Better Call Saul and Barry -- Endings

There's a curious conjunction between the final episodes of AMC's Better Call Saul, now available on Netflix and HBO's series Barry.  In both programs, the shows' directors, writers, and showrunners seem to have become exhausted and, perhaps, even contemptuous of their material and characters in these long-running shows.  I have often commented that the format for shows on Cable TV encourages narrative inefficiency and, even, overt padding.  (There are many instances of this dating back to Fassbindser's 16 or so episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz made for German TV in   ; there are hour-long shows in that series in which literally nothing takes place -- people drink and quarrel to no end in supernal darkness on claustrophobic sets and that;'s about it; you can barely see what's going on but there's nothing to see because nothing is going on anyhow.)  Both Barry and Better Call Saul in their final iterations have a weird posthumous quality -- the shows seem to outlive themselves and continue in only a faint semblance to those qualities that made them popular and famous.  Because these shows were written and produced by world-class talents, these curious "zombie"-endings are not without interest.  Indeed,these shows remain brilliant and innovative but in a peculiarly desultory way -- in their concluding episodes both Better Call Saul and Barry veer into despondent surrealism.  It's a kind of insult to the audience. an action melodrama (or neo Noir) with bigger than life characters and plot lines that suddenly reneges on all the promises earlier made to the viewers and drifts into narrative limbo; it's as if Samuel Beckett were engaged to bring these popular and highly acclaimed shows to their conclusions, which are less conclusion than a sort of radical reject of every thing that came before.  I can't tell if this strangely disenchanted effect arises from an artistic impulse to subvert and question the gaudy violence and operatic melodrama of the previous seasons or if this ennui evidences some sort of laziness or, even, disdain for the viewers.  Nonetheless, both Better Call Saul and Barry morosely slip off the rails in a fascinating way that is very similar.

Better Call Saul, of course, is a spin-off of the brutal crime drama, a very dark Black Comedy Breaking Bad.  Saul Goodman (a slurred 'it's all good, man.') is crooked lawyer.  In earlier seasons, he has various adventures, mostly involving two narrative threads -- in half the shows, Saul (previously called Jimmie McGill) connives to thwart the "silk-stocking law firms" in Albuquerque where the show is set; these episodes are satirical, although highly realistic in their details about the legal profession, and they involve Jimmie/Saul inflicting various indignities on his arrogant, snooty betters (so they think) at the Bar.  These episodes feature a lot of inside jokes about the legal profession, the implicit point being that all lawyers are crooks of one sort or another and that it's vanity for one set of serpents to regard themselves as better than others.  The other narrative strand is a florid and violent account of the shyster lawyer's entanglement with warring Mexican drug cartels -- these shows involve high-stakes, huge amounts of money, all sorts of torture and coercion and dozens of bloody assassinations.  The two aspects of Better Call Saul are generally kept apart, although from time to time, the high comedy involving class actions and public defenders (and the harried prosecutor for Bernalillo County) intersect with the blood-and-thunder murders and vendettas in the drug cartel narratives.  In most instances, a 42 minute episode (the show had commercials when shown on AMC) will be equal part satire about the machinations of various Albuquerque lawyers (whom Jimmy outsmarts -- he's sort of a trickster figure) and the gruesome fighting between drug gangs competing for the market in southwestern methamphetamine (the link to the meth labs and crime syndicates involved in Breaking Bad)  

In the final 13 part season of Better Call Saul, begins with bloody fighting between rival drug cartels.  An attempt to assassinate one gang leader, Lalo Salamanca, goes awry and results in a dozen or so killings.  Salamanca survives and sneaks across the border seeking revenge on his enemies, the crime organization led by Gustavo Fring, a cultured and soft-spoken gangster who runs a legitimate business on the side, a chicken sandwich franchise called Los Hermanos Pollos.  Fring has hired a German engineer and crew of mining contractors to construct a vast underground meth lab, apparently a location featured in Breaking Bad.  Meanwhile, Saul and his wife, Kim, have contrived an elaborate scheme to frame another lawyer, the narcissistic and patrician Howard Hamlin (Saul/Jimmie's nemesis throughout the series); Hamlin controls a class-action originated by Saul and must be nudged into settlement since Goodman needs the fee-money.  The complicated and implausible frame-up makes Hamlin look like a cocaine-addled drug addict and Kim and Saul are successful; the class-action is settled with Hamlin  completely disgraced.  By sheer coincidence, (the show is cleverly scripted but relies all-too-often on improbabilities), the two plots converge and there are some more killings.  The noble, if arrogant, Hamlin and the corpse of Salamanca end up sharing a shallow common grave in the floor of the subterranean meth factor; Kim and Saul fall out over their successful plot to destroy Howard Hamlin -- although Kim, who is public-spirited and does pro bono work for the poor, has joined somewhat too enthusiastically in the scheme to humiliate Hamlin, she now repents and divorces Saul.  At this point, the show is hollowed-out around an absent center -- there is time-lapse of several years, apparently the duration of Saul's involvement with Jesse and Walter White in Breaking Bad in which the crooked lawyer apparently makes millions of dollars before the whole enterprise collapses and he has to go on the lam.  (The show simply assumes that its audience will know what happened in Breaking Bad -- I didn't watch the show and don't have a clue and, therefore, encountered all sorts of fragmented, dream-like imagery probably referencing events in the other series but incomprehensible to me.  Shows of this extended form represent a new genre on TV and this sort of novelistic and expansive narrative hasn't yet been fully debugged -- the creators of these shows rely upon viewers recalling minor details that transpires many hours earlier in the programs and this doesn't always work; although I could follow the general narrative arc, I wasn't clear on many details, probably because I don't know Breaking Bad but, further, because I couldn't remember clearly things dramatized earlier in the preceding five seasons of Better Call Saul.  I presume that as these kinds of cable shows become more prevalent, narrative problems of this sort will be solved somehow.)  With the end of the dueling lawyers' scenario and the climactic bloodbath in the gang war involving millions of dollars at stake, Better Call Saul, then, moves into some peculiar unexplored territory.  Some indeterminate amount of time has passed and Saul is hiding in a snowy Omaha managing a Cinnabon franchise.  Kim Wechsler has moved to Florida where she works as a clerk in a sprinkler company; she's either remarried or living with another man.  Saul is so inveterately dishonest and so addicted to thrill-seeking that he can't be satisfied slipping into oblivion in an honest trade.  Instead, Saul devises an elaborate plot to steal from an upscale department store in the mall where his Cinnabon business is located.  After five seasons of gangsters murdering each other over millions of dollars, Better Call Saul devotes an entire episode to what is, in effect, an intricate scheme to shoplift some suits and handbags.  It's profoundly weird and dispiriting; the show has become intentionally trivial.  (The Omaha scenes are shot in black and white, but they are, also, a species of delirium -- for some reason, Omaha is always covered in snow and flakes are always falling, but the trees seem to be in full summer leaf; in other words, everything about the Omaha sequences is eerie, disconnected to the rest of the show and visually baffling.)  After nearly getting busted for the shoplifting scheme, Saul cons an old woman, played wonderfully by a distraught, if intelligent and quarrelsome, Carol Burnett.  The show seems to want to depict Saul in complete decomposition -- he's still a crook and fraudster but his criminal schemes are now completely sordid, low-stakes, and, even, a bit uninteresting.  With a couple of dishonest Nebraskans, Saul begins to roll drunks and steal their credit cards -- this also goes predictably wrong and Saul is arrested.  This sets up the final episode which is also extremely disorienting.  Saul is extradited to New Mexico.  He lures Kim Wechsler to a court room where there are some baffling proceedings.  In the final show, the theme is regret.  Does Saul have any regrets or is he beyond any kind of redemption?  The thought-experiment in which the show indulges is that of a time machine -- if you could back in time what changes, if any, would you make to your conduct?  Would you try to repair the harm you have inflicted?  This is all bleak, wintry stuff, deliberately undramatic, a climax to the show that is intended to be anti-climactic.  (This has been done before, for instance, in the controversial last episode of The Sopranos, but never at such length and with such conviction as in Better Call Saul).  There are many nice touches in this material (the only color in the last episode is the tip of a glowing cigarette) but the narrative strategies are intentionally off-putting.  In fact, the title sequences for the last four or so shows in Better Call Saul involve a distorted parody of previous titles used on the program with stuttering stop-and-start video and a soundtrack that seems to be recorded on a dictaphone or something, ending with a subliminal flash of imagery from the upcoming episode, but all shadowy and almost impossible to see.  I think it's bold, uncompromising and innovative but I'm still trying to understand exactly what was intended here.  

Barry is a variant on the premise of The Sopranos -- that is, a violent gangster seeks psychological therapy for his depression.  In Barry, a violent CIA-handled assassin finds solace in attending acting classes led by the flamboyant and self-satisfied Henry Winkler, once upon a time, the Fonz in Happy Days.  The assassin played by SNL alumnus Bill Hader and Henry Winkler's narcissistic method-acting coach are both excellently performed but the show's combination of ultra-violence and acting exercises with improv always seemed a little precious to me, a bit implausible although the high-concept is intriguing.  In the final series, Barry has been arrested for the murder of the acting coach's girlfriend, a cop, and, with his former CIA handler, finds himself in a menacing and nasty hoosegow.  A subplot involving Chechen gangsters reaches a violent climax with a score of murders that leaves no one left standing to populate that story.  In prison, Hader and his handler both get tortured and beat up and spend most of the show pretty badly disfigured.  (The show features odd mise-en-scene -- direct frontal shots intercut with landscapes in very long shots; we see tiny figures in vast bleak deserts.)  There's a big slaughter during an attempt to murder Barry in jail (the assassins are led by Fred Armisen, a recipe for disaster) and, after some more killings the hero escapes.  And, at this point, the show replicates the curious anti-climactic strategies at the end of Better Call Saul.  Suddenly, the show shifts, without any explanation, to a vast surreal desert, an empty space barren to the horizon.  Barry is living here in an utterly isolated trailer house with his girlfriend, who is now his wife.  Barry and the woman are now clearly middle-aged and they seem to have a ten-year old son.  What has happened?  Is this supposed to be a real place or are we in some kind of surreal dream?  As in Better Call Saul, the show abandons operatic violence and, even, the melodramatic histrionics of the acting class for completely banal events; Barry's son gets in a fight with a neighbor boy (neighbor?  there's no one around for miles).  Barry's wife, like Kim Wechsler, has some kind of dull job and seems to be an alcoholic -- she's possibly having an affair with one of the morons with whom she works.  Barry seems to have become religious and won't let his son play video or computer games.  Back in Hollywood, Henry Winkler's improv and acting coach resurfaces; he's apparently been in hiding after paranoically gunning down a pizza delivery boy.  In the case of Barry's enigmatic final episodes, it seems, that ten or more years have passed without a trace from the prison-break and the massacre of the Chechen gangsters.. Imagery is intentionally disorienting and the sound-track takes on an autonomous quality -- in the desert place where Barry is hiding, the wind is always howling through the flimsy walls and screen windows; the radio plays sermons and, even, birdsongs have a tinny, amplified quality.  After several episodes poised on the brink of Waiting for Godot, the show reverts to form, ending with the slaughter of, more or less, all of its major characters.  The final two episodes show an odd feature arising occasionally in long-form cable or streaming shows -- that is, the spin-off that's not spun-off but remains embedded within the source series.  In this case, a feud between the Chechen gangster, older but not wiser, and "Raven" (this is Fuches, Barry's spy-master) sets up a confrontation that really has nothing to do with the main thrust of the narrative.  (For some reason that I couldn't make out, Barry's wife and son are kidnapped by the Chechens, but the ostensible basis for the vendetta is that the gangsters seem to have had Fuches (now the heavily tattooed "Raven") tortured continuously in prison -- what doesn't kill Raven makes him stronger and, with a horde of menacing thugs, he attacks the heavily armed Chechens led by Noho Frank (the ineffably weird-looking Anthony Carrigan -- he's completely hairless due to Alopecia Areata, and, so, sufficiently exotic to be type-cast as villains.)  In this show, the Chechens are like Apaches in old Westerns (or zombies in the contemporary TV and movies) -- that is, they are cannon-fodder whose main role is to be gunned-down in huge numbers.  Noho Frank is homosexual and circumstances forced him to have his much-beloved boyfriend assassinated -- the affable and gentle guy was going to squeal on the mobsters and, so, had to be eliminated.  Raven and Noho Frank exchange insults, there's a one-shot tightly choreographed gunfight that lasts about five seconds, and gets rid of both mobs.  Raven is unscathed; Barry's wife and son escape without injury, and Noho Frank dies melodramatically, a bit like Mimi in La Boheme, clutching the bronze hand of a sculpture of his dead boyfriend.  The mayhem in the last couple shows is motivated by acting coach Gene Cousineau's reappearance in Hollywood where, with his agent, he tries to quash a movie in development about the death of his policewoman girlfriend (she was murdered by Barry in the first series).  Cousineau's agent is played by the fantastic Fred Melamed, always type-cast as a very funny, self-aggrandizing and ultra-Semitic Macher.  Cousineau is the ultimate "ham actor" and he can be seduced into performing on the subject of his encounters with Barry; his real objection to the proposed movie is not that it exploits the memory of his dead girlfriend but that he can't really control the project.  After the massacre at Noho Frank's post-modernist enterprise -- it's all glass and vast ballroom-like floors with transparent staircases (it looks like a set for an upscale Thirties' musical) -- Barry, who is a religious fanatic (remember?), goes to turn himself in for the murder of Cousineau's girlfriend and, thereby, redeem himself in the eyes of his son and wife.  But things go disastrously wrong.  In the final six or seven minutes of the last episode, there's another fast-forward in time, signaled by another intentionally disorienting shot of amateur performers taking a bow.  Barry's wife has just finished directing a Community College production of Our Town (in an incredibly lavish theater); Barry's son, who is now in his mid-teens, goes to a friend's house to watch a movie called The Mask Collector, a fictionalized version of the series that we have just watched in which Barry is portrayed as a hero (not as the rather panicked and fidgety murderer that we have seen throughout the show's five seasons.)  On this "Liberty Valence" note, the show ends.  None of this is particularly effective notwithstanding various media critics who have hailed the last season of Barry as some kind of masterpiece on the order of Citizen Kane.  Rather, the show is chaotic and ultra-stylized in a disconcerting way -- we are supposed to take the brutish plot seriously, but the whole thing is tricked-out with distracting surrealist effects and shot in the manner of a movie (or cable show) by Nicholas Winding Refn -- that is, saturated colors, very long and often inexpressive takes, an inclination toward frontal symmetry (look at how Noho Frank dies, with the monument of his dead lover central to the composition, flanked on each side by crumpled dead gangsters), amplified discordant sound track and vast amounts of gloomy, dire-looking glowering -- people glare at one another to beat the band in this last ten or so episodes.  Bill Hader directed all shows in the final series and he imparts a uniquely stark appearance to the final season, but Barry's chief ambition seems to be to transform its affable leading man, perfectly suited to light romantic comedies, into a murderous, beefy and dead-eyed thug.  It's as if Tom Hanks were to play Al Capone or Woody Allen act the part of Meyer Lansky -- the thing can be done, but why?   

 

The Triangle of Sadness

 Western civilization is a sinking ship and its passengers are all sick unto death -- this is the premise of Ruben Ostlund's earnest and strenuously labored The Triangle of Sadness (2022).  Ostlund's movie won a big award at Cannes in 2022 and its highly regarded (as well as notorious for some nauseating scenes in its second act).  But I don't think the movie is as good as its reputation.  

Ostlund is well-known for his thesis-driven movies:  Force Majeure (still his best I think) argues that contemporary sexual politics can't eradicate primordial instincts about gender roles -- a hip young couple find their marriage imperiled when the husband and father fails to act with expected courage in the face of an avalanche at a posh ski resort.  In The Square, Swedish upper-middle class elites are forced to confront the limits of their liberalism in the face of immigration to their country and a banquet like the Nobel prize feast that is invaded by a literal cave man  -- the titular "square" is a conceptual artwork that imagines what it would be like if everyone were really accorded equal rights.  In The Triangle of Sadness, a shipwreck forces a Brechtian transformation of values associated with sex and class roles.  All three movies feature contemporary men forced to confront their failures to meet the standards of chivalry, courage and, even, fundamental competency that traditional values (thought to have been outgrown but still ruling with a dead hand) impose on masculinity.  After Force Majeure, Ostlund has become increasingly overt and ideological with the effect that his films have come to resemble rather tedious and didactic debates staged with interludes of provocation.  The Triangle of Sadness represents the nadir of this development and one wishes that that Ostlund would now devote his considerable talents to making a thriller or Western or romance picture less fraught with political and social implications.

The Tirangle of Sadness refers to the place between the eyebrows where furrows gather -- if you are a male model, your "triangle of sadness" should remain smooth and unblemished.  We learn this proposition in a prelude to the movie, an audition in which twenty or so pretty boys audition for a male model part.  They are supposed to look alternately fierce, depressed and bitter, and happy.  The sequence is funny and it introduces the male protagonist, a very cute, if dim-witted young man named Carl.  (Carl looks like an even more stupid and befuddled Ryan Gosling, an actor who, to my eyes, always looks very dimwitted.)  The film proper divides into three acts.  In the first, "Carl and Yaya", we see Carl fighting with Yaya, a model and internet "influencer", over the bill placed before them at an expensive restaurant, probably in Stockholm.  (The place is so upscale that there are no prices on the menu.)  Yaya, who repeatedly says that she makes more money than Carl, wants him to pick up the bill -- because they're on a date and that's what men are supposed to do.  He disputes this with her and they end up in a savage quarrel; Yaya is pretty smart and she clearly has the upper-hand on poor Carl, who knows he wants something quite desperately but doesn't know exactly what it is.  Act Two is called "The Yacht".  Yaya and Carl are on a super-expensive cruise with various forms of Eurotrash.  (They're  interlopers because they are traveling for free in consideration of Yaya posting pictures to promote the cruise lines on her Instagram account.)  The other passengers are nasty specimens of late Capitalism:  a munitions manufacturer, a Russian oligarch who seems to have two wives, a plump and bald tech wizard who has been stood-up by his girlfriend and wants to post pictures to make her jealous, a German woman who is paralyzed and can only speak three words, "In den Wolken" (that is, "in the clouds"), and several other travelers, one of whom is  obviously demented -- she keeps asking that the sails be cleansed but the ship has no sails and it "motorized" as stated by its Captain played in a performance that is more or less phoned-in by Woody Harrelson of all people.  The crew is equally repugnant, a group of eager-beaver stewards and stewardesses, more than willing to abase themselves for tips from the super-wealthy patrons on board.  They are led by a Nordic goddess with short blonde hair who struts around barking orders like a Nazi concentration camp boss.  Harrelson seems not to have been available for much of the shooting because he doesn't appear except for a fifteen minutes sequence at the middle of the film -- he's not in the movie's last half and doesn't appear on screen throughout most of the "The Yacht"; we hear him, obviously intoxicated, in his Stateroom, refusing to come out of his locked room.  The vicious rich people bicker and bully the crew and, at one point, make them all strip to their bathing suits and zoom down a water-slide into the sea. The Russian oligarch threatens to buy the yacht if his infantile demands aren't met -- a helicopter has come out to the ship with a case of Nutella for him since the yacht wasn't equipped with that stuff when it set sail.  Carl complains to the Nazi boss-lady about a Greek sailor who has taken off his shirt on deck and impressed Yaya with his physique.  To Carl's surprise, the sailor is immediately fired and, in fact, taken by speedboat to the shore.  At the base of this social pyramid, there are a dozen or so southeast Asian women who scrub the floors and maintain the toilets.  

The film's most notorious sequence is the Captain's Dinner, a meal that takes place during heavy seas and results in explosive, projectile vomiting on the part of most of the guests.  This sequence is repellent but funny and, of course, is a reprise of the Mr. Creosote episode in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.  As the perky crew serve bizarre haute cuisine to the guests, people start puking uncontrollably.  The ship is rolling and, at first, this is ascribed to seasickness, with the crew members strangely encouraging people to eat more and not less.  The dishes are cubist collages of atomized sea-weed and fragments of fish in hideous-looking sauces.  The floors get slick with vomit and the storm increases so that the ship rolls wildly back and forth and the guests ending up skidding around in the puke.  Then, the diarrhea begins and we are treated to scenes of guests shitting out their guts in toilets that tip back and forth spilling the excrement and the hapless travelers on the slick tile floors.  The oligarch and the sea-captain are engaged in a drinking game and end up reciting aphorisms about capitalism and socialism over the loud-speaker  By this point, the metaphors have taken over and the film has become a parable about the plight of western civilization.  Two warring ideologies (communism and capitalism)  are on display while the plumbing in the ship (the environment?) bursts and the staterooms and hallways are awash in a sea of shit.  The drunk captain tells the guests by PA system that the yacht is sinking and so they put on life vests and still spewing excrement from both ends stagger around on the vessel so that they are forcefully flung against walls and down steps where the people lay in depressed and motionless heaps.  The scene goes on and on, replete with disgusting special effects and, at last, it's dawn.  Mercifully, perhaps, some African pirates attack the ship; the British munitions maker and his wife pick up a hand-grenade and are blown to bits and the ship sinks. 

The third part of the movie is called "The Island".  Seven survivors have made it ashore to a rocky desert island.  None of them have any idea what do do.  The men are so feckless that it never occurs to them to explore the place to discover its resources -- in fact, the island has a big luxury resort a few miles away but this isn't discovered until the last five minutes of the rather long (two-and-a-half hours) film.  A lifeboat, a sort of sealed orange capsule, washes up.  In this capsule, there is an industrious and omni-competent Southeast Asian maid -- the manager of  "toilet maintenance" on the yacht.  She knows how to fish and start fires and quickly becomes the de facto leader of the castaways.  Of course, systems of oppression always replicate themselves after revolutions or shipwrecks and the enterprising maid exploits the other castaways, ultimately forcing Carl into sexual submission -- while having sex with her, he says "I love you.  You feed me fish."  The castaways have no water except bottled Evian beverages but they have plenty of aerosol spray cans that were advertised as soothing lotion but are really just water.  The Russian oligarch finds one his wives dead on the beach and weeps over her while carefully removing her jewels and diamond necklace. Later, he becomes good friends, as one might expect, with a pirate who has also washed up on the island.  Carl seems to fall in love with the Asian maid who now rules the castaways.  Yaya is jealous but she seems quite resourceful herself and decides to hike across the island to see what is on the other side of the mountains.  The toilet maintenance director goes with her and, together, they discover that there is a big resort just over the hill.  (We suspect this when an African mysteriously appears to the mute German woman and offers to sell her knock-offs of luxury Louis Vuitton and other bags -- it's a parody of Friday's appearance to Crusoe in Defoe's book.)  The castaways are reverting to paleolithic customs -- they murder a poor donkey, a beast whose braying has caused them to think that the island is inhabited by monsters; then, they paint their exploits on the wall of a cave.  

In broad form, the film follows the pattern of Lina Wertmueller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea in August, a 1974 film in which a man and woman become castaways on a desert island after an expensive yacht sinks.  (The film was infamous for its sexual politics, repudiating feminism it was thought -- Giancarlo Giannini played the Communist, brawny sailor who rapes the upper-class dame acted by Mariangela Melato.)  Wertmueller's movie, like Ostlund's film,implies that sexual desire operates according to apolitical, even anti-social paradigms that contradict our liberal assumptions about human nature.  Wertmueller's film was, in turn, a reprise of the 1957 Paradise Lagoon which remakes Cecil B. DeMille's silent film, Male and Female (1919) with Gloria Swanson playing the wealthy and pampered "rich bitch" shipwrecked on a desert island with a lecherous and enterprising butler.  And, of course, the immediate source for all of these films is J. M. Barrie's 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, in which a butler assumes command over rich people and peers of the realm after a shipwreck maroons the castaways on another desert island.  Obviously, this plot is resonant on many levels and has attracted many versions of the story -- The Triangle of Sadness reworks Swept Away, which was remade unsuccessfully by Madonna in 2002 (with Adrianna Giangelo, the son of the star of the 1974 picture) applying a feminist interpretation to what was an originally a scandalous anti-feminist film -- in Triangle of Sadness, the lower class person, whose survival skills allow him or her to dominate the other castaways is an immigrant or guest worker woman from Thailand or Burma; she makes the pulchritudinous Carl into her "boy toy."  Unfortunately, Ostlund is becoming lazy -- the debate between Capitalism and Socialism prosecuted by the oligarch (who argues for Capitalism) and the Ship Captain (a proponent of Socialism) is conducted entirely in aphorisms extracted from speeches by Ronald Reagan, Lenin, and Noam Chomsky.  It's as Ostlund couldn't be bothered to write his own dialogue to make these points.  The movie is too long and too earnest -- it's fundamentally humorless.  (The film illustrates another feature that I've seen increasingly in European movies -- there are, at least, 30 producers who contributed to the movie including the Swedish Film Institute, BFI, and many, many Danish and German and French TV channels and streaming services.  It would be impossible to describe this film as Swedish or British or, even, really foreign since there is undoubtedly Hollywood money in the picture as well.  The movie's dialogue is English.) 

Ensayo de una Crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz)

 Luis Bunuel made twenty movies in Mexico between 1946 and 1963.  These pictures included romantic melodramas, musicals, and comedies.  Many of these films await critical reevaluation and, perhaps, aren't very good.  Nonetheless, Bunuel's Mexican period produced several undisputed masterworks, El, The Exterminating Angel, and Los Olivados, among them and it's my guess that all of these pictures have scenes or interludes worth studying.  Bunuel's style is impersonal and direct; everything is lit brightly and the acting is often stylized and a bit wooden.  But the fact that a picture is directed by Bunuel imports into the viewing experience knowledge of the filmmaker's other movies and obsessions  --this means that even banal sequences that would be unremarkable in any other director's work have a peculiar urgency, tension, and visionary quality.  In an opening scene in Ensayo de una Crimen (1955), the camera shows us a still-life, a toy train on a circular track next to what seems to be a soccer ball -- for some reason, the image has a weird dream-like intensity.  In a later scene, a woman in tight-fitting dress encounters the hero who is inexplicably carrying a vase.  The woman claims to know the protagonist, Archibald de la Cruz, a wealthy, if somewhat smarmy, member of Mexico City's elite.  The two exchange words with the woman behaving in a strangely seductive manner; Cruz simply wants to escape her.  The entire scene is completely utilitarian in its structure and pacing and the camera is positioned to make everything maximally lucid and, yet, there is something awry about the imagery, something a little too avid and off-kilter.  The question here posed is this:  would we have this feeling of the imagery and dialogue being slightly off-balance if we didn't know that this was a film by Bunuel -- that is, would the effect be the same if the movie was directed by someone without a surrealist's filmography?  It's impossible to answer this question because, of course, we inevitably bring to Bunuel's films his entire ouevre  from Un Chien Andalou and L' Age d'Or to That Obscure Object of Desire.  

Ensayo de una Crimen (I'd translate this as "Attempted Crimes"), known as The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz in English-speaking countries is a staggeringly perverse black comedy about a man (Cruz) who earnestly desires to be a serial murderer but can't quite get anyone killed.  The picture is exceedingly ingenious and quite funny -- the movie plays like a warped comedy of manners always threatening to evolve into some outlandish grand guignol bloodbath.  The Spanish word "ensayo" means something like "Versuch" in German (to attempt) or "essay" in English in the old sense of attempting to accomplish something.  The Spanish title probably means something like "Essays in Crime."  Cruz's murderous impulses originate in his spoiled childhood (he's a bit like George Amberson in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons); the year is 1913 and revolutionary soldiers are shooting up the streets of Mexico City.  Little Archie Cruz has been left in the care of his attractive young governess -- she hates the spoiled brat and longs to spank him, but, of course, this is forbidden.  While telling the little boy a story about a magical music box that has the power to grant homicidal wishes, the young woman hears gunfire outside, goes to the window, and is promptly shot dead.  She falls to the carpet with her bare thighs and garter belts exposed and blood welling out of her throat.  The child is sexually aroused by this constellation of stimuli -- the story of the wish-fulfilling music box (which sits on the table), the woman's exposed thighs, and the gush of blood.  This combination of images and ideas causes Cruz to feel omnipotent and to believe that it is his destiny to be "either a great saint or a great criminal"' he elects the latter and decides to become a serial murderer.  We next see Cruz in a sanitarium, attended by one of Bunuel's highly eroticized nuns.  Cruz menaces the nun with a straight razor and she flees in horror -- there are two oddly dreamlike and mismatched shots of the young nun in her habit running away from the camera.  Before Cruz can slash her to death, she falls into an open elevator shaft and dies.  Cruz seeks out a Judge and confesses that he is a murderer.  The Judge is rather disinterested but sits down to hear his story.  This motivates an extended flashback that occupies most of the film and that constitutes the confession tendered to the judge.  Cruz is shown preparing to visit his fiance, the virtuous Carlotta Cervantes.  While shaving, he cuts himself and, when Cruz sees the blood on his finger, he has a voluptuous vision of the dead governess with her plump gartered legs spread, the entire image oozing with black blood.  On the way to visit Carlotta, he encounters a sexy tramp named Patricia.  She knows Cruz from some gambling den that they both frequent although he doesn't seem to recognize her.  In any event, after visiting Carlotta who is praying  on her knees  to the Virgin in a chapel built into a niche in her house (Carlotta's mother supervises the visit), Cruz goes to the casino where the lecherous Patricia tries to pick him up.  Cruz rejects her advances but when she crashes the Cadillac owned by her much older, rather cadaverous admirer, the protagonist goes home with her.  Patricia has a wall covered with pictures of the famous men that she has seduced -- including, notably, John Wayne.  Cruz decides he will kill Patricia and gets his razor ready when her elderly admirer barges into the apartment interrupting our hero's murderous plot.  There follows a odd scene in which Patricia and her boyfriend say that they are living in Hell together and seem to extend an ambiguous sexual invitation for Cruz to join them.  Cruz instead flees and the couple apparently commit double suicide.  Cruz goes to an old convent that is now a kind of dance-club.  Here he meets Lavinia, a shop-girl who also works as a tour-guide for Gringos (Gringitos the dialogue says).  Cruz is intrigued by Lavinia who also seems attracted to him.  Lavinia gives Cruz the address of an expensive boutique where he finds, not Lavinia, but a full-scale mannequin that depicts her in very precise form -- perhaps, it is implied, it is even anatomically correct.  Cruz has had visions of Lavinia enveloped in fire and imagines her to be "his Joan of Arc" -- apparently, he intends to strangle her and burn the corpse in the oven in which he fires his clay vases (by avocation Cruz makes ceramics).  After some adventures and another encounter with the simperingly pious Carlotta, Cruz lures Lavinia to his elaborate mansion where he prepares to strangle her.  But Lavinia has invited her tour group to Cruz' rather gothic manor, apparently so that they can see a real Mexican nobleman's mansion, and a big, loud group of Americans and English appear just as Cruz is stealthily preparing to murder the girl.  As it happens, Carlotta is less pious than she seems -- she is carrying on a torrid affair with a married, somewhat toadish-looking, architect.  Of course, Cruz plans to kill Carlotta during their honeymoon.  But this plan is also thwarted.   Alone together, Cruz makes Carlotta kneel before an image of the Virgin and has her intone a prayer while he prepares to slaughter her.  But, before he can kill her, the architect bursts into the home and guns down Carlotta.  It's this event which apparently led to Cruz admitting himself to the sanitarium and the care of the beautiful and doomed Sister Trinidad.  Upon hearing this confession, the Judge laughs in a jovial way and says "I can't prosecute you for wishing someone's death."  And on this merry note the film ends.

This barren plot summary doesn't capture the bizarre imagery in the film.  Everyone lives in homes that are crammed with gesticulating carved saints, gory crucifixions, and gilt angels --  but, of course, no one shows the slightest trace of religiosity except for the morbidly pious Carlotta (who turns out to be an adulteress).  When Cruz is thwarted in his efforts to murder the tour-guide Lavinia, he drags her mannequin, which he has earlier been kissing and caressing, into his crematorium and melts it down in his fire.  On the way to the oven, the mannequin loses one of its legs --it breaks off at the plump thigh in a way that reminds us of Cruz' poor, dead governess.  We get gruesome close-ups of the mannequin's face melting in the fire.  Cruz has a drawer full of women's underwear that he has used to dress the mannequin and that he offers to Lavinia when she is at his home -- surprisingly, this doesn't bother her at all and she goes into another room to get dressed in the bra and panties Cruz has offered her (this is the costume in which he intends to strangle her).  Earlier at the casino, Patricia takes off her shoes and offers her high-heels as a fetish-object to the other gamblers -- people stroke and kiss the shoe.  (One of these shoes shows up in Cruz' house when Carlotta comes there after the wedding.  Cruz kicks the shoe under the bed before firing a revolver repeatedly into Carlotta who is clad in her white wedding dress -- this turns out to be merely fantasy because, of course, the architect bursts into the house a minute or so later to actually kill her.)  The movie is elaborately perverse but filmed for the most part like a Mexican telenovela or, even, a comedy.  When Cruz asks the Judge, who seems completely indifferent to the hero's murderous impulses, what he should do, the Judge says quite rationally, "Use an electric shaver."  

The film was scarcely visible before this reconstruction.  At last, it seems that the Mexican National Cinemateque has embarked on a campaign to restore films from the country's classic, or Golden Age.  Ensayo de una Crimen is a product of this effort and the film looks great and the soundtrack is clear and distinct.  The movie has an incredibly cheesy score played on a wheezing organ that adds to the film's bizarre charm.    

Miracle of Morgan's Creek

In Preston Sturges' comedy, Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) war-time rationing is in full force:  sugar used for lemonade is being conserved and the schlemihl hero, Norval Jones, has a gas card that limits fuel that he can buy for his jalopy.  The film critic, David Thomson, remarks that, during filming, a scene in which a vehicle skidded was cut -- Hollywood didn't want to be perceived as wasting rubber.  The one thing that is not in short supply, however, seems to be sex; there's no rationing in effect there and the movie depicts in slapstick style the consequences of lonesome soldiers frolicking with small-town girls on the eve of deployment.  (In fact, one of the minor characters has written a newspaper editorial on this very problem.)  The war effort on the home front induces a sort of collective delirium and events proceed in a fever dream of yearning, intoxication, and febrile patriotism.  The memory of the licentiousness surrounding World War One looms over the picture.  The heroine's father, Mr. Kockenlocker (played by Sturges' stalwart, William Demarest) was a soldier in the Great War and he recalls with dismay the swath that A.E.F cut through the local maidens in France.  Hence, his skepticism and alarm when his comely daughter, Trudy, proposes to fraternize with soldiers about to be shipped overseas, asking his permission to attend various patriotic events that turn out to involve increasingly frenzied jitterbug dancing, these orgies sponsored by well-meaning folks in town.  Kockenlocker, the belligerent town cop, forbids Trudy's participation in these events -- she is apparently a minor.  Trudy has an admirer, the milquetoast Norval Jones, a nervous stuttering bank teller who has been rejected from military service on account of high blood pressure, agitation, and the tendency to see "spots" when excited.  He's been in love with Trudy since they were children together,  but to no apparent avail.  Hoping to hook-up with the more virile servicemen about to be shipped overseas, Trudy persuades Norval to take her to a triple feature at the local movie palace, but, then, implores him to let her use his car so she can attend the USO dance -- poor Norval has to wait for her through the triple-feature scheduled to end at 1:15 am.  The camera follows Trudy (Betty Hutton) who dances with a succession of soldiers at several venues; dancing here is an obvious surrogate for something approaching sex.  At one of the dance-halls, Trudy gets pitched into the air during some wild dancing and conks her head on a 1940's version of a disco ball.  Norval waits for her at the theater, increasingly distraught as the hours pass.  Around eight a.m, Trudy shows up disheveled, either drunk or concussed, with Norval's car in ruins.  She's got a curtain ring on her finger and the car is trailing a "Just Married" placard.  Trudy's memory isn't too clear but she recalls vaguely that she married someone whose name contains several "z" letters, but has no marriage license, and turns out to be pregnant to boot.  (Critics marvel that a film with this plot line could be imagined, let alone filmed in 1942 when the picture was made.  Apparently, there was sufficient concern about the movie's subject matter that it's release was deferred until 1944 when the picture was shown in quick succession with its thematic sequel Hail the Conquering Hero, a similarly anarchic home-front picture but one that is more conventionally patriotic.)  Ultimately, Trudy admits her plight to Norval who chivalrously offers to marry her, even though this plan carries with it the danger of bigamy -- after all, she's apparently lawfully married to the soldier-boy with the double "z's" in his name.  More complications ensue and Norval is locked-up, leading to a long scene in which Kockenlocker, the town gendarme, tries to induce him to escape.  (Norval is not only a wimp but a bit dull-witted to boot; in this scene, we learn that 1940's small-town cops carried blackjacks in their back pockets).  Fleeing town, Norval vows to find the caddish soldier married to Trudy but now MIA.  Nine months pass and Norval returns to town, his mission having failed.  Trudy has her child -- in fact, she has her child six times in a row, being delivered of sextuplets.  This "miracle" at Morgan's Creek becomes an international sensation (in vignettes, we see Hitler and Mussolini reacting with dismay at the fecundity of American women).  Norval is instantly admitted to the military, promoted to officer status, equipped with a dumb-looking sword, and his various transgressions, including an attempted bank robbery are all forgiven in the ensuing media frenzy.  

The film moves at a lightning pace, is crammed with laugh-out-loud gags and exemplifies Hollywood surrealism at its most witty.  The scenes involving Trudy's labor and delivery occur on Christmas Eve, therefore, imparting a faintly blasphemous tint to the proceedings.  There is a wandering cow that invades a drawing room, a bit like something that might have been imagined by Dali and Bunuel; Kockenlocker is using a hammer to hang Xmas-tree ornaments, a curious detail, and, for some reason, a climactic city council meeting takes place in a fire station with a spectacular spiral stair and a pole that Kockenlocker uses to reach ground level before slugging the officious and hypocritical town banker.  The slapstick is violent and many of the gags involve spectacular pratfalls and people socking each other in the face.  Everyone is armed and dangerous -- people brandish guns at each other and there is (as in Hail the Conquering Hero) a palpable sense of lurking incipient violence.  (Trudy and Norval plot suicide and discuss in detail how they will drown themselves in Morgan's Creek to avoid shame.)  The final gag, the sextuplets born to Trudy and their unknown father, has a grim aspect -- the world is at war and mothers must replenish the inventory of young men slaughtered as cannon fodder on the various battlefields in Europe and the south Pacific.  

Sturges' direction is sprightly.  the film is structured as an extended flashback in which a man darts away from a crowd of reporters to call the governor (who doesn't even know that the rural backwater, Morgan's Creek, is in his State).  The "miracle" is suppressed at the outset and, only, revealed in stages as the narrative progresses.  Eddie Bracken plays Norval, an odd bit of casting because the actor was a renowned light-weight boxer and not a feckless weakling as portrayed in the movie -- Norval says masochistically that he's too ugly for the gorgeous Trudy and, indeed, he has pug's flattened features with a much-broken nose that looks like a parrot's beak .  In the film's witty ending, we see Norval reacting in dumb-show to the revelation that he is the putative father of six children -- he shrieks with real horror and the screen is speckled with "spots" depicting his discomfiture from the point of view of the audience.  The movie manages to fuse light romantic comedy with a provocative, even rather sardonic and grim subject matter -- the plight of young women seduced and abandoned by soldiers in the context of a war in which many of these heroes will not return from the battlefield. The film is clearly a predicate to Sturges' equally sardonic and, rather, bitter comedy Hail the Conquering Hero which addresses this subject matter from the perspective of the male noncombatant, also played by Eddie Bracken.  (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek takes the point of view of its female characters, Trudy and her kid sister, Emily, clearly the brightest of the various dim bulbs in the movie, who comments with brittle sarcasm on the war fever afflicting everyone in the  picture.  The absence of able-bodied men on the home-front is shown by two startling images -- Trudy is introduced lip-syncing a basso profundo tune played on a record (it's an astonishing image) and, later, at one of the dances hosted by the USO, a a fat older woman plays an impressive gut-bucket trombone.  This is an excellent film, slightly better, I think, than the more conventionally jingoistic Hail the Conquering Hero made immediately after this picture and, in some respects, a tribute to the Marine Corps.  Although there is some war-time patriotism around the edges of this picture, the movie is too anarchic to be plausibly interpreted as part of the war effort.  

 

Don Giovanni (Minnesota Opera 2023)

 In the art world after "Me Too", Mozart's Don Giovanni presents a host of problems to those with the temerity to stage the 235 year-old opera.  The chauvinist hero is an unrepenting rapist; his most formidable adversary, Donna Elvira, is attracted to the man who has seduced and abandoned her -- at the end of the opera, she confesses that she still loves him.  There's a sexy aria endorsing wife-beating performed by Zerlina who seems to regard physical abuse as a mark of her husband's devotion.  And human justice proves to be too frail to avenge the villain's misdeeds -- Don Giovanni perishes at the hands of an animated marble statue and a host of demons who haul him down to Hell; there's no jury of his peers to consign this Weinstein of the 18th century to legal perdition.  And, in our secular age, we know too well that divine judgement is no judgement at all.  There's no politically correct approach to this material and, so, the Minnesota Opera company elects to mollify potential critics by devising a "female-led" production -- the director, most of the stage designers and artisans, and the conductor of the orchestra are all women and, therefore, ostensibly bring their virtuously contemporary sensibilities to the show.  (On the night that I attended, the female conductor was, apparently, indisposed and the orchestra was directed by a man, Mario Matta.)  Apparently, these personnel insulate the show, at least, to some extent from accusations of blatant sexism and, in fact, may liberate the production in certain ways -- Zerlina's notorious aria endorsing wife-beating (or, at least, vigorous spanking) is played for laughs and is unashamedly erotic. The show features a number of women dressed in French maid costumes who rotate the big set by inserting stanchions into sockets and, then, hauling the thing so that it rotates like a carousel.  These silent stage-hands, initially dressed a bit like porno-fantasy figures (one of the maids wears spike high-heels) function as a silent accusatory chorus and, as the show progresses, they abandon their French maid costumes and appear in severe black.  At one point, the aggrieved Donna Anna, Don Giovanni's first victim in the opera, appears among them and terrifies the hero who, immediately takes to his heels in a craven way.  At the end of the show, when Don Giovanni is dragged down to Hell, the austere female stage-hands are the supernumeraries that seize him and yank the hero into the fiery pit.  

The opera's libretto, of course, contains both virulent sexism and its opposite, that is, a sense that the women oppressed by the seducer are empowered to destroy him as well.  Don Giovanni's rape of Donna Anna, performed in dumb-show (with some bondage elements) during the overture is the assault that triggers the hero's downfall, rather laboriously demonstrated over the course of the next three hours. (It's unclear to what extent Donna Anna thinks Giovanni is her lover and play-acting the rape.) Donna Anna's father, the Command, killed in a sort of duel by Don Giovanni returns at the melodramatic climax of the opera as a stony emissary from the inferno, summoning the villain to Hell.  Prior to that point, Don Giovanni has encountered one of his previous conquests, the articulate and formidable Elvira, a character who seems quite sufficiently aggressive to destroy the seducer on her own.  (Her resolve, however, is complicated by the fact that she remains in love with Don Giovanni and, like Hamlet, her ability to act is "sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought.")  Donna Anna and her feckless fiance, Ottavio, pursue Don Giovanni who also runs afoul of the husband of the bawdy peasant girl, Zerlina, another woman that the protagonist pursues, hoping to inflict upon her his arrogant and entitled droit d' seigneur.  Giovanni's amorous escapades are taken for granted by the libretto and, although scandalous, probably not the reason for the protagonist's downfall.  Rather, Giovanni connives to change places with his man-servant, Leporello, exchanging garments with him so that he can pursue a maid.  (We never see this woman).  Leporello in the guise of Don Giovanni encounters the noble Donna Elvira and comes within an eyelash of seducing her and this infraction, violating class distinctions important to the 18th century audience, is probably the offense for which the hero must go to hell -- at least, this is a Brechtian reading of the play's riotous second act.  In fact, nemesis is looming in the form of the infamous "Stone Guest" and, true of the librettist's politically incorrect perspective, men must avenge themselves on other men for transgressions committed against their property --in this case, wives and daughters.  (In theory, the women are powerless, but the opera stands, also, for the opposite proposition -- that is, that the women are also agents in their own right;, and have their own ability to thwart men at every juncture; like all great works, Don Giovanni is able to hold equal and opposite ideas in artistic balance.) 

The opera's costumes are vaguely suggestive of Italian fashions at the turn of the last century.  The set consists of that most frequently invoked of all theatrical cliches -- a stony staircase to nowhere with a door inset in its side for entrances and exits.  Some vaguely Moorish arches transect the set and provide a curious Escher perspective on the action -- from some angles the arches seem to be both behind and in front of the stairway to the heaven, an odd violation of perspective that seems a physical impossibility but that is right there before your eyes.  The lazy-Susan set, rotating by the hardworking female servants, occupies a proscenium also framed with Alhambra-style arches, some of which are suspended overhead and can be dropped onto the stage at intervals and for reasons that were obscure to me.  There are a variety of rather comical hats.  One of the director's conceits is that Don Giovanni has been wounded somehow and is bleeding out -- this is like the fate of the hero in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, a protracted and endless demise that is only revealed at the end when Giovanni's coat is peeled off and we see that his belly is awash with blood.  (This solves the problem of the spectacular denouement that is inconveniently religious for modern sensibilities -- there is no real heaven nor any hell and the protagonist's visions of a fiery fate are merely the delirium of a dying man.  However, Mozart and Da Ponte's libretto is very precisely designed to contrast human with divine justice and, so, the conceit that someone somewhere fatally injured Giovanni and that he is bleeding to death and not being dragged to Hell by demons, damages the opera's entire structure:  in the first half, we see all instruments of human justice thwarted by Giovanni who has the powers of a super-villain to elude an entire village of people seeking to revenge themselves on him -- he is quite literally beyond human vengeance; the show's second half demonstrates that if Don Giovanni is going to get his comeuppance, it will have to be at the hands of supernatural, even, divine forces.)   The singers are very good, particularly the three female leads, all engaged here at the start of what will be distinguished careers in regional opera.  Both Leporello and Don Giovanni were also well performed by Thomas Glass and Seth Carrico respectively.  In some ways, the opera is an account of a close, if perverse, friendship, the bond that exists between the seducer and his "wing man" as it were -- an important aspect of the opera is the mirroring that exists between the nobleman and his manservant, made explicit toward the end of the show when the two men exchange places.  It's important that both singers sound more or less alike and that their voices occupy the same register and this is artfully managed in this production.  Of course, the opera is too long and ends up being tedious.  Mozart's music is so imposing that you have to listen with all ears and your body engaged as well and the effect is that after about two hours, you are too exhausted to enjoy the show.  Or, you can not listen closely and just engage with the plot, mostly comic and, actually, very funny for the first thirty minutes after the intermission (after 85 minutes of music in the first half) -- this might work for you, but the libretto is full of archaic sentiments that aren't really persuasive to modern audiences, and, on any basis (except musical excellence), the last two extended arias in the show (Donna Anna and Elvira's confession of love) are, more or less, completely superfluous -- by this time, Mozart's music has sort of lost its savor (you're too tired to listen with proper attentiveness) and, so, you spend those minutes watching the clock and wishing for the damn thing to end.  The final sextet is sprightly, however, and quite funny -- the characters draw the wrong morals from the proceedings:  Zerlina and her peasant husband are hungry and want to get something to eat (after the hero has been dragged howling to hell) and Leporello, quite reasonably, sings that he'll need to find a better boss.  The sublime, spine-tingling, and thunderous music of the scene with the Stone Guest resolves into a major key and the slippery chromatics are banished and everyone sings the most trite refrain possibe:  you reap what you sow -- and on this note Mozart's masterpiece ends.  

Hail the Conquering Hero

 In the opening sequence of Preston Sturges war-time (1944) move, Hail the Conquering Hero, strange events threaten to derail the screwball comedy.  A pair of shapely gams with tap-shoes attached dances across a floor and the camera dollies through a crowded night-club to pick out a mournful-looking man drinking by himself at the bar -- this isWoodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) the hero of this film.  A middle-aged woman sings a song about the devotion that should be accorded to all mothers and the waiters encircle her with their trays full of drinks and food.  A group of Marines, on R & R in "Frisco," where the nightclub is located, enter the bar in lock-step as if marching on a parade-ground.  Truesmith buys them drinks (they've lost all their money playing craps).  The Marines are obviously a bit damaged by their combat experiences at Guadalcanal (a place no one really knows how to properly pronounce).  One of the Marines, who is palpably deranged (he's called Bugsy) takes offense at Truesmith's disregard for his own mother.  Truesmith, whose lifelong ambition was to be a Marine, has been booted out of the service due to hay-fever and he's working in a shipyard but has written letters to  his mother, claiming to be in combat in the South Pacific.  (He's also written a letter to his fiance, lying as well, and telling her that he's fallen in love with some other woman, also an untruth intended to conceal his shame at being found unworthy for combat service.)  Bugsy is appalled that Truesmith would mislead his mother -- the poor bastard is shell-shocked and was raised in an orphanage -- and finds a phone, calls Truesmith's mother and says that the "combat-decorated Marine" will be returning to his home-town, a little burg called Oakridge on the morrow.  This puts the plot in motion -- a combination of drunkenness, shell-shock, and hysterical mother-worship.  

Sturges made nine movies between 1940 and 1949, about half of them acclaimed as masterpieces (Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story, Miracle at Morgan's Creek and, Hail the Conquering Hero.)  The films feature rapid-fire ultra-literate dialogue, slapstick, and cynical satire.  Sturges was not a visual stylist -- like most directors of comedy, he's mainly concerned that audiences hear the gags and brittle insults from which he composes the script.  (Sturges both wrote and directed these films.)  Hail the Conquering Hero seems to be a giddy patriotic war-time farce but it has odd undertones of melancholy and grief and, as observed, it's frenetic plot is rocketed into action by the phone-call of a madman, Bugsy.  

Truesmith, now decked out in a Marine uniform with a medal on his chest, gets hauled forcibly onto the railroad platform at his home-town.  Everyone has turned out to greet him and there are no less than four marching bands in attendance with enormous banners welcoming him home.  (Sturges is making a point about war-hysteria.)  The tough-as-nails Marines proclaim Truesmith to be a hero, asserting that he slaughtered dozens of "Nips" at Guadalcanal.  The townsfolk go mad with adulation and, ultimately, press-gang him into running for mayor against a plutocrat who dominates the village's politics -- the man is the president and owner of the Nobles Chair Company, the town's largest employer and a vain, preening politician who is not well-liked (it seems that even his wife detests him.)  Complicating the picture is the fact that Truesmith's girlfriend still loves him despite being engaged to Noble's bland, if well-bred and polite son, a handsome stiff in thrall to his overbearing and loutish father.  The town is depicted in bucolic terms, but it's populated entirely by rabid, bloodthirsty hometown patriots, hypocritical clergy and officials, and is more like the sinister village in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt than the idyllic place that it is supposed to represent.  At its pictorial center, there's a shrine to Truesmith's deceased father, also a Marine who was killed in Belleau Wood on the very day that his posthumous son was born.  The shrine to the dead hero has as its counterpart a bronze equestrian statue to General Zabrisky, incongruously near the train station and a monument admired by everyone, although no one seems to know who Zabrisky was, or why there's a monument to him -- it seems that the City Father's got a bargain on the used monument and bought it as a whim.  The Marines who form an honor-guard around Truesmith, who has advanced unwittingly so deeply into fraud he can't find his way back to honesty, are shown twice threatening mayhem -- they carry behind their backs all sorts of weapons with which to attack the townsfolk if something goes wrong -- and there's a question as to who threatens the village more, the distant "nips", our "brown brothers" they are called, or the cadre of violent Marines.  Everything ultimately gets resolved in what seems to be a happy ending, but the movie leaves an acrid, sour aftertaste in the mouth.  This is a very bitter, challenging picture pretending to be a frothy comedy with distinct traces of mourning and madness underlying its giddy imagery.  The weird substrate of mother idolatry suggests an oedipal fixation, a sort of Freudian undertone to all the wild-eyed patriotism.  And the film is visually claustrophobic -- just about every shot is filled to the brim with mobs of people all jostling one another and shoving and pushing.  There are no close-ups just a couple of two-shots but the film's visual emphasis is to show the protagonist thronged by extras, caught in the crush of rabid crowds suffused with patriotic bloodlust.  It's loud, rambunctious, and disturbing.  Lurking beneath the marching, jostling crowds is the sense that, at any moment, the multitude will become a lynch-mob  -- the giddy hysteria in the processions and assemblies seems about to turn into wild violence at any moment.  War has driven everyone insane.  These folks are as besotted with war as Germans at the Nuremberg rallies. (There's a curious democratic impulse in Sturges' films -- the minor characters have just as much energy as the main players; Hail the Conquering Hero features William Demarest as the leader of the Marines, as well as Franklin Pangborn as an unctuous town official.  Bugsy is played by an ex-boxer, Freddie Steele, who may have been a little punch-drunk; he can't act but Sturges puts this to good effect -- the guy is supposed to half-mad, state-raised and shell-shocked to boot, so it's not surprising that he delivers his lines without any affect at all.)

Sholay

 "The greatest cast ever assembled in the greatest story ever told" -- this was the advertising for Ramash Sippy's dacoit ("Curry Western")  film released in stereophonic sound and 70 mm format in 1975.  The movie is frequently assigned iconic status and said to the one of "ten greatest Indian" films ever made.  It's 196 minutes long in the version I watched on Amazon Prime; the movie was re-released in a vivid 3D reconstruction in 2014 and in its renovated form, the picture features lots of firearms shot directly into the camera as well as explosions that hurl debris at the viewer -- these are annoying effects that were presumably imported into the picture when it was restored.  The movie is very entertaining but it's shockingly long.  It is also astonishingly derivative, imitating a number of Italian ("Spaghetti") Westerns, as well as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and some of Peckinpah's films, including The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  Almost every shot in the movie is extracted from some other better film to the extent that it's surprising to me that the picture wasn't embroiled in copyright litigation.  Gargantuan productions of this sort in Hindi cinema have a sort of Shakespearian flair in that the scenario incorporates all possible genres targeted to every possible audience demographic -- there quiet, quasi-philosophical dialogue scenes, Indiana Jones-influenced action sequences, romantic comedy with savage violence, and lavish song-and-dance numbers.  With the exception of the musical interludes, which are superb, the rest of the film is only almost good -- certainly, it exploits an audience that may not have seen Sergio Leone's Westerns or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, another picture that the film shamelessly imitates.  For someone who has seen the prototypes of the movies cited in Sholay, the film is just "almost good" -- it's fun to watch but absurdly formulaic and the mimicry of better films ends up being tiresome; Sippy doesn't do his picture any favors by repeatedly signaling that his picture is a mosaic of stand-out scenes from more memorable movies.  

The picture begins with a homage -- no a direct steal -- from Once upon a Time in the West (itself a pastiche of allusions to American Westerns).  An old steam-driven train, viewed from high angle, pulls into a barren frontier whistle-stop.  Two gunmen emerge from the train and ride cross-country through spectacular terrain to a tiny village in the shadow of huge fins and pyramids of naked granite.  (The landscape is filmed like Monument Valley in a Ford Western and has the same impact.)  The two handsome, roguish gunfighters (think Robert Redford and Paul Newman) are summoned to Thakur Singh's elaborate hacienda built improbably on a rocky pass among the giant slabs of stone.  Singh, a retired inspector (cop), swishes around in an elaborate shawl-like cape.  Thakur Singh contracts with the two gunfighters (they seem to be robbers) for them to capture "alive" a notorious local bandit named Gabbar.  The two lads are Jaidev and Veeru; they are best friends as shown in an engaging musical number in which the boys clown around on a motorcycle with side-car while singing a sort of love song to one another -- it's a bit like a musical scene from one Richard Lester's Beatles movies. (Indian musical numbers of this sort are infectious and spectacularly staged with all sorts of cartoonish acrobatics; generally, these song and dance interludes are best things in these movies.)  Several elaborate and exciting flashbacks follow:  we learn that Thakur had captured Veeru and Jaidev and was taking them to jail when bandits attacked their train, another steam locomotive right out of The Iron Horse, resulting in a Spielberg-style battle on the rails replete with all sorts of explosions, close-calls, and the picturesque slaughter of dozens of bad guys.  This fight has assured Thakur of the two men's prowess in battle.  The lads go to jail, triggering s fifteen minute comic episode, involving a fey prison warden with a Hitler moustache (he imitates Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator) and lots of pranks played by the mischievous protagonists on guards and their fellow inmates.  The lads escape and this brings us to their arrival in the village among the giant batholiths, a town that seems to be under the feudal protection of Thakur, the retired cop.  In scenes derived almost shot-by-shot from Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (and John Sturges Magnificent Seven) a horde of bandits led by the vicious Gabbar attacks the village.  A firefight ensues and, at a vital moment, Thakur seems to be paralyzed; a machine gun has been dropped in front of him but he won't stoop to pick it up.  This leads Veeru and Jaidev to accuse him of cowardice.  Veeru has fallen in love with the "chatterbox", Basanti, a beautiful girl who runs a sort of carriage service with a brightly decorated horse cart and a feisty pony named Dhanno.  (It's not clear when the movie is supposed to be taking place -- there's no electricity or phones in the village and the trains seem to date to about 1880, but Veeru and Jaidev tool around on motorcycle and there's dialogue about Veeru being the "grandson" of James Bond.)  A mysterious widow in white lives in Thakur's ranch-house and there are some pretty shots of her putting out the lanterns on the veranda at nightfall while Jaidev soulfully plays his harmonica -- like Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. Jaidev has clearly fallen in love also with the widow-woman although local decorum requires that neither of them acknowledge the attraction -- this contrasts with the lusty romance between Veeru and the plucky carriage-driver, Basanti.  (Bollywood films feature astonishingly beautiful actors filmed in the most flattering way possible and the characters in the movie are all tremendously charismatic and glamorous.)  During the Holi festival, the so-called "Festival of Colors", girls run around blowing puffs of brilliantly colored powder at one another (and their lovers) and there's a carnival with hand-driven carousel and a little ferris wheels.  At the height of the festivities, in another scene cribbed from Kurosawa, the bandits attack and there's more fighting; again Thakur doesn't defend himself or his village.  When denounced by the gunfighters, Thakur's impairment is explained in a gruesome flashback:  the inspector captured Gabbar years before, gripping him in a choke-hold and proclaiming that his arms were "nooses in which he would hang" the villain.  Gabbar was sent to prison but escaped, lured Thakur to his encampment in the giant rocks and cut off both his arms -- hence, Thakur's mysterious cloak and shawl covering his torso.  Gabbar, then, sent his minions to Thakur's ranch where they murdered everyone in his family, including the cop's nine-year old grandson.  (These scenes exactly imitate the slaughter of the family by Henry Fonda and his gang in Once upon a Time in the West -- the mise-en-scene, down to the iconic scene of the leader of the gang gunning down a child, is shot-for-shot taken from Leone's film.)  This flashback explains Thakur's demand that the two protagonists capture Gabbar and deliver him to the retired inspector, presumably so he can inflict a horrible revenge on him.  At this point, we're at the middle of the movie and there's an intermission.  In the film's second half, the conflict between the bandits and the villagers escalates, the two love stories develop, and there are innumerable showdowns and gunfights and horse chases.  (Be warned:  there are some horrific horse-falls.)  As in The Seven Samurai, the two gunfighters reconnoiter Gabbar's encampment where he is enjoying a dance interlude with local gypsies (who like the Comancheros are supplying him with ammunition) -- this scene features the song "Mehbooba, Mehbooba" with a impressively lewd bump-and-grind belly dance.  ("Mehbooba, Mehbooba" was a huge international hit in Asia and the song is great with surreal imagery shot on a tight little set like one of the campfire scenes in a fifties Western.)  There's another big fight.  Basanti gets kidnapped and is forced to perform a lascivious dance on broken glass -- her feet are ripped up and she leaves footprints of bright blood in the sand  We get some more fighting, torture, and an impressive last stand scene with an army of villains and a scuffle to blow up a stick of dynamite on a rickety-looking bridge over a gorge.  Bad guys get shot off huge rocks and plunge howling to their deaths.  Of course, there's a final mano y mano fight between Thakur and Gabbar (Thakkar has to kick at, and head-bang, the bad guy who cut off his arms) and, then, some tragedy followed by more romance with a wedding in prospect for a happy ending.  

The movie is the definition of excessive and I suppose it's well-done.  But except for the musical numbers (I think there are about six), the picture left me entertained but curiously disengaged.  Sholay has some weird religious politics -- there's a blind Imam in the town who has a mosque up among the spires and pillars of rock.  His son, Achmed, has no future in the town which seems to have a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims -- Basanti, for instance, is a devotee to the god Shiva, although the religious scenes in her case are played for laughs (her suitor Veeru tries to court her by pretending to be the voice of the God.)  When Achmed is murdered by the bandits, the Imam gives a rousing speech, importuning the villages to take up arms to defend themselves.  What exactly this means in the fraught politics of modern India is unclear to me.  The best way to enjoy this film would be to get an anthology of its dance numbers, perhaps, with the train robbery scene and the last stand at the bridge and forego the rest of the three-hour plus version.  The film has such importance in India that the titles for the 3D restoration include a credit for "Travel and Tour Promotion" -- apparently, you can go to Ramanagara and the Closepet granite boulders where the movie was filmed and enjoy the spectacular landscapes there while indulging in a little nostalgia for the good old days when Sholay was released.  There's a powerful romantic chemistry in the love scenes -- the two heroes ended up both marrying their respective love-interests in the film.  The movie is the second highest grossing film in the history of Indian cinema and was, curiously enough, a huge hit in the Soviet Union.  Gabbar has been voted the greatest villain  of all time in Indian films.    

 

Hamlet (at the Guthrie)

The Guthrie Theater's 60th anniversary production of its inaugural play, Hamlet, is lucid, conservatively staged and, generally, well-spoken.  As is true of all performances of Shakespeare's "poem unlimited" the abyss yawning between that poetry as staged in the mind of a reader and the poor shadows strutting and fretting on stage is distressing; Shakespeare's diction and the surreal argument of much of his verse deserves to be intoned in vowels of thunder or inscribed against the sky in incandescent letters and, so, the more sober, level-headed and logical the performance (and the Guthrie production is all of these things), the more pointed the problem of reconciling the words as read and imagined and the text as declaimed on stage.   Hamlet makes thematic the gulf between imagination and action -- the melancholy Dane is forever imagining bloody acts that he can't commit -- so, paradoxically, the more paltry, even skimpy, the production, probably the truer it is to Shakespeare's baffling intent.  But the problem with Hamlet as a theatrical experience is that reduced to its plot elements, that is, to its action, the play makes no sense and the peculiarities of its last act, in particular, defeat the enterprise.  Shakespeare was a great master of theatrical spectacle and effects, but Hamlet's introversion and paralysis defeats theater -- I think this is why we have several folio variants of the play and explains the text's inordinate length (3880 lines); the poet labored over this play more than his other works I think and realized that he couldn't quite get it right for the stage -- hence, the  sprawling, digressive character of Hamlet:  Shakespeare is casting about for a solution to the problem that he posed for himself -- how to make a play out of inaction.

The Guthrie's 2021 productions lacks frills.  The set, the unadorned Wuertele Thrust Stage, is completely utilitarian.  Budget has to go somewhere and, so, Orphelia and Gertrude had frequent costume changes.  Claudius, played as a glad-handing Boris Johnson or Prince Charles, was regal in handsome blazers, although in one scene he appeared in his night-gown, an alarming and kitschy apparition.  The supernumerary players wore military garb like Ukrainian lieutenants or the Honduran National Guard.  The ghost was lackluster and mundane; Hamlet's father made his entrances like a man striding onto a subway platform, a sort of spectral commuter dressed like a storm trooper as imagined by the late, lamented Village People -- the ghost wore mirror sunglasses in the manner of a Southern sheriff in a car crash romp movie.  The numerous cuts necessary to keep the play to a manageable three hours or so were implemented in a seamless manner.  A number of parts were doubled or even tripled -- I think the obsequious Osric, the Player King, and one of the guards on the ramparts at the beginning of the play (possibly Marcellus) were all acted by one player.  (I assume that the gravediggers with their broad Scottish brogues also played other roles in the show.)  The only innovation was an animated black and white projection, cunningly displayed on various flat surfaces on the stage that presented the so-called "dumb show", "The Mousetrap" adapted from "The Murder of Gonzaga" -- that is the play within the play performed by a rather feckless traveling company of actors and wrought to catch the "conscience of the King"  I've seen this effect in other theatrical productions, I think, last in the Minnesota Opera version of The Magic Flute and its effective but distracting.  When the Ghost orders Hamlet to revenge him, a glittering pattern of pearl-shaped orbs fluttered around the stage, also a distraction in my view, but an interesting effect.  Moody, nondescript music was provided by a on-stage figure who is behind a console and looked at bit like the DJ in a nightclub.  (When a flutophone recorder is required on-stage to make a point against the hapless Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, Hamlet simply strides over to the musician takes his instrument and, then, uses it harangue the two courtiers.)  Although the Guthrie is very progressive -- all shows begin with a dedication to the Anishinaabe people on whose misappropriated land the theater is built (I would guess the tribes would prefer rent to this virtue signaling) -- several of the characters, particularly Osric, were overt Gay caricatures, broadly played for homophobic (I thought) laughs.  Polonius was also conceived in broadly comic terms and was, in fact, very funny.  The actor playing Hamlet was well-spoken and convincing, although, of course, no one can give an account of the role sufficient to its rhetoric and diction.  And, by the fourth act, my sympathies had shifted to the calmly practical Claudius and Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude -- you long for them to shut up the snarky Hamlet by giving him "quietus with a bare bodkin."  There was a moment of inadvertent comedy when Gertrude declaimed her spectacular verbal aria describing Ophelia's suicide by drowning.  After twenty lines of exquisite poetry portraying Ophelia's watery demise, Laertes, her brother, asks:  "So she's drowned?" rendering the entire previous verse meaningless.  It's as if Laertes, who completely lacks in gravitas in this performance, hadn't heard a word that the Queen said.  The actor playing Gertrude speaks these splendid lines very well and they have that peculiarly Shakespearian quality of being both gilded and ornamental as well as intensely meaningful.  (Otherwise, the Queen uses a screechy register in her speeches that was difficult for me to understand.)  The idiotic duel and multiple poisonings in the last act were all effectively choreographed but the lighting was bright and clinical, exposing, I think, too much of the folly of the proceedings.  The effect in general was that the Guthrie provided a reasonable map to the play and its various events, but that, somehow, the play itself was missing in action  -- the map, as they say, is not exactly the terrain.