The Man Who Knew too Much

 Turner Classic Movies is an indispensable service for people interested in cinema.  The cable service programs films in ways that promote interesting avenues for study and comparison.  Alfred Hitchcock remade his 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew too Much in 1955.  In October 2023, both films seem curiously timely:  the movies involve a terrorist cell that takes a hostage and attempts an assassination in London.  In the '34 version, the movie involves an oddly disengaged and stoic British couple whose daughter is taken by some Ruritanian/Mittel-Europaische assassins working in concert with a few decidedly eccentric English under the direction of a sneering, if soft-spoken, Peter Lorre as spymaster -- at stake is nothing less than a possible World War; the bad guys are plotting to kill a minor ambassador in a crime that alludes to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.  In keeping with changes in the World Order, the 1955 version involves a brusque ugly American, a surgeon from Indianapolis played by Jimmy Stewart in a state of continuous and scarcely restrained hysteria -- Stewart's character is so high-strung that his marriage to a famous singer Jo Conway (played by Doris Day) is imperiled even before their precocious annoying son, Hank, who is about eight years old is kidnapped by the terrorists.  Both movies feature a famous suspense sequence involving an assassination planned to occur at the Royal Albert Hall during the performance of a ludicrously elephantine cantata -- the assassin will fire his fatal shot at the instant the cymbals strike on stage.  After the assassination is thwarted,  both films feature an extended coda, anti-climactic in the 1955 version but central to the earlier film, in which the hostage is rescued.  Although the movies involve, more or less, the same plot, they are quite strikingly different.  Hitchcock obviously regarded this thriller as central to his ouevre.  It's the only one of his films that he re-made.  The 1934 picture catapulted Hitchcock to world-wide fame as the "master of suspense", a reputation that impelled his career, but, also, limited him in many respects.  Hitchcock told Truffaut that he regarded the 1934 film as the work of a "talented amateur" but felt the 1955 version was superior in all respects.  Hitchcock is always obsessed with the tricks of the trade, that is, the mechanics of making movies and there is, no doubt, that the technicolor wide-screen '55 film is technically far better than the somewhat crude and low-budget effects in the earlier picture.  But there is more to movie-making than mechanical perfection and picture-quality and Hitchcock was so perverse in all respects that there's no reason to believe that he told Truffaut the truth when he expressed his evaluation of the two pictures to the French critic and film-maker.  

The '34 film begins in St. Moritz during a winter sports competition.  The images are all stock footage or very stylized rear projection.  The characters stand out starkly in front of a hazy and pale mountain landscape -- it's all faded whites with ghostly peaks in the background.  An English couple meet a French downhill skier, Louis Bernard, when their daughter, Betty, lets her dachshund dart across the slope and has to retrieve the dog; the rear projection shots showing Bernard's reaction to the dog and his fall on the hill are remarkably bad.  Later, the wife, Jill, competes in a trap-shooting context but is, also, distracted, and misses her shot.  That night, there's a dance in which Jill flirts with Louis Bernard and, indeed, implies that she intends to sleep with him.  Perversely, Bob, the husband, seems to encourage her -- he feigns tears but seems oddly indifferent to his wife's overtures to the handsome Louis.  (There's something kinky going on here -- Hitchcock suggests that these gestures toward infidelity are just some sort of marital game, but the scenes have a nasty edge to them.)  Bernard is killed while dancing with Jill.  However as he is dying, he gives a message to Jill.  Jill tells Bob to go to Bernard's room where he retrieves from a shaving kit an enigmatic inscription on a small piece of paper.  Meanwhile, the couple's daughter, Betty, has been kidnapped and spirited away from St. Moritz to London.  Jill and Bob are afraid to involve the police since they have been told that this will cause the terrorists to execute Betty, but they do advise the authorities that their daughter has been kidnapped.  In London, Bob and a feckless sidekick follow clues on the note to encounter a sinister dentist.  The poor sidekick sacrifices a tooth to the quest to find Betty.  Bob uses the dentist's gas to knock the villain out and, then, traces the conspiracy to a gloomy church building, a ramshackle structure in a slum occupied by the Tabernacle of the Sun.  The Sun tabernacle worshippers are led by a dour, scary-looking woman who is in league with Peter Lorre.  (Peter Lorre was lurking around the edges of the winter sports competition in St. Moritz,chainsmoking and making scarcely intelligible jests -- it's said he didn't know English and had to learn his lines phonetically.)  The congregation in the tabernacle seem to comprise a terrorist cell of eccentric fanatics who may also be some kind of spiritualists -- their creed is bizarre and seems to involve sacramental hypnotism.  Bob and his sidekick infiltrates the peculiar worship service; the sidekick gets summoned to the pulpit where he is hypnotized and passes out.  Peter Lorre recognizes Bob and there's a incredibly strange fight conducted by throwing wooden chairs at one another -- the floor of the church ends up covered in fragments of broken chairs.  Bob is overcome and imprisoned with Betty who is in cheerless upstairs attic in the tabernacle.  Meanwhile, Jill has figured out that "Albert Hall" is a place, specifically, a concert hall, and not a person as she earlier believed.  She goes to Albert Hall where an assassin with the bloated face of a corpse fished out of the water after being dead a week is planning to kill the ambassador, covering the discharge of his long gun with the crash of the cymbals.  Jill screams just before the percussionist crashes the cymbals together and the ghastly-looking assassin misses his shot.  The police converge on the Tabernacle of the Sun, positioning snipers in a brothel nearby and someone's shabby apartments -- they use a mattress and a piano respectively as barricades in their windows.  At this point, the film becomes a combat picture with street-fighting involving a half-dozen casualties -- dead cops are fallen in the middle of the street.  After the terrorists are mostly killed, Bob is gunned down in a stairwell, but Betty gets onto the roof of the tabernacle where she is pursued by the assassin with the swollen face.  The assassin wrestles with her and seems ready to toss her off the parapet.  But Jill, a champion trap shooter seizes a rifle from a cop and, with her unerring aim, kills the bad guy.  Peter Lorre is shot repeated where he is hiding behind a door and it turns out that Bob was merely winged -- he gains consciousness to embrace his wife and daughter.  

The movie is brisk and moves along at a high-pace, scarcely pausing to explain itself as it lunges from one episode to another.  In contrast to the rather slow-paced '55 version, the movie is devised as a series of thrilling or sinister encounters without much in the way of narrative integument.  Lorre is a striking villain; he has the world's worst comb over, a few strands of greasy hair scarcely covering his bone white scalp and his hair as well shows a pale streak like a skunk.  (Lorre gives the '34 version an edge over the '55 reprise; he's a far better villain than the rather uninteresting clerical bad guy in the later film.)  Gripping a cigarette in his jaw, he giggles and, in the combat scenes, morosely helps to reload the guns used by the men and women shooting out the windows -- the bad guys are heavily armed with carbines and big suitcase-sized ammo boxes.  The worshipers at the Tabernacle of the Sun are all half-crazed elderly women and men.  The battle scenes are intensely exciting, shot in chiaroscuro of flashing gun muzzles and police searchlights.  Since this is the U.K., the cops aren't well-armed (they don't have as good guns as the terrorists and don't really know how to use them).  The scenes at the Royal Albert Hall, involving a cantata called "Storm Clouds" are very effective and staged against a coherent concert hall space.  Bob is a figure of fun, a wannabe cuckold it seems, and he is mostly passive throughout the movie -- he gasses the evil dentist and hurls chairs in the bizarre chair-fight scene but he's obviously a secondary comic character compared to his resolute wife who actually shoots the assassin off the roof of the dowdy Tabernacle.  The Man Who Knew too Much is not really a Hitchcock film as we have come to know this director's work -- it's a fast (80 minute) comical thriller with a dual climax:  the scenes at the Royal Albert Hall are recognizably Hitchcock, but the street fighting, the film's second climax, is something else entirely.  (It reminds me that there's a battle scene in The Lady Vanishes as well that looks like it could have been directed by John Ford.)  The fighting at the tabernacle solves a problem that is obvious in the remake -- the rescue of Hank in that picture is notably anti-climactic.  

The '55 version of the film is a vehicle for its stars.  Doris Day sings Que sera sera twice and her stentorian vocalizing, which upsets people in the rescue scene in the embassy (we see them puzzled as to why she is singing so loudly) is central to the movie's plot.  The marital tensions between Jo and her husband, Jimmy Stewart's character, the midwestern surgeon Ben McKenna, are overt and disturbing.  Ben is overbearing and aggressive but his wife, Jo, is apparently a world-famous singer and, when the couple, lands in London, she is greeted by crowds of adoring fans and one fellow calls the surgeon "Mr. Conway" using his wife's maiden name.  Jo goads Ben to violence in a scene involving the mysterious Louis Bernard, in this case an agent in French Morocco.  When Ben acts, taunted into a rage by Jo, his wife, then, reprimands him.  Jo is obviously discontented in her role as handmaiden to Ben and, in a Marrakech restaurant, the couple quarrel so violently that, even, the bad guys, here husband and wife conspirators pretending to be UN workers, are visibly distressed and discomfited.  Ben is a prototypical aggressive American who threatens everyone and can't get along with the natives.  The film begins when Hank, an annoying miniature Ben, rips off a Muslim woman's veil on a public bus, almost triggering a riot.  (Hitchcock famously didn't like children and he makes no effort to create audience sympathy with either Betty, an obnoxious teenager in the '34 version, or Hank, a precocious brat, in the '55 film.)  The most notable difference between the two movies is their wildly divergent rhythm.  The '34 film is a single accelerated narrative with events following one another in fast succession -- it's like Raider of the Lost Ark, a sort of thrill ride with menacing villains and dangers in every scene.  The '55 pictures is far more abstract -- Hitchcock devises the remake as a series of highlighted and distinct set-pieces surrounded by minutes of relatively inert and intentionally dull narrative.  The set pieces obviously engage the director's full instincts for suspense and demonstrate his astounding technical proficiency but these are discrete climaxes that stand out from the texture of the rest of the film.  The set pieces in the '55 movie are Louis Bernard's killing in the Marrakech street, the assassination attempt at Albert Hall, and the final scenes in the embassy in which Jo sings Que sera sera to induce Hank to whistle an accompaniment that leads Ben upstairs to rescue the child -- there's a final set piece in which Ben with the principle conspirator aiming a gun at Hank descends the palatial steps in the embassy, a reprise of a similar scene in Notorious (1946).  These elaborate sequences, comprised of abstract montage, are surrounded by Hitchcock comedy, byplay between minor actors that isn't really very funny and that is obviously just a way for the director to pad the story so as to create more suspense in the set piece climaxes.  In Marrakech, there's a lengthy scene that is scatological in tone -- Jimmy Stewart, as the ugly American, has been told not to use his left hand (the hand used to wipe yourself in Arab countries) when eating a chicken cooked with raisins and olives; to the horror of the Arab waiters, he ends up tearing apart a chicken leg with both hands while bitterly quarreling with Jo.  In London, a group of sycophants have come to see Jo in the couple's hotel room.  We see them sitting around listlessly waiting for something to happen while Jo and Ben are out fighting the terrorists -- these scenes exemplify Hitchcock's esthetic of creating highlights surrounded by little or nothing of interest; the visitors get drunk, lounge around making brittle witticisms, and end up very inebriated and, then, asleep while the movie progresses around them.  There's also a fight in a taxidermist's shop that corresponds to the bizarre battle with chairs in the Tabernacle of the Sun in the first picture -- it's played for slapstick laughs.  (Of course, we are reminded of the dead animals and taxidermy mounts in the hellish scene in Psycho in which Norman Bates interviews his victim -- this was five years later.)  The scenes in Albert Hall in the second movie demonstrate Hitchcock's evolution.  In the first film, Jill is in a recognizably realistic space and acts in accord with the environment in which she finds herself.  In the remake, Doris Day is obviously nowhere near Albert Hall; in fact, the second film demonstrates Hitchcock's perverse skill at detaching his actors from their locations -- it's clear that Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day aren't in Marrakech or London and, certainly, not in Whitechapel where the church is located (it's called Ambrose Chapel and mistaken for person's name initially) or Albert Hall.  It's all done by clever montage and, in fact, is a skillful precursor to the "green screen" effects now prevalent in the movies.  Doris Day is shown in medium shot, isolated in a doorway reacting to something; Hitchcock uses complete stillness in most of the shots to contrast with the frenzied motion at the climax of the scene.  It's completely stylized, extremely suspenseful, and wholly unnatural -- in the '55 movie, London is a collage of  Hollywood back-set alleyways with matte work to depict the steeples and bridges of the city in the background.  When Doris Day crosses a street in Whitechapel, we see her from behind in her rather dowdy grey suit and it's obvious that the figure moving through the location isn't the actress whom we will later see in a close-up in a set simulating a tiny portion of Albert Hall.  Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock's composer, appears in the surreal scenes in Albert Hall, directing the cantata.  The cantata, "Storm Clouds", involves an enormous orchestra with, at least, two hundred singers and a soprano on-stage -- there is an army of musicians and, in the midst of this multitude, the cymbal player who sits motionlessly until the moment he is called upon to act; we see the cymbals sitting next to him, hear the ultra-emotional and bombastic music (it sounds like Richard Strauss but heightened with doses of melodramatic Mahler), but the individual shots show no motion at all, a man with his hands at his side, a harp, a gun poking out from behind a red velvet curtain, Jo standing alone gazing up at the balcony, the musicians in static shots, then, the camera tracking along arpeggios in the score, and, at last and all at once, a flurry of motion as the gun is fired and the assassin plunges to his death from the balcony.  By 1955, Hitchcock's esthetic creates a cinema of pure contrast -- for motion to be effective it has to be marooned amidst inaction and motionlessness; for suspense to have its full effect, suspense sequences have to be islands surrounded by vaguely comic scenes or long episodes of intentionally vapid dialogue.  Both movies are very effective but they are much different in texture and effect.   

Murder by Contract

Murder by Contract is a 81 minute crime film directed by Irving Lerner in 1958.  The movie is austere and nihilistic -- it resembles in many ways crime pictures later made in France by Jean-Pierre Melville, movies like Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge.  The film is the diagram of a movie.  Borges' once said that if you had the outline of a novel, the novel itself could well be superfluous.  This idea supported his notion of reviewing novels that didn't exist; the review could reasonably stand for the novel itself.  A similar sentiment applies to Murder by Contract -- this is the skeleton of a movie, every effective, indeed, because without any excess flesh at all. 

A handsome young man aspires to be a contract killer.  He shaves and dresses neatly to meet a crime boss who, in turn, is beholding to another criminal higher in the pecking order.  The young man named Claude wants to make some money fast so he can buy a house in Ohio (he says).  The crime boss, who repeatedly says he is a "retired real estate broker" is skeptical, but takes Claude's number.  He tells him that he might call in a day or never.  It's a test as to whether Claude can be trusted to be circumspect, discrete, and patient, all qualities necessary to a hit man.  Claude waits patiently, exercising by doing pull-ups, when he gets restless.  The crime boss calls his boss, Brink (we never see him) and, a couple weeks later gives Claude a job.  Claude kills a mobster in a barber shop apparently slitting his throat with a straight razor.  (The film is very reticent about displaying any violence -- the murders all occur off-screen.) Claude doesn't own a gun or a knife; he says that he doesn't even carry his house-key.  After a couple more killings, Brink, apparently, orders him to dispatch the "retired real estate broker".

Cut to Los Angeles.  Two feckless low-level foot soldiers in the mob pick up Claude at the train station.  Claude has been retained to kill a witness scheduled to testify against a mob boss in criminal trial in federal court.  The two foot soldiers are a high-strung Italian wise-guy and a nondescript man who looks like a business man who wears horn-rimmed glass and may be notionally Jewish.  They are worried about the contract killing since the witness has to be murdered before the trial.  The witness, who turns out to a woman night-club singer (the gangster's moll) is under heavy police protection somewhere in the Santa Monica mountains.  Claude wants to see the sights in LA.  He even goes to the zoo and drives balls at a range -- he likes LA and has never been to the place before.  His handlers get increasingly anxious about his delay, but he's having a good time as a tourist. Claude is upset that the target is a woman.  He says that women are unpredictable and talk too much; men are easier to kill.  Claude interviews a drunkard who used to work as the chanteuse's maid -- this informant, who makes a desultory pass at Claude, says that the target spends all day watching TV.  (We also see the woman practicing classical music on her piano).  Claude rigs up a high voltage short circuit in the woman's TV set but the hit fails -- the victim is using a remote and doesn't touch the TV.  He, then, buys a hunting rifle and arranges for a grass fire to distract the cops and bring the woman to the door where he can shoot her with his high-powered rifle.  He does indeed kill a woman at long range, but this is a female cop who has put on the victim's house-coat.  Claude is about to leave town, confident that he has killed the victim, when he sets up a date with a call-girl and, by accident, learns that the target is still alive -- the police woman has been killed by mischance.  Claude's two handlers take him to an abandoned film set for some tiny, unknown motion picture studio. Claude manages to kill both of these men before they can kill him.  But a contract is a contract, and Claude decides to persist in his efforts to murder the witness even though he proclaims the hit is jinxed.  He goes to the county building inspector, gets copies of the plans for the house where the target is under protection, and figures out that he can crawl up a culvert and get into the place.  So he goes there, planning to strangle the woman with his neck tie.  This sets up the hyper-efficient climax, involving a little gun fire, some gunsmoke drifting out of the culvert, and, then, the protagonist's limp hand emerging for a second, drooping down as a final title tells us that this is the "END" of an Orbit Production.  Have you ever heard of Orbit Productions?

The movie is very skillfully written and is a riff on Nietzsche's notion of the "Superman".  Indeed, the Italian wise-guy calls the contract killer "Superman."  The murderer asserts that the ordinary principles of right and wrong don't apply to him.  He is a cold, calculating murder-machine.  (At the climax, it turns out that he's not as amorally rational as he pretends to be.)  There's some understated dialogue on the theme that killing people in war gets you medals; killing people on a contract hit, gets you executed in the electric chair.  The specter of mass death by nuclear war hangs over the picture and we see a machine gun for sale at a sporting goods shop for $124.99.  Conventional morality has failed and all that remains is remorseless slaughter for hire.  The scenes with the two foot-soldier gangsters are carefully and effectively written and the interactions between the murderous killer and women (the drunk maid and call girl) are also very well performed.  The killer is played by Vince Edwards, the man who later acted the role of Dr. Ben Casey in the TV series of that name (the director of Murder by Hire also directed 13 episodes of Ben Casey and, later, worked for Scorsese as executive editor on New York, New York.)  Murder by Hire is pared down to very terse, schematic scenes:  it's the apotheosis of late fifties and early sixties TV style - there's no cursing, no sex, no violence; everything takes place in bright well-lit rooms.  There is nary a shadow anywhere in sight and, certainly, nothing hinting at 'poetry' or symbolism.  Everything is crystal clear and visible to the viewer.  The dialogue has the snappy zip of a scenario by Rod Serling; it's laconic, epigrammatic, and ultra-hard-boiled.  Some of the scenes remind me of the nihilistic criminals in Michael Mann's Thief or David Mamet's crime films but there is likely no influence.  The film looks as if it had a budget of about ten bucks and who ever heard of Orbit Productions? -- none of the actors except for Vince Edwards were familiar to me, although I'm sure they were yeoman players who made a living with bit parts on TV.  And they are all very good.  Martin Scorsese has listed 51 movies that he thinks can be productively paired with his films -- you can see the list on Lettrboxed, a film web site.  He recommends this movie highly and so do I.  There's not a bit of surplus here -- no love interest, no subplots, not even a hint of psychology:  it's all on the surface, a chart of vectors and narrative pathways leading inexorably to the film's ascetic climax.  

The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein - 1928)

 Jean Epstein's 1928 The Fall of the House of Usher (available in various reasonably clear versions on You-Tube) cleaves closely to Poe's tale; it is, perhaps, the most faithful adaptation of the story ever produced.  The surrealist, Luis Bunuel, wrote the screenplay and some of the movie's effects are reprised in his later films -- in particular, a scene in which a filmy white shroud, like the train of a wedding dress, protrudes from a casket is echoed in the The Phantom of Liberty made fifty years after Epstein's film; in The Phantom of Liberty, I think its an exuberant plume of hair that extends away from the lid of a closed coffin.  The silent film isn't frightening; rather, it's a poetic reverie on "motifs" from Edgar A. Poe (as a title informs us).  Usher is a tone poem on morbid themes; it's atmosphere of dread and scarcely suppressed hysteria is expressed through strange dollying shots, cavernous sets so big that they seem to contain their own weather, and wet, murky images of bare trees in autumnal forests,  Many of the shots are both beautiful and intensely suggestive, icons of the disturbed inner physiognomy of Roderick Usher -- the movie establishes a mold that forms many other later films not only in the avant-garde cinema but also in conventional studio-produced horror movies.  Margaret Gance plays the vaporous, dying Madeline Usher, already a specter when the film begins.  (Abel Gance, the great French silent era director, has a cameo part as one of a trio of vagabonds at an inn who warn the movie's protagonist, Usher's "only friend," to stay away from the decaying manor, the titular "house of Usher.")  Roderick Usher is played by Jean Debucour in a flamboyant performance that mimics Poe's prose effects -- like all Poe heroes, Usher has a lofty forehead and piercing eyes and, as his hysteria and madness progress, in the film, his pale face becomes a Kabuki mask of despair mingled with a sort of nameless ecstasy; in some shots, he resembles a demonic Brendon Frasier -- it's one of those performances that will cause you to wonder where you have seen this sort of acting before:  it's both extremely strange and oddly familiar, like something glimpsed in a dream.  (After all, movies are a form of waking dream.) 

A weird-looking little man carrying two heavy valises appears in the dense mist.  He trudges right through muddy puddles that seem close around his ankles. The little man is Usher's only friend; he carries a magnifying glass which he uses to read and has an ear trumpet because he seems to be very deaf.  (The defects in his senses -- he's hard of hearing and can't see to read without the magnifying glass --are the inverse of Usher's fantastically developed hearing and sight.) This figure has a hooked nose and walks with a halting limp and he's very small, always hunched over something -- he seems to be about sixty years old.  Some men drinking at the Inn urge him to stay away from the doomed House of Usher,  These figures are filmed from disorienting angles and one of them has his leg bent away from his body as if it's somehow disarticulated.  The little man pays a coach-man to take him to the House of Usher.  A woman's pale and frantic-looking face appears watching him from a window in the lower corner of an ivy-clad wall.  The coachman drives through fog and barren forests to a big puddle, having already traversed what seem to be streams flowing in the byway.  Unwilling to go any farther, the coachman halts and the little man, Usher's interlocutor, gets out.  Tableaux-like shots without any motion show us the house -- it's a castle-keep but very primitively drawn, sometimes shown under garlands of stars like Christmas tree lights; the image is completely unnatural and cartoon-like and wholly distinct from the rest of the film's brooding forests and vast, empty rooms.  On the front steps of the House of Usher, the interlocutor limps up to the top of the stairs where Roderick Usher reaches out for him -- for some reason, it looks as if the men are so far apart that they can barely shake hands.  

Usher is painting a portrait of his wife, Madeline.  She stands surrounded by dense arrays of candles, half-swooning in the gloom.  Usher tells the interlocutor that the painting "shows the very life of Madeline" and it's apparent that the more detailed and realistic, that is, the more living the picture, the less life available to his wife as she is called in this film -- with each brushstroke, she visibly declines.  As we see close-ups of the brush swabbing paint on the canvas, Madeline flinches as if the brush-strokes are burning on her cheeks and brow.  The interior of the house of Usher is a vast, gloomy basilica without ceilings, walls rising up to vanish in the upper darkness.  Suits of armor on pedestals gaze down on the huge room with its armorial decorations on the walls, its candelabras and sconces, and its half-open closets full of dusty-looking books.  Sometimes, the old volumes cascade to the floor in leather and parchment avalanches filmed in slow-motion.  There's a great broad corridor with alcoves covered by heavy dark drapes.  Somehow, the tempest has entered the house and the drapes blow wildly from their dark niches.  A cadaverous doctor is attending to Madeline who is dying of some nameless malady.  The doctor wears steel-rimmed glasses that sometimes catch the movie-lighting and glint in a sinister way.  Ultimately, Madeline swoons and seems to die.  A lackey carries her empty casket on his hip.  Later, she is crammed into the coffin wearing what seems to be an enormous white chiffon wedding dress.  The dress protrudes from the casket as the doctor, the lackey, Usher's house-guest, and Usher drag the box through the wintry landscape.  The crypt is miles away, beyond a vast lake that the casket crosses on a sort of stygian barge.  (The crypt is simultaneously about a hundred feet from the house; the movie is full of surrealist distortions of both space and time.  The entrance to the crypt is shabby masonry hut with steps inside that lead into a huge dome-shaped vault about a hundred yards across.)  When the sinister doctor pounds nails into the casket to seal Madeline (who is still alive) into her tomb, the screen becomes dense with superimpositions, Soviet-style montage of the nails being pounded layering the screen also congested with images of bare, dripping trees and guttering candles.  Back at the house, maybe a week later, the air is charged with electricity.  The wind whirls through the corridors causing the drapes in their alcoves to blow like pennants.  Now, the floor is covered with fallen leaves and the camera skitters over the leaves as the wind picks them up and hurls them down the passageway.  Lightning flashes in the window.  First, the dwarfish interlocutor is using his magnifying glass to read a huge book, a vast tome that is about the size of a sofa; then, the dwarf reads a very tiny book.  Usher's face is glowing with some kind of supernatural glory -- it's like he's haloed by St. Elmo's fire.  The interlocutor reads the story of Ethelred slaughtering a dragon and Usher knows that Madeline, interred alive in the crypt, is now stirring.  In an inserted image, we see the casket in the crypt sliding off its shelf.  In the flaring glare of the lightning strikes, Usher's head bobs back and forth as he sees Madeline staggering forward over the wet heath, bedraggled, in her enormous wedding dress.  Fires start in the house; the candles have lit the blowing drapes.  Madeline's portrait now is alive and moving itself in its frame made from the white plumes of giant feathers; the portrait has become a mirror and fire is burning everywhere, including in reflections on the picture.  In slow motion, the suit of armor falls over and books slide off the shelves like sullen flows of magma and, at last, Usher, carrying Madeline, and his interlocutor flee the house.  It collapses.  But there seems to be a kind of tentative happy ending.  Madeline, Usher, and the little crooked man watch the house of Usher as it collapses, beholding the falling walls from a copse of barren trees.  

Some of the film's imagery is clearly derived from Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu.  The scenes involving the interlocutor's approach to the house of Usher and the rather comically dire warnings that he receives recapitulate imagery from the vampire film,  A sequence in which the lackey totes around Madeline's casket alludes pretty directly to the scenes in Bremen in the Murnau film in which the monstrous Count Nosferatu carries his coffin on his shoulder through the deserted night-time streets.  But Epstein is also a great inventor of imagery.  The shot following wind-blown leaves through the corridor, tracking along at about 15 inches above the floor is one of cinema's great images -- it's been reiterated in films as diverse as Bertolucci's The Conformist and Paul Brickman's 1983 Risky Business. The colossal gloomy sets without ceilings became a staple in 'thirties monster movies made by Universal.  Thematically, the movie addresses a rather abstract problem:  what is the relationship between the work of art and the thing that it portrays?  Madeline's wasting disease is a pathology of art; her husband's portrait saps her vitality.  When the crooked little interlocutor distracts Roderick Usher by reading him the saga of Ethelred, a medieval fantasy in which the sounds described in the crabbed archaic prose illustrate Madeline's escape from her premature burial, the distinction between fantasy and reality is blurred to the point that the narrative's implosion equals the fall of the house of Usher.    

Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher is about 65 minutes long, only slightly sorter than Edgar Ulmer's equally atmospheric The Black Cat (66 minutes) made in 1934.  Epstein made a couple dozen movies.  None of his other pictures are known to me.  

Killers of the Flower Moon

 Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is, when considered as individual sequences, as it were,  shot-by- pristine shot immaculately edited together, pretty much perfect.  Scorsese's mastery of the film medium is complete -- there's no daylight between his intent and what you see on the screen.  Some people claim Scorsese's Silence is a perfect film; I think this is very close to true -- but Silence with its dire imagery of martyrdom and its last couple reels rife with betrayal is also an experience that I have no desire to repeat.  I have a similar initial impression of Killers of the Flower Moon:  this massive chronicle of cruelty and greed climaxing in the villains betraying one another is perfectly realized in its parts, but the whole is less than the sum of those parts.  Catastrophically over-long and almost wholly joyless, the movie is a martyrdom -- you don't enjoy the thing, you endure it.  

As everyone knows, Scorsese's adaptation of David Grann's nonfiction bestseller depicts a complex criminal enterprise perpetrated by a White plutocrat on the hapless Osage Indians in a place called Fairfax, Oklahoma.  The Osage have become accidental millionaires -- their reservation sits astride a huge and productive oil field.  Set immediately after World War One, the movie's narrative involves a dim-witted veteran played by Leonardo di Caprio who returns home to Oklahoma and immediately becomes a pawn in the criminal scheme plotted by his uncle, William "King" Hale (Robert de Niro), a rancher who, simply  put, personifies evil.  "King" Hale purports to be a friend to the Osage native people and he speaks their language fluently; he seems respectful to their traditions and courteous to their women and elders.  But this is all an act.  Hale is a vicious manipulator whose unctuous solicitude for the Osage masks his contempt for them and hatred.  Hale is at the center of a plot to murder the Osage, primarily by poisoning them, so that he can steal their "head rights" -- that is, their legal rights to drill for oil over the vast reservoirs of the black gold under the land.  Scorsese has never been a subtle film maker -- he makes his points directly and without ambiguity and the Manichean plot of Killers of the Flower Moon is surprisingly simple, a grim morality tale expressed in stark terms of unblemished good and hellish evil. (At one point, a raging prairie fire makes scenes appear to be occurring in Hades themselves.)  It's this simplicity of concept that robs the film of any internal development:  Di Caprio's character (named Ernest) and de Niro's monstrous crime boss are totally, unreservedly evil -- within the film's first forty minutes, Ernest has been wholly corrupted by "King" Hale, a figure who has elements of Shakespeare's Iago and Richard the Third; poor Ernest has nowhere to go but down and so down he goes.  I was startled to hear dialogue within the film's first 45 minutes (and the movie has three hours to go when this dialogue is spoken) in which both the villains admit their perfidy and openly plot to murder innocent women.  By contrast, the Osage are hapless victims, variants on a theme in American films and literature that has been pernicious in its own right -- entirely lacking in agency, the Indians are noble but helpless, incapable of mounting any resistance to the predatory schemes of the White villains.  It's  only when a White FBI man begins investigating that the worm turns and the bad guys are brought to justice.  Scorsese is clearly a bit non-plussed by the turn that the film takes -- the standard White savior appears to rescue the Indians who are being systematically murdered -- and so he installs in his story a handsome and resolute Osage native cop to assist Jesse Plemons, surely the whitest of all white actors, playing the G-Man.  But the Indian part is underwritten to the point of non-existence -- the warrior looks great but doesn't really do anything.  

The film is devised in three broad acts.  In the first part of the film, Ernest arrives in Fairfax a (literally) brawling boom-town.  His evil uncle encourages his to court a handsome Indian woman, Molly Kyle (Lily Gladstone).  Molly's mother is alive and Molly has an ex-husband, said to be a "melancholiac" and two sisters, Rita (married to White man) and Minnie, a rebellious heavy-drinking party-girl.  Many members of the tribe are dying from a mysterious "wasting disease", apparently the effects of systematic poisoning by the greedy White ranchers and townspeople.  Ernest, who is dimwitted and barely literate (we see him puzzling out words in a book about the Osage Indians) woos Molly and, for reasons that are inscrutable, wins her hand in marriage.  (The impression that the viewer has is that Molly is interested in the dismally unattractive and ignorant Ernest because the role is played by Leonardo di Caprio, an actor who ordinarily is shown to be attractive -- in this film, Ernest is fat and belligerent and scowls all the time screwing up his face into a frown that makes him look like Edward G. Robinson.  The audience is aligned with Molly's two sisters who can't figure out what she sees in the wretched schlemihl -- they say he looks like a snake; Molly thinks he's a more attractive critter, a coyote.)  The best parts of the movie are the vigorous scene-setting in the Oklahoma boom town and its adjacent prairies and the courtship scenes between Ernest and Molly -- there's one particularly imposing sequence in which Molly and Ernest drink whiskey while a storm advances on Molly's very nice home (the Indians have White servants and live in respectable frame houses with very expensive automobiles).  Molly, who respects the spirits in the tempest, tells Ernest to just shut-up and, for a few moments, a serene calm descends on the picture.  The film's second act involves Hale and Ernest commissioning various henchmen to murder the Indians in the line of succession to the oil "head rights" owned by Molly's family.  A number of people are assassinated in brief, brutal sequences that would not be out of place in Scorsese's various gangster pictures, most notably Goodfellas and Casino and The Irishman.  There are many killings shown in the movie, so many, in fact, that one assassination in this part of the film, confused me -- two hoodlums stick a sack over someone's head and knife the guy to death.  At first, I thought this was the detective hired by Molly to investigate the murders, but this guy turns up dead much later with his head bashed in and, so, I never figured out who this victim was or why he was killed.  Molly's alcoholic sister is shot in the head; there's a gruesome sequence in which her rotting body is found (Molly has to identify the decomposing corpse) and, then, there's a strange and hideous plein-air autopsy conducted at the murder site.  Molly's ex-husband, Roan, who has tried to kill himself in the past, is murdered on a country lane -- the moronic assassin shoots him the back of the head and runs off with the gun; he's been expressly told to shoot the guy in the face and leave the gun to make the death look like a suicide.  There are a few moments of humor when "King" Hale berates the murderer for not knowing the front of a man's head  from the back -- this is just about the only humorous touch in the three-hours and forty minutes comprising the movie.  Rita and her husband are blown to bits with dynamite planted under their home.  A little later, Hale steps on the severed hand of the couple's Irish maid who was also blown up in the murderous attack.  And, as this parade of horrors is graphically depicted, poor Molly is slowly and laboriously dying from poison that is injected into her belly with the insulin used to treat her diabetes; Ernest, who professes to love her, taints the insulin himself with some kind of morphine and, then, administers the injections himself.  The last act of the film involves the Indians petitioning the Federal government for assistance with respect to the spate of killings -- there's an interesting council scene in which the tribal leaders observe that in the good old days they would have gone on the warpath to avenge all the killings, but now they're reduced to asking for help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the president, Calvin Coolidge, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  An industrious G-man is sent to solve the murders on the reservation and, here, the movie swerves into a commentary, it seems, on Trump's legal problems. By this point, Hale has over-played his hand; like the protagonist of Goodfellas, "King" Hale is so reflexively crooked that he tries to collect life insurance money on one of his victims and is rebuked.  By this time, the Feds are investigating. The G-man's strategy is to persuade the various low-life assassins and henchmen to rat out their bosses.  Various attempts are made at witness-tampering and the minions are threatened with murder themselves but, one by one, they turn State's evidence resulting in successful prosecutions of the villains.  This part of the movie resembles the last section of Goodfellas -- the logic of the criminal enterprise requires the mobsters to turn on one another and start assassinating snitches; by the end of the movie, the bad guys are assiduously killing one another.  Molly's poisoning has been discovered and she is restored to some semblance of health.  Implausibly, she seems to believe that Ernest wasn't really culpable for all the mayhem around here and implausibly attempt a reconciliation with him.  But, when their child, a little girl, dies of the whooping cough (seemingly a natural death), she realizes that Ernest is beyond redemption.  In his jail cell next to the fearsome "King" Hale, Ernest says that, at least, he courted Molly and won her by his own efforts -- that is, he claims to have exercised free will in choosing the woman and marrying her.  But the viewers know this isn't true.  At all times, Ernest was merely a cat's paw for the vicious "King" Hale and we have seen that he encouraged Ernest's interest in the Osage woman.  The film ends with a sort of coda.  Some time in the late forties, it seems, a radio show is broadcasting an account of the Osage murders, once, apparently, a well-known subject in pop culture.  This last sequence allows Scorsese to explain what happened the characters after their trials and imprisonment.  (Scorsese appears in a cameo reading the obituary for Molly who has died of diabetes.  The obituary doesn't mention her role in the killings on the Osage reservation and this elision stands for the country moving on from the story and, in effect, erasing it until David Grann's 2017 book.  A final shot shows an Osage drum circle, apparently in the present day, with the camera soaring overhead to reveal colorful native dancers rotating around the big drum -- the image is of a giant, animated flower with its petals open to the sun.  The ending is quite moving, although I think this is in large part due to the grandiose ambition and dimensions of this movie and the viewer's mixture of awe and relief at the film finally ending.  

The movie is way too long and filled with gratuitous episodes.  For instance, during the extended trial scenes (rendered laughable by cameo appearances by Brendan Frasier and John Lithgow), Scorsese inserts a brutal murder scene, a flashback to the killing the drunken Minnie.  This is effective but totally unnecessary -- just another gangland slaying committed by two inept assassins.  There's a very brutal B film noir from 1955. The Phenix City Story, about a corrupt Alabama town and a bunch of killings committed by greedy crime-lords in that town -- the movie in general structure and emotional effect runs parallel to Killers of the Flower Moon and has some similar racial components:  some of the killings are engineered by the Ku Klux Klan who also make a brief appearance in the Scorsese movie; however The Phenix City Story is about 80 minutes long, very effective, and makes pretty much all the points contained within Killers of the Flower Moon's almost four-hour running time.  The camera work in Killers of the Flower Moon is impeccable; but Scorsese has to just keep repeating his set-ups and typical shots.  Generally, he films colloquies between conspirators with a telephoto lens with foreground action intermittently passing before the figures who are talking.  (He does this about six times in the movie).  His standard dialogue sequence is cut into a large talking head occupying one half of the wide-screen with the other participant in the dialogue at the other side of the screen but filmed out of focus.  There are impressive wide-screen landscapes of the prairie, spectacularly mounted crime scenes, and, in the film's last act, groups of solemn men conferring in darkness, Rembrandt lighting with figures faces appearing pale as "petals on wet black bough."  With only a few exceptions, the acting is brilliant although completely one-dimensional -- the villains are really villainous; the good guys seem impeccably good.  The late, great Robbie Robertson designed the soundtrack and its mostly marvelous -- although in the film's long mid-section and last act, Robertson, who was dying, seems to run out of steam; the score reverts to a single pulsing drumbeat..  As in Spike Lee's movies, there's an insistent undertone of music that generally cuts against the grain of the on-screen action -- Lee uses Terence Blanchard's jazz, inflected with accents of Aaron Copland to give his movies an expansive sense of continuous flowing melody; Robertson's counterpoint to the sinister activity on screen is mostly spooky sounding Delta Blues and hillbilly gospel music, a soundtrack that ironically comments on the murderous imagery on screen. The film's design and period details are brilliantly imagined; for instance, there is a reference to the Tulsa race riots and the natives in Fairfax hang strings of lights in front of their modest houses to ward off attack; in one scene, there's a parade in which the Indian mothers of World War One veterans march in a procession that includes the local Ku Klux Klan.  The scenes are tangible, crisply imagined and staged in physically palpable space, and there's nothing out of place -- and, equally, nothing that seems startling or unpredictable once the film's premises are established.  The natives have visions -- a scary owl haunts the dying and Molly's mother dies in a scene in which her ancestors escort her from her deathbed into a luminous glowing landscape where a small stream glistens in the autumnal light.  

Scorsese is 80 years old and a very serious man.  He bears the entire history of motion pictures as the art of painting with light on his slender and elderly shoulders.  He doesn't seem to have had too much fun making Killers of the Flower Moon.  Most of the film is material that he's done before to better effect in earlier movies -- interminable sequences of Robert De Niro in close conversation with Leonardo di Caprio are reminiscent of the director's earlier and more entertaining movies.  In earlier pictures, Scorsese's criminals were energetic rogues who seemed to enjoy the mayhem they inflicted on each o ther and the law-abiding public -- the gangsters in Goodfellas, for instance, seem to be having a dandy good time as they blithely murder and terrorize one another.  There's a troubling geriatric aspect to Killers of the Flower Moon, something also apparent in the equally cumbersome The Irishman.  Moviemaking is hard work and Scorsese makes you feel the labor and tedious effort that goes into making an epic like this.  I have no doubt that episodes of Killers of the Flower Moon are brilliantly designed and directed and, even, powerfully gripping.  But, after watching this movie, and arguing with it, for almost four hours, I felt physically drained and exhausted.  A half day after watching the film, I was dispirited -- the exercise in depravity and "preversion" as King calls it was so intense and immersive that I had become depressed, "melancholic" as the film would have it, myself.    

  

Mirage

 Mirage is a 1965 thriller directed by Edward Dmytryk featuring a sweaty, intense performance by Gregory Peck.  The movie is a combination of The Manchurian Candidate and Christopher Nolan's Memento.  Although it's not a very good film, some elements of the picture seem curiously prophetic; the movie's general tone of ambient paranoia (probably a result of the pervasive fear of nuclear apocalypse and lingering uncertainty about the Kennedy assassination) creates an edgy unpredictable texture, complicating Mirage's mostly impenetrable narrative.  The film has some interesting and effective aspects, but it's marred by a climax that doesn't make any sense.  

In the film's opening sequence (the best thing in Mirage), a Manhattan midtown skyscraper has gone dark.  The power is out and people are groping around in the dark -- literally, since some of the executives are sexually assaulting the staff and a couple of girls invite the dazed and confused hero David Stillwell to an orgy, a "braille session" as they term it, in a windowless conference room.  Stillwell meets a woman who recognizes him, although he doesn't know who she is -- this is Diane Baker (Shela), the movie's love-interest.  With Shela, David descends four subbasements into the depths of the skyscraper.  It's as if he's following Shela into the inferno. (Later, we learn the skyscraper has no subbasements at all -- so what does this descent mean?)  A famous man falls from the top of the skyscraper and explodes like a "dropped watermelon" on the pavement.  When the lights come on, David makes his way to his apartment where he is threatened by a thug with a pistol and told to take a mysterious document to the Barbados.  David knocks out the thug and, then, inexplicably falls asleep.  When he tries to report the encounter to the cops, he can't recall where he was born or his birthdate.  Suffering from amnesia, he flees from police station and visits a psychiatrist, an unpleasant little man who is always washing his hands.  David says that he is suffering from amnesia retrograde for two years.  The shrink is offended at this statement and claiming that amnesia "doesn't work this way", shows David to the door.  By this time, David is being tracked by two assassins, the thug that he beat up in his apartment and George Kennedy wearing lethal-looking steel-rimmed glasses.  David has flashbacks providing clues as to the time that he is missing -- these scenes, featuring a man falling from the top of the skyscraper and two enigmatic figures standing on what seems a golf course, have some of the spooky effect of similar sequences in Hitchcock's Spellbound, scenes in which Gregory Peck tries to reconstruct a childhood trauma on the basis of dream evidence.  Elements of the movie have a slightly surreal disorienting mood, heightened by the hero's encounters with the enigmatic Shela.  (Of course, to solve these riddles, Stillwell would only have to ask Shela about his past -- it's obvious that they were lovers before he lost his memory; but for reasons that make no sense, he either doesn't ask her or she refuses to be forthcoming about her previous experiences with him.)  There are several chases, quite effectively staged, and a climax in the over-decorated office of a villainous ex-military man played by the scowling Leif Erickson (later to be featured in TV's High Chaparral).  The mysteries are all solved:  David's memory returns and the bad guys are vanquished and Shela and David, apparently, live happily ever after.  

(Here are the spoilers:  David's amnesia, that he construes as retrograde for two years, actually blurs his memories for a period of only two days.  David, who thinks he is a cost-accountant, actually is a nuclear chemist.  He's developed a way to remove the lingering radiation effects from the fall-out from a nuclear bomb.  Like poor Dr. Gatling, David thinks that this develop will eliminate war, but, in fact, the military and its malign contractors are enthused about the invention because it will allow them to use tactical nukes with impunity.  David's boss, a famous humanitarian and pacifist, has succumbed to the blandishments of the military-industrial complex and, now, is in cahoots with the generals to snatch the formula for the no-radiation nukes from David.  (He has conveniently scribbled the formula down on a single sheet of paper.)  At the climax of the movie, all the principals are inexplicably gathered in the ornate office of the evil Major.  The major decides to force David to produce the paper on which the formulas are written by making him play Russian roulette.  This is idiotic because, of course, if a bullet destroys David's brain, all will be lost.  Shela, who's in the room for some reason (and also armed), shoots one of the bad guys and there's a scuffle.  Why David wouldn't just buy time by writing out formulae that the bad guys couldn't understand -- that is, faking the formula is completely unexplained.)

There are parts of the movie that I admired, although the film as a whole is badly botched.  Gregory Peck is surprisingly fierce and, even, violent in the picture -- he forces poor Shela to look at the body of a collateral victim whose head has been bashed to pieces in a  bathtub.  This is a disturbing noir-inflected scene in which Peck seems almost hysterical.  The initial scenes in the darkened skyscraper establish an atmosphere of confusion -- we can't exactly see what is happening  and  this correlates well with the fact that David doesn't know who he is or what is going on.  The scenes involving violence are well choreographed and a chase through the city streets ending in Central Park is fairly thrilling.  Walter Matthau, playing an inept private eye, is very funny and has many good lines -- when the men go for a drink to settle their nerves after a violent encounter, Matthau orders a Dr. Pepper and says that he's not exactly "James Bond."  Matthau's private eye doesn't carry a gun and regards firearms as "filthy things" and so he's pretty much helpless in the shootouts in the movie.  (Matthau is supposed to be playing a very young man, but he has one of those hang-dog faces that signify that he was born old.)  A sinister codger who tracks Gregory Peck and speaks with a weird muted southern accent sounds a little like Truman Capote and make an interesting, unusual villain.  The dialogue is very hard-boiled and even epigrammatic but the plot is ridiculous.  As the psychiatrist notes, "amnesia doesn't work like this" and, so, the viewer can't really effectively suspend disbelief at the bizarre events in the film.  The movie is very effectively shot by Joseph McDonald and has an over-active and insistent musical soundtrack, mostly simmering percussive jazz, by the very young Quincy Jones.  

The Long, Long Trailer (with some notes on Lost in America)

 "Van Life" was a fad among young people, more or less, discredited by the murder of Gabby Petito.  The term describes a nomadic life-style in which people travel around the country in a camper-van.  Ideally, adherents to "Van Life" enjoy the pleasures of the open road, the freedom to travel and live anywhere that there is a road and a place to park their vehicle.  Gabby Petito, a prominent internet celebrity, embarked on her "van life" excursion in July 2021 with her fiancee Brian Laundrie.  Her plan was to post updates on the internet as she traveled across the country with her boyfriend.  And, in fact, Gabby did document the first part of her "Van Life" adventure on the web; unfortunately, the gap between her perky and enthusiastic posts and reality widened dramatically:  in fact, the trip turned into a horrible saga of confinement with her abusive boyfriend -- the van became a prison and, ultimately, Laundrie strangled Gabbie.  So much for the pleasures of freedom and the open road.  As with most everything under the sun, this story isn't new.  In fact, it's an old tale of isolation, abuse, and madness -- elements of this life-style are prominent in another Covid-era film, Chloe Zhaou's Nomadland (released 2021).  But the best depiction of the Van Life ethos and its discontents is Vincente Minnelli's nightmare  film The Long, Long Trailer (1954).  Minnelli's picture exploits the star power of Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnez, in a picture that documents an earlier "van life" craze, the mid-fifties fad for traveling the nation in Airstream and similar trailers.  Minnelli's pictures often have melancholy and strangely forlorn features -- consider, for instance, Judy Garland singing "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" in Meet me in St. Louis and The Long, Long Trailer is particularly disturbing because the film's subtext is a marriage under extreme stress; ultimately, the enormous and cumbersome trailer in which the couple lives becomes an hellish symbol for their marriage and the film's parable, of course, was materialized in the couple's high-profile divorce about six years after the movie was released.

Nicky Callini (Arnez) is some kind of civil engineer -- he builds things like dams.  (His background is unclear -- he speaks with a Latin accent and, at one point, in the movie expresses his frustration in an eruption of Spanish cursing.)  Nicky is engaged to Tracy (Lucille Ball) -- it's unclear what she does for a living; her primary aspirations (it's 1954) is to be a supportive housewife for her husband.  Tracy persuades Nicky to buy a "long, long trailer" -- the idea is that the couple who must move to Denver for her husband's next engineering assignment --will drive the van east from Los Angeles (maybe?) to Denver, enjoying the dubious pleasures of the "open road."  Once, they reach Denver, Nicky and Tracy will park their trailer in a court and live in the place as their home.  The trailer is outrageously expensive it costs about six-thousand dollars and their annual income is only about half of that sum; the trailer is purchased on time and, immediately, becomes a money pit -- the trailer weighs three tons and the couple has to buy a new, more powerful, car to haul it.  The trailer is hard to manage on the highways and if its brakes are not applied in a specific order, the rig will jack-knife disastrously.  The whole enterprise becomes very expensive -- for instance, Nickie has to buy a special heavy duty trail hitch to tow the thing.  The trailer, despite its huge size, is claustrophobic, with an interior step in the wrong place -- Nickie either hits his head on the ceilings and doorways in the cramped space or stumbles over the trip-hazard of the step.  The shower is tiny and the nozzle hard to control; god only knows what the toilet is like.  In the film's first half, several sequences highlight the tiny cramped interior of the trailer.  The sense of pervasive inconvenience and confinement mirror the tensions in the marriage that come to the fore as their cross-country odyssey progresses.  (The film is told as an extended flashback in a trailer court somewhere in the high Rockies;  it's raining and Nickie is locked out of the trailer and, so, he rages to another camper in the office about selling the rig and divorcing his wife.)  

The Long, Long Trailer was promoted as a riotous comedy and, in fact, Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball were so popular that the film was a big hit, notwithstanding the fact that it was competing with Desilu productions I Love Lucy on television.  But there's nothing funny about the movie and it is, in  effect, a highly effective horror film. After a crowded wedding reception in the trailer, horribly packed with people, the couple set forth on their adventure.  On the highways, they block traffic and, unknown to them, wedding guests have posted a "Just Married" sign on the back of the rig so that the trucks and cars passing them are filled with malign-seeming gawkers who jeer at the couple.  With a huge line of cars backed up behind them, the couple reach a trailer court.  The place is full of elderly shirtless men and busy-body matrons and, when their fellow "trailerites" discover that the couple is just married, they flood the claustrophobic trailer for another Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera) crowd scene.  The elderly nomads think that Tracy has sprained her ankle (Nicky lied when he explained why he was carrying her across the threshold) and so someone slips her a sleeping pill.  She's dead to the world and their honeymoon night is thwarted.  (Sexual frustration is a theme throughout the film.)  The next day, the couple flees the oppressive attention of their fellow "trailerites" and take a dirt road into a forest to park their trailer next to a babbling brook -- at least, this is the plan.  But in a horrible rainstorm, the trailer gets bogged down in the mud, tilts disastrously to one side, and has to be towed out of the forest at enormous expense.  (Nicky says they could have stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria for the amount of money spent on the tow.)  For a few weeks, the couple travel around the country, seemingly becoming adjusted to one another and life in the trailer.  They visit Tracy's relatives where Nicky has to back the trailer into a driveway -- he panics and ends up knocking down a wall, some rose bushes, and, ultimately, smashes to pieces the Victorian porte cochere on his new in-laws home.  By this time, Tracy has taken to collecting suitcase-sized boulders -- she plans to display them at their trailer court in Denver.  She has also bought crates of pickled fruit and jams.  Tracy decides to cook a meal in the trailer as they are driving down the road; her plan is to have a wonderful beef ragout supper with Caesar salad ready when they stop for the night.  But it's impossible to cook in the moving trailer (and, in fact, even illegal for anyone to ride in the trailer while its moving) and, while Nickie sings a sort of aria about beef ragout, Tracy is severely battered as the rig bounces over the road -- she gets covered in flour, the ragout and the salad end up on the floor and she is, more or less, knocked senseless.  This is all played for laughs, but, in fact, she's badly hurt and has to see a doctor after this episode.  To get to Denver, the trailer has to be driven over an 8000 foot mountain pass.  Nickie tells Tracy to get rid of all the boulders and the crates of pickles and jam, but she simply conceals the souvenirs in the trailer.  The trip to the crest of the mountain pass is hair-raising -- it's more frightening than anything in Clouzot's Wages of Fear (or Friedkin's Sorcerer  remake of the French film); the trailer has to be backed when oncoming traffic is encountered and the rear of the huge rig hangs out over thousand-foot abysses.  Disturbed rocks plunge into the vertiginous void.  At the crest of the pass, Nickie discovers that the trailer is full of Tracy's boulders and crated jars of fruit and pickles.  In a rage, he hurls the junk over the edge of the precipice.  A horrible fight ensues and Nickie decides to sell the trailer -- but there's only one problem: he has given the deed to the trailer to his wife as a wedding present.  So the imminent divorce is also complicated by property ownership issues.  An old codger at the trailer court in the mountains says that most marriages could be saved if only husband and wife could bring themselves to utter two words:  "I'm sorry."  This turns out to be good advice and so the marriage is saved and the movie ends on an ostensibly happy note with the couple reconciled.  (But the albatross of the trailer remains hanging around their necks.)

I watched the movie is a state of petrified terror.  The whole film is frightening.  For instance, when Nickie is persuaded to allow Tracy to drive she blithely proceeds uphill in the wrong lane nearly causing a dozen accidents.  The unwieldiness of the huge trailer is dramatized in just about every shot.  The scenes on the mountain road, seemingly shot uphill from Lone Pine on the road to the Whitney Portal in the Sierra Nevada are horrifying -- Minnelli tilts the camera to make it seem as if the trailer is being towed up a 45 degree slope.  Desi Arnez' expressive features are contorted into a mask of agonized fear:  his eyes bulge and show white with terror.  When he's not being scared to death by the logistics of towing the three-ton trailer ("remember," someone helpfully tells him, "it's like driving a fifty foot freight train"), he's being humiliated by his inability to back or maneuver the rig.  On their belated honeymoon night, trapped in the downpour in the mud, Minnelli cuts from the bedroom, where Tracy keeps falling out of the sliver-thin bed, to the jack supporting the tilted trailer in the deep, brown mud.  It's a very disconcerting shot and the sequence ends with the jack failing.  When the trailer lurches to the side, Tracy is hurled out the door into the mud and Minnelli shows her literally vanishing into the puddle of muck -- she seems to sink right out of sight in the pelting downpour.  This picture scarier than most horror films.  

Turner Classic Movies programmed The Long, Long Trailer with Albert Brooks' rather smug, and inconsequential Lost in America.  Screening the two movies side-by-side was instructive and entertaining.  In Brooks' 1985 movie, an advertising executive quits his job, buys a Winnebago, and with his mousy, timorous wife, embarks on a cross-country tour of the the country.  The wife, played by Julie Hagerty, loses their "nest egg" gambling in Vegas.  As in the Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball picture, horrible marital problems ensue.  The husband berates the wife mercilessly and they have a huge public quarrel at the Hoover Dam with bystanders fleeing from the scene as Brooks screams at his spouse.  (The parallels to the Gabby Petito killing are too obvious to be ignored -- the police in Utah stopped the couple; Gabby showed signs of being battered by her fiancee, but the cops didn't want to intervene and, so, did nothing to protect the young woman from her abusive boyfriend with the result that she was killed a couple days later.)  In Lost in America, the couple reconcile after the wife is picked up while hitchhiking by a violent psychopathic ex-con.  (He punches Brooks in the nose).  They end up in Arizona in a trailer court; she gets a job as the assistant manager of Wienerschnitzel franchise and Brooks ends up as a school-crossing guard taunted by the feral kids.  Brooks and his wife are mimicking the freedom of the open road as shown in their favorite movie Easy Rider.  When they are stopped by a motorcycle cop, he is about to give them an expensive speeding ticket when the subject of Easy Rider comes up and he lets them go.  The disconcerting aspect of this encounter is that it seems that the cop likes the movie because the hippies on their motorcycle are shot to death by good old boys in the Deep South --  in other words, the cop is probably not a good liberal.  After Brooks encounters a man in Mercedes Benz with a leather interior, he;s moved to go back to New York City with his wife, miraculously finds a perfectly sized parking space on Fifth Avenue in front of his old office building, and returns to the 'rat race.'  The movie is shot like a perverse documentary and features long Cassavetes-style harangues by Brooks' character and the picture is, more or less, dripping with ill-disguised contempt for the denizens of middle America (the wasteland between the coasts).  Like The Long Long Trailer, the film was marketed as a comedy, but it's not at all funny -- it's cringe-humor at best.  The implicit theme of both movies is stay put, blossom where you're rooted, don't try to escape the bourgeois world and its conventions; the alternative to bourgeois domesticity is pictured as a horrific gypsy existence  that is, at once, uncomfortable and aimless and terrifying.

   

The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix - 2023)

 The Fall of the House of Usher is an eight-part series streaming on Netflix.  The show, written and partly directed by Mike Flanagan (four episodes), is an extremely complex, ingeniously plotted family drama, a horror-movie parody of HBO's Succession.  Usher is funny and fantastically gory -- it's good-natured hokum that doesn't take itself seriously; even the most ghastly stuff is presented with tongue-in-cheek panache.  The series is a strange combination of very low-blow scream-scene effects (about five "jump scares" per hour-long episode) and immensely learned allusions to the complete works of Edgar Alan Poe.  While contriving monsters that lunge out of the shadows and into the frame, accompanied by sudden percussive bursts of fright-music, the film also manages to deliver a high-brow discourse on Poe's writing and periodic satirical arias of high rhetoric on social media, late capitalism, and our debased consumer society -- one digression by Roderick Usher on "making lemons from lemonade" is Shakespearian in its ambition and, already, legendary across the internet.. I characterize The Fall of the House of Usher as an "anatomy" -- referring to such works as The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and other similarly satirical and  highly mannered forms of Menippean satire (for instance Apuleis' Golden Ass and Petronius' Satyricon).  An "anatomy" is defined, broadly and inconsistently among authorities, as a large work that combines grotesque social satire with a perverse and elaborate rhetorical structure:  the purpose of such works is to "anatomize", or dissect into pieces, various forms of folly.  The genre is intrinsically gruesome in that it involves all sorts of hacking, cutting, and rending -- individual parts of the body of the world are flayed and exposed for the horrified delectation of the reader (or viewer).  The Fall of the House of Usher consists of an elaborate exposition on all sorts of bad behavior:  greed, lust, drug addiction, gratuitous cruelty as illustrated by the conduct of a family of rascals who have made an immense, incalculable fortune selling opiates.  The show's intent is to wallow in depictions of depravity while simultaneously condemning the conduct of the vicious beasts that we see on-screen.  Usher involves among other things a critique of capitalism, attacks on high-fashion, and a meta-critique of itself, that is, the horror genre in which Flanagan has made his fortune, an enterprise that is, perhaps, not so different from peddling opiates -- Flanagan's work traffics in raw sensation with doses of terror delivered in predictably startling injections, that is, "jump scares."  Heroin is sometimes called "junk"; Flanagan is a purveyor of "junk" as well although in a highly literate and densely plotted format.  

The Fall of the House of Usher is a sort of anthology of Poe's horror stories (with bits of his essays and comic writing interspersed).  In this respect, the movie resembles the old Roger Corman films bearing the titles of Poe works, but, generally, adapting several of the writer's short stories into one rather loosely plotted picture.  In this case, Flanagan builds his plot on elements from the HBO hit Succession, an ostensibly realistic, but obviously satirical, melodrama about family members jockeying to assume the role of leader of a far-flung media empire (modeled on enterprises operated by Rupert Murdoch and his children.)  In Flanagan's show, the premise is that the Justice Department is prosecuting the Usher family for its alleged unlawful conduct in promoting dangerous opioid medications resulting in the addiction of millions of people (a crime also resulting in the creation of a vast fortune).  The first day of trial, involving the appearance of Roderick Usher, the pater-familias and his formidable sister Madeline, allows Flanagan to briefly introduce Roderick's six acknowledged children, three of them illegitimate.  Roderick is married to a bizarre clown-like woman who seems to have a prosthetic limb, a tiny dwarfish woman with a white face and red lips and an unbecoming Beatles haircut.  (She's intended as some sort of allegorical embodiment of addiction -- the other family members abhor her and Usher's attraction to this grotesque figure seems inexplicable.)  Usher's children are all either ambitious scheming rogues or drug-addicted feckless fools.  Something is wrong with Usher's brain and he is prone to sudden, ghastly hallucinations -- he both foresees in visions the deaths of his children (the so-called "Fall" of the House of Usher), but, also, hallucinates the presence of their bloody accusing corpses appearing suddenly in the courtroom or all around him as the show progresses.  Usher's dementia allows the show to spook the viewer with startling, unexpected eruptions of  horror -- the so-called "jump scares" to which I have alluded.  Only Usher and the viewers can see his horrific premonitory (or guilty) visions -- thus, we generally see the action entirely through Usher's eyes.  This is true even in scenes in which Usher is not physically present but which are dramatized for us as part of an extended framing narrative in which the protagonist "confesses" his crimes to is lifelong foe, Auggie Dupin, an African-American lawyer who has brought the charges pending against Usher and his family members that are the subject of the trial scenes.  Dupin, whose name refers to the hero of several of Poe's pioneering detective stories (for instance, The Murders in the Rue Morgue), has been working with (and against) Usher for fifty years, commencing with an investigation conducted by the man, then, a Medicare fraud agent, against Usher's first employer, the Fortunato Company, a predictably evil big Pharma enterprise run by a predictably loathsome Harvey Weinstein-style executive officer -- this guy is named Rufus Griswold, invoking the loathsome clergyman who became Poe's executor and spent the second half of his life calumniating the writer.  (At various points in the show, we see Usher brooding over a brick wall in the cellar of the Fortunato company headquarters -- it's pretty obvious that Usher has immured the vicious executive alive in that wall in homage to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado.")  The "confession" that Usher presents to Dupin, telling the story in rotting house where Roderick and Madeline were raised by their psychotic and violent mother (the secretary and girlfriend of the vicious Griswold Fortunato CEO) brackets the various horrors that the show inflicts upon the viewer. -- the action starts merrily with a "premature burial"  for instance. And, of course, this structure is analogous to Poe's short story featuring Roderick and Madeline Usher in which the hyper-neurasthenic Usher narrates his tale to the story's unnamed interlocutor -- in the story, Usher is suffering from synesthesia and nightmarish insomnia and has buried Madeline alive in the family crypt.  In the TV series, Dupin has alleged that one of the Usher clan is an informer and will testify for the government.  This leads to frantic family powwows, after the manner of the family councils in Succession, and all sorts of vituperative accusations and cross-accusations among the siblings and their spouses.  There are frames within frames in the series, as well as various flashbacks, and Flanagan manages the exceedingly intricate narrative with masterful aplomb -- we always know, more or less, what is going on, although, of course, the whys and wherefores are concealed for later revelation as the show advances.  It's normal for programs of this length and intensity to flag and mark time; it's not easy to fill eight hours of screentime with grotesque and alarming events.  But Flanagan manages this feat effectively; each episode, primarily derived, from one of Poe's horror stories, has a shapely narrative arc and the action, although repetitive, is convincingly suspenseful and cleverly staged. Until the overlong last episode, "The Raven", the story moves at breakneck pace and there's no dead time.  Flanagan delivers the goods -- he ties up all the narrative strands in the last ninety minute show, but this finale feels about 15 minutes too long.   

From the outset, we learn that all six of Roderick Usher's children have died in hideous ways within the two weeks of the protagonist's confession to Dupin.  Dupin suspects that Usher is having his children killed to prevent them from cooperating with the government in the criminal trial.  The truth, as it happens, is far stranger and more sinister.  In fact, a mysterious woman, some sort of spirit of destruction who never ages, has contrived the deaths of Usher's children.  We see this woman in pictures with David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and other plutocrats dating back to Prescott Bush and William Randolph Hearst and before. (She blithely remarks that one of her "clients" wanted total impunity so that he could "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue" and that "no one would care.")  This ageless spirit haunts the Usher family and her siren song, as it were, destroys Usher's children.  Prospero (nicknamed Perry) is a depraved and handsome young man who plans to market a series of pop-up drug and sex orgies.  He holds his first orgy in an abandoned factory with the idea of causing the water from the fire sprinklers to rain down on the participants in the debauchery at midnight.  The strange, beautiful woman, wearing a death's head mask, comes to the party, stalks about (as in "The Masque of Red Death") and, then, departs before the waters in the sprinkler system are unleashed -- as the viewer expects (Flanagan isn't subtle about telegraphing his plot points), the fluid is acid and melts everyone into pinkish goo.  Among the hideously disfigured victims of the acid is Morrie (short for "Morelo" I suppose) the wife of Usher's feckless son, Frederick, who has been enticed into attending the orgy by Prospero.  This woman is horribly injured.  Freddie pretends to be solicitous, but, in fact, he gets her released into his custody so that he can torture the poor, motionless, heavily bandaged and skinless woman.  (Morrie likes to bowl in his one-lane bowling alley, a little detail that is similar to scenes in There will be Blood -- Flanagan promiscuously alludes to all sorts of things; the film is rife with pop culture references.)  Napoleon, another of Usher's sons who is a drug addict, lives with his boyfriend.  His boyfriend has a black cat.  Napoleon hates the cat, kills it, and, then, acting on the premise that all black cats are fungible, goes to an animal shelter where the mysterious woman, the family's nemesis, gives him an identical animal.  The cat turns out to be some kind of demon and you can figure out the rest.  (A scene in which Napoleon uses a convenient sledge hammer to knock down the walls of his luxury apartment echoes a noteworthy scene in Better Call Saul in which a man hypersensitive to electro-magnetic radiation smashes down all the walls in his candle-lit house.)  Victorine, one of Usher's daughters, is the girlfriend of another woman, a gifted medical researcher who is developing some kind of apparatus to keep damaged hearts beating.  The doctor is experimenting on chimpanzees.  Usher's other daughter goes to the Morgue Laboratories, as they are called, to investigate claims of animal cruelty -- she wants to blackmail her sister.  This turns out to be a mistake when the sinister female nemesis (masquerading as a security guard) releases the enraged chimps who proceed to eat the woman's face.  Victorine starts hallucinating and murders her girlfriend, the research scientist.  She rips open the dead woman's torso and installs one of the heart devices, a sort of pacemaker from hell, which keeps pumping blood through the rotting corpse of the girlfriend (a reference, it seems, to "The Case of M. Valdemar").  Tamerlane, another of Usher's daughters, is a cuckquean who makes her fitness guru husband have sex with prostitutes as she watches.  Tamerlane is announcing a new lifestyle and beauty business called Goldbug --  this is a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop.". The family's nemesis drives her mad and she uses a fire poker to smash glass out of mirror in which the sinister woman seems to stalk her.  Avalanches of glass fall on Tamerlane lacerating her to death.   Frederick who has gone insane with coke-fueled jealousy tortures the mutilated and helpless Morrie in some genuinely unpleasant scenes.  He ends up disemboweled by a swinging pendulum of razor-sharp debris in a building that is being destroyhed.  Roderick tries to commit suicide but fails (he's rescued by Verna, the enigmatic murderess stalking the family).  There's a flashback in which we see Roderick and Madeline entombing Rufus Griswold in the basement wall and, then, Roderick, now half-crazed wanders back to the board room in his downtown skyscraper -- the mutilated corpses of his children, with glowing eyes, are now seated around the table.  The air outside the skyscraper, already congested with a tempest, darkens with falling bodies:  the victims of the opioid epidemic, plummeting down out of the skies like contorted, dark hail.  And, so, it goes.

References to Poe are ubiquitous and, often, obscure.  One of the Usher sister's assistants, the man in a bisexual couple whom she is sexually exploiting, is called "Tobie."  This allows the character to repeatedly say "Tobie, dammit!", the name of a character in the story "Never bet the Devil your Head", an unfunny comic story that Poe wrote, that no one really reads anymore, but that was made, I should note, into an estimable short film by Fellini in the omnibus movie Spirits of the Dead.  At the funerals of the dead siblings, the preacher quotes inexplicably from Poe's essays including "The Imp of the Perverse."  Tamerlane's hunky husband is called Bill T (or "Billt" on the basis of his physique) -- I think his name is William Wilson, another character in a Poe story.  The family's brutish lawyer is named A. Gordon Pym, and like the protagonist of Poe's only novel, he has sailed around the world, reached the north pole, and discovered that our earth is hollow. (Pym is played by Mark Hamill.)

The program's last episode is over-determined.  It proposes no fewer than four theories for why things have gone so disastrously bad for Roderick and Madeline Usher.  Most prosaically, Roderick and Usher are visualized as awful people whose bad acts compensate for a childhood of abuse and trauma at the hands of their mentally ill mother and, later, the sadistic Rufus Griswold.  However, an elaborate and baroque speech by Madeline near the show's end posits them as victims of a consumer society that has grandiose visions of ending human suffering, mostly, it seems with the analgesic of consumer goods.  This rather self-pitying harangue is powerfully scripted and acted and suggests that the fate of the Ushers is the result of a particularly corrosive form of late Capitalism.  The series is sufficiently self-aware, however, to also insist that the Ushers must all die hideous deaths because this is required by the genre -- the characters are all entrapped  in a violent and gruesome script, designed for Cable TV, and, so, of course, they must suffer as required by the screenplay.  (In the seventh episode, Roderick in fact cites to the script that he is acting, suggesting that "here is where the screenplay requires me to" say this or that -- he also seems aware of the "jump scares" and suggests it's time for another fright of this sort.  Instead, we see an ostensibly comforting vision of Usher's virtuous first wife, Anabelle Lee with his young son - a hallucination that morphs into the most horrifying image in the program).  Lastly, there's a wholly supernatural etiology ascribed to the show's gory events -- the Usher's have made a deal with the devil and she is merely collecting on their debt to her.  Accordingly, the action in the program can be interpreted as arising from psychological imperatives (the abuse of Usher and Madeline when they were children), from socio-economic forces (capitalism and its discontents), on the basis of the horror genre in which the events are presented, and because the devil is powerful in the world and manipulates events to serve her desires.  The viewer can decide which of these causes best suits their view of the world presented in the show and, so, in the end The Fall of the House of Usher is open-ended, permitting various interpretations of the gruesome parade of horrors that it presents.  

I can't recommend this show to most people.  It's too gruesome and exploitative.  But this is horror and the movie is true to the prerogatives of that genre and, so, if you can tolerate this kind of imagery with its attendant displays of raw depravity and savage cruelty, then I suppose you should take the time to see this program -- it is state of the art.        

Neruda

 I don't pretend to understand Pablo Larrain's 2016 Neruda.  The film's premise, that the policeman and the poet are reciprocally dependent on each another, seems highly questionable to me and I can't quite make the idea work.  Larrain is a great director and Neruda is made with immense authority and is full of remarkable imagery -- indeed, the film's last twenty minutes achieves a sort of ghostly grandeur that is unlike most anything in film.  (Neruda's escape over the mountain pass reminded me of the last scene in Renoir's The Grand Illusion and the climax of Scorsese's Kundun at the border between Tibet and Nepal, but these are only approximately relevant and the connections between these films final sequences are more tonal than thematic.)  This is the kind of picture that inspires you to learn more about its subject matter and I expect to look into historical and literary aspects of the film in the next few weeks.  I regard a film as successful if it inspires you to learn more about its subject matter even, though, on first viewing I'm not sure what to make of the picture.

We first meet Neruda as a Senator in the Chilean congress.  He strides into a palatial toilet at the legislature where he is asked by his fellow representatives to justify his Communist support of Soviet Russia.  Neruda defends the Soviet Union for liberating the working man and saving Europe in the World War -- this film begins in 1948. (Apparently, the President was elected with the support of Neruda and the Communists but has now embarked on persecution of Reds.) Later, we see Neruda at this villa where he and his wife, Delia, are hosting a spectacularly wild and decadent party.  Neruda is dressed as Lawrence of Arabia and everyone demands that he recite a love poem that will be come a leit motif in the movie -- verse that begins "Tonight I write the saddest verse..."  (Apparently, this is an enormous hit in the Spanish-speaking world and people are always asking the poet to recite these lines.)  At the party, Neruda assumes the mantle of the great poet, intoning his verse in a rapturous and legato baritone -- it's as if he's acting the role of the poet, indulging in sort of vatic ecstasy that is similar to the way Yeats read his poems in public. Neruda knows that all the adulation of the frivolous Communist intelligentsia will not protect him in the slightest  The film is narrated with voice-over by someone who seems to both detest and love Neruda -- after about ten minutes, we  learn that the bemused narrator is a detective employed by the regime to hunt Neruda down and either kill or deliver him to the authorities; this man is Oscar Peluchonneau, the son of a prostitute ("I am the son of venereal disease") who has assumed the name of an important right-wing figure in Chilean history and fantasizes that he may be that hero's son.  Oscar is watching the wild house-party, tailing Neruda.  The poet goes to see the former president of Chile, a plutocrat who reports that the United States has told Chile to start killing Communists.  The former president, previously a Leftist, seems to have switched sides.  Neruda is advised to flee Santiago and, with Delia, is driven to the border in the Andes with Argentina.  But Neruda's passport in his actual name (Ricardo Reyes) doesn't match his identity card and so he's turned away.  Returning to Santiago, he hides out at safe house, a modest place that he finds claustrophobic.  (A long-suffering Communist bodyguard, Jara, is ordered to supervise the poet.)  Neruda sends letters about his plight to the Comintern and Pablo Picasso with whom he is friends; we later see Picasso at a party meeting denouncing the repressive regime in Chile.  Neruda is a habitue of brothels and goes to a whorehouse to entertain himself.  There he meets a transvestite male prostitute who sings a song for him and pleads with him to recite his famous love poem.  Later, Oscar, who is now hunting for Neruda, interrogates the male prostitute who with tears in his eyes say that Neruda talked with him "man to man", and saluted him as a fellow "art worker"; "a fucking dog like you can never understand," he says to the detective.  By this time, Communists are being arrested and hauled away to a horrible-looking concentration camp in the Atacama desert.  (The camp is ruled by the youthful Augusto Pinochet who will appear as "the Count" in Larrain's recent vampire movie.)  The detective pressgangs Neruda's ex-wife into a radio appearance.  But, instead of denouncing her ex-husband (whom she bitterly claims "owes (her) millions"), she says that Neruda is a great man.  Neruda flees to Valparaiso where, again, he wanders around the town to the dismay of Jara.  Oscar interrogates a Spanish Communist who inadvertently reveals that Neruda is hiding in Valparaiso.  So, with several cops, Oscar travels to that place.  On various occasions, Neruda leaves books of poetry inscribed to Oscar, whom he begins to regard, in some way, as his brother.  (Oscar is something of a poet in his own right and admires his adversary's verse.)  By this time, Neruda is writing "poems of rage" having turned away from the love poetry that made him famous.  In one poem, he intones quiero castigado -- "I demand that they be punished."  But the only people who seem to be punished are the poor working class stiffs in Valparaiso who are brutalized by the cops and dragged off to prison camps.  Neruda doesn't do well in confinement and he quarrels viciously with Delia his wife -- she's the person who converted him to Communism.  Neruda tells Delia that she's smothering him and encourages her to kill herself so that he won't hate her so much.  (Picasso and Neruda where great men but bad boyfriends.)  Delia is stronger than Neruda in many ways, takes this in stride, and knows she will outlive her husband by forty years.  Neruda grows a beard and takes on the identity of an ornithologist, fleeing with a couple of fellow-travelers south to cross the border with Argentina in the fjords and glaciers in Tierra del Fuego.  In Valparaiso, Oscar interviews Delia who says that the cop is merely a "supporting character" in the fable of Neruda's life and he will be forgotten while the poet will be famous forever.   Oscar is now in hot pursuit all alone, riding a motorcycle filmed against surreal-looking rear projection.  In the wintry wilderness, Neruda hides at a ranch and, then, is taken on  horseback to the border with Argentina.  (It's worth the price of admission to see the poet attempting to mount a pony -- it doesn't go well.)  On the trek across a wooded snowy wasteland, Oscar comes very close to catching Neruda.  The two men exchange shouted hoots and greetings at the glacial pass.  One of Neruda's supporters among the local sheep-farmers bashes Oscar over the head and the policeman is badly wounded.  He gets up staggers toward the mountain pass but, then, dies in the snow.  The dying police officer has a vision in which he imagines that he is a mere supporting character in a book written by the poet.  Neruda, filmed in a spectacular fresco of men against the gloomy white of the mountains, kneels by Oscar and commends him -- he says that Oscar "wrote the snow" and "wrote the horses" and was his essential "inspector and persecutor."  This speech mirrors Oscar's litany that Neruda has written for him a fabulous epic, with animals, with snow, with red blood on the  white, with trees and with music" (cue a dirge with these words).  Later, we see Neruda in Paris with Picasso and Notre Dame in the background.  As he is buried in the mountains, Oscar's voice-over says that 'no one will ever know my name."  But in Paris, Neruda imagines Oscar telling him to "say my name" and, so, he does.  We see Delia painting a large canvas with horses on it.  Neruda mourns the fact that his fame is not based on his love poems, but "(his) poems of rage."  There's a flashback to the Santiago whorehouse where he recites the poem about the "saddest lines he has ever written."   The movie ends with a scarlet throbbing flashback of Oscar in a cheap hotel in Valparaiso with a red neon sign fitfully illumining his handsome features. 

The film suggests that the poet is dependent on the figure of the persecutor, the hunter who tracks him.  I don't know what this is supposed to mean.  (The interplay between the hunter and hunted has a distinctly Borgesian tint, something that is somewhat ironic, since Borges took care to never interact with Neruda when he was in Argentina -- Borges was anti-communist and despised Neruda as a "very mean man.") The film is beautiful, beginning with hazy, bleached imagery in Santiago, the camera tracking Neruda as he strolls like a flaneur through the old streets of the city.  Valparaiso is mean and impoverished, full of miserable-looking workers persecuted by equally miserable-looking soldiers.  The scenes in the mountains, with constant rain at the lower elevations and huge globular snowflakes among the glaciers, are so cold that I took a chill watching them.  The movie has a languorous dream-like quality, contributed to by the sorrowful elegiac music and the poetic and visionary verse on the soundtrack.  (When Neruda crosses a fjord-like lake on a boat, with Oscar pursuing him on the road parallel to the water, we have entered the lake country around Puntas Arenas that features so notably in Larrain's 2023 El Conde.)  Neruda is unprepossessing a pudgy little man with bulging eyes and owlish eyebrows -- but his verse makes men weep and women plead to kiss him.  (The idolatry with which Neruda is met is an artifact of a bygone world in which high art mattered, even to people almost illiterate, but its somewhat alien to an American viewer in 2023.)  At the end of the movie, we see people reading Neruda's poems in jail, including poor Jara who is in a sort of cage.  The film's faith is that poetry sustains the world, that it upholds the world's beauty and righteousness and that it is poetry that summons things to be real and to stand in the truth.  This is a highly mystical conception of poetry, an Emersonian elevation of human nature to the divine, and it's inspiring if also daunting and mysterious.