The Last Picture Show

 Although it is embarrassing to admit, I've avoided Peter Boganovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), the director's first film and, possibly, his best, for almost all of my life. The movie's subject, "coming of age" in a tiny, dying Texas town didn't interest me and the movie's best known subplot, involving an affair between a teenage boy and his football coach's lonely wife, seemed mawkish and repellent.  Indeed, the film is surprisingly depraved, mostly about sex involving High School kids, and certain elements of the movie would induce much hand-wringing today.  The sex between the 40 year-old teacher's wife (Cloris Leachman received an Oscar for the part) and Sonny Boy, played by Timothy Bottoms, is probably statutory rape and, if the genders were reversed, would be subject to considerable moral reprobation by today's much less permissive standards.  (The so-called "Sexual Revolution" at least in mainstream cinema, has been in retreat for the last forty years at least; there is far less nudity and erotic content in Hollywood pictures today than in the seventies).  Bogdanovich films the sex and nudity so as to emphasize the salacious content -- he uses point of view perspectives for much of this material, effectively putting the viewer in the position of his randy teenagers.  And several of the actresses who end up naked in this movie are very young.  This sort of content is problematic today -- witness the re-evaluation of the film that is Woody Allen's masterpiece, Manhattan.  

The Last Picture Show is the kind of movie that reviewers call "moody" -- the film is shot in beautiful, melancholy black and white by Robert Surtees.  The editing is a little choppy but the picture looks great and the complicated roundelay of sexual encounters is lucidly staged and seems a bit like a hillbilly version of a Max Ophuels film, something like a north Texas La Ronde. The picture has an incredible soundtrack, packed with Hank Williams tunes.  I think this soundtrack got the movie in some kind of trouble.  No VHS or DVD version of the picture was issued for many years --  indeed, for the film's first thirty years it was almost impossible to see, excusing, perhaps, my failure to watch the picture. Directors were pretty casual with securing rights for music in movies in the old days and, probably, the soundtrack to The Last Picture Show would, today, cost many millions of dollars in terms of  licensing fees.  (My guess is that home media release of the picture stalled-out over royalties for the innumerable country-western and pop hits that comprise the film's musical cues -- I don't think the picture has any music that isn't extracted from juke-box tunes famous during the early fifties.)   The soundtrack to the film is so good that the picture is worth seeing just for the music cues played in the background.  It seems that the movie was pitched as a country-western riposte to American Graffiti which has a similarly spectacular rock and roll soundtrack -- both movies involve teenage kids and end with a protagonist going off to war:  in American Graffiti, I think the conflict in question is the Vietnam War; in The Last Picture Show, Duane Johnson, with Sonny Boy one of the two protagonists in the film, leaves the hamlet of Anarene, Texas for the Korean War -- the music by Hank Williams and Bob Wills is contemporary to the period depicted by the movie. 

It would be seductive to say that The Last Picture Show spans the period between the first movie shown on the Royal Theater's marquee, Father of the Bride, and the release of Red River -- but this doesn't make sense.  Father of the Bride was made in 1950, and probably would have got to Anarene, a remote village on the Texas-Oklahoma border in 1951 or 1952.   Red River was released in 1948 and so precedes the Spencer Tracy - Elizabeth Taylor Father of the Bride. (Before TV, rural movie theaters couldn't afford first-run movies until the picture had been shown in the big cities and it wasn't uncommon for a film to be screened in little towns more than a year after it's premiere -- and, by that time, the film's print was pretty nearly degraded into illegibility; this phenomenon is very clearly shown in Wim Wender's similarly melancholy masterpiece Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road), made about six or seven years after The Last Picture Show -- in the German film, one of the old Westerns shown in a remote German village burns up before our eyes when it sticks in an antique projector.)  It's fairly clear that the movie is set in 1951 or 1952.  The film proceeds chronologically, depicting landmark events in the senior year for the kids at Anarene High School -- we are told that the two heroes of the film, Sonny Boy and Duane are on the High School football team, a decidedly lackluster endeavor -- in the first scene, everyone in town mocks them for the loss the night before saying:  "You better learn to tackle."  Later the two boys play basketball with similarly awful results --they get beat 126 to 14 or something on that order.  This isn't surprising because the kids in the town aren't athletes but lovers (or would-be lovers) -- everyone is obsessed with sex and, if girls aren't available, they'll have to settle for "heifers" (meant literally I think).  Duane is dating a gorgeous girl, Jacy, who is a teenage femme fatale, a classic destroyer of men using an appeal that she is not really able to control  Jacy is what was once called a "prick-tease" -- that is, she seduces men, but, then, denies them access at the last moment.  In fact, she goes so far with his strategy that she even marries Sonny Boy -- this is after a disappointing sexual liaison with Duane --  only to call things off before they get to the Oklahoma honeymoon hotel.  (Her well-to-do parents, rich with oil money, rescue her.)  When Duane comes back from his basic training --he's enlisted to go Korea -- he gets in a savage fight with Sonny Boy, his best friend, and almost gouges out his eye with a broken beer bottle.  The fight is over Jacy, who has left town for greener pastures (Dallas) and college and isn't on the scene in any event.  This fight and the boy's subsequent reconciliation provides the movie with its climax -- a suitably disheartening one since, a few months after the fight between the boys, a truckdriver runs over the town's simpleton, Billy who spends his time sweeping the middle of the street with a frayed broom.  Sonny Boy carries the dead kid to the threshold of the town's squalid and decrepit pool hall and this seems to symbolize the town's coup de grace.  The picture on its last night shows Red River,  we see the stirring scenes of the cattle drive at the film's end, and the old woman now running the movie theater admits that she doesn't understand the business and has to close down the place.  There is final "dying fall" to the film that is equally depressing -- Sonny Boy tries to leave town, can't summon the nerve, and turns around, returning to his girlfriend, the football coach's doting, lonely wife.  After denouncing him for abandoning her in favor of her rival Jacy (Cybill Shepherd so there's not much of a contest here), she suggests that they can restore their relationship, an implication that is a new "fresh hell" on which the film ends. (In films of this kind, always one of the heroes, can't escape -- a brilliant example of this sort of climax is Fellini's similarly themed I Vitelloni).

The Last Picture Show is noteworthy for its astonishing cast.  Jeff Bridges plays Duane to Timothy Bottoms' Sonny Boy.  Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Ruth, the football coach's miserable forty-year old wife -- it's the kind of performance that the Academy regards as "brave":  Leachman, a beautiful woman, looks dowdy, plain, and pinched and the part is thankless:  there's no glamor and Leachman's character is pathetically possessive of a boy over whom she has no plausible claim at all. Ellen Burstyn has the part of Jacy's mother -- she's carrying on a very open affair with one of her husband's rough-neck oilmen, the loathsome Abilene (Clu Gallagher)..  She urges her teenage daughter to have sex to "get it over with" and demystify the whole process. (This advice turns to be a little problematic because Jacy, after losing her virginity, gets entangled with Abilene, her mother's lover, who, in effect, rapes her.)  Toward the end of the movie, Burstyn's character is about to seduce Sonny Boy but thinks better of it, and zips away in her big Cadillac.  Randy Quaid plays a rich kid seducer who entices Jacy to a pool party involving lots of nudity -- Jacy does a clumsy strip-tease on a diving board, demonstrating the complexity of early fifties feminine underwear.  (The film has a running joke that the boy's can't figure out how to get the girls out of their intricate undergarments and so the young women, while protesting their innocence, simply disrobe for them.)  Of course, the most notable performance in the film is by Ben Johnson who displays unwavering virtue in the midst of all of the sexual shenanigans around him.  Johnson is Sam the Lion, the owner of the town's picture show, pool hall, and cafe and the film's (and village's) moral center..  He's an old cowboy and Johnson channels forty years of performing in Westerns in playing the role.  He delivers a wonderful soliloquy at a "tank" --- that is, a sort of artificial lake where cattle drink.  In his speech, he remembers a wonderful girl that he courted at the tank twenty years earlier -- she was wild and we later learn that the woman is the character played by Ellen Burstyn:  we see her flee Sam the Lion's funeral when he dies about two-thirds of the way through the movie.  (Bogdanovich and Larry McMurty who wrote the script based on the latter's novel have a tendency to be over-explicit -- later, Burstyn gets a showy scene in which she eulogizes Sam the Lion:  it's beautifully written but unnecessary since the grave-side scene showed us what we need to know.)  When Sam the Lion departs the picture a little of its energy leaks out and some of the final sequences seem a little perfunctory --  for instance, the death of Billy, the town idiot, feels unnecessary to me.  

Orson Welles, Bogdanovich's mentor, famously said that he would never shoot an explicit sex scene because imagery of that sort puts too much pressure on the actors -- they have to pretend physical sensations that they can't be feeling.  Bogdanovich seems determined to prove the old master wrong -- he spares the audience nothing with respect to huge close-ups of his stars being penetrated.  Cybill Shepherd almost loses her virginity on screen -- we survey her face as she reacts with disappointment to Duane's impotence.  Poor Cloris Leachman has to register a whole range of emotions from erotic ardor to motherly solicitude to her inevitable disappointment with the physical act itself, all in a tight probing close-up.  One wishes that Bogdanovich had been a bit more tactful and spared his actresses these close-ups, but, in fairness, Cloris Leachman won her Oscar probably on the basis of this invasive imagery.  

The film has some implausibilities but they don't much matter.  The town sometimes seems far larger than it is in reality.  (It's 25 miles to Wichita Falls where people go for their doctor's appointments and serious business.)  There's a subplot involving a preacher's kid who tries to molest a little girl that comes out of nowhere and leads to nothing.  The degree of illicit sexual activity in the little hamlet (it's a miniature Peyton Place) seems sort of exaggerated but who am I to say? -- maybe, the film is an accurate picture of what it was like to live in a town of this sort.  The film 's three themes don't ever exactly coalesce:  the movie is about sexual yearning and loneliness and the meretricious relationships that flow from such feelings; secondarily, the film is about the gradual destruction of the little town, symbolized by the death of Sam the Lion; finally, the picture is about the closing of the American West -- on the weekend that Sam the Lion dies, Sonny Boy and Duane have gone to Mexico, the last frontier for the kids in the town.  The elegiac use of the film Red River with its iconic profiles of John Wayne embody the film's theme about the demise of the old West and its codes of honor.  These elements of the picture are closely related but they don't precisely fit together, possibly a good thing since the film is not at its best when it is spelling out its meanings.

I wasn't as highly impressed by the movie on actually watching it as I expected-- the film is one of those movies with a reputation that may seem outsized when you first encounter it, particularly now fifty years after the movie was made.  But, a day later, the film has greatly expanded in my imagination and I can recognize why it was accounted great in its day.  It still is great.  

The Last Picture Show prominently features an image of the town's crossroad, Texas Highway 79's intersection with 25.  This establishes that the location for the movie is, in reality, Archer City, the place where Larry McMurty spent most of his life.  On the Internet, you can see pictures of the Royal Theater and the Spur Hotel, both featured in many shots in the movie.  

Time to Die (Tiempo di Morir)

Arturo Ripstein was just 21 when he directed Time to Die, a tight, well-crafted "chili Western" with outdoor locations shot in Michoacan and interiors at the Churubusca studio in Mexico City.   The 1966 movie is slow-paced but flawless, an impressive  debut for the young film-maker.  Ripstein was precocious but he had a headstart -- his father, Alfredo Ripstein,, a well-established producer during the so-called "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema", was at the helm of the project and Arturo had apprenticed with Bunuel when he was 18 on the set of The Exterminating Angel (he is said to have carried the Spanish surrealist's briefcase); around the same time, he also watched Louis Malle directing Viva Maria.  Although very economically made,,Time to Die was based on top-notch sources:  Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote the scenario and Carlos Fuentes adapted Marquez' dialogue, which Ripstein recalls as being written in "Colombian", to idiomatic Mexican Spanish.  The film is neatly plotted and features ultra-tough, laconic dialogue -- everyone speaks in tense, declarative aphorisms (seemingly the application of Mexico's pervasive machismo to hardboiled film noir dialogue.)  Marquez would become world famous for One-Hundred Years of Solitude the year after Time to Die was released.  "I knew Marquez before he was Marquez," Ripstein has said.  Much of the thematic material from this film appears later in Marquez' short book Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  

Time to Die's plot is classically simple.  A man convicted of killing a powerful rancher, Raul Trueba, is released from prison after serving 18 years.  Although the ex-convict, Juan Sayago seems to be about 40 everyone calls him an old man.  Sayaga returns to his hometown, a spookily deserted village with empty streets and featureless houses built after the Hispanic pattern -- long bare walls enclosing courtyards.  Sayago is warned that the sons of Trueba, Julien and Pedro have vowed to kill him and, indeed, within 24 hours of his arrival in town.  Both boys have been told that Sayago ambushed their father and shot him in back.  Sayago looks up his old girlfriend, now a widow in black with a little boy.  She tells him to get out of town if he wants to live.  Instead, Sayago goes to his old house (the widow has kept the key for him) and, when he can't get the door open, he kicks it down in a startling scene that reveals that, behind the featureless wall the home turns to the village lane, there is just a ruin where, in fact, a cow is contentedly grazing in the rubble.  Savago has met the younger son of his old nemesis, Pedro, and, in fact, loaned him a "headstall", some sort of equestrian gear, not knowing that the man is his sworn enemy.  (This being a Mexican film, all sorts of equine lore is referenced and a man's ability to tame and control horses is  one measure of his prowess.)  Julien, who seems half-crazed,  dons the natty vest that his father was wearing when killed by Sayago -- the bullet hole is in the breast, a fact that leads Pedro to question the official version of the killing.  Things are starting to look more like the killing happened an "honorable" duel and not a bushwhacking.  And, we learn that Raul Trueba, bested in a horse-race by the young Sayago, taunted him into a duel -- as one of the women says:  "Sayago was better with horses, better with women, and better with guns."  History repeats.  Although Sayago wants to be left in peace, Julien rides around town throwing dead animals at him, shooting out a mirror when he is getting his hair cut, and, then, defiling him with blood in a pig's bladder flung into his face.  Sayago is a broken man, distraught through most of the movie, and he doesn't want to perpetuate the feud -- indeed, in a couple of scenes we could mistake him for a coward.  Pedro, recognizing Sayago's inherent kindness and nobililty, becomes friends with him.  Pedro, who was raised without a father (he was born only after Raul's death), becomes unduly affectionate with Sayago -- when the two of them ride a horse that Sayago has just tamed, snuggling together on the saddle,  it's obvious that Pedro regards the older man as a mentor and father figure.  True to the codes of machismo, the most intimate scenes in the movie involve relationships between men and the scene with the two characters on the horse is startlingly tender.  Enraged at Pedro's defection, Julien rides his horse into the local cantina where Sayago is drinking and shoots up the place.  Julien then harries the disloyal Pedro down a street mercilessly flogging him with his whip, the most violent and disturbing scene in the movie.  Sayago decides he has to intervene and the scene is set for a shoot-out in a strange wind-sculpted badlands, a sort of natural amphitheater surrounded by grotto-like alcoves.  The gun battle takes place in a sand storm.  As we expect, Sayago has no difficulty outdrawing the callow Julien and kills him.  But, then, Pedro arrives and is obligated by the code of masculine honor to kill his father-figure Sayago.,  Sayago refuses to turn on Pedro and, in fact, throws aside his weapon.  Nonetheless, Pedro slaughters Sayago, shooting him repeatedly in the back while the old man staggers away.  Sayago falls dead under a big cross that greets travelers arriving the village -- as Ripstein says the cross "means nothing and is not a symbol"; rather, it's a visual flourish that links the film's grim ending to its beginning. 

In structure and tone, the black and white film is reminiscent of Fred Zinneman's austere and geometric High Noon.  There are ticking clocks and Sayago goes around town encountering various people who either tell him to "get out of Dodge" or encourage him to kill the Trueba boys.  (One of his old friends is paralyzed -- he lies in his bed where he is cared-for by his sister, periodically pulling out his six-shooter to blaze away through the window of his room.  This man is upset that Sayago is slow to retrieve his six-gun from the widow and face-off with the Trueba boys -- when Sayago is finally pushed past all endurance and commits to the duel with Julien, the old ruffian is overjoyed.)  The women in the picture are mostly complicit with the code of machismo -- the widow, in fact, prefers a dead and courageous hero to a live and cowardly lover.  She has been tenderly preserving Sayago's six-shooter and, when she retrieves it from her trousseau, she loving caresses the phallic muzzle of the gun. The eerie village, literally a "ghost town" in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo is also an influence on the film.  The empty streets of the hamlet and its violence-haunted history is closely aligned with the doomed village in Rulfo's novel and we know that Fuentes collaborated with Rulfo himself on Roberto Gavaldon's excellent 1964 film Gallo de Oro ("The Golden Cock"); Marquez claimed that he had memorized Pedro Paramo and could recite the book by heart. Ripstein shoots the film in long hand-held camera sequences tracking characters through indoor and exterior landscapes -- if possible, he executes scenes in one continuous tracking shot.  This provides the film with a claustrophobic sense of fore-ordained doom -- the characters are trapped by the camera observing them.  In the end, Pedro kills the man he has come to admire as his own father with bullets to the back -- replicating his fantasy of how Sayago supposedly killed his own father.  The scene in which Sayago meets his old lover at her home is exemplary of Ripstein's reticent and classic style.  We see Sayago knock at the door, then, there is a medium close-up (Ripstein doesn't really like close-ups in general) of the woman reacting when she sees her old lover standing at the threshold of the house.  Then, we see the open door over her shoulder with only Sayago's hand visible -- as she tries to shut the door, he blocks her by putting his hand on the door and the camera, then, swiftly (and inexorably) re-positions to film him frontally on the threshold of the widow's home.  The motif of closing doors cites similar imagery in John Ford's The Searchers.  Certainly, Time to Die, which won many Mexican awards, is one of the most impressive debuts by a young director in film history. (The Blu-ray restoration of the film made in 2016 features a dialogue commentary by Ripstein and the man who played Pedro Trueba in the film -- the commentary is amusing for a few minutes because it is so ineptly translated:  someone seems to have translated the Spanish literally without regard for English idiom or syntax and it's mostly impossible to know what Ripstein and the actor are actually saying.  ) 

  

History is Made at Night

Frank Borzage's 1937 History is Made at Night, a romantic melodrama, has little to recommend it.  One gets the impression that Criterion is scraping the bottom of the barrel with this release.  The film is reasonably well-made and the actors are appealing, but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.  Here the sow's ear is a script that is a hopeless mess-- reportedly the movie was improvised on the fly, produced primarily because someone like the film's title, a name that has nothing to do with the movie that we see on screen.  Six screen-writers worked on the picture and the film's lavish ending, a revisionist version of the sinking of the Titanic looks like it was cobbled-together from footage cribbed from other even worse movies.  Supplemental information accompanying the Blu-Ray consists primarily of Peter Cowie owlishly correcting Herve Dumont, a Borzage expert -- Cowie comes up with some interesting things to say about the movie to which Dumont accedes by nodding his head and saying "Of course!"  Dumont mostly wants to talk about backstage gossip.  Dumont observes that the film's spectacular ending was shot in the last two weeks of scheduled work on the movie and necessitated that some sequences comprising the beginning of the movie be re-filmed to make things fit together better -- it doesn't work  and, when we are told that the villain intends to cross the Atlantic on the Hindenburg, we expect that we will get two mass casualty transportation calamities for the price of one. (The movie was shot in 1936 and the Hindenburg blew up in 1937, the year the picture was released)>   

The film has a complicated plot that is implausible on all levels.  A spunky beauty from Kansas, Irene (Jean Arthur) is inexplicably married to a paranoid British megalomaniac Vail.  Vail, played by Colin Clive, is the most villainous of villains, a veritable Richard the III of evil.  Vail's insane jealousy has ruined his marriage to Irene and she sends him a note announcing that she intends to get a divorce.  She flees to Paris subject to some kind of bizarre law that she must remain "faultless" for six months in order to secure the divorce decree.  (Why would an idiotic law like this exist?)  Vail pays his chauffeur to rape Irene so that evidence of concupiscence can be used in Court.  During the attempted rape, a suave Frenchman played by Charles Boyer intervenes and knocks out the rapist.  When the fight between Boyer and the wicked chauffeur is discovered, the Frenchman pretends to be a gentleman jewel-thief.  He makes Irene divest herself of her jewels and ostensibly kidnaps her.  Immediately. Paul (Boyer) falls in love with Irene.  He takes her to an upscale restaurant that he seems to own, persuades the staff to work overtime and courts Irene.  (He uses a "cute" trick -- he claims to live with a woman and introduces her to Irene; the woman is his left hand onto which he has drawn a face with long-lashed eyes and lipsticked lips at the cleft between thumb and forefinger.  If someone tried to woo a woman with this gag in real life, any sane female would run for their lives.  Is he implying that he is a compulsive masturbator?  The stunt is nauseating and grotesque, although memorable one must admit.)  Irene dances the tango with Paul until dawn, then, she returns to her apartment.  There, she is greeted by Vail.  In the meantime, Vail has murdered the poor chauffeur, staving in his head with a convenient poker, and the evil shipping magnate intends to pin the crime on Irene's lover -- the bad guy has figured out that Paul is now courting Irene and not really a jewel thief.  (Later, Vail has forgotten about Paul -- the film is confused about what Vail knows and doesn't know).  Irene flees to New York City where she works as a "mannequin" -- that is, showing stylish dresses to society women.  Meanwhile Paul, who is revealed to be merely a head waiter (although the "greatest head waiter" in Europe) decamps to NYC to follow Irene with whom he is smitten.  He is accompanied by his best friend and bosom buddy, an excitable Italian chef named Cesar (said to be the "greatest chef" in all of Europe).  Paul, claiming that European head waiters are paid by the restaurants that they serve, takes over an upscale joint in Manhattan named Victor's.  He reserves a table complete with a floral bouquet for Irene because he expects that one day she will come to dine in the restaurant and provide an opportunity for him to continue their affair.  Paul, who is sort of a gigolo, flatters elderly society matrons and soon enough Victor's is a smash hit, particularly because Cesar is whipping up fantastic victuals in the kitchen.  An innocent man has been framed for the murder of the chauffeur and Irene is pressganged by the vicious Vail into traveling across the Atlantic to testify at the trial of the unfortunate man (whom Vail, perhaps, thinks is really Irene's lover).  On their way to the Zeppelin-port (they are going in style on the Hindenburg), Vail and Irene stop off at Victor's.  Paul serves them and sees Irene laughing uproariously -- he takes this badly since he thinks she is mocking the great lover as being a mere headwaiter.  But Irene is giddy with joy having met her boyfriend in these surprising circumstances.  She tears up her Hindenburg tickets, jumps out of the cab, and runs back to Victor's.  Again it's closing time and there's another nauseating and grotesque romantic idyll -- this time, Irene does the hand gag, making her fist talk, and, thereby, inadvertently suggesting that she's a compulsive masturbator as well.  Paul decides that he must clear the poor fellow on trial in Paris.  So he and Irene book passage to Europe on the Princess Irene, a Titanic-sized vessel that Vail owns -- this  is its maiden voyage.  Vail learns that Irene and Paul are on the ship and so he orders the captain to make the crossing in record speed, despite cold seas, pea-soup fog, and lurking icebergs -- no one has apparently heard of the Titanic disaster except everyone refers to it later when the ship runs afoul, of the floating mountain of ice.  The boat hits the iceberg and starts to sink.  There's chaos on board and Irene refuses to leave Paul even though he tries to shove her onto a lifeboat, but doesn't succeed with this effort.  The ship seems doomed, canted at a sinister angle, with mountains of ice on its decks.  The desolate men on board begin singing "Nearer my God to Thee" and Paul and Irene have a last colloquy that is both mawkish and embarrassing -- the film's dialogue is uniformly awful.  Meanwhile in London or wherever he is, Vail shoots himself, expiring under a lavish portrait of Irene and a scale model of the cruise-ship named the Princess Irene.  The ship doesn't sink and there's general rejoicing on the vessel when it's announced that no one will be going to Davy Jones Locker -- at least not on this night to remember.  The loyal Cesar has stowed-away on the ship and he mugs for the camera.  Paul and Irene smooch.  The End.

This is every bit as terrible as it sounds.  Cesar, (Leo Carillo) who exists for comic relief, is a racist stereotype of an excitable Italian except that, I guess, Italians aren't a race.  He perpetually throws pots and pans in rage, but, then, calms down  when he is flattered -- he has a moustache penciled on his lip like Chef Boyardee.  There are a few nice shots of fog at the end of the movie and the business with the sinking ship is fairly well handled.  Rear-projection scenes of Manhattan and Paris are awful, not competently managed at all.  There are some flattering close-ups of the stars.  The only reason to see the film is for Colin Clive's performance which is over-the-top by any standard.  When he's on-screen, the picture comes fitfully alive.  Clive seems too small for his clothing and struts around stiffly as if he were controlled by a mannequin strings and wires.  Apparently, Clive was drinking heavily when the film was made, out of control on the set, and dying of tuberculosis to boot.  On the subject of Irene, he rants and raves like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab and brings to the picture a weird horror-film ambience.  It's an utterly bizarre, but memorable, performance but not sufficient to save the movie which sinks like the Titanic (but not the Princess Irene.)  

There's a short subject in the supplements about Borzage's other films in the thirties, Man's Castle, Farewell to Arms, and No Greater Glory .  This supplement only makes the viewer wish that he or she was watching one of those films and not this turkey.  I am apparently blind to this film's merits -- it was a major box-office success.  

 

The Exterminating Angel

Edmundo and Lucia have invited 20 guests to their large mansion in Mexico City.  The host and hostess offer their guests a late night meal, after the opera that they have attended -- the opera may be called The Virgin Brde of Lammermoor and the orchestra conductor and one of the singers, called the Valkyrie are in attendance at the post-performance soiree.  Edmundo and Lucia's servants are very anxious to depart for the night and, after quarreling with the master, all of them save one man (designated to serve the guests) flee the mansion.  Weather is windy and cold outside and the mansion sits next to a cheerless boulevard that stretches to a featureless horizon.  At the dinner party, people make rude or weirdly abrasive comments.  The servant falls on his face carrying a tray of some kind awful hors d' ouevres made with liver and almonds.  Debris from the man's fall sprays the guests.  The hostess is planning some kind of practical joke involving three sheep and a bear -- the animals are in a room upstairs where the bear growls at the lambs; ultimately, the hostess decides to defer the joke because it's late and people seem to be a bit peckish.  After the dinner party, the guests adjourn to a room where the bust of Moor adorns an elaborate side-table and where there are couches and easy chairs backed by a series of doors bearing garish-looking religious images.  Edmundo and Lucia are a bit alarmed because the 20 guests show no inclination to leave.  We see that it is three a.m. and, then, four a.m. and people comment that they have appointments scheduled for only four hours in the future but don't want to go out in the bad weather.  (The film is strangely exact about time:  the dinner party begins around 11:40 pm).  An adulterous couple is anxious to escape the gathering so that they can make love, but they don't leave either.  The men take off their tuxedo coats and sprawl on the chairs.  The women who are dressed in evening gowns, recline on couches.  People keep saying that they are going to leave but no one actually attempts to exit the room.  In the morning, a servant is told to serve leftovers (cold cuts) from the meal the night before.  He brings in the food and everyone eats and oddly no one tries to leave.  Gradually, we  become aware that the guests are unable to leave the room where they have gathered -- indeed, they can't even enter the salon adjacent to the room where they are crowded together some kind of enchantment binds them to this place.

Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealist, made this film The Exterminating Angel in Mexico City at the Aztec-Churubusco Studios in 1962.  Gabriel Figueroa, the great Mexican cameraman shot the picture, although it is intentionally drab, poorly lit, and mundane in appearance.  The camerawork is invisible -- except for a couple of inexpressive dream sequences using strange sound-cues and superimposition, there is nothing about the way that the film is made that draws attention to its editing or  image-composition or style.  Bunuel has designed the movie be flat and affectless, like a picture by Howard Hawks but without the glittering dialogue.  The people in the film speak in banal cliches and nothing intelligent is expressed.  I have seen the movie several times and, until recently, the picture was typically shown in a print so disfigured as to be almost illegible.  Criterion has restored the movie so that it can be seen but as a work of film art, the movie is bland and no great shakes at all.  The movie's willful drabness contrasts, of course, with its outrageous subject matter -- the dinner guests are trapped in a room and can't leave and gradually succumb, it seems, to madness with random outbursts of rage and hysteria characterizing their condition.  A crowd gathers outside the mansion but can't get inside -- in fact, some invisible power keeps the people from passing through the gates into the plaza in front of the elaborate mansion.  The plight of the dinner guests trapped in the chalet and the people outside is Kafkaesque -- it isn't clear whether there is some kind of physical barrier barring escape or whether the victims are simply disinclined to make the effort; the latter option seems the most probable -- nothing restrains the people except lack of will.  The film is far more harrowing than I recalled -- the trapped people in the house suffer from thirst and hunger; they are like the victims of a shipwreck.  For awhile, they eat paper, said to be quite tasty, to stave off hunger pains but lack of water weakens them and makes the women delirious.  Finally, the men smash through a wall to reach a water-pipe and break it open so that they can drink.  The sheep wandering through the mansion enter the room where the people are trapped and they are slaughtered for food.  An old man suffers a stroke and dies.  There's a great bit of Bunuelian dialogue.  Someone says:  "In a couple of hours, he'll be completely bald."  An interlocutor says:  "what do you mean?"  "That he'll be dead, of course," the other speaker says.  When the man dies, he is shoved into a closet.  One side of the room is lined with about six or eight doors, each opening into a small alcove.  The doors are decorated with paintings of saints and angels.  Behind one door, we observe many large, expensive-looking vases -- later, we see people slipping discretely in and out of the closets and recognize that the vases are being used as latrines.  The corpse rots behind his elaborately decorated door and the men labor to seal off that space since the stench is said to be "unbearable."  One woman is filmed tearing out her hair.  Edmundo has a jewelry box full of cocaine and morphine and some of the men get high.  The young couple makes love in the noisome closet and commit suicide together there' blood seeps under the door to this closet.  At the dinner party, one woman was shown examining chicken claws in her purse.  These turn out to be magical talismans but without efficacy to assist them in making an escape.  The bear trudges wearily around the mansion.  Outside the police and army troops have mostly abandoned the mansion but some street vendors sell balloons and food to children.  A little boy, not aware of the invisible barrier, blithely walks into the plaza in front of the mansion but he is called back to his school group and led away by the priest in charge of the kids.  In the enchanted and now filthy room, the guests have nightmares.  A woman imagines a severed hand crawling from one of the closets and pursuing her.  She crushes the hand with a knickknack representing the Buddha but the hand, like a cockroach, can't be so readily killed.  A man tells a woman she smells like a "hyena" -- this precipitates a fight.  Finally, one of the women realizes that the people have, by chance, come into the same positions that they occupied before they became entranced.  One of the women plays the song on the piano that they heard before they became trapped and they are able to leave the room.  Later, there is a solemn mass to celebrate their deliverance.  When the mass is concluded the priests start to leave the sanctuary but they decide to wait "for the faithful to file out," pausing at the threshold.  Of course, the faithful tarry, talking to one another, and someone remarks that no one seems inclined to leave the church.  Outside the church, we hear screams and machine-gun fire.  An uprising is underway.  Armed cops machine-gun the crowd and mounted police cut down the rioters with swords in their hands.  The film ends with a shot of the Church facade.

So what are we to make of The Exterminating Angel?  Since the film is surrealist in nature, probably it is  traduced by attempting an interpretation -- the film means what it shows us, no more and no less, and it is certainly not an allegory.  However, the scenes in the Church in which we witness the Mass filmed from a great direction provide some clues as to how we might think about this movie.  The Mass is a ritualized reoccurrence, a perpetual happening of the same.  Bourgeois society is based upon ceremonies that imprison and paralyze.  The conventions and institutions of culture require repetition and everyone is trapped within the confines of social meanings and traditions that we have made but that we feel powerless to change.  "What is the cause of our inaction?" someone asks.  Another man says: "Murderous violence and filth are now our inseparable companions."  The movie asks us to consider what keeps us prisoners of our own habits.  The forces that restrain us are not benevolent but murderous -- this seems to be the import of the scenes of the uprising brutally quashed at the end of the film.  Bunuel observes this all clinically and dispassionately, without any outrage or emotion -- this is simply the structure of reality.  Our disembodied hands, with which we should act to free ourselves, haunt our sleep and become our mortal enemies.  When the famous conductor, the leader of a world-renowned opera orchestra dies, someone asks:  "What's one less conductor?"  The film looks murky and hard to see -- whatever it's showing us remains invisible despite all efforts at film conservation and restoration.

American Insurrection

 A couple blocks from my home, a nice brick house with an elaborate two-story masonry garage flies two flags:  one of them is an American flag that is displayed upside-down; over the backdoor, the homeowner flies a blue and white Trump flag.  Across the street, a few concrete garden gnomes and a fishing boy sit among the bushes under the eaves of the house, impervious, it seems, to the political messages nearby.  This homeowner displays an American flag and a Trump banner on the same flagpole.  Old Glory is above the Trump banner but also inverted.  A large banner is tacked to this man's garage; it reads Fuck Biden! Not my President! -- the colors of that banner are blue with white stripes.  I am told that flying an American flag upside-down is disrespectful and condoned only when the banner is signaling "extreme distress" -- that is, the flag used as a banner to signal that someone is in need of rescue.  Across the street f rom the house with fishing boy and the gnomes and the various flags, someone has raised a flag with rainbow colors -- not red, white, and blue but rather a spectrum as light might cast passing through a prism.  

History presupposes certain events as solutions to problems posed by the past.  Most history is teleological -- that is, it is written or presented with a certain end in mind.  But, of course, life is lived without future outcomes known.   But the comforting sense provided by history is that everything was leading to a certain foregone conclusion and that no other outcome was possible.  But this is not how we experience the present.  The future looms before us vast, dark, and unknowable.  The past is a inscrutable avalanche of coincidences and accumulated circumstances that all lead to my own present consciousness -- but I don't know what that consciousness means in, and for, itself and can't reliably predict the future.  I don't know what, if anything, the warring flags displayed on the three houses in my neighborhood mean.  I note them as data, but what, ultimately, will come from this present moment of divisiveness and conflict can't be known.  

American Insurrection is a Frontline documentary aired on PBS in mid-April and directed by Richard Rowley,  The program attempts to make sense of the assault on the Capitol mounted by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.  The documentary is 1 hour and 24 minutes long and traces one narrow trajectory through the underbrush of rumor, polemic, and opinion that has grown up around this event.  To someone living in this moment, the documentary seems feeble in its pretense to explicate the event.  However, perhaps, this is a measure of the documentary's authenticity and honesty -- a definitive account of the so-called "insurrection" will have to await the verdict of history several generations from today, if, in fact, any reliable verdict is ever achieved.  Obviously, the documentary began in a different form, as an exploration of various paramilitaries that seem to have been galvanized into action by Trump's presidency and, perhaps, the Covid 19 pandemic.  Most of the film was shot and edited before the attack on the Capitol and, so, it's pretty clear that much of the footage has been repurposed to interpret the so-called insurrection.  The result is not particularly convincing and the documentary is more than a little blurred by the compromise between it's original intentions and the way that these objectives have become more or less relevant in light of the Capitol insurrection.  The program as it now stands is not particularly persuasive -- and, I think, it would have been better if the documentary had adhered to its original theme, apparently, presenting a study of the fascistic paramilitaries that have arisen on the Far Right after the "Unite the Right" street fighting Charlottesville, Virginia, an event that occurred only about seven months into Trump's presidency.  Of course, when most of the footage was filmed no one anticipated that the climax of the documentary would be an attack on the American Capitol and much of the best material in the documentary really can't be construed as entirely relevant to what happened on January 6, 2021.

Briefly stated, the documentary tracks an intrepid reporter who seeks to uncover the truth about far Right militia groups.  The reporter is a man named A. C. Thompson.  Thompson is wholly inexpressive.  He has a bald shaved head and little black eyes and you can't tell how he is reacting to the material that he gathers and the interviews that he conducts.  Thompson seems to be successful in persuading suspicious Far Right militia-members and their affiliates to speak with him.  He's the sort of cipher onto which people can project their own emotions -- there's a powerful "negative capability" about the guy that allows him to be a screen for the views of the people that he interviews.  Thompson's guise of semi-autistic dispassion is convincing and, perhaps, not, even, strategic -- in another interview on You-Tube, we learn that he is a product of the Punk Rock scene and, when interviewed by a fraternal fellow-traveler, seems equally nonplussed and strangely without emotion.  Perhaps, the man is simply monstrously disciplined -- he never smiles, never argues or refutes, and never abandons his somewhat stiff poker-face.  When someone says something particularly outrageous, Thompson mutters "Oh wow!" but without any affect at all -- his "oh wow!" lacks my exclamation point and doesn't seem any more or less inflected than a grunted "Uh-huh." 

The thesis of the documentary is that, after the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" debacle, Right wing radicals moved away from neo-Nazi or White Suprematicist ideologies, adopting instead the weirdly nihilistic and apocalyptic activism of the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, and other allied groups -- most notably the Wolverine militia in Michigan that plotted to kidnap and, presumably, execute the State's governor, Gretchen Whitmer.  Although the documentary doesn't explicitly make this connection, these Right Wing paramilitaries seems to be organizing so as to mirror their Antifa adversaries on the Far Left.  Neither Antifa nor the Boogaloo Bois, for instance, are hierarchically organized -- these groups operate as loose confederations of disaffected young men; they are non-ideological in that they have no vision for a better future.  Instead, these groups are opportunistic and, essentially, non-political -- they aren't fighting for a better future or the survival of the White race or the destruction of Communism:  instead they react to ideological conflict by simply sowing chaos and discord.  They revolt for the sake of revolting and not with any particular political objective in mind.  Loose confederacies like the Boogaloo Bois hope to foment a violent civil war -- but to what end?  The closest thing to an ideology expressed in the show is a dictim by a very young Boogaloo boi (Matthew Dunn, just 20 years old) to the effect that he is prepared to fight to keep people from telling him what to do -- Dunn knows that the "Storm" is coming but he can't say why or what it means.  Thompson gets Dunn to talk and the chubby boy is quite articulate, but he can't express in any rational way what he and his allies are attempting to achieve.  Furthermore, these Right Wing militias have Black members and seem to  have appropriated many of the slogans and, even, tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement.  In one startling scene, Thompson knocks on the door of a home owned by a militia-member. The house is hidden in the backwoods somewhere defended by overgrown weeds and bushes.  Children's toys in disrepair are strewn all around and all sorts of road-forage is pushed up against the walls of the house.  A tattered rebel flag dangles down from a pole.  The militia-man isn't at home, but his scrawny, blonde wife answers the door and, after announcing that she has nothing to say, apparently talks at length with the reporter.  I was startled when she says that the militia are enemies of police tyranny that has put a knee on the neck of the citizenry -- obviously invoking the homicide involving George Floyd.  (The film mentions Ivan Hunter, the Boogaloo Boi who shot up the 3rd Precinct station in Minneapolis in retaliation for Floyd's killing -- the screen flashes his picture:  the avenger is a red-headed White kid.). 

American Insurrection begins with certain liberal Left gestures that will be off-putting to some people.  The program is a co-production with PBS, Pro Publica, and the Berkeley Journalism Project and, so, the liberal credentials of the film-makers are on display.  Certain aspects of the documentary are pretentious.  There are Bresson-style shots of Thompson's feet as he doggedly walks from interview to interview -- it's just filler but annoying.  Similarly, there are many shots of Thompson scribbling notes during filmed interviews -- why is he writing these notes?  Can't he rely on the visual record created by his camera crew?  This is B-roll stuff but it's weirdly inconsistent with the post-punk attitude of the film-makers.  (It's like Matt Drudge affecting a fedora after the fashion of a nineteen-forties newspaper reporter.)  There are many possible constructions to be applied to this material:  the documentarian could blame Trump for the mayhem, or Qanon and conspiracy theory, or the media which operates 24-7 to stoke hysteria or, even, radical factionalism in Congress -- the picture glances at only one of these exegetical narratives, blaming Trump a little for the uptick in political violence, although this is obligatory and not really developed.  The sequences showing the "American insurrection" at the Capitol are very effectively edited and, although the footage will be well-known to anyone who has watched TV, the documentary presents the assault as having a sort of churning, sickening inevitability.  The film is most interesting in its parts relating to Steve Carrillo.  Carrrillo is a terrorist who sprayed AK-15 fire into a sentry booth where a man was guarding the Oakland Federal Building.  The cop was killed.  Carrililli set off some pipe bombs, got into a shoot-out with the G-men, and ended up bleeding-out on street where some passerbys had jumped him -- Carrillo tried to detonate a pipe bomb but failed.  He used the blood gushing out his belly to scribble "Boog" and "I became unreasonable"  on the pavement, thereby identifying his affiliation with the Boogaloo Bois.  Casrrullo survived and refused to talk to anyone except a single attractive Latina working the Berkeley Journalism Project.  The documentary doesn't explain why he chose to speak with that journalist.  Carrillo justified his violence with the notion that the police were like rabid dogs on a leash held by the government -- the only way to deal with rabid dogs is to kill them.  Predictably, Trump claimed Carrillo was AntiFa -- in fact, he was a Right-Wing Boog and a supporter of the President.  The show doesn't complicate its narrative by telling viewers much about Carrillo's background.  The man is the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who apparently abused Carrillo's White mother.  The relationship was so bad that Carrillo grew up on a farm in the Mexican State of Jalisco, cared for by his paternal grandparents.  He came back to the US as a young man and joined the Air Force.  (The filmmakers purport to be astonished that significant numbers of the U.S. military and police force espouse Fascist ideology -- who would have thunk it?)  Carrillo's interview with the Latina reporter was conducted half in Spanish and half in English -- this explains why he chose to talk to her.  Carrillo is a fascinating fearsome figure; he inhabits a twilight netherworld that American journalism can't penetrate -- his story requires someone like Dostoevsky as his chronicler.  

     

An Autumn Afternoon

 The great director, Yasujiro Ozu made An Autumn Afternoon around the time that his mother died.  Ozu was a bachelor and lived with his elderly mother until her death in 1962.  He survived her by two years.  An Autumn Afternoon is Ozu's last film.  It is conceived as a gentle family comedy and very eloquently directed -- the film is also almost unbearably sad.  In the ouevre of any lesser director, An Autumn Afternoon would be a masterpiece; it is, for Ozu, a lesser work, a bit repetitious and slow even by the film-maker's standards.  I think it is also an intensely personal film and worth studying on that basis, as well as on its own merits.  

In an important way, An Autumn Afternoon is about drinking, and, probably, alcoholism.  (Ozu was apparently a working alcoholic).  The film features no fewer than nine symposia -- that is, drinking parties among men, most notably the protagonist Mr. Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) and his two close friends, Horei, who has just married a much younger woman, and another businessman, Kawai.  After these parties, Mr. Hirayama comes home drunk and is, invariably, reprimanded by his grown daughter.  The film ends with Hirayama very intoxicated, singing to himself a tune called the "Warship March", a patriotic ditty from the Second World War.  His lasts words are "Alone,eh?"  The film is frank by American standards of the time.  Horei is abused by his compatriots as "clean during the day, but filthy at night" as a result of his young wife and he's teased for taking potency pills.  Hirayama desires grandchildren and there's a candid discussion between the older man and his son about contraception. The film conspicuously detaches love from sex and, even, seems to consider sex and marriage as possibly incommensurate -- there is an intense,lyrical realism about the proceedings that the movie chronicles.

In simplest terms -- and Ozu's films are always fantastically complex and starkly simple -- a man on the threshold of old age, a widower, lives with his daughter, Michiko, and his son, Kazu.  Michiko is 24 and unmarried.  Hirayama is some kind of high-ranking official in a power company -- his job seems to be scrutinizing documents and putting his official seal on them.  Hirayama is content and complacent until his "middle school" buddies host a drinking party for an elderly teacher, nicknamed "the Gourd". This old man has fallen on hard times and runs of third-rate noodle shop with his embittered middle-aged daughter.  The Gourd gets drunk and sentimental, blaming himself for blighting his daughter's life due to his own selfishness -- he's kept his daughter at his side to take care of him as he ages.  Hirayama recognizes a similar dynamic in his life and fears that his selfishness is destroying his daughter's opportunities for marriage.  In Japanese society at the time, middle-aged men seem to act as go-betweens and marriage-brokers -- I think, in An Autumn Afternoon, this is due to the fact that Hirayama is a widower and Michiko has no mother to broker her marriage.  At first blush, the young women in the film seem obedient to these middle-aged men, but we come to understand that they have agency in their own right and are skilled at letting their elders believe that they are in control of the situation when this is not necessarily true. The assumption is that when a woman marries, she will quit her job and we see this paradigm on display in several parallel situations involving secretaries and administrative assistants in the workplace resigning when they are married.  Ozu operates in a leisurely manner and the film is expansive - it has a number of sub-themes, including an interesting perspective on World War II (not generally a subject with which Ozu is comfortable); at the one-hour mark, the film's loose narrative coalesces around Hirayama's efforts to secure a husband for Michiko.  He is successful and, on the titular "autumn afternoon," Michiko is married.  The film is about Hirayama and ends with several short scenes dramatizing the old man's loneliness now that his daughter has left the home.  One of Ozu's consistent themes is that individuals must sacrifice their own happiness for the benefit of others -- and this seems to be what Hirayama has done, although it is also apparent that if he keeps his daughter with him as a sort of quasi-wife, he will ruin both her life and his own as well.  This is moral taught by the melancholy fate of "the Gourd."  The notion of the younger woman acting as aide to an aging man is reflected in Horei's marriage to a woman said to be "three years older than (his) daughter."  The film is circumspect but suggests that this match will turn out to be unfortunate.

Ozu shot this film is color and he uses reds to highlight his scenes.  One way to view the film is an odyssey of scarlet colors, beginning with red bands girdling the smokestacks at the powerplant where Hirayama works though the red fire extinguishers and commercial packaging visible in the backgrounds of some of the scenes and, finally, highlighted in the scarlet sash that the bride wears to her wedding. (The red is not symbolic -- it is a graphic device that Ozu uses to tie together his shots and scenes.)  Ozu's decoupage is strangely elaborate -- he often cuts between shots using indirection, that is, misleading intermediary footage.  For instance, the rather dour Mr. Kawai has come to Yokohama to see a baseball game.  Ozu cuts from a shot of the men drinking in a  private room in a restaurant to the brilliant lights of a baseball stadium; after several shots of those lights, we hear a broadcast play-by-play and see a TV screen showing the baseball game that Mr. Kawai has apparently decided not to attend in favor of a banquet that the aging school chums have scheduled for "the Gourd"-- a teacher that none of them really ever liked (he was a tyrant who taught Chinese literature.)   The TV showing the baseball game is not even in the room where the banquet is underway.  In fact, it's in the adjacent bar shown, as is typical for Ozu, in a formulaic establishing shot filmed down a corridor to where customers are drinking.  Ozu uses similar techniques for a number of transitions.  There's another oddity:  Hirayama frequents a bar called "The Tory" presumably for "Suntory" whiskey served at the place.  However, the film never cuts directly to the bar.  Rather, we see a shot of the alley-like streets in the Yokohama pleasure district, then, a shot of a red marquee for a place called Bar Ace  (the "A" is "Bar" is at the top of the word "Ace").  We see this sign repeatedly, always before the establishing shot of the sign for the Tory Bar -- but Bar Ace plays no role in the script and no one ever goes into the place.  Again, it's an odd indirection, a little baroque flourish intended, I think, to insert a shot of  a glowing red icon into the film. (Another notable example deserves mention:  before the scenes preparatory for Michiko's wedding, the camera shows us a rather grim-looking elementary school -- we hear children's voices singing about the autumn, a sound-cue that plays under the scenes involving Michiko and her father getting ready for the ceremony.  But we don't enter the school, don't see the children, and the place is introduced only to motivate the singing on the soundtrack.) 

The film posits that men construct substitutes for their families -- these are the drinking symposia, that the women dislike but tolerate:  when Horei brings his young wife to one of these drinking parties, there's an almost palpable sense that he is violating a very fundamental premise upon which this society is based.  Men retain relationships with their school buddies as witness the elaborate banquet staged for the "Gourd". And Ozu in this film acknowledges that military service has created a sort of bond between men that persists and has family-like implications.  Hirayama frequents a tavern where the bar-maid looks a bit like his deceased wife --she's not really similar but Hirayama insists that she there's a slight resemblance.  At this tavern, the juke box offers the song "The Warship March", a jaunty patriotic tune that celebrates the power of the "floating fortresses" of the battleships.  In an astonishing scene, Hirayama, who is revealed to have been a captain on one of these ships, meets a sailor who served under him, Yamamoto. The two men get drunk together and speculate as to what would have happened if the Japanese had won the war -- there would be samisen players in New York as well as pachinko parlors and the men would probably be drinking in a tavern in that city with blue-eyed Yankees, but, after a little discussion, everyone agrees that it was for the best that the war was lost.  Then, the bar-maid plays the "the Warship March" and Yamamoto who is very drunk struts around, marching in time to the music while saluting the bar maid and Hirayama, who both return the salute.  The scene has an indescribable aura of sadness, nostalgia, and comedy -- I recall that when I saw the picture twenty years ago this was really the only scene that persisted in my memory.  The men's fond recollections of the lost war also establishes a forbidden, quasi-familial bond between them -- after all, the war represented the "best years of their lives."  

Ozu is clear-eyed about aging.  Viewed in a certain light, the picture is very dark.  Michiko, in fact, likes a young man, Miura, who is a friend of her brother and who works with him.  Michiko's older brother, Koichi, acts as go-between and tries to broker a marriage between his sister and the young salary-man.  But he is already taken, engaged to another woman although he also would much prefer a match with Michiko.  The scene in which Hirayama tells his daughter that she can't marry Miura is very unsettling -- the young woman is obviously terribly hurt, but she takes the news stoically.  You can't always get what you want.  She is later "married off" (to use the film's diction) to another man.  He is never shown in the movie and we have no idea whether she likes or dislikes him, or merely tolerates the match.  Marriages are shown as unhappy -- Koichi's marriage is troubled.  His wife obviously wants a baby, but Koichi is used to being treated as a baby himself and would resent being replaced by a real infant.  (In one scene, Koichi's angry wife eats cherries and spits out the pits aggressively). There's a nasty sub-plot about some golf clubs that Koichi wants to buy with money that his father has given him for a refrigerator -- his wife has to borrow cold foods from neighbors.  Koichi ends up with his golf clubs, only after much whining and sulking (he lies on his futon disconsolately smoking cigarettes) but his wife has negotiated for half of the money to be applied for an expensive leather handbag for her.  Koichi and his wife bicker incessantly and there's no sign that they've ever been happy.  Horei's young wife is predicted to be ruinous for the older man.  We don't have any idea who Michiko has married at the end of the movie.  There's no warrant that she will be happy --  in fact, the film subtly suggests that her marriage will be troubled like that of her older brother -- she is certainly too spirited to be an obedient traditional Japanese wife.  But we know for certain that old Hirayama is now alone and that his remaining years will be solitary and, probably, passed in a state of drunkenness.  "In the end, we spend our lives alone," Mr. Hirayama muses.  Ozu, of course, provides both radiant light and terrifying shadow.  Late in the film, we see Hirayama in a frock with black tails.  He enters his daughter's room where she is being dressed for her wedding.  The framing cuts off the bride -- we can see only part of her.  But, when the camera angle changes to show the young woman, she is not facing the camera frontally -- rather, and this is unusual for Ozu, a sort of exclamation point, we see her in profile.  When she turns to face the camera, she is probably the most beautiful bride in the history of film.  Later, Mr. Hirayama is shot in profile as well, a mise-en-scene that suggests his loneliness, rhyming with the shot of the bride before she turns to face the camera.  Ozu's poetic realism suffuses the film with tender lyrical episodes.  At his office, Mr. Hirayama is filmed against a backdrop of a series of ventilator shaft from which steam oozes.  The little grove of ventilators looks like the cemetery at the end of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai -- it's a melancholy reminder that death is always at our side.

 

Shin Godzilla

"The city is dense and brittle," someone says in Hideako Anno's Shin Godzilla (2016).  Then, an "unknown sea creature" rises from the deep and we get to see just how "dense and brittle" Tokyo is.  Godzilla or Gojiro, depending upon your language and pronunciation is Shin, a god -- "an organism far surpassing man."  ("Shin" is the word for divinity that we detect in "Shinto".)  Like Tokyo, Shin Godzilla is fantastically dense, a complicated set of provocations on the idea of the Kaiju or giant beast monster.  The film purports to be an adult iteration of the creature-destroying-Tokyo movie and, mostly, succeeds -- Shin Godzilla is nothing if not thought-provoking.

The set up is familiar:  a pleasure vessel, apparently a yacht, is found empty and drifting in Tokyo bay.  On the vessel, there are some peculiar charts, seemingly mapping clouds of data, an origami flower, and a strange inscription: "Do as you like."   About four shots after our hand-held camera tour of the yacht, a giant column of water erupts from the bay, blood red foam surrounds the jetting fountain, and, then, an underground traffic tunnel beneath the estuary ruptures pouring about 50 tons of gore onto four-lanes of speeding vehicles.  There follows the first of several long sequences comprised of jump-cuts between administrative meetings and conferences.  People venture various opinions, speakers labeled by surtitles as to their names and rank in the government or its various ministries.  Most of the movie consists of imagery of these conclaves in which officials politely offer differing opinions as to what should be done.  Meanwhile, a sort of larval sea monster, about 500 feet long has come up the river and is now pushing a cone of trains and boats and semi-trucks through the center of the water-front.  No one knows what to do and, worse, different government agencies quarrel over jurisdiction while environmentalists protest about proposals to "exterminate" the huge "unknown sea creature."  Several new agencies are formed and  immediately commence promulgating red-tape restrictions.  The government is paralyzed by its bureaucrats as well as by dependence on the United States, the one great power that everyone in the film seems to despise even more than the sea monster.  Fortunately, the larval Godzilla retreats into Tokyo harbor.  Politicians vie with one another for power and everyone has a political or economic agenda at cross-purposes with other agendas.  The United States sends an ambitious Senator's daughter, Miss Patterson, and she immediately clashes with the rebellious Yaguchi, a realistic young man who is appalled by the bureaucratic chaos hindering any rational response to the threat from the creature.  An agency of nerds is formed, a "flat organization" in which all are purportedly equal, although this group of scientists is led, more or less, by Yaguchi.  Godzilla rises out of the sea once more, this time recognizable as an immense dragon monster with a forest of skyscraper-sized, rubber bristles on his spine and a little lizard head that looks like it's made out of a thousand iron-meteorites all fused together.  Beneath his carapace of spines and scales, the monster throbs with magma-red blood and periodically disgorges tons of the stuff from his gills.  The creature's scales are like tectonic plates gliding on a surface of lava.  This time Godzilla advances into the heart of Tokyo, kills thousands including the ineffectual prime minister and his entire cabinet.  The Secretary of Agriculture, an old codger who complains about limp Soba noodles in his lunch, now is the chief executive officer.  Of course, he takes counsel with the United States government and American officials urge him to authorize a thermonuclear strike on Tokyo, something that is a bit distasteful to the Japanese not only because of the 3.5 million casualties likely to occur, but also in light of memories of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  The nerd conclave labors overtime to figure out an alternative means of destroying the beast.  Lightning fast montage shows a sort of Japanese "Operation Warp Speed" in which scientists and factories labor to produce agents to stop the monster.  By this time, Godzilla is "self-evolving" -- this means mutating -- and gobs of his scales seem capable of regenerating the monster through "self-procreation."  The key to defeating the creature is the weird mandala-shaped map of data points found on the yacht in the first minute of the film.  It turns out that the origami is a clue.  If you fold the data graph, it forms some sort of schematic of the creature's anatomy, which is entirely atomic -- the monster was spawned by eating radioactive waste created by the Americans supposedly and that's why the missing scientist on the yacht turns out to have been a Japanese-American employee of the U.S. Department of Energy.  The gnomic statement:  "Do as you like!" is construed to be a message to the hapless Japanese Self-Defense Force (the SDF) which has been hobbled in its efforts against the monster by limitations on its autonomy.  Japan should "do as (it) likes" in combating the monster and not look to Big Brother America for its defense.  About an hour before the U.S.  is scheduled to commence it'st airstrike, hypocritically saying that it would do the same if the beast were in New York, the SDF launches a full-scale assault on the monster using bullet-trains full of TNT, five sorties of missile-launching drones, and, then, after the monster has been temporarily knocked out, a deployment of huge cranes that inject some sort of super-frigid coolant into the creature.  Godzilla is immobilized more or less under about a half-dozen skyscrapers that have been blasted down on top of him.  He struggles a bit, rises to his feet, but, then, freezes into an enormous immobile colossus, a sort of statue of himself that rises over the Tokyo skyline.  Yaguchi and his nerds are triumphant.  Miss Patterson says that she intends to be the U.S. president in about ten years and hopes she will be able to work cooperatively with Yaguchi (whom she predicts will be Prime Minister).  Yaguchi says:  "You'll want me to be your obedient Japanese puppet."  They both have a good laugh.  The UN and World Bank have issued trillions to rebuild Tokyo, the economy is on the rebound, the familiar corrupt and inert bureaucratic administration seem about to be restored.  In Paris, the Secretary of Agriculture bows deeply to a French official -- it was the French who restrained the Americans for an hour, delaying the nuclear strike so that the Japanese nerd squad could unleash Operation Warp Speed on the beast.  

The film was made before the Pandemic, but it certainly seems prescient.  The monster mutates like a virus, seems indestructible, and ultimately is stopped by an inoculation of super-cooled vaccine (a bit like the Pfizer-Moderna vaccine).  As the movie progresses, the agency devised to combat the creature begins to proliferate sub-agencies and sub-agencies of the sub-agencies all identified by acronyms.  This element of the film, a satiric indictment of the Japanese bureaucracy, is probably the most prevalent theme in the movie -- it's not funny or played for comedy, but, in fact, a deadly serious attack on Japanese administrative institutions and, apparently, derives from the government's ineffectual response to the tsunami and Fukuyama nuclear disaster.  The movie consists primarily of shots of meeting rooms in which groups of men (there are very few governmetnal officials that are women in Japan) debate the problem.  The cutting is fantastically quick and it is often hard to determine what is going on -- the film is Brechtian in that it is "epic":  the concern is not with individual characters but with structures of power, most particularly the Japanese bureaucracy, but, as the film evolves, the world order in which the super-powers bicker over what should be done with the monster.  (The Americans ultimately get blamed for everything and it's the French who save Tokyo.)  The movie is very cold and analytical --  there's no love interest; Yaguchi and the beautiful Miss Patterson's relationship is based upon mutual ambition.  A plain girl among the nerds speaks in aphorisms about the monster and the detail of the creature's anatomy being deciphered as a sort of "fold" or origami pattern is like something out of Gilles Deleuze.  The  impressive creature effects, particularly in the second part of the movie, involve the critter emitting blasts of radioactivity like laser beams from his back and prickly spine and even his tail.  The luminous beams slash through skyscrapers as if they were sticks of butter and the monster is a spectacular apparition glowing like a volcano with satanic red flame.  The movie rushes forward at the breakneck speed of one of Japan's bullet trains and you can't digest the blast of information.  The picture probably has to be watched at least twice to figure out much of what is going on -- particularly the congeries of conspiracy theories animating the plot.  The movie is an impressive achievement but glacially cold and indifferent to suffering, an icy theorem.     

At Midnight, I'll Take your Soul

 At a forum at Lincoln Center, the director of Bacurau, a sort of Brazilian spaghetti-western, said that he admired Jose Mojico Marins, whose work is "vastly underrated."  Jose Mojico Marins was popularly known as Ze de Caixho ("Coffin Joe"), not only the protagonist but also the director of a trilogy of horror films featuring that character.  At the Lincoln Center interview, the film makers said that Marins had, in effect, invented genre films in Brazil, a strange claim that can't be exactly true.  The first Coffin Joe picture was released in 1963, immediately condemned by the Catholic Church, and an enormous box-office success.  That picture is At Midnight, I'll take your Soul.  The movie is zero-budget, shot on grainy black-and-white, with acting that looks like it was perpetrated by friends of the director.  Marins plays Ze ("Joe").  People have large families in Brazil and Marins, in an interview, claims that his film crews were usually comprised of the siblings and kin of his girlfriends.  Whenever he ended a relationship, he had to train a brand-new crew.  

At Midnight... is pretty vile.  But horror films are generally vile and this one is fairly scary and has a few good effects.  Coffin Joe is a local undertaker who seems to have read too much Nietzsche:  he spends most of his time ranting about how crime is the prerogative of the strong.  His obsession is begetting a son since he believes that the "blood-line" is the only immortality granted to human beings.  When Joe discovers that his long-suffering girlfriend, Lenita, is barren, he chloroforms her, straps her to a bed with what looks like duct-tape over her mouth, and unleashes his pet tarantula on her.  (The actress is extraordinarily game, apparently allowing the hairy creature to crawl all over her.)  Of course, the tarantula bites and poor Lenita expires as Ze rants and laughs maniacally.  In the local tavern, staffed by the same set of barflies in every scene, Ze bullies everyone.  When one man refuses to play cards with him, Ze cuts off his fingers with a broken bottle.  Another guy gets whipped repeatedly across his bald head and face.  Ze's best-friend is the gullible Antonio, a man cursed with a beautiful (and presumably fertile) girlfriend, Terezinha.  Ze murders Antonio after first haranguing him about his own superiority and fearlessness.  The bludgeoned Antonio revives in the bathtub where Ze has placed him and so the poor guy has to be killed again, this time drowned in the gory water.  Ze, then, lures Terezinha to his nightmarish house -- it's full of mannequin hands and arms, grotesque statues and stacks of coffins.  There he beats her to a pulp, kisses her bloody wounds, and, then, ravishes her.  Terezinha says that Joe's "ruined her" and that she will commit suicide.  Joe responds sardonically that "this is what they all say."  The next shot is a jump cut to a woman's face shrieking right into the camera -- the woman is peering through a window and a pan shows us that Terezinha has, in fact, hanged herself.  The local doctor plans an autopsy on Antonio.  This upsets Joe who gouges out the physician's eyes with his enormously long, hooked fingernails.  Joe, then, lights the poor whimpering blind man on fire.  It's the Day of the Dead and Joe orders all the barflies to drink with him.  A gypsy woman ,who has the thankless role of baying at all the characters while stroking a skull as if it were her pet cat, has prophesied that Joe will have his soul snatched from him at midnight, after the "procession of the dead."  Of course, Joe is skeptical and mocks the woman as a hag and a witch. A comely  female visitor to town arrives and asks for an escort to her cousin's place, inconveniently located on the other side of the local cemetery.  No one is willing to walk with her past the cemetery -- no one, that is, except Coffin Joe.  He takes the woman to her relative's door, bids her goodbye in a courteous fashion, and, then, of course, is beset by spooks.  He goes mad and, in his terror, flees into the cemetery, a bad idea, it seems.  The promised procession of the dead appears, solarized and appearing on negative film-stock.  Joe goes berserk and ends up in the crypt where Antonio and Terezinha are resting in their coffins.  For some reason, Joe breaks open the coffins and inspects the rotting corpses -- Antonio has Joe's pet spider sitting like a tea-cosy on his face; Terezinha's features sport a dozen busy maggots.  Joe ends up head down, eyes bulging and dead as a doornail.  (I guess he will be revived for two later reboots of the franchise.)

Apparently, the picture was re-released a couple times, most recently in 2002 in which it is tricked-out with a color prologue in which Joe rants at the audience while caressing a couple of zombie-girls.  This is prologue to the film's original prologue in which the gypsy with the skull flamboyantly taunts the audience, daring them to watch the film which, she says, is sure to induce nightmares.  Indeed, at one point, she bellows at the audience that they've made a big mistake buying a ticket to this movie and they would be well-advised to flee the theater.  (Given the shoddiness of the film, she may have a point.)  The movie is pretty barren-- Joe is a pipsqueak wearing a black top-hat and a cape:  he seems to weigh about 120 and is half the size of the thugs that he beats up in the bar.  Before each murder, we are treated to a close-up of his glaring eyes with one eyebrow dramatically raised.  Then, we get an even closer shot featuring his uni-brow, something that Brazilians apparently regard as particularly horrifying.  The sets consist of what looks like a warehouse full of coffins with some smoke and cobwebs in the corner, a miniature forest of potted plants with which Joe keeps wrestling -- for some reason, he's always emerging from behind the leafy branches of these little trees -- and a tavern that would embarrass Ed Wood. Joe's house is full of macabre gew-gaws and he sometimes rants from atop a casket, twirling a weird suspended cage adorned with gothic filigree -- I have no idea what this object is supposed to be, but it is eye-catching.  The best performance in the film is by the tarantula who does what tarantulas do.  There's a weird effect in which Joe's pipe is lit by a corpse who appears in a flickering halo of bright specks -- Marins said he glued glitter onto the negative.  Coffin Joe is an all-purpose bad guy: an avowed atheist, he orders lamb for his Good Friday repast and gnaws on the bones while a religious procession passes under his window (a good effect).  Later, in the tavern, he forces the local barflies to eat meat from a giant lamb drumstick that he wields sort of like Fred Flintstone with his dino-T-bone..  The Catholic Church seems to have been most incensed by the meat-eating on Friday; the rest of the rape and mayhem presumably didn't bother them.  The movie is not so bad as to be funny -- it's just cheap and unpleasant.

Marins, in the first decade of the 2000's was a fat little man with grotesque fingernails, mostly bald with furry eyebrows.  He seems to have been a great fabulist.  He claims his mother was a tango-singer and his father a bullfighter.  In his twenties, he toured the outback of Minas Gerais with a projector and lurid little films featuring rape, torture, and lots of poorly staged sword-fighting.  Apparently, he earned a living projecting these things in tiny impoverished villages.  A Catholic priest apparently gave him one of his first cameras.  

The Outpost

In 1994, Alexander Sokurov released a documentary about soldiers deployed to the border of Afghanistan and Tajikisstan.  The movie is about 6 1/2 hours long and called Spiritual Voices:  From the Diary of a Commander.  I saw the film years ago, watching it in 90 minute increments over four or five evenings.  The picture shows Russian soldiers living in pits and trenches lined with zinc atop a mountain.  They drink a lot and seem to be terribly bored.  From time to time, they descend a thousand feet into a rugged, treeless ravine through which a torrent of water flows.  This is where they wash their clothing.  Some times, an invisible enemy takes potshots at them and they return fire.  There are a couple of skirmishes that are filmed from about six inches off the ground in which we see troops crawling on their bellies and firing their guns.  Someone mentions that NATO might send soldiers into these remote barren mountains to keep the peace.  The Russians scornfully say that the NATO troops would commit suicide if they had to live for any extended time under these conditions.  This movie was made when Russia was fighting the Mujaheddin, among them Osama Bin Laden -- insurgents then allied with the United States.  Rod Lurie's The Outpost takes place in October 2009 in the same general terrain.  In this film, the local tribal warriors are now fighting the United States.  But the situation is pretty much the same -- an isolated outpost is under fire daily from invisible adversaries.  Living conditions are spartan, although considerably better than the primitive pits and lean-tos occupied by the Russians.  The main difference is that the American outpost is at the base of the mountains, encircled by stony dizzying heights.  The unseen foe lobs mortar shells down on the outpost.  The Americans respond with their own mortar fire.  The soldiers in the ANA (Afghan National Army) are pretty much useless and, in fact, flee at the first sign of serious trouble.  As in Sokurov's movie, the soldiers speak in an impenetrable jargon of acronyms, obscenities, and military slang.  Everyone is constantly abusing everyone else.  The commander (or commanders because there are several) try to keep peace with the local elders and meet with them periodically in a shack called the Shura hut.  But the elders seems shifty, dangerous and unreliable.  They peddle corpses of women that they have probably killed themselves to earn $3500 payments of blood money.  The Afghan interpreter is convinced that a big attack is coming, but the Americans ignore him. (This motif is also prominent in the other film that the picture channels -- Zulu_  Then, the big Taliban attack, in fact, occurs and the desperate defense of the base occupies the last half of the film.  

There's no doubt that someone associated with the film has seen Sokurov's monumental documentary.  For the first half of the movie, the picture is closely attuned to the daily activities at the isolated base and focuses on the profane interplay between the troops.  (As in many war films, it's hard to keep track of the protagonists -- the film helpfully labels the soldiers when we first see them, but, unless you're keeping notes, the men all look alike and become, more or less, fungible as the movie progresses.)  The commanders at the base are unlucky.  The first, Captain Keating, tries to drive a heavy vehicle over a mountain pass but crashes the truck and ends up dead.  (The outpost is then named after him.)  The second commander is more aggressive and leads the soldier on patrols up into the rugged mountains.  We get a good vantage on the base from one of these reconnoitering missions and, therefore, understand that the fort is fundamentally indefensible, sitting at the bottom of huge stone funnel.  The second commander gets blown to pieces crossing a hanging bridge --  his brains end up in the mouth of the soldier behind him who suffers shell-shock and has to be evacuated.  A third commander named Broward is appointed to lead the mission.  Broward is thought to be cowardly by some of the men -- he's too chicken to even hike out to the privy to urinate.  Shortly after he's relieved of his command, the Taliban mount an attack in force on the outpost and this battle occupies the rest of the film.

The greatest of all movies featuring an outnumbered force beleagured from all sides by huge numbers of enemies in Cyril Enfield's Zulu, a particularly brutal, if effective, recounting of the fight at Rourke's Drift in what is now South Africa.  Once the Taliban begin the assault, the movie shifts into the mode of Zulu -- indeed, the earlier sequences invoke the movie in which Taliban attacks are, in  fact, contrived to alert the adversary as to the location of the post's defenses, the number of its defenders and the nature of their weapons (as well as the location of the ammunition depot).  (In Zulu, the tribesmen stand on an exposed hilltop stoically absorbing fire from the defending troops for the purpose of "counting their rifles.")   As in Zulu, the attackers swarm down from hillsides and, almost immediately, breach the base's perimeter.  Most of the combat occurs "within the wire" and involves desperate close-range slaughter.  As in Zulu, there are a number of tense scenes set in the field hospital.  A group of soldiers are cut off from the others, trapped in armored vehicles.  One of them, Mace is terribly wounded.  A number of scenes show efforts to drag Mace from the battlefield, an endeavor that results in more catastrophes.  Mace is brought to the field hospital where impromptu transfusions are used to revive him.  (However, he later dies.) By this time, jets from Qatar have arrived along with armed helicopters and the Taliban are blown to bits or roasted alive.  A patrol after the battle inspects craters surrounded by charred and fragmentary corpses.  The movie has a long dying fall.  As in Zulu, titles tells us that many  of the surviving soldiers received medals for valor.  However, we also see the most heroic of the soldiers on the verge of hysteria with a female psychologist treating him for post-traumatic stress.  As he breaks down in tears, a title informs us that the man is a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor -- a poignant touch that I admired.  Not content with these post-action sequences, the film then shows us Jake Tapper (the CNN newscaster) interviewing the actual soldiers who fought in the battle, including one who appears in the film.  (Tapper wrote a best-selling book about the siege.)  The picture ends with a Mormon soldier saying that scripture tells us that the gates of heaven and hell are adjacent to one another and this was what the battle now means to him -- the suffering of the troops was hellish but their bravery and sacrifice also made the experience a foretaste of heaven.  

The film seems to have been made for Netflix.  It is mostly shot with handheld cameras using distorting lenses -- the impression is that the soldiers are staggering around as imaged by selfie-stick-mounted cameras.  The effect is that the soldiers distort space around them.  The movie is primarily concerned with the actions of individual soldiers and so the slaughter of the Taliban is not really shown in any detail -- we just see the hillsides erupting in flame behind the soldiers who are running toward or away from the camera.  There is an extraordinary moment early in the movement, when the camera tilts up vertiginously to show that the base is at the foot of huge mountains, peaks so high that their tops are never really shown.  This gives us the impression that the terrain is monstrously opposed to any successful defense of the outpost.  The Outpost is singularly realistic -- half of the dialogue can't be understood because it is replete with untranslated military idioms.  The first part of the movie is like a horror film with sudden shocking bursts of violence and ominous, shuddering music on the soundtrack.  I think the picture is quite good for a movie of this type.  Like many war films, however, it is, by and large, pointless -- war is hell; soldiers suffer terribly in battle; some people can be very brave.  There's really nothing more to the movie and it's a bit hard to become too involved with the protagonists because they all look and act alike.  

Witness to Murder

TCM's Eddie Mueller, introducing Witness to Murder, a terrific 1954 film noir, observes that this thriller has now accrued new relevance in this #me too era.  The movie is about a woman (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who witnesses a murder, reports the crime, and is, then, discredited as hysterical. Of course, the murderer knows the truth and he stalks the witness, gaslighting her into a kind of madness.  Mueller's introductory remarks are thought-provoking and, indeed, not nearly as scathing as the movie.  In Witness to Murder, the villain is a Nazi.  The killer, Albert Richter (played with silky malevolence by George Saunders) isn't revealed to be a Nazi -- rather, everyone knows that he's a Nazi from the very outset.  The scary irony of the film is that the cops all choose to believe a deranged Nazi instead of a sober, professional career woman in her mid-forties.  The assumption is that the Nazi, who is completely insane, is more reliable than the heroine, simply because he is a man.  

Witness for Murder is luridly effective and no one watching the film could ever pretend to be bored.  In fact, the picture is tremendously gripping and, even, maddening.  We know that the heroine has witnessed a real murder, that she is completely justified in her suspicions, and, yet, no one believes her.  Even Larry, a burly cop, who is implied to be her love-interest, thinks she's nuts and encourages her to seek psychological help for her delusions.  And while the coppers are trying to placate the seemingly histrionic "little woman," Richter is setting traps for her, first persuading the patriarchy to have her committed to a ghastly mad-house, and, then, pursuing her relentlessly -- his plan is to throw the heroine off a skyscraper and make it seem that she has committed suicide.  All of this is hokum, but there is startling subtext (or really text) about gender roles in American society.  The film also has other curious and fascinating undertones:  the script proposes that the female witness and the villain are really soul-mates.  Both of them are obsessives and have lost their "significant others," as we would say today, in the War.  Richter goes so far as to say that he and the heroine (she's called Cheryl Draper -- a good name for an interior decorator) would really get along quite well if only he didn't have to kill her.  Stanwyck looks great with the sardonic, scary Nazi.  By contrast, her sober, staid nominal boyfriend, a police detective studying to be a lawyer, isn't well-suited for her -- in fact, the man has a peculiar Neanderthal profile with a heavy low brow furred with eyebrows like unruly caterpillars.  Throughout the movie, the kindly cop condescends to, and patronizes Cheryl Draper in a way that is more offensive than Saunder's homicidal menace.  The film's point, effectively dramatized, is that no one is willing to believe the heroine when her credibility is compared with that of the "denazified Nazi" who has, in fact, written a book ostensibly about history called The Age of Violence, a tract that seems to make Mein Kampf look restrained and genteel by comparison.  Larry, the detective, notes that The Age of Violence is "just a hash of Nietzsche and Hegel", even though the book advocates the slaughter of subhumans as a way to redeem a decadent society.  Men write big, ambitious books; women gossip.  Characteristically, it's Richter's book that ultimately provides the clue that damns him -- from the beginning to the film's very end, no man has believed a syllable of what the murder witness has said; it's is book that condemns him.  If ever a heroine deserved an apology at the end of a film it's poor Cheryl Draper -- but none of the men ever express any regret that they didn't credit a word that she said.  

The picture looks great.  Indeed, on a shot by shot basis it's spectacular.  The photography is by John Alton, a master of the black and white film noir.  In the opening scenes, a wild wind-storm is buffeting high-rise apartments in Los Angeles.  The camerawork captures a tempestuous chiaraoscuro of billowing shadows, canvas awnings flapping wildly in the wind.  Apartments are intricate labyrinths of light and shadow -- the ominous silhouette of an African fetish in Draper's apartment broods against a remote wall.  When Draper is committed to an asylum, Alton goes all-out:  the ward is full of puddles of unmotivated light, each like a fire containing a damned soul and the mad-women are extravagant and spooky.  Cheryl's interview with the psychiatrist in charge of this hell-hole is conducted in a room lurid with a huge cage-like shadow on the wall and floor.  (When Cheryl leaves the nightmarish office, the cage pattern is picked up on the tile of the corridor.)  Saunders is filmed like the Prince of Darkness, rearing up Nosferatu-style against black velvet curtains, a huge hieroglyph of monstrosity.  (In one scene, he says that he will publish the "Gospel of the Future" that will put to shame Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin -- then, he begins to rant in German.)  At the climax, Cheryl Draper flees across empty urban streets and not just Saunders but everyone in town pursues her -- it's a comical effect a bit like Dr. Suess' recently maligned To think that it happened on Mulberry Street, an impromptu mob of about 20 people led by the villain chases Cheryl to the base of a five-hundred foot tower, uncannily clad with a enormous sheath of scaffolding.  You wouldn't get me to climb up that scaffolding even in broad daylight, but, of course, Cheryl flees up to the tip-top of the huge skyscraper through a vertical maze of dark shadows so that height and the abyss can add to her Angst.  The scene in which the villain plunges down an open shaft, smashing through several floors of flimsy cross members outdoes anything Hitchcock achieved in this genre.  (And even with the villain fallen to his death, Cheryl still has to dangle for an extended period from the side of the building).  Some of the direction is inept -- the film maker was Louis B. Mayer's son-in-law.  A few scenes involve jarring close-ups and shots are held too long or not long enough. There's an amusing, if discordant scene, about how people expect real detectives to act like TV cops and Larry's cigar-chomping sidekick sings the theme to Dragnet.  But, by and large, the direction is good and the acting excellent as well.  

Hitchcock's Rear Window released later in 1954 is a variant on the theme.  Hitchcock's movie, of course, is more ambitious and, in fact, comprises a sort of critique of voyeurism and the cinema itself.  This sort of thing is well beyond the reach of Witness to Murder, but the film, in many ways, is more suspenseful and disturbing than Hitchcock's movie.