People, Places, Things (David Hockney at WAC)

 The Walker Art Center has dusted-off a number of works in its permanent collection made by the painter David Hockney and put them on display in a pleasant exhibition now showing (February 2022).  The show is called "People, Places, Things" and represents a small retrospective of Hockney's work  from the early sixties to the present.  It's a relatively modest undertaking, but certainly worth seeing if you are in the area and willing to inspect objets d'art through fogged glasses whilst wearing a surgical mask.  

I have a great affection for Hockney that arises from the fact that I happened to be in Los Angeles (my first time in California) at the time of one of the artist's first great retrospectives, a huge show at LACMA, probably around 1986.  Of course, I was smitten with southern California, having flown there from wintry Minnesota, and the palm trees, the mountains marinating in the mauve smog, and the smell of eucalyptus was bewitching to me.  I had traveled Mulholland Drive from Sunset Blvd to the place where the road ends as a pot-holed track in the mountains, a steep downward dive from the peaks to a zone of abandoned burnt-out cars and ruins (the sort of place where mobsters deposit bodies) and seen the mountains and the glorious views of the valleys  from the road and so Hockney's huge mural showing the course of Mulholland had a visceral impact on me.  The artist's images of aquamarine and turquois swimming pools and portraits of tanned art collectors on green manicured lawns,, handsome people luxuriating in Billy Wilder's pool, seemed to me to embody the very essence of Southern California.  And the current show at the Walker has a sunny radiance that commends it to people struggling through our cold, icy, and dark Minnesota winter.

The show is relatively small, just four galleries comprising about 40 objects.  There are a number of portraits in the first gallery, the so-called "people" part of the show.  These images show Hockney's ingenuity and versatility -- there are delicately limned pencil and ink pictures that showcase the artist's old master draftsmanship as well as cartoonish garish caricatures and exuberant cubist-style portraits.  One wall of pictures showing Hockney's muse, the beautiful willowy blonde Celia Birtwhistle, demonstrates the different modes in which the artist can work successfully -- the portraits range from Duerer-like delicacy and naturalism to raw images that remind me of Red Grooms or Robert Crump.  "Things" is a collection of pictures, several of them studies of swimming pools, sketches of interior decoration, pillows and couches, and a tour-de-force painting of one of Hockney's houses, a mural that stretches from a patio outdoors slashed with forceful parallel lines of orange, yellow, and honey-colored sunlight, then, inward to a room decorated with paintings (including an image Laurel and Hardy) where a bright cheery orange fire is burning in the hearth, this room also opening out into a scented paradisal garden.  The picture, "Hollywood Hills House" (1982 - 1983) reminds me of Matisse, but articulated through the lens of Los Angeles.  There's a gallery containing Hockney's early (1961) prints of "A Rake's Progress" in which the artist, visualized as an armless torso with a bad hair-cut and horn-rimmed glasses, encounters various temptations, all of this realized in witty schematically etched scenes -- of course, the poor Rake ends in Bedlam, portrayed as a row of speed-walkers seen from behind all identically drawn and wearing identical head-phones plugged into their right ears.  This room also contains some models of Hockney's sets designed for opera, including a Matisse-inflected but cartoonish Riviera landscape with blocky little personages like stelae crowding the proscenium -- this is Hockney's set for Poulenc's gender-bending opera, Le Mammelle di Tiresias.  The last gallery contains the most beautiful images in the show, a sequence of four conventionally drawn but radiant landscapes showing the four seasons in Yorkshire -- these pictures were made on an IPAD and, then, printed in 2011.  (Another of Hockney's works involves faxes taped together -- the artist is a technical innovator; I was disappointed that the show doesn't contain any of his Land Camera polaroid collages, marvelous cubist images made from assembled polaroids.)  The highlight of the show for me was a set of stunning engravings, "the Weather Series" made in 1972 after the example of Hokusai, showing "Wind", "Mist," "Lightning", "Rain" and the like.  These are large format engravings with tremendous presence.  "Mist" shows palm trees englobed in purplish smoggy haze -- an image very redolent of LA.  The last engraving shows fragments of the previous serious as wind-blown scraps on Melrose Avenue, also a wonderful picture.  

The Coca-Cola Kid

 One of the cinema's great enigmas, Dusan Makavejev, shot though the firmament of sixties and early seventies cinema like a flamboyant, brilliant comet.  A product of the brief efflorescence in Yugoslavian film making, Makavejev made two astounding picture in Serbo-Croatian, W.R., the Mysteries of the Organism (197) and the incredibly radical Sweet Movie (1975).  Makavejev's early films, made behind the Iron Curtain amaze by their mere existence -- it remains improbable that pictures so ideologically uncompromising (they are explorations of Wilhelm Reich's theories of sexuality) could ever have been made, let alone under conditions of tyranny in the Yugoslavian confederation.  (Presumably, Makavejev's work was so outre that the censors had no idea what he meant and what he accomplished with these works).  Sweet Movie, banned in many countries -- the film, which stars the real Miss Canada as a murderous, castrating figure-skater whose casually explicit sex scenes with a Red Army soldier are intercut with documentary images of corpses being disinterred from a mass grave (I think it's at Katyn, Poland) -- managed to deeply offend and disturb everyone notwithstanding their political views, Left, Right and Center.  Makavejev ended up defecting to the West and made several much less demanding pictures with Hollywood performers, Montenegro (with Susan Anspach and Erland Josefson, 1981) and, then, 1985's The Coca-Cola Kid (starring Eric Roberts and Greta Scaachi).  The Coca-Cola Kid was Makavejev's bid to achieve Hollywood credibility (somewhat on the model of Ivan Passer's excellent Cutter's Way  and Milos Forman's Amadeus.).  The Coca-Cola Kid is a respectable film and Makavejev directs some remarkable sequences, but as a whole the movie is fragmentary and doesn't really cohere -- it's charming but not entirely successful.  And the script, based on several short stories by the Australian writer, Frank Moorhouse is too subtle to be readily appreciated by most casual viewers -- the film takes an anti-corporate stance toward American cultural imperialism, yet, also celebrates the vibrant rapacious aggression that characterizes US business.  The viewer is stranded between despising the arrogant philistine boosterism of the hero and admiring his pluck, eclat, and tenacity.  This problem is embodied in the musical sequences -- the film formulates a jingle-like theme to promote Coca-Cola to Australians:  the lyric proclaims "Don't want to go where there's no Coca-Cola /Take  life by the throat when you're drinking Coke?" and the music featuring a digeridoo drone and sizzling drums is so catchy and infectious that the tune could well be wildly successful in promoting the soft-drink; it's what the Germans call an "Ear-worm", you can't get it out of your head.  And, yet, the movie is not an advertisement for Coca-Cola and, indeed, is highly skeptical about the invasion of American consumer products into the world outside of the USA.  (In fact, like Sweet Movie, but for other reasons, it seems astonishing that Coca-Cola allowed the film to be made and, in fact, the picture begins with a series of disclaimers by which the Atlanta-based Coke compant disavow the picture in all respects -- although the movie is a veritable museum of trade-marked Coke-related props and memorabilia).  The film's tone is interesting:  the picture is ideologically opposed to American cultural imperialism, but it has a sneaky admiration for the products of American business.  (The movie has a similar theme and ambience to Local Hero, the Scottish director Bill Forsyth's comedy about an American PR man from Houston marooned on a remote Scottish island.  I would suspect that the pitch for The Coca-Cola Kid invoked the box office success of Forsyth's 1983 film.)  

Frank Baker (Eric Roberts) plays a Coca-Cola troubleshooter dispatched to Sydney, Australia.  Baker is an ex-Marine, faithful Christian, and naively committed to the mission of his company -- that is, to disseminate Coke products all around the globe.  Baker learns that a village in a remote Blue Mountain valley shows no sales of Coke products.  He ventures to that place where other Coke employees have mysteriously vanished.  In the village called Anderson Valley, Baker discovers that there is an independent bottling company that controls the market in the region -- this is the business owned by T. J. McDowell.  McDowell runs a Victorian era factory complete with giant flywheels and big spinning governors beside roaring fires and he makes his drinks from truckloads of crushed local fruit.  McDowell attended the 1927 Rotary Convention in St. Louis and there wooed and won the Coca-Cola poster girl.  However, the romance soured and she committed suicide, thus establishing a sort of primal love-hate relationship between McDowell's business and the mighty Coca-Cola company in Atlanta, Georgia.  Baker is threatened by McDowell's thugs and, even, attacked.  McDowell himself takes a couple rifle shots at the Coke man.  But Baker perseveres and, in the end, the old man takes a liking to him.  McDowell comes to Sydney with a cadre of singing girls to promote a strategic alliance between Coke and his company -- the jointly produced soft-drink would be called McCoke and, in fact, McDowell even hires a skywriter to emblazon that logo in the sky over the Sydney Opera House.  But no alliance is possible and, in the end, McDowell blows up his ancient factory to avoid its acquisition by Coca-Cola -- it's unclear whether the old man dies in the conflagration.  Complicating this situation is that the fact McDowell's beautiful daughter (whom he has not seen for seven years) is a working as a secretary in the Coke HQ at Sydney and, in fact, has been assigned work with Baker.  This young woman, Terry, who looks like her mother, provides the film's love interest.  She is smitten with the handsome, if strangely androgynous, Baker (Eric Roberts, who is Julia Roberts' older brother, was always too exotically pretty for his own good.)  Baker seems to have homosexual leanings and there are several scenes in which he is ambiguously courted by gay men who are friends with Terry.  (There's also a silly subplot involving a gay cabana boy at the hotel where Baker is staying.  This man is sure that Baker is a CIA operative and also courts the handsome Coke executive -- at the end of the film, a flower and fruit basket full of American currency changes hands, presumably because the cabana boy, who is also some sort of secret agent, believes Baker is working for the US spy service.)  The plot is vestigial and disorganized -- there are feints in various directions that go nowhere, presumably scraps of Moorhouse stories that figure in the narrative but aren't ever developed.  (For instance, there's a bravura scene where a biplane buzzes and, then, almost wrecks Baker's jeep -- the plane is carrying a lady pilot, an old woman, and wounded wombat being transported to the vet; in fact, the plane is clearly a set up for a whole complicated subplot, possibly involving an affair between the lady pilot and Baker, that never develops and, in fact, receives only one further glance in the whole movie.  In a neat little shot, twenty minutes later, a convoy of Coca-Cola trucks edges along circuitous mountain roads moving toward Anderson Valley while the wombat, with paw in a white splint, watches the procession.)  

By and large, the movie seems to be manufactured, like its titular product, along the formulaic lines of a Hollywood romantic comedy.  But there's an edge, maybe not noticeable, unless you have seen Makaveyev's earlier, more dangerous, pictures.  Comedies tend to be brightly and schematically lit.  Makaveyev, by contrast, uses shadowy Rembrandt-styled lighting, casting many scenes in a penumbral amber darkness.  There's a peculiar homosexual ambience -- in one scene, Terry encourages her gay friends to dance with Baker and, then, seduce him.  Baker ends up half-naked smeared with some white substance in which pale feathers are embedded; he wears a big floppy woman's hat with showy avian plumage.  (These feathers rhyme with the climactic sex scene in which Terry, wearing a Santa Claus suit seemingly stuffed with eiderdown has sex with the Coca-Cola kid -- feathers literally fly and there's a gender-bending aspect to the jolly fat man with the white beard suddenly revealed to be a voluptuous young woman.)  Most remarkably, the musical sequences have the kind of strange ecstatic abandon that we associate with David Lynch.  In Anderson Valley, the local Rotary Club stages a Christmas party in which a man with peculiarly commanding gaze (his eyes bore through the screen) sings "Waltzing Matilda" while a half-dozen Santas dance and quaff Coke -- this scene has remained with me as a vivid memory for almost forty years and, indeed, the sequence is spectacular.  Similarly, the women singing McDowell's jingle look possessed, a chorus of bacchantes.  Sweet Movie was daunting for many reasons, not the least it's equation of sex with chocolate with shit with death.  There's something similar at play in The Coca-Cola Kid -- ice plays an important part in the film (it's used to keep the Coke cold) and there's a lyric encomium to the material spoken by McDowell.  To avoid her father, Terry hides in a freezer full of Coke and ice, a strange conflation of sex with frigidity and, when she emerges, shivering and covered in frost (somewhat like the feathers that will feature in the sex scene) the effect is very compelling and peculiar.  The movie tours all things Australian and there's a indigenous digeridoo player (the "sound of Australia" Baker proclaims) and a camel shot like an alien being, half-concealed in shadow, a sort of quadruped serpent.  The film begins with an opening shot that has a surreal edge -- visitors to Australia landing at Sydney find themselves being fumigated to keep them from transporting foreign viruses and parasites to the Island Continent.  (Of course, Baker is the most insidious of all foreign pests, an American entrepreneur.)  Generally, Makavayev seems to be interested in how American commerce creates fresh desires in people so as to be able to satisfy them.  Ultimately, American consumer goods, as embodied in charismatic Coca-Cola with its extraordinarily attractive trade-mark and packaging, suggests a new kind of commercial erotics.  But these themes, probably the ideas that drew the director to these materials are kept in the background and not rendered as offensive, but rather charming.  An attack on American capitalism becomes, in effect, a rowdy advertisement for Coke.  

(The film once contained an exuberant bathing sequence in which Terry takes a shower, I recall, with her six-year old daughter.  The sequence gave the audience a gander at the sublimely beautiful Greta Scaachi in her full glory and was very memorable for that reason.  But the sequence also had a strangely tender aspect in that it featured the nudity of the pre-pubescent girl as well.  These images have vanished with only a single trace from the film as now available through Amazon Prime -- the frontal nudity is all gone and there remains only the briefest glimpse of mother and daughter seen from behind.  Someone, apparently, construed the sequence as child pornography which it most assuredly was not --and the images have all been cut from the movie.  The Internet confirms that Janson Media, the company who now owns this film, has excised the footage in version available on Amazon -- commentators argue that the shower scene was superfluous in any event.  But this is untrue:  the theme of mothers and daughters is integral to the movie -- Terry is estranged from her father probably because of her mother's suicide; therefore, showing Terry with her daughter in the shower scene coheres with one of the film's thematic points, that is, the relationship between parents and their children.  The little girl is called "DMZ" in the movie because her mother and father are involved in a nasty divorce, but regard the little girl as a "demilitarized zone", presumably a reflection of the unhappy relationship between Terry's parents.  However, even when the movie was brand-new, some viewers were uneasy with the shower scene.  Makavayev's films exist, however, to make people nervous.)   

The Anonymous Lover

 After a COVID hiatus of 752 days, the Minnesota Opera commenced its 2022 season with a performance of Joseph Bologne's The Anonymous Lover.  Bologne, also known as the Chevalier de Saint Georges, was a Black courtier born a slave in 1745 on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, then, a French colony.  Bologne traveled with his mother, a Senegalese slave to France, where his father, a nobleman and politician Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges had him educated.  The young man became a notable fencer, fought with valor in the country's wars, was renowned as a wit, and directed a chamber orchestra.  He was apparently a violin prodigy and composed many musical works including the 1780 operetta, The Anonymous Lover.  One unexpected result of the death of George Floyd has been a scramble to resurrect previously forgotten works by Black composers and artists.  This production of The Anonymous Lover is one aspect of that campaign for racial justice.  

The Anonymous Lover is very slight.  The Minnesota Opera Company has padded out the story by incorporating a couple of art songs apparently separately composed by Bologne and, in fact, has rewritten some features of the libretto.  (The work adapts a play Stephanie Felicite de Genlis although the actual libretto was written by another Frenchman with a long and complicated name.)  The show is pleasingly short -- it clocks in at a brisk 90 minutes.  The text is unassuming and the music sounds like a something composed by Mozart's younger brother -- the tunes are not memorable, but pleasant enough and the music seems wholly competent.  The operetta is really a Singspiel on the order of The Magic Flute -- there is some spoken dialogue interspersed with songs.  Bologne scores this little musical divertimento with a half-dozen nice arias, a couple of choruses, including (as with Mozart) a final number that proclaims that all's well that ends well.  There are a couple of duets and, even, I think a quartet.

There's isn't anything to the story -- it is slight to the point of vanishing.  A nobleman named Valcour has been courting a handsome widow with anonymous letters and entreaties.  (In fact, he's "stalking" her to use the modern nomenclature -- an aspect of the plot that causes some anxiety to the present-day director and dramaturge.)  The widow, Leontine, is ambivalent about her anonymous lover.  (Valcour is always hanging around with his buddy, Ophemon.)  At the end of the first act, Valcour announces that he is the anonymous lover, but his declaration is met with hilarity by the other characters -- much to his chagrin, they think he's joking.  The operetta really seems poised to end at this point.  But  the plot revives with the precise same situation in Act Two in which the widow and Valcour attend a wedding.  Ultimately, the widow and Valcour embrace and the show ends with a merry chorus and a double wedding.

Perceiving the premise of the play is a little creepy -- Valcour pursuing a woman from the shadows without announcing his identity -- the modern dramaturge revises the plot.  In the first ten minutes, the heroine eavesdrops on Valcour as he expresses his love for the widow to Ophemon.  Therefore, the show posits that she knows all along the identity of the anonymous lover and is simply flirting with him by not immediately declaring her romantic interest.  But this revision of the plot makes hash of the romantic and emotional aspects of the Second Act.  Leontine has a showy aria in which she expresses the fact that she has fallen in love with the "anonymous lover" without knowing who he is -- and, indeed, she expresses considerable anxiety and consternation about these feelings.  But none of this makes any sense if she actually knows the identity of her suitor and could summon him to her in a heartbeat.  In other words, parts of the plot musically scored by Bologne to have considerable gravitas make no sense at all if the premise of the lover's anonymity is discarded.  The director also establishes a kind of pantomime parallel action to the plot.  Joseph Bologne appears, albeit without any words or dialogue  -- resplendent in a red waistcoat, he surveys the action from a balcony above the garden and bedroom where the operetta is staged.  He is given a lover, Madame de Genlis, the writer of the play on which the opera is based.  He and Madame de Genlis also pursue one another and, then, end up locked in an embrace at the same time Leontine and Valcour are kissing.  However, Madame de Genlis has a husband and the operetta ends in a somewhat disturbing fashion -- the husband confronts Bologne on the terrace above the happy chorus, apparently enraged that Bologne, who was a slave under the legal codethen-applicable, has been dallying with his wife.  This is an interesting twist on the action although one might complain that casting the Black composer as an adulterer -- when there is no evidence for this interpretation -- is a fall- back to the notion of hypersexualizing Black males. And, perhaps, an insult to the memory of Madame de Genlis as well -- who is collateral damage, as it were, to this fanciful pantomime.  In general, the staging of the show evidences some considerable anxiety about whether there is really enough here to turn this little divertissement into a full-fledged operetta.  The score has long overtures to both the first and second halves -- in other words, musical interludes in which nothing useful happens on-stage.  Furthermore, there are long musical numbers that seem to have been composed for the corps de ballet, dance pieces in which Caribbean peasants of both genders, and Black and White, engage in the tedious sort of rambunctious tom-foolery that is ubiquitous to opera -- lots of peasant dancing, bawdy embraces, drinking, and, even, pratfalls (a banana peel gets cast aside with predictable consequences).  Two pleasant art-songs are inserted into the opera -- these give Celestine's friend, Dorothee, a couple of numbers.  (She sings the tunes, which seem scored to harpsichord, as a "wedding present" at the ceremony in which, ultimately, Celestine and Valcour are united -- the double wedding at the end of the show.)  

The Anonymous Lover was presented by the Minnesota Opera just before Valentine's Day and the show does triple duty -- it's an attempt at an operatic racial reckoning, a celebration of Black history during Black History Month, and a bon-bon for Valentine's Day as well.  The set design is gorgeous, a colonial manor with round arches, a life-size statue rather incongruously holding a pine-apple, some palm trees, and spacious terraces.  The colors of the manor walls are pinks and blues, the palette of Matisse.  The conceit is that the action takes place  in the Caribbean.  The costumes are exceptionally beautiful, huge hooped skirts, colorfully embroidered vests and bodices.  The heroine wears a towering  hot pink turban and matches the hot-pink fringes to her vest.  Leontine is well-sung by a diva of Wagnerian Mezzo-Soprano proportions.  By contrast, the little Valcour looks like a hobbit -- he seems in danger of being suffocated by his lover who is, at least, twice his size.  The Anonymous Lover is sweet, inoffensive, and has pretty music.  One feels churlish suggesting that it's a bit trite.  (The audience loved the show as did my companion.)  

The Sands of the Kalahari

 On an ignored bookshelf in your grandmother's basement, you will probably find copies of Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative and Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape.  The books will be dog-eared -- clearly, they have been read, not once but, probably, several times by several people.  The Territorial Imperative, about the roots of human nature in African "killer apes", was published in 1966, a year after the release of Cy Endfield's The Sands of the Kalahari.  Morris' book, with its self-explanatory title, The Naked Ape endorses similar explanations for human aggression -- that book was published in 1967.  In the mid-sixties, the Zeitgeist, perhaps in reaction to the "Summer of Love," produced a number of books asserting that human beings were inherently violent and territorial, hairless apes engaged in predatory raiding under the leadership of dominant alpha males wielding sexual power over the females in the horde and suppressing the reproduction of less powerful male rivals.  This dispiriting thesis has its pop science origins in Ardrey's earlier book African Genesis (1961) and Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression (1966).  Ardrey's theories, expressed in lyrical, vehement prose (his prose style reads like Clifford Odets), were culturally controversial but indelible -- Ardrey wrote like what he was, a former MGM contract screenwriter.  (Among other things, he wrote the Charleton Heston epic Khartoum).  His rhetoric is a lot like a speech delivered by a movie hero on the eve of a big game or political crisis or battle.  I don't know if The Sands of the Kalahari was directly influenced by the "killer ape" hypothesis promoted in African Genesis -- but there's no question that the film explores similar themes.  

If you saw The Sands of the Kalahari as a child (as I did), scenes from this film will have remained with you for your whole life.  The last sequence in which a brutish big game hunter, unarmed and almost naked, fights for dominance with a vicious alpha male baboon is not the sort of thing you are likely to forget.  And, so, I decided I would revisit the movie, a film that I found fantastically exciting  when I was about 14.  Alas, fond memories from youth are often misplaced -- upon recently seeing the movie, I've been forced to conclude that it's not very good.  The film, particularly with respect to gender assumptions, has not dated well -- it is casually and misogynistically sexist.  Although the plot is well-paced, and fairly exciting, the movie bogs down in tedious preaching and it's pretty obviously allegorical, a form that doesn't work well in the literal-minded movies.  (There's a dystopian aspect about the movie that is derived from the allegorical novel and film The Lord of the Flies -- also a famous artifact from the period:  Peter Brooks' famous adaptation of William Golding's novel was made in 1963).  As a chaste youth, I interpreted the movie to be about conflict between men competing for dominance.  In fact, the Sands of the Kalahari is primarily about sex, generally not a good subject for presentation by he-man great White hunter types -- as witness Hemingway's embarrassing problems with romance and sex scenes in his books.  The movie features the simpering Samantha York as the object of desire that inspires brutish passions in her fellow castaways -- she's not particularly appealing and the film runs true to its anthropological sources in that the characters are all louts, including the heroine.  Robert Ardrey should have been coaxed out of his screenwriting retirement to draft the script -- in general, the film is poorly written.

The story in The Sands of the Kalahari is simple enough and compelling, as I have noted a "castaway" yarn.  When a commercial flight to Johannesberg is diverted to Windhoek, a group of passengers charter a small prop-driven plane to complete the trip.  The passengers are a motley group four men and a luscious babe -- the girl, improbably, named Grace Mountain, is dressed like Jackie Kennedy in white high heels and a little pillbox hat.  The men consist of a German emigre to South Africa, an old man named Grimmelman, O'Brien (played by Stanley Baker) a dipsomaniac oil field roustabout, a social worker employed by the UN Children's Service, and, arriving late to the party on the tarmac, Bain, a big game hunter (Stewart Whitman scowling a lot like Richard Boone in Hombre).  The plane runs into a monstrous flock of locusts and crashes in the middle of a vast desert covered with sand dunes. O'Brien's leg is broken and the co-pilot dies in the fiery explosion.  Without water, but with a surfeit of Bain's hunting rifles, the survivors limp to a furnace-like heap of boulders and wind-abraded pinnacles and spires of grey granite.  Baboons are living in that labyrinth of huge, broken stones and this means that there's water to sustain the group.  Immediately, civilization breaks down.  The pilot tries to rape Grace, but she fights him off and, surprisingly, he declares that he's disgusted with the comely lass (since she didn't melt in his arms during the rape as he expected).  The pilot takes a couple of buckets of water and departs from the stony fortress-like rock formation; he plans to walk to the coast and get help.  Recognizing the Great White Hunter is the alpha male, Grace immediately mates with him.  Bain is a nasty piece of work, spending his nights massacring the baboons whom he interprets as competitors for the scarce resources in the rocky oasis.  Bain thinks there too many mouths to feed among the castaways and so he takes the Social Worker out in the desert, threatens him with his rifle, and makes him march away across the dunes under the remorseless sun.  He tries the same maneuver with the German -- there's a fight and he beats the old man to death.  O'Brien, whose leg is now better, knows that Bain is murdering the other men.  There's a brutal fight and Bain gets knocked out -- O'Brien hits him with a wrench.  Bain, then, gets imprisoned in a oubliette-like cavity in the granite badlands.  A monsoon arrives and in the storm Bain escapes from this pit.  This action is intercut with episodes from the adventures of the pilot -- he makes it to the sea but ends up in proscribed zone owned by a diamond mining company; the diamond mining security guards beat him up.  The Social Worker collapses but is rescued by some Hottentot tribesmen.  A helicopter comes to rescue the castaways.  O'Brien and Grace depart but Bain, who has been mounting a sort of gorilla (pun intended) campaign in the stony fastness of the little massif elects to remain in the wilderness.  Perhaps, he's afraid of being charged with murder.  Left to his own devices, Bain becomes a sort of Robinson Crusoe.  But he can't leave the pack of baboons alone.  Challenging their alpha male, a fight to the death occurs -- the movie predates CGI and the fight is shot in either extremely long shots (showing Bain wrestling with a baboon pelt) or in extreme close-ups (snarling baboon, snarling man, blood, strangulation); the battle is completely unpersuasive.  Bain kills the lord baboon.  A very long shot shows him as a speck in the rocky arena.  The other baboons cautiously circle and, then, converge on him -- it's not clear whether he's been elected king or has become meat.  

The story is pretty thrilling and the picture would work well as a silent movie.  It's the talk that wrecks the show -- everyone keeps saying that there's no difference between men and baboons and that the "overpopulation" at the oasis requires Bain's murderous reduction in force and morality is, generally, eschewed as irrelevant to survival.  There are extremely effective scenes -- some of the baboon massacre sequences are legitimately horrifying (similar to the slaughter of the kangaroos in Wake up in Fright) and one sequence in which the social worker, Bain, and O'Brien slaughter an kind of gazelle, an oryx it seems, with their bare hands is also savagely effective.  Bain is an excellent villain although there is something decidedly gay about the way that he sashays around the oasis in very short shorts, bare-chested, with combat boots and a bandolier of ammo as a belt.  Whitman throws out his brawny chest and has a very cute ass and, in fact, somewhere along the line, the director and screenwriters seem to grasp that there's something campy about the performance -- Bain is very interesting in killing but has no time for sex and his love scenes with the always aroused Grace seem perfunctory at best.  And, announcing the theme of latent homosexuality, someone says that Bain is more concerned with his "rifle" than with the woman.  O'Brien, played by Stanley Baker who co-produced the picture with Cy Endfield (an American on the HUAC/Hollywood blacklist), has the sort of role in which Cornel Wilde or Mel Gibson specialized -- the hero who has to suffer in every scene:  his leg is broken and it pains him terribly, then, he gets savagely beaten by Bain.  His leg is infected at the outset and Grace has to use her body heat to warm him with her embrace -- a scene played straight and not for titillation.  The baboons are great, powerful, sleek-looking proto-humans with huge coffin-shaped muzzles full of dagger-sized canine teeth.  With a lost donkey and a desert tortoise, the beasts are the best things in this movie.  Endfield is an excellent director -- his films, particularly Zulu are singleminded explorations of male fantasies of combat, aggression, and sex.  He amps up the volume on the soundtrack -- the locusts sound like a million chainsaws and the baboons bark and yip and grunt and squeal in loud, alarming choruses.  The plane crash is staged with Theater of Cruelty sound effects, ear-splitting whines and rumbles and roars, and the score is excellent -- there's a jaunty grotesque march, a bit like Shostakovich, at the outset of the film; the tune is a nightmare version of Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" from Hatari.  But the movie is full of implausible details -- in one scene, Grace is walking about barefoot on 140 degree jagged rocks that would both fry and lacerate her feet.  Whitman's brawny chest would be covered with second-degree blisters in the heat of the equatorial sun, so his campy outfit isn't merely risible but seems dangerous.  O'Brien gets to stare in horror at a six-inch scorpion crawling on his arm.  The first third of the movie is pretty good, but, once the allegory is defined and kicks into high gear, the film deteriorates.  There's a roomy cave obviously detached from its environment and very well-lit; this is where the characters speechify.  The film was shot both "on location" and at Shepperton Studios in London -- this is clearly where the nice cave, a little like a drawing room, is located.

The Turning Point (1952)

 The German expat William Dieterle directed the 1952 film noir, The Turning Point.  The picture is efficiently made and reasonably exciting.  It exemplifies craftsmanlike Hollywood film-making:  careful plotting, excellent pithy dialogue, a serviceable moral and ethical perspective, and effective acting.  The film isn't particularly memorable -- indeed, most film noir are similar to one another and fungible:  one plot and one set of characters can be substituted for another without doing much harm to the sturdy premises of these films.  The Turning Point is a noir in the genre of the crusading District Attorney determined to purge corruption (signified by organized crime) from his town -- it's part of group of films that include Fritz Lang's much more indelible The Big Heat and Phil Kaufman's The Phenix City Story.  

A straight-arrow DA named Conroy(Edmund O'Brien) is conducting hearings to expose a criminal syndicate headquartered at a local trucking firm.  These are called the "Conroy Hearings", apparently, a reference to the actual Kefauver Hearings on organized crime that were roughly contemporaneous with the production of this film.  Conroy enlists the support of a cynical journalist, McKibben, played by William Holden.  McKibben, in the first of several stylized and ornate speeches, suggests that corruption is endemic to the human condition (an echo of Willie Stark in All the King's Men) and that Conroy is biting off more than he can chew.  McKibben does some investigation of his own and discovers to his horror that Conroy's father, an old copper, is working for the bad guys. (A scene in which the elder Conroy explains how he became a servant of organized crime is also very well-written and moving:  the old cop betrayed his principles for cash so that he could send his son to law school) The gangsters suspect that the corrupt cop is going to betray them and so they arrange to have him gunned down, killing, as well, the gunsel who lured the policeman into the ambush and shot him down.  The killings were witnessed by the gunsel's moll who approaches McKibban reluctantly offering to be a witness against the mob.  The nasty trucker-gangster sends his men to kill the moll (she's Mexican and her name is Carmelina).  McKibben protects her.  By this times, he's having an affair with Conroy's betrothed, a cool, businesslike dame (Alexis Smith) who seems to have gone to some expensive college out East -- the film takes place in downtown LA and features great location work in the old Bunker Hill neighborhood around the funicular now called "Angel's Flight." McKibban breaks it to Conway that his dad was a factotum for the mob.  The killers draw McKibban into an ambush at the Olympic Arena, a squalid-looking boxing venue.  McKibban is fatally wounded and Conroy and his cops arrive at the scene too late to save his buddy, but in time to shoot down the gunman.  Conroy's men raid the trucking headquarters and haul off the kingpin of the gang as well as most of his men -- a few perish in futile, if showy, gunfights.  McKibban dies in the arms of Conroy's fiancee, thus, solving the problem posed by the meretricious relationship between the journalist and the girl -- adultery or quasi-adultery isn't rewarded.  The dame is left with regrets, McKibban dies nobly, and Conway walks off sadder but wiser.  He pronounces the movie's moral in its last line:  "Sometimes someone has to pay an exorbitant price for the majesty of the law" -- this is a reprise of lines earlier in the film.

The movie has many minor and incidental pleasures.  Caroline Jones is very funny as the prostitute-mistress of one of gangsters -- she has a little scene but makes her mark; she would later be Morticia in The Addams Family on TV.  The scenes in which William Holden is stalked by a baby-faced gunman at the boxing match (the bad guy is hiding high above among the roof-supporting steel-girders -- every time, he gets Holden in his sights, something exciting happens in the fight and the crowd stands blocking his shot -- is very exciting.  Holden breathlessly whispers to Conroy's girl:  "There's a gun on me." as he flees through the exiting crowd. And there's a great scene in which Holden fights off two bad guys with a table flung in their faces while Carmelina flees out the backdoor of a saloon where she has been hiding.  The saloon's back alley opens onto an enormous spiral staircase that coils up the side of one of the buildings on Bunker Hill.  McKibban (Holden) runs up the staircase shouting out the girl's name, an extended shot that's completely pointless (the girl just vanishes), but highlights the fantastic location and has an odd surrealistic edge:  the journalist just keeps climbing and climbing on the narrow spiral steps until he reaches the top of the building -- but since the structure is embedded in the side of a hill, this is just a nondescript corridor that is level with the streets running along the top of hill.  This is really wonderful, the stuff of dreams. 

There will be no Night

I have a longstanding criticism of the well-meaning documentaries produced for PBS by Ken Burns.  These are shows like The Roosevelts, Jazz, and, most famously, The Civil War, the series on which Burns reputation is founded.  In all of his documentaries, Burns runs out of footage relevant to his subject matter -- this is particularly the case with The Civil War series, a program about an event that was only sporadically photographed and, then, with primitive and heavy still cameras.  Burns addresses deficiencies in his visual resources by simply recycling the same pictures over and over again all the while accompanied by plaintive folk-song like melodies and poetic narrative.  This device seems to me dishonest.  Every picture is taken for a purpose and shows something that the photographer wanted to document in its specificity.  I want to know why the picture was taken and who its shows.  I want to know the location where the photograph was made and how the content of the picture relates to the historical information that Burns is providing in his film.  But Burns rarely describes the pictures that he features in his documentaries (unless the show is about country music or jazz in which he can actually edit into his picture real performances).  Indeed, most often the pictures are equivalent of screen-savers, images that are pretty and, even, atmospheric but which are never explained as to person, place or what is being represented.  You can listen to Burns' Civil War like a radio-play.  The pictures are more or less completely superfluous, sometimes to an irritating effect -- after all, some of these pictures are extraordinary, have strange and memorable details and the viewer wants to know what the images mean.  But Burns is to busy retailing to you his tendentious views of history, generally voiced in lugubrious tones by Peter Coyote, and the images always seem to be orphaned, a mere after-thought.

I have a similar response to the nightmare French documentary There will be no Night (2021, streaming on MUBI).  This documentary is comprised entirely of gun-camera footage excerpted from government archives maintained with respect to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.  As the narrator assures us, every single combat encounter is automatically filmed and, then, analyzed and archived.  Failure to retain or archive the gun-camera footage is apparently a felony.  Therefore, there is a huge library of pictures showing helicopter and missile strikes on supposed belligerents in these theaters of war.  The director, Eleonore Weber, has accessed this footage, almost all shot with FLIR (night-vision) technology, and cut together the combat scenes with a poetic, rather Ken Burnsian voice-over.  (One might think that this work required labor in the archives -- in fact, the more spectacular gun-camera images are invariably leaked and can be seen on You-Tube.  (The credits at the end of the film generally identify You-Tube sites -- it doesn't appear that Weber had any cooperation from military authorities either in France or the United States).  Weber consults with a French bombardier and helicopter pilot whom she calls Victor K.  She provides some technical information courtesy of this informant.  However, in general the footage is completely untethered from any circumstances -- with one notable exception, we aren't told where the pictures were made, what is going on in the imagery, or who is being blown to pieces by machine-guns apparently firing explosive shells that rain down on the apparent "enemy" and simply make them disappear.  Without any context, the footage is titillating and depressing, but since we don't what is going on, don't know the nature of the mission, and don't know who is being murdered from the air (often from several kilometers away), it's impossible to evaluate anything that we are shown in the film.  Assuming the nature of these wars and their military objectives (or lack of objectives), we can't tell if we're being shown war crimes, atrocities, or merely violent incidents on the battle-field.  And if we can't evaluate the ethics or morality of the killing with which we are confronted, the movie becomes somewhat pointless -- really just exploitation of the sort that caused these picture to be posted on the internet in the first place.  

The film begins with some FLIR (infra-red night-vision) shots of big, sinister-looking helicopters rising into the sky.  There's an uncanny image of three parallel white beams of light probing along the surface of a butte or mesa -- it's unearthly and I have no idea what I am seeing.  We're shown some training footage -- the gun-sight follows some groups of men in what appears to be a rural French village and, then, the crosshairs track a car.  The narrator tells us that it's important to keep a target in sight at all times -- if you lose track of the target, even momentarily, there may be a case of mistaken identity resulting in a massacre of innocents.  The narrator points out that the gun-sight pilots, who track their targets with motions of their head, seem to be able to see everything, yet always complain that their victims are barely visible at all.  Zooms are "nauseating" and pilots avoid them.  Although the footage shows detailed terrain and enemy movements, there are limitations -- the gunship pilots can't tell roads from rivers except for the fact that water reflects the stars in the sky.  The battlefield footage is all ambiguous.  We don't know what we're seeing.  In one sequence, a car meets a truck next to a bare field.  Men get out and someone carries a long narrow object (a rifle?) into the empty terrain and throws it aside.  The man then darts back to the trucks where a couple of other wait for him.  The pilot fires and the men vanish in a cloud of exploding dirt.  Then, we see a couple wounded men who are flailing around.  One of them rolls under the intact truck.  The pilot, then, blows up the truck, something that Victor K says is "not very decent of him."  In general, once the pilot commits to firing, something that requires approval from HQ, he will keep shooting until any signs of movement are obliterated -- this means that there are several distressing images of obviously wounded figures staggering around (one of them throws his arms up over his head as if to surrender) being blasted into oblivion.  There's an attack on a weird flat-topped building from which dozens of tiny black figure swarm like ants.  Enemies on a hillside are hiding under wet blankets so that there thermal signatures can't be read.  But when some of soldiers emerge, the gunship blows off the top of the ridge.  No context for any of this is supplied:  we don't know where these actions take place or who is being killed; we don't even know in which country these events happen.  The most alarming sequence doesn't involve any gunship attack at all.  A group of about a half-dozen men are struggling to unearth something on a road.  Suddenly, the screen goes dark with a huge flash followed by roiling clouds of smoke and dust.  The men were digging up an IED and it has exploded.  Everyone has simply vanished and there's a big round moon-crater in the middle of the road.  This fascinates the pilots who continuously circle the scene of the blast, exclaiming things like "Holy Shit!" and asking one another if they saw the explosion.  The narrator, displaying a typically French form of rhetoric, says the pilots are circling around a void, an absence where once there were men.  The explosion is so spectacular, however, that you can understand why the pilots would be interested in the crater and the locals  below who appear from the environs to pick at the debris.  We see an infamous You-Tube clip in which a pilot blasts into pieces about five men, one of whom was a journalist carrying a tripod that was mistaken for a long gun.  The men's activities seem jhostile from the air and one can seen how a mistake of this sort could be readily made.  There's a big battle involving an attack on a hillside covered with tents -- it's no so much a battle as a massacre (the men on the ground have no way of fighting back).  The weird thing about the slaughter is that a number of donkeys are standing among the explosions and the gunship pilots are scrupulous in not blowing them up.  It's just the men who vanish in clouds of dust and fire.  In the middle of the mayhem an uncanny figure stalks slowly through the explosions -- the narrator thinks it may be an old woman, stooped over and moving gingerly, but its silhouette looks like nothing earthly.  The film ends with a weird sequence seemingly shot in Utah or at Glen Canyon.  FLIR technology is now so advanced that we can see the desert in color -- the only way that we know that it's night is that the lights of distant town flare garishly against the horizon.  A man is wandering around in the desert.  Here the cameras are not in the air but shooting from the level ground toward the horizon.  The man hides behind a frail-looking bush.  Why does he do this?  What are we seeing?  Is this staged for the movie to show how ambiguous human movements are when viewed from afar?  Or is this guy genuinely playing hide-and-seek in the desolate wasteland?  The final shots are FLIR images of families in the suburbs of an American city -- the gun-sight tracks over them as they wave to the helicopters. I think this is supposed to demonstrate that it is very hard to interpret human behavior viewed from this abstract, schematic perspective -- but the footage demonstrates the opposite:  the sinister meetings between heavy vehicles at remote crossroads, the wolf packs of men furtively loping around the adobe and concrete villages, the tents on the hillside and the bunker from which the men swarm -- all of these images certainly seem to show belligerents and hostile conduct.  But the film never deigns to explain to us what is happening.  When death comes from the air, the Vietnam expression is relevant -- shoot 'em all and let God sort them out.  But most of the killings  in this film, if you support the premise of these wars (which I don't)however, seem to be "righteous".

I assume that the title of this film refers to Revelations 2:22 -- that in the Holy City there "shall be no night."  

Ozark and Sit-Coms

 

The first-half of the Fourth Season, I think, of the hit Netflix series Ozark is now (February 2022) streaming.  This show is one of the best crime programs on TV, brilliantly acted with ingenious plotting and punchy, ferocious dialogue.  As everyone knows, the show's premise is that a financial planner, Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) and his wife, Wendy, have fun afoul of American TV's all purpose boogey-man, a Mexican drug cartel.  As we come to learn, the Byrde's have been complicit with drug cartel from the outset, although the show cleverly portrays Marty Byrde as an American Everyman trapped in the web of an insidious fate, until we learn that he and his wife have been criminals all along.  Forced to flee to Lake of the Ozarks, Marty and Wendy are coerced into laundering cartel money on an industrial scale -- to this end, they begin to invest in various cash-enterprises, including ultimately a strip club (Lickety Splits) various taverns and motels, an undertaking business that proves to be highly convenient, and, finally, a river-boat casino.  In the fourth series, of which seven episodes (about half of the projected series) can be streamed, the Byrdes have become more ambitious.  They scheme to set up a non-profit for redevelopment of poor parts of Chicago and forge a partnership with big Pharma to further the opium epidemic in the rural hinterland, particularly the Ozarks where they live.  The show is casually brutal and very cynical.  In the Fourth Series, we are privy to the maleficent schemes of a corrupt FBI, corrupt Senators, and, of course, the vicious family-operated American cartels that we know as Big Pharma, authorized to legally  manufacture narcotics in vast and socially devastating quantities.  As the scope of the show has broadened, its convoluted plots seem increasingly implausible.  The Byrde's now have such vast power as a result of their alliances with the omnipotent and evil FBI (shown to be engaged in money-laundering itself on a colossal scale) that the Mexican drug cartel seems now a rather minor villain, guilty of mere violent misdemeanors in contrast to the cosmic scheme of criminality committed by the American drug industry, the FBI and its minions, and the American senate.  One wonders, increasingly, why Marty Byrde and Wendy put up with being bullied by the suave, soft-spoken, and rather courtly Mexican gangsters -- as we see, a single phone call is sufficient to unleash armies of FBI agents and, even, the American military on these hapless penny-ante thugs.  The big money is in legal opioids and Senatorial corruption.  

The show is consistently thrilling and, like much malarkey produced by Hollywood, seems fantastically realistic in all its details.  If you want to know how Mexican mobsters live and what their manors are like, this is the show for you.  All the locations and set decoration is pitch-perfect -- the show has a particularly keen eye for the hillbilly squalor of the American south and the trailers and farmhouses in hilss and hollers are wonderfully realized.  But the show, which I greatly admire, has, in effect "jumped the shark" to use a term from TV sit-coms and it has become increasingly difficult to maintain one's suspension of disbelief with respect to the twists and turns in the exceedingly complex plot. (I will say, however, that in contrast with the often incoherent Succession, another excellent cable TV show, everything in Ozark is clearly presented -- the viewer always knows who is killing or threatening whom and why.)  This is part of the fun of the show:  Marty Byrde gets trapped in ever-increasing peril, but always figures out a way to wheedle himself and his family out of trouble -- it some cases, he's beaten to a pulp and lying half-dead on the floor with a 45 aimed at his head, trigger cocked, but the audience understands the contract that Ozark has made with its viewers:  Marty has to survive and he will always figure out some way to avert doom at the very last instant.  Unlike the violent thugs that surround him, Marty is mild-mannered, doesn't swear, eschews all violence, and reasons his way out of scrapes.  It's a wee bit tedious, but this is the way the show is constructed -- everyone else solves problems by murder and mayhem; the rather smarmy Marty who has the morals of a crooked used car dealer, always talks his way out of trouble.  The show is notable for the spectacular performances of its three female principals:  Laura Linney is profoundly disturbing as the steely Wendy Byrde -- she is Marty's equal in cunning and far more explosively prone to violence:  she has her own brother murdered with later dire consequences for her family.  Wendy Byrde makes Lady Macbeth look like Martha Stewart.  Even more terrifying is Darlene Schnell, a ferocious hillbilly poppy farmer's wife -- at least, until she murders her husband.  Darlene goes about with a shotgun and periodically blasts people off-screen, demanding that her teenage boyfriend (she's about 60) bury the corpses in one of her many pastures.  At the center of the show is twenty-something Ruth Langmore (the very pale and rabbit-faced Julia Garner), who embodies the purest form of American White Trash -- but she's fantastically clever and the show delights in implying that somewhere under her hardened carapace there's a heart of gold.  Wendy's murder of her own brother has also deprived Ruth of her boyfriend -- Ruth now totes his ashes about in a cookie jar shaped like an impassive, sinister goat --and, of course, she is on a collision course with Wendy.  Marty tries to umpire all of these conflicts albeit with increasingly unsuccessful results.  

The problem with the show is that the conflicts that it sets up are overly complicated and, of course, given the program's ultra-violent premises all too readily soluble.  Instead of scheming and conniving to wiggle out of trouble, one wonders why Marty doesn't just hire one of his army of henchmen to resolve the issue by a bullet to the brain.  And this is doubly true of the difficulties with Marty's perpetually fractious and threatening Mexican bosses -- why doesn't he just lure them to somewhere on the Lake of the Ozarks and have the lot of them either murdered or captured by his allies in the corrupt FBI?  And some of the plot details, although amusing are a little too much for anyone willing to think for a moment about the narrative.  Marty's fourteen-year old son is involved in money-laundering for Darlene Snell -- the acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree.  Is it plausible that a 14 year old can arrange for 16 off-shore shell companies and have receipts deposited with them according to a completely random wire-transfer algorithm? Wendy schemes to put her son in jail to "save him".  Wouldn't the son, Jonah, simply rat out everyone in the family, including Wendy?  Is this believable?  And if the mechanism for money laundering is wholly computerized why did the hero spend the first two seasons hiding money in walls and, indeed, in the tomb of a deceased Mafia mobster who was once allied with Wendy and Marty (and murdered for his loyalty)?  The difficulty with shows of this sort is also a systemic problem that afflicts TV sit coms and, for better or worse, even a high-budget series like Ozark has its roots in The Mary Tyler Moore Show or I love Lucy.  A series works on  the basis of strong and appealing characters who are involved in a situation that is sufficiently interesting to involve the audience, while sufficiently flexible to allow for profuse variations on the same general theme.  The reason we watch a Sit-com is because we like the characters and are intrigued by the situation -- if the situation varies too much or becomes a caricature of its original premise, we say that the show has "jumped the shark".  This term, referring to notorious episode in the long-lasting TV sitcom Happy Days, suggests that a program's writers have become desperate for new variations on the program's basic themes -- therefore, some sort of extreme and, highly implausible, event is scripted in the hope that this innovation in the plot will attract fresh interest to the show.  (Henry Winkler as the Fonz is water-skiing and jumps over a shark in Happy Days Season 5, Episode 91 -- that is after about 45 hours of programming, the writers who had run out of ideas had to come up with something outrageous to keep the show going.)  The problem with all television series can be readily stated:  the show has to constantly change while fundamentally remaining the same.  If the program deviates too far from the formula that makes it successful, the audience will tune-out.  But if the show simply repeats itself, cloning one episode from another, tedium will result and again the audience will watch something else.  Marty and Wendy Byrde must be threatened with murder and torture in every episode; but they must wiggle out of every tight spot and live to launder money another day.  Inevitably, the screenwriters are confronted with the difficulty of maintaining the same premise (which was never particularly plausible) while varying the individual shows sufficiently to keep the viewer engaged.  This has become an increasingly tall order for Ozark and I suspect that this fourth series will be the last, although. if the show retains popularity, which it will I think, perhaps, more episodes will be purchased. Several times in the Fourth Season, Marty Byrde is trapped in a bad situation and it looks dire for him -- but he calls a side-bar conference to talk his way out of this newest emergency.  I almost imagine that he is asking for a conclave with the writers to work out with them what new direction the show will take -- it's as if he's saying to the camera and other characters, "let's take a little break here to discuss plot points with our writers."