California Split (and the Great Gambler, NogoA_'lpi) -- film group note

“We’ll open with lowball rather than high...”

“Oh, so you mean ‘California split’?”

“That’s high-low poker,”

Dialogue between two gamblers overheard by Robert Altman during production of Slide, later re-named California Split.  

In the 1970's, Robert Altman was America’s essential film-maker.  Critically praised, he exemplified American neo-realism.  With one exception, M.A.S.H., his movies weren’t particularly successful at the box-office.  But Altman had credibility as an artist and his gangly, loosely structured films seemed wired into the Zeitgeist.  His moment in the sun passed quickly enough and, for the last decades in his career, Altman was culturally irrelevant  Like D.W. Griffith in the late twenties, people seemed sometimes surprised that he was still alive and, in fact, making movies.  To use Kevin Brownlow’s evocative phrase, the “parade had gone by” and Altman was marooned in a corner of the industry that he had once dominated.  Steven Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing blockbusters paved the way for a Hollywood in which Altman, always an outsider by inclination, became increasingly marginal,  

Altman’s movies, notwithstanding some goofy marijuana-infused episodes, were a mirror to ordinary life.  But people don’t go to the movies to see themselves reflected on the big screen.  The popular art of movie-making is escapist and Altman’s pictures always impel the viewer to consider the American scene as a social problem, as a specimen of certain forms of corruption, as an enterprise that is self-contradictory and self-defeating.  In his last film, the wonderful Prairie Home Companion Show, shot largely in St. Paul, Altman assembles an all-star cast strangely centered around the obtuse fake humility, unassuming demeanor, and, even, inconsequentiality of Minnesota’s own Garrison Keillor.  The characters revolve around a kind of non-entity and this is reflected by the pervasive sense of loss and, even, mourning that the film embodies – the movie is about death and has as its subject the demise of the long-running radio show that Keillor hosts.  In a real sense, the picture prefigures Garrison Keillor’s own erasure, having outstayed his welcome, a decade or so later.  The movie is brilliant, exquisitely shot and acted, but, it is, in the end, slightly disheartening – it stinks, as King Lear said, of mortality.  The problems that Altman identifies in his films are integral to American culture and not amenable to any ready resolution.

Altman was raised in Kansas City and spent his apprenticeship far from Hollywood, making industrial movies.  He’s a son of the Middle Border, a Midwesterner, and was never particularly comfortable navigating Hollywood.  (In some ways, he resembles George Romero, the horror director who invented the modern zombie film with Night of the Living Dead – although Romero worked in Hollywood and, later in his career had substantial budgets, he was most comfortable shooting his movies in his hometown of Pittsburgh – his best movie 1978's The Dawn of the Dead was produced largely in a shopping mall in Pittsburgh’s suburb, Monroeville.) Altman made a lot of movies and most of them flopped at the box-office.  He was always on the verge of being ousted from the film industry but reliably came back from the brink time and time again.

Between 1949 and 1957, he worked for the Calvin Company in Kansas City making industrial and promotional films.  Almost all of this work has been lost.  (One of his Calvin Company pictures called Modern Football was discovered a few years ago and, supposedly, has a complicated soundtrack with overlapping dialogue of the kind that was Altman’s trademark during the period of his critical eminence.)  In 1957, Altman shot a low-budget ($60,000) exploitation film called The Delinquents; it made no money and seems to be lost.  For the next decade, the director worked in television and reliably produced well-crafted product for the Tube.  MASH, Altman’s breakthrough picture, was released in 1970; this was the same year, Altman made another well-received picture, the surrealist Brewster McCloud, his first movie featuring the ethereal Shelley Duvall. (She worked with him on seven pictures.) On the strength of box office returns from MASH made the great (and greatly misunderstood) Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a film in which the movie’s focus slowly tightens and becomes more clear (in a literal sense) as the movie progresses toward its High Noon-style climax.  Audiences didn’t like the movie’s camera style and its intentionally overlapping and half-inaudible dialogue – but the film featured Julie Christie and Warren Beatty in superb performances and, for a time, Altman, notwithstanding his reputation as being difficult and not profitable, had free rein to make movies without much studio interference.  (It was around this time that Altman slugged a Hollywood producer at a pool party because the man had written a memo threatening to cut one of his films by six minutes.)  Altman’s career tanked for the first time with The Long Goodbye, an idiosyncratic adaptation of a Raymond Chandler crime novel, that the studio marketed as a thriller – languid and rambling: Eliot Gould as Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe) spends much of the movie muttering to himself, bemused and obviously stoned, but it’s a great movie.  The Long Goodbye disappointed audiences who had paid to see a crime thriller not a satire about LA and lost money to the extent that it looked like Altman was washed-up in Hollywood. (It was during the period immediately after The Long Goodbye that Altman made the equally unconventional California Split, also a money-loser.)  But, in 1975, the director came back with Nashville, a complicated, lengthy, and ambitious film about country-western music, and, although the picture didn’t earn much, it was a critical success.  Nashville paved the way for a string of pictures that lost money, some of which were poorly reviewed – the director’s improvisatory style was out of fashion and, when he applied his digressive and diffuse approach to a would-be blockbuster Popeye (1980 with Robin Williams), the catastrophe was so extreme that, again, Altman seemed to be on the verge of some sort of exile from the industry.  For a time, Altman directed Broadway shows, including Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean with Cher, designed operas (The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky), directed some off-Broadway work by Sam Shepherd, and, then, resumed directing, a series of undistinguished pictures that were scarcely marketed until The Player was released in 1992.  The Player, a mild satire on Hollywood and the film industry, was elaborately staged and, again, featured an all-star cast.  When he wanted to play the game by Hollywood rules, Altman could be as effective as most LA regulars and The Player was tightly shot and carefully scripted – the opening Steadi-cam scene is a riff on the famous tracking and crane shot that begins Welles’ Touch of Evil.  A critical success that earned a little money, Altman then went on to make his most ambitious picture Short Cuts (1993), a movie that adapts several short stories by Raymond Carver, again showing to good effect an impressive stable of movie stars including Julianne Moore.  (Gore Vidal remarked that Short Cuts was “the great American movie”, equivalent he thought to the fabled “great American novel” which, of course, Vidal was convinced that he had written.)

Altman’s next movies remained outside of the mainstream and were viewed as relics of a dope-influenced counter-culture that had ceased to exist.  But, just when people had written him off for good, Altman surged back with the completely atypical Gosford Park, a period murder mystery set in a Downton Abbey milieu.  Gosford Park was paradoxically considered Altman’s return to form, largely because he abandoned his trademark stylistic quirks and made nice with Hollywood conventions – you can actually hear the dialogue and understand it and the movie is sumptuously shot with a conventional plot with beginning, middle, and end.  (I think the movie is unrelievedly tedious.)  Altman’s last movie, another critical and box office failure, was A Prairie Home Companion (2006).  Altman was, then, over 80 and not in good health.  Paul Thomas Anderson, an up-and-coming director, was hired to shadow Altman and be prepared to step in to finish the movie if the old man faltered.  Altman didn’t falter and, I think, A Prairie Home Companion, although limited in scope is an emotionally moving and important film, a brooding meditation on loss and mortality.  Paul Thomas Anderson’s affection for Altman is visible in some of the scenes in his films made after A Prairie Home Companion, notably There will be Blood dedicated to the older director.  

Altman died in November 2006 shortly after completing A Praire Home Companion.

Financing

California Split was based on a script written by Joseph Walsh with Steven Spielberg.  (The film was originally entitled Slide.)  The script, of course, was merely a framework on which Altman and his actors improvised the film.  One of the film’s producers, David Begelman, cast a long and disreputable shadow over the picture.  Begelman was a talent agent who ventured into producing films in the early 70's.  Begelman raised half the money for California Split and, therefore, had a 50% ownership interest in the picture.  Begelman was working with Spielberg to produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an expensive movie that promised big box office receipts.  To raise cash for the Spielberg picture, Begelman discounted his half-interest in a sale to the Persky-Bright tax shelter enterprise.  Persky-Bright was the sort of enterprise celebrated by Mel Brooks in The Producers – the more money the movie lost, the better for its tax-shelter investors.  California Split played in limited runs in LA and New York City to considerable acclaim and it was predicted that the movie would make money.  (Ultimately, it grossed 4.5 million dollars, considerably less than its cost of production.)  The movie opened nationwide to promising receipts but after only one week in the theaters, the movie was yanked to make way for the Jack Nicholson vehicle The Last Detail, a bona fide box office success.  As a result, California Split slipped into oblivion and is one of Robert Altman’s least-shown films.  Altman himself was pleased with the movie – he said that he could have made the movie in a way that would generated more income, but didn’t think he could have improved on his direction of the film.  

David Begelman was a sketchy character.  Begelman was indicted for embezzling when a 1099 tax notice provided to the actor Cliff Robertson showed that he had been paid income that he had never actually received.  Robertson, unhappy to be assessed income tax on money that he never saw, complained to the IRS.  Begelman was a powerful figure in Hollywood at that time and was lionized by the industry – when the feds dropped their charges against Begelman, the producer received standing ovations in several well-known Hollywood restaurants frequented by movers and shakers in the business.  Robertson was blacklisted and didn’t work for several years.  The situation was so unfair that it caused Tallulah Bankhead, the gossip columnist, to quip: “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this business?”  Later, Begelman acquired semi-nude pictures of a drunken Judy Garland and used them to extort money out of the movie star.  (This was particularly egregious because earlier he had managed Judy Garland and, apparently, embezzled several hundred thousand dollars from her).  Late in his life, Begelman ran a sort of Ponzi scheme involving a bank account with Credit Lyonnais, a catastrophe for movies that he produced using that money – the French bank claimed ownership in several of those pictures and they were tied-up in litigation.  Begelman committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in a suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1995.

Bad Luck

Bad luck dogged at least two of the players in California Split.  Barbara Ruick, a fifties glamor-girl, who plays the tough and perceptive bartender supervising the Reno poker game, died suddenly in her hotel room while the film was being shot.  She perished from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm on March 3, 1974.  (Ruick was married to the composer John Williams who was, at the time of her death, devising the famous score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.)

Ann Prentiss, the elder and more cynical call-girl in the film, was born Ann Ragusa in San Antonio.  Her elder sister is the movie actress Paula Prentiss (who was married to the actor-director Richard Benjamin).  In 1996, Ann Prentiss was convicted of an assault committed on her elderly Sicilian father.  While serving time for the assault, Ann Prentiss hired a hit man to kill her father, a brother, and her brother-in-law Richard Benjamin.  (The story sounds intriguing enough to be worthy of a film in its own right, but there are very few details publicly available.)  The hit man was an informant and Prentiss was sentenced to 19 years in jail.  She died in prison in Texas in 2010 at the age of 71.  

Technical Notes

At the height of his critical acclaim, actors and well-known film technicians, were enthusiastic about working with Robert Altman.  (Altman considered Robert DeNiro for the role played by Elliot Gould).  Haskell Wexler, the great American cameraman, offered to shoot California Split.  Altman hired Paul Lohmann, a relative neophyte – it was only his second feature-film.  Altman said that Wexler was too skilled and that he would shoot the movie in a way that would cause it to be “too pretty” – Altman was interested in conveying the low-rent aspect of most casino gambling.  

The movie is shot in wide-screen cinemascope (2:35:1) and is regarded as one of the finest examples of the use of this film ratio.  (Lohmann also shot Nashville for Altman in 1975).  Altman pioneered the use of 8-track sound, previously employed only on Cinerama productions.  This technology allowed Altman to record 8 conversations or layers of sound simultaneously and results in the movie’s celebrated overlapping dialogue and sound design.  

As was typical with films shot in the seventies, moviemakers played fast and loose with sound cues and compensation for music rights.  As a result, California Split was tied-up in litigation for many years before rights to all music on the soundtrack could be acquired.  This has also led to the film being only rarely shown.  The picture wasn’t available on DVD until 2004 and, then, was released in a pan-and-scan format that was widely derided – some of the film also had to be cut because of the ongoing dispute over the music.  Amazon paid to restore the film in 2020 and it is now featured on that streaming service.

Elliot Gould  

Once regarded as America’s most promising young actor, Elliot Gould (born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn as Elliot Goldstein) ended his career on TV.  He spent ten years guest-starring as Jack Geller in the TV show Friends.  Most recently, he has been seen in the series Ray Donovan on Showtime (Seasons 1 through 3).  He is now 83.

Gould began acting on Broadway in the late fifties and, then, went to Hollywood where he worked, most notably, with Robert Altman on MASH (he was Trapper John), The Long Goodbye, and California Split. (He first became well-known for his role in Paul Mazursky’s sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969 – he was nominated for an Oscar for this part.)  He was in a number of other successful films and has appeared in all of the reboots of the Oceans Eleven series of movies.  Gould’s fame reached across the ocean.  He was featured in Ingmar Bergman’s movie The Touch, the famous Swedish director’s English-language debut in 1971.  Gould’s fame was such that he was on the cover of Time magazine in 1970.  He was married to Barbra Streisand between 1963 and 1971.  

Gould has been in many noteworthy movies including Alan Arkin’s 1971 version of Jule Feiffer’s play Little Murders and was a supporting actor in Steven Soderburgh’s Contagion (2011).  He hosted Saturday Night Live six times in the late seventies.  He is also well-known for his prehensile “trick” penis featured in the one-armed piccolo player skit in California Split.    

Gambling

The raw, bleeding edge where human endeavor and intent rubs up against Fortuna is luck.  Gambling is play with luck.  Every wager is an encounter with luck, a quality on which everything depends.  It’s probable that life on this planet exists as a result of innumerable lucky coincidences.  Evolution is dependent upon luck or chance operating across eons.  Battles have been lost and kingdoms have fallen due to bad luck.  A hero is one who converts chance into destiny or fate.  For these reasons, the theme of the lucky (and the unlucky) is integral to much art.  California Split is a meditation on luck – at the film’s climax, described by Steven Spielberg as a 32 minute orgasm, games of chance progress from those in which some skill is involved (the epic poker game) to pure play with random fortuity: rolling dice and the roulette wheel.  A man who is lucky is the darling of the gods.  But this happy state can be instantly and irrevocably withdrawn.  Furthermore, the man who has benefitted from good luck harbors a dismal sense of his own unworthiness – he has prevailed... but by neither industry nor art of his own.  The melancholy that always accompanies great good luck is convincingly portrayed in the film.  

The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, gambled incessantly between 1863 and 1871.  He played at the glittering casinos in central Europe, particularly Baden-Baden.  Dostoevsky recorded in his diary that he had discovered a method that would make him always successful at games of chance.  The method involved never becoming emotionally involved in gaming and, always, assessing every risk by logic and mathematical calculation.  If the gambler persevered in this method, he was sure to win.  Two days later, Dostoevsky recorded that he had become swept away with passion while gambling in the casino.  He lost everything and had to pawn his watch in order to buy a ticket to return to Russia.  Deeply in debt, Dostoevsky wrote the short novel The Gambler in order to pay off gambling obligations and finance his next disastrous foray into the casinos.  Of course, Dostoevsky’s system is exact, but, also, impossible.  One gambles for the thrill of wagering everything on the unknown, the turn of a card or the roll of a dice.  But this thrill, the motivation for gambling in the first place, is inimical to the exercise of cold rationality and calculation.  Therefore, Dostoevsky’s method must always fail – if one gambles for pleasure, the thrill of the game will necessarily cloud one’s judgement. (Paul Schrader’s recent movie The Card Counter explores the dynamic of “counting cards”, that is applying pure statistical rigor to games of chance – again, an endeavor shown as doomed to failure.) In Dostoevsky’s novel, Alexei Ivanovich, having lost everything vows that he will never gamble again – but, only after one last visit to the casino.  Altman staffed his gambling scenes with actual gambling addicts, people treating their compulsion to gamble through Syanon.  This seems a ruthless ploy – it can hardly have been therapeutic for gambling addicts to pretend to play cards in Altman’s film.  

In 1498, Albrecht Duerer drew the goddess Fortuna standing like a column in a stone niche.  The naked figure wears a sort of do-rag wrapped over her hair and has her hands behind her back, thrusting out her belly and pudenda.  She casts an insolent glare at the viewer, very much aware that she is being gazed upon.  (Duerer has rejected conventional iconography in which Fortuna is shown as blindfolded; here she invites our gaze and encounter with her.)  The naked woman stands on a globe representing Fortuna’s authority over all the world – after all, it was only six years earlier that Christopher Columbus had wagered everything on a voyage to the West and discovered the Indies.  Fortuna may be pregnant – there is chance involved in conception as well; one in a million sperm makes its way blindly to the egg.  Between 1501 - 1502, Duerer engraved his “Nemesis: the Great Fortuna”.  In this print, the Fortuna still stands atop the globe, but she has become less lissome and more boldly muscular.  The naked goddess presents herself to the eye in profile, a diagram of fortune as revenging fate.  Beneath the basketball-sized globe beneath her feet, the clouds have parted to reveal a landscape with river and villages and a church.  Nemesis carries a diadem and bridle, reward for the lucky and a harness to restrain the headstrong, and she seems to be pregnant.  She has the profile of a Roman emperor of the decadence – Caligula or Nero or Tiberius.  A set of plumed wings extrudes from her shoulders so she can take flight and harry us everywhere that we go.  (Some iconographers interpret the sphere under her feet as not the world, but Uncertainty, a perch on which it is difficult to balance.)  Duerer’s embodiment of Melancholy is also winged and so this giantess reflects the depression and sorrow that attends upon the Great Gambler.  Fortune rules the world as Nemesis – that is, chance deified as fate and destiny.  She is implacable and inescapable.

In Icelandic, luck is heppinn.  Leif, Erik’s son, was lucky (had inn heppn), when he happened upon Vinland.  The old word heppinn morphed into “hap”, a word that is preserved in modern English as “happenstance” – this means “luck” or the “luck of the draw.”  (“Happy” is etymologically related to having “good hap” or having good fortune.)  The origins of “luck” are obscure but the word seems to have originated as a gambling term of art – meaning something like a “draw” of cards or shuffling the deck.  In Northern European thought, luck is everything.  A man or woman survives only so long as luck holds out.  Bad luck means death.  

The Great Gambler

Fate turns on fortune or luck.  The Navajo Apache knew this when they told the story of the Great Gambler.  If you are superstitious don’t read any farther in this note.  The story is forbidden and to misappropriate this tale is to risk the sudden and awful misfortune.  If you wish to wager, proceed.

An anthropology student working among the Navajo in northwestern New Mexico learned that there was a fatal tale.  Not everyone is allowed to know this story.  Generation after generation, It is retold only to a select few and, then, under conditions of great secrecy.  The story was told so that it could be passed down to posterity as a warning.

In the late 1930's, a woman named Gretchen Chapin did field work for her anthropology degree among the Navajo.  She heard rumors of the story of the Great Gambler but no one was willing to tell her the tale.  Five elders said they knew the story but only one of them would reveal it to her and, then, with certain omissions intended to safeguard some aspects of the narrative that are invoked in secret Navajo ritual.  Ms. Chapin’s informant was a 48 year-old man from the Sour Water Clan.  At first, he digressed into a story about the sun-petroglyph on Fajada Butte overlooking the ruins in Chaco Canyon.  Ms. Chapin told him she already knew that story and that he should not try to substitute it for the tale of Gambling God.  At last, after she paid him some money, the man told her this story:

The Great Gambler whose name is Nohoilpi came down from the sky– the actual spelling of his name has many more vowels, but I will not provide them out of respect for this god.  The Gambler descended from heaven bearing the tools of his trade and a basket of turquoise to use for wagering.  Nohoilpi (“He wins men”) lived in a pueblo by himself on the plateau overlooking Chaco Canyon.  This was before the Great Houses were built in that place, shortly after the world was first made.  The Great Gambler taught the people four games: the three-stick game (which is owned by women), the hoop and two-long-stick game, the ball game, and the seven cards in a basket game.  (The latter three games are owned by men and forbidden to women.)  At that time, the people farmed near the stream beds in the canyon and lived in pit-houses.  The Gambler first played with the Rabbit People and defeated all of them.  Then, he played with the Animal People and defeated them in games of chance.  Then, the women played with the Gambler and lost to him.  The women wagered everything, even the food that they had stored.  And it was all lost.  Next, the Holy People played with the Gambler wagering different colored turquoise and other things that can not be mentioned.  They also lost.

The Animal People wanted to win back their wealth but they had nothing with which to wager.  So they gambled with themselves as stakes and lost.  Soon, the Great Gambler owned all of them.  The Gambler’s dice and cards were alive and crept across the stones like tarantulas and scorpions.  The sticks used in the three-stick game were bolts of lightning.  The Rabbit People and Animal People then wagered their children with the Gambler and, also, lost.  

The Gambler sponsored foot-races and the people raced with him and were defeated so that they owed him immense sums that they could never repay.  Everyone was enslaved by the Gambler and he made them build the Great Houses that now lie in ruins in Chaco Canyon.  The people worked day and night setting stone upon stone to build these structures.  The Gambler fed them on seeds that the women ground between rocks. 

Desperate to win back their world, the Holy People agreed to play a game with the Gambler involving a covered hoop with a small ball.  The Gambler bet the Holy People that they couldn’t pitch the ball through the hoop.  Everyone sniffed a certain kind of weed (it is forbidden to identify that plant) and the Holy People went crazy.  But they had enlisted Shrew and put the tiny creature in the ball and, when it was pitched at the hoop, Shrew guided it and the ball went through the opening.  This was repeated four times and, by that wager, the Holy People won back the Rabbit and Animal People from the Gambler.  Sensing that he had been tricked, the Gambler uttered some words in the language spoken by the White people.  Then, he went back to Pueblo Alto on the canyon rim, spoke to the Gods, and ascended like a shot into the sky.  It is said that he went far away and is the father of the White People.

As the Gambler soared into the sky, an old woman with a little boy appeared in the canyon.  She stayed four days with the people living in their villages near the Great Houses that they were forbidden to enter.  The people tired of feeding her – the crops had failed in a drought – and drove her out of their villages.  With the skinny boy, she climbed up above the largest of the Great Houses, the place now called Pueblo Bonito.  To revenge herself on the miserly people, she took an arrowhead and drove it into the edge of the cliff four times so that a great wedge of rock broke free and threatened to tumble down to destroy the Pueblo.  Before the rock could fall, the Animal People carried sand from the river bottoms to the cracks in the rock and cemented them so that the huge boulder would not fall.  (It is called Threatening Rock.)  The people brought four baskets of turquoise covered with corn meal to the old woman and she said that she would stop the rock from falling if they searched the cisterns and caches in Pueblo Bonito and brought her all the turquoise and other gems hidden there.  The people accomplished this task, although entering the ruins is taboo, and, it is for this reason, that those digging in the ruins of Pueblo Bonito no longer can find any turquoise or, even, white shell there.  Satisfied, the old woman and boy went away and were seen no more.

This story can not be told in the Summer on pain of lightning strike, snake-bite, or bear-attack.  Once, someone violated this rule and repeated this story in the summertime.  Then, Threatening Rock broke free and toppled onto Pueblo Bonito and crushed many of its walls and towers.    

June 26, 2022

'Round Midnight (film group essay)

 

“I think cinema is the art form closest to music...”

Terence Davies

1.

Round Midnight, Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 movie, is about a jazz musician who plays in the genre known as bebop.  Critics oriented toward traditional jazz often deplore bebop as formless, an effusion of musical emotion not structured according to obvious harmonic and rhythmic structures.  Louis Armstrong, the most influential traditional jazz player, didn’t like the new form and accused its players of hitting “weird notes” and making incomprehensible “Chinese music.”  You can’t dance to most bebop – the music is played too fast and is too unpredictable.  Therefore, audiences acclimated to Swing and Dixieland rejected the form as illegibly avant-garde. In some respects, the cultural correlate to bebop is abstract expressionism, gestural field paintings of artists like Jackson Pollock, that is art ordered according to a different paradigm than conventional figurative representation.

It’s no surprise that Tavernier’s film about a bebop jazz man has been accused of being formless, non-narrative, essentially a concert movie in which the music isn’t particularly good.  (Gary Giddins says Dexter Gordon’s playing is uninspired and he has “intonation” problems – Giddins would know: he wrote the Weather Bird jazz column for the Village Voice for thirty years.)  More charitably, the film is described as a “mood piece”.  As with the bebop music that inspires the picture, the movie is about the expression of a certain sensibility, a manner of being, the “cool” demeanor of the musician contrasted with the raw emotions expressed in his music.  

2.

No one knows for sure why the sort of music played in ‘Round Midnight is called “bebop.”  The etymology of the word is unclear, although some have suggested that the term derives from “scat singing”, vocal improvisation in which the musician sings nonsense syllables, often at great velocity, on the musical tones that he or she produces.  Bebop seems to have been invented by Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, both tenor sax players, between 1939 and the mid-forties.  Parker’s 1942 performance of “Cherokee” is said to be seminal, a founding document as it were in the genre.  In early accounts of the music, it is called “rebop” or “bebop” – the “rebop” term may be derived from Latin conductors shouting out Arriba, arriba! at their bands. 

Dexter Gordon (1923 - 1990) who plays the protagonist Dale Taylor in the picture was a prominent bebop artist who released a series of important albums beginning around 1943.   Gordon, who came from a prominent African-American family in Los Angeles (his father was a medical doctor), was educated at Howard University and played tenors sax in various big bands.  By 1943, he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie and, later, released numerous records on the Savoy label in the late forties.  He moved from the West Coast to New York where he lived from 1942 to 1962 when he moved to Europe.  Between 1962 and 1976, Gordon lived in Europe mostly in Copenhagen and Paris.  He returned to the United States in 1976 where he commuted between San Francisco and New York.  At that time, he was signed to Columbia records and played a famous extended gig at the Village Vanguard in New York City.  

Gordon’s health declined in the 80's and he retired from performing professionally.  A chain-smoker, he suffered from emphysema and later larynx cancer.  When recruited for ‘Round Midnight, he was living during the cold months in Cuernavaca, Mexico and hadn’t played for money for over two years.  He was rusty and said that he didn’t have the “chops’ for which he was famous at the time the movie was shot.  However, he practiced assiduously for the role and his recording of the eponymous (title) tune at the Davout studio is regarded as one of the highlights of his career.  (We see the Thelonius Monk song performed in the movie.)  Gordon told Tavernier that he would gradually get better as the movie progressed, that is, as he improved due to practice and jazz critics believe this is indisputably shown in the film.  

Gordon was sometimes called “long tall Dexter”.  He was a commanding presence, six foot six inches tall.  Throughout his career, he played small parts in movies occasionally and had a working knowledge of the film industry – he was, after all, from LA.  (He played a jazz musician waiting for his heroin fix in Shirley Clarke’s 1961 quasi-documentary The Connection.)   Gordon was very well-educated and had an eclectic interest in music – he is said to have incorporated motifs from Wagner operas into some of his songs and the affection he shows for Ravel and Debussy in the film was an aspect of Gordon’s own esthetic.  People recall him as suave, affable, and an amusing raconteur.  The figure that he plays in the movie, the melancholy Dale Taylor is nothing like Dexter Gordon.  There’s an element of racism to some interpretations of the film that regard Gordon as simply playing himself.  In fact, he is acting throughout the movie and many of the mannerisms that he imparts to his character were Gordon’s own inventions. An argument can be made that Gordon is actually playing a variant on the mumbling rebellious outsiders that were a specialty of Marlon Brando.  Brando seems to have recognized this when he sent a famous letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences praising Gordon’s performance when the actor was nominated for an Oscar in 1986.  Brando said Gordon’s acting was the best performance in “the last fifteen years” in a movie.  

3.

It’s worth comparing Tavernier’s great film A Sunday in the Country (1984) with ‘Round Midnight made about two years later.  In A Sunday in the Country, Tavernier focuses on an artist in the twilight of his career, a painter who rejected the innovations of his countrymen that led to Impressionism.  The pathos in A Sunday in the Country relates to the protagonist’s sense that the mainstreams of art have marooned him, left him behind.  ‘Round Midnight is set in 1959, at the end of the bebop period – Dale Taylor’s kind of music, which was never widely popular, is obsolete; his way of playing is on the verge of being replaced by “free jazz”, various West Coast styles, and, of course, the kind of jazz-fusion rock-inspired music later pioneered by Miles Davis and, to some degree, Herbie Hancock (who appears in a prominent role in the film).  In fact, there were significant clashes, or, at least, disputes as to musical styles and taste, when the picture was shot.  Herbie Hancock wrote “Chan’s song”, the tune dedicated to Dale Taylor’s daughter in the movie.  Dexter Gordon didn’t think much of the song and was dismissive about it.  Furthermore, he refused to play the song with the phrasing that Hancock suggested.  This rankled Hancock although he was too gentlemanly and professional to disrupt the shooting of the film over this controversy.  Gary Giddins recalls, however, that a year after the movie was released he saw Hancock at a jazz festival.  Hancock insisted on sitting down at a piano and playing “Chan’s Song” for Giddins, noting that his version was the way the song was supposed to be played.  Both A Sunday in the Country and ‘Round Midnight are about artists who have been acclaimed as great and who are exhausted, in the decline of their careers, and who fear that they may have run out of inspiration.   

4.

Dexter Gordon told this story: when he was a kid, casting agents from Hollywood drove through the Black neighborhoods in LA recruiting children to play the part of African natives in Tarzan movies.  Gordon was often passed-over.  He was thought to be “too light” and not sufficiently Negroid to be plausible as the inhabitant of a Hollywood African village.  The gig was fun for the kids and it paid a dollar or so and Gordon was unhappy about not being asked to perform as an extra in the Tarzan movies.  He told his buddies that he would become an actor and win an Oscar – that would show them.  And, in fact, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1986.  He didn’t win but he got close.  (Paul Newman took home the Oscar for his part in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.)

5.

Some of the mannerisms that Gordon uses as Dale Taylor are derived from his observations of Lester Young and Bud Powell.  Lester Young used the appellation “lady” when addressing people – in the film, we hear Taylor use this form of address; for instance, he calls Ace “Lady Ace” in an early scene in the movie.  Lester Young held his saxophone horizontally across his arms before and after performing – we see this gesture in the movie.  Lester Young also had the habit of referring to himself in the third-person, something that Dexter Gordon would never have done.  The anecdote about being put in the brig while serving in the military is derived from something that happened to Lester Young in 1944 – he was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged in 1945.  At the end of the movie, there’s an odd shot showing an unmarked grave among tenement ruins.  This refers to the fact that Bud Powell, Gordon’s contemporary, who died in 1966, is said to be buried in an unmarked grave.

The film is replete with allusions to the tragedy that befell Bud Powell.  A pianist and composer of transcendent gifts, Powell was also mentally ill, possibly as a result of a brain injury that he sustained when a Philadelphia cop beat him senseless in January 1945.  Powell was a drunk and was frequently hospitalized for erratic behavior – he spent 11 months at Creedmore Hospital in 1949.  (Powell was said to be paranoid about racial persecution – but, as is said, you’re not paranoid if there are sinister forces actually out to get you.)  The spectral Herschel who is dying at the Hotel Alvin in the first scene probably stands in for Powell.  Like Edgar Alan Poe, Powell had no resistence to alcohol – one drink would put him into a catatonic state.  (This is depicted in the film.)

Powell emigrated from the United States in 1959 – this was after several heroin busts and problems with drinking that led to electro-convulsive therapy (“shock” treatment).  In Paris, he was befriended by Francis Paudras, a French jazz fan, who wrote a book about their relationship The Dance of the Infidels: the Life of Bud Powell.  (The book titled after one of Powell’s musical compositions was published in 1986 in France and Tavernier credits the biography as one of the sources for the film.)  It was France Paudras who encouraged Powell to leave his exploitative wife, “Buttercup” (Altevia Edwards) and move in with him.  Prior to that time, Powell was living with “Buttercup” and her son at the Louisiane hotel, the Paris equivalent to the Chelsea Hotel – Sartre’s girlfriend (Juliette Greco) lived there as did Henry Miller and most American jazz men working in Paris; Quentin Tarantino stayed there when he was working on Inglourious Basterds.  A mock-up of the hotel features prominently in the film.  

Bud Powell returned to New York in 1963, immediately succumbed to addiction and mental illness, and died at 41 in 1966.  Herbie Hancock said that Powell was a genius who applied the saxophone techniques of Charlie Parker to the piano – “he is the foundation of all modern jazz piano,” Hancock has declared.  One of Powell’s signature works is his recording of ‘Round Midnight,” a composition written by Thelonious Monk.  “‘Round Midnight” is featured in the film due to its connection with Bud Powell and based on the fact that the song was part of the Warner Brothers’ catalogue – the studio owned the song and didn’t have to pay for its rights.  

Contrary to the film’s suggestion, thousands of people attended Bud Powell’s funeral in August 1966 at the Harlem church of St. Charles Borromeo at 142nd Street.  You can see pictures on the internet of the funeral.  A “jazz mobile” followed the cortege and musicians played “Dance of the Infidels” and “ ‘Round Midnight”.  Although his grave seems to be unmarked, it’s not in the corner of a vacant lot in the ruins of the Bronx as shown by the film but at the Fairview Cemetery (a huge and historic African-American graveyard) near Germantown, Pennsylvania.  (The trope of the great musician, ignored by his contemporary and buried in a pauper’s grave, originates with legends about Mozart’s funeral – no more true than the myth about Bud Powell’s obsequies.)

6.

Francis Paudras has a cameo in the film.  He is one of the men shown seated at the bar in one of the scenes set at the Blue Note.  Paudras thought that Tavernier didn’t pay sufficient attention to Dance of the Infidels, his book about his relationship with Bud Powell.  Apparently, there were many clashes with him on the set and during the film’s production. 

7.

Dexter Gordon was in Cuernavaca with his wife when his agent suggested that he do the film with Tavernier.  Gordon was initially skeptical because the picture was produced by Irwin Winkler, the same man who had made the Rocky pictures with Sylvester Stallone.  

Gordon liked Tavernier and the friendship was mutual.  Tavernier was the sort of Frenchman with the endearing, if annoying, trait of thinking that American culture has to be defended from Americans.  Gordon told Tavernier that he hadn’t played for two years and didn’t know about his lip.  But he assured Tavernier: “I’ll get better by the end.”  

Gordon was a little miffed that he had die in the movie.  He said he wasn’t willing to die on-camera.  Tavernier who is a highly intelligent and tactful film-maker said his death would off-camera.

“Why can’t we have a happy ending?” Gordon asked.

“Dexter, we are making a movie,” Tavernier said.  “I am French.  You must die.”  Tavernier recalled that Gordon seemed “very, very old” – far older than his chronological age of 63.  Tavernier said that he seemed “ancient” to him.  

A couple days before his agents encouraged him to make the movie with Tavernier, Gordon reported a dream to his wife.  In his dream, Ben Webster came into his bedroom.  Ben Webster was a great sax player who had worked with Duke Ellington and spent the last years of his life in Copenhagen.  (Webster died in 1973.).  Webster taunted, Gordon: “Dexter, you can’t play any more.”  Gordon’s feelings were hurt and he told his dead friend: “Don’t worry, I’ll show you.”  

8.

African-American jazz musicians had an unsavory reputation for heroin addiction and drunkenness. Tavernier, who was prey to worries that his cast would be absent due to substance abuse, banned alcohol from the set.  This wasn’t a problem with his on-screen performers.  But the ban led to a major problem with Tavernier’s French crew – the French drink wine with their lunch and they thought it was outrageous that Tavernier didn’t allow this.

Near the end of his life, Gary Giddins and Pete Hamill were interviewing Dexter Gordon.  Gordon was courtly but seemed distracted.  Every twenty minutes he would mysteriously excuse himself, vanish for a couple minutes, and, then, return to the table where the men were eating lunch.

During one absence, Hamill wondered out loud if Gordon was “using drugs.”  Giddins followed Gordon during his next absence.  Gordon went outside into the alley, removed a small transistor radio from his breast pocket, and held the radio to his ear.  He was checking on the progress of a Yankees game.

9.

Tavernier begins the movie in a dark mood and shoots on an elaborate, if claustrophobic, set showing the Blue Note, the Hotel Louisiane, and the confined city streets around the Paris saloon.  The set is brilliantly designed but dark.  The sky over the narrow city streets is obviously painted.  (The entire set was constructed in the studio inside and out.) Half of the film has been described with the oxymoron of “technicolor noir.”  Later, the film brightens and many shots are made outdoors on-location as Dale Taylor seems to recover from his alcoholism.  This part of the movie culminates in the sequence involving the recording of “‘Round Midnight” at Davout.  Taylor, then, returns to New York City where the tone darkens again and the movie becomes more confined to the sinister Hotel Alvin – the place was at 52nd Street near the East River.  Tavernier has said that he doesn’t like plots that develop in acts, that is, in a conventional way; a film should be a fluid thing in which all elements work together to define a series of moods – in other words, films should be more like music in that Tavernier’s ambition is to depict a sequence of emotions that develop into one another.  

Tavernier had two requirements for the film.  First, the picture had to be authentic.  To this end, he consulted continually with the jazz musicians involved in the movie.  Many parts of the script were re-written at the request of the musicians to eliminate elements in the story that they deemed implausible or incongruous.  Second, Tavernier recorded all musical performances live and without interruption – in other words, he filmed the musicians as they were playing without edits to improve the performance.  Dexter Gordon is obviously no longer in his prime and has difficulty in the opening songs.  Tavernier regarded this as thematic – he didn’t want Dale Taylor to sound the same way at the end of the movie as he sounds in the first performances; the movie is supposed to document Taylor’s improvement.  One of the film’s themes is that playing this kind of music is demanding and emotionally difficult – Gordon makes mistakes and fears that he is no longer inspired.  

10.

Warner Brothers initially rejected the script for ‘Round Midnight.  None of the other studios in Hollywood were willing to take a chance on the movie’s production.  Warner Brothers, in its budget projections, predicted that the film would make no money at all in American distribution.  However, Clint Eastwood had read the script and urged studio executives with whom he was friendly to make the film.  Martin Scorsese also advocated on behalf of the movie.  And, so, with profound reservations, Warner Brothers advanced two-million dollars for the film.  This was a low-budget for the time.  Tavernier recalls that he was paid almost nothing.  Gordon’s record company, planning to make some money from a sound-track recording, paid Tavernier enough “under the table” so that he could survive during the year-and-a-half production.  

Tavernier initially wanted Sonny Rollins for the main role.  Rollins wasn’t interested and had no acting experience.  Tavernier recalled that he saw a short film featuring Dexter Gordon and, immediately, recognized that the musician had great “screen presence”.  So Gordon was cast for the part.

11.

Hollywood has a complex and shameful history of purging Black musicians from films about Jazz.  Segregation prevailed until the fifties and, generally, it was thought distasteful to show White musicians performing with Black artists.  (An exception was a genre of films in which White musicians actually teach Black jazz performers how to play.)  This pattern of excluding Black musicians from films about an Afro-American art form begins most decisively with 1927's The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first talking picture.  The Jazz Singer, an astonishing film on many levels, features a Jewish cantor’s son who is ostracized by his family for performing as a minstrel in Black face.  In 1930, The King of Jazz was released.  The titular “King of Jazz” turns out to be Paul Whiteman, a well-known Caucasian band director who freely appropriated (some might say “misappropriated”) African-American musical styles.  There are no Black artists in The King of Jazz, indeed, no Black people at all, except for one little girl who sits in a short few-second shot on Whiteman’s lap.  Hollywood continued this trend for more than three decades.  Young Man with a Horn (1950) stars Kirk Douglas. Jimmy Stewart plays trombone in The Glenn Miller Story (1954).   The Man with a Golden Arm (1955) about a heroin-addicted jazz drummer stars Frank Sinatra.  As late as 1988, Sting stars in Stormy Monday, a jazz film featuring a band comprised of White Polish musicians – the jazz club featured in the film is located in Belfast. Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is about an American musician played by Sean Penn obsessed with the music of Django Reinhardt. Tavernier’s ‘Round Midnight is the first jazz film to feature an African-American protagonist.  The picture was followed by Clint Eastwood’s Bird about Charley Parker released in 1988.  

12.

When a top Warner Brother’s exec saw the film, he asked if Dale Taylor was supposed to be homosexual.  “I can tell by the way he walks,” the Exec said, “and the fact he addresses everyone as ‘lady’.”

13.

Dexter Gordon said that his favorite actors were Richard Burton, James Mason, and George Sanders because they all spoke with intonations “like a tenor sax.”

14.

When the set for “The Blue Note” was being built, Herbie Hancock approached the set-designer Alexander Trauner with some trepidation.  Hancock was concerned that the set would not be acoustically sound.  When Hancock asked Trauner about the set design, Trauner (who spoke with a very heavy Hungarian accent) said: “Well, you know, I designed the sets for Rene Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris.  I made those sets specifically with sound in mind.  Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) was the first sound film ever made in France.”  

In fact, “The Blue Note” set was so acoustically superb that many of the musicians who played in that room have said it had the best sound of any place where they performed.  

For a time, there was a cottage industry in Paris showing American musicians the set representing “Birdland”.  The set was apparently so exact and beautiful that it duplicated the famous Manhattan night club perfectly, but had better sound. 

15.  

Tavernier said that he “allowed long pauses” in dialogue scenes “the same way that in the jazz the notes that people don’t play are as important as the notes that they play.”   Tavernier observed “the bizarre enigmatic way jazz musicians relate to one another – they make Pinter’s characters sound like over-explainers...”

16.  

The last word belongs to Dexter Gordon: “Why do most jazz stories dwell on the negative side of this life?  We are people who get to play music for a living.  What could be better?” 

No Time to Die

No Time to Die (2021) is a James Bond movie directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Daniel Craig.  Since Bond dies in this film, the picture may be the last in the series that began in 1961 with From Russia With Love and so has endured for sixty years,  (A final title ominously promises, however, that "James Bond will return.")  The movie is grandiose and mostly dull.  It runs for 163 minutes and has a needlessly complicated plot involving two sets of unrelated villains, spans the globe from Norway to Cuba, as well as Jamaica, London, Italy and, of course, the Faroe Islands (a location used whenever a remote craggy island-fortress is part of the mise-en-scene.)  Daniel Craig playing Bond overacts in a steely, stoic sort of way.  The film's innovation is that the sentimental and romantic James Bond seems the softest and most yielding character among the vicious criminals and apparatchiks who comprise the rest of the cast.  Bond is loving, forgiving, morose over the losses in his life, easily beguiled and tricked, and a good father to boot.  Everyone else is considerably harder and more nihilistically violent.  Of course, no one pays to see James Bond emote; his forte is enduring torture and inventing quips to taunt bad guys that he is about to kill.  He's also supposed to be a great lover and Don Juan, although there's no evidence of that aspect of his character in this picture -- the women are all the aggressors and Bond remains relatively chaste.  The movie is nonsense although it's not as egregiously improbable as many big-budget action pictures and it features five set-pieces of spectacularly conceived and concentrated violence.  The movie is about these operatic massacres and everything else is just filler.

Early in the film, Bond goes to visit a former lover's mausoleum in an excessively gorgeous Italian hill-town.  The grave has been booby-trapped.  (I can't recall if the bomb is set by Ernst Blofeld, the all-purpose villain who appears in no less than seven of the Bond pictures spanning the whole 60 year series -- he's so famous that he's been endlessly imitated and parodied, or the explosive planted, perhaps, by the principal bad guy in this film, Lutysifer Safir played by Rami Malek in a stupefied performance that suggests that he's been sedated with Quaaludes.)  After the explosion, Bond has to flee on motorcycle from a dozen or so pursuing motorcyclists and limousines full of men with machine guns.  At one point, a convenient metal cable allows him to escape a deadly trap on a bridge blocked on both sides by bad guys spraying bullets at him -- he leaps off the bridge holding the cable (which of course would have shredded his hands) and swings to the comparative safety of some equally convenient ledge or terrace below the ancient stone span.  The chase continues with the villains attacking Bond's bullet-proof car with a thousand rounds of AK-47 fire before the hero engages his own machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (and a smoke machine as well) to liquidate the attackers.  (For some reason, the thousand rounds fired at Bond's bullet-proof Aston Martin don't hit the rubber tires and so he can speed away unscathed despite the eight-minute fusillade.)  In the second set piece, ostensibly occurring in Cuba, Bond dressed in a tuxedo attends an orgy sponsored by SPECTRE, an international criminal cartel, and supervised by Blofeld's "bionic eye" -- the eye appears on a silver tray, spouting nonsense somehow (do eyes have mouths?), held over the black-tie orgy by several sinister butlers.  Blofeld, for inscrutable reasons, kills everyone in SPECTRE, the scoundrels all conveniently convened for the orgy, and an evil bio-engineer is kidnapped by the CIA.  (Of course, whenever the CIA appear, the audience knows that our spooks are also in cahoots with the bad guys.) There's another rooftop chase with lots of firepower on display, collapsing scaffolds, big explosions and the like.  It's hard to figure out who is killing whom because all the SPECTRE agents have been wiped-out by some sort of contagious nano-bot -- that is, some kind of artificial pestilence a bit like the COVID virus that the Chinese apparently manufactured in their lab in Wuhan and released on the unsuspecting world.  The virus is DNA-targeted, no collateral damage here, but unfortunately once you are contaminated, you are like Rappacini's daughter, poisonous forever to anyone you touch or love.  Later, there's a third big sequence involving the CIA agent and the irresponsible bio-engineer, a Russian, of course.  The ship goes to the bottom of the sea with James Bond and one of his best friends (who has been shot and fatally wounded).  Bond is a good swimmer and, of course, escapes, now aggrieved by his buddy's death and seeking revenge.  Later, Bond ends up in Norway with his girlfriend, who may be a double-agent, and his daughter, a  homely little urchin with a droopy face and startlingly blue eyes (just like her pa).  Bond and his little family get chased by about a hundred men in jeeps, motorcycles, and  helicopters.  He manages to kill almost all of the bad guys and lures the remainder into a forest that has become suddenly very, very misty.  In the woods, Bond finds another metal cable and hooks it around trees to make merry with bad guys on motorcycles -- there are lots of useful metal-stranded cables lying around in this movie.  Unfortunately while Bond is off murdering bad guys, the chief villain (the picturesquely named Luysifer Safir) snatches his girlfriend and daughter and spirits them off to an island fortress where the mad man is planning "to kill millions" with the nano-bot plague.  (Ultimately, it's less lethal than COVID which delayed the opening of this film and has also killed millions -- so the bad guy's contagion, in  fact, took place in reality and there was no James Bond to save us from its dire effects.)  Bond with a lady 007 -- he's been in retirement and she has replaced him and assumed his numbered "license to kill' --  infiltrates the villain's concrete and heavily fortified laboratory.  Bond and the Luytsifer confront one another and engage in "haranguing" of the sort that is featured in super-hero movies -- the two men lecture each other about fate, destiny, power and dominion.  Then, there's more slaughter.  This sequence is like one of the John Wick movies featuring tough-guy Keanu Reeves -- hundreds of armed bad guys ineffectually throw grenades and fire their machine guns while Bond, carrying a handgun, slaughters them by the dozens.  Ultimately, Bond realizes that he has to save the world and so he calls in an airstrike on himself and ends up dead.  His girlfriend and child survive with the tough as nails lady 007 -- they watch the island blowing up from a safe distance.  The point seems to be that Bond is now superfluous -- the world is full of horrible stuff far beyond the imagining of the relative sedate, if sadistic, Ian Fleming.  Women have taken over -- the female 007 is more fearsome than her predecessor and the lady agent in Cuba, who kills about a hundred bad guys while wearing a backless (and almost front-less) evening gown and high heels is a lot more brutish and effective as a murder-machine than old James Bond.  (In  once scene, he characterizes himself as "an old wreck.")  It's time for him to retire both literally and figuratively and so the shower of missiles in which he dies comes as a kind of relief.  

The movie glances at all the elements from previous movies that have pleased audiences for my entire life.  Bond has a vodka martini "shaken not stirred," there is the obligatory extended opening sequence with spectacular effects after the first few seconds in which we see Bond appear in a sort of spiral camera shutter and fire a shot right at the camera.  Bond jousts with M, played here by Ralph Fiennes and Ms, Moneypenny is still hanging around the M16 HQ.   An owly nerd contrives special weapons for Bond's use in the final attack on the villain's citadel (although it's not really clear how any of this stuff works).  Billie Eilish croons a sultry opening ballad over a surrealistic title-sequence featuring giant fragments of classical statuary strewn across a weird cartoon desert.  There are some playful homages to earlier Bond movies and the action set pieces are reasonably effective -- although I'm bothered by the bullet-proof tires, the over-use of convenient steel cables, and the fact that the mist that fills the Norwegian wood fades away immediately as soon as the last bad guy is eliminated so  that the director can provide us with some narrative information to set up the next scenes.  As I have noted, the final attack on the hyper-modern concrete laboratory with its mighty silos and prestressed cement walls channels similar ultra-violent battles in stairwells and corridors featuring Keanu Reeves as John Wick (scenes derived ultimately from John Woo's operatic gun fights in his early Hong Kong thrillers.)  Blofeld appears in this movie as a descendent of Hannibal Lecter, a mad man in a glass cage like a latter-day Eichmann spouting weird insinuations.  (Blofeld probably inspired Lecter and so the circle is closed in this film.) The four of the five set pieces all involve Bond escaping armies of thugs reminding us that Bond is really more the victim than the aggressor throughout most of the film.  The final half-hour battle in the biolab fortress makes no sense and involves such bizarre elements as men in red biohazard suits standing motionlessly in  an acid-bath swimming pool.  The pool is lit by stanchions of bright light and the henchmen look like people looking for a lost contact lens.  The movie is handsomely shot, although not as clearly as I would have liked -- it features all sorts of Spielberg-style lighting, halos and clouds of amber light against which figures are silhouetted, dark bluish voids, and elaborate if stark sets against which the figures loom like flattened cardboard cut-outs; to my taste, many shots are underlit and too atmospheric -- sea shores and forests are draped in implausibly dense fog.  The exotic locations are shot from picture-postcard vantages.  There's a Hans Zimmer score and Louis Armstrong has been recruited from the army of the shades to sing the final ballad.  The movie is crisply edited but it's way too long.  And there's a garden variety assassin wearing a bland porcelain-white Kabuki mask. (He gets drilled with about nine bullets in one scene and, then, somehow comes back to life.)  The theme from Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daughter" as to a person becoming the bearer of some kind herbal poison (this is the subject of one Luytsifer's monologues) is central to the movie -- Bond become the bearer of a poison that renders him literally untouchable.  Ruefully, one realizes I think, that this theme may have a broader meaning -- what sort of cultural poison did sixty years of James Bond inject into our society, even, our world?  I would like to recommend this picture to you as well-crafted escapist fare.  But the movie is too long and I don't think you should waste almost three hours of your life with this picture.  

   

China 9, Liberty 37

 China 9, Liberty 37, a film title that seems to be a sporting events score, is a curious and obscure 1978 Western directed by Monte Hellman.  (Notwithstanding its American director, the movie is a Spaghetti Western shot with a mostly Italian cast somewhere in the deserts of Andalusia.)  All of Hellman's films are "curious and obscure" and so this description doesn't really distinguish China 9, Liberty 37 from his other pictures, most notably two strange Westerns shot back-to-back in 1966 and both starring Jack Nicholson, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting.  Although these films have a cult following, they aren't very good and it's impossible to determine if their pretentious and nihilistic vacuity is by intentional design or merely incidental to the tiny budgets on which the two movies were made.  Hellman directed a few other pictures and achieved a cult following, as well, with Two Lane Blacktop (1971), a bleak, humorless and existentialism-inflected road race movie starring Hellman's alter-ego and muse, Warren Oates (along with James Taylor with some songs credited to Joni Mitchell).  China 9 features Warren Oates as well -- ultimately, Hellman made three pictures with the actor including Cockfighter released (the term is a misnomer because it's doubtful that this picture was ever really shown anywhere) in 1974.  Hellman who died in 2021, worked on a number of low-budget horror films for TV and, even, made  one picture that I (cautiously) admire, the extremely idiosyncratic Road to Nowhere also not really released in 2010 -- I think the picture went straight to video. 

The Italian title for China 9 is more lurid and better represents to exploitation aspects of the movie -- it was shown in Italy and Europe under the name Amore, Piomba e Furore (Love, Lead, and Fury).  At heart, Hellman was a Roger Corman alumnus who never really ascended above the trashy stuff that he was contracted to turn into drive-in movies.  China 9 is a lurid Western crossbred with soft-core porn -- the movie features lots of nudity starring Jenny Agutter, a British-Irish starlet, who appears in about half of her shots naked, many of them involving stiff and absurd-looking love-making with the Italian heart-throb Fabio Testi.  (Testi is so absurdly pretty that he makes Agutter, a glamor girl herself, seem frumpy -- this guy also spends a lot of his screen-time naked or half-naked; with the heroine, the camera spends several minutes inspecting the gunfighter hero, bare-chested, chopping wood or bathing.  (People do a lot of bathing in this movie since it's a way to get the characters stripped down for the delectation of the audience.)   About half of the movie is pretty good in the misogynistic and bitter style of a subpar Peckinpah imitator.  (In fact, "Bloody"Sam has a cameo role in the film -- he plays a dime-novel writer who tries to enlist the gunfighter, Clayton Drumm, Testi's character, in his enterprises.)  Unlike Hellman's other Westerns, the movie actually has a cast of about fifteen speaking parts and some of the shots are nicely staged -- there are some rudimentary town sets, mostly unpeopled but faintly plausible, and, even, a Spanish church pressed into service as a Mexican mission.  In the middle of the film, the picture deviates into Fellini territory when the characters get involved with a traveling circus, a painfully impoverished troupe that seems to consist of unattractive players who spend most of their time hanging limply upside-down.  (Exploitation reigns here as well -- there's a dwarf and a woman in a skin-tight body stocking who impersonates Lady Godiva.)  The film's plot is pretty good.  A vicious gunfighter is about to be hanged.  (Cue the little kids waiting for the execution after the manner of Peckinpah).  The gunfighter, Clayton Drumm, speaking with an unintelligible Italian accent (he seems to have learned his part phonetically) is spared execution, although the hangman does get to kill a couple of inscrutable Chinese coolies (why and for what is never explained).  Some bad guys, RR moguls, send Drumm out to murder a settler who lives with his beautiful wife in the middle of nowhere.  The settler, Matthew, is played by Warren Oates and the sodbuster's much younger lissome wife is acted by Jenny Agutter.  As in the great Once Upon a Time in the West, the vicious railroad execs need to get Matthew off his homestead -- Matthew has found a vein of coal and plans to sell this resource to the railroad at premium prices.  Drumm likes Matthew and decides to defy his bosses and not kill the settler.  Drumm's also intrigued by Matthew's wife who he has seen bathing in a frothy creek somewhere near the pioneer's little spread.  Drumm and Matthew's wife have sex, in fact, several times in the movie, and when the sodbuster, himself an old gunfighter, discovers the couple making love, a fight ensues.  Katherine, the wife, stabs Matthew and beats him over the head with a rolling pin (I'm not kidding), leaving him for dead when she flees with the handsome hired gun.  Matthew recovers sufficiently to enlist his four brothers as a posse pursuing Drumm and his errant wife.  Most of the brothers get gunned down, there's some scenes in a picturesque brothel, and the circus is in town and selling a medicinal concoction made with cocaine -- this leads to some interesting drunk scenes.  Matthew kidnaps Katherine and Drumm, somewhat lacking in gallantry seems to just ride off. When Matthew returns to his humble abode, he's ambushed by a half-dozen railroad gunmen.  There's a protracted battle in which Drumm arrives just in the nick of time to slaughter most of the bad guys.  By this time, Matthew and Katherine are working as team -- she loads his six-shooter for him.  The movie ends with Matthew and Katherine riding their buckboard  out of the desolate cleft in the rocks where the homestead is located with the cabin and barn set afire and burning spectacularly behind them.  

Some of the picture isn't half-bad.  A scene with Matthew's brothers features some old songs and is sentimental -- an imitation of some of Peckinpah's sequences of this sort which, in turn, harken back to John Ford.  There's some gritty dialogue of the kind that would not be tolerated today:  could an actor really get away with observing of the women in the story:  "If they didn't have cunts, we'd put a bounty on them."? But the movie is negligible and peters out in its violent second half.  There's a neat song by Ronee Blakly.

China 9, Liberty 37 is a sign post pointing the way to two hamlets and, helpfully, providing travelers with the mileage to those places as well. 

The Card Counter

 Paul Schrader makes serious movies about important subjects inflected with theological overtones.  In the seventies, when he helped to write Raging Bull and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese, his scripts had the character of raw Old Testament Jeremiads.  A couple of his movies, American Gigolo (1980) and Hardcore (1979) tapped into the hedonistic Zeitgeist in the late Seventies as monuments to a sober counter-cultural ethos that, nonetheless, managed to titillate by Schrader's thoroughgoing immersion in the wickedness that these films denounce.  Influenced by Bresson, Schrader's films featured long-takes and austere, no frills mise-en-scene, a style that is the polar opposite to the gaudy and lurid subject matter motivating his pictures.  (Although he has often worked with Martin Scorsese, he eschews that filmmaker's devoutly Catholic razz-ma-tazz, that is, Scorsese's baroque style; his use of actors and the camera, in many ways, is the opposite of Scorsese's method of film-making).  Schrader's movies have never really been popular and each picture is a labor of love, carefully crafted and financed by rag-tag production groups almost akin to crowd-funding -- his film with Lindsay Lohan The Canyons was crowd-funded.  He makes worthy pictures, but it's a shame that they aren't very good.

Schrader's most recent picture, The Card Counter is a lugubrious exercise that approaches self-parody.  A mournful ex-con has taught himself to count cards while serving 8 1/2 years in Leavenworth.  The ex-con, who calls himself "William Tell" -- he actual name is something like Bill Tillich -- is one of Schrader's typical monomaniacal loners, a cousin to Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver or the doomed pastor in First Reformed. (And the name "Tillich" refers, I presume, to the well-known Lutheran theologian.) Tell, to use the character's nom de guerre, is constricted, indeed, half-strangled by guilt that he seeks to expiate throughout the movie.  An underground man after Dostoevsky's model, Tell uses his preternatural skills as a card-shark to score only modest earnings -- he prides himself as flying under the  radar.  (It's testament to his self-abnegation that he avoids the gaudy fleshpots of Las Vegas and prowls the melancholy casino wastelands of Atlantic City and the Midwest, riverboat and Indian casinos, and the hillbilly gambling venues at Tunica, Mississippi.  (Shot on a bargain-basement budget, the movie seems to have been made mostly in Mississippi.)  Tell has no friends, only remote associates, and he engages in a bizarre ritual -- every night, he wraps all the furniture at the low-rent motels that he frequents in white sheets, carefully removing all mirrors and pictures, and shrouding tables and chairs in white linen.  The reason for this strange habit, something that would take an hour to install and a half-hour to dismantle, is never explained and the viewer is left to speculate as to the meaning of Tell's weird compulsion to cover all motel surfaces in white fabric.  (There's a supremely irritating aspect to the movie:  as in other Schrader scripts, the anti-hero provides a helpful voice-over in the first part of the movie.  But when the protagonist has to take action that is suspenseful or on which his motivations might be obscure or problematic, the narration suddenly vanishes -- in other words, Schrader's use of voice-over monologue is purely opportunistic:  we get lots of info. about card counting and poker strategy, but the anti-hero never tells us anything useful or plausible about his increasingly implausible motivations for his increasingly implausible actions.  Schrader even has his protagonist keeping a  journal ala Travis Bickel --but the guy never writes anything that would be helpful in deciphering his reasons for acting as he does in the second-half of the movie.  Accordingly, the use of voice-over narration comes to seem a cheat, a sleight-of-hand -- if Tell is going to talk to us, why doesn't he explain his weird conduct in the second half of the picture.)  In a way, The Card Counter is a buddy movie.  At one gambling venue, a convention involving small-town cops, Tell meets an earnest young man, Balfour.  For reasons that are inexplicable, the loner, Bill Tell, takes the kid under his wing and, in fact, offers to pay for his college debt -- like Joe Biden, we all know that tuition is too expensive.  The kid's backstory is that his father committed suicide as a result of guilt over participating in torture in Iraq at Abu Ghraib and Bhagram.  It turns out that Tell was an enthusiastic torturer at those hell-holes as well working under the tutelage of CIA spook and, then, private contractor, Gordo (played the ageless and always game Willem Dafoe.)  The kid is planning to kidnap Gordo and torture him to death as revenge for his fathers' unhappy demise.  Of course, Tell has a similar beef with Gordo.  When the celebrated photos showing US troops torturing Iraquis surfaced, the poor bastards in the pictures were prosecuted and sent to prison (including Tell for his 8 1/2 year stint at Leavenworth) but the people who gave the orders and formulated the "enhanced interrogation" techniques, were all insulated from consequences.  So Tell has his own reasons for wanting to punish Gordo, now a well-heeled government contractor, who is working on facial recognition metrics to detect lies told by suspects under interrogation.  Tell is being courted by an enigmatic woman, Lalinda -- she wants Tell to join her "stable" of gamblers, men for whom she provides financial backing in exchange for a cut of the take.  Tell likes to work below the radar, making only moderate earnings, but he succumbs to her blandishments (and, even, becomes briefly her boyfriend) in order to earn more money to finance his quixotic efforts to help young Balfour.  Of course, Tell is unerring and makes a fortune on the professional gambling circuit.  By this point, the movie has gone pretty much rogue -- it's off-the-rails.  For some reason, Tell is obsessed with reuniting Balfour with his mother.  He threatens to torture Balfour and the kid responds by, in fact, making contact with his estranged mom.  But Balfour, then, goes to Gordo's mansion in the DC suburbs where he gets gunned down by the wily ex-spook.  Tell is playing in the World Series of Poker (a sinister acronym WS - OP -- looks a bit like "Psy Op") against a hyper-patriotic adversary, a guy who shouts "USA! USA! whenever he wins a hand and dresses like Homelander in The Boys -- he goes around literally draped in an American flag.  When Tell learns that his side-kick has been killed, he stalks out of the WS-OP and drives all night to Gordo's place.  There he wraps everything in white sheets and invites Gordo to a torture party.  The two men torture each other until the dawn's early light when Tell who is as good at torture as he is at card counting has killed Gordo.  (He's badly injured himself.)  Of course, the authorities aren't pleased with the torture party and Tell goes back to Leavenworth.  In the final scene, Lalinda comes to visit him and plaintively touches the glass separating her from her boyfriend with her clawlike artificial fingernails.  

The film is completely ridiculous.  Schrader has the good sense to not show the torture party which would, of course, be risible.  He does depict the horrors of Abu Ghraib using a fish-eye lens to survey a subterranean labyrinth in which the "greatest hits" of those atrocities are staged in tableaux form.  It's all dishonest and meretricious.  The Card Counter makes no sense even on the most primary levels as to motivation and plausibility -- why does the alienated loner, Tell, take an interest in Balfour?  why does Balfour tag along with him for months on the poker circuit?  What's with the torture party?  Individual scenes don't make any sense.  At one point, Tell tours some kind of spectacular light-show in what looks like an arboretum holding hands with Lalinda.  The place is so wildly over-the-top  that the viewer wants to know where they are and why everything is lit up with millions and millions of colored lights.  There's nothing new in The Card Counter except the gimmick about wrapping everything in white linen.  In fact, the film is close to a remake of Schrader's much better American Gigolo with Oscar Isaac playing the lonely, talented, and beautiful prostitute acted by Richard Gere in the 1980 picture.  The movie has the same narrative arc and features Lalinda in the role of the procurer in Gigolo who dispatched Gere to his various gigs.  The ending of the film, the encounter in the prison, replicates the last five minutes of American Gigolo in which Lauren Hutton, as an embodiment of spiritual Grace, comes to see Richard Gere in his prison cell -- that sequence was lifted whole from Bresson's Pickpocket (as Schrader has acknowledged) and remains Schrader's touchstone in The Card Counter made late in the director's life -- more than 40 years after American Gigolo (and 62 years after Bresson's 1959 masterpiece.)  The movie is stylishly made, with impressive tracking shots through the rather squalid casinos frequented by the anti-hero, and it has some good songs on the soundtrack and a simmering rhythmic score a little like Giorgio Moroder's music in Gigolo.  But the picture makes no sense and the gambling plot has little or nothing to do with the film's ambitious project to explore expiation for American guilt in the Gulf Wars.  Schrader keeps making the same movie over and over again -- The Card Counter is also a remake of The Walker (2007) which reprised Gigolo -- and, each time, it seems with diminishing returns.

Peter Ibbetson

 Peter Ibbetson is a uncategorizable 1935 film starring Gary Cooper and directed by Henry Hathaway.  Cooper, of course, was famous for playing stoic cowboys and soldiers; Hathaway was an action director -- most notably, he had directed Cooper in the preceding year in The Lives of the Bengal Lancers.  (Hathaway made film noir and Westerns -- he ended his career directing John Wayne in True Grit.  Peter Ibbetson, therefore, is a disturbing supernatural  romantic fantasy featuring an actor famous for playing strong, silent warriors and directed by filmmaker who specialized in rowdy action movies.  The film has an effective, if bizarre, script based on a once-famous novel by George du Maurier.  The movie's production values are lush -- it has spectacular photography by Charles Lang.  The movie is disquieting because it traffics in forbidden fantasies:  what if we were able to enjoy all of our desires in a world of dreams?  What if we could escape the sorrow and grief of our every day existence by fleeing into fantasy?  What if pain and misery are only illusions and that our real existence is blessed, a sort of perpetual idyll in a dream-world in which all desires are satisfied?  These are radical questions because they destabilize our life in the real world, the place that should contain everything for which we hope.  Most of us are resigned to existing in the muck and mire and disappointment of the world into which we are born, but the suggestion that there is another happier realm and that, indeed, it may be somehow available to us is a distressing  notion-- it promotes sadness and causes us to reject with dismay the actual terms on which we live.  Peter Ibbetson traffics in the forbidden zone of our most extravagant and, therefore, deeply suppressed desires.  It's both haunting and a bit horrifying.

The movie is simply and efficiently constructed in three acts.  In the first part, we see two beautiful children living in splendid bucolic isolation somewhere near Paris.  The little boy is called "Gogo" and he is quarreling with a tiny blonde playmate, Mary.  An iron fence separates the children but Gogo is slender and he can pass between the iron spikes.  The children are realistically portrayed and they bicker and behave selfishly toward one another.  The idyll is interrupted when Gogo's mother dies and his uncle takes him away to London.  The little boy longs to stay in Paris with his playmate but they are separated -- it's a scene of primal trauma, rather brutally staged, similar in form to the scene in Citizen Kane in which the young Kane is separated from his sled, Rosebud, and his mother.  In the film's second act, Gogo has now grown to be an architect, Peter Ibbetson.  He is gloomy and exhausted with the world.  His boss sends him on a holiday to Paris where he meets a beautiful and flirtatious young woman (played by Ida Lupino who makes a deep impression in this small role).  Instead of accepting the young woman's implicit invitations, Peter takes her on a tour of the "secret garden" where he and Mary played when they were children.  In effect, Peter rejects the young woman's fairly direct sexual offer in favor of nostalgia.  Back in England, Ibbetson is hired to remodel some stables at a spectacular and palatial manor hour in Yorkshire.  It turns out that the Duchess of Towers, the lady of the house, is Peter's old playmate, Mary, now grown up and resplendent in a severe black velvet gown and wielding a riding crop.  After some more bickering, the childhood friends recognize one another and fall in love again.  They discover that they are sharing the same dreams.  Mary's husband interrupts them in a passionate embrace and there's a fight.  A gun goes off and the husband is killed.  After a trial, Peter is sent to prison. 

The film's  jaw-dropping third-act takes place in some kind of hellish penitentiary in which prisoners are chained to the walls or fettered to wooden pallets in a dungeon.  Peter Ibbetson refuses to work and is starving himself to death.  He rejects drink and water.  When someone mocks Mary, the cause of his imprisonment, there's a fight.  The sadistic guards break up the brawl between the fettered men and Ibbetson's spine is shattered by a blow from a heavy truncheon.  He's pronounced dead, but, while dreaming, Mary comes and summons him back to life -- she arranges to have a ring delivered to him in the prison.  Mary and Peter, then, meet every night in their dreams, exploring together a beautiful wooded landscape with mountains, fairy castles, and pellucid alpine lakes.  When they approach a dream-castle too closely,  it collapses and there's an enormous rock slide with spectacular torrents of boulders falling off the peak.  Mary and Peter are separated but rejoin one another after the calamitous avalanche.  The next twenty years or so, the couple meet each night in their dreams.  Peter remains paralyzed, apparently immobile on a wooden pallet in the gloomy dungeon.  But in their dreams, the couple roams freely through the glorious mountain meadows.  At last, Mary dies.  Peter can no longer find her in his dreams.  Then, she comes to  him as a voice and says that she has "passed over" and that he should follow her into this new realm which is even more wonderful than the dreams they have shared for the last twenty years.  On this note, the movie ends.  

The movie's peculiar details stick in the imagination.  This film has been unavailable for many years and only rarely revived.  Because the movie couldn't be seen, a legend has grown up around it -- the film is, in fact, a sort of cult movie.  Certainly, it was integral to the European surrealists and influenced everyone from Salvador Dali to Jean Cocteau.  (Bunuel said that Peter Ibbetson was one of the ten greatest movies ever made.)  Paul Eluard, the surrealist poet, was in the habit of stalking beautiful women around Paris.  One afternoon, he was trailing a desirable young woman when she suddenly stepped into a movie theater.  Eluard followed her and found himself entranced by the movie that was being screened to the extent that he entirely forgot about the woman that he had been pursuing.  The film, of course, was Peter Ibbetson.  The film has a surreal aspect from its very outset.  The wheels on a doll's perambulator rhyme with the wheels on a wagon that Gogo is attempting to build and the children's quarrel over bits of lumber seems bizarre.  The death of Gogo's mother involves sinister-looking nuns in elaborate wimples and extreme unction administered to the dying woman as glimpsed through a mirror -- many of the shots look like fragments of Welles' Citizen Kane. The little boy is compared to a horse by his creepy uncle and, later, we see Mary's much older husband, obsessed with horses, breaking a new mare -- his casual brutality casts a harsh light on him.  Peter Ibbetson designs gothic, turreted mansions and his boss, Mr. Slade, is blind, "blind from birth" we are told -- certainly, a curious impairment for a famous architect (and a handicap that imparts a weird intensity to his scenes with Peter.)  Ida Lupino's sexual voracity is surprising and it's odd to see Mary reappear toying with a riding crop.  There are little scale models for buildings displayed throughout the movie -- these models are also strange and remind me of the scale models that we sometimes see in Tarkovsky's movies.  Reality exists in different forms and shapes -- real buildings have miniature counterparts.  The film's final twenty minutes is an expressionistic torrent of strange camera angles, vehement high-contrasts lighting and strangely sepulchral staging -- Cooper lies flat on his back with a chain running over his crotch and his trousers marked Justicia for some reason; he looks like a mortuary statue of himself.  The dream sequences involve sylvan woods and meadows.  The climactic landslide with its wild cascade of boulders is not convincing -- but, why should it be?  Everything that happens is happening in a dream.

Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

 Italian director Elio Petri's Investigation of a a Citizen above Suspicion (1970) is peculiar variant on themes in Kafka's The Trial.  Stylized and nightmarish, the film inverts the situation in Kakfa's novel -- Joseph K believes that he is innocent but everyone that he encounters accuses him of a nameless, mortal crime.  In Petri's film, a police commissioner knows that he is guilt of murder, but everyone proclaims him to be innocent.  Joseph K. is always accused; Petri's corrupt and tyrannical bureaucrat, although a murderer, is always proclaimed innocent.  

If you approach, Investigation with innocent eyes (as was my case), the Kafkaesque character of the film emerges slowly -- at first, the audience is lulled into interpreting the movie as a highly abstract crime picture, a police procedural in which the authorities are investigating a crime committed by their boss.  But within a half-hour, the viewer begins to grasp that the film isn't realistic and is a kind of parable featuring abstract and austere sets (underground wire-tap bunkers with hundreds of workers, offices decorated with huge, elaborate paintings and vast brutalist office structures).  The plot involves increasingly desperate efforts by the titular protagonist, the police chief, to prove himself guilty.  These efforts fail and, at the end of the film, the Commissioner (sometimes called the Capo) is forced, seemingly against his will, to sign a "Confession of Innocence".  The movie ends on a freeze-frame adorned with a quotation from Kafka that the version of the film shown on Amazon unhelpfully declines to translate out of its Italian text (of course, itself a translation from Kafka's German).  I didn't like this film, perhaps, because of its bait-and-switch character -- the audience expects a gritty detective show, but, in fact, experiences a rather gloomy and politically tendentious allegory.  The movie is shrill and ugly -- it's mostly huge wide-angle close-ups lensed at about ten inches from the subjects' faces.  There are a lot of tracking shots through the big, mostly empty sets and the film is full of bizarre details -- the Capo tortures his suspects by making them kneel on concrete and forcing them to drink from pitchers of salt-water; when he's confronted about his crime at the end of the film, he eagerly gobbles down a handful of salt, perhaps, in recompense for his own sins.  The texture of the film is uniform from beginning to end -- it features characters that are always haranguing one another in  bellowing voices.  Everyone accuses everyone else of crime or sedition -- the villainous protagonist is surrounded by villainous lackeys.  The Capo's enemies are lurid caricatures of Red Army Brigade terrorists.  There's a suitable macabre musical score by Ennio Morricone, a sort of tick-tock march for bell-whistles and industrial widgets that is the most engaging thing about the film.  Otherwise, the movie is intentionally repellant.

In the opening scenes, we see the Capo, a slender, well-dressed stiletto of a man, hovering around a weird Art Deco apartment in which a seductive witch in filmy negligee lives.  This is the Commissioner's mistress, the wife of a homosexual interior designer.  The Capo plays perverse sex games with her in which she impersonates the victims of murders that her boyfriend has investigated.  (In one flashback scene, she covers her head to mimic a decapitated and decomposing woman found dead on a beach.)  The Capo's girlfriend enigmatically asks him "how are you going to kill me today?"  He responds:  "I'm going to cut your throat."  And so he does while they are having sex.  This time the thrill is real -- she ends up dead.  The Capo, then, intentionally plants clues implicating himself in the killing -- he places threads from his green silk tie in the woman's fingernails, leaves his fingerprints all over the place, and tracks blood around on the soles of his distinctive shoes.  Back at his office, the Capo has been promoted from police chief to Director of Political Intelligence, a higher level job that involves wire-taps on apparently everyone in Rome and all sorts of Fascist thuggery.  Repeatedly, the Capo provides clues that he has murdered the woman, Auguste Terzi.  But all his sycophantic lackeys ignore those clues or just wink at them -- they immediately go to work pinning the crime on the homosexual husband, and, when this fails, on the regime's political opponents.  The Capo's motives are obscure.  We don't know if he's acting from a sense of arrogance -- "I am completely above suspicion," he declares after one of his confessions is ignored -- or out of an obscure sense of guilt in which he may be seeking punishment.  In any event, the Capo's henchmen ignore the evidence before their eyes.  As we learn, Mrs. Terzi was sleeping with a political radical, a sort of college-spawned terrorist who is arrogant and a pretty loathsome figure also.  This enrages the Capo and he tortures the terrorist's associate mercilessly but when the actual subversive is interviewed, the role's are reversed and the Commissioner essentially prostrates himself before the man.  In the end, the poor Capo is reduced to summoning all of his colleagues, a group of black-suited Keystone Kops who ride around in a Keystone Kop car, and explaining to them the murder that he has committed.  But this just results in the Kops making him sign a "Confession of Innocence", the disquieting note on which the movie ends.  The movie is grim, cheerless, although sometimes to the point that it is unintentionally funny.  For instance, after the bombing of the Palace of Justice, some government offices, and American Express, the bureaucrats gather for a conclave is what looks like its taking place at the bottom of a concrete silo -- where is this and why are they gathered here?  The movie consists entirely of ranting tirades in which one man bellows at another.  Now and then, the Capo makes speeches that would impress Hitler with their vehemence and savagery:  all criminals are subversives and all subversives are criminals, the Capo maintains at one point.  Everyone to whom the Capo confesses ends up getting implausibly framed for the murder and the bureaucrats all conspire against one another.  The movie is impressive (it won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film) but not enjoyable in the slightest.  Gian Maria Volonte is effective as the Capo who struts through just above every scene in the film.  

The movie was recently restored for the Cinema il Retrovata festival in Bologna.  Amazon streaming is promoting the film, but apparently with the prediction that no one will be able to watch this thing to its end.  As the movie progresses, the subtitles lag farther and farther behind the speeches on screen.  And this is a problem because the movie is very, very talky.  We end up with something accidentally Kafkaesque.  People speak at length but the subtitles first show up 20 seconds later when someone else is talking.  Simple commands such as "Please shut the door" are incomprehensible when projected in the middle of someone's long (untranslated) political harangue.  When I was in college, art-houses showed films like Renoir's Rules of the Game or Ozu's Tokyo Story with white subtitles that were largely invisible in the brightly lit shots -- the subtitles were purely notional, white on white.  The 16 millimeter prints were faded, disfigured with amateur splices and the sound was like someone talking over a poor telephone connection.  (I first saw Metropolis is a church basement, projected ineptly, with a soundtrack that consisted of music from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring just repeated in endless loops.)  Someone, probably Amazon, has spent a fortune to restore Investigation and it looks great -- but if the subtitles are shown a half-minute after when the words they are spoken the effect is worse than useless.  (Until I saw restored versions of The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about -- the movies were faint shadows of their original design; maybe, I would have liked Petri's film a lot more if the subtitles hadn't been so utterly destructive of the movie's intended effect.)