Blonde

 Obviously, Andrew Dominik, the director of Blonde (2022, Netflix), is an admirer of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull,  Stylistically, Blonde closely resembles Scorsese's bio-pic about the boxer Jake LaMotta.  Blonde is mostly shot in black-and-white, however with interpolated color footage and sketches Marilyn Monroe's life in terms defined by titles setting the year in which the action occurs; there are shots in Dominik's movie that recapitulate key images in Raging Bull -- particularly, scenes in which the heroine is surrounded by photographers with explosive flash-bulbs; in Blonde, the photographers are surrounded by grotesque men with gaping mouths, a carnival of ugly depravity through which the camera tracks.  As in Raging Bull, the action is repetitive -- La Motta is a jealous brute who savages everyone around him and the film shows him destroying relationships with those closest to him again and again; in Blonde, Norma Jeane is the perfect victim:  we see her pregnant not once but three times and, on each occasion, losing or aborting the child  -- she has four sexual relationships depicted in the film, each of them degrading and, ultimately, destructive to her.  Again and again, she is exploited and victimized.  Raging Bull is a great masterpiece, probably the most important film made in the last fifty years as shown, in fact, by the Dominik's reliance on film's stylistic and structural features; Blonde is an unmitigated catastrophe, unbearably dull and lugubrious, a slow, funereal march toward Marilyn's inevitable suicide.  Scorsese makes a film about an alpha male athlete who brutalizes everyone around him -- the film is assertive, with an insanely domineering hero; Dominik's movie is about a hapless woman who is brutalized by everyone around her -- the film's narrative is absurdly passive and Marilyn Monroe is depicted as insanely submissive and masochistic.  Raging Bull works; Blonde doesn't -- it's hard to know if this is a consequence of gender roles and expectations or, simply, the result of the difficulty of making a compelling film about someone who is wholly passive, someone who is acted upon but who doesn't act herself; a writer once said that Bertolucci's The Last Emperor demonstrates the impossibility of making a truly effective movie featuring a passive hero.  Within fifteen minutes, we get the gist of Blonde and the rest of the picture is just a simple-minded, one note, waste of celluloid, or digital data, as the case may be.

Little Norma Jeane's life gets off to a bad start.  Her mother tells the child that her absent daddy loves her, but has also abandoned the family.  Psycho mom shows the little girl pictures of a handsome swarthy fellow with a debonair panama hat -- why Norma's father is imagined as a Latin lover is unclear and never addressed in the film.  After driving the child around in a hellish firestorm (LA is burning), mom tries to drown the little girl in the bathtub.  Things go downhill from there:  Norma falls into the clutches of a Harvey Weinstein lookalike who forces her into coitus a tergo -- poor Norma grimaces at the camera as she is raped from behind.  Somehow, she ends up in photogenic if inscrutable love affair in which she sleeps with the namesake children of Charley Chaplin and Edgar G. Robinson.  Of course, this ends badly.  After a few more misadventures -- she's as unlucky as de Sade's Justine, Norma, now known as Marilyn Monroe, meets up with Joe DiMaggio. He introduces her to his Italian family, a bunch of dark-eyed, dark-haired women who obviously regard her as a hussy and trollop.  When Marilyn poses for the famous shot on the subway grating (dress ballooning up around her) in The Seven Year Itch, DiMaggio goes berserk and beats her up.  Next, she falls in love with Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody).  Miller admires her intellect -- Marilyn knows all about Chekhov and intuitively understands his plays better than he does.  Unfortunately, at a gathering on the Maine seacoast, Marliyn trips in the sand, inducing a miscarriage.  Apparently, this wrecks her relationship with the playwright.  In 1962, she flies cross-country to be hustled into a hotel room where JFK is managing the Cuban missile crisis and watching Earth v. Flying Saucers on TV.  With the bored Secret Service staff sitting about ten feet from the bed, Marilyn gets forced into oral sex with JFK.  We hear her interior monologue, in which she seems mostly concerned about swallowing properly, not gagging, and not puking all over the presidential penis.  (She has said that she's delivered to the hotel room like a parcel of meat.)  Marilyn has yet another abortion -- this filmed from the perspective of the unfortunate fetus in utero -- we get a showy shot of a speculum prying open the heroine's vagina.  (If this child is supposed to be JFK's spawn, it's not evident to me how fellatio can result in pregnancy, but who knows:  Dominik is an Australian and, maybe, things work differently Down Under). Back at home, Marilyn learns that Charley Chaplin, Jr., the bi-sexual with whom she had a menage a trois (with Edgar G. Robinson, Jr.!) has committed suicide.  Throughout the movie, Marilyn has received letters at two or three year intervals from her "tearful daddy" -- this is her absent father who apologizes to her profusely and expresses a desire to meet her.  (I counted five such letters, all, more or less, the same, ostensibly from the "tearful daddy".)  As a final, sadistic blow, Charley Chaplin Jr. reaches out from the grave to tell poor Norma Jeane that he was the author of the "tearful daddy" letters and that there is no such paternal figure.  This revelation destroys Marilyn and she sucks down a dozen barbiturates with whisky, bringing an end to her whole sorry existence.  Monroe's career as a film actress is basically ignored.  However, in one bizarre sequence, we see Billy Wilder directing the actress in Some Like it Hot, probably Monroe's best and most endearing role.  Dominik choses to make Marilyn Monroe's most iconic performance into an exercise in degradation -- she's shown raging over the fact that Wilder's script characterized her strut as "jello on springs".  This is unseemly and malicious -- Monroe's greatest and most sexually assertive performance is treated as a cruel joke on her.  (Clearly Dominik is alarmed at comparisons between his movie and Wilder's classic and, so, he childishly resolves his anxiety by trashing Some Like it Hot).  The movie is chicken-shit and lets the Kennedy brothers off the hook -- they were obviously complicit in her death and, indeed, may have murdered her.  So Dominik shows JFK as a boorish fool and chauvinistic pig, but not a conspirator in a murder.  Ultimately, Monroe is depicted as completely crazy -- she's as nuts as her psycho mother, a full-blown schizophrenic who has split into sex-bomb Marilyn Monroe and the hapless door-mat, Norma Jeane.  Monroe may have been promiscuous and some kind of drug addict qua alcoholic, but she obviously wasn't the hapless whack-job portrayed in the movie.  Dominik thinks he's making some sort of argument about sexual harassment and the patriarchy, but he indulges in just about every misogynistic trope that you can imagine.  The three abortion/miscarriage scenes, all of which are explicit, and two of which involve late-term talking fetuses (it would seem to me that Monroe's abortions would have occurred long before the embryo's developed big sorrowful eyes and could talk) make the heroine into nothing more than her uterine plumbing. 

There are a lot of lies printed about this movie.  But no one will admit that it is profoundly, nightmarishly boring.  Furthermore, critics claim that the picture is a mess but that Ana de Armas, who plays Marilyn, is brilliant.  This is gallant but untrue.  Armas turns in a one-note, lugubrious performance that is irritatingly monotonous.  And truth to tell, Armas doesn't have an iota of Marilyn Monroe's famous sex appeal -- her breasts are small and too girlish and she lacks the pot-belly and padding around the hips and derriere that made Monroe so irresistible.  Armas is skinny and fit; Monroe was voluptuous and always looked like her only exercise was boozing and sex.  If you believe, as I do, that Ana de Arma's performance is dull and unconvincing, then, there is literally nothing in this almost three-hour long film worth watching.   

  

Football (Vikings v. Patriots -- November 24, 2022)

I rarely watch football, typically only one or two times a year.  Of course, I recognize that I am in the minority with respect to my disinterest in the sport.  As far as I am concerned, football is mildly amusing -- on par with game shows and paranormal investigation programs; it's not too interesting but will do in a pinch.  The primary disincentive to watching televised football is the investment of time required; the sport on TV is like playing golf -- it will use up three or more hours of your life and, of course, time is not something we are given in abundance.  

On Thanksgiving, I felt lazy and didn't want to watch something that required much mental effort.  (I recognize that you can apply all the acumen you might accord to a Bergman film to a football game if  you have competency in the sport; my knowledge level is primitive and, so, mostly, I look without seeing.)  I didn't expect to watch more than a quarter or so of the game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New England Patriots, but the competition was so exciting and evenly matched that I ended up glued to the TV for the whole proceedings -- I turned off the show after about 3 hours and 18 minutes, losing interest finally during the post-game festivities which are mostly self-aggrandizing, cloying, and maudlin (a tribute to the deceased John Madden).

My father had been a football star in his tiny town in central Nebraska and, so, he watched the sport on TV during season all day on Saturday and Sunday.  He watched Monday night football as well and had season tickets to the Vikings.  As a consequence, I saw a lot of football when I was growing up, albeit, mostly out of the corner of my eye.  Times have changed with respect to presentation of these games, both on TV and at the stadium.  They are now spectacularly produced, staged for the camera like the latest extravaganza by Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg.  (When I was young, football plays were shot from a fixed position that provided a schematic view of the action, The camera was placed above the field at a slight angle to the line of scrimmage.  There were lots of shots of cheerleaders and local dignitaries in the audience.  Noteworthy events merited slow-motion replay.)  The games are now directed to embody mini-dramas (will the goal-line defense succeed?  will the kick-off result in a stunning return?  can the beleaguered team make a first down on third and long yardage? how badly injured is the fallen player?) -- these dramas, intrinsic to the game, are shot from, at least, a half-dozen angles on the field and augmented with side-line shots showing players on the bench and coaches.  As far as I observed, the filmmakers generally observe the 180 degree rule -- they don't cut to disorienting angles on the field and the action is generally organized around a classical master-shot, the old style aerial schematic of the opposing teams filmed at 20 degree angle from the line of scrimmage.  The montage is dialectical in the Eisenstein-sense -- shot and counter-shot emphasizing the dynamics of conflict on the screen.  Coverage is complete to the point of obstructing the main narrative on occasion:  often, the innumerable camera angles record infractions that should be penalized but that were not observed by the referees on the field.  (There are technical violations of the rules on every single play in professional football -- particularly with respect to pass interference and holding and, so, the referees have to make decisions as to what misconduct is so egregious as to warrant a penalty.  This aspect of football is the most prone to corruption and I suspect that many games are sculpted by the officiating to achieve desired outcomes.)  Sometimes, when the cameras pick up an egregious offense, this information seems relayed to the field and, then, there are challenges mounted -- decided, of course, by reference to the footage.  On other occasions, the announcers merely note the infraction, comment on  it, and the play on the field continues without interruption.  Every notable play is replayed from various perspectives -- a football game is a lesson in epistemology:  different perspectives yield different perceptions.  Sometimes, the bravura camera-work is made part of the foreground:  in the Thanksgiving game I watched, a big drone, apparently equipped with three or four lenses pointed in different directions hovered over the action.  The drone was sponsored by Walmart and had a name:  "the 4K Walmart drone."   The drone, of course, is capable of sweeping Steadi-cam style shots over the field and creates a sense of the epic when it is deployed to provide an Olympian view of the heroics.  There are three commentators, sometime filmed in a cramped shot that seems to be set nowhere in particular.  One of the commentators provides a play-by-play account of the action; another provides technical information with a level of almost Talmudic detail; the third guy makes wise-cracks and provides background.  The chemistry between the commentators is warm and mildly derisive -- the fiction is that these highly accomplished authorities are your buddies watching the show with you in your basement rec room.  

The Thanksgiving Vikings v. Patriots game was conceived as a duel between Patriot's coach (Bill Belichick) and the Vikings head coach, Kevin O'Connell.  The shots intercutting between the two men structured the presentation of the game.  Both men are very photogenic and contrast well on-screen.  Belichick is 70 years old, his brow perpetually furrowed and anxious.  O'Connell is movie-star handsome -- he looks like an idealized Canadian Mounty -- and is only 37 (and looks much younger); he's huge and impressive and stalks around the sidelines like a panther, but, unlike the anxious-seeming Belichick, he seems to be having a good time.  Both coaches are presented as master strategists and the game is shown to be the product of their imaginations -- they call the plays, substitute players, petition the referees and manage time-outs.  The players themselves are conceived as obedient pawns to their commanders, the head-coaches.  An additional level of drama arises from this match-up.  O'Connell formerly played for Belichick and we are repeatedly told that he kept his "notebooks" as to pre-game briefings conducted by Belichick. There is an implication that O'Connell is using Belichick's own strategy against him.) O'Connell is described as not having been a particularly prepossessing player and there is, also, a slight implication that Belichick disrespected him when the younger man played on his team -- thus, the program presents an aspect of revenge or a grudge match between the two coaches.  (I assume that this is purely fictional).  In any event, the camera angles and cutting constructs the impression that the game is combat between the two men -- an impression enhanced by Belichick stolidly crossing the field, his worried expression unchanged, to congratulate O'Connell at the end of the game.  (Belichick is half the size of O'Connell.)

Apparently, leering shots of cheerleaders are de riguer -- there was only one completely wholesome shot of a cheerleader in the entire three-hours plus presentation.  And she was looking at the camera and leading a cheer -- it would be politically incorrect to film a cheerleader in a sexually exploitative manner and the girl's knowledge that she is being filmed is integral to the shot.  Vikings' games appear to be 95% White -- there were no people of color filmed in 66,000 people in the stands.  The games present a level of in-house majesty that I don't recall from the days when I attended Vikings' football in person.  The fans are all dressed in purple and wear plastic hats with horns and blonde braids.  There's an enormous horn mounted above the field that produces an ominous roaring drone -- this horn is supposedly derived from instruments sounded by medieval Vikings before combat.  (The tiny Sunni Lee, a Hmong Olympic athlete from St. Paul was given the honor of sounding the horn before the festivities began.)  The audience has a Skol chant that involves clapping their hands over their heads -- when all 66,000 people perform this ritual the effect is impressive.  The stadium has spouts that can blast artificial snow over the audience enclosed in the vast colosseum -- an remembrance of the old days when football was played in frostbite conditions at Met Stadium. After the game, the most valuable players (MVP) were invited to a banquet table where they were supposed to eat giant, bronzed-looking turkey legs.  (Something called a Turducken -- that is, boneless chicken put inside a boneless duck put inside a big turkey -- was served.  There was a weird and indelible (vintage) shot of the football legend John Madden carving a Turducken with the side of his hand, stiffened as if to deliver a karate chop.)  Two of the players couldn't eat the turkey because they had "grills" in their teeth.  One of the Vikings spit out his bite of the turkey drumstick as too dry to be edible.  At commercial breaks, a drone provides night-time shots of Minneapolis, including an ominous shot made by a drone cruising overhead down an empty Hennepin Avenue -- this has something of an apocalyptic feel to it.  The shots of the illuminated Minneapolis skyline are taken from peculiar perspectives that are not familiar to people who actually live in the cities -- one involves a brightly lit arch bridge over some body of water.  For the life of me, I wasn't able to figure where that picture was taken.

The football game had everything a fan would desire.  There was a wonderful trick play run in the first series by the Vikings.  A kick-off was returned for a 97 yard run to the endzone.  When one team scored, the other team also obligingly scored so that the Vikings and Patriots were equally matched on the scoreboard throughout the entire game.  The final score was Vikings 33 to Patriots 26.       

  

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)

Edward Berger's German-language Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) is a peculiar corruption of Erich Maria Remarque's celebrated 1927 anti-war novel.  Although the changes made to Remarque's expressionistic narrative are intended to enhance the film's drama and make it politically prescient as to later developments in Germany, Berger's additions to the plot dilute the force of the anti-war message and, in fact, raise all sorts of problems not existing in the novel's effective, if simple-minded, depiction of the effects of mechanized war on its young participants.  Changes to the structure and emphasis of the original narrative leave the viewer baffled.  Everyone in the world has read All Quiet on the Western Front or seen film versions of the novel.  Remarque's novel, in fact, defines how most educated people view World War I -- it's the template for how we imagine the conflict.  Lewis Milestone's original adaptation, released in 1930 (shot as a silent film with sound effects and dialogue interpolated) is one of the greatest of all movies -- a picture so powerful that it has always been banned in country's preparing for war and attempting to persuade their people that battle is grand and glorious.  I have seen the movie a half-dozen times -- I think I watched it for the first time with my father when I was in 8th grade and certain scenes, for instance the amputation of Tjaden's legs with his comrades enviously eyeing the young man's new boots that he will no longer need have stuck with me all my life.  The combat scenes in the film are remarkable, representing state-of-the-art silent film-making, at once exciting and horrific and, even, the passages depicting the brutalized young protagonist home on-leave, filmed in static shots with muted, remote dialogue (a result of the primitive "radio" technology used to record sound), have an ominous, primitive pathos; in fact, the raspy sound recording contributes to the effect that Paul Baeumer, the main character, has been traumatized to the point that he can barely hear, let alone speak.  A later film version made in 1979, and featuring Ernest Borgnine and Richard Thomas,  John-Boy Walton from The Waltons TV show brings the movie up-to-date technically but is wholly superfluous.  Berger's 2022 version, made in German for Netflix, scraps many of the novel's signature scenes in order to present a rather vapid political commentary on the last days of the War.  But Berger hasn't fully imagined the political milieu and presents it in the most banal and stereotypical manner -- evil generals listen to opera while gorging themselves on elaborately prepared food while the poor infantrymen pointlessly die, victims to the commanders' vanity and hypocritical (as well as futile) hyper-patriotism.  Although attractively packaged, the political components of the movie are predictable and moronic.  (If you want to see vicious officers engaged in vicious management of ghastly attritional combat, then, watch Stanley Kubrick's brilliant and searing Paths of Glory.)  The superfluous negotiation sequences with French and German legations exchanging insults add about forty minutes to the film -- it its about 2 and 1/2 hours long; Milestone's monumental 1930 version, made 12 years after the guns fell silent on the Western front is also long -- it was released at 152 minutes, cut to 143 minutes and, now exists, only as 133 minute version.

I've read Remarque's novel three or four times and understand the problem that the book poses:  Im Westen nichts Neues is fundamentally shapeless -- there's no plot and not much real conflict.  The novel focuses on the inner experience of infantry facing mechanized combat, the frailty of soldiers in a "storm of steel" as Ernst Juenger phrased it.  The book is fundamentally expressionistic -- the characters are types, "everyman" civilians hurled into the barbaric circumstances.  There are standard expressionistic tropes involving Nature and the inevitable conflict between sons and fathers.  The book even includes dithyrambs to trees and sheltering earth -- there is one notable apostrophe to the soil that occurs when a soldier tries to burrow into the muck to avoid bombardment.   Because war is chaos to the infantry soldier, there is no real narrative -- the book simply follows the experiences of one trooper, Paul Baeumer from his enlistment out of Gymnasium (he's an aspiring poet and, even, has written a play that is unfinished in his desk drawer) through the cruel indignities of his basic training and, then, into combat. After surviving several major battles, Paul returns home on furlough, but is severely damaged by his combat experiences and can't meaningfully interact with civilians, most of whom are still gripped by war fever.  The experience of leave is so alienating that Paul longs to return to the Front where, at least, things aren't obscured by stifling layers of propaganda and patriotic rhetoric.  Paul's mentor at the Front, Katycinski ("Kat") is badly wounded and Paul carries him to a field station where he is told that he has wasted his effort -- the man is dead.  On a peculiarly calm and pacific day on the Western Front, a sniper kills Paul -- the dispatch from that sector of the trenches doesn't mention Paul's death and simply reports Im Westen nichts Neues (literally "Nothing new on the Western Front" but brilliantly translated into English as "All quiet on the Western Front").  Remarque wrote the book during the Weimar Republic and the novel is completely apolitical -- at the time, Remarque, a veteran of the Great War, penned the novel, the Nazis weren't in power and, so, the book makes no predictions as to the future  other than the assertion that a whole generation of men had been destroyed and were psychologically crippled by the experience.  (This was also an oversimplification:  Remarque lived until 1970, wrote many novels and screenplays and, by all accounts, led a lively existence:  he had celebrated affairs with Hedy Lamar, Dolores del Rio, Marlene Dietrich and, at last, married the actress Paulette Goddard.)

Berger's version is in an unseemly hurry to get to the combat sequences.  We see the young men listening to a bombastic speech by a Gymnasium professor and, then, enthusiastically enlisting.  There is no context as to their families and the characters aren't established as the film rushes into battle.  Basic Training sequences important in the novel and Milestone's version are pruned out of the film.  The troops go straight from the streets of their home-town village into bloody and disorienting combat.  Paul is punished for not putting on his gas mask quickly enough and his commanding officer says that he'll be dead by dawn.  There's a horrifying bombardment and, then, in fact, Paul is shot in the head although his helmet saves his life.  A frontal assault follows and Paul is told to "harvest" or gather the dog tags from the dead soldiers strewn around the trenches -- he discovers that several of his schoolmates have died, but this doesn't register since the film hasn't established them as characters.  Then, Berger begins to interfere radically with the novel's plot.  Fast-forward to November 7, 1918 -- that is, four days before Armistice.  (The hero's return to home on furlough is eliminated as are some gruesome hospital scenes).  A virtuous German, Matthias Erzberger travels by train into a forest where he meets with French high command (they meet in rail dining cars) to negotiate an armistice.  Marshal Foch, the French general, insists on humiliating terms.  Foch is portrayed as a vain and pompous villain.  A 72 hour deadline is established during which the terms of the settlement offer remain open.  (This means that the carnage in the War continues.)  Ultimately, the generals and politicians agree to end the bloodbath on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.  Meanwhile, Paul and Kat are still fending for themselves as infantry soldiers.  The film is shot to imply that they are somewhere near the place where the negotiations are taking place on a railroad siding in the woods -- but it isn't clear where they are in proximity to both the Front and the forest.  (This is simply inept filmmaking by the director).  For the most part, the soldiers seem to be in bucolic rural area.  Paul and Kat steal a goose from a farmer.  They enjoy a comically long scene at a latrine.  Both men seem to be defecating for about 10 minutes as Paul reads a letter from Kat's wife to the older man.  There's some more combat, including a battle involving tanks crushing men to pulp and flamethrowers.  A friend named Tjaden who wants to be a policeman is mangled in the fighting and he loses both legs.  When Tjaden discovers that his legs are missing, he stabs himself to death by ripping open his throat with a fork -- this is a very gory scene.  Paul and Kat are horrified.  The soldiers know the war is about to end -- they are drinking and celebrating around bonfires in the courtyard of a big chateau.  Berger has shown us that Marshal Foch is a bad guy and has insisted upon humiliating terms that we know (with the hindsight of history) will lead to the rise of Hitler and the second World War.  But Berger wants to be evenhanded about this and, so, he invents (or highlights) an equally vicious German general who insists upon mounting an attack only 15 minutes before the end of hostilities.  Paul is killed in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting. The movie ends with a new recruit gathering dog-tags from dead German soldiers.  There are several famous passages in the novel that Berger has to cram into the last four days of the War.  In one attack, Paul ends up knifing a French infantryman and is trapped with the mortally wounded soldier in a shell-hole.  Paul regrets that he has murdered the Frenchman and is further traumatized when the man dies.  (In the novel and earlier films, Paul is stuck in the shell-hole with the dying man overnight -- in Berger's version, he escapes during daylight and walks back through No-Man's-Land during daylight.)  Kat's death, occurring during a bombardment (which rips up a cemetery exposing caskets and skeletons), Berger stages as a killing arising from the two friends attempt to steal a duck from a long-suffering farmer located conveniently near the front lines but in a peaceful bucolic valley.  Kat is shot by the farmer's little boy, carried to the field hospital by Paul where the older man is pronounced dead.  

Just about everything that could go wrong goes wrong at the end of the movie.  The final attack mounted against the French trenches seems utterly implausible and it makes no sense that the soldiers would en masse agree to this pointless assault.  (Berger shows an officer executing a couple of men to "inspire" the others -- but, of course, the soldiers are all armed and it seems utterly unlikely they would agree to a big suicidal frontal attack with only ten minutes remaining in the War.) The motivation of the general ordering this assault is mysterious -- he seems to be acting as a moustache-twirling villain acts; the wicked general is channeling Erich von Stroheim, but doesn't play the part nearly as effectively as Stroheim.   The climactic hand-to-hand combat involving Paul and some Frenchmen is staged like an Indiana Jones fistfight -- it has a lot of Hollywood razzle-dazzle that is out of place in this dour film.  Predictably, the French are enjoying some champagne and brandy when they are the victims of the cowardly sneak attack perpetrated by the Germans.  The film's ending makes hash of the movie's famous title -- there's a lot to report on the Western Front including the Armistice preceded by a  huge battle. The movie fatuously presents Paul's death as tragic and pointless because it occurs about one minute before the Armistice goes into effect.  But would his death in 1915 or 1917 have been any less tragic and any more meaningful? The ticking clock aspects of Berger's ending are meretricious and border-line despicable.    Remarque's muted ending, after the novel's exuberant Sturm und Drang expressionism, is extremely impressive and moving.  The war continues just without Paul.  Milestone's film, if anything, improves upon Remarque:  we have been shown that Paul collects butterflies -- in the famous final shot, we see his hand groping across the mud toward a butterfly; then, a shot rings out and Paul's hand goes limp.  

The 2022 version is pretty uniformly praised by critics.  In fact, it's not very good and it's hard to understand why Berger would import the entire negotiation theme into the film, effectively destroying the context for the picture's famous title.  The unmotivated and dastardly attack in the movie's last ten minutes is  incomprehensible.  Germans view everything through the lens of Hitler and, I suppose, Berger's approach to the movie is distorted by that perspective. Hitler and his cronies claimed that the Germans were winning the War when they were "stabbed in the back".  Berger seems to want to show that the Germans, in fact, stabbed the French in the back by mounting the final sneak attack.  The more you think about this movie and it's weird decision to cram all the famous scenes in the book into a four day period, the worse it seems.

In the Bedroom

 Todd Field's In the Bedroom was produced in 2001.  I was vaguely aware of the film but felt that its subject matter, grief that turns to murderous rage, was too unpleasant for me, dire content that would likely outweigh any merits in the film, and so I avoided the picture until Field's Tar, a masterpiece, I think, led me look into his earlier work.  As I surmised, In the Bedroom, is unsettling and very bleak, but the film is so beautifully made and persuasively acted that it's worth watching.  Field is a reticent and tactful director and he knows when to cut away from a sequence that is becoming unsustainably grim.  In the Bedroom, based upon a short story called "Killings" by Andre Dubus, is a little bit thin and pretty predictable -- but the film is wonderfully detailed and evocative.  (Dubus was a lifelong paranoic after his daughter was raped and carried firearms on his person -- he almost shot someone in a scuffle involving his son Andre Dubus III, also a well-known writer, and so the subject of the movie, vigilante justice, is uncomfortably close to the bone.)

In Camden, Maine, a doctor, Matt Fowler (TomWilkenson) leads an idyllic life with his wife, a music professor specializing in Bulgarian folk music.  The town seems to be dominated by two "town and gown" institutions (a bit like Northfield, Minnesota) -- there is a seafood packing plant owned by the Strout family and an expensive private college.  Matt, whose father was a lobster fisherman, and his wife, Ruth, played brilliantly by Sissy Spacek, have a single, much-beloved son, Frank.  Frank is applying to colleges, probably Harvard and Yale, and this will likely be his last summer in town.  The young man is handsome, successful with the ladies (he says he's had many girlfriends) and involved in a relationship with a much older woman, Nanette (Marisa Tomei).  Nanette has two sons and Frank is close to them, so close in fact that the Fowlers have erected a swing set in their yard on which the children can play.  Frank regards the affair as a summertime dalliance, although it's pretty obvious that he loves Nanette and her children.  His plan is to go away to school and end the relationship.  Unfortunately, Nanette is still married to her abusive and jealous husband, the scion of the Strout family, Richard.  Richard is a handsome thug and he is angry that Frank, a "college boy" as he says, is sleeping with his wife and acting as the father to his two little boys.  Frank's mother is protective of her son and thinks the romance with Nanette is a major mistake -- she urges Frank to break it off with Nanette.  Richard beats up Frank, cutting his eye badly.  Paradoxically, this makes Frank more attached to Nanette and her boys and, in fact, he contemplates staying in town and turning his side-gig of lobster fishing into a full-time job.  However,at last, it seems that he has decided to attend college and, in fact, is speaking to the admission's office when Nanette calls him and says that Richard has smashed up her house and is threatening her.  Frank runs to her defense and ends up with his brains splattered on the floor after he is shot by Richard.  This is the film's turning point, about one-third of the way through the movie.  

Dr. Fowler and his wife are devastated by the murder of their only son.  No one witnessed the killing and Nanette's versions of the event are confused and inconsistent.  Richard is released on bail and goes to work bartending in a spooky kind of beach board-walk strip in a nearby town.  Ruth encounters Richard in town at a store and thinks the young man is grinning at her -- in fact, he seems distressed at seeing Frank's mother and his expression is anguished and hard to interpret.  After a horrific fight involving mutual recriminatios between husband and wife, Matt plots with one of his close friends to take justice into his own hands. The friend has a large tract of woodland on a peninsula.  Matt abducts Frank at gunpoint and takes him to his friend's forest where the young man is shot.  Matt and his friend bury the boy in the muck during a thunderstorm.  Before dawn, returning to Camden, Matt and his buddy are stopped at turnbridge where, presumably, the operator of the structure identifies them driving around inexplicably at 4:30 in the morning.  (The implication is that Matt and his friend will be apprehended, but this is left uncertain.)  Matt returns to his home where his wife asks him if he has committed the crime as she has apparently demanded.  (Female lobsters are larger and more aggressive than the male and when a female bearing eggs encounters a male she often rips off its claws.)  Matt crawls into the bed, on the verge of a breakdown, and the film ends with suitably melancholy shots of the empty streets and silent homes in the cold, grey light of dawn.  

The film's subject is fairly obvious and the plotting is predictable.  That said, Field invests the movie with many impressive details and the film is very evocative of its place on the Maine coastline. Field, here,seems influenced by Bresson and there are many short scenes that end in fades to black -- tiny vignettes that dramatize the grief and anger of the bereft parents.  There are curious details -- a panning shot of Nanette's folk song choir, all girls, shows one of the young women with an eye that seems badly damaged.  A few minutes later, we see Frank lying dead on the floor at Nanette's house with his skull ripped open and an eye, it seems, on the carpet.  Before Matt departs on his mission of vengeance, the girls in Ruth's choir perform a concert, the girls all clad in virginal white marching in a candle-light procession across the grass to the amphitheater overlooking the harbor where they will sing.  A pastor tries in vain to comfort Ruth.  He describes a vision of a women who have lost children in a mournful ring around the earth (it's like a foreshadowing of the girls with candles at the concert).  But, we understand that Ruth is inconsolable and, in fact, we react with her to the pastor's words:  it's one thing to have lost a child, another to have lost a child to murder.  (This is never said but we understand this point implicitly).  Ruth, like Tar in Field's later film, is a music conductor and perfectionist.  Matt accuses her of abusing Frank and never being satisfied with him.  Ruth has started the vicious fight by  accusing her husband of secretly lusting after the beautiful and sexually promiscuous Nanette and, for his own vicarious satisfaction, encouraging the mesalliance.  The quarrel is so intense that we expect it to erupt into physical violence -- this is cringeworthy and makes the point that men and women are always on the verge of beating one another up, either emotionally or with fists.  As in Bresson, the film features three sequences of people interacting with machines -- shots that have a detailed immediacy:  we see how lobsters are caught in traps (a trapped lobster is said to be "In the Bedroom"), watch the canning process at the Strout factory, a place that is always at the edge of the frame or looming on the horizon, and, at last, see how the turnbridge gear works to rotate the span so that vessels can pass through the channel.  This latter sequence foreshadows the scene near the end of the movie in which the two murderers are trapped in an early morning queue of vehicles at the channel.  When the killers are digging Richard's grave, a twig snaps and the men turn around to see a large deer browsing the meadow.  Field is a very restrained film maker -- his compositions are very precise and exact.  He understands that every shot and every sequence doesn't need to be a visual aria -- this is unlike some directors like Terry Gilliam and, occasionally, Martin Scorsese.  When Field wants to make a visual point, however, he is tremendously ingenious and effective.  A short shot showing Richard's corpse wrapped in canvas and dragged in the red glare of taillights of an ATV or small jeep is horrifying.  In the final scene, Dr. Fowler lies in bed; Ruth has taken up smoking (with characteristic specificity, we see that she smokes Marlboro Lites) -- the cigarette on the bedside table makes Matt's chest seem to fume like a volcano; he can't get comfortable in his bed and Field uses dissolves to make it look as if he is physically decomposing before our eyes. Matt is oppressed by the pictures that he saw posted on Richard's wall, several drawings by his children and, most importantly, a picture of Richard with Nanette that seems to show that the two of them were genuinely in love.  (The film's opening shows a young couple, as yet unidentified to us, frolicking in a flowery meadow by the sea.  I wondered if this couple was Nanette with Richard, or with Matt and, so, I rewatched the beginning of the film to answer my questions about this sequence -- it's characteristic of Field's movies that they raise questions in the viewer that makes him or her immediately want to re-watch the picture.  In this case, it really doesn't matter as to whether it is Richard or Matt with the young woman -- the point is the lovers are fungible; one can stand in for the other, although when this happens chaos ensues.)  In the Bedroom is grim but worth watching for its beauty and intelligence and Oscar-worthy acting.  

The Wonder

 The Wonder (Sebastian Lelio, Netflix 2022) is not exactly a barrel of fun.  In fact, the film is so cheerless and dire that it's hard for me to recommend:  if the idea of watching an eleven-year old girl starve to death for ninety minutes appeals to you, then, this is your movie.  That said, The Wonder is intelligently made, well-scripted, and fascinating in a gruesome way.  My reservations about the picture have nothing to do with the craft with which the film was produced, the acting in the movie, or, even, its general themes -- my reservations relate to the fact that the movie is an ordeal to watch; some things are better read about than seen and, I think, The Wonder falls into this category.

In some remote and primitive backwater in Ireland, a young girl (Anna) has achieved notoriety, even a whiff of sanctity, by not touching a bite of food for four months.  (Her last repast was the body and blood of Christ taken at Communion).  The story takes place in the Victorian era, immediately after the Crimean War and the Irish potato famine -- both events cast a long shadow on the narrative.  A nurse from London travels to the bogs where the the girl lives with her parents; she is commissioned to watch the girl to confirm that her anorexia isn't fraudulent.  Since Anna is deemed to be a candidate for canonization, a nun is also charged with watching the girl when the nurse, the protagonist in the film, is off-duty.  The nurse is a "modern" woman, liberated according to the mores of the time.  (In fact, she's called "Lib" by the little girl.)  Of course, she clashes with the power structure in the village, a commission of five old men who have appropriated the miracle for their own purposes.  The nurse, named Elizabeth Davis, is badly damaged by her experiences in the Crimean War and has lost a baby, the product of a brief mesalliance -- the father decamped a couple days after the three week old infant died.  Elizabeth seems to be addicted to laudanum (or something that looks like cough syrup) and she morosely swallows her drug while ritualistically handling the little booties that her dead baby once wore.  In the course of the film, Elizabeth has a sexual encounter with an Irish journalist who plays a consequential role in the plot.  (As a measure of the film's depressive tone, the journalist's back-story is that his family of origin perished in the potato famine after having nailed shut from the inside the doors to their hovel -- they didn't want to endure the indignity of wandering around starving and, then, dropping dead in the street.)   Elizabeth solves the mystery of how the girl has survived for four months -- the answer to this enigma is suitably grotesque and will be nauseating to some sensibilities.  However, solving the mystery of the source of the girl's nourishment -- Anna calls it manna -- has the perverse effect of shutting down this supply of food.  Accordingly, the girl, who has been fed by her mother in the context of rather gothic family circumstances, now begins to starve in earnest.  She becomes weaker and weaker, loses the ability to walk, and, after being pushed around in wheel chair for part of the movie, becomes bedridden.  Elizabeth presents her findings to the commission of old men but they reject her conclusions with outrage -- all of them are invested in the girl's sanctity -- and the nun also refuses to support her desperate efforts to save the dying girl.  Finally, Elizabeth comes up with a scheme to convince the girl that she has died and been reborn as another child not burdened with the horrific secrets afflicting Anna.  This ruse succeeds and the film has a happy ending of sorts -- the nurse burns down the family home to conceal the fact that she has spirited away the child, escaping to Australia where, if the gloomy mood of the film is to continue, the protagonists will undoubtedly encounter indigenous victims of genocide and suffer plagues of toads and wild fires.  The film has a frame:  at the outset, we see the movie set and soundstage and the actor (Florence Pugh) who plays Nurse Elizabeth reminds us that the narrative is just a story but that human beings live (and die) by stories; at the end of the film, the camera tracks with a waiter who walks offstage briskly revealing Ms. Pugh, clad in sleek, funereal black, and staring at the camera:  she says "in out in out", a reference to a kind of zoetrope that Anna views in the film and that shows a bird both within and outside of a cage -- you spin the image on a coiled spring-like wire and the rotating picture, by virtue of persistence of vision shows a bird that sometimes seems to be in a cage and sometimes is free.  The idea is that we are both liberated and confined by the stories that we tell about ourselves.  A story can lead us to freedom but it is equally possible that the narrative that we have constructed will end up as a prison.  (There is an annoying notion in contemporary cinema that if we give people narratives that empower people they will somehow be free -- the Black Panther superhero franchise is based on this questionable concept; The Wonder is less sanguine about the liberating power of stories -- in this film, the characters are all trapped by the narrative that the Irish family has constructed to repress certain horrible aspects of their life; the story becomes inescapable to the extent that Anna and her mother sacrifice themselves to it.  In one of his aphorisms, Kafka says:  "A cage went in search of a bird.")

The film is based on a novel by Emma Donohue, a specialist in narratives that are disturbing, even horrific -- the film and novel The Room is the product of her imagination:  that story involved a mother and child confined by a sexual psychopath in a subterranean room for many years.  The Wonder indicts all the usual suspects:  the commission of old men represents the patriarchy at its most grisly, old gents who conspire together to destroy the little girl; the patriarchy is aided and abetted by the more medieval elements of the Catholic church and the landed elites -- the landlord for the tenant bog farmer who is Anna's father has a vested interest in establishing that there is a saint living on his leasehold.  A nasty old doctor, a quack, wants to prove theories of animal magnetism, photosynthesis, and the existence of the fountain of youth on the dying girl.  The bad guys are all awful and, rather, predictably, there is a component of sexual abuse to the story as well.  The movie is effectively shot -- the cottage where the bog farmer lives is an isolated abode (it's called a "cabin" in the film) in the middle of a blasted heath that looks like something described by one of the Bronte sisters -- it's all grey and brown heath, dwarf trees, and barren green hills, some of spiked like pyramids.  The dying girl's mother is filmed sitting in a trench full of water where she has been cutting black turf.  The interiors are all impoverished, cold and nasty-looking.  The camerawork is very good but not intrusive -- the director Sebastian Lelio doesn't want to impose on his story any gratuitous beauty.  The action in the film is mostly nasty:  Anna's tooth falls out, there's some close-up vomiting, and, at one point, the nurse jams a feeding tube about three yards into the little girl's body.  A posthumous picture of Anna's brother who has died has been painted with open eyes on his closed eyelids -- it's a startling image that shocks the viewer and really belongs in a horror film (although it's arguable that this picture is a kind of horror film).  Elizabeth is usually shown eating, probably some kind of hideous stew or gruel -- these shots serve as counterpoint to the little girl's anorexia.  Anna has an uncanny, cadaverous radiance -- she's usually shown in white, standing like an apparition in the chilly exteriors.  Even the sex scene between Elizabeth and the journalist is filmed as a brutish encounter -- the act looks positively unpleasant and uncomfortable.  The sex scene, as well as images of the London journalist leading a big black horse across the moor, seem to be gratuitous but, in fact, the movie is very well-written and everything fits together in a grim, but carefully engineered, manner.

Dilley Symposium Photo Exhibition and Lecture (Christ Episcopal Church November 12, 2022)

 Three photographers, Liz Bennett, Keith Cich, and Kevin Hanson, exhibited their work as part of a lecture symposium on contemporary camera-arts presented at Christ Episcopal Church in Austin, Minnesota on November 12, 2022.  Keith Cich spoke:  his talk was entitled An Instrument for Seeing:  Observing Ourselves through Photography.  Cich illustrated the themes in his lecture with photographs by various artists including Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand and Ansel Adams along with lesser-known photographers such as Wendy Red Star (her remarkable images warrant further investigation).  His words were thought-provoking and provided an excellent theoretical counterpoint to the pictures in the show.   You can't see this show -- it was as ephemeral as heat-lightning in the summer night sky (the pictures were hung on the 11th of November in a church basement and taken down by one pm the next day).  But the lecture and exhibition were memorable and readers should be attentive to future opportunities to see the work of these artists.  Taken together, the show represented different aspects of contemporary photographic practice and the work was highly sophisticated, challenging in some instances, and worthy of close consideration.  

Kevin Hanson's pictures are examples of expressively composed and lucid photo-journalism -- the title of his collective work in the show as "The Ticket" and the pictures document at least forty years of the Iowa caucuses and associated political activities, a traveling circus in which candidates mingle intimately with their supporters and prospective voters.  Because the Iowa caucuses are the first event of this sort in the election year, there is generally a crowded field of candidates and opportunities to observe them at close-hand before the scrum of reporters and photo-journalists becomes an inscrutable screen around front-running politicians in later venues.  Hanson's images show the candidates among crowds of people, working variations on the theme of the one and the many, the singular man or woman against the multitude.  In one picture, Bernie Sanders appears as an indelible white sliver in the middle of a sea of faces, implacable and resolute, it seems, unmoved among the agitated crowds.  Some pictures focus on the faces of the candidates and are iconic:  Chris Christy, for instances, appears as a monster out of Rabelais, Gargantua with his vast mouth open as if to swallow the whole landscape around him.  Other pictures show signs displayed forlornly against empty and bleak landscapes.  Whereas the politicians are shot in their natural habitat, among throngs of people, these signs suggest something lonely and alienated about our political process -- vacant space posted with names and slogans that are incommensurate with the indifferent nature in which the political signs are posed.  We see empty rooms with TVs screens flickering with the faces of candidates.  In one indelible image, Kamala Harris is shot from below and behind, her back and shoulders framed against a vast Ferris wheel (the picture was made at the Iowa State Fair); the wheel seems to signify the role that fortune plays in politics -- it's like an aerial roulette wheel -- and Harris' raised hand, raked by the late afternoon sun, is a gnarled and ancient mess of veins and wrinkles; her hand looks like the roots of an old and beleaguered tree.  The curious aspect of these pictures is how beautiful they are and how completely elusive and uncommunicative, as well, with respect to the personalities and the political ideologies of the candidates shown in the photographs -- one can't infer what motivates these politicians or what programs they espouse.  The photograph records landscapes in which a single figure somehow organizes a multitude around him or her -- but the basis for this organization, structural to many of the pictures, is unclear.  The pictures show us ideas that would be invisible to the naked eye at these events, but the ideas are formal and don't have much to do with the opinions or policies espoused by these politicians.  Hanson's show demonstrates the strength of photography to organize remarkably complex and, even, chaotic events, but, also, shows that a political understanding of the images depends on something extrinsic to them.

Liz Bennett takes pictures of people and places in her hometown of Swea City, Iowa (in Kossuth County on the Minnesota border in north central Iowa).  These pictures are accompanied by a suite of images made in Cuba.  Both sets of pictures, by and large, depict the complex textures and dilapidated forms and facades of places that have seen better days -- although her images are clear and, even, hard-edged there is something deliquescent and even partly decayed about the subject matter.  I characterize Ms. Bennett as a surrealist -- the buildings in Swea City and Havana, and the people visible in some of the shots, are like Dali's melting watches:  time is doing something sinister to these places and they are melting away before our eyes.  Lonely figures peer out of dark buildings -- there's something of the melancholy of Edward Hopper with homage to the great photographer Robert Frank about these photographs.  Someone has painted a door in Swea City, but run out of energy or time or pigment with respect to the spectacularly weathered walls in which the door is hung.  Some men are drinking beer, it seems, on a Havana street -- remarkably, one of the men seems to be stark naked although I suppose he is clothed partially in a way that the camera doesn't reveal.  A dog patrols the roof of a building:  "Mother Hen", the picture is labeled.  (Bennett gives her picture poetic captions that, in some cases, enhance the quality of enigma with which the pictures are invested).  In another photo, a hunting dog, possibly a Labrador retriever, grins at the camera.  But on the dog's flank, framed as a patch shaved in the animal's fur, there is a criss-cross of stitches from some kind of injury or surgery.  In the background, there is a dark aperture that seems to rhyme with the sutured hole in the dog -- this is the pooch's dog house.  A handsome old man with an indomitable, even, belligerent expression on his face, confronts the camera -- he isn't about to be cowed by the lens and the photographer.  A work glove, possibly for welding, reaches down from a clothesline to touch his shoulder -- at least, this is the perspective that the picture offers us.  (There's another brown, battered-looking glove facing us, palm forward on the same clothesline a little behind the man.)  The disembodied hand gropes for the old man to the point of putting a sinister mark on him.  In the next picture, we see the old man's gravestone, not yet installed in the cemetery, but sitting on a kind of folding table with some other bric-a-brac of a vaguely mortuary nature -- "found in the garage," the label tells us.  But why isn't the gravestone with the dead man?  (In her comments to those attending the exhibition, Liz Bennett noted that the man, her grandfather, died in Texas and, perhaps, was never brought back to Iowa from that place.)  A middle-aged lady stands next to a swimming pool on a resplendently bright day -- her bathing suit glows with two slashes of bright color, radiance that illumines the center of her body so that she seems to be gathering and focusing and reflecting light from the landscape around her.  (The label says she's a water aerobics instructor).  The woman looks happy and beams at the camera.  There's nothing even remotely self-conscious about her.  But in another shot, we see her poised on the end of the diving board and there's an ominous chill now in the air, a sense that she is about to venture into the unknown, and, although the day remains as palpably bright as before, an impalpable shadow has entered the frame -- when people are shot with their backs to us, there is something questionable even a bit macabre about the image.  Photography is about seeing and, when eyes and mouth are withheld, this brings something eerie and problematic into the image.

Keith Cich works in a vein of poetic introspection.  His images have an autobiographical valence and are suffused with melancholy.  Hanson's pictures present themselves as documentary and Bennett's images are reveries made objective -- everything in the pictures of these artists would be visible to the naked eye.  By contract, Cich manipulates his images:  in one set of pictures his face appears inverted on the glass viewfinder of an old single-lens reflex camera, a fine grid superimposed on his features; Cich shows himself upside-down as projected by the system of mirrors in the camera.  In another astonishing image, Cich shows his father, then-dying of cancer, enveloped in a sooty black blur, a sfumato-effect that shows the handsome middle-aged man succumbing, it seems, to the darkness that embraces him.  (Cich accurately described the picture as looking like a Rembrandt.)  In two other pictures, Cich shows his father (these photographs derive from Rembrandt portrait) -- in one of these images, Cich has substituted his own eyes for those of his father; yet the effect is imperceptible:  Cich both literally and figuratively has his father's eyes.  The idea of the eye is integral to most of Cich's pictures:  family portraits ask us to evaluate resemblances among kin and particularly how the eyes seem similar to one another.  A hand reaches toward a circular mirror in another stylized image of the eye.  Two deer heads glare out at us and, in context, we focus on the eyes of those animals -- the deer have a distinct mien of alarm and warning:  their glass eyes are strangely admonitory.  These pictures are about seeing and family -- indeed, one might argue how seeing is rooted in family and fascination of family likenesses, how features emerge from the vegetative darkness of kinship, flare into visibility briefly and, then, fade into the embrace of darkness.  A fallen tree shows a delicate filigree of roots, tendrils normally invisible in the darkness of the earth, but here shining in a ray of light that penetrates the black void where the earth has opened under the tree.  A fizz of seed-froth bubbles off the top of some dying weeds -- things grow out of the darkness.  An Eggleston-like image of florescent lights on a metal ceiling makes a cross:  x marks the spot.  The intersection is similar to the grid imposed over Cich's face.  A quotation from Virgil's Georgics reminds us that the eye is capable of swimming -- it overflows with tears or it carries us far out over the waters of Lake Superior shown in two beautiful and morose images:  a wasteland of water lit by twilight or extending to the empty extremity of the horizon.  In a forest, shadows give way to a blonde tree standing denuded on the edge of a pond.  Although the images are all disparate, they seem to form an ensemble:  in a note, the artist tells us that the pictures derive from a period of homesickness, when the photographer was far from his family of origin and when his father was in the late-stages of the cancer that would kill him -- the idea is to see things in a way that makes sense of this experience by raising questions of family continuity generation to generation and how the artist will engage with his own children.  At the center of Cich's group of pictures is an extraordinary portrait of his mother, a glamorous-looking woman with a swirl of turquoise at her throat and the same deep and penetrating gaze that characterizes other family members -- her eyes, it seems, are cameras.  

I thought the show was extraordinary, in the brief instant of its exhibition, the finest show of photographs in the world.  Here are three more examples:  In Iowa, a man confronts a little girl holding a political sign; other signs are visible in the same picture and, in the background, a long way distant it seems (but probably closer than it looks) we see the flares of flashbulbs shining against the late afternoon gloaming.  Politics is the great game that engages us all in a democracy but there is more than a little bit childish about it.  The light bulb flares are like torches.  In Havana, I suppose, or maybe Swea City, there is a petrified-looking cage barren except for a petrified-looking bird, surely one of the saddest and most bleak cages ever photographed.  As in certain landscapes by Magritte, the cage seems to be caught in a transformation into mineral enclosing a mineral bird.  A great paralysis and confinement stiffens the world with rigor mortis.  In a Minnesota forest somewhere, a place possibly stalked by Yeti-like Big Foot creatures, a tree branch enclosed in dark green leaves with a dark green enamel finish presents several apples.  The apples are rose-red, the kind of fruit that a witch might present to a beautiful young girl in order to poison her into a hundred year's sleep.  The apples don't exactly glisten and they are very dark, like drops of blood on the picture.    

Cul-de-sac

 Two men with clownish features are bickering in a car stuck in the mud.  A strange angular castle juts out above a causeway and bleak tidal flats.  One of the men is wounded and seems to be only semi-conscious.  He wears coke-bottle lens glasses and has a huge nose.  The other man speaks with the accent of a heavy in an American gangster film and has a gruff, abrasive-sounding rasp of a voice.  Apparently, the men are criminals who have botched some sort of a heist and are now fleeing.  After more quarreling, the man with the raspy voice removes a tommy-gun from the stranded sedan and says that he is going to seek assistance at the castle on the outcropping over the tidal estuary.  In the seaside dunes, the gangster comes upon a couple making love.  Later, the thug encounters the woman again with another man, her somewhat effete and nervous husband, George.  George's wife, Teresa has painted his face with make-up and dressed him in women's lingerie, apparently for a lark.  But, needless to say, George doesn't present a very formidable figure to the American thug, Dickie who is toting the big submachine-gun.  Dickie says that he has to retrieve his wounded buddy, Albie, from the car, now sinking into the mud and partially flooded by the advancing tide.  Albie, who is gut-shot, is dragged onto the patio under the looming castle-keep where he is laid on a dining table and slowly dies.  The castle is infested with aggressive chickens and the food stocked in the medieval-looking kitchen consists entirely of eggs supplemented with copious stores of booze.  Dickie calls his boss, someone named Katelbach, and asks that someone be sent to rescue the two marooned criminals.  But Katelbach, apparently, is disgusted with the botched heist and it's not clear that he is willing to retrieve his two henchmen.  Sometimes, planes swoop over the castle and flooded tidal flats.  

Time hasn't been kind of Roman Polanski's 1966 Cul-de-sac. a theater of the absurd production that raises existential questions that are, now, dead as a doornail -- the universe is an unforgiving wasteland, the monuments of man are falling into decay and no longer have any meaning, and, as Sartre reminds us in No Exit, "hell is other people":  the characters all are "odd couples" who engage in sado-masochistic power games with one another.  Dickie, who looks like Bert Lahr, and the saturnine, doomed Albie are like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot -- here they are holed-up waiting for Katelbach, a mysterious figure who (it becomes obvious) isn't coming to save them.  Teresa and George obviously represent a mesalliance -- the voluptuous and beautiful French woman is taller and stronger than the fey George whom she dominates.  George is played by Donald Pleasance who is surprisingly attractive when made-up and in drag; Pleasance who seems bewildered for most of the movie is the best thing in the picture -- Teresa continuously hectors him to act like a man and do something about the hostage situation, but, of course, nothing is to be done.  The film slides into Pinter territory when another married couple with a bratty little boy and Teresa's lover from the dunes appears unexpectedly for a visit.  Teresa and George act as if the tough-talking American gangster Dickie is their man-servant and a meal is served -- apparently, consisting of fried eggs and an omelette washed down with copious amounts of booze.  By this time, poor Albie has died and been buried by Dickie and Teresa (who manfully delves in the stony soil with her shovel).  After the visitors depart, there's some gunplay -- George has extracted Dickie's pistol from his coat and brandishes it.  Teresa flees and, after Dickie has been shot, the insulted and injured and humiliated George takes the tommy-gun and shoots the deceased gangsters' sedan, blowing it up.  Now, alone, George sits near the corpse and the smoking ruin of the car and laments his fate.  

The movie is shot in harsh black-and-white.  The night scenes, of which there are many, are harshly lit with flares of raking light.  In the sunshine, the characters have a stark, gaunt, and haggard look and they all act viciously toward one another.  The acting is good and Donald Pleasance is particularly memorable in his role as the abased and self-loathing George.  The film's script and action is pitiless:  human beings are the victims of indifferent and meaningless fate:  everyone claws at everyone else and all relationships are based upon one party abusing and humiliating someone who is weaker or disadvantaged in some way.  Parts of the movie are quite funny, but, of course, it's all pointless -- how could it be otherwise?  Beckett's influence hangs heavy over the movie -- the actor who plays the dying Albie is Jack MacGowan, an Irish thespian, who specialized in roles in Beckett's plays.  Lionel Stander who plays the gruff Dickie is like a combination of Ernest Borgnine and Eugene Pallette, the burly gravel-voiced comedian in many films made in the thirties.  Stander's very good as well, but the part isn't much more than that of barking dog.  Polanski seems to think he's discovered something new and interesting and the film has an uncompromising avant-garde sensibility, but, to be honest, the plot involving a cruel gangster victimizing hostages was old when Edward G. Robinson (with Bogart) played that part in John Huston's 1948 Key Largo (people held hostage in a bar during a hurricane) and, of course, Lionel Stander channels Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours (1955).  Those movies made all the same points as are developed in Cul-de-Sac and with considerable more style, effectiveness, and aplomb.  

The Northman

 Robert Eggers' The Northman (2022) is a morose, doom-laden revenge drama capitalizing on recent enthusiasm for Vikings.  As with the ancient Egyptians, fascination with the Vikings waxes and wanes.  At this moment, we are experiencing a Viking revival:  several important studies have traced the history and archaeology of the Norsemen (Laughing Shall I Die:  the Lives and Deaths of Great Vikings by Tom Shippey and Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price) and there have been popular TV shows about the Vikings, including a historically exact comedy series from Norway, Norsemen; of course, Game of Thrones and its offshoots were filmed in Iceland and has a vaguely Viking esthetic. Eggers' The Northman has been researched to within an inch of its life and I have no doubt that the movie is true to many details of Scandinavian life around the year 895 (a title identifies the period):  it all looks painfully authentic and the characters speak in a sort of menacing gibberish and there are many scenes featuring shamanic and religious rituals, but the movie is inert, sluggish, and completely unconvincing notwithstanding some impressive actors-- Willem Dafoe gets a cameo and the hero is played by Alexander Skarsgaard.  As both Shippey and Price point out, the Vikings murdered and mutilated and enslaved lots of folks and were inscrutable bad-asses when they embarked on raids, but, by and large, the Norsemen, at least in the off-season, were peasant farmers and spent most of their lives raising sheep and oats and a lot of their culture involved agriculture, harvest feasts, weaving and activities of that sort.  Eggers' Vikings are single-minded killing machines and they are utterly and completely humorless, a serious defect in the film particularly for viewers who know the sagas and appreciate the sardonic, understated comedy in those epics.  The Northman features lots of burly men with tangled hair and beards glowering implacably at one another -- everyone, even the women, display war faces and they scowl and glare to beat the band.  

The story is a crayola-crayon version of Hamlet.  A well-born youth observes his uncle ambush his father so as to murder him and seize the crown -- an honor that seems to be rulership over some wretched villages and few subterranean chambers full of fires tended by sullen norns and sorcerers, but with Nicole Kidman as the Queen of the realm.  After biting off the nose of one of the murderers, the dead man's son escapes.  A few years later, we see him practicing ferocity with a bunch of berserkers -- more burly men prancing around next to big bonfires.  In the land of Rus, the Viking longboats raid a village, kill a lot of people, and take slaves.  In an elaborate and pointless scheme to book passage to Iceland, where the murderer of his father is now farming, the hero brands himself with a red-hot iron as a slave (a thrall) and survives a tempestuous passage to Rekyavik where he gets purchased by (you guessed it) his uncle the murderer.  (There would have been a lot easier way to accomplish the various killings that the film features but, as in the Shakespeare version, the narrative requires intricacies and delays before the revenge plot can get properly underway.)  With the assistance of a Slavic prophetess, one of the breed of very pale skinned and blonde women who populate HBO's Game of Thrones et. al., the hero starts slaughtering people on his uncle's remote farmstead.  For a while, the movie plays out like a version of Beowulf with a night-stalker dragging men out of the mead-hall and positioning them picturesquely on the thatched roof of the building.  The hero exposes his plot to his mother (Nicole Kidman) but, guess what? -- she doesn't want to be rescued by her murderous son and, in fact, was complicit in the butchery of her husband, our protagonist's father.  So the hero kills everyone but his uncle, saving him for the climactic face-off. Then, there's a big volcanic eruption and the two hefty swordsmen meet for a climactic duel staged, implausibly, in the middle of trickling red creeks of magma.  Most of the movie is shot at night.  There are lots of ravens and, in one scene, the animal helpers peck away the hero's rope fetters so that he can escape and continue to prosecute his revenge.  We get a Viking funeral, complete with a ship and horse sacrifices.  A human sacrifice is planned but thwarted -- everyone speaks in ornate nonsense that is completely remote from any form of human diction.  Bjork appears as some of kind of norn or weird woman.  Nicole Kidman gets a long speech in which she admits to her criminality and taunts her son -- it's impressive in a dreary sort of way.  A raid on a village is staged in one or two very long takes that are quite well choreographed but strangely ineffective -- you can admire the long tracking shot without finding it particularly interesting.  The movie is very long and dull.

Robert Eggers is a film-maker of promise although his best movie was his first and cheapest, The Witch.  Obviously, he is an assiduous researcher and The Witch was an effective tour of English peasant folkways and superstitions and, in fact, quite frightening -- it involved an isolated farmstead (as in The Norseman) and a talking goat.  The Lighthouse, shot in morbid black and white, was an elaborate two-handed study in cabin fever; two lighthouse-keepers boozing it up with some horrible decoction (rum mixed with tar?) while going violently mad on a small rock island surrounded by turbulent sea.  Eggers is insistent upon people speaking his own particular dialect in his films and, in The Lighthouse, the accents are so heavy that I couldn't understand any of the long and, apparently, impressive speeches.  The movie was much ado about nothing:  a cabin fever epic way too long for its subject matter.  The Norseman is similarly obtuse -- the story is uninteresting and it's hard to understand the guttural and oracular declarations of the characters.  There is some throat-singing on the soundtrack.  We see a Valkyrie who inexplicably is wearing orthodontic braces on her teeth and there are repeated shots of Yggdrisal, the World Tree, with corpses dangling from its branches.  Sjon, the Icelandic magic realist novelist, wrote the screenplay with Eggers.  

Nope

Nope is an intricate and baroque horror movie about an aerial predator that devours human beings and, then, excretes their indigestible parts.  Beginning with a nasty epigraph from the biblical Book of Nahum, the film involves "filth" falling from the sky -- mercifully, most of this filth is in the form of metals:  that is belt-buckles and other hardware including loose change in the pockets of the victims of the flying whatzit.  Directed by Jordan Peele, the movie is visually impressive, although, perhaps, it relies upon too many peculiar locations and artifacts:  key elements in the movie involve a wretched little tourist attraction that simulates a western town, a wishing well that is, in fact, a giant camera that takes photographs through the aperture of its shaft, Muybridge's studies in animal locomotion, a hand-cranked camera, and an army of inflatable figures in various colors that flare up on the desert and flail away at the sky.  A giant balloon showing a chubby globular cowboy with a six-gun is also recruited into the movie's final confrontation with the monster and there is a sub-plot involving a chimpanzee slaughtering and mutilating actors on the set of a popular TV show.  All of this highly ingenious and cleverly done, but the movie feels a bit desperate as if the writer and director, Jordan Peele, is assembling random oddities in the hope that they somehow accumulate into a coherent motion picture.  And, for the most part, Peele succeeds and, if nothing else, Nope is entertaining, well-paced, and quite scary.

Jordan Peele was a successful comedian before he began making (and producing as well) horror films.  Nope is the third movie that he has directed and appears to be a very lavish, high-budget production.  Peele's two earlier pictures, Get Out and Us were designed to be both frightening and, also, astute socio-political documents, critiques of the White power structure in the United States.  These themes are most directly advanced in Get Out, but, also, notable in Us, a film that posits a subterranean caste of workers underlying our reality. only occasionally intersecting in disastrous ways with our reality.  Nope is largely free of tendentious political commentary and doesn't seem to be directly about racial or economic politics in the United States.  To be sure, there are some elements of the film that imply a criticism of the representation of race in American media, but these themes are more or less incidental to the narrative.  Nope is very challenging with respect to its narrative structure.  In some respects, the film seems to be like a horror movie made by Jean-Luc Godard -- at key points, the movie simply stops the action, interposing a black screen to signify a hiatus or lacuna in the narrative; indeed, some scenes simply end in mid-sentence, having set up some kind of confrontation or revelation  but, then, cutting away from the pay-off or resolution of the sequence.  On its face, the movie has a peculiar structure -- it's divided into chapters that are given the name of a major character in each section.  At first, the chapters really don't seem to cohere and part of the pleasure in watching Nope is assembling the parts into a sort of whole.  The chief riddle that the movie poses is the relationship of the main action (involving the flying whatzit) with a subordinate plot that involves flashbacks to a soundstage where a chimpanzee has run amuck, ripping off a woman's face and killing a number of other actors and crew (while an applause sign signals futilely to the studio audience that has fled the scene).  There is a relationship between the subplot involving the homicidal chimp and the aerial predator but the connection is rather abstract and the two narratives, about very different things, don't really comment on one another.  This disconnect between the main and sub-plot is intentional, but it raises questions about Poole's intentions here -- interesting questions to be sure and ones that I'm not sure the movie really answers.  Critics who have tried to assimilate Nope to the more obvious political and racial satire in the director's earlier two films go badly wrong, in my view, in imposing an allegory or symbolism on this movie -- the picture exists to deliver certain thrills (for instance a Black man on a horse challenging the aerial monster while surging orchestral music plays) that don't represent anything outside of the movie or its narrative universe.  This picture is, in effect, a "creature-feature" of a particularly classic form -- images of the monster are withheld and, for the first hour, the identity and nature of the creature is disguised, hidden so thoroughly (although sometimes in plain sight) that a viewer might be advised to watch the movie, at least, twice in order to figure out what is going on.  People sometimes gesture to the sky and shout warnings, but we can't exactly see what is frightening them.  In a couple of scenes, the monster seems to come  to earth, but these sequences are red herrings, misdirections pointing away from the creature.  When the monster is finally revealed, the picture becomes lyrical and soars -- the creature is strangely  diaphanous in one of its avatars, a system of abstract of fields of translucent force that pulses geometrically over the barren grasslands and California foothills.  In an abstract way, the plot could be characterized as a story about a group of people struggling to obtain a clear picture of an anomaly, an extra-terrestrial being or a terrestrial cryptid of a particularly strange and beautiful form.  Once, the monster is visualized this seems to be adequate to the movie's intentions and, so, the film ends.  The notion of seeing the monster and recognizing it turns out to be integral to the movie -- the monster attacks the eyes:  if you look at it, the creature swoops down, sucks you into its gullet (shown as a sort oscillating womb) and, then, spits out your eyeglasses or shoes or the nickels and quarters in your pocket.  Seeing here is equated with being the victim of predation.  If you dare to look at the creature, Medusa-like, it will destroy you.  Hence, the audience is privileged to see what the characters must turn away from -- if the flying monster knows you are looking at it, the creature will devour you.  This motif turns out to be integral to the film:  the chimpanzee attacked the sit-com actors because it was tired of being the subject of the gaze of humans, a gaze mechanically established, as well, by the cameras used to photograph the sit-com featuring the primate.  (Hence, the central role of cameras and moving pictures, including the Muybridge studies of galloping horses, to the film.)  In an early scene, a horse is spooked into violence by people looking at it on a movie set.  So the concept articulated in the picture is that seeing is dangerous, but, also, profitable -- a movie is made to be seen and produce income for its participants; similarly, the characters in the film hope to become rich and famous by selling pictures of the monster to Oprah Winfrey.  

Peele's movie is exquisitely shot and the climax is staged brilliantly.  Much of the film is quite funny in a very dark,  high concept sort of way.  The score is orchestral, sounds like Aaron Copland, and through-composed, a continuous threnody sometimes accelerating into exciting movie music that imitates the scores to classical Westerns like The Big Country or The Magnificent Seven.  (In some ways, the continuous elaborate score underlying the action reminds me of the way that Spike Lee uses music in his pictures, an undercurrent of melody that doesn't necessarily comment on or underscore the action but that moves in way that is parallel to it.)  The title Nope is a joke -- whenever someone in this movie is confronted with a horror to awful to imagine, the character simply rejects the situation and says "Nope!" signifying that something to the effect of:  I see it but I don't believe it and I'm certainly not going to engage with what I see.

Great horror films are also beautiful -- they show us an unseen and malevolent world that is organized according to principles of esthetics that we can recognize but not fully understand.  Peele's picture aspires to this horror-movie pinnacle and mostly succeeds.  Parts of the movie feel too arbitrary and there's, paradoxically,, too much content in the film, but it mostly hangs together in a (mostly) satisfying way. 

 

X

 X  is a horror film directed by Ti West and released in 2022.  The movie is a beautifully shot and intelligently made mad-slasher picture, but it can't overcome the fundamental and misogynistic limitations of the genre.  That said, it's entertaining in a gory way and, viewed as a low-budget exploitation film, it's pretty convincing -- there's lots of sex, tits and ass, and plenty of gruesome carnage.  The movie isn't really frightening -- we know from the outset that the picture is just a hyper-violent and sexualized variation of Psycho, the grandfather of the genre, but the acting is reasonably good, although, one must hasten to say, not good enough to cause us to really care about any of the victims of killer's gruesome rampage.

Set in 1979, X involves a group of young people who travel to a remote location somewhere in southeast Texas to shoot a pornographic movie.  There's a Black ex-Vietnam vet (Marine Corps) stud, a trash-talking blonde bimbo, and a cocaine-addicted girl-next-door type together with the director, an openly avaricious young man who looks a bit like Matthew McConaughey who expects to make a fortune from the filthy "smut" that he is producing.  The crew consists of a mousy college girl (they call her "Church Mouse") and her geeky cameraman boyfriend who is convinced that he is bringing "avant garde film techniques" to the movie.  For some obscure reason, the porno movie is filmed in a sort of bunkhouse, about a hundred yards away from a big old ranchhouse where an old man and his wife live.  The old man has agreed to let the crew shoot in the bunkhouse for a fee of $30 dollars and it's not quite clear that he knows what kind of movie is being made on his premises.  Near the bunkhouse, there's a sinister-looking lagoon patrolled by a big, horrible-looking alligator.  (As Chekhov said:  "If you introduce an alligator in the first act, that alligator had better eat someone in the play's last act.")  In the ranch-house, a TV is tuned to some kind of evangelical preacher who sermonizes on the black-and-white tube in inserted shots throughout the whole movie.  After about forty minutes of establishing narrative, someone starts murdering the cast and crew of the porno film -- as is always the case with this kind of movie, the killings seem to be some kind of perverse punishment for sex and, since the film involves the production of a porno film (The Farmer's Daughter) there's lots of copulation to atone for, sex acts filmed fairly explicitly or, at least, for maximum voyeuristic impact.  The movie is witty, well-acted, and interestingly staged, until the sun goes down -- then, the picture turns into a garden variety slasher film, with increasingly brutal and bloody murders staged for the camera until the so-called "final girl", the last survivor manages to kill the monstrous slasher(s) and escape.  Everything in the last half of the movie (with the exception of maybe one killing) is devised in a way that is wholly predictable -- the writer and director of the movie, Ti West, is clearly a brilliant moviemaker, but he can't do anything with the premise and once the slasher killings begin, there's really no point to watching the rest of the movie -- it's just an unpleasant sequence of gory deaths.  (Spoilers follow.)

The murderers are the old man and woman who live in the ranch-house overlooking the ramshackle cottage where the porno film is being made.  The old man and woman are suitably unpleasant-looking, although their appearance is the result of old age and not some sort of extrinsic disfigurement.  (The film posits as its chief horror that fact that the two oldsters would want, and, indeed, attempt to, have sex.  This aspect of the film is "Ageist" and the older you are, the more unpleasant this seems.)  The influence of both Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hangs heavy over the movie.  The bunkhouse is apart from the "house of horrors" on the hill (complete with a cellar hiding a mangled corpse and rooms full of ancient, morbid-looking dolls); as in Hitchcock's classic, to which the dialogue explicitly refers, the "house of horrors" is often shot from a low angle. By contrast, the rambling bunkhouse is like the Bates' Motel, an annex to the gruesome sequences in the big Victorian mansion.  (There's also the lagoon and, as in Psycho, even, a dead man's car drowned in the water where the alligator lurks.)  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is referenced in the opening shots in which some saturnine Texas rangers explore the murder scene and make grim declarations about its horrors (like the Chainsaw Massacre's opening scene in the cemetery) and the entire situation shown by the film -- a spunky troop of amateur movie-makers collaborating to produce an indelible exploitation movie relates back to the earlier horror movie.  The movie's villains are, also, derived from the oldsters in Tobe Hooper's Chainsaw Massacre -- they're made up in the same way.  (The old woman has a nimbus of white hair that is always rim-lit and that shines with a silvery radiance; filmed from the rear, however, she looks more than a little like Norman Bates' mom.)  The young actors who are slaughtered one-by-one are fairly appealing although they're just cannon-fodder and we don't have the leisure to get to sympathize with them very much -- they're like lab rats, cute and endearing but doomed from the outset.

Although the movie is garbage, it's remarkably well-shot and effectively edited.  There are many long takes involving people moving across the somewhat desolate landscapes and the interior shots are gorgeous -- we can see the woods and meadows through the windows glowing in the magic-hour gloaming and the beds and shabby couches in the bunkhouse are warmly lit so that the naked bodies shine with an amber-colored radiance.  In one scene, a young woman sheds her clothing to swim at twilight in the lagoon (not aware that she's sharing the water with a twelve-foot gator).  In a close-up, we see the pond water rippling around her face reflecting a hundred different colors.  Before the film becomes pointless, the young woman recording sound becomes fascinated with the sex scenes and decides she wants to participate as well.  Her boyfriend, the camera-man is hypocritically appalled. The director expansively says:  "No, no, the camera changes everything," and the blonde Houston call-girl notes that people need to make a distinction between love and sex.  All of this dialogue is pointed and well-written.  It's too bad that when the killings begin, the movie has no place to go.   

The Oxbow Incident

 An economical and bleak anti-lynching film, The Oxbow Incident (1943) encourages us to detest the detestable.  William Wellman's picture is effective, but, ultimately, I think, more than a little dishonest.  At a time when there were many lynchings of Black men, The Oxbow Incident dramatizes the extra-judicial killing of two White men and a Mexican.  (Traditionally, Hollywood has avoided depicting lynchings involving African-American victims -- this is because these killings ordinarily involved allegations of rape and would have alienated audiences in the American South.  The two most noteworthy anti-lynching films made during Hollywood's Golden Age were Fury (1938) and The Sound of Fury (1950) -- both movies that are based upon the 1933 lynching of two White men, Thurmond and Holmes, alleged to have kidnapped and murdered a young man in San Jose.  Both of these films are estimable:  Fury was made with Spencer Tracy by Fritz Lang; The Sound of Fury is one of Cy Endfield's last American films, made before the director was blacklisted and had to emigrate to England).  The Oxbow Incident, based on a 1940 novel by William van Tillburg Clark is nominally a Western and stars Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan as the two cattle-tramps caught up in the lynching -- but the film is atypical as a Western and, with a few exceptions, doesn't look (or feel) much like a film in that genre.  It's a classic Hollywood "message" movie, complete with a moral written in the form of a last letter to wife and children penned by one of lynching victims (played by Dana Andrews); Henry Fonda reads the letter at the film's climax to drive home the point that lynching is bad and that the law is our bastion against chaos and injustice and there's a bit of the tone Fonda's final peroration as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940).

Two cow-punchers ride into a small village in western Nevada.  A mangy dog trots across the screen as they ride down the hamlet's dusty main street.  In a bar, the cowboy played by Fonda bemoans the fact that a woman that he admires, probably a prostitute, is no longer in town.  There's a lack luster fist fight and, when Fonda's character, is waking up (after being knocked senseless by a bottle was broken over his head), a couple of men ride into town hell-for-leather crying out that a prominent local rancher has been found shot dead in a dry gulch and his cattle rustled.  The townsfolk assemble a ridiculously large posse -- probably fifty men under the leadership of a man who claims to have been a Confederate officer:  he sits ramrod straight on his horse, just like Robert E. Lee on Traveler.  A local lawyer and judge decry the pursuit of the murderers by the posse who has become an openly avowed lynch mob.  Fonda and his buddy are caught up in the posse, although they have reservations about the enterprise.  In a desolate canyon, three men are found sleeping in the cold by a fire.  These men include a young cowboy with a wife and two children living on a ranch nearby, a Mexican (played with suitable arrogance and ferocity by Anthony Quinn) and a confused old man.  Circumstantial evidence points to the men's complicity in the murdered rancher's death.  After much debate, a vote is taken as to whether the men should be brought back to town for trial or lynched from a convenient tree on the spot.  Only seven of the 50 members posse stand against the lynching and so the three men are summarily strung-up and, then, shot as they strangle to death.  As the lynch mob rides down off the mountain, they encounter a couple of riders who tell them that the rancher who was allegedly murdered wasn't killed at all and is apparently alive and well.  The mob rides back to the town.  The Confederate officer who looks like General Lee commits suicide after being denounced by his apparently homosexual and effete son -- the old man made his son participate in the murders to prove his manliness.  The rest of the mob sit in the bar glumly drinking whisky.  The local sheriff tells them that they will have to live with their mistake for the rest of their lives but that he isn't going to have anyone prosecuted.  Fonda and his buddy ride out of town as the same mangy dog crosses the screen again, this time sauntering across Main Street in the opposite direction.

The film is grimly effective with respect to its portrait of vigilante justice.  The lynch mob is comprised of many ordinary men but among them are some grotesques -- a toothless old drunk sadistically dramatizes the imminent lynching by twisting his neck, grimacing and bugging out his eyes; Jane Darwell plays a vicious matron in jeans on horseback toting a big shotgun -- she's horrible but so vividly acted that she exudes a sort robust gusto, a bit like a horseback Wife of Bath, and her sneering performance is marvelous and perversely engaging and, even, attractive.  There's an absolutely pointless subplot involving Henry Fonda's former girlfriend whom we meet dismounting from a stagecoach on a narrow canyon defile -- there's been some gunplay based on mistaken assumptions that the posse is band of robbers (true enough in a  way) and Harry Morgan is slightly wounded.  Fonda has an encounter with a orotund San Francisco lawyer, who may or may not be aware, that his bride is a saloon girl.  The girl vamps a little for Fonda, and the lawyer, who is courtly, extends the cowboy an invitation to his San Francisco manor -- none of this has anything to do with the lynching and, after a five minute scene, the woman and her attorney husband vanish from the movie with no consequence at all on the principal plot.  (It seems that this episode may be an artifact from the novel although summaries of the novel that I have read don't mention this aspect of the story either.)  One expects that Fonda and his sidekick may know the identity of the real murderer, or may even be implicated in the man's killing, but it turns out that there was no killing at all and so the movie's two heroes are merely bystanders, detached observers who oppose the hangings but don't really do anything to stop them.  The point may be that a lynching makes everyone complicit but this isn't exactly dramatized and, the unpleasantness behind them, the two cowpokes just ride out of town sadder, but not necessarily wiser.  There is a Black clergyman who administers a few prayers to the doomed men and, then, sings "Lonesome Valley" after the extra-judicial killings -- his presence is intended to alert the audience about the main stakes in the film, that is, the concealed subtext involving the slaughter of Black men throughout the country; the southern general, who turns out to not have fought in the War at all, is also a symbol of the White supremacy that made racist lynchings ubiquitous -- but this theme is addressed so ellliptically as to be essentially absent from the movie.  

The defect in the movie is that it is too liberal and optimistic in its view of human nature.  So far as I know, no one who participated in a lynching ever expressed any remorse or regret.  People will always find ways of justifying their bad actions -- this is how people are.  No doubt the lynch mob here would have consoled themselves, if anyone felt the need for consolation, by simply observing that anyone in their place, confronted with the same circumstantial evidence, would have acted in the same way.  No one admits fault.  The more grave the crime, the less likely is it that anyone will admit wrongdoing -- and this is particularly true where the crime is one that involves a mob of people.  Has anyone expressed any sincere regret over the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021?  I don't think so.

The Oxbow Incident is handsomely shot.  Some of the locations involve the trails and gravel roads leading up to the so-called Whitney Portal (the trails heads leading to the top of Mount Whitney) in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Lone Pine. (This is where High Sierra was filmed).  However, much of the film looks theatrical, like a play recorded on celluloid and the half of the movie takes place in a convincing, if stylized, set on a soundstage, complete with an ominous hanging tree and a little stream trickling through the foreground.  It's strangely lit, somewhat expressionist, and the pervasive day-for-night and shadowy camerawork on the movie soundstage creates a suitably claustrophobic and strangled atmosphere.