that is peeled off his upper lip by his wife (played by Katherine Ross) and planted on her face for their kissing sequence.  At the start of Games, an odd-looking fop is delivered to a party hosted by a depraved young couple, Jennifer and Paul (Ross and Caan).  The fop arrives in horse and carriage to a town house a couple blocks from Central Park.  The scene is redolent of Lewton's pictures ostensibly shot in New York City, particularly Cat People and The Seventh Victim, a movie set in Greenwich Village.  The fop is ushered into a strange party full of perverse looking people.  Paul says that he and his wife have been "dead for three years" but maintain themselves alive by buzzing and sparking Tesla coils and arcing electricity.  "Galvanism!" Paul declares as he distributes electrically charged wands and orbs to his audience.  The fop, who really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, preens like Quentin Crisp or Oscar Wilde.  All of this takes place in a town-house decorated opulently with modernist art particularly Roy Lichtenstein's pop art canvases and various examples of op (or optical) art.  Heavy, funereal antiques are mingled with taxidermied ravens and occult statuary.  The art design in by Alexander Golitzin, the art director who worked on over 300 movies during his long career with the studios, including many of Val Lewton's films.  The first half hour of Games is startling and fantastically eccentric.  However, gradually Harrington has to settle into his suspense-thriller plot and, to be honest, the rest of the film plays out as an inferior variation on Henri Clouzot's Les Diaboliques.  Although the film is quite frightening and never less than engaging, nothing in last hour can quite match the bizarre and grotesque elements in the first third of the film.  

Paul and Jennifer are a young couple supported, primarily, it seems by Jennifer's wealth.  Paul has bought a fine art collection funded by Jennifer's money.  We don't know what Paul does for a living although he wears a suit and sometimes goes to a "club" where gets massages from hunky masseuses in a sort of steam room.  One day, a strange older woman, Mrs. Schindler (played by a very plump Simone Signoret (she was in Les Diaboliques 12 years earlier) appears at the home.  The woman is selling cosmetics door-to-door in this very tony neighborhood, seems perplexed and even a bit deranged -- she rants about meeting "quotas" -- and collapses in the townhouse.  Later, after being revived, she insinuates herself into the household.  She offers to pay for her room and board with a pair of antique dueling pistols, apparently weapons with which one of her past husband's killed himself during a friendly bout of Russian roulette.  Mrs. Schindler says that "three times" she had to escape by clambering over barbed wire and this was something that she had come "to love."  Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with her.  Mrs. Schindler mocks the perverse games that the couple sometimes plays as being without any consequence.  (The couple have a pinball machine in which points are awarded for running down pedestrians, a sort of precursor to video games like Grand Theft Auto.)   Mrs. Schindler encourages the couple to play at Jennifer cuckolding Paul with a handsome if dimwitted grocery delivery boy.  But this sport goes too far and Paul accidentally shoots the delivery boy in the eye with one of the dueling pistols.  (The scenes with the delivery boy and Jennifer are shot with mise-en-scene derived from mid-sixties hard-core porn although without the actual penetration footage.)  The couple scheme to conceal the corpse.  They own a George Segal plaster cast of a man that they display with their Lichtenstein prints and this inspires Paul to put the dead body in a plaster-cast similar to the white statuary made by Segal.  (This foreshadows the scene in Scorsese's After Hours in which the hero is trapped inside a Segal-like plaster cast; this is the movie in which Cheech Marin says that you can tell the value of post-modern art by how ugly it is -- the uglier, the move valuable.)  Throughout these scenes, there are clues that the dead man may not be entirely at rest -- we get the sense that he is haunting the large three-story (with cellar) townhouse.  There is a dumbwaiter used to stow the gory body in one scene and this device later triggers inexplicably as if to convey the living corpse right into Jennifer's bed and bathroom.  Mrs. Schindler isn't helping things by doing eerie Tarot readings and, later, obtaining a crystal ball from which she prophecies all sorts of dire things.  In the end, as in the Clouzot film, the corpse reappears seeking vengeance. The Tesla coils and Jacob's Ladder's all spurt into operation.  And there's a final twist that the audience has seen coming for, at least, half of the movie.  

This is all standard genre stuff but replete with baroque details.  The ghost whistles "London Bridge is Falling Down" (because this was whistled by the delivery boy before he was killed).  There are many shots staged in mirrors that are similar to the tightly woven visual apparatus that drives Fassbinder's films, shiny glass knitting the spaces together in a compelling if illogical way.  An open window is full of wind chimes.  Pinpoint lighting flares on certain details in the fine art decorating the walls of the mansion -- at one point, a character stands in a threshold flanked by a canvas lit so that we can see only one of the brutish-looking hands of the painted figure.  It's all very stylish and ingenious and the story, although predictable enough, holds together reasonably well.  Signoret is effectively eccentric with an edge of hysteria.  James Caan and Katherine Ross are mere children.  They are the weakest part of the film -- it is hard to imagine them as perverse as they pretend to be and the film would be better served by older, more jaded, actors in the central roles  -- maybe Rip Torn and Janet Leigh.  (Harrington has said that he wanted to cast Marlene Dietrich in the Schindler role).   The film is diverting and it is certainly professionally made and there is always something interesting to see in every shot.  Midway through the film Caan develops his trademark strut, something a little like John Wayne's ambling gait although this is not in evidence in the earlier scenes in the movie and one wonders if Harrington taught him how to walk this way.    

 

Waxworks (Das Wachensfigurenkabinett)

 Paul Leni's 1924 film Das Wachsenfigurenkabinett (literally The Cabinet of Waxwork Figures, an allusion The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is the last great monument of German Expressionist film, a style that Pauline Kael called "monstrous", and a movie that is probably more interesting to review and analyze than to watch.  Designed to within an inch of its life, and laden with intricate visual leit motifs all rhyming thematically with one another, the film is fantastically complex visually and has been enormously influential -- but it is also claustrophobic, stylized to the point of emotionally inert abstraction, and, although inspired, oddly airless and dead.  On first watching, the film's oppressive decor and wild-eyed pantomime put me to sleep.  Viewed with commentary, the movie comes fitfully alive.  It must be seen by anyone interested in film history.  You won't feel any affection for this film but it is certainly admirable in its own icy way.

Silent films were less like today's movies and more like kits of footage that projectionists could assemble in various ways to please their audiences.  There is no definitive version of Waxworks today.  The original negative burned in a freak fire in 1925 and, in fact, the German version of the movie was probably projected with the sequences in a different order than the film screened in Britain.  The picture has been reconstructed from the British print which is largely intact, although, nonetheless, about 25 minutes shorter than what was premiered in Berlin.  (Apparently, the frame story was more elaborate but the three episodes in this anthology or omnibus film also were each slightly longer.)  Even as originally projected, the film, in keeping with its expressionistic aesthetic, was ungainly and disproportionate -- a long sequence set in Baghdad and involving Haroun al-Rashid dominates the picture and accounts for more than half of its length.  There is sequence involving Ivan the Terrible that obviously influenced Eisenstein immensely.  That sequence is about half the length of the Baghdad scenes.  The final episode involving "Spring-heeled Jack", the name inexplicably used in the British version for Jack the Ripper, is very short and non-narrative, a kind of abstract summary of themes developed as plot in other parts of the film.  A fourth episode involving the Neapolitan Rinaldo Rinaldini, a brigand, was never shot, although the sequence is set up by images showing the waxwork of that character in the "cabinet".  The picture ran aground on the reef of the deadly German inflation in November 1924 and the Rinaldini episode couldn't be shot -- money (or, at least, currency) ran out.  The film's director, Paul Leni, is undoubtedly one of the ugliest men ever to work in movies -- he has a shapeless body and a face like a goblin adorned with two huge and pointed ears similar to those that we see on the sides of Nosferatu's skull.  Leni was lured to Hollywood where he was very successful and there directed one of the last great flowerings of Expressionist film in America, 1928's The Man who Laughs (with Conrad Veidt).  Leni pioneered the genre of horror-comedy with pictures like The Cat and the Canary.  He neglected an abscessed tooth and died of blood poisoning in 1929 when he was only 44.  

In Waxworks, a young poet (played by Wilhelm Dieterle who was later to direct many films in the United States) is wandering through a phantasmagoric fun-fair, a sort of amusement park that is, in fact, called "Luna Park".  The poet is lured into a museum of waxworks where he meets a beautiful young girl and her rather sinister, derelict-looking father, the proprietor of the place.  The poet is retained to write stories about three of the waxworks -- Haroun al-Rashid (played by a very fat and impish Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (played by Conrad Veidt), and Spring-heeled Jack (Werner Krauss from Caligari).  (We see Rinaldo Rinaldini's waxwork but there is no intertitle introducing that figure -- he was to played by Dieterle.)  Haroun's arm is broken off and the young poet, inspired by that injury to the waxwork, dashes off a story about the Baghdad Caliph.  This tale is extremely perverse and is intended to be broadly comical.  A poor baker, enamoured with his beautiful wife Zarah, is making bread in his oven in a sort of organic cavern at the base of a bulbous structure sprouting onion-dome minarets like tumors.  Atop this odd structure, Haroun is playing chess with his Grand Vizier.  The smoke from the bread-oven upsets him and he demands that his Vizier send the poor baker "to Allah" by beheading him.  The Vizier confronts the baker and sees that he has a beautiful wife.  The Vizier, then, reports on the woman to the Caliph and, that night, Haroun sneaks out to seduce the Baker's wife.  Haroun's nocturnal prowls involve the huge fat man leaving a sort of doll of himself in his bed so that he will not be reported as absent from the palace.  Haroun has a magic, wish-bestowing ring and the baker, who has had a bad fight with his wife, sets out into the night to steal the ring.  Haroun courts the Baker's wife in a hole that looks like the greasy interior of someone's intestinal tract.  The Baker enters Haroun's sleeping chamber and hacks off the arm of the doll in order to seized the ring.  Haroun's minions pursue the Baker who escapes in a spectacular scene -- he hurls himself off the round dome of a minaret onto a palm tree that breaks his fall as he drops about a hundred feet to the ground.  The Baker finds his wife being seduced by the Caliph.  But instead of being angry, he seems flattered.  Haroun winks at him and, then, spreading his vast cloak, enwraps the baker and his unfaithful wife in a close embrace -- the man and woman cling to the Caliph's huge belly.  This is all bizarrely perverse.  The set design is hallucinatory -- Baghdad is like an enormous bloated body full of weird sockets and indentations arranged in a kind of spiral pattern. The Caliph's enormous turban is about five feet tall.  Everyone has to duck and crouch to creep through tubes in the set -- it's as if the film is shot inside one of El Greco's liquescent backdrops.  The lighting is astounding and everything is brilliantly staged and, yet, completely lifeless.  The poet writes himself and his sweetheart, the Waxworks proprietor's daughter, into the scenarios that he invents.  In the Baghdad sequence, the poet appears as the baker and the girl is his frisky wife.

Ivan the Terrible is an oriental monster as well.  He has a torture chamber in which his Court Poisoner is slowly killing people -- he calculates the time of his victims' death to the second and, then, uses barbell-shaped crystal hourglasses to torment them with the image of their lives slipping away as the sand drizzles from the upper to the lower chamber of the time-piece.  Offended by Ivan, the Court Poisoner makes a hourglass for the despot and labels it with his name.  (The torture chamber is like something from Monty Python, a black pit in which ancient bearded wretches in chains are strung up on wet, dripping block walls.)  Ivan goes to a wedding party to exercise his "first-night" rights with the Bride.  Knowing that he is pursued by assassins, he makes her father wear his crown and as he goes outside the monumental hulking banquet hall, the old man is shot with an arrow and dies in the snow.  (The film is full of doubles and doubles of doubles -- Haroun al-Rashid is doubled by a waxwork and the doll that occupies his bed when he embarks on his nocturnal forays.)  Ivan seizes the young woman.  He drags her to his bedchamber where he sleeps inside a cocoon-like fistula, something similar to a melted imperial crown.  She resists him and so Ivan has her fiancee (the poet) tortured in his baroque torture chamber.  The young woman relents, but, at that moment, Ivan sees the hourglass with his name inscribed on it and promptly goes completely mad with terror -- he thinks he can keep his life from ebbing away by continuously turning and re-turning the hourglass.  In fact, he doesn't even need the hourglass -- in the end, he just rotates his hands around empty air.

The final scene is set in the Cabinet of Waxworks.  Spring-heeled Jack comes alive and hunts down the poet, ultimately stabbing him in the heart.  The poet wakes up with his pen poking his breast.  It's all been a nightmare.  He embraces the girl and the film ends.  This last sequence comes close to experimental cinema -- the figures appear in a pictorial maze of superimpositions with the slavering, goggle-eyed Jack relentlessly hunting them through the glistening light and profound shadow of the labyrinth of images.  Space has been completely abolished; there's no up or down, foreground or background.  It's all a palimpsest of superimposed pictures.  

The movie is full of bizarre touches -- for instance, Ivan's waxwork is a kind of automaton.  Individual frames of the film have an awesome,  tallowy half-melted beauty.  Everything seems to be melting like wax.  There are curiously sexualized motifs -- the baker kneads his dough with a sort of orgiastic enthusiasm while the vizier, unseen behind him, simulates his movements by whetting the blade of his scimitar.  The baker seizes the breasts of his wife with his hands covered in dough and leaves globs of the white stuff on her bosom, something that triggers their quarrel.  In the scenes involving Ivan the Terrible, the wedding party is gathered under a vast lowering ceiling made of huge painted and primitively carved beams.  It's all grotesque and barbaric.  Everything seems to be shot inside the body-cavity of some enormous rotting corpse.  I'm happy someone did this once.  You would not want to see this done more than once.