Bergman Island

Bergman Island (2021) is an intricate refutation of the esthetics of the great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman.  Most of the film exudes the ambience of a TV series directed by Lena Dunham.  Viewers will be divided, I think, as to whether Lena Dunham represents an advance over the dour sensibility of the famous Swede.  But the argument is surely worth making and there is a reasonable feminist argument for the notion that Bergman's male rage motivates masterpieces that, nonetheless, must be overcome and, if not surpassed, at least, contested.  On the basis of age and gender, I am of the party of Bergman, but there is something admirable about the attempt to replace him with more humane esthetic principles -- I just wish that the movie making these arguments were better.  But, again, this is a male disposition tied to the sensibilities of my generation -- Bergman made colossal declarations in an aggressively solemn style; one doesn't contradict Bergman by making an equally aggressive counterargument.  Rather, the arguably pernicious influence of Bergman is most effectively undercut by movie-making that is slight, unassuming, comical, even, a bit twee.

A male filmmaker of some note, Tony (Tim Roth). travels with his German girlfriend, Kris, to Faro Island, an idyllic place in the Baltic Sea.  This island was Ingmar Bergman's home in the latter part of his life and many of his movies, beginning in 1960 were filmed there.  Kris is also a film maker, although less well-known than her much older boyfriend.  (Roth looks like he's about 60; Kris played by Vickie Krieps seems to be about 25.)  A summer Bergman festival is underway, complete with screenings of the master's work, lectures, and a "Bergman Safari" -- that is, a colorfully painted bus that takes visitors around the island to view various places made famous in the director's films.  This is supposed to be a working vacation; Tony is finishing a screenplay and receives many calls from his producers as to casting and financing issues.  Kris is also working, albeit with less success, on her screenplay -- her fountain pens keep running out of ink.  A film festival, featuring a screening of one of Tony's recent movies, is also in full spate.  In the first of several subtle if sardonic points made by Bergman Island's director, Mia Hansen-Love (with a line through the "o"),  Tony's movie, at least as much of it as we see, seems to be a sort of pretentious slasher movie -- a man hunts a woman in desolate, dark landscape and she ends up killing him, apparently with his own knife.  Hansen-Love's point is that the male sensibility motivating Bergman's movies has a misogynistic element and, in contemporary film-making seems to have degenerated into gory horror movies (a comment, perhaps, on the films of Lars von Trier).  From the outset, it's clear that Kris and Tony are badly mismatched.  Tony doesn't pay much attention to his girlfriend and takes phone calls when she is trying to explain her screenplay to him.  They clash as to which Bergman film to screen -- they are staying at one of the director's houses on the island and sleeping in the bed featured in Scenes from a Marriage.  (The BnB hostess sourly notes that Scenes from a Marriage caused "many thousands of divorces.")  There's no sexual or romantic spark between Kris and Tony.  Kris wants to watch one of Bergman's rare comedies, Summer with Monika; Tony insists on screening Cries and Whispers, a film that Pauline Kael decried as unmistakably misogynistic and, even, hysterically gynophobic -- a flaw in Bergman Island is that both Tony and Kris seem surprised at the extremely dire subject matter in Bergman's movie; Kris calls it a horror movie without the comfort of seeing monsters vanquished that the genre usually supplies.  Kris is clearly dissatisfied with the relationship and she engages in a flirtation with a young man her age.  While she is supposed to be participating in the Bergman Safari bus-tour, she makes her own inspection of the island with the young man and they end up swimming together at a beach where the water is full of jellyfish.  (They playfully pitch jellyfish at each other.)  The Bergman Safari is satirically treated.  A key stop involves a place where a house was once used as a set for a Bergman film (I think it's Persona) but has long vanished:  everyone obediently looks at a field-stone wall in which a section had to be replaced and some trees where the house once stood.  The people  on the bus are Bergman fan-boys of the most literal-minded type -- they quarrel about whether the title to Bergman's Shame (also shot on the island) is called just Shame or The Shame.  Meanwhile, Kris' friend has  taken her to see Bergman's grave.  Back at the house where Scenes from a Marriage was filmed, Tony shows his indifference to Kris by not even getting mad at her for standing him up on the Safari.  They go out for a walk.  Kris has paged through Tony's notebook full of writing and pornographic sketches, some of them featuring bondage and, obviously, a little disturbing to her.  They have earlier quarreled about Bergman -- the director had nine children with six women and paid no attention to any of his progeny.  An elderly woman defends Bergman saying that he was running the National Theater at the time and had made 25 films in as many years.  Kris says:  "So you are saying he had no time to change diapers."  This is, indeed, what the woman has implied.  Kris says that she would like to have nine children with six different men, a statement that upsets Tony.  On their walk, Kris tells Tony about her screenplay and, as she speaks, the movie opens into a film within a film.  We now see scenes, indeed, whole sequences from the movie that Kris has written.

The film within the film is very obviously intended as the antithesis to Bergman's great, despairing film-declarations.  A young woman named Amy (Mia Wasikowski) attends a friend's wedding on Faro Island.  She runs into a former boyfriend named Joseph.  Twice before they have been romantically involved:  once it was "too early" for her; then, the second time "too late".  Both of them are involved in other relationships but their "significant others" (as they say) are not attending the wedding.  In a sharp contrast to the weighty affairs litigated in Bergman's films, the main issue troubling Amy is the fact that she has brought a stylish white dress to the wedding and protocol forbids anyone from wearing white at such an affair but the bride -- this leads to much discussion among the characters and soul-searching for Amy.  After much hesitation, Amy and Joseph resurrect their failed romance and end up in bed together.  But Joseph feels bad about betraying his girlfriend and rejects Amy's attempt to re-ignite their romance.  He leaves and Amy is desolate without him.  This is where Kris' account of her projected film ends.  She says that she's "stuck" and doesn't know how to end the movie:  should poor Amy commit suicide? What should she do?  At this point, Tony gets an urgent call from his producers (he has already interrupted Kris' story several times) and, now, has to leave the island himself for a meeting somewhere.  Kris stays behind since they have rented the BnB, Bergman's cottage adjacent to his screening compound, for another few days.  It seems obvious to the viewer that Kris and Tony's relationship is doomed.

But there's an epilogue that is intentionally confusing.  Kris goes to Bergman's house, a fairly luxurious place a few miles away.  The house isn't ordinarily open to the public but Kris finds the door open.  She goes inside and meets the young man with whom she exchanged volleys of jelly-fish.  (He had to leave the island to attend at this grandfather's deathbed -- the old man has now died and the grandson is listening to music from Bergman's collection of LPs and brooding about his loss.)  The young man leaves (without the embrace with Kris that we expect) and Kris, alone in the house, looks at Bergman's things, including a model of the Swedish National Theater in which we see a tiny figure of Bergman in an upper gallery seeming to eavesdrop on a rehearsal.  Then, Joseph from Kris' screenplay (and imagined film) appears.  He says he is about to take the ferry off the island.  And he says that the shooting is now finished.  We see that one of the rooms in Bergman's house is still fitted-out with movie lamps, reflectors, and tripods.  The film, then, cuts to the ferry but it is approaching the island, not leaving.  Tony is on the ferry with a little girl probably about six.  With the girl, Tony drives the car to the Bergman cottage where Scenes from a Marriage was filmed.  Kris is working in a windmill on the property.  She sees the little girl and comes from the windmill to ecstatically greet the child; obviously, the child is her daughter with Tony and they, now, seem to be a happy couple.  The ending is complicated and hard to parse.  However, my view is that Kris actually made the film about Amy and Joseph and the wedding on Faro Island; Joseph, the actor in that film, bids Kris farewell after the final shot in the picture has been completed.  (This means that the extended sequences showing Amy and Joseph aren't merely imaginary -- they are, in fact, clips from a movie that Kris actually directed and, indeed, completed on the island.)  The surprise ending is that Kris and Tony, although not well-suited to one another, at least, apparently, are still together, seemingly happy, and have a child.  This provisionally happy ending, of course, is in direct contrast to Bergman's typically tragic denouement.  

As I have noted, the scenes involving the wedding and Amy and Joseph's revived affair are intentionally sunny, trite, and feature (as with Lena Dunham's TV work) lots of casual drug use, nudity, and sex.  Kris' esthetic is posited as female -- the opposite of Tony's sadism and Bergman's exhausting and fearsome misogyny.  Early in the film, Kris notes that the island is bright and idyllic (and, indeed, it looks like Door County, Wisconsin or Cape Cod) and she wonders why Bergman shot the place in dismal black and white like a location in a horror film.  Ultimately, Kris is committed to making a gossipy kind of smart and witty comedy; Tony makes films with men and women literally slicing one another up.  The viewer is left to consider whose esthetic is more valuable.   

Archive 81

An eight episode Netflix mini-series, Archive 81 (2022) is sufficiently entertaining to recommend.  The show is scary but not excesssively unpleasant and it poses enough interesting riddles to maintain audience interest for its eight hour run-time.  The show belongs to a genre that seems  increasingly prevalent on cable and streaming services:  the occult mystery series built to engender endlessly replicating narratives, a labyrinth of branching pathways that tease a solution to various enigmas but won't (or can't) definitively solve the puzzles that it poses.  In a way, this form parodies or, perhaps, embodies the structure of internet inquiries -- one mystery links to another and, pretty soon, the objective of the original search is forgotten, buried under a palimpsest of competing facts and narratives. This is an old and, somewhat, disreputable form, prefigured by the curiously organic, perpetually regenerating narratives in ancient serial movies -- for instance, serials like Judex and Fantomas by Louis Feuillade (among the first popular narrative films ever produced).  The X-Files developed this technique for holding a plot in a sort of perpetual suspension with regard to its"myth" episodes -- that is, shows that explored the dire consequences of the nightmare conspiracy promoted by the "smoking man" and his alien cohorts.  Twin Peaks, in both its first and second series, is a noteworthy example of this type of show.  Lost, the Tv show about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island, brought this kind of maze-like narrative to prime-time network TV.  More recent examples of this genre are Yellowjacket, a variant on the plane-crash plot in Lost and Green Frontier (Frontera Verde) by the Columbian director Ciro Guerra,  Roberto Bolano's longer novels have some of this flavor, particularly 2666.  In these works, protagonists from a realistically portrayed milieu find themselves entrapped in a series of events that become increasingly uncanny and threatening.  The protagonists, although initially presented as competent and down-to-earth, are generally vulnerable and have back-stories that emerge during the series involving trauma and madness.  Often, it is unclear whether the weird events portrayed in the show are actually happening or merely fictions spawned by the hero's overactive imagination.  Economic necessity, the drive to produce a series that has eight or more episodes, requires that solution to mysteries encountered by the protagonist be deferred or that each plot that is resolved spawns additional narratives.  A paranoid aura frequently envelopes these shows -- no one is what he or she seems to be; all characters harbor dark secrets.  Time is fluid -- the protagonist is "unstuck" in time to use Vonnegut's formulation from Slaughterhouse Five.  Flashbacks are necessary to develop the previous history of trauma and these increasingly invade the primary action, destabilizing it.  Green Frontier is a particularly characteristic example of this kind of program -- a plucky female detective investigating the deaths of several women in the Amazon basin finds that her detective work ultimately uncovers her own past; the film shifts in a bewildering way back and forth across three generations and has as its theme the exploitation and genocide of native Indian people inhabiting the rain forest.  Nothing is ever resolved and the show features long hallucinations, some of them triggered by psycho-active drugs used by the characters, others arising from eerie nightmares.  For some reason, death by fire is a prevailing theme in these sorts of shows, I think, for the reason that it is helpful for the scenarist to have bodies destroyed by flame so that people thought to be dead can be resurrected from time-to-time -- the corpses were mistakenly identified.  (This motif leaks into other forms of cable TV -- for instance, there's a conflagration in The Righteous Gemstones, a raucous comedy about mega-church evangelists, and Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley features repeated shots of a blazing fire, filmed in reverse action, that have no real importance in the plot but merely figure as a symbol of the "infernal" qualities of the protagonist.)

I'll call Archive 81, therefore, an example of the paranoid occult thriller (or POT).  The show's premise is that an expert in the restoration of damaged film and video tape is engaged by an avuncular, if mysterious, oligarch to work on a series of fire-ravaged video cassettes.  For unexplained reasons, the hero a handsome lanky African-American named Dan Turner is engaged to do this work at an isolated Brutalist bunker hidden in the mountainous woods somewhere north of New York City.  The mysterious estate features several complexes of concrete structures with apparently limitless cellars and subcellars, including tunnels leading to an abandoned church sanctuary.  Most of this sinister complex is off-limits to the hero, although much of the show involves him exploring precisely those parts of this maze that he is not supposed to enter. (The labyrinth depicted in the show is a mirror for the complicated and involuted plot.)  The damaged tapes were shot in 1993 by a young woman named Melody Pendras.  Melody investigated the residents of an apartment building in lower Manhattan, the Visser Apartments and shot interviews with her subjects on the tape that Dan Turner is attempting to restore.  Melody's project is initially described as a documentary produced for her anthropology class.  Bur, as we discover, she is attempting to locate her birth-mother whose last known address was the Visser Apartments apparently in the late seventies.  (Melody is the archetypal protagonist of this sort of narrative -- as an infant, she was left in a Church, has a conflicted relationship with Catholicism, and seems to have been the victim of some obscure, unnamed trauma.)  Melody is supposed to have died in a fire in the Visser Apartments that claimed 13 lives (maybe -- the bodies were never found).  The damage to the video tapes is due to this fire.  It's worth noticing how this set-up ingeniously supports the complex plot -- first, information can be provided to the viewers through Melody's video tapes but when it is necessary for the narrative to conceal something, the tape just becomes illegible.  In this way, mysteries can be suggested but left interminably unresolved.  Dan Turner's situation mirrors Melody's story.  Turner's father, a psycho-therapist died in a mysterious fire with everyone in our protagonist's family.  Turner has never really understood how this fire occurred and suspects his father may have set the deadly blaze.  Turner is trapped in an eerie maze of concrete corridors full of off-limits zones.  The Visser Apartments, except for one or two shots, is one of the those horror film staples -- a place with no exterior that seems to have limitless corridors with locked doors and an inverted Empire State Building of descending cellars and catacombs.  Like Turner's bunker, the Visser Hotel is full of places said to be off-limits -- Melody is told to avoid at all costs the apartments on the sixth floor -- guess where she spends most of her time? Thus, Archive 8 gives the viewers two spectacularly haunted houses for the cost of one.  And, as you might expect, it turns out that Melody was a patient of Dan Turner's father and, of course, the destinies of the two protagonists are inextricably entangled.  (It's odd for a viewer who was already in his forties in the nineties to see that era portrayed as part of the remote, inaccessible past.)

Archive 81 crams as much weird and uncanny stuff as possible into its brisk 60 minute x 8 episodes.  There is a coven of witches, human sacrifice, psychotropic black mold, a monster that looks like the skeleton of a pterodactyl or stork, a blurry "snuff" film, suicide, drug addiction, baffling post-modern art, epileptic seizures and a spectacular seance that concludes the sixth episode in the show.  Along the way, there are hip references to Andrei Tarkovsky and The Twilight Zone as well as pitch-perfect parodies of TV news and advertisements.  (The show has a "cold open" that is always a fragment of a TV show or commercial.)  The sinister billionaire who has hired Tucker keeps warning him to stay out of the scary sub-basements in his bunker but, of course, he makes a bee-line for those places.  Cell-phones are a problem for shows of this sort -- the protagonists are always woefully ill-informed, have no internet access, and no signal.  (That's why Tucker is restoring the video tape in the remote mountains far from NYC -- he can't reliably get a signal; this is a device parallel to the video that he so effortlessly restores but which always is destroyed beyond recognition just when things start to get interesting.)  Series Tv works on the basis of the charisma of the principal actors.  If the stars are appealing and interest the viewer than you are inclined to stick around and see what happens to them.  Dan Tucker is wonderfully played by a very magnetic actor, Mamoudou Athie -- he's handsome, with great teeth and huge eyes, very important for a role that requires him mostly to react to scary things that he's seeing either on video tape or haunting the interminable basements in his bunker.  (He speaks with the distinctive phrasing that Adam Driver uses -- and I predict that this guy will be the next Adam Driver in terms of Hollywood exposure.) Martin Donovan, Hal Hartley's muse in that director's indie films, is great as the oligarch -- he uses the slight southern drawl that Tom Wolfe famous attributed to the pilots of commercial passenger planes in his book The Right Stuff.  Poor Melody Pendras is played by Dina  Shihabi, also an appealing actor with a curiously flat face -- sometimes, she's gorgeous, other times her prognathous profile looks squished and unappealing.  The Visser Apartments is full of eccentric-looking witches and warlocks, most notably an extremely pale red-headed sorceress named Cassandra -- the actress debuted decades ago in Woody Allen's Interiors. The film is full of odd wall paper, comets, strange patterns in mold, scurrying cockroaches, and, of course, ghosts and the ghosts of ghosts.  As the program progresses, Dan Turner starts to haunt Melody Pendras, somehow appearing in 1993, when her story takes place.  Vice-versa, Melody starts to haunt Turner in his 2022 bunker.  

This series is carefully manufactured for mass audiences but intelligent enough to keep more sophisticated audiences engaged.  For better or worse, it exemplifies the best sort of product built for Cable TV.

Nightmare Alley (2021)

Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley is a vast pharaonic edifice, rippling with palm-shaped pillars and interminable marble passageways, a great, cold mausoleum with nothing inside. The film's plot is complicated, involving two acts complete with separate casts of characters, dramatically different settings and milieu and, even, a marked shift in tone -- the first half of the film involves an impoverished carnival and its low-life roustabouts and freaks; the second part of the movie takes place in high society with palatial locations and elaborate 1940's evening gowns and tuxedos.  The story is rags to riches to rags again, with a brief bitter postlude.  Edmund Goulding, who directed the 1947 picture, required 111 minutes to tell the story and his movie, although briskly paced, flags in places and feels slightly repetitive; del Toro gives his movie an imperial big-budget splendor and the picture clocks in at two and 1/2 hours, that is almost 40 minutes more than the first version.  Already too long in its 1947 incarnation, the 2021 version drags, is overly explicit, and tedious -- bigger and longer isn't better, particularly when the story, although ingenious, is nothing more than pulp melodrama.  

Del Toro's movie is visually impressive but the heavy, dark decor drags the picture down.  Long shots of the wretched little carnival where the story begins invariably feature foreboding clouds and flashes of lightning.  Electra, a carny whose schtick is to grasp Tesla coils, and induce bolts of showy static electricity to surge across her shapely body (she has to be part nude, the carny barker says, to keep her garments from electrocuting her), here is bolted into an elaborate, ominous electric chair and the charges of electricity spill over her body is bright, flashing incandescent cascades like the effects in a super-hero movie.  Del Toro devises all sorts if symbolic and allegorical imagery:  there's a woman whose head appears as an enormous spider in an equally enormous web and a grotesquely deformed fetus, dubbed Enoch, serves as a leit motif, the monster's cyclopean eye glaring at the various grifters and con-artists who populate the film.  When the Geek runs amuck in del Toro's extravaganza he conceals himself in a lavish House of Damnation fun-house that is full of spectacular (and expensive-looking) gimmicks  another giant eye gazing down from an Argos-eyed wall, a giant hell-mouth with huge machine-driven grinding canines and molars, and acres of shadowy passageways.  In Goulding's late-forties film, key plot point are established with lightning rapidity -- wood alcohol gets substituted for drinking booze with the effect that Sheena's old alcoholic partner, a washed-up mentalist, ends up dying; this is set up with a three or four lines and, then, a couple of shots of the old mind-reader expiring in the arms of his wife (who we know to be sleeping with the protagonist, Stan).  Del Toro wastes three or four minutes on laying the groundwork for this sequence and telegraphs everything in tedious detail.  The climactic scene in which the con-man Stan tries to persuade a vicious oligarch that his long-long girlfriend has been resurrected is unimaginatively set up with dull exchanges of dialogue.  Stan's confederate, the hapless electric girl who is now his wife, refuses to play the role and, even, goes to the train station to escape.  This leads to a bizarre scene set in a enormous train station rest-room full of dim stalls, cavenous ceilings (that del Toro features in his characteristic low-angle photography) and big, wet-looking meadows of marble and tile.  In this ballpark-sized Men's room, Stan persuades Polly, the Electric woman, to collude with him in the gag, intended to extract a fortune from the gullible oligarch.  In del Toro's version, the apparition of the dead girl is contrived to appear in a Central Park-sized garden with marble arches and huge flower beds, all winter-killed and the scene takes place in a blizzard-like snowstorm.  The apparition representing a girl who died in an apparent botched abortion in the del Toro version, appears with gore soaking her groin and bloody hands.  Of course, the stunt fails and del Toro amps up the violence, staging a savage beating of the oligarch and, then, the brutal murder of the rich man's body-guard, hurled about forty feet into the air by Stan's car and, then, for a good measure, crushed under the vehicle's tires.  By comparison, the 1947 movie manages this sequence with such haste as to almost seem rushed -- there's no elaborate, overly explicit description of how the ruse will be implemented; we just see the supposedly dead girl walking zombie-like in the distance under some snowy trees; there's no bloody crotch or gruesomely gory hands.  Stan doesn't viciously beat the oligarch to death and there's no body-guard to be savaged by a speeding car.  Del Toro seems to think that his audience is comprised of idiots -- he draws diagrams and inserts explanatory dialogue and telegraphs all of his effects and plot points ad nauseum.  Everything suffers from bloat and excessive explication.  

There is no real deviation from the plot of the '47 thriller.  Stan is a drifter who finds a job with an impoverished carnival.  He ends up in bed with the carnival's fortune-teller, Sheena, an older woman married to a once-great Mentalist who is now a drunk.  Stan accidentally kills the Mentalist by giving him a bottle of wood alcohol instead of the corn hooch that the carnival owner peddles.  There's a geek, almost completely unseen, in the '47 film but here filmed in  lurid detailed close-ups.  Stan wonders how a man can sink so low to become a carnival geek --of course, the film will end with him doomed to accept this role once he has fallen, spectacularly, from his fortune conned out of gullible rich people in the film's second, high-society act.  Stan, seduces Polly the Electric Woman, and ends up married to her.  Sheena's alcoholic husband teaches Stan his mind-reading act, a performance that involves an elaborate code.  With Polly, Stan goes to the Big City and becomes famous as a Mentalist, playing for big bucks in a spectral and elaborate night club.  Despite warnings to not mess around with "spook show" stuff, Stan gets in cahoots with a corrupt lady psychologist and uses her files to bilk the wealthy in town -- apparently, its Buffalo, New York, a city full of vast sepulchral skyscrapers and equally huge marble mansions that look like something in Karnak or Luxor if it were always snowing along the Nile River and in the Valley of the Kings.  The corrupt lady psychologist seduces Stan who actually has a back-story and, indeed, a psychology himself in this picture -- he's been abused, possibly raped by an associate of his father, has let the old man die by freezing, and has, then, stuck the corpse in a hole in the floor of the derelict farmhouse where he was raised, setting the place afire out of spite..  (None of this is a good idea -- the strength of film noir is that people are two-dimensional and monstrous; they aren't given quasi-sympathetic explanations for their villainy.  In forties film noir, it's just cheerfully assumed that everyone is corrupt, venal and sadistic, and doomed; we don't need Freud to understand this.  By contrast, del Toro has to give his monsters a reason, albeit an implausible one, for the wickedness that they display.  There's a lot of psychoanalyzing that goes on and on in this picture and this just adds to the film's peculiarly dull gravitas.)  

The 2022 picture is not without some improvements on its precursor.  There's a very effective scene that is genuinely shocking involving two prominent people bilked by Stan with dire, and wholly unanticipated, consequences.  People gasped in horror as this scene played-out in the theater where I saw the picture.  The ending of del Toro's picture is vastly superior to the rather conflicted, and contrived, last five minutes of the '47 movie with its very faint suggestion of a (possibly) happy ending.  Del Toro knows how to end his movie and does so effectively -- although, I think, he's just adopted the original end of the precursor film vetoed by studio executives as too bleak for audiences to bear.  The pictorial qualities of del Toro's picture are extraordinary -- the sets are the best thing in the movie, although they are so elaborate that they distract from the film's narrative and characters.  Del Toro is prestige director and the movie is chock-a-block with excellent actors -- Bradley Cooper plays the part of the ambitious hustler, a role that was made famous by Tyrone Power whose matinee-idol looks are blurred into a smarmy caricature of the movie star in the '47 film.  Cate Blanchett plays the vicious psychologist.  (Mary Steenburgen has a brief but indelible role.) The carnival people are enlivened by the presence of Ron Perlman who actually clarifies why it is that he insists on Polly's marriage to Stan -- something that was unclear and botched in the 1947 film.  (However, I would hasten to add that these details, although making things more clear, don't really improve the 2022 version -- I assumed that Polly's relationship  with her strong-man protector was based on the fact that she was sleeping with him; this was a good guess given the raunchy aspects of the carnival and its denizens as portrayed in the 1947 picture, but, apparently, wrong -- it turns out the strong man is protecting Polly out of loyalty to her deceased father.)   Willem Defoe acts the role of the depraved carnival operater.  Tim Blake Nelson has a small but memorable turn at the end of the movie.  In general, the acting is very good, although, again, overly detailed and insufficiently abstract for this kind of genre picture.  Del Toro's problem, in general, is that he wants to surpass or transcend the genre  aspects of this tawdry little shocker -- making everything massive and important and pouring in gallons of pop-psychology is not the proper approach to this material.  Goulding's direction of the '47 film was craftsmanlike, efficient, and stolidly unimaginative; del Toro wants to turn everything into an Oscar but undermines the vicious charm of this material with too much strenuous effort.  

    

Licorice Pizza

 During the first third of Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza (2021), the movie's hero, Gary Valentine, an out-of-work child actor, monetizes his status as a former TV sit-com star by attending a "Teen" Convention.  Gary has started a water-bed business (the film takes place around 1973) and plans to peddle his wares at the show.  He enlists his little brother to buy weed and intends to encourage prospective purchasers to smoke a little dope as a sales incentive.  Suddenly, the cops swoop down on him, pin Gary against the squad car, and manhandle him to the station, cursing at him and saying that he is a murderer.  Gary is chained to a bench at the station.  Gary's erstwhile business partner, Alaina, sees the bust -- she's in love with Gary but much too proud and intelligent to succumb to his smarmy charms.  At each juncture in the film, up to its very end, she steadfastly resists Gary's efforts to make her his girlfriend.  Alaina is horrified that Gary has been violently arrested and she runs (the camera tracking her from right to left) at breakneck speed to the police station.  Panting, she stops on the sidewalk and sees Gary inside, handcuffed to the metal bench.  A few moments later, the cops drag in a scum-bag witness who says that Gary "isn't the guy" and, so, without explanation and without apology the police just let him go.  The viewer expects the scene to form part of the narrative, but it doesn't lead to anything -- there's no cause and effect with regard to the arrest; it doesn't teach Gary a lesson (he is incorrigible) and it doesn't advance Alaina's understanding of the hero.  After the sequence ends, it's never referenced again.  The movie sets up a strategy of misdirection -- we think the bust has something to do with Gary sending his nine-year old brother out to buy marijuana, but this isn't related at all.  So the question arises:  what is the scene for?

About an hour later, Alaina is angry at Gary and, so, as is her custom in the film, she flirts with other men to make him angry.  (Gary is excessively jealous and possessive).  Alaina goes to a supper-club called "Tail o' the Cock" where she drinks with an aging movie star named Jack Holden (Sean Penn).  Holden is more interested in booze than the young woman, but his old matinee idol instincts cause him to reflexively make a pass at her.  He quotes lines to her from a war movie, The Bridges at Toko-San  and she asks:  "Are these just lines or is this real?"  Jack doesn't answer because he probably doesn't know the answer.  Jack's half-hearted attempt to seduce Alaina ends when an old crony suggests that he jump a motorcycle over a bonfire built on the eighth tee of a nearby golf course.  Alaina agrees to ride with Jack during this quixotic venture -- the viewer feels a strong dread about the drunken Jack's ability to successfully launch the motorcycle over the roaring fire.  Jack drives off a couple hundred yards with Alaina on the back of the motorcycle (she has a folk singer's guitar strapped over her shoulder).  When Jack guns the motorcycle, Alaina falls off backward and is stunned.  Gary, who has come to the "Cock" to search for her, sees Alaina fall and he runs full-tilt across the golf course to rescue her.  The camera tracks his sprint as he runs from left to right.  Jack's motorcycle going the opposite direction roars by and he successfully makes the jump.  Alaina turns out to be okay.  What is this scene about?  First, the sequence featuring washed-up and aging movie stars reflects, to some extent, Gary's plight -- at age 15, he's already a "has-been."  The drunken crony, played by Tom Waits, channels Edmond O'Brien, particularly as he appears in Orson Welles The Other Side of the Wind, that is, the alcoholic sycophant to an equally alcoholic movie star.  The reckless stunt shows us that these old macho movie stars in their alcoholic stupor can't really distinguish their exploits on-film from their lives on-screen.  But the scene, like the episode of the arrest, goes nowhere -- it causes nothing and is not an effect of anything that we've seen.  The sequence doesn't lead to any decisive conflict -- there's no overt conflict in the movie.  And the scene doesn't signify character development -- no one comes to any recognitions in this film, no one shows much in the way of insight, and no one "develops" (in this way, the film is scrupulously true to life).  The scene exists for one predominant reason -- it gives Anderson an opportunity to show Gary running as fast as he can with the camera tracking on him.

Gradually, the alert viewer comes to the conclusion that Licorice Pizza is primarily contrived to set up shots of the two principals, Alaina and Gary, running across the screen, held in half-focus by a tracking or panning hand-held camera.  Shots of this sort occur about every ten minutes.  Indeed, there are so many shots of this type that Anderson pieces a montage together at the end of the movie, reprising the various sprints he has imposed upon his two, thwarted lovers.  At the end of the film, Gary runs toward Alaina and Alaina runs toward Gary -- this is a standard film trope (there's a noteworthy example in The Graduate).  At last, the two characters are simultaneously running toward one another.  They collide in front of a movie theater showing Charles Bronson's The Mechanic and the James Bond movie, Live and Let Die.  The force of the impact between them hurls both to the ground much to the bemusement of the ticket-seller in her booth.  At last, the two characters have intersected in their passion for one another.  But, characteristically, the sequence goes nowhere -- Anderson plots a non-plot, that is, an anti-climax.  Gary takes Alaina to his pinball arcade and announces to everyone that she is now "Mrs. Gary Valentine" (or, maybe, "Alaina Valentine" -- it would make a difference and I can't remember how this is done).  Alaina is outraged at his audacity and mutters to him "Idiot!"  And, on this note, the film ends.  Anderson's theme is that things don't get resolved in real life, loose ends in the narrative aren't tied up, no one learns from their mistakes or experiences, everyone just blunders along trapped within their own egotism -- the improbable romance between Gary and Alaina will never be a Hollywood romance and so can't have a Hollywood happy ending.  Things will just continue as they have during the film, until one party or the other or both are too exhausted to continue.  Anderson's two hour and fifteen minute non-narrative is a wee bit dull and trying to the audience's patience, particularly since the director sets up mini-plots that seem poised to have meaning but that go nowhere, but the picture, in its rambling formless way is realistic, a slice of genuine life, and the characters, although petty and deceitful, are charming -- a little like the people in Seinfeld.  Anderson's commitment to realism is so strong that his two protagonists don't look like movie stars and, although they have strong presences on screen, aren't even particularly pretty -- Gary inclines toward chubbiness and his a spray of pimples on his lower jaw; Alaina has squinty eyes and a hooked Semitic nose -- in one scene, a talent agent remarks again and again on her "Jewish nose".  These physical defects are evident and, even, emphasized --about half of the film is shot in extreme close-up.  Anderson is interested in the performances that he gets from his actors and, so, the camera scrutinizes them at very close range -- the camera work is uncomfortably intimate.  For instance, in the scene involving the middle-aged female talent agent, the camera is poised about six inches from her face, searching her enormous features for any sign of spite or malice, particularly when she repeated mentions Alaina's nose -- as in real life, people's faces aren't mirrors of their soul; they are more like masks and the huge close-ups register little flickers of emotion but, generally, these faces are inscrutable, even unknowable.  

Paul Thomas Anderson's films are hard to characterize.  What exactly was Magnolia about?  What was theme of The Master or, for that matter, There Will Be Blood --  amovie critics like to pretend that they understand this latter film but they don't.  In his first feature, Hard Eight, the film's tone is impossible to define and it belongs to either no known genre or all genres -- it is crime picture? a semi-documentary about gambling in Vegas (based, in some ways, on Altman's California Split), is it a coming of age picture, a romance, or a homage to the morose character actor Philip Baker Hall?  The film is all of these things and none of them at the same time.  Similarly, it 's impossible to find a category that fits Licorice Pizza -- is it a love story in which the two lovers don't kiss, don't have sex, and never embrace?  Is it a satire about Hollywood in the Seventies (there's a lot of inside dope in the movie that I don't pretend to understand) or is it a study of American hucksters and scam artists?  Or, is the film just an machine to motivate shots of young people running?  The film's formal qualities, which are precise and maddeningly repetitive, are the only real structure that the picture has -- otherwise, Licorice Pizza has all the merits and flaws of a film that is, more or less, formless (even intentionally feckless) with respect to narrative.  

Licorice Pizza starts with Gary Valentine, a formerly well-known (if not exactly famous) child actor, chatting up Alaina.  Alaina is 25 (or, maybe, even 28 -- she admits this once in the film) and working for a school-portrait photography business called "Tiny Toes."  Gary is fifteen and, so, from the outset, it's clear that a relationship between them, although probably plausible by the mores prevailing in 1971, would be  impossible today.  And, indeed, the relationship isn't plausible in any event.  Gary is a shameless self-promoter but pretty much inept and helpless -- for most of the movie, he can't drive and has to be chauffeured around by Alaina.  Alaina is very self-confident, capable, and level-headed.  It's an example of opposites attracting -- "Licorice Pizza", I assume:  that is, ingredients that are wonderful in themselves but that should never be combined.  (Most people, I've noticed, have an instinctive revulsion to the title -- and, for this reason, I'm sure the movie will have little or no box-office.)  The clash of opposite personality types powers the film and establishes a fundamental, insoluble conflict.  Furthermore, the age discrepancy prevents Anderson from showing a physical encounters between his protagonists, a limitation that the director uses the way Shakespeare uses the strait-jacket of the sonnet form -- it's an incentive to creativity.  Gary is known to all the restauranteurs in Encino -- the hosts at all the swank restaurants in town know him by his first name.  (Apparently, as a child star, he was a much sought-after patron and people still, as if by habit, treat him with weird respect -- this is curious because he's really just a pimple-faced teenager. )  Gary talks Alaina into meeting him for a date at the Tail of the Cock supper club and, although she refuses to be his "girlfriend", she's willing to work with him as a "business partner".  She travels with Gary as his chaperone to a New York filming of a reunion show with the cast of Under the Same Roof, apparently, a sit-com in which Gary starred when he was younger.  He reads for a couple parts but his agent (Maya Rudolph) is obviously appalled that he's now a burly adolescent and she has no roles for him -- she has him read copy for an acne cream.  Alaina, as is the pattern in the film, flirts with Gary's co-star on the show and, perhaps, even has an affair with him -- the romance ends at a family Passover meal in which the young man (who is Jewish himself) announces to her pious family that he is an atheist.  Meanwhile Gary has started a water-bed business.  This enterprise is successful until the oil embargo makes vinyl too expensive and the business collapses.  The center of the film is aimless -- the oil embargo results in people always running out of gas.  Gary sells a water-bed to a big Hollywood mover-and-shaker who is a loud-mouth, claiming to bond with Gary over the "way of the streets".  He threatens Gary's little brother, saying he'll strangle him in front of Gary if anything goes wrong with the water bed.  The creepy Hollywood producer jets off in his Porsche (he has a date with Barbra Streisand) but runs out of gas.  Gary, outraged by the man's belligerence, flood his house and, then, with Alaina driving a big moving van, beats a hasty retreat.  But the big truck runs out of gas and Alaina has to steer the vehicle down a steep winding mountain road, driving backward no less.  (This sequence is an example of how Anderson can contrive a bravura action sequence with real menace and suspense, but, then, directs the scene end in anti-climax.  The evil producer in his white jumpsuit appears and we expect him to take revenge on Gary and Alaina, but he's a pussy-hound and gets distracted by two girls walking by on the sidewalk at dawn in their tennis togs -- so he wanders off  in their pursuit and the scene ends.  Disgusted with Gary, Alaina joins the campaign of a handsome young politician running for city council.  The politician seems interested in Alaina and even summons her to an expensive restaurant where we expect that he is going to suggest a relationship.  But it turns out that he's gay and is using her as a "beard" so that she can depart the restaurant with his spurned boyfriend.  In front of the boyfriend's apartment, Alaina and the man commiserate about the fact that they are attracted to "shits."  Gary has learned that the councilman has the votes to repeal an ordinance banning pinball arcades.  And, so, he hustles to set up a pinball emporium which is wildly successful.  This sets up the final scene in which the two characters run toward one another, Alaina upset at being rejected by the politician and Gary jealous that she (seems) to be having an affair with councilman.  

Anderson toys with the audience in several ways.  First, he casts actors who look familiar but can't be exactly who they seem to be.  George di Caprio appears instead of his more famous sib Leonardo.  Gary is played by Matthew Hoffman, the son of the famous Philip Seymour Hoffman who made several noteworthy films with Anderson -- he's in Anderson's first picture Hard Eight and was the star in The Master, the director's film about Scientology.  Tim Conway Jr. is in the movie as is Bernie Safdie, the film-maker, along with Tom Waits and Sean Penn (although these roles are more cameos).  Anderson sets up sequences that seem about to explode into violence, but this never actually happens.  The scenes involving the psychotically aggressive Hollywood producer refers to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, particularly the moment in the movie when the gangster-movie producer smashes a coke bottle on his girlfriend's face ("I would do such a thing to her and I actually loved that girl," the gangster says plaintively; Bradley Cooper plays the part with aplomb and has real menace, but he's too horny to follow-up on his revenge.  At the end of the movie, there's a sinister nerd stalking the politician -- this guy is shot like Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver and we are led to expect that he will assassinate the city councilman.  Indeed, we see him lurking at the restaurant where Alaina is asked to act as a "beard" with the politician's boyfriend.  (Most probably, he's a pick-up who is waiting to leave the place with the politician although the whole set-up is menacing.)  These effects are intended to disorient the viewer and keep us interested, although there's never any conventional pay-off.

Licorice Pizza is full of bizarre bits of business -- there's a restaurant-operator who exploits his none-to-meek Japanese wife; the man bellows at her in pidgen-English with a dubbed samurai accent; she speaks in Japanese which he doesn't understand.  I assume that that there's lots of "inside baseball" here -- that is, characters are playing versions of Hollywood personalities and, probably, some of the scenes are based on movie industry gossip.  The movie's huge close-ups, intended to be inexpressive, give the film a claustrophobic feeling and, truth to tell, its more than a little bit dull -- parts of the movie drag and droop.  But Anderson is an important film-maker and the movie is fascinating, in fact, more interesting to describe and ponder than to watch.  At the screening that I attended, the audience (about eight people, all of them elderly -- kids don't go to movies any more) was obviously baffled.     

("Licorice Pizza" refers to a record shop -- LP, get it?  A "licorice pizza" is made with black sesame seeds. "The Mikado" restaurant referred to in the movie was a real place, operated by Jerry Frick -- the name is used in the movie.  "Tail o' the Cock" was a restaurant (in fact, there were two) on Ventura Boulevard and, also, La Cienaga. Jack Holden is obviously modeled on William Holden who starred in The Bridges of Toko-Ri (1954). and the Tom Waits character is modeled on Mark Robson. Jon Peters was Barbra Streisand's hair stylist and, later, a Hollywood producer.  Gary Valentine is modeled on Gary Goetzman. a child star who operated a water-bed emporium and, later, a pinball arcade; he became partners with Tom Hanks and is now a producer.  Joel Wachs, the closeted politician, was a real city councilman who did, in fact, repeal the law prohibiting pinball arcades.  John C. Reilly appears in a cameo role as Fred Munster at the Teen Fair, also an actual event, although last held the year before the movie's ostensible period -- that is, in 1972.  Christine Ebersole plays a version of Lucille Ball; Under One Roof is based on a film, not a TV series, in which Ball starred.  Most of the movie's locations are in the San Fernando valley where Anderson grew up.) 

The House

Cinema always contains contradictory forms:  for every Western, there is a comedy of manners.  In an era of slick, violent fantasy films, computer-generated from end to end, it appears that the polar opposite form, hand-made, artisanal stop-action movies, are enjoying a resurgence.  Labor-intensive animated films of this sort have always co-existed uneasily (and most invisibly as well) with Hollywood paradigms -- throughout the last decades of the 20th century stop-action pictures by the Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmejer enjoyed some slight renown, movies made to oppose, it seemed, not only Disney but, also, big budget special-effects driven films.  Now, it appears that the form is enjoying a mild sort of resurgence -- two Chilean films, surrealist exploration of the Pinochet era, have recently surfaced to some acclaim (these are The Bones and The Wolf House by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina) and, at present,, there is a feature-length film on Netflix, The House (2021) that employs stop-action in all three of its related half-hour segments.  The House is excellent of its kind and deserves study.  When stop-action is used to animate something other than gorilla monsters and dinosaurs as in King Kong, or skeletal warriors (as in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts), the effects are, often, claustrophobic and uncanny -- inert matter comes alive to writhe and gesture, but; nonetheless, retains its status as fundamentally inanimate stuff; these films exploit the idea of stillness as opposed to motion and can cut very close to the bone.

The House is built from three episodes, each seemingly made by a different director or combination of directors -- the credits list Emma de Swaef (a Swedish animator), Marc James Roel, Niki Lindroh von Bahr and Paloma Baeza as directors; I didn't make up these names -- this is how these people are identified.  All episodes feature startling effects linked by the location in which the tales take place:  A Palladian mansion, built in the 18th century, it seems, that appears in all three stories, albeit in stages of increasing dilapidation. I think the first two sections are better than the somewhat airy and scattered last story.  The house, a stately manor that is strangely vertical - it rises like a white column on the wooded hilltop where it is built -- is imagined as a character in the film:  it has oculus-shaped windows and a tower surmounted by an elaborate weather vane and lightning rod.  The inside of the building is somewhat under-furnished, a series of dim, broad corridors and rooms full of plush velvet drapes.

In the first sequence, a poor family lives in a cottage near a wooded hill.  The people are blobs of pinkish fabric with tiny close-set button eyes and they all look alike -- there's a harried father, a gentle mother, a ten or eleven-year-old girl and a baby named Isobel.  At the start of the episode, some vicious relatives come to visit the family and mock their humble cottage.  That night, the father gets drunk and wanders in the woods.  A spectral hand-carried sedan appears -- its a bit like the conveyance in Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage -- occupied by a fat sinister cherub with flares of white hair on the sides of his head that make him look like Benjamin Franklin.  This is Von Schoonbeek, the architect of the house.  He has a weird whinnying laugh and a hysterical factotum named Thomas.  The next day, before the father's hangover has subsided, Thomas appears and presents a contract to the father and mother -- Von Schoonbeek intends to build them a mansion on the wooded hill but only if they sign the contract.  There are apparently no strings attached; von Schoonbeek wants to demonstrate his prowess as an architect and the poor family will be allowed to live in the manor without any expense.  The house is built.  Von Schoonbeek is like Frank Lloyd Wright -- he has designed the whole house and its furnishings and the family's humble tables and chairs (and an heirloom commode) are put in the storage in the basement; these things would otherwise clash with the decor.  As one might expect, the home develops into a ghastly, incomplete labyrinth, full of remote rooms where the apparitions of workmen continue to hammer and saw wood.  The stairs get removed and the little girl with the baby are trapped on the home's upper levels.  The father and mother becomes obsessed with the house and are forced by the architect, who seems hiding in the woodwork, to wear bizarre costumes so that they fit in with the other furnishings in the house.  After a variety of weird events, the parents are transformed, literally, into furniture.  They have taken to burning their possessions from the cottage in the hearth and, when they burn the little girl's dollhouse (which is a tiny model of the manor), the mansion takes fire itself -- the parents, who are now just chairs, are burned up but the little girl and the baby escape.  This is an uncanny segment relying upon the imagery of the haunted house -- the mansion seems to have endless chambers and cellars below cellars and its full of ghostly apparitions.  The sequence is quite frightening and remorselessly depicts how the possession of a place can lead to madness. 

The second story takes place in the present.  A rat has acquired the house, now located in a genteel suburb, and is refurbishing it.  The rat, who is dressed like a carpenter, intends to flip the place and make a lot of money.  But there are problems -- the place is infested with "fur beetles" (they are like cockroaches) and their larvae.  And the remodeling project, which is leveraged to the hilt, is going poorly.  Finally, the rat gets the house ready for a showing.  He arranges for prospective buyers to inspect the property en masse, offering them canapes and champagne.  But the roaches keep emerging and much of the remodeling seems a bit gimcrack.  (The place has lighting that you can manipulate from your cell-phone and the "last slab of marble quarried from Carrera" in its kitchen.)  Throughout this ordeal, the poor rat-developer had been living in the basement.  No one is interested in the house except for a gruesome-looking couple, a very tall female rat wrapped up in what looks like a cocoon with her fat almost spherical-looking husband.  (The shapes of this uncanny figures imitate the round bodies of the roaches and the long, narrow forms of their larvae.)  This couple indicates that they are "extremely interested in the house" but don't agree to buy it -- they just move in and make themselves at home.  The roaches take over and there is an elaborate Busby Berkeley-style dance number featuring the beetles forming kaleidoscopic patterns as they overrun the house to the tune of sinister dance music.  Then, the intruders invite their family for a visit.  Now, the house is full of aggressive bugs and huge numbers of nasty-looking rodents.  The place is trashed and the hero, driven mad, strips off his clothing and crawls through his rotisserie oven into a dirty burrow in the earth.  The rat, who dreamed he was a gentrifying contractor, is now just a common rodent, scuttling through the filth.

In the last sequence, the characters are all cats.  The setting is post-apocalyptic -- the house stands on an island surrounded by vast lagoon in which bits of buildings peek out over the still waters.  Now, the house is a low-rent maze of studio apartments, but in bad condition -- the tap water runs brown and the wall paper won't stay put on the walls.  Floor boards are collapsing and the whole place seems on the brink of ruin.  The cat landlady, Rosa, has two tenants, Elias (who pays her in fish dragged out of the lagoon) and Jen, a New Age mystic who is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend, a man-cat she met at a retreat for Tibetan throat singers.  (Jen pays the landlady in obsidian crystals.)   The landlady  (like the hapless rat) has an elaborate plan for refurbishing the place, but there's no funds for the project.  The New Age cat-lady's boyfriend agrees to do handy-man work in the building.  But the waters are rising and he knows that boats will be needed.  And, so, he rips up the floorboards on the upper level to fashion to sailboat so that Elias can escape -- he and his girlfriend intend to leave by the sailboat on which he has arrived.  The waters keep rising.  The tenants all depart by sailboat.  Left to her devices, the landlady, Rosa, presses a big lever and this transforms the battered mansion into a kind of big sea-going vessel.  All alone in the house, she sets sail for parts unknown.

The first two stories have very complex undertones and are full of interesting inexplicable details. They have something to do with this proposition:  we don't own property, it owns us.  There are strangely intimate family details in the first story involving the deterioration of the parents and their relationship with their daughters.  (The episode isn't flawless -- the detail of the elaborate commode that the poor family owns, the only thing in which they take pride, is, as the Germans say, a blindes Motiv (a "blind motif") that goes nowhere. It seems pretty clear that the parents were going to burn the commode in the hearth at the mansion -- at least, this was the design -- but, instead, burn the little girl's dollhouse which mirrors the structure of the manor.)  The second sequence is full of bravura effects that are both fascinating and disgusting; the revelation that that the rat-developer with all his hopeless pretensions is just, after all, a common rodent has a Kafkaesque power.  The third sequence is less dire; it's picturesque but doesn't infest your imagination like the first two parts of the movie.  Nonetheless, the entire film is challenging, fun to watch, and, frequently, brilliant.  

Hell Drivers

 Hell Drivers, a British film released in 1957, is a top-notch work of entertainment.  Plotted like a Western, the movie involves truck drivers hauling "ballast" (gravel) for a corrupt firm.  There are apparently 13 drivers and their job is to haul gravel from a quarry to a construction site about ten miles distant.  The route leads over narrow country roads with many hairpin turns and deep flooded potholes.  The men have to load their own trucks at the gravel pit.  Twelve runs daily are required -- if you don't meet that quota, you are fired.  The top hauler, a thug named Red, is reckless and a bully but he makes 18 runs daily and, therefore, has been awarded a solid gold cigarette case by the vicious boss.  The film features wild road-races between the truckers shot with alarming speeded-up motion -- curiously, the effect of cranking the footage to speed up the action is highly effective and the images of the battered dump trucks roaring over the winding, ruinous highways are thrilling.  I suspect that George Miller, the Australian director of the "Mad Max" films saw this movie and, even, studied it closely before making his pictures featuring heavy vehicles careening over treacherous desert highways -- the film's action sequences have the organized over-the-top frenzy that Miller orchestrates in his movies, particularly his early pictures Mad Max and The Road Warrior.  

Hell Drivers, written and directed by C. Raker Endfield (later known as Cy Endfield), follows the format of the classical Western action film.  The movie's narrative seems derived from Howard Hawks' films and Hemingway's prose.  A loner appears in a country village looking for work.  The hero, Tom (although his first name is mysteriously Joe) gets hired as a replacement for a driver horribly injured in an earlier crash -- the man has a "silver plate" in his skull.  Joe is shown the round-trip 20 miles route and encouraged to drive at breakneck speed by a cynical trainer.  When Joe asks the trainer to drive them back to the garage, the man says he can't operate the truck -- the police have taken his license for speeding.  Joe takes a room in a boarding house where the truckers lodge and masters the route.  Immediately, he is bullied by Red, the man driving the firm's number 1 truck -- all the trucks bear numbers (Tom's been assigned the hard luck number 13).  Red holds the coveted gold cigarette case and pushes everyone else around.  It's obvious that he and Tom are on a collision course.  Tom is befriended by an Italian immigrant, Gino.  Gino's girlfriend, Lucy, falls for Tom.  The virtuous Tom, who turns out to be an ex-convict, rebuffs the woman, but, in the end, she seduces him.  There's an obligatory fistfight between the truckers and local hoodlums at a dance -- this has the flavor of a brawl in a Western saloon.  Tom can't really join in the fight, presumably because he's on probation.  This causes the other truckers (except for Gino) to despise him and call Tom a "yellow-belly."  There are more breakneck road-races and Tom begins to best Red in the number of loads hauled.  Red and his buddies sabotage Tom and try to drive him off the road.  But Tom is too cunning himself and skilled to be successfully deterred.  He even follows a secret shortcut pioneered by Red, the highly dangerous "Limestone Quarry" road, a primitive lane that runs along a deep precipice.  Gino offers to help Tom by switching the numbers on the trucks -- he will drive Tom's 13 and let Tom operate under his number 3.  But, before this plot can be implemented, Tom has sex with Lucy, Gino's girl, and filled with guilt and shame decides to quit his job and buys a one-way (third-class) train ticket to London.  Gino, who isn't aware of Tom's plan to get out of Dodge, substitutes the numbers on the trucks, is driven off the road by Red (who thinks he's Tom) and crashes.  Badly burned, Gino is dying in the hospital.  At his bedside, Lucy lies to the dying man, saying that she hopes Gino will recover so she can marry him.  She admits that the contract with the construction firm called for 18 drivers and not 13 and that the trucking company management is pocketing the extra money, hiring immigrants and "drifters" like Tom, to avoid the consequences of this larceny.  (These drivers are deemed expendable).  Enraged, Tom goes back to the trucking firm, confronts the boss, and threatens to expose him.  This sets up the final spectacular road race in which Tom and Red (who has the cowering boss in tow) fight it out, truck to truck and bumper to bumper on the deadly Limestone Quarry Road.  

The film is briskly plotted and lucidly directed with exciting action scenes.  However, the picture is most notable for its excellent cast.  Stanley Baker, a working class  hero, plays Tom.  (There's a Dickensian subplot involving Tom's crippled brother, that part acted by a very young David McCallum -- later to be cast memorably as Ilya Kurykin in The Man From Uncle and "Duckie" in NCIS.)  Jill Ireland plays Lucy, the dispatcher at the trucking company, and Herbert Lom is memorably vicious as the boss.  Patrick McGoohan,  later famous for his role as Number 6 in The Prisoner series, is fantastic as the villainous Red, snarling and sneering at his colleagues with his forehead marked with a long, jagged scar.  (After a ferocious fist fight in which he is beaten by Tom, Red says:  "He kneed me, otherwise I woulda killed him.")  The movie presents a peculiar mix of neo-realist dirty dishes locations (for instance, the lower depths boarding house) and flamboyant actions sequences.  At the climax, Red's truck falls off the cliff into the bottomless limestone quarry -- with the same aplomb that George Miller would show in the Mad Max movies a twenty years later, Endfield cuts to the interior of the falling truck to allow us to savor Red's horror as his vehicle plunges to its fiery destruction.  (The scenes in the hospital with the dying Gino are very similar to a similar sequence in the very first of the Australian films, Mad Max, in which Mel Gibson visits a dying and severely burned friend -- thus setting up, as in Hell Drivers , the climactic car chase and the gory retribution exacted on the villain.)

Endfield was an American from Scranton, Pennsylvania who made about ten films in Hollywood, most notably The Sound of Fury, a very hard-hitting and effective anti-lynching film.  Endfield was blacklisted, wrote a couple more Hollywood pictures and "assistant directed" under a assumed name, but the situation was untenable and he ended up emigrating to Great Britain where he lived until he died.  Endfield made several notable pictures in the U.K.including the unforgettable Zulu (also with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine) and the equally memorable (1965) Sands of the Kalahari, also with Stanley Baker.  He was a consummate craftsman and excellent director of actors, often unknown players who later became famous.  Hell Drivers was Stanley Baker's first major film and Sean Connery has a small role as well.  

Nightmare Alley (1947)

 Nightmare Alley (1947) is a grim film noir, bleak and mostly uncompromising.  It was presented by Eddie Mueller on January 8, 2022 on TCM's Noir Alley -- the timing of this broadcast is designed to complement Guillermo del Toro's remake of the picture that premiered in early December 2021.  The '47 version is certainly fascinating and fun to watch.  But it's  a rather dogged, literal-minded picture and doesn't really soar, despite some wonderful performances. I've seen this picture several times, always liked it in principal, but questioned the somewhat cautious studio-bound execution.  The movie is about criminal hubris :  a petty hustler in a carnival aspires to big-time fraud and, ultimately, pays the price for his pretensions.  The crooks in High Society turn out to be even more wicked and clever than the con artists in the lower depths and, needless, to says the protagonist is punished for the crimes that we have enjoyed watching him commit in the first three-quarters of the movie.  

Tyrone Power, a famous Matinee idol in his time, plays Stan (short for Stanton) an ambitious, penny-ante grifter.  Stan works for a mud-show carnival, assisting Zeena, a mind-reader, fortune-teller, and prophetess for hire.  (Zeena is played by Joan Blondell in some alarmingly form-fitting garments -- one white number that seems painted onto her derriere shows just about anything you might want to see and would earn the film an R-rating today.)  The members of the carnival are cheerfully corrupt and Stan, in particular, is sleeping with Zeena (who is married to a dying alcoholic) and, also, hoping to seduce the show's "Electric Woman", Polly who is the girlfriend of the show's 'strong man' (Mike Mazurski who is always effective as a  thuggish brute, one of Hollywood's great character actors).  Zeena has mastered a complicated code used to communicate information during mind-reading acts -- it was invented by her drunkard husband.  The carnival has a Geek whom we only see howling in the far distance when he periodically runs amuck.  When  Stan says that he wonders how a man could stoop so low to play the part of a carnival  Geek, the audience instinctively knows what's in store for our hero.  (The mood is similar to the opening scenes in the cabaret in The Blue Angel when Emil Janning's Professor Unrat catches a glimpse of a mournful clown and we wonder how someone ends up so humiliated and abject -- well, we are about to find out.)  Zeena's husband accidentally drinks wood alcohol used in her stage show (she burns up messages from the audience with a match dropped into the ETHOH -- but only after her confederates in the "cubby" under the stage have read the texts and inscribed answers to the rubes' questions on a chalkboard.  The movie has lots of interesting inside information about how carnival acts function.  The novelist who wrote the story was himself a carny and knew this sort of arcana.)  Stan has inadvertently caused the death of Zeena's husband -- he gives him the wrong bottle maybe "accidentally on purpose" as is sometimes said.  Stan  convinces Zeena to teach him the code but, after he is caught making love to Polly, the Strong Man's girl -- the carnies force him to marry her.  It seems that they have their own code of honor.  Stan and Polly become famous for a mentalism act, The Great Stanton, and perform inexplicably in a huge night club with a dance-floor, band, and half-a-hundred tables occupied by wealthy customers.  Stan figures out that he can exploit his talents by offering seances to high-paying customers.  He encounters an enigmatic woman who turns out to be a psychologist -- she's also a grifter but much more ambitious:  she records sessions with her wealthy patrons, impressing their confessions onto vinyl disks, presumably to blackmail her them  She makes an alliance with Stan and together they plot to inveigle money from an oligarch who longs to see an old, deceased girlfriend.  Stan persuades Polly to appear as a ghostly visitation from the dead maiden, but she's too simple and virtuous for this kind of corruption and ruins the spectral spectacle.  There's a fight and the elderly rich man is killed.  Stan has to abandon Polly.  He's betrayed by the psychologist who makes off with $150,000 conned from her patient -- the money is to be used to build a spiritualism tabernacle.  Stan turns into a drunk and hobo.  In the end, there's only one profession open to him - you can guess what it is.

This sounds like good lurid fun and it mostly is.  But the film is a bit prudish about showing us what we want to see -- namely, the chicken-chewing antics of a professional geek.  Power looks horrible as a drunk, his face contorted, wrinkles encasing his drooping eyes, and his clothing encrusted in filth.  But the picture spares him the ultimate indignity.  Furthermore, at the end, when Stan has run amuck, apparently something that always happens with Geeks, Polly seems to come to his rescue -- it turns out he's joined the show where she's working.  (This seems implausible and is obviously a sop to studio heads who felt the picture needed at least the glimmer of a happy ending.)  Visually, the movie is unimpressive, which is unfortunate since the carnival milieu is amenable to all sorts of interesting expressionistic effects (see, for instance, Bergman's venture into this same terrain in Sawdust and Tinsel).  There's some spooky supernatural stuff involving Tarot card readings but this is all pretty predictable.  The imagery doesn't really match the scary dire dimensions of the plot. The novelist who wrote this book, also called Nightmare Alley was William Gresham, an ex-carny himself.  Curiously, Gresham died of alcoholism in  he early sixties in the same flea-bag hotel where he wrote the book twenty years earlier.  Gresham's wife was Jo Davidson who left him to marry, of all people, C. S. Lewis -- there's a book and novel about that relationship called Shadowlands.  There are some hilarious scenes-- in one Stan convinces a low-rent local sheriff come to bust the show (or earn some bribes) that Polly as Electra, the Electric Woman, must wear almost no clothing or the electricity that surges through her when she sits in her gimcrack electric chair would roast her alive.  Stan has a con where he has men remember their childhood and mysteriously knows about them roaming in the green hills with a much beloved dog.  It's the dog detail that hooks the rubes -- but, as Stan says, "Every boy had a dog."

West Side Story (2021)

West Side Story (2021), by and large, is a return to form for Steven Spielberg.  The picture reminds us that when Spielberg is engaged by material, and animated by a good script, he can can achieve prodigious things.  Unfortunately, the film falls flat in a few scenes and has some defects mostly attributable to the musical's book.  But much of the picture is excellent and, although almost 2 1/2 hours long, the movie doesn't flag -- it's last half-hour that is lack-luster, but this is a problem with the original Sondheim/Bernstein/ Robbins musical.  

Most of the cast is unknown; the lead, Maria, is new to movies and I didn't recognize any of the young actors playing the warring Jets and Sharks.  Rita Moreno has been recruited to play the role of Doc, the drug store owner who was stage-Jewish and an elderly man in the original show on Broadway and, then, Robert Wise's highly acclaimed, if somewhat perfunctory, 1961 film version. (Moreno is listed as a co-producer of this picture and the Spielberg version has been viewed generally as recompense for the Puerto Rican actress being relegated to a minor part in the 1961 picture while Natalie Wood, who is Whiter than White (she was part Russian) was cast in the lead --and this despites the fact that she (Wood) was unable to sing.  There are various differences between the 1957 Broadway musical, the '61 film, and Spielberg's version written by Tony Kushner (also identified as a producer).  Apparently, the lyrics generally revert to the Broadway text.  The famous aria, "I Feel Pretty" has been moved to after the climactic rumble -- a curious decision because this lengthens the last part of the movie which is unsuccessful compared to everything that precedes it.  The original musical climaxes with the astonishing "Tonight Quartet", an operatic bit of music in which a soaring balladic love song is played as a counter-melody to aggressive music portraying the gang members preparing for combat -- the forces in the opera all converge on this sequence and the music is so spectacular that everything afterwards is anti-climactic.  Therefore, it would seem to me best to pace the film to accelerate to a conclusion after the big fight scene and the killings of Riff and Bernardo.  Putting "I feel pretty" after the rumble slows the movie -- I understand that the sequence is supposed to be brutally ironic but it doesn't work that way; the song is simply too perky to be interpreted as an instance of tragic irony (Maria is singing about her love for Tony just as he is fleeing from where he has stabbed her brother, Bernardo, to death). Robert Wise and Ernest Lehman (the green screenwriter responsible for North by Northwest among other pictures) intuitively understood that the opera is too long, sags in its third act, and should be hurried along to the finale.  The gas goes out of Spielberg's picture after the extremely witty and gorgeously choreographed "I feel Pretty" sequence and the end of the movie, as with the musical, is pretty much of a drag compared to the wonderful stuff preceding it. 

The opening sequences replace Wise's helicopter shots of Manhattan skyscrapers with a bombed-out zone, something that looks like Syria or Baghdad --we are seeing the destruction of the old West side neighborhood through the urban renewal project that will result in Lincoln Center (the home of the Metropolitan Opera among other things.)  The camera surveys smashed scaffolding and acres of ruins before the Jets emerge, literally popping out of the ground with cans of paint.  (They intend to deface a Puerto Rican flag painted on the wall in the Latin neighborhood just beyond the urban renewal war zone.)  Spielberg's direction of the first hour of the film is frenetic, adrenalin-laced, and showy -- the cutting is razor-sharp and the dance numbers are spectacular. As the Jets strut down the street, some of them spontaneously extend their strides and throw out their chests and, in the scope of about thirty seconds, boy-warrior posturing has turned into dance -- it's a magically devised sequence.  When the Jets climb a heap of rubble someone picks up a brick and throws it at the camera.  The film cuts to Tony working the basement of Rita Moreno's drugstore and bodega -- someone has pitched a can at him and he deftly catches it, completing the trajectory of the brick thrown in the preceding shot.  When the Sharks (the Puerto Rican gang) cross a busy street, they ignore traffic surging around them and almost cause about four accidents.  It's typical of Spielberg's exuberance that he can stage a sequence of some young men jaywalking with such memorable aplomb that the audience gasps.  The director's trademark lighting is on display in the high school auditorium dance scene where the doomed lovers meet -- Spielberg yanks his principals out of the chorus of dancers and make them literally glow with a supernatural radiance.  A love scene staged under bleachers while the rest of the dancers blur into multi-colored, out-of-focus orbs dimly glimpsed through the bleacher seats has enormous force -- the lovers are literally set apart from the rest of the scene and bathed in brilliant auroras of camera flares.  The famous balcony scene involves Tony climbing up the side of the building to the height of about fifty feet -- then, the lovers are shot through grills and bars at the beginning of the sequence; as Tony wins over Maria, the obstructions between them fall away -- the love scene is witnessed by laundry tacked to aerial clothes lines and windows in the tenements that glow with honeyed amber light.  Tony takes Maria on a date to the Cloisters.  The medieval arcades are shot under a greenish sky and the air trembles with thunder.  Then, the sunlight comes out and the couple speaks their vows as beams of light ignite a stained glass window and spill colored radiance all over the floor.  There's a spectacular ballet that set on a badly damaged pier with the dancers lunging over ripped-open parts of the wooden dock and posing against wild tangles of broken wood.  (The holes in the dock allow for fabulous-looking low angle shots featuring the dancers leaping over the fissures in the waterfront pier.)  The big battle between the Sharks and the Jets takes place is stark white warehouse full of pyramids of road salt -- the combatants cast enormous shadows as they charge one another. "I feel pretty" is staged in Gambles, a department store, and the rather prissy, British-style lyrics (probably a parody of My Fair Lady) actually make sense with the charwomen posturing among pretentiously dressed mannequins, decked out in tuxedos and evening gowns for "Dinner at 8."  The scene is exuberantly performed and has the crazy Looney Tunes energy that Spielberg can occasionally muster -- I still recall with amazement the fantastic jitter-bug sequences in 1941, a movie that showed the same sort of visual ebullience and go-for-broke ingenuity as the first two-thirds of this film.  After that number, the movie goes cold, but so does the Broadway musical -- nonetheless, Rita Moreno gets to sing "Someday", one of the show's signature tunes and the aria is much more affecting in her version than the lip-synched sequence with Natalie Wood in the 1961 film.  Spielberg's an old man now and Rita Moreno, I think, is in her mid-80's and the film makes way for something like the wisdom of age -- it's effective and almost saves the ending of the movie from becoming excessively maudlin. (In this version of the story, Rita Moreno's character was married to a non-Puerto Rican who is now dead -- therefore, the film suggests in an eerie way what might have happened to Tony and Maria and their cross-ethnic romance if the Shakespearian tragedy hadn't intervened.)  

There are some weird mistakes in the 2021 picture.  When Tony takes Maria to the Cloisters, he makes a sudden exit, brusquely telling her that he'll see her around soon.  This completely deflates the love scene -- he brought her all the way up to Fort Tryon and, then, abandons her there.  The famous satirical song "Dear Officer Krupke" is very inventively staged and the choreography is thrilling but the sequence doesn't make any sense.  A woman who looks like a prostitute views the number from another room in the police station and seems strangely confused and worried -- who is she supposed to be?  The scene "reads' as if she were a police informant but this isn't a plot point that goes anywhere.  When Officer Krupke comes back to see his police station premises wrecked with files strewn all over the floor, he looks as if he's just seen a ghost.  It's as if something horrible happened to him out on the street when he suddenly exited six minutes earlier chasing a trans-sexual character who has escaped from custody.  He's so shocked and morose when he returns that we think Krupke has witnessed some sort of ghastly calamity.  I don't know what to make of how this sequence ends and the whole premise of the famous number gets tangled up in too many politically correct subtexts to be coherent.  Late in the picture, a couple of minor characters suddenly become important.  It turns out that Tony has a would-be girlfriend, Valentina, who gets to mouth some bitter lines -- but the part is underwritten to the point of non-existence and her sudden appearance near the end of the movie is jarring.  Similarly, the character of Chino, Bernardo's choice of a good Puerto Rican boyfriend for his sister, Maria, is also underwritten and so he is scarcely visible until he emerges from the shadows to enact the film's grim climax.   Oddly enough the opera's showstopper, the convergence of gang members and Maria's love song in the "Tonight Quintet" doesn't really work well in the film.  The ballad and its counter-melody have to be experienced as if the singers are all on stage (although in opposite corners) when the piece is performed.  Spielberg opens the scene out and makes it cinematic with a roving camera and dynamic cross-cutting, but this detracts for the energy of the music -- this is a theatrical tour-de-force and should be shot with all the characters within a single stylized space and not scattered over mid-town Manhattan as is the case with the staging here.  

These are relatively minor cavils and the most of the film is as well-directed and energetic as anything that Spielberg has made. The film has been famously unprofitable.  It's viewed, I suppose, as a period piece and not relevant to today's world.  The picture arises from post-War optimism asserting that people should abandon tribal allegiances and strive for the Common Good.  Who believes this in America in 2021?         

The Next Voice You Hear

 A baffling response to the world's post-war trauma, William Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear (1950) is a remarkably melancholy fable, a sort of "magical realism" ten years before the genre was invented.  With a wholly straight face, Wellman documents the sudden eruption of the divine into the disenchanted, enervated years immediately following the convulsion of World War II.  God starts sending messages to Los Angeles, and, in fact, every place in the world with radio transmissions over the air-waves.  Radios turn into instruments of divine revelation.  The film measures the impact of these supernatural declarations across the period of seven days as the Word, as it were, acts on Everyman, a middle-class working stiff named Joe Smith, his wife, Mary, and their son, an all-American boy with a paper route who looks a bit like Brandon DeWilde in Shane, but is played by another, similarly pretty, child actor.  The film's plot and sentiments are mawkish, but the movie is notable for its portrait of post-war malaise in America.  For God to intervene, things must be pretty bad -- and, indeed, the Everyman and family who are at the center of the movie are remarkably dysfunctional and depressed almost to the point of suicide (or, at least, violence.)  The Next Voice You Hear is significant for its unwavering (until its last act) portrait of suburban discontent and alienation.  The film purports to resolve this unhappiness, which is particularly poignant because it is quotidian and undramatic, but the happy ending rings false.

Joe Smith labors in a plane factory.  He has a sour, judemental boss who lectures him daily with the slogan "A day's work for an honest dollar."  For Joe, the war never ended.  He's trapped with a platoon of co-workers, buddies, as it were, on the industrial battlefield where air planes are manufactured.  Joe has a door-mat wife played by Nancy Davis (later to become Nancy Reagan).  When we first see her, she is the exact opposite of a Hollwood glamour girl flat-chested in some sort of shapeless frock -- apparently, audiences in 1950 would have immediately perceived this dowdy garment as a maternity dress.  (I couldn't read the code until Mary mentions that she is pregnant and, not, just a little bit -- she's a week from delivering her child.)  The film proceeds through a series of static repeated shots, documenting the family at breakfast, Joe at work, and, then, their activities at night -- the same camera angles and set-ups are used to signify that the family is trapped in a nightmarish routine and that none of them really like one another very much.  Joe, in particular, is an example of the "quiet desperation" that Thoreau identifies as an uniquely American pathology.  Every day is the same for him -- each morning, he eats Happy brand cereal with his wife and son; his car's starter is busted and he can't get the vehicle to reliably fire-up.  (The routine is so engrained that, at one point, Johnny, the son, mimics precisely every move that his father has to make to get the old jalopy running.)  Joe is always late and is harassed by an officious patrol cop who pulls him over for recklessly backing out onto the road in front of his house or for speeding -- of course, these stops only make Joe more late to work and engender more sarcastic lectures by the boss, Mr. Branham.  The family lives in a dispirited-looking suburb, one of those nondescript acres of tract housing that you see under construction in Laurel and Hardy movies of the mid-thirties.  Joe bullies his wife and, even, snatches buttered toast from her so that she won't gain weight -- and this while she is pregnant.  (Of course, as soon as he departs for work, confident that his male prerogative has put the little woman in her place, she immediately takes another piece of bread to butter and eat.)  Joe perceives himself as hapless, poorly paid, and just barely making ends meet -- the whole enterprise seems just barely afloat and Joe is unhappy about expecting a new mouth to feed.  There's no whiff of sexual attraction between Joe and the frumpy Mary.  His wife's sister, Aunt Edna comes to visit -- Joe detests her and the feeling is mutual:  she says Joe should go on a diet because he's gaining weight "under his heart."  (Later, Joe actually strikes her -- the role is conceived like the maiden Aunt played by Agnes Moorhead in The Magnificent Ambersons).  Everyone is oddly clumsy -- people stumble, get in each other's way, trip and almost fall down.  Hopelessness pervades Joe's life on all levels, including the fact that he seems to be barely able to navigate his kitchen without colliding with his wife.  One day, when Johnny is too sick to deliver the papers on his route, Joe has to take over this task.  In one yard, he's attacked by a vicious dog -- the dog doesn't seem to be acting and is legitimately vicious; oddly enough, this is the most convincing attack by an animal that I've ever seen in a movie and the audience winces when the dog lunges (and keeps lunging) at Joe.

Some religions are iconoclastic and forbid the representation of God.  The Next Voice You Here follows this doctrine.  We don't ever hear God's voice; the film devises various ways for us to know what message God has delivered each night, but without our actually hearing the broadcast.  (I presume that this is because our imagination is more powerful in devising for us the timbre and phrasing that the deity uses than any recitation by an actor could possibly accomplish.)  God intervenes on all the radios in the world, tailoring his words to the language spoken by each listening.  His declarations occur every night at precisely 8:30 pm.  Initially, people think its a hoax or that Orson Welles is up to his old tricks -- this gets mentioned about four times.  But within a few days everyone becomes a believer.  Even Branham, Joe's nasty boss at Atlas Airplanes is converted from atheism to discipleship.  At first, God's messages are ambiguous and a little hard to interpret, but as the movie progresses through its 83 minutes, the revelations become more clear and more obviously maudlin.  Ultimately, it seems, God wants everyone to get along and to perceive every day life in the suburbs as a miracle.  At one point, God seems to threaten wrath and there's a rainstorm that blows up out of nowhere that causes mass hysteria -- people think its a reprise of Biblical flood.  Joe's increasing terror leads him into a bar where he runs into Mitch, the archetypal old outlaw war buddy -- although Wellman never mentions the war in the film;  Mitch buys Joe innumerable drinks and tempts him with his nihilism.  Mitch and  a floozy who flirts with Joe are the only people in the world not tuned into God's evening broadcast.  Staggering drunk and infused with bitter self-pity, Joe goes home, horrifying his wife and son with his inebriation.  Of course, his timing is bad -- Mary has had false-labor a few days earlier and she's primed to have her child any hour.  (Her mother died in child-birth of her second infant and everyone is afraid that Mary is doomed.)  God performs some miracles but the only one we see is that the deity repairs Joe's starter on his old car.  On Monday, the seventh day everyone has gathered in churches and other places of worship.  But God inexplicably ceases his broadcasts -- there's silence on the air-waves.  Mary goes into real labor and, with the escort of the pesky highway patrolman, Joe and Johnny take her to the hospital.  A daughter is born. This is an every-day miracle.  The film ends with a tight close-up of Mary's beatific face.  (Throughout the movie, she has become ever more pinched, unhappy-looking and seems prematurely aged -- she has found a grey strand in  her hair; but the film rejuvenates her to smooth-faced girl-next-door splendor in its next-to-last shot, followed by an image of the sky suffused with light.  

Most of the actors are people who would become ubiquitous on TV in the next decade.  Stewart Whitmore plays Joe.  He does a superb job at persuading the viewer that his character is depressed and enraged, possibly to the point of suicide.  The scene in which Whitmore gets drunk and blunders around like indignant ape is very effective.  (He has one of the strangest hairdos ever seen in films -- his big head of hair is all bouffant and puffed up except at the front of his forehead where he sports a little carefully mowed fringe of bangs.)  The movie's premise is so startling and emotionally engaging that the movie really has nowhere to go -- it's all premise with no delivery.  Once God starts speaking the movie can't figure out what to do with its surfeit of piety and it's (mostly) played totally straight -- no one could make a movie like this today without generous dollops of irony but The Next Voice you Hear is wholly without irony or  humor of any sort. The film resembles an Italian neo-realist picture, indeed something like Miracle in Milan (Vittorio de Sica, 1951).  It is absolutely dour, brutally realistic, and frumpy, shot in old-style Academy ratio.  I recall a moving tribute to Rossellini in which a critic said that he (Rossellini), alone, among the Italian neo-realists wanted to show that some good, that a better society, could arise from the horrors of World War Two.  Wellman seems to show that the war accomplished nothing, that men and women remain trapped in social relations that demean and wound them, and that the only way out of this impasse, the alienation suffusing the post-war world, is the direct intervention of God Almighty.    

Julie Mehretu at the WAC

About a year ago, on a casual visit to the Walker Art Center, I noticed a new addition to the permanent collection on display, a small painting by Julie Mehretu.  I knew nothing about this artist but was enthralled by the picture:  it looked like a miniature apocalypse crammed with battalions of minute soldiers, swabs of moody color, and little cloudbursts irrigating the whole thing with up- and down-drafts.  Although modest in size, the thing breathed enormity.  The painting seemed figurative but was, in fact, completely abstract.

A retrospective of Mehretu's paintings and graphic work between 2000 and the present is now on display at the Walker Art Center.  It's a large show, occupying four galleries with a couple alcoves also devoted to film showing the artist at work.  (Mehretu also served a residency with magnet schools in Somali, Sudanese and Ethiopian immigrant communities:  this resulted in a work jointly made with the students called "Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities".)   Mehretu's work remains astonishing to me and her large canvases, some of them about 25 x 15 feet in dimension, are remarkable works.  

Although her paintings (and prints) have evolved, they all display the same fundamental structure.  The pictures are layered or palimpsest in design.  Generally, she uses four strata -- under the colorful or agitated surface, there is usually a complex of architectural drawings, very neatly and mechanical inscribed in fine black lines; superimposed on the architectural drawings are armies of dots and dashes, hatchmark battalions comprised of very small marks, most of them about a quarter-inch in size.  The outer layers of the painting consist of bold, calligraphically inscribed curves and arches, spiraling arcs and, sometimes, stenciled stars or little vortices that look like miniature tempests or waterfalls. Finally, big wedges of color, sometimes a couple feet long or wide are airbrushed onto the surface.  Except for the fourth layer, the other strata are all transparent and so coexist above or behind one another, depending upon how the viewer perceives these figures.  The surfaces of the paintings are generally strangely industrial.  Apparently, each layer of imagery is fixed in an acrylic glaze that is, then, sanded or abraded to provide transparency and, apparent, depth of field.  The result is that the pictures look slick and somewhat glassy.  (Mehretu's prints, both lithographs and engravings, have a more matted, papery surface -- with some exceptions I don't think her technique works as well in graphic form; she has also made water-colors that aren't particularly distinctive -- they look a bit like floating diaphanous mobs of color, somewhat like paintings by Philip Guston in his Abstract Expressionist phase.)  

I like best Mehretu's early work although most of the pictures in the retrospective are very good.  The stratum involving calligraphic arcs and spirals interspersed with malign-looking little gales or curly marks show a very fine facture -- much like Saul Steinberg's elegant cartoons that exploit calligraphic effects of curving lines that cast shadows or vary in thickness and density.  (Some of her paintings have passages that look like very elegantly drawn abstract cartoons.)  The initial paintings in the show are primarily untitled (or named elliptically) and the substrate of architectural drawing consists of window frames and precisely and mechanically drawn steps shown in careful perspective.  (You don't see the architectural drawing until after your eye has penetrated the surface paint and marks.)  In these pictures, the little hatchmarks are arranged in military formations and one seems to be peering down onto a battlefield from an aerial perspective.  The paintings on display show a middle period in which Mehretu enters a sort of world-historical phase.  Many of her pictures from around 2010 show stadiums apparently populated by thousands of dots and dashes that read as agitated spectators.  The colors of national flags are indicated schematically around the edges of the stadia; stormy weather in the form of little gusts of turbulence seems to spurt up out of the densely patterned surfaces.  Four of these paintings are part of a series called Mogamma, an Ethiopian word for "public buildings" and Mehretu seems to have taken as her subject the uprisings that comprised the so-called Arab Spring.  A number of her pictures relate to the war in Syria, although very indirectly.  In her middle phase, the architectural drawings are more visible and the pictures have a more figurative aspect.  The strength of her palimpsest style is that Mehretu can vary the emphasis -- sometimes focusing on the surface of abstract patches of color, sometimes emphasizing the little marks and vortices, sometimes, featuring as predominant the calligraphic swoops and emblems.  

Beginning around 2016, Mehretu appropriates imagery from journalism, blurs it very heavily with digital technology and substitutes those highly stylized images for the architectural drawing.  This is painting a la mode -- to assert political relevance, Mehretu uses images from the demonstrations at Ferguson, Missouri(BLM content) or pictures of desolate-looking immigration detention centers.  This substrate is so intensely manipulated that the source imagery is completely illegible -- it simply supplies a sort of out-of-focus grid to the other marks swarming the paintings.  To my mind, this is purely opportunistic -- Mehretu wants to claim a contemporary significance to her pictures; for instance, she claims a patch of fuchsia paint represents tear gas -- but this isn't organic to the image and wouldn't be interpreted in this fashion by someone not reading the explanatory wall label.  But she also doesn't want this significance to intervene between the picture and its viewers and so the source images are a matter for politically correct, and hectoring, labels next to the canvases that really have nothing to do with what we see.  (I find this condescending or patronizing and obviously insincere).  The pictures post-2016 are brightly colored and, therefore, quite decorative -- Mehretu is a sensitive colorist -- but the paintings aren't as radical and distinctive as her earlier work and look a bit like late De Kooning or the "Cold Mountain" series by Bruce Marden.  (Mehretu calls some of the big swaths of color "characters" -- in this respect, her paintings contain inhabitants that look a little like the "personages" who appear in Miro and Arshile Gorky.) 

In her best paintings, Mehretu evinces an aesthetic of repletion -- like a Baroque Tiepolo mural, you can't quite see everything going on in these pictures no matter how hard you look. Videos demystify her Atelier -- she uses a computer to design the paintings on a big screen and, then, the actual work (at least in the last decade) is executed by a small army of technicians.  She says that "lots of small marks have power."  The mechanical drawings of architecture are laid onto the picture by use of projections that are traced by her assistants. 

Mehretu exemplifies the "man without a country" characteristics of much modern art.   Born in Addis Ababa, she seems to have been raised in NewYork and on the West Coast -- she speaks flawless idiomatic English and is secular.  (Pictures show her proudly bareheaded at the center of smiling groups of women wearing head-shawls.)  WAC wall labels claim, with her endorsement, that her pictures are about the "patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and imperialism".  This is ridiculous.  Her most recent work is a huge mural executed for Goldman-Sachs, the investment bankers.  (So much for her anti-capitalist esthetics.)

This is an excellent show and I recommend it highly.  (January and February will be good months to visit the Walker Art Center.  Also on display is a large show of recent pictures by David Hockney.  When I looked at Mehretu's work, my eye was exhausted by her big canvases and so I didn't dare to venture into the Hockney show which would have required a massive shift in perspective.  I hope to see that show sometime  in the next month.)